Brothers Keepers by Donald E. Westlake (M. Evans and Company, Inc 1975)

“Have I kept you waiting? I’m so sorry,” Brother Oliver said. “I was painting, in the courtyard. This winter light is so perfect for—”

Dwarfmann gestured that away with an impatient flick of his numerical wrist; I couldn’t see the numbers. “My days,” he said, “are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Let’s get down to business.”

I’m sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann’s rattly style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, “Was that from Job?”

“Chapter seven, verse six,” Dwarfmann snapped. “Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.”

“I don’t know the Apocrypha,” Brother Oliver said.

Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. “You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five.”

“Then I can only cite One Thessalonians,” Brother Oliver said. “Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men.”

“Let us run with patience,” Dwarfmann or somebody said, “the race that is set before us.”

“I don’t believe,” Brother Oliver told him, “that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context.”

“Hebrews, twelve, one.” Dwarfmann shrugged. “Then how about Paul to Timothy, with its meaning intact? Be instant in season, out of season.” Again he tapped those little red numbers, and now I saw them: 2:51. I don’t know why I felt so relieved to know the exact time— something about Dwarfmann’s presence, I suppose. And he was saying, “I’m a busy man.” That couldn’t be Biblical. “My man Snopes told you all you needed to know, we’ll give you every assistance in relocation, given the circumstances we’ll go farther than the law requires. Much farther. But that wasn’t enough for you, you have to hear it from me direct. All right, you’re hearing it from me direct. We’re building on this site.”

“There is a building on this site,” Brother Oliver said.

“Not for long.”

“Why not look at it?” Brother Oliver made hospitable gestures, urging our guest to come look the place over. “Now that you’re here, why not see the place you intend to destroy?”

“Beauty is vain,” Dwarfmann said. “Proverbs, thirty-one, thirty.”

Brother Oliver began to look somewhat put out. He said, “Wot ye not what the Scripture saith? Romans, eleven.”

With that sudden thin smile again, Dwarfmann answered, “What saith the Scripture? Galatians,  four.”

“Pride goeth before destruction,” Brother Oliver told him, “and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs, sixteen.”

Dwarfmann shrugged, saying, “Let us do evil, that good may come. Romans, three.”

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. Isaiah, five.”

“Sin is not imputed when there is no law,” Dwarfmann insisted. “Romans, five.”

Brother Oliver shook his head. “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”

“Money answereth all things,” Dwarfmann said, with a great deal of assurance.

“He heapeth up riches,” Brother Oliver said scornfully, “and knoweth not who shall gather them.”

“Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” Dwarfmann permitted his own scornful expression to roam around our room, then finished, “But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Another quick look at his watch. “I think we’ve played enough,” he said, and turned toward the door.

Brother Oliver had two pink circles on his cheeks, and his pudgy hands were more or less closed into ineffective fists. “The devil is come down unto you,” he announced, “having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Dwarfmann’s hand was on our doorknob. He looked back at Brother Oliver, flashed that thin smile again as though to say he was glad we all understood one another now, and with another quick glance around the room said, “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. Job, chapter seven, verse ten.” And he left.

Brother Oliver expelled held-in breath with a sudden long whoosh. Shaking my head, I said, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. “Is that New Testament? I don’t recognize that.”

“Uhh, no,” I said. “It’s Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry,” I said.

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan (Penguin 1971)

 

HOW IT ALL STARTED

September 3rd, 1939. The last minutes of peace ticking away. Father and I were watching Mother digging our air-raid shelter. “She’s a great little woman,” said Father. “And getting smaller all the time,” I added. Two minutes later, a man called Chamberlain who did Prime Minister impressions spoke on the wireless; he said, “As from eleven o’clock we are at war with Germany.” (I loved the WE.) “War?” said Mother. “It must have been something we said,” said Father. The people next door panicked, burnt their post office books and took in the washing.

Surviving Sting by Paul McDonald (Tindal Street Press 2001)

The Start of Something

Joolz and I got together at the Walsall Town Hall disco in 1979. She'd been going out with a mate of mine, Brainy Kev, for some time but had recently put an end to the relationship.

'I've put an end to the relationship,' Joolz screamed, trying to make herself heard over the thundering funk rhythms of James Brown. 'I've chucked the bastard!'

'Why?' I shouted, watching in dismay as a fleck of my saliva flew from my mouth and landed with a silent splick in her tequila sunrise.

Knackers, I thought.

'He changed when he bought his new coat,' she bawled.

I knew she was referring to Brainy Kev's duffel coat. It was a charcoal duffel with a tartan lining purchased in preparation for his first term at university. He was going to read theoretical physics at Manchester. The coat was a symbol of his new life and status as an 'intellectual'. He deserved to be chucked.

We were sitting next to one another in the bar, a little way from the dance floor. Joolz had been dancing and her bare shoulders glistened with sweat. So did her cleavage. Trying not to stare at it was like having a plastic cup in your hand and trying not to do a Jimmy Durante impression. In those days my TNT testosterone kept me in a permanent state of arousal. My eyes followed girls like helpless puppies.

Do I Love You? by Paul McDonald (Tindal Street Press 2008)

Birmingham University 1985

A Naked Billy Goat

It was 2 a.m. and Warren was busy burgling the research laboratories of Birmingham University. He was looking for drugs, amphetamines preferably, and he’d already filled three carrier bags with stuff: powders, capsules, pills; anything that looked promising in the orange flare of his fag lighter. He’d never burgled a university laboratory before. He’d burgled everywhere else — chemists, doctor and dentist’s surgeries, the houses of fat ladies who he knew were prescribed amphetamine for slimming purposes. But this was his first laboratory — and it was full of chemicals. Thousands of them.

But he hadn’t expected a billy goat, let alone a naked one. And yet there it was, standing alone in a pen made of plywood and chicken wire. Naked. Nude. Bare-beamed and obscenely starkers.

In the ordinary course of things the word naked isn’t one you associate with billy goats. They’re always naked, aren’t they? Except for the ones that dress up as mascots for marching bands. But few words could better describe the billy goat that Warren Clackett observed.

Warren screamed.

It was a proper scream too: almost prepubescent in its shrillness. He hadn't screamed that way since the day he saw his pet pit-bull, Panzer, lose a fight with a squirrel. His assumptions about how the universe works were undermined that day and it was happening again.

The Beiderbecke Affair by Alan Plater (Mandarin 1985)

The Adult Education Institute was built in the nineteenth century by a paternalistic mill-owner with the stated aim of bringing a spiritual uplift to the artisans of the area. A hundred years later, it still had not succeeded. The building, designed in the Gothic Inspirational manner, was now a hive of small rooms in which groups of predominately earnest people discussed D. H. Lawrence, watched The Battleship Potemkin or threw pots. It was not unusual for six people to be plotting revolution in Room 5, while across the corridor in Room 6, another six people were plotting counter-revolution. All twelve would meet in The Bells afterwards for a pint.

I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle (Ecco Books 2007)

Rich had had a much less tragedy-free life. We needn't go into the details, since it's a long, sad and ultimately unoriginal story, but as a result Rich had developed a coping mechanism by which all of the terrible things that happened to him were merely wacky complications that would, before the movie of his life was over, be resolved in an audience-pleasing happy ending. He occasionally worried his life might be an independent film, or worse, a Swedish flick, but he chose to behave as if the movie he lived was a raucous teen comedy and he was somebody like Ferris Bueller or Otter from Animal House, or, worst-case scenario, that guy who fucked a pie.

Mystery Man by Bateman (Headline 2009)

This is all quite new to me, so I am not above seeking wiser counsel. When that isn't available I occasionally consult my assistant Jeff. I would say that he works for me Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it would be more accurate to state that he appears in the store twice a week and manages to spend most of that time on the phone calling disinterested parties on behalf of the local chapter of Amnesty International. Jeff has been rather subdued since the death of General Pinochet. Human rights violations under his regime had been Jeff's area of expertise, but now that the General was gone, the spotlight had shifted on to more recent abuses in the Middle East, leaving him marginalised. He had committed the cardinal sin of failing to move with the bleeding-heart-liberal times, he was yesterday's man clinging to the vain hope that someone even more despotic would come to power in Santiago and rescue him from his do-gooding isolation. I thought drawing him into helping me with the case might rescue him from his doldrums in a way that my humming of 'Don't Cry for Mr, Chile' every time I passed him hadn't.