The Gene Wizards

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Curfew's 'Hood

On their usual patrol car tour of Little Titmongering, Bummidge and La Touche pulled up opposite the driveway of Succor Grange, which they privately referred to as 'Suckers', in mock homage to the Vanpyre family who had owned it for several generations. Over the months they had been working together they had come up with a fine list of alternative names for the Vanpyre mansion – Corpuscle Manor, Leukaemia Grange, Fangs, Sickle Cell Hall, Blood Bath House, Platelets and Chateau Anaemia had all had their day, but they had settled on Suckers. It was simple and to the point.

On this particular day, because Bummidge had just returned from his vacation, La Touche had to bring him up to speed on the comings and goings at Suckers. By this time on the third course of his packed lunch, the milk chocolate bar, La Touche remarked that Countess Verruca Vanpyre had been away for a week.

"Oh?" said Bummidge, wrestling with a mint wrapper.

"Yes, in hospital for an operation, apparently," replied La Touche.

"Why, what was she having, a personality transplant?" jibed Bummidge. La Touche chuckled in reply. Reluctantly clearing up the debris from their lunch, they started the patrol car and moved on.

If you followed the road from Little Titmongering to Nether Sodbury, you would come to a little hump rising unexpectedly like an afterthought to the village of Crasslington Upstart, before plummeting out of this bucolic paradise into the housing estate on the outskirts of Nether Sodbury. Struggling to dominate this depressing vista was Crushingham Academy, formerly Crushingham Comprehensive School. Plonked on the landscape like a cadaver on a mortuary slab, Crushingham was fully equipped, and yet like a corpse conspicuously lacking all signs of life, and certainly intelligent life. This dreadful institution was where Gary's sister Tracey Bummidge had the misfortune to work as one of the teachers.

Presiding over the mental defibrillation of the local youth was Crushingham's Principal, Barker Winnett, B.Ed. Out of the damp, mushy ashes of Crushingham Comprehensive, an 'under-performing' school, Crushingham Academy had risen on the turd-coloured wings of Barker Winnett. He had accomplished this feat by a combined strategy of incarcerating up to a third of his pupils at a time in detention rooms (at one point they almost ran out of space to detain them), and bullying his teachers into writing their pupils' coursework for them. In this way, he managed to chalk up literate-looking examination results from cohorts of students who could barely speak in complete sentences, let alone write in them.

Winnett was for the most part monosyllabic. His favourite expression was "Job done!" The most frequent exception to this rigorous syllabic economy was "wanker!" - an expression which seemed to apply to virtually everyone he met. Under duress, this might be extended to the four syllables of "stupid wanker!", but he took care not to use this too often, in case four syllables in a row made him look too intellectual. Punctuation was another minefield, especially his apostrophes, which were either omitted altogether, or pelted his texts with such intensity that his PowerPoints looked as if they had survived a bombardment of grapeshot.

His speech was an eerie reflection of his mind-set. His dropping of the letter H at the beginnings of words and after the letter T seemed to mirror his determination to stifle all aspiration, whatever its source, for his was the kingdom of standardization, and standardization is the enemy of aspiration. Likewise "–ing" endings were also frowned upon.

Imagine the alarm triggered in Winnett's universe by the two school subjects that he pronounced "'Isstree" and "Lit-ritcha". The number of syllables alone was suspicious enough, but the real problem was that they require the skills of evaluation. This all sounded too much like thinking, which meant that the people who taught these subjects needed to be closely watched and, if possible, well and truly stomped on. At Crushingham, Gary Bummidge's sister Tracey and her colleagues were subjected to humiliations that would make some totalitarian regimes blush. Whereas the only gesture to the physical surveillance of the students was a motion sensor in the bathrooms, the teachers were subjected to permanent video surveillance in all classrooms. The purpose of this surveillance was to ensure a) that they were always standing at the front of the class; b) that at no time would a teacher presume to park even a single buttock on a desk while talking to their students; c) that under no circumstances were teachers permitted to read aloud to students (potentially much too enjoyable for all parties) and d) that all teachers followed a rigidly prescriptive ratio of 80% writing to 20% active teaching during all lessons. Thus, the typical condition of the teaching staff was one of permanent demoralized exhaustion. Propped up by a raft of psycho-pharmaceuticals, and with bags under her eyes big enough to carry her students' homework in, Tracey Bummidge had the privilege of working a minimum of seventy hours a week as 'Ed of Isstree' at Crushingham while only being paid for half the hours she worked.

So it was that in the new 'standardized' version of history, the study of historical sources was now confined to deciding whether they were deemed 'true'. Evaluating the reliability of historical sources was now considered both suspect and unworkable. For one thing, it's a concept, and therefore to be discouraged per se, and for another it contained such an orgy of syllables that from Winnett's point of view it might as well be radioactive.

Constable Gary Bummidge's sister Tracey was a marathon enthusiast and a natty dresser. Evidence of these two facts, in the form of a pair of honed and shapely legs, caught the attention of Barker Winnett's deputy, Bev Alcock, or 'Cocky Bev' as she glanced out of a corridor window at break-time to see Tracey supervising in the playground. Whereas Barker's stock phrase was 'wanker', Bev's, in a virtuoso meld of stupidity, speech impediment and de-aspiration, was 'kwe'in', that touching term of endearment that most people would pronounce as 'cretin'. The trouble is, no matter how often you call people 'wankers' and 'cretins' they never manage to be quite as dumb as you need them to be.

What caught Bev's eye on this occasion were the pink floral patterned tights which adorned Tracey's shapely legs under the dusky pink two-piece suit that she was wearing. Those tights were enough to send Bev scurrying to Winnett's office to report a dangerous outburst of colour. A brief, monosyllabic exchange took place, after which Bev Alcock strode back to the playground to 'deal' with Tracey. Bev, her P.E. chest fully inflated, informed Tracey that she had been summoned to the Principal's office regarding her manner of dress. The response was not quite what she expected. On being told that her tights did not conform to the school's dress code for staff (manure brown pin-stripe, presumably) and that Winnett's instruction was that she would have to change, Tracey found herself instantaneously in possession of a laser-focused, white-hot anger, which she now directed at Bev, who instinctively took a step backwards out of the corner of the playground before Tracey had even opened her mouth.

"I absolutely and categorically refuse to negotiate my mode of dress with you, with Barker, or with anyone at this school!" she retorted. "Oh, Oh! Oh!" bumbled the blanching Bev, before abandoning the field to a magnificently outraged Tracey and scurrying back to the Principal's office. It was as easy as bursting a bubble. After all, all it takes is one little prick.