7
It was late afternoon when Jonny next awoke. Not that he knew for certain that it was late afternoon. It could have been any time really for Jonny, because the room in which he now awoke did not own to a window. It was a windowless room.
In fact, it was more of a cell, really.
In fact, it was a cell.
A padded cell.
Good and proper.
Padded walls and padded door and padded floor as well. A single light bulb somewhat above. And all hope sinking fast.
‘Oh great,’ said Jonny. ‘This is just great.’ And he said it loudly, then shushed himself. The cell was probably bugged – most of them were nowadays.
Well, at least he wasn’t in restraints.
He wasn’t in a straitjacket.
Which was something. Although not very much, considering. Jonny’s stomach rumbled loudly. Jonny tried to shush it. But he was very hungry.
Jonny, who had been lying where he’d been left, flat on his back in the centre of the cell, rose unsteadily to his feet. He had that terrible post-medication hangover effect: all the pain, whilst not having previously experienced all of the pleasure. Jonny’s knees were shaky and his mouth was dry. Things really weren’t going his way at the moment. Not that they ever really went his way, but what had brought all this lot on was anyone’s guess. He hadn’t done anything. He had tried to rescue a drowning child. He was an innocent man. And given that this was a loony wing – although of course they would never use the ‘L’ word – he really didn’t qualify to be here. He was no more loony now than he ever had been. And the amount of loony that he ever had been was insufficient to merit him being banged up in here now. So to speak.
It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.
And then Jonny recalled that he had already learned that life wasn’t fair. And so this unjust confinement was not teaching him anything he didn’t already know.
But, God, was he hungry.
Jonny took himself over to the padded door and addressed the little sliding shutter jobbie. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, in as polite a fashion as he could manage, ‘is there someone there? I’d really like to speak to a doctor, if it would be convenient for one to speak to me.’
The little shutter shot instantly open. The face of Nurse Cecil grinned through it.
‘Hello, Sunshine,’ said Nurse Cecil. ‘Up and about again, are we?’
‘Could I please speak to a doctor?’ asked Jonny.
‘But of course,’ said Nurse Cecil. ‘I’ll see to it at once.’
And he slammed shut the grille.
And he turned off Jonny’s light.
And time can pass slowly in a padded cell with the light off.
But presently, when afternoon had become evening, although Jonny was not, of course, to know this, the door to Jonny’s padded cell opened and he was beckoned to accompany Nurse Cecil on a little walk to somewhere.
Although sadly not the canteen.
These offices are always the same, no matter the hospital. A desk, two chairs, bookshelves with the inevitable textbooks. A file of Rorschach ink-blots. The big, big file of the patient. An object of interest or two, perhaps a plastic human skull or a phrenology head (out of the reach of the patient, of course).
And a certain smell. A certain medical smell. Which somehow conjures images of Nazi concentration camp experiments. Somehow.
Jonny shivered as he was thrust by Nurse Cecil into this office. Behind the desk sat an earnest-looking fellow in a white coat. He was tinkering at the keyboard of that other thing that all these offices, indeed all offices everywhere, has nowadays.
The computer.
‘I’ll never get the hang of this,’ said the earnest-looking fellow. ‘Do sit down, please,’ and he consulted the big, fat file upon his desk. ‘Mister Hooker.’
Jonny Hooker sat down.
‘You may leave us, Nurse Cecil.’
‘Wouldn’t hear of it, sir,’ said the male nurse. ‘Leave you alone with this raving maniac? It’s more than my job’s worth.’
‘I’m sure Mister Hooker is not going to cause any bother. Are you, Mister Hooker?’
Jonny Hooker shook his head. ‘Definitely not,’ he said. ‘Do you think that Nurse Cecil might go to the canteen and fetch me something to eat? I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours, at least.’
Moonlight shone through the uncurtained window. Jonny’s timing guesswork was right.
‘Please get Mister Hooker some supper, would you, Nurse Cecil?’
Nurse Cecil grunted in the affirmative and grudgingly left the office, slamming the door behind him.
‘A willing enough fellow, really,’ said the chap behind the desk, ‘but not the brightest star in the firmament. My name is Doctor Archy. You may call me Doctor Archy.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Jonny. Who wasn’t.
‘I have you in here,’ said Dr Archy, tapping some more at his computer keyboard. ‘The trouble is that I just can’t get at you. You’re on the database. You’d be surprised at all the information there is on here about you.’
No I wouldn’t, thought Jonny. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Might I have a glass of water?’ he continued. ‘My mouth is really dry.’
‘Of course, of course. There’s a machine thing over there with paper cups, help yourself.’
Jonny turned in his chair and noticed the other thing that these offices always have: the little water cooler jobbie. They also have the box of tissues, for when you’re having a good cry. But Jonny hoped that he would not be needing the box of tissues. He rose from his chair, passed by the open window – making a mental note of just how open it was, and how open it would need to be for him to shin out of it – and took himself over to the water cooler.
‘So much information,’ said Dr Archy. ‘Too much, some might say. Or the wrong information. Or information parading, indeed masquerading, as information when it is anything but. If you understand my meaning.’
Jonny turned from his water-cup filling. Eyes met across the office.
Jonny shrugged in as non-committal a way as he could manage. ‘Thank you for the water,’ he said, and he drank from the cup and refilled it.
‘I understand your feelings,’ said Dr Archy when Jonny, with water-filled cup, had returned to the patients’ chair. ‘You’re being cautious. You do not wish to say anything that might incriminate you in any way. Give the impression that there is something, how might I put this, wrong about you.’
‘Politeness costs nothing,’ said Jonny. ‘That’s what my mum always says.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Dr Archy. ‘Your mother. Tell me about your mother.’
Which rang a bell somewhere.
‘I think,’ said Jonny, ‘that I must be a terrible disappointment to her.’
‘You love your mother?’
‘Everyone loves their mother,’ said Jonny.
‘Interesting reply.’ The doctor tapped some more at the keyboard of his computer. ‘This business with the drowning child,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about that now?’
‘I can’t say,’ said Jonny.
‘Can’t?’ said the doctor, raising his eyes.
‘I have been medicated,’ said Jonny. ‘I cannot be certain of anything.’
‘Nurse Cecil told me that you hallucinated a female nurse this morning.’
‘Apparently so,’ said Jonny. ‘I can’t explain it. She did seem very real.’
‘But now you know that she was not?’
‘How can she have been?’
‘Good,’ said the doctor.
There was a knocking and an opening. Nurse Cecil appeared, bearing Jonny’s supper on a tray. He placed this tray on Jonny’s lap. ‘Salad,’ he said. ‘You did say that you were a vegetarian.’
‘Did you?’ asked the doctor, raising his eyebrows.
‘Yes,’ said Jonny, who knew better than to argue. ‘Just this week. You won’t have it on your records.’
‘Enjoy,’ said Nurse Cecil. And, grinning
, he left the office.
Jonny Hooker viewed his supper. Lettuce and uncooked vegetable stuff and a glass of tomato juice.
‘Mm,’ went Dr Archy. ‘Looks yummy. Do tuck in.’
Jonny Hooker tucked into his salad. As a hungry man will do.
‘Ah,’ said the doctor, still tapping at his keyboard, ‘something coming up here, I think. Ah yes – it says here that you have developed a recent compulsion to enter competitions.’
Jonny Hooker looked up from his salad, a spring onion stuck between his lips like a green cigarette. ‘What?’ he mumbled, with his mouth full.
‘You are apparently trying to crack the Da-da-de-da-da Code. What would that be all about, then?’
Jonny Hooker’s jaw hung slack.
‘That’s not a very good look,’ said Dr Archy. ‘I think you should swallow before you open your mouth like that.’
Jonny munched and then swallowed. ‘That is on your computer?’ he asked. ‘That I have entered a competition? But I haven’t done it officially. I have decided to do so, that’s all.’
‘I told you that you’d be surprised by what’s on here. You do look surprised.’
‘I’m amazed,’ said Jonny. ‘And also rather concerned.’
‘Why so?’
‘Because—’ Jonny paused before saying more. Indeed, he now intended to say no more. He knew full well, because. Because it meant that he had been ‘observed’, ‘listened in to’. That he was under surveillance. How else could that piece of information about himself be on the doctor’s computer?
‘Because?’ said Dr Archy.
‘Nothing,’ said Jonny. ‘Do you think I might have a look at this computer entry about myself?’
‘Not permitted, I’m afraid,’ said Dr Archy.
‘No, I rather thought not.’
Jonny forked the last of his salad into his mouth and munched upon it. Plastic knife and fork, he noted. No weapon potential there. Dr Archy smiled towards Jonny. Jonny smiled back at the doctor.
And then Jonny leapt from his chair, paper plate and cup of juice all spilling to the floor. He swung the computer monitor around. The screen was blank. The computer wasn’t switched on.
And Jonny cocked his head on one side and smiled at the doctor. And then swung his fist with a good wide swing and clocked that doc full-face. And the doctor fell back in a flurry of case notes.
And Jonny leapt out of the window.
8
Jonny Hooker awoke with a head full of noise.
A head full of noise and a very damp constitution.
He blinked in the daylight and took in the leaves and the grass and the sky and the hedgehog. The hedgehog sidled away and Jonny clasped at his naked arms and felt a little confused.
Slowly, but shuffled and dealt as if playing cards, memories of the previous evening returned to him. Jonny sorted these memories into their separate suits.
The Special Wing of the hospital. Nurse Hollywood. The padded cell. Nurse Cecil. The interview with Dr Archy. Dr Archy’s knowledge of Jonny’s doings. Jonny’s escape through the window. A horrid chase up the Ealing Road. The outrunning of his pursuers. The scaling of the gates of Gunnersbury Park. The hiding out in the mulberry bush.
The waking up in the morning now, all damp, in the mulberry bush.
And a head full of noise, noise, noise.
‘Da-da-de-da-da! Da-da-de-da-da! Da-da-de-da-da!’
‘Stop it!’ shouted Jonny, and he pressed his fists to his temples. Then, ‘Keep it down,’ he told himself. ‘But stop with the “da-dade-da-das”.’
‘Would you prefer a couple of fol-de-rols and a twiddly-diddly-de?’ asked Mr Giggles the Monkey Boy. ‘This is rather rubbish accommodation, even for you.’
‘The drugs have worn off, then,’ said Jonny Hooker, ‘and I am cursed once more with you.’
‘And you should be glad to have me. See the trouble you get yourself into when you’re on your own? Medication and a padded cell and a nice plate of salad for your supper.’
‘I escaped,’ said Jonny. ‘I didn’t need your help. And it was all your fault that I ended up there in the first place. Drowning child? There was no drowning child!’
‘You saw the drowning child with your own eyes.’
‘We both know that I cannot trust the evidence of my own eyes.’
‘I suspect that you’re being personal again. But no matter. It’s a beautiful day – how do you plan that we spend it?’
Jonny Hooker made an exasperated face. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m wearing nothing but a hospital smock. I am officially an escaped mental patient. They’ll have my picture in the papers and on the news.’
‘You’d better keep your head down, then. That would be my advice.’
‘Oh, sound advice, thank you very much.’
‘I do detect a certain tone in your voice.’
‘I’m starving,’ said Jonny. ‘I’m starving and I’m freezing to death.’
‘Then you must be fed and warmed. My advice would be to hide out here in the park until things calm down a bit. Back in the days when Sir Henry Crawford owned the mansion here, he employed an ornamental hermit to adorn the grounds. The hermit was allowed a Bible for his spiritual sustenance and access to the kitchen garden for vegetables, which he was required to consume raw. He wore a rabbit-skin surcoat and boots made from bark and—’
‘Please be quiet,’ said Jonny. ‘I have no wish to live the life of a hermit, ornamental or otherwise.’
‘You were pretty much a hermit anyway. Living rough and foraging for your own food will be character-building. And you know what they say: a healthy body makes a healthy minefield.’
Jonny had long ago given up on the thankless task of taking a swing at Mr Giggles. ‘Perhaps,’ said he, ‘I will just return to the hospital. The bed was comfy enough and I’m sure I could come to some arrangement with Nurse Cecil that would involve me being fed at regular intervals.’
‘A tree house,’ said Mr Giggles.
‘What?’
‘You could build a tree house, here in the park, high up a tree and camouflaged. And there’s loads of fish in the ornamental pond. You could catch fish at night. And you could rig up ropes between the trees, swing from one to another, like Tarzan.’
Jonny had always liked Tarzan.
‘I’ve always liked Tarzan,’ he said.
‘Really?’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Fancy that.’
‘No,’ said Jonny. ‘Not a tree house. Although, perhaps … I wonder what time it is.’
And, as if in answer to his question, the distant clock on the spire of St Mary’s chimed the seventh hour.
‘I have an idea,’ said Jonny.
The park rangers’ hut was nothing much to look at from the outside. It was one of those horrid Portakabin affairs, of the variety that working men rejoice to inhabit on building sites. There is always the suggestion about such huts that dark and sinister things go on inside them.*
The park rangers’ hut lurked behind trees to the north of Gunnersbury House. The trees were many and various. There were the standard oak, ash and elm, sycamore and horse chestnut, but this being Gunnersbury Park, a park which, it must be said, had, over the years, been owned and landscaped and planted and tended by one rich weirdo after another, some of the trees that prettified the place were of the ‘odd’ persuasion. You don’t see moosewood every day – well, not hereabouts anyhow – nor too much in the way of monkey puzzle. And there were sequoias, cornels, dogwoods, ilex, sal and Papuan minge trees, in considerable abundance.
The monkey puzzle having been planted during Princess Amelia’s residence, the minge trees during that of Sir Henry Crawford. Who, being a member of the aristocracy, was never averse to a bit of minge in his ornamental garden.
Jonny drew Mr Giggles’ attention to the monkey puzzle tree.
Mr Giggles pointedly ignored it.
The park rangers’ hut was locked.
‘You’ll have to smash a window,’ said Mr Giggles. r />
‘Which is where you are wrong,’ said Jonny, and he rooted around and about the door. Presently he upturned a flowerpot to disclose the keys that were hidden beneath. ‘Nice as ninepence,’ said Jonny.
‘What?’
Jonny opened up the door and had a peep within. ‘Splendid,’ he was heard to say, and he made his way inside.
And presently, at a time not too far distant from his entrance, Jonny Hooker emerged from the park rangers’ hut wearing the uniform, cap and boots of a Gunnersbury park ranger. ‘How about that?’ he said to Mr Giggles.
‘Positively inspired,’ said the Monkey Boy. ‘Now I suggest that you run like the wind before the real park rangers arrive.’
‘No,’ said Jonny. ‘I won’t.’
‘They will catch you and bring you to book.’
‘They won’t.’
‘They gave you a pretty sound walloping when they dragged you out of the pond.’
‘They won’t recognise me,’ said Jonny.
‘What?’
So how exactly does it work, or rather why does it not? You can go into that shop week after week, month after month, and get served by the same person, or be on the same bus every day and have your ticket clipped by the same bus conductor. But pass the shop assistant or the conductor in the street, when they are out of uniform and not in the environment that you have come to associate them with …
And you don’t recognise them!
What is that all about?*
But whatever it is all about, it works the other way round.
Put someone you know well into a uniform and you hardly recognise them. Freaky, isn’t it?
‘So your theory is that you will not be recognised because you are wearing a uniform?’ said Mr Giggles.
‘In as many words,’ said Jonny. ‘Although, of course, I do not recall uttering any to that effect.’
Jonny dusted down the sleeves of his uniform and squared up his shoulders. The uniform fitted him rather well, and it rather suited him, too.
‘I think I cut something of a dash,’ said he.
‘It’s a shame the Village People split up,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘You’d have looked right at home amongst them. So much the bum-bandit, you look.’