The Fandom of the Operator

by Rovert Rankin

  “It is,” I said. “We tried.”

  “So, in a way, we’ll be able to look back on this. We’ll even laugh about it. We’ll say, ‘Remember when we were kids and we tried to raise P.P. Penrose from the dead?’ We’ll laugh, we’ll chuckle. We’ll have smoker’s cough and tweed suits and we’ll smell of wee-wee like old people do and we’ll laugh together.”

  “I like that idea,” I said. “That sounds nice. Although I don’t fancy smelling of wee-wee.”

  “So we must promise,” said Dave, “you and me, we must promise that no one will ever know about this. It will be our secret. Just the two of us. We tried to do a great thing, and we failed. But the magic, the magic which is our friendship, is in that we did try.”

  “You are so wise,” I said to Dave. “With a wisdom of your age, of course. But you are wise and I am proud to call you my bestest friend.” I put my arm around Dave’s shoulder.

  “We did a brave thing,” said Dave. “We did a noble thing. And now, as I can hear the front door being opened and the security chain being bashed about, I suggest that we climb out of the window and have it away on our toes.”

  “I so agree,” I said, and Dave upped the nearest window.

  I took a final look at Mr Penrose. He remained in silence. In repose. His eyes were closed and his nose shone in the sunlight. His mouth looked somewhat wonky though. “Goodbye, Mr Penrose,” I said. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t raise you from the dead. Dave and I tried. Goodbye.”

  Mr Penrose had nothing to say and Dave and I took our leave.

  The funeral of Mr P.P. Penrose, sporting man, best-selling author of the Lazlo Woodbine thrillers and Brentford’s most famous son, was held the very next day.

  Dave and I didn’t need to bunk off school: a public holiday had been declared by the Brentford Town Council and the school was closed.

  We followed the horse-drawn hearse, with its plumed black horses and its wonderful etched-glass windows and polished coach lamps, led by the slow-striding mutes in their veiled top hats and ceremonial coats.

  Behind walked figures of renown. The Prime Minister was there and the heads of state from several countries of the British Empire.

  Crowds lined every inch of the funeral route, casting roses over the road before the funeral carriage. It was a very moving affair and I was very moved by it all.

  Mr Penrose had sportingly written in his will that if his coffin should be preceded to the graveside by twenty proven virgins of the parish, then one thousand pounds would be given to the Mayor of Brentford to be used at his discretion.

  As I was young and ignorant and all, I didn’t understand at that time the concept of virginity, and therefore I had no idea at all about the lather the Mayor got himself into regarding how he could get his hands on (so to speak) twenty proven virgins.

  I learned later that he consulted an aged mystic, a certain Professor Slocombe, resident of Brentford, who was considered by many to be the borough’s patriarch.

  Professor Slocombe whispered words into the Mayor’s ear and Mr Penrose’s coffin was preceded to the graveside by twenty five-year-old girls from the infant school.

  The Mayor, apparently, took the thousand pounds and absconded with it. A thousand pounds was a lot of money in those days.

  Dave and I got ahead of the procession and dug ourselves in beneath another hedge of the borough cemetery. We got a pretty good view of the burying.

  “It was a very good do,” said Dave to me. “Very dignified. And I’ve heard that there’s to be an obelisk put up on his grave and also a special bench with a brass plaque on before the Memorial Library. That’s nice. Someone famous might one day sit on that bench and muse about things. It’s nice. All nice.”

  I agreed that it was nice. Mr Penrose was resting in peace. With the respect of all those many people who had loved his books and thought that he was a great man. It was a good thing that we hadn’t managed to raise him from the dead. He was better at rest and at peace.

  When the funeral service and the burying was over and the crowds had all gone away, Dave and I lazed upon the marble bed of Mr Doveston, smoked cigarettes and looked up at the sky and all the passing clouds.

  “Nice,” said Dave. “All nice.”

  “A pity there won’t be any more Lazlo Woodbine books, though,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Dave. “A pity, but all good things must come to an end.”

  “You are so wise,” I said to Dave. “So very, very wise.”

  As it happened, there was just one more Lazlo Woodbine book. And a really good one at that. Death Wears a Grey School Jacket, it was called. It would never have been published at all if it hadn’t been for Mr Penrose’s wife.

  Apparently the manuscript had been buried with Mr Penrose at his request. Unknown to Dave and me, when we had been trying to raise him from the dead that manuscript had been sitting there in the coffin under his bum. If Dave had known that, he would certainly have nicked it.

  Mr Penrose’s widow contested her husband’s will, had his body exhumed and the manuscript retrieved and published.

  It made the papers at the time. But not because of the manuscript.

  It was because of something else entirely.

  Apparently, when they opened his coffin to take out the manuscript, the cemetery workers got a bit of a shock.

  The body was all twisted up. The face was contorted, the hands crooked into claws with broken, bloody fingernails. The underside of the coffin lid was covered in terrible scratches. It appeared that Mr Penrose had awoken in his coffin only hours after he’d been buried and he’d tried to fight his way out. Mr Timms the undertaker gave evidence in court. He swore that Mr Penrose was definitely dead when he was buried, that he had been drained of blood and embalmed and that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly have been buried alive.

  Mr Timms said that it must have been post-mortem spasms and gaseous expansion and all kinds of stuff like that which had caused the semblance of reanimation. And he was acquitted of all charges of negligence.

  Dave and I never got to sit on that bench in our old age and chat about our past. So we never got to discuss the time when, as children, we had tried to reanimate a dead man, not realizing when we performed the ritual how long it would take to work its terrible magic. In fact, we never spoke about that subject ever again.

  Some things are better not spoken of.

  Nor even thought about.

  8

  Everything changes. And the present soon becomes the past and is gone.

  I awoke to find that there was silence in our house. It was Thursday, yet there was silence. I was seventeen years of age.

  Uncle Jonny came no more to visit. My father had died the previous year. A trapdoor he was standing on gave way beneath his feet. Few men can predict with accuracy the day and the hour of their passing. My father did. He knew the exact minute when he would die.

  The judge had told him.

  I did not attend the Daddy’s trial. There were no spare seats in the public gallery. My mother had reserved them all for herself and her personal friends. They all had banners with them and specially printed badges that they wore. These appealed for justice to be done.

  No clemency, they said. And Hang the blackguard high.

  Whether the Daddy was really guilty of all the charges laid against him, I cannot say. Certainly he murdered the ice-cream man, but that fellow had it coming. The Daddy had warned him on numerous occasions not to park outside our door and ring his damnable bells. He had told him what he could do with his chocolate nut sundaes and where he could stick his Cadbury’s Flakes, and what would happen if he didn’t move his van to places far away. But the fellow persisted. It was a free country, he said. He had a special licence, he said. He could park wherever he pleased, he said. Move or die, the Daddy said. The ice-cream man stayed put.

  In the months leading up to his murderous assault upon the vendor of iced sweeteries, the Daddy had, as they say, lived on his nerves.
He was a troubled daddy. He eschewed good food and dined on drink alone. He developed strange compulsions. He would spend hour upon end sniffing swatches of tweed in the gents’ outfitters. He became prone to outbursts of uncontrollable laughter. He bethought himself a Zulu king and dressed in robes befitting. He became obsessed with the idea that an invisible Chinaman called Frank was broadcasting lines from Milton directly into his brain.

  His plea of insanity was ignored by the court. And rightly too, in my opinion. I did not consider the Daddy to be mad. Perhaps a tad eccentric – but then, who isn’t?

  Upon that fateful night, the ice-cream man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the story of most of our lives. My daddy had just too many things all preying on his mind. The ice-cream man’s bells pushed him over the edge. And if the bells weren’t bad enough, the fact that my daddy caught the icecream man sexing my mummy was.

  The French have a special term for this kind of crime. And the perpetrator often gets off scot-free in their courts. But that’s just typical of the French. We’re far more civilized here.

  So, I suppose, fair do’s, the Daddy got what he deserved. And I, for one, was glad to see the back of him. I really enjoyed the street party that was held to celebrate his hanging. But I do feel that the court should have left it at that. Punished him for the crime he had committed, without bringing in all that other stuff, which seemed to me to be done for no good reason other than spite.

  The counsel for the prosecution called a special witness: a research scientist who worked for a government department, which didn’t have a name, or did, but it was a secret. This special witness gave evidence that my daddy had been directly responsible for all manner of terrible crimes against mankind and the planet in general. Climate changes; the extinction of a breed of rare miniature sheep; Third World famine. He even blamed my daddy for the rise of rock-’n’-roll.

  I heard this all from Dave, who, having recently become very close with my mother, had got a good seat in the public gallery.

  When I expressed my doubts to Dave regarding the scientist’s claims, Dave had shaken his head and no-no-no’d me into silence. The scientist had brought in a blackboard, Dave said. He had drawn equations on it. Dave said he had explained in terms that even the layman could understand how all the equations pointed to my father being the culprit and there was no room for error. So said Dave.

  “It’s a new science,” Dave said to me. “Based upon the discovery that we human beings do not actually think with our brains. Our brains are, apparently, receivers and transmitters, which receive information from our surroundings and transmit it to a distant point in the universe; then instructions to proceed in this or that endeavour are transmitted back, or some such, in so much and so on and suchlike. And things of that nature generally.

  “And half of the rubbish that’s going on in the world is all your daddy’s fault,” said Dave.

  I pricked up my ears at this, which got a cheap laugh from Dave. But what he said rang a distant bell with me. I thought back to that time when I’d been hiding in the restricted section of the library (a section that had recently been removed to an unknown location) and had overheard those two young men talking about this very thing.

  Curiously, there was no mention of this scientist’s evidence in the newspaper coverage of my father’s trial. The press just stuck with the business of the ice-cream man being run through the backside with my daddy’s Zulu asagi.

  The editor of the Brentford Mercury excelled himself.

  ICE CREAM, I SCREAM, EYES STREAM

  I had that front page stuck up on my bedroom wall for years.

  So, as I say, it was now very quiet in our house.

  I didn’t miss the Daddy. I’d loved him, for he was my daddy, but I’d never liked him very much. I blamed him for all the bad traits I now possessed. Whatever you learn in your childhood stays with you for life. It colours your opinions: it structures your thinking. You are programmed when young. You can never alter your basic programming.

  I can’t blame the Daddy for all the mistakes I’ve made in my life. That would be absurd and irresponsible. But I blame him for most and that is enough for me.

  So, as I say, and I’ll say once more: it was now very quiet in our house. And as I’d always loved quietness, I was grateful for it.

  And, as I said, everything changes. The present soon becomes the past and is gone.

  The borough was changing. The old streets were coming down and new blocks of flats were rising to take their place.

  This was now the nineteen sixties. Change was fashionable. And I was fashionable too. I was a mod.

  And I was a homo.

  That might come as a bit of a surprise to you. It did to me, when I finally found out what the word meant. I was rather disappointed about that, I can tell you. I’d thought that it must mean something really, really bad. I didn’t expect it just to mean that. I’d been doing that for years. I went to an all-boys school and everybody did that. We did that whenever we got the opportunity. Doing that took our minds off the fact that there weren’t any girls around for us to do that to. And when you did that to boys, you couldn’t get them pregnant, so you didn’t have to marry them. So I quite liked being a homo.

  Ultimately I didn’t stick with it, though.

  You could say that I tried to be a homosexual, but I was only half in Earnest.[6]

  But things were definitely changing.

  I wandered down Moby Dick Terrace one day, wearing-in my new Ivy Shop loafers with the gilt bar and low-level Cuban heels, to discover that Mother Demdike’s hut had gone. Workmen were laying the foundations for a new three-up, two-down, with an indoor lavvy. I asked one of the workmen what had happened to the witch’s hut and indeed to the witch herself. But the workman told me that he knew nothing about any old witch, he was just laying the main drains.

  He was a nice-looking workman, with tight jeans that flattered a pert little bum. I asked whether he’d like to come out to the pictures some time. The workman took umbrage at this and called me a poof to my face. And he said that he’d give me a kicking if I didn’t clear off pretty sharpish.

  I have always found homophobia offensive and I don’t take kindly to threats of violence. I took the workman quietly aside and discussed the matter with him. And then I hurried on about my business.

  But I wondered over Mother Demdike and her hut. I recalled the hag telling me that one day she and her kind would be gone and forgotten. Gone, as if in a dream that vanishes upon waking.

  And indeed she was gone.

  Dave was also gone for a while. To a young offenders institution. They say that if you want to learn how to be a real criminal, then prison is the place to go. If you’re not a crim when you go in, you’ll certainly be one by the time they let you out again.

  It isn’t utterly true. Criminals in prison can’t really teach you very much. Because, let’s face it, if they were any good at being criminal, they’d not have ended up in prison, would they? Their advice and their criminal knowledge really isn’t worth much at all. The only criminals whose advice is worth taking if you wish to pursue a life of crime are those who have never been caught. And those criminals will never give you any advice at all. Because they will deny to their dying breath that they are criminals.

  Because how can they be classified as criminals? They’ve never been convicted of a crime!

  Dave came out of the young offenders institution full of all kinds of rubbish. Theories on how you could commit the perfect crime. I argued with him that there was no such thing as the perfect crime. Silly, I know, but I was a teenager.

  Actually, if you’d like to commit the perfect crime just once in your lifetime, I’ll tell you how to do it. It’s a secret, so you’ll have to promise me that you won’t pass it on to anyone else. Do you promise?

  All right, I’ll tell you what to do.

  What you need to have is a bank account that’s in credit to more than one hundred pounds, a hole-i
n-the-wall cash card and a sombrero. If you have these, then this is what you do.

  Put on your sombrero,[7] go to the hole-in-the-wall when there’s no one around, insert your cash card and order up one hundred pounds. When the money appears through the little slot, very carefully ease out the middle twenty-pound note, leaving the rest where they are. Then wait. After a couple of minutes the cash machine will take back the money. It will credit one hundred pounds back to your bank account. Leaving you with twenty pounds in your hand. This is of course illegal, so I would be committing a crime if I encouraged you to do it. Or in fact even told you about it. So I won’t.

  Instead I’ll continue with my tale. The Daddy was dead, I was an uncommitted homo (because now I’d left the all-boys school to seek employment). Mother Demdike was gone and all but forgotten and Dave was back from the young offenders institution.

  It was Thursday. And it was seven o’clock.

  I met up with Dave at the launderette.

  “I can’t believe that you still get a feed out of this,” I said to Dave, as I watched him watching the washing going round and around.

  “A feed?” said Dave. “Speak English.”

  “You still enjoy this stuff,” I said. “It still excites you.”

  “One day,” said Dave, “you’ll appreciate it for yourself. Oh God, there’s a spin cycle coming up. Don’t talk to me till it’s over.”

  I kept silent and left him to his pleasure. I went outside and lit up a Passing Cloud.[8]

  They don’t have Passing Cloud cigarettes any more. Few folk remember them now. Wills made them. In a flip-top pink packet, in two rows of ten. Oval, untipped cigarettes, with Big Chief Passing Cloud on the front, smoking a clay pipe. I never understood about that. But we had some really classy fags back in those days. Balkan Sobranie, Spanish Shawl, a perfumed cigarette, Three Castles, Capstan Full Strength.

  Those were the days.

  And, frankly, I miss ’em.