Idolism (23 page)

“Really?”

“Really. TV viewers won’t notice the difference, but in the studio everyone can hear you.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m dead!”

We fell silent for a while.

After a few minutes I said, “So they elected Maddock as the new Pope. What do you guys make of
that
?”

“We’re all dead,” Tummy muttered.

“Well,” Julian shrugged, “if something doesn’t happen for ... how long, Tummy?”

“Five hundred years. Last non-cardinal to be elected Pope was Leo X in 1513.”

“There you have it,” Julian continued. “If something doesn’t happen for 500 years, people tend to forget that it’s even possible.”

“Leo wasn’t even an ordained priest yet,” Tummy said, “just a deacon. But his last name was Medici. The Medici were, like, almost as rich and powerful as Maddock is, so that probably explains a lot.”

I looked at Tummy. “Since when did you become a walking Wikipedia anyway?”

“Me mum made me learn about all the Popes. I mean, every single one of them. For almost a year every day after school she taught me about a different Pope. Then in the evenings she quizzed me on them, and if I got as much as a birthday wrong she would send me to bed without dinner. Her method was very effective.”

“So how difficult—or easy—do you think it would be to rig a papal election?” I asked.

Tummy snorted. “Next to impossible. I mean, back in 1513 only 25 cardinals were taking part in the election. Today we have, like, 120. Plus, the election process is completely transparent, at least for those who take part in it. I mean, the balloting may be secret, but collecting the ballots, checking them and double checking them and counting them is all done right in front of everyone’s eyes. There’s not a lot of room for manipulation.”

“Unless everyone is in on it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Suddenly a lot of the news from the last couple of months seems to make sense,” I said. “How the MMC Cares foundation has been building schools all over the place in South America, Africa, and Asia. And we’re not talking about putting a blackboard in a mud hut and calling it a school, we’re talking about proper schools with proper equipment, computers, Internet access, the whole lot. Maddock himself travelled to all of these places to open one school after another, to meet one cardinal after another. And then he used his own TV channels to celebrate himself as this kind, benevolent philanthropist who tried to lift the poorest of the poor out of their misery. What if that wasn’t philanthropy? What if it was bribing cardinals?”

Neither Tummy nor Julian had an answer.

We didn’t talk much more that night. It had been a hectic and eventful day, and we were all dead tired. Julian soon dozed off, and Tummy obediently followed suit. I couldn’t sleep, though. My eyelids were heavy as lead, but even with my eyes closed and Julian and Tummy peacefully snoring beside me, I couldn’t seem to find any rest. Too many things were going through my mind, and I felt miserable. Not because I had to spend the night in jail. Being locked up and unable to get up and get out if I wanted to didn’t really bother me all that much. Back home I was used to pulling all-nighters in my dark and windowless basement without getting out or even having the desire to do so. Besides, if I hadn’t had to spend the night in jail I would have spent it in a hotel room, equally with no desire to get out and walk around, so what was the big difference? The police had contacted our parents, and I was pretty sure that in the morning one of them would show up and bail us all out. I thought it would most likely be Ginger’s dad because he was a lawyer who had worked for international organizations in foreign countries before. When the police called him to tell him we were all in jail he probably contacted all our parents right away and told them, ‘Don’t worry, I got this. I’ll fly to Rome first thing in the morning and bring our babies back home.’ I also thought there was a fair chance that my dad would say to him, ‘That’s great, George, but I’m coming with you,’ and that George would say, ‘Sure, Martin, why not?’

I didn’t think it was very likely that Julian’s mum would make the trip to Rome—on most days she didn’t have the mental strength to make a trip to the supermarket—but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Tummy’s mum or dad might come down to Rome, get him out of jail and take him directly back to the Colosseum and throw him to the lions. Either way, we’d be free again in the morning. The police had told us there would be a fine but no criminal charge, so our criminal records would remain squeaky clean. Even so, I didn’t feel comfortable. I had always been aware of the possibility that one day the law would knock on my door and say, ‘You must come with us.’

It goes with the territory, I guess. If you spend most of your time engaging in borderline illegal activities like snooping around the school computer network or downloading top secret government memos from a politician’s laptop, then legal consequences is something you keep thinking about. It’s not something you anticipate to happen, but you can’t rule it out either. And so you become rather paranoid and extra careful. You cover your tracks as best you can, and you try to avoid giving the authorities any reason whatsoever to take a closer look at you. The others were sometimes making fun of me when I refused to cross the street at a red light. It seems such a trivial thing to do, but what if by chance a police car passes by? They see you and they stop you to give you a warning. And because they notice that you’re slightly nervous, they become suspicious that you have something to hide. That’s all it takes for them to legally strip search you is
reasonable suspicion
that you’re a terrorist. And in 21st century Orwellian Britain it was really easy to be classified as a potential terrorist.

The Terrorism Act 2000 redefined the meaning of terrorism. It used to mean
violence for political ends
. Now it meant
action, used or threatened, for the purpose of advancing any political, religious or ideological cause
, and action included
behaviour to seriously interfere with or to seriously disrupt an electronic system
. Action, political, religious, ideological, interfere, disrupt, all these terms were open to extensive interpretation. Unfortunately, all the interpreting was done in court, by which time the police would already have searched you and your computer, taken your fingerprints and written up a nice big dossier about you. I’d rather not let it come to that, and that’s why I didn’t cross the street at a red light. It’s sad, but I’ve found the only way to protect myself against the state’s paranoia to be becoming even more paranoid myself.

The longer I thought about it, the more upset I got by the fact that I had ended up in the holding cell of an Italian police station just because Julian had to sing instead of just moving his bloody lips. It had been a stupid, reckless, unnecessary, avoidable mistake that had put us all in jail. And suddenly I felt anger. It was the first time. I had known Julian nearly all my life, he had been my friend—my best friend—all my life, but I had never been angry with him. Apart from my dad there was no one in the world who knew me as well as Julian did, and I like to think that no one in the world knew Julian as well as I did—not even his mum. Of course we had our disagreements every once in a while. Just because we were best friends and we knew each other’s quirks and idiosyncrasies didn’t mean we always had the same opinion on everything. We didn’t. In fact, we disagreed on many things, and we often had long debates about all sorts of stuff, but they were never so fierce as to make either of us angry. We always managed to appreciate the other’s opinion and different point of view. But this time was different. Things had changed. Julian had changed. Ever since that school anniversary that had hurled us into the public consciousness, Julian had become a different person. The change had been slow, even subtle at first, so slow that I hadn’t even noticed it right away, but now Julian’s deterioration into a celebrity seemed to pick up speed. What bothered me the most was that he didn’t even seem to mind. In fact, he seemed to rather enjoy it. Julian had become fascinated with his own fame and with the way people reacted to it. He suddenly behaved like a rat in a lab experiment who had figured out that if he pushed the right button, some stupid human would reward him a few drops of sugary water. There were a lot of stupid humans out there, there were lots of buttons to push, and Julian had become addicted to the sweet taste of TV fame. He had yet to realize that it wasn’t good for him or for any of us.

I looked at him as he was lying there next to me on a naked mattress on the floor of an Italian jail cell, sleeping peacefully with the shadow of a smug smile on his face, full and self-satisfied like a baby, and suddenly I felt scared, because the longer I looked at him, the less I seemed to recognize him anymore. What had happened to him? What had happened to the silly little boy who couldn’t walk past Buckingham Palace without stopping to watch the Changing of the Guards? I didn’t know anyone who was as fascinated with rituals and pompous ceremonies as Julian was, yet here we were in Rome, having the once in a lifetime chance to witness the dramatic announcement of a new Pope, but in an act of vain self-aggrandizement and conceited self-adulation he got distracted by his own narcissistic self and turned his back because there was a camera pointed at him. Was he so much in love with himself, or was he just in love with the fact that people were in love with him? And did it even make a difference?

I kept staring at Julian sleeping, smiling, and possibly even dreaming of himself, and I was trying to determine the object of my anger. Was it really Julian whom I was angry at, or was I angry at myself because I couldn’t bring myself to talk with him directly about my doubts and my discomfort? For a moment I was tempted to wake him up and to force him right then and there to look me in the eyes and tell me what the hell he thought he was doing. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, scream and shout at him and ask him what the hell was going on behind that pretty face, but I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I was scared of his reaction. I was scared that he would be questioning my loyalty and that he would accuse me of not understanding him. It was my fear of facing that accusation, the accusation that I did suddenly no longer understand my best friend, that left me paralyzed and sleepless that night, not because it was a groundless accusation, but because I was afraid it might be true.

The Gospel According to Tummy – 12

That night in jail changed a lot of things, for all of us. I mean, I can only speak for meself, but it was obvious that we were all doing quite a bit of serious thinking. None of us got more than two or three hours of sleep. The rest of the time we were just sitting or standing or walking up and down our cell, thinking. I mean, I suppose the others were thinking too. I know I was. It may surprise people, but even when I’m not doing anything, my brain is always thinking, although I have to admit that most of my thinking is about simple things, like food or sex.

Oh well, sex. I had spent the night before in bed with the most beautiful woman in the world. And now, barely 24 hours later, I was in jail for crashing the Pope’s welcome party. How much more Rock’n’roll can you get? It was pretty awesome. But it was also pretty scary, and the longer I thought about it, the more scary it got. I had disrupted the Pope’s inauguration live on the Internet, and we’d probably made the evening news as well. Again. Me mum would kill me for insulting her idol. Me dad would kill me too, for continuing to destroy his career as a politician one day at a time. And once they were all done killing me, I’d surely end up in hell.

I had no idea how long they’d keep us in that jail cell in Rome, but I was pretty sure that I’d have to do a lot more time in solitary confinement in me bedroom when I got home. Me dad was probably already putting iron bars in front of me window. And by the time I got out of me home jail, Momoko would probably already be married and have a bunch of beautiful little babies, and I’d spend the rest of me life on the dole.

Rock’n’roll.

We didn’t talk much that night. I mean, what was there to talk about? We committed a minor offence and they locked us up because they couldn’t reach our parents. Things would look different in the morning, and until then nothing any of us could have said would have made our immediate situation any different, so we all kept to ourselves and to our own thoughts.

Julian, as always, seemed least affected by the whole situation. He spent most of the time jotting down notes in that little notebook he kept carrying around everywhere he went. He was probably turning the events of the day into ideas for new song lyrics. Come to think of it, Julian probably enjoyed spending a night in jail—despite the fact that he didn’t get that single room that he usually insisted on—because it was a new experience for him. Well, being in jail was a new experience for all of us, but Julian was the one most likely to embrace the situation despite its inconvenience and to turn it into something positive and creative. It’s not that Julian enjoyed new situations per se. In fact, he once told us that new and unexpected experiences terrified him. However, he had this amazing talent of transforming his fear into creative energy. Judging from the speed of his scribbling he’d probably have the lyrics for a whole new album done by the end of the night. The question was if we’d ever get to record it.

The Gospel According to Michael – 11

In the morning at ridiculous o’clock our cell door opened, and a policeman told us to get up. As we shuffled out of our cell, Ginger and another policeman were already waiting for us in the hallway. Ginger looked grumpy and tired. Well, she didn’t just look it.