29. THE DANCER

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES 29

The moment Angelina slipped the diamond set of dentures into her mouth she became aware of a completely different dimension. The medieval bedroom didn’t exactly fade away but was immediately overlaid by something that wasn’t, as far as she knew, in the world she had been in until that instant, and the overlay was more detailed, more colourful and certainly more interesting than the reality of a medieval boudoir even it it did have a Prime Minister in it.

The new reality consisted of a committee room. There could be no doubt about that at least, and sitting round a huge table was a group of men she recognised from television news broadcasts. They were politicians, all of them, and they were looking intently at a very different figure standing on the table, in its centre.

“Fun, isn’t it?” said Igor, his voice coming from the shadow world of reality, “watch on!”

“Fun, isn’t it,” echoed the easily distinguished voice of the Prime Minister from this new reality, “show us what you’ve got, woman!”

“Confusing,” she agreed, her own voice sounding as if it belonged to somebody else.

“Go on, my dearest,” boomed the Prime Minister as the figure on the table hesitated.

“Show us what you’ve got,” wittered the Home Secretary sitting next to him.

“Everything,” chortled the Chancellor of the Exchequer, “don’t forget I’ve got my hands on the biggest purse you’ll ever see!”

And the figure on the table turned to face Angelina. It was clear to her that its movement was coincidence. That figure, a woman with an extravagant hat consisting of what looked like a fruit salad and a bouquet of roses, turned to seem to be looking straight at Angelina.

“I know that face,” murmured the Angelina, “I saw it in the office. It’s that posh bird, the one who was in the bath with her librarian...”

“Keep quiet, woman!” ordered the Prime Minister from his place on the Tudor bed in the real world, his voice slightly muffled as though it were travelling a long mile to reach her, “you must not see this! It is for cabinet members only!”

But Angelina couldn’t help what she saw. And what she was witnessing was grotesque. It was the same woman, the one who called herself Mildred Kampinella-Plonker, and she was doing the impossible, or at least to Angelina it was impossible, the table woman Mildred being an age when such things simply were no longer done. She was no young teenage tart but a woman who looked to be wearied by life.

She was wearing long gloves, the sort that cover the entire forearm up to the elbow, and whilst gyrating her body in what would have been a sensuous way in somebody less well stricken with age, she started pulling one off. And she took her time over it, the thick wedge of lipstick covering her mouth forming a come-and-get me smirk under the shadow of that absurd hat. And the removal of her first glove seemed to take an age before she started on the second.

“This is horrible...” muttered Angelina, knowing that what she was witnessing was a strange mixture of terrible and fascinating.

After an age the second glove lay where she’d thrown the first, on the table close to where the Prime Minister sat, and he was squirming in his seat as if he’d suddenly been attacked by an army of ants.

The woman on the table, the ill-named Mildred Kampinella-Plonker, hadn’t finished. Not by any means. This was to be a masterclass of erotica.

She was wearing stockings, and it was their turn next in what she obviously thought was a titillating performance but what, to Angelina, was anything but.

“I could do better than that woman,” she said to those in the medieval boudoir, and she turned round to see them. The antics of the stripper in the cabinet committee room continued, still inside her field of vision whichever way she looked, which in itself was disconcerting.

“Don’t look!” bellowed the Prime Minister, “please don’t look! Take the damned teeth out! It’s illegal to see what you’re seeing and I’ll see you in damned jail for looking!”

“I stripped at a party once,” she said to him, not removing the dentures. “It was a policeman’s ball and I was a novice still at college. People say that removing one’s clothes in such a way is demeaning, but I found it anything but. I gained strength from it, because it showed me just how much power a woman might have if she uses it properly, unsupported by the dictates of fashion, over both men and women. You know all the feminists who way back before I was born advocated burning their bras? The really determined ones? Those who denigrated beauty contests? They weren’t all driven by a desire for equality with men but because there wasn’t a beauty contest they would stand a chance of winning! They bemoaned the fact that they would never win the prize, yet they denied other prizes, the sort they were probably capable of winning for themselves, and often did, from the young beauties in a parade who didn’t have the brains to stand a chance!”

“I hear you, but what’s that got to do with anything?” asked Royston, confused by the outburst from a young officer he was falling ever more in love with and wishing, there and then, that he’d been at the policeman’s ball she mentioned.

“She’s on her bra...” whispered Angelina, “and oh, what a shrivelled duo are they!”

“You mustn’t look!” croaked the Prime Minister, trying to detach himself from a medieval bed whilst nursing a fractured leg. The small party of critters that had taken residence on his uncontrolled blond cranium found themselves being shaken off and some of them forced to take refuge back inside the centuries old mattress once again.

“I can’t help it,” replied Angelina, and then she had a second thought and calmly removed the dentures from her mouth and passed them to Royston. The false reality in which an old woman contrived a terrible strip-tease was switched off the moment they left her mouth.

“Here, see what you make of it,” she said to Royston. He looked at her and then at the dentures, glistening with moisture from what he saw as her lovely mouth, and then back at her.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Go on,” she said, “it’s something all men should see, the sort of thing that passes for entertainment for the richest and most powerful men in the nation. See what you think.”

Then Royston carefully placed the dentures in his mouth and the very moment they were in position he experienced exactly the same as Angelina had. His eyes opened wide, hopefully with astonishment rather than appreciation, and he settled down on the edge of the bed to concentrate on the grotesque masquerade trapped in the heart of a tiny diamond.

“You make me sick,” Angelina said to the Prime Minister, and two of his guards moved lethargically to stop her. But she ignored them.

“I know what I saw,” she said, “that woman … she must be as old as the hills … doing that! And what for?”

“I can tell you what for,” came a new voice from the doorway, and the extravagantly-hatted Mildred Kampinella-Plonker stood there, fully dressed (which to Angelina was a bonus). “And it wasn’t worth it,” she said, “do you want to know who I really am?”

“Don’t,” snapped the Prime Minister, finally in an almost upright position but with a leg bleeding where a sliver of his precious prime ministerial shin bone stuck through, “don’t you bloody dare!”

© Peter Rogerson, 09.12.20