The early morning air blew over the City, and buildings were tussled with anticipation but unknowing. And the shouts of change rumbled again, this time much more obvious than before.
Mikey took off his thick rimmed glasses. He said mysteriously, ‘Take off your smile, Boris. The air feels surprising.’
Boris removed his smile. The shadow of what was to come grew greyer, and the morning session neared. On the wind, the sound of crashing came to them. It was the sound of Brexiters falling over themselves in blind departing panic.
Boris said, ‘Tell me how it’s going to be old chap.’
Mikey had been listening to the distant sounds, but didn’t give a monkeys. For a moment he was business-like. Like Brutus, planning. ‘Look across the room, Boris, I can tell you so you can almost see it.’
Boris turned his head and looked across the podium and up the darkening slopes of the moment to come. ‘We’re going to have it all,’ Mikey began. He reached inside his attaché case, and brought out the gun; he snapped off the safety, and the hand and gun lay on the table of papers – the big buffoon’s leadership campaign speech – behind Boris’ back. He looked at the back of Boris’ head, at the place where the ruffled falling leaves of dishevelled hair fell randomly across where the spine and skull were joined. Like they were once. And Mikey thought, at least he has a spine, but then he banished this recognition from his mind in an instant, smiling like a fish with its face to the glass-tank wall.
An anxious journalist called from a different room and another answered.
‘Go on,’ said Boris.
‘We’ll have real power,’ said Mikey, ‘like we had at Oxford but with so much more ability to ruin infinitely more. And we’ll have…we’ll have…’
‘A Thames Bridge Garden!’ Boris shouted.
‘That was another dream,’ Mikey said.
‘And I get to be Prime Minister,’
‘And you get to be Prime Minister,’ Mikey couldn’t help but smirk.
Boris giggled with happiness, rather than because of his usual buffoonery. ‘And rule the roost.’
‘Yes.’
Boris turned his head, hair falling into different messy places.
‘No, Boris. Look out across the room, like you can almost imagine yourself as Tory Leader.’
Boris obeyed him. Mikey looked down at the gun.
‘You aren’t mad at me, are you Mikey?’ Boris asked.
‘I’m not mad at you. Just mad. As a platter of sprats.’
There were crashing footsteps, this time journalists and Tory sycophants communing and coming.
‘Go on, Mikey. When do I make my announcement?’
‘Any time soon.’
‘Me and you old boy.’
‘You….and me actually. Just me really Boris, you old fool. Just me.’
Boris said, ‘I thought you were my friend Mikey?’
‘No,’ said Mikey. ‘No, Boris, I’m not your friend. I’m my friend. This isn’t a jolly foreigner’s moralising narrative about some pair of friends representing the fundamental decency of human partnership and caring. We screwed that with Brexit, you stupid old so and so. I had fairy tales like that banned in a previous megalomaniac life and don’t intend to allow that kind of EU-inspired bodhicitta to be available as propaganda again.’
The voices of expectation came close now. Mikey raised the gun and stopped listening to any others, apart from those of Sarah and Dacre and Murdoch, and all the other dark movers and shakers in the brush of his dangerous head.
gravyfromthegazebo 