The Fandom of the Operator

by Robert Rankin

  ‘Fifteen seconds.’

  ‘It’s been nice knowing you,’ said Dave to me. ‘Would you have any objections if I just ran outside with my hands up, before the tactical missile strikes home?’

  I shrugged. ‘No, I suppose not. I’m just sorry that we didn’t have longer. We could have had one of those deep and meaningful conversations about the nature of friendship, with flashbacks to our childhood and stuff like that, like they do in the movies.’

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Dave. ‘Sorry there’s no time to shake your hand, but––’

  ‘Five seconds.’

  ‘That was a bit quick.’

  ‘Three…two…one…’

  And then there was this incredible explosion.

  Half the side of the café came down. Chairs and tables rocketed towards us, borne by the force; pictures were torn from the walls; light fittings and fixtures shattered and toppled. There was tomato sauce everywhere. And mayonnaise, in those little hard-to-open sachets. And amidst all the force and the dust and the mashing and mayhem a voice called out to me. And the voice called: ‘Come with me if you want to live.’

  I looked up and Sandra looked down, from the cab of the white transit van.

  ‘Hurry up!’ she shouted. ‘My head nearly came off driving through that wall.’

  Dave and I scrambled from the rubble and scrambled some more into the transit. Sandra reversed it out at the hurry-up.

  ‘Zero!’ came the loud-hailer voice.

  And then there was a real explosion.

  22

  I was really impressed with Sandra. That was genuine loyalty. That was love. That is what marriages are all about. And she drove very well for a woman. Especially a dead one. She managed to mow down at least three policemen as we left the car park. And a couple of civilians who were looking on.

  Which served them right for being so nosy.

  ‘I’m really impressed,’ I said to Sandra, as she put her foot down and we sped away. ‘That was genuine loyalty. That was love. That is what marriages are all about.’

  ‘Sandra not do it for Masser Gary,’ said Sandra. ‘Sandra do it for Dave. Him great lover. Him has always been.’

  ‘The woman’s over-excited,’ said Dave. ‘She did it for you. She really did. Didn’t you Sandra? You did it for Gary. Who won’t put your head in the fridge any more. Or possibly rip it off and stamp on it, if he thought that you hadn’t done it for him.’

  ‘I did it for you, Masser Gary,’ said Sandra. ‘Sandra love Masser Gary.’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ said Dave.

  ‘I’m upset by this,’ I said to Dave, fishing a London A-Z from the glove compartment. ‘Now, which way to Mornington Crescent?’

  And then we heard the police sirens.

  ‘Best put your foot down, Sandra,’ said Dave.

  ‘Oi!’ I said. ‘I’ll order the zombie. Foot down, Sandra, now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Dave. ‘No offence meant.’

  ‘None taken, I assure you.’

  They came up on us fast. But a transit is a transit and a police car is only a police car. We had one of them off the road at the roundabout and another into a row of parked cars soon after. Which left us only the helicopter.

  ‘It’s a helicopter!’ shouted Dave. ‘We’ll never be able to lose that.’

  ‘To the nearest underground station,’ I said. ‘We’ll take the tube.’

  ‘But we need a van for the booty.’

  ‘We’ll improvise when the time comes. To the nearest tube station, Sandra, and step on it.’

  ‘Yes, Masser Gary,’ said Sandra, bless her little heart. Charred though it was, in a burned-out cab in Chiswick.

  Now happily for us, the nearest tube station was Earls Court. And since there are loads of different lines that run through Earls Court, the police wouldn’t know which one we were getting on. So they wouldn’t know which train to shut down in which tunnel. Which meant we were safe for now.

  ‘Three singles to Mornington Crescent,’ said Dave to the chap in the ticket office.

  ‘Get real,’ said the chap.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Dave.

  ‘Three singles to Mornington Crescent. Do I look like a complete twonker?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dave. ‘But what has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘It has to do with the fact that Mornington Crescent station is closed for repairs.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dave. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since 1945.’

  ‘You blokes on the transport don’t rush yourselves with repairs, do you?’

  ‘We’re very thorough. We have the public’s safety always in the forefront of our minds.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Dave, ‘what line is Mornington Crescent on?’

  ‘The Northern line,’ said the chap.

  ‘And what’s the nearest station to it, on that line?’

  ‘Euston,’ said the chap.

  ‘Three singles to there, then.’

  ‘Righty right,’ said the chap. ‘But just one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Dave.

  ‘The woman with you, the one with the wonky head that doesn’t seem to match her body––’

  ‘What about her?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Why is she stark bollard naked?’ asked the chap.

  ‘She’s a naturist,’ said Dave. And he paid up for the tickets. Yes, well, I suppose that I should have had Dave nick some clothes for Sandra when he nicked some trousers for me from the fashionable boutique. But I can’t be expected to think of everything.

  I must confess that we didn’t exactly blend in with all the other commuters. People kept looking at Sandra.

  And, frankly, I found that rather offensive. Blokes eyeing up my missus. I felt that I should take issue with them. Possibly make an example of one.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Dave, who apparently read my mind. ‘We’ll change from the District line at Embankment. Then we’ll travel with the driver.’

  ‘Do they let you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dave. ‘But we’ll sort it.’

  At Embankment, we changed onto the Northern line. We got into the first carriage and Dave knocked on the driver’s door. ‘Inspector!’ called Dave. ‘Could I have a word?’

  The driver opened the door. We pushed our way into his cab.

  ‘Get out!’ shouted the driver. ‘You’re not allowed in here.’

  ‘Deal with the driver, Gary,’ said Dave.

  ‘Aaagh!’ went the driver. ‘It’s Cheese the psycho killer. I saw you on TV.’

  I dealt sternly with that driver. And then I turned to Dave. ‘He recognized me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s hardly surprising,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yeah, but no one else on the trains we’ve been on seemed to recognize me. How do you account for that?’

  ‘I think Sandra might have distracted them.’

  ‘Oh yeah. So what are we going to do now?’

  ‘You’re going to drive the train and stop it at Mornington Crescent.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to drive a train.’

  ‘Sandra know,’ said Sandra.

  ‘You do?’ I said.

  ‘All middle-class girls taught how to drive trains at prep school,’ said Sandra.

  ‘Eh?’ said I.

  ‘In case society collapse. If revolution come. All middle-class girls taught everything. How to drive trains, run power stations, run government, everything.’

  ‘I didn’t know this,’ I said.

  ‘That because you working class. Working class know nothing. Get taught nothing at school. Kept ignorant, kept under control.’

  ‘This is a bit of a revelation,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ said Dave. ‘Mr Trubshaw told me all about this conspiracy-theory stuff in Strangeways. He said nothing in society is actually what it seems. The whole thing is a big con.’

  ‘I’d like to hear more,’ I said, ‘but the commuters will soon b
e banging on the door demanding to know why the train isn’t moving.’

  ‘You don’t travel much on the tube, do you, Gary?’ said Dave.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head, and wiping the driver’s blood from my hands.

  ‘Well, trust me, the commuters won’t notice any difference. Now, Sandra, please drive the train to Mornington Crescent.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ I said. And I told her.

  There was something altogether weird about Mornington Crescent. As Sandra drew the train to a halt, Dave and I stared out at it. The lights were on, but no one was at home. Nor, it seemed, had anyone been home since the end of the Second World War. There were all these wartime war-effort posters on the walls, and others for Bovril and Bisto and Doveston’s steam-driven wonder beds.

  ‘What about the commuters?’ I asked Dave. ‘We can’t let them all out here.’

  ‘We’ll leave through the driver’s door, directly onto the platform,’ said Dave. ‘Why not stick the driver’s hand down on the deadman’s handle and send the train on to other parts?’

  ‘But it might crash,’ I said.

  Dave raised an eyebrow to me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what came over me there.’

  We got out of the driver’s door, I dumped all of the driver down on the deadman’s handle and Sandra set the train back in motion. And we watched as the train gathered speed and left the station.

  ‘There,’ said Dave. ‘Job done.’

  ‘You’re pretty quick on your feet, aren’t you?’ I said to Dave.

  ‘Have to be,’ said Dave. ‘In my business, you always have to be thinking one step ahead.’

  ‘If you’re so smart,’ I said, ‘how come you’re always getting caught?’

  ‘Because,’ said Dave, ‘I may be smart, but there’s always some-one smarter. In my case it’s Inspectre Hovis of Scotland Yard and that’s now in your case too. So if we wish to outsmart him, we should both get on with the business at hand, rather than stand around here making chitchat.’

  ‘Lead on, Dave,’ said I. ‘Take us to the booty.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t exactly know the way from here. I sort of knew the way from a secret tunnel that Churchill told me about, but I don’t think it’s anywhere around here. We’ll have to work this out together.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘At least the lights are on. Let’s go and explore.’

  So we went and explored.

  Mornington Crescent didn’t smell too good. It smelled musty and lifeless, as if no one had breathed the air there for years. Nor was supposed to.

  ‘It feels really odd here,’ said Dave, as we wandered down the big tiled corridors. ‘Unworldly. Do you know what I mean?’

  I nodded. And I remembered too. All this reminded me of something. Something I’d felt a long time before. ‘It’s like those crypts,’ I said. ‘The ones I used to crawl into in the graveyard when I was a child. They felt like this. Like you weren’t supposed to be in them. Which you weren’t.’

  ‘Station dead,’ said Sandra. ‘All dead here. Sandra know, Sandra dead too.’

  ‘Don’t go putting yourself down,’ said Dave. ‘You’re more alive than half the people I know.’

  ‘Thank you, Dave,’ said Sandra. ‘Sandra love Masser Dave.’

  ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Sandra say, “Sandra love Masser Gary,”’ said Sandra.

  ‘Hm,’ said I.

  ‘There’s a light up ahead,’ said Dave. ‘Big light. Big something, by the look of it.’

  ‘Sssh,’ said I.

  ‘What?’ said Dave.

  ‘I hear people,’ I said. And we crept forward. We emerged from the tiled corridor onto a kind of gantry at the top of an iron staircase. And we found ourselves looking down onto something that was altogether big.

  ‘What the Holy big Jackus is that?’ whispered Dave as he and I and Sandra stared down together.

  It was big, and when I say it was big I mean what I say. It was like some vast aircraft-hangar sort of arrangement and there were.

  ‘Flying saucers,’ whispered Dave. ‘Tell me that those aren’t flying saucers.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘They are.’

  And they were. There was an entire squadron of them. Polished chromium craft. The classic Adamski shape. Discs with a raised central area, ringed around with little portholes.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what I was expecting,’ said Dave, ‘but I don’t think it was this.’

  ‘I thought you said that it was the Germans who had the alien technology in the war.’

  ‘Yeah, but the Germans lost the war. Oh shug! Look at them.’

  I looked and I saw. Little grey men with big egg heads moving around the flying saucers.

  ‘Aliens,’ I said. ‘Well, I suppose that where you get UFOs you’re bound to get aliens.’

  ‘Sandra no want to see aliens,’ said Sandra. ‘Sandra afeared of aliens.’

  ‘Why do they scare you?’ I asked her.

  ‘We leave,’ said Sandra. ‘Leave now. Go back. Take Sandra back, Masser Gary.’

  ‘We’re staying,’ I said. ‘I want to find out what’s going on here.’

  ‘Sandra go. Sandra cannot stay.’

  ‘Face the wall,’ I told Sandra. ‘Stand still. Dave and I will go and have a look around. Don’t move until we come back.’

  Sandra turned slowly and faced the wall.

  Dave looked at me and I didn’t like the way that he did it.

  ‘Problem?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dave. ‘Nothing. What do you want to do?’

  ‘You’re the criminal mastermind; you tell me.’

  ‘Creep down, have a shifty around, see what we can see, hear what we can hear, nick what we can nick.’

  ‘Good plan,’ I said. ‘Sandra, stay.’

  ‘Sandra stay,’ said Sandra.

  ‘Good girl,’ I said. ‘We won’t be long. We hope.’

  Dave and I crept down the iron staircase. It was a very long staircase and there were a lot of stairs, but presently we found ourselves at the bottom of them.

  Dave looked back up the way we had come. ‘We have a problem here,’ he said. ‘I can’t see us being able to carry too much booty up all those steps.’

  ‘There’ll be another way out. Now, let me see, there’s something we need if we’re not going to be noticed.’

  ‘Cloaks of invisibility?’ Dave suggested. ‘You are strong with spells today?’

  ‘No, Dave. White coats and light bulbs, that’s all we need.’

  ‘Okey pokey,’ said Dave and we set out in search of them.

  Now, if there was one thing that I was certain of it was that, in places such as this, there is always a locker room where you can slip into a white coat or a radiation suit or something. At least there always is in James Bond films.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dave, pointing to a door. ‘This will be the kiddie.’

  I perused the sign upon the door. WHITE COAT AND LIGHT BULB STORE, it read.

  ‘After you,’ said Dave.

  ‘No, after you.’

  ‘No, after you.’

  ‘Oh, please yourself, then.’ And I pushed open the door and went inside.

  And suddenly, for there was no warning at all, I found myself falling and falling into a bottomless pit of whirling oblivion.

  Which is what Lazlo Woodbine used to fall into at the end of the second chapter of each of his thrillers, when the dame that done him wrong bopped him over the head.

  Which might have been all right for Laz, but it certainly wasn’t for me.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!’ I went.

  And then things went very black indeed and that was that for me.

  23

  I awoke with undoubtedly the worst hangover I have ever had in my life. There is no mistaking a hangover. You can’t pass it off as a migraine. It hurts like the very bejabers and there’s no one to blame but yourself.

  I made dismal groaning sounds
of the ‘I must have had a really, really good time last night’ variety and felt about for that elusive something-or-other that folk with hangovers always feel about for when they awaken in this terrible state.

  But then I became aware that I couldn’t seem to feel about for anything, as my hands wouldn’t move at all. I opened a bleary eye and viewed my immediate surroundings. At first glance they didn’t look too good. On second glance they looked worse.

  It appeared as if I was strapped into some kind of large chair. I tried to move my head, but found that I couldn’t. I tried to move my feet, but this was not, as they say, ‘a happening thing’.

  I did some more glancing, just to make sure that the conclusions I had drawn from my previous glancings were not mistaken. No, it seemed that they were not.

  I was in a small, rather surgical-looking room, with walls to either side of me and a glass screen in front. And beyond the glass screen I could see another room, larger than mine and all decked out with rows of chairs. Upon these chairs I could make out a number of people, some of them strange to my eyes, but others most familiar.

  Amongst the familiar persuasion, I spied out my mother, weeping into a handkerchief. And beside her my brother, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly ten years. And there were several of my mother’s friends. And there was a long thin man in Boleskine tweed: Chief Inspectre Hovis, he was. And there was Dave and sitting beside Dave, being comforted by Dave with an arm about the shoulder, was Sandra. She was dressed rather smartly in black and her face was well made up.

  I began to struggle, as one would, and I did, but sadly to no avail whatsoever. So I decided that shouting would be the thing to do. But I couldn’t shout because my mouth was gagged by what felt to be a strip of adhesive tape. So I made ferocious grunting noises and struggled and struggled. And then a rather brutal-looking individual in the shape of a large prison officer appeared in my line of vision and menaced me with a truncheon.

  ‘Shut it, loony boy,’ said this fellow. ‘Or you’ll get one in the ‘nads with this stick.’

  I quietened myself, but with difficulty. I felt truly panicked. How had I ended up here? Wherever here was, it looked awfully like an execution chamber. And how come I had a hangover? I hadn’t been drinking. I’d been falling. Oh yes, I remembered that – falling into a dark whirling pit of oblivion. I confess that I was confused.