Snuff Fiction by Robert Rankin

Author:Robert Rankin [Rankin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: sf_humor, Fiction, Humorous
ISBN: 9780552160520
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Limited
Published: 2010-03-15T07:15:03+00:00

As I drove away into the night, I felt certain that I would be. I just knew that I would be.

And I would.

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, all about how the council were selling off the flats and how fortunes were being made. Another cutting covered the trial and conviction of Councillor McMurdo, who had apparently siphoned away millions 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 allied 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, all black glass and chrome. The name was picked out in tall 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 teller a well-deserved kick in the balls.

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

And someone kicked me in the balls.

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 well-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’ll kick your ass.’

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

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