Boris Johnson - Seventy-Two Virgins

‘I’ll get the health and safety round to that garage,’ he said. ‘We all know what goes on there. It’s disgoosting,’ said Dean’s adoptive father, and Dean felt a twinge of remorse.

And then one September, two and a half years after the deployment of the leylandii, Price exacted his appalling revenge. Dennis and Vie and Dean had been to Alicante, and things had not been easy. Dennis resented the way Dean kept his headphones on all day, and Dean was basically doing his nut. For seven solid days he had endured a beach holiday with his adoptive parents: Dennis with the Factor 15 glooped on top of his head, and every other extremity, Vie with her crispy hair and stunned blue eyes and pointless expensive jewellery; Dennis with his old man’s tits, Vie with her evening lipstick running into the cracks around her mouth.

Dean would stare at the incredible girls, and feel a repeated sense of amazement that people were allowed to appear like this, before him, in public. He would lie on his back and squint at the surf, and observe the curious fact that when a beautiful girl emerged from the sea, you couldn’t always tell how big she was. As she rose, with water running down her terrifying shape, he would assume she was a divinity, a Venus Anadyomene, a mega-titted six-footer. But then as she came closer, so close that sometimes she would drip all over him, he would see that she was really just a little Spanish girl, all in the same proportions, but with her dimensions magnified by the sun.

‘Dean!’ Vie had called to him at one stage, ‘shouldn’t you be going for a swim?’ And he had leaned forward, flapping his hands in irritation. He had sulked, in fact, all holiday, and his sulk was the worse because he was ashamed of his sulking; and he was ashamed because he knew, with the good part of himself, that Dennis and Vie were only doing their best. He sulked, and felt guilty for sulking, in the taxi all the way from Birmingham Airport.

So when he saw what had happened to the hedge, he felt an almost superhuman surge of loyal rage. The desecration was bad enough on its own, the tremendous battlefield aura of aggression and violation that rose from the buzz-sawed stumps. It was insane, in itself, that Price should have felt able to cross the frontier, in broad daylight, and perpetrate this massacre. But the real offence was the insult that made Vie cry, and made Dennis sink to his knees in lamentation. ‘My trees,’ he cried, and his voice rose over Wednesbury like Rachel weeping for her children.

At the end of the lawn, next to a mound of hacked-off foliage, were the limbs and trunks of the victims, neatly hewn by this psychopath, into even lengths. Propped up, in felt tip, was an amateur advertisement: ‘Logs for sale.’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Price the Cheese. ‘Law’s been changed, hasn’t it. The council sends you three warnings, and then they are entitled to chop down a vexatious tree.’

‘I saw no warnings,’ said Dennis Faulkner.

‘Really?’ Price cocked an eyebrow.

‘What is this law?’ wailed Vie.

‘Check it out. It’s called the High Hedges Act. Labour chap called Stephen Pound. First piece of Labour legislation I’ve agreed with, actually.’

For many human beings there is something psychologically disabling about an act of violence on this scale. Some will lash out, and let the instant flame of vengeance bloom in their hearts; others find themselves winded, depressed, and full of the loneliness of the victim. So Dennis and Vie made themselves a Baxter’s mushroom-rich cuppasoup and retreated to their bedroom. As he lay in his own narrow cell, adorned with Lord of the Rings posters and a Sunday Times map of the Roman Empire, Dean listened to their defeated murmurs and fed his fury. He knew in his heart that Price had a point. They all knew it secretly, even Vie. But the coffee-coloured semi-detached adolescent saw in the disaster a chance for oneness with his parents.

He would fight their corner. He would make a great act of atonement for the fact of his difference. He lay and watched the car headlights pass with aqueous mystery across the ceiling. Perhaps he would execute some Godfather-type revenge, and cause Price to wake screaming, his sheets polluted with a gigantic truckle of one of his experimental fromages. Then he had a better idea. Expertly skipping the stair that creaked he went downstairs, equipped himself, and stole like the shadow of a panther into the garden of Price the Cheese.

In the months that followed his social workers and probation officers would often ask him where he had come by the idea; and though it was of course the classic culmination of neighbour disputes, from Birmingham to Bosnia, he always insisted that it was his own.

The first warning Price had was the BANG of the frosted glass on the front door, blown in by the heat from the banked bonfire of logs and kerosene-drenched brushwood. Immediately his house began to surrender itself to the flames. The junk mail writhed and was consumed on the mat. The mat offered no resistance. All along the corridor it was a tale of instant, ecstatic capitulation by the pictures and soft furnishings. All Price’s possessions were ready to turn themselves in, without a fight, and might have betrayed their master to perdition, had he not heard the boom, nipped out from under his duvet in his Viyella pyjamas, opened the landing window, and leapt for the now non-existent branches.

So Price the Cheese fell with an oath, because he had no doubt who had done this to him, and bust his ankle.

As he stood with his parents watching several thousand gallons of water thud into the Hollyhocks, and as the glare of the last flames died on their aghast faces, Dean knew what to do. He took a snap decision. He would say nothing. It was certainly possible that Dennis would hail him as a hero, and love him forever more for visiting such destruction on his enemy. But as he looked at the soaking, carbonized living room, and as the night air of Wolverhampton was filled with the smell of toasted cheese, he decided not to take the risk.

As a strategy, it failed. The police came looking and found a jerry can covered with Dean’s fingerprints, in the Faulkner shed. Dean was taken to the living room, and under the gaze of the Queen Mother, his adoptive parents, and two kindly members of the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, he burst into tears. His mother said nothing, but it was the words of his father that he kept and nursed, coddling and crooning over them when he wanted to bruise his heart into hatred.

Poor Dennis had tried so hard, for Vie’s sake, to love the kid with all his heart, but he had never utterly succeeded. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ he said now, swatting the side of his head as though a mosquito had landed on either ear.

‘You stupid little… coon!’

As soon as the word was out he wanted to choke it back. Vie was furious. Dennis had never said anything like it before, and it was a complete rejection of everything she stood for, what with her work in the Sue Ryder shop and all.

‘Dennis!’ she snapped. ‘Oh I’m sorry, my dear,’ said the former lift executive, advancing on Dean.

One of the policemen scribbled ‘coon’ in his notebook. You never knew how these things would go. But Dean shrank before him, and the ambiguities in his status seemed to fade away.

There it was, en c/air, decoded. He was a coon, and he was stupid, and he was stupid because he was a coon. And whenever he was subsequently affected by doubt or scruple about what he was doing, he would say ‘stupid coon’ to himself, and immediately the watertight bulkheads in his brain would come crashing down. Which was what Dean did now as he sat in the stifling heat in the back of the ambulance, assisting in a plot that had started to go wrong almost as soon as it began.