“I don’t understand. Calm yourself down.”
Old Pete’s fingers trailed away. “Burn them all. Or by the God of gardeners, I’ll do it for you.”
And with that said, Old Pete left The Flying Swan, his loyal Chips hard upon his down-at-heels.
The door swung shut upon the decrepit departer and Norman’s eyes turned away from it and returned once more to the bar.
Just in time to see Neville striking down the wandering bishop with his knobkerrie.
“I think I’ll head off home now,” said Norman to himself. “Under a ragged coat lies wisdom and there’s no peace for the wicked.”
9
Jim Pooley felt decidedly strange. He sat in his bed at the Cottage Hospital and viewed tiny stars and sailing ships and sausages and sprouts.
“I can’t imagine why I’m seeing sprouts,” said Jim. “I’m sure it’s the wrong time of year for sprouts.” Jim gingerly fingered his aching head. Jim’s aching head was swathed in bandages. To the casual observer it would have appeared that Jim had taken up Sikhism.
“What would I know?” asked the casual observer in the bed next to Jim. “I only came in here to deliver a parcel and they’ve taken out my appendix.”
“My head hurts,” said Jim Pooley.
“You’re always complaining.” This voice belonged to John Omally, who lay in the bed to Jim’s right, the casual observer being in the bed to Jim’s left (looking in from the door, of course).
“I am unfailingly cheerful,” said Jim. “And I never complain,” he complained.
“Then I’ll complain for you,” said Omally. “Even though neither of us is little more than bruised, I’ll have that Neville for this. He will pay for the unwarranted violence that he visited upon us.”
“It wasn’t his fault, John,” said Jim, who, even on his bed of pain, was still a caring fellow. “He’d had a rough day. The professor’s choice of me as team manager came as just as much of a shock to him as it did to me. I think I’ll quit the job now before anything else happens. Will I get redundancy money, do you think?”
“I think you’ll get a smack from me if you don’t shut up.”
“It’s all your fault,” said Jim, sulkily. “You got me into this mess.”
“I had a dog once,” said the casual observer. “Used to chase cars.”
“Fascinating,” said Jim.
“Used to catch them, too,” said the casual observer. “Big dog, it was, the size of a small barn. Or Switzerland.”
“Which ward are we in?” Jim asked John.
“Which one do you think?” John made circular finger motions against the side of his bandaged head.
“Ah,” said Jim. “That ward.”
“So, are you a Sikh, too?” the casual observer asked John. “I see you’re wearing the same turban as this bloke.”
“No,” said John. “I’m a berserker. I suffer from a rare syndrome that manifests itself in bursts of uncontrollable violence when I’m questioned about anything.”
“How did you catch that?” asked the casual observer. “No, let me put that another way. Very nice to meet you. Good night.” And he turned upon his right-hand side (when looking from the door, of course) and feigned snorings.
“We have to get out of here,” said Jim. “I dearly need a drink. And a fag, actually.”
“I don’t think we’ll be drinking in The Flying Swan tonight.”
Jim shook his aching head. “This is a terrible business, John,” he said. “To be barred from The Flying Swan – that is as bad as it is possible for things to be.”
“There are many other bars in Brentford, Jim.”
“Take that back,” said Jim. “There is no other bar like The Flying Swan.”
“You are, of course, right.” John Omally leaned back upon his comfy pillows. “I think we’d do best to rest up here for the night. Gather our senses. Regain our vitality.” John reached out and pressed the little button on the wall beside his bed.
“What are you doing?” Pooley enquired.
“Summonsing the nurse,” said John. “Did you get a look at her through your stars and sprouts? She’s a rare beauty. I thought I’d ask her to give me a bed bath.”
“I think I’ll get some sleep, then.”
“Good idea, my friend. I’ll have the nurse put the screens around my bed. And I’ll try to keep the noise down.”
“Good night, then, John,” said Jim.
“Good night, Jim,” said John.
“Goodnight, Ma, goodnight, Pa, goodnight, John Boy,” said the casual observer, who was a fan of The Waltons.
Norman should have called it a night and simply gone back home, but somehow he couldn’t. He had no idea exactly what had come over Old Pete, nor why the haggard horticulturalist should have got himself into such a state at the mention of the Babbage Nineteen-Hundred Series computer parts. But Norman did feel somewhat excited about all those computer parts, particularly because all those computer parts were the sort of computer parts that Norman could really come to terms with. He’d never really got on with microchip technology. It was all too small. You couldn’t tinker at it with a big screwdriver. Valves and diodes and valves and more valves – that was what technology was supposed to be about. That was what it was all about when Norman had been a lad, when he’d read Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Not to mention Modern Mechanix and Inventions and Mechanics and Handicrafts and Science and Mechanics. That Hugo Gernsback knew exactly what the future was supposed to look like. It was supposed to look BIG. Huge flying-wing aircraft powered by dozens of propellers, with folk supping cocktails on glass sundecks. And vast cars that seated a dozen well-dressed future folk, who also supped cocktails as they cruised along twelve-lane superhighways. Such cars had big fins on the back and a great deal of chrome. And domes on the top, of course. Everything had a dome on top. Your house had a dome on top. And your dog, of course, and you, too, if you were taking your dog for a walk on the moon. Near to the moon base. Which was inside a great big dome.
Norman sighed for this future that hadn’t come to pass. Hugo’s vision of tomorrow had been thwarted by the coming of the microchip. The future really should have been worked by valves. The future should have been BIG.
And so Norman returned to his lock-up garage.
He upped the up-and-over, switched on the light as it was getting dusky out, then downed the up-and-over and viewed the stacks of crates. It was a nearby viewing. Norman edged around the stacks, avoiding the half-sack of gone-solid cement.
“The thing to do,” said Norman to himself, “would be to dig into the crates, sort out enough bits and bobs to assemble a complete computer. Then whip them back to the shop in the van and piece them all together. But—”
Norman lifted a suitable tool from a rack upon the garage wall and took to prising the lid from an uppermost crate. “An instruction manual or book of assembly diagrams would be helpful.”
Norman peered into the crate he had opened: lots of waxed paper and lots of valves. Splendid.
Norman opened further crates and upon his opening of the fifth was heard to cry out (at least by himself) the magic word – Eureka.
“Eureka,” Norman cried out. And he drew into the light afforded by the naked flyspecked dangling bulb a clothbound booklet which had inscribed in gold upon its cover the words Babbage 1900 Series Computer Assembly Manual.
Norman leafed through the pages, oohing and ahhing to equal degree. And then he began to open other crates, marvelling at their contents and setting this, and indeed lots of the other, aside.
And when several hours had passed, Norman was done with all of his settings aside. He loaded all he had set aside into a number of emptied crates and loaded these into the back of his Austin A40 van.
And having turned off the light and secured the lock on his lock-up, Norman climbed into his van, donned his Meccano and Christmas-light helmet, keyed the ignition, swore loudly at his van and returned home in time to receive a good telling of
f for missing his dinner.
Night fell upon Brentford.
Neville evicted the last of his patrons, drew the bolts upon The Swan’s saloon bar door, switched off the bar lights and took himself off to bed. Where he spent a fitful night, his dreams beset with images of high-security prisons, where he was banged up at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a small and dismal cell, in the company of a tattooed Neanderthal lifer who referred to himself as “The Daddy” and Neville as his “bitch”.
Jim Pooley also spent a troubled night. His dreams were of football, with Jim being called on to the pitch to substitute for the Brentford striker who had been shot by a sniper during a penalty shootout with Real Madrid. And Jim was trying really hard to kick the ball, but his feet kept sticking to the turf and the ball wasn’t a ball at all, but a sprout. And the Real Madrid goalie certainly wasn’t a goalie, he was some sort of dragon.
And Jim kept getting woken up by all this noise coming from the bed to the right of him (when looking from the door). All this grunting and erotic moaning and—
Jim fell back asleep and dreamed some more about football.
Professor Slocombe rarely slept. He sat long into the night poring over ancient and not-so-ancient tomes. He pored over the Roy of the Rovers annual and Rommel’s How to Win Tank Battles Bedside Companion and the autobiography of Alexander the Great and The Necronomicon (naturally) and Death Wears A Tottenham Strip (a Lazlo Woodbine thriller) and a copy of Banged Up and Gun Totin’ that had been delivered with his morning paper by mistake. And at four in the morning he slept for an hour in his chair and dreamed an alternative and far cleverer ending to the last episode of The Prisoner.
Mahatma Campbell slept and dreamed, but what he dreamed of when he slept, only the Campbell knew.
Others slept and dreamed of Brentford. Old Pete, for instance – he slept and dreamed and his dreams were troubled, troubled by memories he had long suppressed. Memories of things which he knew to be true, but had spent a lifetime convincing himself were otherwise.
And Gwynplaine Dhark slept, but didn’t dream.
And John Omally eventually slept and did. And his dreams were of a pretty nurse and John enjoyed these dreams.
And so the folk of Brentford slept and mostly dreamed.
And the moon was in its seventh house and Jupiter was in alignment with Mars.
And eventually something cock-a-doodle-do’d and a new day came to Brentford.
10
John Omally woke and yawned and wakened not the nurse who slept beside him. Divesting himself of his bandage turban, he slipped from his bed of not-too-much-pain-really and nudged the sleeping Pooley.
The sleeping Pooley woke to find the face of John Omally grinning down upon him.
“Wah?” went Jim. “What are you doing in my boudoir?”
“You’re in the hospital,” John told him. “Summon up your powers and let’s be on our way.”
“Oh yes,” mumbled Jim. “I remember.”
“Up and at ’em, Mr Manager,” said John. “The borough’s relying on you.”
Jim’s mumbling became a groan. “I really hoped I’d just dreamed yesterday,” said he.
“Well, you didn’t,” said John. “I’ll treat you to a breakfast at The Plume, then we’ll get down to business.”
“We?” queried Pooley.
“We,” said John. “We’re in this together, I told you, thick and thin. We’re the boys, aren’t we? The boys from Brentford.”
“There appears to be a penguin in your bed,” said the casual observer, “from where I’m lying, of course. Which must be on the left, if you’re looking from the door. Although I might be wrong.”
“First thing, then,” said John, as he and Pooley took to their breakfasts in The Plume Café, “is to go to the ground and get you settled into your manager’s office.”
“First thing,” said Jim, “is for me to go to Norman, purchase my copy of Sporting Life and make my selections for the day. And check on the results for yesterday. I might already be a multi-millionaire.”
“No,” said John, a-shaking of his slightly bruised but otherwise undamaged head.
“No?” said Jim, a-shaking of his head in a similar fashion.
“Those days are behind you. You are a man of responsibility now.”
“I don’t want this,” said Jim. “I really don’t.”
“You trust the professor, though.”
“He has a rare sense of humour. He might just be winding us up.”
“I don’t think so.” John tucked into his double eggs.
“Woe unto the house of Pooley,” quoth Jim, “for it is surely undone.”
“Another cup of tea?” asked John.
“A mug,” said Jim, taking out a Dadarillo and lighting it. “I need to keep my strength up.”
There was a degree of unpleasantness.
In fact, it was more than just a single degree.
In fact, there were sufficient degrees involved to construct an isosceles triangle.
Mahatma Campbell, groundskeeper of Griffin Park[8], refused the team’s new manager’s entrance.
“Open up these gates,” demanded Jim.
“I know you,” spat the Campbell. “I know you well, wee laddie.”
“Hear that,” said Jim to John. “The team may not know me, but he does. This is such a bad idea.”
“The Campbell knows everyone,” said John. “He knows Professor Slocombe, don’t you, Campbell?”
There was more unpleasantness, and much shouting from the Campbell, but eventually much limping off to the telephone and much grudging limping back and even greater grudging unlockings of the gate.
“I willna call ya sir,” the Campbell told Jim. “And I have this job fer life here. It’s in m’contract, so dinna think of sacking me.”
“It was the furthest thing from my mind,” said Pooley. “Would you kindly lead the way to my office?”
Now, there are offices. And there are offices.
Some offices are directors’ offices. These are well-appointed offices, they are spacious and luxurious, with a window that occupies the entirety of one wall through which can be viewed panoramic cityscape skylines.
Other offices are poky and wretched, like those of downbeat private eyes, for instance, such as Lazlo Woodbine, the fictional gumshoe created by the mercurial mind of P.P. Penrose (Brentford’s most famous and fêted writer of detective “genre” fiction). Such offices as these have a ceiling fan that revolves turgidly above fixtures and fittings of the direst persuasion: a filing cabinet with few files to call its own; a water cooler that steams gently throughout the summer months; a desk that one would not care to sit at, accompanied by a chair that no one would ever care to sit upon; and a carpet that, should it receive a description, certainly doesn’t deserve one.
Jim Pooley viewed the office that was now his own.
“Well appointed,” said Jim, approvingly.
“Poky and wretched,” said John Omally, “but nothing a lick of paint won’t cure.”
“And see, John,” said Jim, “a desk of my very own. Do you think it has anything in its drawers?”
“I think I’ll open the windows,” said John, “and let the bluebottles out.”
“Isn’t it interesting?” Jim sat down in the manager’s chair that was now his own and had a little swivel about on it. “It should be me complaining, but it’s not. It’s you. How would you explain this, John?”
“I’m only thinking of your interests,” said Omally, who certainly was not. “I want what’s best for you. Perhaps we could knock through a wall, put in a Jacuzzi and a sofa bed?”
“I can’t imagine why I’d need those.”
“I can,” said John. “But you certainly have a good view of the ground from here.” John viewed this view through a window that did not occupy the entirety of one wall, but a tiny portion thereof instead. “You can almost see the full length of the pitch.”
“There’d be a director’s box, wouldn’t ther
e?” said Jim. “There’s always a director’s box. We’d sit in there during a match and drink champagne whilst cheering the team on to victory.”
“You’ll be sitting down by the pitch.” John pointed in that direction. “Encouraging the team to victory.”
“You know what, John?” said Jim, now leaning back in his chair. “There’s no real reason why I should do this job at all. You could do it. It’s only following the professor’s instructions, passing the tactics on to the team. And you have plenty of natural charisma. The team would listen to you. Especially the centre forward – I understand that you are not unacquainted with his wife.”
“Oh no,” said John, “the professor chose you and I agree with his choice. You deserve a chance, Jim. It’s your right. I will act as your PA, take away any weight that might bear down upon your noble shoulders.”
“What is a PA?” Jim asked.
“Personal assistant,” said John. “It’s what posh directors have. While they loaf about in their offices and consume liquid lunches, the PAs do all the real hard graft.”
“So what real hard graft would you be doing?”
“Oh, you know, running things generally, things unconnected with the training of the team. Such as the bar, for instance, making sure that it has enough beer beneath its pumps. And the club shop, of course. There are more things that it could be selling than reproduction team shirts. And there’s buying and selling of players and all kinds of similar tedious stuff. You don’t have to worry about any of that, Jim. I’ll take care of the lot of it.”
“You’re a saint,” said Jim. “And you’re hired.”
“I’ll draw up a contract,” said John. “You can sign it later. Or I’ll sign it for you, to save your precious time.”
“Excellent,” said Jim Pooley. “So what do you think we should do first?”
“How about a stroll around the grounds?”
It was a sad and sombre stroll, for although it had to be said that Mahatma Campbell certainly maintained a fine pitch (many football pundits agreeing that, but for Wembley, Brentford has always had the finest pitch in the country) the rest of the Griffin Park ground left very much to be desired. It was wretched, it was run down and it was going to pieces. And it was now all Jim’s responsibility. And the terrible weight of this responsibility pressed down upon the aforementioned noble shoulders of the lad.
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