Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series Page 36

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ Bretwalda rumbled, ‘you’re always free to bugger off!’

  Normally, Mr Disvan didn’t approve of strong language but, for once, he overlooked it and even added something in Mr Bretwalda’s support.

  ‘And spend the rest of your life flitting from place to place,’ he said to Hood.

  Be he American or whatever, Mr Hood had bags of bulldog spirit, I had to give him that. He wasn’t intimidated by all this; he merely considered it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I was way out of line, I admit it. Sorry y’all. Are we still in business?’

  Disvan indicated that they were—whatever that meant.

  Hood was very pleased to hear it.

  ‘It’s just I’ve developed a powerful mislike of living in those woods,’ he said. ‘That’s not the life for me; no way.’

  Sadly, at that point, the logical imperative ever present in me surged up and took temporary control. I heard my voice saying, ‘I would have thought that with a name like yours, the woods would have been your natural habitat.’

  Once again, Mr Hood wasn’t amused.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ he said in a way that had little to do with apology.

  ‘Well, you know, Hood—Robin Hood—and his merry men, in Sherwood Forest...’

  ‘And we warned you about the name as well,’ interrupted Mr Disvan. ‘Robin Hood, honestly!’

  ‘But what could be more English than that?’ said ‘Mr Hood. ‘I reckoned it was a real good choice.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t,’ said Disvan tersely, ‘and kindly stop that noise.’

  The landlord, among others, had started humming the theme tune from the much loved ‘60s television series. Unbidden, the words surged out of my childhood memory banks.

  ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood

  riding through the glen,

  Robin Hood, Robin Hood

  with his band of men,

  feared by the bad, loved by the good,

  Robin Ho-od, Robin Ho-od, Robin Ho-od.’

  Mr Disvan’s wishes were normally law, but that sort of folk memory takes some stopping. Even I felt a powerful urge to join in the community hum and it needed a few seconds for peace to return.

  ‘What was that about?’ asked the man who called himself Hood.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ replied Disvan. ‘Now listen; you’ll be eating at Mr Oakley’s house tonight.’

  ‘Will he?’ I asked. ‘Who says?’

  ‘You do,’ replied Mr Disvan, nothing perturbed. ‘Sorry, did I forget to ask you? Is it a problem?’

  ‘Well... not exactly. I suppose if Mr Hood needs help I could... It’s just a question of notice...’

  Why, I asked myself in the privacy of my head, had my parents brought me up to be so reasonable, in the face of an unreasonable world?

  ‘No, no problem,’ I said resignedly.

  Mr Disvan smiled warmly.

  ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘Then when we’ve eaten, presuming we survive, we’ll have an inquest on today’s lamentable outing.’

  ‘Okay, will do,’ said Hood smartly.

  ‘And bring your photographs along to show to Mr Oakley.’

  ‘Okay, will do,’ said Hood again.

  I’d heard that sort of offer before. It was either holiday or family snaps, which was bad enough, or, in the context of Mr Disvan, something disturbing and/or horrible.

  ‘Don’t bother about them,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Just bring yourself along.’

  Disvan had clearly been trespassing in my thoughts again.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘they’re nothing horrible.’

  Hood lay an oversized paw on my shoulder.

  ‘Man,’ he said, ‘you will like them. Believe me, they’re out of this world!.’

  Disvan grinned mischievously and the landlord laughed.

  * * *

  ‘Well, it’s quite cosy, as holes in the ground go, Oakley,’ said Mr Hood, ‘but a hole in the ground it remains, even so. I’m used to something better.’

  After Disvan’s analysis of Mr Hood’s earlier failure to deceive, Hood had turned to asking me all about my house and lifestyle. I’d duly returned the compliment. It transpired he’d escaped the mortgage trap by occupying a well designed hide in the woods on Binscombe Ridge.

  ‘Except,’ he explained, ‘when kindly folk, such as yourself, invite me to their homes for a spot of good cooking and a hot bath.’

  In fact the cooking had been good, but it wasn’t mine. I’d fetched in a mega-meal of fish and chips. It had been a form of compromise between my Japanese/vegetarian tastes and Mr Hood’s probable, impermissible, desire for a Macdonald’s.

  ‘It sounds very nice,’ I said.

  Hood looked astounded.

  ‘It does?’ he replied. ‘Do you wanna swap?’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Disvan. ‘That was polite English understatement. Do you recall what we said to you about that?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ agreed Hood. ‘I recall that. You say something that you don’t mean at all—right?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Disvan doubtfully.

  Hood nodded and smiled.

  ‘I know another name for it,’ he mused, as if to himself.

  Fifteen-Love to him, I thought, beginning to enjoy myself.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying to sound as forthright as Cromwell before his maker, ‘let’s be painfully frank...’

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ said Hood.

  ‘Um, well, living in a hole on Binscombe Ridge sounds pretty horrific, actually.’

  ‘Glad you see it my way after all, Mr Oakley.’

  ‘Don’t mention. So why do it?’

  ‘Well...’ Hood drawled, leaning back in his (my) chair, ‘I could pussyfoot you round some in answering that, Mr O—but I won’t, seeing how’s you want to be frank or earnest or whoever. Did you ever see Apocalypse Now, Mr O?’

  ‘Just the half dozen times, yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll understand what I mean when I say that I’m playing Captain Kurtz out here in Bins-combe.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Shame on your thinking processes, boy. What I mean is that I was military, that I have been a naughty boy and that my ex-friends mean to terminate me with extreme prejudice.’

  ‘You mean kill you?’

  ‘Reckon so—leastways, eventually.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really. Just because of a few pictures...’

  ‘What, of generals in compromising positions, do you mean?’

  ‘No sir. Nothing that commonplace. What I’m talking about is a bit more world shattering.’

  The press applied that phrase to every transitory ‘crisis’ and five-day-wonder pop group, so I wasn’t in danger of over-heating. Consequently (?) Mr Disvan put his oar in.

  ‘And the world Mr Hood is speaking of,’ he said, ‘is not our world.’

  This did the trick. As an avid, if ignorant and bleary-eyed, viewer of The Sky at Night, the mention of other worlds hauled me into Hood’s story.

  ‘Have you got photographs of a UFO?’ I asked enthusiastically.

  Hood brought out a padded envelope from his sports jacket and made a space for it on the table amid the plates and sauce bottles.

  ‘Maybe... maybe,’ he said cautiously, ‘but first you gotta understand how I came by them.’

  Apparently Mr Disvan had heard all this before. He ostentatiously left the table and went to make free of my drinks cabinet. I thought that was a bit much and turned my head so as to say ‘help yourself’ or some such sarcasm. Like one of Dr Pavlov’s doggies I was brought to heel by a ringing noise. Mr Hood had rapped the edge of his tea cup with a spoon.

  ‘Pay attention,’ he growled.

  I did so, now ignoring the chink of bottles behind me.

  ‘Do you recall the Viking 3 Mission, Mr O?’ Hood was gently stroking the padded envelope with his fingertips as if he was drawing up his story from inside.

  ‘Um... no.�
�

  ‘Permit me to refresh your memory, then. Viking 3 was the last unmanned Mars probe. It circled the Red Planet for a while, sent down a lander, did a lot of tests, took a lot of pictures—that kinda thing. Are you with me?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘Good. Well, there’s always a few military personnel attached to missions like that. We’re meant to look for armed-forces-applicable information, do a bit of liaison work, etc, etc. In practice, we listen to the dome-head’s idiot blurbs and drink beer, okay?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. For Viking 3, I had the honour of heading the combined services team attached. I’d just had a rough tour in “Contra-Land” and people figured I needed a rest to cool out. Someone read my records and found I’d got a science major a decade or so before. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about it, but it clinched me the job. That’s the way things go.’

  Mr Disvan rejoined us. From the kerfuffle he’d made, I was expecting to see an exotic cocktail with umbrella and jungle at the very least. It turned out that all the effort had produced was a heroic-sized vodka. He sipped at it daintily.

  Hood’s tea-cup chime once again brought me to order and started another round of conversation.

  ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr O,’ he continued, ‘I don’t much like beer. Neither do I necessarily believe the bulletins NASA put out for the press corps. I’ll give you an example. There was this guy in a white coat, with his hair on upside down, do you know what he said to me? “Here, have the newsletter we send out to junior high-schools—see how you get along with that’’.’

  Mr Disvan laughed, unkindly I thought, and Hood grimaced.

  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I’m a professional, I didn’t reply but I took that as an insult. I thought I’d take my poor old brain over and have a look-see at the raw data. They couldn’t stop me, I had the clearance—it was just that no one had reckoned on me using it.’

  ‘If you’re part of an organisation of several million armed men,’ mused Mr Disvan, swirling his drink to and fro in the glass, ‘it’s amazing what doors are open to you.’

  ‘Quite,’ agreed Hood, missing the sledgehammer humour. ‘Anyhow, while my colleagues were making nuisances of themselves with the lady whitecoats, I went through every damn print out and photo that had come back. Then I saw something interesting and ordered it computer enhanced. Shortly after, my service career came to an abrupt end.’

  Hood’s large hairy paw nigh on covered the padded envelope—otherwise I’d have got to the heart of matters by simply enquiring within. A moment of silence ensued. Mr Hood looked puzzled and hurt.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why?’ he said. ‘Or is this just some of the “English cool” I’ve heard about?’

  Actually, it was a hard day at work and a degree of world-weariness, but I thought it easier to go along with Hood’s interpretation.

  ‘I do beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘Please carry on. Why did your service career come to an abrupt end?’

  ‘Because they, by which I mean everyone with push, didn’t like what I’d found. I was told to hush my mouth. They made nasty noises about my pension rights should I fail to do so. Some Viking 2 pictures were substituted in the records for the ones I’d located. Everything was wrapped up tight—me included.’

  ‘There’s a smudge on your forehead,’ said Disvan matter of factly.

  Hood was caught off balance. ‘Really?’ he said and—plainly the product of a good home—instinctively rushed to wipe it off. Mr Disvan leaned forward and picked up the momentarily unguarded envelope.

  ‘Here you are, Mr Oakley,’ he said handing it to me, ‘this is why Mr Hood lives in the woods.’

  Hood wasn’t best pleased at being tricked, but not quite displeased enough to fight me for the package so he could finish his spiel.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I guess they’re the long and the short of it anyhow.’

  He went off to splash a great deal of my only bottle of single malt into his empty glass.

  I found that the envelope contained two colour photographs. They wouldn’t have made the grade as Royal wedding snaps, but otherwise the resolution was so-so. I studied them for a while.

  ‘Okay,’ said Hood from beside the drinks cabinet, ‘whaddya think?’

  I found it hard to work up any enthusiasm, genuine or otherwise.

  ‘I think you’ve brought the wrong set along,’ I said eventually. ‘Is this your house in Texas?’

  Mr Hood moved from scowl to roaring laughter without a gear change. He went so far as to slap his knee with the hilarity of it all. Mr Disvan smiled politely.

  ‘I can see why you might think that, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan as Hood rejoined us at the table. ‘The reddish, rocky landscape, the little “house” in the distance and so on. However, you’re a shade off target.’

  ‘Texas my ass!’ said Hood, pointing the ketchup bottle at me. ‘Man, that’s Mars you’re looking at!’

  I looked again.

  ‘It can’t be,’ I said, still reasonably convinced within myself; ‘there’s a house in the photograph.’

  ‘More of a trapezoidal megalith I would say, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan. ‘But I agree, with a picture of that type you can’t be dogmatic about interpretation. Call the thing a house if you like.’

  Rather pointlessly, I turned the pictures through three hundred and sixty degrees without them yielding up any fresh wisdom. Now that I came to think about it, the horizon did seem suspiciously close, the sky suspiciously pink and somehow ‘thin’. The scattered rocks didn’t look ordinary anymore.

  To allay the icy-fingered disquiet I now felt, I refocused on the ‘house’. It wasn’t much help. This time round the ‘housey’ features were playing hide and seek—either that or my eyes had created homeliness where none existed.

  ‘There was a five minute time lapse between the pictures,’ said Mr Hood. ‘Do you see any difference between the two?’

  I found that I wasn’t so keen to study these views again. All of a sudden, the sense of wonder associated with new worlds was entirely lost on me. I realised I was quite happy with the world I’d been born on, thank you very much. After all, I hurriedly rationalised, the pictures were not exactly a visual feast, were they? As studies of an arid bit of Texas they’d been merely dull. Now that I was informed they were considerably more far-fetched, the snaps seemed somewhat sinister as well.

  I glanced at them for a scant second, a mere fig leaf for me to say, ‘No, I can’t see any difference. There’s just a red desert with a block sort of thing in the distance.’

  ‘Concentrate on that block,’ said Hood, leaning forward and touching one of the photographs.

  I concentrated. ‘It’s a block... or house,’ I said.

  Hood shrugged his shoulders. ‘Okay, Mr O. And in this one, taken five minutes later?’

  ‘The same house. Oh Lord... with a black gap... with its door open!’

  Mr Hood folded his arms.

  ‘Viking 3 didn’t take any more pictures, Mr Oakley. Less than five minutes after that picture, its camera got zapped.’

  ‘Or simply broke down,’ suggested Mr Disvan.

  Hood gave every sign that he didn’t think much of that theory.

  ‘Well .... maybe, Mr D, but it’s a hell of a coincidence if that’s so. The remaining Viking 3 systems, which all kept on working, suggested a sudden and total camera misfunction. I reckon something zapped it. More importantly, they—the button men—reckoned so too.’

  I put the pictures face down on the table and slid them back to Mr Hood.

  ‘So why should you have to flee?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  Without asking permission, Hood lit the first of a succession of cigarettes. Mr Disvan took the cue and produced his wretched pipe. Soon enough my dining room was under battle-style smoke cover and was acquiring a new, tar-based wallpaper.

  ‘I agree,’ came Hood’s voice from within the cloud, ‘but wanting publication was my
fault. Protesting the substitution of old Viking 2 photos for the genuine article was my fault. Complaining about them laying heavy manners about silence on the flight control staff was my fault. Poking my nose in and shouting my mouth off about “affairs of state” were my fault also, I guess. It was one dumb thing to do.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘Honesty was the only honourable policy.’

  Hood took a serious draw on his (my) whisky.

  ‘Maybe so, Mr D. But there again, you don’t have to live in a hole in some goddamn woods.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Disvan cheerfully.

  Mr Hood gave a bitter laugh.

  ‘And it was mite hypocritical of me as well,’ he said, ‘considering some of the other things I’d done in my service career. Why, I recall that village in Nicaragua and the donkey timebomb I rigged up...’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t, actually,’ I said swiftly.

  ‘Okay, Mr O, I’ll clam re that tub of blood. All I’m trying to say is that my conscience was a little late in arriving on the scene—but when it got there...’

  ‘You found it had no brakes?’ prompted Disvan.

  ‘Pre-cisely, Mr D. I tell ya, I could have lived with the cover-up, gotten smashed a few times and called the whole thing just part of life in the raw. However, “they” tried to kiss it better for me and let me in on their game plan. That’s what pushed me over the edge.’

  He smiled and spread his hands.

  ‘And,’ he said, ‘at the bottom of that cliff, here I am.’

  The jargon had been a little hard going but, doggedly, two or three seconds out of phase because of the translation problem, I had followed so far.

  ‘What was their “game plan”?’ I asked.

  Hood finished his drink and went to replenish it before answering.

  ‘It was a two-option, uneven loaded strategy, Mr O,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. The way they saw it was that they could maybe tack an afterthought high-res TV camera on the next scheduled US Mars probe, alter its flight plan, and get some real good home movies of just what’s going on at Cydonia Region, 41NOT North, 10NOT West. Trouble was, that’s five years off, minimum and, sad to say, the good ol’ USSR’s Phobos probe will be there three years beforehand. That was a no-no apparently.’