Sprout Mask Replica (24 page)

‘Paper,
sir, and breakfast,’ called back a voice I did not recognize.

I rose
and stretched again and rubbed my arms, for it was pretty cold, and, opening
the door, took in a tray of tea and toast and a rolled-up copy of the
Daily
Sketch.

As
there was no table in my little room I set the tray down on the floor, poured
lukewarm tea into the chipped enamel mug, added milk and, finding no spoon
available, stirred this with a soldier of toast.

And
then I unrolled the newspaper.

TRAGIC
DEATH OF A ROCKSTAR

Ran the
head line and beneath this—

PANAY CLOUDRUNNER
DIES AGED
23

I read
the news and then— Oh boy!

He’d
blown his mind out in a car. He hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed.

A
terrible chill ran through me as I read the time of the fatal accident. Not a
half-hour after I’d spoken to the waiter with the bloody nose. Dear God, what
had I done?

Well,
it was all too clear just what I’d done. I’d killed him as surely as if I’d put
a gun to his head and squeezed upon the trigger.

I had
killed a perfect stranger. This was terrible. Terrible. Beyond terrible. This
was— ‘Oh my God!’ I wailed. Most terribly I wailed. Beyond terribly, in fact. I
wailed and gnashed my teeth and beat my forehead with my fists. And then I
stumbled from my room. Along the corridor, down the stairs, into the lift, out
into the foyer. And into chaos.

The
foyer was packed with people. News teams with cameras and boom mics like furry
blimps. Others. Many others, shouting to be heard.

A woman
in a Salvation Army uniform thrust a collecting tin into my face. ‘Are you one
of the blessed?’ she asked. ‘Would you care to make a contribution?’

‘I don’t
give to paramilitary organizations,’ I told her. ‘Get out of my way.

‘Help
save the whales,’ called somebody else.

‘Stuff
Prince Charles,’ I replied.

I
fought my way through the crowd and out into the street. Here I passed more
newsmen speaking into cameras.

‘I’m
standing here,’ said one. ‘In what must be England’s luckiest town. Yesterday
nearly one hundred homeless and destitute people became the unlikely recipients
of huge sums of money. Bizarre coincidence? Act of God? Who can say. I have
with me a close friend of one of the lucky ones that local folk are now
calling,
the blessed.
Mr Colon, would you care to say a few words?’

I
turned at the name and Colon flashed me a winning smile. ‘Nice one, man,’ he
said.

I waved
at him feebly, turned away, tripped on the kerb and fell directly into the path
of an oncoming Blue Bird Cleaners’ truck.

And
black went the world about me.

I awoke with a start to a
terrible shock.

‘Stand
clear,’ said a voice and then
THWUNKQ,
which was just how it felt. My
chest heaved and then I felt my eyelids being tampered with. A very bright
light shone into one eye, then the other.

‘I’m
sorry,’ said the voice and I could see its owner now, a doctor in a white coat.
‘There is nothing more I can do for this man.’

Nothing
more?
I tried to cry out but my mouth wouldn’t
move. Nothing would move, not a finger not a toe.

‘Time
of death, two-thirty p.m. Have an orderly move him to the morgue please.’

The
morgue!
An awful fear ran through me. This fool
thinks I’m dead, which is surely not the case.

‘Are
you certain?’ asked a pretty nurse, gazing down at me. A voice of reason.
Yes!

The
doctor felt my pulse, put a stethoscope upon my heart, put a finger to my neck,
shone his damn torch in my eyes again. ‘Absolutely certain, nurse. This man is
dead.’

What?
The awful fear became an awful terror. Well beyond
an awful terror.
Dead? I’m not dead. I’m not dead!

‘He’s
dead,’ said the doctor.

‘Dead,’
said the nurse.

And ‘dead’,
said the lady with the alligator purse (who just happened to be passing the
door on her way to a nursery rhyme).

I’m
not dead, you fools, I’m not dead.

And
then someone pulled the sheet up over my head and I couldn’t see any more. I
could still hear though.

‘Do we
have a name for him?’ asked the doctor.

‘No,’
said the nurse. ‘There was no identification on the body. We must assume he was
one of the homeless people who were accidentally allocated the grants for the
secret government germ warfare project yesterday.’

‘That
was a right royal cock-up,’ said the doctor. ‘Are the police hunting those
transients to recover the money?’

‘No
luck apparently. Word must have leaked out last night. The homeless people all
left the hotel before dawn, there’s no trace of them.’

‘Was
there any money on this chap?’

‘No
money, but his pockets were full of rubbish. Filter tips, lolly sticks, biro
caps, bottle tops, bits of coloured wool.’

‘Just
another loser, eh? Well, usual procedure, morgue then the crem.’

The crem?
The CREMATORIUM!
I tried hard to scream, I really
did. But there was nothing. Nothing. And then I knew it. Knew it because I knew
I wasn’t breathing, that my heart wasn’t beating, that my blood no longer
flowed.

I knew
that I was really dead.

Then I
heard the door open, sensed others in the room. Something bumped up against my
bed, hands were laid upon me and I was roughly manhandled onto, what? A
trolley.

Then
movement, momentum, I was being pushed out of the room, along corridors. I
heard people speaking. Live people. People who weren’t dead like me. People who
weren’t destined for
the crem.

The
morgue was very cold and dull, but at least they turned down the sheet from my
face so I could see. I couldn’t see much though, but for the ceiling.

I lay
there. A body on the slab. A corpse.

So this
was it. And the unspeakable fear that all men fear unspeakably was founded. The
mind survives the body after death. The senses still function. I could feel the
cold, smell the antiseptic reek, see through my dead eyes and hear through my
dead ears. I would suffer it all in silent agony. An autopsy perhaps, but then
the
crem.

And
then what?

I heard
the morgue door open and the sounds of approaching footsteps. Two young men
loomed above me.

‘What
happened to this bloke?’ said one.

‘Road
accident,’ said the other. ‘Stepped out in front of a truck.!

‘Silly
bastard. Next of kin paying a visit?’

‘John
Doe, identity unknown.’

‘So
they won’t be bothering with an autopsy or anything.’

‘No,
bung him in the freezer, we’ll fire him up this evening.’

I felt
a tugging at my hand. ‘He won’t be needing this ring then,’ said one of the
young men.

‘Nor
this leather jacket,’ said the other.

And
then I was lifted onto this big long filing drawer sort of thing and slammed
away into freezing darkness.

I was
left in absolute silence and absolute black, utterly utterly alone.

As the
temperature dropped I thought of my friend and his experience at the war games
on Salisbury Plain. How his past life hadn’t flashed before his eyes, only a
wish to make up for all the sex he’d missed out on. But I wasn’t thinking of
sex. All I felt was envy. Envy of the living. All I wanted was life, more life.

‘And if
you had it, what would you do with it?’

I
groaned inwardly. That was all I needed now. A voice in my head. Not only dead,
but mad with it. Perfect.

‘Actually
you’re taking it quite well,’ said the voice. ‘Your average dead person is
usually reduced to an incoherent mental babbler. Apart from the Christians, of
course. It’s all, “Praise the Lord, I’m coming to glory” with those lads. You’d
still be an atheist, I suppose.’

I tried
to ignore the voice and set my mind to desperate practical thinking. There had
to be some way out of this.

My
thoughts turned to the island of Haiti, over there voodoo priestesses were said
to be able to reanimate the dead as zombies. I had all my sensory faculties
about me, I could hear and see and feel. If there was some way I could send out
a telepathic message to any voodoo priestess that happened to be in the area
and get her to hurry on over before I went into the oven— ‘That’s a new one,’
said the voice in my head. ‘Usually it’s just a futile struggle to get the
personality out of the body and float off somewhere. The Buddhists have that
off to a fine art. Did you know that the Dalai Lama practises dying four times
a day? So he’ll be prepared, you see. Whip straight off to his next
incarnation.’

‘I read
somewhere that monks make amulets out of his poo,’ I said, without moving my
lips or making a single sound. ‘But I’m not talking to
you,
you’re just
a figment of my imagination.’

‘You’ve
got spirit,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll give you that.’

‘Bugger
off!’

‘Now
that’s no way to speak to God, is it?’

‘You’re
not God. I don’t believe in God.’

‘Rubbish,
everyone believes in God. Some just pretend they don’t.’

‘Well,
I
don’t.’

‘Fair
enough, you’ll be wanting to stay in your body then. For
the crem.’

‘I’m
expecting the imminent arrival of a voodoo high priestess, as it happens.’

‘Well,
I hope she knows which bus to catch, I think those sods who nicked your ring
and jacket are coming back. They probably want to knock off early. I think they’ve
got tickets for the Sonic Energy Authority gig at Wembley tonight. There’s a
new bass player, you know.’

I
managed another inward silent groan. And another, ‘Bugger off.’

‘Oh
well, please yourself. I’ll pop back later, after the inferno, try to catch you
before they grind your bones up. That’s quite an unpleasant experience I hear,
even worse than the burning.’

‘Hold
on, wait, don’t go.’

‘Hah.
Decided to change your mind, eh? Decided to believe in me after all?’

‘I don’t
believe you’re God.’

‘Oh go
on, you do really.’

‘I
don’t.’

‘You’re
one stubborn bugger for a dead bloke. But you’re quite right, I’m not really
God.’

‘So
what are you?’

‘I’m
your Holy Guardian.’

‘My
what?’

‘Your
Holy Guardian, assigned to watch over you throughout your life.’

‘Well a
shit job you’ve made of it. I walked under a truck.’

‘Sorry
about that. I wasn’t concentrating. Nobody’s perfect, you know. Except for God,
of course.

‘Look,’
I said, still without actually speaking, ‘if this is the case, do you think it
would be all right if I had a quick word with God? I’m sure if you were to
explain what happened—’

‘I
thought you didn’t believe in God.’

‘I’m
coming around to the idea. Go on, a quick word, what harm could it do?’

‘It
could do
me
a lot of harm. I was supposed to be on the job. Your Holy
Guardian.’

‘He’ll
forgive you, you’re one of his angels, after all.’

‘Well.’

‘Well
what?’

‘Well,
I never said anything about being an angel.’

‘You
said you’re my Holy Guardian. That’s an angel, isn’t it?’

‘Well,
it can be. For some people. But there’s an awful lot of people on Earth. More
people than there are angels, in fact. Look upon me as your little gift from
God’s garden.’

‘What?’

‘I’m
your
Holy Guardian Sprout.’

I groaned
another inward groan. A great big one this time.

‘Look,
don’t take it so badly. Think of me as a family retainer. I’ve been with your
lot for generations. Not that I ever get taken any notice of. What did I say to
your great
³
granddaddy? “Don’t go bothering the people in the field
next-door.” I said, but did he listen? No, he didn’t. And your great
²
granddaddy.
What did I say to him? “Don’t go on the
Titanic,”
I said, “that bugger Crombie’s
going to be on board.” Same business.’

‘You’ve
never said a word to me,’ I said (silently as ever).

‘I
bloody have.’

‘You
bloody haven’t.’

‘I have
you know, I said, “Turn on your private eye tape recorder.” Back in the Gents
at Fangio’s Bar when you first met Colon the super-dense proto-hippy.’