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  Chosen

  Within moments of Jeremy’s head hitting the palliasse and Pete snuggling down next to him, his life so far began flashing before his mind’s eye. And, with his new epiphanic perspective, he didn’t like the look of it. Not one bit he didn’t. The insistent question he kept asking himself as he writhed and sweated was: “What have I ever chosen?”

  So down the list he went, starting with birth. Well, he hadn’t chosen that, had he? What human or any other animal ever did? How could they, pre-embryonically? Mind you, parents Gloria and Ron hadn’t exactly planned Jeremy’s coming into the world either, by all accounts, notably those of his Auntie Maureen.

  “Proper surprised they were when you came along,” she’d once confided to Jeremy in a pub called The Hope and Horse after five Xmas gin and tonics too many. “At their age. Dearie me. Our Gloria must’ve forgotten her pills or sunnink. Probably reckoned she didn’t need ‘em any more. But then out you popped.”

  So, birth not planned, more a question of accident. A fumbled quickie, then the random workings of sperm and ova, and bingo a baby! Him. Fair enough, Jeremy could live with that.

  But then on the list went: school, Oxford, the bank, Sophie. Had he ever chosen any of them? Of course he hadn’t, quite the reverse. It was he who had been picked by them because he was either so bloody clever at maths (school, Oxford, bank) or, later when fabulously wealthy, Sophie.

  “And where was free will in any of this?” he mumbled, clutching at his head and whacking at the palliasse. “Nowhere, that was WHERE,” he yelled, which upset Pete who rolled onto his other side and grunted, “oink.” What was wrong with this human?

  But, being a pig, Pete had no answer to that. Didn’t have the big brain to fathom such angst. Just found it irritating. Life for Pete was lived from one moment to the next without worrying about anything except where his next meal was coming from. As far as he was concerned, concepts like life and death, let alone who chose whom or why, had no meaning. Pete didn’t even know that were he to venture unwarily out of his barn, he could be captured, killed, and turned into sausages, bacon, chops, or, in the worst case scenario, pork scratchings. Lucky Pete.

  What They Are Saying About Chosen

  An entertaining Kafka-esque fantasy. Pragmatic Jeremy Crawford is successful, wealthy and has everything laid at his feet. A genius in his work and force to be reckoned with, until the day he suddenly wakes up with a jolt. He recognizes the ephemeral life he's had over the years. Meaningless and all given to him. Not chosen. Questioning himself and his actions, Jeremy withdraws from the outside world and engages with philosophical conversations with a pig named Pete.

  This is a very funny and cleverly-written book. The writing is fantastic. The dialogues just blew me away and I loved the way Paddy Bostock describes things. He's an author that anybody could easily love. If you're an adult or a teen, you would definitely enjoy this book. It's out of the ordinary, charming and extremely witty.

  —Dawn Martinez

  www.goodreads.com/reviews

  After reading The Hanging by Paddy Bostock, I was thrilled when I got the ARC for Chosen. I like the unique style of Paddy where you not only have a good storyline and character-building, the writing style itself is very enticing.

  The story revolves around the MC Jeremy who suddenly realises he's never Chosen anything in his life so far. He has conversations with his pet pig Pete about how his life is ... one-sided of course!

  What he does and how he takes charge of his life…or does he is the rest of the story. I absolutely loved Jeremy. This is a wonderful change from hard and arrogant MC that seems to be a common troupe with Romance novels. Also, I loved Julie and she's an ideal match for Jeremy.

  Want to know what happened and how? You've got to read the book, of course!

  —Sherin Lloyd

  www.goodreads.com/reviews

  In this wonderful political fantasy, Paddy Bostock is back with a book that is unforgettable and mesmerizing. It is a book that I couldn’t put down once I started reading it.

  It is a story that most of us can relate to. We all get bored with our lives, regardless of what profession we are in. And sometimes, we feel that we have to make fairly big changes just to have a little bit of bliss and freedom. Jeremy Crawford wants to live a life he chooses and not one that is handed on by others.

  Jeremy Crawford seems to have it all. He has a great life as a very wealthy banker. But he feels that something is missing in his life. He no longer wants to continue as he has for many years, living someone else’s life. He wants to live a life than isn’t mediocre and dull. He wants to be able to do other things of his own choosing.

  It’s hard to believe Jeremy would want to pursue something as different as politics. But he does. Much like our world, the world that Bostock has created in his book is just as out of control as ours is currently. But how can Jeremy resolve his need for freedom and autonomy through the world of politics? It seems that these goals do not cohere with each other, until we read Bostock’s story.

  I loved the story from start to finish. It is honest and raw. And it highlights the need that we all have as humans to be recognized and free. This story is so powerful it may just make the reader want to reflect on his own life and make some small and/or big changes. I’d love to thank Bostock for yet another great story! I can’t wait to read your next book! Rating: 5 stars

  —Irene S. Roth

  irenesroth.wordpress.com

  rothsbookreviews.wordpress.com

  Chosen

  Paddy Bostock

  A Wings ePress, Inc.

  Political Fantasy

  Edited by: Jeanne Smith

  Copy Edited by: Christie Kraemer

  Executive Editor: Jeanne Smith

  Cover Artist: Trisha FitzGerald-Jung

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Wings ePress Books

  Copyright © 2018 by Paddy Bostock

  ISBN 978-1-61309-363-4

  Published In the United States Of America

  Wings ePress Inc.

  3000 N. Rock Road

  Newton, KS 67114

  Dedication

  To the young ones: Anya, Dan, Ishbel and Theo. May theirs be a fairer and saner world.

  One

  It took Jeremy Crawford a good chunk of the twentieth century and almost two decades of the twenty-first to get sane. At least that’s how he thought of it. Others—his wannabe actress wife, Sophie, his ageing parents, Gloria and Ron, his colleagues at the bank, fellow members of the squash club, assorted relatives and acquaintances—didn’t. They all thought he’d lost his mind. Why else, on the spur of the moment, would a person quit his lucrative position as HAA (Head Assets Analyst) in the City and on the evening of the very same day, decamp from the sumptuous interior of his multi-million-pound mansion to a disused barn at the foot of the thousand-square-metre “garden” to sleep on a palliasse with a pig called Pete and “consider matters”? To do that a person had to have lost his marbles, reckoned Jeremy’s relatives and friends.

  Okay, a minor aberration for a day or two due to stress at work they might have understood. Such was frequently the outcome of high-pressure jobs these days. But once Jeremy had been in his barn for two whole weeks and refused to come out, they were pretty sure he’d
lost the plot altogether. Food—he insisted on nuts and berries only—and water had to be left outside by Barry, the gardener, and were gathered in only when Barry was safely off talking to his trees and flowers. Jeremy trusted Barry. Apart from him, nobody was allowed within range, physically, telephonically, or cyber-technologically. It was Sophie who reported watching from their bedroom window as he tossed his three beloved smartphones, the ones he’d once termed his “lifesavers,” into the stream bordering the estate and waving at them as they sank out of sight. “Bye, bye. Glug, glug, gluggity and fuck you forever,” Sophie reported him having screamed as a full moon rose.

  Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before Jeremy’s relatives, acquaintances, friends and, leading the pack, his ex-boss Sir Magnus Montague, who hadn’t a clue about assets analysis and was ruing the loss of Jeremy’s expert advice, took to speculating about the desirability of psychiatric intervention to bring him back to his senses.

  “Jeremy’s evidently off his trolley and needs help, no question about it. Genius close to madness and so on,” was Sir Magnus’s view, as expressed at a private family powwow over canapés and champagne in one of the mansion’s larger gazebos in a copse of silver birches a stone’s throw from Jeremy’s barn.

  “Know a couple of trick cyclists myself, if that would be of any use,” he added. “Top of the range Harley Street types. Would cost a few quid but I’m sure the bank would be happy enough to fork out to retain a fellow of Jeremy’s talents. Wouldn’t want those vanishing down the pan, now would we?”

  “No we certainly wouldn’t, Sir Magnus,” was the joint response of Sophie, Gloria, and Ron, all of whose life expectations depended in one way or another on Jeremy’s capacity to keep on earning as many shedloads of money as possible. Sophie, because she was a bimbo trophy wife who’d never done a day’s work in her life and liked her mansion, and Gloria and Ron because their pensions were minuscule and they depended for their biannual private cruises to the Med and the Caribbean on their unexpectedly brilliant son’s inordinate wealth coming their way at regular, monthly intervals. Big investments in Jeremy’s continuing sanity they all had, and if this Sir Magnus bloke could find a way to keep the cash flow flowing, and pay for Jeremy’s treatment from bank funds rather than theirs, well he was their man.

  It was Ron, a retired small-time failed entrepreneur, who piped up first.

  “We’re in your capable hands, Sir Magnus,” he said. “Anything it takes to get poor old Jeremy back onto the straight and narrow.”

  A sentiment echoed by Gloria and Sophie.

  “Carte blanche for me on the trick cyclist front then, eh?” said Sir Magnus.

  “Of course,” said Ron.

  “Jolly good. It is in all our interests to see Jezza—that’s what we call him at the bank—back in business when all is said and done. And I’m sure a few sessions with one of my psycho johnnies would do the trick. Probably just some little glitch in the wiring somewhere, eh? A few calmer-downers, a touch of the old talking cure, and he’ll be back up to speed in two swishes of a pony’s tail.”

  Sophie, Ron, and Gloria smiled happily.

  “So then, many thanks for the nibbles and the bubbly, but now I really should be taking my leave. The car’s waiting, so toodle-oo, I’ll be in touch,” said Sir Magnus, levering his large backside from the gazebo’s finest wicker chair and opening the door.

  “And don’t fret, chaps, the shrinks will have old Jezza back to normal before you can say boo to a pelican,” he called over his shoulder as he planted one large, brown, pointy-toed Oxford brogue onto Barry’s carefully manicured grass and waved cheerily at the barn housing his ex-HAA before climbing into the back seat of the midnight blue Bentley 4x4 awaiting him.

  Peeping through the gap between two loose barn planks, Jeremy watched on as his ex-boss took his leave, and overheard his parting comment.

  “‘Normal,’ huh?” he muttered, returning to his palliasse. “Well, normal zormal. Eh, Pete?”

  “Oink,” said Pete, whom Jeremy now thought as his only friend apart from Barry.

  ~ * ~

  And what, you will be wondering, had happened to Jeremy so radically to shift his lifestyle from one of extreme opulence to dossing in a barn with a pig? Hiding away from some indictable 2008-ish banking crime he’d committed which had suddenly been unearthed and was threatening to ruin his career and bring shame on him and his family and see him incarcerated for the foreseeable future?

  Well, actually no. Jeremy had milked the markets with the best of them until the whole shebang went tits up and had been proud—as had Sir Magnus—of the firewalls he’d erected between himself and the bank to offset any threat of discovery or litigation. Due diligence was Jeremy’s forte and he had his mansion and treasured white, latest model Mercedes E-Class Coupé to prove it. No, no, his current circumstances had nothing to do with any malpractice of that kind.

  “So what then?” I hear you ask.

  Well, in the nuttiest of nutshells, the answer is the past participle “chosen.”

  “‘Chosen’?”

  Yes. You see, Jeremy had awoken one morning after a night of agitated dreams—tossing and turning a bit like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis—as an entirely new person, only mercifully not one transmogrified into a dung beetle. Call it an epiphany, call it anything you want, but overnight Jeremy Crawford had been reborn with whole new perspective on life. Whence the change had come he had no idea. But it had come. And the words echoing in his head when his eyes blinked open were: “In your whole life, Jeremy, you have never chosen anything. All you’ve ever been is chosen.”

  Well, you can imagine the mental kerfuffle that caused. On the morning of his reincarnation, Jeremy had batted it away. Treated Sophie to her regular morning power fuck until she rolled over and went back to snoring as if she’d never noticed. Then did a few press-ups and knees-bends on the carpet for the cardiovasculars before power showering, dressing himself in his snazziest Master of the Universe outfit—the tieless, slinky, shiny, blue suit with the thin trousers and pointy shoes like Sir Magnus’s—scarfing two energy bars with a doppio espresso, and heading to the Merc in the garage before hitting the highway City-bound to make his mark yet again on the international money markets.

  It wasn’t until he was only moments away from the office that he was forced to pull the Merc over, park illegally, and yoga-breathe.

  “What the bloody hell?” he said to himself.

  But the power breathing did nothing to improve his mood. Gone were his drive, his competitive edge, his desire to succeed, and, worst of all, his thirst for the status money guaranteed. And the bloody dream would...just...not...go...away. Normally Jeremy didn’t dream at all. Out like a light he would go once he’d checked his three phones one last time before putting them under his pillow, then oblivion till six a.m. the next day, when the regular pattern would be repeated. As indeed it had been today despite the bloody dream, which, dammit, kept reverberating around his head. “Choose.” “Be chosen.” “Choose.” “Be Chosen,” the chanted words peculiarly counterpointed with the throbbing of The Sex Pistols’ version of “My Way” and images that would have been familiar to Salvador Dali but weren’t to Jeremy because Jeremy had never liked art. Reckoned it the escapist enemy of the capitalist work ethic, unless it sold for millions, of course. Then it had value.

  It was as he was slapping his temples with both palms and banging his forehead on the Merc’s horn that the cop car pulled up alongside and two officers jumped out asking if he was all right.

  “Fine, and thank you for your concern, officers. You know how it can be on some days. Yakety yak from the missus, dog just puked on the kitchen floor, kids screaming—”

  Jeremy had neither a domestic animal nor a child on the principle either would have deflected attention from him, and Sophie was usually too hungover in the morning to speak, especially after she’d been power fucked, but he imagined that was the sort of situation lower-class types like coppers might
recognize.

  And how right he was.

  “Yeah, sounds just like my house,” said the PC, who introduced himself as Bill McGinity. Shaking his head and looking glum.

  “Mine too, only we got cats who do the puking. All them mice they keep eating,” said PC Johnny Staniford, showing his badge. “Only, never mind all that, you still can’t park here, pal. So on your way, okay?”

  “Okay. And thanks for the understanding.”

  Which was an unusual thing for Jeremy to say, for two reasons.

  Reason one: he never normally thanked anybody for anything,

  and,

  Reason two: he operated in a workplace where emotional responses threatened performance and were thus discouraged.

  Still the subterfuge had worked. No parking ticket. No warnings. Nothing. Nice enough blokes. Yet still, even as Jeremy gritted his teeth and pressed on towards the office, that godforsaken dream along with its Johnny Rotten soundtrack and its Salvador Dali fried-egg clocks kept flashing through what, he was beginning to fear, might have originated in his id. Fear because, as with art, Jeremy had always poo-pooed the possibility of explanations to life other than the super-ego awareness of profit and loss accounts, in Jeremy’s case always profit. So fuck Freud and his pals, right? Keep that kind of hooptedoodle safely where it belonged, in the basket marked “Basket Cases.”

  But still something very weird was happening to him. It was hard to deny. So, illegally U-turning in a city street and waving V-signs at the ensuing blast of fellow motorists’ horns, he headed straight back to the mansion, where, sidestepping Sophie’s surprise at his early return, he heading to the barn, sent his immediate resignation to Sir Magnus Montague, laid his throbbing head on the palliasse, said “hi” to Pete, and hoped beyond hope the “Chosen” nightmare would go away.