The Throwback

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘This is the Pursley Brigade of the Provisional IRA,’ he said in a supposedly Irish voice. ‘We’ll be expecting your contribution in the next few days. The code-word is Killarney.’

  Mr O’Brain’s reply went unheard. A retired gynaecologist, he was sufficiently Anglicized and wealthy to feel resentful of this call on his time and resources. He promptly phoned the police and asked for protection. Lockhart, from the window of his bedroom, saw the patrol car at the end of the street move forward and stop outside the O’Brain house. It would be as well not to use the telephone again, he decided, and went to bed with a different scheme in mind. It involved the use of the sewer and was likely to disprove Mr O’Brain’s claim to have nothing to do with any organization that sought to achieve its ends by violence.

  The following morning he was up early and on his way to the shopping centre when the mail van arrived and delivered several packets to the Misses Musgrove. Lockhart heard them express some surprise and the hope that these were fresh donations to the church jumble sale. Lockhart doubted the suitability of the contents for any church function, a view shared a moment or two later by the Misses Musgrove who, having glimpsed Mr Simplon’s penis, recognized some awful similarity between it and the monstrous objects that they found inside the packets.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said Miss Mary, examining the address. ‘We didn’t order these frightful things.’

  Her elder sister, Maud, looked at her sceptically.

  ‘I didn’t anyway. I can assure you of that,’ she said icily.

  ‘Well, you don’t suppose for one moment that I did, do you?’ said Mary. Maud’s silence was answer enough.

  ‘How perfectly horrid of you to entertain such a suspicion,’ continued the outraged Mary. ‘For all I know you did and you’re just trying to throw the blame on me.’

  They threw the blame on one another for the next hour but finally curiosity prevailed.

  ‘It says here,’ said Maud, reading the instructions for the ejaculatory and vibrating dildo of adjustable proportions, ‘that the testicles can be filled with the white of egg and double cream in equal proportions to attain the effect of a lifelike ejaculation. Which do you think the testicles are?’

  Miss Mary correctly discovered them and presently the two spinsters were busy mixing the necessary ingredients, using the vibrating dildo to best advantage as an egg-beater. Having satisfied themselves that the texture was that recommended in the instructions, they had just filled the testicles to capacity and were arguing from their little observation of Mr Simplon’s unobtrusive organ what proportion to adjust the dildo to, when the doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ll answer it,’ said Mary, and went to the front door. Mrs Truster was there.

  ‘I’ve just dropped in to say that Henry’s solicitor, Mr Watts, is confident that the charge will be dropped,’ she said, sweeping in her accustomed way down the passage and into the kitchen. ‘I thought you’d be glad to know that …’

  Whatever the Misses Musgrove might be glad to know, Mrs Truster was horrified at the spectacle that greeted her. Maud Musgrove was holding an enormous and anatomically exact penis in one hand and what appeared to be an icing syringe in the other. Mrs Truster stared wildly at the thing. It had been bad enough to suspect that her husband was a homosexual; to discover with absolute certainty that the Misses Musgrove of all people were lesbians who mixed slight culinary gifts with gigantic sexual ones was too much for her poor mind. The room swam for a moment and she collapsed into a convenient chair.

  ‘Dear God, oh Lord,’ she whimpered, and opened her eyes. The beastly thing was still there and from its … whatever you called a dildo’s opening … there dribbled … ‘Jesus,’ she said, calling on the Almighty yet again before reverting to more appropriate speech, ‘what in hell’s name is going on?’

  It was this question that alerted the Misses Musgrove to their socially catastrophic predicament.

  ‘We were just …’ they began in unison when the dildo answered for them. Triggered by Miss Maud’s sitting on the mechanism that controlled its functions the dildo expanded, vibrated, jerked up and down and fulfilled the guarantee of its manufacturer to the letter. Mrs Truster stared at the terrible thing as it gyrated and expanded and the mock veins stood out on its trunk.

  ‘Stop it, for hell’s sake, stop the fucking thing,’ she yelled, forgetting her own social position in the enormity of her horror. Miss Maud did her best. She grappled with the creature and tried desperately to stop it jerking. She succeeded all too well. The dildo lived up to its promise and shot half a pint of mixed egg white and double cream across the kitchen like some formidable fire extinguisher. Having achieved this remarkable feat it proceeded to go limp. So did Mrs Truster. She slid off her chair on to the floor and mingled with the dildo’s recent contents.

  ‘Oh dear, what do we do now?’ asked Miss Mary. ‘You don’t think she’s had a heart attack, do you?’

  She knelt beside Mrs Truster and felt her pulse. It was extremely weak.

  ‘She’s dying,’ Miss Mary moaned. ‘We’ve killed her.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Miss Maud practically, and put the deflated dildo on the draining board. But when she knelt beside Mrs Truster she had to admit that her pulse was dangerously weak.

  ‘We’ll just have to give her the kiss of life,’ she said, and together they lifted the Vicar’s wife on to the kitchen table.

  ‘How?’ said Mary.

  ‘Like this,’ said Maud, who had attended a first-aid course, and applied her knowledge and her mouth to the resuscitation of Mrs Truster. It was immediately successful. From her swoon Mrs Truster regained consciousness to find Miss Maud Musgrove kissing her passionately, an activity that was entirely in sexual keeping with what she had already observed of the two spinsters’ unnatural lusts. Her eyes bulging in her head and her breath reinforced by that of Miss Maud, Mrs Truster broke away and screamed at the very top of her voice. And once again Sandicott Crescent resounded to the shrieks of an hysterical woman.

  This time there was no need for the Pettigrews to phone the police. The patrol car was at the front door almost immediately and, breaking the glass panel in the window beside it, the police unlocked the door and swarmed down the passage into the kitchen. Mrs Truster was still shrieking and crouching in the far corner, and, on the draining board beside her, motivated a second time by Miss Maud’s slumping into the chair on which its mechanism stood, slowly swelling and oozing, was the dreadful dildo.

  ‘Don’t let them come anywhere near me with that thing,’ screamed Mrs Truster as she was helped out of the house, ‘they tried to … oh God … and she was kissing me and …’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind just stepping this way,’ said the Sergeant to the Misses Musgrove in the kitchen.

  ‘But can’t we put that …’

  ‘The constable will take that and any other evidence he finds into possession,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Just put your coats on and come quietly. A policewoman will come for your night clothes, et cetera.’

  And following in the footsteps of Mr Simplon, the Revd Truster and Mr and Mrs Raceme, the Misses Musgrove were taken to the police car and driven off at high speed to be charged.

  *

  ‘What with?’ Lockhart asked as he passed the constable on duty outside the house.

  ‘You name it, sir, you’ve got it. They’ll throw the book at them and two nicer old ladies to meet you couldn’t imagine.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Lockhart, and went on his way with a smile. Things were working remarkably well.

  When he got home Jessica had prepared lunch.

  ‘There was a phone message for you from Pritchetts, the ironmongers,’ she told him as he sat down. ‘They say they’ll send round the two hundred yards of plastic piping you asked for some time later this afternoon.’

  ‘Great,’ said Lockhart. ‘Just what I needed.’

  ‘But, darling, the garden’s only fifty yards long. What on earth can you want with two hu
ndred yards of hosepipe?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t have to go and water the Misses Musgrove’s garden at Number 4. I think they’re going to be away for some considerable time.’

  ‘The Misses Musgrove?’ said Jessica. ‘But they never go away.’

  ‘They’ve gone this time,’ said Lockhart. ‘In a police car.’

  12

  That afternoon, on Lockhart’s suggestion, Jessica went round to the Wilsons to ask if there was anything she could do as their landlady to rectify the state of their drains.

  ‘There’s a very nasty smell,’ she said to the wild-eyed Mrs Wilson. ‘It’s really most offensive.’

  ‘Smell? Drains?’ said Mrs Wilson, who hadn’t considered this practical reason for the stench of death in the house.

  ‘Surely you can smell it?’ said Jessica as Little Willie wafted from the coal cellar.

  ‘The grave,’ said Mrs Wilson, sticking firmly to first principles. ‘It is the smell of afterlife.’

  ‘It smells more like that of afterdeath,’ said Jessica. ‘Are you sure something hasn’t died? I mean things do, don’t they? We had a rat die once behind the fridge and it smelt just like this.’

  But though they looked behind the fridge and under the oven, and even inside the Wilsons’ tumble drier, there was no sign of a rat.

  ‘I’ll ask my husband to come over,’ Jessica said, ‘and see if it isn’t the drains. He’s very practical.’

  Mrs Wilson thanked her but doubted there was anything practical Mr Flawse could do. She was wrong. Lockhart arrived ten minutes later with two hundred yards of plastic piping, and proceeded to investigate the drainage system with a thoroughness that was entirely reassuring. His conversation wasn’t. Lapsing into his broadest Northumbrian as he worked he spoke of ghosties and ghouls and things that went bump in the night.

  ‘I ha’ the gift of second sight,’ he told a gibbering Mrs Wilson. ‘’Twas given me as ma birthright. ’Tis death I smell and not the drain, aye, not one death but e’en the twain.’

  ‘Twain? Don’t you mean two?’ shuddered Mrs Wilson.

  Lockhart nodded grimly. ‘Aye, twain it is depart this life, with blude-red throats and bludier knife, so runs the rune my heart espied, ’tis murder first then suicide.’

  ‘Murder first? Then suicide?’ said Mrs Wilson in the grip of a terrible curiosity.

  Lockhart glanced significantly at a carving knife hanging from a magnetic board. ‘A woman screams without a tongue, and then from rafter man is hung. I see it all as I ha’ said, ye both mun leave ere both be dead. The hoose it is that has the curse, I smell your death and soomat worse.’

  His eyes lost their glazed look and he busied himself about the drains. Upstairs Mrs Wilson was packing frantically and when Mr Wilson returned she had already left. On the kitchen table there was a hardly legible note in her shaking hand to say that she had gone to her sister’s and that if he was wise he’d leave at once too. Mr Wilson cursed his wife, the ouija board and the smell, but being of a more insensitive nature refused to be daunted.

  ‘I’m damned if I’ll be driven out of my own house,’ he muttered, ‘ghost or no ghost,’ and went up to have a bath, only to find a rope with a noose on it hanging from the rafter in the mock-Tudor ceiling in the bedroom. Mr Wilson stared at it in horror and recalled his wife’s message. The smell in the bedroom was equally alarming. Lockhart had retrieved portions of the putrefying Willie and distributed them in the wardrobe, and as Mr Wilson stood sickened by the bed the voice he had heard before spoke again, and this time closer and more convincingly. ‘Hanged by your neck till ye be dead, the grave tonight shall be your bed.’

  ‘It bloody well won’t,’ quavered Mr Wilson but he too packed and left the house, stopping briefly at Number 12 to hand Jessica the key and his notice. ‘We’re going and we’re never coming back,’ he said, ‘that bloody house is haunted.’

  ‘Oh surely not, Mr Wilson,’ said Jessica, ‘it’s just got a nasty smell, but if you are leaving would you mind saying so in writing?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Mr Wilson who didn’t want to dally.

  ‘Now,’ said Lockhart, emerging from the hall with a form.

  Mr Wilson put down his suitcase and signed a formal statement to the effect that he renounced his tenant-right to Number 11 Sandicott Crescent immediately and without condition.

  ‘But that’s marvellous,’ said Jessica when he had gone. ‘Now we can sell the house and have some money.’

  But Lockhart shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘When we sell we sell them all. There’s such a thing as Capital Gains Tax.’

  ‘Oh dear, why are things always so complicated,’ said Jessica, ‘why can’t they be simple?’

  ‘They are, darling, they are,’ said Lockhart. ‘Now don’t worry your sweet little head about anything.’ And he crossed to the Wilsons’ house and began to work again. His work involved the hosepipe, the drains and the gas system, and that night when he slipped down the manhole entrance to the sewer in his wet-suit with a large lump of putty in one hand and his torch in the other there was murder in Lockhart’s heart. Mr O’Brain was about to rue the day he ignored the threat of the Pursley Brigade of the IRA. Dragging the hosepipe behind him he crawled down to the outlet from Mr O’Brain’s lavatories. There was one on the ground floor and one in the bathroom upstairs. Working swiftly Lockhart fed the pipe up the outlet and then cemented it in place with the putty. Then he crawled back, emerged from the manhole, replaced the cover and entered the Wilsons’ empty house. There he switched on the gas main to which he had connected the pipe and waited. Outside all was quiet. The police car at the entrance to the Crescent burbled occasionally with radio messages but there was no criminal activity in East Pursley to warrant their attention, only a slight burbling, bubbling sound in the U bend of Mr O’Brain’s downstairs toilet. Upstairs Mr O’Brain slept soundly, secure in the knowledge that he had police protection. Once during the night he got up for a pee and thought he smelt gas but, since he didn’t use it himself but relied on electricity, imagined sleepily that he must be mistaken and went back to bed. Mr O’Brain slept more soundly still, but when he awoke in the morning and went downstairs the smell was overpowering. Mr O’Brain groped for the telephone and less wisely for a cigarette and, while dialling Emergency Services, struck a match.

  The resulting explosion dwarfed all Sandicott Crescent’s previous catastrophes. A ball of fire enveloped Mr O’Brain, billowed through the kitchen, blew out both front and back doors and every downstairs window, destroyed the conservatory, ripped plaster from the ceiling and turned to shrapnel the thick glazed porcelain of the downstairs lavatory pan which hurtled through the door and embedded itself in the wall of the hall outside. In an instant Number 9 was turned from British Bauhaus into Berlin bunker by a series of sequential explosions that ripped cupboards from walls, Mr O’Brain from the telephone, the telephone from its connection box, books on gynaecology from their shelves and finally, sweeping upstairs, lifted the flat roof off its moorings and deposited fragments of concrete in the road at the front and the garden at the back. By some extraordinary miracle Mr O’Brain survived the blast and was catapulted, still clutching the receiver, through the drawing-room window on to the gravel of his drive as naked as ever Mr Simpson had been but blackened beyond belief and with his moustache and fringe of hair scorched to a tinder. He was found there raving about the IRA and the ineffectuality of the British police force by Colonel Finch-Potter and his bull-terrier.

  It was an unfortunate rendezvous. Colonel Finch-Potter held the firmest views about the Irish and had always regarded Mr O’Brain as a pussy-prying Paddy on account of the consultant’s profession. Assuming, with some slight justification, that Mr O’Brain had brought this holocaust on himself by making bombs, Colonel Finch-Potter exercised his right as a citizen to make a citizen’s arrest and Mr O’Brain’s demented resistance only exacerbated matters. The bull-terrier, resenting his resistance and particularly the p
unch Colonel Finch-Potter had just received on the nose, turned from the amiable beast it had previously been into a ferocious one and sank its implacable teeth in Mr O’Brain’s thigh. By the time the police car arrived, a matter of two minutes, Mr O’Brain had escaped the clutches of the Colonel and was climbing the lattice-work of his magnolia with an agility that was surprising for a man of his age and sedentary profession, but was to be explained by the bull terrier’s adherence to his backside. His screams, like those of Mr Raceme, Mrs Truster and Mrs Grabble, could be heard beyond the bird sanctuary and below the surface of the road where Lockhart was busily removing the putty from the outlet and dragging the hosepipe back to the Wilsons’ house. Ten minutes later, while more police cars sealed off the entrance to Sandicott Crescent and only allowed the ambulance through, Lockhart emerged from the sewer, and crossing the Wilsons’ back garden went home for a bath. Jessica met him in her dressing-gown.