by Sue Townsend
The Queen persuaded Violet to try on a wide-brimmed hat, covered in peacock feathers, saying, ‘I always felt a little intimidated by it, but it will suit your… bolder personality perfectly.’
Violet smiled when she saw her reflection in the looking glass. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘this hat don’t scare me.’
After titivating their faces with the stash of Estée Lauder cosmetics the Queen had kept unused in a drawer for a special occasion, the two women left the house, treading carefully on the broken pavements in their court shoes, and headed towards the One-Stop Centre. The invitations to the ceremony had said, ‘Dress smart: no jeans, no trainers, no Burberry, no horses.’ The Queen had puzzled over the ‘no horses’, before being informed by Harry that ‘no horses’ was code for ‘no Ralph Lauren’.
All over the Flowers Estate similar scenes were taking place, as people pulled their smartest clothes out of cupboards and wardrobes. A mellow golden sun warmed the Flowers Exclusion Zone, for which both the Reverend Edmund-Harvey and the Imam Mohammed Akbar took credit. Both men had been asked by Sandra Grice if they would pray for good weather.
Sandra had spared none of Arthur’s expense; she had hired a job lot of entertainers from an agency calling itself Joviality Incorporated. She had not had her pick of agencies; most of them carried a warning on their advertising literature: ‘No Exclusion Zones’. A small orchestra had been engaged to play Arthur’s favourite music, before, during and after the ceremony. Arthur’s taste had not changed since he was a young teenager, and when Sandra had asked him what the orchestra should play, he’d replied, ‘Motown, there’s bin no music since 1965.’
The One-Stop Centre had been draped in English flags and bunting. Balloons had been tied, perhaps unwisely, to the razor wire that ran around the perimeter of the roof. Inside the main hall, floral displays of carnations and chrysanthemums spelt out S.A.G., Arthur’s soon-to-be initials. Round the back of the building, inside a hired freezer, was an ice statue of Arthur, depicting him as a purposeful visionary with one hand shielding his clear-sighted eyes from the sun.
A magnificent six-tiered cake, each tier supported by eight icing-sugar faux scaffolding poles, stood in the middle of a room-sized buffet table. The food was a hymn to saturated fat. There were mounds of Turkey Twizzlers, stacks of mini pork pies, piled wedges of glutinous pizza, a small mountain of suppurating cheese cubes on sticks, deep bowls of potato crisps and platters of slimy chicken thighs. Sandra had crossed ‘salad’ off the suggested menu: Arthur never touched rabbit food and considered those that did to be communists and cranks.
At ten o’clock the Queen and Violet arrived at the One-Stop Centre. After passing through various security checks, they were shown by a policeman in a bullet-proof vest into the main hall where the caterers, two bickering bald men, were putting the final touches to the food by decorating it with plastic watercress. There was a raised dais at the end of the hall on which stood a semicircle of gold-painted chairs. Each chair had a card Sellotaped to the seat: ‘Reserved for Royal Family’.
Violet said, with an aristocratic hauteur, ‘And where exactly do I put my arse?’
The Queen tore off one of the Sellotaped cards and said, ‘Princess Michael will have to sit in the audience.’
Violet nodded and took her place next to the Queen.
The small orchestra gathered around the piano and frowned over their sheet music. More used to Salzburg than Motown, they nevertheless started up gallantly with a somewhat staid rendition of ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’.
At ten fifteen, the Queen, Violet and the rest of the Royal Family were escorted to a side room while the dais was prepared with a velvet footstool and the ceremonial sword. At half past ten a procession of cars and flatbed lorries assembled at the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Exclusion Zone. Arthur and Sandra were sitting in the back of an open-topped carriage, drawn by two white horses whose manes had been plaited with purple ribbons to match Sandra’s purple velvet ermine-trimmed dress and cloak. Arthur was an imposing figure in his top hat and tailored morning suit.
Sandra had told her dressmaker to run her up something ‘sexy but tasteful. Tits, but no nipples. Bum, but no crack. Legs, but no fanny.’ The dressmaker had dropped her other work to concentrate on Sandra’s outfit and had produced a frock that Camilla later described as a hybrid of flamenco dancer and Ruritanian princess.
Rocky sat between Arthur and Sandra, wearing a new purple rhinestone collar. He was dreading the mockery of the dogs on the estate. He had refused to jump into the carriage, until Arthur threatened him with ‘a good kickin’, if you don’t get your arse in sharpish’, so Rocky had been given no choice but to do as his master commanded.
Columns of security police, including Dwayne Lockhart and Inspector Lancer, walked alongside Grice’s carriage. The carriage driver, a melancholic man who owned a riding school near to the Old Mill, had been bribed by Sandra into wearing an eighteenth-century costume, including a powdered wig and tricorne hat. After they had been trotting along for only a few moments, Arthur tapped the driver on his back and said, ‘Alter your face, sunshine, you look like you’re on your way to the bleedin’ gallows.’
The entertainers walked at the rear of the procession, behind a small brass band that played hits from the Eurovision Song Contest, including ‘Congratulations’ and ‘Boom-Bang-A-Bang’. The residents of the Exclusion Zone lined the streets in their thousands, lured out of their houses by the banging drums, clashing cymbals and oom-pah-pah of the trumpets and trombones. Their numbers were reinforced by Grice’s scaffolders, who had been given a day’s holiday – without pay – so that they could celebrate his social elevation.
The night before, Dwayne Lockhart had spent several fraught hours reading Dostoevsky’s harrowing account of his incarceration in a Siberian Gulag. Dwayne had been moved to tears by the great writer’s description of a Christmas Day treat, when some of the prisoners had performed a melodramatic play for the other convicts. The brutalized men – some of whom had raped and murdered, and had been sent mad by the horrific conditions – were transfixed by the clumsy acting and brightly lit stage. The brutality had left their faces, and for an hour or so they became better men. Dwayne fancied he saw the same redemptive expression on the faces of those watching Grice’s parade (though, it has to be said, nobody else he conferred with afterwards witnessed such a transformation).
A juggler threw five oranges in the air and caught most of them most of the time. A mime artist carried an imaginary sheet of glass. Two stilt walkers, in very long trousers, sulked at the back, desperately trying to keep up with the rest. A clown in an orange fright wig squirted onlookers with water from a flower pinned on to his loud checked jacket, until a youth who had failed an anger management course took exception and threatened the clown with grievous bodily harm.
Dogs stood among the crowds throughout the route, and Rocky’s worst fears were realized. His purple rhinestone collar was the cause of much canine hilarity, and there were cruel jokes about his sexual orientation, cracked in the safe knowledge that Rocky’s elevated social position made it impossible for him to jump from the carriage and rip their throats out. As the carriage passed Hell Close there was a barrage of what sounded like orchestrated barking, from the resident dogs. On-lookers swear that the dogs were lined up in three rows in order of height, and that Harris appeared to be conducting from the front. What Rocky heard was: ‘Rocky, join our Hell Close Pack! Send your rhinestone collar back!’
At Cowslip Lane the morbidly obese waddled to their front gates to watch. At Daisy Hill the cadaverous junkies gathered to gape. In Slapper Alley the young mothers held their babies up to see the parade. The lap dancers came out of Grice-A-Go-Go and gyrated their nipple tassels and wolf-whistled Arthur as he passed by. At the gates of the Arthur Grice Academy the children were lined up in their school uniforms to sing a song specially commissioned by Sandra for the occasion. There was nobody in the school who could play a musical
instrument, so the children sang unaccompanied:
Thanks to Arthur we are blessed,
We shall strive and never rest
Till our school is in the black
And we have the things we lack,
Paper, pens and canteen cooks,
Teacher’s aids and library books.
Praise to Arthur, prince of men,
Arthur Grice we sing ‘Amen’.
Few of the struck-off professionals came out on to the street, but many disgraced doctors, solicitors and teachers watched from their windows and doorsteps. A police helicopter clacked overhead and a policeman could be seen videoing the procession and the on-lookers. A large crowd of hoodies jeered and shouted obscenities as the procession passed Asbo Gardens. Arthur ordered his security police to, ‘Present tasers!’ and the hoodies slunk away.
The Queen and the rest of the Royal Family, Charles, Camilla, Andrew, Edward, Sophie, Anne, Spiggy, William, Harry and Princess Michael, waited in a small side room that was normally used for obesity counselling. Step-on scales that registered up to fifty stone stood in one corner.
Princess Anne, in a tweed suit and sensible shoes, said to her brother, Andrew, ‘Go on, Porky, weigh yourself. There’s a machine you won’t break.’
Andrew, in a pinstriped suit that strained to contain his bulk, said, ‘Have you looked at your husband lately, Annie? He looks like a beach ball on legs.’
‘I like bein’ fat,’ said Spiggy, patting his big check-shirted belly. ‘An’ anyway, the last time I lost weight, I lost a couple of inches off my sausage. Annie didn’t like that, did you, Annie?’
Anne said, ‘No, I did not. A chipolata is no match for a decent banger.’
William and Harry, dressed in smart casuals, laughed and snapped their fingers. Edward and Sophie, both in grey suits, sniggered and Charles, in blazer and what he called ‘slacks’, turned away and studied a wall chart detailing the weight fluctuations of the morbidly obese population of the Flowers Exclusion Zone.
Camilla, in the dress and coat she had worn for her own wedding, whispered to Charles, ‘Darling, please don’t go into one of your black-dog moods.’
Charles whispered back, ‘I sometimes wonder if I belong to this family, they are so bloody coarse.’
When the sound of the brass band was heard outside, playing ‘Puppet on a String’, the Queen said, ‘Mr Grice is about to arrive. We ought to take our seats now, he is the star of the show.’
As they were about to file into the hall, Violet said to Princess Michael, ‘By the way, you’ve got to sit in the audience with the ordinary people. I’m ’er lady-in-waiting, I’ve got to take ’er bag from ’er when ’er ’ands are full.’
Princess Michael was about to protest, but was silenced when, with the appearance of the Queen, the orchestra struck up the national anthem. Only a few people in the hall stood up to sing. The Queen was glad when it was over and she could take her place on the dais.
Disappointingly, few of Arthur’s friends and relations had been able to attend the ceremony; many had been called away at the last minute on urgent business or had developed sudden incapacitating illnesses, so most of the seats in the hall were occupied by workers in the scaffolding trade and their families.
The trumpets from the One-Stop Centre Boys’ Brigade Unit played a discordant fanfare and Arthur Grice entered with Sandra on his arm. They walked down a strip of red carpet towards the end of the hall, to where the Queen was waiting, her hands clasped in front of her, her handbag in the crook of her arm. A single twitch at the corner of her mouth betrayed her amusement at the sight of Arthur Grice in a top hat that was a little too small for his massive head. As Arthur proceeded up the aisle he wished that his father were still alive to witness him now, about to be honoured by the Queen. The last time he had seen his father, the old man had screamed, ‘May you burn in hell, Arthur, you ugly bastard!’ His father had been suffering from delirium tremens at the time and Arthur liked to think that he didn’t know what he was saying.
Before Arthur knelt on the velvet stool in front of her, the Queen said quietly, ‘Good morning, Mr Grice. I hope that you do not think that I am impertinent, but I have one more request before the investiture.’
Arthur waited. What did she want? Money? No problem, he had loads.
‘I would like you to double the nursing staff at Frank Bruno House and arrange for the residents to have assistance to eat their meals.’
Arthur did a quick calculation; he could easily afford to take a cut in profits, old people were a lucrative business.
‘You’ve goddit,’ he said.
The ceremony was held up briefly when Sandra found her reserved seat occupied by Princess Michael, but after a brief scuffle and a few exchanged obscenities, Inspector Lancer stepped in and escorted Princess Michael outside, and the proceedings continued.
Violet Toby stepped forward to take the Queen’s handbag and received a round of applause and a few whistles from the Tobys in the audience, then the Queen indicated by a slight inclination of her head that Grice was to kneel. He handed his top hat to Sandra, who was sitting immediately behind him, and knelt before the Queen. The Queen took Grice’s own ceremonial sword, the one he’d confiscated from a rival gang in the early days of the scaffolding turf wars, and tapped Grice once on each shoulder with the flat of the blade, before saying, ‘Arise, Sir Arthur Grice.’
As Sir Arthur Grice staggered to his feet, Sandra Grice screamed, ‘Live the dream, babe! Live the dream!’ And much to the Queen’s alarm, others in the room began to scream and whistle.
Charles whispered to Camilla, ‘Why can’t people be quietly pleased any more? Why do they have to scream like banshees?’
Lady Sandra flung herself into Sir Arthur Grice’s arms and sobbed, ‘Babe, I’m so proud of you.’
Arthur wept astonishingly large tears and said to those congratulating him, ‘It’s a bleedin’ dream come true.’
Asked by a local radio reporter, ‘How do you feel?’ Arthur said, obligingly following the script for such occasions, ‘It ain’t sunk in yet.’
Over his shoulder, Sandra, following another version of the same script, said, ‘Perhaps by tomorrer it might ’ave sunk in.’
Four burly scaffolders carried the ice sculpture of Arthur into the overcrowded room and placed the glistening statue in the centre of the buffet table. The Queen, Charles and Camilla went to take a closer look; Lady Sandra joined them.
When the Queen congratulated Sandra on having made the arrangements so quickly, Sandra said, ‘It was easy, I just chucked money at it.’
Camilla said, ‘I do envy you your figure, Lady Grice.’
‘Yeah, the surgeon wanted two grand per tit, but Arthur beat him down, and he done the two tits, and took a wart off Arthur’s nose for three grand.’
‘Warts and all,’ said Charles. ‘Jolly good. I wonder if he’s any good with ears?’
‘Listen,’ said Sandra, ‘this bloke could fix Dumbo’s ears and make a nice elephant-skin bag with the leftovers.’
Out of politeness Charles took the surgeon’s telephone number, though he had no money for plastic surgery. The Queen was hurt when she overheard him in the cake queue, complaining to Camilla, ‘I should have had them pinned back when I was a boy.’
Later, as Camilla watched Prince Andrew flinging Marcia across the improvised dance floor, Charles nudged her and said, ‘The statue.’ Arthur’s nose had melted, making him look more pig than man. But nothing could spoil Arthur’s evening. He even broke up a fight between two drunken scaffolders arguing over the last remaining chicken thigh.
Coming back to join the Queen at her table, Arthur blew on his smarting knuckles and said, ‘It can’t get much better than this: a title, a few drinks, the company of friends and a fist fight to round it all off.’
How cruel, then, that when Sir Arthur and Lady Grice returned home to the Old Mill, they found that the glass floor had cracked open and the mill stream had rerouted itself so that it now
ran through the Edwardian conservatory via the minimalist German kitchen. The stench made Sandra gag.
As the stinking water lapped around his ankles, Sir Arthur railed against nature. He cursed everything living and swore to avenge himself on the natural world. Then, because he could hardly blame Sandra for the crack in the glass floor, he took his rage out on Rocky and kicked him around the sodden floor until the dog lay in a whimpering heap in a corner of the thatched porch. When Sir Arthur stormed off to ring for help, Rocky climbed to his feet slowly, checked each of his legs for damage, and then started the painful four-mile walk to Hell Close.
The Hell Close dogs were waiting at the entrance to the cul-de-sac for Rocky to arrive. He had announced his destination when he was a mile away; Rocky’s bark was a thunderous basso profundo that carried a huge distance. Harris barked to the other dogs, ‘Rocky is joining us; he will be an extremely useful member of the pack.’
Protracted bum-sniffing and tail-wagging celebrated Rocky’s arrival in the close. Some of the bolder dogs tried to lick his genitals, but Rocky yelped in pain and they backed off and apologized. Because the dogs could not survive without human help, there was the question of which household Rocky should attach himself to. Rocky growled, ‘I’m not going where I’m not wanted.’
It was Micky, Violet’s dog, who suggested that Rocky should wait a while and see which of the humans would offer Rocky a home. After warning him about Maddo Clarke, the other dogs went to their owners’ homes and left Rocky to lick his wounds. As expected, it was Maddo who first tried to lure Rocky off the green, but a low menacing growl and a display of dripping fangs sent him scuttling back behind his garden fence. Eventually, as night fell and a light rain began, Barry Toby tramped across the green and said, ‘Come on, lad.’ And Rocky got up and followed Barry home.
46
Chantelle and Chanel had turned Violet Toby’s cramped front room into what they called ‘a pampering parlour’. Camilla had been ordered to soak her ‘damaged by gardening’ hands in a pudding basin full of warm, soapy water by Chanel Toby, who had been horrified at Camilla’s ragged cuticles and broken nails. Chantelle was giving the Queen a pedicure. Each time a royal toenail was cut and a clipping flew across the room, it was chased by Micky, who retrieved it and brought it back to Chantelle, who said, ‘Good boy, Micky.’
