2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu)
Page 17
‘Too much information. I just want to know what is happening to Winnie and Yoko. Is she pregnant? Are they—?’
I am afraid you are going to have to wait until Book Three before you are updated on their situation; right now you are going to have to keep up with all these names and ridiculous subplots. And maybe the story of Tangerine NiteMare is the main thing in this book, and Winnie and Yoko a mere passing phase. Okay, all right, if you really can’t be bothered with all of this: Winnie has a miscarriage, Darcy drops dead and she ends up having to marry Rochester. Now please let the rest of us get on with it.
‘Sorry, can’t help, Mister Fox. Drums of Death have a gig tonight at the London Aquarium, but seeing as Azealia “I’m a ruin you cunt” Vaults has pulled out, maybe Tangerine NiteMare could do the show?’ says Colin from Oban.
‘I will check with the others, but I’m guessing that could be a great crowd for us. They are very big with the fish demographic. That Stingray down there is always on FaceLife bigging up the team,’ says Mister Fox.
Ten seconds later, Mister Fox is on the mobile to Killer Queen.
‘Look, we are going to have to shift the gig. We can’t get the sound system out to the Maelstrom. But Colin from Oban – you know, the Drums of Death lad with the scary make-up? – said we could do the gig with him tonight at the London Aquarium. You think you can get down here in time?’ says Mister Fox.
‘Yeah, sure. And, anyway, that Colin from Oban owes me one. He ripped all that black-and-white make-up thing off me. Mind you, it’s a pity Azealia ‘It’s some sex shit’ Vaults can’t make it as well. She been my favourite for some time,’ says Killer Queen.
Ten seconds later, Killer Queen is on conference to all the others.
‘So we got the gig tonight at the London Aquarium. I say we do the whole gig in the same running order as it is on the album,’ says Killer Queen.
‘I’m on social media now with it,’ says Dead Perch.
‘Can you get some peanuts on the rider?’ asks Dead Squirrel.
‘I’ll have to tell my mum. She is still cut up about me being dead,’ says John Lennon.
And by the time we leave this scene for the next, all the Little Perch know about it and they are beside themselves with excitement.
13:29
Will Gompertz has now got the full story on the Unknown Artist. He is about to broadcast live from Ground Zero Two. Her body is being left exactly where it splatted onto the ground, but now with velvet rope around it. This may be irony, or part of planned framing by the artist herself. Art lovers from around the world are queuing up to appreciate the work. Lord Saatchi has just flown in and is in negotiations to buy the complete piece.
It is rumoured there are those who do actually know her name and background, but the history of art for these times is already written, and it seems from now on she will always be known as the Unknown Artist.
Will Gompertz turns to the camera. ‘Good afternoon. It is with great pleasure I can now proclaim that what we have experienced today is the first time in the complete history of art an artist has compressed their life’s work into one action, which took less than sixty seconds to complete.
‘There have been plenty of artists before whose fame rests on one particular work. Munch and his Scream, Duchamp and his Fountain are two obvious examples, but with them they went on to spend a lifetime making work no one really gives a toss about. But here with the Unknown Artist and her Great Tumble from the Sky, we have the first to “cut the crap” and just deliver the one great work and exit, with not even a gift shop in sight. The exit being a major part of the work.
‘This will undoubtedly start a movement, and one that may last as long as twenty-four hours. We can expect a whole slew of young and impressionable artists to attempt the same feat. They will fail, their names only remembered by their mothers and brothers.
‘It has been confirmed Lord Saatchi will be exhibiting the work from tomorrow morning as a replacement for the now seriously dated and outflanked Three Posters.’
The cameras cut to a close-up, before repeating a looped clip of the actual tumble.
In a small village in the Massif Central region of France, a mother weeps for the loss of her daughter. Her daughter was the illegitimate child of the world-famous high-wire artist Philippe Petit. His daughter grew up never having known her father other than through the media. She wanted to beat him and show him she could not only do it better than him but do it without any support structure and famous friends. She died trying. She failed.
3 May 1984
Dear Diary,
Today I have passed the halfway point in writing this book. It is now the fear starts to ratchet up. The advice I have been given in the past is to not look down, the analogy being that of the highwire artist. But it is not the looking down, and the loss of balance it may engender, I fear. It is the unseen stroke, the hidden heart attack and the fatal motorcycle accident lurking around the next bend that will prevent me finishing this novel.
Looking down from the high wire I can handle. It is the innocent downdraught of the passing helicopter that is the making of my nightmares.
With what is left of this day I will walk around the coast and seek out the cave that can only be entered at low tide, or so I have been told.
Yours,
Roberta
* Note to self: maybe no one will remember who or what Al-Qaeda was when this book is read by you. Or even Harry Patch.
6: BIG MAC WITH FRIES
Radicalisation is a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or reject and/or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice.
Chodak is a character we met briefly at the end of Book One.
Chodak grew up in a village in Tibet.
Chodak is a young Buddhist monk.
Chodak entered his monastery in early 2017.
Chodak was seventeen years old.
Chodak’s monastery is in the mountains above the holy city of Lhasa.
Chodak is now 23 years old.
Chodak was radicalised by himself.
Chodak was radicalised by the internet.
Chodak was radicalised because the world had failed him.
Chodak was born to be radical.
Chodak has walked out of his monastery.
Chodak is walking down the mountain.
Chodak is wearing a saffron robe.
Chodak has a shaved head.
Chodak has high cheekbones.
Chodak does not see the lone crow flying across the sky.
Chodak does not hear the squabbling Twenty-Three Sparrows in the thornbush.
Chodak has his sword still carefully concealed under his robes.
Chodak can see the city of Lhasa below him.
Chodak has never been to Lhasa.
Chodak has never seen the bright lights.
Chodak is walking into Lhasa.
Chodak’s sacred number is 108.
Chodak silently repeats his sacred mantra 108 times.
Chodak has 108 beads on his Japa mala string of beads.
Chodak’s earliest memory is of learning to say four words.
Chodak did not know what those words meant.
Chodak did not know what language those words were in.
Chodak is silently repeating his sacred mantra 108 times.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Chodak does not know why these were his earliest words.
Chodak does not know why they became the words of his mantra.
/> Chodak does know why 108 is his sacred number.
Chodak does know that all Buddhist monks know 108 is the most sacred of numbers.
Chodak does know 108 is more sacred than seventeen, 23 and Forty.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Chodak did not know what a Big Mac With Fries was until he entered the monastery.
Chodak clicked on Google Images to look at photographs of a Big Mac With Fries.
Chodak clicked on Google Images every day to look at a Big Mac With Fries.
Chodak did not know what a Big Mac With Fries would taste like.
Chodak wanted more than anything else to know this taste.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Chodak knew a Big Mac With Fries came from McDonald’s.
Chodak knew McDonald’s was the biggest fast-food chain in the world.
Chodak had never seen a McDonald’s.
Chodak knew there was a McDonald’s in Lhasa.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Chodak did not know fashions change.
Chodak did not know things come and things go.
Chodak did not know people no longer ate Big Macs With Fries.
Chodak did not know that the last branch of McDonald’s closed yesterday.
Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away
Chodak had never heard The Beatles.
Chodak had never heard The American Medical Association.
Chodak had been a big fan of Azealia ‘black girl shit’ Vaults.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
We know why fashions change.
We know why things come and go.
We know why the last McDonald’s closed, even if you did not know until you were reading this right now that the last of the McDonald’s to close in the big wide world was in Lhasa, high up in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet.
And yes, we all know why Azealia ‘kizzat sh-shaved’ Vaults is married and settled and no longer the bad-mouthed bitch-queen of the R&B scene.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
The reason why the last prison on Earth closed was slightly more complicated, but not much. People had known for centuries that prisons did not work, but, as long as we had democracy, who would vote for a political party that had the abolishment of all prisons in their manifesto?
In an earlier chapter in this novel it was mentioned in passing how the Islamic State had been given their own channel on WikiTube, and how this got them into a more user-friendly line of work. This, in a way, skated over the real change in what was happening on the far shores of Islam. People had been blaming ‘radical’ Imams and inner city Mosques, wanting the Imams chucked out and the Mosques burnt down.
This was a mistake.
All the facts were already there and staring us all in the face.
But we chose to ignore them.
By early 2017 70 per cent of the prison population throughout Western Europe was made up of young men from Muslim backgrounds, whereas the proportion of Muslims in the broader population was little more than 10 per cent. While in prison these young Muslim men got angrier with society as a whole, and the injustices that led them to be incarcerated in particular.
Their anger was rewarded with a more radical take on their faith.
This radical take answered questions, gave life meaning, purpose and direction. To use the cliché of the time, they became ‘radicalised’. As soon as they got out of prison, they headed for the ever-growing caliphate and started chopping off the heads of unbelievers, or anybody who did not quite believe in the version of Islam that they believed in. An oversimplification, obviously, but I don’t want to bog down the flow of this chapter with too much detail and pseudo-academic shite.
Why play Call of Duty when you can do it for real?
Why put up with the shit when you can change the world?
The Western World as we knew it was being brought to its knees by young men who were nearly all ‘radicalised’ in our prisons. The logic had to be addressed.
And it was.
All the prisons were closed down and all the prisoners freed.
An end to radicalisation using radical means.
It worked.
The young men were also given start-up loans.
This also worked.
As for punishment, the public stocks were revived.
As a system it had worked for hundreds of years, until they fell from favour in late-Victorian times.
Twenty-four hours in the public stocks, with recycled food waste being thrown at them, put near enough everyone that contravened accepted behaviour back on the straight and narrow. The ‘short, sharp shock’ that really worked.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
But none of this is relevant to Chodak in his Buddhist monastery up in the Himalayas. For him, Buddhism had all the answers, and nobody was listening. He needed to make the world listen. And as a bit of skimming of religious history over the last ten years told him in no uncertain terms, the chopping off of heads was the only failsafe way of getting the world to take notice.
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Big Mac With Fries
Chodak walks into Lhasa.
Chodak walks the streets to where the local branch of McDonald’s has always been. Or has been since the deal was done between Xi Jinping and the last but one President of the USA, back in 2017.
Chodak is using GoogleByte Maps on his iPhone23.
X marks the spot where McDonald
’s will be.
Chodak arrives in time for tea.
But the McDonald’s is boarded up.
No longer in business.
The world has moved on.
Ronald has been let go.
They let him keep his clown drag for old times’ sake.
Starbucks has opened next door, but Skinny Latte To Go is not Chodak’s mantra.
However hard he might have tried.
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Skinny Latte To Go
Even 108 times was not going to work.
Chodak looks down the street.
Chodak sees the drunken Ronald McDonald staggering towards him.
Chodak draws his sword.
Its blade glints in the late-afternoon sunlight.
As Ronald McDonald staggers his last …
Chodak sweeps his blade down in the most graceful of arcs.
Without a moment for hesitation.
Without a cry of despair.
Without a second for pain.
Ronald McDonald’s head is cut clean off.
Ronald McDonald’s head rolls into the gutter.
Ronald McDonald’s neck spurts blood.
Chodak sits down to wonder at what he has done.
A crowd gathers round, too startled to do or say anything.
Ronald McDonald is well and truly dead, even if his left hand can be seen to twitch.
Chodak takes from his bag a book. A yellow book. A Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs kind of book.
Chodak opens it at the page, the only page in Ü-Tsang, his own language.
Chodak reads the following words aloud to those who have silently gathered around:
There are no more wars