2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu)

by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

  But I digress. I am supposed to be thinking about Winnie, what she looks like, her character and all that.

  So here it is. Winnie, in 2023, is twenty-eight years old, roughly. Just the right age to start on your life’s mission. Her hair is mousey and hangs naturally to her shoulders. As a child she had it long. As a teenager she cropped it short and dyed it blonde. Since turning twenty-one she gets it trimmed regularly so it just touches her shoulders. And she has not dyed it.

  She did have some weight issues when she was in her late teens and early twenties, going from painfully skinny to the verge of overweight. But she is now on top of things. She keeps to her broadsheet diet, which seems to work for her.

  Sex is something I don’t usually write about – I don’t feel particularly well qualified to do so. But Dog has advised me, as my literary agent, that I should have some hint of it to keep the reader interested. So for those that need to know, Winnie would tick the heterosexual box, but does usually have a crush on someone of her own sex. For a time it was Viv Albertine, who played in that band The Slits. This side of her sexuality was only consummated once; it was with her Cantonese teacher on a school trip, although she is in denial about the consummation.

  As for her regular heterosexual side, there have been a number of unsuitable boys and men. None lasted much longer than a few months. Each of them left their mark, but none as profound as the mark she left on them.

  I hope those two last paragraphs keep Dog Ledger happy.

  This evening I will not be driving the thirty-one miles down to Craighouse on my Brough. And may not do so again until Francis writes a letter apologising for his behaviour last night.

  I don’t think the locals know who I am.

  Love,

  Roberta Antonia Wilson

  Postscript: there is no point in me hiding my real name from you, ‘Dear Diary’.

  Postscript to the Postscript: something I have just thought of. If you are a male reader of the book, imagine Winnie to be two inches shorter than you. If you are a female reader, imagine Winnie to be two inches taller than you.

  And I guess I’d better tell you why he is called Dog Ledger and what our relationship is. I know you must be wondering. He started life as Douglas McLedger. It is his, or at least his family’s, ancestral cottage I am staying in. His first name went from Douglas to Dougie while attending the primary school on Jura. At the high school in Oban it became Doug. At university in Edinburgh, where we met in the late ’40s, the ‘U’ got dropped and he became just plain Dog. It was a sort of joke, but it stuck. He decided to drop the ‘Mc’ when he fell out with his father. So now he is known across the literary world as Dog Ledger. He spends most of his life in his cottage in the Pyrenees. It was as a student that he invited me up to stay in this house at the northern tip of Jura. And yes, of course, we were lovers for a while, but that was all decades ago. That said, there are still some of the frissons ex-lovers can have at times. Not that I would be interested. If and when I need a man, I need a young man.

  * Cynthia being a better ‘shag’ was the word in John’s mind and not the sort of language used by me, George Orwell.

  3: SKY OF BLUE AND SEA OF GREEN

  09:43 Sunday 23 April 2023

  A frail and old Japanese lady sits on her balcony and looks out across the city that has adopted her. She sips the orange juice that has been freshly squeezed for her. The morning light is gentle. The heat of the day has not yet found its force. This lady remembers the young girl she once was in her native city of Tokyo, in a bunker hearing the bombs drop and wondering if she would live to see the sun rise. That little girl picked up a pencil and on a scrap of paper made a list of the things she wanted to do before she died.

  The sun is rising above New York.

  A young man enters the balcony.

  ‘Ms Ono, two packages have arrived for you. Shall I open them?’

  ‘No, just bring me my knife and I will open them myself. But thank you for offering.’

  She decides to open the larger of the two boxes first. It measures about 40 × 20 × 30 cm. The sharpened kitchen knife slices easily through the tape and the box is soon opened. It contains mugs. Coffee mugs. All identical. There are probably twenty in the box, but she is not counting them, she is pulling one of them out of the box to have a look. It is better than she was expecting. In fact, she is quite thrilled at the way it looks.

  When her management first approached her about doing a deal with Starbucks, she was unsure. Why would she want to do that? She didn’t need the money. She didn’t go to Starbucks. She didn’t even drink coffee. But something inside her, a small voice, said, ‘Yes.’ Maybe the voice of the girl in the bunker in Tokyo listening to the bombs, or the voice of John, saying, ‘Yes.’

  So she said ‘yes’ to her management. And now they have sent her a box of twenty mugs. She holds one of them in her hand. It is the standard Starbucks mug that is in their coffee shops all around the world, but the face inside the logo is not the face of the girl that is usually there. It is her face. Well, her face maybe fifty years ago taken from a photo, but still her face. Above the logo it says ‘STARBUCKS’. Below the logo it says ‘WAR IS OVER’. The little girl in the bunker would be pleased with her. John would be pleased with her. Her mother would be pleased with her. She was pleased with herself. This was good.

  Then she picks up the other package. It is nowhere near as big. It only measures about 20 × 15 × 3 cm. She already knows it is going to be a book. Many people send her books. But it is not packaged in the usual AmaZaba packaging. It is plain. She picks up the kitchen knife and slices the packaging open. The book slides out. The book is yellow and hardback. On the front in large bold black typeface are the words ‘Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs by Yoko Ono’.

  The frail old lady turns the book over to find out if there is any other information to be had, but on the back there is only a photograph of a grapefruit sliced in half. She flicks through the pages. Each page has on it what looks like a poem, or maybe a set of instructions. One page just has the word ‘NO’ on it, but very tiny. She puts down the book and picks up the packaging. She looks at the back of the packaging. There is a sender’s address, of sorts:

  Yoko Ono

  Warehouse A

  Hackney Wake

  London

  Albion

  The frail old lady feels a flash of anger jolt through her. This book has nothing to do with her. It is not only using her name, but the name of the fruit that has been associated with her artistic practice ever since the 1960s, before she met John, before the world knew who she was, before the world hated her. Before the world respected her. Before she did a deal with the largest coffee chain in the world, for reasons she is not too sure about.

  She throws the book over the balcony.

  Halfway around the world on the second floor of a warehouse in an area of London called Hackney Wake another Yoko Ono washes a sharpened kitchen knife. And she is thinking. She is thinking she could never have guessed how easy it is to kill someone. Even the person you love more than anyone in the world. Only yesterday she would have gone anywhere with this person. And done absolutely anything for them. But now they were dead and she felt nothing. There wasn’t even that much blood. She rolled the body up in their duvet and planned to push it (note: no longer even him and certainly not the John who she had loved like no other man) out of the canal-side doors of their floor and let it drop into the canal two floors below.

  If she could remember, she would remember that as a little girl she made a list of things she wanted to do in her life. There were one hundred things on the list. One of the things on the list was to climb to the top of Everest. Another was to be the first woman on Mars. And yet another was to murder someone. That little girl can now cross off another of the things on that list.

  Yoko then goes back to the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. The mug is one John stole for her yesterday as a much-belated Valentine’s Day present. It is one of those mug
s Starbucks are now using with the other Yoko Ono’s face on it and the words ‘WAR IS OVER’ underneath the logo. She puts the mug down and picks up one of the books from the pile of five identical books. She looks at the title and reads it again. She must have picked it up and read it a thousand times since she first got the box of books from the printers. She is still very pleased with the title Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs. Actually she only changed the word ‘Weapons’ to ‘Bombs’ at the last minute. She wonders if the other Yoko Ono has received the copy of the book she posted to her. And she wonders what she thinks. ‘I bet she will love it.’

  In New York, the sun has risen and the other Yoko Ono is on the phone to her management. She wants him to find out where this book has come from, who has written it and for all copies to be destroyed. ‘I have had a lifetime of people trying to cash in on me, use me, take me for granted, and for what … They are not the ones Starbucks want for endorsement …’ She slams the phone down.

  A crow lands on the railing of her balcony.

  Winnie is sitting in front of her screen, daydreaming about her Mother. Winnie was five when she left. She remembers her as a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent hair. As for her father, maybe more of him later. This is all just before FaceLife and everything else.

  A few years ago, back in the late Teens, when Winnie first got the job with GoogleByte, she could not imagine a more perfect job to be doing. A job she could do from anywhere in the world whenever she wanted. It all started with watching a TED lecture that Celine Hagbard gave. The name of her TED was ‘Don’t Be Evil’.

  Everything about Celine Hagbard seemed ten times larger than life and just so inspiring. Hagbard swept all other heroines aside in one forty-minute TED. Winnie then fired off an email to her, never expecting to hear anything back.

  It’s hard to tell what was real and what was just made up about Celine Hagbard. For a start, did the submarine exist? Had she actually had a sex change or was that just a publicity stunt as well? Or was all that happened that he flipped his last name with his first name and he became a she?

  But none of that really mattered because FUUK-UP was for real. FUUK-UP, or to give it its full and proper name, First Universal Uber Kinetic-Ultramicro Programmer, was the beginning of the internet. It was where it all started. Then FUUK-UP became Google, for obvious marketing reasons. Which then became GoogleByte. That was after Celine did the deal with Melinda Gates for MicroSoft.

  If any one woman can lay claim to having united the world, it must be Celine Hagbard.

  It is that TED lecture that made Winnie realise there was so much more to the world than the old right versus left, money versus art, real versus virtual, girls versus boys, even life versus death stuff that plagued her through her late teens and early twenties.

  Everything is an opportunity. Even death. Every door can open onto a new world. Even though she knew it might all sound to others like that inspirational claptrap churned out by all those supposedly inspirational speakers of her father’s generation, what Hagbard had to say was the real thing. She had done it, made it happen, saved the world – for ever.

  It was just after midnight on 23 August 2017 when Winnie hit ‘Send’ on that first email to Hagbard. And by 3:00 she had an email back from her/him. And not only was he/she answering Winnie’s question, Hagbard was also offering her a job. The ultimate job!

  In Winnie’s email to Hagbard she told her about her dream. In the dream she worked out how to record everything in her thoughts, all of it: her daydreams, her actual sleeping dreams, all her memories, even her emotions – everything. And then how to upload it all onto her computer. It was like she would then not need to have her own brain, her own memories. And as long as she kept uploading it every day until she physically died, she could then in theory live on for ever as all her thoughts, dreams, desires would be there to interact with everybody else. You could then carry on with being on FaceLife and send out tweets and wish your great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren a happy birthday, and they could do the same back to you.

  Up until then Celine Hagbard had only been able to use GoogleByte to connect all that dull reality stuff in the world. What Winnie was proposing was she could connect every human being’s brain with everyone on Earth for all time. Death would be vanquished.

  At the bottom of the email from Hagbard was the quote, ‘To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

  No wonder that back in 2017 Celine Hagbard got back to Winnie almost immediately. It was Hagbard’s from here to eternity moment. This girl from nowhere was not only offering her immortality, she was offering it to all womankind.

  If anyone ever asks you what that record by The American Medical Association was about, it was about that very moment Celine Hagbard had at 3:00 on 23 August 2017. Celine Hagbard had long since acknowledged to herself that she had the greatest brain ever, so she not only understood exactly what this young woman was proposing, she could follow the logic of Winnie’s theories-cum-equations-cum … This was an email from a mind that was at least equal to her own.

  In the email back to Winnie, Hagbard told her she could start immediately, be paid whatever she wanted as long as they were ready to launch in six years’ time: 23:00 on 23 April 2023 to be precise.

  Whatever Winnie asks for and whatever she actually gets, me, the writer of this book, and you, the reader of it, are not party to. All we know is Winnie’s financial circumstances do not particularly change. Winnie just gets on with the work. And she works almost non-stop.

  The day before yesterday, the job was done, everything is in place. All she has to do is upload it all to GoogleByte’s mainframe, and people around the world can plug in to have their brains connected and death will be over. Of course, the doctors still have to work on our bodies not falling to bits, but as far as our minds and imaginations are concerned we can be there for the Big Drive. And we would have access to everything in everybody else’s brains, memories and imaginations as well – for ever.

  All Winnie has to do is hit ‘Send’.

  But Winnie doesn’t hit ‘Send’. She goes out and buys her jotter, Parker Pen and bottle of Quink ink. Then tries to start writing down her thoughts. Her very own thoughts, not thoughts to be Shared or Liked, and definitely not all her thoughts that are going to be there for ever.

  And this morning she is not hitting ‘Send’ either. She is just staring at her screen trying not to think about anything. Well, anything other than that young man’s back. And what her Mum might be doing and where.

  Meanwhile:

  Celine Hagbard is sitting at a pavement table of her regular Starbucks in New York City. Other than one small cloud drifting aimlessly across it, the sky is as blue as it has ever been. She is about to sup the dregs of her second double espresso when something falls from the sky and lands on the sidewalk next to her. It is a book. A hardback book. A yellow hardback book. Hagbard picks it up. She then instinctively looks up at the sky above to see where it has come from. All she can see is the small white cloud. She reads the words on the front cover: ‘Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs by Yoko Ono’.

  Now, plenty of people might wonder, ‘What are the chances that I have just noticed Yoko Ono’s face is now being used within the Starbucks logo, 23 seconds before a book by Yoko Ono falls out of the sky at my feet?’ They would then probably answer their own question with: ‘Several trillion to one.’ Whereas Celine Hagbard knew the chances were exactly the same as any other two things happening at the same time. But most people do not see the bigger picture Hagbard sees.

  We now have to throw another fact into the equation. You can check it on Wikipedia, if you don’t trust me. In 1968, when Hagbard was still young, and to all intents and purposes still a man, he was taken on by The Beatles as a ‘crazy inventor’. It was when The Beatles were going through their Apple end-phase and breaking out in all directions, awarding alternative knighthoods to people like S
pike Milligan and making records with Wild Man Fischer and Vera Lynn.

  Although history seems to have rewritten it as John Lennon’s idea, in fact the whole Yellow Submarine idea came from Ringo Starr. Plans were pretty far developed with the submarine. Hagbard had spent two years on the designs. Paul McCartney had developed a working relationship with the shipyards in Gdańsk, Poland, where it was going to be built. This all started in 1965, when a young shipbuilder called Lech Wałęsa wrote a fan letter to McCartney about his bass playing, and, because McCartney’s father had worked in shipbuilding on the Mersey and was laid off after the war, never to work again, McCartney had a real and lasting empathy with shipbuilders worldwide and their day-rate/non-contract plight.

  Paul McCartney and Lech Wałęsa were pen pals right through the rest of the ’60s. It was Paul who suggested to Lech he should form a trade union; and it was his girlfriend Francie Schwartz who came up with the idea to name the union Solidarność, or Solidarity in English. Paul convinced Lech the name would play well in the Western media.

  For a few days in February 1970, the album that was subsequently released as Let It Be was going to be called Solidarity. It was Yoko Ono who stopped it and demanded it be called Power to the People. George and Ringo came up with the peace-making compromise of Let It Be.

  As The Beatles were prevented from taking their royalties out of any of the Eastern Bloc countries for records they sold there, they used them to secretly bankroll the whole Solidarity Union movement right up until 1992.

  Most historians cite the influence of Solidarity as the first move that, over the next two decades, brought down the whole Eastern Bloc. All because one young mechanic wrote a fan letter to Paul McCartney asking about the bass playing on ‘Ticket to Ride’.

  Before I get sidetracked even further into the secret history of The Beatles, I will bring it back to known and well-documented facts. George Harrison persuaded the other three the only worthwhile thing left for them to do was to stop the Vietnam War, thus bringing about world peace. No amount of protesting by the ‘long-haired freaks’ was going to make any difference. The Beatles knew they were the only group of people who had the power to make this happen. But they also suspected their power would cease the moment the decade ended.