Keeping Up with Mr. Johnson

I wrote this yesterday, for a prompt to do with people trying to overcome a language barrier. The fact that this was the first thing to come into my head speaks volumes. Not very good volumes.

“ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT?”

“No,” replied the terrified receptionist, thereby exhausting her entire supply of English words.

Boris sighed loudly, and ran a hand through his bright blonde mop of hair, the mop that had twice appealed so to the voting populace of London. “All right then. Is there ANYONE” – he made an expansive gesture with his hands – “in this ESTABLISHMENT” – he attempted to indicate the hotel as a whole – “who speaks BLOODY ENGLISH?!”

The receptionist shrugged helplessly. To think, she had been so pleased when the big man who always appeared in photos on the Internet looking silly had come to stay! She had been hanging around the hotel even in her off hours, trying to get a picture of him puffing out his cheeks while playing tennis or sliding down a zipline or something. The fact that the hotel had neither a tennis court nor a convenient zipline hadn’t struck her as an obstacle particularly. A good funnyman always found an opportunity.

Now he was on the phone, pacing up and down in front of her and getting increasingly red-faced. “Yes, David, it’s Boris. Yes, I know. Yes, it’s this bloody backwater you’ve stuck me in. Nobody here seems to speak a single word of a civilised tongue. What can you… No, I don’t care what… No, I don’t want to talk to George! Why would I want to talk to… Yes, get William on it. Or Theresa, I don’t know. Someone. Iain, maybe- no, not him, actually…All right, yes, fine. I don’t what you think it’ll accomplish, but…” He turned back to the receptionist. “Look, I’m going to put the Prime Minister on speakerphone.” He attempted, poorly, to mime sound coming out of the phone. “He’ll sort this out. He’s got experience dealing with foreigners.”

He placed the phone carefully on the desk, and pressed the speakerphone icon with the air of a surgeon making an incision. A voice came from it: “Hello? Receptionist? Can you hear me?”

The receptionist looked from the phone to Boris helplessly.

“She doesn’t speak English, David.”

“Oh, yes, shit, you did say that. Erm, how does Hollande do it… Bonjour, mademoiselle. Er, je m’appelle David… or should that be Davide?”

“Tried that. She doesn’t speak French either.”

“Oh, all right. Er, Merkel, Merkel… Guten Tag. Ich heisse David-“

“Or German.”

“Oh, hell. Erm, ave-“

“Or Latin.”

“Well bloody hell, Boris, what languge does she speak? Where are you again?”

“I don’t know! Wherever it was the party sent me after that… incident. With… the woman. Surely you should know.”

“Surely you should know! You’re there!”

“I don’t know. It’s hot. There’s… trees outside. There’s a pool.”

“Did you catch a trace of any language you understood?”

“No. Why would I be listening to other people talk?”

“Look, Boris, I’ve got to go. I’ve just switched on BBC Parliament and Corbyn isn’t wearing a tie; I’ve got to go talk to the media about it. You take care of yourself.”

The line went dead. Boris’s eyes widened.

“You can’t leave me like this, David! Does Bullingdon status mean nothing anymore?”

The phone stubbornly refused to respond. Boris exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“So,” he said finally, turning back to the receptionist. “Have we tried Ancient Greek yet?”