Time of Lies

by Douglas Board

  Angela’s Range Rover is a long wheelbase SV Autobiography in drake’s-neck green, with ten-inch screens in the back and a chauffeur in the front. She steps out, covered in zips and something more expensive than white leather. When her boot touches the turf, it’s one small step for Angela but one giant step from 1960s sci-fi. No kiss this time.

  The chauffeur opens the boot to release a Shock News camera drone. When the drone has me in the foreground and Patrick behind, I spill everything – the little that I know of my whereabouts since Tuesday morning; who Patrick is; the switch; the coup; ACERBIC; Brussels. Patrick spits out denials like Gulliver tethered in a nefarious land. My fifty-pound bet pays off handsomely.

  ‘Shall we get the back view?’ says Angela. While the drone inspects Patrick’s buttocks, Angela stands out of his eyeline unscrewing a one-litre carton from a supermarket. ‘The idea that you invented ACERBIC just for Bob would be terribly clever, Patrick, but Jennifer got an ACERBIC briefing just like Bob’s. He’s as outraged as the rest of us.’

  ‘He’s just trying to save his own skin,’ Patrick growls.

  ‘Well, yes, and – oops! – you might want to do the same.’ Petrol vapour rises as the contents of the carton splash across Patrick’s buttocks and onto the grass. I step back. The fluid reaches Patrick’s scrotum and he winces. Angela moves away from the petrol to stand by Patrick’s head. She strikes a match.

  ‘Besides, whether ACERBIC is actually true will become a moot point,’ she continues. ‘If conspiracy theorists think Britain doesn’t have a deterrent, and enough of our enemies are conspiracy theorists, then we don’t, even if we do.’ She drops the match beside Patrick’s face, where it flickers and dies.

  ‘You’re wantonly destroying £100 billion worth of national defences!’

  Another match. ‘Something was going to put Trident out of business one day, it’s just not what you anticipated. But hasn’t that always been the way? The Maginot Line, the fall of Singapore, and all that.’

  ‘You media tarts spend so long fucking around with words, you think words can do anything. Let’s see who’s laughing when we detonate a warhead.’

  ‘That’s bottom of the class for you, Patrick,’ I observe, while Angela strikes a third match. ‘We’ve exploded single warheads since the 1950s. To blow ACERBIC out of the water you’d have to fire a missile and detonate, oh, at least six warheads? It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Besides, who is the “we”?’ Angela asks. ‘The coalition won’t last twelve hours after this story is out. By this evening Labour and Conservative MPs will be disowning their parties and streaming to BG. Tonight we’ll have a new prime minister and a majority BG government.’

  Patrick’s hopes have flared and died like the smoking matches beside his face.

  ‘Oh look!’ Angela suddenly exclaims, kneeling beside Patrick’s left buttock, moistening a Kleenex on her tongue. She wipes some existing words, fishes out her own lipstick and writes something new. ‘Annabel is re-launching BG. She’s putting young people first. Cancel debt. Subsidise starter homes. Tax second homes. Guarantee first jobs for apprentices and graduates. Votes after seventy-five to depend on GP assessment. Euthanasia free on demand – there’s more than one way to deal with the crowding on these islands. And there’s a brand refresh to go with it. She hopes you’ll like it, Bob.’

  The drone’s pilot composes the desired shot of Patrick’s arse which Angela wants. After ‘Britain’s Great!’ it now says in the colour of vomited cherries, ‘Start of!’

  EPILOGUE

  Hope

  53

  Helensburgh, Tuesday 6 July 2020

  It’s 9.15 in the morning. In twenty minutes the Clyde and the clear sky above it will succumb to slanting rain. HMS Victorious nudges out of Faslane and heads towards Rosneath Point. After a modification to her propulsion, it’s time to verify her noise signature. For three days and nights she will play hide and seek with a frigate and two helicopters. When she returns, she will have four weeks to make ready to replace HMS Vengeance on a deterrent patrol. But ACERBIC has changed everything. In four weeks’ time, ten of Victorious’s ratings will be in jail in Colchester for refusing to spend the next three months in a pointless tomb.

  This morning the submarine’s retinue of tugs and close protection vessels is led by a fireboat. Pecking repeatedly at the flotilla is a television crew and the Scottish First Minister in a motorboat. The BG government has scorned the coalition’s promise of a second independence referendum, so the First Minister is announcing that Scotland will hold its own, with observers from the European Union. The skipper of the motorboat will get his bonus if he can get the First Minister hosed down on television by the fireboat.

  ‘How confident are you of Scotland’s future outside the UK?’ asks the interviewer.

  ‘Prosperous and brighter than ever,’ the First Minister replies. ‘Of that there can be no doubt.’

  From a garden on the hillside a lady with partly combed, long grey hair looks down on the nautical gavotte. Since her daughter left her, her pompadour remains in her chest of drawers. A woman in her fifties in comfy trainers brings out shortbread and two cups of tea. ‘Mind now Cairstine,’ she says, ‘the tea’s hot.’

  ‘My Kathy left in one of those,’ Cairstine says, pointing at the submarine. ‘I waved her goodbye. I knew she would leave me. She didn’t believe me, but some things a mother knows.’

  On the Clyde, fierce swords of spray erupt from the fireboat.

  Cairstine turns to her companion. ‘But you’ll never leave me, will you?’

  Meghan holds her client by the arm and gives the answer which she is paid to give.

  54

  Admiralty Island, Tuesday 6 July 2020

  Kathy and Zack flew north from Vancouver to Alaska, landing in Juneau. The high summer was offset by high latitudes: it was cool enough for Zack to be comfy in his wig. They missed by hours the chance to bellow ‘Four more years!’ at a seventy-four-year-old with more hair even than Zack. Fresh from his unveiling at Mount Rushmore, the President announced a second wall – this one around the blue states, and the Democrats would pay. He was accompanied by Second Lady Sarah Palin. Paying no attention, Kathy and Zack grinned from ear to ear.

  A float plane took them across fifteen miles of water. Their hike to the sanctuary’s observation point was escorted by a ranger with a shot-gun. During July and August this visit was permitted to only twenty-four people each day. A pair of bald eagles kept watch.

  Two mothers, one with one cub and the other with two, emerged from opposite sides of the creek. The single cub wanted to play. For a while his mother humoured him before turning, like the other mother, to the chores of food shopping. Lithe, lumbering and weighing one-third of a ton, the female brown bears padded out into the tidal flats. Within two or three minutes there was an abrupt jump of half a body length followed by a short scamper. In the paws of one mother flapped a salmon, silver, red and as large as an Alsatian. The skin made an amuse-bouche while the mother returned to her cub.

  ‘Nature doesn’t lie,’ sighed Kathy. ‘At least bears and salmon don’t.’

  ‘What about dogs and cats?’

  ‘Never!’ Kathy retorted.

  ‘We might have infected them. Oh wow.’ Playing in the water, one of the cubs had caught its own salmon.

  ‘Do babies lie?’

  ‘How would they?’ mused Zack. ‘By crying when they don’t need anything, I suppose.’

  ‘They cry when they need something, even if it’s just attention.’

  ‘If babies aren’t born to lie, then it’s us who teach them.’

  Kathy thought about it. ‘You mean when they are annoying and want sweets, and it’s easier to say there aren’t any more.’

  ‘Oh, earlier than that!’ Zack opined.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’ll be like this. We’ll hold our baby r
eally close.’ Zack cradled Kathy’s waist. ‘Then we’ll bend low and whisper: listen – listen – listen – everything’s going to be all right.’

  55

  Eton, Friday 10 July 2020

  Nassia and I are sitting in a cake shop sandwiched between fluttering Union Jacks in Eton High Street (Slough Road to you and me). Around us Chinese and Japanese tourists are learning English tea ceremonies from Poles – so much for BG’s immigration policies around these parts. Some tourists point, or take selfies with me in the background.

  Summer is Eton’s fallow time. Two weeks ago thirteen hundred adolescent males migrated to the four corners of the world. September will see new thirteen-year-old faces, mostly virginal and faintly stained with over-excitement. Which also describes the copy of Copenhagen on the table in front of us.

  I’ve shown Nassia a few pictures of Zack and Kathy. They were snapped unawares through the glass front of a Vancouver coffee shop (witness protection is a bit crap if it’s your government which wants to find you). The two of them look really happy and I’m happy for them.

  Me? I fancy the Tokyo Olympics, following Fiji in the rugby sevens. Then August at Janine’s in the Rockies, champagne round the campfire, helicopter access to keep the paparazzi away. Zack and Kathy wouldn’t be so far away, I might even go see them. When I told Nassia that on the phone, she asked if I still had Zack’s play.

  Do I remember reading it? Sure. I tell Nassia again it was a waste of time. Two atomic scientists meet in the after-life (yeah, right) and tell again and again the story of one meeting during the war. Each version is never quite the same – ‘another draft’, the playwright calls it. How can it end and what’s the point?

  I tell Nassia, here’s how I understand things. All of us play two chess games at the same time. The boards are next to each other but only one game counts: the game which happens outside your skin – fixing stuff, doing stuff, having stuff. The other game, what’s going on inside your skin, is make-believe and ghosts – stuff you have to manage in order to concentrate on the first game. Zack was into make-believe and ghosts from the off. But when a bus hits you crossing the road while you’re playing your inner game, the bus wins.

  Outside my skin, I’ve made £20 million, become prime minister, maybe changed my country and become famous. So I’ve won, surely? Except now I’m looking at these photographs.

  Nassia turns my chess story around. What if I always did stuff, and then had to do more exciting stuff, because I didn’t know that the life inside my own skin was interesting? Maybe I sneer at the second game because I don’t understand it.

  ‘What’s that got to do with the play?’

  ‘The outside game in Copenhagen about an atom bomb. What’s the inside game?’

  ‘Who the hell knows.’

  ‘Do you want to know?’ she asks.

  Damn, I can’t believe it’s happening again! I get myself sorted and then a smart sexy woman pops up with something which I didn’t know I wanted, and maybe I don’t want. Then I want it. Last time Angela waved the keys to Number Ten; this one is more of a mind-fuck.

  I bite my lip hard. ‘If the play’s not stupid, then there’s stuff which matters which I really don’t get.’

  ‘And who does?’

  ‘You. And this is the shitty bit; my brother. But I’m not asking him, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You don’t need to if you can be bothered to understand your own second game,’ says Nassia. ‘Two characters meet in the after-life to discuss one encounter. Two teenagers – you and Tel. Tell the story of what happened – you remember it like yesterday. Use your phone – record it. But then do Tel’s story. He remembers it pretty well because it killed him. Why is he carrying a knife? Does he draw first, or do you do something? No, no you protest, but let him finish. Then okay, I forgot something, you say, but you got it wrong – it was more like this. Record again, play it back another day. Another go, another draft.’

  What the fuck? I still don’t see how it ends, or what’s the point. How do I know what Tel thought? It’s twenty-five years ago, I’ll just be spouting make-believe. Look at me, I’ve done well for myself, I’m a super-confident guy, I know what’s what. But then I look at Zack and Kathy’s photos one more time.

  END

  Acknowledgements

  This novel first stirred into life in December 2013. The main writing started in July 2015. Getting a finished product into your hands has been the work of a team pulled together by Dan Hiscocks at Lightning Books, notably Scott Pack, Ruth Killick, Hugh Brune and Katherine Stephen, supported by Andrew Samuelson. Each of them offered me years of expertise and warm enthusiasm. I am in debt to them for both – and to Dan for our longer journey together, including my first novel ‘MBA’.

  Tom Merrill allowed the use of part of a poem. He also read the whole manuscript and offered advice. So did Clare Ella and a third individual who prefers to remain, shall we say, submerged. Jonathan Morgan read multiple versions of this manuscript and, undeterred by having done the same on ‘MBA’, Peter and Rosemary Drew did the same. Peter and Rosemary: you are the sine qua non of this novelist. Guy Meredith and C M (Craig) Taylor taught me the writing skills which I brought to this project, and discussed early versions of the story with me. Kathy Jones, Rob Warwick and Alison Donaldson have been companions on broader writing journeys. Thanks to you all.

  The Ministry of Defence will be happiest if you think that ACERBIC sprang out of Jonathan and I shooting an alcoholic breeze one evening. I can confirm that is the case. Then again, this is a post-truth novel.

  Here in Bermondsey, Michael Hutton shared many experiences from his upbringing without knowing how they might turn out in the novel. Furkan Choudhury also helped. I thank them for their friendship and trust. Neither are responsible for characters or events created in my imagination.

  I have lived in Britain since I was fifteen. Now I look back, class has run through my life like a live wire. Therefore thank yous for this book would be incomplete without some thank yous for my life. Trish, my wife, brought me to Bermondsey in 1987; I’d like to thank her, Ted, Pat and Jo-ann. From a different part of south London Jonathan also shared his experiences of class.

  Many people in Bermondsey welcomed me or let me be myself among them. I hope they will understand if, rather than naming the many I know, I say thank you instead to Simone Wood.

  Simone had a busy, commercial day job but worked a regular shift in the Wibbley Wobbley. The Wib was a much-loved, idiosyncratic pub in Bermondsey’s Greenland Dock. Simone worked there because of the people. Around 2009 I would sit on my own of an evening, drinking beer and reading books for my doctorate. One day I returned from the gents having left the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu splayed open (so to speak) on the stained table. ‘I’ve read books like that,’ Simone announced. ‘They don’t frighten me. Come and talk.’ She acted fearlessly from her belief that we all have more in common than divides us, for which I thank her greatly. Her own dream took her to a yacht and a scuba diving business in Mexico, where she died in Hurricane Odile in 2014.

  Responsibility for any flaws in the book, or the life out of which it has grown, is of course mine.

  December 2016

  If you enjoyed this book, why not try Douglas Board’s first novel, MBA? We are giving you 90% of it for free. Just visit https://douglasboard.com/novels/mba/html

  MBA, A Novel

  ISBN: 978-1785630057 £8.99

  Why is so much of the world Managed By Arseholes?

  Were they born that way? Did they sweat to achieve it? Or did we send them to special schools to learn? Fired by an arsehole just as his career is taking off, 30-year-old MBA Ben Stillman finds his ideas about success have been turned upside down. No such confusion troubles William C Gyro, the American dean of Ben’s alma mater: he is about to complete the transformation of Hampton Management College from a second-rate English business
school into a world-class madrassa of capitalism.

  When Ben agrees to spend 10 days helping Gyro, a vortex of events sucks in the world’s fattest fat cats, banking-crisis culprits, the British Prime Minister and the only woman who can confront Ben with his own inner arsehole. Will any of them survive? Do any of them deserve to?

  A contemporary farce with the pace of a thriller, MBA is also a piercing yet hopeful inquiry into success.

  Here’s what the reviews say:

  “A must-read for anyone who enjoyed Franzen’s Freedom or Eggers’ The Circle.”

  Felicity Wood, The Bookseller

  “Given their role in shaping and propagating the ideas that govern all our working lives, business schools have for the most part unjustly escaped the attentions of fiction writers. All the more refreshing, then, to read Douglas Board’s wonderfully enjoyable dissection of the swirling currents of ambition, dissembling, power and fortune that are all too often rationalised away in textbook accounts of ‘leadership’. Witty and deeply informed, Board’s rich satire is nearer the bone of business than a lot of people would want you to think.”

  Simon Caulkin

  “When the mindless, probably male, manager in your life puts you down, pick this up. Hilarious and spot on.“

  Sandra Burmeister, CEO Amrop Landelahni

  “A virtuoso plot and unrelieved bass-note of suspense whisk the reader through MBA with no time to fasten a seat-belt. Iconoclastic and LOL hilarious, this story unpicks the fabric of leadership and interrogates the murky motives of the über-‘successful’. Irresistibly funny and deliciously uncomfortable, MBA is a seductive cocktail of politics, human relating, banking, feminism, the dangers of intelligent underwear and so many other unusual bed-fellows.”