Professor Slocombe, whom no man present would have dared to strike no matter how dire the circumstances, edged through the
“He’s getting away,” yelled someone, struggling up from beneath the mad Irishman. “After him, lads.”
The crowd swung in a blurry mass towards the saloon-bar door through which Pooley was now passing with remarkable speed. The tumbling mass burst out after him into the street. Professor Slocombe stepped nimbly aside and took himself off to business elsewhere.
Leo Felix, who had been labouring away with welder’s blow-torch in a vain attempt to salvage anything of his defunct tow-truck, stared up, white-faced and dread, as Pooley blundered into him. “I and I,” squealed the rattled Rastaman, vanishing away beneath a small Mount Zion of bowling bodies. Jim was snatched up by a dozen flailing hands and raised shoulder-high. The stampede turned to a thundering phalanx which lurched forward, bound for Bob the bookie’s, bearing at their vanguard their multi-million dollar standard. Jim prepared to make a deal with God for the second time in as many days. When the sixth horse floundered, as surely it must, Mr Popular he was not going to be. “Father forgive them,” he said.
Antoine turned Bob’s Roller into the Ealing Road with an expensive shriek of burning rubber. Ahead, the advancing phalanx filled the street. Antoine yanked hard upon the wheel, but the car appeared to have ideas of its own. It tore forward into the crowd, scattering bodies to left and right. Jim cartwheeled forward and came to rest upon the gleaming bonnet, his nose jammed up against the windscreen. The Roller mounted the pavement, bringing down a lamppost and mercifully dislodging Jim, who slid into the gutter, a gibbering wreck, bereft of yet another jacket sleeve, which now swung to and fro upon a gold-plated windscreen wiper like some captured tribal war trophy.
Antoine leapt from the cab as Pooley’s sixth horse kicked betting history into a cocked hat and Bob’s Roller plunged onward, bound for the rear of Leo’s tow-truck and the paw paw negro blow-torch which was even now blazing away at the unattended oxy-acetylene gas-bottle beneath it.
“It’s been a funny old kind of day,” said Bob the bookie.
13
The Brentford sun arose the next morning upon a parish which seemed strangely reticent about rising from its collective bed to face the challenge of the day ahead. The Swan in all of its long and colourful history had never known a night like it. Jim had loaded the disabled cash register with more pennies than it could ever hope to hold and announced to all that the drinks were most definitely on him. The parish had not been slow to respond to this selfless gesture, and the word burned like wildfire up the side-streets and back alleys as it generally did when fanned by the wind of a free drink.
Brentford put up the “Closed for the Night” sign and severed all links with the outside world. The Swan’s rival publicans chewed upon their lips for only a short while before leaving their cigars to smoulder in the ashtrays and join in the festivities. The borough council awarded the swaying Jim their highest commendation, the Argentinum Astrum, before drinking itself to collective extinction. With the charred automotive wreckage of Bob’s Roller and Leo’s tow-truck removed, there had been dancing in the street that night.
For Neville, upon his bed of pain, news never reached him. The Sisters of Mercy who tended to his bed-pan and blanket-baths, hiked up their skirts and joined in the revelry, leaving the metaphysical fat boy to sleep on under his heavy sedation.
For John Omally it was a night he would long remember. As Christ had feasted the five thousand upon half a score of Jewish baps and as many kippers, thus did Omally quench the thirsts of the Brentford multitude. Like the barman of myth, his hand was always there to take up the empty glass and refill it.
For Jim Pooley, morning suddenly appeared out of drunken oblivion beating a loud tattoo of drums upon the inside of his skull. Jim shook his head. An ill-considered move. The tattoo grew louder and more urgent. Jim reopened a pair of blood-red eyes. He found himself staring into the snoring face of Miss Naylor, Brentford’s licentious librarian. “Gawd,” muttered Jim to himself, “I did strike it lucky last night.”
The pounding was coming from below, from his front door. It was the relief postman. Jim rose giddily and lurched towards the bedroom door. The words “never again” could not make it to his lips. “Shut up,” he whispered as the hammering continued. Jim stumbled down the uncarpeted stairs and caught his bare toe for the umpteenth time upon the tack protruding from the sixth tread. Howling beneath his breath, he toppled into the hall to find himself suddenly swimming in a sea of paper.
The hallway was jam-packed with letters, literally thousands of them, of every way, shape, colour, and form. Telegrams, buff-coloured circulars, and picture postcards.
Pooley rubbed at his eyes as he lay half-submerged in the papery cushion. He was certain that they hadn’t been there the night before, but as the later moments of the previous night’s revels were blank to his recollection, as attested to by the snoring female above, Jim’s certainties were purely subjective in nature.
The banging continued beyond the barricade of the king’s mail.
“All right, all right.” Pooley clutched at his temples and fought his way towards the front door. Pushing envelopes to left and right with great difficulty, he opened it.
“Mail,” said a sweating postman, thumbing over his shoulder towards a dozen or so bulging sacks which lay in an unruly line along the pavement. “Your bloody birthday is it then, pal?”
Pooley shrugged, dislodging an avalanche of letters which momentarily buried him.
“I’ve been sticking these bastards through your letter-box for the better part of an hour and I can’t get any more through. Do pardon this departure from the norm, but I must insist that you post the rest yourself. I am here on relief from Chiswick as the local bloke hasn’t turned in. What is this, some kind of bleeding joke?
Pooley hunched his shoulders beneath the pressing load. “What are they?” he asked. “Who has sent them?”
“From those which unaccountably fell open in my hands, they would seem to be begging letters to a man. What did you do then, come up on the bleeding pools?”
“Something like that.” Jim made an attempt to close the door.
The postman’s contorted face suddenly sweetened. “Is that a fact?” he said thoughtfully. “Then let me be the first to congratulate you.”
“You are not the first,” Jim replied, “but thanks all the same. Now if you will excuse me.” He fought with the front door but Posty’s foot was now firmly in it. Pooley relaxed his grip. “Your foot is caught,” he observed.
“It must be a wonderful thing to have money,” said the postman, edging forward. “I have always been a poor man myself, not that I have ever resented the rich their wealth, you understand, but I have often had cause to wonder why fate chose to deal with me and mine in so shabby a way.”
“Really?” said Jim without interest.
“Oh yes. Not that I complain, soldiering on in all weathers, crippled to the fingertips with arthritis, simply so the mail should get through.”
“Very noble.” Jim applied more pressure to the door but it was getting him nowhere.
“And my wife,” the postman continued, “a holy martyr that woman. If I only had the money to pay for the operation I am certain that she could be relieved of her daily misery.”
“Let us hope so.”
“And my poor blind son, Kevin!”
“Get your bloody foot out of my door.”
Knowing a lost cause when he saw one, the postman withdrew his boot and swung it at the nearest sack. The contents spilled out to flutter away upon the breeze. “Privileged bastard,” he called after the retreating Pooley. “Come the revolution, you and your kind will be first up against the wall. Capitalist Pig!”
Pooley slammed fast the door and stood engulfed in the flood tide of mail. He had sent out a
