The Greatest Show Off Earth

by Robert Rankin

  ‘What is this?’ he demanded to be told.

  ‘Read it, you’ll see, I think.’

  The grey man read it. ‘“This is to certify that Simon . . .”‘ He paused and looked up. ‘Is this really your surname?’

  Simon offered a dismal nod. ‘I try not to think about it.’

  ‘Obvious to see why. So. “This is to certify that Simon, surname as stated, has been a patient at my surgery for ten years and suffers from short-term memory loss. He is therefore excused games and must always have a seat next to the radiator in winter time.” What is this?’

  ‘It’s a doctor’s note. You see I forget things. All the time. Like, you just said I was in The Bramfield Arms. Perhaps I was. I don’t remember.’

  The grey man raised an eyebrow of a likewise hue.

  ‘It’s not my fault. I can’t help it.’

  ‘So you don’t remember where you were, say, yesterday evening, for instance?’

  ‘Yesterday evening.’ Simon pursed his lips. ‘Give me some time and I expect it will come back to me.’

  ‘How much time?’

  ‘The doctor said about fifteen years.’

  ‘Oh yeah? And when did he say that to you?’

  ‘About fifteen years ago, when he wrote the note. I think.’

  The grey man looked Simon up and down. ‘You’re a bit of a prat,’ said he. ‘I think.’

  Simon nodded hopelessly. ‘I suppose I am. What did you come in here for? Was it to read the meter?’

  ‘Yeah, that was it. To read your meter. And I’ve done it now.’ The grey man stalked back to the front door and swung it violently open, taking the lock-keep right out of the door frame. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  ‘Er, just one thing.’

  The grey man turned.

  ‘Could I have my note back please?’

  The grey man screwed up Simon’s note and tossed it back at him. ‘Prat,’ said he, departing into the street.

  Simon paused a moment before hurrying into the front room and once more lifting the corner of the net curtain.

  The shiny grey van was parked on the corner of the street. The grey man’s grey companions were lounging against it. Simon’s unwelcome visitor strode up to them. Words were exchanged. The unwelcome visitor twirled his finger against his temple and then gestured back towards Simon’s house. Some laughter was shared. Then all three grey men got into the shiny grey van and drove off, in the direction of the allotments.

  Simon returned to his hall. Pushed the front door shut and re-slotted the security chain. He picked up his ‘doctor’s note’, smoothed out its latest creases, returned it to its envelope and the envelope to his wallet. He returned his wallet to his pocket. Which he patted. Smiling as he did so.

  It had served him well had the old ‘doctor’s note’. Got him out of many a heavy scrape in the past and into more than a few beds also. It was remarkable how fast word could travel around a village WI that there was a handsome young man with whom a frustrated housewife might live out her most intimate sexual fantasies, secure in the knowledge that he would remember nothing about them the following day.

  ‘Prat?’ said Simon. ‘I don’t think so . . .’ But then a troubled look appeared upon his face. ‘That book,’ said he. ‘About that book.’

  Simon went back upstairs, seated himself upon his bed and took up the book in question. He rapped his knuckle upon Raymond’s nose. ‘We haven’t got off to a very good start, have we?’ he asked. The book did not reply.

  Simon thumbed through it once more and found his place.

  A knock came at Simon’s door. Luckily for Simon it was only the postman.

  Simon clicked his porcelain caps. ‘Wrong,’ said he, reading on.

  Or so Simon thought. Although exactly why he thought this is unclear . . .

  Simon ground his porcelain caps.

  . . . Especially considering the remarkable, some might even say uncanny, powers of perception he was later to display.

  ‘Ah,’ said Simon. ‘Ah.’

  He read on. It was all there. His encounter with the grey man at the door. It was all there, but it wasn’t quite the same. The version in the book was better, it had Simon running spectacular verbal rings about the grey man, before finally frog-marching him down the hall and tossing him into the street.

  Simon chewed upon a thumbnail. Now why was that?

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Simon. ‘I know why. Because that must be the way I tell it to whoever writes this book. It’s the way I would have wanted it to have happened. Damn.’

  Simon flung the hardback to the floor. He could hardly capitalize on what was in there, if all that was in there was a load of exaggeration and half truths. What cruel and bitter irony. Hoist with his own petard. And such like.

  ‘But hang about.’ Simon picked up the book and ran his nail-chewed thumb across its glossy cover. ‘I know this now. So. If I make a solemn vow right this minute, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to whoever interviews me in the future about my side of the story. Then . . .’ Simon thought about it. ‘Then, everything in this book about me, from this moment on, Will be correct. Yes. It must work. It must.’

  And it seemed logical that it should. Well, as logical as anything so improbable could seem anyway.

  Simon scratched at his head. Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth was going to be something of a challenge. But it was something that he had to do, because then he could be absolutely certain that everything the book said that he’d do, he’d do. And the beauty of it was, that if he was very careful and just read the book a little bit at a time, then let the events in it catch up with him, he’d be sure to make the right moves every time. Because he’d know what the right moves would be, he’d have just read about himself making them. Magic.

  And the possibilities were endless.

  ‘Now, just let me work this out,’ said Simon. ‘Say, for example, that I wish to back the horses tomorrow. At this present moment I do not know which ones will win. But six months from now, or whenever I’m interviewed by the writer of this book, I will know them then. So, if I tell the writer that I backed those winning horses, and I make sure that he puts down their names in this book. Then I can consult this book now, and know which horses will win tomorrow. Which means that I will have told the whole truth to the writer, because I did win on those particular horses.’

  Simon’s hands began rubbing themselves together as thoughts about multi-million-pound killings on the stock exchange and the world’s money markets now swarmed into his head. He had struck the mother lode this time and no mistake. This book was his passport to paradise.

  ‘Perhaps I should flick on a few chapters and see if I’m sailing on my luxury yacht, surrounded by page-three lovelies.’

  The temptation was overwhelming. A quick look couldn’t hurt now, could it? ‘Oh yes it could.’ Simon did big nods. ‘That way madness lies. I will have to be extremely disciplined about this. Only work one page at a time. Now, how to begin? Hm. Well, start in a small way. First thing in the morning I will go to the bank and draw out fifty pounds. Shall I check on that?’ Simon made with the furtive glancings, then leafed furiously through the book.

  Simon was the first in the queue outside the bank that morning. When it opened at nine-thirty he went in and drew out all of his savings. Precisely one hundred pounds.

  ‘One hundred pounds?’ Simon stroked his chin. ‘Nice round figure. Yes, one hundred pounds it is then. But what do I do next?’

  Then he set off to the bookies, where he placed his now legendary four-horse accumulator bet.

  ‘Yes’ Simon leapt up and made punchings at the ceiling. He kissed the cover of the book, going ‘Yes yes yes’ as he did so. He flung himself on to his bed and kicked his legs in the air. ‘Yes!’ he went, and ‘yes’ and ‘yes’.

  He’d cracked it this time and no mistake.

  ‘Thank you, Raymond.’ Simon hugged the book to his chest. ‘You did this, didn�
�t you? Somehow you sent me this book from the future. The future where you become, what is it?’ He reread the title. ‘The Saviour of Mankind. Brilliant. Then it looks as if we’re both going to crack it. What can stop us, eh? The grey men are off my case now. They can go clean up the allotment. And I shall clean up here. Financially speaking, of course. And you can save mankind from whatever it has to be saved from. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Yes?

  And that, thankfully, is where we leave Simon for now. Lying on his bed, hugging Raymond’s book, kicking his legs in the air and repeating the word ‘Yes’

  Not a pretty sight. But then, watching some ruthless, callous, self-seeking bastard furthering his own ends without giving a tinker’s toss for the rest of us, rarely is. And what made it all the worse in this particular case, was that the bastard in question had actually witnessed his best friend being taken into space by a flying starfish; had learned that this sort of thing happened on a regular basis and that teams of grey men were employed to cover up afterwards; and that this was part of a diabolical conspiracy, which existed to conceal an interplanetary trade in human beings, pickled, canned or bubbled.

  And with all this terrible knowledge in his possession, what does this bastard do? Does he use the book from the future as the potent weapon it is to help save the world from the aliens who secretly prey upon its people?

  Does he heck as like! He uses it to make himself rich!

  Bastard!

  But then. Perhaps. Are we being too hard on Simon? After all, what is he actually free to do? He holds in his hands a book which foretells his future. A future already mapped out for him and from which it is impossible to escape. Just as Judas was destined from birth to perform his dirty deed, so too is Simon a victim of predetermined fate. Helpless and without any genuine free will of his own.

  Perhaps.

  Perhaps.

  But then, what about the way he conned the grey man with that phoney doctor’s note. No-one could ever get away with a stroke like that, could they?

  But he did.

  Bastard!

  8

  The grand salon of the SS Salamander was quite simply splendid. A veritable tour de France in Victorian marine Moorish, it resembled nothing less than the grand harem of some grand vizier from the Baghdad of Scheherazade.

  Twenty-three traceried columns, wrought with opulent enamels and inlaid with lapis lazuli and chrysoprase and alexandrite, offered their enthusiastic support to a richly ornamented dome of a ceiling. This was of the most gorgeous rosy tint, smothered by a confusion of erotica. Bonking big time. The walls of the grand salon were similarly frescoed. But all in the best possible taste. This wasn’t the leering nastiness of the cheap pornographer. This was the jolly romping sex of Peter Fendi or Thomas Rowlandson. A kind of comic Kama Sutra.

  Pierced screens of gopher-wood and sandalwood and sycamore broke the floor, which was a marvel of interlocking mosaic.

  It was a pretty swell old gaff. And it had a bit of a history also.

  When Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the ill-fated Great Eastern, his avowed intention was to create a ‘floating palace’ on a scale which had never before been known. And indeed The Great Eastern was the biggest vessel to brave the waters since the now legendary ark of Noah.

  Mr Brunel was a man with a vision. An engineering genius who helped shape the Victorian age. The Great Eastern was to be his triumph. It proved to be his downfall. Isambard died, a broken man, at the age of fifty-three, within days of the big ship’s launching. A launching which had been delayed for three long months, the landlocked vessel stubbornly refusing to leave its dock and enter the Thames. Ill fortune travelled with it from the first, when an engineer and his mate were sealed up alive within the double hull. On its maiden voyage one of the funnels exploded killing several crewmen. A catalogue of disasters followed which dogged the ship for thirty years until it was finally broken up in 1889. Its interior was never completed and it had caused the deaths of many men. It was a jinxed ship and a sad legacy for Isambard to leave behind.

  But he left others. Amongst these his unborn son Colin. History speaks little, in fact nothing whatsoever, about young Colin. The boy who would one day build the SS Salamander, but would never get a commemorative medal from Queen Victoria for so doing. The Salamander was commissioned by an Eastern potentate. A great Eastern potentate. The symmetry of this pleased young Colin, who had inherited neither his father’s genius nor his name.

  Colin was born on the wrong side of the duvet, to a Whitechapel prostitute of his father’s acquaintance. This lady of the night had managed to escape the attentions of Jack the Ripper, whom she chanced upon during his Grand Guignol farewell performance at Miller’s Court. She produced a doctors note which explained that she had short-term memory loss and so wouldn’t remember in the morning that Jack was really Mr Gladstone.

  Colin did not actually design the SS Salamander. Because, as has been said, he did not inherit his father’s genius. Colin inherited his father’s briefcase. The man of vision having forgotten to take it with him after the night of passion during which Colin was conceived. In the briefcase were the plans for the SS Salamander, a liner so magnificent as to make The Great Eastern look like a tugboat in comparison.

  And the rest is unwritten history. The Salamander was built. But not on planet Earth. The great Eastern potentate was a very Far Eastern potentate.

  He hailed from Uranus, where he was the sultan.

  Now, as none of the foregoing was as yet known to Raymond, he simply stood in the vestibule of the grand salon, eyeing all around and about him, with his jaw hanging slack and his hands a-dangling at his sides.

  It was all a little much to take in. And if the salon was a marvel to be seen, what could be said of the banquet presently in progress?

  Quite a bit actually. At the centre of the salon, beneath the mighty ornamented dome, stood a table of heroic proportions; and laid out upon this, a repast deserving of an ode.

  There were comports of curly kale, cabbage and cauliflower.

  Bowls of bouillon, bortsch, bouillabaisse.

  There were salvers of sweetmeats and soufflés and mousses.

  And truffles and crumbles and fruits a la glace.

  There was ragout and fricassee, salami and casserole.

  Salt-water herring and freshwater trout.

  Bilberries, dewberrries, gooseberries, cranberries.

  A clam bake, a pot roast, a beano blow out.

  It was Jaffas and mandarins

  Stone fruits and tangerines.

  Haggis and hotchpotch and chowder and stew.

  It was waffles and whitebait.

  Butterscotch shortcake.

  Plum duff and dumplings. And potables too!

  Red wines and white wines and roses and sparklings.

  Tawny Madeiras and twelve-year-old ports.

  Champagne and Chardonnay, claret and Burgundy.

  Cognac and cordials, snifters and shorts.

  And so on and so forth. It was very impressive. And Raymond did have a very empty stomach.

  And if the salon was a marvel to be seen, and the repast deserving of an ode, then what of the banqueters? What of those who sat about that table of heroic proportions, within this marvelous salon, and dined upon the viands aforementioned.

  What indeed?

  These were the artistes of Professor Merlin’s Circus.

  They were gorging themselves upon the fabulous spread. Laughing and joking and carrying on in that easy manner in which only true friends can. And they were the most amazing characters that Raymond had ever seen.

  There were about twenty of them and they presented a singularly colourful and flamboyant display.

  To Raymond it was all a riot of sequin and spangle.

  Exotic women with painted faces, high-topiarized hair-dos, primped into peacock perms and hung with danglums and tassles. Bedecked with jewellery. Necklaces of sarkstone, cat’s-eye and tourmaline. Bloodstone pendants, gilded nose-rings set with
heliotrope and beryl. Torques of coral and jade.

  Their costumes were of the most lavish that may be imagined, and quite the prettiest and best becoming, glamourizing the wearers with a luxuriance of frills and furbelows, decked with swathes of chiffon, which released a tantalizing glimpse or two of perfumed flesh. Here a powdered shoulder and there a dainty ankle, clenched by a circlet of black pearls.

  The menfolk were robust and well knit. Big broad-shouldered types, but none the less bedecked and bejewelled. Veritable dandies all, they displayed themselves in regal fineries. Frocked coats of cloth of gold, with padded shoulders and slashed sleeves. Silk bandannas and velvet cummerbunds, moleskin pantaloons and quilted spats. And each and every bit and bob of a sparkling rainbow hue.

  And at the head of the table, holding forth to the merriment of all and seated upon a throne-like chair composed of peacock plumes and ostrich feathers sat quite the most fantastic of them all.

  He was tall and tapered. Long and lean and loose of limb.

  A purple periwig adorned a narrow head distinguished by many a notable feature. Twinkling turquoise eyes flanked a slender sweeping shark’s fin of a nose. Beneath this, waxed moustachios taut as watchsprings coiled and uncoiled, as a jolly mouth, well-to-do with golden teeth, munched upon choice snackeries and gave out with a humorous monologue which held the diners in a state of high jocularity. A chin of considerable length dipped and bobbed as if possessed of a life of its own.

  Raymond noted also a curious tattoo above the right eyebrow and the large clear-glass ring which pierced the left earlobe.

  Moving on down, this gentleman’s get-up seemed all of the Regency period. High starched collar, rising above a white silk cravat. A waistcoat of rich red brocade, embroidered with arabesques of golden thread and dressed with an indulgence of silver watch fobs and dandy chains. A frock-coat of green velvet, the lapels peppered with emeralds and sapphires. Laced shirt cuffs flounced from beneath the ornamented sleeves.