Snuff Fiction

18

I worked for a full ten years at Castle Doveston.

Ten bloody years it took me doing it up. And when I had finally finished my labours, the Doveston drew my attention to some of the first rooms I’d decorated and remarked that they were now looking somewhat shabby and would I mind just giving them another lick of paint.

I did mind and I told him so. I had my conservatory to get started on and I felt I could use a holiday.

Mind you, I’m not saying that my years at Castle Doveston weren’t fun. In fact I’m prepared to say that they were some of the happiest years of my life. During those years I must have taken every conceivable drug and indulged in every conceivable form of sexual deviation known to man and beast. There was even some talk of naming a brand of iodine after me.

And I did get to meet the rich and famous. I got to watch them engaging in the bad behaviour that their status afforded them. And if I wasn’t there to witness it in person, I could always watch it on video the following day.

My video library became a bit of a legend in Brentford and I derived a great deal of pleasure from standing in the saloon bar of the Flying Swan, listening to conversations about the rumoured sexual peccadillos of film stars, before chipping in that I had them captured on tape doing worse. I never charged for private screenings, although I made a fair bit of money from marketing bootleg copies.

I should never have sent that compilation tape off to You’ve Been Framed though.

The vice squad did me for Possession of Pornographic material. Another two Ps there, you notice. But the case never came to court. The Doveston’s influence saw to that. His video library was far bigger than mine, with its own special magistrates’ section. And anyway, he was by now so hand in glove with the government that all his employees carried diplomatic immunity. Which meant that we could behave very badly and park on double yellow lines.

It was during this period, of course, that the Doveston became world famous. He had been rich and powerful for years, but he really got off on the fame.

It was the snuff that did it. The Doveston designer snuff

The Nineties, you see, were no laughing matter. These were the years of PC. Political Correctness. For which you can read TYRANNY. People were urged into giving things up. They gave up having casual sex. They gave up eating meat.

They gave up smoking!

They didn’t want to, but they did. The Secret Govermnent of the World decreed it and it was so. And where people had to be urged that little bit harder, they were. We all know now that AIDS and BSE were not the products of nature. They were engineered. But when it came to smoking, the approach was far more subtle.

The scare stories that smoking was actually bad for your health were never going to work. No-one in his or her right mind would ever believe such nonsense. So the Secret Government saw to it that smoking was banned in public places. You could no longer smoke in certain restaurants, in cinemas, in art galleries, in theatres and shops and schools and swiniming pools. Smoking was forbidden.

BUT NOT SO THE TAKING OF SNUFF.

It was almost as if he had seen it coming. Almost as if— perhaps —he’d had a hand in it. He had extensive tobacco plantations by now, in several Third World countries, along with his estates in Virginia. And was it really a coincidence that at a time when he was opening up trade with China, a vast and lucrative market which would surely swallow up everything he could produce, that smoking was suddenly being actively discouraged in the West?

And you see, the thing about snuff is that it can be produced cheaply from the dried end leaves of tobacco that are not of sufficient quality to use in cigarettes. Every plantation finds itself each year with a surplus of this stuff It’s usually just mulched up for fertilizer.

Aha! I hear you cry, the rat is smelled. But what about Political Correctness as a whole? Surely it wasn’t just a callous hoax, played upon a gullible public for motives of profit alone?

Well sorry, my friends, I’m afraid it was. The fear of AIDS led to the abandoning of casual unprotected sex. Shares in condom companies boomed. The fear of BSE led people to give up eating meat and eat more vegetables. Shares in agri-chemical companies boomed. And so on and so forth and suchlike.

No matter what you gave up in the cause of PC, it benefited some rich bugger somewhere.

So what about that snuff?

The first TV commercial was a masterpiece. It featured an actress from one of the popular ‘soaps’. Normally it is written into the contracts of such actresses that they cannot appear in commercials. Except, of course, if the soap itself is sponsored by the makers of the very product that is being advertised. And when the product is ‘the healthy PC alternative to smoking’, where could be the harm in it?

It was the very first TV commercial for a branded product ever shown on the BBC.

And the range of fashion accessories that went with the product! The snuffbox jewellery, the pendants and necklaces, bracelets and brooches. The cufffinks, the hipflasks, the snuff-dispensing pens. All, of course, with their distinctive Gaia logo. What could possibly be more PC?

But for all the design and the promo and bullshit, what of the product itself? Was the snuff any good? Did it smell nice? Did it give you a buzz? Remember, you had to stick this stuff up your hooter and the taking of snuff had formerly been regarded as solely within the province of dirty old men.

Well, come on now, what do you think?

It was bloody marvellous. It smelled like Heaven and set you right up for the day.

It came in fifty different blends, each the product of years of research and development. And he’d left nothing to chance. He had trademarked the name Doveston’s Snuff Which is to say that he had not only trademarked his own name, but the word ‘snuff too. How he did it is anyone’s guess, although I have a few of my own. And what it meant was that no rival could use the word ‘snuff on their product. And there were to be many rivals. Any good idea spawns imitators and I still own in my private collection a packet of Virgin Sniffing Mixture.

It never caught on.

The Doveston began to make his first public appearances: on talk shows, at world premières, society functions and fight nights. He was a natural raconteur and the camera loved him. He would turn up on Newsnight, discussing ‘Green Issues’, and on Blue Peter, demonstrating how you could make a snuffbox for Mummy out of sticky-backed plastic and Fairy Liquid bottles with their names blacked out.

He appeared on the covers of trendy magazines and it wasn’t long before photographers from Hello! were given the secret password to get them through the gates of Castle Doveston.

And it wasn’t too long after that that the first piece of shit hit the wildly whirling fan. Some stills from a video recording found their way into the hands of a Sunday tabloid journalist. The joyful journalist passed these on to his editor. The elated editor passed on the news that he intended publication to the Doveston. The Doveston apparently then told him to publish and be damned.

Or so the story goes. Some, who are better informed, tell it that the words used were actually: you ‘Il be damned before you publish. If these were the very words used, then they were uncannily prophetic, for the editor died the following day, in a freak accident involving his car-exhaust pipe and a stick of dynamite.

The incriminating photographs went up with him. Or should that be down, in the case of the damned?

But the brown stuff always sticks and even as the Doveston was making his way to Buck House to receive his OBE ‘For Services to the British People’ from his grateful monarch, queues of young women were forming outside the offices of the nation’s press, each of these young women being eager to offer details, in exchange for nothing more than large sums of money, of how the man they now called the Sultan of Snuff had tried to coerce them into giving him blow-jobs, or got them to do rude things with cigars.[9]

And it seemed that every miffed ex-employee, or indeed anyone who had ever known the Doveston, had some lurid story they wanted to sell. Even Chico’s now-aged aunty, who still ran the ever-popular House of Correction in Brentford, came forward with a ludicrous yarn about the young Doveston sexually molesting her pet chicken and running off with her favourite teapot.

But all publicity is good publicity and if you are very very rich it doesn’t matter what the tabloids print about you. Or even how true it might be. You sue and you win and the public loves you for it. And the damages make you even richer.

Mind you, there were moments when things got mighty dangerous. Someone — and it might very well have been the same someone who sent the video stills to the tabloid — someone tipped off a prominent investigative TV journalist that the British government was funding the importation of narcotics and that the Doveston was acting as middle man and taking one per cent of the profits.

It chills my very soul today when I recall the ghastly details of the freak accident which took that TV journalist from us. May his tortured body rest in peace.

But oh, I hear you say, enough of this. Relevant as all these details are and necessary to the telling of the tale, we really do want to get on with the guts and the gore.

Well, all right all right all right. I can beat about the beaver no longer, the story must be told and only I can tell it. The real guts and gore and the madness and mayhem occurred at the Great Millennial Ball.

Held at Castle Doveston, this was to be the social occasion of the century. Anyone who was anyone had been invited and anyone who wasn’t wasn’t getting in.

Evidently I wasn’t anyone, because I hadn’t received an invitation. The first I heard about the ball was when Norman told me about the costume he was working on that ‘would really impress the ladies’.

Norman had just returned from the balloon trip. What balloon trip? Well, the one the Doveston had organized for his closest friends to rise above the clouds over the English Channel and view the total eclipse of the sun.

What total eclipse? The one that the rich people watched and we didn’t. That’s what!

‘Good, was it?’ I asked Norman.

‘Bloody brilliant. You should have been there. Mind you, it fair put the wind up the Doveston. He’s expecting the end of the world as we know it. He seemed quite certain that the eclipse was a sign. A portent in the heavens. He wee-wee’d himself. In front of the Prime Minister.’

‘I’ll bet that made you laugh.’

‘Of course it didn’t. Well, it did, a bit. Well, quite a lot really. I nearly wee-wee’d myself, trying not to.’

‘So, he’s still as Richard as ever?’

‘Much more so. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘Four years. Ever since that business with the videos and the vice squad. He pays me a retainer, but I’m no longer welcome at Castle Doveston. I receive press packages, so that I can continue to work on the biography.’

‘And how is that coming along?’

I made the face that says ‘bollocks’.

‘I’ll get us another round in, shall I?’

As Norman went off to the bar, I looked around and about me. I was in the Flying Swan, that drinking house of legend. No-one here had any plans to celebrate the millennium. They’d already done it. Last year. It had all been down to a tradition, or an old charter, or something. I’d missed it, but I’d heard tell that it had been quite an occasion. Second coming of Christ and everything. Norman had put on the firework display. I wondered if he would be doing the same for the Doveston’s bash.

‘Tell me all about this ball, then,’ I said when he returned with the drinks.

‘Oh yes, I was telling you about my costume, wasn’t I?’

‘Something about a peacock, you said.’

‘Yes, that’s it, the peacock suit. It’s not a peacock costume, that would be just plain silly. It’s a peacock suit, as in peacock mating display. You see, the male peacock’s tail feathers serve no purpose whatsoever, other than for attracting a mate. Female peacocks get off on males with big tail feathers. They always have. So those are the ones they mate with and, in consequence, natural selection has meant that the males have evolved bigger and bigger tail feathers. So big now that the blighters can’t even get off the ground. Not that they’re bothered; they’re too busy having sex.

‘I’m sure there’s some point to this,’ I said. ‘But so far it’s lost on me.

‘Well,’ said Norman. ‘Imagine a human equivalent. A suit that a man could wear that would attract females.’

‘There already is one. It’s called a Paul Smith suit.’

‘I seem to recall that yours didn’t work very well.’

I took a wet from my glass. ‘Whatever happened to Jackie,’ I wondered.

‘Died in a freak accident, I think. Tragic business. But I’m not talking about a very expensive suit that turns some women on just because it is very expensive. I’m talking about a suit that turns all women on. I have designed such a suit and when I wear it to the ball, I shall be able to have the pick of any women I choose.’

‘That’s bollocks,’ I said. ‘That can’t be true.’

‘I seem to recall that you said the same thing about my invisible paint. And where did that leave you?’

‘In hospital,’ I said. ‘With fractured ribs.’

‘Well, it served you right. The next time someone comes driving straight at you in an invisible car, hooting the horn and shouting out of the window, “Get out of the way, the brakes have bloody failed,” you’ll know better than to stand your ground, shouting back, “You don’t fool me, it’s a sound effects record,” won’t you?’

‘Whatever happened to that car?’

‘Dunno,’ said Norman. ‘I can’t remember where I parked it.’

‘So this peacock suit of yours will really pull the women, will it?’

‘Listen,’ said Norman, drawing me close and speaking in a confidential tone. ‘I gave the prototype a road test in Sainsbury’s. I was lucky to get out alive. I’ve adjusted the controls on the new one.’

‘Controls? This suit has controls?’

‘It works on a similar principle to the Hartnell Home Happyfier. But I’ve decided to hang on to the patent this time. I intend to prove to the world that a man with mutton-chop side-whiskers and an Arthur Scargill comb-over job can actually get to have sex with a supermodel.’

‘Only by cheating.’

‘Everybody cheats at something. The problem is that I’m going to have to keep my suit on while I’m having sex.

‘How about a pair of split-crotch peacock underpants?’

‘Brilliant idea,’ said Norman. ‘And to think that everybody says you’re stupid.’

‘Eh?’

Our conversation here was interrupted by a shout of: ‘It’s that bastard on the telly again.’ Knowing full well that the Swan did not have a television, or a jukebox, or a digital telephone, I was somewhat surprised by this shout. But sure enough, it was some out-borough wally with a tiny TV attached to his mobile phone.

Norman and I helped Neville the part-time barman heave this malcontent into the street. But while we were so doing, I chanced to glimpse the tiny screen and on it the face of the bastard in question.

It was the Doveston.

The photograph was only a still and one taken some years before. A publicity photo, of the type he liked to sign and give out to people. The voice of a mid-day newscaster tinkled from the tiny TV. The voice was saying something about a freak accident.

The voice was saying that the Doveston was dead.