‘Or first day on Garage Band,’ adds Stock.
‘Well, turn the rest of the track into 3/4 time,’ commands King.
‘No one has danced to waltz time since the Second World War,’ sneers Stock.
‘What about Strictly?’ responds King.
‘Exactly,’ jibes Aitken.
Matt turns to Mike: ‘I say we quit now and start working with Waterman again.’
‘Well, then you can all sod off out of my studio,’ tantrums King.
Matt and Mike walk out. So does Phil Harding, the engineer, and Rick, the tea boy.
While Yoko dreams, I am still on the island of Fernando Pó, off the coast of Africa. I am staring at the five handmade dolls on my table, wondering which one I should stick the needle into next. Yesterday I received a package in the post. I have never ever received a package in the post before in my life, even on my birthday. When I opened it I was disappointed to find it was a book. The disappointment was compounded when I flicked through the book to discover it was in all sorts of languages I could not and did not want to read. But then I came to one page I would allow myself to read, as it was in Bube, the language of my people. The future language of the entire world.
Up until now, when referring to myself in this novel I have made no mention of my name or my position in society. This was because it may have had untoward repercussions, but with the knowledge of the death of Celine Hagbard I feel more at ease sharing this information. You may think I am a witch doctor or something, but in fact I am none other than the future head of state of Fernando Pó, King Francisco Malabo Beosá XXIII, or just plain Malabo to my family. I made it a point of principle from the moment of my coronation I would never speak the colonial Spanish again or for that matter any language other than Bube.
And what I read yesterday morning, and I am reading again right now, as Yoko is dreaming of yet another pyramid, is:
It is your duty to save not only your people
But all the people of Africa
But for this to be done
Five have to die
Thus
Make Five dolls out of straw
Dress the dolls in rags
Make a sharp needle from bamboo cane
Imagine each doll to represent
The Kings or Queens of the Five States
Over a period of 23 hours
Sink a needle through the straw flesh
Of each of the Five dolls
The Kings or Queens of the Five States will die
A Child will be born
She will be the One
Build a pyramid in Her honour
I read and reread it before lifting the needle to sink it into the next doll. Stevie, your time is up. The AppleTree will fall.
While Yoko dreams, Makka Pakka crouches on the ground beside an ATM machine, wondering if he can get enough for his breakfast before the thirst kicks in. Then he looks at a passing stranger who is looking disparagingly back at him and he turns to say to the camera that is not there, ‘Makka Pakka, Makka Pakka,’ in the way he always did within In the Night Garden.
Makka Pakka still collects stones, but only when nobody is looking.
While Yoko dreams, Winnie is also dreaming. It is the sort of dream you have when you are almost waking. It is a dream she has had ever since she was five or maybe six. It is a dream about meeting her baby sister.
In the book Yoko gave her yesterday was a page with only one word on it. Winnie took little notice of it. The word was in capitals with a question mark:
SISTER?
While Yoko dreams, Siobhán Harrison is sad and worries she has not heard from her son Paul in almost forty-eight hours. Since moving down to London and moving in with that strange girl who insists she is called Yoko, he has been very good at keeping in touch. He phones her nearly every evening. And if he can’t phone, he will text. But nothing since the night before last.
While Yoko dreams, Angela Merkel flicks through the book her assistant has just brought in. If we could understand German, we would know the conversation is going something like this:
‘Why have you brought me this, Frank?’
‘Because I thought you might think it funny. It might cheer you up.’
‘There is very little to cheer me up in the world right now. The people have everything they want. What is there left for people like me to do?’
‘But you know, Angela, this is only a phase. There have been many phases before where peace has reigned for a while, but the people get bored, the human condition wants more. And then, Angela, it will be someone like you who will have to show the way, take the reins and prevent the likes of Putin or his heirs from wresting control again. Anyway, there was a page in German in the book that I thought you might like. I have turned the corner.’
Angela Merkel finds the page and reads:
When the new day dawns
And the seas begin to toss
The world will need a woman
To provide a steady hand on the tiller
You are that woman
A red kite is mobbed by a pair of crows above the Brandenburg Gate.
While Yoko dreams, it is almost 4 a.m. in a New York nightclub. Out on the floor is Upsy Daisy. She will dance until dawn. Sometimes she still wonders where Makka Pakka is now.
While Yoko dreams, Camille, the seventeen-year-old woman in Port-au-Prince, is still being raped by the transgender artist in a room at the Hotel Oloffson. She will learn later in the day that a package has arrived for her. Although you, the reader of this book, and me, the writer of it, can guess what is in the package, we do not know as yet if there is a page written in Haitian Kreyòl that she will be able to read.
While Yoko dreams, Moses Tabick is on the 491 bus. He has just got back from Damascus, where he is studying at the newly opened Jewish Theological Seminary. He is young and eager and has only one more year to go before he is a fully qualified Rabbi. His attitudes are very liberal even for these liberal and enlightened days. When he was coming through customs this morning he was handed a package with his name on it. It is only now on the 491 that he starts to open it. It is yellow. It is hardback. On the cover is a sliced grapefruit. But he is the first person to receive a copy of this book to notice, in the pattern created by the slicedthrough segments of fruit, that there is a star. A six-pointed star.
He opens the book at random and he is surprised to see that the words are in Hebrew. And if we could read Hebrew, we would read:
You listened when I spoke from the burning bush
You led our people out of bondage
You parted the waves of the Red Sea
You wrote the words on tablets of stone
Yeah, but
What have you done for me lately?
I said
What have you done for me lately?
Moses closes The Book, looks out of the window and realises it is not good enough to be a Rabbi to please his mother. He has to be a Rabbi because he has been chosen to lead his Chosen People.
While Yoko dreams, John Lennon is lying at the bottom of the Lee Navigation beginning to decompose. He is very glad to be in the band with Killer Queen, Crow and Dead Squirrel and hopes they do many more records together. He is also glad Yoko gave him his copy of Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs before killing him. And that he finally got to throw a brick through the window of the pet shop. The weird thing is, a lot of the tropical fish that died on the pavement after he had done it are now fans of Tangerine NiteMare.
While Yoko dreams, Divine, the seventeen-year-old girl in an unnamed village a hundred or so kilometres upriver from Mbandaka on the Congo is still being raped by the boy she used to fancy when they used to go to Sunday school. Divine is wondering why nothing has changed in her world even though the world has now been saved. Her copy of Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs was stolen. We will find out how and why in a later chapter.
While Yoko dreams, a package arrives at a Buddhist monastery in Tibet, high in the Himalaya
s. It is opened by the young novice monk, who is on admin duty for the day. It is his job to respond to all email, phone calls and traditional mail, and do the daily tweets, FaceLife, etc., while his brothers are in silent contemplation and prayer.
Inside the package is a book. He has never read a physical book. Only the Holy scrolls; everything else is online. He opens the book at random and after sniffing the pages – he didn’t know real books smelt so nice – he reads the words on the page. If we could read Ü-Tsang, we would read the following:
There are no more wars
There is no more hunger
There is no more slavery
But in the souls
Of the people of the Earth
There is war, hunger and slavery
It is only your religion
That can
Bring that peace
Feed that hunger
Free those bonds
It is your calling to go out into the world
Use whatever powers you can harness
And make this happen
The novice reads these words again and then again. And he knows these to be the words of a higher calling. That these words have been sent directly to him for a purpose and he must follow them. That he must, today, leave this monastery, come down out of the mountains and into the world and use whatever powers he can harness to make all this happen. Nothing else will do. He puts down the book, wraps his saffron robe around him and sets off into the world. His name is Chodak. We will all hear more of Chodak.
While Yoko dreams, Stevie Dobbs has died in her sleep in her log cabin up in the Redwood Forests. No one will know she has died for twenty-four hours, as she has insisted that she needs to have a break from everyone and everything until she says otherwise. The package with a book in it with her name on the address c/o AppleTree Campus, Cupertino, California, was instantly dropped into the paper-recycling skip, as were the similar packages sent to ‘The Princess of Wales at WikiTube’ and ‘Jessie Bezos at AmaZaba’.
While Yoko dreams, Meg of Meg & Mog fame (but not that Mog the Forgetful one) is riding on her broomstick heading South. She is currently crossing the Thames. What she hopes to do is land on the very top of the Shard and from there cast a spell over all of London and maybe even the whole of the world. Owl is flying behind them.
While Yoko dreams, she dreams again of her aborted son. When she was sixteen and in her first year of Foundation at art school (instead of sixth form) she started to have an affair with her life-drawing teacher. His name was Mike Large. All the girls liked him.
He used to take her out at lunchtime in his car and fuck her in a wood. She didn’t know if she loved him, but she felt differently about him than any of the boys she had gone out with before. He was thirty-two, married with two children. He used to joke that his wife understood him too well.
All the other girls were jealous, even though they disapproved. But then she got pregnant. She decided to keep the baby. Mike was angry. His anger took different forms. He would have nothing more to do with her. He kept on asking, ‘What about the man’s right to choose?’ But he wasn’t asking, he was telling. He said he would pay for the abortion. She didn’t want ‘his fuckin’ blood money’.
She had to leave art school. Her Mother said she would help look after the baby. She was five months into the pregnancy when she had to go in for an ultrasound scan. On that day she learnt two things: the first was that the baby was going to be a boy. The second was that she had endometrial cancer, or cancer of the womb to you and me, and it was pretty far gone. If they did not operate immediately, there was no chance she could survive. She had no choice. She lost both her baby boy and her womb before teatime on a Saturday afternoon.
She had already decided what she was going to call her child if it was a boy – John. After the grandfather she never knew.
Yoko did not post the book to her unborn son John. She did what she did with his birthday cards each year and the children’s books she would be reading to him if he were alive. These were the children’s books her Mother had read to her. She would buy him The Tiger Who Came to Tea, take it home and, when John Lennon was not around, she would read it aloud as if she were reading it to her three-year-old son. And then she would burn the book page by page. She would sit and watch kids’ TV programmes like Peppa Pig and In the Night Garden, imagining she was watching them with him. She would build towers out of Duplo pretending that he was building them with her. She would teach him to dance and sing the songs that her mum had taught her.
Yesterday morning she burnt every page of his copy of Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs at the open doors that look over the Lee Navigation. When John came back from putting up the ‘2023: WHAT THE FUUK IS GOING ON?’ posters, he said something and whatever it was he said, there was only one course of action to be taken, and ten minutes later he was rolled up in their duvet cover and at the bottom of the Lee Navigation.
No one saw. As he fell, but before the splash, a magpie flew past. Yoko hated magpies because of the way they raid other birds’ nests, killing their babies. But she loved the way they look. She loved their clean black and white. They reminded her of a killer whale she saw once when she was on a boat in Scotland. Her Mother had taken her on a holiday to the Scottish Islands. She did not know what a killer whale was then, but as she was leaning over the side of the boat looking at the gannets dropping from the sky, a huge creature leapt out of the water. And this creature was all gleaming and smooth and black and white. And so pure. It was seven metres of female killer whale.
She has one book left. She was going to post it to the last Chairman of the old communist China, but she doesn’t know who he was or where to send it, so she just throws it into the Lee Navigation in the full knowledge that somehow the killer whale will get the meaning of it all.
End of Book One
Barnhill
Jura
28 April 1984
Dear Diary,
I was going to write some more about how Yoko was dreaming about a ghetto-blaster coming down from the sky to land on the pyramid and that maybe King Francisco Malabo Beosá XXIII had the same dream.
And I wanted to say that while she was still dreaming, all the daffodils across London were in full bloom smiling at the sun, but then I remembered daffodils would be past their best by 24 April, even if the Spring was late.
I know I wanted to end Book One of 2023 with Yoko still dreaming her last dream of the night, while Winnie sent an email off to Celine Hagbard saying she was going to take twenty-four hours off before hitting ‘Send’ on the end of death thing. Obviously this would have just been before the world got to know about Celine Hagbard’s death. And then I would have finished with it being a bright warm day in April 2023 and the clock just about to strike thirteen as the clock had not been mended yet and, in fact, it was just 9:00. And how Winnie in her Levi’s slung low and her T-shirt freshly unbranded strode through the gates of Victory Mansions across to the Starbucks on the corner of her block for her first skinny latte of the day.
Maybe also mention something about Winnie noticing not only that the three posters had been removed from the wall, but three whole chunks of the wall had been removed.
But I got emotionally carried away with the whole abortion bit and forgot all of this stuff. So instead I am going to get on my faithful Brough Superior, drive the thirty-one miles to Craighouse and see if I can do a ton on that long straight.
And maybe if Francis has any more of his homemade LSD, I’ll drop a tab and then get drunk.
Love,
Roberta XXXX
Postscript: I have no idea what sort of book I am writing. But if Dog Ledger does not think it genius, I’m changing agents.
I should warn you, over the twenty-four hours that pass during Book Two, we will not be hearing from either Winnie or Yoko.
BOOK TWO
The Rotten Apple
ROBERTA ANTONIA WILSON’S PREFACE FOR BOOK TWO
Book One, The Blaste
r in the Pyramid, is done. I have written it and maybe you have read it. The final two chapters of it were written at speed and in a state of mental stress and—
For Book Two I hope things don’t jump all over the place like they did in those last two chapters. I mean, why should you know who Jonathan King is, let alone Phil Harding? Reading back through that stuff this morning, it feels like it has been written for an audience of less than half a dozen. It feels like I was just trying to layer the whole thing with all sorts of reference points to impress … well, whoever it is, I don’t know. And it is not going to help sell any more books than my last one. That one was called Uganda.
Ten minutes ago, while I was having my final cup of tea before starting the day’s work of hitting these keys on my portable Empire Aristocrat, I had an idea. Each chapter in Book Two would be based almost entirely around one of the characters you have already met (and one you might not have).
As with Book One, all the events take place over a twenty-four-hour period, but this time I am going to totally ignore the different time zones. This means the whole world is on British Summer Time. And there is no way I can find out what time zone they are in the MidWest of the USA, let alone Tibet. So if it is teatime here, it is teatime in Tokyo.
Here goes.
1: REVENGE OF THE CHILD ACTOR
09:01 Monday 24 April 2023
The sun is up and over London. There is some weather coming in from the Southwest, but it will not be here until the early afternoon – or that was what the weather forecast claimed on the radio first thing this morning.
Henry Pedders is nineteen and he lives with his mother in a block of flats on Queensbridge Road, Dalston. On the seventeenth floor of 355 Queensbridge Road, to be more precise. His dad lives elsewhere.
No. 355 is a massive block of flats, and it is where Henry has grown up. There is a window in this flat that Henry has been looking out of ever since he was tall enough to look out of a window. What he has been looking at is how London has evolved in his lifetime. The first thing he can remember is seeing the enterprise zone down in Docklands grow. Down there were the first proper tall buildings in London, if you don’t count the Post Office Tower, which we won’t.
2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Page 11