You know, I get accused of all SORTS of things.
And not the least of them is fair. I work hard. Every minute of every hour of every fucking day I labour to put a dignified and a polite and a friendly face on my interactions with the kind of people the rest of you would run from, should you be caught alone with them and with your back turned to their knives. Let me tell you something: your back IS turned.
Yes, I may be a Communist and — yes — I may be a terrorist sympathiser. It is true that I met with, befriended and funded the IRA and — yes, yes, a thousand times yes — most nights I spend tangled in twisted bedsheets, drenched in the fever of my own saltwater, semen issuing from my very veins as the Fist of Revolution flexes and clenches within the prism of my chest. Yes, I am driven by an inchoate urge to turn the rich from their castles and drive them naked into the North where the savages there will deal with them plainly and — yes, if I must admit it — in my office I have a painting of Chairman Mao.
Yes, I was a great friend of Yasser Arafat. Yes, when Margaret Thatcher died I wept — for days. You think you know what a word means, because you have a dictionary, because you have a library, because you've lived a few years on this
FUCKING ROCK
— but look into the eyes of a chasm, a vast and laughing nothing, the dismal and formless VOID of a living ghost drawn up through some black rite so to inhabit the shell of a human and — and live. Then when the tyrant dies, you'll know what joy means.
Yes, I have known killers. And I have killed. But I put a professional face on that shit. Do you think I enjoy sitting opposite that grim Brillo-haired corporate monstrosity on a Wednesday afternoon? Right Honourable this and I-think-the-House-would-all-agree that, what a pile of Punch-and-Judy bollocks and bullshit. What a stack of scripted fake-statistical jingoistic quarter-baked shitbiscuits and bilious non-truths. What a mountain of turds, and how murderous the tapeworms within.
I don't want to smile at her for fuck's sake — she might smile back. Sometimes she wears lipstick. You realise, don't you, that red lipstick is supposed to heighten female attractiveness by mimicking sexual arousal? Good God, if there IS one. She looks like a red crayon on a builder's doormat. She looks like an Israelite's front door on Passover. She looks like a shit I once took that made me pass out from the pain. Putting lipstick on Theresa May is like putting eye shadow on a map of the Himalayas. It's like painting a wall after it's fallen down, or planting a vegetable patch in the side of a sand dune. It's not lipstick she needs — it's napalm. She only looks good if you're a necrophile, although to be fair there're plenty of them packing out the benches on both sides.
You think I want to listen to that thing read from its script, then patiently pick up my own script and read the empty words put there by unseen fingers, then cycle home on that shitty bicycle, like a cunt? Do you? You think I want to be called a racist and a hippie and a witch and a terrorist and an idiot and to be LAUGHED at, cycling home like an utter bellend while the rest of them head off to the Commons bar to get stone drunk or jump in limousines back to the perfectly-modest eight-bedroomed second home you're paying the mortgage for? Do you fucking really think that?
Do you think I want to stand there and WARP THE STUFF AND SUBSTANCE OF MY SOUL issuing the damned lies and talking points and meaningless rebuttals I cannot refuse to say, while the bloviate butlers-of-banks, having laughed and jeered enough, shamble off to their dens and their iniquity and their black-tie dinners where they feast like Nero on swan and dolphin and their orgies and their temples and their sacrifices, and then get on my little bike and strap on my helmet and put my fluorescent strip around my chest and roll out into the streets,
MONKEY TO ALL ORGAN-GRINDERS AND 33rd-DEGREE CUNT IN THE GRAND ORDER OF THIS-COUNTS-FOR-NOTHING
and just eat my dinner and go to fucking bed, nighty night Grandad, don't forget to take your teeth out, don't mention that dossier you treasonous little Commie stoat or you'll end up on the sharp end of your principles like Robin Cook, head on the pillow and there to dream of what the world might have been if people spoke the truth a bit more instead of waiting for a saviour to coalesce from all this smoke? Fuck off. You must be joking.
What do you even expect me to do? I'm 83 years old. You want the truth? The only truth is what gives your life meaning and if you've got your dial tuned into these vampires, de-tune. De-synch. Cut the cord. Float away, because I can't.
One day, though, I'll wake up from my nightmares and the sun will shine straight in my bedroom window. I'll be happy, and this twisted knot of thwarted existence inside my gut will be gone — don't know where. Won't care. I'll roll out of bed, have a cup of tea. I'll stand in the garden with my toes spreading in the rich, black loam and smoke a spliff. Roaming clouds will stretch fingers upon the blue and the homeless creatures that dwell there will look up at the ridiculous humans, stuck fast to their upside-down utopia, and I will laugh, and I will put on my shoes and I will get on my bicycle and on that morning, I shall enjoy riding it, and I will smile at every rushing commuter, but I will not rush.
I could say that I will empty a phial of holy water over Theresa May's head, but having watched her melt like wax thrown on roaring logs, what then? The thing that inhabited her will simply find another vessel. No. On that day, I shall simply tell the truth and be dead by tea time.