THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part 1

Following a failed séance, a woman agitated a mop in a bucket of hot disinfectant before swishing it across the creaky room’s bare floorboards. Her name was Sharon Platt. She was overweight, dressed in a khaki sarong, a bin liner wrapped across her breasts, as she savagely swiped the already clean floor, listening through headphones to a military brass band. Glancing through her window, Sharon noticed the wig tunnel was on fire and immediately thought of ringing the fire brigade, but, then, she thought, somebody would already have done so. She was right as a matter of fact and this is what happened:
Person ringing the fire brigade, ‘This is an emergency—the wig tunnel’s on fire!’
Fire brigade, ‘Wig tunnel on the Kafka estate, is that?’
‘That’s right only you’d better hurry. There’s loads of smoke coming out and you know what they say…’
‘Yes, they say, “There’s no smoke without fire” and we say there’s no fire without us on the end of a well-aimed hose!’
Hoses were indeed used to extinguish the attention-grabbing fire in the wig tunnel. So, Sharon, now she was able to without distraction, resumed her frantic floor mopping after mopping her sweaty brow, soaking, in the process, the sleeve of her jumper.
One hour, Sharon’s mop caught on a nail protruding from one of the floorboards. Cursing, she elbowed a hole in the plaster and lathe wall she stood too close to and cursed again at the mess on the floor she’d accidentally created. Frustrated, she rent her hair. In need of shelter, she rented the room that, now, provided a source of gloom; she felt the floor would never get clean. Her eyes rose to the ceiling as she cupped her hands in a gesture of supplication. It could do with another coat of white gloss she mused, despite having had four coats the previous week. Behind the skirting boards, sounds of radioactive mice explosions startled her into placing a fiercer grip on her mop’s handle.

Gulliver Trent, window-cleaning barrister, was sent from Kent to check distances between emptied shelves in Croydon premises. He used this work to focus his attention away from his arthritis, which agonisingly preoccupied him. In his leisure time, he sought the company of traffic wardens. They were cool he thought and he liked their attitude, often taking drugs and drinking with them. Gulliver sent photographs of some empty shelves he’d measured the distance between to the DVLC, along with a thank you card for traffic wardens. Apart from his affinity with traffic wardens, Gulliver was close to a giraffe-neck-width-guesser from Hull, who died in an accident with some thin ice. Gulliver was devastated and organised the explosion of a shopping trolley next to a parking meter in Hull by way of a farewell tribute. He also persuaded nearly ten local traffic wardens to hold a brief vigil at this site. People close to Gulliver attributed his subsequently odd behaviour to the tragic loss of his friend. On one occasion, he’d disrupted a backgammon championship being held in East Croydon by attending as a pun—with a piece of rotting gammon selotaped to his back. The fish created such an appalling smell, that everyone associated with him, that no one would associate with him, except, of course, for loyal traffic wardens.

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