“Another cup of tea for the lady, perhaps?” said Barry with a knowing nod at Maurice who, reading the runes, linked an arm through one of Maggie’s and led him gently away.
“Blurg? Phlut?” said Clarissa. Understandably. After all, nothing in her previous existence had prepared her for this sort of treatment. Yes, there had been the daily barrage of jibes from the media and fellow members of the House of Commons at every fumble she made, but never before had she been kicked behind the knees and then faced with an evident lunatic burbling about the joys of self-reinvention.
Jeremy smiled, sat down beside the prime minister and recounted his story. Well, not all of it, just from the part where he could stand his old life no more and went to live in a barn with a pig called Pete.
“That’s him over there,” he said, pointing at Pete who preened, winked at Clarissa, and said “oink.”
“Then Barry here came and rescued me.”
Barry bowed slightly.
“And the next thing I knew, I’d been branded the bonkers banker and the rest is history. Some of it of your making, ma’am.”
Clarissa blinked and edged away from Jeremy, who edged closer to her saying, “But let bygones be bygones, eh? Turn the page and begin a new chapter?”
“Quite sure you wouldn’t fancy another cuppa?” said Barry. “On the house.”
“Wuh-where’s muh-my wuh-whirlybird?” Clarissa gurgled, casting her eyes this was and that.
“Migrated,” said Dame Muriel.
“You’re all alone, your bird has flown,” sang Julie to the tune of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” one of her dad’s favourites.
“Pretty harsh treatment even for a prime minister as doolally as Clarissa,” I hear you object. But, you might reflect, how else were the Shepherd’s Hut gang of seven to reduce to a modicum of compliance the woman in whom nobody in the land had much faith when it came to flexibility? By saying, “There, there, we’ll sing to your song sheet, my dear? I don’t think so. Anyway, like it or not, that was the treatment Clarissa got. Pro tem she was a prisoner and, with a little kindness thrown in here and there, she might eventually listen to their reason.
It was Dame Muriel who explained this rationale.
“A shame it has had to come to this,” she said as Clarissa’s head lolled. “But what is, is. And your job now is to make the best of it. You may or may not recall Girton’s old motto ‘better is wisdom than weapons of war,’ but it is precisely in harmony with that philosophy that you needed to be reduced to your current impasse, for impasse I’m afraid it is. Unless of course you are prepared to have a little wise re-think.”
Clarissa raised her head with difficulty and peered at Dame Muriel.
“You see, my dear, these chaps, all of whom you believe to be bonkers, have an interesting strategy up their sleeves that might just help you and your suffering government to a better place.”
“Heaven?” said Clarissa.
“Not heaven, my dear. We’re not planning to kill you.”
“Good,” said Clarissa, gazing around the Shepherd’s Hut at Barry, Maurice, Jeremy, Julie, Maggie, Dennis and their animals.
“Just help you along the road to the better place. So, d’you want to hear our plan or don’t you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Okay then, let’s hear the bally thing.”
Which was when Dame Muriel called Maurice over to outline to the prime minister the cunning plan he’d developed to improve her status her from zero to hero by taking the credit for making Igor Ripurpantzov’s governance of Russia a tad less comfortable than it had been to date and possibly unseating the madman in the White House. Equally it would be bound to raise her clout with the beasts of Brussels.
“You don’t mean?” said a newly alert Clarissa when Maurice’s shtick was over.
“That is precisely what we mean,” said Dame Muriel. “Should you lend your approval to the idea, you may well find yourself becoming a credible world leader and, doubtless to your immense satisfaction, get the media off your back for the foreseeable future. Would you care to observe some recent responses to Double O Seventeen’s initial foray into the Internet?”
And, although at first aghast, Clarissa was soon gazing on in wonder as Maurice replayed the clips from Lewes, St Petersburg and so many other places.
~ * ~
As noted, amongst those other places was San Francisco, specifically the Santa Clara Valley area better known as Silicon Valley and home to such super-hi-tech giants as Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo et al. Yet never in their illustrious and/or infamous postmillennial histories had the bosses of such companies witnessed outpourings of glee and rage on such a scale as those experienced at the announcement of John Lennon’s sudden reincarnation on the world stage. The glee came from elderly ex-hippies just like the ones in Lewes East Sussex, and the rage from the bible-bashers who’d never forgiven Lennon for his comments on the relative popularities of The Beatles and Jesus, but either way it was good for business, thought the gazillionaire bosses.
There was one exception to this rule, however, and that was Harvard Law School dropout Monty Gaspachio, twenty-two year-old founder, owner and CEO of the newly emergent BlabberMouth, estimated on Nasdaq to be worth upwards of $56B. For it was Monty who was the only one to spot not only the big bucks angle in this latest outburst of furious tribalism, but also its political ramifications. It was on the very evening Maurice’s teaser hit the global sites that Monty, relaxing in a Lay-Z-Boy lounger beside his San Jose pool with his newest girlfriend Jennifer, experienced the sudden epiphany in which he sensed how these outpourings of glee and rage eerily mirrored the current radical division in American society between the left behind rednecks, hillbillies and Rust Belt workers who worshipped the psycho in the White House and the liberals on the West and East coasts who loathed him.
“You see where I’m goin’ with this, Jenny?” he said, jerking bolt upright in his Lay-Z-Boy lounger and verbalised his flash of insight.
“Not rilly,” said Jennifer when he’d finished. Hollywood movie star wannabe Jenny was busy drying in the sun from her latest dip in Monty’s pool.
“Ookay. So I’m gonna spell it out to you, hon’,” said Monty, launching into an exegesis of how the White House had been hijacked by a psychotic megalomaniac grifter who, with the help of Russia’s Igor Ripurpantzov, had secured the presidency through deceit, lies and appeals to the basest instincts in human nature.
“This is the guy,” he continued while Jennifer applied unguents to her breasts and legs, “who has torn up the consensus that kept America more or less in one piece for the most part of a hundred and fifty years. The guy who stands a good chance of causing civil war two.”
“And you’re gonna do something about that, Mont, am I right?”
“Sure as hell is hot I am, babe,” said Monty, leaping from his lounger and belly flopping into his pool.
“Ouch,” remarked Jennifer but, rolling onto his back and kicking his legs in the California air, Monty was laughing.
“Hey, babe,” he called. “You wanna do me a favour?”
“Sure I do, Mont.”
“Go in the house and dig out my music compilation gizmo. You know where that is?”
“On the bedside table?”
“Right in one. Then you hook it into the outside loudspeakers and the songs I’ll be wanting to hear are Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A Changin’’ and Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ You can do that small thing for me?”
“Honey, for you anything,” said Jenny, who knew Monty was owed serious money by the kinds of wannabe movie directors in LA he might just persuade to find her a walk-on part in their latest blockbuster.
“Great. Thanks,” said Monty, climbing out of the water and hitting the button on his Lay-Z-Boy armrest that would enhance Maurice’s teaser and blazon it all across BlabberMouth, along with undisguised editorial comment reminding folk of how much the madman in The White House wo
uld have disgusted John Lennon and urging them to hit the streets en masse in sympathy. If he lost his BlabberMouth empire and all his money as a result of a covert White House smear campaign, well so be it. Money wasn’t the only thing in life. This was the time for Monty to make a stand. He punched air when out came the sounds of Dylan and Lennon singing their songs. Jennifer had done a good job. The neighbours would hate it, but Monty hated the neighbours, so that was okay. Maybe tomorrow would be a very new day. He sure hoped so.
Thirty-one
Things gathered pace at the Shepherd’s Hut once Clarissa had agreed to Maurice’s plan and hailed a fresh helicopter to take her and PCs O’Brady and Chaplin back to London. En route she phoned RAF Air Marshal Sir Roderick “Biggles” Ramsbottom, insisting that under no circumstances should her Fanbury destination be divulged to anyone, an agreement she’d already secured from O’Brady and Chaplin without much difficulty, given their embarrassment at having been tied to trees.
“Top secret, Biggles,” she’d said. “Anyone ever finds out where I’ve been, and your job’s down the toilet along with your pension rights. Understood?”
“Loud and clear, ma’am. Roger that,” said Biggles, not one to waste words.
“Roger?” said Clarissa, but Biggles had already disappeared into the ether.
However, Clarissa had more to worry about than the bizarre lingo of a mere Air Marshal. Prime amongst her concerns was the growing fear she’d been an idiot to accede to a la-la-land plan cooked up by people very possibly out of their minds even if they counted amongst their number Muriel “The Maggot” Eggleshaw and Mister Clever Pants OO17. But it was too late now. She’d signed on the dotted line. On the other hand, what if the bally plan worked and she hadn’t signed on the dotted line? Where would that have left her? Out in the cold while others gloried, that was where. Oh, how confusing life was.
“Buggerkins,” she mumbled as the Puma HC2 banked for a landing on her private helipad close to St James’s Park.
The further question that arose in her scrambled mind, however, was, “who am I going to tell about this?” None of the ministers in the bally cabinet, that was for sure. They couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret between themselves, never mind maintain corporate confidentiality in face of the press hordes. Bunch of loose-lips they were. And not a whisper to the commie leader of the opposition, who seemed to have a soft spot for Ripurpantzov…soo, as Muriel insisted, this was a secret Clarissa would just have to keep to herself.
“Mind you,” she reflected as she climbed out of the Puma, teetered down the steps, met her personal policeman and marched back with him to Number 10, “I’m pretty damn good at keeping secrets. ‘The submarine’ is what they call me, isn’t it? Which is probably why they never understand what I’m saying.”
“Everything OK, ma’am?” said PC Tom (no second name), the PM’s personal policeman.
“Fine, Tom, fine. Have a nice rest of the day,” said Clarissa, stepping across the threshold where her butler Billy was waiting to take her coat.
“Good trip?” said Billy, rumoured by many to be the second major source of leaks from No 10 after the fractious cabinet.
“Trip, Billy?” said Clarissa. “Oh that trip. Just been off at Chequers overseeing the new sapling plantings…cedars, silver birches, Japanese cherry blossoms and so on.”
“Ah. And I hope they grow nicely, ma’am” said Billy, an early and enthusiastic recipient of Maurice’s Lennon teaser. “The Foreign Secretary is waiting in the antechamber.”
“Jolly good. Splendid,” Clarissa lied, thinking, “What does foot-in-his-mouth Fat Slob want now?”
“Show him through when I’m ready,” she told Billy. “Which won’t be for at least an hour. Meanwhile give him a cup of tea.”
“Just the one, ma’am?”
“As per normal, Billy. And offer him no biscuits.”
Billy smiled and said, “With pleasure, ma’am.”
What Billy would have liked most was to kick Fat Slob in the goolies, but for all the pleasure it would have afforded, it would clearly also have signalled the end of his No 10 butlership.
Anyway that was what was happening to PM Clarissa in Westminster.
As noted, back at the Shepherd’s Hut things were gathering pace.
~ * ~
Having completed his final edits of the Reconstructed Beatles footage, each take focusing heavily on Jeremy/John, Maurice congratulated the whole band on their “fab” performances and thanked Barry for “hospitality well beyond the call of duty.”
“Never have I encountered such a splendid set of chaps,” he told them all at the farewell party Barry threw before Maurice and Dame Muriel returned to Tooting in the Morris Minor Traveller.
Julie/Paul raised an eyebrow and winked.
“And the chapess, of course,” said Maurice with a thespian bow before taking her in a warm hug. “The movies never came up with a Bond girl better than this one. You’re a lucky man, Mister Crawford,” he added across Julie’s right shoulder.
Jeremy blushed, nodded, and said, “I know.”
Barry, Maggie and Dennis hear-heared and raised their glasses of Geranium Cava à la Broadbent in a toast.
“To Julie and Jeremy,” they chorused as Julie left Maurice’s embrace and entered Jeremy’s.
“And I am a lucky woman,” she said. “When this is all over, I’m taking him back to Liverpool to show off to my dad.”
Maurice smiled. “That may not be anytime soon however, my dear. For a little while longer it may be wise for him to lay somewhat low. As is the case with the rest of you fellows, n’est-ce pas, Dame Muriel?”
“Indeed, Double O Seventeen. Best advice I can give is you all remain under your present cover for the foreseeable future. I will personally ensure, however, that any expenses you may incur meanwhile shall be covered by my department.”
Barry thanked her but said neither he nor his new friends would be looking for any “expenses.”
“We have pretty much all we need. Not so, chaps…and chapess?”
Julie, Jeremy, Maggie and Dennis nodded their agreement.
“An exciting adventure this has indeed been,” Barry continued, “and one looks forward with interest to its potential outcomes, but, as Kierkegaard had it: “repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life,” and such is the project in which I and my new friends are currently engaged, not with politics but with the natural world that surrounds us…which costs nothing. What, somehow or another and from different perspectives, we have chosen. And none of this comes with a bill to M16 or anybody else.”
It was around then that, checking his watch, Maurice expressed sympathy with such an aim but said, in his and Dame Muriel’s world at least, tempus was fugiting a tad and it was really time they hit the road.
“I have the sense of an ending,” he said. “But who can know when that may be?”
And so saying, he and Dame Muriel took their leave and headed back to number thirteen Oakshot Street Tooting for Maurice’s final remix before the grand launch on the Internet.
“Miaow!” said Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat when they arrived. Hank and Butch next door were okay with their tins of Pussy Cuts and everything, but she’d missed her proper owner. Plus the lady he had with him hadn’t proved all that bad either, so she was pleased to see them both back home.
Within minutes, however, Maurice was upstairs with his computer bank sharpening, titillating and finalising the missive he hoped might re-balance a political world spinning more or less out of control—in his view anyhow.
That was how pace was gathering on the home front.
~ * ~
Elsewhere on the planet, things were moving fast too, largely as the result of the continuing reaction to Maurice’s initial teaser sparked by the Internet-flooding techniques employed by both Yuri Krumkin in St Petersburg and Monty Gaspachio in Silicon Valley. Unbeknownst to either, however, their enthusiasm for the cause had spread contagiously, such that similar hi-tech deluges
were exploding from places beyond Russia and America. The computers of, inter alia, Wolfgang Hesse in Berlin, Gianfranco Maglioni in Rome, Francine Daudet in Paris, Mateo Garcia in Barcelona, Maureen McAteer in London and a certain Steve Mackintosh in Liverpool were sizzling with support messages. And all of this even before taking account of the tweeters, likers, and befrienders in countries where the idea of the potential overthrow of populist dictators had not yet even dawned as a possibility. And what did all of these folk want? Further evidence of Lennon still being alive, coming out of hiding and singing to them, that was what.
Maurice was delighted, watching on in the interstices between fiddling with the final cut of the Reconstructed Beatles video.
“What an audience we’re going to have, Tiddles,” he told Terpsichore/Cat, who was watching on from her vantage point on Maurice’s lap.
“MiaOW,” she said.
And it was not just on computer and smartphone screens that such evidence of international disquiet was evinced. It also spilled over onto the streets of cities across Europe, including the UK, where PM Clarissa was thrown and gladly took the lifeline of finally ignoring the alt right Brexiteers in her party and siding with the voices of moderation and reason. Even in places as normally quiescent as Tokyo and Hong Kong there were demonstrations. There, in imitation of the American protests in which pro-Lennon kids joined hands with the March For Our Lives kids sickened at the gun deaths in their schools, brave Japanese and Chinese students had also marched in defiance of their leaders. “Protest,” for so long since the nineteen sixties a dirty word, was being rekindled.
Monty Gaspachio and Jennifer hadn’t witnessed the original outpourings of demands for peace, love and flower power on the streets of San Francisco because they hadn’t been born yet. But boy were they ever enjoying it now as they and their friends, joined by local groups of septuagenarian ex-hippies, demonstrated all around Haight Ashbury and into the Golden Gate Park. Then there was the wider network of Internet friends they had all across America, but best of all in Chicago, where the 1968 siege was still remembered, and in New York City, where so many vigils were being observed at the Strawberry Fields memorial area of Central Park cops were on permanent stand-by and bleating for more resources.
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