Read by Rhik Samadder
‘ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN PECKHAM RYE PARK: COME AND CELEBRATE WILLIAM AND KATE’S BIG DAY!’
‘I don’t know,’ hesitated Mr Patel, looking at the flyer. ‘There’s bound to be trouble.’
‘It will be a great day to be English,’ said James. ‘And there will be sausages.’
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out London Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other London-based stories from the League archives, appears.
‘Of course I’m proud to be English,’ said Mr Patel. My ancestors fought with the Rani of Jhansi in the Indian Mutiny.’
Before he left Ohio, James had read all three volumes of Simon Schama’s ‘History of Britain’. Somehow, it was proving less helpful than he had anticipated. The problem was that everyone in this small island seemed to remember a different history than the one that he had read about.
‘Hmm,’ said James non-committally. ‘Wasn’t the Rani rebelling against colonial rule? And didn’t she lose?’
‘Of course,’ replied Mr Patel. ‘What could be more English than to fight on the losing side?’
‘I see,’ said James, although he didn’t.
The street party had been his father’s idea. James Senior was a serious Anglophile who had never had a passport, but he was delighted when James had said that he was going to London. James himself hadn’t been so sure. It was the first time that he had ever left America, and he found himself missing the familiar things. He called home every Sunday.
‘A Royal Wedding! Street parties! Like when Princess Di married that guy with the ears,’ enthused James Senior. ‘You gotta go!’
‘There don’t seem to be any on around here. Maybe there’ll be one in Trafalgar Square.’
‘No, you gotta keep it local. You organise one for your street James, that’s how.’
‘I don’t know,’ said James. ‘It seems kinda presumptuous.’
After all, he was only an exchange student. Two years into his degree at the University of Ohio, a year abroad studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths had seemed like a great escape. In his spare time, James painted landscapes, mostly pale blue skies over endless flat fields. Sometimes he painted in a tiny cow, but he never got the faces right. James loved Turner, but he couldn’t paint like him. England was Turner’s country: he felt like he owed the English. He made up some flyers and walked through Peckham, trying to hand them out.
On Lordship Lane, a skinhead struggling with a pitbull took a flyer. The skinhead had an upside-down Union Jack tattooed on his neck.
‘I love them Royals!’ said the skinhead. ‘Salt of the earth. And sausages! Mugabe here loves sausages!’
‘Sure,’ said James, moving away quickly from the excited dog straining against its leash. ‘Something for everyone.’
In Tesco’s, the cashier who scanned his Pot Noodles shook his head.
‘This be some Babylon ting, man. Not for de bredren.’
James tried not to stare at the cashier’s head, where ghostly pale scalp showed up between tight cornrows. His nametag read, ‘Hi, I’m Sebastian Fortescue-Smythe!’
‘Come if you can, Sebastian. How often does a Prince get married?’
‘You get another chance if this dude be anyting like his Dadda,’ replied Sebastian.
In college the next day, James waited until the end of the lecture.
‘Erm.’
Most of the other students ignored him. In the front row, a girl with a large plastic bone through her nose was texting, stabbing the keys as if they were to blame for whatever had happened to her face.
James wasn’t sure what to make of his fellow students. They didn’t have people like this back in Ohio. The top students in his class were a Russian woman who electroplated dead cats into positions from the Kama Sutra, and an old Etonian who spraypainted ‘This Wor(l)d Is Shit!’ on billboards with human excrement. The students had clapped the cat bronzer, and they cheered the shit guy. When James had presented his own work – his best landscape, with two small cows – no-one had said a word.
‘I have an announcement!’
Now they were all looking at him, even the girl with the nose-bone. He held up a flyer.
‘It’s a party because William and Kate getting married. Everybody’s invited!’
No-one moved.
‘Is it going to be, like, you know, an Event?’ asked the shit guy. ‘In the sense of an actual Happening?’
‘Not really,’ said James. ‘But it’s our chance to celebrate!’
Some muttering. A groan or two.
‘There will be sausages!’
The students started to leave. James thrust a flyer at the nose-bone girl, holding it out until she took it. ‘Please come! It’ll be great!’
She has very blue eyes, he thought. Aquamarine, like a frozen ocean.
‘Maybe.’
Then she was gone. He pasted the rest of the flyers up around the college.
Soon, he noticed graffiti starting to appear on his flyers:
‘Kate is a slag.’
‘Royal Family = Inbred scum!’
‘William – call me b4 u do something crazy, we’ll talk! Love always, Peter.’
He read all the graffiti carefully, but none of it seemed helpful. Mr Patel told James not to worry, and lent him a gas barbecue.
‘You’ll need a permit to use it in the park though.’
At the Town Hall, a clerk obscured behind a wire grille stamped the forms.
‘Preparation of foodstuffs for human consumption, ten pounds. Permit for open fire, fifty pounds. And I’ll need a credit card for the police bond.’
‘What police bond? Why on earth would I need the police?’
‘I don’t make the rules, mate – the Prevention of Terrorism, Raves, and Other Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2010 does.’
James went to Tesco to buy sausages and buns. He asked Sebastian what the English drank.
‘Pimm’s, of course. The taste of an English summer!’
James was already over budget, and he could only afford two bottles. He found plastic cups and plates. The plates had pictures of William and Kate. Their pink-cheeked faces were friendly but bovine. They didn’t look like anyone he’d ever seen in London.
The day before the wedding, he rummaged through the pound shop. He bought twenty metres of bunting in red, white and blue. The only balloons they had left were bright green.
‘Irish it up a bit,’ said the assistant. ‘It’s only fair really.’
James bought a string of plastic Union Jacks to make up for it.
That night, he couldn’t sleep. Early the next morning, he walked over to the park. The sky was grey and the grass was damp, but the day seemed full of possibilities. He lugged his kitchen table across the road and set up his portable radio. He brought all five chairs from his flat. If people wanted somewhere to sit, they’d just have to bring their own. James imagined his neighbours streaming out of their houses, bearing their chairs high while the aroma of grilling meat wafted all around. It took him hours to set up, stringing the bunting between the trees and blowing up the balloons. A couple of passing joggers looked curious, but didn’t stop. He hummed as he worked, wishing that he knew the words to ‘God Save The Queen’ past the first line.
At ten o’clock, a police car pulled up and an enormous policeman got out.
‘Good morning, sir. I’m DS Osundo.’
‘Welcome to the celebrations!’ said James.
‘Not here to celebrate, unfortunately, sir. More of a watching brief for this demo of yours.’
‘It’s not a protest, officer,’ James laughed. ‘It’s for the Royal Wedding! So we can all show how proud we are to be English!’
Osundo consulted a clipboard.
‘Says demonstration down here, sir. How many are we expecting?’
James chuckled.
‘You’ll know that better than I will, officer. Fifty, a hundred? How many loyal English subjects do we have round here?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Osundo. ‘You’ve got your Croatia versus Tunisia match on Sky this afternoon.’
The radio started to play wedding marches. In his heart, James knew that the nose-bone girl was sitting on a bus, getting closer. He turned up the radio and fired up the burners on the gas stove. Soon sausages sizzled and popped. Twenty buns lay split and buttered, with another twenty in reserve. He set out plastic cups and the two bottles of Pimm's. The table looked a bit bare. Maybe people would bring their own salads and desserts, James thought. He should have put that on the flyer. He imagined sherry trifle, jam roly-poly – even Spotted Dick, whatever that was. He looked around the small park. The trees were beginning to show spring leaves. Soon everybody would arrive. He hoped that he wouldn’t run out of food.
At eleven o’clock, a young Vietnamese couple with a baby hurried by. They stopped momentarily, but then the baby started to cry. When James offered them a sausage, they examined it carefully and smiled before they shook their heads.
Soon afterwards, two men in dirty overcoats turned up. One wore a fur trapper’s hat.
‘Mmm, sausages,’ said Fur Hat, helping himself. ‘What’s the occasion?’
‘C’mon – it’s the royal wedding!’ said James. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Congratulationth,’ said the other. His mouth was so full he was having difficulty speaking. ‘Who’th the luckee lathie?’
‘It’s not me,’ said James. ‘It’s William and Kate.’
‘Cheers then, Bill,’ said Fur Hat, drinking from one of the bottles of Pimm's. ‘But where’s this Kate bird? Left you already?’
The other man laughed so hard that crumbs sprayed across the table. Then the pair went quiet, stuffing sausages into their mouths and passing the Pimm's bottle back and forth. James hid the other bottle under his jacket.
‘This is nice,’ said James. ‘But ...’
He was interrupted by a police siren. When the two men saw Osundo getting out of his car, they grabbed handfuls of sausages and ran across the park.
‘Shiftless bastards,’ said Osundo.
‘They’re my only guests,’ said James glumly. He watched the two figures disappearing into the trees.
‘Still bastards,’ said Osundo, helping himself to a sausage.
It started to drizzle, and the wind grew gusty. Osundo disconnected the gas burner.
‘Health and safety,’ said Osundo when James protested. ‘You’d better turn that radio off.’
‘Don’t you want to know how the wedding is going?’
‘Not really,’ said Osundo. ‘They’re all much the same.’
‘But this one is special!’
Osundo snorted. ‘You sound like my wife.’
‘Does she like weddings?’
‘She likes them enough to leave me and marry someone else,’ replied Osundo. He took another sausage and went back to his car.
James decided to leave the radio on and risk electrocution. People would want to hear the commentary, even if it was hard to hear over the sound of the wind. He waited for a while, but no one else appeared. James decided to persist a little longer – just in case the girl with the bone through her nose was late. The radio started to crackle.
‘... an update on that wedding coming up – right after these messages!’
James ate a sausage while he listened to advertisements for Anchor Butter and Toyota cars. The meat was lukewarm and greasy. He wondered whether he had cooked the sausages properly. Were they truly meant to taste like this? He thought he saw Mr Patel walking along the far edge of the park, but he couldn’t be sure. The Union Jacks flapped in the wind, and he noticed that he had hung them upside down. When the radio dissolved into static, he turned it off.
It began to rain in earnest. A small lake formed on the grill, and the sausages started to float. James watched Osundo drive away. Perhaps William and Kate were already man and wife. He imagined the two of them on honeymoon, lying together in a hotel bed, as stiff and waxy as mannequins. In Ohio, the cows were waking up to another day of eating grass.
James felt like he didn’t care if he never ate another sausage in his life.
But he packed the remaining food into a box and put it under the table. Then he climbed underneath the table too.
He couldn’t imagine that Turner had ever had a day like this.
James decided to become a republican.
He took the Pimm's from his jacket and drank, watching the bunting disintegrating under the force of the rain. Pimm's tasted horrible, like peanut butter and jelly when you eat all the peanut butter first. He took another swig, and almost dropped the bottle when someone knocked on the table.
‘Hello? Is it too late?’
James stuck his head out into the rain. It was the girl with the bone through her nose.
‘I brought you something.’
She dropped a packet into his lap. He picked it up to read the label: ‘Marks & Spencer Limited Edition William ‘n’ Kate Commemorative Sausages.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said James. ‘I think I finally get what the English are all about. Would you like to drink a toast?’
He held up the bottle and wished William and Kate all the happiness in the world.
--
O Happy Day ... by David Bausor was read by Rhik Samadder at the Liars' League Pride & Prejudice event on Tuesday 10th May 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
David Bausor lives in London and has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway. He is currently completing a novel about a war crimes trial called Ghosts in the Palace.
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