3
Jim Pooley sat upon his favourite bench before the Memorial Library, racing paper spread out across his knees, liberated Woodbine aglow between his lips, and Biro perched atop his right ear. Few were the passers-by who even troubled to notice the sitter upon the bench. Fewer still observed the chalk-drawn pentagram encircling that bench, the sprig of hemlock attached to the sitter’s lapel, or the bulge of the tarot pack in his waistcoat pocket. Such subtleties were lost to the casual observer, but to the trained eye they would be instantly significant. Jim Pooley was now having a crack at occultism in his never-ending quest to pull off the six-horse Super-Yankee.
Jim had tried them all and found each uniformly lacking. The I-Ching he had studied until his eyes crossed. The prophecies of Nostradamus, the dice, the long sticks, the flight paths of birds, and the changes of barometric pressure registered upon the charts of the library entrance hall – each had received his attention as a possible catalyst for the pulling off of the ever-elusive Big One. He had considered selling his soul to the devil but it was on the cards that the Prince of Darkness probably had his name down for conscription anyway.
Thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, Jim peered down at his paper. Somewhere, he knew, upon this page were those six horses. Tomorrow, he knew, he would kick himself for not having seen the obvious cosmic connection. Jim concentrated every ounce of his psychic energies upon the page. Presently he was asleep. Blissful were his Morphean slumbers upon this warm spring morning and blissful they would no doubt have remained, at least until opening time at the Swan, had not a deft blow from a size-nine boot struck him upon the sole of the left foot and blasted him into consciousness. The man who could dream winners awoke with a painful start.
“Morning Jim,” said the grinning Omally. “Having forty winks were we?”
Pooley squinted up at his rude awakener with a bloodshot eye. “Yoga,” said he. “Lamaic meditation. I was almost on the brink of a breakthrough and you’ve spoilt it.”
Omally rested his bicycle upon the library fence and his bum upon the bench. “Sorry,” said he. “Please pardon my intrusion upon the contemplation of your navel. You looked to all the world the very picture of a sleeper.”
“Nothing of the sort,” Pooley replied in a wounded tone. “Do you think that I, like yourself, can afford to fritter away my time in dalliance and idleness? My life is spent in the never-ending search for higher truths.”
“Those which come in six or more figures?”
“None but the very same.”
“And how goes this search?”
“Fraught as ever with pitfalls for the unwary traveller.”
“As does our each,” said the Irish philosopher.
The two men sat awhile upon the library bench. Each would dearly have liked a smoke but out of politeness each waited upon his fellow to make that first selfless gesture of the day. “I’m dying for a fag,” sighed Jim, at length.
Omally patted his pockets in a professional manner, narrowly avoiding the destruction of five Woodbine he had secreted in his waistcoat pocket. “I’m out,” he said.
Jim shrugged. “Why do we always go through this performance?” he asked.
Omally shook his head, “I have no idea whatever, give us a fag, Jim?”
“Would that I could John, would that I could. But times are up against me at the present.”
Omally shook his head sadly, “These are troubled times for us all I fear. Take my knee here,” he raised the gored article towards Jim’s nose. “What does that say to you?”
Pooley put his ear to Omally’s knee, “It is not saying much,” he said. “Is it perhaps trying to tell me that it has a packet of cigarettes in its sock?”
“Not even warm.”
“Then you’ve got me.” Omally sighed. “Shall we simply smoke our own today, Jim?”
“Good idea.” Pooley reached into his waistcoat pocket and Omally did likewise. Both withdrew identical packets into the sunlight and both opened these in unison. John’s displayed five cigarettes.
Pooley’s was empty. “Now there’s a thing,” said Jim.
“Decoy!” screamed John Omally. Pooley accepted the cigarette in the manner with which it was offered. “My thanks,” said he. “I really do have the feeling that today I might just pull off the long-awaited Big One.”
“I have something of the same feeling myself,” his companion replied.
4
The part-time barman finished the last of his toast and patted about his lips with a red gingham napkin. He leaned back in his chair and rested his palms upon his stomach. He felt certain that he was putting on weight. A thin man from birth, tall, gaunt, and scholar-stooped, Neville had never possessed a single ounce of surplus fat. But recently it seemed to him that his jackets were growing ever more tight beneath the armpits, and that the lower button on his waistcoat was becoming increasingly more difficult to secure. “Most curious,” said Neville, rising from his seat and padding over to the bathroom scales which were now a permanent fixture in the middle of the living-room floor. Climbing aboard, he peered down between his slippered toes. Eleven stone dead, exactly as it had been for the last twenty years. The part-time barman shook his head in wonder, it was all very mysterious. Perhaps the scales were wrong, gummed up with carpet fluff or something. He’d let Norman give them the once-over. Or perhaps it was the dry cleaners? Things never seemed quite right there since that big combine bought old Tom Telford out. Possibly this new lot were having a pop at him. Putting an extra tuck in the seat of his strides every time he put them in for their monthly hose down. Most unsporting that, hitting a lad below the belt.
Neville laughed feebly at his unintended funny, but really this was no laughter matter. Taking out the tape measure, which now never left his person, he stretched it about his waist. All seemed the same. Possibly it was simply a figment of his imagination. Possibly he was going mad. The thought was never far from his mind nowadays. Neville shuddered. He would just have to pull himself together.
Sighing deeply, he shuffled away to the bedroom to dress. Flinging off his silken dressing-gown he took up the rogue trousers from where they hung in their creases over the chair and yanked them up his legs. With difficulty he buttoned himself into respectability. They were definitely too tight for comfort, there was no point in denying it. Neville stooped for his socks but stopped in horror. The blood drained from his face and his good eye started from its socket; a nasty blue tinge crept about the barman’s lips. It was worse than he feared, far worse. His trouser bottoms were swinging about his ankles like flags at half-mast. He wasn’t only getting fatter, he was growing taller! Neville slumped back on to his bed, his face a grey mask of despair. It was impossible. Certainly folk could put on weight pretty rapidly, but to suddenly spring up by a good inch and a half overnight? That was downright impossible, wasn’t it?
Pooley and Omally strolled over the St Mary’s Allotments en route to John’s hut and the cup that cheers. Jim tapped his racing paper upon his leg and sought inspiration from the old enamel advertising signs along the way which served here and there as plot dividers. None was immediately forthcoming. The two threaded their way between the ranks of bean poles and waxed netting, the corrugated shanties, and zinc watertanks. They walked in single file along a narrow track through a farrowed field of broccoli and one of early flowering sprouts, finally arriving at the wicket fence and pleasant ivy-hung trelliswork that stood before Omally’s private plot. John parked his bicycle in its favourite place, took up his daily pinta, turned several keys in as many weighty locks, and within a few short minutes the two men lazed upon a pair of commandeered railway carriage seats, watching the kettle taking up the bubble on the Primus.
“There is a king’s ransom, I do hear, to be had out of the antique trade at present,” said John matter-of-factly.
