The Mechanical Messiah (61 page)
Read The Mechanical Messiah Online
Authors: Robert Rankin
‘I am sure it would be a very big adventure,’ said Darwin.
Cameron Bell reached over and tousled the monkey’s head. ‘If Alice says no,’ he said, ‘I will return to my profession and you will be my partner. It is a promise.’
Darwin the monkey grinned.
He
had gained access to Alice’s dressing room. And
he
had caught Alice in the arms of a tall, dark, slim and handsome fellow. One of the jugglers. Alice had referred to this handsome fellow as her secret admirer. And sworn Darwin to secrecy.
‘I think I might take to the wearing of a deerstalker hat, ‘said Darwin, the world’s first monkey detective.
THE END
Alice Lovell died in 1979.
Her son Ernest (1917-2010) was the inventor of the
Deanox Process,
which produces the world’s finest iron-oxide pigmentation used, amongst other things, for the colouration of asphalt. The pink of the Mall that leads to Buckingham Palace is a testament to this modest man’s genius.
His granddaughter is married to the author.
[1]
Canine excrement used in the tanning process for the manufacture of kid gloves.
[2]
History asserts that
The Great Eastern
was broken up in 1889. But what does history know!
[3]
History records that
The Pickwick Papers
was originally published in 1837 and that Charles Dickens died in 1870, the year of Cameron Bell’s birth. No further references to the inaccuracy of recorded history will be made in this tome.
[4]
Mr Pickwick’s famous valet.
[5]
William Butler Yeats, 1865—1939. An Irish poet and dramatist, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
[6]
Scientists have recently been considering the possibility that the missing racehorse Shergar entered a black hole and was transported into the past. This would tend to confirm that proposition.
[7]
They can’t all be winners.
[8]
As popularised in the ever-green Music Hall song ‘Treacle Sponge Bastard for Me, Please’.
[9]
Nunbuck
—
a six-legged Jovian horse of irascible disposition.
[10]
The patent Ferris Electrical Dewhiskerisor being a must-have for any gentleman’s travelling case.