The Slipkin Papers: 1. Slipkin's Bad Day

As his car’s wheels left the road at the bad bend near Brough, Slipkin still had time to reflect that it had not been one of his better days. Usually Slipkin wasn’t the reflective sort. This was probably just as well, because Slipkin’s life was very unusual. If he had been the kind to think about the way he spent his time, he would have been a very worried, or at least puzzled young man. Since he wasn’t the kind of person who thought about things like that, he hadn’t really considered the reasons why he didn’t think about those things, and how sensible it was of him not to.

But now, at the beginning of a lethal crash, on a high and deserted moorland road, as his little Citroen slewed sideways, the skidding tyres coming broadside to their previous direction of travel and tripping over, sending the car into the air, there came the sort of moment that seems to insert itself into the normal flow of time on occasions like this. The sort of moment when the brain speeds up in an attempt to get a lot of thinking done while it still has the chance.

He had intended to leave London by three o’clock, but the business with the vicar and the uninvited penguin had kept him till gone six. The penguin had seemed pleased to see him, though not as pleased and relieved as the vicar, who as usual in these cases seemed unsure about how he had come by his short waddling houseguest. There had been no taxis about in Pimlico, where he had picked up the bird, so he had been forced to take it to Mr. Redhead, his contact at the Zoo, on the Underground. He had a heated argument with the lady at the ticket office at Pimlico Tube station about the rules concerning the use of the Underground by penguins. There weren’t any, so in the end after asking a few questions about the penguin’s likely age, she had given it a child’s ticket.

He had expected to have difficulty with the bird, because the collar that he had brought with him with him was too big, so he couldn’t use the lead. He needn’t have worried. The penguin waddled along beside him throughout the journey, morose but co-operative. As usual in London, none of the other passengers had paid his short dinner-jacketed companion any attention whatsoever, but kept their noses down in their books and newspapers. It reminded him of the time when he had been sitting in a Central Line train and a Greek Orthodox Bishop, complete with flowing jewel encrusted robes and enormous shepherd’s crook, together with a black cassocked attendant had got on and strap hung for several stops. No one else appeared to even glance at them. Slipkin had looked at them. He found it impossible not to. Neither priest had acknowledged his gaze until they were getting off at Marble Arch, when the Bishop had stared straight at him and winked.

After depositing the penguin, Slipkin had raced back from Regent’s Park to his flat in Highgate to pick up his car and then jerked and weaved along the M1 in the rush hour traffic out past Watford. He hadn’t reached Derby till nine. He had thrown himself on the mercy of Ronald MacDonald somewhere near Sheffield. The quarter-pounder with cheese was still throwing its greasy weight around his stomach and bullying the pathetic little fries it had come in with as he pressed on along the A1 to Scotch Corner and then, around eleven thirty, onto the A66. It had been the end of a blistering bright summer day when he had set out and he felt hot and harassed long after the sun had rolled down red into the west.

As he climbed up into the northern Pennines, he was very tired and thoroughly fed up. Roiling thunderclouds had trundled in from the West, swallowing the sky, so that he felt like he was driving into an unmade bed. Soon the heavy cloud masses had overwhelmed the parched sky, bringing total blackness. Any moment, he had felt, the rain would fill his cup of unhappiness to the brim: the first overweight drops had splattered his windscreen, but the full storm seemed reluctant to burst, like a small child holding its breath while building up to a ghastly scream. What made it even worse was that he had no idea why he was doing this.

Every so often impulses to strange actions would break the surface of his mind, like submarines that had suddenly become frightened of fish. When it happened he had no choice but to obey. If he tried to resist his head would throb and butterflies would swarm inside him like shrapnel bursting. It hadn’t happened for a while, not since last winter, when he had dropped everything, (even the urgent problem of the lap-dancing pig and the bishop) driven like a demon to Switzerland, and left a strawberry cheesecake on the very lowest slopes of the Matterhorn (he had wanted to get to the top but had no head for heights and the cheesecake was crumbling badly). Somehow, at times like this, what he was driven to do seemed absolutely normal and … necessary? Only afterwards would it occur to him that others might find it a little strange: all right, outstandingly insane. Then, being Slipkin, he would forget about it till the next time. The next time had arrived the moment he had awakened that morning. It had been a struggle to carry on with his day, only possible because he had hoisted a mental white flag and accepted the urgent call to drive north before the day was out.

Slipkin was an accepting sort of person. When shit happened his instinct was to walk round it, or in the worst cases wipe it off, and carry on without complaining or getting unduly upset. In any event, what else could he do when the confectionery urge overwhelmed him? When it happened it was too late to resist, and when it wasn’t happening he felt quite normal, far too normal to pop along to his GP and tell him about these bizarre cake-laden journeys. Besides, given that his day job involved recovering uninvited animals from the homes of clergy how unusual or unhealthy were these excursions anyway?

So now here he was, straining to drive faster and faster through the murky and humid night, with the back seat of his battered Citroen loaded with seventy-five boxes of increasingly sweaty chocolate éclairs. He didn’t even like chocolate éclairs, though that didn’t really matter, because they weren’t for him. He flicked on the wipers, turning the squashed bugs on the windscreen into a greasy paste that blurred his view still more. Still, he had brought a satisfied smile to the face of the lady in Iqbal’s halal/kosher patisserie in Camden (good old-fashioned New Labour types), as she helped him out to the car with armfuls of fragile blue and white cardboard containers.

He passed the turn off to Bowes to his right, which made him think of the late Queen Mother. That took his mind off the poor driving conditions for a short while. He remembered her grateful, yet dignified, smile when she had thanked him for his services in the matter of the rabbi and the transsexual corgi. His eyes misted with the proud memory, then he realized that it wasn’t his eyes but the windscreen. Those éclairs really were sweating badly now – like old explosives. He wound down the window in an attempt to clear the condensation and was hit in the cheek by another plump raindrop. He wound the window back up and switched the demister to full power, completely drowning the labouring engine.

Glancing down at the fuel gauge, he saw that he had much less than half a tank left. As usual, he had left it a little late to consider the practicalities of what he was doing. He had passed countless service areas and filling stations since setting out without paying them any attention. Even when he had stopped for the cheeseburger he had still been in a semi-daze, preoccupied with the burning need to get the éclairs to their as yet unknown destination and hadn’t given petrol a thought. Turning back for fuel was not a possibility. He knew that if he tried to turn back, his hands would shake and shudder and refuse to obey him.

As Slipkin’s little car headed west the road grew higher and narrower and there was no other traffic. He reached a point where at each side of the road, spaced out around twenty metres apart, were black and white poles about ten feet high. Slipkin realised they were to mark the course of the road during the winter blizzards. How much further? That time in Switzerland he hadn’t known precisely where he was going either. He knew only when he’d got there and the Matterhorn’s grim flanks filled his windscreen. This time he knew he was heading the right way, but felt far from any possible destination. As he thought about this several things happened at once. This is usually bad news when you are travelling at seventy-eight miles an hour in the dark along a poor road with which you are unfamiliar. This time was no exception.

The road dropped suddenly and sickeningly away to the left to avoid a boulder-strewn slope. Even as Slipkin wrenched at the steering wheel, powerful dazzling lights approached fast from ahead and above, also to the left, where the road must climb back up out of the dip. He stood on the brakes and swung the steering wheel hard left. It wasn’t a sensible thing to do, but it was the only thing that occurred to him and felt better than doing nothing. The Citroen, astonished, slewed and began to roll. He was conscious of éclairs escaping their boxes and ricocheting, sticky shadows in the blinding light. He became aware of the tortured scream of the skidding car and felt the wheels part company with the tarmac. As he cringed away from the coming impact he remembered the same sort of brief flight he had experienced when struck a glancing blow by a car as a child: as he had taken to the air after that impact, he had a stark memory of blurred tarmac rushing beneath him while he dimly anticipated a bone-breaking landing. He had been lucky to escape with bruises that time. His fall had been broken by a group of elderly ladies, waiting to go in to the bingo next to the sweetshop towards which he had been running to buy his week’s supply of those rice-paper flying saucers filled with sherbet. He had picked himself up from the scatter of moaning bodies, dislodged spectacles and false teeth and carried on into the shop as if nothing had happened.

The Citroen, now upside down, suddenly leapt skyward, as if seized by a giant hand, though Slipkin had felt no impact with the ground. His seat belt cut into his lap and shoulder and his head smacked against the driver’s window. At the same instant the bright light was extinguished, so that he thought he had gone blind. He waited numbly for the dead cat bounce that would squash him, the roof of the Citroen and the éclairs together in an eternal embrace. It never came: the upward movement continued and the car continued its roll until it was upright. All the éclairs that had huddled together in the roof space dropped onto and around him. He realized that his eyes were screwed shut and cautiously opened first one and then the other. The car was still rising and it was gathering speed. It was already so high that Slipkin could make out the orange glow from distant towns. The car slanted sharply upwards, just like an aircraft on take off so that his head thudded back against the little plastic headrest. The engine had stalled and the noise of the wind rushing past the car was startlingly loud. Leaning forward, he switched off the ignition and pulled the handbrake on, knowing as he did so how ridiculous that was, but needing to do something familiar when the laws of reality seemed to have gone out for a breather. Preferably, of course, that something would have been to put the nose of the car down and glide to a safe landing. Immediately he had a mental picture of the car tumbling out of the sky and smashing over several acres of moor land. He locked the doors.

His senses began to recover from their recent overload. He wiped a smear of cream from his cheek and licked his finger absent mindedly, then grimaced as he gazed down, pressing his cheek against the freezing glass. He had to be at least a thousand feet up already. For some reason he unfastened his seatbelt, probably because he always did that as soon as possible after take-off in more conventional aircraft. Slipkin often dreamed that he was able to fly. In his dreams he would just move his feet as if they were on an invisible staircase and up into the air he would climb. As long as he didn’t think too much about the gulf opening up beneath his feet and kept his breathing steady he could rise up to great heights and then stride out to distant destinations. He always felt disappointed when he woke up and realised he had been dreaming. This time he fervently wished that he really was dreaming and that soon he would wake up safe in bed in his flat. Yet, strangely, the flashes of fear that he sometimes experienced in his flying dreams, when a sudden crisis of confidence led him to wobble on the verge of plunging to the ground, were absent

Climbing swiftly, the Citroen was now within a few hundred feet of the base of the thunderclouds that stretched away on every side like an inverted stormy sea. As if to warn him away a brilliant blue-white flash and an instant sizzling crash of thunder made him cower back against his headrest, blinded and deafened. Rain beat angrily on the car. The storm had broken. The car seemed quite untroubled by the turmoil outside: it didn’t rock or sway but just swept on upwards smoothly and silently.

Slipkin stared out at the fast approaching clouds and shook his head slowly to clear it. No, he didn’t feel afraid, but wasn’t surprised at that. He thought once more of being struck by that car, years before. Then, while it was happening, there hadn’t been any time for fear. It was only afterwards that he had begun to shake and when he had got home Mrs. Holyoak had called the doctor and he had been sent to bed. This time he did have a chance to think, but the whole situation was so crazy that it was somehow impossible to take it seriously. Perhaps he had wiped himself out on that bad bend and this was the afterlife? Or was this whole flight just a mental escape from the coming impact, like that Ambrose Bierce story where the Civil War soldier escapes from his executioners and heads for home, but just as he gets to his front door he reaches the end of the rope so it isn’t a happy ending after all.

The Citroen reached the thunderclouds. Just as it did there was a flash of light so intense that Slipkin thought his eyeballs would melt. The roaring, tearing shock of the thunderclap made him feel as if all his bones had jumped out of his body looking for somewhere to hide, realised there was nowhere safer, and tumbled back inside him. He nodded his head and tried to still his suddenly chattering teeth. Yes, now he was scared.

In his childhood he had come across a dusty pile of books about Biggles, a relic presumably of Mr. Holyoak’s childhood. The ones he had liked best were the earliest ones, about Biggles’ exploits in the Great War in his trusty Sopwith Camel. When faced with a swarm of German aircraft, (you could tell they were German because, apart from the big black crosses, there were always lots and lots of them and they were painted in showy colours, unlike the dull browns and greens of our chaps) he would of course dive into their midst and send them flaming to the ground. Often, one of the Huns, typically sporting a vivid scarf and a bushy blonde moustache, would take on Biggles and face him man to man. As their planes flew head on at each other, guns blazing, Biggles would smile his famous fighting smile. Bullets would pluck at his sleeves and spang in the rigging, but still he would keep on smiling his grim, tight-lipped and famous fighting smile. At the last moment the Hun’s nerve would break and he would dive away. In a flash, Biggles, presumably still smiling, would hurtle after his foe and send him sizzling to his death. As the flames reached the doomed German’s moustache, Biggles would salute in polite thanks for a good scrap before flying back to pass off his exploits as modestly as possible to Algy and the rest of the chaps. Only in later years did Slipkin begin to wonder how Biggles’ fighting smile could be famous when he only smiled it while fighting in a single-seater aircraft. Did he tell people about it afterwards – ‘Got the bally Hun in the end, I was smiling my famous fighting smile you know…’ Only in still later years did Slipkin begin to have doubts about the exact nature of Biggles’ relationship with Algy and Ginger.

Slipkin tried to stretch his own lips into a tight devil may care smile. It was no good. They were trembling too much and he realised he was just pouting. He also realised that his eyes were tight shut again, which completely spoiled the effect. He became aware that all motion had ceased and a deep silence fallen, apart from the ringing in his ears from the thunderclap. He opened his eyes and for a few moments could see nothing but blotches of light where the flash had assaulted his retinas. As his vision returned, what he saw through the windscreen made him close them again quickly. Slipkin saw stars: real stars, not twinkling and distant, but hard and sharp: seeming as near as ice crystals on a windowpane. He opened his eyes again. Hanging in the star field was the familiar blue and white globe of the Earth. It was about the size of a soccer ball, so he was seeing it from thousands of miles away. He had a sudden onrush of omni-directional vertigo: in every direction were terrifying gulfs of nothingness.

Slipkin sat in his Citroen in deep space and wondered. He wondered how he had got here. He wondered once more if he had died and this was the afterlife, though he had never figured on his car going with him. How was he still breathing? Why hadn’t he been blasted by radiation, asphyxiated and frozen? This must all be a dream: it certainly wasn’t possible for things like this to happen. He shook his head violently. Nothing that had happened since the car had gone into a skid could possibly have taken place. Yet here he was. He held a hand up in front of him as if to remind himself who he was, it was shaking violently, more violently than what he felt inside seemed to justify. He let his hand drop back onto his lap. Wait a moment. Why wasn’t his hand floating? Why weren’t the éclairs drifting slowly about him rather than lying in inert sticky ruin? If he was in Space, why wasn’t he, and everything in the car with him, weightless? Then he heard a sound that explained everything to him. He heard, from outside the car, loud echoing footsteps coming nearer and then a plummy voice said

“Be with you in a moment Mr. Slipkin!”

Slipkin felt almost pleased to realize that he had gone mad. Somewhere on the A66 he had completely dumped sanity overboard and frankly he found he really didn’t miss it. Presumably at some point he would wake up in a hospital somewhere being tended to by deliciously starched nurses, who would cup his brow in their cool hands and glance knowingly at one another and one of them, the small shy dark-haired one, would lovingly tend him back to health and…

“Please excuse the delay…”

and, and then there would be a long period of convalescence, far from dark roads and misplaced penguins …

“There we are…”

The voice sounded satisfied

“now then...”

English, upper class, deep and resonating, authoritative, friendly and strangely familiar, though hard to identify in this interplanetary context.

And, and this would all just be a strange dream: probably he wouldn’t even remember it.

Suddenly, off to his right, a large tree appeared floating in the void maybe five or six metres away; an oak tree in full leaf. It stood on a small patch of grass framed by a bright blue skyscape, a small circle of normality fringed by stars still gleaming in the blackness of space. Beneath the tree stood a familiar figure, seen often by Slipkin on television though never before at first hand. So surprised was he that he hardly noticed the rest of the country scene blinking into existence around him, blotting out the deeps of space until Slipkin was sitting in his car in a meadow beside a swiftly running stream. There, smiling encouragingly at him was Prince Charles, heir to the throne of England. Somewhat unexpectedly Charles was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt. His feet were thrust into cowboy boots. He looked younger than Slipkin remembered him. Slipkin sat paralysed with astonishment as His Royal Highness approached, bending to look in at him through the driver’s window.

“Have you brought them? Oh… good show…” A frown of concern creased the royal brow. “I say. Are you alright old chap?”

Charles tugged at the door handle. Automatically Slipkin unlocked the door and it swung open. A pleasant breeze filled the car making the éclair boxes flutter. Charles extended a surprisingly large and very strong hand to help Slipkin out. As his feet touched what, against all his expectations, was solid ground, he sank gently onto the grass wondering if he would ever be able to speak to this apparition or indeed ever speak again.

For the moment there was no need to say anything. The Prince’s surprisingly large rump waved in the air as he rummaged in the car. A few moments later he emerged cradling three or four boxes of éclairs.

“Jolly good. Jolly good.” murmured Charles, with a distracted air, his eyes fixed on his prize. “Your car’s a bit of a mess I’m afraid, but I’ll get my man to sort it out. Why don’t you pop back to the house with me for a pot of tea?”

“Yes, er, fine.” said Slipkin, getting to his feet by way of his hands and knees. He had a horrible feeling that any moment he would fall straight through the grass into the abyss beneath. He reached back into the car and removed the ignition key

Charles was already walking briskly across the meadow toward a large honey stoned country house that nestled between more great oaks. Slipkin hurried after him and as he did so noticed a dapper figure walking towards them across the lawn from the house. Once again there was something familiar about the person approaching. It was a man, short and stiff-backed, dressed as a butler.

It was Adolf Hitler, right down to the moustache and soulless eyes. He stopped and bowed respectfully at the Prince as Slipkin came up, his skin crawling.

Charles nodded placidly at this spruce embodiment of evil, clearly totally at ease with his presence. “Ah Hitler, see if you could sort out Mr. Slipkin’s car would you? Then bring the rest of the éclairs up to the house – get Goebbels to help you, don’t struggle all on your own.”

“Of course sir” said Hitler in perfect, if heavily accented, English. “Eva has put tea in the drawing room as you requested”

“Good man. Good man. Carry on then” said Charles, beckoning to Slipkin to follow him. Slipkin handed Hitler the car key, taking care that their fingers did not touch.

The ex-Reichsfuhrer nodded and stood aside politely. As he walked on in Charles’ wake, Slipkin couldn’t stop himself turning round to look behind. Hitler was still standing, watching them walk on to the house. He nodded again, at Slipkin, this time more curtly then turned on his heel and set off toward the Citroen. As he did so, a slight figure, dressed in gardener’s dungarees and a checked shirt that both seemed several sizes too big for him, emerged from the trees to the left and hurried after Hitler without looking in their direction. The sallow sunken cheeks and rat-like profile were unmistakable; it was Josef Goebbels.

Slipkin and Charles walked on across the heavily manicured lawn

“So good of you the bring the er, éclairs Mr. Slipkin.”

“Oh, no, that’s quite alright…” murmured Slipkin, defaulting to politeness as he gazed awestruck at the huge expanse of closely cropped grass, stretching ahead and to either side of him for several hundred metres. The trees behind them stretched round to either side of the lawns and disappeared behind the house. The sky overhead was blue, the few clouds high white and fluffy. The sun shone high above, so here it was early afternoon rather than late evening. But where was here, and more to the point, what was Prince Charles doing here?

Beneath his numbed amazement, and his instinctive fear of worse, or at least even less believable, events to come Slipkin was conscious that he no longer had the compulsive feelings associated with the delivery of the éclairs. He had come to the right place. Now it was just a question of finding out where this right place was and then how to get back to London. Simple really. Slipkin knew as he thought this that he was disregarding the sheer impossibility of his situation in an attempt to avoid panic but, after all, that was no more than most people did every time they opened a credit card statement or woke up in an unfamiliar bedroom beside a complete stranger.

They walked on for a few moments in silence, then Charles coughed and said, “Good man, Hitler you know…” Seeing the incredulous look on Slipkin’s face he continued hurriedly, “speaking of him in his er, capacity as Butler, you understand and not as ex-leader of the Third Reich.”

“Yes.” Slipkin stared ahead at the house. Built of dark grey stone, it was at least three stories high, and he could make out dormer windows in the roof. There were tall chimneys at regular intervals. A flight of steps led up to the large double main doors. As he looked at the house he thought about Charles’ distinction between Hitler as power-crazed lunatic and Hitler as faithful manservant. Was it possible that genocide and the shattering of Europe could have been avoided if the he had found different employment? How different could world history have been if instead of toppling the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great had just opened a kebab house? What if Ghenghis Khan had stepped out of his yurt one sunny morning, looked round him at the endless steppe and then decided to settle down and open an organic yoghurt shop?

“Yes indeed,” continued the Prince, “I must confess that I was somewhat apprehensive when he joined us to take up his position. He has however proved to be an asset to the household. He certainly keeps the rest of the staff on their toes.”

Slipkin thought about that. What had happened when Adolf had turned up? Had Charles pointed out to him that he was, in point of fact, a long dead, charred and bullet-ridden inhabitant of a Moscow fridge? Or had he just asked for suitable references? All he said was “I imagine he has ways of making them work.”

“Ah yes,” nodded Charles, smiling vaguely at Slipkin, “yes, ha ha, yes. Jolly good.”

They reached the house. Sweeping round the foot of the stairs that led up to the grand entrance was a broad driveway of pink gravel. As they stepped onto it a throaty roar from their right announced the arrival of a speeding motorbike. They heard it before they saw it coming from somewhere to the right, where a narrow driveway disappeared behind the screening trees. A big shiny high-powered machine came into view and raced toward them. The rider, who was hunched low over the handlebars, did not slacken speed and looked as if he had no intention of stopping. Instinctively they both leapt for the safety of the broad stairs. Charles seemed as surprised and alarmed as Slipkin. As he jumped for his life HRH yelped

“What the hell!”

The bike broadsided, sending up a shower of gravel and came to an expert halt. The leather clad, small and rather plump rider gave a high-pitched girlish laugh and pulled off the full-face helmet.

As he gazed into the broadly grinning but unmistakable face of Queen Victoria, Slipkin’s overloaded consciousness finally threw in the towel. Charles caught him as he fell and the last words Slipkin heard before he escaped into unconsciousness were

“Vicky! Now look what you’ve done!”