by Alexei Sayle
After a restless night he got on the phone to his painters first thing in the morning but they were doing up Lord Winston’s place and couldn’t get back till the day after tomorrow. He would have to spend two whole days with the desecration on his house.
It was torture, those two days; though he was in the house with the door slammed behind him there was no relief. Notwithstanding that he was inside it made no difference —the wall might as well have been made of his beloved glass for the violation had given him X-ray vision, he could see straight through it to the sacrilege on the other side: ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’ ‘PATRICK’. And as his office was at home he was trapped with ‘PATRICK’ patrolling up and down outside like an escaped tiger.
After the long wait the painters turned up in their horrible van at 7 a.m., got Out their special builders’ portable radio which seemed to be tuned to two stations at the same time and set it blaring, hissing and honking on the pavement. They then went off for a fried breakfast leaving the radio yodelling and scraping to itself. They came back over two and a half hours later, big fried breakfasts being hard to hunt down in Belgravia. Then they set to work.
About ninety minutes later the head painter, a tall laconic black man called Tommy, who always had a copy of the Sun in the back pocket of his overalls with the daily xenophobic headline clearly displayed, rang at the door and asked to speak to rupert. ‘Mr … erm … Mr … rupert. I fink you should come outside, we… erm… dere’s a bit of a problem.’ He led the trembling rupert round the corner.
What must have happened was that there appeared to have been some chemical reaction that had gone on between the paint underneath and the paint being put on top, so that rather than obliterating the offending name, it was now rather splendidly picked out in bright orange against an immaculate white background. And it seemed to have got bigger: ‘PATRICK’. It shouted as if rupert’s house was some new kind of bar called ‘PATRICK’ or something. ‘We give it tree coats,’ said Tommy. ‘But de damn ting keep comm true.’
rupert went back through the front door quite calmly then turned into the kitchen dining area which led off the main entrance. He lay down full length on the nice cool stainless steel floor. A stainless steel kitchen with a stainless steel floor. They used to have a cat but it went to live over the road because it got sick of sliding and skidding all over the place on the slippery floor. rupert was frankly glad it had gone because it had made the place look messy, lying on its back with its legs open in hot weather. The boys must have loved it though because they spent a great amount of their time now over the road with the Saudi Arabian family who had taken it in. From his nice place on the floor rupert looked up at the wire Bertoia chairs he had insisted on for the kitchen. They were originally without cushions, as they should have been, so that dinner guests were left with savage criss-cross lines on their bottoms, as if they had spent the evening with a particularly savage dominatrix. On this one, this one time, Helen put her foot down and went out and bought cushions for the chairs from Liberty and rupert let her and was secretly relieved she’d done it, after all he didn’t want people to be getting the wrong idea about Baroness Jay from marks his chairs had given her on her bottom.
‘There’s sharks in the deep end of my think tank,’ he found himself thinking, and then he thought that he no longer understood his own thoughts. He had to get off the floor, he knew that, it was extremely important; Tony wouldn’t like him lying on the floor. At that point his mobile phone rang and seeing it was in his pocket, down there on the floor with him, he got it out and answered it.
As if he had sensed his distress it was Tony ringing him in his hour of need.
‘Awright, geez?’ Tony said in the funny wide-boy voice he used sometimes when he was larking about.
‘Yeah sound geez,’ replied rupert.
‘Listen,’ said the Prime Minister reverting to his normal tones. ‘We’ve got the President of Indonesia over here and he’s a bit sick of being a dictator. Alastair was telling him about your ideas. Wanna come over and tell him yourself? Marco Pierre White’s doing us all Nasi Goreng.’
He still mattered. ‘I’ll be there in twenty, Tony.’
Then he went back outside where his workmen were perfecting their oafish impersonations. He had a special cockney voice he used with his workmen. ‘Listen, yew cunts,’ he said, ‘I just want you to get rid of this fucking word. Do you understand me? I don’t care what you have to do. Get shot of it, chop it out if you have to, but get the fucking job done!’
Then he went to Number 10 Downing Street for Nasi Goreng.
Coming back later in his own car, swinging into the street, rupert turned his headlights to high beam to look more clearly at what his workmen had done.
What they had done was this. With their sharp chisels and their little hammers the workmen had chipped the name out of the brickwork, painfully they had hacked away the plaster leaving the rest of the wall completely untouched, so that now there was carved into the wall in huge letters, perhaps eight foot high, the one word, the one word: ‘PATRICK’.
More or less without thought rupert drove his foot almost through the floor of the car as he pressed the accelerator pedal and drove the Audi straight at the word, the wall, the word was the wall, by now so big that he couldn’t miss the word wall.
They’re known for their safety, big Audis are, so he walked away without a mark on him, the German car’s crumple zones having crumpled and all its airbags dangling like big used condoms. Inside the kitchen he hunted under the sink for a bottle of bleach then sat down on the nice cool stainless steel floor to drink it. As it poured down his gullet he felt it scouring him, reducing the untidy tangle of his insides to a minimalist shell.
He would have died if the varnished pine-coloured Finnish au pair hadn’t come in looking for some polenta for a late night snack. Being Finnish and with suicide being so common in that country that they teach antidote administration at junior school, she immediately knocked the bottle out of his hand and poured bottle after bottle of Evian down him till the paramedics came.
After he got out of hospital rupert and Helen and the kids went to stay in a whitewashed farmhouse just outside a lovely little walled town in a valley in Southern Spain. All the time he’d been in the Chelsea and Westminster none of the government had come to see rupert, though Gordon Brown had sent some balloons. Now the family was back together. They went walking through the orange groves, swam in the pool, had simple dinners on the Arabic-style terrace. Over the phone Helen sold her flag cleaning business to the Granada Group and they were free of all worries, the money she got allowed them to live in delirious clutter, the kids running in and out all day.
rupert let his hair grow and tied it in a little pony tail at the back. They talked about buying a small farm and raising sheep and goats. But then slowly rupert began to return to the world; he bought a radio that could pick up the BBC World Service and would impatiently sit through reports of government reshuffles in Malawi, falling groundnut prices in the Congo and requests to play Celine Dion records for teenagers in Damascus (‘I am most wishing to hear the marvellous Canadian songbird trill her hit song from the film Titanic…’) all so he could catch a fragment of news from back home, a sliver of information of his former pals, Gordon and Jack and Tony.
Helen caught him looking discontentedly at the mess in their farmhouse, studying the shape and the layout, thinking of improvements. One day he shouted at Corbu, ‘For God’s sake, can’t you clear up some of this bloody mess.
Helen and the two boys stood frozen, it was like a Siberian farmer hearing the howl of the first wolves of winter. They knew He was back.
In the middle of that night as rupert lay sleeping, wrapped in dreams of towering cities, Helen rose and went outside to the white moonlit wall of the farmhouse. With a Pentel pen she wrote in tiny letters on the wall, the o
ne word: ‘PATRICK’.
A CURE FOR DEATH
The anti-gravity hover ambulance lifted off in a halo of dust from the special landing pad that he’d had built in the grounds of his home on the tax-free haven of the Isle of Morrisons. Inside he lay on a stretcher plugged up to a rats’ nest of wires and tubes. The man was one hundred and sixty-nine years old and barely alive. The pilot/paramedic headed the flying machine east across the Irish Sea, soon they crossed Liverpool Bay and without pause began travelling inland. High above the town of Stoke-on-Tescos, the pilot tilted his control column, causing the rotors to swivel in their housing, and the craft turned south. About an hour after take—off from the billionaire’s island they glided in to land at their destination, the giant laboratory complex that he had had constructed on the outskirts of Milton Kwiksave Old Town, Berkshire Sector.
This was where they were working on a cure for death.
The patient’s name was Edmund Chive and he had been a happy but poor man until the age of twenty-eight when he had become immensely rich by inventing a new kind of thing: not a completely new thing but an exciting new twist on a thing that had been around for years and everybody had got used to and a bit bored with. If he had invented a completely new thing he probably wouldn’t have prospered because the geniuses who do that seldom do; it is the plodders who come after who make the gravy. At first all the money had made his life great: three girls in the bed, four Ferraris in the garage, that sort of thing. Then one day while he was licking crème fraîche off a light-skinned Dominican lesbian, a bad thought descended like an anti-gravity hover ambulance. It was an idea so horrible to him that it froze him in mid-lick with his tongue sticking out and dairy product dripping off it. His life was so great, so brilliant, so fantastic, so wonderful, he thought, and yet one day it would end — because he was at some point in the future going to die just like the lowliest tram driver. That couldn’t be right, could it?
From then on his money was spent not on making his life happy but on making it infinite. He sought a cure for death and hired the finest anti-death scientists to bring it to him. The answer lay somewhere in genetics, they were all sure of that.
While he waited for the cure to be discovered he employed the finest health experts to keep him in the best shape for the longest time. His days were entirely taken up with yoga, exercise, positive visualisations; his mealtimes were taken up with munching his way through piles of fibre, nuts and raw vegetables. He kept away from women and wanking because the Bhuddist monk he employed on a part-time basis told him to on no account spill his vital fluids into women or paper tissues. He didn’t watch TV because his fourth, ninth and twenty-second personal trainers had told him that bad ideas leaked out of the set from news programmes and made the watcher lethargic. And he didn’t mix with people because he might catch something.
So he lived for one hundred and sixty-nine years, though they were not by and large happy years, certainly not the latter ones, for although science could extend life it turned out it could do very little about curing the painful conditions that came with ageing. Just as Alzheimers only came to be known about once people started living long enough to get it, so as humans started passing the hundred and thirty mark in large numbers a huge variety of new conditions appeared, all of them excruciatingly painful and many of them embarrassing and depressing. Apart from the usual faithful companions of old age, Arthritis, Angina, Thrombosis, Prostate Cancer, there now appeared illnesses such as Poliakoff’s Syndrome where the sufferer’s body fat became so tired and worn out that it caught fire and burned from within like a fire—bombed council house, there was Clutterbuck’s Disease in which the excessively old person’s bones calcified to such a degree that they more or less turned into a pillar of salt, and the memory loss that occurred in those of seventy, eighty, ninety, was replaced by memory gain in those of one hundred and thirty, forty, fifty. But the memories that re-appeared were entirely faulty so that many aged folk ended their lives thinking they were chickens or trees or Bruce Springsteen (apart from Bruce Springsteen himself who thought he was Dag Hammersholt, a secretary general of the UN in the 1950s).
So Edmund Chive’s health gradually deteriorated, despite all the effort of the finest medical minds in the world, and he was in the middle of his eighth bout of pleurisy and on his twenty-seventh pet labrador called Sparky 9 when the call came from his scientists that they had made the breakthrough and they were there. The cure for death was waiting for him in a glass bottle. The hover ambulance kept on permanent standby was started up and the journey was made.
The two scientists in charge of project CFD, Professor Drew Cocker and Professor Lindy Wheen, were waiting for their benefactor as he was wheeled into the central chamber of the complex.
Edmund Chive managed to crowbar open his clag encrusted eyes and croak at his two hirelings, ‘Where is it?’
‘We’ve got it here, Mr Chive,’ said Professor Cherry holding up the bottle. ‘As we thought, the answer is essentially a question of genetic mutation, by altering the DNA chromosome of—’
‘For God’s sake, inject me, there’s not much time le—’ said Edmund and then he died.
But this was not the end for Edmund as he had feared it would be. After he died Edmund felt himself travelling down a long, gently sloping tunnel. It reminded him of the time in the happy days before he was rich when he’d been to a water park and had dived down a spiral tube, head first. There’d been no time for that in the last one hundred and forty-one years. Following some seconds, or perhaps minutes, it was hard to tell, of gentle floating, a bright white light appeared, small as a pinhole. He drifted towards it as it grew in his vision. The light resolved itself into the end of the tunnel; light as a rice cracker he slipped out of the tube and into a huge vaulted chamber lit by a kind, lambent light. Waiting for him were a group of people all smiling at him. The first person there he recognised was his father, not as he had died, etiolated and grey, but fit and hale as he had been in his late forties, behind him was Edmund’s mother as she had been around the time of the war in Korea, a beauty capable of stopping air traffic. Behind them in a spreading phalanx were all his uncles and aunts, his friends, his teachers from primary school, girls he had slept with at university still looking as they had then, and running in and out of their feet all the pets he’d ever had, Sparkies 1 to 8, cats and kittens, lizards and snakes. Edmund’s father approached him, his hand outstretched, his smile rueful. ‘I bet you feel like a right silly cunt now, he said as he embraced his son.
‘Fucking hell, yes,’ exclaimed Edmund. ‘What a twat! I didn’t think for a second there was a cunting afterlife!’
His mother came up and took him in her arms. ‘We were all silly shites,’ she said. ‘None of us shagging believed there was anything after we fucking died.’
Without looking at himself Edmund knew his body was as it had been when he was thirty-five years old, round about the time when all the exercise he was doing had temporarily given him a physique that was buffed and perfect, glowing with health and happiness. ‘So is this bollocking heaven?’ he asked.
‘Fuck knows,’ laughed Abigail Watts, the first girl he had had sex with.
‘This might be heaven or it might just be another stage on the shitting journey,’ said his Uncle Leon.
‘There is still pain here,’ said his father,’… and death.’
‘But it’s a different kind of pain and a different kind of death,’ explained his primary school teacher Miss Wilson. ‘A better kind.’
Suddenly Edmund was embarrassed thinking about what he had caused to be done back in the life before. ‘Erm, I think I might have made a bit of a fucking rick back … erm … there,’ he mumbled.
‘What’s that son?’ said his dad.
‘Well, I’ve… fucking invented a fucking cure for death. I’m not sure anybody else will be coming here soon.
Everybody laughed like a drain at this.
‘Knackers,’ said his mum.
‘F
uck ‘em,’ said Uncle Leon. ‘If they don’t want to come that’s their twatting problem.’
‘They can stay where they are, the wankers,’ said a man who’d been his best friend over a century ago.
‘Well, that’s a fucking relief,’ said Edmund.
‘I’m fucking gagging for a pint,’ said Miss Wilson.
‘Let’s go then,’ said Edmund’s dad. ‘The rest of you tossers coming?’
There was a general murmur of assent and they all went off to get what constituted, in this new place, pissed.
Back in the previous life Drew and Lindy stared at Edmund Chive’s cadaver, lying mute and sparkless on its trolley. ‘Well, this is unfortunate,’ said Drew.
‘Bad timing,’ said Lindy.
‘What do we do now?’
They both knew what they were talking about: the little glass bottle.
‘No point in wasting it,’ said one.
‘No point at all,’ said the other.
So they injected themselves with the anti-death serum. Then stood in silence for a few minutes. Finally Drew said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’
Lindy looked into an infinite future of coffees, coffee after coffee after coffee for tens of thousands of years.
‘I think I’ll wait till later,’ she said.
WHO DIED AND LEFT YOU
IN CHARGE?
Miss Cicely Rodgers strapped her cock and balls into the Miracle Deluxe Vagina, which was made from skin-like flesh-coloured latex and came with frilly adjustable straps to ensure a perfect fit and to hide any last sign of maleness. It was complete in every detail including soft vaginal lips and a simulated clitoris. Over this she slipped Femme Form padded hourglass panties to give her womanly curves, and onto her chest she put a lacy padded bra. Next came make-up, beard coverer and on her head the popular page-boy wig, suitable for all face shapes. Finally a sober women’s business suit in charcoal grey and on her feet simple court shoes, though huge in a size eleven, with a restrained, ladylike, two-inch heel. Cicely wasn’t one of those trannies who dressed like a Chechen prostitute. When she was Clive he wore clothes that were a bit too young for a man of forty-five, trainers like dead pigs’ noses in grey and orange with light-reflecting strips on the back, designer combat pants so expensive it would be cheaper to join the army for a year and T-shirts with ‘Quack, combust, shithouse squad’ or similar gibberish written on them. Cicely considered herself superior to Clive, with a more innate sense of good taste. After all, they both thought, what was the point of being a part-time woman if she was going to be the same sort of woman as you were a bloke?