The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘But she hadn’t explained how the handbag came to be missing.’

  ‘And she never did. I had to find that out for myself.’

  ‘And you followed Billy Barnes to Brentford, did you?’

  ‘Kill two birds with one stone, Barry. I figured that Billy probably did have the handbag, so I went in search of him.’

  ‘And what happened when you found him?’

  ‘Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It took me a while to find him, and before that, other things happened. Shall I continue with the story?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘OK.’

  The estate agent showed Billy around the penthouse flat.

  ‘This is very much top of the range,’ she said. ‘This suite offers the most wonderful views of Brentford there are to be had. From here you can see the water tower.’ She pointed with a long slim finger. ‘And the famous gasometer. And beyond there the river bridge to Kew and the Royal Gardens.’

  Billy’s gaze followed the direction of the pointing finger, and then returned along the hand, arm, shoulder and neck to the attractive face of the elegant young woman. ‘Very nice,’ said Billy.

  The estate agent smiled up at him, turned and strode across the black marble floor upon long slender legs. ‘You have your fully fitted kitchen,’ she said. ‘Very hi-tech, very chic. Your lounge here, all mirror tiles and Bauhaus furniture, and the bathroom, with a Jacuzzi, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Billy.

  ‘And will you be living here alone, Mr Barnes?’

  ‘I haven’t made my mind up yet.’

  ‘Well, it certainly suits you. You look right at home here, as if it was built for you.’

  ‘Why, thank you very much. And what is through that door over there?’

  ‘That is the master bedroom, would you like to see it?’

  ‘All in good time.’

  ‘Well I’m sure that you’ll like it. And the suite is all ready for anyone to move in. Fridge fully stocked, champagne on ice.

  ‘Perhaps we might enjoy a glass or two now.’

  The estate agent laughed a pretty laugh. ‘Not until the contracts are completed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be afraid.’ Billy took something from his pocket; it was wrapped in silver foil. ‘Something for you,’ he said. ‘A present.’

  ‘A present for me?’

  ‘Just for you.’

  The estate agent took the present and unwrapped it. It was a brightly coloured plastic something.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, as she gave it a squeeze.

  ‘It’s called a pleaser,’ said Billy. ‘Now let’s get that champagne open, and then we can explore the master bedroom.’

  Smart Hat

  That’s a smart hat, Billy,

  A fine and bonny lid,

  A tasteful piece of headwear,

  You’re sporting there, our kid.

  You look like Humpty Gocart,

  With all that canny brim,

  And it’s a rare old compliment

  To say you look like him.

  It really really suits you,

  You know I wouldn’t lie,

  You cut a dashing figure, lad,

  They’ll cheer as you go by.

  I only wish I had one

  So I could wear it too,

  And all the folk would say I looked

  As half as good as you.

  From an ingratiating follower of natty headgear

  12

  Hang on by your fingernails and never look down

  RORSCHACH

  (inventor of the ink blot)

  The hat looked good on Billy, and so did the coat.

  They suited him and he suited them. The chap at the tailor’s remarked upon this and so did his assistant. They helped Billy carry his purchases out to his car. His new car, the one driven by the lady chauffeur.

  The lady chauffeur who had, until recently, been an estate agent. They loaded Billy’s buys into the boot and waved as the chauffeur drove him away.

  ‘He really suits that car,’ said the tailor chap, and his assistant agreed.

  Billy sat in the back seat, tinkering with the CD player. In his opinion this car suited him very well. It was a definite cut above that belonging to the now defunct young man. It wasn’t top of the range, but it was the best his lady chauffeur could afford. The car phone rang and Billy answered it.

  ‘Barnes,’ he said.

  ‘Billy,’ said the voice of Mr Dyke. ‘Settling in all right? Got yourself all sorted with a place to stay, I hear.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Billy.

  ‘Splendid. Then it’s time for you to go to work’

  Billy’s mother sat a long time in the shed talking to the lad who would be Woodbine. But she communicated no further details regarding the mysterious disappearance of the voodoo handbag. Evidently glad to have got the whispering side of it out of the way, she made a great deal of noise. Rattling flowerpots about and banging the walls of the shed with a shovel.

  Eventually several neighbours came to complain, there was some unpleasantness and Billy’s mum was forcibly evicted.

  The lad who would be Woodbine sat and pondered. He had been offered a weekly retainer – a sum coincidentally equal to that of Granny’s old age pension – to locate and return the handbag. And, he concluded, as he would remind his Holy Guardian Sprout some ten years later, the best way to go about this was to kill the two birdies with the single stone and seek out Billy Barnes.

  And this he set about doing.

  Now it has to be admitted (although not yet by him) that he was not exactly in the Billy Barnes league when it came to the matter of mental agility.

  Here was a lad of good intention, hell bent on becoming a famous Private Eye, but not exactly, how shall we put it, gifted. He had read Hugo Rune and his Law of Obviosity, but he had not fully grasped all the principles.

  When he left the shed, a month later, somewhat grey and sallow of face due to the restricted diet of uncooked potatoes, he had at least reached the conclusion that although the shed seemed a very likely candidate for the least most obvious of all least most obvious places for Billy Barnes to turn up handbag in hand (and therefore the most obvious place that he would), he obviously wasn’t going to yet!

  And so, perhaps, rather than risk starvation, it might be as well to begin the search elsewhere.

  And as Brentford was as much of an elsewhere as anywhere else, and the lad had an uncle called Brian who lived there, then Brentford seemed as good a place as any to begin.

  And so he, which is to say I, arrived upon my Uncle Brian’s doorstep with a smiling face and a change of underwear. The year was 1977 and the date was 27 July. It was a Sunday and a sunny one at that.

  Uncle Brian opened the door. He was a short man, Uncle Brian, positively dwarf-like. He wasn’t Welsh, but then who ever thought that he was?

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Uncle Brian.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.’

  ‘Well, you never can be too careful, come in.’

  And I went in.

  I had to squeeze past a lot of cardboard boxes that were blocking up the hall. ‘What do you have in these?’ I asked my uncle.

  ‘Rubber gloves. Would you care for a cup of something?’

  ‘Tea would be nice.’

  ‘Yes, wouldn’t it?’

  Uncle Brian led me into his front room. It had been stripped of all furniture and the floor was covered in cushions.

  ‘Having a party?’ I asked.

  ‘Sleeping,’ said my uncle. ‘I sleep as much as I can, wherever I can. To sort out all the world’s problems.’

  ‘Top man,’ I said. ‘If the people in power spent more time sleeping and less time trying to sort out all the world’s problems, the world’s problems would probably sort themselves out.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ my uncle asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well you
should try it. I do, it helps me to sleep.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. But I didn’t.

  ‘You don’t,’ said my uncle. ‘But sit down, I’ll explain.’

  So I did, and he did.

  ‘Dreams,’ said my uncle. ‘The power of dreams. Where do you think ideas come from?’

  ‘You think them up,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but where do they come from?’

  ‘You think them up,’ I said again.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said my uncle. ‘They have to come from somewhere. They don’t just spontaneously appear in your head.’

  ‘I think they sort of do. I think an idea is actually composed of lots of different other ideas that sort of give birth to it.’

  ‘Cobblers,’ said my uncle. ‘When you ask someone how they came up with a really amazing idea, they’ll say “it just popped into my head” or “it came to me all at once” or “I had a dream” or “I had a vision”, or something similar.’

  ‘So you’re saying that ideas come from outside your head.’

  ‘No, they come from inside. But from a different world inside, the world of dreams.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a different world,’ I said. ‘I think that when you’re asleep, your mind is sort of idling, and dreams are just jumbled-up information.’

  Uncle Brian shook his head. ‘It’s a different world, we enter it when we are asleep and dreaming. It seems weird to us because we are strangers there, we don’t understand the laws that govern it. It’s a world of pure idea, you see. Thought only, with no physical substance. Pure idea. Sometimes we bring a little of that back with us into the waking world. And pow, we have a new idea.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re trying for?’

  ‘Exactly. A big idea. Hence the dream surfing.’

  ‘What is that, exactly?’

  ‘When you go to bed at night you set your alarm, you need a digital one, you set it to go off at random times in the night to wake you up. Wake you up while you’re dreaming. Break in on your dreams, see? Because normally, in the natural way of things, you only wake up when a dream is over, and so you don’t remember any of it. This way you’ll hit a few dreams in the night, you wake up with a start and hastily write down whatever you can remember.’

  ‘Does it work?’ I asked.

  My uncle made a grumpy face. It was the kind of grumpy face that people who haven’t been sleeping too well often make. ‘Speaking of work,’ said my uncle. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

  ‘I have become a private detective,’ I said, preening at the lapels of my trench coat.

  ‘I thought you were in show business. Carlos the Chaos Cockroach, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t do that any more.’

  ‘But wasn’t it something to do with the butterfly of chaos theory? Didn’t you claim to be able to cause great events to occur by moving biros about and sticking paperclips on your ear? I seem to recall my deep involvement in the entire adventure. Although perhaps I just dreamed it.’

  ‘Well, I’m over that now,’ I said.

  ‘The tablets are helping, are they?’

  ‘Tablets always help, that’s what tablets are for, isn’t it?’

  ‘My sleeping tablets definitely help,’ my uncle yawned.

  ‘Do you want to get your head down for half an hour?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’ll be fine. But if I doze off in the middle of a conversation, don’t take it personally, it’s not because you’re dull, or anything.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘So tell me about this private detective work of yours. It must be very interesting.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘This case I’m on now for instance—’

  ‘Zzzzzzzzzzz,’ went my uncle.

  About an hour later an alarm went off and my uncle awoke. He snatched up a notebook and wrote frantically with a biro.

  ‘Come up with a good’n?’ I asked, when he’d finished.

  My uncle examined his writings. ‘Very b*oody odd,’ he said. ‘But I suppose it must mean something.’

  ‘What have you written?’

  ‘Well, I had this dream that I was in a fishing port somewhere. There were all those whaling boats, very old-fashioned, and I went into this bar on the quay and got into conversation with this ancient mariner.’

  ‘And he gave you an albatross?’

  ‘He gave me a message to give to you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you were in a great danger and that you should beware of a Billy Barnes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Billy Barnes. Do you know a Billy Barnes, then?’

  ‘I used to go to school with him. It’s Billy Barnes I’m searching for.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d better jack it in.’

  ‘Bug*er me,’ I said.

  ‘No thanks,’ said my uncle.

  ‘But it’s quite incredible. You dreaming his name. Did the ancient mariner say anything else?’

  Uncle Brian consulted his notes (which rang a future bell somewhere). ‘I have the word CHEESE written down in big letters and underlined.’

  ‘So what does that mean? That I should beware of cheese?’

  Uncle Brian shook his head. ‘It’s probably a symbol. You get lots of symbolism in dreams. Cheese probably doesn’t mean cheese, it means something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, what do you associate with cheese?’

  ‘Mousetraps?’ I said.

  ‘Mousetraps, good. And where would you find a mousetrap?’

  ‘In the larder?’

  ‘The larder, right. And a Lada is a kind of car, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not a very good one, I’d prefer a BMW.’

  ‘Then that’s probably what it means, you’d better be careful when you drive your BMW.’

  ‘I don’t own a BMW.’

  ‘All right. Let’s try another tack. What else do you associate with cheese?’

  ‘Onions.’

  ‘Why onions?’

  ‘Cheese and onion crisps.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a good one.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Well, an onion is a vegetable and crisps are made out of vegetables. So where do you get vegetables?’

  ‘Out of the larder?’

  ‘Hm,’ said my uncle. ‘So what does cheese rhyme with?’

  ‘Peas?’ I said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said my uncle. ‘Keys, you have something there.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘The Green Carnation Club,’ said my uncle. ‘It must mean that.’

  ‘What, you have the keys to the place or something?’

  ‘No, it’s simple world association. Keys. Keys go in locks. Locks rhymes with box. Cricketers wear protective boxes. Cricketers bowl “overs”, over rhymes with Rover, Rover is a dog, dogs chase cats, cats have nine lives and Oscar Wilde lived at nine Chesham Place, London.’

  ‘And Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation.’

  ‘Exactly. And the Green Carnation Club is in Moby Dick Terrace, just round the corner.’

  ‘And Moby Dick was a whale and you dreamed about whaling boats.’

  ‘There you go, then,’ said my uncle. ‘And I’ll bet Billy Barnes drives a BMW.’

  I shook my head. ‘Incredible,’ I said, and I meant it.

  And my uncle smiled. ‘A piece of cake,’ he said.

  ‘Cheese cake?’

  Oh how he laughed.

  ‘But I’ll tell you one thing,’ said my uncle. ‘If you do go to the Green Carnation, watch out for yourself.’

  ‘You mean it’s a gay bar, I’m not worried about that.’

  ‘No, its the bar. The one in all the jokes. You know “a man walks into a bar”. Those jokes. The Green Carnation is the bar where all those jokes originate from.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Everything has to come from somewhere,’ said my uncle.

&nbs
p; And he was right, of course.

  I shouldn’t have gone to the Green Carnation that night. I should have gone straight home when I left Uncle Brian’s. If I’d gone straight home, then I’d never have got involved in any of the horror. I’d have been safe. And perhaps, years later, I might even have asked Billy Barnes for a job. But then, if I hadn’t gone to the Green Carnation, I wouldn’t be telling you this story now, or perhaps I would, but you wouldn’t be there to read it. Or perhaps you would, but I wouldn’t, or I would, or maybe I wouldn’t.

  I’m not completely certain.

  But I did go along to the Green Carnation.

  And there was a BMW parked out the front.

  It didn’t belong to Billy Barnes though, it belonged to Johnny Ringpeace, the nightclub owner. Johnny hailed from the North, where real men hail from. Real men with button-up flies and spittle on their boots. Johnny was well hard. He had a tattooed todger, a guard dog named Ganesha and a boil called Norris on the back of his neck.

  As I wandered into the bar Johnny was arguing with a customer.

  ‘And I’m telling you!’ shouted Johnny. ‘You can’t bring that dog in here.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said the customer. ‘Just a swift half and I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Not with that dog, you’ll have to leave him outside.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the customer.

  ‘Because if my dog sees him, he’ll kill him, that’s why.’

  ‘I’m sure he won’t,’ said the customer.

  ‘He bloody will. He’s a Rottweiler, he’ll make mincemeat of him.’

  ‘Oh, I bet he won’t.’

  ‘Bet? Bet? You wanna bet, do you?’ Johnny dug into the back pocket of his leather trousers. ‘Well, here’s a ton, says he will.’

  ‘A hundred pounds?’ The customer looked a little worried.

  ‘Take the bet or *iss off.’

  ‘Okay!’ The customer dipped into his pocket and counted one hundred pounds onto the bar. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see about that, Ganesha!’

  A very large Rottweiler came bounding around the bar counter.