Snuff Fiction

  ‘Rubber?’ asks the magistrate.

  ‘Rubber duck,’ says Norman. ‘Although actually I was hoping for a shag.’

  The court stenographer makes a note to edit Norman’s statement down to a couple of paragraphs during the lunchtime recess.

  ‘Then,’ says Norman (continuing), ‘we hear the police cars. Well, I hear the police cars. The crowd with the kit off start shouting that they can see the sounds of the police car sirens. They’re shrieking, “Beware the black lightning,” and crazy stuff like that. Well, I don’t know who actually called the police, or why they did. Although I did notice a couple of furtive-looking fellows who kept speaking into their Y-fronts. Although of course they might have been Egyptians.’

  The court stenographer rolls his eyes; the magistrate nods his head.

  ‘So,’ continues Norman, yet again. ‘Police cars come screaming up and all these coppers come piling out and they’ve all got truncheons and they all pour in through the gates and crash, bang, wallop and thud and hit and beat and bash and—’

  ‘Have to stop you there,’ says the magistrate.

  ‘Why?’ asks Norman.

  ‘Because it’s not very nice. I don’t like the idea of policemen beating up unarmed naked people with truncheons. It’s horrid.’

  ‘It was horrid,’ says Norman. ‘I was there.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like the way you’re describing it. It shows our police force to be little more than thugs. Imagine if the newspapers were to get hold of this. People would be thinking that we’re living in a police state, rather than never having had it so good.’

  ‘So what would you like me to say?’ Norman asks.

  ‘I don’t mind what you say. But I object to the word truncheon. Call it something else.’

  ‘Riot stick?’ says Norman. ‘Baton?’

  ‘No no no. Nothing like that. Something more friendly.’

  ‘Tulip?’

  ‘Perfect,’ says the magistrate. ‘Now kindly continue.’

  ‘Right. So the police rush in with these tulips and there’s bashing and crashing and blood everywhere. And people’s faces are getting smashed in and the police are ramming their tulips up—’

  ‘No no no.’

  ‘No?’ says Norman.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’m just getting to the good part.’

  ‘Does this good part involve tulips?’

  Norman made the ‘so so’ gesture with his raised palms. ‘Not a great many tulips.’

  ‘Well, go ahead then and I’ll stop you if I don’t like the sound of it.’

  ‘Right. So the police have, you know, with the tulips and everything, but they’re really outnumbered and the naked people start grabbing the policemen and tearing off their uniforms and soon you can’t tell who’s who and the next thing it’s all turned into this sort of mass orgy and everyone’s going at it like knives.’

  ‘Sounds amazing.’

  ‘It was quite some party, I can tell you.’

  ‘I went to a party like that once,’ says the magistrate. ‘Back in ‘sixty-three. What a do that was. Someone even blew up the host’s dog with dynamite. Well, never mind about that. Orgy, you say?’

  ‘Gang bang, big time.’

  ‘So, you are telling me that the policemen were raped.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘They must have been raped. After all, they were completely out-numbered and they only had tulips to defend themselves with.’

  ‘Rape’s a rather unpleasant word,’ says Norman. ‘Perhaps you could say they were “loved against their will”, or something like that. Except they weren’t. They were right in there, especially old Mason, and I used to go to school with him.’

  In his final summing up of the case, the magistrate did not use the words loved against their will. He used a lot of other words though. Rape was one and tulip was another. And he used an awful lot of adjectives: terrible, horrible, loathsome, nightmarish, vile and filthy and degrading.

  He said that he had no intention of holding two thousand separate trials. He would never live to see them end. And for one thing, how could witnesses be expected to recognize defendants, as all people looked the same with their clothes off

  The festival-goers were not to blame for their actions, he said. They were innocent victims of toxic poisoning.

  It wasn’t their fault.

  So whose fault was it, then?

  Of this the magistrate was in no doubt. It was all the fault of a single individual. A criminal mastermind. A modern Moriarty. A fiend in human form who had clearly known exactly what he was doing when he emptied those drums of chemical waste into the water supply.

  The Doveston did not attend the trial. He was too ill to make an appearance. It was a shame really, because had he been there, I really would have liked to ask him a few questions.

  Such as how those drums of chemicals came to be in my hall. But he wasn’t there, so I couldn’t ask him.

  And even if he had been there, would it have made any difference?

  You see I had glimpsed the future and I knew that the drums of chemicals had nothing whatsoever to do with the madness. The chemicals were not to blame.

  It was the Brentstock cigarettes.

  Cigarettes that had been manufactured from genetically engineered tobacco. Genetically engineered from a formula laid down in the notes of Uncle Jon Peru Joans, the man who would talk with the trees.

  So, what should I have said? Should I have grassed up my bestest friend? Blamed it all on him? And on what evidence? That I had glimpsed the future?

  I couldn’t do that.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ I told the magistrate. ‘It wasn’t me.’

  But did he listen?

  Did he Hell!

  14

  Send me to Newgate and the gallows. I care not. I will laugh and jest and share a pipe or two with the hangman.

  Dick Turpin (1705—1739)

  I really miss the 1970s.

  Which is to say that I really missed them.

  Missed every year of them. Every single month and day. Every hour and minute.

  He banged me up, the magistrate did. Sent me down. Gave me fifteen years.

  Fifteen years!

  I wasn’t pleased, I can tell you. I was angry. I was bitter and twisted and boiling and brooding. I was not a nice man to know.

  They sent me first to Parkhurst and then to Pentonville. Later I was moved to Powys, then Penroth and finally to Poonudger. That each began with the letter P gave me no cause for amusement.

  The Doveston wrote to me, of course. His early letters were full of apologies and promises that he would do everything within his powers to secure me an early release. Knowing well his love for dynamite, I slept nightly with my mattress over my head, to shield myself from the blast that would bring down my cell wall and herald the arrival of the getaway car that would whirl me off to freedom.

  No blast came; no car arrived.

  His letters became few and far between, but with them now came press cuttings. A note was enclosed with the first of these to the effect that, as his biographer and finding myself with time on my hands, I should dedicate my days to compiling an archive of his achievements as they were chronicled in the daily newspapers.

  This, he suggested, would give me something worth while to do, with the added bonus that it would also keep me well informed as to what was going on in the world outside and just how well he was managing, even without my invaluable help.

  We would get through this thing together, he wrote. But he never once came to visit.

  Norman called by every month, until they moved me north. Norman brought me news of Brentford. Mostly grim, as I recall.

  The growing of tobacco on the St Mary’s allotments had been banned. The plots had been split up again and it was now as if the plantation had never existed. The Mexican migrant workers had moved on. The Crad fields of Chiswick were now a council estate. In Hammersmith a woman had given birth to a child the s
hape of a hair-drier and there had been numerous signs and portents in the heavens.

  ‘Surely,’ said Norman, ‘the End Times are upon us.

  Along with the reports of prodigious births, the sightings of mythical animals and the life and troubled times of a Brentford confectioner, Norman also brought some tragic news.

  Chico was dead.

  Gunned down in a drive-by whilst dealing on the street.

  ‘It was how he would have wanted to go,’ said Norman.

  And who could disagree with that?

  Norman was not my only visitor. Brother Michael dropped in once or twice. He offered me counselling, with the view that I should purge myself of former wrong-doing and release the monk within. He told me that he had been inspired by a dream, a vision it was, which showed me as a monk in a low-cut leather habit, receiving the stigmata in a most unusual place.

  Brother Michael displayed before me the holy paraphernalia that he had brought with him to effect my initiation. The crucifix and rosary; the golden icon of St Argent with his tiny nose; the Latin texts and phial of holy water; the sash of penitence; the tube of KY jelly. Although tempting, as some may consider it, I did not become a monk. In fact my physical response to the brother’s proposition, which manifested itself upon his person in a most vigorous and prolonged fashion, left him not only in some doubt as to the accuracy of visions, but also no longer predisposed to the riding of his bike.

  It got me six months in solitary and put two more years on my sentence.

  I was never the same man again.

  I don’t know whether you have ever read any Hugo Rune. But amongst the many Ultimate Truths revealed by this great twentieth-century philosopher and shoulder-rubber with the famous, is one that relates to the human condition. Rune states, in terms which even the layman can understand, that IT IS THE NATURE OF MAN TO BEHAVE BADLY.

  According to Rune (and who is there to doubt his words?) ‘Any given person, at any given time, will be behaving as badly as he or she is able to get away with.’

  According to Rune we are born behaving badly. We enter this world kicking and screaming and pooing ourselves. As children we are constantly punished for behaving badly. We are taught where the line is drawn and what will happen if we step over it. This continues throughout our lives, at school, in the workplace, in relationships and in marriage. We each behave as badly as we can get away with, stepping across a particular line at our peril.

  Exactly how badly we are able to behave depends entirely on our circumstances. The poor oft-times behave very badly, as can be witnessed in football hooliganism, holidays abroad and the wearing of sports clothes. But if you wish to see real bad behaviour, bad behaviour taken to the extreme and exhibited (privately for the most part) as an art form, you must visit either the haunts of the very rich and privileged, or a long-term institution.

  It is something of a cliché to state that wealth and bad behaviour go together. We have all heard the stories of best-selling authors who demand kumquats and chardonnay from harassed sales staff at signing sessions, of the antics of rock stars and cabinet ministers, matinée idols and members of the Royal Family. We know it goes on and we tut-tut-tut, but if our roles in life were reversed, we would do the same.

  IT IS THE NATURE OF MAN TO BEHAVE BADLY.

  And the more that you can get away with, the more you will try to get away with.

  So what of the long-term institution? Well, here we have another set of circumstances. Here we have a place almost entirely peopled by folk who have stepped over the line. They are paying the price for their so doing.

  Here we have the murderer whose bad behaviour has condemned him to life imprisonment. Society has condemned him to this punishment, even though this same society is forced into turning a blind eye upon the bad behaviour of its army or police. Society has said that this form of bad behaviour cannot be tolerated. Lock the bad man up forever, get him out of our sight.

  But is the murderer always a ‘bad’ man? If it is the nature of man to behave badly, was he not simply following the dictates of his nature? Doing what was natural to him? And what of the person he murdered? Was this an innocent victim?

  I only touch upon this now, for reasons that will later be revealed. But I learned, whilst in prison, that the man without hope of release is the man who has no line left to put his foot across.

  And you don’t push in front of such a man when in the queue for breakfast, or you will see some very bad behaviour.

  They say that you meet the most interesting people in pubs. But this is only said by people who spend a lot of time in pubs. In my personal opinion, you meet the most interesting people in prisons. They’re not all interesting, don’t get me wrong. Heinlein said, famously, that ninety-five per cent of all science fiction was rubbish, adding that ninety-five per cent of everything was rubbish. This could be taken to the next logical stage, by stating that ninety-five per cent of people are rubbish too. It is not a view that I hold myself, but I know of some who do.

  Now, having just suffered the preceding paragraphs, the reader might well believe that I have taken on a somewhat morbid mind-set. In fact that I had become bitter and twisted and boiling and brooding and not a nice man to know.

  Well, you try more than a decade in the nick and see if you come through grinning! It wasn’t all misery and I did meet some interesting people.

  I did, for instance, meet an old acquaintance.

  In Penroth Prison for the Criminally Disturbed I re-met Mr Blot. I didn’t even know they’d banged him up and I got quite a shock when I saw his gangly frame making its loomy way along the corridor of C Block. I wondered if he would recognize me, but he just gave a bit of a sniff as he passed and continued on to therapy.

  I sniffed at him in return and for the first time I realized what that smell was. The smell which had surrounded him at the Grange. That odd smell.

  It was the smell of prison.

  I learned all about Blot’s crimes from one of the nurses who were giving me the electric-shock treatment. This, combined with the large doses of pharmaceuticals, were helping to keep my temper in check, and I hadn’t bitten anybody’s face off in more than a month.

  The crimes of Blot were not without interest. He had, it seemed a penchant for corpses. Necrophilia, they call it. Apparently, as Blot had never had much success with live women, he had turned his amorous attentions upon those buried in the graveyard that backed on to the school playground. Easy access over the school wall had provided Mr Blot with a veritable harem. His QC argued that although none of the corpses offered their consent, nor could it be proved that they were unwilling participants, as none, it appeared, had put up any struggle.

  Mr Blot had been visiting the graveyard for years, and would probably have continued to do so undiscovered, had he not begun taking his girlfriends home.

  I got on well with Mr Blot. We talked a lot about the good old days and he took great joy in showing me his Bible. He had bound it himself and it had been one of the few items he had been allowed to bring with him to prison. ‘They always let you bring your Bible,’ he explained.

  The cover was unusual. It bore a pattern on the front, the like of which I have only ever seen once before — as a tattoo upon my late granny’s leg. The resemblance was quite uncanny.

  So prison life wasn’t all bad.

  I met a few interesting people and I did build up the Doveston Archive. As the years slowly passed for me, the volume of material increased. I was able to follow his progress and it made for a fascinating read. It was as if luck was always on his side.

  When I’d heard from Norman that the plantation was no more, I’d wondered just what the Doveston would do next. The answer to that had arrived in the post: a snipping from the Brentford Mercury, taken from Old Sandell’s column.

  UNHOLY SMOKE! WHATEVER NEXT?

  Hard upon the heels of last year’s yo-yo frenzy, we have the mini-pipe or Playground Briar. Just like Daddy’s, says the advertising.


  But once more there’s trouble. Brentford vicar, Bernard Berry, has condemned the little mini-pipe and forbidden its use amongst choirboys in the vestry. Why?

  Apparently because of the logo. What looks to me to be three small tadpoles chasing each other’s tails, is, so the good vicar tells us, the Number of the Beast: 666.

  Up your cassock, says Old Sandell, let the young ‘uns have a puff in peace.

  The mini-pipe did not enjoy the yo-yo’s success. But whether this was down to Vicar Berry, who can say? If there was triumph in his pulpit following its removal from the shelves of Norman’s shop, that triumph was short-lived. Old Sandell had this to report in his column, a scant three weeks later.

  BERRY BLOWN TO BUGGERATION

  Brentford vicar Bernard Berry got the final surprise of his life this week when he lit up a stick of dynamite in mistake for a communion candle.

  Poor labelling on the box, allied to the vicar having mislaid his specs, led to the tragedy.

  But who ended up with the candles? Accidents will happen, says Old Sandell, we’ll have to let God sort it out.

  The failure of the mini-pipe did nothing to deter the Doveston. It was a rubbish idea anyway and his sights were set on far higher things. I collected the clippings as they came in, filing them carefully, following how one business venture led to the next and noting how, with striking regularity, those who stood in his way fell prey to freak accidents of an explosive nature.

  But accidents will happen, as Old Sandell says, and we’ll have to let God sort it out.

  Accidents happen everywhere and a good many happen in prison.

  In Powys I met a young fellow by the name of Derek. Derek had been convicted for murder. The murder, it turned out, of Chico. Within just three days of my meeting Derek, he was dead. He died, coincidentally, on the very day that I was leaving Powys to be moved on to Penroth. Derek died in a freak accident involving tied hands and a toilet bowl.

  I expect old God knows what He’s up to.