13. MARMADUKE’S BABY

Marmaduke feels lost and his loyalties divided

“He’s lovely,” Marmaduke told Dragona with a huge smile on his face, “you clever old thing,” he added, thinking that might be exactly the right thing to say. He’d never fathered a cild before and wasn’t quite sure what proportion of the praise should go to his own bodily fluids.

She looked at him and shook her head. “You didn’t seem to know it at the time, but you contributed fifty percent to this little fellow,” she told him.

That hit Marmaduke. Maybe he should have been more aware of what was going on when she, he supposed the right word was seduced, him on the way home from their honeymoon.

His trouble was he wasn’t always sure what he should be doing, and when.

He recalled when he was at school in a games lesson and he scored a try in rugby, quite against the odds seeing that the team he was in consisted of also-rans and they were playing against the best the year he was in could produce. It was a mistake that almost found him being selected for the school team, a mistake he was determined never to make again.

Which brought him back to that very day and Sid.

“I’ve got to do something,” he spluttered, “to do with the Prime Minister,” he added, hoping that made it sound important.

“You’ve not been here ten minutes!” she protested, “and we haven’t mentioned what name we’re going to give him! I mean, that’s something he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life, and he’s lived his first hour or so without any sort of name! Baby Lauderdale, they call him. I mean, he can’t go through the rest of his life being called Baby!”

“Sid!” he said, remembering what he was charged to do by the unknown man who’d knocked his front door. And in between the admiring of his son (his? That hadn’t quite lodged home yet) he had the idea that if he didn’t do what he’d been told to do the Prime Minister might be shot! Maybe by terrorists! The Prime Minister’s life might well be in his hands, and here he was worrying about a baby’s name.

He looked at the infant again. “He’s got a good tan,” he murmured as an alternative to thinking properly, “It must be quite pleasant inside your tummy.”

“Now then, Marmaduke,” said his dear wife almost angrily, “I’m having nothing like Sid as a name for my handsome young man! He’s worthy of a much better name than that! What about Louis or Claude? Names with class!”

“I didn’t mean…” he spluttered, “this man came to the door and told me to see a man called Sid at MI5, and if I didn’t a gunman was after the Prime Minister!”

“That’s the tallest tale I’ve heard in a lifetime of tall tales,” she sighed, “I suppose I will eventually get used to your nonsense, but until I do don’t expect me to agree with anything you say!”

“No,” he spluttered, “I’m supposed to be going to see Sid at MI5! Honest! The Prime Minister may be at risk! You know there are quite a lot of ignorant people who despise him?”

“Are you calling me ignorant, dearest?” she asked, “because I’m not and yet I despise the man! Man, did I say? He’s no man as I define men! He may have male bits and pieces at the tops of his legs and he may have a masculine voice, but neither of those things make him a man!”

“That’s not fair!” snapped Marmaduke, knowing her attitude to a man he admired more than anyone. “He’s generous to a fault. You must know that!”

“And that’s why half the population wants to shoot him?” asked Dragona wearily.

“I didn’t say half the population, I sad a madman!” snapped Marmaduke, “I admire the man, you know that, but just because you’re a commie it doesn’t change the fact that the P.M. is anything but a witty and generous gentleman we should all be proud of having at our helm!”

“I am not a communist even though I believe all people should have an equal crack at life,” sighed Dragona, “and that whatever good that exists in a country should benefit everyone and not just the few who happen to have too much money and can afford what the majority haven’t got a hope of affording.”

“Look, darling,” (he winced when he called her that) “I must be off or the boss might well be shot. But I’ll be back as soon as I can and see, what did you call him, Claude, for longer. But golly, he does look healthy. It must be sunny inside your womb for him to get a nice tan like that!”

“Don’t you even want to have a say in what we call him??” almost wept Dragona, “because if you don’t I want a divorce, and if I do that what do you think your boss will think of you then?”

She had barely stopped talking and scowling at him when there was a sudden outburst of voices outside the room. It suddenly sounded as if everyone in the town was squashed in one small room and they all were talking at once.

The door to the maternity ward burst opened and a flushed and very excited nurse looked around her, her eyes alive with excitement.

“You won’t have heard the good news, will you?” she called out, “it’s all over the news! Someone’s shot the Prime Minister! Here, I’ll put the telly on!”

There was a television set in the ward and she switched it on. A sombre newsreader was addressing the camera, and he had the sort of attitude you might expect of one who has seen the end of the world approaching and been plucked out of the resulting chaos by an angel from a mythical heaven and then taken to a balmy and luxurious place in which pretty girls with wings flutter about somewhere that can’t possibly exist if the laws of nature are correct.

“He was with his MI5 agents,” he said in a flat tearful voice, “and unknown to them he wandered off on his own. It is thought he saw a crowd in front of him and for no reason anyone could think of he decided to avoid them by walking into a public convenience that had been out of order for as long as anyone could remember. Our cameraman caught him as he disappeared into the building…” and here the image of the newsreader faded and the prime minister could be seen as he sauntered out of sight through a door that was normally locked, and out of sight.

The picture of the newsreader reappeared, and he continued, “then there came the sound of a shot followed by a man dressed in black rushing out of the door that the prime minister had just entered. Government agents chased him and he was shot in the leg and therefore captured, limping. Then an agent wearing an MI5 tie went into the toilet, holding a handkerchief to his nose, and upon reappearing announced that the Prime Minister had been shot and was wounded but should be all right…”

Then the picture changed to an ambulance, blue lights flashing and its warning siren shrieking loud enough to waken the dead, screeching to a standstill close to the disused toilet. Two men, obviously paramedics, holding towels against their noses, ran into the toilet, and out of sight.

There was a pause during which the newsreader repeated much of what he had already said, and then the image changed once again, to that of a stretcher being carried carefully by two paramedics. The figure on the stretcher was clearly the well known and frequently caricatured image of the man in charge of the nation.

“I should have gone to Sid,” muttered Marmaduke, “but it’s all your fault, silly woman, having a baby at a time like this…”

Dragona looked at him with an expression that might have been capable of killing her husband while she decided there and then that she needed a divorce, badly, and how soon should it be?

Meanwhile, the news reporter announced, sounding as if he had been awarded a [prize for insincerity, that the Prime Minister was alive and well and would be addressing the nation from his hospital bed as soon as medical authorities said that he could.

And as for other news, there really wasn't anything worthy of the word news.

© Peter Rogerson, 30.05.22

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