Inflatable Hugh

by Terry Ravenscroft

  Mr Willoughby wanted to know what Mrs Bean’s sister-in-law was doing walking the streets of Ramsbottom at two-o-clock in the morning.

  Mrs Bean said she could probably get her sister-in-law to say she was a prostitute touting for work.

  Mr Seal said that Mrs Bean’s sister-in-law sounded like she was a bit of a sport and he was sorry that Mrs Wisbech had refused to let her be chained to the railings along with the other ladies as she was just the sort of lady member VAST was short of.

  Mrs Wisbech asked Mr Seal what he meant by that.

  Mr Willoughby reminded Mrs Wisbech that she must speak through the Chair.

  Through the Chair Mrs Wisbech asked Mr Seal what he meant by that.

  Mr Seal said through the Chair that Mrs Wisbech could take it any way she wanted, he was sick and tired of her bossy ways and she could go fuck herself as far as he was concerned.

  Mrs Wisbech told Mr Seal, not through the Chair, that she wasn’t going to stay here and be spoken to like that, and left in a huff.

  Mrs Bean proposed they should send some flowers to Mr Khan, seconded by Fr Flannery, and the motion was passed.

  Mr Willoughby said his headache was starting up again, Mr Seal said he wasn’t feeling too good either, and it was decided to end the meeting to allow the gentlemen to nurse their wounds.

  The next meeting was arranged for February 25th.

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Hugh Pugh took another sip from his rum daiquiri and contemplated how utterly wonderful life was. Nothing to do all day but lie on the beach getting slowly pissed, back to the five star hotel about five, shag Lorelei, a little nap, then dinner at eight with the local transport chief and his entourage at one of the top Maldives restaurants. He wondered if they had lobsters in the Maldives, he liked lobster thermidor now and again. All day on the beach again tomorrow, getting even more pissed even more slowly as there wasn’t an official function to attend that evening and he wouldn’t have to reserve some drinking capacity. Then on Wednesday a fact-finding mission to learn about the way the Maldives authorities dealt with transgressors of their rules of the roads – his guess was that they ate them – followed by another afternoon on the beach and an official reception in the evening, black tie.

  He turned his head to look at Lorelei, stretched out on the sun lounger beside him, working on her tan. She wouldn’t have to work hard, thanks to her daily sessions on the sun bed he’d had installed for her in the attic of his London home, and which had cost him a small fortune.

  He ogled her for a moment. Dressed in just the bottom half of the skimpiest of bikinis she was really something. A bit like Britt Ekland before the ravages of time, Rod Stewart, Peter Sellers and God knows how many other lovers had taken its toll on her. They’d only been on the beach for half-an-hour and she’d already caused three men to drool as they walked past on the way to the bar, and to repeat the performance, even more slowly, on the way back.

  Pugh didn’t mind men drooling at Lorelei. Quite the reverse, he liked them to drool, it proved to him that Lorelei was worth fucking. The day they stopped drooling would be the day he started worrying, the day he started thinking it might be time to turn her in for a newer model. One of the men, Spanish looking, young, the colour of copper, washboard stomach and probably balls like maracas, had actually stopped and openly stared at Lorelei. Pugh had given him a dirty look, just for appearances sake, and shrugged it off. What else could you expect from a dago?

  In fact it was Lorelei who was responsible for Pugh being in the Maldives. Six weeks earlier, four days after his dreams for the future had gone up in smoke along with the An Hour In Bed factory, she had asked him just what was his problem, why was he walking about with a face like a blistered kipper? He had almost told her to mind her own business. Women didn’t solve problems, they caused them; Mata Hari, Cleopatra, Margaret Thatcher. It was women who had caused his present problem, a million inflatable fucking rubber women.

  But for some reason he told her. He couldn’t have said why; maybe it was because it was in the back of his mind he’d recollected the saying ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’. Not that he thought there was any truth in the saying; he didn’t subscribe to homespun philosophy horseshit like that. “Doctor I think I’ve got VD.” “Well don’t worry about it, Mr Pugh, I’ll have half of it for you.” Load of bollocks.

  It was possibly because he was desperate. Or maybe that by telling her, by talking about it, it might make him feel just a little bit less depressed about it all. It certainly wasn’t because he expected her to come up with any sensible solution. But she had. Bless her little cotton panties.

  “Is it because of what happened to your factory, Pughie?” she had said.

  Pugh snapped at her. “What?”

  “Because if that’s all it is what’s to stop you starting it up again?”

  Pugh sighed, long suffering. It couldn’t do any harm to tell her, even if it was bloody obvious. “Because it would take money, that’s why, my little airhead. Money I haven’t got.”

  “How much do you want?”

  He almost told her to fuck off. What difference did it make how much he wanted? She hadn’t got any money, silly bitch. But again something made him tell her. Looking back on it now, from the comfort of the sun lounger on the beach of the exclusive Kuredu Island Resort, he could only put it down to fate. God must have been with him. He didn’t believe in God, but no matter, he had made him tell her, and he was just grateful to them he had.

  A few days earlier, he had asked Plimmer how much it would cost to get the factory back to normal. In the high hundreds of thousands, the An Hour In Bed company secretary had replied.

  “A million,” Pugh said to Lorelei. “I need a million at least. It might as well be a hundred million.”

  “I can get you a million, Pughie. No problem.”

  Pugh looked sharply at her. Was she serious? She looked as though she was, at least as serious as it’s possible for a blonde bimbo to look. “Where from?” he said. “Where would somebody like you get a million quid?”

  “One of my footballer ex-boyfriends. Maybe not Dwayne, because I hurt him when I gave him the elbow for Shane, but he might, you never know. I mean they like their money, the both of them, if either of them thought he was on to a good thing he’d be in, no messing. Shane would definitely go for it, we parted as friends me and Shane, it was all very amenable, a million’s nothing to Shane, he’s on a hundred grand a week and that’s just wages, that’s not counting his hair gel and athletic support sponsorships.” She paused, then added, well aware of Pugh’s racialist tendencies and suspecting that they might stop him accepting money from a black man, “He’s the white one.”

  She needn’t have worried. Pugh couldn’t have cared less if Shane were black, brown, yellow or khaki with red spots on as long as he came up with the money. He kissed Lorelei. It was the first time he’d ever kissed her when it wasn’t a prelude to sex. A meeting was arranged between Pugh and England striker Shane Hibbert (11 appearances, 0 goals, 4 yellow cards,1 red), for the following day. Hibbert, accompanied and guided by his agent and financial adviser, and having been put in the picture reference the imminent Sole Driver Tax and the undreamed of riches it would bring to the An Hour In Bed operation, agreed to provide one million pounds cash for twenty five per cent of the profits. As with his agreement with the Prime Minister Pugh was confident that creative accounting would reduce this to a figure more in keeping with his idea of what greedy footballers should get for doing nothing more than providing the money then just sitting on their backsides. Five per cent would be about right, call it four.

  Work started immediately on refurbishing the factory and either mending or replacing the fire damaged machinery. Six weeks later production began on a limited scale.

  A week later the Sole Driver Tax was made law, to take effect immediately. Any sole occupant of a motor vehicle, using their vehicle on a motorway, dual carriageway or clearway, woul
d now have to display a disc on their windscreen, next to the road fund licence disc. The cost of the disc would be one thousand pounds. Drivers failing to display it when using motorways etcetera would receive one penalty point on their driver’s licence.

  Hedge fund operators, lawyers, council chief executives and all other overpaid people laughed off the Sole Driver Tax. Most of them claimed it on expenses anyway. Members of Parliament weren’t allowed to claim it on expenses but put it down as something on which they could claim expenses. A great many of the rest of the driving population, not wishing to cough up a thousand pounds on yet another tax, thought of ways they might get round having to buy a disc.

  Pugh, in league with Good, had gauged the response of the driving public well. Getting a point, or even two or three, on their licence was a risk a significant number of them were quite happy to take. The chances of being picked up by the police were pretty remote nowadays, the spotting of a policeman on the outside of a police station being about as likely as the sighting of a Great Bustard.

  The An Hour In Bed sales and distribution network were ready for them. The company’s mail order sex doll expertise was put to good effect and Male and Female Virtual Passengers (VPs) were added to their catalogue. VPs were also made available at selected supermarkets and branches of Halford’s. A leading supermarket had approached An Hour In Bed to see if a ‘Value’ version could be made available, and talks were well advanced. VPs were advertised in motoring periodicals and leading men’s and women’s magazines Loaded, GQ, Hello and OK. On hearing about VPs the BBC featured them on the BBC 2 motoring show Top Gear. Over a hundred viewers phoned it to say the VPs were better looking than any of the three presenters, especially Jeremy Clarkson, and that the VPs in men’s clothes were much better dressed. The VPs dressed in women’s clothes loaned by An Hour In Bed to the Top Gear team were never returned.

  A week before the launch of the Virtual Passengers, Hugh Pugh, accompanied by Lorelei, had begun the previously arranged fact-finding mission to the Maldives. It was touch and go right up to the last minute whether he would go or not. On the one hand he wanted to be around to watch his great idea take off. On the other hand there would be a lot of flak heading in his direction following the introduction of the most unpopular piece of legislation since VAT. On balance he had felt that the avoiding of flak, especially if it meant avoiding it on the sun drenched beaches of the Maldives, was the better option.

  He hadn’t really wanted to take Lorelei along with him; he was only too aware that once the press got to hear he’d taken his girlfriend on holiday at the taxpayer’s expense again they’d be onto it in a flash. But after the way she’d got him out of the deep shit he’d been in he couldn’t really see how he could leave her behind. It did cross his mind that with his new found riches about to start flooding in he could pay for her to go, but crossed it so quickly it might as well not have bothered.

  It wasn’t the only reason he would rather have gone to the Maldives unaccompanied. There were the local ladies to consider. He’d got hold of a Maldives holiday brochure and the girls in it were something else. Talk about dusky doe-eyed beauties. Give him some of that! But with Lorelei on his arm, and his case, there would be a lot less chance of him getting some of that. It would be a great opportunity missed if he were to go on a fact-finding mission to some exotic clime and return home without having sampled a few of the indigenous population –provided of course that he didn’t come back with something else as well - and even if he did it wouldn’t be something that a jab of penicillin in the bum wouldn’t take care of.

  There would be opportunities though, he was sure. Lorelei had mentioned a pony-trekking trip she’d love to go on. She would want him to go with her of course; she wasn’t daft, she knew that given half a chance he’d be shagging the local lovelies as fast as they could be pulled from under him. But she loved pony-trekking, and if he could come up with a reasonable excuse it would be enough for her to go on her own. He would probably tell her his piles were playing him up, she knew he had piles and how much they sometimes troubled him from the time he’d had them caked in Calamine lotion.

  Lorelei suddenly interrupted his thoughts. “Hey, you’re in the paper, Pughie. There’s a picture.” She had taken a time out from sunning herself to catch up with news of home in yesterday’s Daily Mirror. “I’m not in it,” she added, disappointed. She read the news item. “It says I’m with you though. In the Maldives.”

  Pugh groaned. He could imagine what the news item said.

  Lorelei told him anyway. “‘Secretary of State for Transport Hugh Pugh is currently on a fact-finding mission in the Maldives. Where he will no doubt be finding a few facts about his accompanying girlfriend, former Page 3 stunner and ex-Wag, Lorelei Laverne, 37-21-36’.” She smiled. “Stunner, eh? Nice.”

  Now back living with his parents in Manchester Elton Arbuckle was reading more or less the same news item in his copy of the Times. It was the accompanying photograph which had attracted his attention. He had recognised it immediately as Mr Pugh, the boss of An Hour In Bed. When he learned, on reading the item, that in addition to being the owner of an inflatable rubber woman factory his post in the government was Secretary of State for Transport he didn’t attach any great significance to it. He might not know a great deal about the ways of the world, but one of the things he did know was that being a government minister didn’t preclude a man from having business interests.

  Having neither university to attend nor job to go to, Arbuckle now spent a lot of his time reading the newspapers. So it was almost certain he would read the article heavily critical of Pugh’s Sole Driver Tax that was printed the following day. He attached no more importance to it than he had to the discovery that his former employer was the Transport Minister. There were too many cars on the roads, it was a way of reducing them, it sounded like a good idea actually.

  It was a couple of days later when he read an article about how some members of the driving public had responded to the Sole Driver Tax that he started to attach significance to his earlier discoveries. Apparently, according to the article, drivers were putting dummies in the passenger seats of their cars in an effort to get away with not paying the tax. There was even a firm selling them, a company that used to sell inflatable rubber women. In fact the Virtual Passenger, as they called it, was not dissimilar to an inflatable rubber woman, according to the report.

  It took no time at all for Arbuckle to put two and two together and come up with four.

  Arbuckle was not a vindictive man. When he had been kicked out of university he had entertained no thoughts of revenge. It was just his bad luck, an unfortunate chain of events, Mr Pugh mistaking his true intentions, whatever. However after learning that Pugh was profiting from his position in the Government in an illegal way, or if not strictly illegal as near to illegal as made no difference, he began to look at things in a different light. For this was the man who’d had him kicked out of university and ruined his future. And was now making a mint from his dubious dealings. And as if that wasn’t enough, while the mint was being made, he was sunning himself in the Maldives with his beautiful blonde girlfriend. And all paid for with the taxpayers money.

  Arbuckle thought about the situation long and hard. For what he’d done, and especially what he’d done to him personally, Pugh deserved everything that was coming to him. The trouble was that what was coming to him at the moment was all good. How could he make it bad?

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  “‘....Plumber Derek Hargreaves leapt in the canal after he heard the mother of the eighteen-month-old scream for help. Hargreaves, 41, said: ‘She said she couldn’t swim. I’m not a very good swimmer myself but I couldn’t just let him drown. Another passer-by gave the toddler the kiss of life following his rescue in Winsford, Cheshire.’”

  Lorelei looked up from the newspaper to see if Pugh was taking any notice. He wasn’t, as usual. She didn’t think he would be. Why should he, he hadn’t ta
ken any notice for three weeks. She looked at her watch. She’d been reading to him for fifty minutes. Ten minutes to go and her hour would be up and she’d leave him to it. She was about to start reading the next item of news in the paper when the nurse walked into the room. She smiled at Lorelei and indicated Pugh. “Still asleep is he?”

  Lorelei nodded, glumly. “Are you sure this is doing any good, Nurse?”

  “It’s not so much the reading as the sound of a familiar voice.”

  “It’s really boring.” Lorelei sighed deeply, as if to back up her words. “I usually only have five minutes with the paper, that’s plenty for me.”

  “At least you’re a caring enough person to read to him. I remember one patient’s wife making a tape recording of herself talking and we had to play that all the time,” the nurse said, with a disapproving raise of her eyebrows.

  The day after the news of Pugh’s jolly to the Maldives had appeared in the newspapers he had caught Dengue Fever. The tropical disease, not unusual in The Maldives, initially manifests itself as a rash. At first Pugh thought it was a return of the infection he’d picked up off the contaminated inflatable rubber woman and had sent Lorelei out for a bottle of Calamine Lotion. The Maldives, one of the most fragmented countries in the world, is made up of one thousand one hundred and ninety two islets, and after visiting half a dozen of them Lorelei soon discovered that not only were chemists shops thin on the ground in the Maldives but that Calamine Lotion was even thinner.

  By the time she returned three hours later, tired and Calamine lotion-less, Pugh’s condition had deteriorated considerably. He had broken out in a fever, had a blinding headache, and every muscle and joint in his body ached. Lorelei sent for a doctor, who took one look at him and despatched him by power boat to the Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital at Malé.