by Tom Sharpe
‘Can’t,’ he said finally, and unconsciously tried the edge of his knife on the ball of his thumb. The manager found the gesture reason enough.
‘All right. I’ll just put you down as having domestic reasons for wanting time off.’
‘Have,’ said Willy, and left the manager even more bewildered than before. He trotted up the street towards Rabbitry Road and was just in time to spot Yapp striding down it towards him. Willy merged with a woman pushing a pram and emerged when Yapp had passed. From then on he was never far behind, though it took him all his stamina to keep up, and by the time Yapp marched into the Museum Willy was glad of a breather. Peering through the glass door he saw Yapp accost the Curator and then slipped inside to listen.
‘The Petrefact Papers?’ the Curator said. ‘Yes, they’re certainly here but I’m afraid I can’t let you see them.’
‘But I’ve already explained my credentials,’ said Yapp, ‘and I have here a letter from Lord Petrefact . . .’
Willy made a note of the fact and also its failure to impress the Curator.
‘I still have to say No. I have explicit instructions from Miss Emmelia not to allow anyone to see the family documents unless she has authorized their viewing. You’ll have to get her permission.’
‘I see. In that case I will obtain it,’ said Yapp, and after glancing briefly round the Museum and complimenting the Curator on the display of early farm implements, went out into the street. Willy followed. This time their route took them down to the Mill where, much to his surprise and Yapp’s premature approval, they found a line of pickets carrying placards demanding higher pay for shorter hours and threatening scabs and blacklegs. To the best of Willy Coppett’s knowledge pay was high and hours short at the Mill and he couldn’t for the life of him understand it. Yapp on the contrary thought he could, but disliked the suggestion that he was a scab and blackleg.
‘My name is Yapp, Professor Yapp. You may have heard of me,’ he told the leader of the pickets, a large man whose placard while smaller than the others had a rather heavier handle which he waved menacingly. ‘I wouldn’t dream of strike-breaking.’
‘Then you don’t cross the picket line.’
‘I’m not trying to cross it,’ said Yapp, ‘I have come here to make a study of your working conditions.’
‘Who for?’
Here Yapp hesitated. The truth, that he was working for Lord Petrefact, was hardly likely to find favour and it went against his nature to tell a downright lie, especially to a shop steward.
‘I’m from Kloone University,’ he equivocated, ‘I’m Professor of Demotic Historiography there and I am particularly interested—’
‘Tell it to the bosses, mate. We aren’t.’
‘Aren’t what?’
‘Particularly bleeding interested. Now shove off.’
To emphasize the point he raised his placard. Yapp shoved off and Willy took up his station behind him with the satisfying knowledge that whatever extras he might have been offered the night before, Professor Yapp was getting nowhere fast today. And fast was all too true. By the time they had walked, and in Willy’s case dashed, for a mile along the river bank, had gone aimlessly up one street of mill houses and down another where there were no front gardens in which he could possibly conceal himself so that he had to wait until Yapp had turned the corner before he sprinted after him, and had had to run a gauntlet of abusive small boys in the process, Willy was beginning to think he was earning his ten quid the hard way. To make things even harder Yapp stopped several times to speak to people and Willy had to repeat the interview to find out what he had said.
‘He wanted to know what I knew about the bloody Petrefacts,’ shouted one old man when Willy had managed to convince him that he wasn’t addressing a nosey child but a genuinely inquisitive dwarf. ‘I told him I didn’t know the buggers.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What it was like in the Mill, how much they paid me and such like.’
‘Did you say?’
‘How the bloody hell could I, lad? Never set foot in place. Worked all my life on railway up at Barnsley. Here on visit to my daughter.’
Willy dashed off, shot round the corner and was only partly relieved to find that he hadn’t lost his quarry. Yapp was seated on a bench overlooking the river talking – or, more accurately, shouting questions into the hearing aid of another old-age pensioner. Willy moved behind a post box and listened.
‘You’ve lived here all your life?’ yelled Yapp. The old man lit his pipe with a shaking hand and nodded.
‘And worked at the Mill?’
The man continued to nod.
‘Can you tell me what it was like, conditions of work, long hours and low pay, things of that sort?’
The nodding went on. But evidently Yapp’s hopes were rising. He opened his tin and took out a sandwich.
‘You see, I’m making a study of working-class exploitation by mill owners during the Depression and I’m told that the Petrefacts are notoriously bad employers. I would appreciate any information you could give me.’
From behind the post box Willy listened with interest. At last he had something to report, and since he had recognized the old man as being Mr Teedle who, besides being stone deaf, had contracted the habit of nodding instead of opening his mouth thanks to a long married life with a woman of strong character and a loud voice, he felt the Professor was in safe and uninformative company. Willy left his hiding-place and crossed the road to the River Inn where he could have a pork pie and several pints while keeping an eye on his quarry at the same time. But first he’d make a phone call to Mr Frederick. With the freedom that came from being the town’s popular dwarf he carried a beer crate to the phone and dialled the Mill and asked for Mr Frederick.
‘All he’s doing is asking people what’s going on here?’ Frederick asked when Willy had finished. Willy nodded and Frederick had to repeat the question before he could overcome the dwarf’s speechless deference.
‘Yes,’ he mumbled finally.
‘He isn’t asking questions about anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Just what we’re making here?’
‘Yes,’ said Willy, who preferred to maintain his new standing with Mr Frederick by not mentioning low pay and bad working conditions. This time it was Frederick who was silent. He was debating what to do. There were a number of choices, none of them pleasant.
‘Oh well, grasp the bloody nettle, I suppose,’ he muttered finally.
‘Which one?’ asked Willy.
‘Which what?’
‘Nettle.’
‘Nettle? What the hell are you talking about?’
Willy relapsed into mute awe and before the question could be satisfactorily answered his money ran out and the phone went dead. With a sigh of relief Willy climbed off the crate and returned to the bar. Yapp was still engaged in his interrogation of Mr Teedle and Willy settled down to his beer and pie.
*
In his office Frederick poured himself a stiff whisky and cursed his father for the umpteenth time. The old devil must know what he was doing, must know in fact that he was endangering not only the rest of the family but his own position in society by sending Yapp to Buscott. It didn’t make sense. At least the idea of the strike had been a good one and the pickets had seen the brute off. And with the consoling thought that it was a good thing Aunt Emmelia was such a recluse and stuck to the obscurity of her immaculate garden, he went out for lunch.
13
For once he had miscalculated. Emmelia Petrefact might take the family tradition of keeping herself to herself to extremes but the same thing could not be said for her cats. They led gregarious and promiscuous night lives, usually in other people’s gardens, and it was as a result of her favourite Siamese, Blueboy’s, indiscreet courtship under Major Forlong’s bedroom window and the Major’s remarkably accurate aim with a flower vase that she was taking the partially neutered animal to the vet when she saw the pickets outside the
Mill gates. For a moment she hesitated but only for a moment. Blueboy’s name might have to be changed, but that of the Petrefacts must not be sullied by strikes. Ordering her chauffeur to stop and then convey the stricken cat to the vet she stepped out of her 1937 Daimler and marched across the road.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ she demanded, and before the pickets could begin to explain she had crossed the line and was making her way into the factory.
‘Where is Mr Petrefact?’ she asked the woman at Enquiries so imperiously that the secretary was left speechless. Aunt Emmelia marched on. Frederick’s office was empty. Emmelia passed through into the first workshop and was astonished to find the place filled with women busily at work with sewing machines. But it was less the lack of any evidence of a strike that astonished her than the nature of the garments they were producing.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked a forewoman. Emmelia gaped at a pair of crotchless wet-look camiknickers which one of the seamstresses was lining with chamois leather and could find no words for her horror.
‘These are one of our most popular garments,’ said the forewoman. ‘They go down extraordinarily well in Germany.’
The words reached Emmelia only subliminally. Her revulsion had been drawn by a woman who was stitching hairs to what had all the awful appearance of being a bald pudenda.
‘And where does that go down?’ she asked involuntarily.
‘Here,’ said the forewoman indicating the groin of an all too obviously male costume model. ‘The straps go round the back.’
‘What for?’
‘To hold the merkin in place, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Emmelia in such a trance of prurient curiosity that what she had intended to be a disgusted exclamation lost its emphasis. ‘And do many people buy merkins?’
‘You’d have to ask sales but I suppose they must. We’ve increased production by thirty per cent this year.’
Emmelia dragged herself away from the repulsive object and wandered off down the line of women making merkins, plastic leotards and inflatable bras. What she was seeing was utterly revolting but it was counter-pointed by the chatter which seemed to take merkins and scrotum restrainers for granted while concentrating on banal domestic dramas.
‘So I said to him, “If you think you can go down the pub every night and drink the holiday money, one of these days you’ll have to cook your own supper. Two can play that game.”’
‘What did he say to that?’ asked a woman who was stitching HIS onto what until that moment Emmelia had assumed to be the sole necessity of HERS, namely a sanitary napkin.
‘Wasn’t much he could say, was there? Not that . . .’
There was nothing Emmelia could say. She tottered on past women discussing baby foods, last night’s episode of Coronation Street, where they were going for their holidays and other people’s matrimonial troubles. By the time she came to a group of evident artists who were painting veins onto what she would otherwise have assumed to be rather large and unfinished salt dispensers, she was feeling decidedly mad. She sank into a chair and stared dementedly into space.
At the far end of the workshop the forewoman was holding a heated discussion with the woman from the Enquiry desk.
‘Well, how was I to know? You let her through and naturally I thought she was a buyer . . .’
‘She’s Miss Petrefact, I tell you. I saw her at the Flower Show last year. She was judging the begonias.’
‘You should have stopped her.’
‘I couldn’t. She asked for Mr Petrefact and marched into his office. He’s going to have a fit when he finds out.’
‘Not the only one,’ said the forewoman and hurried down to intercept Miss Emmelia who had risen from her chair and was heading for what had formerly been the Loom Repair shop.
‘You can’t go in there,’ said the forewoman rather too imperatively, and promptly revived Miss Emmelia’s tattered sense of self-importance.
‘I most certainly can,’ she said with new authority. ‘And what is more I intend to.’
‘But . . .’ the forewoman faltered. Emmelia went past her and opened the door and was instantly deprived of the slight hope she had held that some part of The Petrefact Cotton Spinning Manufactory maintained its original purpose. A blast of warm air hit her and with it a particularly unattractive smell. For a moment she hesitated and then her attention centred on a conveyor belt of those revolting salt pots which had so distracted her in the other room. As they moved slowly past her the sense of unreality returned with, in the vernacular she had never used before, knobs on. Or whiskers or wands, certainly protrusions of some sort whose purpose she could only vaguely define and preferred not to. In short the erstwhile Loom Repair Shop became something she was only dreaming, a nightmare assembly line of extruded plastic penises, perpetually erect. Emmelia shut the door and tried to regain her composure.
‘Are you all right?’ the forewoman asked anxiously. Emmelia’s pride reacted.
‘Of course I am,’ she snapped and then, partly out of unwilled curiosity but more from the stern sense of duty so ingrained in her character, pushed the door open again and stepped inside. The forewoman followed unhappily. Emmelia regarded the penises severely.
‘And what do you call those?’ she enquired, and added dildos to her vocabulary.
‘Do many men require them?’ But the faint hope that the Mill was less what first impressions – and particularly those revolting crotchless camiknickers – suggested than an artificial limb factory for the sexually mutilated was doused by the reply.
‘They’re for women,’ said the woman faintly.
‘Ultimately I suppose they would be but initially men must . . .’
‘Lesbian women,’ said the woman even more faintly.
Emmelia pursed her lips and then raising herself to her full height walked slowly down the line. At the end a machine was wrapping rather flimsy articles in foil.
‘French ticklers,’ explained the woman when Emmelia asked with almost royally affected interest what they were.
‘Remarkable.’
And so the progress continued and by the time they reached a young man who was hammering out male chastity belts Emmelia was sufficiently majestic to stop and ask him if he enjoyed his work and found it rewarding. The youth gaped at her. Emmelia smiled and moved on. From Dildo Moulding and Handcrafted Chastity Belts they advanced to Hoods, Chains and Flagellation Accessories in the Bondage Department where Emmelia took a serene interest in inflatable gags.
‘To be used in conjunction with French ticklers no doubt,’ she said and without waiting for a more accurate explanation examined several types of whip. Even the clitoral stimulators failed to shake her composure.
‘It must be most satisfying to know you are helping to bring so much pleasure to so many people,’ she told the girl who was checking each one. Behind her the forewoman wilted still further but Emmelia merely walked on, smiling kindly and with all the outward appearance of imperturbable assurance. Inwardly she was seething and badly in need of a cup of tea.
‘I’ll wait in the office,’ she told the woman when the tour was over. ‘Be so good as to bring me a pot of tea.’
And leaving the forewoman standing in awe Emmelia went into Frederick’s office and seated herself behind the desk.
*
At the Buscott Working Men’s Liberal and Unionist Club Frederick rounded off his leisurely lunch break with a game of snooker and was about to go back to the Mill when he was called to the phone. Ten seconds later he was ashen and all desire to go anywhere near the bloody Mill had left him.
‘She’s what?’ he shouted.
‘Sitting in your office,’ said his secretary. ‘She’s been right round the factory and now she says she’ll wait until you return.’
‘Oh, my God. Can’t you get rid . . . No, I don’t suppose you can.’ He put the phone down and went back to the bar.
‘I want something strong and odourless,’ he told th
e bartender, ‘preferably with aunt-repellent in it.’
‘Vodka’s not too smelly but I’ve never tried it on aunts.’
‘Any idea what they gave the condemned?’
The barman recommended brandy. Frederick drank a triple, tried frantically to think of a suitable explanation for Aunt Emmelia and gave up.
‘Here goes,’ he muttered, and walked down the lane back to the Mill. The pickets were still outside the gates and Frederick told them to pack up. Whatever their usefulness in keeping Yapp out he could see now that they had brought his aunt in, though why the hell she had chosen this of all days to come to town he couldn’t imagine. It was a secondary problem. The fact was that she had come. With a curse that embraced Yapp, his father, Aunt Emmelia and the hypocrisy from which he had been making a fortune and which now seemed certain to take it away from him, he entered the Mill and with affected surprise found Aunt Emmelia behind his desk.
‘How nice to see you,’ he said summoning what he hoped was charm to his aid.
Aunt Emmelia ignored it. ‘Shut the door and sit down,’ she said, ‘and wipe that inane grin off your face. I have seen enough repulsive objects in the last hour to last me a lifetime. I can do without smarm.’
‘Quite,’ said Frederick. ‘On the other hand, before you start sounding off about pornography, perverts and lack of moral fibre let me say—’
‘Oh, do keep quiet,’ said Aunt Emmelia, ‘I have far more urgent things to think about than your inverted conscience. Besides, if there is a market for such singularly tasteless contraptions as the Thermal Agitators With Enema Variations advertised in the latest catalogue I suppose it is not wholly unreasonable to supply it.’
‘You do?’
Emmelia poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Of course. I have never been very clear what market forces are but your grandfather held them in very high esteem and I see no reason to doubt his good judgement. No, what concerns me most is the presence of men with banners parading for all the world to see outside the gates. I want to know why they are there.’