“What?” Jim’s jaw fell, to land with a palpable clunk upon his chest. “Barred?”
“Barred!” quoth Neville. “Now kindly get out of my pub.”
“Hold on there, Neville.” John made a cheesy grin. “That is not at all funny. Look at poor Jim, the colour’s gone right out of his chops.”
“Barred,” said Neville and he bared his teeth. “Traitorous, devious dogs. Out of my pub now or I’ll take my knobkerrie to the both of you.”
“Five more halves of cider over here,” called a pale-faced business type.
“Be with you in a moment, sir,” said Neville. “As soon as I have evicted these two undesirable elements from the establishment.”
“Neville,” said John, “have you become bereft of your senses? It’s us – John and Jim, your favourite patrons.”
“Curs and rapscallions,” cried Neville, reaching below the counter for his knobkerrie.
“Neville, please.” John raised calming palms. “Whatever is going on? What is all this about?”
“You know full well. You put him up to it, I know you did.” Neville glared at Jim with his good eye.
“What did I do?” Jim Pooley clutched at his heart.
“I’ve just had a phone call from Professor Slocombe,” said Neville.
“Ah,” said John.
“‘Ah?’ Is that all you have to say, ‘Ah?’” Neville now raised his knobkerrie.
“I think I’ll be heading back to the office,” said the pale-faced business type.
“It’s not my fault,” wailed Jim. “I didn’t volunteer for the job. It was all Professor Slocombe’s idea.”
“I trusted you.” Neville waggled his knobkerrie in Jim’s direction. “And I trusted this Irish ne’er-do-well. And what do you do? Stab me in the back, that’s what you do.”
Jim Pooley shook his head. “Never,” he said. “We never did. We never would.”
“Manager!” Neville had a good old shake on now. His good eye bulged from its socket. “You couldn’t manage a knees-up in a whore house.”
“Neville, calm yourself.” John leaned forward across the bar counter. “This could really work to your benefit. Allow me to explain. You see—”
But John Omally said no more, as at that moment Neville swung his knobkerrie and bopped him on the head. John’s eyes crossed and then they closed and John sank slowly to the carpet.
Jim looked down in horror. Words tried to form in his mouth, but could not. He raised a bitter gaze towards Neville and prepared to leap across the counter and exact a bloody revenge.
But Neville swung his club once more.
And Pooley hit the deck.
8
Norman pressed home the bolts on the shop door and turned the “open” sign to “closed”. Norman always loved his Wednesday afternoons, when at one he could shut up shop and engage in his own activities. With Peg, his oversized other half, off at her weekly meeting with the Chiswick Townswomen’s Guild, Norman’s time was his own. Certainly he was supposed to remove himself to the wholesalers to stock up on Pontefract cakes and liquorice sticks and jujubes and sherbet lemons. But as folk never bought those sweeties any more, and the jars that lined the dusty shelves always remained full, it didn’t really matter anyway.
Norman divested himself of his brown shopkeeper’s coat and hung it behind the door of the kitchenette, taking unto himself the patched jacket of green Boleskine tweed that had been his father’s before him and slipping it on as if it were a loving glove. Norman let himself out through the back door, locking it behind him, and sauntered off to his lock-up in Abaddon Street.
Now, a lock-up garage is a wonderful thing, almost as wonderful in its way as an allotment shed. It is a “man’s” place, full of a man’s accoutrements: tools and spare parts and things that no longer work because they need a few spare parts to set them going, and boxes of old magazines that must not be thrown away because there are interesting articles in them that might one day be interesting to read. And as with an allotment shed, or indeed a garden shed, there is always a half-bag of gone-solid cement that you always fall over when you come in. Which is there, as we all know, because it is a tradition, or an old charter, or something.
Norman unlocked and swung up-and-over the up-and-over garage door, stood in the entranceway and breathed in the ambience of his lock-up. It smelt good. It smelt of a man’s accoutrements, of tools and spare parts and things that no longer worked because … and so on and so forth and such like.
Norman smiled the smile of inward satisfaction, stepped forward into his garage and fell over a half-bag of gone-solid cement. Righting himself, Norman smiled some more and sought out his car keys. Because Norman owned a car. Well, not a car as such – it was more of a van. In fact, it was a van. An Austin A40 van that Norman was restoring. And not only restoring, but improving, enginewise.
Norman had certain theories regarding the internal combustion engine, mostly of the nature that it was a most inefficient means of powering an automobile. Norman was working on an alternative drive system for the A40 van, a revolutionary new method of automotive propulsion. It was near to completion and only needed a few spare parts to keep it going as smoothly as he would have liked.
It was not your everyday revolutionary new method of automotive propulsion. This was something quite different.
Norman had modestly named it the Hartnel Grumpiness Hyper-Drive. It would, in Norman’s humble opinion, bring joy to millions and millions of drivers who drove old and unreliable automobiles. Folk such as himself, for instance.
The genesis of this particular invention had come about when Norman had purchased a book called The Power of Positive Thought, written by some American woman with big hair and a lot of letters after her name that didn’t seem to spell out anything sensible. Norman had read this book from cover to cover and then tossed it into the fire, where it burned most warmly, which was about the most positive thing it had done since Norman had purchased it.
The book was a load of old New Age toot, but it had set Norman to thinking. What if you could harness the power of negative thought? There was surely a great deal of that in the world just going begging. If you could tune into that you’d surely have a source of almost infinite power. Because everyone, it seemed to Norman, was almost always in a bad mood about something.
Norman had been mulling this concept over in his mind whilst he drove along in his old Austin A40 van. In fact, he’d been mulling it over when the van did as it so often did – stuttered from life and rattled to a halt in the middle of busy traffic. Norman swore wildly at his van, bashing at its steering wheel with his fists. He got into a very bad temper. There was a lot of negative energy buzzing about in that van.
And so was born the Hartnel Grumpiness Hyper-Drive. Fuelled, if you like, upon road rage.
Norman had pushed the van back to the lock-up and broken out the Meccano set.
So far things had not been going quite as the scientific shopkeeper might have hoped with the Hartnel Grumpiness Hyper-Drive. But then, thought Norman, that was the problem. He shouldn’t be hopeful about this project. Hope was positive. He should be gloomy, taciturn, without hope, he should begrudge every moment that he spent on the project. He should hate every moment, build up so much negative energy that the van would run for fifty years without requiring further shouting at.
Norman climbed into the driving seat and placed upon his head a helmet constructed from Meccano and Christmas-tree lights. Many wires ran out of the helmet and away to vanish beneath the dashboard where many complicated (and, many cynics might claim, ludicrous) electronic doodads of Norman’s design and construction were linked to the mechanical gubbins that were the Austin’s engine parts.