Out-and-Out Liars: Of Ice, Fur and Fire (Chapter 4, Part 9)

                                                                            

                                                                                 9.

It is  none of these. A shoe found at the water’s edge, caught between not-quite night and not-quite morning in search of the author standing in a killer rain. In a London black fog-shaped buses thrown from steep hills passing. Homes call him as non-memory assails his homeless cries.

The smog, or London Particular shapes a group of exotic animals and carves also a twin-set limping woman breathed hurriedly in and out. Waiting for the life-blood goods shimmer awake behind membranes, sleepwalkers rush bleary-eyed to be reunited with half keys jangling to release dreams in design. The author does not notice the fog give way along Oxford street. In the gloaming Delftware blinks awake, a gross Lavazza expresso machine yawns in a corner shelf, sofa beds concertina themselves upight and the chandeliers wipe their myriad eyes for new misdirected lies as the draughtsboard, an early riser, spins out the designer into a studious chair, he vainly pats loosely-hanging hair back over his bald pate.

 

Night crawling shamans, still hungover, danced by music and drums, drunk by licensing laws, sensually stroked and prodded by promises skid through reverberating skeins to the otherside. The sun is coming over the edge and over the edge  the twin-spirited ones hunted by the denizen of daylight, called by their respective departments, jump out of form into lampstands, Le Creuset cookware, bales of cloth, a nubian queen owns Egyptian cotton as haven, the night’s DJ high-fives a hi-fi and disappears, an uppity queen recharges in a tiara his best friend a jade necklace.

Animal wet foot prints seek out unvacated caches, a saddle in the sequestriana, a supple haven takes Karen Smith, the leather creaks a sighing relief. A dainty coffee cup sings Floy in, Zelda consumed by leopard skin shoes.

A chorus sings in the dawn arrivals; the workers will arrive soon. John Lewis fills up, then empties, opening time has yet to be. All along Oxford street, the restricted, sung into Tie-rack, the parochial and patriotic sung into souvenir shops and tea rooms, the natty and prissy sung into suits and cashmere coats, the mincing into stilettos, the street is still silent, and a thousand muffled sounds as a thousand doors are drawn shut form inside wardrobes, dressers and the making sure they are all safe inside.

The author wakes up in a dream to find himself home, the objects and furniture are overjoyed with gratitude; A knocked door, the house lets them in. Unseeing the revellers, old friends, pass through to apartments he does not recognise, a new space, not hostile but indifferent. A party of friends to uninvite him, conversations to ignore him, plans to exclude him, children who make no attempt to place the author.

In fixing the lock he breaks the key, the door is now open. He jumps into an antique set of quills the tip, a wine barrel ink-stand qlimpses adventures had, between the quills the sharp-toothed pike's head guesses at concealment; the author now vanishes over the edge. They are planning their day; the shops will be open soon and the sleepwalkers will descend on Oxford street where behind vast windows mannequins also abstain from the spree settling into regained poise and unblinking fear. Crouched, shiny, chrome, metal, steel, plastic, teak, oak, cedar, walnut, ceramic, bakelite, Beautiful Things, as still as Christmas night, hopeful for a new life.  A cyclonic junk yard fathoms deep, in a murderous watery dance, whirls towards Oxford Street beneath a rising sun.

 

In a Greenwich vintage shop nostalgia queens hang back behind the empire line, taken care of by the security of fur; the young twinks beaming from tiny-sized bright thick pullovers eager to be taken home to snuggle up warm to the firm bodies of youthful men and leap from bar stools and cloak rooms. “Without us you’d be on the rag pile or the shredder”, they taunt the rows of cardigans and suede fronted Cecil Gees on the railing below, “We pay to keep you faded old wall flowers”.

It was the foreign imports who were being picked on especially tonight.

“Coming over taking our rail space”. They were Indian Sweat Shops dresses discarded off-cuts from larger international companies, vintage copies, they hung in identical twins, triplets and quadruplet, bottle green, floral, burnt orange and black stripes, newly placed in the window that day, sweeping down like new arrivals off the Empire Windrush.

“We don’t want you here”, said a malevolent Philips 1950’s record player and went back to humming  A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square

“Why, do you try to look like us?  I knew the genuine article, swingers back in the sixties”, said a sweaty faded queen haunting a canary yellow viscos dress;

A Brazilian flat-fronted pipes, the latest thing in raised hemlines said  “ darlings, my rise is your fall. I’m going back to Brazil.”, Against the Made in Englands protests, the India Sweat Shops and the Made in Chinas concurred.

A huge black red-silk-lined Cromby concealed a Churchill-loving-back-in-my-day professional preditor said. “Shut it, I’m the Oswald Mosley of opinion around here. We got a consignment of redundant uniforms coming in, to bulk things out, now if they don’t find a place to sleep…well. I know for a fact, cos, I was in the store room with one  just arrived from Afganistan, well, he said they’re all English Defense League, so you imported cheap shit will find yourselves dead or back where you came from”.

A liberal pollar-neck concealed a brooding waspishly frail thing said “ It is my observation that once  the foreigner is removed, “every last one of them” as you are constantly saying, the English we will be left behind with…well  the English, who will simply turn on each other... again. Remember, we weren’t particularly nice to each other before the Made in Elsewheres arrived”.

“You're making more noise than sense!” barked a parliament of middle-management double-breasted suits.

“Well, we’re going out… Better than  listening to you boring misogynist lot", said a trio of mini-skirts scantily sheltering three heavily made-up Cilla, Sandy Shaw and Lulu drag queens respectively, and with a three-part harmony rendition of Downtown they stepped through the membrane into the night.

“I’m not being funny”, said a nicotine-stained crochet knee-length cream top whose refrain was a bitch to sing in or out. “ I’ve just arrived and though I am glad to be here, I miss the up-to-date gossip of the IndianSweat Shops and the Made in Chinas. I mean. I was bought by a Lithuanian girl and though I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, we were always out and about, and although she got peanuts she worked hard,  harder than the last lazy old cow who wore me before…always on the moany old sofa on her moany old fat arse”.

“Taking our jobs”, Said one of a group of old coats in a dark corner still smelling of old tobacco, these housed the regretful queens, forced by fusty convention to marry with memories of a first world- war army chum ;a  love to burst the heart,,,and make it sour. “See those trouser’s over there?”

“You’ve already told us!” Intoned the whole shop.

“Belonged to a pole in Dagenham undercut some of our local lads on a building job”. Continued the old coat. “Took ages to get the bloodstains out, didn’t it Polack, where we knee-capped him” The trousers in question withdrew into itself.

“Up until last week, I worked in the House of Common’s, security, sixty years”, said a shiny buttoned uniform who housed a deferential cottage queen into geriatric parliamentarians before being finally gazumped by his own increasing age. “The second-hand rags are all being moved up north, Saudi’s and wealthy Nigerians don’t believe in wearing other people’s clothes’.

“So what are we?” asked a bewildered halter-neck.

“We’re vintage dear”, consoled a tie-dye flared-sleeve tee shirt. “We don’t do class tourism”.

“Choose whatever allegiances you want; we’re all second hand now, no matter what airs and graces”. A collective whimper rippled around the shop, a 50s lampshade gulped.

“Westminster, that House of Drunken Managers, for that is what it is, is managing us out of London and all up north” The uniform went on,  “I hear from some of the new Made Elsewheres that people are walking into supermarket up there, in gangs and just taking food, clothes and walking out without paying. Other uniforms tell me, they can’t do anything about it…too many of them. And some of the uniforms are on their side, especially if they are single mothers!” Here, he chuckled “Once all you Nylons, Orlons, Viscose and Arcrylics get into the mix, it’ll all spark off…literally”.

“We don’t care about anyone or any thing except parties and fun. !” Chanted a rack of cream floral 1920s silk ball gowns pointedly.

 The suede fronted Cecil Gee kissed its teeth, while two tribly hats headbutted each other and screamed "Ouch!"

A time-set lava lamp in the window sung in by a mercurial shape-shifting queen, announced, as it had done at the same time every night before switching off,” Omies and palomies, I am the centre of the universe, and when I close my eyes, it is night!”.

As they stepped from garments and vintage objects through the membrane to regale themselves or simply water plants, feed cats or catch up on gossip until the gloaming, or ecoup in a deep armchair, on the counter a beautiful pin cushion that had seen more pricks than …well, a pin cushion and concealing a new breed of passive-aggressive queen, called out “Can I come too?”

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 8)

                                                                                    8.

Five minutes after he had freed  Zelda, a female Crested- Macaque, from The Exotic Pets Department in Harrods, Floy realized he had done the wrong thing; she was a consumer addict with not the slightest idea of how to delay gratification. She launched into the various halls of neatly arranged luxury goods and demanded, in a tone she could only have picked up over the years from ogling visitors to her department and from a entitled clientele ranging from as far afield as Highgate and Golders Green. “ You’re not going to buy for me that its-so loverly –everyone-will-say-what-a-caring- husband-he-is- lime green floor-length Zandra Rhodes coat?. You want I should escape in rags?”.

The fact they were not married and not likely to ever be, notwithstanding, when Floy pointed out she could have anything for free as it was the middle of the night and that her companions were already marauding through the hangers, more by accident than by design, acquiring incongruous bits of out-fit and had collectively acquired a ‘look’ that wouldn’t have been out of place at a grunge party had they not been wildlife, his new potential mate protested. “So, you want I should become a thief. So, you're an expert on prison manicures all of a sudden?". Then, " Now give young Benjamin here your most expensive smile, or I’m speaking to management". This last sentence was delivered in a clipped entitled High Clapham voice, for the culmination of watchfulness and long periods absorbing speech and behavioural patterns of the wealthy had left Zelda with more personalities, all of them insufferable, jostling within her than nature intended. “If we pretend we slipped on this puddle Lizzy dear, we can sue this place.  Yes Richard, we have somewhat drunk our wealth away.” It seemed Zelda had picked up a tad more than terms of endearment and bescreeching requests.

Floy used a system of designer ties to get all the escapees and now colourfully dressed menagerie out of the store. A single driver, drunk enough to think he was sober enough to drive was the only soul about who, (the Highway Code being the gossamer thin line between civilisation and utter barbarianism,) slowed to a halt at the zebra crossing to witness an ape leading an elephant in jogging pants and tweed stalker hat,  two lions in gold and silver sequin boob-tubes, a Crested-Macaque sashaying in lime-green coat and Russian fur hat, a snake with a rainbow Cashmire Pashmina, and two bonobos in hoodies and top of the range pumps. Three alligators took up the rear in an assortment of bangles, one whose mouth was clamped shut by a Rolex and Giraff with a Gucci handbag dangling from its neck and a foot wedged in bespoke toaster.

Meanwhile in the Arctic Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse presumed dead, had caught up with her beloved Swarovski-collar wearing Chihuahua. Their respective modes of transport had run out of fuel, the septuagenarians and bankers having, to a last man succumbed to the rigours of sub zero temperatures.Clad in knit-ware the bearded drag queen and her toy dog now stood blissfully content side by side in the tundra. Blissful indeed not because they were finally reunited but because, immediately above  and all around them they were treated to a most wondrous and awesome vision:  the dazzling sight of tens of thousands of beautiful young men of all hues borne along by giant white wings where arms should be. In slow motion the white angels flew gracefully and soundlessly overhead with the focus and determination of migrating swans; they were going south.

It would be a while before Mary Mary would make the connection between the unending fleets of white angels that sailed, unseeing, passed her and the utter distress of her country-men, -women and -children back home on their knees praying for the next meal, heat or both. Now standing there in the snow, a single feather fell in a slow gyratory motion and landed in the palm of Mary Mary’s outstretched hands, anchoring the vision in reality.

She realized she was crying, her tears washed by what she initially thought to be rain; the angels were weep, their tears comingling with her own amid the vast, silent, light snowfall.

Out-and-out Liars;Of Ice,Fur and Fire, (Chapter 4, Part 7)

 

                                                                                7.

 

 

At the breaking news that the United Kingdom was about to be relinquished to an overseas bidder in the Christies auction and be dismantled and used by its new Saudi owner as a museum and series of studios for costume drama and finally an aircraft carrier, this agitated the already demoralised inhabitants out of their food and poverty sequestration brought on by the over-reaching of basic instincts of the few at the expense of the many; they hit the streets to face the well-prepared crush zones and kettling well rehearsed by an army the Prime minister, in a zeal to be go down in history as Winston Churchill mark 2 at any cost, had irrationally suggested at the last mass outing of the housebound poor.

This was the hapless leader’s vanity project and it had been in the pipe-line for some time; since he was five years old. He was not so much predestined to ruin the country as propelled by a demonic  and sadistic sense of humour stoked and epitomized by George Frazer’s  tales of Flashman a hero whose only quality was a skewed colonial slave-owner’s world-view of egotistical Schadenfreude; a malicious joy at the dire misfortune of others. This misfortune had now peaked along with the uncontainable glee of its arch manipulator.

 

No mercy was shown as the army and police cracked the skulls, broke the limbs of, and tazered grandparents and children alike with a relish hitherto suspected of the armed forces and police but now in full sadist flow. Squashed against the empty Jessops, Comet, Boots, Waterstones, Currys, Thomas Cook, HMV. Superdrug, Tesco, Sainsburys. PoundLand and other defunct franchises, the bloodied and battered staggered into Starbucks to be treated like their American counterparts on September 11^th, near the toppled Twin Towers and charged for bottles of water with which to wash their open wounds.

 

The Prime Minister however was not the only person who had a ringside seat paid for in advance, Plan B was to divert attention from revolution and his own personal and obvious failure by inviting a coalition  of VIP generals and arms dealers from Russia, ‘How can I get more money…before I leave?’. A Doomsday chant then and now, was permanently perched on the Prime Minister's mendacious lips. His dark shadow lurked in the bowls of Westminster, an addict in dragon-form whose greed could not be slaked and whose misery over his hoard was all eyes. Plague would no longer be sufficient to reduce the population, especially a querulous one; medicine had become too good, but there was profit there too; people were always secondary to commerce, (The alcohol industry was already cashing in on politically induced atomized despair; a dragon no Beowulf would step forward to slay this time.) and now another war was what was needed and with the leader at the helm of the most winsome arms contracts; Winston Churchill Mark 2 was within sight.

The Achilles heel in the Prime Minister’s hubris was that the invited invaders were intending to…well, invade anyway. Devoid of the Christian concept of ‘Love thy neighbour’ our Slavic neighbours had been merrily waiting in the wings, watching Europe in general and the United Kingdom in particular; as cut-backs sapped the very thing a country needed to defend itself, and as the basic means by which a people need to...well, basically stand upright became increasingly scarce the jobless, half-starved and dispirited population were sleepwalking into disaster and into the ambush of its Prime Minister’s gigantically myopic Master-plan.

Those who had other countries to return to simply returned. Those who had enough money to leave for more lucrative pastures had long ago left. It is a commonly known fact that the UK landmass is not sufficient to feed the inhabitants of that landmass, and a pact of Russo-Moslem ships surrounded the besieged island, this put a sudden stop to all cooking programs as the prospect of obtaining any of the ingredients on show became a wild fantasy. The adage ‘Don’t kick a man when he’s down’, was being internationally flagrantly violated both figuratively and literally. “Nostradamus predicted this!” shouted a middle-class hippy father of four as he was brutally floored by the butt of a Russian machine gun. The sudden sense of belonging the UK citizens felt with Europe came with the comforting knowledge that those on the continent were being treated to the same annihilation.

 

In the place of a male monarch a short-lived sense of freedom would, dove-like ascend into the sky to be shot down in mid-flight. A huge unexploded bomb stuck out of the MI5 building, street-side, like a huge ice-cream cone. Those inhabitants left alive were treated to the view of a flotilla of enemy ships moored in every available space along the Thames. At gunpoint, the hapless Prime Minister, in shirt sleeves, was made to climb the thirty nine steps to the belfry of Big Ben; his bound feet formed the tip of the third hand of the famous clock face.

 

On the radio the customary bravura of the commentators had crumpled into craven jocularity last heard on the occasion day of the 2008 financial crash; it was hard to tell if the loud bangs heard in the studio were the sound-effects of three Champaigne bottles being opened or a short round of bullets.

 

Will Self was the first of the intellectuals to be arrested; he protested with his usual
dry wit, completely lost on the occupiers as were the philosophical protestations of Alan de Boton. Nicholas Shakespeare, Joanna Trollop and Martin Amis would all witness the end of their respective dynasties at the hands of thugs. In vain and in his prison cell Ian McEwan wished to survive to record the experience in his next novel. The invaders loved J K Rowling and only wanted her autograph for their children, requests to which she gracefully obliged while wishing she had Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility.

To add grist to the apocalyptic mill, China’s five hundred million-strong army of over-confident only-child young men and women also waited in the wings to avenge the already beleaguered land for the Opium Wars with a conflagration the like of which has never been seen. An over-exaggerated karmic come-uppance; gross ingratitude one felt, for China’s narcotic dependency and near demise while Britain talked business over tea.

 

Class being now, as always, the dictate of the occupier the feral middle classes roamed the land in search of…well, the middle classes. Fascist groups and perverts of every stripe, who had escaped the scythe-like radar of the invaders, went on an unbridled spree, raping and brutalizing anyone who had hitherto been protected by political correctness. A veritable Tourette’s Syndrome of racial invectives were heaped upon first and second generation Brits caught in the cross fire between two evils. The Jews, who perpetually lived with a little suitcase packed just in case, had gauged the temperature some months earlier and were now setting up market stalls in New Zealand. Gangsters and criminals stood about dumbstruck gazumped by the general base behaviour on display. The gays, those erstwhile ancient shamanic beings untramelled by natural selection and sent to balance the brutal polarities of the hetrosexual world, were now, once again balancing on the edge of a very long knife indeed.

As a conflagration of opposing fires swept across the country the animals of the zoos had been freed and now roamed about the city. The roar of lions mingled horrifically with the laughter of hyenas and the screams of monkeys. The wet sleek slithering hiss of snakes made the flesh crawl, especially the flesh of Karen Smith as she dreamed of the demise of the country she had just sold at auction. She awoke from her nightmarish dream as a leathery finger passed across her forehead, to find she was in Hyde Park, in the dark with a Macaque Crested Monkey crouching over her and in the background a menagerie of animals recently freed from Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department.

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire (Chapter 4, Part 6)

                                                              

                                                                          6.                                                         

 

From afar it looked like a penguin colony, that is what Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse presumed-dead-but-now-in-the-Arctic-circle, thought as she trundled across the tundra  on a sledge of carefully latticed sun loungers off the HMS England, and drawn, at a snail’s pace, by a diminishing pack of disability buggies and their septuagenarian drivers. Yes, that is what is must be, penguins, and where there was wildlife, -like those anthropologists that seemed on the National Geographic Channel first to lurk, then comment and then barge their way to the front of every camera shot to pose condescendingly patting the locals, eventually ruining every remote tribe on the planet by their autistic drive to take over, around this cluster of penguins - there was bound to be interfering Western scientific researchers of every ilk and self-importance.

 

From  several miles closer, Mitzy, Mary Mary’s  pet Chihuahua-who had been snatched by a passing fox, escaped with her life and Swarovski studded collar and now found herself being inched across the ice in pursuit of Polar fur by an equally diminishing pack of city bankers coming down from cocaine-  the sight up ahead was clusters of piled up Self-Help books; for she had seen this image before: Shortly after her attack on her owner who, having fallen on hard times, wanted to take and pawn her diamond collar and narrowly lived to regret it, Mitzy had been dragged along to the first floor of a central London mega book store directly facing Foyles bookshop in the Charing Cross Raod, in the hope of finding clues to both of their psychological problems. Piles of books dotted the vast area, like dolmens, some with readers flicking through and discarding tome upon tome, on their knees as though in manic prayer for elusive nuggets of wisdom. “It wasn’t always like this”, the young male sales assistant had told her owner. “Since the introduction of coffee into bookshops, people come in looking for something specific in the New Age and Spiritual Well-Being section, have a super-strength triple shot Americano and, for several hours their soul-searching enters a period of hyper-drive. There are piles of books, some reaching up to the ceiling and that’s just in the café! At the end of the day we have to return them all to the shelves. The customers become very aggressive and violent when told we’re closing; security has to get quite firm with them; the serenity and spiritual harmony they came in for goes completely out the window. What with soul-searching caffein addicts and the internet we’re losing sales”.

 

Weeks later and on their way to a Chinese herbal remedy clinic Mary Mary had dragged Mitzy past  the same mega-store; the book shop was a wasteland of circling vultures as customers fought each other in the classics section for volumes of English literature at clearance prices. The store had gone into administration and its loyal customers were picking the shelves clean. Through the unsightly scrum Mitzy could make out the prophetic and oddly serene face of the young male assistant while all around him his colleagues looked on in abject horror.

 

In the land of the midnight sun , the sun failed to set remaining just above the edge of the horizon and everything threatened the liminal and magical possibilities of twilight,  a prolonged witching hour as dusk segues seamlessly into dawn. Against the crepuscular light the icescape, monochromatic in stark relief, seemed suspended, permanently on the verge of pouncing, yet somehow held back, coiled, crouched, unsprung…

 

 Across this scene back in the opposite direction from which Mary Mary was travelling in pursuit of her pet Mitzy several miles ahead, the Sea Shepherd, silhouetted against the half-light, was marooned once again in tightly packed ice shelves. Through a portal of golden light the Captain, pen in hand, was writing another missive to his beloved Mrs Sedgewick. Beyond, further south through polar winds and the odd milestone of abandoned septuagenarian and collapsed banker, passengers of The HMS England were enjoying the rare luxury and threat of dying of malnutrition and hyperthermia while on a sceptred isle of plenty. The cruise ship singer and entertainer Jane MacDonald had agreed to be ferried off the HMS England, (like all artistes, her loyalties as good as her last gig). and onto to the French pirate freighter Ecologically Dirty Fuel, : .who having discovered the vessel in crisis boarded her, locked up and commandeered its food supplies by placing burly West African security at the entrance to… well secure the food supply, and realising that the passengers did not so much represent a humanitarian cause in need of rescuing but a meal ticket, and an English one at that, Entente Cordial  was made to walk the plank as the ailing majestic oak that was the country’s last fuel supply was dragged splintered from its place of prominence and thrown overboard. A cable was fed into the ship and through a system of metered toll points passengers were encouraged to spend their last savings on heat, the tariff of which, like that manipulated by Enron’s Alfa males, (Now, thankfully on the Alfa Course), rose randomly as warning shot powercuts periodically plunged the bow and the rest of the HMS England into darkness, killing our grandparents in the process.

 

Further out to sea somewhere between the Shetland Isles and Norway the passengers of the HMS Wetherspoons were experiencing their own drought; unbeknown to them with one malign stroke of the pen in apparent revenge for Dunkirk and Waterloo the French company Atos now deemed everyone in ‘perfidious Albion’  fit for work and the amount left to live on did not, sadly, stretch to a cup of tea on the Woolwich Ferry let alone to an oceanic booze-cruise and the revellers now found their source of cash summarily cut off as the on-board ATM machines simply stopped issuing money. This somewhat killed the atmosphere of merriment and mirth dead in the water, so to speak as the last order bell, discovered in the life-jacket cupboard, was rung like a death-knell by an overly gleeful recovering alcoholic who had been forced to accompany his wife on this floating hell. Some remained anchored firmly in the bar staring lovingly at the metal grating securing their beloved internal sunshine. As the HMS Wetherspoons was left by its Captain to mass dementia tremens and the harrowing results of diminishing mental health medication the chant ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!’ could be heard as far off as Tromso.

 

While the ship Russia Today patrolled the waters in search of whatsoever wreckage it could salvage from the economic genocide, Mary Mary, now with a full beard framing faded lipstick and obscuring the blusher she had had dyed onto her cheeks, was, despite her lop-sided and frozen bee-hive, reverting to the man she strove tirelessly to subvert. Her baby-doll nighty, useless in minus 37 degree temperatures, was customized and now peaked out of a veritable riot of knit-ware whisked off the backs of her septuagenarian charioteers as they were cut free. Her/his six pairs of eyelashes had, one by one fallen off in frozen plates and skidded across the ice like skillets in a game of hockey. She was unaccountably depressed; it must be something in the air, she thought hoping there would be something more joyous up ahead.

 

Landscape proves an out-and-out liar as it shimmers and warps dreams and visions erecting demonic towers and spires in the mind’s eyes. The pristine wilderness was having an effect on both canine and human alike. As the gap closed between Mitzy and Mary Mary and as they neared what each had imagined they had seen, the hopeful smiles disappeared as the vision jumped out of view appearing now to the left of their course and further away. The mirage was now a village, complete with church and TV aerials. The landscape, the photos of which on other occasions would be lovingly shared, had become hostile , heart-sinkingly hostile like the loss of recreational sheen a tourist experiences finding himself robed and suddenly penniless.  a cityscape known only to the homeless, luridly desperate through the dirty and broken windows of poverty. Like the deceit of her lovers who’s out-and-out lies had, in shade and subtleties, more angles than a Rubics Cube, Mary Mary found she suddenly no longer trusted what she had hitherto believed . What she remembered she would forget as she glided, lead now by her an awakening intuition across the ice, her eyes cleared, shoulders relaxed for the first time in years, her beard glistened and her lopsided bee-hive was polished smooth by the arctic winds, the aurora borealis danced overhead accentuating her turquoise eye shadow giving Mary Mary an air of royal command.

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 5)

 

 

                                                                                 5.

 

She was daughter of a mercenary and mercantile race, National Geographic Magazine sent her the DNA mouth swab kit the result of which revealed that her ancestors had never travelled outside the British Isles and never mixed; she was one hundred percent Anglo-Saxon. Hadn’t they originally filled a vacuum left by the retreating Romans as occupying force? So why should she feel any qualms, over a dozen centuries later, about asset stripping a land her Germanic ancestors had meant to…well, asset strip anyway. Karen Smith was twenty-six, she had been in London only three years now found herself in the privileged and very lucrative position of negotiating the telephone bid at the world famous Auction House Christies on behalf of a Saudi Prince for, (page 13-18 in the catalogue),  Lot 26: The United Kingdom, otherwise known as Great Britain,

 

One hundred and fifty pounds… over there.” Bellowed the middle-aged, ruddy faced auctioneer in a cut-glass accent and the alcoholic shakes as he leered out among the general tat of a country that would soon only exist only on the Footsie 100, Nasdaq, in cyber-space and on BBC Radio 4. and which was about to come under the hammer. The country was already being auctioned off by share-holders who lurked in smug  monetary oasis, like crocodiles, removed from the lives of their own extended family whose habitat was being sold off piecemeal in a bid for the largest share of the waterhole. The populace waited with baited breath and deeply frightened eyes, their blurred poverty-curfewed silhouettes reflected against the myriad cell-block windows of their fuel-poor over-priced hovels, “Any advances on one hundred and fifty pounds;… for this glorious reversible collapsible nineteenth century mahogany card table”. The mainly Chinese clientele stared back blankly.  “Going once, going twice, I repeat, do I hear two hundred?  He bought down a hammer on an green velvet auction block, indicating an inanely grinning Russian oligarch.

 

Karen felt she was at the top of her game; she was about to justify her existence on the planet, especially in the eyes of her highly-strung parents, an international arms trader and politician respectively, who had sent her away at the age of six to Preparatory school, then to Rhodean private girls school and had constantly reminded her of the expense she had cost them and cautioning her that the only attitude to take towards them, was not one of affection, but extreme gratitude. During these periodic parental Power Point presentations the possibility of a simple hug was incrementally eroded and replaced by the need to embrace the idea of the acquisition of wealth as surrogate; her parents even began to look like characters on bank notes. Karen Smith had a brief  moment of insecurity when  her emotions spiked; on the verge of selling her own country. she wondered weather a warm hug might indeed be preferable. She swatted the invisible thought with her hand, hardened and dialled up her Saudi buyer.

 

“Lot 26. the United Kingdom”. Announced the auctioneer. “The United Kingdom. 244.820 square kilometres . Population 60 million, optional. Comes complete with external territories The Channel Islands, The Isle of Man, Anguilles, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, The Falkland Islands, Saint Helena, Turks and Caicos Islands, South Georgia. Five previous owners: the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, current owner the Bank of England. Constitutional monarchy, again optional. Can we start the bidding at 5 billion dollars”.

 

Before long, imperceptible nods and micro-gestures had pushed the bidding price up to a cool 20 billion. Karen Smith knew her job, she would hold out, her Saudi boss was out for a bargain and had an absolute limit with no reserve; Greece, after all, was also up for grabs in the coming months.

 

“Twenty-six billion pounds, cheaper than the Damian Hirst collection”. Someone who looked suspiciously like the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was in the audience, and Karen felt that throughout, the bidding price was being raised artificially. “Do I hear 27 billion dollars?” An almost inaudible grunt came down the telephone; Karen Smith raised an eye-brow.

 

“That’s 27 billion for Lot 26, The United Kingdom”. The room fell into a hush. “Do I here any advances on 27 billion? Going once, going twice. Sold! Would you see one of our ushers afterwards”. The auctioneer said to a slightly depressed Miss Smith. There was an immediate hubbub of conversation as everyone turned to see who the current owner of The United Kingdom might be. She was vaguely aware that her Saudi boss intended to digitally map the country, recreate it as a virtual museum and film studio for period costume dramas and then dismantle the whole and turn it into an aircraft carrier.

 

“Now Lot 27, a collection of original 1960s larva lamps…”

 

She walked past the Natural History museum with a massive sense of anti-climax; she was unaccountably miserable and exhausted. “That’s lovely dear”, said her mother absent-mindedly down the phone as Karen sat under an oak tree staring at a buttercup in Hyde Park. “Don’t be short-changed on the commission, will you dear. You can be a soft touch”. Having just made the biggest deal in her career Karen expected…well she wasn’t sure exactly what she expected; all she knew was, she wasn’t getting it. She hung up, lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

Out-and-out Lairs ;Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 4)

                                                                                  4.

Although Floy, the simian who invented the 0 1 binary code used in computers all over the planet in the 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool was technically in police custody he suddenly found himself in the unique position of being the only Macaque Crested monkey to have diplomatic immunity; the Ecuadorian government refused to allow him to be removed from its Embassy. The disappearance of Julian Assange and the appearance of Floy in his absence sent the nation into yet another bout of introspection and conjecture.

 

It was a while before Lady Gaga, the international singer was even remotely linked to the Wikileaks founder absconding the territory from his place of asylum a few yards from Harrods in Knightbridge. In the interim period many witnesses came forward to say they had seen the men who had executed the kidnapping of Assange ; Some came forward to say they heard the abductors speaking German though they themselves did not speak German. Others swore blind they spoke Greek and a ransom demand to pay off the Greek National Debt was posited. Bulgarians and Romanians were also placed at the scene which fed the already isolationist consensus that whoever they were, continental Europe was at fault. A Palestinian academic recognized the Hebrew language in their gruff commands to a struggling Mr Assange. A Russian millionaire claimed the gang were Russian and used Polonium. Emotive and flagrantly xenophobic words became the order of the day. After the owner of a local newsagency declared he may have seen 'Middle-Eastern types' in the vicinity the words ‘Storm’ and ‘Al Queda’ were unduly linked to the word ‘Embassy’ and as front page headlines appeared in the red-top tabloids a noxious alchemy somehow transmuted a formerly vilified Assange into hero again, the word ‘kidnap’ having crept, first into the periphery of the nation’s sight, then by dint of general and customary apathy, into the dead-centre of its slumbering awareness. Suddenly others came forward, taxi drivers, neighbours, shoppers, and the inevitable opinionated old bag-lady. “ I see everything that goes on ‘round here”, she said, a veritable fortress of coats, scarves, zimmer frames and shopping trolleys protecting her from the world’s scorn.

 

A recently homeless middle-class family had been rooting through the dustbins in an alleyway immediately behind the famous department store’s Food Hall in search of foie gras and jars of out-dated lobster bisque. “Yes, they were dark men, three of them”. Declared Mrs Evans as she held a Harrods bag in full view of the camera, her radar for respectability still partially intact. This single interview with the down-and-out yet well-spoken Evans family secured coverage in the broadsheets. “From what I saw, I can safely say that Mr Assange seemed reluctant to leave with his captors. “ Mr Evans, a former careers advisor, told the press. “Are you saying Mr Assange was forced at gun point?” Someone asked pressing a recording device forward. “That might have been the case, but I am not…” As though the wind had changed direction, those who traded in smoke without fire, as suddenly, lost interest; AL QUEDA LEADS JULIAN ASSANGE FROM EMBASSY AT GUNPOINT hit evening rush-hour newsstands across Britain.

 

A murderous chronology of hostage-takings, beheadings and heinous acts against western civilisation presented itself to the weary commuter adding to the general and generalized fear of the ‘other’ gleefully fostered by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph; many phoned home to warn their spouses once again to stay within the besieged boundaries of the garden fence. Scaffolders, working on a nearby building detecting an opportunity for their five minutes of fame came forward to swear unanimously they had seen the driver of the white get-away van. However, their story was refuted by a Nigerian Traffic Warden, a Mr Ade Anuolua who testified that no such vehicle would have left unticketed on his beat. “If I had encountered these people, I would have held them in negotiations and pointless discussions”. A white South African intervened to declare, boorishly that he was taking over the whole crisis single-handedly.

 

                                                                  

Floy now made appearances at the balcony window in place of its former guest and tourists threw exclusive chocolates and organic bananas bought from Harrods and Harvey Nichols into his out-stretched arms while the nation cringed. Had this ape been left as a token insult, for that is how it felt. A negotiator was sent to the window, ducking an assortment of luxury foodstuffs to plea-bargain with Floy, to no avail. A female Macaque Crested monkey was found in Harrods’ Exotic Pets Department and in a role reversal of Romeo and Juliette, stood bewildered before the balcony; it was hoped she would somehow translate the preference of life in the basement of a department store over that of a Latin American embassy. Instead she merely grunted at Floy, gathered what she could of the fallen chocolates and organic bananas and indicated to her keeper that she would now like to return to her cage. Meanwhile, Floy had, with his feet, surreptitiously and deftly removed the bunch of keys dangling from the keeper’s belt and on her departure gave his new female Macaque Crested friend, who he found exceedingly pretty, a knowing grunt in return.

 

Messers Pilger, Lynch, Moore, and Miss Kahn now found that the bail money of three hundred and forty thousand pounds collectively stumped up for bail was, in the blink of a mischievous Supreme Court Judge’s eye, now transferred to the conditions of Floy’s house arrest, the reflected glory of which did not have the same shine as that of the internet revolutionary Julian Assange. In the mendacious scramble to recoup the money there followed among the contributors a great deal of mud-slinging and there was no part of the absent man’s ego that was not retrospectively torn to shreds. Furthermore, in an act of one-upmanship over the Supreme Court Judge’s decision they declared that the bail money, three hundred and forty thousand pounds was now being offered up as a reward for Mr Assange’s capture, dead or alive. In the days and weeks that followed the announcement, anyone looking even remotely like the Wikileaks founder had a very hard time of it indeed.

 

A government Think-Tank convened an emergency meeting at the revelation that Assange had indeed fled voluntarily concealed in one of Lady Gaga’s most extravagant costumes to date; how could an apology for the veritable rivers of crud written in the national press, online and spewed forth in the media 24/7 about the, generally gentle and hospitable Arabic speaking races be avoided?  It was to Inspector Salamander Buckle’s absolute amazement that a mug-shot of the Algerian who had met his end in and been discovered by him up the chimney with the Ecuadorian Ambassador was published with two fresh bullet holes where bullet holes should not have been; his swarthy death-mask exonerating Lady Gaga in one yawn of national soporific collusion. Some years later, Salamander Buckle’s illustrious career would end somewhat less illustriously in a field some yards away from the suicide note, incorporated into a thrushes’ nest, of an equally isolated former weapons inspector.

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4. Part 3)

                                                                                     3.

Once Floy was safely in the custody of the police he began to relax. It was the first-rate detective by the name of Salamander Buckle, he who had  famously solved the Nigerian Law School Murder back in 1996, who now, at 56 years of age, in middle age, having recently solved  L’Affaire d’ Un Singe, ( a gallic pun, Knightbridge being French) could now like Floy also relax. Buckle was the son of an Irish Catholic priest, again like Floy, who had had to flee, under the guise of insanity the nightmarish conditions of The Ten Thousand Hour Monkey Typing Pool, Salamander Buckle had fled a homeland in which guilt had become the cornerstone of paranoia measured on how well one could evade answering a direct question directly. Before Buckle’s recent vertiginous trajectory into the full glare of public adoration, he maintained that most if not all of his sleuthing methods were, indeed to be found in the scholarly study of the Good Book, for it constituted a catalogue of humanity’s vices and sin and gave a clear insight into motive, as it were. “Leviticus stands out” He mused. The rest he’d learned at the cost of an awful lot of hard work at the scene of various murderous sprees.

 

His first suspect was the singer Lady Gaga, for was it not she the media snapped going into the Ecuadorean Embassy wearing a life-size live monkey as both stole and headdress; this was not an era to be stuffy about such attire, for had the quirky international star not received an award dressed as an abattoir. “I’m the Lady who has her name in the paper on a daily basis, several times a day- how do you expect me to recall the photo shoot I did outside of a horrific and inexplicable crime.” She said at her New York apartment, fame and insanity parting in each other’s company. Buckle would need to take a firm stand; she wasn’t the first flaky artiste he had interviewed. To jog her memory he recreated the scene.

 

A dark dappled room in the Ecuadorian Embassy,  a vortex of disarray, the furniture, Spanish colonial was trashed, one of the pillaged Inca relics which stood in pairs on the ambassador’s desk lay, along with a razor in the middle of the room. Unaccountably, there were traces of human hair, whole clumps, seemingly yanked out in a cat-walk-model-like frenzy, though no cat-walk models were present. Upon the middle shelf above thirty leather-bound volumes the complete series of Las Dias Del Conquistadores,  volume twenty-three lay open on a desk along side a  hat belonging to the Latin American revolutionary Simone Bolivar, a picture of Jenifer Lopez hung above the fire place with greasy talcum-powered fingerprint of the Algerian upon its smashed glass; An open laptop was found on the floor by the open bay window, bouncing diagonally across the screen to the strains of Waltzing Matilda, the legend, ‘G’DAY MATE; Julian Assange was nowhere to be found.

 

Of the Ecuadorian Ambassador there was no trace. “After  recounting the crime scene Miss Lady Gaga claimed to know nothing of the diplomat’s whereabouts”. In the following media scrum Inspector Buckle would tell anyone who cared to ask, “Miss Gaga stated, when interviewed, ‘I remember buying an Orang-utan in Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department that day. You know they recently reinstated that department, but it took a distinct dislike to my wrap-stroke head-wear…something about cross-species war…well that’s what the sales manager was telling me as my purchase ran toward the perfume department to mate with an assistant who was spray tanned the same colour , you know’”. Inspector Buckle did not know, as a dyed-in-the-wool policeman he took Orang-utan to mean someone from an immigrant background. “‘Then I went next door, well I’d come this far. I told Mr Assange how I understood how restricted he must feel, I mean I ought to know’, she said her head artfully wedged into a micro wave oven, the door ajar.  ‘I congratulated Mr Assange on being instrumental in my progress; He said he quite understood and I said when my president gets England’s president to let him out then he was a good as employed, as far as a job goes. Then we went to the balcony; I think the crowd all enjoyed seeing me, you know, with him’.”

 

It was an Algerian-whose finger prints were being presented to  the jury as Exhibit A, in talcum-powdered relief from the black rubber dildo found at post-mortem, (incidentally, left out of all Inspector Buckley’s descriptions due to his catholic up-bringing and unsavoury flashbacks,) - who was found halfway up the chimney, pushed with some force, dead and with lacerations where lacerations should not be. “Indeed”, said Inspector Buckle,” had this young Arab been the only casualty, this case would not be a murder case, not on my watch anyway, but simply a matter of Mr Assange absconding from our territory”. The High Court Judge presiding over the trial ignored the institutionalised racism asking “And you say the ambassador of Ecuador to London was also found stuck up the flu, also with some force?…curious. It would appear this case has more of entrances than exits”, quipped His Honor, to Inspector Buckley’s evident disgust.

 

However it would be the word ‘entrance’ which would prove a vital clue to the solving of this incredible mystery.It was the picture of Lady Gaga in the papers the day following the tragedy that, for Inspector Salamander Buckle crystallized the beginnings of a theory. One broadsheet newspaper wrote ‘The singer looked beyond surreal as she was snapped ascending the steps through an aisle of bobbies wearing a live Crested-Macaque Monkey up to and unannounced through the doors of the Embassy’. Whatever the ambassador and his magrebin guest were up to when she entered the room, on seeing her they found themselves simultaneously scrambling for the nearest escape. L’Affaire D’Un Singe, [The French cannot say the Wikileak founder’s surname without dragging their knuckles along the ground], the unfolding details of which first sent Scotland Yard into such delusions of SAS grandeur that their own grandmother’s could have gone down in a volley of fire so mindlessly eager were they for action, was a national embarrassment. Luckily the order for summary execution through wildly disproportionate force upon an Australian guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy was belayed. There then followed a period of national volt-face, in which the nation’s embarrassment transmuted the heretofore hero into vilified scapegoat. England entreated Ecuador to release Assange to face a rape charge in Sweden Britain now openly  and unanimously found him guilty of. Ecuador, grabbing the slim window of international attention threw a party, its president reminding the world that ‘since the end of its empire Britain was still farting higher than its arse’.

The deafening silence that followed does not make sense; the gargantuan elephant that is Julian Assange, remained plonked firmly on the nation’s lawn, the view obfuscated not by a painful and somewhat begrudged collective introspection but by the tacit agreement the man might be simply nationally ignored into annihilation.

The clumps of hair found at the scene of the crime were, after DNA tests found to contain no DNA whatsoever, the fur proving to be entirely synthetic of a type produced in China and exported in the form of  monkey suits for fancy dress sold at a costume hire outlet on Shaftsbury Avenue in London’s West End. The sales assistant remembered nothing out of the ordinary maintaining that customers dressed as Salome wearing a platter with a decapitated head as a hat, in the company of a Yeti was all in a days work and since the Ivy restaurant was a stones throw away and the likes of the late milliner Isabella Blow and costume designer Zandra Rhodes popped in frequently before dining to use the toilet so versed were they at assisting in the deconstruction and reassembling of complicated and angst-ridden haut couture.

Imagination was all the Inspector Salamander Buckle need apply to conjure the ensuing chaos as, once Lady Gaga had produced the suit from her bottomless handbag, an eager Assange and star-struck Floy tried to climb into the suit at the same time while the famous singer perused the leather-bound tomes on the book shelf. At one point, keen to help and ignoring the eventuality of smuggling both out upon her slender shoulders, she found she had somehow entered the suit herself, backwards. In wresting la Gaga’s head stuck firmly in one of the arms, Assange and Floy clearly lacked the skill of theatrical dressers and handfuls of fur fell to the floor of the Ecuadorian Embassy. At another point all three found themselves blinking at each other from its dark interior and in a frenzied attempt to extricate themselves ambled dangerously about the room crashing into furniture eventually head butting the framed picture of Jenifer Lopez. Unnoticeably dishevelled, Lady Gaga emerged airily suggesting that it would be easier to leave with the Ambassador and his friend as they were already in a favourable position to be shoe-horned into the suit while wedged in the chimney. That was the point at which Floy seized the cut-throat razor and Assange armed himself with the Inca relic; it was becoming desperately apparent that time was running out and only one of them could leave alive. The public permanently positioned outside Assange’s place of asylum would surely notice if the singer left with if an extra Macaque Crested monkey above her head.  Lady Gaga artfully came between the two antagonists and with one randomly choreographed move deftly knocked both weapons to the ground, seized volume twenty three of Las Dias Del Conquistadores, Simone Bolivar’s hat, lead Floy to the large velvet upholstered chair behind the former ambassador’s desk, sat him down, placed the hat firmly on his head, placed the book upright in front of him and hoped no one would notice until long after she and Assange were out of the country.

It was thus that Lady Gaga was photographed leaving the Ecuadorean embassy; wearing an all-in-one headdress and stole live Crested-Macaque suffering from acute alopecia. And it was a hawk-eyed Inspector Buckle who pieced together the incredible jig-saw that was L’Affaire d’Un Singe, albeit too late.