Paddy Bostock - Chosen

Sighing but nonetheless hoisting the receiver off its cradle, Maurice rehearsed the line he’d long ago invented for IFCS and their like, namely: “This telephone contains a special voice-activated recognition device which is currently recording your name, address, eye colour, underpants size, and the condition of your vital organs—heart, liver, kidneys, and so on—all of such details to be fed into a special computer program which will pinpoint your location and allow me to press the button that will zap you into outer space without a parachute.” Which, given Maurice’s computer wizardry, was no idle threat. Not that he ever intended to use it, of course, but the Mumbai hackers weren’t to know that.

This time it wasn’t IFCS or one of their copycats on the line, however. It was Dame Muriel.

“Casa no va? What the bloody hell ’s going on?” her voice boomed down the line. “Tried your bally mobile a thousand times, but it kept going to message. What kind of an OO17 are you?”

“One who switches off his mobile when he’s driving in case he causes a fatal accident, ma’am.”

“You don’t have hands-free?”

“Never saw the need. Now, how may I be of assistance?”

Dame Muriel wasn’t the only one suffering practically terminal impatience at the absence of news from OO17. Clearly PM Clarissa knew nothing of The Reconstructed Beatles plan, but she remained obsessed with the need to find Jeremy Crawford, brand him the hidden architect of all her tribulations, switch focus, and for once and for all to stop the media dubbing her as dithering, incompetent, mealy-mouthed, and, in the words of the Daily Snitch ’s latest editorial: “So feeble she couldn’t knock a hole in a damp Kleenex.” It was all too much, truly it was! Half her time these days she spent on aeroplanes trying to stitch up jazzy trade deals with thriving economies out side the blasted EU: Kuala Lumpur, Uzbekistan, and Timor, to name but three. And all the while playing what she thought of as hardball with the squabbling Tory factions in not only her own cabinet, but also in parliament and increasingly amongst the very grassroots membership, as well as playing even harder ball with the sanctimonious Europeans who still wouldn’t agree to a bespoke trade deal for Britain after Brexit. What the hell was wrong with them, she wondered, pacing up and down her Downing Street bedroom. Had they ever had empires upon which the sun never set? Had they invented the language now spoken, albeit often distortedly, by practically everybody on the planet? Did they have a Shakespeare? Did they have monarchies dating back a thousand years? Of course they bloody didn’t. So they were just jealous, that was all. It was enough to make a PM cry, which on occasions Clarissa did. On and on she struggled to do her job, and still it was only sneers all around she received in return. If only Miserable (probably also Jealous) Muriel and her fancy boy Casanova could do their bally jobs properly and find the megalomaniac bonkers banker, everything would be sooo…

It was during one these fits of pique that, keen to wring any last drop from the Special Relationship with what was after all one of her ex-colonies, Clarissa called the madman in The White House on her red-button hot-line to seek his advice on story-switching. After all, as a fellow sufferer from the slings and arrows of outrageous journalists, “enemies of the people” as he termed them, he should know. What if there were some new angle she could use as back-up to the awful possibility of Jeremy sodding Crawford never being found?

“Yup? Oh hi there, Clarrie. Only you gotta be quick, sweetheart,” said the madman only seconds before the call went to super-encrypted message. “I got me a little fake photo problem here.”

“Fake photo problem?”

“You ain’t seen it? It’s all over the freakin’ Innernet? Two trillion hits an’ countin’.”

“No.”

“Of me climbing up on board Air Force One and then there’s fake wind blowin’ at the back of my head and my hair comes awf. Fake, fake, fake .”

“Your hair ?”

“No honey, the damn photo . My hair’s the most beautiful natural hair any president ever had . Everybody knows that and is jealous. The photo’s fake. Worked up by some Democrat computer nerd, most likely. Or mebbe a Mexican. I ever catch the guy who dunnit he’s gonna be waterboarding in Guantanamo till it’s his dick that drops awf.”

“Sorry,” said Clarissa, keen to move the conversation along.

“So you should be. But I’m comin’ back from this, like I always do. You better believe it, Clarrie. You know whut I’m gonna do?”

“Not off hand,” said Clarissa, in her well-practised equivocation voice.

“I am gonna order me a parade of all my biggest, most nuclear, most long-distance miss’les and thousands of my soldiers, airmen, and marines to march past along Pennsylvania Avenue while I take the salute as Commander-in-Chief,” said the president who’d dodged the draft claiming he had a sore foot and was in any case too busy avoiding sexually transmitted diseases to go off fighting yellow people. That was his per sonal Vietnam.

“Ain’t no fake hair disser gonna argue with that kinda power,” he added.

“Golly,” said Clarissa, attracted to the notion of Britain’s heavily armed bravest and best marching up Whitehall from Parliament Square past The Cenotaph to Trafalgar Square surrounded by tanks while she looked on and saluted commandingly. Possibly with a fly-past from the RAF and a few nukes on display, too. Not bad as a diversionary plan. Not bad at all .

“Sorry about your hair,” she said, but mercifully for her, the follicularly challenged sex pest in the White House was already holding the phone from his ear.

“Gotta love ya an’ leave ya, pussycat,” he muttered. “A business—excuse me country —to run. Busy, busy, busy… like always.”

As indeed he was, hanging up the phone and moving from behind the presidential- decree-signing desk to stand before a wall-length mirror and hold behind his head a smaller glass to inspect the extent of hair loss and seeing only the patch of blue-veined scalp now so (fakely) familiar to millions across the Twitterverse.

“Holy Christ on a fuckin’ bike , sumptn gotta be done about this,” he was saying as his new rug toupée director, Marianna Kolmover was ushered into the Oval Office all confidence and smiles.

“No problemo, Mister President. Just a brand new hairpiece and little more glue here and there,” she said, taking from her EHL (Emergency Hair Loss) satchel a brand new, gleaming blond, man-wig and a tube of Super Stick.

“This better be good, babe,” said the world’s most powerful cretin. “I’m a guy on camera all the time an’ I gotta look my best. An’ al ways better than Ripurpantzov! Other hand, he’s nearly bald, so I got the advantage over him right there, don’t I?”

“Sure you do,” said Kolmover. “You wanna turn around and sit down so I can take a closer look?”

“Okay, honey. Hey, nice tits you have. And some ass ! Mebbe, when you’re through with my hair, we could, ya know, spend a little cozy comfort time together?”

But ex-Miss Kansas Kolmover was no new kid on the block. She knew only too well of the president’s peccadilloes and had been prepped for any of what, in the wake of recent Hollywood scandals, the media were now calling HLISBS (High Level Inappropriate Sexual Behaviour Syndrome). A shame from the president’s perspective he had no idea she also currently headed up a national cross-party women’s campaign called “Gropers Go Fuck Your selves ” and had been weaselled into the White House in the undercover guise of a rug toupée expert to collect any dirt she could on the asshole currently running the White House. In her bra lay secreted a micro-recorder, which hadn’t been found by the goons at the door when they tried to frisk her because she had threatened them—and their boss—with instant international HLISBS media exposure if they laid so much as a finger on her.