Snuff Fiction

by Robert Rankin

  I shuffled downstairs to see who was there. It was the Doveston.

  He looked pretty dapper. His hair was combed and parted down the middle and he wore a clean Ben Sherman shirt with a button-down collar and slim leather tie. His suit was of the Tonic persuasion, narrow at the shoulders and high at the lapels. His boots were fine substantial things and polished on the toe-caps.

  I smiled him hello and he offered me in return a look of unutterable woe.

  ‘Whatever is the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Something terrible has happened. May I come inside?’

  ‘Please do.’

  I led him into our front sitting room and he flung himself down on our ragged settee. ‘It’s awful,’ he said, burying his face in his hands.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘My mum and dad. The doctor’s just been round. They’ve come down with Lugwiler’s Itch.’

  ‘My God!’ I said, for what I believe was the first time that day. ‘Not Lugwiler’s Itch.’ ‘Lugwiler’s Itch,’ said the Doveston.

  I made the face that says ‘hang about here’. ‘But surely,’ said my mouth, ‘Lugwiler’s Itch is a fictitious affliction out of a Jack Vance book.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the Doveston.

  ‘Oh,’ said I.

  ‘So the party’s off.’

  ‘Off? The party can’t be off. I’ve been working on my costume. It’s really trendy and everything.’

  ‘I was going to dress up as Parnell. But it’s all off now, there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘What a bummer,’ I said. ‘What a bummer.’

  The Doveston nodded sadly. ‘It’s the loss of face that hurts me most. I mean, having a party really gains you a reputation. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Gaining a reputation is everything.’

  ‘Well, I’ve blown it now. I shall become the butt of bitter jokes. All that kudos that could have been mine is gone for ever. I wish the ground would just open and swallow me up.’

  ‘Surely there must be some way round it,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you hold the party somewhere else?’

  ‘If only.’ The Doveston dabbed at his nose. ‘If only I had some trusted friend whose house was available for the evening. I wouldn’t mind that he earned all the kudos and gained the reputation. At least I wouldn’t have let everybody down. Let all those beautiful girls down. The ones who would be putty in the hands of the party-giver.’

  There followed what is called a pregnant pause.

  8

  Cigareets and wuskey and wild wild women.

  They’ll drive you crazy. They’ll drive you insane.

  Trad.

  Yes, all right, I know it now.

  But what else could I say? It just seemed the perfect solution. Well, it was the perfect solution.

  ‘The church hall,’ I said to the Doveston. ‘You could hire the church hall.’

  If only I had said that. But I didn’t.

  ‘Hold the party here?’ said the Doveston. ‘In your house?’

  ‘The perfect solution,’ I said.

  ‘We ought to ask your parents first.’

  ‘They’ve gone out and they won’t be back before twelve.’

  ‘That’s settled then.’ The Doveston rose from the settee, shook me by the hand, marched to the front door, opened it and whistled. Then all at once a number of young men I’d never seen before came bustling into my house carrying crates of brown ale, cardboard boxes full of food and a real record player and records.

  In and out and round about they went, like some well-drilled task force. The Doveston introduced me to them as they breezed by.

  ‘This is Jim Pooley,’ he said. ‘And this is John Omally and this is Archroy and this is Small Dave.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘Down here,’ said Small Dave.

  ‘Oh, hello. They’re not in fancy dress,’ I whispered to the Doveston.

  ‘Well, nor are you.

  This was true. And this was a problem. If the party was going to be held at my house, how was I going to make the big dramatic entrance in my costume?

  ‘Hadn’t you better get changed?’ the Doveston asked.

  ‘Yes, I . . . But—’

  ‘Listen,’ the Doveston said. ‘You are the host of this party and I think you should have the chance to make a big dramatic entrance in your costume.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘Then you go up to your bedroom and get ready, I’ll take care of things down here and when everybody has arrived, I’ll come and get you and you can make a really big dramatic entrance. How’s that?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘You’re a real pal.’

  ‘I know.’ The Doveston pushed past me. ‘I want those cartons of cigarettes stacked in the kitchen,’ he told one of his task force. ‘That’s where I will be setting up my shop.’

  So I went up to my bedroom.

  It didn’t take me too long to get ready and having posed a good few times before the wall mirror, I sat down upon my bed and listened to all the comings and goings beneath.

  The sounds of music drifted up to me as platter-waxings of the latest rockin’ teenage combos went round and round on the real record player at forty-five revolutions per minute.

  And although I didn’t know it then, I was about to make history. You see, during the 1950s there had never been such a thing as a teenage party. Lads were conscripted into the armed forces on their thirteenth birthday and not set free upon society until they reached twenty. At which time they were considered to be responsible citizens.

  My generation, the post-war baby boomers, missed conscription by a year and what with us never having had it so good and everything, we literally invented the teenage party.

  And what I didn’t know then was that the party in my house would be the first ever teenage party. The one that would set the standard against which all future teenage parties would be judged.

  So I suppose, in this respect, I have much to thank the Doveston for. And although he did blow up my dog, he did apologize afterwards.

  I sat there upon my bed, getting all excited.

  An hour or so later, I began to fret. My bedroom was hazing with cigarette smoke rising from the kitchen, the merry sounds of partying were growing ever louder and the Doveston had not yet come to get me.

  I reasoned that he was waiting for the right moment. Indeed waiting until the gang were all here. At around about nine my doubts set in. Waiting for the right moment was all very well, but I was missing my own party and I was quite sure that I had heard one or two breaking sounds. As if things were getting smashed. I really couldn’t wait much longer.

  It was nearly ten before a knock came at my door. My bedroom was now so full of smoke that I could hardly see across it. I stumbled to my door and flung it open.

  On the landing stood John Omally, his arm around the shoulder of a teenage girl. I smiled heartily. Omally was dressed as Parnell, the girl as Mrs O’Shea.

  I must have created quite an impression, what with all the smoke bursting out around me and everything. The girl shrieked and Omally fell back, crossing at himself.

  ‘Where’s the Doveston?’ I asked.

  Omally made dumb pointings in a kitchenish direction.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t wait any longer. I was going down now and that was that.

  It was quite a struggle getting down. The stairs were crowded with couples and these couples were snogging. I stepped over and between them going ‘Sorry, sorry’ and ‘Excuse me, please’. There were so many people in our little hall that I had to push with all my might. The front door was open and I glimpsed a great deal more party folk outside in the garden and the street. I fought my way to the front sitter where all the dancing was going on and tried without success to make myself heard. The record player was on much too loud and nobody was paying me the slightest bit of notice.

  I must confess that I was fed up. Really fed up at all this. I shouted ‘Oi
!’ at the top of my voice and at that very moment, the record that was playing finished and I found that I had the attention of everybody in the room.

  They turned and they stared and then they screamed. Well, the girls all screamed. The blokes kind of gasped. That softy Paul Mason, who used to be in my class at the Grange, and who I was unimpressed to see had come dressed as a pimple, simply fainted. And then there was a lot of pushing and shoving and shouting and a good deal of backing away.

  I hadn’t noticed that the Doveston was there. His costume was so convincing that I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway. He hadn’t come as Parnell at all. He had come as Lazlo Woodbine, private eye. Trench coat, fedora and vacuum-cleaner nozzle. He stepped forward and looked me up and down. I smiled back at him and said, ‘What do you think?’

  The Doveston extended a finger, ran it down my cheek, put it to his nose and sniffed.

  ‘It’s tomato ketchup,’ he said. Then, turning to the starers and the gaspers, he said, ‘It’s all right, it’s only tomato ketchup.’ And then he turned back to me and he glared. ‘What the bloody Hell do you think you’re up to?’ he asked. ‘Coming down here with your head all covered in tomato ketchup and frightening the life out of my guests?’

  ‘But you said I was to come as something trendy.’

  ‘So you came as a tomato ketchup bottle?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve come as President Kennedy.’

  Now what happened next made me angry. In fact it made me very angry. It was all so undignified. The Doveston grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me from the room. He frog-marched me into the kitchen, rammed my head into the sink and turned on the taps. Once he had washed all the ketchup from my hair and face he straightened me up, thrust a tea towel into my hands and called me a twat.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘Coming as a dead bloke, you twat.’

  ‘But you’ve come as a dead bloke.’ I dabbed at myself. ‘And that John Omally has come as Parnell, he’s a dead bloke and—’

  The Doveston cut me short. ‘I was going to say, coming as a dead bloke before I had a chance to introduce you properly. I knew you’d come as Kennedy, I saw you nick the ketchup bottle from the Plume Café and I put two and two together. I was going to play “The Star-spangled Banner” on the record player and pretend to shoot you as you came down the stairs. But you’ve screwed it all up now.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.

  ‘And so you should be. Would you care for a beer?’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  My first beer. I will never forget that.

  It tasted horrible.

  Why do we bother with the stuff, eh? Whatever is the attraction? I didn’t like my first beer at all; I thought it was foul. But I felt that as beer was so popular and all adult males drank it, I’d better see the thing through. I finished my first beer with difficulty and belched.

  ‘Have another,’ said the Doveston.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do.’ The second tasted not so bad. The third tasted better.

  I swigged down my fourth beer, went ‘Aaaah’, and smacked my lips.

  ‘It grows on you, doesn’t it?’ said the Doveston.

  ‘Pardon?’ I replied.

  ‘I said it grows on you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I shouted too, as the music was now very loud indeed and the hustling and bustling in the crowded kitchen made it almost impossible to talk.

  ‘Go and dance,’ the Doveston shouted. ‘Enjoy the party.’

  ‘Yes. Right.’ And I thought I would. After all, it was my party and there seemed to be an awful lot of girls. I pushed my way back into the hall, rubbing up against as many as I could. There were girls here dressed up as princesses, page boys, panel-beaters and Pankhursts —mostly as Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) the English suffragette leader, who founded the militant Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903.

  I squeezed by a girl who was dressed as a parachute and elbowed my way into the front sitter. The joint was a-rockin’ and I was impressed. There were popes here and pilots and pit lads and pastry chefs. Even a couple of Pushkins. Whoever Pushkin was.

  I was about to get in there and boogie when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Hey, homes,’ a voice shouted in my ear. I turned. It was Chico.

  ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes,’ I shouted. ‘I’m President Kennedy.’

  ‘President who, homes?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  I looked Chico up and down and all around. He had a bath towel over his head, held in place by a fan belt. He was robed in chintzy curtains, secured at the waist by a dressing-gown cord. His face was boot-blackened and he wore upon his chin a false goatee fashioned from what looked like (and indeed turned out to be) a pussycat’s tail.

  ‘Who are you supposed to be?’ I shouted.

  ‘Che Guevara,’ he shouted back.

  The light of realization dawned.

  ‘Chico,’ I shouted. ‘That’s Che Guevara, not Sheik Guevara.’

  ‘Curse this dyslexia.’

  Oh how we laughed.

  Chico had brought the new gang members and he hauled me outside into the street to make the introductions.

  ‘Your costumes are great,’ I told them. ‘You look just like Kalahari Bushmen.’

  ‘But we are Kalahari Bushmen.’

  Oh how we laughed again.

  Chico winked in my direction. ‘I also brought one of my sisters.’

  ‘Not the one with the moustache?’

  We would no doubt have laughed again, but Chico chose instead to hit me. As he helped me back to my feet he whispered, ‘Just for the benefit of the new guys, no offence meant.’

  ‘None taken, I assure you.

  And then there was a bit of a crash as someone flew out through the front sitter window.

  ‘Neat,’ said Chico. ‘Where’s the booze?’

  I gaped in horror at all the blood and broken glass. My parents wouldn’t be happy about this.

  The Doveston appeared in the front doorway. He came over and handed me another beer. ‘Don’t worry about the damage,’ he said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Here,’ said the Doveston. ‘Have this too.’

  He handed me a large fat cigarette. It was all twisted up at one end.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a joint.’

  My first joint. I will never forget that. It tasted . . . W O N D E R F U L

  I drifted back towards the house and was met by two girls dressed as pixies who were patting at a big and soppy Labrador.

  ‘Is this your dog?’ one of them asked.

  I nodded dreamily.

  ‘What’s its name?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘When I got it I thought it was a boy dog and so I named it Dr Evil.’

  ‘Oh,’ said one of the pixies.

  ‘But it turned out to be a girl dog, so my mum said I had to call it something else.’

  ‘So what’s its name?’

  ‘Biscuit,’ I said.

  The pixies laughed. Rather prettily, I thought. And I was aware of the pale pink auras that surrounded them and so I smiled some more and swigged upon my beer and sucked again at my joint. ‘Try some of this,’ I said.

  I suppose things really got into full swing around eleven o’clock. Up until then only one person had been thrown out through the front window and he had got off lightly, with nothing more than minor scarring for life. The bloke who’d climbed up onto the roof wasn’t quite so lucky.

  I didn’t actually see him as he plunged past my parents’ bedroom window onto the spiked railings beneath. I was in the double bed with one of the pixies.

  We were having a go at puberty together.

  My first sex. Now I really do wish I could remember that!

  I do have a vague recollection of a lot of people piling into the bedroom and saying that I had to come downstairs because there had been an accident. And I think
I recall stumbling down the stairs naked and wondering why the walls had been spray-painted so many different colours. I don’t remember slipping over in the pool of vomit on the hall carpet, although apparently this got quite a laugh. As did the look on my face when I saw that the front sitter was on fire.

  I have absolutely no idea who took the fridge and the cooker, and, as I told the magistrate, if I had known that there was a gang bang going on in my back parlour and being filmed by students from the art school, I would have done something about it.

  What I do recall clearly, and this will be forever tattooed on my memory cells, is Biscuit. Biscuit, coming up to me as I stood in the open front doorway, staring out at the police cars and fire appliances. Biscuit, licking my hand and gazing up at me with her big brown eyes.

  And me, looking down at Biscuit and wondering what that strange firework fizzing was, coming from under her tail.

  9

  Snout: British prison slang for tobacco.

  I awoke naked and covered in Biscuit.

  Now, you know that panicky feeling you get when you wake up after a really heavy night of drink and drugs and know, just know, that you’ve done something that you shouldn’t have?

  Well, I felt like that.

  I did a lot of blinking and gagging and groping about and I wondered how come my bedroom ceiling was suddenly all tiled over.

  Now, you know that panicky feeling you get when you wake up after a really heavy night of drink and drugs and find yourself naked in a police cell?

  No?

  Well, it really stinks, I can tell you.

  I screamed. Screamed really loud. And I wiped at myself with my fingers and I gaped at the guts and the dark clotted blood.

  ‘Biscuit,’ I screamed. ‘Biscuit.’

  A little metal hatch in the large metal door snapped open. ‘You won’t get a biscuit here, you bastard,’ called a voice.

  ‘Help,’ I called back. ‘Let me out. Let me out.’

  But they didn’t let me out. They kept me locked away in there all day, with only a plate of cornflakes and a cup of tea to keep me going. And at about three o’clock in the afternoon the door swung open and Brother Michael from St Argent’s sauntered in.