Fast Fiction: Mrs Codge
Richard Mallinson introduces us to old Mrs Codge the cleaner - and what a story she has to tell!
‘You can always leave if you don’t like it here,’ said Hopper, the top man of our small island. I stared at him, then insultingly turned my back.
The others laughed. They enjoyed seeing him brought down a bit.
But what would they think, I wondered, if I brought him right down - and then took over in his place?
That night I asked my concubine, Vera, for her opinion and she said, ‘What a super idea.’
She was rampant in the dark, much to my satisfaction.
In the morning, however, she went to Hopper and told him what I’d said.
Obviously he should have had me arrested and dumped in a cell but all he did was to send for me and repeat, ‘You can always leave if you don’t like it here.’
Behind his desk he was even less impressive than out in the open.
I said, ‘Perhaps the time has come for you to leave, not me’ and I moved forward and loomed over him until he was only a blob in my shadow.
Scared, he pressed a button and when the straw-hatted security men sidled in with their guns he pointed at me and said, ‘Take him away.’
Of course they took him away instead and now I sit behind his desk and issue all the orders, including one to have Vera locked up for several years.
Well, she did do a very silly thing, didn’t she?
She backed the wrong villain.
*
I see a reflection in the screen of my computer and turn round to find old Mrs. Codge, our cleaner, standing there.
‘Now let that be a lesson to you,’ I say mock-sternly, ‘never back the - ’ but she moves off to dust a pile of art books and it is only later, when I am having my aperitif, that she tells me her name used to be Vera.
Apparently that was before she was abducted, beaten and sold into -
‘You don’t know the half of it, she says, folding her arms.
