PEPAC novel: excerpt: "The Coming"

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

*

The bloody Provinces.  Where Civilisation slowed down at some point in the heretofore and gave up the ghost in the shortly thereafter.

It is early morning.  Richard stands outside Tring train station.  He has called for a taxi.  He has been assured it is coming.

The town of Tring is nowhere to be seen.   Richard is marooned on the side of a winding B road like an abandoned camel, laden down with leather luggage.  There is a view over foggy fields.  He could be anywhere.  The only sign of Civilisation is a big white pub, which, unsurprisingly at this time of the morning, is shut. 

Not In Business.  Some impact statement, that. 

Richard has left the Aston Martin at home and got the train, not wanting to get the Vantage dirty out in the Provinces.  That was his first mistake.  His second mistake was to dress in a rather nice linen suit he picked up in Sydney.  The suit, although projecting a good balance of nice chap/serious chap, is turning out to be desperately unfit for purpose. 

But then how was he to know that, deep in the primeval Hertfordshire countryside, it is biting cold at 7 o’clock in the morning?  A week before Midsummer’s Day!  We’re only forty miles outside London, for God’s sake.

More to the point, how was he to know that Tring station is the only transport hub in the Western world without a coffee shop?  Or even a coffee vending machine?  A bloody coffee bean would do — if he had to, he’d grind it between his own buttocks, set fire to his useless suit for heat and brew up an expresso with dew from the station railings.  Anything for caffeine.

Coffee’s probably banned in the Provinces anyway, he thinks gloomily — too much excitement.

Having said that, the view from the side of the road outside the station is rather  dramatic, Richard admits grudgingly.  Very pagan. 

Backlit by a ghostly sun, mist hangs in spectacular banks on the ground.  All sorts of lighting effects make the fields look like a film set: dew-dropped cobwebs glinting in the hedgerows, odd patches of crops blazing gold with sunlight, that sort of showy stuff. 

Beyond the fields, there appears to be some sort of forest that stretches away as far as Richard can see.  Dark, still forest, with consecutive ridges of bulbous trees in silhouette, flat, like images painted on plates of photographic glass, divided by slow, shifting planes of mist.  Rather unreal.  Definitely rather ominous.  Here be Ye Ancient Chiltern Hills then; something about charcoal-mining and the HSE train project. 

Running the trains on charcoal?  For Health and Safety reasons?  Really? 

Home to PEPAC, at any rate.  The Chiltern Hills.  Archetypal Provinces.  The Land That Time, Technology and Coffee Forgot.

It is all too much to think about. 

He’s going to be the CEO of a company in the Provinces.  And he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.

Until he Googled it, he didn’t even know what a CEO was exactly.  He thought he was going to be the next CBO, not CEO.  But CBO, apparently, is an American TV channel and not a company officer.  Such as a CEO, which stands for …

Well what does it stand for?  Chief Executions Officer, or something like that.   There was something on Google about three legs of leadership and a stool, which had, not usefully, put him in mind of a three-legged dog doing a crap. 

Chief Executioner would be more like it.  Lopping off a few heads.  Mass sackings would make a suitably stern start, that’s for certain.  Start with the coffee-hating Management of Tring Railway Station and progress randomly to the ranks of this PEPAC lot of which he has heard so much.

But he wouldn’t know one end of the proverbial axe from the other.  And probably shouldn’t really do anything business-wise until he does.  Know anything, that is.

That’s the problem, thinks Richard.  I don’t know anything.

Richard doesn’t know one end of an office from another, that’s one thing he can be proud of.  Always kept well clear of offices.  Got friends who work in them, but mostly it’s rugger, squash, that sort of thing with them.  Seem a little vague about the actual work; structuring, finance, gobbledy-gook of some kind. They don’t understand a word of it.  But everybody is rather good about everything apparently, not really any pressure.  

…

Things are moving too fast, that’s the problem.  A man should know where he stands, and that takes time to establish. 

It’s relentless.  First there was Dad and all that palava.  Then that stuff from Francesco about the letters and his mother.  Then, delayed, the realisation that he hadn’t actually inherited fifteen billion pounds after all.  And finally the robust invasion of his flat by a Marine SWAT team from the American Embassy — demanding, at gunpoint, that he hand over the keys — climaxing, of course, in the highly distressing business with the cat.

Christ, the Marines only needed to ask for the keys.  He would gladly have handed them over.  He has always assumed the flat was in his name, not dad’s, but if not, fair-dos: thanks to his dad’s conviction as a global drugs baron, it belongs to the US Government now.  Like the rest of Mayfair.  Not worth getting exercised about it with SWAT teams.

Having said that, the Marines only needed to not shoot the cat, and look what happened — the cat which is lucky to be alive, incidentally, after surviving at close range a burst of automatic fire from that bloody AK47 hung in the kitchen. 

Some SWAT trooper took the AK off the wall and assumed — with a degree of idiocy apparently accessible only to US Embassy Marine SWAT teams — that it wasn’t loaded.  Wanted, inexplicably, to check the trigger.  Tripped over the cat checking the trigger, and voilà: in a bid to escape the ensuing hail of lead, the cat breaks the feline record for Free Climb Under Fire as it flashes up the side of the fridge and, perhaps maddened now too by the stench of cordite, accelerates onto the ceiling and ends up, three frenzied minutes later, upside down in the oven trying to bite its way out of the broken lampshade wrapped around its head. 

Going back to the imbecilic trooper responsible for the incident: checking the trigger for what, exactly? Richard knows a lot about triggers.  Very interesting generally.   Lot more to them than Pull And Bang!  But he’s never heard of checking them.

So, look, I do know about something! He thinks.  Richard is immensely cheered for a moment.  I do know about triggers. 

And so now, unfortunately, does the cat.  Since yesterday it has been staying at a friend of his called Fenella Rotherington-Bell and, according to her panicked call an hour ago, it has already bitten the gardener, crapped in the Aga and, for the nineteen consecutive hours since the incident, continued to pant “in the exaggerated manner of a rapist”; some sort of stress reaction, Fenny thinks.  She’s given it some valerian root. 

Maybe she should take some herself.  Maybe she has done.  All sounds a little far-fetched, even after Richard had witnessed for himself the cat’s crazed destruction of his kitchen. 

…

The taxi speeds through the treeline and zooms into a chicane of swooping, steep, lanes.  It’s rather disorientating, like a rollercoaster ride — now in the pitch darkness of the shadows, now blinded by harsh blazes of sunlight cutting through the canopy. 

And there is a canopy! 

There are trees everywhere, including overhead (which is, in Mayfair, generally unheard-of). It’s like Lord of the Rings!  Big, bustling ferns sprouting out of the banks to either side of the road.  Rocks and moss.  All very magical in a predictable sort of way. 

Any resident elves, of course, would have long ago been run down by idiots like this taxi driver.  Several times now he has veered off-road.  No apparent reason.  No kerbs of course, let alone road markings, to be fair.  Not too much traffic either, with most of the drivers — like the elves — having presumably been tricked to their deaths long ago by the insidiously-bucolic driving conditions.

Quite unexpectedly the driver pulls up in a muddy little layby.  Richard looks around.  It’s a shadowy corner of an anonymous lane.  The taxi engine ticks.

A picturesque track, tarmac, leads off and up into the trees between a pair of grimy, stone columns.  In front of them, apparently close to being overwhelmed by a huge bramble bush, stands some sort of broken-down shed, squat and wide, with its door hanging off. 

Next to the shed stand a couple of laden pallets wrapped in cellophane.  They look like giant ice-cubes.  Next to them, obscurely, is a small pink skip, which looks rather like a giant ice bucket. 

Richard ponders whether this arrangement is deliberate.

“Here you are boy,” says the taxi driver, “that will be fifteen quid please.”

Richard turns to the face the driver for the first time.  He is a big jolly-looking fellow, with beefy forearms protruding from a checked shirt.  Looks like a farmer.  Bloody swindling farmer, charging fifteen pounds for that piffling little shuttle run. 

Homeless he may be, but Richard’s got cash.  So he is not completely buggered.  Nor is he completely stupid — he’s paid to come to PEEPAC Head Office, not the bloody front gate.

“I’ll just drop you off here then,” says the cabby meaningfully..

“Where is here?”  Asks Richard irritably.  “This is nowhere.  I assume that is PEEPAC?”  He gestures towards the lane leading off into the trees.  “Can’t we go any further?”

“Not allowed, mate.  Standing orders.  Security.”

Which surprises Richard.  PEPAC Security clearly isn’t that hot, because just inside the shed he spies what appears to be a tramp dressed, bizarrely, in a tuxedo.

Eyes on the tramp, Richard produces a twenty pound note.  As if to say ‘keep the change’ he waves his hand reluctantly at the cabby, who takes the money and lights up a cigarette in celebration.   “You’ll need an escort, boy,” he explains cheerily.

Escort?  Images of glamorous and compliant totty fill Richard’s mind. 

“Right.  Escort.  Thank you very much.”  He struggles out of the car with his luggage.  “Good.  I’ll sort it out.” He assures the cabby through the cab window. 

The cabby eyes him sympathetically: “He’ll sort you out, I’d say.  Find Mick.” And off up the road, into the gloomy beech forest, he goes. 

‘Find Mick?’  Perhaps the tramp knows who Mick is?  Maybe the tramp is Mick?  Richard turns back to the shed.

But the tramp isn’t there.  And his chair is not empty.  Where the tramp was sits a small, white dog.

Now —now, now, now.  Richard is disorientated, but not so disorientated to imagine that the tramp has magically turned into a dog.  Nor is he flighty enough to think that he’s been slipped a Micky Finn by the taxi driver, or that there is some peculiar hallucinogenic fungus in the air of this treacherous forest, but WHAT IN THE DEVIL’S NAME IS GOING ON?   

The dog begins to make tight little circles on the chair like a cat settling down.  Richard notices that it is missing an ear. 

The dog continues to turn about itself, never settling.  How peculiar!  It looks strangely distracted, as if it’s not sure why it’s doing what it’s doing but is doing it anyway.  Richard knows the feeling. 

But maybe there is something distinctly un-pukka in the air?  Maybe the dog is hallucinating?  

Or maybe it’s just looking for its missing ear? 

Or maybe its tail?  Because it’s missing that too. 

Or is it? 

Is he now, definitely, hallucinating?

There is a tap on Richard’s shoulder.  Bloody hell! 

He turns as quickly as he can, laden down with his luggage. 

It is the tramp.  In his tuxedo. 

The craziest eyes Richard has ever seen squint at him suspiciously.

And the reek of piss and alcohol! 

Raddled, knobbly face.  Fantastically-squashed red nose beneath a flattened felt hat sporting an oily feather.  Small bones, stiff and defiant like a fighting cock.  Scarecrow tuxedo bottomed off by a pair of gleaming black boots.

Everything apart from the boots is  … well, trampled on.

Maybe the indiscriminate trampling is why they call them “tramps”?  Ponders Richard.  Maybe that’s why the boots are the only thing unscathed, because it is them that do the trampling?

 The tramp just looks at him, chin jutting out.  He takes a swift swig from his can (Red Dragon, whatever that is). 

He’s like a cross between Steptoe and … well, an elf actually.   A very pissed-off elf.  A very pissed-off, pissed-up elf.  With his tux and stubbly little white beard, he’s a maverick Christmas elf, expelled from Lapland for roguish drinking and incontinence! 

Richard decides to take action before his imagination runs away with him (although he does congratulate himself briefly on that unbidden burst of what he assumes to be the much-vaunted Creative Thought.)

“Are you Mick?”  He asks firmly.

“Héss-éskin?” says the tramp, sticking his wrinkled neck forward like a tortoise.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”  Awfully thick Irish accent.

“I said, who’s asking?”

“Well … I am.” Says Richard puzzled. 

The tramp retracts his neck, looking equally puzzled.  He tilts his head from side to side in odd little movements, as if conferring with invisible colleagues.

“You’re Mick.”  Volunteers Richard.

“Who’s asking?”

“Oh, I see!  I’m Espinosa-Smith.”

The tramp takes a scuttling step forward and peers up at Richard.  “Not from the Dog People?”

“The Dog People?”

“The dog-snatching unit, politicians.  Come for the dog now and again.  Send ‘em packing.  Don’t we Benson?”

The little dog leaps down from the chair and trots across to the tramp.  Rather sweet little thing actually, some sort of terrier.

“You look like a politician,” accuses the tramp.  Benson the dog, sitting neatly at his heels, fixes Richard with a quizzical look that suggests he might agree.

“You look like a gentleman politician.” The tramp adds, as if that qualification would make him infinitely worse.   “What in the name of Garbo do you want?” 

The tramp says takes a swig from his can and hurls it into the skip.  A pheasant sqwarks its alarm from somewhere in the bushes.  Benson pricks up his ear with interest.  “Forget it Benson.  We’re not poachers.”  Growls the tramp.  “Or politicians.”  He adds meaningfully.

“I’m not a politician.”  Richard explains briskly.  “I don’t like politicians actually.”

“Well you would say that now?  Wouldn’t he, Benson?”  Unexpectedly the tramp shuffles forward quickly to peer right up at Richard’s face.  “You’re a tall lad, aren’t you?  Quite the beanstalk.”  The tramp’s mouth tightens ominously. His top lip curls and hovers, trembling, over his upper gums, like he’s showing his (lack of) teeth to the dentist. 

“HAVE YOU GOT ANY SPARE CHANGE UP THERE?”  The tramp suddenly hollers, face contorted like a demented pirate. 

Alarmed, Richard takes a step back. 

“Any gold?”  The tramp’s tone changes abruptly to a spooky sing-song.   “Any gold from the Beanstalk, Jack the Lad?” 

Now Richard can’t read the tramp’s expression at all.  His face appears to have got stuck between a snarl and a howl. 

Or is that a smile? 

That’s it!  He’s been trying to smile!

There must be something wrong with his face. 

Thank God for that.  Richard was convinced he was about to get his chin bitten off. 

“Well?” Says the tramp, “Have ye, or haven’t ye?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” says Richard hastily, producing a couple of pound coins from his trouser pocket and placing them in the tramp’s trembling outstretched hand.   

“Well, Benson, he’s not a politician, definitely not a farmer, not if he’ll put his hand in his pocket.”  The tramp inspects the coins dubiously and then slides them slowly into his own trouser pocket.  “Assuming they’re not clinker.” 

Richard doesn’t know what “clinker” is, so doesn’t know what to say.  He watches Benson.  He assumes “clinker” means counterfeit dosh, but suspects it has something to do with charcoal-mining, which the tramp, being a Local, may be touchy about.  Richard doesn’t want to offend him with his theory about charcoal-powered trains.

Benson ignores both men, intent on biting ineffectually at dry leaves on the ground.

Lost for anything remotely sensible to say, Richard asks if Benson is hungry.  The tramp replies that of course he’s fucking hungry, he’s drunk.  Benson is always hungry when he’s drunk.

“And how often is he drunk?” Richard asks.

“Whenever he’s thirsty.  I shan’t be buying him bottles of Evian to drink now, shall I?”  Mick snorts at the idea and that increasingly familiar (and disturbing) grimace of suspicion intensifies; it’s threatening to squeezes his face inside out once and for all.  “So, who did you say ye are?”

“Richard.  Not from the Government.”

“Richard Not From The Government.  Quite a mouthful, Jack.”

“And you’re Mick.”

“Am I now?  You seem to know a lot about me, young feller.”  He motions to the shed ominously.  “Maybe you and I should go up to the House and see what’s what?”

“No, no, I’m quite alright, thank you.”

What does he mean?

“I thought you wanted to go up the House?  Why else would ye be here?  Unless you are here for the dog?”

“Oh — yes, of course, PEEPAC, that’s what I’m after.”

“So you’ll be wanting a ride?  I’ll get me keys.”

The tramp spryly scoops up Benson and deposits him gently in the skip.  Benson disappears from view.  The tramp disappears, with a bow-legged scuttle, into the shed.  “Wait there, Jack!”  He shouts.

Two minutes pass.  Or something like that.  Rather a nice morning actually.  Birdsong and all that.  Good to hear a pheasant.  At least somebody’s got the sense to be shooting the wildlife around here.

But what is the tramp doing in the shed?  And what is his ‘ride’?  Should he be driving at all?  And why has he put the dog in the skip?

Why would anybody put a dog in a pink skip?

  “Um … what have you done with the dog?” Asks Richard nervously, raising his voice to be heard.

The tramp re-appears instantly at the door of the shed.  “The question is, what have you done with the dog?”  He glances in the skip.  He then looks unmistakeably ferocious at Richard.  “Don’t you fecking touch him, do ye hear?”

Christ Almighty, this man is NOT one of Santa’s elves.  Anything less like a Festive Bearer of Gifts And Jollity would be hard to imagine.  

“Well, yes, obviously, quite …  but what about …  in the skip?”

“Don’t worry about ‘in the skip’!”  Shouts the tramp, disappearing out of sight behind the shed.  “You’ve got enough to worry about.  ‘In the woods’.”  Seconds later, there is the roar of an engine starting up. 

The tramp emerges from the other side of the shed driving a quad bike.  It is pulling a small trailer with some sort of large, boxy cage. 

The tramp pulls up in front of Richard, engine running.  He is delighted with himself. 

“You’d never think it, would ye? That shed,” he gestures over his shoulder enthusiastically, “is not just a place for me wankmags.  Eh?”  He becomes confidential in tone, “It’s a D – N – A facility, Jack.  And I’ve tested yer beanstalk D – N – A from the clinker ye give me.  Tested it against your D – N - A profile — proper security professional so I am.  And guess what?  Guess what Jack?”

Richard is suddenly very worried.  “What?” 

Something come up about his dad?  With the DNA?

“Your D-N-A is N-F-G!  You’re not who you say you are, are ye?”

“What?  Yes! NFG?”

“Nobody’s who they say they are, Jack.  That’s what you’d call a psychological constant!”

“No.  Ye – is it?  But yes, I am who I say I am.”

“But who am I, Jack?  Tell me that.”

“I really don’t know.  I thought you were Mick.”

“And I thought ye were from the Dog People.  But you’re not.”  The tramp raises his chin, officious now.  “So who’s telling fibs now?”

“But what is it?  My DNA?”  What in Hells Bells is going on here? ”Is there a problem?”  Is any of this even real?

The tramp’s eyes flash with mischief.  He is suddenly jovial.  “What do you think, ye bloody idiot!  Come on Jack, I know who you are well enough.”  He shakes his head with glee.  “That Cordelia told me all about ye.”

“Cordelia?”

“Whippy girl, runs things up at the house.  She’ll have you for breakfast.  You’ll see.”  Mick lifts his hat and scratches his head furiously.  “Never liked Leer anyway.”  He mumbles.

“Leer?”  Richard finds this reference particularly confusing since the tramp’s face appears to be permanently set now in a definite leer.  A friend of Cordelia?  Clarissa!  That’s who means, dad’s girl there at PEEPAC.  “You mean Clarissa, surely?

“Clarissa?  What are you talking about?  A girl?  That miserable old cunt, Lear.  Killed his girls.”  The tramp looks very solemn for a moment.  “Unless he was a woman, which would explain a lot to yer.  Now go and get me a drink and get in!”

Richard shrugs.  “A drink?” 

“From the pallets!  Take this.”  The tramp hands Richard a medieval-looking blade from his jacket pocket; it looks like a modified butcher’s hook.  “And don’t lose it, I got it special for the job.”

Richard spends a good thirty seconds slashing and tugging at the cellophane on one of the pallets.  Inside, there are thousands and thousands of identical cans of Red Dragon.  New, unopened cans.  Cider.  Should have guessed. 

Richard retrieves a can from its plastic bindings with some difficultly and trots back to the tramp.  As he does so he glances worriedly in the skip.

Inside there are also thousands and thousands of empty cans of Red Dragon.   Should have guessed that too. 

But the dog is nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t worry about the dog!”  Shouts the tramp.  “He likes it in there, likes the smell, see?  Can’t come with us.”  He shakes his head emphatically. 

Richard hands the tramp the can.  The tramp grabs it and jams into a beaker holder attached to his crossbars.

“Why not?”  Asks Richard, stepping up onto the trailer at the back.  He peers into the cage.  Bars, mesh, the whole lot.  Smells funny, bit like a butchers.  What in God’s —  oh well.  Better not to ask, probably. 

He drops his various bits of luggage on the floor of the cage, steps up inside through the open door at the rear, and sits on the low wooden bench to his left.  His back leans uncomfortably against a hinged window in the cage wall.  “But why not?”  He repeats.

“Why not what?” Shouts the tramp, revving the engine gleefully.

“Why can’t Benson come with us?”

“Because of the wolves!”   Shouts the tramp without turning his head.

With a jolt, the unlikely caravan heads into the trees like a travelling circus, with a confused but surprisingly calm specimen of Espinosa Minor the only attraction. 

Without for a second questioning his own credulity, Richard carefully pulls across the bolt on the inside of the cage door.  Better to be safe than sorry.