East of Ealing

  Pooley struggled a moment to comprehend this intelligence. Slowly he withdrew his betting-slip and peered between his fingers at his selection. ‘By the gods,’ said he. ‘Did you hear the Starting Price?’

  ‘Sixty-six to one,’ Old Pete replied. ‘A quid or two there for the outside better.’

  Pooley spread his betting-slip before him on the bar counter, ‘I am sixty-six quid in the black,’ said he.

  Omally peered over his shoulder. ‘Then order me a pint of froth quickly then, Jimmy boy,’ said he. ‘I suppose there is no chance that was your only bet of the afternoon?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ said Jim. ‘I have an accumulator here.’

  ‘A four-horse Yankee?’

  ‘No, a six-horse Super-Yankee.’

  ‘I’ll get my own in then.’

  ‘Nobody has any faith in me whatever,’ Jim told Professor Slocombe.

  ‘No?’ the old man shook his head in wonder. ‘Then let me at least get you another drink in. Are you feeling a little better now?’

  ‘A temporary lapse,’ said Jim. ‘Your man from below puts the wind up me more than a little.’

  ‘The two o’clock’s on,’ said Old Pete. ‘Got one in here, Jim?’

  Pooley nodded. ‘Lucifer Lad.’

  ‘Want to listen?’ Old Pete took out his deaf aid and turned up the volume. The Mickey Mouse voice of the commentator tinkled out the race as three men, at least, knotted their fists and offered up with small sounds of encouragement for the game outsider. Lucifer Lad romped home at sixty-six to one.

  ‘My brain’s gone,’ said Pooley. ‘Can anybody work it out?’

  ‘You don’t want to think about it, Jim,’ said the Professor. ‘Let us just say that it is a goodly sum.’

  ‘How goodly, tell me.’

  ‘Four thousand, three hundred and fifty-six pounds.’

  They brought Jim round with the contents of the soda siphon.

  ‘Jim,’ said John, drawing him up by the lapels, ‘now wake up. What kind of deal have you done with Bob?’

  ‘The six-horse special as ever,’ mumbled Pooley. ‘Six winners or nothing.’

  ‘You buffoon.’ Omally threw up his hands, ‘If you’d had another winner you’d get a percentage even with a couple more seconds or thirds. You’d be a thousand pounds in profit now. There is no such thing as a six-horse Super-Yankee, such things are myths. An ITV-seven there is, that bookies laugh at as they fly off to their holidays in the Seychelles. Give me that slip.’ Pooley pushed it across the counter.

  ‘Anybody got a paper?’ Pooley brought his out. ‘Did you pay the tax?’ Pooley nodded. ‘You blessed buffoon.’

  ‘Tell me again how rich I am,’ said Jim. ‘Just so I can hear it.’ Omally dutifully worked it out on his fingers.

  By the time he had finished Old Pete said, ‘The two-fifteen’s on.’

  Bob the bookie was enjoying a most unpleasant lunch at The Bonny Pit Lad in Chiswick. The tenant of this dire establishment, who, as the result of some major brainstorm, had convinced himself that ‘Mining Pubs’ were going to be the next big thing, had borrowed a considerable sum from Bob to transform the place from a late Victorian money-spinner to a coalface catastrophe. The pit-props and stuffed ponies, the stark wooden benches and coal-dust floor had proved strangely uninviting to the Chiswick drinking fraternity. Even in those winter months, when lit by the cosy glow of Davy Lamps, there was at least a good fire burning in the hearth.

  Bob the bookie had, of course, extended the tenant’s credit to the point that he now owned the controlling interest in the place. The plans for the luxury steak-house it was shortly to become were already drawn up and in his safe. As he sat alone in the deserted bar devouring his ‘snap’, Bob pondered upon what far-flung tropical beach he might park his million-dollar bum at the weekend.

  Antoine the Chauffeur entered the bar in a flash of white livery, bearing upon a silver platter the computer print-out of the latest racing update just received through the Lateinos and Romiith in-car-teleprinter. The telexed message that Jim Pooley, through merit of his win in the two-fifteen was now two hundred and eighty-four thousand, one hundred and ninety-six pounds up put the definite kibosh on the apple crumble end of Bob’s Cornish pasty.

  ‘You damnable blessed buffoon,’ went John Omally. ‘You’d be rich, you bally big bonkers damnable blessed buffoon.’

  ‘It hasn’t changed me,’ said Jim. ‘I’m still your friend. Lend me a pound and I’ll get them in.’

  ‘Are we all aboard for the two-thirty?’ asked Old Pete. ‘What is your selection, Jim?’

  ‘Seven Seals.’ Pooley checked his slip.

  ‘Sixty-six to one,’ said Old Pete.

  Omally pressed his hands to his temples. ‘I just knew he was going to say that,’ he groaned.

  Exactly how Seven Seals, who had been running a very poor eighteenth, actually managed to catch up and overtake the favourite in the last six furlongs was a matter for experts in that particular field to ponder upon for many moons yet to come.

  ‘You are definitely ahead now,’ said John Omally. ‘I make that eighteen million, seven hundred and fifty-six thousand, nine hundred and thirty-six pounds at the very last. A tidy sum I would call that.’

  ‘Lend me another quid,’ Pooley pleaded. ‘I think I’d like to buy a cigar.’

  As he steered Bob the bookie’s Roller through the crush of lunchtime traffic in the Chiswick High Road, Antoine the Chauffeur leafed through the ‘Situations Vacant’ column of the Brentford Mercury. Bob sat quivering in the back, shaking from head to toe, his knuckles jammed into his mouth. The in-car-tele-printer punched out the runners for the two forty-five. There it was, Millennium Choice at sixty-six to one, and the runners coming under starter’s orders. Bob punched away at his golden calculator but the thing merely rang up ‘No Sale’ and switched itself off in disgust.

  ‘Do I get any redundancy money?’ Antoine enquired politely.

  ‘They’re off,’ bawled Old Pete.

  The Swan’s crowd knotted its fists and shook them in time to Mickey’s little voice. Cries of encouragement were obviously out of the question, as to hear anything of the race required a great deal of breath-holding and ear-straining, but the patrons went about this with a will. Their faces like so many gargoyles, veins straining upon temples, and sweat trickling through the Brylcreemed forelocks. They took up the universal stance of punters, legs apart and knees slightly bent, bums protruding, and chins to the fore. They were phantom jockeys to a man, riding upon the commentator’s every word. Nerves were cranking themselves into the red sector.

  Millennium Choice was laying a not altogether favourable sixth in the six-horse race.

  ‘Come on man!’ screamed Omally, who could stand it no longer, his outcry breached the dam and the floodtide hit the valley floor.

  ‘Go on my son! Give him some stick! The whip, man, use the whip! Dig your heels in!

  ‘Millennium, Millennium, Millennium . . . Millennium . . .’ The voices tumbled one upon another rising to a deafening cacophony.

  Old Pete snatched up his hearing aid and rammed it back into his ear. If the entire pub had decided to go off its head he felt no reason why he, at least, should be deprived of the result.

  Bob the bookie’s Roller was jammed up at the Chiswick roundabout but his Lateinos and Romiith Vista Vision portable television was working OK. As Millennium Choice swept past the post a clear six lengths ahead of the field Antoine calmly drew a red circle about a likely vacancy.

  Bob looked up towards the flyover soaring away into the distance. I’ll have to sell that, he thought.

  ‘Who won it? Who won it?’ The Swan’s lunchtime crowd engulfed Old Pete. ‘Out with it.’

  The ancient raised his thumb. ‘Your round I think, Jim.’

  The crowd erupted and stormed the bar, Croughton the pot-bellied potman took to his heels and fled.

  Omally laboured at his exercise book. ‘I can’t work it out,’ said he, tearing out great tuf
ts of hair. ‘Professor, please?’

  The old man, who had worked it out in his head, wrote one thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven million, nine hundred and fifty-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six pounds.

  ‘I think your day has also come, John,’ he said, indicating the vacancy behind the bar counter. Omally thrust his exercise book in front of the golden boy and shinned over the counter to realize his own lifetime’s dream. He was a natural at the pumps and the clawing, snapping, human-hydra was rapidly quelled.

  ‘When the sixth horse goes down nobody will ever speak to me again,’ the back-patted Jim told the Professor. ‘Five offers of marriage I have had already.’

  ‘Perk up,’ the scholar replied. ‘I know the odds are unthinkable, but I have a feeling just the same.’

  Omally stuffed a pint of Large into each of Pooley’s outstretched hands. ‘What a game this, then?’ said he.

  ‘You will hate me also,’ Pooley replied dismally.

  ‘Me?’ Omally pressed his hands to his heart. ‘But I love you, my dearest friend, the brother I never had.’

  ‘You have five brothers.’

  ‘None like you.

  Jim considered his two pints and raised both simultaneously to his lips. It was the kind of feat no man could be expected to perform twice in a lifetime, but he drained the two at a single draught. ‘Oh cruel fate,’ said he, wiping the merest drip from his chin.

  ‘Tell me, Jim,’ Professor Slocombe asked, as a crowd of female kissers took turns at their hero’s cheek, ‘how did you do it? Was it the product of pure chance or through the study of form? I ask out of professional interest, I can assure you that it will go no further.’

  Jim brushed away the barmaid from the New Inn, whose arm had snaked about his waist. ‘If you really want to know, it was down to you and your talk of numerology. Find the pattern, you said. Break everything down to its numerological equivalent, you said, and the answer is yours.’

  Professor Slocombe nodded enthusiastically, a light shone in his old face. ‘Yes, yes,’ he cried, ‘then you have solved it, you have found the key. Tell me Jim, I must know.’

  ‘It wasn’t all that,’ Jim replied. ‘Get off there woman, those are private places. I simply followed the lines.’

  ‘The lines? What lines?’

  Pooley pushed his racing paper towards the Professor, ‘Those boys there,’ he said. ‘Madam, put those hands away.’

  Professor Slocombe drew a quivering finger across the row of computer lines, eighteen in all, three groups of six. ‘Oh my Lord,’ he said slowly. ‘Jim, do you realize what you’ve done?’

  ‘Pulled off The Big One.’

  ‘Very much more than that.’ Professor Slocombe thumbed the paper back to its front page. ‘I knew it. This is not your paper.’

  ‘I borrowed it,’ said Jim guiltily.

  ‘Jim, tear up the slip. I am not joking. You don’t understand what you’ve got yourself into. Tear it up now, I implore you.’

  ‘Leave it out,’ Jim Pooley replied.

  ‘I will write you a cheque.’ The Professor brought out his cheque-book. ‘Name the sum.’

  ‘Is the man jesting?’ Pooley turned to Old Pete who was banging his deaf aid on to the bar counter.

  ‘I’ve gone deaf here,’ the other replied.

  ‘Jim,’ the Professor implored, ‘listen, please.’

  ‘Pete,’ said Pooley, ‘you old fool, give me that thing.’

  Three o’clock was fast approaching upon the Guinness clock.

  ‘Switch her on then,’ said somebody, nudging Old Pete upon the arm.

  Now, it must be fairly stated that Pete’s hearing aid was not one of those micro-chipped miracle appliances one reads so much of in the popular press. Such articles, one is so informed, although no bigger than a garden pea, can broadcast the sound of a moth breaking wind to the massed appreciation of an entire Wembley cup-tie crowd. No, old Pete’s contraption was not one of these. Here instead, you had the valve, the pink Bakelite case, and the now totally expended tungsten carbide battery.

  ‘It’s broke,’ said Old Pete. ‘Caput.’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘Pardon?’ the elder replied. ‘You’ll have to speak up, my deaf aid’s gone.’

  ‘Deaf aid’s gone. Deaf aid’s gone.’ The word spread like marge on a muffin. The panic spread with it.

  ‘Tear up the slip,’ the Professor commanded, his words lost in the growing din. Pooley clutched it to his bosom as the threatened firstborn it was. Omally sought Neville’s knobkerry as the crowd turned into a mob and sought a beam to throw a rope over. It was lynching time in Brentford. Having seen active service in many a foreign field, Old Pete was well-prepared to go down fighting. He swung his stick with Ninja fury at the first likely skull that loomed towards him. Friend or foe wasn’t in it. Fists began to fly. Omally, knobkerry in hand, launched himself from the counter into the middle of the crowd. ‘On to the bookie’s, Jim,’ he shouted as he brought down a dozen rioters.

  Sheltering his privy parts and clinging for dear life to his betting-slip, Pooley, in the wake of Professor Slocombe, whom no man present would have dared to strike no matter how dire the circumstances, edged through the melee.

  ‘He’s getting away,’ yelled someone, struggling up from beneath the mad Irishman. ‘After him, lads.’

  The crowd swung in a blurry mass towards the saloon-bar door through which Pooley was now passing with remarkable speed. The tumbling mass burst out after him into the street. Professor Slocombe stepped nimbly aside and took himself off to business elsewhere.

  Leo Felix, who had been labouring away with welder’s blow-torch in a vain attempt to salvage anything of his defunct tow-truck, stared up, white-faced and dread, as Pooley blundered into him. ‘I and I,’ squealed the rattled Rastaman, vanishing away beneath a small Mount Zion of bowling bodies.

  Jim was snatched up by a dozen flailing hands and raised shoulder-high. The stampede turned to a thundering phalanx which lurched forward, bound for Bob the bookie’s, bearing at their vanguard their multi-million dollar standard. Jim prepared to make a deal with God for the second time in as many days. When the sixth horse floundered, as surely it must, Mr Popular he was not going to be. ‘Father forgive them,’ he said.

  Antoine turned Bob’s Roller into the Ealing Road with an expensive shriek of burning rubber. Ahead, the advancing phalanx filled the street. Antoine yanked hard upon the wheel, but the car appeared to have ideas of its own. It tore forward into the crowd, scattering bodies to left and right. Jim cartwheeled forward and came to rest upon the gleaming bonnet, his nose jammed up against the windscreen. The Roller mounted the pavement, bringing down a lamppost and mercifully dislodging Jim, who slid into the gutter, a gibbering wreck, bereft of yet another jacket sleeve, which now swung to and fro upon a gold-plated windscreen wiper like some captured tribal war trophy.

  Antoine leapt from the cab as Pooley’s sixth horse kicked betting history into a cocked hat and Bob’s Roller plunged onward, bound for the rear of Leo’s tow-truck and the blow-torch which was even now blazing away at the unattended oxy-acetylene gas-bottle beneath it.

  ‘It’s been a funny old kind of day,’ said Bob the bookie.

  13

  The Brentford sun arose the next morning upon a parish which seemed strangely reticent about rising from its collective bed to face the challenge of the day ahead. The Swan in all of its long and colourful history had never known a night like it. Jim had loaded the disabled cash register with more pennies than it could ever hope to hold and announced to all that the drinks were on him forever. The parish had not been slow to respond to this selfless gesture, and the word burned like wildfire up the side-streets and back alleys as it generally did when fanned by the wind of a free drink.

  Brentford put up the ‘Closed for the Night’ sign and severed all links with the outside world. The Swan’s rival publicans chewed upon their lips for only a short while before leaving their cigars to smoulde
r in the ashtrays and join in the festivities. The borough council awarded the swaying Jim their highest commendation, the Argentinum Astrum, before drinking itself to collective extinction. With the charred automotive wreckage of Bob’s Roller and Leo’s tow-truck removed, there had been dancing in the street that night.

  For Neville, upon his bed of pain, news never reached him. The Sisters of Mercy who tended to his bed-pan and blanket-baths, hiked up their skirts and joined in the revelry, leaving the metaphysical fat boy to sleep on under his heavy sedation.

  For John Omally it was a night he would long remember. As Christ had feasted the five thousand upon half a score of Jewish baps and as many kippers, thus did Omally quench the thirsts of the Brentford multitude. Like the barman of myth, his hand was always there to take up the empty glass and refill it.

  For Jim Pooley, morning suddenly appeared out of drunken oblivion beating a loud tattoo of drums upon the inside of his skull. Jim shook his head. An ill-considered move. The tattoo grew louder and more urgent. Jim reopened a pair of blood-red eyes. He found himself staring into the snoring face of Miss Naylor, Brentford’s licentious librarian. ‘Gawd,’ muttered Jim to himself, ‘I did strike it lucky last night.’

  The pounding was coming from below, from his front door. It was the relief postman. Jim rose giddily and lurched towards the bedroom door. The words ‘never again’ could not make it to his lips.

  ‘Shut up,’ he whispered as the hammering continued. Jim stumbled down the uncarpeted stairs and caught his bare toe for the umpteenth time upon the tack protruding from the sixth tread. Howling beneath his breath, he toppled into the hall to find himself suddenly swimming in a sea of paper.

  The hallway was jam-packed with letters, literally thousands of them, of every way, shape, colour, and form. Telegrams, buff-coloured circulars, and picture postcards.

  Pooley rubbed at his eyes as he lay half-submerged in the papery cushion. He was certain that they hadn’t been there the night before, but as the later moments of the previous night’s revels were blank to his recollection, as attested to by the snoring female above, Jim’s certainties were purely subjective in nature.