OUT OF ESSEX – CHAPTER 18

 

 

“Whatever we build in the imagination, will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.”

WB Yeats

 

 

On a warm, early August evening, a resurrected Mike Burper paced Southchurch Park’s perimeter. He paused at the park’s west entrance. Eyeing the battered residential facades of Kensington Road, he noticed a crew working late on streetlight repairs.

Mike swivelled east, surveying tents littering a football pitch, still covered in the flood’s thin white legacy. A spot where, 35 years ago, he had half-crippled an opponent, behind the referee’s back. Rubbing his right shoulder, he wondered whether a community could “secede from the sovereign”, as nearby graffiti recommended.

He had just come away from Little Venice, the nickname for the cafe and its surrounds. The park’s heart and hub, the cramped old building had survived the May 12 waters. Now, amid chairs and picnic benches, overlooking the model boating and duck lake, residents congregated, ate, voted and relaxed. Mike preceded each night shift with a coffee and a chat, often to a rousting backbeat from Parklife, the community’s DIY punk band.

After his deep salting in the estuary, which sat just two hundred yards away, Mike had felt inexplicably drawn in by Dan’s ad, splashed across print and online media and plastered on Essex billboards. “Do you want to live without money, close to your fellows? Can you contribute, in return for food and shelter? Southchurch Park is now open for a community adventure.”

The incomers were diverse, not easily stereotyped. Mike chuckled quietly at the pretentions of a few who had likened themselves to the Plymouth Pilgrims reaching Massachusetts in 1620, seeking religious freedom or a fresh start. He was more open to a couple who had touted the Wachowski Brothers’ futuristic notion of ‘quitting the Matrix’. But only because he had seen the film.

Some called the park the ‘Ark’. One or two reckoned they were ‘escaping tick-tock’. Mike saw these ideas as complete bollocks. Another occasional point of reference was Dial House, an anarchist-pacifist establishment in Epping Forest, on London’s outskirts.

He passed five tents pitched in horseshoe shape, wrapping around a gaggle of dirty-looking children, still up and playing. Southend’s growing poverty, and the hardships among its single parents, had become evident in the increasingly popular ‘Girl Named Jack’ blog, written since 2012 by journalist Jack Munroe, to help people cook as cheaply as possible. Yet only a few Southend family units had shown the willingness to swap familiar consumer traps and comforts for the unknown challenges and freedoms of the park.

Nearby sat a bright orange tent, home to Dutch captain Johan van Hoyte, still traumatised by his ride on a tsunami. After his release by police, Johan had quit the merchant navy. He had wandered into Southend, ending up in what he called “this liminal place”. Over a mug of tea one evening, he insisted to Mike that Britain had become a mentally ill society. “For so many, good times are gone, Michael. Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve.” He described a cave overhanging the River Mersey in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in which homeless people were reportedly living.

Nearer to home, the magnet of three daily meals and accommodation had pulled several dozen homeless individuals into Southchurch Park, both long-term sufferers and those usurped by the Big Wave.

Heading north, away from the river, Mike saw another new friend, Claire, filling a wheelbarrow with the whitened turf. She threw back her head of rainbow-streaked locks. “People here are creators, part of the 5% for whom mind control doesn’t work,” she was telling her fellow diggers. An Atlantis, Essex tattoo adorned her left forearm. She bubbled about the new solar panels adorning park buildings; and teaching the community’s children to engage in spiritual development. “Stan, we need new journeys to replace old greed-based models,” she incanted to a guy with a red beanie and a ponytail.

This was her brother-in-law. Almost another ATOS victim. Stan had survived his wife’s death, and a kidney transplant. Although the medication used to control the rejection process had caused severe problems, ATOS had cleared Stan as capable to work, stopping his benefits. Unable to buy food or heat his flat, and with nothing to live for, he had ceased taking his medication.

Now he was digging up the heavily salinated topsoil. In return for being nurtured back to health by acupuncture, aromatherapy, herbal and other park treatments – not least fellowship – he had supplied a car boot of bagged lentils and oats to the park kitchen. His laptop was available in the wi-fi area. Others cooked and cleaned for their keep, or deployed building, electrical and plumbing skills.

Mike reached the park’s northern border, where crews were also working on streetlights. Adjacent houses bore water tidemarks. He looked again at the sports field. It was bleached with salt residues, aside from a dark area, whose top layer was being stripped away. But for what purpose? How could you plan to cultivate land that would be infertile for years?

Gandhi seemed undeterred. In a quiet address to the Little Venice crowd, he had stated that a first crop of homegrown vegetables would be available from spring 2014.

Mike was opening to the idea of miracles. When Claire had described her Old Leigh escape from drowning, and the subsequent disappearance of her rash, he had volunteered his own unique story. How, when the tsunami ignored his punch and swept him across Chalkwell esplanade, his body had slammed into a hedge. How a rebounding surge flung him back out to sea, where his upper torso and right shoulder smashed into a stone monument. How he had floated down a vibrating tunnel where a 25-year old version of his mother waved cheerily. How she kissed him briefly, urged him to “stop wasting your life”, and faded. How, somehow, he had found the strength to grip the monument, the Crow Stone, which represented the furthermost reach of the Port Authority of London.

Now he patrolled Southchurch Park by night, keeping his new ‘family’ safe from intruders. By day he slept in the cricket pavilion, sharing a tiny room with an ex-soldier, Alex, who worked the daytime shift.

“Dad what are you doing here, with these weirdos?” his 30-year old son had asked several days ago, sitting outside the cafe. Mike told it straight. “I nearly lost my life, Josh. It makes you think. I never enjoyed my job. My pension entitlement covered my debts. I thought ‘fuck it’ and cashed in.”

Josh didn’t look persuaded. “When I heard about this place, something told me to take a proper look,” Mike continued. “Right away I could see some of the poor buggers needed protecting from yobs coming in the park. I asked if they needed a security guard. We made the job up, on the spot. I get a place to kip, three meals a day and physio treatment for my shoulder.”

Satan walked past, carrying plumbing pipes. “Who’s he?” asked Josh “He looks well hard. How much do they pay you?”

“That’s Sal. He trouble-shoots and tackles problems. Two other guys, Dave Dawson and Micky Gaze, organise things. Gandhi teaches people to make clothes. The pay is never money, we don’t use it. Like I said, food, a roof, a daily shower, medical care if I need it, and companionship. Friendship like I’ve never known. The big plan – which I can’t get my head around – is to grow enough food to be self-sufficient.”

“Gandhi? Wasn’t he some Indian git? Is he still alive?”

“He stood over there yesterday, telling us all that the future depends on what we do in the present.”

“Dad, none of this sounds like you. What about beers and watching Spurs?”

Mike’s hands ran through salt and pepper hair that was once ginger, and abundant. “Doing those things mean I have to scramble around for cash. And I’m not so sure about winning anymore. Does it matter? I know, it does sound weird. But Josh…This place. I love it.”

More than once he had thought these were the happiest days of his life. Mike’s first job had been to clamp down on theft. A group of Romanians in the first wave of incomers had baulked at earning the ‘merits’ tradeable for food and shelter. They had quit, taking community tents and sleeping bags. Males returned on night-time stealing sprees before Mike caught one and marched him to Satan, arm halfway up his back. Inexplicably, his hearing had sharpened. He would sit in the dark, pinpointing sounds.

Josh had more earnest questions. “How does this place pay for itself Dad? How will you get by in winter? You’re not young anymore.” Honest concern on his face.

Mike relayed what he had been told. “We have two main benefactors. Micky Gaze used his lottery proceeds to buy the park, and to pay for things like the solar panels. The journalist who scooped the tsunami story, Dan, has bought in a shed load of tents and camping equipment, a load of refrigerators and washing machines, and a job lot of sewing machines. Together, they have promised enough food basics to get us through year one. Dave Dawson – he’s a diamond bloke – has pledged seeds to get the farming plan motoring. After that we’re on our own.”

“Dad you’re gonna freeze your nuts off in winter.”

“Micky also bought some damaged houses around the park. He’ll draw up rotas. People here can get warm beds a few times a week. There are other houses at Leigh where people can learn meditation and yoga. Dave’s wife Sarah calls it ‘going inwards’; reckons it’s the other part of this adventure.”

Satan walked past again, winking at Mike. “He is unlike anyone I’ve met, Josh. He says we are doing God’s work.”

Mike handed his son some keys. “There’s only a week to run on my rent. I’ve taken the laptop and a few other bits for the park. I need you to chuck out the crap and give anything half-decent to charity or take it for yourself and the kids.” His other son, in Ireland, showed no inclination to make contact. “I’ll transfer you the deposit, in case I do need money.”

Josh spoke quietly. “Dad I think you’ve gone slightly mad.” His eyes moistened. “Let me know if you want to watch Spurs. The kids send their love.”

 

***

 

Back in the present, long shadows covered the car park, as the evening burned down. Not one of the park’s new residents cared that Mike had been a claims adjuster.

Another Old Leigh ‘survivor’, Sheena, always detained him. “People have joined together before and survived by barter and farming,” she said, arranging wood inside a chiminiere. “We must act as a big family, and earn our freedom by helping others, mustn’t we Mike,” she half-pleaded. In her tent teddy bears and family pictures were arrayed next to physiotherapy oils.

She had quit her job at Southend Hospital. Her husband carried on at home, paying the bills. “How’s the shoulder?” She spoke again before he could reply. “One of the ways we can work on minimising pains and swellings is by creating our own natural antibiotics. We can grow garlic, ginger and turmeric. We’re all too dependent on instant-fix pharmaceuticals, which is symptomatic of a larger problem – we have forgotten how to commune. Look at us talking now, Mike. It’s like an old-fashioned fireside chat.”

She lit the wood, flames darting. He smiled as she switched topic to Gandhi, who had set up in the Southend Manor changing rooms, overseeing the sewing machinists. “Did you know that Gandhi is the only human ever to lead a successful, non-violent mass civil disobedience campaign? He got a whole nation to boycott British exports, schools, jobs and courts. How can that person be here?” Mike shrugged, kept his thoughts to himself.

One warm hug later he set off for the children’s playground, bathed in crepuscular light. One of his tasks, in conjunction with Alex, was keeping an eye on the area, which adjoined Lifstan Way, on the park’s eastern side. The vote in Little Venice to maintain public access was almost unanimous. But locals sometimes snuck in at night for drinks and recreational drugs.

Three lads had jumped over the gate “How’s it going guys?” he said, focusing on the biggest. Satan quietly watched from the nearby flower gardens how Mike handled the boys, ushering them out while maintaining the banter.

 

***

 

By two o’clock on weekday nights – and later at weekends – any external threats had abated. Mike would sit outside the cafe, knowing Satan would bring a bottle to ‘see in the dawn’. The ritual involved the most impossible conversations. Sal opened their first session with a teasing delivery. “Your life turned upside down after you laid into that tsunami Mike,” he smiled, wickedly.

Mike’s face contorted. “Who the fucking hell are you?”

Sal introduced himself, fully. Before Mike could object, enquire or run away, Sal related how Maggie had persuaded God to slow down the surging currents as Burper slumped against the Crow Stone. “He punched a tsunami! We need that type of bravery,” she had urged.

“He’s a psychopath, for God’s sake!” God had said.

“Those people can be useful,” retorted Maggie, remembering various Cabinet Ministers.

Several large shots later, Mike had adapted to the notion that he had befriended the Devil, was working with Gandhi, and would duly meet Buddha and Maggie. The 18-year old Macallan Gran Reserva was to die for, with powerful sherry hues that soon numbed critical faculties.

“Just so I’m clear.” He paused. “God is female. And you know Jesus?”

“Know him? I’ve lost track of how often we’ve got rat-arsed.”

Satan told Mike they had argued over whole crates of single malt in The Place about starting a community without money, as opposed to using a new currency, or even a cryptocurrency. “God swears that it always goes wrong whenever money becomes common currency.” Mike scratched his ear.

“She swears wealth travels up the chain of command every time, and that central banks ultimately give their power away to private bankers. Only a handful of countries – like Cuba, Iran and North Korea – now run independent central banks. Libya had one before NATO invaded and sent the country back to the Stone Age.”

Mike tried to nod knowingly. As they stood taking a piss into the boating lake, after Satan untied the tail around his trousers, he was glad any sobriety had long departed.

Back at the table, Sal told how often Jesus had saved him from the worst part of himself. “Whenever I encounter the damaged DNA of any senior banking family, I completely lose it. How many trillions of dollars do these cold-hearted fucks, the blue-blooded gangsters, think they need, while hundreds of millions struggle or starve?”

It was bizarre to hear how Jesus would sit with Satan, sending his purple light. “But the hatred that those families breed, all that service-to-self shit, is getting worse.” Satan looked at him: “You reckon we can start to change that Mike?”

A new tack was introduced. “Nobody needs a bible. The censorship in the fourth century left a shell of the original, but the truth is simple. Jesus would urge you to focus on just a few things. Tell the truth; stick to it; don’t be vain, or power hungry; be very generous and kind; but watch out for those who would harm you, because they are in every group. Take care of the weak who cannot fend for themselves; and never judge by appearances. And forget the Church – you are divine, with no need of a middleman to contact spirit!”

Satan talked about “tricks of the eyes”, comparing this with “the true spirit of God that opens your eyes, and works through you”. Mike had to change subject. A big sip of the Gran Reserva made the field’s tents and half-white surface resemble a mad dream poking through the darkness. “Tell me again how old your three boys are?”

“Beelzebub is 2,254, Lucifer 1,570, and Belial is 990, still a nipper.” Hooting at that improbability, Mike felt his blood run cold at Satan’s constant disdain for the United States political, military and financial systems. “While we speak, elites in Washington DC are conspiring with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to fund and arm jihadists in Syria. I’m talking support for ISIS and Al-Qaeda. On the watch of “peace president” Obama.”

Mike was even more perplexed by Satan’s insistence that the Bush family had helped fund the Nazis. “That cannot be true Sal. I love America.”

“Sadly, it is true. But what do you expect from people that bear blood linkages to Europe’s royal families? Union Banking Corporation and Brown Brothers Harriman are on public record as channelling money to Hitler’s Germany for several years after the war began. Prescott Bush was a board member of both.”

Mike recoiled as Satan recounted how Hitler’s war machine was entwined with Western businesses. “Nazi trucks carried Ford components. US ball bearings were used in German warships. Royal Dutch Shell provided millions of gallons of free oil to the Nazis. Standard Oil invested millions in IG Farben, which opened a gasoline factory within Auschwitz. Allied bombers were told this was off bounds. These things are seldom mentioned by Disney Media, but don’t just take it from me – research it.”

Satan was insistent that core pockets of Nazi mentality still flourished. “Germany lost the war, but huge numbers of Nazi scientists ended up working at NASA after hiding in South America.” Mike chipped in. “Not much difference in the words Nazi and NASA”.

“That sort of frivolity gets the word ‘theory’ added when some very real conspiracies are discussed.”

Mike wondered how he had ended up as Satan’s drinking partner in a Southend-on-Sea park. He awoke each afternoon with upended beliefs. Watching TV on a café laptop, he noticed how a BBC news item on World War One veterans described the horrors of French and Belgian trenches. It was followed by straight-faced newsreaders announcing that the US – and possibly Britain and France – were preparing to drop bombs on Syria to ‘address’ its complex problems. He watched programmes where experts argued that taking away UK welfare benefits would “make work pay”. In a market where even graduates struggled for employment.

Satan’s over-arching idea was that traditional society was finished, as old mental patterns and habits would soon be cast off like snakeskin. “Think about this: you live in a country so out of balance that a government let Jimmy Savile, a psychopath and paedophile, run a high-security psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor.”

New dawns peeked out each day as Sal talked the sun up. “You are part of a new model unravelling here Mike. God wants one great last period for humans – and you will have the utter privilege of building your soul and exercising your free will as you live through the death rattle of capitalism and neoliberalism. Those twin fuckers have been eating away at loving human culture like some kind of invisible Pacman, and you will help steer their demise.”

He was a realist though. “Hierarchies have had it, but Rome didn’t collapse in a day.”

 

 

I received a sad surprise one afternoon last week, when cycling past the Three Elms pub, on the Mashbury Road, just outside Chelmsford. Like many other rural pubs in our vicinity, it has closed its doors.

Couldn’t say I was shocked, but I did feel for the landlady, who had made a steady effort to bring in trade, through music evenings, mini-beer festivals, discount offers on the food and other promotions. The beer selection was generally good.

Maureen and I sat out front one sunny lunchtime, eating a lovely plate of fish and chips, while the host told us how she and her partner had sold up in London and bought the pub. She was living her dream. But acknowledged the challenges.

The biggest was that no more than a couple of dozen people live within easy walking distance. She had to try and drum up regulars from further afield through decent grub or other means. The first time I visited was on a quiz night, when the place was full. Ironically, the visit came after cycling with my old mate Tony to The Fox in Mashbury, only to find that it, also, had shut up shop. We popped into the Three Elms on the way back.

I walked to the Three Elms once with my good friend Jono and his dog Ruby, across the fields from Broomfield. A dark winter day, so we necked a nice few single malts. On the way back, I realised I’d left my phone on the table. There it was, behind the bar, handed in. I was so grateful.

 

 

My most recent visit was a Monday night in early August. After the last evening of the transcendental meditation course. There must have been 15 or so people inside. Not bad for a Monday. I sat outside, enjoying a pint, happy that I’d started something significant. With no idea that the struggle to make ends meet behind the bar must have been coming to a head.

Rural pub numbers will continue to decline. Top class food seems to be the main way to keep going. Out in the wilds of Radley Green, a place called The Cuckoo has a flow of regulars. I was out there a few months ago, watching the cars pour in on a Tuesday evening. A quick look at the menu said you would be paying at least £50 a head. Once upon a time, Julian Dicks (ex-West Ham) and his Canvey Island mates used to have a Sunday afternoon kickabout on an adjacent soccer pitch after sinking a few pints.

My favourite mid-Essex pub, The Compasses at Littley Green, has discreetly added a motel on one side.  Yet the bar still breathes out the past. The beer is hand pulled, in a separate cellar. At the other end of the spectrum, the Green Man at Howe Street has had a gleaming £3 million refurbishment, after a Galvin Brothers takeover. It heaves with punters, but if you want a single malt, the prices start at £7.50 a shot.

Anyway, RIP the Three Elms. I will miss its options, and its kind proprietor. I don’t imagine it will be coming back as a pub.

 

OUT OF ESSEX – Chapter 17

 

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.

Tao Te Ching

 

 

 

Mary Fawkes gently pulled the sheet, quilt cover and pillowcases off the bed. How could that just have happened? Dan was 53. She was two years younger.

Opening the curtains, she was hit by the tapestry of roses blooming up and down the suburban front gardens. Oranges, reds, purples and creams. Dan should have been exhausted. Instead he was already outside in the early July sunshine, whistling, loading the caravan, in which they would spend the next month. Then back to Chelmsford with Rose and Edward for a fortnight. After that, it was unscheduled, to be made up as they went along.

Dan had been bubbling for weeks: cracking jokes, acting like he was 24, when they first met.

The financial weight lifted from them was one factor. Each daily check of the joint bank account indicated that they might never have to worry about money again. Clifford, bless him, had seen to that, in his hard-fisted negotiations over the royalties from Dan’s video, and the rights to his story. It also meant that Dan could invest, if that was the word, his currently plentiful spare income in the Southend park experiment. Whatever that might turn out to be.

In search of ingredients, they had met up with Micky Gaze again, two days ago. The sight of the Crooked Billet made Mary tremble, memories rushing back. She heard Russian and Chinese accents in the public bar. It was the oddest thing, unfair somehow, how tourists now flocked to the much-celebrated ‘intactness’ of old Leigh. While much of Southend groaned under the herculean task of reconstructing miles of wrecked seafront buildings.

Micky was still a stranger, so they had knocked back the double Bowmores to help leapfrog the conversational uncertainties. Bending themselves back into 12 May spirits. “Let’s refer to you-know-who as Sal” said Dan, looking furtively around the crowded bar. “Where did you first meet him Micky?”

“Down at the casino, a couple of years ago. He’d been looking at me for a couple of minutes, by one of the roulette tables. Then he asked to borrow two quid. He was so bloody tall, and intimidating. So I said yes, to get rid of him. Then I watched him place it on black ten times in a row. Matching his clothes. Every time putting it all back on, and winning.”

Mary worked it out. Over £2,000. “So that was……his ATM while he was here? A roulette table?”

“He paid me back £200 for the £2 loan. That night they actually banned him from playing again. He said it was the fourth time he’d taken two grand from them. He asked for my mobile number. After that, I was his ATM, for each visit. Seems I just got paid back.”

“How the hell did we end up in this story?” asked Dan. “Do we get to meet God in the last chapter?”

Ex-fireman Micky didn’t know. But he oozed practicality. He told them he had built parts of his own house. He could wire and plumb. Sort out car engines. Heating systems.

He was pleased as punch that a guy named Dave Dawson had been in touch. “This bloke badly wanted to know who the park’s new owner was. His house overlooks the place. I dunno if he’s mad or can see into the bloody future. But he reckons he’s known for years that some sort of apocalypse was coming. He’s stored up a seed bank, and other survival stuff. Somehow, he seems just right for what we’re doing. So I told him all about the project. I mean everything. And he wants in.”

Micky said they had met up, down at the Railway Hotel in central Southend. “He’s a local, lived in Southchurch all his life. We’re gonna need every bit of help that’s out there.”

Mick shook his head, grinning. “And he’s only gone and told me that the real King of England was some elderly geezer living in Australia. Remember that historian Tony Robinson?”

“He played Baldric in Blackadder!” recalled Mary.

“That’s the bloke. Well funny. Anyway, Dave swore blind that Tony Robinson proved in 2004, in one of his history programmes, that the current bunch on the British throne are illegitimate. ‘Pretenders’, he called them.”

Mary had watched Dan light up at that, and almost everything else Micky mentioned. The joint responsibility for the “moneyless” park’s finances; helping its unknown incomers bed in; and the serious physical work to be done.

“I’ve been half-killing myself, Mick, doing other people’s work, for much too long,” Dan sighed. “I never knew that this was coming, or that I would want it so much.”

Mary’s brain was seething, dancing, pirouetting around the mind-shattering fact that Gandhi and the Buddha would be active again, living amongst them, according to Micky. With Satan as their ‘minder’! However hard she pinched herself, their lives kept turning somersaults, flipping into deeper unknowns.

Best of all was how her husband was such a joy to be with again. What they had just experienced was wild and surely impossible. He had taken her up against the bedroom wall.

Then pulled her down to the floor, remarking on her wetness, before releasing a second spurt. “Jesus Dan, it’s like I’m thirty years younger – I’ve got a bloody wide on,” she moaned.

Twenty minutes later, another climax together, using their mouths. She had described it as “the fuck of the century”, laying in his arms, still adrift in pleasure.

“Have you taken a pill?” she laughed.

“Not yet,” he said, still panting, kissing her throat. “Hopefully not ever.” He was straight about that kind of stuff. But never that straight, and for that long.

“We nearly died on May 12,” he whispered. The tsunami still towered in her dreams, the wave surging up the hill towards them with a power that took away the breath. Like yesterday, she remembered Dan’s reassurance. “It won’t reach us.” And holding her so tightly that she could not run.

He tickled her armpit, looking in her eyes. “It’s all a bonus from now on. And someone has put a new battery in me, Mary Fawkes. Charged me up with joy.”

And here they were, packed and ready to go. The house was tidy. Her boss at the London university had agreed to an ultra-flexible working schedule over the remainder of the year. “Don’t forget about us Mary. You’re my brightest researcher.”

Rose was a little worried about looking after Ed, who was 14. Mary felt her daughter was engaging in a silent trade: the washing and cooking, for the use of the house with her college friends and boyfriends.

Her note kept it simple. “Just call me whenever you need, darling. We can drive back in less than an hour. You’ve got money. We love you.”

She was a mum though. Thoughts of what could go wrong assailed her as they drove south-east down the A120, towards Rettendon Turnpike, in the afternoon brightness. Would Rose be aware if Ed didn’t come home, if she was otherwise engaged with her friends? Would they eat properly? What if they forget to turn off the gas cooker?

“Dan, what will happen to them if we never come back?”

 

 

 

 

 

Like David Lynch’s films, I once thought people could only love or hate Nick Cave, and his Bad Seeds.

He was most definitely for me. But, with his voice like an Old Testament prophet, Biblical references all over the shop, and his songs about death and murder and the deep addictions of love and sex and drugs and rock n roll and alcohol, with burning images of good and evil fighting toe-to-toe, he wasn’t for everybody.

He didn’t give a flying one. His fans loved him. Yet despite himself, perhaps, he became something like commercially popular. There was the duet with Kylie, “Where the Wild Roses Grow”.  The song in the Harry Potter movie, “O Children”. And, of course, the dynamic intro to ‘Peaky Blinders’, “Red Right Hand”. The beautiful “Into My Arms”, which featured in the film ‘About Time’, was another gem.

Then, in 2015, his son Arthur died, aged 15. Fell off a cliff near Brighton.

Four years later, he has written and released ‘Ghosteen’. Ghost Teen?  It’s a pouring out of a vast, intensely personal grief. With achingly beautiful melodies and harmonies, pushed by piano, strings and synthesiser, taking his voice to its furthest limits. Almost no guitar or drums.

 To draw you in, then completely break your heart, it is split into two parts. First, slowly building out the ghost’s viewpoint, patient, still there.

I am beside you, look for me

I am in you, you are in me

 I’m by your side and I’m holding your hand.

Peace will come, while a spiral of children climbs up to the sun.

 I’m just waiting for you to return.

 

After the briefest of intermissions, part two. The parents’ grief.

 

There goes the Moonlit man

Got his suitcase in his hand

He is moving on, down the road

Things tend to fall apart, starting with his heart

But he kisses you lightly and leaves your sleeping body curled and dreaming

Around your smile

 

These words melt me.

 

The three bears watch the TV

They age a lifetime, O Lord

Mama bear holds the remote

Papa bear he just floats

and baby bear he is gone…to the moon in a boat

 

The past, with its fierce undertow

Wont ever let us go

If I could move the night I would

And I would turn the world around if I could

There’s nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand

 

There is little room for wonder now

Little room for wildness too

We crawl into our wounds

Towards a climax

And I’m just waiting now for my time to come, for my place in the sun, for peace to come

 

Darling your dreams are your greatest part

I carry them with me in my heart

 

And then the killer verse.

 

Now I’m standing on the shore

And the animals roam the beaches

Sea creatures rising out the sea

Everyone begins to run

The kid drops his bucket and spade

And climbs into the sun

 

All love must turn to suffering, then transmute back to love.

 

Everybody’s losing someone

It’s a long way to find peace of mind

And I’m just waiting now for my time to come, for peace to come

 

It’s an old idea that artists can dig into their pain, put it out on display, and find catharsis, and forms of redemption. Hope it worked for you, Nick.

‘Ghosteen’ is penetrating all my mental orifices at present. I’m singing and humming snatches when I meditate, cycle and walk. When I go to sleep and wake up.

It’s a masterpiece. Mandatory listening. A compassionate musical hug for all those who have mourned, and who will grieve.

As a reference point, the nearest thing that comes to mind is David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’. But that was dark, laden with occult signs. ‘Ghosteen comes from the heart. And you can listen to it again and again, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwlU_wsT20Q

 

Ghosteen dances in my hand

Slowly twirling, twirling all around

Glowing circle in my hand

Dancing, dancing, dancing all around

 

 

 

 

 

It’s sometimes too easy to forget the natural beauty of our residence in mid-Essex. I took these shots today. The mutually-adoring cows is my favourite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 16 – Black swans

 

 

“Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

 

 

Six days after the Thames tsunami, Micky Gaze won the UK lottery. Following a rollover, his lucky numbers generated almost £12 million. Micky cleared his debts, gasping with gratitude, before taking Satan’s texted advice to purchase two separate blocks of real estate at knock-down prices in a drenched, grieving, shell-shocked Southend. Micky had no idea what was unravelling. But the bonanza and the Old Leigh escape confirmed what he had long believed. God had his back.

***

Dawn Landais effortlessly made her own financial hay in the days following the ‘Big Wave’, as it rapidly became known. The drivers waiting at the Eastwood lights were all desperate to talk, all knew somebody who had perished. Dawn listened from her heart. “Forget about my screen, sweetheart,” said one female regular. “I just want to say that I love you. You are kind. You always smile.”

She pressed a fiver into Dawn’s hand, squeezing hard. The woman’s son had drowned, while walking their Labrador along Chalkwell beach.

A cocktail of trauma, sorrow, compassion and an almost uncontainable desire to be with others was afoot. Some compared the mid-May pheromones in the Southend air to the post-9/11 atmosphere in New York City, 12 years earlier. Across southern Essex, pregnancies quadrupled, and venereal disease burgeoned. Numerous couples who were on the skids finally broke up.

***

Micky’s first buy involved six adjacent houses on the slope down to Old Leigh. All were uninhabitable, soaked and broken by the Big Wave. They were to be transformed into the spiritual equivalent of a martial arts centre, overseen by the Buddha. To the vendors, cash on the nail was irresistible, given the wait for property insurance indemnifications.

Micky hired tradesmen to restore the properties. Mary Fawkes went part-time in her London psychology post. She began to administer the embryonic ashram.

Satan’s second request focused on eastern Southend. “Buy Southchurch Park, plus as many surrounding houses as possible Mick. We’re starting a self-sustaining community, and bringing in Gandhi,” the text message explained.

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council  was in the same financial quagmire as its peers around the estuary, requiring barrow loads of reconstruction money. It fell over itself to monetise Southchurch Park. It had been cash-strapped before the disaster. Now, like New Orleans, post-Katrina, it was discovering that the politicians who walked around with sleeves rolled up had only peanuts to shell out.

Having helped with the purchase of the park, Dan Fawkes’ friend, a legal wiz named Clifford de Ricardo, spotted another opportunity for Micky’s money. At a deep discount, an extra sum was agreed and documented as equivalent to the pre-payment of all forms of local tax related to Southchurch Park, for an irrevocable 50-year period. The Firm’s control of the park was complete.

***

God glowed with well-being, exercising ferociously on the cross-trainer while monitoring her screens. But Satan was irritated with his boss.

“Was it really necessary to manifest a Book of Revelations scenario to buy up some land?” he asked, disgruntledly. They were sipping 17-year old Glengoyne, after a morning briefing. “Couldn’t you just let Micky win the lottery, and leave out the bloody tsunami?” Satan added, never afraid to speak his mind. “From several angles, what you and Jesus did looks suspiciously like a terrorist act. Our enemies will milk that.”

God was unequivocal. “It was a means to an end.” She pushed the shot glass aside, without commenting on the citrus-laden flavour. “And frankly, I’ve had it with being patient. Too few will be tempted to join our experiment, unless daily life becomes very uncomfortable. Then we can begin to stop capitalism’s barbarisms. Elevate the standard of living for all humans.”

There was more. “And I detest the word ‘terrorist’. Would you want the Republic of Ireland still under English dominion? Should South Africa still be ruled by white people? So-called ‘terrorists’ drove those changes.”

Resting nearby, Maggie felt sufficiently relaxed to watch and listen. “And what about Gandhi?” added God. “Even he would be branded a terrorist these days.”

Satan kept pushing God’s buttons. “And what if the plan doesn’t work? All I can still see – in Southend, Timbuktu, and everywhere else on the planet – is more of that same rampant free will that led Greece’s corrupt elite to half squander and half trouser loans from greedy bankers, sending their country down the pan.”

“Then I may need to be even more active,” said God. Secretly, she loved it when Sal played Devil’s advocate.

***

UK media spin accelerated into its most nauseous overdrive in the second half of May, after the BBC announcement. ‘Terrorism, terrorism, awful despicable terrorism,’ bellowed and stamped and screamed the hacks, as the dust began to settle on the May 12 Thames Estuary events. Two potential suspects seen in Old Leigh were reported to be suspiciously Middle Eastern in their garb, or at least Asian. Moreover, the LNG vessel had brought gas from Qatar. Van Hoyte underwent prolonged questioning, but Essex police provided no further information.

Several dailies produced pictures of a London group of Muslim women and children who had visited Southend seafront on May 12, taking in the aquatic attractions at Seaworld. Without a shred of proof, it was alleged that one or more had been harbouring technology able to detonate distant bombs. One tabloid spoke of an “Islamic submarine” patrolling the depths of the Thames. All that was missing, thought Dan, was speculation that a bloke in a cave four thousand miles away may have masterminded events.

***

Steve Landais lay in bed, nerves still shot by his 5-hour immersion beneath a betting shop floor. Dawn’s extra income was proving critical. IKEA had laid off Steve and the rest of its Lakeside workforce in Thurrock, due to the flooding damage at the store. The social wouldn’t pay out immediately, so his winning bet, which yielded exactly a grand, had come in useful.

Genevieve was driving her parents mad. She wanted to drop out of high school, to join a volunteer project helping the tsunami survivors. “I want to do something useful mum. I’m surrounded by unquestioning halfwits with rich daddies at that fucking place. The only worthwhile thing I’ve learned is foreign languages.”

Dawn’s daughter – and her lad, Nigel – were still transfixed by the video shot by Dan. Replayed ceaselessly, around the entire world, it showed the huge wall of water scything into Old Leigh, yet somehow rising and curving above the area. “It’s like an invisible dome was in place,” said Nigel, one teatime. “If you look at the flood damage, there’s a sort of semi-circle within Old Leigh that stayed as dry as a bone.” All his school mates were talking about the subsequent photos shot from the air, which bore out this out.

One of Nigel’s friends reckoned that a being from another dimension might have placed a cosmic protractor on a map, with the point centred on the Crooked Billet, drawn a circle, and then “come up with a mumbo-jumbo spell” to protect the old town. “Maybe there was something there that had to be preserved.”

“Don’t be a twat,” said his mates.

***

God’s plan hit a technicality. The Creator had envisaged turmoil spreading through insurance markets, as claims accumulated an unprecedented critical mass. Reinsurers would be equally vulnerable, having hedged their bets in wobbly derivatives markets. The eventual result, God foresaw, would be a new form of financial sector collapse, never to be recovered from, and speedier transition to a moneyless world. Maggie would cheerlead that, in parallel to the Southchurch initiative.

God was not the first to be caught out by insurance exclusions. It transpired that the surge of property claims from businesses, local authorities and individuals around the Thames and across the North Sea were being rejected by underwriters citing war risk exclusions. They emphasised that derelict weapons of war had been stored in the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, explaining that war-risk cover was traditionally excluded from the ‘all-risk’ insurance policies of the afflicted individuals and businesses making the claims. In short, ‘we ain’t paying out’.

Given that the overall bill for flood damages was aggregating towards £125 billion, the global insurance industry swooned with relief, while God berated herself for not being utterly omniscient. She hit the single malts with a vengeance, cursing her right-brained tendencies that were best suited to the imaginative business of creation.

In left-brained insurance markets, the narrow technical escape by underwriters spawned the formation of policyholder protest groups, which begat a wider movement shouting that individuals and businesses everywhere should cease to use insurance. As with Occupy, it was treated with disdain by most media, but insurance turnover began to dwindle. Maggie wondered if God’s plan was taking a “crafty dog-leg”, as her husband Denis liked to refer to certain golf course holes.

Dan wrote a series of articles in late May, asserting that a new ‘Black Swan’ lurked. Unconnected to Micky Gaze’s debauching of a white swan in 1976, the over-arching Black Swan idea was that certain events – such as the Big Wave, 9/11, or the collapse of the USSR – came swooping in below radar to trigger huge changes that were impossible to predict.

In various publications, Dan tentatively described a new financial paradigm unravelling. He highlighted the £1.5 billion “capital hole” at the UK’s Co-Operative Bank, which led, in mid-June 2013, to Britain’s first bank bail-in. It was paid for by retail and pension funds, whose holding was cut by more than half in value. BBC Breakfast reported merely that shareholder bonds were being “changed”.

On June 25, EU finance ministers agreed to finalise, by end-2013, a plan that rendered all European bank accounts open to ‘bail-ins’. Officials had previously insisted that Cyprus was a “special case”. Media coverage of what would essentially be daylight robbery remained sparse, at best.

At the consumer end, individuals in Western Europe were finding cashpoints to be  inoperative for unexpected periods, due to “technical” reasons. Dan finally put his daughter’s question to his legal friend, as they sat in Cliff’s hilltop garden one summer evening. “Is her bank account, with its few hundred quid, safe?”

Dusting off and delving through dusty tomes, Cliff came upon the precedent established by the House of Lords, 165 years prior. Cliff quoted the Foley v Hill judgment handed down by Lord Cottenham, the then-Lord Chancellor. “Money when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal… it is then the banker’s money; he is known to deal with it as his own; he makes what profit of it he can, which profit he retains himself.”

“And in plain English?”

Cliff’s explanation crystallised. “There is absolutely no criminal liability if such money disappears. A banker cannot be prosecuted for losing his “own money”. If her bank became insolvent, your daughter Rose, as an unsecured creditor, would stand last in the queue of creditors to be paid out. The secured creditors are always first in line.”

“Well tickle my arse with a feather,” said Dan.

****

After an overcast summer day, candles were lighting the bars around Leigh. Old-fashioned kegs were dispensing ale. Decimated businesses and public services were teasing out improvisation across the entire estuary region, where power supply remained unreliable.

Former soldier Alex sat with Chanelle in the Broadway pub, just a strong stone’s throw away from the proposed ashram. Having survived the tsunami, they had swapped digits, then much more.

Chanelle’s lad Nathan was ecstatic. He had a real soldier to play battle games with him. Alex was less robust than he appeared. His dreams were haunted by the eyes of an Afghan he had shot through the throat. Chanelle had other challenges. She had twice stolen food so that her children could eat.

They talked about combining his income as a security guard with her benefits. As Chanelle worked her mobile, he sipped his pint. He was on duty later that night, guarding a Lloyds Bank unit which administered lending and credit card debt. He listened to chat at the bar about the coming football season.

One guy was boasting about three ‘payday loans’ he had amalgamated to buy a week’s holiday in Ibiza. “Yolo” yelled a mate. “The Dalai Lama disagrees”, replied a clever Essex wag.

A confident-looking guy sat down nearby. The man called somebody on his smartphone, asking if she fancied a holiday in Mauritius. Then moaned about the extra commuting due to the closure of the battered Fenchurch Street railway line.

Alex guessed the man’s profession. He puzzled again over the bank ‘rescue’ by Gordon Brown. Banks in London had behaved so recklessly that the required bailout reached £850 billion by December 2009, he had read. The figure quiely grew in subsequent years. Meanwhile the EU had spent a third of its economic output on trying to “save” its banks, using taxpayer cash, between 2008 and 2011. A third.

Work was calling. Alex wondered if life was possible without debt and war. It had stuck in his head as a kid that Australia’s entire land mass could be parcelled out so that every human owned slightly less than a quarter acre, enough to be self-sufficient in food. Given that the whole world was available, that indicated a badly managed planet.

***

Already bloodied and bruised, God’s plan was feeling new heat. The media blitz surrounding the tsunami was papering over a non-stop reversal of 20^th century advances by Britain’s working classes. More public sector workers were receiving their marching orders under Chancellor Osborne’s ‘savings’ drive, while ATOS actions and other welfare cuts continued. People were dying directly from the effects, or sometimes taking their own lives. Official data showed 40 consecutive months of contraction in UK wages.

In Newcastle, “savings” measures were decimating the community. One of over 1,000 Newcastle council staff to have already lost their jobs was Alex’s brother, Bryn. His last e-mail had been despondent. “People up here are finding there is no real welfare anymore. Whether you’re sick or unemployed or disabled, they will try and make sure you get nothing by denying you are sick or saying you haven’t been looking hard enough for a job, no matter how hard you try. You can even see why they do it – it’s because their own jobs are on the line”.

The city council was set to lose between 55% and 60% of its government income over a six-year period. Moorside library in central Newcastle was set to close, while Newcastle City Pool – which produced three Olympic swimmers – was shutting. Further ahead, council-funded home care would be rationed to the most profoundly vulnerable elderly and disabled residents. More premature death assured. Rubbing salt into open wounds, bonuses at state-owned banks flowed copiously. Corporate tax-dodging remained rife.

Dan got into hot water with an editor by describing “an austerity pogrom to continue the class war declared by Maggie”. Gandhi, who came up for air now and again from his deep immersion in Britain’s situation, argued that caste systems were emerging in the UK. “Welfare claimants and the poorly-paid are becoming Britain’s untouchables,” he told God.

Satan’s images were blunter. “They might as well start dropping bombs on the poorest parts of Britain. The planes could have FINANCIAL SECTOR emblazoned under each wing.”

***

Sensing Sal’s mood, Jesus descended the Highway to Hell, with the offer of a new twist. “I feel restless Yesh – everything is changing,” his friend admitted.

Satan’s temper was foul. He had been ‘quizzing’ a recently-deceased senior executive from Goldman Sachs, a banking institution that was once memorably described in Rolling Stone magazine as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.

Succumbing to metaphor, Sal had dressed up as a vampire, and reduced the banker to something like a stir-fried calamari, heavily seasoned with salt.

“We are all having to adapt to mum’s plans”, said Jesus. “We would like you to assume a different role. It will mean leaving Morgana and the boys for a spell.” The clear blue eyes flashed down at Sal. Jesus was nearly 12 feet tall.

“In the new Essex community?” Jesus nodded. “As an enforcer?” Another nod.

Satan needed new horizons, more than he could remember. He knew his oldest boy, Beelzebub, was more than ready to deputise. The lad knew precisely which incomers needed pliers on their teeth. Sal listened to Jesus explain how the Southend experiment would allow participants to step right out of money, politics and media matrixes. “But it is critical they avoid confronting the system while trying to leave. Sal, you would be at the heart of a strong protective layer enabling them to develop independently.”

Satan suggested it might be like a Special Circumstances role in Iain Banks’ Culture novels. “The best approach is to focus on the positives and enjoy the work,” said Jesus. Satan’s brow furrowed. “Big question Yesh. Can humans fundamentally change their ingrained patterns?” he asked.

“Unless they truly prefer a hamster wheel which they are told must be spun faster and faster, then yes.” Jesus nevertheless warned that, as the new model unfurled, “those that control the money supply and those that still live well will frantically seek to maintain the existing ‘one over another’ world.” Satan liked that last phrase.

Jesus’ eyes were distant. “We need an evolution, a transcending evolution of consciousness, to bring Earth from its invisible quarantine.” As he spoke, his body shimmied, mimicking trance dancers seen by Satan in southern Asia. “What humans own is inside them: energy, spirit, soul and consciousness. The gamut of material possessions is little more than a tempting trick,” Jesus said.

Satan recalled his chum’s immunity to temptation. All their larking about in the Judean desert. “You make a fair point, old pal. Nonetheless the bus service in Southend is currently useless. So I will need a good motorbike to travel the four miles between two Southend sites, and maybe further afield. The dream ride would be a Ducati Diavel.”

Jesus scratched his head: “Dammit, what was it I used to say? That’s it! Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”

“I’ll get a decent motorbike lock,” said Sal.

 Chapter 15 – Remote control

 

 

If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.

Mark Twain

 

 

 

48 hours after the Thames tsunami, Eric headed east along the A1060, in his anonymous blue Ford estate. After the heaving M11 traffic, the Essex roads were quiet.

The PM kept the radio off, to escape the endless verbiage about the Southend event. Approaching the tiny hamlet of White Roding, he turned south, and then south-west, driving through remote back roads dissecting sprawling farmlands. When he needed thinking time, away from the City, this remoteness was his refuge.

The earlier conference call kept looping around his head. The estuary explosion had shocked and surprised all of the families. In over three decades of video link ups, that was unprecedented. At MI5, the sharpest brains were convinced that the Montgomery had blown up through tidal causes. The other agencies under clan control had offered zero intelligence, which was also a first. Even Mossad, God bless them.

During the last mile of Eric’s journey, remnants of the former Matching airfield – used in WW2 by the RAF and US air force – were visible. Out on an old runway, doing nothing, sat a dark Tata International lorry. An Indian company originally.

The Asians had been the most vocal on the video call. Speaking from New Delhi, Mukesh had suspicions that Pakistan could be testing a new detonation device. The Americans also could not see beyond a military operation, with Russia as the prime suspect. The heads of the two major ‘Dragon’ families had both asked about the scope of weather control systems. And precisely which groups were in possession?

George had pulled it down to a practical level, where they shared common interest: the insurance claims flooding into companies that were about 80%-owned by the clans, directly or indirectly. “We have a very legal loophole out of the business and property claims,” he explained, firmly.

It went without saying that all media coverage would be tightly controlled. The now-standard ploy of blaming terrorists would be rolled out, again. “The usual suspects, yeah I like that,” chuckled Frank. Incipient chinks of New York sky framed the former mobster’s face.

The meeting had ended in gales of laughter. In Rome, Frank’s blood relative Vito spoke of the boatloads of Libyan refugees steadily entering southern Italy, and the hugely polarising effects on Italians. “In all its glory, we look upon the democracy of the Arab Spring,” he suggested, almost hissing. Every time, without fail, the ‘D’ word was guaranteed to tickle and cheer the men with no surnames.

Cricketers in whites were moving slowly in the distance, as Eric pulled into The Chequers’ car park. Nowhere in the world relaxed him quite like Matching Green, bathed in early evening sunlight. He turned his phone to vibrate. Nobody batted an eyelid at the white-haired man who quietly entered the bar.

He asked the serving wench for a pint of Noble English Craft Lager. Exceptionally flavoursome, ice cold. One glass only. Enough to slake the thirst; and jog the thoughts. But insufficient to jeopardise the return drive.

He took his beer outside, to a faraway table. Crows hopped around in the foreground. A span of detached, expensive houses backdropped the cricketers. Reminding him that he owned a property a few miles away, in deepest Magdalene Laver. A pragmatic retreat, once home to discreet trysts.

Each chilled sip acted to reanimate the morning conversations. All the families had the singular, similar aims of limitless profit amid zero publicity. And they shared sufficient common ground to keep from each other’s throats, whether it be the bread and butter insurance and banking businesses, or the mind-boggling margins produced by asteroid mining.

His nagging discomfort was specific. He and George still knew nothing about the true provenance of the Thames events, on their own manor. There were huge reputational risks in not controlling one’s patch.

Lev, who ran Eastern Europe with an iron fist, had highlighted the fact that Old Leigh remained nearly unscathed by the tsunami. “Makes no sense. What’s actually going on Eric….daan in Sarfend?” His estuary mimic masked the probe. ” You boys been sellin’ ouija boards, or what?”

Two couples in their sixties sat at a nearby table, laughing and enjoying the evening. The tsunami peppered the conversation. “It feels so good, just to be alive, sitting in the sunshine” said one of the women. She was plain-looking.

For relief, he listened to a pair of middle-aged men discussing whether to invest in Tuscan real estate. Small-timers. Wrapped up in ideas of themselves as canny investors. The louder of the two know-nothings was questioning whether Italian banks were a safe vehicle through which to operate, given the debts they had piled up. Vito was one of just a few who could answer that. Europe’s middle classes were in for big shocks, if the banking and derivatives markets came undone again. That was still to be decided.

Eric nodded hello to an arriving cyclist, who pulled a water bottle from his bike, strolled to a tap used mainly to fill dog bowls, and topped it up. The man drained it slowly and returned to fill it again. He clipped it to a bike that might grace a Tour de France, stood up, and took his leave. His achievement, of hydrating while not spending a penny, impressed the PM.

One hundred yards away, a bowler shuffled towards the wicket, arm coiled, like a scene from a bucolic 19^th century painting. Simultaneously, the cyclist appeared, at the very back of the canvas, swift as a falcon, propelling his state-of-the-art machine to somewhere. For a second, the PM’s dormant artistic sense stirred.

Just as quickly, a woman sitting down 50 yards away triggered his habitual instincts. There was an unknowing grace, almost an innocence, to her movement. His lizard brain tuned in. Watching her pretty face, and its waves of dissatisfaction with a male partner who misunderstood her food order. Of her lower body, only a shapely calf showed. As she glanced down at her phone, he thought of his nearby house. The display of wealth was the ultimate seduction tool around these parts. At the business end, his pills made Viagra look like tic-tacs.

Eric had long concluded that relationships were both dangerous – too many questions about the business – and tedious. The last one ended in the woman calling him a psychopath. “Is that supposed to be an insult?” he replied. “It may have escaped your notice, but I have done rather well in life.”

His choice had been to reactivate the oldest profession under his own roof. To pay his live-in females £8,000 for each session. Loose change, for satisfactions that he defied any man of his age to emulate. Naomi was his current favourite. Money and sex. The only things really worth a damn, his father always said.

He finished his pint, shadows lengthening. As he fished for his Mondeo keys, he smiled at the woman. It would always be her loss, never to have known him. He could, literally, do anything to almost anyone in Britain.

The man’s face told him he had overdone it. “Can we help you mate?”.

“I intruded. Yes….So sorry. This young lady reminded me of my lovely daughter. A good evening to you both.” Eric headed for the car.

“Fucking old perv,” muttered the male. Eric smirked inwardly. Little Essex man would be missing his oats tonight.

Two other decisions had been made by the clans that morning. Firstly, a new lease of life for the spavined finance system, still hobbling after the global bailouts. Driven by nascent media campaigns, the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ would help reinvent the fiscal wheel. A UN conference would be held in Paris, two years from now, to push ‘green’ taxes and ‘sustainable’ finance. Maybe the planet really was on its last legs. If so, the new catch phrases were perfect.

More pertinent, for him, was support for his idea that Britain’s long-discussed referendum on leaving the European Union might be dusted off and brought to bear, in the next few years. The result could be manipulated, either way, near the finishing line. The important thing was the old game: divide and rule. All the initial signs from the Thames events indicated Brits finding a new sense of togetherness. If it persisted, it could be ripped apart again. In the US, Frank told them, the real estate and casino mogul Donald Trump had been singled out for a run at the 2016 presidency. “Gonna be fireworks, guys,” he predicted. “Next civil war, maybe.”

On the surface, all good then. But throughout the drive back, his gut said something new was gestating, untraceably. He had to find it. Control it.

At 8 p.m., the PM turned on Radio 4, to hear the BBC headline. The female newsreader could have been a condescending schoolteacher. Her bulletin was prim, not for contradicting.

“Essex police have in the last few minutes announced that a group of Muslims are under arrest, in relation to Sunday’s events in the Thames Estuary.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 14 – Smoke on the water

 

 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

William Shakespeare.

 

 

 

Windows continued to crack. Dan sensed veils lifting, time slowing into long fractions. God was rooted to her screens, admiring the tsunami’s rapidly spreading circle, resisting huge urges to dance. Jesus was positioned mid-river, between the pier and the Medway Estuary. His purple palate of energised colour wobbled violently as the SS Richard Montgomery’s remnants were blasted in every direction.

Thames Estuary dwellers were being blitzed by the ear-pounding detonation of anywhere between 1,400 to 3,000 tonnes of explosives, including 2,000 cases of cluster bombs. The Montgomery had become the first wreck designated as dangerous under section 2 of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973. It sat in an exclusion zone, monitored visually and by radar.

As an ascended master, Jesus refused to be excluded. He had created his own portal near the Sheerness coast, while listening to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Down to Earth’ album. And out he had popped, skipping across the strong currents, passing right through the LNG vessel, and perching on a mast poking above the waters. “I have a Mother who is greater than I. From her I have received all things, and I do only her will,” he softly incanted.

The wreck had for decades been subject to speculation. How much damage to humans and infrastructure might its near 70-year old ordnance inflict? And what could set it off? An investigation by New Scientist magazine in 2004 made no mention of divine sparks, but concluded that a collision, an attack, or just tides shifting the cargo, might be enough.

God settled into her work, wiping a bead of sweat. As the river began to hollow out, and a tower of fire brought bizarre new colours to the sky, time all but stopped. Next to her sat Maggie, transfixed. Satan was opening a bottle of Highland Park, to smooth the transition back. The first sip provided a remarkable heather character. “Jesus told me that the peat used is hand-cut,” Sal told anyone who might be listening.

Operating in nano-seconds, God kept track of the inevitable collateral damage. She accorded each task a prioritisation, attempting to keep children paramount in her deliberations. Certain parents in Southend, Canvey Island and Sheerness had earlier that morning made unexpected decisions on impromptu visits to inland relatives, or trips to rural Essex and Kent. Further down God’s karmic rankings, just below the wasps annoying people on Southend seafront, were categories such as deceitful politicians and Essex bankers who gambled in derivatives markets.

A key task was to oversee the LNG vessel. Having completed almost fifteen hundred voyages, Johan van Hoyte, the Dutch pilot, had sensed an unusual danger. He had read subtle signs in the Cape Horn skies. He had given the slip to armed pirates in Indonesia’s Molocca Straits. But never had he seen the colours which spread-eagled across the Thames Estuary on May 12.

With the Isle of Grain terminal hoving into view, Johan had glanced nervously to starboard where the Montgomery’s masts protruded. Did a mauve aura envelop the wreck’s location? In plain sight ahead lay the ugliness of Thamesport container port and the adjacent Grain power station, near to the LNG import and regasification terminal.

He felt rather than saw the blast. Automatic thoughts of emergency procedures were transcended by terror, followed by astonishment that his huge ship sat atop a moving water cushion.

God absorbed endless cameo details. Beyond the ship, the humans nearest the blast were a 29-year old Belgian woman, Eema Koont, and her 43-year-old lover, a Liberal-Democrat MP. High on cocaine, they had walked the pier. Halfway out, Eema saw a female Buddhist practitioner in red and yellow robes, gazing calmly to sea. In her abandonment, Eema believed she was creating lilac across the sky. She had worked her way into ATOS middle management, gaining hefty bonuses for every batch of claimants torn away from benefits.

In the café, at the pier’s end, her lover tore her clothes off against the disabled toilet wall. He had amassed a small fortune as a parliamentary lobbyist, receiving shares in the private health companies springing up like cancers on the dying NHS body.

Now, in rising wind, they ran from the building laughing like teenagers, carving their initials on a nearby wall, either side of roughly hewn genitalia worn by wind and spray. They sat by a silver bell.

25 yards away, facing the Thorpe Bay shore, the bronzed, bearded but hung-over angler Dickie Durban cast out for mackerel in the warm water. Nothing was biting. Yesterday he had filled his net, celebrating with can after green can of lager. It took a second for the blast to register, another to realise his hearing had gone. Sky was morphing into crazed oranges, browns and blacks, as water all around the Montgomery found paths of deadly destiny.

Was it the coke? Or was a wall of water obliterating all view of Kent? Eema recalled pictures of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. That memory shuffled with others as her mind expanded at light-year speed toward enlightenment. An unhappy childhood in Antwerp; flashes of her first lover; holidays stoned in Morocco; a brief flirtation with meditation.

God, also, was remembering. How she had almost intervened before the atom bombs hit Japan. As the Creator let time pay out, the pier’s front end levered up from its stanchions, like velcro unfastening. A quarantine was lifting. Buildings flipped skywards. The politician flew at last, remembering Aleister Crowley’s words: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”.

Eema Koont span through the sky and onto an exposed, rusty pier stanchion. Similarly harpooned, yards away, her lover twitched uncontrollably. God nodded, satisfied.

Nearer the shore, a pier train catapulted towards the Buddhist. In her mind she sat by her master. Dickie Durban was already sleeping with the fishes, soon to enter the long tunnel.

The karmic mega-wave was pelting towards the Southend coastline, gaining height as the water lost depth. Geoffrey Summers viewed it from his wheelchair two hundred yards west of the pier. His 89-year old body had all but given up. Fluid drawn from his lungs, two weeks ago, was refilling. He had felt the strange compulsion to visit the seafront, painstakingly rolling his chair to its resting place. He thought of World War Two, serving on army hospital ships under the Egyptian sky. Geoffrey recalled his wife’s last years, in a nursing home, unable to recognise him. Regretting he had never said it. How much he loved her.

He thought of the late 1970s, working for a Fleet Street company where printers took turns to sleep through night shifts. Maggie had taken them on. Maybe she got that one right. In his last second, as saltwater filled his mouth, he puzzled over Britain’s mutation. Many people now lacked sufficient food and warmth. His last thought comprised two words: “Perfidious Albion.”

The tsunami raced across the seafront road, sweeping pedestrians and cars into buildings before coiling up slopes. To the west, water smashed though the dark, sleek casino, tilting every wheel to zero. Early Sunday afternoons were quiet. A few croupiers; several Taiwanese and Japanese punters.

From a quantum viewpoint, Jesus saw that no distance existed between Southend and the Isle of Grain. Calmly, he recalled post-Golgotha days. After he and Mary Magdalene fled Jerusalem for India, they lived peacefully, absorbing and teaching ancient Hindu and Buddhistic wisdoms. Mary later left for southern France, taking their two children, but remaining in telepathic contact. Jesus eventually died at a ripe age and was buried in Srinagar, in a zone disputed between India and Pakistan. Now more burials loomed. He would help heal the incoming souls to The Place, where Buddha was chanting to ease the suffering.

East of the pier, Sally Chloe sat in the public bar of the time-worn Hope Hotel. A married guy was buying her shots. She knew a toll might be expected, perhaps at her small flat. Having graduated in psychology, Sally had found only temporary work. It was difficult to get dressed some days. She had been told to look nationwide in her job applications, or risk severing her benefit. Friends in accountancy, law and banking were already halfway to six-digit salaries.

Fiddling with the patch on her cardigan sleeve, she feigned interest in drunken male antics in Ayia Napa. Her thoughts were consumed with money. A friend, Katie, had been seconded to work in the UK Treasury. Kat had told her of a plan to sell off nearly 4 million student loans to private sector buyers, and to remove interest rate caps. One calculation, said Katie, suggested some graduates might then work until retirement without ever repaying their debt.

Sally’s eye was caught by a line Katie had highlighted in the briefing document, which was prepared by Rothschild Investment Bank, an unknown name to her. It said “investors who want inflation protection” should receive more shelter from the financial risk in the loans than the government. There was something odd there, reminding her of Gordon Brown’s 2008 bailout of banks. Why was the private sector prioritised?

Degree or not, Sally was a short jump away from the food bank, or maybe the park bench, given the collapsing welfare system. If the lecherous git sitting opposite were to impregnate her – which he would, given half a chance – she could face the situation she saw locally. Some of the town’s poorest mums were starving themselves to feed their kids.

“You listening or what love?” smiled her gallant suitor, a second before the front windows caved inwards, hurling glass across the room. Sally ignored the apocalyptic view that opened up, ignored her fags, grabbed her bag and ran. Instinctively, she turned right. Lower territory lay to the left. Sprinting, in her red pumps, hoping she could reach the High Street. A glance told her the Adventure Island playground would be pummelled in its location either side of the pier.

Several emporia east of the Hope, Steve Landais stood in a betting shop, a stone’s throw from the Kursaal. A seven furlong horse race at Salisbury was underway. If his £100 cash bet won, the next two rent payments were covered. Reluctantly, Dawn had agreed, given his confidence.

His selection, My Mind Told Me, was a late finisher. With four furlongs to go, the shop’s front window disintegrated. Fellow bettors scrambled for the back door, but Steve’s horse was cruising behind the leaders. “Come on you beaut!” he roared. Outside, thousands of tonnes of metres-high water charged towards the beach.

Lungs bursting, Sally was weaving through terrified locals and day-trippers. Passing the amusement arcades, climbing Pier Hill, slowing, she noticed the young woman trying to gather two kids outside a café. “Do as you’re bloody well told, we’ll be at Nanny’s in just a minute,” shouted Chanelle Robinson, whose mum lived in Alexandra Street, off the main drag.

Sally stopped. “Let’s carry one each, please don’t argue” she yelled. Sally picked up the girl, who was chuckling at the wall of water steadily scything the pier from its moorings. Chanelle grabbed her boy. He insisted Spiderman and Power Rangers were coming.

Moving at any speed was as difficult as resisting the temptation to look seawards. Panting for breath, Chanelle wondered if she might be better off dead. She was ashamed of always pretending to have more than she did. Increasingly uncertain if she could survive on her welfare payments, she had discovered legal aid for consumers was in jeopardy, after disputing a bill with her mobile phone provider.

God switched her lens back east, to a semi-detached house overlooking Southchurch Park. She saw local boy Dave Dawson look up from his spring vegetables at the blast, as darkness smeared the sky above the elevated sea wall a few hundred yards away. Dave ran in and up to where his wife had been sprinkling lavender in their daughter’s bath. “It’s the Montgomery, isn’t it?” Sarah asked anxiously. Dave had regularly mentioned the dangers posed by the wreck.

As a young boy, on the nearby council estate in Newington Avenue, Dave had planted his first seeds. When he met Sarah, who was qualifying as a holistic therapist, his own alternative views had driven him to prepare a ‘survival’ store for the moment of social collapse: thousands of seeds, canned food, medical items, cash and a cluster of silver and gold coins.

Lauren dropped her duck, smiling at the ripples. Watching her, hanging from the toilet roll holder, was the Queen’s face. Dave wondered if he would be reported to the police, but still contended that unelected hereditary monarchies that leeched off their subjects were as archaic and unfair as sending children down mines. The previous week, images of Cameron and Clegg adorned their loo-roll. Dave said the government had soiled itself in its receptiveness to lobbying, which Cameron termed as “the great scandal” a fortnight before being elected. The sound of rushing water rose through the open window. Sarah dried Lauren while he went to their balcony.

God switched back to Chanelle and Sally, who were discovering that a child’s life at stake could trump screaming leg muscles. At the top of Pier Hill, Alex Coppell, a black 25-year-old, had reverted to his military training when windows began disintegrating. By the time the two women crested the hilltop, fighting for breath, Alex had canvassed every section of a crowded fast-food restaurant at the seaward end of the High Street, urging patrons and staff upstairs. As he shepherded the two women and the children to safety, water surged into the High Street. His memories of Afghanistan were re-erupting.

Further west, three friends had followed their Sunday lunchtime routine. From a Westcliff seafront café, they had watched an increasingly purple sky frame a blue and white Maersk container ship. As usual, soccer talk petered out. Talk of past sexual antics was stale. Despite seeing only middle-aged men shovelling beer into their faces, God followed a hunch, and called up the File on Mike Burper.

The school record was mediocre, accompanied by a history of bullying. Then a career in insurance and two divorces, each wife citing physical violence. Big anger problems stemmed from paternal DNA. A separate side-file contained a long list of attacks on soccer opponents, and even referees. Two grown sons remained terrified of him, but were apt to mirror his behaviour. ‘Hello Mike’ whispered God. “Old Testament time!”

When the explosion occurred, some two sea miles away, the threesome separated. One sought safety up the hill behind the café. Another reckoned he could reach his car outside Maxims Casino.

Burper’s vehicle lay the other way. He legged it towards Chalkwell, breath rasping. Cars were crashing and spinning off the road in the panic. He looked over his left shoulder, stomach spinning at the darkness mushrooming across the estuary. 20 seconds later he knew he wouldn’t even reach the car. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

Through the gathering roar of death, Jesus entered Mike’s ear. “Only one thing remains Michael. Forsake all you have in the physical realm, and come with me.” Mike’s next move possessed a certain Essex panache. He halted, turned and faced down the tsunami. “Come on then,” he snarled. As it leapt onto the road, he threw his last punch.

Beneath the betting shop, Steve Landais sat in a black hole, like Jonah and Ishmael. Squeezed against the underfloor safe, winning slip in his back pocket, he heard the water flooding the shop; wondered how much air was left; texted Dawn that he was OK.

Messages flew like a mini 9/11. From his balcony, Dave Dawson texted his brother, who lived by Southend East railway station. A cataclysm of seawater had charged down and through every gap to the south side of Southchurch Park, smiting aside any weakness. It was filling the huge recreational space and surrounding roads. Dead bodies, sections of beach huts and boats were surging past. Dave saw two boys had perched, precariously, on the roof of the park’s cafe. The younger cried, holding his brother’s hand.

Looking down, Dave estimated nearly three feet of flooding, gauging the water’s height against his front windows. Damage to their property would be acute, and his vegetables ruined, but insurance would kick in, barring an act of God or some other exclusion.

In Heaven, Buddha recited the Great Compassion Mantra for each soul that departed earth.

In Leigh, hundreds of desperate people were scrambling and jostling along roads and up slopes from the old town. Ricky Ravenous-Glutton remained rooted outside the Billet, his memory straying unaccountably to his granddad in Benfleet. Ricky’s toy army overran the Germans, by the coal fire, while Pops snored in his favourite chair. Yards away, Claire had joined Sheena, Ruth and Jess, watching the horizon diminish. Her rash had also shrunk.

Deploying his fireman’s instincts, Micky Gaze picked the pub as the best of a terrible set of options. He forcefully told the women that the Billet’s floors, several feet above ground, might offer sanctuary. “Out here we’re dead,” he shouted. Ravenous-Glutton followed the small group climbing the pub steps.

15 miles away, in Basildon, a redhead standing outside Primark felt an unknown emotion. She heard the blast, saw the south-eastern sky darken. Why did she suddenly remember the chancer she had entwined with at the Canvey nightclub? Crisps and sex were his pleasures.

Above Old Leigh, Dan’s camera lens was providing strange pictures. The oncoming barrage appeared to bounce off an invisible covering across the old town. It curled and stretched onwards and upwards in a diagonal, north-westerly thrust, engulfing running and falling humans. It bubbled and broiled up to within 50 yards of where Dan and Mary sat transfixed, nerve holding.

The tsunami rushed on, mercilessly, across the greenery of the under-named Two Tree Island, where ‘doggers’ lost the use of the nature reserve for weeks. Next in line, Canvey Island never stood a chance, despite two miles of reinforced concrete sea walls. The island had achieved fame via its major 1953 flooding. The 2013 version killed several hundred inhabitants, including a hatful of hardened criminals.

God never lost sight of the LNG vessel. The ship grounded down upon the Isle of Grain’s expansive mud flats, without causing a second huge explosion. Nearby, the living daylights were knocked out of the regasification terminal, container port and combined cycle power station, smashing away a percentage of the UK’s optimal power supply and racking up billions of pounds of damage. The town of Sheerness on the adjacent Isle of Sheppey was a sitting duck for the wave, while the upper reaches of the River Medway experienced a huge surge, ruining parts of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester. So many lives lost.

Tilbury Docks took a huge hit from the swell. Terrified drivers looked down from the QE2 road crossing at Dartford, catalysing crashes hundreds of feet above the river. Industries, transportation facilities and residential areas along the Thames suffered major damages and residual flooding. However, the Thames Barrier, east of the Isle of Dogs, held firm. Nonetheless insurance companies would soon receive balance sheet busting bills, including damage to Belgian and Dutch coastlines.

In the taxi back to Chelmsford, Dan wrote the story on his mobile. You couldn’t make it up. The first British tsunami and the miracle of Old Leigh. By the evening, he had a scoop that a legal friend negotiated with ravenous publishers. Dan’s pictures collected royalties for decades.

The Mouth of the Empire had been dealt a huge punch. Now the real work would begin.

 

CHAPTER 13 – The mouth of the empire

 

 

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside/Oh I do like to be beside the sea

With a bucket and a spade/And a fucking hand grenade

Beside the seaside, beside the sea

Football chant once linked to Southend United Football Club

 

 

 

 

Feeling bold, God was enjoying a widescreen view of the Thames Estuary, where the exorcism would begin.

A minor breeze ruffled the river, which was England’s mouth. It had feasted heartily on spices, tea, rum, tobacco and sugar, and lustily on diamonds and gold, particularly gold. It had burped out weaponry exports, trading some of these for slaves.

The river was at full tide, covering the Mulberry Harbour off its northern shoreline at Southchurch, and wetting every leg of Southend Pier, the world’s longest. The swell was unable to conceal the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, which sat in sandbanks off Sheerness, ring-fenced by buoys, after running aground in 1944. At the screen’s periphery, God saw a ship ploughing north-eastwards along the Kent coast. 190,000 cubic metres of Qatari liquefied natural gas (LNG) was heading to the Isle of Grain.

Recent myths and legends of super-heroes flitted across the mind of God. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, and Wolverine. And now Buddha, Gandhi, Satan and……. Maggie. She hoped Gandhi and Maggie would rub along.

She pondered their track records.

Both fervently admired the Sermon on the Mount, her son’s message of striving towards the Kingdom of God. Both had changed history. In Maggie’s case, the virus of neoliberalism had been unleashed across the globe, with its attendant demons of privatisation and privation. At home, the UK’s homeless and unemployment statistics had soared. “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” she had once told the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly.

Gandhi had refused food, leading hunger strikes to protest British rule of India. He had lived without possessions in pursuit of social justice. At his death the Indian had perceived, and then seized the “dharmata” opportunity, liberating himself forever from ducking in and out of human bodies.

 

***

 

Karma did not preoccupy 25-year-old Richard Ravenous-Glutton. On Sunday 12 May, 2013, Ricky was lunching on prawn cocktail crisps while emptying his bladder in the brick outhouse beside the Crooked Billet.

He heard the trap door open in the corridor behind him. A nocturnal-looking geezer, wearing gloves, was holding the wall for support. He was well over seven foot tall. “Fuck me”, said Rick.

“What the fuck,” he added, pissing on his shoes and spilling crisps as a second figure emerged. This one had huge ears, an Arsenal shirt stretched over his tummy, and a dazzling smile. Stretching his multi-tasking skills, Ricky whipped out his phone and activated the videocam. “This is mental m8,” he somehow texted his friend Chris, outside in the Leigh-on-Sea sunshine. The Nepalese prince Siddharta Gautama wobbled after Satan towards the bar.

“Arse bandits in loo,” Rick texted again when another Indian-looking male stumbled out, wearing sandals, spectacles and a loose white robe. One thin shoulder was exposed. He placed a walking cane on the slippery floor.

What had the nut-jobs been up to in the khazi? “Facebook evryfin m8,” Rick texted. And again: “OMFG CANT B NO FKN WY GET PICS ON FB”, after a woman’s leg emerged, unsteadily.

Strange things happened in toilets. The previous week a redhead from Basildon had bent over for him, in a nightclub cubicle. But three guys and a woman would need every last inch of confined space. He considered the angles, entertaining the pleasing notion that one of the weirdos had been shafted by another geezer while two of them did the bird. But his carnal calculations were blown to pieces by the woman’s inescapable identity. “Bloody hell,” mumbled Rick. “Impossible.”

Maggie looked resplendent in classic cream jacket and A-line skirt, court shoes and matching handbag. She glanced with deep disdain at Rick’s dripping member, on which a crisp had lodged, as she lurched away. Finally, Bob staggered out, hardly able to place his paws.

The upload to Facebook, which would trigger a real-time avalanche of local interest, was almost complete. Rick and Chris didn’t have a clue that Britain was about to receive a karmic punch in the teeth. The sky gave little away. Its royal blue contained small billows of white.

Micky Gaze stood loyally outside the Billet. Thinking about money. To cover the incomers’ immediate needs, he had ordered double Bowmores for the delegation, who were to meet Dan and Mary, journeying in from Chelmsford, and to familiarise with the locality. £35 for the round. He had to talk to Sal about the mounting expenses.

Walking over the nearby railway bridge, heart in his mouth, Dan looked up, adjusting the camera strap around his neck. Could a sky look messianic? From early that morning, he had been listening incessantly to the Nick Cave track ‘Higgs Boson Blues’. It depicted a world where time had stopped, and a preacher spoke in a new language.

Sal spotted a couple of fishermen. He asked about the tide, its duration and strength. Unfathomably, during the last 24 hours, it seemed that Leigh’s fishing fleet had enjoyed its biggest catch in decades. Buddha took a seat by the sea wall, opposite a woman in her thirties, nursing a half pint. She looked to be in physical discomfort. Mentally, he imprinted three purifying Sanskrit letters into the ale.

Siddharta had reached enlightenment in the sixth century BC, going on to teach a spiritual path followed by untold millions across Asia. It was his first time in England. He gazed with curious pleasure at the eating and drinking houses, craft shops, galleries, wharves and cockle sheds. The woman introduced herself as Claire. Something told her that this relaxed man would understand her illness. A rash had covered her shoulders months ago, and spread, unabashed by GP prescriptions. The urge to scratch ruined her sleep. Oddly, her beer tasted different. Maybe cleaner.

Beneath his breath, Buddha chanted the Great Compassion Mantra for the people of Southend. Om moni bemi hong. Om moni bemi hong. It asked for compassion for all deceased beings, and for those directly or indirectly responsible for their deaths. He looked up. Shades of purple had manifested. Plums and cranberries peeking from clouded white wispiness.

But still hot, which suited Gandhi’s light garb. Sensing familiar scrutiny, from many eyes, Mahatma watched the man and woman arrive. Satan greeted the female, whose husband looked overwhelmed by Satan’s height, and equally shocked to see Maggie.

Traditionally a sherry drinker, Britain’s former PM was gulping the Bowmore to regain her ‘land legs’. It was feisty then sweet to the taste. She now recalled living in Essex after World War Two. Renting in the garrison town of Colchester, she had commuted to a chemical plant near the River Stour. She had visited Southend many years later, in May 1969, speaking to Conservative women at the Grade II listed Kursaal building, on the seafront.

Mahatma was deeply perplexed by Maggie’s inclusion in the team. “British bull in a China shop”, was his description.

God explained little, observing only that this version of her was, at her request, an exactitude of her “space-suit” at the age of 41, back in 1966. Maggie was oddly fixated on that year, when, as a shadow treasury spokesman in Ted Heath’s Conservative party, she had expressed forcible opinions on public expenditure.

In the Billet, Micky Gaze stood at the cliff-face of his overdraft limit. He ordered fish and chips for seven, and more double Bowmores. He grabbed a word with Sal. “I’ve laid out £130 already today. Can’t do it much longer, or me and the wife will go bust,” he said, apologetically.

Satan looked into his friend’s eyes. “Big day today Micky, but I’ll talk to God.” Sal was temptingly handsome, whatever way you swung.

In the virtual world, pictures of Satan and his squad were whizzing through ether. Locals were thronging down hillside paths from Upper Leigh to view the free-of-charge freak show. Chris told Ricky that Paulie and the lads would be along soon, and Johnnie Tattoo’s crew were finishing up drinks at the nearby Peter Boat pub.

Maggie strode across to three women tucking into seafood lunches, sliding into the spare place. Her Asprey brown alligator structured flap front top handle satchel handbag gleamed in the sun. It looked to her new companions to have cost thousands of pounds.

A Bengali woman opposite was enjoying peppered cockles. Sheena was a physiotherapist at Southend hospital, where noises about redundancies were growing. Struck by the newcomer’s uncanny resemblance to a recently-deceased politician, she carried on discussing a 53-year-old woman, Stephanie Bottrill, who had recently walked in front of a lorry in Birmingham. The trigger was a letter stating she would lose £80 of monthly housing benefit under the ‘bedroom tax’. She had posted her keys through a neighbour’s door. And a note, saying “I can’t afford to live”.

Sheena took a slug of pinot grigio. Gazing at Maggie, she paid little attention to the rising south-easterly breeze. “Maybe that’s how it’s going to be, a controlled social demolition,” she pondered aloud.

Maggie sipped more Bowmore. Then spoke confidently. “Any legitimate government should fear the people, not the other way around. And governments can and should, always, be held accountable for their actions.” Sheena spluttered wine across her friend Ruth’s potted crab.

Feeling words flow with new sympathies, Maggie spoke again. “Why let the present bunch off the hook?” She referred, with a look of distaste, to Lord Green, the unelected Minister of State for Trade and Investment. His credentials involved heading HSBC Bank when it was laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels. She spoke of “a graceless corruption” permeating Westminster, where over 200 parliamentarians possessed financial interests in private sector health care.

People were already crowding tightly around the table, manipulating smartphones. God was pleased at how swiftly Maggie had adapted to the mission, after intense briefings. Maggie switched back to Stephanie Bottrill. “According to the Daily Mirror, she was diagnosed with serious auto-immune system deficiency in her childhood, and was told by doctors that she was too ill to work. However, she never registered as disabled, and lived without disability benefit. Like me, and I suspect all of you, she was a proud lady.”

She couldn’t stop: “These ‘austerity’ measures that we keep hearing about do not even save money, because your chancellor is furiously borrowing again in the bond markets, in order to pay debts that keep growing.” On she went, breeze lifting and sunshine fading. “How many more stories like this do any of you need to hear? How much more nonsense about deficits, and ‘we’re all in this together’, while the richest pile up more assets?” No replies.

“Life is pretty crap for many people right now,” said another woman at the table, Jess, whose hair was preternaturally grey. Released from her bus driving job due to a pulled back muscle, which had failed to heal, she was attending a ‘work programme’ where bullying and intimidation from Job Centre staff was rife. Yet, when awakening that morning, she sensed something incredible was brewing. A Sambuca shot accompanied her white wine.

Stephanie Bottrill’s story reminded Jess how a terminally ill man had died of kidney failure and starvation in East Grinstead, Sussex. Hardly able to believe her story, she told her companions that the 63-year-old died following a medical assessment by ATOS, which passed him fit to carry out manual work, and had recommended that his benefits should stop, despite his kidney treatment five days a week in Haywards Heath. ATOS subsequently denied any wrong-doing, reiterating that it was following Department of Work & Pensions imperatives to get one million people into work. Pumping up the bile, the Daily Mail had published a ‘workshy map’ of Britain, based on disability benefit claimants that ATOS had disqualified.

A woman in a smart red hoodie piped up. “I’ve always loved being British. But not so much now.” Ruth ran a dance school in Westcliff. Poorer mums were increasingly unable to pay for the lessons, which integrated physically challenged children. Ruth told the group about remarks by Colin Brewer, a councillor in Cornwall, who had advocated killing the disabled at birth due to the costs in keeping them alive. She pulled up her hood against the breeze. “Two options, I reckon. We all start finding our tribes, and creating our own realities; or we wait for super-heroes to sort out this mess.” She looked in bewilderment at Maggie.

There was no longer room to move in the old town. Having slept under a bench, after lapping at a saucer of whisky, Bob was stirring as food arrived for Satan’s gang. Gandhi looked at the glory of mauve, lilac and lavenders around the sky; felt the breeze chilling his bare shoulder. A staunch vegetarian, he would not eat the fish.

Seldom curious, Ravenous-Glutton was nagged by a question. He approached Buddha. Siddharta looked Rick up and down, enjoying the boy’s outfit: orange tee-shirt, purple jeans, blue shoes and yellow watch. Smiling deeply, he said: “Whatever and however you might think of me, please remember that I never claimed divinity, but merely knew that I possessed the seed of enlightenment. That nature is the birthright of every sentient being, I realised, after sitting under the tree at Bodh Gaya.”

Rick and his mates had drunk enough beer to float a local cockle boat. “Yeah…course mate. Listen we’re all Spurs – where you get that Arsenal shirt?” he asked, spitting crisp fragments.

Buddha replied with graciousness: “From a big but compassionate being. For you, I would say this. Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small. However small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain. What you are is what you have been. What you will be is what you do now.”

“What the fuck you on about?” said Rick.

Chris got it. “Geezer’s talkin about karma Ricky. You know, like, what goes around comes around.”

Paulie and Johnnie Tattoo decided to nick Maggie’s handbag for a laugh. Jess was talking about the BBC, whose licence she had stopped buying. “Its journalists seem willing to protect paedophiles and politicians. I’m not paying any money until their programmes start representing my views. The real news is online anyway.”

Maggie saw the arm reach for her bag. She instinctively grabbed Johnnie’s dark wrist and yanked it behind his back, making him grunt with pain. “We are supposed to be responsible adults, yet we get caught with our hands in the cookie-jar, don’t we” she scolded, just like the old Maggie. But with martial artistry.

Buddha was explaining reincarnation to Claire, who had forgotten her skin condition. The sky was howling out strange rainbow colours, dominated by purple. Conversations increased in animation as the streets reached logjam.

“People have ability to create deep in their minds,” grinned a teenager who had smoked some excellent weed. “95% of the endeavour known as work is either destructive to the land, the psyche or both. This goes way beyond the right to work – or to beg for a job.”

One voice piercing the clamour shouted out that financial crashes had taken place in 1907, 1929 and 2008. “The first two were followed by war – so should we be getting ready for a new holocaust?”

Satan told Dan to stop drinking. To write down all he had seen and heard. Then to leave, with Mary. Find a particular vantage point, and prepare to file the story of his life. The light in the sky was almost messianic, almost there. Satan told them the change would begin with a ground-breaking community in eastern Southend, in which they would be intimately involved. Dan remained awestruck.

“Humanity has to become more spiritual and raise its energy, so its benevolent thoughts manifest quicker. You’ve seen Maggie, Gandhi and the Buddha, all of whom will work with you. Dan, you will control PR. Mary, you will be tasked with a range of jobs.” He raised an eyebrow: “You both up for that?” As Satan elaborated, Dan looked at Mary, and thought of how he loved her. In his song Brompton Oratory, Nick Cave sang:

No God up in the sky; No devil beneath the sea

Could do the job that you did, baby; Of bringing me to my knees

Dan and Mary walked back across the railway. They ascended steps to higher ground, while Buddha traced a dome in his mind. It blanketed the old town. He followed Satan, Gandhi and Maggie through the crowd, back to the toilet. Bob scampered and staggered between their feet.

Mary and Dan found a seat at the top of Cliff Gardens. Holding hands in the driving gale, coming from the direction of Southend pier, they tried to make sense of events. The sky was like nothing ever seen. As if a purple column of rapidly spinning electrons was funnelling upwards and outwards, mid-Thames, near the Isle of Grain. Satan said to train the camera towards the estuary mouth and wait, finger on the video facility. Through the sights Dan saw the LNG vessel approach its terminal. Mary was texting their daughter Rose.

He shut his eyes at the flash, felt the air wobble past his ears, and heard windows shatter behind him. Rising, beyond the pier, a wall of water was unfurling in all directions, including the old town. The camera was catching it all, and Dan’s body was vibrating and glowing with the imminence of death.

 

 

 

Around this time last week we enjoyed a few hours in Chelmsford with our daughters Lauren and Josie. We grabbed some Italian food, and sat by the River Chelmer, eating and talking. I was so happy, quietly marvelling at our female offspring. Carrying all the challenges of their generation, but brilliant company. So proud of them both. Kind, attentive, sharp, sharing, witty, thoughtful and empathetic.

We wandered over to the Chelmsford Odeon, to see Brad Pitt’s new film, Ad Astra. The kindest thing to say is that he made a decent fist of a terrible script.  And that his previous appearance, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was mesmerising.

Ad Astra started with promise. A father-son relationship with a huge hole. Against a background where the solar system has become a commercial environment, as the last 500 years of capitalism have driven mankind outwards, off a struggling planet. Travelling to the moon is like taking the Eurostar to Paris, with snacks buyable by debit card, and delays at customs. And then the revelation that rival earth forces are fighting the US for space resources. Nice shots of space, and the planets.

After that the plot fell apart, as if a 9-year-old scriptwriter had butted in. Brad makes it to Mars, where he swims through a dark underground tunnel and climbs up the launch gantry, through the increasing heat, and, one second before take-off, lets himself in a hatch at the bottom of the rocket that will travel to Neptune to seek his maverick father. Tommy Lee Jones, his dad, has lived on space rations for 30 years, controlling a craft that is emitting mysterious power surges that threaten planet Earth.

That’s all fine if you’re watching Disney. Trying not to spoil the plot here, so won’t say any more except that the story gets more and more ridiculous. The ending is best summed up by the phrase “this is utter bollocks”.

Has Hollywood had its day? There were just 10 people in the cinema. Our tickets were purchased cheaply on Groupon. Yet the Guardian reviewer called it a ‘soaring psychological space-opera’, noting that it played to rapt crowds at the Venice Film Festival. They must have been handing out Italian mushrooms at the door. Or bribing them.

A few days later, Maureen and I watched Silence, Martin Scorsese’s look at how Christianity was banned in 17^th century Japan.  It started slowly, brooded, and took an hour or so to hit its stride. You had to be patient, but the story felt authentic, tracing the fates of the Portuguese Jesuit priests as they and their followers ran into the Nipponese version of the witchfinder-general.

The stark choice was to deny Christ or die. To be endlessly silent, or pay the price. So much to think about, not least how religion and the Japanese state were indistinguishable. Not unlike Henry VIII’s England. And how the official faith, Buddhism, paid lip service to the priority of its founder – the alleviation of suffering. In a country described more than once in the film as a ‘mudswamp’, forever dragging down the highest impulses.

I love being prompted to think. Can you do more, alive, albeit compromised and almost powerless, in a hostile empire? Or does veracity, truth and influence lay in the agony of the cross? No middle ground. Scorsese, leveraging his Catholic background , provides no answers, but tells a compelling story.

For a far better analysis, it’s worth visiting the review on the excellent Laughter over Tears website, at https://staceyebryan.wordpress.com/2019/09/04/silence/

For sure is that it has made me want to see Scorsese’s True Confessions again.