‘Aaagh!’
It was 1975 and Dave was sitting at his desk, struggling to eat a gobstopper.
He gingerly felt his face. ‘This is breaking my jaw. If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t bother.’
Greg, his assistant editor, looked up from proof-reading some artwork pages and sneered.
Dave removed the gobstopper and returned the sneer. ‘I see you disapprove of my breakfast. But I haven’t had to pay for my breakfasts since 1973. The cost to my health has been heavy; but it’s a price I’m prepared to pay: nothing.’
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He reached into a large box of assorted free sweets given away with comics since the 1950s.
‘So let’s see what else there is in the bilious buffet.’
He extracted a packet of sweet cigarettes with an illustration of a cruel-looking teacher in mortar board and gown on the front. A medal hung from his mortar board and a cigarette from his mouth as he wielded his cane.
Dave read the brand-name. ‘Caning Commando Sweet Cigarettes.’
There was a further caption on the side. ‘For Tomorrow’s Smokers’.
‘Did you know these are worse for you than the real thing, Greg?’
Greg didn’t bother to reply. ‘I approve of that,’ Dave added.
He rummaged further. ‘Black jacks … Flying saucers … Aniseed balls. Once you’ve sucked off the outer layer, they make lethal mothballs … Yo Ho Ho liquorice chewing tobacco … Kojak lolly. “Who hates you, readers?” I do. And I always will … Edible false teeth …’
Greg lit a Black Russian Sobranie cigarette and shook his head disdainfully, continuing to ignore Dave. The cigarette completed his Man in Black image, with his black hair, black polo neck, black cords and blue and black, patent leather platform shoes. Dave disapproved, but at least it was preferable to Greg’s other look: Billy Liar, complete with flying jacket and boots.
‘Bit queer,’ Dave commented on the Black Russian cigarette.
‘No.’ replied Greg. ‘I smoke them to annoy you.’
‘You succeeded. Now. Whatever you do, Greg, don’t lose this box,’ Dave continued. ‘You wouldn’t like to see me when I’m not on my fizzy pop.’ He found a blue paper cylinder with a liquorice straw. ‘Ah! The choky sherbet given away with Gulp! It lasted just three months. Let’s drown our sorrows in sherbet.’ He sucked up the sherbet enthusiastically through the liquorice straw. ‘Mmm … the sweet nectar of failure.’
As promised on the label, he started choking, scattering sherbet down his Marks and Spencer white safari suit. As he dusted himself down, Greg finally smiled. ‘It’s those bloody things you’re smoking,’ scowled Dave and opened the window wide, letting the chilly Autumn air fill the office.
It was the suit Greg had recommended after Dave realised he needed to improve his image if he was to find himself a girlfriend, which he reluctantly thought he should. After all, he had been single for a long time. Forever. And he was an editor, even if it was only editor of The Spanker comic.
Greg had told him he’d look like Roger Moore’s James Bond in a safari suit.
‘You’ll look so cool. You’ll be the Editor With The Golden Pun,’ he assured Dave.
‘You really think so?’
‘Definitely. Especially with your Hai Karate aftershave.’
‘There’s an instruction booklet of karate self-defence moves with it, to help me fend off lustful women driven crazy by the scent. I haven’t been attacked so far.’
‘You will be in a safari suit. Trust me.’
And Dave had fallen for it. It was necessary to be slim and trim to wear a safari suit; Dave was neither, and Greg knew that, which is why he suggested it. The suit looked terrible on Dave, just as Greg hoped it would. Dave’s old fashioned, old man’s haircut didn’t help.
This gave Greg enormous pleasure and made the experience of being his assistant tolerable.
Dave was unaware of just how unflattering it was. Cost was his first priority. The safari suit wasn’t expensive and that’s what mattered. Not least because he was saving up for something far more important.
It is said that we fight our inner demons or surrender to them. Dave had hung out a white flag to his a long time ago. After his traumatic childhood, he liked to boast that he was possessed by more demons than the Gadarene swine.
These traumas were no minor ‘character-building’ misfortunes. There was his mother’s mysterious disappearance, Mr Cooper’s ‘games’ every Saturday morning, his father’s break-downs, and more.
It was his demons who had built his character so that he had become the newsagent.
Or as near as possible, as the editor of The Spanker.
The Spanker had absorbed The Fourpenny One, the comic of Dave’s dreams and nightmares, some years before. Its name was still visible on the comic’s masthead in small type: THE SPANKER and The Fourpenny One.
There were other similarities between Dave and Mr Cooper. Both were involved in publishing: one at the beginning, the other at the end of the process. Cooper’s hatred of his customers mirrored Dave’s hatred of his readers. Cooper’s sarcasm inspired Dave’s sarcasm. Dave played secret games on his readers that surpassed even Cooper’s games. History was repeating itself. All that was missing was the newsagent’s brown jacket and the nicotine-stained fingers. Dave preferred a liquorice pipe.
Fortified by the knowledge that he was the embodiment of Mr Cooper, the purveyor to kids of all things cheap and usually rather nasty, Dave turned to Greg. ‘Today’s literary challenge. Did you come up with a new name for our great free gift?’
Dave held up a piece of red plastic that crudely resembled a delta-winged aircraft. ‘This example of finest Hong Kong plastic.’
Greg consulted his notes as Dave prepared to fly the plane with an elastic band.
‘Super Stuka?’
Dave scowled. ‘Loada crapper,’ he responded. It was typical of Greg, he thought, to suggest a Nazi plane. Greg was obsessed with all things German.
‘Bionic Bomber?’
By way of response, Dave fired the plane directly at Greg. It flew across the large, high-ceilinged Edwardian room, Greg ducked and it crashed into the frosted-glass partition wall that separated them from the Spanker art department. ‘Watch it! You could take someone’s eye out with that thing,’ Greg protested.
‘Good,’ said Dave. He smiled evilly as he picked up the futuristic aircraft. ‘We’ll call it The Super Nuker: The Red Terror from the skies.’
Greg looked appalled. ‘What? You’ll be giving kids nightmares about nuclear annihilation.’
‘I live in hope. Although I personally look forward to nuclear annihilation. No, really. I do. Sadly, The Spanker would survive it. I’m sorry to say it will survive a nuclear winter.’ Dave considered his comic’s future. ‘Although we might have to chisel it out on a rock. There’ll be two-headed readers queuing up for it. We’ll be able to sell the little bastards two copies at once.’
Greg sighed, ‘Why can’t we have decent free gifts like Angus, Angus and Angus’s comics? The Whirly Bee. Or The Thunder Cracker. I loved those as a kid. They were great.’
‘You didn’t rate our last free gift? A conker with detailed instructions and free string?’
Dave fired the Super Nuker at Greg again. It flew past him, through the open window, and landed on the flat roof extension outside.
Dave scowled and continued. ‘Our readers don’t deserve a free gift that actually gives them pleasure. It has to be shite. I did suggest they give away real shite. I would have been happy to have made a donation.’
He went to the window and climbed out.
‘There must be something more interesting we can give them?’ pondered Greg.
Dave looked back at him. ‘There is. Something they’ll find useful all their lives. A free P45. I’d like to sack the lot. They’ll get no reference from me.’
Dave made his way out along the roof.
Fleetpit Publications, who published The Spanker, were housed in an imposing six-storey former Edwardian hotel on Farringdon Street just off Fleet Street. Many of Britain’s popular culture magazines were produced here. Women’s magazines like Darling, Twinset, Mumsy for Today’s Young Mums and Heroine Chic. Teenage girls magazines. Comics. Specialist magazines from Stately Piles to Advanced Caravanning. Sexy magazines like Casino for the Man about Town. Household names. The publications that had once filled Mr Cooper’s shop.
The wind blew the Super Nuker further along the roof and Dave followed it. The Spanker office was located on the third floor at the back of Fleetpit House, looking down on an inner courtyard. Across the void, he could see the offices of the teenage magazines: My Gang with tartan scarves and feather boas hanging up in the window; Hot Pants with a poster of Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors; Get It On! with a dreamy image of Gilbert O’Sullivan.
He glanced up to the sixth floor attic rooms. They were used mainly for storage and were unoccupied, except for Dave, who had been furtively living there for some months in the turreted tower at the very top of the building. He was content to see there was no sign of activity, so his secret was still safe.
He continued his rooftop stroll. He felt no sense of embarrassment at being out there, staring into everyone’s offices. Nothing ever fazed him, he was used to spying on people and to getting away with eccentric behaviour.
Nothing except …
From an office on the second floor below, he heard a long, whinnying, bleating laugh, instantly depressing, like the whine of a soul in eternal torment, and he trembled.
There it was again. It was hideous. Like the endless, monotonous drone of a buzz saw. It made him felt sick to the pit of his stomach and he had to steady himself against the wall and take deep breaths.
The hellish sound came from the editor of Laarf!, the most unfunny comic ever created. It filled Dave with dread, because, whenever he screwed up on the The Spanker, which was often, he was threatened with a six-month sentence on Laarf!
Sweating and shuddering at the thought, he carried on. He headed past Pinafore, edited by the tweedy, forty-something Bridget Paris. It was a rather dated, ‘nice’ comic, the kind parents and teachers approved of. A cigarette dangling from her mouth, she seemed utterly bored by the comic proofs she was checking and was oblivious to him passing by her window and leering in at her. He always felt there was something familiar about Bridget. He was sure he had seen somewhere before, but just couldn’t work out where.
Beyond Pinafore was the top-selling, not-so-nice Shandy, edited by Glaswegian Joy Glass. The Super Nuker had now completed its bombing run and landed outside her window. Picking it up, he casually glanced into her office.
Joy was in her underwear, trying on clothes. Her light-fingered friend Sofia, who worked at the legendary Biba’s, had ‘liberated’ some stock in August, just before Dorothy Perkins pulled the plug on the ailing store. Joy had bought three outfits from her at bargain prices: A gingham shirt and matching waistcoat and skirt. A pink, satin-weave, cotton trouser-suit. Cotton dungarees with a yellow and black Art Deco pattern, reminiscent of the Biba logo.
Unaware she was being watched, the striking twenty-four-year old tried on the pink trouser-suit. It fitted her perfectly. She imagined herself in a Nova fashion spread – the famous women’s magazine that had more male than female readers. That would show Daddy. She knew her Australian father wrote for Nova sometimes – alongside Graham Greene, Lynda Lee-Potter and Christopher Booker – giving readers his legendary, eye-witness accounts of wars in far-flung corners of the globe. She imagined the awed expression on his handsome, tanned, chiselled face as he saw his daughter staring out from its pages as he sipped his Pimms in the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel, Singapore. She had made it on her own.
Then she recalled Nova had just folded. Like Biba.
And all the time she dressed and undressed, Dave watched through the window, open-mouthed, slack-jawed, unable to avert his eyes from the object of his desire. His loins were stirred as never before. Joy was so intent on trying on her bargain-price purchases, she was unaware that she was giving Dave a long and intimate private floorshow. She pouted and posed in a mirror, imagining the effect on Greg, her current boyfriend, who seemed to have lost interest in her recently.
‘This should light your fire,’ she teased her lover in the mirror, her man in black, who was actually better looking than the Cadbury’s Milk Tray man in black. Greg could swing across the rooftops for her, anytime. She imagined him landing cat-like on the roof, deftly opening the window and entering her bedroom, and … Lost in her fantasy, she stepped out of her dungarees and turned seductively towards the window, running her fingers through his luxuriant, stylish black mane, murmuring, ‘Take me now.’
And there, indeed, on the other side of the glass, was a man staring in at her. Dave.
Her expression quickly changed to shock and fury and it was no-good Dave lamely pointing to his Super Nuker to explain why he was spying on her. His glazed expression and open, drooling mouth told her otherwise. In vain he covered his eyes, pretending he couldn’t see her in her underwear.
Then he shook his head, miming the words ‘No. No. You’ve got it wrong. It’s not you I’m interested in! No! Not you!’ and desperately pointed to something else in her office. The real focus of his lust. But she shook her fist, angrily pulled down the blind, and in a moment it was lost from view.
His fantasy was hanging from a coat hook within. Sexy, slinky, grey and white, with a generous, warm, soft, inviting collar. It was everything he had always wanted. Everything he had ever desired.
Joy’s vintage Arctic fox fur.
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.
A stonking good read! Some real laugh out loud moments here. Loved the free gifts on comics laughs.
I read it in paperback edition a while algo. One of the funniest books I've ever read. I'm currently reading the second (it's great too), and waiting for the third and fourth... Pat always delivers, no doubt about that...