The Triple Goddess (136 page)

Cilla “Mellifluous” Polybius 0009R(Hon.), who for fifty years had been the voice of the Speaking Clock, until the State cancelled her contract, and threatened her with worse than a lawsuit if she went independent, was at age one hundred and twenty-one smuggled out of the Sunset Lodge Nursing Home, where she was fondly known amongst the residents as “Superfluous Mellifluous”.

Polybius’s vocal cords were restored by private subscription of those who very much wanted to hear her soothing voice counting off the remaining hours, minutes, and seconds of the world. For secrecy, and to ensure that her unique timbre was preserved, the operation was performed in the basement of his house on Harley Street by a sympathetic retired Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon, Larry Engitis 5654H, rather than through one of Central’s home-installed Jiffy-Fix machines, from which every operation was scanned for automated authorization by Central’s Department of Medical Corrections, under the direction of Ribby Braka-Legg 4723C.

A week later, when Cilla Polybius had recuperated, she was wheeled into another room at Abbey Road Studios, London
NW8
, where she was to record her first announcement of the day, at six o’clock
ante meridiem
, on a scrambled satellite frequency set up by the complicit owner of the Sirius radio station, Howard Stern III 9753L.

At first things went well, and Mellifluous sounded pretty good, if one made allowances for over a century of gin and cigarettes. Then at 18:10, precisely, Polybius uttered, in an uncharacteristic foghorn voice, the words, “Tempus? Fugit!”—and collapsed, dead.

Her mortified surgeon, Larry Engitis, swearing that it was not his fault, made what amends he could by taking Cilla home with him in the trunk of his car, where he retrieved her larynx, had it enshrined in Perspex, and donated it anonymously to the British Museum.

In the business world, nobody cared about making or hoarding money any more, only spending it; for, as the adage went, “You can’t take it with you.” Hard-nosed executives did whatever it took to trigger or invoke their golden parachute clauses, and the softer-muzzled ones took advantage of early retirement packages.

Fraud, embezzlement, and the fudging of expense accounts ceased.

The stock market bubble burst, not for economic reasons, but because stockbrokers, and bond and futures traders were not showing up for work, and nobody cared what the world financial market indices or currency exchange rates were. Investors shrugged instead of mourning their robust portfolios, TESSAs, ISAs, 401ks, and IRAs, which had been depleted yet again by the technology shares that they had held onto after the last crash.

The Central State Bank, under Director Midas Ruptt 0192A, reduced interest rates to below zero. Newly friendly and caring lending banks, Building Societies, and Savings and Loan institutions, sent letters to their customers informing them, with their compliments, that they could burn their mortgage documents, and that they were now pleased to be offering non-repayable loans.

The regional State governments in Greece, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere around the world as word got around as to what the Greeks, Italians, and Spanish were doing, applied for further financial bail-out packages. The head of the World Bank, Max Meany 1098A, had already got his extra-long cheque book out, so that all the zeros could be fitted in, and was writing before he came to her senses.

Lloyd’s of London sustained the last in a record string of deficit years, and underwriters crushed the nibs of their pens on their desks.

Psychologists took their tear-stained couches to the dump, threw away their hypnotic watch-chains and pendulums, and wrote to their patients cancelling their appointments and advising them to stop whining and get a life for the short time remaining to them.

Those who had paid good money to psychics and clairvoyants over the years walked into their parlours and gave them knuckle sandwiches.

The police did not bother to arrest anyone, even when crimes were being done under their noses.

Lawyers took down their shingles, as no one was bothering any more to sue, divorce, make last wills and testaments or contest them, or disinherit their children.

Estranged families and friends sat down together to smoke the pipe of peace filled with the substance of their choice.

While genuine obituary columns in newspapers went ignored, those commissioned from ghostwriters by the famous amongst the live and kicking, and published online, attracted a great deal of interest.

Travel agents refunded deposits on next summer’s bookings without being contacted; while cruise lines were inundated with reservations from those who for years had sworn, without ever meaning it, to give up their jobs and travel the world, braving drunken skippers, and Norwalk-agent-like taxonomic family Caliciviridae RNA viruses.

Insurance companies waived the pages of exclusions in their policies, and paid lump sum annuities ahead of schedule.

Former aristocrats shivering in ancestral homes plagued by draughts and damp took down their tapestries, Rubenses and Velasquezs, and used them as firelighters. The remaining vintage wines in the cellars, which were not due to reach their peak for another five or ten years, were quaffed without regret, accompanying quite the wrong dishes.

In non-religious and irreligious marriage ceremonies the phrases “For better or for worse” and “Until death us do part”, spoken by emotional couples as they tied the knot, were replaced with “For better and better”; and “Until death or April the thirteenth, whichever the sooner.”

A well-known heterosexual man got wed to a gay squirrel, and the reception, which was broadcast on TV, was held in a tree house.

No one bought burial plots, and those who already had them used them to inter their (deceased) pets in.

Terrorism, violence, and sectarian warfare ceased, and the lion lay down with the lamb more often than was good for the bloodlines of either species.

Paynim played peanuckle with closet Pentecostalist.

The Israeli government wrote to the Palestinians that they were welcome to live where they damn well pleased, only to receive an identical letter from the Palestinians that had crossed in the post.

Stalwarts of the Irish Republican Army and Unionist Party, who had resumed hostilities after their brief period of concord, because they were bored, tossed their weapons into the lough, and went off arm in arm with each other to sink pints of Guinness, and Black and Tan, in the pub.

Sicily and New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Los Angeles and New Jersey became vendetta-free zones, as Corleone, Gambino, Colombo, Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese, and Soprano, capo crimini capo de tutti capis, consiglieres, capo bastones, contabiles, caporegimes, sgarristas, and piciottos, sat down to meetings with their opposite enemy of State numbers, buried their stilettos in the tables instead of each other, passed around pictures of their offspring, and the recipes of their mothers’ tomato sauce, and admitted that their sisters were indeed the ugly whores that the other parties had long maintained.

No one bothered any more to have cosmetic or plastic surgery.

People resumed taking snuff and chewing baccy, drinking rivers of booze, sucking unfiltered cigarettes until the smoke came out of their ears, and snorting kilos of cheap coke supplied by the overworked and underpaid hairpin untitled children of former king- and linchpin drug lords and barons, enemies of the drug tsar, Candy Snowe 4654C.

Men stopped having vasectomies. Condoms became optional. Women junked their diaphragms, coils, and other cervical contraceptive devices, in favour of morning-after Plan B One-Step® pills, or nothing, as free sex and key parties resumed, and brothels opened in shopping malls.

Health clubs closed.

Those who had been on the Nutkins diet switched to the new “All Fat All the Time”, “Dine While you Sleep” and “Karbo and Kandy” programs. McDonald’s Triple ClogBurgers, which contained three hundred grams of saturated fat, and enough sodium to turn the combined output of the Evian and Vittel springs into a Sargasso Sea, flew off the griddles. A computer at Central registered that, within two months of the Apocalyptic news, the world’s population had doubled its avoirdupois; and that in California, home of the worst dietary offenders, an earthquake registering 10.3 on the Richter scale rolled only a single French fry onto a floor, so heavily and evenly weighted were the North American and the Pacific tectonic plates.

Men and women who had worked in factories for forty years retired to huts in the Andes, to write the one novel that they knew they had in them.

People went off to collect deadly snakes in the Cameroons, to climb Annapurna without oxygen, to search for moonstones in the Rocky Mountains, to go walkabout with Aborigines, to train to become prize-fighters, and to perform stunts that, a month ago, they would have dismissed as madness.

Trapeze artists and high-wire acts donated their safety nets to trawler fleets, and added more somersaults and creative twists to their routines.

The last man still to be hunting the Snark retired and took up lawn bowls.

So completely did everyone get carried away by the mood of
carpe diem
, that few gave thought to whether or not Central would succeed in turning the hourglass the other way up, before the last grain of sand trickled through on its way to being beamed up to Nowhere over the Rainbow. Loudly they sang the words of the 1948 Sigman and Magidson song that had become the new global mantra:

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think;

Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.

Chapter Fifteen

As if this unorthodox behaviour was not odd enough, the world underwent an environmental transformation. In a matter of weeks the ozone layer, which had come to resemble a Swiss cheese without the cheese, was filled; red tides ceased, and the palm-studded beaches of the Arctic and Antarctic were flooded and covered with icebergs.

What was left of the Amazon basin took health-giving breaths of carbon dioxide, and regrew as if it had been drenched in QuickGro Arborfeed.

Greenpeace and the Sierra Club laid off all their employees and shut down.

The mercury levels in swordfish, ling, and orange roughy—a restaurant favourite since its name had been changed from slimefish, a denizen of the deep with a not-uncommon lifespan of a hundred and thirty years—fell to zero, and the streams of New Jersey ran so clear that water bottled from the Raritan River outsold that of Poland Spring.

People reported that rare birds were nesting in their gardens and raising brood after brood of chicks.

Forestry commissions stopped felling trees, lumber sales plummeted, housing starts ceased, and paper-mills closed.

Now that no one was interested in cutting down the few remaining trophy sequoias in the California redwoods, the stalwarts of the open-sandal and fungus-toed, nut cutlet and slippery-elm-eating, tree-hugging brigade, who were still occupying their leafy platforms a hundred feet above the ground, came down. They went home to their old cabins, lit rusted wood- and fossil-fuel burning stoves and boilers, tossed in their malodorous plaids and Birkenstocks, and swigged from demijohns of Old Possum Bourbon as they deloused their bodies and soaked in their first hot baths for years, and blunted clippers and scissors and razor after razor on hair, face foliage, underarms and legs.

Bald and clean-shaven, and reeking of whiskey, Old Spice, and Johnson’s Baby Powder, the naturists packed a few essentials and quit their cabins, on the way out tossing a firebrand in the door, walked into town, shopped for designer clothes, and bought toothbrushes. They moved into motels, ordered in extra-large pizzas, turned up the air-conditioning, and tossed their garbage and recyclable materials out of the window. They made down-payments on SUVs and left the engines idling overnight on the street, spent their days picketing chemical and nuclear waste sites and landfills to protest how under-utilized they were, and went on marches calling for greater efforts to use up Earth’s remaining resources before they went to waste.

Disdaining sun-block, groups of them basked on globally overheated beaches, where in the evenings they barbecued genetically modified meat. The stay-at-homes held bonfire parties in the wilderness, while those with—now only metaphorically—itchy feet signed up for panda-hunting trips in China.

In a radical doctrinal shift, for religious practices had been forbidden since formation of the Central State
, in extremis
a proclamation was issued that citizens were now free to believe in the theoretical existence of a superpower other than that of Central.

That such a determination could be made, permitting a faith-based allegiance, resulted from a Central-sanctioned dispensation granted by a once-lowly individual called J. Arthur Salamander 9999V, whose title was now Chief of Religion and Other Entertainments.

J. Arthur had been a professional clown, until he was summoned to Central for the purpose of keeping 0001A, the most important man in the world, amused as his Fool.

Like Ian Fleming’s M, 0001A had no name but 0001A. Although this fearsome and unmentionable character ate other Central officers…0001A was agnostic as to whether they were As, Bs, or Cs…for breakfast several at a time, cooked over easy, because Fool J. Arthur Salamander 9999V was so funny he had no reason to fear being served in place of 0001A’s Yoplait Very Vanilla non-fat yoghurt—his boss preferred Dannon’s Light ’n Fit French Vanilla, but his personal shopper told him that the corner store did not carry it any more, and he suspected that it had been discontinued—and Old Fashioned Quaker Oats porridge.