Chosen Read online

  Two

  But it didn’t, far from it. 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.

  Meanwhile Jeremy continued to whack at his palliasse as into his troubled mind oozed a yet more vexed question, namely: “If—as I now suspect—I were chosen by school, Oxford, the bank and Sophie, was I also chosen by my best friend Mister Money and what he could buy? Using me as his puppet and jerking my strings. Not me who chose the mansion, therefore, but the mansion that chose me. Not me who chose the Merc but the Merc that selected me saying it was the best car on the market for a person like me to be seen driving. Ditto for the power clothes from top tailors, and even the Bankerese I spoke…or was I spoken by it just as I had been by the Oxford drawl I adopted when the public school brigade mocked my ‘funny prole sayings’”?

  And the answer to this was: “Yes to all of the above.”

  But it was the language issue that really stuck in his gullet. Spoken by? Never speaking? Parroting the words of others without ever examining the embedded agendas those words concealed? Jeremy also now “spoke” smatterings of tongues other than English—bits of French, German, Italian and Spanish, all at restaurant level—and whenever he did it was like acting. The different body language, the different grammatical structures, the different nuances, until…he became a different person, which was fun but unreal. No wonder some actors no longer knew who they were and went crazy. So maybe he’d been chosen yet again, this time by the very instrument that supposedly separated him from the animals. And how was a person expected to think if he couldn’t trust the very words supposed to carry meaning, if the only purpose of those words were some form of phatic psycho-babble? Find a whole new language? Well, maybe.

  “Holy SHIT,” said Jeremy, slapping at his head.

  From his side of the palliasse, Pete said, “Oink, oink, OINK,” which roughly translates as: “Shut the fuck up, will you? I’m trying to get a little shuteye here.”

  Jeremy calmed, nodded over at Pete, and smiled his first smile in a long time.

  “Okay, pal. Point taken,” he said. “Just trying to get the madness out of my mind, that’s all.”

  “Oink,” said Pete, who took to snoring.

  ~ * ~

  No sleep for Jeremy, though, because the madness issue continued to torment him. What actually was madness, he asked himself. Clearly everybody he knew would conclude from his current behaviour he was the one who was mad because they were continuing to play the games required of them for social acceptance. So they would obviously consider themselves “normal” and him “mad.” Jeremy saw that and didn’t blame them for it. But that still didn’t answer his central question.

  Dimly, from an Oxford symposium he’d attended all those years ago, he recalled the words of a shrink called Laing. R.D. Laing, maybe? What was it he’d been quoted as saying again? That insanity was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world, something like that. Jeremy also remembered the work of a Frenchie called Foucault discussed at the same event. How it was that civilisation constructed ideas of madness—or “unreason”—for its own devious purposes but this said nothing about the condition itself. Indeed was fundamentally misleading. And had not the ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once been heard to remark, “I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.”

  “Mmm, not just me then,” Jeremy mused as Pete continued to snore contentedly.

  Then there was a novel the audience been advised to read, by a writer called Ken Kesey, who’d been conned by his publishers and never made a dime from his work about a falsely diagnosed “mad” guy who gets lobotomized for causing trouble and telling the truth about the mental institution he’s been incarcerated in. What was it called again? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s something. Nest? That was it. A fiction, but nonetheless a persuasive one when he considered the ways “madness” was used as a convenient excuse to ridicule or lock away opponents of political systems that brooked no dissent, vide the ways of the ex-Soviet Union or the current psychopath in the Kremlin. Or indeed the psycho in the White House whose routine response to criticism was to brush it off as “fake” and/or “insane” and fire its exponents.

  “Sooo,” Jeremy asked himself. “Is it really me that’s mad, or is it the world?”

  To address this question, he opted to narrow the focus to only recent history and take a cold look at the facts—if there were still “facts” in a post-truth society where lies were told with a “fuck you and your mother if you don’t believe me” impunity. In which a mega-rich narcissist could get himself elected American president by lying through his teeth, abetted by his psychopath pal in the Kremlin and the corrupt social media. In which British electors had been conned into voting to leave the European Union through a campaign targeted to arouse xenophobic delusions of their specious grandeur. In which parliamentary democracies built across centuries were under threat from meddling personal data banks like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. What sane person could contemplate such a scenario and think it anything but insane? Not Jeremy, that was for sure, so maybe it was Laing’s version of insanity he needed rationally to adjust to. And what better way to face up to this dystopian chaos than to confront it? How, he had no idea, but at least it was in his mind as a possibility.

  “Better late than never,” he muttered, covering his head with a smelly blanket and snuggling down on his palliasse. “Nightie, nightie, Pete.”

  “Oink,” said Pete in mid-snore.

  “Mmm, who knows?” Jeremy mumbled. “Meanwhile it’s sleep for me too, perchance to have a happier dream this time. That would be a turn up for the book.”

  ~ * ~

  As fate would have it, Jeremy’s first confrontational opportunity came with a tapping on his barn door at eleven thirty-five the following morning just as he was enjoying a happier dream. In it he featured as an elf called Yarume
who could morph into any form he wanted, human or bestial, depending on the nature of the adventure he faced, and nobody ever called Yarume crazy and got away with it. Gurgling happily to himself, Jeremy slept on far beyond sunrise. Never, ever, even on a Sunday, had Jeremy slept so late, but now he was Yarume who was never defeated in any task he undertook, so let’s enjoy the ride…

  Then there came the tapping. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, it went.

  Followed by a knock, knock, knock, knockity KNOCK.

  Jeremy snuggled deeper into his palliasse, terrified his only ever happy dream might have taken a turn for the worse. Worse even than the Kafkaesque one that had caused him so much trouble in the first place. You know how it is when you emerge from sleep betwixt and between one form consciousness and another. How you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, how long it can take for the mists to clear and “reality” to clutch you back into its grip.

  “Ug? Grrrrr. Nnnnn?” he said, covering his head with the hay sack he used for a pillow.

  Then came the voice. Blurred, distant, but nonetheless recognisable even to Jeremy/Yarume as a human voice, and one he had no desire to hear.

  “Jeremy, Jeremy?” it said.

  “Fuck off,” moaned Jeremy into his hay sack pillow.

  “Oink!!!” agreed Pete, who didn’t like his sleep disturbed at the best of times, but certainly not at eleven thirty-five in the morning.

  But on...and on...and on went the knock, knock, knockity, KNOCKing. And the voice, now hiked in decibels.

  “JER-EM-YEEE. JEZZA. We know you’re in there,” barked Sir Magnus Montague, hammering harder on the door and wincing at Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf, the Harley Street shrink he’d brought along at the family’s behest to make Jeremy normal again.

  “FUCK OFF,” counter-barked Jeremy, finally recognising the voice and rising from his palliasse.

  “OINK, OINK, OINK,” said Pete.

  “Clearly off his trolley, wouldn’t you say?” whispered Sir Magnus to Gisela. “We’ll need to tread very carefully.”

  “Natürlich,” said Gisela.

  Such were the circumstances leading to Jeremy Crawford’s first attempt at asserting his sanity in face of a mad, mad world. And, recognising it as such in the nick of time, he pulled himself together, abandoned his fury at being awoken and, attired in one of Sophie’s diaphanous taupe nighties with the frilly neckline, the only nightwear he’d managed to snatch from the laundry basket before heading to the barn, opened the door.

  “Do step inside, I was expecting you sooner or later, Sir Monty,” he said, bowing thespianly and waving inside his ex-boss and the sour-faced blonde bint accompanying him.

  Three

  “Sorry I can’t offer you tea or biccies, it’s all a tad spartan around here. But do take a pew anywhere you can find one,” said Jeremy, gesturing vaguely at the pewless barn. “Or possibly a hay bale. Jolly comfortable things, hay bales.”

  Sir Magnus Montague and Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf swapped meaningful glances while Jeremy pulled on the suit trousers he’d been wearing on and off for the last two weeks, then tucked Sophie’s diaphanous taupe nightie into their waistband before cinching the ensemble with a Gucci belt. An unusual outfit, even Jeremy had to concede, but it would have to do.

  Sir Magnus and Frau Professor Doktor Gisela exchanged even more meaningful glances, but, casting around for something authoritative to sit on and finding nothing suitable, went for the hay bales. Which were neither authoritative nor comfortable, but it was either that or standing. And, in the face of a loony needing life-changing therapy, standing/looming would have been threatening and counterproductive, soo...

  “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Sir Magnus, on this fine morning?” asked Jeremy. “Although I could hazard a guess.”

  “Oink,” agreed Pete, who’d lumbered over to check out these unexpected and unwelcome visitors. Snuffling at their trouser cuffs—Frau Professor Doktor Gisela was also wearing trousers, black shiny ones—and showing no evidence he approved of either of them. This he evinced by farting fulsomely, then sitting on Frau Professor Doktor Gisela’s right, also black-shiny, shoe causing her to squirm, blink, blanch, and only just manage to prevent herself from screaming. But how could Pete have known that back in Swäbisch Gmünd as an adolescent, Gisela had developed a horror of the pigs on her father’s farm and had herself needed long-term therapy to cope with it, hence her first introduction to psychiatric treatments, “face your fears” and all that. Which was now her professional, professorial mantra along with heavy doses of Meister Freud and anxiolytics, if push came to shove.

  “Could you possibly persuade the pig to lever his bottom off the lady’s shoe, Jezza?” Sir Magnus asked as politely as he was able.

  “Pete?”

  “You have a name for him?”

  “Yes,” said Jeremy, beginning to enjoy himself. “‘Pete.’ Also, who is the woman on whose shoe Pete is sitting? I don’t believe we have been introduced. Does she have a name too?”

  Sir Magnus took to grinding his molars. This wasn’t going anything like the way he’d planned it. By now, Frau Professor Doktor Gisela’s fabulous Freudianism and prescription mind changers should already have been at the very least mentioned as a means of healing Jeremy’s clearly deranged mind. Persuading him to be normal and worship money again. Persuading him to get back to work and make shedloads of it for the bank—and his family, of course. It wasn’t as if Harley Street Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von fucking Strumpf had come cheap either. Four thousand big ones he’d had to shell out just for her to agree to turn up. And all that now jeopardised by her evident hang-up over some pig called Pete farting, then sitting on her foot. In his long and distinguished career, Sir Magnus had faced all manner of crises—political, financial, fiduciary, all sorts. But this one took the biscuit.

  “Yes, of course she does,” he said, peering critically at von Strumpf who was attempting to overcome her Schweineangst by kicking Pete in the bottom with her free black-shiny shoe—the left one—which Pete wasn’t appreciating.

  “Oink, oink!!” he said, huffily. Shifting his prodigious weight such that his bottom immobilised both Gisela’s feet, which caused her to shriek: “Scheisse. Ach, meine liebe Götter and collapse face forward over Pete’s pink, bulbous, and prickly back.

  Pete took that as the sign of the sorts of friendship and acquiescence which would allow him to forgive the lady, grunt, turn his head, and nuzzle her ash-blonde wig, thereby causing it to fall off and reveal a grizzled-going-on-white crew cut. Still Pete enjoyed chewing on the hairpiece. Made a nice change from hay and corn meal.

  Jeremy chuckled. “And what is it...her name?” he asked Sir Magnus, whose face had turned puce, even more puce than normal. Sir Magnus’s face was always puce-ish, given his proclivity for regular nips of five-star Courvoisier between high-protein luncheons and dinners mainly featuring boeuf bourguignon with frites and peas and two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to go with them. But this was a new and rare kind of puce bordering on vermilion.

  “Frau Professor Doctor Gisela von Strumpf,” he spluttered.

  “Long name. And she is here why?”

  “To help you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself, you dumb prick.”

  Jeremy frowned.

  “‘Prick’?”

  “Yes, ‘prick.’ Off you potter to live in a pigsty while your poor wife and parents are left bereft of cash? While the bank’s funds are dwindling in your absence. For God’s sake, man, get a grip of yourself.”

  “And you brought along this Frau Professor Doktor person to help me out with that?” said Jeremy, gripping himself in the crotch while waggling a pinkie.

  “Yes.”

  “And she is a Frau Professor Doktor of what?”

  “Psychiatry. You’ve gone bonkers, so you need a shrink, old chap. Simple.”

  “Simple, pimple. Tell you what, why don’t you bugger off and take the lady with you? Lo
oks to me like she needs a whole lot more help than I do,” said Jeremy, raising both eyebrows in the direction of von Strumpf, who looked to be suffocating under the pressure of Pete’s attentions, seeing as he was clearly beginning to think of her as his new best friend.

  “Grrrurg, bleeerg, Donner und Blitzen,” she said, having taken to weeping and gurgling once Pete began chewing at her grizzled crew cut after he’d swallowed her wig. But however hard she swatted at his muzzle, it made no difference, seeing as Pete reckoned she liked him and this was some form of foreplay. Watching on, Sir Magnus had little option but to agree with Jeremy on the buggering-off issue.

  “Just call your pig off,” he said.

  So Jeremy did. “Pete. Enough,” he commanded.

  And, surprisingly, Pete obeyed. Stopped trying to eat Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf’s hair, climbed off her shiny shoes, and shambled back off to his hay corner.

  “Okay. Thanks,” said Sir Magnus, taking the distraught Freudian by a limp hand and dragging her to the barn’s door.

  “But I’ll be back,” he shouted over his shoulder as he and von Strumpf made their inglorious exit. “With reinforcements.”

  “Bring it on,” Jeremy called back.

  “Nice one, Pete,” he then told Pete, but sapped by more human intercourse than a pig could be expected to tolerate on an otherwise perfectly normal day, Pete was already asleep.

  ~ * ~

  “Mmm,” Jeremy muttered to himself, pacing up and down the barn once Sir Magnus and the pig-challenged female had bowed out. “Gonna have to make a plan here.”