NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  ‘Sense of smell? Oh bollocks!’ said Owen.

  ‘What’s up now?’ hissed Wedgwood.

  ‘I’m wearing the new Lynx “Sex-Zombie” all-over anti-perspiration pro-odorant body-spray! If these things work by sense of smell... I might as well be a sideways-blinking roasted chicken in a bar mitzvah bar. Oy!’ whispered Owen.

  ‘What the hell are you wearing that goyim feygele nonsense for? We were just nipping for a quick pint of claret and some fatty luncheon meat before the afternoon committee session!’

  ‘I know, but it was three for two at Boot’s Apothecary and I thought I might pull. Well, you never know. A chap has to be prepared and take his chances where he can these days.’ He shrugged. ‘OK - I’m desperate. The nearest I’ve had to sex since my home-schooling governess left was a good gallop across the Kate Bush Moor on a cheap Budget Rent-a-Horse with one leg slightly longer than the others and a loose saddle. I even had to loosen the saddle myself.’

  ‘Well, you’re well and truly screwed now anyway.’ Boulton slowly shifted around to the opposite side of Wedgwood, away from the alluringly perfumed Owen.

  At the end of the road a cornered rat broke loose from a drainpipe, squealed and then fell ominously, seriously, fatally, silent in a culinary sense of the words “silent” and “fatally”. The silence of the street-scene was broken only by the short-measure tearing of fresh, fat, luncheon-rat flesh.

  ‘What are they?’ hissed Owen, finding himself needing the Gents again and considering doing something he had done only twice since his early childhood and on one of those occasions for a significantly lucrative bet.

  ‘Hungry, evidently, and fond of fresh meat – even rat. Let’s hope they don’t eat gentlemen.’

  ‘Dear God – “Fresh Meat” was my nickname at Eton.’

  ‘At Rugby mine was “The Juicy Fat Rat”.’

  ‘Then we’re both screwed.’

  ‘No - I think they’re workers. Displaced workers, migrated in from the countryside.’

  ‘But they look so... evil. What do working people ordinarily look like? Are they normally this ugly?’

  ‘God knows. Probably something like indoor staff and coachmen I’d guess but weatherworn and cheaper, grubbier, nastier. Maybe something like under-gardeners or gamekeepers or boot-polishers.’

  ‘These are different. They’re changing. They’re mutating, morphing.’

  Boulton and Owen looked about for Plasticene figures getting into mild desktop mischief with pencils and a children’s entertainment programme.

  ‘Maybe we’ve just caught them in the larval or pupæ stage? A sort of “rural peasants go in one end smelling of horse poo and crop rotation and a “working class” comes out the other end of the process looking like shit and covered in engine oil, lathe swarf and rickets” kind of thing?’

  ‘Did you just say that we’ve just caught them?’

  ‘Figure of speech dear boy. Look, we can’t stay here all day, we have to do something.’

  The beast nearest them rolled over in the gutter onto his stomach, disturbing a cloud of flies and looking angrily at them before settling back down to snooze with his head on his empty Mexican beer bottle. All about him fluttered leaflets for something called “bogofs double glazing-over”. Buy one get one for a shilling with free fitting.

  ‘They’re just waiting.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘In a way, yes. I think they’re waiting for the Industrial Revolution. Gentlemen, this is our workforce. Our labour. Look more closely. See that one over there sleeping on that lamp-post? Notice how contented he is at unnatural heights? Look – those, the ones scuttering around in the dust, back and forth like shuttlecocks. Mill-rats cleaning between machinery. That one – see? Look at the size of its fists – a natural panel beater.’

  Owen was intrigued. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. Look – that one. It looks half dead already, it would be ideal for use in dyeing and mordanting processes, maybe even for making Lucifer sticks. Generally the heads all look small in relation to body size – these creatures probably just need telling what to do. They need purpose, and good, dog-fearing work.’

  ‘Don’t you mean good God-fearing work?’

  ‘You run your estates your way, I’ll run mine as I see fit, with Foreman and Overseer.’ At the sound of their names his dogs, Foreman and Overseer, crawled out on their Rottweiler stomachs from under a nearby chestnut roaster’s cart and wagged their tails.

  ‘Still, do not relax your guard gentlemen, they could turn on us in a minute. One false move and they could become a violent rabble bent on sabotage and destruction, demanding decent pay and humane working and living conditions. Step carefully, gentlemen, step very carefully and very slowly and make no sound, no eye contact, and we may yet live to see our currently-idle factory chimneys belch soot and smoke and profit and progress and red Porsche 911 Turbos ready-wired for our iHarpsichords and Smart-Teleprinters.’

  The three slowly and nervously picked their way along the road, avoiding the larger groups and staying very, very, close to each other. Even Foreman and Overseer were careful where they stepped, growled, bit and pooped.

  ‘It’s patently almost a mile to the Patent Offices – we’ll never make it’ whispered Owen.

  ‘Keep your nerve, man, keep your nerve. Damn it, you’re a gentleman. Don’t let them see fear on you. We tackled worse than this in the changing rooms before running out onto the rugby fields at Cambridge and Oxford.’

  Suddenly Owen squealed and clutched Wedgwood’s elbow in a grip like an eight-fingered, two-thumbed squealing-vice (he’d only been to Durham). All three gentlemen froze and simultaneously gratefully came to terms with the over-generously porous nature of bulk-buy Y-fronts. The spoor of fear lay upon their gussets.

  Several of the more predatory working beasts sniffed the air. One of the feral interlopers had been loping past, as feral beasts often do in loping season, and it stopped, briefly. It listened for the double-thump ruling-class heartbeat that said “live-food, live-food, live-food ...” at seventy beats per minute or, in the case of Mr Owen, one hundred and ten with the occasional missed stroke and a squelchy echo.

  Gradually, while they stayed as absolutely still and as silent as it was possible for young gentlemen with reforming ideas and lots of cash money to do, the socio-dynamics of the pride or the nest or whatever the collective noun would be for factory fodder returned to what would soon seem so normal. They settled back into inactive indolence and resentment.

  ‘What?’ hissed Boulton, incredibly annoyed at Owen for stopping them on the battlefield.

  ‘Women! That one over there is female... look.’

  ‘My god – I think you may be right, Owen. Boulton, look at the clothing – it’s ever so slightly different. The face is the same, the rough musculature, the hobnailed feet, tattoos and hair are identical, the sense of simmering menace is similar but the clothing, the posture, I think you’re right – it is definitely a female of the specie.’

  Owen gave a quiet sob. ‘It is. Dear God, it is.’ He crossed himself and began chanting. ‘Our Father, who aren’t in Devon, hallowed be thy new persona as a dame. Give us this day my coach and horses and do unto them before it is nobler in the mind, a sling, or an arrow – anything, God and saints preserve us, holy outrageous fortune Batman, partibus deus biggus omnibus dieu et mon droit gaudete all around my hat, inshallah, inshallah, Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha‑olam, ha‑gomel lahayavim tovot sheg'malani kol tov! Ooh Mummy, Phuphox ache, cor luv a duck, amen.’ Owen, having covered his available gibbering-bases, then covered his face in his hands and wept.

  ‘Control yourself man. So what if it is a woman? As I said, we’ve tackled worse than women in the changing rooms before running out onto the rugby fields at Cambridge and Oxford.’

  ‘But I only went to Durham!’ wailed Owen.

  ‘We must get back to report this development’ said Wedgwood, and Owen guiltily assumed Wedgie was referring to his confession to thi
s one minor fib on his curriculum vitae. Durham shmurham, and always in some sort of trouble because of it.

  At incredible speed and with a howl that would terrify even a large dog in the Baskerville household, one of the female creatures leapt like an exception to the laws of Newtonian Physics and pinned Owen to a wall.

  The rottweilers Foreman and Overseer, who were in fact closely related to the Baskerville hounds but who were far from stupid and had been around the block several times on more than mere walkies, pretended to have noticed nothing and just looked casually in every other direction. They gave their attentions to whistling How much is that doggy in the window without an apparent canine care in the world. One of them inspected his claws as he whistled, the other just had to scratch his ribs with his eyes closed.

  Sniffing all about and then, bloodshot eye to weeping eye, predatory jaw to weak-chinned slack-jaw, the female creature slavered and growled while Owen turned his head to one side and sobbed again, convinced of his immediate and bloody demise and all probably because he’d only been to chuffing third-rate Durham. With a final sniff and a snap of the nut-cracker mandible the working class creature pushed away from Owen and the wall with both hands, danced a small jig, gathered its filthy, torn, skirts in a bunch and then sauntered back to pressing the business of indolent, suggestive, “want to do some business dearie?” loafing at the kerb with ne’ery a backwards glance.

  Maybe the new “working classes” were fussy after all? Had this creature some natural sense of genetics and an instinct to avoid Nature’s in-bred cul de sacs?

  Wedgwood and Boulton gently collected Owen from his renewed and deepening puddle of entrepreneurial, social innovator’s terror. God alone knew where he got it all from at such short notice.

  ‘It knows that you’re pregnant with ideas, industrial notions, social notions, welfare notions. It won’t kill one of its own. Your very weakness has proven to be your strength, man, so stand! Stand I say! We must go on!’

  The men shuffled bravely on, picking their route through the unconscious and the unconscionable, past bawdy Barrett home, Plymouth gin-flop and Wendy whore house.

  ‘Those weren’t there when we went for a pint. There wasn’t a single house of good ill repute in all of Manchester was there?’

  ‘Yes there were, loads of them, they were just smaller and better hidden. I mean, unless you already knew of its existence you’d never have been able to find the one in Regent’s Way with the studded black leather ...’

  Owen and Wedgwood gave Boulton a look and he trailed off just before he could finish saying “...anatomically correct mechanical bull”.

  ‘How could this all change so quickly though?’

  ‘Well, there’s a reason why they call it The Industrial Revolution and not The Industrial Gradual Change. Where have you been for the past two hundred years?’

  ‘On my estates, hunting, shooting, fishing and amusing myself in my workshops and private observatory, dining at my club or doing the leisurely and luxurious “Grand Tour” through Greece, Italy and Egypt and suchlike.’

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  Ho hum. Such was history. They moved on, cautiously.

  Suddenly, a compensation claimant with no legs, arms or body shuffled up with outstretched paperwork, and behind it a case of iron-smelter’s pox alongside something homeless or poor or uneducated or just plain generally horrid. Owen screamed again and all about, like young alien spiders emerging from the nest, the industrially injured and the sick and the old and the landless dispossessed clamoured forward to check if their time had finally come. The three men fled.

  Throwing caution, dignity and loose coinage of the realm to the wind they fled, screaming, to the safety of the Patent Office and the Committee rooms, where they found that Foreman and Overseer had arrived well before them (both also significantly out of fleeing-doggy breath). They banged on the door like lost souls seeking sanctuary in a church playing soul music on the organ, and Wedgwood, Owen and Boulton thumped and kicked upon the door along with them.

  What key-carrying civil servant, even in times of Suffragette-besieged crisis, could possibly refuse so heartfelt and desperate an entreaty? Owen, Boulton and Wedgwood followed the dogs in and fell gratefully upon the cool marble floor.

  After multiple-document identity check, registration, the issuing of clip-on day-passes and signing of the Visitor’s Book they resumed their screaming, terrified flight up the marble stairs and into the committee rooms where they bit knuckles, stared wild-eyed to the horizon and scratched at the plasterwork with broken, bloodied, nails. The rest of the committee turned to see what the commotion was all about and then their features softened as they beheld the two dogs in such obvious emotional turmoil. It took a while for most to realise that there were also three human beings in the roiling mass of canine panic.

  Branson walked to the door of the committee room and called for his personal secretary. ‘Miss Roux? Oh Miss Ruby Roux? Where are you when I need you?’

  ‘Yes?’ answered a small voice from the heady, chlorinated atmosphere of the typing pool.

  ‘Is that you, Ruby Roux?’

  Miss Roux appeared, wrapping a towel around her damp hair and trailing wet footprints.

  The two dogs, never liking having the pst extracted quite so obviously, quieted themselves and began to consider contracting two cases of post-buttock biting lockjaw or some other revenge. The buttocks of a patronising, pst-taking git are a dish best eaten cold, and eaten at some opportunity they would be.

  ‘Miss Ruby Roux, here’s what I want you to do – take these two and whip up one of your special Ruby-snacks and a stiff drink for them please.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Roux.’

  The two hounds slunk out of the room, mouthing “Ruby-snacks?” to each other under their breath and giving canine shoulder shrugs signifying “buggered if I know either” to each other.

  Left to their own devices the remaining three wild animals on the committee room floor eventually stopped roiling and began explaining.

  ‘We’re all doomed! Doomed I tell you! Doomed!’ explained Owen, fully.

  ‘We’re all undone! Woe, woe and thrice woe, Petunia!’ formulated Boulton.

  ‘We’re all going to have to throw caution to the wind and, ready or not, we’re going to have to just fecking do it! JFDI, gentlemen, JFDI!’ shouted Wedgwood in the manner of some Staffordshire Potteries soothsayer. ‘The Industrial Revolution must be brought forward and it must happen now, gentlemen! Now! JFDI I say! Let’s just focus, do it and get it over with, my nerves can’t take any more antici ... pation!’

  Branson closed the mouth he was about to use to make an inspirationally worded announcement to the committee with and sat down. Now he’d never get to spell out the letters in lovely dance steps, damn it.

  ‘Doomed?’ capital-ventured Sir British-Leyland, catching up with developments and holding fast onto his blueprints for the baby-poo beige Austin Allegro with “quartic” steering wheel, dark brown velour upholstery and clotted-cream coloured vinyl roof.

  ‘Undone?’ pressed Lord Velcro, tugging hopelessly at the little steel-hook and steel-loop fastener strip of his cummerbund and wondering when pliable plastics might be invented. He indicated wordlessly to a footman to fetch the ruddy tailor’s-hacksaw again please.

  ‘JFDI! I like that!’ enthused Frank Whittle, scribbling on a pre-Post-It note so that he wouldn’t forget to tell his wife, Betty, later. ‘Well I never – Just Fecking Do It! Hah! Marvellous! Wedgwood – you’re a genius.’ He had to rub out his preliminary sketch for a passenger-carrying aero-locomotive with turbine propulsion system to make room for “JFDI” in large capital letters on his pad.

  Branson rubbed his eyes to stop them watering emotionally and sorted his papers, turning over his reply to the Ladies’ Committee to remind himself of the business in hand and to dull the latest of the endless little tragedies of missed opportunity in
his life.

  ‘Wedgwood, Boulton, Owen – have you gentlemen been drinking?’ he enquired.

  ‘Of course we have!’

  ‘Good, but you’re still a little hysterical. Pour yourselves another and then explain to the committee, if you would be so kind, just why we are doomed and undone so and why you consider that the orderly timetable of the committee must be abandoned.’

  Owen drank from the decanter and then passed it on to his colleagues, utterly heedless of whether he passed to the left or to the right.

  ‘The peasants, Sir, the peasants – are revolting!’

  Most of the members simply agreed by nodding, like bulldogs under the weight of personal experience gained in their country seats. Branson felt that he had to reply. ‘This is not France, Sir, our peasants do not “revolt”. That is why we exported all of the trouble makers, ne’er do wells and peculiar religious sects to America, year of their lord sixteen-hundred and something or other.’

  ‘But we’ve seen them!’ Owen took another long swig at the decanter and then sucked at the glass stopper like some over-privileged semi-alcoholic cross-eyed baby carrying a couple of dozen extra stone in puppy-fat.

  ‘Mr Wedgwood. Can you make sense of this for us?’ asked Branson with his elbow on the table and his head resting on his hand, aware that it was shaping up to be another day where he missed Thy Weakeste Linke, Blanketty-Not-Filled-In and Ye Olde Emmerdale Farme.

  ‘I hardly know where to begin’ replied Wedgwood, fumbling with his notebook.

  ‘Begin at the very beginning, if you please, Mr Wedgwood.’

  ‘Yes, course, the beginning, that’s a very good place to start.’

  He dropped his notebook. ‘Doh!’

  ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘We saw a female’ informed Wedgwood, with incredulity.

  ‘Shut up dear!’ gasped Branson.

  ‘Ray – would you open the blinds please, we could do with a drop of golden sun.’

  ‘Me, I take the blame, all by myself.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So far, we had a long, long way to run.’

  ‘Tea, perhaps? A drink, with jam and bread?’