Time of Lies

by Douglas Board

  My left jawbone collides with the base of an amplifier rig. Frank has rugby tackled me from the right. From the opposite direction a second drone slices through the space I’ve vacated, kicking Dizzy’s gun-metal artefact into the air before disintegrating, pouting, smoking and electric against the hindquarter of a Nelson lion.

  I’m bundled into the people carrier – I assume the Jag is needed by Number Ten’s new occupant. I hold my face in anticipation of the pain which will kick in shortly – for now everything is still adrenaline. Next to me Kathy’s rib cage heaves twice, wheezing in protest against the world. As we shoot down onto the Embankment her fingers unclutch a Tesco carrier bag, and she starts to unfasten her lieutenant-commander’s epaulettes. ‘I resigned my commission. While we were in the Palace.’

  ‘Who else has ever done that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe no-one. Ever.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Then believe this.’ From my jacket pocket I slide the torn page which has spent the morning next to my heart, keeping me going. It’s from a travel brochure. ‘Admiralty Island. It’s in south-east Alaska, north of Vancouver.’

  ‘Admiralty Island – that’s funny. You chose it for the name?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s amazing. It’s one of the most concentrated brown bear habitats known to man. We’ll be there next week.’

  We’ve crossed onto the south side of the river and are heading west, I’m guessing for a switch underground in the land of London Spy – MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall.

  PART FOUR

  Chaos

  49

  London, Sunday 5 July 2020

  Water. Pounding. Gasp. Water. Pounding – water – water…

  I’m running the Grand National in Easter sleet, and not as a jockey. I’ve got a thirst from hell. Right now I’m waking up to disturb an autopsy – my own. ‘Sorry love, didn’t mean to startle you. Carry right on, I was sure I was a goner myself.’ I must have ticked the box for black sheets at my autopsy – black sheets and curtains in spew-green velvet.

  The curtains can’t make up their mind whether to let the daylight through or not. The air is stuffy and warm with an undercoat of nicotine, but I’m shivering violently. The bedsheets have been tossed about by an Atlantic weather front.

  I turn my head to the right. A black pillow has become a quad-biking park for snails. Either that or council road-painters have streaked it all over with lube. Two huge mirrors, tackily-framed stage props for a brothel, cover opposite walls. The mirrors reveal a receding line of bald white whales lying on black-sheeted double beds with ‘Britain’s Great. End of!’ tattooed on their left buttocks. Turning left, an ash-tray has suffered an Aberfan event. I count four different brands of cigarette, about thirty butts and three kinds of lipstick.

  I need water. Still naked, I stagger out of bed. Lying on the bedroom carpet is a stained vibrator which looks … forget it. My stumbling shatters a third, free-standing mirror into a jigsaw puzzle. When I scream nothing answers – no rat at the skirting board, no air-blocked pipes, no fridge or washing machine. No computer, no music, no people.

  I sniff the sheets before picking one to wrap around my waist. One calf cramps up. It’s a dead slow and stop one-legged walk down the stairs, barefoot on planks with protruding nails and exposed carpet gripper. The kitchen is a shell with a stained sink and no hob, glasses, cups or plates. I knock back fistfuls of tap water and rub the sides and back of my head. About four days’ stubble, maybe five.

  Item, one three-bedroom semi with the master bedroom done up like a whorehouse. Item, a semblance of a living room – the cheapest possible net curtains, no settee, two Ikea armchairs and a Jack Vettriano poster. Item, every other goddam room completely bare. Because there’s no hob, microwave, telephone or TV, so there’s no clocks on these things either. No toilet seats or toilet paper, no clothes, no phone, no Rolex.

  The lock has been smashed so the front door swings freely. Where is junk mail when you need it? I’m a half-naked prime minister wandering in the only house in London (is it London?) without a thick doormat of direct mail and special offer crap. A junk letter might have a date as well as an address. A leaflet might boast ‘the thickest crust pizzas in …’.

  I make it a full hour and maybe thirty more fistfuls from the tap before I hit the street. I’m a guru with no sandals. The black sheet covers my left shoulder and my midriff downwards. Come to me you who are heavily laden and I will nick your Nikes. And, while I’m about it, your Nurofen.

  Well, at least I’m in England. Everything under the grey sky is hot and damp without the relief of rain. The tarmac is hotter than the pavement but less dog-fouled. Semi-detached houses stretch away on both sides of a long street. It could be this light at half past six in the morning in early July, but the street feels baked in afternoon heat. Is it early July?

  Someone shouts in my ear, ‘You’ve forgotten your pills, grandpa!’ Two teenagers race past on a shared bicycle. Teenagers, so maybe it is the afternoon. The passenger has donated her earlobes to geometric science and is riding side-saddle. She whips out her phone for a pic. The pedaller is a peach-haired punk. They must be about fourteen.

  I count house numbers from 86 down to single figures before hitting a minor junction and a street sign in the London borough of Brent. There are no shops or traffic, nor any clue to finding these things.

  I cross two more residential streets and find a small park, its promenade lined with the mottled bark of plane trees. I look for drones but see none. I’m hungry now as well as thirsty. Two race-walkers pass me, all Lycra and slender muscle. They are too busy to give me a glance, wrapped in their own surround-sound worlds, pumping their fists like Victorian steam engines.

  I stop beside a park bench and a recently tended bed of scarlet flowers. A bony seventy-year old turns and angles her body in slow motion watched by sculptures. A notice dedicates the sculptures to prisoners of war and concentration camps. Scrawled on the notice in red paint is ‘BG! End of!’.

  The woman’s eyes watch me while her limbs revolve around her like a three-dimensional Dutch windmill. ‘You should try it, Bob,’ she says, recognising me. ‘Tai chi. For balanced strength and mental clarity.’

  Yeah, grandma, gimme some of that.

  Twenty minutes later we are exceeding the speed limit anti-clockwise from Neasden on the North Circular. We’re looking to pick up the start of the M4 at Chiswick. Yvonne doesn’t hold with speed limits, she thinks everyone should drive up to their age – in her case seventy-six. The phone pumping out Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is the same cantaloupe orange as the speakers in her two-door Fiat 500.

  We did this deal: Yvonne gets me to my place in Eton with a homemade sarnie and a flask of sweet tea. In exchange she gets video on her phone of the bedroom and me coming out of the front door of no 86. She stands to make a few hundred quid on the footage. I draw the line at getting back into the bedroom.

  On the ride Yvonne passes me one of yesterday’s tabloids – yesterday being Saturday 4 July. I’ve underestimated her fee by a couple of zeros. ‘BOB IN SHOCK ORGY HIDE AWAY’ displays various butcher’s cuts of my torso in configurations with two girls (twenty-two girls, if you look in the mirrors). The girls are fifteen years old – ha bloody ha. The good news: since I was comatose, there are no shots needing a porn star Equity card and only one shows my face, eyes blissfully closed in the embrace of a pair of boobs. The reporter states that my location remains a mystery.

  Yvonne watches me as well as the road.

  I say, ‘Did you read all this shit? I’m surprised you picked me up.’

  ‘I might fancy my chances. Sex in North London isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, except apparently at number 86.’

  ‘Including number 86.’

  ‘You don’t remember anything about it?’

  I shake
my head.

  ‘Ketamine?’

  ‘Elephant anaesthetic, by the feel of it.’

  ‘What will you do in Eton?’

  I look back at her. ‘Get some of my own clothes on me before I do a nuclear explosion of my own. Where the fuck was my police protection? How does the Prime Minister of Great Britain get abducted in full view of the world? Why haven’t the Vigilance been into every single bedroom in the United Kingdom, let alone Willesden, looking for me? The four Bills – the Met – Jennifer – they’ll all be bricking it when I show up.’ I fold the paper and put it beside the hand-brake. ‘But when I do, I don’t fancy showing up looking like that twenty-four page spread.’

  ‘You’re not the Prime Minister, Bob. You threatened to toss Brussels onto a nuclear barbie and then resigned. It’s a five-party national coalition now, two Labour, two Conservative and the SNP. And that youngster is running BG – Annabel something.’

  The grey sky starts to come apart. Gobbets of rain, the first of many, spatter the windscreen.

  For a moment I think the show isn’t over: the streets were empty for a reason and Yvonne is a plant. Then I snatch the paper back and open it. Even in a titty tabloid, you can find out who the Prime Minister is, if you know where to look.

  When we get to my driveway we both stand in the rain, Yvonne filming. The lights in the flagstones change colours while I throw a brick through the stained glass inset in the front door. Inside I step over an alpine range of junk mail and delivery leaflets and fetch Yvonne a card with Angela’s number at Shock News. By the time the police come Yvonne is long gone. I’m in an Orlebar Brown poplin short-sleeve shirt and chinos. One and a half litres of Coke and a home-delivery pizza (thick crust with double meatballs and extra cheese) have appeared and disappeared again.

  50

  London, Sunday 5 July 2020 (2)

  I debate whether to call Annabel but decide just to call Angela. She can get to me in two hours. I spend the time before she arrives surfing the web big time and thinking. Goddammit, bro, you really pulled it out this time – where did that come from? I never knew you had it in you to say boo to a goose.

  I see the work he put in – the gestures, the creasing of the forehead, the walk – unbelievable. That speech in Trafalgar Square is hypnotic, I play it a dozen times: I want to believe some agency which charges several thou per hour wrote it, but somehow I know the words are Zack all the way down. I agree more than he or you might think.

  Day five and the coalition is already in a mess. It seems the leaders of the two Tory and two Labour parties and the SNP take turns to decide which day of the week it is. The SNP’s price signed up an independence referendum at a time of their choosing.

  Straight off the bat on Wednesday Annabel did a blinding interview as Leader of the Opposition with the Beeb’s political editor. Who lost Bob Grant? Where is he? Cover up, cover up, cover up. Then she’s back laying out the new politics: student debt cancelled in return for five years of patriotic part-time service. Fifty thousand quid of debt gone in return for joining the Vigilance at weekends. She knows what she wants – power – and she’ll have it soon enough.

  When I banked £20 million and had no plan, Angela Deil showed up with the keys to Number Ten sticking out of her bra. That solved a whole bunch of wants, but it was also ten years ago. Getting the keys was cool but even a month on the buzz was fading – just too many fucking problems with your name written on them. So if I don’t want that power back, what do I want?

  A tanker load of revenge, obviously, anyone would want that. Patrick Smath needs that grin I failed to understand wiped off his face. And ACERBIC, I need to factor that in. Looking back, that’s what knocked my mojo – discovering that twenty-six years ago a bunch of dull grey men dreamt up a shocker beyond anyone’s wildest imagining. I want my mojo back, which means thinking equally big.

  It takes about half an hour but gradually I get things clear. If I go for revenge for the coup, a couple of mandarins go to jail, maybe some military, I get quarter of a million for a book advance which I don’t need and the ruling class get away with everything – as per usual. They hop about screaming, ‘Shock! Horror!’ and sometime after climate change gets fixed, a sixteen-volume inquiry report lands. By the way, my part in that story is a victim, a dupe – not a good look. But if I go for revenge for ACERBIC … well, that’s a whole other ball of wax.

  ***

  Angela shows up after three hours, not two; she went in to the office to cut the deal she wanted with Yvonne. Today she’s in 1930s platinum coxcomb curls, a navy-blue jacket with padded shoulders and a strapless white top. We kiss, no tongue.

  She helps herself to a vodka and tonic from the bar, hollow cubes clinking into her glass from the ice-maker with a nude on the side – a memento. I show her where they hacked in: eight needle marks in my arms. She knows I didn’t have any needle marks.

  ‘You asked, so we’ve got grannie and her pics on hold for twenty-four hours if we need it.’ Angela wriggles her behind into one of my armchairs. The armchair doesn’t seem to mind. ‘So what’s your plan? And what happened? We’ve been wondering, to put it mildly.’

  ‘“We” being?’

  ‘Annabel and I, plus most of the world’s sentient creatures. Hasn’t Annabel done an amazing job, given that none of us had the foggiest what you were up to? Not just the Beeb interview but Prime Minister’s Questions. Lab-Con went straight back to doing PMQs the old way, in Parliament, and she knocked the socks off them. They held her incommunicado in this bunker under the MOD until you had left the Square. Then they marched to her office to collect her stuff and threw her out, like they’d caught her with her hand in the till.’

  Angela stops to think what else has happened. ‘We lost twenty-eight of our MPs, they decided to start their own party – wankers. Anyway, give Annabel eighteen months and we’ll be sorted. Lab-Con will have fallen apart and the country will be ready for her to be its saviour. Will you mind being forgotten? I’m sure Annabel would offer you a job in the House of Lords except you promised to abolish it.’

  ‘How about we get Annabel into Downing Street in eighteen hours, not eighteen months?’

  Angela eyes me sharply. ‘Really?’

  I nod. ‘By tomorrow evening.’

  ‘I’m all ears. But first, what did happen to you? Everyone’s been told that you were coked up to the eyeballs when you threatened Brussels and then went to the Palace. They’ve pumped out a ton of non-attributable stuff about your getting dealers round to Number Ten, getting more and more out of it each week. Implication, because you couldn’t hack it. To be honest, I’m surprised they didn’t truss you in lead foil and shoot you out of a torpedo tube in the middle of the Atlantic.’

  ‘I’m guessing my brother made them promise not to.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Jack Grant. Goes by the name of Zack Parris. You met him here, thirteen years ago.’ I fire up the tablet on the coffee table and scroll to the speech in Trafalgar Square. I’ve bookmarked ‘people who arrogantly assume they understand their neighbours’ lives, their brothers’ and sisters’ lives’. As he says the words, Jack looks at the camera.

  I scroll back to Jack coming out of 10 Downing Street to head to the Palace. I point to the naval officer with him. ‘That’s Kathy, his wife. You also met her here. She was standing behind me when I told the EU where to get off.’

  Now that’s one for the album – the chief executive of Shock News shocked. What a rarity. Angela starts gabbling, ‘We’ll find them. Both of them. My God, my God, what a story…’

  I hold up my hand. ‘Sure. That’ll make for some really good armchair TV when you find them somewhere in the world in six months’ time. Tell me when you do because I’d like to see Jack again. Make that Zack – I reckon he’s earned it. He really stepped to the plate and delivered.

  ‘But that’s not the story that will bring d
own this government in the next eighteen hours. For one thing, Patrick and co will have done a decent job. Zack will have an alibi for Tuesday – they’ll be able to show he wasn’t even in the country.’

  ‘I’m onto Zack’s Facebook now. Something about a Middle East assignment.’

  ‘There you go. In three or four days Shock News will knock that alibi down, but that’s still missing the main chance.’ I quickstep Angela through the moves. No Labour or Conservative MPs cross the aisle to BG. Not their fault – civil servants to blame – one or two bad apples – the national unity coalition commands a majority in Parliament.

  ‘Instead we can do a story which has half the Labour and Conservative MPs deserting to BG. Annabel as prime minister with a big majority by Monday evening, and the ruling class smashed forever. Just turn up here at six tomorrow morning, and deliver me Patrick Smath three hours earlier. You’ll need the Vigilance to get him, I expect he’s got protection. Can you do that? Get him here by three in the morning, and you come along for six.’

  ‘I don’t see a problem unless Patrick’s out of the country. General Wale is still in charge of the Vigilance, I just need to tell her the story. So what is it?’

  So I spill the beans about ACERBIC. When she’s gone I open the French windows onto the patio, lawn and garden. Beyond the sycamores at the bottom are the playing fields of Eton. The air which rolls in is still clammy and tropical.

  In the middle of the lawn lands an Indian peacock, resplendent in a royal blue ruff and a long, furled maharajah’s train. I stand on the patio to watch. The fowl and I tease each other for a few minutes before he turns and elevates his display, fanning out a satellite dish made of jewelled silk. Thirty turquoise ocelli stare at me from the densely interwoven wicker fan.