The Fandom of the Operator

  ‘Cunnilingus?’ my uncle suggested.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Go to your room!’

  ‘I don’t have a room!’

  ‘Then go to your cupboard.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to my cupboard,’ I said. ‘I want to know things. I want to know about all sorts of things. Every sort of thing. I want to know all about death and what happens after you die...’

  ‘So do I,’ said Uncle Jon.

  ‘Shut up, you,’ said my daddy.

  ‘We have to know,’ said my uncle. ‘It’s important. We have to know.’

  ‘It’s not important!’ My father’s voice was well and truly raised. ‘It happens. Everybody dies. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s how it is. The boy’s a boy. Let him be a boy. He’ll be a man soon enough and he can think on these things then. Get out of my house now, Jon. Let me be alone with my grief.’

  ‘Your grief for Charlie? You old fraud, what do you care?’

  ‘I care enough. I do care. He was my bestest friend.’

  ‘You never had a bestest friend in your life.’

  ‘I did and I did. You cur, you low, driven cur.’

  ‘You foul and filthy fiend!’

  ‘You wretch!’

  ‘You cretin!’

  And there was further rancour.

  I never cared for rancour at all.

  So I slipped away to play in the yard.

  2

  I would have played in our yard. If we’d had one. But as we did not have one, I didn’t. I went to play in the graveyard instead.

  The graveyard was really big back then. Before the council divided it up and sold all the best bits. All the best bits were the Victorian bits, with their wonderful tombs and memorials. All those weather-worn angels shrouded by ivy and all those vaults that, if you were little enough and possessed of sufficient bravery, you could crawl into.

  I was little enough and had plenty of bravery. I could worm my way in under the rusted grilles and view the coffins of the Victorian dead at my pleasure.

  You might consider me to have been a morbid little soul. But that was not how I considered myself. I considered myself to be an explorer. An adventurer. An archaeologist. If it was acceptable for adults to excavate the long-buried corpses of the Pharaohs, then why shouldn’t it have been all right for me to have a little peep at the bodies of my own forefathers?

  On this particular Thursday, I didn’t worm my way under any of the iron grilles. I just lay in the sunshine upon my favourite tomb. It was a truly monumental affair. A great fat opulent Victorian fusspot of a tomb, wrought into the semblance of a gigantic four-poster bed, mounted upon a complicated network of remarkable cogs. The whole fashioned from the finest Carrara marble.

  It was the tomb of one David Aloysius Doveston, purveyor of steam conveyances to the gentry. ‘Born 27th July 1802, died 27th July 1902.’ A good innings for a Victorian; a grand century, in fact.

  I’d taken the trouble to look up Mr Doveston in the Memorial Library. I’d wondered why it was that a purveyor of steam conveyances had chosen to have his tomb constructed in the manner of a fantastic bed.

  In amongst the parish records, housed in the restricted section, I located a big fat file on Mr Doveston, who, it appeared, had been something of an inventor. I uncovered a pamphlet advertising what appeared to be his most marvellous creation: ‘the Doveston patent steam-driven homeopathic wonder-bed’. This incredible boon to mankind had been displayed at the Great Exhibition and was presented as being ‘the universal panacea and most excellent restorer to health, efficacious in the cures of many ills, pestilences and dreadful agues that do torment mankind to mortification’. These included ‘milliner’s sniffle, ploughman’s hunch, blains which pain the privy member, rat pox, cacky ear, trouser mite, the curly worms that worry from within’ amongst sundry other terrible afflictions.

  I must suppose that the homeopathic wonder-bed proved equal to the claims of its inventor, for not only had he lived to be one hundred years of age but also, as far as I knew, ploughman’s hunch and the curly worms that worried from within no longer plagued the general public.

  In fact, as I could find no trace of any of these ghastly maladies listed in any medical dictionary, I remain of the firm conviction that Mr Doveston’s invaluable invention effected their complete eradication.

  I was surprised, therefore, that he hadn’t, at the very least, had a local street named after him.

  I lay upon the marble replica of Mr Doveston’s beneficial bed, all curly-wormless and thinking a lot about the death of P. P. Penrose and all my uncle’s rancour.

  Although I hadn’t let on to my father, or to Uncle Jon, I felt very bad about the passing of the Penrose. Very bad indeed. I loved that man’s books. I was a member of the now official P. P. Penrose fan club. I’d saved up, sent away for and received the special enamel badge and everything. I had the Lazlo Woodbine, private-eye secret codebook, the pen with the invisible ink, the unique plastic replica of Laz’s trusty Smith & Wesson (that was not a toy, but a collectable) and the complete set of Death Wears a Turquoise Homburg trading cards. I was saving up for the Manhattan Scenes of Woodbine diorama playset, a scaled-down section of New York City, where you could be Woodbine (if you were very, very small).

  Lazlo Woodbine was the classic 1950s genre detective. He wore a trenchcoat and a fedora and worked only in the first person. And, no matter how tricky the case might be, he only ever needed four locations to get the job done. His office, where women-who-would-do-him-wrong came to call, a bar where he talked a lot of old toot with his best friend, Fangio, the fat boy barman, an alleyway where he got into sticky situations, and a rooftop, where he had his final confrontation with the bad guy. According to Laz, no great genre detective ever needed more than these four locations. And I was saving up for the complete set. And it all came in a cardboard foot-locker.

  None of this will mean very much to anyone who hasn’t read a Lazlo Woodbine thriller. But as most of you will realize, this was special stuff, which if it was still extant and found its way into an auction room today would command incredible prices.

  I was a fan. I admit it. A big fan. Still am. I loved and still love those books. All those stylish slayings, all the Woodbine catch-phrases. All the toot he talked in bars, the women who did him wrong, the bottomless pits of whirling oblivion that he always fell into at the end of the second chapter when he got bopped on the head. The whole kit and genre caboodle and the Holy Guardian Sprout inside his head.

  I loved the stuff I did and do. I loved it.

  Which is why I mention it here.

  I was miffed. I’m telling you. I felt well and truly cheated. My favourite author dead and never called my father, mother. And my father had actually known him. And I never knew that he did. I could have met the man. Had him autograph my books. Talked to him. But no. He was dead. Defunct. Gone and would write no more.

  That seemed really unfair. Really stupid. Really pointless. I felt really bad.

  I mean, and give me a minute here while I get deep, I mean, what is the point of death? Does anybody know? Being alive has a point, it has a purpose. If people weren’t alive, weren’t aware, then what would be the point of the universe? It might exist, but if there was no one in it to know it existed, it might as well not exist. You had to have people in the universe to be aware that there was a universe. You didn’t actually need God, who it was claimed created the universe, He was completely unnecessary. You could just assume that the universe had always been there, always would be there, for ever. But without people to see it was there, what was the point of it being there? No point! That’s an original concept, you know: I thought of that. That was what being alive was about.

  But dying, what was the point of that? You spent your life being aware, taking in information, creating things, like P. P. Penrose created Woodbine, or Mr Doveston his wonderful bed. And then you died. And that was it. No more awareness, no more creativity, no more anything
. What on Earth, or off it, was the point of dying?

  It’s a big question, you know. A really big question.

  I won’t labour it too much here, because I don’t want you getting bored and closing the book, especially as it does get really exciting as it goes along. But it’s important that I do address the issues that led me to take the course of action that I took.

  You see, even though I was young, I did have this thing about death. It bothered me, it upset me, it annoyed me. And even way back then, when I was so young and all, I felt that there had to be a point to it. It couldn’t be that you just appeared out of nowhere, into the universe, lived for a short while, then were just snuffed out and were gone for ever more. That seemed utterly absurd. Utterly wasteful. Utterly pointless. There had to be something more. Something beyond life. Something we weren’t being told about.

  But then, of course, we were being told about it. We were being told about it all the time. I was being brought up in a Christian society. I was being told what would happen to me when I died. If I was good, I’d go to heaven; if not, then down below to the bad place. For ever.

  Now that didn’t make any sense to me. The proportions were all wrong. You only got sixty, seventy, eighty years alive, then your creator decided your eternal future. That certainly wasn’t fair. That was ludicrous. So what did happen after you died? Did anyone know? My conclusion was, no, they didn’t. They were only guessing.

  People believed that they knew. But that was all it amounted to, belief. No one really knew for sure. It was all very well having faith in a religious hereafter, but having faith in a belief didn’t mean it was correct. I’m sorry if I’m going on about this, but it is important. I personally believe that the whole God thing was invented by some clever blighter, because he knew that it was the best way to keep society behaving in a decent fashion. And, more than that, he realized that without some belief in the hereafter, with rewards for the good people and punishment for the bad, society would go all to pieces.

  I think that whoever that person was, he (or she) was probably right. I mean, imagine if it was proved conclusively that there was no life beyond death. Imagine if all those Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Jews suddenly found out for certain that the whole thing was a hoax. I’ll bet they’d be really upset. I’ll bet a lot of them would go down to the nearest pub, get commode-hugging drunk and then go looking for a vicar or a priest to punch.

  They would, they really would.

  I’d been brought up as a Christian, but at that time in my life I didn’t believe in a hereafter. It didn’t make any sense to me. I remember my Uncle Tony dying. He’d had Alzheimer’s, although they hadn’t had a name for it back then. All that was Uncle Tony had died before his body did. His personality, along with his understanding, his memories, his recognition, gone. So what of Uncle Tony was going to the afterlife? In my opinion, nothing. The way I saw it, when you were dead, you were dead. Gone, finished, goodbye.

  But I was torn, you see, because I could understand the point of being alive (I thought) but I couldn’t understand the point of being dead. And I felt sure that there had to be a point. That’s been my problem all along, I suppose, thinking that there has to be a point. It’s been tricky for me.

  Difficult.

  Difficult times. Difficult thoughts.

  But I was young then, so I can forgive myself

  ‘Wotchadoin’?’

  I opened my eyes and beheld my bestest friend. His name was David Rodway. Answering to Dave. Dave was short and dark and dodgy. A born criminal. I know there are lots of arguments, the nature-versus-nurture stuff I know all that and I don’t know the answer. But Dave was dodgy, dodgy from young, from the very first day I met him back in the infant school. But dodgy is compelling, dodgy is glamorous, don’t ask me why, but it is. I liked Dave, liked him a lot. I was his bestest friend.

  ‘Hello, Dave,’ said I.

  ‘I’ve just been round your house,’ said Dave. ‘Your daddy was fighting with your Uncle Jon.’

  ‘Was he winning?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Your uncle had him down and was belabouring him with his blind-man’s stick.’

  ‘Good,’ said I. ‘My daddy clicked my jaw out once again.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Dave. ‘One day you will be big and your daddy will be old and frail and then you can bash him about at your leisure. You could even lock him in a trunk in the cellar, feeding him dead mice through a hole and giving him no toilet paper at all.’

  ‘That’s a comforting thought,’ said I. ‘And offers some happy prospects for the future.’

  ‘Glad to be of assistance.’ Dave climbed onto the Doveston marble bed and lay down next to me. ‘I figured you’d be here,’ he said. ‘You being so morbid and everything. You always come here when there’s fighting in your house.’

  ‘There’s usually fighting in my house,’ I said. ‘If it’s not my dad and my uncle, then it’s my dad and my mum.’

  ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘He’s gone to prison again.’

  ‘For fighting?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I never fight,’ said Dave. ‘Don’t see the fun in it. You know my funny uncle?’

  ‘Uncle Ivor? The one who’s a homo?’

  ‘That’s him. I said to Uncle Ivor, “Do you like all-in wrestling?” And do you know what he said?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He said, “If it’s all in, why wrestle?” ’

  I shook my head once more. ‘P. P. Penrose is dead,’ I said.

  ‘No?’ said Dave. ‘You’re joking. It’s not true.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘But he’s my favourite writer.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘I know, you introduced me to his books.’

  ‘He’s the greatest.’

  ‘Was the greatest, now.’

  ‘Still is and always will be.’

  ‘This is really bad news,’ said Dave, taking out his hankie and burying his face in it.

  ‘I’ve seen that trick before,’ I said. ‘Give me one of those humbugs.’

  ‘What humbugs?’ said Dave, with one cheek bulging.

  ‘You just slipped a humbug in your mouth. Give me one.’

  ‘It was my last.’

  ‘You are so a liar.’

  ‘There’ll be no more Adam Earth books, although they were rubbish. But there’ll be no more Lazlo Woodbine books.’ Dave rooted in his trouser pocket and brought out a fluffy-looking humbug. ‘Imagine that, no more Lazlo Woodbine thrillers.’

  I took the fluffy-looking humbug, spat upon in and cleaned it on my jersey sleeve. ‘There’s going to be a wake,’ I said. ‘For P. P. Penrose. And my daddy and my uncle will be going to it. They knew him.’

  ‘They never.’

  ‘They did. My daddy said that Mr Penrose was a great sportsman. That he thought sportsmanship was everything. Or something like that.’

  ‘I’ve never cared much for sportsmanship,’ said Dave, chewing ruefully upon his humbug. ‘But we should go to this wake. Do you think the coffin will be open and the dead corpse on display?’

  I popped the still rather fluffy humbug into my mouth and nodded.

  ‘We could get something,’ said Dave.

  ‘Get something? What do you mean?’

  Dave grinned me a toothy smile. ‘Something to remember him by.’

  ‘We have his books to remember him by.’

  ‘No, I mean something more personal than that. Something of his. Some personal possession.’

  ‘Steal something from a dead man? That’s not nice.’

  ‘You’ve done it before.’

  ‘Only coffin handles and stuff. Not from someone newly dead.’

  ‘Relics,’ said Dave. ‘We could take relics. After all, that man was a saint amongst writers and there’s nothing wrong with owning the relics of a saint. It’s something you do out of respect. It’s not really stealing.’

  ‘What sort of relics??
?? I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. His little finger or something.’

  ‘We can’t do that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’d get caught. Someone would see us.’

  ‘All right,’ said Dave. ‘Then we go to the funeral, see where they bury him, come back the same night and dig him up. We could choose the bits we want at our leisure.’ Dave liked doing things at his leisure.

  ‘Now you’re talking sense,’ said I. ‘In fact––’ And I set to thinking.

  ‘What have you set to thinking about?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Something big,’ said I. ‘Something very big.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me what it is?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said I, rising from the marble bed of the Doveston. ‘I have a really big idea, but it will need work. I have to go to the library and do a bit of research.’

  ‘I was just going that way myself.’

  ‘No, you weren’t. But I’ll meet you later and tell you all about it. This big idea of mine will require the two of us to bring it to fruition.’

  ‘Speak English,’ said Dave.

  ‘I’ll meet you at six o’clock at the launderette.’

  ‘Now you’re speaking my language. I love that launderette.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ said Dave.

  I left Dave and the graveyard behind and took myself off to the library. I often visited the library on Thursday afternoons. I did this for two reasons. Firstly, to get away from all the inevitable rancour in our house, and, secondly, because the library was closed on Thursday afternoons. You might have wondered how it was that a ten-year-old child could gain access to the library’s restricted section in order to look up information on Mr Doveston. The answer is, of course, that under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t be allowed to. Which is why I always visited the place when it was closed. Me being so slim and scrawny and all that I was capable of slipping under the iron grilles that protected the Victorian mausoleums in the graveyard, I was also sufficiently slim and scrawny and all to slip in through the cat flap in the caretaker’s lodge, borrow his keys and let myself into the library. I do not consider that this was a criminal activity. I was only engaged in research. Where could be the harm in that?