15

 

THE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS TOLD IN THE FLYING SWAN

 

THE LAST THING I EXPECTED, SAID LEONARD ‘LEGLESS’ LEMON, AS HE leaned perilously upon The Flying Swan’s highly polished bar top, ‘the very last thing I expected when I opened my gaily painted front door yesterday was a bloody emissary from the planet Venus come to award me the galaxy’s highest accolade.’

John Omally spluttered into his pint of Large. ‘Word get out about your prize marrow then, Len?’

Leonard the legless ignored him. ‘The galaxy’s highest accolade,’ he said once more, lingering upon each word, savouring each syllable.

‘Which is?’ asked Neville, who always enjoyed a good yarn. ‘The Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Hoy, inscribed with the sacred formula for denecrolization.’

Omally nodded and raised his glass. ‘Who would have expected otherwise?’ he said.

‘And what is denecrolization, when it’s at home?’ asked Neville.

‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out.’

‘Stick another half in here please, Neville,’ said John Omally, pushing his glass across the counter.

‘You never believe a bloody thing I tell you, do you, Omally?’ Legless Len made a brave attempt at pathos, by putting on a wounded expression, but it, like the point of owning a file-o-fax, was lost upon Omally.

‘To be quite truthful, no,’ said John. ‘However, the doubting Thomas in me might speedily be put to shame, were you to produce this golden tablet for his perusal.’

‘Good idea,’ said Neville. ‘Let’s have a look.’

And others about the bar went, ‘Yes.’

The legless one (and perhaps it should be explained here that this was legless as in drunk. Not legless as in legless) became momentarily flustered. ‘I don’t have it with me,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent it off to the British Museum to have it valued.’

‘Ah,’ said Omally. A meaningful ‘Ah’.

And someone said, ‘Yeah sure,’ and someone else said, ‘Cop out.’

‘But I do have a photograph of it.’

‘Ah,’ said Omally, it was quite another ‘Ah’.

‘Go on,’ said Neville. ‘Whip it out.’

Legless Leonard felt about for his snakeskin wallet. And from this he withdrew a dog-eared photograph with somewhat tattered edges. This he held towards John.

‘So what is that then, might I ask?’

John scrutinized the photograph. ‘That,’ he announced, ‘is the photograph you always show us when demanded to prove the authenticity of your claims. This picture has, in the past, purported to be of you making love to Marilyn Monroe, you shaking hands with J.F.K. before he was famous, you in the SAS saving a child at an embassy siege, you parting the river Thames in the manner of Moses, you, well, need I continue?’

Legless Len made a surly face.

‘For myself,’ said Omally, ‘and going on no more than the evidence provided by my excellent vision, I believe this to be a photograph of you on a donkey at Great Yarmouth.’

Mr Lemon swallowed Scotch and then, excusing himself with talk of ‘a weak bladder brought on by all yesterday’s excitement’, vanished away to the Gents.

Upon his return he looked Omally up and down, declared him to be typical of his class (whatever that meant), and slouched from the bar.

Omally returned to his drinking and peace returned to The Swan, but only for a while because the phone began to ring.

‘Flying Swan,’ said Neville, lifting the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he continued after a short pause. And, ‘Yes, Leonard Lemon, yes, no, he’s not here at the moment. A message, hold on I’ll get a pencil.’ Neville got a pencil. ‘Go on. Yes. British Museum, you say.

The Swan took to one of its famous pregnant pauses.

‘Golden tablet, not gold, you say. Unknown metal. Being passed on to a secret government research establishment, tell Mr Lemon to report to Mornington Crescent. Well, yes, I’ll tell him—’

‘Hang about, Neville,’ Omally leaned over the counter and snatched the telephone. ‘That horse came in at thirty to one, Len. Do you want me to collect your winnings or shall I stick the lot on Lucky Lady?’

‘Collect my winnings, you bloody Irish mad man.

Omally replaced the receiver. ‘You know the terrible thing is,’ he said to Neville, ‘that one day he’ll probably turn out to be telling the truth.’

 

 

THE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS LEONARD LEMON SAW IT

 

The previous day Len returned from his allotment. He smelt strongly of those organic substances, which though loved by rhubarb are so detested by the traveller who steps in them.

‘If my marrow does not win the coveted Silver Spade Award this year, then there is absolutely no justice left in the world,’ he told his lady wife.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said.

‘I think I might take a bit of a bath now.

‘Yes, dear.’

Legless Len ascended his vilely carpeted staircase. He had purchased the carpet whilst drunk. He was a happy man, was Len. A broad smile of the Cheshire Cat persuasion bisected his ruddy workman’s face.

As he ran the bath water he whistled ‘Sweet Marrow of My Heart’s Desire’ (one of his own compositions).

Removing his unsavoury undergarments he tested the water with a temperature-toe. ‘Oh yes,’ he giggled. ‘Just right.’

As he sank into the steaming scented water he heard the distinctive chimes of his musical doorbell ringing out the opening bars of ‘The Harry Lime Theme’.

‘Hello, hello, hello,’ said Len, who had once thought of joining the police force. ‘What do we have here then?’

There was some silence, then the sound of voices and then a bit more silence. Then his wife called up the stairs. ‘Len,’ she called. ‘Len, there’s two fellas here from the planet Venus. They’ve come to award you the galaxy’s highest accolade.’

Len sank lower into his foaming bath tub. ‘Tell them to come back later,’ he replied.

Len’s wife passed the message on.

‘They say they can’t wait,’ she called up this time. ‘They say they have to catch the twelve-o’clock tide.’

Len huffed and puffed then rose from his bath. He shrugged on his wife’s quilted nylon dressing-gown and flip-flapped down the stairs leaving a dark damp footprint on each and every vilely carpeted stair.

At the door stood two enigmatic-looking bodies. Dressed in the ubiquitous one-piece coverall uniforms so beloved of the cosmic traveller and sporting the now-traditional mirror-visored weather-domes. They had a look which was at once familiar but, also, at twice totally alien.

‘Ie-e-oo-ae-u,’ said Rork, the taller of the two.

‘Ao-e-uu-o-i,’ replied his companion, whose name was Gork.

Legless Len, who had only done ‘O’ level Venusian at Horsenden Secondary School, nodded his head.

‘This is most unexpected,’ he said, but so that it came out, ‘Eo-i-u-o-i.’

‘His enunciation of the former “i” lacked for inflection and there was far too little slant on the “o—i” modulation,’ said Gork to Rork, ‘but other than that it wasn’t bad for ‘O’ level Venusian.’

Len overheard this remark. ‘Now just look here,’ he said in a heated tone. ‘I’m a piss-artist jobby gardener, not a bleeding professor of languages.’

The space travellers made apologetic vowel sounds.

‘I should think so too,’ said Len.

And then the space travellers went on to explain to Len that they had come to bestow upon him the galaxy’s highest accolade.

‘Did word get out about my marrow, then?’ asked Len.

Sadly though, as the atmospheric conditions on Venus preclude the growing of almost any vegetable (save alone the wily and adaptive sprout), Len’s question, ‘Ao-e-ii-o-marrow-ue?’ had the spacemen scratching their helmets.

Rork spoke. ‘We understand that you are the inventor of the Harris Tweed,’ was what he said in translation.

Len stroked a bath-foamed chin. ‘Inventor of the Harris Tweed, eh?’ Obviously the old Venusian spy network was not all it might have been. Len looked the two travellers up and down, they had come a very long way. And it was the galaxy’s highest accolade.

‘Yep, that’s me,’ lied Len. ‘Old Len “the tweed” Lemon, friend of the working man.’

The Venusians passed Len the Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Hoy, made a small vowel-encrusted speech, offered him a stiff salute and departed.

‘Cheers,’ said Len, waving. ‘And thanks a lot.’

 

 

THE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS ARCHROY’S WIFE OVER-THE-ROAD SAW IT

 

Now all who knew Archroy’s wife, and many did in the biblical sense, knew her to be a woman of diverse sexual appetites. And no small sense of humour. These ranged from the ‘Oh my God I hear my husband coming in the back door’ routine, which had lovers shinning half-naked down the drainpipe to confront Jehovah’s Witnesses on the front doorstep, to the ‘Of course it won’t result in any lasting injury, would I do that to you?’, which had more permutations that Vernon’s Pools.

On the day that Len received his award, and at that very moment, in fact, Archroy’s wife was indulging in one of her personal pleasures, that of leaning, head and shoulders out of her bedroom window, waving to passers-by, whilst being ravished from behind by a boy scout (or at least a man dressed up as one).

As the golden tablet changed hands and Len closed his front door, Archroy’s wife waved down to the Venusians.

One of the Venusians waved back at her. The tall one. He waved in a friendly way, almost, one might say, in an intimate way. In fact, it was in such an intimate way that an observer who could recognize an intimate wave when he saw one might have been forgiven for thinking that here was a case of illicit interplanetary liaison.

Which was not the case.

Archroy’s wife had waved because she did know the larger of the two aliens. And that was know in the biblical sense. But she knew this alien to be no alien at all.

For rather than step into some sort of telekinetic—anti-gravitational beam and levitate up to a waiting scout craft, as one might have expected of an alien, the alien removed his mirror-visored weather dome, stroked down locks of curly black hair and climbed into a Morris Minor.

‘Come up and see me sometime, Omally,’ called Archroy’s wife, as he drove away, ‘and bring the costume.’

 

 

THE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS THE BRITISH MUSEUM SAW IT

 

The curator of outré’ antiquities and general weird shit looked up from a desk all jumbled high with jars of pickled bats’ wings, plans of ancient flying craft, dust-dry bones and mottled tomes, curious stones and garden gnomes, maps and caps and spats and hats and many other things.

‘Ah, Sir John,’ he said, adjusting his pince-nez upon the bridge of his bulbous nose, ‘I had not expected you so soon.

‘I set out the moment I put down the telephone.’ Sir John Rimmer, for it was he, tapped his silver-topped cane lightly upon marble floor and removed his wide-brimmed hat. To those who had never met the world-famous psychic investigator before, his appearance had a sobering effect, to those who already had, it still did the same. As it were. Standing nearly seven feet in height, his vast red beard spread nearly to his waist. His gaunt frame, encased in lush green velvet, seemed permanently a-quiver. Steel-grey eyes glittered behind horn-rimmed specs atop his hawkish nose.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the curator, staring up at the phenomena that loomed above him. ‘Well, the item in question turned up this very morning. It was in a shoe-box, would you believe, which had apparently fallen down the back of a radiator. Would you care to examine it now?’

‘I would.’

‘Then follow me.’

The curator led the long stick insect of a man down aisles of files and corridors of drawers, past cases of braces and spaces where faces of concubines and philistines stared from oils that were the spoils of war and the so much more to gaze on them was sure to quite amaze.

‘If we might simply cut the poetic descriptions and get straight to the matter in hand,’ said Sir John who was not to be shilly shallied, dilly-dallied, taken for a ride or subtly pushed aside, ‘the shoe-box!’

‘It’s here,’ said the curator.

‘Ah, so it is.’

Sir John gave the box a good looking-over. On the lid, a label bore a British Museum catalogue number and the words THE GOLDEN TABLET of Tosh m’Hoy, written on with biro in a crude hand. Sir John blew dust from the lid and the curator, who received it full in the face, took to a fit of coughing.

‘And how long has this been down behind the radiator?’ asked Sir John.

The curator added a polite cough or two to his indiscriminate stream. ‘About thirty years,’ he said.

‘Thirty years!’ Sir John rose to a quite impossible height.

‘Booked in in 1966.’

‘1966,’ Sir John’s narrow head nodded. ‘But of course it would have been. That was when it all happened.’

‘All what?’ asked the curator, who being a curator was nosy by nature. A bit like being a window cleaner really, or one of those people who views houses for sale when they’ve no intention of buying them, or an investigative journalist, or— ‘Shut up!’ shouted Sir John.

‘But I only said, all what.’

‘Never mind.’ Sir John opened the shoe-box lid and viewed the contents. ‘The Golden Tablet of Tosh m’Hoy. And it was claimed to be of extraterrestrial origin.’

The curator’s head bobbed. ‘And is it, do you think?’

‘No,’ said the psychic investigator. ‘It isn’t. But I’ll take it with me, if I may.’

‘I’m sorry, but you may not.’

‘Nevertheless I will.’

‘I really must protest.’

Sir John raised his cane and smote the curator on the head. The curator collapsed in an unconscious heap.

Of mounted sheep

And things that creep

And parchment scrolls

And— ‘Shut up!’ said Sir John.

 

 

THE EPISODE OF THE GOLDEN TABLET AS SIR JOHN RIMMER EXPLAINED IT

 

In a dungeon beneath the Hidden Tower, the manse of Sir John Rimmer, three men were gathered about a cylindrical steel coffin. Pipes ran from this to various control units, stop-cocks, temperature gauges, canisters of liquid nitrogen, electrical apparatus. It was very cold down there in the dungeon, the breath of three men steamed in air made bright by naphtha lamps.

Sir John was there with his two associates, Dr Harney, of the white nimbus hair and freckle face, and Danbury Collins, the psychic youth and masturbator.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Sir John, ‘I have called you here, upon this dark and stormy night’ (thunder crashed distantly and a flash of lightning showed beyond a stained-glass window), ‘because our search is finally at an end.’

‘You have found the tablet?’ said the good doctor.

‘At last. It has lain lost in the vaults at the BM for almost thirty years, handed in by a Mr Lemon who believed it to be a gift from Venusians.’

‘And it’s not?’ asked Danbury, scratching his trousers.

‘Terrestrial in origin. I have examined it at great length. It was carved in the early nineteen sixties, then buried on the St Mary’s allotment, where a Mr Omally found it and then passed it on to Mr Lemon as a prank. I believe it was intended that we come across it at the same time we acquired our chap here,’ Sir John tapped lightly upon the cylindrical coffin, then examined his fingertips for frostbite. ‘In 1966, however, it got knocked down behind a radiator and thirty years have been allowed to pass.’

‘But it will do what you think it will do?’ asked the doctor.

‘The spell of denecrolization is engraved upon it.’

‘What exactly is that?’ asked Danbury.

‘A spell for reanimating the dead.’

‘Ooh, freaky.’

‘Shut it, boy, and take your hand out of your trouser pocket.’

‘Thirty years is a long time,’ said Dr Harney. ‘Do you think the corpse—’

‘The corpse has been preserved at a temperature of two hundred and forty degrees below zero, it will be in mint condition.’

‘Let us hope so. But listen, perhaps now, before you speak the spell, you might care to reacquaint us with the details of this extraordinary business.’

‘I would be glad to.’ Sir John took to pacing, and spoke as he walked. ‘As you will recall, we rescued this chap from the hospital morgue just hours before he was due to be cremated. We brought him here and froze him up.’

‘Nasty,’ said Danbury.

‘Not nasty, boy. He is dead, he can’t feel anything, can he?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I know his real name, but we will refer to him as John Doe. The story begins back in the 1950s. The Ministry of Serendipity, a secret government research department, were searching for the Alpha Man. That is a man who is number one in the process of idea-to-realization of idea. An original originator, if you like. They were not successful in their search but they later discovered someone with an extraordinary gift. John Doe here. He possessed the power of the mystical butterfly of chaos theory. He could achieve great ends by performing small feats, but he was unaware of his wild talent. The ministry nurtured him and by enlisting relatives of his, an uncle and John Doe’s brother, they set up a controlled experiment: a stage act where John played Carlos the Chaos Cockroach. They worked out what actions he should perform with a specially designed computer program. The experiment was a success, but John overheard his brother and uncle in conversation and realized that he was being used. The M.o.S. put plan B into operation, they set up a phoney attack on Fangio’s Bar, allowing John Doe to escape in the company of a woman called Litany. Litany was also in the pay of the M.o.S. She was one of their top agents.

‘The plan was that she would be John’s lover, and guide him to use his gift for the ends of the M.o.S. These ends were, naturally enough, world domination by the United Kingdom.’

Dr Harney whistled.

Danbury tinkered in his trousers.

‘However,’ said Sir John, ‘things didn’t go the way they planned. At a seaside resort called Skelington Bay, John used his talents to make all the local homeless wealthy. Call it fate or call it irony, but the money came from the coffers of the M.o.S. They were furious and tried to track down all these now wealthy homeless. But the homeless were one step ahead, they donated all their money to local charities in the town. The M.o.S. couldn’t touch them.

‘Now we come to the bad bit. Our John Doe here has a fatal accident. He walks into the path of a Blue Bird Cleaners truck.’

‘Is that a truck for cleaning blue birds?’ Danbury asked. ‘As in birds in blue films?’

Dr Harney clouted Mr Collins.

‘Ouch,’ said Mr Collins.

‘Fatal accident,’ continued Sir John. ‘Except it was no accident. The driver of the van was an M.o.S. hitman. Mr Doe had been targeted for termination, as they say. He had become a dangerous liability. They snuffed him out.’

‘That’s very bad,’ said Dr Harney.

‘Very bad,’ Sir John agreed. ‘But there is a little more to the story. My investigations have uncovered that throughout the course of Mr Doe’s short life there are a number of curious anomalies concerning time. For instance, this man’s brother owned a disco van in 1966 in which he played the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’ on the radio. ‘Eight Miles High’ was not released until 1967.’

‘That could just be a mistake,’ said Danbury. ‘Maybe it was a promo copy.’

‘Possibly, but how would you explain him receiving a copy of Captain Beefheart’s legendary 1969 album Trout Mask Replica in 1957 when he was eight years old and playing it on a 1980s stereo system?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘And most recently a 1966 Lincoln Continental was trawled from the mud flats in Skelington Bay, where it had lain for thirty years. On its back seat was a 1996 laptop computer.’

Danbury now whistled.

Dr Harney didn’t tinker with his trousers.

‘There are many more such anomalies,’ said Sir John. ‘This lad’s life was riddled with them.’

‘Are you suggesting that he caused them?’ the doctor asked.

‘I am. Unwittingly, unconsciously, he caused things to occur. Part of some great pattern that only he knew about and yet that even he himself was not aware that he knew about. It is my belief that he created this Golden Tablet with the spell of denecrolization upon it so that it could be used upon him after his death.’

‘That’s quite incredible!’ said Dr Harney.

‘It’s not bad, is it?’ said Sir John. ‘And it hasn’t half tied up a few loose ends.’

‘So are you going to speak the magic words?’ Danbury asked.

‘I am.’

‘Just one thing.’ Dr Harney raised a freckled hand. ‘Do you think this is really a wise thing to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that perhaps it would simply be better to leave him as he is. If this man has the power to control the world, isn’t he better left dead? There’s no telling what he might do when he’s reanimated and finds out what the M.o.S. did to him. He might take it out on us.

‘Not a bit of it.’ Sir John shook his slender head. ‘We will be releasing him from death. We will be his saviours. He will be forever in our debt. Think what we might learn from him. Think what he might teach us. Think what he might give us by way of a reward.’

‘It’s iffy,’ said Dr Harney, ‘very iffy.’

‘It is nothing of the sort.’

‘But what if he was to find out about the M.o.S. killing him? He might take a terrible revenge.’

‘But he’s not going to find out, is he? Because we are not going to tell him.’ Sir John tapped very lightly upon the steel cylinder. ‘All that I have just said is our secret, he must never find out. And, frankly, unless he’s been able to overhear our conversation, there’s no way he ever will.’

Sir John laughed. And he winked as he laughed and, raising high his hands, he spoke the spell of denecrolization.

 

Inside the steely cylinder John Doe lay rigid. But even though suffering the agonies of being frozen two hundred and forty degrees below zero, he had heard every single word.

And he wasn’t happy.