LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!

Ex-MP and best-selling novelist, Lord Godfrey Archibald Bower (Archie to his “friends”) was widely known as the kind of man who would bottle your piss and sell it back to you. Despite, or because of his incorrigible mendacity, Bower was an avuncular enough fellow - quite the motivator in fact. He had the sort of inveterate charm that could enchant the socks off a recalcitrant leprechaun.

In the perennial expectation that loosened tongues might give up some useful tidbit of self-incriminating muck, he made a point of always drinking orange juice when others were making merry. Archie would drink ( OJ - one of his few Americanisms - mixed with champagne) on only two other occasions: namely, at family celebrations with his two sons (Oscar and Elijah) and their mother, the long-suffering Lady Fragance Bower, or on extra-marital assignations with miscellaneous members of the British Collective of Prostitutes. (It was a point of principle with his Lordship to engage only unionized sex slaves.) Fuck’s Bizz, as he called his favourite on-the-job loosener, was typical of Bower’s privately expressed juvenile wordplay.

Lady Fragance was atypical of his taste in women and as such made her a perfect frontispiece wife. The notoriously spiteful Lady Fragance was an unlikely environmental scientist with an aptitude for understatement. Her coiffure was poised in lacquered rigidity; her head and shoulders set permanently in the manner of a TV newsreader, moving only to accentuate a word of barbed bile at any unfortunate soul within earshot she took a disliking to. Her tongue was a curare-tipped dart. Her tolerance and patience surrounding all things Archie, in starkest contrast, were kindly, motherly and saintly.

She is reported to have once said, “Godfrey has the gift of Machiavelli”, inaccurately as it turned out: the journalist’s spell check kept red-lining Manichaeus. It was the first and last time she ever spoke to the press about her husband. On the record. Off it, she talked about little else, save for hobby-horsing to glassy-eyed hacks on the disproportionate efforts made in the areas of household and business waste recycling. As they yawned, she popped a vol-au-vent in their mouths, patted their behinds and, barely audibly, muttered inappropriately apropos the cost of spanking these days.

It was on that very subject that our dialogue opens.

- Mistress.(Thwack) Ah! Mistress. (Thwack!) Ah!

- Silence! You miserably inadequate shrivelled up snivelling little wretch. You call that decent. That's pathetic. I want it standing to attention.

Mona McAteer (aka Mistress Slipper) was under strict instructions to wait for the correct cue before desisting from discipline. Mona was a consummate professional.

- Please stop (Thwack!) Ah! (Thwack!!) Stop. (Thwack!!!) For God's sake Mona stop. I've forgotten the bloody word.

Against every tenet of her vocation, she refrained. Long enough to get her breath back and for Lord Godfrey's derrière to regain its dignity. The whole scenario was in danger of descending into tabloid farce.

Archie had had enough. He wanted to talk.

- Look Mona. I'm not really in the mood. I've overdone it on the 'poo. Be a darling. Get me a couple of painkillers and tell me about Bert.

Archie followed Bert's progress more closely than his legitimate progeny. Truth to tell, he was the only bastard he'd ever loved.

Bert, who knew not his father nor of Mistress Slipper’s vocation, was her third illegitimate. The other two had gone into care and out of her life for good, and bad. Mona's devotion to Bert was typical of the selfless post-Thatcherite working women who lead double lives for the benefit of their offspring. There was no society. But there were children. There was compassionate, caring conservation of one's own flesh and blood, in short, motherhood.

And Bert was doing well. Bert had achieved what Lord Bower of Stowe-cum-Quay had only been able to intimate he had done, inaccurately, in his autobiography - a work more broadly fictional than any one of his novels. Bert had succeeded in going up to Cambridge as a full undergraduate.

- He's in, Archie. Trinity. English Lit.

Godfrey wiped away a tear. It was one of the last of anal pain. It was replaced by one of pride and joy.

- Promise me one thing Archie.

- What's that, Mona?

- That you had nothing to do with this. He got in off his own bat, said Mona, unaware of the irony, as she clutched Lord Bower's favourite spank paddle to her bosom.

- Of course he did. Bert's an extremely bright and able young man.

- So you had absolutely nothing at all to do with it?

- Would I lie to you?

Immediately, Mona was minded of the old joke.


 Q: How do you know when a politician is lying? A: His lips are moving.
Q: Yeah? Which ones?


She wanted so much to believe him. She put it out of her mind just as quickly.

Archie, on the other paddle-wielding hand, wanted so much to be punished. He had been such a naughty boy. Shame. It was the one moment in his private life where he could have transcended cliché. As gifted a genre fictionalist as he was, he felt he'd never quite managed it in his endings.

Me neither. (Thwack!!)