As noted, back at the Shepherd’s Hut things were gathering pace.
Having completed his final edits of the Reconstructed Beatles footage, each take focusing heavily on Jeremy/John, Maurice congratulated the whole band on their “fab” performances and thanked Barry for “hospitality well beyond the call of duty.”
“Never have I encountered such a splendid set of chaps,” he told them all at the farewell party Barry threw before Maurice and Dame Muriel returned to Tooting in the Morris Minor Traveller.
Julie/Paul raised an eyebrow and winked.
“And the chapess, of course,” said Maurice with a thespian bow before taking her in a warm hug. “The movies never came up with a Bond girl better than this one. You’re a lucky man, Mister Crawford,” he added across Julie’s right shoulder.
Jeremy blushed, nodded, and said, “I know.”
Barry, Maggie and Dennis hear-heared and raised their glasses of Geranium Cava à la Broadbent in a toast.
“To Julie and Jeremy,” they chorused as Julie left Maurice’s embrace and entered Jeremy’s.
“And I am a lucky woman,” she said. “When this is all over, I’m taking him back to Liverpool to show off to my dad.”
Maurice smiled. “That may not be anytime soon however, my dear. For a little while longer it may be wise for him to lay somewhat low. As is the case with the rest of you fellows, n’est-ce pas, Dame Muriel?”
“Indeed, Double O Seventeen. Best advice I can give is you all remain under your present cover for the foreseeable future. I will personally ensure, however, that any expenses you may incur meanwhile shall be covered by my department.”
Barry thanked her but said neither he nor his new friends would be looking for any “expenses.”
“We have pretty much all we need. Not so, chaps… and chapess?”
Julie, Jeremy, Maggie and Dennis nodded their agreement.
“An exciting adventure this has indeed been,” Barry continued, “and one looks forward with interest to its potential outcomes, but, as Kierkegaard had it: “repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life,” and such is the project in which I and my new friends are currently engaged, not with politics but with the natural world that surrounds us… which costs nothing. What, somehow or another and from different perspectives, we have chosen. And none of this comes with a bill to M16 or anybody else.”
It was around then that, checking his watch, Maurice expressed sympathy with such an aim but said, in his and Dame Muriel’s world at least, tempus was fugiting a tad and it was really time they hit the road.
“I have the sense of an ending,” he said. “But who can know when that may be?”
And so saying, he and Dame Muriel took their leave and headed back to number thirteen Oakshot Street Tooting for Maurice’s final remix before the grand launch on the Internet.
“Miaow!” said Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat when they arrived. Hank and Butch next door were okay with their tins of Pussy Cuts and everything, but she’d missed her proper owner. Plus the lady he had with him hadn’t proved all that bad either, so she was pleased to see them both back home.
Within minutes, however, Maurice was upstairs with his computer bank sharpening, titillating and finalising the missive he hoped might re-balance a political world spinning more or less out of control—in his view anyhow.
That was how pace was gathering on the home front.
Elsewhere on the planet, things were moving fast too, largely as the result of the continuing reaction to Maurice’s initial teaser sparked by the Internet-flooding techniques employed by both Yuri Krumkin in St Petersburg and Monty Gaspachio in Silicon Valley. Unbeknownst to either, however, their enthusiasm for the cause had spread contagiously, such that similar hi-tech deluges were exploding from places beyond Russia and America. The computers of, inter alia, Wolfgang Hesse in Berlin, Gianfranco Maglioni in Rome, Francine Daudet in Paris, Mateo Garcia in Barcelona, Maureen McAteer in London and a certain Steve Mackintosh in Liverpool were sizzling with support messages. And all of this even before taking account of the tweeters, likers, and befrienders in countries where the idea of the potential overthrow of populist dictators had not yet even dawned as a possibility. And what did all of these folk want? Further evidence of Lennon still being alive, coming out of hiding and singing to them, that was what.
Maurice was delighted, watching on in the interstices between fiddling with the final cut of the Reconstructed Beatles video.
“What an audience we’re going to have, Tiddles,” he told Terpsichore/Cat, who was watching on from her vantage point on Maurice’s lap.
“MiaOW,” she said.
And it was not just on computer and smartphone screens that such evidence of international disquiet was evinced. It also spilled over onto the streets of cities across Europe, including the UK, where PM Clarissa was thrown and gladly took the lifeline of finally ignoring the alt right Brexiteers in her party and siding with the voices of moderation and reason. Even in places as normally quiescent as Tokyo and Hong Kong there were demonstrations. There, in imitation of the American protests in which pro-Lennon kids joined hands with the March For Our Lives kids sickened at the gun deaths in their schools, brave Japanese and Chinese students had also marched in defiance of their leaders. “Protest,” for so long since the nineteen sixties a dirty word, was being rekindled.
Monty Gaspachio and Jennifer hadn’t witnessed the original outpourings of demands for peace, love and flower power on the streets of San Francisco because they hadn’t been born yet. But boy were they ever enjoying it now as they and their friends, joined by local groups of septuagenarian ex-hippies, demonstrated all around Haight Ashbury and into the Golden Gate Park. Then there was the wider network of Internet friends they had all across America, but best of all in Chicago, where the 1968 siege was still remembered, and in New York City, where so many vigils were being observed at the Strawberry Fields memorial area of Central Park cops were on permanent stand-by and bleating for more resources.
Even in Moscow there was evidence of a reawakening. Not out in the open in case they got shot or poisoned by Ripurpantzov’s goons, but young Muscovites were nonetheless following Yuri Krumkin’s advice to make their voices heard. Singing and playing Beatles songs at the dead of night, then like spooks vanishing back into the shadows and cellars where the police couldn’t find them. Night after night after night it went on, and not only in the capital. In Minsk, home of the old KGB headquarters, and in other cities all across Russia, there were similar ghostly whisperings. Even in Sevastopol on the newly “liberated” Crimean peninsula.
And how, you will be asking, were the psychos in the White House and the Kremlin feeling about this? Twitchy is the answer. Even Ripurpantzov, the guy who’d been newly re-“elected” as president having jailed any credible opposition, the “strong man” who was keen on following the example of China’s leader and making himself president for life, was hearing the worrisome echoes of a history he believed dead and buried. Good at judo and other forms of manipulation though he may have been, the very last thing he needed was any underground interference in his mind games with the West or any contradiction of his assertion of its pernicious influence on Mother Russia. Some nights he lay awake and wondered.
As did the madman in the White House, as he stuffed himself with cheeseburgers and fizzy drinks while fiddling with his Twitter feed and flicking around TV stations, on which even his beloved Fox News was showing signs of nervousness at the re-emergence of what it contemptuously described as “youth culture.”