Gain Shufty burst into a fit of laughter. “Tell you what,” he said, between guffawings, “the Consortium will write off the debt, how about that?” And then he laughed some more.

Neville was definitely not laughing.

“Write it on, then,” said he.

“Do what?” Shufty asked.

“Write it on to the contracts. What you just said – that if Brentford were to win the FA Cup, you’ll write off the debt.”

“That’s absurd,” said Gavin Shufty.

Neville nodded sombrely. “I know,” said he. “It’s totally absurd. So what harm can it do?”

Gavin Shufty wiped tears of laughter from his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Neville, “I am. As you say, I can do nothing to stop this. I’m outvoted. I could abstain and not put my signature to this contract, but I am only a human being and I would dearly love to own my own pub. But I am not only a human being, I am a Brentonian. And Brentonians will rise to the challenge when called upon to protect what they care about.”

Gavin Shufty laughed once more. “I’m afraid that this is one challenge that Brentonians will not be able to rise to,” said he.

“Then humour me,” said Neville. “What do you have to lose?”

Gavin Shufty gave a shrug. “Absolutely nothing,” he replied.

4

John Vincent Omally, bestest friend of James Arbuthnot Pooley, crested the canal bridge from the Isleworth side and soared down into Brentford. Omally soared upon Marchant, his elderly sit-up-and-beg bike. There were times when John and his bike did not see eye to eye. As it were. Times when John cursed Marchant and Marchant returned John’s curses with what is known in military circles as “dumb insolence”. Troubled times were these for the both of them.

But not on this particular morn.

Upon this particular morn, boy and bike were as one, in cosmic synthesis, in a harmony that bordered on the divine. Marchant declined to snag John’s turn-up in his chain wheel and John felt not the need to chastise Marchant for his bad behaviour. The sun shone down and God was in his Heaven and to Omally all seemed more than just all right with the world.

That John, a curly-haired son of Eire, Dublin born and Brentford bred, should be approaching the borough at this time of the morning rather than stirring from his cosy bed in Mafeking Avenue, just to the rear of Peg’s Paper Shop, would have surprised none who knew John well. John was a bit of a ladies’ man. And as the now-legendary Spike once put it, “One bit in particular.” And upon this particular morn, John was returning from a night of passion with an Isleworth lass whose husband worked the night shift at the windscreen-wiper factory.

John did whistlings as he rode along, and singings, too, and sometimes reckless chucklings. That one day he would be made to pay for his transgressions, brought to book and no doubt soundly thrashed by some cuckolded hubby, perhaps played a part in these whistlings and singings and reckless chucklings as well. For it was the risk that did it for John – the risk, the thrill and of course the joy he brought to the women that he pleasured.

Not that John was a bad man.

No. Like unto Pooley, his bestest friend, and unto Neville and unto Norman, John Omally was a good man. John was as Jim, which is to say basically honest. Indeed, he was the partner of Jim, a fellow entrepreneur. Together they toiled hard evading what is so laughingly described as “honest work”. Together they lived by their wits. Together they drifted through life.

And happily.

Down the High Street came John, sometimes on the road and sometimes on the pavement, oblivious to hooting horns and startled shoppers. Onward, ever onward. ’Til he stopped. Before The Plume Café.

Omally dismounted, leaned Marchant against the café window to enjoy the late-season sunshine and entered The Plume Café.

The Plume Café had seen better days, and had probably even enjoyed them. These better days had been during the post-war years, those years known as the nineteen-fifties. Rock’n’rollin’ years these had been, of Teddy Boys with Brylcreemed heads and long drape coats and fat-soled brothel-creepers. When Elvis was King and fags were three pence a packet. And you could buy a dog for a shilling that was big enough for all the family to ride on. And whose name was Jack.

The Plume retained features of this glorious decade, including an espresso coffee machine that still made impressive noises. Whilst concealed behind its bulk, Lil, The Plume’s proprietress, would furtively ladle a spoonful of Maxwell House into a stranger’s mug and shake it about a bit. It also boasted a jukebox of the Rockola persuasion, now sadly scarified with the rust but still with its original selections: “Wild Gas On Saturn” by The Rock Gods; “Standing in the Slipstream of the Jets” by The Flying Starfish From Uranus; the “Two-By-One Song” by Little Tich and The Big Foot Band; “God’s Only Daughter” by The Sally Girls; and selections from Armageddon: The Musical sung by the original cast. There were “contemporary” chairs and Formica-topped tables and even those plastic tomatoes that dispense ketchup when squeezed. And those chrome-topped glass sugar dispensers, which rarely dispense anything, even when shaken with surpassing fierceness. The Plume remained as those who had always known it knew it, and those who knew it, knew it well. And loved it also.

And so also loved they Lil.

The sign above the door proclaimed in faded italics that The Plume was the property of one Mrs Veronica Smith, but whether this was Lil, none asked, nor even thought to.

Lil was Lil, or Lily Marlene to a stranger, a Junoesque beauty now in the middle fullness of her years. A suicide blonde[4], all pouting lips of rubeous hue and mammaries to set a young lad’s loins a leaping, with skirt that little bit too short, heels a tad too high and those parts that were clothed pressed into garments of a size that didn’t “fit all”.

It was popularly believed by the good men of Brentford that they did not make women like Lil any more, and so she was adored by them. Yet they feared her in equal measure, for Lil was fierce.

Omally, who had known many women of the borough and indeed the surrounding territories, did not number Lil amongst his conquests. Although he flirted with her mirthfully, and she with him, such a liaison – interesting though it might have been for the both of them – would have been, in Omally’s opinion, and no doubt Lil’s, inappropriate. A friendship existed between them, a deep friendship that would not have been strengthened by sexual congress; rather it would have been severed.

Omally entered The Plume Café and breathed in of its ambience: the fragrance of frying, the bouquet of bacon, the heady scent of the sausage. Of customers there were but several: a tall youth named Cornelius Murphy munched upon bacon sandwiches in a window seat and discoursed with his dwarflike comrade Tuppe; a salesman, travelling in tobaccos and ready-rolled cigarettes, downed cornflakes alone in a corner; and a native of the Andaman Islands took tea with an elderly sea captain.

Omally nodded good mornings to each and to all and for the most part these were returned to him. The Irishman approached the counter; the eyes of Lil, framed by their painted lashes, fell upon him.

“Well,” said Lil, a-pushing out her bosoms, “if it isn’t my own dear John.”

“Indeed if it isn’t,” said himself. “Hail, Lily, full of grace. Blessed art thou amongst women.”

“The usual?” said Lily.

“The usual would be sublime.”

Lil set to the frying of John’s usual. And John watched her at it and smiled as he did so.

“That idiot grin becomes you,” said Lil, cracking three eggs simultaneously into the cacky pan. “It is surely the grin of one who has recently enjoyed the illicit favours of another’s wife.”