I agreed that it was nice. Mr Penrose was resting in peace. With the respect of all those many people who had loved his books and thought that he was a great man. It was a good thing that we hadn’t managed to raise him from the dead. He was better at rest and at peace.
When the funeral service and the burying was over and the crowds had all gone away, Dave and I lazed upon the marble bed of Mr Doveston, smoked cigarettes and looked up at the sky and all the passing clouds.
“Nice,” said Dave. “All nice.”
“A pity there won’t be any more Lazlo Woodbine books, though,” I said.
“Yes,” said Dave. “A pity, but all good things must come to an end.”
“You are so wise,” I said to Dave. “So very, very wise.”
As it happened, there was just one more Lazlo Woodbine book. And a really good one at that. Death Wears a Grey School Jacket, it was called. It would never have been published at all if it hadn’t been for Mr Penrose’s wife.
Apparently the manuscript had been buried with Mr Penrose at his request. Unknown to Dave and me, when we had been trying to raise him from the dead that manuscript had been sitting there in the coffin under his bum. If Dave had known that, he would certainly have nicked it.
Mr Penrose’s widow contested her husband’s will, had his body exhumed and the manuscript retrieved and published.
It made the papers at the time. But not because of the manuscript.
It was because of something else entirely.
Apparently, when they opened his coffin to take out the manuscript, the cemetery workers got a bit of a shock.
The body was all twisted up. The face was contorted, the hands crooked into claws with broken, bloody fingernails. The underside of the coffin lid was covered in terrible scratches. It appeared that Mr Penrose had awoken in his coffin only hours after he’d been buried and he’d tried to fight his way out. Mr Timms the undertaker gave evidence in court. He swore that Mr Penrose was definitely dead when he was buried, that he had been drained of blood and embalmed and that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly have been buried alive.
Mr Timms said that it must have been post-mortem spasms and gaseous expansion and all kinds of stuff like that which had caused the semblance of reanimation. And he was acquitted of all charges of negligence.
Dave and I never got to sit on that bench in our old age and chat about our past. So we never got to discuss the time when, as children, we had tried to reanimate a dead man, not realizing when we performed the ritual how long it would take to work its terrible magic. In fact, we never spoke about that subject ever again.
Some things are better not spoken of.
Nor even thought about.
8
Everything changes. And the present soon becomes the past and is gone.
I awoke to find that there was silence in our house. It was Thursday, yet there was silence. I was seventeen years of age.
Uncle Jonny came no more to visit. My father had died the previous year. A trapdoor he was standing on gave way beneath his feet. Few men can predict with accuracy the day and the hour of their passing. My father did. He knew the exact minute when he would die.
The judge had told him.
I did not attend the Daddy’s trial. There were no spare seats in the public gallery. My mother had reserved them all for herself and her personal friends. They all had banners with them and specially printed badges that they wore. These appealed for justice to be done.
No clemency, they said. And Hang the blackguard high.
Whether the Daddy was really guilty of all the charges laid against him, I cannot say. Certainly he murdered the ice-cream man, but that fellow had it coming. The Daddy had warned him on numerous occasions not to park outside our door and ring his damnable bells. He had told him what he could do with his chocolate nut sundaes and where he could stick his Cadbury’s Flakes, and what would happen if he didn’t move his van to places far away. But the fellow persisted. It was a free country, he said. He had a special licence, he said. He could park wherever he pleased, he said. Move or die, the Daddy said. The ice-cream man stayed put.
In the months leading up to his murderous assault upon the vendor of iced sweeteries, the Daddy had, as they say, lived on his nerves. He was a troubled daddy. He eschewed good food and dined on drink alone. He developed strange compulsions. He would spend hour upon end sniffing swatches of tweed in the gents’ outfitters. He became prone to outbursts of uncontrollable laughter. He bethought himself a Zulu king and dressed in robes befitting. He became obsessed with the idea that an invisible Chinaman called Frank was broadcasting lines from Milton directly into his brain.
His plea of insanity was ignored by the court. And rightly too, in my opinion. I did not consider the Daddy to be mad. Perhaps a tad eccentric – but then, who isn’t?
Upon that fateful night, the ice-cream man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the story of most of our lives. My daddy had just too many things all preying on his mind. The ice-cream man’s bells pushed him over the edge. And if the bells weren’t bad enough, the fact that my daddy caught the icecream man sexing my mummy was.
The French have a special term for this kind of crime. And the perpetrator often gets off scot-free in their courts. But that’s just typical of the French. We’re far more civilized here.
So, I suppose, fair do’s, the Daddy got what he deserved. And I, for one, was glad to see the back of him. I really enjoyed the street party that was held to celebrate his hanging. But I do feel that the court should have left it at that. Punished him for the crime he had committed, without bringing in all that other stuff, which seemed to me to be done for no good reason other than spite.
The counsel for the prosecution called a special witness: a research scientist who worked for a government department, which didn’t have a name, or did, but it was a secret. This special witness gave evidence that my daddy had been directly responsible for all manner of terrible crimes against mankind and the planet in general. Climate changes; the extinction of a breed of rare miniature sheep; Third World famine. He even blamed my daddy for the rise of rock-’n’-roll.
I heard this all from Dave, who, having recently become very close with my mother, had got a good seat in the public gallery.
When I expressed my doubts to Dave regarding the scientist’s claims, Dave had shaken his head and no-no-no’d me into silence. The scientist had brought in a blackboard, Dave said. He had drawn equations on it. Dave said he had explained in terms that even the layman could understand how all the equations pointed to my father being the culprit and there was no room for error. So said Dave.
“It’s a new science,” Dave said to me. “Based upon the discovery that we human beings do not actually think with our brains. Our brains are, apparently, receivers and transmitters, which receive information from our surroundings and transmit it to a distant point in the universe; then instructions to proceed in this or that endeavour are transmitted back, or some such, in so much and so on and suchlike. And things of that nature generally.
“And half of the rubbish that’s going on in the world is all your daddy’s fault,” said Dave.
I pricked up my ears at this, which got a cheap laugh from Dave. But what he said rang a distant bell with me. I thought back to that time when I’d been hiding in the restricted section of the library (a section that had recently been removed to an unknown location) and had overheard those two young men talking about this very thing.
Curiously, there was no mention of this scientist’s evidence in the newspaper coverage of my father’s trial. The press just stuck with the business of the ice-cream man being run through the backside with my daddy’s Zulu asagi.
The editor of the Brentford Mercury excelled himself.