Authors: Danny Wallace
I looked at Hugh. He shrugged and nodded.
“Women aren’t allowed to play snooker?” I said in utter disbelief. “But … why?”
“The official wording is that ‘women are not allowed to play snooker, because they might rip the cloth.’”
“Women aren’t allowed to play snooker because they
might rip the cloth?”
I said, perhaps a little unnecessarily. “But that’s …
ludicrousl!”
Arlene laughed.
“Why is that rule there?” I said. “Did a woman once rip the cloth?”
“I don’t think so,” said Arlene. “But you know … one
might”
I was aghast. “But so might a man!”
Arlene considered it.
“To tell you the truth, Danny, I’m not very into snooker anyway.”
“But what if it turned out you were really excellent at it, and you got invited to a big, lady snooker tournament in Tokyo or somewhere, but you had nowhere to practise, because people thought you might rip the cloth?”
She thought about it.
“I wouldn’t mind going to Tokyo.”
Hugh and I finished our game, drank our drinks, and got ready to go. I was still very keen to talk to him about how he could help me with my predicament. Was there a way of making this easier? Of wiping out nervousness or regret or fear and just making Yes seem like the only sensible option? There was so much I wanted to ask him. I looked around and realised I still couldn’t quite believe the time warp I’d walked into. But I suspected that change wasn’t far around the corner. In a couple of years time there probably wouldn’t be four old men in that men-only room, but three instead. And after that, just two. And then one. And then one day after that, maybe—just maybe—they’d turn the jukebox up and allow women in, and they’d all dance on the snooker tables and rip the cloth up on purpose and make green baiza dresses and go utterly snooker loopy. This had been a man’s town once upon a time, but with the industry gone, perhaps all some men found they had left to hang on to was their traditions…. Perhaps that was why it was given so much respect. Not just by the older men, but by the younger men, too. The men who’d one day in 1980 seen their dads lose their jobs.
Hugh and I walked out of the workingmen’s club the back way. We waited for Arlene by the car. She’d had to walk the long way round.
Well, rules are rules.
* * *
“I’ll heat up the wonton,” said Arlene, “and you boys can talk about whatever it is you’re going to talk about.”
Arlene gave Hugh a conspiratorial glance. “Oh, and Hugh—we should probably draw the curtains….”
Why did they have to draw the curtains? It was only about two o’clock, and the weather was lovely.
“Good point,” said Hugh and did as she said.
I decided not to ask why. Perhaps Arlene was going to get a secret snooker table out and wanted to avoid prosecution.
I made my way into the living room.
“When you were talking to Tommy in the club there,” I said, “and you gripped him by the shoulders and told him your powers were weak … were you hypnotising him?”
“No,” said Hugh. “I was just speaking slowly. Sometimes that’s for the best.”
“Because it looked like you were using some kind of Jedi mind control.”
Hugh laughed. “I was in that, you know.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“You were in what, sorry?”
“Star Wars.”
My eyes widened to the size of a giant squid’s.
“You were in
Star Wars?”
I said. “No, you weren’t. Were you? You could not have been in
Star Warsl”
“I was. I used to be a professional extra.”
“And you were in
Star Wars?!”
This was too much to believe. This man in front of me had been in the defining film of my childhood! He was essentially
part
of my childhood!
“What were you in
Star Wars?”
I said.
“Oh, you know … one of those guys in white.”
“A stormtrooper?” I nearly shouted, my voice sounding suddenly rather prepubescent. “You were a bloody
stormtrooper?”
They were only the coolest things in the film!
“A stormtrooper, that was it. Yeah, I was one of the main ones. I’ve never seen it, mind you.”
My brain nearly popped.
“You’ve never
seen Star Wars?
And you were
in
it?”
It was unbelievable to me. It would clearly be the first thing I told people
when I met them! I would walk around in homemade stormtrooper uniforms! I would have business cards made up reading
DANNY WALLACE—I WAS A STORMTROOPER!
“Nope, never seen it.”
I needed to sit down.
“I remember this one time,” said Hugh, “we were filming a scene where the heroes were in this big hangar, and they were trying to get away in their spaceship, and me and two other stormtroopers arrived on this lift thing, and then we were firing our laser guns at them …”
“I know exactly the scene!” I said. “Han Solo and the others are trying to escape in the
Millennium Falcon …”
“Er, yeah … probably …”
“And then Obi-Wan Kenobi gets out his lightsaber!”
“Oh, yeah. He got killed or something. I was there when it happened.”
Who else could say they were there when Obi-Wan Kenobi was killed? Especially when you consider the fact that he was killed thousands of years ago in a galaxy far, far away.
“Anyway, there were supposed to be a few explosions around us, but they’d been wired up wrong, and they exploded too close to our heads. One of the guys got hurt, and my ears were killing me. So they took three of us to this hospital, but we couldn’t exactly walk in dressed like stormtroopers, because no one in the world had ever seen stormtroopers before. So they took our uniforms off us, and we had to walk around the hospital, wearing leotards and big white Wellingtons.”
“Not a good look for a stormtrooper,” I said, still rather amazed by it all.
“Not really … Hey, I should go and get Murphy….”
And with that the man I realised I’d first seen more than twenty years earlier in one of the greatest boys’ films ever made, left the room to fetch the world’s only hypnotic dog.
The day couldn’t get any stranger.
Moments later he walked back into the room, followed by Murphy the Hypnodog.
The big, black Labrador settled in and sat himself down on the floor in front of me, sniffing my feet. I was still smiling from the
Star Wars
revelations, but I couldn’t help but notice there was something a little unusual about the dog in front of me.
“Um … Hugh,” I said. “Murphy the Hypnodog appears to be wearing a …
fez.”
“Oh, that?” said Hugh distractedly. “He’s always wearing that old thing.”
I looked at Murphy again, who was just sitting there, staring at me with his fez on his head. It didn’t seem entirely natural.
“You just put that fez on him a minute ago, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I did,” said Hugh. “I just thought you’d like it.”
I did. And I take it back: The day had just got a little stranger.
“It’s a fascinating problem,” said Hugh, munching on a wonton. “Usually I get asked to help people say no more. You know … no to whatever they’re addicted to. Are you sure you’d want to just blindly say yes to things?”
I thought about it. Even without the help of hypnosis, I’d already run up an intimidating debt on credit cards I should never even have applied for, let alone used, I’d found myself some kind of masked enemy figure who was out to torment and ruin me, I had the haircut of a hick, I’d bought a car, and I’d loved and lost.
“Yes,” I said with a small shrug. “I just need to know if there’s an easy option. You know? A better way of going about things? I’ve still got a couple of months of this left before I move on forever, and I thought it would get easier the more I did it. But certain … things … have happened which have made it harder.”
“What things?”
“A girl. A girl, for one thing.”
Hugh nodded and said, “Ah.”
“And a … well… a nemesis.”
“Anemesis?”
“A nemesis. Someone keeps winding me up and making me do things because they know I’ll say yes. But I don’t know who they are, and I’m afraid that if I say no to them, it’ll ruin everything, and all my hard work will have been for nothing.”
“So you want to say yes, so that your hard work means more?”
I nodded. My phone rang. I answered it. They hung up. I was getting really bloody sick of these polite nonconversations. Whatever happened to having a good old chat?
“It’s interesting,” said Hugh, leaning forward to make a roll-up. “I suppose in some ways all this is about confronting fears. People sometimes go through their lives having fears and never realising they can be removed in just a few minutes, forever. People are always saying no to things, aren’t they? They’re frightened of
change, used to routine, used to doing things a certain way. Like, the people who take risks in business are the people who don’t fear change, and ultimately they’re the most successful.”
“I think this started through fear,” I said. “I was living quite negatively, and I was missing out on things. I guess I’m afraid of what you can miss out on in life. Every single day.”
“So,” said Hugh, licking the rizla. “It’s a kind of fear of the unknown, in your case. It’s a negative form of thinking. People do miss out on so much by instantly and unthinkingly saying no…. They don’t realise they’re putting a real limitation on their lives. Take Arlene, for example. When we were first friends, I offered her wonton and she said, ‘no way.’ And then she tried it, and she
loved
it.”
“That’s true!” shouted Arlene from somewhere in the house. “I
love
wonton now!”
I didn’t know how to respond to a sentence like that coming from someone in a different room. Usually a smile would have done, but she couldn’t see that, so I just said quite loudly, “I like wonton too.”
Hugh lit his roll-up and continued.
“It’s the same with travel. People decide to stay at home. They say, what would I want to go to Spain for? What’s in Spain for me? I’ve got everything I need right here in Pontypridd. And they miss out on a wonderful new experience. It’s all they ever know. They just say no.”
I considered Hugh’s words.
“Tom Jones used to live in Ponty!” shouted Arlene. “He used to walk around the pubs, singing for pints. My granny booed him one night.”
I smiled and once again realised that she couldn’t see me. So I said, “Tom Jones is a good singer.”
Hugh nodded.
“Bloody
good singer,” he said.
Murphy’s fez had fallen off, and he hadn’t bothered to pick it up and put it back on again. That’s dogs for you. Lazy.
He was sitting with his paws on my lap, staring up at me with the big, brown eyes that have made him the toast of the transcontinental animal-variety circuit. I was on the comfy chair, ready to “go under.” We were watching videos of Murphy and Hugh’s various television appearances around the globe. Hugh wanted to show me what I’d be in for, if we went ahead with the hypnotism.
We’d already watched their appearance on American tabloid shows
Hard Copy
and
Inside Edition
, and now we were watching a Discovery Channel show called
Animal X
.
“This … is tie Hypnodog!” bellowed an American man over some sloweddown footage of the slavering Labrador, bounding toward the camera. “Few stand a chance against his mysterious stare!”
Some sinister music started up. And then there on the screen was Hugh, sitting on a sofa in a softly lit room, with his dog on his lap.
“I must admit … It is unusual,” he said.
“Unusual indeed!” bellowed the American man again, who must be a nightmare to sit behind in the cinema.
“Animal X
tracked the Hypnodog down … to Luton, England!”
“It was actually Harrow,” said Hugh.
I suppose saying it was Luton gave it more mystique.
“But other dogs are said to have mysterious powers too!” said the American. “This terrier”—they showed a picture of a small terrier—“became famous in the United States for bringing a young boy out of a coma!”
“What did he do?” I said. “Jump on his bollocks?”
Hugh and I laughed for ages, which was fair enough, because it was a quality gag.
“But the Hypnodog is said to have the strangest powers of all … the power to control the human mind! Animal expert Dr. Roger Mugford has come across other animals with the same skill….”
The camera cut to Dr. Roger Mugford.
“A mongoose can hypnotise a snake!” he said with some enthusiasm. “And a tiger can hypnotise a monkey!”
I made a mental note to remember these sentences for the next bring-a-fact party I attended.
“The Hypnodog is said to have hypnotised a man into handing over his lunch. And those who fall under his spell tumble like a row of dominoes at the sight of the deep, brown pools of his eyes …”
I looked down at Murphy. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tumble like a row of dominoes. For starters there was only one of me, so Fd have to keep getting back up and knocking myself down again. Murphy stared up at me. Suddenly it was a little disconcerting. I had definitely caught sight of the deep, brown pools of his eyes. What was going to happen to me?
Suddenly, Hugh was by my side.
“If you’re still feeling nervous, read one of these …”
He handed over a cuttings book. There were hundreds of articles, from all over the world.
“Paws for Thought!” screamed the
New York Post
. “Trances with Wolves!” read the
Mail
.
“It should reassure you. Murphy and I have hypnotised many, many people. You’re in safe hands.”
It wasn’t the hands I was worried about. It was the paws. And what the hell was
this?
“Hang on,” I said. “What’s this headline here about?”
I pointed it out. “Hypnotist’s Spell Made Girl’s Boobs Swell!”
“Ah, yes,” said Hugh. “I enlarged a German girl’s breasts.”
And he left it at that.
“So you just want us to make you more open, then …,” he said, his hand on my shoulder.
“Well, yes. That, and I suppose … to give me a total and utter inability to say no. At least for a couple of months. Until December 31.”