“It’s taken me months,” said Barry. “But I’ve traced it, a yard at a time. I know where the wire goes.”
Now I have to confess that I was shaking all over by now, not just my head. I really was. Whether it was anticipation, I don’t know. Perhaps it was something more than that. Remember I mentioned in a previous chapter what it might be like for a believer in Christianity if he or she was offered absolute proof that there was no afterlife? Well, it was something like that. I did want to know where the wire went, but also I didn’t! Life can be such a complicated business at times. Can’t it?
“It goes up …”
“No!” I said to Barry. “I don’t want to know.”
“You do, you know, although you don’t know it yet.”
“I don’t think that makes sense, but I really don’t want to know.”
“Well,” said Barry, “I can understand that too. If the bulb was simply connected to some random number indicator computer thing and the whole job really is a complete waste of time simply to keep employment figures stable, you’ve wasted five years of your life. Haven’t you?”
I didn’t want to nod, so I didn’t.
“Well, it isn’t that,” said Barry. “The wire goes to a definite place.”
I wiped my hands across my brow, which had a fine sweat on. And slowly, very slowly, I said, “All right, then, where does it go?”
“Upstairs,” said Barry. “It goes upstairs. Upstairs to the seventeenth floor.”
“The seventeenth floor?” I said that slowly too.
“The seventeenth floor,” said Barry. “To Developmental Services.”
14
The evening after I’d had that conversation with Barry, I was wide awake and ready for action. And I was wearing a pretty nifty disguise.
Lazlo Woodbine was a master of disguise. He possessed, amongst other things, a tweed jacket, which when worn without his trademark fedora and trenchcoat literally transformed him into the very personification of a newspaper reporter. I did not think that particular disguise would be suitable for what I had to do, which was to infiltrate Developmental Services, so I chose another, which was.
I wore a white coat.
I confess that the white coat idea wasn’t mine. The idea came originally from a friend whom I’d known in my teenage years. A chap called Mick Strange. Mick came up with this brilliant scam for getting into anywhere. By getting in, I mean getting into events, or into virtually anywhere that you would otherwise have to queue up and pay to get into.
The scam was simplicity itself and although nowadays it is attempted (with minimal results) by many, he thought of it first. In order to get in, to virtually anywhere and everything, all you had to do was put on a white coat and carry a large light bulb.
I saw him do it at Battersea funfair and also at Olympia when Pink Floyd played there. He simply walked in, wearing his white coat and carrying his big light bulb. He looked official. He looked like an electrician. He got in. QED. End of story.
I arrived back at the telephone exchange at nine of that evening and clocked on for my overtime. I went into the bulb booth, woke up Barry, who was already having a kip, told him to remain alert, changed into my white coat, which I had brought in stuffed down my trouser leg, and took up my light bulb, which I had secreted in my underpants, and which had got me several admiring glances from young women on the bus. Barry didn’t ask me what I was doing. Barry didn’t care. I asked him to wish me luck, though, and, very kindly, he did.
“Good luck,” said Barry.
“Thank you,” I said. “Very kind.”
And then I went off down the corridor and got into the lift.
Now, OK, I confess, I had a sweat on. I had to keep wiping my forehead. And I was upset by this. As a child I had been brave. A very brave boy indeed. But it seemed that over the years, as Sandra had said, I’d lost it. Lost myself. But I was now determined to get myself back. And definitely do it this time. Not like when I’d made that drunken promise to change the world and liberate the slaves of the system.
And I’ll tell you this, when that little bell rang and the light flashed in the number 17 button and the lift doors opened, I was almost brave again.
Almost.
Nearly almost.
I straightened the lapels on my white coat and I held my light bulb high and I marched along the corridor, noting that this was a somewhat swisher and better-appointed corridor than the one seventeen floors beneath that led to my bulb booth. But I walked tall and true and I marched, I fairly marched, towards room 23.
And when I got to it, I didn’t knock. I opened the door and I walked right in. And I didn’t half get a surprise.
Room 23 was a very big room. And when I say big I mean big. It wasn’t so much a room as an entire operations centre. It was vast. And it was high, too. I figured that they must have knocked out the ceilings and floors of the eighteenth and nineteenth floors too to accommodate all this equipment and all these walkways and gantries and stairways that all these men in white coats who were carrying light bulbs were walking along and up and down and all around and about.
I fairly smiled.
And then I joined them.
And then a man with a white coat who didn’t carry a light bulb but instead carried a clipboard (which singled him out as a “technician”) stopped me.
“And where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“I’m not quite sure,” I said.
“I thought so,” said the technician. “Let’s have a look at that bulb.”
I held up my bulb for his inspection.
“That’s an XP103,” he said. “North end of the Mother Board, gantry five, level four, row ten.”
I looked at him.
“Hurry, then,” he said. “A missing bulb is an accident waiting to happen.”
“Indeed,” I said. “North end, you said.”
“Gantry five, level four, row ten. Hurry along.”
So I hurried along. And it did have to be said that when it came to bulbs, the lads in Developmental Services had the market cornered. I had never seen so many bulbs all in one place at one time ever before in my life.[18] One entire wall of this vast department was all bulbs, so it seemed. Thousands and thousands of them, all flashing on and off and some just flickering in between.
I felt almost sick at the sight of them. Having had only the one to deal with myself, this was all very much too much. A bulbsman’s nightmare. I’d had dreams like this myself.
“Hurry,” said the technician once more, for I had paused in my hurrying.
I hurried along gantries and up stairways until I was out of the sight of that technician and then I stopped and took stock. What the fugging Hull was all this? What was a Mother Board? What did all these bulbs do? I almost asked a fellow white-coater. Almost. But not quite. I knew what the answer would be: “Don’t ask me. Do I look like a Grade A bulb supervisor first class?” or something similar. So I didn’t ask. I milled about, looking as if I was busy, and I listened.
I couldn’t understand much of what was being said. It all sounded terribly complicated and technical, but then I suppose that it would. Being so complicated and technical.
And everything.
I overheard the word “interface” being used a lot. And a lot about “frequencies”, getting the frequencies right. And the dialling codes. “Exactitudes” regarding the dialling codes. It was all a mystery to me.
And then some oik in a white coat accosted me and asked whether I was “the new bob who wanted to speak to his granny”.