The Fandom of the Operator

16

“You bollard!” I shouted. “You gimping no-nads!”

But I wasn’t shouting at my daddy. I was shouting at Barry.

I was back in the bulb booth now and I was shouting at Barry.

Loudly.

And I was waving my arms about and making fists with my fingers.

Violently.

“You switched me off! You fugging switched me off!”

I shouted loudly as I waved my arms and made my fists. “You brusting swabster!”

“I’ve never heard such language,” said Barry, “and I did nothing of the kind. What are you talking about?”

“The bulb flashed on and you switched it off.”

“And you’re complaining about that?”

“Of course I’m complaining. You stupid bulb-monkey. You switched me off.”

“I do wish you’d calm down, man,” said Barry. “All this shouting is giving me a headache.”

I took Barry by the throat and shook him all about.

“Gggmmmuurgh …” went Barry, eyes popping out and face turning red.

“Upstairs,” I shouted. “Upstairs on the seventeenth floor. There’s this huge computer room thing and it’s all to do with frequencies and stuff. And there’s a telephone box and …”

“Mmphgrmm …” went Barry, face rather purple now.

“And you can dial up the dead. That’s what FLATLINE is. A hot line to the dead. And I was talking to my daddy and you switched off the bulb, you stupid … Barry, are you listening to me?”

But Barry’s face had gone rather blue.

I let him sink to the floor and I nudged him a bit in the ribs with the toe of my boot.

Barry took to coughing and gagging and curling into the foetal position.

“Are you listening to me?” I asked him once again.

“Yes, yes.” And Barry waved a limp-looking hand. “Don’t kick me any more.”

“I wasn’t kicking, I was nudging.”

“Then don’t nudge, please.” And Barry was sick on the floor.

Of my bulb booth.

My … I prepared to put the boot in some more, but halted my boot in mid swing. My bulb booth. Where the bulb-monkey sat. Of course it wasn’t Barry’s fault. What did he and I know? We knew nothing. We just switched the bulb off. But at least I now knew why.

“I’m sorry,” I said and I dragged Barry up and deposited him in the chair. “I’m sorry. I got a bit stressed there. Are you OK?”

“No,” spluttered Barry, feeling at his crumpled windpipe.

“Well, I’m sorry. But how would you feel? Talking to your dead father on the phone and someone cuts you off.”

“And I did that?” Barry looked up at me with eyes all red and tearful.

“That’s what the bulb does. Operatives up there are given three minutes to speak to a dead person of their choice. Then the bulb flashes here and we switch them off.”

“Why?” Barry managed to say.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I actually talked to my dead father.”

“Why?” went Barry once more.

“I just said that I don’t know.”

Barry coughed a bit more and wiped away some flecks of vomit from his mouth. “The second why meant: why did you talk to your father?”

“That’s a pretty stupid question, isn’t it?”

“Are you kidding?” said Barry, which had me rather confused.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“What I’m talking about” – Barry coughed a bit more – “what I’m talking about is: you had the chance to speak to the dead person of your choice and you chose to speak to your father. Why?”

“Eh?” I said.

“I mean, it didn’t cross your mind to speak to someone really special instead, such as …”

“Aaaagh!” I went, clapping my hands to my face.

“Such as P.P. Penrose,” said Barry. “That’s who I would have spoken to.”

“Aaaagh!” I went once more and I punched myself right in the face.

“Now that must have really hurt,” said Barry, as I struggled to pick myself up from the floor.

“You fell down in the vomit,” Barry continued and he laughed. Or tried to. Then he vomited some more.

“My God,” I said. I was up on my knees and rocking somewhat on them. “I could have spoken to Mr Penrose, but I chose to speak to my wretched father. What was I thinking of?”

“Perhaps you miss your dad,” was Barry’s suggestion.

“No, I fugging don’t.”

Barry shook his head painfully. “But this is really true?” he said. “That’s what they’re doing up there? Talking to the dead? I thought it was something to do with extraterrestrial life or some such toot. But it’s really the dead? This is incredible. This is unlike anything. This is really truly far-out, man. I mean, the dead. At the end of a phone line, the dead.”

“It’s the dead,” I said. “It’s really the dead.”

“Then I want a go. Lend me your white coat and your light bulb.”

“Stuff that,” I said. “You’re on duty. You do it in your own time.”

“What? And have you switch me off?”

I looked at the bulb and Barry looked at the bulb and then on some metaphysical level certain thoughts were exchanged.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Barry.

“If it’s what I’m thinking, then yes,” I said.

“I’m thinking chats with the dead,” said Barry. “Lots of chats with the dead and all a lot longer than three measly minutes.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding my head. “I’m up for that. But how and when?”

“Both easy,” said Barry. “After eleven, when they all go home.”

“Hold on,” I said. “They all go home after eleven? Does that mean that the bulb never flashes after eleven?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Barry. “I usually get my head down for some sleep after eleven. I have to be up bright and early in the morning. I have another job as a milkman. I’m saving up to be a millionaire.”

I made a fist, but I didn’t use it. “So Developmental Services closes at eleven?”

“It has as long as I’ve been working here. The bulb never flashes after eleven. In fact, there’s hardly anyone left in the building. That’s how I traced where the wire went. There’s only the night watchman and he just sits at the front desk reading nudie books.”

“All right,” I said. “After eleven it is.”

And so we waited until after eleven. We listened at the bulb-booth door as the technicians chatted and smoked before clocking off for the night. And then when all was still and quiet we left the bulb booth and took the lift to the seventeenth floor.

“It will all be locked up, won’t it?” I asked as we sidled up the corridor towards room 23.

Barry shrugged as he sidled. “Dunno,” he said. “I traced the wire up to this floor, but I never tried any of the doors. I was going to, but then” – he shrugged again – “I couldn’t be arsed. I was just so sure that it would be a terrible disappointment, so I didn’t bother.”

“Fair enough,” I said, although I wasn’t altogether convinced. We had reached the door to room 23, so I put my ear against it.

“Hear anything?” Barry asked.

I withdrew my ear and shook my head. And then I tried the handle. And the door was locked.

“Let’s kick it open,” said Barry. “Stuff it, who cares?”

“I do,” I said. “If we can get away with this without anyone knowing, we can do it every night.”

“Good point. Which leaves us stuffed. Unless you happen to know how to pick locks.”

I grinned at Barry. “Of course I do,” I said. “My friend Dave, who is a criminal by profession, taught me. All I need is a couple of paperclips.”

“No problem,” said Barry, producing them out of thin air.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“My friend the Great Gandini taught me. He’s a magician by profession. Used to do an act in Count Otto’s dad’s circus.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“Well, it’s as believable as your mate Dave teaching you how to pick locks.”

I took the paperclips and picked the lock.

“Coincidence is a wonderful thing,” said Barry. “Let’s go and talk to the dead.”

The lights were still on in room 23. All the lights. All the bulbs, flashing and flickering, going on and off.

“It’s a Mother Board,” said Barry, staring up in awe.

“What is a Mother Board?” I asked him.

“It’s the central framework of a computer.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that would explain it. It’s a very big computer. Come on, I’ll take you to the phone box.”

And I took Barry to the phone box.

“Right,” said Barry, rubbing his hands together. “So what do I have to dial?”

“You dial in the full name of the deceased person and the date of their death. Then multiply the figure that comes up on the screen by the age of the person when they died and take away the year they were born in and, wallah, you have your dialling code.”

“And it’s as simple as that?”

“I suppose the big computer does all the calculations and works out the frequencies and stuff.”

“Fair enough.” Barry opened the phone-box door. “Let’s go and speak to Mr Penrose.”

“Now, hold on,” I said. “If anyone’s going to speak to him, I think that someone should be me.”

“Why?” Barry asked. “It was my idea. You wanted to speak to your dad. I suggested Mr Penrose.”

“It should be me,” I said.

“No, it shouldn’t,” said Barry.

“Should,” I said.

“Shouldn’t.”

And so I hit Barry right in the face.

“That is so unfair,” said Barry, dabbing at his bloody nostrils. “You wouldn’t be up here if it wasn’t for me.”

“That is so a lie,” I told him. “But stuff it, I don’t care, you go first, if you want.”

“Thanks,” said Barry and he went into the phone box, took up the receiver and dialled the name and the numbers. Then he waited for a bit and then he slammed down the receiver and came out and scowled at me.

“It didn’t work,” he said. “It did nothing. This is all a wind-up, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “I spoke to my dead dad.”

“Are you sure they weren’t just pulling some trick on you up here?”

“No, I thought of that. It worked. It was real.”

“Well, it doesn’t work. I dialled him up. It didn’t work.”

“It must work. What did you dial?”

“I dialled up P.P. Penrose and the date he died and all that other stuff.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because you’re a twonk. His real name wasn’t P.P. Penrose. It was Charles Penrose. My daddy knew him. I was at his wake, you know.”

“You never were?”

“I was, and at his funeral.”

“And were you at the exhumation, when they found him all mashed up in the coffin because he’d been buried alive?”

A terrible shiver went down my spine. “No,” I said. “I wasn’t at that. Terrible, that was. Horrible.”

“Yeah,” said Barry. “So go on, then, if his name was Charles. Dial him up.”

My hand was on the door, but suddenly I felt rather sick. I was the one who’d done that to Mr Penrose. Brought him back to life in his coffin with voodoo. Put him through hideous torment until death had taken him again. I wasn’t so sure that I really wanted to speak to him. What if he knew it was me? There was no telling what the dead might know about the living. What they could see. Where, exactly, they were. He might know I’d done it. He wouldn’t be too pleased to speak to me.

“You do it,” I said. “You dial him up again.”

“Why not you?”

“Do you want to speak to him or not?”

“I do,” said Barry and he waited outside, while I did the dialling this time. And it took me a couple of goes to get it right. Because the real date of Mr Penrose’s real departure was the day that he died, for the second time, in his coffin.

At the other end of the line a distant bell began to ring. I opened the door, handed the phone to Barry, went outside and listened.

“Hello,” I heard Barry say. “Hello. Mr Penrose, is that you?”

And something must have been said in reply, because Barry turned to me and gave a thumbs-up. I gave a thumbs-up back to him and he turned away once more and went on speaking.

And speaking.

And listening.

And speaking some more …

And some more …

I looked at my wristwatch. It was now twelve-thirty. I bashed my fist on the glass of the door. Barry turned and made sssh-ing noises.

I dragged open the door.

Barry put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Go away,” he said. “I’m talking to Mr Penrose.”

“Well, I want a go.”

“Do you want to speak to him?”

“Er, no,” I said. “Not at this moment.”

“Then, go away. Come back in half an hour.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t.”

“Well, who do you want to speak to, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then, go away and think of someone.”

I let the telephone-box door swing shut. I so, so, so wanted to talk to Mr Penrose. Tell him I was sorry. Ask him to forgive me. Just to talk to him. But I confess I was scared. I know I should have been scared anyway. After all, he was dead. This was a pretty big number. But it was more than the business of awakening his corpse in his coffin. It was the matter of speaking to him. To P.P. Penrose, the greatest writer of the twentieth century. The creator of Lazlo Woodbine. Penrose was my hero. I was a fan.

I was totally stuffed.

And so I just stood there, outside the phone box, while Barry rabbited on and on, then listened, then rabbited on some more.

And then, at four-fifteen in the morning, Barry came out of the phone box.

“Finished, have you?” I asked in a tone that was far from friendly.

“I have to go,” said Barry. “To the toilet. I’m bursting for a piss.”

I glanced towards the phone. The receiver was down. “He’s gone, then, has he?”

“Yeah, he had to go for his lunch. Time is different there. Everything is different there. Well, not everything. Actually, it’s mostly— No, listen, I really do have to go to the toilet. Use the phone now. Call someone.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’re acting really weird,” said Barry. “Go on, call someone. It’s no problem – they’re really anxious to say hello. They’re dying to talk. Hey, that’s a good’n, isn’t it, dying to talk.”

“Go to the toilet,” I said.

Barry went off to the toilet.

And I just dithered. If Mr Penrose had gone off for his lunch, then I couldn’t speak to him. So who could I speak to? What famous dead person would I really like to speak to? I thought hard about this, even harder than I had been thinking for the last couple of hours, and my conclusion was the same: quite a few of them. But I didn’t know the exact dates of their deaths. I was going to have to come back tomorrow night.

But then I thought of my daddy. I could phone him. And he had said that he had something fantastic that he wanted to tell me. I could phone my daddy.

Barry returned with a smile on his face.

“That was quick,” I said. “Where is the toilet?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Barry. “I just pissed in someone’s desk drawer.”

“You stupid sod.”

“Calm down,” said Barry. “It will be dry in the morning. Just a bit smelly. No one will suspect anything.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“What? Aren’t you going to phone anyone? Mr Penrose will probably have finished his lunch by now. Time is different there.”

“I have to think,” I said. “I don’t want to waste this. I want to do it properly. To some purpose.”

“Please yourself, man. But if you’re not having a go, then I’m going to speak to Mr Penrose again.”

“What did he say?” I asked. “What is he like?”

“He’s OK,” said Barry. “A really nice bloke. Very forthcoming, very open. Talks a lot about sportsmanship. He’s very big on that. But he’s so angry. Someone did something to him. Did voodoo on him or something after he died and—”

“I don’t want to know,” I said. “I’m going home. Close the door on your way out. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

“I’m going to bring a tape recorder,” said Barry. “Get this on tape. This is big news. The world should know about this.”

“No,” I said. “Hold on. You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. This is beyond big. This is beyond anything. And it’s a secret. A government secret. If anyone found out that we’re doing this, that we’re unauthorized and doing this, we’d be in really big trouble. This is our secret. We can’t tell anyone. No one must know.”

“OK,” said Barry. “It’s our secret.”

“Let’s shake on this.” I put my hand out and Barry shook it. “Fair enough,” I said. “Now, I’m off. Some of us have to work in the morning.”

“Both of us have. Stuff it, I’ll call it a night in half an hour. See you tomorrow evening.”

“See you.” And so I left Barry and wandered off home.

I slept all alone in my bed, but I didn’t sleep very well. There were far too many bits and bobs whirling about in my head. FLATLINE was something so big that the implications of it all were beyond imagining. The very concept of definite contact with the dead. That changed everything, didn’t it? All theories of God and the hereafter. All of recorded history. It would now be possible to know literally everything. About exactly what happened in the past and exactly what happened after you died. Everything would be known. It was too much to think about. Too much for me, anyway.

The more I thought about it all, the more messed up I became. There was power here. Those who could speak with the dead could learn a lot. A whole lot. Einstein had probably thought up loads more important equations since he’d snuffed it. And all those other scientists and composers and geniuses. And all the murdered could identify their murderers – well, the ones who’d seen them, anyway. And, oh, the more I thought, the more messed up I became. This was such a big secret. The biggest secret.

And Barry and I were on the inside of it. We were an even bigger secret, because the men who held this secret didn’t know that we knew about it.

Eventually I did fall asleep, but, as I say, I did not sleep very well and when the alarm rang and I crawled off to the telephone exchange I was feeling very sick indeed.

And when I went into the bulb booth to relieve Barry, I was not altogether thrilled to find that Barry was fast asleep.

I awoke him with a kick in the ribs.

“Whoa!” went Barry, lurching into consciousness.

“Time to go home,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, man.” Barry yawned and stretched.

“Have a good night?” I asked him. “Chatting with Mr Penrose?”

“You’re not kidding. What a man. He told me all about the people he’d met and the things he’d done. I’m going to write his biography.”

“What?”

“Straight from the hearse’s mouth,” said Barry, grinning foolishly. “He’ll dictate it to me down the phone. It’s a secret, though; you can’t tell anyone.”

I made fists once again. “I’m not going to tell anyone, am I? But you can’t do this.”

“Why not? Give me one good reason.”

I couldn’t. “This is ridiculous,” I said.

“I think it’s brilliant. And when I’ve done Mr Penrose I’ll do some others. Mr Penrose says that the famous dead are crying out to the living, but the living can’t hear them. But we can hear them down the FLATLINE phone and they all want to dictate their life stories. You can do some too. We’ll be rich authors – there’s millions to be had in this.”

I gave my chin a stroke. Barry was right of course.

“I’m going to buy a tape recorder today,” said Barry. “We can just set it up at the phone and let Mr Penrose talk for as long as he likes each night. This is so brilliant.”

I gave my chin another stroke. This was brilliant, there was no doubt about that. “We will have to be so careful.”

“I’m going to call myself Macgillicudy Val Der Mar.”

“Eh?” said I.

“My pen name. My nom de plume. Mr Penrose gave it to me. I’ll keep working here until I’ve made a couple of million, then I’ll just vanish. Of course, by then I’ll have about a dozen other ‘biographies’ on the tape. So more millions, but far away from here and the Official Secrets Act. Somewhere that has no extradition treaties with the UK.”

“You’ve got all this worked out very quickly,” I observed.

“It’s all down to Mr Penrose.”

“This is dangerous,” I said. “Very dangerous.”

“You’re not kidding. But we can both get very rich on this. And we can get out of here. Do you want to spend the rest of your life flicking this switch, or do you want riches and out?”

I gave the matter a bit of thought.

“I want riches and out,” I said.