Sprout Mask Replica

  ‘I really don’t think you should, chief. It might upset you.’

  ‘I can no longer be upset, Barry. Nothing can faze me any more. I know this world is a rotten place, I know it is my destiny to change it. Nothing can get to me any more, I am immune to all upset.’

  ‘That’s very nice to know, chief.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Who, chief?’

  ‘That man on the screen.’

  ‘Him? Just a man, chief. I think he’s the, er, I think he’s the present Prime Minister. Yes, that’s who he is.’

  ‘There’s something very familiar about him.’

  ‘They all look the same, don’t they, chief? Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, hard to tell one from the other. Switch the TV off, let’s hit the beach.’

  ‘No, Barry. Oh my God!’

  ‘Oh my God?’

  ‘It’s him! It’s him!’

  ‘God, chief?’

  ‘Not God. You know exactly who it is, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s just a man, chief, it’s—’

  ‘My brother! It’s my bl**dy brother!’

  Actually, I think I took it very well, considering. All right, so I trashed the room. All right, so I threw the television set out of the window. All right, so I got into a fight with the policemen who were called to deal with the disturbance. And, all right, so they did give me a kicking down in the cell. But considering the circumstances, I still think I took it very well.

  Apart from the kicking, of course. I didn’t take that too well. And as I lay there on the cell floor, all bruised and battered, I must confess that I didn’t take the next bit too well either.

  ‘I’m sorry, chief. What can I tell you? I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Barry.’

  ‘Well it is, chief, that’s why I’m saying sorry.’

  ‘Forget it. You didn’t want me to watch the television, because you didn’t want me to find out that my brother is now the Prime Minister. You didn’t want to upset me. That’s okay.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m apologizing for, chief.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have anything else to apologize for, do you? It’s not as if you made him Prime Minister, is it?’

  ‘Well, chief–’

  ‘What do you mean, well, chief? You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘Well, chief–’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘I was only trying to help, chief. I mean I am the family retainer. For all your family. I’m your brother’s Holy Guardian Sprout too. And what with you banged up in the freezer for thirty years and your mum and dad thinking you were dead and everything—’

  ‘My mum and dad. I hadn’t even thought about them, are they still alive?’

  ‘They’re fine, chief. But what with them thinking you were dead, I thought that if your brother became really successful, it would ease their grief. And it did, you know, I don’t think you’ve crossed their minds in the last twenty-five years.’

  ‘You stupid—’

  ‘Steady on, chief. He’s not a bad Prime Minister. Obviously he’s not a good one, none of them are. But he’s no worse than any other. And he’s a real crowd-pleaser. Brought back conscription and hanging and—’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘The ducking stool.’

  ‘He brought back the ducking stool?’

  ‘I told you he wasn’t too bad, chief.’

  ‘Well, good, bad or whatever, he’s going to be out of office tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t be hasty, chief, please.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this, Barry, and there is no hastiness at all involved. I’ve made my telephone call and as soon as the bass player bails me out, it’s back to the hotel and on with the show.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no other little skeletons in the family cupboard you’d care to mention, Barry? I mean you haven’t made my Uncle Brian President of the USA or anything, have you?’

  ‘Well, chief, now that you mention it.’

  ‘WHAT?’

  The bass player did bail me out, but he made a right fuss. He said I’d behaved irresponsibly and that throwing a TV out of a hotel window was a disgraceful thing to do. I, in reply, asked just what kind of a rock’n’roller he thought he was, with an attitude like that? And then he told me that he had recently been elevated to the status of Cardinal by the new Prime Minister.

  There was some unpleasantness then, and I ran off.

  ‘Is it heresy to head-butt a Cardinal?’ Barry asked, once we were safely back at Hotel Jericho.

  ‘No,’ I said, looking dismally around the trashed-up room, ‘but it does mean that we’ll have to go this one alone from now on.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’m going to start at once, Barry. And you are not going to stop me this time.’

  ‘As if I’d try, chief, as if I’d try.’

  ‘As if you would. But just listen to me for a moment. Thirty years ago I became aware of my special gift, I used it to bring wealth to some homeless people, then WHAM! I’m run over and killed. I spend the next thirty years in frozen pain. I get defrosted and I tell you that I intend to go on with my mission. Then POW! I’m involved in a fight in Wembley High Street that puts me in intensive care for six months. I survive and we come here. I tell you that I am still determined to continue with my mission, and what happens, I see my brother has become Prime Minister and ZAP! I’m banged up in a police station. Now call me paranoid if you will, but I have the definite suspicion that someone, or something is trying to stop me from changing the world.’

  ‘I hope you’re not implying that I have something to do with it, chief.’

  ‘What you, who made my rotten brother the Prime Minister, and my uncle, Pope? Perish the thought. So now, if you don’t mind, I intend to begin. The door is locked, the blinds are drawn and there is nobody here for me to get into a fight with. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that is going to stand in my way this time.’

  ‘Did you hear that, chief?’

  ‘What, Barry?’

  ‘It sounded like a car crash outside, do you think you should go down and see if anyone’s hurt?’

  ‘You’re lying, Barry, aren’t you?’

  ‘I can’t lie, chief, I’m a Holy Guardian Sprout.’

  ‘So was there a car crash outside?’

  ‘No, chief. But there might have been. You never know. Best go and check, eh?’

  ‘No, Barry, I am going to remove my brother from office. This is the new phase one in my from-the-ground-up reconstruction.’

  ‘It’s not a good idea, chief. Please don’t.’

  ‘Silence, Barry.’ I took a deep breath and concentrated all my thoughts. Remove my brother from office. And then I snapped my fingers, tugged upon the lobe of my right ear and stamped upon my own left foot.

  There came a great pounding at my door. ‘Fire, fire!’ someone shouted. ‘Evacuate the building!’

  ‘Nice try, Barry,’ I said, ‘but too late.’

  20

  AHA!

  ‘You again!’ said the doctor, staring down upon me. ‘What happened to you this time?’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ said the nurse. ‘He has forty per cent burns. Refused to leave his room when they were evacuating the hotel.’

  ‘Was this the hotel? Hotel Jericho?’

  ‘That’s right, doctor.’

  ‘Well indeed, I suppose it makes this chap a little part of history, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well if there hadn’t been one guest left in the blazing hotel, then the fire crews would never have gone in. And if they hadn’t gone in, they would never have burst into the secret room by mistake and found all the documents that proved the Prime Minister was selling nukes to the Iraqis. I just heard on the news that he’s resigned from office. And apparently the Pope was in on it too. And he’s had to resign as
well.’

  If I could have managed a smile, I would have. But I couldn’t, so I did not.

  ‘So, Barry,’ I thought, ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘About what, chief?’

  ‘About the nukes, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh those.’

  ‘Yes, those.’

  ‘It was all quite innocent really. He was doing it for the good of all mankind.’

  Bunging nukes to Iraq? For the good of mankind?’

  ‘Certainly. Your brother reasoned that a country with nukes dare only nuke a country without nukes. Because if another country has nukes, it will nuke back, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So if every single country in the world has nukes, then no country would ever dare to nuke any other country because it would fear the inevitable retaliation. It was what he called a world peace initiative.’

  ‘It would never have worked.’

  ‘Why, chief?’

  ‘Well–’ I tried to think of a why, ‘but... just because, that’s all.’

  ‘Fair enough, chief. We’ll never find out now, will we? Not now he’s resigned from office.’

  ‘Hmph,’ I said, and it didn’t half hurt.

  Actually I didn’t look too bad once the plastic surgeons had finished with me. I could have passed for forty, as long as I wore a hat. They told me my hair would eventually grow back and that the no-eyebrow look was the current chic. They were also very apologetic when they handed me the bill, saying that before the old government got ousted over the nuke scandal, all the work could have been done on the NHS. But the new government had privatized all hospitals, so I’d just have to pay up.

  I told them that this created no problem, that I would just telephone my friend who was a cardinal, and then I slipped out of a back door and ran.

  I returned to my room at Hotel Jericho. There wasn’t much of it left and the bed was down to bare springs. But I wasn’t beaten yet.

  ‘Have you ever heard the expression, sucker for punishment, chief?’ Barry asked.

  ‘Just shut it, you.’

  ‘But, chief, come on. Surely you’re getting the message. Every time you do something small that causes something big to happen, it bounces right back upon you and you end up in the ka-ka.’

  ‘All right, you don’t have to rub it in.’

  ‘I’m just trying to look after you, chief, provide a bit of Holy Guardianship. If you get snuffed out a second time, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to rescue you. I mean, let’s face it, it was a pretty far-fetched do the last time, Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Plonker, or whatever.’

  ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Aha!’

  ‘What are you “aha-ing” about, chief?’

  ‘You’ve just given me a very good idea.’

  ‘Was it the one about hitting the beach, by any chance?’

  ‘No, it’s a reworking of the more-radical-than-voodoo one. I am going to withdraw from the plot and let other people do all the doing.’

  ‘But, chief, I won’t be able, I mean you won’t be able to have any influence over them.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  ‘No, stop, chief, this chapter’s too short, you can’t end it like—’

  21

  THE BIG ANSWER

  ‘The greatest darts player I ever met was George Bernard Shaw.’ This extravagant claim emerged from the not-particularly-extravagant lips of John Vincent Omally, The Flying Swan’s Liar in Residence.

  ‘Old George and I once fought for the love of a good woman,’ said Gimlet Martin from The Shrunken Head. ‘I won, he came second.’

  ‘I only met him on a single occasion.’ The voice belonged to Derby Phil Wainscot of The New Inn. ‘And that was in a former incarnation.’

  And that earned Derby Phil the point and he took that round clear. The scores now stood at ten apiece, but Omally was warming up nicely.

  ‘George Bernard, or Podger, as he liked me to call him, was a great man for the hang-gliding. Not a lot of people know that.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Gimlet Martin.

  ‘Me too,’ said Derby Phil. ‘Went gliding with Podger many a time.’

  ‘So,’ continued John, unabashed, ‘we were up one day at about two thousand feet and Podger said to me, well he sort of called to me, “John,” he called, “John, you and I have a lot in common. We both enjoy a game of darts, the company of rough-looking women and the study of interplanetary communications.” ’

  ‘I hope Omally knows what he’s doing,’ said Neville the part-time barman. ‘We could really do with a win this year.’

  For this was The Flying Swan’s fifth annual All Brentford Open Lying Competition and out of the original one hundred and fifty contestants for the much coveted Silver Tongue Trophy and the even more coveted fifty-pound prize, three alone had survived to the final.

  The crowd that remained to witness this event was of that discerning variety one observes mostly at darts matches and road traffic accidents. Little was spoken, but for the occasional appreciative gasp, depreciating exhalation or whispered order for drinks. There was fifteen minutes left on the clock and all was even on the scoreboard.

  Gimlet Martin took up Omally’s challenge. ‘The study of interplanetary communications has for me always been an interest second only to that of viewing women’s legs on escalators. But as I have an uncle who is married to a Venusian woman with very long legs, I am able to combine my interests.’

  ‘What’s your uncle’s name?’ enquired Derby Phil. ‘Perhaps my Cousin Stubby, the Martian ambassador knows him.’

  ‘If it’s his Uncle Barry,’ said Omally. ‘Then we all know that old deviant well enough and if he’s married a Venusian, then I will eat the hat Orson Welles once gave me. The one he wore in The Third Man.’

  ‘Get your knife and fork out then, Omally,’ said Gimlet Martin.

  ‘Did your uncle marry a south Venusian or a north Venusian?’ asked Derby Phil, as if it really mattered.

  ‘South, from the D-Zm lake region.’

  ‘I know the place well,’ said Derby Phil. ‘I was there last week with my Cousin Stubby. We went to a movie, Roswell Alien Autopsy: The Director’s Cut.’

  ‘The place has gone down since the tourists have moved in,’ said Gimlet Martin. ‘But the beer’s good.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Phil agreed. ‘Good beer.’

  And this turn in the conversation found the three finalists studying their now empty glasses.

  ‘Your round, Phil,’ said Omally. ‘A pint of Large, please.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Phil and rising purposely, began to pat his pockets. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you’ll never guess what.’

  But by the rarest of coincidences both John Omally and Gimlet Martin did guess. Correctly.

  ‘Surely,’ said Gimlet, ‘I am right in assuming that you’re next up in line for getting them in, Omally.’

  John Omally grinned. ‘If only such were the case, I would gladly oblige. But I know for a fact that the lot falls to you, and I have no wish to insult us both by muscling in.’

  ‘Your nicety is a thing to inspire us all,’ said Gimlet. ‘But you see Phil here was carrying my money also. Why not then lend him the cash and he will get the round in.’

  Omally turned up his hands. ‘If only I could, but on the way here I was accosted by two Jehovah’s Muggers.’

  Neville called for a time out and the three finalists repaired to separate tables for refreshment, and some scholarly advice from their trainers.

  Jim Pooley spoke close at Omally’s ear. ‘Don’t keep changing the subject,’ was what he had to say. ‘You started well on George Bernard Shaw but within a couple of minutes the talk had turned to beer on Venus. I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  Omally sucked upon his orange. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ said he, ‘and I’m moving in for the kill.’

  The battered Guinness clock above the bar struck nine silent strokes, which meant it was ten o’clock. Something to do
with British Summer Time ending and nobody getting around to climbing up and altering it. Or possibly, as has been mooted, it was a tradition, or an old charter, or something.

  The finalists returned to the competition table.

  ‘I was having a word with God the other night,’ said Gimlet Martin.

  ‘Which one?’ asked John Omally.

  ‘How many are there?’ came the rhetorical reply.

  ‘Six to my knowledge,’ said John. ‘Although I’m only on first-name terms with three of them, myself.’

  ‘Which three do you mean?’ enquired Derby Phil. ‘Only another of my uncles happens to be the Dalai Lama and he’s not just on first-name terms with the gods, he has them round to tea on Thursdays.’

  Omally shook his head. ‘These gods are strictly pagan,’ said he. ‘Your Lamaic uncle wouldn’t know these lads.’

  Derby Phil nodded sagely.

  Gimlet Martin wondered what he’d got himself into. ‘Which gods are you talking about, exactly?’ he asked.

  Omally raised his eyebrows. ‘The six tertiary gods, of course: Goth, Mebob, Kalil, Narfax, Bah-Reah and little Wilf. The three to which I reverently refer, and before whose images I prostrate myself three times every day, are Goth, Mebob and Bah-Reah, born of the dreamtime world BLISH, apprentices to the big jobber Zematod, who plumbed in the universe after the great flood.’

  ‘I have an uncle who chats with a dead red Indian via the medium of a golden megaphone,’ said Phil, ‘although the communications seem strangely one-sided to me.’

  ‘An uncle of mine died once,’ said Gimlet Martin. ‘My aunty says he’s gone to see God.’

  ‘As I was saying,’ Omally continued, ‘Goth, Mebob and Bah-Reah, apprentices to the celestial plumber who guards the big stop-cock, which if turned would see the entire universe vanish down a great plug hole.’

  ‘Black hole,’ said Gimlet Martin.

  ‘Plug hole,’ said John. ‘And I don’t just speak to them, they speak to me also.’

  ‘Perhaps you might ask them to say something to you now,’ said Phil.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘We are all blessed,’ said Omally. ‘Fancy them saying that.’