Continue, the magistrate tells Norman and Norman continues once again.
‘So,’ continues Norman, ‘I say to this girl, in the nicest possible way and in a manner that I hope will not offend, that she is stoned out of her face and why doesn’t she come back to my place for a rubber—’
‘Rubber?’ asks the magistrate.
‘Rubber duck,’ says Norman. ‘Although actually I was hoping for a shag.’
The court stenographer makes a note to edit Norman’s statement down to a couple of paragraphs during the lunchtime recess.
‘But then,’ says Norman (continuing), ‘we hear the police cars. Well, I hear the police cars. The crowd with the kit off start shouting that they can see the sounds of the police car sirens. They’re shrieking, “Beware the black lightning,” and crazy stuff like that. Well, I don’t know who actually called the police, or why they did. Although I did notice a couple of furtive-looking fellows who kept speaking into their Y-fronts. Although of course they might have been Egyptians.’
The court stenographer rolls his eyes; the magistrate nods his head.
‘So,’ continues Norman, yet again. ‘Police cars come screaming up and all these coppers come piling out and they’ve all got truncheons and they all pour in through the gates and crash, bang, wallop and thud and hit and beat and bash and—’
‘Have to stop you there,’ says the magistrate.
‘Why?’ asks Norman.
‘Because it’s not very nice. I don’t like the idea of policemen beating up unarmed naked people with truncheons. It’s horrid.’
‘It was horrid,’ says Norman. ‘I was there.’
‘Well, I don’t like the way you’re describing it. It shows our police force to be little more than thugs. Imagine if the newspapers were to get hold of this. People would be thinking that we’re living in a police state, rather than never having had it so good.’
‘So what would you like me to say?’ Norman asks.
‘I don’t mind what you say. But I object to the word truncheon. Call it something else.’
‘Riot stick?’ says Norman. ‘Baton?’
‘No no no. Nothing like that. Something more friendly.’
‘Tulip?’
‘Perfect,’ says the magistrate. ‘Now kindly continue.’
‘Right. So the police rush in with these tulips and there’s bashing and crashing and blood everywhere. And people’s faces are getting smashed in and the police are ramming their tulips up—’
‘No no no.
‘No?’ says Norman.
‘No.’
‘But I’m just getting to the good part.’
‘Does this good part involve tulips?’
Norman made the ‘so so’ gesture with his raised palms. ‘Not a great many tulips.’
‘Well, go ahead then and I’ll stop you if I don’t like the sound of it.’
‘Right. So the police have, you know, with the tulips and everything, but they’re really outnumbered and the naked people start grabbing the policemen and tearing off their uniforms and soon you can’t tell who’s who and the next thing it’s all turned into this sort of mass orgy and everyone’s going at it like knives.’
‘Sounds amazing.’
‘It was quite some party, I can tell you.’
‘I went to a party like that once,’ says the magistrate. ‘Back in ‘sixty-three. What a do that was. Someone even blew up the host’s dog with dynamite.’
‘Well, never mind about that. Orgy, you say?’
‘Gang bang, big time.’
‘So, you are telling me that the policemen were raped.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘They must have been raped. After all, they were completely outnumbered and they only had tulips to defend themselves with.’
‘Rape’s a rather unpleasant word,’ says Norman. ‘Perhaps you could say they were “loved against their will”, or something like that. Except they weren’t. They were right in there, especially old Mason, and I used to go to school with him.’
In his final summing up of the case, the magistrate did not use the words loved against their will. He used a lot of other words though. Rape was one and tulip was another. And he used an awful lot of adjectives: terrible, horrible, loathsome, nightmarish, vile and filthy and degrading.
He said that he had no intention of holding two thousand separate trials. He would never live to see them end. And for one thing, how could witnesses be expected to recognize defendants, as all people looked the same with their clothes off
The festival-goers were not to blame for their actions, he said. They were innocent victims of toxic poisoning.
It wasn’t their fault.
So whose fault was it, then?
Of this the magistrate was in no doubt. It was all the fault of a single individual. A criminal mastermind. A modern Moriarty. A fiend in human form who had clearly known exactly what he was doing when he emptied those drums of chemical waste into the water supply.
The Doveston did not attend the trial. He was too ill to make an appearance. It was a shame really, because had he been there, I really would have liked to ask him a few questions.
Such as how those drums of chemicals came to be in my hall.
But he wasn’t there, so I couldn’t ask him.
And even if he had been there, would it have made any difference?
You see I had glimpsed the future and I knew that the drums of chemicals had nothing whatsoever to do with the madness. The chemicals were not to blame.
It was the Brentstock cigarettes.
Cigarettes that had been manufactured from genetically engineered tobacco. Genetically engineered from a formula laid down in the notes of Uncle Jon Peru Joans, the man who would talk with the trees.
So, what should I have said? Should I have grassed up my bestest friend? Blamed it all on him? And on what evidence? That I had glimpsed the future?
I couldn’t do that.
‘It wasn’t me,’ I told the magistrate. ‘It wasn’t me.’
But did he listen?
Did he bugger!
14
Send me to Newgate and the gallows. I care not. I will laugh and jest and share a pipe or two with the hangman.
I really miss the 1970s.
Which is to say that I really missed them.
Missed every year of them. Every single month and day. Every hour and minute.
He banged me up, the magistrate did. Sent me down. Gave me fifteen years.
Fifteen years!
I wasn’t pleased, I can tell you. I was angry. I was bitter and twisted and boiling and brooding. I was not a nice man to know.
They sent me first to Parkhurst and then to Pentonville. Later I was moved to Powys, then Penroth and finally to Poonudger. That each began with the letter P gave me no cause for amusement.
The Doveston wrote to me, of course. His early letters were full of apologies and promises that he would do everything within his powers to secure me an early release. Knowing well his love for dynamite, I slept nightly with my mattress over my head, to shield myself from the blast that would bring down my cell wall and herald the arrival of the getaway car that would whirl me off to freedom.
No blast came; no car arrived.
His letters became few and far between, but with them now came press cuttings. A note was enclosed with the first of these to the effect that, as his biographer and finding myself with time on my hands, I should dedicate my days to compiling an archive of his achievements as they were chronicled in the daily newspapers.