The author would always set up his wooden box in the busiest part of the monthly outdoor car boot sale open air market.
“Give me some space will you.”
Impervious to the pushing and jostling, he’d climb aboard and balance precariously. The crowd would part around him – almost recoil.
Then, as the author talked in his special way, people would become curious. Like snakes fascinated by the charmer, they would move closer. Each time he would have a new theme. Whatever he said and whatever he sold to the crowds around him would act as a pall over the ensuing weeks or bring a cheery grin to passers by – until the next time.
Waving above his head a slim bundle of pages, he would peer down at a middle aged Mrs., comfortably replete in slacks and rolling contentedness, with his single eye.
“Madam,” his voice was deep and resonant. “Madam, what do you know about adultery?”
The implication was that she knew more than she would be willing to admit.
“Madam, would you walk away and miss finding out what happened?”
This was his favorite phrase. It raised a question in the minds of those around him. It tweaked their curiosity.
“This week,” he would say, “I have an account that is depraved and disgusting. Those of a weak disposition MUST NOT … His voice rose into a tremulous falsetto. MUST NOT purchase this slim tome – for I will not allow it.”
“Only those who, out of a sense of outrage, are brave enough to experience first hand the fruits of true sexual peccadillo should dare to delve within.”
“Go on, you don’t know what you are talking about, One Eye!” scorned a pretty young twenty-something. Her slim hips had been poured into cut off shorts and her push chair was loaded with bargains and snoozing offspring.
“And you’re in the story too, so you can’t talk,” said One Eye. The girl giggled.
“If I’m in the story it’ll be a pretty boring story judging by my sex life,” she said.
The crowd around tittered.
“You can talk and laugh as much as you like,” said One Eye, “but this author has conducted extensive research for this little piece of investigative journalism and I know that the people exposed in these pages are at this very moment quaking with fear.”
He surveyed the growing group around him, his one eye shining brightly.
“Quaking in their shoes and underwear, and more about that I will not say for fear of offending you gentle country folk gathered here to celebrate this authors piece of literary genius.”
And so the haranguing would go on backwards and forwards between the local writer and author and the crowd. Then one by one they would pay their pound sterling and carry away the slim volumes to read either in their cars or later when they got home – just in case a neighbor would see their blushes.
Then the rumors would start.
“I reckon its that John that did it, you know him that lives down by the marshes.”
“Never, he wouldn’t have the courage – it’s Fred over on the other side of the hill. He always had an eye for the ladies. I knew one who stayed overnight and she was never the same again and wouldn’t talk about it.”
“What a thing for a woman to do – can you credit it – disgusting I call it and, all the time, her husband next door.”
The conversations went on and on. Always puzzling, always wanting to know. Sometimes the response was angry.
“That vile man. All that power and he uses it like that. He is supposed to be working for the community but he’s got fat on it and is kept in office by elderly voters living in the past. If I could get my hands on him in his posh London Board room, I’d give him a talking to.”
“Go on, he doesn’t care. It’d be water off a ducks back. He’s laughing all the way to the Bank with his cronies – and they own the Bank. He’d laugh in your face.”
“Then I’d dot him one right in the middle of his stupid face, the slimy rat.”
“Anyway, it’s supposed to be a story. You don’t know if it’s really about him.”
“I know enough! One of my business mates tried to get some help from him – as is his right – and said more or less the same thing. He was more interested in whether a non-executive Board room job was likely to become available than the merits of the case.”
Backwards and forwards the conversations went. They knew he was an author and it was supposed to be fiction but everybody believed it was fact and in a small community everybody believed that they could spot the characters. And then the next time would come and, grudgingly, they would crowd around him and buy his latest offering.
If the books had been sold in the local book shop nobody would have bought them. Next to the bright covers of historical romances and hi-tech thrillers, the photocopied pages, hand folded and wrapped in a blank cover would not have appealed.
It was the immediacy of his presence and the knowledge that others would inevitably buy or, on a bad day, be given the secrets to which he was privy that brought the desire to know.
Whether all that he wrote was as a result of extensive research or whether he was just a good author and shrewd judge of character, nobody knew. Perhaps he just had a very fertile imagination and the courage to stand up literarily and be counted.
But his descriptions never disappointed. His imagery was sharp, his character descriptions poignant. You could taste the food on which his characters dined and the cider that they drank. His bushes were a deeper green and his roses blossomed more brightly.
At the end of an account, he always left you feeling better. You had lived through an event that was important for somebody. You were uplifted by the experience. Drawn in by curiosity, the form of his art was to supply nothing less than satisfaction.
“You should get yourself published properly as an author, Jack,” one onlooker shouted.
“And one day I’ll write a story to tell you exactly why I’d never do that,” yelled back Jack. His thick set lips curled with distaste in the mass of his ragged beard at the thought of fame, fortune and corporate money.
One day he was recounting the outline of a story to the gathered crowd when a stranger pushed through and tugged on the author’s arm.
Hesitating for a few minutes and then obviously in distress, Jack gathered up his box and followed him away from the crowds and out to his old Ford motor that was always parked outside the open air market and car boot area.
Then he disappeared …
People instantly missed him.
“Where’s old One Eye”, they would say at the open air market and car boot sale. “He’s not been around for a while. Silly old duffer – hope he hasn’t come to harm. Terrible author and couldn’t write of course – but I’d buy the odd one just out of charity really. Do you know where he lived – did he have any family?”
And so it went on. For years, although an oddball, he’d been an author and part of the community. Now he was remembered with affection. As the weeks then months passed, slowly his name passed into folk memory.
“Used to be an author and writer at this open air market you know. Suddenly disappeared. Never did hear what happened to him. They say he was offered a job on a London Magazine as a features writer – around here probably wasn’t not good enough for him, I’ll warrant. Of course we felt let down after we’d supported him all those years by buying his silly stories. I doubt we’ll ever know where he went to now.
But they did get to know and in the strangest way you could imagine.
Photocopied sheets of typed paper suddenly began to appear around the town, in a telephone box, on the counter of the local paper shop.
“I don’t know how they got there,” said Barney, the owner.
More copies appeared and each without warning and from unexpected places.
Some people, once they had got a copy and got over the shock of the contents, did more. They copied the pages again – and gave them to their friends.
“It reads like that old author One Eye, the style is the same and the pages look the same, but when you read inside, you can’t see how it can be!”
The same phrases passed backwards and forwards from mouth to mouth and each time another pair of eyes would avidly read the lurid tale. Some were moved to tears.
“I could just see the woods and feel how he loved them as he walked on that final journey. Rhododendrons have always been a favorite of mine but to be buried under one – I couldn’t bear that.”
“For me it was the way he fought of his attacker until his one eye got so damaged he couldn’t see at all. How he broke away at one point and then hid from them wounded and bleeding for hours – how they eventually found him again and even then he still fought on.”
“But he was outnumbered and they got him in the end. And the people responsible did it all for a contract – they had nothing against him themselves. It was all just for money.”
“I reckon it was money that was behind it anyway. He may only have been an author but he’d offended too many local people in high places.”
“In my opinion the police ought to investigate that politician, he’s the one that the stories were about. He’s the one that had the motive and the money and opportunity.”
“Don’t be daft, it’s only a story!”
“I’m not so sure – it rings true to me – more than you might think.”
“Anyway how would the police know which rhododendron to look under. There’s hundreds up there in the woods.”
“They could get our help – I’d be willing to put in a few hours with a shovel and a fork for good old One Eye.”
“And what about if you found him, you’d jump a mile high in the air you would. You nearly fainted when they killed that goose at the last Goose Fair”.
“I don’t care. It would be worth it if it got the heap of slime that did it his just desserts.”
“Well you can bet I’ll never vote for him again!”
The elections came round and the local dignitary was appalled at the result of the votes. In office for years, he now came a dismal third. His speech was full of half references to unsubstantiated gossip and rumor mongers but he was out of office and many people felt a little better.
Then television latched onto the story and pretty soon the ex-politician was facing their investigations into his activities. Yet more printed details of One Eyes’ final hours were found in public places.
They told of how his home had been broken into and his family threatened. Steamy details of the dignitary’s love nest were also revealed and still nobody knew who was the author.
“Bank accounts in Switzerland, he had and an illegitimate son from that dolly bird he kept in his London flat – and him a married man that we’re supposed respect!”
“That bit about him, dressing up at that party was too smutty for me. I don’t like reading about that sort of thing – it’s filth.”
“But you can’t deny that it goes on. Better out in the open where everybody can know about it.”
Then, one morning, posters appeared everywhere around town inviting residents to go to the police station at one o’clock in the afternoon to carry out a search of the woods to assist police enquiry.
When they all arrived, the Chief of the local constabulary didn’t like to admit that neither he nor any of his officers had issued the posters. Fearing a public riot, if he didn’t show willing, he quickly organized the search.
The area they concentrated on was a bleak tree covered hollow between the two parts of the village. Nobody had ever built properties there because of the marshes. But the rhododendrons loved it and thrived in the hundreds.
Some brought their children to help, running and cavorting besides them. Others pushed their young ones along in buggies that snagged on the uneven paths. Amongst all was a steely determination that at long last, justice would be done.
When eventually, after hours of determined searching, the body was found, the cry that went up was fit to have wakened the dead and echoed eerily around the surrounding hills. Then, silently, with heads bowed in respect and tired sadness they trudged back through the woods to await the autopsy in their homes.
The arrests followed soon afterwards. The politician first and then his helpers. At first, he tried to wriggle out of it by saying he’d only meant for the hired muscle to frighten One Eye not to kill him.
And how did the autopsy confirmed their guilt? The horrifying facts soon became clear.
Inside One Eyes rotting stomach along with the residue of his last days prawn vindaloo was a plastic coin bag. Inside the coin bag was a hurriedly hand written sheet that described his attackers and their paymaster, gave their names and full details that eventually let directly to their imprisonment.
In those last moments of freedom before his attackers had found him again, grievously wounded and knowing that he only had minutes more to live, One Eye had written down everything that he knew, placed the A4 sheet in the coin bag and swallowed it. It was enough to seal his attackers fate.
And who was it that somehow knew where to find him? Nobody knows. But to this day, when the local open air market and car boot sale comes round, there is a new author on the wooden box declaiming to the assembled crowd about stories they won’t dare to read and then selling them for only one pound sterling each.
Some say he’s now a published author with a London company and that the book carries a dedication:
“To the bravest man I’ve ever known – my dad!”
The End
© Rob Hopcott 1999 – 2007, all rights reserved. All characters are fictitious in this story and no reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.
