by Tom Sharpe
‘I’m the Dean, you know the Dean of Porterhouse, Jeremy dear …’
‘Lord Pimpole to you,’ Pimpole yelled and called the dog, ‘Scab, Scab go fetch!’
But the Dean had had enough, enough of the stinging nettles, of the ditch, of Pimpole, of the whole bloody situation, and he had not the slightest intention of being fetched by that filthy dog. He scrambled to his feet and shot out of the ditch and was only stopped from falling flat on his face in the lane by Pimpole who caught him in his arms.
‘Hold hard there,’ he yelled. ‘Steady the Buffs. No need to take off like a scalded bloody cat. Why, my goodness gracious me, if it isn’t the Dean. My dear fellow, what on earth were you doing in that ditch? I mean one’s heard of hedge priests and all that sort of thing but I’ve never seen you in that role, old fellow-me-lad. Marrying someone down there, were you? What a rum show.’ And breathing crème de menthe, gin and draught beer fumes in the Dean’s face he put his arm through his and off they staggered together towards the cottage. Behind them, disappointed by the missed opportunity to get its own back for its stepped-on tail, slouched the dog. But at least Pimpole had regained some of his old warmth and friendliness, probably due to a second or even a third Dog’s Nose. He was obviously very drunk indeed and waxing maudlin.
‘Don’t know what the fuck the country’s come to, Dean my old dear,’ he said, practically weeping. ‘Gone to the dogs. Not that I mind dogs. Love the little buggers. And the big ones too, of course. Irish Wolfhounds. Lovely beasts. Knew a chap in Spain who bred them. Bloody good judge of a dog. Didn’t much care for me though. Can’t think why. I’m not a bad sort of dog, am I Dean?’
‘No, of course not. A very good one,’ said the Dean.
‘Lost all my bloody money though. Can’t think how. It just stopped coming in. It was Mummy’s, of course. Copper and stuff like that in Northern Rhodesia and places like that. Just stopped. Couldn’t pay the butler. Bugger took to drink. And I thought, that’s not a bad idea, so we used to make Dog’s Noses and have some laughs together I can tell you but I had to give it all up. Polo ponies. Used to like polo and then some blokes came along. Called themselves bailiffs or receivers or some such. Never seen them before in my life. Offered them a Dog’s Nose. Don’t really know what happened after that. Live by myself now with Scab of course. Bloody loyal friend, Scab. Old Barney Furbelow’s wife comes in and does for me now three times a week and I do for her when I can. Used to be the Under-Gardener Barney did. And his father before him. The good old days, Dean, bloody good old days.’
Somehow they went into the cottage and Pimpole tried to show the Dean up the stairs to his room and failed. The Dean helped him to his feet.
‘Sleep on the sofa in the front room,’ Pimpole muttered. ‘Lavatory is out the back when you want it.’
The Dean went up to his room and, having undressed, got into bed. It was an iron bedstead of a sort the Dean had forgotten existed and the mattress was thin and lumpy. His hands still stung from the nettles, his face did too, and the sheets smelt peculiar, but he was glad to be alone and under a roof. It had been an appalling day.
It wasn’t a very pleasant night. A sleepless hour later he needed to pee and the lavatory was out in the back garden. The wall-eyed dog wasn’t. It was sleeping with Pimpole in the front room and as the Dean came down the stairs it poked its horrid head out of the door and growled. The Dean stopped and the dog came further out and growled again. The Dean backed miserably up the stairs and shut his bedroom door hoping that a room equipped with such an ancient bed might also contain a chamber pot. It didn’t, and in desperation he was forced to piss out of the window, from the sounds of things onto the metal lid of a dustbin. Then he got back into bed and fell asleep for another hour, woke, shuddered and thought about death and the dying of the England he had loved and how squalid it had all become and longed to be back in Porterhouse where he would be safe and need never again have to experience the horrors attached to drinking a Dog’s Nose in a public bar with the ghastly Pimpole.
How many hours, if they were hours, he managed to sleep he didn’t know but at 6 a.m. he could stand the bed no longer. He got up and went in search of the bathroom to wash and shave. There wasn’t one or if there was it was downstairs and that damned dog … He dressed, thanked God that he’d only brought an overnight bag into the house and that the rest of his luggage was in the boot of his old Rover, and with a murderous courage in his heart went downstairs, braved the growls of Scab, and walked out of the cottage.
*
By the time he got back to Cambridge the Dean had experienced more of the horrors of modern England. Eschewing the narrow lanes and country roads he had so enjoyed on his drive north, he had stuck resolutely to motorways, only to be held up by an accident involving a chemical spill outside Lancaster and an enormous tailback; the old Rover had overheated; the RAC man who arrived to get it started again had been amazed it went at all and wanted to know how it had ever got its MOT certificate; the Service Area he had stopped at for coffee and something to eat had been occupied by eight coachloads of Liverpool football supporters with several police vans in attendance; the sausage and chips he had chosen to fill the vacuum in his stomach disagreed with him and made him wonder if the sausages had been well past their sell-by date; and, to complete his humiliation, he had been called a stupid old wanker by a young lout he had bumped into in a public lavatory near Birmingham. To round off the horrors of the day he had missed the turn-off on the M1 and had had to drive for miles before finally managing to back-track to Cambridge.
By the time he arrived at Porterhouse the Dean was not in a bad temper. He was too exhausted and disenchanted to be in any temper at all. He hadn’t had a bath for forty-eight hours and was unshaven and was just glad to be back in a world he understood and could to some extent control. And go to bed in something that did not have quite so much in common with cobbles as the mattress in Pimpole’s spare bedroom. Handing the keys of the old Rover to Walter, he slunk up to his rooms and lay down. His guts were telling him something again and this time there was no mistaking their meaning. He would have supper sent up to his room and not go down to dinner that night. He wasn’t fit company for anyone.
17
Something of the sort could be said for both the Bursar and Kudzuvine, though in Kudzuvine’s case he hankered for the Bursar. It was Skullion’s company he was so particularly anxious to avoid. The Bursar on the other hand had come out of his first little chat, as the Praelector insisted on calling it, in such a state of shock and terror that, like Kudzuvine, he had to be given something calming by Dr MacKendly before he could be induced to go into the bedroom a second time.
‘This will put some lead in your pencil,’ the doctor said before administering the injection. ‘They tried it out on some conscientious objectors in America before the war with Iraq and it turned them into some of the finest fighting men in the world.’
The Bursar pointed out that he didn’t want to be a fine fighting man, while the Praelector wondered aloud how there could have been any conscientious objectors in the US Army because they were all volunteers and professionals. ‘And I’d still like to know the names of the two gunship pilots who shot up two well-identified British armoured vehicles,’ he said. ‘Our dear transatlantic allies refused to let them give evidence at the enquiry or reveal their identity. Friendly fire my foot. No such thing.’
But it was the Bursar who objected most strongly. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with Americans, especially ones like Kudzuvine who came from Bibliopolis, Alabama, and who told him with such evident relish awful stories about people they’d known who’d been used as shark bait. He particularly didn’t want to hear one word more about Edgar Hartang. As he put it in language reminiscent of his last interview with Kudzuvine (the drug was having some curious side-effects), ‘Hell, man, that man Hartang is a fucking walking death machine. He finds out I been asking questions about him he’s going to have me Calvied by some fucking independents o
r down the tube from twenty thousand feet the Bermuda fucking Triangle like.’
‘There is that to be said for Hartang,’ said the Senior Tutor but the Praelector wasn’t quite so happy.
‘Are you sure you’ve given him the correct dose?’ he asked Dr MacKendly. ‘I mean we don’t want him going in there and alienating the bloody man by talking like him. It will make it extremely difficult to identify who is saying what when we come to transcribe the tape.’
‘Probably just a temporary side-effect,’ the doctor assured him. ‘Must take people different ways of course but I daresay he’ll steady down in a bit and be as right as rain. I got it from one of the medical chaps out at the US airbase at Mildenhall at the time of the raid on Libya. They gave it to some of the pilots who had the habdabs about being shot down and skinned alive by Arab women. Can’t say I blame them. Arab women do that, you know. Pilots went off as happy as sandlarks and perfectly normal.’
‘Perhaps that explains why they only managed to kill Gaddafi’s children and missed him,’ mused the Praelector.
‘And what exactly did you get it for?’ enquired the Senior Tutor.
The doctor smiled. ‘We had one or two fellows who’d done the Senate House Leap and had lost their nerve,’ he said. ‘Thought it might help them get it back. Didn’t have to use it in the end. One of the poor blighters fell off Ben Nevis and the other one gave up climbing altogether, which was a bit wet of him, I thought. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world.’
‘It’s certainly made a world of difference to the Bursar,’ said the Praelector. ‘I’ve never seen such a change in a man.’
‘It’s only temporary,’ said Dr MacKendly. ‘He’ll be himself again in no time at all.’
‘For God’s sake don’t start on about Selves again,’ snapped the Senior Tutor. ‘I can’t stand it.’
Dr MacKendly looked at him curiously. ‘Feeling a bit low, are we?’ he asked but, before the Senior Tutor could tell him exactly what he felt, the Bursar was raring to go. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit,’ he said suddenly, using imagery that didn’t come naturally to him, and shot through the door into the bedroom.
For once the metaphor was almost precise. Whatever sort of animal the Bursar had become, Kudzuvine had all the characteristics of a petrified rabbit. Almost an entire day and part of the night with the Master sitting by his bedside had destroyed his confidence as effectively as any anti-psychotic Dr MacKendly could have misprescribed. He was delighted to see his friend Professor Bursar again. And said so. ‘Am I pleased to see you, Prof Bursar,’ he said. ‘I sure as shit am. I’ve had that Quasimodo update in the wheelchair up to here.’
‘You can stop talking about the Master like that,’ said the Bursar harshly.
‘The Master? You call him the Master too, Prof Bursar? Oh my God. Someone please help me.’
‘And you can stop calling me Professor Bursar. I am the Bursar. Get that into your thick head.’
Kudzuvine shrank back in the bed. ‘The Bursar? And Quasimodo’s the Master? Oh sweet Jesus. Where am I?’
The Bursar ignored the question. ‘The Bursar. Emphasis on the the. Got it? And you don’t call the Master Quasimodo once more. He’s Skullion. But not to you, Kudzuvine. To you he’s the Master. Emphasis the. And you’d better believe me.’
‘Yes sir, I sure do. Anything you say, Professor the Bursar.’
‘Not Professor. I am not a Professor. I keep telling you I am the Bursar. This isn’t some academic scumhole in Biblifuckingopolis, Alabama, or anywhere else in the US of A where every asshole who can read and write and produce dumb doctoral theses like they’re dungflies laying eggs gets called Professor. This isn’t even Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Cambridge, England, and more to the point this is Porterhouse College, Cambridge, England, and the next time you look at a portrait of one of our great past Masters in the Hall you don’t call him human foie gras or you’ll learn what force feeding really means.’
‘Yes sir, Prof … I mean Mr the Bursar, sir,’ Kudzuvine whimpered.
‘That’s better, Kudzuvine,’ said the Bursar. ‘Now I’m going to ask you some simple questions and you’re going to answer them truthfully or you’re going to learn …’
But the mere mention of force feeding had touched the rawest nerve in Kudzuvine’s demented mind. He understood now the reason the Chaplain had produced that disgusting douche bag so readily. It wasn’t something he had dreamt up in his mad unconscious. It wasn’t a symptom of anything. It was an old Porterhouse custom. ‘I swear I’ll tell you anything you want to know, swear to God I will,’ he moaned.
‘Right,’ said the Bursar who was obviously on a winning streak for the first time in his life and knew it. ‘So what does Hartang do, and don’t give me any shit about baby octopuses and turtles and the Galapagos Islands.’
‘Well, we do make movies about protected species as well –’ Kudzuvine began but the Bursar stopped him.
‘Like you were bringing in a consignment of fucking turtles from the Galapagos Islands like twenty million turtles and they all go play hookie in the Bermuda Triangle? I said truthful, Kudzuvine, truthful answers. Want me to spell it out for you?’
‘Jesus, no, I don’t want no spelling lessons, Prof Bur … the Bursar, sir. Twenty million in Bogota Best. You know. Street value twenty million, you know.’
‘No,’ said the Bursar. ‘You tell me, Kudzuvine. Tell me about Bogota Best.’
‘Cocaine, man, coke, snow, ice, Colombian marching powder. That’s what the consignment was. We got cover Transworld Television Productions. Go anywhere filming and making movies about God for little children. That’s how we started. Old E.H. says “What do people want? Like God and a buzz.” Necessities of fucking life is what he says. Got it from the Good Book too. He’s reading it in prison some place and it says there guys don’t live on bread alone they gotta have spirit and this sets old E.H. thinking because he’s short on the bread side and he’d sure as hell like some Beluga caviar and a plank steak but what’s with the spirit? Shit, he don’t want no moonshine gutrot or whatever they drink wherever he comes from like slivovitz and schnapps I don’t know. Got to be some other kind of spirit the Good Book’s got in mind. So he sits there thinking but most of the time he’s thinking about bread and not just the ordinary crusty kind or pumpernickel but the other sort and he gets the answer to all his problems. Old E.H. gets religion and starts making religious movies and it don’t matter what fucking religion so long as people buy it. Jesus, Prof … the Bursar, sir, you know how much money there is giving people certainty they ain’t never going to die, just go along to heaven no questions asked? Shit, man, billions and do I mean billions of dollars, D-marks, pounds sterling, rupees, yen, whatever. I mean it. But old E.H. has some buddies down Lima, Peru or maybe Rio someplace and they’re helping him pump out some more of this religious kiddie crap and putting up money provided he runs some Bogota Best for them. How’s he going to refuse in the jungle some place with guys like Dos Passos with guns all round and maybe the meat-hook and the piranhas waiting for a snack? No way. So he runs the stuff out once twice and he thinks this is great. Got cover with the Jesus Loves You or Mahatma Gandhi’s Got a Place for You in His Heart, we made a movie about this God Gandhi one time and the turtles and rain forests and whales and the baby … OK I’ll level with you, the Bursar sir, they weren’t baby octopuses. Didn’t have no legs at all. Flippers. Baby seals. Yes sir, baby seals.’
‘So why did you say octopuses?’ demanded the Bursar.
Kudzuvine tried to remember. ‘Had to do with legs. Like they’re beating these baby seals to death for the movie and there’s blood everywhere and I think “Shit, if they had legs they wouldn’t just sit there and let this happen” and I thought one time about octopuses like the fucking monsters they got Alaska, Canada some place and they don’t need eight fucking legs. Four or five would do just as well hug something to death and those baby seals could do with two or three. Like they wouldn’t just sit there. I got mud
dled is all.’
‘Get unmuddled, Kudzuvine,’ said the Bursar. ‘So how come Hartang is running Bogota Best and wants to give Porterhouse money? You tell me that.’
‘Hell shit, Pro … the Bursar, sir, he ain’t running dope no more. Daren’t and don’t any place. He’s lost Dos Passos twenty million bucks and that’s like death. No, sir, the cartels and the Sicilians and guys out of Russia you don’t want to mess with, you name them, is all running the stuff. What they can’t handle is the greenbacks coming in in truckloads. Now if old E.H. understands anything it’s bread. He don’t think words, he thinks dollars, D-marks, francs, pesetas, pounds and yen. You’ve heard him. You understand him? I don’t, except when he wants somebody dead. But figures and numbers is something else. Shoot, like he’s got a computer instead of a brain and I mean a real fast number-cruncher. So he washes the stuff for the cartels and the Sicilians and the runners. Got satellites and TV stations all over the world and the You’re Going to Live Forever business is spreading and, man, are they ever moving God along with contributions pouring in so who’s to know the snow cash from the dollars or D-marks or rupees buying you into heaven? No way. And old E.H. can bounce cash off satellites from one bank in Bombay, India to Santiago, Argentina and back to some bank Stateside by way of London, England, like it’s been washed and dried and pressed and it came down with Moses from the mountain only it’s easier to handle. Hell, he’s even bouncing stuff into Moscow, Russia and out again like it’s Yo-Yo Festival time down Santa Fe and he’s buying half of the old USS of R.’
‘I understand all that,’ said the Bursar, whose morale-booster was beginning to wear off. ‘But why give Porterhouse money?’
Kudzuvine looked at him incredulously. All this talking had improved his morale no end. ‘Giving he ain’t. He’s buying the place. That old turtle needs another shell. Like I told you, he covers his ass. No time he doesn’t. He’s got too many guys like Dos Passos want him dead. So he buys protection. Gives a bit first like it’s bait and before you know it you’re all wrapped up webwise and he’s got some new place he can hide. Like …’