Necrophenia by Robert Rankin Read Free Book Online

then.’
    ‘Well,’ I said. And, ‘Well indeed. No, hang about,’ I then said. ‘Dad mentioned a travelling salesman and a gatherer of the pure. He hasn’t got a job shovelling up dog shi-’
    ‘No, no, no,’ said my mother. ‘Something quite different – your father has been given a job as a roadie for a rock ’n’ roll band.’
    ‘What?’ I said. And I said it loudly, too.
    ‘A chap in dark glasses who looks a bit like your music teacher gave him the job. He’s going to be the roadie for a band called The Rolling Stones.’
    ‘What?’ said I. And even louder now.
    ‘But let’s not talk about your father,’ said my mother. ‘Tell me, Tyler, what was your really exciting news that you mentioned just before you fainted?’

9
    The Saturday that followed the Friday evening that had been The Sumerian Kynges’ very first gig was much the same as any other at that time.
    My father was doing some home improvements. He was papering our sitting-room walls with billiard table baize and Captain Lynch had taken my mother to the pictures, because there was a film on about Jesus that my father wasn’t particularly keen to see.
    I got up, then went without breakfast because my mother had apparently left early for the pictures so as to be first in the queue. Then I watched my father’s increasingly abortive attempts to paper the sitting-room walls until I could control my laughter no longer and had to rush to the toilet and be sick.
    Which made me feel even hungrier. So I did what all lads of my age did and went off to the Wimpy Bar for lunch.
    Wimpy Bars were the latest thing. They were American and therefore cool. They served a variety of foodstuffs that had never before been served upon these shores. And there were ice-cream desserts with names like the Brown Derby and the Jamaican Longboat.
    How fondly I remember those.
    I once found a pound note blowing down the street, which I considered was surely a gift from God. And myself and Neil Garden-Partee tried to spend the lot at the Wimpy Bar. And we really tried. We had as many burgers (with fries, as the Wimpy Bar’s chips were called) as we could pack in, then we laid into the desserts. And the milkshakes.
    But we only spent fifteen and sixpence, all told.
    Which wouldn’t, nowadays, even buy you a cup of tea.
    As I have lived my long and eventful life and watched the world falling to pieces all around me, I often think back to those more innocent days of the early nineteen-sixties.
    A time when two young men, in the full flush of their youth, could not eat their way through one pound’s worth of Wimpy Bar grub.
    And I feel grateful, somehow. Blessed.
    That I hadn’t been born twenty years earlier and got myself killed in the war.
    What goes around comes around, I suppose.
    Like diseases.
    And whilst we are on the subject of diseases, I have to admit that I caught my first one of the ‘social’ persuasion in an alleyway at the back of the Wimpy Bar.
    But not on this particular day.
    Because on this particular day I was still a virgin.
    I wasn’t too phased about being a virgin. Most of my pals, I knew, were similarly so. Although most bragged otherwise.
    Neil, I knew, was a virgin. The girls didn’t take to his goatee. And Rob, although a genius with a chat-up line, never seemed to pull. Toby, however, was another matter. Toby was a bit of an enigma and if all was to be believed, and it probably was, he had had his first sex while at junior school.
    With the teacher.
    And the teacher wasn’t a man.
    Just in case you were wondering.
    I took the Sixty-Five Bus from South Ealing to Ealing Broadway. My favourite clippie, the Jamaican lady with the very white teeth, wasn’t clippying on the bus upon this morning and so I had to pay the fare. The Jamaican lady with the very white teeth always took pity on the hang-dog expression that I wore and my tales of poverty and child abuse, and let me off without paying.
    The evil harridan of an Irish woman who