A DOG CALLED DEMOLITION
ROBERT RANKIN
A Dog Called Demolition
Originally published by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers
Doubleday Edition published 1996
Corgi Edition published 1996
Kindle Edition published 2012 by Far Fetched Books
Diddled about with and proof-read by the author, who apologises for any typos or grammatical errors that somehow slipped past him.
He did his best, honest.
Copyright Robert Rankin 1996
The right of Robert Rankin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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For Jim and Yvette and Verity.
The Campbells
In particular to the memory of Jim,
the best friend that I have ever had.
A man of inspiration,
profound wisdom, charm and wicked humour.
There is a Jim-shaped hole in the world of all who knew and loved him
A WORD OF WARNING
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A FACT IN THE CASE
A DOG CALLED DEMOLITION - The Soundtrack.
A WORD OF WARNING
Most novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
This one doesn’t.
But it does have a soundtrack.
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The swine who stole my dog doesn’t realize what he did to me.
ADOLF HITLER (1889-1945), 1917
The guy who said money can’t buy you happiness was shopping at the wrong store.
JON BON JOVI (1962-), 1995
THE REALIZATION OF OLD SAM SPROUT
It was the kind of weather that made you feel God must be really upset about something. Cats and dogs, it was. Hammering down. It hammered down against the front-room window, filling the front room with that terrible sound television sets make when all the programmes are over. That terrible sound that wakes you up after you’ve fallen asleep in your armchair and gets you all confused.
White noise, it’s called. Which lends dread to the thought of what black noise might be like.
Old Sam Sprout didn’t hear the rain. The batteries in his hearing-aid had gone flat. Old Sam Sprout didn’t realize that they had, he just thought the world had grown much quieter of late. Which was no bad thing, considering.
Sam sat in his armchair before his television set. No white noise came from Sam’s television set. Because Sam’s television set was broken. The volume control seemed to have gone on the blink, so Sam had rattled the television set about. And now the television set was broken.
So Sam couldn’t watch it any more.
Not that Sam cared much about that. What Sam cared most about lay upon a Persian pouffe, equidistant between his armchair and his television set. And this was Sam’s left foot. Sam, of course, had a healthy regard for his right foot also. He had no prejudice either way. A foot was a foot, be it a left one or a right. To show greater favour to one, rather than to the other, would be an absurdity, but at the present Sam really did care most about his left foot.
Because his left foot was all bandaged up.
His left foot was seriously injured.
The Fates had dealt Sam Sprout another body blow and this time one way below the belt. Sam was no stranger to accident and injury. Ill fortune had pressed upon him all the long years of his life. As a boy he had collected bad luck the way other boys collected birds’ eggs. And by the time he was ten, he had broken most of his bones several times over and been struck down by such a large variety of childhood ailments, that his doctor brought medical students round to Sam’s house each Friday morning to test their powers of diagnosis.
Sam was the only child in Brentford’s long and dignified history to develop beriberi twice. Whenever an epidemic broke out in the borough, the emergency services never had far to look for the epicentre.
But, then, at the age of sixteen, Sam’s illnesses suddenly cleared up. This came as an untimely shock to his physician, who had been making more than a comfortable income from displaying his patient and had based two bestselling novels on him.
‘Are you sure you feel all right?’ he asked the teenage Sprout.
‘Never better,’ Sam replied.
Doctor Kinn, for such was the physician’s name, thumbed through his medical directory. ‘Possibly he has contracted some hitherto unknown malady, which manifests itself as a facsimile of perfect health,’ he said to Mrs Sprout, while wondering whether this might be the first recorded incidence of Kinn’s Syndrome.
A vision of his name in three-point bold, atop a full-page write-up in The Lancet, flashed before his eyes. This was undoubtedly The Big One.
But it wasn’t.
The weeks passed and Sprout grew stronger. His scrofula shrank and his mange became memory. His canker was conquered, his buboes were banished. His scurvy was scuttled, his trench foot transcended. And he was literally liberated from leprosy. And so on.
Even his Ghanaian gut-bloat got better.
‘I feel even healthier today than I did yesterday,’ he kept telling his doctor.
‘I fear for his life,’ the great physician told Sprout’s mother. ‘No-one should be this healthy.’
On the morning of his seventeenth birthday, the radiant Sprout opened the front door to find three policemen on his doorstep. One of them had a dog. The dog’s name was Princey.
‘Are you Samuel Oliver Sprout of number four, Moby Dick Terrace?’ asked one of the policemen. (The one on the left, not the one with the dog.)
‘I certainly am,’ said Sam. ‘And I feel really well.’
‘Then I must caution you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.’
The Fates, who had spent a full year debating upon how next to mistreat Sam, had apparently reached a joint decision. Sam was now to know the sorrows attendant to wrongful arrest.
‘But I haven’t done anything,’ he protested, as the officers of the law dragged him off to the Black Maria.
‘What am I accused of anyway?’ he continued, in a manner not unknown to Franz Kafka. ‘Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves,’ he concluded. ‘To quote Abraham Lincoln,’ he added.
Sometime the next day, which was the day after Sam’s birthday, which meant that Sam missed his party, Sam was released. The police informed him that there had been a clerical error, that they had, in fact, been searching for a certain Sam O’Sprout, the notorious baby de-ce
rebrationist and player of the Hammond organ. Samuel Oliver Sprout was thanked for his cooperation and returned home on the crossbar of a constable’s bike. (The constable was the constable who had the dog, but he had borrowed the bike from the other constable, the one who had not cautioned Sprout.)
‘I’m sorry about all this confusion,’ said the constable, dropping Sam off at his gate. ‘Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ said Sam, ‘I haven’t. And what about all this? He gestured all about his person, drawing the constable’s attention to the cuts and abrasions on his head, the severe bruising he had received during what he had been assured was ‘routine interrogation’. The section of bedraggled cloth which terminated above his left knee had once been, until very recently in fact, a complete trouser leg.
‘Sorry,’ said the constable, shrugging, as he contained his mirth. ‘Worse things happen at sea, I expect. Cut along now, sir, or I’ll run you in for loitering.’
‘Thanks a lot.’ And Sam dragged himself into the house.
And ‘Where’s all the furniture gone?’ he asked his mother.
‘We’ve had burglars in, while you were out,’ said his old mum, cheerfully. ‘One of them played the Hammond organ.’
Sam said, ‘I’m dead chuffed that The Fates, who have ignored me for a full year, are now once more giving me their undivided attention.’
‘I shouldn’t talk like that, dear,’ advised his mum. ‘Your father once talked like that and look what happened to him.’
Sam peered into the goldfish bowl. ‘Has Dad had his ant’s eggs today?’ he asked. (Years ahead of “American Dad” on that one, then).
But all that was a long time ago.
An astonishingly long time ago.
The Sam Sprout who now sat in his battered armchair caring for his bandaged left foot was eighty-seven years of age. That’s eighty-seven years of age.
Which is old and that’s a fact.
No-one, who had ever witnessed the disasters which had followed Sam through his life like a faithful dog called Princey, would have imagined such longevity conceivable. Time after time The Fates had hurled down tribulations upon Sam which would surely have felled an ordinary mortal.
But old Sam Sprout was no ordinary mortal. No ordinary mortal was he. Oh no.
‘Things haven’t been too bad of late,’ said Sam, reaching up for his cherrywood briar and knocking his snuffbox from the mantelpiece into the roaring fire. Such trifles as this Sam put down to pure chance.
‘Quite recently I have noticed a distinct letting-up in the ill-fortune department, almost as if The Fates were beginning to relent.’
A lorry passing the front door rattled Sam’s signed photograph of the Queen Mother from its honoured place on the parlour wall and shivered it to pieces on the red-tiled floor.
Of course, Sam didn’t hear this, as he had not heard his own voice speaking. But it had happened. Which possibly proves that thing about the tree falling in the forest when there’s no-one around to hear it.
‘I think it is all down to this left foot of mine,’ said Sam. ‘In fact, the more I think about it, the more certain I become.’
Sam rose painfully from his armchair and limped over to the window. The rain had stopped. But as Sam hadn’t heard the rain and so didn’t actually know that it had been raining, he was not altogether sure just where that left him.
He could observe, however, just how much flooding there was in his basement area. And what a pity it was that he hadn’t taken his washing in. Or covered up his pushbike. Or left that cake out.
Two teddy boys were unscrewing the brass numbers from Sam’s front gate. A neighbour’s dog, whose name was Princey, was burying a foetal pig in Sam’s herbaceous border.
It was just another day.
‘It’s just another day for some,’ said Sam, ‘but not for me.’ He turned down his eyes to view the new damp patch that was spreading along beneath the window. ‘Not for me and my bandaged foot, my bandaged foot that holds all the answers. No Siree, by golly.’
Old Sam limped off to his kitchen. As he passed through his parlour, shards of the Queen Mother’s picture glass penetrated the heel of his right slipper and entered the heel of his right foot.
Old Sam ignored the pain, he had no interest at this time in his right foot. He couldn’t have cared less for his right foot. His right foot did not matter. It was superfluous.
It had its uses for getting about on, obviously. But Sam wasn’t dwelling on those.
‘How I came by my bandaged foot would certainly put the cat amongst the Picassos if it was ever to come out before the public as a Warhol,’ he said. It wasn’t that his mind was wandering, it was just that he couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Sam hobbled into his kitchen and fumbled about in his fridge. He was searching for a fresh pint of milk.
Somehow the fridge had become unplugged and a flood of lime-green water splashed over Sam’s punctured slipper and began to soak into the bandages that swathed the foot of mystery. There was a nasty smell of rotting vegetables in that kitchen. It did not go unnoticed by Sam.
Sam sought a saucepan that still had a handle and a cup of a similar nature. Both these he tested gingerly in his hands, and satisfied that they had at least one more go left in them, he poured freshish milk into the cup and from thence to the saucepan, which he placed upon the gas stove.
‘All those who dare to Dali with the supernatural will learn the importance of being Ernst, when all is revealed concerning my bandaged foot,’ said Sam, as he turned on the gas. ‘My bandaged foot will become an object of veneration. A bit like the Toulouse-Lautrec shroud,’ Sam also said, as he searched in vain for the sugar bowl. ‘I think I’ll have it without sugar today.’
The coffee had run out the day before, but Sam’s home-help had neglected to replenish the jar, preferring instead to abscond with his silver.
‘I think I will have it without coffee as well,’ Sam added, wondering why there weren’t any spoons.
He did not waste time looking for the biscuit barrel. Though it was a very nice biscuit barrel, it having a photograph of the Queen Mother on it and everything, the last time Sam had opened it, a scorpion had been inside. Sam now gave biscuits a miss.
Sam took a box of matches from his waistcoat pocket and opened it. Upside down. The matches scattered about the kitchen floor, old Sam smiled a secretive smile, took out his Ronson and flicked back the striker.
‘Ping’ went the flint as it joined the matches.
Sam smiled on, took the electric lighter with the rechargeable batteries from its special socket next to the cooker, held it to the gas and touched the button.
The gas lit.
Sam’s secretive smile now became one of triumph. ‘I know what I know,’ he said, tapping his nose with the lighter and nearly putting his eye out. ‘And soon all will know what I know. And then they’ll know something. Oh yes.’
Sam returned to his front room and the comfort of his armchair and pouffe.
‘I must write to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Prime Minister, to the President of the United States, and to the Queen Mother,’ said Sam. ‘And also to Damien Hirst. What I have stumbled upon, in both the physical and the metaphysical senses of the word, is of such great import, that all must know of it. Whoever would have guessed,’ Sam said, ‘that the entire population of the world, every man, woman and child of every race, colour and creed, is slave to an invisible race of mental parasites? Whoever would have believed,’ Sam asked, ‘that the voices which scream in the heads of maniacs are the voices of these same evil beings? Who could ever have conceived,’ Sam enquired, ‘that all this would become known to me via the medium of my left foot?’
Sam shook his old head and perused the bandaged extremity. The green water from the fridge now added a certain something to its air of mystery. An aura of light shone about it.
Sam shook his old head again. ‘I do believe,’ he declared, ‘that my whole life has
been a stage, set and waiting for this bandaged foot to make its entrance. Possibly this is why The Fates have dealt so shabbily with me.’
Sam thought of the biblical Job. God had dealt pretty shabbily with him, but things had worked out just fine in the end.
‘I have been tested and found not wanting,’ said Sam, who hadn’t slipped an artist’s name into his monologue for quite some time. (Apart from Damien Hirst, of course, but Sam really did intend writing to him.) ‘So I shall prove the world is wrong and I am Frank Lloyd Wright.’
And it was at this very moment that old Sam Sprout had the very realization which had inspired the title of his chapter. It was the realization that he had been chosen.
That all he had suffered had been for this one reason alone.
That he and only he could alter everything. And very easily too.
‘Yes!’ Sam lurched from his armchair. ‘Of course!’ he yelled, with the light of his realization shining from his face. ‘I know exactly what I must do and exactly how I must do it!’
But he didn’t say more than this.
Which is hardly surprising, really.
To state what happened next, would be to state the obvious. The clues were all in place for all to view. And if one thing alone is surprising, it is the fact that old Sam managed to say quite as much as he did, before the inevitable occurred.
And to state what this ‘inevitable’ was, would once more be to state the obvious.
To state how the milk boiled over and put out the flame and how the gas built up in the kitchen, before moving on to the parlour, then along the hall, finally to reach the roaring fire in the front room at the exact moment old Sam Sprout came to his state of cosmic realization would be to state the obvious.
And none of us want that.
And so the money ran out in the gas meter.
Old Sam Sprout opened his mouth to speak, but the voice which spoke from it was not his own. It was a dark, gruff, guttural sound. Like the baying of a monstrous hound. A sound that was surely the dreaded black noise itself. And the noise became a single word. And that word was DEMOLITION.
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