by Kerrie Noor
They began to talk about editing.
A few sighed as Woody finally caught sight of the “old git” and chased him off with a “you got all you’re getting so piss off.”
“Hello,” shouted one of the dashboard Operators.
They watched Pete mouth hello, followed by a glimpse of Woody.
“It’s Woody,” shouted the secretary. The others looked up at the screen. A few sighed.
“He’s so handsome,” muttered someone.
Woody, unaware that he was being watched, brushed the crumbs from the table.
“And clean.”
“He can clean my table any day.”
A few chuckled until Bunnie’s face filled the screen from Mex’s connection.
“Who are you?” said the Operator.
“Who the hell are you?” said Bunnie.
Chapter Nineteen—Getting There
“GETTING THERE IS EASY—STAYING there takes planning, luck, and more planning.” —Woody to Pete (but Pete wasn’t listening)
DJ got off the train at Glasgow Central and headed towards Buchanan Street. He passed the coffee shop, unaware of Pete and Woody sitting by the window and unaware that they were expecting him.
When Bunnie’s face appeared on the wide screen, all hell broke loose in the shed. No one knew who Bunnie was and to be honest no one was particularly interested. But they knew that Hilda would flip, and Hilda had a habit of arriving without warning . . .
“Put her on hold,” shouted the first in command.
“And keep her there,” said the second.
“Hold—is that the same as tweaking?” said Dashboard Operator One.
“Put a cloth on it,” shouted the secretary, “and press the pause button.”
The DBO stomped to the cupboard under the stairs. “First tweaking, now holding,” she muttered as she pulled out the box of screen covers, taking her time to select what she thought would be the least appropriate—silk or fishnet.
DBO 1 had spent all afternoon trying to work out a way to communicate with Pete and Woody, and without a break. Then, once Pete started muttering “I understand,” the secretary and the like had taken over; like it was them who had done all the tweaking. It should have been her who got the thumbs-up from Woody—not them. Her who told Pete the whereabouts of the plugulator while joking about DJ’s height.
Instead, she was left to deal with a full frontal of Bunnie’s face—staring at her with a set of lashes that could sweep a barn. And she had yet to see a cup of tea, let alone a biscuit.
She pulled out the fishnet. Silk was too good for them.
PETE SAT AT THE CAFÉ waiting for his plugulator and the wearer of the plugulator to pass; he was poised, ready for action, like a cat watching his prey in the grass, except Pete was watching from behind a menu.
“That plugulator is my insurance,” whispered Pete.
Woody nodded.
“My get-out-of-jail-free card . . .”
Woody looked at him.
“As long as she doesn’t know what I know, I have a future.”
Woody pushed the menu from Pete’s face. “She?”
“Beryl, she who must be obeyed—as long as she is in the dark, all is good.”
“Beryl? I thought it was Mex we should be worried about.”
“Well, yes, but Beryl is worse, especially if you are an Android.”
Woody looked at Pete’s face as if for the first time. “You’re a robot?”
“I prefer Android.”
“That’s still a robot.”
“Yes, but ‘Android’ has a capital A.”
Woody looked at Pete’s identical, square fingers, one with a mood ring rammed tight like a napkin ring on a napkin. Why hadn’t he seen it before? “So you’re not a transvestite with a really bad tan?”
Pete ignored him as Woody continued on about plastic surgery and Adam’s apples. “It’s just with you insisting on a bra and all . . .”
Pete stared out of the window; the Operators told him five minutes.
“I can’t believe you’re a robot.”
“Android.”
“Maybe you should lay off the sugar,” said Woody. “I mean, this Teflon . . . is it sugar-resistant?”
Pete sighed. He didn’t have time to explain about the magic of Teflon. He was sober with a headache and a sickening feeling in his stomach—maybe he missed this plugulator thief? Pete peered into the crowd. “She said look out for a tall man. I mean, how tall is tall?”
Woody didn’t answer.
And then Pete saw it—his plugulator, sitting on top of a head way above the crowd. DJ, six foot ten, was striding down the street straight for the café. Pete, without one thought for his cappuccino, jumped to attention.
Woody muttered “incognito” as he pushed Pete back into his seat—a few of the Operators sighed.
They waited until DJ came closer, striding with purpose until he passed the café and his back was to them. Then Woody gave Pete the nod and Pete dived for the door, sending a few chairs flying. DJ turned as Pete skidded on his spilt cappuccino. DJ clocked Pete and picked up his speed, striding down the street, oblivious to the crowd.
Pete followed. Nothing was getting in the way of him and his plugulator.
Chapter Twenty—The Limo
“THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, you just need the right set of glasses.” —Beryl
Beryl was sitting on a plush purple leather seat in the back of her driverless car. She was staring at the glass partition window. It was made of smoky glass with a painted shadow of a male chauffeur to give the illusion of one being present, although Beryl had yet to work out who was fooled by such a silhouette.
It was one of Vegas’s creative initiatives since her recent move to her new post at the “Arts and Stuff” cooperative. Vegas, like Hilda, had been educated on the other side of the tracks. And she had, according to many, including Beryl, little knowledge of anything above a chocolate wrapper when it came to art. A fact made obvious to anyone who sat in the back of the limousine staring at the erect sticklike figure with a pumpkin for a head.
Beryl stared at the motionless head. She had been outmaneuvered yet again by Hilda and she still had no idea what the flat-faced cow knew.
She ran her palm over the armrest.
“Yeeees, marrrm,” said the automated male voice.
“Tonic, ice, sparkly, and, let me see, how about something, err . . .”
“‘Something err’? Does not compute.”
“Just the tonic then . . . err, now.”
“Marrrm?”
A trapdoor opened at the back of the front seat and an opened box slid out with Beryl’s drink fizzing inside. A cocktail umbrella dropped from the top of the box into the glass followed by the “plop” of a grape on a stick, causing the marshmallow already in the drink to start bobbing like a plastic duck in the bath. Beryl went to pick up the glass when another marshmallow was plopped in, followed by another.
Beryl sighed and cursed the damnable Voted In and their collective sweet tooth. It had obviously been one of them last in the car.
Beryl lifted the glass as more marshmallows plummeted to the floor followed by a prolonged retraction of the flat escalator back into the box. The trapdoor snapped shut followed by a loud clatter.
Fluid in the trapdoor never really worked well.
She pulled out a pad and pen from her breast pocket, ran her palm across the armrest, and wondered about Legless.
Everyone thought he was dead . . .
HILDA HAD SPENT THE morning in an ex-Operator’s kitchen.
After several cuffs around the ear, the voice from the back was summoned to Hilda, who was now standing outside the Operators’ shed staring at the printout of Pete’s log. Hilda demanded to meet “the grandmother who could read hieroglyphic handwriting.”
The voice at the back of the room, who was so insignificant that Hilda had no interest in her name, took Hilda to her grandmother’s kitchen. Her grandmother had called her H2 in hon
or of Hilda, an honor that, up till now, H2 appreciated. The grandmother was one of the first Operators and was not surprised when Hilda barged through her kitchen door; she had been warned by someone who knew someone that H2 had been noticed, and for the first time in her life she was impressed with H2.
“I don’t want to know your name or anything about you,” snapped Hilda.
“It’s Verruca.”
“I said I don’t want to know your—Verruca, that is disgusting.”
“Well, that’s what you get for having a man-father with a man-sense of humor.”
Hilda looked at the old woman. She had more wrinkles than the footman. “Sense of humor, huh?”
“That’s right. He laughed his way through three rowing machines, as well as a stationary—”
“I said I don’t want to know anything, I just want you to read me this.”
The old lady looked up at the kitchen screen door. It had slammed shut right in H2’s face and she was peering through while knocking, an irritating habit at the best of times, but more so when they had the great Hilda herself present. Although, thought Verruca, Hilda’s short back and sides did her no favors; perhaps her hairdresser had a sense of humor too.
“Now would be a good time,” continued Hilda.
The old lady slid on her glasses and began. Hilda listened to the rich, robust voice; it was a voice like no other Hilda had heard, smooth, silky, and deliciously chocolaty. A lesser woman would have been lulled into a trance of drooling. But not Hilda, her steel-trap mind was sharply focused; even H2’s incessant knocking didn’t put her off track. Hilda, unasked, pulled up a seat. As Verruca read a few lines . . .
“So I am the Queen Snorter,” Hilda muttered to the ex-Operator.
“It would appear so,” said Verruca.
“And what do you make of this ‘shag me and I’ll shag you’ note?”
“Well,” said the old lady, “in my day—”
“What’s a shag?” shouted H2 from the behind the screen door.
Both women stared at the whisper of a girl peering through the screen door.
“A shag,” said Verruca, opening the door to let H2 in, “is an old-fashioned term for an old-fashioned form of egg making.”
“Requiring two people,” added Hilda.
“Being present during the said egg making—that is.” Verruca looked at the confused face of her granddaughter and sighed. “It’s a bird.”
“Young one,” said Hilda, mildly impressed, and then turned back to the handwriting. “Are you sure she called me undermining? I mean, I thought I was subtle.”
Verruca peered over her glasses. “Obviously not, and there is much more; even Legless has something to say about you.”
“Legless,” muttered Hilda. “I hardly spoke to him.”
“Hmm. Well, you left an impression,” she said and continued to read.
Hilda was intrigued. Pete’s log was turning into more than an eye-opener. And Legless, according to Beryl, had an opinion on everything. He even used words like “cutthroat” and “Machiavellian.” Hilda had no idea that a man could be so eloquent and perceptive.
“He said that about me?” she asked.
Verruca nodded and began to read from the 1960s Legless logs. Verruca was a curious woman, and at her time in life she had nothing to lose. She called it “living on borrowed time,” or “being old enough to remember when men did more than peddle a stationary”; either way, she had no fear of satisfying her curiosity and decided to start at what looked like an “interesting bit.”
The restructure of pay or good old-fashioned overtime seemed to have done the trick. I did warn them. As I said to the Voted Ins, “Commands are wasted on a crew who are paid a pittance. I mean, if your men can’t even afford fresh wipes, let alone liquid soap, they are hardly going to jump to attention, are they?”
However, surprise, surprise, the Voted In were completely unimpressed.
“These men,” I said, “talk of points to prove, and the other week they went into overdrive.”
“Hard to believe, on a stationary,” joked that smart-arsed, up-yourself Hilda.
Hilda smiled to herself. Not a bad line.
I told the Voted In that if they don’t stump up for decent beverages for the men, then the implementation of energy would be buggered.
Of course, Legless had to put his twenty cents’ worth in; that night he came to my room with some cockamamie story about how he could “deal with it.” “You’re a man,” I said. “You can’t deal with anything without my say-so.”
“That’s your answer to everything,” he snapped, stomped back to his stationary, and peddled like there was no tomorrow, completely burning out my straighteners.
“Well, it’s better than beer and Lycra,” I shouted back, which it turns out was what they wanted after all . . .
Hilda remembered those years: the Voted Ins were running on empty and they had, according to many, forgotten their roots of cleaning and low pay.
Now they sup their cappuccino and Moroccan spice like the princes they tired of. Whatever happened to the women who took over—how could they forget? We got rid of men because they were ineffectual and now look at us, wearing suits and shouting “hear, hear” at everything and erecting ridiculously large phallic light fixtures.
“Phallic?” asked H2.
“Penis shaped.”
“I don’t understand,” said H2.
Verruca stared at H2 with disappointment. “Banana shaped,” she said, “with more—how would you put . . .” She looked at Hilda.
“Presence, power; balls?”
They both laughed, as H2 made a mental note to not only keep her mouth shut but perhaps create some distance from her mentor granny; after all, was it not she who was responsible for H2’s so-called education? It was hardly her fault she had never heard of such things as bananas with a “presence.”
Beryl’s writing talked about producing energy with male muscles and how it started. How men were made useless by egg popping and how “every man and his dog” headed for the gym and worked their butts off to pull a successful upwardly mobile woman, and it was then the potential for energy and cycling machines were linked.
“There was a time when looking at a six-pack was good for a woman’s health,” muttered Verruca.
H2 glared at her grandmother with a “what would she know” glare.
The fastest men began to sell their legs (along with the rest of themselves) to the highest bidder; some even became personal stationary bike assistants until, that is, they grew too old.
Give the workers what they think they want and you walk away laughing; you can always tax later . . . that’s what the great Manifesto said. Of course, Legless didn’t agree, even when I told him the great Manifesto himself was “a man.”
“Your point being?” he said. Honestly, give a man a view and it goes to his head.
And then, in mid sentence, Verruca looked up at the great Hilda. She had begun to read Beryl’s take on the Story and it was different from what she, like everyone else on the planet, had been told.
Verruca, like everyone else, had been educated on the Story, which, in the end, tells of a burnt-out Legless with balls down to his shins, eyes as glazed as a jelly tart, and his seeds spent, lost, and limp like a used tissue. A Legless who had just enough life left in him to stumble to a dark cave in the highlands of Scotland and take the never-wake-up pill.
And as for Identities, everyone knew that was just a myth, a fairy story to tell children, as believable as the elves that live in the hedges. (Everyone but the Voted In, the Operators, and the footmen, who kept their views to themselves for the rare privilege of drinking adulterated coffee.)
But what she was reading said differently. It said not only that Legless was alive, but that he had invented the spark plug . . .
She looked at Hilda. Should she tell her?
And should she tell the rest of her clan that perhaps elves may exist after all?
Chapter
Twenty-One—Jimmie’s Arabic Tea Shop
“A CUP OF TEA IS ONLY as good as its saucer.” —Jimmie’s Arabic Tea Shop, back of the menu
DJ was heading for the Sunday meeting at Jimmie’s Arabic Tea Shop. It was in the West End, a place Woody knew like the back of his notepad, but, unlike his notepad, Woody had no idea of what was coming next.
Jimmie’s Arabic Tea Shop was an old storehouse overlooking a derelict slope. It was very arty, with retro crockery and mismatched tables and chairs. Just like Granny used to have. It served homemade hummus, flatbreads, and olives, along with fifty types of world teas, by students with no sense of time. But no one cared about waiting; it was part of the charm of Jimmie’s Tea Shop, along with the prayer flags blowing under the veranda and the homemade cakes that collapsed as soon as you looked at them.
And it was the perfect place for someone extraordinary and half human to blend in.
DJ pulled out his phone. “I am being followed,” he said.
“Yes, isn’t that the idea?”
“But I got this thing on my head . . . do you think it’s a good idea?”
“Is she good-looking?”
“If you call a bright orange transvestite good-looking, well, yes.”
“Sounds innocent. We haven’t had a transvestite for a while, and it does rile the old boys . . . does she look like a dancer?”
DJ looked behind him; Pete was strolling across the pavement on nimble legs with a rhythmic hip roll. “Probably.” DJ paused. “And she is not alone.”
“Another dancer?”
“I have no idea, but he is very short and looks like something from a circus.”
“Argh—one of us then.”
HILDA WAS STILL SITTING in the kitchen with H2’s granny; they had degenerated into reminiscing about the good ol’ days. In fact, so engrossed were they in the banter that they didn’t hear the slam of the wire door as H2 left, nor the crunch of gravel as she stomped up the path dragging her 49cc moped hand-me-down along with her.
