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Listeners' Fantasies |
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Regina vs Shula
by Gnome de Plume
 Recent Ambridge events, as seen through the slightly twisted periscope of Gnome de Plume and posted to the Fantasy Archers topic of The Archers message board.
Shula leaned forward on her uncomfortable chair, her fists clenched as tightly as her jaw muscles, one of which twitched with the tension. Would they never listen? A voice droned in the background; the summer heat - so rare this season - lay heavy, dust particles lit by sunrays fluting to the floor. A fly droned lazily through the still air, then alighted in sudden silence on the Bible in front of her. She killed it with one swift and sudden short blow, the noise causing several seated around her to jolt as doziness fled the crowded room.
The judge looked over his half-moon glasses and addressed the witness, radiant in the sunlight flooding the witness box, lighting her hair into a pure halo of golden, joyous righteousness. He stared, paused, shut his opened mouth twice at the sight before him, then recovered speech. "Do you understand the nature of the charges?"
A pause. Dozens of pairs of eyes stared at her, some harshly, but the myopic ones were filled only with tenderness, attempting to understand, to empathise, to protect. Jill Archer was in court yet again to watch over her daughter.
"Yes." The voice was low, feminine, alluring, and charged with feeling. Yet, something was lacking. Another pause. "Yes, m'lud."
Someone rustled papers, someone coughed. Was that "Rhubarb," she heard? The judge spoke loudly. "Silence. Let the witness, ahem,". He adjusted his glasses, squinted at a spot of dirt on them, wiped it off on his red and black robe, placed them back on his nose, lifted his wig, mopped his brow and continued speaking. "Let the fragrant witness speak, though goodness knows how this spotless lady should be forced," his voice rose, a hint of thunder in the background, "forced to appear before such a simple, coarse group of citizens is beyond my, and any, any judicially aware individual's, comprehension. Gentlemen, I sense a travesty ..." He stopped himself, took a sip of water from the dusty glass before him, and collected himself. A murmur arose from the filled courtroom. His voice gathered strength and feeling. "Speak, o fragrant one," he boomed. He sagged into himself, shaken by the strength of emotion - could this be passion, he asked himself, surging through his bone and sinew.
Shula stood, drew herself to her full height, adjusted her second-best pair of jodphurs, brushed at the dog dribble stain and set her face into an expression filled with emotion, yearning and a tinge of vague regret, the last being brought on by nothing more meaningful than the large portion of takeaway korma imbibed last night as a prelude to the wild delights of whitewashing the woodshed - not achieved alone. Oh, the joys of emulsion! She shook her head briefly, the vagrant thoughts disappearing instantly as she fell straight into a role for which she was born, nay, destined.
Shula bowed her head slightly, her corpulent yet strangely firm body weaving as she grasped at the dock to support herself. She spoke. Her voice was firm yet low, her words measured and well-chosen. This moment is what she had waited for, for so long. Now they would hear how it was! Now they would see how monstrous it all was!
Her lips trembled. She cleared her throat, delicately. "M'lud. It's so unfair!" A sob caught at the back of her throat. Shula paused. "His customer, related to him by a marriage into which I brought vast sums due to the sad yet deserved demise of my beloved yet boring spouse; this customer, who aways paid his bills after an average of a mere 25 days after the due date; this customer has despised and rejected him." Her voice caught in a sob, and Shula steadied herself, reaching for a handkerchief and noticing only slightly too late that the dead fly smeared on it was by now already clamped against her left nostril. Or at least some of it. She shuddered.
The judge spoke to her, urged her to continue. She wiped her nose and finished what she had come here to say. "He trusted them, he helped them, and they do this!" As she shrieked the final word, she waved a booklet. The Dummy's Guide to Cows, her voice boomed, feeding off her self-righteousness. Plate 1: Pull De Udder One.
Shula recovered herself. Her voice become demure, seductive, low. "My husband, my husband," her propriety asserted itself, "he knows that cows have bits underneath them, and sometimes," she glanced around, a rosebud of blush colouring her two visible cheeks, her voice dropped, "sometimes milk comes out of them. And sometimes," her head drooped like an ailing swan's, elegant yet struggling in the battle for life, "sometimes something that helps make Mrs Cows become, um, Mummy Cows."
"He's helped people. And cows. And they do this." Her shoulders heaved with silent sobs. Her ears filled with the sounds of muttering, muttering, always muttering, from those bearing witness to the court scenes unfolding; these coarse, ordinary people, non-Archer people, sitting in witness and judgement against her, Shula; not an ordinary crass creature of the soil, but Shula, destined for so much more.
The crowd rumbled. "Monstrous, shame! Hang ‘em. The man is a martyr to his cause."
The judge raised a hand; silence fell like a stone. "Outrageous!" he thundered. "I order that the case be dropped. No, more than that." His face purple with passion, he raged, "This summer flower, this precious frail, faultless creature, I demandthat she be exonerated now and forever. Look at that milk-white brow, look at that halo, am I alone in seeing purity, innocence, martyrdom here, as God is my witness?"
Uproar broke out. Screams of "Hallelujah, take her now, Lord," could be made out in the shrieks and cries of jubilation and passion erupting in the normally so-still courtroom, amid other cries of, "not just yet, Lord, what about that mineshaft?" What could it all mean? Shula swooned to the floor, it all was going dark around her, yet she felt lifted up, and indeed, it was true, it was real! Borne out of the courtroom on the shoulders of unknown supporters and into the streaming sunlight of day, Shula saw justice had been done! What was done to Alistair was not fair, and people would pay for it! Preferably on the nail, and without necessarily waiting for a clean bill of health, mere detail indeed!
"Next stop The Bull! The milky bars are on me!" she shouted fragrantly.
In the Vatican, the new Pope put down his coffee cup, silenced his cardinals, and stared at the words, Saint Shula, that he seemed to have doodled on his TV licence change of ownership letter that had arrived that day, along with some adverts for a car that claimed, "if only everything in life were as reliable as a VW". "What can this mean?" he cried, only to hear his own question echoed by his staff. "No, not the car ad. Saint Shula? Vot ist heppeningk?"
Back in the surgery, Alistair sat, flicking through old copies of Punch which went back to the days when it was really funny: what did 2/6d mean again?
Only last week Alistair had had a customer with a sick gerbil, and under his careful treatment the gerbil's illness had stabilised. True enough, the child had cried, but Alistair's strong and knowledgeable words had eased the pain: "He'll always be this stable now, lad. Leave him with us, and we'll take care of him." And Shula's dear, darling, tedious Alistair had accepted only after slight admonishments the bag of wrinkled apples in payment for stabilising the boy's dearest companion. He made a note to stick them all, gerbil included, straight in the composter that evening, and kept the fixed smile on his face as his one and only customer that week left the cold, dusty surgery, bumping down the weed-grown drive. On the wall beamed down the poster depicting a cow, with arrows pointing at all the tricky bits, how well he knew them now, even with his eyes shut. "Udders are udderneath," he murmured, "and Horns are on the Head: think h/h horns/head." Alistair doodled dreamily on this week's New Cow magazine open in front of him, the apples and gerbil now together in the same bag, a pair of spectacles on the big, bovine, trusting face on the magazine cover, a moustache and a big speech bubble coming out of its mouth, "Ooooh nooooooh!"
The only question in Alistair's mind weighed him down and pinned him to his surgery chair. Were brown cows the same underneath as black cows? His thoughts spun further. What about brown and white cows? Were they like black and white ones? With a dribble front end and a smelly back end? And some had four dangly bits, and occasionally there was a grumpy one with just one dangly bit? "Life ain't easy," sighed Alistair, his elbow on a pile of envelopes with red print showing through their cellophane windows.
Sam kissed Fliss warmly, slowly, deeply, sighed and smiled into her eyes. He reached behind her unresisting back, and made a subtle, gentle and deft move. Her face tipped upwards towards his, and she yielded to his passionate embrace backwards, with a breathy gasp that got louder and more rasping by the second. "Oh Fliss. Oh nooooo," yelped Sam, "jang on, love, Oi've got you." She folded in his arms.
"Oh, bugger! These patches don't last foive minutes these days even if Oi don't rush her," exclaimed Sam, hopefully to himself alone. Moments like this lost the sheer spontaneity of their passion. The evening ruined, grumpily he squeezed all the air out of her and packed her back, other parts folded around her, neatly into the box which he slid into the wardrobe.
"G'noight, Fliss," he said dreamily, a little later, as his head settled on his Fireman Sam pillow, his Spiderman pyjamas pulled up high and snug, his fluffy cow Friesian slippers tucked neatly under his bed. A slight huff, gentle and full of meaning, escaped the wardrobe. Aah, she wasn't asleep yet, bless.
As his eyelids sank, the last glimpse of Sam's almost-awake eyes caught sight of the two faces on his wall: Alistair now had glasses and a moustache, plus a dart planted in the middle of his forehead. Above Alistair's picture, a young, handsome, dark man looked into Sam's room, his eyes intelligent and searching, his hands grasping a certificate: "Dairylea Cow Expert 2005, Bovine Correspondence University: You Pay Us, We Pass You. Firsts Guaranteed." His smile glinted proud.
Above both pictures, a red cow's head grinned: La Vache Qui Rit would have winked if it weren't all just too terribly sad ...
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