Vail (24 page)

‘I am not nervous.'

Angie doesn't look convinced. She says:

‘You just have to be careful what you do, that's all.'

What does she mean? ‘What does that mean?'

Is she tacitly giving him her approval or sounding a warning?
Whose bloody side is she on?

‘I've been told to say that and no more. The rest is up to you.'

‘That's all very well but where does it leave me?'

‘I can't make the decision for you,' Angie rebukes him.

‘What is this, some heavy moral message or other? Every person responsible for his own destiny? Is this the answer to the famous meaning-of-life riddle you've been torturing yourself with?'

‘That crap,' Angie says, amused, shaking her head. ‘You really were taken in by it, weren't you? Just as you've been taken in by everything else. You're pretty dumb, Jack Vail.'

Vail searches for a smart reply but can't think of one. He feels crushed and small. Perhaps the meaning of life boils down to this: you can never think of a smart reply when you need one.

Someone, – a Cabinet Minister most likely, or a Lord, – had planned it with the utmost meticulousness. As later reported, the DIs were led and carried and dragged in to a steady clapping chant and a uniform stamping of feet on the concrete floor. There were even a few cheers.

Stewards and security men arranged them like sacks of flour in a semi-circle round the dais on which the PM was to speak, in front of the throng so that the TV cameras had a clear, uninterrupted view. By this time the smell in the bunker was becoming quite foul, and together with the suppurating sores and rotting bodies of the dioxin victims caused several of the bystanders to faint clean away.

The VIPs and officials on the platform, however, all wore brave smiles, though one or two did take the occasional whiff from scented handkerchiefs concealed in their cuffs.

Not so the PM of course, whose beatific smile sprayed these unfortunate wretches with tolerance, understanding and forgiveness, duly caught and captured by the lenses and preserved on tape for the archives.

As was the limbless trunk of the little red-haired girl with
pigtails which squirmed up the steps and flopped onto the dais and rolled to a stop at the feet of the PM holding a bouquet of Freesias in its teeth. Tremors of emotion permeated the hall; tears leaked unashamedly and trickled down cheeks; the sorrowing heartfelt pity was palpable.

Graciously stooping to take the bouquet from the jaw of the child, the PM patted the pigtailed head and then, very gently, pushed the trunk with a polished toe so that it rolled off the platform and bumped down the steps where it was retrieved by a steward and set upright back in line. This incident was subsequently to be made famous by the media-managers who dubbed it ‘PM's Helping Toe for Heartbreak Imbecile'.

Then came the PM's speech. A stirring performance that was to remain engravened on the hearts of all those present on that memorable and historic occasion. It began:

‘Suffer little children to come unto me,' – provoking such a storm of applause even before the final syllable had rung out that it was several minutes before the PM was able to continue.

‘Never let it be said,' the speech resumed, ‘that we cannot find it in our hearts to be generous to those unfortunate imbeciles and mental defectives who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the bottom of the heap of life. How can they be blamed for parental sloth, stupidity and ineptitude? Fathers too lazy to give a decent day's work for a decent day's pay. Mothers who smoke, watch television in the afternoons and patronise bingo establishments when they ought to be making the tea. Older brothers and sisters who get pregnant and stab old ladies in the eye, or vice versa, instead of caring and sharing and setting an example for their armless, legless and brainless siblings.

‘These, the older ones, who ought to know better, – and I will not mince my words, – are the scum of the earth. Personally I've neither time or patience for them, and I fail to see how any decent, God-fearing, hard-working person can have time or patience for them either. You might say they're beyond hope, to which I would reply, ‘Yes, I agree, – and the best place for people beyond hope is beyond the wire!''

The PM sipped a glass of mineral water while the applause gathered itself and rose in a huge wave from the body of the hall and cascaded over the platform, drenching everyone in approving honey dew smiles.

The PM, however, remained stiff-necked and stern.

‘Let us not forget also, that in some places which it would be invidious to mention, such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and certain countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and North Africa, peopled by mixed parentage races of a dusky hue, such unfortunates as these displayed before us tonight would not be acknowledged even to exist. Official secrets acts and juggling with Govt statistics would successfully disbar us from ever knowing about them in the first place. But in a democracy this can never happen. We
know
and we
care
.

‘This alone makes our democratic freedoms all the more worth fighting for. What price democracy if we have to knuckle under and kow-tow to subversive terrorist groups and shiftless gangs of workshy layabouts and foreigners whose sole purpose is to impose their own brand of totalitarian ideology on the freedom-loving peoples of these islands? On this sceptred isle set in an azure sea? I for one will resist such encroachments with every breath in my body. I say this to them: Drop the Bomb, see if I care. When the dust has cleared you will find me still standing there in the rubble, bloody but unbowed, chin held high, fists raised in defiance. You may wipe us out but you will never defeat us. We are made of sterner stuff. We will fight, and continue to fight, in what is left of the streets, in the ruins of the supermarkets, in the debris of the video shops and software centres. We will never give in.'

The deformed imbeciles round the dais were growing restless. Some were lying in the product of their own incontinence, dabbling in it with their stubby feelers. Movement for most of them was difficult, so they could only flop and squirm about in the spreading watery brown pool seeping from the elasticated sides of their plastic drawers. The more able and lively amongst them threw feeble handfuls of solid matter at one another, gurgling and mewling with glee, as malformed cretins are wont to do.

The crowd retreated to a respectable distance as the stench began to rise in dense torpid swathes.

Apparently oblivious to this, the PM went blithely on:

‘I have heard it said that in these days of economic stringency we cannot afford moral standards. Nonsense. Hand in hand with sensible fiscal housekeeping must go the sternest and most rigorous moral strictures, set by those of us who know better as an example and guiding principle for the weak, the gullible, and the foolish. I put it to you: how can they live their lives usefully and fruitfully, and be of benefit to society, unless we have taken care to give them a framework of sound moral values within which to operate?

‘Your glue-sniffer of today is your welfare state sponger of tomorrow. Wife-swapping may seem a harmless pastime to the uninitiated but it leads to moral degeneracy and a breakdown in family life. The child who doesn't attend Sunday school may well turn out to be another Yorkshire Ripper, or failing that a backstreet mugger who will stab a seventy-three year old lady in the eye for the few pence in her purse or rape and ravish a young innocent schoolgirl. Children who watch and revel in video nasties are income tax dodgers in the making.

‘These are but a few examples I could cite of the danger areas, – and where our duty, as guardians of the nation's moral health, lies. It isn't enough to teach them geography and the three Rs. We must also teach them to respect other people's property. We must instil in them a suitable deference to their elders and betters. We must impress upon them that it is preferable to be seen rather than heard. Above all we must inculcate in the young those sterling qualities of politeness, docility, acquiescence, and not least of all to refrain from asking those silly questions which waste everyone's time and cause unnecessary fuss.

‘It's all very well asking questions, I'm forever asking them; but there is a proper time and place for asking questions, and a correct manner, which older people recognise and accept and are perfectly happy to go along with. The young should learn from them.

‘Of course an inquiring mind is all to the good, and I would be
the last person to discourage it. But at the risk of repeating myself I would just say this: people with inquiring minds very often find out things they would rather they hadn't learnt, and would be far better off remaining in ignorance of. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, as the poet says. Much more sensible to leave decisions to experts, those of us who have studied the various social, economic and moral problems in depth and have arrived at a balanced and informed opinion in the best interests of all our people.'

Blue-uniformed stewards with mops and buckets were now swabbing the lumpy brown mess in which the imbeciles were squatting and squirming. Sandbags had been brought in and placed at strategic points in an attempt to contain its creeping spread; – indeed, unbeknown to the guests, their neat footwear had been spoiled by the lapping tide of bodily product, so intent were they on listening to the PM's speech and drinking in every word. Several found themselves stuck to the floor and had to be levered free.

‘Which brings me to the highlight of the evening, the reason we're all down here in the first place, surrounded by these adorable little deformed bodies and grotesque faces, and that is to pay tribute to a television programme that has won all our hearts with its deft mixture of compassion, social concern, self-sufficiency, – the absolute imperative of standing on our own two feet, or stumps, as the case may be, – and not least that great rollicking good humour which is one of the shining merits of the British people: our ability to poke fun at ourselves and laugh at our own misfortunes.

‘I refer, of course, to
Bootstraps
, which tonight is to be honoured with a special award for its outstanding contribution to current affairs entertainment.

‘Its consummate triumph, I believe, is in demonstrating our very real concern for the more unfortunate members of society, – these wretched abnormalities you see displayed before you, – while at the same time administering a short sharp shock to the consciences, so-called, of the shirkers and spongers and backsliders, providing the timely reminder that no one gets a free
ride any more, and shaming them (if such creatures can be shamed) into hauling themselves out of the pit of sloth and sickening self-pity into making a genuine effort to contribute positively to society instead of being a dead weight and a drain on its resources.

‘This brilliant concept was the brainchild of producer Bryce Ransom and his associate producer Mzzz Virgie Hance. Together they identified a need in mass televisual entertainment and set about filling that need with quite remarkable instinct, flair and professional skill. It is an object lesson to us all; the principle of freedom-loving competitive democracy in action, made flesh so to speak.

‘I needn't add that such a programme would not find favour, much less receive the breath of life, in certain other regions of the globe it would be churlish to mention, except to remark in passing that one of them lies roughly above latitude 43 degrees north and covers 8,649,489 square miles, the eastern portion of which is snow-covered for much of the year.

‘However, this isn't the moment to point the finger at non-democratic totalitarian slave states where the secret police rule the roost and pull you out of bed at two o'clock in the morning; rather we should rejoice in our own self-enlightenment, in our unflinching honesty and bravery in allowing this programme to be made and shown to a primetime mass audience. Where else in the world, we might legitimately ask ourselves, could this happen? I think we know the answer.

‘Not least in this wonderful success story was the inspired choice as presenter of a man who rose from total obscurity to become a megamedia star in his own right. A true ‘man of the people'. A man after my own heart.

‘From humble beginnings, by dogged perseverance, unstinting application and the sweat of his brow, Jack Vail carved out a career for himself in the dynamic and highly competitive world of television. Not for him the moping miseries of the fainthearts and the whingeing fringers; no, here was a man determined to claw his way from the bottom of the social slag-heap come hell or high water.

‘Without the benefits of a privileged background and university education, Jack Vail proved to one and all that upward mobility is no empty myth. Given the right kind of stuff, which he has in ample abundance, he showed how an ignorant and uncouth
swmbwl
a onetime manual worker and ex-union member no less, can throw off the shackles of the underclass into which he was born, rejecting the spurious ‘values' of apathy and morbid defeatism of that same class, and overcome all obstacles to emerge triumphant, a credit to himself and to society at large.'

The stewards and security men were becoming desperate, as was the Cabinet Minister, or perhaps it was a Lord, who had planned the evening's itinerary with stopwatch precision. By this time the deformed imbeciles should have sung their song and been long gone from the bunker, whereas the PM's prolix and discursive peroration, – already overrunning its allotted span by several minutes, – had long exceeded their capacity to remain quietly seated, composed, and continent. Indeed, there was some doubt now as to whether they would even remember the words they had been taught parrot-fashion so painstakingly over recent weeks.

As if this weren't bad enough, the smell was making a number of people physically ill. Several had been supported or bodily carried to the rest rooms, while others had moved as far away from the dais as the confines of the hall would allow.