The Dream Factory by John Simes

Author:John Simes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

15

Miss B

Miss Bonkers had finished her lunch, and Pearl Furkiss wiped away the last residues of apple crumble and custard from around her mouth. “There you are, my love.”

Miss Bonkers scribbled on her notepad – just one word: “Lipstick!”

“Oh, right you are. Now where d’you keep your lippy?” Pearl held up the woman’s vast leather handbag. Miss Bonkers nodded. “In ’ere? Oh, my Lor’… There’s so much stuff in ’ere.” While Pearl rummaged, Miss B looked through the arched Gothic windows of The Fossils. They afforded a clear view of the old cart track as it curved through the grounds beneath the stately oaks and elder trees, and across to the little wood that bordered Stoggie’s Farm. She had the same view every day. She liked it. She enjoyed the way the winds swung aside the full-leafed branches of the trees to unveil a fleeting vision of the valley down to Eastcombe. Will the children come to the woods again today? she wondered.

Pearl had found the lipstick and did her best to apply it while Miss B puckered and pouted. In her youth Miss B had scandalised her prim, wealthy parents by appearing topless in The Daily Splash – the stable lad had handed a copy of it to her father, she recalled with a smirk. The old man nearly swallowed his pipe. Her next outrage was to be photographed again – which she had arranged – dancing naked at the Isle of Dogs Pop Festival with her completely stoned friends, her body painted purple but for a single sunflower growing from where the sun could not possibly shine.

Her colourful career as an art and music teacher concluded abruptly when, under her tutelage, one her students persuaded a thirty-foot-long inflatable penis to wobble ominously through the window behind the principal’s head as he was addressing a governors’ meeting. She had then married one Timothy Smallpiece, the curator of a tiny art gallery in Sleephaven where her work was featured. One of her sculptures – a wicker basket containing a severed head on a bed of exotic fruits – memorably caused one elderly voyeur to pass out.

As she was ever a woman of lustful pleasures, her husband had passed away from exhaustion a few years before. Now she sat on her Celtic dragon throne chair, propped up by vermillion and gold cushions, and spent each day nagging the staff, scribbling incomprehensible poetry, and sailing on a sumptuous ocean of memories and pure invention. It was a constant voyage that she loved. The grandson of one of the other “inmates,” as she called them, had looked at her and remarked, “I wouldn’t want to end up like that,” before stuffing a cheeseburger into his head. She’d thought, Thank God I never ended up like you, and that was revenge enough for his insult. She savoured victories of the mind.

Miss B had been enjoying watching the storm’s lightning fork the land, and its shifting ghostly drift across the valley and punishing needles of rain excited her spirits.

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