Seventy-Two Virgins

by Boris Johnson

  Even so Pickel might have pulled it off, once he had sat on Indira’s head. He still had a clear shot at Jones, Dean and a good chance of hitting Haroun. He might still have earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. He might still have been graciously appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to the most excellent order of the British Empire, had he not spotted something out of the corner of his eye that made him think he was going mad.

  It was that big puff of hair, that foaming crest he would know anywhere. It was that Limey journalist, it was that pisser of poison from the Daily Mirror. It was Barry White, who had used his disgusting good manners to seduce him with his satphone, and had fatally distracted him from his duties as a guard, and who had written his reputation into the dust, and his marriage into oblivion.

  Barry White was ambling with his pass to the public entrance, thinking that the Mirror wouldn’t conceivably want more than a couple of pars about the speech, and plotting his assignation for lunch, wondering why the people in the yard were all staring at the roof, and quite unaware that one of his most conspicuous victims had drawn a bead on his head and was fantasizing about how it would look when he pulled the trigger.

  When he was a child in Iowa, Pickel used to look forward to visiting old Grandmaw Pickel, a woman as profoundly religious as she was deaf, who had a fetish for growing gigantic vegetables. Every year she would compete at the Town Fair with extra-large marrows, super-size squashes, and prodigious zucchini. Late one August evening she had taken him to the pumpkin patch and shown him her latest entrant, a colossal orange globe glowing in the gloom. He had never seen anything like it. It had winner written all over it, and as the day of the fair approached all Grandmaw’s friends were invited to witness the almost visible expansion of its flesh, and to feel their morale sink.

  Alas, Grandmaw had cheated. She had no special talent for manure; it was no priestly incantation that plumped the great gourd. When no one was looking she had tied a piece of cotton thread to the tap on the side of the house and she had run it to the pumpkin, and she had tied the thread to a needle, and stuck that in the top of the vegetable.

  Then drip, drip, drip, she had opened the tap just a little and fed her pet continuously for weeks, with the pumpkin equivalent of anabolic steroids. Young Jason would never forget the moment of tragic revelation. On the day of the fair the whole family was assembled in the vegetable garden to see the raising of the pumpkin. Three male Pickels between them were scarcely able to hoist it on to a wheelbarrow, but Grandmaw wanted a photograph of herself holding it aloft, much as Hemingway would insist on commemorating the capture of an enormous marlin.

  She reached down with both hands and gripped the freshly cut stalk as thick as a baby’s arm, and she straddled her legs into a squat-thrust and heaved. And because it was she whose beefy genes had made Jason so big and strong, she prevailed. With the triumphant grunt of a female Ukrainian shot-putter, she lifted it up, first to chest height, then to her head. She smiled for the camera, and the scene was seared in Jason’s memory, his grandmother backlit by the sun, and the fluorescent orange vegetable and everyone laughing and clapping.

  Because all at once there occurred an event as sudden and horrifying as the conflagration of a hydrogen-filled airship. The pumpkin exploded. Fattened beyond endurance, unable to cope with the demands of gravity, the skin of the pumpkin popped like a balloon and splattered Grandmaw and Jason and everyone else with clods of waterlogged mulch and pulp and gunk.

  Yeah, one moment a sphere, the next moment his grandmother holding nothing but a stalk, and that, thought Jason as he hummed his hymn and located Barry White in his sights, was what was about to happen to this guy’s head. Except that Indira, dazed and winded beneath him, chose that moment to fight back.

  Nothing could be worse, she decided, than the smegmatic oblivion of her current position. Rotating her head she bit what she took to be Jason Pickel’s inner thigh, but was in fact his left testicle.

  ‘Yowk,’ said Jason Pickel, and his finger withdrew from the trigger guard.

  Barry White walked on, quite oblivious, round the corner of the Members’ Entrance and through the swing doors of the South Porch into Westminster Hall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  1011 HRS

  ‘Jeee-zus,’ said Jason, and tried to fight back. This time his finger clinched the trigger. The gun bucked.

  The bang scattered the group in the yard. The bullet whined off the cobble and into a tree.

  Jason shoved his left forefinger into Indira’s mouth as though to pacify a baby, and squeezed off two more rounds.

  Even the sharpest sharpshooter finds it hard to cope with an Indian hellcat scratching and biting at his groin. Pyo-yowyoing the first went over the heads of the policemen and they rolled into defensive positions, behind the porch and out of the line of sight of the deranged Yank on the roof.

  Thwok, the next round took off the gargoyle’s right ear and a fourth ascended in a steep parabola, to land unnoticed ten miles away in a garden in Highbury. Jason did not fire a fifth shot. Barry White had eluded him. Indira was once more quiescent. The British police officers were pointing their trembling carbines at the roof.

  Jones, Habib, Haroun and Dean had slipped into the Members’ Entrance of the House of Commons, like deer suddenly lost in the woods. Roger Barlow ran after them.

  On the roof Jason and Indira disentangled themselves, and stared at each other in a miserable post-coital way. ‘Where are you going?’ said Indira, as Pickel slung his rifle over his shoulder. But the American was off singing his song of crucifixion. ‘When I survey the wondrous cross,’ he hummed as he ran down the roof beam, sure footed as a marmoset, ‘on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss,’ he puffed down the stairs and sprinted along the parapet in the direction of Westminster Hall, ‘and pour contempt on all my pride.’

  Pickel’s gun was not especially loud, and the four seal-bark shots meant nothing to most people in the hall, least of all the President, who chuntered gently on. To Cameron, whose ears were pricked for the unusual, it sounded potentially bad. And for some of the audience at the far end there was certainly a distraction in the noise of Jones’s entreaties, and the coppers falling over, and Jason Pickel’s shouted orders. Some of them vaguely paid attention to the banging of the swing doors in the Members’ Entrance, and the sound of running feet dimly in the corridor to their left.

  But in the Ops Room, there was a kind of frenzy, and they boiled and thrashed and snatched at scraps of information, like a tankful of fish at feeding time.

  ‘We’ve got shooting,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘We’ve got shooting in the yard. Four shots,’ he said, holding the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Four shots?’ said Bluett. ‘Didn’t the tow-truck guy say there were four of them? Whoo-hoo. I bet damn Pickel has pegged those babies.’

  ‘What do you mean, pegged them?’

  ‘Shot their motherfucking asses.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, my old mate.’

  Jones confidently led the way through the Members’ cloakroom, a route he had long ago identified as the least heavily secured. No eyes beheld him, even at this stage, as he pushed open the oak swing doors, save the sightless bronze orbs of one Randall Cremer, parliamentarian of the nineteenth century.

  No alarms sounded, no sensors were triggered. For a moment he thought he would be able to complete the twenty yards of the cloakroom entirely unseen .

  Whoosh, whoosh went the shoe brush, wielded with manic zeal by Woodrow Watson, Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford. He was standing in the corner of that dim silent place to which no one is admitted who has not been elected by the sovereign people of Britain. It is like a scene from a l950s film about public school life. There is rank upon rank of coat hooks, with red tape nooses into which MPs are supposed to put their swords, and long-forgotten macs and duffle coats suspended as if in some spooky human abattoir.

  At the far end is a mirror, a TV screen, a let
ter writing set, some scurvy hairbrushes and an ancient set of electric scales, which tired, fat, dejected MPs mount and remount, jettisoning still more from their pockets, in the hope of achieving a favourable reading. At the near end by the swing doors from New Palace Yard, are the shoeshine things.

  Here, since the break-up of his marriage, Woodrow Watson was spending more and more time. He fully understood the psychological meaning of his actions. By shining his shoes he was doing what he could to bring back lustre and perfection to his life. His heart was a mess, scuffed, battered, shredded. But the shoes could be made whole and clean. The more he hurt the harder he polished. Around Westminster his colleagues bickered and plotted. Speeches were made. Reputations rose and fell. But Woodrow Watson stood in the twilight and buffed. He was a buffer, he told himself. At fifty-six he was on the threshold of bufferdom, and this was his buffer zone.

  First he ground the polish in, smearing it over the welts and into the cavity in the instep. Then he left one shoe to dry while whoosh, whoosh, he began his obsessive frottage. His standards were by now very high. He no longer accepted the sheen of a polished apple. Even when his wrist ached and the lactic acid was building in his bicep, and he had produced the kind of vitreous surface that would get top marks at Sandhurst, Woodrow Watson was not satisfied. He liked it when all the crinkly surfaces of the leather sparkled with tinsel points of halogen brightness. That was the good bit; that made him feel calm. As he rotated the shoe like an Amsterdam jeweller, he felt momentarily proud of his work and with that brief surge of self-worth, he was able to obliterate his wife’s desertion.

  The trouble was that he needed his fix ever more frequently. He was getting through tins of taxpayers’ polish. His nails looked as though he’d been mining coal, and though that was once a proper function of a Labour MP, his colleagues knew what he was up to, and he was starting to feel ashamed.

  So when the funny Asian- or Arab-looking TV crew burst through the door, Woodrow Watson tensed. Hardly daring to breathe, one hand clenching the shoe, the other poised in mid-buff, his eyes locked involuntarily on Dean.

  Oh God, thought Watson. It’s probably a documentary about the peculiar habits of MPs. Blasted media. Don’t they know they’re not allowed in here?

  The three others walked on quickly to the far door, but the young half-caste was still staring at him.

  ‘Yer gotta stop it,’ said the kid.

  Watson thought he must be hallucinating. Who was this epiphany sent to piss around with his brain?

  ‘It’s madness,’ said the hallucination, and Woodrow Watson could take it no more.

  He knew it was eccentric to stand all day polishing his shoes, but he was damned if he was going to accept any kind of counsel from this intruder, who had in any event, no right to be here at all. He unstuck his terrified tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  ‘You…You…’

  But then one of the two Arab cameramen stalked back down the cloakroom. To the horror of Woodrow Watson, the young man stuck his face unconscionably close.

  ‘Please, man,’ said Dean, ‘yow gotta get help.’ It was too much. The shoe dropped from one hand, the brush from the other.

  He had to get help.

  He knew he had to get help. But he didn’t need this squit to tell him.

  Roger Barlow should easily have overhauled the four terrorists; and under any normal circumstances would have done so. But his legs were tired after so much running, and his feet were dragging.

  The result was that he snared himself in one of the long black cables that coiled through the Members’ Entrance and fed the TV lights and the cameras. He tripped, and fell flat on his face.

  As he put out his arms to break his fall, both hands somehow became caught up in other rubbery snakes of electric flex. He righted himself, and the writhing lianas wrapped themselves about his arms and shoulders.

  Oh for the Lord’s sake, he said to himself.

  Had Roger been in the mood for literary echoes, he might have caught his resemblance to the Vatican sculpture of Laocoon, who warned in vain of the Trojan horse, and who was devoured by sea-snakes.

  Instead, he thought that even by his own energetic standards, he was making a bit of a berk of himself. He wondered what his wife and children would make of his performance, and remembered that it was the second time he had been shot at that day.

  As the Oedipal four-year-old had once told him with a withering look, when refusing to unlock the French windows to let him in: ‘I am sorry. You are not an Aztec.’

  The President had reached a delicate point in his speech. He had invoked the spirit of Anglo-American cooperation. He had taken his audience with him and stormed the Normandy beaches hand in hand. Churchill had been cited so often that the French Ambassador was calling for le sac de vomissement.

  Now, however, he was required to justify Anglo-American cooperation in Iraq. He sucked, and gave a birdy squint around the hall. So when the camera crew slipped in through the door down on the far right, the President was one of the few who noticed. He also observed the flustered fellow who followed them, a few seconds later, and stared around.

  Not that the President saw anything sinister in these arrivals. He was just thinking what a grim old place this was and wouldn’t it be nice if they covered those dungeon walls with paintings, but he got on with his homily. ‘It’s easy to have friends in the good times. Everybody wants to know a man when he’s up. It’s when you’ve taken a big knock and you’re down and you’re frightened. That’s when you find out who really cares. That’s how you know who your real friends are. And that’s how we in America feel about Britain.’ The President had felt so passionately about this bit that he had tried to draft it himself. He’d shoved in lots of biblical stuff about the road to Jericho and falling among thieves, and those who passed by on the other side.

  The State Department had warned that his savage rebuke against the Priest and the Levite might be taken as some kind of reference to France and Germany, and the President had said too damn right it was a reference to France and Germany, but the striped pants would have none of it, not at a time of building bridges. So the President just got on with eulogizing Britain, the Good Samaritan, aware that his audience was becoming restless, and of the peculiar camera crew sidling fast up the right-hand wall.

  Roger Barlow might have gone after them, and fully intended to raise the alarm. But he was intercepted. ‘Roger,’ cried someone, grabbing his arm and hauling him into the empty seat beside him.

  ‘Oh, hello, Chester,’ said Roger warily. He hadn’t seen Chester for more than twenty years, or at least not in the flesh. He had seen him plenty of times on TV. He had watched Chester Minute, de Peverill’s introduction to top speed cookery, and Chester Little Bit More. He had caught the tail end of Chester’s Gourmet Christmas, whilst vaguely searching for something smutty on the high number satellite channels. In a hotly contested field there was no one on earth whom Roger found more deliriously irritating, though he sometimes felt rather ashamed of his feelings. In his heart, he knew that the TV chef might be bumptious, but was basically amiable. It had begun at university, when Roger had expended Herculean effort on persuading a very beautiful girl to go out with him. Barely had he succeeded when Chester started to pester her with lewd invitations.

  ‘How do you know you prefer steak & chips,’ read Chester’s Valentine card, ‘When you have never tried foie gras?’ Roger thought this cheeky. To his slight annoyance his girlfriend thought it amusing. And so after university it was with some prickliness that he had watched Chester’s TV chef persona —laddish but just pissionate, pissionate about food — rise and swell, like one of his very own soufflés.

  What the hell was Chester doing here, anyhow?

  ‘Oi,’ he gasped, as the Arab film crew continued up the left-hand wall.

  ‘What’s up mate?’ Chester whispered. Among the chef’s affectations, even though his family came from Godalming, was a faux Australian accent.

  ‘You
see that lot there.’

  ‘Which lot, Roger, mon ami?’

  ‘The chaps with the cameras and what not.’

  ‘The film crew?’

  ‘Yes, I think something pretty ghastly might be about to happen.’ Roger lurched to his feet and several people nearby went ‘ssst’.

  Chester gripped his arm again. ‘Sit down, Rog, or you’ll embarrass us all.’

  ‘But I think they could be Arab terrorists.’

  ‘If you want to make a complete wazzock of yourself in front of a thousand people while the President of the United States is speaking, you go right ahead.’

  ‘But it’s my fault they’re in here.’

  ‘Good for you, cocker, and frankly I’m glad to see that someone from your party is supporting a bit of ethnic TV.’

  It came back to him that Chester de Peverill was thought to be stonkingly cool. His whole schtick was to recreate mankind as a hunter-gatherer with himself, Chester, leading the rediscovery of ancient flavours. He would be filmed scrumping for crab apples or gorging on offal rejected by even the most outré of game butchers. No weed or windfall was deemed too ridiculous for his hammered copper saucepans.

  Across the Home Counties girls boiled up nettles for their men, so persuasive was his advocacy, and when suppertime ended in gagging on the hairy stalks, they didn’t blame Chester; they always blamed themselves for getting the recipe wrong. They loved his ‘I eat anything’ approach, with its flagrant sexual message.

  At one point Chester’s PR people had let it be known that he had kept his wife’s placenta in a fridge and then fried it up with some little Spanish onions — a revelation that was false, but which did nothing to damage his popularity. ‘You poseur,’ Roger thought, not without admiration, ‘you shameless poseur with your clustering curls.’ But he stayed in his seat.