Inflatable Hugh Read online

  Pugh grimaced. “Very droll I’m sure. So what did his firm make?”

  “Inflatable rubber women.”

  “Inflatable rubber women?”

  “Apparently your brother maintained the belief that having sex with an inflatable rubber woman was almost as beneficial in creating a feeling of well-being as the real thing. This being the case he viewed his operation more like a public service than a money-making operation. Which isn’t to say he didn’t make substantial profits from the sales of inflatable rubber women. Which remains the case with An Hour In Bed today, so far as I know.”

  Pugh’s heart beat faster. Substantial profits. What a wonderful coming together of words. “How big are they?”

  “Well the usual size I suppose. Although I’m told they do one for dwarfs. Modelled on Disney’s Snow White I believe.”

  “Not the fucking inflatable rubber women,” Pugh barked impatiently, “the firm, how big is the firm?”

  ****

  INFLATABLE HUGH

  Copyright © Terry Ravenscroft, 2011

  Cover by Tony Colligan www.tctoons.com

  A RAZZAMATAZZ PUBLICATION

  ****

  About the author

  The day after Terry Ravenscroft threw in his mundane factory job to write television comedy scripts he was involved in a car accident which left him unable to turn his head. Since then he has never looked back. Born in New Mills, Derbyshire, in 1938, he still lives there with his wife Delma and his mistress Divine Bottom (in his dreams).

  email [email protected]

  facebook http://on.fb.me/ukZ78e

  twitter http://bit.ly/t0mVyB

  website www.topcomedy.co.uk

  ****

  Also by Terry Ravenscroft

  FOOTBALL CRAZY

  JAMES BLOND - STOCKPORT IS TOO MUCH

  CAPTAIN’S DAY

  DEAR AIR 2000

  DEAR COCA-COLA

  LES DAWSON’S CISSIE AND ADA

  STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

  I’M IN HEAVEN

  THE RAZZAMATAZZ FUN EBOOK

  ZEPHYR ZODIAC

  (Will be published early in 2012)

  Sample pages of each of these titles can be read at the end of this book.

  ****

  INFLATABLE HUGH

  CHAPTER ONE

  For the first few years of his life Hugh Pugh, the Secretary of Trade for Transport, had been quite fond of his name. He liked the sound of it, the rhythm of it, Hugh Pugh, it was like a little rhyme all of his very own. It was not until he commenced school at the age of five that he began to dislike it. For his classmates didn’t see his name in the same way Pugh did, as a little poem, but as an object of fun, their cruel young minds immediately homing in on its phonetic possibilities and coming up with hurtful nicknames like Hugh Poo and Hugh Phew.

  By his ninth birthday he had begun to like it again. By then he had learned from his father, a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Labour Party, that he had been named after the great Labour leader Hugh Gaitskill. Already a Labour supporter even at that tender age, having been thoroughly schooled in the dogma of Socialism by his father, it had made him very proud.

  Since that day in the long ago Pugh had experienced good days and bad days. Today was a bad day. And things would soon be getting worse. Much worse. The next general election, hanging over his head like a dark cloud, was only months away - probably May, but subject to the Prime Minister’s whim – and following it he would be out on his ear along with about a hundred other Labour MPs, if the opinion polls were to be believed.

  As things stood at the moment he was just about able to keep his head above water on his ministerial income, plus what he was able to fiddle on expenses, which wasn’t half as much as it used to be thanks to the goose that laid the golden egg having been killed off in the 2010 crackdown. Over the past thirty odd years, during the process of going down the well-trodden path from bright-eyed idealistic young party worker to grasping Member of Parliament, he had also gone through three expensive divorces and now bore the ongoing maintenance costs this entailed. Three of his offspring were being educated at private schools, which didn’t help matters. If that wasn’t enough he had the latest in a string of high maintenance girlfriends to keep fed, clothed, shoed and watered.

  Pugh’s office in the Marsham Street premises of the Department of Transport was as devoid of taste as it was opulent. It was the room of someone who, with a very large amount of money to spend, had been intent on spending as much of it as he possibly could. Nothing stated this more than the carpet.

  Carpets had always signified class to Hugh Pugh. When he was a boy people who were better off than his parents had carpets. They were the first thing his young mind had recognised as a status symbol. One of his schoolmates had a carpet in the living room; his dad was a foreman at the bike factory. His Uncle Alf and Auntie Nellie had two carpets; Uncle Alf was a solicitor’s clerk. The Pugh’s home, a two up two down terraced house in the suburbs of Nottingham, didn’t even have one carpet; the living room floor was covered by cheap linoleum and a peg rug. Pugh had vowed that when he grew up, got married and had a house of his own he would have a carpet as good as anyone.

  He kept his promise, and on becoming a Member of Parliament had extended it to include the carpet of his office. With easy access to the means by which to fund the purchase of carpets his various offices had benefited from a fine carpet ever since. The higher the position in Government he had attained, the more sumptuous the carpet he had demanded. His present carpet, a specially commissioned Axminster in browns and greens, had a pile well over an inch thick.

  The wallpaper, which Pugh didn’t particularly like, and had only purchased because it was more expensive than Derry Irvine’s, had a pattern similar to the brown aerial roots of the mangrove tree on a background of green foliage. Pugh’s secretary Myra had once remarked that the journey from his office door to his desk was like going on safari.

  In a corner of the office, adding to the jungle effect, stood a ceiling-high rubber plant. To demonstrate his wit to the many visitors to his office Pugh had hung several condoms from the plant’s branches. Not a single visitor had laughed. The nearest thing to a laugh was a sort of curled-lip smirk from the Deputy Prime Minister, which could have been indigestion. The Minister for Children, who at the time had a larger than usual bee in her bonnet about under-age sex, had actually scowled at him when he had pointed out the rubber plant’s rubber crop. Pugh had put it down to their lack of a sense of humour.

  On the wall in front of him, at either side of the door, two blown-up framed photographs reminded Pugh of his past and his present, where he was and where he was now. His past was represented by a black and white snapshot of him as an eight-year-old, standing on the front doorstep of his home, wearing his first ever Labour Party rosette. Depicting his present was a photograph of him shaking hands with the Queen. Looking at them now Pugh reflected bitterly that if there had been a photo on the wall illustrating his future it would be perfectly blank, or at best a huge question mark.

  Seated at his large desk, which along with his chair was fashioned from an oak tree purloined from Sherwood Forest, the first thing he had ordered on becoming a fully-fledged Minister five years previously, at Environment, Pugh now considered his position for the tenth time that morning.

  There was no doubt he would be defeated at the next election; unlike his ample bottom he had only a marginal seat. His majority of under a thousand would not so much be eaten away, more hungrily gobbled up, if the eight per cent swing predicted by the opinion polls was only halfway accurate. Four per cent would be more than enough. How on earth was he supposed to manage, when his income had been snatched away from him, if he could barely manage now? It didn’t bear th
inking about it; the decline from plenty to poverty would be unbearable. There would be a generous ministerial pension of course, about half his current salary he reckoned, but munificent as this was it wouldn’t amount to anything like the amount he was clawing in at the moment.

  He might of course be able to work himself onto a Quango or two, which would bring in some extra money. The earnings wouldn’t be peanuts, especially if he could manage to get himself appointed chairman and thus gain access to the loot. But it was a big might. Although there was a lot of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ between the main political parties, with the best will in the world Pugh couldn’t see his own back being scratched very much as the Conservatives hated him to a man. Calling their leader ‘The Oxford Abortion’, in his occasional column in the Guardian, hadn’t improved matters. Still he’d said it now, what’s done was done, no use worrying about it, you can’t put the shit back in the donkey.

  A spell as an MEP would be the thing. You only had to look at Neil Kinnock. The ex-Labour leader hadn’t looked back since he’d managed to work himself onto the European gravy train. Top paid job after top paid job, Commissioner of This, That and the Other, he was better off than he’d ever been, certainly far better off than he’d ever been as Leader of the Opposition. The same for his Welsh bit of a wife.

  But no one knew more than Pugh that a job in Europe was just pie in the sky, given his record over the last few years, for no one had spoken out against the European Union more vociferously than The Right Hon Hugh Pugh.

  In reality he had no strong feelings about the EEC either one way or the other. However, an even greater and much more significant reality was that his constituency had over the last couple of years absorbed more than its fair share of emigrant Poles; Poles whom his constituents saw as a danger to their job prospects and consequentially to their living. With an eye on nothing more than the next general election, and the votes that these constituents had in their gift, no one had spoken out louder than Pugh about the influx of Europeans invading our shores, infesting our neighbourhoods and stealing our jobs (after first satisfying himself that there were still more of the indigenous population living in his constituency than there were of Poles).

  Many ministers on retiring write their memoirs. But Pugh couldn’t see the world of literature bolstering his pension pot. He had already approached four publishers and none of them had shown the slightest interest. He scowled as he recalled this. It would have been different if he’d have been Posh bloody Spice or some other so-called ‘celebrity’. The bastards would have been queuing up with their million pound advances. A book of your favourite Australian Outback road kill recipes, Kylie? Get scribbling.

  The Lords was another source of potential income. But when he had hinted to Phil that he wouldn’t be averse to accepting a peerage in the next honours list the Prime Minister had as usual skirted around the subject, hadn’t given him a direct answer yea or nay. The second time Pugh had brought it up it was the same story. It was only at the third time of asking, when he had insisted on an answer, that Phil had informed him he didn’t hold out much hope that a seat in the upper house would be anything more than an outside possibility; he would clearly do his best, but there were only so many peerages he could dole out without the media jumping on him and his next list was oversubscribed already.

  Pugh scowled again on recalling the meeting. Well bollocks to Phil, and bollocks to a peerage too, the thought of having to turn up at the House of Lords every day in order to qualify for the lousy three hundred quid a day appearance money and sit with those old wankers who daily disgraced its chamber made him almost as depressed as the prospect of not having enough money to live on.

  He sighed deeply and looked out of the window. The view from his top floor office was uninspiring. Not that he expected that looking out through the window would give him inspiration. Hugh Pugh was not the sort of man who could be inspired by views, unless they were views of the insides of restaurants and wineries. He would give you ten views of the Lake District’s Derwent Valley seen from Latrigg for one of the kitchens at The Fat Duck or the cellars of Chateau Latour.

  At least it was Friday. Tonight he would be able to get the hell out of London and hightail it up the motorway to spend the weekend in his Derbyshire constituency, exchange the noise and grime and sleaziness of the capital for the peace and tranquillity of the countryside. Which wasn’t to say that he ever spent much time in the actual countryside, the countryside of leafy trees and rambling streams, of verdant meadows and winding lanes. The many and varied walks in the hills and dales to be found on his doorstep held no attraction for him whatsoever. However within the many little villages to be found in those hills and dales were welcoming oak-beamed country pubs with even more welcoming bits of skirt who didn’t mind dropping their knickers for a powerful, important politician.

  The extent to which women were attracted to men who held power had never ceased to amaze Pugh. Henry Kissinger had been spot on when he said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. The opposite sex was certainly impressed more with power than they were with good looks, if Pugh knew anything about it. Indeed if it came to a straight contest between himself and a good-looking young man as to which of them would be the first to bed a beddable young woman he would lay odds on himself any day of the week.

  Thinking about this he regarded the life-size bronze bust of himself on his desk. He had three more such busts, specially commissioned when he first rose to the heights of Cabinet Minister. One was in the windowsill of his study in his Derbyshire cottage. Another was on a pedestal in the entrance hall of his London town house, looking down imperiously on all who entered. The third had been intended to grace a retreat in the south of France. However the planned retreat had never materialised, through lack of funds, and the way things were looking at the moment it wouldn’t be all that long before it retreated altogether.

  The face of the bust bore what Pugh liked to think of as an expression of guarded benevolence, but had more accurately been described by more critical observers as ‘like a bulldog chewing a wasp’. As he looked at it now it confirmed to him that it couldn’t be his good looks that supplied him with a steady string of bed partners, for he was indeed no oil painting. From a certain angle and in uncertain light he bore a striking resemblance to Andrew Lloyd Webber. He certainly had Lloyd Webber’s heavy jowls - a feature which he could happily have done without, but not at the expense of reigning in an appetite for the type and quantity of food that could only encourage heavy jowls. Along with Lloyd Webber’s bushy eyebrows he shared the peer’s indeterminate hair style, although not its colouring; Pugh, rather than resort to the dye bottle, preferred to leave it in its natural grey state, fondly imagining that it made him look distinguished. And of course the famous composer lacked the distinctive scar that Pugh had on his top lip, a campaign wound in more sense than one, which he had received when he had been unfortunate enough to kiss the only six months old baby in his constituency who possessed a full set of teeth, and with which, showing admirable judgement, it had bit him.

  In many respects Pugh was similar to John Prescott; unfaithful, uncouth, occasionally obnoxious, and, like the former Deputy Prime Minister, a man who had been promoted far beyond his abilities as a sop to the trades unions and the far left. People who go line dancing would be more suitable for office.

  A difference between Prescott and Pugh was that the latter could put together a sentence in which the words were more or less in the right order. A further dissimilarity between the two heavyweight politicians was that Pugh didn’t have two Jaguar cars at his disposal, and had therefore not been christened ‘Two Jags’ by the press. He did however have two cars, and was well aware that the only reason he hadn’t been named ‘One Merc One Beamer’ by Fleet Street was because the expression sounded a bit awkward, even by the standards of the British press.

  The most notable similarity Hugh Pugh had to John Prescott was that he was a self-made man. Like Pr
escott he had not made a very good job of it. Good enough to drag himself off the shop floor of the Nottingham bike factory in which he had toiled since leaving school at fifteen to become the union’s youngest ever shop steward at the age of twenty; good enough to be voted onto the city council four years later; good enough to become a county councillor in another four years; good enough to stand for and win a seat in Parliament at the second attempt at the age of just thirty three; and good enough now, at the age of fifty five, to be a Minister in Her Majesty’s Government.

  But not good enough, whilst in the process of doing all this, to have insulated himself against future bad times, to have feathered his nest, or at least feathered it enough to withstand the loss of his parliamentary salary when the country next gave its verdict at the ballot box. For in tandem with his rise through the ranks from shop steward to Cabinet Minister had come an appetite for good living; the forsaking of the pints of beer of his early days as an MP in favour of the expensive bottles of wines of the Cote d’Or and Bordeaux; the switch from fish and chip suppers or Chinese and Indian takeaways to dinner several times a week at The Ivy and Le Gavroche; the casting off of ready-to-wear suits from Montague Burton in favour of bespoke suits from the tailors of Savile Row; the exchange of Saturday afternoon at the football match for Saturday night at a West End theatre or a top London nightspot; and although he had yet to replace cricket with croquet it was felt by many observers that it was only a matter of time.

  Reflecting on his problems he sighed again. It was all right for the other lot, the hairy-arsed, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats to a certain extent; when they got booted out of Parliament they just walked into a job, some cushy number or other, pausing only to add another couple of directorships to the half-dozen or so they already held down courtesy of being a Member of Parliament. It was different for Labour MPs. Especially ones like himself, who didn’t have any cronies in industry who could offer him one of the sinecures they distributed to their own with no less abandon than if they were throwing confetti at a wedding.