LXIII
Sinners, Poor and Wretched
Sir Norman
2079
There was so much to adjust to now he'd returned to England. The list was long and mostly rather distressing. For a start, this wasn't the same country as the one he'd escaped from just over a year before. At that time it had been a Kingdom. Now there was no longer even a Royal Family. He was now a citizen of the Republic of England. What next? Would the English provinces also demand political independence and leave only the Home Counties under Westminster's sway.
The worst was that he was no longer a man with a title. Lord Newbury was no more. He could use the title, of course, but it was reduced to a meaningless honorific. Perversely, as a concession to demands from the press barons who'd shafted him more completely than did any Congolese male prostitute, the government of the Republic of England had elected to allow nobles to retain their knighthoods. This was justified on the basis that the title was associated with desert rather than heredity. But without a monarch to whom one could bend the knee and be dubbed a knight, Sir Norman would now be one of the last free-born Englishmen to hold the title.
Sir Norman's view was that the loss of royal status diminished the essence of the nation whose traditions he'd worked so hard to defend. Nobody had much respect for a National Constitution as opposed to a Constitutional Monarch. This much was obvious from the hurriedly redesigned airport signs and the parliamentary insignia that substituted a thoroughly uninspiring image of a threadbare lion for the grand crest that once denoted a great nation. It was almost as bad as the crappy red cross on a white background that Sir Norman still didn't properly associate with the country of his birth. Spin it by forty-five degrees and it resembled the symbol for a charitable organisation whose services across the globe had stretched beyond breaking point. And who'd want a nation of shopkeepers to be reduced to the status of a high street charity shop?
Still, however shitty modern England was, it could never be worse than the Congo. Although Sir Norman had been mostly insulated from the world beyond the compound walls, from both its oppressive heat and its unsightly poverty, the Congo had a way of making its presence felt. He had the pick of the best black arses in the land and his wealth, already considerable, was much greater in comparison in a country where lives were cheap and everyone's anus was for the shafting. Nevertheless nothing could forever hold back the rough justice of civil war and the subsequent collapse of the Congolese government. So, before the time arrived when he would be strung up and disembowelled like so many other notable foreign residents, Sir Norman decided to take the lesser risk of returning to England, via Wales' porous border, with his American passport and the identity of Newton Nash from Oklahoma.
"So what have you arranged to celebrate arrival of the homecoming knight and his entourage?" Sir Norman asked Oscar, his old friend and one-time business associate.
"I've got some brown arse, some white arse and, knowing your preference, some black arse," said Oscar as he pulled aside the curtain that divided Sir Norman and his close friends from the hired services he'd outsourced for the evening.
"And some white cunt, as well," Sir Norman sniffed as he pointed at the few women that interspersed the line of naked men.
"That's mostly for my personal pleasure, my lord," said Oscar who knew how much his friend liked to still be addressed by the honorific that had been taken from him. "Although, as you know, I'm tempted by a puckered hairy anus after a line or two, men aren't generally my first preference."
"I've seen better women," Sir Norman remarked. "Was there a discount offer at the brothel?"
"None of the women are professionals," said Oscar who kept his voice low enough that Sir Norman's female guests couldn't hear him. They were talking among themselves and wholly unabashed by their state of nakedness. "They think they're just at a different kind of party. Although they'll get something for their effort, none of it will go to an agency or pimp. There's no third party to take a slice of the action."
"You don't mind having to fuck mere amateurs?" remarked Sir Norman incredulously.
"I've always retained a taste for the real deal, my lord," said Oscar. "Professionals are better at going through the motions, but I prefer an unfaked orgasm from the woman I fuck. In any case, there's a sentimental reason for the selection of women you see here."
"There is?"
"That one there, the blonde, I used to fuck her mother years ago. Now I get to fuck the daughter. What could be more delicious?"