The audience in the hall coughed and fidgeted. The audience at large watched him with fascination. Even the Vietnamese catfish fishermen watching from their pool tables wondered quite how this was relevant.
‘The Americans wanted to encourage their own catfish producers, so they slapped such prohibitive duties on Vietnamese catfish that, you know, they had a very tough time of it.’ Chester was conscious that this was perhaps not the most powerful point he could make, given that the anti-globalization movement, to which he was in theory affiliated, was also in favour of tariffs and protection, but he ploughed on, amid general expressions of disbelief.
‘Do you know how many Americans have food poisoning every day? Two hundred thousand, and it’s no wonder when you consider the kind of gloop they eat. Have you ever eaten American cheese?’
‘Listen, Chester,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘why don’t you just put a sock in it for the time being?’
Chester paused. He was being heckled and he knew from the studio audience at
‘Well, my friends, what do we have here? It’s my old friend Roger. He’s a politician, you know.’
‘Do shut up, Chester,’ said Roger. ‘These people are murderers.’
‘And my old friend Roger doesn’t want to hear my view of American cheese, which strikes me in a way as being not that surprising, because what you get from politicians like Roger is just like American cheese, processed and heat-treated to the point of macrobiotic extinction; and what you get from me is raw, unpasteurized — and you know, for some people like Rog here, I suppose I may be just a little bit too pungent for his taste.’
The TV chef looked down almost affectionately at the politician. Chester was quite oblivious to his surroundings, with the Asperger’s syndrome, the quasi-refusal to relate to the feelings of other people, that begins to afflict those who spend their evenings in star dressing rooms and their days absent-mindedly scanning the face of everyone they pass to see if they have been ‘recognized’.
‘Its good to see you, Rog. You know, folks, at university he was known as Roger the Artful Todger and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s been up to some kind of beastliness again, whanging the old donger in the kedgeree I have no doubt, no offence, Rog.’
Roger grabbed de Peverill’s tie and pulled down hard.
‘Stop,’ cried Jones, who could hardly believe his good fortune in finding this advocate of his cause. ‘You there, leave him alone and you, yes you, Mr Cook, please continue with your interesting remarks.’
‘And do you know,’ said Chester, scowling at Roger with magnificent disdain, ‘that in spite of their pasteurized, homogenized, sterilized, emulsified, genetically modified and hormone-pumped food, the Americans eat so much of it that they are the fattest country on earth. We all know about the evils of the tobacco industry. We all know about the creeps and saddos who defend the right of every American school kid to bear arms, even if it means bearing an AK47 into the maths class and wiping out teach and sixteen pre-pubescent school children. But what, my friends, are we going to do about the real enemy of our values, I mean our European values, that have produced in France a country with 258 cheeses? The real enemy is not big oil, it’s not big tobacco, it is big food.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
1043 HRS
Across the Far East the debate was going badly for America, or at least for the President. The Chinese were now voting for the return of the gagged and ski-goggled Guantanamo prisoners by 68 per cent to 32 per cent. In Malaysia the Yes vote reached a staggering 98 per cent. Even in South Korea, the country for which many young American soldiers had died, there was a 52 per cent majority of TV viewers in favour of the return of the prisoners and the story was certainly no better in Vietnam, where an apathetic public were scandalized afresh by the American insult to their catfish.
In Europe the polling was closer, and in some countries, notably Denmark, there was already strong and implacable opposition to anything that sounded like cooperation with a bunch of Islamic nutcases. Britain was proving staunch, at least so far, in that many people understood that a yes vote was a victory for the terrorists. As for America, slowly waking up, it was a different story.
Americans looked at this lank-haired chef, condescending to them about their diet, and decided they liked him about as much as they liked Osama Bin Laden. Of course, it was still early days, and even in countries like China people were delaying before casting their votes, as families feuded about the meaning of what they were doing. Phone sockets were ripped out of walls, handsets were hidden under cushions while decent people wrangled about the limits of respectable anti-Americanism. One Chinaman told his brother to go and copulate with a pangolin in a lake. He was stabbed with a letter-opener in the duodenum.
In Pakistan a man was so scandalized by his wife’s refusal to vote against the awful Rumsfeld Stalag in Cuba that he shouted
And Chester de Peverill jawed on, protected by Jones. He began on the infamy of America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. He went on to America’s disgusting attempt to patent seeds that were the intellectual property of Third World farmers. Barlow and others had at one point tried to slow handclap him, but Jones was having none of it.
Jones wanted the debate, and yet he was growing increasingly antsy. For more than twenty minutes now he had held the Western world at his mercy, and he knew it would not be long before the imperialists struck back.
A man in a muddy tracksuit was being shown into the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard, accompanied by Sergeant Louise Botting of Horseferry Road. It was Dragan Panic, the tow-truck operative. He really didn’t like being surrounded by so many policemen, but he had been told that his cooperation was essential, especially if he wanted Indefinite Leave to Remain in Britain.
He was plonked in front of a TV, which appeared to be showing some boring parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall. Nobody watched the debates in Westminster Hall, not even the MPs who took part in them.
‘Is that them?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.
At that moment the cameras were panning across the hall, to take in Benedicte and the two other Arabs, and so Dragan began to shake his head.
‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, when the President and Jones the Bomb suddenly filled the frame. ‘I know him anywhere, that creepy man.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked numbly.
‘That,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘is something we are having a look at now.’
It is well known that in his younger days Henry VIII of England was very far from the bloated fat-kneed creature of caricature. He was tall and lithe, with blond locks, constantly springing into the saddle and faring forth for a spot of falconry, and then springing down again to strum his lute and knock up some imperishable masterpiece like ‘Greensleeves’. He danced and sang in his lusty tenor and he also played tennis, which comes, as everyone knows, from ‘tenez’, the word you called out at courtly matches as you prepared to serve and as you instructed your opponent to get a grip on his racket. In 1532 he built a splendid indoor facility at Hampton Court, but at some point before that date he must have seen the possibilities of Westminster Hall, with its hard flat surface and its sheer walls offering the perfect ricochet shot. We know he must have played here because in 1923, when they were making repairs to the hammerbeams, they came across some brown and shrivelled objects in the eaves. They were of leather and stuffed with hair. They were among the first tennis balls. Their hair was shown on examination to be taken partly from a dog and partly from a human being, perhaps because the Tudors, like future generations, had a superstitious faith in composite materials.
One can imagine the scene.
It is a bright morning in the springtime of his reign, the sun strong enough outside to fill the hall with a blue smoky light. Enter Henry, determined to work up an appetite for swans stuffed with goose stuffed with vole, or whatever he is proposing to eat for lunch.
