by Paul Sussman
He scratched his beard and lapsed into a silent reverie, his lips moving slightly as though he were talking to someone.
‘She was very beautiful, you know,’ he said after a while. ‘Some said she was the most beautiful woman in London. What a waste.’
He leaned forward and, picking up the colander from the sideboard where I’d deposited it, began fiddling with the protruding wires.
‘Just a few minor modifications and then I can sit and listen to her all day. I’ve got her old jewellery box, you know. There should be lots of sounds in that.’
He removed a small screwdriver from his top pocket and set to work on the underside of the colander. I watched him for a while, and then, when it became evident he had no more to say to me, stood and told him I had a train to catch.
‘Yes, yes,’ he replied. ‘Don’t let me keep you. Come by again soon. Your input has been invaluable.’
We shook hands rather awkwardly, and I made my way back across the cluttered workshop.
‘School all right?’ he called after me.
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘Just fine.’
At the door I turned and waved a final farewell.
‘You look just like her,’ he said softly. ‘The spitting image. Sometimes, when you were young, I would see you out of the corner of my eye and think maybe . . .’
I never saw him again. The next day, at almost precisely the same moment as I was sending him a telegram from Southampton announcing my departure to America, a freak electrical surge sent 15,000 volts flying into his colander and thence directly through his head, killing him instantly. His death was, of course, a complete accident. I might be many things, but a patricide is not one of them.
By the time I arrived at Meaty’s family home, an ornate, neo-classical mansion 15 miles north of Southampton, it was 8 p.m. and they’d started dinner without me. I changed quickly into my evening dress and, having joined the group, was made to down a pint of claret as punishment for being so late.
‘We’re all pissed as twoopers already,’ exclaimed Meaty triumphantly. ‘Been at it pwetty much since lunchtime. More wine here, Fwiggs! More wine, I say!’
Friggs, the aged butler, shuffled forwards and refilled my glass.
‘Down the pwoverbial!’ cried Meaty. ‘Or is it up the pwoverbial? God, I weally am in a lather!’
As well as myself and Meaty, the party included Pepper, Charlie, Topper, Bunty, Bongo McCabe and, seated at the head of the table and resplendent in black tie and a necklace of translucent white shells, Prince Gummy-Molars himself.
‘What’s the necklace for?’ I asked.
‘A charm!’ he boomed. ‘Those who wear it can never become drunk.’
‘Obviously not working in your case,’ chipped in Bongo, ‘because you’re pickled as Somerset chutney, old boy!’
‘I am not!’ roared the prince, banging his fist upon the table. ‘I’m sober. Sober, I say! Sober! Sober! Sober!’
Whereupon he struggled to his feet, lurched across the room and was violently sick in the fireplace.
‘Bwavo, Gummy!’ called Meaty. ‘I say, Fwiggs, scoop that up and take it through to Mrs Lockhart in the kitchen. She might be able to make a soup of it. And get some more wine while you’re there, will you!’
‘Yes, m’lud,’ sighed the long-suffering Friggs, shuffling dejectedly from the room. Gummy rejoined the table and tucked contentedly into a large plate of quail’s eggs.
‘You see,’ he chortled. ‘Very sober.’
We remained at dinner for the next three hours, polishing off at least half Lord Heaty’s famously well-stocked wine cellar and driving poor Friggs to distraction by constantly sending him away for more alcohol and then throwing food at him whenever he returned. By the time we’d finished port and cigars and retired from the table the poor man looked like he’d had a dustbin emptied over his head, whilst we were, to a man, incoherent with drink. We played a couple of games of billiards, and then, with Gummy fast asleep in an armchair – his broad nostrils flaring prodigiously as he snored, his lips wobbling like a pair of jellies – the rest of us trooped on to the terrace for a breath of fresh air. Which is where we saw the giant catapult.
‘I say,’ cried Bunty, ‘what an absolutely spiffing toy.’
It was a huge machine, some ten feet high, supported on four wooden wheels, with a long arm with a dish at one end, into which, presumably, was put whatever object was due to be catapulted.
‘What is it?’ asked Charlie.
‘A catapult,’ replied Meaty.
‘I can see that. But what’s it doing here?’
‘Father had it built,’ explained Meaty. ‘For the five-hundwedth anniversary of Agincourt. We had a pageant here on the lawn. It’s been here ever since.’
‘It looks like a spoon,’ opined Bongo. ‘A huge great medicine spoon, like the one matron used at school. I wouldn’t fancy one of those full of cod liver oil!’
We walked around the catapult a couple of times, and then climbed on to it, clambering around like children on a climbing frame. Pepper ensconced himself in the concave wooden dish at the end of the catapult arm, reclining with his hands behind his head as though he were on a sofa.
‘Very comfortable,’ he proclaimed querulously. ‘Very damned comfortable.’
‘Does it still work?’ inquired Topper, swigging from a bottle of vintage port.
‘No idea, old boy,’ replied Meaty. ‘It did at one time, but that was four years ago.’
‘I say,’ cried Bunty excitedly, ‘shall we have a go? I bet it’s got a hell of a shot.’
‘It’ll probably fall to bits as soon as we crank it up,’ opined Bongo. ‘I’m for another game of Bulldogs.’
‘Don’t be such a misewable defeatist, Bong-Bong,’ said Meaty. ‘I think Bunty’s quite wight. It’s our duty as Englishmen and Invincibles to get this catapult working. We shall be like knights of the Round Table! Come on down, Pepper, you slouch, and lend a hand.’
We gathered at the rear end of the catapult and, with Meaty shouting instructions, pushed it slowly into the middle of the terrace, its giant wheels crunching on the gravel. Some lamps were brought out – it was by now well into the early hours, although still perfectly warm – and by their flickering light we set about preparing the contraption to fire.
This was by no means an easy task, since none of us had the least idea how it worked. Topper got a nasty crack on the head when the catapult arm smashed down on top of it, and Bongo somehow contrived to get his finger stuck in the ratchet mechanism. After much pulling of ropes and cranking of levers, however, we finally had it ready for action. Meaty placed a decanter of Armagnac in the firing cradle and, with a cry of ‘Tally-ho!’ sprung the catapult. There was a loud whoosh, a snap of wood, and the bottle disappeared into the night. We were speechless.
‘Crikey,’ exclaimed Charlie eventually. ‘Did you see it fly!’
‘It must have gone half a mile!’ whooped Bunty.
‘I didn’t hear it smash,’ said Meaty. ‘It must have gone wight over the woods and into the lake. What a wheeze!’
We let out a loud cheer and charged back into the house in search of other objects to catapult, returning with cushions, books, bottles, an umbrella stand and an old gramophone, all of which we duly dispatched over the garden and into the woods beyond. Some, such as the gramophone, we heard crash into the trees; others just disappeared gracefully into the night, never to be seen or heard of again.
‘What we need,’ opined Pepper drunkenly after an hour of uninterrupted catapulting, ‘is something really heavy, like a large rock.’
‘Pepper’s wight,’ said Meaty. ‘We need something that will test our machine’s capabilities to the full.’
Bunty scratched his head.
‘An armchair?’ he suggested.
‘Too cumbersome,’ said Meaty.
‘A suit of armour,’ offered Topper.
‘No, no, no. Father would be absolutely fuwious. He’s very particular about his ar
mour.’
‘A big cooking pot?’ wondered Charlie.
‘Hmm, possibly,’ mused Meaty. ‘Not very inspiwing, though.’
We fell silent, each of us racking our brains to come up with a projectile worthy of such an enormous catapult. From the living room came the gurgling rasp of Gummy’s snoring.
I don’t think anyone specifically suggested using the prince as a missile. Not in the sense of actually vocalizing the idea. I think rather that it sprung up in all our brains simultaneously, prompted by the monstrous cacophony issuing from his giant rubbery nostrils. We stood around uncertainly, eyes flicking from one face to the next, each person wondering if anyone else was thinking the same thing, and then suddenly, decisively, without a word being spoken or an objection raised, we trooped back into the living room, lifted Gummy from his armchair and brought him outside. Pepper and Meaty held on to his somnolent form whilst the rest of us cranked the apparatus into preparedness, and we then hoisted him into the firing cradle.
‘I am your master,’ he muttered in his sleep. ‘Bring me sweetmeats!’
‘Off we go then,’ cried Meaty. ‘Gummy away!’
I was nearest the firing lever and, with a yank, pulled it back. There was a crack and a whoosh, and Oduduwa Ifa Ogunmola, Prince of the Kikiwe, was launched skywards to tumultuous applause from his inebriated friends. Up and up and up he went, cartwheeling across the face of the moon and looking for a moment as if he might be on his way out of the earth’s atmosphere altogether. Eventually, however, he attained optimum height and, after hanging in the air for a seemingly impossible length of time, began his descent. Much to our surprise, he woke up on the way down, shouting, ‘My head’s spinning!’ before plummeting headlong into the trees at the end of the garden. There was a crashing of branches, followed almost instantaneously by a resounding thud. A hundred birds rose up into the air screaming, and then everything fell quiet.
‘What a marvellous show!’ said Meaty. ‘Gummy weally is the life and soul.’
Soon after that everyone went to bed. Topper expressed vague reservations as to the legality of the night’s proceedings, but that was the closest any of us got to remorse for our activities. The truth was that catapulting Gummy had been extremely good fun, and had there been anyone else suitable to hand we would doubtless have catapulted them too. Bongo suggested going and getting Friggs, but was outvoted, and everyone duly trudged off upstairs.
Everyone, that is, except me; for although feeling drunk I wasn’t yet tired, and with a quick squeeze of The Pill in its silver snuffbox, and pat of The Photo in my jacket pocket, I therefore wandered off across the lawn and into the woods at the bottom of the garden. Dawn was breaking, and the ground was covered in dew. My dinner suit was rather crumpled.
I had gone about 50 yards into the trees, and had already stumbled across the shattered remains of the catapulted gramophone, when I found Prince Gummy-Molars hanging upside down from a large oak tree, his foot caught in the crook of a branch. His head was some 15 feet off the forest floor and appeared to have split clean in half, spilling brains and all sorts of gunge across the trunk and lower branches. His eyes were wide open; or at least one of them was, the other having apparently popped right out of its socket, whilst his lips hung pendulously downwards as though he were blowing me a kiss. He cut a most unappealing figure, and after gazing for a moment in horrified fascination I turned to my left and hurried off into the trees. I returned a moment later, however, and picked up his wallet from the forest floor. It appeared to have quite a lot of money in it.
‘I’m sure he would have wanted me to have it,’ I thought.
I wandered on for 20 minutes or so, feeling increasingly tired and heavy-headed, and finally, emerging from the trees into a misty glade, decided to sit down and take 40 winks. I duly slumped at the foot of mossy silver birch and, face to the rising sun, closed my eyes, drifting into a sleep almost immediately. When her voice came, I presumed I was just dreaming.
‘You’re sitting on the mushrooms!’
‘Hmmm,’ I mumbled.
‘You’re sitting on the mushrooms, Raphael.’
‘Yes, Emily, I know. I’ll eat them later.’
‘Raphael, do stop talking gibberish. I can’t pick mushrooms if you’re sitting on them.’
‘Of course not, Emily. Emily. Emily!’
My eyes jerked open and I sprang to my feet.
‘Emily! Is it you?’
Indeed it was, standing right in front of me, calm as you like, framed in a halo of dawn sunlight. I’m always startled by Emily’s sudden appearances, but on this occasion I was particularly so, for after her departure in 1910 I’d genuinely thought I’d never see her again. Now, however, she was back, unexpectedly, miraculously, as though from the dead. Aside from being a little taller, and possessed of certain womanly convexities that hadn’t been apparent when we’d last been together, she looked exactly the same as when we’d parted.
‘Emily, my darling! This is impossible. I never thought we’d see each other again.’
She stooped to pick an enormous, umbrella-sized mushroom.
‘Well, it all happened rather suddenly,’ she said, dropping the mushroom in her basket. ‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to hear from me.’
‘Wouldn’t want to hear from you!’
‘I thought you might be cross and upset. About my disappearing like that.’
‘Of course I was cross and upset. But that just made me want to hear from you more. God, Emily, you amaze me sometimes. You really do amaze me!’
She shrugged, and indicated that I should hold out the basket so she could drop some mushrooms into it.
For the next half-hour or so we zigzagged to and fro across the misty glade, and I filled Emily in on what I’d been doing for the last eight years – omitting to mention I’d been sent down from Cambridge and had just killed someone with a giant catapult. By the time the basket was full the sun was up and peeping over the tops of the trees.
‘So how long are you here for?’ I asked.
‘Not long,’ she replied. ‘I sail to America this afternoon, from Southampton. On the Aquitania.’
She must have noticed the spasm of disappointment that crossed my face, for she added:
‘Why don’t you come too? It’s a super ship. I’m sure we’d have a lot of fun.’
‘What, to America? Do you really mean it?’
‘Of course I mean it.’
‘But Emily, this is wonderful! Wonderful! It’s more than I could ever have hoped for!’
I leapt forward and embraced her and then, taking a last long look at her beautiful pale face, set off immediately into the swirling dawn mist. ‘I’ll meet you on board!’ I cried over my shoulder. ‘If you get there first, order me a pink gin!’
But of course she couldn’t order me a pink gin because she never actually boarded the ship (although she always swears she did). And so I rolled and puked my way over to America alone, and didn’t see my angel for another 12 long years, about which you can read more back in the bathroom. God, how I missed her.
And that’s really everything there is to say about Gummy, although I ought, before finishing, to tie off a few loose ends.
Gummy’s body was discovered two days after we killed him. It caused quite a stir, and Meaty and his friends were brought in for questioning by the local police. Since Lord Gosport had that very year donated £5,000 to the Police Benevolent Fund, however, the questioning was neither intense nor protracted, and no charges were brought. A coroner’s inquiry later concluded Gummy had slipped whilst tree-climbing.
Dayo Obafemi, Gummy’s younger brother, subsequently ascended to the throneship of the Kikiwe and proved, by all accounts, an excellent ruler. Far better, I suspect, than poor old Gummy would ever have been.
My father’s corpse, the colander still smouldering on his head, was discovered by Mrs Eggs, who wrote immediately to inform me of what had occurred. Her letter, however, only caught up with me eight months lat
er, in New Orleans, by which point White Lodge and everything in it had been sold to pay off my father’s mountainous debts, and our former housekeeper had moved to Eastbourne to live with her sister. I neither saw nor spoke to her ever again.
Of my fellow Invincibles – of Bunty, and Bongo, and Jonty, and Topper, and Pepper, and Charlie – I can tell you little, although I did hear a rumour that Jonty had married into the Norwegian royal family, and Pepper became something big in the Tory Party.
The blonde-haired girl to whom I lost my virginity died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919.
And finally, Meaty. For 40 years I heard nothing either of or about him until, quite by chance, our paths happened to cross, in the early Sixties. I was, at the time, in the service of Lord Slaggsby, and, as you may remember from my account of that period, there was an evening when His lordship, quite contrary to his usual practice, had a guest to dinner. That guest was none other than Maximilian Heaty, now Lord Heaty, 4th Earl of Gosport. Fat, gouty and riddled with the cancer that was soon to kill him, he quite failed to recognize me and spent the entire evening complaining about coloured immigrants.
‘Not that I’m a wacialist, of course,’ he lisped. ‘Quite the contwary. Used to have a vewy good black chum myself. Spiffing fellow. Called him Gummy-Molars. Life and soul of the party, he was. Absolute life and soul.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AT LAST, IT’S all coming together! After all the traumas and upsets and fuck-ups of the early part of the week my death is finally getting back up to speed. I’m feeling good. Really good. Better than I’ve felt for years. As Keith would have put it: ‘We’re rocking, man! Like, really rocking!’
Whoopee!
Part of the reason for my improved spirits is that that damned knocking finally seems to have stopped. It had been getting louder and more intense and more frequent all week, until by Wednesday night it had become so furious I genuinely thought whoever was doing it was going to smash their way right through the castle’s front door.
