Tuesday, July the 12th, 2005
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Dobson once worked, very briefly, as a park-keeper. On the morning of the first Thursday of his second week in the job, he had an accident while creosoting some railings, and was temporarily deafened. Finding Dobson twitching and shattered at the edge of a bed of peonies, the Captain of the Creosoters alerted the Park Railings Person, who in turn reported the accident to the Top Cadet of the Park Perimeter Patrol, who told the Acting Duty Monitor, who sent a metal tapping machine message to the secretary of the Park Surveillance Gang, who passed it to the Railings Subcommittee Recorder, who told me. I sent a squad of paramedics to tip Dobson into a Mobile Accident Response Pod which was propelled at unimaginable speed to one of the underground Park Personnel Recuperation Units. When, later that afternoon, Dobson stormed into my office shouting that he was temporarily deaf, I saw my chance to introduce him to the so-called Pompous Lip-Reader.
The Pompous Lip-Reader had been hanging around outside my office for weeks on end with nothing to do, for not a single one of the Park Persons had any kind of hearing problem. I was growing increasingly irritable with the presence of this tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug, and indeed pompous lip-reader, who was making unwarranted inroads into my supply of teabags, so much so that I had taken the precaution of padlocking the Park Pantry. The Pompous Lip-Reader promptly smashed the padlock and left it in fragments on my desk. He was goading me, I knew that much. I tried, one evening when everyone had gone home, to disable the kettle, but I am not of a technical bent, and I succeeded only in electrocuting myself. It is lucky that I am not a whooper swan, or I would have been eaten by Peter Maxwell Davies*. As it was, I discovered that I have a superhuman ability to withstand electric shocks, though unfortunately this is not accompanied by any other special powers, nor, in truth, by any burning ambition to right wrongs and to overpower criminals. As far as I was concerned the only person who needed overpowering was the Pompous Lip-Reader. I had been told I could not dismiss him, for apparently both his pomposity and his lip-reading skills gave him the Sanctuary of the Parks. I had not come upon this phrase before, but the Brevet Colonel of Park Practices pointed it out to me in the handbook.
On this Thursday afternoon, then, as Dobson stood berating me, holding his puny fists—still caked with creosote—against his temporarily useless ears, I saw my chance. Depressing the knob on my plastic buzzing console, I summoned the Pompous Lip-Reader. When he wafted in, tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug and pompous, a cup of tea balanced on the damned saucer he held so delicately, I announced: “I am assigning you to this man here,” — and I pointed at Dobson, although there was no one else in the room save the three of us—“He is a member of the Southwest Sector Creosoting Fivesome, and he had an accident this morning at the Southwest Sector Peony Bed Railings. He is temporarily deaf, so you can follow him about and lip-read for him until further notice.”
Dobson's hearing returned during the small hours of the very next morning, when he was woken by the sound of rats gnawing his wainscot. He saw that the Pompous Lip-Reader was perched at the end of his bed, tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug and pompous, and drinking a cup of tea. Something about the Pompous Lip-Reader appealed to Dobson, and despite his now being able to hear perfectly, the pair of them were inseparable for the next seven years, until they parted one day, with a handshake, in a patch of waste ground rife with thorns.
* NOTE : See Swan News, 31st May.