The Fandom of the Operator

by Robert Rankin

  The offender turned to face me. He wore one of those burglar eye masks, the sort that the Lone Ranger used to wear. He also wore what appeared to be a prison uniform of the comic-book persuasion that have the arrowhead (or is it crow’s-foot?) motifs all over them.

  ‘Blimey,’ said the malcontent. ‘Blimey, Gary, it’s you.’

  I stared once and then I stared again.

  ‘Dave,’ I said. ‘Dave Rodway, it’s you.’

  ‘It was, the last time I looked,’ said Dave. ‘But I don’t look often, in case I’m up to something. If you know what I mean, and I’m sure that you do.’

  ‘I certainly do,’ I said. ‘But what are you doing here? I thought you were doing a five stretch in Strangeways.’

  ‘I absconded,’ said Dave. ‘Stole the governor’s keys and his motorcar and absconded. It was dull in there and they wouldn’t let me work in the laundry room.’

  ‘Well, bravo, Dave,’ I said. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Dave. ‘But let me nick you one instead.’

  ‘I can get the drinks for free,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s the sport in that?’

  I let Dave nick us a bottle of bubbly, then we ejected a couple of Smokey Robinson’s Miracles from a comfy-looking sofa and sat down.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Dave, pouring drinks, and we drank.

  ‘This is brilliant,’ I said. ‘Seeing you again. I’ve missed you, Dave.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ said Dave.

  ‘I have, a bit.’

  ‘I heard about Sandra. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘She’s over there, chatting with Olivia Newton John,’ I said.

  ‘She’s what?’ said Dave. ‘But she’s dead.’

  ‘Was dead,’ I said. ‘I re-animated her, like with Mr Penrose. I dug her up first, though.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Dave. ‘You’re still into all that death and magic stuff, then? You’re still a weirdo. I’m glad. I thought you’d sold out to the system.’

  ‘Me? Never.’

  ‘So what are you doing? Up to no good? Wheeling and dealing? Being your own man?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I lied. ‘The nine-to-five will never be me, as Sid Barrett used to sing.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Dave. ‘And what about Harry? Fell on his feet with this job, eh?’

  ‘Bought a motorbike,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘But what are you doing here?’

  ‘I happened to be passing by, well, running by. I’d been perusing a civilian suit in a West End tailor’s and the alarm went off. The sissy boy bouncer saw my mask and thought I was a guest.’

  ‘And so we meet up again. What a happy coincidence.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. ‘What about that, eh?’

  We got stuck into the bottle of champagne.

  ‘So,’ said Dave, by way of conversation. ‘How is Sandra holding up? Is she – how shall I put this delicately? – is she, well, decomposing?’

  ‘Sadly, yes,’ I said. ‘I have to keep gluing bits back on. But they’re making all kinds of advances in the field of medicine nowadays, grafting and suchlike. I have high hopes for the future.’

  Dave nodded thoughtfully and the eyes behind the mask followed a particularly delicious-looking young woman in next to no clothing, who was clicking her high-heeled way towards the ladies. ‘Look at the body on that,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I sighed.

  ‘Sandra had a good body,’ said Dave.

  ‘Very good,’ I agreed.

  ‘Very curvy in all the right places.’

  ‘Very curvy, yes.

  ‘And that little mole on her bum. And the way she whinnied like a pony when she—’

  ‘Eh?’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Dave. ‘All women have moles on their bums. And the posh ones always whinny when they, you know...’

  ‘Do they?’ I asked.

  ‘So I am reliably informed.’

  ‘I quite miss the mole,’ I said. ‘It came off last week.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Dave. ‘You should get Sandra a new one.’

  ‘A new mole? Where do you buy new moles?’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting that you buy one. I was thinking more that you acquire one.’

  ‘Acquire one? What are you talking about?’

  Dave set his glass aside and put the champagne bottle to his lips. He took a big swig and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘She needs spare parts,’ said Dave. ‘She’s your wife; you care about her. Her welfare should come first.’

  ‘It does,’ I said.

  ‘Then get her some spare parts. If a leg gets ropy, get her a new one. Get her two. And a bum.’

  ‘Her navel’s caved in,’ I said.

  ‘Then get her a new stomach, and tits.’

  ‘She could certainly do with new tits,’ I said.

  ‘Then go the full Monty: get her an entire new ensemble. A whole new body. It would be great for her, like having a new dress. And it would be great for you. A new body. A fresh new body.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ I said. ‘And a good one. I could dig one up for her, I suppose.’

  ‘Use your brain,’ said Dave. ‘Why dig up a dead one? It would already be going mouldy. Get her a new fresh body. Get her a live one.’ He nodded towards the delicious young woman who was now coming out of the Ladies. ‘Get her that one.’ And he turned and winked through his eye mask. ‘Sandra would really appreciate that one.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked, but I knew exactly what he was saying.

  ‘You know exactly what I’m saying,’ said Dave. ‘How long have we been bestest friends, Gary?’

  ‘For ever,’ I said. ‘As long as I can remember.’

  ‘And we trust each other, yes?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could poke you with a stick.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean that we can trust each other in that what we say to each other will never go any further. We can trust in each other.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘How could it be any other way?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dave. ‘So we are honest with each other.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  ‘So let’s be honest,’ said Dave. ‘Where are you working, Gary?’

  ‘At the telephone exchange,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there for five years.’

  ‘There,’ said Dave. ‘That wasn’t difficult, was it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like lying to you.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dave. ‘So, I’ll ask you another question and you’ll give me an honest answer, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ said Dave, in a lowered tone. ‘To your knowledge, how many deaths have you been responsible for, Gary?’

  I scratched my head. What kind of question was that? I mean, what kind of questions was that?

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said Dave.

  ‘How many?’ said Dave.

  ‘A few,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘A few,’ said Dave. ‘Maybe. And that would account for your daddy, the ice-cream man, and Count Otto Black and Sandra, by proxy. I might have been in the nick when Count Otto copped it, but I knew what he was up to with Sandra. And I recognized your hand in his tragic demise.’

  I shrugged and made an innocent face, but as I was wearing a domino mask Dave couldn’t see me making it.

  ‘So, that would be four,’ said Dave. ‘You never actually laid a hand on them, but I know, and you know that I know, that you were directly responsible. I’m asking you how many others you have actually killed by your own hand.’

  ‘It’s not so many,’ I said.

  ‘How many?’ said Dave.

  ‘About thirty.’

  ‘About thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-two. No, ‘three.’

  ‘Thirty-three would be the taxi driver I ran past earlier in the quiet street round the corner, I’ll bet.’

  ‘You should have se
en how much he wanted to charge us for the fare.’

  ‘I’m not judging you,’ said Dave. ‘I’m your friend. Your bestest friend. The fact that you are a serial killer does not affect our friendship.’

  ‘Nor should it,’ I said. ‘It has nothing to do with our friendship. Have I ever condemned you for being a thief?’

  Dave shook his head. ‘You killed Captain Runstone, didn’t you?’ said he.

  ‘I did.’ I sighed. ‘He was the very first, no, second, actually. He caught me in the restricted section of the Memorial Library. He was drunk and he tried to interfere with me.’

  ‘Self-defence,’ said Dave. ‘You’d have got away with that one.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind him interfering with me,’ I said. ‘I quite liked it. But his breath smelt rotten.’

  ‘You’d have gone down,’ said Dave. ‘You were wise to keep quiet. But what about all the rest?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was just here and there. People upset me. They make me angry. I hit them. I don’t mean to. Something just comes over me, or in to me, or something, and I’m not myself, I just do it. There was the labourer, once, on a building site, where Mother Demdike’s hut used to be. He was a homophobe. Something came over me. I lost my temper. Stuff like that.’

  ‘Well, I’m your bestest friend and I would never grass you up, as you know. It’s your thing. It’s the way you are.’

  ‘It’s my daddy’s fault,’ I said. ‘I’ve read a lot about this sort of thing. An abused child becomes an abusing adult. It’s in the programming.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Dave. ‘But I’m not judging you. All I’m saying, and this is the whole point of this conversation, you love Sandra and so you should put Sandra first. And if that means sacrificing a few young, nubile, attractive women to acquire their bodies as replacements, then you should consider it. You would be doing it for your Sandra. The benefits for yourself would of course be secondary.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said and I nodded thoughtfully. ‘You have a good point there.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Dave. ‘And I took the liberty of placing the dead cabbie in the boot of his cab and helping myself to the keys. So, if you wish to acquire the nubile young woman later, I’ll be more than pleased to give you a hand.’

  ‘You’re a real friend, Dave,’ I said, putting out my hand for a shake. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to people about the bad things I do, but I know they’d only freak out and tell the police and then I’d have to go to prison and I don’t want to go to prison. I’m really glad we could talk about it. It’s good to have a friend like you.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Dave, shaking my hand. ‘I’m your bestest friend.’

  And so we drank some more champagne.

  And we chatted about the good old days and we buddied up once again and I thought to myself what a wonderful thing real friendship is and how you can’t put a price on it. Which is probably why the rich and famous, for all the money they have to squander, never have any real friends.

  Dave nicked another bottle of champagne and we took to drinking that too.

  And, of course, when you drink a lot of champagne and you’re in the company of your bestest friend you do tend to talk too much.

  ‘I talk to the dead every night,’ I said to Dave.

  ‘Now, why doesn’t that surprise me at all?’ Dave said in reply. ‘You’ve finally taken to drugs, then, have you?’

  ‘No, it’s not drugs. I really do talk to the dead. On the telephone.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Dave.

  ‘No, really.’ And I told Dave all about FLATLINE. All about FLATLINE.

  ‘Bowls of bleeding bile!’ said Dave when at last I was done with my telling. ‘And this is true?’

  ‘All true,’ I said. ‘All of it.’

  ‘And you haven’t got caught?’

  ‘Barry and I have it sewn up.’

  Dave shook his head and he shook it violently. ‘You are in big trouble,’ he said. ‘And I mean the biggest.’

  ‘Eh?’ said I. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying,’ said Dave, ‘that I’ve heard about this. In the nick. I met an old boy in there, he’d been in for years, who told me about the FLATLINE thing and I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But if you’ve actually spoken with the dead, then it must be true.’

  ‘Who is this old boy?’ I asked.

  ‘His name is Terence Trubshaw.’

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ I said. ‘He was a bulbsman. Mr Holland told me about him. He took a day off. It was wartime. They banged him up for forty years.’

  ‘He didn’t take a day off. He found out about the program. It wasn’t called FLATLINE then. It had a secret operations name. Operation Orpheus. He was a Greek mythical bloke who went into the underworld.’

  ‘I knew that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it was part of the war effort. They had all kinds of weird secret operations back then. Because the Nazis had contacted aliens from outer space who were supplying them with advanced technology so they could win the war. Be a puppet world power run by the aliens.’

  ‘Get real,’ I said.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Dave. ‘Well, according to Mr Trubshaw, it is. The allies had to produce something pretty special, so some bright spark came up with the idea of contacting the dead by scientific means. The theory was to interrogate German officers who had been killed in the war. German officers who knew stuff, like secret information that the allies needed. They had this bloke who could impersonate Hitler’s voice. They managed to tune into the dead by using certain radio frequencies and mathematical calculations and the impersonator interrogated the dead officers and got all their information and that’s how the allies really won the war.’

  ‘And Mr Trubshaw told you that?’

  ‘He found out. Memos that he shouldn’t have seen got put on his desk by mistake and he read them.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And how did he get found out about the memos?’

  ‘He said that the entire telephone exchange is bugged. There’s secret cameras and microphones everywhere. Well, there would be, wouldn’t there, if it was a secret operations HQ in the war? And apparently all this stuff still goes on secretly. And the British government goes on pulling the same scam. When someone politically important overseas dies, or is assassinated, they call them up on this FLATLINE hot line, impersonating their Prime Minister, or King, or suchlike, and get secret information out of them, which is why Britannia still rules the waves.’

  ‘But it doesn’t rule the waves,’ I said. ‘There is no British Empire any more.’

  ‘Oh yes, there is,’ said Dave. ‘England is really the ultimate world power, because we alone have the FLATLINE technology. England might not seem to be the power controlling the world, but it is. It’s all a big conspiracy. It’s the biggest secret.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thanks for sharing that with me.’

  ‘Gary,’ said Dave. ‘Gary, my bestest friend. Don’t mess around with this stuff any more. Leave it alone or you are going to turn up missing. This is a big deal here and you could be in really big trouble.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘Run,’ said Dave. ‘Run now. Tonight. Don’t go back.’

  ‘Where can I run to?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have any money. Where would I go? And anyway, just hold on here, I’ve been doing this for months and I haven’t got caught yet. Maybe they don’t have all the bugs and cameras any more. After all, they are a bit free and easy with the technology. Letting their operatives call up their dead grannies and suchlike.’

  ‘They’ve all signed the Official Secrets Act. They know what the penalties are.’

  ‘Yeah, but––’

  ‘Get out,’ said Dave. ‘Run. This is big. It doesn’t come any bigger.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said to Dave. ‘You’re right about that. It really doesn’t come any bigger than this, does it?’

  ‘No,’ said Dave. ‘It’s
huge. It’s world-sized.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is. I’ve been going about this thing all the wrong way.’

  Dave made groaning noises.

  ‘No, really, listen. Barry and I have been doing “biographies”, dictated by the dead. That’s what the launch party here tonight is for. P. P. Penrose dictated his life story to Barry.’

  Dave laughed. ‘Not to you, then? What a surprise.’

  ‘Cut it out,’ I said. ‘I admit it, I didn’t have the nerve to talk to him. But think about it, Dave: if the dead are willing to talk, they might be willing to talk about anything. We were just thinking biographies, but that was Barry’s idea. You’ve given me a better idea. What about all those dead criminals, like, say, pirates for instance? They might be prepared to tell us where they buried their treasure. And not just criminals. Leonardo da Vinci might tell us where he hid his last notebook. Michelangelo might tell us about the location of a few missing masterworks.’

  ‘Hitler’s mob probably had all that lot,’ said Dave.

  ‘Yeah,’ said I. ‘And a whole lot more. There must be tons of hidden booty that only the dead know about. I don’t know why I never thought of this before.’

  ‘Because you weren’t with your bestest friend,’ said Dave.

  ‘You are so right,’ said I.

  ‘And perhaps you’re right too,’ said Dave. ‘Perhaps the fact that you haven’t been caught means that there isn’t any surveillance. I think that, together, you and I might pull off a very big number here.’

  ‘The very biggest,’ said I.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Dave, ‘this will have to be between you and me. We daren’t have any loose ends. No smoking pistols. No one but the two of us must know about this. Are we agreed?’

  ‘We are,’ I said. ‘Anyone else,’ and I drew my finger across my throat, ‘no matter who they are.’

  ‘Hello.’

  I looked up and so did Dave.

  ‘Enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Yes indeed, Barry,’ I said.

  Sandra drove Dave and me home in the taxi. I was far too drunk to drive and also too excited.

  Sandra drove very well, considering.