Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  The younger, smaller skinhead had paused halfway to the front door to turn and puke all over his brother. There was suddenly vomit all down the brother’s jeans and spattering copiously onto his gleaming boots. His brother stared at him in horror, then at himself in even greater horror, then dragged him away. We heard the distant tortured screech of a rusty tap being wrenched open, then the sluggish juddering of water pipes in the wall.

  They had gone around the corner of the house and were using a hose to wash themselves down. We heard them splashing as we crept out the front door, a sound weirdly reminiscent of children’s summer parties and inflatable paddling pools, though those would be without the steady stream of frenzied cursing. We hurried across the driveway and took shelter safely behind the barn.

  While they were occupied cleaning up, we got out of there. We walked through the fields back to where we’d left the car. The sun was high now and the birds were singing. “By the way,” said Nevada. “I was being unfair to the hotel. Their roast beef was really good. Or at least it looked really good. I couldn’t eat a bite because you’d disappeared and I was too worried about you.” We stopped walking and kissed.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For saving my life.”

  “Always a pleasure. I had them put the roast beef in a doggy bag for us. Plus the vegetables. All the trimmings.”

  * * *

  Back at the hotel, we discovered that Tinkler and Clean Head had arrived. When I’d gone missing Nevada had asked them to join us as soon as possible, and they’d got here a couple of hours ago and had been waiting tensely in the hotel for us to return ever since.

  Nevada had already phoned them with an account of what had happened, and Clean Head and Tinkler looked at me like a man who had risen from the grave.

  Which in a way I suppose I was.

  It only took a few seconds, though, for Tinkler to return to form. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “You know they put that roast beef dinner in a doggy bag for you last night when you couldn’t eat it? Well, I have a confession to make.”

  “He’s eaten it,” said Clean Head, succinctly.

  “It was delicious,” said Tinkler.

  “That’s really not on, Tinkler,” said Nevada crossly. “Because both of us are ravenous. And we were looking forward to that fucking roast beef dinner. And my beloved here nearly died.”

  “I’ll make it up to him. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  “Breakfast is not the same.”

  “I’ll pour syrup on things for you. The bacon will be crispy. My god, now I’m making myself hungry.”

  “Not again,” said Clean Head. “Not already.”

  “It must be all this sex I’ve been having,” said Tinkler.

  “Oh, please,” said Clean Head. “No need for details.”

  Tinkler beamed at me, looking a little manic. “And just think,” he said, “now you can go on having sex, too, because you’re not dead.”

  “There is that,” I said.

  “That’s the crucial thing. Not being dead.”

  “Profound words.”

  Tinkler looked at Nevada. “By the way, what if he hadn’t been in the sett? I mean you cold-cocked the guy on the tractor and everything.”

  “Cold-cocked him?”

  “Knocked him unconscious. What if you’d looked in the hole and found he wasn’t in there?” Tinkler glanced at me. “What if it was just badgers?”

  “Then at least I would have saved some poor badgers,” said Nevada.

  We ate breakfast in the beer garden and then drove back to London.

  “They were setting you up,” said Tinkler in the backseat. “Do you get it? Setting you up…?”

  “Shut up, Tinkler.”

  “All right.”

  He was silent for a moment then leaned forward again. “If Nevada hadn’t got there in time, it would have been game, sett and match.”

  “Tinkler, shut the fuck up.”

  30. NATIONAL NEWS

  To Nevada’s delight, the story made the national news. We heard it on the car radio driving back to London.

  “Responding to a telephone tip-off, police in Gloucestershire have today raided a farmhouse, seizing a large cache of illegal firearms. A substantial quantity of contraband cigarettes were also found. Police sources say they believe the weapons may have been used in a number of recent high-profile crimes. Two men have been arrested.”

  “Amazing what you can do with one little anonymous call,” said Nevada happily. I was equally pleased at the thought of those two jokers cooling their heels in a police cell somewhere. The report went on to identify the men as brothers and name them as Carroll and Vivian Weston.

  I noted the girlie names and wondered if they had spent a lifetime being mercilessly teased about them. Was it a reaction against that that had put them on the path to fascist thuggery?

  Tinkler dropped us off at our house and then drove home to Putney, presumably to an emotional reunion with Opal. We went inside and as soon as I was through the door I had an emotional reunion of my own; the cats were all over me. I managed to sit down on the sofa with them both struggling to climb into my lap, sniffing at me eagerly. Nevada stared at us.

  “They’re behaving so strangely towards you. Isn’t it extraordinary? It’s as if they know what happened. They must be able to sense that something terrible almost happened to you.”

  I said, “Either that or they can smell the badgers.”

  Eventually I managed to detach myself from the worshipful cats and went and took a shower. I stood under the hot cleansing spray and just let it wash everything away. I stood there for so long that Nevada knocked on the door to see if I was all right. I said I was. Finally I turned off the shower, towelled myself dry and put on a bathrobe.

  I sat in the living room while Nevada made coffee, and I tried to summon the energy to ring Joan Honeyland and report on recent events. It was going to be a long report. At length, I sighed and reached for the phone and, as I did so, it started to ring. I picked it up.

  It was Tinkler.

  He said, “Opal said to tell you she spoke to the barmaid.”

  “What barmaid?”

  “Did those badgers destroy your brain? Do you remember the Silk Stockings Murder? Opal’s great-grandmother dead in a beer barrel? The mystery man and the bottle of drugged whisky?”

  I did remember. “And she spoke to the barmaid again?”

  “Yes. She asked that question that you asked her to ask.”

  This, I didn’t remember. “What question was that?”

  “I really do think those badgers did something to you.”

  “There weren’t actually any badgers in the sett with me. They had very sensibly vacated it for the evening.”

  “Well, we’ve been reading about badgers. Opal and I. She’s fascinated. Because of your recent experience we are thinking of painting one on the van.”

  “We?”

  “That’s right,” said Tinkler. “Opal and I are thinking of painting a badger on the van. Maybe two badgers. One by day and one by night. Anyway, we’ve been researching them and apparently they even have toilets, special badger toilets, among the chambers in the sett. Did you find the badger toilet?”

  I sighed. “No, Tinkler, I didn’t find the badger toilet.”

  “And apparently they take their bedding, which is made of hay, straw, bracken and grass, up onto the surface to air out and be cleaned by the sunlight.”

  “Yes, it was pretty clean. It smelled all right.”

  “So you don’t think you’ve lost your memory because of exposure to toxic badger poo? I think it’s still a strong possibility.”

  “Tinkler, remind me why you rang?”

  “You see what I mean?”

  I sighed. “What did the barmaid tell Opal?”

  “Well, you remember—or perhaps you don’t—that the barmaid never got a good look at the mystery man’s face. But you said she must have heard his voice. And Opal
said she’d ask about that.”

  I remembered now. I was all ears. “And what did she say?”

  “She said he sounded posh.”

  “Posh?”

  “Yes.”

  After Tinkler had hung up I sat there, staring at the phone.

  I didn’t ring Miss Honeyland. Instead I went and looked through the pile of clothes I’d taken off, which were in a plastic basket in the spare room waiting to be washed. I dug through my pockets and took out the pamphlet. The one that had been used as a bookmark in Mein Kampf.

  The Crucial Racial Question. I studied the cover with the crude cartoon of an insect depicted on it.

  The insect was, of course, a locust.

  * * *

  “These are very good,” said Toba Possner, looking through the photos. “These will do very well.” They were colour photographs that Nevada had printed off our computer, featuring our cats. Perhaps not surprisingly, we had quite a few photographs of the two of them stored on our hard drive.

  “I’m glad you like them,” said Nevada, leaning forward eagerly. The three of us were sat in Toba’s tiny front room in her flat in Chelsea, which meant all our knees were virtually touching. “I tried to choose the best ones.”

  “They’re lovely. The colours are excellent. Look at those exquisite turquoise eyes.”

  “That’s her name, actually, Turquoise. We call her Turk for short.”

  “And their coats as well. Lovely markings. I shall be able to make great use of the interplay of the colour of their coats, the way I juxtapose them in the composition according to their posture and the way they are lying against each other, the contrast of their markings as they follow the contours of their bodies.”

  She set the photographs aside and looked at us shrewdly. “But that isn’t what you came here to talk to me about, is it? Commissioning a portrait of your cats?”

  Nevada looked at me. “Ah, not exclusively, no.”

  I said, “Do you remember showing us the clipping that Lucky Honeyland gave you before you started work on the illustrations for his book?”

  She looked at us steadily with her strange pale brown eyes. “Yes, of course. The one he gave me as a guide. Do you want to see it again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She went to the filing cabinet and took out the manila folder, extracting the fragment of coloured paper from it. She handed it to me. I was already holding the pamphlet I’d stolen from the farmhouse. I took the fragment and placed it on the cover.

  It seemed to vanish, blending in with the background.

  A perfect match.

  I turned the fragment over and opened the pamphlet and repeated the process with the inside front cover, but it was already a foregone conclusion. Another perfect match. “So you found where that clipping came from?” said Toba. “That was clever of you. I’ve always wondered where Mr Honeyland got that image. I’ve been wondering about it, on and off, now and then, for the better part of my life. May I look?”

  I hesitated. “Of course you can,” I said. “But I’d better warn you that it’s the most virulently anti-Semitic propaganda you can imagine.”

  She smiled at me. “You wouldn’t believe what I can imagine.”

  “Basically it depicts the Jews as a scourge sweeping through Europe, sweeping across the world…”

  “Like a plague of locusts.”

  I nodded. “Exactly, yes.”

  I looked at the cartoon on the cover, the grotesque locust head with the semi-human features. The jutting, hooked, hairy nose that I’d thought was supposed to be Roman but was now clearly a clichéd caricature of a Semitic stereotype. I handed her the pamphlet. She leafed through the pages, not bothering to read the text, just glancing through it.

  “And does it propose a solution to this plague of locusts?”

  “It makes it pretty clear that the best thing to do with locusts is exterminate them.”

  “Naturally,” she said. She set the pamphlet carefully aside and went to a bookshelf, where she pulled down a copy of Farmer Henry Versus the Locusts. She returned to her seat and flipped through its brightly coloured pages, beloved of generations of children, depicting the evil locusts being crushed, impaled, spattered and, of course, baked in ovens.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch.

  She handed the book to me. I opened it to the title page, which had a dedication printed opposite. For Taffy—who hates the locusts as much as I do. “Do you know who was responsible for this pamphlet?” said Toba. I nodded. I’d done some research online. There weren’t any images of the pamphlet’s cover art, but its title cropped up in places, with appropriate historical and political commentary.

  “It was financed by something called the Cavermann Foundation. Herman Cavermann was an American, a wealthy right-wing nutcase who lived in London where he met and married Millicent ‘Taffy’ Honeyland.”

  “Lucky Honeyland’s sister.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “They lived here until the war came, her and her rich American fascist, and then they fled to Argentina.”

  “But you don’t know who actually wrote it?” She picked up the pamphlet by one corner as if it was contaminated. I was hoping she didn’t plan to do anything dramatic like tearing it to shreds, because I needed it.

  “I have my suspicions,” I said. She gave me a piercing look.

  “Would you care to share them with me?”

  “Well, Lucky Honeyland wrote a lot of highly dramatic propaganda for Bomber Command during the war.” I shrugged. “Maybe he had some practice before that.” Toba Possner was silent for a long moment. Finally she spoke.

  “When I finished doing the illustrations for his book, Mr Honeyland was very pleased with them. He gave me a bottle of wine as a present. It was obviously a very good and very expensive bottle of wine. I remember at the time wishing it was money instead, because I needed money and I didn’t need wine. He was in a very good mood, I remember. High spirits. I believe he had already drunk some wine himself. He kept referring to me as a ‘daughter of Abraham’, by which he meant Jew. This was his way of being tactful. He said he was delighted with the pictures I had done for him. And he was especially delighted because I was a daughter of Abraham. Because I was a Jew.” She picked up the copy of Farmer Henry Versus the Locusts and peered at the cover, or rather into it, as if it was a looking glass.

  “It turned out I was a good Jew,” she said. “A clever, resourceful one. Shrewd at business. Because after making some enquiries I sold that bottle of wine he gave me. I sold it for a considerable sum. Rather more than my commission for doing the illustrations, in fact.”

  “Good for you,” said Nevada. I admired her restraint in not asking what kind of wine it was.

  Toba put the book down and picked up the pamphlet again. She smiled a crooked smile. “Now at last I know what he meant, why it was particularly pleasurable for him to have a Jew doing the pictures for his book, and her not even knowing what it was really about. It must have been—how can I put it? Piquant.”

  * * *

  When we got back to the house Tinkler was waiting for us, sitting on the raised concrete edge of the garden bed by our front gate. Fanny was lying among the flowers beside him, allowing him to rub her ears. “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I was waiting for you to come home. It’s certainly taken you long enough.”

  We unlocked the front door and Fanny hopped out of the flower beds to follow us in. “But why, pray tell, were you waiting in the first place?”

  “I came over to get some stuff from Opal’s van in the garage.” Tinkler followed us in.

  “But you can’t get into the garage without a key.”

  “So I realised.”

  “And we’ve got the key.”

  “That’s why I’m so glad to see you,” said Tinkler.

  We gave him the key and he went out again, heading for the garage area. Nevada fed the cats while I started to prepare dinner. We heard the front gate open and saw Tink
ler there, holding a precarious pile of boxes. He’d evidently got what he wanted. Nevada opened the door for him and he tottered into the kitchen, still holding the boxes. There was a precarious stack of books protruding from the one on top.

  “Got what you came for, then?” I said.

  “Yup. Yes, indeed. Just thought I’d check in to see what’s cooking for dinner. If it’s something nice—”

  “Is it ever not?” said Nevada.

  “If it’s something nice,” continued Tinkler pointedly, “I thought I might grace you with my company.”

  “What about Opal? Surely you will want to dine with your turtledove?”

  “I thought I could take her a doggy bag,” said Tinkler. “She says she misses your cooking.”

  “Enough with the doggy bags,” said Nevada and hit Tinkler between the shoulder blades. It was only a playful blow, but it carried sufficient force to cause the boxes to tremble in his hands, and consequently the book at the top of the stack toppled off and fell to the floor.

  “Ouch,” said Tinkler. “That hurt. I’d be rubbing my back if my hands weren’t full.”

  “Here, I’ll rub it for you,” said Nevada. “You big baby.”

  I bent down to pick up the book. It had a curiously familiar cover. “Put it back in the box, then,” said Tinkler. I ignored him, studying the book. It was a statistics text. I realised where I’d seen it before.

  In the recording studio in Camberwell Green. The one that had belonged to the guy who’d been shot down outside.

  I reached for the box of books and carefully lifted it off the stack Tinkler was holding. “Hey, what are you doing?” he said. “Put that back. I may never get this stuff stable again.”

  I looked through the books. “These are Opal’s?”

  “Yes,” said Tinkler.

  I didn’t recognise any of them. I certainly didn’t remember any of them being on the shelf in the recording studio. But they were all books about mathematics or statistics. I looked at Tinkler.

  “She asked me to pick them up because she needs them for research,” he said. “She’s working on her dissertation about her great-grandmother.”