The Chickens of Atlantis and Other Foul and Filthy Fiends Read online

  ‘Two specials and two ales,’ said the what-passed-for, and he scuttled away.

  Folk were still glancing so we sat a while in silence. When all appeared safe, I asked Mr Bell whether he had any kind of plan.

  ‘I am working on one,’ he said.

  ‘One that will involve our swift departure from this time?’

  Mr Bell made the ‘so-so’ gesture with his fingers. ‘I am thinking more of a plan to raise sufficient funds that we are not forced to sleep beneath the stars at night.’

  ‘Preferable beneath the stars here than beneath the ground in London.’

  What passed for a waiter brought us our ales and popped the tops from the bottles. ‘Please do not take offence, sir,’ he said to Mr Bell, ‘but I wonder if you would be so good as to settle a matter for us?’

  ‘If I can,’ said Mr Bell. ‘What does this matter entail?’

  ‘Well,’ began the what-passed-for, ‘my friend Mr Walter Tomlinson over there says that you are a stage magician.’

  Mr Bell sighed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But my other friend, Mr Terence Lightfoot, says that you are the Great Caruso himself.’

  ‘The Great Caruso?’ said Mr Cameron Bell. ‘And do you have an opinion of your own?’

  ‘Not one that I would care to voice.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Bell, ‘I can tell you that I am neither a stage magician nor the Great Caruso himself.’

  ‘I suspected not Caruso, sir, as he died in nineteen twenty-one.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Bell. ‘But I am indeed a well-known face upon the London stage.’

  I raised my eyebrows to this outrageous lie.

  ‘I am the celebrated Professor Thoth,’ said Mr Cameron Bell, ‘and this is the equally celebrated Darwin, known and loved from the Americas to Hindustan as the Educated Ape.’

  ‘Educated?’ said the man. ‘How so?’

  I stared slack-jawed whilst Mr Bell explained.

  ‘He is a Wonder of the World,’ explained he. ‘A simian prodigy that does read and speak and prognosticate the future.’

  A look of avarice appeared in the what-passed-for's eyes. A certain longing, perhaps, to leave his mundane job behind, take to the bright lights of the city and exhibit an educated ape.

  Mr Bell noted well that look. ‘Naturally, he can only perform whilst in my company,’ he said, and he gritted his teeth and then added, ‘Gottle o’ geer.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the hoped-to-be-top-of-the-bill. ‘I see.’ And he winked at Mr Bell.

  ‘We are hoping to be engaged to play at the Pavilion,’ continued my duplicitous colleague. ‘But please keep it under your hat, as it were,’ and he pushed a sixpenny piece in the fellow's direction.

  The fellow offered another wink, scooped up the tanner and then, with a grin, departed. He returned to his chums and words were exchanged and interest in us was no more.

  ‘A ventriloquist's dummy!’ I bared my teeth at Cameron Bell.

  ‘Calm yourself, please,’ he replied. ‘The opportunity seemed Heaven-sent. I should be praised for my gifts of improvisation. Cheers.’ And he raised his beer bottle.

  ‘I will not do it,’ I said most firmly. ‘No, I jolly well won't.’

  ‘I wonder, do they still have barrel organs in this benighted time?’ my friend chanced to wonder.

  ‘I'll not do it,’ I said.

  But of course I did.

  There appeared to be no other way for it at the time.

  We were trapped in this beastly period, and until Mr Bell came up with a solution to our problems, here and now we must remain, and we would need coin to furnish us with food to fill our empty bellies.

  I told Mr Bell that I thought I could get used to Hastings. The air was bracing and the castle hill picturesque. Mr Bell in reply told me that we would not be staying at the seaside, in the comparative safety of this unbombed little town. Rather, we must return to London so that he could lay his hands upon the Pearly Emperor and seek to undo whatever had been done to change the past so drastically.

  ‘There is nothing else for it,’ said Cameron Bell.

  Though I did not agree.

  *

  Professor Thoth and Darwin the Educated Ape premiered at Olympia on the thirtieth of July. Olympia at that time had a standing circus with many sideshows attached.

  We rented a booth that had recently been vacated by Fremly, the Three-Legged Yorkshireman. Fremly's supernumerary appendage had apparently fallen off due to his dancing before the public under the influence of brown ale. An off-duty policeman had then recognised the erstwhile human tripod to be none other than Black Jack Magillicuddy, a light-fingered lighterman wanted the length and breadth of the Thames for crimes of a nautical nature.

  And so we took the booth.

  ‘I will just fold my arms and say nothing,’ I said to Mr Bell.

  ‘Then you and I will grow very thin, living on no food at all.’

  ‘But I am an ape of education—’

  ‘And that, indeed, is the point!’ Mr Bell threw up his hands and sighed the most terrible sigh. ‘I am not asking you to make a fool of yourself. Rather, to impress folk with your erudition.’

  ‘By saying “gottle o’ geer”?’

  ‘Darwin, at times you quite exasperate me.’ Mr Bell now folded his arms and made a very fierce face.

  Actually, I quite enjoyed myself, but I was not prepared to admit it. We gave lunchtime and afternoon performances and the great hall of Olympia closed promptly at six. Its roof was tiled with glass, you see, and could not be ‘blacked out’.

  The hours suited me and the pennies flowed in and the days became carefree. But the nights were always filled with dread, when the sirens cried out and we took to the underground shelters.

  Mr Bell worked hard at being Professor Thoth. But he also worked hard at being Mr Cameron Bell. He needed to enter the secret headquarters of the Ministry of Serendipity and there lay his hands upon Mr Arthur Knapton.

  We discussed the matter over bottled beer in our Earls Court digs.

  ‘According to the papers that I found in the library room in ancient Egypt,’ said Mr Bell, ‘our quarry will hold a meeting with Mr Churchill this coming Friday evening.’

  ‘Just two days from now,’ I said. ‘Will this be our only chance?’

  ‘I regret so,’ said Mr Bell. ‘If we do not take him then, he will be gone from this time and our chance of escaping with him.’

  ‘And so you have a plan?’

  Mr Bell drank deeply of his ale.

  ‘Was the answer in the form of mime?’ I asked him.

  ‘I do have a plan. But it is reckless and dangerous, too.’

  ‘So no change there, then,’ I said, employing the popular parlance of the day. ‘And no way, José, if it involves dynamite.’

  ‘I know the location of the secret entrance but my key no longer fits the lock.’

  ‘You have your housebreaking tools.’

  ‘I will tell you my plan,’ said Mr Bell. ‘And when I have told you it, I will allow you to cast the deciding vote.’

  ‘Most magnanimous of you,’ I said, and I toasted my friend with my bottle.

  ‘Possibly so,’ agreed Mr Bell. ‘But if you do not give it your seal of approval, we will be forced to live in this time for the rest of our days, and you might grow tired of the bombs and the loss of life.’

  And so my good friend Mr Cameron Bell, once the Victorian era's most celebrated detective, set about telling me his plan. He laid it out for me in the clearest of details, and when he had done with his telling, he raised his hands and asked me what I thought.

  I will not belabour the reader's sensibilities by setting down here exactly what I had to say. Mr Bell's plan was not only dangerous and reckless, it was many other things besides, and none of them appealing.

  ‘So it is a no?’ said Cameron Bell.

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘Your plan sounds well conceived, and although there will be explosions, naturally, they all appe
ar to be for a noble cause. I will raise my thumb to you, Mr Bell. For what could possibly go wrong?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Mr Cameron Bell. ‘What indeed could possibly go wrong?’

  16

  r Winston Churchill is not quite so well remembered as he was. As I write these words in the year two thousand and twelve, it is clear to me that many things regarding that national hero are now quite forgotten.

  You will surely recall that he was noted for his wily wit and quotable quotes, and if you have ever suffered the misfortune of being drawn into playing a game of Trivial Pursuit, you will know that you are on a reasonably firm footing when the witty quotes come up if you attribute them to either Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill.*

  Mr C was very good at one-liners:

  LADY ASTOR: If I were married to you, I would put poison in your coffee.

  WINSTON: If I were married to you, I would drink it.

  WINSTON: Madam, you are ugly.

  UNKNOWN LADY: Sir, you are drunk.

  WINSTON: But I shall be sober in the morning.

  And when it came to the making of speeches that stirred up the people of Britain into a regular ferment, Mr Churchill was quite in a class of his own. Who can forget:

  I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

  May 1940

  We shall fight on the beaches,

  we shall fight on the landing-grounds,

  we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

  we shall fight in the hills.

  We shall never surrender!

  June 1940

  When I warned [the French] that Britain

  would fight on alone, whatever they did,

  their Generals told their Prime Minister . . .

  ‘In three weeks, England will have her

  neck wrung like a chicken.’

  Some chicken. Some neck!

  December 1941

  Who can forget? Well, clearly most, as few there are who can quote these speeches today.

  Mr Churchill has certainly retained his popularity and respect, however, for in two thousand and two the nation took a poll to decide who were the top one hundred greatest Britons.

  Sir Winston Churchill was voted number one.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel, number two.

  Aleister Crowley (!) came in at seventy-three, beating

  Charles Babbage, who attained to number eighty.

  We will draw the veil of discretion over the placement of a certain Bono within this top one hundred.

  So, as you can see, the people of Britain still care for Mr Churchill. Even though they have forgotten so very much about him.

  How many today, for instance, know that Winston Churchill was the very last man in England to employ the services of a monkey butler? Very few, I will wager.

  Or that when he was not insulting titled ladies or leading his nation to victory, he loved nothing more than to dress up in frilly frocks and petticoats and troll about the War Room in the guise of his alter ego, Buttercup?

  That Mr Churchill was a notable and prolific dresser-up-in-women's-clothes is all but forgotten today. But during the war years, Buttercup was as well known to and as well loved by the British public as Grayson Perry's second self Claire is today, the only difference being that the British public of the war years pretended they did not know that ‘Lady Buttercup’ was actually Winston Churchill.

  I for one will never truly understand the humour of the British public.

  So . . .

  That the great statesman and the cross-dressing potter might share this common – one hesitates to use the word ‘fetish’ – might appear somewhat outré. But many a great man has favoured a frock, and there is no shame in that.

  It is probable that Lady Astor's famous remark regarding coffee and poison was uttered in response to her discovering Winston digging through her wardrobe in search of a gown in which to promenade Horse Guards Parade.

  But who can say for sure? As few remember these details today, I mention them here purely to inform the reader who might otherwise be surprised by what I am shortly to relate regarding Mr Cameron Bell's plan to lay his hands upon the Pearly Emperor and remove us from the time of the Second World War.

  So . . .

  It all began in this fashion.

  And here I will eschew the grammatical category of ‘first monkey’ and allow the tale to tell itself, as it were.

  For as these are the memoirs of Darwin the monkey, I can do just as I please.

  The Adventure of the

  Prettified Prime Minister

  The marvellous monkey was greatly admired, his charm and deportment earning him paeans of praise. Ladies yearned to stroke his glossy flealess coat and gentlemen conversed with him on this engaging topic and the next. For this was no ordinary ape that the patrons of Olympia clamoured to meet. This was Darwin, the Educated Ape. Darwin, the Sensational Simian.

  In those days, Olympia owned to a standing circus where some of the world's most accomplished performers were to be viewed, displaying their remarkable skills to an appreciative public. Animal acts found favour then, acts such as Reekie's Remarkable Ribald Rhinos, Crawford's Cat Carousel, Captain Purkey's Perambulating Penguins and Kimberley's Kick-Boxing Kiwi Birds – the latter being avian acrobats who had performed before the Royal Household on many a state occasion.

  Beyond the big top and the cheering crowds lay the showmen's booths, where were displayed a multitude of human curiosities of such strange and fanciful kidney that might serve as muse to any aspiring poet.

  There was:

  Cuttlefish O'Hooligan, the Human Octopoid,

  A chap of many arms and charms,

  A raconteur and wit.

  A lady, loved as Layla,

  Who sang songs through a loud-hailer

  Whilst dwelling in an oven

  And revolving on a spit.

  The famous Jack-o’-Lantern with his bunny-rabbit eyes,

  Whose lustrous luminescence shone

  Like diamonds in the dark.

  A giant known as Marmaluke,

  A dandy and a dancing duke.

  A cleric in a barrel

  Who charmed cobras in the park.

  And so on and so forth in that fashion, and wonderful they were to behold. But none could hold a candle to the Sensational Simian who had captured the public's heart, who was spoken of in drawing rooms and downstairs parlours, bar rooms and bordellos, houses both of God and ill-repute, on croquet lawns and carriageways.

  Darwin, the Educated Ape.

  This marvellous monkey's manager was a rotund, avuncular figure who went by the name of Professor Thoth in public and by Cameron Bell when locked behind closed doors. He was not a sideshow proprietor by first trade – rather, owning as he did to some small skills in the arts of criminal detection, he styled himself as an investigator and had enjoyed a modest degree of success in this specialised field.

  How man and monkey came together would be a long tale in the telling, but that they had travelled far over distances both temporal and otherwise in close company lent them a familiarity which encompassed trust, admiration and indeed love, to a degree. They had fetched up at Olympia through necessity rather than choice, where the talents of the ape, those of human vocalisation, had made him in three short days the very talk of the town. Professor Thoth had invested a considerable portion of the first two days’ takings in having playbills printed extolling the virtues of the marvellous monkey, and so it came to pass that by the Friday of their very first week at Olympia, titled folk were offering their patronage and requesting private audiences with this prodigy now called the Ape of Knowledge.

  The Ape of Knowledge sat upon a muchly cushioned chair, a velvet smoking cap aslant across his noble brow. He was bedecked in a suit of dark cloth and a most flamboyant bow tie. This attire was not altogether of his choosing, but as his own wardrobe had been lost to him, he was forced to wear the clothes his manager had acquired, which had been stripped – al
though the man kept the knowledge from the monkey – from a discarded ventriloquist's dummy.*

  Upon this Friday morning, at a little after nine, the Ape was sharing his knowledge with a strapping young fireman who had been prepared to pay the now-necessary guinea.

  ‘I come,’ said the fireman to the Ape, ‘from a showman's background, for once I was a circus strongman. I have sailed the Seven Seas of Rhye, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.’

  ‘And what is that, young man?’ The Ape of Knowledge raised a languid hand to his face and drew upon a slim cheroot, releasing from his mouth white featherings of smoke.

  ‘I would know truth,’ said the fighter of fires.

  ‘Ethical axioms are found and tested not so very differently from the axioms of science,’ said the Ape. ‘Truth is what stands the test of experience.’

  ‘To quote Einstein,’ said the erstwhile circus strongman.

  ‘Hm,’ went the Ape. ‘Next, please.’

  ‘Ah, just one thing before I go. I have studied the poster that advertises your skills.’

  ‘Hm,’ went the Ape of Knowledge once more. It was a certain ‘hm’.

  ‘It recommends you as the Prognosticating Primate and claims that you can predict future events. Speak to me of the future.’

  ‘The future,’ declared the Prognosticating Primate, ‘is much like the past, in that there will be an equal amount of it. But I might tell you this: the Greatness of Mankind is now behind us. The past is the new future. Fuss not for the future, for it will be on you soon enough and what is now will soon be then behind you.’

  ‘Such is the doctrine of Zen,’ said the seeker after truth.

  ‘Next, please!’ called the magnificent monkey.

  ‘Might you tell me something specific about the future?’ asked the young man, who had been kneeling, as he rose at last to his feet.

  ‘A man will come,’ predicted the Prognosticating Primate, ‘a man and two women. The man will be quite without talent, yet he will be elevated to a position of greatness. This man's name will be R*ssell Br*nd.’*

  ‘And the women?’ asked the young man, stroking sawdust from his knees.

  ‘They will go unrewarded, though their talents surpass those of all who have gone before and their beauty eclipses that of any other female. For the small will attain greatness and the great become small. This will be the way of the future. Amen.’