Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  His father didn’t question how he spent his time and never felt tempted to visit the attic. Charlie was down every morning to open the shop and served as a watchman at night and that was enough for the barber. The boy had been the curse of his life and he was glad to be rid of him.

  Charlie never returned to the house behind the privet hedge. The barber died alone in its kitchen. He cremated himself one night by forgetting to watch a frying pan. The pan exploded. He laughed in surprise as beautiful blossoms of fire wobbled from the ceiling and petals cascaded over the walls. He was so drunk that he lost his feet in the smoke, lay down on the floor and went to sleep with his head in the flames.

  His ashes were sent to Geraldine at Golders Green Cemetery and Charlie was left in the painted attic above a run-down barber’s shop.

  16.

  It was several weeks before Charlie discovered the final remains of his father. They were hidden in a small yellow cupboard at the back of the shop. The cupboard had been sealed shut by many coats of paint and the collapse of its rotting hinges. Charlie broke it open with a butter knife.

  On the shelves he found a forgotten stash of rusting King Gillette blades, a roll of styptic pencils, a flat red tin of Elastoplast, a bundle of Skirt Lifter magazines, an unframed photograph of Geraldine and a military issue handgun.

  The Skirt Lifter magazines were black and white catalogues of portly women in corsets, stockings and garter belts. They had been obtained for the barber’s personal comforts during his lonely bachelor days and when he had grown tired of them, he’d offered their frazzled pages for his customers’ amusement while they waited their turn in the chair.

  Calling all Men! A hundred gorgeous views of gals. Artists models. No two alike. Every one guaranteed a study. Sent in plain cover. Your money back if not satisfied.

  Attention! Restore energy, defeat bad health, with the famous Vitabrace iodised jock strap and body-belt, the perfect support for men of all ages. Prevents rupture and varicose strain.

  Victimised by nerves? Dr Niblett’s Sedative gives prompt relief, Every bottle with full instructions. Booklet sent free.

  The women in Skirt Lifter were the ancestors of the girls in Stiffy. By the time Charlie uncovered them some of the women were already dead and the rest were so old they’d adopted waterproof underwear.

  The photograph of Geraldine had been taken by her father with a Kodak Instamatic and showed his favourite daughter as a young woman posed proudly in the grocery shop. She was wearing a starched apron and standing before a pyramid of canned pineapple chunks in heavy syrup. Her face was frozen into a smile. A pencil was stuck in her tight curly hair. She was eighteen years old and had no idea she would marry a barber and fall to her death from a bedroom window. At the time of the photograph she thought she would marry Burt Reynolds, bless him with children and live forever.

  The handgun was a small .380 Beretta automatic presented to the angry barber by one of his customers after a series of minor thefts in which nothing much had been stolen but soap, brushes and boxes of condoms. The barber had fully intended to use the gun to defend his property against any future intruders. But the thieves had failed to return and the weapon had been forgotten.

  Charlie added his mother’s shoe to these curious relics and kept them in a metal cashbox stashed under the bed.

  17.

  ‘Is that it?’ the Mariner said. He yawned a vast reptilian yawn exposing the back of his bright blue throat.

  It was hard to believe that these peculiar primates had continued preening and grooming themselves while all around them the world was dying. What had gone wrong in their big, soft brains?

  Charlie woke up from his dream and groaned. He blinked at the light and wiped his face in his hands As he recovered he sensed something move among the trays of dusty plants he kept on the chest beneath the window. He glanced furtively in that direction, half-afraid of what he might find staring back at him.

  The cactuses, which an hour ago had been no more than shrivelled brown thumbs, had swollen and stretched and cracked their pots! They gurgled and rattled their quills. Some of them now were as big as marrows, pushing and heaving against each other, their tops crowned with trumpets of painted flowers.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ he whispered in amazement. ‘Everything is going mad!’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ the Deep Time Mariner said, inspecting this outbreak of undergrowth. He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘I can’t help it. Plants seem to like me.’ Charlie took a step towards the window. The myrtle shattered its china bowl and burst into masses of perfume flowers. The ivy began to unravel and clamber across the curtains.

  ‘What do you think of his story?’ Einstein demanded anxiously, running up and down the room, trying to attract their attention. ‘Didn’t it make you want to weep? Didn’t it squeeze your heart?’

  ‘Frankly. I’m not impressed,’ the Mariner said, bending down to bury his face in the myrtle flowers. He appeared to suck up the scent of the bloom, drew back his head and sighed.

  ‘There’s more!’ Charlie protested. ‘That was nothing. We haven’t scratched the surface.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen enough,’ the Mariner said, turning away from the window. ‘I came for the dog on an errand of mercy. There’s nothing to be gained by watching you stroll down memory lane.’

  But you’ve seen nothing!’ Einstein complained. ‘Nothing. He was groping in the dark until I came into his life. He was less than a slithy tove when I became his guardian. A rath. A mimsy borogrove.’ He snarled and snapped at the ivy as it curled surreptitiously under his legs.

  ‘I can speak for myself,’ Charlie said, scowling down at the angry mongrel. ‘It might mean nothing to you,’ he said to the Mariner, ‘but I had my hopes and ambitions like everyone else. I was going to be an artist. My life was going to make a difference. I was going to change the world.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with the world until you fell out of your tree,’ the Mariner said, shaking his head. ‘I’m disappointed. You’d be of greater interest if you were more typical of your species.’

  ‘Typical?’ Charlie hooted. ‘I’m as regular as clockwork. I’m a positive model of average ineptitude. I’ve wasted my time, crushed my own spirit, squandered my talents, done everything that can be done to encourage disappointment and self-disgust. That’s typical. What’s missing?’

  ‘Everything!’ the Mariner growled. ‘You’re a poor advertisement.’

  ‘What did you expect to find?’

  ‘If you were a textbook primate I‘d have found you astride your mate,’ the Mariner said. ‘You’d be grinding your teeth and squirting your seed in every direction. I might have escaped detection if you’d been bent to your buttock business.’

  Six billion monkey-men swarming over this tiny planet like maggots infesting a corpse. How had such a catastrophe happened? He had heard that the males were always on heat and the females were always in season. And he knew they had bred at alarming rates, despite the fact that their world was no longer fit to inhabit. They continued to breed in flood and famine as if they dwelt in a land of plenty. They were mad. No doubt about it. But if he could learn the reasons for this madness he might have an answer to the tragedy.

  ‘I’m as normal as the next man,’ Charlie said indignantly. It hadn’t been easy living alone, deprived of a woman’s comfort.

  ‘You’re all freaks,’ the armour-plated lizard murmured.

  ‘I once had a wife,’ Charlie said

  ‘She was a rough and randy piece of work,’ Einstein interrupted, ‘But all the same, it can’t be denied, she gave him a champion litter.’

  ‘A litter?’ the Mariner said. ‘Is that right?’ His curiosity seemed to stir again.

  ‘You want babies?’ Einstein the seasoned slave trader said, cracking a wet and whiskery grin. ‘He had babies. Certainly. Dozens of them. Shouting and steaming and puddling corners.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating.’

  ‘Strike me
dead—every word is true,’ Einstein said. ‘He had a house stuffed with babies. The carpets crawled with them. There were so many brats you couldn’t count them.’

  ‘What happened?’ the Mariner asked suspiciously. ‘Did he eat them?’

  ‘That’s another story,’ Einstein said.

  ‘I’m not to blame for what happened,’ Charlie began.

  ‘Shut up and sit down, noodle-brain!’ the faithful scamp snarled. ‘Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you?’

  ‘Close your eyes and concentrate,’ the Mariner ordered, turning again to Charlie. ‘Show me what happened…’

  18.

  Charlie closed his eyes again and now they saw a stranger in the attic, sitting on the sofa that served as a bed, staring at a pile of Charlie’s paintings. He was a fat man in a dark suit and a fancy satin waistcoat. He was fat, there was no doubt about it. He was supremely fat. He was dangerously corpulent. He had a stupendous belly and a head that was pillowed on many chins. And yet, despite his size, this man held an air of sombre elegance. His hair was silver. His teeth were a most expensive blend of porcelain and gold. His hands, which were very dainty, were embellished with blue tattoos, as fine as copper engravings. His name was Harry Prampolini.

  Harry was from a circus family. His parents had been famous jugglers but he had chosen to work with freaks. He had exhibited mermaids, wild men from Borneo, dogs with feathers and pickled human babies with wings. But the shows were no longer popular. The modern world was filled with freaks. Farmers found them mewing in lambing sheds. Midwives pulled them from screaming mothers. Trawlermen came home with their nets torn by fish with human heads. It was an age of monsters. He could see a time when everyone would have a hairy baby with flippers or keep a legless kitten rolling around on a rubber cushion.

  He had abandoned all the old fairground traditions. He had cut himself loose from his family and friends. He was a man in search of adventure and fresh business opportunities.

  Charlie had first encountered Fat Harry when the showman had ventured in from the street, sat down and ordered a shave.

  While he was in the chair he had tried to sell Charlie a two-headed sheep. She was a good-natured sheep, very friendly, and living with a travelling circus that was going bankrupt in the outskirts of London. He was trying to save her from slaughter by finding her another home.

  ‘What would I do with a two-headed sheep?’ Charlie grinned. He liked this man with his strange talk and illustrated hands.

  ‘She’ll be no trouble,’ Fat Harry said. ‘She’s grown so old she does nothing but sleep. You could put her in your window. A two-headed sheep is a big attraction. You could give her a wash and shampoo, shave a slogan into her fleece.’

  When Charlie couldn't be persuaded to buy the sheep he offered him a shooting gallery. A dozen rifles and a gizmo that balances coloured balls on jumping jets of water. When that failed he offered him a helter-skelter. Guaranteed a hundred years old. A museum piece. A collectors' item. Finally he set out to sell Charlie a Chuck Wagon business.

  The Chuck Wagon was a Bluebird trailer equipped with a hotdog machine. It carried gas bottles and a water tank on the roof. The walls unfolded to make counters and windbreaks. The windbreaks were painted with pictures of palm trees and dolphins jumping in sapphire seas. Fat Harry carried a photograph of the Chuck Wagon in his wallet. He claimed you could make a fortune selling boiled franks in soft steamed rolls.

  ‘Everyone loves a hotdog,’ he wheezed. ‘It’s the smell. You hold a dog in your fist, smother it with onion and ketchup and it smells like every circus between here and Marrakech.’

  ‘It sounds good,’ Charlie said.

  ‘It is good,’ Fat Harry agreed. ‘A man takes one bite from a hotdog and he remembers the world when he was young and he thinks about the penny arcade and the Big Dipper and the Ferris wheel. He remembers the goat-faced woman and the India-rubber man. He remembers the fire-eater and belly dancer, the sword-swallower and stilt-walker. He remembers all the long, starlit summer nights when he was tall and trembling with love for the beautiful girls who were sawn in half and smothered by snakes and shot from the mouths of smoking cannons. When a man eats a hotdog he’s biting into his own memories.’

  But Charlie shook his head.

  ‘I don’t want to sell hotdogs for the rest of my life,’ he said as he ran the blade around the fat man’s chins.

  ’It’s an honest trade,’ Harry snorted, finding an insult where none was intended. ‘It’s no worse than being a barber.’

  ‘I want to be a painter,’ Charlie tried to explain. ‘I want to travel and paint the memories of my journey. I don’t want another trade.’

  ‘You want to see something of the world,’ Fat Harry suggested. He understood. He had been to Moscow and Vienna, Kathmandu and Casablanca. He relaxed and closed his eyes.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d better get out and do it fast,’ Harry warned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard that Disney™ want to buy the planet and turn it into a leisure park. One day you’ll wake up and find them charging admission whenever you leave your own front door. When you walk down the street you’ll have to shake hands with Mickey Mouse™ or some other cartoon character.’

  ‘I’ve got plans,’ said Charlie confidently. ‘I’m not staying here forever. Do you want me to trim your ears?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Do you have any cologne?’

  ‘Royal Prussian or Sweet Lime?’

  ‘Bay Rum,’ Harry said. He stirred and opened his eyes, staring at the paintings around the walls.

  They were a collection of small landscapes, brilliant tangles of colour and movement, emerald lakes, chrome yellow mountains, vermilion fields under cobalt skies. Charlie had hung them in the shop because the attic walls had long been covered. He had paintings stacked in the little kitchen and paintings stashed beneath the bed.

  At first Charlie had felt shy about putting his work on public view but none of his customers gave it a glance. Fat Harry had been the first person to have noticed his paintings and taken the trouble to study them.

  ‘Is this your work?’ he said at last, as Charlie splashed him with the sour dregs from an empty flask of Bay Rum cologne.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said, wiping his hands on a towel.

  ‘It’s all very bright,’ Harry declared, squinting through a keyhole of dainty blue fingers.

  Charlie looked shocked. He stepped back from the chair and stared around the shop, as if looking at the paintings for the first time.

  ‘People like a cheerful view,’ Harry said. He meant it as a compliment. He cocked his head at Charlie and grinned.

  ‘Would you like one?’ Charlie said hopefully. ‘Choose one that takes your fancy. I‘ve got hundreds.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘How much do they cost?’

  ‘I don’t know… ’ Charlie stammered. ‘I’ve never thought about It. How much do you think they cost?’ As far as he had been concerned paintings were either worthless or priceless, nasty daubs or masterpieces. Something happened to artists, something he didn’t yet understand, that catapulted some of them from obscurity into the world’s great museums and galleries. This transformation was sudden and violent. Between neglect and adulation there was only darkness.

  ‘You need a manager,’ Harry frowned. ‘Someone to help you sell your work.’ Paintings or hotdogs, it was all the same to him. He was looking for the big opportunity. The chance to make some money.

  ‘Do you really suppose that people will buy them?’ Charlie asked, begging for admiration.

  ‘I’m surprised you’re not famous. I’m shocked you’re waiting to be discovered,’ Fat Harry said. ‘We should go into business together. You paint ’em and I’ll sell ’em.’

  Fat Harry knew that a good artist must also be a showman and the best showmen were accomplished artists. When the circus retired to its winter quarters it was Harry who had always
stayed with the show, repairing the hoardings and carousel horses. Paint and varnish. Spit and polish. Appearances were everything.

  He had painted the mural for his own freak show, a huge canvas depicting a mermaid, a cannibal, a cockatrice and a two-headed sheep. And behind this extravagant painting, in the gloom of the narrow circus tent, the freaks themselves were triumphs of Fat Harry’s art. He had made the mermaid with his own hands. She was a porcelain doll with glass eyes and graveyard hair, stitched by her hips to the tail of a fish, afloat in a murky tank of broth, embellished with sequins and shells. The cannibal was a large ape, purchased from a taxidermist, shaved and sporting a bone through its nose. It wore handcuffs and a startled expression. The cockatrice was a skeleton made from rabbit and chicken bones. The sheep alone was a work of Nature and failed to look in the least convincing, slumped in her crate like a scrag-end of carpet, matted with dung and straw.

  Fat Harry became a daily customer at the shop and while he sat in the chair for his shave he told Charlie about his plan. It was simple. They would change the course of their lives by entering into a partnership. Charlie would paint in the attic and Harry the brilliant showman would sell all the work downstairs in the shop. They would throw out the barber’s chair and basin, the pictures of Douglas Fairbanks and the sizzling Durex sign. They would redecorate, strip the walls, polish the floorboards, install a proper system of lighting and call it the Church Street Gallery.

  Harry would need a new set of clothes and he’d stay in the attic until they’d made enough money to move him.

  ‘You’ll find me no trouble,’ he promised Charlie. ‘I’ve done a lot of sharing, l know how to keep myself to myself. We used to travel six in a trailer and that included a bearded lady and a highly flatulent dancing bear. You’ll find me a tolerable companion. And I don’t care where you give me quarters just so long as the sheets are clean and there’s always plenty of piping hot water.’

  If Charlie had been a few years older he would have known not to trust strangers who turn up on your doorstep and promise to make your fortune by spending your savings. He would have known that nobody makes big money, working at home, no experience required. But Charlie was an innocent and as a result he prospered.