The Midden

by Tom Sharpe

  Henry intervened before his uncle could explode. ‘As a matter of fact we’ve been for a rather long walk. Along the cliffs,’ he said.

  Timothy missed the implication. ‘You might have woken me. I could have done with a walk,’ he said.

  ‘You were dead to the world when I looked in at you this morning or I would have done,’ Henry continued. ‘Anyway you wouldn’t have liked it much. Very windy and gusty.’

  In the kitchen Victor was clearing up. ‘Thank you for the tact,’ he said when Henry came through. ‘Almost certainly saved me from a murder charge. I know I’m at the age when one starts complaining about declining standards and so on but that young man really does convince me that things aren’t what they used to be. A short – better still a long – spell of hard labour would surely do him a world of good. More to the point, it would certainly do the world some good.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what he gets, Uncle Victor,’ Henry said quietly as he began to wash the plates up. ‘He’s certainly up to something a bit shady.’

  ‘Is he indeed?’ said Victor with a touch more optimism. ‘May one enquire how you know?’

  ‘I sat up with the idiot last night, and listened to all his drunken boasting. He didn’t tell me what the game is, but he was fairly definite about being on to a quote good thing unquote, and in my experience that nearly always means something on the wrong side of the law.’

  ‘How very interesting. You know, I should rather enjoy it if the police arrested him here. It would give me something to deter the rest of the Bright family from ever visiting us again.’

  ‘On the other hand it would give Aunt Brenda something else to forgive you for,’ Henry pointed out.

  Victor winced. ‘It’s not a joke, my boy, not a joke at all. I hope that your wife has a thoroughly unforgiving nature, I hope for your sake, that is. You have no idea what a terrible deterrent forgiveness is. I’ll never forget the time Brenda forgave Hilda Armstrong for . . . well, something or other. Of course she did it in public, at a Women’s Institute meeting – or it may have been a parish council meeting. Most embarrassing for everyone. Must have been the parish council because I don’t attend Women’s Institute functions. Anyway it led to the Armstrongs being ostracized and, when old Bowen Armstrong didn’t divorce her, he got poison-pen letters and filth like that. In the end they had to go back to Rickmansworth and pretend that life in the country hadn’t suited Hilda’s health. Actually she’d looked quite remarkably . . . yes, well, it only goes to show how very deadly forgiveness can be.’

  ‘By the way, Uncle,’ Henry said as they finished in the kitchen, ‘I’d most strongly advise you not to touch any of that Perth Special tobacco. I know it’s your favourite, but Timothy has been smoking it and . . .’ He hesitated for a moment.

  ‘And what?’ said Victor.

  ‘It may be a bit adulterated, Uncle V. I mean . . . Well, I just think –’

  But Victor Gould interrupted him. ‘Say no more. I think and hope I understand. And don’t think for a moment I blame you. By the way, where did you find the cyanide?’

  Henry laughed. ‘Nothing as bad as that, I promise. It’s just something I was given in Australia. I don’t know exactly what it does because I don’t use stuff like that but it’s like a rather more powerful form of . . . Are you sure you want to know?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Victor. ‘I think I’ll go and meditate in my study for a bit.’

  He went back across the lawn to the summerhouse and sat in his favourite chair and thought how very pleasant it was to have a really amiable and intelligent nephew like Henry to help him cope with the crisis. And crisis was what having to cope with Timothy Bright amounted to. It was one of the mysterious aspects of human psychology that a family that could produce Brenda who, for all her faults – in Victor’s opinion, saintliness was one of them – was intelligent and civilized, while at the same time spawning a creature like Timothy. Perhaps he was putting it the wrong way round and the peculiarity lay in the production of Brenda in a family composed otherwise of idle, snobbish and self-centred morons. Presently Victor Gould dozed off with the thought that he couldn’t care less what Henry had put in his tobacco. If it got rid of the dreadful Timothy it couldn’t be all bad.

  *

  In front of the TV set Timothy Bright was wondering what they were going to have for dinner. It was still early, of course, but he felt like a drink. If Henry hadn’t been there in the room with him he would have gone over to the corner cupboard and helped himself, but with Henry there he somehow felt awkward about it. Instead he reached for the tobacco tin and began to fill his pipe as a way of showing he could do anything he liked if he really wanted to.

  Opposite him Henry tried not to look. He had had no idea how much Toad to put in and only a very vague notion of its effect. He had never been into hallucinogenics and had only brought the bufo sonoro back to give to a friend who was doing research into mind-bending chemicals. All he had been told in Brisbane was that Toad was about the strongest LSD-type drug you could find and gave one hell of a trip. And a trip was just what Timothy Bright deserved. On the other hand he didn’t feel inclined to sit there and watch what happened. Definitely not. He got up and was about to go out when Timothy lit the pipe.

  ‘I say,’ he muttered, ‘this baccy’s a bit off, isn’t it? Got a bloody odd smell.’

  ‘It’s Uncle Victor’s Special blend,’ Henry said. ‘It may be a bit different.’

  ‘You can say that again. Got an odd taste too,’ said Timothy, and inhaled.

  It was clearly a bad mistake. The tobacco was far too strong to be treated like a cigarette. He stared in a most peculiar way in front of him, then took the pipe out of his mouth and stared at that too. Something was obviously happening that he didn’t fully understand. The ‘fully’ was entirely unnecessary. Timothy Bright didn’t understand a thing. He took another puff and thought about it. The first impression – that he was inhaling from the chimney of some crematorium – had entirely left him. Timothy Bright smoked on.

  He was in a strange new world in which nothing was what it seemed and familiar things had turned into fantastic and ever-changing shapes and colours. Nothing in this world was impossible; things moved towards him and then suddenly veered away or by some most extraordinary involution turned inside out and returned to their original shape. And the sounds were ones he had never heard before. The TV voices echoed in his seemingly cavernous mind and there were moments when he was standing, a puny figure, underneath the apse of his own skull. There were other voices in this great dome which was curved bone around, voices that reverberated like sunken thunder and ordered him to flee, to move, to run away while there was still time and before the great pig with the cut-throat razor came to exact vengeance on him. Timothy Bright obeyed the voices of his own inclinations and ran. He ran past Henry, ran wide-eyed and unseeing out into the garden to his Suzuki and a moment later that magical thing had left Pud End with a final spurt of gravel and was away down the country lane towards whatever he had to do and away from the pig with the razor.

  Behind him Henry and his uncle stood on the croquet lawn and stared after him in awe.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Victor as the sound of the bike died away. ‘Was it my imagination or did he actually have some aura surrounding him?’

  ‘I didn’t see an aura,’ said Henry, ‘but I know what you mean. He’s driving without lights, too.’

  ‘At an incredible speed,’ said Victor, trying to suppress the hope that was beginning to burgeon in his mind. Then they both looked up at the full moon.

  ‘Of course, that may account for some of his actions,’ Victor said. ‘What in God’s name is that muck made of?’

  ‘Just some sort of toad,’ said Henry. ‘And I don’t know that anyone is entirely sure. I suppose the nerve-gas scientists know exactly, but for all I know it may vary from toad to toad. I’ll have to ask my biological chemist friend.’

  ‘Well, I suppose
we ought to have a drink,’ said Victor. ‘Either to celebrate or mourn, or possibly both. What a relief to have him out of the house.’

  They went inside and turned off the television. ‘I feel a bit guilty –’ Henry began but his uncle stopped him.

  ‘My dear boy, the damned fool helped himself to something that did not belong to him and there’s the end of the matter. Doubtless in two hours time he will reappear and prove as noxious as he did just now.’

  *

  But Timothy didn’t. He was already far to the north, travelling up the motorway at enormous speed and ignoring the rules of the road as if they did not exist. In what was left of Timothy’s mind, they didn’t. They had been replaced by a sense of the possible that defied all normal practice. He was not even aware of the motorway as such. What little mental capacity for analysis he had ever possessed had quite left him. He was on automatic pilot with the skill to ride a desperately fast motorbike without knowing in the least what he was doing. In short, with the Toad coursing through his bloodstream and doing extraordinary things to his synapses, Timothy Bright had regressed to the mindlessness of some remote, pre-human ancestor while retaining the mechanical skills of a modern lager lout. It would have been incorrect to say he was clean out of his mind, which was the observation of two traffic cops when the Suzuki clocked up 170 mph on their radar and they made the decision not to chase him on the grounds that they would only get involved in a particularly grisly retrieval operation requiring an infinite number of body bags. To Timothy Bright such a likely end never occurred. He was in the very centre of an enormous disco with flames and shadows dancing round him and terrors twining and unwinding in an intricate pattern of lights that were sounds and musical notes that transformed themselves into colours and endless necklaces of lights, before detaching themselves from the cat’s eyes in the road and becoming the faces of Mr Markinkus and Mr B. Smith. If the Suzuki could have gone much faster at this point Timothy would have ensured that it did. He was now in the grip of demented terror which reached one almost insufferable climax only to have it succeeded by another. Underneath him the miles slid by unnoticed. Car and lorry rearlights swam towards him and were avoided like so many images on an arcade game with, to other drivers, a quite terrifying ease.

  By ten o’clock Timothy had swung off the motorway onto side roads across a rolling upland of little towns and villages, wooded valleys and tumbling rivers. Here, acting on the instructions of his automatic pilot, he slowed down for corners and braked where necessary and swept up hills and onto moors where sheep miraculously crossed the road just ahead of him or just behind and there were few signs of habitation. Somewhere ahead of him lay safety from the demons in his skull and somewhere ahead was a paradisiacal land where there was infinite happiness. The images were ever-changing but the same message of escape in alternate forms sustained him for the drive. On and on he went into a world he had never known before and would never be able to find again. And all the time Timothy Bright remained unconscious of his actions and his surroundings. His hand on the throttle twisted this way and that, slackening the speed on the bends and accelerating on the straights. He didn’t know. His inner experiences dominated his being. At some point during the night his bodily sensations joined forces with the mental images to convince him he was on fire and needed to take his skin off to escape being burnt. He stopped the bike in a wooded area by a stream and stripped off his clothes and hurled them down the bank before mounting the Suzuki again and riding on into his internal landscape entirely naked. Ten miles further on he came to the Six Lanes End where it joined the Parson’s Road to the north. Timothy Bright shot across the intersection and took the private road belonging to the Twixt and Tween Waterworks Company. With a fine disregard for its uneven surface he shot the Suzuki up it. Cattle grids rattled briefly beneath him and he was up onto Scabside Fell beside drystone walls and open grassland. Ahead of him a great stone dam held back the waters of the reservoir. It was here that the night ride ended.

  As he accelerated on what looked to him like the blue, blue sky an elderly sheep that had been sleeping on the warmth of the road grew vaguely aware of a distant danger and rose to its feet. To Timothy Bright it was merely a little cloud. The next moment the sheep was airborne and hurtling with the motorbike over the deepest part of the reservoir. In another direction Timothy Bright, still sublimely unconscious of his surroundings, shot through the air and landed in a coppice of young fir trees on the far bank. As he drifted limply through them and landed on the pine needles underneath, he knew no fear. For a while he lay in the darkness until the conviction that piggy-chops had begun drove him to his feet and out of the coppice. Now he was a bird, or would have been if the ground hadn’t kept getting in the way. Three times he fell over on the tarmac and added to the damage he had already suffered. And once he got his foot stuck in the iron bars of a grid which he mistook for a giant clam. But this time the total disassociation produced by the Toad had begun to wear off. Having escaped from the terrible grip of the clam he felt strangely cold.

  He had to get home, though the home he had to get to had no clear identity. Home was simply where a house was, and ahead of him he could see a building outlined against the sky. In the half-world between mental agitation and partial perception he made his way towards it and found himself confronted by a solid stone wall and some iron gates. It was exactly what he wanted. He tried the gates and found them locked. Something dark was on the other side and might be looking at him. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting into a warm bed. Timothy Bright grasped the wrought-iron gates and began to climb. He was going to fly from the top. On the other side a large Rottweiler waited eagerly. Trained from its infancy to kill, it was looking forward to the opportunity.

  At the top of the gate Timothy Bright hesitated momentarily. He was a bird once again and this time he definitely intended to fly. Letting go of the spikes around him, he stood for a second with his arms outstretched. For a moment he was very briefly airborne. As he plunged downwards the Rottweiler, like the sheep on the dam, had a vague awareness of danger. Then 190 lb of yuppie dropped on it from a height of ten feet. As the great dog’s legs buckled beneath it and the deep breath it had taken was expelled from its various orifices together with portions of its dinner, the dog knew it had made a mistake. Its jaws slammed together, its teeth locked on themselves and it was desperately short of breath. With a final effort to avoid suffocation, it tried to get its legs together. Splayed out on either side of its body, they wouldn’t come. Only when Timothy Bright rolled to one side did it manage to break free. But the Rottweiler was a broken beast. With a plaintive whistle and a hobble it slunk round the corner of the house to its kennel.

  Timothy Bright lay a little longer on the cobbled forecourt. He too had had the breath knocked out of him though to a lesser extent than the Rottweiler, but the urge to go to bed was stronger than ever. He got unsteadily to his feet and found the front door which flickered under a light in front of him. He turned the handle and the door opened. The hall light was on. Timothy moved towards the darkened stairs and climbed them with infinite weariness. Ahead of him there was a door. He opened it and went inside and found the bed. As he climbed into it someone on the far side stirred and said, ‘God, you stink of dog,’ and went back to sleep. Timothy Bright did too.

  5

  In the conference dining-room at the Underview Hotel in Tween the Chief Constable, Sir Arnold Gonders, presided over a celebratory dinner for the Twixt and Tween Serious Crime Squad. Ostensibly the dinner was being held to mark the retirement of Detective Inspector Holdell, who had been with the Squad since it had first been set up. In fact the real celebration had to do with the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions in London not to proceed with the trial of twenty-one members of the Squad for falsifying evidence, fabricating confessions, accepting bribes, the use of unwarranted violence, and wholesale perjury, which crimes had sent several dozen wholly innocent individuals to prison for senten
ces as long as eighteen years while allowing as many guilty criminals to sleep comfortably at home and dream of other dreadful crimes to commit.

  The Chief Constable was particularly pleased by the outcome. He had spent the day in London and had had a private meeting with the Home Secretary and the DPP to hear the decision. As he put it to his Deputy, Harry Hodge, ‘I told them straight. The morale of the Force is the priority. “Top Priority,” I said. “And if you want to undermine that morale, you just go ahead and drag my lads into court. You won’t have me as Chief Constable if you do and you’d better know that now.” Well, they got the message and no mistake.’

  Which was not exactly what had happened.

  *

  The decision had been taken two weeks before and even then it had needed the DPP’s strongest arguments to persuade the Home Secretary that a trial would not be in the public interest. He had explained the problem over lunch at the Carlton Club. ‘Start opening that particular can of fucking worms,’ he said, ‘and Pandora’s Box will look like the good times.’

  The Home Secretary had mulled this over with a piece of lamb’s liver. ‘You know, I’d never thought of it that way before,’ he said finally, running a hand over his greasy hair. ‘I suppose they have to.’

  ‘Have to what?’ asked the Director.

  ‘Fuck. Must do, I suppose. Stands to reason.’

  ‘Fuck what?’ asked the DPP, who was beginning to think his own preference for prostitutes was being got at. For the life of him he couldn’t remember one called Pandora.

  ‘Other worms,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘All the same sex or both sexes, worms are. I suppose that’s what bifurcated means.’