by Ian Hutson
[I’m sure that it was “rivet”. Yes, yes – The Rivet Dance by Mick Flatleaf or some such. Lots of idiots prancing around like hob-nailed ballerinas with diarrhoea and Wild West line-dancers with someone shooting at their feet.]
Branson allowed his mind to drift logically from Lily Langtree’s arse, through the drizzle, towards La Petomaine’s arse and onwards, for some fashionable social-chemical imbalance reason, toward formulating a plausible and non-offence giving reply for the inevitable enquiry from the Press as to just who might have leaked details of the Industrial Revolution to the Ladies’ Committee of the etcetera etcetera.
He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. For the moment that was a problem on the back burner and just one of many such. Right now they were all still, metaphorically speaking, wearing their T-shirts with the Project-Subcommittee approved slogans “Industrial Revolution – I’ll have some of that, thank you” and “Agrarian Society – I think not!”
That it was still just metaphorical rather than Jermyn Street tailored was indicative of another problem – even the bloody casual shirt movement was behind schedule, just a sketch on the drawing board of one of the members of the board who was too busy playing with his membrum virilis to extract his digit, focus and just get on with it. The board member in question was currently busy in vile weather and a funky yellow oilskin sou’wester on some Cornish coast attempting to determine whether an “surf board” might be used for coastal postal navigation or commercial line-fishing. Early results were not encouraging although he did report that he was getting laid much more easily than he was used to. His last postcard mentioned that he had developed an entourage of “surf chicks” whatever the hell that was. Maybe he’d be able to answer the “perennial egg question” soon even if nothing else? Science often worked in unpredictable ways, especially where salt-water coastal chicks were involved. Just look at Grimsby.
A more pressing practical problem for someone was the very high probability that the police horses, left outside as they were during the sudden meteorological inclemency, would later prove difficult or even impossible to start. A Horse & Carriage Association patrol or a Royal Equine Club mechanic would probably have to be summoned to administer a rub-down, dry tack and a bale of fresh unleaded hay. Hopefully The Police maintained a current Rescue, Recovery & Home Start policy with one of the reputable firms. Branson remembered how he’d once put the wrong sort of fuel in his horse and had to have its stomach-pumped out by a local blacksmith at outrageous cost – apparently his big mistake had been in moving the horse once he’d put the incorrect food in. Breakdown insurance had been a godsend then, as had a green plastic gallon of oats obtained from a kindly nearby farmer. How the hell was he to have known that horses didn’t run on spare quail’s eggs, cheap caviar and over-warm flat champagne all served in a “borrowed” policeman’s helmet?
As it happened, the rain proved to be no more than just a light and disconveniencing shower. High on eastern tannin infusions, intoxicated with fresh Jersey bovine lipid suspensions and hypnotised by Messrs Tate & Lyle’s promises of legalised West Indian refined monosaccharide carbohydrates, the Constabulary stumbled back into the damp daylight like refreshed Orcs bursting forth from a Middle Earth Cafe. Yes, they were that ugly.
They found that several of their horses had been clamped and bore the hallmark Council Coffers kerching-spoor of Fixed Penalty Notice parchments glued to the leather blinkers with yellow and black sealing wax. The Maria-of-Colour and the Riot Squad’s Emergency Response barouche were both in the process of being lifted bodily, horses and all, onto the back of a sub-contracted “Council” kerchING-clamping kerchING-cart for kerchING-removal and further kerchING “storage” at two-hundred and fifty guineas a day or part thereof.
[Any member of Her Majesty’s public who thought it odd that the Establishment could remove property and hold it to ransom, calling it a “public service”, while private citizens who did so were prosecuted for theft and extortion, was immediately subjected to one hundred and twenty hours of graffiti removal to stop them ever thinking logically again out loud.]
‘Tough, Mate’ explained the kindly Clamping Utility’s National Tsar to the Chief Constable. ‘Once either the wheels of the vehicle or the hooves of the horse have left the road it’s out of my hands, I have to take it in. You’ll have to collect them from the impound field and pay the fine and the stabling for the horses. Shouldn’t have been so stupid as to park them here in the first place – the sign’s obvious enough.’ He pointed to what appeared to be a faded postage stamp on the wall in the shadows under the eaves of a nearby building, occasionally visible provided that the ivy had been recently trimmed and there was a light northerly breeze with no serious cloud cover.
The ladies from the Peace Camp watched with obvious glee and petit buerre from the windows of the A-Cup & Saucer Lounge as the fetlock clampers changed their minds under a hail of Police truncheons and fair-enough Guv fisticuffs. It did their hearts good to see fisticuffs still in everyday use between chaps. The barouche and the Maria-of-Colour, complete with prisoners’ hands and cries reaching through the bars, were lowered back to the roadway under the terms of Article 1, Paragraph 1, Sub-section 1, Clause 2 of the Because I Bleedin’ Well Say So Mush Act of eleven twenty-three, or possibly half-past seven.
Once the fracas had subsided into a mere bonfire of clamping vehicles and several twitching ankle-clamped bodies, Lady Florence of Berkeley Square took control and asked the improprietress of the Tea Rooms to call nine-nine-nine. It wouldn’t do for the conflagration to spread again like that clumsy baking mishap in sixteen-something or other.
Doris duly opened the door, tugged the cigarette butt off her dry lower lip and called out ‘nine-nine-nine’ in the manner of an on-shore foghorn. She blinked like a less-than refreshed Orc at the entrance to a Middle Earth Tea-Rooms. Yes, she was that ugly too. Daylight lost itself, never to be seen again, in her crows-feet and in the pucker-marks under her moustache and just above her food-laden beard. Like so many twenty year-old lifelong smokers she had lips that suggested she could latch onto any farm animal, field or barnyard, alive or dead and remove the vitals intact with a single cross-eyed suck, a swallow and a hint of a gulp as the spine went down.
Her delicate cry was repeated several times until a small breathless Corporation Urchin ran up. “Emergency – which service do you require?” asked the urchin.
‘Fire and ambulance please Duckie’ replied Kylie, staying calm and handing over two farthings and a stale fairy cake as a tip.
[Someone had left the lid off the big tin of fairies and, if they were to be used up before they went off then lovely, moist, stale-fairy cakes were the only option. Nota bene, years later all of the magic would be taken out of these little confections and they would become known in “global” “English” rather more drearily as “cupcakes”. This is why you can no longer buy tins of either fresh or dried fairies except in speciality comestible shops.]
The urchin ran off at top speed towards the hospital and the fire station. Doris, watching the urchin depart, made that odd smoker’s shoulder-flicking motion and a fresh cancer stick appeared from her cuff, slipped between the dull yellow marks on her fingers and lit itself.
Branson, still watching from the window, sighed wistfully, picked up the heavy black Bakelite telephone from the windowsill and untangled the plaited fabric cord. He held the receiver to his ear. Still no dialling tone. Bloody English Telecom! Years behind everybody else! He hefted the useless apparatus back onto the equally heavy leather-bound volumes of Domestic Directory and Yellowed Pages and pushed them all into a corner. Then, on impulse, he pulled the volumes out again and checked whether Her Majesty was, in fact, listed. It seemed that she was entered in several places as The Queen, Her Majesty, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith and also plain Victoria of the House of Hanover, cross-referenced under Heads of State and Marriageable First Cousins. Her telephone number was “1”. No area code, just “1”. Dial 1 for One
. Branson contrasted that with his own entry in the high double-digits next to a pickle manufacturer and sighed again.
He did a lot of sighing.
Sighing, he whispered to himself “sod it, decision made, let’s just do it”. With a heavy heart and a BIC ink-quill he unilaterally began to compose the committee’s reply to the protestors’ demands. Ready or not, it was time to just focus and do it. He doodled “JFDI” on the blotter to remind himself. It looked cute in a might-get-me-beaten-up kind of way. In fact, he liked it so much that he smiled and said it out loud.
‘It. JFDI. Hmm. I like that. Perhaps it might be matched with some encouraging dance movements. Jay-eff-dee-aye! It’s fun to decide to jay-eff-dee-aye-yie. Young man, there’s no need to kneel down, young man, if you’ve got half a crown, young man, you just to need to do the jay – eff – dee - aye, oh it’s fun at the jay-eff-dee-aye...’ Suddenly realising that he was probably visible from the typing pool Branson coughed, straightened his tie and sat back down at his desk, little the worse for his jigging.
My dear Lady Constance Mann-Bighter,
I write in thanks for your non-submissive missive of the twenty-third inst., and to advise you that the bones of your Committee’s demands have been accepted in principle, pro rata, cui bono, sonny bono, caveat emptor, ad infinitum in excelsis gloria and other posh latin stuff, by all of the parties involved in the Industrial Revolution Project. (And here he kept the fingers of both hands crossed behind his back as he wrote; clever chap).
This acceptance of the need for dispatch happily includes your insistence upon the bloody invasion of Belgium, and the War Office has accordingly advised us that some six hundred officers and men of Her Majesty’s Light Brigade have been stationed in the Valley of Mort, just outside Brussels, preparatory to a wild charge to be undertaken late tomorrow morning or in the early afternoon, weather and horse-feed permitting.
Several technical issues have caused delays in the deployment of the new industrial practises but we feel that, with one or two aesthetic tweaks and with the late invention of the stoic coal miner and the perfection of the blueprint for the cotton mill family dynasty with roving over-advantaged elder son, these have now, largely, been overcome. There remain only the inconsequentials of peasant morbidity and mortality which, as you suggest in your addendum, we may cheerfully ignore.
Accordingly, I should like to extend an invitation to you, and to your Committee members, to attend Manchester Railway Station at eight o’clock of the morning on the thirtieth. There we hope you will witness the spectacle of a dozen tons of coal moving at ten or even eleven miles per hour and, possibly, or as some cynics say, probably, the first dramatic and officially notifiable industrial accident involving blood curdling workingman-screams and a standardised Whitworth screw thread.
Please bring a coat and, if available commercially yet, your portable Daguerre Image Capture Device, trained magnesium flash-light operators and plenty of spare glass photographic plates, for it is bound to be a spectacle! Remember also to bring your spectacles, if worn. Refreshments and the new plumbed-in sanitation facilities will be available from a penny upwards, both at the same time with waitress service included if you take advantage of our VIP package at 3/- 6d per person.
Yours truly,
Sir Mr Richard Delphinium Mount St.Helens Fortesque Bulawayo La-La Branson, Chairman, blah blah blah, ever your most humble, AC, DC, BBC, ITV, Natural Gas and God Save The Queen.
p.s., as regards the introduction of billiards cues in ladies’ sizes we feel it politic to delay further development until after the invention of the butch evening-lesbian and the simple-cut dinner jacket.
He scattered sand and rolled his work carefully with a young blotter. Then he patted the blotter’s bottom and sent her, giggling, on her India-ink stained way.
Members of the committee were beginning to drift back after luncheon, and mostly only after their rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms had sent porters to knock on the doors. Most members were be-whiskered gloom incarnate. One or two were as sober as High Court Judges and had to be assisted into their seats. Branson turned over his draft reply to Lady Constance Mann-Bighter so that it would not be read before he announced his invention of the JFDI with dance moves. Young Messrs Wedgwood, Boulton and Owen were late, as usual. Branson checked his watch – their time was close but it had not yet actually arrived, and the committee could wait just a little longer (but not more than a decade or so). He made polite enquiries against future need.
‘Young Messrs Wedgwood, Boulton and Owen - their favoured club is in Lower Colonies Damned Occupying Forces Road, is it not?’
‘No, Sir – Upper Empire Ruddy Locals Crescent, near the new gasometers. It’s not far, about a mile as the Crow walks. The Crow Nation is well known for its characteristic hop-skip-jump-sashay mode of cross-city ambulation using only the straightest possible of lines. Hell of a rough neighbourhood though. Bloody good stock of claret if I remember correctly, but hell of a rough neighbourhood.’
[Gasometers: still empty, awaiting the invention of town gas and the greasy black-encrusted single burner hotplate for dingy bedsits. The greasy black-encrusted single burner hotplate and the bedsit were, in turn, awaiting the invention of the barely independent bachelor-about-town. The latter had so far been delayed in development by mothers who just couldn’t learn to let go.]
Branson checked his watch again. ‘We’ll wait then. I have an announcement to make.’ He absent-mindedly practised his jay-eff-dee-aye moves and finished with an experimental moonwalk that did little good for his cobblers.
A mile and two Crow-hops away Messrs Wedgwood and Boulton stepped cheerily out of their private gentleman’s club, the Infernal Combustion Engine, a Free House with rooms and fine dining in Upper Empire Ruddy Locals Crescent, and then stopped dead in their tracks. Owen, having called at the Gentlemen’s Gents on their way out of the club to reduce his brain pressure, was quicker to realise the problem and didn’t just stop but positively cowered alongside them like a Wesleyan Methodist caught in bright sunlight.
‘We’re doomed, doomed I tell you!’ he whispered. ‘We’re all going to die.’
‘Don’t panic, man. We shall be lost for certain if we panic. Stiffen your upper lip and don’t be so demonstrative – you sound like some sort of damned foreigner!’ hissed Wedgwood.
All about the now eerily quiet street lay indolent men, whittling at small pieces of wood or smoking dull, will-o-the-wisp long clay pipes, or sharpening chisels, testing the weight of spanners and oiling the bubbles in spirit-levels. It was as though some alien-human hybrid ovipositor had dotted them around and about the new urban landscape, spaced out to allow the air circulation to dry them off and harden their shells into skin like rough, dry, dirty-brown leather. Their skin, to a man, was like rough, dry, dirty-brown leather, which just rather proves my point doesn’t it.
Their boots, if they had them, were hobnailed and huge, their hair was wild and unkempt. Their feet, if they didn’t have boots, were hobnailed and huge, and their hair was also wild and unkempt, especially on the feet. Their clothing was mostly torn sackcloth or cheesecloth or denim, all washed in ashes, bodily-crevice cheese or the gravel and stones currently so popular for that distressed-designer look. Here and there a patched and torn jacket or boilerplate overalls, now and again a man with riveter’s scorched gloves and bucket, occasionally an ill-fitting donkey jacket with orange “dayglo” visibility patches over all four shoulders and, settled between them all, the dark, empty, hungry eyes of the general unskilled labourer in his trackie bottoms, Umbro shirt and ruddy baseball cap.
As the three young gentlemen stood, standing quite still, still more workmen approached almost silently, and stood, still aimless and lacking all sense of social standing, at least in any sense that it was still understood by anyone still standing. Some of them sat and were still. Some stood but remained still while others who had been sitting already remained so and still sat still, lacking the energy to stand or even underst
and that they should. Still there were others, silent, still, leaning against trees and paring their nails with pocket knives, or laid out on the tops of walls like so many unemployed sides of forgotten beef. Some, gathered in groups of two elevens or in fives a side, kicked their heels and dribbled their balls and shifted restlessly in the hot, desiccated dust swirls of an El Niňo English summer afternoon. It was hot in the city, hot in the city alright. The back of Wedgwood’s neck was getting dirty and gritty and there was a catchy and popular tune buried in there somewhere.
A scuffle broke out among some of the alpha males but developed into a hungry, menacing, nothing much to write home about in the heavy, storm-laden air. Like gargoyles perched on rooftops and playground swings the workmen watched, and waited, and bided their time, like Nature gone bad.
Owen made as though to run but Boulton stopped him.
‘Wait! No! Don’t make any sudden movements. I suspect that if we seem to be no threat to them then they won’t attack us. It’s our only chance, believe me. With creatures like these and with the domestic hen the vision is based upon movement. Mr Darwin says that’s true for anything that blinks sideways, lays eggs or works for the Civil Service in the lower, non-pensionable ranks.’
‘Actually, I think they may rely on their sense of smell more than their eyesight’ added Wedgwood, who had been carefully observing the beasts and scribbling copious pencil notes both on and off the cuff, a practice his housekeeper’s laundry-scrubber’s cuff specialist hated.