Mean Spirits
Right-wing ghosts have left Heaven thanks to Hexit and are perverting the spirit of Christmas. Seasonal satire, with apologies to Charles Dickens, by Adam Jezard.
Stave the First: The Ghost of Icarus Barley
Barley was dead. Deader than the proverbial door nail, but as no one much does DIY anymore I only mention that for dramatic emphasis and not because anyone today has a clue what I’m talking about. But anyway, if you’re to follow this tale at all, just accept Icarus Barley was dead and remember it. Because I’m short of patience these days and I’m bored with repeating myself to numpties who don’t pay attention.
Anyway, Icarus had in life been the partner in an accounting firm with one Cyrus Sage, as kind-hearted a man as you could wish to meet. He paid his staff well, ensured they had pensions, holidays, what health benefits they needed and weren’t too encumbered with overtime, though being accountants and time being money they sometimes forgot that rule, until Cyrus noticed on a handy app they were doing too much overtime and told them to stop, giving them time off in lieu for the excess hours they had put in.
Now it was early on Christmas Eve and, although Cyrus was not a religious man, he’d given his team the whole week off and was pottering about in the office when two men came to the door just as he was leaving and locking up for the evening.
“Mr Cyrus Sage?” one enquired.
“Yes,” said Cyrus.
“We’re hoping to might like to join NUTS-r-US and help reduce the burden of taxes on the ultrawealthy,” the first man said.
Sage was confused. “NUTS-r-US?” he asked.
“Yes, the New Unions for Taxes Reductions for Ultrarich Socialites,” said the other. “You see, we believe that there are too many benefits and health services for the poor, so we go to church and prey that God will reduce the amount the state pays in benefits.”
“At the same time,” said the first man, “we also want the state to build more prisons and reintroduce the work houses, in the hope many of the poor, disabled and people suffering from mental illness will go into them and die and so decrease the surplus population.”
Cyrus Sage shook his head in shocked wonder. “That’s not the image of the season I have in my head,” he said. “Sorry, but I can’t help you.”
Forcing his way between the two men when they tried to block his path, he headed to the nearest bus stop while he observed the two men get into a Tesla. As the car passed him one of the men opened a window and he was sure he heard him utter the word “woke” scornfully as the car went by.
Cyrus Sage shrugged, got out his phone and doubled his monthly donation to his local food bank on his banking app.
It was a short journey to the street where Sage lived in a comfortable apartment. As he walked up to his doorway, he noticed that the door camera seemed to be reflecting not his face but that of his late business partner Icarus Barley. Shaking his head, Sage unlocked his door and walked into the hall. As he did he imagined, or thought he imagined, that he saw a shadowy motorcycle hearse being driven by a skeleton in full Hell’s Angels leather gear through the hallway. On the back of the spectre’s leather jacket were written the words “Conservative” and “Republicans” and on the coffin a flowered wreath spelt out the word “Reform”.
Dispelling the image from his mind, Sage left his coat and backpack in the hall and went into his kitchen. He was preparing a light dinner of avocado, poached egg and sourdough toast when he became aware of a coughing behind him. Turning around he saw the ghost of Icarus Barley.
“Good grief,” said Cyrus. “What are you doing here? You’ve been dead for seven years. Died because the Conservatives cut funding for emergency cancer treatment. We all went to the funeral.”
Icarus looked glum. “That’s a big consolation,” he said. “Did that smarmy swine from the Tory association who liked waving a collection tin for them try to get off with my widow at the wake? Bastard.”
Cyrus didn’t know. “Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “But what are you doing here? Isn’t this all a bit Dickens? Aren’t you supposed to be covered in chains and warning me about the bad things I’ve done in my life?”
“But I’m not wearing chains,” said Icarus. “In fact, I’m burdened for my sins with nothing except this.” He held up what looked like a small thin bracelet dangling at the end of his wrist. “Yours is even smaller. You’ve lead an exemplary life and have no worries about the afterlife.”
Cyrus was starting to get annoyed. “Of course I won’t you moron, because there isn’t one. You’re probably an undigested piece of vegan macaroni cheese. Anyway, oh figment of my imagination, as you’re not going away you might as well tell me what are you doing here if I’ve nothing to worry about.”
“Well,” said Icarus Barley, in a conspiratorial tone, “I’ve come to warn you. You see, there’s been a bit of a mix up in the, urgh,” he pointed ceiling wards, “ahem, other place. You see a lot of people who shouldn’t have got in did and when they were told they’d have to move they decided to form a union, which they’d been opposed to in life, and then demanded to have a space of their own that wasn’t Heaven or…” he pointed downwards. “They called this separation Hexit.”
“So what happened?”
“God was bored with them so gave them Purgatory. They’re not members of either place so they can’t stay for more than three months in either of them without special permission. Also they can’t get all the benefits they used to in the place they came from and they don’t want those on offer in the other.”
“Typical right-wingers,” muttered Cyrus.
“That’s as may be, but they’ve got a plan to recruit more members down here and then take over both places as their ranks swell. And that’s what I’ve come to warn you about. Tonight you will be visited by three spirts who will try to persuade you to join their forces.”
Cyrus sighed. “One at 1am, one at 2am and one at 3am? I had hoped to watch a few episodes of something on Netflix and go to sleep.”
“Bad luck,” said Icarus. “The sods have your name on their list and they’re coming to see you whether you like it or not.”
“Sounds like Christmas,” muttered Sage. “The ones you don’t want to see always drop in.” He sighed. “Oh, well, they won’t consume much of my Christmas goodies if they’re ghosts.”
“Don’t you bet on it,” said Icarus. “They’re all Tories or Republicans after all. They’ll find a way to take anything they can from you and persuade you it’s for your own good.”
“Are any of them, you know, nice?” asked Cyrus waveringly. “I mean they got into the upstairs in the first place after all.”
“No,” sighed Icarus. “They’re all absolute bastards. Good luck.”
With that Icarus Barley disappeared and won’t reappear in the story, so I won’t have to remind any numpties among you again that he was dead.
Stave the Second: The First of the Mean Spirits
Cyrus Sage decided that if he was going to be up all night with the ghosts of right-wingers past he’d better have an early night so he settled into bed with a cup of hot chocolate made with Waitrose unsweetened almond juice. As he lay reading the pages of a Richard Osman mystery novel to his great astonishment the hourly alarm on his phone, which he only used during the working day to remind him of appointments, jumped from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve. It was just past six when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have got into the app. Twelve. With annoying regularity the alarm quickly buzzed through the next four quarters of an hour until it sounded 1am.
Perturbed, Cyrus switched off the phone and had resolved to go back to a Filofax and brick mobile in the new year when he became aware of a strange light appearing in one corner of the room by his wall-mounted TV. Gradually this formed into the shape of a man, pale, thin, with even thinner lips and the face of a cadaver. In one hand he held a lighted cigarette that he puffed on incessantly and he wore a long white chorister’s gown and red cape. In the other hand he held a sprig of holly and on his face was an expression of utter revulsion.
“What the Devil is that you’re drinking?” he asked.
“Hot chocolate made with almond juice,” said Cyrus Sage. “From Waitrose.” He paused as he saw the look of disgust filter slowly across the ghost’s face. “And the chocolate is Fair Trade, organic and I make sure I ship in the least environmentally damaging way possible. Oh, and I can recycle the packaging, made from rice starch…”
“Jesus Christ,” roared the spirit. “Enough, you need to get some good red meat inside you.” He dropped the cigarette into Cyrus’s waste bin, which promptly caught light, forcing Cyrus to leap out of bed and pour his nightside bottle of water on it.
“So now you’re going to tell me you’re the spirit of arsonists, are you?” said the riled accountant.
“For flip’s sake no, I’m the ghost of Christmas past.”
“Ah, my past?” enquired Cyrus.
“Good God man, you don’t think you’re important enough to get a spirit talking to you about your own bloody past, do you? No, the ghost of many, mythical and non-existent nationalist British pasts, when the country was made up 100 per cent of white people, who all went to church, and things were better because TV and films were in black and white. Your support for our cause on earth will increase our chances of overthrowing those woke do-gooders upstairs when you get elected to up there. I mean, that Jesus, what a leftie.”
Cyrus was non-plussed. “You do realise my family is of Jamaican origin?” he said. “And the time you’re talking about never existed. There have been non-white people on these islands at least since the Roman times.”
“Yes, but we don’t care about them and you’re in a salary bracket where that past doesn’t matter. We want you to join us and help spread the story of a mythical past, when Britain was great because it had the rest of the world in chains, except we don’t talk about that bit because, well, the Daily Mail readers don’t like it.”
Cyrus let out a “hurrumph” sound. “They only don’t like it because you don’t tell them about it and you want them to fear other people who aren’t like them.”
“I knew it,” the spirit said, roused to passion. “I knew we’d have trouble with you. Almond juice… I bet there’s no added sugar.”
“Of course not.”
“Avocado-eating, chai-latte drinking, sourdough-with-almond-butter-eating wokerati,” the spirit spluttered contemptuously.
The alarm on Cyrus Sage’s watch, which had mysteriously turned itself back on, rang the three-quarter hour to 2am, something it had never been asked to do or done before.
The spirit of Christmas past suddenly looked a little sheepish. “I say, you haven’t got a little drop of something to keep out the cold night air have you? After Hexit that Purgatory place is freezing, we haven’t got enough supplies to heat the old place and keep body and soul together. But I still maintain we can get a good deal with both down and up and be better off, free to make our own decisions without God or Beelzebub breathing down our necks.”
“I can offer you a gin and tonic,” said Cyrus, adding, almost as an afterthought, “but it’s alcohol free.”
The spirit roused itself angrily then pointed an accusing finger at Cyrus Sage. “May you never consume anything but beef in red-wine gravy and caffeinated coffee again in your life.”
And with that, the first of the mean spirits was gone.
“Well,” said Cyrus, “that’s it. I’ll definitely donate to Black History Month and vote against Restore Trust at the next National Trust AGM.”
Stave the Third: The Second of the Mean Spirits
Cyrus climbed into bed but gradually became aware of the lights dimming around him while an eerie light filtered into the bedroom from under the door of the next-door room. With a feeling of dread he levered himself out of bed and opened the adjoining door. In front of him a spectral being floated in front of his Christmas tree, which was adorned with presents for the adopted children of his neighbours, refugees from the Niger Delta they had taken in because of the effects of famine caused by climate change.
“Oh, no,” said Cyrus. “You look just like a bad AI artist’s impression of a ghost. Are you the ghost of Christmas present?”
“I am,” said the spook in a feminine voice that sounded uncannily like Margaret Thatcher.
“So what is it about Christmas present you wish to misguide me?”
“It is that, at this time of year, we want to make sure that the message that refugees in small boats coming to these shores are evil and should be deported to Rwanda, or Romania, or Russia, or any country starting with R to which most people in this country haven’t been and so won’t know how bad it might be for anyone we send there.”
Cyrus sat on the sofa and looked at the spirit. “Forgive my ignorance,” he said, “but isn’t this the time of year we’re supposed to be remembering some refugees fleeing evil dictators who came to a new land to escape persecution and the potential murder of their baby? Shouldn’t we be opening our hearts and doors and borders to these people?”
The spirit hovered by the tree. “Where on earth do you get that nonsense from?”
“I think it’s called The Bible,” said Cyrus wearily.
“Well, we don’t want any of that pussy, woke nonsense do we, not at Christmas,” said the spirit. “We should be agitating to ensure as many Daily Express and Mail readers as possible are angry about refugees coming over in boats and that governments ignore their human rights to seek asylum where they choose, and we maintain the fiction they are taking homes from the young and poor, and we don’t allude to the fact it’s the vastly wealthy buying houses and land they don’t live in or on, often with expropriated funds from foreign lands, so forcing up housing prices, that are a large part of their problems.”
“I see,” said Cyrus, dazedly. “So this is the Christmas story in reverse. We don’t save the baby Jesuses, we let today’s Herods kill them all.”
The spirit thought about it a moment. “Well, I wouldn’t put it as bluntly as that but, basically…”
“Well?” demanded Cyrus after a lengthy pause.
“…Yep, you hit the nail squarely on the head,” the spirit conceded.
Cyrus went to his record turntable and took out a vinyl 33rpm album, placing it carefully on the turntable and letting it play.
“What are you doing?” the spirit asked anxiously.
“I’m playing Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, the theme from The Exorcist, you know, in the hope it might exorcise your presence from my house.”
The spirit puffed itself up pompously. “We’re the right-wing,” it said. “We prey on people’s fears, greed and ignorance. We always come back.”
And with that it disappeared in a puff of smoke, the strange illumination with it, leaving behind it a trail of accusing snowflakes blowing in a sudden wind.
“That’s it, I’ll increase my volunteer time with the refugee charity,” Cyrus muttered savagely under his breath.
Stave the Fourth: The Last of the Mean Spirits
Out of the dark a greenish glow appeared and in this a cowled figure slowly emerged from the gloom. The phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. The very air through which this spirit moved seemed to emanate gloom and misery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand carrying a flag bearing the stars and stripes. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
“And who are you, the ghost of Christmases yet to come?” said Cyrus, his voice rising in anger.
“I am the ghost of the small state,” said the voice. “Remember, the thing people dread to hear is the phrase ‘I am from the government, I am here to help.’”
Something in the voice made Cyrus shiver. “What do you mean?”
“There should be no government, no taxes, there should be no corporate regulation, unions should be outlawed and civil rights condemned as being bad for business,” the spirit said. “Watch my lips, no new taxes.”
“I can’t see your lips,” Cyrus said.
“Well, if you saw them that is what they’d say.”
Cyrus Sage stepped forward and flung back the spectral hood, revealing nothing underneath except the face of a skeleton. “You haven’t even got any lips,” he told the ghost, “so what you’d say with them would be complete codswallop.”
“We’ll pass over my lack of facial labia,” said the phantom in a hurt voice, pulling the hood back over its features.
“So companies would do everything?” asked Cyrus. “They’d deal with water treatment to make it safe for us to drink, they’d deal with air pollution, so we could breathe without fear of being polluted by bad air, they would provide all the health care and they would repair the roads, teach the children and care for the mentally ill and physically needy? You know a third of my local taxes are spent on schools and another third on social services like for the mentally ill and elderly?”
The spectre paused. “Well, companies will only look after you if you can afford it,” the spirit said. “Anyone who can’t afford, quite frankly, isn’t working hard enough or isn’t economically viable. They should get another job.”
“What if they’re already working 40 hours a week for a pittance?” asked Cyrus incredulously. “You know, providing care for the elderly, or emptying waste bins, or teaching children, or working in shops. Or what if they’re too ill or too old?”
The spirit shrugged. “They should have got a better education and gone into banking or become the CEOs of private health insurance companies,” it said. “There’s no end of roles you can get if you want to be a millionaire. Of course, you nearly always have to be a millionaire to get one of those jobs, but we don’t tell people that, after all, we don’t want them to stop believing in the small state.”
Cyrus at this point blew his cool. “The privately run US healthcare system,” he said, “is the most expensive in the world and it has the least patient benefits of any developed country,” he said scornfully. “So why don’t you tell people that no state provision means bad roads, poor education, worse healthcare and no hope for the millions of people who struggle daily and need a hand?”
“Oh,” said the spirit, waving an airy arm, “we don’t want to alarm the populace unduly. Better to make them think if they keep all their taxes themselves they’ll be better off and that the other guys need to fend for themselves, rather than them realising we’re bilking them even more for less.”
“So, it’s Christmas,” said Cyrus resignedly. “What of the Christian messages of love, redemption, caring, solicitude and hope for mankind?”
The spirit laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about those things, most Christians on the religious right don’t, they’re OK financially themselves, and they especially don’t care if you’re talking about anyone who’s, you know, different.”
Anger had been building up inside Cyrus, like steam pressure within a kettle, and suddenly it exploded. “The moneylenders have taken over the temple,” he said angrily. “Well, they may win, but not today, not here, not me, not this Christmas.”
In a few choice words he told then the spirit what it could do with its small government, though the spirit maintained this was anatomically an impossibility, before Cyrus picked it up, carried it downstairs and shoved it out of the front door, applying a foot to its rear end as it went.
As the spirit flew into the distance it let out an anguished wail: “Cuck!” it cried, before it vanished entirely from view.
Wiping his hands as if having disposed of an unpleasant piece of trash, Cyrus Sage shut the door and went back to bed.
The End
Copyright Adam Jezard December 2024