23
SSSH NOW, I’M WAGGLING
THE SOUND MADE BY THE EXPLOSION OF AN ATOMIC BOMB HAS BEEN likened to that of a great door slamming in the depths of Hell. The sound I now heard wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t far off. The blast that tore the door of Fangio’s Bar from its hinges this time was one of quite considerable force. I was lifted from my feet, carried backwards across the bar and straight out through the exit. I would surely have met with certain death against the wall of the building next door had I not had the good fortune to strike a woman in a straw hat who was dragging a deckchair. We went down amongst plastic rubbish sacks, Styrofoam food cartons and rotting fruit and veg.
I shook a dazed head and glanced all around. A shrill wind howled down the alleyway. Overhead the sky was— ‘Green. The sky’s turned green.’
‘Call them back, chief,’ cried Barry in my head. ‘Do what?’
‘The Holy Guardians, chief, call them back, as quickly as you can.’
‘I bloody won’t.’
‘You must, chief, you must. Things have turned really bad. You’ve done a really bad thing. Two poems at the start of the chapter. That’s really bad. Call them back, chief, the Holy Guardians, call them back.’
‘I will not.’
‘Chief, we don’t have a lot of time. In fact, if you don’t call them back, there isn’t going to be any more time, period.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ducked as a dustbin whistled past my head. It was whistling the famous tune ‘When Your Grey Hairs Turn to Silver Won’t You Change Me Half a Quid?’
‘Did you hear that dustbin?’ I shouted.
‘Stuff the dustbin, chief, call back the Guardians. Twiddle your thumbs about quick, while you’ve still got thumbs to twiddle.’
‘What are you going on about? And why has the sky turned green?’ I took to cowering in a doorway, all manner of stuff was blowing by. Bicycles and barnacles, cigarette packets and blue book jackets, parsnips and pomegranates, old grey wigs and suckling pigs.
‘It’s chaos, chief.’
‘You’re damned right. What is going on?’
‘Call back the Holy Guardians, chief, I’ll tell you then.’
‘Tell me now.
The bricks of the building next door started to separate, they weren’t bricks any more, they were small living things that began to jostle in an agitated fashion.
‘That Fangio must have slipped a tab of acid into my beer,’ I shouted. ‘I’m having a really bad trip here, Barry.’
‘It’s no trip, chief, call back the Holy Guardians. Do it now, chief, or the entire planet will go down the plughole.’
‘It’s only another trick, Barry, to stop me putting the world to rights.’ I struggled out of the doorway, bracing myself against the driving wind and blundered into the street.
Folk were running madly about. And not just folk. There were other things, vague, indistinct, dark forms, low and scuttling.
‘Call them back, chief, please call them back.’
‘I did this, didn’t I?’
‘Just call them back, please.’
‘All right.’ I twiddled my fingers.
A great jagged crack tore across the sky.
‘It didn’t work, Barry, my fingers — God, my fingers!’
But they weren’t fingers any more, they were tubes of toothpaste. All with the tops unscrewed and these streams of different-coloured toothpaste oozing out and twisting all about.
‘Do something else, chief. Wink your eyes, waggle your ears, anything. Anything.’
I winked and waggled for all I was worth.
A black limousine drew up beside me. A black window swished down and the face of Small Dave grinned out. ‘Time to be off to the gig,’ he giggled.
‘That’s not right.’
‘Waggle some more. Do something, anything.’
‘I’ve got your brother in the back,’ called Small Dave. ‘He’s all ready for you. All trussed up. If you butcher him now, we can eat him together.’
‘Barry, get me out of this.’
‘Only you can, chief, only you.
The ground began to sink beneath me and I jumped aside. Something rose from the earth, something huge and hairy. Parts groaned open to expose green things within. Emeralds surely, large as tennis balls.
‘Run, chief, and waggle while you run.
The street tipped alarmingly and I ran in the downhill direction. ‘That’s him,’ cried a woman in a straw hat. She sat astride a great white horse, at the head of a legion of Cossacks. ‘He’s to blame for it all. Deviant, he’s destroyed the entire programme. Trample down the deviant.’
‘Run and waggle, chief, run and waggle.’ I ran and I waggled as I ran.
‘Tell me what’s happening, Barry,’ I howled.
And then I was in amongst the crowd, the cheering crowd.
The cheering, singing, stamping crowd. And it wasn’t thousands, it was millions. Millions and millions.
I was near the front. Near the stage. I could see the band. Sonic Energy Authority. They seemed to be playing in slow motion, but the sound was accelerated. Too fast to catch, a high-pitched scream. And then I saw the bass player, Panay Cloudrunner and he looked down at me and he pointed and the music stopped and the crowd stilled and they all looked at me and they stared and they pointed. And Litany was there, sitting on my brother’s shoulders and she stared and pointed too and so did he.
‘He never killed me,’ said Panay Cloudrunner pointing at me. ‘I killed myself. I was speeding out of my brain, I’d run down seven people before I hit the road block. They never put that in the paper. They wanted him to feel guilty, they wanted him dead.’
‘Is that true, Barry?’
‘Don’t take any notice,’ said my Uncle Brian, putting his hand upon my shoulder. ‘They’re just trying to confuse you. It’s the iron, you see. The iron in the guitar strings. If you can free yourself from the influence of iron, you can do anything, absolutely anything.’
‘Don’t listen to your uncle, dear,’ said my mum. ‘He’s quite mad. The whole family’s quite mad. Always has been, always will be, of course you were adopted, the fairies left you on the doorstep.’
‘They were my fairies,’ said Uncle Brian. ‘The lad had a mission. He was the Chosen One, sent up from below to balance things out. If he hadn’t run off I would have explained everything to him.’
‘Everything about what? Barry, what is he talking about?’
‘This isn’t real, chief, you’re imagining it all. Please try to concentrate, waggle your fingers, bring back the Holy Guardians.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s happening?’
‘It’s very straightforward,’ said my Uncle Brian. ‘The world is dissolving. Reality is dissolving. Everything is returning to chaos.’
‘I didn’t mean that to happen. I wanted people to be free.’
‘Well, they’re going to be free now. Free of all existence. That’s the ultimate in freedom, I suppose. Well done.’
‘That’s not what I intended.’
‘Waggle your fingers, chief. Stop it now.’
‘I want to know the truth. Won’t anyone tell me the truth?’
‘I’ll tell you.
I turned at the voice. What a voice that was. Charismatic. A real blinder of a voice. The kind of voice that could talk a Tesco’s frozen turkey into a tug-o-war team.
‘Colon,’ I said, ‘the super-dense proto-hippy.’
‘You’d better call the Holy Guardians back,’ said Colon, sweet as you please.
‘I must know the truth.’
‘There is no ultimate truth,’ said my Uncle Brian.
‘You keep out of this.’
‘I’ll tell you the truth.’ said Colon. ‘But first call back the Holy Guardians.’
‘No I won’t,’ I said, surprising even myself. ‘Not until I know the truth.’
‘One part of knowledge,’ said Colon, ‘consists of being ignorant of such things as must never be known.’
And then the green sky cracked completely and night was upon us. Colon and I stood alone upon an endless expanse of absolutely nothing. Black earth below, black sky above, but a sky made beautiful by stars.
Colon stared up at them. ‘Have you managed to join up those dots yet?’ he asked. ‘Have you divined the Big Answer?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘That’s a pity. I felt sure that you would.’
‘Have you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Colon.
‘You lying git.’
‘I have too.’
‘You never have.’
‘Have too.’
‘So what is it then?’
‘It’s the future,’ said Colon. ‘The light from the stars comes to us from the past, it spells out the future.’
‘What a load of old rubbish. Where are we, by the way? It’s getting very nippy.’
‘Allow me to explain,’ said Colon, ‘about your gift, about everything.’
‘Will any of this be the truth?’ I asked. ‘Because so far everyone has lied to me about pretty much everything.’
‘People mostly lie because they don’t know what the truth is.
‘You’re never caught short for a New Age platitude, are you?’
‘Will you bloody shut up and listen?’
‘Well, excuse me.
‘Your gift,’ said Colon, in rather a stern voice I thought. ‘The mythical mystical butterfly of chaos theory—’
‘I know, the one that flutters its wings up the Orinoco and causes the price of condoms to go up in Tierra del Fuego.’
‘The same. It’s the butterfly of chaos theory. Not the butterfly of Order Theory. When it flutters its wings it does not bring order out of chaos, it does exactly the reverse. When you used your “gift” you did exactly the same.
‘I only tried to help people. To help mankind, and I would have succeeded, but I kept getting exploited and sabotaged.’
‘But you could have expected nothing more. You couldn’t change the world for the better, no matter how good your intentions were. You could only make things worse by your interference.’
‘My heart was in the right place,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with trying to change mankind for the better. They all got a day at the seaside. Well, most of them did. Listen, all right, I’ll have another go. I won’t screw up this time.’
‘You can only screw up. You don’t understand how things work.’
‘Because no-one will tell me the truth. Will you tell me the truth? Now, before I waggle the fingers that I see have returned to me.
‘The Holy Guardians,’ said Colon.
‘Oh, not them again.’
‘Yes, them again. What do you think Guardians do?’
‘Well, they guard things, obviously.’
‘And what do the Holy Guardians do?’
‘Guard people, I suppose.’
‘From what?’
‘From other people, from themselves—’
‘Wrong,’ said Colon.
‘Oh well, I don’t know, you tell me.’
‘Chaos,’ said Colon.
‘That again, eh?’
‘That again, yes. The order that is life on earth is a very fragile affair, difficult to maintain and easily tipped back into chaos. The universe isn’t still and peaceful, it’s whirling chaos. Chaos is its natural order. The Holy Guardians are there to protect mankind from this chaos, and also to be the conscience of man, the inner voice. What raises man above the animals, what will one day allow him to join up the dots and read the Big Answer.’
‘And Captain Kirk told you this, right?’
Colon made an exasperated face. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘The universe is a very chaotic place.’
‘It doesn’t seem too chaotic to me, the moon goes round the Earth, the Earth goes round the sun.’
‘And in a couple of billion years the sun will go super nova and explode, which will be pretty chaotic.’
‘Yeah, well that’s a long way off in the future.’
‘That’s diddly-squat in universal time, that’s half a second.’
‘Well, I don’t think that concerns us here.’
‘Well it concerns me. I’m responsible.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Well, I am God,’ said Colon.
‘You’re who?’
‘God,’ said Colon. ‘I think you’ve heard of me. You’ve dispatched all my Holy Guardians and reduced my planet to chaos. I should be very angry with you.’
‘You’re never God,’ I said. ‘If you’re God, then tell me something, why did you invent the bluebottle?’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I have just told you I’m God and you’re asking me about bluebottles. You don’t feel that perhaps you should be prostrating yourself and begging forgiveness?’
‘Frankly no,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t believe any of this. I think I’m probably lying unconscious in a gutter somewhere, dreaming the whole damn lot.’
‘OK,’ said Colon. ‘If that’s the way you want it, don’t believe in me. See if I care.’
‘Fair enough, I won’t.’
‘Just waggle your fingers and return all my Holy Guardians.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no? You can’t say no to God.’
‘Oh yes I can. If you’re God, then you waggle your fingers. You bring back your stupid Holy Guardians.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m not allowed to interfere in human affairs.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s written into my contract. I only have the franchise for this particular planet and it’s a real struggle to hold it all together I can tell you, but I can’t act directly. I can’t interfere.’
‘You’re interfering now. You’re trying to persuade me to do something.’
‘It’s a vision. Visions are allowed.’
‘This is all absolute nonsense. I’m getting out of here. But I’ll tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ve just given me a great idea. I will bring back the Holy Guardians, if it’s the only way to restore some kind of order, but I think you’re onto something with this God business. I think I’ll give that a go.’
‘You’ll what?’
‘Sssh now, I’m waggling.’