Bread

by Stephen Brown

THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY

  Being stranded there at the roadside was awful. There was no damage to the car, but we had to flag someone down and get them to phone the rescue services - and it took ages for anyone to drive by in the first place. Then when the mechanic showed up a couple of hours after that, one look was enough to tell him we needed a bigger tow truck. By the time we were finally pulled back onto the road and were able to get on our way again, Geeza was right – we probably could have walked back to Lake Louise Village!

  At the time I remembered having seen somewhere that you should always stay with your vehicle as it is easier for spotter planes to find a car than it is a couple of people wandering aimlessly about, but on reflection maybe I was being a tad overdramatic. That advice was for when you have broken down in the middle of the desert, not for when you’ve gone about fifteen feet off a tarmac road which you could easily follow straight into town. In my defence though, while it could hardly be described as scorching heat that would dehydrate you in less that an hour (it was pretty parky in fact!), it was still around forty miles to Lake Louise and it was not a well travelled road. Still, it doesn’t really matter now.

  The frustration we felt at being stuck for so long was made much worse when we finally screeched into Calgary airport to find that not only had we missed Humphries by some time, but also that things seemed to have escalated out of all proportion.

  We have massively misjudged the man it would seem. Our Professor is no mere lunatic, acting in random, largely whimsical if dangerous ways. We now know he is actually a criminal mastermind of the very worst kind and the plot we have become embroiled in is of a global scale! It would be far more suited to the likes of James Bond, Steed and his Avenger friends or even perhaps Superman.

  Not us though.

  But having come so far, can we just back down and keep the lowest of low profiles, hoping that 007 turns up and saves the day? Of course not. Criminal genius he may be, but we are still hot on his trail! Probably closer than anybody else anyway, so we can’t stop now. And there is no doubt whatsoever that he is quite mad - we only need this insanity to cloud his reason once and he will make a mistake. And when he does, we will have him high and dry.

  Dumping the car in the hire company’s drop off bay we rushed unsuspecting into the terminal building. The first things we noted were the numerous television sets dotted around the building, suspended from the ceiling on high tension steel cables like some sort of cubist’s mobiles, put up there to distract the public’s attention from the tedium of hanging around. On each of these TVs, a news story that has just rocked the world was beaming itself out at us.

  There, standing in front of a dark, grey backdrop shouting furiously into a single microphone stood Alan Humphries, dressed in the same suit I had seen him wearing in the MacPlimsol Conference Hall back in Eilean Ban. However, gone was the smiling, unruffled Professor who had so easily lulled us to sleep with his hypnotic ramblings on the subject of Mathematics. This time his hair was unkempt and sticking out at all angles, his eyes burning with a cold, blue fire. The most striking part of his apparel though was the frown he wore upon his face, which was ugly and terrifying.

  “Are you listening world? Ha! Of course you are. You have no choice!” Quite clearly mad, his ranting continued. “Listen and listen well – I have amassed over seventy per cent of all the Scottish money still in existence. Now I am aware, as are your governments, that to the common man and woman this might not seem even slightly important, but ohhh, it is! Important enough for me to jam every TV station in the world and to reveal myself - to show my hand at last!

  “I am going to explain to you all a little something about global economics now and it would be well worth your while to pay attention: you have been deceived people. Your governments have lied to you.”

  No, you don’t say!!! Surely not!

  “For many, many years – as long as there have been any governments, they have lied to you about how the world is financed. It is generally well known that global markets choose to trade in one popular currency, as much for simplicity’s sake than for anything else. The common misconception is that it is currently American dollar – in making you believe this, the governments around the world have been able to perpetrate the biggest on-going fraud the world has ever known. It is this terrible secret which I am about to expose.

  “In every country around the world the governments and the big, multi-national industries deal amongst themselves exclusively in Scottish money. As they negotiate contracts, trade deals and aid packages, they speak behind closed doors in Scottish currency and only once all the t’s had been crossed and i’s dotted do they make it public, converted to the currency of the day. It used to be pounds sterling; now indeed, they talk in dollars.

  “Most people look upon the Scottish currency as a joke. Put out by Westminster to appease a conquered, but unruly nation, it’s not real money. In reality however, the Scottish pound is unbelievably strong – on the markets this morning for example, you could have got around five hundred million dollars for your one pound Caledonian, were you able to do such a thing - which of course you are not.

  “There is a very good reason behind all this secrecy,” he explained. “There have always been a few pounds here, a few shillings there, kept as curios and keepsakes by everyday folk such as yourselves. Now while any average person may have held onto these coins simply for posterity’s sake - for the memory of a treasured holiday spent traipsing around the Highlands, or visiting the ghost of Edinburgh castle or whatever - had the truth ever emerged as to their real value it would have made them richer beyond their wildest dreams – richer probably than eighty per cent of all of the countries, individually, on the planet!

  “The global economy would have been devastated over night. The entire financial infrastructure that has been built up so painstakingly over the last few centuries would have come crashing down in an instant. Current world powers would have toppled as certain individuals, perhaps just common laymen or housewives from Selkirk would have overtaken them in wealth. It would not have taken long for the world to sink into a sea of anarchy and chaos.

  “Oh yes, there would be bedlam if the truth ever got out. The whole of our Coca-Cola civilisation would implode and humanity would face its biggest crisis since the Ice Age. Bigger even.” He smiled an evil looking smile. “That is, of course, if the truth ever got out. Which now, thanks to me, it has.”

  He laughed insanely as he went on to explain how for years now he had been steadily accumulating all those loose bits of change, claiming to have traced almost every single penny ever hammered out on the Scottish Mints, long since destroyed.

  This is the reason why almost every nation on earth is billions of dollars in debt. That much has been made clear in the media over the last couple of years with all these financial crises, but in debt to whom? That much was never explained. The IMF, the World Bank – it was never really adequately explained where any of this money was actually coming from.

  As the Professor went around somehow collecting in all that Scottish money for himself though, governments began finding it more and more difficult to foot the bills. Humphries, it seems, has single-handedly plunged the world into a vast economic crisis.

  I must confess though that despite everything, I still found it fascinating to learn that these archaic Scottish Mints stood on the site where Balmoral Castle now stands, itself built specifically to ensure that no trace of the ancient mines, mint and treasury could ever be exposed to the modern world.

  “How else do you think Britain, such a tiny, windswept little cluster of islands become the world’s first Super Power?” the Professor asked.

  It had all been won by the wealth of Cairn Crathie, the world’s first bank, back in antediluvian times. What he told us next may have seemed an irrelevance to some, but it tied off a loose end I have pondered over for years. Has anybody else, I wonder, ever given thought as to how the Polo, that certain ‘mint-with-a-hole’ was
brought into being?

  Most of the people who work in the marketing industry could just as easily be labelled as ‘care in the community’ folk, their brains not functioning on quite the same level as the society they are living in. However, this ring shaped mint was not the innocent result of the surreal imaginings of a fractured mind in the middle a board room somewhere. It was in fact a tribute, calculated and deliberate, dreamt into life by somebody in the know - a long dead governor of the Bank of England, who also happened to sit on the board of a certain confectionary company.

  You see, all coins started life as rings, or discs with holes in them. Historians would be able to show you monies thousands of years old from Japan or China that would verify this in a moment. In the days long ago when coins were still made out of gold this was done for two main reasons:

  Firstly it would have been disastrous to lose any of them – this was real gold we are talking about, not just something you can afford to let fall down the back of the sofa. It was therefore deemed much safer to be able to carry the things on a length of knotted cord, or a finely wrought, close-linked chain. That way no one could easily lose them. Only a fool would let slip his entire fortune, clustered together as it was. Incidentally, it was around this time that key-rings were also invented, as were candy necklaces, but neither of those facts are really important.

  The second reason was simply one of weight. What most of us do not realise is that gold is very weighty - much heavier than people think and it was very soon understood that just by pinching a piece from the middle, the coins could be made much more user friendly.

  The reason Polos were made into mints as opposed to any other sort of sweets – liquorish or chocolate for example – was yet another gesture, paying homage to Cairn Crathie itself: the worlds first Mint.

  The word mint has always been associated with coinage, ever since the very first excavations were made around Cairn Crathie. The site on which it was established was originally covered by acre upon acre of wild Scottish mint, menthus caledonius, an ancient forebear of the various types of plant sharing the same genus found today.

  It is a quite natural phenomenon in any virgin environment, one completely untouched by the exploitative hand, for mint to thrive in soil found over areas in which quantities of gold have formed deep underground. All mint, and Scottish mint in particular, loves something that occurs and spreads through the earth during the metallurgical process of gold developing and Cairn Crathie was built at the opening of what was to become the deepest gold mine in the ancient world. The gold found there was the richest seam in the British Isles and ran thicker than a man’s arm half a mile beneath the surface.

  The Professor explained that Scottish gold is far more pure, chemically speaking, than gold from anywhere else on our fair planet. Something to do with geological pressures within the Earth’s crust and the permeability of igneous and non-igneous rock. He lost me for a minute with all that, as he did, I suspect, the majority of his audience. Apparently the introduction of naturally occurring mineral impurities which are absorbed over several millennia by gold found everywhere else other than Scotland is key.

  How? Why? Well he did explain, the sinister Mr Humphries, but I can’t say I understood anything of what he said, no matter how many times he went over the theory of plate tectonics.

  Anyway, eventually he moved on. “The only Scottish money I do not yet possess - and yet,” he stressed, “is such a small word - is that being held in certain repositories of various national treasuries, along with a very few dribs and drabs I still have trickling in courtesy of my numerous agents.” Thugs such as those that accosted me outside the stock exchange I suppose. Geeza had been right about that all along. “I am issuing an ultimatum here and now to all those nations who still hold Scottish money in your vaults - you know who you are. Starting with Japan, you will hand over to me,” a brief glance down at the notepad he obviously had on a table beneath him, “the seventeen pounds, three shillings and ninepence you have stockpiled. You will do this by placing it in a locked case on the roof garden of the Billy McAngus Cordon Bleu Eatery in the centre of Kyoto City.”

  He then gave a deadline which equated to ten o’clock this morning, Canadian time (this had been a recording first shown last night). “Or suffer the consequences,” he continued, “which, I can assure you with the utmost sincerity, will be most dire.”

  The screen then turned on to a couple of very graven-faced newsreaders.

  “That was a recording from last night when this psychotic madman, yet to be identified, interrupted broadcasts all around the world to issue his demands,” one of them said, the distinguished looking, silver-haired, male half of the pair – you know how these formulaic news teams are put together. The younger, attractive-but-serious looking woman then took over in the same ‘concerned’ tone (honestly, these things are serious enough without some cretinous pair trying to dramatise things even more. Just read the damn news!)

  “That’s right Graham. Just coming in, we have the chief Minister of the Japanese Treasury who is about to give a statement.”

  “Thanks Jane. Let’s cut to him now. Is this live?”

  “Yes it is Graham.”

  “Live to Japan then.”

  The camera cut quickly to a frail looking Japanese gentleman, who seemed genuinely worried. He was assaulted by a barrage of camera flashes before he spoke in heavily accented English.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the world. It is my duty to inform you all that the Japanese people will not be held to ransom by the actions of a solitary, highly questionable madman.” Though clearly rattled it was obvious to all that, true to form for any politician, he was lying through his teeth as he continued. “Further more, I would like to take the opportunity on behalf of the Japanese government to assure citizens of all nations that this craven terrorist’s spurious talk of world economics and about Scottish money is completely false. This man, whoever he is, is clearly delusional and cannot seriously hope that the Japanese public would fall for his far fetched panic-mongering.

  “I am not aware of how he has managed to hijack the media to such an extent, but I am sure that Japan is not the only country putting every available resource into finding and stopping this deranged criminal. On behalf of governments all over the world we request that people remain calm and to carry on as if none of this had happened. Let us be clear about this. There is no threat. Please, carry on with your lives as before.”

  Ten o’clock this morning was the deadline.

  It was now nine forty-seven.

  ***