Thursday, December the 7th, 2006

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Dobson and Longevity

As I was preparing for yesterday's edition of Hooting Yard On The Air, I received an email from listener Jonathan Coleclough. Actually, Jonathan just forwarded an email to me, adding a note: “The subject line of the email below promised so much. But of course it was just spam. [Sigh]”

The subject line of the forwarded email was “Dobson and longevity” and, indeed, what followed was twaddle. I wrote back to Jonathan as follows… “I find it disconcerting that Dobson is haunting the less salubrious corners of the world wide interweb, e'en from beyond the grave. That … and longevity seems to betrying to tell us something… something spooky and almost Lovecraftian. I may have to investigate.”

Of course I have not yet had time to make a full investigation, to send agents from Haemoglobin Towers fanning out across the globe, with their ponderous briefcases, beaver fur headgear, badger badges, and piercing eyesight, but I have been able to give the matter some thought. Could it really be true that the out of print pamphleteer cheated death? That beneath the funeral shroud, that uncanny yellow festoonment cut from a bolt of cheap tarpaulin from a chandlery in the brine-soaked hellhole of O'Houlihan's Wharf, a tarp stitched with cack-handed embroidery of piddocks and toredos and winkles and periwinkles and strombuses and whelks and loligos, that wrapped in it was not the dead Dobson but an imposter or simulacrum? If so, if Dobson lived, where was he? He would be impossibly old by now, creaking and crumbling. Was he trudging along alien pathways, anonymous, in some distant land, his eyes—one beady, the other milky—fixed straight ahead, an undead dead man plodding ever forward towards he knew not what? We had all thought our dear pamphleteer a wisp, a fume borne upon the luminiferous aether, the spindly frame he once inhabited discarded, hurled enwrapped in its hideous tarpaulin from the worm-eaten jetty outside O'Houlihan's Wharf post office into the boiling sea.

Dobson and longevity, indeed. But perhaps, ill tempered and hateful, he skulked in a booth somewhere, in the outskirts, feeding on biscuits and berries and birds plucked in mid-flight from the air, sucking drops of rainwater from the toggles of his duffel coat. Wherever he was, the undead Dobson remained invisible to all who had known him, yet he somehow had the ability to seed the world wide interweb with texts that none would ever read. Was he making some skewed commentary upon all those unread out of print pamphlets that poured out of him during the years before that thunder-wracked gathering in the bracken- and bindweed-choked churchyard of St Bibblydibdib's when bells clanged lamentations, and salt tears ran down the cheeks of even the most grizzled countenance? Where was Dobson then? Did he scuttle from beneath the shroud when backs were turned? Were there conspirators who replaced him with an effigy of felt and excelsior and cardboard and rags? Who could such conspirators have been? Certainly Marigold Chew cannot have been among them, for who could ever question the bleak desolation with which she sported her widow's weeds?

If there is anyone to point a finger at, it would be Ned Blewitt. Dobson had not known this urchin for long. As far as we know the two met just an hour or so before Dobson's death, or his alleged death as we must now refer to it. Dobson had left the house to buy a new picnic hamper, for it is a little-known fact that he was fond of extravagant picnicking occasions, and much given to hauling a hamper stuffed to the brim with cake and pomegranates and Limburger cheese and pre-sliced slices of pemmican and brazil nuts and more brazil nuts and even more brazil nuts and parsley and treacle pies and mashed potato and suet puddings up punishing slopes and down inclines into declivities in the hills where bats are legion and no other human being has ever trod. There, Dobson would unpack his hamper and scoff his food unobserved, one of his own out of print pamphlets propped open with a stick, chewing and reading and impervious to the wind and the drizzle. Such excursions battered the ageing Dobson as much as they battered his hamper, but a picnic hamper can be replaced. And so it was, on that March morning, that Dobson pulled on his Belgian Cadet boots and his souvenir cardigan from the Ayn Rand Exposition at Jakarta and strode off towards the picnic supplies boutique at the perimeter of Old Farmer Frack's fields on that patch of scrubland beyond Blister Lane.

Next to the boutique was a kiosk operated by the Holy Sisters Of Headaches And Dismay, an order of nuns who dispensed bowls of soup to passing mendicants. As Dobson made his tottering progress towards picnickery, he was buttonholed by one of the sisters… no, hang on, I've got the wrong day. The kiosk was gone by then, obliterated by livid purple death rays from a spaceship caught in a pocket of error in the continuum. I mean the space-time continuum, I think. Anyway, where the soup kiosk once stood there was now a tent, pitched there by The Mighty Alphonso, a roguish refugee from many a penny circus who promised to astonish and astound the crowds with feats of legerdemain and prestidigitation, accompanied by his assistant, Little Alphonso The Memory Man. But there were no crowds that day, only Dobson, who hurried in through the tent flaps to avoid an encounter with one of his creditors, it doesn't matter which one, who was lurking outside the picnic boutique hoping to waylay the pamphleteer. Inside, in the gloom, he came upon Little Alphonso rehearsing his latest show-stopper, a recitation of a historical glossary of diseases. Peering over his shoulder to ensure that he had not been followed, Dobson slumped into a pew, one of many pews stolen from a cathedral by the ever-resourceful Mighty Alphonso, and hearkened to the words of the diminutive urchin as he learned his lines.

“Abscess, Addison's disease, Ague, Ague-cake, Anasarca (generalised massive dropsy),” recited Little Alphonso, “Apoplexy, Aphthae, Aphthous stomatitis, Ascites, Asthenia, Bad Blood, Bilious fever, Biliousness, Boil, Brain fever, Bronchial asthma, Camp fever, Cancrum otis, Catalepsy, Catarrh, Chlorosis, Cholera infantum, Chorea, Colic, Congestion, Congestive Fever, Consumption, Convulsions, Croup (the crouping noise was similar to the sound emitted by a chicken affected with the pip; also known rising of the lights), Debility, Diphtheria, Dropsy, Dysentery, Effluvia, Epilepsy, Erysipelas, Fatty Liver, Flux, Furuncle, Gangrene, Gleet, Gravel, Grippe, Hectic fever, Hives, Hospital fever, Hydrocephalus, Hydrothorax, Icterus, Inanition, Infection, Inflammation, Jaundice, King's evil, Lockjaw, Lung Fever, Lung Sickness, Malignant fever, Marasmus, Meningitis, Milk Sick (poisoning resulting from the drinking of milk produced by a cow who had eaten a plant known as white snake root), Mormal, Neuralgia, Paristhmitis, Petechial fever, Phthisis, Pleurisy, Pneumonia, Podagra, Potts Disease, Putrid fever, Putrid sore throat, Pyrexia, Quinsy, Scarlatina, Scrofula, Septic, Ship fever, Softening of the brain, Spotted fever, Summer complaint, Suppuration, Trismus nascentium or neonatorum, Typhoid…”

“Oh for God's sake,” shouted Dobson, “I have heard enough!”

“Sorry, I didn't see you there,” said Little Alphonso. “I am Little Alphonso The Memory Man,” he added, “Although of course that is a stage name, and as you can see I am preparing for a stage performance later on today when the rains tumble from the sky and the townsfolk hereabouts will seek shelter in this our tent as you have done for a purpose unbeknown to me. You are staring in perplexity at my pointy triangular cap, I see. Well, I always wear it for rehearsals, for concealed within it, attached to my cranial integuments, are wires which transmit brain-rays by invisible forces thus nourishing my mental capacity and magnifying it a thousandfold. Would you like a conference pear?” … and the urchin took two of the said fruits from a pocket and passed one to Dobson.

Bear in mind that Dobson had little more than an hour to live. There has never been any suggestion that he was poisoned by the pear proffered by Little Alphonso, whose real name, of course, was Ned Blewitt. If anyone had the means and wherewithal to spirit the still living Dobson from beneath his apparent funeral shroud, and to replace him with a counterfeit corpse, it was Ned, and that is why my suspicions rest on him.

My investigations will continue. The next step is to ascertain if The Mighty Alphonso may also have been involved. Unlike Little Alphonso, The Mighty Alphonso was no mere stage name. That fact alone should give us pause. And so I shall pause, not, like the doomed—or maybe not doomed—Dobson, to gobble down a conference pear, but to stretch my legs in the direction of a pie shop, to purchase a lemon meringue pie, and to carry it in its cardboard packaging to a shrine where I will place it as an offering to appease the mad and terrible gods before whom I bow down on Wednesday afternoons.