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  Derek passed the crow’s foot puree.

  ‘I was once a prisoner of war,’ said Old Vic. ‘You won’t remember the war in question. It’s the one that they make movies about, although they always get the haircuts wrong.’

  A group of visiting English hairdressers who worked for Pinewood Studios cheered at this.

  ‘I call this poem “Blood and snot for breakfast again and only human finger bones to use for a knife and fork.” ’

  Ellie choked on her surf and turf and a small fight ensued between pimply young men who wanted to pat her on the back.

  Old Vic launched into his poem.

  ‘We was up to our eyes in pus and puke

  There was only me and Captain Duke

  Who could still stand up on where our legs had been

  Which were oozing mucus and rotten with gangrene.’

  Pimply men took turns at Ellie’s back.

  ‘We boiled up some phlegm to make a cup of tea

  In the skull of the corporal from the infantry

  Captain Duke drank the lot and left none for me

  But I didn’t mind, because I’d spat in it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ellie. ‘Stop patting my back or I’ll break all your arms.’ The pimply men stopped patting and Ellie sipped wine and tucked once more into her tucker.

  ‘I spread some bile upon my maggot-ridden bread…’

  ‘Pat,’ gagged Ellie, pointing to her back.

  Old Vic’s poem was only seventeen verses long and when it was finished it drew a standing ovation even from those who remained sitting down.

  Ellie heard the cheering, but she didn’t join in with it. For Ellie was in the ladies, bent rather low above the toilet bowl.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Derek, upon her return to the bar.

  ‘That wasn’t funny,’ said Ellie, who still looked radiant, as only women can, after a bout of vomiting. ‘That was disgusting.’

  ‘Perhaps the mandrake salad dressing didn’t agree with you.’

  ‘I’m going,’ said Ellie. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

  ‘I’ll be on in a minute,’ said Derek. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss me, would you?’

  ‘Do your poems involve any pus or mucus?’

  Derek thought for a bit. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re mostly about sex.’

  Ellie stared at him. ‘And what would you know about sex?’

  ‘Oh I know a lot about it,’ said Derek. ‘It’s just that I don’t do a lot of it.’

  ‘I overheard a pimply bloke saying that poetesses are easy. Surely if you’re a regular performer you get to have sex every once in a while.’

  ‘Don’t be crude,’ said Derek. ‘But actually it is true, poetesses are easy. Well, at least the fat ugly ones with moustaches are.’

  Ellie gave Derek another one of those looks. ‘That would be the fat girls are grateful for it theory, would it?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Derek. ‘I’m not fat, but I can tell you, I’m really grateful for it.’

  ‘Whose round is it, then?’ asked Ellie. ‘If I’m staying, you could at least have the decency to buy me a drink.’

  ‘I think we’d started buying our own,’ said Derek.

  ‘No, I think you were still buying mine.’

  ‘Barman,’ hailed Derek. ‘Barman, please, barman.’

  Next up upon the rostrum was a poetess. She was not a fat moustached poetess who was grateful for it. She was a young and beautiful and slim poetess who could afford to be choosy.

  She recited a poem about her cat called Mr Willow-Whiskers. Who was apparently her furry little soulmate.

  Ellie was forced to return to the ladies and lose the rest of her supper. At length she returned, still radiant, to the bar.

  ‘That’s definitely enough for me,’ she said. ‘ “Mr Willow-Whiskers with his soul of crimson sunset”. That was enough to make anyone throw up.’

  ‘The pimply youths seemed to like it,’ said Derek. ‘They’re asking for her autograph.’

  ‘I’ve never been comfortable with poetry,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s either well meaning, but bad, or beautifully constructed, but unintelligible. I quite like limericks though, have you ever heard the one about the young man from Buckingham?’

  ‘I have,’ said Derek. ‘It’s truly obscene.’

  ‘Well, I’m off. Enough is enough is enough.’

  ‘I’m up next,’ said Derek. ‘Please stay until I’m done.’

  Ellie smiled. ‘And your poem will be about sex, will it?’

  Derek grinned. ‘I’ve been working on my delivery. The way I see it, with performance poetry, it’s not so much what you say, as the way you say it. My poems aren’t actually rude, but I inject into them a quality of suggestiveness which gives them the appearance of being extremely risque.’

  ‘Derek,’ said Ellie. ‘We’re friends now, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Derek nodding. ‘I think we are.’

  ‘Then as your friend, allow me to say that you are a complete and total prat. No offence meant.’

  ‘And none taken, I assure you. But you just wait until you hear my poem. It involves the use of the word “plinth”, which as everybody knows, is the sexiest word on Earth.’

  ‘Plinth?’ said Ellie.

  ‘My God,’ said Derek. ‘Say it again.’

  A round of applause went up as Mr Melchizedec, Brentford’s milkman in residence, concluded his poem ‘Oh wot a loverly pair of baps’. It didn’t include the word ‘plinth’, but as his style of delivery owed an homage to the now legendary Max Miller, the two Olds, Pete and Vic, were now rolling about on the floor, convinced that they had just heard the filthiest poem in the world.

  ‘Check this out,’ said Derek, grinning at Ellie and pushing his way through the crowd towards the rostrum.

  Ellie yawned and looked at her watch. She’d let Derek do his thing, then she’d get an early night in. She wanted to look her best for her first day at Mute Corp, tomorrow.

  Derek mounted the rostrum and smiled all over the crowd.

  The crowd didn’t seem that pleased to see him, although Ellie overheard a fat poetess with a moustache whisper to her friend, a poetess of not dissimilar appearance, that ‘he looks like he’s up for it’.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Derek, to no-one in particular. ‘This is a poem dedicated to a lady. She’s a very special lady. She doesn’t know that she’s a very special lady, but to me she is.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ called out Old Pete, lately helped up from the floor.

  ‘That’s my secret,’ said Derek.

  ‘I’ll bet it’s this bird here,’ said Old Vic, pointing towards Ellie. ‘The bird with the nice charlies.’

  Ellie glared pointy daggers; Old Vic took to cowering.

  ‘The poem is untitled,’ continued Derek.

  ‘So what’s it called?’ Old Pete called.

  ‘It doesn’t have a title.’

  ‘A poem should have a title,’ said Old Vic. ‘Or at least a rank. We all had ranks in the prisoner-of-war camp.’

  ‘Yeah,’ called a pimply youth. ‘You were all a bunch of rankers.’

  The barman (who had been conversing in Brentford Auld Speke to a wandering bishop, down from Orton Goldhay for the annual congress of wandering bishops that was held in the function room above the Four Horsemen public house) shouted out, ‘Oi! We’ll have no trouble here.’

  ‘It should have a title,’ said Old Vic. ‘It should!’

  ‘All right,’ said Derek. ‘It’s called “Sir Untitled Poem”, okay?’

  Ellie looked at her watch once more. Perhaps she should just go.

  ‘ “Sir Untitled Poem,” ’ said Derek, launching into ‘Sir Untitled Poem’.

  As Ellie had feared, ‘Sir Untitled Poem’ was pants. It was one of those excruciating love sonnets that lonely teenage boys compose when all alone in their bedrooms, and then make the mistake (only once!) of reciting to their very first girlfriend on their very first date.

>   It would, however, possibly have ranked as just another poem of the evening, had not something occurred during its recitation.

  It was something truly dire and it put a right old damper on the evening. So truly dire, in fact, was it, that the wandering bishop, who had been chatting with the barman, found himself very much the man of the moment, several pimply youths found themselves in the loving arms of fat moustachioed poetesses, and Old Vic finally found another subject worthy of a poem.

  Not that he would recite it at the Brentford Poets for a while. What with the Arts Centre being closed for extensive refurbishment, what with all the mayhem and destruction and suchlike.

  But before this truly dire event occurs, as it most certainly must, it will be necessary for us to take a rather radical step and return to the past, so that the truly dire event might be truly understood.

  We must return to the evening before last.

  To the cottage hospital and the bed of Big Bob Charker.

  The time is eight of the evening clock.

  And Big Bob isn’t happy.

  9

  Big Bob Charker lay upon his bed of pain. Not that he was aware of any pain. He wasn’t. Big Bob was not aware that his nose had been broken, nor that he had suffered extensive bruising, a degree of laceration and a fractured left big toe.

  He was not alone in his ignorance of the left big toe injury, the doctors at the cottage hospital had missed that one too.

  Big Bob Charker was aware of nothing whatever at all.

  If he had been capable of any awareness whatsoever he would have been aware that his last moments of awareness were of his awareness vanishing away. Of everyday objects becoming strange and alien. Of colour and sound becoming things of mystery, of speech becoming meaningless. Of everything just going.

  But Big Bob was unaware.

  Big Bob lay there, eyes wide open, staring at nothing at all. Staring at nothing and knowing nothing. Nothing whatever at all.

  Dr Druid stared down at his patient. ‘I hate to admit this,’ he told a glamorous nurse. ‘But this doesn’t make any sense to me at all.’

  ‘Could it be conjunctivitis?’ asked the nurse, who had recently come across the word in a medical dictionary and had been looking for an opportunity to use it.

  ‘No,’ said Dr Druid, sadly shaking his head.

  ‘What about scrapie then?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the doctor.

  ‘What about thrush?’ asked the nurse, who had more words left in her.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the doctor.

  Pearson Clarke (son of the remarkable Clive and brother to the sweetly smelling Bo-Jangles Clarke, who bathed four times a day and sang country songs about trucks to those prepared to listen) grinned at the nurse and then at Dr Druid. Pearson Clarke was an intern with ideas above his station. His station was South Ealing and most of his ideas were well above that. ‘You should run a brain scan,’ said Pearson Clarke.

  ‘I have run a brain scan,’ said Dr Druid. ‘It shows that this patient has absolutely no brain activity whatsoever.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘Even deep coma patients have brain activity. They dream.’

  ‘This man doesn’t dream,’ said Dr Druid. ‘Nor do the other two patients, the driver and the woman with the unpronounceable name.’

  ‘I can pronounce it,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘It’s pronounced…’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dr Druid. ‘It’s as if this man’s thoughts, his memories, his personality, everything has been erased. Wiped clean. Gone.’

  ‘That isn’t how the brain works,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘That can’t happen. A patient can lose his memory. But the memory is still there in his head, he simply can’t access it. Mostly it’s just temporarily impaired. Bits come back, eventually.’

  ‘I’m sure I recall telling you to shut up,’ said Dr Druid. ‘Although my memory might be temporarily impaired.’

  ‘Impetigo,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Shut up, nurse,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Joking apart,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘The brain-scan machine might be broken. You know that thing people do, photocopying their bottoms? Well, Igor Riley the mortuary attendant…’

  ‘Son of Blimey and brother to Smiley Riley, who swears he has a genie in a bottle?’

  ‘That’s him, well, Igor Riley has been scanning his bottom in the brain-scan machine. He might have, well, farted in it, or something. It’s a very delicate machine.’

  ‘I’ll have him sacked in the morning then.’

  ‘Rather you than me,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘A bloke in a pub once punched Igor Riley in the ear. Igor told his brother and his brother got his genie to turn the bloke into a home-brewing starter pack, or it might have been a…’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the doctor. ‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.’

  ‘Please yourself then,’ said Pearson Clarke, grinning at the nurse, who grinned right back at him.

  ‘I think it’s Tourette’s syndrome,’ whispered the nurse.

  ‘I f**king heard that,’ said Dr Druid. ‘But, as I said, before I was so rudely and irrelevantly interrupted, I am baffled by these patients. We might be witnessing something altogether new here. Something as yet unlisted in the medical dictionary.’

  ‘That’s me screwed then,’ said the nurse. ‘And I thought I was doing so well.’

  ‘I’ll teach you some more words later,’ said the doctor.

  ‘I’ll just bet you will,’ said Pearson Clarke. ‘But listen, if this isn’t listed, it will need a name. How about Clarke’s syndrome? That rolls off the tongue.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Druid. ‘Druid’s syndrome. I like that.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Pearson Clarke.

  ‘Oh look,’ said the nurse. ‘Look at the patient, doctor.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Druid. ‘I am a very patient doctor.’

  ‘No doctor, the patient. Look at the patient.’

  ‘What?’ asked Dr Druid, looking. ‘What about the patient, nurse?’

  ‘He’s flickering, doctor. Look at him.’

  Dr Druid looked and his eyes became truly those of the tawny owl. Big and round, like Polo mints, with black dots in the middle. Possibly liquorice.

  ‘Oh,’ went Dr Druid. ‘Oh.’ And ‘Oh dear me.’

  For Big Bob Charker was flickering.

  Flickering like crazy.

  His head was coming and going like the image on a TV screen when a heavy lorry goes by outside, or at least the way they used to do in the old days.

  Dr Druid reached down and tore the sheet away.

  All of Big Bob was coming and going, all the way down to his fractured left big toe.

  ‘That left big toe looks wonky,’ Pearson Clarke observed. ‘There’s a fracture there or my name’s not…Oh crikey!’

  And there was Big Bob Charker.

  Gone.

  Just gone.

  Dr Druid stared and gasped and then he turned around. The beds of the other two patients stood empty. They had just gone too.

  Out of a tiny transparent dot of nothing whatever at all, things rushed back to Big Bob at a speed beyond that of travelling light. A speed that well and truly was the speed of travelling thought.

  Big Bob did blinkings of the eyes and clickings of the shoulder parts. ‘Ow,’ and ‘ouch,’ quoth he. ‘My nose, my bits and bobs, my poor left big toe. I am sorely wounded, wherefore-art hath this thing happened? And for that matter, where the Hell am I?’

  Big Bob now did focusing and situational-taking stocks. ‘I’m in hospital,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m in a hospital bed,’ and then he saw intern Pearson Clarke and Dr Druid and a nurse with a very nice bosom. ‘Why look you upon me in this startled fashion?’ asked Big Bob. ‘Thou seem to have the wind up. No don’t turn away.’

  But Dr Druid and Pearson Clarke and the nurse, who Big Bob now noticed also had a very nice bottom, had turned away, and were staring at two empty beds.

  Big Bob followed the
direction of their starings.

  ‘Oh hello Periwig,’ he said. ‘Thou art here too. And the lady who wore the straw hat, hello.’ And Big Bob waggled his fingers.

  Periwig Tombs stared back at him. The lady said, ‘Where am I?’ And, ‘Where is my hat?’

  ‘We’re in hospital,’ said Big Bob. ‘Weren’t we on the tour bus a minute ago?’

  Periwig shook his large and bandaged head. ‘I am perplexed,’ said he. ‘What happened to us, doctor?’

  ‘They’re gone,’ croaked Dr Druid. ‘They vanished. You saw them vanish, didn’t you?’ Dr Druid shook Pearson Clarke by the lapels. ‘You did see it. Swear to me you saw it.’

  ‘I did see it. Yes I did. Stop shaking me about.’

  ‘Doctor?’ said Periwig. ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Gone.’ Dr Druid buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Periwig. ‘I get it. Very amusing. They’re making the mock, Bob. Pretending they can’t see us.’

  Big Bob watched Dr Druid clinging to the nurse. He was blubbering now and he really seemed sincere.

  ‘Periwig,’ said Big Bob. ‘I don’t think they can see us. Are we dreaming this, or what? What is going on?’

  ‘Some kind of stupid joke,’ said Periwig. ‘Can you walk, Big Bob?’

  ‘My left big toe really hurts, but yes I think I can.’

  ‘Then let’s get out of here.’

  ‘GAME ON,’ came a very large voice from nowhere and everywhere both at the very same time.

  Big Bob Charker and Periwig Tombs and the lady, lacking the straw hat, covered their ears. Dr Druid and Pearson Clarke and the beautiful nurse blubbered and boggled on oblivious.

  ‘Who said that?’ asked Big Bob, staring all around and about. And gingerly uncovering his ears.

  ‘YOU EACH HAVE THREE LIVES,’ the very large voice said. ‘IF YOU CHOOSE TO PLAY. IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO PLAY, YOU WILL BE INSTANTLY DOWNLOADED.’

  ‘I’m not bloody playing anything,’ said Periwig Tombs. ‘In fact I…’

  And then he was gone.

  Just gone.

  ‘Periwig?’ Big Bob’s eyes came a-starting from-his sockets. ‘Periwig, where have you gone?’