CORTINA TRAP (SUSPICIOUS MINDS)

It was early evening as Henry entered Slough from the direction of Iver, passing the dog stadium and driving along Bath Road with The Queensmere on his right.

From the 1500's onwards Slough was the second stage for coaches going west. In 1667 it took three days to reach Bath. In 1784, Britain's first mail coach went through Slough taking 16 hours to reach Bath. A highwayman calling himself Flying Hawkes was notorious in the area, delaying many a traveller, though too early to catch Henry, who in turn had arrived in Slough to soon to see Tesco.


The thought uppermost in Henry's mind was of Janice, his colleague at Barclays Bank, the only reason why he should forsake a night at the pub with his mates and drive all the way to Slough just to compete in an inter-bank darts contest.

At the age of nineteen he no longer considered himself young, but he was aware that he had yet to discover his true personality. Some things though were obviously not him. Things like the shirt he had chosen to wear: the one that had seemed most appropriate as he stood facing the bedroom mirror assessing the size of bulge in his tight cream slacks, the light beige one with the antique car pattern that his mother had been so pleased to buy him; That shirt was definitely not "him".

He passed the Brunel Bus Garage behind which stands Slough Station, built when Brunel's Great Western Railway arrived in 1838. The first train to Paddington departed on 31 May and took thirty-four minutes. Over a century and a half later such has been the march of progress that one might be tempted to allow only half an hour for the very same journey.

The nearby canal on the other hand came late to Slough in 1879, like a guest arriving at party where only the sherry remains un-drunk.

As Henry searched for The Centre in Farnham Road, a huge building only missable by someone whose whole being refused to accept the obvious, he experimented with the number of buttons he could afford to leave undone. He wanted to show his surprisingly hairy chest to its best advantage. One thing he did know about Janice was that she loved Gary Glitter. He wondered if maybe some kind of medallion would have been appropriate and if he had doused himself sufficiently with Brut splash-on antiperspirant, as recommended by Henry Cooper.

Janice was rather boyish, which in Henry's eyes made her the perfect starting point for what he hoped would prove to be a heterosexual life. Seven years in the cloistered confines of an all-boys school, and an illustrious career in the Scouts had left him uncertain about the issue of gender. He'd known many boys more effeminate than Janice, who, with her inability to look convincing wearing makeup and her tendency to discuss sport, represented in Henry's mind the nursery slopes of sexual encounter; the practice ground before the slalom. The manager's assistant had, rather uncouthly in Henry's opinion, only the day before informed the assembled staff that Janice wore a Chelsea bra........ loads of support but no cups. Henry was unsure about couth (un- or otherwise), but he did feel uneasy that the contents of a young girl's bra should be the subject of middle-aged speculation. He felt a duty, as the only male member of staff to find Janice in any way attractive, to stand up and defend her maligned figure; to befriend her diminutive protuberances and then perchance to take them home and play with them, like pet rodents, or Play-Doh.

The AM radio in the beige Cortina was struggling to keep track of Capital Radio.
'Little Nicky Horne.' The radio sang. The show was called "Your Mother Wouldn't Like It".
'Here's Hall and Oates,' Little Nicky Horne almost sang.
'She's gone...oh ah, I'd pay the devil to replace her,' Hall and Oates cried, just as they had so many times before.

'Geriatric nonsense.' Henry muttered as he reached for the off switch. He wondered if it would be any use sending Capital a few record tokens so they could play something different. They played "She's Gone" so often you could measure the frequency in Hertz, or maybe that should be hurts.

Things were looking up for Henry. He had been working for six months at Barclays and the management was very impressed by his performance. This in itself should have been vindication for having been dropped, after six moths trial, from the staff of Midland Bank who claimed his solemn and morose nature made him unsuitable to confront the public, but he had only that morning heard news from his old branch that had tempted him to believe in divine retribution. The manager at Midland Bank in Hillingdon, Mr Shitehouse (née Whitehouse), had a reputation for giving the young male staff a hard time whilst being excessively friendly and supportive to the young female staff. During the period that he was writing bad reports on Henry, a young cashier named Kathy was planning her impending wedding to Terry, a local car dealer. Terry became well known at the bank and would often pop in just before they all went to the pub at lunchtime. Being a forgetful type he would ask if someone would print him up a temporary cheque book as he had used up all his cheques and forgotten to hand the slip in for a new book. They were "good old Tel" who always stood his round, and bubbly Kath, salt of the earth, 'ow's your father, just one sugar, 'Coz I'm sweet enough'. No one wondered why Kathy was always the first to arrive. She would sort the mail and start inputting into the computer the cheques that had not gone through the automated clearing, apparently just to kill time and help the computer operator. The most common reason for cheques not going through the clearing was that they were temporary cheques that only had the account number printed and were not magnetically encoded.

Kathy and Terry got five years each for fraud after the bank noticed that few of Terry's cheques had ever been debited from his account. Henry was lost for words to describe his emotions on hearing this news; schadenfreude would have been a good word, but these were the unenlightened days of pre-Café Hag advertisements.

Henry's future was assured. Bank clerks marry other bank clerks; they get cheap mortgages and retire on a good pension. All he would have to do is keep his more ludicrous ambitions locked up in the guitar case under his bed.

To Northolt
To Harefield