THE RIGHT TROUSERS

Prime Ministers, eh?

Godwin didn’t for one minute think he’d get away with murder, but he did.

It was Helena really. She’d been asking for it since the week after their wedding when the true Helena had crawled out of her expensive cosmetics and assumed classy accent which had been all he had seen of the woman for as long as he’d known her.

“I don’t think much of those trousers,” she had said and somehow managed to inject concentrated furious acid into that simple sentence.

“What’s wrong with them?” he asked, hurt.

“They’re the old you,” she complained, still sounding vitriolic.

“I thought you rather liked the old me,” he mumbled, “after all, it was the old me that you married last week!”

“And that was when it was meant to end,” she retorted, “put a better pair of trousers on, for goodness sake! One that shows that you’re a man on his way to somewhere! A pair of trousers with creases so sharp you could cut yourself on them! And one that gives the impression there might be something truly special about your underpants which the world might praise if your zipper broke!”

“What’s wrong with my pants?” he almost cringed.

“They’re white: that’s what’s wrong. What you need is a pair of nice tartan boxers to show your Scottishness. Scottishness is going somewhere. Scottishness is cool and vibrant!”

There’s not one speck of Scot in my heritage,” he told her. “I’m English through and through. I even come from as near as d****t is to swearing to the dead centre of England, in Leicestershire, and I’m proud of it.”

“Well, you’ve got to learn to change your ways if you’re going to get to the top!”

“What top?” he asked, feebly.

“Of the tree, of course!” she snapped. “I want you to enter politics! I want you to go into Parliament! I want us to live in number ten with me, and you know where that is, don’t you?”

“The Gorbals?” he asked, almost offensively.

“Don’t be such a jerk,” was her reply. “Now go and take a bath: I want a tribe of children to take with us when you reach the top, a tribe that will make all the colour supplements and show us off to be the people I need us to be. We’ll make the first one today, hopefully a boy, before lunch. At least it’ll be a reason for you to take off those ghastly trousers!”

“Make the first one?” asked Godwin feebly.

“Son, of course. In every family of note the first one is a son, to carry on the family name into the invisible future. So go and take a bath and we’ll meet in the boudoir!”

At that she busied herself dead-heading her favourite pot plant and hitching up her skirt, possibly, he thought bitterly, because she thought she looked more attractive with her skirt hitched up. She didn’t: she looked scruffy, untidy, and anyway it was a fairly mini skirt before she hitched it anyway, and now looked ridiculous as if she was trying to tempt a bee to partake of a toxic flower.

So he took his bath because that’s what she wanted him to do, and as per instructions they met in what she liked to call her boudoir where however hard he tried he couldn’t find one thing remotely attractive about her that inspired the least bit of strength in him to create a son or daughter or even a disfigured pauper like himself.

“This is no good!” she snapped, “do it like you did before we got married!”

“You mean, like we did when I loved you?” he asked.

“Like you love me,” she snapped back, “once in love, always in love: remember how you said it to me!”

“Then you should have produced the son you want back then,” he glowered, hating the way she had suddenly started belittling him, treating him as if his every thought and deed was imperfect in some major way and even despising his trousers.

“I was on the pill back then, silly!” she retorted, “I wasn’t going to produce a kid out of wedlock and need a little old man to change it’s nappies.”

It was then that he decided he hated her so much he would kill her. But not an ordinary sort of killing. Not blood and gore or poisons that made her squirm and die, but a life long torture of death.

He would climb to the top of the tree she was often on about and show her the world from there. He would show her who she really was by looking down on her.

He put his plan into action almost immediately and it all began by him buying himself a new pair of trousers as well as some snazzy boxer shorts just to show her that he was a real man. Then he joined a local political association (he wasn’t bothered about the actual policies it espoused, just that it usually won general elections) and set about being recognised.

The trousers helped. It came as a shock to him that what he said about the state of the nation, and the fervour with which he said it, was less well applauded than those trousers with their keen creases and snazzy but subdued classic grey-blue pattern.

“That now man, that Godwin what’s his name, he knows a good pair of trousers when he sees one,” he overheard one man say.

“Pity about his shirt, though,” mumbled a second.

So he went straight out and bought himself a nice new shirt, one that matched his trousers with such perfection that the combination might have been designed by a Picasso. Even Helena approved of them and even let him catch a glimpse of her bare bosom as a mark of appreciation for the efforts he was making.

As chance would have it, a General Election was just round the corner and a debate began as to who the candidate representing Brumpton should be. A short list was drawn up and to his personal grief he wasn’t on it. Then a debate began, a debate in which one one by one the men (and one woman) on the short list were deleted from it, one because he passed away and another because his Alzheimers was getting worse and he couldn’t remember his own name. A third had gone to the wrong school as an infant and a fourth thought they were all in Rugby. The last name on the shortlist turned out to be currently in prison, where he was expected to remain beyond the end of the parliamentary term and well into the next, so a new short list was opened, and as chance would have it the boxer shorts saved the day for Godwin.

It happened like this. He went to the gentleman’s toilets where three of the committee were urinating, the latest craze being to see who could wee furthest up the wall (it was a pre-modern urinal) and in order to stand a chance Godwin exposed an almost indecent amount of those colourful boxers in order to gain every possible advantage, and consequently won.

“Nice boxers!” congratulated the Chairman.

“Where did you get them from?” asked the Treasurer.

“They match your trousers perfectly,” approved the Secretary.

And as a result of that adulation it was decided, when the committee met again, that the candidacy called for new blood and Godwin found himself the party’s candidate for the upcoming parliamentary elections.

“I knew you were the man,” praised Helena, tasting in her imagination the champagne that allegedly runs out of the taps in Number Ten.

“I’ll show you, you b***h,” he replied, and she couldn’t find it in her heart to complain about his language. He’d never called her a b***h before and maybe calling her it now was a sign of great things to come.

The weeks before the General Election were frantic. Godwin went round the borough in his best trousers (which were stroked an inordinate number of times by bored housewives, some of whom even ventured to caress his zipper), and when the actual big day arrived he was up at the crack of dawn while Helena slept on. By then she was pregnant having spent an hour in the company of their window cleaner while it rained and he couldn’t polish glass without smearing it, and that had culminated in the arrival of an unexpected pregnancy, which Godwin put down to nocturnal passion whilst he slept, exhausted.

You know what happened next. The trousers won the election for him by an almost unbelievable margin, and he went to Parliament in glory.

“Right, you b***h,” he smiled to Helena, “let’s see what you make of this!”

“Anything, Godwin,” she wittered back, doing her best to hold her stomach in so that it looked flat and unpregnant.

Crowds had gathered to watch the procession as new members made their way to take their seats in the house of Commons, and amongst them was Godwin, with Helena cheering on.

Until, that is, she saw what he was wearing.

It was his old trousers and they were so badly crumpled they looked like rags, had no crease, and the zipper was broken so that she could just make out the grey-white of an elderly pair of underpants.

“Oh good Lord,” she gasped, and right there and then she collapsed to the concrete floor of the pavement at Westminster, suddenly bereft of any sense she had, her brain abruptly addled by a mixture of loathing and contempt brought on by his trousers.

Godwin looked at her as her mouth distorted but failed to do anything but gabble meaninglessly, and smiled.

“Sometimes prayers are answered,” he mused, “You need a wheelchair, my lover, and I’ll find a little old man to push you around, see if I don’t. And then you’ll be able to look around you and dream of perfect trousers while I see you as you are!”

© Peter Rogerson 24.04.22