Paddy Bostock - Chosen

“Well, if you want to think of it that way, Milly. Mind you, Jesus Christ pretty much fits the same bill, would you not say? Another chap back from the dead, even though nobody’s ever actually seen him. But even so, just look at the clout he ’s had. And indeed continues to have, whether in his Catholic or Anglican version.”

An other hiatus while Dame Muriel struggled with her demons, namely the enduring paradox of the ghost of her recently deceased father whispering to her nightly, “There is no heaven, sweetie,” and the happy clappy religion she quotidianly had shoved down her throat by her governesses, all of whom assured her heaven was where the good girls went. And this while her mother danced the nights (and days) away with fancy boys in Soho.

“Milly? Or should I call you M?”

“Muh-muh-Milly’s fine,” said Dame Muriel, remembering her lacrosse days and pulling herself together sharpish. “Whatever you wish to call me, and always assuming I agree to your plan, we are still left with the problem of Lennon being dead, whether or not people believe in afterlives.”

“You will, however, recall my suggestion of a lookalike, Milly, an entirely live person who, through computer generated imagery, could easily be confused with the real , albeit supposedly deceased, John Lennon. Same Scouse accent, same hair, same guitar style, same everything. I have all the means to achieve that.”

“And you have a candidate in mind for this role?”

“Milly, Milly ? Sorry, you’re fading on me. Battery low, reception masts on the blink perhaps, don’t know what’s happening,” said Maurice, tapping at the Get Lost button on his phone. “But before you vanish into the ether altogether, may I assume you will at least consider my little plan?”

“A pre-launch run-through in my office before I make any final decision, but in principle…” Dame Muriel was saying as Maurice fully depressed the Get Lost button.

“Yessss,” he then said, punching air.

“Oink, oink ,” said Pete, dancing a little pig dance called the Pig Trot.

“PM on the line again?” Barry said when a gleeful Maurice re-joined the company accompanied by a still Pig-Trotting Pete.

“Not this time. The circus. Perhaps you would care to step outside with me while I explain?” whispered Maurice, casting a meaningful eye over at Maggie, who was busy exchanging choosing/chosen experiences with Jeremy, Julie and Dennis.

Intuiting this concern, Barry refreshed guests’ glasses with raspberry champagne and said he’d be just outside with Maurice for a moment and if anybody wanted anything they only need call. But nobody seemed to notice, all of them engrossed in sharing tales of their previously unexamined lives in a combined effort to make the current ones worth living. “Yeah, exactly the same thing happened to me ,” was the comment featuring most regularly. It was all very therapeutic.

“So, circus?” said Barry, when he and Maurice were through the door and out of earshot. “Which one assumes to be one of the MIs.”

Maurice nodded.

“Five or Six?”

“Six,” Maurice confirmed. “Dame Muriel, my boss.”

“The Girton gal?”

“That’s her. How did you…?”

Barry shrugged. “Oxbridge gossip from the old days. Pal of Clarissa’, if I’m not mistaken. Could’ve ended up PM herself if she’d played her cards differently.”

“Pity she didn’t. At least Muriel has the power of thought.”

“Not what I heard on the ancient grapevine. But never mind that, what did the dame have to say?”

Maurice recounted the conversation.

“And you took her response as a thumbs up?” said Barry.

“Well, she didn’t say no. And my policy with a door that’s ajar has always been to put my foot in the opening and push a little harder before it gets slammed in my face.”

Barry nodded. “Very wise, my boy. Reticence never got anybody anywhere. Unless of course they didn’t want to get anywhere in the first place.”

“Quite.”

“So, your plan of campaign?”

“Is what I wanted to discuss with you. Who better than my old mentor?”

“Even if he is now a tatty old gardener.”

“Cultivating his garden just as well as he once cultivated minds.”

Barry smiled. “Okay, enough of the flattery, let’s get to the point, shall we?”

And so it was that, in the heart of rural England, Maurice repeated the plan he hoped would shake up and re-balance the corrupt conceits currently dominating world political institutions, both East and West.

Barry nodded and shrugged.

“I know, I know, it all sounds a bit like William Morris’s ‘News From Nowhere’ or some of Ivan Illich’s more bizarre proposals,” Maurice concluded. “But, if we ever lose sight of utopia, we might as well kiss our humanity goodbye and accept we are no more than the instruments of global greed. How are future generations of SATs-driven and smartphone-brainwashed kids ever to grow into thinking adults if they can’t dream? Look how long it took Jeremy to achieve his freedom, and against what odds. One assumes the same may be the case for Dennis, Julie, and even this Maggie fellow.”

Barry couldn’t deny it. He’d walked the same road.

“You may remember Lennon’s lines in ‘Working Class Hero.’ About children getting tortured and scared by parents and teachers for twenty-odd years until they can’t think straight because they’re too full of fear. And these days there are Twitter, Facebook et al to add to the mix, channels through which all sorts of unregulated bullying and indoctrination can be transmitted, which is why the madmen in the White House and the Kremlin are addicted to them. So, ironically using the very same weapons, it is in my humble opinion time to fight back.”

Barry held up his hands in submission. “Say no more,” he said. “To stick with pop music, you’re talking to a man who’s still crazy after all these years. Just need to be reminded from time to time, that’s all. Which you have achieved with the same starred first you won from Oxford. So… to the actual strategy.”

Maurice smiled and clapped his old tutor on the back.

“Just one more little doubt, though,” said Barry. “You’re quite, quite sure it is within your Secret Service remit to undertake such a mission?”

“What else but saving the world from megalomaniacs were James Bond’s missions ever about? And let us be clear, Barry, Fleming’s stories were only marginally embellished. Then, of course, there are John le Carré’s. I’m not comparing myself to Double 0 Seven or George Smiley, you understand, I would never make so bold. Also I’m clearly not fictional. But…”

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” said Barry.

“You might put it that way, although the sources of that epigram remain obscure. Now , you asked about the actual strategy.”

“So I did.”

Which was when Maurice explained how he intended to fashion the Jeremy Crawford character through make-up, lip-syncing, an intensive course in method acting and computer generated imagery to sing an album of Lennon songs, including “Revolution” as if they had only newly been recorded.

“As if ?” said Barry who, since opting for a career in gardening, had spent no time wondering about distortions of reality.

Maurice nodded. “It’s admittedly a leap of the imagination, but sadly I have to say it is also the hallmark of the make-believe world we currently live in. How many films are made these days with out recourse to digitalized suspensions of disbelief?”

“Don’t know. Don’t go to the pictures much these days. Ever actually,” said Barry. “The last film I liked was Brief Encounter with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. After that, everything seemed to go downhill a bit.”