by Sue Townsend
As she was letting herself into Number Nine, William drove by in a white pick-up truck on the side of which was emblazoned ‘Arthur Grice, Scaffolding’. She could hear Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ pouring out of the open windows. He papped the hooter and pulled up.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
William had been given permission to leave the estate and work on a contract erecting scaffolding, in preparation for converting a Norman church into a casino in Swindon.
‘It was OK,’ said William. ‘We stayed in a Travelodge, the other chaps were terribly nice to me. I took a bit of stick at first because my hands were so soft.’
The Queen said, ‘Was it horribly hard work?’
‘Yes, horribly,’ said William. He held out his hands to show the Queen. They were now cut and calloused, but the Queen could see that he was proud of having completed a week of manual work.
She said nothing to him, but she was proud of the boy. He had lived most of his life on the estate, surrounded by some dreadful people, but had managed somehow to remain law-abiding and utterly charming.
2
England was an unhappy land. The people were fearful, believing that life itself was composed of danger, and unknown and unknowable threats to their safety. Old people did not leave their homes after dark, children were not allowed to play outside even in the daylight hours and were escorted everywhere by anxious adults. To make themselves feel better the people spent their money on things that diverted and amused them. There was always something they thought they must have to make them happy. But when they had bought the object of their desire, they found, to their profound disappointment, that the object was no longer desirable, and that far from making them happy, they felt nothing but remorse and the sadness of loss.
To help alleviate the pensions crisis, the laws on euthanasia were liberalized and pensioners contemplating suicide were encouraged by a government information leaflet entitled ‘Make Way for the Young’.
In a desperate attempt to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about crime and social disorder, the Government’s Department of Liveability embarked on a bold programme to convert the satellite council estates into Exclusion Zones, where the criminal, the antisocial, the inadequate, the feckless, the agitators, the disgraced professionals, the stupid, the drug-addicted and the morbidly obese lived cheek by jowl.
The Royal Family, those who had not fled abroad, were living in the Flowers Exclusion Zone (known locally as the Fez) one hundred and nineteen miles from Buckingham Palace, in the East Midlands Region. Arthur Grice, a scaffolding magnate and multi-millionaire, owned and managed the estate; he considered it to be his personal fiefdom. The Royals lived in Hell Close, a cul-de-sac of sixteen small semi-detached ex-council houses. The houses had small front gardens, fenced to waist height. A few of the gardens were lovingly kept. Prince Charles regularly won the Grice Best Kept Garden Award, whereas his neighbours’, the Thread-golds’, garden was an eyesore of old mattresses, vicious brambles and festering rubbish bags.
When Charles offered to clear up and cultivate the Threadgolds’ disgraceful garden, Vince Threadgold said, ‘You ain’t confiscatin’ my land. This ain’t the Middle Ages, an’ you ain’t got no royal prerogative no more.’
Beverley Threadgold had shouted, ‘Anyroad up, there’s field mice nesting in them old mattresses. I thought you was for wildlife!’
A twenty-foot-high metal fence topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras formed the boundary between the back gardens of Hell Close and the outside world. At the only entrance to the Fez, on a triangular piece of muddy ground, squatted a series of interconnected Portakabins, housing the Grice Security Police. The residents of the zone were required to wear an ankle tag and carry an identity card at all times. Their movements were followed by the security police on a bank of CCTV screens, installed in one of the Portakabins.
When Camilla’s tag had been fitted, immediately after her wedding on the estate, she had said, with her usual cheerful pragmatism, ‘I think it flatters my ankle beautifully.’ By contrast, Princess Anne had wrestled two security police to the floor before a third officer had finally managed to attach her tag.
There were many prohibitions and restrictions imposed on the residents of the Fez. A strict curfew had to be adhered to; residents must be inside their homes from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m. at weekends. During the week they must be inside their houses from 9.30 p.m. Residents were not allowed to leave the estate. All correspondence, both in and out of the Exclusion Zone, was read and censored as appropriate. The telephone system did not extend to the outside world. There were only two free-to-view television channels, the Advertising Channel, which showed a few programmes now and then, and the Government News Channel, which, unsurprisingly, had a perceptible bias in favour of the Government.
The Fez heaved with dogs. They were everywhere, running in the streets, gathering on pavements, fighting on the few areas of scrubby grass and guarding their unlovely territory. There was not a single minute, night or day, when a dog was not barking. After a while the human residents no longer heard the noise: it became as much part of them as the sound of their own breathing. It was a continuing mystery as to how some owners managed to acquire their pedigree dogs, which often cost many hundreds of pounds, since all residents received the same weekly allowance of £71.32.
Jack Barker, leader of the Cromwell Party, Prime Minister and architect of the Exclusion Zones, could not get out of bed. It was ten thirty in the morning and he had already missed three appointments. He lay under the duvet in his bedroom at Number Ten Downing Street, listening to Big Ben striking the minutes and hours of his life away.
He was tired, he lived in a permanent state of déjà vu: he felt that everything he said, he had said before. Everything he did had already been done. Most of his trusted colleagues, those who had been elected with him thirteen years before, on a heady mix of idealism and principle, were dead or had resigned. Jack’s wife of twenty-four years, Pat, his childhood sweetheart and political ally, had confronted him one night and accused him of fraternizing with the Devil after he had spent a convivial evening dining with Sir Nicholas Soames at a gentlemen’s club in St James’s. She had screamed, ‘You’re the leader of the Republican Party, for Christ’s sake! You called the fucking cat Tom Paine!’
Soon after Jack’s second election victory, the Republican Party had changed its name. A team of brand management consultants had deliberated for months, at an estimated cost of three million pounds, on the wisdom or otherwise of giving the party a new name. A 402-page report was produced, which almost nobody read in full, but instead turned to the executive summary, which said that, yes, a new name was called for due to constant confusion with the American Republican Government, underlined when Jonathan Ross called the Prime Minister ‘Mr Pwesident’ on Ross’s Friday-night chat show. Another firm of fantastically clever consultants was contracted to think up a new name and logo. This team retired to a country house hotel where they brainstormed for five consecutive days and nights before coming up with the Cromwell Party.
Jack was now married to Caroline, who had fine bones and was the eldest daughter of a baronet, but Caroline found politics ‘tiresome’ and had recently started to criticize the way he held his fork. Jack was slightly afraid of Caroline, her vowels intimidated him and her pillow talk was formidably intellectual. Last night she had thrown Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique across the bedroom, shouting, ‘Lightweight!’
Jack had looked up from a report on phone tapping (161 Members of Parliament were currently having extramarital affairs), and said, ‘Who’s a lightweight? Me?’
‘No, fucking Voltaire,’ she had said. ‘Enlightenment, my arse!’
Jack had looked at her lovely profile, at her angry, heaving breasts, and felt a twinge of desire, but the last time they had made love, Caroline had said, after they had peeled away from each other, ‘Jack, you make love like a laboratory rat; your body’s there, but your brain is elsewhere!’
If Caroline had a weakness it was her inability to pass a handbag shop. She currently had her name on a waiting list for a black Italian handbag, costing £2,000. When Jack grumbled that she already had eleven black handbags, she screamed, ‘I can’t be seen with last season’s handbag. I’m the wife of the Prime Minister.’
Jack’s mother had used the same navy-blue handbag for forty years. When the handles had become frayed she had taken the bag to a cobbler, who had repaired the handles for one and sixpence. When he told Caroline this, she said, ‘I’ve seen photographs of your mother. She made Worzel Gummidge look positively elegant!’
Caroline had a pale beauty that mesmerized the picture editors of the English newspapers. She appeared on the front pages of most of them on a daily basis, often on the flimsiest of pretexts: ‘CAZ BREAKS NAIL!’ had been one recent headline.
Big Ben struck eleven times. A statement was issued to the press that the Prime Minister was ‘indisposed’. The pound fell against the dollar.
Jack’s Government was sometimes accused of being totalitarian, which made him laugh. He was far from being a Stalin or a Mao; it wasn’t his fault there were no viable opposition parties. He had been forced to detain some of his potential opponents, but only because they had been stirring up trouble. He could not take chances with the security of the country, could he? He was hardly responsible for the political apathy that hung over England like a fog, was he?
A little crowd of agitators, Republican purists, had stirred themselves enough to hold an unlawful protest outside the Palace of Westminster, accusing the Government of revisionism. They had been dealt with but Jack could not help feeling that the tide was about to turn and cut him off from the shore. Perhaps he should not have put Stephen Fry under house arrest. It hadn’t done any good: Fry had continued to mock the Government on the Internet, from his Norfolk home. He should have sent Fry to Turkey to have his cuticles seen to by one of their security forces’ crack manicurists. That would have wiped the smile off Fry’s satirical face. Jack laughed briefly under the duvet, but soon resumed his gloomy thoughts.
His workload was unremitting, remorseless. Just lately, Jack had begun to fantasize about walking away from his desk and never going back. Let some other poor bastard make the decisions, chair the meetings, deal with the arseholes and fools he was surrounded by. Had nobody noticed he was going mad? Were they unaware that he had developed a tick in his right eyelid? That he was forgetting the simplest of words? Didn’t the strain show in the way that he occasionally found himself weeping real tears in public? What did they think he was doing when they saw him mopping his eyes?
He was not a quitter; he couldn’t give the job up of his own volition. His mother’s last words had been, ‘Jack, get rid of the monarchy.’ Though this was disputed by others round her deathbed, who thought she had said, ‘Jack, give Sid me front-door key.’ It was hard to be sure because of her oxygen mask.
He knew the Chancellor was after his job. Jack wished Fletcher would make his move and stick a metaphorical dagger in his back; he couldn’t do it to himself. He couldn’t let his mother down. He pulled the duvet over his head and reviewed the past thirteen years. He’d failed to win England’s independence from America; he was spending billions on an asymmetrical intractable war in the Middle East. The roads and motorways were almost at a standstill. He was still subsidizing British farmers for doing fuck all. The rich were vastly richer, and the poor seemed to be morphing into a deviant subculture. The one thing he could be proud of though, Jack thought, was the removal from British life of hereditary titles. He had, with the stroke of a pen, destroyed the monarchy, forever.
3
Inspector Clive Lancer, the senior officer in Arthur Grice’s private police force, was giving new recruit Dwayne Lockhart an induction to the Flowers Exclusion Zone. Dwayne was uncomfortable, not only because his uniform was slightly too small for his lanky body but also because he knew most of the people in the Fez and from now on he was expected to order them about and report them for various misdemeanours. As the two men walked around the almost deserted streets, a little plane circled overhead.
‘Spotter plane,’ said Inspector Lancer, throwing back his huge head. ‘He’s doing aerial photography, looking for illegal sheds.’
‘Is it against the law to have a shed now?’ asked Dwayne.
‘It is if they’ve not got planning permission and they’re evading council tax. A shed counts as a home improvement,’ said the inspector. Sensing Dwayne’s disapproval, Lancer said, ‘We’ve got to keep on top of the scum, lad. Give ’em an inch an’ they’ll thieve the sodding ruler.’
Dwayne thought, yesterday I was one of ‘the scum’, the only difference between then and now is that I’ve took this job and had my tag took off official. I can go where I want now.
He couldn’t wait to visit the lending library in the town. He had heard that there were thousands of books on the shelves.
They walked down Bluebell Lane; known locally as Slapper Alley because of the preponderance of teenage mothers living there.
‘We’re on slapper territory now, lad,’ said Inspector Lancer. ‘Some of these slappers can intoxicate a man and make him lose his head. You’re replacing Taffy Jones, who was lured on to the metaphorical rocks by a slapper called Shyanne Grubbett.
‘Taffy told me at the disciplinary hearing that he took one look at her white tracksuit, stilettos and hooped earrings and he was already halfway to losing his job. When she unzipped her tracksuit top and he saw her knockers spilling out of her skimpy Nike vest, he said he was lost.
‘So keep your guard up, lad. The Jezebels are always waiting for fresh meat.’
Dwayne was extremely well read, but as was so often the case, he was relatively sexually inexperienced. There had been a few fumblings with an older girl at school, but he was still technically a virgin.
Inspector Lancer said, ‘We’ll stop here and wait for a slapper to come along. I want to demonstrate stop and search procedure.’
They leaned against a wall covered in obscene and possibly libellous graffiti about a woman called Jodie and her relationship with her dog. It wasn’t long before a sweet-faced girl pushing a fat baby in a buggy came towards them.
Lancer sprang to attention and said, ‘Right, I’ll demonstrate a female stop and search.’ He held his arm out and the girl sighed and stopped. Lancer said, ‘First, ascertain the name and tag registration number of the suspect.’
The girl said, automatically, ‘Paris Butterworth, B9176593,’ and produced her ID card. She pointed at the baby, who was chewing at the corner of an unopened packet of Monster Munch crisps. ‘’E’s Fifty-cents Butterworth. ’E ain’t been tagged yet, ’e ain’t old enough.’
Lancer said, ‘Ask to see the baby’s ID, Dwayne. You can’t believe what these slappers tell you.’
Dwayne said, ‘Would you mind if I had a look at Fifty-cents’ ID, Miss Butterworth?’
She unzipped the baby’s mini-anorak, delved beneath his sweatshirt and pulled out an ID card hanging from a blue ribbon. Two of the card’s corners had obviously been chewed.
Lancer examined the card closely and said, ‘Note the damage to this card, Dwayne.’ Then he said to Paris, ‘That is damage to government property. I could give you an on-the-spot fine for that.’
Paris said indignantly, ‘’E’s teethin’, ’e’s chewin’ owt ’e gets ’is ’ands on.’
Lancer said quickly, ‘We’ll let it go this time, Miss Butterworth. Right, having ascertained the identity of the suspects, we proceed to the search. In the absence of a female officer we must proceed carefully, Dwayne. So, avoiding the obvious erogenous zones, give Butterworth a quick pat down.’
Dwayne and Paris exchanged a glance. Dwayne thought, she’s got lovely eyes.
‘You’re looking for drugs, stolen goods, concealed weapons and bomb-making materials,’ said Lancer.
Paris said, ‘As if! I wouldn’t know a bomb-making material if it come up an’ smacked me in
the gob.’
Lancer said, ‘Al Qaeda are known to have infiltrated slapper society in the past, Dwayne. So we take no chances.’
Lancer took his truncheon out and pointed with it at various parts of Paris’s slim body, before saying, ‘Now you pat her down, Dwayne.’
Dwayne tentatively ran his hands around her waist and shoulders, down her back and around her shins. He could feel her trembling and said, ‘Sorry.’
Lancer continued, ‘Then, once you are satisfied that the suspect is not concealing anything on her person, we search the baby.’
Dwayne bent down and said, ‘Hello, Fifty-cents. Can I tickle your tummy, eh?’
Fifty-cents stared back warily. He wasn’t keen on men. Men shouted and made his mother cry. Dwayne quickly ran his hands around the squashy body of the stern-faced baby, finding nothing unusual apart from a chewed-up plastic giraffe, which had fallen inside his vest. Dwayne held the model giraffe out to Paris; she took the animal from him and said, ‘’E’s mad ’bout giraffes.’
Inspector Lancer searched the bag that was hanging from the handles of the buggy and pulled out a letter addressed to Mohammed Yousaf at Wakefield Prison. He handed the letter to Dwayne and said, ‘Why am I going to confiscate this letter, Dwayne?’
Dwayne tried to remember the half an hour that had been devoted to correspondence in his week’s training. He said, ‘Residents of an Exclusion Zone are prohibited from corresponding with serving prisoners.’
Lancer said, ‘You’re a naughty girl.’
Paris’s face crumpled, and she began to weep. Nothing in Dwayne’s training had prepared him for this situation. He stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do.
Paris sobbed. ‘It’s Mohammed’s birthday next week.’
‘Well, I’m sure we’ll all wish him many happy returns,’ said Lancer. ‘Be on your way.’
Dwayne wanted to apologize to Paris. He hoped that she could see from his expression when he looked at her, that he would not have confiscated her letter. He didn’t know how long he could stand this job if today was anything to go by. Paris zipped up the baby’s coat, gave him the giraffe and walked away in the direction of the shops.