Sprout Mask Replica (3 page)

Sailors at home from the sea.

There are three jolly butchers

And two bally bakers

And Eric and Derek and me.

There’s a gutter of fish

And a breeder of snails

And a chap who takes whippets for walks.

There’s a bloke from the zoo

And he walks whippets too,

But he’s also a monkey that talks.

There are doctors and dentists

And Seventh Adventists

And pop stars and patrons of arts.

There’s that guy off the telly

Who isn’t George Melly,

The one who wrote Naming of Parts
[4]
.

There are chaps with cigars

Who have bloody great cars

And bracelets as gold as can be.

They’ve got wives who wear diamonds

And coats made of mink

And they don’t give a toss for PC.

There’s a coach-load from Lewes

Of girls with tattoos

Who’ve all got pierced…

Well,
you get the picture. They come from all walks of life, but they all share that
love and appreciation for the noble art, for a classic sport that dates back
thousands of years; to watch highly trained athletes, their bodies honed to
physical perfection, exhibit their skills. The bravery, the competition, the
artistry. The poetry.

The
blood.

Electric
it is and it crackles.

Minutes
before the first fight, the house lights go down and the ring illuminates. The
crowd dip and hover, form tight knots about the doorways and bars, wave
programmes and cheer wildly. Many pounds change hands and many loyalties also.

Then a
ring of the bell. The man in the tuxedo. The announcements of benefit nights
and early retirements (as with disgraced politicians, broken boxers leave the
arena to spend more time with their families).

There
are bows from visiting ex-champs and then the game is afoot.

Billy
The Whirlwind Bennet sat in his changing-room, his hands, neatly bandaged,
resting in his black satin lap and his legs dangling down from the bench.
Ernie, almost sober, was administering the last—minute advice.

‘Now
this
won’t
be the doddle I was hoping it would be,’ said he. ‘The fellow
I had lined up for you got walloped last night in a disco, they’ve substituted
a rather hard case. But you’ll take him. If you just box clever, you’ll take
him.’

‘I
certainly will,’ agreed Bill. ‘Fish fish fish.’

There was
a rapity-rap-rap at the door and a voice called, ‘Bennet.’

It was
time to go.

The
walk from the changing-room to the ring has been compared to that from the
condemned cell to the electric chair. And there are
some
similarities,
from that scrubbed and clinical room, along that darkened corridor and then out
into the bright bright lights.

‘Roar!’
and ‘Cheer!’ went the crowd.

‘Fish
fish fish,’ went Billy, as he jogged towards the ring, punching holes in the
air.

As he
neared the squared circle he spied out his opponent being uncaged and led
forward on a chain.

‘Oh
dear, oh dear,’ mumbled Ernie. ‘Just box clever,’ he told young Bill.

Billy
The Whirlwind Bennet cart-wheeled over the top rope and did the old soft-shoe
shuffle in the sand tray.

‘Will
you be wearing any gloves?’ asked the referee, who had been following the story
closely and had noted the omission.

The two
fearless facilitators of fisticuffs faced each other. (Forcefully.)

Kevin ‘Mad
Dog’ Smith, tattooed terror from Tottenham, glared down at Billy Bennet. ‘You’re
dead,’ was all
he
had to say.

Billy
just winked and spoke a single word.

And
that single word was ‘fish’.

‘Seconds
out. Round one.’ The bell went ding and Billy went to work.

He
rushed across the ring like a human tornado. He battered Smith with a blizzard
of body-blows. He tormented him with a tempest of trouncings.

‘Fish,’
went Billy. ‘Fish fish fish.’

Stormy
weather though it was, Smith fought bravely back, but he couldn’t lay a glove
on Billy.

The boy
was a blur. A thunder storm. A buster.

A
tornado. A typhoon. A cyclone. A simoon.

The
fight lasted just the two rounds. The broken bloodstained ruin that had once
been Kevin Smith was stretchered away to hospital and the fight scribes at the
ringside abandoned the rest of their evening of boxing to rush to their offices
and file reports on this sensational discovery.

The
crowd rose as the one it was and the applause reached ninety-eight on the clapometer.

Billy
The Whirlwind Bennet had found his way into the people’s hearts. He was borne, shoulder-high,
to the changing-room.

He
would never box again.

The plot was an old one
and owed much to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had used it twice in his Sherlock
Holmes stories. The object of the exercise had
not
been to create a
boxing legend. It had been to keep Ernie Potts away from his gym for one full
evening, Potts, as has been stated, being a virtual recluse.

The
full evening in question being this very one. 16 August 1977. Because this very
one was the hundredth anniversary of the burial of my great
³
granddaddy.

For
while Billy fought bravely and scored great points in the annals of boxing, his
brother Nigel packed thirty pounds of dynamite into the basement of the Sir
John Doveston Memorial Gymnasium and blew the whole caboodle to oblivion.

This
act of vandalism would normally have raised a few eyebrows and caused a bit of
a to-do. But not tonight. Tonight the locality was deserted. Tonight all the
folk for a half-mile radius of the gym were packing Wembley, hoping to see a
local boy make good.

It was
a brilliantly conceived plan.

Nigel Bennet now stood in
the tumbled ruins of the gum, an ancient map in his hands.

‘Twenty
paces north and four west,’ he said, pacing appropriately and studying his
compass. And then ‘aha,’ and he kicked amongst the fallen bricks. ‘This must be
the spot.’

Nigel Bennet
had come in search of my great
³
granddaddy’s sporran which local
legend (for local legend is a funny old fellow and tales grow with the telling)
now foretold, would, upon the one hundredth anniversary of its laying-to-rest,
pass on magical powers to whoever should unearth it.

Exactly
what these powers might be, no-one seemed absolutely sure, but that they would
be pretty awesome was the general opinion.

Oh what
fools we mortals be. And such like.

Nigel
stumbled around in the moonlit ruination. ‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘I’m here. I’ve
released you from your tomb. Pass on your powers to me.’

It wasn’t
all that likely, was it?

Nigel
kicked about. ‘Come on,’ he growled, ‘come on. I paid good money for that dynamite.
I can’t hang around here all night.’

A
sudden rustling at his feet caused him to jump backwards and he fell heavily,
tearing the arse out of his trousers.

A rat
scuttled by.

‘Bugger,’
swore Nigel. ‘Oh bugger me to Hell.’

Another
rustling, this time beneath his bum, caused him to leap once more to his feet.

Something
stirred.

Nigel
stared down. Something seemed to be burrowing up through the dirt.

‘A
bloody mole.’ Nigel raised a boot to stamp the beastie down. But it wasn’t a
mole. Nigel’s foot hovered in the air. Something large heaved itself up from
the earth, something large and hairy.

‘A
beaver?’

Not a
beaver! This was large and it was hairy. But it was also bright and silvery
about the bright and silvery parts. And these bright and silvery parts were all
engraved in a Celtic manner.

The
sporran rose slowly into view.

‘Great
Caesar’s ghost,’ whispered Nigel, who favoured an archaic comic book
ejaculation during periods when he wasn’t sweating. ‘It isn’t, is it?’

But it
was.

Now
fully emerged from its hundred-year hibernation, the mighty sporran lay
a-gleaming (about the silvery bits) by the light of the full moon. And as Nigel
leaned forward, hands upon his knees, it creaked open (at the opening bit) to
reveal what looked for all this wild and whacky world of ours to be nothing
more nor less than emeralds of vast dimension.

‘Emeralds,’
Nigel’s lips went all a quiver. ‘Emeralds the size of tennis balls.’

Nigel
dug in deep, plucked out an emerald and held it to a greedy eye. ‘This ain’t an
emerald, it’s a bleeding sprou—’

But he
never had time to finish the word. There was a ghastly gasp, a sickly snap and
the sporran of the Devil swallowed Nigel in a single gulp.

The crowd at Wembley and
the folk later packing the pubs of Brentford knew nothing of this. Billy,
unaware of his brother’s hideous fate, but sure that a share of something
awesome would soon be heading his way, drank champagne, posed for photographs
with local publicans and made certain that Ernie was in no fit state to get
back to the gym before morning.

And
when morning finally came and Ernie staggered back to find his gym gone and
Billy became aware that his brother had gone with it, rumour spread across the
borough like a social disease.

‘Smith’s
manager did it,’ claimed someone.

‘More
like the council,’ claimed someone else.

And
someone else again spoke of a natural disaster. ‘Look at that hole,’ this
someone said. ‘Surely a meteor hit this place.’

Nigel Bennet
was never seen again. Billy, who now considered that his brother had absconded,
taking with him whatever awesome powers the magic sporran had seen fit to dish
him out, joined Jimmy at the bar and took to drink.

Whether
he would ever have made a champion, who can say, but Ernie still dines out on
tales of his greatness.

And
there is talk of the council building another gym.

Not on
the site of the old graveyard though.

CAMPING
OUT

My Uncle Brian, whom Mum never cared for,

Would come up to see us, each once in a while,

And we’d sit and listen for hours as he told us

Of things that he’d done long ago, when a child.

Like camping out, for instance.

You’ll need a good penknife and three yards of
string.

Some pegs and some canvas, a tent is the thing.

A sturdy tin-opener, never forget

You can’t light a fire if your matches are wet.

Keep socks on at night and you’ll never catch flu.

Don’t camp near an ant hill whatever you do.

Take plenty of water and plenty of beans,

You can always scrounge milk by all manner of means.

Elastoplast dressings, you’ll need quite a lot,

And your trunks and a lilo in case it gets hot.

Never leave litter all lying about

And you’ll do the job proper when you’re camping out.

I began
to understand why Mum never cared for Uncle Brian.

2

THE
LAWS OF POSSIBILITY

THE
LAWS OF SCIENCE

AND
THE LAWS OF NATURE

And how
the man who is foolish enough to tamper with any of these will inevitably come
to grief

THE WORD LUNATIC, OR SO MY
FATHER TOLD ME, COMES FROM THE conjoining of two separate words: luna, meaning
moon,
and attic, meaning upper storey.

Hence,
lunatic means ‘having the moon in your upper storey’.

My
Uncle Brian certainly had the moon in his upper storey, but it hadn’t always
been so. Sanity’s sun once shone brightly through Uncle Brian’s sky-light, but
a dark cloud had crossed its face. A cloud in the shape of a motorbike.

And I
shall tell you how this came about and how this concerned one of