by Sue Townsend
As they were shuffling their papers together and closing their laptops, Boy said, ‘I don’t have to keep this fucking dog, do I? I can’t stand the bloody things.’
‘No,’ said a press adviser. ‘It can go missing. We could spin it out for weeks.’ The adviser began to fore-see the press campaign, saying, ‘I can see it now, Boy tramping the streets looking for his lost dog. You could give one of your “blinking back tears” interviews, Boy.’
Boy said, ‘Good work, team. Win, win, eh?’
Dwayne was sitting with five other trainees including Peter Penny in an improvised classroom at the Control Centre. Inspector Lancer was giving a lecture on ‘patriotic protection’. A stun gun was being passed from hand to hand around the small room.
Lancer was saying, ‘A stun gun is a most effective non-lethal weapon. If you’re attacked by Exclusion Zoners, or threatened by one of their mad dogs, don’t panic or cry for your mother. You only need to touch your attacker with one of these stun guns for three or, in the case of fat bastards, five seconds. The high-voltage shock will immobilize them for a few minutes: long enough to get a few hard kicks in, eh lads?’
Dwayne handed the stun gun back to the inspector. He could think of no circumstances in which he would use the horrible thing. Inspector Lancer patted the stun gun fondly, as though it were a household pet.
Lancer continued, ‘Life in the Exclusion Zones is full of danger; your average street is chock-a-block with ruthless criminals, terrorists and the like, and because lily-livered poofs like Prince Charles cry into their lentils at the very mention of arming the police with AK47s, we have to settle for the next best thing. So, now I turn to the Grice taser gun, which happens to be a particular favourite of mine. If you’ve been attacked by an assailant before you’ll know how important it is to have a powerful weapon.’ He took the little taser gun from the holster around his waist and said, ‘Come up here, Dwayne.’
Dwayne got up from his chair reluctantly, keeping his eyes on the small black gun; Lancer waved him to the end of the room. Dwayne stood with his back against the wall.
Lancer said, ‘Just point and shoot the taser at your assailant. The taser will fire wires up to a range of fifteen feet and attach themselves by little hooks to the assailant’s clothing, thereby sending powerful “T” waves through the wires into their scumbag bodies. This will jam the criminal’s nervous system. The sudden deadlock will cause total incapacitation.’
Lancer pulled the trigger of the gun and two wires shot out and attached themselves to Dwayne’s jacket. Dwayne screamed in agony, dropped to the floor, curled into a foetal position and lay there, motionless. Peter Penny rose to his feet, then sat down again.
Lancer carried on addressing the rest of the group, ‘This will give you time to leave the location or call for reinforcements. The Grice taser gun does not cause long-term damage, you’ll be pleased to know, Dwayne, and it’s more effective and faster than poncy chemical sprays. So that’s your common or garden taser. Any questions?’
‘How much do they cost, sir?’ asked Peter Penny when it became obvious that no one else was going to speak.
‘They’ll cost you about five hundred quid a go.’
‘They’ll cost us?’ checked Peter Penny.
Inspector Lancer gave Dwayne a gentle kick to check that he was still alive. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mr Grice has generously offered to accept four easy payments of one hundred and twenty-five pounds to be docked out of your wages over the coming months.’
After fifteen minutes Dwayne had recovered enough to be able to sit up and accept a glass of water from Peter Penny. When Lancer came over to him to take his order for the taser, Dwayne said, ‘I think I’ll pass on it, sir.’
Lancer said, ‘Think again, lad. From today a taser is considered to be essential equipment, and you can’t work for Grice Security without one.’
‘And they’re not provided free?’ checked Dwayne.
‘No,’ said Lancer. ‘Mr Grice is not made of money.’
12
Boy had represented the Great Clutterbuck constituency in Norfolk for five years. He had won the seat with a majority of over five thousand when the incumbent Member of Parliament had been discovered pocketing some of the funds of a children’s hospice. Boy hardly ever visited Great Clutterbuck. It was difficult to get there by car, the trains were infrequent and overcrowded and the local airport closed down at 5 p.m. Few of his constituents noticed his absence. He kept the elderly women activists happy by attending the Christmas Fayre, the Easter Bonnet Competition, the Summer Fête and the annual Bonfire Party held in the grounds of nearby Sandringham House on November the fifth.
His constituency agent, a retired butcher, Derek Proudfoot MBE, dealt with the usual tedious constituency problems: complaints about damp housing, demands for zebra crossings and the constant drip of grievances against Vulcan, the government computer which, when it was not erroneously paying pensioners a million pounds a week, was expecting single parents to live on one pound ten pence for the same period. Boy loathed the flat vastness of the horizon that surrounded Great Clutterbuck. He found the local accent incomprehensible and his wife complained that it was impossible to find focaccia in the village shop.
It was sunny when a convoy of 4 x 4s swept along Great Clutterbuck High Street on its way to the ‘Fossdyke Rescue Centre’, where a madwoman, Ms Fossdyke, harboured stray dogs from the Greater Norfolk Area. Ms Fossdyke patrolled the byways in a converted ambulance on a constant lookout for down-and-out dogs. When Boy’s press officer had rung her to ask if she would object to being filmed helping Boy choose a dog, she had hesitated. When an ‘inconvenience fee’ of three hundred and fifty pounds was mentioned, she agreed.
It was grisly filming. Boy had to trudge in his wellingtons up and down the narrow cinder path in front of the cages of rescued dogs, trying to look interested. Nothing went right. The dogs seemed to take an instant dislike to him.
The director said to Ms Fossdyke, ‘Isn’t there a sweet little puppy with, you know… big eyes?’
‘There’s Tommy,’ Ms Fossdyke croaked. ‘He’s got a thyroid complaint.’
The director had already decided that Ms Fossdyke would be edited out of the footage. She was alarmingly eccentric. Boy thought, if I was told by somebody that Ms Fossdyke had been suckled by wolves, I’d believe them.
In a break from filming caused by a series of low-flying jets, a car drew up in the lane at the end of the drive to the kennels. A door opened then slammed shut. The car sped away, with a melodramatic squeal of its brakes. Ms Fossdyke excused herself, saying, ‘Another poor wretch.’ She lurched away down the drive.
She came back holding a potato sack tied at the top with many knots. The sack was moving, something was whimpering inside. The cameraman shouted, ‘Wait,’ as Ms Fossdyke began to undo the knots.
The director shouted, ‘Boy, I want you in shot. Ms Fossdyke, fuck off and let Boy open the sack.’
Boy said, ‘I’m not up to date with my tetanus shots. Let her open the sack.’
Ms Fossdyke’s knobbly fingers picked at the few final knots and a little black-haired puppy blinked in the daylight. There was a collective, ‘Aah.’ Boy put his hand out and the little dog licked his fingers. Once again the crowd of onlookers said, ‘Aah.’
Boy picked the dog out of the sack and cradled it in his arms, saying into the camera, with a wavering voice that was not entirely bogus, ‘I’ve found my dog.’
The director shouted, ‘Cut! Make-up, our little friend in the sack looks a bit too healthy for a puppy that’s just been dumped. Break it down a bit, will you? Give it a bit of wear and tear.’
Boy was overwhelmed by the immediate love he felt for this little nameless dog. He had witnessed his eldest child, Dora, being born, but when the midwife had passed the baby to Boy, his main emotion had been relief that his wife, Cordelia, had stopped screaming, and he was glad when the midwife took the child away to be cleaned and weighed. But now he held on to the litt
le dog and would not allow the make-up artist or anybody else to take it from him.
To break the long drive back to London, Boy and his entourage called on Stephen Fry. They knew he would be at home in his old mellow-bricked rectory because he was under house arrest. He’d been found guilty at Norwich Crown Court of ‘inappropriate and deliberate mockery of the authorities’.
Boy had previously met Fry at the opening of a new pig-slaughtering house in Watton. Until very recently, Fry had been a National Treasure and Boy’s most famous constituent. His trial had been seen as a watershed: many comedians had fled the country and were living, for some inexplicable reason, in Belgium.
As they drove down the country lanes that led to Fry’s house, Boy sat with the dog on his lap, addressing it directly, talking gibberish. His advisers debated among themselves about what the dog should be called.
‘The name needs to be politically expedient,’ said one.
‘It needs to appeal to a wide demographic,’ said another.
Boy said, ‘Fuck all that, his name is Billy.’
Fry came to the door, accompanied by a lolloping chestnut-coloured dog with sad eyes and long drooping ears.
‘This is Chaucer,’ said Fry. ‘He won’t hurt you, though he has a vicious tongue.’
Chaucer looked up at Billy, who was still in Boy’s arms, and asked, ‘How old are you?’
Billy said, ‘Three months.’
‘Three months!’ said Chaucer. ‘I’m a very old dog. Is he your first owner?’
‘No,’ said Billy. ‘My first owner didn’t like me peeing in his shoes. He threw me into a black bag and dumped me on the side of the road.’
Chaucer appraised Boy, who was talking and laughing with Stephen Fry on the doorstep.
Chaucer said, ‘A word of advice, young fellow. Whatever your opinions, keep them to yourself. Our masters like us to have spirit, but not independence. Fry is a good master, I can’t fault him – apart from a tendency he has to open his heart to me. He tells me things that frankly, Billy, I don’t want to hear. He’s not as confident as he looks. Bless him.’
Boy asked Fry how he was finding house arrest.
Fry said, ‘I’m having a splendid time. I read, I fart about in the house; I drop to my knees every day in thanks to Jack Barker. He’s given me a lovely, albeit enforced, holiday.’
Boy asked, ‘Are you doing any work at all?’
Fry drawled, ‘I scribble a few words now and then, when the fancy takes me.’
Boy took this to mean that Fry was writing another book. He said, ‘I wondered if I could count on your support, Stephen?’
Fry said, enigmatically, ‘I wonder. Pray, do tell me how your policies differ from those of your rivals.’
Boy said, ‘There’s no point in pretending that we’d manage the economy any better: the western world is on the same fiscal treadmill, but the Cromwellians are against the monarchy and dogs, and we New Cons are very much for them.’
Fry said, ‘The paucity of your ambitions will, I expect, be matched by the parochialism of their execution.’
Boy was unsure if he had been insulted or not. He said, ‘If you vote for me, and I win, Stephen, you’ll be released immediately from house arrest.’
Fry said, ‘Oh dear, and I was so enjoying my sojourn in the country.’
Boy said, ‘Can we use a photograph of you and Chaucer in our election campaign?’
Fry said, ‘If I did that, Boy, I’d risk being sent to the Cromer Exclusion Zone. Which truly would be a fate worse than death.’
As Boy turned to leave, Chaucer barked to Billy, ‘Good luck, and remember to use your eyes. They can’t resist our eyes.’
13
Arthur Grice was staring gloomily through the glass in his living-room floor to the fast-running mill stream below. The branch of a tree had wedged itself in the narrow channel and had gathered around itself an old Coke can, several plastic bags and, to Grice’s disgust, a condom which, full of water, mocked Grice’s male appendage. Grice was trying to work out how to clear the rubbish. He had invited several VIPs to a cocktail party that evening, and he had wanted to impress them with the Old Mill’s outstanding feature. He had rehearsed in his mind the moment when, having gathered his guests in a circle around the glass floor, he would use the remote control to switch on the lights that illuminated the millstream. He anticipated the gasps of amazement and the cries of, ‘Wow!’
Sandra, his wife, had told the snooty estate agent, employed to find them a character property, that the house must have ‘the wow factor’. Arthur wondered if, in the hour before the guests were due to arrive, he could borrow a small child from somewhere and get the kid to jump in the stream and free the branch and the rubbish.
Sandra called to him from the hot tub on the veranda outside the living room. He slid open the glass doors and removed his terry-towelling robe. As he climbed into the tub Sandra closed her eyes against his nakedness. Her new breasts bobbed above the bubbling water like two huge pink ping-pong balls. Arthur was dying to get his hands on them but Sandra had told him that her breasts must not be touched or fondled for at least eighteen months. Arthur preferred his wife’s old, original breasts. They were less intimidating, and friendlier, he thought.
Sandra said, ‘How did you get on with the Queen, then?’
Arthur sighed, ‘I done everything right, din’t lay a finger on her, I called her by the right names, but she din’t seem keen on giving us a title, Sandra.’
Sandra said, ‘We work our fingers to the bone, Arthur, and what do we get for it? A slap in the fucking face.’
They talked for a while about the various Grice businesses. Sandra said, ‘We’ve got so much money in the bank, I’m running out of ways to spend it, but do you know what we ’aven’t got?’
Arthur didn’t know. As far as he was concerned they’d got it all: electric curtains, gigantic plasma tellies on the wall of every room, white carpets throughout, an Italian coffee-making machine, a French stove, an American fridge, four cars in the garage. ‘What ain’t we got?’ he asked, genuinely wanting to know.
‘Respect,’ she said, examining her red-painted nail extensions. ‘People think we’re common. I want to be respectable, Arthur. I want to mingle with people with class, and a bit of refinement.’
Arthur took her hand. She was asking for the one thing he could not give her.
She cried, ‘I’m fucking sick of havin’ friends called Mad Mick or Brutal Bob, even your mam’s called Knuckles Nora!’
Arthur took umbrage and said, ‘You’re going too far now, Sandra. It’s years since me mam ’ad a fistfight.’
Arthur’s mother, Nora, was downstairs preparing food for the cocktail party. She lived in the granny annexe that had been converted from a building where sacks of grain were once stored. Arthur worshipped his mother, and she worshipped him. In Nora’s eyes Arthur had thrown himself away on Sandra, who she considered to be ‘as spoilt as a sailor’s arse’.
‘You could go on a “Find Your Inner Princess” course,’ said Arthur. ‘The Queen’s butler is running one at Cavendish Manor. We done a scaffolding job there. You could learn to talk better and how to lay a table and ’ow to geddout of a car without showing your fanny.’
Sandra said unenthusiastically, ‘I went on a course once and I ended up on probation.’
Arthur said, placatingly, ‘Yeah, but that yoga wanker was asking to be duffed up. This course is a different barrel of monkeys, it’s five grand a week, and you’d be mixing with near aristocracy.’
Nora Grice slid open the glass doors and shouted, ‘I’ve done the cheese an’ pineapple, and the chipolatas are in the oven. I’ll get off now, I’ve got to change the bandages on me legs.’
Arthur said, ‘Thanks, Mam.’
Sandra said, ‘Nora, if you’re thinking of joining us later, have a shave first, will you?’
Nora stomped away on her ulcerated legs.
Arthur said, ‘I’ll ring that butler bloke tomorrow and get
you a place.’
Sandra said, despondently, ‘Don’t bother, Arthur. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
‘But you can!’ said Arthur. He called Rocky upstairs and tried to get the puzzled dog to sit upright on his hind legs.
When Rocky repeatedly fell over, Grice lost his temper and kicked Rocky across the decking, saying, ‘You’re neither use nor ornament.’
Rocky growled, ‘Kick me again and I’ll rip your throat out,’ then turned and ran downstairs.
Later that evening, as Arthur and Sandra were chatting to their guests, most of whom were drawn from the professional criminal classes, Arthur mentioned with apparent nonchalance that he had been talking to the Queen earlier in the day, in her own home. ‘A very nice lady,’ said Arthur, ‘very regal. I’d lay my life down for ’er.’
There was loud assent from the criminals, their wives and girlfriends, all of whom considered themselves to be true patriots.
Later, one of the criminals sidled up to Arthur and, putting his mouth close to Arthur’s ear, said, ‘There’s a story doing the rounds, that the Queen has got the Imperial State Crown ’idden somewhere in her ’ouse. It’s said by them in the know, that the crown is priceless, Arthur, and we all know how much that is, don’t we?’
Arthur said, ‘Anybody what even thinks of ’avin’ that crown away is already dead: ’is legs is in concrete buckets. ’E’s ’anging from a meat hook. ’E’s falling from an ’igh building. In fact, I’m startin’ to feel very sorry for that bloke.’
After their guests had departed and Nora was washing up downstairs, Arthur said, ‘I think that went well, don’t you?’
Sandra yawned, ‘Apart from your mother’s shaving cuts. She might have wiped the blood off before she went round with the chipolatas.’
14
Camilla was having her hair coloured in Beverley Threadgold’s spectacularly untidy kitchen, where a small television was balanced precariously on a cluttered work surface. Camilla was slightly alarmed at the eye-watering strength of the peroxide solution that Beverley was sloshing on to her hair. She said, ‘Bev, are you an experienced colourist?’