The Fandom of the Operator

  We went along the hall, then stuck our heads round the door at the end of it. And then we viewed the wake that was going on beyond.

  Having never seen a wake before I didn’t know what to expect, so I suppose that I was neither surprised nor disappointed. Nor even bewildered nor bemused. Nor was I amazed.

  But I was interested.

  The room that lay beyond the door was a withdrawing room. The room to which rich men of yesteryear withdrew after the completion of their feasting at the dining table, where they left the womenfolk to chat about things that womenfolk love to chat about. Particularly fashion. Such as, what particular colour commandos would be wearing that year.

  The rich men withdrew to the withdrawing room and talked about manly things. Like port and cigars and football and diddling about with servant women and stuff like that. They probably talked about commandos too, but only about what colour their guns would be. It seemed pretty clear to me that if we were having good times now, and we were, those rich men of yesteryear had had better.

  The room was tall and square with frescoed walls in the Copulanion style. There were over-stuffed sofas all around and about and these were crowded with red-faced men who held glasses, and all, it seemed, talked together. They talked, as far as I could hear them, mostly of P. P. Penrose. Of what a great sportsman he’d been. And of his love of sportsmanship. And of his skills as a writer. And of how amazing his Lazlo Woodbine thrillers were. And of what rubbish the Adam Earth science-fiction series was.

  Although I understood their words, the manner in which they spoke them was queer to my ears. They all talked in up-and-down ways. Beginning a sentence softly, then getting louder, then all fading away once more.

  ‘They’re all drunk,’ said Dave. ‘They’ll all be singing shortly.’

  ‘How does “shortly” go?’ I asked. Which I thought was funny, but Dave did not.

  ‘Look there,’ Dave said and he pointed.

  I followed the direction of Dave’s pointing. ‘The coffin,’ I said.

  In the middle of the room, with the over-stuffed sofas and the men sat upon them with the glasses in their hands, talking queerly and on the verge of singing, lay the coffin.

  Up upon a pair of wooden trestles, it was a handsome casket affair, constructed of Abarti pine in the Margrave design with Humbilian brass coffin furniture and rilled mouldings of the Hampton-Stanbrick persuasion. And it was open and from where we were standing we could see the nose of the dead Mr Penrose rising from it like a pink shark’s fin or an isosceles triangle of flesh, or in fact numerous other things of approximately the same shape.

  But it was definitely a nose.

  ‘Cool,’ went Dave. ‘I can see his dead hooter.’

  ‘Here’s the plan,’ I said to Dave. ‘You create a diversion, while I perform the complicated ritual and feed him the magic herbs.’

  Dave turned towards me and the expression on his face was one that I still feel unable adequately to describe. Expressing, as it did, so many mixed emotions.

  I smiled encouragingly at Dave. Dave didn’t smile back at all.

  ‘Not a happening thing, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Speak English,’ said Dave.

  ‘I mean, you don’t think you can do it?’

  ‘No,’ said Dave. ‘I don’t. Why don’t we just try to mingle amongst the drunken men, bide our time, as they say, await the moment.’

  ‘Well put,’ said I. ‘You go first, then.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Dave. ‘This is your big idea.’

  ‘No, it’s not. My big idea was to dig him up later.’

  ‘All right,’ said Dave, pushing open the door. ‘Let’s risk it. Let’s mingle.’ And he strode right into the withdrawing room.

  I followed cautiously, trying to avoid the eyes of my father. They were rather red-rimmed and starey eyes, but they were his none the less. I could see my Uncle Jonny sitting over by one of the windows and I didn’t want to look at his horrible eyes.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Dave, to no one in particular. ‘Hello there, hi.’

  We made our way across the richly carpeted floor towards the coffin. It’s funny how certain things stick in your mind and even now, all these many years later, I can remember that moment so very, very clearly. What happened next. And what was said. And what it meant.

  I can recall the way my feet felt, inside my shoes, as they trod over the thick pile of that carpet. And the smell of the cigarette smoke and the way it coloured the light that fell in long shafts through the tall Georgian casement windows. And the dreamlike quality of it all. We weren’t supposed to be in this room, Dave and I: it was wrong, all wrong. But we were there. And it was real.

  ‘Stop,’ said a voice and a big hand fell on my shoulder. I turned my head round and up and found myself staring into the long, thin face of Caradoc Timms, Brentford’s leading funeral director.

  Caradoc Timms leaned low his long, thin face and gave me a penetrating stare with his dark and hooded eyes. ‘You, boy,’ he said in a nasal tone. ‘Can’t stay away from the dead, can you?’

  I made sickly laughing sounds of the nervous variety. ‘I’ve just come to pay my respects,’ I said. ‘Mr Penrose is my favourite author.’

  Mr Timms shook his head. ‘And all those times you’ve come round to my funeral parlour, asking to be taken on as an apprentice?’

  ‘I just wanted an after-school job, to earn money for sweeties,’ I whispered.

  ‘And all the funerals you follow, when you duck down behind the tombstones and watch?’

  ‘Research?’ I suggested. ‘I’d still like a job, if you have one going.’

  ‘Unhealthy boy,’ said Mr Timms. ‘Unspeakable boy.’

  ‘Is that my boy?’ I heard the Daddy’s voice. ‘Is that my Gary you have there?’

  ‘Dave,’ I said. ‘Let’s run.’ But Dave was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Gary?’ My father rose unsteadily from his seat upon an over-stuffed sofa. ‘It is my Gary. Smite him for me, Timms.’ And my daddy sat down again, rather heavily, and took out his pipe.

  ‘Shall I smite you?’ Mr Timms asked.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ I prepared myself to run.

  ‘So what should I do, then? Throw you out on your ear?’

  ‘I’d rather you just let me stay, sir. I won’t be any trouble to anyone. I’ll just sit quietly in a corner.’

  Mr Timms nodded his long, thin head. ‘I hope I live long enough to see it,’ he said.

  ‘What, me sitting quietly? I’m sure you will.’

  ‘Not that,’ said Mr Timms. ‘But you at the end of a hangman’s rope.’

  ‘What?’ said I, rather startled by this statement.

  ‘You’re a bad’n,’ said Mr Timms. ‘A bad’n from birth. I see’m come and I see’m go. The good’ns and the bad. I’ll tuck you into your coffin when your time comes, you see if I don’t.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ I said, in the voice of one who felt he truly hadn’t.

  ‘If you haven’t yet, then you will.’ Mr Timms stared deeper still into my eyes. Right through my eyes, it seemed, and into my very brain.

  I got the uncanny feeling that this man could somehow, not read, but see my thoughts. And not just my thoughts at this moment, but the thoughts that I would have at some time in the future. See things that I would do in the future. But how could anybody do that? It was impossible, surely? But it seemed to me that this man was doing it. That he really did know. Well, that’s how if felt. It was not just an uncanny feeling, it was a terrible feeling. A feeling of inner violation. It put the wind up me something terrible. And I was a very brave boy.

  ‘You’ll hang,’ said Mr Timms. ‘I know it.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

  Mr Timms gazed down at me with his penetrating eyes. His long head went nod, nod, nod, and his voice said, ‘Yes, you will.’

  I held my ground and stared right back at him and then, because I felt so absolutely sure tha
t he could see my thoughts through my eyeballs, I turned those eyeballs down to the floor and studied the pattern on the carpet.

  A number of options lay open to me and I pondered on which one to take.

  I could run straight out of the door. That one was obvious, but that one would be to accept defeat. I could burst into tears and tell my daddy what Mr Timms had said to me, in the hope that my daddy would smite him on the nose. But my daddy might well take Mr Timms’s side and smite me instead.

  Or I could burst into tears and shout, ‘Get off me, you homo.’ I’d seen Dave do this once to the owner of the sweetie shop who had caught him nicking bubble gum. A crowd of young men had closed in about the shopkeeper and Dave had managed to make good his escape, taking the bubble gum and a Mars Bar as well.

  So I burst into tears, kicked Mr Timms in the ankle, shouted, ‘Get your hands off me, you homo. Help me, Daddy, please,’ and ran straight out of the door.

  6

  Dave was in hiding across the street, behind a hedge in someone’s front garden. As I ran out of the front door he called me over and I joined him there.

  ‘You’re crying,’ said Dave.

  So I told him what happened.

  Dave put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You did brilliantly,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it.’

  ‘You ran off and left me behind, you coward.’

  ‘I wasn’t scared,’ said Dave. ‘But I have a gyppy tummy and had to come outside to use the toilet. It’s this touch of Black Death I’ve got.’

  ‘Don’t breathe on me, then,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to catch it.’

  Dave slid his arm from my shoulder and took to picking his nose.

  ‘I suppose we might as well go home,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to get back inside now, are we? This has all been a waste of time.’

  ‘Seems a shame,’ said Dave. ‘It would be so much easier to bring Mr Penrose back to life now, rather than go to all the trouble of digging him up later.’

  I shrugged. ‘So you think we should wait some more?’ I asked.

  ‘It would be good practice,’ said Dave.

  ‘Practice for what?’

  ‘For the future. It seems to me that adults spend most of their time waiting for something or other. A bus or a train or, for those who have a telephone, a telephone call. Or waiting for the postman or the milkman or the man to fix the broken pipe or their girlfriend to arrive. Or––’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘There must be more to being an adult than that. You can get into pubs and drink beer.’

  ‘Waiting at the bar to get served,’ said Dave. ‘Waiting for the cubical in the gents to be free so you can be sick in it. Waiting––’

  ‘Stop!’ I put my hands over my ears.

  ‘Adults spend most of their time waiting,’ said Dave, in a voice that was loud enough for me to hear. ‘Because all they’re really waiting for is death.’

  ‘You paint a rosy picture of the future.’ I took my hands away from my ears and took to picking my own nose. ‘According to Mr Timms, my death waits for me at the end of the hangman’s rope.’

  ‘I hate adults,’ said Dave. ‘And adults secretly hate children. Because children have more life left to them than they do. Adults are jealous. And they think they know more about everything than children do.’

  ‘That’s because they do,’ I observed.

  ‘There’s some truth in that, I suppose,’ said Dave. ‘And I get well peeved because there are so many things that I don’t understand yet. But I would be able to understand them if adults answered my questions. But they don’t. The reason children don’t understand as much as adults is because adults don’t tell them everything they know. They keep secrets from children. Adults complicate the world to death, but children see the world as it really is. They see it as simple. For some reason, adults don’t like “simple”, they like “complicated”. So adults screw up the world and children suffer for it.’

  ‘You really are wise beyond your years,’ said I.

  ‘How dare you,’ said Dave. ‘I’m wise because I’m wise. Right now, as I am. And you’re wise too. You know how to raise the dead. How many adults know that?’

  ‘It was an adult who thought up the formula and the rituals and everything.’

  ‘Only because stuff like that takes years to work out. If you started from scratch now, it might take you twenty years before you got it right. But once you had got it right, you could pass the information straight to your ten-year-old son and he’d know it too. Or you could keep it a secret to yourself. Which is what adults do about practically everything. They’re all a lot of homos, adults.’

  All? I puzzled over this. I felt that one day I was bound to find out what a homo was, but it probably wouldn’t be before I was an adult. And then it might be too late: I might actually be a homo myself. The thought didn’t bear thinking about, so I didn’t think any more about it.

  ‘I have this theory,’ said Dave. ‘About Life, the Universe and Everything.’

  ‘Sounds like a good title for a book,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t talk silly,’ said Dave. ‘But I’ve thought hard about this theory. It’s in the form of a parable. Do you know what a parable is?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘It’s a bird that a pirate has on his shoulder.’

  Dave shook his head.

  ‘I was only joking,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dave. ‘I still haven’t worked out the one about the man with the huge green head. But a parable is a moral story, like in the Bible. Would you like to hear mine?’

  ‘Are there any spaceships in it?’ I asked, for I greatly loved spaceships. Although not all spaceships. I didn’t, for instance, like the spaceships in P. P. Penrose’s Adam Earth books. They were rubbish, those spaceships.

  ‘Of course there are spaceships in it. I only know parables that have spaceships in them.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ said Dave. ‘This parable is called “The Parable of the Spaceships.” ’

  ‘Good title,’ I said. ‘I—’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dave. And I shut up. And this is how it went.

  THE PARABLE OF THE SPACESHIPS

  Once upon a time there was a planet called Earth. And it was the future and people had cars that flew in the air and telephones that didn’t need wires and wore televisions on their wrists and had futuristic haircuts and big wing shoulders on their plastic jackets and lived in huge tower blocks that reached up into the clouds.

  And they had spaceships. But the spaceships could only go fast enough for people to commute between the planets in this solar system, which they did all the time, for going to work and stuff like that. Mostly mining emeralds on Saturn.

  Everybody was not doing OK in the future. Because there were so many people and all the planets in the solar system were getting completely overcrowded. So the scientists worked really hard on developing this spaceship that could travel at the speed of light and they built a special chamber in it where the pilot could be frozen up and stay in suspended animation until he got to his final destination, which would be the nearest planet capable of sustaining human life. They programmed the computer in the spaceship to search out the nearest planet that would comfortably support human life and then they looked for a volunteer. They wanted someone a bit special, because he would be the first man ever to set foot on this planet, which would mean that his name would go down in history and everyone would remember him for ever more (after his mission had been successful, of course, and later people had gone out to colonize this new world).

  Eventually they settled on this chap whose name was Adam. Well, he had the perfect name, didn’t he? And he had a nice family with three sons and was an all-round nice fellow. And a very good spaceship pilot who flew flights to Uranus. And so Adam said that he would be pleased to go, even though it meant that he might never see his family again, but he felt certain that he would, because it was such a good
spaceship and the scientists were so clever and everything.

  So, there were a lot of broadcasts on everyone’s wrist televisions and a big parade and Adam got into the spaceship and waved goodbye and was frozen up and the rocket blasted off into space.

  And that was the last that anyone on Earth ever saw of Adam.

  He travelled across the universe at the speed of light, covering unimaginable distances, and his spaceship went on and on and on, searching for the perfect planet.

  And then one day, it must have been thousands of years later, his spaceship eventually found the perfect planet and landed and Adam unfroze and opened the door and stepped out of the spaceship.

  And found that he was back on Earth.

  Well, at least it looked just like Earth.

  And not just because of the trees and flowers. But because of the buildings and flying cars and all the people who were gathered around looking up at his spaceship.

  And then out of the crowd appeared this chap who looked just like Adam. Just like him. And this chap said, ‘Hello, Dad,’ and another chap said, ‘Hello, Granddad,’ then another appeared and said, ‘Hello, Great-Granddad,’ and another who said, ‘Hello, Great-Great-Granddad.’

  And they all looked like Adam.

  And Adam got a little confused.

  And so the one who had said, ‘Hello, Dad,’ explained the situation to him. He said, ‘Well, Dad, after you’d gone, time passed and I grew up, and I became a scientist and I looked at the plans for your spaceship and I said, “I can improve on that. I can make a spaceship that will travel twice the speed of light.” So I did and I got in it and I got here in half the time it took you to get here. But when I did, I found that my own son was already here, because while I’d been gone he’d grown up and become a scientist and looked at the plans of my spaceship and said, “I can improve on that,” and built a spaceship that could go four times the speed of light and he’d got here in half the time it had taken me to get here. But when he’d got here, he’d found that his own son was already here, because he’d grown up and improved the spaceship even more and got here in half the time again. But when he got here, he found that his son was already here because—’