Inflatable Hugh

by Terry Ravenscroft

  Things might have been different, maybe the future would have held out a little more hope for Hugh Pugh, had he possessed any particular skills that could be offered to the world of commerce in exchange for filthy lucre; it is by no means unknown or even uncommon for Labour Members of Parliament to hold directorships in industry. However the only skill Pugh had acquired during his years as an MP was the art of keeping his head just enough above water to keep on being an MP, which is of course the prime consideration of all MPs.

  On his way up to Cabinet Minister level Pugh had also held the position of Junior Minister at Health, at Education and at Culture. In common with the vast majority of politicians he had known nothing about the job he had been put in charge of before being put in charge of it, and even less about it when he had left it in order to jump back on the merry-go-round that would drop him off at the next job he knew nothing about. On the re-opening of Parliament following the general election of 2010 a BBC television reporter had commented that whilst awaiting the start of the swearing-in of new Members of Parliament Ceremony all the new MPs were simply milling around without knowing quite what was going on, without knowing quite what they were doing. Nothing that has happened before or since would lead anyone to believe the situation will ever be otherwise.

  It was this total lack of expertise in anything other than being a politician that was Pugh’s problem. The only job he had ever held down was as a machinist at the local bike factory, a place of employment where he had in fact machined the same bicycle part as the actor Albert Finney when he starred in the role of Arthur Seaton in the groundbreaking kitchen sink film ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. However Pugh was aware that the ability to machine a bike part was unlikely to impress the board of a bicycle manufacturing company enough for them to offer him a directorship, even if they still made bicycles in Britain.

  He knew this to be true because years ago, on first becoming an MP, he had let it be known to one such manufacturer that he had very close connections with the industry; in fact he had once been employed in the very same job as that performed by Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Much to his delight the imparting of this information had struck pay dirt immediately.

  “You don’t say?” the cycle manufacturer had said, obviously impressed. “I may have just the job for you, Mr Pugh.”

  Could it be that easy? “Really?” he said, scarcely able to credit his good fortune.

  “If you’d be interested of course?”

  “Well of course.” Get in there Pugh.

  “Yes, my eldest daughter has her mind firmly set on a career on the stage. No shaking her I’m afraid. Perhaps you could give her a few acting lessons?”

  Pugh blinked, bemused. “Acting lessons?”

  “You said you were an actor.”

  “Did I?”

  “You said you once did the same job as Albert Finney?”

  When Pugh had explained that the job he had once shared with Albert Finney was the one in which the actor had machined a bicycle part the cycle manufacturer had lost all interest. Sadly the opportunity to offer his services to another cycle manufacturer had never presented itself again and Pugh had remained without a directorship to his name from that day to this.

  He shook his head to rid his mind of what might have been, with a bit more luck, and reluctantly turned his thoughts to work. Not that he ever did much work; he let his three Junior Ministers, his Parliamentary Under Secretaries, do all the department’s spadework. Why have a dog and bark yourself?

  It was during the second of his previous two ministerial appointments, at Food and Agriculture, having had the experience of running Environment for eighteen months and making an utter balls of it, that it had dawned on Pugh that the best way to go about the business of being a Minister was to let his immediate subordinates make all the decisions. That way he could take credit for their actions when they got things right whilst firmly laying the blame at their door when they got things wrong. All he had to do was keep an eye on them.

  At the moment the subordinates taking the decisions at the Department for Transport were Justin Dowell, responsible for the country’s road and rail networks, Tony Hilversum who looked after air transport and its constituent parts, and Ray Brick who looked after sea transport and everything else. Pugh couldn’t abide any of them. He didn’t like Dowell and Hilversum on principle, as both were champagne socialists, the spawn of Blair, the socialist equivalent of Hooray Henries, bloody nancy boys. Neither Dowell nor Hilversum had ever held down a proper job in their lives, the pair of them entering politics direct from university. In Pugh’s unconsidered opinion, because it was something that didn’t even need considering, if they’d had to live on their wits they would have died of starvation long ago.

  He disliked Brick even more than he disliked Dowell and Hilversum. Although a Junior Minister Brick was older than Pugh by a few years, and like Pugh was one of the old school of socialists, a fire and brimstone man, a man who had been attracted to the Labour party and its ideals through its traditional connection with trade unionism. These credentials sat very well with Pugh. What didn’t sit at all well with him was that Brick had his beady eyes on the Secretary for Transport’s job, and to enhance his chances of achieving this ambition took every opportunity to show himself in good light, to the detriment of Pugh.

  Brick’s latest underhand move had been to wait until Pugh was out of the country on a two week fact-finding mission to the Bahamas before going behind his back to the Prime Minister with the solution to the long term coastguard problem. For this act of treason Pugh had tried to have Brick moved sideways to another Ministry, or even upwards to another Ministry but Phil, a close friend of Brick’s son, an up-and-coming back-bencher and star of the future, would have none of it. Pugh hadn’t pushed it in case he himself was moved sideways, or even worse downwards, perish the thought.

  He contemplated his future yet again. What on earth could be done about it? Something would have to be, and pretty damn quick, that much was for certain.

  ****

  CHAPTER TWO

  A similarity Elton Arbuckle shared with Hugh Pugh was that for the first few years of his life he had liked his name. He liked it for its exclusivity. There were plenty of boys called Taylor or Smith or Jennings, but there was only one Arbuckle.

  As was the case with Hugh Pugh he had begun to dislike it the day he started school, when his form teacher, twinkly old Miss Baker, with a warm smile and without a trace of malice, had called him ‘Fatty’. Young boys were no less hurtful to their peers than in Hugh Pugh’s childhood thirty years previously and Arbuckle’s classmates had seized onto the nickname and called him Fatty for the rest of his schooldays. As Arbuckle was stick-thin he was at a loss as to understand why. One thing was certain though; he hadn’t like being called Fatty, and did his best to discourage his classmates. But the more he protested the more they persisted, and from being the pleasant, well-adjusted five-year-old who had walked into Bessie Street Infants gaily swinging his little satchel he gradually turned into an introverted little boy who only ever swung his satchel after first aiming it at the head of one of his tormentors.

  At the age of fourteen, whilst investigating his family tree on the internet, he had learned that the identity of the person whose nickname he now bore was the extremely fat Hollywood film star Roscoe Conkling ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, a sex-mad fiend, who in an infamous case had been found guilty of rape. This caused him to retreat even further into his shell. It did carry a bonus with it however. Until then the young Arbuckle hadn’t known what sex and rape were and had had to look up both words in his Oxford English Dictionary, one of his many school prizes. Having done so - and notwithstanding the shame brought down on him by his namesake - he had construed that sex must be something well worth having if someone had committed rape in order to get it. From that day on he had looked forward eagerly to the time he would have some of it for himself. Ten years later he was still looking forward to it.


  If it was Arbuckle’s introverted character which had caused him to cut himself off from the other boys, it was his classmates’ treatment of him that was responsible for making him study much harder than they did, which gave him the determination to show them that although he might be known to them as Fatty it didn’t stop him being a whole lot cleverer than they were. He had achieved this objective with flying colours. The cost was that it had made him into something of a loner, a trait he was to carry with him into adulthood.

  Sadly, on leaving Bessie Street Infants at the age of eleven and transferring to the renowned Manchester Grammar School, the nickname ‘Fatty’ had accompanied him, thanks to the only other boy in his class with pretensions to cleverness switching to the same school. Thankfully, on completing his secondary education, he left the name Fatty behind him with the desks and blackboards. But by then it had shaped his future.

  Thanks to his studies Arbuckle had become a very clever young man. Blessed with an I.Q. of 155 he could do the Times crossword in an average time of nine minutes, he knew the answers to well over half the questions posed on ‘University Challenge’ and he regularly outscored all four contestants in the general knowledge section of ‘Mastermind’. However he could never have held the Waterford Crystal trophy presented to the winner of Mastermind as he didn’t have a specialist subject - although he knew quite a bit about most specialist subjects he was not sufficiently interested enough in any of them to explore them to Mastermind standard. Therefore at the age of eighteen he had fourteen GCSE ‘A’ levels and not the slightest idea of what to do with any of them, and when it came time to leave school for the university of his choice he not only didn’t have a university of choice but even if he’d had one had no idea what he wished to study at it. What to do then?

  He had done nothing. For ten years. His mornings were spent lying in bed, his afternoons and evenings doing whatever took his fancy. Fortunately his needs were few - the library, the internet, both free - and he found he could live comfortably, if not well, on the income support doled out by the state. The occasional luxury was made possible courtesy of hand-outs from his doting parents, both of whom were sure their gifted offspring would one day find his niche in life.

  Arbuckle’s only problem during this period of his life was that he wasn’t getting any sex. Since he’d looked up the word he had spent many hours speculating about this mysterious coupling of the male and female bodies. He wondered what it was like. What it felt like. To put part of you into part of someone else. Did it hurt? Apparently it hurt the woman the first time but did it hurt the man too? It certainly hurt if you put your hard willy in the cardboard tube in the middle of a toilet roll, because in an effort to find out what sex felt like he’d tried that.

  In his mission to find out more about sex he had turned to his good friend Google. The internet search engine had duly informed him where sex could be had, bought, watched, filmed, worshipped, discussed, successfully gone without (he ignored this as he was already expert at it), and simulated, but not what it was like.

  One of the thousands of Google’s pages on sex simulation had taken him to the weblog of Randy Andy, who had suggested that not only was a soapy roll a worthwhile alternative to sex but felt a lot like it too. Apparently the idea was to soap the hands thoroughly, then masturbate. A variation was to soap a sponge, wrap the sponge around the penis, then masturbate. Arbuckle tried both methods and although they had been all right he considered soapy rolls to be not all that much different than masturbating in the normal manner. However on the plus side he had ended up with a very clean penis. He certainly felt that actual sex must be a good deal better than a soapy roll or people wouldn’t make such a fuss about it, they’d just settle for soapy rolls. Perhaps he should have used more soap? Or a different soap? He’d used Lifebuoy; would his mother’s pink Camay be any better? He tried it, but apart from smelling nicer and attracting a funny look from the man who came to read the gas meter it had been no different, so he’d put soapy rolls on the back burner for the time being.

  Sex with animals, cows and sheep especially, was claimed by several internet websites to be virtually the same as having sex with a woman. A Buxton smallholder preferred it. However cows and sheep were hard to come by in the Ardwick Green district of Manchester and the only animal Arbuckle ever came into regular contact with was next door’s pit bull terrier. Fang was a bitch, but so is life sometimes, and the dog had once bitten him when he had encroached on its domain when retrieving his football. If the dog had bitten him just because he tried to get his ball back Arbuckle could only imagine what it might do to him if he tried to have intercourse with it, so this method of sexual fulfilment had joined soapy rolls on the back burner.

  A third alternative, according to ‘Meatblog’ of Leeds, was Marmite. You either smeared it on your penis before jacking off or inserted as much of your penis as you could into the still full jar of Marmite then waggled the jar about. As this idea seemed to Arbuckle to be both a variation of the soapy roll and similar to his experiment with the toilet roll, but a whole lot messier, he hadn’t seriously considered it, not even for the back burner. And it had put him off Marmite for life.

  To get someone to have real sex with him was the answer, but this was easier said than done. This was partly because he was not an outgoing young man, blessed with the ability to charm, although even if he had been he would never have been able to afford to frequent the haunts - discos, clubs, gigs etc - where girls could be charmed. And partly because cultivating his high IQ and obtaining his fourteen GCSE’s had necessitated his living a somewhat cloistered existence. In adulthood, as with many academics, this had resulted in his being hampered by a certain unworldliness, if not downright naiveté. Consequently, approaching his twenty-fourth birthday, he was still a virgin.

  Since the age of seventeen, confident that his virginal state would not last for very much longer, he had carried a condom in his wallet. He had twice had to replace it, fearful that if and when the opportunity came to use it the rubber would have perished. Not wishing to waste his money completely he had masturbated in the first condom before throwing it away, but not in the second, as his experience with the first taught him that it was more enjoyable doing it without. He surmised from this that having sex whilst wearing a condom wouldn’t be as enjoyable as sex without one and filed this in his mind for future reference.

  Naturally he was aware that his chances of getting sex would improve if he had a regular girlfriend, but in nine years of trying he had only been able to get two: Rhoda, who turned out to be a lesbian, was even poorer than he was, and was only interested in him because she was an aficionado of the cinema and he paid for her to go; and Lola, whose name might have given him a clue, who turned out to be a transvestite. Again the cinema paid a part in Arbuckle’s discovery of his potential conquest’s true sexual leanings as it was on the back row of the local Odeon that he slipped his hand under Lola’s skirt and put his hand not on the vagina he had been expecting to find there but on a throbbing hard on.

  Wary of being ensnared by another Rhoda or Lola his natural insularity came to the fore and the only sexual experiences with women he’d had since had come courtesy of the previously mentioned five-fingered widow.

  The niche his parents felt sure he would find one day presented itself the day after his twenty-third birthday in the shape of an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph (whose crossword he scorned as being too easy). Apparently Cleek University, a red-brick, groundbreaking, cutting-edge seat of learning (their description), was offering a degree course in ‘Sex and Inflatable Rubber Woman Studies’. Its remit was ‘To compare the differences between sex with a human female and sex with an inflatable rubber woman, with the object of promoting the latter as an alternative and safe means of sexual gratification’. The advert was designed to make young men like Arbuckle sit up and take notice. Arbuckle duly sat up and not only noticed but did so with great enthusiasm. At last a university was doing a course in
something he was interested in. Sex. He was overjoyed, overcome, over the moon. On reading the rest of the advertisement, which went on to inform him that there was ‘a shortage of experts in the sex and inflatable rubber woman field, whose skills would be in great demand as the sexual revolution gathered pace’ he was over Venus, or whatever planet was sufficiently distant to match his euphoria; for as a man who had never had sex he found it difficult to see how he could spend three years at Cleek University comparing the differences between sex with a human female and sex with an inflatable rubber without having lots of it. He had applied to the university the same day and two weeks and a short interview later had been accepted.

  The Department of Sex and Inflatable Rubber Woman Studies had been set up thanks to half the proceeds of a donation to Cleek University made by a generous benefactor. (The other half to go to the university to spend as they wished, a bribe for agreeing to host such a dodgy degree course as Sex and Inflatable Rubber Woman Studies in the first place). Elton Arbuckle was not aware of this of course. However he was to discover it later, to his great cost.

  Arbuckle enjoyed university life. Unlike his school life nobody called him Fatty, although they might now have been justified in doing as due to his sedentary lifestyle over the last ten years he was about four stones overweight. He found the Sex and Inflatable Rubber Woman Studies course both interesting and disappointing; interesting in that it taught him many things about sex that he didn’t know, disappointing in that after six months it still hadn’t provided any of it.