8.6: The Manifesto of the Bradford Boys
As he agreed, pTravis steps outside the Potting Shed to parlay with his former friend. And of course, Lottie immediately squeezes through the shutting door to be with him. pTravis suddenly realises that he wishes Fabian were here too. Perhaps it will come to that.
“Come on ’Gillo, what’s this all about? And what is this
army?”
“Well you know we all call the workshop in the under-drawing of the Potting Shed the ‘Orc Pits’? I’ve taken that a little more seriously. You may not even have noticed my absence, but I have been below you all, for days!, toiling in the cellars, while you feasted on vegetables and fruit, like decadent idiots. These are my Spronge-orcs or Sponge-bots! No, they are Sponge-borgs! Part machine. Part organic matter! I’ve made a myth to kill a myth, as Wilfrid Sellars promised. They are here to sweep aside the foreign faith we suddenly acquired in the Order of the Sponge!”
“But how were you able to create them?” Lottie sounds genuinely surprised and impressed.
“Well while golden boy here went to Cambridge reading philosophy, I worked my guts out at Loughborough on robotics.”
“But you said ‘organic matter’, also?”
“As a mole, one comes across quite a bit of undifferentiated organic matter.”
“Yurgh!”
But now pTravis cuts in: “You said they were part of your plan to sweep aside our faith in the Order of the Sponge. But you too used to have faith in the Order, too! They helped us out with that plague of bulbs!”
“I’m not sure they did. I think we had a collective
hallucination and the bulbs just left. I think that the Order of the Sponge is
like K-Pop. It’s suddenly very fashionable. It’s catchy. But it’s not very
English is it? I’m here, with my army of sponge-orcs to put us back onto the
straight and narrow.”
“But that doesn’t sound very English, or, better, British,
or, better, decent, either! You can’t go round changing minds through violence!”
“The Poet thought so! Farren, I mean. He’s our guide, isn’t
he?”
Lottie murmurs: “I wonder. Has Farren become our Cavafy?”
But then she adds, louder: “You’re not going to quote from the ‘Manifesto of
the Bradford Boys’ are you? It was never proved Farren wrote any of that. Even
the judge said so! He only served time because of his role in the violent
affray it helped cause. They never found the knife! The child survived. Play
fair!”
Manifesto of the Bradford Boys
Lottie shivers and draws herself under pTravis wing, a
movement in comparison to which, at all other times, she’d prefer painful death.