“What a wicked thing to say.” Jim made tut-tut-tuttings. “And if he had died and the Beatles hadn’t re-formed, England would not have won the Eurovision Song Contest four years running. Nineteen eighty-two, nineteen eighty-three, nineteen—”
“Yes, I know all that.” Omally viewed his drink can with distaste. “But what a sell-out that was. Eurovision Song Contest. That ain’t rock ’n’ roll.”
“Just stop! Just stop!” Geraldo waved his chubby paws about. His voice was faint but frantic. “You’re saying that John Lennon did not die in nineteen eighty?”
“Of course he didn’t die.” Jim shook his head and rolled his eyes. “That young bloke saved bis life. What was his name, now?”
“They never knew his name,” said John. “He just appeared out of nowhere and patched Lennon up. And then he vanished when the paramedics arrived. Lennon wanted to give him a million bucks but he never came forward to claim it.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a bloke at all,” said Jim. “Perhaps it was an angel. Perhaps it was the Spirit of rock ’n’ roll. Are you all right, Geraldo?”
But Geraldo wasn’t all right. Geraldo was coughing and spluttering. “It’s not right,” he kept saying between convulsions. “He should have died. It isn’t right.”
“You’re not right,” said Jim. “Have you been drinking?”
“I’ve gotta go.” Geraldo rose shakily to his feet and stumbled off to join his fanboy cronies at the bar.
“What a very strange man,” said Jim.
“Perhaps he’s a chum of Soap’s.”
“Come again?”
“Well, Soap’s got a bee up his bum that the Queen wasn’t assassinated and Geraldo thinks that John Lennon was.”
“Nineteen eighty,” said Jim.
“What about it?”
“Nineteen eighty was when Lennon got shot and survived and the Queen was assassinated. Same year.”
“People get shot every year,” said John. “It’s a tradition, or an old charter or something.”
“Or something. But this is a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? Who is this Geraldo anyway, John? Where do you know him from?”
“I don’t know him at all. He just came up and asked for my autograph.”
“Why would he want your autograph?”
“I think he thought I was someone famous. He was terribly polite and sort of—”
“Sort of what?”
“Reverential,” said Omally. “That’s the only word I can think of.”
“This is all very weird.”
“There is nothing weird about it.” John gulped down the contents of his can and tried to look happy for doing so. “This is a music pub, Jim,” he said. “And the folk who go to music pubs are not your everyday folk. Don’t go getting yourself all upset.”
“I wasn’t getting myself all upset,” said Jim, who clearly was.
“Well, don’t. Soap is confused. Geraldo is confused.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them. Lennon did survive, the Queen did not. That’s history and you can’t change history, can you?”
“Well …” said Jim. “I suppose not.”
“You definitely can’t. History cannot be changed.”
The invasion of the body snatchers.
The thing from Planet Z.
The big-eyed beans from Venus.
The fiend without an ’ead.
The wild wild women of Wonga.
Morris the human mole.
Loup Garou.
The man from the Pru.
The beast from the bottomless hole.
The phantom of the opera.
The lad from the Black Lagoon.
Vampires and umpires and pirates and poets,
The Scotsman who lives on the moon.
Turned up on my doorstep yesterday,
To say that they’d put up my rent.
I said, curse and damnation
(They had an Alsatian),
And that’s why I live in a tent.
6
Norman Hartnell[4] once said that life would be a whole lot easier if it could be lived in little movies. The gist of this was that life nowadays is simply too complex for the average man to get his average head around. There’s too much going on all at the same time. Too many plot-lines, if you like, weaving in and out and all round about. If you could live your life in little movies, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, you could concentrate on one thing at a time. Enjoy each for whatever it was and give of your best to each in turn.
And things of that nature.
Generally.
Norman considered that, ideally, each little movie would last for a week. You would begin whatever particular enterprise you chose to begin, on the Monday. Give it your absolute and undivided attention until Friday (by which time it would have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion), and then you’d have the weekend off to plan what you should do the following week.
Norman was what is called “an Idealist”.
He was also a corner-shopkeeper.
And a single man.
Norman’s shop was known to the good folk of Brentford as The Sweetie Shop that Time Forgot. Norman had inherited the shop from his father, Norman Hartnell Senior (whom many at the time had confused with the other Norman Hartnell), way back in the nineteen sixties and had done his best to keep it just the way it was.
This was not for the sake of nostalgia, or as some posthumous tribute to his daddy. It was simply that Norman liked the shop the way it was and could think of no sound reason for changing it. The shop served as Norman’s base of operations, where he applied himself not only to living his life in little movies, but also to his hobby.
For Norman, Idealist, corner-shopkeeper and single man, was also an inventor.
England has proudly given birth to many a great inventor. It has also, almost without exception, failed to capitalize on this. Inventors have found themselves unable to raise finance to develop their ideas and have inevitably sold them abroad.
The reason for this, in Norman’s opinion, was that those who sat in the seats of power, those big seats in Whitehall with red leather backs, tried to do too much at once and so did everything badly. They missed opportunities because they didn’t live their lives in little movies.
Norman had written to them explaining this, but so far had received no reply.
Which, in his opinion, proved his point.
So Norman did not waste his precious time sending off details of his latest revolutionary invention to the big-seat-sitters of Whitehall. He applied himself to solving local problems. To improving the lives of those who lived around him.
Idealist, shopkeeper, single man, inventor and very nice fellow was he.
This week Norman was building a horse.
It was to be a surprise present for Jim Pooley, who was a good friend of Norman’s. Jim was the only man that Norman knew of, other than himself, who actually lived his life in little movies. True, Jim’s little movies were always repeats. In fact they were always the very same movie. The one about the bloke who spends all his time trying to win on the horses but always fails to do so. It was a very dull little movie and it didn’t have a happy ending.
But Norman meant to change all that for Jim. He was doing what inventors do. Which is to identify the problem and provide the simple solution.
Over the previous weekend Norman had identified the problem. Jim never won much money on the horses, because they were not his horses, and so he could never know for certain whether they would win or not. Therefore the solution was to provide Jim with a horse that could be guaranteed to win.
4
He was never confused with the other Norman Hartnell, because no one could remember who the other Norman Hartnell was.