Omally cocked a quizzical eyebrow at the aged machine.
“You mean that it actually works. I thought it was broken beyond repair.”
“I suspect that it will not take him long to discover that it is only lacking a fuse in its plug.”
Omally’s face took on a strangely guilty expression.
“I have seen the selection he proposes to substitute,” said Neville gravely. “And I fear that it is even grimmer than the one you have for so long protected our ears against.”
“It has a nautical feel to it, I suspect.”
“There is more than a hint of the shanty.”
“HMS Pinafore?”
“And that.”
“I suppose,” said Omally, hardly wishing to continue the conversation, or possibly even to draw breath, “that there would not be a number or two upon the jukebox by the Norman Hartnell Singers or Norm and the Waders?”
“You are certainly given to moments of rare psychic presentiment,” said the part-time barman.
At this point there occurred an event of surpassing unreality, still talked of at the Flying Swan. John Omally, resident drinker at that establishment for fifteen long years, rose from his stool and left undrunk an entire pint of the brewery’s finest, bought and paid for by himself. Not a mere drip in the bottom you understand, nor an unfortunate, cigar-filled, post darts-match casualty, but an entire complete, untouched, pristine one-pint glass of that wholesome and lifegiving beverage, so beloved of the inebriate throughout five counties.
Some say that during the following month John Omally joined an order of Trappist monks, others that he swore temporary allegiance to the Foreign Legion. Others still hint that the Irishman had learned through the agency of previous generations a form of suspended animation, much favoured by the ancients for purposes of imposed hibernation in times of famine. Whatever the case may be, Mr Omally vanished from Brentford, leaving a vacuum that nobody could fill. His loss was a sorry thing to behold within the portals of the Flying Swan, time seemed to stand still within those walls. Pooley took on the look of a gargoyle standing alone at the bar, drinking in silence, his only movements those born of necessity.
But what of Norman Hartnell (not to be confused with the other Norman Hartnell)? Certainly Norman’s ventures had, as has been noted, tended to verge upon the weird. This one in particular had transcended bounds of normality. When Peg made grandiose statements about her husband’s press conferences and tendencies towards lamaic meditation it may be said without fear of contradiction that the fat woman was shooting a line through her metaphorical titfer. Norman, who by nature was a harmless, if verbally extravagant, eccentric, had finally played directly into the hands of that volatile and conniving fat woman. She had watched him night after night experiment with inflatable rubber footwear, bouyant undergarments and stilted appliances. She had watched him vanish beneath the murky waters of the Grand Union Canal time after time, only to re-emerge with still more enthusiasm for the project. Only on his last semi-fatal attempt had she realized the futility of his quest; if any money was to be made out of it, then she’d have to do it.
Since she was somewhat more than twice her husband’s weight it had been a simple matter one dark night to subdue him and install him in the coal cellar, where, other than for continual cramps and the worrisome attention of curious rodents, he was ideally situated for lamaic meditation should he so wish.
The long-standing and quite fornicatious relationship that she was having with the editor of the Brentford Mercury was enough to seal poor Norman’s fate. When the police, having received many phone calls from simple souls during the week enquiring after their daily papers and packets of Woodbines, broke into Peg’s paper shop they found the bound and gagged figure of the erstwhile Channel Wader. Blinking in the sunlight, he had seemed quite unable to answer the inquisitions by various television companies, newspaper combines and foreign press agencies, each of whom had paid large cash sums for exclusive rights to the Channel Wade. Many questions were asked, but few answered.
Peg had upped and awayed it with her pressman stud, never to be heard of again. Norman simply shrugged his shoulders and remarked, “A rolling stone gathers no moss yet many hands make light work.” These proverbial cosmic truths meant little to the scores of creditors who daily besieged his paper shop, but as Norman had no legal responsibility, his wife having signed all the contracts, little could be done.
A few pennies were made by others than Peg and her paramour; Jim Pooley had successfully rattled his tin under enough noses to buy Omally several pints of consolation upon his return.
Neville had a hard job of it to sell the Wader’s Jubilee Ale, which was only purchased by those of perverse humour and loud voice. It was only a chance event, that of a night of heavy rain, which saved the day, washing as it did the Jubilee labels from the bottles to reveal that they contained nothing more than standard brown ale.
Norman seemed strangely unmoved by the whole business, considering that his wife had left him penniless. Perhaps the fact that his wife had also left him wifeless had something to do with it. Possibly he still secretly harboured the wish to wade to France, but principle alone would have forbidden him to relay this information to another soul. Still, as Jim Pooley said, “Time and tide wait for Norman.”
4
If there were one ideal spot in Brentford for the poet to stand whilst seeking inspiration, or for the artist to set up his three-legged easel, then it would certainly not be the Canal Bridge on the Hounslow Road, which marks the lower left-hand point of the mysterious Brentford Triangle. Even potential suicides shun the place, feeling that an unsuccessful attempt might result in all sorts of nasty poisonings and unsavoury disease.
Leo Felix, Brentonian and Rastafarian, runs a used car business from the canal’s western shore. Here the cream of the snips come to stand wing to wing, gleaming with touch-up spray and plastic filler, their mileometers professionally readjusted and their “only one owner’s” inevitably proving to be either members of the clergy or little old ladies.
Norman had never owned a motor car, although there had been times when he had considered building one or even constructing a more efficient substitute for the internal combustion engine possibly fuelled upon beer-bottle tops or defunct filtertips. His wife had viewed these flights of fancy with her traditional cynicism, guffawing hideously and slapping her preposterous thighs with hands like one-pound packets of pork sausages.
Norman squinted thoughtfully down into the murky waters, finding in the rainbow swirls a dark beauty; he was well rid of that one, and that was a fact. He was at least his own master now, and with his wife gone he had left his job at the Rubber Factory to work full time in the paper shop. It’s not a bad old life if you don’t weaken, he thought to himself. A trouble shared is a trouble halved.