Read Online The Fandom of the Operator by Robert Rankin - Free Book Online Page B

how could anybody do that? It was impossible, surely? But it seemed to me that this man was doing it. That he really
did
know. Well, that’s how if felt. It was not just an uncanny feeling, it was a terrible feeling. A feeling of inner violation. It put the wind up me something terrible. And I
was
a
very
brave boy.
    “You’ll hang,” said Mr Timms. “I know it.”
    “No, I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.”
    Mr Timms gazed down at me with his penetrating eyes. His long head went nod, nod, nod, and his voice said, “Yes, you will.”
    I held my ground and stared right back at him and then, because I felt so absolutely sure that he could see my thoughts through my eyeballs, I turned those eyeballs down to the floor and studied the pattern on the carpet.
    A number of options lay open to me and I pondered on which one to take.
    I could run straight out of the door. That one was obvious, but that one would be to accept defeat.
    I could burst into tears and tell my daddy what Mr Timms had said to me, in the hope that my daddy would smite him on the nose. But my daddy might well take Mr Timms’s side and smite me instead.
    Or I could burst into tears and shout, “Get off me, you homo.” I’d seen Dave do this once to the owner of the sweetie shop who had caught him nicking Blackjacks. A crowd of young men had closed in about the shopkeeper and Dave had managed to make good his escape, taking the Black Jacks and a Mars Bar as well.
    So I burst into tears, kicked Mr Timms in the ankle, shouted, “Get your hands off me, you homo. Help me, Daddy, please,” and ran straight out of the door.

6
    Dave was in hiding across the street, behind a hedge in someone’s front garden. As I ran out of the front door he called me over and I joined him there.
    “You’re crying,” said Dave.
    So I told him what happened.
    Dave put his arm around my shoulder. “You did brilliantly,” he said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it.”
    “You ran off and left me behind, you coward.”
    “I wasn’t scared,” said Dave. “But I have a gyppy tummy and had to come outside to use the toilet. It’s this touch of Black Death I’ve got.”
    “Don’t breathe on me, then,” I said. “I don’t want to catch it.”
    Dave slid his arm from my shoulder and took to picking his nose.
    “I suppose we might as well go home,” I said. “We’re not going to get back inside now, are we? This has all been a waste of time.”
    “Seems a shame,” said Dave. “It would be so much easier to bring Mr Penrose back to life now, rather than go to all the trouble of digging him up later.”
    I shrugged. “So you think we should wait some more?” I asked.
    “It would be good practice,” said Dave.
    “Practice for what?”
    “For the future. It seems to me that adults spend most of their time waiting for something or other. A bus or a train or, for those who have a telephone, a telephone call. Or waiting for the postman or the milkman or the man to fix the broken pipe or their girlfriend to arrive. Or …”
    “Stop it,” I said. “There must be more to being an adult than that. You can get into pubs and drink beer.”
    “Waiting at the bar to get served,” said Dave. “Waiting for the cubical in the gents to be free so you can be sick in it. Waiting—”
    “Stop!” I put my hands over my ears.
    “Adults spend most of their time waiting,” said Dave, in a voice that was loud enough for me to hear. “Because all they’re really waiting for is death.”
    “You paint a rosy picture of the future.” I took my hands away from my ears and took to picking my own nose. “According to Mr Timms, my death waits for me at the end of the hangman’s rope.”
    “I hate adults,” said Dave. “And adults secretly hate children. Because children have more life left to them than they do. Adults are jealous. And they think they know more about everything than children do.”
    “That’s because they
do
,” I observed.
    “There’s some