Time of Lies

by Douglas Board

  But Zack could walk away. Concealing that Kathy had come up with the idea didn’t restrain Zack’s freedom. In fact, if he wanted to laugh the scheme out of the park as crazy, he’d suffer no embarrassment on Kathy’s behalf.

  While she had been thinking, she had missed something Patrick had said. It turned out to be about Cairstine, whether leaving her behind would be an issue. Kathy pointed out that it was something which she and Zack had already discussed, given Patrick’s ambitions to post Kathy to DC.

  ‘Good,’ said Patrick, resuming his customary role as a chess-master of the universe. ‘But I mention it now because I thought you might find it helpful, ahead of Friday, to ponder some options. We can whisk both of you out of the country for a new start somewhere else, once it’s all done, if that’s what you want. We could hardly do less. But strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be necessary for you to end your Navy career so prematurely.’

  ‘You mean Zack could do the whole thing on his own.’

  ‘Might I speak objectively – like a benevolent relation, if you will? At this point your career prospects and Zack’s are rather like chalk and cheese. You would be giving up a lot more than him. Bear in mind that it would be perfectly possible for us to connect the two of you in, say, DC, in some months’ time. When any fuss has died down.’

  ‘Meet him in his new, improved persona? Fall in love with each other all over again?’

  ‘What a charming thought. Don’t mention the possibility to my ex.’

  ‘I’m not letting Zack sink or swim on his own. That really would be betrayal.’

  Patrick’s eyebrows circumflexed. ‘Betrayal? Don’t even think of it. You’re Zack’s most important champion and support, his rock. You’re helping him rise to the professional opportunity of his life. He’s fantastically lucky to have you.’

  ‘Someone probably said something like that to Lady Macbeth, don’t you think? Or Judas Iscariot.’

  Patrick ended the conversation by squinting at the Lynx helicopter which had appeared some miles astern.

  23

  London, Tuesday 19/Wednesday 20 May 2020

  Returning to Putney close to 11pm, Kathy braced herself for ten minutes while Zack explained his latest idea for a Bob Grant video sketch. He reckoned he could put it on YouTube with only two other actors, a busty female and a Manuel-type from Fawlty Towers, but there was no point incurring that expense before he had three solid hits in the bag: this would be the first of them, he was sure. Kathy nodded and then buried herself in an unclassified report with six appendices entitled ‘Winning Through Focus: Why Taskforces Fail’ (aka WTF2). Zack failed to see how this could be more important than congratulating him on his creative genius, or discussing why Patrick Smath had invited both of them to dinner at The Shard in three days’ time. However, he was wise enough to crack open another couple of beers and let she-whose-alarm-was-set-for-quarter-to-six do her thing.

  The following day, Wednesday, Zack despaired of turning his inspiration into words. The idea was simple enough: desperate for relief from a ghastly international summit, Prime Minister Bob demands a massage. He is offered every variation imaginable – Swedish, Finnish, Indian, Native American and Thai – but he insists on a Great British massage, end of. By 2pm the comic ingredients remained unassembled, laughing at him instead of the other way around.

  Rather than waste the afternoon Zack rallied his house-keeper energies instead. He summarised his progress in three sequential voicemails for Kathy, describing not finding a cross-head screwdriver in its proper place, cracking the light bulb casing inside the refrigerator and returning from the DIY store (a twenty-minute walk) with the wrong size of bulb. The third voicemail explained that he would seek a consolatory pint in The Rear Admiral. Zack omitted to mention that midweek The Engineer had a two-for-one happy ‘hour’ from four until seven.

  Having lost Tuesday to Vengeance, Kathy’s Wednesday was frantic. At first after the election it seemed that there would be nothing for the residents of Whitehall to do. New BG policies simply appeared, dropped out of the sky like pigeon shit. But for sustainable shit production on an industrial scale even the new lords of the manor needed the bureaucratic machine. The catch was their insistence that only a hand-picked few among the most senior civil servants – Patrick, for example, which in practice meant Kathy – could do the work.

  When she got to the day’s messages on her personal mobile it was gone seven-thirty in the evening. In London’s permanent rush hour, the train home was still standing room only. Intermittent reception and endless train announcements meant that extracting even sixty per cent of the sense of the messages took Kathy from Waterloo to Clapham Junction, at which point she rolled her eyeballs. She had waded through a message from her bank and an offer on data bundles from her phone company before she got to Zack’s three-voicemail-dirge left at 4.20pm. That was followed by three voiceless messages from his phone: at 5.23pm the sound of jostling hub-bub like a party; at 5.58pm a lot of people shouting; and finally a text at 7.18pm: ‘With Alan. LBV. Come. Important. Zx’.

  For most of the ten-minute walk from Putney station to Le Bon Vin, Kathy made an uncharacteristic spectacle of herself, shouting at the air.

  Like anyone partnered to a sometimes-functioning alcoholic, Kathy knew The Rear Admiral’s happy hours without having to be told. Important? she yelled at a passing piece of street furniture. Tell her about important. Yesterday in Gare Loch she had helped deliver an envelope which could kill millions of people, whose contents had been written by a certifiable idiot. Today her husband, mortally wounded by his inability to change a light bulb or string together enough jokes to fill an envelope, had got so happy before the end of happy hour that he had gone on the razzle, to the point of not knowing when he was pressing the speed dial on his phone. Having collided with Alan somewhere, the boisterous carousel had now ended up in LBV, whose lamentable steak-frites would be the excuse for no dinner on the table. Still, some of the day’s frustrations had burst their dam and flowed towards the Thames by the time Kathy pushed open the wine bar’s doors.

  Entering Le Bon Vin, Kathy saw Alan at a table alone. His jacket was dishevelled and his head out of joint, with a dried streak of blood. Notwithstanding Alan’s alarming appearance, what Kathy stared at first – it was so striking that she had no choice in the matter – was six customers wearing regulation yellow Bs stitched onto their clothing. Alan was wearing his B so that it clashed as loudly as possible with his cream jacket and grey and pink checked pants (a souvenir from Naples, Florida). He had started wearing a B since the election as a protest, even though no legislation had been passed. Something had happened to turn protest into compliance. By the time Zack appeared with two blood-stained dish-cloths and ice in a bucket, Kathy realised that her rage belonged outside.

  Alan’s silhouette was fighting the Battle of the Bulge. There was a price to pay for retiring to gorge on raclette, but Alan negotiated a handy discount by visiting his custom tailor once a year.

  At fourteen Alan had discovered how handy it was, with girls and housemasters alike, to look intelligent. To borrow his own pejorative, the contents of Alan’s forehead were pretty ordinary – enough for some kinds of banking, but with nothing to spare. However it was the forehead itself which did the trick. His eyebrows raced forward like forested ridges to join his nose, suggesting he was decisive. His eyes sat in shadowed ravines, conveying depth. The ridges and the squirrel-grey meadow of hair above had not thinned too much, and Alan’s eyes could still flash with mackerel to show brilliance or pleasure – as they did now, seeing Kathy. This evening above the north-east ridge he was nursing a cut and a rivulet of clotted blood.

  ‘What happened?’ Kathy exclaimed.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Alan replied. ‘Pretty ordinary stuff under this government.’

  ‘A fire-bomb,’ said Zack. ‘Another one. Now you’re here, Kathy, how about some steak-frites?’

&nbs
p; At two in the afternoon Alan had led a protest in the local shopping centre, outside the shop taken over by The Vigilance. A core of two angry former bankers (Alan and his friend Deirdre) had been joined by, of all things, three nose-ringed activists from Labour for a Kinder, Gentler Britain – Alan thought their policies were nuts but at least LKGB were ‘willing to get off their arses to save human rights’. Together the five had painted a giant yellow B on the blacked-out Vigilance shopfront. For the first half of the afternoon the atmosphere had been light-hearted. The few Vigilance members who showed their faces appeared nonplussed, and the protestors tweeted away, joining with fellow protestors in the City, Croydon, Leeds and Edinburgh to bat back the predictable online abuse.

  The idea behind the protest was to paint Bs on property paid for with bank loans and mortgages, starting with properties linked to BG. That way bankers could protest their stigmatisation and point out their usefulness (ultimately nearly every property in Britain would have a B on it), while the left-wing could uphold human rights and point to the cancerous spread of debt.

  What really changed things was when four car-loads of Vigilance foot-soldiers arrived. At that point Alan texted Zack, ‘We might need witnesses’. Soon after Zack got there, two police constables gave up trying to keep the disputing groups apart. So the mismatched gangs pressed into each other’s space, bawling out abuse, spittle and promises to kick each other good and proper. Alan and his co-conspirators gave as good as they got (‘at least we could spell the swear-words we were using’) but they were outnumbered and surrounded, and Alan got knocked to the floor.

  ‘I saw Alan disappear but I couldn’t see what had happened. I couldn’t understand why there weren’t more police,’ Zack said. ‘In fact I was asking the constables why they hadn’t called for reinforcements – they said they had, several times – when someone threw a fire-bomb through the shop window. Suddenly flames and electrical fumes were everywhere. Thank God the shopping centre’s sprinklers came on. Everyone ran. Alan and I found each other in the car park. By then there were drones galore. I put my jacket over Alan’s head and we came round the back way to here.’ He lifted his right sleeve to show blood stains underneath.

  Kathy’s hand went to her mouth. ‘Why didn’t you call an ambulance?’

  Alan shook his head. ‘It was nothing, Kathy, really – just superficial bleeding. Quite a lot of the ambulance service have joined The Vigilance too. Since the election, it’s quite the thing to do. Just the ticket if you want promotion, or a quiet life.’

  ‘So who threw the fire-bomb? LKGB?’

  Alan shook his head. ‘I don’t believe they would. Besides, we were completely surrounded. None of us had room to throw a punch, let alone a fire-bomb. It had to be someone on the outside of the group. Maybe not someone who looked like part of The Vigilance, but someone they organised. Fire-bombs are their way of doing things. I think they did it themselves, but so it looked like us.’

  ‘Inside a shopping centre there’ll be video, that’s for sure. Another bottle?’ Zack offered. The two of them had finished a pinotage from Lammershoek. Alan decided to switch to water, so Zack retreated to the bar to get a glass of house red for himself, and a white wine spritzer for Kathy.

  On his phone Alan pulled up the image of a face, half-hidden by a scarf. ‘The Vigilance have already released a video still of the fire-bomber. I think it looks quite like me.’

  Kathy grabbed the phone. ‘No!’ But it did look a bit like Alan – certainly the individual had the right forehead.

  Alan shrugged. ‘Photoshop, obviously.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’ asked Kathy. ‘To create trouble? Just for the hell of it?’

  Alan gestured around the bar. ‘Did you notice all the Bs when you came in?’

  ‘I could hardly miss them. What’s happened?’

  ‘So you didn’t catch this afternoon’s announcement.’

  Kathy closed her eyes. ‘I’ve been up to my eyeballs. Annabel Wale is mad, but you knew that.’

  ‘So, this from the Home Office, at half past four this afternoon.’

  Kathy scrolled down on Alan’s phone: it was an announcement from @BGGov. Bankers and former bankers – to improve your safety and community relations, always wear your B in public places from tonight. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but where’s the policy statement? The Order in Council? Parliament hasn’t even voted on the policy yet.’

  Alan shook his head. ‘That’s the old world, Kathy. This is the policy – this is the legislation. It’s a tweet. No, I tell a lie – they’ve also abolished human rights. Here’s Bob himself, on the steps of Buckingham Palace:

  British rights are defended by the British sovereign. That was good enough for Magna Carta, and it’s good enough today. That’s why I’m delighted to say that the Prince Regent has agreed, when he succeeds to the throne, to assume the new title, Defender of Rights. Claiming bogus international ‘rights’ is stabbing this great country in the back. The lawyers’ gravy train is over. Britain’s Great! End of!

  Kathy’s head swam.

  Zack reclaimed his seat. ‘Time for some light relief? I think so.’ He flipped the lid on his own phone and went to the Guardian’s website. ‘Check that out.’ That was an article with the title, ‘If your grandmother can’t remember the Sixties, maybe she’s still there.’ Zack was hooting. ‘Recreational drugs are turning out to be a big problem with the new generation of old people. The thing is, if you got into them, it makes sense to do them in your seventies. I mean, you’ve got the money, you’ve got the time and you’ve got bugger all else to do. Why pollute the planet taking holidays? It’s not as if they aren’t popping a dozen different pills anyway.’

  Cairstine taking illegal drugs at 78? Kathy couldn’t work out whether the idea was more or less nuts than Jimmy Keohane’s pretend dementia. ‘Of course!’ she snorted. ‘And I know who Cairstine’s dealer is – Meghan.’

  ‘No, Kath, here’s the thing. The article says, in eighty-two per cent of cases, the nearest and dearest haven’t a clue it’s going on, and when memory loss kicks in, the old druggie can’t remember what they’ve taken or where they’ve put their gear.’

  Kathy’s memory wasn’t perfect but she knew exactly where she had left her rage outside LBV’s door. She had her hands back on it in less time than Zack would have needed to recite all the lines he had ever spoken on a West End stage – four.

  24

  London, Thursday 21 May 2020

  The first dinner anyone can fix between Angela and me is weeks away, so I’ve given the Bills a bollocking, basting the offending parts of their anatomies with piri piri sauce. Annabel had a good tip to make up for the wait – get Angela round late one evening for a glass of bubbly in the Cabinet Room. So that’s what we’ve just done, the two of us alone, me in the Prime Minister’s chair (the one with arms in front of the clock), her opposite with her stockinged feet up on the table. We compare notes on how yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions from the Red Lion came over. A fortnight into the BG government and the ratings haven’t dipped yet. What’s on Angela’s mind is drones, and Europe.

  ‘Zaf is totally clear on our drones policy. Trust me, he and I went through it ten days ago. He’ll be announcing it in a couple of weeks. For three years we’ll only allow two big commercial fleets – Shock News for media and news, and Gargantua for deliveries.’

  ‘We think it should be five years. We discussed five years.’ Angela’s wearing a white jacket and trousers and a black shirt buttoned low. Tonight her orange curls are tight and high.

  ‘We did, but Zaf has got to make the policy stack up as a trial period, balancing new services with the public’s safety. Three years is the most that the civil servants can come up with, to work out safe new rules of the air. Then we let everybody compete. But by then you and Gargantua should be so far ahead of your competitors – imagine, three years with no other media o
rganisation allowed to use drones! Not even the Beeb.’

  ‘OK, but until you get the policy out there, we can’t move. Until then that’s staying top of my commercial agenda. Top of my viewers’ and readers’ worry list is Europe.’

  ‘I hope you’re not worried?’ I ask. ‘We’ve ripped up the single market rule book already and no-one’s done anything about it. Result!’

  ‘Up to a point. But everyone knows a showdown is coming.’

  I begin, ‘After the Tory Brexit fiasco we haven’t come all this way to bottle it…’

  ‘That’s for sure. That’s so for sure.’ She’s distracted now, speaking as if to one of her five hundred best friends.

  It’s tough to have better information than Angela but sometimes I do. ‘The Polish prime minister and Ducros will be in Toulouse tomorrow. Airbus will announce moving wing manufacture from Broughton to Katowice in Poland, and R&D from Filton to Toulouse. That’s ten thousand jobs gone directly, a multiple of that in the supply chain.’

  ‘What’s Ducros doing there? Airbus is supposed to be an independent company.’

  ‘He’ll announce big infrastructure works to move the wings. The A380 wings are huge motherfuckers. Plus some European Defence Corps contracts. He’s been pushing European defence hard ever since Britain got out of the way.’

  ‘Your plan?’

  ‘Arrests at dawn tomorrow for the CEOs of our major banks. They’ll get bail, but still.’

  ‘Our cameras will be there?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’ll keep Airbus off the top of the news but our readers are still going to want our European push-back.’