Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  Bullseye.

  The Mod spasmed as though electrified. He tumbled away from Petra, his erect, shit-stained cock flapping wildly. He tried reaching for the mop handle spearing him from behind, but couldn’t pull it out. Eventually he collapsed against a dustbin, choking and mewling.

  The nee-naw, nee-naw of a panda car siren skirled above the rooftops, growing louder. One of the Mods yelled, “Fuck, it’s the fuzz!” and they all fled, haring to their scooters.

  Guy didn’t give a toss about them any more. He crawled over to Petra. There was blood leaking from between her buttocks. He took off his jacket and draped it over her, and he stayed there, hugging her to him, sobbing, until a police officer found them.

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Petra lay unconscious, sedated. She had had to have surgery, five stitches, but the prognosis was good. There was no reason why she shouldn’t make a full physical recovery.

  Guy’s injuries were seen to, too. He sported some atrocious contusions and abrasions but, aside from pain and stiffness, he was fine. Nothing broken or ruptured.

  The Mod he had stabbed was also there, in the intensive care ward. The doctors were unsure if the man would walk again. The mop handle had partly severed his spinal nerve. “Frankly, if he’s left a cripple,” a consultant confided to Guy, “it’s no more than the bastard deserves.”

  When Guy had finished giving his statement to a detective sergeant, he was allowed to go free. He stayed by Petra’s bedside through the night until dawn. He didn’t sleep a wink.

  It would be fair to say that that long, lonely vigil was a pivotal moment in Guy’s life. He thought again and again about the Mods’ vicious, mindless assault. He thought about tribes and factions, confrontation and hatred. He thought about his father, dead now for over a decade, victim of the worst kind of irony, murdered while on a mission to broker peace. He thought about the bigger picture, the blocs the world was divided into, the ever-present threat of nuclear obliteration, the insanity of the superpowers’ doctrine of mutually assured destruction. He thought about individuals, who only wanted peace, and collectives, who seemed hell bent on war, a seemingly intractable paradox.

  Come the morning, he had arrived at a turning point. A decisive moment.

  He went in search of a pay phone.

  He didn’t have a great deal of change on him, but that didn’t matter. He dialled 100.

  “Operator. How may I help?”

  “Yes, I’d like to make a reverse charge call please,” Guy said.

  “What number to?”

  “It’s an oh-one London number.” He reeled off seven digits.

  “And who shall I say is calling?”

  “Guy Lucas.”

  The distant burr of a phone ringing. Finally, a click of connection.

  “Hello? This is the operator. I have a call for you from a Guy Lucas. Will you accept the charge?”

  Silence. Then a grumbled, “Very well.”

  “Putting you through now, sir,” the operator said chirpily to Guy.

  “Alastor?” Guy said into the receiver. “It’s your stepson. I’d like to talk.”

  “Guy,” said Wylie. “I’m not sure you and I have much to say to one another.”

  “Please, hear me out.”

  “Do you know what time it is? I happen to have been up half the night trying to sort out this bloody public sector pay chaos. We’re in for a wretched bloody winter if this nonsense carries on much longer.”

  “It is early, and I apologise for that.”

  “Hmm. Well, that’s something, I suppose,” said Wylie, partly mollified. “An apology. Are you after your mother? She’s still asleep upstairs.”

  “No, it’s you I want,” Guy said.

  “Curiouser and curiouser. Well? What is it you’d like to talk about?”

  “Me. Us. The future. My future.”

  A pause, then Wylie said, “Interesting. Do go on.”

  2013

  GUY LUCAS SAT back in the plush leather back seat of the Jaguar XJ Sentinel with a sigh and folded his hands across his belly. Through his silk shirt, he could feel a roll of flab like a lifebelt, quivering with the vibration of the idling engine. He was softer around the middle these days, no question. His wife kept hinting that he should lose some weight, and a couple of his aides and advisers actively nagged him to do so. It wasn’t good image control to appear bulky and contented. People might get the wrong idea.

  But Guy didn’t care. Fuck image control. He was pushing sixty, damn it, and could be forgiven for carrying a few extra pounds at that age. Besides, the public liked him just the way he was. They could relate to him precisely because he wasn’t movie-star svelte and toned.

  So, no, he wouldn’t flog himself half to death on an exercise bike or forgo chocolate biscuits and the nightly glass of red. What was life without the small pleasures? No life at all.

  IT WAS OVER a glass of red – Château Lafite Rothschild Pauillac, to be precise – that he and Alastor Wylie arrived at a rapprochement, back in 1979, at the turn of the new year. Guy went to Wylie in the manner of a supplicant, humble, on bended knee. He asked for forgiveness. He apologised for his previous behaviour. He had had time to think, he said. To reconsider. He was not the callow, opinionated, misguided youth he used to be. He had had some troubled years that had given birth to some, ahem, eccentric ideas. He regretted that. He was saner now. He saw things more clearly.

  “The prodigal returns,” said Wylie. He smiled sleekly. “I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later. We’re all allowed to be young and wayward, but there comes a time when a man must shoulder responsibility and enter adulthood. You’ve taken longer than most, but you’re here now. What can I do for you? What do you want from me?”

  Guy smiled sleekly too. “I want you to take me under your wing, Alastor. I want you to be my mentor. Teach me all you know. I’m ready to learn.”

  THE CHAUFFEUR ENGAGED gear and the Jaguar pulled away from the kerb. Cameras flashed. Journalists clamoured. “This way, Guy!” “Go on, give us a smile!” Within moments the car had reached the end of Downing Street. The huge black steel security gates which had been erected in 1989 were no longer there. Guy had ordered them to be dismantled in 2006, shortly after he began his third term in office. He had called them, rightly, redundant.

  It was in that same year that Guy had decreed that he would no longer travel around in specially modified vehicles. The Jaguar he was currently riding in was an ordinary factory model that had come straight off the production line, with no Kevlar lining or bulletproof polycarbonate glass installed. The man behind the wheel was not a special forces close protection driver, but just an ordinary professional chauffeur. His name was Derek, and he was, by his own admission, one of Guy’s biggest admirers.

  “What you’ve done for this country, Mr Lucas,” Derek once told him, “well, it fair brings a tear to the eye. Not to be a crawler or anything, but you, sir, have put the great back in Great Britain.”

  Today was a momentous occasion, and the usually chatty Derek maintained a respectful silence. He turned left out of Downing Street, onto Whitehall, and guided the Jaguar slowly and sedately north towards Trafalgar Square.

  MARGARET THATCHER CAME to power in 1979, the Tories riding a massive upswing in popularity after the disastrous so-called Winter of Discontent and the collapse of the Labour Party. Those in the know credited Alastor Wylie, at least in part, for her success.

  Guy spent most of the 1980s scurrying around Westminster in a variety of menial roles – personal assistant to so-and-so, private secretary to such-and-such. Wherever Wylie sent him, he went. Whatever Wylie instructed him to do, he did.

  It was hard work, and not always gratifying, but he made useful contacts and got himself known. He also established a functioning relationship with his stepfather, much to his mother’s delight.

  It helped that he had a devoted, stable girlfriend he could lean on when he got tired and stressed and life seemed too much like drudgery. Petra – tastef
ul makeup, big shoulder pads, blonde-streaked Princess Diana hairstyle, showing not a trace of the punk she had once been, apart from a tiny piercing scar in her nose – was endlessly encouraging and supportive during these years of struggle and consolidation. She kept Guy on course during the times when he began to doubt himself and wonder whether it was all worth it. She helped him screw his courage to the sticking place.

  The day he got an inverted pentagram tattoo to match hers, Petra held his hand. It was done in secret, on a trip to Paris, in some back-alley parlour where nobody recognised him. It bloody well hurt, but Guy was no stranger to pain.

  Petra also held his hand on a more public occasion: the day they got married, 26th June 1985, in a costly, elaborate service which was conducted at St Mark’s Church in Regent’s Park and paid for, in full, by Alastor Wylie. Countless politicians, tycoons and society bigwigs attended. The event marked Guy out, once and for all, as someone to watch, a face of the future, while his bride looked, of course, radiant.

  AS THE JAGUAR cruised up the broad canyon of Whitehall, Guy acknowledged the cheers of the crowds lining the pavements. Over the decades, a couple of dozen of prime ministerial motorcades had plied the same route and barely caused a stir. But Guy Lucas was not just any prime minister, and a fifth successive election win – yet another landslide victory – was hardly going to go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Union Jacks fluttered. His name was chanted. In order that as many people as possible saw his face, he even wound down the window and leaned out.

  “I didn’t win,” he called out over the roars of approbation. “We all did.”

  WHILE GUY WAS learning the political ropes, he was also covertly seeking out allies, likeminded souls, people he felt could be fellow-travellers on the journey he was planning on taking. It was a long, cautious, sometimes tedious process. Quiet chats in the Pugin Room at the Commons. Quick asides in a corridor. Dinner-party conversations that strayed, ever so artfully, down esoteric byways.

  Always he deferred to Petra in matters of character judgement. She, better than he ever could, knew how to distinguish sincerity from fraud. She ruthlessly rooted out the phonies, the yes-men, the ones who seemed sympathetic and compatible but would, in truth, say anything to gain advancement. Plenty of people clung to Guy, because he was a comet, rising fast, spectacularly full of promise, but not all of them were trustworthy or without self-interest. Petra, a bullshit detector par excellence, never once steered him wrong. With her aid, Guy secured allegiances that would stand him in good stead later on.

  In the meantime she raised their children, Beattie and Alex, and played the dutiful wife at drinks parties, Commons functions, and weekend stays in the country. She flirted outrageously with the older MPs and simpered winsomely with other parliamentary wives, sharing their complaints about the punishing hours their husbands worked, the long absences from home, the tendency towards alcoholism.

  Sometimes, just sometimes, Guy might catch a tinge of anger or melancholy on her face and knew she was recalling that awful day in ’78 when the Mods came to town. But she was strong. She was a hell of a strong woman. She knew how to adapt and survive.

  And their mission was as important to her as it was to him, if not more so. They had made a pact in the hospital, as soon as Petra had recovered from the anaesthetic and her mind was clear. This was what they would do. Whatever it took, whatever it cost them, this was their path together.

  TRAFALGAR SQUARE WAS packed, too. People clambered up onto Landseer’s lions to get a better view. The Jaguar rolled under Admiralty Arch and into the Mall, where there were yet more crowds. Guy saw placards. Many carried his name – WE ♥ YOU GUY and so on – while others sported the Black Flame Party logo, an upward-pointing black arrow on a bright red background.

  Guy recalled the day Petra had sketched it on a notepad in their kitchen.

  “ISN’T IT A bit, well, Nazi?” he said.

  “It’s simple,” she replied. “It’s striking. Unforgettable.”

  “And calling ourselves the Black Flame? Won’t that give the wrong impression? People will only have to look up what it means, and...”

  “We’re not going to make any secret what we’re about,” Petra said. “That’s the whole point. Absolute honesty, absolutely all of the time.”

  It was 1989. The Falklands War was beginning to recede from memory. So was the Enniskillen bombing. The conflict between Iran and Iraq had petered out. The Berlin Wall had come down. The Cold War was thawing out.

  Change was in the air. It was time to make their move.

  “DEREK, STOP THE car,” Guy said.

  “Right you are, Mr Lucas.”

  Guy climbed out of the Jaguar. The crowds went wild. He signed autographs, kissed babies, posed for cameraphone pictures, shook hands until his knuckles ached. Someone offered him a toke on a spliff. “Way of saying thanks, mate. Ten years of decriminalisation. Personal responsibility, yeah? We’re all grown-ups.”

  “Yes,” said Guy, and drew deeply on the joint.

  Half a mile away, at Buckingham Palace, the Queen was waiting.

  She would just have to wait a little while longer.

  THATCHER WAS OUSTED in 1990, undermined and betrayed by her own Cabinet. The Conservatives limped on under John Major. Labour was still in disarray, riddled with infighting and indecision.

  A new political party emerged seemingly from nowhere. Disaffected MPs on both sides of the House were drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. Its policies were brutally, brilliantly forthright. Its manifesto, in a nutshell, was: Do unto others as they do unto you.

  AS GUY RETURNED to the Jaguar, he couldn’t help grinning. It wasn’t just the dope. He was remembering how Wylie had laid into him one evening in the Strangers’ Bar. Wylie was patently drunk, which was unlike him. Hitherto he had always struck Guy as a man who could hold his liquor. Tonight he had imbibed more liquor than he could hold, and Guy could guess the reason.

  “What’s this?” Wylie slurred. “What the hell’s going on? You and your cronies have formed a new party. Isn’t two enough? Or three if you count the Liberals, which I don’t. Two parties is plenty for a country like ours. We don’t need some bunch of upstarts coming along and splitting the vote.”

  “Rocking the boat, don’t you mean, Alastor?” said Guy. “Isn’t that the real problem here? The Black Flame is something you can’t influence or control. We’re independent-minded and antiestablishment. We don’t do things the way you like them to be done. For once you’re – what’s the word? – let’s say impotent. Or maybe irrelevant.”

  “Don’t you get fresh with me, young man,” Wylie barked back. “You’re not even a constituency MP. You’re a nobody. How can you have pulled off a coup like this?”

  “Quite easily, as it turns out. By making the right friends. A trick you taught me.”

  “But I made you! You’re mine!” Wylie’s voice had risen loud enough to dampen other conversations in the room. People still talked, but they were also listening in. “Without me you wouldn’t be where you are. You’d be nothing.”

  “I’m more than grateful for all you’ve done for me,” Guy said. “But now’s my time to move on, to take the next step. It’s also your time to bow out. One generation has to give way to the next. It’s the natural order.”

  He strode away from Wylie, a deliberate act of provocation.

  “Don’t you turn your back on me!” Wylie spluttered. “How dare you! Come back here, Guy. Come back this instant! I haven’t finished talking to you. I can destroy you, you know. As easily as I built you up, I can tear you down.”

  But the fact that he had to say this out loud meant he was no longer in a position to make good on the threat. He realised it. Guy realised it. Everybody present realised it. Wylie, all at once, was a spent force. He could do little but bluster. Guy Lucas now had the upper hand.

  GUY WAS VOTED in as an MP in 1995. His constituency was Kensington and Chelsea, close to home, close to Westminster. The sitting MP there had h
ad to resign after an extramarital affair with his secretary came to light, forcing a by-election. Guy put himself up as a candidate, with the backing of dozens of his parliamentary allies. The Black Flame Party gained its first seat in the Commons.

  A general election followed two years later. Black Flame candidates stood in almost every seat. Their campaign was predicated on a policy of truth and self-reliance. Voters were invited to listen, not to manifesto promises, but to their own consciences. They were offered free will to choose exactly as they pleased. The other two parties responded with scare tactics and smear campaigns. Despite that, Black Flame MPs were swept to victory all across the land. Guy Lucas, their leader, became prime minister.

  Wylie, who had had some involvement in orchestrating opposition to the Black Flame, keeled over from a heart attack two days after the election. He died a week later, of complications. Guy delivered a moving eulogy at the funeral. His mother was inordinately proud of him and told anyone who would listen that her son had been Wylie’s loyal protégé to the end. She was so glad that two of them had managed to set aside their differences and make up, all those years ago. The thought made her grief as a widow that bit more bearable.

  THE JAGUAR HOMED in on Buckingham Palace, skirting round the Victoria Memorial, with its bronze statues depicting Charity, Peace, and the Angels of Truth and Justice.

  Guy mused idly that there ought to be a fifth statue, that of a Rebel Angel.

  Or, to give him his proper name, Man.

  THROUGHOUT THE LATE ’90s and early 2000s, there had been calls to arms. Britain was invited to involve itself in this or that conflict, send troops in, help quell civil wars and suchlike. Guy steadfastly refused.