This Time It’s Personnel (Oddjobs, #2)

by Heide Goody

leather, spikes, flagellation – like a Tory MP’s ideal weekend but without safe words.”

The true purpose of education is to show progress, to put a numerical figure to a person and say, ‘This person is better than that one.’ How can we instil British values such as fortitude and personal endeavour if we do not have the failures of the rabble to learn from?”

“How can there be social mobility, if there are no bodies to climb over?” said the headteacher.

“So, all existence is futile and meaningless and the only truth to be gained is through creating artificial confrontation and then sharing our pain with others?”

But her imagination didn’t have a huge special effects budget and in her mind’s eye she saw something like a body bopper in a sleeping bag rolling across a miniature city made of cardboard boxes.

Vivian had seen a lot of rituals in her time: weddings, banishments, christenings, summonings, graduations, funerals, initiations, blood libations and Christmas dinners. They all had the same four elements, starting with the set dressing – the flowers in the aisle, the holly wreath, the black robes of Baphomet. Next came the words of preamble that, no matter how you rearranged them, amounted to “we are gathered here today to whatever-it-is-we’re-here-to-do.” Then came the words of the ceremony itself, which could be spoken perfectly well without any of the other nonsense but without which there was no ritual at all – the “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the “the power of Christ compels you”, the “I have no mouth but I must scream.” And finally came the symbolic act that sealed the ritual, made of it a sacrament or covenant – the rings, the plunging dagger, the soil on a coffin lid.