The Throwback (20 page)

‘I still think you should see what is inside those letters,’ Jessica said as they went to bed that night. ‘They might contain proof of your father’s identity.’

‘There’s time enough for that,’ said Lockhart. ‘What’s in those letters will keep.’

What was in the French letter that Colonel Finch-Potter nudged over his penis at half past eight the following night had certainly kept. He was vaguely aware that the contraceptive felt more slippery than usual when he took it out of the box but the full effect of the oven cleaner made itself felt when he had got it three-quarters on and was nursing the rubber ring right down to achieve maximum protection from syphilis. The next moment all fear of that contagious disease had fled his mind and far from trying to get the thing on he was struggling to get the fucking thing off as quickly as possible and before irremediable damage had been done. He was unsuccessful. Not only was the contraceptive slippery but the oven cleaner was living up to its maker’s claim to be able to remove grease baked on to the interior of a stove like
lightning. With a scream of agony Colonel Finch-Potter gave up his manual efforts to get the contraceptive off before what felt like galloping leprosy took its fearful toll and dashed towards the bathroom in search of a pair of scissors. Behind him the Scarlet Woman watched with growing apprehension, and when, after demonically hurling the contents of the medicine cabinet on to the floor, the Colonel still screaming found his nail scissors, she intervened.

‘No, no, you mustn’t,’ she cried in the mistaken belief that the Colonel’s guilt had got the better of him and that he was about to castrate himself, ‘for my sake you mustn’t.’ She dragged the scissors from his hand while the Colonel, had he been able to speak, would have explained that for her sake he must. Instead, gyrating like some demented dervish, he dragged at the contraceptive and its contents with a mania that suggested he was trying to disembowel himself. Next door but one the Pettigrews, now quite accustomed to things that went bump in the night, ignored his pleas for help before he burst. That they were mingled with the screams of the Scarlet Woman didn’t surprise them in the least. After the Racemes’ disgusting display of perversion they were prepared for anything. Not so the police at the end of the road. As their car screeched to a halt outside Number 10 and they were bundled out to the scene of the latest crime they were met by the bull-terrier.

It was not the amiable beast it had been previously; it was not even the ferocious beast that had bitten Mr
O’Brain and clung to him up his lattice-work; it was an entirely new species of beast, one filled to the brim with LSD by Lockhart and harbouring psychedelic visions of primeval ferocity in which policemen were panthers and even fence posts held a menace. Certainly the bull-terrier did. Gnashing its teeth, it bit the first three policemen out of the panda car before they could get back into it, then the gatepost, broke a tooth on the Colonel’s Humber, sank its fangs into the police car’s front radial tyre to such effect that it was knocked off its feet by the blow-out while simultaneously rendering their escape impossible, and went snarling off into the night in search of fresh victims.

It found them aplenty. Mr and Mrs Lowry had taken to sleeping downstairs since the explosion of Mr O’Brain’s Bauhaus next door and the new explosion of the blown-out tyre brought them into the garden. Colonel Finch-Potter’s illuminated bull-terrier found them there and, having bitten them both to the bone and driven them back into the house, had severed three rose bushes at the stem with total disregard for their thorns. If anything it felt provoked by creatures that bit back and was in no mood to trifle when the ambulance summoned by Jessica finally arrived. The bull-terrier had once travelled in that ambulance with Mr O’Brain and residual memories flickered in its flaming head. It regarded that ambulance as an offence against Nature and with all the impulsion of a dwarf rhinoceros put its head down and charged across the road. In the mistaken
belief that it was the Pettigrews at Number 6 who needed their attention the ambulancemen had stopped outside their house. They didn’t stop long. The pink-eyed creature that knocked the first attendant over, bit the second and hurled itself at the throat of the third, fortunately missing and disappearing over the man’s shoulder, drove them to take shelter in their vehicle, and ignoring the plight of Mr and Mrs Lowry, three policemen and the Colonel whose screams had somewhat subsided as he slashed at his penis with a breadknife in the kitchen, the ambulancemen drove themselves as rapidly as possible to hospital.

They should have waited. Mr Pettigrew had just opened the front door and was explaining that for once he didn’t know who was making such a fuss in the Crescent to the ambulanceman who had rung the bell when something shot between his legs and up the stairs. Mr Pettigrew misguidedly shut the door, for once acting with a degree of social conscience he hadn’t intended. For the next twenty minutes Colonel Finch-Potter’s bull-terrier ravaged the Pettigrew house. What it saw in tasselled lampshades and velvet curtains, not to mention furbelowed dressing-tables and the mahogany legs of the Pettigrews’ dining suite, it alone knew, but they had evidently taken on some new and fearful meaning for it. Acting with impeccable good taste and unbelievable savagery it tore its way through these furnishings and dug holes in a Persian rug in search of some psychedelic bone while the Pettigrews cowered in the cupboard
under the stairs. Finally it leapt at its own reflection in the French windows and crashed through into the night. After that its howls could be heard horrifically from the bird sanctuary. Colonel Finch-Potter’s howls had long since ceased. He lay on the kitchen floor with a cheese-grater and worked assiduously and with consummate courage on the thing that had been his penis. That the corrosive contraceptive had long since disintegrated under the striations of the breadknife he neither knew nor cared. It was sufficient to know that the rubber ring remained and that his penis had swollen to three times its normal size. It was in an insane effort to grate it down from a phallic gargoyle to something more precise that the Colonel worked. And besides, the pain of the cheese-grater was positively homeopathic compared to oven cleaner and came as something of a relief, albeit a minor one. Behind him, garnished in suspender belt and bra, the Scarlet Woman had hysterics in a kitchen chair and it was her shrieks that finally drove the three policemen in the patrol car to their duty. Bloody and bowed they broke the front door down in a wild rush provoked as much by fear of the bull-terrier as by any desire to enter the house. Once in they were in half a dozen minds whether to stay or go. The sight of a puce-faced old gentleman sitting naked on the kitchen floor using a cheese-grater on what looked like a pumpkin with high blood pressure while a woman wearing only a suspender belt and bra shrieked and gibbered and in between whiles helped herself to a bottle of neat brandy was not one to
reassure them as to anyone’s sanity. Finally, to add to the pandemonium and panic, the lights failed and the house was plunged into darkness. So were all the other houses in Sandicott Crescent. Lockhart, under cover of the concentration of police and ambulancemen on Number 6 and 10, had slipped on to the golf course and hooked his patent fuseblower over the main power lines. By the time he got back to the house even Jessica was in a state of shock.

‘Oh, Lockhart, darling,’ she wailed, ‘what on earth is happening to us?’

‘Nothing,’ said Lockhart, ‘it’s happening to them.’ In the pitch darkness of the kitchen Jessica shuddered in his arms.

‘Them?’ she said. ‘Who’s them?’

‘Them’s the warld that is not us,’ he said, involuntarily slipping into the brogue of his native fells. ‘For arl that’s them the good Lord curse. And if ma prayer he doesna heed, it’s up to me to do the deed.’

‘Oh, Lockhart, you are wonderful,’ said Jessica. ‘I didn’t know you could recite poetry.’

No more did anyone else in Sandicott Crescent. Poetry was the last thing on their minds. Colonel Finch-Potter had no mind to have anything on, and it was doubtful if his Scarlet Woman would ever be the same again. Certainly the Pettigrews’ house wouldn’t. Torn to shreds by the bull-terrier, the house was in a state of total chaos. The Pettigrews, emerging finally from the closet under the stairs just after the lights had failed, supposed that they alone had suffered this misfortune and it was only when Mr Pettigrew, trying to reach the phone in the living-room, tripped over the hole in the Persian carpet and landed on a savaged lampshade that the true extent of the damage began to dawn on them. By the light of a torch they surveyed the remnants of their furniture and wept.

‘There’s some terrible curse on the street,’ wailed Mrs Pettigrew, echoing Lockhart’s prayer. ‘I won’t stay here a moment longer.’ Mr Pettigrew tried in vain to adopt a more rational approach but he wasn’t helped by the demented howls of the bull-terrier in the bird sanctuary. Having lost a tooth, it had fortunately lost its way as well and after gnawing several large trees in the archetypal belief that they were mammoths’ legs had given up to
wail at five multicoloured moons that squirmed in the sky above its imagination. Mr and Mrs Lowry were busily trying to bandage one another in portions of anatomy least amenable to bandaging and were considering suing Colonel Finch-Potter for his dog’s damage when they too were plunged into darkness. Next door, Mrs Simplon, convinced that her husband had deliberately fused the lights so that he could the more easily break in to retrieve his belongings, proceeded to warn him off by loading the shotgun he kept in the cupboard in the bedroom and firing it out of the window twice at nothing in particular. Not being the best shot in the world and lacking the light of the bull-terrier’s imaginary moons, she managed with the first shot to blast the greenhouse in the garden of the Ogilvies at Number 3 and with the second, fired from the front, to add to the Pettigrews’ problems by peppering those windows the bull-terrier had left unscathed. Only then did she realize her mistake and the fact that the entire street was in darkness. Not to be dissuaded but rather encouraged by the screams and yells of the Scarlet Woman, who was being dragged into the police car, and convinced now that the IRA had struck again, she reloaded and loosed off two more barrels in the general direction of Mr O’Brain’s former house. This time she missed the house and fired point-blank into the Lowrys’ bedroom which happened to intervene between the Simplons’ and Mr O’Brain’s residence. Outside Colonel Finch-Potter’s the policemen hastily dropped their burden, took cover and radioed for armed assistance.

It was no time at all coming. Sirens sounded, police cars converged and under covering fire a dozen men surrounded Mrs Simplon’s mock-Georgian mansion and ordered everyone inside to come out with their hands up. But Mrs Simplon had finally discovered her mistake. The volley of revolver shots that seemed to come from all quarters and through every window, and the winking lights of the police cars, not to mention the voice on the loudhailer, persuaded her that absence was the best defence. Dressing as swiftly as she could and grabbing her jewels and what money she had, she went through the connecting door in the garage and hid in the sump pit which Mr Simplon, who liked tinkering with the underbodies of cars as well as Mrs Grabble’s, had thoughtfully constructed. There, with the wood pulled over her head, she waited. Through the wood and the garage door she could hear the loudhailer declare that the house was surrounded and there was no point in further resistance. Mrs Simplon had no intention of resisting. She cursed herself for her stupidity and tried to think of an excuse. She was still trying in vain when dawn finally broke over the Crescent and fifteen policemen broke cover, the front and back door, four windows and found the house to be empty.

‘There’s no one there,’ they told the Superintendent, who had come to take charge. ‘Searched the attic but there’s not a soul.’

Mr Pettigrew protested that there must be. ‘I saw the
flash of the guns myself,’ he said, ‘and you’ve only got to look at my house to see what they did.’

The Superintendent looked and expressed some doubt that gunshot had ripped lampshades from their stands, cushions from sofas and curtains from windows, and had sunk what looked like fangs into the mahogany dining-tables.

‘That was the dog,’ said Mr Pettigrew, ‘the dog the ambulancemen brought with them.’

The Superintendent looked even more doubtful. ‘Are you trying to tell me that all this devastation was caused by a dog and that the aforesaid dog was introduced into your house by ambulancemen?’ he asked.

Mr Pettigrew hesitated. The Superintendent’s scepticism was contagious.

‘I know it doesn’t sound likely,’ he admitted, ‘but it looked like a dog.’

‘I certainly find it hard to believe that a dog can have created this degree of havoc on its own,’ said the Superintendent, ‘and if you’re suggesting that the ambulancemen …’ He was interrupted by a howl from the bird sanctuary. ‘What in God’s name is that?’

‘That’s the thing that wrecked my house,’ said Mr Pettigrew. ‘It’s coming from the bird sanctuary.’

‘Bird sanctuary my foot,’ said the Superintendent. ‘More like a banshee sanctuary by the sound of things.’

‘I didn’t think banshees wailed,’ said Mr Pettigrew inconsequentially. A sleepless night, most of it spent in a
broom cupboard, and the rest in the darkness of his devastated house, had not helped to make him clear-headed and Mrs Pettigrew was wailing too. She had discovered the remnants of her underwear shredded in the bedroom.

‘I tell you it wasn’t a dog,’ she screamed, ‘some sex maniac’s been chewing my undies.’

The Superintendent looked at Mrs Pettigrew dubiously. ‘Anyone who chewed your undies, madam, would have to be …’ he began before checking himself. Mrs Pettigrew had only her vanity left and there was no good to be done by removing that too. ‘You’ve got no idea who might have a grudge against you?’ he asked instead. But the Pettigrews shook their heads in unison. ‘We’ve always lived such quiet lives,’ they said. It was the same in every other occupied house the Superintendent visited. There were only four. At Number 1 Mr and Mrs Rickenshaw had nothing to add except gratitude that the police car was always parked outside their house. ‘It makes us feel much safer,’ they said.