Billy Friend’s eyebrows receive considerable prominence on his face because they are thick and black, and he has no other hair of any kind upon his head. Around about the time that Joe’s father was called to account by Her Majesty for being in loco parentis to a large quantity of imported cocaine (rather than being in loco parentis to, to take a random example, his son) Billy Friend acknowledged that his personal battle with male-pattern hair loss was at an end. On the day of the trial—quite coincidentally, there was no very strong connection between Joe Spork and William Friend back then—he ditched his fiancée, bought a shiny new suit, and had the last of his mortal youth removed by a Knightsbridge barber. Since which time, beyond varying the ridiculous waxes he uses to produce a manly gleam on his alarmingly sexual pate, he has changed not at all. Billy Friend, riding the coat-tails of Patrick Stewart’s supersexed telegenic baldness—though Billy would tell you he was there first.
Joe generally avoids Billy in his professional context. They go out on the town every so often, share a meal, maybe some drinks. Billy is brash and embarrassing, and therefore exactly the kind of person who can force a moody Joe Spork to have a good time, even talk to women he finds attractive. It’s the kind of friendship which endures, despite minimal tending and no apparent central plank. Billy in mufti, ordering another bottle from a cheerily scandalised waitress, is a part of the landscape, awkward and familiar and finally indispensable.
Billy the dealer is a trickier proposition, fraught with complex questions of murky legal ownership and tax-free cash jobs—but on this occasion Joe was so unwise as to pick up the phone without checking to see who it was, got blindsided, and as a consequence is here in this greasy spoon drinking thick, orange tea. An object lesson in paranoia, but not in the end a bad result, because Joe has to confess he is having minor money issues at present, and Billy Friend, when not attempting to sell him a pup or persuade him to take part in some dubious scheme involving Latvian modelling agencies, is a good source of gainful employment as well as a genuine if barmy long-time pal.
“What sort of commission?” Joe says carefully.
“Well, Joseph,” because Billy likes to be formal when he’s conning you, “it is—and at the same time, you understand, it is not—for it’s an equivocal and quirky sort of object, hard to get to know and spiky about the edges, which is what made me think of you … It is a what you might call without fear of immediate contradiction though at the same time without expressing the fullest truth … a doodah. From an estate sale.”
“Estate sale” meaning, most probably, nicked. Although Billy Friend, when he is not dealing in knocked-off antiquities and seducing the daughters of provincial publicans, is a member in good standing of the Honoured & Enduring Brotherhood of Waiting Men, which is to say he is an undertaker. He is therefore well-positioned to come across estate sales before the actual sale has begun, but Joe does not automatically accept that Billy actually buys from the bereaved, because in one of his many other professional hats, Billy is a freelance spotter of thievable items for burglars in London and the Home Counties.
“I’ve got a lot of doodahs, Billy,” Joe says. “My life is in some measure awash in doodahs. How is your doodah different from everyone else’s doodah?” And he realises too late that Billy has set him up.
“Well, Joseph, one doesn’t like to brag …” Followed by a huge laugh which turns heads all around, and most particularly the head of the young, flirtatious waitress, whose personal attention Billy Friend has been working to secure since they sat down.
“Billy …”
“It’s a book, Joseph.”
“A book.”
“Of sorts, yes.”
“Then you’re wasting your time. I don’t do books. I mean, I like books. Books are good and we should have more of them. But I’m not a bookbinder, a paper specialist, or a restorer. I can’t help you with a damaged book.”
“You can help with this one.”
“Is it a clockwork book?”
“It is.”
“Because if it’s not a clockwork book, there’s not very much I can do, is there?” Joe pauses. Some part of the last exchange did not play out as he imagined when he ran it through in his mind.
“What do you mean, ‘it is’?”
Billy waves his arms to indicate the magnificence of what he has to offer. “The item is a combination book and device. The textual part is in acceptable if foxed condition, nice leather cover, looks like a diary. The peculiarity is that the outer edges are punched in a grid, so that the book as a whole functions or appears to function as a set of punchcards. One might think of it as equivalent to the drum on one of your music boxes. Yes?”
Joe Spork nods assent. Billy goes on, waving his hands for emphasis, which he is pleased to call “emf-arse-is,” because it generally gets a rise out of the ladies.
“And in, as it were, the same sack, the same rattling old box, the same shabby loft where the book was located, there is a collection of mucky, disassembled bits and bobs which could, under the right circumstances and through the intervention of a skilled craftsperson such as yourself, form some sort of mechanism which appears, on close and expert examination by me, to attach to the written volume along the spine. Further, there is what I can only describe as a large gold ball forming part of the mechanical apparatus, whose function I have not at this time been able to discern. Thus, a conundrum. A book which is more than a book, and the implication of a machine which does something with it. Hence, to avoid the practice of neologism, Joseph, which as you know I despise, I call it a doodah.”
Joe Spork gazes at Billy through narrow eyes. It does not please him to be so easily led about by the nose. He knows that Billy knows this kind of thing is his particular delight. He anticipates some species of hustle, or possibly just a task of mind-numbing boredom by way of compensation for his pleasure.
“And what do I have to do in exchange for this doodah job?”
“Nothing dreadful, Joseph, just a bit of repair on something, nothing base nor wicked nor criminal—” Billy falters. He must see something in Joe’s face which tells him the Sporkish forbearance is at an end. He holds up a hand in acknowledgement. “Let me show you the patient, all right? It’s a bit special.” And he already has the parcel on the table, so it’s only a second before it stands revealed. It’s quite a sight in a quiet café. “Spicy, eh? Those Victorians, they liked their toys. Their erotomata, to coin a phrase. Their ’ow’s yer father, though this looks more like ’ow’s yer father, madame, and can I get you something to drink after, and maybe for your sister, too? I knew some sisters like this once, mind. Frightful handful.”
The object is indeed an automaton, a clockwork tableau in tin and lead paint, with fabric to flesh out the figures and a brass-and-steel movement visible through the glass floor. A lusty gamekeeper sort of fellow with red cheeks stands on one side, and two ladies in riding dresses stand on the other, and when Billy Friend flicks a switch the figures move around one another in a decreasing spiral until the gamekeeper’s trousers come down and the ladies’ dresses come up, and a somewhat improbable object emerges from the gamekeeper’s burlap undergarments and goes smoothly into a matching aperture on Sister 1, while Sister 2 reclines on a wall and satisfies herself quite frantically, and then the whole thing starts to shake and Sister 1’s head goes all the way around and the gamekeeper suddenly gets what appears to be a hernia and cannot continue, and the whole assemblage grinds and stutters to a halt.
Joe is furious to find that he is blushing. Billy Friend smirks at the waitress, who is staring with wide eyes at the contraption and looking not entirely unlike a sort of Sister 3. She collects herself and smirks back, then wanders off to the kitchen.
“For God’s sake, Billy …” Joe says.
“Ahh, dear. Handsome fella like you, Joseph, you’re a bit young to be so old. Tell you, why don’t we go out together one night?”
“No, thank you. Tell me about the clockwork book.”
“You used to be a lot more fun, Joe. You’ve got sensible, is what it is. Terrible thing to happen to anyone, puts years on you. I know a place in Soho. No, not that kind of place, though if you’ve a mind … no, thought not. No, just a bar, matey, with convivial clients. Australians, mostly. Bored and up for it.”
“Billy, I’m only going to say this once more, and then I’m going to assume you are pulling my pisser. And then we’re going back to formal payments, cash on delivery. Right? Because I’ve got to open the shop. So, God help me: tell me about your doodah.”
Billy Friend measures Joe and sees, if not resolve then boredom, and knuckles down.
“Party wants it cleaned up and repaired, made ready for use, and delivered to a gentleman in Wistithiel. That’s Cornwall, by the way. Cash in advance, naturally, this being a hard and dishonest world.” Billy Friend, in his time both hard and dishonest, sighs the sigh of a disappointed philanthropist. “Party has also supplied a tool to go with. I have taken to referring to this object as the whojimmy. It resembles no tool the like of which I have ever seen, and I am to inform you that you are permitted to keep it as a souvenir or part-payment. The whojimmy is apparently necessary to gain access to certain of the moving parts of the doodah. Thus not, in fact, merely a twofer, as our American cousins would have it, meaning two-for-one, but a threefer, which I believe is heretofore unknown in the world but which I am proud to bring before you now in the spirit of commerce and collegial respect.” Billy smiles his winning smile.
“Who’s the party?”
“A gentleman never tells.”
“A lady.”
“I think we may say without fear of breaching the seal of professional confidence that she is of the female persuasion.”
“And there’s no question that she owns these items?”
“None at all. Very respectable old duck, I thought.”
“She acquired them in this estate sale you mentioned.”
“Ah. There, Joseph, you have me. It is my unfortunate habit to refer to any object whose origin I am not at liberty to divulge as coming from an estate sale. It defers questions and creates a proper sense of gravitas.”
He lifts his brows so that Joe can admire the clear, unquestionable honesty in his gaze. He waits. And waits. And waits, looking just a little hurt. Finally—
“Drop them round to me this afternoon,” Joe says. Billy Friend grins and sticks out his hand to seal the deal. He pays the bill and collects a phone number from the waitress. Joe wraps the erotomaton in its tissue paper again, for transport.
“They miss you at the Night Market,” Billy informs him from the door to the street, “ask after you. It’s not the same without … well. You should come by.”
“No,” Joe Spork says. “I shouldn’t.”
And even Billy Friend doesn’t quarrel with that one.
A tugboat hoots out on the river. Joe Spork puts Billy to one side—bad news always finds you in the end—and picks a key from the trolley and walks moodily across the road and down a narrow, mean little alley to a padlocked gate, and through a gap between two buildings, and finally to a row of rusted and barnacled doors facing the river. Traitor’s gates, perhaps, or boathouses for very small boats. Or maybe, when the river was lower, nuclear-hardened bathing cabins. He has no idea. Ghost architecture, hanging on when the reason for it is past. Now, though, one of them stores the remaining bits of his past he doesn’t wish to think too much about. He opens the door once every few months to make sure the water hasn’t risen above the level of the little red splot of paint he marks on the wall each autumn, but aside from that he lets the place keep its secrets.
And secrets, undoubtedly, it has. One of the other doors, he happens to know, is not for storage at all, but dips down into an old ammunition dump, itself connected by a bit of Victorian sewer tunnel to a medieval crypt, which in turn gives on to a brewery. A man with an accurate map might walk from here to Blackheath, and never see the sun.
And somewhere down there, though he has never seen it, is the hallowed den where Mathew Spork prepared his first assaults on London’s banking community. In a vaulted room of red brick and York stone, Mathew first fired his Tommy gun and learned to ride its kick. The young Joe, raised on a steady diet of comic books and tall tales, imagined that his father held off a Russian army in the sewers, killed aliens and monsters, and kept London safe for small boys. Every day was the day Dutch Schultz and Murder Inc. fought it out at the Palace Chophouse, and every day Joe’s father came away unscathed. Through blazing, worshipful dreams, Mathew walked like a titan, wreathed in cordite smoke and glory.
Joe wonders, from time to time, where the gun is now. It sat for years in its case in Mathew’s study, and the son of the House of Spork was not permitted to touch it. He would stare, wide-eyed, as Mathew cleaned it, and sometimes made bullets for it. But the gun was not a thing to be played with, not ever, not even on high days or birthdays.
One day, son, I’ll teach you the proper way. But not today.
And never, as it turned out. Perhaps the gun is waiting down there, somewhere.
London is old, and each generation has added to its mysteries.
The door sticks, and he has to kick at it. Muck and more barnacles, and a splash as something alive makes itself scarce. A sign the river is getting cleaner. Mind you, that also means the door will rust faster. Oxygen, a bit of salt, and plenty of bacteria. He’ll have to come down here and replace it. Or he could let the Thames have its way, and see Daniel’s last bits and bobs go sailing away to Holland, and maybe walk a little lighter. Emptier, but lighter.
There’s a wind-up torch hanging from a peg at shoulder height. It amuses him that crank-handle torches are all the rage now. He made this one under Daniel’s supervision when he was nine. They even blew a bulb together, a glass balloon with a filament, pumped full of inert gas. This almost immediately exploded and had to be replaced with a commercial one.
The white lamplight picks out a mess of odds and ends: a china cow; a red and black molasses tin which Joe knows is full of decaying rubber bands; a terrifying marionette with all the strings cut. And there, on the far shelf, a stern, upright leather case in a clear plastic sack to protect it from the damp: Daniel’s record collection.
He takes it down and then, for reasons he does not fully understand, draws out one record at random and puts the rest of the collection back on the shelf. After a moment he extracts from his pockets two further items—recent acquisitions, both—and rests them next to the record bag.
This is absolute paranoia. Like checking under your car for bombs because there’s a bit of wiring on the tarmac.
He carries the record back to the warehouse under his coat.
The gramophone is a classic: horn in rich brown mahogany and body in inlaid oak, turntable covered in felt and chased in silver. Even the crank is beautiful. It took him months to repair it. The previous owner had had it stored in a loft full of bats.
He winds it slowly, because even in extremis and excitement you don’t hurry a lady. The needle is old, so he puts in a new one. Then he makes a cup of tea, and reads the sleeve notes. Slim Gaillard. Joe has heard of Slim Gaillard. Tall, arachnodactyl Slim, who drank a bottle of whisky with every show and smoked all night, and could play the piano with his hands upside down. Not, please note, with his hands crossed while he himself lay on the piano stool, but actually inverted, with his knuckles.
He puts the record on the felt, and brings down the needle.
Well, that’s not Slim Gaillard. That much I do know.
A woman’s voice, soft and old and filled with emotion. She is not English. French? Or something more exotic? He isn’t sure.
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
A bucket of ice water over his head and down his neck. Hairs on his arms like guilty nightwatchmen, all awake. Impossible, impossible. A dead woman’s voice. The dead woman. House of Spork’s very own family ghost, speaking to him. It has to be. Who else would apologise to Daniel Spork by pho
nograph recording, made in some tiny booth in Selfridges for a few Imperial pennies? Who else would Daniel conceal in this bizarre way, discarding brother Slim and moving the label to this record so that no one would ever know what he had?
Frankie.
“I’m so, so sorry. I could not stay. I have work. It is the greatest thing I have ever done. The most important. It will change the world. The truth, Daniel. I swear it: the truth shall set us free!” Rich, splendid, throaty. An Edith Piaf voice. An Eartha Kitt voice. A voice filled with all the passion and regret of a refugee, and all the certainty of a prophet.
“You must never tell. They will stop me. The thing I must do now … it will uproot so many old and rotted trees, and there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood. All the bows and arrows in the world are made of this, and I will bring it down. I will make us better than we are. We must be better than this!”
Joe waits for her to say “I love you,” but she doesn’t, and the other side of the record is blank, an endless white noise spatter, like rain on old cast-iron guttering.
III
Going postal;
amid the frills and bunting;
not your average music box.
Edie Banister is feeling like a cow. More, she is conscious of sin. Not in any fleshy way, alas, but in her heart. She has transgressed against Joshua Joseph Spork. She has, in fact, stitched him up like a kipper, albeit for the good of mankind and the betterment of the human race. She persuaded herself that it was not personal. That this was the best way. Now, gazing at the little toy soldier he repaired so deftly, and recalling the stifled disappointment on his face when he saw that that was all she proposed to show him, she feels wicked. She is increasingly certain that some part of her has borne a grudge for longer than J. Joseph Spork has been alive, and has chosen this method to revenge itself. Duty, love, idealism and spite all discharged at once. She contemplates her soul, and finds it wanting.
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