"Robert Rankin - Brentford 02 - The Brentford Triangle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

Today it would find but an empty pillow, showing naught of a recumbent head but a slight indentation and
a Brylcreem stain. The coverlet was tossed aside and a pak of ragged pyjama strides lay in an athletic splits posture
upon the linoleum. A timeworn tweed jacket was missing from its appointed hook behind the door. It was not yet
eight of the clock and John Omally was no longer at home to callers. For John Omally had important business
elsewhere.
John Omally was gone a-golfing.

'Fore!' The cry echoed across the allotment, struck the wall of the Seamen's Mission and passed back over
the head of a curly-headed son of Eire, clad in soiled Fair




Isle slipover and rolled-up tweeds. 'Fore and have a care!' Omally swung the aged club, the relic of a former
and more refined age, with a vengeance and struck the little white pill a mighty blow. The ball soared some
four feet into the clear morning air and fell to earth in the midst of Jim Pooley's radish patch.
Jim stifled a titter and read from a dog-eared exercise book entitled The Now Official Handbook of Allotment
Golf: 'Unless rendered totally inextricable, by nature of being unreachable, i.e. under more than four feet of
water or beyond climbing capability, the player will play the stroke. Should the player, however, endanger the
growth of his opponent's radishes he will forfeit the hole.'
Omally scratched his head with a wooden tee and eyed Pooley with some suspicion. 'I don't recall that bit at
the end, Jim,' said he. 'May I venture to ask whether the rule applies to runner beans, possibly of the variety
which you uprooted from my plot yesterday whilst attempting that trick shot of yours on to the fourth?'
Pooley made a thoughtful face. 'Beans are not specifically mentioned,' he said, carefully examining the note he
had so hastily scribbled. 'But if you are making an official request to have them included in the handbook then I
think we might stretch a point and pencil them in.'
At this moment the two golfers suddenly threw themselves down commando-fashion into a clump of long grass.
An explanation for this extraordinary behaviour was almost immediately forthcoming as the distinctive tuneless whis-
tling of Small Dave signalled the approach of that midget as he took his regular morning short cut through to
the Butts Estate.
Allotment Golf had not yet caught the eye either of the allotment holders or the general public, and both
Pooley and Omally wished to keep it that way. They would have greatly preferred to golf upon one of the




municipal courses but circumstances had decreed that their photographs now appeared upon every persona-non-
grata board throughout the county.
It had all appeared so trivial at the time, the small disagreements, the occasional bout of fisticuffs; hardly police
matters one would have thought. Golfers, however, are a clannish bunch with rather a conservative attitude
towards sport. The two Brentonians' extraordinary conception of the game had not been appreciated. Their
constant rule-bending and wild club-swinging, their numerous bogus claims to the course record, achieved
for the most part by omitting to play the more difficult holes, their total disregard for other players' safety,
refusing to shout 'Fore', before what Omally described as 'heavy putting', had been too much to bear. The secretary
of one course had shown moments of rare tolerance: he had respected Pooley's request to play the holes in
reverse order, he had suffered Omally playing in cycling cape and fisherman's waders one particularly wet day, but
when Pooley relocated all the tee markers (in order to make the game more interesting) and Omally had dug a
second hole upon the third green in order to sink a birdy four, stern measures had been taken. The two potential
Ryder Cup winners had been given what the French refer to as 'La Rush de la Bum'.
Thus in a moment of rare inspiration, necessity being, like Frank Zappa, the mother of invention and Jim