‘Mind who you call fool; try and see if you can do it yourself,’ squeaked Lesley, and paused to give the audience a chance to titter in anticipation. ‘Only show me how and I will do it directly.’
I felt my body shift in anticipation of the move that would shove my head into the noose. Which is when I thought that if I couldn’t get rid of the compulsion, maybe I could change it enough to break it. I did it like anti-noise, where you cancel out a sound wave by broadcasting another sound wave with an inverted phase – it’s clever stuff and very counter-intuitive, but it works. I was hoping the weird, inside-my-head version would work because I’d only just started making the shape in my mind when my mouth said, ‘Very well, I will.’
My forma met the compulsion like the wrong two gearwheels brushing up against each other in a transmission. I thought I could actually feel bits of the forma spinning around in my brain and painfully ricocheting off the inside of my skull, but that could have been my imagination. It didn’t matter. I felt my body unlock and I yanked my head away from the noose and looked at Lesley in triumph.
‘Or maybe I won’t,’ I said.
A huge arm clamped itself across my chest from behind and a large hand gripped the back of my head and pushed it through the noose. I smelled camelhair and Chanel aftershave – Seawoll must have walked up behind me while I was feeling clever.
‘Or maybe you will,’ said Lesley.
I twisted, but while there are some big men who are surprisingly weak, Seawoll wasn’t one of them, so I jammed the syrette into the exposed bit of his hand and gave him the whole dose. Unfortunately the whole dose had been calibrated for Lesley, who was half Seawoll’s size. The pressure never wavered until Lesley yelled, ‘Hoist away, boys,’ and I was dragged into the air by my neck.
The only thing that saved my life was the fact that I was being hanged in a theatrical noose which had been designed, as a matter of health and safety, not to hang the attractive Croatian baritone whose neck was supposed to be in it. The slipknot was a fake and there was a wire reinforcement inside the rope to keep the loop in shape. Undoubtedly there was a eyelet for clipping a tether to the no doubt artfully concealed safety harness to be worn by the handsome baritone, once he’d made his farewell aria. Unfortunately I didn’t have a harness, so the damn thing half-killed me before I managed to get my head out of the loop, scraping the skin off my chin in the process. I got my elbow into the loop for more support, but even with that, there was a sudden line of agony down my back.
I had a quick look down and saw that I was a good five metres above the stage. I wasn’t going to be letting go any time soon.
Below me, Lesley had turned back to the audience. ‘So much for the constabulary,’ she said. Behind her Seawoll sat down heavily on the stairs and slumped forward like a tired runner, the etorphine hydrochloride kicking in at last.
‘See,’ said Lesley. ‘One officer of the law kicks his last, while another lies sleeping, no doubt stupefied with drink. Thus do we good men of England put our trust in swine barely separate from the villains they purport to chase. How long, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, are you prepared to put up with this? Why is it that men of good quality pay their taxes while foreigners pay naught, and yet expect the liberties that are an Englishman’s hard-won prerogative?’
It was getting harder to maintain a hold, but I didn’t fancy my chances letting go. There were huge curtains either side of the stage, and I wondered if I could swing over far enough to grab one. I changed to a two-handed grip on the loop and started to shift my weight and to flex, to get momentum going.
‘Because who is more oppressed?’ exclaimed Lesley. ‘Those that seek nothing but entitlements for themselves, or those that claim for everything: social security, housing benefit, disability, and pay for nothing?’ One thing I did do in history was the reform of the Poor Laws, so I knew then that Henry Pyke must either be using stuff from Lesley’s memory or else had been reading the Daily Mail for the last two hundred years.
‘And are they grateful?’ she asked. The audience muttered in response. ‘Of course they are not,’ said Lesley. ‘For they have come to look upon such things as their right.’
It wasn’t easy keeping the rope from swinging out over the orchestra pit. I tried to correct, and ended up describing a figure of eight. I was still several metres short of the scaffolding platform, so I put my back into it, jack-knifing my legs to cross the gap.