Carney Palafox

Something happened to Carney Palafox one evening as he was running for a number 5 bus in London. He was running as fast as only somebody can who despises running and wishes to get it over with as soon as possible. He caught his bus and found a seat upstairs and was so stunned by the insight he had experienced thirty yards ago that he forgot even to pant. Breathing quite normally, this forty-one-year-old scriptwriter suddenly knew he was the greatest athlete who had ever lived. He also knew that he could only ever prove it five times in any specific event; once he had used up those five astonishing victories he would have to remember never to try again since on the sixth occasion he would perform like any other forty-one-year-old scriptwriter who despised sports.

From the moment he got off his bus to walk towards Sadlers Wells and home Carney Palafox was a changed man. His immediate life was utterly clear to him. He knew exactly what he had to do. All he could ponder was how best to go about it so as to make the utmost of his five chances and extract the maximum vengeful pleasure from this astounding windfall. For a start, whom could he tell? It was a ludicrous assertion just to come out with at his time of life, and he knew it simply by listening to an imaginary conversation he might have later that night, maybe while undressing for bed.

‘You know, Katie, I sometimes wonder if I couldn’t be something of an athlete if I tried’ – diffidently stepping out of his underwear and glancing down at his neither fat nor thin physique.

‘You know, Carney, I’m thinking of becoming a concert pianist when I grow up.’

No; absurd. Suddenly he had turned into a man with a mission, and men with sudden missions were ill-advised to announce them rather than just get on and fulfil them. Deeds. But – and Carney knew as little about sports as a man can to whom it is a matter of pride to have forgotten how many players there are in a cricket team – he had a suspicion that demonstrating you are the world’s greatest might be catered for only by a slow and rigid system of entering a heat here, an event there, being picked for a team still later to perform at some sodden track on the outskirts of a city. He suspected there were few short cuts to events at which world records could be set, and with only five chances at each event he could not afford such a slow accumulation of credibility.

Sometimes it could slip his mind that he was under contract to a large and famous television company since he always worked from home and visited the monolithic block of studios and offices as infrequently as possible. However, he now remembered that this television headquarters contained whole suites of studios entirely given over to sports reporting. In particular, he found next day that most of these studios were occupied by the company’s star sports attraction, a programme named Action Replay. Towards the lunch hour he paid these studios a visit and found a lot of middle-aged men sitting around reading magazines about car racing and horse racing and tennis tournaments. To a man they were wearing rather expensive clothes designed to resemble professional sportswear, things which looked to Carney like mohair track-suits. In addition they all had on running shoes with cleats and stripes and flashes. Their entire wardrobe was covered in brand names and they mostly had moustaches.

‘You’re Bob Struthers?’ Carney asked a man behind a desk which had across the front a large sticker reading ‘The Bob Struthers Experience’. He vaguely recognised the name. The man he had asked looked at him over the top of his magazine with genuine amazement and took his feet off the desk.

‘Do I look like Bob Struthers?’ he enquired.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Carney. ‘I’ve never met him as far as I know.’

‘Good grief,’ muttered the man, glancing round at his colleagues with an expression which was meant to make a conspiracy of their general disbelief and ridicule. They paid no attention since they were still reading their magazines. ‘In there,’ said the man, indicating a glassed-in sanctum to one side. ‘And you are?’

‘Carney Palafox.’

‘Never heard of you, either.’

‘I’m a scriptwriter on Up Yours!’

‘Well, you’ve given me a laugh already.’

Once inside the sanctum Carney recognized that the magazine-readers in the other room had all been mere clones of the original who sat before him. His track-suit had the sheen of raw silk, his training shoes had been hand-stitched by Italian craftsmen. His moustache said of itself ‘Bay Area leather bar’, but the wearer would possibly have been shocked to hear it. This time Carney found the face itself faintly familiar.

‘I’m Carney Palafox, I’m a scriptwriter on Up Yours! and I need a simple piece of information about sports. Sorry to bother you, but I thought I’d better get it from our top man.’

‘Always happy to have the old brain picked,’ said Bob Struthers, waving at the sofa. ‘Chuck some of those mags on the floor and fire away. What’s this – a piece of authentic sporting stuff you’re writing into your series?’

‘Sort of…. It’s this. Supposing somebody were completely unknown in the sports world, no connection whatever, but had an amazing talent for – I don’t know – let’s say the hundred yards. How would he go about setting records and generally getting himself acknowledged as the world’s greatest?’

‘Well, now, Carney.’ The ex-athlete steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s take it from the top. For starters, do you really mean the hundred yards?’

‘Er … the hundred metres?’

‘What’s the world record for the hundred metres?’

‘You’re asking me? I haven’t a clue,’ said Carney. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Currently,’ went on Bob Struthers with his modulated announcer’s voice, very quiet when not being amplified, ‘it’s nine point nine-three. That’s seconds,’ he added helpfully.

‘Ah. Well, suppose this fellow came along out of the blue and said, “I can do it in eight seconds flat,” what would you think?’

‘This is all “let’s pretend”, right? You’d have to think he was off his head. But if he really looked authentic – you know, probably a black American, right height, right weight, thigh muscles out here – I’d still think he was a nut. Maybe he could do it in ten-five on a good day with the wind behind him. But we’d know. If he was anyone at all, he’d have form. Nobody that good appears from nowhere.’

‘This one does exactly that.’

‘It’s a nice idea. Into the office walks this complete unknown whose muscular neck is destined for the weight of Olympic gold. Good stuff.’

‘But, playing along with the “let’s pretend” for a moment, what’s the next step?’

‘Well, if he’s really just off the streets he joins a club and runs his way to the attention of talent scouts or gets the sort of times and wins which would put him in line for a team selection.’

‘Yes, yes, in other words he works his way up. But this guy has neither the time nor the inclination for all that. He can break the world record right now, so he doesn’t want to waste months joining the Haggleswick Harriers or the Aberdaff AAA.’

Bob Struthers glanced at his watch, a complex affair of overlapping dials and sweep hands, then patted the little high-life pot which his tailored track-suit almost concealed. ‘The Bob Struthers inner timing device,’ he said, ‘which is far more accurate than anything Omega ever made with quartz, tells me it’s time for a drink. Join me?’

Without waiting for a reply he reached back in his swivel chair to a shelf of Wisdens, opened it and disclosed a small refrigerator stacked with cans. ‘Now, this is the stuff,’ he said, selecting two and nudging the door shut. He handed Carney a can of No-Calorie Root Beer. ‘Do you know I can drink as much of this as I like every day for the rest of my life absolutely free? One more promotional freebie. I could fill my swimming pool with it and they’d be only too happy. “Who but Bob Struthers starts each day with a brisk 100 metres in invigorating No-Calorie Root Beer?” All that good stuff.’ His moustache crackled at the opening of the can. Seeing Carney about to speak he held up his free hand. ‘Don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking. But this isn’t just a lot of time-wasting bullshit I’m handing you. I’m trying to get across that international sport nowadays has very little to do with packed stands and centre courts. That’s the public-spectacle part and it’s almost incidental. We’re talking about big business, Carney, one of the biggest. Top athletes are bought and traded like wheat futures; the real money is won and lost in boardrooms, not on tracks. Sponsorships, TV deals, promos, franchises, the international games circuit, the betting consortiums, the sportswear manufacturers, the drinks people, the fucking paper-cup makers….’

A note of something or other – passion? mere vehemence? – had crept into the famous voice. In a moment, Carney thought, he’ll be asking me to guess which of all the various signed photographs, awards, little silver television cameras on little silver tripods on display around the room had given him the most pride and pleasure, and the answer will undoubtedly be the dented cup over the door, ‘Victor Ludorum 1955’, which he had won when he was thirteen despite having just recovered from chickenpox.

‘… the hack writers, the ghosted-autobiography writers, the chat-show hosts, the groupies, the fan-club organisers, the exclusivity-rights lawyers, the city-hall lobbyists bidding to host the Olympics in twenty diddledy-three, the airlines who fly the Olympic teams about, the manufacturers of the nose-hair tweezers used by the pilot of the sodding plane which carried the victorious nation’s team back home…. You name it, Carney. And every one of those bastards is living and jet-setting and wining and dining and making his fortune on the backs of a few hundred people out there on the tracks and courts and pools, sweating their wretched guts out and praying the latest dope-test techniques are still a year behind what their managers are giving them. Shee … it!’

‘Heavens,’ said Carney mildly with what he hoped was an irritating other-worldliness. ‘I never thought it was all such a – well, racket. So what you’re saying is …?’

‘What I’m saying’ – Bob Struthers brought into his voice a fine edge of patience – ‘is that it’s next to impossible for someone like your guy to bull his way to the top in one easy move because it does a lot of people out of their cut. Once he’s a star, of course, they’ll be fighting over his body. But until someone’s identifiably a biggie with the prospect of being packaged and sold for real money the industry likes its athletes to be quite conventional and work their way up in time-honoured fashion. Life, Carney,’ explained Bob Struthers, ‘is a simple knock-out competition and you’d better believe it. You win the eliminator and move on to the qualifying rounds, and then you win and win and win and suddenly it’s the quarter finals, then the semifinals and then by the Grace of Whatever it’s the bloody Final and you’re there…. Or not, depending. This isn’t hack philosophy, Carney. It’s what I see and know, every day, everywhere. Do you know what my proudest possession is in the whole of this room?’

‘No?’

‘That,’ said Bob Struthers, flicking the silver television camera on its silver tripod which stood on the desk before him, ‘because it’s this year’s. And that makes it better than last year’s and the year before’s.’

‘Well,’ said Carney, gathering his legs under him into an about-to-leave posture, ‘you’ve been very helpful, Bob. I really appreciate it.’

‘Just filling in some of the background for you, Carney; I haven’t finished yet. Now, what effect does all this have on the ordinary man in the street who, whenever he turns his TV on, hears and sees nothing but stars – names he knows as well as his own, faces he’s more familiar with than those of his own family? I’ll tell you. It’s made him a fantasist…. By the way, Carney, this is a pet theory of mine.’

‘You certainly seem to like your subject.’

‘I love it, Carney, I really love it. Now, it’s made him a fantasist because of the nature of publicity itself. My theory is that there are no real stars – very few, at any rate. What there is is stardom. It’s the top spot in whatever you like – sport, films, er … comedy’ – he nodded benignly towards his guest – ‘and the top spot is occupied by one of a constant stream of winners who come up, get that spotlight of attention full on them for a year or two, then move off into outer darkness. A lot of the people who find themselves briefly at the top are pretty unmemorable, frankly, and this is where your man-in-the-street fantasist comes in. He looks at those stars and he thinks: That bugger’s no different from me. Bit better built, nothing a few months of weights and saunas couldn’t put right, but that could be me being kissed by film actresses and accepting cheques from the Duchess of Doggydo and advertising a lot of rubbish with glucose in it on every high-street hoarding. All I need is the Big Break. He’s a fantasist, you see, because he leaves out the hard work bit: the months in the gym, the tons of weights, the pushups and the lonely miles along the A1 at dawn. He sees instant recognition, immediate fame. The Big Break.’

Bob Struthers reached down and pulled open a desk drawer from which he grabbed a handful of loose sheets at random. ‘There you are,’ he said, dropping them on the desk. ‘Fantasy. Every day I get them, letters by the sackful.’ He picked one up. ‘“Dear Bob Struthers, I’m an avid watcher of your programme blah blah. You’re not going to believe this but yesterday, 3 July, at the Penge Sports Hall, I was timed at fifty-three point seven seconds for the hundred metres freestyle. I have six witnesses to prove it and the stopwatch was electronic and has since been checked by a certified jeweller blah blah. Could you please ensure that my name is put forward immediately to the England Team selectors for Honolulu next month? It is vital for the success of our country, whose reputation as a sporting nation I’m sure you blah blah. I am sending a copy of this letter by registered mail to Sir Benedict Frowde, Chairman of the Board of British Aquasports Selection Committees. Yours sincerely.” Typical.’ Bob Struthers let the sheet fall back to his desk. ‘The only thing he left out was the “PS I am not a crank. Please take this letter as seriously as it was intended.” Most put that in. But you see what I mean? Everybody connected with sports gets letters like that all the time. I just get more of them because I’m so exposed. The Big Break’s what everyone’s after: you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve tried me. Like those women.’ And Bob Struthers smiled tiredly to himself, to the letters on his desk, to the silver television trophy. ‘Does that answer your question yet, Carney?’

Carney Palafox was still uncertain as to whether Bob Struthers had divined his real purpose in coming, but blushed in any case. Did he have to come for an impromptu interview with a sort of fake-macho has-been to be told he was a middle-aged fantasist? He supposed he did. But searching resignedly to see what had become of the withered little conviction he had brought with him into the room he was considerably surprised to find it intact. There was only one way to settle the matter. Deeds.

‘Nearly,’ he said. ‘But I still think for the character I have in mind we’re going to have to rule out the slow traditional route and go for this big break thing.’

‘I see. OK, what is this guy of yours? A sprinter? Field-eventer? Swimmer?’

‘Oh, anything you like.’

‘Why didn’t you say? I had him fixed in my mind as some sort of sprinter.’

‘I sort of did, too. But he doesn’t have to be.’

‘Try this, then; no problem. Enter him for the London Marathon in November. Actually, it’s being run in a week’s time. But, anyway, have him carve a minute or two off that. Why do you think all those thousands tag along? It’s not just the challenge. How many people do you imagine would take part if there was guaranteed no TV coverage?’

‘Not so many?’

‘Not so many, Carney, is what I was attempting to suggest. It’s ideal. TV, a few international marathon names to set the pace for the young hopefuls all after – you’ve guessed – the Big Break.’

*

When Carney Palafox unofficially joined upwards of eighteen thousand competitors for the London Marathon a few days later he was still in the grip of his powerful conviction, so much so that he had taken some care with planning his running equipment: a pair of jeans, an old jersey with a hole in the back and a pair of comfortable but beat-up Hush Puppies. His only concession to the occasion was some new laces. Even mixed up at the back of the athletic throng waiting for the off he cut an eccentric figure. It was noble and right that more or less disadvantaged people were responding to this challenge as best they could in a variety of wheelchairs and with an array of prosthetic devices, but they all did so in athletic gear of one sort or another. Indeed, Carney could spot only one other person in street clothes and he was standing about wearing a sandwich board which complained in red capitals about sexual licence. Even the spectators were wearing track-suits, much as elderly men living on houseboats welded to the landing-stage on grimmer reaches of the Thames will affect yachting caps and reefer jackets.

The pack set off, the professionals at the front conspicuous with their practised pace, the eager amateurs behind them yearning to overtake but dissuaded by the thought that if international marathon-runners went at that speed they did so for good reason. Somewhere in the mob Carney Palafox cleared his mind of all but running for an extremely distant bus. At the halfway stage he was lying sixth and had long since been picked up by the television cameras. Those who lined the streets merely took him for another merry-andrew who had tagged on a few hundred yards back to give his friends a laugh, something akin to those maverick riderless horses which always seemed to be waiting for the winner to catch them up in the Grand National; but the television cameras had him firmly on their monitors mile after mile. He was running in a manner so as to give maximum irritation to those taking the proceedings seriously, with a slight frown as if miles away thinking private thoughts which would then produce a brief smile. Once he took a pencil and a piece of folded paper from his pocket and, still running, appeared to make a note of the name of a shop which caught his eye, craning round the farther away he ran until for a few paces he was actually running backwards before turning and tucking the paper in his pocket.

With five miles to go he took the lead, glanced at his watch with a puzzled expression, rapped its glass sharply, held it to his ear and with a show of amused resignation doubled his speed. The crowd were beside themselves. Indeed, it had been a privilege for them to see the face of the leading international marathon-runner – a scrawny Japanese with a demon’s visage – as this cumbersome figure in jeans and dog-walking shoes appeared at his elbow, gave a cheery nod, shot past and disappeared.

When he reached the line he was nearly four minutes ahead of the Japanese. He stood for a moment surrounded by utter consternation and then, when the second runner still had not appeared, spoke for the first time.

‘Well, I think I’d better be off. Train to catch.’

This was picked up by incredulous cameramen, several of whom were still convinced that it was all a stunt, some immense practical joke. But there were plenty who recognised his clothes from way back in the race, and his finishing position at least was beyond doubt.

‘You can’t go,’ said an official. ‘There’s got to be a proper enquiry about this. In any case there’s your prize.’

‘Oh, I don’t want any prize, thank you,’ said Carney. ‘I only did it to fill in a bit of time. No, you give it to that oriental gent with the stitch.’

In the middle of the mêlée which greeted the arrival of the Japanese, Carney Palafox somehow disappeared, perfectly inconspicuous in his jeans and sweater. That night he was soaking his slightly blistered feet in the bath, watched by the cat, when the telephone rang.

‘God, they’ve tracked you down,’ said Kate. They had been giggling together over newsreel excerpts from the race on television all evening, Kate’s initial incredulity now a realisation that somewhere between lunchtime and suppertime a great change had come over her life, and she was in no way responsible. She now brought her middle-aged athlete husband the telephone in his bath.

‘Carney?’

‘Er, who’s that?’ he asked cautiously.

‘This is Bob Struthers, Carney. Listen, you bastard, you’re up to something, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Carney told him.

‘Well, I want in on the story. I gave you time the other day and I think you owe me a bit in return. I was covering the International in Antwerp but I got back a couple of hours ago and heard all about it and, listen, I’ve seen the clips and I think I can work up a theory about how you did it. So we’ve got to meet.’

‘Of course, Bob. Delighted. I could come round tomorrow some time to your studio place. Sort of lunch-ish?’

‘Carney,’ the voice calmed itself, ‘I don’t think you quite understand. You’ve just got away with something which everybody knows is completely impossible. Now, they haven’t yet figured out how you managed it, but for sure there’re a lot of folks pretty pissed off out here. I mean, you just don’t walk away with a marathon dressed like a Chelsea poof in the sixties. Believe me, Carney, you just don’t. So when I say we’ve got to meet I mean right now. This very hour.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t manage that, I’m afraid. I’m slightly weary, if the truth be told, and my feet are a little sore. Besides, at this particular moment I’m in my bath.’

‘Carney! Listen, will you? God damn it, I can’t work out whether you’re really that innocent or just playing dumb.’

‘I’m just playing dumb, Bob.’

‘Nor do I yet know what hook or crook you used to pull today’s little stunt, but for the moment, at any rate, you’ve got your big bloody break. OK? You’re a celebrity. Believe me, nobody’s talking about anything else. I mean, you may be settling down for a quiet evening’s Scrabble but out here everybody’s busting their guts trying to get a line on you. You’ll be all over the front pages tomorrow, I promise you. Probably a good shot of you crossing the finishing line with, for God’s sake, your hands in your pockets, and headlines like “Mystery Outsider Makes Laughing-Stock of Marathon”. Shut up; just listen. Now, by nine tomorrow morning half the country will still be splitting their sides, half will be sharpening their knives and a third half will be trying to sign you up. Now tell me we still haven’t got something to discuss this evening.’

‘Well, I suppose if you insist.’

‘Yes, Carney, I am insisting. I think I’d better come right on over. Where is it again?’

But at that moment the certitude welled up within him. There was a time to play dumb – because it infuriated people – and a time to remember that he had very recently become a man with a mission.

‘No, Bob, you’re not coming here. If you want to see me tonight, you’re going to have to do as I tell you; I’m sorry, but there it is. I’ll give you what you say you want – some of my time – but in exchange for what I want.’

‘Of course, Carney. I’ve got you. How much?’

‘Not money. No, I don’t want money. What I’m insisting on is a short interview with you, videotaped in the studio. That’s all. I’m not insisting that it’s ever broadcast, just that it’s made. I can promise you only that I’ll say something which will make you sit up. Between you and me, Bob,’ Carney said confidentially, ‘I’ll take a small bet that some of it at least will go out. Sooner or later.’

The interview he taped that night at the studios did indeed go out – not once but many, many times over the next months. In fact it became famous as source material for a thousand broadcasts in a hundred languages, known simply as ‘The Palafox Challenge’. In its unedited entirety the brief interview ran:

	BS:		Mr Palafox. The sporting world tonight – indeed, the whole world tonight – is still reeling from your extraordinary victory in the London Marathon earlier today. I must admit that in all my years in and around sport I have never seen anything quite like it before. (A short silence) Mr Palafox?
	CP:		I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you had asked me a question.
	BS:		Well, I think the question uppermost in all our minds here on Action Replay – as, I’m sure, in the minds of all viewers everywhere – is how did you do it?
	CP:		Oh, I sort of just ran, I suppose. It’s awfully boring, you know, the marathon. It goes on and on. Actually I was quite thankful to stop.
	BS:		I can’t…. You do realise, don’t you, that there were world-class runners in the field today? Noriyuki Kume holds the second-fastest time ever for a marathon and yet you beat him by almost four minutes.
	CP:		Oh, did I?
	BS:		You know you did. What we want to know is how?
	CP:		Really?
	BS:		Yes, really. Holy bananas.
	CP:		If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. I just knew I could do it faster than anybody else, that’s all.
	BS:		But that’s not all, Mr Palafox. You know as well as I do that all athletes tell themselves they can do it faster than anybody else, and they can’t all be right. It’s called psyching yourself up. That kind of self-confidence is indispensable to all good sports performance, but so are fitness and training. Self-confidence on its own is not enough. I presume you trained quite hard for your victory today?
	CP:		No.
	BS:		Put it this way, Mr Palafox: how many marathon distances have you run in the last year?
	CP:		Only today’s. Good lord, that was quite bad enough.
	BS:		I’m sorry, Mr Palafox, but I don’t really – and I’m sure the viewers will find it just as hard to believe. How many marathons have you run in your life, then?
	CP:		Only today’s.
	BS:		Shorter-distance training, then. You must have been running regular stints in practice sessions?
	CP:		(After reflective pause) I ran for a bus recently.
	BS:		Cut, cut, while we get this fucker sorted.
	STUDIO MANAGER: Running, Bob.
	BS:		Let’s get back to your clothes, Mr Palafox. That’s surely one of the things which everybody noticed, your almost – if I may say so – deliberate avoidance of traditional sportswear. (A short silence) Mr Palafox?
	CP:		I’m awfully sorry, Bob. Was that a question again?
	BS:		Why did you run today’s Marathon in street clothes?
	CP:		They’re comfortable. Anyway, I didn’t have any others with me. I imagine all those running shoes and track-suits are rather expensive, and it didn’t seem worth spending all that just for two hours’ running.
	BS:		God. Oh, sod it. I’m sure many viewers will find your whole attitude very puzzling. It’s almost as if it’s a direct challenge of some kind.
	CP:		It is.
	BS:		I see. And just what is your challenge?
	CP:		It’s very simple, Bob. I think the whole organised sports business takes itself too seriously by half. I think – I know – that people are far better at sports, at everything, than they are trained down to be. My challenge is this: In any event you care to name – swimming, track, field, I don’t care what it is but subject only to my refusing on grounds of boredom – I will undertake to set a new world record.
	BS:		That’s all?
	CP:		That’s all.
	BS:		And just a small point, Mr Palafox: you are – what – forty?
	CP:		Forty-one, actually.
	BS:		OK, the man’s a nutter. You can cut now. Somebody go hire a rubber room.
	CP:		I’m afraid you’re going to have to take this seriously, Bob. That was a demonstration today. Set something up. It doesn’t have to be public. Just set something up – a camera crew, timekeepers – and I’ll prove it to you.
	BS:		It’s crazy. Get me a root beer, somebody.
	CP:		I’m sure you know best, Bob. But isn’t that what your viewers want? Up-to-the-minute sports action? The Bob Struthers Experience?
	BS:		Listen, Sunshine, I’m a long way from being convinced. There’s something phoney going on and I’m going to find out what. World record in anything you care to name, my arse.
	CP:		Very well, Bob. Your arse is what it’ll be if I take this to the BBC.

It took a day or two to arrange, of course, but the television company – two of whose employees were suddenly turning out to be the protagonists in a worldwide news-story – hired a well-appointed sports stadium on a gloomy strip of suburban water-meadow near Twickenham. The grounds belonged to a multinational chemical company whose own fertilisers and herbicides had produced an unnatural springy grass just the wrong shade of emerald. Inside the stadium, however, not a lot of grass had been allowed to intrude. A dull red oval track of international standard lay intimidatingly empty before Carney Palafox early one Thursday morning, its newly marked lanes meeting at infinity.

In the meantime Bob Struthers had been busy. One of his first and shrewdest acts had been to establish that Carney really was a scriptwriter with the company. He had discovered that, far from being a mere writer, he was the deviser of several highly successful comedy series of which Up Yours! was only the latest. They all had in common a certain anarchic undertone which many people found unsettling without knowing why, and not a few found downright offensive. Thoughtfully the sportscaster arranged with the Legal Department to see a copy of Carney’s contract. Objections were initially raised, but the famous Bob Struthers presence allayed all fears and left a few choice grandstand tickets in its wake. The contract, he found, had an exclusivity clause which bound Carney body and soul to the television company. There was nothing – neither his talent nor even his physical image – which he could legally take to the BBC or anyone else. Bob Struthers’s arse was safe.

He remembered this as he escorted Carney out on to the track. The man was obviously a charlatan of sorts, as the morning’s demonstrations would no doubt quickly reveal. He was glad it could all be fairly well kept from the public eye. ‘Famous Sportscaster Brilliantly Hoaxed’ was not a headline he had any intention of reading. Conversely, if by some stroke of the miraculous the man turned out to be what he said he was there was no end to the capital which could be made out of it if handled properly. Certainly enough to pay the hair transplant clinic’s bill.

‘Now, then, Carney,’ he said, ‘here we are. You’ve got what you asked for. See? Cameramen, official timekeepers down there, starter with gun, twenty sober witnesses from Action Replay and the old bloke over there who looks like Hitler and I think’s the groundsman. OK? I don’t mind telling you it’s cost the company a fair old sum laying this lot on, so I do hope we’re going to get our money’s worth. Right, then; it’s all yours. Now, what’ll it be? Hundred metres for a start?’

‘Why not?’ said Carney. ‘That doesn’t seem too far. From about here down to where those fellows are standing?’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘Any old lane?’

‘Yes,’ said Bob Struthers heavily, ‘any old lane. You’re really not going to change your clothes?’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. These’ll do.’ ‘These’ were the same jeans he had worn for the Marathon, a check shirt with long sleeves and button-down collar and a tweed sports jacket. Instead of Hush Puppies he now wore a battered pair of greyish tennis shoes. ‘Besides….’

‘… you haven’t anything else to change into, yes, I know. But I do like the gym shoes. A small step, Carney, but a significant one. OK, everybody. One hundred metres, the gentleman says.’ He produced a small radio and spoke into it. Far off down the track a hand waved. The starter loaded his gun. ‘Right, Carney, we’re ready when you are. Where do you want the blocks?’

‘Which blocks are those?’

‘These funny old things,’ said Bob Struthers kindly, indicating the pair he was holding. ‘You crouch down and put your feet against them. It helps you start.’

‘Oh. No, no, I don’t think I shall want those. No, I’ll just stand here until the gun goes off.’

‘A standing start, Carney? How wise. What an original touch, too, if I may say so. I don’t think anybody’s started a sprint from the standing position since about the eighteenth century. So. Here’s your line. Cameras running?’ He slipped on a pair of headphones. ‘It’s yours, Starter.’

None of those actually watching, as opposed to peering into viewfinders, could say exactly what happened when the gun went off, but it was truly extraordinary. One moment the middle-aged figure was standing on his line in an archaic, faintly pugilistic stance, for all the world like a motheaten housemaster demonstrating how he had once knocked down an utter cad for calling his sister ‘a bit of stuff, and the next he was at full tilt, moving faster than anyone there had ever seen a person move. Carney Palafox was running for a number 5 bus which had got rather a good head start. But he needn’t have worried; he caught it in exactly eight and a half seconds. The world record had been shattered, and it was all on tape.

‘There’s just got to be a trick to it.’ Bob Struthers was talking to his colleagues from Action Replay. ‘I mean, it’s totally ludicrous. Look at him.’

Down on the track Carney Palafox was diffidently scuffing his gym-shoe toes in the cinders; occasionally he yawned. From the pocket of his sports jacket he took a small notebook and made an entry.

‘You saw it, Chief,’ said one of the track-suited clones. ‘The guy ran from here to there in eight-point-five. Maybe we’d better measure it again. Suppose he slipped down here last night and somehow altered the markings to seventy metres …?’ His voice trailed away before the look Bob Struthers gave him.

‘I’ve been looking at tracks all my life, lad,’ he said. ‘That’s a hundred metres all right. But when this is finished I’m going over that film frame by frame. Maybe that’ll tell us something. Well, let’s see what else Superman can do. Ahoy down there!’ he shouted. Carney looked up. ‘What’s next?’

‘I don’t know. Have you got any of those round things?’

‘Dear God, now what’s he on about?’ asked Bob Struthers plaintively of his colleagues. He raised his voice again. ‘What exactly do you mean, Carney? Discus?’

‘No. Cannonballs, like on those porridge packets.’

‘You want to do some shot-putting? Why not, indeed? Come on, everybody, it’s field-events time.’

The weight of the shot seemed to surprise Carney. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t want to drop this on your toe. Can I use both hands?’

‘Yes,’ Bob Struthers told him. ‘There’s a limit to the amount of wind-up area you’re allowed, but I don’t think there’s anything in the rules about how many hands you’ve got to use. In fact you could probably lie on your back if you wanted to and do it with the soles of your feet. But I should imagine that over the years people have tried all sorts of bizarre ways of throwing this weight as far as they can without mechanical assistance and the present technique which has evolved has been found better than most.’

‘Still,’ said Carney judiciously, ‘I think I’ll try it with both hands all the same. It’s a bit late for me to start learning new techniques…. Which reminds me – I’m going to refuse if you ask me to do pole-vaulting or ski-jumping. I’ve not the slightest doubt I could do them if I tried, but I might break my neck in the process.’

‘We don’t want that,’ said Bob Struthers.

Eventually, his feet planted firmly apart and holding the shot in both hands between his bent knees, Carney Palafox straightened up as if hydraulically operated. He was aiming to get a number 5 bus which was waiting at a stop a good way off and to his pleasure he did – plumb on the roof. The faces of startled passengers appeared at the upstairs windows like a row of distressed moons.

‘That’ll dent the bugger,’ he said happily.

‘Rather more than a dent, Carney. You’ve actually smashed it to smithereens.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the athlete, returning to earth.

‘The world record. Wasn’t that what you were after? They’re measuring it now, but it looks like a clear two metres, which is just plain ludicrous. Is there anything you can’t do?’ Bob Struthers asked in a tone of voice which was to become very familiar to Carney Palafox over the next few months. It was a mixture of exasperation and plain awe.

‘I’m a lousy cook,’ the new world record holder admitted. ‘And as a brain surgeon I was lamentable, as I found out during a short stint in Burma.’

And so far still was Bob Struthers from grasping what was happening he found himself asking incredulously, ‘You, Carney? You were a brain surgeon? In Burma?’ before he noticed the back of the sports jacket shaking as if from some Parkinson’s tremor. He felt his face burn. ‘Third choice, Carney,’ he said brusquely. ‘Let’s get this farce over with.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the champion, bending down and inserting the tip of his ballpoint ruminatively into the split which was opening between upper and sole of one gym shoe. ‘You choose.’

Eventually he was handed a javelin. Bob Struthers was evidently learning, because he had predicted to himself that Carney would scorn anything as conventional as a run-up. Instead the radical athlete stood foursquare on the line, grasped the javelin in both hands above his head, bent backwards until the tip almost touched the ground behind him, then hurled it so as to spear a number 5 bus which was moving diagonally away from him like an okapi on the plains of Serengeti. It was a bull’s-eye. The spear smashed into the window immediately behind the driver, pierced the bulkhead and transfixed the driver in his seat. There was a distant wail of agony. The bus swerved in a cloud of dust, teetered, then overturned with an immense crash, wheels still spinning. ‘Got you!’ he said.

‘So, gentlemen,’ Bob Struthers addressed the stunned witnesses as they packed up their equipment. ‘In the last hour and with our own eyes we’ve seen the utterly impossible happen not once but three times. I thought when I came here this morning we’d at least rumble his trick but I can’t honestly see how he can be pulling one. The man’s incredible. We have a sporting phenomenon on our hands, no question about it. Cancel the rest of today,’ he instructed his PA. ‘We’ve got a press conference to hold.’

*

And so began a public career which completely dominated the world news for most of next summer. It was a phenomenon which scandalised some, demoralised many, riotously entertained most and riveted everybody. It had the awful hypnotic appeal of watching the lava-flow from a cataclysmic volcano. Day by day on the world’s television screens it was viewed from all angles and with absolute fascination as it rolled on, engulfing ancient monuments and living heroes. ‘What’s Carney goin’ to trash today?’ was a question which might be heard on a Detroit building site, just as unseasonably early snowfall in Austria was blamed by jocular locals on the ‘Karnei Effekt’. In each case there was no doubt what was being referred to.

In its early days, of course, it began with widespread incredulity. The video pictures of Carney Palafox in a sports jacket putting the shot produced international hysterics. The only people not laughing were the athletes and their trainers who had laboured for years to be able to throw the thing two metres less far. General opinion was that it was a hoax: a brilliantly conceived and wonderfully executed leg-pull. But the videos and the recordings and the measurements withstood the closest scrutiny. ‘The Carney Tapes’ – the record of his first morning’s work near Twickenham – achieved a notoriety and a level of bar-room debate on a par with the Nixon Tapes of a generation earlier. Then came the day when he was invited to represent England in a friendly fixture against the East Germans’ third team, and his selection made it suddenly clear that somebody somewhere was taking him seriously.

He had consistently refused to be interviewed after the initial ‘Palafox Challenge’ recorded with Bob Struthers. He seemed to have become semi-fugitive, nomadic, glimpsed here and there but never when not diffidently scratching the back of his head with a preoccupied frown or patting his trouser pockets as if he had come out without his keys and loose change. It was well known he had written a respectful letter to the chairman of the selection committee thanking him for his confidence and saying he would be delighted to appear for the games, although he had one or two conditions to stipulate. The first was that he was not going to take part in any sort of training sessions and the other was that he would wear what he chose. Otherwise he was not taking part. The reply had also been made public: he would be excused the training sessions but ‘team clothing’ was mandatory under rules which would not in any circumstances be waived. Regretfully, a substitute was found. The interest and consternation can be imagined, then, when Carney Palafox turned up at the games and actually spoke into a microphone which was thrust before him.

‘Do you intend to take part, Mr Palafox?’ the reporter asked him.

‘Yes and no,’ replied Carney mysteriously, but would not explain further.

‘You are aware that your name has been withdrawn from the England athletics team.’

A short silence fell.

‘Mr Palafox?’

‘I’m so sorry, I hadn’t realised that was a question.’

‘Are you aware of that?’

‘Of course I am, you half-wit. The letter was in plain English and I can read.’

The reporter seemed momentarily taken aback by this reply. It was not often that someone was addressed on camera as a half-wit. Meanwhile Carney Palafox strode away and was lost in the crowd.

He reappeared to general amazement just as the 100 metres finalists were under starter’s orders. He positioned himself next to the innermost runner, but off the track. He clearly intended to run up the grass verge, which he did, a pair of black patent-leather ballroom-pumps twinkling on his feet. He passed the level of the finishing line a generous two seconds before the foremost athlete and turned away to write something in a small notebook. His performance was, of course, not officially recognised but it had been witnessed by thousands of spectators, would be by millions of viewers later that evening, and had not gone unnoticed by the unfortunate East German who was awarded the winning medal. A general sense of discomfiture and demoralisation set in, seeming to affect the British athletes as much as their opponents. The games proceeded, but in some peculiar way the heart had gone out of them. It was clear that everyone was on tenterhooks waiting for Carney Palafox’s next impromptu performance. Word got around that something unusual was happening and regular radio programmes were interrupted for short bulletins on the games’ progress.

Nothing untoward happened for the best part of the day, however, and the spectators had all but lost hope of witnessing another historic intervention by this weird counter-athlete. Then just before the start of the final event, the men’s 4 x 400 metres relay, a figure whom everyone had taken for one more of the press corps was noticed assuming the increasingly familiar pugilistic stance on a level with the inside runner. By the time a thousand fingers had pointed and a thousand voices had mouthed his name it was too late to do anything. The starter’s gun fired, and Carney was off. This time, in deference to the need for disguise, he was wearing a bright green nylon anorak with the hood up, a complicated-looking camera bouncing on his chest; but there was not a soul present who did not recognise the twinkling black pumps, and a great cheer went up.

Carney kept pace with the lead sprinter, but it was obvious he was not exerting himself overmuch. Now and again he would pull out a lead of several paces and then glance back with a sympathetic shrug and allow himself to be caught up. By the time the first baton changed hands Carney was adjusting his speed to match that of the new leader, a powerful-looking blond German who tore away, stabbing the air with his baton. It was dawning on the spectators that Carney Palafox was planning to run the entire relay race solo and win. Every so often marshals would appear in his path on the outer edge of the green central oval, arms outstretched and shouting inaudibly; but each time Carney evaded them with deft footwork and the elusiveness of a rabbit. Just before the last baton change, however, a murmur began growing. The pace was evidently beginning to tell even on Carney Palafox. His twinkling feet were settling somewhat flatter on the turf; his head had begun to roll. As the leading team’s last sprinter took over from his exhausted colleague, Carney stopped dead. The cheers mixed relief with disappointment. He produced a handkerchief, mopped his brow, blew his nose, glanced at his watch, shook his head and took off like a bullet. The cries became a roar.

It seemed certain he had overplayed it; the sprinter already had a fifty-metre lead. But to everybody’s amazement the gap decreased rapidly. From the stands above the track it was less as though a fast runner were being caught by a faster than that the man in the lead were being somehow pulled back by what was on his heels. The weight of contempt which was implicit in every stride Carney took in his dancing shoes appeared to attach itself to the heels in front of him, slowing them down. With eighty metres to go Carney overhauled the man, glancing sideways at him as he did so like an anxious parent on school sports day worried about their child’s overdoing it, then shot past. He was far enough ahead at the finish to stop a few feet short and walk the rest, still crossing level with the line a metre or two in front of the winning East German. The crowd were hysterical.

Immediately after the games had ended Carney was mobbed when spotted trying to sneak out of the stadium. In return for the promise of an escorted passage home he condescended to give a short press conference. In a stuffy room behind the royal box he faced some of the world’s less distinguished sports correspondents who had been delegated to cover what had been supposed was a minor friendly fixture while the luminaries of the microphone were commenting on more prestigious events elsewhere. As it turned out, and thanks to the serendipity which watches over the careers of the undeserving, these correspondents – who were mostly either rookies working their way up or hacks drinking their way down – found themselves present at one of the more significant sporting interviews of the century.

It began as a bear-garden, a barrage of simultaneous questions which Carney sat out. Sometimes he glanced at his watch, sometimes at his pocket notebook. Once he took off one of the patent-leather pumps and studied the inside thoughtfully. Finally there was a lull. Then spontaneously it started again as each reporter tried to steal a march on his colleagues.

‘Mr Palafox, why did you take part in the games today when you had been officially replaced?’

‘Mr Palafox, what training have you had as an athlete?’

‘Do you have a special diet?’

‘Are you on anabolic steroids?’

‘Are you a member of a religious sect?’

‘Are you really forty-one?’

‘Who is your trainer?’

Carney raised a hand. The voices gradually subsided.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and his voice was so quiet they had practically to stop breathing in order to hear him at all, ‘let me just give you the odd fact about myself. I will then answer a question or two providing they are sensible and then, I’m afraid, I’ll really have to be off; I have a cat to feed.

‘As to who I am, quite a lot of you will already have seen my name countless times on television, but only in the credits so it probably won’t have registered. As has been rumoured, I am a scriptwriter with the television company whose logo you see on the side of that camera there. If you wish to check further, I am the deviser of a series which I deeply regret is entitled Up Yours! currently being shown on, I believe, Wednesday evenings, although I myself have never watched it. I am indeed forty-one years old. I do not smoke, I am not a homosexual, I detest all religions and especially Christianity, I despise the monarchy, I’m strongly against capital punishment and vehemently in favour of putting all pensioners back into useful employment at the earliest opportunity – possibly down the mines since most of the miners seem currently to be busy practising to be pensioners. Oh, and I’m fond of cats but not pathologically so. Does that help any?’

There had been some nervous laughter at these sotto voce declarations. The correspondents were clearly unsettled by their interviewee’s twin roles as amateur sports phenomenon and professional comic writer: it seemed devilish hard to separate them out.

‘Can we quote you on all that, Mr Palafox?’ asked a voice. A look of exasperation crossed Carney’s face.

‘I understood that was the entire purpose of press conferences,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it would be easier if you went away and just made it all up as usual? Then I could go home.’

‘Mr Palafox,’ broke in another correspondent, ‘I think what a lot of people would like to know is where have you been all this time? Why do you decide now to make your extraordinary talents public?’

‘That’s a very reasonable question,’ said Carney. ‘Why, indeed? One of the answers would be that I have only lately had them revealed to me. Don’t,’ he said quickly, ‘don’t misinterpret me. Perhaps “revealed” is the wrong word since it smacks of religious lunacy. The Holy Ghost did not pay me a personal visit in my bath one night and whisper to me divine revelations of gold medallions. More accurately, I suppose, I realised what I could do comparatively recently. I can tell you truthfully that it was running for a bus that convinced me, but you probably won’t believe it.’

‘But now, of course, you’ll concentrate on a sporting career?’

‘Good heavens, no; indeed, I shan’t. I have no interest whatever in sport of any kind, which I suppose is why it took me so long to discover I could do it.’

‘You can’t be serious, Mr Palafox. We believe you have three world records pending official confirmation and all in different events.’

‘I assure you I’m entirely serious.’

‘Could you comment on the suggestion that you’re in it for the money?’

‘Easily. I’m not “in it” and I’ve neither received nor wish to receive a solitary penny. I do what I do entirely for my own amusement. You may say I’m in it for laughs if you like.’

‘Is that why you wear the clothes you wear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Palafox, one last question, sir: are you aware that in addition to the admiration you have aroused in taking on and beating top athletic performances at the age of forty-er, one, you must also be arousing considerable opposition and resentment by the way in which you have chosen to do it?’

‘I am.’

‘Would you say it amounted almost to a carefully planned insult aimed at the international sporting fraternity?’

‘Strike “almost”, as I believe they say in America.’

A clamour of voices among which a reasonable bass was heard to ask: ‘Whatever did they do to you to deserve it?’

‘Bored me rigid,’ said Carney Palafox succinctly, and the press conference was over.

*

He went back to the life of an itinerant hermit since his modest flat near Sadlers Wells was besieged night and day and Katie was constrained to shut the place and move in with friends, taking the cat with her. She toyed with the idea of beginning piano lessons.

‘What for?’ asked her friend. ‘Did Carney ever practise running?’

‘Carney? You know Carney, Beth. The very idea….’

‘Exactly. So it would be much better just to book the Festival Hall and go right in off the street wearing tennis clothes and play Tchaikovsky like he’s never been played before.’

Meanwhile Carney was wearying of dodging reporters. Besides, never having had to live the life of a celebrity, he was rather bad at it, although considerably helped by his all-purpose middle-aged appearance. He looked like Almost Anybody as played by the late Tony Hancock. Still, he often failed to elude the newshounds, and the papers seized on Carneyisms with relish. His views were, as they were fond of saying, ‘controversial’ and began to be eagerly sought on matters a long way from the sporting field. When asked to express an opinion about an imminent anti-nuclear demonstration which promised to close off much of central London for the day he said although he had no wish to be fried in any global holocaust he thought it highly undignified to winge in public about it. Death was only death, after all, and mass displays of cowardice were unedifying. It was quite unfashionable at the time to call the caring, sharing, Earth-Mother-of-four on a peace demo ‘chicken’ – not like a few years later – and his remarks led to howls of protest. It was bad enough, they suggested, that anyone as unspeakable as Carney Palafox should ever have emerged to cock a snook at the sporting pleasures of millions but far worse that he should thereby be accorded a public soap-box from which to air his monstrous views about the world in general.

One morning a priest with horn-rimmed spectacles entered the Action Replay studios and asked to speak to Bob Struthers.

‘I’m afraid Mr Struthers is extremely busy at the moment, Bishop,’ said one of the clones. ‘Would someone else do?’

‘I am not a bishop, my son, merely a minor canon. Rather small beer, I’m afraid. Thank you for your offer, but I fear it must be Mr Struthers. If he will just speak to me for a moment, he will learn something to his immortal soul’s advantage.’

Eventually Bob Struthers appeared, a video-cassette in one hand and a preoccupied expression on his face. Track-suit confronted cassock.

‘If you’ve come to tell me you’re the world’s best pole-vaulter, I shall scream,’ he said.

‘But I am,’ said the priest. He removed the spectacles. ‘Father Carney would like an audience.’

‘Carney!’ cried Bob Struthers. ‘My God, man, where have you been? Do you realise you’re the world’s most sought-after person? The phone here never stops ringing. “Who is his agent?” “How can we sign him up?” “Would a million dollars do?”’ He ushered Carney into his sanctum and shut the door. Curious faces pressed towards the glass from all sides.

‘The deal I want to make is once more very simple,’ said Carney, declining a can of No-Calorie Root Beer.

‘Name it. We’ll talk it over and then get some lawyers up. This is going to be big.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Carney corrected him. ‘At least, probably not in the way you’re hoping. I’m afraid I don’t want a manager. But I do need an agent who’s in the sporting business and who can fix, er – what are they called nowadays? – venues, I think. Dreadful expression.’

‘You want to take part in some competitions? As a team member?’

‘Dear me, no.’

‘Just as well. I don’t think it would be easy. You’ve no idea how ironic it is. You’re currently the world’s hottest sporting property – or at any rate you’re in some insane class of your own – but I doubt anyone would let you into a team. Not only would you presumably refuse to conform in such matters as training, clothing and – dare I say it? – conduct, but I can’t imagine you’d find many people willing to compete with you. Or even against you. You make a mockery of it all, Carney, and that people can’t forgive. They might at a pinch put it all down to eccentric temperament – genius or something – if you were the world’s greatest at one particular thing. Then the only guys you’d really upset would be those directly involved in it. But to be that good at everything and still not give a damn and wear, God help us, tap-dancing shoes while doing it: nobody in the trade is about to overlook that.’

‘The expression you see on my face, Bob, is one of pure contrition. But I still feel I have a little way to go yet with my mission – a few more laughs to get. I want to set one or two more records before I get really bored and find something else to do. You can help arrange it just as you did at that dismal stadium the other day.’

Bob Struthers was nodding. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘we can fix that’ – and his brain lobes were thudding with arithmetic. ‘Let’s see, the TV fees we could charge would be astronomical – we could cover our costs in the first five seconds of bidding…. What about spectators?’

‘Oh, yes, lots of those. The more the merrier.’

‘Great, Carney. Entrance fees…. How much will your cut be, do you imagine? A ball-park figure?’

‘Nil.’

‘You mean nothing?’

‘I told you before, I don’t want money; I’m not doing it for money. I already make quite a decent amount out of my serials, you know.’

‘Yes, but no money…. It’s pretty weird. In fact it’s the most bizarre thing of all. Limitless talent and you refuse to capitalise on it.’

‘I’m laughing, Bob, that’s what you don’t understand. Deep inside I’m falling about.’

‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Bob Struthers, ‘but, OK, if that’s what you want. Now for the bad news, Carney. There’s going to have to be a quid pro quo on your part.’

‘I may not like it.’

‘Oh, you won’t. It’s called a medical examination. The plain fact is that a lot of people flatly refuse to believe that someone your age can do what you do without assistance. They suspect either that you’re a guinea-pig for a new superdrug or a sort of test-bed for some bionic device.’

‘Like the Six Million Dollar Man? Rewired and full of microchips? Servo-motors? That sort of thing?’

‘I know, I know, Carney. I think it’s crazy, too. But there it is. Without a thorough medical examination …’

‘… carried out before twenty thousand witnesses …’

‘… no record you set will ever be officially recognised. There’s a more sinister aspect, too. I had a call from somebody claiming they were working with the Ministry of Defence. Did I know where you were and, if so, would it be OK to ask you to pop down for a chat? All very matey, of course, but need I go on?’

‘I’m of potential military value? I get clobbered by the Official Secrets Act? To prevent me from falling into Russian hands I am given a drugged cup of coffee and wake up in a country house in darkest Berkshire where in the course of several agonising weeks implacable army surgeons tear my body and mind apart to find out what makes me different? I like it, Bob, I like it. It’s got real potential for a series. I see it all, now. At the end of their experiments they’re left with a pile of bones and tissue, the usual human debris, without having learned anything. The silly asses have done what an old proverb from China’s Frozen North no doubt says: you don’t cook your lead husky.’

‘I didn’t expect you to take anything I say seriously.’ Bob Struthers, on whose words an audience of millions hung weekly, was obviously not used to mockery.

‘You’re put out, I can tell. Don’t worry; I shall know what to do if anybody with an old school tie offers me coffee.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Like it or not, Sunshine, you are currently our lead husky. But even huskies get a going-over from the vet before long journeys.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Carney said.

‘Dope tests are perfectly standard practice,’ urged the ex-athlete. ‘With the sort of publicity you’ve got there’s not a cat in hell’s chance they’ll allow any record you set without one. In fact, the faster you run or the farther you throw, the more suspicious they’ll be.’

‘OK, Bob,’ said Carney wearily, ‘I’ll have to concede, I suppose. Set it up, if you would, please. As from next week, though. Until then I’m going to be a bit busy.’

The nature of that ‘busyness’ did not emerge until early Sunday morning, European time, when the first satellite pictures began arriving of extraordinary goings-on in California. The scene was an Olympic pool on the outskirts of Los Angeles where a major international games was in progress. The actual event was the final of the men’s 200 metres freestyle. The swimmers had just left their blocks when a naked man streaked from the competitors’ entrance, plunged into a spare lane of the pool in the swimmers’ wake and ploughed after them doing a species of crawl. Amusement and head-shaking greeted this piece of light relief until a word began to be heard around the pool, becoming louder and louder as more and more voices took it up: ‘Carney!’

At the first turn the naked swimmer was nearly up with the two trailing competitors. The television cameras, torn between capturing a real news event and preserving their viewers’ modesty, tried to go into long focus whenever Carney Palafox crossed their viewfinders; but as he began to overhaul the leading swimmers they found him increasingly difficult to censor. Somehow his glistening buttocks rolling in the swirl of chlorinated water exercised a magnetic attraction. In all their glory they crossed a million screens as their owner concentrated on catching an amphibious bus whose image some distance away he had firmly fixed in his mind as it chugged along with its passenger platform awash. On the third length he took the lead and began opening up a prodigious distance between himself and the nearest swimmer, whose rubber cap fell bobbing away behind him like an abandoned fishnet-float. On the third and final turn the cheering became louder still, for it was quickly noticed that Carney had changed his stroke for an inelegant but highly effective back butterfly. Now it was no longer his buttocks which rose and fell mesmerically on a million screens, and station switchboards were jammed long before he touched the end of the pool, scrambled out, slithered like a pale eel through the combined grasp of a stern-faced reception committee and vanished from sight.

His return from America was slightly delayed by the time it took to engage a lawyer and negotiate his television company’s going bail for him. He was greeted at Heathrow Airport with scenes reminiscent of the sixties. ‘We love you, Carney,’ said placards jiggled by bands of teenagers screaming on the terminal roof. It was a declaration not shared by serious-minded people, of which the world suddenly seemed abnormally full.

In the next few weeks Carney Palafox put in a few comparatively sober appearances at prearranged attempts on official world records. They were sober only in that he turned up and did what he said he would. His every appearance was greeted with hysteria by the spectators who jammed the stadiums. It did not escape the notice of professional sportsmen that whenever a Carney Palafox display coincided with a regular event that event drew small crowds consisting mainly of a core of hardline traditional sports enthusiasts who would have nothing to do with this middle-aged wunderkind. He dutifully underwent a battery of medical tests before each occasion. ‘Carney Normal Say Doctors,’ was one headline. ‘Nothing Wrong With Carney – Official,’ said another. ‘Clean Bill of Physical Health,’ said a third, pointedly leaving open to question his mental status.

And so that brief summer Carney Palafox ran, jumped, hurled and on one occasion cycled his way into the record-books. His attire remained idiosyncratic but he was clearly finding increasing difficulty in varying it without having to fall back on ordinary sportswear. On one of his last appearances as a record-setter he amazed the crowd by turning up in a somewhat bulky crimson track-suit with CP in gold embroidered letters on the back. But things were restored to normality when he unzipped it to reveal a full set of lime-green motorcyling leathers in which he then beat his previous record for the 100 metres.

Close observers also noticed that he was clowning less, that he consulted his notebook more often with a frown of worry. There came the day when, after throwing a discus an unprecedented distance he consented absentmindedly to try to better his own 100 metres sprint record once again. His performance was that of a forty-one-year-old scriptwriter. Badly out of breath he crossed the line in seventeen seconds, missing his number 5 bus by miles. Somehow he must have lost count in his short and hectic sprinting career. Never again would he break the world’s 100 metres record. The crowd loved it, though. They thought he was fooling.

Meanwhile he was being endlessly begged to appear on television shows in exchange for prodigious sums. The more he turned them down and the more he refused to attend any organised debate of his own phenomenon, the more eagerly he was pestered. The inducements would have corrupted a Gandhi, the sums exceeding many a poor nation’s GNP. To all the most prestigious television hosts Carney Palafox said no. To one alone he said yes, and that one had never even asked.

Desmond Lermit hosted a chat show on one of Britain’s least-watched channels. He was a benign, fiftyish hangover from the days when the occasional gentleman was still to be glimpsed in a television studio, slightly unsettled like a dodo sensing the approach of beaters. His shows tended to go out late at night and his guests were mainly people in the world of the Arts and more often than not were decayed knights of the theatre. Carney had met him once or twice over the years, running into him at a party here, in a meeting there, for the world of television is still smaller than it likes to imagine. Beneath the courteous exterior he had thought to glimpse a somewhat cynical nihilism akin to his own. Desmond Lermit, however, had not the least idea that he had made this impression, so it came as a complete surprise when Carney Palafox rang him up one morning and asked if he would consider him as a guest on his show some time.

Privately at a loss as to why he should have been chosen while a dozen celebrities in Britain and America had been spurned, Lermit ruthlessly cancelled a forthcoming guest-list which was to have featured the decrepit and much-loved Welsh comedienne Dame Martha Tydfil and substituted the single name of Carney Palafox. The chagrin in the world of entertainment at this windfall for the Desmond Lermit Half-Hour was unparalleled. Needless to say, in the event nobody watched anything else. From the opening moments the public found itself privy to what seemed to be a conversation between two people who had just discovered they ought to have been close friends for the last quarter-century and who were making up for lost time. It was a very private coming-together which happened to be eavesdropped by nearly twenty million people. And in its wholly unpredicted manner it turned out to be compulsive viewing.

‘Am I right in thinking, Carney,’ began Desmond Lermit, ‘that you find life as exemplified by modern British civilisation boring?’

‘Annihilatingly so.’

‘Do you really? Oh, so do I. Isn’t it ghastly?’

‘Dreary beyond belief.’

‘It’s not so much’ – Desmond Lermit recklessly threw social impartiality to the winds – ‘not so much the fact that everything has sunk to a general level of proletarian sub-culture, although God knows that’s bad enough….’

‘Fast food and Up Yours!’, interjected Carney, nodding.

‘… but it sometimes seems that every damned thing is so regulated, so organised, so subject to interminable by-laws, restrictions and conventions that the whole tone of life has assumed that of a sort of homogenised sleepwalking.’

‘Oh, I like that phrase, I wonder if it means anything?’ the erstwhile scriptwriter mused.

‘Not a lot, but I know what I mean.’

‘Me, too, Desmond, only too well. Far be it from me to make too much of the utterly trivial work I’ve been doing to earn a living, but there was a comedy series I had a hand in a couple of years ago trying to make that precise point.’

‘Gawd ’Elp Us!? Yes, indeed, I’m sure a lot of viewers like myself still recall it with pleasure. In fact I have here a scene from one of the episodes in which your unemployed young hero Keith is confronted by a warden who reprimands him for straying off the “nature trail” in a Derbyshire theme park, whatever that may be. I’ve never been quite certain.’ He laughed apologetically and pressed a switch on the television monitor.

‘Nor me, actually,’ came Carney’s voice as the picture on the monitor expanded to fill viewers’ screens.

After the two-minute excerpt, which left both host and guest smiling, Desmond Lermit resumed.

‘All this has been by way of background to what, if I were that sort of person, I might be calling “The Carney Palafox Story”. I have deliberately not started with clips from your “Challenge” film, not because they aren’t interesting in themselves but because everybody’s already seen them ad nauseam. We all know what you claimed to set out to do. I’d like to get at a slightly different Carney Palafox, or at least to flesh out the eccentric skeleton we now have, if you don’t object?’

‘Not at all. Splendid idea.’

‘For a start, this sudden ability you admit to having discovered so lately, do you yourself have any idea how it came about?’

‘No,’ said Carney. ‘I’ve often puzzled over why it should have happened just at this moment. I’m slightly less puzzled about how it happened at all.’

‘Might you elaborate?’

‘I’ll try. I suppose over the years – and quite unconsciously, I might add – I’ve been formulating the idea that human beings are capable of very much more than they themselves think and infinitely more than they are told. Everybody knows that small children can easily be brought up bi-, tri- or even quadrilingual. There seems no end to what their brains can assimilate. Now look at the educational system of a country like this one – or of any other, come to that. It’s lamentable. Children can actually and legally leave school at the age of sixteen functionally illiterate in their own mother tongue. Clearly no one is being educated to even a fraction of their innate abilities and, indeed, the more you stand back and look at the whole social set-up with a properly jaundiced eye the more it seems that it’s in nobody’s interest that they should be. The whole aim of advanced civilisation, now that the immediate horrors of nature have been more or less held at bay, is to keep people quiet at all costs from cradle to grave. Just that. Nothing else.’

‘Yes!’ Desmond Lermit was sitting forward in his chair, the rare image on television of unfeigned attentiveness. ‘That’s it exactly. That is the Social Contract. In exchange for its total and mindless passivity the public agrees to be entertained for life. More ghastly TV channels, more dreadful sit corns, more awful video-cassettes, more organised sports, more hideous golf-courses, theme parks, computer games….’

‘You take my point,’ Carney interrupted gently, perhaps lest his host get properly launched into some private Jeremiad. ‘Now, it came to me that just as people’s brains are not being educated to appreciate much other than organised entertainment nor are their bodies being trained except down to the standards of organised sports. I found myself doubting whether the current levels of physical achievement as measured by world records represented more than a fraction of human bodily potential. It’s as simple as that.’

‘But how did you liberate your own potential?’ asked Desmond. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

‘I’m not too sure,’ confessed Carney, ‘although I can tell you it happened quite suddenly one evening as I was running for a bus. But before that I’d been thinking the traditional shibboleth about endless concentration and single-mindedness being the way to achieve anything was probably completely wrong. Indifference and contempt would be a better start….’

‘… and a fine maxim for dealing with life,’ interrupted his host. Off-camera the Studio Manager buried his face in his hands.

‘… but what was needed was a way of liberating the mind completely from all thoughts of the effort it takes to do something. I can tell you that, in so far as I think about anything when I’m breaking records, I imagine myself trying to catch an elusive number 5 bus. Five seems to be a significant number for me,’ he added, but did not elaborate.

‘I think it’s brilliant,’ said Desmond admiringly. ‘I’ve never heard anything quite like it. But presumably your physical potential could have been expressed in any activity?’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

‘Would I be right in thinking that your choosing sport was precisely because you despised it?’

‘Perfectly. Actually, I don’t despise sport as such; it’s merely something people can do if they like. I particularly loathe organised sport, the mass international sporting machine, that whole world so beautifully typified by bogus tennis-tantrums. So sports seemed like a sacred cow that it might be quite fun to have a tilt at. The British are so enslaved by their whole social organisation that they’ve long since forgotten how to say boo to geese, much less moo to sacred cows.’

This made Desmond laugh enough to waste nearly thirty seconds of peak viewing time. ‘I think that’s a scriptwriter speaking,’ he said when he recovered. But then his face fell surprisingly as if an inner sobriety had surfaced unbidden. ‘I’m awfully envious, you know,’ he said. ‘Not of your records, of course; they’re rather silly, aren’t they?’

‘Footling.’

‘But I wonder what I could do?’ mused Desmond Lermit wistfully. ‘I’m almost fifty.’

‘Oh, anything you like. Motor racing?’

‘Much too noisy. And the company….’

‘Of course. Mountaineering? That’s quiet.’

‘Not the way I’d do it; I’m terrified of heights. I rather like depths, though, oddly enough. How about deep-sea diving?’

‘Perfect. Go to it.’

And so the viewing public was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of a television host planning his own future by using his guest as job consultant. The Studio Manager stood like Lot’s wife in headphones.

Desmond Lermit showed a few more clips of Carney Palafox’s sporting achievements, then said: ‘You surely won’t go on with this sports thing now?’

‘No. I think I’ve got as much amusement out of it as there is to get. It’s becoming tedious. I’d like to get back to my wife and my cat. No, I’ll leave it to the professionals to catch up, although maybe I’ll have just one last fling. Do you suppose there’s a marathon in the offing? I’ll have to ask around and see if anybody knows. I started with one and, although they take an awful time to do, there’d be a certain symmetry to end with one, wouldn’t there?’

‘He’s completely insufferable,’ said Bob Struthers, who was watching. The wastepaper-basket beside him was full of savagely crushed root-beer cans. ‘They both are, him and that Lermit queen. As far as I’m concerned, it’s goddamned open season on huskies. I wonder what the sod’ll turn up to ruin now?’

The answer was a marathon run ten days later in Italy as part of the Rome Games. Carney Palafox was not an official entrant; but a figure dressed as a chef was seen to attach itself to the back of the pack and rapidly work its way to the front. This time he was evidently going for maximum humiliation since within the first kilometre he took the lead and had soon disappeared. Helicopters, gaggles of motorcycles and convoys of press cars with cameras mounted on their roofs kept him on Italian television screens, though, and everybody was prepared to see the fastest-ever marathon. Within sight of the stadium and a clear sixteen minutes ahead the fleeing chef had nearly caught his number 5 bus when a man burst through the cheering crowds lining the road. In front of a dozen cameras Carney Palafox was shot dead on the spot by a disgruntled Turkish miler who then made a dash for it. He was soon outpaced and torn to pieces by devout Carney fans.

And thus ended the more public and the shorter of Carney Palafox’s two careers. That summer unquestionably marked an indelible trauma in the collective memory of international sports, and Carney himself would have been the last to be surprised at the conspiratorial way in which the public machine closed ranks and dealt with it. The sporting journals and the Guinness Book of Records went on printing their annual lists of new achievements year in, year out, just as they always did. Only in the columns assigned to that particularly memorable year there appeared ten entries right across the range of sporting activities, each marked with one asterisk or two. At the foot of the page the rubric read: ‘*CP official world record’ and ‘**CP unofficial world record’. It was one way of glossing an annus mirabilis. But Carney Palafox’s records stood for an awful long time, nine of them outliving his cat and five of them his wife.