Where new writing finds its voice
Short Story

The Curious Case of Dave Bend and the Flying ISLAP Monkey

Mark Cobley

Bob the bloody Trot’, he thought, as the distant, inverted terraces drifted past his forehead and the chill northerly whistled down the leg of his boxers, ‘has a lot to answer for.’

His name was Dave Bend. This was a source of boundless amusement to the two hundred horrible creatures at whom he robotically taught each week, but it was the only name he had. Bend was a science ;teacher at Halworth Secondary in the rubbishy end of southwest London. The part the property developers, the dead-eyed PR girls and the Lib sodding Dems hadn’t got to yet.

It all started on a Tuesday afternoon in late April. This was always a bad time for Bend, especially in a general election year. He hated being interrupted mid-rant, and he had been halfway through a really good one that afternoon which had led him, by the least direct route possible, from the malfunctioning toilets in C Block and the poor quality of today’s boardmarkers to a general denunciation of New Labour in all its various shades of purple evil, when the Menkie boy, the gurning, ginger, ugly face in the front row who was fast replacing his father as the official Bane of Bend’s life, produced a glossy brochure.

‘My Dad says p’raps you better give is lot a try this time, sir,’ he sneered, brandishing it mockingly. Dave snatched it away, and his eye began to twitch as it recognised The Conservative Party Manifesto. To those pupils learned in the ways of Bend, if not in actual GCSE science, the twitching eye was a telltale sign. Bend was smooth and calm as he reached for a dented waste-paper basket and clanged it down onto the desk.

‘You,’ he snarled at the Menkie boy, ‘can tell your father what I think of that!’

Thirty pre-adolescent voices were raised high in delighted laughter as he produced his lighter with a flourish, stuffed the booklet into the bin and turned Michael Howard’s leering, plastic face into a temporary human torch. The general hilarity lasted about thirty seconds, before the fire alarms went off and the sprinklers came on.

Later, a Dave Bend who was dripping all over the carpet of the headmaster’s office tried to claim it was an act of righteous, revolutionary fervour against the corrupt, reactionary State which had cut this year’s Halworth LEA budget by thirteen percent and was still expecting the school to meet its Ofsted targets. By means of this tactic did Dave Bend hope to appeal to the essential bureaucrat that nestled snugly within the headmaster’s soul.

It didn’t work.

The headmaster writhed his hands together uneasily for a time, and then swept them up decisively and pressed his thumbs firmly into his temples, which was how Bend knew this was going to be difficult.

‘David, David, David,’ he sighed.

‘It’s Dave, Keith,’ Bend said automatically.

‘David, what am I going to do with you?’ the headmaster said, leaning back in his squeaky leather chair.

By this token was Bend assured that his promotion to housemaster, which was never so much dismissed out of hand as never actually getting into anyone’s hands in the first place, was to be postponed for perhaps the thirteenth year running. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to become Prime Minister after all.

 

* * *

 

The first step was to become an MP. Well, that was actually the second step. The first step was to be selected as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. It was something Bend had been dithering over for the past couple of weeks, and the incident with the Menkie boy had made up his mind.

‘The twenty-ninth meeting of the Halworth North & Wallsey Independent Socialist Labour Alliance Party is hereby called to order,’ rasped Bob’s blubbery beard. Bend winced. The name hadn’t been his idea. For a start it spelt out ISLAP. But Bob the Trot had been the last man standing from Independent Socialist Labour when it was absorbed by Bend’s Labour Independent Socialists, and he was keeping the proud flame burning.

The constituency party meeting was also, technically, the Executive Committee meeting, and the Bunley Hill Ward party meeting, and the Elections & Representation Committee meeting, and even the Events & Social Committee meeting. Not that Bob the Trot would acknowledge this. Each would have to be separately adjourned and the next called to order, in dreadful relentless succession, until deep into the night – longer, if the bloody students decided to start a debate.

Bend scowled at them now, and took a liberal swig at his bottle of whisky. Besides himself, Bob the Trot, and Bob the Trot’s mum, ISLAP was completed by Feliks and Sveta, two unwashed, earnestly bespectacled young intellectuals from London South Bank University who believed honestly in the power of pamphlets, megaphones and the Stop the War Coalition and who seemed to have swapped haircuts at some point in the late nineties. Both of them were foreign, because abroad was the only place you found real socialists under the age of forty these days.

Bend scanned down the typewritten and coffee cup-ringed agenda. A fairly standard sloppy effort on Bob the Trot’s part, complete with the usual spelling mistakes, but one heading intrigued him: ‘Item 8: APE’. What the hell was that? Some new workers’ movement they were going to either form an electoral pact with or denounce furiously as counter-revolutionaries? Bend began idly to concoct names from the acronym, but the best he could come up with was the Alliance for Public Exposition, which sounded vaguely nudist.

First, there was Item 7: Parliamentary candidate. It was dealt with quickly enough, in much the same way as in the last four general election years.

‘I have to declare an interest, and step down from the Chair,’ Bob the Trot wheezed, spittle spluttering at the corners of his mouth. ‘Will the Deputy Chair take over please?’

‘I have to declare an interest as well,’ Bend said dutifully, without looking up. He swigged again from the whisky. It was the only thing that got him through these interminable committees.

‘Will the Party Secretary take over?’

Pause.

‘Mum, that’s you.’

‘What, dear?’

‘Oh for God’s sake.’

‘What, dear?’

‘The Party Secretary has agreed to act as Chair.’

‘What, dear?’

‘Nominations, mum, you have to invite nominations for the candidate.’

‘Oh, right you are, dear,’ Mrs Bob the Trot beamed. ‘Let’s do that, then.’

Bob rose theatrically to his feet. ‘Comrades!’ he began. He went on. For half an hour he went on, liberally sprinkling his audience with unwelcome saliva. When he had calmed down again, Bend stood up.

‘Vote for me,’ he said, and stood down. ‘Please,’ he added, as an afterthought, before glugging once more from the bottle.

It was four to one. Even Mrs Bob the Trot voted for Bend, but that was probably because she thought they were deciding the tea run and she knew how her Bob struggled when he had to move his bulk more than five feet in any direction.

‘Congratulations, comrade,’ Bob shook his

hand vigorously. ‘Let me be the first to offer my unqualified support for the party’s united choice.’

Bend flicked the spittle from his jacket unhappily.

‘Item 8: APE.’

The students exploded into excited explanation. It seemed that in a daring act of revolutionary fervour, one or more of the Socialist Workers’ student wing had broken into the university Rag week supply store and liberated a fourteen-foot high inflatable ape. One of them slapped it down, in flat-packed form, atop the table now.

‘We can use zis for a campaign aid, no?’ Feliks said, grinning as if unhinged. ‘It weel make a good joke, no?’

‘Ah, the famous Polish sense of humour,’ Bend sneered, and took another gulp of alcohol.

‘We can make the slogan: Only an Ape votes for Menkie, no?’

Bend groaned.

 

* * *

 

First there was the Menkie boy taunting him at school. Then there was the headmaster. Then there was the whisky. Then there was the demob happiness that came with Bob the Trot adjourning the series of meetings early so they could put the students’ plan into action. And there was also the longstanding ‘friendly’ rivalry between Bend and Steven Menkie, which stemmed back to their time on the council in the mid-eighties when Labour had been real Labour and Bend was proud to be a Bunley Hill councillor. (The rivalry was only friendly on one side, and it wasn’t Bend’s.)

And that was how the four of them (Mrs Bob the Trot having retired) ended up sneaking into the garden of Steven Menkie, prospective Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Halworth North & Wallsey, just as the evening light started to fade. Bend glanced up at the sky nervously. He hoped it would hold for another half-hour or so, or the snappers from the Wallsey Gazette wouldn’t get a decent picture.

Getting the ‘Vote Menkie’ sign down was the easy part. Replacing it with a crudely daubed board saying ‘Vote Bend’ wasn’t difficult either. Securing a helium-filled inflatable gorilla wearing a placard around its neck reading ‘Only a Monkey Votes for Menkie’ (Bend’s rather more acute punning skill had prevailed despite the alcohol) so that it soared eerily above the property – that was going to be harder.

They crept around the house and into the back garden, or rather, Bend and the students crept, and Bob the Trot waddled along afterwards, wheezing and chewing on a burger that spilled garishly-coloured sauces down his front. Bend had never encountered a less stealthy person. He kept treading on things and swearing, spraying crumbs about like a Gatling gun.

Sveta, the Ukrainian with the peroxide rat-tails, bravely sneaked up beneath each of the lit windows, but there were no Menkies in evidence. She gave a thumbs-up, and Bend attempted to focus on her. Bob the Trot was grinning like an idiot and egging him on.

Together, Bend and Feliks manhandled the enormous, gloomy shape of the gorilla into position, and Bob ambled behind clutching the loops of rope in his burger-free hand. It fell to Bend to climb the pole. The Menkies had an old-fashioned washing line that consisted of a sixteen-foot pole at the foot of the garden and a line (when raised) that stretched back to the rear of the house. To this, the monkey would be tied.

‘Put him very high!’ Feliks urged. ‘Take up spare length of rope, so he flies!’

Having nowhere else to put it, Bend wrapped a length of the rope around his middle, and then up he went, hand-over-hand, grimacing and chewing the rope in his teeth while the monkey bobbed above. He was getting just a little too old for this nonsense. Why weren’t either of those two young revolutionaries doing this?

A loud flapping caught his ear. He looked up to see one of the stapled photocopied sheets, the one that bore the letters ‘IE!’, had come loose. Cursing, he pulled the ape down towards himself. This would have been a hell of a lot easier if he weren’t pissed, he reflected. He stretched for the placard.

Below, the pole shifted in the ground, and Bend nearly let go of the monkey entirely. He hissed something angry down at Feliks, who was supposed to be holding the pole firm.

‘Hee hee,’ a mischevious part of Bend’s mind thought, ‘a Pole holding a pole…’. The dirigible Kong bounced about crazily, and wafted beneath the clothesline. He pulled on the cord, and the ape bobbed gamely towards him. This time, when he reeled it in, he looped a length of the slack rope around the thing’s neck and around himself one more time. This was much more difficult in practice than in theory, but the thing was finally tamed. To the sound of sporadic clapping from below, he reached for the placard.

Whether it was because Feliks had removed his hand from the pole to applaud, or just because the old thing couldn’t stand any more of a 90-kilo Dave Bend jiggling about on top of it, at this point the pole gave way. It began to pitch over with alarming speed. Bend screamed in alarm and did what came naturally: he jumped. There was a lurch, a dizzying second of free-fall, and then his bottom slapped into something rather hard. The rope tightened sharply around his middle, and he was airborne.

‘Help!’ he squealed, rather ineffectually, down at his comrades in the garden. There was a loud clang and the sound of a collapsing fence, and then all their pale, upturned faces disappeared. In the spirit of revolutionary comradeship, they legged it.

‘HELP!’ Bend shouted as he drifted up further. From behind came the sound of something tearing, and then of paper ripping. With another howl of fear Bend dropped once more in his rope bonds, and suddenly felt very cold below the waist. His trousers had caught on a loose staple, with the result that now ‘IE!’ had departed entirely, joined by ‘NK’ and Bend’s trousers. He watched all three flutter to earth with a wistful grimace.

And that was how he came to see the camera flashes.

As Bend drifted back and forth above the rooftops, he reflected what a funny business politics was. He was bent over in front of a fourteen-foot inflatable gorilla, sailing though the summer sky with no trousers on. He looked for all the world like he was engaged in some bizarre aerial bestiality ritual, with a placard above his head declaring proudly: ‘Only a Monkey Would Vote For Me’.

On the basis of the free publicity alone, it was already the best start to an election campaign that ISLAP had ever had.