Free Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls by Robert Rankin Page A

he’s done, we’ll sneak back and put it right.”
    “Put it right?” said Jim.
    “See that John Lennon bites the bullet, as it were.”
    “Eh?” said Jim, and, “What?”
    “Well, we can hardly leave things as they stand, can we?”
    “Can’t you?”
    “Certainly not. And wasn’t that Elvis I heard on the barman’s sound system?”
    Pooley nodded. “It was,” he said.
    “Bloody Wingarde again,” said one of Geraldo’s cronies.
    “Look,” said Jim. “Just stop. Just stop right there and here and now. Just tell me simply and in a manner that will not confuse me.”
    “What?” Geraldo asked.
    “Just who the frigging hell you are.”
    “We’re fanboys,” said Geraldo. “Surely you can work that out.”
    “Fanboys,” said Jim. “You’re just fanboys.”
    “Well, not
just
fanboys. We’re rather special fanboys, as it happens.”
    “And just how special might that be?”
    “We’re fanboys from the future,” said Geraldo.
    Not with a Bang, or a Whimper, But a Quack
    Don was a dead or dying duck.
    The last of the final few.
    The fowl of the air
    Weren’t anywhere,
    And there weren’t no rabbits too.
     
    There were not even tiny frogs,
    Nor jumping moles and that.
    There barked no dogs
    Or ’ollered ’ogs,
    Nor sang no sing-song cat.
     
    What now of your jovial toad?
    Or ferret so fecund?
    The pig on the road
    Has done his load,
    Like the swans on the village pund. [6]
     
    All alone was Dead Eye Don
    Whom quacked for all him worth.
    And out somewhere
    In that final air
    The last quack on the Earth.
     
    Bye bye, Don.
    Goodnight, everyone.
    Goodnight.

8
    Being the professional he was, Neville took it like a manly man. He didn’t flinch and he didn’t tremble. He didn’t even break out in a sweat.
    He would later admit in his bestselling autobiography,
Same Again: The Confessions of a Full-Time Part-Time Barman
, that the incident had shaken him severely and that he was never the same man ever again, be that manly or not.
    It had shaken others who’d witnessed it, but none so deeply as Neville, who’d had to slip away afterwards and sit down quietly and dab his wrists with lemon juice and pray.
    But then it
had
come as a terrible shock and the more Neville thought about it, the more inclined was he to believe that it couldn’t actually have happened at all.
    But it had.
    It really had.
    Jim Pooley
had
walked into the Flying Swan in the company of twelve sweetly smelling young men in black T-shirts and shorts and he really-truly-really-really-truly
had
stood them
all
a round of drinks.
    Thirteen pints of Large and all purchased by Pooley.
    No wonder Neville would wake up in the night, all cold sweats and screaming.
    And it wasn’t just the matter of the purchasing of all those pints. It was that in the shock of it all, Neville had committed a cardinal sin. He had forgotten about the Swan’s dress code, which forbade the wearing of shorts in the saloon bar. He would never live
that
down at future Lodge meetings. The brothers of the
Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout
would make him the butt of many a bitter joke.
    But it had happened.
    It really truly had.
     
    “Cheers, Neville,” said Pooley, accepting his change and, to the part-time barman’s further horror, thrusting the coins straight into his pocket without even bothering to count them.
    Neville slipped off for that quiet sit-down. Pooley led Geraldo to a table.
    “It’s a nice pub, this,” said the fattish bloke, seating himself upon a comfy cushion. “Very quiet, very sedate.”
    “And the finest beer in Brentford.” Jim raised his glass and sipped from it. “Which is to say, probably the best beer in the world.”
    “It’s not at all bad.” Geraldo took a mighty swig. “Although last week I had a beer in a New Orleans bar with Robert Johnson—”
    “
The
Robert Johnson?”
    “
The
Robert Johnson.”
    “Who died in nineteen thirty-seven.”
    “You know your bluesmen, Jim.”
    “And so, apparently, do you. But