The Brentford Triangle

10

Small Dave peeled open a packet of frozen filet mignon amoureuse and oozed it into the cankerous baking tray which had served his family for several generations. Turning the enamel oven up to regulo six, he popped the gourmet’s nightmare on to a vacant shelf and slammed shut the door. This having been done to his satisfaction, the dwarfish postman slouched over to his sawn-down armchair and flung himself into it. He was not a happy man.

It is a sad fact that those unfortunates amongst us who are born lacking certain vital parts, or possess others to over-abundance, have good cause to bear grievance regarding their lots in life. Those blessed with the lucky humpty back, those who perpetually bump their heads upon the undersides of road bridges, or are capable of walking beneath bar stools without stooping, tend to feel that the gods have dealt with them rather shabbily.

Small Dave was one of this unhappy crew and he played the thing up for all it was worth. He took kindness for pity, the friendly word for the cutting jibe, and spent his days making life miserable for a community which would gladly have taken him as one of its own had he given it half a chance. When it came to having the old chip on the shoulder the little postman was in a class by himself. The arguments that many a famous man had been well below average height and that it wasn’t a man’s height that mattered, it was what he had in his heart, fell upon very deaf ears. Small Dave had resolved that if it stood taller than four feet and walked about, he hated it.

He was not exactly Mr Popular in Brentford. In fact, in a parish which tolerated almost every kind of eccentricity, he managed to achieve some notoriety.

This pleased his contemporaries, for, after all, they had wasted a lot of breath trying to convince him that you didn’t have to be tall to be famous. Now they felt a lot less conscience-stricken about hating the vindictive, grudge-bearing wee bastard.

Small Dave dug his pointed nails into the chair’s ragged arms and looked up at the clock. Nearly midnight, nearly time to get this camel business sorted out good and proper. He had been made to look very foolish this day, but he would have his revenge. Rising from his chair and setting flame to his acorn pipe, he paced the threadbare carpet, emitting plumes of sulphurous herbal smoke. At intervals he raised his fists towards heaven and at others he took to bouts of violent hand flapping.

At length the china Alsatian mantelclock struck the witching hour and Small Dave ceased his manic pacing. Striking one diminutive fist into the palm of its opposite number, he lurched from the room as if suddenly dragged forward by the ethereal cord which binds body and soul together. Up the staircase he went at a goodly pace, across a lino-covered landing, and up to the doorway of what estate agents laughingly refer to as the Master Bedroom.

Here he halted, breathing heavily, further hasty progress rendered impossible by the nature of the room’s contents. It was literally filled with books. How the floor of the room was capable of supporting such a load was a matter for debate, but that the room contained what surely would have been sufficient to overstock an average public library was beyond doubt. The books cramming the open doorway formed a seemingly impenetrable barrier.

Small Dave looked furtively around, then withdrew a long key which he wore on a leather thong about his neck. Stooping, he found the hidden keyhole and swung open a tiny concealed door, formed from dummy bookbacks. With a curious vole-like snuffling, he dropped to all fours and scampered into the opening. The door of books swung silently shut behind him, leaving no trace of its presence.

Inside the room of books, Small Dave penetrated a tortuous labyrinth of tiny tunnels which were of his own creating. Deeper and deeper into the books he went, to the room’s very core, where he finally emerged into a central chamber. It was a chamber wrought with exact precision into the interior of a perfect pyramid, aligned to the four cardinal points and fashioned from the choicest leather-bound volumes of the entire collection.

Within this extraordinary bower, illuminated by the room’s original naked fly-specked bulb, were ranged an array of anomalous objects. A low dais surmounted by a single velvet cushion, a crystal, a milk bottle containing joss sticks, a framed picture of Edgar Allan Poe and a lone sprout under a glass dome.

Small Dave scrambled on to the velvet cushion and closed his eyes. The spines of the books stared down upon him, a multi-coloured leathern brickwork. He knew that he could never remove a single volume, for fear of premature burial, but as he had read every book in the room several times over and had memorized all by heart he had little need ever to consult them. His knowledge of the books transcended mere perusal and absorption of their printed words. He sought the deeper truths, and to do so it was necessary for him to consort with their very author. For if it was strange that such a chamber should exist and that such a collection of books should exist, then it was stranger still that each was the work of one single author: Edgar Allan Poe.

It was certain that if any of the Swan’s patrons, who knew only Dave the postman while remaining totally unaware of Dave the mystic, had viewed this outré sanctum, they would have been forced to re-evaluate their views regarding his character. If they had witnessed the man who even now sat upon the dais, hands locked into the lamaic posture of meditation and legs bent painfully into a one-quarter lotus, they would have overwhelmingly agreed that the term vindictive, grudge-bearing wee bastard hardly applied here. Here it was more the case of vindictive, grudge-bearing wee lunatic bastard being a bit nearer the mark.

Small Dave began to whistle a wordless mantra of his own invention. His eyes were tightly closed and he swayed gently back and forth upon his cushion.

He had come to a decision regarding this camel business. He would ask help from the master himself, from the one man who had all the answers, old EAP. After all, had he not invented Dupin, the original consulting detective, and hadn’t that original consulting detective been a dwarf like himself? Certainly Poe, who Dave had always noted with satisfaction was a man of less than average height, hadn’t actually put it down in black and white, but all the implications were there. Dupin could never have noticed that body stuffed up the chimney in Murders of the Rue Morgue, if he hadn’t been a little short-changed in the leg department.

Small Dave screwed up his eyes and thought “Sprout”. It was no easy matter. Ever since he had first become a practising member of the Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout he had experienced quite a problem in coming to terms with the full potential power of that wily veg. His guru, one Reg Fulcanelli, a greengrocer from Chiswick, had spent a great deal of valuable time instructing Dave in the way of the sprout, but the wee lad simply did not seem to be grasping it. “Know the sprout and know thyself,” Reg had told him, selecting a prime specimen from his window display and holding it up to the light. “The sprout is all things to all men. And a law unto itself. Blessings be upon it.”

Small Dave had peered around the crowded greengrocery, wondering at the mountain of sprout sacks, the caseloads and boxfuls cramming every corner. “You have an awful lot here,” he observed.

“You can’t have too much of a good thing,” the perfect master had snapped. “Do you want two pound of self-enlightenment or do you not?”

Small Dave hadn’t actually reached the point of self-enlightenment as yet, but Reg had assured him that these things take a good deal of time and a great many sprouts.

Dave contorted his face and rocked ever harder. Ahead of him in the blackness beneath his eyelids the mental image of the sprout became clearer, growing and growing until it appeared the size of the room. Reg had explained that to ascend to the astral, one had to enter the sprout and become at one with it. When one had reached this state of cosmic consciousness all things were possible.

A bead of perspiration rolled down to the end of Dave’s upturned nose. He could almost smell the sprout, it was so real, but he did not seem to be getting anywhere with the astral travelling side of it. He took a deep breath and prepared himself for one really hard try.

Downstairs in Small Dave’s ancient enamel oven the now unfrozen filet mignon amoureuse was beginning to blacken about the edges. Soon the plastic packets of sauce which he had carelessly neglected to remove from the foil container would ignite causing an explosion, not loud, but of sufficient force to spring the worn lock upon the oven’s door and spill the burning contents on to the carpet. The flames would take hold upon a pile of Psychic News and spread to the length of net curtain which Small Dave had been meaning to put up properly for some weeks.

Small Dave, however, would remain unconscious of this until the conflagration had reached the point which sets schoolboys dancing and causes neighbours from a safe distance to bring out chairs and cheerfully await the arrival of the appliances.

It is interesting to note that, although these things had not as yet actually come to pass, it could be stated with absolute accuracy that they would most certainly occur. That such could be so accurately predicted might in a way, it is to be supposed, argue greatly in favour of such things as precognition and astral projection.

Small Dave would argue in favour of the latter, because by some strange freak of chance, while his physical self sat in a state of complete ignorance regarding its imminent cremation, his astral body now stood upon a mysterious cloudy plane confronting the slightly transparent figure of a man in a Victorian garb with an oversized head and narrow bow tie.

“Mr Poe?” the foggy postman enquired. “Mr Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Small Dave?” said that famous author. “You took your time getting here.” He indicated something the ethereal dwarf clutched in his right hand. “Why the sprout?” he asked.