Ladies From Hell Read Online Free

through the windows of every Funeral Parlour in Salisbury, got herself twenty-five per cent for five years and ended up better off than any of us. I heard her defence was that she could never stand euphemisms.
    The Establishment took its revenge of course. Or rather it took a whole series of revenges, each wilder than the last. The first move was to disenfranchise all negatax payers. Thatdidn’t get to where I lived as I’d never voted anyway; the nearest I ever got to a polling booth was spinning a coin in front of the Recording Officer and getting slung out for cheek. Then they pronounced us second class citizens, which we’d been for years anyway, and banned us from jury service and from holding public office. That rebounded as well; having a class of legally-defined dropouts caused all sorts of piquant problems. There were some more High Court junketings, at the end of which the Pre-Raphs got themselves declared a public charity and there was a rush to adopt us as deductible assets. Owning your own nut case became the in thing overnight; it was a bit like being an eighteenth-century hermit. Which was why Lady A turned up in person one bright morning in a brand new State Alpha and hauled me off to the Ancestral Pile. Clancy, Am and Evan went to Wilton New House, where they’ve done very well; and the Overseers appeared.
    That isn’t their proper title of course; they’re Field Liaison and Surveillance Officers, or some such bloody rubbish. But whatever you call them, the effect’s the same. All Class D’s have them now; they live with us, read our mail, bicker over our expenses and snoop generally. To each his priest and whore; it’s a bit like having a personalized super-accountant. If we clean a window for half an Anglo they’re supposed to pocket it and issue a receipt. In theory they never let us out of sight in case we concoct a mischief against the State, though in practice that’s a laugh a minute. They’re supposed to keep our noses to the grindstone too; their salary increments are keyed to our income in some way that’s never been fully made clear to me, so a year or two in the field can be quite profitable for them. But with negatax payers the situation’s very different. The snoopers are still expected to keep the percentages up; but the more we earn the more we
get
, which isn’t the name of the game at all. So either way a negatax Overseer can reckon on getting his balls chewed with monotonous regularity, and the only way the Service can staff the scheme at all is by making it a hyper short cut to Senior Grade. Hence the deepening lines on the forehead of my current watchdog; it’s a situation in which nobodycan win.
    In fact, owning your own Overseer can have its compensations. As I said, George was coming on nicely; my first one fancied himself at Scrabble and there was another who was the best sort of chess opponent you could wish for, he always went to pieces if you collared his knights. And there was another, the fourth I think or it may have been the fifth, who played a really mean game of squash. I lost twelve pounds in four weeks after Lady A built the new court; I was quite sorry when he passed on.
    I woke up thinking about Clancy. I’d decided I owed her a letter; I wanted to write anyway to find out when Am was likely to be coming down again. But there was a letter from her in the post. James brought it down from the house. He’s a bloody old tealeaf is James, but he does the silver salver bit a treat. I made some coffee, and he sat and had a crafty drag before he went back. Technically of course the Overseer should have opened the mail; but he wasn’t in evidence yet, though there were grampus-type noises coming from the bathroom. So I took the letter into the Barn to read. I could always give it to him later.
    “There’s one good thing to note,” Clancy said at the start. “Evan’s got the commission for the mural they were talking about. That’s ten thousand nega at least