2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu)

by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

  ‘Whatever. You’re the boss. I can handle the emotion. Does their mum know anything about this?’

  ‘Nothing, but she is currently working behind the bar at the Mermaid in Cheapside. I might get her to do a driving job for me tonight as well.’

  ‘Okay, that might be more difficult to handle. You know what it is like with exes. Unfinished business and stuff. But I will be cool. Time?’

  ‘Just after midnight.’

  ‘A’right, boss. See you later.’

  ‘Well, as you know, you won’t see me. Nobody sees me. I don’t exist. Remember.’

  ‘Cool, boss. See you … I mean, cool.’

  ‘BANKSY here. Is that you, Alan? I need you and your pair of halfwits at the Top of the Pops studio tonight. You know, in Shepherd’s Bush? I got a show for you.’

  ‘But we got a gig at the Underground.’

  ‘Forget it, mate. You do this gig and you will be in my film and you will be massive again. Guaranteed. And remember, you owe me one from way back when.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, the Guy Fawkes mask idea.’

  ‘Okay, I understand. But make sure that I— I mean we, as in Extreme Noise Terror, are on the bill above any of the other proper bands.’

  ‘You will be the only rock-type band there.’

  ‘Okay. A’right, we’ll be there. But we’ll want a crate of Manns Brown Ale on the rider.’

  ‘It will be there in your dressing room. Just after midnight, right? But make sure you boys deliver. You may have been big in the ’90s, but I don’t want any of those “leads falling out” and “the bass player being totally out of tune” excuses after the show.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘One last thing – it is good to see the Cobblers† back up in the old First Division where they belong. Next thing you know, the Hatters‡ will be up there too.’

  ‘Okay, see you later, but no mention of the Guy Fawkes masks. My whole reputation rests on it.’

  ‘And that is why I know I can call on you.’

  ‘BANKSY here. Is that Mister Fox?’

  ‘Yep. This better be important, BANKSY.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I am putting on a FUUK tonight and making a film about it. It will be a slice through modern culture at this most crucial of times. And without Tangerine NiteMare there, it would be more than lacking.’

  ‘No can do. I have the boys playing at the Maelstrom tonight. That is where you should be making your film. That is where it is happening. All your stuff is just so – how can I put it? Humancentric. You have no take on the animal world and the possibilities of parallel dimensions.’

  ‘Don’t give me the bullshit, Mister Fox. We all know this is just your publicity crap. That your band were just a bunch of lads that missed the Brit Pop bandwagon and—’

  ‘Just fuck off now, BANKSY, you can keep—’

  ‘You are so easy to wind up, Mister Fox. I believe it all. But, anyway, I will make it worth your while. I have already spoken to Drums of Death as well, so that is sorted. We’ll need you at the Top of the Pops studio just after midnight. You know where it is an’ all?’

  ‘Yeah, cool. See you later. I mean, I won’t see you later, but we will be there.’

  ‘BANKSY here. Is that “Nina Simone”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t know me, but Ronnie Scott told me you were doing a set at his club tonight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I wondered if you would be interested in performing your version of “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” later tonight for a film I am making.’

  ‘Sounds interesting – but am I to be the token black female artist in the film?’

  ‘No, we already have one of those. We want you for your talent.’

  ‘Then I will be there. You know my standard fee?’

  ‘Of course, Nina.’

  ‘Miss Simone to you.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Simone.’

  ‘Can I play some Johann Sebastian Bach on the soundtrack as well?’

  ‘I was too afraid to ask.’

  ‘Then we have a deal.’

  I guess I have made my point – the phone lines are up and working. A new mongrel culture of some sort is spiralling out of control, but somewhere behind it all, strings are being pulled, if you want to read things that way.

  As far as I am concerned, I still believe in Chaos Theory, and BANKSY is under the delusion that he is somehow in control of these things. But as the author of this book my job is to relay to you the facts.

  Meanwhile:

  In a cell in HM Holloway Ladies’ Prison, two young women discuss their fate.

  ‘You mean to tell me you cheated on him five times with five different men?’

  ‘Well, it never felt like that at the time. It only felt natural. It was real.’

  ‘So you went and killed the man you keep telling me how much you loved, just ’cause he cheated on you once?’

  ‘As far as I am concerned, me killing him for that “just once” proves how much I loved him. And here I am, every day for the rest of my life, proving to you, him, his mother, the rest of the world how much I loved him. My love for him now is the greatest work of art I could ever produce. And no one will ever know about it, it is like your six million people that got killed in a war in a jungle in Africa that no one ever knew about, but bigger.’

  We will leave them there. For a start I have no idea how Winnie should have or could have responded to Yoko Ono the Younger’s last statement.

  ‘BANKSY here. Is that E. H. Gombrich?’

  ‘Yes. This better be important, I have to get the last chapter done before it goes to press. The Story of Art has to be told, and it has to be told now, for today, and not what was happening in the Teens.’

  ‘And that is exactly why I am phoning you. The history of art is going to be amended tonight, and you need to be there so the story can be told.’

  ‘And you are not shitting me?’

  ‘No, this is for real. If you miss out on what’s happening tonight, your great-grandfather will never forgive you.’

  ‘I will be there – but where?’

  ‘The Top of the Pops studio, Television Centre, in Shepherd’s Bush. Be there just after midnight. But no cameras.’

  ‘Cool.’

  And that is the end of that chapter.

  Dear Diary,

  There I was thinking I knew how it was all going to go, and suddenly this very minor passing character takes over the whole thing. Who would have guessed this BANKSY person would be pulling so many strings?

  To be honest, I am knackered. I am going to have a bit of a nap now before attempting the last three chapters and working out my escape plans.

  The afternoon tea trolley is just about to come around. A mug of hot sweet tea and a couple of Rich Tea biscuits and I will have an hour of shuteye.

  See you later.

  Yours,

  Roberta X

  * Reggae term for acetates.

  † Cobblers – Northampton Town Football Club.

  ‡ Hatters – Luton Town Football Club.

  5: THE GREAT ESCAPES

  19:19 24 December 2023

  We now have to put to one side some of these admittedly ridiculous subplots and return to Winnie and the condition of her mind and body, as she is unable to do much else other than lie down on her top bunk in their cell and wait for her time to come. She can hear Yoko gently snoring from the bottom bunk.

  I may have been over-flippant in my description of her state of mind as portrayed in the previous couple of chapters. The truth is, Winnie is riven with fear about what she is about to go through in the very short term. What woman has not been, ever since Eve gave birth to her troublesome sons? And whatever the prison staff tell her – and some of them are very supportive and understanding – she has no understanding of how she is going to get through all of this in the short term, let alone for the next ten years
.

  From baby to first words, from crèche to nursery, from primary to secondary school, how will her child explain to the other kids in the playground that Holloway Prison is home and her mum is doing ten years for aiding and abetting a murder? Who would believe her that it was a murder her mother had nothing to do with?

  Here I need to stop and address something else. Winnie has no idea what sex the child is going to be. She has never had a scan – but somehow she assumes it is going to be a girl.

  You see, this is where Saint Matthew and Saint Luke got it wrong. In their telling of the story of that other nativity, you never get any real angle on what Mary is going through. The Biblical Mary is just there as a blank canvas – an Every(young)woman – there was no real sense of her fear. There was no anger at Joseph for dragging her off so he could do his civic duty for the national census. Then there was no mess in the stable, no blood all over the place, no screaming in pain, no afterbirth, no umbilical cord to have to be cut with a blunt farming utensil.

  And had Mary miscarried before or again? We’ve had centuries of men reminding us how Jesus was born in the most humble of surroundings. But every time it has been visually depicted in art, or whatever, Mary is always there in her blue robe, trimmed with white, looking the picture of health, with the lambs and the doves and the Star up above and the lovely Shepherds and the Three Wise Men with their gifts.

  Why the fuck did we never get the true story of what Mary was thinking?

  Top of the list of what she must have been thinking was:

  ‘How the fuck did I get up the duff, when I ain’t – or should that be in’t? – fully fucked any Tom, Dick or Harry?’

  As for Joseph, he obviously has a problem in that department.

  And this is the question Winnie has been asking herself ever since the time of the month never arrived, and nor did it the next month, or the next. And she could feel those changes in her body and mind. And the belly began to swell.

  Here she is in her cell, her time is almost up and she is no closer to learning how this happened. No Angel has appeared at the bars of her cell window with any sort of explanation. Not even in her dreams.

  It goes around and around and around her mind near enough all the time, however hard she tries to suppress it.

  If the truth be told, for all her violent sexual fantasies, the idea of a male cock – member, penis, whatever – physically entering her body fills her with disgust beyond any sort of rationality.

  ‘So how did this happen?’

  She keeps coming back to a theory that does not really stack up. This is the theory:

  One night early last April, she did have a few drinks too many and she can remember chatting to some unsuitable man at a party. She had sort of been celebrating. She had got everything done, and the end of death was guaranteed, once, that is, she hit ‘Send’ to Celine Hagbard. This ‘unsuitable man’ tried to convince her that he managed a band – but they were a conceptual band, or that is what he was telling her, but what the fuck is a conceptual band?

  The thing is, for all her fluttering of eyelashes and laughing at his dull jokes, she very much remembers coming home alone – as she always did. But when she woke the next morning, somewhat the worse for wear, she did feel strange and sore down below and a bit abused, and there were those hairs on her pillow that were definitely not hers – short red hairs. And that black feather on the bedroom floor?

  She also knew however much she drank, and she had been way drunker in her red wine days, she would never have consented.

  Winnie tries to stop thinking these thoughts and puts away all the fears and just strokes her swollen belly and feels the gentle kick coming from inside.

  But then the tears start again. This child she is going to bring into the world will not only have no father but no doting grandmother or proud grandfather either. No siblings to rival.

  At least that other immaculately conceived child would have had a proper childhood, running around the streets of Nazareth, and grandparents to do the doting and a bit of childcare.

  At least she has Yoko. She could not have wished for a better friend, and there is obviously no chance of her going anywhere.

  It is at this point in time, just gone 21:37, that she hears a heavy metallic scraping noise coming from what sounds like underneath Yoko’s bottom bunk, followed by a very male and old-style Cockney accent issuing the word ‘Fuck!’ – definitely not said in reference to the new genre of music she has no knowledge of.

  We will leave this scene now so we can catch up with what else is going on across the city of London on this first Christmas Eve in the real post-digital age, not one that is just some fashion statement.

  Subcomandante Marcos is on his horse riding along the elevated section of the Westway. Two bullet-belts slung across his chest. His trusty AK-47 sitting across his lap, ever at the ready. His balaclava down. His cap with the three stars polished. And, of course, his peasant pipe freshly packed with tobacco. We may never learn how Subcomandante Marcos made it onto the elevated section of the Westway, let alone across the Atlantic, but he is here and, as far as he is concerned, before the night is out the revolution will have begun where Marx and Engels dreamt of it first beginning.

  The Twenty-Three Sparrows have settled down for the night in a bush somewhere in West London.

  Queen Kate Moss and Queen Kate Middleton are fine-tuning their joint Queen’s Speech in the their joint penthouse pad in Buck House.

  Moses Tabick and Henry Pedders are at their usual table in the Jellied Eel & Pie shop in Hoxton Market – round the back from the bottom end of Kingsland Road. Since first bumping into each other in The Three Crowns last April, they get together at least once a week to discuss religion and politics.

  Of course, the New Jerusalem thing up in the Pennines never happened. Not through it not being a good idea, but with the collapse of any real mass contact with his brothers on the banks of the Jordan, let alone the wider diaspora, Moses had to put the plan on hold.

  As for Henry Pedders and his career, as you may have already realised, it has taken a turn for the meteoric rise. Now that people across England, or for that matter the UK, have an appetite for politics again, numerous political parties have sprung from almost nowhere. The entire political party-type infrastructure that had been staggering along until 2017 has long since been swept away, along with any other rubbish that is no longer needed. These new political parties are all desperately trying to find credible and charismatic leaders before the first proper general election, to be held in three months’ time.

  After all sorts of deals done over pies and pints in smoke-filled rooms – yes, smoking is back – the dozens of new parties whittled themselves down to three. These three are the Young Socialist Workers’ Party, the New English Tory Party and the Liberal Rights of Man Republican Party. Their names may give you a fake sense of their differences. The Young Socialist Workers’ Party is for the ‘hard-working families’. The New English Tory Party is for the ‘families that work hard’. And the Liberal Rights of Man Party for Republicans is for anything they feel is not already covered in the manifestos of the other two major parties.

  And Thomas Payne is back as the new Karl Marx.

  It was after Henry Pedders burnt down the Shard, and the New Dark Ages began, that he realised he owed it to himself, his mother, Dudley Dursley and the people of England to put his leadership skills to good use. He had never been interested in politics before – back in the days when politics were used to run things – which means he had no sense of party-political allegiances.

  Only in the last couple of months had it become obvious that it was going to be a two-horse race between the Young Socialist Workers’ Party and the New Tory Party of England. Henry thought he should nail his colours to a mast. He took an old penny that had been handed down to him by his grandfather. He flipped it – tails for the New Tories of Old England and heads for Young Socialists. Tails got it. And now, two months later – as in Christm
as Eve 2023 – he is running for the leadership. Admittedly it is looking neck-and-neck between him and the old guard, William Hague, but over the past week he has been making all the right moves, and the press is right behind him – especially the Guardian and the Daily Express.

  But none of this ‘meteoric rise’ stuff gets in the way of his twice-a-week-or-more get-togethers with Moses Tabick at the Eel & Pie shop in Hoxton Market. And for the record, and as you might expect, Moses always goes for the jellied eels, Henry the pies.

  Some days Pete from The Libertines joins them.

  Throughout their endless and open discussions about religion and politics, they seem to have arrived at an understanding that if religions and in turn the concept of there being a mysterious hand at play behind all of Creation, and in turn the concept of there being innate morals, were invented, it follows that the political manifestos man must follow are equally all made up by man and likely to change with the seasons. Thus there are no rights and wrongs – never were – just survival.

  The acknowledged truth of this agreement between these now close friends does not get in the way of either’s chosen career path.

  I am afraid both Moses and Henry still think in terms of mankind and not wo/mankind.

  On this particular evening when the Eel & Pie shop is closing up for the night and they are considering walking up to The Three Crowns for a pint, in comes a rather startling-looking young man with a shaved head and saffron robe and bare feet. It may not be snowing outside, but this is still 24 December.

  In one hand this young man has a staff, in the other he is clutching a yellow book.

  As for Gimpo – we may have met a female Gimpo somewhere earlier in the book who had served as a nurse in the Falklands War and went on to write a slim volume of great influence. This Gimpo is male. He is of a different generation, but has some of the same characteristics. This Gimpo works for BANKSY, although, like everyone else in this novel, he has never knowingly met BANKSY. Gimpo is a very able young man and has a can-do attitude to most things in life.