The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag Read Online Free PDF

lent it to a friend and
never got it back. Apparently this friend had lent Gilly’s book to another
friend and never got it back from her.
    A
friend-of-a-friend that would be then, wouldn’t it!
    By
midnight I had run up a very large phone bill and worn out my friendship with
quite a few people, but I was absolutely no nearer to finding what was now
acquiring the status of a literary Holy Grail.
    I went
off to bed in a very bad mood!
    But I
was up bright and early the next morning.
    Because
I’d had an idea.
    I’d
remembered that there are companies in London that specialize in finding books
for collectors. That’s what they do. You pay them’ a finder’s fee and they seek
out the book. Mind you, I’d heard that this can take years, but I felt it was
certainly worth a try.
    Directory
Enquiries put me on to the most famous one. I’m not allowed to mention their
name here, but you’ve probably heard of them, they do posh auctions, too.
    The
chap I spoke to first was very helpful, and very posh. Was it Jonathan Quinn?’
he asked. ‘The contemporary of Beau Brummel and the Prince Regent?’
    ‘No,’ I
said. ‘Just plain Johnny, mucker of Billy Burroughs back in the Swinging
Sixties.’
    ‘Ah,’
said the chap, ‘then you will need to speak to our Mr Hiemes, who specializes
in books from the 1960s. He’s our resident expert on the period.’
    ‘Splendid,’
I said.
    He put
me through to their Mr Hiemes and I told their Mr Hiemes that I was looking for any book by Johnny Quinn.
    ‘Johnny who?’ asked their Mr Hiemes.
    ‘Quinn,’
I said, ‘surely you’ve heard of him?’
    Their
Mr Hiemes said no, he hadn’t.
    I said to
their Mr Hiemes that I’d been told he was the resident expert on the period.
    ‘I am,’
said their Mr Hiemes, ‘and I’ve never heard of Johnny Quinn.’
    ‘You
have to be joking!’
    But he
wasn’t.
    And nor
were any of the other experts I spoke to that morning. None of them had ever
heard of Johnny Quinn. None of them.
    ‘But
that’s absurd,’ I told the last in a dismal line. ‘I spent yesterday afternoon
going around Brighton and just about everyone I spoke to remembered Johnny
Quinn. And you blokes are supposed to be experts on the literature of the
Sixties, and none of you have ever heard of him. You’re all a bunch of
tosspots.’
    And the
chap put the phone down on me.
    Absurd!
    But
then it got beyond absurd.
    I went
through the Yellow Pages and started phoning bookshops. Any bookshop.
All bookshops. High street chains, collector’s bookshops, independents,
weirdos, every kind of bookshop. And though I spoke to some very helpful
people, not a single one of them had ever heard of Johnny Quinn.
    I was
truly rattled. How could it be that yesterday nearly everyone had heard of him,
and today nobody had?
    I
decided to retrace my footsteps. I went back to Waterstone’s. The chap behind
the counter remembered me from the day before. But when I told him that I had
drawn a complete blank on Johnny Quinn. he told me that he wasn’t in the least
surprised.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    Well,’
he said, ‘after you’d gone I got to thinking, and the more I thought about
Johnny Quinn the less I seemed to remember. And eventually I got to thinking
that probably I didn’t remember Johnny Quinn at all, I only thought I did.’
    ‘Absurd!’
I said.
    ‘Not
really,’ he said. ‘You see, it happens all the time in this business. Someone
will come into the shop asking for a book that doesn’t exist, saying that a
friend of a friend of theirs read it and thought it was wonderful. They know,
or think they know, all kinds of details about the book and its author. But the
book doesn’t exist. Even though it seems as if it should. It’s like an urban
myth, someone starts it off in a bar or something and it takes on a life of its
own. I’ve developed a mystical theory about it. I think that the book exists in
some kind of parallel universe and it’s trying to exist in this one too.