Stop The Rock
After a while, George realised he was going to have to start charging people to touch the rock.
At first it wasn’t a problem; it had just been local people. Friends and neighbours. Relatives. Weird Andy from the Hop & Grape. They came, they saw, they touched: they went away empowered.
Charlie from next door was the first. He’d offered to give George a hand moving the rock from where it landed – on his rockery. Funny that, George thought, if it had just been a little bit smaller, he might simply have left it there, made a feature out of it. But it wasn’t a little bit smaller, it was a whole lot bigger – and it threw out the symmetry of his whole garden. So it had to go.
George would have tried to move it himself, but Betty gave him so much earache after he did his back in carrying those bags of cement for the patio, he thought it wise to accept Charlie’s help. Besides, whether he liked it or not, George was seventy-six now, and that rock would have been heavy for a man half his age. Charlie was a good few years younger than that, plus he went down the gym three nights a week and played five-aside for the local league, so he was in pretty good shape – for an accountant.
It wasn’t immediately apparent that anything happened when Charlie tried to lift the rock; he just went purple and made a face like Bill Bixby on that old TV show. It wasn’t until the following weekend that he revealed his new ability to George. Charlie knew exactly what time the postman was going to arrive, every single day of the week. At first he’d thought it was just a fluke. A lucky guess. But after six days of heralding the delivery down to exactly where the second hand would be on the kitchen clock, Charlie knew this was something more.
In the meantime, a number of people had been over and touched the rock; all quite innocently since nobody yet knew there was anything special about it, other than that it fell from the sky during the meteor storm and that it glowed an eerie spinach green at twilight. (Neither did anyone realise that the speckles of phosphates and chlorides that patterned the rock were identical to the configuration of stars and nebulae in the lesser-known Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte galaxy, on the outer rim of the Cetus constellation. Then again, you wouldn’t expect them to.) Afterwards, Michael from two doors down swore he could make the kettle boil in the morning without even getting up and switching it on. He just had to think about it, while going about his a.m. ablutions, and by the time he got downstairs, the tea was ready to mash. (He hadn’t yet worked out how to get the water to pour itself, but given time…) Then Barbara from the Guild discovered she couldn’t ever lose at chess. Even when playing her grandson’s computer, which had always trounced her in the past, she made checkmate in under ten moves. She was thinking of becoming a pro. And then there was George’s nephew, Alan, who came round to visit for Betty’s birthday and was amazed to discover that after manfully failing to budge the rock even an inch from where it lay, he could suddenly make women do whatever he told them to. Unfortunately (or perhaps not so, depending on your point of view), Alan was gay, so mostly he made them watch Moulin Rouge and Chicago with him on DVD (which most of them would probably have done anyway), and buy him the occasional Jack ‘n’ Coke in the Hop & Grape (ditto, because Alan was such a nice bloke).
Then it was Betty’s turn. She’d taken to sitting on the rock on sunny afternoons, and had almost persuaded George to leave it where it was (though it did throw out the symmetry of his whole garden), when she developed the uncanny ability to predict the past. Now at first this wasn’t so amazing – knowing exactly when their first son had been born, or who won the World Cup in 1966, didn’t impress her husband one bit: quite the opposite, in fact. George was beginning to worry his wife was finally going, a bit doolally like, losing her marbles, until Betty predicted something he’d never told her before – that when they were struggling for money early in their marriage, George had sold the antique silver fob watch his grandfather gave him after the war. When Betty predicted that (or, perhaps, George considered, the more accurate term would be postdicted) – when Betty postdicted that, George started to take her ability with a little less salt.
By now, word of George’s amazing rock had spread far and wide, and when Weird Andy discovered that he could use the pub telephone to call up and give advice to fictional characters in films, thereby altering the course of the story and changing the entire history of cinema (forewarned that an assassin is to murder his wife in 1969, James Bond alters his honeymoon plans and goes on to live happily ever after; made aware from the first reel that he’s actually a ghost, Bruce Willis stops hanging around with that creepy kid and goes off to rekindle his romance with Demi Moore, being that she has a thing for supernatural entities anyway) – well, after that, everybody wanted a go.
So George really didn’t have any choice: he was going to have to start charging. It wasn’t that he was looking to turn a profit, but everybody else was getting something out of touching the rock (no matter how often George laid hands, he hadn’t felt so much as a super-powered sneeze) – and besides, all these visitors were making a dreadful mess of his lawn. It was going to cost him a fortune in turf and topsoil.
And so it went. Charlie’s wife, Jacqui, could answer every question on The Weakest Link, even before they were asked. (She still failed the audition to get on the show.) Gordon, George’s younger brother, found that he knew exactly when garage mechanics were lying to him. It turned out there was absolutely nothing wrong with his head gasket, and his rear brake pads weren’t at all worn, so he saved over two hundred pounds on his MOT. After that, everyone started letting Gordon take their cars in for a service, and serious questions were asked about the downturn in profits at three local dealerships. Then there was Fiona, from number 29, the would-be model who practised holding her head at that shy Princess Diana angle because she’d read somewhere that men found it alluring – Fiona was thrilled with her new ability to never show VPL, no matter how thick her underwear, particularly as it meant she could stop going commando to the office now that the winter nights were drawing in.
But all good things, dot dot dot – and it was only a matter of time before the authorities got wind of George’s rock and decided to spoil the party. First the Ministry of Defence set up a quarantine around George’s helianthemums, then the diggers moved in, finally a cheque arrived in the post (11.37 and 26 seconds, according to Charlie, the night before) making full restitution for all the destruction and disruption caused by the rock’s removal. And then it was gone, and the only symmetry left in George’s garden was on the sundial – it was cracked at both sides.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.
Forgetting to fill the kettle one night before bed, Michael came downstairs the following morning to find the element had burned out, and so had most of his kitchen. The Post Office were now refusing to deliver any mail to Charlie’s house on account of his bizarre and frightening behaviour; while Alan was seriously considering leaving town – so fed up was he of straight men, forever pestering him to make their wives or girlfriends compliant. Gordon was punched repeatedly in the face by a Kwik-Fit fitter; Fiona was getting shunned by all her bitchy girlfriends; and Weird Andy was fighting multiple lawsuits filed by MGM, Time Warner, M. Night Shyamalan, United Artists, and The Cubby Broccoli Estate, among others. By the time Betty postdicted her husband’s affair with Sheila from the Gas Board back in 1971, George was starting to wish he’d never even seen that bloody rock. But at least he’d seen the last of it now…
The following year, British forces led the coalition attacks on North Korea with soldiers who could deflect bullets through a combination of halitosis and funny looks, inspect WOMDs from a hundred yards using only their acute sense of irony, and detect enemy aircraft through women’s intuition and nervous twitching. Watching the news in his lonely high-rise one room, George knew it wasn’t going to end well.
