Waiting for Godalming

by Robert Rankin

  Icarus nodded. ‘But you don’t feel that your total lack of artistic skill might prove a handicap in this?’

  ‘A considerable handicap,’ agreed Friend Bob. ‘But a man must dream his dreams.’

  ‘Indeed.’ There was a moment of intimate silence, each man alone with his thoughts and his dreams.

  ‘So,’ said Friend Bob, when he had done with silence. ‘What do you have in your briefcase?’

  ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ Icarus lifted the lid of the case.

  ‘Urgh,’ went Friend Bob, peering in. ‘Leather underpants, you pervert.’

  ‘You are, as ever, the wag. Have you eaten your lunch yet? There are some sandwiches in here.’

  ‘I have no wish to munch upon sandwiches that have been hobnobbing with a pervert’s knickers, thank you very much.’

  ‘Hello, what’s this?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘This.’ Icarus lifted from the briefcase a small dark electronic doo-dad. ‘Transistor radio, I think.’

  ‘It’s a Dictaphone,’ said Friend Bob, who had a love for all things electrical. ‘You can record your voice on that. Here, I’ll show you how.’

  Friend Bob took the Dictaphone, held it up to his mouth and pressed a little button.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh!’ went the Dictaphone.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaagh!’ went Friend Bob, flinging it back into the briefcase.

  ‘Surely that’s the wrong way round,’ said Icarus. ‘I thought you were supposed to record on to it.’

  ‘I pressed the playback button by mistake, you fool.’

  Icarus now took up the Dictaphone, tinkered with the volume control and then pressed the playback button.

  ‘No,’ screamed a voice of a lesser volume. ‘No more pain. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’

  ‘Oh shirt!’ said Friend Bob, whose mother had told him not to swear. (And who had found the word “shirt” substituted for “sh*t” whilst reading the previous book in this trilogy.)‘It’s someone being tortured.’

  ‘Leather pants in the case,’ said Icarus. ‘Probably just some recreational activity. Shall we hear a bit more?’

  ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Come on now, what harm can it do?’

  Icarus fingered the button once more. A new voice said, ‘Tell me all about the drug.’

  ‘It’s drugs.’ Friend Bob flapped his elongated hands about. ‘It’s gangsters. I’m off.’

  ‘It’s probably just a TV programme, or a radio play, or something.’

  ‘Or something. Whatever it is, I’ve heard enough. I don’t want to get involved. Return the case to its owner, Icarus, please.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘It will end in tears.’

  ‘Let’s hear a little more.’

  ‘Fug that.’ Friend Bob lifted his angular frame from the seat next to Icarus Smith. ‘I have tiles to polish. And bottles of aftershave to arrange in a row. I will bid you farewell.’

  ‘Are you coming to the Three Gables tonight? Johnny G’s playing.’

  ‘I’ll be there. But listen, just dump the briefcase, eh? Leather pants and tortured souls are not a healthy combination.’

  Friend Bob turned upon his heel and had it away on his toes.

  Icarus sat and considered the Dictaphone. He turned the volume down a bit more and held the thing to his ear.

  ‘What drug?’ came the voice of the tortured soul.

  ‘Red Head,’ said the other voice.

  ‘Red Head?’ whispered Icarus Smith. ‘What kind of drug is that?’

  There came a crackling sound from the Dictaphone, followed by another ‘Aaaaaagh!’ and a ‘Stop, please stop, I’ll tell you everything.’

  And Icarus listened while the tortured soul told everything. And as Icarus listened, his face became pale and his hands began to tremble.

  For what Icarus heard was this and it bothered him more than a little.

  ‘Tell me all about Red Head,’ said the other voice. ‘How did you come up with the formula?’

  ‘From the flowers. It was the flowers that showed me the way.’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ said the other voice.

  ‘No. I’m telling you all the truth. And I have to tell someone. I’ll go mad if I don’t.’

  ‘Just tell it all from the beginning then.’

  ‘All right. As you know I worked for the Ministry of Serendipity. On the A.I. project. Artificial intelligence. The thinking computer. Rubbish, all of it. But we didn’t know it then.’

  ‘Why is it rubbish?’

  ‘Just listen to what I’m telling you. From the beginning, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I worked on the project with Professor John Garrideb. He was one of three brothers, all of them something in mathematics. John was always convinced that we’d make the big breakthrough. But when we did, when I did, it wasn’t the way we expected and it’s my fault, what happened to him, which is why I’m telling you this.

  ‘We worked on the project for twenty-two months, but like I say we were getting nowhere and we kept getting all these directives from above, saying that our work was in the National Interest and we should hurry ourselves up and that other governments were ahead of ours and all the rest of it. And we were working really long hours and I took to drinking a bit in the evenings. And then a bit more and then a bit too much.

  ‘And one night I left the Ministry and went home on the special train from Mornington Crescent and got off at the wrong stop. And I found myself in Brentford and I fell down on the floral clock in the Memorial Park and that was when it came to me.

  ‘I had a sort of revelation. It was all to do with the flowers on the floral clock. It was well after midnight and as I lay there I noticed that all the flowers were still awake. They had their petals open. And I thought that’s a bit odd and then I saw the floodlights. They’re on all night, you see, to illuminate the clock and because they’re on all night the flowers stay open. The flowers never sleep. The flowers cannot dream.’

  There was a pause and Icarus heard sobbing.

  ‘Stop blubbing there,’ said the other voice. ‘What are you crying about?’

  ‘Because I understood it then. I understood why we could never build a computer with artificial intelligence. Because a computer cannot dream. It’s a man’s dreams that give him his ideas. A man is what he dreams.’

  ‘Sounds like rubbish,’ said the other voice. ‘But go on.’

  ‘When we sleep,’ said the tortured soul, ‘it’s only our bodies that sleep. Our brains don’t sleep. Our brains go on thinking. If we have problems, our brains go on thinking about them, trying to sort them out, trying to solve them. But the solutions our brains come up with are in the form of dreams that our waking minds cannot understand. People have tried to interpret dreams, but they can’t, dreams are too subtle for that. But the way we behave and the solutions we eventually arrive at are guided by our dreams, even though we’re not aware of it.

  ‘I suddenly understood all this, you see. Probably because it was ultimately the solution to the problem I had. The problem with artificial intelligence. The answer was right there. In our heads, you see. The brain is the ultimate computer, you just have to know how to use it properly.’

  ‘Which is why you came up with Red Head?’

  ‘To enhance the intellect. To speed up the thinking processes. To create the human computer. Why bother to build machines, if the answers to the problems you would set them to solve were all inside your head anyway? Just needing a little chemical help to bring them out. But I didn’t come up with Red Head.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said the other voice. ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘I was lying there amongst the flowers,’ said the tortured soul. ‘And it all became clear, like I say. And I realized that if such a drug could be formulated, it could change everything, solve all human problems. A group of human computers dedicating themselves to the good
of humanity. Just think what might be achieved. I saw the big picture. The overview. But then I thought, how could I ever formulate this drug? It might take years and years. The rest of my life. What I really needed was a drug to speed up my own thinking processes, in order that I could create a drug that could speed up thinking processes. Bit of a Catch 22 situation there. But the crooked man showed me how to read the flowers and that’s how I came by the formula.’

  ‘Crooked man?’ asked the other voice. ‘Who is the crooked man?’

  ‘He found me lying there on the floral clock. He helped me up and he showed me how to read the flowers. He told me that the flowers would help me, if I helped them. All they wanted was to sleep. It seemed a pretty fair deal to me.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain this,’ said the other voice.

  ‘The crooked man helped me up. He said he’d been listening to what I’d been saying. I thought I’d only been thinking but apparently I’d been talking out loud. Or according to him I had. He said the answer was staring me right in the face, all I had to do was look at the flowers. Well, I looked at the flowers, but all I could see was the flowers. Lots of different coloured flowers in the shape of a floral clock. But he said, look at the colours. Think of the rainbow. Well, I remembered the poem we’d been taught at school, about how you remember the order of the colours in the rainbow. It’s a poem about fairies. It goes, Some came in violet, some in indigo, In blue, green, yellow, orange, red, They made a pretty row.’

  ‘I remember that,’ said the other voice.

  ‘Yeah, well I remembered it and looked at the flowers. First the violet ones, then the indigo ones and so on. And they spelled out letters. Letters and numbers. They spelled out a chemical formula. The chemical formula for Red Head.’

  ‘With the corner up,’ said the other voice.

  ‘It’s true. Well, the formula is true at least. The drug works. I wish to God now that it didn’t. But it does. When I’d written the formula down, I thanked the flowers and then I smashed the floodlights so that they could sleep and dream and then I walked all the way home and went to bed.’

  ‘Incredible,’ said the other voice. ‘Insane.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the tortured soul agreed. ‘It’s quite insane. All of it. I went into the Ministry the next day. Gained access to the laboratory and mixed up a batch of the drug. It was remarkably simple and straightforward. And then of course I had to test it. See if it really worked. So I tested it upon myself.’

  ‘And it worked?’

  ‘It worked all right. But not in the way that I’d been expecting. I thought it would speed up my thinking. But the human brain is not a calculating machine. It functions by entirely different processes. Organically. Thinking is organic, that’s what it’s all about. The drug enhanced my thinking processes. It opened my eyes and allowed me to see clearly. To understand everything. To see things as they really are. And people as they really are. The ones who actually are people. And the ones who aren’t. The wrong’uns.’

  ‘Careful,’ said the other voice.

  ‘Or what? You’ll kill me? You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you? You have to keep your secret. If humanity knew about you and your kind and what you’re up to and how to see you—’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘Be damned,’ said the tortured soul. ‘Be damned the lot of you. I know you for what you are. And I know what you want.’

  ‘Only the formula.’

  ‘But you won’t get it.’

  ‘You’ll tell us what we want to know eventually.’

  ‘Not I,’ said the tortured soul. ‘I’ve only told you this much because I wanted to spend the last few moments of my life free from pain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The poison I’ve taken will kick in at any moment. You’ll never find the drug. But someone will and that someone will learn the truth and they’ll put paid to you and your kind. That someone will change the world for ever. That someone will make things right.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve told us enough anyway,’ said the other voice. ‘We know where to find the formula. On the Memorial clock.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Right.’ A laugh came from the tortured soul. ‘The flowers. I got very angry over the flowers. Because of what they’d done to me. Because they’d given me the power to see something so awful that it would ultimately lead to my own destruction. As it has. So I went back there, to punish the flowers. To stamp them to oblivion. But then I thought no, it wasn’t their fault. They were quite mad, you see, the flowers. That’s what happens when you’re deprived of sleep. When you cannot dream. You go mad. The flowers couldn’t dream and so the flowers went mad.

  ‘But I did go back. I made a kind of pilgrimage. I wanted to see whether the floodlights had been repaired. And if they had, then I would break them again. So I returned to the Memorial Park, and do you know what I found when I got there?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the tortured soul. ‘Nothing whatsoever. You see, there was no floral clock in that park. There never had been.’

  ‘What are you saying? Speak to me.’

  Another silent moment, then another voice spoke.

  ‘Save your breath on him,’ it said. ‘He’s dead.’

  3

  Now this is where I came into this tale, so listen up people and listen up good.

  With me you get what you pay for, when you pay for the best private eye in the business. I don’t come cheap, but I’m thorough and I get the job done. I know my genre and I stick to it. When I’m on the case, you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a corpse-strewn alley and a final rooftop showdown.

  And along the way you’ll get all the stuff that you get when you pay for the best. You’ll get a generous helping of trenchcoat humour, a lot of old toot being talked in a bar, running gags about the mispronunciation of my name and my trusty Smith and Wesson, a dame that does me wrong and a deep dark whirling pit of oblivion that I tumble down into, when she bops me on the head at the very beginning of every new case. Which is arguably a bit new, as I always used to get a guy to do it.

  That’s the way that I do business, always has been, always will be (apart from the dame). Because, like I say, I stick to my genre. And because, like I say, I’m the best.

  If you’re looking to get all fancy and post-modern, then don’t come a-knocking at my partition door. Because if what you want is a lot of psychological fol-de-rol and a tormented detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage, who’s coming to terms with a tragedy that happened in his youth and is reaching out to his feminine side, then buddy you’ve come to the wrong address.

  But if your taste is for a hard-nosed, lantern-jawed, snap-brimmed-fedora’d, belt-knotted-trenchcoated, bourbon-swigging, Camel-smoking, lone-walking, smart-talking, pistol-packing, broad-smacking, mean-fighting, hot-pastrami-biting, tricky-case-solving son-of-a-goddamn-prince-among-men, then knock at the door and walk right in and ask for me by name.

  And the name to ask for is Woodbine. As if you hadn’t guessed.

  Lazlo Woodbine, Private Eye.

  Some call me Laz.

  You see me, I keep it classic and I keep it simple.

  I work just the four locations. An office where my clients come. A bar where I talk a load of old toot and where the dame that does me wrong bops me on the head at the beginning of the case. An alleyway, where I get into tricky situations, and a rooftop where I have my final confrontation with the villain.

  No spin-offs, no loose ends and all strictly in the first person. No great genre detective ever needed more than that and no detective ever came greater than me.

  So, with that said, and pretty goddamn well said too, let’s get us down to the business in hand and begin it the way that it always begins.

  And it always begins like this.

  It was another long hot Manhattan night and I was sitting in Fangio’s, chewing the fat with the fat boy. The fat boy’s name was Fangio, but the fat we chewed went nameless.


  It had been a real lean year for me and I hadn’t had a case to solve with style since the big one of ’98. Times were getting tough.

  It’s all well and good being hailed as ‘the detective’s detective’, and having your craggy silhouette on the cover of Newsweek magazine and your office featured in Hello! but fame won’t buy you a ticket to ride if you don’t have the fare for the ferryman.

  At the present, I was down.

  My bank account was redder than a masochist’s butt and the trench had washed out of my trenchcoat. The trusty Smith and Wesney Snipes was gathering rust in Papa Legba’s pawnshop and my now legendary snap-brim fedora seemed to suit my landlord who had taken it in lieu of last month’s rent.

  I was down.

  Down. Down.

  Deeper and down.

  I was deeper and down than a pit lad’s purse in a pocket of Pleistocene pumice. More at sea than a Lascar’s lunch on a leaking Liberian lugger. Further south than a tired Tasmanian’s toe-jam tucker-bag take-away.

  But hey, when you’re deeper and down as that, my friends, the only way is up. You can’t just sit there on your sorry ass, waiting for the wind of fortune to blow in your direction.

  You have to lift yourself high above adversity.

  You have to make your own wind.

  ‘Holy humdinger,’ flustered Fangio, fanning his face with his fat. ‘If you make wind in my bar one more time, Laz, I’ll kick your sorry ass out.’

  Oh how we laughed.

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ the fat boy flustered further. ‘I put up with a lot from you, Laz. The running gags about your trenchcoat and your trusty Smith and West Bromwich Albion. The dame that does you wrong always bopping you on the head in my bar. And you calling me the fat boy all the time. But I do draw the line at you making wind. I’m running a business here.’

  ‘But you are a very fat boy,’ says I, faster than a ferret in a felcher’s footbath.

  ‘And those dumb surrealistic metaphor jobbies you insist on using all the time because you think it gives you your own style. The ones that gradually get more and more obscene and obscure and are neither funny nor clever.’