The Plan part one

A basement room, five empty cans of Kronenbourg on an office table, two very basic chairs, as devoid of life as Hitler’s bunker. 

A man paces across the room frantically. He stops from time to time, ‘thinking’, but the time for that is well past. Every one of his screwed up thoughts is a piss in the snow, lost but for steam and little pinpricks on the snow’s surface. Gone in the wind.

A door opens and a man enters briskly. It’s David Davenport-Dewsbury.

God, thinks the other man. Him? Why him? They could have at least got Boris or Rishi to tell me what the fuck’s going on. But no, I get the cokehead with a history of incest and a deep interest in child slavery. He is also a firm advocate of The Plan, which he is about to (almost) explain to poor old Kier. Dave scrapes a chair across to where he wants it and sits, plonking his phone on the table.

‘It’s been approved. All the right eyes have seen it and I have to say it’s an incredible plan.’

‘Can I see it? Can I…’ The childish repetition of these utterly useless words are terminated by Dewsbury’s right hand, held up defiantly. As Kier stops talking, he stares at Dewsbury’s hand. It has five fingers and a nodule for a thumb. 

‘It’ll mean bye bye Britain, I’m afraid,’ he says, withdrawing his arm. Before Kier can throw words out of his mouth, Dave adds ‘Forever’, the hand half-cocked.

Kier readjusts his posture, leaning back into the chair to assume the assured look. But his tie is skewed to the right as if someone has just strangled him with it. She had a good go. His neck is lacerated with little skin rips and one of his cheeks has two fresh, pulsating red scratches that run all the way down to the neck. They’re more like scrapes, really nasty gouging. This feline act was administered only twenty minutes ago by his secretary, Janet, the moment after he told her about what he knew of The Plan, which, although little, was enough to generate an enormous amount of hatred in the woman. 

‘I’m OK with that,’ he says, straightening the tie, dabbing his cheek with the back of his hand, then wincing as he sees the blood.

‘Great, you’ll need to start thinking about where you want to live. Choice is limited but it’s a pretty good selection if you ask me. There’s one in the Caribbean I think. Somewhere round there. It’ll be pinged to your Whattsapp shortly.’

‘How many options are there?’

‘You’ll see. Lots with sunshine but quite isolated, as you’d expect. It’s only for the first year or so, mind. After that, people will have, well, forgotten.’

‘Fuck people, what about my family?’ Kier draws himself into the table. 

‘Your family will be with you, if you wish. But, if your wife chooses to stay, which does happen sometimes, then you’ll be on your own. OK?’

This, Kier understands, is not a request. It’s an orderfrom the very epicentre of the dirtiest, smelliest pile of plutocratic nuclear effluent on earth. 

Kier nods. ‘OK’

Dewsbury goes for his phone, looks at the time and then switches off the recorder, saying ‘terminated nine-ten’.

‘Beer?’ he says, dropping his phone into and pulling a can of Stella out of his satchel. It’s waved away.

Kier sits expectantly, thinking now’s the time he’ll be told about The Plan. He waits as Dewsbury digs into his satchel to do something else on his phone. He sighs to himself through his nostrils as his fingers tap effortlessly on the thing.

‘So,’ he says, looking up. ‘Welcome to your new life. I daresay it won’t be easy the first few weeks but you’re a tough man. There’s lots of fight in you yet, I’m quite sure of  that.’ He says this like a father to a dribbling, juddering deaf and dumb child, knowing he is doomed forever.

Kier resumes the laidback posture, nodding as thoughtfully as theatrically reachable, sweaty blood streaks dripping from various pockets across his cheek, his tie, now hanging ordinarily, the noose to his snuffed out future.

‘Come on, Dave,’ he says, trying to sound laddish, like they’re in the pub getting gossip out of each other. ‘What’s The Plan? I want to start thinking, you know, how I can help.’ That’s bullshit and Dewsbury knows it.

‘It’s all set, mate. They’re twenty moves ahead, whatever happens. Anyway, I can’t say a thing till you’re on the plane so don’t bang on. Honestly, I’ve got it on the strictest confidence that you’ll be told everything just as soon as your pink arse is ten foot off the ground.’

Kier digs a hand into a pocket. ‘Where’s my fuckin’ phone?’ 

‘Janet’s got it.’

‘Oh. Yes. Erm, can you go and grab it for me?’

‘I’ve got it here,’ says Dewsbury, loving every damnable second of Kier’s unwarranted pleasure as he passes the thing. 

Kier swipes at it greedily, looking for the Whattsapp message.

‘It won’t be there yet.’

‘Why the fuck not? How am I supposed to get on the cunting plane when I don’t know where I’m going?’

If only you knew, thinks Dewsbury. 

Kier looks at his phone suspiciously. ‘Hang on, this isn’t even my phone. My one’s got a little dink in the…’

‘That one’s your new one. We’ll transfer all your data onto it and keep yours. Security. You know the drill.’

During the time it takes for Dewsbury to gurgle out these barefaced lies, Kier finds that all his family pictures are gone. Not only that but all of his apps are absent from the new phone. 

‘There’s nothing here!’ he barks.

‘Slow down, raisin bran,’ Dewsbury calls out. 

‘That’s from Silver Linings Playbook, isn’t it?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I love that film,’ Kier laments, realising that there will be very little entertainment where he’s going. ‘God, what have I done?’ he mutters.

This isn’t a good sign, thinks Dewsbury. Not good at all. It’s certainly not good for The Plan. What they’d hoped for was a much more assured Kier, a resolute Kier, the Kier they all knew and trusted, but when lives are at stake and shit hits fan, we see the real man for who he is. In Kier, we witness the reality of and the trouble with the basic human condition. It basically stinks, even from the best of minds. But there is nothing remotely original or interesting about Kier. He is one of the great many, fascinated and stupefied by life, a screamer to the end at the gallows, a proper knob, victim or viewer.

Davenport-Dewsbury knew that he would fold and crumple like an empty pack of fags flung from the pudgy hand of an elderly whore onto a paving slab covered in urine and rain, then flattened by a passing foot. No, he would never rise again. He would be lost to the dump, if only he could get there in one piece.

Dewsbury loves nothing more than seeing a plan come to fruition. The more crippling by design the better by effect. This is why he was given the task of interviewing Kier. They knew he’d give nothing away, such is his gargantuan lust for sadistic mastery at an industrial scale. 

‘I’ll need that list of fuckin’ shitholes you want to send me to,’ says Kier, resigned to the terror of the situation.

‘I’ll have it with you in a jiff,’ says Dewsbury, getting up to leave. 

‘How long am I down here?’

‘Not sure. Won’t be too long. Just start picturing what sort of place you want to go to.’ Breezy, but bold as brass.

Kier is sure he can hear a stifled snigger as the door shuts firmly. As he hears it lock automatically, he mutters something at himself.  ‘Brilliant. Fuckin’ brilliant.’

Dave left him down there to stew all afternoon, fishing him out at six. Having sent the six possible destinations,one was indeed in the Caribbean, but it was Haiti, which is in a state of anarchy and run by machete swinging gangs. Four other options were stinkers, two in Rwanda, one in Burma and another in Venezuela, all crap by design to lead him to the one option that wasn’t crap at all, in New Zealand. Sixty miles from civilisation, Kier scrolled down the pictures of a vast house with everything in it. A vast sea with an eternity pool as a teaser, a decent fishing boat in a cove to boot about in.Everything very nicely maintained.

Having leaked the story to the papers mid-morning(‘Two weeks before the election, Kier Starmer is to resign as Labour leader and retire from public life due to ill health’), three thinktanks based in the North Sea and an army of Whitehall nobodies have been frantically analysing the fallout from the media all day. It doesn’t look good for Kier.

His wife is being pressed and hounded. She remains unavailable for comment, a lock-in at her hairdresser’s Mayfair pile. Every person who has had the slightest contact with Kier over the last three years is either being called (harassed) by thousands of reporters baying for blood or their data is being hacked to hell by hundreds of geeks disguised as office workers, sifting through crapfor anything remotely Kier in a Croydon skyscraper.

The Six O’Clock News offers no further detail, citing only ill health as the cause for Starmer’s resignation. Loads of people are interviewed, worried faces, some unable to hide a smirk. One northerner says ‘I told you so’, wagging a sausage finger at the camera. 

‘It’s all very sad,’ says ‘a Labour spokesperson’ (Jean from accounts).

At six-fifteen, Kier is taken from the room and escorted to a blacked out limo.

Leaving the building, a message appears on the screen ofhis new phone, revealing that he can connect to theinternet but without access to outgoing calls. His facefalls as he scrolls through news items, the headlines, then he looks out the window to find people walking around stunned, bewildered, all because of him. There’s a protest outside parliament. Labour supporters want answers. Tories are laughing their heads off everywhere. It’s game fuckin’ over. Unable to hide a laugh, he waves at one particularly tearful old woman balanced on a granny trolley.

‘Jesus wept,’ he says, his breath forming on the window.

 

Read Part 2