“Who?” I badly wanted to know. That was half the point of being with this wagon train to Utah or wherever.
“Helen. Margaret. That Customs bloke’s bird with the big tits. Jill, the slag. Three-Wheel Archie. Liz Sandwell, wouldn’t mind stuffin’ her. That poofy bleeder’s tart Lily.” He means Patrick. “And yon Scotch bint, arse and legs.”
“Charmingly put, Tinker.” Very little wheat in all this chaff. “What’d Archie want?”
“Dunno. Wouldn’t say.” He waxed indignant. “Interrupted our dominoes down the George, the burke.”
Archie dicing with death there. “Dutchie back yet?”
“Nar. Don’t like his neffie barker, that Dobson.”
“Yeh, yeh.” Tinker’s likes and dislikes can get you down. I thought a minute, the delay costing another fortune in the coin box. I heard a gust of renewed hubbub as the taproom door swung. Voices shouted hello, one falsetto. That’d be Patrick making his entrance.
“Tinker. Tell Archie I say to pass the message on. I’ll ring the Spread Eagle after midnight.” I added with brutal calm, “And get going or it’s no beer money.”
That set him coughing from worry, so I hung up. Leaving the phone, I had an idea.
Why not look around for antiques where I was, treat it like an antiques sweep through the countryside? That at least might pay my way and rescue me from the dreaded Rolla-Penny. I walked back to the fairground whistling.
« ^ »
—— 7 ——
I’m one of those whose mind is ablaze in the dawn. It fires again going on for midnight.
In between, though, my intellect becomes a rubbishy zero. During the daytime I just walk among mankind for the sake of appearances. It is very necessary, because in our dark East Anglian villages they start sharpening up long oaken stakes if a neighbor seems too nocturnally inclined. This afternoon, however, I was a ball of fire.
Betty ran me an errand, three dozen large sheets of yellow paper and a box of crayons.
Between customers I made strikingly inept posters. There were six arguments with folk convinced their coins had rolled to victory; I gave in and paid up, to the derision of the entire fairground. By five o’clock I’d done thirty posters. Francie took over with Betty while I literally ran about the town stapling my posters to telegraph poles and bus shelters. I got so carried away, I even paid a baker’s shop my last quid to put one in their window. It read:
AT THE FAIRGROUND NOW!!!
CHRISTYS AND SOTHEBIES
JOINT OFFICIAL GENUINE
ANTIQUE ROAD SHOW!!!
Expert Free Appraisal of Household Objects,
Paintings, Pottery, Furniture, Jewelry, Other Items!
All Valuations Free
As Seen on TV.
Then underneath, in the neatest painting I could manage: This Genuine Antique Road Show Is Guaranteed
By The Trade Descriptions Act
By Parliamentary Law.
By six-thirty I was breathlessly noshing Francie’s fry-up in her caravan with Dan and Betty. They were curious and asking me what I was up to, which made me maddeningly evasive. Francie got quite irritated.
The posters were quite legal, in that fraudulent way law permits. Near-skating, I’d carefully misspelled the names of the two great London auction houses. The correct name of the BBC’s so-called spontaneous antiques sweep uses the plural: “Antiques.”
Copyright. Make it singular, and it becomes legal. The Trade Descriptions Act simply covers trade, and I’d do the valuations free. At least my own particular road show really would be spontaneous, not a put-up job like all the rest. It was basically the old saying about the Mountain and Muhammad. I’d have to move on with the fair, so I wouldn’t have time to scout the area for junk. Now, the countryside would bring their junk to me.
And they did.
Funny, but that first night I was really nervous. Francie pressed my trousers and jacket, and gave me one of Dan’s least gaudy shirts. A maroon silken scrap poking from my top pocket as an artistic touch. My hair got semi- straightened and painfully I scraped my nails with a borrowed emery. I was neat, an all-time first. Francie bought me some new modern sponge impregnated with shoe-polishing wax to do my shoes. I was delighted, because Cherry Blossom thought that ancient idea up long before the modern fairground was born. Nice to see old friends.
Dan found me a corner in the peas-and-spuds tent, and Big Chas and Ern erected a section of green canvas. To the sound of roaring generators and in the fug of black peas I set up my borrowed rickety trestle and switched on Francie’s anglepoise lamp.
Dan’s best cuff links gleaming at my wrists, my frayed jacket cuffs inturned and my scrubbed face frowning with sincere honesty, I was ready for the world.
Dross, when it comes in a deluge, isn’t really dross. It’s really something else, like snow. Look at snow one way and it’s a nuisance, blocking roads and flooding your socks. Look at it another, and it’s brilliant crystals spun into
