Intire Irons

‘The criminal isn’t making a fashion statement when he wears Intire Irons around his ankle – they’re simply the most secure bondage available.’

This message, along with the accompanying picture of thuggish criminals, clad in irons, posing on a catwalk, was posted on billboards all around the town of Brackley as part of Intire’s campaign to win the leg-iron contract for the local prison.

The campaign was a success, but in more ways than anticipated. The same day they were awarded the prison contract, a woman walked into Intire’s offices and asked for a set of the leg irons ‘to liven up her home life’.

Archy Norris was told of the new development and asked to come up with a slogan to attract the new market, which he did: ‘Is your woman chained to the kitchen and a slave in the bedroom? She could be – with the Intire Bondage Kit’.

The accompanying images were a sensation: fashionable, attractive women chained to a kitchen table, a cooker, and, most suggestively of all, a bed. There wasn’t a single conversation to be heard in Brackley that didn’t in some way reference the advertisements.

Archy Norris had his own personalised chains, his reward for devising the wondrous slogans, with leather padding for comfort, Alas, the prison authorities were not so relaxed as to allow him to go without leg-irons. It was a cushy job, they reminded him, not the back-breaking hard labour enjoyed by the other prisoners.

Norris received an allowance of a few pennies for his work. There were other rewards, including better food, but not the release he so desired – a gruesome murderer he would never be freed, in fact but for his value to the advertising industry he would almost certainly be hung for his crimes.

Norris had been given early sight of the irons, to help him come up with a slogan. His cell mate, a former blacksmith, had taken advantage of the fact to work a key which would fit any of Intire’s leg-irons.  

A mass breakout was planned, coinciding with the launch of Intire’s ‘Share-With-A-Friend’ range. Many of the prison guards, and their wives, received invites to the launch, as did the police and their spouses.

It was the dullest breakout in prison history, 493 prisoners simply undid their chains, overcame the few guards by sheer numbers, and walked through the gate unchallenged.

Norris was amongst them, and he walked off into the night, into obscurity.

Or, at least, he nearly did. Then he realised that life on the run would involve the same struggle for existence that had landed him in prison in the first place, there would be no cosy jobs for advertising companies, no being the governor’s favourite, no special food, he would be another anonymous escapee.

As his fellow inmates romped free, thanks to the poor-quality irons he had helped make famous, Archy Norris returned to his cell, re-clad himself in Intire’s finest ironware, and waited.