Chosen

by Paddy Bostock

  “And you think your Beatles have a role to play in all of this?”

  “Indeed I do, ma’am.”

  “Because?”

  “They’re class-neutral. Their words, especially Lennon’s, strike chords in all of us.”

  “Play me one of his songs, could you?” said Dame Muriel.

  “You’ve never heard one before?”

  “Remind me.”

  “Okay. So how about this one?” said Maurice, taking out his laptop and calling up Our World, the first ever international satellite broadcast of June 25th 1967 featuring Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso…and the BBC’s contribution to the show of The Beatles playing “All You Need Is Love,” a song Lennon had written especially for the occasion.

  “I particularly like the line about us all being able to learn how to be ourselves in time. You didn’t see the programme, ma’am?”

  “I was a mere girl at the time and school would never have allowed it anyway. No Beatlemania for us girls,” said Dame Muriel by way of explanation. “And you’re younger than me. So how did you…?”

  “Through an indulgent and Beatlemanic father, ma’am.”

  “Ah. Quite a nice little ditty, though, and with a whole bally orchestra to go with it,” said his boss as the screen faded. “I rather liked the Marseillaise bit with the French horns at the beginning. May we hear it again?”

  Maurice smiled and hit replay, to which Dame Muriel clicked her fingers and giggled a bit.

  “And the Lennon chappie is which one?” she said as the video re-ran.

  Maurice pointed him out in his long silk jacket and Indian beads.

  “Mmm, one has to admit one can see a certain attraction,” said the head of MI6. “And he’s dead, you say?”

  “Shot to death outside The Dakota apartment building in New York. He said it was the only city on earth he’d ever felt free to walk the streets.”

  “Dear, dear. And this was long ago?”

  “December the eighth, nineteen eighty,” said Maurice who, like many people around the world, remembered precisely where he was when the news broke. In the case of a fledgling OO17, it was deep undercover in Moscow of all places.

  “And it’s the revenant of this fellow you’re telling me who could, after all these years, so appeal to the global public imagination as to…?”

  “As I have always said, it’s a gamble, but I believe the odds could be in our favour. There are, after all, people who believe Elvis is still alive and living on Mars, so…”

  “Elvis?”

  “Presley, ma’am.”

  “Was he a Beatle too?”

  “No. He was an American singer known as the king of rock ’n’ roll who…”

  “Anyway, anyway, Double O Seventeen,” said Dame Muriel, “to return to topic, you mentioned a lookalike to play this revenant.”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “And may one ask who? After all, your original mission was simply to find the bonkers banker, not to fiddle-faddle about with solutions to global neo-fascism.”

  “Quite so, ma’am,” said Maurice, sufficiently encouraged by Dame Muriel’s visceral attraction to Lennon to lay before her all his cards. Which was when he fessed up to having found Jeremy Crawford and his new albeit improbable friends, all of whom had found it easy to learn how to be themselves in time.

  Dame Muriel paled, then flushed, then paled again, then flushed again.

  “You…mean…to…tell…me…you…found…? she eventually spluttered.

  “The bonkers banker? Yes. And he is very far from bonkers. Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

  More spluttering, ending with, “And you didn’t tell Phoebe either?”

  “No, ma’am. You’re the only one to know.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. And these friends of his?”

  “One used to be a philosophy prof, my philosophy prof as it happens, at Oxford. He’s a gardener now. Another is an ex-policeman. And the other two are Jeremy’s ex-banking boss and his woman PA.”

  “A very odd bunch.”

  “Indeed, but they have come together through shared life experience.”

  “Explanation please, Double O Seventeen. All a tad esoteric for me.”

  So it was that Maurice outlined the difference between choosing and being chosen and the way such an insight could alter the course of a person’s life, never mind their background or gender.

  Hiatus while Dame Muriel digested this and Maurice took another happy look at The Beatles’ offer to Our World in 1967.

  Once the digestive hiatus was more or less over, she said, “And these people of yours are to play a part in this plan?”

  “A critical one. They are to be The Reconstructed Beatles, although the focus of my attention will be on John, who will be played by Jeremy, the bonkers banker.”

  “And the rest of the real Beatles. Are they dead too? I mean, if they’re still alive, how are they going to feel about having other people playing them? Can’t have MI6 facing plagiarism and impersonation suits for huge sums.”

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ve already thought of that. Poor old George died some years ago too, but Paul and Ringo are still alive and very much kicking. To assuage your fears, I have already been in touch with them and they are happy for tribute bands to play their tunes without any royalty claims. All they ask is for any money raised to go to charities of their choice.”

  “Pretty decent chaps then,” said Dame Muriel.

  Maurice smiled, sensing a shift in his boss’s position and, thus emboldened, threw into the conversation an adaptation to the plan for her to ponder, namely the new Lennon narrative he had dreamt up on the tube from Tooting to Vauxhall Cross, the one in which John is shot but doesn’t die. He and Yoko have fabricated the whole murder scenario so they can escape forever the hassle of fame and live in peace on some desert island where nobody can find them. Only now, given the awfulness of world politics, he has decided to return and save the day.

  “Yoko? Funny name. Who she?” asked Dame Muriel.

  “His widow, ma’am. She’s Japanese.”

  “Gosh. Will she come too?”

  “No,” said Maurice, making a mental note to check with Yoko Ono, although he was pretty sure as co-writer of ‘Imagine’ she would love the story.”

  “And you’re floating this fantasy, although presumably the killing was recorded and somebody locked up for it…”

  “Mark David Chapman, and he’ll never leave prison.”

  “Even if his murderee suddenly turns up alive? Surely then he could claim a legally suspect verdict and damages galore.”

  Maurice nodded. “The thought has also crossed my mind, ma’am. But remember what we’re tapping into here is the power of myth, in which verifiable facts play little part. Chapman can plead whatever he likes, it’ll make no difference.”

  “You mean we would be lying? I have never known you to lie, Double O Seventeen.”

  “There are outright lies, ma’am, then there is massaging of the truth, as you will have observed in the clouds of obfuscation surrounding both the madman in the White House and his counterpart in the Kremlin. Hard to tell in such circumstances what ‘truth’ even means any longer, except that it’s normally declared ‘fake’ in these post-truth days. One only needs think of the pearls of solipsism dripping from the lips of our current foreign secretary, let alone the loony in the White House.”

  Maurice shrugged meaningfully.

  Dame Muriel nodded. She was no fan of either.

  “And as you must well know, ma’am, there are moments when counter intelligence requires us get our hands dirty too. Whether we like it or not.”

  Dame Muriel nodded again. “Okay, I’m beginning to understand, Double O Seventeen. A case of means and ends we’re talking here, am I right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And Machiavellian though it may be, if it’s the only game in town what is the point of us standing on the side lines shouting boo at the ref when the ref has already been paid off b
y the opposition to go deaf?”

  “Point taken, Double O Seventeen. So what we are about to toss onto the pitch here is the bombshell image of a dead/undead person and hope that will shake things up.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself, ma’am.”

  “Just one last thing though. How old was Lennon when he was shot?”

  “Forty.”

  “Which means he’d be in his late seventies by now. Bit old for a rock star, isn’t it?”

  “Some of them are still around and gigging, ma’am.”

  “And what age is Jeremy Crawford?”

  “Mid-forties, perhaps.”

  “So you’ll dress him up as a pensioner?”

  Maurice laughed. “Jeremy will only be the subject of a computer generated image, an image I can manipulate to suit any taste. You’ll just need to trust my eye to find the one that works best.”

  Dame Muriel sighed for a bit, then said, “Okay, Double O Seventeen. Keeping all my fingers and toes crossed, I shall sign off on this. But it better bloody well work.”

  “I can promise you nothing but my best, ma’am.”

  “Good enough for me. And remember, schtum is the name of the game where Phoebe is concerned.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way. And thank you, ma’am,” said Maurice, levering himself up from his chair and heading out of the MI6 HQ office, downstairs, and then out of the Vauxhall Cross building for a contemplative stroll along the banks of the Thames. Along the way he sang to himself extracts from “All You Need Is Love,” getting stuck on the line about how there was nothing he could sing that couldn’t be sung.

  Twenty-seven

  During the following three months Maurice, Barry, and The Reconstructed Beatles worked tirelessly at perfecting the precise image for the final launch across the Internet. The key rehearsal work on the songs—body language and so on—was done on weekdays at the Shepherd’s Hut, after which at weekends Maurice would motor back to Tooting to upload the footage he’d taken into his computers, match them against recordings of the real Beatles, then fiddle into the wee small hours until his eyes failed and his brain hurt. It was a task he loved however. In some strange way he almost felt himself reincarnated as Brian Epstein, the original Beatles maker.

  Barry, Jeremy/John, Julie/Paul, Maggie/George, and Dennis/Ringo were having the best time of their lives too. Okay, they’d all abandoned their pasts but none had any particular future in mind. Now they had one: to bring a little light into a darkening world. Not that they truly believed it would effect radical change, but still the idea was a lot more fun than working in a bank or a police station. Each Sunday evening when the Morris Minor Traveller sighed to a halt outside the Shepherd’s Hut, they would be clustered on the doorstep hungry for the latest Beatle computer imagery Maurice had manipulated. Would it be the early tight-fitting smart suits and fresh-faced grins again or had they moved on to the Sergeant Pepper-type moustache stage yet? Or, in full denial of fresh-facedness and fancy dress, would they sport the shoulder-length hair and beards of the pre-split up period? It was all very tantalising.

  Julie was still longing to tell her dad Steve what she was up to but Jeremy still wouldn’t let her.

  “Total top secret, luv,” he told her in the Lennon-esque Scouse he’d been practising so hard it had become part of him. “Stanislavski eat your heart out,” he was fond of saying.

  “I wouldn’t tell him everything,” Julie argued in the Paul tones she’d adopted, which wasn’t hard seeing as she’d been born within a mile of the Liver Building. “Just the part about us making a new tribute band. Dad loves The Bootleg Beatles. Goes to all their gigs. He’d be sooo proud of me.”

  “But this is news he can’t know. Top secret like Maurice told us. Last I heard you’d told your dad you were away on a all-expenses-paid bank business trip to Kathman-fuckin’-du.”

  “First time ever I lied to Dad. He was the one who told me lies would always catch up with me in the end. Have a fit if he knew, he would.”

  “Well, there’re lies you tell for your own good, then there are those you tell for other people’s, right?”

  “True enough.”

  “And Steve must know the phone and Internet connections in Kathmandu aren’t the greatest. Also what the fuck would you be doing joining a Beatles tribute band in Katmandu anyway?”

  Just like the old John, Jeremy sprinkled his sentences liberally with “fuck” after watching a clip of “Working Class Hero,” the first time he’d ever heard the expletive used in a song. Now it was across the media all the time, even on the BBC, but back in 1970 it must have been pretty revolutionary. Sometimes Julie used it too, just for fun. Mind you, as she remembered from the time before she left Liverpool, in that city it was used pretty much as punctuation, although more by the lads than the girls.

  “Fair dos,” she finally agreed. Then she told Jeremy/John to kiss her and he obliged with smackeroos on both cheeks.

  The rest of the team had no trouble obeying Maurice’s omertà injunction though, mainly because they had no loved ones to tell of their exploits. Maggie was too old to have parents any more, Dennis was a foundling, and neither of them had spouses let alone children, so no complications on that front. Jeremy of course did have family but the last thing he wanted was for any of them to know what he was up to. Overriding all of that, however, was the bliss of having ditched their previous existences to become anything else they might fancy, and what better, pro tem at least, than to become a computer-reconstructed Beatle with an ideological purpose? Nothing they could think of off hand. Plus they were intrigued by Maurice’s insights into the nebulous world of counter espionage and thrilled to feel they could become a part of it.

  That left Barry, who was also unmarried, childless, and too old to have parents. And he hadn’t been given a Beatle role to lose himself in because there weren’t five Beatles. But Barry didn’t care. He’d stopped caring about himself more years ago than he could remember. Gardener was fine with him, by which term he meant anything he could help to grow. Until recently that had meant tending the plants of the earth but if, as had been his happy experience since rescuing Jeremy and Pete from their barn, it could also be interpreted to mean helping people flourish, that was fine with him. That’s what he’d hoped to achieve at Oxford until he deconstructed the fissures in the dreaming spires.

  It was Jeremy who asked him about such matters one late night/early morning Saturday when everybody else was in bed.

  “I hope you don’t regret bringing me here,” he said. “And drawing all the other guys in my wake. There you were peacefully cultivating your garden, and now all this.”

  Barry smiled. “How’s your French, Jeremy?”

  “Poor going on minimal.”

  “But you may remember Édith Piaf?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, this is what she had to say about regret. I’m sure you’ll catch the gist.”

  And then, in the best Piaf imitation he could muster, Barry sang: “‘Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien. Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait, ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal.’”

  “At my stage in life there’s little point in looking back in regret,” he explained. “What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Some parts of it were tolerably good some were rubbish, but no good fretting over spilt milk, eh? As Édith says, it’s all the same to me.”

  “Sounds a little fatalistic,” said Jeremy.

  “It does, but it is also wise because it allows the mind to stay open to whatever may befall us, and deal with it. To see clearly when the rain has gone and welcome a bright sunshiny day when one dawns.”

  “And this is one of your sunny days?”

  “One of my sunniest. As they say, learning never ends. Just so long as we keep open our eyes to see. In answer to your original question, Jeremy, it has been a great pleasure for this old man to welcome you and your friends to my humble shack and, because of you, also to have attracted my most promising
alumnus to it. And, as for the adventure we’re all embarked on, how could I ever have foreseen that? No, no, I regret nothing. I am after all no more significant in the grand scheme of things than a butterfly or a wasp. Another drop of the dandelion brandy?”

  Jeremy passed his glass.

  “I’ll have to remember the Piaf song,” he said.

  “Ah, the petit moineau—or little sparrow to the non-francophones,” said Barry. “How about a toast to her?”

  And so it was that Barry and Jeremy touched glasses and, clearing his head of Lennon-esque Scouse, Jeremy stood and launched into a barely recognisable reprise of “Non, je ne regrette rien’s” first verse.

  Barry laughed and clapped. “Possibly not quite nasalised enough and a little light on the syntax, but nonetheless an excellent rendition. You’re a fast learner, old chap. Now, do you not think we should turn in for the night? Tomorrow promises to be another busy day. One wonders what Beatle trickery Maurice will have up his sleeve this time.”

  ~ * ~

  Back at No. 10 Downing Street, Clarissa/Phoebe was feeling a whole lot less relaxed than the occupants of the Shepherd’s Hut, her mind aflutter, aflurry and afizz with discrepant inputs to which it could find no coherent answer. After becoming prime minister she had expected all those beneath her—her cabinet, her MPs, Mister and Missus Pleb of the general population—to kowtow, bow, scrape and defer to her wishes. After all, apart from the queen, she was the top woman in the land. But had there been any kowtowing, bowing-and-scraping, let alone deference from any of those parties? Like hell there had. The opposite in fact as daily she faced carping from all sides, including aspersions she didn’t even have what in human terms might have been thought of as a mind. “Robotic” was the description she was becoming increasingly infuriated by. Mind you, “wishy-washy U-turner who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow” wasn’t pleasing her much either. Such slights were endemic, even from the bally foreigners in Brussels who kept on and on and on wanting to know what exactly she meant by “Brexit” because none of the explanations she’d given them the previous week tallied with the one she was giving them this week. Worse still even her own people, the valiant Brits who had voted by the victorious margin of 4% to tell foreigners where they could go shove themselves, were champing at the bit, unhappy at her persistent doublespeak. As, even more worryingly, were the far right of her own cherished Tory party whom she knew she had to keep on board while she tried to steer a steady middle course through choppy, some said tsunami-ish, waters. Not even Sir Stanley Michaelson, Head of Armed Forces, was apparently onside. All he had offered by way of a march-past up Whitehall was a couple of battalions of Territorial Army recruits and one tank. No nukes, no squadrons of saluting full-time army, navy and RAF officers, just the TA guys and gals and the one (obsolete) tank.