Read by the author
Boris Johnson woke up in his underpants on the floor of Number Ten. Carrie had gone to her mother’s with the baby. She left a note to say they were done and she’d see him in court. That he was nothing but a selfish toad. His model bus was still in pieces all around him from where he had smashed it in rage the night before. Boris Johnson liked to make buses. He had this thing where he made models of buses. He would get old wooden crates and turn them into buses and paint passengers enjoying themselves on the wonderful bus. And now his bus was broken because he had broken it and what a terrible time over which to preside.
Mary had coffee for him. ‘Good morning, sir.’
‘I dreamt I was dead.’
‘Have some coffee. I’ll get your trousers.’
‘Get a pen and paper, Mary. I’ll need to apologise to Carrie.’
‘No trousers?’
‘What did I just say?’ He walked to the window with his coffee. He saw the protesters of unfairness below, with their signs and their platitudinous upchuck, and Johnson thought to himself, what wetness, what dire engagement. He wanted to shout out to them about their bootstraps, and tell them that racism was only in their little fruitcake heads. Johnson thought the new way of life he had been trying to lead was stupid, and process was stupid, and people on the news pulling down statues were stupid. ‘Why don’t they pull it all down while they’re at it—pull down Westminster Abbey. Pull down Stonehenge.’
Mary came to his side and placed her hand on his shoulder and watched something stir at the top of Whitehall. ‘Men,’ she said.
The first of the lout herd began to swing plastic bags of lager cans down Whitehall and towards them in a pall of piss stain and Fred Perry. There were rangy and lanky men, and small tubby men, some just out of the nick or recently divorced, non-molestation orders on the lot of them, and high blood pressure, but no two exactly alike yet they were all the same angry and terrified man. And they made sure to scare off the protesters of unfairness, ripping up their signs and kicking them in the arse as they fled, their platitudinous upchuck in disarray.
‘Fun,’ Boris Johnson said. And the men saw Boris Johnson looking down at them and waved and shouted, ‘All right Bo-Jo!’
‘I suppose they’ve seen us,’ Johnson said.
‘They’ve seen us all right,’ Mary said.
‘How many do you make it?’
‘News has it at several thousand. Maybe tens of thousands.’
Johnson watched them unconcerned with the lines of riot police. ‘They don’t seem concerned, do they?’
‘No, sir. They don’t.’
Johnson smiled grimly. ‘We may see a little sport here before the day is out.’
Small and scrawny teenagers acted as scouts and videographers, shouldering one another, climbing onto windowsills of the different ministries to film and jeer and throw half empty beer cans that cracked and splashed on the asphalt. Mounted police at the sides of the men nudged their horses through their columns and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers, the ringleaders, were now coming through, down from Trafalgar, and the dust of the day was up, fusing with sunshine and deodorant.
The first men had begun to veer off from the herd and into Parliament Square to debag one another and spit at riot police, the police present to protect the boxed-up statue of Churchill from them, the men themselves there to protect Churchill from people not there, because the people-not-there did not understand that Churchill had moved Heaven and Earth to defeat the Nazis in the 1940s, and so the legion of men tried to defend it from people-not-there with Nazi salutes while singing Ten German Bombers, and they looked confused at Churchill boxed up—they hadn’t expected it.
They looked around for more statues to try and protect, and still the drovers beat their way forward, hands full of Stella Artois and cider, necking quarter bottles of vodka for courage, rising, chanting, and now too, Johnson heard above the footfall, throwing monkey gestures at the few protestors who dared stay, and some among the company had begun to saw back on themselves in ranting and unrealised ideological argument with the protesters until they felt they won the argument by pointing skyward at the chartered plane, a banner from its tail reading All Lives Matter, and some milled in confusion, not knowing what statues to defend and what ones to desecrate, these men who had dropped an entire class in the last hundred years, all stood thinking it was owed back to them, these men who once ruled the world now barely ruling their own trousers. They needed to be heard because they were in pain. They were going unmattered, and if Churchill was not in that fucking box, maybe he would come back and lead them into a fine and glorious war in which they could die mattering.
And just when the police thought the affair was as bad as it was going to get, up from the offside of the Embankment rose a more horde of worse cunt. They were gobbing yobs with knives in their belts, men who’d killed, men who’d beaten women and children, men who’d groomed, who’d raped their daughters. Men with nothing but the sexual abuse they suffered as a child on their minds and in their hate. Men you thought did not exist, sixteen pints in their bellies and ready to die, the present moment realised but distorted, mutated, and without any good inside it.
They pissed on graves of dead policemen and pissed on war memorials and spat on picnickers in the park and kicked the picnickers on the ground all in the name of free speech, and bore flags with misspellings of Britain on them, bedight with bits of broken beer bottle that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of the mounted police.
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, thousands even, half naked, pissing and shitting themselves, clad in Union Jack, wardrobed out of some fevered Wetherspoon’s nightmare, poppy pins, triskeles and swastikas, tattoos of the number 18 and 88 or 4/20, or Hitler’s birthday tattooed on their backs, Aryan fists in the air and the National Front emblem and Mohammed be damned, The Sun newspaper rolled up in their back-pockets like batons, Daily Mails like instruction manuals, Stone Island jumpers and coats of football firms, one still in the paper custody suit the cops had released him in, one with an umbrella and one in a green phosphorescent bikini and a bloodstained wedding-veil and some in headgear of the English Defence League or shouting Rahowa to imply the fierce racial and holy wars to come, and how National Socialisms and Zionist-led governments must topple, Heinrich Himmler’s horns and one man in Bullingdon coattails backwards and otherwise naked, and one in the t-shirt of Odin’s cross and a deeply pissed pair of trousers, cuts and black eyes done on other days by men now dead.
The men threw beer cans at the police and then verged the lines and threw fists and threw jeers and threw cries that they were in pain, and they screamed like abandoned babies upon the reeds, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous swear, flaring like a horde from hell more horrible than any kitchen sink Channel 4 documentary, screeching and yammering and vaping and smoking and filming, the universe experiencing itself through these men’s eyes, its curiosity concerning monosyllabic thought and untreated intellectualism well and truly satisfied.
‘Oh my God,’ said Mary.
‘Indeed,’ Boris Johnson said, happy for the first time in a long time.
Because Buller men once drew lines and carved up the world. They were Lord Lieutenants gone rogue. They waged illegal wars only to sit down and write history books about how they heroically brought an end to those very same wars. Buller men colonized South Africa and old-chap charmed their way out of ethnic cleansing tribunals—dust-ups, punch-ups and dukes-up. Buller men created Jack the Ripper to clean up the slums of East London making solid sport and bank in doing it. Buller men poisoned Maharajas for plantations in Pakistan, and once it was obvious they were the killer, they bribed entire towns quiet, while, from the princess’ fingers, they kissed back their opals.
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was a Buller man for fuck-a-doodle-do. A lot of the Edwards. Buller men were the shaggers and lothario conmen on the front pages, walking down court steps with a wry smile saying nice try coppers but you’ll never catch me alive. Von Bismarcks, Earls and Baronets—little Archibalds who married not just for dowry but for meanness—marrying to ruin the little bitch’s life. Buller men were meant to be the motherfucking juice, not the nincompoops.
Now they sat on boards of banks, guzzled dick pills and avoided grapefruit juice. Now they slumped their way through marriage counselling and grabbed a randy secretarial grope when they could, and paid off private detectives with hush money, but mainly apologised for swearing. Now they just ran the country. Now they were the administration.
The game was too small. Chicken shit stuff. Brexit on a bus and selling off the NHS be damned.
Because there was always going to be a baby on the way, or an illegitimate child looking for a hug or a cheque, and there was always going to be a publisher breathing down his neck for the return of an advance. There would always be a backstabbing Brutus and there would always be a back to stab. There would always be photos taken by hidden cameras. There would always be the past transgressions in Italian villas to bribe quiet and there would always be a Russian donor to answer for.
In the end there would always be the blasted Russians. There would always be a blackmail tape, a European Union to leave, a sense of racism to stir with a stick of populism, an economy to worsen for one’s own political gain, and none of it much mattered, not remain nor leave, not live nor die, not pluckiness taken to levels of farce, not disgraceful insincerity, not incessant lying, not manipulating, not jingoism, not nepotism, not negligence, not cronyism, not usury, not cheating.
All that mattered to Boris Johnson, if he was honest, above all else, was wanting to be the lad down there in the green phosphorescent bikini.
‘Good for you, lads,’ Boris Johnson said. ‘By God that’s Bullingdon blind and you don’t even know it.’
‘How shall I word the apology to Carrie?’ Mary asked, pen ready.
‘To hell with it.’
‘To hell with it?’
‘Never mind that stuff. There’ll always be someone looking for an apology, Mary.’
‘Forget the apology?’
‘Didn’t I just say never mind the apology?’
‘You did, sir.’
‘So why are we still talking about it?’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘Did you vote for me, Mary?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He was sure she was lying and he was turned on by it. He enjoyed the bone evil of these women. He wanted to crack an egg in her deceitful arse and fuck her so hard it scrambled. But that would be for another day. ‘Go away.’
Mary left him alone and Johnson got to picking up the broken pieces of his wonderful bus, but not before shouting after Mary that if she wanted to make herself useful, she could locate him some fucking macaroni shells. And some sparkly things for decoration, glitter and whatnot, and more red paint. And some glue for Christ’s sake! Some bloody bastard glue.
(c) David McGrath, 2021
David McGrath is the author of one novel published in 2015. He has won the Bare Fiction Prize, Storyslam and has twice been an MVP for Liars’ League. He used lockdown to write a novel called The Quockerwodger of Stonehenge: A Fan Fiction. It’s a fictionalised take on Boris Johnson’s 2020. His story tonight, The Capture of Whitehall, is from the novel. It’s inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, particularly the savages passage.
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