Because, from the tales they’d told him, that’s exactly what Jeremy, Julie, Dennis, and now Maggie were—re-made, re-born almost. As indeed was his erstwhile professor, Barry. And not through the intercession of outside agencies, but from their own initiative, Maurice mused while slipping Dvořák’s cello concerto in B minor into his CD player and humming along—dee dum dee dee dee do dah, dee dum dee dee dee dee dah. How peculiar yet how courageous such fight back was that, against a culture devoted to the myth of belonging? A very special one, he concluded, mindful of the dread with which so many twenty-first-century people would regard the prospect of standing outside the flock, the original Latin meaning of the now pejorative term “egregious,” if he remembered rightly. Where would Twitter and Facebook and company be were more to follow the example of Barry, Jeremy & Co. and become loners? Out of business, that was where. And so much the better for it, Maurice was reckoning as he drew up outside his house and the Morris Minor gasped its relief.
“Hi there, Tiddles,” he said, opening the door and nearly tripping over Terpsichore who was catnapping on the inside mat. “Hank and Butch been looking after you nicely, have they?”
“Miaow,” said Tiddles (/Terpsichore/Cat) non-committally.
“Glad to see Daddy home?”
“Miaow,” Tiddles repeated, also abstractedly.
You know how it is with cats. How dogs come bounding up to lick you when you come home but cats don’t. As an admirer of their insouciant nature, Maurice just nodded and smiled.
“Thought so. How about we open a nice tin of Pussy Chunks?”
Tiddles semi-shrugged but nonetheless wandered off into the kitchen where Maurice’s landline phone was ringing fit to bust until, as usual, it went dead just as he picked up.
“Bugger,” he said, dropping his overnighting travel bag and dialling 1471.
“You were called today at sixteen thirty-two hours,” said the British Telecom lady accusingly. “The caller withheld their number.”
“Thank Christ for that,” said Maurice, slamming down the phone.
His patience with telephone scam artists was running on empty. How dumb did the dorks have to be to think that he of all people would believe they were the International Fraud Crime Squad—IFCS—operating out of Manhattan (more likely Mumbai to judge by the Bollywood accents) and unless he gave them the details of all his credit cards and pin numbers immediately, he would be opening himself to “total financial wipeout and potential accusations of terrorist sympathies” seeing as they had evidence of his cards having been stolen by a gang of ISIS thieves intent on branding him as one it its members and thus rendering him in mortal danger of retribution from the lunatic in the White House and his alt-right redneck and hillbilly backers.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he was saying as the phone took to warbling all over again.
Sighing but nonetheless hoisting the receiver off its cradle, Maurice rehearsed the line he’d long ago invented for IFCS and their like, namely: “This telephone contains a special voice-activated recognition device which is currently recording your name, address, eye colour, underpants size, and the condition of your vital organs—heart, liver, kidneys, and so on—all of such details to be fed into a special computer program which will pinpoint your location and allow me to press the button that will zap you into outer space without a parachute.” Which, given Maurice’s computer wizardry, was no idle threat. Not that he ever intended to use it, of course, but the Mumbai hackers weren’t to know that.
This time it wasn’t IFCS or one of their copycats on the line, however. It was Dame Muriel.
“Casanova? What the bloody hell’s going on?” her voice boomed down the line. “Tried your bally mobile a thousand times, but it kept going to message. What kind of an OO17 are you?”
“One who switches off his mobile when he’s driving in case he causes a fatal accident, ma’am.”
“You don’t have hands-free?”
“Never saw the need. Now, how may I be of assistance?”
~ * ~
Dame Muriel wasn’t the only one suffering practically terminal impatience at the absence of news from OO17. Clearly PM Clarissa knew nothing of The Reconstructed Beatles plan, but she remained obsessed with the need to find Jeremy Crawford, brand him the hidden architect of all her tribulations, switch focus, and for once and for all to stop the media dubbing her as dithering, incompetent, mealy-mouthed, and, in the words of the Daily Snitch’s latest editorial: “So feeble she couldn’t knock a hole in a damp Kleenex.” It was all too much, truly it was! Half her time these days she spent on aeroplanes trying to stitch up jazzy trade deals with thriving economies outside the blasted EU: Kuala Lumpur, Uzbekistan, and Timor, to name but three. And all the while playing what she thought of as hardball with the squabbling Tory factions in not only her own cabinet, but also in parliament and increasingly amongst the very grassroots membership, as well as playing even harder ball with the sanctimonious Europeans who still wouldn’t agree to a bespoke trade deal for Britain after Brexit. What the hell was wrong with them, she wondered, pacing up and down her Downing Street bedroom. Had they ever had empires upon which the sun never set? Had they invented the language now spoken, albeit often distortedly, by practically everybody on the planet? Did they have a Shakespeare? Did they have monarchies dating back a thousand years? Of course they bloody didn’t. So they were just jealous, that was all. It was enough to make a PM cry, which on occasions Clarissa did. On and on she struggled to do her job, and still it was only sneers all around she received in return. If only Miserable (probably also Jealous) Muriel and her fancy boy Casanova could do their bally jobs properly and find the megalomaniac bonkers banker, everything would be sooo…
It was during one these fits of pique that, keen to wring any last drop from the Special Relationship with what was after all one of her ex-colonies, Clarissa called the madman in The White House on her red-button hot-line to seek his advice on story-switching. After all, as a fellow sufferer from the slings and arrows of outrageous journalists, “enemies of the people” as he termed them, he should know. What if there were some new angle she could use as back-up to the awful possibility of Jeremy sodding Crawford never being found?
“Yup? Oh hi there, Clarrie. Only you gotta be quick, sweetheart,” said the madman only seconds before the call went to super-encrypted message. “I got me a little fake photo problem here.”
“Fake photo problem?”
“You ain’t seen it? It’s all over the freakin’ Innernet? Two trillion hits an’ countin’.”
“No.”
“Of me climbing up on board Air Force One and then there’s fake wind blowin’ at the back of my head and my hair comes awf. Fake, fake, fake.”
“Your hair?”
“No honey, the damn photo. My hair’s the most beautiful natural hair any president ever had. Everybody knows that and is jealous. The photo’s fake. Worked up by some Democrat computer nerd, most likely. Or mebbe a Mexican. I ever catch the guy who dunnit he’s gonna be waterboarding in Guantanamo till it’s his dick that drops awf.”
“Sorry,” said Clarissa, keen to move the conversation along.
“So you should be. But I’m comin’ back from this, like I always do. You better believe it, Clarrie. You know whut I’m gonna do?”
“Not off hand,” said Clarissa, in her well-practised equivocation voice.
“I am gonna order me a parade of all my biggest, most nuclear, most long-distance miss’les and thousands of my soldiers, airmen, and marines to march past along Pennsylvania Avenue while I take the salute as Commander-in-Chief,” said the president who’d dodged the draft claiming he had a sore foot and was in any case too busy avoiding sexually transmitted diseases to go off fighting yellow people. That was his personal Vietnam.
“Ain’t no fake hair disser gonna argue with that kinda power,” he added.
“Golly,” said Clarissa, attracted to the notion of Britain’s heavily armed bravest and best marchi
ng up Whitehall from Parliament Square past The Cenotaph to Trafalgar Square surrounded by tanks while she looked on and saluted commandingly. Possibly with a fly-past from the RAF and a few nukes on display, too. Not bad as a diversionary plan. Not bad at all.
“Sorry about your hair,” she said, but mercifully for her, the follicularly challenged sex pest in the White House was already holding the phone from his ear.
“Gotta love ya an’ leave ya, pussycat,” he muttered. “A business—excuse me country—to run. Busy, busy, busy…like always.”
As indeed he was, hanging up the phone and moving from behind the presidential- decree-signing desk to stand before a wall-length mirror and hold behind his head a smaller glass to inspect the extent of hair loss and seeing only the patch of blue-veined scalp now so (fakely) familiar to millions across the Twitterverse.
“Holy Christ on a fuckin’ bike, sumptn gotta be done about this,” he was saying as his new rug toupée director, Marianna Kolmover was ushered into the Oval Office all confidence and smiles.
“No problemo, Mister President. Just a brand new hairpiece and little more glue here and there,” she said, taking from her EHL (Emergency Hair Loss) satchel a brand new, gleaming blond, man-wig and a tube of Super Stick.
“This better be good, babe,” said the world’s most powerful cretin. “I’m a guy on camera all the time an’ I gotta look my best. An’ always better than Ripurpantzov! Other hand, he’s nearly bald, so I got the advantage over him right there, don’t I?”
“Sure you do,” said Kolmover. “You wanna turn around and sit down so I can take a closer look?”
“Okay, honey. Hey, nice tits you have. And some ass! Mebbe, when you’re through with my hair, we could, ya know, spend a little cozy comfort time together?”
But ex-Miss Kansas Kolmover was no new kid on the block. She knew only too well of the president’s peccadilloes and had been prepped for any of what, in the wake of recent Hollywood scandals, the media were now calling HLISBS (High Level Inappropriate Sexual Behaviour Syndrome). A shame from the president’s perspective he had no idea she also currently headed up a national cross-party women’s campaign called “Gropers Go Fuck Yourselves” and had been weaselled into the White House in the undercover guise of a rug toupée expert to collect any dirt she could on the asshole currently running the White House. In her bra lay secreted a micro-recorder, which hadn’t been found by the goons at the door when they tried to frisk her because she had threatened them—and their boss—with instant international HLISBS media exposure if they laid so much as a finger on her.
“Whoa there, buddy,” she said, when The Leader of the Free World made a grab for her backside, “Touch this gal and you’re toast,” she added, clicking a hidden switch which replayed his lubricious language back to him and caused him to flinch. “Now d’you want me to fix your goddam hair or dontcha? Elsewise I’m outta here right now.”
This left the prez in a no-man’s land between lust, rage and narcissism. To demand one more freebie fuck with an ornery babe even if it meant yet another infuriating sex slur, or to get his rug fixed, that was the question. After a fleeting hiatus during which he scowled threateningly and stumped about promising to “stiff” Kolmover if she ever released a single word he’d said, he backed down and went for getting his rug fixed. A case of looks über alles.
~ * ~
Back in Downing Street, PM Clarissa was already on the phone to the head of the armed forces, Sir Stanley “Six Gun” Michaelson, requesting a full military march-past (and flyover) up Whitehall while she saluted from the steps of The Cenotaph.
“And make bloody sure all the papers, and the telly people, and the Internet, and the whole nation, know about it,” barked Clarissa.
“Noted, ma’am,” said Sir Stanley. “Only it’s going to cost you.”
“Cost me?”
Which was when Sir Stanley reminded the PM of how much government expenditure on the armed forces had been slashed in recent years on the repeated excuses of austerity and the costs of Brexit.
“We have only half the manpower we need to rule the world as we used to, nuclear submarine building is in tatters, the RAF has no nice new planes, chaps and chapesses on the ground are eating from food banks to survive. Need I go on? And now you want a godforsaken march-and-fly past?” said Sir Stanley, slamming down the phone and posing yet another challenge to Clarissa’s supreme authority.
“Oh, for God’s sake, where’s the blasted megalomaniac bonkers banker when I need him most?” she wailed into the echoing silence.
~ * ~
In the Kremlin, Igor Ripurpantzov chuckled as he listened in to the latest results from his Sputnik bugs in both the White House and Downing Street. Okay, he was a little pissed at the allusion to his near baldness, but didn’t the knobhead US prez know that bald guys had bigger dicks than guys with hair, even fake hair? Sometimes he wondered why he’d gotten the guy elected in the first place. And as for the shlyukha (whore) in London, she could have all the military parades she wanted—if she could rustle up the kopeks to pay for it—but none would ever match the ones he saluted. Still it was always good to know his enemies in the new cold/chilly war were such priduroks (morons). Made his job a whole lot easier. Which, now he remembered, was exactly why he’d had the madman elected to the White House in the first place.
Happy with himself, Igor wandered off for an ice bath followed by a hundred one-arm press-ups—fifty for each arm—all the while singing to himself, “I am the iron man, I am the iron man, I am the iron man, goo goo g’joob,” blissfully unaware of the origins of the tune and Lennon’s goo goo g’joob lyric. Such is the nature of hubris.
Twenty-six
As coincidence would have it, at roughly the same time Igor was fêting himself with goo goo g’joobs, Jeremy/John and the other Reconstructed Beatles were singing “I Am The Walrus” too. Not with guitars or drum kits—Maurice had said those, along with face recognition treatment, could be superimposed with CGI at a later stage—but at least they were wearing the Beatle wigs Barry had dug out from his ex-thespian store in his cellar. And it was not only “I Am The Walrus” they were practising. Before he left the Shepherd’s Hut, Maurice had downloaded from Barry’s ancient computer the whole Beatles’ playlist as well as clips from their Cavern days, scenes from their movies, interviews on US TV (notably the Ed Sullivan Show), and the iconic events at Shea Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl.
“Look, listen and learn, guys,” Maurice told them before he left at Dame Muriel’s behest. “All the little gestures, winks, leg positions and mop top shakes, especially on ‘Twist and Shout.’ And never forget Paul’s a leftie, guitar always the wrong way around. To make this work, you guys have got to be spot on. Think Stanislavski. You are not just going to be playing The Beatles you are going to be The Beatles. Especially you as John, Jeremy. He’s going to be a hard act to follow, but it must be believable. Every little gesture, every little nuance, particularly on ‘Revolution.’ The lip-syncing I can handle, but the gestures, the knees, the sidelong glances at Paul, the head-bobbing, those you must get down to a T.”
“I’m up for it,” Jeremy said. “Best moment of my life so far.”
A sentiment echoed by Julie/Paul, Maggie/George, and Dennis/Ringo. Every day since Maurice’s departure for the city, with Barry’s enthusiastic encouragement, they’d watched the tapes, listened to the songs, and rehearsed. Julie/Paul in particular was over the moon.
“My dad would sooo love this,” she told Jeremy every night as they snuggled down together on their sofa bed.
“Only don’t tell him,” Jeremy would say. “Not yet. Not till it’s over. If it’s ever over.”
“You think I’m daft, or d’you think I’m daft?”
“I think you’re the nicest daft person I’ve ever known.”
“So kiss me.”
“Okay, Paul.” That was the line that had Julie chuckling till her eyes closed on a whole new future.
~ * ~
; “So Double O Seventeen, come to your senses on this Beatles nonsense yet?” Dame Muriel asked Maurice Moffat when he finally turned up for his appointment at MI6 HQ. “I’ve been talking the matter over with Sir Hubert at MI5 and he reckons you’re off your trolley. He likes the idea of music-related Internet counter activity, but reckons Richard Wagner would be a better bet than the mindless tunes of some scruffy louts from Liverpool. He became somewhat exercised over the matter.”
Maurice smiled. “He would.”
“Explain yourself, Double O Seventeen.”
“Sir Hubert is a high culture snob.”
“Excuse me! Sir Hubert is a man of the greatest distinction, a man who…”
“Has conveniently forgotten Hitler’s passion for Wagner. You may recall the Führer’s hi-jacking of the Übermensch when calling for racial purity in Germany.”
“Oh dear,” said Dame Muriel.
“‘Oh dear’ is correct, ma’am. And to use such music when working to nobble Ripurpantzov and the madman in the White House would only play into their equally dirty hands. By the by, we are clear, are we not, that you have passed none of my plans along to the PM?”
“Not a dicky bird.”
“Good, because one suspects she too may be susceptible to delusions of grandeur.”
“Am I therefore to assume it is to low culture snobs you are hoping to appeal, Double O Seventeen? Because it seems to me they can be as nastily parochial as the high culture brigade.”
“Indeed so, ma’am. When it comes to outsiders, there is an unholy alliance between the non-reflectives on both sides, with only the liberally democratic “art-farties’ in the middle. Hence the disaster of Brexit.”
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