The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag (17 page)

‘Are
you taking the piss?’

‘Not me,
chief.’

‘Well,
don’t. You know what I went through, Barry. You know I was trapped for ten
years inside the Necronet.’

‘Now
that’s not altogether accurate is it, chief? I mean I wasn’t actually in there
with you, was I?’

‘No.
But
I
was there, and it was all down to that bastard Barnes.’

‘So you
keep saying, chief. But remember, I only caught up with you again when you were
in the mental hospital. I don’t really know exactly what you went through and
why you hate Billy Barnes so much.’

‘Do I
have to go through the entire thing all over again?’

‘It
might be helpful, chief.’

‘All
right. So where was I?’

‘Well,
chief, Billy Barnes had just got himself a job as information gatherer at
Necrosoft and his mum had just come around to your shed, told you the horrible
tale about Inspector Kirby, and asked you to find the voodoo handbag.’

‘Ah,
yes.’

‘But
she hadn’t explained how the handbag came to be missing.’

‘And
she never did. I had to find that out for myself.’

‘And
you followed Billy Barnes to Brentford, did you?’

‘Kill
two birds with one stone, Barry. I figured that Billy probably
did
have
the handbag, so I went in search of him.’

‘And
what happened when you found him?’

‘Well,
let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It took me a while to find him, and
before that, other things happened. Shall I continue with the story?’

‘Please
do.’

‘OK.’

The estate agent showed
Billy around the penthouse flat.

‘This
is very much top of the range,’ she said. ‘This suite offers the most wonderful
views of Brentford there are to be had. From here you can see the water tower.’
She pointed with a long slim finger. ‘And the famous gasometer. And beyond
there the river bridge to Kew and the Royal Gardens.’

Billy’s
gaze followed the direction of the pointing finger, and then returned along the
hand arm shoulder and neck to the attractive face of the elegant young woman. ‘Very
nice,’ said Billy.

The
estate agent smiled up at him, turned and strode across the black marble floor
upon long slender legs. ‘You have your fully fitted kitchen,’ she said. ‘Very
hi-tech, very chic. Your lounge here, all mirror tiles and Bauhaus furniture,
and the bathroom, with a Jacuzzi, of course.’

‘Of
course,’ said Billy.

‘And
will you be living here alone, Mr Barnes?’

‘I
haven’t made my mind up yet.’

‘Well,
it certainly suits you. You look right at home here, as if it was built for
you.’

‘Why,
thank you very much. And what is through that door over there?’

‘That
is the master bedroom, would you like to see it?’

‘All in
good time.’

‘Well I’m
sure that you’ll like it. And the suite is all ready for anyone to move in.
Fridge fully stocked, champagne on ice.

‘Perhaps
we might enjoy a glass or two now.’

The
estate agent laughed a pretty laugh. ‘Not until the contracts are completed, I’m
afraid.’

‘Oh,
don’t be afraid.’ Billy took something from his pocket; it was wrapped in
silver foil. ‘Something for you,’ he said. ‘A present.’

‘A
present for me?’

‘Just
for you.’

The
estate agent took the present and unwrapped it. It was a brightly coloured
plastic something.

‘What
is it?’ she asked, as she gave it a squeeze.

‘It’s
called a pleaser,’ said Billy. ‘Now let’s get that champagne open, and then we
can explore the master bedroom.’

Smart Hat

That’s a smart hat, Billy,

A fine and bonny lid,

A tasteful piece of headwear,

You’re sporting there, our kid.

You look like Humpty Gocart,

With all that canny brim,

And it’s a rare old compliment

To say you look like him.

It really really suits you,

You know I wouldn’t lie,

You cut a dashing figure, lad,

They’ll cheer as you go by.

I only wish I had one

So I could wear it too,

And all the folk would say I looked

As half as good as you.

From an ingratiating
follower of natty headgear

12

Hang on
by your fingernails and never look down

RORSCHACH

(inventor of the ink blot)

The hat looked good on
Billy, and so did the coat.

They
suited him and he suited them. The chap at the tailor’s remarked upon this and
so did his assistant. They helped Billy carry his purchases out to his car. His
new car, the one driven by the lady chauffeur.

The
lady chauffeur who had, until recently, been an estate agent. They loaded Billy’s
buys into the boot and waved as the chauffeur drove him away.

‘He
really suits that car,’ said the tailor chap, and his assistant agreed.

Billy
sat in the back seat, tinkering with the CD player. In his opinion this car
suited him very well. It was a definite cut above that belonging to the now
defunct young man. It wasn’t top of the range, but it was the best his lady
chauffeur could afford. The car phone rang and Billy answered it.

‘Barnes,’
he said.

‘Billy,’
said the voice of Mr Dyke. ‘Settling in all right? Got yourself all sorted with
a place to stay, I hear.’

‘I’m
fine,’ said Billy.

‘Splendid.
Then it’s time for you to go to work’

Billy’s mother sat a long
time in the shed talking to the lad who would be Woodbine. But she communicated
no further details regarding the mysterious disappearance of the voodoo
handbag. Evidently glad to have got the whispering side of it out of the way,
she made a great deal of noise. Rattling flowerpots about and banging the
walls of the shed with a shovel.

Eventually
several neighbours came to complain, there was some unpleasantness and Billy’s
mum was forcibly evicted.

The lad
who would be Woodbine sat and pondered. He had been offered a weekly retainer
— a sum coincidentally equal to that of Granny’s old age pension — to locate
and return the handbag. And, he concluded, as he would remind his Holy Guardian
Sprout some ten years later, the best way to go about this was to kill the two
birdies with the single stone and seek out Billy Barnes.

And
this he set about doing.

Now it
has to be admitted (although not yet by him) that he was not exactly in the
Billy Barnes league when it came to the matter of mental agility.

Here
was a lad of good intention, hell bent on becoming a famous Private Eye, but
not exactly, how shall we put it,
gifted.
He had read Hugo Rune and his
Law of Obviosity, but he had not fully grasped all the principles.

When he
left the shed, a month later, somewhat grey and sallow of face due to the
restricted diet of uncooked potatoes, he had at least reached the conclusion
that although the shed seemed a very likely candidate for the least most
obvious of all least most obvious places for Billy Barnes to turn up handbag in
hand (and therefore the most obvious place that he would), he obviously wasn’t
going to yet!

And so,
perhaps, rather than risk starvation, it might be as well to begin the search
elsewhere.

And as
Brentford was as much of an elsewhere as anywhere else, and the lad had an
uncle called Brian who lived there, then Brentford seemed as good a place as
any to begin.

And so
he, which is to say
I,
arrived upon my Uncle Brian’s doorstep with a
smiling face and a change of underwear. The year was 1977 and the date was 27
July. It was a Sunday and a sunny one at that.

Uncle
Brian opened the door. He was a short man, Uncle Brian, positively dwarf-like.
He wasn’t Welsh, but then who ever thought that he was?

‘Who is
it?’ asked Uncle Brian.

 ‘It’s
me,’ I said. .’

‘Well, you
never can be too careful, come in.

And I
went in.

I had
to squeeze past a lot of cardboard boxes that were blocking up the hall. ‘What
do you have in these?’ I asked my uncle.

‘Rubber
gloves. Would you care for a cup of something?’

‘Tea
would be nice.’

‘Yes,
wouldn’t it?’

Uncle
Brian led me into his front room. It had been stripped of all furniture and the
floor was covered in cushions. ‘Having a party?’ I asked.

‘Sleeping,’
said my uncle. ‘I sleep as much as I can, wherever I can. To sort out all the world’s
problems.’

‘Top
man,’ I said. ‘If the people in power spent more time sleeping and less time
trying to sort out all the world’s problems, the world’s problems would
probably sort themselves out.’

‘Have
you been drinking?’ my uncle asked.

‘No,’ I
said.

‘Well
you should try it. I do, it helps me to sleep.’

‘I see,’
I said. But I didn’t.

‘You
don’t,’ said my uncle. ‘But sit down, I’ll explain.’

So I
did, and he did.

‘Dreams,’
said my uncle. ‘The power of dreams. ‘Where do you think ideas come from?’

‘You
think them up,’ I said.

‘Yes,
but where do they come from?’

‘You
think them up,’ I said again.

‘No,
no, no,’ said my uncle. ‘They have to come from somewhere. They don’t just
spontaneously appear in your head.’

‘I
think they sort of do. I think an idea is actually composed of lots of
different other ideas that sort of give birth to it.’

‘Cobblers,’
said my uncle. ‘When you ask someone how they came up with a really amazing
idea, they’ll say “it just popped into my head” or “it came to me all at once”
or “I had a dream” or “I had a vision”, or something similar.’

‘So you’re
saying that ideas come from outside your head.’

‘No,
they come from inside. But from a different world inside, the world of dreams.’

‘I don’t
think it’s a different world,’ I said. ‘I think that when you’re asleep, your
mind is sort of idling, and dreams are just jumbled-up information.’

Uncle
Brian shook his head. ‘It’s a different world, we enter it when we are asleep
and dreaming. It seems weird to us because we are strangers there, we don’t
understand the laws that govern it. It’s a world of pure idea, you see. Thought
only, with no physical substance. Pure idea. Sometimes we bring a little of
that back with us into the waking world. And pow, we have a new idea.’

‘And
that’s what you’re trying for?’

‘Exactly.
A big idea. Hence the dream surfing.’

‘What
is that, exactly?’

When
you go to bed at night you set your alarm, ‘you need a digital one, you set it
to go off at random times in the night to wake you up. Wake you up while you’re
dreaming. Break in on your dreams, see? Because normally, in the natural way of
things, ‘you only wake up when a dream is over, and so you don’t remember any
of it. This way you’ll hit a few dreams in the night, you wake up with a start
and hastily write down whatever you can remember.’

‘Does
it work?’ I asked.

My
uncle made a grumpy face. It was the kind of grumpy face that people who haven’t
been sleeping too well often make. ‘Speaking of work,’ said my uncle. ‘What
have you been doing with yourself?’

‘I have
become a private detective,’ I said, preening at the lapels of my trench coat.

‘I
thought you were in show business. Carlos the Chaos Cockroach, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t
do that any more.’

‘But
wasn’t it something to do with the butterfly of chaos theory? Didn’t you claim to
be able to cause great events to occur by moving biros about and sticking
paperclips on your ear?’

‘I’m
over that now.’

The
tablets are helping, are they?’

‘Tablets
always help, that’s what tablets are for, isn’t it?’

‘My
sleeping tablets definitely help,’ my uncle yawned.

‘Do you
want to get your head down for half an hour?’ I asked.