Robert Rankin by Snuff Fiction

Author:Snuff Fiction
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-10-19T22:56:34+00:00

15

A long-legged woman and a fine cigar. You got those things. You’re happy.

Al Capone (1899—1947)

I had no home to go to. My parents had disowned me when sentence was passed. My mother wept the tears that mothers weep and my father took it like the man he was and said that he’d never cared much for me anyway. As I drove down to London, I had but one destination in mind and that was the House of Doveston.

The House of Doveston was no longer in Brentford, but then the House of Doveston wasn’t a house. It was a very swish tobacconist’s in Covent Garden.

I knew that the Doveston had sold his penthouse flat in Hawtrey House. He’d sent me a press cutting, al about how the council were sel ing off the flats and how fortunes were being made. Another cutting covered the trial and conviction of Council or McMurdo, who had apparently siphoned away mil ions from the borough coffers. I never met up with McMurdo when I was inside, I think he went off to one of the rather luxurious open prisons, where people who have behaved badly but have good connections are sent.

Now, I was impressed by the House of Doveston. It was right on the central plaza, next door to Brown’s Restaurant. And it was big.

The style was Bauhaus: the German school of architecture and al ied arts that was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius (1883—1969). The experimental principles of functionalism that he applied to materials influenced the likes of Klee, Kandinsky and notably Le Corbusier.

Although the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus in 1933, its influence remains amongst us to this day.

I gazed up at the building’s façade, al black glass and chrome. The name was picked out in tal slim Art Deco lettering, which, along with the triple tadpole logo, was in polished chrome on polished black. It was austere, yet grandiloquent. Understated, yet overblown. Unadorned, yet ostentatious. Vernacular, yet vainglorious.

I hated it.

I’d never given a monkey’s member for the Bauhaus movement. Give me the Victorians any day. And one thing I had learned in prison was that running gags which involve esoteric knowledge and the use of Roget’s Thesaurus earn for the tel er a wel -deserved kick in the bal s.

I pushed open the black glass door and swaggered into the shop.

And someone kicked me in the bal s.

I toppled backwards, out into the street, passed by a shopper or two and sank to my knees in the road.

‘Oooooh,’ I went. ‘That hurts.’

A large and wel -knit black chap in a natty uniform stepped out from the shop and glared down at me. ‘Move on, sniffer,’ he said. ‘No place for your type in there.’

‘Sniffer?’ I went. ‘Sniffer? How dare you?’

‘Sniff your glue pot down the road. Go on now, or I’l kick your ass.’

I eased myself with care into the vertical plane. ‘Now just you see here,’ I said.

He raised his fist.

‘I am a friend of the Doveston,’ I said.

The knuckles of the fist made crackling noises.

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