14. MARMADUKE IN TROUBLE

Marmaduke earns a ticking off...

Dragona was back home with Claude, the name she had decided was a great deal more sophisticated than Sid. Although she considered herself to be one of the ordinary people who would never valle their offspring anything like Claude, there was a corner of her mind that liked to cling to what she saw as quality, and, Claude was a quality name and any child given that name at birth couldn’t help but succeed in life.

By being back home with baby Claude I mean that the home she was in wasn’t the one she shared with Marmaduke Lauderdale, her husband, but the onne she’d been brought up in by her ever-caring parents. They had always kept a room for her just in case things didn’t work out with the despicable Marmaduke. That’s how they saw him, anyway. The things he espoused frequently made her father have to control himself or Marmaduke would have suffered serious physical injuries.

There was the time when a news item on the television had suggested that a Government minister, no doubt quoting what the Prime Minister had said, declared that if anyone was hungry he should get a better paid job, and Dragona’s mother, a nurse in the same hospital where Claude was born though not on duty at the time, declared that would mean all the hospitals would be emptied of staff if all those who were finding the economic situation difficult were to do what Marmaduke said was the sensible thing to do, and then where would the sick and injured go? To which Marmaduke had replied that the solution was easy: sell the hospitals to the highest bidder and charge the patients enough to economically cover the wages of the staff that treated them. Easy peasy, he said.

And rather than clout him Dragona’s father had simply asked where the poor who fell off ladders or succumbed to this or that virus would go, or would they simply be allowed to die? And Marmaduke reflected for a moment and said that yes, they should die because they were not in the economic cycle of life, and at that point Bert, Dragona’s dad, told him to go and not darken their doorstep again.

Bert was a humanist and believed that everyone should live out their lives in comfort and not be eliminated by death just because they were nurses or checkout girls at the supermarket.

To which Marmaduke had fled before he got belted, and seriously thought of reporting the matter to the police.

A great deal of cooing at Claude, and tickling under his chin until he smiled and making baby noises at him occurred without the baby’s biological father being present. He was at his large and imposing home wondering what he’d done wrong and hoping that the Prime Minister wasn’t dead.

On that last point his boss actually appeared on a news broadcast on the BBC next morning explained that he’d been bullied into wearing a bullet proof vest by a nice man called Sid because Sid had heard a rumour from a reliable source that an attemp to thinkt would be made on his life.

“The scoundrel was shot in the leg by a marksman and is on his wsy to prison, where he will doubtless remain until the day he died,” he said without once mentioning porcine cartoon characters. “My belly is a little sore,” he continued, making a valiant attempt at reaching the ears of what he looked on as the common man by using the word belly.

Finally, after a great deal of huffing and puffing and meaningless waffling he declared that democracy was dead if a Prime Minister can’t parade amongst the people without being shot at, and he would introduce legislation that would reintroduce the death penalty for anyone found guilt of such a heinous crime.

“Jolly good,” thought Marmaduke, without even bothering tgo think about the implications that might involve innocent men being caught in a situation, unaware of what was going on.

It was when the broadcast was over he was telephoned by Dragona because she wanted to let him know where his son was and they’d have to put their heads together and discuss the finacial implications of her having to bring up a child on her own. Single mothers, she said, are under awful financial pressures, and that simply isn;;t fair while the child’s father is alive.

“What about single fathers?” he asked.

“So you want to be one of those, do you?” she asked, “you want Claude to live with you, be fed by you and have his hygiene seen to by you? Don’t forget I’ve seen some of your underpants and the state they get in…”

“I didn’t mean me, silly,” he almost shouted at the phone, “I’ve got a full time responsible job! I can’t take care of a youngster! I wouldn’t know where to begin!”

“Then we’ll leave it at that for the time being,” Dragona said, with the threat of future debates written into the tone of her voice, and she hung up without inviting him to as much as coo at his own son.

Several weeks past and he was grateful for the pause in his married life. On his own, he could employ someone to do the menial tasks involved in running a home and keeping it clean and tidy, preparing his meals when he was at home, and he made sure that it was a woman of a certain age, one he assumed would show no interest whatsoever in his trousers.

Mrs Phelps was ideal, though the downside was he was sure she was a commie because every time she mentioned his wife and child it was with a what he considered a disproportionate amount of sympathy and the making of clucking noises. And occasionally he saw her eyes sneaking towards hos crotch, as if he’d spilt something like gravy down hois pants.

With a degree of organisation in his home life he found that he was ordered to Number Ten where the Prime Minister wanted a word with him. Maybe word had got to him that Harmaduke had virtually saved his life, and he was quite sure that he could spin the events when he’d failed to find Sid and the Prime Minister had been shot at.

It turned out that the Prime Minister wanted more than a word, he wanted many sentences of words and he wanted to utter them in a loud and threatening voice. The essence of what turned out to be a harangue was the fact that although the miserable Lauderdale had been ordered to inform Sid of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister he’d done nothing of the sort and if the latter hadn’t been equipped with protective clothing he might have been shot very dead indeed, and nobody wanted that, did they?

He felt like saying that his wife thought it wlould be a good idea, but clammed up and told the Prime minister that she was having a baby at the rime, and everything seemed to be piled onto everything else, and he didn’t know whether he was coming or going.

“I am your Prime Minister,” came the heavy reply, “and therefore your chief concern. If anyone from the Services mentions my name then you must jump, and if that person mentions Sid then you must run. As fast as you can, and giving no concern to babies being born alive or dead! The sprog was alive, I suppose?”

“Yes sir,” he almost squeaked, “thank you sir.” He wasn’t used to being spoken like that, at least not since he’d left school a decade earlier.

“Well, as this has been your first offence I’ll leave it at this,” rumbled the Prime minister, “but if there is any further offence, with or without you trying to offload your guilt onto a baby, then I will have to inform the secretary of your local branch to go in search of another candidate for the next election. Now go, and be thankful that I’m in such a generous mood.”

And that was his ticking off and when he walked down Downing Street he mused at what an excellent man the Prime minister was, and what a crime it was that somebody had actually shot a bullet at him.

At the end of the street and beyond the gates a small group was being threatened by a policeman. They were holding a sign suggesting that the Prime Minister himself should be in gaol Only they spelt it jail, which he thought looked too lower class for a place like this.

© Peter Rogerson 31.05.22

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