It wasn’t until he was only moments away from the office that he was forced to pull the Merc over, park illegally, and yoga-breathe.
“What the bloody hell?” he said to himself.
But the power breathing did nothing to improve his mood. Gone were his drive, his competitive edge, his desire to succeed, and, worst of all, his thirst for the status money guaranteed. And the bloody dream would… just… not… go… away. Normally Jeremy didn’t dream at all. Out like a light he would go once he’d checked his three phones one last time before putting them under his pillow, then oblivion till six a.m. the next day, when the regular pattern would be repeated. As indeed it had been today despite the bloody dream, which, dammit, kept reverberating around his head. “Choose.” “Be chosen.” “Choose.” “Be Chosen,” the chanted words peculiarly counterpointed with the throbbing of The Sex Pistols’ version of “My Way” and images that would have been familiar to Salvador Dali but weren’t to Jeremy because Jeremy had never liked art. Reckoned it the escapist enemy of the capitalist work ethic, unless it sold for millions, of course. Then it had value.
It was as he was slapping his temples with both palms and banging his forehead on the Merc’s horn that the cop car pulled up alongside and two officers jumped out asking if he was all right.
“Fine, and thank you for your concern, officers. You know how it can be on some days. Yakety yak from the missus, dog just puked on the kitchen floor, kids screaming—”
Jeremy had neither a domestic animal nor a child on the principle either would have deflected attention from him, and Sophie was usually too hungover in the morning to speak, especially after she’d been power fucked, but he imagined that was the sort of situation lower-class types like coppers might recognize.
And how right he was.
“Yeah, sounds just like my house,” said the PC, who introduced himself as Bill McGinity. Shaking his head and looking glum.
“Mine too, only we got cats who do the puking. All them mice they keep eating,” said PC Johnny Staniford, showing his badge. “Only, never mind all that, you still can’t park here, pal. So on your way, okay?”
“Okay. And thanks for the understanding.”
Which was an unusual thing for Jeremy to say, for two reasons.
Reason one: he never normally thanked anybody for anything,
and,
Reason two: he operated in a workplace where emotional responses threatened performance and were thus discouraged.
Still the subterfuge had worked. No parking ticket. No warnings. Nothing. Nice enough blokes. Yet still, even as Jeremy gritted his teeth and pressed on towards the office, that godforsaken dream along with its Johnny Rotten soundtrack and its Salvador Dali fried-egg clocks kept flashing through what, he was beginning to fear, might have originated in his id. Fear because, as with art, Jeremy had always poo-pooed the possibility of explanations to life other than the super-ego awareness of profit and loss accounts, in Jeremy’s case always profit. So fuck Freud and his pals, right? Keep that kind of hooptedoodle safely where it belonged, in the basket marked “Basket Cases.”
But still something very weird was happening to him. It was hard to deny. So, illegally U-turning in a city street and waving V-signs at the ensuing blast of fellow motorists’ horns, he headed straight back to the mansion, where, sidestepping Sophie’s surprise at his early return, he heading to the barn, sent his immediate resignation to Sir Magnus Montague, laid his throbbing head on the palliasse, said “hi” to Pete, and hoped beyond hope the “Chosen” nightmare would go away.
Two
But it didn’t, far from it. Within moments of Jeremy’s head hitting the palliasse and Pete snuggling down next to him, his life so far began flashing before his mind’s eye. And, with his new epiphanic perspective, he didn’t like the look of it. Not one bit he didn’t. The insistent question he kept asking himself as he writhed and sweated was: “What have I ever chosen?”
So down the list he went, starting with birth. Well, he hadn’t chosen that, had he? What human or any other animal ever did? How could they, pre-embryonically? Mind you, parents Gloria and Ron hadn’t exactly planned Jeremy’s coming into the world either, by all accounts, notably those of his Auntie Maureen.
“Proper surprised they were when you came along,” she’d once confided to Jeremy in a pub called The Hope and Horse after five Xmas gin and tonics too many. “At their age. Dearie me. Our Gloria must’ve forgotten her pills or sunnink. Probably reckoned she didn’t need ‘em any more. But then out you popped.”
So, birth not planned, more a question of accident. A fumbled quickie, then the random workings of sperm and ova, and bingo a baby! Him. Fair enough, Jeremy could live with that.
But then on the list went: school, Oxford, the bank, Sophie. Had he ever chosen any of them? Of course he hadn’t, quite the reverse. It was he who had been picked by them because he was either so bloody clever at maths (school, Oxford, bank) or, later when fabulously wealthy, Sophie.
“And where was free will in any of this?” he mumbled, clutching at his head and whacking at the palliasse. “Nowhere, that was WHERE,” he yelled, which upset Pete who rolled onto his other side and grunted, “oink.” What was wrong with this human?
But, being a pig, Pete had no answer to that. Didn’t have the big brain to fathom such angst. Just found it irritating. Life for Pete was lived from one moment to the next without worrying about anything except where his next meal was coming from. As far as he was concerned, concepts like life and death, let alone who chose whom or why, had no meaning. Pete didn’t even know that were he to venture unwarily out of his barn, he could be captured, killed, and turned into sausages, bacon, chops, or, in the worst case scenario, pork scratchings. Lucky Pete.
Meanwhile Jeremy continued to whack at his palliasse as into his troubled mind oozed a yet more vexed question, namely: “If—as I now suspect—I were chosen by school, Oxford, the bank and Sophie, was I also chosen by my best friend Mister Money and what he could buy? Using me as his puppet and jerking my strings. Not me who chose the mansion, therefore, but the mansion that chose me. Not me who chose the Merc but the Merc that selected me saying it was the best car on the market for a person like me to be seen driving. Ditto for the power clothes from top tailors, and even the Bankerese I spoke… or was I spoken by it just as I had been by the Oxford drawl I adopted when the public school brigade mocked my ‘funny prole sayings’”?
And the answer to this was: “Yes to all of the above.”
But it was the language issue that really stuck in his gullet. Spoken by? Never speaking? Parroting the words of others without ever examining the embedded agendas those words concealed? Jeremy also now “spoke” smatterings of tongues other than English—bits of French, German, Italian and Spanish, all at restaurant level—and whenever he did it was like acting. The different body language, the different grammatical structures, the different nuances, until… he became a different person, which was fun but unreal. No wonder some actors no longer knew who they were and went crazy. So maybe he’d been chosen yet again, this time by the very instrument that supposedly separated him from the animals. And how was a person expected to think if he couldn’t trust the very words supposed to carry meaning, if the only purpose of those words were some form of phatic psycho-babble? Find a whole new language? Well, maybe.