BERTIE
and the Hairdresser Who Ruled the World
Mike A. Vickers
Newly re-elected Independent MP James Timbrill is a hero to his constituents and now lives in marital harmony with his wife Celeste and their super-sentient hyacinth macaw Bertie in the not-so-wilds of the Gloucestershire countryside.
Some people, though, aren’t keen on James’s political impartiality, and mean to make sure that he starts singing to their tune. A cabal of criminal businessmen presents James with an offer he can’t refuse – not if he wants to keep all his bits intact! Resist and there will be consequences – for him and his loved ones.
But those ultimate dodgy dealers haven’t counted on the Sisterhood – a secret society dating back to the ancient world – nor the combined talents of an ageing ex-copper, a determined hairdresser, and our heroic macaw…
A fantastic farce for fans of traditional British satire.
To Jan
Who always returns from the hairdressers both invigorated and bursting with new ideas…
Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus
Many regard the hyacinth as the most beautiful of all macaws. Those who have had the fortune to see this magnificent bird in person are always astonished by its dazzling deep blue plumage. Coverage is complete but for bright yellow flashes beside the bill and thin sunshine spectacle rings around the eyes. The largest species of macaw, hyacinths are now heavily protected. Very few remain in the wild and those still existing in Paraguay and Brazil have seen their habitats decimated by increased human activity. Hyacinths are not deep forest birds but prefer open areas of savannah where they live in small social groups. They benefit from extended lifespans and are normally placid. Unlike African grey parrots, who demonstrate remarkable linguistic skills, hyacinths are not particularly noted for having unusual cognitive abilities.
But there are always exceptions…
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AND FINALLY…
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
BERTIE…
OTHER ACCENT PRESS TITLES
CHAPTER ONE
There is a smell, of all the smells in the world, which has delighted generations, heightening anticipation and creating wonderful feelings of delicious expectation. This seductive smell makes people close their eyes, raise their chins and inhale deeply with a dreamy smile on their faces. Of course, the world is full of such smells and some are excellent indeed, such as welcome rain sizzling on a sun-baked pavement, bread fresh from the oven, or a newly mown English lawn, green and striped. Many other odours are perhaps less evocative but remain, nonetheless, immediately recognisable: WD40, oranges, ozone, molten tar, Burton-on-Trent.
We live on a surprisingly whiffy planet and as a consequence have been generously gifted by nature with the means by which to detect these odours. (Incidentally, the positioning of our noses, so conveniently sited as they are between our eyes, has also greatly assisted in the design of spectacles.) So, on the whole and taking all things into account, there is a positive cornucopia of great smells and it’s one of these more agreeable aromas with which we are concerned at this particular time.
It is the wonderful smell of coffee brewing.
Doreen Coddle stood listlessly, twirling a lock of hair around her finger with that characteristic abstract nonchalance unique to women, waiting for the coffee to percolate. She was on the phone, her sleek black mobile pressed to one ear, a sour expression on her normally placid face. This particular conversation required privacy and so she’d excused herself from company and slipped away into the small kitchenette, but now the woman on the other end of the line was being plain tiresome and Doreen had no time for that, thank you very much. She had just suggested a particular course of action and, as a consequence, the woman was protesting as only a haughty Latin American aristocrat can protest. Doreen let the heavily accented contralto blather on for the length of time it took the old-fashioned percolator to burp thrice then stopped the woman in mid-word with a sibilant hiss. Maria desisted immediately, showing uncharacteristic restraint as she lapsed into a fuming silence. It took a special kind of authority to stopper up the nimble tongue of the mistress of the President of Paraguay – and Doreen had that authority.
Oh, yes, she had it in spades!
Now in her late forties, Doreen Coddle did not appear in any way remarkable for one endowed with so much power – and indeed one certainly needed to be a remarkable personage to be on nodding terms with the mistress of the President of Paraguay. She was of a more generous silhouette than she would have liked, the result of a sedentary life, a hopeless addiction to chocolate and the production of two sturdy children, and it sometimes depressed her that almost every effort she made to trim down her weight seemed to trigger an adverse reaction. She suspected there was an as yet undiscovered law of physics describing how, when dieting, the compulsion to graze between meals was directly proportional to weight lost. Now, there’s something really useful physicists could turn their minds to instead of wasting time on black holes and – er, time. In reality, Doreen had long ago acknowledged that raiding her private sweetie store to satisfy an attack of between-meal munchies probably had something to do with those lying scales registering a steady upward nudge of the needle with each passing year.
However, although not a great beauty by any standard, neither was Doreen cursed with any distressing ugliness – but it sometimes rankled that, in a crowd, she would inevitably be one of the last to stand out, unless, of course, the selection process was determined by hair colour alone.
No, it could not be denied, Doreen was neither a Plain Jane nor a stunning beauty but instead found herself comfortably located within that convivial middle ground occupied by vast swathes of the human race, being neither tall nor short, stick-thin nor truly dumpy and neither elegant nor clumsy. She was an average mother of average height and somewhat above average weight, with an average complexion just on the right side of pale, and she had resigned herself to spending the rest of her life slowly becoming more and more comfortable around the middle. Nonetheless, there remained a waist in there somewhere and a careful choice of clothing could still raise a smile of satisfaction in the dressing mirror and more than just an affectionate squeeze from Bernard.
However, when it came to the really essential life skills, the things that truly mattered to women across the globe, she excelled in three vital areas; she’d married a good man, brought up two wonderful children – and most crucially of all, she had an impeccable taste in shoes.
But, sadly, none of those fine attributes were helping at the moment.
Doreen sighed inwardly and ran an exploratory hand over her hip as she let Maria stew in simmering silence. Yes, there was no doubt about it – despite a strict diet dripping with carbohydrate, sugar and fat, her body was finally answering the siren call of gravity. Mercifully, her features remained essentially unchanged. She had pale, greenish-grey eyes, fine brows, clear skin and a thin-lipped mouth. Her hair, her pride and joy, was always cut in a very nice bob, but those luxuriant waves had recently found themselves host to a very, very unwelcome guest – and this was a
guest who had no plans to move on, no plans at all.
She’d first become aware of this interloper two days ago and the sight had almost reduced her to tears. Two days! How could so short a time have had such a devastating effect? How could it have changed her life so much? The guest was still there and very soon one of its cousins would be coming to stay as well. Then another would join them both, and another. Doreen sighed. Her first grey hair was going nowhere. It was making itself entirely at home, settling in for the duration, a distressing, unwanted, insignificant but ultimately deadly ashen thread emerging like an infection at her temple.
This catastrophe merely reminded her she now lay firmly in the grasp of middle age. Her youth had long departed, and like just about everyone else, she hadn’t even noticed! This, above all, was the source of her current bout of unease and dissatisfaction, and spurred on by that single grey hair putting its feet up beside her ear, she’d taken out her frustration with Moaning Maria. Doreen had to admit it was grossly unfair – but it did help. A lot.
For a long time every facet of Doreen’s existence had been remarkable for actually being unremarkable – and that, in a nutshell, more or less describes the lives of almost everyone on the planet.
Then she came.
Until that moment there had been no real extremes in Doreen’s life, neither peaks nor troughs to liven things up a little, and she had somehow found that fact to be increasingly sad. She’d been essentially content with Bernie and the kids, with her career, but there had always been that quiet nagging voice inside, the one whispering that surely there was more to life than this. She was in no doubt other women heard the same whisper, including many of her friends. This is life, it murmured over tea and a plateful of buttered scones, do something with it before it’s too late! Bernie would have been surprised to discover Doreen had felt that way. He was a good husband and gave his all to provide for the family, but again, that had been before she came. That woman! That remarkable, warm-hearted, astonishing, passionate, charismatic woman.
She changed everything.
Suddenly, Doreen’s life had more ups and downs than a Merthyr Tydfil bus route. Who would have believed it!
Oh, and by the way, be careful what you wish for. Be very careful indeed.
Her thoughts again turned to that awful grey hair while she continued to let Maria fume. She knew it was pointless plucking it out. That would merely initiate an avalanche of eager replacements, all keen to avenge their cruelly uprooted colleague. Damn, why did it have to happen now, just as she was getting acclimatised to her disappearing waist? She checked the mirror again, just to see if she’d been mistaken, but it was still there contaminating her lovely colour. The sight of this solitary interloper had made her sharper than usual with Maria.
Patience. Always. Especially when dealing with prickly characters like the volatile, sharp-tongued and extremely excitable Maria Consuela Bernicia Rosalinda Melgarejo: concubine, mistress, pneumatic ex-call girl and savvy bed partner to one of South America’s most egocentric and bombastic presidents. He liked to think his beloved people still called him El Toro – The Bull – but although El Presidente was snorting, belligerent and muscular in his public life, he was not quite so bestially potent between the sheets. El Toro’s horn tended to be short, blunt and downward-turning these days, much to Maria’s chagrin.
Now there was something Doreen had no complaints about, even after twenty-seven years of marriage. Bernie had been her childhood sweetheart and she still found him as enticing as the day she went on the pill as a sixteenth birthday present to him, some time way back in the foggy dimness of the eighties. To tell the truth, Doreen actually had to come off the pill just before their wedding and in one of those strange coincidences which often pepper our lives, her mother, that very evening, had sat her down and advised that now she was about to marry she should strongly consider oral contraception to prevent any untoward accidents. Poor Mum; she never knew the truth to her dying day.
Bernard Coddle had approached the young and fresh-faced Doreen Williams in their school bike sheds one lunchtime in March. She was fifteen, he a year older. No awkward shuffling of the feet and sheepish mumbling for Bernie. No, indeed. He had simply walked up to her as she was padlocking her bike and said, ‘Doreen, you’re the prettiest girl in school and I want to go out with you.’ Overwhelmed by the subtlety of his approach, Doreen simply had nodded and when Bernie marched off, head held high, she’d walked to her history lesson in a bit of a daze. The lively consequences of the Enclosure Acts had held no interest for her on that particular afternoon!
They married young and the kids came quickly after that, doubtless something to do with coming off the pill. She and Bernie had done a lot of squeezing in those days. Martin came first, a bouncing bundle endowed with three superlative skills: smiling, puking and farting. A year later he was joined by Joanne. Doreen’s hopes for a less messy baby were sadly shattered. Jo was everything her brother was, with the added bonus of an ability to fill her nappy with truly astonishing frequency. Doreen had thought there was something very wrong with them both until her mother informed her they were merely continuing a fine family tradition.
Doreen found motherhood daunting and by far and away the most difficult task a woman could ever attempt. Catastrophic injuries were avoided on an almost hourly basis and the house needed steam cleaning at least twice a day – but when things went well it was just the best feeling ever. Their summer holidays in Weymouth were legendary, but then they really splashed out and went abroad for the first time. To Saundersfoot. She’d made cardboard passports for the kids which they waved at the tollbooth woman on the Severn Bridge. When they finally arrived, a passing truck had clipped the town sign, reducing it by one letter to Saundersfoo. That holiday had passed into family history, never to be beaten.
Time galloped by, uncaring and swift, so when Doreen reached her thirties she had two boisterous youngsters to control in addition to keeping down a full-time job. Bernie had his plumbing business to keep him busy, It’s A Doddle For Coddle proudly emblazoning the sides of his van. Stresses and strains tore at her family in much the same way as they did for just about every other family she knew. Some went under, others survived. Hers fell into the latter category. Just! Now Jo and Marty were both postgraduates and had proper passports of their own, the type where the photo actually looked lifelike and an embedded chip allowed you to roam the world. Saundersfoo had been replaced by Faliraki, Weymouth by Ibiza. The kids were gone, living their own lives and only returning when the laundry needed doing. Doreen wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Maria had never experienced such difficulties, bless her flashing almond eyes. She had no children and planned none for the future. Her ovaries were locked up tight and strictly off-limits to any passing sperm. She was a woman with an eye on the main chance and no snivelling, figure-ruining, nipple-chewing infant was going to stop her achieving what she desired most. Status. Money. Power. El Toro provided them all with traditional South American presidential flamboyance.
Doreen could almost feel Maria’s Latin incandescence radiating from the phone pressed to her ear. She’d now been forced into this wholly unnatural silence for nearly a minute, yet Doreen knew she could keep her waiting for as long as she liked. Power indeed. The woman was literally panting with frustration. No doubt her bosom was doing that wobbly thing which made El Toro go weak at the knees, but Doreen didn’t care too much about Maria’s trembling hooters.
‘We all have to make sacrifices, Maria,’ she said finally, taking pity on the poor woman before she started ripping out her own hair. The conversation required a patience she didn’t really feel, necessitating the use of that calm voice she knew exasperated Maria so much. ‘You are part of a larger picture. Your needs must sometimes be put to one side. No sex. That’s an order.’
‘But –’
‘No, Maria. I will not hear any more. I admit it is unfortunate for you to be involved with such a petulant, self-centred, arro
gant bully-boy, but it is your duty. I tell you again, it is vital to deflect El Toro. He’s just irritating the Bolivians now but they are a grim and determined lot when they get going. Use your most powerful weapon. Deny him your connubial services. Coupled with the rumour I have just decided you are going to spread that not all is well in the presidential trousers, this should be enough to achieve our aims. In my experience with men such as El Toro, the merest suggestion of soft cock syndrome would prove too humiliating. You only need to point out, in your inimical way, just how embarrassing it would be if his chuckling populace discovered the extent of his sexual inadequacy. How much it would demoralise his military. You only need to deflect him minimally while I work on the Bolivians, then, once conflict has been averted, you can restore his vigour with some of those imaginative techniques for which you are so renowned. I’m confident you’ll find some way to correct his distressing lack of rigidity.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ replied Maria in a suitably deflated tone.
‘Good. Now then, my dear, you will keep me informed, won’t you.’
‘Certainly, Mother.’ Poor Maria sounded most despondent. Doreen decided to offer a little reward.
‘And when the dust has settled, I’ll arrange for a presidential trip to London and we can go shopping for shoes.’
‘Oh, thank you, Mother,’ squealed Maria with genuine delight. Now, that had cheered her up. Considerably.
‘I love you, Maria. Do not ever forget that.’ Doreen finished the call and took a deep breath to calm herself. Goodness, she’d almost lost her temper. South American dictators and their lively concubines could be so tricky to handle. She mulled over the situation while the coffee machine continued to belch spasmodically, and wondered why this burden had settled on her shoulders. The answer came immediately, as it always did in these moments of reflection, accompanied with the fond memory of that day in February over fifteen years ago, the day her life changed for ever.
Bertie and the Hairdresser Who Ruled the World Page 1
