one, and the runners coming under starter’s orders. Bob punched away at his golden calculator but the thing merely rang up “No Sale” and switched itself off in disgust.
“Do I get any redundancy money?” Antoine enquired politely.
“They’re off,” bawled Old Pete.
The Swan’s crowd knotted its fists and shook them in time to Mickey’s little voice. Cries of encouragement were obviously out of the question, as to hear anything of the race required a great deal of breath- holding and ear-straining, but the patrons went about this with a will. Their faces like so many gargoyles, veins straining upon temples, and sweat trickling through the Brylcreemed forelocks. They took up the universal stance of punters, legs apart and knees slightly bent, bums protruding, and chins to the fore. They were phantom jockeys to a man, riding upon the commentator’s every word. Nerves were cranking themselves into the red sector.
Millennium Choice was laying a not altogether favourable sixth in the six-horse race.
“Come on man!” screamed Omally, who could stand it no longer, his outcry breached the dam and the floodtide hit the valley floor.
“Go on my son! Give him some stick! The whip, man, use the whip! Dig your heels in! Millennium, Millennium, Millennium… Millennium…” The voices tumbled one upon another rising to a deafening cacophany.
Old Pete snatched up his hearing aid and rammed it back into his ear. If the entire pub had decided to go off its head he felt no reason why he, at least, should be deprived of the result.
Bob the bookie’s Roller was jammed up at the Chiswick roundabout but his Lateinos and Romiith Vista Vision portable television was working OK. As Millennium Choice swept past the post a clear six lengths ahead of the field Antoine calmly drew a red circle about a likely vacancy.
Bob looked up towards the flyover soaring away into the distance. I’ll have to sell that, he thought.
“Who won it? Who won it?” The Swan’s lunchtime crowd engulfed Old Pete. “Out with it.”
The ancient raised his thumb. “Your round I think, Jim.”
The crowd erupted and stormed the bar, Croughton the pot-bellied potman took to his heels and fled.
Omally laboured at his exercise book. “I can’t work it out,” said he, tearing out great tufts of hair. “Professor, please?”
The old man, who had worked it out in his head, wrote one thousand, two hundred and thirty- seven million, nine hundred and fifty-seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six pounds.
“I think your day has also come, John,” he said, indicating the vacancy behind the bar counter. Omally thrust his exercise book in front of the golden boy and shinned over the counter to realize his own lifetime’s dream. He was a natural at the pumps and the clawing, snapping, human-hydra was rapidly quelled.
“When the sixth horse goes down nobody will ever speak to me again,” the back-patted Jim told the Professor. “Five offers of marriage I have had already.”
“Perk up,” the scholar replied. “I know the odds are unthinkable, but I have a feeling just the same.”
Omally stuffed a pint of Large into each of Pooley’s outstretched hands. “What a game this, then?” said he.
“You will hate me also,” Pooley replied dismally.
“Me?” Omally pressed his hands to his heart. “But I love you, my dearest friend, the brother I never had.”
“You have five brothers.”
“None like you.”
Jim considered his two pints and raised both simultaneously to his lips. It was the kind of feat no man could be expected to perform twice in a lifetime, but he drained the two at a single draught. “Oh cruel fate,” said he, wiping the merest drip from his chin.
“Tell me, Jim,” Professor Slocombe asked, as a crowd of female kissers took turns at their hero’s cheek, “how did you do it? Was it the product of pure chance or through the study of form? I ask out of professional interest, I can assure you that it will go no further.”
Jim brushed away the barmaid from the New Inn, whose arm had snaked about his waist. “If you really want to know, it was down to you and your talk of numerology. Find the pattern, you said. Break everything down to its numerological equivalent, you said, and the answer is yours.”
Professor Slocombe nodded enthusiastically, a light shone in his old face. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “then you have solved it, you have found the key. Tell me Jim, I must know.”
“It wasn’t all that,” Jim replied. “Get off there woman, those are private places. I simply followed the lines.”
“The lines? What lines?”
Pooley pushed his racing paper towards the Professor, “Those boys there,” he said. “Madam, put those hands away.”
Professor Slocombe drew a quivering finger across the row of computer lines, eighteen in all, three groups of six. “Oh my Lord,” he said slowly. “Jim, do you realize what you’ve done?”
“Pulled off The Big One.”
“Very much more than that.” Professor Slocombe thumbed the paper back to its front page. “I knew it. This is not your paper.”
“I borrowed it,” said Jim guiltily.
“Jim, tear up the slip. I am not joking. You don’t understand what you’ve got yourself into. Tear it up now, I implore you.”
“Leave it out,” Jim Pooley replied.
“I will write you a cheque.” The Professor brought out his cheque-book. “Name the sum.”
“Is the man jesting?” Pooley turned to Old Pete who was banging his deaf aid on to the bar counter.
“I’ve gone deaf here,” the other replied.
“Jim,” the Professor implored, “listen, please.”
“Pete,” said Pooley, “you old fool, give me that thing.”
Three o’clock was fast approaching upon the Guinness clock.
“Switch her on then,” said somebody, nudging Old Pete upon the arm.
Now, it must be fairly stated that Pete’s hearing aid was not one of those microchipped miracle appliances one reads so much of in the popular press. Such articles, one is so informed, although no bigger than a garden pea, can broadcast the sound of a moth breaking wind to the massed appreciation of an entire Wembley cup-tie crowd. No, old Pete’s contraption was not one of these. Here instead, you had the valve, the pink Bakelite case, and the now totally expended tungsten carbide battery.
“It’s broke,” said Old Pete. “Caput.”
“It’s what?”
“Pardon?” the elder replied. “You’ll have to speak up, my deaf aid’s gone.”
“Deaf aid’s gone. Deaf aid’s gone.” The word spread like marge on a muffin. The panic spread with it.
“Tear up the slip,” the Professor commanded, his words lost in the growing din. Pooley clutched it to his bosom as the threatened firstborn it was. Omally sought Neville’s knobkerry as the crowd turned into a mob and sought a beam to throw a rope over. It was lynching time in Brentford. Having seen active service in many a foreign field, Old Pete was well-prepared to go down fighting. He swung his stick with Ninja fury at the first likely skull that loomed towards him. Friend or foe wasn’t in it. Fists began to fly. Omally, knobkerry in hand, launched himself from the counter into the middle of the crowd. “On to the bookie’s, Jim,” he shouted as he brought down a dozen rioters.
Sheltering his privy parts and clinging for dear life to his betting-slip, Pooley, in the wake of
