Chapter 11
Saturday 24nd June London Borough of Upper Springwood
The heaventree of stars
Hung with humid night-blue fruit
JAMES JOYCE
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune, full set of muscles but less the odd marble or two, is in want of a further fortune.
Bats, moths, locusts-in-battledress boogie to a happier, hippier beat under the gilded gas-lamps. And half-hidden on the hill by a choker of bogey-green gas, the Gothic splendour of the castle.
High Gates part by magic.
What a gas! What a garden! For so it had always seemed to her when, with the parting of velvet curtains, she had burst open the French windows and plunged as a child into the free air. The child Sharon Shrewsmith a victim of school bullies. And those bullies kissing the pruny pole of promotion to become the Dean and Chief Constable. But Sharon Shrewsmith studied hard, worked hand, and was deservedly promoted to branch manager of the Fascist Pig Bank down on the High Street.
Sharon’s mother did not prostitute bits of her body or sell her daughter for medical experiments. And one day mother securing honest employment as housekeeper to the crazies in the castle on top of the hill. And to avoid the childminding fees during the school summer holidays, mother gaining permission to bring along her daughter while at work. Young Sharon played contentedly with her bestest friend in the whole wide world, one Jason Knees, swearing that one day he would help Sharon gain her revenge over her bullies.
My my, many generations of ducks must have ducked their ducky heads in that pond. And now a security goat guards high-mindedly the pot-plants. Grazes grass. Bobs its horny head. And a floral chloral of dickies serenades Sharon Shrewsmith’s high-heel click-click scaling the garden path. Hot blood pumps pulses of passion beneath the high oak doors.
Pulling the Gargoyle’s plonker limpens the knees. Ah! The same lagoon-blue eyes, muscles bulge where once pimpled puppy-fat, and Sharon longing to be marooned on a desert island and playing with his man-Friday.
Sharon plunges — lips agape — into a sea of poppy balloons and party streamers and diamond fairy-lights and long shag, and Armin van Buuren’s Burned With Desire throbs deep her aural passage.
‘Did he receive you well?’ twitters Granny Pol-Pot like a twisted Mrs Haversam, twinkly-eyed from the perch of her high-backed commode.
‘Most like a gentleman.’
‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown.’
‘Blasted with ecstasy,’ mumbles Sharon hot-flushing red cheeks.
The Professor host-with-the-most floats like a mauve butterfly, smokes like a chimney. You’ll never find him in the kitchen at parties.
A beautiful last supper: silk-smooth hired staff flutter about the VIP guests with a flourish of serviettes, a clatter of knives and forks, a clinking of champagne flutes, serving from silver platters, scooping from silver bowls with long-handled ladles, and with each course a change of wine, and the shadows dance on walls and tables to the shimmering flames, fat spliffs pass from left and right, and the night of champagne melts into twinkle-twinkle-little-star crystal.
Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall clasped in her clammy fingers, Sandra sucks a bendy straw and admires the fast hands of DJ Benjamin. Cola Boy’s Seven Ways to Love penetrates every room, upstairs and down, in full-bodied surround sound. Fairy lights sparkle like Christmas, and dancing trips of diamonds play upon the pyramid of those chocky-balls they serve at embassies. Rude not to. And Sandra is not one to turn her nose up at Coke (and Bacardi) if they have it on tap at parties.
Bonnie Samuel’s brown arms clamp the birdie neck of Uncle Chopper and rocking his pigeon-back (rehearsing possibly a future raid) Bonnie Samuels rides Bronco Billy the ocean of deep Chinese carpet, red juice runs down her chin, T-shirt and decorates Uncle Chopper’s head.
Cherubim Chopper, magnificent in a flowing marquee of gold lamé, carts a plate or two of choice titbits, sufficient to keep body and soul together, to the long velvet curtains and French windows.
Red rose adorns a rich sweep of gloss-black hair and Conchita Gonzalez reminds her withdrawal-loving husband Gonzalez that there are more banks on the mainland of Europe than is dreamt of in their Rota of Robbery.
Roaring past the rubber plant at speed in a supernova-charged chair the black-hole-loving Professor Stephen Squawking come to look for himself at Professor Knees’s Wormhole.
And Sandra is tempted by a red devil to extend a finger and touch the peachy backside of the tasty Professor — to touch that holy of holies the Professor’s spliff — to suck the specially prepared end — to apply the pressure of red lips to the trunk of the Beast and softly withdraw when satiated.
The lion’s black mane of Professor Field Marshal Jason Knees and the sparkling blue eyes wafting with the summer breeze past the hanging palm pot-plant and the pot-planted hanging palm of Sandra. The Professor pauses puffing to pull the bell-end of plush curtain open-sesame the French windows. General Chopper freshly freed from the runaway jockeyship of Bonnie Samuels, parades the long drop of windows in pressed fatigues and gold-starred cap. ‘I have a cunning plan —’
‘My dear chap ...’
‘— I row across the lake —’
‘Yes?’
‘— I hike all night the forest, over the gravestones, through the vicarage, cross from Ocean Drive, I creep nose to the pavement behind the car’ — He frets a finger across a spectrum of raw pink flesh — ‘and slash e’s throat.’
They are jointed for the great meeting of military minds by Gonzalez-the-Basque-Bank-Robber. ‘I keel heem!’
The Professor peers into the night with the rank nervousness of a rare trip to the lecture theatre.
‘Cut!’ cries General Chopper.
‘Keeel!’
‘Cut!’
‘Keeel!’
‘To cut or to keeel. That is the question.’ A blast of the Hindu Kush and fantasy nights of flaming bush. ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of double parking, or to take arms against a sea of blubber, and by clamping wake him?’
‘Cut!’
‘Keeel!’
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to make do without the cutting or killing,’ sighs the Professor. ‘The car’s gone.’
Beneath the boughs of the tall rubber plant the basking Sandra feasts her eyes on the peach butt of the potty Professor and licks her blood lips at the packing of a howitzer. Before the night is dry that butt will be hers: lock, stock and two bulging barrels.
Flashing an armoury of Ouzo-white teeth Conchita Gonzalez confronts the tall rubber plant: ‘He does confess he feels himself distracted; but from what cause he will by no means speak. Nor do we find him forward to be sounded; but with a crafty madness keeps aloof.’
Sparkly from the tips of chandeliers to the tingling tips of her ruby toes, Sandra sheds her heels and stomps the undergrowth of carpet as horny as a rhino on a hot tin roof.
Thick trickle of treacle tattooing her pork-scratching chin, Granny Pol-Pot waves her silver spoon at a tasty young black man. The head of a tortoise snakes from the black hole of a sleeve and tugs the bell-rope of a dreadlock — ‘Nits.’
‘Come hagen?’
‘If you don’t get your hair cut, you’ll catch nits.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
But the gin-soaked turbocharged dictator cut off at the pass by Persephones Knees (the same trestles of black as her fluff-brained father, the same come-to-the-back-of-my-lecture-theatre eyes and the same drop-dead looks, but less the dribbling, rotating of the eyeballs and less the thousand-trick telescope). ‘Does your bag need changing, Gran?’
‘No need to shout. I’m not deaf, you know.’
The squelchy bone-fist squeezes the last drops of life from Benjamin’s limp brown dreadlock, and two prune-eyes peer with the fresh love of a Californian grape: ‘I can’t remember the last time a young man had me on my back.’
Bad Boy Benjamin’s brown eyes bore into the mass of holey cardigan, dazzling teeth menace worse than a visit from the Osmonds: ‘Now, Gran, how would we like to be taken —’
‘Yes?’
‘— on a nice long holiday?’
Granny Pol-Pot shrinking upon the mahogany commode to a raisin.
Sandra tongues the last drop to the bottom of the glass as the host-with-the-most weaves a delicious wake between the heaving bodies. Hot blood pulsating the bulging veins of her neck, Sandra licks her plump lips and pulls hard on a well-rope of courage.
No faint heart ever won a crack-head Professor.
Sandra lurches the long shag, through the kitchens, pantry and shrine of golden plenty.
She fingers the light-cord and pushes the peach butt against the basin and a tongue tasting faintly of Pernod and fumbling.
Some things can wait. Others can’t.
Sandra swallows hard.
Very hard indeed.
*****