Children found it irresistibly amusing that they could utter forbidden words in front of their parents and not get told off for it. They learned to insert the words into strings of made-up nonsense. Their parents knew they were swearing, but where was the proof?
Disgruntled employees who had their bosses’ private phone numbers rang them and denounced them vehemently, knowing that as long as they restricted themselves to certain ribald terms and coinages their voices would be almost impossible to identify.
The presenter of a kids’ morning TV show, having ingested more than his fare share of cocaine in the dressing room beforehand, went a little mad and started calling his co-presenters, the programme’s producer and even the Director General of the network all sorts of foul names, thinking that because of swearing disorder he would be safe to do so. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t actually contracted Bowdler yet. The live transmission was interrupted with a test card and the presenter was summarily sacked.
Performances of a David Mamet play in the West End had to be cancelled until further notice.
The same fate befell a one-man show from Steven Berkoff.
That evening a broadcast of the movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino, garnered extraordinary ratings. Viewers tuned in simply to hear the kind of verbiage they themselves could no longer employ. Tony Montana’s prolific cursing brought a tear to many a wistful eye.
Meanwhile, at Chilton Mead, someone had come up with an idea.
8
“Windbag,” said Edwin Chao.
“Are you mad?” said Adrian Gold, the Ideative Manipulation team’s semantics guru.
“Set a logovirus to catch a logovirus. Release Windbag.”
“That’s the stupidest ₣µ¢µ!^§ idea I ever heard.”
Chao’s confidence crumbled. Blushing, he fumbled with his spectacles and murmured that it had only been a suggestion.
Professor Bantling was thumb-stroking his philtrum. “As a matter of fact, Edwin…”
9
It took a while to convince Nutter. With one logovirus already on the loose, unleashing another seemed to him, at the very least, rash. Yet eventually Bantling’s arguments began to make sense.
“I’ll run it past the PM,” Nutter said, and picked up the phone. “A moment’s privacy?”
Bantling had to wait outside Nutter’s office for quarter of an hour, during which time several of his colleagues passed by. All of them subjected him to frosty stares, and one even congratulated him sarcastically on putting everyone’s jobs on the line. When he was at last invited back in by Nutter, Bantling found the colonel looking markedly more haggard than when he had left him.
“The Prime Minister has such a saintly image, doesn’t he?” Nutter said. “But I tell you, get him away from the cameras and in a bad mood, and he could give a Glaswegian navvy a run for his money. If it wasn’t for Bowdler, the receiver would probably have melted in my hand. Anyhow… The good news is, he bought it. We can give the Windbag Strain a shot.”
“The bad news? I assume there is some.”
“Leave me to worry about that. What do you need? A company? A regiment?”
“How big is a regiment?”
“Three companies, three hundred men. With ancillary staff, say a thousand in toto.”
“Do you think that would be enough?”
“I think that’s about the most we can reasonably commandeer.”
“Then a regiment will be fine.”
10
At midday on Sunday 21st, a blue Transit van with blacked-out windows drove onto the parade ground of Her Majesty’s 11th Bayoneteers. Assembled to meet the van, in neat ranks and full uniform, was the entire complement of the regiment.
The van halted, and from its passenger-side door out stepped Colonel Nutter. He was greeted with a salute by Colonel Atkins of the Bayoneteers, and he returned the salute with a vigour and crispness undiminished by his eight years behind a desk at Chilton Mead.
“Thank you for the use of your men, Atkins.”
“Not at all, Nutter. Believe me, we want to help as much as we can. Have you heard about our RSM?”
“No.”
“Hospitalised.” Colonel Atkins twirled a forefinger beside his temple. “That sort of hospitalised. Can’t swear, and it’s driven him bonkers. A sergeant major lives by his bad language, doesn’t he?”
“Awful. My sympathies.”
“Well, quite. It means, at any rate, that the men have a vested interest. They’re mad keen to get their own back on this … this thing.”
The van’s rear doors opened, and Professor Bantling climbed out, followed by Edwin Chao. Both were carrying ear defenders, as was Nutter. The professor turned and beckoned, and from within the van’s darkened interior a man ventured hesitantly forth. He was dressed in the same type of hospital-style gown worn by all the test subjects at Chilton Mead, and the lower half of his face was encased in an elaborate-looking surgical gag. The daylight dazzled him. As Bantling and Chao helped him down from the van, he held a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. Barefoot, he stood on the parade ground tarmac, swaying tremulously, blinking hard, apparently unsure where he was or what he was doing there.
“That’s him, eh?” said Atkins.
“That’s him,” said Nutter. “Now listen. Do you want a set of these?” He held up his ear defenders. “For when he speaks? There are spares in the van.”
“Not me, old chap. What’s good enough for the men is good enough for me.”
Nutter gave a respectful nod. “Very well. Then shall we get on with it?”
At an order from a sergeant, the regiment was brought from at-ease to attention. “All right, you lot,” the sergeant barked. “You know what you’re here for, but in case any of you haven’t been paying attention, which wouldn’t surprise me, I’ll go though it again. It’s really very simple. When required, you will be asked to listen. That’s all. Just listen. In my experience not all of you are very good at listening, but never mind. I’m sure you’ll manage. If anyone does not hear that fellow over there with the gag when he speaks, say so immediately. I suspect the gentleman will be addressing you somewhat more quietly than me, which I know is hard to believe, seeing how dulcet my tones are. However, there is a chance his voice may not reach those of you at the back. I repeat, if this is the case, say so immediately. It is imperative that every one of you hears him talking. Have you got that? All right.”
The sergeant stamped over to Colonel Atkins, saluted, and said, “Regiment ready to listen, sah.”
“Very good. Colonel Nutter?”
Nutter turned to Bantling and indicated that he should proceed. Bantling and Chao lodged their ear defenders firmly on their heads, and Nutter did the same. As Bantling moved behind his test subject to undo the gag, Nutter pressed the ear defenders hard against his skull to make the soundproof seal tight and absolute.
For a long time the test subject said nothing. His mouth, freed from the gag, hung open in a bleary gape. His name was Alan Lloyd-Jacobs, he was fifty-two, and until three years ago he had been a classics teacher at a top public school, until an unfortunate incident—a misunderstanding, really—had brought about a spectacular fall from grace. Lloyd-Jacobs was still not quite sure how it had happened. The boy had been willing, hadn’t he? That was the distinct impression he had got. Willing, if a tad nervous. Perhaps it was the language he had used in his overtures towards the lad, all that talk of concupiscent sodality and the Hellenic tradition. Lloyd-Jacobs had always prided himself on his elaborate and often abstruse turn of phrase. Pupils used to tease him about it, but it made him different, individual, memorably eccentric, and that was what being a schoolteacher was all about, wasn’t it? Making an impression on impressionable minds? He could not help thinking, however, that had he not been such a confirmed sesquipedalian, the boy might have apprehended his intentions sooner and thus things would not have travelled as far down the fatal road of no return as they did. In the event, Lloyd-Jacobs had been ho
unded out of his job, out of his home, out of his life, and had ended up broke, haunting a rancid bedsit somewhere in Plaistow and drinking far too much cheap alcohol—had become human detritus, the jetsam of an uncomprehending and unforgiving world. And then some men had grabbed him one night and he had been taken off to a white cube, where he had been subjected to all manner of strangeness and indignity. And now this.
“Say something,” Professor Bantling urged him, speaking too loudly on account of the ear defenders.
Lloyd-Jacobs gazed around at the soldiers, row upon row of them, all sharp creases and strong chests and smooth chins. What could he say? What did everyone expect of him here?
“Come on,” said Bantling.
After several failed attempts, Lloyd-Jacobs finally found his voice. “In the Spartan army,” he said, “sexual affiliation between soldiers was deemed acceptable, nay positively encouraged. It cemented comradeship. It fostered loyalty. A man was far more likely to lay down his life for a brother-in-arms if he had first lain down with that brother-in-arms. Indeed –”
At this point, Bantling hurriedly reapplied the gag, and Lloyd-Jacobs was bundled back into the van.
Among the ranks of Her Majesty’s 11th Bayoneteers there was a certain amount of puzzlement, and not a little consternation as well. Had that man really just started to deliver a lecture on the subject of sex between soldiers? What in heaven’s name was the brass up to, ordering them to listen so attentively to that?
Confusing though this was, it was nothing compared with the orders the Bayoneteers received next.
11
It had already been decided, in an emergency session of the Cabinet, that soldiers should be put on the streets.
“Purely a precaution,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference. “Nothing to be alarmed about. There are people who might try to take advantage of the prevailing situation of uncertainty, and a high-profile military presence will discourage them from doing so. Looters, rioters and other troublemakers need to know that their behaviour will not be tolerated.”
“Prime Minister,” said one journalist, “is this a declaration of martial law?”
“Of course not,” came the reply. “If it was a declaration of martial law, I’d have said so, wouldn’t I?”
Martial law or not, the army was deployed swiftly, efficiently, extensively and prominently. By Sunday evening there was a pair of rifle-toting soldiers on every street corner, it seemed. Naturally their primary role was to keep the peace, and by and large they succeeded; but they had a secondary function as well. Each regiment, prior to being sent out, had been joined by a member of the 11th Bayoneteers. The Bayoneteers had made a point of talking to everyone they met, and by God, they were a chatty lot! Loquacious in the extreme. And their loquacity, indeed their profuse verbosity, was hard to resist mimicking. In no time at all, almost every member of the British army, from private to commander in chief, was exhibiting a facility with and a penchant for elocutionary expatiation of the highest order, seldom using a simple, unornamented sentence construction when something far more fanciful, protracted and obfuscatory could be employed.
The Windbag Strain was taking hold.
12
At Chilton Mead there was nothing to do but wait and see. Hopes were pinned on Windbag for two reasons. First, its symptoms were less startlingly dramatic than Bowdler’s, and nowhere near as unsettling. Second, by its very nature Windbag instilled the avoidance of vulgarity. No one who caught Windbag would resort to four-letter words, not while they were so enthusiastically utilising fourteen-letter words. The full range of the English language was theirs to command, so what need was there to wallow amid the baser idioms when altogether more refined and elegant modes of expression were available?
Monday morning saw members of the British public gracefully bidding one another “a pleasant day” and “adieu” as they passed by in the street. At breakfast tables, parents admonished their children to “exercise vocal desuetude” and “kindly give godspeed to the milk”. In offices across the land, banter of Wildean calibre was exchanged. Likewise in classrooms, teachers found themselves on the receiving end of waspish taunts which wouldn’t have displeased Noël Coward. Truckers’ cafés, normally home to the saltiest dialogue known to man, became something akin to literary salons, with the waitresses being complimented on their sizeable embonpoints even as they were invited to provide refills of that refreshing hot infusion which slaked the thirst like no other beverage. London taxi drivers opened up their fare-wearying homilies with phrases such as “Do you know whom it was my honour to chauffeur just recently?”, while an on-board train announcement from the conductor could last nearly the entire duration of the journey between stations. Radio DJs managed to do without music almost altogether, being so busy introducing songs that scarcely any airtime was left to play them in. Meanwhile, call centres suffered a marked decline in efficiency because telephone operatives were spending up to five minutes simply greeting customers.
Everywhere, garrulousness reigned supreme. A whole nation spoke in polysyllables and periphrasis, from just-learning toddler to slowly-forgetting senior citizen. The only place where no one noticed any difference was in the country’s law courts, which had long been havens for orotundity and convolution. There, it was business as usual.
For a day, it was amusing. People didn’t mind that some of the words coming out of their mouths were unusually and often unpronounceably ornate. They were so taken with their new-found familiarity with the nether reaches of the dictionary that they forgot all about their loss of invective capacity. Windbag, as Professor Bantling and colleagues had surmised, neutralised Bowdler’s symptoms. It was not cure but it was palliation, and that was the best result they could expect, under the circumstances.
By Tuesday, however, the British public were rapidly becoming disenchanted. Everyone was saying a lot but not conveying a great deal. There were plenty of words flying about but scant action. The country ground to a halt, much as it had on Saturday but, on a weekday, with more severe effect. Businesses were not doing business. Industry was not putting out output. The economy was starting to become economised. Precious little was being achieved, because everybody was taking too long giving orders and explaining in precise and abstruse detail what they needed. Concision was hard to come by, and hence so was productivity.
Bantling had suspected this might happen, but then the deployment of Windbag was, he had known, only a stopgap measure. It had been intended to give him and his assistants more time to come up with a vaccine, and they had been working round the clock in pursuit of that goal.
They had not yet succeeded, however, and Bantling realised that if they didn’t deliver the goods soon, the countrywide panic which he’d predicted for Bowdler would manifest as a consequence of Windbag instead. Colonel Nutter concurred. For him, there was added pressure coming from the direction of Downing Street, and not just from Number 10, either. At Number 11, concern was mounting over the sudden, sharp fall in trade and manufacturing revenue. Financially as well as socially, Britain was at risk of collapse. Nutter was besieged on two fronts at once. When he wasn’t talking to the PM, he was talking to the Chancellor. They were taking it in turns to phone him and berate him. It seemed the moment one of them put down the receiver, he would bang on the party wall to tell the next-door neighbour to pick up his receiver. Tag-team haranguing. Nutter was reaching the end of his rope.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the politest protest rallies in history occurred. A frightened, bewildered populace took to the streets, wielding placards which were inordinately large in order to accommodate the effusive slogans daubed on them. The protestors’ chants, too, were of significant length and intricacy. The ringleaders did not simply shout “What do we want?” but “Let us adequately state that object of desire which is of the utmost importance to our good selves”, and the massed responses to such exhortations could last for anything up to a minute. Shakespearean soliloquies have expressed more in less t
ime. The protestors marched through the centres of all the major cities and voiced their fear and discontent. They pressed their already aching tongues into service, letting the government know that they had stomached a plentiful sufficiency of the current situation and were unwilling to accept yet a further portion.
13
Nutter delivered the bleak news to the Chilton Mead boffins on Wednesday morning.
“You’ve failed to come up with any results,” he said, “so I have no alternative. I’m informing the PM that he must resort to drastic measures.”
“D-drastic?” stammered Bantling. “How drastic?”
Nutter rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “On Sunday, the PM told me that if Windbag doesn’t do the trick—and I think we can all agree that it hasn’t—he’s going to go to the Americans.”
“What do the Yanks have to do with this?” demanded Chao. “What the ₣µ¢µ business is it of theirs?” By now, the sound of a Bowdlerised profanity was so familiar it passed unremarked.
“For one thing,” said Nutter, “the Americans rule the world, like it or not. Everything is their business. But for another thing, their research into logoviruses is considerably more advanced than ours.”
“I doubt that,” scoffed Bantling.
“Doubt all you want, but it’s true. Some of the stuff they’ve been getting up to in their Nevada facilities makes you lot’s work look positively Stone Age. I’m sorry to be brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Geniuses though you all quite clearly are, you’re back-of-the-room schoolkids compared to them.”
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