Ed awoke on the morning of the election from uneasy dreams
and found himself transformed into a gigantic millipede.
His wife said: Hadn’t you better get up?
He could hear his voice reverberating, but destroying the sense
of his words. He suspected that his delusions were about to
evaporate.
Ed! The Chief Whip’s here!
The Chief Whip had been encouraging him to explain why he was
not facing up to the deficit.
Your position in the firm is not unassailable, he had warned.
It’s not going as well as I had hoped, Ed had admitted. But just give
me another chance. The voters just need to be soothed, persuaded
and won over.
He was finding it difficult to make a U-turn.
In the crowd who awaited his levee was a small businessman
who opened a file which he claimed had details of his complete state
of despair. He complained that Ed and his friends had borrowed so
much that although households had been kept afloat, everyone had
become complacent about the cash flow.
A music student presented herself and said that she could not afford
to study at the conservatoire. Ed felt sympathy for her plight, but knew
student fees would have to be budgeted for in other ways.
There was a lot of grumbling from older folks about dividends being all
very well, but money needing to be kept for rainy days. The aged and
disabled could not be expected to make a contribution.
The hospital across the road was beyond his field of vision. The view
from his window was of a gray land under a gray sky.
The ordinary family were now so over-worked that they had no time to
think about Ed. Circumstances had conspired to make it impossible to
downsize from their apartment, as they had had to take in lodgers
to avoid bedroom tax.
Ed had felt guilty in the past that he had not helped enough and so
he had decided to put in an appearance. He would show himself to
the masses now!
Delegates from the EU were appalled at the thought of having such a
creature in the same chamber. They refused to pay a penny towards
their keep. Rather, they demanded compensation. Ed feared that the
general tension would discharge against him.
It was agreed by one and all that they would have to rid themselves
of this creature. He would be the death of them all.
If only he would understand us, sighed a poor old man, who had
worked for a bank at one time.
The music student hissed: He’s just like Clegg. Another unpleasant insect.
We believed in him for so long and in what he pledged regarding fees.
They all weaken our borders and want the apartment to themselves!
Ed remained still until Big Ben chimed. Then he realised that he had not
the ghost of a chance of survival.
The parasites dispersed. They left a note confirming that the finances
were not hopeful. He crawled back under his bed.
But then the electorate went out into the Spring sunshine and discussed
their prospects without him. They weren’t too bad after all, because
they all had jobs which were quite promising and which could lead to
better things.
Maybe the future wasn’t so Kafkaesque after all!
