The Insomniac Booth E-Book

Clive Gilson

• Herausgeber: Clive Gilson
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Insomniac Booth continues many of the themes that first emerged in Clive Gilson's earlier collection of short stories, The Mechanic's Curse. This second collection continues with the investigation of magical realism and the glories of traditional folk and faery tales. As ever, these are intimate tales, focusing on broad but subtle themes and personal recollections. Clive Gilson's stories continue to link recurring themes of fantasy with urban and future decay – splintered glass, dust motes and cracked plaster; the loss of loved ones, of the ability to remember; black and white movies of the mind; shafts of golden light shattered by war; haunted memories and the night darks.  There is a poetic lilt to the narrative, that delights in the minutiae of observation, bringing the mundane into the spotlight, giving it a meaning and beauty that is mostly lost on us busy ones; there is the terror of the ordinary, the shadow in the midday sun; and then there is the humour: sharp, cynical, painfully astute.  Clive Gilson's stories reverberate in the mind, long after they've been read. They connect us in their telling, because we relate to these deep, dark moments of human emotion that make us who we are. These are, indeed, black and white movies for the mind...

Leseprobe

I have edited Clive Gilson’s books for over a decade now – he’s prolific and can turn his hand to many genres: poetry, short fiction, contemporary novels, folklore and science fiction – and the common theme is that none of them ever fails to take my breath away. There’s something in each story that is either memorably poignant, hauntingly unnerving or sidesplittingly funny. 

Lorna Howarth, The Write Factor

Also by Clive Gilson

FICTION

Songs of Bliss

Out of the walled Garden

The Mechanic’s Curse

The Insomniac Booth

A Solitude of Stars

AS EDITOR – FIRESIDE TALES

Tales from the Land of Dragons

Tales from the Land of the Brave

Tales from the Land of Saints and Scholars

Tales from the Land of Hope and Glory

Tales from Lands of Snow and Ice

Tales from the Viking Isles

Tales from the Forest Lands

Tales from the Old Norse

More Tales About Saints and Scholars

More Tales About Hope and Glory

More Tales About Snow and Ice

The Insomniac Booth

And Other Stories

Clive Gilson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favourite authorised retailer.

ISBN: xxx

For Sophie & Jemma

CONTENTS

Rag Trade Gepetto

The Politician's New Speech

The Insomniac Booth

Beginning with Smith

Heirs and Graces

Fergus on A Bridge

The Starving Wolf

Fancy and the Flutter

Towering Dreams

Do Unto Others

The Mobile Phone

For The Love Of Comets

The Tender Kiss

Only The Names Change

Jamul’s Happy Day

Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill

Where the Grass Is Greenest

Hesperus Wrecked

Picking the Wings off Crane Flies

Lord of the North Wind

The Assistant Shop Manager

Pigs and Dogs

Bastille Day

The Last Watchman

This Song is for You

About the Author

Rag Trade Gepetto

SLEEP WAS A STRANGER to David. Our gentle friend, that warmth of embrace and soft comfort at the end of a long day, had always seemed to be at one remove from his soul. He tried in vain to count sheep, failing miserably each night to imagine any flock big enough, and through that imagination to will his limbs to slumber. David lay at night amid the intermittent tics and spasms of sagging brickwork and leeching pipes. Minutes might turn into decades of waiting, during which time he focussed on liver spots on the painted ceiling above his dishevelled bed. He always returned to the same theme, and in so doing he inevitably banished all hope of that slow decline into the unconscious world of the dream king. And so, wiping the grit from the corners of his eyes, he would rise, usually around two in the morning, make a pot of tea, and sit in front of the television flicking between the educational and the banal.

On occasions David tried alternative tacks, pouring himself liberal measures of cheap brandy in an effort to knock himself out, and but for the persistent worry that his liver would explode, he might have considered alcoholism as a cure for insomnia. Fridays were his favourite tipple days, as he generally did not work on a Saturday and then had time to recover before Monday. Even here, though, when sweet oblivion coursed through his veins and he collapsed on the sofa, he couldn’t ever say that he slept. Rather he entered a twisted world where the great theme of his life was made real, and the tempting began all over again. In some ways, these weekly diversions seemed more real to David, full of the visceral sharpness of existence, than did the mundane world of rag trade cutting on Eastcastle Street in London’s West End.

David’s inability to enter the altered state of mind that brings mental recharge and balance was caused directly by his chosen trade. David worked the cutting benches for those ‘B’ list designers who stitch their way through one financial crisis after another at the back of Oxford Street. He spent his days surrounded by fittings, by models, and by the spike-tongued hopefuls trampling their way towards the catwalk, and all of them, the girls, the boys, the madames, the couturiers, only ever saw him as a pair of sharp blades.

David, however, saw beyond the chalk line and the pattern book. David saw girls and women. He watched them move and twist within their fabric shrouds and surrounded by skin and bone and muscle and the imposing beauty of the fashionista, he wept internally. Summer was the worst time of all with acres of breast exposed to draw his gaze down into the realm of the lascivious. David was one of life’s luckless men. He smiled and made a threat of it. He laughed and drew fingernails across a blackboard. He held a woman’s hand for just a moment too long. He tried too hard.

He was barely thirty years old, skilled and adept at his trade, but he was already balding, noticeably overweight, had crooked teeth and one eye that stared manically out of its socket. He knew instinctively that he was never noticed for who he might be, but only ever for what he could do. Those paragons of perfection who employed him would not see the man because his flesh offended them.

At night, David thought about one thing; his ideal woman. In spending his sleepless nights imagining perfection, and then in the morning looking at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, he committed himself to a cycle of despair that he was convinced would only ever end when he put out the lights…permanently. It wasn’t as though David wanted too much of the world. He recognised in the sea of fake perfection that ebbed and flowed around his salt bleached rock, that beyond the make-over shores, where bleary eyed beauties awoke in their raw state, there might be a little nook or tight cranny where he could find happiness. All he wanted was a cuddle, was warmth other than his own in bed on a cold night, and in the throes of such thinking, when the alcohol finally bit, his dreams took him into strange encounters with girls made of glass and wax, girls who beckoned to him and then shattered at his touch. He dreamed of feminine peacocks, creatures of fan and feather and piercing shrillness. He dreamed of the hunting tigress with cubs mewling in the undergrowth and he knew the bite of her rancid fangs. David also dreamed of a man, who sat at the edge of the disillusionarium that his drunken world inevitably became, a man who never spoke, who never moved, but watched and waited, and waited and watched, a man dressed in the threads of deep, black time, threads woven into a riverboat gambler’s brocaded frock and embroidered waistcoat.

It was on one such Friday amid the high heat and low-cut bosom of June that David forsook the usual Fundador and splashed out on two bottles of Grouse. He never drank Scotch. It made him unduly maudlin, but, he decided while wandering disconsolately down the drinks aisle at his local Tesco Metro, that it had been a fucking maudlin day, and the cause of his melancholy was the new girl on reception.

During a quick introduction by the owner of the salon, David had let his gaze linger too long on the new girl’s breasts and rather than the usual snort of disgust he’d received a round, heavy slap in the face. The sound of her palm on his cheek filled the air with thunder, rattling across the downstairs showroom, and he had fled in horror to the workshop on the first floor. No matter how large the stone he overturned, he found no place to hide, and blushing crimson the day long he’d chalked and cut and made one ham-fisted, embarrassed mistake after another, until She Who Must Be Obeyed had waved her finely manicured hand at him and told him to go home. The fact that she added words like creepy and weird and skin-crawling to the usual terms of abuse that he periodically suffered was, he felt, a little gratuitous. He had never actually touched a girl’s breast, nor would he dare to do so, but sometimes he just couldn’t help where he looked, afflicted as he was with the blow of the birthing ugly-stick.

“It isn’t weird or creepy”, he told himself repeatedly as he stared at the rack full of spirits in Tesco. “I just lose track of where I am looking sometimes. For God’s sake!”

David caught sight of another shopper looking at him as if he were the nutter on the bus, so he picked up the two bottles of scotch, bowed his head, and walked quickly to the check-out counter.

*

Slumped on the sofa, with the world drifting into an amber haze fuelled by an empty bottle of the blend, David closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately. All he wanted on this night of all nights was the blackness of absolute torpor, but even in his befuddled state he still staggered into the kingdom of impossible dreams. David stood on a beach watching the waves crash in, swaying in drunken rhythm with the surf.

In the distance he saw his alter ego, Mister Darcy on a white charger, galloping along the shore line with whipping hair and muscular abandon. Unlike his previous dream incarnations, however, there was no immediate object of the chase, no impossibly fragile maiden to save. Instead, his imagined avatar turned the horse to face a rocky spur at one end of the beach, and there he saw the man in black. Again, breaking with all tradition, the usually passive and silent man stood, climbed down from the rocks and started to walk towards the Darcy figure, who dismounted with a jump and a flourish. The two figures met in the curl of receding water at the shore line. They stared at each other for a moment before Darcy spoke.

“Are you the Devil?” he asked. “Have you come to make a pact? Is this my Faustian temptation?”

The man in black looked down at the wet sand and shook his head. “Nothing to do with me, mate, all that Devil nonsense”.

He looked up and pointed back along the beach to where the true-to-life form of the dreaming David stood watching them. “There’s no magic can make him any less ugly than he is.”

“We know,” replied Darcy, “but we’ll do anything for just one chance. Souls aren’t much use when you’re as disappointed and as lonely as we are.”

“That’s true enough,” said the man in black as he kicked at a pebble embedded in the soft, wet sand. “But it won’t change anything. When he wakes up he’ll be just as unattractive as he was yesterday. More so, given how much he’s put away tonight. Anyway, I’m not in the soul business. I’m just a gambling man.”

Darcy moved in a little closer and looked hard and long at his companion on the beach. “So, what are you doing here? Why are you always in our dreams?”

The gambling man shrugged his shoulders. “Waiting for the moment when you get off the horse and ask that very question. I feel sorry for you, for him.”

“But according to you there’s nothing that will change our life?” asked Darcy, looking confused.

In the dream David and Darcy started to merge together, so that, as the man in black watched and smiled sweetly under the towering blue sky, the impeccable and imposing rider of the white steed twisted and decayed back to his sad and depressive core component part.

The man in black waited for the metamorphosis to complete before speaking again.  “I didn’t say that. I said you’d still be ugly in the morning. I never said anything about not being able to change your life.”

With that the man in black took David’s hands in his and turned them over as if inspecting for warts and calluses. “Hands of a craftsman, mate. I don’t think you have any idea just how skilled you are. Think about it. Tomorrow, when you wake up I’ll give you this – no hangover, nothing but the fresh breeze of a summer morning, and you’ll feel great. Think about what you can really do with these hands.” He paused. “And with what’s in your heart.”

The man in black smiled and let David’s hands fall to his sides. “As I said, I’m not looking for a soul. Not looking for anything of yours. You live your life, mate. If there’s anything to collect it’ll be done long after you’ve stopped shuffling through this mortal soil.”

With that he turned on his heel and walked back towards the rocks. David felt tears stinging his eyes as they welled up and then fell upon his ruddy cheeks, and as his vision blurred so did the image of the walking man. David wiped away the tears with the back of his hands, but when he finally saw clearly again, there was no gambler, no Darcy and no white charger on the beach. There were no fantastic images of women, no wheeling gulls, nor was there the reassuring sound of surf. Slowly a dusky darkness fell, and for the first time in years David slept truly, like an innocent child.

*

Despite the evidence around him, the empty bottle of scotch, an overturned tumbler, the crick in his neck and the taste of deep sleep in his mouth, David had never felt quite so bright and alive of a morning. It was still early, the clock hands reading just seven o’clock, and already the summer sun streamed in through windows against which no curtains were drawn. He stretched out on the sofa, yawned, considered his options and realised that he was hungry, as if he had been walking in coastal air all night.

He remembered nothing of the dream, but he felt a tingle in his fingers, as though they were trying to speak to him. David made himself a cup of tea, sipping the hot drink slowly, and all the while he basked in the warming sunlight that flooded his meagre little flat. He had an idea, but first he must shower and then, rather than hunt for a dry crust in the bread bin, he would walk down to the coffee bar on the corner of the street and eat Danish pastries. For some reason it seemed to him that this was a good day be alive. To Hell with the bloody women and their bloody dresses, he thought.

The rest of the weekend saw David working to liberate himself from the squalid mediocrity that had coloured so much of his life to date. He cleared the flat of rubbish. He swept and dusted and hoovered. The bathroom gleamed as never before and the whole place bloomed like a summer flower bed bursting through mulch. He washed clothes, bagged up old items for the charity shop, and without quite knowing why he put aside the best cuts of collected redundant cloth for some future use.

During Sunday afternoon he started to move the furniture around so that he could create a working space, and there he placed the tools of his trade, his scissors, his needles, his threads, his bodkins, together with his one pride and joy, an antique hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. Finally, come Sunday evening, when all was set and clean and fair, he took himself off to the bathroom and scrubbed himself with a vim and vigour that suggested in no uncertain terms that David wanted to scour away the stain of disappointment that had soiled his life so far.

Although the previous working week had ended in personal embarrassment for David, the one saving grace in all this was his skill and his craft. He might have been ridiculed the previous Friday, but he had not been sacked. As he walked up the stairs at Oxford Circus station and headed along towards Eastcastle Street, he felt serene and relaxed.

He bought flowers from a stand by the old Post Office. The morning girls, all bright and rouged and clad in their summer skimpies, simply didn’t interest him. He entered the building where he worked, handed the flowers to the receptionist and apologised for his previous indiscretion. He skipped up the stairs in the full knowledge that mouths hung open behind his back, and when the Madame appeared to ask what was going on he simply smiled at her and told her that he had thought long and hard about life and that he was now a changed man. David couldn’t quite tell what they believed and what they disbelieved, but then he didn’t care. A plan was forming, a scheme of divine proportion, that would take away the edge of his physical and emotional hunger forever.

The plan was nothing more than a vague shape in the early moments of Monday morning, but by degrees, as he worked through the day, smiling and whistling to himself, the bones of the thing began to form. He surveyed the fabrics in the workshop and saw in lycra and toile and cotton the shapes of limbs. In taffetas and satins and wools he saw skin tones and contours. The mannequins upon which hung Madame’s latest creations gave form to the coagulation of shape and sinew, and in his hands he held the means, held the tools that might bring life to the ideas floating dimly in his head. By the end of that first working day after the disaster and the dream, he was resolved to act. He would borrow a mannequin and, at the end of each day working the cloth, he would take home off-cuts. David would fill his evenings with the sound of the Singer.

Over the next few weeks there appeared in David’s flat a succession of patchwork skins, each one crafted on the old singer and fitted over the mannequin like a Lycra glove. Colours and shades entwined, with gold and silver threads catching the light, but none of the textures and the patterns, made up from off-cuts as they were, could ever quite conform to David’s aesthetic. Her skin had to be perfect before he would consider the next steps.

Days merged into nights and back into the rising light of late summer and then early autumn. David worked all day at his trade, a changed man, happy and discrete and gentle. At night, with his latest captures from the cutting room floor, he became a fevered creature, bending over his old sewing machine for hours in an effort to sew the smallest and the finest seams. David never drank now, but the hours and the days spent spinning the sewing machine wheel in both directions inevitably took its toll on the man.

Towards the end of September, just as the Devil spat on the bramble bushes in the courtyard behind David’s flat and the Hawthorn in the local park hung heavy with blackening sloes, David began to realise that something had to give. His search for perfection was driving him towards the madness of insomnia again, and he had either to finish his dream project or abandon happiness for all time. On the last Friday of the month, as he yawned over his scissors and counted the minutes down until lunch time’s sweetly fresh air, the Madame entered the cutting room. Across her arm she held a bolt of the finest golden Escorial, which she laid gently on David’s table.

“For that singer, you know, hot little arse but slight nasal whine on the high notes…touring at Christmas and wants this ready for dress rehearsals next month.” she said, smoothing out a crease in the material. “I’ll send the drawings up later. Usual stuff, patterns and cuts, and I know you’ll do your best. Beautiful isn’t it?”

David simply stared at the sheer brilliance and the tight but elastic weave of the Escorial. It was, indeed, beautiful. He nodded his agreement as Madame turned and headed back down to the lower floor. The Escorial was perfect.

True to her word Madame sent up the relevant drawings, a design for a light and skimpy halter neck dress, cut low at the front and back. It was all so depressing, he thought. Here he was, staring at the most stunning bolt of cloth just when he needed it, but judging by the drawings he would have to be profligate with the material. While the line was simple, there were so many flourishes and twists and hints to be cut for the associated dancers that there would nothing serviceable left of the Escorial, nothing worth taking home for his darling girl. It would be a tragedy, but, as he turned the design round in his hand, desperately trying to find economies within the pattern, David decided that it was time to sink or swim. He had to finish his dream girl, and only the golden Escorial could possibly do. The entire bolt of cloth would be required, but from it he could cut a perfect skin, and then he could really begin to make his dreams come true.

David spent his entire lunch break walking the diesel fumed streets that ran around the John Lewis store at Oxford Circus in a vain attempt to clear his mind. This would be the last straw as far as Madame was concerned. David tried to talk himself back towards a land of common sense, but he was, he knew, already too far gone with his new enterprise. Eventually a grimly determined David returned to his cutting room, gathered up the golden skin, stuffed it under his arm, and, taking one last look around his place of work for so many years, he boldly marched out of the building and took the first train home.

Never in any folk or fairy tale did a man work as hard and with such concentration as David did that Friday night. No elves, no pixies, no faeries, not a single creature, not even Tom Tit Tom, could have sewn and measured and cut with such care and deliberation. David could feel a fever brewing up in his blood, but it was, he knew, a fever of the heart. This skin would become flesh and blood in his hands. He was a chalice filled to the brim with love, and he alone possessed the skill to make that love real. By Saturday morning the skin atop the mannequin was complete and without blemish. He ran his hands over the perfect material, sensing the warp of the fibres as though they were pores, and David shivered with delight. The skin fitted every contour perfectly, revealing a proportioned ideal of womankind, full of breast and slim of waist. He could not rest yet, however. As perfect as the skin might be it was still many hours and days away from being his darling girl.

Where before David might have sought out alcoholic remedies for his nocturnal restlessness now he revelled in the fever of work. The only time that he left the flat was to buy threads and cottons. He spent nearly twenty-four hours embroidering just one eyebrow. She would take time and effort and skill to complete, all of which David devoted to her making without care or thought for his own state. He embroidered full lips of ruby red, eyes of a deep, longing brown, toes that were flawless, fingers that were slender and golden, and ears that were faultless and delicate. He spent days bent over an embroidery hoop, barely remembering to drink the meanest cup of water or to eat even the most frugal morsel. Every ounce of David’s energy, every luminescent molecule of his soul, fed this unbridled passion. He was determined, come Hell or high-water, that he would create the perfect woman, the ultimate partner in life.

It took almost three weeks of the most painstaking work to complete the embroidery, to carefully add elements to the skin that would enhance her beauty, and finally to make the prefect little black dress for her to wear. By the end of his labours, David was blindly in love with his fabulously fake creation, seeing in her weave and in every stitch the embodiment of everything that he could never be close to in the flesh of real life.

He spoke with her about love and truth and timeless bliss, imagining her voice as a soft and sultry summer night’s whisper. He sat at her feet, gazing up into her embroidered mannequin eyes, and wept quiet tears for such beauty. In his heart he also wept because he knew that there was no such thing as a fairy god mother, no matter how much he wished it, no matter how loudly he wailed and pleaded. He suddenly remembered the words of the gambling man in his dream, a dream that seemed to exist in another lifetime. There was no soul. There would be no miracle. He would never meet his own Jiminy Cricket, nor would his darling girl ever come to life. For weeks David had denied this one simple fact while lost in the fever of creation, but now that this simulacrum of love stood rigid above him, he had to admit the truth, and with that admission the last of his strength began to drip away.

But there was yet one decision that David had to make. He understood that if he were to die for love, he would leave the girl standing as cold as stone in his flat, and that would never do. He had to find a way for them to be together, if not in this mortal world, then together in spirit, as one being within the eternal flame. Slowly David rose to his feet and, with the world swimming in black spots, he reached out and leaned on his work chair. Gradually the close horizons of his little working world steadied and he managed to focus. Where would they go, he asked himself? Where could they go? David was so tired and so run down and so exhausted of life that he really couldn’t think clearly. Every spin of the cog wheels in his brain drained him of precious energy, so he took a decision. They would trust to Lady Luck.

Although rigid, the mannequin body was light. Without putting on shoes or coat, David picked up his darling girl, manoeuvred her down the stairs to the street door, and stepped out into a foreign world. When last he’d been out it was autumn and blustery but still warm. The world around him now was white and thick and diamond clear. Snow had come to blanket the world outside, marking the end of living time for another year with the coming of the sterile freeze.

David felt the cold for just a moment as the snow underfoot melted into his socks and the cold air scratched at his throat. The only question in David’s mind was where should they go. A church? A bar? None of the obvious places for seeking happy oblivion seemed appropriate. Instead, David and his perfect woman set off towards the south, heading slowly down from the smothered heights of the city towards the equally hidden river valley below. It was early in the morning, judging by the sense of quiet slumber that emanated from under the snow-covered duvet that lay snug upon the streets, something for which David was rather grateful. Even in his befuddled state he still remembered the tattered edges of reason that came with ridicule.

After a mile or so, David began to lose all feeling in his feet and hands. He nearly dropped his perfect girl while negotiating kerbs, and he cursed the fates that might yet ruin his work. To make the river meant another mile or so of heavy trudge through the soft snow, and David began to doubt whether he had the strength to make it. He forced himself to take another step, and another, until, rounding the corner of some municipally grey building, David saw the flicker of bright red and yellow flames in a brazier at the end of an otherwise isolated and dark alley.

“Oh, yes,” he whispered to his love. “Forgive me my dear, but I need to spend a minute or two by the fire.”

There was a pause, as though she was answering him, and then he replied, “I know, but the river will take us down to the eternal sea. Just a moment of warmth, my love, just one minute, and then we’ll be on our way again.”

David dragged both his own shattered body and his frigid lover towards the brazier. There was no one in sight, although signs of itinerant occupation remained; an abandoned overcoat, an overturned mug next to a half full bottle of cider, cans and cigarette butts, a ravaged pizza box, and what looked like a used condom. David shuddered and told his darling girl not to look. He spread the overcoat out onto the bare snow and lay down in front of the brazier, letting the feeble flames work their magic, but magic, as David had already surmised, does not exist for people like us. Slowly as the effects of hyperthermia set in and the cold and the fatigue settled into the unconscious descent to coma and death, David muttered one last word; “Soon.”

Without strength and without a word from his one true love, he slipped away towards the great sea of eternity, sailing towards his death just as he had always navigated the oceans of his life; alone.

The world was silent for a moment but then there came a footstep in the snow, followed by another and another. The footsteps were slow and measured. Slowly, taking shape in the feeble fire light from the brazier, the form of a man dressed in a black frock-coat and waistcoat appeared. He knelt down where David lay next to the perfect mannequin and placed a hand on David’s forehead and then at his neck. He held his hand there for a moment and then with a shake of his head he turned his attention to the mannequin. In running his fingers along her seams, in tracing the contours of the plastic body under her dress, and in touching her fantastically embroidered lips and eyes, he marvelled at the workmanship. She was truly the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen.

He turned back towards David’s body and said, “I knew you could do it. If anybody could do it, it was always you.” He patted David’s cold leg. “And I meant what I said. No souls. It’s like Michelangelo, you know, that one great work, the one that uses up your life. Still, it’s worth it, isn’t it, mate. She’s stunning.”

The man in black turned back to the mannequin, took both of her rigid cloth covered hands in his, and to her he whispered that simple phrase that brings life to the world; “Love you, babe”.

The air suddenly grew warm and tropical around the brazier, melting snow and ice in an instant. The golden cloth shimmered in the fire light. Every stitch and every thread strained and writhed as the inner plastic of the shop-window mannequin twisted and buckled and then snapped back into place. Textures mingled and changed, and the world suspended belief for just one second, during which the man in black stood up and helped a gorgeous young woman to her feet. She wore a simple black dress over olive-golden skin, her dark hair falling in long cascades about her shoulders.

He looked into her eyes and smiled. “Been a long time waiting for you, babe.” He bent forward and kissed her on her ruby-red lips.

She smiled too and then looked down at the crumpled body of the cloth cutter. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Long story, babe. I’ll tell you sometime. Right now, I’d wager you’re just a wee bit hungry. What do you say we head down to the river where I know a great all-night café?”

The girl prodded the body with the toe of her bare right foot and shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah”, she said, “I am a bit peckish, now you come to mention it.”

The Politician's New Speech

(Loosely based on Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes)

POLITICIANS COME AND GO, passing through the revolving doors of power and celebrity, and sometimes even infamy, like eels sliding from a barrel. For the most part the good folk who take up the cudgels of representative democracy on our behalf are well meaning, hardworking souls armed with the sword of conviction and the shield of dedication. In recent years this combination of valour and commitment has been ably demonstrated by many of the parliamentarians who congregate at Westminster. During recent periods of parliamentary jousting one politician above all others has become synonymous with the ruthless pursuit of truth and the calling to account of those who would betray the allied boons of principle and practicality. He has made it very clear that he doesn’t care for convenient little compromises and political deals, believing absolutely that a spade should be called a shovel. That he is no longer in direct control of the levers of power is a shame, but in his time of greatness he employed a whole army of secretaries and assistants, whose sole job it was to document every fact and every detail of every case and policy so that he could remain true to his principles. He was well known for his ability to quote chapter and verse, with a comprehensive range of interpretations, on any of the hot political potatoes of the day.

So renowned was he throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, that many famous and influential people came to visit the him at his London home, from where the man worked so hard to forge his shrine to political verisimilitude. One day, attracted by the unrivalled opportunities being offered to skilled people by this new broom sweeping through government’s old and crusty cobwebs of social patronage, two provincial public relations specialists arrived in the city determined to make their fortunes. They watched and listened in the market places, taverns and forums, and then, one morning, they called an impromptu press conference where they made a grand announcement. They could, they said, write the most fabulously truthful documents in all the known world.

"That's right", they said to an amazed crowd of journalists and onlookers in the main parliamentary square, "we are the greatest doctors of spin ever seen or heard. Our speeches, pamphlets and white papers are guaranteed to cure all evils".

To cap it all, they claimed that their documents were so beautifully written and were so truthful that they had a very singular and wonderful effect. Their words, phrases and arguments were so truthful that they became quite invisible to any person who was unfit for their office or who was inadmissibly stupid. The great politician was stunned when he heard these claims. "What a wonderful thing", he thought to himself. "With documents like this I can find out which men and women in my government aren’t suited for the posts they hold; I can tell the wise ones from the stupid. Yes, these men must become my secretaries at once".

Within a couple of days, the politician’s grey suited emissaries employed both men at a very competitive salary and asked them to lend their considerable expertise to the production of a particularly difficult document that the governing party had to set before their parliamentary colleagues. The two men were installed in a bright new office full of the latest computers, printers and online, on-demand production facilities. They sat tap-tapping away for days on end, preparing this very difficult document from the politician's notes and the supporting data supplied by various agencies, committees and focus groups. They attended countless briefings with government advisors and other interested non-governmental agencies, demanding without ceremony or attention to etiquette or protocol, the finest paper, the most exquisite pens and a great largesse of expenses, all of which disappeared into their briefcases at the end of each long working day.

After a month, and with the deadline for the great politician's speech looming, he decided that he would like to see how the document was progressing, although, given the special properties of this document, he felt a little uneasy about reading it in person. He certainly didn't want to appear unfit or stupid. The great politician did not believe in conceptual attitudes like fear, but nonetheless he felt it best to send one of his advisors to find out how things stood. After all, the political and media establishment knew about the magic powers this wonderful document possessed and the great politician knew that these people, who generally failed to see the bigger picture, would be as keen as mustard to see how unfit or stupid various members of the government might be.

"I'll send my faithful old private secretary to see these doctors of spin", thought the great politician. "He's very capable and far from stupid, so he's the best one to see how the land lies".

Sir John Gladstone went to the rather tastefully decorated office where the two word-smiths were beavering away at their task, and as he perused page after page of the report he became more and more agitated. "Heavens above", he thought, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. "I can't see a single word on any of the report's pages". But he said nothing.

The two writers asked him if he thought the syntax was just perfect? They asked for his opinions on all manner of things, and particularly whether he thought the blending of fact, interpretation and style created the most stunning and persuasive of arguments? Then they showed him the latest section of the report, which was hot off the printer, and Sir John could do nothing but open his eyes wider and wider. He couldn't see anything but blank pages, for there was, as far as he could tell, nothing written on any piece of paper anywhere in the room.

"Great galloping synonyms", he thought. "Am I really this stupid? I've never thought so, and if I really am then no one can ever find out. And if I’m not stupid then I must be unfit for my post! No, it will never do to let anyone know I can't read the report".

One of the two men of letters asked the old man, "Well, what do you think? You're being very quiet"

"Oh, erm, it's wonderful, to the point, pithy but flowing, quite brilliant…" enthused Sir John.

"We're delighted to hear it", said the two men, beaming at him, and they proceeded to name the chapters, to summarize their arguments and to explain all of the most salient points they had made. The great politician’s faithful private secretary paid close attention to everything the men said so that he could repeat it all verbatim when he reported back to his master, which he did directly.

After this visit, and pleased with their work, the two doctors of spin demanded an increase in their salaries somewhat above the prevailing rate of inflation. They also asked for a chauffeur driven limousine and a large apartment overlooking London’s magnificently refurbished and regenerated dockland landscape, but not a word was typed even though they sat in their office day after day tap-tapping away diligently on their keyboards.

Not long after this, and with the day of the speech now very near at hand, the great politician sent another official to review the document and to report back on its progress, but exactly the same thing happened to him as had happened to Sir John. He read and he read, but as there was nothing to read but empty pages, he couldn't actually read a thing.

"Isn't it a beautifully constructed thing", said the two public relations wiz kids, and they explained every nuance, every intimation and every statement, overt or implied.

"Well, I'm not stupid", thought the official, "and neither am I unfit for my position...at least, I’ve always assumed that was the case. If I really am incompetent I must be careful not to reveal it".

And so, he praised the document that he couldn't read and assured all who would listen that it was perfect. "It really is your sort of thing", he said to the great politician later that same day. "It’s direct, to the point and it’s sure to knock your opponents into next week".

Every journalist and commentator in the world of newspapers, television and radio, together with every member of the chattering classes and everyone who was anyone in the established elite, were all talking about the soon to be published paper. Reassured by his aides and aware that the world’s press was waiting with baited breath, the great politician himself now wanted to read the document, even though there were still some relevant facts to include and a few final conclusions to draw. Together with Sir John and his cabinet colleagues, the great politician swept through the corridors of power and into the office where the two doctors of spin were pretending to type away furiously at blank computer screens.