Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “And it is none of your business, Miss Murray,” said Vivian and walked towards the library doors.

  “Okay, so you don’t know me in this reality,” Nina said into her phone. “But maybe you would like to know me. I’m a complete sex kitten. Yes. Yes, I know you’re married. Is that going to stop you?”

  Rod shook his head. “So, Morag? Pub?” he said, trying again.

  “Can’t take a kid to a pub,” she said.

  “You said we could go for KFC this weekend,” said Prudence.

  Rod pulled a face. “No one wants to do that.”

  “We’re having milkshakes,” Prudence said, as though this would be the clincher.

  “Okay,” Nina was saying. “Six o’clock. The cocktail bar at the top of the Cube. Actually, no, I’ve never been there. Cool.” She ended the call and looked at the others. “Well, that’s my evening sorted. You?”

  “Apparently, it’s a toss-up between beer and milkshakes,” said Rod.

  Nina clicked her fingers. “Freakshakes. That’s where it’s at. I’m talking five thousand calories in a glass.”

  Prudence gasped. Morag was already shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s appropriate. Even for a growing a girl.”

  “My neighbour, Mr Chowdhry, owns this Freakshake Shack on the high street and, I swear – crap—!” She clutched her phone again. “I didn’t even think to check where my parents had got to!”

  As she tried to make her call, Morag felt the wind’s chill get to her and steered Prudence towards the doors.

  “So, we’re agreed we’re going for a drink,” said Rod. “We just haven’t decided what.”

  “We’ve got time,” said Morag. “We can do them all.”

  They went into the library, which was just a library.

  * * *

  Izzy Wu followed the rest of the students through the lower level of the library. A study trip had sounded like a fun alternative to lectures, but she was already bored beyond belief. She thought it had looked cold out, but now her duffel coat was boiling hot and her knitted scarf was nearly strangling her.

  The undergrads trudged in a line after Professor Omar of the Practical Theology department. The wander through the library’s collections seemed a pointless excursion. Prints from two-hundred-year-old magazines. Scrapbooks of paintings of Shakespeare’s plays. A mahoosive illustrated book of birds which the professor insisted everyone should be impressed by, but Izzy couldn’t see why.

  “Joe, Josh, this way. Maryam, if you and Kyra could actually bother to look,” said the professor.

  He urged them closer. Izzy kept a respectable distance. Professor Omar was a creepy guy and made her skin crawl. Everyone said he had a thing going on with the weird little man who worked in his office. Izzy wasn’t homophobic, no way, but old folks should have put sex and stuff behind them years ago.

  “So, what do you think this is?” said the professor.

  “It’s a bloody big book,” said someone.

  “Very good, Owen. It is. And, in truth, that’s all we know about it. The leather binding is possibly eighteenth century – perhaps the work of Roedelius – but the ravages of time have made the interior pages inseparable and it is therefore, literally, a closed book to us. Some wag nicknamed it the Wittgenstein Volume because…?”

  The professor let the questioning sentence hang in the hope one of his students would fill the silence. Izzy sighed and tugged at her scarf. On the wall opposite was a display shelf. Stuffed untidily between two archive boxes was a ragged doll. It was a foot high at most. Its top half was made from badly cut sack material. Its bottom half was made from neatly stitched cotton with a jaunty black and red floral pattern. The doll had a stitched-on smile, and two angry little wooden eyes. It looked like it had been scorched badly in a fire.

  “Is this some sort of voodoo doll, professor?” she asked.

  “I was talking about the Wittgenstein Volume,” said the professor testily. “Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a thought experiment, the notion that if you could describe the whole universe in a book – every single molecule and every single action – that book would not contain a single ethical judgement. This, to be clear, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is not that book.” He took a deep, nasally breath and adjusted his glasses. “But what a lovely thought though, eh? A universe without judgement.”

  The undergrads had no comment on the matter.

  “No?” said the professor. “You’re all Philistines, aren’t you? And nothing would make you happier than if I said we should all go upstairs to the cafeteria for coffee and cake.”

  There was wordless but nonetheless audible approval for this notion.

  “Philistines,” repeated Professor Omar. “Cake it is.”

  Izzy waved her hand at the ugly doll. “Is it a voodoo doll then or what?”

  “Gooey chocolate cake is calling, Miss Wu,” said the professor. “We’re moving on.”

  “But, sir…”

  Izzy glanced back at the shelf but now there was just a space between the archive boxes and the doll had gone.

  Author Notes

  YES – The Bella in the Wych Elm story is generally true as told here. A woman’s skeletal body was found wedged inside an elm tree in Hagley Wood in 1943. Mysterious graffiti appeared on walls in the city, asking “Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?” and it still pops up from time to time. Go look.

  NO – The body of Bella isn’t that of a time-travelling Spanish sorceress. Theories have abounded, including suggestions that she was a German (or Dutch) spy, a local prostitute or even the victim of an occult murder linked to a ‘Hand of Glory’ ritual.

  YES – The body, autopsy and other records all disappeared during the Second World War, adding to the mystery. One of the authors spent a wonderful afternoon in Hagley Woods and local area, exploring possible sites for that fateful elm.

  YES – In 1949, a massive skull was discovered in a shop doorway on Broad Street. It was so big it damaged the back door of the police car they took it away in.

  NO – It was not a Venislarn monster’s skull. It was an elephant skull and the whole event was a surrealist joke engineered by the artist Desmond Morris.

  YES – That Desmond Morris. Readers of a certain age will remember him as the maker and presenter of TV nature shows and as the author of The Naked Ape.

  YES – The artist Conroy Maddox had a house overlooking Calthorpe Park in Birmingham. He wished it to become a house devoted to surrealism. Wild parties were commonplace. The jazz singer and art critic George Melly attended at least one of these parties. Poets, university communists and Windrush-era Caribbean immigrants were also often in attendance.

  NO – These parties were not used for occult rituals. However, photographs and paintings from these parties featured Conroy Maddox in the company of a nun. A faked crucifixion of Conroy Maddox took place. The nun allegedly enjoyed a bottle of local Mitchell and Butler beer during the proceedings.

  YES – As briefly mentioned in Oddjob 2, there is a mine underneath Birmingham University. It was excavated in 1905 by and for the undergraduates studying mining at the university. It’s still there but, sadly, not accessible to members of the public.

  NO – It’s not in use as a magical storehouse. Nor is it illuminated by an eclectic array of kitsch lampshades. Which is a shame.

  YES – The university clock tower is called Old Joe. It is the tallest free-standing clock tower in the world. According to some sources, it was the inspiration for the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

  YES – Spaghetti Junction (or to use its proper name, the Gravelly Hill Interchange) is a somewhat complicated looking road junction, opened in 1972. It has five levels of overlapping roads but is also a junction for rivers (the Tame and the Rea), railways (cross-city and Walsall) and canals (Tame Valley Canal and Birmingham and Fazeley Canal). Although there are other ‘spaghetti junctions’ around the world, the Birmingham one was the first to be given the name.

  NO – Spaghetti Jun
ction is in no apparent danger of becoming a loop-the-loop sushi conveyor belt for Venislarn diners.

  YES – There are deer and donkeys in Sutton Park. At 2,400 acres, it is the second largest urban park in the UK. The park is a mixture of heathland, wetland and ancient woodland. Wild muntjac deer live in the park. The donkey sanctuary in the park is part of the nationwide Donkey Sanctuary charity.

  NO – None of the donkeys in Sutton Park are magically transformed people.

  NO – Carcosa is not our invention. It was first mentioned in Ambrose Bierce’s story ‘An inhabitant of Carcosa’ published in 1886. It has been subsequently embellished upon by the likes of Robert W Chambers and August Derleth. It appears on the maps in the ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ books by George RR Martin’s. It even appears in the TV shows True Detective and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

  YES – The Bridgeman playground sculptures were real things. They were constructed in the 1960s by Birmingham College of Arts sculptor John Bridgeman. There were several of them across the city and were meant to be both climbing frames and works of abstract sculpture.

  NO – They’re not really blood-drinking concrete monsters. And that’s not the reason why all but one them have now been destroyed. The surviving ‘fish’ sculpture can be found in the park area near the tower blocks in what was once the grounds of Fox Hollies Hall in Acocks Green. The gateposts and gate are all that remains of the original manor house.

  YES – There is an abandoned cinema forty feet underneath Holloway Circus roundabout in Birmingham city centre. The Smallbrook Queensway Odeon closed in 1988 and has been unused (and essentially unchanged) for over thirty years.

  YES – Oscar Deutsch, a resident of Balsall Heath, created the Odeon cinema chain. He opened his first cinema in nearby Brierley Hill. It was indeed later claimed that the word Odeon stood for “Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.”

  NO – The abandoned Odeon cinema hasn’t been used a secret base by armed militia, as far as we know.

  YES – St Chad was a local boy, relatively speaking. In the seventh century AD he was installed as bishop to the Mercians, and Lichfield (north of Birmingham) became the centre of his diocese. Several of his bones now rest in St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham city centre.

  YES – The statues of Queen Victoria, the sphinx-like Guardians and the Floozie in the Jacuzzi are as described in the book. The Floozie’s proper name is ‘River’ but no one in Birmingham calls it that. The Floozie and the Guardians were designed by the Indian sculptor, Dhruva Mistry.

  NO – The Guardians are not, as Nina supposes, “some weird Venislarn shit”.

  YES – The statue Mr and Mrs Seth cower behind is real. It is a gilded bronze statue of Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch.

  NO – Despite it gaining the nickname of ‘The Carpet Salesmen’, Boulton, Watt and Murdoch are not looking at a carpet but a plan of a steam engine. The three men worked together on developing steam engine designs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  YES – St Chad’s Cathedral was struck by an incendiary bomb in World War Two but the church building was saved because the bomb had smashed heating pipes on the way down and the water extinguished the incendiary device.

  YES – In 1998, while attending a G8 summit, US President Bill Clinton made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go for a drink and visited the Malt House pub. He had a pint and shared a plate of chips with Bill and June Scott from Hall Green.

  NO – The use of both ‘mom’ and ‘mum’ is not a series of typos, or a desperate attempt to play to a US audience. Native residents of Birmingham use ‘mom’ routinely, so Nina talks about her mom. Elsewhere in the UK, it is more usual to say ‘mum’ so Morag talks about her mum.

  Acknowledgments

  Writers often thank people who helped them during the writing process of the book and the people they often thank are other writers and editors and other people in the writing and publishing biz. We’d like to start by thanking our readers. Yeah, you. Whether it’s by leaving reviews, or responding to our newsletters or by chatting to us directly on Facebook groups, readers have supported us through the writing of these books and many others.

  Those readers have also been keen to help us with research and nuggets of personal and technical knowledge that have rounded out the narrative.

  Among those readers, we would like to single out Sgt Mark Smith for being our informal military advisor and for providing sterling input regarding Rod’s armaments and modus operandi. Mark provided us with a battle plan for storming the Cube that was so wonderfully comprehensive that we didn’t have opportunity to include even a quarter of it in this book. Any omissions or mistakes in this area are definitely ours, not his.

  We also would like to thank our friend and all-round good egg, James Brogden, who was an invaluable source of information on Bella in the Wych Elm. Brogden’s folk-horror novel, The Hollow Tree, tackles the Bella myth with far greater depth and sympathy than we do here.

  About the Authors

  Heide and Iain are married but not to each other.

  Heide lives in North Warwickshire. Iain lives in South Birmingham.

  It’s a forty minute car drive door-to-door.

  They do meet up in real life but far less than people imagine.

  * * *

  Website:

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  * * *

  Facebook:

  The Comedy Kitchen

  Clovenhoof Books

  The Oddjobs Books Discussion Page

  Also by Heide Goody and Iain Grant

  Clovenhoof

  Charged with gross incompetence, Satan is fired from his job as Prince of Hell and exiled to that most terrible of places: English suburbia. Forced to live as a human under the name of Jeremy Clovenhoof, the dark lord not only has to contend with the fact that no one recognises him or gives him the credit he deserves but also has to put up with the bookish wargamer next door and the voracious man-eater upstairs.

  * * *

  Heaven, Hell and the city of Birmingham collide in a story that features murder, heavy metal, cannibalism, armed robbers, devious old ladies, Satanists who live with their mums, gentlemen of limited stature, dead vicars, petty archangels, flamethrowers, sex dolls, a blood-soaked school assembly and way too much alcohol.

  * * *

  Clovenhoof is outrageous and irreverent (and laugh out loud funny!) but it is also filled with huge warmth and humanity. Written by first-time collaborators Heide Goody and Iain Grant, Clovenhoof will have you rooting for the bad guy like never before.

  * * *

  F. Paul Wilson: "Clovenhoof is a delight. A funny, often hilarious romp with a dethroned Satan as he tries to adjust to modern suburbia. The breezy, ironic prose sets a perfect tone. If you need some laughs, here's the remedy."

  Clovenhoof

  Jaffle Inc

  Alice works for Jaffle Tech incorporated, the world’s biggest technology company and the creator of the Jaffle Port, the brain implant that gives users direct access to global communications, social networks and every knowledge source on the planet.

  Alice is on Jaffle Standard, the free service offered to all people. All she has to do in return is let Jaffle use a bit of her brain’s processing power. Maybe it’s being used to control satellites. Maybe it’s being used to further space exploration. Maybe it’s helping control self-driving cars on the freeway. Her brain is helping Jaffle help the world. And Jaffle are only using the bits of her brain she doesn’t need…

  * * *

  But when a kind deed goes wrong, Alice gains unauthorised access to her entire brain and discovers what she has been missing out on her entire life: music, art, laughter, love…

  * * *

  Now that she has discovered what her mind is truly capable of, how long will the company bosses let her keep it?

  Jaffle Inc

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