| NOTES |
After having to leave Sidge's flat, under the circumstances related in the chapter before last, I was obliged to turn next to Maurice and Dave for shelter. They are included in the descriptions of some of the Beats in Chapter 51, so I will not describe them again here. Suffice it to say that they were still up to their old tricks. Virgins were still being sacrificed (or at least scared witless) at midnight on Nyetimber Hill. The difference was that the pair now had a place they could call home, in the form of The Rupippa. She was a former motor torpedo boat, a veteran of the Second World War, converted into a houseboat and moored in Newhaven Creek, a few miles along the coast from Brighton. Mick Dancey, The enterprising owner of the boat, who had towed her by rowing-boat all the way from Shoreham, rented out each cabin individually. There were probably eight or ten people living on board, all told. Maurice and Dave had the captain's state room - the largest cabin by far. It even had its own bathroom and galley with cooker. |
| The pair of them still visited the Brighton beach scene from time to time, possibly looking for sacrificial victims. I suppose I made contact with them again during one of my own visits to the beach. I now only went anywhere near the Beats when desperate to find a 'Pseudo-Beat' (one with a pad to go home to now and again) who could put me up for a while. Maurice and Dave knew that I now had access to a little money, so were very willing to take me on as a third tenant to share their spacious apartment. Dancey took no interest at all in who was actually staying on the boat, as long as he got his rent. |
| Newhaven Creek is completely tidal, with very deep water at high tide and no water at all at low tide, when the boat would just lie at a crazy angle in the mud. If you returned to the boat at low tide, you had a long jump down onto the deck, which was a bit scary after dark. I found the twice-daily extreme rise and fall of the boat very much to my liking. Every time the tide went right out, many eels were stranded. Some of the other tenants occasionally caught them, chopped them up while still alive and cooked them. This I didn't like at all and refused the frequent offers of stewed eel. |
| Occasionally, Maurice and Dave would queue at the docks at six in the morning, hoping to get a day's casual work. I went with them a few times and actually got taken on twice. Both times I spent an exhausting twelve hours unloading tomatoes for a tiny amount of money, illegally paid cash-in-hand at the end of the day. They told me I was very lucky to get such an easy cargo as tomatoes twice running. |
| Two or three times a week I walked the ten miles or so along the coast road to Brighton, to continue the dual work of organizing the raising of money for the Brighton Hostel Project, and spending it on anything but. Well, not anything - certainly not clothes, for example. But some evenings were spent on the boat, and very strange evenings they were. Maurice said that he had a brilliant novel in his head, but couldn't type, even though he had a typewriter. I volunteered to type the novel for him while he dictated. It soon became clear that he was simply dictating a Denis Wheatley novel from memory, not realizing that he was doing so. Even the names of the characters were the same! So as he dictated, I changed things more and more radically. At first, when reading it back to him I got away with the changes by persuading him it was a matter of style. He was prepared to believe, to some extent, in my superior abilities in that direction. However, it eventually became apparent that I was altering the story and the names as well, and he became quite agitated. The collaboration was at an end. |
| After this, Maurice put on an act of oily pleasantness, while exchanging devilishly sinister leers and grimaces with Dave, who smirked knowingly back. I think I was supposed to notice this and to fear that some diabolical fate was being brewed up for me. Indeed it was, as soon became apparent when Maurice asked if he might have some of my finger-nail clippings and a few hairs from my head "for a chemical experiment". Of course, I now knew my Wheatley well enough to realize that they were planning a curse, but played along with them as though they were children needing to be humoured. In a way, they were. As soon as they had acquired the aforesaid items of my person, they disappeared. I knew that they had gone to their 'temple' - a derelict farmhouse somewhere in the area - in order to burn my bits and pieces while incanting. No doubt a terrified teenage girl featured somehow in the proceedings. This seemed to be de rigeur. |
| Please bear in mind my margin note in Chapter 51 about Maurice's reaction to reading my descritpions of him on this site. | The next day, Maurice, all devilish smiles, asked me how I felt. I was going to say jauntily that I felt just fine, thank you, but then I realized that this would have been a bit mean, so I invented some vague aches and pains. This caused the most ridiculous suppressed demonic chuckling, together with the opinion that I didn't look too good at all and that I was probably in for something pretty serious. |
I've heard from someone who was on the Rupippa at the same time and he tells me that Mick eventually burned the boat, salvaging the copper and brass for scrap. I've just remembered that my informant worked nearby at Vacco and got me a job there, smashing skip-loads of reject vacuum flasks with a sledge hammer. I doubt that I stuck it for long enough to collect any pay.
Maurice tells me that Dave died in 2013. | Within a few days, several very strange sores had broken out on my face, which bled quite a lot and gradually increased in size. Then one appeared on the back of each hand. The two followers of Old Nick, as they themselves lovingly called him, could barely disguise their delight at my unsightly predicament, and were certain that the sores would spread all over my body. They'd seen it before, they said. Of course, I didn't even begin to believe that it was they who had been the agents of the current state of my face and hands, even when the sores indeed began to spread all over my body. I went to a doctor who immediately asked me if I'd been borrowing someone else's razor. I certainly had - Maurice's. (Instead of a beard, I sported a large handlebar moustache at this particular time, which I suppose was hardly in keeping with my almost waist-length hair). He diagnosed a quite rare variety of herpes but assured me that good old earthly penicillin would soon clear it up, which it indeed did, but not before the state of my face and hands had revolted a large number of people. Much as I had enjoyed the boat and even the eccentric if slightly unnerving company of Maurice and Dave, I decided I had now had enough of them and would move back into Brighton. |