THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part5

Sharon crossed her legs. Then, she put noughts all over them and stood up, adjusting her hair and pouting in the mirror. She closed her bedroom window, deftly locking it with her pudgy fingers. She knew that the bristles of her best three-inch paintbrush were wearing thin and that the imminent necessity of further coats of paint on her lounge ceiling would shorten them even more, forcing her to consider the possibility of a replacement. What would Jane or Zoe have done? She wondered. She decided against phoning them, instead making tea carefully in a cup of no sentimental value. She really ought to read the leaflet on giraffe-neck-width-guessing more thoroughly she realised, as more explosions of radioactive mice, behind skirting boards in other rooms, disturbed her.
‘Shit!’ she said spilling her tea on the recently cleaned floor.

Ted Switch—cruelly labelled ‘Switch the Twitch’ by cruel labellers, aware of his nervous twitch—switched between subjects at the drop of a hat, asking questions during the pub quiz. A traffic warden at the bar did drop his hat at a trick question Ted, looking smug, announced the answer to when the quiz ended. Gulliver’s team won, answering sixty-nine out of eighty questions correctly. Vi stood on a table and kissed the team member’s bared heads, shook their hands and gave them their prize money, conscious that it wasn’t really leaving her pub. As the raucous team headed straight for the bar, Gulliver felt drunk and intoxicated by his good fortune, laughing at jokes and returning the backslapping of his cohorts. Then, a savage onslaught of arthritis blighted him, making him shake with pain.
‘Are you all right, Gully?’ Tom asked. His face mirrored the instantly visible concern of the others.
‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ said Gulliver. It serves me right for getting so carried away enjoying myself he thought.

The team that boarded up the wig tunnel after the fire were a group of lads on Project Work, the latest government initiative. They were trainee tunnel closure operatives, no less. They used scaffolding to erect timber frames blocking either end of the tunnel. The frames were covered with metal panels screwed into place. The job took two days and featured in a story in the local paper, which, later, wrapped some chips eaten by one of the trainees. The chips were paid for out of the money he’d earned from the tunnel closure job, but when the lad’s letter about this fact was ignored by the same local paper, he killed himself in dismay. In next to no time, the metal panels sealing the tunnel were daubed in graffiti. Letters of complaint about this were printed in the local paper, copies of which subsequently wrapped chips eaten by the graffiti artists.

Flies died in the atmosphere of the closed—after hours—Traffic Wardens’ Arms. The grey doors were locked in place in the grey walls of the pub at the bottom of the hill that was also grey looking. The hill with the steep incline that tormented the legs of arthritis sufferers walking up it, like Gulliver, on his way home, swaying and feeling nauseous as he held his breath in an attempt to suppress his hiccups. He tripped over his undone shoelace and broke his nose. Rising unsteadily, a feral dog seized his ankle and chewed on it aggressively, Gulliver wet himself shouting at the dog.
‘Get away from me! Clear off!’
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