East of Ealing

4

The part-time barman finished the last of his toast and patted about his lips with a red gingham napkin. He leaned back in his chair and rested his palms upon his stomach. He felt certain that he was putting on weight. A thin man from birth, tall, gaunt, and scholar-stooped, Neville had never possessed a single ounce of surplus fat. But recently it seemed to him that his jackets were growing ever more tight beneath the armpits, and that the lower button on his waistcoat was becoming increasingly more difficult to secure. “Most curious,” said Neville, rising from his seat and padding over to the bathroom scales which were now a permanent fixture in the middle of the living-room floor. Climbing aboard, he peered down between his slippered toes. Eleven stone dead, exactly as it had been for the last twenty years. The part-time barman shook his head in wonder, it was all very mysterious. Perhaps the scales were wrong, gummed up with carpet fluff or something. He’d let Norman give them the once-over. Or perhaps it was the dry cleaners? Things never seemed quite right there since that big combine bought old Tom Telford out. Possibly this new lot were having a pop at him. Putting an extra tuck in the seat of his strides every time he put them in for their monthly hose down. Most unsporting that, hitting a lad below the belt.

Neville laughed feebly at his unintended funny, but really this was no laughter matter. Taking out the tape measure, which now never left his person, he stretched it about his waist. All seemed the same. Possibly it was simply a figment of his imagination. Possibly he was going mad. The thought was never far from his mind nowadays. Neville shuddered. He would just have to pull himself together.

Sighing deeply, he shuffled away to the bedroom to dress. Flinging off his silken dressing-gown he took up the rogue trousers from where they hung in their creases over the chair and yanked them up his legs. With difficulty he buttoned himself into respectability. They were definitely too tight for comfort, there was no point in denying it. Neville stooped for his socks but stopped in horror. The blood drained from his face and his good eye started from its socket; a nasty blue tinge crept about the barman’s lips. It was worse than he feared, far worse. His trouser bottoms were swinging about his ankles like flags at half-mast. He wasn’t only getting fatter, he was growing taller! Neville slumped back on to his bed, his face a grey mask of despair. It was impossible. Certainly folk could put on weight pretty rapidly, but to suddenly spring up by a good inch and a half overnight? That was downright impossible, wasn’t it?

Pooley and Omally strolled over the St Mary’s Allotments en route to John’s hut and the cup that cheers. Jim tapped his racing paper upon his leg and sought inspiration from the old enamel advertising signs along the way which served here and there as plot dividers. None was immediately forthcoming. The two threaded their way between the ranks of bean poles and waxed netting, the corrugated shanties, and zinc watertanks. They walked in single file along a narrow track through a farrowed field of broccoli and one of early flowering sprouts, finally arriving at the wicket fence and pleasant ivy-hung trelliswork that stood before Omally’s private plot. John parked his bicycle in its favourite place, took up his daily pinta, turned several keys in as many weighty locks, and within a few short minutes the two men lazed upon a pair of commandeered railway carriage seats, watching the kettle taking up the bubble on the Primus.

“There is a king’s ransom, I do hear, to be had out of the antique trade at present,” said John matter-of-factly.

“Oh yes?” Pooley replied without enthusiasm.

“Certainly, the junk of yesterday is proving to be the ob-ja-dart of today and the nestegg of tomorrow.” Omally rose to dump two tea bags into as many enamel mugs and top the fellows up with boiling water. “A veritable king’s ransom, ready for the taking. A man could not go it alone in such a trade, he would need a partner, of course.”

“Of course.”

“A man he could trust.” John put much emphasis upon the word as he wrung out the tea bags and added the cream of the milk to his own mug and a splash of the rest to Jim’s. “Yes, he would definitely want a man he could rely on.”

“I am convinced of that,” said Jim, accepting his mug. “A bit strong, isn’t it?”

“Antique bedding is currently the vogue amongst the trendies of Kensington, I understand,” John continued.

“Oh those bodies.”

“Yes, the fashionable set do be weeping, wailing, and gnashing its expensively-capped teeth for the lack of it.”

Pooley blew on to his tea. “Strange days,” said he.

John felt that he was obviously not getting his point across in quite the right way. A more direct approach was necessary. “Jim,” he said in a highly confidential tone. “What would you say if I was to offer you a chance of a partnership in an enterprise which would involve you in absolutely no financial risk whatever?”

“I would say that there is always a first time for everything, I suppose.”

“What if I was to tell you that at this very moment I know of where there is an extremely valuable antique lying discarded and unwanted which is ours for the taking, what would you say then?”

Jim sipped at his tea. “I would say to you then, Omally,” he said, without daring to look up, “dig the bugger out yourself.”

Omally’s eyebrows soared towards his flat cap.

Pooley simply pointed to an L-shaped tear in his own left trouser knee. “I passed along your path not half an hour before you,” he said simply.

“Your lack of enterprise is a thing to inspire disgust.”

“He that diggeth a pit will fall into it. Ecclesiasticus Chapter twenty-seven, verse twenty-six,” said Jim Pooley. “I am not a religious man as you well know, but I feel that the Scriptures definitely have it sussed on this point. A commendable try though.” Jim took out his cigarette packet from his top pocket and handed the Irishman a tailor-made.

“Thank you,” said Omally.

“Now, if you really have a wish to make a killing today -” John nodded enthusiastically, it was early yet and his brain was only just warming up to the daily challenge, “- I have seen something which has the potential to earn a man more pennies than a thousand buried bedframes. Something which a man can only be expected to witness once in a lifetime. And something of such vast financial potential that if a man was to see it and not take advantage of the experience, he should consider himself a soul lost for ever and beyond all hope.”

“Your words are pure music,” said John Omally. “Play on, sweet friend, play on.”

As Neville the part-time barman drew the polished brass bolts on the saloon-bar door and stood in the opening, sniffing the air, the clatter of two pairs of hobnail boots and the grating of rear mudguard upon back wheel announced the approach of a brace of regulars. One of these was a gentleman of Celtic extraction who had recently become convinced that the future lay in perpetual motion and its application to the fifth gear of the common bicycle. Neville installed himself behind the bar counter and closed the hinged counter top.

“God save all here,” said John Omally, pushing open the door.

“Count that double,” said Pooley, following up the rear.

Neville pushed a polished glass beneath the spout of the beer engine and drew upon the enamel pump handle. Before the patrons had hoisted themselves on to their accustomed barstools, two pints of Large stood brimming before them, golden brown and crystal clear. “Welcome,” said Neville.

“Hello once more,” said Omally, “Jim is in the chair.” Pooley smiled and pushed the exact amount of pennies and halfpennies across the polished counter top. Neville rang up “No Sale” and once more all was as it ever had been and hopefully ever would be in Brentford.

“How goes the game then, gentlemen?” Neville asked the patrons, already a third of the way through their pints.

“As ever, cruel to the working man,” said John. “And how is yourself?”

“To tell you the truth, a little iffy. In your personal opinion, John, how do I look to you?”

“The very picture of health.”

“Not a little puffy?” Neville fingered his middle regions.

“Not at all.”

“No hint of stoutness there? You can be frank with me, I have no fear of criticism.”

Omally shook his head and looked towards Jim. “You look fine,” said Pooley. “Are you feeling a bit poorly, then?”

“No, no.” Neville shook his head with vigour. “It’s just that, well…” he considered the two drinkers who surveyed him with dubious expressions. “Oh, nothing at all. I look all right you think? No higher, say, than usual?” Two heads swung to and fro upon their respective necks. “Best to forget it then, a small matter, do not let it spoil your ale.”

“Have no fear of that,” said John Omally.

The Swan’s door opened to admit the entry of an elderly gentleman and his dog. “Morning, John, Jim,” said Old Pete, sidling up to the bar. “Large dark rum please, Neville.” Neville took himself off to the optic.

“Morning, Pete,” said Pooley, “good day, Chips.” The ancient’s furry companion woofed non-committally. “Are you fit?”

“As well as can be expected. And how goes the sport for you? That Big One still lurking up beyond your frayed cuff?”

Pooley made a “so-so” gesture. “Inches, but…”

Old Pete accepted his drink from Neville and held up the glass to evaluate the exact volume of his measure before grudgingly pushing the correct change across the bar top. “So,” he continued, addressing himself to Omally, “and how fare the crops?”

“Blooming,” said Omally. “I expect a bumper harvest this year. Come the Festival. I expect several firsts and as many seconds in the Show.”

“King Teddies again then, is it?” Revered as the personification of all agricultural knowledge within a radius of an ’nth number of miles, Old Pete had little truck with potato growers.

“Nature’s finest food,” said John. “Was it not the spud which sustained the Joyces, the Wildes, the Behans and the Traynors? Show me a great man and I will show you a spud to his rear.”

“I have little regard for footballers,” said Old Pete. “If you were any kind of a farmer you would diversify your crops a little. I myself have fostered no fewer than five new varieties of sprout.”

Omally crossed himself and made a disgusted face. “Don’t even speak the word,” said he. “I cannot be having with that most despicable of all vegetables.”

“The sprout is your man,” intoned the old one. “Full of iron. A man could live alone upon a desert island all his life if he had nothing more than a few sprout seeds and bit of common sense.”

“A pox on all sprouts,” said John, crouching low over his pint. “May the black fly take the lot of them.”

Pooley was consulting his racing paper. Possibly there was a horse running whose name was an anagram of “sprout”. Such factors were not to be taken lightly when one was seeking that all elusive cosmic connection. The effort was quite considerable and very shortly Jim, like Dickens’s now legendary fat boy, was once more asleep. Neville made to take up the half-finished glass for the washer. With a sudden transformation from Dickens to Edgar Alien Poe, the sleeper awoke. “Not done here,” said Jim. “It’s Omally’s round.” Omally got them in.

“Let us speak no more of horticulture,” said John to Old Pete. “Your knowledge of the subject is legend hereabouts and I am not up to matching wits with you. Tell me something, do you sleep well of a night?”

“The sleep of the just, nothing else.”

“Then you must indeed have a cosy nest to take your slumbers in.”

“No, nothing much, a mattress upon a rough wooden pallet. It serves as it has since my childhood.”

Omally shook his head in dismay, “Longevity, as I understand it to be, is very much the part and parcel of good sleeping. Man spends one third of his life in bed. Myself a good deal more. The comfort of the sleeper greatly reflects upon his health and well being.”

“Is that a fact?” said Old Pete. “I have no complaints.”

“Because you have never experienced greater comfort. Take myself. You would take me for a man of thirty.”

“Never. Forty.”

Omally laughed. “Always the wag. But truthfully, I attribute my good health to the comfort afforded by my bed. There is a science in these things, and believe me, I have studied this particular science.”

“Never given the matter much thought,” said Old Pete.

“So much I suspected,” said John. “You, as an elderly gentleman, and by that I mean no offence, must first look after your health. Lying upon an uncomfortable bed can take years off your life.”

“As it happens, my old bed is a bit knackered.”

“Then there you have it.” Omally smacked his hands together. “You are throwing away your life for a few pennies wisely invested in your own interest.”

“I am a fool to myself,” said Old Pete, who definitely wasn’t. “What are you selling, John?”

Omally tapped at his nose, “Something very, very special. The proper palatial pit. The very acme of sleeping paraphernalia. Into my possession has come of late a bed which would stagger the senses of the gods. Now had I the accommodation I would truly claim such a prize for my own. But my apartments are small and I know that yours could easily house such a find. What do you say?”

“I’ll want to have a look at the bugger first, five-thirty p.m. tonight, here.”

Omally spat upon his palm and smacked it down into the wrinkled appendage of the elder. “Done,” said he.

“I’d better not be,” said Old Pete.

Omally drew his partner away to a side-table, “Now that is what you call business,” he told Jim. “The old bed is not even dug out, yet it is already sold.”

Pooley groaned; he could already feel the blisters upon his palms. “You are on to a wrong’n there,” he said. “This venture has to me the smell of doom about it. That is a bomb site you will be digging on. There will probably be a corpse asleep in that bed. Should bed it in fact be and not simply a shaft or two of nothing.”

Omally crossed himself at the mention of a corpse. “Stop with such remarks,” said he. “There is a day’s pay in this and as the digger you deserve half of anything I get.”

“And what about Norman’s wheel and the many millions to be made from that?”

“Well, we have no absolute proof that the wheel spins without cessation. This would be a matter for serious scientific investigation. Such things take time.”

“We have no lack of that, surely?”

“I will tell you what,” Omally finished his pint and studied the bottom of his glass. “I will chance your wheel if you will chance my bedframe.”

Pooley looked doubtful.

“Now be fair,” said John. “There are degrees of doubt to be weighed up on either side. Firstly, of course you cannot approach Norman, he knows that you are on to him. A third party must act here. Someone with a subtlety of approach. Someone gifted in such matters.”

“Someone such as yourself?”

“Good idea,” said John. “But time is of the essence, we don’t want any opportunists dipping in before us. When we leave here you collect a couple of tools from my plot and whip the bed out and I will go around to Norman’s.”

If Pooley had looked doubtful before, it was nought to the way he looked now. “I do not feel that I am getting the better part of this,” he said slowly.

“Better part?” Omally’s face was all outrage. “We are a business partnership are we not? There are no better parts involved here. Surely you are now sowing seeds of distrust?”

“Who, me? Perish the thought. The fact that I will be labouring away in a minefield digging up a rusty old bedframe while you stand chit-chatting in a cosy corner-shop had not crossed my mind.”

“So?”

Jim folded his brow. “Whose round is it?”

“Yours, Jim,” said John Omally, “most definitely yours.”