Snuff Fiction

  I enjoyed one too. I’d acquired a few free packets from Norman and although I can’t say that they were a great smoke, they did have something special about them.

  The Doveston left the stage to a standing ovation and I found him back at the mixing desk, where a goodly number of females had gathered, all eager to adjust his yo-yo. As I have never been too proud to bathe in a bit of reflected glory, I introduced myself all round and enquired suavely as to the chances of getting a shag.

  And did I get one? Did I Hell!

  Saturday afternoon was a gas. More bands played and the beautiful people continued to dance. The bands had no difficulty getting into the festival, because the constable on guard had only been ordered to stop people getting out.

  I dwelt a bit upon all that business with the Chief Constable. I mean, the whole thing was ludicrous really. Totally far-fetched, absurd and beyond belief. I mean, only one constable on duty at the gate. You’d have needed at least two, surely?

  It was just around the five o’clock mark when I became fully aware that things weren’t altogether right with me. It seemed that throughout the afternoon I had been slowly acquiring a number of mystical powers. The power to see sounds in colour, for instance, and also the power to hear smells.

  I found that I was becoming just a little bit confused by what was going on around me and this was not helped at all by the curious sense of detachment I was experiencing.

  Every time I took a couple of steps forward, I had to stop to let myself catch up. ‘I feel distinctly odd,’ I said to Humphrey.

  ‘You’re tripping, man, that’s all.’ His words emerged as purple stars that floated off into the sky.

  ‘I can’t be tripping. I haven’t done any acid.’

  ‘Go with the flow, man. Go with the flow.’

  Purple stars and little yellow patches.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around very slowly, to keep my consciousness inside my head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked the Doveston.

  ‘I’m talking to Humphrey. He says that I’m tripping. But I can’t be, I haven’t done any acid.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of Humphrey,’ said the Doveston. ‘He can’t be trusted.’

  ‘Oh yes I can,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘Oh no you can’t.’

  ‘Oh yes I can.

  ‘Why can’t he be trusted?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Humphrey is an oak tree,’ said the Doveston.

  13

  Tobacco hic,

  If a man be well it will make him sick.

  John Ray, 1627—1705

  We shared a Brentstock moment.

  There was a band playing up on the stage. The band was called the Seven Smells of Susan: five small dwarves with very tall heads and a rangy fellow in tweeds. The Seven Smells played ‘coffee-table music’, the 1960s precursor of Ambient. They only ever released one album and this, I believe, was produced by Brian Eno. It was called Music for Teapots. I don’t have a copy myself.

  I was no great fan of the Smells, their music was far too commercial for me, but on this day they were magic. The sounds of the duelling ocarinas and the semi-tribal rhythms of the yoghurt-pot maracas issued from the speakers in Argus-eyed polychromatic fulgurations, which were both pellucid and dioptric, daedal and achromatic, simultaneously. It was as if I were actually viewing the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter, without having recourse to an Inter-Rositor.

  Nice.

  But good as the band were, nobody seemed to be listening. The centre of attention was no longer the stage. The crowd had withdrawn to the riverside end of the allotments, to re-form in a number of Olympic Ring-like interlocking circles, each of which centred on one of the ancient oaks. Most of the folk were sitting cross-legged, but I noticed some were kneeling with their hands together in prayer.

  ‘The trees,’ I said to the Doveston. ‘They’re all talking to the trees.’

  My words were tiny green transparent spheres which burst all over his forehead, but he didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps he was being polite. ‘What the bloody Hell is going on?’ I heard and saw him say.

  ‘Everybody’s tripping. Everyone. Someone must have dropped acid into the water supply, or something.’

  ‘Or something.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ My question was orange, with small yellow stars.

  ‘I’ll get Chico on to it.’ Red diamonds and fairy-lights.

  ‘He might be stoned as well.’ Pink umbrellas.

  ‘He’d better not be.’ Golden handbags and grated cheese guitars.

  ‘I can’t handle this,’ I said, in a mellowy-yellowy-celery way. ‘I’m going home to bed.’

  I stumbled across the tobacco-stubbled waste, pausing now and then to let myself catch up, climbed carefully over the back garden fence and in through the kitchen window. The Smells’ music was really beginning to do my head in and I was quite pleased when, at the exact moment that I plugged in the electric kettle to brew a cup of tea, they apparently finished their set.

  Obviously there were some who were not so pleased as I, because I heard the sounds of shouting and of blows being exchanged. But it was hardly any of my business, so I just sat there waiting for the kettle to boil.

  It took an age. It took a lifetime. It took an aeon.

  Did you ever see that documentary about the scientist Christopher Mayhew? It was made by the BBC in the 1950s. Old Chris takes mescaline and attempts to describe the on-going experience to this terribly proper BBC commentator-chappie. There is one classic moment when he stares briefly into space and then announces that he has just returned from ‘years and years of Heavenly bliss’. The bit that sticks with me is the part at the end. After the effects of the drug have worn off, he is asked what he has learned from his experience. Mr Mayhew concludes, ‘There is no absolute time, no absolute space.

  As I sat and waited for that kettle to boil, I knew just what he meant. At that moment I stepped outside of time. It was as if the part of me that kept me forever only in the present had been removed or switched off. All times were instantly accessible. The past, the present and the future. I had no wish to revisit the past. I’d been there and done it and not been there and done it very well. But the future, oh the future. I saw it all and it terrified me. I saw what I was going to do and I knew why I would have to do it.

  I saw myself a prisoner. A prisoner of time, perhaps? Shut away for years and years and then released to wander on a lonely moor. And then I saw bright lights and London town, and then myself, a man of property. I wore fine clothes and drove a snazzy car. And then, upon a bleak horizon, loomed a mighty house, a Gothic pile, and there, within, debauchery and drugs and long-legged women. I enjoyed this part considerably and lingered in my time-travelling to dwell upon the details and the depths of my depravity. And very nice it was.

  But then came tragedy. A death that seemed to shake the world and shortly after, a great and wonderful party, which, for some reason that I could not understand, I did not enjoy at all. And then the world went mad. It was the end of the world as we knew it. Nuclear war. Then wastelands and scattered communities.

  This part was all pretty crap. Like some cheap Mad Max imitation, so I skipped through it as quickly as I could. But I was drawn up short by a really nasty episode that made me feel sick in my stomach.

  I was in a tiny underground room beneath ruins, with an old frail man who sat in a chair. And this old man was ranting at me, and I really hated him, and suddenly I was killing him. My hands were about his wrinkly throat and I was squeezing the life from his body.

  And I could see myself here, today, in the year 2008, writing these words. Remembering then what I remember now, remembering.

  So to speak.

  I feel certain that I would have been able to see well beyond the extent of my own brief lifetime and off into eternity, had I not been quite so rudely interrupted. I don’t know who it was who came crashing in through my kitchen window
and ripped the kettle plug out of the wall and started beating me over the head with the kettle. He looked a bit tweedy and rangy to me, but as I was soon very unconscious, I really couldn’t be sure.

  Now, you know that panicky feeling you get when you wake up after a really heavy night of drink and drugs to find that you can’t move and then it slowly dawns on you that someone has glued your head to the floor and then it slowly dawns on you that no they haven’t, you’ve just chucked up in your sleep and the vomit has dried and stuck your face to the limo and— No. You don’t know that feeling, do you.

  Well, it’s almost as bad as the police cell one.

  Almost, but not quite.

  I tried to lever myself up, but I didn’t make too much progress. Luckily I happened upon a spatula I’d dropped a couple of weeks previously, which had somehow got kicked under the cooker, and was able to ease it between the floor and my face and gently prise myself free. It was a horrible experience, I can tell you, and I got all breathless and flustered and desperately in need of a nice cup of tea.

  I really won’t bore you with what happened after I plugged the electric kettle in again.

  But what happened might well have saved my life, or at least my sanity. If I hadn’t taken that second beating and if the ambulance hadn’t been called to whisk me off to the cottage hospital, I would certainly have gone back to the festival and what happened to all those innocent people would undoubtedly have happened to me. Whoever beat me back into oblivion spared me from all that.

  But spared me for what? And for why?

  That I should go forward through my life knowing what was to come and yet be powerless to prevent it?

  That I should be some kind of helpless puppet doomed to a terrible fate?

  That the grinning purple kaftan of truth should shed its wings and eat the flaccid ashtray of tomorrow?

  The latter was a puzzle and that was for sure! But hey, these were the 1960s after all.

  I have pieced together what happened that day from conversations I had at the hospital and later with Norman and others, through secret police documents that came into my possession, and suppressed film footage. The real story has never before been told.

  I tell it here.

  To begin, let us examine the statement given by the ambulance-driver Mick Loaf.

  ‘Oh yeah, right, is the tape rolling? Okay. So, yeah, we got the call-out at about ten on the Sunday morning. I’d just come on shift. I’d been away for a couple of days, visiting my aunt. What? Pardon? Tell the truth? I am telling the truth. What, the machine says I’m not? Okay. Yeah, well, it wasn’t my aunt, but does that matter? Yeah, right, I’ll just tell you what I saw. We had the call-out, house a couple of streets away from the hospital. The caller said that a chap called Edwin had been beaten up by some gypsy-looking types and was bleeding to death in his kitchen. So we drove over, okay?

  ‘Well, you have to pass right by the allotments and I didn’t know there was some kind of festival going on and as we’re driving by we see all these thousands of people sort of swaying to the music. All in time, very impressive it was. But it was warm, see, and I had my window open, and I couldn’t hear any music. So I says to my mate, Chalky, “Chalky,” I say, “look at all those mad hippy bastards dancing to no music.” And Chalky says, “Look at the stage.” And we stopped the ambulance and looked at the stage and there wasn’t a band up there, there was just a whole load of potted plants with microphones set up around them, as if these plants were the band. Weird shit, eh?

  ‘What? The chemicals? Oh, you want to know about the chemicals. Well, there’s not much to tell. I gave my statement to the police. When we got to the house the front door was open. We went inside, but we had to come out again and get the respirators because of the smell. There were all these drums of chemicals stacked up in the hall. American army stuff— someone told me that they use it in Vietnam, but I don’t know what for. Smelled bloody awful though, made me go wobbly at the knees.

  ‘Anyway, we found the Edwin bloke in the kitchen. He was in a right old state. We got him back to the hospital and they gave him a transfusion. Saved his life.

  ‘That’s all I know. I missed what happened later. Bloody glad I did.’

  Councillor McMurdo, head of the town-planning committee, gave only one interview to the press. This he did by telephone from his villa in Benidorm.

  ‘The allotments’ water supply is separate from that of the rest of the borough. It is supplied from an Artesian well beneath the allotments themselves. If toxic chemicals were used on the allotments, there is every likelihood that they would contaminate this supply. There is only one tap on the allotments. This is situated next to the plot owned by a person known locally as Old Pete. It is my understanding that stall-holders who had the food franchises at this festival used this tap. The council can in no way be held responsible for the tragedy that occurred.’

  All becoming clear? A big picture starting to form?

  But what exactly did happen? What was the tragedy?

  Let us hear it all from Norman Hartnell, as he told it at the trial.

  ‘I went home early on the Saturday afternoon, before things began to turn strange. I’d completely sold out of Brentstock cigarettes, didn’t even get to try a packet myself. I thought I’d go home for tea and grab an early night. I wanted to be up bright and fresh on the Sunday and get a good place down at the front by the stage. I was really looking forward to seeing Bob Dylan and Sonny and Cher.

  ‘I brought a flask of tea with me on the Sunday, just as I had done the day before, but even though I got there really early, I couldn’t get near the stage. In fact, I couldn’t even see the stage, because all this silent dancing was going on. I don’t dance a lot myself, do the Twist a bit at weddings, that’s about all. But as a lot of the girls there had taken all their clothes off, I thought I’d join in, just to be sociable.

  ‘So, I was sort of jigging about with this very nice girl who had the most amazing pair of Charlies—’ At this point the magistrate interrupts Norman to enquire what ‘Charlies’ are.

  ‘Breasts, your honour. Fifth generation Brentford rhyming slang. Charles Fort rhymes with haute. Haute cuisine rhymes with queen. Queen of the May rhymes with hay, and hay and barley rhymes with Charlie’.

  The magistrate thanks Norman for this explanation and asks him to continue.

  ‘So,’ continues Norman. ‘We’re dancing away and I’m saying to her that not only does she have a most amazing pair of Charlies, she has a really stunning Holman—’

  Once more Norman is asked to explain.

  ‘Holman Hunt, 1827-1910,’ says Norman. ‘English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He painted a lot of women in the nude. But some of them didn’t like that, so he used to put his trousers back on. He always wore a headband.’

  The magistrate then asks Norman whether a Holman Hunt is a type of headband. Norman says no. ‘It’s a tattoo of a giraffe.’

  The magistrate then orders a clerk of the court to strike Norman for wasting everybody’s time. Norman is duly struck.

  ‘So, we’re dancing,’ says Norman, once he has recovered, ‘and then suddenly everyone stops at once. Except for me, but I soon stop when I hear the shouting. Someone is up on stage bawling into the microphone. It’s a bloke’s voice and he’s going, “Now you’ve heard it. Now you’ve heard the truth. The Great Old Ones have spoken to us, their children have sung to us, what are we going to do about it?”

  ‘I shout, “Bring on Bob Dylan,” but nobody’s listening to me. They’re all ripping off their clothes and shouting, “Back to the old ways” and “Tear up the pavements” and “Let the mighty mutant army of chimeras march across the lands” and stuff like that.

  ‘I don’t know what that’s all about, but as clothes are coming off all around, I think I’d better get in on the act, so I whip off my shop-coat and fold it neatly on the ground. And I say to the girl with the Holman and the nice Charlies, “What is
this all about?” and she says,

  “Whenever you speak, all rainbow-coloured sweeties come out of your mouth.” Which is a bloody lie, because I don’t eat sweeties any more, although I do know all about them. I know nearly everything there is to know about sweeties , you just try me, if you think I’m not telling you the truth.’

  The magistrate asks Norman how they get all the different colours inside a gob-stopper. Norman says he does know, but he’s not telling, because it’s a trade secret. The magistrate makes a huffy face, but asks Norman to continue.

  Norman continues. ‘So,’ continues Norman, ‘I ask her again, “What is this all about?” I ask her. And she says, “The trees, the trees. The trees have told us the truth. Mankind is destroying the planet. Raping Mother Earth. Mankind must return to the old ways. Hunting and gathering and fornicating on the grass, because the grass quite enjoys it.” And I say, “Me too, let’s do it right away.” But she isn’t keen, she says that the trees have told everyone that they must tear up the pavements and burn down all the houses and plough Brentford over and plant loads of sprouts, because sprouts are like little planets and have lots of wisdom and—’

  The magistrate asks Norman whether he likes sprouts. Norman says he doesn’t and the magistrate says that he doesn’t either and he asks for a show of hands around the court to see how many people actually do like sprouts. There are eighty-nine people present in the court and out of these only seven are prepared to own up that they do and out of these, two say that they aren’t really that keen.

  Continue, the magistrate tells Norman and Norman continues once again.

  ‘So,’ continues Norman, ‘I say to this girl, in the nicest possible way and in a manner that I hope will not offend, that she is stoned out of her face and why doesn’t she come back to my place for a rubber—’