THE JAIL BIRD

This is purely fiction...

It was cold and miserable in the cell and he wished he’d never heard of hedge funds or the manipulation of global currencies and set about using that knowledge as a game, for fun. He would have given half his fortune to be anywhere else than where he was, and the other half to the love of his life, the sweet and fragrant Melissa, if she’d only take her knickers off one more time…

But how was he to know that people wouldn’t like what he’d done? The smashing of his national currency so that, when he picked up the pieces after things settled a bit, he picked up a great deal more than he had at the start? An eye watering amount more.

How could he possibly have been expected to guess that the vast majority of proles would be fed up to the back teeth with his shenanigans? How could he, who had known poverty in his life, of course he had, daddy had actually cancelled an expensive membership to one of his clubs when the fees at Eton had gone up, and that was poverty, wasn’t it? They said he had no idea, but didn’t that prove that he did have a very good idea?

And now look at him.

In court, yes, he’d actually been dragged to court and arraigned before the beak, a grim-faced man in silk had gone on and on and on about people dying in the streets as if it had anything to do with him. How could he help it if simple minded men and women, and they had to be simple minded to even dream of doing it, chose to sleep in shop doorways on winter nights until their life was frozen from them? It was a choice, wasn’t it? After all, there are plenty of houses around and some of them are actually empty and waiting for someone to occupy them. Melissa had said once, whilst they were in bed together and he was saying how toasty warm her duvet was and how he really loved snuggling up to her, that they were fortunate to be under a roof, and how thankful she was.

Of course they were under a roof! But so could everyone else be just as fortunate, couldn’t they? Roofs aren’t that expensive, are they? What’s a thousand here or a thousand there when the alternative is dying in freezing agony? It’s just got to be their fault. Hasn’t it?

So why was he here, in this cell, convicted of financial crimes? Found guilty of being responsible for those morons who died in the streets? It was socialism, that’s what it was, socialism pure and simple. That evil anti-capitalist curse that was built on the falsehood that everyone deserved equal wealth in a fair socialist society.

He could spit!

“And they lock me up because of that,” he moaned almost silently. Almost, but not quite.

“Are you playing with yourself, you nonce?” asked his cell mate. Yes, cell mate! He actually shared a tiny Victorian space with someone called a cell mate! And what if he was scratching an itch? He could do that, couldn’t he? Itches that go unscratched eventually send a fellow mad, don’t they?

“It itches,” was his simple reply. Brief. He had to be brief when talking to cell mates or they found something in his words that he hadn’t meant to put there, and punched him.

He’d had quite a few punches in the days that he’s been here. He offered money, the odd few thousand that he wouldn’t miss, when he got out of there, when that lawyer who cost so much had sorted things out for him and he was back, holding the reins of power.

“I promise,” he’d said, “a few thousand. To help you along the way if only you stop punching me.”

He got another punch for his cheek. One that really hurt.

“You can’t buy me, you b*****d,” was all he was told.

Of course he could! You can buy everyone, can’t you, though his attempt to buy the judge had fallen on stony soil. Probably because he hadn’t offered enough. What price freedom, though? What price judges? He’d obviously worked that one out wrongly. But he was only good with money when it came to accumulating vast quantities of the stuff. Trivial amounts always seemed to go wrong, somehow.

Someone had asked him how much a loaf of bread cost, an insolent prole on a television programme, some socialist moron wanting to make him seem ignorant, socialists were like that, thinking that knowledge of the price of bread was something important men like him carried around in their heads. Anyway, it had been Melissa who bought the bread, and before her there had been Janine until her tits sagged.

Melissa bought bread with seeds or something like that all over it. She’d often mentioned that it was expensive, so he had slipped her a few notes from petty cash. That always made it all right. Melissa liked a few notes now and then, but she turned her nose up at coins.

The cell door opened and a warder came in, sour faced like he was trained to be and jangling more keys than anyone could possibly need.

“Scumbag, you’ve got a visitor,” he said gruffly.

Goody! That could mean his solicitor had come to tell him everything was sorted and he’d be out and back home before you could say Jack Daniels!

He liked Jack Daniels. It was smooth and made him feel manly. And it made Melissa look sexy when he drank it.

But when he got to the visiting room it wasn’t his solicitor. It was Melissa. Looking lovely, hair bouffant like he admired it, skirt short enough to quite plainly display her knees and a bit of her excellent thighs, face bright, though it would have been nicer if she’d smiled when she saw him.

“I thought you were the Jonny I paid to get me out of here,” he grunted. No need to sound to chirpy because, well, he didn’t feel remotely chirpy.

“I’m not any kind of Jonny, I was your lady friend,” she said, and her voice was cold and he noticed her use of the past tense.

“It’s all been a blasted error,” he continued, “putting me in here as if I was some kind of crook!”

“It was no mistake,” she told him, “you broke the country’s economy and it’s only just started to recover. You are some kind of crook. Have you any idea how many more homeless people there are, some of them dying where they lie, cold and bitter and hating you?”

“But it’s not my fault...” he stammered.

“But it was,” she replied, tartly. “After all, you were the Prime Minister and could have done quite a lot about it.”

“If they choose...” he plumbed.

But she interrupted him. “There’s talk about you being tried for murder,” she said, “being directly involved in the deaths of men, women and children in this once proud nation of ours. And if they do...”

“Damn them!” he spluttered.

“There’s talk of them bringing the death penalty back for corporate murder,” she breathed. “And as for me, I’ve got a new love in my life. He’s nice, he’s kind and, you know, he doesn’t try to buy my love by throwing money at me like you used to do.”

“Bah!” he spluttered, lost for words.

She stood up and prepared to walk off. “You’ll know him as being a bright young socialist on the front bench opposite you in Parliament,” she said, “and he’s so cute.”

© Peter Rogerson 03.10.19