Paddy Bostock - Chosen

“You’re right. So far downhill that what attracts and persuades the twenty-first century consumer of instantly streamed movies and the dross swirling around the Internet is precisely ‘as if .’ We are currently living in a simulated world, Barry, and a very dangerous place it is.”

“And you know the tricks of this new trade?”

“I’ve learnt. I had to or there was no longer a way to do my job. In some ways it’s a cop-out, I agree. But to beat your enemy, first you have to join him. Then, when he’s not looking, you whack him with his very own tools.”

“You’ve come a long way from your Oxford days, my boy. And more power to your elbow,” said Barry. “I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you. What I was also wondering, however, was what sorts of contribution Julie, Dennis, and now Maggie, might make to this scenario. It would be a pity to waste their new-found resources, would it not?”

“Well,” said Barry after a moment’s thought, “how about we dress them up as Paul, George and Ringo? Then we’d have the whole crew back from the dead.”

Maurice laughed long and hard at that.

“Silly idea?” said Barry.

“No, no, not at all. Brill iant idea,” Maurice spluttered when he’d finished laughing long and hard. “Possibly a little tricky where Julie’s concerned… she is a girl after all. Mind you,” he added, “she does have a certain look of Paul about her. And Maggie has lost a lot of weight, so I can see him as George. And Dennis for Ringo, well why not? We’ll need to obtain the consent of the real Paul and Ringo, of course, but my sense is they would be onside happily enough.”

“Okay, so meanwhile shall we pop back inside and explain to the guys how the good news, in its twenty-first century version of course, has been brought from Ghent to Aix?”

“Might take another stretch of the imagination, but we can try,” said Maurice, turning back to the Shepherd’s Hut.

On the way he reminded Barry of Browning’s omission in his poem to divulge either what the good news from Ghent was or why it was important to Aixians. A lot of the time, the poet was apparently unsure, or had forgotten, what his poems were about. As evinced on the occasion when asked by one of his female admirers for the meaning of one of them, only to receive the reply: “When I wrote it, only God and Robert Browning knew the meaning; now God alone knows.”

“Let us just hope our good news can be explained a little better,” he was saying as Barry pushed open the already reopened door.

“Oink,” agreed Pete, who had yet again nosed his way outside to see what the humans were up to.

Having secured the agreement of Jeremy, Julie, Dennis, and Maggie to take part in his little project, Maurice motored back to number thirteen Oakshot Street Tooting in his dad’s old Morris Minor Traveller to prepare the computer mock-ups he would need for his meeting with Dame Muriel. Along the way he mused on the gratifying speed with which Jeremy and company had accepted the challenge of becoming The Reconstructed Beatles, or TRB, as they had finally agreed to be known. Ignorant of the Liverpool music scene, Maurice had proposed The Bootleg Beatles, but Julie/Paul had scotched that idea.

“We’ve already got them back home and they’re great,” she’d said. “Be wrong to go stealing their name, wouldn’t it?”

“Quite wrong,” Maggie/George had agreed. “Wouldn’t want accusations of plagiarism stalling our plans at their very inception.”

And so it was that Jeremy had come up with the “reconstructed” idea. Against some opposition from Dennis/Ringo, who had proposed “new and improved” until reminded by Julie of Billy Connolly’s mockery of the phrase, noting a product was either new or improved but couldn’t be both.

It was on the word “reconstructed” that Maurice dwelt as the old Morris Minor trundled along A and B roads at its top speed of 45 mph. No use taking the poor old thing on motorways where it would get flashed and honked at even in the slow lane. Maurice had once tried the hard shoulder as an alternative, only to be stopped by a wailing police siren and threatened with a lifetime driving ban until he showed the coppers his MI6 ID. And even then, albeit huffily, they’d escorted him off the main drag onto a D road occupied by sheep and cattle and told him to get lost. Not the sort of treatment James Bond would have tolerated, but then, unlike Maurice, OO7 would have been driving an Aston Martin DB7 in the fast lane. And outrun the coppers anyway. But, on balance, Maurice was glad he was only OO17 rolling along quietly on uncongested roads. More time for thought. And it was to reconstructed that such thoughts kept returning.

Because, from the tales they’d told him, that’s exactly what Jeremy, Julie, Dennis, and now Maggie were—re-made, re- born almost. As indeed was his erstwhile professor, Barry. And not through the intercession of outside agencies, but from their own initiative, Maurice mused while slipping Dvořák’s cello concerto in B minor into his CD player and humming along—dee dum dee dee dee do dah, dee dum dee dee dee dee dah. How peculiar yet how courageous such fight back was that , against a culture devoted to the myth of belonging? A very special one, he concluded, mindful of the dread with which so many twenty-first-century people would regard the prospect of standing outside the flock, the original Latin meaning of the now pejorative term “egregious,” if he remembered rightly. Where would Twitter and Facebook and company be were more to follow the example of Barry, Jeremy & Co. and become loners? Out of business, that was where. And so much the better for it, Maurice was reckoning as he drew up outside his house and the Morris Minor gasped its relief.

“Hi there, Tiddles,” he said, opening the door and nearly tripping over Terpsichore who was catnapping on the inside mat. “Hank and Butch been looking after you nicely, have they?”

“Miaow,” said Tiddles (/Terpsichore/Cat) non-committally.

“Glad to see Daddy home?”

“Miaow,” Tiddles repeated, also abstractedly.

You know how it is with cats. How dogs come bounding up to lick you when you come home but cats don’t. As an admirer of their insouciant nature, Maurice just nodded and smiled.

“Thought so. How about we open a nice tin of Pussy Chunks?”

Tiddles semi-shrugged but nonetheless wandered off into the kitchen where Maurice’s landline phone was ringing fit to bust until, as usual, it went dead just as he picked up.

“Bugger,” he said, dropping his overnighting travel bag and dialling 1471.

“You were called today at sixteen thirty-two hours,” said the British Telecom lady accusingly. “The caller withheld their number.”

“Thank Christ for that,” said Maurice, slamming down the phone.

His patience with telephone scam artists was running on empty. How dumb did the dorks have to be to think that he of all people would believe they were the International Fraud Crime Squad—IFCS—operating out of Manhattan (more likely Mumbai to judge by the Bollywood accents) and unless he gave them the details of all his credit cards and pin numbers immediately, he would be opening himself to “total financial wipeout and potential accusations of terrorist sympathies” seeing as they had evidence of his cards having been stolen by a gang of ISIS thieves intent on branding him as one it its members and thus rendering him in mortal danger of retribution from the lunatic in the White House and his alt-right redneck and hillbilly backers.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he was saying as the phone took to warbling all over again.