SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (10 page)

Helen
caught him looking discontentedly at the mess in their farmhouse, studying the
shape and the layout, thinking of improvements. One day he shouted at Corbu, ‘For
God’s sake, can’t you clear up some of this bloody mess.

Helen
and the two boys stood frozen, it was like a Siberian farmer hearing the howl
of the first wolves of winter. They knew He was back.

In the
middle of that night as rupert lay sleeping, wrapped in dreams of towering
cities, Helen rose and went outside to the white moonlit wall of the farmhouse.
With a Pentel pen she wrote in tiny letters on the wall, the one word: ‘PATRICK’.

A CURE FOR DEATH

The anti-gravity hover
ambulance lifted off in a halo of dust from the special landing pad that he’d
had built in the grounds of his home on the tax-free haven of the Isle of
Morrisons. Inside he lay on a stretcher plugged up to a rats’ nest of wires and
tubes. The man was one hundred and sixty-nine years old and barely alive. The
pilot/paramedic headed the flying machine east across the Irish Sea, soon they
crossed Liverpool Bay and without pause began travelling inland. High above
the town of Stoke-on-Tescos, the pilot tilted his control column, causing the
rotors to swivel in their housing, and the craft turned south. About an hour
after take—off from the billionaire’s island they glided in to land at their
destination, the giant laboratory complex that he had had constructed on the
outskirts of Milton Kwiksave Old Town, Berkshire Sector.

This
was where they were working on a cure for death.

The
patient’s name was Edmund Chive and he had been a happy but poor man until the
age of twenty-eight when he had become immensely rich by inventing a new kind
of thing: not a completely new thing but an exciting new twist on a thing that
had been around for years and everybody had got used to and a bit bored with.
If he had invented a completely new thing he probably wouldn’t have prospered
because the geniuses who do that seldom do; it is the plodders who come after
who make the gravy. At first all the money had made his life great: three girls
in the bed, four Ferraris in the garage, that sort of thing. Then one day while
he was licking crème fraîche off a light-skinned Dominican lesbian, a bad
thought descended like an anti-gravity hover ambulance. It was an idea so
horrible to him that it froze him in mid-lick with his tongue sticking out and
dairy product dripping off it. His life was so great, so brilliant, so
fantastic, so wonderful, he thought, and yet one day it would end — because he
was at some point in the future going to die just like the lowliest tram
driver. That couldn’t be right, could it?

From
then on his money was spent not on making his life happy but on making it
infinite. He sought a cure for death and hired the finest anti-death scientists
to bring it to him. The answer lay somewhere in genetics, they were all sure of
that.

While
he waited for the cure to be discovered he employed the finest health experts
to keep him in the best shape for the longest time. His days were entirely
taken up with yoga, exercise, positive visualisations; his mealtimes were taken
up with munching his way through piles of fibre, nuts and raw vegetables. He
kept away from women and wanking because the Bhuddist monk he employed on a
part-time basis told him to on no account spill his vital fluids into women or
paper tissues. He didn’t watch TV because his fourth, ninth and twenty-second
personal trainers had told him that bad ideas leaked out of the set from news
programmes and made the watcher lethargic. And he didn’t mix with people
because he might catch something.

So he
lived for one hundred and sixty-nine years, though they were not by and large
happy years, certainly not the latter ones, for although science could extend
life it turned out it could do very little about curing the painful conditions
that came with ageing. Just as Alzheimers only came to be known about once
people started living long enough to get it, so as humans started passing the
hundred and thirty mark in large numbers a huge variety of new conditions
appeared, all of them excruciatingly painful and many of them embarrassing and
depressing. Apart from the usual faithful companions of old age, Arthritis,
Angina, Thrombosis, Prostate Cancer, there now appeared illnesses such as
Poliakoff’s Syndrome where the sufferer’s body fat became so tired and worn out
that it caught fire and burned from within like a fire—bombed council house, there
was Clutterbuck’s Disease in which the excessively old person’s bones calcified
to such a degree that they more or less turned into a pillar of salt, and the
memory loss that occurred in those of seventy, eighty, ninety, was replaced by
memory gain in those of one hundred and thirty, forty, fifty. But the memories
that re-appeared were entirely faulty so that many aged folk ended their lives
thinking they were chickens or trees or Bruce Springsteen (apart from Bruce
Springsteen himself who thought he was Dag Hammersholt, a secretary general of
the UN in the 1950s).

So
Edmund Chive’s health gradually deteriorated, despite all the effort of the
finest medical minds in the world, and he was in the middle of his eighth bout
of pleurisy and on his twenty-seventh pet labrador called Sparky 9 when the
call came from his scientists that they had made the breakthrough and they were
there. The cure for death was waiting for him in a glass bottle. The hover
ambulance kept on permanent standby was started up and the journey was made.

The two
scientists in charge of project CFD, Professor Drew Cocker and Professor Lindy
Wheen, were waiting for their benefactor as he was wheeled into the central
chamber of the complex.

Edmund
Chive managed to crowbar open his clag encrusted eyes and croak at his two
hirelings, ‘Where is it?’

‘We’ve
got it here, Mr Chive,’ said Professor Cherry holding up the bottle. ‘As we
thought, the answer is essentially a question of genetic mutation, by altering
the DNA chromosome of—’

‘For
God’s sake, inject me, there’s not much time le—’ said Edmund and then he died.

But
this was not the end for Edmund as he had feared it would be. After he died
Edmund felt himself travelling down a long, gently sloping tunnel. It reminded
him of the time in the happy days before he was rich when he’d been to a water
park and had dived down a spiral tube, head first. There’d been no time for
that in the last one hundred and forty-one years. Following some seconds, or
perhaps minutes, it was hard to tell, of gentle floating, a bright white light
appeared, small as a pinhole. He drifted towards it as it grew in his vision. The
light resolved itself into the end of the tunnel; light as a rice cracker he
slipped out of the tube and into a huge vaulted chamber lit by a kind, lambent
light. Waiting for him were a group of people all smiling at him. The first
person there he recognised was his father, not as he had died, etiolated and
grey, but fit and hale as he had been in his late forties, behind him was
Edmund’s mother as she had been around the time of the war in Korea, a beauty
capable of stopping air traffic. Behind them in a spreading phalanx were all
his uncles and aunts, his friends, his teachers from primary school, girls he
had slept with at university still looking as they had then, and running in and
out of their feet all the pets he’d ever had, Sparkies 1 to 8, cats and
kittens, lizards and snakes. Edmund’s father approached him, his hand
outstretched, his smile rueful. ‘I bet you feel like a right silly cunt now, he
said as he embraced his son.

‘Fucking
hell, yes,’ exclaimed Edmund. ‘What a twat! I didn’t think for a second there
was a cunting afterlife!’

His
mother came up and took him in her arms. ‘We were all silly shites,’ she said. ‘None
of us shagging believed there was anything after we fucking died.’

Without
looking at himself Edmund knew his body was as it had been when he was
thirty-five years old, round about the time when all the exercise he was doing
had temporarily given him a physique that was buffed and perfect, glowing with
health and happiness. ‘So is this bollocking heaven?’ he asked.

‘Fuck
knows,’ laughed Abigail Watts, the first girl he had had sex with.

‘This
might be heaven or it might just be another stage on the shitting journey,’
said his Uncle Leon.

‘There
is still pain here,’ said his father,’… and death.’

‘But it’s
a different kind of pain and a different kind of death,’ explained his primary
school teacher Miss Wilson. ‘A better kind.’

Suddenly
Edmund was embarrassed thinking about what he had caused to be done back in the
life before. ‘Erm, I think I might have made a bit of a fucking rick back …
erm … there,’ he mumbled.

‘What’s
that son?’ said his dad.

‘Well,
I’ve… fucking invented a fucking cure for death. I’m not sure anybody else
will be coming here soon.

Everybody
laughed like a drain at this.

‘Knackers,’
said his mum.

‘Fuck ‘em,’
said Uncle Leon. ‘If they don’t want to come that’s their twatting problem.’

‘They
can stay where they are, the wankers,’ said a man who’d been his best friend
over a century ago.

‘Well,
that’s a fucking relief,’ said Edmund.

‘I’m
fucking gagging for a pint,’ said Miss Wilson.

‘Let’s
go then,’ said Edmund’s dad. ‘The rest of you tossers coming?’

There
was a general murmur of assent and they all went off to get what constituted,
in this new place, pissed.

Back in
the previous life Drew and Lindy stared at Edmund Chive’s cadaver, lying mute
and sparkless on its trolley. ‘Well, this is unfortunate,’ said Drew.

‘Bad
timing,’ said Lindy.

‘What
do we do now?’

They
both knew what they were talking about: the little glass bottle.

‘No
point in wasting it,’ said one.

‘No
point at all,’ said the other.

So they
injected themselves with the anti-death serum. Then stood in silence for a few
minutes. Finally Drew said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’

Lindy
looked into an infinite future of coffees, coffee after coffee after coffee for
tens of thousands of years.

‘I
think I’ll wait till later,’ she said.

WHO DIED AND LEFT YOU

IN CHARGE?

Miss Cicely Rodgers
strapped her cock and balls into the Miracle Deluxe Vagina, which was made from
skin-like flesh-coloured latex and came with frilly adjustable straps to ensure
a perfect fit and to hide any last sign of maleness. It was complete in every
detail including soft vaginal lips and a simulated clitoris. Over this she
slipped Femme Form padded hourglass panties to give her womanly curves, and
onto her chest she put a lacy padded bra. Next came make-up, beard coverer and
on her head the popular page-boy wig, suitable for all face shapes. Finally a
sober women’s business suit in charcoal grey and on her feet simple court
shoes, though huge in a size eleven, with a restrained, ladylike, two-inch
heel. Cicely wasn’t one of those trannies who dressed like a Chechen
prostitute. When she was Clive he wore clothes that were a bit too young for a
man of forty-five, trainers like dead pigs’ noses in grey and orange with
light-reflecting strips on the back, designer combat pants so expensive it
would be cheaper to join the army for a year and T-shirts with ‘Quack, combust,
shithouse squad’ or similar gibberish written on them. Cicely considered herself
superior to Clive, with a more innate sense of good taste. After all, they both
thought, what was the point of being a part-time woman if she was going to be
the same sort of woman as you were a bloke?

This
transformation from Clive to Cicely was taking shape in a place called
Transformations, which is right opposite Euston Station in Eversholt Street,
Camden Town. It is in a row of shops, a couple of the type where you can’t
remember what it is they sell even though you looked in the window five seconds
ago and two old-fashioned cafés that serve chicken curry with boiled potatoes,
and spaghetti with chips on the side and two slices of margarined bread for the
consumption of solitary men wearing hats in all weathers. Euston and Kings
Cross used to be surrounded with cafés serving this kind of grub, as if the
first thing a fellow fancied after coming down from the North was a weird
combination of food? As it turned out, what a lot of fellows seemed to want as
soon as they got off the train from the North was to be a woman. Transformations
was opposite the station so that nervous businessmen from Tring and Liverpool
and Glasgow could slip in there and be transformed into nervous women. The
windows of Transformations are painted red, the writing on them says: ‘Wigs,
waist cinchers, make-up’. There is also a big before and after photo, on the
left a young man in chinos who a market researcher might put in the B2
socio-economic group, self-employed graphic designer or something similar, and
on the right the young man is now done up as a woman from a Bradford council
estate who has had a hard life on account of her daughter being pregnant and on
crack and who sings at the Trades and Labour Club on Fridays to keep her
spirits up.