by Rob Grant
He slipped into first gear and, with the satisfying grind of slow vehicular damage, disengaged his car from the target vehicle and rolled as far forward as he could go, accidentally crunching into the bollard in front of him, then switched back into reverse again and slammed his foot on the accelerator.
This time there was a bigger crunch, and the uplifting chorus of much more damage, and his airbag blasted out of the steering wheel and almost smothered him. When the bag had finally deflated, he looked in the mirror again, but, again, the harridan's vehicle was still blocking his way. He got out of the car to inspect the damage.
The woman's SUV had not moved an inch. Worse still, it had not even sustained any damage to speak of. Some paint scratches on the front bumper were just about the only evidence of the encounter, and, they looked like they were actually paint from Grenville's own vehicle, and might very well scrub off.
The rear end of Grenville's car, in contrast, had been almost completely stove in.
Perhaps he hadn't thought this through as completely as he might have done. Perhaps it had been a slightly foolhardy plan, attempting to budge what was, let's face it, the urban version of a Centurion tank, with a second-hand three-door family hatchback. Perhaps he should have waited for the red mist to subside before completely deciding on the wisest course of action.
He strolled to the front of his car. His front fender was bent and the radiator grille looked like a losing boxer's gumshield. Right. Now what was he supposed to do? Hang around until that dreadful woman emerged and clocked what he'd been up to? She didn't seem the type who'd let a major attempted assault on her property pass without comment. The police would doubtless be summoned and, although Grenville was morally in the right, he was, unfairly, legally culpable. He noticed the bollard he'd hit had been slightly dislodged, and the concrete at its base was cracked. Well, if he couldn't go backwards, he would have to go forwards.
He jammed himself back in the driver's seat. He switched off 'Born to Be Wild', because, quite honestly, he wasn't feeling all that wild any more, and since he couldn't recall anything in his collection entitled 'I'm An Idiot', he decided not to bother with music at all.
He disengaged the vehicles, wincing at the sound of what he now realised was even further major damage to his own car.
He rammed the bollard again, deliberately this time. He had to ram it twice more before it surrendered, by which point his bonnet was severely crumpled and steam and/or smoke was hissing out of it.
He trundled across the pavement by the automatic doors, which opened as he passed. He caught a glimpse of the blonde receptionist, who had finally put down her checklist and was wearing a truly bewildered expression. Grenville gave her the finger, aimed the car through another pair of bollards and almost made it without sustaining major destruction to both of the wings and a symmetrical set of deep double gouges along the entire length of both his side panels and doors.
He pootled off, whistling, for some reason, up to the barrier, at which point he realised he'd forgotten the security number in all the excitement. He drove through the barrier anyway, in the process losing his bonnet entirely and smashing his windscreen.
Yes, on balance, the health club had probably not been what you could call a 'good idea'. Well, at least he still had his diet to cling to. At least he'd managed to stick to that. At least he was losing weight. That was the main thing.
The health club was situated at the back of an entertainment complex, which had a cinema, a bowling alley, an ice rink and some restaurants. As he shuddered up to the exit roundabout, he noticed there was a sign for a drive-thru McDonalds, and giggled to himself. How insane was that? Siting a McDonalds next to a health club. And before he knew how it had happened, he was idling outside the drive-thru hatch and ordering two double sausage and egg McMuffins, both with hash browns, which he consumed with great delight and terrible guilt while he drove his smoking shell of a clown car one-handed towards the exit. He was just looping round the roundabout again and about to buy two more when he was saved from himself by the two policemen who placed him under arrest.
NINE
Jeremy was sitting in a helicopter.
And not just any helicopter.
Jeremy was sitting, if you must know, in the Prime Minister's private helicopter, which, incidentally, was flying somewhere. Specifically, it was flying Jeremy somewhere. Does real life get any hornier than that? Officially, of course, the Prime Minister didn't have a private helicopter. That might make him look like some kind of bloated, self-important plutocrat. Officially, it was a Government helicopter that anyone could use, theoretically. Only no one ever did, of course. It flew only when and where the Prime Minister wanted, and it only carried the Prime Minister and people the Prime Minister wanted it to carry.
The noise was breathtaking. The whole experience was breathtaking. Orgasmic. Shagtastic. He would have loved to call Derrian right then and explain why he was having to shout over the noise from the blades of the PM's chopper, but he'd been told he couldn't use his cellphone while they were in the air, more's the pity.
In the front, there were, perhaps unsurprisingly, pilots. Seated opposite him there was a woman. A fairly attractive woman, in Jeremy's professional opinion. She'd been there since he'd come aboard. She'd looked up from her laptop as he climbed in the cabin, nodded briefly and proceeded to ignore him. She didn't look like staff, so presumably she was a fellow traveller, heading for the same destination. He'd made several attempts to catch her eye. He was usually good at that, and there wasn't a whole lot of competition, but she seemed studiously uninterested. Jeremy wondered if was genuine uninterest, or if she was making a point of being uninterested, in which case his luck was very much in.
Jeremy had found that women often liked to show their interest by feigning uninterest. He had no idea why they would do that, but they did. Women often did the opposite of what you'd expect. You're talking to a woman, you're getting along fine, and it looks like it might be leading somewhere and then she mentions, almost carelessly, her boyfriend. Right away, your instinct is: she has a boyfriend, better back off, this is never going to happen. But you'd be wrong. She's not just mentioning her boyfriend to put you off: she's mentioning it to remind herself she has a boyfriend and she shouldn't be as attracted to you as she is. The boyfriend mention is her Alamo, my friend. Once the boyfriend is mentioned, you're on a cert.
Here's an even better one: a girl agrees to go to bed with you, but very firmly insists there will be no intercourse, which you both know is probably not true, but you go along with it anyway because you're a gentleman, and certainly you would never dream of having nonconsensual sex. This day and age, you want the consent in writing, my friend, with at least three countersignatures from professional people of excellent standing, her mother and her father and, if practicable, all four of her grandparents, or you're a rapist.
So, she gets into bed with you, and in order to preserve the no-sex myth, she discards everything except her knickers. Well, that's money in the bank, buddy. That is, let's get real, a face-saving mechanism. 'Hey, I got into bed with this guy and stripped off and got into some serious foreplay action with him, but, ladies and gentlemen, I KEPT MY KNICKERS ON. Everyone knows that knickers are impenetrable even to the most agreeable and persistent penis. How on Earth we progressed from that innocent erotic enterprise to full, consensual intercourse is a bizarre mystery. And why we, furthermore, repeated this same, inexcusable act five more times in less than as many hours is so far beyond inexplicable, it beggars belief. I may sue those panty manufacturers. Their product should offer more sturdy protection.'
So, no problem if the girl was ignoring him. Especially if she was ignoring him deliberately. Bring it on, sister. Jeremy had stuff to do, anyway. Prime Ministerially allocated stuff. He could play the deliberate ignoring game, too. He took out the folder Debs had given him and worked his way through it.
Something changed in the chopper. Jeremy couldn't tell if it was the sound of
the blades or the angle of attack. He looked out of the window. Yes, they were definitely descending.
There was some sort of camp below them. Like a holiday camp, or maybe a barracks. It was big. It was very big. They were already too low to take all of it in, but from above, the buildings all seemed to be laid out like giant Ferris wheels.
They landed on the large, white H in a circle, and the pilots cut the engines. Shame. Jeremy had wanted to race out, ducking under the blades through the dust storm they were kicking up, with someone shouting a greeting to him over the impressive din, as though he were not just a very important person, but a very important person in a hurry.
The woman put her laptop away, smiled at him and offered her hand. 'Jemma,' she informed him.
'Jeremy.'
'Nice to meet you. Didn't want to get into all that with the blades roaring. Worse than trying to chat in a nightclub.'
She'd been on a chopper before. 'Absolutely,' Jeremy agreed. 'Can't stand it either.'
They clambered down the steps from the chopper.
'And what are you doing here, Jeremy?'
'Oh, I'm just here to check the place out. Get the lie of the land, sort of thing.' At the behest of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, he wanted to add, but was worried it might sound a tad pompous.
'Well, obviously that's why we're all here. But what are you? A doctor? A lawyer?'
'I'm a Conceptuologist.'
'You're a what, now?'
'A Conceptuologist. I take ideas from Notion to Nation.' The girl was still looking blank. This was often the way, Jeremy found, when you tried to explain what it was you did to the hoi polloi. He smiled indulgently. 'Look, the word "concept" comes from the same root as conception. I nurture notions through their birth process. In a way, I'm a concept paediatrician.' And still blank. 'A concept marketer. I take concepts and find ways to accentuate their appeal.'
'You're in PR?'
That stung. 'Not really. I'm a Conceptuologist. What about you?'
'I'm a Knowledge Awareness Investigator and Dispersalisator.'
Was she taking the piss? 'I'm sorry?'
She giggled. 'I'm a research assistant. I report to the Dietary Research Department at ULIST, which, in turn, reports to the Government.'
A research assistant. In other words, a student. Where was she getting her airs and graces from?
A man wearing a yellow hard hat drove up to them in an electric golf cart. He got out, nodded at Jeremy's companion and smiled. 'Jemma.'
She nodded back. 'Pete.' This was not her first visit.
He handed her a hard hat and turned to Jeremy. 'And you would be Jeremy Slake?'
'Jeremy Slank.'
'Sorry, Slank. The PR guy, right?'
Jeremy winced, but didn't correct him. What was the point? Pearls before swine. He smiled and took the proffered hard hat. It would seriously screw up his hairstyle, but it was doubtless compulsory. These days, you had to wear a hard hat to pick up a screwdriver. He'd seen men working on kerbstones on his street wearing hard hats, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out why. There seemed to have been no serious threat from above, unless someone was planning a suicide jump from a nearby rooftop, in which case the hard hats would, presumably, have been of scant use.
'I'm Peter Stone, Project Manager of this happy holiday home here. And I've been told to give you the full VIP tour. Is that OK?'
Jeremy said, 'Sure,' then realised the man had been talking to Jemma, who probably knew the tour by heart.
'That's fine with me, Pete.' Jemma smiled. 'I imagine there's been some changes.'
'Oh, yes. Some refinements, definitely.' Stone gestured for them to move off, and they did.
'OK, the stats: it's a four-hundred-acre site, with four planned phases. We've already completed phase one, and we're almost there on two. This fence skirts the entire perimeter, that's almost four miles of fencing...'
The fence was crosshatched wire, and sturdy wire at that, and it was at least twenty feet tall. Pretty much unclimbable, unless you were a circus acrobat.
Jeremy said, 'That is some serious fence, there. Is it electrified?'
Stone laughed. 'No. And there are no machine gun posts either. The intake here won't exactly be prisoners, but the regime will be pretty tough, and we don't want to encourage any potential quitters. We figure if they're fit enough to scale that fence, they'll be fit enough to leave.'
'Will there be guards on the gate?'
'There will be a security presence, but they'll be there more for stopping the ne'er-do-wells getting in than stopping the clientele getting out.'
'What happens if someone does escape?'
'They'll be chased by a giant rubber ball and suffocated. Look, Jeremy, it's not a prison camp. The people here will be morbidly obese. We're in a valley, and we're pretty remote. If one of them does try to bolt, they'll probably race thirty yards up the hill and collapse in a whipped-cream-deprivation coma. Let's take the tour.'
As they climbed into the golf cart, Jeremy finally caught the briefest glimpse of Jemma's knickers. Definitely not La Perla. Not even a thong. They were very businesslike low-rise shorts, less than a tenner for a pack of three from good old M&S, unless he was very much mistaken. Sturdy and practical, but that mattered not one whit. Jeremy conservatively reckoned they would be dangling from his bedpost before dawn.
TEN
Hayleigh resealed the magazine in its plastic wrapper and gave Jase just one last kiss. Hayleigh was a good kisser, in her own estimation. Seven or maybe eight on a scale of ten, she reckoned. She'd never actually kissed an actual boy quite yet -- she'd never actually met an actual boy she'd like to actually kiss, if you want to know the truth -- but she practised quite a lot: on her pillow, and on her hand, shaping the thumb and forefinger so they formed a very lifelike pair of lips. Plus, she'd seen an awful lot of screen kisses, so it wasn't like there was any big mystery. No big mystery, either, as to who the imaginary recipient of these practice snogs might be.
The letter from school was near the front of Chick Chat, wrapped in a plastic envelope of its own so it didn't get sogged from the food. The food was nearer the back of the magazine, sandwiched between a double-page spread on the pathetic manufactured boy band Cuz Weer Uz, who, in all seriousness, deserved everything they got, soggy food wise.
She was all ready to go now, with a few minutes before the call down. She opened her curtains to look out onto the dismal day. It was grey and wet out there, as it always seemed to be nowadays. Hayleigh, quite frankly, couldn't remember what the summer was like. The sun was struggling to cut through layer upon layer of stubborn cloud, and look: there was the moon. You didn't often see the sun and the moon in the sky together.
Hayleigh froze. It was a half-moon. Was it waxing or waning? That was the key question. If it was on the rise...
She rushed to check her diary. The thirteenth. She flicked back the pages. Crappy crud burgers! She should be on.
Hayleigh had started her periods a long time ago. She had been barely ten. Inside of a year, they'd become very regular indeed. You could set your watch by them. But lately, the last six months or so, they'd stopped. She was quite glad about that, really. They didn't seem to bring any particular benefits along with them, just unpleasantness and pains and some wild mood swings and pretty much nothing good after the initial novelty of Finally Being A Woman had worn off. But she was worried that if Mum found out, she might consider it another symptom of Hayleigh's Imagined Ailments. She might even have to face a grilling from a doctor and all kinds of psychiatrists and experts and wind up being force fed, which was the threat. She just couldn't bear to go through that malarkey. She still had a ton of weight to lose, and nobody seemed to understand that. Nobody seemed capable of wrapping their heads around that one at all.
She went into her drawer and took out the Swiss Army knife she'd slightly borrowed from Jonny's room, and flipped open the box containing the pink waterproof plasters she'd slightly liberated from the
kitchen first aid kit. She dashed over to her door and cracked it open. She could hear Jonny rapping along to his terrible hip-hop music in the bedroom opposite. It was a fetching little ditty. Someone was going to 'shit on the bed, you son of a bitch'. Lovely. A Brahms chorale, perhaps? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Matins live from St Peter's?
Nobody else was around. Nobody likely to interrupt. She clicked the door closed and dashed over to her bathroom. No lock on the door, of course. Although she was unlikely to be disturbed in here, it could happen. Mum was fairly thoughtless when it came to her children's privacy, and she might wander in without thinking to replace the loo roll, or the soap or some such thing, and if she caught Hayleigh doing this...
Quickly, then. She removed a sanitary towel from its packaging and sat down on the loo. She held the knife over her palm. No time for timidity, here. You have to be bold and decisive, otherwise it doesn't work and it hurts. A lot.
She made a smooth cut, about two centimetres long, precisely along her life line. If you cut along the lines, you won't leave too bad a scar. She squeezed either side of the incision. You needed quite a lot of blood for this to be convincing. She let it drip onto the towel. In the early days, she'd tried doing it with ink, but you could never quite get the right shade of red. Plus, ink didn't age in the same way as blood, and if the towels lay in the waste bin for days, as well they might, they just wouldn't be convincing. Besides which, ink smelled like ink, and blood... didn't.
She jumped as she heard her mother's foghorn summons. 'Come on, Hayleigh, we're late!' as if this were some kind of shock-horror newsflash. As if there were some morning they were not running late. She smeared the towel with the rest of the blood, then ran her hand under the cold tap until the bleeding seemed to have been stanched. She dried it quickly on the sanitary towel and applied the plaster. She dropped the doctored towel into the little metal pedal bin below her sink, then pressed on the wound and checked the blood wasn't leaking out. Excellent. Job done.