‘Is that why you wear the clothes you wear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Palafox, one last question, sir: are you aware that in addition to the admiration you have aroused in taking on and beating top athletic performances at the age of forty-er, one, you must also be arousing considerable opposition and resentment by the way in which you have chosen to do it?’
‘I am.’
‘Would you say it amounted almost to a carefully planned insult aimed at the international sporting fraternity?’
‘Strike “almost”, as I believe they say in America.’
A clamour of voices among which a reasonable bass was heard to ask: ‘Whatever did they do to you to deserve it?’
‘Bored me rigid,’ said Carney Palafox succinctly, and the press conference was over.
*
He went back to the life of an itinerant hermit since his modest flat near Sadlers Wells was besieged night and day and Katie was constrained to shut the place and move in with friends, taking the cat with her. She toyed with the idea of beginning piano lessons.
‘What for?’ asked her friend. ‘Did Carney ever practise running?’
‘Carney? You know Carney, Beth. The very idea….’
‘Exactly. So it would be much better just to book the Festival Hall and go right in off the street wearing tennis clothes and play Tchaikovsky like he’s never been played before.’
Meanwhile Carney was wearying of dodging reporters. Besides, never having had to live the life of a celebrity, he was rather bad at it, although considerably helped by his all-purpose middle-aged appearance. He looked like Almost Anybody as played by the late Tony Hancock. Still, he often failed to elude the newshounds, and the papers seized on Carneyisms with relish. His views were, as they were fond of saying, ‘controversial’ and began to be eagerly sought on matters a long way from the sporting field. When asked to express an opinion about an imminent anti-nuclear demonstration which promised to close off much of central London for the day he said although he had no wish to be fried in any global holocaust he thought it highly undignified to winge in public about it. Death was only death, after all, and mass displays of cowardice were unedifying. It was quite unfashionable at the time to call the caring, sharing, Earth-Mother-of-four on a peace demo ‘chicken’ – not like a few years later – and his remarks led to howls of protest. It was bad enough, they suggested, that anyone as unspeakable as Carney Palafox should ever have emerged to cock a snook at the sporting pleasures of millions but far worse that he should thereby be accorded a public soap-box from which to air his monstrous views about the world in general.
One morning a priest with horn-rimmed spectacles entered the Action Replay studios and asked to speak to Bob Struthers.
‘I’m afraid Mr Struthers is extremely busy at the moment, Bishop,’ said one of the clones. ‘Would someone else do?’
‘I am not a bishop, my son, merely a minor canon. Rather small beer, I’m afraid. Thank you for your offer, but I fear it must be Mr Struthers. If he will just speak to me for a moment, he will learn something to his immortal soul’s advantage.’
Eventually Bob Struthers appeared, a video-cassette in one hand and a preoccupied expression on his face. Track-suit confronted cassock.
‘If you’ve come to tell me you’re the world’s best pole-vaulter, I shall scream,’ he said.
‘But I am,’ said the priest. He removed the spectacles. ‘Father Carney would like an audience.’
‘Carney!’ cried Bob Struthers. ‘My God, man, where have you been? Do you realise you’re the world’s most sought-after person? The phone here never stops ringing. “Who is his agent?” “How can we sign him up?” “Would a million dollars do?”’ He ushered Carney into his sanctum and shut the door. Curious faces pressed towards the glass from all sides.
‘The deal I want to make is once more very simple,’ said Carney, declining a can of No-Calorie Root Beer.
‘Name it. We’ll talk it over and then get some lawyers up. This is going to be big.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Carney corrected him. ‘At least, probably not in the way you’re hoping. I’m afraid I don’t want a manager. But I do need an agent who’s in the sporting business and who can fix, er – what are they called nowadays? – venues, I think. Dreadful expression.’
‘You want to take part in some competitions? As a team member?’
‘Dear me, no.’
‘Just as well. I don’t think it would be easy. You’ve no idea how ironic it is. You’re currently the world’s hottest sporting property – or at any rate you’re in some insane class of your own – but I doubt anyone would let you into a team. Not only would you presumably refuse to conform in such matters as training, clothing and – dare I say it? – conduct, but I can’t imagine you’d find many people willing to compete with you. Or even against you. You make a mockery of it all, Carney, and that people can’t forgive. They might at a pinch put it all down to eccentric temperament – genius or something – if you were the world’s greatest at one particular thing. Then the only guys you’d really upset would be those directly involved in it. But to be that good at everything and still not give a damn and wear, God help us, tap-dancing shoes while doing it: nobody in the trade is about to overlook that.’
‘The expression you see on my face, Bob, is one of pure contrition. But I still feel I have a little way to go yet with my mission – a few more laughs to get. I want to set one or two more records before I get really bored and find something else to do. You can help arrange it just as you did at that dismal stadium the other day.’
Bob Struthers was nodding. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘we can fix that’ – and his brain lobes were thudding with arithmetic. ‘Let’s see, the TV fees we could charge would be astronomical – we could cover our costs in the first five seconds of bidding…. What about spectators?’
‘Oh, yes, lots of those. The more the merrier.’
‘Great, Carney. Entrance fees…. How much will your cut be, do you imagine? A ball-park figure?’
‘Nil.’
‘You mean nothing?’
‘I told you before, I don’t want money; I’m not doing it for money. I already make quite a decent amount out of my serials, you know.’
‘Yes, but no money…. It’s pretty weird. In fact it’s the most bizarre thing of all. Limitless talent and you refuse to capitalise on it.’
‘I’m laughing, Bob, that’s what you don’t understand. Deep inside I’m falling about.’
‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Bob Struthers, ‘but, OK, if that’s what you want. Now for the bad news, Carney. There’s going to have to be a quid pro quo on your part.’
‘I may not like it.’
‘Oh, you won’t. It’s called a medical examination. The plain fact is that a lot of people flatly refuse to believe that someone your age can do what you do without assistance. They suspect either that you’re a guinea-pig for a new superdrug or a sort of test-bed for some bionic device.’
‘Like the Six Million Dollar Man? Rewired and full of microchips? Servo-motors? That sort of thing?’
‘I know, I know, Carney. I think it’s crazy, too. But there it is. Without a thorough medical examination …’
‘… carried out before twenty thousand witnesses …’
‘… no record you set will ever be officially recognised. There’s a more sinister aspect, too. I had a call from somebody claiming they were working with the Ministry of Defence. Did I know where you were and, if so, would it be OK to ask you to pop down for a chat? All very matey, of course, but need I go on?’
‘I’m of potential military value? I get clobbered by the Official Secrets Act? To prevent me from falling into Russian hands I am given a drugged cup of coffee and wake up in a country house in darkest Berkshire where in the course of several agonising weeks implacable army surgeons tear my body and mind apart to find out what makes me different? I like it, Bob, I like it. It’s got real potential for a series. I see it al
l, now. At the end of their experiments they’re left with a pile of bones and tissue, the usual human debris, without having learned anything. The silly asses have done what an old proverb from China’s Frozen North no doubt says: you don’t cook your lead husky.’
‘I didn’t expect you to take anything I say seriously.’ Bob Struthers, on whose words an audience of millions hung weekly, was obviously not used to mockery.
‘You’re put out, I can tell. Don’t worry; I shall know what to do if anybody with an old school tie offers me coffee.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Like it or not, Sunshine, you are currently our lead husky. But even huskies get a going-over from the vet before long journeys.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Carney said.
‘Dope tests are perfectly standard practice,’ urged the ex-athlete. ‘With the sort of publicity you’ve got there’s not a cat in hell’s chance they’ll allow any record you set without one. In fact, the faster you run or the farther you throw, the more suspicious they’ll be.’
‘OK, Bob,’ said Carney wearily, ‘I’ll have to concede, I suppose. Set it up, if you would, please. As from next week, though. Until then I’m going to be a bit busy.’
The nature of that ‘busyness’ did not emerge until early Sunday morning, European time, when the first satellite pictures began arriving of extraordinary goings-on in California. The scene was an Olympic pool on the outskirts of Los Angeles where a major international games was in progress. The actual event was the final of the men’s 200 metres freestyle. The swimmers had just left their blocks when a naked man streaked from the competitors’ entrance, plunged into a spare lane of the pool in the swimmers’ wake and ploughed after them doing a species of crawl. Amusement and head-shaking greeted this piece of light relief until a word began to be heard around the pool, becoming louder and louder as more and more voices took it up: ‘Carney!’
At the first turn the naked swimmer was nearly up with the two trailing competitors. The television cameras, torn between capturing a real news event and preserving their viewers’ modesty, tried to go into long focus whenever Carney Palafox crossed their viewfinders; but as he began to overhaul the leading swimmers they found him increasingly difficult to censor. Somehow his glistening buttocks rolling in the swirl of chlorinated water exercised a magnetic attraction. In all their glory they crossed a million screens as their owner concentrated on catching an amphibious bus whose image some distance away he had firmly fixed in his mind as it chugged along with its passenger platform awash. On the third length he took the lead and began opening up a prodigious distance between himself and the nearest swimmer, whose rubber cap fell bobbing away behind him like an abandoned fishnet-float. On the third and final turn the cheering became louder still, for it was quickly noticed that Carney had changed his stroke for an inelegant but highly effective back butterfly. Now it was no longer his buttocks which rose and fell mesmerically on a million screens, and station switchboards were jammed long before he touched the end of the pool, scrambled out, slithered like a pale eel through the combined grasp of a stern-faced reception committee and vanished from sight.
His return from America was slightly delayed by the time it took to engage a lawyer and negotiate his television company’s going bail for him. He was greeted at Heathrow Airport with scenes reminiscent of the sixties. ‘We love you, Carney,’ said placards jiggled by bands of teenagers screaming on the terminal roof. It was a declaration not shared by serious-minded people, of which the world suddenly seemed abnormally full.
In the next few weeks Carney Palafox put in a few comparatively sober appearances at prearranged attempts on official world records. They were sober only in that he turned up and did what he said he would. His every appearance was greeted with hysteria by the spectators who jammed the stadiums. It did not escape the notice of professional sportsmen that whenever a Carney Palafox display coincided with a regular event that event drew small crowds consisting mainly of a core of hardline traditional sports enthusiasts who would have nothing to do with this middle-aged wunderkind. He dutifully underwent a battery of medical tests before each occasion. ‘Carney Normal Say Doctors,’ was one headline. ‘Nothing Wrong With Carney – Official,’ said another. ‘Clean Bill of Physical Health,’ said a third, pointedly leaving open to question his mental status.
And so that brief summer Carney Palafox ran, jumped, hurled and on one occasion cycled his way into the record-books. His attire remained idiosyncratic but he was clearly finding increasing difficulty in varying it without having to fall back on ordinary sportswear. On one of his last appearances as a record-setter he amazed the crowd by turning up in a somewhat bulky crimson track-suit with CP in gold embroidered letters on the back. But things were restored to normality when he unzipped it to reveal a full set of lime-green motorcyling leathers in which he then beat his previous record for the 100 metres.
Close observers also noticed that he was clowning less, that he consulted his notebook more often with a frown of worry. There came the day when, after throwing a discus an unprecedented distance he consented absentmindedly to try to better his own 100 metres sprint record once again. His performance was that of a forty-one-year-old scriptwriter. Badly out of breath he crossed the line in seventeen seconds, missing his number 5 bus by miles. Somehow he must have lost count in his short and hectic sprinting career. Never again would he break the world’s 100 metres record. The crowd loved it, though. They thought he was fooling.
Meanwhile he was being endlessly begged to appear on television shows in exchange for prodigious sums. The more he turned them down and the more he refused to attend any organised debate of his own phenomenon, the more eagerly he was pestered. The inducements would have corrupted a Gandhi, the sums exceeding many a poor nation’s GNP. To all the most prestigious television hosts Carney Palafox said no. To one alone he said yes, and that one had never even asked.
Desmond Lermit hosted a chat show on one of Britain’s least-watched channels. He was a benign, fiftyish hangover from the days when the occasional gentleman was still to be glimpsed in a television studio, slightly unsettled like a dodo sensing the approach of beaters. His shows tended to go out late at night and his guests were mainly people in the world of the Arts and more often than not were decayed knights of the theatre. Carney had met him once or twice over the years, running into him at a party here, in a meeting there, for the world of television is still smaller than it likes to imagine. Beneath the courteous exterior he had thought to glimpse a somewhat cynical nihilism akin to his own. Desmond Lermit, however, had not the least idea that he had made this impression, so it came as a complete surprise when Carney Palafox rang him up one morning and asked if he would consider him as a guest on his show some time.
Privately at a loss as to why he should have been chosen while a dozen celebrities in Britain and America had been spurned, Lermit ruthlessly cancelled a forthcoming guest-list which was to have featured the decrepit and much-loved Welsh comedienne Dame Martha Tydfil and substituted the single name of Carney Palafox. The chagrin in the world of entertainment at this windfall for the Desmond Lermit Half-Hour was unparalleled. Needless to say, in the event nobody watched anything else. From the opening moments the public found itself privy to what seemed to be a conversation between two people who had just discovered they ought to have been close friends for the last quarter-century and who were making up for lost time. It was a very private coming-together which happened to be eavesdropped by nearly twenty million people. And in its wholly unpredicted manner it turned out to be compulsive viewing.
‘Am I right in thinking, Carney,’ began Desmond Lermit, ‘that you find life as exemplified by modern British civilisation boring?’
‘Annihilatingly so.’
‘Do you really? Oh, so do I. Isn’t it ghastly?’
‘Dreary beyond belief.’
‘It’s not so much’ – Desmond Lermit recklessly threw social impartiality to the winds – ‘not so much the
fact that everything has sunk to a general level of proletarian sub-culture, although God knows that’s bad enough….’
‘Fast food and Up Yours!’, interjected Carney, nodding.
‘… but it sometimes seems that every damned thing is so regulated, so organised, so subject to interminable by-laws, restrictions and conventions that the whole tone of life has assumed that of a sort of homogenised sleepwalking.’
‘Oh, I like that phrase, I wonder if it means anything?’ the erstwhile scriptwriter mused.
‘Not a lot, but I know what I mean.’
‘Me, too, Desmond, only too well. Far be it from me to make too much of the utterly trivial work I’ve been doing to earn a living, but there was a comedy series I had a hand in a couple of years ago trying to make that precise point.’
‘Gawd ’Elp Us!? Yes, indeed, I’m sure a lot of viewers like myself still recall it with pleasure. In fact I have here a scene from one of the episodes in which your unemployed young hero Keith is confronted by a warden who reprimands him for straying off the “nature trail” in a Derbyshire theme park, whatever that may be. I’ve never been quite certain.’ He laughed apologetically and pressed a switch on the television monitor.
‘Nor me, actually,’ came Carney’s voice as the picture on the monitor expanded to fill viewers’ screens.
After the two-minute excerpt, which left both host and guest smiling, Desmond Lermit resumed.
‘All this has been by way of background to what, if I were that sort of person, I might be calling “The Carney Palafox Story”. I have deliberately not started with clips from your “Challenge” film, not because they aren’t interesting in themselves but because everybody’s already seen them ad nauseam. We all know what you claimed to set out to do. I’d like to get at a slightly different Carney Palafox, or at least to flesh out the eccentric skeleton we now have, if you don’t object?’
‘Not at all. Splendid idea.’
‘For a start, this sudden ability you admit to having discovered so lately, do you yourself have any idea how it came about?’
The View from Mount Dog Page 8