Snuff Fiction

  I stared helplessly at this. ‘It’s an address book,’ I said.

  ‘And a diary. It’s a personal organizer.’

  ‘Yes. And?’

  ‘It’s fashionable. You carry it everywhere with you and always put it on the table when you’re having lunch.’

  I shook my head. ‘But it’s an address book. Only woosies have address books.’

  ‘There are pouches in the back for putting your credit cards in and a totally useless map of the world.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘These are the 1980s,’ said Jackie. ‘And in the 1980s there are only two types of people. Those who have Filofaxes and those who don’t. Believe me, it is far better to be a have than a have-not.’

  ‘But look at the size of the bloody thing.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find somewhere to put it.’

  ‘Where do you keep yours?’ Jackie pointed.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Of course. Silly question. I’m sorry.’

  And I did get a watch. Watches were a big number in the Eighties.

  And none of that digital nonsense. Real watches with two hands and Roman numerals and clockwork motors. I still have the watch Jackie bought for me. And it still keeps perfect time. And it didn’t explode at midnight before the dawn of the year two thousand. Curiously, I have no idea whatever became of my Filofax.

  ‘You’ll need a car,’ said Jackie. ‘What kind would you like?’

  ‘A Morris Minor.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘One like that.’ I pointed to a car across the road.

  ‘A Porsche.’

  ‘That would be the kiddie.’

  And it was.

  The Doveston set me up in a little flat just off the Portobello Road. ‘This area is coming up,’ he told me.

  I viewed the greasy lino and the broken window panes. ‘It would perhaps do better for pulling down,’ I suggested. ‘I don’t like it here.’

  ‘You will not be here for long. Only until you have decorated the place.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once it has been decorated, we will sell it for double the price.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I will move you into a larger flat in another area that is coming up. You will decorate that one and we will sell it once again for double the price.’

  ‘Is this strictly legal?’

  ‘Mark well my words, my friend,’ said the Doveston. ‘There is a boom going on in this country at the moment. It will not last forever and many will go down when the plug is pulled. In the meantime, it is up to us, and those like us’ — he raised his Filofax, as if it were a sword — ‘to grab whatever can be grabbed. These are the 1980s, after all.’

  ‘And tomorrow belongs to those who can see it coming.’

  ‘Precisely. I’m not into property. Buying and selling houses holds no excitement for me. I want to make my mark on the world and I shall do that through my expertise in my chosen field of endeavour.’

  ‘Tobacco,’ I said.

  ‘God’s favourite weed.’

  ‘I have no wish to share another Brentstock moment.’

  ‘Ah, Brentstock,’ said the Doveston. ‘Those were the days, my friend.’

  ‘They bloody weren’t. Well, some of them were. But do you know what happened to me when I smoked that stuff of yours?’

  ‘You talked to the trees.’

  ‘More than that. I saw the future.’

  ‘All of the future?’

  ‘Not all. Although it seemed like all at the time. I saw glimpses. It’s like déjà vu now. I get that all the time and sometimes I know when something bad is going to happen. But I can’t do anything about it. It’s pretty horrible. You did that to me.’

  The Doveston went over to the tiny window and peered out through the broken pane. Turning back towards me he said, ‘I am truly sorry for what happened to you at Brentstock. It was all a terrible mistake on my part. I worked from Uncle Jon Peru’s notes and I thought that the genetic modifications I’d made to the tobacco would only help it to grow in the English climate. I had no idea the cigarettes would have the effect they did. I’ve learned a great deal more about that drug since then and I will tell you all about it when the time is right. But for now I can only ask that you accept my apologies for the awful wrong that I’ve done you and ask that you don’t ever speak of these things to other people. You can never be certain just who is who.’

  ‘Who is who?’

  ‘I am followed,’ said the Doveston. ‘They follow me everywhere. They watch my every move and they make their reports. They know I’m on to them and that makes them all the more dangerous.’

  ‘This wouldn’t be the secret police again, would it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Doveston, grave, in the face. ‘Uncle Jon Peru Joans knew exactly what he was talking about. You experienced the effects of the drug. You know it’s true.’

  ‘Yes, but all that secret police stuff. I remember you saying that they would be in the crowd at Brentstock. But I thought you were only winding me up.’

  ‘They were there and they’re out there now. At some time in the future, when I consider it safe, I will show you my laboratory. You will see then how the Great Work is progressing.’

  ‘The Great Work? Uncle Jon Peru’s Great Work?’

  ‘The very same. But we shall speak of these things at some other time. I don’t want to keep you talking now.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I don’t. You’ve got decorating to do. You’ll find all the stuff in the kitchen along with the plans for which walls you have to knock down and how to plumb in the dishwasher. Try and get it all done by next week, because I think I’ve got a buyer lined up.’

  ‘You what?’

  But the Doveston said no more.

  He turned on his designer heel and, like Elvis, left the building. He did pause briefly at the door to offer me a smile and a wave, before he went.

  And it was then I saw it. That look in his eyes.

  The look that Uncle Jon Peru had had in his.

  That look that the monkey in the Mondo movie had.

  And I suppose it was at that very moment that I realized, for the first time ever, just how absolutely mad the Doveston was.

  But I wouldn’t let it spoil our friendship. After all, I was on a roll here. I was in the money. I had a Paul Smith suit, a Piaget watch, a Porsche and a personal organizer.

  All of these began with a P.

  I really should have noticed that . . .

  16

  Beatle bones and smokin’ Stones.

  Don Van Vliet

  For a man who was not into property, the Doveston sure bought a lot of it. During my first six months of freedom, I moved house eight times. Each to somewhere grander in a more up-market neighbourhood. By Christmas of 1984, I had made it to Brentford.

  Yes, Brentford!

  The Butts Estate.

  And which house was I living in? Why, none other than that once owned by Uncle Jon Peru Joans. It would have been a childhood dream come true , had I ever dreamed of such a thing in childhood. The dreams I’d had in childhood, however, were formed of far humbler stuff. Never once had I thought that one day I might live on the Butts Estate.

  The conservatory had been rebuilt, but not in its original style. Two local jobbing builders, Hairy Dave and Jungle John, had hobbled a nasty double-glazed atrocity of the monstrous carbuncle persuasion across the back of the house and my first job was to pull it down.

  I did have a bit of a party when I moved in. But all very low key and sophisticated. I’d been hoping to get my leg over Jackie, but she wasn’t having any. She told me that even though there wasn’t much that she wouldn’t do for a man in a Paul Smith suit, there was no way she was going to shag a bloke who was a painter and decorator. What did I think she was, a slapper?

  I took that one on the chin and determined that one day. . .

  One day. . .

  Norman spoiled the party fo
r me somewhat. He’d brought with him several bottles of home-brewed sprout brandy, of which he imbibed too freely. In a moment of drunken bonhomie, he called me his bestest friend and said that this was the bestest party he’d ever been to.

  Except for one he’d been to back in ‘sixty-three, where somebody had blown up the host’s dog with dynamite.

  Oh how we laughed.

  I was really up for rebuilding that conservatory. I’d managed to get copies of the original plans from the Memorial Library and a nearby foundry had agreed to take on the job of casting the columns and decorative ironwork.

  When, in the January of the following year, the Doveston told me that it was time to move again, I said no. I wanted to stay where I was, complete the conservatory and once again be a Brentonian.

  To my great surprise the Doveston said that he didn’t mind. I could keep the house, but on one condition. He himself had recently acquired a property in Sussex. If I would decorate that for him at no charge, the house in the Butts was mine.

  I readily agreed.

  I was pretty nifty now, when it came to the old renovating. I had a small team of lads who worked for me and we breezed through it at the hurry-up. I figured that a month or two’s work on the Doveston’s property, in exchange for Uncle Jon Peru’s house, was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  There was just the one question that I should have asked. And this was: ‘How big is this property?’

  The winter of ‘eighty-five was the coldest ever on record. The River Thames froze over and thousands died from hypothermia. Few of these thousands, I suspect, left Filofaxes to their next of kin. The nation had divided itself into two separate classes. The we-have-lots and the we-have-bugger-alls. The we-have-lots were topping off their walls with razor-wire. The we-have-bugger-alls were planning revolution. The Doveston’s limo, an armoured affair with bullet-proof glass and gun-ports on the roof, picked me up on a February morning to ferry me down to Sussex. The snow had been falling non-stop for almost a month and if it hadn’t been for the chains on the tyres and the snow-plough on the front, I doubt whether we could ever have completed the journey.

  I’d never been to Sussex before and all I knew of the countryside was what all Londoners knew: the folk there lived in thatched cottages, hunted foxes and shagged the sheep. When not shagging sheep, they shagged their daughters, and if their daughters weren’t keen, they set to work on the chickens.

  I am prepared to agree now that this commonly held view of country folk is not altogether accurate. Most country folk do not shag their sheep, their daughters or their chickens.

  They do, however, practice human sacrifice in their worship of Satan. But who doesn’t nowadays? And they do make nice jam.

  The Doveston’s property was situated on the edge of a picture-postcard village called Bramfield, some ten miles north of Brighton.

  Bramfield skulked in the South Downs. Most villages nestle, but not Bramfield. Bramfield was a definite skulker. It had its head down. It was cowering. And, as we reached the end of the High Street, it was plain to see from what.

  Ahead, across the snow-covered fields, arose a terrible building. It looked as I imagine Gormenghast must look. A great black hulking Gothic nightmare of a place, all twisted towers and high cupolas, gabled roofs and flying buttresses.

  ‘Look at that bloody horrible thing,’ I said as we approached it.

  The Doveston raised an eyebrow to me.

  ‘It’s not?’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ was his reply.

  And the nearer we got, the bigger it grew, for such is the nature of things. When we stepped from the car into three feet of snow, it was heads back all and gape up.

  Jackie huddled in her mink and her mouth was so wide that I’m sure I could have climbed in there to shelter from the cold. The Doveston’s chauffeur, Rapscallion, took off his cap and mopped at his brow with an oversized red gingham handkerchief ‘Holy crap,’ was all he had to say.

  I, however, had quite a bit more. ‘Now just you see here,’ I began. ‘If you think I’m going to decorate this monstrosity for you, you’ve got another think coming. Who owned this dump before you bought it, Count Dracula?’

  ‘Most amusing.’ The Doveston grinned a bit of gold in my direction. ‘I have my laboratory here. I only wish you to decorate some of the apartments.’

  ‘Laboratory?’ I shook my head, dislodging the ice that was forming on my hooter. ‘I assume that you have an assistant called Igor, who procures the dead bodies.’

  ‘He’s called Blot, actually.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s go inside before we freeze to death.’

  ‘We belong dead,’ I muttered, in my finest Karloff.

  Inside it was all as you might have expected. Pure Hammer Films. A vast baronial hall, flagstones underfoot and vaulted ceiling high above. Sweeping staircase, heavy on the carved oak. Minstrels’ gallery, heavy on the fiddly bits. Stained-glass windows, heavy on the brutal martyrdoms. Wall-hanging tapestries, heavy on the moth. Suits of armour, heavy on the rust. Authentic-looking instruments of torture.

  Heavy.

  It was grim and lit by candles and the fire that blazed within a monstrous inglenook. Everything about it said, ‘Go back to London, young master.’

  ‘Let’s go back to London,’ I suggested.

  ‘Too late now,’ the Doveston said. ‘It’s getting dark out. We had best stay for the night.’

  I sighed a deep and dismal. ‘This is undoubtedly the most sinister place I’ve ever been in,’ I said. ‘It literally reeks of evil. I’ll bet you that all the previous owners came to meet terrible ends. That half of them are walled up in alcoves and that at midnight you can’t move for spectres with their heads clutched underneath their arms.’

  ‘It does have a certain ambience, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Sell the blighter,’ said I. ‘Or burn it down and claim the insurance money. I’ll lend you my lighter if you want.’

  ‘I have plenty of lighters of my own.’ The Doveston took off his designer overcoat and warmed his hands beside the fire. ‘But I have no intention of burning it down. This is more than just a place to live. A title goes with it as well.’

  ‘The House of Doom,’ I suggested.

  ‘A title for me, you buffoon. I am now the Laird of Bramfield.’

  ‘Well pardon me, your lordship. Does this mean that you will soon be riding to hounds?’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘And shagging the sheep?’

  ‘Watch it.’

  ‘Oh yes, excuse me. If I recall correctly, it will be the chickens that have to keep their backs to the henhouse wall.’

  A look of anger flashed in his eyes, but I knew he wouldn’t dare to strike me. Those days were gone, but it wasn’t too smart to upset him.

  ‘So that’s why you bought it,’ I said. ‘So you could be Lord of the Manor.’

  ‘Partly. But also because it can be easily fortified. I’m having the moat re-dug and a high perimeter fence put up.’

  ‘That should please the locals.’

  ‘Stuff the locals.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘But don’t you see it? The kudos of owning a place like this? I shall be able to entertain wealthy clients here. Hold stupendous parties.’

  ‘Hm,’ I went. ‘You’ll have to do something about the ambience then.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll switch that off’

  ‘What?’

  The Doveston strode back to the big front doors and flicked a tiny hidden switch. I experienced a slight popping of the ears and then a feeling of well-being began to spread through me, as if I were being warmed by a tropical sun. But not too much. Just enough.

  ‘Mmmmmmm,’ went Jackie, flinging off her mink.

  ‘Right on,’ said Rapscallion.

  The Doveston grinned. ‘It’s clever, isn’t it?

  I went, ‘What?’ and ‘Eh?’ and ‘How?’

  ‘It’s an invention of Norman’s. He calls it the Hartnell Home H
appyfier. There’s one installed in every room.’

  I went, ‘What?’ and ‘Eh?’ and ‘How?’ some more.

  ‘You see,’ said the Doveston, ‘Norman saw an advert in the Brentford Mercury for ionizers. They’re all the fashion nowadays, supposed to pep up the atmosphere in offices and suchlike. Norman thought that one would be good for his shop. But when it arrived and he tried it out, he found the results to be negligible. He thought that perhaps it was broken, so he took it to pieces to see how it worked and he discovered that there was damn all inside it and what there was didn’t do much anyway. So Norman got to work with his Meccano set and designed a better one. One that really did the business.

  ‘Norman’s one has three settings. Grim, which is what I had mine set to. That really discourages burglars, I can tell you. Normal, which is what you are experiencing now. And Yaa-hoo-it’s-Party-Time, which really gets the joint a-jumping.’

  ‘But that’s incredible,’ I said. ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Something to do with the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter, I believe.’

  I shook my head in amazement. ‘But an invention like that must be worth millions.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And yet I was able to buy the patent from Norman for less than one hundred pounds.’

  ‘Why you crooked, double-dealing—’

  ‘Not a bit of it. I have no wish to profit financially from Norman s invention. I just wanted to make sure that it remains only in the right hands.’

  ‘And these right hands would be the ones that often hold a Filofax?’

  ‘I generally hold mine in my left hand. But essentially you are correct. Shall we dine?’

  We dined.

  And as we dined, the Doveston spoke. And as had the walrus of old, he spoke of many things. Of pipes and snuff and smoking stuff and Brentstock Super Kings.

  He spoke of his plans for the house. It was currently called Bramfield Manor, but he intended to change the name to Castle Doveston. It was to be made a secure area. I assumed that this meant secure against any possible attacks from villagers with flaming torches. But I later came to understand that this meant secure against the surveillance of the so-called secret police.