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The Medium is the Mess - A novel - In association with http://moralorder.mediumisthemess.com/
Intro:-
Stop Press: The Last Word
If you were to lay end to end all the words that have been committed to paper
(or communicated according to ancient oral tradition) since the dawn of civilisation, meaning not simply those words that
appeared in published works but also those that appeared in the first and second and subsequent draughts of those published
works (as well as all the words that had been crossed out in all of those draughts); if you included all the words in all
of the copies of those published works, whether sold, remaindered or trashed and then added all the words from unpublished
books (by frustrated authors and the like); if you also took all the words that had been committed to the Internet and computer
files and disks and other new media formats; if you were to lay end to end all these words chronologically in a line starting
from some point on earth - perhaps a seat of learning would be appropriate - and pointed the line of words out into space;
and if you then decided to read every word, using some form of interplanetary or inter-stellar device which moved slowly enough
for you to read (although it need not be that slow for speed-readers) but also miraculously had enough thrust to get you out
of the earth’s atmosphere; if you were twenty when, starting from the first ever recorded piece of literature, you began
to read this long line of words, you would be married with two kids by the time you had read any Homer, you would be drawing
out your pension by the time you got to Euripides and dead before you’d even reached Aristophanes. And if the rocket
carried on following the line of words, then by the time it had reached the last word ever written, the Universe would have
aged by thousands of millions of light years and there would be literally trillions and trillions of new words created to
add to the end of the original line of words, assuming that, by that time, words still existed and had not in fact been sucked
into some kind of great big Black Hole.
Chapter One: The Heist
“You can’t help wondering what gentle, peace-loving Jesus
Christ would have thought…” said Neville, playing with his glasses. “…had he known what
would be done in his name,”
“I imagine he would have thought, ‘why didn’t I see this coming?’
” I replied
But he ignored me, pressed
his nose against the Perspex, as if trying to penetrate Feebly’s installation. “And you can see why the curator
had a fight on his hands… trying to persuade the powers-that-be to display this work here, at this retrospective of
all places.”
The conceptual art ‘retrospective’,
‘Cool Britannia to the Credit Crunch’ appeared little more than a celebration of Ichabod Feebly and his conceits
of the past decade. I could not understand why Neville had dragged me inebriated and drowsy to this jumble of bric-a-brac
- beds, bed knobs and skeletons - when all I had requested were the email addresses of a couple of his media friends.
“I
had no idea that the curator had a fight,” I muttered. I really did not care whether he had or not. I had scanned so
many column inches about Feebly’s ‘outrage’ that I wondered what I could add. But I squeezed out a question:
“What exactly was he trying to say then? Does this work really say anything about water-boarding that hasn’t already
been said, you know in the newspapers?” I hoped that this might draw Neville back to the subject of journalism and my
really quite reasonable request. But he was detached and carried on examining the wretched thing.
Neville had put on weight
since I had last seen him. He was once wiry, hungry-looking – he was always on the go. But too many lunches and too
much booze during the latter half of his career had made him balloon. His choice of clothing was suspect: He had swapped the
Armani and Paul Smith for a country gent look – tweeds, cords and brogues. And what was the cravat supposed to mean?
Squire Neville? Bit incongruous for a lad who had grown up in Finchley. Perhaps he was reminding me that he owned a hundred
acres in Wiltshire – purchased with an outrageous 2004 bonus, needless to say.
Neville’s guise as art connoisseur
was laughable. He explained to me that the ‘culture-technician’, Ichabod Feebly, had successfully merged nineties
Brit style with topical subject matter –
formaldehyde, Perspex, with an interior that was very much ‘de
nos jours’: war, torture and the human condition. Inside the Perspex, the artist had suspended a human skeleton, a towel
wrapped around the skull. There were no interrogators though, no buckets of water that might actually facilitate a ‘water-boarding’.
But the skeleton’s isolation made the whole thing seem altogether more ‘brutal.’ So I was told.
Neville
went on in this vein for a while, before enquiring, “Was Feebly in fact making a subtle statement about baptism…
As some have suggested?”
“Baptism,” I laughed. “What on earth has it got to do with Baptism?”
“Feebly
is obsessed – some say for all the wrong reasons - with Christian iconography. As far as I know – well as
the legend has it, to be precise - truth sets you free. It is something along those lines.”
“Truth sets you
free? Excellent. More like, in vino libertas… wine sets you free.”
“Before you sneer, this kind of conceptual
art is all about getting people talking… It is all about getting people to ask questions. It is all about creating…
controversy… like the little boy in the playground who gets out his John Thomas.”
I was about to chuckle very
loudly but I realised that Neville was serious. The absurd nature of the allusion perplexed me. “Everyone notices the
little fellow, you mean?”
Again, he would not connect, but continued with his analysis. “Look at that pattern
on the towel… or is it a towel? Is it a shroud?” His manner became playful, breezy. “And of course you cannot
make out the pattern. Some have suggested that if you stretched open the towel you would detect the face of our Lord. A reference
to the Turin Shroud, one supposes.”
“You are not serious…”
“Oh, I mean it.”
He said. “I’m absolutely serious. Maybe it’s a rumour put about by the artist… to get people even
more enraged, more engaged. But the point is, it is simply impossible to know because the poor fellow – the skeleton,
I mean - is suspended in formaldehyde and the towel – or should I say shroud? – is nailed to the skull. It is
inaccessible. One thing we do know is that water-boarding is an activity that supposedly leads to truth. Therein lies the
connection, perhaps..? Therein lies the rub…? Well, just a thought.”
Just a thought? I went on, “Surprising
no-one’s attacked it when you think about it.”
Neville looked at me quizzically.
“You know what people
are like.” I explained. “People, people… actually attack art nowadays… or hadn’t you heard?”
I could tell that the remark was unwelcome and I felt my cheeks radiating warmth. I shifted to a tone more earnest, the manner
of Neville. “And perhaps that is what these artists want… Free publicity, you know. Coming back to the boy with
his willy, his John Thomas I mean and, and… It’s all about provocation, right?” I wasn’t getting through.
I blushed more and fanned myself with the leaflet. “Also if you ask me, the security in this place is crap, or you know,
not very good. So in actual fact anyone could come in here and lob a brick at it.”
I had said too much. But even
this prompted little response, although I did detect a quiet tut. Nev was clearly focused. He returned to the subject of journalism
- but for the wrong reasons. “I spied an article recently... I think it was the Guardian. The erudite Christopher Magee
tried out water boarding.”
“He did?”
“It was, you could say, an…
experiment. Wanted to see what it was like… see how long he could withstand it.”
“Really?”
“Indeed,
he said he didn’t last more than a few minutes. It was unbearable.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“And
that, Dean, was all in the name of journalism.” For the first time since we arrived at the retrospective he looked me
in the eye – not like the occasional sideways glances earlier, but a firm gaze that clearly suggested that he expected
me to take note. “Real journalists put themselves in danger.”
“There’s commitment for you.”
I said, worried where this was leading.
“Maybe that’s the kind of commitment you need to show yourself, Dean…
you know, if you want to get on.”
“Yes, but…”
“Ever thought of trying what Magee tried?”
“What?
Water-boarding? You must be…”
“You might actually have a chance of getting something published…
Might, I stress. You could even set yourself up, compete with Magee. See if you could go longer than Magee. I’ve met
Mr. Magee by the way… You never know, you might one day end up on reality TV… or something.”
“You are joking aren’t you?”
He walked around to
the other side of the work and I followed. I peered really, really hard at the shroud, trying to make out the pattern. But
the cloth was too wrinkled. I looked back at Neville. Was he going to get involved in this water-boarding? “And what
exactly are you suggesting? You’d help me? Like, you’d take on the interrogator role, I suppose?”
“Yes,
I could work with you on this,” he said ambiguously. “When it comes to who does what, we could take it in turns.”
I
smiled awkwardly. “And you think that if I only wrote an article… about my experience… my experience of…”
Neville
nodded enthusiastically, indicating that I should pursue this line of thought.
“You think that some… some editor…”
I tailed off, feeling slightly deflated.
Neville stopped nodding and shrugged. “Just an idea, Dean. You don’t
understand quite how hard it is to ‘break into journalism’ as you put it earlier… freelance or otherwise.
You really need to have something quite special… to sell. Papers have all the columnists and restaurant correspondents
and art critics and sports writers and travel writers they need…”
As we wandered on he muttered, “I heard
about your little friend from the Rutherford by the way? The fellow who secured you the invite to the collider. Very jammy.
Hope you’ll make something out of it.”
I smiled meekly. He was referring to a media event that I had attended
that morning, courtesy of another University friend, Professor Richard Blakemore. This was the switch on of the experimental
‘particle collider’ in Northern France. How had Neville found out about it? He duly answered this without prompting.
He
chuckled - I’m not sure why. “I heard about it from Lilly Magritte – that rather coquettish French physicist
I introduced you to a year ago… She worked with me in Securitisation. She’s returned to the Grande Ecole…
after the world collapsed, after the world rediscovered entropy. Putting her science to better use, I should say.”
Nev
was generously referring to a ‘rocket scientist’ that his bank had employed who had returned to the scientific
community. She was now with the establishment that built the ‘collider’ – a strange piece of machinery that
was designed to recreate something called the ‘God Particle’. Should I tell Nev that the whole ‘switch on’
had washed over me? Probably not. Never know, he might be so impressed that he’d get one of his friends at the FT to
commission an article.
“Good for you,” he concluded. “Good… for … you.” His manner
appeared to indicate faint praise. “But how many lucky breaks like that will you get?”
I shrugged.
He continued
“Of course, coming back to stunts, if you don’t fancy water-boarding, and no good comes from the ‘collider’,
you could always go to a war zone, I suppose. Under fire or what have you. That might kick start your new, your new…
career.” There was an element of disdain in his tone. “Kick… start,” he repeated and laughed.
It was fine for Neville, I thought, with all his media chums. He
could afford to down tools for a year or so, live off his offshore millions; wing the odd article about market meltdowns into
his pal Milo Gould at the FT. So much for wanting to ‘help you out, old boy’. This was it…? Why don’t
you give torture a go, Dean, old boy… fly to a war zone, endanger your life because it was ‘headline grabbing’…
And whilst we’re at it, shall we have a laugh at my invitation to the collider ‘switch on’ - something
most people would consider a big event..?
I was tempted to remind him how I often I had assisted him in the old days,
in the ‘dating department’ back at University… I let him tag along on numerous occasions whilst Mel and
I got pissed at vodka staircase parties. He would just drool over her friends and make cack-handed attempts to get them back
to his room on Great Court (“Come back for a whisky… the view is exquisite!”). After the first term, I had
become tired of his hanging around the crowd, turning up at their rooms after pub closing with a bottle of Bulgarian in his
sweaty palm, or lurking at the Modern Language Faculty, sipping weak coffee, nodding inanely at anything they said, clearly
‘gagging’ for it. He didn’t even realise that the girls took the piss out of him behind his back.
How
the desperate had risen…. And where did he get this ‘old boy’ stuff from? Probably from this City Livery
company that he’d joined back in 2000. Yes, he’d really made it.
So why did he answer my email the other day if he simply wanted to explain
how the media worked over lunch, then illuminate me with his detailed knowledge of Modern Art?
Ah! Perhaps that was the point - he wanted to emphasise how our careers
had diverged after University. After all, how many million dollar bonuses had I banked over the past ten years? Had I been
on the board of a US investment bank? How many houses in London and St Jean did I own? How many Ichabod Feeblys had I purchased?
Is that what he was saying?
Then again, he had some nerve bragging… at a time like this. I could well point out
that his Investment Bank had run out of cash and that his successful career and his fabulous life had ended in the tatters,
in the embers of a massive, massive corporate insolvency… And that I was not the only city drop-out trying to re-invent
himself?
Well, second thoughts, maybe not… at least until I’d seen whether he could get me those names.
The next installation in the ‘Cool Britannia’ line-up:
a female shop dummy, a plastic Mannequin. Something about it was familiar, I thought. It wore a pink latex mini-dress and
sprouted cropped red hair haphazardly noosed in a Union Jack bandana. From somewhere within this crude representation
blared the infantile gurgles of JD Crackden - pop princess, early exponent of ‘girl power’ and the ‘artist’
of two best-selling albums, ‘Kingdom of the Bland’ and ‘Four Eyed Queen’. The East London girl, plastic
and empty like the dummy was the darling of all generations - teens and thirty-some things… I had heard greying sixties
academics on chat shows extolling her ‘throughput’. Her individuality, her ‘eccentricity’ and her
personal ‘struggle’ (with drugs) had, I suppose, mesmerised the public.
It appears that these admirers ignored the minor fact that she was in
reality an ex fashion model - discovered and moulded by pop impresario Dr. Hansel Mendel. Was he a real doctor? I don’t
know. But the guy’s technical wizardry had transformed the identikit model into identikit singer – a therapy of
sorts, I guess. And it was this issue of the ‘svengali’ and the model that the installation laid bare.
Neville
spewed forth, “Ah, ‘Music Box in a Mannequin’. Another Feebly enigma... A reference to popular music as
much as to art.”
I stifled a yawn. The guided tour was becoming rather tedious. I asked wearily, “I presume
this was done with her consent?”
“Interesting point, isn’t it?”
No, I thought… It is really
not that interesting… simply all that I could think of right now.
“The work is clearly making a comment on
the state of popular music. It is saying that pop is mass-produced, a dreary cultural paste made from… from re-formed
cuts of other artists.”
Here we go again. This time the yawn could not be stifled and I projected a groan that caught
Neville’s attention.
“Too much wine, old boy?” He asked. A weak grin spread over his face.
I was
about to ask him “What’s with this old boy thing?” But he returned to the installation and continued, “The
producer finds a teenager who looks the part but cannot sing. Then he mashes
together clichéd words and derived harmonies that the model tries
to learn and repeat.” He said this with clear disdain. “And whatever comes out is digitally enhanced to make it
sound acceptable… in a very insipid and predictable sort of a way of course.”
Yes, yes…thanks for
the lesson on popular culture, I thought. This was the kind of thing I’d been banging on about for years… It was
galling to hear a cynical character like Neville Greenspore sounding judgemental. I spelt out my previous question more precisely,
“Can you tell me why exactly Dr. Mendel and Crackden would allow this artwork to appear? It is a slur on their…
their professionalism perhaps?”
“The only slur Miss Crackden might care about is slurring her words. These
people are t… tarts. They welcome the free publicity. You see, it’s the publicity that matters. It sells more
records, keeps them in the spotlight, brings in more money. That is all that really counts.”
“A symbiotic relationship
is what you’re saying?”
“Indeed I am.” Neville replied and smiled preciously. “Indeed I am.”
It wasn’t immediate - my sense that something was up. I registered
a disturbance; a flurry of activity in the corner of my eye. But I think that I blithely dismissed it as something to do with
the ‘retrospective’. Maybe a stunt, maybe an attack on the Feebly (if only!) Then there was a scream from the
crowd of Hoxton art trendies that we had bumped into earlier. Their bleached quiffs were fluttering wildly in the turbulence;
they had stopped mincing around in their black leathers and grey linen ponchos and were scattering. Neville and I swung round
and saw a wild eyed little man in a cream linen suit and silver tie, waving a revolver, hurtling towards us.”
“Ruddy hell,” I screamed.
We dived in opposite directions
and hit the parquet. I crunched my elbow, numbing the funny bone and winced for a second before slithering further out of
the gunman’s way.
The gunman darted by and went straight for the mannequin. He grappled with it, staggering, even
though it was inanimate and offered little resistance, before he yanked it up, with music box, and raised it onto his right
shoulder. He staggered around like a drunkard then struggled to find his bearings. His grip on both gun and mannequin was
unsteady. He turned in the direction of the exit and…
I realised that I knew this guy. Tom Crown. Thomas Bukovic
Crown.
It was the cackling eyes, the deranged eyes, bolts from the blue… bloodshot, wild and unhinged… the
product of mind warping drugs I found out… little man, that stumpy little man… and the Slavic, the angular cheekbones…nose
like a ferret’s… sniffing its quarry, analysing the air…
Tom Crown… What had brought him here?
What did he want with the Feebly Mannequin? My initial thought was Neville… Neville had set this up. Neville had to
know that I knew this guy. Neville probably knew this guy. A player like Tom Crown had probably used banks like Neville’s
for finance. That had to be why Nev was so insistent that I tag along… to the retrospective – he was going to
turn this into another… endeavour. A stunt.
But… I looked over at Nev. He was terrified… No hint of foreknowledge
– not now at least. Maybe I was paranoid. The drink earlier? Ego… egocentricity?
I had not bumped into Crown for years. Of course I’d seen
him… The guy had become a well known face on business television. He had made something of his life, more than I, much
more than Neville. This was a boy who’d been expelled and re-educated, expelled again and finally imprisoned…
an old schoolmate, and later successful ‘entrepreneur’; rags to riches and perhaps back to rags again… Tom
Crown, the boy we used to call DD – ‘Designer Drugs’.
I shouted, “Crown? Tom Crown? It’s
me, Ludd. Dean Ludd.”
This threw him – or at least I think it did. His head swung round, destabilising his
little frame. He staggered three steps forward and dropped the dummy, which came crashing to the ground. The ‘Music
Box’ (which resembled a large IPOD) flew from the Mannequin’s neck wrenching it from the speakers that Crown had
forgotten to disconnect and that were now on their side.
Then the oddest thing happened: He regained his composure and
looked up, bewildered for a moment, then twigged. “Ludd. Dean Ludd. How are you?” His cheerful manner disarmed
me. It was as though he’d seen me yesterday. And then his posture stiffened. He bristled. He said, “Ludd, I can’t
stop now.”
What brought about this change of attitude? One minute, a dishevelled mess, the next upright, focussed
and serious. Before he marched out, he turned and said coolly:
“Drop me and email. I’m:
TomCrown@ .com
“We
should catch up.”
With that he darted off, gun in his left hand, Dummy propped on his shoulder.
Neville
crawled over. He scrutinised me, or it appeared that he was scrutinising me. “Seemed to know you, old boy. Any reason
for that?”
“No, no reason whatsoever. Total, total non-reason...”
“You do know that fellow,
am I right?”
“Well yes but…” I was tongue-tied once more. “D… Did you see that? His
odd manner? What an odd way to, you know…”
“Yes, I had noticed.”
“This is really bizarre,
you are not going to believe this, but I used to go to school with the guy.”
Neville did not pick up on this for
some reason, but said, “I rather think that I recognise him… he’s that property tycoon fellow, isn’t
he? What’s the ghastly programme called…? Mortgage, No Mortgage?”
“Yes, yes ghastly, ghastly, absolutely
ghastly. I don’t watch it.”
“And just so happens, a modern art fanatic… funnily enough. Coincidentally
enough.”
“Oh right, I see… I see.” I was thinking, this is fake, right? “Well, modern art
is something he takes very seriously, judging by that performance…” I studied Neville’s face searching for
clues. He
was poker-faced. “Neville? Can I just ask why exactly did you bring
me to this retro..?” But my question was interrupted as two uniformed men entered the room. They looked bemused.
A
moment later, two, three, then six security guards swarmed around the room, looking aimlessly for someone to restrain.
Neville
turned and pointed towards the door, “He’s gone that way, for crying out loud.”
The guards looked even
more confused and continued spreading around the room.
Neville jumped up. “He’s gone down the corridor. He
is not in here any more…” He pointed and emphasised. “T-H-A-T W-A-Y”.
Chapter Two - The Morning After – Where’s Neville?
Mel left the house as quietly as I had entered it three hours
earlier. I peered cautiously from under the duvet. She hadn’t even tried quizzing me on my five o’ clock return.
I had feigned heavy, heavy slumber as she was primping, smoothing, spraying her black helmet. Maybe she didn’t have
time. Perhaps grilling me was pointless – another barrel of lies and excuses would gush forth.
I should worry.
Why did she no longer interrogate me? Ok, she probably had more important matters to tend to. But it might be the case that
she no longer cared… because she had a new agenda: The big D. Our career trajectories, our lives had certainly diverged
over the past year. Her lobbying job had taken her to new heights. I was ‘re-inventing’ myself because my day
job had gone. She swept through life clad in Dior; I pottered about in ten year old shirts and stonewashed jeans, in this
grim new economic reality.
Still, one step at a time; her hurried departure was a relief.
I could barely function, let alone fabricate an excuse. My head was filled with a kind of sludge, a mixture of gruel and wire
wool; a few neurons were firing off. The rest were still paralysed, numbed by the cocktail of chemicals ingested the night
before. Problem was, my memory was colluding in this meltdown. I struggled, cajoled my grey matter into offering up some detail…
…After
the heist, Neville had shot off to some dinner. But what had I done after he’d gone… and what exactly did we get
up to when he returned later in the evening telling me that ‘he needed to level with me’? Who or what got me home?
There were definitely other people involved... somewhere along the way.
My tongue was coated with a béchamel glaze; my
face had all the texture, all the glow of peeled potato; my hair was without rest… I had forgotten to brush my teeth;
they were plaqued and grainy; I tried to co-ordinate… I thought about a toothbrush… for a while… then hobbled
around. A flash-back of sorts materialised… Neville and Tom Crown… something about the two of them sitting together….
Maybe I dreamt about them though. I had an image, a vague focus… I was sitting in a room with them, I know that much…
possibly arguing. Could it have involved drugs? And there was some kind of violence. Not sure what.
I avoided putting pressure on the creaky banister, as I hobbled
downstairs and bent forward gingerly to manhandle the papers that Mel had propped against the wall. I felt nauseous; my head
filled with blood.
Since I’d embarked on my ‘career change’, I’d taken to ordering a raft of papers
– or rather Mel had on my behalf. But they left me feeling rather hopeless. What was the point of any of this, I thought.
Everything I wanted to do, someone else could do better, was doing better. Although of course I did have some strong opinions
on this stuff; I could opine at length, oh yes… But then, as Neville had said, no-one would pay me to opine at length…
in view of the fact that I was unknown… and apparently ‘unconnected’. Plus there was the fact that they
had all the columnists they needed.
I idled through the redtops:
"MINE'S A JD"
There’s my reality check, I thought. Many of the papers were
leading on the theft… There’s Ichabod Feebly’s reality chick as well – a picture of the real, stoned
looking JD… and next to her the crude representation – Feebly’s plastic songbird gone for ever, grabbed
by a recidivist who went to the same school as I and who could well have blown my brains out yesterday afternoon…. Well
assuming the gun was loaded of course. And then of course there must be the insurer’s reality cheque winging its way
to an owner recently bereft of this dismal conceit. And then… the reaction of the gallery’s curator, Janacek Pobbly
on hearing that his cherished mannequin had vanished. He had puked all over one of Feebly’s other works: A reality chuck.
Now the possible connection: Property Developer and Art lover, Tom
Crown, some were suggesting, had been infatuated with the real life JD Crackden. They had met briefly at last year’s
Pen and Ink Festival in Basingstoke that Crown’s company, Crown Property Management had sponsored. Maybe this was no
ordinary heist…. This time it was personal etc.
I recalled that Crown had always been a hothead when it came to women
– he once accused me of looking the wrong way at his girlfriend, Tuesday Kramer. I was only looking at her because she
had changed her hair colour from a subtle shade of mouse to crimson. Little did Tom know that I really did sleep with her
on one occasion.
But why would he steal this dummy?
Investigations were continuing and police had visited Crown’s
properties in South Kensington and Cheshire…
Having read a ropey description of the theft – apparently one
of the Hoxton bores had attempted to foil the heist by tripping Crown – I moved on; I took a look at the Chronicle.
I saw something that made me despair:
“HOME SECRETARY THROUGH TO FINAL OF CELEBRITY DANCING”
“Home secretary, Olga Mather has beaten all other Whitehall contenders
to reach the final of BBC’s…”
I groaned. What’s going on? Dancing ministers? Clearly not enough
to occupy them at Westminster.
Maybe I was trying to break into the wrong profession. Maybe Neville was right when
he raised Chris Magee’s water-boarding antics: my aims were ill-conceived. Why would anyone hire me to write yet another
column? The raison d’etre of newspapers was making money and to do that you had to give people what they wanted. That
or produce something highly unusual, sensational… something other reputable writers could or would not produce themselves.
It got worse:
“SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER HAS SEX CHANGE!!”
“Mega-rich singer, Satan has produced another record. This
time it’s a medical one! Her pooch Anubis, has today emerged from the Beverly Hills Canine Sex Clinic… a bitch.
The singer had for some time been aware that Anubis was not happy in the original doggy position and had apparently whimpered
longingly at a pink leather diamond encrusted collar when Satan took him/her shopping in Bond Street last year...” People
really get into this stuff, I thought. No doubt, the dog will convert to Buddhism next. Dogs have a spiritual side.
On a more serious note the Herald had this.
“NATIONAL DEBT MUCH BIGGER THAN RECORDS SUGGEST”
The article referred to the manipulation of debt by keeping it all
off the ‘balance sheet’. ‘Private Finance initiatives have allowed the Chancellor to claim that the national
debt was a third of its true value.’
Narrative, narrative, narrative, I thought. That’s what it’s
all about. This was a favourite ruse, a way of massaging the narrative. The truth is only as good as the numbers you select
to define the truth. If you are lucky enough to be able to set the guiding principle of truth, then you can make the truth
appear as you want it to appear. It was like the scam where train operators alter the definition of ‘overcrowding’
on trains. If there were normally sixty people standing on every train, then by redefining ‘overcrowding’ as sixty
one people standing, you could claim to have abolished ‘overcrowding’.
The truth shall set you free?
Change
the terms of the narrative and you can change peoples’ perception of truth. Indeed, it was the kind of tomfoolery that
the likes of Neville Greenspore and Tom Crown cherished.
Cherished? Maybe not.
Finally, something about science and
religion, the kind of subject that I was drawn towards and hoped might be my niche… one day.
"DON’T ASK GOD, ASK ME,ME, SAYS SCIENTIFIC LITERALIST DAWKINS"
A paper on memetics written by a noted biologist claims that God
is in fact a poor copy of an earlier version of God given to us by our early reasoning ancestors.
Sounds like bullshit,
I thought… Maybe the guy is trying to say that religion’s in our DNA. If so, they should ban it, just like anger
and rage or arrogance and pomposity… is that what he means? And should they also ban schizophrenia? Obsessive compulsive
disorders? Bad Science?
I was having second thoughts (or third thoughts, fourth thoughts) about
journalism. Maybe Neville’s hint was right. I wasn’t up to it. I had to be prepared to take risks, do something
different, deliver stuff people wanted to read, not simply look for alternative avenues for my proselytising.
Of course
I did have a headline story myself now – the Mannequin theft. I was on the spot… could not have been closer. I
even knew the perpetrator. That could be my angle, my plan… Write something about the heist. I should talk to Neville
again. What was it he said last night? Oh dear… Maybe that was the problem - He might agree that it was indeed newsworthy.
But would he put me in touch with ‘the right people’ if I cobbled something together? Maybe he would want to cobble
something together himself. After all he was there and it might be a good news item for him.
But what angle should I take
anyway, assuming it was a goer? What was really going on here? There was more to this theft than met the eye. Someone I knew
carried this heist out, at
the very moment that I was visiting the gallery. Some coincidence? What
were the odds of this really happening? What would Neville’s aims be in setting up something like this? One thing was
for sure: He was very keen to take me around the ‘retrospective’. And his behaviour did seem a bit erratic, measured,
contrived: Then he’d scuttled off to this dinner straight after the heist, didn’t he? Furthermore I was becoming
more and more sold on the idea that Nev must have come across Tom Crown on a professional basis, at some point in his investment
banking career, even though he did not admit it. I don’t think he did. And Tom Crown turned up later in the evening.
So it was all planned in some way - no coincidences. And what of the strange reaction from Crown when he was actually at the
gallery? After all these years he reacted as though we had talked a week ago. That had not been explained last night.
Neville
was supposed to have answered these questions when he zipped back after the dinner to ‘level with me’. But we
had been distracted. From what I can recall, he was always just about to give me the low-down on the theft… but we never
quite got there. And why? Why? Getting more drunk did not help and… also there were drugs… quite a lot of drugs…
he thought it amusing to keep me on tenterhooks, keep me guessing. “You want to know what this is all about, Dean? You
know the lesson we’re going to learn here, old boy?” But he never got around to it… But why? Why? Something
happened… and it was to do with Tom Crown turning up, that was it, it was after he turned up… and then there was
some kind of… violence. The evening went awry. Things… got out of hand.
My chain of thought was shattered as
the phone rang a few feet away from me. Eleven o’ clock, said the Magritte wall-clock. Probably Mel checking on me –
what had I got up to? Maybe she’d read about the theft and wanted to get the low-down. Maybe she worried about me. I
let the phone trip onto answer; I wasn’t ready to squirm quite yet.
The voice that crackled was a woman’s but it was not my wife’s
“Hello,
Dean? Dean? Are you there? I really need to speak to you. Please, please, please, if you are there it is urgent. Please can
you pick up?”
It was Nev’s wife Ruthie. She had once been a banker – head of bond sales at Neville’s
house; that’s how they met. But she had abandoned her career a few years earlier to become a full time, very well turned
out, mother. Very important to Neville, she was a couple of rungs up the social ladder. It meant that he could penetrate the
other elite - the kind of people who had been thin on the ground up in Finchley. She was now at vanguard of the anti-banker
brigade that had developed since the financial meltdown. She had known what these guys were like; she’d been exposed
to the testosterone, the bullshit… Jail them all, she now said. She hated Neville’s derivatives friends. The dark
side of finance she called them. I leapt at the phone and wrestled with it for a moment before putting it to my ear. “Hi,
Ruth, it’s Dean. What’s up?”
“Oh Dean, hi, hi. It’s Neville. He didn’t come home last
night and, and I’m a bit…”
“He didn’t come home? He did attend the awards thing, right..?”
Neville had scuttled off after the police finished questioning us because he had to attend some Awards Dinner. This no doubt
involved more financiers, artists and media types, I reckoned. It was just a shame that he couldn’t have invited me
to that. That would have been a rather fine way to get to know his media mates.
“Yes, he came to the dinner,
Dean. But it was after that. He went off again. He said that he was going off to find you for some reason.”
“Right?
Ok, yes… Well I believe that we did meet later for a drink… we sort of chewed over the, the… we discussed
the theft of the, you know, at the gallery… I seem to remember. Or at least we were going to. We didn’t quite...”
“Dean, before he even went off to find you again, it was clear
that something was up. He was very drunk. And he kept on disappearing… to the loos… rather a lot.”
“Really?”
I sniggered childishly. “What do you think he was doing… drugs or something?” I thought: Is that why you
haven’t called the Police?
Ruth was clearly not amused. She continued, “He was behaving very erratically. Could
he have been traumatised by the whole experience at the gallery? And… and what did you talk about… you know, this
Mannequin…when he came back to find you last night?”
“Well, I suppose, the papers more or less tell you
about the theft itself.” I said avoiding the detail. “With a few bits of… embroidery of course. Looking
back at it, it’s more farcical than traumatising. I assume that the gun was fake.”
“I’ve read the
papers, Dean. But you were there. What exactly happened?”
“Well nothing specifically that would affect Neville
any more than me. I mean I was as close to this Tom Crown and his so-called gun.” I said. I was struggling.
Ruth
paused. “And what about later when you met up again? Tell me honestly, Dean. Did he come and find you again because…
you know… Was he on some kind of drug quest...? I do know that he has dabbled in the past.”
I thought, if only
you knew, Ruth. He has more than dabbled. Allegedly, a courier dropped off five grams every Friday evening back in the old
banking days. Whacked off a gram or two with his PA even before they left the office for South Ken. “Well, to be honest
my recollection is a bit hazy…”
“Dean,” she replied with more gusto. “Please, Dean.
I am really rather worried.”
“I am telling you the truth. I really cannot say exactly.”
“You
really cannot say exactly?” she said mimicking my vagueness.
“I really don’t… I wish I could give
you a complete run-down…”
“Yes, of course you do.” She sighed heavily down the phone, to show her
displeasure. “And do you know anything about this conspiracy theory of his? Is it something that you boys were working
on?” She emphasised ‘boys’, I presumed, because it belittled us.
“Conspiracy?” I racked my
brains. “We turned over a lot of things, I think… But what do you mean conspiracy?”
“Maybe he didn’t
mention it to you… Or maybe he did. We were sitting by a Russian financier and his wife. I thought they seemed like
a perfectly lovely couple. She was from the Ukraine and he was an ex government official, I think. But Neville seemed to have
a problem with him. Probably squaring up to the new order, a banking competitor, the new face of…”
“What’s
this got to do with the art theft?” I asked.
“I’m not sure that it has anything to do with it.”
She replied. “That is why I am asking you. Neville was making a nuisance of himself. He grilled this Russian fellow
about the losses suffered by the oligarchs in the recent market turmoil. This poor fellow really didn’t want to talk
about it. It was obvious. But Neville was insistent... you must know what he’s like when he’s drunk. He probably
convinced himself that he had a piece for the FT. You know, about oligarchs. Although it’s all over the pages nowadays
anyway…”
“Right…” I replied, still confused.
“And
in the end I left them to it. I didn’t want to suffer further embarrassment.”
“I see,” I replied,
still unsure of the significance. “So what happened after that? He didn’t tell me any of this.”
“I
hardly spoke to Neville for the rest of the evening. After the meal I was chatting to some friends at another table. And then…
towards the end of the evening, he came over to me and blurted out this silly theory.”
“Okay.” I replied.
I was feeling bogged down.
“He had a theory about some Russian art fraud and he was talking about… about how
they would try to smooth over this theft at the gallery yesterday. I don’t know who they are. Or why they would smooth
it over, whatever that means.
“No… no, sounds very odd,” I replied, not letting on that I was sure that
the heist was a set-up. I continued, “I was just looking at the article; it’s all over the front page. They don’t
mention either of us… which I suppose is fortunate… in a way.”
“Yes, I suppose that it is fortunate.
Why? Do you two consider yourself to be expert witnesses, Dean?”
Ruth’s cynical tone wrong footed me. “Well…
in a sense…”
“And Neville said that you know this Tom Crown fellow.”
“I was school with
him can you believe it?”
“Oh were you? Oh I see.” She said. She was evidently
troubled. “And may I ask, what school did you go to?”
I attempted to laugh off her haughtiness. But there was
a brief pause. It seemed momentarily as though she expected an answer.
“Anyway,” she resumed, “Neville
came out with silly, silly nonsense about how he’d discovered… he’d been talking to a ‘journalist’
contact of his who was also at the dinner on another table… and he said he’d discovered that some news story was
about to break… some scandal at the heart of government.”
“What?” I chuckled. “Another scandal?”
“Not
another scandal. Oh I don’t know, I’m not sure now… I thought it was all related.”
“What
was?”
“Well the Russian chappie and and…”
“The Russian chappie?” I let out a half
hearted laugh. “Sorry, I don’t get…”
“Will you be quietfor a moment. You might find this
terribly amusing…”
“No, I don’t, I don’t,” I responded, terrified. “I just, just…”
She
snapped, “It was some… some spy scandal.”
You what?” I suppressed a laugh. I was hoping that she
would expand before my mind turned to jelly. Neville with a spy scandal? Whatever could he be up to? Who knows, maybe he was
better
connected than I imagined. Maybe this would be a story I could get in
on quick... Another lucky break. “Well that would be a big story.” I said, trying to sound earnest. “Do
you have any more info?”
She ignored me and continued talking about Neville. “And then, then Neville said something
about how he really had to get in touch with you. And he was going to grab a cab…”
“Yes, I know and as
I say, we did meet up, but I don’t remember anything about a conspiracy exactly. Certainly not a spy scandal. I think
I would have remembered that. No, definitely, I would have… But do you have any more information about it?”
“Of
course I don’t,” she said angrily. “That’s why I’m asking you, you dolt.”
This threw
me and I stammered, “Oh, I er… I really don’t know what to…”
“You er really don’t…”
she said, mimicking me once more.
“Look, Ruth, let me make some phone calls or something.” Why did I
say this..? I was at sea.
“It would be very nice of you if you could make some phone calls.” She said
sarcastically.
“Yes, I will, believe me Ruth. I will get in touch with… with…” I realised that
I hadn’t a clue.
“What if he’s had an accident? What if he’s in casualty somewhere… and he
can’t speak, or he’s unconscious. I’m really so worried. You know, I’ve tried his mobile several times.
It’s switched off.”
“Listen Ruth,” I said shifting to a relaxed and comforting tone, “Let
me make a few phone calls. Let me see what I can do. I’m sure this is nothing.”
“Nothing? Nothing?” she replied angrily. “I wish
I could be so confident. The best I can hope for, Dean… and I don’t take this lightly, is that he is having a…
a mid-life crisis, if you catch my drift. And perhaps… there’s something that you aren’t telling me…
in order to protect him.”
I replied weakly, “N… no. I’m… I’m not protecting him.”
Then
she went off on another tangent. “This whole business of re-inventing himself…”
She must have known I
was also ‘re-inventing’ myself.
She continued, “How is he going to be able to keep all the balls in
the air if his income becomes one tenth of what it was? That’s what we’re talking about. One tenth. He has to
learn how to live like everybody else. How is he going to pay the mortgage… the school fees?”
“I thought
that he’d parked away a tidy sum, before the balloon went up, if you know what I mean.” Then I corrected myself,
“If you don’t mind my saying, I mean… He did suggest that things were secure… certainly for the time
being. Also as you know, he has made some pretty good contacts in journalism – not just financial journalism - over
the past few years. But also in other areas… like art journals… And you’ve got to admit he’s well-connected
in the art world.”
“That remains to be seen,” she replied. “And I do know all about his contacts.
We had this Milo Gould over to supper the other day. He had a raging cold… apparently. But this freelance thing…
it seems to me like too many long lunches, too much alcohol… and definitely too much staying out late. I think he’s
taking the freelance element a bit too far.” Then she added, “Don’t you?”
“Ruth, Ruth, Ruth,”
I replied trying to convey an air of confidence. “He seems to me to be pretty disillusioned… I’ll give you
that.” I said this even though I was not sure that he was actually
disillusioned. I was disillusioned. Then trying harder to re-assure her
I continued, “But you have to give Neville a chance. The career that has sustained him, that has sustained a lot
of people is over, gone. I think that he just needs a bit of… time. A bit of time-out.”
She was not impressed.
“Dean, I’m giving him a chance and a bit of time out, as you put it. I think that I have the patience of a…”
she tailed off., not one to brag. “Let me just say that some wives I know would consider this marriage break up territory.”
I
gulped. I knew that I was on very shaky ground whatever I said. “He’s lucky to have someone as understanding as
you, Ruth.” The comment made me cringe. “But as I say these are tough times. We’re all… re-evaluating
what we believe in, our… our assumptions.”
Ruth said calmly and slowly, “Well I would be very grateful
if you could think… think about what might have happened last night and what he means by smoothing over this conspiracy,
assuming it means anything at all… does he… does he really have some journalistic ‘hunch’? Please
do have a think about why he didn’t come home last night. If the reality is that he has met somebody and you’re
protecting him, just think what it is like for me. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
“No, I know
Ruth,” I said.
“Please, just have a think, Dean. That’s all. Or make your phone calls, or whatever you
have to do. But please, please… just think.”
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