Barf the Barbarian in The Tower of the Anas Platyrhynchos (The Chronicles of Barf the Barbarian Book 1)

by Michael White

  “Dum on numdinger.” said Barf nasally, patting the pocket on his belt. “Led’s doe and have a drink.”

  THE END

  BARF THE BARBARIAN WILL RETURN IN

  “THE HAT OF THE DRAGON”

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  FROM MICHAEL WHITE

  READ ON FOR THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF “ANYONE”

  ANYONE

  Part One: The Theoretical Cat

  Prologue: CDJ Electronics August 3rd 2007

  “Blue or Red?” said the tall guy as he rose slightly from his chair to give a brief but firm handshake. It was always the question anyone asked a newcomer in any place of employment on Merseyside and it was always one I dreaded. Not because statistically speaking you always had a fifty per cent chance of getting it right but because in truth I had a one hundred per cent chance of getting it wrong. He had glanced at me; fifty-one going slightly grey and I had assessed him too; big guy, late twenties. Obviously interested in football. It was a thing blokes always do when they first meet.

  “Neither.” I mumbled in embarrassment. “Not really into football sorry.” This answer, although perfectly true, always brought colour to my face and a slight feeling of embarrassment tinged with the thought that by not supporting a local football team (and God help you if you revealed that you supported any team from outside Merseyside) you were letting the side down just a little bit. I had glanced down at the desk where we were sitting and amongst the scraps of crumpled paper, discarded pens and scribbled on notepads there was a coffee stained Everton mug and I could have taken the easy way out I suppose, though I rarely did. The truth will always find you and bite you on the arse.

  The reaction of the man sitting facing me, his glasses balanced on his nose as he tipped back his chair (quite a feat for a chair on wheels I thought) was not however the same usual look of disbelief and disdain. He just raised his eye brow slightly and gave a small half grin that if I were to use one word to sum up how it looked then it would be, “mischief”.

  “Are you gay?” He smiled and the inflection he used made me realise he wasn’t being homophobic. Not at all. He was actually helping me out of an awkward position on my first contact with anyone on my first day in a new job. I knew all this, and he knew that I now knew all of this and he did it all with a half-smile and one eyebrow. I was impressed.

  “Don’t gay people like football either?” I smiled and his smile increased just a little more.

  “Of course they do.” He replied. “It’s just that they all seem to support Arsenal.” I laughed at this and pointed at the Everton mug.

  “I can name the 1966 cup final team though.” He looked at me doubtfully.

  “Go on then.”

  “Right.” I said, counting out on my fingers as I racked my brains. “West, Wright, Wilson, Temple, Harvey, Young.” I could see his eyebrows rising even more as I continued to search my memory. “Gabriel, Labone, Harris.” Still two more. I paused before the names jumped into my mind. “Scott and Trebilcock.” I finished triumphantly and with a flourish just to show off added, “Manager Catterick.”

  The guy gave a slow handclap. “Well done.” He smiled. “How come you can name the team and yet you’re not a fan?”

  “Well when I was a kid there wasn’t much else to do really, it was either football or cowboys and Indians.” He looked at me as if appraising me. I was a lot older than him; fifty one. I had him down for late twenties at best, though I could see even though he was sitting down that he was a big bloke; not fat – not at all, but tall and broad. “Think of it this way. We only had two fucking telly channels. Well, unless you had a posh telly of course and you could get BBC2 as well.” He looked appalled at this. “No internet.” I smiled.

  “Christ.” He said, and there was a flash of that mischievous grin again. “Where did you get your porn from?” I laughed aloud.

  “From the local newsagents.” He laughed. “You usually had to slip it into the TV times and flash it to the poor woman behind the till so she could ring it up on the register along with a quarter of pineapple chunk sweets.” He laughed aloud at this; a warm laugh; loud but full of humour. He stood at this point and held his hand out for me to shake it again, which I stood and did.

  “I thought the nineteen sixties were all in black and white.” He laughed and I joined him.

  “Jon.” He said, raising himself off his chair to shake my hand.

  “I am Luke.”

  “Pleased to meet you Luke.” He said, lowering himself down again.

  “And you.” I said.

  It was my first introduction to a man who over the course of the next few years would reduce me to tears of laughter on a regular basis. It is an over-used expression I think, but with Jon it was the truth. He once actually managed to make me laugh so much I was nearly sick. He had a knack for it. One mischievous grin and it was game on.

  Yet that was in my previous workplace. Six years in a technical support role sitting next to a harried and noisy sales department, of which Jon was but one member. He had made the place worthwhile really, and a counted him as one of my very few friends. Down to the smoking shelter we would go and have a laugh, chew over the day’s news and generally take the piss out of everyone. We were a team and both he and I thought the world of him. There would be football talk too of course which he always referred to as “white noise” because you could almost visibly see me zoning out when he started talking about football with anyone who was out there smoking with us.

  “He’ll always give you back a dirty shirt…” I heard him say and so carried on day dreaming for a while longer. Then In October last year I had a really bad water infection and was off work for a few weeks. When I returned Jon wasn’t there.

  “Have you heard the news?” asked Debbie who sat on the other side of the desk from me in what the management laughingly called, “pods”.

  “No.” I said distractedly, trying to catch up on the hundreds of emails that seemed to have accumulated during by absence.

  “Jon has got cancer.” She said and everything stopped.

  “What?” I managed, and she told me. It was in his bowel and a few other places too, Aggressive cancer. The Chemotherapy had to work.

  I felt sick.

  Although we were friends we didn’t socialise outside work – after all, I was nearly twice his age despite everything, and although I knew he wasn’t on Facebook (even though I was) I didn’t have an email address for him or a mobile number. I did know his twitter account though and so I sent him a message.

  “I go off sick with a water infection and you go and get cancer. You really should learn to curb your competitive spirit you know.” There was a few minutes’ gap and then a reply:

  “Ha Ha! I will be back before you know it!”

  He didn’t come back. The chemotherapy didn’t work as the cancer was too aggressive; too advanced. He died two months later on the 31st December 2012.

  I was devastated.

  I guess really a few years later that I still am. I don’t make friends easily and I felt his loss to the extent that I had to leave. Find a new job. I would look at where he sat and hate whoever it was that sat where he used to. Sometimes I would look up expecting to see him, and he would catch my eye and take the piss out of me in some way.

  Sometime I thought I did see him.

  I had to get out. It was time for a change.

  Chapter One

  “We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.”

  (Erwin Schrödinger)

  So here I was on my first day of a new job. I felt lucky to get it if truth is told as it was a definite step up from my previous job. It was still a technical support position, but the wages were considerably more, the hour’s nine to five and I also had the option of a residential place on site which I had taken up. That would certainly save me some money!

  It had all begun with the advertisement advertising the po
sition of, “technical support person” or something like that. I’ve forgotten the exact wording of the rest of the advertisement now, it was just over a month ago and I’ve got a memory like a sieve, but it doesn’t really matter how the job was described, for when the job description says, “technical support” then you usually found that the job description had absolutely nothing to do with the actual work itself at all.

  So it is an understatement of understatements that the advertisement in The Liverpool Echo had caught my eye the minute my alcohol fuddled eyes slid across it. Not that I’m a regular reader of the Echo or anything. No, in fact I only bought the local rag on a Thursday for the job pages and it was in there that I saw it. The main thing that stood out I am not ashamed to admit is not the fact that the job description was at best vague to the point of non-existent, but the salary, which was enormous.

  I waited for inspiration to come for a few days, mulling it over as if trying to convince myself that I had no chance of ever getting a job with wages as good as that, but in the end I wrote up a letter and CV of what I considered to be of particular brilliance if not entirely factual and once done I made a quick trip to the post office and posted it.

  You could have knocked me down with a feather when less than a week later I received an invite to an interview with the head of the department, a professor Theodulus Wingnut. You read that right, by the way. That’s the prof’s full name. These days I usually just call him “Professor” and I think he’s okay with that. Never complains anyway. There’s no way I could use his real name all the time. I think it’s the kind of name that only a parent would ever love, and an employee could never get used to. I pissed myself laughing at the time, and I must admit I read the name two or three times, laughing like a loon as I did so, but I then remembered the salary and resolved to somehow or another scrape the money together to hire a suit for the interview. Oh, and to keep a straight face when I shook the guy’s hand too.

  I scanned the letter once again, noting the time, date and place. There was a train ticket and schedule included with the letter, and I was surprised to see that I was to be collected by car from the railway station and driven to the company offices where the interview was to be held.

  Which I felt was a bit of over-kill really, as the company offices were only in one of the nicer parts of Cheshire and so not too far away. I didn’t have a car right then but it would have not been any great hardship to get there. So: a bit over the top, but nice to feel that a bit of effort was being put into the process on their behalf anyway.

  Being a bit of a nosey bugger I was slightly wary when I found out that the building itself did not seem to appear on Google Maps no matter how hard I tried to find it. According to the map page the location given in the letter was simply a big empty field, not in any way distinctive from the other fields that seemed to surround it. Weird. I mean, if he wasn’t on Linked-In then who the hell was he? If anything, this made me even more curious but searches for the location and the professors name came up with sweet bugger all every time. Such things I put out of my head and slowly but surely the interview date came around. I will say looking back on it that in all seriousness there was absolutely no excuse for getting completely pissed the night before the interview. I don’t mean rolling drunk and staggering home with a kebab at 3am.

  I had been completely caned.

  The next morning found me lying on the couch with the uncomfortable thought that for some reason the goldfish was staring at me. The kebab rolled greasily around in my stomach and my mouth felt as if someone had sand papered my tongue.

  “Luke. For God’s sake. Your train is in an hour.” The goldfish focused into view and I noticed my mother tugging at my sleeve at the same time.

  Yes. You got that right. Fifty-one and living at home, though more out of necessity than anything after my divorce. It could be difficult going back home, but it wasn’t too bad unless you actually told somebody that you were still with your parents. Then you were fucked. At this precise moment however I was struggling with the thought that my mum seemed to have turned into a goldfish when I also began to realise that not only was I lying on the couch, but also that the rest of my body seemed to be doing its best to kill me. There were bits of me aching that I’d forgotten I had.

  Placed precariously about three feet in front of where my eyes were attempting to focus there seemed to be a bright orange traffic cone, a small pile of loose change and what appeared to be a stuffed penguin. I vaguely remember falling over a park bench somewhere and my aching shins seemed to be trying to remind me of that. Mum shook me roughly again. The loose change swum out of focus, and then swum giddily back into view. I managed a grunt as I heard mum reminding me that the train for my interview was in an hour. Vaguely my brain managed to grasp this and over the course of the next hour I managed to coax myself off the floor, into the shower and down to the train station.

  The train was on time and I had to change trains just once to head out into the Cheshire countryside. I took the opportunity to take a brief nap in the hope of feeling more human as the hangover began to kick in. Luckily I had a hangover cure powder in the top pocket of my hired suit, and mixing that with a little cup of flat coke from the buffet car I began to feel a little bit less wrecked. I looked at the letter and studied the station that I was to get off the train. Glancing up at one of the line maps overhead I followed our journey from station to station as rail passengers frequently do, though God knows why, because there are rarely any shocks in store. From small pretty looking station to identical next pretty station we went until finally Alverscot was next. I straightened my tie in my reflection in the window, noticing at the same time that I still looked awfully pale, and made my way out of the carriage.

  I dropped the window as the train slowed, made its way over a small road crossing against which no cars seemed to be waiting, and turned the handle on the door as the train pulled past what seemed to be an old coal yard and came to a halt. I disembarked the train and standing on the platform waited for it to pull out of the station before getting my bearings. The station itself was completely empty, not a soul about at all. As the train rattled into the distance around the bend in the track I looked for the exit. The posters on the wooden boarding around the station seemed curiously old fashioned, and I finally noticed a small wooden footbridge at the end of the platform that led from one platform to the next. About half way along a small wooden gate led into a small car park. An old fashioned black car was parked by the gate, and a tall bald man was stood beside it. As I caught his eye he waved stiffly at me and I waved back, before making my way over the footbridge towards him.

  As i got closer I could see that the car was really old fashioned. It looked like something from a mafia film and the chrome sparkled brightly in the early afternoon sun, the black shape of the bonnet almost like a work of art, and on the bonnet a silver Vikings head emblem bearing the words, “Rover 14”. To say it looked spectacular was an understatement. The tall bald man standing next to it was also immaculately suited, two large black suitcases sitting firmly by his feet. He stood watching me as I approached, his face completely blank of any emotion. I held out my hand and introduced myself and the tall bald man shook my hand firmly, verging slightly on the over enthusiastic.

  “Hank.” he said, introducing himself. His voice was deep and emotionless. I said I was pleased to meet him and picking up the suitcases he gestured for me to get into the car and closing the door behind me he placed the two suitcases onto the space beside the driver’s seat and got in.

  Hank wasn’t a great conversationalist though it didn’t really matter. The inside of the car was just as amazing as the outside, the smell of leather was strong and the metal surfaces gleamed. The countryside was spectacular too, though the roads were awfully quiet. Hank maintained no conversation at all, despite several attempts to pass the time of day myself, and eventually the car turned off the small road and onto a long drive that wound in amongst the trees ahead. I pai
d strict attention to how the office itself looked, for after all first impressions are important, but so far all I could see was trees. They did seem to have peacocks running about the grounds but that was it really.

  The drive turned tightly to the left and a large old fashioned house came into view. I say house. It looked more like a stately home to me. The car drew up outside on the gravel drive, and Hank stopped the engine. He got out quickly and opened the door for me, the two suitcases once again at his feet. “The professor awaits you in the green light room.” he said in his deep voice and gestured for me to follow him into the house.

  The entrance was large and imposing, but the doors opened automatically as we approached, Hank leading the way, carrying the suitcases in each hand as he went. We climbed up a little set of broad stairs and approached the twin glass fronted doors that were sufficiently opaque to obscure the interior of the building. Yet as Hank led the way the doors swished open, revealing a large well-lit foyer that more resembled the foyer of a hotel than some kind of office building. As I crossed over the doorstep and entered the building I felt what I assumed was a small discharge of electricity, probably a remnant from the lush finish of the interior of the car, but it soon passed. Following Hank closely the tall man approached the long desk behind which was seated a young man wearing some sort of Bluetooth headset who nodded briefly to Hank and cast a quick curious glance in my direction. I returned the glance but was more concerned with having a real good look at the foyer.

  It was a bit weird really. It wasn’t anything like what I would have expected. Opulent was probably the right word, but all my mind could settle on was “flash”. There was money on display here, and loads of it too. Unlike any form of logo or notice of any kind. Hank put what looked like the keys of the car on the desk and in a vaguely monotone voice said, “1957.” before continuing, “Interviewee for Professor Wingnut. Luke Williams.” The man behind the desk merely nodded and sweeping what i assumed to be keys from the desktop and stowed them somewhere out of sight before nodding briefly. He consulted a computer screen the top of which was just visible above the well of the desk and motioned off to his right.