East of Ealing

19

Old Pete thrust his wrinkled hand beneath the shining plexiglass counter-shield of the sub-post office. The dark young man now serving behind the jump did not remove his minuscule headphones but merely nodded as he passed the electronic light-wand across the ancient’s palm. He punched a few details into the computer terminal and awaited the forthcoming readout. Upon its arrival he raised a quizzical eyebrow towards the pensioner and said, “There appears to be some discrepancy here, sir. I suggest that you come back next week.”

Old Pete glared daggers at the dark young fellow-me-lad behind the tinted screen. “What damned discrepancy?” he demanded.

The young man sighed tolerantly. “The computer registers a discrepancy,” he said. “It states that for the last ten years you have been receiving two pensions each week. Such a thing could not, of course, happen now under the new advanced system. But with the old Giro, well who knows? We shall just have to resubmit the data and await a decision.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Well, computer time is valuable, you are allotted six seconds weekly; we will see what happens when your turn comes around again.”

“And in the meantime?” foamed Old Pete. “Do you mean that until your filthy electronic box of tricks gives you the go-ahead I am penniless?”

“The word ‘penniless’ no longer applies. It is simply that, pending investigations, your credit is temporarily suspended. You must understand that this is for the public good. We are trying to institute the new system hereabouts in a manner that will cause minimum civil unrest.”

“You’ll get maximum civil unrest if I don’t get my damned pensions, I mean, pension!” Young Chips growled in agreement and bared his fangs.

“Next customer, please,” the dark young man said.

“Hold hard,” cried Old Pete raising his stick. “I want to speak to the manager.”

“This branch no longer has a manager, sir, but an operator, fully conversant, I hasten to add, with all current trends in new technology.”

“A pox upon your technology. Who do I see about my pension?”

“Well you might fill in a form which we will forward in due course to Head Office, requesting a manual systems over-ride, although the procedure is somewhat archaic and extremely lengthy.”

“Then I’ll go up to your Head Office and speak with them.”

The dark young man laughed malevolently. “One does not simply go up to Lateinos and Romiiths and speak to them. Whoever heard of such a thing?” He smirked towards his assistant, who tittered behind her hand and turned up her eyes.

“Oh don’t they, though?” snarled Old Pete, grinding upon his dentures and rapping his Penang-lawyer upon the plexiglass screen. “Well, we’ll see about that.” With Chips hard on his down-at-heels, the ancient departed the sub-post office, walking for once without the aid of his stick.

Ahead, where once had been only bombsite land, the Lateinos and Romiith building rose above Brentford, a dark and accusing finger pointing towards the enclosed triangle of grey-troubled sky. Sixty-six floors of black lustreless glass, swallowing up the light. Within its cruel and jagged shadow magnolias wilted in their window-boxes and synthetic gold-top became doorstep cheese. It was not a thing of beauty but there was a terrible quality of a joyless for ever about it. High upon the uppermost ramparts, amid the clouds, tiny figures came and went, moving at a furious pace, striving to increase its height. Never had there been a Babel tower more fit for the tumbling, nor a fogey more willing to take on the task.

Old Pete rounded the corner into Abaddon Street and glowered up at the sheer glass monolith. “Progress,” he spat, rattling his ill-fitting dentures. “A pox on it all.” His bold stride suddenly became a hobble once more as he passed into the bleak shadow of the imperious building and sought the entrance. A faceless wall met his limited vision. Another painful hundred yards, a further corner, and another blank wall of featureless glass. “Damned odd,” wheezed the ancient to his dog as he plodded onwards once more. The entrance to the building could only be in the High Street. To Old Pete’s utter disgust and still increasing fury, it was not.

He now stood leaning upon his cane beneath the night-black structure, puffing and blowing and cursing loudly whenever he could draw sufficient breath. There was simply no way in or out of the building, not a doorway, not an entrance, not a letter-box or a nameplate, nothing. Young Chips cocked his furry head upon one side and peered up at his ancient master. The old boy suddenly looked very fragile indeed. The snow-capped head shook and shivered, and beneath the frayed cuffs of his one suit, the gnarled and knobby hands with their blue street-maps of veins knotted and reknotted themselves into feeble fists. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” snarled Old Pete, still undefeated. Once more raising his stick and this time striking at the dead-black wall towering towards infinity. The blow did not elicit a sound and this raised the ancient’s fury to cardiac arrest level. Pummelling for all he was worth he retraced his steps and staggered back towards Abaddon Street.

As the aged loon lurched along, raining blows upon the opaque glass, a hidden probe, shielded from his vision, moved with him, scanning his every movement. Digesting and cataloguing the minutiae that made up Old Pete. Through an advanced form of electro-carbon dating it penetrated the bone rings of his skull and accurately calculated his age to five decimal places. Its spectroscopic intensifiers analysed the soil samples beneath his fingernails and generated graphs which were no matters for jest. Fluoroscopes X-rayed his lower gut and ruminated upon the half-digested lunchtime pork pies, which contained no traces of pork whatever. The probe swept into the fabric of his wartime shirt, illuminating a thousand hidden laundry marks and cross-indexed them. It moved down to his underpants and hurriedly retraced its metaphorical footsteps to areas above belt-level. It checked out the tweed of his jacket, measured the angles of the lapels and, through numerous esoteric calculations, tracked down the suit’s manufacture to a Wednesday in a long hot summer prior to the Great War. The computer banks gulped it all down and gorged themselves upon the feast of data; gurgled with delight and dug in ever more deeply in search of further toothsome morsels. They entered secretly into his head and chewed upon his brain cells, ravenously seeking the possibility of electron particle variabilities in the codex of his cerebellum.

Within.666 of a second they had done with their main course and were seeking a mangey-looking half-terrier for afters. The read-out which followed, had it been broadcast in standard five-point lettering, would have formed an equation sufficient to engirdle the Earth several times around. Summing up, the computer pronounced Old Pete a harmless loony and no threat to security. It did, however, suggest that certain discrepancies existed regarding multiple payment of pensions in the past and that the data relating to this would require a prolonged period to assess accurately. It refused to comment on Young Chips, offering only a cryptic remark that the wearing of flea collars should be made compulsory.

Old Pete finally gave up his unequeal struggle and limped off down the street effing and blinding for all he was worth. Young Chips lifted his furry leg contemptuously on to the dull black-glass wall and skipped off after his master. The Lateinos and Romiith mainframe filed away Old Pete’s vitals and beamed a triplicate copy of the now completed programme to the bio-gene constructional workshop, twenty-six storeys below. The probe moved up once more to the building’s roof and turned itself to more pressing business. Included amongst a billion or so other tiny matters which required attention was the removal from this plane of existence of a certain local Professor and his unclassifiable house-guest.

The sensory scanner criss-crossed the triangle of streets and houses, prying and probing. The X-ray eye of the great machine penetrated each dwelling, highlighting the plumbing pipes and television tubes. The house-owners were tiny red blotches moving to and fro, going about their business unaware that all was revealed to the voyeurist machine which lurked above their heads. The data whirred into the computer banks, but at intervals the motors flicked and whined as a patch of impenetrable white light appeared on the screen. As the macroscope focused upon the area of disturbance and intensified its gaze, the area revealed itself to be a large house and garden set upon the historic Butts Estate. The data retrieval cross-locators coughed and spluttered, fruitlessly seeking a snippet of relevant information, but none was to be found. The white patch glared on the screen, the missing piece of a great jigsaw. The best the print-out could come up with was “Insufficient data, scan penetration negative, over-ride and re-submit.”