QUILPS IS LOST

A final look at Indigo Quilps as his sanity melts away

QUILPS IS LOST

Quilps was quite happy when it came to lurking on the opposition back benches and dosing off when he hoped the cameras weren’t on him, which they hardly ever were. But that couldn’t go on for ever because not so far on a near horizon lurched a general election. It happened every five years, and that was a fact that had escaped him in the silent fury that was his life.

It meant that if he wanted to return to Parliament he had to get voted in by the hoards on the streets, hoards that he had very little knowledge of but had to go it alone without a party to give him the support he actually needed, and he discovered two things when that nightmare came along.

Firstly, it was hard work knocking on doors, particularly the majority that didn’t want anyone, especially someone like him, to knock on them and secondly it was expensive. He wanted a leaflet printed, one that promised a shining future for the town, together with a border of little pink flowers in terspersed with words like LOVE and HOPE and not one of the local printers could offer mates rates to what they saw as a rich nonentity like him who wanted something dafter than daft. In fact, they were in a loose way all affiliated to one of the two major parties and one of them only agreed to print for him if it was a single monochroe black (no pink) sheet and didn’t take much effort even though the price seemed to Quilps to be exorbitant.

But the General Election came on its appointed day and he did disastrously despite visiting polling stations and doing a great deal of smiling at people he generally thought would vote for anyone but an independent candidate like himself. There was I, he grumbled to his inner self, well on my way to a comfortable desk in Downing Street when it crossed my mind that we politicians don’t always give enough account of the consequences of our decisions, and that’s because we’re not really bothered...

Then Melissa came along…

Melissa and her granny!

But it had been wrong, hadn’t it? That government policies hard on the heels of the twisted and selfish withdrawal from the EU had contributed to the humiliating demise of an old lady with a lovely granddaughter? And how that so-called referendum (which had been promoted by already rich men out for a bit more for themselves) had led to a queue of traffic that had done just that.

He’d tasted the power in politics and Melissa had brought him up short. And at about the same time that Parliament had ended and a bloody general election had taken over.

So he lost that general election and it was with a feeling of relish that he noted that the woman who had opposed him in the bye-election had been victorious. Eva Curry was the new MP for Brumpton!

“You did your best,” said Melissa from inside his wardrobe, “granny would have fallen for you! She always said how in her younger days, back after the brutal second world war, she had been a bit of a tease when it came to young men! She’d have teased you into bed, there’s no doubt about that!”

He leapt out of bed and opened the wardrobe door, but there was nobody in there.

“Tell me about being a boy in an orphanage,” she coaxed from somewhere near the ceiling light.

And he did because those had been the best days of his life. He’d been able to pretend, back then, that he was living in the best of all worlds. He’d been told stories that confirmed it! Stories about hardship and poverty, cruelty and hatred.

“I was given a sense of reality,” he told the disembodied voice, “I was told that small boys can have a voice in the world. I wanted to call my baby Oliver in recognition of that, but it was a girl ao she was Olive. Matron read me the stories and she was a darling…”

“But you ruined my life!” put in Mollie Daybright from her perch on the window sill, “you said there was abuse, and everyone knows what that means!”

“I meant the abuse was my parents dying!” he wailed, “the orphanage was a wonderful substitute, but that’s all it was: a substitute.”

“I know, darling,” whispered Melissa, who had somehow morphed into the doorknob, “and this is your reality now. Will you marry me?”

“Of course I will…” he agreed, “I’ve said it before...”

“Granny will like that. I’ll bring her ashes and she can be my bridesmaid! She’ll leap out of her little urn holding the most beautiful bouquet you ever did see!”

And instead of scorning the idea, it appealed to him. “I’d like to see that,” he thought aloud.

“Let’s face it,” said the prime Minister from behind her bars where thoughtless legal eagles had put her for doing not very much, but doing it badly, “you’re mad!”

He gnashed his teeth. “Better than being sane,” he said, and added in a whisper “if you are really sane. All of you shouting and spitting and cursing in parliament, you’re all looking after yourselves! I’m going down the pub!”

And he pulled a pair of shorts on together with a tee-shirt from Venice, stepped into his favourite sandals and sneaked out of the house.

The pub, his local whimsically called The Seagull’s Fart, was a good lope away but it didn’t take him long to get there. The lounge bar was crowded, just as he liked it, with a motley selection of people all around.

He went up to the bar, smiling broadly. And ordered a G and T.

“It cleanses the palate, he told a jar of pickled eggs, tonight is the most wonderful night of them all. Melissa’s granny’s dead, you know, but she’ll come back to life to be bridesmaid when I marry her granddaughter!”

“No, I’m afraid I won’t,” whispered the granny, heavily disguised as a clock on the wall, “look at my face, Indigo, look straight at my face.”

She sounded so insistent, so he did.

“See,” she said, “it’s closing time. Beddy-byes is calling, have you lot got no home to go to?…”

“So it is,” he mumbled sadly, and time for dreams to end…”

THE END

© Peter Rogerson, 20.08.22

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