Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls (7 page)

“Four bloody inches,” the fattish bloke said. “Four bloody inches off my waistline.”

“How?” whispered Jim. “I mean, what happened, how?”

“It’s her voice. I knew it was true. The others didn’t believe me. They said it was just a rock legend. But I talked them into coming. I knew it was true, you see. I’d read all about the Gandhis and their Apocalypso Music”

“Slow down,” said Jim. “I don’t understand.”

“This was the incident. The one that started it all. And now I can say I was there. And if no one believes me” – the fattish bloke plucked at his trousers – “they’ll believe this, won’t they? My mum will be dead pleased. She’s always going on about me losing weight.”

“You knew this was going to happen.” Jim fought to make sense of it all. “You knew. How did you know?”

“Looked it up on Porkie.”

“What’s Porkie?”

“Its real name is SWINE. Single World Interfaced Network Engine. It pretty much runs the whole planet. Or did.”

“I’m losing this,” said Jim.

“Of course you are. But even if I told you all about it, you’d never believe me.”

“I’d give it a go.”

The fattish bloke turned to his friends, who were blissfully sniffing their armpits. “What do you think?” he asked them. “Should I tell him?”

The armpit-sniffers shrugged. One of them said, “What does it matter? We’ll all be off tomorrow.”

“Off?” said Jim.

“We’re going to Woodstock.”

“Woodstock?”

“Yeah. But never mind about that. Do you want me to tell you, or what?”

“Please tell me,” said Jim. “Tell me how you knew and tell me just what happened.”

“All right, I’ll tell you it all. I know I really shouldn’t, but as you tipped me off about John Lennon, I’ll tip you off about something in return. You might do us all a bit of good by knowing.”

“Geraldo,” said Jim. “It is Geraldo, isn’t it?”

“Was the last time I looked.”

“Geraldo, what do you mean about John Lennon?”

“You tipped me off that he didn’t die.”

“But he didn’t die.”

“No, but he should have done. And if he didn’t, it means that Wingarde’s been interfering again.”

“Curiously,” said Jim, “you’ve lost me once again. Who, in the name of whatever I hold holy, is Wingarde?”

“He’s a flash little hacker with a better rig than mine.”

“All becomes clear.”

“Does it?” asked Geraldo.

“No,” said Jim. “It does not.”

“Yeah, well don’t you worry about Wingarde. He might think he’s been really smart. But now that we know what he’s done, we’ll sneak back and put it right.”

“Put it right?” said Jim.

“See that John Lennon bites the bullet, as it were.”

“Eh?” said Jim, and, “What?”

“Well, we can hardly leave things as they stand, can we?”

“Can’t you?”

“Certainly not. And wasn’t that Elvis I heard on the barman’s sound system?”

Pooley nodded. “It was,” he said.

“Bloody Wingarde again,” said one of Geraldo’s cronies.

“Look,” said Jim. “Just stop. Just stop right there and here and now. Just tell me simply and in a manner that will not confuse me.”

“What?” Geraldo asked.

“Just who the frigging hell you are.”

“We’re fanboys,” said Geraldo. “Surely you can work that out.”

“Fanboys,” said Jim. “You’re just fanboys.”

“Well, not
just
fanboys. We’re rather special fanboys, as it happens.”

“And just how special might that be?”

“We’re fanboys from the future,” said Geraldo.

Don was a dead or dying duck.

The last of the final few.

The fowl of the air

Weren’t anywhere,

And there weren’t no rabbits too.

There were not even tiny frogs,

Nor jumping moles and that.

There barked no dogs

Or ’ollered ’ogs,

Nor sang no sing-song cat.

What now of your jovial toad?

Or ferret so fecund?

The pig on the road

Has done his load,

Like the swans on the village pund.
[6]

All alone was Dead Eye Don

Whom quacked for all him worth.

And out somewhere

In that final air

The last quack on the Earth.

Bye bye, Don.

Goodnight, everyone.

Goodnight.

Being the professional he was, Neville took it like a manly man. He didn’t flinch and he didn’t tremble. He didn’t even break out in a sweat.

He would later admit in his bestselling autobiography,
Same Again: The Confessions of a Full-Time Part-Time Barman
, that the incident had shaken him severely and that he was never the same man ever again, be that manly or not.

It had shaken others who’d witnessed it, but none so deeply as Neville, who’d had to slip away afterwards and sit down quietly and dab his wrists with lemon juice and pray.

But then it
had
come as a terrible shock and the more Neville thought about it, the more inclined was he to believe that it couldn’t actually have happened at all.

But it had.

It really had.

Jim Pooley
had
walked into the Flying Swan in the company of twelve sweetly smelling young men in black T-shirts and shorts and he really-truly-really-really-truly
had
stood them
all
a round of drinks.

Thirteen pints of Large and all purchased by Pooley.

No wonder Neville would wake up in the night, all cold sweats and screaming.

And it wasn’t just the matter of the purchasing of all those pints. It was that in the shock of it all, Neville had committed a cardinal sin. He had forgotten about the Swan’s dress code, which forbade the wearing of shorts in the saloon bar. He would never live
that
down at future Lodge meetings. The brothers of the
Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout
would make him the butt of many a bitter joke.

But it had happened.

It really truly had.

“Cheers, Neville,” said Pooley, accepting his change and, to the part-time barman’s further horror, thrusting the coins straight into his pocket without even bothering to count them.

Neville slipped off for that quiet sit-down. Pooley led Geraldo to a table.

“It’s a nice pub, this,” said the fattish bloke, seating himself upon a comfy cushion. “Very quiet, very sedate.”

“And the finest beer in Brentford.” Jim raised his glass and sipped from it. “Which is to say, probably the best beer in the world.”

“It’s not at all bad.” Geraldo took a mighty swig. “Although last week I had a beer in a New Orleans bar with Robert Johnson—”

“
The
Robert Johnson?”

“
The
Robert Johnson.”

“Who died in nineteen thirty-seven.”

“You know your bluesmen, Jim.”

“And so, apparently, do you. But listen, Geraldo. I’ve bought you the beer and so I’d like to hear the story. On the understanding, of course, that it is now beyond the ten o’clock watershed.”

“What is the ten o’clock watershed?” Geraldo asked.

“It is that time of the night when men in bars who have sufficient alcohol inside them begin the telling of tall tales, which generally conclude with the words ‘and that’s the God’s honest truth, I’m telling you’. This is considered acceptable social behaviour in bars. It’s a tradition, or an old charter—”

“Or something,” said Geraldo. “I get the picture.”

“And,” Jim continued. “Those who listen to such tall tales never ever respond by saying, ‘You are a lying git.’”

“Even if they are?” Geraldo asked.

“Even if they are.”

“Very civilized,” Geraldo said. “But what I’m going to say is the God’s honest truth, I’m telling you.”

“You’re supposed to say that at the end. But never mind, just please tell me your story.”

“Right.” Geraldo took another pull upon his pint and finished it. “I’d like another one of these,” he said.

“
After
you’ve told your tale.”

“Right.” Geraldo set down his empty glass and rubbed his podgy hands together. “Where to start. OK, I’ll start at the end, because that’s where it all began.”

Jim sighed inwardly. So far not so good, he thought.

“
The end
,” said Geraldo, “came about at precisely ten seconds after the ninth minute of the eighth hour of the seventh day of the sixth week of the fifth month of the year four thousand, three hundred and twenty-one. The scientists at the Institute confirmed this and that made it OFFICIAL.

“Ten – nine – eight – seven – six – five – four – three – two – one. That was zero hour, you see.”

“I don’t,” said Jim. “But I do see a flaw in the calculations.”

“Then well spotted, Jim. The scientists didn’t spot it, however. But whether that has any bearing on how things worked out I’m not sure. Now, I’m going to tell you what happened in the form of a story. I’ll do all the voices and when I describe each character I’ll do it in verse.”

“Why?” Jim asked.

“Because I’m a bit of a poet.”

Jim sighed outwardly this time.

“And I wasn’t actually there when it all happened. But I watched and heard it all, because I’d hacked into the closed-circuit surveillance video at Institute Tower. I was hooked into Porkie, you see.”

“The Single World Interfaced Network Engine?”

“The very same. So just sit back and drink your beer and I will tell the tale.”

And so saying, Geraldo told Jim the tale. Doing all the voices and describing the characters in verse.

The tale had chapters and titles and everything.

And this is how it went.

It was a conclave and a cabal. A council and a conference.

They were a synod of scientists. A bothering of boffins.

Top of the tree, these fellows were, in the fields of their endeavour. The back-room boys with the front-room minds and the lofty aspirations.

The year was 4321. It was early on a Sunday morning. It was rather later than it should have been in May.

The conclave and the cabal was held in the big posh high-domed solar lounge at the top of Institute Tower.

The tower itself was a monumental cylinder of pale pink plasti-glass, which thrust from the Earth like a raging stonker and buried its big knob end in the clouds. It was a testament to technology, a standing stone to science.

It was an architect’s vision.

The architect was a man.

The scientists were all men, of course. There had never been a lot of room for girlies in science. And so, on this very special day, there were four of them present and these were the last men who worked in the tower. These were the final four.

A thousand years before, when it was first constructed, the tower had housed hundreds of the buggers. Buzzing around like albino bees, with their white coats and their clipboards in their hands. They scratched at their unkempt barnets with the butt-ends of Biros. Chalked calculations on bloody big blackboards. Drank lots of coffee from styrofoam cups and wore those atrocious ties with little cartoons of Einstein, which folk always give to scientists for Christmas and scientists always wear to show what jolly chaps they are.

Those had been the days, my friends.

But those days were all gone.

Now there were only four of them left and soon these four would be gone, like the days had been gone. So to speak.

It was all down to knowledge, you see. For it was knowledge that had brought about THE END.

The director of the Institute was Dr Vincent Trillby. He was a man of considerable knowledge and, as it was he who had called the conclave into being, he was the first man to speak.

Though not as tall as bigger men

He didn’t lack for height.

His chest was trim

And his hips were slim

And there wasn’t a pimple in sight.

His eyes were grey

As a cloudy day,

And he carried himself in a confident way.

He was dapper and sleek

And when he rose to speak

He was rarely obscure. He was never oblique.

“Gentlemen,” said Dr Vincent Trillby, rising from his antique chromium chair and casting a grey’n over his three colleagues, who sat about the black obsidian-topped table. “Gentlemen, we all know why we’re here. It’s a regrettable business, but we all knew it had to happen eventually. The final papers are in. The calculations cross-check. The big clock on the wall is counting down and when the long hand reaches the tenth second past the ninth minute that will be it. THE END.

“And that’s OFFICIAL.”

The three men mumbled and grumbled and shifted in their chairs and drummed their fingers on the tabletop. They didn’t like this at all. But they all knew that it had to happen one of these days and they all knew that the calculations had to be correct.

After all, the calculations were Porkie’s and Porkie’s calculations were always correct.

“Gentlemen, the clock.”

The three men turned their eyes towards the clock and watched the final seconds tick away, tick tick tick, the way those seconds do. The long hand crept around the face, reached the tenth second past the ninth minute.

And then stopped.

“So that’s it,” said Dr Vincent Trillby. “THE END. Not with a bang, nor even a whimper, just with a big full stop. And not even a big one. But that’s it, gentlemen, our job here is done and I’m away to the golf course. Don’t forget to clear your desks before you go and the last man out please switch off the lights.”

Following a moment of rather bewildered silence, a plump hand rose shakily into the air-conditioned air.

“Blashford,” said Dr Vincent Trillby. “You have some apposite remark you wish to favour us with?”

“Something like that, sir, yes.”

“Onto your fat little feet then, lad, spit the fellow out.”

Blashford rose, a podgy youth.

A lover of women, a lover of truth.

The top of his class in advanced trigonometry.

Branches of physics and snappy geometry.

Though rather sweaty down under the arms

He was popular due to his eloquent charms.

And his optimism.

“Dr Trillby,” he said, in a polite and measured tone. “Dr Trillby, I am aware, as we all are, that this is THE END. There is no room left for doubt. If I might, perhaps, liken science to a lady’s silken undergarment. I, for one, would not expect to find the skidmark of error soiling its gusset. We, as the last men of science, know that everything that could possibly be achieved has now been achieved. That science has finally advanced to a point beyond which it cannot go. That all that can be done has been done. That—”

“Is there some point to this, Blashford?” Dr Trillby mimed golf swings. “Because I can hear the fairway calling.”

“Dr Trillby.” Blashford toyed with his tie. It had little cartoons of Einstein all over it. “Dr Trillby, sir. I do have to ask you this.”

“Well go ahead, lad, do.”

“Dr Trillby, what does it mean?”

“Mean, lad? Mean? It means that it’s THE END. That’s what it means. Mankind has come to a full stop. There can be no further progress. You said it yourself. All that can be done has been done. Everything.”

“If I might just slip a word in here.”

Clovis Garnett rose to speak.

Clovis with his fiery mane.

Clovis with his ruddy cheek.

Clovis with his ankle chain.

Clovis with his bright red blazer.

Clovis with his bright red tie
[7]
.

Clovis sharp as any laser.

Fixed them with his cherry eye.

“I think, sir, what Fatty Blashford is trying to ask—”

“Oi!” cried Blashford. “Enough of that fatty talk.”

“What our esteemed and magnificently proportioned colleague is trying to ask—”

“That’s more like it,” said Blashford. “Nice tie, by the way.”

“What he is trying to ask,” said Clovis, “is: what happens next?”

“Nothing,” said Dr Trillby. “Nothing happens next. That’s the whole point of THE END. Nothing happens after it. Nothing
can
happen after it.”

“You’ll be playing golf,” said Blashford. “That will be happening.”

Clovis sniggered. “There’s nothing very happening about golf,” said he. “Golf was never a happening thing.”

Dr Trillby sighed. “All right,” he said. “I know it’s Sunday and I know it’s early in the morning and I know this is all very upsetting for you. So, as a special favour, I will run through it all just the one more time and then I am off to play golf.”

Three pairs of eyes, two pairs blue and one pair red, fixed upon Dr Trillby. Dr Trillby spoke.

“We have all read the Holy Writ of Saint Charles Darwin,” he said. “
On the Origin of Species
has been taught in every classroom and preached from every pulpit for nearly two thousand years. Mankind evolved, through the Will of God, by means of natural selection. Had natural selection continued, mankind would have continued to evolve. Into what? Who can say. A race of gods, perhaps. But the point is moot. Mankind did not continue to evolve. And for why? Because of science.

“During the latter part of the twentieth century and the earlier part of that following, natural selection ceased. Advances in medicine, food production, welfare, genetic modification,
science
, saw to it that
all
survived. Not just the fittest. But
all
.

“No more survival of the fittest. No more evolution.

“So, as human evolution had ceased, it became inevitable that the human race would one day reach a cut-off point. When mankind had finally achieved everything it was capable of achieving; when every book had been written, every piece of music composed; everything capable of invention invented; everything that could be accomplished accomplished. The lot. The entire caboodle. All. There is now nothing that anyone can think of that hasn’t been thought of before. It has all been done. Everything. We have reached THE END.

“And with that all said,
again
, would any of you now redundant fellows care to join me for a round of golf?”

“I have a question,” said Blashford.

“Perhaps you do, lad. But not one that hasn’t been asked before.”

“But what if
I
thought of something new?”

“You can’t, lad. There is nothing new that can be thought of.”