Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  Anyway, my memories of the event are hazy – can’t remember much of what happened that day. But later I became aware that I was in a dream, and he was there too, just sitting on the steps outside Tooting Bec station. He regards me impassively. ‘How can I find a way out?’ I hear myself ask, as if it’s another part of my brain that’s composing the question.

  He seems to be measuring me up with his cold gaze.

  ‘You afraid of dying, brother?’ he asks.

  I answer honestly that I am, very much. He looks down at his feet ruefully, shaking his head a little. Then he gets up and beckons me into the station and down the escalator. We board an empty train carriage. The doors close and it starts to move.

  I look at a tube map on the wall. The arrangement of coloured lines looks familiar, like it’s the London tube system. But when I look closer it appears to be some kind of kabbalistic diagram, a map of my own psyche. Some of the stations are named after ex-girlfriends, or people I’d gotten batterings from as a school kid. There’s a deeply familiar symmetry or sense to it all. The black line heading out the top of the diagram isn’t the Northern Line, it’s called Thanatos. And the Central Line – the red horizontal one – is now Eros. The erstwhile Piccadilly line is now Justice, which worries me. Fishburne beckons me to a seat.

  ‘I’m gonna show you something, man,’ he says, glancing out the window.

  There’s no one else in the whole tube system, it seems. Trains, empty. Stations, completely dead.

  He pauses to take a couple of bottles out of a polythene bag. It looks like the cheap cider I used to drink as a teenager. He hands me one. I’m confused but I pop the top off it anyway. Before taking a sip I look closer at the label and it says ‘Astral White’.

  ‘This ain’t exactly regular cider,’ he says unnecessarily, before upending the bottle and taking a gulp. ‘Got some hallucinogenic shit in it.’

  He nods at my bottle and I take a hit. As I sit back I feel the tube accelerating, and I put a hand on the seat to steady myself. The stations start to flash past at smaller and smaller intervals, till there’s only a fraction of a second between them. They’re positively streaking past. Then the tube system seems to fall away, leaving inky blackness on all sides.

  A few moments later it’s like we’re back in a different tube system, a 3D one this time, with no walls between the tunnels, which themselves come from all directions. The line we’re travelling on is just one filament in a vast, cosmic head of hair, one of trillions of coloured flues streaming in to converge on a large dark object, like an asteroid, somewhere up ahead.

  I look out the window as one of the other trains draws closer. The rail it’s riding on is a thin cylinder of light, electric blue in colour. And the train itself looks more like a blue tic tac, with square windows. Its passenger appears to be a white fluffy lion, sitting upright like a person. It makes eye contact with me but seems vaguely bored.

  ‘Is this the astral plane?’ I ask.

  Fishburne looks at me and nods curtly, as though rationing his information carefully.

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ he says. He crosses the aisle to look out the window at the strange planetoid up ahead. ‘It’ll make sense when we get there.’

  We whizz round the edge of the big asteroid and the slate-like surface appears mottled with what looks like stubble. It’s a head! But we’re too close to discern the face, to recognise it.

  We enter the mouth of the thing. Inside, it’s like some horrendous, fleshy Death Star. The tube train is speeding through an endless, heavily shadowed alimentary canal, several stories high and wide. The tube door opens and we hang our faces into the deathly slipstream, hearing the strange whisper of our onward transit through the meaty, sepulchral corridor.

  ‘God, where are we? What is this thing?’

  He looks at me, slightly incredulous. ‘Well if you don’t know,’ he chuckles and shakes his head, ‘I don’t know how the hell the rest of us are supposed to cope with it’. My memory of his exact wording is a little vague.

  A few moments later he grabs me. He looks spooked, like Tyrone in Apocalypse Now just after he has strafed gunfire across a boatload of farm animals and Vietnamese people.

  ‘Look, I should have said something. It’s a black hole in here. We can’t get back out.’

  ‘Well, who’s driving? Can’t we steer it out?’

  Panicked, I rush through the carriage and reach the empty driver’s compartment. I grab the controls and steer us sharply into the fleshy wall of the tunnel. We tear into the fibrous surface and burst out the other side into another passageway. Then another, and another. Soon we’re hurtling towards a glowing wall lined with veins.

  We smash into it, passing through 100 yards or so of pulpy white matter before ripping out the other side and back into the empty blackness of space. Behind us, the ruptured pupil of an enormous eye comes into perspective, then the rest of the eye, all framed by a titanic head, my head. I laugh insanely – a mix of terror and exultation matched by the expression on the huge head, just before it caves in on itself, as though consumed by a black hole inside.

  The drip stand vibrated a little as I released the grip on my arm. My section of the room was enclosed by a section of blue curtain. I had been under heavy sedation for the past week, according to the female Indian doctor who appeared shortly afterwards. The double vision freaked me out at first, but she explained I’d have to get used to it. Damage to the optic nerve of my left eye, sustained by a blow to the face, meant that I would have lost much of the sight in it. But I was still lucky to be alive.

  Karen came to the hospital that evening and handed me a copy of a newspaper. My eyes fell on the front page headline:

  GANGLAND FANTASY WORLD ENDS IN TRAGEDY

  It’s some bullshit about how a taste for the high life had led two younger men from respectable backgrounds to operate on the fringes of a world of drugs and violence etc., etc. The high life? The article seemed to imply that Martin was a far bigger player in things than I had known. He had built himself a proper little empire, if this story was to be believed.

  It’s hard to believe it now, really.

  I don’t know if it happened, but according to the account from Saint Augustine, a pirate was brought to Alexander, who asked him, ‘How dare you molest the seas with your piracy?’ The pirate answered, ‘How dare you molest the world? I have a small ship, so they call me a pirate. You have a great navy, so they call you an emperor. You’re molesting the whole world …’ That’s the way it works. The emperor is allowed to molest the world, but the pirate is considered a major criminal.

  Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes

  Chapter 10

  They said they shot Osama B in da face. Are we supposed to feel safer now? I don’t know if I do. It’s like saying, ‘You know that runaway train that has been hurtling down the track towards that bus load of primary-school children stuck on the level crossing? Well, good news. The train driver’s dead.’

  The US government has released pictures of bin Laden sitting on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, while watching himself on a portable television. On the one hand, they are trying to show that he was a pathetic, vain little man who lived in a hovel, while at the same time they’re also saying that he was controlling the world’s biggest terrorist network from his secret base. Osama had no internet access. It explains why he was so angry. He’d never seen a panda sneeze. Or a cat playing the piano.

  That’s the room from which he organised his network? He’s not even organised enough to buy a TV table. Comedy is a strange business. It can only really be Barack Obama and myself who, when hearing the news that a 52-year-old man had been shot in the head, both thought ‘Fucking Jackpot!’ Osama bin Laden got his face shot off before being dumped into the sea. It’s got to be my favourite-ever episode of Celebrity Wipeout. My biggest worry about the burial at sea is that if there’s any truth in homeopathy, that whole ocean is now pure evil.

  The US killed the
Saudi Arabian bin Laden in Pakistan for atrocities that were plotted in Germany. Which strangely doesn’t mean it’s time to say sorry for invading Afghanistan. Abbottabad, where Osama was killed, is a popular summer resort. Bin Laden must enjoy the heat, which is good news considering where he is now. Argentina.

  Afghan leader Hamid Karzai says terrorists should learn an important lesson. Presumably the lesson that it’s possible to evade the world’s most powerful army for almost a decade. Imagine the sort of information that bin Laden could have given about his network of contacts if he’d been taken alive. No wonder the US government wanted him dead.

  Bin Laden was getting on a bit. Sooner or later he was either going to be attacked at home by US forces or by a teenager with a fake Gas Board ID.

  The world is now a safer place, President Obama told us, from behind bullet-proof glass, surrounded by security. He also said there will be no photos released of Osama. Which means I’ll have to buy the unofficial calendar this year. Come on CIA, it took you ten years to get all the plastic surgery done to that decoy, you might as well show us the pictures.

  His neighbours first suspected who might be living in the compound when their football went into his garden and he said, ‘If that ball comes over here again I’ll put a plane through it.’ The Navy SEAL attack wasn’t all bad for bin Laden. He was about to redecorate his living room anyway and had chosen a brain-splattered wallpaper pattern. It seems amazing that the Navy SEALs managed to get inside the compound and shoot Osama so efficiently. I can only imagine they were told that the mission was to rescue a bearded British hostage and he must be brought out alive. His compound didn’t have the internet or a phone. Apparently, the Americans located it by following all the pigeons he was using to make his Facebook updates. No internet? It’s no wonder he needed more than one wife, then. If that was one of his main criteria he could easily have hidden out on the Virgin Glasgow to Euston train service.

  Originally, they said he used his wife as a human shield. That’s nothing. I heard he used a skyscraper as a runway. That’ll explain that entry I saw on dating site Match.com – ‘Bearded extremist seeks giant, wide, fat woman. GSOH.’ I can’t judge. I confess I once used my partner as a shield while being shot at. A stupid thing to do, as it was hard enough persuading her to go to that swingers’ party in the first place.

  There was a $25 million reward for getting bin Laden but, as the US Marines shot him on a Bank Holiday Sunday, surely they were on at least time and a half? Bin Laden refused to surrender and, because he was unarmed, they had no other choice than to shoot him in order to prevent him escaping on a getaway donkey.

  Normally, the Americans like to parade their victims like Saddam’s sons, who they stitched together for a photo call. This operation seems to have been designed to create maximum doubt. They say he was unarmed but resisted them. How? Is it Navy SEAL policy to ask nicely once and if he says ‘no’, then there’s no other course of action but to shoot him twice in the face? The first soldier that found him cut his beard off and started wearing it, the next soldier came in and thought he was bin Laden and shot him, then he put on his beard, and so on until about five soldiers were dead.

  Pakistan’s government denied that they had any knowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts, even though in 2005 he appeared in the Pakistani version of A Place in the Sun. They’re going to demolish his £1 million house. I hope they fit a couple of wings and a tail fin to the bulldozer, just for old time’s sake.

  The US is treating the fact that Osama was broken, old and grey as a victory. No, that just means it took them bloody ages to find him. Osama’s final insult to the West – having a home life so boring that the news media scrabble around trying to find the evil implications of a man wearing a hat buying chickens. His house had trailing leads and extension sockets everywhere. This man just toyed with danger. Five videos have been described as the US’s biggest-ever intelligence haul. That’s because in previous operations the soldiers have burnt all the books they’ve found, while squealing like frightened chimps. If you find a haul of videos in a military genius’s compound, all that proves is that Sky+ is harder to operate than a remote detonator.

  Apparently Osama dressed as a woman to have important tactical meetings. Either that, or a woman actually did all this and, as usual, will never be credited for it.

  Muslim extremists have supposedly set their sights on Prince Harry. Is beheading Prince Harry the biggest threat terrorists can come up with? At least kill someone who won’t ejaculate when it happens. Harry’s hardly scared of dying. He’s a ginger that’s desperate to go back to the desert. Seems Harry has grown up to be like his mother – fucking with Muslims might be his main cause of death. If Muslims’ number one target is Prince Harry, it goes to show that David Cameron is as ineffectual internationally as we’d always suspected. I suppose Harry is doing his best to keep Afghanistan safe. While he has six SAS gunman following him around to parties, they’re not in Afghanistan shooting shepherds.

  A church in the southern US caused chaos in Afghanistan by setting fire to a copy of the Koran to commemorate 9/11. Of course it’s their right to do it. As any student of pre-war Germany will tell you, book burning’s just a healthy part of building a democracy. The pastor said he’d stop the book burning if it caused too much offence. And made sure he had a full bladder just in case. It just seems so unnecessary to burn a copy of the Koran. Especially when every bookshop in the world still has copies of Michael McIntyre’s Life and Laughing.

  If this is all about honouring the victims of 9/11, is it not a bit tasteless to set fire to a book? They might as well throw it from the 35th floor of a skyscraper. They are trying to send a message to Islamic fundamentalists, that message being ‘Come and kill us.’ Hillary Clinton said the plan did not represent American values. She’s right. It would be far more representative of American values if Justin Bieber smashed a Blu-ray copy of the Koran to pieces using a turkey drumstick.

  The church had planned to set fire to a large heap of Korans the previous year. I think they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of capitalism. If they’d just bought 200 copies, the publishers would have been thinking, ‘Hey, there’s a real demand for those Korans down in Florida. Let’s print up another 5,000.’ And, of course, they’d have been burned too, and more would have been printed. The cycle would have continued until, in the state of Florida, the only book you could’ve purchase would’ve been the Koran and the only items you could’ve legally purchased from a shop would’ve been a hijab and a cigarette lighter.

  UK Islamic extremist Emdadur Choudhury was fined £50 for burning poppies at the last Remembrance Day parade. I say, if he wants to live here, he should protest about the occupation of Afghanistan the British way. Just shrug his shoulders and reach for the remote when it comes on the news.

  Burning poppies is a pretty piss-poor way of showing disrespect to our soldiers. It’s not a patch on failing to give them proper body armour. Lots of people desecrate the two-minute silence. At least Choudhury had an opinion about war – surely it’s more offensive when people just continue browsing through the Disney Store? How dare he publicly protest against the occupation of Afghanistan? Especially after all our efforts to bring it free speech. Apparently, he had planned a more lavish protest to bring the infidel British puppet government to its knees. But he couldn’t buy the fireworks as his benefit cheque didn’t arrive in time.

  I loved a couple of recent stories that described terrorists being uncovered after US spies picked up ‘internet chatter’ indicating an imminent attack. Internet chatter? That doesn’t mean anything. We’re probably running scared after a simple Twitter game of #terroristattackcheeses. The man who suggested ‘Al Qa-Brieda’ is in protective custody, while ‘Gouda Meinhof’ is still under investigation. Police have cordoned off Leicester and Caerphilly, just in case.

  The government says that terrorist groups are hell bent on sabotaging our computer networks. Which means that Virgin Media must have b
een working as an Al-Qaeda splinter cell for some time. The National Security Strategy has announced the top 15 threats to the UK. A list of 15 major disruptive events to British government, and revolution is not one of them? Brothers! We can take them by surprise! The Sun said, ‘Many services rely on computers – police and banks, to name just two.’ Leading me to believe the Sun has done a new poll and found most of its readership to be time travellers from our destroyed, cave-dwelling future. It’s bloggers I feel sorry for. Without the internet they’ll end up walking round town just handing out typed sheets listing the shit they’ve been up to.

  A man living behind Wembley Stadium was discovered to be funding Al-Qaeda. Living on the route to the shrine of the drunken, violent idiot? Do you think he started hating the West before or after his daughter’s Wendy house became a urinal?

  A plot was smashed to launch a Mumbai-style attack on Cardiff, inspired by Western decadence. What? In Cardiff? They haven’t even got a fucking Starbucks! Police are now investigating whether a Mumbai-style attack was launched against Glasgow but no one noticed. You can’t terrorise a Welshman by threatening to blow up New Look. The only things they’re scared of is impotence, and having to move out of their mum’s house.

  Possibly the craziest scaremongering of recent times was the story that female suicide bombers are being fitted with exploding fake breasts by Al-Qaeda. Just five ounces of explosives in a breast would be enough to blow a hole in the side of a jet. This is going to make security checks at airports more interesting. ‘Excuse me madam, but are your tits ticking?’

  These women want to use the exploding breasts for terror but they could be put to a very different, much more positive use. As anti-rape devices. Think about it. You’re being chased through the park, and both your rape alarm and Mace fails to put the attacker off. You then blow off your own tits like the fuel cells on a space shuttle. Nobody’s getting raped that night.