Candyman
‘Pblllllmmmt!’ was the fart the dog-man heard, not the whole fart. ‘Vwarpt- Pblllllmmmt!’ was its full expression. The ‘vwarpt!’ – the prefix as it were – had sounded itself out already and was trapped swilling around in a segment of the revolving door. The same segment an unsus
pecting office worker had chosen to ride on his way out of the building.
‘That infernal charlatan!’ bawled Woo the creator, the brewer of that flatulence, giving full vent now from the opposite end of his digestive tract. He had spilt out of the spinning doors into the reception of Stalingrad House as if someone had thrown him through them and meant it.
‘Charlatan! Charlatan!’ rang out and echoed around the cavernous mock-marble foyer. Vladimir Woo was a compact ball of fury, swamped by a baggy nylon shell suit, a viscous black ooze dripping from the top of his baseball cap and down his contorted face.
‘He knows nothing!’ screeched Woo.
The dog-man, a man dressed in a dog suit, looked up from the newspaper he had secreted under the reception desk, past Woo first of all to the office worker spluttering for air on the street side of the revolving doors.
‘Oh, dog-man. There you sit. How lucky you are. A dog-man’s life, indeed,’ moaned Woo, the storm blown out. Though his breathing was laboured, his voice had regained something of its refined Edinburgh lilt.
The dog-man stared.
Woo’s face was red and puffy. The grey thatch of hair cut in a severe fringe sprouting from beneath the baseball cap, was matted with black midge juice. So too a paintbrush-shaped moustache, constantly a-twitch. A squadron of flies that had survived whatever ordeal had befallen their brethren had made themselves satellites of Woo’s head.
‘You could quit,’ suggested the dog-man, reasonably. A muffled reasonable suggestion from under the dog suit.
‘I beg your pardon?’ spluttered Woo, blinking disbelievingly. ‘Quit? Seriously? Quit? What do you take me for?’
Woo half-collapsed, half-launched himself at the reception desk and pedalled clumsily in his attempt to locate a foothold on its polished flank.
You see this face?’ he wheezed, heaving himself across the desk and thrusting his purple swollen midge-encrusted head into the dog-man’s personal space. ‘This is a face not to be messed with… anymore!’
The dog-man continued to stare, impassively, or at least with the same expression lent by a pantomime dog head.
‘I shall never quit,’ growled Woo, slipping back down from his precarious perch to stagger off in no particular direction across the echoing foyer. ‘I will fight my corner and other corners… that belong to others. O’Singh claims he can know everything. But what for? He doesn’t know the first thing about what is traditional!’
A ghostly hush settled on Stalingrad House. It was midweek in the middle of the day and the building was all but abandoned of life. Life – the city traffic, the streams of office workers – was there beyond the revolving doors and the pane glass, beyond the grassy square out front.
‘Let me help you,’ said the dog-man, breaking the silence. His words hung on the air, sounding more like a self-revelation than an offer.
‘What? You?’ exclaimed Woo. ’An excuse for a common mutt? An ersatz pooch? How could you even help?
‘You… you cane-four-and-a-half,’ Woo threw in for good measure. He limped back to the reception desk so he might admire the subject of his description.
The dog-man shifted slightly in his seat. ‘Beg your pardon?’ he mustered.
‘That’s another one for you,’ grinned Woo grotesquely, pleased at least to offload his frustrations on some other soul. ‘You’re half-dog, aren’t you, not the full canine? Makes you a cane-four-and-a-half,’ he gurgled. ‘You do the math!’
For a moment, the dog-man sat impassively, or at least sat still presenting its immutable, fluffy head – the tongue permanently sticking out the corner of the mouth in perpetual eagerness to please. Then, decisively, he thrust open a desk drawer, seized upon a large bunch of keys and sprung from his chair, hoisting them aloft like trophy fish.
‘Perhaps I could help if I were to, let us say, fail in my security duties,’ he suggested, tantalisingly, rounding the reception desk.
‘Come,’ he insisted and signalled that Woo should accompany him across the expanse to the lifts at the rear.
‘To think,’ he enthused to the trailing Woo, ‘not so very long ago, the limit of O’Singh’s ambition was to secure a research post at the University of Strathclyde.’
Professor Breville O’Singh, the man the dog-man alluded to, the object of Woo’s contempt, had indeed been there at Strathclyde preaching, showcasing his ideas from the stage of the amphitheatre. A bear-shaped man or perhaps a man-shaped bear, rolling his hands one over the other to facilitate the order of his speech. Not in a rhythmical way, but more in the fashion of a father dancing at a disco. A big man as imposing a figure as Cassius Clay, but always looking sorry for the imposition. Kind of limp, drawing in his bulk. Professor Breville O’Singh was apologetically large.
O’Singh’s audience, a gaggle of professors, sat in their various attitudes of contemplation, in judgement, squinting into a blinding low-angled shaft of Spring sunlight.
‘When asked a question to which there is any number of possible answers, we reply, “How long is a piece of string?”’ observed Professor Breville O’Singh. ’But we could ask similarly, could we not, “How wide is a piece of string?”’
The professors looked on, narrow-eyed.
‘At Strathclyde, O’Singh spoke of string theory,’ said the dog-man, dithering an instant at the lifts.
He dabbed a paw at a button to ascend. ‘Ding!’ answered the button to the touch, an elevator car languishing at ground level always a strong possibility. Stalingrad House was a 1960s block that had outlived its purpose as business HQ material.
‘Come!’ entreated the dog-man.
The doors trundled shut and the lift car shuddered into life.
‘Day after,’ he resumed, ‘O’Singh was at Exeter…’
Sure enough, Professor O’Singh had been there at the University of Exeter walking a campus path, breaching the grassy paddock between faculty buildings. Midway, mid-speech, he stopped and swung round to shield himself from a flurry of cherry blossom blown up by a sudden gust.
’We ask ourselves, “What is the meaning of life?” yelled O’Singh, addressing his fellow-strollers, his Exeter peers, above the whoosh of the gust. ‘But what indeed is the meaning of death?’
O’Singh stood with a clump of cherry blossom adorning his left ear, looking like the most oversized lady in a Hawaiian greeting party.
‘At Exeter, he waxed existential…’ said the dog-man, checking the floor numbers on the display above the door.
The lift spasmed and stopped. The doors lurched open. Floor 3. The dog-man stepped out into a long, narrow corridor lined with light and dark blue checked industrial carpet tiles that crunched underfoot.
‘Soon after, Lancaster. Where he did attract a flicker of interest …’ he conceded to the dishevelled Woo shuffling behind in his billowing shell suit.
‘Did show promise, what you brought to the table,’ conceded A’Court, the vice-chancellor at the University of Lancaster, strutting with Professor O’Singh along a modernist gallery.
‘Well thank you, but...’
‘What was it again?’
‘Should underpants be considered underpants if the wearer is not wearing his trousers?’
’So an instance where the wearer is no longer wearing them under anything? Where the underpants become… well, rightfully they become pants? Yuh, I do like that.’
‘A respectful word of advice,’ offered Professor A’Court, pulling O’Singh into his office.
‘You will need to find applications for your ideas if you hope to gain a platform at an academic institution. We have to be much more about income-generation. We need to turn a penny, you understand?’
‘Okay…’ drawled O’Singh. His earlier insights he felt had a certain ring to them. They scanned well. String Theory in Strathclyde. Existentialism in Exeter. Here, in Lancaster, alas, he had come a little less sure of himself, with a certain sense of foreboding. Underpants in Lancaster. It didn’t scan.
‘I could perhaps make that a starting point for finding an application,’ suggested O’Singh, feebly. ‘I do actually really, absolutely need to get started on the platform thing tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? Actually tomorrow? Why tomorrow?’
‘I have computed the time I will need to discover everything as the number of years from my age tomorrow to the average age of death of a luminary scientist.’
‘What do you…? Explain.’
A’Court drew out a leather chair from his desk for O’Singh to make himself comfortable.
‘I calculated the number of years that Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Curie, Sigmund Freud all lived after making their first discovery and took the average. That is the time the average scientific pioneer needs to produce their finest work. To produce mine, I would need to start tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ stressed A’Court, taking his seat opposite O’Singh.
‘Eleven minutes past eight. In the morning. What time do you start work here?’
‘I’m afraid 9.30. We couldn’t help you even if we did offer you a position.’
‘I could perhaps start a little later at that time and work through my lunch hour?’ suggested O’Singh, hopefully.
‘Same old story in the end though,’ sighed the dog-man, locating O’Singh’s dark wood veneer office door. ‘O’Singh was clutching at straws.’
He knelt down and coaxed a key in the lock.
Woo snorted. The dog-man glanced back to see that the little man was eyeing the sign etched on the door’s rippled glass panel: ‘The Investigations of the Para-Usual’.
The dog-man swung the lock and leant a canine shoulder into the door. It yielded and gave with a petulant hinge whine. Tentatively, Woo entered at the dog-man’s bidding, taking in the heavy wooden furniture, the synthetic strip curtains and the general toxic combination of reds and oranges in carpet and upholstery.
‘And then there was you, Mr Woo,’ considered the dog-man from the door. ‘You threw O’Singh a lifeline, didn’t you? Back at the Academy?’
Woo drew himself up and turned to face the dog-man, striking a pose one might associate with a Master of the Universe. He stood legs apart, chest puffed out, stroking his wise, encrusted chin.
‘Indeed, the professor had believed the game was up, when out of the blue he got the call to attend the Academy of Philosophy.’
Woo nodded profoundly. He slowly raised an arm and pointed at the dog-man, the cue for him to continue.
‘O’Singh was desperate and hopeful in equal measure,’ said the complying dog-man. He fumbled with dog paws a stubby plastic-sheathed key on his ring and held it foremost like the prized fish in the shoal. ‘For him,’ he proffered, gliding towards the office desk, ‘the Academy represented his last chance of securing a position in academia, his very last chance of discovering everything...’
