“Aye, aye, cap’n!” he responded with great presence of mind, on being jolted from sleep by an angry shout from Hugh. He scrambled to the stern of the rowboat, unknowingly loaned by a drinking acquaintance, and cut the rope that secured it to a baulk of timber. The boat began to drift offshore, slowly revolving.
Heath searched for whatever means of locomotion the boat possessed. There were no oars. He managed to pull out a seat-board. Using this as a paddle, he got the craft near enough to the bank to make himself heard by his patrons.
“Ahoy, there...I’ll belay her down wind a point and get her to where you said. You go and hoist your film gear and she’ll be there before you can spit.”
Heath had been punctilious in one respect: he had donned the costume devised by the TEAK Tele-kinetics Division for his role—indeed it had so taken his fancy that he had been wearing it continuously since the previous evening. It consisted of a scarlet and gold waterman’s doublet, Nelsonian breeches and a highwayman’s hat left over from a stillborn campaign on behalf of Dick Turpin Y-fronts (The B-I-G Holdup).
The plan was for this picturesque figure to row out to mid-stream, mime a baling action to make it seem he was filling the antique brass-bound plastic tub in the prow, and return to the shore. A series of brief clips would convey an impression of the operation and of its sequels: the transfer of the supposed river water into the washing machine ashore and the supposed addition of the miraculously saponifying Product, in order, that a collection of the town’s most gruesomely stained articles of apparel might supposedly be cleansed to the astonishment, edification and high delight of the beholders.
Heath’s intended course was marked by three poles that had been driven at low tide into the river bed at twenty-yard intervals. These rose some ten feet above the present water level and served the primary purpose of supporting a banner that read: BRIGHT, BRIGHT—NEW LUCILLITE.
Having with difficulty brought his boat to the bank close by the first pole, and exchanged his extemporized paddle for the oars that Hugh had commandeered from a beached dinghy near by, Heath spat on his hands and struck a nautical attitude.
“Everything shipshape, cap’n?” he inquired of Antony, already clamped to his viewfinder.
“Lovely. Lovely. Carry on. Marvellous. Now the rowing. Lovely. Pull. Try and keep both together. You’re Captain Bligh. Yes, lovely. You’re Bligh, duckie. Intrepid. Obsessed. Yes, yes—marvellous. Knot your neck muscles. Now a teeny bit of agony. You’re being lashed. Ooo...lash, lash, lash. Lovely...”
When he had been for some time out of range of these murmured exhortations, Heath judged the moment appropriate to stop rowing and to go through the baling routine. The third pole, he noticed, was only a yard or two away. He picked up the reproduction eighteenth century grog pannikin that had been supplied with his costume and dipped it in the river, then emptied its contents into the tub. He repeated the operation half a dozen times.
A shout came from the shore. Heath looked back to see Hugh waving and pointing meaningfully at the boat. Antony had stopped filming and seemed to be making gestures indicative of impending self-destruction. Heath, much puzzled, cupped his hand to one ear.
“Get the bloody thing off!” came over the water from Hugh. “It’s right in the bloody picture!”
Heath frowned, shrugged and inquiringly doffed his three-cornered hat.
“No!” bellowed Hugh. “Not that.”
Heath put his hat on again.
“In the water,” Hugh shouted. “There. Just by the stern.”
Heath peered over the prow.
“Stern! Stern!”
“The back!” screamed Antony. Heath gave a great quarter-deck salute of comprehension and clambered aft.
What he saw was enough to disconcert more seasoned mariners than Heath. Waterborne just below the gunwale and staring up at him with bulbous, bloodshot eyes was the head of some monstrous animal. Strips of hide floating from the severed neck had caught on the farthest banner-supporting pole.
Heath stared for nearly half a minute at the creature’s chaps, blackened as if by mummification, at its bull-like nostrils and partly submerged horns.
Then, quite suddenly, it dawned on him that the thing was too buoyant to be real. He poked it with an oar. It bobbed, sending an impression of wood, of hollowness, up the oar. He leaned out and tugged the leather strapping free from the pole. Heaving the head into the boat took scarcely any effort at all.
“Beg to report sea monster in the scuppers, cap’n!”
The homeward-bound Heath, delighted with the discovery so late in life that he could row, grinned over his shoulder at the assembly on the bank.
A few of the women smiled back. The others, who had heard some of the things which Hugh and Antony had been saying to each other about Heath’s odyssey, remained grave-faced.
As soon as the boat touched ground, Hugh yanked out the head and swung it on to the turf behind him. In a terribly audible whisper he ordered Heath to turn the boat round and go through his whole routine again but not like a piss-boiling twat this time or God help him he’d stitch his ears to his arsehole and please but please to remember this whole thing was more serious than the Holy Ghost so no more bloody jokes...
Heath embarked on his second voyage to the accompaniment of another stream of those delirous little cries of encouragement which seemed to issue from Antony quite automatically whenever he aimed a camera at anybody.
Hugh, his solicitous affability restored to full pressure, marshalled the washwives into new positions for interviews and amazement shots.
The Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome and the Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin arrived back from their working lunch in the APD’s Sholto-Clore Mark III Retaliator. They watched the filming for a few minutes from the observation window of the campaign cruiser, then closed their eyes in order to internalize a few of the day’s ideas.
Only two people seemed disposed to take notice of the great mask that lay on the grass, the spring sunshine drawing from it faint wraiths of steam.
One was Mrs Flora Pentatuke, who had been watching from the opposite bank during Heath’s first excursion.
The other also was a woman. Her name was Miss Amy Parkin and although she was of exceptionally short stature, she somehow had contrived that afternoon to get her face on to more than half the footage of Antony’s film.
Chapter Five
Saturday morning in Flaxborough is normally an undemanding, leisurely interlude between five days of labour and the athletic, alcoholic or concupiscent demands of the week-end. There is an open street market at one end of the town and at the other an auction of such various objects as henhouses, bags of onions, fishing rods, rolls of wire, saplings, tortoises and second-hand hearing aids. The shops in between are packed with citizens exchanging news and opinions and occasionally buying something. Inns do a moderate trade, but the availability of their liquor is of secondary importance to the comfort and seclusion of their bar parlours. The drivers of the cars wedged irrevocably in narrow streets do not engage in the empurpling bouts of mutual recrimination that are the sole enlivening indulgence open to the city motorist; they sensibly go in search of talk and refreshment until such time as the situation be resolved by the Flaxborough equivalent of natural selection. Even policemen, from Chief Constable Harcourt Chubb to the rawest cadet in Fen Street, subscribe—in normal times—to the preservation of Saturday morning as a strictly social amenity which could be blighted by the slightest excess of zeal on their part. “Let it mulch until Monday”, is one of the favourite advisory metaphors of Mr Chubb, a keen gardener in his considerable spare time.