Fangio shrugged. ‘I suppose he just felt like it today. I know I did.’
‘I see.’
‘And here I am at the beach,’ smiled Jack. ‘And what a wonderful day for it. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the water is warm, warm, warm. And what a crowd we have here. Reports say that London is virtually empty, only one per cent of the working population actually having turned in at their places of employment today, and most of those folk who run their own businesses. As for the rest, they’re in for a swim.
‘And on the world front. It’s the same game. Folk taking to the beach and smiling. I’ve never seen so many happy people before. It’s just as if the whole world woke up today and said, “Let’s do it.” This is Jack Black, cross-dressed and proud of it, returning you to the studio.’
And then the test card came up on the screen.
‘What a very nice dress,’ said Fangio. ‘I wonder where he bought it. And what a wonderful day, would you care for another beer, on the house?’
‘I certainly would,’ I said, and I smiled as I said it. Fangio went around the bar to pop another bottle. ‘Come on, chief,’ said Barry, ‘you can’t sit around all day drinking. You’ve got to put all this right. The whole world’s taken the day off and it’s all your fault.’
‘The whole world is happy and smiling,’ I said. ‘And I’m proud of it.’
‘Me too,’ said Fangio.
‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t talking to you.
‘Oh no problems, you were talking to your sprout, I suppose.’
‘My what?’
‘Your Holy Guardian Sprout. I’ve got a radish, you know. Never even knew I did until this morning when it started talking to me. Robbie, his name is.’
‘Robbie the radish?’
‘Wotcha, Robbie,’ said Barry.
‘Hi, Barry,’ said Robbie.
‘Hang about,’ I said. ‘What is all this?’
‘The merciful arrival of the cavalry I hope, chief. As you’ve brought the world out on strike, let’s pray the Holy Guardians can persuade everyone to go back to work tomorrow.’
‘But that’s cheating. That isn’t free will. That’s not the freedom I wanted everyone to have.’
‘It’s all for the best, chief, really.’
‘Why, you sneaky little sod. You’ve been trying to persuade me to change everything back and while I’m saying no, your mates are trying to persuade everyone else. This is sabotage.’
‘Not really, chief. It’s just that you neglected to mention it in the small print of your BIG ANSWER.’
‘Well I won’t forget it next time.’
‘Next time, chief? What do you mean, next time?’
‘You wait and see.’ I began wishing very hard and doing strange things with my fingers.
‘No, chief, you can’t, you can’t, chief—’
‘Wanna bet?’
HUGE BLACK BULLET
Farmers in gaiters looked up from their digging
Sailors in bell-bottoms watched from the rigging
Dons in their dinner suits choked on their egg
When the huge black bullet landed
Fey window dressers fumbled their frocks
Men from the Ministry registered shocks
Tall executioners leant on their blocks
When the huge black bullet landed
Cavalry officers out on fatigues
The elves who make boots that can walk seven leagues
The lovers of Dresden turned off Arthur Negus
When the huge black bullet landed
The glass-blower’s clerk laid down his crucibles…
Don’t be silly!
The carpenter’s lackey put down his new plane (that’s more like it)
The toffs watched from seats on the Paddington train
The chef dropped his pudding and cried out in pain
When the great big
Coal black
Horrible
Beastly
Huge black bullet landed.
And that’s why I’m late for my first day at work—
The huge black bullet landed.
HUGE BLACK BULLET II
BLACK CAPSULE (SON OF BULLET)
To be intoned in a deep dark voice.
Oh black capsule
Son of bullet
Relative of Dick
Brother to
Lord Vindaloo
(The stuff that makes me sick)
Oh black capsule
Friend of Jimmy
Lover of Van Gogh
Mucker to
Lord Vindaloo
(That makes me choke and cough)
Oh black capsule
Chum of Derek
Pal to Simon Dee
Buddy to
Lord Vindaloo
(I had some for my tea)
Oh black capsule
Loved by Lemmy
And George Bernard Shaw
Cousin to
Lord Vindaloo
(I don’t want any more)
But blood is thicker than water.
But I’m in trouble deep.
23
SSSH NOW, I’M WAGGLING
The sound made by the explosion of an atomic bomb has been likened to that of a great door slamming in the depths of Hell. The sound I now heard wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t far off. The blast that tore the door of Fangio’s Bar from its hinges this time was one of quite considerable force. I was lifted from my feet, carried backwards across the bar and straight out through the exit. I would surely have met with certain death against the wall of the building next door had I not had the good fortune to strike a woman in a straw hat who was dragging a deckchair. We went down amongst plastic rubbish sacks, Styrofoam food cartons and rotting fruit and veg.
I shook a dazed head and glanced all around. A shrill wind howled down the alleyway. Overhead the sky was—
‘Green. The sky’s turned green.’
‘Call them back, chief,’ cried Barry in my head.
‘Do what?’
‘The Holy Guardians, chief, call them back, as quickly as you can.’
‘No I won’t. I have sent them all away for the good of Mankind’
‘You must call them back, chief, you must. Things have turned really bad. You’ve done a really bad thing. Two poems at the start of the chapter. That’s really bad. Call them back, chief, the Holy Guardians, call them back.’
‘I will not.’
‘Chief, we don’t have a lot of time. In fact, if you don’t call them back, there isn’t going to be any more time, period.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ducked as a dustbin whistled past my head. It was whistling the famous tune ‘When Your Grey Hairs Turn to Silver Won’t You Change Me Half a Quid?’
‘Did you hear that dustbin?’ I shouted.
‘Stuff the dustbin, chief, call back the Guardians. Twiddle your thumbs about quick, while you’ve still got thumbs to twiddle.’
‘What are you going on about? And why has the sky turned green?’ I took to cowering in a doorway, all manner of stuff was blowing by. Bicycles and barnacles, cigarette packets and blue book jackets, parsnips and pomegranates, old grey wigs and suckling pigs.
‘It’s chaos, chief.’
‘You’re damned right. What is going on?’
‘Call back the Holy Guardians, chief, I’ll tell you then.’
‘Tell me now.
The bricks of the building next door started to separate, they weren’t bricks any more, they were small living things that began to jostle in an agitated fashion.
‘That Fangio must have slipped a tab of acid into my beer,’ I shouted. ‘I’m having a really bad trip here, Barry.’
‘It’s no trip, chief, call back the Holy Guardians. Do it now, chief, or the entire planet will go down the plughole.’
‘It’s only another trick, Barry, to stop me putting the world to rights.’ I struggled out of the doorway, bracing myself against the driving wind an
d blundered into the street.
Folk were running madly about. And not just folk. There were other things, vague, indistinct, dark forms, low and scuttling.
‘Call them back, chief, please call them back.’
‘I did this, didn’t I?’
‘Just call them back, please.’
‘All right.’ I twiddled my fingers.
A great jagged crack tore across the sky.
‘It didn’t work, Barry, my fingers – God, my fingers!’
But they weren’t fingers any more, they were tubes of toothpaste. All with the tops unscrewed and these streams of different-coloured toothpaste oozing out and twisting all about.
‘Do something else, chief. Wink your eyes, waggle your ears, anything. Anything.’
I winked and waggled for all I was worth.
A black limousine drew up beside me. A black window swished down and the face of Small Dave grinned out. ‘Time to be off to the gig,’ he giggled.
‘That’s not right.’
‘Waggle some more. Do something, anything.’
‘I’ve got your brother in the back,’ called Small Dave. ‘He’s all ready for you. All trussed up. If you butcher him now, we can eat him together.’
‘Barry, get me out of this.’
‘Only you can, chief, only you.’
The ground began to sink beneath me and I jumped aside. Something rose from the earth, something huge and hairy. Parts groaned open to expose green things within. Emeralds surely, large as tennis balls.
‘Run, chief, and waggle while you run.’
The street tipped alarmingly and I ran in the downhill direction.
‘That’s him,’ cried a woman in a straw hat. She sat astride a great white horse, at the head of a legion of Cossacks. ‘He’s to blame for it all. Deviant, he’s destroyed the entire programme. Trample down the deviant.’
‘Run and waggle, chief, run and waggle.’
I ran and I waggled as I ran.
‘Tell me what’s happening, Barry,’ I howled.
And then I was in amongst the crowd, the cheering crowd.
The cheering, singing, stamping crowd. And it wasn’t thousands, it was millions. Millions and millions.
I was near the front. Near the stage. I could see the band. Sonic Energy Authority. They seemed to be playing in slow motion, but the sound was accelerated. Too fast to catch, a high-pitched scream. And then I saw the bass player, Panay Cloudrunner and he looked down at me and he pointed and the music stopped and the crowd stilled and they all looked at me and they stared and they pointed. And Litany was there, sitting on my brother’s shoulders and she stared and pointed too and so did he.
‘He never killed me,’ said Panay Cloudrunner pointing at me. ‘I killed myself. I was speeding out of my brain, I’d run down seven people before I hit the road block. They never put that in the paper. They wanted him to feel guilty, they wanted him dead.’
‘Is that true, Barry?’
‘Don’t take any notice,’ said my Uncle Brian, putting his hand upon my shoulder. ‘They’re just trying to confuse you. It’s the iron, you see. The iron in the guitar strings. If you can free yourself from the influence of iron, you can do anything, absolutely anything.’
‘Don’t listen to your uncle, dear,’ said my mum. ‘He’s quite mad. The whole family’s quite mad. Always has been, always will be, of course you were adopted, the fairies left you on the doorstep.’
‘They were my fairies,’ said Uncle Brian. ‘The lad had a mission. He was the Chosen One, sent up from below to balance things out. If he hadn’t run off I would have explained everything to him.’
‘Everything about what? Barry, what is he talking about?’
‘This isn’t real, chief, you’re imagining it all. Please try to concentrate, waggle your fingers, bring back the Holy Guardians.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s happening?’
‘It’s very straightforward,’ said my Uncle Brian. ‘The world is dissolving. Reality is dissolving. Everything is returning to chaos.’
‘I didn’t mean that to happen. I wanted people to be free.’
‘Well, they’re going to be free now. Free of all existence. That’s the ultimate in freedom, I suppose. Well done.’
‘That’s not what I intended.’
‘Waggle your fingers, chief. Stop it now.’
‘I want to know the truth. Won’t anyone tell me the truth?’
‘I’ll tell you.’
I turned at the voice. What a voice that was. Charismatic. A real joy-bringer of a voice. The kind of voice that could talk a Tesco’s frozen turkey into a tug-o-war team.
‘Colon,’ I said, ‘the super-dense proto-hippy.’
‘You’d better call the Holy Guardians back,’ said Colon, sweet as you please.
‘I must know the truth.’
‘There is no ultimate truth,’ said my Uncle Brian.
‘You keep out of this.’
‘I’ll tell you the truth.’ said Colon. ‘But first call back the Holy Guardians.’
‘No I won’t,’ I said, surprising even myself. ‘Not until I know the truth.’
‘One part of knowledge,’ said Colon, ‘consists of being ignorant of such things as must never be known.’
And then the green sky cracked completely and night was upon us. Colon and I stood alone upon an endless expanse of absolutely nothing. Black earth below, black sky above, but a sky made beautiful by stars.
Colon stared up at them. ‘Have you managed to join up those dots yet?’ he asked. ‘Have you divined the Big Answer?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘That’s a pity. I felt sure that you would.’
‘Have you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Colon.
‘You lying git.’
‘I have too.’
‘You never have.’
‘Have too.’
‘So what is it then?’
‘It’s the future,’ said Colon. ‘The light from the stars comes to us from the past, it spells out the future.’
‘What a load of old rubbish. Where are we, by the way? It’s getting very nippy.’
‘Allow me to explain,’ said Colon, ‘about your gift, about everything.’
‘Will any of this be the truth?’ I asked. ‘Because so far everyone has lied to me about pretty much everything.’
‘People mostly lie because they don’t know what the truth is.’
‘You’re never caught short for a New Age platitude, are you?’
‘Will you just shut up and listen?’
‘Well, excuse me.’
‘Your gift,’ said Colon, in rather a stern voice I thought. ‘The mythical mystical butterfly of chaos theory—’
‘I know, the one that flutters its wings up the Orinoco and causes the price of condoms to go up in Tierra del Fuego.’
‘The same. It’s the butterfly of chaos theory. Not the butterfly of Order Theory. When it flutters its wings it does not bring order out of chaos, it does exactly the reverse. When you used your “gift” you did exactly the same.’
‘I only tried to help people. To help mankind, and I would have succeeded, but I kept getting exploited and sabotaged.’
‘But you could have expected nothing more. You couldn’t change the world for the better, no matter how good your intentions were. You could only make things worse by your interference.’
‘My heart was in the right place,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with trying to change mankind for the better. They all got a day at the seaside. Well, most of them did. Listen, all right, I’ll have another go. I won’t screw up this time.’
‘You can only screw up. You don’t understand how things work.’
‘Because no-one will tell me the truth. Will you tell me the truth? Now, before I waggle the fingers that I see have returned to me.’
‘The Holy Guardians,’ said Colon.
‘Oh, not them again.’
‘Yes, them again. What do
you think Guardians do?’
‘Well, they guard things, obviously.’
‘And what do the Holy Guardians do?’
‘Guard people, I suppose.’
‘From what?’
‘From other people, from themselves—’
‘Wrong,’ said Colon.
‘Oh well, I don’t know, you tell me.’
‘Chaos,’ said Colon.
‘That again, eh?’
‘That again, yes. The order that is life on earth is a very fragile affair, difficult to maintain and easily tipped back into chaos. The universe isn’t still and peaceful, it’s whirling chaos. Chaos is its natural order. The Holy Guardians are there to protect mankind from this chaos, and also to be the conscience of man, the inner voice. What raises man above the animals, what will one day allow him to join up the dots and read the Big Answer.’
‘And Captain Kirk told you this, right?’
Colon made an exasperated face. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘The universe is a very chaotic place.’
‘It doesn’t seem too chaotic to me, the moon goes round the Earth, the Earth goes round the sun.’
‘And in a couple of billion years the sun will go super nova and explode, which will be pretty chaotic.’
‘Yeah, well that’s a long way off in the future.’
‘That’s diddly-squat in universal time, that’s half a second.’
‘Well, I don’t think that concerns us here.’
‘Well it concerns me. I’m responsible.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Well, I am God,’ said Colon.
‘You’re who?’
‘God,’ said Colon. ‘I think you’ve heard of me. You’ve dispatched all my Holy Guardians and reduced my planet to chaos. I should be very angry with you.’
‘You’re never God,’ I said. ‘If you’re God, then tell me something, why did you invent the bluebottle?’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I have just told you I’m God and you’re asking me about bluebottles. You don’t feel that perhaps you should be prostrating yourself and begging forgiveness?’
‘Frankly no,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t believe any of this. I think I’m probably lying unconscious in a gutter somewhere, dreaming the whole damn lot.’