A Damnably Nice Chap!
To begin with, nobody had any idea that Cabot was Argentinean; but it turned out that his Mother was, and that Alfie stood for Alfonso. He had been born into a poor family, his father worked for the railways, whilst his mother did the best she could to bring up Alfie and his seven siblings in a suburb of Buenos Aires. He had been an unusually inquisitive child, yet shy, introverted and sickly, but an intellectual diamond, who has passed through his local schools with flying colours, gaining a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States. After graduated with honours he returned to South America and had taken up a number of positions, being named Professor Emeritus at the tender age of forty two.
And the rest was, as they say, history.
The three modelled him upon Professor Delaney; Cabot too was trained as a physicist with a special interest in fluid mechanics.
The first thing the friends did was create a website for Alfie. This was a one hour job using one of those create-a-site-in-a-nite programmes. Finding pictures to put on the site was straightforward because, when one thought about it, no-one knew what Alfie looked like, so the three randomly selected a recently deceased academic from Argentina and used his videos and pictures on the site.
The videos in particular were an effective touch, but their inclusion was also a risky gambit; for although they were helpfully dubbed over in English by a heavily accented Barney, there was an outside chance that a lip-reading Spanish-speaker might stumble across Alfie’s site and realise that the speaker was not who he was made out to be, and in point of fact, did not give a jot for environment.
‘Is true that if eh I care for the world, the world she care for me’ said Barney into an mp3 recorder.
Drade was impressed and even Belter nodded his approval.
‘I have to say, he sounded more Chilean than Argentinean,’ said Belter cracking another good ‘un.
‘Well, before coming to Buenos Aires looking for work, his parents hailed from the north of Argentina, – along the border actually,’ said Barney.
‘Is that a fact?’ answered Belter as he copied and pasted photo after photo of his unwitting Argentinean accomplice onto Cabot’s expanding website.
It was then felt that Alfie needed a page on Wikipedia, so Drade got to work and was astonished at how easy this was. It took him less than five minutes to set up, and five minutes later this page had not only been linked to his website, but also to his newly set up Facebook and Twitter accounts.
As well as having his own forum, Alfie quickly established a presence for himself on the forums of others, and was a popular addition to a number of newsgroups. His appeal was in part, because members could not help feeling exceedingly flattered that one as eminent as Professor Cabot should grace them with his presence, and in part because he was always so delightfully agreeable. It must have occurred to many that there was really something working in the world, that one from such humble and inauspicious origins as he could rise to the very pinnacle of his profession, and, yet remain so genial, down to earth, unprepossessing and yes...I’ll say it for them:
‘So damn nice!’
But there it was: a miracle on the Superhighway; and they do happen sometimes.
The three puppeteers worked feverishly to attract science undergraduates to discuss Cabot’s many opinions. This turned out to be rather simple, as scientists, tending towards introversion, were only too happy to meet like-minded individuals. In addition, the good professor was offering five generous research grants to be given out in the name of a charity of which he had recently agreed to be a patron. Decisions as to whom the grants would be given would not be published until the following summer, but applications were welcome immediately.
The grants had been Belter’s idea.
‘Nothing gets interest quite as much as a pile of free money.’ He smirked as he scanned the in-box of the email address especially set up for applicants. ‘Like piranhas around a piece of meat, one can hardly make anything out for the spray.’
So great, in fact, was the stir that young Alfie was creating, that between the three of them they began to have difficulty keeping up with all the emails he was receiving; and it did not stop there. To create the impression that Alfie was truly an international figure, they set up PO boxes in Buenos Aires, Paris, Beijing and Toronto at very little cost, but made sure that any actual mail was immediately forwarded to his main London offices.
Endowing the Professor with publishing heritage proved a little more problematic. But only a touch more. Belter spent a day making himself familiar with the rubrics and conventions of the scientific paper, and concluded that three quarters of the average piece of research was essentially cribbed from the research of others. Furthermore, what remained was almost never ground-breaking, but either exceedingly timid or astoundingly obvious. Belter decided that as long as the vast majority of the publication was taken from existing research and the original bits were relatively innocuous, then, as likely as not, it would not be noticed, still less challenged, and if considered at all, would merely be seen as one of the professor’s less important papers – the type that academics are required to knock out from time to time to maintain their currency in the academic world and to satisfy their higher ups in the institution in which they served.
With this in mind, by the end of week three, Cabot had written four books and published dozens of papers on a surprising range of subjects, all of which were generously made available online for free download. Each piece was essentially a montage of credible, but not terribly well-known bits of legitimate scientific literature and research, all of which were carefully acknowledged and their contributing authors duly thanked. By the end of the first month, the trio had obtained ISBN numbers for Cabot’s increasing contribution to the academic world, and as a sideline, were advertising much of his literature for sale online via Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and in fact all over the internet.
At the beginning of month two, the young Cabot had started to flex his muscles, and used the occasion of his being invited into the Portuguese order of St. Michael of the Wig to write in to the Evening Standard, bemoaning Britain’s isolationist position when it came to respecting the environment. ‘The sun shines on all of us,’ he pointed out. His observation proved divisive: several people immediately wrote in advising the Professor to go back to Portugal if he liked the sun so much, whilst others immediately leapt to his defence. Upon seeing this, one outraged French academic sent an open invitation to the Professor asking that he might attend a conference on solar energy in Paris the following month. Cabot was humbled, as one might have immagined, but regretted that he had already promised to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of Waseda (near Tokyo) at that time. He did, however, find the time to send a brief message to be read out in his absence. It was Barney, having a natural flair for these things, who penned it (literally, as the Professor, being a kind of old-fashioned boy, still preferred to write certain things by hand). Once written it was placed carefully into one of the Professor’s beautifully initialled envelopes and posted off.
As the weeks passed the three found ever more ingenious ways of getting other people to spread the name of Alfie Cabot at little or no cost to themselves.
Obituaries were perhaps the simplest and most effective.
‘Easy as pie boys,’ said Barney. ‘All you do is wait for someone to die – the more illustrious and ennobled the better – wiki and Britannica them, write a summary and then add a pile of touching memories to personalise the eulogy. Remember the older they are, the fewer people are around to contradict you.’
‘Yup,’ agreed Belter, ‘and we should always be nice about them. Nobody wins points for insulting the dead.’
‘So,’ continue Barney, scrolling through GoogleNews RSS feeds, ‘today I spy that old Clark Schmidt has finally kicked the bucket at the tender age of 92.’
‘Who’s Clark Schmidt?’ asked Belter.
‘Who indeed,’ said
Barney, flicking to Wikipedia. ‘Well he was one of the lesser well known members of the team that discovered DNA back in 1953 – degree MIT, PhD Cambridge England, blah, blah, blah, not married, excellent, no kids to dispute the record, lived alone until two years ago – even better, writer of limericks and er…’
Barney looked at Belter for inspiration. ‘…loved to sing in barber shop quartets, having a wonderful base baritone voice.’ Barney turned to his computer and started typing: ‘I remember once, some years ago at a conference in Canada, Clark followed me into the lavatory, switched off the lights, throwing the room into complete darkness. Then in the deepest of voices boomed ‘What kept you Chuck?’ It was an absolute scream, especially as there were two other people in there at the time whom Clark did not know about.’
‘Bit lame,’ said Belter.
‘For Guardian readers – they’ll roar with laughter!’ said Barney.
‘We’re going to put this in Guardian?’ asked Belter.
‘We’ll send it to all the papers. One of them will be bound to bite.’
‘Right, well you try and get a couple of obituaries done a week and I’ll put in a load of planning applications.’
‘Planning applications?’ said Barney.
‘Yes, very easy. They cost nothing for listed buildings and conservation areas, and the council is obliged to go and publicise them far and wide to see if there are any objections. They only take a couple of hours each and they can actually be done online. Nobody bothers to check if the people who make the applications actually exist, they just want to know if there are any objections, and there won’t be because I’ll choose projects which are highly inoffensive in remote areas. Easy peasy!’
‘Never would have thought of that in a million years,’ said Barney.
The grand fabrication continued, and as days turned to weeks and weeks into months, still the trio laboured on.
Before the next month was up a new word made its entry into some of the online English dictionaries, first as a type of slang, but over time even reputable dictionary compositors began to consider the adjective ‘cabotesque’ as a possible new entry into the language.
‘adj. syn. Expressive, Representative, Symbolic esp. in relation to popular sentiment viz ‘the awarding of a knighthood to the entertainer was a cabotesque gesture by the prime minister.’
‘Nice touch involving the PM and a knighthood,’ said Belter, noting Barney’s handiwork.
‘Thanks,’ said Barney, tossing an envelope into his out-tray. ‘But what our man needs in order to make him even more important is substantive friends.’
‘True,’ agreed Belter, ‘but they tend to be difficult to amass in a hurry.’ He paused. ‘How to get friends?’ he murmured to himself.
‘Well, I generally find that if you want to get on the right side of someone, do something for him,’ said Drade. ‘It worked at school.’
‘Offer him something? Yes...but what?’ asked Belter. ‘The problem is that we don’t want to be splashing money around on this and nobody can actually meet him. So he can’t exactly nip round to people’s houses and do their gardening for them.’ Belter paused again. ‘I suppose...’ he muttered, and reached for a old copy of The Times, thumbed through it rapidly, stopped at a particular page and read an article. ‘This might work,’ he said. ‘What you do is find an MP, or even another person of authority, speaking about something vaguely related to environmental issues, like..er...well, like this..Raymond Stoddard MP for Somewhere-up-North is campaigning against the building of a new superstore on the outskirts of Somewhere, so what Alfie does is to write a letter of fervent support. The MP’s a nobody, politically speaking, so his getting a letter from someone as grand as Alfie will be something of a coup, and I shouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the not-too-distant future he’ll mention the support he received from Alfie.’
‘Yes, sure he will,’ said Barney. ‘You never know we might have use for a bundle of unknown MPs at some point.’
The three applied this strategy to scores of MPs and public figures, and within a few more weeks, Alfie had been mentioned in Hansard several times, by members to whom he had given vociferous and unwavering support on a number of diverse issues, ranging from a new footpath numbering system proposed by the member for Kundley South, to a cross-party proposal to divide agricultural land use into no fewer than thirty-eight sub-categories.
Word soon spread to the House next door; one of their Lordships found himself inspired by a Cabot article on Cauliflowers and later that week, Judge Abrahams of the High Courts of London, had harsh words for a local magistrate who had only handed down some community service to two enterprising students. They claimed to be working for the Cabot Foundation and had succeeded in persuading a string of pensioners to part with much of their savings in order to provide shelter for London’s homeless.
Even the Duke of Cornwall, long a champion of the environment, found himself quoting the ever-more-venerable professor on more than one occasion, for it so often happened (as it did to many of The Great and The Good) that this eminent academic had written upon issues close to his heart with such insight and perspicacity that they might have been composed by the good Prince himself.
So, over the months and little by little the name of Cabot came to be widespread, as his offices all over the world overflowed with research proposals from hungry students, invitations to speak also arrived from any number of academic institutions as did the usual fan mail which anyone of any level of notoriety attracts.
Ace in the Hole
And while Alfie was enjoying his remarkable transformation from a nobody, hailing from somewhere pampas-like in Argentina, to Britain’s favourite professor, another idea no less surprising was gaining momentum in the bad lands of Chelsea.
It appeared that a groundswell of opinion against the port was growing all over the borough. And this was no accident.
‘What I’ve done,’ said Barney, during one of their many board meetings in the broom cupboard, ‘is light little fires in different places all over the borough.’
‘Fires?’ queried Drade.
‘Yes well, like this for example,’ said Barney holding up a small, purple jar with a bright green label on it. ‘This is Old Thames, now stocked at the very finest establishments in the King’s Road and beyond. In fact, I have a meeting tomorrow at Harrods, and well, let’s just say, I’m hopeful.’ He winked at Belter and Drade.
‘What is Old Thames?’ asked Belter. ‘Sounds a bit like Old Fruit! to me.’
‘Glad you asked,’ said Barney, ignoring Belter’s stab at his juice bar experiment. He turned the jar to the side and read out the back label.
‘Er…it says here…used since Elizabethan times as a face cream, Old Thames is derived from the Thames River muds found around Chelsea Harbour, and helps to rejuvenate dead cells, tighten the skin, and restore its natural shine…’ Barney looked up triumphantly, ‘A bargain,’ he added, ‘at twelve pounds a jar.’
‘They’ll never buy it,’ Belter said bluntly. ‘And what’s all this about Queen Elizabeth? As far as I remember, she had terrible pock-marked skin and nits to boot!’
‘We all live in Elizabethan times,’ said Barney, ‘and frankly, if big companies can get away with telling people that mixing petroleum jelly and cucumber is good for eyelids, and that bits of broken nutshell mixed with vegetable oil and lard is a great body conditioner, I can’t see the problem.’
Belter looked unconvinced.
‘Just a little fire – maybe it will take hold,’ said Barney. ‘And we’ve discovered a rare plant too.’ He pulled a freezer bag out of a box at his feet and slapped it on the table. ‘It’s a type of seaweed. ’ He handed it to Belter.
‘You found this by the river?’ said Belter studying the bag. ‘Looks a bit slimy.’
‘It is. But what we do is shove it in the oven, dry it, crunch it up and use it as a herb – tastes like, er…well, has a delicate earthy quality. Chef is workin
g on recipes as we speak,’ said Barney, ‘he doesn’t know where it comes from. Perhaps you could get your doctor to recommend it?’
‘My man is a serious doctor, not some quack. He’s not going to recommend Thames weed!’ Belter paused and then added as an afterthought, ‘What colour is it?’
‘This is exactly the kind of thing that the Riverbankers might have eaten,’ exclaimed a much excited Drade.
The other two looked at him.
‘I went down there a couple of days ago to see if I could get some inspiration, and I bumped into this odd-looking fellow with a crystal stuck to his forehead. Apparently he’s some kind of a shaman who believes himself to be a direct descendant of the “Riverbankers”.’
Belter and Barney looked mystified.
Still Drade continued, ‘According to him, ‘Riverbankers’ are the indigenous people, who survived for centuries upon the banks of the Thames, and whose capital – in times gone by – had been somewhere in the Lots Road area. Crystalman couldn’t quite pinpoint the location of “Tamagea” but…’
‘Tamagea?’ interrupted Belter.
‘Tamagea, yes, the name of their capital,’ said Drade. ‘But it’s not there anymore.’
‘Got washed away did it?’ intoned Belter.
‘Actually, yes, it did,’ mewed Drade. ‘But apparently the high metal content of the muds means that, using a special magnetic tool, he was able to trace where it was. And you’ll never guess where the lines lead.’
‘Tell us,’ said Barney.
‘Right under out feet,’ said Drade. ‘This building and garden was the centre of the town.’
‘Small town,’ observed Barney.
‘Only a few inhabitants.’ said Drade.
‘The Riverbankers, eh.?’ said Barney.
‘The last of the fisher-foragers,’ Drade went on, ‘driven out by the Romans, returned during the Dark Ages, then driven out again by the Normans. According to this guy, to this day many of the locals are descended from Riverbankers.’
‘Doesn’t sound very plausible,’ said Belter, ‘but it would explain a few things.’
‘The point is that he’s got about a billion followers, who all believe the same thing. Shall I refer him to you, Barney?’ asked Drade.
‘Yes why not,’ said Barney. ‘And you know that old boat outside in the garden, between the allotment and the orangery? Well, the Governor has agreed to donate it to the Sea Scouts, and Jamie has given them a place to dock it next to his barge.’
‘Excellent,’ said Belter.
It seemed that all three of them were really pulling together, and matters were proceeding apace.
One morning, Belter, who normally arrived at Base earlier than most, arrived earlier still. He went straight to the broom cupboard, forgoing his coffee and toast, and two hours later, when Drade and Barney strolled in, Belter was still hard at work.
‘Got something for us, Belter?’ asked Barney, squeezing a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits onto the cluttered table.
‘Just a thought, Barney,’ said Belter almost to himself.
Drade and Barney exchanged blank looks and then returned to their own tasks. Barney was working on some correspondence while Drade was busy going through the daily team leader reports and general Alfie-Supporters-Club correspondence.
At length, Belter looked up, plucked a biscuit from the plate, dipped it into the now cold coffee and swivelled round in his chair.
‘Been thinking,’ he said.
‘Yas?’ interjected Barney.
Belter held an index finger in the air, as if trying to reign in Barney’s impatience. ‘One would get the impression that many people had approved this planning application, after all, it is in the name of the council, which represents the fine people of Kensington & Chelsea. In fact, these kinds of decisions are made by a few individuals, and when you boil it down, you find they are made by a very few indeed, and all the other members of the council just nod along.’
‘Okay, so who’s responsible for this decision?’ asked Drade.
‘There are three,’ said Belter, ‘Chris Carpet, Marigold Templer and Kenneth Bobbin.’
‘Kenneth Bobbin!’ exclaimed Drade. ‘I know him – he lives in Cheyne, and he’s always buttonholing me about me selling him Dad’s old Jaguar.’
‘And you know one of them,’ continued Belter as if he had known this in advance.
‘Don’t trust him an inch,’ continued Drade, ‘…carries a plastic smile around with him like a knife.’
‘But still you do know him,’ insisted Belter.
‘Didn’t know he was a councillor though. Thought, had a place down in Kent somewhere, with bees or bedding plants or something.’
‘No, no he’s a councillor, who actually lives in that block near Dolphin Square. He doesn’t even live in Chelsea,’ said Belter. ‘I found that out today.’
‘So?’ said Barney.
‘Well, Hamish here knows him, so we’ve got an in,’ said Belter, turning to Barney.
‘Hang on, hang on there,’ said Drade. ‘I don’t really know him. Just in passing, nodding acquaintances in fact, barely that.’ Drade was back-peddling as fast as he could. The idea of making friends with the egregious Kenneth Bobbin was not something which he relished.
‘I’d prefer to stroll through a steamy sewer on hot day than befriend Kenneth Bobbin,’ he said as a simple matter of fact.
‘But that’s only one vote, what about the other two?’ said Barney, ignoring Drade’s plea.
‘Traitor!’ thought Drade, making a mental note never ever to trust Barney again.
‘Been thinking about that,’ said Belter. ‘It’s this Chris Carpet character – long standing Conservative member, former racehorse trainer, good pedigree himself. But doing a bit of research, you know, had a chat with some of the stable hands who used to work for him and it seems that during the sixties this guy was something of an outcast. Expelled from two schools, dropped out of the third, bit of a scrounger, bit of a swindler, bit of a fraud – nothing proven, but generally known.’
‘Who’d have thought it,’ murmured Drade.
‘It all changed for young Chris when he married Lady T’raid Hemmingway and suddenly became very respectable. Got into racehorse breeding, had some success, and then he got into politics.’
‘Long time ago,’ Barney doubted. ’People change…’
‘Yes, but this flyer from his campaign is very recent and paints a very different story. According to this the Honourable Chris Carpet spent his teenage years in the third world building villages and finding water.’
Barney took the leaflet from Belter and scoffed as he read another paragraph out loud.
‘…Chris finally felt called back to his own country and got involved with helping budding entrepreneurs find their feet during the recession of the early 80s. He is still connected with these fledgling businesses today, some of which have become household names...’
‘There’s a good bit about his retiring young from business to concentrate on his other great passion – racehorse breeding,’ added Belter with a smile.
‘I dunno, Belter,’ said Barney. ‘How are we going to go about proving any of this?’
‘I don’t really think we need to prove any of it. It’s just that yesterday, this arrived by post addressed to Professor Alfie Cabot.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I can’t tell who it’s from – it doesn’t have a return address or anything – the postcode is SW10, which doesn’t really narrow it down much. But it doesn’t really matter much who it’s from.’
Belter delved into the large jiffy bag and pulled out a handful of yellowed newspaper clippings.
‘These scraps all relate to the misspent youth of young Mister Carpet.’ He plucked one at random and scanned the article. ‘This one for example is from the Eastern Daily Press on June 16th 1969 and it describes a police investigation into odds-fixing at Aintree. Mister Carpet helped police with their enqu
iries for two days before being released without charge.’
Belter handed the article to Barney and started to read another.
‘This one is more recent, from 1985, about concerns that funds provided by the Surrey Enterprise Agency to support budding entrepreneurs had been misappropriated.’ Belter sped through the article, mumbling to himself and then, out loud: ‘…Mister Curtain refused to be specific on what precise purpose such hospitality would serve, but assured us that he would deliver a more detailed response in due course. We are still waiting for that detail – though not with baited breath.’
Barney took it and showed it to Drade. Belter continued to study the contents of the envelope.
‘He really is a caramel-coated cad,’ he muttered.
Barney agreed. ‘Umm, yes there is clearly something here, but are you just going to confront him with it?’ he handed back the articles to Belter.
‘Something like that,’ said Belter. ‘I’ll choose something really juicy, beef it up a bit and then whack him on the head with it.’
‘So that’s two,’ said Barney.
‘Yes, now the last one is this Mzzz Templer, and she’s going to be a lot trickier. You see, she’s a Liberal.’ The words dripped off Belter’s lips like warm lard, for as everyone knows, Liberals as a group tend to be notoriously slippery characters, with their feet in so many camps it was well-nigh impossible to trip them up.
‘Money problems?’ asked Barney with some hesitancy.
‘Born rich…very rich,’ said Belter.
‘Scandal?’ suggested Barney.
‘Plenty. But nothing she is ashamed of – it’s all cool.’
‘Dodgy friends?’ offered Drade.
‘Yup, but nothing illegal about that. No suggestion she’s done anything personally. She’s just comfortable with diversity’ said a glum-faced Belter.
‘Has she ever been politically inconsistent, changed her mind about something, not practiced what she preaches; you know, said one thing and done another’ said Barney with a note of desperation.
‘She is a Liberal,’ explained Belter, ‘so she has no fixed opinions about anything. She does all those things as a matter of course; but she gets away with it, because, whenever she does takes a definite position, she always qualifies it with weasel words and caveats, that she could be meaning just about anything. Completely untouchable in that respect, I’m afraid.’
There was a pause. Finally Drade piped up: ‘Wasn’t she the one who got involved with that scheme to recycle old computer parts and then send the proceeds to poor people in Wales?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ rejoined Barney, ‘and when they investigated, they found that everything was being shipped off to China to be stripped down by little kids in sweat shops.’
‘It was her,’ said Belter, ‘but she was exonerated. She really did know nothing about it.’
‘Nevertheless, she might be someone whose conscience could be pricked, mightn’t she be?’ asked Barney.
‘Got a weakness for lost causes and doesn’t really scrutinise things,’ mused Belter. ‘Umm, we might be able to convince her – especially if there was a human angle.’
‘I see kids fishing,’ said Barney. ‘Leave it to me.’
‘Fine,’ replied Belter. ‘So I’ll get on and tackle the Carpet.’
Drade sighed, ‘So, I guess that leaves me with the Bobbin.’