He had now stepped fully from the shadows, and we were able to have a really good look at Mr Ishmael. The hall being so brightly lit, and everything.
He was very, very smart, was Mr Ishmael.
He was tall. In a way that transcends the way that the famous are tall. Because the famous are, in truth, rarely if ever tall. The famous are mostly short, but look tall because they are famous. And one naturally feels that famous folk must somehow be tall, and so we invest them with a quality of tallness, which mostly belies their shorthood.
Such is ever the way.
But Mr Ishmael was naturally tall. He topped the magic six-foot mark with ease. And he had the big barrel chest of an all-in wrestler. And the barrel chest and the rest of his parts were encased (with the obvious exception of head, neck, hands and feet) within a sumptuously expensive blue velvet suit. His hair was black and all slicked back.
His complexion tanned, his cheekbones high, there was an oriental cast to his features, but it was impossible to put a place to the look. He leaned upon a black Malacca cane that had as its head a silver penis and a pair of balls.
It was a notable cane.
‘I do not like your music,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘And believe you me, the ukulele has seen out its days. But I discern potential and I would be prepared to finance you, to the tune of appropriate instrumentation. ’
‘And new stage clothes?’ asked Neil. ‘I’m not too sure about these sequins.’
‘The sequins stay,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I just adore the sequins.’
And he twirled his cane and tapped it thricely on the floor.
‘Instrumentation?’ said Toby.
‘Electric guitars. Amplifiers. A PA. A stack system.’
‘A what?’
‘All in good time. I think – in fact, I know – that you have the seeds of greatness. Sown, as it were, and yet to be reaped. A field of gold, as it were, also.’
The us upon stage that were conscious did further lookings at each other.
‘Serious?’ said Neil.
‘Serious,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I will manage you. Promote you. I will make your names household words.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Neil (whose surname was Dishwasher).
‘What is your surname?’ Mr Ishmael asked of Neil.
‘Garden-Partee,’ said Neil. (Whose surname was not really Dishwasher.) ‘It’s hyphenated. We’re a hyphenation, but we have no money to go with it.’
‘But you will. You will.’ And Mr Ishmael approached the stage. And as he did so, a certain coldness approached with him. A certain chill in the air.
‘So,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Will you let me take you to fame and fortune? What do you say?’
And what did we say?
Well, we said yes, didn’t we? Because what else were we likely to say? And Mr Ishmael produced a contract for us to sign, didn’t he? Well, of course he did. And we all signed it, didn’t we? Well, of course we did that also. We even moved Rob’s unconscious hand on his behalf. And we signed in blood?
Well, that goes without saying, really, doesn’t it?
And so, upon that night, the night of our very first gig, we, unwittingly, but greedily and without thought of any potentially disastrous consequences, signed away God alone knows what to Mr Ishmael and played our part in bringing the world and the universe to the point where I would almost save Mankind. Almost.
What a carve-up, eh?
8
It was well after midnight when I got home. Which I found somewhat surprising as I was sure that it was hardly ten.
My mother and father were still up. Because mothers and fathers stayed up in those days if schoolboys didn’t arrive home until well gone midnight. And mothers and fathers generally had quite definite things to say to the late-returning youth.
They were both in the hall as I entered.
I pushed open the front door, which was never locked, because no one ever locked their doors back in those days. Well, not in our neighbourhood, anyway.
It wasn’t that people were more honest in those days. No, it really wasn’t that. It was that we, along with our neighbours and most other folk in our neighbourhood, had absolutely nothing whatsoever worth stealing.
Except, of course, for the Sea-Monkeys.
But then, as everyone had Sea-Monkeys in those days, there was really no need to walk into someone else’s home through their unlocked front door and steal theirs.
So I pushed open our unlocked front door to find my mother and father waiting in the hall.
‘Hello, Mother,’ I said. ‘Hello, Father. I have some really exciting news.’ And then I gave the hall the once-over. But for my mother and my father and now myself, it was otherwise empty.
‘Where’s my bike?’ I asked. ‘I left it here in the hall.’
‘Someone’s nicked it,’ said my father. ‘Probably either that travelling mendicant who specialised in gutha pertha dolls, or that gatherer of the pure who popped in earlier to share a joke about beards and baldness.’
‘Right,’ I said. Slowly and definitely. ‘Right, I see.’
‘You do,’ said my father. ‘You do.’
And I did. In a manner of speaking.
‘And you are late,’ said my father, pointing to his wrist, where a wristwatch, had he worn one, would have been and then towards the circular light patch of wallpaper where, until quite recently, our hall clock had hung. ‘It’s after midnight.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I am confused about this.’
‘How so?’ asked my father, already unbuckling his belt.
And, I knew, preparing himself inwardly for the beating he was about to administer, which would be prefaced with the words ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’.
‘Well,’ I said, wondering quietly to myself whether tonight might be that night. That night, which I had been assured by my peers would one day come, when I would stand up to my father and, as a result of him now being old and frail and myself young and in the peak of my physical fitness, mete out to him many summary blows to the skull and never again feel that belt of his across my rarely washed bottom. ‘Well-’
‘Well what?’
I shuddered, silently. It was not going to be that night.
‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand two things in particular. One being how come it is now after midnight, because I am absolutely sure it was only a quarter to ten just a few minutes ago.’
‘And secondly?’ asked my father, his belt now off and his trousers falling to beneath his knees for the lack of its support.
‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘how we actually know that it’s after midnight, as we no longer have any means of accurately telling the time in this house.’
‘The boy has a point there,’ said my mother, who, I must say, in praise of her loving humanity, hated to see my father laying about me with his belt.
She always thought he went far too easy on me and would have much preferred to have done the job herself.
There were some times when I actually wished that we did not live in the enlightened times of the nineteen- sixties, but back in Mediaeval days.
