Chosen

By Paddy Bostock

It's only rock 'n' roll but…

Jeremy Crawford has had enough of his life as a megawealthy banker and is prepared to give up all its privileges for the sake of freedom. Why? Because he's suddenly realized he has never made any choices of his own and only ever been chosen. But that is about to change. With a little help from his friends, he finds a way to resolve both his own issues and those of a political world gone crazy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613093634

Book preview

One

It took Jeremy Crawford a good chunk of the twentieth century and almost two decades of the twenty-first to get sane. At least that’s how he thought of it. Others—his wannabe actress wife, Sophie, his ageing parents, Gloria and Ron, his colleagues at the bank, fellow members of the squash club, assorted relatives and acquaintances—didn’t. They all thought he’d lost his mind. Why else , on the spur of the moment, would a person quit his lucrative position as HAA (Head Assets Analyst) in the City and on the evening of the very same day, decamp from the sumptuous interior of his multi-million-pound mansion to a disused barn at the foot of the thousand-square-metre garden to sleep on a palliasse with a pig called Pete and consider matters? To do that a person had to have lost his marbles, reckoned Jeremy’s relatives and friends.

Okay, a minor aberration for a day or two due to stress at work they might have understood. Such was frequently the outcome of high-pressure jobs these days. But once Jeremy had been in his barn for two whole weeks and refused to come out, they were pretty sure he’d lost the plot altogether. Food—he insisted on nuts and berries only—and water had to be left outside by Barry, the gardener, and were gathered in only when Barry was safely off talking to his trees and flowers. Jeremy trusted Barry. Apart from him, nobody was allowed within range, physically, telephonically, or cyber-technologically. It was Sophie who reported watching from their bedroom window as he tossed his three beloved smartphones, the ones he’d once termed his lifesavers, into the stream bordering the estate and waving at them as they sank out of sight. "Bye, bye. Glug, glug, gluggity and fuck you forever," Sophie reported him having screamed as a full moon rose.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before Jeremy’s relatives, acquaintances, friends and, leading the pack, his ex-boss Sir Magnus Montague, who hadn’t a clue about assets analysis and was ruing the loss of Jeremy’s expert advice, took to speculating about the desirability of psychiatric intervention to bring him back to his senses.

Jeremy’s evidently off his trolley and needs help, no question about it. Genius close to madness and so on, was Sir Magnus’s view, as expressed at a private family powwow over canapés and champagne in one of the mansion’s larger gazebos in a copse of silver birches a stone’s throw from Jeremy’s barn.

Know a couple of trick cyclists myself, if that would be of any use, he added. "Top of the range Harley Street types. Would cost a few quid but I’m sure the bank would be happy enough to fork out to retain a fellow of Jeremy’s talents. Wouldn’t want those vanishing down the pan, now would we?"

No we certainly wouldn’t, Sir Magnus, was the joint response of Sophie, Gloria, and Ron, all of whose life expectations depended in one way or another on Jeremy’s capacity to keep on earning as many shedloads of money as possible. Sophie, because she was a bimbo trophy wife who’d never done a day’s work in her life and liked her mansion, and Gloria and Ron because their pensions were minuscule and they depended for their biannual private cruises to the Med and the Caribbean on their unexpectedly brilliant son’s inordinate wealth coming their way at regular, monthly intervals. Big investments in Jeremy’s continuing sanity they all had, and if this Sir Magnus bloke could find a way to keep the cash flow flowing, and pay for Jeremy’s treatment from bank funds rather than theirs, well he was their man.

It was Ron, a retired small-time failed entrepreneur, who piped up first.

We’re in your capable hands, Sir Magnus, he said. Anything it takes to get poor old Jeremy back onto the straight and narrow.

A sentiment echoed by Gloria and Sophie.

"Carte blanche for me on the trick cyclist front then, eh?" said Sir Magnus.

Of course, said Ron.

Jolly good. It is in all our interests to see Jezza—that’s what we call him at the bank—back in business when all is said and done. And I’m sure a few sessions with one of my psycho johnnies would do the trick. Probably just some little glitch in the wiring somewhere, eh? A few calmer-downers, a touch of the old talking cure, and he’ll be back up to speed in two swishes of a pony’s tail.

Sophie, Ron, and Gloria smiled happily.

So then, many thanks for the nibbles and the bubbly, but now I really should be taking my leave. The car’s waiting, so toodle-oo, I’ll be in touch, said Sir Magnus, levering his large backside from the gazebo’s finest wicker chair and opening the door.

And don’t fret, chaps, the shrinks will have old Jezza back to normal before you can say boo to a pelican, he called over his shoulder as he planted one large, brown, pointy-toed Oxford brogue onto Barry’s carefully manicured grass and waved cheerily at the barn housing his ex-HAA before climbing into the back seat of the midnight blue Bentley 4x4 awaiting him.

Peeping through the gap between two loose barn planks, Jeremy watched on as his ex-boss took his leave, and overheard his parting comment.

‘Normal,’ huh? he muttered, returning to his palliasse. Well, normal zormal. Eh, Pete?

Oink, said Pete, whom Jeremy now thought as his only friend apart from Barry.

AND WHAT, YOU WILL be wondering, had happened to Jeremy so radically to shift his lifestyle from one of extreme opulence to dossing in a barn with a pig? Hiding away from some indictable 2008-ish banking crime he’d committed which had suddenly been unearthed and was threatening to ruin his career and bring shame on him and his family and see him incarcerated for the foreseeable future?

Well, actually no. Jeremy had milked the markets with the best of them until the whole shebang went tits up and had been proud—as had Sir Magnus—of the firewalls he’d erected between himself and the bank to offset any threat of discovery or litigation. Due diligence was Jeremy’s forte and he had his mansion and treasured white, latest model Mercedes E-Class Coupé to prove it. No, no, his current circumstances had nothing to do with any malpractice of that kind.

"So what then?" I hear you ask.

Well, in the nuttiest of nutshells, the answer is the past participle chosen.

"‘Chosen’?"

Yes. You see, Jeremy had awoken one morning after a night of agitated dreams—tossing and turning a bit like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis—as an entirely new person, only mercifully not one transmogrified into a dung beetle. Call it an epiphany, call it anything you want, but overnight Jeremy Crawford had been reborn with whole new perspective on life. Whence the change had come he had no idea. But it had come. And the words echoing in his head when his eyes blinked open were: "In your whole life, Jeremy, you have never chosen anything. All you’ve ever been is chosen."

Well, you can imagine the mental kerfuffle that caused. On the morning of his reincarnation, Jeremy had batted it away. Treated Sophie to her regular morning power fuck until she rolled over and went back to snoring as if she’d never noticed. Then did a few press-ups and knees-bends on the carpet for the cardiovasculars before power showering, dressing himself in his snazziest Master of the Universe outfit—the tieless, slinky, shiny, blue suit with the thin trousers and pointy shoes like Sir Magnus’s—scarfing two energy bars with a doppio espresso, and heading to the Merc in the garage before hitting the highway City-bound to make his mark yet again on the international money markets.

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.

"Holy SHIT," said Jeremy, slapping at his head.

From his side of the palliasse, Pete said, "Oink, oink, OINK, which roughly translates as: Shut the fuck up, will you? I’m trying to get a little shuteye here."

Jeremy calmed, nodded over at Pete, and smiled his first smile in a long time.

Okay, pal. Point taken, he said. Just trying to get the madness out of my mind, that’s all.

Oink, said Pete, who took to snoring.

NO SLEEP FOR JEREMY, though, because the madness issue continued to torment him. What actually was madness, he asked himself. Clearly everybody he knew would conclude from his current behaviour he was the one who was mad because they were continuing to play the games required of them for social acceptance. So they would obviously consider themselves normal and him mad. Jeremy saw that and didn’t blame them for it. But that still didn’t answer his central question.

Dimly, from an Oxford symposium he’d attended all those years ago, he recalled the words of a shrink called Laing. R.D. Laing, maybe? What was it he’d been quoted as saying again? That insanity was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world, something like that. Jeremy also remembered the work of a Frenchie called Foucault discussed at the same event. How it was that civilisation constructed ideas of madness—or unreason—for its own devious purposes but this said nothing about the condition itself. Indeed was fundamentally misleading. And had not the ex-Beatle Paul McCartney once been heard to remark, I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

"Mmm, not just me then," Jeremy mused as Pete continued to snore contentedly.

Then there was a novel the audience been advised to read, by a writer called Ken Kesey, who’d been conned by his publishers and never made a dime from his work about a falsely diagnosed mad guy who gets lobotomized for causing trouble and telling the truth about the mental institution he’s been incarcerated in. What was it called again? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s something. Nest? That was it. A fiction, but nonetheless a persuasive one when he considered the ways madness was used as a convenient excuse to ridicule or lock away opponents of political systems that brooked no dissent, vide the ways of the ex-Soviet Union or the current psychopath in the Kremlin. Or indeed the psycho in the White House whose routine response to criticism was to brush it off as fake and/or insane and fire its exponents.

Sooo, Jeremy asked himself. "Is it really me that’s mad, or is it the world?"

To address this question, he opted to narrow the focus to only recent history and take a cold look at the facts—if there were still facts in a post-truth society where lies were told with a fuck you and your mother if you don’t believe me impunity. In which a mega-rich narcissist could get himself elected American president by lying through his teeth, abetted by his psychopath pal in the Kremlin and the corrupt social media. In which British electors had been conned into voting to leave the European Union through a campaign targeted to arouse xenophobic delusions of their specious grandeur. In which parliamentary democracies built across centuries were under threat from meddling personal data banks like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. What sane person could contemplate such a scenario and think it anything but insane? Not Jeremy, that was for sure, so maybe it was Laing’s version of insanity he needed rationally to adjust to. And what better way to face up to this dystopian chaos than to confront it? How, he had no idea, but at least it was in his mind as a possibility.

Better late than never, he muttered, covering his head with a smelly blanket and snuggling down on his palliasse. Nightie, nightie, Pete.

Oink, said Pete in mid-snore.

Mmm, who knows? Jeremy mumbled. Meanwhile it’s sleep for me too, perchance to have a happier dream this time. That would be a turn up for the book.

AS FATE WOULD HAVE it, Jeremy’s first confrontational opportunity came with a tapping on his barn door at eleven thirty-five the following morning just as he was enjoying a happier dream. In it he featured as an elf called Yarume who could morph into any form he wanted, human or bestial, depending on the nature of the adventure he faced, and nobody ever called Yarume crazy and got away with it. Gurgling happily to himself, Jeremy slept on far beyond sunrise. Never, ever, even on a Sunday, had Jeremy slept so late, but now he was Yarume who was never defeated in any task he undertook, so let’s enjoy the ride...

Then there came the tapping. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, it went.

Followed by a knock, knock, knock, knockity KNOCK.

Jeremy snuggled deeper