Paddy Bostock - Chosen

While Barry was off trying to pee, Jeremy checked out the poetry and fiction shelves in his library and found them to be as representative of top writers as those of the philosophy section. And not just with texts from the Eng. Lit. canon. It also included contributions from the French, the German, the Spanish, the Italian, the Russian… most in translation, but not all.

“Holy shit,” he was muttering to himself as he heard Barry returning.

“More friends?” he said, gesturing at the bookshelves.

“Indeed. Always need the balance of the literary and the logical to feed both sides of the old brain,” Barry replied, struggling with the flies of his khaki gardener’s pants. “Fancy a smoke?” he added, taking a battered Old Holborn tin from his pocket.

Jeremy hadn’t smoked since varsity where it had been de rigueur to smoke, whatever the health Nazis said. Would probably make him dizzy after all these years. But, hey, what was a little dizziness in addition to his other problems? Might even help.

“Sure. That’d be great.”

“A fatty or a thinny?” said Barry, extracting his green Rizla cigarette papers.

“A thinny or my head might blow off.”

“Okey dokey. Now, where were we?”

“You quitting Oxford.”

“Right. And you know why?”

“Because of the chinless twit business.”

“Yes, the chinless twit business. But that was only the surface reason,” said Barry, carefully tamping and rolling Jeremy’s “thinny” before handing it over along with a red plastic lighter. “May I quote my old pal Socrates?”

“Quote away.”

“‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ a concept which failed to penetrate even the most brilliant minds in academe, all of which appeared to be so concentrated on self advancement no room was left for the question: Why exactly am I doing this?”

Jeremy nodded as the tumblers began to fall.

“It was on this basis I found your questioning of the ‘choosing/chosen’ dyad so interesting,” said Barry, head bent as he concentrated on rolling up his “fatty.”

“Because you had done the same thing yourself.”

“Precisely, old fellow. Took a long hard look at myself and, like you, concluded it was time to put an end to singing from other people’s hymn sheets. To examine very carefully the power games secreted in their subtexts. And when I looked, again like you, what did I see?”

“Lies? Fantasies? Delusions?” Jeremy nodded, puffing on his roll-up.

“Exactly so. Belief systems swallowed whole. As you said, folk chosen by the cars they drove, the smartphones they changed every five minutes, the fashionable clothes they wore. All the while fooling themselves into thinking it was they who were doing the choosing. It was you who also gave the example of ‘speaking’ languages as opposed to being spoken by them, if I remember.”

Jeremy nodded again. Some memory this bloke had.

“But sadly how else are we to communicate, except through our always already infected grammars and lexises?” Barry continued. “What was it George Bernard Shaw said? ‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’ Something of the sort. I now think bees are more capable of sending effective messages than us poor humans. We could learn from bees.”

“And the rest should be silence,” muttered Jeremy, misquoting a line from the only Shakespeare play he’d ever watched, the one at the local church hall in which Sophie played Ophelia badly.

“I wish it were,” said Barry lighting his fatty. “So much better than the gibberish we are given to think of as reason. Once one becomes aware of these things, life changes. It must . Which is why you find me where I now am.”

Jeremy stubbed out his roll-up in the ashtray Barry proffered for the purpose.

“And you’re happier now?”

“Ah, happy. A problematic notion, happiness. You may recall Basil’s line in Fawlty Towers when asked by his wife, Sybil, whether something was the matter because he wasn’t looking very happy. ‘Happy?… happy?… Oh, happy ?’ Basil replies delving back into ancient memory.”

Barry chuckled and crushed out his own cigarette.

“So rather than ‘happy,’ let us just say I am at peace with myself and leave it at that, shall we? Now, look, you’ve had a long day, old chap. I’ve been gassing for far too long and there’s still a lot to think about. So why don’t we call it a day and hit the hay?”

“Call it a ‘dawn,’ maybe,” said Jeremy, as slants of light started filtering through the Shepherd’s Hut window and Shirley and Pete began showing signs of life.

“Possibly literally and metaphorically,” said Barry. “In any case, let me show you to your quarters.”

Nobody made a mockery of Sir Magnus Montague and got away with it, and he was going to make damn sure Jeremy Crawford, the maths genius upon whom the bank’s future depended, wasn’t going to succeed where others had so frequently failed. First the little blighter had gone bonkers and lived in a barn with a pig. Then he refused psychiatric assistance. Then he had the audacity to disappear altogether, leaving Sir Magnus the laughing stock of his very own army of shrinks and thespians. At least he’d had the pleasure of firing them . But what was his next step to be? That was the million-dollar question.

Back in his City office, he twirled around and around in his high-backed, maroon-leather swivel behind his mahogany Chippendale desk and, sucking on a Havana Tranquillity cigar, rehearsed what he knew so far. He’d checked with Sophie and found that all three of Jeremy’s cars were still in the garage, so he couldn’t have skedaddled in one of those. Scrub that escape plan then. Unless he still had his credit and debit cards on him. But Sir Magnus had also checked that possibility with Sophie. The cards were in his wallet in the bedside table where he always kept them. And, when Sir Magnus dialled, his smartphones only made funny, gurgling, watery noises, so no chance of his having used those to facilitate his escape. He was on foot then, which meant he couldn’t have got far. Great! So call in the sniffer hounds. But by then, the trail would have gone cold, however many pairs of Jeremy’s soiled underpants and socks the hounds were given to sniff. And the last thing Sir Magnus needed after the risible failure of his dimmo hired army was a pack of bemused hounds setting off in different directions sniffing each other’s bottoms for want of anything better to do.

So what was his next step to be? Call the rozzers, possibly? But no. Too many of Sir Magnus’s business dealings were far too shady to get those blighters involved. Ditto for private eyes. Alert the press? Also no, for the same reason. So what was he to do? It was a conundrum indeed for a person of Sir Magnus’s limited intelligence, and frustration soon set in.

“ FUCKKKK ,” he ululated, the Havana Tranquillity having failed to live up to its name.

It was this racket—plus the same expletive being repeated six fold, each time accompanied with what sounded to Julie Mackintosh, Sir Magnus’s PA, a lot like headbanging—that persuaded her first to knock tentatively at the door, then, at the seventh ululation, to open it.

And what Julie saw wasn’t a pretty sight. Never had she witnessed her boss so out of it. Flinging his arms about while nutting the Chippendale and continuing to mutter profanities.

“Everything okay, Sir Magnus?”

You know how it is with us British. How we ask people who’ve just been run over by a pantechnicon if they’re okay, and expect the answer: “Yes, fine, thanks.”