Seventy-Two Virgins. Boris Johnson
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He tended to wear T-shirts in bed, and this one was a relic of a brief but illustrious former Tory leadership under which he had been proud to serve.
‘It’s Time For Hague’, proclaimed the T-shirt, while the back announced: ‘The Common Sense Revolution’. As a piece of nightwear, his wife claimed that it had anti-aphrodisiacal properties of a barely credible order.
‘MMM,’ said his wife.
‘Mmm,’ said Roger. ‘Back in a mo.’
As he went into the bathroom he heard the flap of the letterbox. Cee-rist! he thought, the papers …
He scooted downstairs and scooped them up off the mat. Quickly he went through the brutal tabloid that was most likely to have done him in, and then the ones that pretended to be more responsible.
Nope.
Nothing.
Nope. Nothing.
Phew.
Just the usual flammed-up load of old cobblers, masquerading as news.
There was allegedly a ‘dirty bomb’ threat to London, or so said ‘sources’ in the Home Office, with an eye, no doubt, to stirring up public alarm, and then introducing some fresh repression of liberty. There were acres of predictable drivel about the security arrangements for the celebrations today.
The police had launched some Al-Qaeda raid in Wolverhampton and Finsbury. But then there was one of those every month.
In other words, there was nothing important, and certainly nothing to feed his ludicrous paranoia. But some guilty instinct told him to purge the house of these bullying quires of paper.
So he stretched down the Common Sense Revolution to make it a kind of nightshirt (common sense, innit?) and zipped outside into the summer morning. He stuffed them into the fox-ravaged bin, and then checked that no one had seen him.
Drat. Someone had indeed seen him. It was that funny woman who was always muttering under her breath, and who had once seen him administering physical chastisement – in fact it was about the only occasion he had ever done so – to one of his other children.
He beamed at her, tugging the T-shirt over his hips.
With a shudder his neighbour hurried about her business, and Roger darted back up the steps to see the door shutting in his face.
‘Oi. You. No!’ he said.
He bent down to look through the flap.
‘Please,’ he said.
The child’s sweet face came closer. He was now dressed in a red crusader’s tabard, and brandished a plastic gladius or stabbing sword.
‘You are not necessary,’ he said to Roger through the letterbox. ‘Mummy,’ he called, looking back over his shoulder, ‘do we know this man?’
Five minutes later, and with the help of his wife, Roger Barlow had regained access to his house, dressed, washed, and was thrashing around the kitchen looking for that … that thing.
‘You know,’ he said to his wife, ‘the thing with the thing in it.’
His wife had been around long enough to know what to do in these circumstances. She got on with drinking her coffee. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘that thing.’
Barlow cast a worried glance at his watch. It was that green folder thing, the one all about poor Mrs Betts. They were threatening to close the respite centre she needed for her son, who had such severe learning difficulties that he had no realistic hope of education. And last night, in a fit of alcohol-induced elation, he had been staring at the autistic Betts kid’s drawings, which were pretty good, and thought he had seen the answer. But he had had had HAD to have the file.
He was going to ring Mrs Betts that afternoon, and it was no use if he …
Maybe Cameron still had it. He looked again at his watch and wondered whether to dial his beautiful, omnicompetent American researcher. It was too early.
He searched again in his office, under the bed, under the sofa, under the doormat, in the stuff being put out for recycling. He had a sudden horror that he had accidentally thrown the folder away with the papers, and went back to the bins. And then he saw something under his son’s chair, where the child was eating his second breakfast.
He had no time to ask how it had got there. He had no time to speculate on the industrial-strength adhesive with which it was now covered, and which is created by mixing Weetabix with milk.
He had no time because he had a speech to prepare, a respite centre to save, and he had to get to the Commons before the whole of Westminster was blockaded by the Americans.
The President was due to start speaking at 10 a.m., and Roger had to be in his seat in less than an hour. He pointed the bike south and started to churn his legs.
As for the President’s breakfast, it differed from Roger’s in almost every respect. It was a leisured and ruminative repast, taken at a round table in a vast bay window in the same vaulted apartments that have been given to every visiting head of state for the last fifty years.
Olaf of Norway had slept there. So had King Baudouin of Belgium. So had the Pope, and come to that, President Marcos of the Philippines and sundry other thugs the Foreign Office had once thought fit to foist on Her Majesty, notably President Ceaucescu of Romania in 1978 and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe in 1994.
On the bedside table was a guide to the British Museum, a volume of Tennyson and a Dick Francis hardback that might have been new in 1973, when the room was used by President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.
Now the President looked out over Windsor Great Park, at the ancient oaks, trussed and propped with iron, and the deer, and, in the distance, the looming turrets of Legoland; but what fascinated him most was the yellow packet of breakfast cereal, reposing in a specially constructed silver cruet.
‘Say, honey, look at this,’ he said to the First Lady, and read out the awesome royal warrants. ‘By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Weetabix and Co., purveyors of breakfast cereals. And Prince Charles. And the Queen Mum. I thought she passed away.’
‘Gee,’ said the First Lady, who had also been trying to eat the Weetabix. ‘Does that mean they make this stuff specially for the Queen?’
‘I guess she has to sort of approve it.’
‘How much does she have to eat?’ asked the First Lady.
They both stared at their bowls. ‘I dunno,’ said the President. ‘Kind of soaks up the milk, doesn’t it?’
Like Barlow, the President considered the amazing physical properties of a Weetabix/milk solution, and its possible application in the construction industry. The First Lady fleetingly wondered what it would be like to have the Presidential seal on the back of a packet of Froot Loops.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Sir,’ said a US Secret Service man in a blue blazer, ‘Colonel Bluett just called. He wanted to be sure you were aware of the security implications of the arrests last night.’
The President grimaced. He had naturally read the papers, but had been hoping not to bring the subject up in front of his wife.
‘You bet,’ he said. ‘Good job by the Brits.’
‘We should go now, sir, if you’re ready, ma’am.’
‘Too bad they didn’t catch the main guy,’ said the First Lady, who had also read the news.
That wasn’t the only detail troubling Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Purnell, who had been sitting at his desk since 6 a.m. in the New Scotland Yard Ops Room. News had come in of a vehicle theft in Wolverhampton, a crime that appeared to have taken place shortly before the not-quite-successful synchronized raids. It might mean something; it might mean nothing. But it was a very odd thing to steal, and his dilemma, now, was whether or not to