‘Aren’t you cold wherever you are, without any clothes?’ asked Big Frank.
‘Nah,’ said old Sam. ‘The sex keeps me warm.’
‘The sex?’ Four voices said this. In unison they said it.
‘Of course the sex.’
‘You have sex where you are?’ Danny said this.
‘Certainly do. All the time. Get up in the morning, have sex, breakfast, more sex, lunch, then sex, dinner, then sex. Then bed-time. Then sex, of course.’
‘Holy Hell!’ said Big Frank. ‘And that’s what Heaven’s like?’
‘Heaven be jiggered,’ said old Sam Sprout. ‘I’m not in Heaven, I’ve been reincarnated as a rabbit in Hyde Park.’
3
Save the planet, kill yourself.
THE CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA, 1995
SHADES OF RUDYARD KIPLING
(Or why Danny’s Aunt May won’t allow animals in the house)
During that rough old period we had after the Boom Years finished, Danny’s Aunt May thought it might be a good idea to supplement the modest income she made from the Tupperware parties and take in a lodger.
Danny’s Aunt May was living in Dacre Gardens at this time, opposite the abandoned cement works, so she put aside her first thought of an advert in Country Life and settled for a postcard in the window of Peg’s Corner Shop.
Aunt May cleared all her late husband’s tweed suits from the wardrobe, gave the tiny back bedroom a good flicking over with a feather duster and awaited the rush.
Now Danny’s Aunt May was not a silly woman and being a regular patron of the Walpole Cinema (this being the time when they showed proper British films), she was well acquainted with tales of aged lodgers who died and left their fortunes unexpectedly to kindly landladies.
Aunt May’s postcard read: FURNISHED ROOM TO LET. WOULD SUIT RETIRED GENTLEMAN OF MILITARY BACKGROUND. (In capital letters.)
‘Someone around the eighty-year mark,’ Aunt May told her friend Mrs The Kid, who lived around the corner in Purple Haze Terrace. ‘And looking as much like Wilfred Hyde-White as possible.’
Her first applicant was a beturbaned bus conductor whose credentials were quite unsuitable.
Her second was a young man named Stewart, who wore a quiff and a most unusual brand of aftershave. He was similarly rejected.
Colonel Bertie C. Bickerstaff, late of the Khyber Rifles, arrived on a bright summer’s morning, crocodile-skin travelling case and polo sticks clutched in wrinkled sunburned hands.
He was eighty if he was a day, a gentleman if ever there was one and his resemblance to Wilfred Hyde-White was quite uncanny.
‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said he and was received into Aunt May’s little terraced house with a degree of accord that Aunt May would normally have reserved for a visiting member of the royal household (should one have ever chosen to make a visit) or the Dalai Lama (Aunt May having a go at Buddhism at the time).
Colonel Bertie C. Bickerstaff was not a hard man to please and although his conversation seemed somewhat limited – ‘Your servant, ma’am,’ to Aunt May and ‘Man’s a damn fool’ to the milkman – he fitted into the house of Danny’s aunt the way the toad of yore fitted into its hole.
He had been ensconced therein for some three months before he chose to make, what seemed at the time, an innocent request.
‘Mind if I bring one or two small house plants up to me quarters, ma’am?’ he enquired. ‘To make me-self feel more at home, as it were.’
‘Certainly you may,’ said Danny’s aunt. ‘Feel free to treat this house as your own.’ It was a poorly chosen remark, but at the time it seemed appropriate. After all, the old fellow didn’t look short of a few bob and none of us are getting any younger.
‘Your servant, ma’am,’ said the colonel.
The first consignment of plants arrived the next Tuesday. A swarthy individual, smelling strongly of the Punjab, knocked upon Aunt May’s gaily painted front door and announced, ‘Plants for Colonel-Sahib, missy.’
‘Colonel,’ called Aunt May, up the flight of twenty-three stairs, ‘your plants are here.’
‘Jolly good show,’ bluffed the old boy, blustering down. ‘Jolly good show.’
The box was not a large one, but it seemed unduly weighty. Aunt May had to join in the struggle to hump it up the stairs.
‘Mostly packaging,’ said the colonel, apologetically. ‘My eternal thanks, ma’am, my eternal thanks.’
Well satisfied to have earned the eternal thanks of a rich old lodger, Aunt May started down the stairs.
‘Drop the driver-johnny a couple of rupees, would you, my dear?’ the colonel called after her.
Aunt May parted with a two-bob bit.
The driver-johnny thanked Aunt May and departed, leaving the air heavily scented with vindaloo.
Over the next few weeks there was a lot of coming and going in Dacre Gardens, and all of it at Aunt May’s house. A great many discarded packing cases, bearing inscriptions in Urdu, found their way into Aunt May’s back garden. The same number of two-bob bits left her purse.
Aunt May began to grow a tad uneasy.
‘I don’t like to mention it to the old gentleman,’ she told her friend, Mrs The Kid. ‘After all, he does pay his rent on time and his resemblance to Wilfred Hyde-White is quite uncanny.’
‘It’s probably just a hobby,’ her neighbour replied. ‘My hubby, Mr The Kid, collects encephaloids. I don’t mind, it’s quiet enough.’
‘He’s been bringing home some very strange things lately.’
‘He needs them for his work.’ Mrs The Kid reddened about the cheek areas.
‘No, not your hubby, I mean the colonel.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs The Kid enquired as to what sort of things these might be.
‘Mosquito nets, a lot of old leather suitcases. He stays up until all hours. I can hear him muttering away and banging about. I think he must be making something.’
Mrs The Kid’s face took on the look of grave concern which she always kept in reserve for moments such as this.
She aroused her husband who was sleeping peacefully in the front parlour, his feet in the tub of fuller’s earth and his head in a brown paper bag (a popular homoeopathic remedy for curing dropsie).
‘Mosquito nets and old leather suitcases,’ mused Mr The Kid, once he had been given a synopsis of the story so far. ‘Anything else you can think of?’
‘He collects bones from the butcher.’
Mr The Kid smiled mysteriously. ‘That elephant’s foot umbrella stand you have in your hall, has he asked to borrow that, by any chance?’
Danny’s aunt nodded.
‘Eureka!’ went Mr The Kid, which made everybody jump. ‘I know what he’s up to then.’
‘You do?’ asked his wife and her friend, Danny’s aunt.
‘It is obvious.’ Mr The Kid preened at his braces. ‘Consider the facts: a retired colonel of the Khyber Rifles takes up lodgings in your house. He begins filling his room with plants, then with hide suitcases and bones and seemingly unconnected oddments. To my mind there can be only one logical explanation.’
‘And what, pray tell us, is that, Mr Sherlock Holmes?’ asked his wife.
‘The nostalgic colonel is building himself a jungle.’
Aunt May gasped.
‘And an elephant!’
Aunt May fainted.
‘I suppose you think that’s very funny,’ said Mrs The Kid, as she applied the smelling bottle to Aunt May’s nose.
‘Simply applying Occam’s razor, my sweet,’ said Mr The Kid, returning to his tub and paper bag.
‘I’ll take you home, dear,’ said Mrs The Kid, once Aunt May had been adequately revived. ‘And we’ll go and have a word with this colonel of yours.’
As the two ladies approached the tiny terraced house at the end of Dacre Gardens, they were both equally surprised to see the large foreign-looking lorry that was parked outside.
The word ‘surprise’ however was hardly adequate to describe their feelin
gs as they watched an enormous packing case being manhandled with the utmost care through the front door. On the side of this packing case were printed the words BENGAL TIGER. HANDLE WITH CARE (in capital letters).
‘Now there is a thing,’ said Mrs The Kid.
‘And there is another,’ said Danny’s aunt, as she spied a crowd of little brown-skinned men approaching from the direction of the abandoned cement works. They were banging gongs and blowing whistles. ‘Surely those would be native beaters, wouldn’t they?’
‘What, people who beat up natives?’
‘No, natives who beat.’
‘Oh, I see.’
The porters who had been manhandling the packing case into Aunt May’s house, emerged from the front doorway in considerable haste, bundled into the foreign-looking lorry and departed at speed.
Danny’s aunt looked at Mrs The Kid.
And Mrs The Kid looked at Danny’s aunt.
They both looked towards the approaching native beaters, the half-open front door, and then back at each other once more.
‘I think we had better get all this sorted out right now,’ said Mrs The Kid, in a most determined tone. ‘Come on, let’s do it.’
‘After you, my dear,’ said Danny’s aunt.
As she pushed the front door fully open, Mrs The Kid became immediately aware of the unusually pungent odour which filled the little house.
‘Smells a bit like the hot house at Kew,’ whispered Mrs The Kid, ‘only more so.’
Aunt May, who had her eyes tightly shut, opened them a crack.
‘Oh my goodness,’ she said, closing them again. ‘Gracious me,’ she continued, as she opened them a second time and became fully aware of the bizarre transformation which had taken place in her house during the few short hours that she’d been out.
Palms and ferns and vines and grasses rose from rows of aspidistra pots and choked up the hall. From the reproduction coachlamps above the Queen Mother’s portrait, spotted lemurs skipped and chattered. The distinctive diamond-shaped leaves of that tree which is sacred to the Bodhisattva shone richly from the direction of the kitchenette. All in all the effect was one that would have had the likes of Gunga Din, or indeed Mowgli, feeling well at home.
Overhead, indeed coming from the direction of the back bedroom, a curious trumpeting arose. Mrs The Kid clapped a hand to her cheek. ‘Tsetse fly,’ she said, knowledgeably.
Aunt May was feeling faint once again. ‘Shall we come back later?’ she asked.
Mrs The Kid was now adamant. ‘We will see this thing through now,’ she said, with the kind of spirit that made folk like Scott of the Antarctic, Lawrence of Arabia and Jones of Indiana exactly whatever it was they were.
Mrs The Kid advanced along the hall, beating at the vegetation with her parrot’s-head umbrella. ‘Follow me,’ she cried, making an assault upon the stairs. The lemurs chattered with glee and curious reptiles stuck their scaly heads out from the greenery and blew raspberries.
Upon gaining the upper floor, the two ladies espied what was surely the tail-end of a King Cobra protruding from the bathroom. Over this they stepped, most nimbly.
The back-bedroom door stood ajar. Clumps of exotic foliation showed about the hinges and the smell of Kew’s-hothouse-but-more-so was more-so than ever. The landing window had steamed up and the light which fell upon the newly mossed linoleum lacked not for arboreal ambience.
The two ladies looked at each other once more.
Then a terrible shout was heard.
‘Where’s me damned mahout?’ went this shout. ‘Mahout, be damned, where are ya?’
The shout was the shout of Colonel Bertie C. Bickerstaff, late of the Khyber Rifles.
Mrs The Kid put her hand to the back-bedroom door and gave it an almighty push. As the door swung in and the two ladies stared, a singular sight was seen.
The lower jaws of Mrs The Kid and Danny’s aunt fell slack when they saw what they saw. Because it can truly be said that they had never seen anything like it before, nor ever have they wished to see it since.
There it stood, in the middle of the floor.
The colonel’s mad creation.
It was as Mr The Kid had foretold.
An elephant.
But no ordinary elephant, this. Here was a grotesque parody of an elephant. A mockery. A monstrosity. Styled out of ancient suitcases, plaster of Paris and chicken wire, a length of garden hose serving for a trunk, two bicycle lamps for eyeballs and a pair of brass Peerage hunting horns serving as the mighty tusker’s ivory glory. This travesty stood some four feet high and atop it, in a makeshift howdah, formed from Aunt May’s favourite wicker commode, sat the colonel, all in shorts and tropical kit, a .577 Cordite Express double-barrelled sporting piece across his lap.
‘Wot ho, me dears,’ called the old loon as he spied the boggle-eyed twosome. ‘Climb aboard and join the shikar. Damn me!’ he continued, pulling out his pocket watch and rattling it at his ear. ‘Those bally native beaters are late.’
‘They’re outside in the street,’ said Mrs The Kid. ‘Now see here, Colonel—’
‘Bring’m in,’ cried the colonel. ‘Bring’m in. Don’t stand on ceremony. The hunt is on.’
‘There’ll be no the-hunt-is-oning here, if you don’t mind.’ Mrs The Kid folded her arms, which those who knew her knew to be a bad sign.
‘Would you care for a cup of tea, Colonel?’ asked Danny’s aunt, she being one of those individuals who believed that no matter how dire the circumstance - leg blown off by terrorist bomb, cobblers held fast between the teeth of a Dobermann - a cup of hot sweet tea is a universal panacea. These individuals have names like Elsie of Hartlepool or Doreen of Huddersfield, but they never receive the acclaim of the Scotts, Lawrences or Joneses.
There’s no justice in this world.
‘No time for tea, me dear,’ chuffed the colonel. ‘Have to hunt down old Shere Khan. Damn treacherous man-eater that one. Been bothering the cattle, doncha know.’
‘Cattle?’ Aunt May shook her well-baffled bonce.
Mrs The Kid pointed to the left front leg of the colonel’s mount. ‘There’s your umbrella stand, dear,’ she said.
An Indian in white livery came puffing to the bedroom door. ‘We track down tiger to lair beneath box ottoman in front parlour, sahib,’ he said.
Aunt May fainted.
‘Forward, my mahout!’ bawled the colonel, cocking his shotgun.
Now, at this time things really got moving. The native beaters sighted the tiger through the front window and broke into the house, Mrs The Kid became suddenly entangled in the coils of a boa constrictor and the colonel let fly with his .577.
A neighbour, taking this report to be a gas mains explosion, called for the fire brigade, who arrived in record time and began training hoses on the house and winching up the big ladders.
The native beaters, who had not been able to squeeze themselves into Aunt May’s house, were somewhat incensed by the drenching and replied with a hail of stones and flower pots.
The tiger, sensing that perhaps the time was right to make a break for it, escaped through the scullery window.
Aunt May slept on, oblivious to it all.
Order was finally restored at about three fifteen, when a heavily armed rapid-response team abseiled in from helicopters.
Though many were wounded in the rioting and mayhem, there was only one fatality.
And that was Colonel Bertie C. Bickerstaff, late of the Khyber Rifles and now late of Dacre Gardens also. His body was carried reverentially down the twenty-three verdant stairs of 23 Dacre Gardens by four native beaters and laid to rest upon a makeshift bier of milk crates.
There was some talk of the natives wishing to cremate him there and then, but the rapid-response team soon put a stop to that.
The coroner’s report stated that the old man had died from multiple injuries, impacted fractures and burst whatnots, almost consistent with ‘being trampled to death by a rogue elephant’.
Aunt M
ay doesn’t live in Dacre Gardens any more, what with all the publicity and everything, she decided to open her house up as a safari park. The novelty certainly seems to have caught on, because there are now three more such parks in Dacre Gardens alone and the word is out that the council may be converting some of its maisonettes in Moby Dick Terrace into wildlife sanctuaries.
It is sad to record that Colonel Bertie C. Bicker-staff died penniless, so Aunt May did not come into an inheritance. Apparently, a single week before the old warrior took his final salute, he entered into some kind of financial agreement which involved him making over all his not-inconsiderable personal wealth to another party.
This party was a certain Samuel Sprout.
4
People can only talk about you if you exist.
ERIC CANTONA, 1995
THE MARK-TWO DANNY ORION
(Or a change is not always as good as a rest)
Danny Orion sat upon a bench in Walpole Park. He was well peeved. The day, as they say, had not been his.
Soaked to the skin at old Sam’s funeral, then striped up for two and a half quid by Madame Lorretta.
Danny shook his head. And for the entire episode to come screaming to a halt with a duff old gag about rabbits in Hyde Park...It was all too much.
Danny sniffed. He was sure he was catching a cold. Marmsly had gone home for a hot bath and a change of trews. Big Frank had taken Madame Lorretta to the cinema and The Kid had gone off to visit his aunt, who had a sealife centre in her kitchen sink.
Danny sniffed again. In the far distance a man walked a dog, which made Danny sad as he was greatly desirous to own such a beast. In the middle distance some children played hopscotch and bowling the penny. And in the near distance, on the bench next to Danny, a poet sat composing links to go between the background music.
‘The rain is gone, And my name’s John, And I’ve a bench, To sit upon,’ composed the poet.
‘Good grief,’ said Danny. It was definitely time for a change. What he needed for certain was a change. If there was one thing capable of lifting himself out of himself, then that one thing would be a change.