The Dressing-Up Box - A Hall Of Mirrors Story

It was an ordinary day in Downing Street. Russian oligarchs were slipping surreptitiously in and out of Cabinet Office rear entrances, civil servants were barking into their phones whilst agitatedly scanning the pavement for press crews asking if they had paid their multiple fixed penalty notices. A gust of wind suddenly barrelled down the busy road followed by Michael Fabricant in hot pursuit of what appeared to be a small mustard yellow dog making a bid for freedom. Michael Gove peered out at the scene from within the dank storm drain, and chuckled.

A police transit van screeched to a violent halt and disgorged its cargo of four burly officers dressed in riot gear. Priti Patel alighted from the driver’s seat and coolly surveyed the scene in search of a lost soul to apprehend. Spotting the elderly man walking his French poodle as he held his granddaughter’s hand, Patel pointed her finger and growled, “Him!”. Her henchman had tasered the miscreant and had his crumpled form face down on the floor and in restraints within seconds. The little girl burst into distraught tears and something inside Priti swelled with inestimable, glowing delight.

A scuffle had broken out outside number 11. A coarse woman was apoplectic with rage, her vicious temper turning the air blue as expletives flew from her lips like a mass evacuation of startled bats from their disturbed cave. Her consignment of pork scratchings had been cancelled by the man inside number 11 and she was going to give him a piece of her mind. An aide was desperately attempting to limit the portion, fearful that any further reduction in cognitive function might render her even more dangerously unhinged.

Mrs T. stared out of number 52 and an inane smile made a tragic attempt to gather up the folds of her face, like a bachelor wresting with a rumpled duvet recalcitrantly refusing to enter a freshly washed duvet cover. Her small blue eyes twinkled, set deep within her deflated features, they looked rather like twin pilot lights flickering weakly in an attempt to ignite the boiler of her barely safe mind. She brushed a strand of straw-dry blonde hair off her forehead, itself resembling a mangle’s much used washboard. Grabbing her Parliamentary pass, she left the house and set off for the park bench.

As Mrs T. sat on the bench, she wondered what it would be like to visit a foreign military base and say nasty things about someone nobody liked. The thought pinged around the cavernous environs of her empty skull like a ricocheting pin-ball and suddenly she knew just what to do … the Costume Shop !

The door to the special shop opened and she stepped inside with the giddy excitement of a small child. As if by magic the shopkeeper appeared, his red fez and black moustache instantly causing Mrs T. to smile like the slim man at number 11 when his wife told him how much this month’s dividend payment was going to be. Mrs T. gazed rapturously at all the fancy dress costumes hanging from the overcrowded clothes rails.

Since winning her seat as MP for South West Norfolk, she’d tried on numerous fancy dress outfits and enjoyed some truly wonderful escapades. She’d dressed up as an Education Minister and taught children to identify leaves and then donned the apparel of an Environment Secretary. She’d particularly enjoyed being a Justice Secretary but had much preferred pretending to be Chief Secretary to the Treasury. No fan of bureaucracy or sensible policies, she’d had a spiffing time talking about things she did not try to understand and enthusiastically practicing her serious face for the cameras.

Her most recent visit had seen her try on the garb of an International Trade Secretary in which she was allowed to promote UK Plc abroad. Her boss had encouraged his charge to keep the costume on, as wearing it meant that she was seldom actually in the UK. He still remembered the “cheese comment” and found her to be an incorrigible scallywag with a penchant for telling anybody who would listen, that she “did not have that information to hand, but would certainly find out”.

The shopkeeper presented his customer with the new outfit. A fighter pilot’s fatigues complete with bulbous flying helmet. “How did you know?” …her question directed at the obsequious retailer. “I read your mind, my dear; it’s a short read”. Foreign Secretary. The costume would surely lead to her greatest adventure to date, enabling her to take an absolute plethora of bizarrely incongruent selfies, whilst pontificating about dreadfully important matters she would never need to understand.

Mrs T. skipped across the changing room and virtually barged through the door with eager, childish anticipation. She hastily disrobed and poured her bony physique into the pilot’s uniform, remembering the time she made black pudding and got to wear a lovely pair of white wellies and a hairnet. Mrs T. regarded herself in the mirror. ET in a space suit was just the ticket!

Mrs T. kicked the discarded skin of her real identity aside, the clothes seeming to vanish into thin air like her insubstantial conscience. Only her emotional intelligence could evaporate with this lightning speed, and she recalled the conference speech about apples and the audience’s crypt-like silence when her last words had plummeted mid-flight, like drunken pigeons falling unceremoniously to the ground.

The second doorway beckoned. She wondered where it would lead to and gaily trotted through the changing room’s rear exit. Another superb adventure was sure to be had and she quivered with expectant joy. Her skeletal frame rattled as she barely suppressed a girlish shriek of delight. The motorised shutters of the press corps’ SLR’s would be whirring imminently and the stage would be hers ! She’d be peppering the airwaves with asinine drivel very soon, her serious face and feckless smile serving to lend her comments the gravitas they deserved.

The shopkeeper placed the heavy brown envelope beneath the counter, the notes it struggled to contain forcing it to bulge like the PM in one of his ill-fitting white shirts . Mrs T.’s latest fancy dress outing had been fully expensed by Lubov Chernukhin, though somewhat dispiritingly, her husband’s ghoulish aides had said the next payment might have to be in roubles …