THE DILIGENT POLICEMAN

Maybe a policeman shouldn't have any imagination...

Paul Pewter sat in front of his rather geriatric typewriter, knowing he was daft hanging on to it, but thirty years ago he’d written a longish short story on it, about a mermaid doing something or other with a loofah when she was in the bath and ending up in a whirlpool of her own making before being dashed to pieces on savage rocks until she had the most godawful headache imaginable. And he’d used this very typewriter.

The short story had been published somewhere, in a magazine that he’d tried to find at the newsagents but had failed to, which had upset him at the time, and for the past thirty years he’d tried to emulate that success by getting another short story accepted for publication. But he was a busy man, a local policeman and even a lay preacher, so his time was mostly used up by activities that didn’t require the use of a typewriter.

He had a laptop computer as well, but he much preferred using his typewriter when he was going to be creative. It had a solidity about it, and the noises that it made, from the moment he bashed the first key to the time he typed his name at the end, had about them the kind of touch that a proper author must experience.

And this particular Sunday morning, with Wendy his sometimes lovely wife out at the shops with Brenda, their daughter and radiant but sometimes noisy promise for the future, he had an hour or two spare, and he knew that an idea that had been rotating in his brain since he’d first contemplated it a week or more ago might well grow into a proper, publishable short story.

So he pushed his coffee to one side, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine, and started.

He knew what the scene was because he’d day-dreamed about it often enough, mostly when he was walking the length of Daemon Street after dark because there had been too many robberies down Daemon Street for the Superintendent’s peace of mind.

It was quite a long street, and parts of it found their way subconsciously into his story, places like the alley way that led down the side of the chip shop and behind the houses that had been there since Queen Victoria had been on the throne. He hated that alleyway because it was dark and he needed to use his torch or end up stumbling into something that shouldn’t be there. Only last week, with the batteries in that torch beginning to dail, he’d found himself on his bottom in an old bath that was somehow half filled with water. At least, he’d hoped it was water, but you can’t be sure what might have been dumped down the alley behind the houses on that side of Daemon Street.

Wendy had been none too pleased when she saw it and even less pleased when she sniffed it. He’d had to change outside the back door, which might have been embarrassing had anyone come to call because he had to change his boxer shorts as well as his trousers, and put both garments into the washing machine himself because she wasn’t going to touch them, while she did something hygienic with his shoes.

And that was where he was going to set his story. Starting outside the chip shop with a couple of young urchins begging for a penny for the Guy even though it was March and nowhere near November 5^th. They were going to be whisked off by aliens who quite naturally were mistaking them for examples of human intelligentsia, and taken to an alien planet inhabited, of coures, by aliens themselves

Memories of some of the weirdos on his beat down Daemon Street provided a host of additional ideas for this story. Not only were aliens a really good ideas, but the young woman at number 14 was another fine example of the sort of creature that he wanted to populate an alien planet somewhere out in the wilds beyond the solar system.

Why, a couple of weeks ago that woman had raced out of her house in the flimsiest nighties he had ever seen shrieking murder! murder! in a voice laden with far too many decibels, and he had sheltered behind a brown bin and chuckled at the way that nightie almost left her body completely as she ran, shouting and waving down the street.

He’d was still chuckling about the woman and her nightie as he sauntered down the rest of his beat and paused to have a cigarette at the end before turning round and starting the long walk back to the chip shop. There was some sort of fuss with an ambulace parked on the road ahead, and what looked like a car used by DCI Greengage, and that collection of important vehicles would be best avoided, after all, he wasn’t even any sort of witness to anything, was he? He was just a police constable keeping order on a difficult beat.

He smiled and recalled the flying nightie, which cheered him up.

A whole planet filled with shrieking young tarts in flimsy nighties would help sales of his story no end, he thought, because the memory of she at number 14, and especially her night dress, warmed the cockles of his heart and would surely do that to any real man who chose to read his story.

He tapped away for several minutes then read the result of his outpourings. Yes, that set the scene all right. He had used precisely the right words to describe the woman and her rather risqué outfit. He giggled to himself, looked at his watch, scowled because Wendy might not be too long now, and cast his mind further back to his night beat on Daemon Street.

There was the kid on his moped half way down the darned road. He must love at number forty or something like that. It hadn’t quite been dark and the boy had been trying to do a wheelie after accelerating as much as he could which was really too fast for Daemon Street, and then he had hit one of those so-called sleeping policemen or speed humps planted there by a thoughtful council because once upon a time there had been kids like this one, racing their motorbikes or mopeds or even push bikes much too quickly, which was a risk to normal people who might be pushing babies in prams or holding the hands of toddlers on their way to school.

But it had been so funny watching the silly kid flying through the air as the one wheel on the ground lost anything like traction on the road And he had landed with a crash. It was a good job he might have been wearing a crash helmet according to the law, though it must have been small one because PC Pewter hadn’t seen it all that clearly. But a planet of maniacs trying to do wheelies over bumps as an entertainment for simple minded aliens would make a fine chapter in a longer tale. Or at least, he thought it would because, well, hadn’t it made him giggle?

Then there was the incident of the cat flying through the air. It had troubled him to start with because, well, he had a soft spot for animals and cats numbered among his favourites and he couldn’t abide any sort of cruelty. First, a voice he recognised because it bellowed so often drunkenly at night that he’d learned to ignore it, then a loud feline squawk followed by the flying cat. In the darkness it seemed to crash head-first in the opposite wall but that can’t have been the case, can it? Cats are famous for landing on their feet, aren’t they?

He typed away again and by the time that Wendy came in with little Brenda he had completed a fair enough first draft of what he hoped would be his first footstep to fame and fortune.

“You’re a lucky man,” she told him, “from what I’ve heard! A murder, a fatal motor bike crash and even cruelty to a cat! All on Daemon Street where you have your beat! Your lot are looking for witnesses! Pity you didn’t see anything. There’s even talk of a reward for anyone who could help the cops!”

“Oh lordy,” thought PC Paul Pewter.

“I’ve finished my story,” he mumbled to Wendy, “and did Brenda behave herself? Was ths e a good girl?”

“Of course she was,” smiled Wendy, “I’ll read your story after dinner if you like.”

“Not yet. I need to make changes. In fact it’s not very good. I’ll start again when I’ve got a bit more time,” muttered Paul, and he tore his manuscript up.

© Peter Rogerson, 01.04.23

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