Diversifications Read online

  At Fleshtone, his peculiar outburst had been forgotten, if not forgiven. He had been transferred to personnel management, away from the factory, away from the actual production process. His salary stayed the same but the move was a demotion in every other respect. He dealt with workers now, not the objects the workers worked on.

  Already the next generation of Head was in the pipeline.

  And coming shortly, according to the even more insanely wealthy Wingate-Hayes: the Body.

  CARRY THE MOON IN MY POCKET

  When, during break one morning, Luke Weatherby spied Barry Griffin striding purposefully across the school playground towards the low wall where he was sitting, he immediately did what any sane person familiar with Barry Griffin’s reputation would have done. Hastily folding up the National Geographic he had been reading, he leapt to his feet and set off in the direction of the science block with the air of someone who has just remembered he is late for a very urgent appointment.

  The first time Barry called out his surname, Luke pretended not to have heard and carried on walking. The second “Weatherby!”, however, was bellowed with such irresistible authority that Luke had no choice but to stop dead in his tracks. Slowly, with a mouth gone suddenly dry and his heartbeat thumping in his ears, he turned round. He had no idea what he might have done to attract Barry’s attention, but whatever it was, he was already regretting it.

  Usually when Barry Griffin was about to beat someone up, his pudgy features would clench into a purple scowl of disapproval, a thundercloud that presaged a storm of physical violence. On this occasion, however, the expression Luke saw on his face was less overtly intimidating and, consequently, far more unnerving.

  Barry was smiling.

  “Yeah, Weatherby,” he said, as he halted in front of Luke. “I been looking for you.”

  “Ohhhh?” said Luke. It came out more like a groan than anything.

  “Yeah.” Barry’s breath wisped in the cold November air. “I got something for you.”

  “Something?” Luke imagined a smack in the mouth, a dead arm, a Chinese burn, a wedgie.

  “An offer. I got something I think you might like. You’re into the moon and them spacemen and that, aren’t you?”

  This was something of an understatement. At that time, November of 1972, there couldn’t have been many eleven-year-old boys who didn’t have at least a passing interest in the Apollo missions. Luke, though, was not just a keen follower of the lunar landings. For him, the unfolding adventure of the American astronauts’ voyages to and from the moon was nothing short of a grand passion. An all-consuming obsession.

  In response to Barry’s enquiry, he gave a numb nod.

  “So how would you like to own a piece of it?” Barry asked.

  Luke blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  Patiently Barry elaborated: “How would you like to own a genuine and absolutely real chunk of moon rock?”

  “You’re serious? You have a chunk of moon rock?”

  “Yeah. Genuine and absolutely real.”

  “Well, I mean, how? I mean, where is it? Can I have a look? Now?”

  “It’s not here. I wouldn’t bring it in to school, would I? Someone might try ’n’ nick it off me.”

  Given that Barry was taller and stockier than almost anyone else in the entire school, and noted for his violent tendencies, Luke didn’t think that this was very likely, but he said nothing.

  “Meet me at the gates after last bell and I’ll take you to see it. All right?”

  “Um, yeah,” said Luke. “All right. Fine.”

  “Good,” said Barry, and about-faced and walked away, leaving Luke standing bewildered, scarcely able to believe that the foregoing exchange had taken place and, moreover, that not one portion of his body was now either bruised or bleeding.

  At lunch, over a plateful of suety steak-and-kidney pie, diced mixed vegetables and two hard scoops of mashed potato, Luke regaled his best friend and confidante Mandy Briggs with an account of the brief breaktime encounter with Barry.

  “I don’t know what’s harder to believe,” Mandy said. “Barry saying he’s got a bit of moon rock or you having a conversation with him that didn’t end in you getting hurt.”

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “Well, it does sound a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it? Like something he made up to appeal specially to you.”

  “To me?” said Luke. “What for?”

  Mandy spelled it out for him. “To get you on your own so he can do you in.”

  “But why? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Makes no difference. Barry doesn’t need a reason to beat somebody up.”

  “So why didn’t he just do it there and then?” Luke argued. “It doesn’t make sense. You know, Mandy,” he added, unconsciously emulating the tolerant, liberal tones of Mr Clement, their bearded, sandal-wearing RI teacher, “maybe Barry’s not the bad guy everyone makes him out to be. Maybe it’s time somebody gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

  At this, Mandy snorted so hard that morsels of half-masticated mashed potato shot out of her nose and into her bowl of spotted dick and custard. “Luke—Barry Griffin! You don’t give Barry Griffin the benefit of the doubt. You steer clear of him.”

  “Even so,” said Luke. “If there’s a chance he’s not lying and it’s not a trick and he does have that moon rock, then I have to meet him. I’ve got no choice.”

  “Well, if you have to, you have to,” Mandy said with a grim grin. “Just tell me this. What music would you like played at your funeral?”

  The sarcastic laugh with which Luke responded to Mandy’s remark returned to haunt him as he stood outside the school gates three hours later. Back in the crowded, rowdy confines of the school canteen, he had found it easy to sneer at his friend’s scepticism. Now, waiting for Barry to appear, he felt considerably less secure in his faith in Barry’s better nature. Mandy might be right. This might just be an elaborate ruse to get Luke alone so that Barry could give him the kind of prolonged, uninterrupted duffing-up that could not easily be carried out on the school premises without the risk of teacher intervention. It didn’t matter that Luke still could not think of anything he had done to offend Barry. Did you have to offend the lightning bolt that struck you? The rabid dog that bit your hand?

  Several times he nearly lost his nerve and fled. Only the thought of that lump of moon rock, the possibility of being able to touch, to hold an actual fragment of the moon, kept him put.

  Eventually Barry emerged from the school building, accompanied by one of his lieutenants, Kevin Holroyd. Kevin, like Barry, was not the brightest of sparks, but unlike Barry he did not have brute physicality to compensate for his lack of academic prowess. Gangly, stoop-shouldered and shuffling, with a drooping jaw, sluggish lips and a maternally-inflicted haircut so atrocious that sometimes complete strangers would stop and point at him in the street, Kevin was patently one of life’s losers. Perhaps the only shrewd decision he ever made—and many would argue that it was dumb luck rather than shrewdness—was to fall in with Barry. Association with such a notorious and dreaded figure afforded Kevin immunity from the insults and injuries that would otherwise, in the normal course of events, have been heaped upon him.

  At the sight of Kevin, Luke’s spirits sank. All at once his worst fears (not to mention Mandy’s suspicions) were confirmed. Barry was bringing Kevin along as an accomplice, someone to pin Luke down on the ground while Barry delivered the blows.

  Praying that Barry had not yet spotted him, Luke started to creep furtively away from the gates.

  “Hoy! Weatherby!”

  Luke froze.

  “Where you off to?” Barry demanded.

  “N-nowhere,” Luke stammered. “I was just …” He fumbled for an excuse. “Thought I saw a five-pee on the ground. I was just going to pick it up.” He mimed scrutinising the pavement. “Only I think I made a mistake. Well, anyway.” He let out a somewhat too chirpy laugh. “Here we all are. Hello, Kevin.”

&
nbsp; “Wuh,” said Kevin.

  “This way,” said Barry, pointing along the road. He and Kevin started walking, and Luke reluctantly fell in step behind.

  In the misty, darkening light of the late-autumn afternoon the three boys wove their way through town. Barry and Kevin set up a brisk pace, which Luke did his best to match, but it was an effort to keep his feet from lapsing into a condemned man’s trudge. Where were they taking him? Some remote, secluded spot, no doubt. Somewhere where his cries would not be heard.

  Several times he considered making a bid for freedom, only to reject the idea. If he ran and Barry and Kevin caught up with him, wouldn’t the pummelling he received then be twice as severe? Slowly, resignation set in. He had never been beaten up before. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as he thought. One thing was certain: he wasn’t going to offer any resistance when the time came. He would take his punishment like a coward.

  They had gone about half a mile in silence when, abruptly, Kevin said, “S’yuh,” to Barry and veered off down a terraced side-street. Luke watched him go with a mixture of puzzlement and relief. So Kevin hadn’t come along as an accomplice after all. And if that was the case, then maybe Luke had misread the situation and maybe—just maybe—Barry’s moon rock did exist.

  Feeling considerably happier, though still not yet completely at ease, Luke continued walking alongside Barry, while one by one the streetlamps flickered on overhead, the dull red gleam of their bulbs quickening to orange.

  The Sussex country town Luke called home was spread over several interleaving humps of the South Downs, and its social strata were roughly demarcated by altitude. The older, smarter and costlier properties were situated on top of the hills and benefited from good views and spacious gardens. The further down-slope you went, the closer-quartered and less venerable the houses became. Deep in the folds of the valleys was where the council estates huddled, honeycomb warrens of pebbledashed post-War semis.

  It was to one of these estates that Barry led Luke, who, hailing as he did from a detached, four-bedroom Edwardian residence near one of the hilltops, seldom had cause to venture into the nether reaches of town and, doing so now, felt like a cross between Theseus and Dr Livingstone.

  A cockeyed garden gate provided access to a concrete pathway that crossed a square of overgrown lawn to the front door of what Luke correctly assumed to be the Griffin homestead. Outside the house an old, partially dismantled Triumph motorcycle leaned on its kickstand, removed components lying around it like body parts around a blown-up soldier. Inside, a dog was barking, a baby was screaming, a TV set was jabbering, and music—the Rolling Stones, Luke thought—was blaring.

  Barry entered and, without announcing his arrival to his family, headed straight upstairs. Luke followed him in but halted in the hall. Odours of cigarette smoke, dog urine and boiled cabbage stunned him. Through one doorway he glimpsed a harried-looking woman pacing up and down the linoleum of a kitchen floor, trying to quieten a squalling infant. Through another doorway a pair of sock-clad feet were visible, perched on the arm of a sofa and tapping together in time to the theme tune of Screen Test. From behind a third door, this one firmly shut, came the sound of canine claws scratching and scrabbling, along with that angry barking which, to judge by its deepness and gruffness, emanated from the throat of a hound the size of a shire horse.

  Having absorbed all these impressions of life chez Griffin in the space of a few head-spinning seconds, Luke decided he was safer off sticking close to Barry—better the devil you know and all that—and pursued him up the uncarpeted staircase and into his bedroom.

  The room was small, with just enough floorspace for a single bed, a wonky G-Plan wardrobe, and a low armchair upholstered in a coarse, lime-green fabric. The view from the window, through a grubby net curtain, was of the gable end of the adjacent house. A pin-up of the current Brighton and Hove Albion squad, pulled from the centre of Shoot! magazine, was the room’s only decoration.

  Barry was on his knees, groping under the bed. Hearing Luke enter, he told him to close the door. Luke did as commanded. The door to some extent muffled the downstairs domestic racket, although the music, which was coming from the adjacent bedroom, continued to pound through the party wall unabated.

  From beneath the bed Barry produced a small steel money-box, which he unlocked and opened with a tiny key. Saying, “Here,” he handed the box to Luke.

  Inside, lying in a nest of crumpled toilet paper, was a lump of dark, brown-grey mineral approximately the size of a golf ball. It was rough-textured and porous like a sponge, pitted and knobbly and near-spherical, with here and there a twinkling glint of something crystalline in its composition.

  Luke stared at it, conscious of not breathing, of not daring to breathe.

  Was it …?

  Could it really be …?

  It certainly looked as though it came from the moon. It looked, in fact, like a miniature moon itself—like a tiny, scale-model replica of the earth’s cosmic travelling-companion, small enough to pick up, large enough to hold in one’s fingers, lift up and just block the real moon from sight.

  He didn’t want to believe that it was moon rock. He didn’t want to believe that it had been gathered up from the moon’s surface by one of the Apollo astronauts (which one?) and taken aboard a lunar module to be ferried a quarter of a million miles back to earth. He didn’t want to believe this because, rationally, he knew that there was no way a young boy in a small, unremarkable English country town—a young boy, moreover, like Barry Griffin—could have obtained something so fantastically valuable and rare. It was impossible. Inconceivable.

  Yet, oh God, in his heart of hearts Luke knew. He knew what he was looking at. He knew—from the sonorous, reverberant chime of recognition that was thrilling through him—that the rock was the genuine article.

  And he knew that he had to possess it.

  “So, um, Barry,” he said, when he had regained sufficient composure to speak again, “where did you get it from?” It seemed wise to investigate the rock’s provenance and give an impression of cautiousness before the negotiations began.

  “Me mum’s brother give it me,” came the reply. “He’s an engineer, and he was working over in—where’s that place where them rockets take off?”

  “Houston, Texas.”

  “Yeah, there. There was a lump going spare, so they said he could have it.”

  That sounded plausible to Luke. Or at any rate, it didn’t sound implausible. Hundreds of rock samples had been brought back from the moon by the five successful Apollo missions to date. Surely the NASA geologists didn’t need all of them.

  “And, er, how much are you asking for it? I mean, if we’re talking cash, then the best I could offer is, oh, say, fifty pence?” In fact Luke was prepared to go as high as one pound, but he knew it was a good idea to start with a low bid. Perhaps Barry was too stupid to realise the true value of his uncle’s gift.

  “A tenner,” said Barry, simply.

  “What!”

  “Ten quid,” Barry reiterated.

  “Ten quid? But that’s—that’s a fortune!”

  “Take it or leave it,” Barry said, and relieved Luke of the box and closed the lid.

  And so it was that Luke learned one of the hard lessons of commerce: that which the buyer desires the most, he must expect to pay a high premium for.

  He had no alternative but to agree to Barry’s price.

  He knew his parents would not give him the money, but he asked them anyway and, as expected, was turned down. He then asked if they would lend him the money, which they also refused to do, his mother referring to that sage maxim, “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be.”

  “What do you want ten pounds for anyway, Lunatic Luke?” his father enquired.

  He couldn’t tell them. They would think it was ridiculous. They would say he was wasting his money.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Awful lot of lolly to spend on nothing,” said his father, with a genial t
witch of his eyebrows.

  Christmas was coming soon, and with it the customary annual windfall of cheques and postal orders from uncles, aunts, godparents and grandparents. But Luke didn’t think he could wait that long to buy the moon rock; and besides, before he had left Barry’s house, Barry had intimated to him that the moon rock was not going to be available for long. Several other buyers were interested, Barry had said, so if Luke wanted it for himself he was going to have to move fast.

  There was nothing else for it. He would have to earn the money.

  Over the next fortnight Luke washed cars, weeded neighbours’ flowerbeds, ran errands for elderly Miss Warburton, polished all the brass fixtures and silverware at the Fraylings’ house, and served as a bow-tied and thoroughly charming butler at one of Mrs Stoughton-Hadley’s Saturday coffee-mornings.

  The result of all this activity, which took up every minute of his spare time for those two weeks, was a net haul of a little over six pounds. That sum, added to the modest savings that had accumulated in his post office account, took him to a total of seven pounds and fifty-three pence. Still not enough, and Barry was making it clear to him that the window of opportunity was closing fast. If Luke didn’t come up with the cash soon, one of the other buyers was going to nip in and snatch the moon rock out from under his nose.

  Drastic action was called for. In order to make up the shortfall, Luke began selling off treasured possessions. Justin Watkins had long had his eye on Luke’s impeccably assembled Airfix Saturn V booster and didn’t need much persuasion to part with thirty pence for it, while Stefan Meyer generously agreed to take Luke’s revolving moon-globe off his hands for the princely sum of forty-five pence and Tom Greenough bought Luke’s Dinky Toy lunar rover for a figure not much higher. None of the items Luke sold fetched anything close to what he considered to be its true market value, but that was just another hard lesson of commerce to be learned: a desperate vendor is always at a disadvantage.