Necrophenia

‘You’d be rubbish at that, too,’ said Rob.

  ‘So where does this leave us?’ I asked.

  ‘It leaves you, gentlemen, with a most exciting option.’

  Now, I never said that, and nor did Neil and nor did Rob and nor did Toby. And nor did Mr Jenner, nor any of The Rolling Stones, nor any of the fourth- or fifth-year girls of Southcross Road. Nor even Mrs Simian the school cook, nor her weird sisters of the kitchen cauldrons.

  ‘Who said that?’ asked Rob. ‘Or Who’s Next, as I might put it, if it were an album, or something.’

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ said a gentleman. For surely indeed this was a gentleman. He stepped from the shadows at the rear of the brightly lit hall. The left-hand side, when looking, as we were, from the stage.

  ‘Looks like a man of wealth and taste,’ Rob whispered to me, as I was standing closest to him.

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Call me Ishmael,’ said Ishmael. ‘Mr Ishmael,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I liked your performance.’

  ‘You did?’ I was puzzled by this. To say the very least.

  ‘Perhaps he’s a homo,’ whispered Rob. ‘They’ll say anything in order to get a bit of youthful bottom.’

  And then Rob said no more. He sort of clutched at his throat and sort of fainted dead away. And all we Sumerian Kynges hastened to ignore Rob’s plight and see what Mr Ishmael’s ‘most exciting option’ might be.

  ‘You are not, by any chance, the owner of a vast cheese empire?’ Neil asked Mr Ishmael.

  ‘Why do you ask me that?’ the other replied.

  ‘Because Rob has fainted. I’m asking on his behalf.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I see.’

  ‘Glad that someone does,’ said I.

  ‘The Sumerian Kynges,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I like the name. It is very - how shall I put this? - meaningful.’

  Our young heads went nod-nod-nod. Here, it was clear, was an adult who was on our wavelength.

  He had now stepped fully from the shadows, and we were able to have a really good look at Mr Ishmael. The hall being so brightly lit, and everything.

  He was very, very smart, was Mr Ishmael.

  He was tall. In a way that transcends the way that the famous are tall. Because the famous are, in truth, rarely if ever tall. The famous are mostly short, but look tall because they are famous. And one naturally feels that famous folk must somehow be tall, and so we invest them with a quality of tallness, which mostly belies their shorthood.

  Such is ever the way.

  But Mr Ishmael was naturally tall. He topped the magic six-foot mark with ease. And he had the big barrel chest of an all-in wrestler. And the barrel chest and the rest of his parts were encased (with the obvious exception of head, neck, hands and feet) within a sumptuously expensive blue velvet suit. His hair was black and all slicked back.

  His complexion tanned, his cheekbones high, there was an oriental cast to his features, but it was impossible to put a place to the look. He leaned upon a black Malacca cane that had as its head a silver penis and a pair of balls.

  It was a notable cane.

  ‘I do not like your music,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘And believe you me, the ukulele has seen out its days. But I discern potential and I would be prepared to finance you, to the tune of appropriate instrumentation. ’

  ‘And new stage clothes?’ asked Neil. ‘I’m not too sure about these sequins.’

  ‘The sequins stay,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I just adore the sequins.’

  And he twirled his cane and tapped it thricely on the floor.

  ‘Instrumentation?’ said Toby.

  ‘Electric guitars. Amplifiers. A PA. A stack system.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘All in good time. I think - in fact, I know - that you have the seeds of greatness. Sown, as it were, and yet to be reaped. A field of gold, as it were, also.’

  The us upon stage that were conscious did further lookings at each other.

  ‘Serious?’ said Neil.

  ‘Serious,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I will manage you. Promote you. I will make your names household words.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Neil (whose surname was Dishwasher).

  ‘What is your surname?’ Mr Ishmael asked of Neil.

  ‘Garden-Partee,’ said Neil. (Whose surname was not really Dishwasher.) ‘It’s hyphenated. We’re a hyphenation, but we have no money to go with it.’

  ‘But you will. You will.’ And Mr Ishmael approached the stage. And as he did so, a certain coldness approached with him. A certain chill in the air.

  ‘So,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Will you let me take you to fame and fortune? What do you say?’

  And what did we say?

  Well, we said yes, didn’t we? Because what else were we likely to say? And Mr Ishmael produced a contract for us to sign, didn’t he? Well, of course he did. And we all signed it, didn’t we? Well, of course we did that also. We even moved Rob’s unconscious hand on his behalf. And we signed in blood?

  Well, that goes without saying, really, doesn’t it?

  And so, upon that night, the night of our very first gig, we, unwittingly, but greedily and without thought of any potentially disastrous consequences, signed away God alone knows what to Mr Ishmael and played our part in bringing the world and the universe to the point where I would almost save Mankind. Almost.

  What a carve-up, eh?

  8

  It was well after midnight when I got home. Which I found somewhat surprising as I was sure that it was hardly ten.

  My mother and father were still up. Because mothers and fathers stayed up in those days if schoolboys didn’t arrive home until well gone midnight. And mothers and fathers generally had quite definite things to say to the late-returning youth.

  They were both in the hall as I entered.

  I pushed open the front door, which was never locked, because no one ever locked their doors back in those days. Well, not in our neighbourhood, anyway.

  It wasn’t that people were more honest in those days. No, it really wasn’t that. It was that we, along with our neighbours and most other folk in our neighbourhood, had absolutely nothing whatsoever worth stealing.

  Except, of course, for the Sea-Monkeys.

  But then, as everyone had Sea-Monkeys in those days, there was really no need to walk into someone else’s home through their unlocked front door and steal theirs.

  So I pushed open our unlocked front door to find my mother and father waiting in the hall.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ I said. ‘Hello, Father. I have some really exciting news.’ And then I gave the hall the once-over. But for my mother and my father and now myself, it was otherwise empty.

  ‘Where’s my bike?’ I asked. ‘I left it here in the hall.’

  ‘Someone’s nicked it,’ said my father. ‘Probably either that travelling mendicant who specialised in gutha pertha dolls, or that gatherer of the pure who popped in earlier to share a joke about beards and baldness.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Slowly and definitely. ‘Right, I see.’

  ‘You do,’ said my father. ‘You do.’

  And I did. In a manner of speaking.

  ‘And you are late,’ said my father, pointing to his wrist, where a wristwatch, had he worn one, would have been and then towards the circular light patch of wallpaper where, until quite recently, our hall clock had hung. ‘It’s after midnight.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I am confused about this.’

  ‘How so?’ asked my father, already unbuckling his belt.

  And, I knew, preparing himself inwardly for the beating he was about to administer, which would be prefaced with the words ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’.

  ‘Well,’ I said, wondering quietly to myself whether tonight might be that night. That night, which I had been assured by my peers would one day come, when I would stand up to my father and, as a result of him now being old and frail and myself young and in the peak of my physical fitnes
s, mete out to him many summary blows to the skull and never again feel that belt of his across my rarely washed bottom. ‘Well—’

  ‘Well what?’

  I shuddered, silently. It was not going to be that night.

  ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand two things in particular. One being how come it is now after midnight, because I am absolutely sure it was only a quarter to ten just a few minutes ago.’

  ‘And secondly?’ asked my father, his belt now off and his trousers falling to beneath his knees for the lack of its support.

  ‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘how we actually know that it’s after midnight, as we no longer have any means of accurately telling the time in this house.’

  ‘The boy has a point there,’ said my mother, who, I must say, in praise of her loving humanity, hated to see my father laying about me with his belt.

  She always thought he went far too easy on me and would have much preferred to have done the job herself.

  There were some times when I actually wished that we did not live in the enlightened times of the nineteen-sixties, but back in Mediaeval days.

  Because in those days I could have denounced my mum as a witch and had the very last laugh.

  ‘I think twelve of the best are in order,’ said my father, struggling one-handedly with his trousers.

  And then he beckoned to me with his belt hand and I took a trembly step forward in the hall.

  And lo.

  I felt a certain something. It was something that I had never felt before. And, as such, it was something that I did not entirely understand at first. My initial thought was that it had snowed in the hall, but that someone had painted the snow. And I’ll tell you for why this was.

  It was because, as I took that trembly and tentative step forward into the hall, I felt something soft beneath my feet. Where before, and for ever before, there had been bare floorboards, now there was a certain softness all in green.

  ‘Carpet,’ I said, in the voice of one exalted. ‘Praise baby Jesus, Mother, a miracle - we have a fitted carpet.’

  ‘And not just in the hall -’ my mother now raised her voice also ‘- but all through our poor but honest little home.’

  ‘All through . . .’ and my voice tailed off. All through? Picture that! At this time in my life I could not. And so I must have fainted. Dead away.

  I awoke to find myself supported by my mother’s arms, upon the Persian pouffe beside the fire. I awoke with a start and then with a cough, for thick smoke appeared to fill the room.

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself about the smoke,’ said my mother, once she had teased me into full consciousness with a Bourbon biscuit dipped in sal volatile. ‘It’s only the offcuts burning in the grate. They haven’t proved themselves to be a particularly good substitute for coal. I think I will discontinue their use as soon as I run out of them.’

  ‘Offcuts?’ I said. And then, ‘carpet offcuts.’ And then I felt faint all over again. But I didn’t pass out again. Once wasn’t cool. Twice would really be taking the Mickey Mouse hat. And I didn’t want to do that.

  I did a little squinting about and, true as true, we did have a carpet, too, right here in the sitting room. Same as the hall. Same green.

  ‘Billiard table green,’ I said.

  ‘Billiard table baize offcuts,’ said my mother. ‘The same as the stage clothes you are wearing. In fact, when you fainted in the hall we had a job finding you. You sort of blended into the carpet. As would a chameleon.’

  ‘Billiard table baize offcuts?’ I did a bit of gauging up and mental arithmetic. ‘I would say,’ I said, ‘that surely this front sitting room of ours would have a floor area roughly equivalent to at least three billiard tables. Surely these are very large offcuts.’

  ‘That is what the foreman said to your father,’ said my mother. ‘Before he sacked him, this afternoon.’

  ‘Sacked him?’ I said. ‘Oh dear, not again.’

  ‘No, he only sacked him the once.’ My mother was a stickler for detail.

  My father was not in the room. For had he been, I very much doubt whether this conversation would have taken place.

  ‘Since you have known my father,’ I said to my mother as she now kindly mopped my fevered brow with a rum-soaked copy of Pirate Today,7 ‘how many different jobs do you think he has had?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by “different”,’ said my mother. ‘Many have been in the same line of business.’

  I nodded and I gave the matter thought. ‘With different employers, then,’ I said.

  ‘Goodness me,’ said my mother. ‘I have long ago lost count. But forty or so years from now you will be able to “Google” him on the “Internet”. You can find out all about him then.’

  ‘Google?’ I said. ‘Internet?’ I said also.

  ‘Sorry,’ said my mother. ‘I was just having one of my visions. I have been granted the gift of prophecy, you see, from Northfields Pentecostal Church. Captain Lynch is schooling me in the technique.’

  ‘I’ll just bet he is,’ I said. ‘And have you had any visions, or prophetic insights, regarding him? Such as him discovering a lost city of gold, or suchlike?’

  My mother shook her head and said that no, she hadn’t.

  ‘I suppose Dad’ll be at home a lot now,’ I said, with a degree of dread, if not in my voice, then probably upon my face. ‘It always takes him a long time to find a new job.’

  ‘Research,’ said my mother. ‘So much research.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, recalling my father’s research. ‘He always researches the various strengths of alcohol in the local public house, but never takes a job there.’

  ‘Not in a single public house,’ said my mother, once more the stickler for detail. ‘He does his research in many different public houses. He’ll do so much research in one public house that the landlord will urge him to go elsewhere, lest he over-researches.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. With the same inflection I had put into the previous ‘right’.

  ‘But no,’ said my mother, now applying vinegar and brown paper to my forehead, for she had read in a nursery rhyme that this was a timeless remedy. ‘He won’t be researching in public houses because he already has a new job.’

  ‘Already?’ I said. ‘But he was only sacked this afternoon.’

  ‘I know,’ said my mother. ‘What a world we live in today and no mistake. It must be this Space Age that they are all talking about. But a man knocked upon the door earlier this evening and offered your father a new job. And he took it, right there and then.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. And, ‘Well indeed. No, hang about,’ I then said. ‘Dad mentioned a travelling salesman and a gatherer of the pure. He hasn’t got a job shovelling up dog shi—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said my mother. ‘Something quite different - your father has been given a job as a roadie for a rock ’n’ roll band.’

  ‘What?’ I said. And I said it loudly, too.

  ‘A chap in dark glasses who looks a bit like your music teacher gave him the job. He’s going to be the roadie for a band called The Rolling Stones.’

  ‘What?’ said I. And even louder now.

  ‘But let’s not talk about your father,’ said my mother. ‘Tell me, Tyler, what was your really exciting news that you mentioned just before you fainted?’

  9

  The Saturday that followed the Friday evening that had been The Sumerian Kynges’ very first gig was much the same as any other at that time.

  My father was doing some home improvements. He was papering our sitting-room walls with billiard table baize and Captain Lynch had taken my mother to the pictures, because there was a film on about Jesus that my father wasn’t particularly keen to see.

  I got up, then went without breakfast because my mother had apparently left early for the pictures so as to be first in the queue. Then I watched my father’s increasingly abortive attempts to paper the sitting-room walls until I could control my laughter no longer and had to rush to the t
oilet and be sick.

  Which made me feel even hungrier. So I did what all lads of my age did and went off to the Wimpy Bar for lunch.

  Wimpy Bars were the latest thing. They were American and therefore cool. They served a variety of foodstuffs that had never before been served upon these shores. And there were ice-cream desserts with names like the Brown Derby and the Jamaican Longboat.

  How fondly I remember those.

  I once found a pound note blowing down the street, which I considered was surely a gift from God. And myself and Neil Garden-Partee tried to spend the lot at the Wimpy Bar. And we really tried. We had as many burgers (with fries, as the Wimpy Bar’s chips were called) as we could pack in, then we laid into the desserts. And the milkshakes.

  But we only spent fifteen and sixpence, all told.

  Which wouldn’t, nowadays, even buy you a cup of tea.

  As I have lived my long and eventful life and watched the world falling to pieces all around me, I often think back to those more innocent days of the early nineteen-sixties.

  A time when two young men, in the full flush of their youth, could not eat their way through one pound’s worth of Wimpy Bar grub.

  And I feel grateful, somehow. Blessed.

  That I hadn’t been born twenty years earlier and got myself killed in the war.

  What goes around comes around, I suppose.

  Like diseases.

  And whilst we are on the subject of diseases, I have to admit that I caught my first one of the ‘social’ persuasion in an alleyway at the back of the Wimpy Bar.

  But not on this particular day.

  Because on this particular day I was still a virgin.

  I wasn’t too phased about being a virgin. Most of my pals, I knew, were similarly so. Although most bragged otherwise.

  Neil, I knew, was a virgin. The girls didn’t take to his goatee. And Rob, although a genius with a chat-up line, never seemed to pull. Toby, however, was another matter. Toby was a bit of an enigma and if all was to be believed, and it probably was, he had had his first sex while at junior school.

  With the teacher.

  And the teacher wasn’t a man.