by Sue Townsend
Susan ran up to Britney and sniffed her bum. When she ran back to Harris, Susan reported, ‘She’s a slag, Harris. Keep away from her.’
But Harris was mesmerized. ‘How do you do?’ he growled. ‘I’m Harris, the Queen’s dog.’
Britney lay down, displaying her elegant limbs to their best advantage. ‘Am I bovvered?’ she said, tossing her blonde head. ‘Do I look like I’m bovvered?’ she yawned.
Susan yapped, ‘Harris! She’s had more dogs inside her than the show ring at Crufts!’
But it was too late. Harris lay down beside Britney and began his seduction routine.
A mildly obese teenage girl showed the Queen and Violet into a front room, where to their surprise they joined other people who were sitting around the edges of the room on white plastic garden chairs. Piles of ancient celebrity magazines were stacked on a coffee table. The television in the corner was showing the wedding of the Prime Minister’s daughter. The cameras swept around the flower-filled interior of Westminister Abbey, picking out famous faces in the seated congregation. ‘Jimmy Savile,’ said Violet. ‘I thought he was dead.’
‘If he’s not, he deserves to be,’ said the Queen irritably. She had not expected that she would have to wait. After all, it was not as if the pliers woman had a qualification in dentistry. When screams were heard from the next room, the teenage girl came in and turned the volume up on the television. The deep vibrato of the Westminster Abbey organ rattled the pliers woman’s sash windows.
Violet Toby said, ‘Look, Liz, the Prime Minister’s scraping his foot on the steps. He looks like ’e’s stepped in dog muck.’
After an hour of agonized waiting for the Queen, the teenage girl came to collect her, saying, ‘Mam’ll see you now.’
The Queen was shown into the steamy kitchen where a pan was boiling on the stove, watched by a plump woman dressed in Lycra leggings and a white tee shirt, on which was printed the slogan ‘NO PAIN, NO GAIN’ across the front.
‘Won’t be a minute,’ said the pliers woman. ‘Only I ’ave to sterilize between patients, I’m dead careful like that.’
A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the draining board. Every now and then the pliers woman picked up the cigarette and sucked on it as though she was drawing nourishment from it. ‘Sit down and take the weight off your legs,’ she said, dropping cigarette ash into the pan. The Queen hesitated. It was not too late to apologize for wasting the pliers woman’s time, and leave before her consultation began, but she simply could not face another sleepless night. So she sat at the kitchen table and looked at the row of small metal implements laid out on a clean white towel. She recognized some of them: a crochet hook, eyebrow tweezers and a darning needle. A bottle of vodka stood on a tray with a glass next to it.
‘I know your daughter-in-law, Camilla,’ said the pliers woman, who believed in putting her patients at ease with small talk.
‘Oh, really,’ said the Queen, who was possibly the world’s leading expert on inconsequential chat.
‘Yeah. She goes down the One-Stop Centre on Thursdays, karaoke night. She’s a mate of that big gob, Beverley Threadgold. Camilla’s all right, though.’
‘Does Camilla sing?’ asked the Queen, who knew very little about nightlife on the estate.
‘Yeah, she does. Gloria Gayner, “I Will Survive”. She ain’t bad, but it don’t sound the same in a posh voice. Right, let’s get started.’
She put on a pair of Marigold gloves and, using barbecue tongs, grabbed the pliers out of the boiling water. While they cooled she examined the Queen’s mouth.
‘Yeah, you got a nasty back molar there. I’ll soon ’ave that out, it’s as wobbly as Pavarotti’s arse.’
After asking the Queen ‘to keep dead still’, she yanked on the tooth with the pliers. The Queen felt a violent pain, which subsided almost immediately.
The pliers woman dropped the tooth into a paper tissue and said, ‘That bleeder’s better out than in.’
After swilling her mouth out with vodka and spitting into the sink, the Queen said, ‘How much do I owe you?’
The pliers woman said, ‘Just give us a couple of quid towards the vodka.’
Before she left the kitchen the Queen said, ‘I’m terribly grateful.’
The pliers woman said, ‘Perhaps you’ll remember me when you’re back in the palace.’
The Queen could not imagine the extraordinary circumstances that would compel her to call on the services of the pliers woman again, but she said, ‘I most certainly will.’ Thinking to herself, if the honours system is restored I will recommend the pliers woman gets an OBE, for services to the community.
It should have been the wedding of the year. The guest list was an impressive mix of British society. There was Sir David Frost, Jordan, Cliff Richard, Nancy del’Olio, Frank Bruno, Simon Cowell, Elton John, Peter Mandelson, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, Chris Evans, Charlotte Church, Kate Moss, Steve Redgrave, Ben Elton, Carol Thatcher and numerous foreign dignitaries and heads of state. Jeremy Paxman had declined, claiming he had an important fishing match to attend.
Sonia was marrying a public relations executive. There were gratifyingly large crowds outside the Abbey when Jack arrived with her in the open-topped golden coach that Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, had used many years before. There were some in the crowd of onlookers who thought that this was rather excessive for a proclaimed Republican, and a few brave souls protested. There were shouts of ‘You’ve sold out, Barker’ and a madwoman shouted ‘Golden coaches for cockroaches!’ But the police moved in and dragged the dissidents away, citing the new Disrespect to Those in Public Office Law.
The day was suffused with autumnal sunshine and Sonia looked spectacularly beautiful in her white, strapless, satin dress with the long shimmering train. When Jack stepped out of the carriage, he trod straight into a mound of dog muck that had just been deposited by a sniffer dog with an upset stomach. The dog was Mercury from the Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad. His handler was Sergeant Andrew Crane. (An investigation by the News of the World later found that Sergeant Crane had been transferred to the Falkland Islands. Despite an intensive search, Mercury was never traced. Now and again, on a ‘slow news day’ one of the tabloids will raise the question: What happened to Mercury?)
Jack managed to push Sonia away from the mess on the otherwise immaculately clean red carpet, but his own right shoe was covered in the stinking muck. There was a gasp from the crowd, then a ripple of laughter.
From inside the Abbey came the sound of the organ playing the ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’. Jack had no other option but to walk on, up the steps. He hoped there would be an opportunity to clean his shoes before he escorted Sonia down the aisle. But no such opportunity arose.
The smell intensified under the television lights, as Jack and Sonia processed down the aisle. When they passed Cliff Richard, Jack saw the singer wrinkle his nose in disgust. He glanced behind and saw that he had trailed dog muck up the red carpet and that the bridesmaids holding Sonia’s train were inadvertently spreading more of the nightmare substance on their white-ribboned ballet shoes.
When they reached the altar, the groom and the best man covered their noses. Jack watched the Archbishop of Canterbury as he struggled with ecclesiastical duty versus human revulsion. Nothing showed on the cleric’s face, but when Jack looked down he saw that the Archbishop was wearing open-toed sandals and that he was curling his toes back in an effort to protect them from the pollution. He heard his first wife crying behind him.
At that moment, having ruined his daughter’s wedding day and humiliated himself in front of the world, Jack vowed to rid England of dogs.
10
When the Queen emerged from the pliers woman’s house, holding a clean white handkerchief against her jaw, she saw, with some disgust, that Harris and Britney were mating in the middle of the road, and were holding up the traffic.
Susan ran up to the Queen and howled, ‘He’s gone too far this time. He’s humiliated me for the last tim
e.’
The Queen made several futile attempts to separate the conjoined dogs, but nothing would disconnect them. A van driver at the head of the queue of traffic sounded his horn and shouted, ‘If that was ’umans doing it in the middle of the road, they’d be arrested.’
Seeing the Queen’s distress, Violet went into the house and came out moments later with a bucket of water, which she threw over the two trysting dogs. They flew apart immediately and the Queen angrily clipped the lead on Harris’s collar and dragged him back to Hell Close.
Several people had stopped her on the way to say that they would be sorry to see her leaving the Fez. Maddo Clarke, skunk dealer and single father of seven unruly boys, said, ‘We seen it on the news, ’ow you might be going home to Buckingham Palace like. I said to one of my customers, ’ow you brung a bit of class to the neighbourhood like.’
Violet said, after Maddo had lurched away, ‘I know it’s not the done thing to talk about why we’re all in the Exclusion Zone, but do you know why Maddo got sent here?’
The Queen bent her head to hear Violet’s story.
Everyone in Hell Close had at least one dog, except for Maddo Clarke, who had been forbidden by a magistrates court after the five dogs he’d owned at the time had destroyed the council house he rented and made it unfit for human habitation. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had brought a prosecution, claiming that Maddo’s dogs were emaciated and covered in sores caused by untreated flea bites. Maddo had defended himself in court, maintaining that a thin dog was a fit dog and that fleas were nature’s natural parasites. When the five dogs had been rounded up and taken away, Maddo was bereft; he started drinking heavily and then stumbled into the brotherhood of the drug-dependent.
Finally, when to his great disappointment, his wife Hazel gave birth to a seventh boy, Maddo cracked, and under the influence of drugs and drink tried to snatch a baby girl from a maternity-ward nursery and substitute his newborn son for the day-old child. He was caught trying to remove the kidnapped child’s plastic identity bracelet with his teeth, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Wolf Man’ after a headline in the popular press: ‘WOLF MAN GNAWS ON BABY’S ARM.’
For some reason, Maddo had always blamed his five-year prison sentence and subsequent banishment to an Exclusion Zone on dogs.
As Violet and the Queen turned into Hell Close, the Queen saw Camilla in her front garden planting bulbs. Camilla looked up and said, ‘Beverley Threadgold told me you were having a tooth pulled by the pliers woman. Was it wretched?’
The Queen prodded the gap where the molar had been with the tip of her tongue and said, ‘Not as wretched as watching one’s dog copulate in public.’
Later, after a rest on the sofa, the Queen was cleaning her front-room windows when she saw Arthur Grice’s yellow Rolls-Royce draw up outside her house. Grice’s Dobermann, Rocky, could be seen snarling on the back seat. The Queen ducked out of sight and hoped that Grice was not about to call on her; she was not dressed for company. She was wearing an apron and slippers and had two plastic rollers in the front of her hair.
To her great annoyance, she heard an aggressive knock on the front door. Harris and Susan ran into the hallway and barked their usual hysterical warning. The Queen tore her apron off, snatched the rollers out of her hair and stuffed them into a drawer of the Chippendale bureau in the hall. As she reluctantly opened the door, Arthur Grice removed his custom-made baseball cap and swept it in front of his bulky body with a theatrical gesture, reminiscent of a bad actor in a Restoration drama. He then gave a deep bow and waited for the Queen to speak first.
Arthur had ordered Sandra, his wife, to download and print out a few pages on royal etiquette from the Web. The pages had told him he must not address the Queen first, but must wait until she had spoken to him. He must not touch her on any part of her body. He must call her ‘Your Majesty’ the first time he spoke to her, and thereafter call her ‘Ma’am’.
After a brief silence, the Queen said, ‘Mr Grice, how do you do?’
Grice lifted his head and gave the Queen one of his rarely seen smiles. ‘I’m all right, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m champion.’
The Queen led him into the front room; it was the closest she had ever been to Grice. His face and scalp showed the evidence of a life lived in violent confrontation; knives, knuckles and broken bottles had embedded themselves in Grice as he had battled and cheated his way to riches. The Queen did not ask him to sit down and they stood facing each other, Grice’s bulk towering over the Queen’s slight frame.
The Queen said, ‘How may I help you, Mr Grice?’
Grice said, ‘It’s not so much me I’ve come about, Ma’am. It’s my wife, Sandra.’
The Queen nodded.
Grice rumbled on. ‘I don’t know if you are aware, Ma’am, but Sandra runs herself ragged for ’er charities.’
‘And what are your wife’s charities?’ asked the Queen.
Grice said, ‘She’s the one what started VOICE.’
‘Voice?’ queried the Queen.
Grice said, slowly and carefully, ‘Victims Of Incompetent Silicone Enhancement.’ He then added, ‘She ’ad a boob job what went wrong. One of ’er boobs is twice the size of the other. She’s lopsided for life.’
Grice dropped his head and stared gloomily at the floor.
The Queen murmured, ‘How very unfortunate.’
Grice said, ‘An’ she does a lot of work with teenage boys.’
‘Very admirable,’ said the Queen, who had often seen Mrs Grice driving around the estate playing pounding music in her cabriolet with various louts in the front passenger seat. Mrs Grice had been cosmetically enhanced to such a degree that she looked like a suntanned trainee astronaut undergoing G-force training.
The Queen said, ‘And your point is, Mr Grice?’
Grice said, ‘You wun’t believe the grief she gets from some people. They’re jealous of course, she’s a beautiful woman an’ she ain’t ashamed to show her body off. Some people put it about that she’s a slag. I had ’em dealt with, but if she was Lady Grice she’d feel a bit better about herself.’
The Queen muttered, ‘No doubt.’
Grice said, ‘So if you could see yourself honouring her like.’
The Queen played for time, saying, ‘Perhaps, in the future…’
Grice said, ‘Couldn’t you give me a knighthood, now, while I’m here. I’ve gotta sword in the boot of the Rolls.’
The Queen said, ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Grice. There is a procedure to be followed… advisory committees.’
Grice said, ‘But you’ll be the Queen again soon. If you wanted to honour a local philanthropist what’s overcome all the odds to run the biggest scaffolding business in the Midlands an’ who owns an Exclusion Zone, who could stop you?’
The Queen looked up into Grice’s scarred face and said, ‘I’m afraid my answer is no, Mr Grice.’
‘No?’ said Grice, who rarely heard the word. ‘But I’m the biggest employer on this estate. I break my back for charity. It was me what funded the academy.’
The Queen said, ‘We live in an age when every citizen is of equal worth, Mr Grice. I no longer have the power or, quite frankly, the inclination to grant your wish.’
Grice said, ‘But I set your grandson on as a scaffolder.’
The Queen said, ‘I’m sure William is an excellent scaffolder. He’s a very conscientious boy.’
Grice said, more to himself than to the Queen, ‘She’s ordered new address cards with Sir Arthur and Lady Grice and a coat of arms on ’em. Three scaffolding poles in a triangular configuration with a rampant lion and a panda bear in the centre; she loves pandas.’
The Queen said, ‘It was somewhat premature of your wife to have ordered new stationery, Mr Grice.’
‘She’s an impulsive woman,’ said Grice.
He was not looking forward to going home to his restored watermill and telling his wife that he had failed to secure her an honour. She was high m
aintenance, he thought. He’d spent two hundred and fifty grand on doing the Old Mill up, and his wife was already banging on that the sound of the water got on her nerves.
‘Well, perhaps when you leave ’ere, you’ll visit me and my wife at home, Your Majesty. We’ve got a glass floor in the living room so you can watch the water going by. We’re both nature lovers,’ he said, ‘like yourself.’
The Queen gave him one of her frosty smiles but he did not respond. She walked to the front door and opened it, giving Grice no option but to leave the house. Harris and Susan stood on the doorstep barking at the Dobermann on the back seat.
‘Heil, Rocky, we hope you fall through the glass floor and drown!’ barked Harris. Rocky threw himself against the car window in a frenzy of frustrated anger.
Grice shouted, ‘Get down, you stupid bleeder!’ Once inside the car he added, ‘Another do like that, Rocky, and I’ll have your balls cut off and fried up for me tea.’
Rocky lay down on the back seat and calmed himself. Grice didn’t make idle threats.
The Queen realized she could no longer ignore the possibility that she would have to once again take up her royal duties, and decided that the Royal Family should have a meeting to discuss the possibility of their return to public life. But first she would visit her husband and ask him for advice.
HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been confined to bed for two years after suffering a stroke that snatched away his vision, memory and mobility. He was a long-stay resident in the Frank Bruno House nursing home at the far end of Arthur Road, which ran through the centre of the Fez, a fifteen-minute walk from Hell Close. He languished in a dark back room that he shared with a garrulous former trade union official – the wheelchair-bound Harold Bunion, aka ‘Bolshie’ Bunion. Bolshie talked in his sleep with the same aggrieved tone he used in the day, when he was fully, aggressively, awake.
The Duke of Edinburgh was confined to his bed and considered himself a prisoner of Bolshie’s. He constantly complained to the staff that he had been moved from Heaven, the royal palaces, into Hell, the Fez, and was now living in Purgatory.
