Sprout Mask Replica (Completely Barking Mad Trilogy Book 1)

by Robert Rankin

  ‘You’ve eaten it?’ I stepped back in amazement. ‘You eat the money?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Is your surname Crombie?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. But you’re holding me up from my work. Please let me pass.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not until you’ve told me all of the truth. I don’t believe you exist on a diet of small change.’

  ‘Oh I do,’ he said and then in a very dark tone. ‘But you wouldn’t want to know why.’

  ‘Oh yes I would.’

  A sinister gleam came into his eyes. ‘Then I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘Why do you think it is that every country in the world except Switzerland is in debt?’

  I shrugged. ‘Countries owe money, they have national debts.’

  ‘So where has all the money gone to?’

  ‘It was borrowed and spent.’

  He shook his dreadlocks. ‘If it was spent then someone else must have the money, but they don’t. The whole world (except for Switzerland), is in recession, more and more money vanishes away, but no-one ever knows where it really goes to.’

  ‘And where does it go?’

  ‘It goes to me. Me and other special ones like me. We’re all over the world. We go around in circles collecting money. But the money never leaves the circle.’

  ‘So where does it go?’

  ‘In here,’ he pointed down his throat again and this time as I looked I could see that it wasn’t a throat at all, it was a great black endless void. ‘I am one of the financial black holes of the world,’ he continued, ‘a monetary vortex that sucks cash in. Where to? Even I don’t know that. To the past, to the future, to somewhere it is needed more?’

  I was rattled, I kid you not. And I didn’t really know quite what to say next. I managed, ‘Why not Switzerland?’

  ‘They don’t allow begging in Switzerland,’ he said and then pushed right past me and made off along the street.

  I never saw him again after that, although I kept an eye out. My last recollection is of him marching off around the next corner, pausing only to ask a passer-by for money, which they pressed into his hand.

  Litany returned from the bathroom, she wore a colourful bikini top and a short skirt. ‘Go and have a wash,’ she said. ‘Then let’s go out for a walk.’

  We strolled arm in arm along the promenade. I felt great. Although I now had nagging doubts. Such as, what class of locomotive was Litany? Was she out for what I could give her? I didn’t know, but I intended to watch her closely to see what, if anything, she had in mind.

  The sea was so blue that I had to part my hair on the right-hand side and pull my jeans pockets inside out.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ said Litany. ‘Say a poem in your head or something.’

  I said a poem in my head. It was a dark one about a devil-possessed matchbox. I was just into the last verse when this young chap in dreadlocks, studied-raggedness and bare feet came up and asked me if I had any small change.

  I gave him a head-butt. ‘That will teach you to suck in the world’s money, you ratbag,’ I told him.

  Litany stared at me in horror.

  ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry,’ I said, helping the fellow to his feet. ‘An awful mistake, I, er, I thought you were my brother.’

  The young man stood there looking dazed.

  ‘Give him some money,’ said Litany.

  ‘Certainly not, he’ll eat it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh I’m sorry. Sorry.’ I dug into a pocket of my leather jacket and found a pound coin. ‘Sorry, friend,’ I said, handing it over.

  He grinned, winked and made off at the trot as if bound upon some important mission.

  ‘You shouldn’t be horrid to the homeless,’ said Litany.

  ‘It was a mistake. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, I think you should make amends.’

  ‘I just did. I gave him a pound.’

  ‘You should do more than that.’

  ‘Well, he’s gone now, so I can’t.’

  ‘He hasn’t gone.’

  ‘Who he?’

  ‘There’s a chap over there, sitting by the entrance to the pier. Chap with the dog. See him?’

  ‘Bloke with the dreadlocks and the big boots?’

  ‘That’s the one. Give him something.’

  ‘But I didn’t head-butt him. And I don’t have any more change.’

  ‘Then this would be as good a time as any for you to use your gift.’

  An alarm bell rang in my brain. ‘Oh yes?’ I said suspiciously. ‘What do you have in mind? Do you want me to channel some more money into your bank account so you can write him a cheque?’

  ‘Of course not, I want you to give it to him directly.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Hm, well, I don’t know.’

  ‘What harm could it do? Give it a try.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to do it, what actions to make.’

  Litany smiled that smile again. ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ she said, ‘and I reckon you couldn’t do it if you were thinking consciously about it. It wouldn’t work. It has to be an unthinking, subconscious, almost reflex action. You’d have to set yourself the task, i.e. “give this poor man lots of money”, then clear your head of all conscious thought and let things happen naturally.’

  ‘Sounds about as unlikely as anything else.’

  ‘But it couldn’t hurt to give it a try.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Go on, to make amends for your bad behaviour. Make me proud of you.’

  ‘Proud, eh?’

  ‘Proud.’ She kissed me again, on the mouth this time, a real deep lingerer.

  ‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s make the beggar-man a millionaire.’

  And I almost believed it myself.

  I set the thought in my head and then promptly forgot it, because another thought had entered, this one with blond hair and no clothes on. I mentally replayed the events of a few hours before and my hand strayed unconsciously toward my groin and twiddled near my belt buckle.

  ‘Oh look,’ said Litany. ‘Something’s happening.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s getting up, the chap with the dog.’

  And he was, he yawned and stretched then packed up his bed roll.

  ‘Is he going to get rich at once, do you think?’

  As if!

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I told her, ‘if I can make it work at all. It’s a chain of events, starting small then growing bigger to produce the huge event. The money wouldn’t just drop from the sky.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Litany. ‘So what do you think might happen next?’

  ‘Well, perhaps he’s going off now to apply for a job and he’ll be given it, be successful at it and five years from now he’ll be rich.’

  Litany made the face that says, “I don’t find that very convincing”.

  I just shrugged.

  The beggar slung his bed roll across his shoulders. Stretched again and then without any warning at all, struck down the nearest passer-by, a young man with a briefcase, snatched the briefcase and ran off, his dog at his heels.

  Litany turned and smacked me right in the face. ‘You vile turd!’ she said. ‘You did that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You caused him to hit an innocent passer-by and steal his briefcase.’

  ‘I never did.’

  ‘You did it just to spite me.’

  ‘Spite you?’ I shook my head, which now hurt again. I really would never understand women. ‘How do you figure that out?’

  ‘You wanted to make a fool of me.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I just tried to help him, like you asked me. I didn’t know he’d do that. Anyway he stole a briefcase, that’s not going to make him rich, is it? Perhaps he’ll get arrested and serve time in prison and write a bestselling book about his experiences. I
don’t know. I did it with the best of intentions, to bring happiness, not to harm any innocent people.’

  A crowd was already beginning to form about the young man. Litany pushed her way through it to help him up. The young man scowled at her, thrust her aside and stumbled off in pursuit of the thief.

  ‘Didn’t need any help, eh?’ I said.

  Litany stroked the shoulder the young man had pushed and examined her fingertips. ‘He was full of rage,’ she said. ‘But also he was full of fear. And there was something there, something evil.’

  ‘You really can sense these things, can’t you?’

  ‘I always have. Ever since I was little. But there was something sinister about that young man.’ She shuddered. ‘Something very wrong.’

  And there was. Although the truth would not emerge until sometime later. I had said that I did what I did with the best of intentions, to bring happiness, not to harm any innocent people. Three weeks after the incident the young man’s body was found floating in the sea. He had been cruelly tortured before having his throat cut. The police identified him as Piers Britain, notorious child pornographer and drug courier for the mob. The ‘word on the street’ was that he had been carrying a briefcase containing nearly one million pounds in used notes that was to be used for the purchase of crack-cocaine for sale to minors, and that the money had mysteriously ‘gone astray.

  The above appeared as front page news in The Skelington Bay Mercury. Inside the same issue was a much smaller item which read to the effect that the local children’s home had been saved from closure by a gift from an anonymous benefactor. Three-quarters of a million pounds in cash, it was. The anonymous benefactor was described as a young man with dreadlocks and a dog.

  Normally you might have expected the children’s home article to have merited a bit more prominence. But, as it happened, it was rather lost amongst numerous other such articles. One about a building project to house the homeless being financed by a similar gift, and one about a drug rehabilitation centre being financed by another similar gift and one about the maternity hospital and the hospice and the day-care centre and the crèche. Then there was the cats’ home and the dogs’ home and the donkey sanctuary and the wild-life park. Many, many millions of pounds were involved, being handed out willy-nilly to the needy.

  It was as if the entire nation had woken up one morning and decided to get its priorities right.

  And that was just how I intended it to be, but things didn’t work out as I planned.

  PLEASED AS PUNCH

  I was pleased as Punch to see old Reg

  The lad who sold the fruit and veg

  And once gave me two tickets for the fight.

  But Reg was sad, believe you me

  He said he’d suffered tragedy

  And he’d be glad to tell me through the night.

  So I sat up with poor old Reg

  Who told me that the fruit and veg

  Was dropping off and trade was getting poor.

  I yawned as he told tales to me

  Of troubled times and poverty

  And once threw up behind the kitchen door.

  ‘It’s very glum,’ I said at last

  And thought my watch was running fast.

  ‘Is that the dawn that’s creeping up the sill?’

  But Reg was well beyond all that

  He only moaned and as we sat

  I swear I heard a cock crow on the hill.

  When finally he took his leave

  I found it quite hard to believe

  That this was Reg who used to buy me lunch.

  All raggedy and bad from drink

  It really, really made me think

  Why seeing him had made me pleased as Punch.

  I’m a real fair-weather friend, me.

  13

  GOOD INTENTIONS

  It was my original intention, when first I sat down in my room at Hotel Jericho to pen this autobiography (thirty lines to the page, twenty pages to the exercise book), that I might chronicle the lives of my forebears.

  I wished to write of my great grandfather, a sprout farmer and man of the cloth, who always wore weighted boots while in the pulpit, to avoid embarrassing levitations brought on during moments of extreme rapture.

  And flatulence.

  Of my grandfather (lay preacher, large sideburns, taste for sprouts), who spoke only in rhyming couplets to appease the spirit of his dead wife, and who owned a black pig named Belshazzar, that dined exclusively upon the aforementioned vegetables and did strange things on the back parlour wall.

  And of my father (an elder in The Hermetic Order of the Golden Sprout), briefly mentioned, who practised body-modification in an attempt to win a bet with his brother Jack (a monk, not mentioned at all) that he could shin up the inside of a drainpipe.

  But alas, time and space do not allow. And when I speak of time and space, I speak as one who knows.

  Brought up, as I was, within the sacred confines of The Brentford Triangle to such worthy stock and raised upon a diet of sprouts and salvation, I was surely destined to become a God-botherer, not an iconoclast.

  And such had been my intention.

  When I discovered my gift and that I was the Chosen One, my only thought was to aid mankind. And to pull a few birds, but that’s only fair.

  Things didn’t work out on either account.

  So far I had pulled just the one bird and if she was typical of her sex, it was clear to me that relationships with women were a tricky old business and not to be entered into lightly.

  Litany had stormed off back to the hotel, leaving me alone at the pier feeling guilty. There was no doubt in my mind that I had caused the beggar-man to thump the fellow with the briefcase. I do not believe in the concept of synchronicity, meaningful coincidence. Things happen because things happen. Each person’s life consists of a chain of events interlinked with that of each other person across the globe. Imagine it as a vast Chinese puzzle which metaphysically—

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a small girl, tugging at my trouser leg.

  ‘Yes, my dear?’ I leaned down to hear what she had to say.

  The small girl knotted her fist and punched me in the mouth.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked, clutching at my face.

  ‘A lady with blond hair and a bikini top asked me to do it. She said you’d probably be getting pretentious again. What does pretentious mean, by the way?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’ I cuffed the small girl lightly about the head and she burst into tears.

  A large ugly looking fellow with cropped hair, wearing nothing but tattoos, long shorts and flip-flop sandals, detached himself from the milling crowd, strode over and biffed me in the stomach. I folded double, gagging for breath.

  I would have fought back, but I remembered my father’s words, ‘Never get into fights with ugly people, they have nothing to lose.’

  ‘Consider yourself lucky I don’t have me boots on,’ and the large ugly looking fellow, escorting his now-giggling daughter away.

  I lay awhile groaning in the hope of a good Samaritan. But none happened by, so presently I upped and took my leave.

  I returned to the hotel to find Litany doing likewise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’m doing likewise.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like.’

  ‘Does this mean that we won’t be getting engaged?’

  Litany made the face that said something very rude indeed.

  ‘Oh come on,’ I told her. ‘There’s no need for this, let’s go back to your room and make up.’ I saw the fist coming and stepped aside.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘This was a bad idea. I should never have got involved with you.’

  ‘Please stay.’ I was down on my knees again, a most undignified display. ‘I will make amends for the chap on the pier. In fact, I already have.’

  ‘What did you say?’

 
; ‘I’ve already made amends. Well, I have if it’s worked. On the way back here, I made a wish and cleared my mind. I picked my nose and stuck the bogey on the end of a lollipop stick, I think it’s done the trick.’

  Litany’s eyes had grown rather wide. ‘What have you done?’ she asked. ‘What have you wished for?’

  ‘I made a wish that all the poor and homeless in the area would become rich. But that it wouldn’t involve anyone getting mugged. I imagined all the money that’s ever got lost or has vanished away and nobody knows where it ever went to. I pictured all this money coming back from these momentary black holes’ – I was very pleased with this bit of thinking, one in the eye for the blighter in the dreadlocks and bare feet, I thought – ‘and all this money going to the needy. Pretty good, eh?’

  ‘Pretty good.’ Litany said it in almost a whisper. Then she said, ‘But you didn’t ask me about this. You should have cleared it with me first.’

  ‘With you? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m supposed to–’ She paused. ‘Look, never mind, I’m sure, well, I hope, you’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘I did it to please you. I thought it would make you happy.’

  ‘Yes it does, it does. All right, look, I won’t leave. Let’s go up to my room.’

  ‘And have more sex?’

  ‘Yes, if you want to.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  But of course she didn’t.

  As we went up in the lift together I watched her from the corner of my eye. She was edgy, she chewed upon her hair and shifted from one foot to the other.

  ‘Do you need the toilet?’ I asked.

  ‘No I do not!’

  I recall shrugging and I also recall thinking, I wish she wasn’t so damned difficult all the time. And then I became aware of the size and shape of the lift and had to compensate by opening my mouth very wide.

  And then as the lift doors opened at her floor, Litany suddenly smiled and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult and everything. Let’s call down for some ice-cubes and a bottle of Tabasco sauce and I’ll show you something rather special.’

  And she did. Oh yes indeed.