The View from Mount Dog (7 page)

It took a day or two to arrange, of course, but the television company – two of whose employees were suddenly turning out to be the protagonists in a worldwide news-story – hired a well-appointed sports stadium on a gloomy strip of suburban water-meadow near Twickenham. The grounds belonged to a multinational
chemical company whose own fertilisers and herbicides had produced an unnatural springy grass just the wrong shade of emerald. Inside the stadium, however, not a lot of grass had been allowed to intrude. A dull red oval track of international standard lay intimidatingly empty before Carney Palafox early one Thursday morning, its newly marked lanes meeting at infinity.

In the meantime Bob Struthers had been busy. One of his first and shrewdest acts had been to establish that Carney really was a scriptwriter with the company. He had discovered that, far from being a mere writer, he was the deviser of several highly successful comedy series of which
Up
Yours!
was only the latest. They all had in common a certain anarchic undertone which many people found unsettling without knowing why, and not a few found downright offensive. Thoughtfully the sportscaster arranged with the Legal Department to see a copy of Carney’s contract. Objections were initially raised, but the famous Bob Struthers presence allayed all fears and left a few choice grandstand tickets in its wake. The contract, he found, had an exclusivity clause which bound Carney body and soul to the television company. There was nothing – neither his talent nor even his physical image – which he could legally take to the BBC or anyone else. Bob Struthers’s arse was safe.

He remembered this as he escorted Carney out on to the track. The man was obviously a charlatan of sorts, as the morning’s demonstrations would no doubt quickly reveal. He was glad it could all be fairly well kept from the public eye. ‘Famous Sportscaster Brilliantly Hoaxed’ was not a headline he had any intention of reading. Conversely, if by some stroke of the miraculous the man turned out to be what he said he was there was no end to the capital which could be made out of it if handled properly. Certainly enough to pay the hair transplant clinic’s bill.

‘Now, then, Carney,’ he said, ‘here we are. You’ve got what you asked for. See? Cameramen, official timekeepers down there, starter with gun, twenty sober witnesses from
Action
Replay
and the old bloke over there who looks like Hitler and I think’s the groundsman. OK? I don’t mind telling you it’s cost the company a fair old sum laying this lot on, so I do hope we’re going to get our money’s worth. Right, then; it’s all yours. Now, what’ll it be? Hundred metres for a start?’

‘Why not?’ said Carney. ‘That doesn’t seem too far. From
about here down to where those fellows are standing?’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Any old lane?’

‘Yes,’ said Bob Struthers heavily, ‘any old lane. You’re really not going to change your clothes?’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. These’ll do.’ ‘These’ were the same jeans he had worn for the Marathon, a check shirt with long sleeves and button-down collar and a tweed sports jacket. Instead of Hush Puppies he now wore a battered pair of greyish tennis shoes. ‘Besides….’

‘… you haven’t anything else to change into, yes, I know. But I do like the gym shoes. A small step, Carney, but a significant one. OK, everybody. One hundred metres, the gentleman says.’ He produced a small radio and spoke into it. Far off down the track a hand waved. The starter loaded his gun. ‘Right, Carney, we’re ready when you are. Where do you want the blocks?’

‘Which blocks are those?’

‘These funny old things,’ said Bob Struthers kindly, indicating the pair he was holding. ‘You crouch down and put your feet against them. It helps you start.’

‘Oh. No, no, I don’t think I shall want those. No, I’ll just stand here until the gun goes off.’

‘A standing start, Carney? How wise. What an original touch, too, if I may say so. I don’t think anybody’s started a sprint from the standing position since about the eighteenth century. So. Here’s your line. Cameras running?’ He slipped on a pair of headphones. ‘It’s yours, Starter.’

None of those actually watching, as opposed to peering into viewfinders, could say exactly what happened when the gun went off, but it was truly extraordinary. One moment the middle-aged figure was standing on his line in an archaic, faintly pugilistic stance, for all the world like a motheaten housemaster demonstrating how he had once knocked down an utter cad for calling his sister ‘a bit of stuff, and the next he was at full tilt, moving faster than anyone there had ever seen a person move. Carney Palafox was running for a number 5 bus which had got rather a good head start. But he needn’t have worried; he caught it in exactly eight and a half seconds. The world record had been shattered, and it was all on tape.

‘There’s just got to be a trick to it.’ Bob Struthers was talking to his colleagues from
Action
Replay.
‘I mean, it’s totally
ludicrous.
Look
at him.’

Down on the track Carney Palafox was diffidently scuffing his gym-shoe toes in the cinders; occasionally he yawned. From the pocket of his sports jacket he took a small notebook and made an entry.

‘You saw it, Chief,’ said one of the track-suited clones. ‘The guy ran from here to there in eight-point-five. Maybe we’d better measure it again. Suppose he slipped down here last night and somehow altered the markings to seventy metres …?’ His voice trailed away before the look Bob Struthers gave him.

‘I’ve been looking at tracks all my life, lad,’ he said. ‘That’s a hundred metres all right. But when this is finished I’m going over that film frame by frame. Maybe that’ll tell us something. Well, let’s see what else Superman can do. Ahoy down there!’ he shouted. Carney looked up. ‘What’s next?’

‘I don’t know. Have you got any of those round things?’

‘Dear God, now what’s he on about?’ asked Bob Struthers plaintively of his colleagues. He raised his voice again. ‘What exactly do you mean, Carney? Discus?’

‘No. Cannonballs, like on those porridge packets.’

‘You want to do some shot-putting? Why not, indeed? Come on, everybody, it’s field-events time.’

The weight of the shot seemed to surprise Carney. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t want to drop this on your toe. Can I use both hands?’

‘Yes,’ Bob Struthers told him. ‘There’s a limit to the amount of wind-up area you’re allowed, but I don’t think there’s anything in the rules about how many hands you’ve got to use. In fact you could probably lie on your back if you wanted to and do it with the soles of your feet. But I should imagine that over the years people have tried all sorts of bizarre ways of throwing this weight as far as they can without mechanical assistance and the present technique which has evolved has been found better than most.’

‘Still,’ said Carney judiciously, ‘I think I’ll try it with both hands all the same. It’s a bit late for me to start learning new techniques…. Which reminds me – I’m going to refuse if you ask me to do pole-vaulting or ski-jumping. I’ve not the slightest doubt I could do them if I tried, but I might break my neck in the process.’

‘We don’t want that,’ said Bob Struthers.

Eventually, his feet planted firmly apart and holding the shot in both hands between his bent knees, Carney Palafox straightened up as if hydraulically operated. He was aiming to get a number 5 bus which was waiting at a stop a good way off and to his pleasure he did – plumb on the roof. The faces of startled passengers appeared at the upstairs windows like a row of distressed moons.

‘That’ll dent the bugger,’ he said happily.

‘Rather more than a dent, Carney. You’ve actually smashed it to smithereens.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the athlete, returning to earth.

‘The world record. Wasn’t that what you were after? They’re measuring it now, but it looks like a clear two metres, which is just plain ludicrous. Is there
any
thing you can’t do?’ Bob Struthers asked in a tone of voice which was to become very familiar to Carney Palafox over the next few months. It was a mixture of exasperation and plain awe.

‘I’m a lousy cook,’ the new world record holder admitted. ‘And as a brain surgeon I was lamentable, as I found out during a short stint in Burma.’

And so far still was Bob Struthers from grasping what was happening he found himself asking incredulously,
‘You,
Carney? You were a
brain
surgeon? In
Burma?’
before he noticed the back of the sports jacket shaking as if from some Parkinson’s tremor. He felt his face burn. ‘Third choice, Carney,’ he said brusquely. ‘Let’s get this farce over with.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the champion, bending down and inserting the tip of his ballpoint ruminatively into the split which was opening between upper and sole of one gym shoe. ‘You choose.’

Eventually he was handed a javelin. Bob Struthers was evidently learning, because he had predicted to himself that Carney would scorn anything as conventional as a run-up. Instead the radical athlete stood foursquare on the line, grasped the javelin in both hands above his head, bent backwards until the tip almost touched the ground behind him, then hurled it so as to spear a number 5 bus which was moving diagonally away from him like an okapi on the plains of Serengeti. It was a bull’s-eye. The spear smashed into the window immediately behind the driver, pierced the bulkhead and transfixed the driver in his seat. There was a distant wail of agony. The bus swerved in a cloud of dust, teetered, then overturned with an immense
crash, wheels still spinning. ‘Got you!’ he said.

‘So, gentlemen,’ Bob Struthers addressed the stunned witnesses as they packed up their equipment. ‘In the last hour and with our own eyes we’ve seen the utterly impossible happen not once but three times. I thought when I came here this morning we’d at least rumble his trick but I can’t honestly see how he can be pulling one. The man’s incredible. We have a sporting phenomenon on our hands, no question about it. Cancel the rest of today,’ he instructed his PA. ‘We’ve got a press conference to hold.’

*

And so began a public career which completely dominated the world news for most of next summer. It was a phenomenon which scandalised some, demoralised many, riotously entertained most and riveted everybody. It had the awful hypnotic appeal of watching the lava-flow from a cataclysmic volcano. Day by day on the world’s television screens it was viewed from all angles and with absolute fascination as it rolled on, engulfing ancient monuments and living heroes. ‘What’s Carney goin’ to trash today?’ was a question which might be heard on a Detroit building site, just as unseasonably early snowfall in Austria was blamed by jocular locals on the ‘Karnei Effekt’. In each case there was no doubt what was being referred to.

In its early days, of course, it began with widespread incredulity. The video pictures of Carney Palafox in a sports jacket putting the shot produced international hysterics. The only people not laughing were the athletes and their trainers who had laboured for years to be able to throw the thing two metres less far. General opinion was that it was a hoax: a brilliantly conceived and wonderfully executed leg-pull. But the videos and the recordings and the measurements withstood the closest scrutiny. ‘The Carney Tapes’ – the record of his first morning’s work near Twickenham – achieved a notoriety and a level of bar-room debate on a par with the Nixon Tapes of a generation earlier. Then came the day when he was invited to represent England in a friendly fixture against the East Germans’ third team, and his selection made it suddenly clear that somebody somewhere was taking him seriously.

He had consistently refused to be interviewed after the initial ‘Palafox Challenge’ recorded with Bob Struthers. He seemed to have become semi-fugitive, nomadic, glimpsed here and there but never when not diffidently scratching the back of his head
with a preoccupied frown or patting his trouser pockets as if he had come out without his keys and loose change. It was well known he had written a respectful letter to the chairman of the selection committee thanking him for his confidence and saying he would be delighted to appear for the games, although he had one or two conditions to stipulate. The first was that he was not going to take part in any sort of training sessions and the other was that he would wear what he chose. Otherwise he was not taking part. The reply had also been made public: he would be excused the training sessions but ‘team clothing’ was mandatory under rules which would not in any circumstances be waived. Regretfully, a substitute was found. The interest and consternation can be imagined, then, when Carney Palafox turned up at the games and actually spoke into a microphone which was thrust before him.

‘Do you intend to take part, Mr Palafox?’ the reporter asked him.

‘Yes and no,’ replied Carney mysteriously, but would not explain further.

‘You are aware that your name has been withdrawn from the England athletics team.’

A short silence fell.

‘Mr Palafox?’

‘I’m so sorry, I hadn’t realised that was a question.’

‘Are
you aware of that?’

‘Of course I am, you half-wit. The letter was in plain English and I can read.’

The reporter seemed momentarily taken aback by this reply. It was not often that someone was addressed on camera as a half-wit. Meanwhile Carney Palafox strode away and was lost in the crowd.

He reappeared to general amazement just as the 100 metres finalists were under starter’s orders. He positioned himself next to the innermost runner, but off the track. He clearly intended to run up the grass verge, which he did, a pair of black patent-leather ballroom-pumps twinkling on his feet. He passed the level of the finishing line a generous two seconds before the foremost athlete and turned away to write something in a small notebook. His performance was, of course, not officially recognised but it had been witnessed by thousands of spectators, would be by millions of viewers later that evening, and had not gone unnoticed by the unfortunate East German who
was awarded the winning medal. A general sense of discomfiture and demoralisation set in, seeming to affect the British athletes as much as their opponents. The games proceeded, but in some peculiar way the heart had gone out of them. It was clear that everyone was on tenterhooks waiting for Carney Palafox’s next impromptu performance. Word got around that something unusual was happening and regular radio programmes were interrupted for short bulletins on the games’ progress.