Time of Lies E-Book

Douglas Board

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Bob Grant, former football hooligan, now the charismatic leader of the Britain s Great party (slogan: Britain s Great! End of!) has swept to power on a populist tide. With his itchy finger hovering over the nuclear trigger, Bob presides over a brave new Britain where armed drones fill the skies, ex-bankers and foreigners are vilified, and the Millwall football chant No one likes, we don t care has become an unofficial national anthem.Meanwhile, Bob s under-achieving, Guardian-reading brother Zack gets a tap on the shoulder from a shady Whitehall mandarin. A daring plot is afoot to defy the will of the people and unseat the increasingly unstable PM. Can Zack stop his brother before he launches a nuclear strike on Belgium? And just what is ACERBIC, Britain s most closely-guarded military secret?A darkly comic political thriller, Time of Lies is also a terrifyingly believable portrait of an alternative Britain. It couldn t happen here... could it?

Leseprobe

‘A milestone in dystopian fiction. The first post-Truth, post-Brexit novel. We are destined to hear more of Douglas Board.’

CHRIS MULLIN, AUTHOR OF A VERY BRITISH COUP

In 2020 the United Kingdom elects its own Donald Trump.

Zack can’t believe that his brother, a Bermondsey geezer made good, has his finger on the nuclear trigger.

His brother can’t believe that Guardian-reading Zack is going to do anything about it.

Bob Grant, former football hooligan, now the charismatic leader of the Britain’s Great party, has swept to power on a populist tide. With his itchy finger hovering over the nuclear trigger, Bob presides over a brave new Britain where armed drones fill the skies, ex-bankers and foreigners are vilified, and the Millwall football chant ‘No one likes us, we don’t care’ has become an unofficial national anthem.

Meanwhile, Bob’s under-achieving, Guardian-reading brother Zack gets a tap on the shoulder from a shady Whitehall mandarin. A daring plot is afoot to defy the will of the people and unseat the increasingly unstable PM. Can Zack stop his brother before he launches a nuclear strike on Belgium? And just what is ACERBIC, Britain’s most closely-guarded military secret?

A darkly comic political thriller, Time of Lies is also a terrifyingly believable portrait of an alternative Britain.

It couldn’t happen here… could it?

DOUGLAS BOARD is the author of the campus satire MBA, published by Lightning Books in 2015, and hailed by The Bookseller as “a must for anyone who enjoyed Franzen’s Freedom or Eggers’ The Circle”.

Born in Hong Kong, he has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and worked for the UK Treasury and then as a headhunter. He has also had a distinguished career in public life, serving as treasurer of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and chairing the British Refugee Council.

He and his wife Tricia Sibbons live in London and Johannesburg.

Follow him on Twitter @BoardWryter and www.douglasboard.com

Time of Lies

Douglas Board

Published in 2017

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

ISBN: 978-1-78563-040-8

Copyright © Douglas Board, 2017

Cover by Chris Shamwana

Typesetting and design by Clio Mitchell

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

To Jo Cox, MP1974-2016#moreincommon

The quotation on the next page describes the test of an air-dropped hydrogen bomb at Semipalatinsk on 22 November 1955. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Knopf 1990) p. 191, quoted in Lorna Arnold, Britain and the H-Bomb (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001) pp. 29-30.

The second quotation is from the poem You Who Read No Calm by Tom Merrill. Tom is a writer and Advisory Editor at The Hypertexts, an online literary outlet mainly but not exclusively devoted to publishing poetry.

http://www.thehypertexts.com/9-11%20Poetry.htm

Downloaded 15 November 2015 and reproduced with Tom’s permission.

TIME OF LIES is a work of fiction. Where characters bear the names of living politicians, no connection with actual, sentient beings with moral capacity is suggested.

I saw a blinding yellow-white sphere swiftly expand, turn orange in a fraction of a second, then turn bright red and touch the horizon, flattening out at its base. Soon everything was obscured by rising dust which formed an enormous swirling, gray-blue cloud, its surface streaked with fiery crimson flashes. Between the cloud and the swirling dust grew a mushroom stem, even thicker than the one that had formed during the first thermonuclear test. Shock-waves criss-crossed the sky, emitting sporadic milky-white cones and adding to the mushroom image. I felt heat like that from an open furnace on my face – and this was in freezing weather, tens of miles from ground zero. The whole magical spectacle unfolded in complete silence. Several minutes passed, and then all of a sudden the shock wave was coming at us, approaching swiftly, flattening the feather-grass.

You, who read no calm reportings

Of alien, distant, dire events,

But shriek and keen as loves go down

Beyond all help, to violence;

Whose temple’s walls, stormstruck and split

by sizzling bolts collapse around,

While mid the crash of chaos hope

Whirls in a death-spin to the ground;

You, who alone in deep distress

Cry out for help where there is none,

All you whom I shall never know:

I know a portion nonetheless

Of cruel trials you undergo.

Contents

PROLOGUE: Calm reportings

1: London, January 2019

2: London, January 2019 (2)

PART ONE: Alien, distant, dire events

3: Helensburgh, Sunday 19 April 2020

4: Helensburgh, Sunday 19 April 2020 (2)

5: London, Monday 20 April 2020

6: London, Monday 20 April 2020 (2)

7: London, Tuesday 21 April 2020

8: London, Wednesday 22 April 2020

9: London, Thursday 23 April 2020

10: London, Thursday 23 April 2020 (2)

11: Eton, September 2007

12: Eton, September 2007 (2)

13: London, Friday 24 April 2020

14: London, Saturday 25 April 2020

15: London, Saturday 25 April 2020 (2)

PART TWO: Loves go down

16: London, Friday 1 May 2020

17: London, Thursday 7 May 2020

18: London, Friday 8 May 2020

19: London, Tuesday 12 May 2020

20: London, Tuesday 12 May 2020 (2)

21: London, Wednesday 13 May 2020

22: Gare Loch, Tuesday 19 May 2020

23: London, Tuesday 19/Wednesday 20 May 2020

24: London, Thursday 21 May 2020

25: London, November/December 1994

26: London, January 1995

27: London, Friday 22 May 2020

28: London, Friday 22 May 2020 (evening)

PART THREE: Stormstruck and split

29: Helsinki, Tuesday 26 May 2020

30: Brixham, Friday 29 May 2020

31: London, May 1997

32: Brixham, Saturday 30 May 2020

33: London, Tuesday 2 June 2020

34: Brussels, Thursday 11 June 2020

35: London Friday 19 June 2020

36: Brixham, Friday 19 June 2020

37: London, Saturday 20 June 2020

38: Totnes, Saturday 20 June 2020

39: Mid-Atlantic, Friday 26 June 2020

40: Helensburgh, Saturday 27 June 2020

41: London, Sunday 28 June 2020

42: London, Monday 29 June 2020

43: Camberley, Monday 29 June 2020

44: Camberley, Tuesday 30 June 2020

45: London, Tuesday 30 June 2020

46: London, Tuesday 30 June 2020 (2)

47: London, Tuesday 30 June 2020 (3)

48: London, Tuesday 30 June 2020 (4)

PART FOUR: Chaos

49: London, Sunday 5 July 2020

50: London, Sunday 5 July 2020 (2)

51: London, Monday 22 June 2020 (two weeks earlier)

52: Eton, Monday 6 July 2020

EPILOGUE: Hope

53: Helensburgh, Tuesday 6 July 2020

54: Admiralty Island, Tuesday 6 July 2020

55: Eton, Friday 10 July 2020

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

Calm reportings

1

London, January 2019

My three-month holiday starts in Angela’s office at twenty past three on Friday afternoon. It finishes at half eleven on Monday morning. You couldn’t even call it a long weekend.

By twenty past three Tower Bridge has vanished in the sleet outside Angela’s glass walls. I’m defying the weather with a lightweight gilet (Diesel but you won’t see it in shops before March), jeans and suede deck shoes. A bald man returns my gaze from the mirror – five-foot-ten, thirteen-and-a-half stone, stocky but with a fair bit of muscle.

Do I look like I need a holiday? Have I ever had longer than a week? Smokeless flames smirk at the question from the designer campfire in the centre of the marble floor. Very executive bling – very pre-2018 meltdown.

Angela’s not budging. ‘Trust me, Bob. Come the summer you’ll be overdosing on photo-ops – business leaders and new generation political leaders worldwide. The White House, for sure. In the autumn you’ll start campaigning, and then you’re flat out until May. When you win, you’ll bust open that disappear-for-August political culture because you’ve got a country to save. The next three months will be your only break for the next three years.’ She slips me two VIP tickets for next month’s Atlanta Super Bowl. Okay, there are fifteen thousand better places to be than England’s drippy, annoying take on winter.

Angela gives me a peck on the cheek and fixes a Shock News car. On the ride home I flick through my phone to see who’s partying this weekend. I ponder my pick of three. Frankie’s will be toptastic if he doesn’t overdose on reggae. I might even stay over and catch Millwall.

The Millwall game finishes up lame-oh but it’s good to have a sing. Don’t tell anyone but I’m a bit rusty on the players’ names, which won’t do come the election. It was 2007 when half the squad came to my housewarming. On the upside, the party was well worth the bother.

Monday morning sees London still immersed in grey, like the bottom of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned. I arrive at Odyssey at half ten. It’s off Kensington Church Street, and the best venue by far for a Monday morning.

Yanni’s taken the place back to the original three-storey Victorian schoolhouse. The room he calls ‘the gym’ I have to myself – full-size tables for snooker, table tennis and table football, and a single ten-pin bowling lane complete with pick-up machine. The bowling lane is called ‘Capitalism’: you knock all the ‘workers’ down by bowling at them with ‘market forces’, then ‘the state’ stands them up for another go. Yeah, Yanni is a bit of a nerd. For me politics just gets in the way of fixing stuff.

I’ve muted the two footy-sized TVs: on a Monday Yanni’s addicted to Waste-of-money Central, aka the BBC. He has it on while he goes around minding the clean-up after the weekend. I’m drinking super-cold cider in a frosted glass while giving the snooker balls a work-out. The vacuum cleaner next door is part of the Monday morning vibe.

On screen seven semi-geriatric men in suits and two women file out from behind a wooden door with frosted glass windows. They sit at a curved table. For Chrissake, Yanni – BBC Parliament?! I check my Rolex – eleven twenty-three. Seven minutes till Odyssey starts serving chips.

Ten minutes later the nine stand up and file out. Now it’s some squeaky clean thirty-two-year-old standing on the grass in Parliament Square. The caption says ‘Supreme Court: New Brexit Judgement’. I turn up the volume.

By half eleven I fucking need a weapon, so I smash the cue against the table, snapping it in two. Its jagged point is raw and splintered. A picture of a clock tower in a market square, four decorated classical columns on a square brick base, comes onto the screens. I hurl snooker balls at the screens, shattering the glass and scattering sparks. The loose end of a turquoise wire flickers with a flame as small as a child’s birthday candle.

When Angela’s on the phone I scream at her, ‘Who the fuck do they think they are? Jesus, they think we’re so stupid! My campaign starts now!’

2

London, January 2019 (2)

‘So we’ve just heard the President of the Supreme Court read out the judgement. What does it mean, Kieran?’

‘Well, Janet, it’s a complete surprise. Everyone thought that the Court had shot its bolt two years ago. The Government got its ducks in a row and gave notice to leave the European Union a few months later.

‘Today’s case was brought by a three-truck haulage firm in Scotland, after Borisgate – the leak of five thousand emails exchanged between Brexit ministers in the run up to giving notice. Supported by crowd-funding as well as the Scottish government, the truckers got their case into the Inner House of the Court of Session – the highest civil court in Edinburgh. From there it came to London. The upshot is that by a five to four majority the Supreme Court have accepted a claim of “Wednesbury unreasonableness” and quashed the UK’s notice to leave.’

‘Quashed? What does that mean?’

‘It means that our notice in 2017 was invalid. It doesn’t count. Now the President of the Court did stress, this does not mean that the UK cannot leave. Indeed the Prime Minister is likely to give a fresh Article 50 notice later this week, as soon as the Government is confident that they have made their reasoning legally watertight.’

‘Will we be staying in the EU another two years?’

‘Probably not. If there is a fresh notice, formally the negotiations on exit terms would start again – but in practice all the pieces of paper with agreements written on them are still there. And none of the parties, the EU countries or the Commission or the European Parliament, will have changed their positions. For example, the IMF insisted on five transitional years in the European Economic Area as the price for helping us to bail out our banks last year – that won’t have changed. So fresh negotiations could be a formality with the exit later this year as originally planned. This new judgement may be no more than an intense embarrassment for the Government.’

‘Whatever the legal arguments, Kieran, isn’t this judgement going to be seen by many people in this country as a gross interference with democracy? One hashtag going wild on Twitter is #judicialcoup. And what about the tiny majority, five to four?’

‘Out of a panel of nine, a majority of one is eleven per cent, which is nearly three times the size of the leave majority in the referendum. And when you say “people in this country”, remember Scotland voted remain. Three of the Law Lords noted that the Court was sitting as the Supreme Court of Scotland. Since we may still be leaving the EU on the same terms and the same date, talk of a judicial coup is a little excitable.’

‘So what’s the point of the judgement, Kieran?’

‘Wednesbury is a market town in the Black Country – I think we’re showing its clock tower behind me. Today it has no cinemas but in 1947 it had three, the Rialto, the Imperial Palace and the Gaumont. In 1947 the Court of Appeal had to decide whether the condition which the local authority had imposed as part of allowing Sunday screenings – essentially that children couldn’t attend – was reasonable. The cinema owners said the condition wasn’t reasonable. The court said it was. But the court laid down a principle that acts of officialdom could conceivably so fly in the face of reason and logic – in plain English, could be so stupid – that they would for that reason alone be null and void. The Supreme Court has just ruled, by five to four, that the way the Government went about deciding when to give notice was that stupid.’

PART ONE

Alien, distant, dire events

3

Helensburgh, Sunday 19 April 2020

Three of us are in Cairstine McGinnis’s living room on Sunday afternoon with her 1920s tea service. Cairstine and her daughter look at each other across cold tea in bone china cups. My own gaze has escaped the double-glazing and dashed into the spring lawn. Once fondness bloomed there but now new things have pushed through. Splashes of purple and yellow from crocuses match the colours of two teenage members of a hockey team, climbing towards us. Helensburgh’s streets slope down to the Firth of Clyde and Gare Loch in an American-style rectangular grid.

Photos fill the mantelpiece, frame clips holding tight to memories which Cairstine loses completely, like the Mary Quant admirer in a mini-skirt (herself, age twenty-nine). Cairstine’s words come out spiky and tart, like gooseberries. ‘That Kathy – you won’t go leaving me like her!’

It’s Kathy, her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, to whom Cairstine is speaking. Once Cairstine’s mind had high caverns and cool vaults which stored the better part of Scottish civilisation, but the passageway to those spaces has collapsed. However, her tongue is as cutting as ever, like a cheesemonger’s garrotte.

‘Of course you’ll not leave me,’ Cairstine purrs, stroking Kathy’s arm. The skin on Cairstine’s thin bones gleams like translucent silk. Something plastic and made in China falls loose from her pompadour; she brushes it back into place.

Kathy replies, ‘Of course I won’t leave you.’ That’s Kathy: keep calm and carry on smiling.

The twenty years I’ve known Cairstine are the twenty years Kathy and I have been together, since I graduated in 2000 at the peak of Cool Britannia. We married, and I moved into Kathy’s flat in Putney, eight years later.

Kathy is the anchor of my life, but the Royal Navy hoists anchors. The top brass have decided to ‘discover’ her so we’re not sure where we might be for the next couple of years – possibly Washington DC. In the meantime I try to pull my weight when she visits Cairstine. Helensburgh can be a tough gig for her to do alone. Often enough we’ll walk down to the promenade where the bust of John Logie Baird, Helensburgh’s celebrity, fixes the loch with a proprietorial gaze; if we feel like it we might stroll along to Rhu to see whether any submarines pass by.

Right now I’m staring as hard as I can at the crocuses, because Cairstine is about to make me explode into giggles. Kathy and I went to see Jimmy Keohane at the AlbaR last night, the club on North Frederick Street. After all, Glaswegian comedy is famous. The club was Kathy’s pick, up-and-coming, so we overlooked its heart-on-its-sleeve Nationalist sympathies. Besides, Brexit and the collapse of English politics into a kindergarten had turned every comedian north of the border into a Nationalist. In London we missed the fuss about Jimmy’s new material on dementia.

***

Setting off a hydrogen bomb is like telling a joke with a triple punch line – one which leaves hundreds of thousands of people irradiated, incinerated or turned into burning postage stamps by the blast wave.

Someone pulls a trigger – the first punch line. Inside a metal coffin two bits of stuff are hurled together by a conventional explosion. Harmless on their own, together they create the second punch line – an atomic explosion. That explosion hurls yet more stuff together to make a third kind of explosion, the kind you get inside a star: your own private star, coming now to where you now live. So Kathy pulled the trigger which sent us, harmless on our own, smashing into Jimmy Keohane; Jimmy sent us smashing into Cairstine; and then off we all go, twinkle, twinkle.

The AlbaR was like an upside-down gym. Benches, weight stacks and rowing machines hung at odd angles from bare ceilings and ventilating shafts. The place was heaving. Kathy had booked us into the eating area but the rest was standing-room only.

Until Jimmy came on, what we got was intravenous politics. True, we’re in a General Election. Even in Scotland it’s still a General Election. For the comedians, the politicians were like fish in a barrel.

Fair play, the governing parties – the two Tory parties and the Scot Nats – were getting crucified for the 2018 bank bail-outs. You have to hand it to the bankers, and by God as taxpayers have we done that with feeling. The Treasury had never really recovered from 2008, so when our banks fell over again we had to crawl to the IMF. This time the eighteen-year-olds have woken up to who’s going to pay off the new debt (them), and how (unemployment). So even in a Nat club the Nat leader was getting a hosing, while the Frumpy Tories and the Future Tories were getting water-boarded. (‘I see a few faces from last week. Now me nan brung me up to say sorry when I overstep the mark, and last week I did. I told a few jokes about the Tories and paedophilia. Well, I’m sorry. Tonight I’ll stick with paedophilia.’)

Then Jimmy Keohane came on. He was my height, five foot nine with a buzz cut. His humour was based on physical repetition. When he repeated a line, every hair in his eyebrows and every crease in his belly repeated what they had done four or five seconds before, exactly. His flesh moved like a freaky, computer-generated image. He kicked off with some gentle parody of marital arguments.

‘You moved the spoon.’ (He re-plays moving the spoon.)

‘No way I moved the spoon.’ (He re-plays not moving the spoon.)

‘Are you fucking blind? Of course you moved the spoon. I blame your mother.’

We had no idea why we were corpsing, but we were. Then, before we knew it, Jimmy flipped subjects: he started dancing with dementia.

According to the biggest rumour ever, dementia is why the Queen withdrew to Balmoral in 2019, installing Charles as Prince Regent. Funny that, Jimmy said; we put the Queen away because she’s started talking to plants when Charles has been at it for years. No, he argued, the Queen was just pretending to have dementia; the greed and idiocy of British politics had simply got too much for her. Who could blame her when Cameron had twice tossed the fate of the kingdom – her kingdom – to a referendum, like a coin?

And then Jimmy threw out the idea that is making me squirm in Cairstine’s. What if the Queen was not the only senior citizen to have had a light-bulb moment? What if older people aren’t half as stupid as we think? Maybe they’ve cottoned on that pretending to have dementia is a way to snatch back power and make everyone else’s life utterly miserable. Besides, Jimmy claimed, how hard can dementia be to fake? What’s more like dementia than forgetting the story you’re making up?

With that, Jimmy brought us Roger and Johann, a gay couple, having tea with Roger’s ma. Pretending to have dementia lets ma stick her beak ruthlessly into Roger and Johann’s relationship, breaking it like a beady-eyed bird smashing an oyster against rocks. Just like what Cairstine was doing to Kathy right now.

4

Helensburgh, Sunday 19 April 2020 (2)

‘Both of my girls were angels,’ explains Cairstine, ‘in their own way. But Kathy was very focussed on her career. I had to find my place in her order of things.’ She beams a smile like a cracked dinner plate. ‘She left me.’