Knees Up Mother Earth by Robert Rankin

shake on now. His good eye bulged from its socket. “You couldn’t manage a knees-up in a whore house.”
    “Neville, calm yourself.” John leaned forward across the bar counter. “This could really work to your benefit. Allow me to explain. You see—”
    But John Omally said no more, as at that moment Neville swung his knobkerrie and bopped him on the head. John’s eyes crossed and then they closed and John sank slowly to the carpet.
    Jim looked down in horror. Words tried to form in his mouth, but could not. He raised a bitter gaze towards Neville and prepared to leap across the counter and exact a bloody revenge.
    But Neville swung his club once more.
    And Pooley hit the deck.

8
    Norman pressed home the bolts on the shop door and turned the “open” sign to “closed”. Norman always loved his Wednesday afternoons, when at one he could shut up shop and engage in his own activities. With Peg, his oversized other half, off at her weekly meeting with the Chiswick Townswomen’s Guild, Norman’s time was his own. Certainly he was supposed to remove himself to the wholesalers to stock up on Pontefract cakes and liquorice sticks and jujubes and sherbet lemons. But as folk never bought those sweeties any more, and the jars that lined the dusty shelves always remained full, it didn’t really matter anyway.
    Norman divested himself of his brown shopkeeper’s coat and hung it behind the door of the kitchenette, taking unto himself the patched jacket of green Boleskine tweed that had been his father’s before him and slipping it on as if it were a loving glove. Norman let himself out through the back door, locking it behind him, and sauntered off to his lock-up in Abaddon Street.
    Now, a lock-up garage is a wonderful thing, almost as wonderful in its way as an allotment shed. It is a “man’s” place, full of a man’s accoutrements: tools and spare parts and things that no longer work because they need a few spare parts to set them going, and boxes of old magazines that must not be thrown away because there are interesting articles in them that might one day be interesting to read. And as with an allotment shed, or indeed a garden shed, there is always a half-bag of gone-solid cement that you always fall over when you come in. Which is there, as we all know, because it is a tradition, or an old charter, or something.
    Norman unlocked and swung up-and-over the up-and-over garage door, stood in the entranceway and breathed in the ambience of his lock-up. It smelt good. It smelt of a man’s accoutrements, of tools and spare parts and things that no longer worked because … and so on and so forth and such like.
    Norman smiled the smile of inward satisfaction, stepped forward into his garage and fell over a half-bag of gone-solid cement. Righting himself, Norman smiled some more and sought out his car keys. Because Norman owned a car. Well, not a car as such – it was more of a van. In fact, it
was
a van. An Austin A40 van that Norman was restoring. And not only restoring, but improving, enginewise.
    Norman had certain theories regarding the internal combustion engine, mostly of the nature that it was a most inefficient means of powering an automobile. Norman was working on an alternative drive system for the A40 van, a revolutionary new method of automotive propulsion. It was near to completion and only needed a few spare parts to keep it going as smoothly as he would have liked.
    It was not your everyday revolutionary new method of automotive propulsion. This was something quite different.
    Norman had modestly named it the Hartnel Grumpiness Hyper-Drive. It would, in Norman’s humble opinion, bring joy to millions and millions of drivers who drove old and unreliable automobiles. Folk such as himself, for instance.
    The genesis of this particular invention had come about when Norman had purchased a book called
The Power of Positive Thought
, written by some American woman with big hair and a lot of letters after her