The Antipope Read Free Page A

between thumb and forefinger. “As I thought, most interesting. You say that your wife received them in payment for your old Morris Minor?”
    Archroy didn’t remember saying anything of the kind but he nodded bleakly.
    “They are beans of great singularity,” said the tramp. “I have seen beans and I have seen beans.” He returned the articles to Archroy’s still-extended hand. “These are beans indeed!”
    “But, magic?” said Archroy.
    The tramp stroked the stubble of his chin with an ill-washed knuckle. “Ah,” he said, “magic is it? Well that is a question. Let us say that they have certain
outré
qualities.”
    “Oh,” said Archroy. He felt a little better about the beans now, the loss of his trusty Morris Minor seemed less important than possessing something with
outré
qualities, whatever
outré
might mean. “What are you doing on my allotment?” Archroy asked in a polite tone.
    The tramp described a runic symbol in the dust at Archroy’s feet with the toecap of his sorry right shoe. “You might say that I am here to meet someone,” he said, “and there again you might not, if you were to say here is a man upon a mission you would be correct, but also at the same time you would be mistaken. There is much about my presence here that is anomalous, much that is straightforward, much that…”
    “I must be on my way now,” said Archroy, attempting to rise and feeling at his knees. They offered him no support. “I am incapacitated,” he announced.
    “… Much that will be known, much that will remain unexplained,” continued the tramp.
    Archroy wondered if he had eaten something untoward, toadstools in his hotpot, or slug pellets in his thermos flask. He had read of strange distillations from the Amazon which administered upon the head of a pin could paralyse a bull elephant. There were also forms of nerve gas that might find their way into the sucking section of a fellow’s briar.
    The tramp meanwhile had ceased speaking. Now he stared about the allotment in an interested fashion. “And you say that Omally won one of those plots from Peg’s husband at the paper shop?”
    Archroy was certain he had not. “The one over in the corner with the chimney,” he said. “That one there is the property of old Pete, it has been in his family for three generations and he has made an arrangement with the council to be buried there upon his demise. Blot the Schoolkeeper runs the one to the west backing on to the girls’ school, it is better not to ask what goes on in his shed.”
    Archroy rose to point out the plot but to his amazement discovered that the old tramp had gone. “Well I never,” said Archroy, crossing himself, “well I never did.”

3
    No-one could ever accuse Peg’s husband from the paper shop of being dull. His wife, when enquired of by customers as to her husband’s latest venture, would cup her hands upon her outlandish hips and say, “There’s never a dull moment is there?” This rhetorical question left most in doubt as to a reply, so the kindly soul would add, “You’ve got to laugh haven’t you?” which occasionally got a response, or “It’s a great old life if you don’t weaken”, which didn’t.
    Her husband, however, shunned such platitudes and preferred, during moments of acute brain activity, to deal exclusively in the proverb. On the occasion of his bike going missing for the thirteenth time from its appointed rack at the Rubber Factory he was heard to mutter, “Time is a great healer.” And during that particularly hot summer when someone set fire to his runner beans, “Every cloud has a silver lining.”
    Norman’s proverbs never quite matched up to the situation to which they were applied, yet seemed in some bizarre way to aid him to the solution of extremely obtuse problems. This lent him the air of a mystic, which made him regularly sought after by drunks in need of advice. His “ventures”, as they were termed, were never devoid of interest.