The answer was therefore to build Jim a horse.
It might well have been suggested to Norman that the answer would be to buy Jim a horse. But Norman would certainly have pooh-pooed this suggestion.
Racehorses cost a fortune to buy. It was simpler all round just to build one.
Norman had recently come into possession of a scientific magazine, ordered in error by a customer. In this there had been a long and involved article about a sheep called Dolly, which had supposedly been cloned. This had set Norman thinking.
Like all manly men, all truly manly men, Norman had a love of science fiction. Not just a liking, but a love. And there was no shortage of novels dedicated to this particular subject. Norman had rootled about in his collection and come up with a couple of Johnny Quinn classics. Crab Cheese and The Man Who Put his Head on Backwards.
In Crab Cheese the eponymous detective (Crab Cheese) finds himself on the trail of a serial killer of the vampire persuasion, who turns out to be a human clone. The cunning twist at the end is that the man does not have a soul. The theory being that you might be able to clone the man, but you cannot clone the soul[5].
This gave Norman pause for thought. Did animals have souls? No one really knew for certain. But then if they did, and the one you cloned didn’t, would it really matter? Norman wondered about Dolly. Had she shown any leanings towards vampirism? If she had, the scientific journal failed to mention them.
The Man Who Put his Head on Backwards was a different kettle of genetics altogether. It involved rich people in the future who were cloned by their parents at birth. The clones were then carefully reared on special farms to provide spare parts and replacement organs for the originals. As and when required.
This led Norman into wondering whether he should perhaps clone half a dozen horses in case the first one broke a fetlock or something.
But he decided to scrub around that. He only had space in his back yard to graze one horse and he didn’t want the neighbours complaining again.
What a fuss they’d made about his outside toilet. It had seemed such a good idea at the time, catering as it did to customers who were suddenly caught short in his shop. The world had clearly not been ready for the open-air female urinal.
So, over the aforementioned previous weekend Norman had set himself to planning how he might clone the greatest Derby winner of them all. It would need to have all the best features of all the best horses all rolled into one. But how to go about the task? How to acquire the necessary genetic material? You couldn’t just knock at the door of some stud farm and ask to borrow a few skin scrapings. Well, you could, but …
Well, you could in a manner of speaking. You could certainly ask for something.
On the Sunday Norman drove off to Epsom in his Morris Minor. He set out early and sought the grandest-looking stables. Here he leaned upon the fence and watched the horses being groomed. He had brought with him two essential items. A breeder’s guide and a bucket. These were all he needed to gain the something he required.
His technique proved to be faultless. Having selected from the breeder’s guide a horse suitable for cloning, Norman shouted abuse at the stable lad grooming it. The stable lad replied to Norman’s abuse in the manner which has been favoured by stable lads since the very dawning of time.
He hurled horseshit at Norman.
Norman gathered up the horseshit and put it in his bucket.
Having visited five stables, Norman had a full bucket, containing all the genetic material he needed.
He was even home in time for Sunday lunch.
On the Monday, Norman used whatever time he could between serving customers to slip away to his back kitchen workshop and extract the DNA from the horseshit. This was a rather tricky task, requiring, as it did, a very large magnifying glass, a very small pair of tweezers and a very steady hand …
By shop-close, however, he’d filled up a test tube. Now, there is, apparently, something of a knack to gene-splicing. It calls for some pretty high-tech state-of-the-art equipment, which is only to be found in government research establishments. Norman did not have access to these, so instead he gave the test tube a bloody good shake. Which was bound to splice something.
On the Tuesday, which was today, things had not gone well for Norman. He’d been hoping to at least knock out a test horse, but there had been too many interruptions.
People kept bothering him for things. Could he get them this? Could he get them that? Norman told them all that he certainly could not. And then there had been all the fuss about the videos.
He should never have started hiring out videos. It was a very bad idea. Norman couldn’t think for the life of him why he’d started doing it in the first place. But then, for the life of him, he remembered that he could.
It was all the fault of John Omally.
Omally had come into Norman’s shop a couple of months before, complaining bitterly that there was nowhere in Brentford where you could hire out a videotape.
Norman had shrugged in his shopcoat.
“There’s a fortune waiting for the first man who opens a video shop around here,” said Omally.
Norman nodded as he shrugged.
“A fortune,” said John. “I’d open one myself, but the problem is finding the premises.”
“Why is that the problem?” Norman asked.
“Because there aren’t any shops to rent around here.”
“Which must be why no one has opened a video shop.”
“Exactly,” said Omally. “And it’s not as if you’d need a particularly large shop. In fact, when you come to think about it, all you’d really need would be a bit of shelf space in an existing shop.”
“I see,” said Norman.
Omally glanced around at Norman’s shop. “I mean, take this place, for instance,” he said. “Those shelves over there. The ones with all the empty sweetie jars. Those shelves there could be earning you a thousand pounds a week.”
“How much?” said Norman.
“A thousand pounds a week.”
“Those shelves there?”
“Those shelves there.”
“Bless my soul,” said Norman.
Omally did a bit of shrugging. “Makes you think,” said he.
“It certainly does,” Norman agreed. “Of course, there would be the enormous capital outlay of buying all the videos.”
“Not if you had the right connections.”
“I don’t,” said Norman.
“I do,” said John.
And it had seemed a good idea at the time. What with Omally knowing where he could lay his hands on five hundred videotapes for a pound each. It was only after Norman had parted with the money and Omally had loaded the tapes onto the shelves that Norman thought to ask a question.
“What are on these tapes?” Norman asked. “None of them are labelled.”
“I don’t know,” Omally said.
“But haven’t you tried any out?”
“How could I try any out? I don’t own a VCR.”
Norman’s face came over all blank. “But I thought you were bitterly complaining that—”
“There was nowhere in Brentford you could hire a videotape from. Yes, I was. But I was speaking generally. I didn’t mean me personally.”
“Oh,” said Norman. “I see.”
“Well, I’m all done now,” said John. “So I’ll be off.”
And with that said, he was.
It took Norman more than a week to go through the tapes. He had some very late nights. To his great disappointment, none of them turned out to be Hollywood blockbusters. All contained documentary footage. Of Chilean secret police interrogating prisoners.