by David Nobbs
‘Ah! Good!’ said Reggie. ‘What on?’
Doc Morrissey glanced round the company uneasily.
‘Pencils,’ he said.
‘Pencils?’ said Jimmy incredulously.
‘Pencils,’ affirmed Doc Morrissey.
‘What sort of pencils?’ said C.J.
‘HB, C.J.,’ said Doc Morrissey.
‘I didn’t get where I am today by drinking liquids that have only been tested on pencils,’ said C.J.
‘Did the pencils show a marked lack of aggression?’ said Tony.
‘Come come,’ said Reggie. ‘It’s all to easy to be sarcastic. It’s a failing that I’ve slipped into myself once or twice, but it really is terribly negative. I’m sure Doc Morrissey had his reasons. Tell us, Doc, what’s the point in testing the liquid on pencils?’
‘Not much,’ said Doc Morrissey. ‘I didn’t have any animals, though.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Tom. ‘I’m against testing animals on principle.’
‘Pencils are all right, though, are they?’ said Linda. ‘What about the poor old Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Pencils?’
‘I think vivisection of Paper-mates is shocking,’ said Joan.
‘I was outraged to read about the propelling pencil that was trained to turn round and propel itself up its own sharpener,’ said Tony.
‘Please!’ said Lettuce.
She rose from her armchair and stared fiercely at the assembly. She had a kind of beauty at that moment, as the Grampian Mountains sometimes do, when touched by the evening sun.
‘I think it’s pathetic to listen to you all being sarcastic about pencils when Doc Morrissey has stuck his head on the block for the sake of the community,’ she said. ‘I’m happy to take a dose of the medicine now.’
She sat down, and there was an abashed silence, broken only by the twanging of a spring deep in the tattered bowels of her chair.
‘Stout scout,’ said Jimmy, patting her hand with proprietary pride. ‘Count me in too.’
Reggie banged on the table with his fist.
‘Hands up all those prepared to test Doc Morrissey’s magic potion.’
The hands of Doc Morrissey, Jimmy, Lettuce, Linda and Elizabeth shot up.
‘I may as well,’ said David Harris-Jones. ‘What does it matter if it kills me?’
‘Oh get off your self-pitying backside and go and drag Prue back,’ said Reggie.
‘I happen to believe that she was justified,’ said David Harris-Jones. ‘I succumbed to craven weakness. It’s Dolly Lewellyn from Pembroke Dock all over again.’
‘Dolly Lewellyn from Pembroke Dock?’ said Reggie. ‘Who’s she?’
‘I don’t really want to go into her, if you don’t mind,’ said David Harris-Jones. ‘I didn’t much want to at the time. One isolated lapse in a lay-by on the A1076 and I had to make thirteen visits to the outpatients department at Haverfordwest General. I knew then that I wasn’t destined to be a Casanova. I didn’t have another woman from that day till I met Prue, and now I do this. Men are such fools. I . . .’
David Harris-Jones suddenly seemed to realize that he was talking to the collected staff of Perrins.
He blushed.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I . . . I didn’t . . . er . . . realize. Sorry. Tragedy must have loosened my . . . er . . .’
‘Go and find her, wherever she is,’ said Reggie.
‘. . . tongue,’ said David Harris-Jones. ‘I will. I’ll go to her mother’s and find her, wherever she is. Tomorrow. But first, I’ll take Doc Morrissey’s potion.’
‘Thank you,’ said Doc Morrissey, whose lone hand was still raised in a gesture of long-suffering patience. ‘I wondered when we were going to get back to that.’
David Harris-Jones raised his hand. So did Elizabeth, Jimmy, Lettuce and Linda.
Linda looked at Tom.
‘I still have moral qualms,’ said Tom.
‘If Doc Morrissey’s drug had been given to Jack the Ripper, his victims wouldn’t have died,’ said Reggie. ‘Do you think they’d have had qualms?’
Tom raised his arm slowly.
‘It was probably just the qualm before the storm,’ he said. ‘Joke. Joke over.’
Joan looked at Tony. Tony looked at Joan.
‘Oh come on,’ said Joan. ‘It’s May As Well Be Hung For A Sheep As Lambsville, Arizona.’
Joan and Tony raised their arms.
‘Oh well’ said C.J. ‘Never let it be said that I was the one ugly duckling that prevented the goose from laying the golden egg.’
‘I promise you I’ll never let that be said,’ said Reggie.
C.J. raised his arm.
‘And you?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Oh no,’ said Reggie. ‘Somebody has to remain totally unaffected in order to observe the results scientifically.’
Slowly, one at a time, all the hands were lowered.
‘And what more natural than that that somebody should be McBlane?’ said Reggie.
‘Perhaps you’d like to be the first to drink,’ said Doc Morrissey.
‘Splendid,’ said Reggie. ‘Absolutely splendid.’
Trust and faith. He poured himself an inch of the potion.
‘The dose is half a glass,’ said Doc Morrissey.
I want to leave enough for the others,’ said Reggie.
‘My resources are to all intents and purposes infinite,’ said Doc Morrissey.
‘Oh good,’ said Reggie. ‘Splendid.’
He drank his dose swiftly, and to his surprise he didn’t fall down dead.
All the staff took their doses.
Reggie called a special meeting of the staff and eighteen remaining guests. Doc Morrissey spoke about the drug. The staff took their second dose, and Reggie asked the guests for volunteers.
All eighteen volunteered.
Afterwards, they shared cigarettes and swapped yarns. A squash player with a drink problem sang Cherokee love songs. A time and motion man who’d investigated his own firm and been declared redundant as a result sang his own compositions, bitter-sweet laments for a less ruthless age. An overworked builder, known throughout his home town as Mañana Constructions, told an interminable story about the amazing prescience of his cat Tiddles. The manager of a drycleaner’s in Northamptonshire went into the garden and made love to a lady computer programmer from Essex. Snodgrass was quite shocked when she came upon them, shivering from cold and ecstasy, naked and dewy under the suburban stars.
In the morning David Harris-Jones set off for Prue’s mother’s place in Exeter.
McBlane prepared twenty-nine portions of chicken paprika, and C.J. felt slightly queasy at breakfast.
Shortly after breakfast, both Tony and Joan felt slightly ill.
By half past ten, all three of them, plus Linda, had retired to bed with stomach trouble.
By twenty to eleven, stomach trouble was already a euphemism.
News of the outbreak spread rapidly. So did the outbreak. Was Doc Morrissey’s potion to blame?
At five past eleven, Reggie confronted the inventive exmedico in his upstairs room at Number Nineteen.
‘Five members of my staff are ill,’ he said. ‘Three guests are feeling queasy.’
‘Four,’ said Doc Morrissey. ‘One just left me in a hurry.’
‘Your potion’s responsible,’ said Reggie.
‘It can’t be,’ said Doc Morrissey adamantly.
‘How can you be so certain?’ said Reggie. ‘Tell me just what was in that liquid.’
A strange smile played on Doc Morrissey’s lips.
‘It was water,’ he said.
‘Water?’
‘Plain simple water. You don’t really think I’m skilful enough to create a drug that does all I claimed for it?’
‘Well, I did wonder,’ said Reggie.
‘Oh you did, did you? I shall take that as a personal insult,’ said Doc Morrissey.
Reggie sat on the couch.
‘May I ask you why you presented
us with a wonder drug which was in reality water?’ he asked grimly.
‘Faith and trust. It was a psychological, not a medical experiment, Reggie, but I didn’t want you to know it was psychological.’
‘You concealed it for psychological reasons?’
‘Exactly. But I didn’t want you to know that the reasons were psychological. Psychology, Reggie. I wanted you to think that I was concealing the ingredients because I couldn’t remember their medical names. When in fact I was concealing them because there weren’t any. Pretty good, eh?’
‘Excellent.’
‘It was all lies, Reggie. Even the bit about the pencils. I just tossed that in to add authenticity.’
‘It wasn’t a conspicuous success.’
‘I felt that. I wanted you to gain confidence because you believed you’d taken a wonder drug.’
‘I see. Then why is everybody ill?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Reggie looked Doc Morrissey straight in the eyes.
‘I don’t know how to put this without being mildly rude,’ he began.
‘Be mildly rude, Reggie. I can take it,’ said Doc Morrissey, smiling the cheerily mournful smile of a man reconciled to his pessimism.
‘Your medical reputation at Sunshine Desserts wasn’t high. You weren’t known as the Pasteur of the Puddings. This reputation wasn’t enhanced when you were sacked from the British Medical Association for gross professional incompetence. It is possible that, far from inspiring us to confidence, your mystery panacea has provoked us to fear, that my staff are persuading themselves into illness. The obverse of the mind over matter syndrome, Doc. The dark side of the psychological moon.’
Doc Morrissey looked stricken.
‘Mass auto-indigestion!’ he said. ‘It’s possible.’
He clutched his stomach and groaned.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, and hurried from the room.
The epidemic continued to spread.
An accident prevention officer swooned on his way to the toilet, fell downstairs and broke his leg.
Reggie sent for a doctor. He arrived at twelve twenty-three. Eight members of the staff and nine guests were by this time ill.
‘It’s mass hysteria,’ he told Reggie at the conclusion of his visit. ‘I’ve known similar things in girls’ schools, and what is this place but a girls’ school where the pupils happen to be adult and predominantly male?’
‘I see no similarity,’ said Reggie.
‘I only mean,’ said the doctor, ‘that the emotional soil is favourable to hysteria. Hysterical dysentery. Fascinating.’
‘And what do you propose to do about it?’ said Reggie.
‘Ah, that,’ said the doctor, as if treatment was an afterthought of little consequence.
He prescribed medicine for people on the National Health and a better medicine for the private patients.
‘Thank you,’ he said, as he set off down the garden path in a burst of tactless sunshine.
‘Thank you,’ he repeated, for all the world as if the epidemic was a charade laid on for his delectation.
The symptoms of dysentery are widely known and it is best to draw a veil over them. Suffice it to say that at one o’clock fifteen people were sitting down, and in only seven cases was it for lunch.
The seven lunchers tackled McBlane’s hare terrine in circumstances that were far from propitious.
‘Tidworth all over again,’ muttered Jimmy cryptically.
All five attempted to make cheerful conversation over the chicken paprika.
‘Worse than Ridworth,’ declared Jimmy, still in gnomic vein.
It was a deflated trio that struggled with McBlane’s superb lemon meringue pie.
Both men accepted coffee.
‘Far worse than Tidworth,’ asserted the gallant old soldier, rushing out to meet his Waterloo.
And so, when McBlane entered to collect the pudding plates, he found Reggie in solitary state, defiant to the last, alone on the bridge of continence as his ship was scuppered about him.
‘Thank you, McBlane,’ said Reggie bravely to the pock-marked Pict. ‘A superb luncheon.’
The bad luck that had assailed Perrins seemed determined to continue to the last.
It was bad luck that the doctor should have a drinking acquaintance who was a stringer for several national newspapers, so that Reggie spent much of the afternoon fending off the queries from the gentlemen of the press.
It was bad luck that it should be on this of all days that the environmental health officer came to review the sanitation arrangements. At first, all went well. He began with an examination of the kitchen. As luck would have it, McBlane was preparing a marinade for boeuf bourguignon, and not powdering one of his extremities or recycling his boil plasters.
McBlane appeared to be, albeit unconsciously, an advocate of Cartesian dualism. I, McBlane, can be monumentally filthy, inventively scabrous and permanently itching. You, the kitchen, must be clean and gleaming at all times. In truth, however, it was emotion and not logic which created this spectacular dichotomy. McBlane loved his kitchen. Nay, more. He was in love with it. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, McBlane and his kitchen, three great love stories, passionate, vibrant, ultimately tragic.
Violent death parted Romeo and Juliet. Violent death parted Antony and Cleopatra. The tragedy of McBlane’s great love was different.
His passion was unrequited.
Why did the tough scion of Caledonia love his kitchen? Because he didn’t dare give his love to a woman. Women would spurn him. He had too many skin diseases.
While the kitchen didn’t love him, it didn’t spurn him. It didn’t know that he was covered in spots. McBlane, ever a realist, had settled for the kitchen.
The Environmental Health Officer didn’t know any of this.
‘Only one health hazard there,’ he told Reggie. ‘The chef.’
Their examination of the toilets was hampered by the fact that they were constantly occupied. The presence of people standing in agonized poses waiting to enter the toilets was explained away by Reggie as art therapy.
‘They’re representing the agony of the human struggle in modern dance,’ he said.
‘They look as if they’re waiting to go to the toilet,’ said the philistine official.
‘You see what you’re capable of seeing,’ said Reggie.
The Environmental Health Officer told Reggie that he’d be turning in a very unfavourable report.
‘What do you have to say to that?’ he said.
‘Excuse me,’ said Reggie.
He spent three days in bed with hysterical dysentery.
The newspaper headlines included ‘Hysteria Bug Hits Jinx Community’, The Squatters of Botchley’ and ‘Perrin Tummy KO’s Commune’.
Undoubtedly, the hysterical dysentery would have caused many of the guests to leave, if they hadn’t been too ill with hysterical dysentery.
Gradually., the staff and guests recovered. Four guests did leave.
A post-dysentery evening was planned, in which they would drink from communal bowls of Andrews Liver Salts and Bisodol.
Reggie let himself out of the side door and then remembered that he was banned from every pub in Botchley.
He walked down Oslo Avenue, and turned left into Bonn Close, a sinister figure with the collar of his raincoat turned up against the penetrating drizzle of early May.
He turned right into Ankara Grove, went down the snicket to the station, and took the narrow pedestrian tunnel under the tracks. It dripped with moisture and smelt of urine.
He plunged into the streets of the council estate, on the wrong side of the tracks. Here the houses were poor and badly maintained. Every possible corner had been cut, in the interests of persuading the inhabitants that they were inferior, so that they would accept their role in society and commit the vandalism that was expected of them, thus confirming the people on the right side of the tracks in their belief that they were right to stick these people in coun
cil estates on the wrong side of the tracks. Thus mused Reggie bitterly as he slipped through the dark, inhospitable streets.
Beyond the housing estates came the damp backside of Botchley, a rump as pitted and pocked as McBlane’s. The street lamps were widely spaced and feeble, dim as a Toc H cabaret, their faint yellow glow deepening the darkness of the night around them. Here the streets were like teeth – old, stained, badly maintained, and full of gaps. It was the sort of area that film companies use for their blitz sequences. Even the potatoes on the tumble-down, refuse-ridden allotments were suffering from planning blight.
At the far end of these streets lay the Dun Cow.
Reggie entered the public bar, a tiny, ill-lit, raucous place, where the beer tasted as if several elderly dogs had moulted in it.
But it had one great advantage. He wasn’t known here, and so the ban would not be imposed. He ordered a pint and prepared to assault it.
‘Holy God, it’s Mr Perrin himself,’ said a familiar Irish voice.
Reggie turned to find himself gazing into the agreeable features of Seamus Finnegan, the former navvy whom he had plucked from obscurity to become Admin Officer at Grot.
‘Seamus Finnegan!’ said Reggie.
‘If it isn’t, some bastard’s standing in my body,’ replied that worthy.
‘Terrible beer,’ said Reggie.
‘It is that,’ said Seamus Finnegan. ‘Undrinkable.’
‘Have another?’
‘Thank you, sir.’
They sat in a corner, watching two youths in filthy jeans throwing inaccurate darts at a puffy travesty of a board.
‘It’s good to see you, Seamus,’ said Reggie.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Seamus.
‘Come on, Seamus. We’re friends. Less of the ”sir”.’
‘Thank you, sir, but your insistence that I don’t call you sir is based on a false premise.’
‘What premise is that?’ said Reggie.
He closed his eyes, shut his nose, and forced a sizeable draught of beer down his throat.
‘You’re thinking ”Poor Seamus. I brought him out from the obscurity of the Climthorpe Slip Relief Feeder Road, a simple tongue-tied Irishman from the land of the bogs and the little people, I rescued him from the swollen underbelly of that fat old sow that is urban deprivation, I made him Admin Officer in the hope that his simple Irish idiocy would send the whole Grot empire tumbling about our ears, but with the true contrariness of Erin he proved to be a genius, and then I disbanded Grot, leaving poor old Seamus to return to the drunken monosyllabic slime of the road works, his only companions simple oafs, and the occasional inarticulate driver of an articulated lorry, back in the gloomy underbelly of the aforementioned sow of urban deprivation from which I had so irresponsibly rescued him”,’ said Seamus Finnegan.
