Sprout Mask Replica

  But I won’t.

  We went to Litany’s room. She called down for the ice-cubes and the Tabasco sauce. We put the ice-cubes into our drinks and the Tabasco sauce onto our roast beef sandwiches, then she showed me something rather special. It was a mint condition copy of the very first issue of SFX magazine, with the free gift and everything.

  I was very impressed.

  Then we called down for half a dozen bulldog clips, an ironing-board and a stirrup pump.

  And—

  No, I’m lying again.

  After a game of chess, which I lost, because she ‘huffed’ my bishops, which I’m sure was cheating, we were interrupted by a lot of loud knocking at the door.

  It was the waiter from the Casablanca dining-suite.

  ‘One thousand pardons, monsieur,’ he said, ‘but I regret to say that you and the beautiful young lady must vacate the room at once.’

  ‘Shove off,’ I told him.

  ‘No, monsieur, please. We have, how do you say, the big trouble downstairs in the foyer. Many ragamuffins demanding rooms for the night. All with much money saying they are the eccentric millionaires. We have called for the gendarmes to come and hit them with sticks, but we must evacuate the hotel.’

  ‘If they’ve got much money, why don’t you just give them rooms for the night?’

  ‘Ah, monsieur has seen through my cunning ploy. We are giving them rooms for the night, at inflated prices.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine then.’

  ‘Fine for them, monsieur, but not for you. We’re giving them your rooms, so would you and the beautiful young lady kindly pack your bags and take your leave?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then regrettably I must call the gendarmes and inform them that you have been having under-age sex with the beautiful young woman.’

  ‘She’s not that young.’

  ‘No, monsieur, but you are.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, it’s not illegal for me to—’

  Litany pushed me aside. ‘Let me handle this,’ she said.

  I felt reasonably sure I could predict what might be coming and so I took an extra step aside.

  Litany punched the waiter in the nose.

  The waiter went down onto his bum, with a hand to a gory nostril. ‘Oh thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘That’s really sweet, that is. I’m only trying to do my job. Do you think it’s any fun having to pretend you’re a French waiter? I’m a musician, me. I once auditioned to be the bass guitarist with Sonic Energy Authority, but I didn’t get the lucky break. And now I get a punch in the nose. Thank you very much.’

  I looked to Litany in the hope she might apologise. But she didn’t. She just stormed off to the en-suite bathroom and slammed the door behind her. I helped the waiter to his feet.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I know what it’s like being in a rubbish job. If you really want to be a musician, I think I might be able to help you out.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and how?’

  ‘What if I could give you your lucky break? Get you the bass guitarist’s job with Sonic Energy Authority?’

  ‘But that’s impossible. Panay Cloudrunner’s the bass guitarist. He’s never going to quit the band now they’re so big.’

  ‘Just trust me. Leave us in peace and I’ll make it up to you for the bloody nose. Expect a phone call.’

  ‘Expect a phone call? You’re kidding right?’

  ‘I’m not, I’m certain I can do it, trust me, all right?’

  He shrugged. ‘All right. But if you can get me into S.E.A., then you’re some kind of miracle man.’

  ‘Expect a phone call.’

  ‘OK.’

  He stumbled off down the corridor holding his nose. I concentrated very hard and thought, I wish that young waiter could get Panay Cloudrunner’s job in Sonic Energy Authority. And then I recited a poem in my head called ‘Pleased as Punch’ which I felt was appropriate, and subconsciously untucked my T-shirt and placed a five-pence piece in my navel.

  Then I went and bashed upon the bathroom door.

  We didn’t dine that night in the Casablanca dining-suite. I didn’t know when, or really even if the waiter would get his telephone call, but anyway the restaurant was packed.

  It looked like a new-age travellers’ convention. I had never seen quite so many dreadlocks or small dogs on strings in one place before. Everyone looked very jolly though, and they were really tucking into the grub.

  Litany didn’t look best pleased, so I thought it prudent not to mention the promise I’d made to the waiter.

  I suggested we take a drink at a tavern on the promenade, but it wasn’t such a good idea. Conversation buzzed all around us about the strange doings of the day, how all the local homeless had suddenly struck it rich.

  Some folk said that The Big Issue had seen fit to award its sales force massive cash bonuses. Others spoke of wealthy American tourists heaping traveller’s cheques on folk slumped in shop doorways. There was even wild talk about a mysterious scruffy chap with bare feet vomiting pound coins. We drank up and returned to the hotel.

  Litany said that she wasn’t feeling too well and would I mind sleeping in my own room. I agreed without a fuss. Well, I did go down on my knees and beg a bit, but she closed her door upon me and that was that.

  I took the lift and then the stairs to my room. It was very small and right up in the eaves. It put me in mind of my own loft bedroom at home and my thoughts turned once more towards my evil brother. I would have my revenge upon him and my Uncle Brian, but for now I was quite exhausted. It had been a long and eventful day and although it wasn’t ending in the way I might have hoped, I still felt rather warm inside.

  I’d helped those homeless people, I knew that I had and I felt very good about that. I settled down upon the straw-filled mattress and went straight off to sleep.

  And I slept very soundly. I remember that.

  But then I would. Because, after all, from that night on, and for the next thirty years, I would never sleep again.

  TRAVEL IN DISTANT LANDS

  Enough of this dull existence, cried Tom, in a fit of gin.

  I’m off to sail the ocean blue,

  Walk till I wear out my shoe,

  Bid the foreigner how d’you do, and grow a beard on me chin.

  I’ll drink to that, said Brother Jim, for he was easy going.

  I’ll join you, Tom, if you don’t mind,

  The holy grail we’ll seek and find,

  And Spanish gold and The Golden Hind, even if it’s snowing.

  That’s not exactly what I reckoned, Tom was heard to say.

  I thought perhaps a day at the sea,

  If Aunty May comes down with me,

  And we could board with Mr McGee, at his house in Toby Way.

  You dull and dismal fellow, Tom, said Jim as he sought the bottle.

  We’d walk in distant sunny climes,

  And drink a very great deal of times,

  And possibly commit strange crimes, not unlike Aristotle.

  Though Tom tried hard he couldn’t follow all that Jim had said.

  What has this Aristotle chap

  In common with this horse’s crap

  That you’ve been talking, Jim old chap, I must be off to bed.

  14

  MORE RADICAL THAN VOODOO

  I awoke from a dream about travelling in distant lands, to the sound of a knocking at my chamber door. I yawned and stretched, and farted too, I must confess, and called out, ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Paper, sir, and breakfast,’ called back a voice I did not recognize.

  I rose and stretched again and rubbed my arms, for it was pretty cold, and, opening the door, took in a tray of tea and toast and a rolled-up copy of the Daily Sketch.

  As there was no table in my little room I set the tray down on the floor, poured luke-warm tea into the chipped enamel mug, added milk and, finding no spoon available, stirred this with a soldier of toast.

  And then I unrolled the newspaper.
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  TRAGIC DEATH OF A ROCKSTAR

  Ran the head line and beneath this—

  PANAY CLOUDRUNNER DIES AGED 27

  I read the news and then— Oh boy!

  He’d blown his mind out in a car. He hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed.

  A terrible chill ran through me as I read the time of the fatal accident. Not a half-hour after I’d spoken to the waiter with the bloody nose. Dear God, what had I done?

  Well, it was all too clear just what I’d done. I’d killed him as surely as if I’d put a gun to his head and squeezed upon the trigger.

  I had killed a perfect stranger. This was terrible. Terrible. Beyond terrible. This was—

  ‘Oh my God!’ I wailed. Most terribly I wailed. Beyond terribly, in fact. I wailed and gnashed my teeth and beat my forehead with my fists. And then I stumbled from my room. Along the corridor, down the stairs, into the lift, out into the foyer. And into chaos.

  The foyer was packed with people. News teams with cameras and boom mics like furry blimps. Others. Many others, shouting to be heard.

  A woman in a Salvation Army uniform thrust a collecting tin into my face. ‘Are you one of the blessed?’ she asked. ‘Would you care to make a contribution?’

  ‘I don’t give to paramilitary organizations,’ I told her. ‘Get out of my way.’

  ‘Help save the whales,’ called somebody else.

  ‘Stuff Prince Charles,’ I replied.

  I fought my way through the crowd and out into the street. Here I passed more newsmen speaking into cameras.

  ‘I’m standing here,’ said one. ‘In what must be England’s luckiest town. Yesterday nearly one hundred homeless and destitute people became the unlikely recipients of huge sums of money. Bizarre coincidence? Act of God? Who can say. I have with me a close friend of one of the lucky ones that local folk are now calling, the blessed. Mr Colon, would you care to say a few words?’

  I turned at the name and Colon flashed me a winning smile. ‘Nice one, man,’ he said.

  I waved at him feebly, turned away, tripped on the kerb and fell directly into the path of an oncoming Blue Bird Cleaners’ truck.

  And black went the world about me.

  I awoke with a start to a terrible shock.

  ‘Stand clear,’ said a voice and then THWUNKQ, which was just how it felt. My chest heaved and then I felt my eyelids being tampered with. A very bright light shone into one eye, then the other.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the voice and I could see its owner now, a doctor in a white coat. ‘There is nothing more I can do for this man.’

  Nothing more? I tried to cry out but my mouth wouldn’t move. Nothing would move, not a finger not a toe.

  ‘Time of death, two-thirty p.m. Have an orderly move him to the morgue please.’

  The morgue! An awful fear ran through me. This fool thinks I’m dead, which is surely not the case.

  ‘Are you certain?’ asked a pretty nurse, gazing down at me. A voice of reason. Yes!

  The doctor felt my pulse, put a stethoscope upon my heart, put a finger to my neck, shone his damn torch in my eyes again. ‘Absolutely certain, nurse. This man is dead.’

  What? The awful fear became an awful terror. Well beyond an awful terror. Dead? I’m not dead. I’m not dead!

  ‘He’s dead,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Dead,’ said the nurse.

  And ‘dead’, said the lady with the alligator purse (who just happened to be passing the door on her way to a nursery rhyme).

  I’m not dead, you fools, I’m not dead.

  And then someone pulled the sheet up over my head and I couldn’t see any more. I could still hear though.

  ‘Do we have a name for him?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘No,’ said the nurse. ‘There was no identification on the body. We must assume he was one of the homeless people who were accidentally allocated the grants for the secret government germ warfare project yesterday.’

  ‘That was a right royal cock-up,’ said the doctor. ‘Are the police hunting those transients to recover the money?’

  ‘No luck apparently. Word must have leaked out last night. The homeless people all left the hotel before dawn, there’s no trace of them.’

  ‘Was there any money on this chap?’

  ‘No money, but his pockets were full of rubbish. Filter tips, lolly sticks, biro caps, bottle tops, bits of coloured wool.’

  ‘Just another loser, eh? Well, usual procedure, morgue then the crem.’

  The crem? The CREMATORIUM! I tried hard to scream, I really did. But there was nothing. Nothing. And then I knew it. Knew it because I knew I wasn’t breathing, that my heart wasn’t beating, that my blood no longer flowed.

  I knew that I was really dead.

  Then I heard the door open, sensed others in the room. Something bumped up against my bed, hands were laid upon me and I was roughly manhandled onto, what? A trolley.

  Then movement, momentum, I was being pushed out of the room, along corridors. I heard people speaking. Live people. People who weren’t dead like me. People who weren’t destined for the crem.

  The morgue was very cold and dull, but at least they turned down the sheet from my face so I could see. I couldn’t see much though, but for the ceiling.

  I lay there. A body on the slab. A corpse.

  So this was it. And the unspeakable fear that all men fear unspeakably was founded. The mind survives the body after death. The senses still function. I could feel the cold, smell the antiseptic reek, see through my dead eyes and hear through my dead ears. I would suffer it all in silent agony. An autopsy perhaps, but then the crem.

  And then what?

  I heard the morgue door open and the sounds of approaching footsteps. Two young men loomed above me.

  ‘What happened to this bloke?’ said one.

  ‘Road accident,’ said the other. ‘Stepped out in front of a truck!

  ‘Silly sod. Next of kin paying a visit?’

  ‘John Doe, identity unknown.’

  ‘So they won’t be bothering with an autopsy or anything.’

  ‘No, bung him in the freezer, we’ll fire him up this evening.’

  I felt a tugging at my hand. ‘He won’t be needing this ring then,’ said one of the young men.

  ‘Nor this leather jacket,’ said the other.

  And then I was lifted onto this big long filing drawer sort of thing and slammed away into freezing darkness.

  I was left in absolute silence and absolute black, utterly utterly alone.

  As the temperature dropped I thought of my friend and his experience at the war games on Salisbury Plain. How his past life hadn’t flashed before his eyes, only a wish to make up for all the sex he’d missed out on. But I wasn’t thinking of sex. All I felt was envy. Envy of the living. All I wanted was life, more life.

  ‘And if you had it, what would you do with it?’

  I groaned inwardly. That was all I needed now. A voice in my head. Not only dead, but mad with it. Perfect.

  ‘Actually you’re taking it quite well,’ said the voice. ‘Your average dead person is usually reduced to an incoherent mental babbler. Apart from the Christians, of course. It’s all, “Praise the Lord, I’m coming to glory” with those lads. You’d still be an atheist, I suppose.’

  I tried to ignore the voice and set my mind to desperate practical thinking. There had to be some way out of this.

  My thoughts turned to the island of Haiti; over there voodoo priestesses were said to be able to reanimate the dead as zombies. I had all my sensory faculties about me, I could hear and see and feel. If there was some way I could send out a telepathic message to any voodoo priestess that happened to be in the area and get her to hurry on over before I went into the oven—

  ‘That’s a new one,’ said the voice in my head. ‘Usually it’s just a futile struggle to get the personality out of the body and float off somewhere. The Buddhists have that off to a fine art. Did you know that the Dalai Lama practises dying fo
ur times a day? So he’ll be prepared, you see. Whip straight off to his next incarnation.’

  ‘I read somewhere that monks make amulets out of his poo,’ I said, without moving my lips or making a single sound. ‘But I’m not talking to you, you’re just a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘You’ve got spirit,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Shove off!’

  ‘Now that’s no way to speak to God, is it?’

  ‘You’re not God. I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Rubbish, everyone believes in God. Some just pretend they don’t.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Fair enough, you’ll be wanting to stay in your body then. For the crem.’

  ‘I’m expecting the imminent arrival of a voodoo high priestess, as it happens.’

  ‘Well, I hope she knows which bus to catch, I think those rotters who nicked your ring and jacket are coming back. They probably want to knock off early. I think they’ve got tickets for the Sonic Energy Authority gig at Wembley tonight. There’s a new bass player, you know.’

  I managed another inward silent groan. And another, ‘Just go away.’

  ‘Oh well, please yourself. I’ll pop back later, after the inferno, try to catch you before they grind your bones up. That’s quite an unpleasant experience I hear, even worse than the burning.’

  ‘Hold on, wait, don’t go.’

  ‘Hah. Decided to change your mind, eh? Decided to believe in me after all?’

  ‘I don’t believe you’re God.’

  ‘Oh go on, you do really.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You’re one stubborn dead bloke. But you’re quite right, I’m not really God.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘I’m your Holy Guardian.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your Holy Guardian, assigned to watch over you throughout your life.’

  ‘Well a poor job you’ve made of it. I walked under a truck.’