From this example you will begin to understand the genius level at which Maurice Moffat’s mind operated. An intellectual he was, but not one merely at the pedestrian level of disputing and revamping the work of others. A loner with both the rational and creative capacities to imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, take the risk and maybe, just maybe, make something new. In other words, someone whose left and right brain hemispheres didn’t just bicker with each other—“I’m the clever one, you’re daft; no I’m not, you’re the daft one, I’m the clever one” and so on—but worked together in constructive harmony.
“Ookay then, cat, this shall be our path,” he told Terpsichore/Tiddles, now “Cat.”
“Miaow,” said Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat.
Maurice took that as a yes, laid back on the sofa with his hands laced behind his head, nodded off, and took to dreaming.
In Maurice’s dream, Jeremy Crawford is located in no time at all by GRNAV and turns out to a thoroughly decent chap in some mysterious way connected to Maurice’s old pal Prof Broadbent, who hovers about out of focus on the irritatingly ungraspable oneiric fringes of perception like some spirit. You know how it is with dreams, how they work vertically rather than horizontally. Like stacks of tarot cards that won’t reveal their narrative meaning until laid out and interpreted, which they never allow in dreams. Just jumbled upside-down and back-to-front metaphors of all the dross on your mind they remain until you awaken perplexed.
So it was in Maurice’s dream, although it wasn’t puzzling him. In fact he was quite enjoying it. Apart from the elusively hovering Prof Broadbent, there were other folk around Jeremy too, all of them chuckling and having fun. And there were several animals. No cats as far as Maurice could make out. More like dogs, although there may even have been a wild boar in there in the mix. Anyway, not the sort of party Maurice wished to gate crash with threats to Jeremy of him being scapegoated for all the mistakes of Capricious Clarissa and her hapless government. Especially not after he was invited into the company, introduced to everyone and, after initial reserve, licked by the animals and accepted by the people. Even asked if he he’d care for a glass of the local brew. Not the Cockburn’s Special Reserve port wine Prof Broadbent kept in his Oxford rooms, but tasty nonetheless.
It was at this juncture that the laced hands behind Maurice’s head went numb and he was obliged to re-position himself further down the sofa on one side, thereby squashing Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat, who said miaow in protest, waited till Maurice was off in cloud cuckoo land again, then sat on his head.
Immediate shift in dream scene possibly occasioned by having a confused tabby sitting on his head. Suddenly and inexplicably Maurice is in Moscow, where he has been many times before as a spy during the Igor Ripurpantzov regime. But this isn’t the new Moscow he’s dreaming of; this is the old one in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Glasnost and perestroika are in the air and Beatles’ songs are being allowed on the radio for the first time ever. Pretty girls in short skirts and longhaired lads in blue jeans are dancing in the streets to John Lennon’s “Revolution.” And in “Back in the USSR,” Paul McCartney is screaming about the Ukraine girls who really knock him out, the Moscow girls who make him sing and shout, and how Georgia is always on his mind. Also, and for no connected reason (right brain was having a ball), Maurice hears lines from Lennon’s much later “Working Class Hero.” How you were hated if you were clever but despised if you were a fool.
That’s when Maurice awoke, took Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat from his head, and sat bolt upright.
“That’s it,” he muttered as his limbic system shut down and Left Brain got in on the act, supplying Maurice with the memory of a TV programme he’d recently managed to stay awake for, which explained how much influence The Beatles had had on the revolution that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Dimly he remembered the image of an old man in St Petersburg with lank hair who was building a shrine to John Lennon and peering out at the sea awaiting his return. Thinking even one of the seagulls might be John flying home.
“Never mind he is dead. He shall return. We need him now more than ever,” the old man told the TV interviewer in Russian, before singing a croaky version of “Imagine” in English.
“Mmmm,” mused Maurice, closing his eyes again and allowing Right Brain to do the thinking.
And some dream scheme it came up with. From way out in left field, so fantastical and audacious was it. Yet, given the common knowledge of Ripurpantzov’s cyber finagling in Western elections, these days it was not beyond the bounds of practicality. But Maurice wouldn’t mention any of this to Downing Street any time soon, if ever. First thing tomorrow he would prime his GRNAV, go in search of a smear of bonkers banker DNA, and with any luck find the fellow. And if, as he had dreamt, Jeremy was indeed in the company of Prof Broadbent and some other decent types, well who knew what might follow? After all, in many parts of the world before Freud took to his meddling, dreams were regarded as prophesies.
Leaving Terpsicore/Tiddles/Cat to her dreams on the sofa, Maurice went downstairs, tucked his trouser cuffs into his socks, extracted his bike from the garden shed, and headed out into the midnight streets. Nothing he liked better for calm reflection than the dark winter streets of Tooting when the world had gone home, taking with it the fuss and the fights.
Sixteen
If you’re as sceptical of the narrative potential of dream prophesies as I, you’re not going to like what happened next, but the fact of the matter is that the part of Maurice’s dream in which he finds Jeremy came true, so it’s suspend-your-disbelief time for both of us, I’m afraid.
Anyway, what happened next was that Maurice Moffat found Jeremy Crawford the following day with his GRNAV, which to his delight worked with pinpoint precision. Leaving Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat in the care of Hank and Butch, his neighbours at number eleven Oakshot Street, all he had to do was motor up to Fanbury in his Morris Minor Traveller at the dead of night, find the barn Jeremy had holed up in, according to all the newspaper and Internet stories, pick the lock and, with a special DNA detector device also of his own concoction, scrape from the palliasse the required smidgeon of the essence of Jeremy’s being, feed it to GRNAV, and bingo! Within the half hour he was tapping at the front door of Barry’s mobile Shepherd’s Hut saying he was sorry for the disturbance, but…
It was Barry who opened the door.
“Moffat? Maurice Moffat?” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”
It took a second for Maurice to recognise his old prof. He had to have aged since their Oxford days, but if anything, with his shoulder length hippy hair and the glint in his eyes, he looked sprightlier.