Web Site Story (2 page)

And now the time was right. Mr Doveston was behind the desk of power. The nation could be told. The nation would respond. Great days lay ahead. There would be dancing in the street (quite careful dancing, given the height and complexity of some of the footwear), heavy petting in the back seats of Morris Minors and jumping for joy (again with care) the length and breadth of the country.

There would be the singing of songs too. New songs with catchy tunes and easily rememberable lyrics. Lyrics written in the new tongue of Runese. The Universal Tongue of Peace. And a few minor changes besides, such as allocating every first Monday in the month as a bank holiday and renaming the months of the year. Hence the month of Rune.

It would all be joy and joy and happy joy.

Happy happy joy.

And it was. It truly was.

Well, at least it was for a while.

'Dost them remember the Tamagotchi?' Big Bob Charker looked up from his breakfasting bowl. The bowl was moulded in durable pink plastic and rested upon a metric yard of pink gingham tablecloth woven from a man-made fibre. This joyful item was spread across a dining table topped with a Teflon veneer. The Teflon veneer was of pink. The curtains were rather pink too.

'The Tamagotchi toy, do you mean?' Big Bob's wife was named Minky, after the popular wash and wipe.

'The same,' said Big Bob. 'Well it sayeth here…'

'There in your bowl?' asked his wife. 'Your bowl of pink breakfasting?'

Big Bob sighed his first sigh of the day. 'Not in my bowl, woman,' he declared. 'My
empty
bowl, which thou hast neglected to fill upon this joyous bank holiday Monday. It sayeth here, in my morning newspaper, which I have concealed upon my knee, lest its whiteness clash with the pinky shades of our dining area-'

'Pink is the colour of joy,' said his wife, smoothing down her polynylonsynthafabric housecoat with the plastivinylsuedosilkette gay and quilted lapels. 'Pink is where the heart is.'

'Home
is where the heart is,' Big Bob corrected his erring spouse.

'Our home
is
pink,' his errless spouse replied.

'Yes, well, quite so, but it sayeth here, in my newspaper, which is not pink-'

'The Financial Times
is pink.'

Big Bob sighed his second sigh. Three were his maximum for any given twenty-four-hour cycle, even a joy-filled bank holiday one. 'Please be silent, woman,' said he. 'Lest I fell thee with the pink-hued reproduction warming pan that your sister J (named after the
other
wash and wipe) gave you for your birthday and which hangs above our pink-hued faux-marble fireplace.'

Big Bob's wife lapsed into a sullen silence.

'There, that's better already.' Big Bob shook cornflakes into his bowl. The cornflakes were pink; his wife had connections at the factory. Big Bob topped up the bowl with strawberry milkshake.

'It sayeth here in my newspaper, that a fellow in Orton Goldhay has one still on the go.'

Big Bob's wife viewed Big Bob through her pink contact lenses, but said nothing. Big Bob almost sighed once more. 'Do you remember the Tamagotchi?' he asked. Politely.

Minky smiled, exposing teeth the colour you get from mixing red with white. 'I do remember the Tamagotchi,' she said. 'From when I was a girl in the 1990s. It was called "The Pocket Pet", there was a tiny screen and tiny buttons and you had to look after it by feeding it and cleaning up its poo, which you did by pressing the appropriate buttons at the appropriate times, which were mostly times inappropriate to be pressing. And it grew up and changed shape on the tiny screen. But eventually, after about thirty-three days, this figure possibly symbolizing the years in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, it died and would be reborn again. It was very popular for about six months, then it went the way of the Rubik's cube and the hula hoop and the Pog. Not to mention the Scooby Doo.'

'The Scooby Doo?' her husband asked.

'I told you not to mention that.'

Big Bob withheld his final sigh. 'Well it sayeth here, in my newspaper which is not pink, that a fellow in Orton Goldhay has managed to keep his Tamagotchi alive for twenty-five years and that it has evolved into a sentient life form, possessing rudimentary intelligence, capable of performing simple tricks and communicating with its owner through the medium of mime.'

'Does it sing?' asked his wife.

'It says nothing here about singing. Why speakest thou of singing?'

'Well.' His wife teased at her tinted ringlets. They were tinted to a colour harmonious to their present setting. 'If it sang, that would be truly
folderiddledee.’

‘Folderiddledee?
What twaddle talk is this?’

‘Runese,' said Minky. 'I am taking a night-school course on the World Wide Web.'

'What?' went her husband. 'What? What?
What?

'Folderiddledee
means "the ecstatic realization that even little things can be as wonderful as big things and that everything is wonderful really, so why don't we all just smile and have a nice time instead of hitting each other with blunt instruments, or even worse with pointy ones?"'

Big Bob spoke through gritted teeth. 'Woman,' he said. 'Speak unto me. Tell me where do we live?'

'We live at number twenty-two Moby Dick Terrace, Brentford, where all is
folderiddledee,'
his wife answered, correctly.

'Brentford,' said Big Bob. 'Brentford being the operative word. When the out-boroughs
[3]
stood shoulder to shoulder, heel to toe, nose to tail, three sheets to the wind and a law unto themselves and withheld their votes at the last general election, what did we do?'

'We withheld ours,' said Minky, straightening nonexistent creases in her plastivinylsuedosilkette gay and quilted lapels.

'We did indeed. But not for the same reasons. Brentonians have always withheld their vote. Because the borough of Brentford holds a self-governing charter dating back to the fourteenth century, when Hector the Hairless, Baron of Brentford, performed certain deeds for the Monarch and was granted such from then till kingdom come.'

'I knew that,' said Minky. 'Everyone knows that.'

'And as such,' her husband continued, 'we of Brentford have no truck with the whims and fancies of the world beyond. Dost thou see me sporting foolish footwear? Do I jabber in this Universal Tongue? Don't answer! I do
not
!'

'You've spilt your cornflakes down your tie,' his wife observed. 'They'll soak right in.'

'Woman,' said Big Bob. 'I will have no damned Runese spoken within the pinkly papered walls of this fair house of ours. If thou must persist in such folly, kindly restrict thy usage of this linguistic tomfoolery to places more befitting. To wit-'

'To woo,' his wife interjected. 'You should attend to your tie. The strawberry milkshake will stain the fabric.'

'And there you have it also,' said her husband in a voice of raised tone. 'My tie, thou will observe,
can
be stained. It is made of cotton. A natural fabric. Dost thou remember cotton?'

'I remember the Alamo,' said his wife. 'But I was not there.'

'My point is…' said her husband. But by now he had quite forgotten just what his point might have been. It had been something to do with the sentient Tamagotchi of Orton Goldhay. It had also been to do with the speaking of Runese. But it had also been to do with natural fabrics and their present scarcity.
And
being in Brentford.
And
possibly much more besides. But conversation with his wife oft-times confused Big Bob and oft-times left him in some doubt regarding what the point he hoped to make might be.

'You'll be late,' said Minky Charker, wife of Bob to whom the appellation 'Big' was generally applied.

Big Bob studied his wristwatch. It had hands upon its face, which moved by the power of a clockwork motor. 'I
will
be,' said he. 'And so I must gird up my loins and sally forth. Stain upon my tie or not. And the Devil take the hindmost.'

He arose from his rose-tinted breakfasting chair, dabbed at his mouth with a colour-matched serviette, ignored his pale paper, which had fallen from his knees, puffed out his chest, which
was
big as even big chests go, and prepared to take his leave.

'Have I sandwiches?' he enquired, by way of conversation.

His wife smiled sweetly. 'I give up,' said she. 'Have you?'

'That would be a no then, would it not?'

His wife produced a round of sandwiches sealed in a styroclingnlm sheath from the pocket of her polynylonsynthafabric housecoat with the plastivinylsuedosilkette gay and quilted lapels. The sandwiches were of white bread. Their content however was spam.

'Have a nice day,' she said. 'In fact have a folderiddledee day.'

The day was jolly and joyful and the newly risen sun pampered Big Bob's baldy head as he sallied forth on his way.

His way led him down to the bottom of Moby Dick Terrace, where the flowers (many pink) in their well-tended beds prettified the memorial park and the sparrows, their chorusings over and their minds made up regarding their plans for the day, were putting those plans into practice.

One nearly did a doo-doo on Big Bob's baldy head, but on such a day as very good as this one was, it didn't.

Big Bob took to a bit of whistling. Nothing fancy. Just basic stuff. Basic
old
stuff. None of this newfangled Runey-Toons nonsense. Big Bob favoured the classics. A hint of Sonic Energy Authority here. A touch of the Lost T-shirts of Atlantis there. And a smidgen of the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death when no-one was likely to hear him. Today he whistled 'Why is there never a policeman around when you need one, but always three buses turning up at the same time when you've given up waiting and just got into a taxi'. A tune Mr Melchizedec the milkman had taught him. And in fact had whistled earlier this day, after placing two pints of the finest gold-top onto the well-worn step of the Flying Swan.

Whilst acting in the capacity of milkman in residence to the borough of Brentford, Mr Melchizedec always wore his official cap. Big Bob also wore a cap, but this was not a milkman's jobbie. Big Bob's cap was the cap of a tour guide. An official tour guide.
The
official tour guide. The official tour guide of the Brentford guided-tour guide.

Big Bob did not wear his cap whilst not in
his
official capacity and as his official capacity did not begin until he clocked in at the depot, he was not wearing it now.

Hence the naked baldy head that didn't get the sparrow's doo-doo on it.

Still whistling, and still bare and baldy-headed, Big Bob perambulated his ample frame, with its generous chest and broad, yet hitherto unmentioned shoulders, onwards towards the depot.

The flowers continued with their prettifying and the sparrows with their actionable plans.

The depot was more of a shed than a depot. In fact it was a shed. A large enough shed to house a bus, but a shed more so than more less. It was an aged shed and had been an engine shed, in the days when trains still ran at all, which were days that were now far gone.

Trains had been a very good idea at the time. A time that lasted for more than one hundred years. But at some period back in the late twentieth century, some unqualified Prime Minister or other had thought it would be a very good idea to privatize the system. He'd sold off the railways to various business concerns, run, curiously enough, by fellows who, although very good at business, were totally unqualified to run a railway system.

So now there weren't any trains any more and those who had run them and run them down, ran other things instead and those who missed them, missed them, and missed them very much.

Big Bob didn't miss them at all. He'd never actually travelled on a train, having had nowhere he ever needed to go upon one. Buses were Big Bob's thing. Big buses with open-topped upstairs regions. Old-fashioned buses, painted in cream, with chromium-plated radiator grilles and a special place for the conductor to stand. Buses that went in a circular route and ended up where they began. But there weren't many of those around any more either. Big Bob knew of only the one. The one in the depot in Brentford. The one that he took on guided tours. Tours with a circular route.

Big Bob crossed over the bridge that had once crossed over the railway and made his way down the narrow flight of stairs that led to the yard and the depot.

The yard, ex-railways and now the property of Brentford Magical History Tours Ltd, looked just the way such a yard should look. Decoratively decked out in rusted ironwork of the corrugated persuasion, flanked around by tall fences topped with razor wire. A sign on the gate which read beware the savage dogs that roam these premises by night, and a great many of those corroding oil drums that always look as if.they must contain something very very dangerous indeed.

Big Bob ceased his whistling and smiled the yard a once-over. He really loved it here. This was his kind of place. Old and mellow and one foot in the past. And one foot was all you ever really needed, as long as you knew how to balance upon it and weren't going anywhere else.

Big Bob pushed open the gate with the sign that warned of the nocturnal growlers and entered the depot's yard. The double doors of the shed stood open, the double-decker stood within.

Beneath the double-decker on a long tray affair that moved upon castors, somebody tinkered with tools at the brakes of the aged bus. No saboteur, this somebody, but Periwig Tombs, the mechanic and driver.

'Morning Bob the Big,' called he, espying the large approaching footwear of the large approaching tour guide.

'Morning Peri my lad,' called Big Bob. 'Applying those touches that finish?'

From beneath the bus came that head-clunking sound that mechanics' heads always make as they clunk upon the undersides of vehicles, when the owner of the head raises it without thinking, to answer some question or other. Why mechanics do this few men know, and those who do don't care.

'Ouch,' said Periwig. 'Why do I always do that?'

'I don't know,' said Big Bob. 'But I do believe that I care.'

Periwig Tombs slid out from beneath the bus, upon the long tray affair with the castors. He was rubbing his head as he slid. It was a head of generous proportion. A lofty dome of a head. Sparsely sown with sandy hair and flanked with large protruding ears. Given the scale of such a head, one might have expected a goodly helping of facial featurings. But no, the nose was a stubby button, the eyes were small and squinty and the little kissy mouth seemed always in a pout. The neck that supported this head was of that order which is designated 'scrawny' and the body beneath was slim and lank and undersized and weedy. At school, fellow students who knew of the
Eagle
comic had christened him the Mekon.

Periwig Tombs eased himself into the vertical plane. Wiped his slender hands upon an oily rag, which increased their oiliness by precisely tenfold, and grinned kissily at Big Bob the tour guide.