Just in case you were wondering, Simon Cowell was murdered by a former contender live on China’s Got Talent back in 2019.
The artist formerly known as M’Lady GaGa is sitting in a Starbucks in Hoboken, New Jersey, doing exactly the same updating thing with her Wikipedia page. And she is also wondering how it all went wrong for her. There were a couple of years in the early Teens, only ten years ago, when she could do no wrong. But it seemed the more she learnt about her craft, the less it impacted on the world at large. And now she can sit in this Starbucks and no one knows who the fuck she is. There were a couple of teenagers in last week and she overheard one of them saying, ‘Isn’t that M’Lady GaGa?’ And the other said, ‘No, M’Lady GaGa is not fat.’ How painful was that? She just wanted to get up and scream.
She sits there going back and forward through her Wikipedia page trying to work out where it went wrong. The only bit she can maybe point at is when she decided not to contact The American Medical Association to see if they wanted to come out of retirement and do a track with her, but instead she went and did a recording with the E Street Band. Then those tracks with Tony Bennett – a major mistake. Then it was all over.
She has an idea. She needs to make a record with a less trashy version of Pussy Riot. Someone hip and of the moment. And foreign.
And she knows exactly what she wants the video for the song to be like. In it she would be a mermaid tempting a passing Viking longboat onto the rocks. And you would see the longboat smash and the Vikings drown. And all the little girls around the world would love her again.
A news story pops up on Winnie’s iPhone. ‘David Hockney, Albion’s greatest ever artist, has died of lung cancer at the age of ninety.’ Winnie remembers being taken by her father to a David Hockney exhibition. It was in a converted mill up in Yorkshire somewhere. She was very young at the time, but ever since then she has always liked Hockney, not so much because of the work, but because it somehow reminds her of a time when both her parents were there.
She is trying not to think about what she should be thinking about, which is the email she should be sending to Celine Hagbard. So instead she decides to carry on reading Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs. Even though the real Yoko Ono is her favourite artist, and she knows this to be just a play on her book, she really likes it.
These are some of the entries she is reading:
Remake Apocalypse Now using Plasticine men and stop-frame animation. The dialogue must be kept exactly the same except for the ‘Napalm’ line to be changed to ‘I love the smell of burning MONEY in the morning’
Make a pot of tea
Buy a roll of Gaffa Tape
no
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Gaffa Tape up holes and cracks
Gaffa Tape up your mouth
But then Winnie reads this one:
Ask your boyfriend to choose a number between one and six
Ask him not to tell you the number but to write it down on a piece of paper
Ask him to fold up the piece of paper
Ask him to give you the piece of folded-up paper
Don’t open it yet
Later
When alone
Roll a dice
Then unfold the piece of paper
If the rolled number on the dice is the same as on the piece of paper
Kill your boyfriend
Choose your own time
Winnie looks up and out at the horizon. She can just see the top of the Shard. There is no eyeball looking back at her. But she can see a giant grapefruit sliced in half rising above it. She knows this is not real. She knows this is just her imagination. But recently her imagination has been doing too many things like this.
The sun is already starting to dip. The day is sliding towards its end and still she does not hit ‘Send’. Still she does not end death. For ever.
In an earlier chapter of this book it is mentioned that Winnie does not listen to music other than by chance in cafés or elsewhere. This, although not a complete lie, is not exactly the case. Occasionally, very occasionally, she will go on YouTube and watch clips of Nina Simone singing songs. The reasons for this are mixed, but the main reason is that one of the more powerful memories she has of her Mother is of her listening to Nina Simone. And her Mother telling her that Nina Simone is the most real woman in the world. A woman’s woman. A woman who knows how to say ‘No’. A woman who is a true artist whatever song she sings or whoever wrote it. A woman who only has to open her mouth and she is not only singing for all women and all African Americans but for every person that has ever lived and has ever been oppressed.
Okay, she can’t actually remember her Mother saying all of those things, but that is what she believes her Mother felt about Nina Simone.
So Winnie listens to her sing ‘I Put a Spell on You’, then ‘Here Comes the Sun’, then ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, then the absolute classic ‘Sinnerman’.
And as she is just about to click on ‘To Love Somebody’, she notices there is a version of ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ sung by Nina Simone.
Now, you may not know this, but ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ is a song written by Jonathan King and was a hit for him way back in 1965, when he was still a fresh-faced student at Cambridge University. If there is one other thing Winnie remembers about her Mother and music, it is how much she hated Jonathan King and everything he seemed to represent to her.
Winnie does not know if she wants to hear her Mother’s musical heroine sing a song by the man she loathed. She can’t stop herself. What she hears is not what she is expecting. It is the Jonathan King song, but it is not sung in the usua
l Nina Simone commanding way. It is a frail and old voice, still Nina’s voice, but with none of her inner strength, and the accompaniment is just Nina playing the piano. And even her piano playing is faltering.
Winnie clicks it off. This is not the Nina she wants. She looks up again. Darkness is falling and now, instead of a grapefruit above the Shard, she can see a full moon rising.
It is mid-afternoon in New York. Celine Hagbard has decided to walk from one end of Manhattan to the other. This is a walk of about twenty kilometres. All the way from Battery Park up to Inwood Hill Park.
When things are troubling Celine she likes to walk from one end to the other. It gives her time to think, time for emotions to settle, time to come up with a plan. And things are troubling her. She needs a plan. She has been expecting an email from Winnie Smith all day. This is what they have been working towards for the last five years. Through all the personal ups and downs there has always been daily contact between the pair of them. Whatever massive business deals she is in the middle of, every time she sees there is an email from Winnie in her inbox she gets a bit of a rush. It isn’t a sexual thing, it’s more that Winnie is the daughter she never had. The perfect daughter, who seems to understand the world in the way she does. She would not have used the word ‘love’, but that is what it is.
Then, mixed in with all of this, there is the Yoko Ono book that fell from the sky. She went online and nowhere in the world of GoogleByte is there any mention of this book. Nothing. And as far as she’s concerned, if GoogleByte cannot track it down, it does not exist.
Celine has her own personal memories of Yoko Ono from the late 1960s back in London. She never really took to her then. That was a long time ago.
This book, this Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs book, has triggered all sorts in her. Very much unsettled her. She has read it from cover to cover while still sitting in the Starbucks – mind you, that didn’t take more than thirty minutes. She keeps on coming back to one particular statement – ‘Push The Button’. Not just a statement, more a commandment. It is like these three words are screaming at Celine Hagbard from the middle of an otherwise empty page. She knows the button has to be pushed. But she cannot push it until Winnie Smith emails her the final information that would make all the other bits slot together. Today is the 23rd April 2023. This was always to be the day the button was to be pushed.
Just as Celine is striding up Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard through Harlem she feels this sharp pain at the bottom left of her back. It is as if someone had stuck a knife in her. As she falls to the ground she turns her head to see who has stabbed her. There is no one there.
Whereas I am still on the island of Fernando Pó. Whoever is writing this book has not transported me to the Isle of Jura, off the coast of Scotia, to make things more attractive for film options.
And as I made plain to you in an earlier chapter, womankind needs to have war, famine and inequality to function properly. Without them we as a species will be over within a couple of generations. And I still believe we need as many competing religions as possible to compete for our souls. The more radical the religion, the better. And the so-called sorcery I practise is possibly more radical than most.
About thirty seconds ago I sunk my needle into the doll I have created to be Celine Hagbard. And wherever this Hagbard is in the world, I am hoping she is suffering the consequences of my actions. It is the least she deserves.
Tate World have just announced they are going to rebrand the Turner Prize as the Hockney Award. This is in honour of David Hockney, whose death was announced earlier today. The shortlist for the Hockney Award will be announced tomorrow.
Yoko Ono looks down into the waters of the Lee Navigation from the open doors of her floor and she starts talking to her boyfriend, who is lying at the bottom of the water underneath the reflection of the moon. She tells him she has a plan and he will be proud of her. In the background we can hear some loops he had created for a track they had been working on. The samples he used to loop were taken from ‘Sinnerman’ by Nina Simone. There was also a M’Lady GaGa sample in there as a hook.
Streets full of people
All alone
Roads full of houses
Never home
A church full of singing
Out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the Moon
Jonathan King (1965)
Barnhill
Jura
25 April 1984
Dear Diary,
Things are getting stranger.
As I get closer to what may lie at the heart of this book, I sense I may be losing people. That is, if anyone is reading it in the first place. I keep circling around something from character to character. Which character will be the first to jump? Which will be the first to reveal?
Before I started writing this chapter this morning I was tempted to kill off one of the major characters, almost creating a ‘who done it?’ mystery. I know the bogus John Lennon character was killed off in Chapter 3, but we know who did that, so there is no mystery there.
As yet I have not decided if Celine Hagbard is already dead – that decision can be left for the morning, when Chapter 6 is to be attempted. Then there is the need to have some sort of romantic thread to the story. Does she or does she not get the boy? That’s always a good way to keep the reader turning the pages. And which boy? Certainly not that O’Brien I mentioned in Chapter 2 and, anyway, I seem to be leaving behind the templates of 1948 and Kosmik Silver Trigger that I was using earlier on.
Then there is the lack of a clear-cut villain. People like to have a villain. If this were to be a proper dystopian novel, there would be the dictator or the police state we could all hate, but that doesn’t exist here, mainly because it is not a dystopian but a utopian novel. That bloke in Fernando Pó might think Celine Hagbard and the rest are baddies but none of the other characters in the book particularly think so.
I did not send anything off to Dog Ledger again today. I phoned him instead and made up some excuse about the fax machine still being broken.
I just got back from the bar about twenty minutes ago – and things were getting strange there too, but in a good way. Francis’s mate Jimmy from Devon, who did the poster from Mervyn Peake, is still up, as is the manager of Echo & His Bunnymen. We all got talking about the film Wicker Man. Jimmy thought it was filmed up here on one of the islands, but the manager of the band – Will Drummond, I think – said it was filmed around his home town of Newton Stewart down in Galloway. But both were agreed it would be a good thing to try to do it for real one day. By the end of the evening they seemed to agree they would return in the future to build and burn a giant wicker man on Jura. I said I would definitely be back to witness it as well.
I would like to put it on record – even supposing it is only me who ever reads this – that I neither drank too much nor embarrassed myself by making untoward advances to any young men.
Let’s hope I have a good night’s sleep. Or at least until the call of the curlew wakes me in the morning.
Love,
Roberta X
6: PUSH THE BUTTON
21:37 Sunday 23 April 2023
The crow is pecking an eye out of the dead squirrel in Gillett Square by the Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston.
John Lennon is lying at the bottom of the Lee Navigation, thinking the thoughts of a dead man.
Killer Queen is riding the crest of a wave and thinking about music. She wants to form a band.
Mister Fox is trotting along a darkened street without a care in the world.
Dead Perch is contemplating a career in social media.
Shanthi is trying to work out why dating in the modern world never works.
A reader is thinking, ‘Who the fuck is Shanthi and why is she in this book?’
And we don’t know if Celine Hagbard is alive or dead.
A cloud drifts between the moon and Winnie. She can no longer see the Shard. Winnie returns her gaze to Grapefruit Are Not
the Only Bombs. She turns the page and reads. And what she reads is not what she wants to read:
Push The Button
So she turns to the next page and she reads:
Wait until after dark
Catch a bus
Stay on the bus until the end of the line
Catch another bus
Stay on that bus until the end of the line
Run back to where you started
Winnie has waited and it is after dark. And Starbucks is still open. She decides to go for a double espresso before catching the first bus. As she closes her front door behind her, Crow lands on her balcony rail.
As she passes the entrance to the Arcola Theatre she notices they are about to stage a version of Macbeth but done in Pidgin English; it is being directed by a Daisy Campbell. Winnie makes a mental note to go and see it. She has seen eleven different versions of Macbeth, and that is not enough. It is never enough.
Ten minutes later Winnie is boarding the 149 heading North to Edmonton Green.
At Edmonton Green, Winnie gets off the 149 and catches the next bus to pull up. It is the 279 to Waltham Cross. She used to catch this bus to the home of her first boyfriend, who lived in Waltham Cross. They used to hold hands and listen to music and talk about things. It was a long time ago. Nearly fourteen years. Half a lifetime. They are still friends on FaceLife.
She gets off the bus at Waltham Cross and starts running. She is running East towards Waltham Abbey. When she gets to the bridge, she ducks down to the river. It is the Lee Navigation. But it is North of the M25. There are fields either side. She heads South. She keeps running. Her mind is sliding, the reflection of the full moon in the water is following her. She sees a dead Oak tree standing on top of a small hill. A sliced grapefruit is rising behind the tree. The two men she has seen before in her dreams are walking up the hill in silhouette. These men are also on the poster of The Scream she first got when she was thirteen and still has now. Although now she has it in a frame. She always knew why the person was screaming but what were those two men with their top hats doing? Where were they going? What were they thinking? The screaming is the easy bit.
2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Page 7