Revolt Read online

  Revolt

  Vernon Coleman

  ©Vernon Coleman 2010. The right of Vernon Coleman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book was first published under the pen name Robina Hood.

  ISBN: 978 0 9535061 6 3

  Vernon Coleman is the bestselling author of over 100 books – many of which are now available on Amazon as Kindle books. For a full list of books available please see Vernon Coleman’s author page on Amazon or search for `Vernon Coleman Kindle’. Vernon Coleman’s books have sold over two million hardback and paperback copies in the UK and been translated into 25 languages.

  All characters, organisations and businesses in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons (living or dead), organisations or businesses is purely coincidental.

  A political satire.

  Based on a true story

  that hasn’t happened yet.

  Chapter 1

  Tom opened the cupboard beside the oven and rummaged around. He tried to do so quietly, but it is difficult to move pots and pans without making a noise.

  ‘What are you doing love?’ his aunt asked.

  ‘I’m looking for something heavy,’ whispered Tom, pulling an aluminium saucepan out of the cupboard. It is, he thought, dangerous to be right when the Government is wrong. But maybe, he added to himself, as a corollary, it can also be dangerous to work for the Government when the Government is wrong.

  ‘What do you want something heavy for?’ his aunt asked. She had lowered her voice to match her nephew’s.

  ‘I want to kill someone with it,’ whispered Tom. ‘I’m going to hit him on the head.’ He half heard himself and could hardly believe what he half heard himself say. Though he had always stood up for himself, his beliefs and those he cared for he had always avoided violence. He had played rugby as though the aim of the game was to avoid contact with the ball. At school he had only ever been involved in one fight. An older boy had taunted him with lewd remarks about his mother, younger and considerably more attractive than the mothers of any of his contemporaries. Tom had punched the boy on the nose, leapt upon him and pummelled him until he’d been dragged off. It was his only ever fight. After that the other boys treated him with quiet respect. ‘It’s got to be heavy,’ he repeated, half to himself

  ‘Ah,’ said his aunt with a nod of comprehension. ‘Then that pan is too light. You need something heavier. The frying pan is iron and much heavier. Try that.’ She spoke with as much emotion as if she were suggesting the correct pan for frying eggs.

  Tom put the saucepan back and picked up the frying pan which was on the stove. He weighed it in his hand. It seemed wellmade and solid. The handle felt good. It fitted his hand nicely. He looked at his aunt, for whom he felt affection and a great sense of responsibility, and then thought about Dorothy, whom he loved dearly, and realised that he really had no other option. He took a deep breath and went back into the hall. His love for Dorothy, and the companionship that had grown out of that love, was all that he had; it was all he had to live for; all that held him together. He would do anything for Dorothy.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said the sprout, waiting in the hallway. ‘You’re too damned late. You killed him.’ He looked at the frying pan in Tom’s hand. ‘What the hell is that..?’ He stared at the frying pan with disbelief. The sprouts’ arrogance made them stupid and careless and more vulnerable than they could think possible.

  And that was as far as he got before Tom hit him on the head with the edge of a frying pan.

  The sprout fell immediately. To Tom’s quiet surprise there was almost no blood.

  Tom stood still for a moment. Then he bent down, put his fingers against the sprout’s neck and felt for a pulse. The sprout’s heart was still beating. Tom raised the frying pan and brought it down even harder. This time some blood seeped from a small, broken vein. The frying pan slipped out of Tom’s reach and bounced and slithered down the hallway towards the door to the kitchen. Tom checked again. The man still had a pulse.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Horrified, Tom turned. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion but he was concentrating so hard on what he was doing that he didn’t even recognise his aunt’s voice. And it was his aunt who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘A sprout,’ answered Tom.

  ‘What on earth is he doing?’

  ‘I hit him.’

  ‘Why did you do that, dear?’

  ‘I wanted to kill him.’

  ‘He’s not dead.’

  ‘No. I know that, auntie.’

  ‘So, hit him again!’

  ‘I can’t get to the frying pan.’

  ‘Use his shoe.’

  Tom tore the man’s shoe from his foot and banged him on the head with it. The shoe simply bounced off the man’s head.

  ‘It’s got a rubber sole. I don’t think hitting him with it is doing him any good but it’s not going to kill him.’ Tom felt hot and sticky. He had pains everywhere; the ones in his chest and down his arms were the most worrying. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

  ‘It’s not supposed to be doing him any good. You’re trying to kill him. What’s that awful smell?’

  ‘It’s corning from his shoes.’

  ‘His shoes?’

  ‘He must have stepped in something on the way here.’

  Tom’s aunt looked at the sole of the shoe her son was holding, wrinkled her nose and turned away her head. ‘Ugh! How disgusting. He’s a sprout?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought he was,’ she said, with a nod. ‘He’s got very smelly shoes.’

  Just then the first sprout stirred and groaned. Tom jumped.

  ‘He’s not dead either!’ said Tom’s aunt. ‘You’ll have to hit them both again.’

  ‘We could electrocute them,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve seen them do it in films. We put them into a bath full of water and then throw in an electrical appliance of some kind.’

  His aunt looked at him.

  ‘An electric fire. A toaster. Something like that.’

  ‘The only electric fire we have is fixed into the wall in my bedroom and it doesn’t work.’ She waved a hand towards the frying pan. ‘Give that thing to me.’

  Tom hesitated.

  ‘Give it to me.’ She pointed. ‘The pan thing.’

  Tom stood up, fetched the frying pan and turned back to hand it to his aunt. But she’d disappeared. He went back into the kitchen. She wasn’t there. He went back into the hallway and saw her coming out of the living room. She was wearing a golf glove on her left hand. She had never played golf in her life, though Tom’s father had been a keen golfer. Tom didn’t know they still had one of his golf gloves.

  ‘Give me the pan,’ she said.

  Tom handed her the frying pan and watched in astonishment as she swung it above her head and brought it down first onto the head of one sprout and then onto the head of the other.

  ‘We can’t have bodies at the bottom of the stairs,’ complained his aunt, peering at the sprouts to see what damage she had done. ‘We will have to move them. I can’t be clambering over bodies at my age every time I want to go to the bathroom. I might trip up.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘How many what?’

  ‘Bodies.’

  ‘Just the two.’

  ‘Oh. I wondered if there might be more. Still, when you’re trying to get around, one is plenty but two are far too many.’

  ‘They’re sprouts, auntie. I killed them.’

  ‘I wondered who they were. I didn’t recognise them. Are they anyone I know?’

  ‘I don’t think so, auntie.’

  ‘Your grandf
ather killed Germans in the war. They gave him medals for it.’ Tom’s aunt had been diagnosed as suffering from mild dementia, though Tom was often painfully aware that the adjective ‘mild’ is invariably applied subjectively.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He had a German helmet. Kept it at the back of the wardrobe. They didn’t give him that. He took it. Black with a big spike on the top.’

  Tom didn’t want his aunt to get too involved with memories of her father. He enjoyed talking to her about the past but this didn’t seem to be a suitable moment.

  ‘They came to check on our labels.’

  ‘He kept it in the wardrobe because my mum was worried that my brother or I might hurt ourselves on it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The helmet.’

  ‘These two were label inspectors,’ said Tom, trying to turn his aunt’s attention back to the present.

  ‘Well, don’t worry about it. I expect they’ve got plenty more of these people.’

  ‘I’ve killed them!’

  ‘Were they German?’

  ‘No. They were Romanian.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then. As long as they were foreign. Do you think they’ll give you a nice medal? Who do we have to tell for you to get a medal?’

  ‘They won’t give me a medal. But they might have me killed.’

  ‘No medals? Your granddad got medals for killing foreigners. Have they changed the rules? Why on earth would they kill you? Is killing Romanians a bad thing to do? It’s a pity they weren’t German.’

  Tom paused for a moment. ‘They might think it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘And they will want to punish you for it?’

  ‘They will if they find out.’

  ‘Oh dear. Well, that’s outrageous. What is the world coming to? No one ever threatened to lock up your granddad. He was given his medals by a General. How dead are they?’

  ‘I don’t think there are varieties of dead, aunt. There aren’t stages as there are with drunkenness or wickedness. You’re pretty much either dead or you’re not.’ Tom loved his aunt but he was beginning to realise that she was perhaps not the best person to have at his side at what he thought he could fairly describe as something of a crisis.

  ‘And they’re definitely dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure? Is this one totally dead?’ She poked the body of the second sprout with the toe of her pink fluffy slipper.

  ‘Completely, utterly, totally dead.’

  ‘Does he know?’ She poked him again, bent down and peered at him very carefully.

  ‘The dead man?’

  ‘Of course, dear. Who else are we talking about?’ Tom sighed. ‘Yes, aunt, the dead man knows.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I wouldn’t say he is dead. If you want him to be dead you’re going to have to hit him on the head again with something pretty solid.’

  It was at that moment that the dead body, irritated by all the nudging, sat up, rubbed his head and looked around. As might be expected he looked confused and rather bewildered by his circumstances.

  Without hesitation Tom’s aunt raised the frying pan above her head and brought it down as though it were a golf club and she was playing a drive with one hand. It hit the side of the sprout’s head with a fearsome crack.

  ‘There you are,’ said Tom’s aunt. ‘That’s the way to do it.’ She smiled at him.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tom, quietly.

  ‘That made me feel better,’ she said. ‘I’ve been very pissed off for much longer than you have.’

  Chapter 2

  None of this would have happened if Tom hadn’t been upstairs painting a cupboard.

  Tom Cobleigh didn’t like unexpected visitors and had long ago disconnected the front doorbell, unfastening one of the wires so that when callers pressed the button attached to the door jamb nothing happened inside the house.

  He had kept the bell push, rather than simply removing it and throwing it away, in the hope that callers would assume that, since they had pressed the bell push, then a bell must have rung somewhere in the house and, would, therefore, leave satisfied that they had made their presence felt but that the house had been unoccupied at the time of their visit.

  ‘Most people respond to bells,’ explained Tom who had read more than most people about Pavlov and his dogs. ‘Telephone bells, doorbells, it doesn’t matter what sort of bell it is, most people respond when they hear them. And so those same people assume that other people behave the same way. They believe that if a bell is rung, and heard, it will be dignified with a response. And that conversely, if a bell is rung and there is no response then there must be no one there to hear it ring.’

  His friends, few in number though they were, constantly argued with him about this, though there were, they knew, many other things that were far more worthy of argument than the importance, or otherwise, of answering doorbells.

  ‘The point of having a bell,’ explained one, ‘is so that you can tell when there is someone at the door, respond to their presence and see what they want.’

  ‘That’s exactly the point,’ agreed Tom. ‘It’s always about what they want. When do people ever come to the front door with good news? No one ever rings my doorbell to bring me something I want. They always want something from me. They want to tell me I haven’t paid my television licence or they want to sell me something. They want to ask me for a donation or to ask me to take out a subscription to something. They want to offer to paint my house or they want their ball back. They want me to do something that will help them.’

  ‘But if you don’t open the door you can’t let anyone in!’

  ‘Precisely! I never let anyone in unless I want to see them, know they are coming and, most importantly of all, know why they are coming. And if I want to see them and know they are coming, I undo the bolt on the back gate and they come in that way.’

  Tom’s aunt, who was tiptoeing, unsteadily but with quiet determination, into the world of senility, and who had journeyed some distance into the land where truth and reality have become slightly hazy memories, but fantasy and paranoia have not yet completely replaced them, didn’t understand any of this. When she heard a telephone ring she answered it. And when she heard a doorbell ring, she answered it. If she’d heard a dinner gong sound, and had known what it signified, she would have probably responded to that too. Pavlov would have approved of her. He would have been proud of her. She was a woman after his own heart; a woman with sensible reflexes. And so she also opened the front door when people knocked on it.

  Before she came to live with Tom she had, for a week, been in a hospital after collapsing at home. She’d had a stroke and had been found in her hallway, semi-conscious and almost moribund. A neighbour had called an ambulance and, in the mistaken belief that they were dealing with a sprout (why would anyone call an ambulance for someone who wasn’t a sprout?), the ambulance men had delivered her to the local hospital.

  A word of explanation is in order.

  The people of Europe had been divided into two groups: those fortunate individuals who worked for what had been the European Union but was now known as the États-Unis de Communauté Européenne (referred to as EUDCE), and its various subsidiary authorities, commissions and bodies (individuals known formally as officiers and informally as sprouts because they were all controlled from EUDCE’s permanent headquarters in Brussels) and those far less fortunate folk who didn’t (known officially as habitants and equally unofficially as civilians or, more commonly, as suspects because that’s how they were regarded).

  A week later, when he eventually found out where she’d been taken (a neighbour of his aunt’s had told a friend who’d told someone who knew Tom) Tom had visited her there and had found her starving, lying between filthy sheets, in a filthy bed on a filthy ward.

  A falling out among relatives meant that he hadn’t seen much of his aunt when he’d been small, and had hardly recognised her when he’d met her again. He was sad about that. She’d always se
nt him birthday and Christmas presents when he’d been a boy and they’d been trains and cars too, instead of the socks and handkerchiefs favoured by most of his other female relatives.

  She’d had an adventurous life. Eccentric, big, blonde and boisterous she’d worked as a magician’s assistant until she’d grown too big (in all directions) to fit into the box. Unable to earn a living being sawn in half, she’d moved gracefully and naturally into jobs behind a series of bars. She’d been a born barmaid.

  ‘Excuse me, but my aunt looks dehydrated,’ said Tom to one of the nurses when he visited the hospital. ‘And she’s lost a lot of weight. Do you know if there is a reason for that?’

  ‘She won’t drink and she won’t feed herself,’ snapped the nurse.

  ‘She had a stroke,’ Tom pointed out.

  ‘She’s over that now.’

  ‘But she’s confused,’ said Tom. ‘Shouldn’t someone feed her?’

  ‘This isn’t a restaurant,’ snapped the nurse.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect her to be fed in a restaurant,’ said Tom. ‘But isn’t this supposed to be a hospital?’

  ‘We don’t feed patients,’ said the nurse, lifting her jaw and skewering him with a glare she probably used to strip paint. ‘We’re professionals. We have other, more important things to do.’

  ‘But if she carries on at this rate she’ll starve to death,’ Tom pointed out.

  The nurse shrugged. ‘She’s well over 80,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to do anything with the over 60’s. Anyway, she’ll be going home tomorrow.’ She sniffed. ‘And she shouldn’t have been admitted. She’s not entitled.’ Tom’s aunt’s big problem was that she was suspect not a sprout. Suspects weren’t entitled to any sort of medical care or residential support.

  And old suspects were definitely on the not-wanted list. The sprouts in Brussels had announced plans to make it a legal requirement for suspects over the age of 60 to join a proposed involuntary euthanasia programme. They were going to call it the Life Release Programme and those who enrolled would be paid a small fee in recognition of their commitment. The fee would be just enough to pay for a modest funeral. The scheme was considered an integral part of the two-tone civilisation created by the hierarchy in Brussels. Suspects who reached the age of 59 would be invited to attend classes and take a degree course to prepare them for the end. They would be given a copy of a glossy magazine called Dying, the production of which would, it was hoped, be subsidised with advertisements from appropriate and enterprising businesses. They would also receive a set of six coasters celebrating modem postLisbon Treaty European history and the promise that their names would appear on a Roll of Honour on a EUDCE sponsored website. Like all degree courses the whole merry venture would end not with an orthodox examination (such interventions had for years been forbidden as both dangerously elitist and woefully discriminatory) but with a ceremony where all candidates who had attended the requisite number of classes would be given the details of the website upon which their graduation diploma could be found.