The View from Mount Dog (9 page)

‘I may not like it.’

‘Oh, you won’t. It’s called a medical examination. The plain fact is that a lot of people flatly refuse to believe that someone your age can do what you do without assistance. They suspect either that you’re a guinea-pig for a new superdrug or a sort of test-bed for some bionic device.’

‘Like the Six Million Dollar Man? Rewired and full of microchips? Servo-motors? That sort of thing?’

‘I know, I know, Carney. I think it’s crazy, too. But there it is. Without a thorough medical examination …’

‘… carried out before twenty thousand witnesses …’

‘… no record you set will ever be officially recognised. There’s a more sinister aspect, too. I had a call from somebody claiming they were working with the Ministry of Defence. Did I know where you were and, if so, would it be OK to ask you to pop down for a chat? All very matey, of course, but need I go on?’

‘I’m of potential military value? I get clobbered by the Official Secrets Act? To prevent me from falling into Russian hands I am given a drugged cup of coffee and wake up in a country house in darkest Berkshire where in the course of several agonising weeks implacable army surgeons tear my body and mind apart to find out what makes me different? I like it, Bob, I like it. It’s got real potential for a series. I see it all, now. At the end of their experiments they’re left with a pile of bones and tissue, the
usual human debris, without having learned anything. The silly asses have done what an old proverb from China’s Frozen North no doubt says: you don’t cook your lead husky.’

‘I didn’t expect you to take anything I say seriously.’ Bob Struthers, on whose words an audience of millions hung weekly, was obviously not used to mockery.

‘You’re put out, I can tell. Don’t worry; I shall know what to do if anybody with an old school tie offers me coffee.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Like it or not, Sunshine, you are currently our lead husky. But even huskies get a going-over from the vet before long journeys.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Carney said.

‘Dope tests are perfectly standard practice,’ urged the ex-athlete. ‘With the sort of publicity you’ve got there’s not a cat in hell’s chance they’ll allow any record you set without one. In fact, the faster you run or the farther you throw, the more suspicious they’ll be.’

‘OK, Bob,’ said Carney wearily, ‘I’ll have to concede, I suppose. Set it up, if you would, please. As from next week, though. Until then I’m going to be a bit busy.’

The nature of that ‘busyness’ did not emerge until early Sunday morning, European time, when the first satellite pictures began arriving of extraordinary goings-on in California. The scene was an Olympic pool on the outskirts of Los Angeles where a major international games was in progress. The actual event was the final of the men’s 200 metres freestyle. The swimmers had just left their blocks when a naked man streaked from the competitors’ entrance, plunged into a spare lane of the pool in the swimmers’ wake and ploughed after them doing a species of crawl. Amusement and head-shaking greeted this piece of light relief until a word began to be heard around the pool, becoming louder and louder as more and more voices took it up:
‘Carney!’

At the first turn the naked swimmer was nearly up with the two trailing competitors. The television cameras, torn between capturing a real news event and preserving their viewers’ modesty, tried to go into long focus whenever Carney Palafox crossed their viewfinders; but as he began to overhaul the leading swimmers they found him increasingly difficult to censor. Somehow his glistening buttocks rolling in the swirl of chlorinated water exercised a magnetic attraction. In all their glory they crossed a million screens as their owner concentrated
on catching an amphibious bus whose image some distance away he had firmly fixed in his mind as it chugged along with its passenger platform awash. On the third length he took the lead and began opening up a prodigious distance between himself and the nearest swimmer, whose rubber cap fell bobbing away behind him like an abandoned fishnet-float. On the third and final turn the cheering became louder still, for it was quickly noticed that Carney had changed his stroke for an inelegant but highly effective back butterfly. Now it was no longer his buttocks which rose and fell mesmerically on a million screens, and station switchboards were jammed long before he touched the end of the pool, scrambled out, slithered like a pale eel through the combined grasp of a stern-faced reception committee and vanished from sight.

His return from America was slightly delayed by the time it took to engage a lawyer and negotiate his television company’s going bail for him. He was greeted at Heathrow Airport with scenes reminiscent of the sixties. ‘We love you, Carney,’ said placards jiggled by bands of teenagers screaming on the terminal roof. It was a declaration not shared by serious-minded people, of which the world suddenly seemed abnormally full.

In the next few weeks Carney Palafox put in a few comparatively sober appearances at prearranged attempts on official world records. They were sober only in that he turned up and did what he said he would. His every appearance was greeted with hysteria by the spectators who jammed the stadiums. It did not escape the notice of professional sportsmen that whenever a Carney Palafox display coincided with a regular event that event drew small crowds consisting mainly of a core of hardline traditional sports enthusiasts who would have nothing to do with this middle-aged wunderkind. He dutifully underwent a battery of medical tests before each occasion. ‘Carney Normal Say Doctors,’ was one headline. ‘Nothing Wrong With Carney – Official,’ said another. ‘Clean Bill of Physical Health,’ said a third, pointedly leaving open to question his mental status.

And so that brief summer Carney Palafox ran, jumped, hurled and on one occasion cycled his way into the record-books. His attire remained idiosyncratic but he was clearly finding increasing difficulty in varying it without having to fall back on ordinary sportswear. On one of his last appearances as a record-setter he amazed the crowd by turning up in a somewhat bulky crimson track-suit with CP in gold embroidered letters on the
back. But things were restored to normality when he unzipped it to reveal a full set of lime-green motorcyling leathers in which he then beat his previous record for the 100 metres.

Close observers also noticed that he was clowning less, that he consulted his notebook more often with a frown of worry. There came the day when, after throwing a discus an unprecedented distance he consented absentmindedly to try to better his own 100 metres sprint record once again. His performance was that of a forty-one-year-old scriptwriter. Badly out of breath he crossed the line in seventeen seconds, missing his number 5 bus by miles. Somehow he must have lost count in his short and hectic sprinting career. Never again would he break the world’s 100 metres record. The crowd loved it, though. They thought he was fooling.

Meanwhile he was being endlessly begged to appear on television shows in exchange for prodigious sums. The more he turned them down and the more he refused to attend any organised debate of his own phenomenon, the more eagerly he was pestered. The inducements would have corrupted a Gandhi, the sums exceeding many a poor nation’s GNP. To all the most prestigious television hosts Carney Palafox said no. To one alone he said yes, and that one had never even asked.

Desmond Lermit hosted a chat show on one of Britain’s least-watched channels. He was a benign, fiftyish hangover from the days when the occasional gentleman was still to be glimpsed in a television studio, slightly unsettled like a dodo sensing the approach of beaters. His shows tended to go out late at night and his guests were mainly people in the world of the Arts and more often than not were decayed knights of the theatre. Carney had met him once or twice over the years, running into him at a party here, in a meeting there, for the world of television is still smaller than it likes to imagine. Beneath the courteous exterior he had thought to glimpse a somewhat cynical nihilism akin to his own. Desmond Lermit, however, had not the least idea that he had made this impression, so it came as a complete surprise when Carney Palafox rang him up one morning and asked if he would consider him as a guest on his show some time.

Privately at a loss as to why he should have been chosen while a dozen celebrities in Britain and America had been spurned, Lermit ruthlessly cancelled a forthcoming guest-list which was to have featured the decrepit and much-loved Welsh
comedienne Dame Martha Tydfil and substituted the single name of Carney Palafox. The chagrin in the world of entertainment at this windfall for the
Desmond
Lermit
Half-Hour
was unparalleled. Needless to say, in the event nobody watched anything else. From the opening moments the public found itself privy to what seemed to be a conversation between two people who had just discovered they ought to have been close friends for the last quarter-century and who were making up for lost time. It was a very private coming-together which happened to be eavesdropped by nearly twenty million people. And in its wholly unpredicted manner it turned out to be compulsive viewing.

‘Am I right in thinking, Carney,’ began Desmond Lermit, ‘that you find life as exemplified by modern British civilisation boring?’

‘Annihilatingly so.’

‘Do you
really
?
Oh, so do I. Isn’t it ghastly?’

‘Dreary beyond belief.’

‘It’s not so much’ – Desmond Lermit recklessly threw social impartiality to the winds – ‘not so much the fact that everything has sunk to a general level of proletarian sub-culture, although God knows that’s bad enough….’

‘Fast food and
Up
Yours!’,
interjected Carney, nodding.

‘… but it sometimes seems that every damned thing is so regulated, so organised, so subject to interminable by-laws, restrictions and conventions that the whole tone of life has assumed that of a sort of homogenised sleepwalking.’

‘Oh, I like that phrase, I wonder if it means anything?’ the erstwhile scriptwriter mused.

‘Not a lot, but
I
know what I mean.’

‘Me, too, Desmond, only too well. Far be it from me to make too much of the utterly trivial work I’ve been doing to earn a living, but there was a comedy series I had a hand in a couple of years ago trying to make that precise point.’

‘
Gawd
’Elp
Us!
? Yes, indeed, I’m sure a lot of viewers like myself still recall it with pleasure. In fact I have here a scene from one of the episodes in which your unemployed young hero Keith is confronted by a warden who reprimands him for straying off the “nature trail” in a Derbyshire theme park, whatever that may be. I’ve never been quite certain.’ He laughed apologetically and pressed a switch on the television monitor.

‘Nor me, actually,’ came Carney’s voice as the picture on the monitor expanded to fill viewers’ screens.

After the two-minute excerpt, which left both host and guest smiling, Desmond Lermit resumed.

‘All this has been by way of background to what, if I were that sort of person, I might be calling “The Carney Palafox Story”. I have deliberately not started with clips from your “Challenge” film, not because they aren’t interesting in themselves but because everybody’s already seen them
ad
nauseam.
We all know what you claimed to set out to do. I’d like to get at a slightly different Carney Palafox, or at least to flesh out the eccentric skeleton we now have, if you don’t object?’

‘Not at all. Splendid idea.’

‘For a start, this sudden ability you admit to having discovered so lately, do you yourself have any idea how it came about?’

‘No,’ said Carney. ‘I’ve often puzzled over why it should have happened just at this moment. I’m slightly less puzzled about how it happened at all.’

‘Might you elaborate?’

‘I’ll try. I suppose over the years – and quite unconsciously, I might add – I’ve been formulating the idea that human beings are capable of very much more than they themselves think and infinitely more than they are told. Everybody knows that small children can easily be brought up bi-, tri- or even quadrilingual. There seems no end to what their brains can assimilate. Now look at the educational system of a country like this one – or of any other, come to that. It’s lamentable. Children can actually and legally leave school at the age of sixteen functionally illiterate in their own mother tongue. Clearly no one is being educated to even a fraction of their innate abilities and, indeed, the more you stand back and look at the whole social set-up with a properly jaundiced eye the more it seems that it’s in nobody’s interest that they should be. The whole aim of advanced civilisation, now that the immediate horrors of nature have been more or less held at bay, is to keep people quiet at all costs from cradle to grave. Just that. Nothing else.’

‘Yes!’ Desmond Lermit was sitting forward in his chair, the rare image on television of unfeigned attentiveness. ‘That’s it
exactly.
That
is
the Social Contract. In exchange for its total and mindless passivity the public agrees to be entertained for life. More ghastly TV channels, more dreadful sit corns, more awful
video-cassettes, more organised sports, more hideous golf-courses, theme parks, computer games….’

‘You take my point,’ Carney interrupted gently, perhaps lest his host get properly launched into some private Jeremiad. ‘Now, it came to me that just as people’s brains are not being educated to appreciate much other than organised entertainment nor are their bodies being trained except down to the standards of organised sports. I found myself doubting whether the current levels of physical achievement as measured by world records represented more than a fraction of human bodily potential. It’s as simple as that.’

‘But how did you liberate your
own
potential?’ asked Desmond. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

‘I’m not too sure,’ confessed Carney, ‘although I can tell you it happened quite suddenly one evening as I was running for a bus. But before that I’d been thinking the traditional shibboleth about endless concentration and single-mindedness being the way to achieve anything was probably completely wrong. Indifference and contempt would be a better start….’