The Coal Miner & The Conservative

"I am not defensive!" snapped Gary, the reaction causing great amusement to Paul and Julie.

"If you say so," said Paul.

"I do say so," said Gary. His mind thought back to how Felicity was dressed earlier in the afternoon. "Those clothes she was wearing when she was wearing when she came to the house, they looked pretty expensive. It was like she was rubbing it in our faces, look how expensive my clothes are, look how much more money I have than you. I hate that, she's such a show-off ..."

Paul and Julie rolled their eyes, Julie glancing towards the road where a rather expensive car had pulled in near the park. "Gary, do you know who really likes to talk about Felicity Thornton-Browne?" she asked.

"No who?" asked Gary, who had his back to the road, and had not seen the Thornton-Browne car arrive.

"Felicity Thornton-Browne herself," said Julie. "And you've got your chance now. They're here."

Gary turned around to see the Thornton-Browne family making their way across the lawn. Mrs. Thornton-Browne wore an expensive cream-colored dress more suited to a high society function attended by royalty than a small, humble wedding in a Yorkshire coal mining city. Her son and husband wore dark suits, no doubt equally expensive but Gary's attention went straight past them to Felicity. The pretty blonde wore a bright blue dress that came down to her knees, her tied back with a blue ribbon. As the family drew closer, he could see that the jewelry that Felicity wore was also blue in color.

"Will you look at what Felicity is wearing," said Gary.

"Yes, she's wearing a dress," said Paul. "What did you think she was going to wear to a wedding? A tracksuit? A bikini? An old sack she found at the side of the road?"

"Yeah, but look at the dress," said Gary.

"I think you need to have a lie down, Gary," said Julie. "It's a dress. I'm wearing a dress, Mum's wearing a dress, and Granny is wearing a dress. All the women here today are wearing dresses. When Becky arrives, she'll be wearing a dress too."

"Are you two colorblind? It's blue!" exclaimed Gary. "Not only the dress, but her hair ribbon and jewelry too."

"Blue, so what?" asked Paul.

"It's the Conservative color, I bet she's done it on purpose," said Gary. "Julie, you're wearing a red dress, its Labor color, its good. Nobody else here is wearing a blue dress. I'm telling you, she's done it just to annoy me."

"I really don't think so," said Julie. "Maybe you could ask her? Paul and me, we need to go and talk to normal people about normal things rather than crazy people about crazy things."

Paul and Julie headed off to talk to other relatives, leaving Gary standing alone watching the Thornton-Browne family as they walked across the lawn. Mrs. Thornton-Browne made straight for Mr. and Mrs. Carter, her husband and son behind her.

"Mary, your dress still looks as good today as the first time you wore it in 1978," was Mrs. Thornton-Browne's first comment to her sister, her voice carrying throughout the park.

Gary kept looking at Felicity, the girl looking back at him and the pair making eye contact. Gary immediately looked away, but Felicity walked towards him, Gary feeling most awkward.

"Have you changed your mind about continuing our discussion earlier?" Felicity asked.

"No," snapped Gary.

"Really? By the way you were staring at me, I thought you had."

"I wasn't staring at you, I wasn't even looking at you."

"Keep telling yourself that if it helps to believe it," said Felicity in her smug manner Gary found so infuriating. "Don't you know it's rude to stare?"

"I'm not rude, you are," responded Gary.

"If you say so," said Felicity.

"I am saying that you're rude."

"So, this is Becky's wedding," observed Felicity.

"Yeah, what's the matter? Not fancy enough for you?" asked Gary.

"Well, it's not like any of the other weddings I've been to, that's for sure."

"Yeah, well up here we don't have the money to spend on fancy weddings and stuff. We've even less money now thanks to the bloody Government you think is so bloody wonderful."

"I thought you didn't want to talk about that?"

"I don't."

"So why did you bring it up?" Felicity asked with a laugh.

"I wish you'd just go back to London and stop stirring up trouble around here where you're not wanted," said Gary. "Can't you see you don't fit in here?"

Felicity raised her eyebrows. "I do not want to fit in here, thank you very much. It's like I'm on Mars, a dusty, dull, red planet full of strange inhabitants obsessing over holes in the ground."

"And which planet do you and your kind come from, Uranus?" countered Gary.

"Oh I don't think so, Gary. Uranus is green. If I did come from another planet, it would be Neptune because it's blue in color, and far bigger and much more powerful than little red Mars."

"Yeah, blue like your bloody dress," Gary scowled.

"What's the matter with my dress?"

"I just told you, it's blue."

"What's wrong with a blue dress?"

"Come on, a blue dress here and now? It's a Conservative color."

"Gary, that's ridiculous. Are you suggesting that I would deliberately wear a blue dress just to cause trouble?"

"Yeah."

"Gary, I think that is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. It's just a dress coloured blue, nothing more, nothing less. Cyan, azure, sapphire if you like, they're all synonyms for blue. A synonym is a different word for the same thing."

"I know what a synonym is!" Gary snapped. "I'm not uneducated, you know."

"I see you were paying attention in English that day, well done," said Felicity. "So Gary, what is the antonym of synonym?"

Gary did not know the answer, and was determined not to be drawn into Felicity's little game of proving how much smarter she was than he, so instead he asked, "Why do you hate people like us so much?"

"Did I say I that I hated people like you?" asked Felicity.

"No, but you don't need to. You can tell how much you hate people who work an honest day's work to support their families."

"Gary, correct me if I'm wrong but you wouldn't have actually have worked since the strike started in March. That's unless you were one of those scabs, as your union mates so charmingly put it."

"There you go again. You hate unions. Let me tell you something, we need trade unions ..."

"Yes, to cause trouble and inconvenience up and down the country and prove that they are still relevant. To stand in the way of the government's important economic reforms that Britain so badly needs."

"No, because if we didn't have unions there would still be kids working down mines or in factories or up chimneys fourteen hours a day."

"I see we finally have something we agree on," said Felicity. "You think child labour is bad, I think child labour is bad, and yes, the unions were right to have that abolished. But Gary, that was all 100 years ago now. We're living in 1984, not like characters in a Charles Dickins novel in 1884. Charles Dickins was a famous British author ..."

"Again, I know who Charles Dickins was," said Gary impatiently, Felicity's patronizing ways succeeding once more in getting under his skin. "I've read his work."

"Really, which is your favorite Charles Dickins novel?" Felicity asked.

Gary had in fact read only two chapters of one Dickins novel before giving up and returning it to the library, but was determined not to let Felicity know this. "I think they're all good."

"We'll, I've read all of them and gained an A plus studying them in English Literature at school, so it will be interesting to speak to another person who has a vast knowledge of Dickins' work and get his perspective," said Felicity.

Mr. Thornton-Browne's voice was heard. "Felicity darling, come along. Your cousin Rebecca has arrived and we need to take our places."

"Coming Dad," Felicity called back.

She turned back to Gary, and whispered. "I know you are no expert on classic English literature, Gary, so don't worry, I won't talk to you about Charles Dickens. But I also know that you are no fool. I mean, you noticed that I chose to wear a bright blue dress today."

"You really did wear it on purpose?" Gary nearly choked. He had been thinking, given Felicity's initial reaction to this, and Julie and Paul saying that the notion that Felicity had worn a blue dress just to cause trouble was ridiculous, that he had over-reacted.

"Maybe, or maybe not," said Felicity teasingly. "But the last time I wore this dress was to a Conservative party function three weeks ago, so you can draw your own conclusions from that."

Gary had watched a television program several weeks earlier about paranormal mysteries, which included a segment on spontaneous human combustion, where people had inexplicably burst into flames without rhyme or reason, their bodies burned to ashes with their surroundings untouched. Watching Felicity's slim figure in her blue dress as the girl walked across the lawn to join her father, an expression as though butter would not melt in her mouth etched on her pretty face, Gary pondered if the reason for spontaneous human combustion might be anger. Such was the fury that raged inside Gary that he wondered if he might succumb to the phenomenon right here, right now.

"You need to be careful, you might pick up a Northern accent if you keep talking with that young man and we wouldn't want that, would we?" Mr. Thornton-Browne said to his daughter, giving Gary a disapproving look before the Thornton-Browne family made their way to their seats.

"Yes, we wouldn't want that, would we?" said Felicity in response.

Watching Felicity walking alongside her parents and brother, Gary wished he had magical powers. If he did, he would summon a large bird such as a goose or swan to fly overhead and crap all over rich bitch Felicity and her precious blue dress, or cause a giant puddle of mud to form right under her feet so she would sink right into it. Or better still, cause the elastic in Felicity's knickers to fail so they would fall down right to her ankles in front of everyone. Yeah, that would really embarrass the toffee-nosed little Tory bitch.

Absolutely rigid with rage, Gary made his way to the seats, and took his place beside Paul and Julie, both of who were trying - and failing - to suppress their sniggering. "Did you have a nice chat with Felicity?" Paul asked, he and Julie collapsing into fits of laughter.

"Oh, shut up," said Gary.

*

Throughout Becky and Des's wedding ceremony, Gary scarcely heard a word that the bride, groom or celebrant said. His attention was firmly on the back of Felicity's long blonde hair tied back with the blue ribbon, replaying their conversations in his head over and over again. At one stage, Gary reminded himself that he should be paying attention to the wedding and tried to think about how pretty Becky looked as a bride. Unfortunately, as Becky was a pretty blonde it served to remind him of her cousins Julie and Felicity, and of course Gary's mind returned to Felicity and there it stayed.

At the conclusion of the formalities where Des and Becky were pronounced husband and wife and sealed their union with a kiss, Gary again struggled to think why Felicity Thornton-Browne bothered him so much. Lots of things bothered him in life; the fact that he and his friends and co-workers faced an uncertain future in the coal mining industry, heavy-handed police at the picket-lines, worry about paying maintenance for his daughter, his awful absentee father, his cold indifferent stepfather, his no-hoper younger brother falling in with neo-Nazis and Angie's delinquent sister Sheree. Yet none of these things kept his mind so fully occupied and filled with rage as a particular 19-year-old blonde girl he had met just this very afternoon. Her parents and brother were absolute snobs too, so why did they not cause him the same level of anxiety?

Gary took several deep breaths and tried to calm down and think logically. He had known the Carter family all 20 years of his life, and this was the first time he had met their upper class London relatives, the Thornton-Browne family. Perhaps another 20 years would pass before he would see them again? Gary hoped so, by then it would be 2004 and the world would be a very different place. Felicity would be a high-priced London barrister earning a mint, married with two high achieving kids and living in luxury. Gary would be living on a mate's couch and contemplating over a decade on the dole following the closure of every single coal mine in the country. That or working a minimum wage job asking teenagers not even born now, "Would you like chips with that, Sir?" Emma would be pregnant with her third kid to a third different no-hoper father, holding up her Aunt Sheree as her idol in life. Julie and Paul would have found people to marry and moved away; and Kenny would either be in prison or somewhere in Eastern Europe having joined some extreme far right wing paramilitary group based in the region. Imagining a miserable future for himself and a successful one for Felicity made Gary's mood even darker, and he brooded upon these thoughts as everybody went to the wedding reception.

The reception was being held at the pub - or hotel as Hilda Thornton-Browne insisted on calling it - and while this was the most humble of budget weddings, the landlord Eric was very glad of the money. Since the strike, the pub patronage was well down, and Eric like many business owners was finding the going tough.

Following the Carter family into the private function room, Gary assumed he would be at their table and was a little put out to find that due to seating arrangements, he as a single male guest had been relegated to another table to make the seating arrangements work. As he turned to look for his allocated table - number 9 - Gary could only shake his head.

Every family seemed to have a group of odd relatives, and for Des this was his Uncle Stan, Aunt Muriel and their two adult kids, Denise and Billy. Stan, who worked as a bus driver, and his wife Muriel were the dullest - and fattest - people Gary had ever met. Their son Billy was just as fat as his parents, had never held down a job and sat at home eating and watching television all day with his mother and sister. Denise, the older and less overweight of the two siblings had a five-year-old son called Jason, but the father had long since shot through and nobody, probably not even the dim-witted Denise herself, really had any idea who Jason's father really was.

Gary could see Paul and Julie smirking as he approached his table, and with great reluctance, took his place next to Billy. "Hi," he said in greeting.

Stan, Muriel and Billy stared at Gary, then went back to staring vacantly into space. Denise, who was wiping Jason's nose with a handkerchief, looked up, stared at Gary, and then went back to removing mucus from her child's face without a word. Gary sighed; this was going to be a fun evening. His dining companions never said anything, because they had nothing to say.

Jason stared at Gary unwaveringly, before the child pointed at him and grunted repeatedly, "Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh!" Gary wished that the stupid kid would shut up and keep silent like his mother, uncle and grandparents.

Gary looked at the table, which seated ten. There were six so far, and Gary pondered who would fill the other four places, when he soon received an answer. "Richard, we're at table nine," came Hilda Thornton-Browne's voice and Gary's miserable day was getting worse by each minute that passed.

His heart sank as the Thornton-Browne family walked across the room and Felicity took her place at the table next to him, her brother on the other side and their parents opposite. "Hello Gary," she smiled.

"Yeah hi," Gary mumbled under his breath.

At the other table, Gary could see Julie and Paul collapsing with laughter at his latest misfortune, and he glowered back at them, this reaction only making the brother and sister laugh more and more.

The first course was soup - a choice between beef and chicken. Gary had ordered the chicken soup, and made his way to the men's room, standing at the urinal providing at least a short break from his awful dining companions, the snobs and the weirdos. He would normally have been delighted that the stuck-up Thornton-Browne family had found themselves sharing a table with such an awful family, but that he had to put up with them too removed any joy from the situation for Gary.

On the way back from the men's room, Gary heard the voice of Eric the landlord talking to the staff in the kitchen. "Snooty little cow at table nine says she don't eat beef nor chicken soup, says she wants vegetable soup instead. Find her a can of vegetable soup, chuck it in the microwave and give it to her. Bloody teenagers these days, she should eat what she's bloody well given and be bloody satisfied."

Gary could easily guess who the 'snooty little cow' at table nine was, and this was confirmed a short while later when Felicity was served vegetable soup, and soon more dramas followed when it was time to order the main course - a choice of steak, chicken and fish.

"I am a vegetarian," Felicity said to the waitress. "I would like to be served a vegetarian meal, thank you."

"How about the fish, Miss?" the waitress suggested.

Felicity looked down her nose at the woman. "If I had wanted fish, I would have asked for fish wouldn't I? Obviously you have some vegetables, could I be served vegetables please? It doesn't seem an unreasonable request. Oh, and a green salad on the side. No dressing."

"Vegetables and salad it is Miss," said the exasperated woman.

"I'll have the steak, please," said Gary when it came time to take his order. "Extra rare."

Gary could see the look of disgust on Felicity's face, and it pleased him to have drawn the intended reaction. "Don't you like meat, Felicity?" he asked.

"No, I do not, that is why I am a vegetarian," said Felicity.

"You don't know what you're missing out on," said Gary. "You can't beat British beef. You won't get some strange disease from it, you know."

"No, I will stick with vegetables and salad thank you very much."

"Suit yourself. Anyway, I thought vegetarians ate fish."

"Normally I do eat fish, however around here I'm not subjecting my digestive system to third rate fish deep fried in two thousand calories of fat."

When the main courses arrived, Gary sat in silent disbelief watching Stan, Muriel, Denise and Billy eat. They were something like a herd, with the father, mother, daughter and son eating in complete unison, cutting a piece of chicken, raising it to their mouths, chewing and swallowing at exactly the same time, the quartet even drinking and wiping their mouths at the same moment. The only one who did not eat in unison was the kid Jason, Denise cutting up her son's food and allowing the child to eat with his fingers, the boy stuffing piece after piece of chicken into his mouth and chewing it loudly, his mouth remaining wide open as he did so.

Mr. Thornton-Browne attempted to engage Stan and Muriel in conversation, not because he was a friendly person but because it gave him a chance to talk to new people about his favorite subject; money, how much he had of it and how much more of it he intended to make in the future from a wide portfolio of different investments. Stan and Muriel along with Billy and Denise simply stared back at him with blank expressions, not uttering a word. Gary doubted they understood what Mr. Thornton-Browne was talking about, or could even comprehend the individual words that he was using, and Mr. Thornton-Browne soon gave up on this as a lost cause.

During a break between the main course and dessert, Jason became restless, the child fidgeting and pointing at people and grunting, "Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh."

Denise, who along with her parents and brother were smoking cigarettes - again in complete unison - obviously wanted to enjoy her smoke in peace, so she rummaged through her bag, produced a dummy and to Gary's utter disbelief, stuffed it into her son's mouth. Jason sucked eagerly and noisily upon his pacifier, marching back and forward, at times hitting the back of Gary's chair.