The Lord of the Ring Roads

by Robert Rankin

  Because a strange unearthly light was to be seen within the shop.

  ‘It’s Ted’s wife with a torch,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s run.’

  ‘I’m with you there,’ John tried to turn but found that he could not. ‘I can’t move my feet, Jim,’ he whispered. ‘I appear to be glued to the spot.’

  ‘Don’t joke around now, John,’ said Jim. ‘Whatever is going on here, running is the very best option we have.’

  The light was growing brighter now, flooding out into the street, casting the two men’s shadows onto the road.

  ‘Help me, Jim,’ cried John.

  Jim flung aside his beer and grabbed his best friend round the waist. ‘Pull,’ John shouted. ‘Hard, for God’s sake man.’

  Jim tugged and John struggled but all it seemed to no avail whatsoever.

  ‘Oh no what is that?’ croaked John.

  ‘Singing,’ said Jim. ‘It’s singing.’

  And singing it was. But not the curious singing Jim had heard when down at the old canal bridge. This was more of a keening screech that set the nerves upon edge. It rose in volume with the growing light and curled like smoke about them, Omally thrust his fingers into his ears. ‘It is the song of the siren, Jim,’ he shouted. ‘Run my friend and save yourself.’

  ‘I certainly will not,’ Jim Pooley was suddenly down on his knees.

  ‘What are you doing?’ cried John.

  ‘Untying your bootlaces. Come on my friend.’

  John heaved and Jim heaved and as the light and sound engulfed them they tumbled back to fall in a great foolish heap.

  ‘Run!’ advised John.

  And both of them ran.

  At speed. Away. And were gone.

  Which was certainly for the best as it happened, because neither of them would have enjoyed viewing what followed. What with John Omally’s favourite boots breaking free from their mysterious moorings to rise into the air, then vanish into the keyhole.

  At speed.

  Away.

  And just gone.

  11

  A golden dawn came once again to touch the

  Town of Brentford.

  A gentle breeze chased wraiths of mist

  Across the River Thames.

  And in a café called the Plume

  Two gentlemen sat deep in gloom

  And thought no more of cunning schemes

  And moneyed stratagems.

  The gentlemen in question presented themselves collectively as a sad and sorry sight and neither felt the wish to versify. Certainly it is a fact well known to those who know it well (and most indeed do know it well enough) that there is nothing quite like the big, fat, slap-up full English breakfast to restore the spirits and ease the pain of a hangover.

  But today such breakfasts found no joy with either John or Jim.

  ‘My head is killing me,’ said Pooley, tasting tea, making a face, then adding extra sugars to his cup.

  ‘Mine too, my friend, mine too.’ John Omally splashed brown sauce over his breakfast.

  ‘But what did happen?’ whispered Jim. ‘I’m still not entirely certain.’

  ‘We left the pub,’ said John. ‘Went round to yours, drank too much bottled beer and both fell asleep on the floor.’

  ‘You seem to be missing out a rather important part of the story.’

  John Omally shook his head. ‘We were drunk, Jim. Silly things happen when you are drunk. You for one should surely understand this.’

  ‘I hardly ever drink,’ said Jim, crossing his fingers and his toes and making the sweetest of faces.

  ‘Oh right,’ said John. ‘So who was it that a few months back phoned the BBC at midnight to pitch them an idea for a television show?’

  Jim got stuck into a sausage.

  ‘The Dying Game, I believe you called it.’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘I recall,’ said John. ‘It ran this ways, if I remember. A celebrity fakes his own death. Friends and especially enemies get invited to the funeral and wake. But unknown to them, not only is the celebrity still alive, but he is watching through a two way mirror at the wake, where various stooges are winding up his enemies to say something dreadful about him that can be caught on film, before he leaps out at the end with a cry of “surprise”.’

  ‘It was a better idea than the way you make it sound,’ Jim complained. ‘Pass the brown sauce if you please.’

  John passed the sauce. ‘Let’s just forget about last night,’ said he.

  ‘Forget about it? The light, the singing. Your boots getting stuck to the ground. The wee-wee going through the keyhole—’

  ‘Not so loud!’ cautioned John. ‘There could be all manner of logical explanations.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Marsh gas, or the planet Venus seen through a layer of clouds.’

  ‘That’s UFOs.’

  ‘Eat your breakfast, Jim.’

  ‘John, whatever happened, it was something evil. Something horrible. We should tell someone, we really should.’

  Omally chewed on further bacon. ‘The police perhaps?’ he said.

  ‘If needs be, yes.’

  ‘If needs be no!’ said John. ‘Let me picture this for you. “Good morning officer, my name is Jim Pooley and I would like to report a supernatural occurrence. I had been drinking for about ten hours and on the way home I was just taking a piss in a greengrocer’s doorway when—”’

  Jim raised high his hand. ‘Enough,’ said he. ‘I get the picture. Perhaps discretion is required.’

  ‘Yes,’ said John and he dunked a bit of toast into his egg.

  ‘But what about your boots?’ Jim whispered.

  ‘Gone,’ whispered John. ‘I popped out of your place earlier to have a look in daylight. They’re gone, which is why I am wearing your creepers.’

  Jim peeped beneath the table. ‘My favourite blue suedes,’ he said.

  ‘So just let it be,’ said John. ‘Get on with your day. Go to the library, have a pint at lunchtime, pretend that nothing happened and think about all the money we’ll soon be making.’

  ‘When the Goodwill Landscaping Company puts in its bill to the council?’ said Jim.

  ‘And let us not forget the Brentford Lottery. Which should today be amply advertised upon the front page of The Brentford Mercury.’

  ‘Hm,’ went Pooley, tasking further tea.

  ‘Don’t you hm me, Jim Pooley,’ said John. ‘My task today will be to engage a glamorous female celebrity to pull the winning lottery ticket tomorrow night.’

  Jim Pooley rolled his eyes.

  ‘Today is your own,’ said John Omally. ‘Do whatever you want with it.’

  Jim took himself to the library. As he ambled down what would soon be Pooley Plaza, he could not help but become aware of the all the busyness.

  Somehow, vile Tony Watkins, who drove the nocturnal street-cleaning truck, had been lured into the hours of daylight and was driving his canary-coloured conveyance up and down. Water jets whooshed and splattered, pedestrians fled in distress.

  Upon ladders, were to be seen fellows in one-piece work suits, stringing bunting between lamp-posts and whistling while they worked.

  Folk were sweeping up with brooms and others washing windows. Jim took some small comfort in all this enthusiastic activity. The doings in Uncle Ted’s doorway seemed most unreal in the light of day amidst such human endeavour.

  Ms Jennifer Naylor seemed quite pleased to see him.

  ‘I see your friend Omally is back in the news,’ she said.

  Alarm returned to Pooley.

  ‘He’s all over the front page of the Mercury promoting the Brentford Lottery.’

  The chief librarian turned the paper on her desk for Jim to read. Jim read it in silence. It was pretty much what he expected. Promises of untold wealth. Talk of a worthy cause other than the creation of the pedestrianised town centre. Something to do with the extermination of rodents.

  Jim rolled his eyes and shru
gged his shoulders.

  A combination that boded ill for his hangover.

  Jim clutched at his head, and took himself off to the single working computer.

  After a small degree of unpleasantness — though nothing that approximated violence — Jim logged in and checked his emails.

  A message from Goodwill Jeremy, the deposed Nigerian prince.

  Jim patiently deciphered its curious content. The prince had received his cheque with great joy. Well, not the prince himself, of course, for the prince was still in Africa, but his English representative in Croydon to whom Jim had been instructed to send the cheque.

  Goodwill Jeremy was profuse in his thanks. Jim, he wrote, had restored his faith in mankind and would become the recipient of copious quantities of cash, once the prince had made his way to London to settle his affairs. He would let Jim know if any further moneys were required and remained his “obeisant savant”.

  Jim responded with kindly words then went on to the online gambling site. The quest to pull off the ever-elusive Six Horse Super Yankee, a sacred quest indeed it seemed to Jim, today had lost its appeal. Jim just did not feel lucky. He felt — well — he felt edgy at best.

  A phrase used by Omally the previous evening during the extraordinary goings on in Uncle Ted’s doorway paid a visit to the mind of Pooley.

  Jim typed the song of the siren into the search engine. Up came the Tim Buckley song, a movie about the Gulf war and of all things a hand-made fishing rod. Then Jim found Wikipedia.

  Sirens, it seemed, were dangerous creatures, who lived upon an island somewhere in the Med and lured nearby sailors, with their enchanting music and song, to shipwreck on their rocky coast. But Jim knew of this, for hadn’t there been sirens in the 1958 Ray Harryhausen movie, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad ? And sirens were mythical, they did not exist in real life.

  Jim did as Jim would and followed various links. At length he found himself on a folklore site reading of the banshee. This creature was clearly a distant cousin to the siren. A more northerly relative, whose “keening wail presaged doom”. Had the song been a “keening wail” Jim wondered. Jim did key-taps to reveal recent West London sightings.

  Jim leaned back in his chair and whistled.

  ‘Not in here,’ hissed Jennifer Naylor.

  Jim scrolled down the page. There had actually been recent reports of banshees and in the West London area. In Hampton Court, in Kingston, at Teddington Lock, at Richmond — Jim paused with his scrollings. This was the route taken by the Goodwill Giant, surely? Jim did a bit of cross-referencing. The banshee reports came always a day after those of the Goodwill Giant. Was a banshee following the giant? Was the giant now in Brentford with the banshee holed up in Uncle Ted’s greengrocery? Chills ran up and down Jim Pooley’s spine. ‘Oooooooooo,’ went Jim.

  ‘Be quiet,’ hissed the senior librarian.

  ‘Banshee,’ said Jim. ‘There’s a banshee.’

  He pointed wildly at the screen and as he did the screen went rather dark.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jim drummed at the keyboard. ‘The computer has turned itself off.’

  Jennifer Naylor glared Jim daggers. ‘It keeps doing that,’ she said. ‘Come back tomorrow, it might be working by then.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Jim made croaking noises.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the chief librarian. ‘Not tomorrow. According to The Brentford Mercury, tomorrow has been declared a Borough Holiday hereabouts to celebrate the opening of the ring road and so the library will be closed.’

  ‘But….’ went Jim and he but-but-butted.

  ‘Out,’ cried Jennifer Naylor. ‘Out and off on your way.’

  Norman had not been out of his shop this morning. He was far too busy to leave the premises unattended. In fact, to Norman’s memory, this was probably the busiest day he had ever had in all his many years of corner-shop keeping.

  And, in Norman’s opinion, it was well deserved, considering all the unpleasantness he’d been through the day before.

  It had started about an hour after he had sent young Zorro out on the paper round. Folk started drifting in on their way to work, asking about the purchase of lottery tickets. Norman had decided that he would not be stocking any lottery tickets as he had a natural distrust for anything that John Omally had a hand in. But it would have been pure foolishness on his behalf to turn away all those potential customers.

  Now Norman did not have any real lottery tickets to sell, but as a chap of almost infinite resource he did what he did best and improvised.

  In his store he knew was an ancient box containing hundreds of books of raffle tickets. And a lottery is really just a raffle by another name after all.

  At a pound a raffle ticket Norman’s cash drawer was filling nicely and when about an hour after the first hour had passed, folk from other corner-shops began to turn up on his doorstep, saying that word had reached them that he was the go-to man when it came to lottery tickets, Norman was happy to oblige them.

  ‘There’s one hundred tickets in each book,’ Norman explained to Mr Maggs, who ran the newsagents in what would soon be known as Pooley Plaza. ‘So if I sell you a book for twenty pounds, you’ll make eighty for yourself.’

  ‘How about three books for fifty pounds?’ asked Mr Maggs.

  Norman Hartnell spat upon his palm.

  ‘Same for me,’ said Mr Patel.

  Norman asked the shopkeepers to form an orderly queue.

  ‘I ordered Quasimodo’, said Neville to the brewery boy who diddled with his doo-dad.

  ‘I know you did, squire, I know you did.’ This was a different brewery boy, but the doo-dad looked the same. ‘Thing is that all the brewery’s pubs want Quasimodo. It’s proving to be the most popular beer the brewery’s ever produced.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted better,’ said Neville.

  ‘So it’s all a matter of supply and demand. If you get my meaning, squire.’ The brewery boy winked in a manner both lewd and suggestive.

  ‘I understand your meaning perfectly. How much do you want?’

  ‘How about ten quid for me per barrel?’

  ‘How about five quid per barrel?’ said Neville. ‘And I will throw in two bonuses.’

  ‘How so?’ asked the brewery boy.

  ‘I will neither report you to the brewery for taking bribes, nor strike you down with my knobkerrie for ripping me off.’

  ‘Five pounds it is then,’ said the brewery boy.

  ‘Five pounds of bacon, sir and two pounds of sausages. Fifteen eggs and three whole loaves of bread.’

  Professor Slocombe raised a canescent eyebrow. ‘Well now Gammon,’ he said to his servant. ‘Our guest certainly knows how to put away breakfast.’

  ‘And how to snore, sir. My quarters abut the garage, as you know. It was like trying to sleep through an earthquake.’

  ‘You can move into one of the spare bedrooms here in the house,’ said the professor.

  ‘And as for the toilet,’ said Gammon.

  ‘Please no,’ said Professor Slocombe. ‘Is there anything left for me to eat for breakfast?’

  ‘There’s muesli,’ said Gammon.

  Professor Slocombe made the sign of the cross. ‘Pop down to Gregg’s in the High Street,’ he said. ‘And buy me a sausage roll.’

  ‘He’s popped out,’ said Mrs King, John Omally’s landlady. ‘Gone off to the big city, so I am told.’

  ‘But I was only having breakfast with him an hour ago,’ said Jim.

  ‘Yes and he said that if you came calling, and he said that he just betted that you would, I was to tell you not to fret, because he’d be back tomorrow.’

  ‘Back tomorrow?’ Pooley was appalled.

  ‘He told me he had important business to transact, regarding a famous celebrity who would be pulling the winning ticket in the lottery tomorrow.’

  Jim Pooley’s hands began to flap and Jim began to spin in tiny circles.

  ‘And you can stop doing that,’ said Mrs King. ‘That is ungodly that is.’<
br />
  Jim drew himself to an unsteady halt. ‘Did he tell you exactly where he was going to?’ he asked. ‘It is very important that I speak to him.’

  ‘He wasn’t specific, but he did say that I was to thank you for him.’

  ‘Thank me for what?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Well, he said that you’d lent him a pair of shoes.’

  ‘I had.’

  ‘Well, he also said that he’d popped into your place and borrowed your going-out suit to go with them.’

  ‘What?’ went Jim.

  ‘He said it was important business and you would understand. Oh and there was something more.’

  ‘There was?’ said Jim.

  ‘He said you’d pay me that fifty pounds he owes in back rent. Out of company funds, he said.’

  Pooley’s hands once more began to flap.

  ‘Cough it up,’ said Mrs King, ‘or I’ll welt you with my handbag.’

  Old Pete coughed and spat in that manner so favoured by the elderly and steered his rugged footwear along the stony path of the allotments. A path today unblocked by a sleeping giant. Young Chips sniffed the air and found it pleasing, sniffed his ancient master then made coughing sounds of his own.

  ‘Keep up, boy,’ the elder said. ‘Let’s see how the monkeys are doing.’

  Unlocking the cold frame Old Pete viewed his monkeys. They were growing nicely, but still weren’t showing any hints of movement.

  ‘I think we’ll have to write these fellows off,’ the horticulturalist told his dog. ‘Chalk it up as a dead end, I suppose.’

  Young Chips with his front feet upon the cold frame sniffed the monkeys. Being a dog he knew how monkeys smelled. That was one of the best things about being a dog, really, the smelling of stuff. Lamp-posts and other dog’s bottoms mostly, of course. But it was all logged there, into the canine computer banks, as it were. The whole olfactory box of tricks. The ability to identify almost anything by its smell. It was a dog thing.

  Young Chips sniffed once more at the planthropoids. They certainly did smell like real monkeys. There was a hint of sprout about them, but then there was a hint of sprout about most things. Even dog’s bottoms and dogs don’t even eat sprouts as a rule.