Jurassic Car Park Read online

  Mr Sidhu was filling a holdall with cigarettes and money when he looked up and, somewhat cheerfully, said, “Oh, hey Alan. Hey John. Be with you in a minute. Let me just finish serving this gentleman first.”

  “Take your time,” I said, and the man with the shotgun nodded thanks at me before turning his attention back to Mr Sidhu. “Are these notes traceable?” he said.

  “If anyone could be bothered tracing them,” said Mr Sidhu. “But I don’t think anyone will. No, you’ve caught me on a bit of an off day. Just take everything you want and go. I won’t even call the police straight away. It’s all on CCTV anyway, so I’m pretty sure it will all sort itself out eventually.”

  John looked at me, and I looked at John, and then we both returned to looking at the Sugar Puffs because neither of us were heroes, despite watching Die Hard every Sunday evening for the past fifteen years.

  With the bag loaded, the armed robber stuffed the shotgun down his trousers and made for the door. I thought about sticking a leg out – what would John McClane do? – but changed my mind. Besides, I wasn’t wearing my white vest. No, this robber had made a clean getaway, and that was fine, because John and I were about to become millionaires, and that was far more important than some struggling corner shop’s survival in an already hectic financial climate.

  “Wotcha, Mr Sidhu,” I said, sidling up to the counter. “That was all a bit nasty, wasn’t it? I thought about sticking my leg out, but changed my mind.”

  “No, you’re not even wearing a white vest,” said the shopkeeper, and how we laughed. “That’s the third time this year I’ve been robbed,” he said. “And it always comes when the insurance compensation runs out. Remarkable that, don’t you think.”

  And I nodded. “What are the odds?”

  “Speaking of odds,” said John to the shopkeeper. “You wouldn’t happen to know what the Lotto results were for Saturday just gone?”

  “I would indeed, my slightly-inebriated friend,” said Mr Sidhu, and he printed something off using the lottery machine which took up the majority of the counter. “Got a feeling you’re a winner, huh?”

  “Not yet,” said John, and I shot him daggers. “I mean, erm, I’ve got an inkling I’ve won with the syndicate down at The Fox. Three numbers. Ten quid. Split eighteen ways. Hardly worth coming in, but money’s money, and I don’t have any, so—”

  I flicked John about the face and he stopped talking, which was the desired effect. Mr Sidhu handed me a pink slip with the results of the Lotto from Saturday just gone printed upon it, and I thanked him, and also tried to talk him into purchasing a cricket bat from me at a very reasonable price.

  “It won’t do any good,” said the shopkeeper. “And besides, I need the insurance payouts. Shiva’s off to medical school in September, and I don’t think they’ll accept payment in Kit-Kat multipacks.”

  “I think you’re right there,” I said. “Hey, you never know. Sometimes, money can fall in your lap when you least expect it.”

  And with that we left the little shop on the corner, and John turned to me and said, “What was that all about?”

  “That was a scene with a shopkeeper,” I said. “Very integral part of the story, too.”

  “No,” said John. “That little speech about money falling into one’s lap when one least expects it.”

  I knew what he was getting at. And more importantly, I knew that he knew that I knew what he was getting at, and so I told him. “We like Mr Sidhu, do we not?” John nodded. “I was thinking that when we’ve got money coming out of our earholes in a few hours’ time, we could bung him a few thousand quid. You know? Pay for Shiva’s medical tuition and whatnot.”

  “You little rogue,” said John, which was fine as I had been called much worse. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better about committing fraud.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  “Okay, I am. But if you can’t put back into your community when you can afford to, then you’re simply an arsehole. Besides, who knows? Ten years from now, one of our testicles could be about to drop off. Probably one of yours as you don’t wash as much as I do. They take you to the hospital in one of those posh ambulances, wheel you onto the ward, and lo and behold, who’s there to greet you but Shiva Sidhu. And she’s about to save your manky bollock, all because we gave Mr Sidhu a couple of grand. What goes around comes around, my friend.”

  “I do prefer two bollocks,” said John, thoughtfully. “They work much better as a pair, don’t you think?”

  “I do indeed,” said I. “And you’re going to need a good, clean pair of balls to service all those beautiful fair maidens that money brings.”

  “Good point,” said John, and so on to Charlie Chaplin Street we marched, and what a beautiful day it was.

  But then of course, in that moment we didn’t know about the dinosaurs…

  9

  “Have you ever been punched in the throat, Mr Brewster?” said the doctor, and to be honest, it came as something of a shock. Doctors aren’t supposed to say things like that. They’re supposed to say things like, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ or, ‘please bend over,’ and suchlike. I made a mental note to put in a formal complaint once all this was over. “Stop going on about the bleeding dinosaurs. I don’t want to hear about the dinosaurs until they arrive in the plot.”

  “It’s called foreshadowing,” I said, and I knew that it was because I’d read all about it in a book. “Adds a little tension. Keeps the reader turning the page when what they really want to do is get off the toilet and set fire to the book.”

  “I know all about foreshadowing,” said the doctor.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “You’re a professional. Therefore, would you be so kind as to keep your professional mouth shut while I tell the story?”

  It was the doctor’s turn to look shocked, which made us even by my count.

  “Right, where was I?”

  “You were just stepping onto Charlie Chaplin Street.”

  “Correct. So, we arrived at the abandoned car-park…”

  10

  “I’ve never been to an abandoned car-park before,” said John, and he looked up at the huge concrete structure before us in awe. Graffiti was daubed here and there by someone with all the artistic talent of a drunken cub-scout. “It’s a lot creepier than I thought it would be.”

  I had to agree with my best friend. This place fairly put the shits up me, and make no mistake about it. It was…it was…it was so quiet, and I don’t know why that surprised me as I hadn’t expected to be greeted by a brass band. “They make them like this so that people stay away,” said I. “Who in their right mind would go in there unless absolutely necessary?”

  “Just us,” said John. “Oh, and The Barry Boys, but they haven’t been in their right mind since birth, but inbreeding will do that to you.”

  We made our way around the edge of the car-park, searching for a way in. At least I was. I believe John was searching for a reason to go back to the pub.

  “Ah, here we are,” I said as we came across a pair of broken wooden barriers. The booth between the barriers was empty. Of course it was empty. If we had discovered a man sitting in there, I’m pretty certain I would have defecated in my pantaloons. “I wonder what level it’s parked on.”

  We searched the first level, and then the second. By the third we were both fairly knackered and had to stop for a breather. On the fourth level, we found an old glove, but since that wasn’t what we were looking for, we continued up to the fifth, to where—

  “Oh. My. God,” I said. “That’s it! That’s a fucking DeLorean!” And it was. Sitting there all pretty and shiny was the car made famous by that movie with the accidental time-travel incest. “Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as that?”

  John shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said. “As cars go, it’s not the most aesthetically-pleasing.”

  “It’s a time-machine,” I reminded my simple best friend. “Surely y
ou can forgive the gull-wing doors if the thing can take us back to the past.”

  “Or the future,” said John, and I had to remind him that we were treading a very fine line, and that if we wanted to avoid a Robert Zemeckis lawsuit, we ought to stay away from such words.

  “Come on, let’s take a closer look,” I said. “Make sure it’s got all the right bits and bobs.”

  “Flux capacitors and all that?” said John, and I flicked him in the head and reminded him of my previous warning.

  The car was certainly the right one. A DMC-12, panelled in SS304 stainless steel. “Look,” I said, peering in through the window. “There’s the flux…I mean…the contraption that activates when we get the car up to 141.6 km/h, or as it’s more commonly known in this country, 88mph.”

  “So this is, in fact, a time machine, and not just some prop?” said John. “You know what those cosplay people are like. Every little detail counts.”

  “This is the real deal,” I said, for I was sure that it was.

  “Then I am actually aroused,” said John, and I could see that he was by the way he was standing. “So do you know how to get into it? I appear to have left my DeLorean lock-picking set back at the pub.”

  I tried the door, and luckily for us it swung open and up. Well, lucky for me. It wasn’t so lucky for John, who should have taken a step back if he’d wanted to avoid a clobbering.

  “Are you okay?” I said, for he was my best friend, and, well, he didn’t look quite the same with that chipped tooth.

  “Can we just get this over with?” he said. “We don’t know what time The Barry Boys are coming to get this thing.” He glanced over his shoulder and visibly shuddered.

  “Time is no longer a concern,” I said, and I climbed into the DeLorean. “How do I look?”

  “Like a prick about to steal a DeLorean,” said John. “And, while we’re on the subject, don’t we need to generate 1.21 gigawatts – or as he says in the film that shall not be named, one-point-twenty-one-jigowotts – of electricity to get this thing moving?”

  “Small details,” I said, “and certainly not ones I’m going to worry about for the purposes of this plot.” I patted the passenger seat. “Come on. Let’s see if this thing actually works.”

  John sighed heavily, scoured the car-park nervously once more, and then made his way around to the passenger-side door before climbing in. “A lot smaller than I thought it would be.”

  “Well, if you know of any abandoned Tardises in Buckfutt, be sure to let me know,” I said. “Look, someone left the key in the ignition.”

  “How fortunate for the purposes of this plot,” said John. “And somewhat unlikely,” he added, but I chose to ignore it.

  I turned the key, and the whole car lit up inside, including the unit with the fourteen- and seven-segment displays showing the present, the past, and the future. “Okay,” I said. “We want to go back to Saturday just gone. Today is the fifteenth, which means we need to go back to the eleventh.” I plumbed that in to the console. “Any time before 7pm, when they stop accepting Lotto,” I said, and put that into the console also.

  “This is all a bit unbelievable, isn’t it?” said John. “Like something out of a bad book.”

  “If you say so,” I said, for I knew the writer and he was a thoroughly lovely chap. “Put your seatbelt on, will you, pal?” I said.

  “We aren’t really going anywhere though, are we?” said John. “I mean, technically we’re not even leaving this car-park.”

  “I’m going to be driving at 88mph toward that concrete wall,” I said, and John quickly buckled himself in. “Right. Are you ready?” I could see by the way he bit the dashboard that he wasn’t.

  “All of a sudden this doesn’t seem like a good idea,” said John through gritted teeth. Teeth that hadn’t seen toothpaste for many a year.

  “Of course it’s a good idea,” I said, though it wasn’t, not at all. “This is going to work, or my name’s not Alan Brewster.” And with that, I turned the key once more to the right and the engine roared into life. And it was a fine roar. It was the kind of roar one might expect from an angry dinosaur, but since we’re not allowed to use that word until absolutely necessary: it was the kind of roar one might expect from an angry hippo.

  “John, please stop nibbling at the upholstery,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he replied, easing himself anxiously back into his seat. “Is it too late to have a poo?”

  “Far too late,” said I.

  “Thought as much,” said John, and he closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross – spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch – even though he wasn’t religious, nor did he wear spectacles. “Let’s just get this over with so we can get back to The Fox.”

  “Yessir!” I said, and I put my foot down, and we careened toward the far wall of the abandoned car-park at breakneck speed, and that was when I realised it was never too late for a poo.

  “Aaaaaaarghhhh!” said John.

  “Eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhh!” I added.

  And just before we slammed into the concrete at precisely 88mph, thusly killing us instantly, something remarkable happened. But then again, it wasn’t really remarkable, was it? Not if we were expecting it to happen. Still, it was weird stuff, and make no mistake about it, because one minute we were racing toward a brick wall at what can only be described as an alarming rate, and the next, we were racing away from the same wall, back to the spot in which we had found the DeLorean.

  “Brakes!” John screamed. And I thought, in my infinite wisdom, that brakes were probably a very good idea in that moment, and so slammed my foot down on the pedal and hoped for the best.

  There was a shrill screech as the DeLorean’s wheels locked up, and I had to do battle, momentarily, with the steering wheel, which seemed to want to see me crash into one of the walls either side of us, and it cared not which.

  They say, and by ‘they’ I mean the boffins who have nothing better to do than make stuff up, that your entire life flashes before your eyes in the moments before death. I say this is absolute bollocks, for the only thing that flashed before my eyes in that moment was a pair of fuzzy dice and my best friend John’s flailing arms.

  “Why are we not stopping?” said John.

  “Give it a second,” I said, for we were definitely slowing. I could smell burnt rubber, and something else, as one of us – I’m not sure which – had done something untoward in our jodhpurs, but the less said about that the better.

  The DeLorean, with one final twerk (I was using it well before Miley Cyrus) of the wheel, came to a halt in the exact same spot from which we’d sped only a moment ago, albeit facing the other way. “Well that was bizarrely entertaining,” I said. “I should imagine it would make good reading.”

  “Only because the reader can’t smell the shit in here,” said John. “I told you I needed to go before you went Hell for leather at that concrete wall.” He tugged at his trousers and made a disgusted face.

  I opened the door on my side and climbed out, sucking in huge lungfuls of fresh air. Glancing about the place, I noticed that everything looked exactly the same as it had a few minutes ago, but then it would, wouldn’t it? Nothing much ever changed in an abandoned car park. The rats got bigger…some of them died…occasionally you’d get a nice new piece of graffiti to look at (usually a rudimentary penis with jizz shooting from its tip), but apart from that, nothing really changed.

  “Look,” said John as he climbed out of the DeLorean and limped toward the side of the car-park, where there was a gap in the concrete between our heads and the ceiling. “It’s pissing it down out there.”

  Excitement washed over me, for I remembered that the weather had been royally atrocious on Saturday afternoon just gone. “It worked,” I said. “It bloody worked.”

  “How can we be sure?” said John.

  I shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” That was when I looked down and saw a boy – an urchin, in fact – running past with what looked like a larg
e goose under his small arm. “I say, boy! Small boy who has no place in this narrative!” And he looked up at us, and I could see that he thought we were a pair of strange paedos, but that’s the world we live in right now. “You wouldn’t happen to know what day it is?” I said.

  “Fuck off, mister,” said the boy, which was rather rude, even from a Dickensian urchin.

  “I will give you threepence if you tell me what day it is today,” I said, tossing down a pair of copper coins, which the boy dutifully pocketed. Threepence wouldn’t even buy him a penny chew in the current financial climate, but we were playing at A Christmas Carol, where he could buy a fleet of horses and a coach for them to pull for sixpence, and so he went along with it.

  “Why it’s Saturday,” said the boy, in that way Dickensian urchins often do. “Evening, to be exact. About two hours before the Lotto is drawn, if you really must know.”

  I tossed the boy another threepence. “Thank you, young urchin,” I said. “Away with you. Go buy a fleet of horses and a coach for them to pull.”

  “Fuck off, mister,” said the boy, jogging casually away. “Sixpence won’t even buy me a bag of weed.”

  “Nice boy,” I said to John.

  “I thought that,” said John, and we both did smilings of the face until we realised how stupid we looked.

  “Off to Sidhu’s we go,” I said, for we were about to become rich beyond our wildest dreams, so long as we didn’t dilly-dally or get buggered and left for dead by marauders in the meantime.

  11

  “You can see why you’re wearing that straitjacket,” said the doctor. “DeLoreans, time-travel, Dickensian urchins, it’s all a bit far-fetched.”

  “I haven’t even got to the dinosaurs yet,” I reminded him.

  “Precisely!” said the doctor. “I shall have to make sure the electrolysis machine is plugged in and warmed up for you by that point.” And I could see that he meant it, and my balls shrivelled up inside me. “So what happened next? After you arrived at last Saturday in a stolen time-machine?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m making it all up. There’s no need for electrolysis. I’m healed.”