Ladies From Hell Read Free Page A

me, it’s just the sort of thing that turns her on. I thought I’d maybe try for a different eye colour this time; sort of a greeny gold, something nearer her own. Also I’d get her to walk through a patch of duckweed so she’d come up all green spangles. It would have to be a Pentax job; everybody’s got their limits, and standing in a pond for two or three hours is no sort of joke anyway. But I could do the main studies in the Barn. And I was thinking about a plain wood frame with a
trompe l’oeil
dragonfly on it. I drifted off to sleep full of ideas. That’s the great thing about painting of course; you never get to the end of it. It nearly makes up for being a Class D sometimes.
    I suppose I’d better explain about the tax structure, since though you all live in the bloody country none of you seem to understand it. Still as you’re mostly Class B’s there’s no real reason why you should.
    It all started with a man called Hemingway. John Buchan Alexander, or something of the sort. That was back in the last millennium, somewhere round ’97 or ’98. The tug of war Britain had got itself into—the hoi polloi wanting to keep their slice of cake, the Andy Capp fraternity wanting to take it off ’em—had resulted in close on a decade of hung parliaments; and social and economic collapse of course, though nobody worried too much about that. At least not till a few little peccadilloes like the Siege of Notting Hill started bringing the facts of life home to roost. Then everybody let rip. The Russians showed distinct signs of making an investment in NorthSea Oil, while the Americans started muttering about annexing us as their latest and least important State. Hemingway was well in with the Police Federation and the Army, so the King—we even had a King, in the last century—asked him to sort things out.
    I will say this for J.B.A.: he’d done his Classical homework.
Panem et circenses
was definitely the order of the day; but there was one snag. He wasn’t a politician at all, he was a very, very senior Civil Servant; and by the time the NF had stopped exporting blacks in converted oil tankers, the Cappites had run out of peers to hang from lamp posts and the Bank of England had got tired of printing thousand pound notes we had an Administration that made all the rest look like a Sunday School treat. The tax system is its proudest creation to date.
    In practice it’s all dead complex of course, with scores of categories and sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories attached to them; but the theory has a certain nauseating simplicity. There are four main Classes. Class A subscribers, as we call them these days, are rolling in it because they pay damn all. They comprise the élite of the Civil Service—couldn’t let ’em all in of course, they’re sixty per cent of the workforce now—plus anybody else with enough muscle to grind the country to a halt or otherwise make a blasted nuisance of themselves. Which includes the miners and power workers, the oilrig people, the top brass of the TUC and all those inky little sods who pull the tits in Fleet Street. Class B’s, the biggest group, make up for it all by paying tax at sixty per cent basic; that includes the politicians, since the Civil Service still has a death-grip on the reins. Nice to see democracy in action at last. Class C’s a ragbag; teachers, doctors, vicars, anybody with a vocation who can be made to pay through the nose for following it. C’s include hereditary title holders, oddly enough; though old Ardkinglas told me they mostly pay the B rate, sometimes even the A. Seems the Service still has a wild respect for a title. Can’t help itself I suppose; grained in after a few centuries of kowtows.
    Class D’s are the untouchables. That means artists, writers, composers, philosophers and anybody on whom the suspicion of creativity falls; the Service always did take a strong lineabout people trying to think. We pay at the C rate, seventy per cent,