Tales of the Talking Picture Read online

  Tales of the Talking Picture

  by Tom Slemen

  Content copyright © Tom Slemen. All rights reserved

  Published in the United Kingdom

  First Publishing February, 2012

  Every picture tells a story.

  Old Proverb

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Robot Job

  Myrk

  Ship of the Damned

  The Sunday King

  Higgledy

  The Ultras

  Destination Titanic

  The Thinking Cap

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  It was Thursday! Pocket money day! Twelve-year-old Matthew Brindley rose earlier than usual on such days. On this morning there was a silvery glimmer of hope in the otherwise bleak grey hour before school imprisonment.

  Matthew’s father Frank punctually performed the Parting with the Fiver ceremony at 8.40 a.m., and his only son feigned his usual thankfulness and hurried off, not to school, but to Dave’s junk shop.

  From an upstairs window, Frank Brindley noted the telltale deviation in his son’s path and begrudgingly smiled. He turned to his wife Maureen, who was laid up in bed with a bad dose of the ‘flu, and said, ‘There he goes Mo, off to that junk shop I’ll bet.’

  ‘The council should close that place down, or make it open up after nine like other decent shops,’ Mrs Brindley croaked in a laryngic voice. ‘If that Dave ever sells another air pistol to Matthew I’ll go to the police and the newspapers. He’s like an arms dealer, the stuff he sells to kids.’

  ‘Yeah I know Mo,’ said Frank, sympathetically, watching his wife struggle to breathe as she spoke. ‘I’d have words with that Dave fellah, only I know you’d get upset.’

  ‘No, you have words with him Frank; let him know the parents round here have had enough,’ was Maureen’s surprise reply.

  Butterflies fluttered in Frank’s pot belly at the thought of a confrontation with Dave, the man who had once been a bouncer at the infamous Thingies Nightclub - until the people of a rival club had the premises burnt down. ‘Oh, I’d be the villain then though, wouldn’t I Mo?’

  ‘No you wouldn’t Frank-‘

  Frank struggled for an excuse. ‘Dave would say I was threatening him with menaces or whatever and the law would be behind him. Thugs, drug-pushers and killers are protected by the courts nowadays. Law-abiding people and concerned parents are politically incorrect –‘

  ‘Oh don’t talk daft Frank Brindley. You’ve got no bottle. I wish I was well; I’d give that Dave a piece of my mind.’ Maureen blew her nose into a disposable handkerchief and turned over in her bed. ‘Men,’ she sighed, then closed her bleary eyes.

  ‘What do you mean, I’ve got no bottle?’ Frank squinted with a puzzled expression at the lump in the quilt, then gave a little hollow, irritating laugh, even though he was deeply upset by his wife’s accusations of cowardice. ‘Okay Mo, I’ll go on the rampage then, and petrol bomb Dave’s shop, and you can find a new school for Matthew after his teachers and friends have seen his dad on Sky News, battling with armed police. You can visit me in the nick, if they take me alive.’

  ‘Yeah ok,’ muttered Maureen from beneath the quilt.

  ‘This is grounds for divorce you know Mo?’ Dave said in an upset tone as he strode towards the door.

  ‘Bye Frank,’ said Maureen, without opening her eyes.

  The door slammed.

  The Magpie’s Nest was Dave Garner’s Mecca for the blissfully immature school-kid, beloved by Goths, nostalgia freaks and collectors. At ten to nine the shop was already open, and Matthew hurried in to survey the clutter of curiosities. Among the useless and the discarded, the schoolboy inspected a guitar with one nylon string, a pair of walkie-talkie wristwatches with a working range of twenty-five feet, a battery-operated toy that could blow glow-in-the-dark bubbles, and an ultra-light long-distance frisbee that was powered by a solar-powered propeller. Matthew then rummaged through a pile of musky books and homed in on a paperback entitled, How to Read Minds. After flipping through a few pages, he said to Dave, ‘Do you think there’s such a thing as telepathy?’

  Dave looked at him blankly and then blinked once.

  Matthew stared back, puzzled. He felt nervous under the fearsome gaze of the shaven-headed tattoo-emblazoned twenty-two stone goliath.

  At last Dave said: ‘I just answered your question with my mind, but you obviously couldn’t pick it up. That book’ll tell you how to read minds. Imagine reading girls’ minds…’

  ‘Yeah,’ Matthew put the book back on the pile and then pulled back the sleeve of his blazer and glanced at his watch. Two minutes past nine. He was going to be late for school. He headed for the door but was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a fantastic-looking robot in a box at the end of the counter.

  ‘Wow, how much is that?’ Matthew picked up the box and scrutinised the seven-inch tall mechanical man through the cellophane window of its colourful box.

  ‘The robot’s five quid,’ said Dave, sorting out old vinyl records on the counter.

  ‘That’s a bit steep isn’t it Dave?’ Matthew felt the crisp five-pound note in his pocket.

  ‘No way; it’s a collector’s item, that robot is,’ Dave told him, adding, ‘I could get a hundred quid from that on eBay.’

  ‘Does it need batteries?’ Matthew queried, taking the fiver out of his pocket.

  ‘No, it has a little atomic pile that never packs in,’ was Dave’s sarcastic reply.

  ‘You’re kidding; has it?’ Matthew’s innocent blue eyes widened.

  ‘Of course it uses batteries, clockwork stuff’s out now y’know.’

  ‘Oh well I’ve only got five pounds, so I won’t have enough to get batteries as well,’ Matthew complained.

  ‘Here,’ Dave expertly and swiftly plucked the fiver from the preteen’s hand, and made him a dubious offer in his salesman’s voice: ‘You take the robot, and I’ll tell you right now to your face that you’ll have to get the batteries yourself. You only need two AA-sized batteries and you can borrow them from your telly remote control when you get home later. Now, on the plus side, not only have you got a pristine robot which you could sell on eBay – and make a two-hundred percent profit – I will also throw in a mystery gift as well, which happens to be another collector’s item. How does that grab you?’

  Matthew blinked. His pocket money had gone forever, once it was in Dave’s clutches, so he had to concede defeat. He nodded.

  ‘Ah, you’re a star,’ Dave smiled insincerely.

  ‘What’s the mystery gift?’ Matthew asked, as Dave rushed through the doorway leading to a rear room.

  ‘If I told you that it wouldn’t be a mystery gift would it?’ Dave replied, out of sight. Then came the distant sound of rummaging, and Dave whispering ‘Where is it? Where has she put it? That woman!’

  A minute hadn’t passed when Dave returned in a hurry with something that was cocooned in brown paper. It looked flat and oval, and it was thrust into a plastic carrier bag and handed to Matthew.

  The schoolboy looked in the bag as he walked to the door.

  ‘You’re going to be late mate!’ Dave distracted him and hurried him off the premises.

  Matthew left Magpie’s Nest and headed to school, with his hand in the carrier bag, partly unwrapping the brown paper from the mystery gift.

  Meanwhile, outside the junk shop, Dave’s wife, Barbara came to a halt in her old transit van. Her husband came out the shop to help her convey boxes of books and magazines from the van to the premises, and smiled gleefully. ‘Just got shut of that picture,’ Dave told her.

  ‘The Crying Boy one? Hope the bad luck goes with it. We should have burn
t that picture,’ Barbara struggled with the heaviest cardboard box towards the shop door.

  ‘No, not that one Barb, the haunted one.’ Dave bumped his box into her back impatiently.

  ‘Oh that weird one of the girl?’ Barbara recalled the spooky oval portrait.

  ‘Yeah; you said the eyes used to follow you around the room,’ Dave chuckled and smirked behind her back. Haunted picture! Barbara was so superstitious. She read newspaper horoscopes and tealeaves.

  Barbara hated the way he laughed at her belief in the supernatural. ‘Dave, your own mother said she saw that girl move in that portrait, so it isn’t just me. Old Mrs Maloney said she had seen that picture when she was a child, and she’d heard weird stories about it.’

  ‘Maloney baloney,’ joked Dave, ‘Come on, let’s get this stuff in from the van.’

  Matthew Brindley was hurrying between the entrance gateposts of his school when he heard a succession of thuds to his left. He glanced over to see the highly-strung headmaster Mr Gittens pounding his fists on the pane of his office window. Matthew stopped in his tracks. Gittens pointed at his watch, then swung open the squeaky-hinged window. ‘You’re late – again!’ he roared.

  Matthew stood in the playground, struggling to think up an excuse. ‘My cat was run over Mr Gittens.’

  ‘Again?’ the pearl-coloured handle-bar moustache of the manic headmaster twitched as a tic flexed his face.

  Matthew quickly recalled he had used that excuse about his cat once before, months ago. His mother had warned him how a liar had to have a good memory. Perhaps he could defuse the situation with a little joke? ‘This was the big one,’ Matthew replied,’ life number nine sir.’

  ‘You – you cheeky, disrespectful, insolent and pathetic idiot! Call at my office at noon Brindley!

  As Matthew walked into the school with his head bowed, Gittens cursed him under his breath, and then sat down at his computer. He opened his Special Punishment Spreadsheet, and printed off pages of five-digit numbers to be added. At noon sharp, Matthew turned up at the headmaster’s office, wondering what the psychological punishment would be this time. Last time he had to take home a copy of The Catcher In the Rye to read over the weekend before returning to school to deliver a talk about the novel on the stage. Not an easy task when you’re dyslexic and suffer from stage fright.

  ‘Sit down over there and add these up,’ Gittens handed Matthew seven pages of figures for the long-addition punishment.

  Matthew sat in the corner at a table, and readied himself for the task. As soon as Gittens had left the office for lunch, Matthews took out his iPhone and dialled home. His father answered. ‘Dad, listen carefully, have you got a calculator there?’

  ‘Why?’ Mr Brindley asked.

  ‘I have to add up all these numbers because I was late for school. Have you got a calculator?’

  ‘No I don’t know where it is son; what about our computer? Hasn’t that got a calculator thingy?’

  ‘Yeah, good idea. I have a calculator on this iPhone but it bleeps loud when I use it and Gittens might hear it. Dad, go and switch the computer on and call me back.’

  'You forgot the magic word son,'Frank Brindley said in a mild sulk.

  'Eh? What word?' Matthew asked, rather perplexed, then realised what his dad meant. 'Oh yeah, yeah – please Dad.'

  Frank Brindley turned on the old computer and with some difficulty located the little calculator icon. He clicked on it and called his son back. For over and hour he helped his son add up the pages of sums, losing the total a few times along the way and arguing with the wonky computer mouse. At 1.25pm, the grand total was arrived at, and Matthew heard Mr Gittens coming down the corridor outside. The headmaster burst into the room and his perpetual aroma of nicotine assaulted Matthew’s nostrils immediately.

  ‘I’ve done it sir,’ Matthew told him proudly. He handed the final sheet with the grand total on. He had even jotted fake numbers in the margins of the paper to make it look as if he had been making notes during the mammoth fete of mental arithmetic.

  Gittens snatched the paper from his hand – and crumpled it up. It was dropped in the metal bucket bin. With his back to Matthew, he said, ‘Right, go to class Brindley, and if you are ever late again I will summon your parents to my office.’

  ‘But aren’t you even going to check that long sum sir?’ Matthew felt so cheated.

  ‘To class boy! Go!’ roared Gittens.

  After the purgatory of school, Matthew rushed straight home, and from the lap of his sleeping father, who was reclining limp and open-mouthed in an armchair, he gently picked up the remote which controlled the TV and DVD player, and took it away to remove its two AA-sized batteries. As the family Alsatian dog Larry looked on from the comfort of the fireside rug, Matthew inserted the power cells into a compartment in the robot’s back. Matthew slid the battery cover shut and pressed a small red button on the little electromechanical man’s chest. ‘My name is Mechanizmo,’ announced the toy robot, ‘what is your name?’

  Larry whined and his ears swivelled backwards to the back of his head. He didn’t like Mechanizmo.

  ‘My name’s Matthew.’

  ‘Hello Matthew!’ Mechanizmo’s innards whirred and he offered his little silvered plastic hand. ‘Pleased to meeeeeeet you!’

  A huge ear-to-ear smile broke on Matthew’s face.

  ‘Put me down Matthew and let me walk,’ Mechanizmo told the boy.

  Matthew put the robot on the floor, and the simulacrum’s legs walked with a realistic humanlike gait.

  ‘Cool,’ Matthew watched Mechanizmo head towards Larry, who fled in total fear from the rug with his back legs ahead of his front ones, and his tail curled under him. The terrified dog ran off into the hallway and bounded up the stairs to Mrs Brindley’s room.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Mechanizmo asked the fleeing animal, then his infrared, ultrasonic motion detectors and artificial intelligence programs reasoned that the object was either a small child or animal.

  Upstairs, the flu-stricken Mrs Brindley was reading a magazine when the bedroom door burst open and a black blurred object hurled itself onto the duvet.

  ‘Gerrroff!’ Matthew’s mother shrieked as a petrified and confused Larry tried to hide under the covers.

  As Mrs Brindley tried to console the hysterical canine, Matthew came up the stairs with his robot. The strange metallic voice of Mechanizmo made Larry’s ears flip into various positions.

  ‘Matthew!’ croaked Mrs Brindley, ‘what have you done to this dog?’

  Matthew shouted back: ‘Nothing mum, he’s just scared of this robot.’ He walked into his mother’s room and explained further, ‘He’s been a nervous wreck ever since Bonfire Night.’

  When Larry saw the robot he growled, then nudged his nose into Mrs Brindley’s armpit and wailed. ‘Take that thing into your room! Now!’ Mrs Brindley grappled with the dog and tried to throw him off the bed.

  Matthew went to his room in a huff and put the robot on his bed. He recalled Dave’s “mystery gift” – the little oval portrait of a young woman. He went downstairs and took a look at the picture. Should he throw it in the bin? It looked boring, and depicted some girl who had died years ago. How Matthew hated history, so he decided to put it in the dustbin in the yard – but then he wondered if the picture could be worth anything. Whenever the Antique’s Roadshow programme was on the telly, Matthew’s dad often told him about the money to be made from old, seemingly worthless items of junk found in attics and second-hand shops. Perhaps the old picture was worth a fortune; and if it was, then Matthew could buy that Porsche he stopped to ogle at each day in the window of Carringtons car showroom. That would impress Christina Masters, the girl he adored from afar. Matthew imagined her climbing into his turbo Porsche at the school gates with his friends and teachers looking on, all green with envy.

  Matthew hurried upstairs to his room with the picture and turned on the computer. He typed ‘PAINTINGS WORTH MILLIONS’ into the Google search engine and clic
ked on the links to the listed websites, but none of them showed any portraits like the one he had. He looked at the picture, hoping to see the artist’s signature, but could find none. There was no information on the reverse of the portrait either, just a hard wood backing which couldn’t be removed.

  Matthew looked at the young lady in the portrait, and slowly found himself being drawn in by her delicate features. The image was so finely painted, it looked almost photographic. Her perfect, flawless facial contours and exquisite cheekbones; her perfect pouting lips, and the way the curled golden locks of her mane shone with an unearthly lustrous radiance. And those hypnotic blue eyes, so full of life and sparkle…

  Matthew felt warm. His face flushed, and he realised he was developing a crush on a woman old enough to be his great-great grandmother. She was probably dust now; a skeleton lying in a long-forgotten grave. Well, Matthew knew it was crazy being infatuated with a dead person, but it was a pleasant craziness, so he put that picture on his wall amid the glossy posters of his favourite pop and movie stars. As the night moved in, a growing sixth-sense suspicion told Matthew that there was something very strange about that lady in the oval portrait. Goosepimples rose up on his arms as the wind made a bare tree-branch tap at his widow.

  Matthew left the room and went downstairs.

  His father was awake, and repeatedly pressing the remote control, unaware it had no batteries in it. Matthew said he was hungry and Frank Brindley asked his son to go to the Kebab House.

  ‘Your ulcer dad, remember? No junk food.’ Matthew told him.

  ‘Don’t patronise me and pretend you care for my health,’ said his father, ‘when you are just too bone idle to go for a kebab.’

  ‘Okay, okay it’s a kebab then,’ Matthew acquiesced.

  At Zorba’s Kebab House, there was the beautiful Goth, Christina, waiting to be served, and there was no other customer in the place. Matthew’s heart fluttered at the sight of her, standing there in Doc Marten’s, black fishnet tights, a black mini skirt draped in chains, and a black leather jacket studded with silver skulls and spikes. Her shiny black bobbed hair was a stark contrast to the clown-white makeup on her face.