The common-or-garden prisoner inflaming a deep-seething prejudice, a cruel cold blue cuts to the roots — ‘You’re going nowhere, Knees. We got your number. You never be able to spend it. We is watching you like an hawk.’ Serpents of incense writhe an earthy creeping to the gods. ‘You think about it long and hard. And we be back. Huffing and puffing your private castle. After you’ve had a good hard think.’ Whitelaw fires his Parthian shot — ‘Co-Op-Per- Ration!’
‘Co — Op — Per — Ration,’ repeaters Pym and standing stiff.
‘Co — Op — Per — Ration!’ Whitelaw hammers the thick shock-glass, kicks back the chair, pans past Blunkett, the blow of criminal laughter like saltpetre to the brain.
Whitelaw safely out of earshot, ‘I thought it went well.’
‘One-point seven-five-million.’
‘Genius, my arse. You wait till I see Archie tonight.’
‘One-point-seven-five-million,’ chants cowboy Pym, weapon-hand firmly on the job in hand.
***
Doctor Thysson hoofs shut the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet with her soft white shoe. The dog-’n’-bone barking and Doctor Thysson manhandles the receiver.
‘Hello, the name’s Aster,’ says the voice, ‘from The Obscurer. Are you the prison Quack? Good. I wonder if you can give me the latest batting averages?’
‘How are you getting ziz number? Leave me alone. We are huffing Media Blackout.’
‘Did you say Media Blackout? Is that official policy?’
Doctor Thysson drops the receiver and retrieves it to assure herself the voice is vanished.
From the pores of every brick bleeds the heavy-duty skunk of men.
But not one scratched love-heart.
‘Stand up for yourself,’ mother is saying.
Yes very well. She should have told him. Nothing in her contract of Anwendung that says she has to write leaflets and he can’t force her. If Herr Gerbil is wanting some good, he should be giving an injection for her budget.
An overdose of resentment ovulates within <—>
She is never taken seriously. Like one of the men. Nobody gives her a second thought. Treated as an equal. An intruder inside this stalag of stale man-smells.
Götterdämmerung! ‘Stand up for yourself,’ mother is saying.
Hot hypodermic needles trapped at the traffic lights of the throat <—>
Doctor Thysson storms the frontline of the Ones armed with a new determination, a new dose of homespun blunderbuss. This time Herr Gerbil must listen properly. To her. To what she has to say. She is right. And he is wrong. This time, this time she will not be deterred.
‘Stand up for yourself,’ mother is saying.
She fists the dirty brass nameplate.
A weak defenceless Black Forest shot-putter untouched in a foreign country.
‘Come. Ah, Thysson. Time to trim your figures.’
The fish-stink of alcohol shoots from the barrel.
‘Singly you fail to appreciate, good lady, every time you call out an ambulance the cost gets fixed to your budget. And you’re already way — way into the red.’ Varminty eyes, venose nose and weak chin snuffle the paper trough. ‘I fail to see why we can’t shove the wounded in the hospital wing.’
Every drop of frustration ever swallowed frizzles from the fusebox of her neck. ‘Because I huff six beds. You close ze rest. I huff no fart-zilities. No monies in my chest —’
‘Now look here. I need your proposals for budget economies on my desk first thing Monday afternoon. Do I make myself clear?’ Mean purple lips splat the budget sheets the flack-’n’-fury of a Gerbil. ‘And I need hardly remind you we have in Operation a chronic Media Blackout.’
‘Und I need hardly remind you, Herr Vankermeister, I am huffing no monies in my chest. You drags me in here to deal viz ze slaughter und merryhew —’
‘Slaughter and merryhew? Now —’
‘Yes. Slaughter und merryhew. I em learning your English diarrhoea-lick.’
‘Pooh!’
‘Und expect me to get on viz it. I ham not ein Miracle Virker —’
‘Now hold it right there —’
‘You vill listen —’
‘No, you vill listen! I went out on a limb to hire you. A woman! A German woman!’
‘Austrian hapsually.’
‘All right then. Austrian. Have it your own way. And this is the thanks I get.’
‘I em sick to ze back teeth viz clearing after you —’
‘How dare you! Get out!’
‘Don’t vurry. I em going. You are ein horrid little man viz ein horrid Gerbil villy und I em zaying ziz to you —’
‘Get out!’
‘— Please to be sticking your job hup your HARSE!’
‘Get out!’ shrieks the shrunken purpling head. ‘Go on! And don’t think we can’t get by without you!’
Two hundred and fifty pounds of shot-putting muscle crush the fake pine desk to a mound of splinters. She storms the shiny floor — red armbands loitering with their saucer-shaped polishing machines — the fresh rush of freedom for the first time up her nasal passage.
‘Get out!’ Fades to grey. ‘Get out!’ Faintly. ‘Get out!’ The squeak. ‘Get out!’ Of a mouse.
***
A visit from your honest half leaves you with a bucket of human demotion to be dumped down the sluicehole.
Sick if you do, sick if you don’t.
‘We’re dead.’ Dreamlocked Benjamin drained and downbeat. Blinking over the Brim of Life and into a Cave of Nothingness. Struggling to summon from a sinkhole the words you want but none dredge to the rescue. Dead. No horizons. No golden sunsets. Cracking up down Crap Creek, smash’d-sail to the Promised Land, and the boat sinks quick.
How hang the clouds so heavy over the head of Benjamin the scholar!
‘Are you listening to me? I said we’re dead.’
♪ ‘Some say I’m cray-zee ...’ ♫ The Professor’s grip on Reality, slender at the best of times, hangs by a David Icke thread.
‘Definitely dead.’
The scholar Benjamin reinforcing the stomach for lunch with an hors d’oeuvres of Hamlet but discomposed by the ghastly apparition of Goebbels squealing and squirming past General Chopper and Gonzalez-the-Basque-Bank-Robber to the doorway of Room 102. Lowest life-form to crawl from under a stone. Not so low as your hospital trust manager or your vivisectionist but close. Putrid and horrible. Slithery and slimy. Slug on a mission from Tosa-the-Man-Mountain with unseasonable demands for an immediate conflab in the committee room. On pain of death.
The Brink of an Abyss. Spinal hairs charge negative. By no means benevolent spirit. Vile goblin of evil damned.
‘Definitely decidedly dead.’
Benjamin harries over the head with the deadweight of a hangman’s sack heaviest homespun jumper, and hurries behind the fallen-angel-soul-train of leading Professor, General Chopper and Gonzalez-the-Basque-Bank-Robber.
Blithe spirit, and for his star appearance on the Fours the Professor greets his people not like Noël Coward in The Italian Job.
Heavy heavy dreadlocks veil a veinless face. Heart sinking heavier than the poor sop who finds herself broadside el Presidenté Bliar on a long-haul flight. With nowhere left to run. And nowhere left to hide. Simply the votive of a wet painful death. Benjamin relieves himself of a final-wish lungful and stamps dead the stump on the crosswalk of the Fours.
Around the post grave-cold and down into the depths of Hell reeking of boiled cabbage Benjamin drags leaden feet and laden heart against his better judgment step by iron step. High ovehead the funeral choir of dickies unleash blue murder to join the bedlam of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and DT8 Project’s Winter from two hundred radio boxes.
A private chain of guilt drags Benjamin around the foot and forces the Block to revolve in slow motion. Like a show-lagging frame of a black and white film. As if everything is wrong. How he longs to leap furlongs, to be free of gravity and to fly like a bird. To leap freefall as smashes the world record like Bob Beamon through the thin air of Mexico City. Numb. Rooted to the green linoleum of the Ones in a soul-sickening stasis.
Frame by frame the Professor’s knuckles drop the handle of the Committee Room to reveal a psychodrama of Tosa-the-Man-Mountain centre-seated the far side of the pocked table and flanked each side by six Nazis, backs against the wall, and shiny pink domes like garden gnomes stripped of their glory.