‘Anybody? Anybody at all?’
Those who could be bothered shook their heads. Most just stared on blankly. But then, somewhere near the back of the auditorium, a little hand went up.
‘Who’s that back there?’ asked Dr Steven.
‘It’s me, sir. Molekemp, Harry Molekemp.’
‘Why, Molekemp, this is an honour. You are out of your cosy bed somewhat early.’
‘Wednesday, sir. The landlady always vacuums my room on a Wednesday.’
‘Rotten luck. And so, do you have some erudite comment to make?’
‘Yes I do, sir. I don’t believe Mason. You told the shaggy dog story in the first person. If Mason had been the bearded passer-by, you would have known.’
‘Very good. Well, at least you were listening.’
‘Yeah, but I wasn’t very interested.’
‘But you were listening.’
‘Oh yeah, I was listening. But only in the hope that there might be some mention of genetic engineering. As that is what this course of lectures is supposed to be about.’
A rumble of mumbles signified that Molekemp was not all alone in this hope.
‘Touché,’ said the monochrome doctor. ‘But the stories did have a purpose. What do we really know about our own genetic makeup?’
‘We don’t really know much at all, sir. We were hoping that you might enlighten us.’
‘And that I was endeavouring to do. Let me briefly summarize. Firstly, the shaggy dog story. Here we have a mythic archetype. Cerberus, several-headed canine guardian of the Underworld. Ancient belief brought fleetingly into a modern day setting. Of course, Mason was lying. The story was not true. It was a shaggy dog story with a twist in its tail. But think archetype, if you will. Think of old gods and old belief systems. Think of THE BIG IDEA, which existed in the beginning and from which all ideas come. I will return to this.
‘Secondly we have the ghost story. The present-day scientists are studying the ghosts of the past. They can’t actually see them, but they think perhaps they might be able to hear them, to sense them. But then we discover that the scientists themselves are not of the present day. That they too are ghosts, mere shades and shadows. And the story could continue endlessly. The tramps turn out to be ghosts, witnessed by others who turn out to be ghosts and so on and so forth.
‘So think here, the march of science, half-truth superseding half-truth superseding half-truth, on and on and on, towards what? Ultimate discovery? Ultimate revelation? Are you following any of this, Molekemp?’
‘I suppose so, sir.’
‘Jolly good. Third story. The fairy tale. The Old Pete character knows of the existence of fairies, he can see them with his own two eyes. But he cannot admit this to his friend who has just told him that only people with child-like minds can see fairies. Tricky dichotomy there, and one that cannot be resolved. The Old Pete character’s observation of the fairies is purely subjective. He may be a dullard, or he may be a visionary. And we all know how the scientific fraternity loves to mock the visionary. Science demands a provable hypothesis, repeatable experiments, double-blind testing and the seal of approval by those in authority. How well would fairies fare?’
Molekemp’s hand was once more in the air. ‘Surely this is all somewhat circuitous, sir,’ he said. ‘Fascinating though it is, or, as far as I’m concerned, is not.’
Dr Steven shook his head. ‘I felt that the stories had a certain elegance,’ he said, ‘and this too I wished to touch upon. Science holds elegance to be something worthy of veneration. The poetry of mathematics, always in stanzas rather than blank verse. The beauty of the models science creates to convey what can never truly be understood. The pigeon-holing of reason. The belief that one thing should actually balance another.’
‘I’m lost again,’ said Molekemp.
‘Then you are a nincompoop,’ said Dr Steven, ‘and I shall waste no more time upon philosophical concepts.’ He turned to the blackboard and chalked up the letters DNA. ‘So,’ said he, ‘DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid, the main constituent of the chromosomes from which we are composed. The DNA molecule consists of two polynucleotide chains, in the form of a double helix, which contain––’
Somewhere in the distance a bell rang, and as if in silent tribute to Pavlov (whose lectures were apparently a howl a minute) the students gathered together their belongings and left the auditorium.
Dr Steven Malone stood alone before his black-board. Top of the tree, icing on the cake and ivory mouthpiece he might have been, but communicator of wisdom to the young and impressionable he was not. He was a visionary and he had glimpsed THE BIG IDEA, but getting this across to his students was proving tricky.
He had been leading up to his conviction that present-day scientists in the field of genetics (that field with the big tree in the middle on which perched Dr Steven Malone) went about things in all the wrong ways. They were obsessed with the study of present-day man’s DNA, in order to discover its secrets.
But the secrets did not lie in the DNA of present-day man. Present-day man was a genetic mutation, an evolutionary development. In order to learn the secrets of DNA you had to study it in its original form – the form that had existed in the very beginning. You would have to study the DNA of Adam and Eve. Or even go one better than that. God created man in his own image, so the DNA prototype was to be found in God himself.
But how could anyone study the DNA of God? And what might you find if you did?
These were the thoughts that obsessed Dr Steven Malone, that had driven him into the field of genetics in the first place, and would drive him to his inevitable and devastating downfall.
But his downfall was still some months away.
Some years away, in fact, or even centuries, depending on just where you happened to be in time. So be it only said that Dr Steven had a plan. It was a brave plan and a bold one. It was daring; it was dire. And had it not already been given away on the cover of this book, it would have come as one hell of a surprise to the reader.
But such is the way of it, and so we must leave Dr Steven Malone for the present. A noble figure, all in black and white, still bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Sidney Paget’s renderings of Sherlock Holmes.
Dr Steven stands in profile and points to something off the page.
2
And a great wind came out of the East,
as it were a burning cloud consuming all before it.
And the sons of Man did weep and wail and rend their garments,
Crying, surely this is the breath of Pooley.
‘Surely this is the breath of Pooley?’ Jim Pooley reread the computer print-out. ‘How can this be?’
The obese genealogist leaned back in his creaking leather chair and clasped his plump fingers over an expanse of tweedy waistcoat. ‘How it can, I do not know,’ said he. ‘But there you have it, for what it’s worth.’
Jim, now breathing into his cupped hands and sniffing mightily, said, ‘I might well have the twang of the brewer’s craft about the gums myself. But as to a burning cloud consuming all before it, that’s a little strong.’
‘Hence all the weeping and wailing, I suppose.’ The genealogist grinned.
‘Are you sure it isn’t a misinterpretation or something? These ancient scribes were subject to the occasional slip-up, you know. A transposed P here, a wayward ey round the corner.’
Mr Compton-Cummings shook his bulbous head. ‘I’m sorry, Jim,’ he said. ‘But it looks as though your forebears were notable only for their extreme halitosis. They put the poo in Pooley, as it were.’
Pooley groaned. ‘And this vile smear upon my ancestors you propose to publish in your book, Brentford: A Study of its People and History?’
‘It would be folly to leave it out.’
Jim rose from his chair, leaned across the paper-crowded desk, knotted a fist and displayed it beneath the snubby nose of Mr Compton-Cummings. ‘It would be a far greater folly to leave it in,’ he suggested.
Mr C
ompton-Cummings put a thin smile upon his fat face. He was a Kent Compton-Cummings and could trace his own ancestry back to the Battle of Agincourt. ‘I would strongly advise against a course of violence, Mr Pooley,’ he said softly. ‘For it is my duty to warn you that I am an exponent of Dimac, the deadliest form of martial art known to mankind. With a single finger I could disfigure and disable you.’
Jim’s fist hovered in the air. A shaft of sunlight angling down through the Georgian casement of the genealogist’s elegant office made it momentarily a thing of fragile beauty. Almost porcelain, it seemed. Hardly a weapon of terror.
Jim chewed upon his bottom lip. ‘Sir, you are surely joking,’ said he.
‘I never joke,’ the other replied. ‘I was schooled by no less a man than the now legendary Count Dante himself, inventor of the Poison Hand technique. Perhaps you know of it.’
Jim did. ‘I don’t,’ he said.
‘To maim and mutilate with little more than a fingertip’s pressure. It is banned now under the Geneva Convention, I believe.’
Jim’s fist unfurled.
‘Good man.’ The fat one winked. ‘Reseat yourself. I’ll call for tea and crumpets.’
Jim sat down. ‘It’s just not fair,’ he said.
We cannot choose our parents, nor they theirs. Such is the way of the world.’ Mr Compton-Cummings strained to rise from his chair and made good upon the third attempt. To the sound of considerable wheezing and the creak of floorboards, he manoeuvred his ponderous bulk to the door and coughed out a request for tea to a secretary who sat beyond, painting her toenails with Tipp-Ex.
Pooley’s unfurled hand strayed towards a heavy onyx ashbowl. A single blow to the back of the head and a sworn testimony on his own part that the fat man had merely tripped and fallen were all that would be required. But the obscene thought passed on at the moment of its birth. Jim was not a man of violence, and certainly not a murderer. He was just plain old Jim Pooley, bachelor of the parish of Brentford, man of the turf and lounger at the bar counter of the Flying Swan.
He had hoped so much that he might have been more. That perhaps somewhere, way back down the ancestral trail, there might have been one noble Pooley, who had achieved great ends, performed mighty deeds, written the poetry of passion . . .
Or left an unclaimed legacy!
But no.
Jim had been shafted again.
Not, as was usually the case, by the quirks of cruel fate, or the calumny of strangers, but by one of his own tribe, and a long-dead one to boot. It really wasn’t fair.
Mr Compton-Cummings ladled himself back into his reinforced chair and smiled once more upon Jim, who leaned forward.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What if, for a small remuneration, you were to change the name in the manuscript?’
‘Change the name?’ The genealogist puffed out his cheeks.
Jim nodded enthusiastically. ‘To, say––’ He plucked, as if from the air, the name of his closest friend. ‘John Omally,’ he said.
‘John Omally?’
‘Certainly. I’ve often heard John complain about how dull his forebears were. This kind of notoriety would be right up his street.’
Mr Compton-Cummings raised an eyebrow. ‘But that would be to hoodwink and deceive the common man.’
‘It is the lot of the common man to be hoodwinked and deceived,’ said Jim. ‘Believe me, I speak, from long experience.’
‘Out of the question. I have my reputation to think of.’
‘And I mine, such as it is. Listen, if this gets out I will be the laughing stock of the borough.’
‘I sympathize, of course. But it is my bounden duty as scholar, researcher, writer and gentleman to do all within my power to ensure absolute accuracy in the book I am compiling. Such is the standard I have set for myself – a standard which, were you to view it from a more objective viewpoint, you would find admirable and worthy of emulation.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Jim, making a grumpy face.
Mr Compton-Cummings turned up his pink palms. ‘What more can I say? After all, it was you who answered my advertisement in the Brentford Mercury for local people, who felt that they might have had ancestors who played a part in the making of this fine town, to come forward and have their ancestry traced, for free. You who plied me with talk of blue blood coursing through your veins. You who swore upon your mother’s life that it was a Pooley who had won the land upon which Brentford now stands in an I-spy-with-my-little-eye competition with Richard the Lionheart. You––’
‘Enough,’ cried Jim, waving his hands. ‘My motives were entirely altruistic.’
‘Then we are kindred spirits.’
Jim once more took up the computer print-out and perused its dismal details. Back they went, an unbroken chain of Pooleys, marching through time. Well, hardly marching, slouching was more like it, with their heads down, probably to mask their evil breath. Peons and peasants, sanitary engineers and shovellers of sh––
‘Ah, here’s the tea,’ said Mr Compton-Cummings.
The secretary held Jim’s towards him at arm’s length. Her face was turned away.
‘Thanks very much,’ said Jim.
‘Look on the bright side,’ smiled the genealogist, sipping at his Earl Grey. ‘My book will be a very expensive affair, pandering to an elite minority. The scholastic fraternity, Fellows of the Royal Society, the intelligentsia. Hardly the class of folk to be found flinging darts in the saloon bar of the Flying Swan. The chances are that your rowdy drinking chums will never even see a copy, let alone purchase and read it. The secret of your malodorous predecessor will most likely remain just that.’
Jim sipped at his own tea. The cup smelled strongly of Dettol. Mr Compton-Cummings was probably right. John Omally rarely read anything heavier than the Morris Minor Handbook. Archroy was a Zane Grey man and Neville the part-time barman subscribed to SFX Magazine; Old Pete stuck to the People’s Friend and Norman of the corner shop to the Meccano Modeller. Though wise words were often spoken within the Flying Swan, those words derived not from books but rather from personal insight gained through the observation and intuitive understanding of natural lore. He was safe. Of course he was.
‘Well, thus and so,’ said Jim. ‘You are no doubt right, I’m sure.’
The genealogist offered Pooley one big smile for luck, the two shook hands and Jim took his leave.
As he trudged up Moby Dick Terrace towards the Ealing Road and the Flying Swan, Jim sighed a great deal inwardly, but put his best foot forward. So what if he hadn’t sprung from noble stock? So what if he came from a long line of nobodies? So what if the only Pooley who had merited more than a statutory birth, occupation and death mention in the parish records had been some kind of brimstone-breathing ogre? So what indeed!
Jim, though often daunted and done down, was an optimist ever. He rarely opened his eyes upon a new day without a sense of wonder and excitement. Certainly, on more than a few occasions, those eyes were somewhat bleary and bloodshot and the brain behind them still blurred from drink, but life was life and life was now. And Jim lived his life to the fullest he could manage.
Jim breathed in the healthy Brentford air, scented with honeysuckle, jasmine blossom and sweet pea. The sky was blue as a blue could do and the sun beamed down its blessings. Alive was a wonderful thing to be on such a day as this. Jim pulled back his shoulders, thrust out his chest, put a pace into his stride and found a tune to whistle. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world of Brentford.
Pooley had a fair old skip on by the time he reached the Flying Swan. He put his hand to the saloon bar door and pushed it open, to find himself confronted by a most bizarre spectacle.
Old Pete’s half-terrier, Chips, lay upon its back in the centre of the floor, a paw drawn across its canine snout. It appeared to be shaking with mirth. At the bar counter, several customers had handkerchiefs tied cowboy-bandit fashion about their faces. Two old fellas from the estate sat at their domino table holding their nose
s and fanning their beer, while John Omally stood with his arms folded and a Vick inhaler stuffed up each of his nostrils.
Neville the part-time barman stuck his head up from beneath the counter. He was wearing a gas mask. ‘Wotcha, stinker,’ he said in a muffled tone. ‘Just breezed in from the East?’
And then the Swan’s patrons collapsed in helpless laughter.
Pooley stood, slack-jawed and shaking, slowly clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘Compton-Cummings,’ he said in a cold and deadly voice.
‘Got him in one,’ declared Neville, removing his gas mask and mopping tears of laughter from his eyes. ‘He phoned here five minutes ago, plugging his latest book. Thought we’d all be keen to buy a copy.’
Jim Pooley left the Flying Swan and went home to find his old school cricket bat.
3
The judge, in his final summing up of the case, described the attack as vicious and cold-blooded. He said that for all his long years at the bar, he could not recall an incident of similar barbarity. He drew the jury’s attention once more to the horrific photographs taken by the police scene-of-crime photographer, which showed in gory detail the full extent of the victim’s injuries. He displayed the broken blood-stained cricket bat and spoke of the long drop from the second-floor window to the pavement below.
He spoke of escalating violence, the influence of television, the need to be firm (but fair), the need to see justice well and truly done and the need to clear the streets of inhuman monsters and make them safe for dear little white-haired old ladies to walk upon.
And then he added that in his personal opinion the attack was totally justified and dismissed the case out of hand. He also dismissed Mr Pooley’s claim for one million pounds compensation. Mr Pooley, he said, had got the hiding he deserved.
‘As a practitioner of Dimac myself,’ the judge said, ‘and a fellow Freemason in the same lodge as Mr Compton-Cummings, I would have dealt with you far more severely.’
Bang went the gavel onto the block, the court cleared and Jim was left alone in his wheelchair.