(Loosely based on Grimm’s King Grisly Beard)
The world seems to grow ever smaller, with the grandeur of sheer distance made into a commonplace game of skipping by the advent of more efficient means of travel and the communications revolution that has blossomed in the bright sunshine of this digital spring. England’s green and pleasant land is no exception, with every home an entertainment gin palace, where businesses thrive and prosper in the information age, and where the electronically dispossessed watch the valves and fuses of their analogue existence slowly burn down towards a state of mass extinction. London boasts at least seven Interweb billionaires amongst its fabled glitterati, but not one of them can begin to measure their fortune or their white-hot technological status against that of old Jimmy Cameron, the founder, chief executive and principle shareholder of NanoGoo International. Mister Cameron is blessed with the sort of fortune that, in fables and fairy stories at least, has only ever been granted to mere mortals in return for a lien on their soul. Jimmy, of course, puts it all down to a combination of hard work and inspiration.
Before his recent retirement James Cameron’s octopine good fortune reached its happy tentacles out to touch every aspect of his life, not the least part of which was his stunningly beautiful eldest daughter, the delightfully named Cyberia. In every facet and viewed from every aspect old Jimmy’s business life, his family life and his charitable works, underpinned as they were by an income that was the envy of many developing nations, were beyond reproach. Jimmy Cameron’s world was a veritable treasure trove of goodness and sparkling happiness, except for one thing. Cyberia was quite possibly the most haughty, proud and conceited young lady to have ever shopped and lunched in the fabulously gold plated arcades and streets of London Town.
In spite of every advantage in life, including a fabulous education and a family ethos of good works and humble gratitude for the largesse granted by fate, this young lady rarely had a good word to say for anyone. Her sole purpose in life seemed to be dedicated to looking down her nose at people, and nowhere was this alarming personality trait more obviously demonstrated than in her reaction to possible suitors. She was famed throughout the elite echelons of London’s highest society for humping and dumping the most eligible young men, and all of it was done in the blaze of paparazzi flashbulbs and on the glossy pages of celebrity gossip magazines. Cyberia was an Olympian in making a sport out of rudeness.
The regularly played out scenes of Cyberia’s drunken wantonness eventually became too much for old Jimmy to bear and he finally decided to do something about his wayward daughter. Together with his wife he planned a great party, to which he invited the country’s great and good, including every single unattached young man who either possessed or was heir to a significant wedge. Come the day of the party, each of these potential suitors was made to sit in a row, ranged according to their social rank and family wealth. Cyberia, under the gentle but determined guidance of her despairing father, was made fully aware of the fact that her allowances, party frocks and charge card accounts would be summarily discontinued if she failed to choose a husband and settle down into a life of domestic contentment and suitably directed good works.
The young lady was somewhat less than impressed by the situation. It was only under the severest of admonishments that she had ceased to throw plates, crystal knickknacks and sundry items of cutlery at her parents. Come the evening of the party, and even with a substantial layer of foundation on her face, the guests could still see red rings under her eyes from all of her screaming, bawling and crying. Needless to say, and despite the threat of imminent penury, she could hardly contain her contempt for the men displayed before her. As she walked along the line of potential suitors she spat out insults at every one of them.
The first was too fat. “Euk! Mister bloaty or what?” she bellowed.
The next young man was far too tall and lanky. Pinching her nose and turning to the other guests she exclaimed in a nasal tone, “Smells of wee-wee!”
The next young man, while muscular and neither too fat nor too thin, was far too short. Cyberia refrained from speaking to him at all, and simply put her empty glass down on the top of his head.
The fourth young man was too pale and she called him a lungfish, and so it went on. She cracked wicked jokes or made spiteful personal observations at the expense of almost every single one of the young men at the party, until coming face to face with the last of the line she burst out into raucous laughter. It took two security guards to hold her down and a good ten minutes before the sobbing, giggling young woman could regain any semblance of composure.
“Look at him”, she said, choking back tears, “his teeth are all crooked and those glasses, that moustache… what a minger!”
And that is how Captain “Rocky” Flashman-Pebble, a company commander in the Royal Horse Guards and heir to the fourteenth Duke of Stackton, got the new nickname of “Minge-face”.
Old Jimmy Cameron was furious when he witnessed at first hand how his daughter treated his guests and friends. Her behaviour was quite beyond the pale and he took all available legal steps to ensure that every one of her lines of income and credit were suspended with immediate effect. He also made a solemn vow to his wife later that evening that, willing or not, Cyberia would marry the very first man, be he prince or pauper, that pressed the buzzer on the security gates that separated the family mansion from the mean streets that housed the capital’s hoi-polloi.
All was quiet in the Cameron household on the day after the party. A combination of hangovers, of both the alcoholic and emotional varieties, served to keep father and daughter well out of each other’s way. On the second morning after the party, however, there was a loud bleep on the intercom that connected the house with the electronic gates. Jimmy buzzed back and heard a young man’s strangely colloquialised voice ask, “Sorry to bother you, guv, but I’m a bit down on my luck. Tenner for a song?”
The busker was granted admittance to the Cameron estate and proceeded to play a very rough rendition of a then popular chart tune as he stood on the front doorstep. When he finished murdering the melody, the clean shaven young man asked for a few pounds to keep hunger at bay, at which point old Jimmy asked him if he would like to come in for a cup of coffee and a bun. Over a mid-morning snack in the kitchen, with Cyberia watching from a safely curious distance, her father turned to the young vagrant and said, “Tell you what, you’ve sung so…erm…beautifully for us this morning that I’m going to give you my daughter for a wife!’
Cyberia stood transfixed for a long, fecund moment, quite unable to believe her ears. Her father had often threatened her with punishments when she was naughty, but he had never actually carried them out. She was his little princess, his little starlet, and he simply couldn’t mean to go through with his threat from the party. Cyberia looked at her father and saw in his eyes something that she had never seen there before, namely hard, cold, blue steel. The poor little rich girl sank to her knees and begged her father for forgiveness. She promised, swearing blue and blind to every saint and deity that she could think of, that she would be good from now on, but no matter how much she pleaded and cried, her father would not to be moved.
“I swore the other night that I’d be rid of you. I’m going to teach you a lesson, and this fine young man is the first to knock on our door. This time I will keep my word!”
The car was called for and Jimmy Cameron, his wife, his daughter and the young busker were whisked through town to the ‘Elvis, “The King”, Wedding Chapel’, where, by twelve noon, the young man and his reluctant bride were duly wed by a fully shell-suited, coiffured and qualified registrar. Once the ceremony was over, old Jimmy poked his head out of the car window and looked at the newly weds. Cyberia stood dumbly next to her beau.
Jimmy smiled at the happy couple and said, “Well, my girl, you’re on your own now. I’ve stopped your allowances and cards, and given this young man a small bung to see you through for a day or two, but it’s up to you now. Don’t come back to the house”.
With that the black tinted window glided back up and the car purred its silent, luxurious way into the teeming lunch time streets of London’s hustling West End.
“Well, doll, time to be on our way”, said the young busker and he lead his bride by the hand through the crowded and dusty city streets.
Cyberia, unaccustomed as she was to seeing the metropolis in its daytime apparel, walked open-mouthed past dingy basement flat windows, down long, dark alleyways and visibly felt herself shrink before the impressive, classically styled porticos of ancient institutional temples. Eventually, as she and her new spouse walked down one of the leafier boulevards of the city near the diplomatic quarter, she saw a mansion house of the most ornately carved variety. Stopping and pulling the young man back towards her she asked, “Please wait. Do you know who lives in that marvelous house over there?”
The young man looked at the house that Cyberia was pointing at and replied, “Oh yeah, that’s Stackton House, owned by the fourteenth duke. I think his son, Minge-face, lives there at the moment. If you’d behaved properly, all that could’ve been yours”.
Cyberia felt a long, hollow pain swell up in her chest as she gazed on the magnificent residence and sighed, “It’s not fair…if only I’d been nicer to Minge-face…”
The unhappy couple continued their foot slogging journey across the Smoke, heading for the river and the poor busker’s home territory in one of the poorer southern suburbs. As they crossed the river on one of the city’s famous bridges Cyberia caught sight of a huge, enclosed park and wished for all the world that she could sip some cool lemonade and rest her weary legs under the shade of a great oak tree.
She stopped the young man once again and asked, “That park looks lovely in the sunlight. Who owns it?”
The young man shielded his eyes and looked across the diamond-encrusted water. “That place? Lovely isn’t it. Belongs to the Duke of Stackton, part of his extensive estate here in the city. You see, if you’d been a good girl you could’ve enjoyed all your summer afternoons in there.”
Once again the shattered young lady felt great pangs of regret well up in her throat. “Shit”, she muttered, “if only I’d listened to the old man”.
Cyberia turned to look once again at London’s more fashionable districts that towered above her on the northern bank of the river Thames. Never again would she see the inside of a five-star restaurant or dance the night away to the latest drum n’ bass beats in the Department of Tunes nightclub. As she gazed on her former life for the last time she found her eyes drawn to the tallest glass tower on the city skyline, on the windows of which the brilliant afternoon sun was conducting a symphony of light.
“Oh”, she sighed, “how beautiful. Who owns that skyscraper?” The young man didn’t bother to turn and look, but continued to drag the reluctant young girl towards his home as he spoke.
“Stackton family”, he said. “Actually, it’s called the Flashman-Pebble Tower and it’s owned by old Minge-Face’s property development company. Part of his long term plans, so they say, for when he leaves the cavalry and becomes a city gent.”
Words could never convey the utter despair and horror that Cyberia felt as the full force and consequence of her past life fluttered down to roost on the parrot cage perch in her brain. As she stumbled blindly after her new husband towards a life of disappointment and endless drudgery, the brightly coloured bird of regret that now inhabited her waking mind squawked repeatedly, “Told you so! Told you so!”
The newly spliced couple tramped onto the dirty soil of the young man’s home manor, and as the young woman became visibly cowed and burdened by her fate, the young busker made one final observation.
“No point crying over spilt milk, love. No point wishing you’d married someone else. We’re done and dusted, all legal, and you’ll find I’m perfectly good enough for you.”
At last they came to a very down at heel street, where most of the back-to-back terraced houses were either boarded up or bare boned skeletons. The man stopped outside the only house in the road with glass in its windows.
“What a dismal place”, said Cyberia. “Who on earth would live in a place…?” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. She knew in her heart of hearts that this was now her home. The young man opened the front door and ushered her into a world of bachelor squalor, where dust hung in the air permanently because it refused to fall on flat surfaces that had already accumulated too many years worth of grime and flaked skin.
“I don’t suppose we have a cleaner?” asked Cyberia in a flat, monotone voice.
“We do now”, replied her husband. “You’ll find the kitchen down the end of the hall. There’s a mop and a bucket and stuff. There’s also a kettle and a cooker, although that’ll need some elbow grease on it. Be a love and make a cup of tea”.
A cup of tea was one thing, but when it came to domestic chores, cooking and the generality of tasks that comprise sound household management, Cyberia was a complete novice. For two days the blissful romance that should be the ambrosia of all newly weds was forced to give way to lessons in using the Hoover, heating up baked beans and loading the washing machine in such a way that the clothes didn’t all come out shit colour drab.
When the small pile of cash that Jimmy Cameron had given to the young man had been exhausted on take-away curries and some cheap red plonk, the young busker turned to his new wife and said, “Right, time for you to earn your keep. You’re to look after the house and cook meals, and you’ve also got to earn cash. I’ll put an advert in shop windows telling people you take in ironing.
Over the next three or four days a succession of busy city types, who had invested in this run down part of the city in an attempt to make a killing on property prices in a rising market, brought around baskets full of striped shirts, frilly blouses and flimsy briefs to be ironed. During the day the young man went off to commit his musical crimes in shopping malls and bus stations, only to find that he had to hand over most of his meagre gains to blustering brokers and flustered financial advisers because Cyberia had scorched their whites. Eventually, over a bowl of thinly disguised gruel, he said, “Look, love, this won’t do. I can see ironing’s not your strong suit, so from tomorrow you’ll do piece work. There’s three hundred greeting cards a day for you to paint and stick. I’ve arranged for someone to drop them in of a morning”.
True to her husband’s word, a man arrived on the doorstep early the next morning and deposited a number of cardboard boxes in the hallway. He told Cyberia that there were some instructions in an envelope in one of the boxes and that he would be back that evening to pick up the first three hundred cards. All she had to do was colour in the flower petals and stick paper leaves to the front of each card. Having spent her first week of married life struggling with piles of creased cotton and Lycra, Cyberia felt much happier about her revised career prospects.
“After all,” she said to herself as she unpacked the boxes and made neat piles of the cards and the packets of paper leaves, “I always enjoyed art classes at school and it can’t be that hard to make a few hundred of them”.
Unfortunately, Cyberia’s appreciation of art and craft was based on the experience gained at her finishing school, where she had spent relaxed Wednesday afternoons fiddling with watercolours and making decoupage kittens out of old socks and yoghurt pot lids. Nothing, however, on her curriculum vitae included the term ‘industrialised’. When her husband returned home after another hard day performing for London’s musical cognoscenti he found the poor girl buried up to her armpits in smudged sheets of thin cardboard. Her arms, her nose and her hair were covered in glue and disintegrating paper leaves. She was in such a frustrated lather that her mascara had run right down her cheeks and lay in a sludgy grey puddle on the kitchen table.
“What the bloody… you’re crap at cards as well!” he exclaimed, sweeping the mess of celebratory messages into a big black bin liner. “Right, plan C. It’s Saturday tomorrow. There’s a load of old rubbish in the lock up I nicked from outside charity shops, you know, dead men’s suits and dog eared paperbacks. I want you down at the car boot sale at six tomorrow morning flogging the lot. One way or another you’ll earn your keep, girl!”
Clothes, of course, were something that Cyberia did know about and despite the unearthly hour of her rising and the wonky wheels on the shopping trolley that she had to use to transport her uncharitable apparel down to the local football club’s car park, she made a good fist of the first hour. By arranging the suits, shirts, blouses and skirts by label, size and colour she managed to shift most of the better items to middle class bargain hunters and a good deal of the less fashionable items to the local student population. By nine o’clock Cyberia had nearly sold out her stock and was looking forward to the little luxury that might be afforded by way of a bacon butty and a polystyrene mug of tea, when her husband arrived pushing an old pram full of soiled tee-shirts and builders’ low slung jeans. He forbade her to take a break until the whole wardrobe had been disposed of and it wasn’t until nearly four o’clock that afternoon that Cyberia managed to trudge home wearily, smelling of sweat, fried burgers and other people’s loose change.
Nonetheless the day had been something of a success. From the takings her husband was able to recompense his mate for the ruined cards, put enough cash in his pocket for a good night in the pub and leave Cyberia with enough housekeeping to keep them going for nearly a whole week, providing, of course, that she shopped frugally and avoided anything expensive like fresh bread and real butter. During the week Cyberia cleaned the house, cooked meals and performed a range of other wifely duties while her husband, under the guise of bringing euphonic enlightenment to the masses, rescued black bin liners full of old clothes, books and partially complete jigsaw sets from the doorways of London’s charitable retail outlets. On Saturday and Sunday mornings for the rest of that summer you would have found Cyberia pushing shopping trolleys full of used clothing in the direction of car boot sales full of eager, budget priced consumers.
In relative terms everything seemed to be going well for the young woman until she encountered a group of local youths one Saturday afternoon. She had seen them hanging around the car boot sale all morning but thought nothing much about their presence other than that they exuded the normally confused menace of seventeen year old boys. They had, however, been scouting out a likely target and had chosen the slightly built young lady with the bulging money belt as the best source of the filthy lucre that they needed to maintain their lighter fuel and crack cocaine habits. Cyberia soon realised that the normally confused menace presented by a group of teenagers in a crowded car park was nothing like the real, in your face, blade wielding menace that they could deliver on the corner of a quiet, backwater city street. Her husband was not impressed when she eventually returned home minus the shopping trolley, without any money and too scared to make amends for her failings by popping down to the off-licence for him.
“I mean…it’s not as though you’re a child”, he admonished her. “They’re only kids but you’re a grown up and with all the work you’ve been doing around here you’ve got muscles on your muscles. If you’re going to make your way in this part of London you’ve really got to learn to stand up for yourself”.
Cyberia tried to be brave but the trauma of the robbery combined with the endless trials of her new life had worn her out. As she sat on a kitchen chair and quietly sobbed to herself, her husband decided that he had, perhaps, been a little harsh. He made her a nice cup of tea, sat down opposite her and suggested an alternative way in which she could contribute to family life.
“OK, darling, what about this? I’ve got a mate, well, a contact really, up in the city who’s always looking for a nice girl to do a bit of work for him. It means working at night, but the pay’s not bad if you don’t mind a bit of scrubbing. Shall I tell him you’re interested in a bit of office cleaning?”
And so Cyberia became one of London’s army of night cleaners helping to keep the wheels of commerce running on well oiled bearings, and by combining her weekly wage packet with her husband’s musical royalties the couple managed to earn enough to keep the wolf and the bailiffs from the door. After a few weeks Cyberia was even asked to become a cleaning team supervisor and, accepting the increase in wages without a second thought, took command of the cleaners on the executive floor at the NanoGoo International headquarters building.
A few evenings later, as Cyberia was preparing to dust the huge, polished wood boardroom table, an officious looking woman in a bright red power-shouldered suit came into the room and button holed her.
“Can you make a bit more of an effort today, dear. We’re holding a party here tomorrow afternoon to welcome Captain Flashman-Pebble onto the board. I want you to make sure you can see your face in the table, that the bins are all emptied properly and that you run the Hoover under the chairs and not just around them. Understood?”
Cyberia just looked at the woman.
“Hello? Speakie English?” asked Jimmy Cameron’s personal assistant, before pointing at the table and making grunting noises. She turned on her heel and muttered something about employing immigrants.
Left alone with her thoughts, Cyberia collapsed in on herself and slumped down into one of the big leather boardroom chairs. After all of the hardships of the last few months, this was the final straw. She cried and cried and cried, grieving for the pride and the utter folly of her previous existence that had now laid her down so low. The teams of cleaners finished their work and, wondering where their supervisor had disappeared to, signed themselves out of the building and evaporated back into the teeming maelstrom of the city from whence they had come. Left alone in the boardroom, Cyberia lost all sense of time as she sobbed her heart out for her foolishness.
Time passed in a blur of wet eyes and convulsive sobs, and it was late into the evening before Cyberia realised that she was not alone in the boardroom, and through her tears she could barely make out the shape of the person standing by the door. She waved her hand at the figure, desperate to shoo the person away, and continued to spill bitter tears upon her red flushed cheeks, but the figure came towards her, knelt at her feet and held her hands. She felt the rough calloused fingers of someone she had come to know well in recent weeks and her shoulders immediately began to heave in a great, heartfelt wail. He would only make fun of her, she thought, and pulling away from her husband she tried to rise from her chair and run for the door.
Her husband refused to let go and pulled her back into his arms, where he held her close and tight to his chest until her anger, fear, frustration and wretchedness dissipated and she fell into a gentle half swoon. Quietly and softly he lifted her head up so that she could look him in the eye.
“Aaaarrrggghhh!” she screamed, desperately trying to push him away. “It’s…it can’t be…Minge-face?”
“I prefer Rocky, or Captain”, he said tenderly, taking off the milk bottle glasses, pulling a set of theatrical teeth out of his mouth and ripping off his fake moustache. “Don’t be afraid, my darling. It’s always been me. I fell in love with you ages ago, but you were always so rude. Your father and I cooked up the whole plan. All of the other girls are sweet but so utterly boring. To be a real member of Albion’s aristocracy you have to have some spunk in your soul, but you we’re something else. I had to cure you of your pride before you met Mummy and Daddy”.
Cyberia flung her arms around her handsome, landed busker and hugged him so tightly that he thought he would burst. Just then the doors to the boardroom crashed open and the combined weight and wealth of the Cameron and Flashman-Pebble clans surged into the room, waving glasses of bubbly and cheering loudly as they celebrated the perfect society couple locked in true love’s wonderful embrace.