Chosen

by Paddy Bostock

  “Lurch?”

  “The chancellor. Both vying for the top job, from what one hears, eh? Cabinet in disarray as usual, all warbling from different hymn sheets over Brexit. Plotting rife. Insurrection on the rise around the Nazi back benches. And all the while the Brussels eurocrats watching on, laughing their socks off. Along with the madman in the White House and Ripurpantzov in the Kremlin, no doubt…”

  “Double O Seventeen?”

  “Yes, Milly.”

  “Enough of the flimflam. I asked you a question.”

  “Which was? Remind me.”

  “What ‘close’ to Jeremy Crawford means. To which I require an answer. Now!”

  “Ah.”

  “Otherwise you may soon be finding yourself an ex-Double O Seventeen.”

  “I see.”

  “So no more muddying of waters.”

  “Point taken, Milly,” said Maurice, “rest assured I’m working on the problem twenty-four-seven.”

  “With…what…outcomes?”

  Maurice took a deep breath and stroked the head of Pete the pig, who had nosed his way through the door Maurice had left ajar and wandered over to see what was going on.

  “Oink,” he said. Encouragingly.

  “What was that noise?” said Dame Muriel, furrowing her brow.

  “Wind,” said Maurice. “In the willows. There’re a lot of willows around here.”

  “Where?”

  “Where I am.”

  “My patience is running very thin, Double O Seventeen.”

  “Understandably, ma’am.”

  “Quite. What, where you are concerned, one might term a career-defining moment. So get to the point or be damned.”

  Maurice opted for bean spillage and let devils take their hindmosts.

  “Well, ma’am, I do have up my sleeve this rather cunning ruse, even if I say so myself. Like to hear it?”

  Hiatus while Dame Muriel digested this resonant remark, reminding her as it did of Sir Hubert’s hope for precisely the same thing and his belief if anyone could come up with such a plan, Double O Seventeen could. What she really wanted to know was whether Maurice had found Jeremy Crawford yet, but if…

  “Milly? You still there?” said Maurice, as the hiatus persisted.

  “I’m here.”

  “So cunning ruse time?”

  “Okay, but it better be good. And make it brief,” said Dame Muriel. “I’m not one for beating around bushes, as you well know.”

  “Indeed, ma’am,” said Maurice, before outlining his plot to destabilize the positions of both the Russian and American dictators by flooding the Internet with images of John Lennon lookalike.

  Another hiatus this time, an even longer one.

  “Still there, Milly?” said Maurice. “Milly?”

  “Have you completely lost your marbles, Double O Seventeen?” Dame Muriel eventually spluttered. “A John Lennon lookalike, for God’s sake! If memory serves, was he not LSD-addicted, long-haired, Liverpudlian oaf who sent his MBE back to the queen?”

  “Indeed so, ma’am. In protest at our involvement in the Vietnam war. And who, along with his fellow Beatles, played a major part in Gorbachev’s glasnost.”

  “What? The bally Beatles weren’t politicians.”

  “No, ma’am. At least not overtly. But you have no idea of the power of popular music when it comes to consciousness-raising. You may recall the effect of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ on American society. And he’s a Nobel Laureate now,” said Maurice, adding for good measure his tale of the ancient St Petersburg guy still praying daily for Lennon’s spirit to return to Russia.

  “Cloud bloody cuckoo land,” spat Dame Muriel. “And even if it were to work on Ripurpantzov, which…I…very…much…doubt, are you also telling me it could work on the cretin in the White House?”

  “Point taken. It’s a long shot, Milly,” Maurice agreed. “But given the power of not only music but the social media in these bizarre days, in my view it’s one worth taking. What we’re looking at here is an iconic reminder of a less jingoistic, less me-me-mine age and, given the psychosis emanating from the White House and encouraged from the Kremlin, you just wonder how many folk might welcome that.”

  Yet another hiatus as Dame Muriel reflected on Sir Hubert’s comment on the fillip for MI6’s and MI5’s reputations should the cunning ruse he hoped for manage to upset apple carts in both Moscow and Washington simultaneously, feathers in caps and so on.

  “Milly?”

  “I’m here, Double O Seventeen. And your assessment of the potential impact of all this on fatuous Phoebe and her Brexiteers is? She is our current client, remember.”

  “Only too well.”

  “So?”

  “In a word?”

  “If you please.”

  “Wipeout,” said Maurice.

  Dame Muriel liked the sound of that.

  “A reversal of the knee jerk alt-right, and indeed alt-left, populisms currently wreaking havoc on British democracy as we once knew it, to be replaced by a resurgence of wiser, dare one say it, more reflective arguments.”

  “Like ‘make love not war’?” said Dame Muriel, vaguely recalling the line both she and Clarissa had scorned back in their distant Girton days.

  “Not such a foolish idea after all. A case of ‘coming together,’ as Lennon had it in his usual double-entendre-ish manner. A shame he had to be shot.”

  “Which leaves you with something of an impasse, even if I do agree to this nonsense, doesn’t it, Double O Seventeen?” said Dame Muriel. “What with the fellow being dead and everything. No good swamping the cyber waves with a dead person’s image, is there? Hardly likely to arouse much of your consciousness-raising, given people will have seen the images a million times already. Might as well put up pictures of Mozart.”

  “Quite so, Milly. Hence the part of my cunning ruse which posits John as a walking, talking returnee to planet earth, an avatar if you wish.”

  “A ghost?” whispered Dame Muriel, whose childhood had been spent in a haunted house in Hertfordshire.

  “Well, if you want to think of it that way, Milly. Mind you, Jesus Christ pretty much fits the same bill, would you not say? Another chap back from the dead, even though nobody’s ever actually seen him. But even so, just look at the clout he’s had. And indeed continues to have, whether in his Catholic or Anglican version.”

  Another hiatus while Dame Muriel struggled with her demons, namely the enduring paradox of the ghost of her recently deceased father whispering to her nightly, “There is no heaven, sweetie,” and the happy clappy religion she quotidianly had shoved down her throat by her governesses, all of whom assured her heaven was where the good girls went. And this while her mother danced the nights (and days) away with fancy boys in Soho.

  “Milly? Or should I call you M?”

  “Muh-muh-Milly’s fine,” said Dame Muriel, remembering her lacrosse days and pulling herself together sharpish. “Whatever you wish to call me, and always assuming I agree to your plan, we are still left with the problem of Lennon being dead, whether or not people believe in afterlives.”

  “You will, however, recall my suggestion of a lookalike, Milly, an entirely live person who, through computer generated imagery, could easily be confused with the real, albeit supposedly deceased, John Lennon. Same Scouse accent, same hair, same guitar style, same everything. I have all the means to achieve that.”

  “And you have a candidate in mind for this role?”

  “Milly, Milly? Sorry, you’re fading on me. Battery low, reception masts on the blink perhaps, don’t know what’s happening,” said Maurice, tapping at the Get Lost button on his phone. “But before you vanish into the ether altogether, may I assume you will at least consider my little plan?”

  “A pre-launch run-through in my office before I make any final decision, but in principle…” Dame Muriel was saying as Maurice fully depressed the Get Lost button.

  “Yessss,” he then said, punching ai
r.

  “Oink, oink,” said Pete, dancing a little pig dance called the Pig Trot.

  Twenty-four

  “PM on the line again?” Barry said when a gleeful Maurice re-joined the company accompanied by a still Pig-Trotting Pete.

  “Not this time. The circus. Perhaps you would care to step outside with me while I explain?” whispered Maurice, casting a meaningful eye over at Maggie, who was busy exchanging choosing/chosen experiences with Jeremy, Julie and Dennis.

  Intuiting this concern, Barry refreshed guests’ glasses with raspberry champagne and said he’d be just outside with Maurice for a moment and if anybody wanted anything they only need call. But nobody seemed to notice, all of them engrossed in sharing tales of their previously unexamined lives in a combined effort to make the current ones worth living. “Yeah, exactly the same thing happened to me,” was the comment featuring most regularly. It was all very therapeutic.

  “So, circus?” said Barry, when he and Maurice were through the door and out of earshot. “Which one assumes to be one of the MIs.”

  Maurice nodded.

  “Five or Six?”

  “Six,” Maurice confirmed. “Dame Muriel, my boss.”

  “The Girton gal?”

  “That’s her. How did you…?”

  Barry shrugged. “Oxbridge gossip from the old days. Pal of Clarissa’, if I’m not mistaken. Could’ve ended up PM herself if she’d played her cards differently.”

  “Pity she didn’t. At least Muriel has the power of thought.”

  “Not what I heard on the ancient grapevine. But never mind that, what did the dame have to say?”

  Maurice recounted the conversation.

  “And you took her response as a thumbs up?” said Barry.

  “Well, she didn’t say no. And my policy with a door that’s ajar has always been to put my foot in the opening and push a little harder before it gets slammed in my face.”

  Barry nodded. “Very wise, my boy. Reticence never got anybody anywhere. Unless of course they didn’t want to get anywhere in the first place.”

  “Quite.”

  “So, your plan of campaign?”

  “Is what I wanted to discuss with you. Who better than my old mentor?”

  “Even if he is now a tatty old gardener.”

  “Cultivating his garden just as well as he once cultivated minds.”

  Barry smiled. “Okay, enough of the flattery, let’s get to the point, shall we?”

  And so it was that, in the heart of rural England, Maurice repeated the plan he hoped would shake up and re-balance the corrupt conceits currently dominating world political institutions, both East and West.

  Barry nodded and shrugged.

  “I know, I know, it all sounds a bit like William Morris’s ‘News From Nowhere’ or some of Ivan Illich’s more bizarre proposals,” Maurice concluded. “But, if we ever lose sight of utopia, we might as well kiss our humanity goodbye and accept we are no more than the instruments of global greed. How are future generations of SATs-driven and smartphone-brainwashed kids ever to grow into thinking adults if they can’t dream? Look how long it took Jeremy to achieve his freedom, and against what odds. One assumes the same may be the case for Dennis, Julie, and even this Maggie fellow.”

  Barry couldn’t deny it. He’d walked the same road.

  “You may remember Lennon’s lines in ‘Working Class Hero.’ About children getting tortured and scared by parents and teachers for twenty-odd years until they can’t think straight because they’re too full of fear. And these days there are Twitter, Facebook et al to add to the mix, channels through which all sorts of unregulated bullying and indoctrination can be transmitted, which is why the madmen in the White House and the Kremlin are addicted to them. So, ironically using the very same weapons, it is in my humble opinion time to fight back.”

  Barry held up his hands in submission. “Say no more,” he said. “To stick with pop music, you’re talking to a man who’s still crazy after all these years. Just need to be reminded from time to time, that’s all. Which you have achieved with the same starred first you won from Oxford. So…to the actual strategy.”

  Maurice smiled and clapped his old tutor on the back.

  “Just one more little doubt, though,” said Barry. “You’re quite, quite sure it is within your Secret Service remit to undertake such a mission?”

  “What else but saving the world from megalomaniacs were James Bond’s missions ever about? And let us be clear, Barry, Fleming’s stories were only marginally embellished. Then, of course, there are John le Carré’s. I’m not comparing myself to Double 0 Seven or George Smiley, you understand, I would never make so bold. Also I’m clearly not fictional. But…”

  “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” said Barry.

  “You might put it that way, although the sources of that epigram remain obscure. Now, you asked about the actual strategy.”

  “So I did.”

  Which was when Maurice explained how he intended to fashion the Jeremy Crawford character through make-up, lip-syncing, an intensive course in method acting and computer generated imagery to sing an album of Lennon songs, including “Revolution” as if they had only newly been recorded.

  “As if?” said Barry who, since opting for a career in gardening, had spent no time wondering about distortions of reality.

  Maurice nodded. “It’s admittedly a leap of the imagination, but sadly I have to say it is also the hallmark of the make-believe world we currently live in. How many films are made these days without recourse to digitalized suspensions of disbelief?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t go to the pictures much these days. Ever actually,” said Barry. “The last film I liked was Brief Encounter with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. After that, everything seemed to go downhill a bit.”

  “You’re right. So far downhill that what attracts and persuades the twenty-first century consumer of instantly streamed movies and the dross swirling around the Internet is precisely ‘as if.’ We are currently living in a simulated world, Barry, and a very dangerous place it is.”

  “And you know the tricks of this new trade?”

  “I’ve learnt. I had to or there was no longer a way to do my job. In some ways it’s a cop-out, I agree. But to beat your enemy, first you have to join him. Then, when he’s not looking, you whack him with his very own tools.”

  “You’ve come a long way from your Oxford days, my boy. And more power to your elbow,” said Barry. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you. What I was also wondering, however, was what sorts of contribution Julie, Dennis, and now Maggie, might make to this scenario. It would be a pity to waste their new-found resources, would it not?”

  “Well,” said Barry after a moment’s thought, “how about we dress them up as Paul, George and Ringo? Then we’d have the whole crew back from the dead.”

  Maurice laughed long and hard at that.

  “Silly idea?” said Barry.

  “No, no, not at all. Brilliant idea,” Maurice spluttered when he’d finished laughing long and hard. “Possibly a little tricky where Julie’s concerned…she is a girl after all. Mind you,” he added, “she does have a certain look of Paul about her. And Maggie has lost a lot of weight, so I can see him as George. And Dennis for Ringo, well why not? We’ll need to obtain the consent of the real Paul and Ringo, of course, but my sense is they would be onside happily enough.”

  “Okay, so meanwhile shall we pop back inside and explain to the guys how the good news, in its twenty-first century version of course, has been brought from Ghent to Aix?”

  “Might take another stretch of the imagination, but we can try,” said Maurice, turning back to the Shepherd’s Hut.

  On the way he reminded Barry of Browning’s omission in his poem to divulge either what the good news from Ghent was or why it was important to Aixians. A lot of the time, the poet was apparently unsure, or had forgotten, what his poems were about. As evinced on the occasion when asked by one o
f his female admirers for the meaning of one of them, only to receive the reply: “When I wrote it, only God and Robert Browning knew the meaning; now God alone knows.”

  “Let us just hope our good news can be explained a little better,” he was saying as Barry pushed open the already reopened door.

  “Oink,” agreed Pete, who had yet again nosed his way outside to see what the humans were up to.

  Twenty-five

  Having secured the agreement of Jeremy, Julie, Dennis, and Maggie to take part in his little project, Maurice motored back to number thirteen Oakshot Street Tooting in his dad’s old Morris Minor Traveller to prepare the computer mock-ups he would need for his meeting with Dame Muriel. Along the way he mused on the gratifying speed with which Jeremy and company had accepted the challenge of becoming The Reconstructed Beatles, or TRB, as they had finally agreed to be known. Ignorant of the Liverpool music scene, Maurice had proposed The Bootleg Beatles, but Julie/Paul had scotched that idea.

  “We’ve already got them back home and they’re great,” she’d said. “Be wrong to go stealing their name, wouldn’t it?”

  “Quite wrong,” Maggie/George had agreed. “Wouldn’t want accusations of plagiarism stalling our plans at their very inception.”

  And so it was that Jeremy had come up with the “reconstructed” idea. Against some opposition from Dennis/Ringo, who had proposed “new and improved” until reminded by Julie of Billy Connolly’s mockery of the phrase, noting a product was either new or improved but couldn’t be both.

  It was on the word “reconstructed” that Maurice dwelt as the old Morris Minor trundled along A and B roads at its top speed of 45 mph. No use taking the poor old thing on motorways where it would get flashed and honked at even in the slow lane. Maurice had once tried the hard shoulder as an alternative, only to be stopped by a wailing police siren and threatened with a lifetime driving ban until he showed the coppers his MI6 ID. And even then, albeit huffily, they’d escorted him off the main drag onto a D road occupied by sheep and cattle and told him to get lost. Not the sort of treatment James Bond would have tolerated, but then, unlike Maurice, OO7 would have been driving an Aston Martin DB7 in the fast lane. And outrun the coppers anyway. But, on balance, Maurice was glad he was only OO17 rolling along quietly on uncongested roads. More time for thought. And it was to reconstructed that such thoughts kept returning.