The Brightonomicon

by Robert Rankin

  ‘Thank you,’ I said and I raised my head. ‘Thank you, sir, for that.’

  Tobes looked most embarrassed. He obviously did not take too much to us kneeling there before him. Although I am reasonably sure he preferred it to me kicking him.

  ‘Get up,’ said Tobes. ‘It wasn’t me. Something weird just happened, but I didn’t do it.’

  ‘You did,’ said Mr Rune, now raising his head, ‘and my eternal thanks to you. And if you will return with us now to our rooms in St Aubyns, I will show you something that will explain everything.’

  ‘I’m returning to the bar,’ said Tobes. ‘This would never have happened if I’d been drunk.’

  We owed it to Tobes to buy him a drink and so we returned to the bar. In the dance hall proper, Tim McGregor was playing ‘I Got the Clap and My Knob Fell Off by Lawnmower Death. Which I felt was most inappropriate.

  Tobes slumped down in a chair at a vacant table. Mr Rune sat down beside him and I brought over the beers, which I had gained for free. I must have looked pretty raddled after my sojourn to the alleyway. The knees had gone out of my thigh-high boots and my hair was all over the place. It is funny how that look really gets men going, is it not? I also had whisky chasers to go with our beers, and I placed one of these into the outstretched hands of Tobes.

  ‘I suppose I’ve always known that there was something different about me,’ he said, tossing back the whisky and reaching out for his beer. I’ve never been ill in my life, you know. And weird things happen around me all the time. Crips* leaping out of their wheelchairs in Lidl when I pass them by on my way to the off-licence section. Which is why I get drunk all the time – it drives me nuts.’

  ‘And why you wake up sober five minutes later,’ I said.

  Tobes hung his head. He had finished his beer. I offered him mine and he took it. ‘That man,’ said Tobes, ‘who stepped over me, who shot you in the alleyway – that man is pure evil.’

  ‘Count Otto Black,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘And I walked right into his trap.’

  ‘How could he know,’ I asked, ‘that you would be searching for the Lord Tobes here?’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ said Tobes. And he downed Mr Rune’s Scotch, which I found most amusing.

  ‘I am sure he would have searched our rooms at forty-nine Grand Parade before he torched them,’ said Mr Rune. ‘He would have found the map of the Brightonomicon. He reasoned it out. I have to give him credit.’

  ‘Perhaps then he has also located our present rooms and has taken the Chronovision.’

  ‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Mr Rune, ‘for I gave him our address.’

  ‘But you said to Lord Tobes in the alleyway—’

  ‘He will have taken what he believes to be the Chronovision. I removed the real one this morning before you awoke and substituted a similar television that I’d purchased from the Sussex Beacon in George Street.’

  ‘That sounds most unlikely,’ I said.

  ‘But nevertheless it is the case. And so I suggest that the three of us collect it now. And if it is convenient to you, Lord Tobes, might I ask that we return to your abode for the night?’

  Lord Tobes did not answer this. For he was asleep once more.

  I would have liked to have stayed a bit longer at Rock Night. I was rather warming to heavy metal. And all the free beers were not going amiss, either. But Mr Rune roused Lord Tobes and asked again if we might stay with him, and him being as nice a fellow as he was, he said yes.

  After we had downed a few more drinks.

  Which we did, so I did get to stay a bit longer, after all.

  And I had a dance, too. Several dances, all of them the head-banging dance that involved the fingering of invisible guitars. I got really into that dance. And I must have been pretty good at it, too, because a most appreciative audience of young black-T-shirted fellow-me-lads formed about me as I danced and I got even more free drinks.

  ‘I can see that being a good-looking woman really does have its benefits,’ I said to Mr Rune when I returned to our table once more, somewhat sweaty.

  ‘Beware the balance of equipoise,’ said Mr Rune. ‘For every favour offered, one is expected in return.’

  A handsome young stud dressed in the de rigueur black, who had earlier identified himself to me as Matty and joined me in dancing to some of the more frenzied numbers, came over to our table.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, Yola?’ he asked.

  ‘Yola?’ said Mr Rune.

  I shushed at him. ‘If you have no objection to buying for my granddad and my brother also,’ I said.

  ‘Your granddad?’ said Mr Rune.

  I shushed him once more.

  Matty made away to the bar and shortly returned, as I had requested that he did, in the company of a bottle of the house champagne.

  And four glasses.

  ‘I shall uncork the bubbly,’ said Matty, popping the bottle.

  ‘What is zis?’ asked another fellow, giving Matty a bit of a push.

  I looked up at this interruptive fellow. It was Mario, the waiter from Georgio’s Bistro.

  ‘Hello, Mario,’ I said. ‘Sit down with us, have a drink.’

  ‘I turna my back,’ said Mario, ‘anda my betrothed, she go outa on da town, taking drinks from this gigolo.’

  ‘I’m not a gigolo,’ said Matty. ‘I’m a computer programmer.’

  ‘You are a son of a bitch!’ And Mario thumbed his teeth, which judging by all the Mafia movies I had seen was not a very good sign.

  ‘It is not what you think,’ I said to Mario. ‘Matty is only a friend.’

  ‘But you said—’ said Matty.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Mr Rune.

  ‘She’s my girlfriend, anyway,’ said a very tall fellow called Solo, who I had met earlier, and who had also bought me a drink.

  ‘Whose girlfriend are we talking about?’ said Tim McGregor, who I had met while I was dancing on the stage and who had promised to buy me a drink when he was taking his half-time break.

  ‘My fiancée,’ said Mario, pointing at me.

  ‘I am not his fiancée,’ I said.

  ‘But my papa, he pay the dowry money to your papa here.’ And he pointed to Mr Rune.

  ‘What?’ I said rather loudly. And my loud ‘What? ’ awoke Tobes, who had nodded off again at some point.

  ‘Whose round is it?’ asked the great-times-whatever grandson of Christ.

  ‘Yours, I think,’ I said.

  Tobes looked around. ‘And who are all these people?’ he asked.

  ‘Well …’ By this time there were quite a lot of people gathered around our table. A lot of male people, all in black T-shirts. ‘Well, that is Dave, and that is Marcus, and that one is Neil—’

  ‘Chris,’ said Chris.

  ‘Sorry, that one is Chris. That one is Neil.’

  ‘You have a lot of friends,’ said Tobes.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. And I looked all around at my newfound friends. There were lots of them. The only ones who had not bought me drinks were the ones who were presently on their way to do so and had just popped by our table to enquire what my preference was.

  ‘And this nutter here,’ said Matty, nudging at Mario with the champagne bottle, ‘seems to think that Yola here,’ and he gestured at me with the bottle, ‘is his fiancée.’

  ‘And I am not!’ I said.

  ‘Well, of course you’re not,’ said Tobes. ‘You’re not any bloke’s fiancée.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Because how could you be, seeing as you are a bloke.’

  Now, it must have been at this precise moment that the stand-in DJ chose to change records, because there was a sudden silence. And I do not know whether you have ever heard the term ‘the silence was deafening’, but this was one of those moments. The silence was also a pregnant silence.

  Pregnant with the promise of the premature birth of something very violent indeed.

  Now, I do not know who hit whom first. I think Mario hit Matty. A
nd I will bet that Matty would have hit him back if he had not been coming at me with the champagne bottle. Mario must have brought Matty down, because Marcus, who was also coming at me with a bottle of his own, this one being full of Guinness, fell over Matty and crashed down hard on our table, spilling drinks.

  A fact that did not please Tobes.

  Tobes, I think, hit Neil, or it might have been Chris. But it was certainly Dave who hit Solo and Solo was a very big chap and he just started hitting everybody.

  Funny how these things spread: what begins as a localised brawl soon becomes widespread mayhem.

  And as to who had the petrol bomb, or why they had it with them, I cannot say. But at that moment Mr Rune rose, taking Tobes by the arm, and I followed on in their wake.

  The Sussex constabulary had a busy night. The mayhem spilled from the burning town hall and many shop windows were broken.

  At a little after three of the new morning clock, Inspector Hector read the Riot Act through a loud-hailer atop the Sherman tank.* And the first of the tear-gas grenades were launched.

  We watched a lot of it on TV at Tobes’s house in Withdean, which we journeyed to in a cab that Mr Rune hailed. I will not go into details here regarding the fate of the taxi driver, but there was a stout stick involved. The ongoing riot was broadcast live from a news helicopter that circled over the war-torn streets of Hove. It all looked very exciting.

  ‘What are we drinking now?’ I shouted to Lord Tobes.

  ‘Calvados,’ Tobes shouted back. ‘And don’t call me Lord.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You were thinking it.’

  ‘Oh, look,’ hollered Mr Rune, ‘the rioters have set The Albion ablaze.’

  ‘That is a shame,’ I bawled. ‘I hope Fangio is okay. Oh, look, there he is. What is he doing with that axe?’

  ‘Looting the dry cleaners across the road,’ thundered Mr Rune. ‘They do have exceedingly good cameras on those newsreel helicopters, don’t they?’

  ‘Almost unbelievably good,’ I screamed. ‘As is this Calvados.’

  ‘Enjoyable as all this is,’ boomed Mr Rune, ‘I think we should get down to business.’

  ‘Lord Tobes has fallen asleep,’ I yelled. ‘Perhaps we should do it in the morning.’

  Mr Rune agreed that perhaps we should. So we finished the Calvados. And the brandy and the cans of beer in Tobes’s fridge. And a bottle of banana liqueur I eventually located beneath the kitchen sink, because there is always one somewhere if you are desperate enough to search for it and prepared to search long enough.

  Then Mr Rune and I fell fast asleep in Lord Tobes’s sitting room. Which I must explain about, because the reader might be wondering why all the shouting and hollering and bawling and booming and yelling had been going on. Tobes’s sitting room was approximately the size of a football pitch and the chairs and the TV were positioned on opposite sides of it. When asked to explain how he had such an impossibly huge room within what was indeed a very small house, Tobes adequately explained that the estate agent had told him that the living room was ‘deceptively spacious’.

  So, that explains that.

  Morning sunlight came in through the distant windows, but we did not heed its arrival. We slept in late. But to be fair, it had been a stressful night.

  I got to yawning and opening my eyes somewhere around three p.m. Lord Tobes still snored, but of Mr Rune there was no sign to be seen.

  However, there was a certain smell, and that was of frying bacon. I dragged myself from the sitting-room floor and shambled the considerable distance to the kitchen.

  A naked man was cooking food. I knew him at once to be Barry, the chef from Eat Your Food Nude who had served his time at Grand Parade before leaving over some trifling matter, which involved his wages.

  ‘Hello, Barry,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Mister Rune called me earlier,’ said Barry, ‘said it was an emergency. He had me call in at a secret place and bring him a Bakelite television. And call in at Lidl for supplies.’

  ‘But I thought you—’

  ‘An emergency is an emergency,’ said Barry. ‘And I am a professional.’

  Mr Rune breezed into the kitchen, tapping the morning’s Argus against his leg.

  ‘Sunny-side up, those eggs,’ he said to Barry, ‘and French toast all around. Did you get those da-bigga-da-sausages?’

  ‘All is under control, Mister Rune,’ said Barry.

  I shook my head and sat myself down at the kitchen table.

  ‘You will need to eat a hearty breakfast,’ said Mr Rune, seating himself also, ‘for today is the day.’

  ‘The day for what?’ I asked.

  ‘The final day,’ said Mr Rune. ‘The last that you and I will spend together.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, then, ‘No, I do not want that to happen.’

  ‘But nevertheless it will be so. One final conundrum, and for you, I feel, in the great tradition of your fictional hero Lazlo Woodbine, a final rooftop confrontation.’

  ‘Not with this hangover,’ I said. ‘And certainly not in these clothes.’

  ‘The hangover will shortly pass, but I agree that it would be better that you end our adventures in a manly fashion. Barry here will give you a haircut and there are clothes for you hanging on the door there.’

  I glanced towards the door. And there clothes hung: a three-piece suit of tweed, in a dry cleaner’s plastic sheath.

  ‘Fangio picked carefully during his looting,’ said Mr Rune. ‘If you recall, I whispered certain words into his ear before we left his bar to go to Hove Town Hall. These words were to the effect that should the unlikely occur – to whit, a bit of a riot – he should slip across the road and loot the dry cleaners and pick you out a suit.’

  ‘But how …’ But I did not bother to go any further with that. Instead, I took the suit and myself to Tobes’s bathroom, showered, washed the make-up from my face, dried all nice and put on the three-piece suit. A shirt and some shoes would have been lovely, but beggars cannot be choosers.

  Mr Rune rapped on the bathroom door. ‘I have a shirt and a pair of shoes here. Hurry now or I will have to eat your breakfast.’

  Dressed in this spiffing attire, I returned to the kitchen and sat down once again. ‘Thanks for this,’ I said to Mr Rune.

  ‘Well,’ said the All-Knowing One, ‘I think we’ve had sufficient mileage out of you being dressed as a woman. Best to have you well turned out now that the end is near.’

  ‘And it will end today?’ I asked.

  ‘The fourteenth of February. One year to the day since we first met.’

  ‘February?’ I asked. ‘I thought it was still January.’

  ‘I let you sleep in again,’ said Mr Rune. ‘You needed to regain your strength.’

  I shook my head and opened my mouth to protest. But just then Barry served up breakfast, so I used my mouth to set about that instead.

  And we were more than three breakfasts in, and Barry had finished my hair cut, before Tobes appeared in the kitchen. ‘Who drank my banana liqueur?’ he asked. ‘I was saving that for a special occasion. Like now, when there’s no more booze left.’

  ‘Rizla drank it,’ said Mr Rune. ‘On the first night we came here. Pray sit down and join us for breakfast.’

  ‘There is a naked chef here,’ said Tobes, observing Barry. ‘Is that not illegal?’

  ‘Best eat,’ said Mr Rune. ‘There’s a busy day ahead.’

  Tobes unearthed a bottle of home-made sloe gin from within the apparently hollowed-out kitchen toaster.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ said Barry. ‘I just cooked toast in that. How—’

  ‘Do not even ask,’ I told him. And we enjoyed sloe gin with our breakfast.

  ‘We must sit before the Chronovision now,’ said Mr Rune. ‘There is much that you must see, Lord Tobes.’

  Our breakfast finally concluded, Mr Rune dismissed Barry and handed him a bundle of large-denomination money notes.

  I rai
sed my eyebrows at this and the hairs stood up on my arms.

  Mr Rune took Lord Tobes and me to the sitting room, explained to Lord Tobes the workings of the Chronovision – to whit, what it did rather than how it did it – then fiddled with the knobs and we sat down to watch.

  And we saw it all in a sort of fast-forward, starting with the life and eventual natural death of Jesus, then continuing with the history of his subsequent bloodline. And as event after event unfolded, I saw it – what history actually was. What human life actually was. This series of seemingly random and disparate incidents, the losing of something trifling, which led to someone meeting someone. The decisions of small folk that affected the great. And how it all fitted together to move Mankind forward. Towards what?

  Well, I could not say then and still cannot. The Chronovision showed only the past. The future was still to occur.

  But I did see the point and Lord Tobes saw the point, too. And the point was so simple that it was almost obscene. There is purpose to it all. Our little lives are part of a greater something, and that something is what Mankind might become – should become – if all things work to the good.

  But all things rarely work to the good. At least, they have not so far, because there has always been someone who will seek to use the world to his or her advantage. They crop up in every age, like a cancer. And Mr Rune and his kind, and the ancestors of Lord Tobes, do battle with them, unseen and unknown to the rest of us.

  It is the stuff of which movies are made.

  And it is sad, but true.

  Which was a track by Metallica that I had quite liked at Rock Night.

  When Mr Rune finally switched off the Chronovision and pulled its plug from the wall, Lord Tobes and I did not have anything to say to each other.

  Each of us was alone with his thoughts.

  Which is how, I suppose, we always are.

  ‘Well,’ said Lord Tobes, breaking the silence, ‘I suppose then that there is nothing for it other than for the three of us to engage in battle against Count Otto Black.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mr Rune, and he nodded. ‘I only wish that we had some vintage champagne to toast the success of this remarkable alliance.’

  ‘I’m sure I can find some somewhere,’ said Tobes.