Pooley groaned; he could already feel the blisters upon his palms. ‘You are on to a wrong’n there,’ he said. ‘This venture has to me the smell of doom about it. That is a bomb site you will be digging on. There will probably be a corpse asleep in that bed. Should bed it in fact be and not simply a shaft or two of nothing.’
Omally crossed himself at the mention of a corpse. ‘Stop with such remarks,’ said he. ‘There is a day’s pay in this and as the digger you deserve half of any thing I get.’
‘And what about Norman’s wheel and the many millions to be made from that?’
‘Well, we have no absolute proof that the wheel spins without cessation. This would be a matter for serious scientific investigation. Such things take time.’
‘We have no lack of that, surely?’
‘I will tell you what,’ Omally finished his pint and studied the bottom of his glass. ‘I will chance your wheel if you will chance my bedframe.’
Pooley looked doubtful.
‘Now be fair,’ said John. ‘There are degrees of doubt to be weighed up on either side. Firstly, of course you cannot approach Norman, he knows that you are on to him. A third party must act here. Someone with a subtlety of approach. Someone gifted in such matters.’
‘Someone such as yourself?’
‘Good idea,’ said John. ‘But time is of the essence, we don’t want any opportunists dipping in before us. When we leave here you collect a couple of tools from my plot and whip the bed out and I will go around to Norman’s.’
If Pooley had looked doubtful before, it was nought to the way he looked now. ‘I do not feel that I am getting the better part of this,’ he said slowly.
‘Better part?’ Omally’s face expressed outrage. ‘We are a business partnership are we not? There are no better parts involved here. Surely you are not sowing seeds of distrust?’
‘Who, me? Perish the thought. The fact that I will be labouring away in a minefield digging up a rusty old bedframe while you stand chit-chatting in a cosy corner-shop had not crossed my mind.’
‘So?’
Jim folded his brow. ‘Whose round is it?’
‘Yours, Jim,’ said John Omally, ‘most definitely yours.’
5
Norman had been dancing gaily through his morning’s work. Between customers he had skipped backwards and forwards, turning the enamel door handle and squinting into the gloom to assure himself that all was as it should be. The wheel had been tirelessly spinning for more than four hours now and showed no signs whatever of grinding to a halt. As the Memorial Library clock struck one in the distance he turned his sign to the ‘Closed For Lunch’ side, bolted up, and pranced away to his sanctum sanctorum. The wheel was an undoubted success and, as such, meant that Phase One of his latest, and in his own humble opinion undeniably greatest, project was complete.
Norman slipped off his shopkeeper’s overall and donned a charred leather apron and a pair of welder’s goggles. Dusting down his rubber gloves with a tube of baby powder, he drew them over his sensitive fingers and flexed these magical appendages. With a flourish, he dragged aside a length of gingham tablecloth which curtained off a tiny alcove in one corner of the crowded room.
Upon a worm-eaten kitchen chair sat another Norman!
Clad in grey shopkeeper’s workcoat, shirt, tie, trousers, and worn brown brogues, he was a waxen effigy of the Madame Tussaud’s variety. The
scientific shopkeeper chuckled and, reaching out a rubber-clad finger, tickled his doppelganger under the chin. ‘Afternoon, Norman,’ he said.
The double did not reply, but simply sat staring sightlessly into space. It was as near a perfect representation of its living counterpart as it was possible to be. And so it might well have been considering the long years of Norman’s labour. Countless thousands of hours had gone into its every detail. Every joint in its skeletal frame was fully articulated with friction-free bearings of the shopkeeper’s own design. The cranial computer banks were loaded to the very gunwales with all the necessary information, which would enable it to perform the mundane and tiresome duties required of a corner-shopkeeper, whilst its creator could dedicate the entirety of his precious time to the more essential matters of which Phase Three of the project were composed. All it lacked was that essential spark of life, and this now ground away upon the kitchen table at precisely twenty-six revolutions per minute.
Norman chuckled anew and drew his masterpiece erect. Unbuttoning the shirt, he exposed the rubberized chest region which housed the hydraulic unit designed to simulate the motions of breathing. Tinkering with his screwdriver, he removed the frontal plate and applied a couple of squirts of Three-in- One to the brace of mountings, identical in shape and size to those which now cradled the ever-spinning wheel. He had sought far and wide for a never-failing power supply, having previously nothing to hand save clumsy mains cables which, even when disguised by poking from trouser bottoms, left his progeny little scope for locomotion. This compact unit would do the job absolutely.
Norman crossed to the table, and with a set of specially fashioned tongs carefully lifted the spinning wheel upon its polished axle-rod. It turned through space gyroscopically, if nothing else it would certainly keep the robot standing upright. With a satisfying click the wheel fell into place, and Norman closed the chest cavity and rebuttoned the shirt, straightening the tie and work coat lapels. The shopkeeper stepped back to view his mirror image. Perfection. There was a gentle flutter of movement about the chest region, a sudden blinking of eyelids and focusing of eyes, a yawn, a stretch. Clearing its throat with a curiously mechanical coughing sound, the creature spoke.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ it said.
Norman clapped his hands together and danced one of his favourite silly dances. ‘Wonderful,’ he said with glee. ‘Wonderful.’
The robot smiled crookedly in the manner of its maker. ‘I am happy that you find all to your satisfaction,’ said he.
‘Oh, indeed, indeed. How are you then, Norman? Are you well?’
‘A bit stiff, sir, as it happens, but I expect that I will wear in. Is there anything in particular you would like doing?’
Norman clapped his hands, ‘How about a cup of tea, what do you think?’
‘Certainly, sir.’ The robot stretched himself again and waggled each foot in
turn.
Norman watched in sheer exaltation as his other self performed its first task. The tea was exactly as he would have made it himself. ‘You will pardon me if I don’t join you, sir,’ said the pseudo-shopkeeper, ‘but I do not feel at all thirsty.’
At a little after three p.m., Pooley and Omally left the Flying Swan. As the two friends strode off down the Ealing Road, Neville the part-time barman pressed home the brass bolts and padded away to his quarters. The floor boards groaned suspiciously beneath his tread but Neville, now buoyed up with a half-bottle of Bells, closed his ears to them.
‘Right then,’ said Omally, ‘to business, it is yet three p.m. and we have not earned a penny.’
‘I have missed the bookies,’ said Jim. ‘I am a hundred thousand pounds down already.’
‘The day may yet be saved, positive thinking is your man. To work then.’
Pooley shook his head and departed gloomily down Albany Road, en route for the allotment. Omally squared up his shoulders and entered Norman’s corner shop. Behind the counter stood Norman, idly thumbing through a copy of Wet Girls In The Raw. Beneath the counter crouched another Norman, chuckling silently into his hands.
‘Afternoon, Norman,’ said Omally. ‘Packet of reds if you please, and a half-ounce of Golden.’
The mechanical confectioner cleared his throat with a curiously mechanical coughing sound. ‘Certainly, sir,’ said he, turning away to seek out these articles from their niches. Below the counter Norman clicked his tongue in silent displeasure. Above the counter Omally’s hand had snaked into the peppermint rack and drew a packet away to his trouser pocket. Norman would have to chalk that one up to expe
rience and punch a few more defence mechanisms into the machine’s computer banks. He scribbled a hurried note on to a discarded ice-cream wrapper and awaited developments. He did not have to wait long.
‘Stick them on my slate please, Norm,’ said Omally.
‘Pardon me, sir?’
‘On my slate, I’ll settle up with you later.’
‘I regret, sir, that I cannot allow you to leave the premises without having first paid for the goods. Such is the way with commerce, you understand.’ Below the counter, Norman chewed upon his knuckles. This was much better. He patted his creation upon the trouser knee and gave it the old thumbs up. ‘Please do not ask for credit, sir,’ said the robot, ‘as a smack in the mouth so often offends.’
‘What?’ Omally surveyed the shopkeeper with open horror, this was not the way business was done. Not the way it had been done for the last fifteen years. He did not expect to actually leave the shop without paying, unless, of course, he caught Norman on one of those occasions when he had been testing his home-made sprout beer. But this? Omally pushed back his flat cap and tugged at his curly forelock. Was this simply some new ploy perhaps? Maybe Norman had been reading some American magazine about self-assertion or the like? He would play it along. ‘My knees ache something wicked,’ he said, changing the subject.
A mystified look appeared upon the robot-Norman’s face. ‘I am sorry to hear that, sir,’ said he, sympathetically.
‘It is the cycling I believe,’ John continued, ‘constantly forcing the pedals round and around and around. I would be lost without the bike of course, as it is my only means of transport, but I do believe that the physical effort required by the cycling is slowly crippling me.’
The robot-Norman shook his head sadly. ‘That is a pity,’ he sighed.
‘Yes, if only there was some alternative to be had for the eternal pedalling. Around and around and around.’ Omally’s hand made the appropriate movements in the air. ‘If you know what I mean.’
The sub-counter Norman nodded, he was already way ahead of him. The duplicate, however, seemed not to have grasped it as yet. ‘Could you not possibly trade in the bike for a car or something?’ he suggested.
‘A car?’ Omally looked askance at the shopkeeper. ‘A car? How long have you known me, Norman?’
The Irishman did not hear the purring of cogs and the meshing of computer mechanisms as the robot sought out the answer to this question.
‘Precisely fifteen years two months and nine days, he said. ‘You were, if I recall, wearing the same cap and trousers.’
‘And do you suppose that a man who is still wearing this cap and trousers is the sort of man who could afford to buy a car?’
‘I have not given the matter any thought as yet, sir,’ said the robot. ‘But if you like I will apply myself to it whilst you are paying for your purchases.’
Omally chewed upon his lip; he did not like the smell of this one little bit. ‘So how goes the work then?’ he asked, changing the subject once more.
‘Business is slack, as ever. The monthly returns are down again.’
‘No, not the shop, I mean, your work,’ Omally gestured towards the kitchenette door. ‘What wonders are germinating in your little den?’
‘If you will pardon me, sir,’ said the robot, reaching forward, ‘it is becoming apparent to me that you have no intention of paying for your purchases, would you kindly hand them back?’
‘Norman, are you all right?’
The robot suddenly lunged forward across the counter and grasped Omally by a tweedy lapel.
‘Be warned,’ said the Irishman. ‘I know Dimac.’
Beneath the counter, a sudden terror gripped the heart of the hidden shopkeeper. He had programmed the entirety of Count Dante’s Dimac Manual of Marital Arts into his creation as a precaution against it being attacked. Omally’s statement he knew well enough to be pure bravado, but he doubted that the robot would take it as such.
‘Thus and so,’ said the duplicate, drawing Omally from his feet, ‘and hence.’
With a deft flick of an automated wrist, which the now legendary Count catalogued as Move thirty-two A, The Curl of the Dark Dragon’s Tail, Omally found himself catapulted through the air in a flailing backward somersault which ended in sprawling confusion amidst a tangle of magazine racks and out of date chocolate-boxes.
‘You blaggard,’ said John, spitting and drawing back his sleeves. Norman cowered in the darkness, covering his ears. The robot climbed nimbly across the counter and stood over the fallen Irishman. ‘The tobacco and papers,’ said he, extending a hand.
‘Come now,’ said John, ‘be reasonable, what is all this about? You cannot go attacking people over a packet of baccy. Have you gone mad?’ Whilst the robot was considering an answer to this question, Omally struck out with a devastating blow to the shopkeeper’s groin. There was a sharp metallic clang and a sickening bone-splintering report. ‘My God,’ groaned John, falling back and gripping at his knee. ‘What are you wearing, a cast-iron codpiece?’
The robot was on him in a flash and, whilst Norman cowered in the darkness saying the rosary and praying desperately for the little brass wheel he had so recently set in motion to irrevocably break down, the martial duplicate lifted his struggling charge high above his head and cast him once more across the shop. This time, however, there was little to cushion Omally’s fall. He struck the shop’s aged front door, carrying it from its hinges, and flew out into the Ealing Road to land across the bonnet of a parked Morris Minor. It is certain that a lesser man would not possibly have survived such an assault, but Omally, momentarily numbed, merely slid down the driver’s side of the car bonnet and prepared once more to come up fighting. ‘Nuts and noses’ his daddy always told him, and it was obvious that nuts were at present out of the question.
6
Jim Pooley slouched across the St Mary’s Allotments dragging Omally’s pickaxe and spade. At intervals he stopped and cursed, he was sure that he had got the worst part of this deal. Omally was probably even now sitting in Norman’s kitchenette sipping celery hock and discussing contracts. Somehow John always came out on top and he was left holding the smelly end of the proverbial drain rod. The fates had never favoured the Pooleys. In Jim’s considered opinion the fault lay with some neolithic ancestor who had fallen out with God. It had probably been over some quite trivial matter, but as was well known, the Almighty does have an exceedingly long memory and can be wantonly vindictive once you’ve got his back up. Pooley cursed all his ancestors en masse and threw in a few of Omally’s just to be on the safe side. He was making more than a three-course meal out of the prospect of a bit of spade work and he knew it. Hopefully, a few digs at the thing and it would simply crumble to dust. At worst, a blow or two from the pickaxe would hasten the action. With all the millions to be made from Norman’s wheel a few meagre pennies for a buried bedframe seemed hardly worth the candle.
Pooley slouched through the allotment gates and off up Albany Road, the spade raising a fine shower of sparks along the pavement behind him. He turned into Abaddon Street and confronted the high fence of planking shielding the empty bombsite. With a heartfelt sigh Jim slid aside the hanging board which camouflaged the secret entrance, and climbed through the gap, backwards.
An ill-considered move upon his part. With a sudden strangled cry of horror Pooley vanished away through the gap. Omally’s spade spun away from his fingers and tumbled downwards towards oblivion. By the happiest of chances Jim maintained his grip upon the pickaxe, whose head now jammed itself firmly across the gap. Where once there had been well-trodden ground, now there was complete and utter nothing. The bomb-site had simply ceased to exist. Jim was swinging precariously by a pickaxe handle over the sheer edge of a very very large pit indeed. It was the big daddy of them all, and as Jim turned terrified eyes down to squint between his dangling feet, he had the distinct impression that he was staring into the black void of space.
‘Help!’ wailed Jim Pooley, who was neve
r slow on the uptake when he discovered his life to be in jeopardy. ‘Fallen man here, not waving, but drowning . . . HELP!’ Jim swung desperate feet towards the wall of the chasm, his hobnails scratched and scrabbled at the sheer cliff face but failed to find a purchase. ‘Oh woe,’ said Jim. ‘Oh, help!’
A sickening report above drew Jim’s attention. It seemed that the elderly head of Omally’s pickaxe was debating as to whether this would be as good a time as any to part company with its similarly aged shaft. ‘Oooooooh noooo!’ shrieked Jim as he sank a couple of inches nearer to kingdom-come. Pooley closed his eyes and made what preparations he could, given so little time, to meet his Maker. Another loud crack above informed Jim that the pickaxe had made up his mind. The handle snapped away from the shaft and Jim was gone.
Or at least he most definitely would have been, had not a pair of muscular hands caught at his trailing arms and drawn him aloft, rending away his tweedy jacket sleeves from both armpits. A white-faced and gibbering Jim Pooley was dragged out through the gap in the fencing and deposited in a tangled heap upon the pavement.
‘You are trespassing,’ said a voice somewhere above him. ‘These are your jacket sleeves, I believe.’
Jim squinted up painfully from his pavement repose. Above him stood as pleasant a looking angel of deliverance as might be imagined. He was tall and pale, with a shock of black hair combed away behind his ears. His eyes were of darkest jet, as was his immaculate one-piece coverall work suit. He wore a pair of miniscule headphones which he now pushed back from his ears. Jim could hear the tinkling of fairy-like music issuing from them.
‘I was passing and I heard your cries,’ the young man explained. ‘You were trespassing you know.’
Jim climbed gracelessly to his feet and patted the dust from what was left of his jacket. He accepted the sleeves from the young man and stuffed them into a trouser pocket. ‘Sorry,’ said he. ‘I had no idea. My thanks, sir, for saving my life.’