The Throwback

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Well, at least he knows we were telling the truth,’ said Mr Pettigrew and told his wife to shut up wailing like some woman for her demon lover, a remark hardly calculated to restore domestic peace to their sufficiently demented lives.

  From their bedroom at the end of the street Lockhart and Jessica watched the chaotic scene. The Simplons’ garage still blazed, largely thanks to the intervention of the dog, the hosepipe still writhed and spouted water from a score of holes high into the air like a lawn sprinkler with megalomania, firemen huddled on their engines and policemen in their cars. Only the armed men, brought in to deal with whoever had fired from the house, were still abroad. Convinced that the blazing garage was a diversion to allow the gunmen inside the house, who had eluded their search, to make good their escape under cover of the smoke, they lurked in the adjacent gardens and the foliage of the bushes by the golf course. It was in consequence of this and of the smoke that obscured their view and that of an early foursome, one of whom had an incurable slice, that a ball hit an armed constable on the head.

  ‘They’re coming at us from the rear,’ he yelled, and emptied his revolver into the drifting smoke, hitting the man with the now terminal slice and the Club House. He was followed by several other policemen who fired in the general direction of the screams. As the bullets ricocheted round the East Pursley Golf Course and punctured the windows of the bar, the Secretary lay on the floor and dialled the police.

  ‘We’re under attack,’ he screamed, ‘bullets are coming from every direction.’ So were other golfers. As they dashed through the smoke they were met by a hail of bullets from the Simplons’ back garden. Four fell on the eighteenth, two on the first, while on the ninth a number of women clustered together in a bunker they had previously done their best to avoid. And with each fresh volley, the police, unable to observe who was firing from where, engaged in warfare among themselves. Even the Rickenshaws at Number 1 who only an hour before had been congratulating themselves on the presence of police protection came to regret their premature gratitude. The contingent of police who arrived at the Club House armed now with rifles as well as revolvers and stationed themselves in the bar, the Secretary’s office and the changing-room, answered their comrades’ desultory fire with a positive barrage of their own. A hail of bullets screamed across the heads of the women cowering in the sandtrap on the ninth and through the smoke into the Rickenshaws’ sitting-room. In the sandtrap the women screamed, in the sitting-room Mrs Rickenshaw shot through the thigh screamed and the fire engine driver, mindless of his extended ladder, decided the time had come to get out while the going was good. The going was not good.

  ‘Never mind that fucking fire,’ he yelled at the men huddled on the back, ‘it’s gunfire we’ve got now.’ At the top of the ladder a fireman didn’t share his point of view. Clutching his dribbling hose he suddenly found himself moving backwards. ‘Stop,’ he yelled, ‘for God’s sake stop!’ But the roar of the flames and the rifles drowned his protest and the next moment the fire engine was off at top speed down Sandicott Crescent. Fifty feet above it the fireman clung to the ladder. He was still clinging when having cut a swathe through half a dozen telephone wires and an overhead electric cable the fire engine, travelling at seventy miles an hour, shot under the main railway line to London. The fireman on the ladder didn’t. He shot over and landed in the path of an oncoming petrol tanker, missing the London to Brighton express by inches on the way. The tanker driver, already unnerved by the careering fire engine, now ladder-less, swerved to avoid the catapulting fireman, and the tanker ploughed into the railway embankment and exploded in time to shower flaming petrol over the last five coaches of the express above. In the guard’s van, now engulfed in flames, the guard did his duty. He applied the emergency brake and the express’s wheels locked at eighty miles an hour. The subsequent screech of scored metal drowned even the sound of gunfire and the Superintendent’s howls in the bird sanctuary. Inside every compartment passengers sitting with their fronts to the engine shot into the laps of those with their backs to it and in the dining-car, where breakfast was being served, coffee and waiters mingled with diners to shoot everywhere. Meanwhile the last five coaches blazed away.

  So did the police in the golf club. The sight of the burning train emerging from what appeared to be a napalm bomb exploded in the centre of East Pursley only lent weight to their conviction that they were dealing with an outbreak of urban and golf-course terrorism unprecedented in the annals of British history. They radioed for army help and explained that they were pinned down in the East Pursley Club House by sub-urban guerrillas firing from the houses in Sandicott Crescent who had just exploded a bomb under the London to Brighton express. Five minutes later helicopter gunships were hovering over the golf course searching for the enemy. But the policemen in the Simplons’ garden had had their fill. Three lay wounded, one was dead and the rest were out of ammunition. Dragging their wounded they wormed their way across the lawn and round the side of the house and ran for the police cars.

  ‘Get the hell out of here,’ they yelled as they scrambled in, ‘there’s a fucking army out there.’ A minute later, their sirens receding into the distance, the patrol cars had left the Crescent and were heading towards the police station. They didn’t reach it. The tanker that had exploded on to the express had doused the road beneath and the tunnel was an inferno. Behind them Sandicott Crescent was in little better shape. The fire in the Simplons’ garage had spread to the fence and from the fence to the Ogilvies’ potting shed. It was well named. Riddled with bullet holes it added its flames and smoke to the general pall that hung over Jessica’s inheritance and lent a grisly light to the scene. The Ogilvies clung to one another in the cellar, listening to the whine of bullets ricocheting round their kitchen, and at Number 1 Mr Rickenshaw, tightening a tourniquet round his wife’s leg, promised her that if they ever got out of this alive they’d get out of the house.

  It was the same at the Pettigrews’. ‘Promise me we’ll move,’ whined Mrs Pettigrew. ‘Another night in this awful house and I’ll go mad.’

  Mr Pettigrew needed no urging. The series of events that had swept through Sandicott Crescent, and in particular their house, like the plagues that had affected Egypt, inclined him to renounce his rationalism and return to religion. His social conscience had certainly deserted him and when Mr Rickenshaw, unable to phone for medical assistance thanks to the scythe-like activities of the fire engine’s ladder, crawled across the street to ring the Pettigrews’ doorbell to ask for help, Mr Pettigrew refused to open the door on the reasonable grounds that the last time anyone had asked for medical help, namely the ambulancemen, of all people, they had introduced a mad dog into the house and that as far as he was concerned Mrs Rickenshaw could bleed to death before he opened his door again.

  ‘You can think yourself lucky,’ he shouted, ‘your fucking wife’s only got a hole in her leg, mine’s got one in her head.’ Mr Rickenshaw cursed him for his bad neighbourliness and, wholly unaware that Colonel Finch-Potter, having been relieved of his penis-grater, was now in intensive care at the Pursley Hospital, tried to knock him up. It was Jessica who finally came to his aid, and, braving the slackening gun-fire from the Club House, went down to Number 1 and applied her knowledge of first aid to Mrs Rickenshaw’s wound. Lockhart took advantage of her absence to make a last sally into the sewer. Donning his wet-suit, he crawled along to the outlet of Mr Grabble’s house with a bucket and a Second World War stirrup pump that Mr Sandicott had kept in his workshop for watering plants. Lockhart had another purpose in mind, and having introduced the nozzle into the discharge pipe and cemented it there with putty, filled the bucket from the sewer and began to pump vigorously. He worked steadily for an hour and then undid his apparatus and crawled home. By that time Mr Grabble’s ground floor was awash with the effluent from every other house in the street and all his attempts to get his ground-floor lavatory to behave in the normal manner and discharge excreta out of the house rather than pump it i
n had failed disastrously. Driven to desperate measures and wading through sewage with his trousers rolled up, Mr Grabble had seized on the idea of using caustic soda. It was not a good idea. Instead of going down the pipe to unblock whatever infernal thing was blocking it, the caustic soda erupted from the pan in an extremely vindictive fashion. Fortunately Mr Grabble had had the good sense to foresee this possibility and was out of the tiny room when it happened. He was less sensible in resorting to an ordinary lavatory cleanser and, when that failed, adding to it a liquid bleach. The two combined to produce chlorine and Mr Grabble was driven from his house by the poisonous gas. Standing on the back lawn he watched his living-room carpet lap up the foul liquid and the caustic soda eat into his best armchair. Mr Grabble took the unwise step of trying to dam the flood and the caustic soda dissuaded him. He sat on the edge of the fishpond bathing his feet and cursing.

  In the bird sanctuary the Superintendent was still shouting for help, though less loudly, and at the far end the bull-terrier was sleeping it off on the mat outside his master’s back door.

  Lockhart, divesting himself of the wet-suit, ran himself a bath and lay in it contentedly. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. There could be no doubting now that Jessica would be in full possession of her inheritance and with the right to sell every house whenever she chose. He lay thinking about the tax problem. His experience at Sandicott & Partner had told him that Capital Gains Tax was levied on every extra house an individual owned. There had to be some way round it. The tax on twelve houses would be enormous. By the time he got out of the bath he had found a simple solution.

  15

  Nobody else could find a simple solution to the problem of what had occurred in East Pursley. The discovery by an army helicopter of the Superintendent of Police hanging to the upper branches of a monkey-puzzle tree which would have defied the efforts of any but the most insane men to climb it didn’t help to clarify matters. He kept screaming about mad dogs being loose in the neighbourhood and his statement was supported by Mr Pettigrew and the Lowrys who had wounds to prove it.

  ‘It hardly explains how six golfers and five of my own men came to be shot,’ said the Commissioner of Police. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the midday sun but the former don’t carry side-arms. And what the hell do we say about that fire engine and the petrol tanker, not to mention the London to Brighton express? How many passengers went west in that inferno?’

  ‘Ten,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘though accurately speaking they were going south. The Southern Region caters …’

  ‘Shut up,’ snarled the Commissioner, ‘I’ve got to explain this to the Home Secretary and it’s got to sound good.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we could divide the two incidents into separate areas,’ suggested the Assistant Commissioner, but the Commissioner only looked at him the more lividly.

  ‘Two? Two?’ he yelled, rattling the windows of his office. ‘One, we have an utterly insane half-pay colonel whittling his prick with a cheese-grater in the company of a high-class whore. Two, we have a mad dog roaming the district biting everything in sight. Three, someone looses off firearms into several houses and then explodes a fucking garage with an unidentifiable woman in the inspection pit. Do I have to spell it all out for you?’

  ‘I take your point,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘which according to Miss Gigi Lamont is what Colonel Finch-Potter …’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the Commissioner savagely, and crossed his legs. They sat in silence and considered a convincing explanation.

  ‘At least the TV people and the press weren’t present,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, and his superior nodded thankfully.

  ‘What about blaming the IRA?’

  ‘And give them something else to boast about? You must be out of your tiny mind.’

  ‘Well, they did blow up Mr O’Brain’s house,’ said the AC.

  ‘Nonsense. The sod blew himself up. There wasn’t a trace of explosive in the house,’ said the Commissioner, ‘he was fiddling with the gas stove …’

  ‘But he wasn’t connected to the gas main …’ the AC began.

  ‘And I won’t be connected to my job unless we come up with something before noon,’ shouted the Commissioner. ‘First of all we’ve got to stop the press going in there and asking questions. Got any ideas on the subject?’

  The Assistant Commissioner considered the problem. ‘I don’t suppose we could say the mad dogs had rabies,’ he said finally. ‘I mean, we could put the area in quarantine and shoot anything—’

  ‘We’ve already shot half the police in that patch,’ said the Commissioner, ‘and while I’m inclined to agree that they were mad you still don’t go round shooting people who’ve contracted rabies. You inoculate the brutes. Still, it would serve to keep the press and the media out. And how do you explain the six bleeding golfers? Just because some fool slices his drive you don’t have a drive to slice him and five others with multiple gunshot wounds. We’ve got to come up with some logical explanation.’

  ‘Sticking to the rabies theory,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘if one of our men contracted rabies and went berserk—’

  ‘You can’t contract rabies instantaneously. It takes weeks to come out.’

  ‘But if there were a special sort of rabies, a new variety like swine fever,’ persisted the Assistant. ‘The dog bites the Colonel—’

  ‘That’s out for a start. There’s no evidence that anybody bit Colonel Finch-Fucking-Potter except himself and that in an anatomically impossible place unless the bastard was a contortionist as well as a pervert.’

  ‘But he’s not in a fit condition to deny the rabies theory,’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘He’s clean off his rocker.’

  ‘Not the only thing he’s off,’ muttered the Commissioner, ‘but all right, go on.’

  ‘We start with galloping rabies and the dog and everything follows quite logically. The armed squad go off their heads and start shooting—’

  ‘That’s going to sound great on the nine o’clock news. “Five officers of the Special Squad, organized to protect foreign diplomats, this morning went mad and shot six golfers on the East Pursley Golf Course.” I know there’s no such thing as bad publicity but in this case I have my doubts.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be announced on the news,’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘In a case of this sort we invoke the Official Secrets Act.’

  The Commissioner nodded approvingly. ‘We’d need the cooperation of the War Office for that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, those helicopters could have come from Porton Down and the Biological Warfare Research Station is there.’

  ‘They just happen to have come from somewhere else, and anyway they came after the show was over.’

  ‘But they don’t know that,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, ‘and you know how dim the Army Command is. The main thing is that we can threaten to put the blame on them and …’

  *

  In the end it was agreed at a Joint Meeting of the Home Secretary, the Minister of Defence and the Commissioner of Police that the happenings at Sandicott Crescent were subject to official silence and, invoking the Defence of the Realm Act together with the Official Secrets Act, the editors of all papers were ordered not to publicize the tragedy. The BBC and ITV were similarly warned and the news that night contained only the story of the petrol tanker that had exploded and set the London to Brighton express on fire in the process. Sandicott Crescent was sealed off and army marksmen went through the bird sanctuary with rifles killing anything that moved as an exercise in stopping the spread of rabies. They found only birds and from a sanctuary the wood became a mortuary. Fortunately for the bull-terrier it didn’t move. It slept on and on outside the Colonel’s kitchen door. It was about the only creature apart from Lockhart and Jessica who didn’t move. Mr Grabble, driven from his house by the upsurge of the sewer, handed in his notice that afternoon wearing a pair of bedroom slippers over his chemically
cauterized feet. Mr Rickenshaw finally managed to get his wife to hospital and the Pettigrews spent the afternoon packing. They too left before dark. The Lowrys had already left and were being given rabies inoculations in the company of several firemen, the Superintendent and a number of his men at the local isolation hospital. Even Mrs Simplon had gone, in a small sinister plastic bag which so upset Mrs Ogilvie that she had to be sedated.

  ‘There’s only us left,’ she moaned, ‘everyone else has gone. I want to go too. All those dead men lying out there … I’ll never be able to look out at the golf course without seeing them on the dogleg ninth.’

  This remark put Mr Ogilvie in mind of both dogs and legs. He too would never feel the same about Sandicott Crescent. A week later they too left and Lockhart and Jessica could look out their bedroom window at eleven empty houses, each standing (with the exception of Mr O’Brain’s Bauhaus, which had slumped somewhat) in substantial and well-kept grounds in an apparently desirable neighbourhood within easy reach of London and adjoining an excellent golf club whose waiting list had been conveniently shortened by recent events. As the builders moved in to restore the houses to their pristine state, and in the case of Mr Grabble’s to a sanitary one, Lockhart had time to turn his attention to other things.

  There was, for instance, the little matter of Miss Genevieve Goldring’s forthcoming novel, Song of the Heart, to be considered. Lockhart took to buying the Bookseller to check when it was due to be published. Since Miss Goldring managed to write five books a year under various pseudonyms, her publishers were forced by the impetus of her output to bring out two Goldring books in the same period. There was a Spring List Goldring novel and an Autumn one. Song of the Heart appeared in the Autumn List and came out in October. Lockhart and Jessica watched it climb from nine on the best-sellers list to two within three weeks and finally to Top. It was then that Lockhart struck. He travelled to London with a copy of the novel and spent part of an afternoon in the office of the younger of the two Giblings, and the rest of it in the office of the older with young Mr Gibling in attendance. By the time he left, the Giblings were in transports of legal rhapsody. Never in all their experience, and old Mr Gibling had had a great deal of experience in matters concerning libel, never had they come across a more blatant and outrageously wicked libel. Better still, Miss Genevieve Goldring’s publishers were immensely rich, thanks in large part to her popularity, and now they were going to be immensely generous out of court in their settlement, thanks to Miss Goldring’s wicked libel, or best of all they would be immensely stupid and fight the case in court, a prospect so eminently to be desired that Mr and Mr Gibling proceeded with a delicate hesitancy that was calculated to allure.