Vail Read online

  ‘As I understand it, there are various groups, or factions, or cells, attempting to overthrow the status quo. They all have the same object in mind, though for different purposes. None of them, apparently, gets on with any of the others. Why I don’t know, so don’t ask me. Some of them are a bit upset because Urop was devastated by a nuclear blast and the Govt refuses to admit it …’

  ‘Devastated?’ the chauffeur interrupts, glancing at Vail in the mirror. ‘Is dat de same as destroyed? Urop bin destroyed? Since when? I ain’t read ‘bout dat.’

  ‘No, you won’t have because the Govt won’t admit it. That’s why the factions are a bit upset.’

  ‘No damn wonder.’

  ‘You could say dat. That.’

  ‘When dis happen?’

  ‘Nobody seems to know. Perhaps it never did happen, – hasn’t happened yet, I mean. Some factions insist that it did, others disagree.’

  ‘Don’t nobody know for sure? Either it did or it didn’t, can’t be no two ways ‘bout it.’

  ‘Then there’s the Libyans.’

  ‘How dey come into dis?’

  Vail thinks hard, trying to remember what he has been told. ‘I seem to recall they were working hand-in-glove with the INLA.’

  ‘What dem Libbys and de Inner London Ed’cashun Aut-ority got in common, for de lawd’s sake? Dey’s poles apart, seems to I. Dis is very confusin’, bawz.’

  Vail has to agree. And how did toxic waste and radioactivity fit into the picture? Were the Red Brigade and Black September trying to spread the contamination or contain it? Could they be described as urban guerrillas, freedom fighters, subversive terrorists or what? And who was funding them, – the Confederation of British Industry? And supposing they did succeed in overthrowing the status quo, what then? Would the British Isles be devastated as allegedly Urop had been? His head was starting to throb and he hoped the chauffeur wouldn’t ask any more questions; how had they started this conversation in the first place?

  The city unfolds around them like a sour dream. A yellowish miasma (toxic pollution? acid rain? radiation cloud?) hides the sun. Yet the people in the streets are fat and sleek and prosperous and the tourists are buying up Oxford Street as though there were no tomorrow. Perhaps they know something?

  The Merc is diverted round the sterile area of Knightsbridge by a police roadblock. Now that Harrods has an average of ten bomb alerts and three actual blasts a week it is no longer permissable to approach within one hundred yards of the proud and battered building except on foot, and then only after a rigorous body search. Vail had paid a visit two or three days ago. It was a sight and a symbol that brought a mist of patriotic fervour to the eyes of any true Brit.

  Huge banners draped across the cracked and shattered face of the building proclaimed: GRAND RE-RE-RE-OPENING (the third, in fact, this week) and BUSINESS AS USUAL and WE NEVER HAVE AND NEVER WILL CLOSE. A fortune was being spent on the continuous rebuilding and refurbishing programme. Hours after the latest current blast the builders and glaziers and decorators moved in to repair the damage. A special high-powered Govt fund had been set up, – chaired by a cabinet minister, – which promised to match penny for penny what was raised by public donations. Millions poured in every week. Those damn subversive scum would never make the country’s finest and most famous emporium, with its decades of heritage and tradition of doughty British trading, knuckle under to cowardly terrorist blackmail. Just who did these spineless greasy foreigners think they were dealing with?

  It grieved the heart and at the same time lifted the spirit to wander through the blitzed marble halls, the crunch of glass underfoot. Most of the counters were matchwood of course, their place taken by trestle tables and doors propped on wooden boxes. All the chandeliers had been wrecked, splinters of crystal dangling limply on broken chains from the ceiling. The goods on display, despite being bomb-blasted and blackened by the smoke, were still of the usual first-rate quality, and amazingly varied. – Black Mamba snakeskin belts. Piano-shaped fudge in 3 kilo boxes. Platinum ‘His ‘n’ Hers’ roller skates. ‘Country Recipe’ Cotswold Pizzas. Pearl-inlaid toilet roll holders. Fourteen-piece alligator luggage with matching personalised brolly.

  But the most wonderful, heart-warming thing of all was the staff. Pale, twitching, hollow-eyed and battle-scarred, wearing steel helmets stencilled ‘Harrods’ and flak jackets edged with royal blue piping, they were as unfailingly polite and knowledgeable and helpful as ever. A warning siren might sound at any moment (and invariably did), yet they carried on with their appointed duties, bloody but unbowed. They knew at once where to find the nearest Red Cross post, could dress a splinter wound as ably as wrap a parcel or charge to credit, would lead thirty or forty people in community singing during a blackout with stoical aplomb. Indeed, it was strange but true, – and much quoted by the media, – that applications to join the staff had quadrupled since the bombings began; the greater the wreckage and human carnage, the more people flocked to do their bit at this great heart and soul of the nation’s indomitable commercial defiance.

  Reporters set up a permanent bivouac in Raphael Street in order to interview and photograph survivors on the spot. There was a good deal of competition between the tabloids to sign up victims to an exclusive contract, the most horrendously injured naturally commanding the top prices. ‘£££s-Per-Stitch’ became the bargaining factor, so that a fifty-stitcher, as it was known in the trade, could demand a high fee for an exclusive, while anything over eighty stitches, providing it was face and neck, could ask the earth and get it, with BUPA and three weeks’ recuperation in Honduras thrown in. Amputees, especially children, did well, as did pet dogs; poodles, setters and Labradors being the favoured breeds.

  Stories went round of people walking up and down Knightsbridge all day long hoping to get caught in the next blast. Some victims were devious, and had been known to extend superficial wounds with concealed razor blades, transforming them from a mere scratch into a lucrative ‘fifty-stitcher facial’.

  But, as ever, competition was fierce and getting fiercer. Now the loss of an eye was coming to be regarded as the minimum for a front-page splash. There were those who dreamt of the dream scoop: an eighteen-year-old nubile bride-to-be scarred and blinded (both eyes) while out shopping for her trousseau.

  The roof of the building is hazed in smoke from an incendiary device, glimpsed by Vail as the car completes the detour and heads west once more. A news bulletin within the hour will give the names of a dozen or so groups, factions or tendencies squabbling to claim responsibility.

  Oddly, the newspaper story has awakened in Vail a sickening unease. Ever since he became rich and famous his resolution to kill somebody has atrophied, and now he feels an unaccustomed stirring of guilt. He is riding high on the hog in his white Merc with his black chauffeur, why rock the boat? He has his yellow card and his Resident Alien permit. He has sufficient fuckable material to last him a lifetime, – more than enough, what with Angie and Virgie and the twenty-three thousand four hundred and seventy-nine members of his fan club.

  It is so easy to ignore and forget. In any case, his little girl will have rotted into the ground by now, along with the tartan blanket.

  He settles back into the deep moquette and turns to the FT Index. In the mirror his chauffeur’s broad black face switches to full beam as he steers the Merc along the Kensington Road.

  At the studio in the carpeted, quiet and calm dressing-room Vail changes from dark puce double-breasted blazer, tan Daks slacks and slim patent slip-on shoes into soiled muffler, torn jacket, frayed trousers and laceless ripped pumps.

  He has already plastered used diesel oil on his hair, worked grime into his eye-sockets, smeared his cheeks with soot and finished off with a light powdering of coal dust. He nearly forgets his fingernails: scrapes them through a tub of gas-cooker grease and dunks them in fresh dog turd. Per-fect.

  The call comes. ‘VTR in Studio 9,’ and Vail shuffles off to tape the show in all his glory.

&nbs
p; [5]

  Reliable sources had it that Bootstraps had found favour at the most senior executive levels and as a consequence of this the producers of the show, – Bryce Ransom and Virgie Hance, – had been given the green light to extend its run into the indefinite future, which in television terms is thirteen weeks. Everyone was cock o’ hoop at the news. Champagne was opened and supped from polystyrene cups. Secretaries were chased into filing rooms and interfered with. Ed Flesh sent a cablegram of congratulation sprinkled liberally with percentages and £ signs. Bryce Ransom voiced the opinion, which seemed to be shared by everyone, that it was, ‘Super uptight fuck cunts finally it just have didn’t to break!’

  (Vail has come to the conclusion that he is either talking backwards or in anagrams, but still can’t decipher sense or meaning.)

  The ‘philosophy’ behind the show, as explained by Virgie Hance to newspaper reporters, is to make cripples get up off their stumps and do something with their lives instead of just lying back on their bed sores begging for sympathy and suppurating and whingeing about it. You had to learn to crap in nests other than your own. It was no good, for instance, patients in terminal cancer wards bemoaning their lot and blaming society; since when had society given them cancer? So why they expect society to feel sorry for them and pick up the tab?

  Similarly, Virgie expounded, who was to blame for bringing deformed imbeciles into the world? Certainly not the state. Accidents of nature were God-given, not man-made. Unreasonable, therefore, to look to secular tax-payers to foot the bill for what the Almighty, in all His omnipotent wisdom, had thought fit to decree. Didn’t the Church say, ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off?’ The Church didn’t say anything about relying on subsidised health care to cut it off for you: the emphasis, surely, was on self-reliance and doing your own dirty work.

  One of the most successful shows (ratings-wise) had been the one in which a paraplegic basket case and a thalidomide victim had been encouraged to crawl through a pipe of untreated farm slurry to reach a key that unlocked a casket containing two phials of golden liquid. One was cider, the other urine. The winner of the ‘race’ had the choice of which phial to drink, but once having chosen then had to drink the liquid straight down, even if he discovered he’d picked the wrong one. This led to much gleeful anticipation and hilarity from the studio audience as they breathlessly watched the faces of the two contestants at the moment the phials touched their lips. It was felt (at the most senior executive levels) that this particular show best combined a moral tract with a spot of harmless fun, sugaring the pill of the message as it were.

  Another rib-tickling wheeze, dreamt up at one of the weekly programme planning meetings, was to have someone with Parkinson’s Disease administer an insulin injection to an aged diabetic already in the final stages of toxic shock coma. Would the old crock get the needle in time, – and in the right place, – or would he end up like a pin cushion before the medics rushed in at the very last moment to save him with ‘red alert’ emergency procedure under the full glare of studio lights and the mesmerised stare of the goggling millions? Here were knockabout farce and tension combined, – laughter one minute, white-knuckled suspense the next, – making the point that, even supposedly suffering from the jitters of Parkinson’s Disease, nobody’s hand shook to such a degree that he couldn’t control it when occasion demanded. Although in fact he did miss the vein fourteen times before locating the spot, and then more by accident than design.

  Despite being in an off-peak slot the show climbed high in the JICTAR ratings, even outplacing Feet ‘n’ Porridge. It tickled the nation’s funny-bone, inspiring a craze for such jokes as: ‘Where’s the first place spastics go when they attend school in the morning?’ ‘Assembly.’ And ‘What do spastics do before the school holidays?’ ‘Break up.’ Saloon bars and hairdressing salons all over the country rocked.

  Rumours percolated down to the studio to the effect that the show met with the approval of certain people in Govt circles, and that the PM was said to be a keen viewer; supreme accolade indeed.

  As a result of this success Vail was invited to meet the Head of Documentaries and Current Affairs, Laine Vere Jumper, an immensely tall aristocratic man with a noble brow and a failing chin, spotted bald head, pink glasses and velvet bow tie, whose drawling speech was out of sync with his lip movements. First came the empty mouthings followed seconds later by the appropriate matching sounds. This gave the impression that at the start of every sentence the unfortunate man was gulping water like a goldfish in a bowl.

  Laine Vere Jumper himself never watched TV on principle, though he studied the ratings with a savage analytic eye and heard about the programmes from his secretary, a homely body with a blue rinse by the name of Mrs Stretcher. Mrs Stretcher had no time for arty-farty nonsense; she liked medium two-shots interspersed by profile close-ups, interviewer and interviewee darkening to silhouette against a pale cyclorama as the credits rolled up, and a signature tune you could hum as you went to make the cocoa and put the cat out. Legend in the building had it that Mrs Stretcher could spot a stinkeroo even before the station ident had faded. She thought Bootstraps ‘so true to life’ and ‘hilariously funny without resorting to smut and innuendo’. It was the ultimate stamp of approval.

  ‘........ I trust that we’re looking after you,’ Laine Vere Jumper drawls at Vail in his delayed-action voice. They are sitting in his fifteenth-floor executive office suite sipping chilled golden wine from green crystal goblets. One complete wall is all blank television screens while another is all glass, overlooking a London skyline crumbling at the edges from the effects of sulphuric downpours. The hissing of the rain is no longer merely onomatopoeic. ‘........ You seem to have adjusted remarkably quickly to fame, fortune and success ........ Getting plenty of tit and fanny?’

  The last three words of this sentence are vibrating the molecules in the air even as Laine Vere Jumper is sipping his wine, which is a cute trick if you can do it. Why, thinks Vail, the dying words of this man could be still ringing in your ears after he had actually expired.

  ‘More than adequate, thank you. Yourself?’

  ‘........ Oh, I’m queer as a coot,’ Laine Vere Jumper confides. ‘........ The female form disgusts me........ So verbose ........ An abundance of epidermis.’

  ‘I’d never thought of it in quite that way before.’

  ‘........ You heterosexuals never do ........ Leanness and sparsity of form are what appeal to me.’ He shudders with exquisite distaste and crosses amazingly long tapering legs. ‘........ I detest grossness however it chooses to manifest itself ........ And the world today is too unutterably gross ........ One despairs ........ Every time I see Selina flashing her pudendum in public I feel positively dire.’

  ‘I suppose it is a bit overfacing,’ Vail has to concede.

  ‘........ And goodness me, tits that size oughtn’t to be allowed out of captivity ........ Did you know, for instance, Jack, that life on this planet is in danger of being swamped by mammaries? ........ My God, they’re everywhere ........ There are probably more tits per hectare than hairs on a navvy’s arse ........ And I should know. Imagine, this inordinate plentitude of tit might well signal the end of civilization as we know it.’

  Laine Vere Jumper seems genuinely distressed at the prospect and takes another sip of piss-coloured wine with eyes painfully screwed tight.

  Vail wonders whether all heads of departments in television companies are homosexual, and if so, why there was so much breast and female pudenda filling the screens of the nation night after night. Of course, it takes but a moment’s thought to realise that ratings dictated content just as content determined ratings, and therefore there wasn’t all that much of a paradox about it after all. Aristocratic homosexual he might be, but Laine Vere Jumper isn’t fool enough to deny the great public sufficient sub-Freudian tit with which to smother itself.

  [6]

  Wayde Dake Ass. Inc. reports in person:

  ‘Howdy,’ the Texan
booms, looming over them like a sandstone cliff and wielding a thick file which he slaps on Vail’s ceramic and glass coffee table. ‘These phone calls. Guy by the name of Tex Rivett. Heard of him?’

  Vail shakes his head.

  ‘Sneaky little bastard. Member of a subversive underground cell seeking to overthrow the status quo. Arrived in London on August 6 in a milk tanker.’

  Vail goggles in disbelief and terror.

  ‘Known associates include a guy by the name of Urban Brown and the leader of the cell, Fully Olbin. There’s a girl too, but we can’t trace an ID on her. Sure you don’t know any of these people?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  Angie sets down a tray and they all sip coffee in silence. Vail ponders the remarkable coincidence of two people arriving in London in a milk tanker on the same day. The only other explanation he can think of is that he is Tex Rivett, but as he knows he isn’t he dismisses it. No wonder there were questions in the House.

  ‘Any idea why they should want to contact you? Money? Blackmail? Drugs?’

  ‘Jack doesn’t deal in drugs,’ Angie says quickly.

  ‘No, Rivett does,’ Wayde Dake says. ‘That’s how they finance their operation and get people to do them ‘favours’. For some reason they must want you.’

  ‘What can they possibly want me for?’

  ‘To do them a favour, I guess.’ The coffee cup is like a thimble in the American’s giant sandstone fist. ‘You can get into places they can’t. You meet people they can’t get access to.’

  ‘Are they dangerous?’ Vail asks.

  ‘Extremely. They’ve been known to kill people who annoyed them, even one teensy-weensy little bit. Sometimes for no reason at all. The person Brown already has a murder-one rap hanging over his head. Strangled and dumped a woman on the A422 outside the wire. But we’ll get him or my name’s not Weird Ache.’