44 Acorn Grove and Other Stories

by Steve Howrie

  “Oh, and by the way cowboy, that drink was poisoned.”

  I turned again and walked down the street - this time leaving behind a stunned silence. Seconds later a thud on the Saloon floor told me the concoction had done its work.

  I put down the pile of loose A4 pages and turned to Mel.

  “Well - what do you think so far?” She was quiet for a few seconds, then said,

  “You did surprise me with that bit in the Saloon. I quite liked it though. Is this your first Western?”

  I nodded. “Do you think it’ll sell?” I asked. She screwed up her face in the same way that I’ve often screwed up a manuscript.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure about the place,” she said.

  “You mean Doncaster?”

  “Yes. You don’t get many cowboys in Doncaster, do you?” The builder who made a complete mess of our extension last year came to mind. And then there was that plumber who tried to charge me fifty quid for changing two washers. But I didn’t think this was what Mel meant.

  “Well no… I guess there’s not many cowboys in Doncaster - not in real life. But this is fiction,” I said.

  Mel went quiet, collecting her thoughts, trying to decide the best way to tell me that my version of a Western was not worth the paper it was printed on - and I only paid one pound ninety-nine a ream for it. Then she said, “Read a bit more.”

  I wandered over to the Sheriff’s Office and rang the bell...

  “Did you say, ‘rang the bell’?” Mel interrupted.

  “Yes - one Aunt Jean uses when she wants something. Not an electric bell.”

  “Okay – just checking,” she said and sat back. I continued.

  Matt Black, one of the Sheriff’s Deputies, came to the door, chewing tobacci. He leaned lazily on the door frame.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Jim.”

  “Jim’s not in - he’s up at the Dooley’s place. I reckon there’s trouble up there again.” The Dooley’s stayed on the outskirts of Doncaster, and they were always causing trouble. The Sheriff would need my help.

  “You’re not going up there, are ya?” the kid asked.

  “Sure. Coming with me?”

  Black spat into the gutter. “No way - that’s a one-way ticket to the undertakers.”

  I caught Mel’s expression again. “What is it now?” I asked.

  “A one way ticket to the undertakers...”

  “So?”

  “You mean you can get a return ticket?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just an expression...”

  “A pathetic expression if you ask me.”

  “It’s how Black speaks - he’s a moron.” Mel tightened her lips as if to say, ‘he’s not the only one.’ But she let me carry on.

  So I headed on up to the Dooley’s Place. The sun was low in the sky now, but it was still hot, and boy did I need a drink. But that would have to wait - because I’d just seen Jim. There he was, face down in the dirt, lying in blood. Jim’s blood. Shoot! I muttered, dropping off my horse and keeping low. I looked over to the Dooley’s ranch on the hill. Someone’s gonna pay for this, I vowed, and I didn’t just mean the funeral.

  “Is this book going to be all about killing then?” interrupted Mel.

  “Of course it is - it’s a Western. The Americans are like that - just look at John Wayne or George W. Bush...”

  “I’d rather not, thanks.”

  “You know what I mean - shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “When they’re all dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, it’s your story.” It was the way she said ‘your’ story that worried me. It was unnervingly reminiscent of her mother, and my life wasn’t worth living when Linda spoke like that. But I continued:

  I made my way up the hill, crawling in the grass like a Comanche Injun. I’d spent six long months in the Nevada desert with the tribe, and they’d learned me how to live and fight like the best warriors this side of Reno.

  I edged closer and closer to the ranch-house, trying not to make a sound. Soon I could see figures moving inside - two or three at least. I ran the last few steps to the side of the wooden cabin, catching my breath. I could hear voices now - and the loudest was a woman’s. It must be Ma Dooley. She was worse than all them men folk put together; she scared the living daylights outta me for sure. Then I heard her say, angrily,

  “Now I wanna know, for once and for all, who shot the Sheriff?”

  “Eric Clapton,” said Mel.

  “What?”

  “Eric Clapton shot the Sheriff. Don’t you know the song?” Well, of course I knew the song. But I’m not going to put a rock musician in a cowboy story, am I? So I told Mel that we couldn’t have Eric Clapton because he’s not from Doncaster. But Mel wasn’t going to give up so easily.

  “He could have travelled there - in a stagecoach.” As soon as she folded her arms I knew I was in for trouble. So I tried to compromise.

  “What about Eric Dooley?” Mel shook her head. “But they’re all Dooleys,” I urged. “It’s the Dooley family!” I cursed introducing Mel to my Eric Clapton CD collection. Why couldn’t I have stuck with the Dooley Brothers? Then I had an idea.

  “How about ‘Eric Clapton-Dooley’ - a double-barrelled name - and he shot the Sheriff with his double-barrelled shotgun?” Mel smiled and I knew I’d won her back.

  “Okay - I like that,” she said. “Eric Clapton marries Mel Dooley and that’s how they get the name.”

  I gave her one of my quizzical looks (I have several). “Mel Dooley? Where did she come from?”

  “Sheffield… or Rotherham. I don’t mind which.” I was beginning to wonder who was writing this story. But I took a deep breath, and resumed the tale - redrafting it as I went along.

  I managed to edge close to a window and caught a glimpse of the old lady: it was Ma Dooley all right. In the room with Ma were her sons Mike and Joe, her daughter Mel, and Mel’s man Eric. After a couple of minutes, Eric Clapton-Dooley stood up, guiltily.

  “Ma - it was me: I shot the Sheriff.”

  I looked at Mel. Her eyes were closed now, and her arms no longer crossed. I tucked them under her blanket and gently kissed her on the forehead. I love her to bits, but it probably wasn’t such a good idea to read the first draft of my Western to my precocious eight-year old daughter. Or perhaps it was: she might just have helped me to get this book published.

  * * *

  Carvolution

  As a journalist, you’re always looking for the next big story, the one that makes you rich and famous. Having said that, money has never been the strong motivating force that it is for others. Otherwise, I’d have been an accountant.

  But fame and prestige - being noticed and acknowledged - that’s a different matter. I was brought up in a large family, where I received very little attention from my parents and had to fight for recognition - sometimes physically fight when it came to my big brother John. So when I grew up and left home, I vowed that one day I would become someone that people would want to talk to – and hence the step into journalism.

  So here I was, then, about to interview a man whom most people acknowledged to be one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century: Dr Carl Robbins. My editor hadn’t been quite so complimentary.

  “That man’s a nutcase!” he yelled at me in his office.

  “All great thinkers are eccentrics - you know that,” I replied. “Copernicus and Galileo were both branded as lunatics when they postulated their ideas.”

  “Don’t give me all that postulation crap - talk normal English will you. You’re a journalist, not a frigging academic. Wake up Zack.” But I wasn’t going to be put off so easily. I told him I’d work on the Dr Robbins interview in my own time and still do the magazine column I was really paid for. He grunted what I took to be an affirmation, and I left his office before he changed his mind.

  I arrived at Dr Robbins home having found his address on the Internet. It w
as a large greystone building in the New Forest, miles from the nearest village. I parked my car and stepped outside, drinking in the atmosphere. Here I was, outside the home of a man who had changed the thinking of everyone on Planet Earth - including my editor, though he’d never admit it. I had an immense feeling of history as I locked the car and walked down the gravel pathway to the front door.

  Now in his nineties, Dr Robbins was understandably not in the best of health, and required round the clock attention. His nurse answered the door and I introduced myself.

  “Oh, Mr Waters, please do come in. Dr Robbins is so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “He hasn’t talked to any journalists for such a long time now.”

  As I walked with nurse Peters down a long blue corridor with peeling wallpaper, I reflected on how sad it was that such a genius lived out his remaining years in isolation from the World. Was this the fate of all farsighted men and women? We stopped at a door with nothing more than the number twelve on it.

  “Here we are - just let me see if he’s ready for you.” She popped her head round the door without knocking and then beckoned me in. “Well, I’ll leave you to natter. Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee?”

  “A black coffee would be nice, thanks. No milk or sugar.”

  “A man after my own heart”, replied a frail, grey-haired old man sitting in a lived-in armchair and wearing an old maroon dressing gown over blue and white striped pyjamas. “Make that two black coffees would you Margaret.”

  The nurse nodded and smiled at me as she left, leaving me alone with Dr Robbins. At first I wondered how any revolutionary theory could emanate from the man I saw before me. But as we began to talk, his brilliant mind soon began to shine through. I kicked off by asking him how it all started - how did he come to that ‘Eureka’ moment?

  “At that time, my scientific career was all but over. I was approaching sixty-five, and retirement, and my goal of making a great discovery, and thereby a name for myself, was then just a distant dream. So I wasn’t prepared for the ideas that suddenly came to me.”

  Just then Margaret returned with a tray containing two cups of steaming coffee. She placed the cups and a plate of assorted biscuits on the small round coffee table between us.

  “I brought Dr Robbins favourites. They’re all different shapes and sizes, but made from the same flour.” She smiled at Dr Robbins, and he smiled back, as if sharing a private joke.

  The old man waited until the nurse had closed the door, and then continued.

  “I recall it was a Friday night. A documentary was showing on BBC2 – the Horizon programme I think it was - and the subject was advances in Stellar Physics. Are you familiar with the theories of astrophysics Zack?”

  I had to admit I wasn’t. But Dr Robbins patiently gave me a basic introduction to Stellar Theory.

  “If you look up at the dark, night sky - far away from the glare of street lights, and not on a night when the moon is full or bright - take a closer look at the stars. Preferably through binoculars or a small telescope. You’ll see that stars are not all white points of light. There are red, orange, yellow and even blue and green stars. And they’re all different sizes and intensities. At first, in the early days of astronomy, little attention was paid to this. But in the early twentieth Century, astrophysicists realised that what we are witnessing is ‘stellar evolution’. Stars are not static bodies - they change just like we change. As human beings, we are born small and young; we expand and develop, become stronger and brighter, then begin to decline. We shrivel, grow old and weak, and then die. So it is with stars. Young blue stars, grow into larger, more radiant, white bodies, which develop into strong yellow stars...”

  “Like our Sun?” I interrupted.

  “Exactly like our sun,” the doctor exclaimed, now animated by his own descriptions. “The yellow stars mature and become large orange stars, which expand further to become cooler red giants. After that, things can go one of two ways: if the star is very large, its own gravity will force it to completely collapse into itself, forming what we call a white dwarf, or even a black hole.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of those...” I found myself saying, trying to show that I knew at least something about the subject.

  “But I bet you’ve never seen one!” The doctor was jesting with me now. I had to admit I hadn’t.

  “Well, of course, nobody has! But the theory says there are millions of them in the universe.”

  I picked up my coffee, thinking about what he had said. I did wonder what black holes had got to do with his theory - but I thought he would come to that. The doctor gingerly picked up his own cup, his spindly hand shaking with the weight of the coffee, so I reached over and helped him put the cup to his lips. He took a few sips, and continued.

  “Throughout my career, I always needed several stimuli at once. It was never enough to just read a book - I would have to put some music on, or the television - or sometimes both. So when I turned on the Horizon programme, I was already reading a magazine.” He paused as if reliving the moment, his eyes wandering to look out of the window towards the gardens surrounding the nursing home. “Wheels in Motion - that was the title. Couldn’t think of it for a minute - that’s what happens when you get to my age, I’m sorry. Anyway, I’d always been a great car enthusiast and had a monthly subscription to the magazine. Read it cover to cover - even the ads! And then - bang! Eureka! It was suddenly so very obvious.”

  “A real Rolls Royce moment?” I replied. The doctor chuckled.

  “Yes! You could say that. All these different cars in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours, with no apparent rhyme or reason for their design. That had always puzzled me. I could never understand why there were so many different types. Why weren’t they all the same - like the Germans’ black VW Beetle in the 1940’s? And then the explanation was staring me in the face. Carvolution - the evolution of one vehicle into another - just like in Stellar Physics.”

  I found myself nodding in appreciation of the great leap in thinking that this man had made. Without his intelligence, we would never have discovered or understood one of the fundamental principles of Car Mechanics.

  “It must have been a very special moment,” I observed.

  “Yes it was - very special. My mind suddenly went into overdrive - if you’ll excuse the pun. And the theory was so simple. Over millions of years, a bicycle evolves. It finds a need to go faster and faster, and starts to develop a small engine - and hey presto, we have the first motorbike. Over the next thousand millennia, the bike grows a side car and an extra wheel, and it isn’t a great leap from there to a three-wheeled car - the Robin Reliant. The bike is adjusting to the changing climate of the Earth, which, during the last Ice Age, was extremely inhospitable - as you can imagine. Through the need for greater stability, the Reliant develops a fourth wheel, and the Mini car is born. Moving on, its need to survive the harsh climate, and travel further and faster, the car increases its engine size and carrying capacity, and we have the appearance of Fords, Peugeots, Renaults and Nissans - and then Mercedes and Bentleys. Finally, at the top of the tree, the Rolls Royce.

  The doctor sank back in his chair with great satisfaction - as if he had just postulated the theory for the first time. Like everyone else, I was introduced to this theory at Primary School, and I never questioned any part of it at the time. Probably because it was taught as fact rather than theory - and how could my teachers be wrong? But having heard the hypothesis from the horse’s mouth, as it were, something troubled me - and I just had to voice my thoughts.

  “Dr Robbins, it was fascinating to hear you reiterate the theory of Carvolution - to get it in your own words. I really felt that I was there, reliving the discovery with you. But there’s just one aspect of the theory that troubles me. Can I ask you a question about it Doctor?”

  “Of course you can! You’re a journalist, aren’t you? You’re meant to ask questions.” I nodded foolishly, and he continued. “When I first came up with the theory, the
re was great opposition to my ideas, and so many questions. I was shunned by many of my colleagues for years, and the Church still doesn’t acknowledge the theory as fact - despite the overwhelming evidence. So go ahead.”

  I didn’t want to pick holes in his ideology, but there was something I just had to clarify. “If every bicycle and car evolves into something bigger and better, why do we still see so many bicycles and small cars still around? Surely they would have all evolved into BMWs, Mercedes and Rolls Royces by now?”

  The doctor smiled and nodded to himself, as though he’d heard this objection thousands of times before. “Consider the stars that we talked about previously. They were not all created at the same time. We’re looking at various stages of evolution over millions and millions of years. So it is with bicycles and cars. Bicycles will inevitably evolve into Bentleys and Rolls Royces, just as our sun will inevitably become a White Dwarf. This is just how things are in the Universe.”

  I understood his reasoning, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

  “But what will happen to the Rolls Royce - what’s the next stage in its evolution? Will it develop wings and fly?”

  I was being a little sarcastic, I have to say. But the doctor smiled at me again - more broadly this time. “Where do you think aeroplanes come from?” he asked.

  I was stunned. This had never been mentioned at school: cars becoming aeroplanes! I wanted to question him more; but the nurse entered and, having put down her tray, turned to me and said that if we were finished, Dr Robbins could really do with a rest. I thanked the doctor for his time, switched off my recorder and picked up my bag. Dr Robbins had closed his eyes now and I left quietly, whispering goodbye to the nurse as she put a blanket over him. But she seemed oblivious to my leaving.

  As I walked back down the corridor toward the front door, my mind was trying to take in the morning’s events. My thinking had been turned upside down by what I’d heard that day.

  On reaching my car, I was somewhat relieved that my Ford Escort had not yet turned into a single-engined Cessna. Not that I didn’t want to fly home, but I could no longer accept the theory of Carvolution as fact. It just didn’t ring true. And as much as I hated to admit it, my editor had been right about Dr Robbins - he was indeed a nutcase.