Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  Many times in the past, I’d felt that life and the cosmos were just too complicated. There was just too much information input. That had now all been sorted out for me, but I didn’t feel very grateful.

  The depressed policeman was also still in position, perched dejectedly on the railings between prom and beach. I caught his eye as he lifted his head from his hands. In the expression, unbeknown to me, apparently occupying my face, he evidently saw a kindred spirit.

  ‘I know,’ he said sullenly. ‘Ghastly, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Accustomed as I was to Bali and the Maldives, even a short holiday in Eastbourne would have been bad enough. The thought of eternity there put my adrenal glands into overdrive and sustained a bubbling sea of panic and anxiety on whose edge I permanently tottered.

  On the surface, life was not too bad. My room at the Grand was all it might be, the food and drink were inexhaustible (though pointless) and the ‘night-life’, when people could raise the energy, frenetic. After a fashion, society, a sort of 1920s in amber, staggered on.

  And yet, and yet... permeating everything that was done or said, was a virulent virus of despair, a weariness bred of the sure knowledge that none of this was real. It led some to cast themselves in the sea or leap from the roof of the hotel, but they came to no harm. The aimless passers-by did exactly that, and the would-be suicide had to get on up and go into the years ahead. I know because I was one of them.

  Then, one day, sitting on the prom, reading the yellow and brittle Eastbourne Herald of 23/3/29 for the umpteenth time and holding back a desire to scream, a coach pulled up alongside me.

  There was nothing unusual about that as such. This was, after all, a holiday town and holidaymakers often travelled in coaches. I resumed my bleary peruse of ‘Scoutmaster on grave charges.’

  But... there were few enough cars in this Eastbourne, and even fewer coaches. There were no modern coaches at all, none with ‘Pothecary and Sons Ltd of Binscombe—we’ll get you there in style’ painted along the side. I looked up.

  ‘Hello, Mr Oakley,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘How are you?’

  Apparently I did a little dance of joy although I don’t recall it. Disvan later said it proved the wells of collective tribal subconscious hadn’t quite run dry in me. ‘You’re not one hundred percent “Gatwick Man” yet,’ he said.

  It seemed like all the Argyll regulars were there—mostly ignoring me as usual. Once alighted, I saw that they were busy with something at the boot of the coach and too occupied to swap greetings.

  Even so, I was, to put it mildly, pleased to see them. Their lovely modern faces and lovely modern coach sent me into a transport of delight. The landlord, lounging on the coach’s steps, observed my beatific smile and burst into unprovoked song:

  ‘Did you think I would leave you lying

  when there’s room on my horse for two?’

  The horrible noise broke the spell I was in and allowed me to speak for the first time.

  ‘Well, yes, I did actually,’ I said.

  ‘There’s gratitude for you!’ came the deep bass rumble of Mr Bretwalda from the region of the coach’s open boot. ‘Next time you’re stuck in a pocket universe, Mr Oakley, don’t expect us to come rescue you.’

  Even Mr Disvan, perched up behind the wheel, looked a trifle aggrieved.

  ‘We’ve gone to a great deal of trouble for you, Mr Oakley’ he said chidingly. ‘The least you could do is—’

  ‘…is give us a hand with this hard work,’ came Bretwalda’s voice again.

  All energy and apologies, I rushed round to where he and Mr Patel, Doctor Bani-Sadr, the Reverend Jagger and all the others were delving into the boot. Bretwalda had already brought forth a huge square parcel and was holding it secure in his hawser like arms. The rest were having difficulty with their load, a similar container, and were struggling to drag it clear of the boot’s gaping mouth. In point of fact, when I looked closer, it wasn’t only they that were struggling but the parcel as well. So far as the sturdy wrapping would permit, the box was writhing in their grip. Its contents were alive with a powerful desire for freedom.

  After a momentary hesitation, I lent the required hand and between us we hefted the container down. Mr Bretwalda then did a passable imitation of a Russian lady shot-putter (just as big, marginally more hairy) and launched his box high up into the air. Above the noise of the sea it was difficult to be certain, but it seemed to me a terrified shriek emanating from the parcel, terminated abruptly by the squelch of its hard landing on the concrete of the prom.

  ‘Down you go and fare ye well,’ said Bretwalda, with what I called his alligator smile. ‘And I hope you burn all the way.’ He brushed his hands together briskly. ‘Right then lads, off we go. All aboard the Skylark!’

  We couldn’t emulate his throwing feat, and so just dumped our box on the ground. To my relief it made no sound other than the thud one would expect.

  Freed from this welcome distraction, I now noticed two new developments containing nothing for my comfort. Firstly, before ambling back round to the front of the coach, the Binscomite posse paused to collect weapons previously stowed in the boot. There was a motley collection of lethality, from shotguns to baseball bats, all equally alarming to a genetically-determined pacifist like myself.

  Secondly, I saw that I was not alone in welcoming the Binscombe coach. My fellow prisoners were also homing in on it, taking the keenest interest in our doings. A sizeable crowd had gathered, their wolfish, predatory approach entirely subverting the shabby genteel atmosphere of a few moments ago.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ said the Reverend Jagger. ‘Trouble, I fear.’

  Without so much as a decent pause for thought, he discharged both barrels of a twelve bore into the face of the manager of the Grand, who happened to be in the forefront of the pack.

  As I’ve already said, death and injury were barred from this particular Eastbourne, but shock and kinetic energy still held sway as in the real world. The manager was lifted off his feet and thrown back a good few yards before collapsing in a battered heap.

  Doctor Bani-Sadr clapped the reverend on the shoulder.

  ‘Well done, vicar,’ he beamed. ‘Just like your old Mau-Mau days again, eh?’

  Then the manager spoilt the party by waking up and raising himself on one elbow.

  ‘I say,’ came his familiar bellow, ‘that was rather uncalled for!’

  With this encouragement, the mob surged forward. We Binscomites all gaped a bit and then did a good impersonation of a panic retreat onto the coach.

  Back at the door, the landlord (who always had to go one better) was casually examining a large Kalashnikov rifle whose shiny newness suggested provenance from Esther Constantine’s Spetsnaz allocation. He noted our lack of relaxation and, given the pressing circumstances, forewent the witticism he’d been forging in favour of buying precious moments by hosing down the Eastbourners with lead. Bodies went flying everywhere but the blazer and boatered horde still came on. But for the fact that, veteran style, the landlord had a second magazine taped to the first, their rush would have carried them onto the coach during the break in firing. As it was, one of them had the shoe off my foot just as I hurled myself in.

  On the one hand (or foot) I was just glad I wore slip-ons and not lace-ups. On the other, I was now proud owner of just one hand-made, two-tone Italian shoe, formerly part of a pair worth £150.

  The landlord used the dregs of the second magazine on the shoe-stealer’s head and then the door hissed shut a millimetre or so behind his formidable bulk.

  Mr Disvan, as cool and remote as the Pluto of previous mention, smiled indulgently as we puffed and worried by, and then expertly gunned the coach away.

  A few of the photo-phantoms threw themselves after us and clung on for a while. Disvan checked them out in his mirror and rectified the situation by smearing them up against walls or lampposts. Soon we were away and free, zooming down the promenade at speed.

  I picked myself
up out of the aisle where Disvan’s jet-style acceleration had thrown me. The Argyll crowd were settling themselves in seats, chatting happily as if for all the world they really were on a pub outing. They were sufficiently strange, alien even, to me at that moment, that I could conceive they thought they were.

  Stumbling alongside Mr Disvan at the wheel, mind full of questions like how and why and what for, I was saved the trouble of speech by his suspicious percipience. I also discovered my ‘outing’ theory, too bizarre for thought mere seconds before, happened to be correct.

  ‘How and why, Mr Oakley?’ he asked, lightly anticipating my fevered desire to order events.

  ‘Er... yes please.’

  ‘Thought so. Right: in brief, we captured Mr Windsor’s photo and got Boots to splice a picture of last year’s Duke of Argyll outing onto it and take a print. That creates a sort of hybrid version of the pocket universe where we can interact with you but still escape when our additions to it are reversed. Do you follow? No? Well, take my word for it, we did all that and, hey presto, we materialise here, coach and all.’

  Like an oversize pill, the story almost went down but then reappeared, rejected by a spasm of logic.

  ‘But the guns... on a pub outing?’

  ‘Well spotted, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan. ‘I see you’ve not lost your eye for pedantic detail. We took a photo of them and added that as well.’

  I held on hard as Mr Disvan swung the wheel to run over all of a family blocking our way. The second or so of distraction allowed me to swallow the craziness whole, and this time Disvan’s explanation stayed down.

  ‘Where did you learn to drive a coach like this?’ I asked, stunned into banality.

  ‘Oh, it’s not much different from a T62 or Merkava tank, Mr Oakley,’ he replied opaquely. ‘Tons of beef but steers like a lead shopping trolley. Sorry about the rough ride but we’re a bit pushed for time.’

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’

  ‘Our man at Boots, Mr Lotus, is going to destroy the composite print thirty minutes after developing it. We didn’t fancy an eternity here if anything went wrong, you see. The downside of that, however, is that if we’re not out of this picture by then, we go up in flames with it.

  Suddenly I really did believe Mr Disvan’s story, heart and soul, and wanted to add my uni-shoe’d weight to the accelerator pedal.

  Mr Disvan, who had an alarming habit of watching everything but the road, noticed my new wish to help events along.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘we’ll probably make it. We budgeted for time spent looking for you, time to fend off the Eastbourners trying to hitch a lift back to the real world, time to drop off Mr Windsor and Biffo...’

  Something clicked into place and my mental machinery whirred.

  ‘Those boxes…’ I stuttered. ‘They were...’

  ‘Certainly. We caught that Biffo man as soon as he exchanged with you. Very cross and imperious he was, unaware of half a century of amelioration in class deference—until Mr Bretwalda hit him. I think he’d been looking forward to another wild spree like last time, hijacking another person’s identity and committing all sorts of crimes and wickedness.’

  ‘He... took my identity?’

  ‘Oh yes, came out as a spitting image of you, he did, like he’d made a personality transfer. But we knew it wasn’t you. He had too much zest and spirit in him.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ I said sourly, but needn’t have bothered. Sarcasm missiles bounced off Mr Disvan’s incurable literalism.

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Oakley. At least you won’t have a spectacular trial and a decade plus of incarceration to face when we get you home—not like poor old Mr Windsor did. Honestly, the things that Biffo got up to then. Your father might have mentioned it to you. The Roedean riding crop and confectioner’s custard scandal. “Advancing the frontiers of slavering human depravity to hitherto inconceivable limits,” the judge said.’

  That sounded intriguing but I chose to ignore it for the present.

  ‘Speaking of Mr Windsor...’ I said.

  ‘He’s met his just deserts, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan, as terse and brutal as a death warrant. ‘We shouldn’t have rescued him the first time. Surely you of all people don’t object to a bit of street justice in his case?’

  I looked within at my liberal outrage response mechanism and was shocked to find its batteries at an all-time low. In this one, surely understandable case, I told myself, Mr Disvan’s Bronze Age ethics did have a certain appeal.

  The landlord, just behind us, sensed I was on the banks of a moral Rubicon and took it on himself to push me in.

  ‘He had it coming to him, did Windsor,’ he chuckled. ‘Miserable old bugger!’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Disvan. ‘But maybe a nice long holiday beside the sea will cheer him up, eh?’

  And everyone (possibly including me) laughed uproariously as, apparently bang on time, the coach hit the boundary wall of nothing.

  * * *

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Mr Disvan, sipping delicately at his glass, ‘how anything well earned tastes better.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed,’ I replied, a trifle bitterly.

  ‘Well, maybe not, Mr Oakley, but there again, you’ve had to pay for this champagne. I think the essential principle remains valid.’

  I lapsed into sullen silence, aware I should be grateful just to be here and able to pay my wager. Somehow however, it didn’t feel like an occasion for glee.

  We had materialised back in the place we’d left, the bar of the Argyll. Our transport presumably reappeared in Messrs Pothecary’s coach park, minus, I hope, the gore and scratch marks it had acquired during our second, unofficial, hiring. Very soon after, the taciturn film processor, Mr Lotus, had arrived, bearing an envelope of ashes to prove the Eastbourne/Binscombe composite world he’d created was no more. He seemed very relieved to see us and shed the weight of responsibility he’d been bearing (fearing himself a possible mass-murderer) in a sea of champagne paid for by me. I suppose it was a good deal, but all the same...

  ‘How long have I been away?’ I asked and was informed a month and a half, all told.

  ‘Your rescue took some planning,’ explained Mr Disvan. ‘And what with the Five Nations championship on the telly and all that, there was bound to be some delay. Don’t you worry, though. We rang up your work and said you’d had a nervous breakdown and wouldn’t be coming in for a while. They were very solicitous about you, really, in a cold sort of way. Doctor Bani-Sadr will write them a certificate, so your job will still be open... probably.’

  It was hard, very hard indeed, but I somehow forced myself to say thank you.

  A party of sorts developed, although I was not the life and soul of it. At its height, while sitting alone at a table and idly starring into space, a certain idea occurred to me. I tried to push it aside, to cancel and forget it but, welcome and pleasurable as a tarantula on the face, it wouldn’t sidle off. Then, at that precise moment, prompted by pity or sadism, Mr Disvan noted my isolation and came to join me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Oakley?’ he asked. ‘You look like death warmed up.’

  ‘Something’s just dawned on me,’ I said levelly as Disvan followed my gaze to alight on an ancient photograph of a long-gone set of bell ringers. It was something we’d both seen and then ignored, countless times before.

  ‘‘Ah, yes,’ said Disvan cautiously. ‘Let me guess. You want to know if all photographs...’

  ‘If all photographs...’ I interrupted and then faltered.

  ‘If all photographs capture and preserve those depicted? If every single photo ever taken has doomed those in it to an eternity of ennui trapped in a static, sterile, pocket world. Is that what you wondered?’

  I nodded weakly.

  ‘With particular reference,’ he went on, matter of factly, ‘to your childhood snaps, your school photos, the records of your graduation ceremony, those of all your holidays...’

  Another nod.r />
  ‘I don’t know, Mr Oakley,’ he said with a friendly smile. ‘It’s possible, quite possible. Don’t gawp like that, it’s not nice.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Exactly. You mustn’t think about it. Even if you burnt every picture of yourself that you own, there’d be plenty of others knocking about. I mean, how many times have you been caught in the corner of some tourist’s lens? How many group photos have you posed for?’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Yes, religion might well be some solace in dealing with the notion. Essentially, though, it’s just one of the horrors of life you have to deal with—or resign. It’s akin to Esther Rantzen’s popularity, just one more on the list of existential nauseas. Give in to it, though, and you’ll end up like Mr Windsor.’

  He was right, in a way. It was too big and icy cold a thought to contemplate. I found I could sublimate it now, albeit with the sure and certain knowledge of its eventual return in the reaches of the night or during the tedium of train rides.

  ‘Talking of him,’ I said, ‘what about the photograph he showed me? I presume that was burnt as well.’

  Mr Disvan looked puzzled.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he replied. ‘I have it safe here.’ Aand he patted his jacket to indicate the breast pocket. I instinctively recoiled.

  ‘You jest!’ I gasped, but Disvan was adamant.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why on earth dispose of something that useful?’

  I didn’t really want to travel down this road but bravely felt I ought to. ‘What do you mean, useful?’

  Mr Disvan put his ‘soul of sweet reason’ face on.

  ‘Well, think of it, Mr Oakley’ he said. ‘Think of all the irritants of modern village life. Consider the yuppies, the yobboes and the... well, I can’t think of another “y” but you know what I mean. What about the wife-beaters, the late-night car door slammers, the lager drinkers, the nosey-parkers, poison gossips and speculative developers. What about architects, for goodness sake! And pretty soon there’ll be the poll tax people...’