Goodnight, John-boy: Chapter 37
As always, the Major had improvised when it came to weapons, and smashed his killer in the face with his portable typewriter, before he fell dying to the ground.
Welcome to Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep.
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If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
AFTER THE FUNERAL, the reception was held at The Eight Veils. As well as the Fleetpit crowd, there were groups of ex-wives and girlfriends and debtors, many of whom knew the Major by different names and ranks, as well as his real name: Private John Taylor of the Army Catering Corps. Some still seemed to think he was a Battle of Britain fighter pilot.
Paula was crying, still stunned by his death. ‘I haven’t had such a shock since I was a teenager. Woke up next to a dead Chinaman in a Chinese laundry. He’d overdone the pipe of dreams.’
Dave resisted bringing out his own pipe of comfort. He was in a state of shock that someone he cared about was dead, thanks to what he had done.
Leni was standing next to him, crying her heart out, which was surprising as she had never actually met the Major.
Then Dave realised it was because she still hadn’t got over her breakup with Greg.
‘I’ve lost my schnookie,’ she lamented. ‘He dumped me. He dumped me.’
Dave backed away from her emotional outpourings and headed towards Greg, who was keeping well out of her way.
So the weeping six-footer, dressed in a smart black power suit, turned to Joy for comfort. ‘Because I’m so tall, men don’t understand I’m also soft, vulnerable and easily hurt, just like other women,’ she sobbed.
Joy gave her a silent like I give a fuck? look, lit another cigarette and started to sidle away from her.
But Leni pursued her. ‘It’s easy for you, Joy. Because you’re petite, you can get sympathy from men any time you want. They think you’re sweet and cute.’
‘Let them think what they fucking want,’ Joy growled.
‘But it’s so hard for me, when I’ve lost my schnookieputz,’ complained Leni and she collapsed into tears again.
‘Leni, can I remind you, we’re here to remember the Major,’ said Joy coldly.
‘I know. I know. I just can’t help myself,’ said Leni.
‘I don’t work on Mumsy. I’m not Marjorie Rayner. I can’t help you.’
‘Ja. Ja,’ said Leni. ‘I will talk to Marjorie. She will help me get over Greg.’
‘Right now, I want to get over the Major’s death,’ said Joy pointedly.
‘Ja. Ja. Group hug. Group hug, everybody.’
The Fleetpit contingent had no choice but to comply with their publisher: Roger Baker, the Caning Commando artist; Joy; Bridget; Deep Throat; Dmitri; Guthrie; Dave; Ron and others. Everyone but Greg, who was hiding in the gents. Ron scowled contemptuously at his tearful enemy, which gave way to an expression of horror as she drew the circle ever closer until his face was crushed into her double-D bosom.
Dave couldn’t understand his feelings. He didn’t feel self-hatred or guilt at being responsible for the Major’s death. Instead, he felt self-hatred and guilt that he didn’t feel self-hatred and guilt. What was wrong with him? Was he a sociopath? Probably, he concluded. Then he decided he couldn’t be, because he was actually feeling something, only he couldn’t put a label on his feelings, except he knew they were painful.
To get away from those feelings, he focused on the details of the murder. The Major had been stabbed with a misericorde, a medieval dagger used to penetrate the gaps in suits of armour and give wounded knights the coup de grace. The police knew this because the blade had remained lodged in the Major’s body as he fought back. So at least Dave now knew what the killer had in the boot of his car.
As always, the Major had improvised when it came to weapons, and smashed his killer in the face with his portable typewriter, before he fell dying to the ground. His broken machine lay beside him, the keys scattered across the pavement, as the killer made his getaway.
There was speculation that he was someone from the Major’s colourful past: a debtor or an angry husband. There were numerous suspects, but Dave knew the truth. It had to be the anonymous caller who worked somewhere in Fleetpit House on any one of its endless publications.
The Major’s last Caning Commando story had been found in his typewriter case, ready for the artist to break down into pictures and illustrate, and it was now being respectfully passed around for the mourners to read. As Ron handed the story to Dave, its title sent a shockwave of feelings through him.
The Caning Commando. The character the Major had created to save his life, but which, ultimately, had led to his death.
Because of Dave.
Were his feelings his wake-up call? Warning him that it was over? That he should now reject his criminal ways and start a new life? The pain he felt was so intense, it seemed like the only way to make it stop.
To hand himself in. Confess what he’d been doing. And accept the consequences. Take his punishment.
But the demons that drove him didn’t see it that way. And they told him a different, far better solution.
Not to feel anything at all. Like comic book heroes.
Like the Caning Commando himself.
Dave remembered how readers never want the heroes they love to change. The most popular remain endlessly in stasis, never ageing, never evolving, never marrying and having families. They face murder and mayhem on a daily basis, and are rarely troubled by it.
At the loss of someone close to them, they feel pain briefly and then it passes. There would be a token scene of mourning, a few cool words and a gritted-teeth glare before they stoically head off into the symbolic darkness.
They had learnt how to bury their feelings.
Dave had spent his life reading and writing such heroes. They had been his role models. They were the only role models he had, apart from Mr Cooper and Ernie Gambo.
If it was good enough for his heroes, it was good enough for him. Their way was the way he would get through this.
Gritting his teeth, he started to read the story.
It was told at the usual frenetic pace, reflecting the speed with which the Major would have written it. Usually around fifteen minutes. Like the other mourners, despite the sadness of the occasion, Dave found himself smiling at the title of the Major’s last story:
The Bum Note
It began when Alf Mast was kidnapped by the enemy and taken to Berlin. The kidnapping puzzled Victor Grabham: why would the Germans go to the trouble of kidnapping an idiot like Corporal Punishment who was afflicted with wet rot of the feet and dry rot of the brain? There was one possible explanation. They wanted to discover the secrets of the Caning Commando.
But Grabham knew Alf would never break under interrogation. He could endure extreme torture due to having a goldfish-like memory. And, although he had the ignorance of an entire busload of dullards, his plucky young companion also had the courage of a legless whippet.
Eleven other British schoolboys – intelligent ones – had also been mysteriously kidnapped, and a ticket to the Berlin Opera House had been found at the scene of one of the crimes. Grabham was parachuted into Berlin to find out the truth.
At the Opera House, he discovered yet another of his greatest enemies was responsible: Arsene Assbender, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, a mad German composer, his face hideously scarred after the Caning Commando had once thrown hot tea over him.
German soldiers emerged from the wings and turned their guns on the black-robed teacher.
‘Drop your cane, Grabham,’ sneered Assbender, and the Commando realised he had been led into a deadly trap.
The Phantom gloatingly revealed to Grabham that he had discovered the manuscript of Mozart’s legendary missing masterpiece: The Magic Cane. And he intended to perform it as the composer originally intended, with Alf Mast as the star!
Grabham was flabbergasted. Mast, the star of an opera?!
It was unthinkable. Why Mast, with his thick Cockney accent, could barely speak the King’s English, never mind sing in German!
But now the curtain was going up on the opening night of The Magic Cane in front of opera lover Reichsfuhrer Hermann Goering himself. As the orchestra played the overture, Grabham snarled at Assbender: ‘I fail to comprehend why you chose Mast, Assbender? I have heard lungfish with greater vocal range, and seen bison with more grace.’
By way of explanation, with a flourish, the mad maestro revealed a row of bent-over British schoolboys whom he was about to thrash. At the end of the line-up was Alf Mast! Under heavy guard, the boys were unable to move. The soldiers also trained their guns on the Caning Commando, so he, too, could do nothing.
Assbender flicked back his flowing mane. ‘Every boy has been specially chosen, Grabham. When caned, each one will produce a different note, just as Mozart intended.
‘But … there was still one note missing to make my singspiel complete. Then I discovered Alf Mast has the perfect falsetto note I was looking for. He will hit the highest note of all.’
Grabham remembered the high note Alf once hit when he caned him for having saucy pictures of ‘bumpy men’.
‘I fear you’re right, Assbender. Unlike his trousers, his voice has never dropped.’
The cheery Cockney agreed. ‘My voice never broke, despite you breaking several canes on me, sir.’ He was delighted to be thrashed alongside the public school boys. Under normal circumstances, he would have been regarded as much too common to be caned with the toffs.
Waving two canes, the Phantom strode up and down the line of his victims, inflicting a series of blows, which producing a range of high-pitched screams.
From his private box, a sneering Goering smiled his appreciation.
‘I am delighted you came to hear my “organ”, Caning Commando,’ jeered the Phantom.
Then it was Alf Mast’s turn. The Phantom raised his canes over Mast’s rear.
‘And now! Enjoy the star performance of The Magic Cane.’
‘You swine, Assbender!’ snarled Grabham, seething with impotent fury that he could not go to the aid of his companion.
With a gloating, manic laugh, Assbender thrashed the brave young Cockney.
As the blows landed on him, Alf let loose an earth-shattering high C of such lung power that the Opera House chandelier exploded.
The windows smashed.
And even Goering’s monocle cracked.
It was the chance Grabham had been waiting for. Taking advantage of the chaos, the sinister, black-robed teacher seized his cane, leapt for the chandelier chain, and swung through the air on it, sending his guards flying. He used it to hurtle across the Opera House to Goering’s private box and jumped down inside.
There, he belayed the Reichsmarshal’s bounteous buttocks, then threw the screaming Nazi out onto the stage.
Finally, he leapt back down into the orchestra pit to confront the Phantom, as the ‘caning chorus’, led by Alf Mast, was finishing off their guards.
‘Your time has come, Assbender!’ the Commando roared as he swung his cane. ‘It’s time to Carpet Bum the Hun!’
Wielding two canes, the mad organist had the advantage of him at first and delivered a series of lethal blows to the Commando’s rear. But the wily teacher could take it: he bit on a bullet, a time-honoured method of surviving a flogging.
Then, spitting out the bullet, it was his turn. ‘Know, Assbender, that canes are school swords which the Almighty has committed to the hands of teachers that they may chastise the wicked with them. And you are in for such a chastisement!’
Again and again he struck. ‘High and hard, low and mean!’ Soon his old enemy was reduced to a blubbering heap.
‘Mercy! Mercy!’ Assbender begged.
‘No chance,’ said the teacher. ‘My bowels of compassion never move.’
A light aircraft landed outside the opera house. The Commando and the boys just managed to squeeze inside. The aircraft was barely able to take off with so many passengers.
But, finally, it was aloft, narrowly avoiding the roof of the Berlin Opera House. It came under heavy fire from anti-aircraft guns as the pilot desperately tried to gain height.
The Phantom and Goering ordered the gunners to concentrate their fire on the plane. They could not permit the Caning Commando to escape. Not after they had been humiliated by such a first-rate flogging.
A wing strut was broken off by the flak. Then the wing started to tear itself free from the fuselage. It looked like the aircraft would crash.
The Phantom and Goering exchanged triumphant looks.
‘Finally it is all over for the Caning Commando,’ exulted Goering.
But Grabham courageously climbed out of the plane, as it continued to lurch up into the night sky, with flak bursting all around it.
He desperately clung onto the fuselage as he used his cane to replace the broken strut and stabilise the wing.
And then they flew back towards Blighty and safety, landing in the grounds of the Golden Hind Academy,
‘Thank you for rescuing me, sir,’ said Alf Mast as they entered the school. ‘I was thrilled to be with the posh boys today.’
‘And so you should be, Mast. However, that temporary lowering of the boundary between the human and animal kingdoms should not give you any ideas. You must remember your place, boy.’
‘I think I remember it, sir,’ said Alf uncertainly. ‘Is it my tree-ape nest, sir?’
‘Indeed it is. Make sure you put fresh straw in it.’ The Caning Commando gave him a cold smile. ‘Or there will be music in the music room and I will be beating time with my stick.’
* * *
‘The Bum Note’ was possibly the most ludicrous and unlikely Caning Commando story the Major had ever written – although there were other serious contenders – and it was the perfect tribute to his comic-writing genius.
Ron addressed the mourners. ‘The Major didn’t deserve what happened to him.’
‘You’re right,’ said Dave sadly. ‘He didn’t deserve it at all.’
‘I hope they find the evil bastard who killed the Major.’ The others nodded their agreement.
‘They should never have done away with capital punishment,’ said Ron.
‘And I hope they find him soon,’ said Dave. ‘Very soon.’ The others looked surprised by his vehemence. ‘I mean, he could strike again, couldn’t he?’
Ron raised his glass. ‘To the Major. An officer and a gentleman.’
The mourners raised their glasses in response. ‘To the Major. An officer and a gentleman.’
Dave, too, raised his glass to the man he had betrayed and silently asked for his forgiveness. His plan to use the Major as his scapegoat had worked only too well.
‘Goodnight, John-Boy.’
As the evening wore on, the legendary tales about the Major grew ever bawdier. Ron told Dave and Greg how, when he and the Major were in Spain looking for artists, they had tried out the slimming belts in a gym.
‘We’d had a couple of gallons of that fucking piss-poor Spanish beer and we dropped our strides and tried the weight-loss machines with the vibrating belts. It was all right.
‘Then the Major, he says, “I’ve got an idea, dear boy”. So then he turns round and puts the belt around his wedding tackle. And it went like the fucking clappers. “What’s it like?” I asked him. “It’s shining my privates up splendidly, Ron,” he says. “Oh, by crikey yes. They’re absolutely sparkling.”
‘Unfortunately, just as the Major was about to whitewash the wall, in comes the fucking local jefe of police, right in his line of fire. Fucking hell, chum. The Old Bill’s uniform ended up looking like a plasterer’s overalls.’
The story seemed about as likely to Dave and Greg as the Major’s Caning Commando stories. But then Dave had to remind himself that truth is generally stranger than fiction, and the Major was a larger than life character.
In effect, it was no less likely than a killer stabbing a comics writer to death, and pursuing a comics editor next.
Meanwhile, Leni was telling Joy about her great idea for the new sf comic.
‘We bring back Dan Darwin from Homework. We’ll get huge publicity for the comic.’
‘I don’t know, Leni,’ said Joy diplomatically. ‘Dan Darwin’s a famous strip, but it’s really a bit old school, don’t you think?’
‘That’s okay,’ Leni shrugged. ‘Dave and Greg can update it.’
‘I don’t know if it’s really their thing.’
‘I can help them. I have lots of ideas. My ex-husband works for NASA.’
‘Really?’
‘Ja,’ Leni chuckled. ‘He used to call me his Space Cadet.’
‘He knew you were out of touch with reality?’
‘No.’ Leni looked puzzled. ‘Because when NASA get the go-ahead for the civilian space program, I will be high on the list.’
Joy took in this surprising news.
‘That’s why I married him,’ Leni explained. ‘And also because he has a big penis. I’ve done all the basic training. Flying. Deep-sea diving. Going up in the vomit comet.’
‘So how could you help with Dan Darwin?’
‘Because I know all about the E.T.’s. I want to bring them in from space, you see? I’ve talked to “the boys” and they tell me they want to come in from the cold.’
‘The boys?’
‘I channel them every night.’
‘D’you think … y’know … when you’re out there in space,’ said Joy very casually, ‘you might actually want to stay there, Leni? It could be the best way for you to help the boys.’
The statuesque blonde considered this. ‘Ja. This is what my ex said. This is why I’m so high on the NASA list. And because I managed to get into Vandenberg Air Force Base. I got to meet the Commander of the Space Shuttle launch program. He thought it was an excellent idea for me to be sent into space.’
‘I can see where he’s coming from.’
‘I really need to talk to Steven Spielberg, too. He’s making a film about the E.T.’s.’
‘I heard. Close Encounters?’
‘Ja. He hasn’t been returning my calls. Next time I’m in LA, I find him.’ Entering a guarded Hollywood film set would be no problem for a woman who could get into Greek prisons, Vandenberg Air Force Base, or meet Tribal Elders on the Third Mesa. Leni’s great talent was that she was oblivious to rejection. The words ‘fuck off’ were meaningless to her. They just didn’t register on her radar. Joy felt rather sorry for Steven Spielberg.
Joy returned to the subject of Dan Darwin. ‘There’s also the original creator to consider. How he’d feel about Dan coming back with a new look and a new creative team.’
Leni looked puzzled. ‘What’s it got to do with him? He doesn’t have any say in it. Fleetpit owns Dan Darwin now.’
‘But you’re going to pay the artist for using his creation, I hope?’ asked an apprehensive Joy.
Leni laughed. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ said Joy, knocking back her drink.
‘We’re going to pay him zilch, honey,’ said Leni, ‘because that’s our legal right.’
‘You may have a legal right, but do you have a moral right?’
‘What’s morality got to do with it?’ snapped an irritated Leni. The Queen of New Agers didn’t like being challenged. The women’s raised voices caused a curious Greg and Dave to look over.
‘It’s theft,’ Joy glowered.
‘It’s publishing,’ sneered Leni.
‘Doesn’t matter if it’s legal theft, it’s still theft,’ seethed Joy.
‘He should have thought of that before he signed away all his rights,’ said Leni.
‘He’s an artist, not a fucking Suit,’ said Joy.
‘Tough shit,’ Leni snarled ‘I own the character. I can do what I like with him. He’s my property! So keep your hands off him!’
‘Girls, girls,’ said a smiling Greg, sauntering over and happy to be the peacemaker. He opened his arms expansively. ‘There’s need to fight. There’s enough of me to go around.’
‘Fuck off, Greg!’ said Leni and Joy together.
Goodnight, John-boy is the second book in the Read Em And Weep series and you can buy it digitally or as a paperback.