Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  Paul is giving us the sound of schoolchildren singing, a little further to the west of the great city development to which we have been referring. Paul has located a school of the new regime: they’re singing a Christian song as recommended by an Act of Parliament at morning assembly. Their innocent voices carol: this is what they sing:

  “So here hath been dawning

  Another blue day,

  Think, wilt thou let it

  Fly useless away?”

  So far so good; the Protestant work ethic still about its perfectly decent business. But what is this? What are they singing now?

  “Or wilt thou use it

  For profit, and say

  Hasten the dawn

  Of another blue day ?”

  What has got into their voices, their hearts, their souls? What view is this of their own existences? Do they no longer want to go to heaven? Do they want heaven on earth, these kids? Do they want their oats now, not later? Good God, how will we keep our youth in order, if they have adopted the hopes and aspirations of their elders and betters, Mr. Maxwell, Mrs. Thatcher and her fine son Mark, all those City folk whose names we have already forgotten, stabbed in the back by their colleagues, the insider dealers, the fraudsters, the goers to sea in sleazy yachts? The new robber barons. Weep, children, weep for your lost souls. Trust Les to be hot on Paul’s heels, getting them into shot. What’s happened is that Paul and Les have a new master now: the stern director Angus, and a commission from the BBC, though it scrapes its barrel for funds. Oh yes, we’re into fiction now. We’re allowed a glimpse of the terrors of reality.

  Here, little sister to Canary Wharf, we see Bagshott Towers, an unfinished development complex striving to survive recession. Once it was the little river port of Parrot Pier: a pretty place: a miniature Greenwich, albeit on the wrong side of the river. Parrot Pier boasted a Georgian house or so, and an old playhouse, some bonded warehouses, a host of railway cottages and navy dwellings. Gone, all gone: in their place a cluster of concrete structures rise out of a river of mud. If Les will only point his camera where Angus requires, we can see what can only be a group of anxious structural engineers teetering on the still unfinished thirteenth floor of a residential block, wondering whether or not it’s entirely safe. Too late, in any case—from the ground floor up to the twelfth the habitation units are already occupied; here now dwell the desperate human overflow from the Inner City (the local council hires in homeless from other city boroughs for a substantial fee, hires out its own homeless to others for a lesser one, and so mysteriously makes a profit: it has something to do with the river view and Poll Tax levels).

  Listen hard, and hear the hurrying feet of Rupert Oates, the social worker, driven by pressure of overwork to speak his thoughts aloud, at our expense. “Les, where are you? Paul, Paul, pick up Mr. Oates’ thought patterns, if you please. Paul, are you happy?”

  “More than happy, Mr. Angus, sir. I call you ‘sir’ because you as my director are equipped to take an overview, earn more than I do, are not staff but work freelance, and can engage the bosses in conversation. I, who do not have the benefits of your education, your background, your capacity for chutzpah, am only fit to lick your boots, be told what to do and develop biceps, which my girlfriend hates, by swinging the sound boom overhead. She does not like me to be muscly, macho. More than happy, sir! What option do I have? The thoughts in Mr. Rupert Oates’ head run thus:

  ‘Listen, folks, I have a tale to tell of Bagshott Towers, I know it well. Being the welfare man round here: kept sadly busy too, I fear. Here, where once stood Parrot Pier and village pond and willows dear, now soars the height of Bagshott Towers, stressed concrete takes the place of bowers—’

  “You live in a flowery house called The Bowers, I believe, Mr. Director Angus, over on Hampstead Hill, next door to ‘The Cot’ where Mr. Bagshott used to live, before he was carted away for corruption. Bagshott tore down his dovecote, according to the gutter press, and put in a swimming pool and re-named The Cot ‘Amanda’ after his girlfriend—and why not, Mr. Director? Mr. Bagshott was a vulgarian, as am I: happy Paul the sound-man. Mr. Oates has a word or two to say on that. They go like this: ‘The grass of course is greener on the other side, where the gentry of the world reside. But listen, folks, we have a tale to tell, of how the rich and mighty fell. The property speculators’ bubble produced this land of mud and rubble. And Timothy Bagshott’s dad, I fear, is much to blame for all that’s here, and now he languishes in jail, so let Jim himself take up the tale.’”

  “Les,” says Angus, “that’s more than enough of Paul. Can we reconstruct Amanda three months ago, when the fraud squad swooped at five that summer morning, and eased Jim Bagshott out of bed, and put him in a police car and sped him off to meet his just deserts? And can we do it within budget?”

  You, the viewer, will have seen similar scenes on TV many times. The camera, following the vanishing car, seldom turns back to the house to see the forlorn figures of those left behind, waving goodbye on the step: in this case it’s young Timothy Bagshott and his dismal Aunt Annie. Or, as Rupert Oates observes, “My tale’s of Timothy Bagshott, son of Jim, and how misfortune came to him, and how the lad faced up to perils great, and how at least he conquered cruel fate.”

  Paul the sound-man swears this is what goes on in Rupert Oates’ head, and Paul has the acuity of the really happy to be believed now. “Paul, are you happy?”

  “Happy as Larry, Angus.” There is hope, you see: there is always some underlying happy refrain, if only we can hear it. Let’s for God’s sake get on before the light goes.

  “I’ll have something to say to my solicitor,” says Jim, and who should he find sharing his open prison cell, of course, but Clive his solicitor, so this is how the word or two went:

  “What are you doing here?” asked Jim.

  “Six years,” said Clive. “For fraud. And you?”

  “Twenty years,” said Jim, “for bribery and corruption.”

  “Last time we met,” said Clive, “we had champagne and chips for breakfast. Remember that.”

  “And now,” said Jim, “we are reduced to porridge. But, knowing us, we’ll soon have cream on it. My only worry is the boy. Poor Timothy, poor motherless boy. The house sold over his head; his school fees left unpaid. Nothing between him and destitution but my sister, his Aunt Annie, and all she cares about is herself, but then who doesn’t?”

  “But he’s got the Welfare, Jim,” said Clive. “Let us not forget the Welfare. It’s what we paid our Poll Tax for, or failed to, as the case may be.”

  “What’s to become of the boy?” asked Jim again. A tear or two fell from his eyes.

  “The criminal classes often weep for the sorrows of children,” Angus the director says in a note to the actor playing Jim, “although they have caused the sorrows themselves.” The actor yawns.

  Ripple-dissolve to a month ago—Angus favours ripple dissolves: they remind him of his childhood and save re-writes—when on the step of the shuttered Amanda, Timothy Bagshott stood alone, his smart pigskin suitcase by his side, the very model of a smart City gent in uniform, only slightly miniatured by virtue of his lack of years. And zooming up is a battered mini-van, with DEPARTMENT OF YOUTH writ large upon its rusty side—nothing rustier than the Welfare, these days, in any city in the world—and in the van our good friend Rupert Oates himself. Paul, happy Paul, pick up his thoughts!

  “See, here I come, the Welfare Man, in the County Council van, though Bagshott is a cursed name round here, still Timothy does deserve my care.”

  And Timothy and his poor Aunt Annie, a nervous, plain, unmarried lady in her middle years, much burdened by black plastic sacks into which are crammed all her worldly belongings and such of Timothy’s as she could be bothered to bring, step into the van. The boy would not be seen in public, even on the steps of a disgraced and shuttered house, with a black plastic sack. He would rather die than lose his dignity. This is what private education does to a lad.

  An
d off the van goes, through the dilapidation of poor Parrot Pier, to the slightly less broken structures of the new estate. Here removal vans abound: the hopeful and the hopeless, the repossessed and unpossessed: have you got them in shot, Les? You’re not doing a promotional video now: this is real life. “Till Timothy’s fortunes we decide,” thinks Rupert Oates, “it’s been judged best that he reside, for such are fate’s ironic powers, with his aunt in Bagshott Towers. A Council rent book! Oh, what shame, to those with Bagshott as a name.”

  Les captures the faces of Timothy and his Auntie Annie, as they stare up the soaring, if truncated, face of Audrey Tower, their future home. Twelve floors finished and twenty-five hoped for. “Most of us,” observes Rupert, “of course are glad to take what there is to be had, but Audrey Tower I have to tell is where the problem families dwell, and as a pleasant place to live is quite the worst the Council has to give.”

  The arrival of the Bagshott aunt and nephew and Mr. Oates in Council towers is observed by one Jon-Jon Ooster, a sixteen-year-old punk of some charm and intelligence, albeit white-faced, grimy and hung with leather, chains and nose rings. Jon-Jon, a vegetarian, smokes a cigar in the corridor he is to share with the Bagshotts (and a dozen others, of course, but they’re too in terror of Jon-Jon to leave their apartments to put in an appearance). Paul, a snatch of conversation, please. Are you dreaming? We have to hear as well as look.

  “I’m certain there’ll be a shortage of oxygen this high up,” said Aunt Annie. “If Timothy’s asthma returns I shall hold you responsible, Mr. Oates.”

  “I didn’t know you had asthma, Timothy,” says Mr. Oates.

  “I haven’t,” says Timothy.

  “Yes, he has,” declares Aunt Annie. “It started the day his mother left home. He was only seven. Do you remember that day, Timothy?”

  “Not if I can help it,” observes Timothy.

  “See? How he suffers!” says Aunt Annie. “Poor little Timothy! Poor wee boy!”

  Aunt Annie has decided that the mercy directed at Timothy, by virtue of his childish state, shall include her too, by reason of the sympathy and concern she clearly shows for her nephew. Aunt Annie is not without a soupcon of her brother Jim’s self-interested genes.

  Into the flat they go, gene sharers both, sister and child of brother Jim, and find it bleak, and sparse and grim. The view’s terrific, even so.

  “Is this really how the workers live?” asks Annie. “Come away from the window, Timothy, it isn’t safe. Timothy suffers from vertigo. Don’t you, Timothy?”

  “No,” says Timothy.

  “You must understand, Mr. Oates,” says Aunt Annie, “that it’s impossible for us to live here.”

  “All flats on the Bagshott Estate are of standard size and shape, Miss Bagshott,” observes Mr. Oates. “You are very lucky indeed to have anywhere at all to live. Bed and breakfast is the best that you could have reasonably hoped for. I had to plead your case most strongly at the last Council meeting to get you even this.”

  “But my brother built the place,” says Aunt Annie.

  “Exactly,” says Rupert Oates.

  “Ingratitude!” exclaims Aunt Annie. “And how are we expected to live? I am penniless, you understand. All my money was in my brother’s companies.”

  “So was the Council’s,” says Mr. Oates. “The Social Security office is not far. Try to attend early, otherwise a queue builds up.”

  “I must live on charity?” asks Annie.

  “It’s that or work,” says Rupert Oates. “The same for you as it is for everyone. Nor can the Council continue Timothy at his private school: last term’s incidentals, we notice, came to £1,500. Timothy must say goodbye to riding lessons, stables for his mounts, music and fencing tuition, and a log fire in his study. Timothy must go to the local comprehensive, like anybody else. To Bagshott School.”

  Les, turn your camera to the comprehensive school, a structure twenty-five years old, once pride of Parrot Pier, now in excessive disrepair, except that a recent Council grant of £150,000 paid through Jim Bagshott’s companies has recently effected some meagre improvement. Graffiti sour the walls, the scuttle of cockroaches unnerves the listening ear.

  “A boy with Bagshott as a name at Bagshott School? It seems unkind but that’s the rule,” muses our friend and Timothy’s, Rupert Oates, who now uses his mobile phone to get in touch with Mr. Korn, headmaster of Bagshott School.

  Picture Mr. Korn, frame him in shot: a good man, the hope of the nation, of middle class origin and working class aspirations: he has children’s art upon his walls: night and day he fights for the rights of his pupils and the survival of civilisation, in the face of finance cuts, the irrationality of the parent classes and the original sin of his pupils. He’s tired but he won’t give up. What’s he saying, Paul?

  “I’d like to oblige but I can’t. The second year’s full and I’m understaffed as it is. I know, Mr. Oates, that it’s my happy duty to educate all the kids in this area regardless of race, colour, creed and handicap. If there were only something special about him. There is? What is it? His dad’s in prison? So are all the dads in prison. What’s that you say? Jim Bagshott’s boy? Impossible! I won’t be responsible. He’ll be lynched, and I’ll be blamed.”

  But Mr. Oates puts the pressure on and so the second years squeeze over to make room for Timothy Bagshott. On his way down twelve flights of stairs—the lift is broken—Mr. Oates has a word or two with Jon-Jon Ooster, who keeps him company.

  “I had a letter from your headmaster, Jon-Jon.”

  “Two thousand pupils and Mr. Korn writes about little me! Quel honneur!”

  “You can hardly count as a pupil, Jon-Jon, since it seems you seldom attend.”

  “They go on at you if you’re there,” says Jon-Jon, “and they go on at you if you aren’t. So what does it matter one way or another?”

  “Tell you what, Jon-Jon,” says Mr. Oates, “since we’re all in this together, how about you keep a helpful eye on young Timothy Bagshott, your new neighbour. You’re a good boy at heart. Help him settle in.”

  And Jon-Jon laughs and says, “Yes, me and my mates, we’ll help settle any Bagshott in.”

  “Ingratitude, complaints,” thinks Rupert Oates, “what else can be expected? We have so far from nature’s way defected, the Bagshott lift in Bagshott Towers is often stuck for hours and hours; they piss into the shaft and rust soon turns all moving parts to dust.”

  “I say,” said Timothy Bagshott to his Aunt Annie as dirty water from the loo bubbled up into the sink, “I’m sure the Pater never imagined his own family would end up here or he’d have seen to everything very differently. Tell you what, try running the bath: sometimes it’s a simple matter of an airlock,” but both are distracted by cries of help from the Ooster household and a sudden blow is directed upon the thin front door, which splinters, and there stands Jon-Jon.

  “My mum,” says Jon-Jon, “cannot abide it no more. Every time you empty your bath her loo fills up.”

  “Too bad, old chap,” says Timothy, and shuts the door in Jon-Jon’s face.

  “People like that having the nerve to complain!” remarks Annie. “Why, they’re nothing but a Problem Family!” Another blow upon the door: a burst of splinters in the room: Jon-Jon enters in unasked, and with him brothers both older and younger.

  “Ooster’s the name,” says Jon-Jon, “and this is Joe-Joe and this is little Ripper, and as for me, I’m Jon-Jon.”

  “What quaint names you have round here,” says Timothy. “None so quaint as Bagshott,” observes the middle Ooster lad. “Ripper’s called Ripper for a reason, and Joe-Joe’s back from Borstal where they taught him love of animals and how to have a cold shower every day. We Oosters get about, enjoy life: they suspend our sentences more often than not, to save the prison service aggro.”

  “How fascinating,” observes Timothy.

  “I am reliably informed,” says Jon-Jon, “that you are about to attend Bagshott Comprehensive. I am a pupil there myself.
If I were you, I’d get your Auntie Annie not to take a bath from now on, because my mum don’t like it when she does.”

  “I’ll think about it,” says Timothy, and closes what’s left of the door and tries not to tremble.

  News of his family’s predicament flies fast to big bad Jim, but how can he help his little son?

  “Lovely piece of renovation we did on that school,” observes Jim. “He shouldn’t have too hard a time. Re-named in my honour. A deal of asbestos in the assembly hall walls and high aluminium joists as well; not too good at stress-bearing but economical. Perhaps I should mention it? What do you think, Clive? Imprisonment makes me indecisive. I blame the Courts!”

  “Quieta non movere.” replies Clive, which, being translated, is “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “A lot of glass in that assembly hall,” muses Jim. “What with the roof. They may have had the impression it was anti-ultraviolet glass, but the contractors let me down. What could I do?”

  “Quieta non movere,” says Clive.

  “A fuss about nothing, a scare, this ozone layer,” says Jim. “If a boy gets skin cancer it’s easily cured. I blame his mother; she had no business walking out on me. Everything a woman could want—a fur, a chauffeur, nannies, holidays. Ingratitude! The boy takes after his mother, Clive, and that’s the truth of it. All that money spent on his education, and not a flicker of gratitude: has he been to visit me? No! He thinks himself a cut above me: always did. Sneered at me from behind the bars of his cot. I hope his Aunt Annie’s coping. Perhaps I should get in touch with his mother?”

  “Quieta non movere,” is all Clive says, and Jim fears his friend means to sleep the years of his sentence away …

  An evening or two later (Angus deals with the passage of time on screen by flicking over the days in a calendar; that simple nostalgic device) and there’s Auntie Annie removing soup stains and ironing a secondhand school uniform for Timothy to put on in the morning for his first day.

  “Black, grey and navy blue,” observes Timothy. “How dreary; necessary, I daresay, amongst the great unwashed or why would those in charge choose it? And supposing I get head lice, or impetigo? What then? Perhaps I should aim for a quick medical discharge?”