7. Free Range Adventures

What Ho Proles!

[My Man has gone to town typing up the latest chapter of my Memoirs of the 2005 General Election. I told him to edit it down to an easy 900 words, but I came downstairs this morning to find the damn blighter's left me with the full 2000 words to post. Well, I'm just too busy today to do anything with it, so it is with many apologies that I present it to you in its unadulterated form. All this is in draft form, as you're bound to appreciate, but anything with the Murgatroid name attached should still be fit for purpose and I fear that this post is a mite long to really appreciate. Rest assured: there will be repercussions. JPM.]

The better part of a swollen hour later, my stomach groaned under an excess of eggs, sausages, and bacon; all free-range produce of the Finley Farm, and all, I might say, very intent on continuing their free roaming ways. It was with the reservation that comes of feeling a mite bilious that I said goodbye to Barry Fry Davis and faced my first appointment of the day.

For some inexplicable reason, my name had been pencilled in as the first candidate to be grilled by media consultants hired by the Party to check out how we all handled ourselves in front of a camera. I like to think of my going first as a compliment to the generations of Murgatroids that have done wonders for the Tory cause, but I was later told it had something to do with ‘concerns’ that had been raised by those higher up in the party ranks. In all fairness, Frederick Finley had made a fool of one of their prize assets, so I expect they wanted to be sure that the goods weren’t damaged, so to speak. The Conservative Party is, after all, the finest political party ever to don a rosette. We gave the world Winston Spencer Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Iain Duncan Smith. It stands to reason that we have to be a bit careful who gets to brandish the Tory torch before the common hoards.

The scrutiny lasted an hour. I sat in a room with cameras, microphones, and machines to measure one’s body temperature (inside and out), while a rather stiff young fellow interviewed me about the usual stuff that the Media and Joe Q. Public feel is their right to know. He then asked me a few things I would have said were none of his business but, reminding myself it was all a test, I answered with recourse to expletives on only three occasions. All in all, I’ve give interviews to Newsnight that have gone much worse.

After an hour, I’d been worn to a frazzle by the constant grilling and much relief was felt when the probes were removed and I was told I could go. Let off the hot plate and still feeling the effects of the breakfast, I decided fresh air and a walk around the grounds were the order of the day.

Finley Hall sits in an estate about half the size of what I’m used to in C---- N----, but with all the other candidates inside doing the Tory thing, it left me plenty of room to stretch my legs in the peace and quiet of a spring morning. Tranquillity nipped at my heels as I began to stroll around the Hall and it was only when I turned to disappear behind the house that I heard a human voice. Well, I say it was a voice but it was actually much more significant than that. It was a male voice pleading the word ‘Rosa!’ like it was some sort of religious chant.

In a small alley at the back of the hall I found gates barring my entrance to a lower courtyard. Able to go no further forward, I was about to turn back when I heard the voice cry out ‘Come on Rosa!’ from right above me. Looking up, I saw an open window on the first floor and another cry of ‘Rosa!’ confirmed that this was the source of the voice. I knew at that instant that if I was going to get an edge in solving the issue of Rosa Shaw and her adulterous campaign manager, I would have to take a punt and investigate further. It was a task made so much easier by one of my favourite things about true English ruins.

The walls of the Hall were typical of many in that thick ivy formed both a protective drape against the elements and an open invitation to all who fancied climbing it. Clambering up ivy covered walls used to be part of the training that went into being an English gentleman, which is why so many of the old school make such damn find jewel robbers. Still, putting my lifelong admiration for upper class thievery aside for moment, I say I did a damn good job scaling that wall. Nothing like one of your common thieves, you understand, though I have no doubt I would have done equally as well should I have been out of my head on lager and with my arms full of stolen video recorders. Within a minute of putting my mind to it, I was pulling myself eye level with the window and gazing into the room beyond.

The room was larger than the attic room I’d been allocated on the fourth floor, but it was in a mess. Sheets of newspaper were strewn all about and covered a television that had been left on mute in the corner of the room. The colour had been turned up to retina bursting brightness and the face of Adam Boulton, the Sky News editor, yabbered away in that incessant way he has.
You’d have been forgiven for letting your mind a moment or two to take all this in, but to do so would have been to ignore the one item that really demanded your attention. Sitting on the bed was a thoroughly disconsolate-looking campaign manager, naked but for the look of ambition in his eyes. It was an ambition, at that moment, fixed on clipping the nails on his right foot.

From the bathroom, Rosa Shaw emerged in the staple Tory uniform: blue suit, white shirt, black shoes, handbag. In the process of brushing down her jacket, she gave her beau a look meant to wither.

‘You can have your shower now,’ she said.

‘Do I have to?’ mumbled the lump of obesity.

‘You know the rules,’ she answered shortly. ‘And do you have to do that, Melvin? Can’t you clip them in the bathroom?’

Jenkins fell back onto the bed, his face crimson with the blood pressed into his upper torso as he’d wrestled his right leg into submission. ‘I can’t reach my foot in the bathroom,’ he gasped.

‘Unless you’d care to help...’

She sniffed back a reply and walked to the window. If she hadn’t closed her eyes at the thought of clipping the man’s bunions, she might have spotted me before I’d ducked down. ‘Are we meeting for lunch?’ she asked, now inches above my head.

‘I suppose,’ he sighed. ‘I’m not going to any of the meetings until this afternoon. Thought I’d read the rest of the papers.’

‘I hate to think,’ she sniffed.

‘And what does that mean? You read what they said about me?’

‘You’ve read much worse…’

‘Yes, well… not when I’m so hungry.’

Light laugher inches above me made me giddy with excitement. ‘You don’t see how it’s doing you the world of good, Melvin,’ she answered. ‘And you’re looking so good!’

‘I suppose,’ he allowed. ‘I wouldn’t have done it without you, my Peach.’

The sound of quite un-peach-like footsteps moved across the room and encouraged me to raise my head and peer in. Rosa was now sitting on the end of the bed with Jenkin’s foot in her lap.
I’d watched in moderate revulsion as she snipped each toenail, blowing on each toe as she went. Not the sort of thing one likes to see when hanging by one’s fingertips twenty feet in the air, and I thought I could taste some eggs I thought I’d seen the back of with a round of toast earlier that morning. The only thing to keep me quite was the knowledge that I was amassing insider info, sure to be valuable in the coming days.

And just at that moment, I felt something excruciating and sharp bounce off my right buttock.

I responded as any man might when injured in that region. I gave a yell and let go of everything I was holding at the time. In this case, it was the two handfuls of ivy.
Monasteries during the Reformation fell less heavily.

Suddenly there was shouting from the room, now twenty feet above me, and I was lying on my back, staring at sky, wall, greenery, and the Honourable Frederick Finley standing with a long home-made bow, a handful of arrows, and huge sickly grin across his face.

Luckily, anybody looking out from the window could not have seen me through the thick foliage at the base of the wall. I lay there, gasping air back into my lungs and trying to wiggle my toes to prove my spine hadn’t cracked with the fall. Oddly, one of my first thoughts was to wonder if I’d every thrash a prole again.

A voice roused me from my daze.

‘Hey, what’s your game?’ It was Rosa Shaw, shouting from the window. Frederick looked up, grinned, and then waved at her before he looked back at me. The look in his eye was one of absolute pleasure in another fellow’s predicament. I closed my eyes as I waited for the inevitable moment when he told Rosa about the man frantically engaged in toe wiggling beneath her window.

I don’t know how long I waited for the moment but I remember opening my eyes when I heard the window slide shut. The Hon. Frederick was nowhere to be seen and the place was silent but for the distant sound of a power shower belching into life.

I stood up and checked my undercarriage. A slight hole in the seat of my pants was probably the worse of the material damage and I immediately made mental note that this was the second pair of trousers the child had damaged in as many days.

Thinking of every bitter invective to hurl at the boy, I dusted myself down and hobbled around the side of the building.

It seemed strangely appropriate that the little devil was waiting for me.

‘I suppose you thought that was funny,’ I said, rubbing my rump.

‘It was quite funny,’ agreed Frederick Finley, ‘though I was aiming more for the middle. What a shot that would have been! A real jape!’

His laughter was as evil as his intentions.

‘Well clear off,’ I said, ‘before I have My Man demonstrate why the place you put your arrows is called a quiver.’

‘Pffft,’ he said, though perhaps with more ‘f’s than even I can do justice. ‘You don’t scare me.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘Oh, I know your sort,’ he said. ‘In fact, we’re birds of a feather. That’s why I want you to do me a favour.’

‘A favour?’ I said. ‘You’ve got a lot of damn cheek, Frederick Finley, to ask a favour of me. You may be an Honourable but I’m an Honourable also. And you’ve already cost me a small fortune with your ruddy daft directions and now you’ve gone and shot me in the family seat.’

‘Oh, well,’ yawned the boy, ‘perhaps I should just go and tell Father about the strange chap who I caught spying on people in their bedroom. They say there are people who enjoy that sort of thing.’

‘People wouldn’t be interested,’ I assured him.

‘Oh, I’m quite sure my Father would be very interested, if I told him about you.’

‘Go ahead and tell him,’ I said. ‘What do I care? You haven’t a shred of evidence and with all the stunts you’ve been pulling around here lately, I’ve a jolly good mind to expose you as the card carrying cad you are!’

At which point the child smiled and pulled a mobile phone from his pocket. I thought he was about to call his father but instead, he simply held it up to me.

‘What am I meant to do with that?’ I asked, wondering if he expected me to dob myself in.

‘Look,’ he simply said and turned the camera my way.

The screen may have been small and my eyesight far from perfect, but I could still recognise the rump that was clinging desperately to a wall of ivy. The Murgatroid profile was a recognisable as ever and, beyond it, the open bedroom window alluded to privacies invaded. My shoulders sagged at the devil’s command.

‘What do you want?’ I sighed.

‘Oh, I’m very reasonable,’ said the boy. ‘I just want you to go to father’s office and retrieve something that belongs to me.’

‘And why can’t you go yourself?’ I asked. ‘What is it about this task that requires top Tory material?’

‘Well, I can’t go,’ he laughed. ‘Why on earth do you think Father took my rifle in the first place?’

‘Rifle?!’

‘It’s an air rifle, actually. Hell of a lot better than a bow and arrow,’ he explained, looking ruefully down at his makeshift weapon. ‘I bet I couldn’t break skin with one of these things.’

I rubbed my sore buttock. ‘That,’ I replied, ‘would be a bet you would be ill advised to take, young Finley.’