I never got to the bottom of how Tanya knew about Mary Barton because seconds after knocking my socks off Kieran had bounced up to me like an unreconstructed Tigger to introduce Dolores Simpler (yes, her real name). Dolores, who was a Texan and about the size of that state, was a big bucks voice over artist of Kieran's who, unfortunately for me, aspired to write theatre plays. She sent me one which featured actual dragons. When I asked her over the phone how she expected to manifest dragons on stage she said we could perhaps borrow a couple from London Zoo. The play was crap but I cannot entertain, anyway, anyone who thinks dragons are real. If she was joking she needs to brush up her act. Anyway I turned her down unceremoniously. Kieran knew all this so had brought her up to make me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I wonder how he combs his hair and hides the horns. There's enough people in the world that hate him already, I don't know why he has to work so hard at getting more.
I did, however, manage to pin down Tanya for a few seconds and get her to commit to meeting me in the new year. I suspect we were about to join forces which, given our history, is quite extraordinary. Accordingly I hop out of a cab outside the Two Brewers in Covent Garden on a sunny January lunchtime just as Tanya is chaining her bike to a lamp post. (it's an affectation, she only lives about three hundred yards from here.)
'Caught me. Dyke with a bike.'
'I'd get lynched for saying that. Probably by your ex-readers.'
'And nine months ago I would have put your head in the noose. Funny how things change.'
'Hilarious.'
Tanya extricated her walking a stick from the bicycle frame and hobbled into the pub in front of me. 'Before you ask; no I can't walk three hundred yards anymore. I have to cycle everywhere. Or take taxis.'
Well, that's telling me.
'What do you call a stick that makes you walk faster?' she said, throwing herself into a seat by the door. 'A hurricane.'
'Jokes? Didn't know you had it in you.'
'I used to write sketches for the Footlights at Cambridge. Once upon a time I fancied doing stand up. I wasn't always so serious.' She nodded towards the bar. 'Tomato juice. I have to stay off the booze for now.'
I followed my orders. I had no intention of staying off the booze even though it was only eleven thirty in the morning. Hence the pub was empty. I placed her juice in front of her and took a long heave on my beer whilst Tanya assailed me with another gag. 'What do you call a cripple in a hot car? A steamed vegetable.'
'You could go far,' I said, not at all convincingly.
'It's the way I tell 'em.'
'I told you your play was funny.'
'Ach, well, okay. But freelancing for The Guardian doesn't help your sense of humour.'
'Yeah, I stopped seeing the funny side of things when I was reading that rag as well.'
'The only way I'm going to get through this crap,' she gesticulated at her body, 'is to laugh about it.'
Under the circumstances I felt guilty about asking the next question but it was, after all, the reason I'd arranged to meet her. 'Tanya, why did you mention Mary Barton on new year's eve?'
'Do you believe in a battle between good and evil?'
'For goodness sake Tanya, you're a journalist, you should be able to tell when a phrase I've uttered has a question mark at the end of it.' Me being single-minded as usual.
'All in good time. Do you though? A battle between good and evil.'
'I don't know,' I think I did, particularly these days, but I wasn't going to commit.
'I didn't. I was one of those proud materialist stroke rationalists. Educated at Cambridge to know how the world really worked, leaving all the religious and flaky superstitious bulshit and the belief in gods to the uneducated. And then I became a journalist and ended up at The Guardian no less. Where any concession to the non-physical has all the cachet of a cucumber sandwich soaked in raw sewerage. And then, hey ho, I got stabbed by my country. I got assaulted by the very agencies that I thought were supposed to look after me. God, how can I be so stupid! And then my eyes got opened.but, boy, I nearly had to give up my life to truly see. Nothing is what it seems.'
It's customary for me to make a flippant remark when I am otherwise rendered speechless but unless you know this woman like I do you can't imagine how unlikely it is for these words to emanate from her voice-box. A year ago, even less, this woman would have devoted thousands of column inches excoriating conspiracy theorists like I am alleged to be. (Compared to Martin Spangler I'm a virgin.)
'What's the most dangerous thing you've done? Voluntarily.'
Even though this question came out of left field I obediently tried to answer it. 'I dunno. I was lined up to do a parachute jump once for charity until a friend said "if at first you don't succeed then skydiving is not for you." I'd just finished rehearsing a play that didn't open so I took that as a sign.'
'And now you don't leave the house unless someone's read your tea leaves.'
I ignored the jibe. 'I did buy hashish round the back of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul right after seeing the film "Midnight Express" which seemed a bit foolish under the circumstances.'.
'The most dangerous thing I've done is take that vaccine. Willingly. But that's because no-one told me there was a risk. If you get in a plane you know there's a risk, if you go rock climbing there's a risk - '
'If you cut your toenails on the toilet pan there's a risk you'll fall in.'
She ignored me. Fair enough, I would have too. 'But there was supposed to be no risk. They were absolutely safe and effective.'
'Yeah, I noticed there's been an epidemic of flying pigs circulating over our heads for the last couple of years.'
'I got vaccinated in mid May.'
My knee jerk reaction was to say 'so did millions of others, what did you expect, a medal?' since I was still programmed to see Tanya as the enemy, but you don't shut the door to those seeking the light.
'Within twenty four hours my hands were burning as if I was holding them permanently over an open fire. After three days I was getting headaches like I've never known lasting a whole day at a time, one day on three days off. I had to take time off sick. Then I got Bell's Palsy.'
'I remember. Last time I saw you. In July.'
'My face was so distorted I could have been auditioning to play Quasimodo. '
I grinned as if acknowledging Tanya's courageous attempt at a joke but really I was amused by an irony. Tanya's favourite show of all time (though she can't tell her Guardian readership this) is Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera.'
'And then, by the end of the month I was having terrifying chest pains. Several visits to hospital later it turns out that I have a heart inflammation called myocarditis. God knows how I got up to Liverpool at the end of June to write that notice for your appalling excuse for a musical.'
'Tanya, that has about as much to do with me as a bad script for a crap show like Eastenders just because I happen to be a writers' agent. I am in the Notso world, not of it, to paraphrase a pretty popular book.'
'I didn't want to make the connection at first to the vaccine. I believed all the bulshit I had been fed. But I did some research anyway and it appears that these vaccines were doing far more damage than anyone was letting on. I talked to my editor: why weren't we writing about it? I got the brush off. nothing to write about. The Guardian doesn't subscribe to conspiracy theories.'
'Well since Silly Billy Gates is Godfather to both The Guardian and vaccines it's hardly surprising. It would be like trying to sell cyanide to Cadbury's to put in their chocolate.'
'You have no idea the hell I went through between May and July. And the more I looked outside the mainstream the more reports I saw. And I made a point of saying so around the offices more than once. So, of course, my card was marked. By mid July most of my colleagues were treating me as if I was a leper and they might catch something.'
'Compassion and journalists don't go together like a horse and carriage do they? Save that for love and marriage.' God knows why I was suddenly riffing on a song lyric.
'What?'
'You know: you can't have one without the other,'
'Are you taking drugs?'
'I always thought it was a song from "My Fair Lady" but only last year I discovered that Frank Sinatra sang it in a TV version of "Our Town". Shameful lack of knowledge for a theatre agent.'
'Have you just been abducted by aliens?'
'It might be all very well that they go together like a horse and carriage but if I was the horse I could do without the carriage. Horse, you know…Stud… doesn't need the institution of marriage…' I was floundering big time.
Tanya looked at me like I was a soiled toilet she didn't want to use. 'In September and October I was in a coma for six weeks,' she said so matter of factly she might have been reeling off the train timetable.
'God, I didn't know,' I said, grateful to be back on track, at the same time looking around for a hole I could crawl into.
'Well, something good came of it I guess. I surfaced with a deep hatred of everything I once supported. The first thing I thought of when I recovered consciousness, for some reason, was going to a production of "The Crucible" when I was at school and thinking thank God that couldn't happen these days. You know, the Salem witch trials. But it could. We're just as easily brainwashed today.'
'Too right,' I said. Of course I did agree but I said it because I still felt an arse and thought it better to sit on my hands than attempt another folly of lame verbal prestidigitation.
'I was speaking to someone who's had two heart attacks since he had the vax. He's only in his forties. Super fit sportsman. He reckons the plan is to annihilate a quarter of the world's population by 2030. He did some digging and discovered that the jab seems to act as an accelerant: in other words what would have been coming for you down the line in twenty or thirty years hence is coming for you now. '
'Jesus!'
'Of course today I'm persona non grata and no-one wants to talk to me'.
Still somewhat embarrassed by my little detour into the Frank Sinatra songbook I was concerned Tanya wouldn't find my next question genuine. 'Last time we met was the beginning of last July. You collared me in The Bay Tree. You said that you had something important to tell me but then shot off to meet someone.'
'Yeah, I must have seemed like a big tease'. Relief, she did find the question genuine. 'You heard of Naomi Wolf?'
'Of course.'
'Well a colleague of hers was over from the States. Naomi had all sorts of dirt on Pfizer. Someone had put me in touch with her colleague and I needed to meet him at Heathrow before he flew back. Naomi alleges that Pfizer knew by December 2020 that the vaccines didn't work. They waned in efficacy and presented as 'vaccine failure' but Pfizer initiated the programme anyway. They knew after only a month of the roll out that one side effect of the vax was actually getting Covid for pity's sake. By May of last year, according to Naomi, Pfizer knew that minors they had been observing had suffered heart damage a week after getting the mRNA injection. But the US FDA executed the Emergency Use Authorisation for teenagers a month later anyway. And parents did not get a press release from the US government about heart harms until August of 2021, after thousands of teens were vaccinated. '
'Why don't we know about this?'
'The media dumb ass! This is exactly the thing The Guardian would be suppressing. Apparently Naomi's compiling a paper with the proof. The whole thing seems to be a massive fraud. Of course I'd already had the vax so I knew I was probably fried already. I certainly knew I was ill before I met this guy at Heathrow. How ill remained to be seen.'
'Tanya, I'm gobsmacked. I never believed I'd hear this from you.' And as an accompanying thought: 'I am so, so sorry.'
Tanya pressed the back of my hand as if to say thank you. 'Having a brush with death makes you look at things with a different perspective. I realised how brainwashed I'd been. We're all brainwashed, but most never get to find out. But it seems, over many years, the powers that be have told us lie after lie after lie. And we in the press, as their minions, just soaked it all up and churned it all out. I hate the expression but I've gone down the rabbit hole big time. When I said "Here's to you 2022?" at the party I meant here's to looking at things with new eyes.
'You'd just mentioned Mary Barton, but how could you know I'd spoken to a Mary Barton?'
'Sharon told me. She's taken me on as a client. Well she's farmed me out to Tessa.'
I was silent for a moment, trying to take this in. I was simultaneously outraged and disappointed. 'Is that it? Sharon told you? And I'm thinking there was something far more intriguing, like the plot of a PD James novel. That you knew Mary independently of me. Sharon told you! So that was just one big tease. Did you tell Ackerman to say what he did? About knowing something about Pattie?'
'No I didn't!'
'You said sometime ago that you thought Pattie didn't commit suicide, but that was while you were still batting for the other side.'
'Look, I never believed Pattie committed suicide - for my own reasons. But I was never big on conspiracies until now.'
'Your own reasons?'
'Pattie phoned me up, apart from anything else she didn't want her clients to run foul of The Guardian if we didn't see eye to eye.'
'About what?'
'She rang me about my play - '
'She hadn't read it.'
'She was going to read it after you'd given her a breakdown. You must know how much she trusted your instincts. Anyway two days before she died she rang to arrange a meeting for the following week. I couldn't commit to a date because I was going to Brazil to cover the Rio Grande arts festival for The Guardian. So I said I'd phone her when I came back. She was dead before I got to do that. She gave me her mobile number. Does that sound like someone who is suicidal?'
'She gave you her mobile? That's unheard of. That was for her inner circle only. '
'So she must have trusted me implicitly. That's when she asked about "Eyes Wide Shut' '
'Why haven't you told me this before?'
'Why should I? We were enemies…and I didn't trust you.'
'But if Pattie trusted you, why couldn't you trust me?'
'Because, unlike Pattie, you have no diplomatic skills. You're legend at The Guardian for being an outspoken and very difficult curmudgeon. '
'Blimey, what it is to have such reach.'
'Antony, you do still know you were Pattie's closest friend?'
'I'm beginning to wonder.'
'Pattie loved you and she was trying to protect you. I thought she was misguided but there you go. She was trying to protect you because she knew how impetuous you are. It's too personal with you Ant, you can't keep your powder dry once you know an injustice has been done. You would have ridden out on your white charger for Pattie, died for her. That's why she kept certain things from you.'
'Like what?'
'I don't have the details.'
Gratified that I might have been that Pattie did love me, I didn't want to get sidetracked just then: 'Mary Barton told me that one of the things Pattie asked was whether she was familiar with "Eyes Wide Shut." '
'So Sharon said.'
I was mildly irritated that Tanya seemed to have won Sharon's confidence as easily as it seemed she'd won Pattie's, but I didn't want to get knocked off course here. (Actually, it was more than mild, but what can you do?) 'I can understand Pattie asking you because film is one of your disciplines. But why ask a microbiologist you haven't seen for decades?'
'Presumably you're going to ask her. When are you going up there?'
Even more irritated that Tanya seems to be muscling in on my parade. How did that happen? 'Couple of weeks. She asked you, she asked Barton, she asked Spangler. She talked to me about it the night before she died. What is it about that film that I'm not getting? And why, for pity's sake, would Barton be an expert on Kubrick?'
'You know there's a conspiracy theory that's been doing the rounds forever that the moon landings were faked and actually shot by Stanley Kubrick?'
'Pattie wasn't given much to conspiracy theories. She'd read too many bad scripts with conspiracy being the central theme. She was getting there with Covid though. '
'What is a conspiracy theory and what isn't? Six months ago I dismissed it all as drivel. And now? It's like someone's opened a door onto a whole new world, a whole new consciousness. You know what mankind's greatest achievement is?'
'I dunno. Liquorice Allsorts? Cricket?'
She was too earnest now to acknowledge my facetiousness. 'You notice, even as a feminist, I used the term mankind. Man's (which encompasses men and women and I don't care) greatest achievement is: His capacity for self deception. We're convinced that the powers that be, at least in the west, are benevolent. Forget about the nasty communists, but we, here, are all about freedom. We fought and won the second world war for freedom. But what if, in all that time, those powers that be had been - for the last two or three centuries - working towards something far more insidious, far more dark and nefarious….'
'Like what?'
'How about total world control and complete and utter slavery?'
Normally I would have said something like 'welcome aboard' to someone who was just waking up. But this is coming out of Tanya Parker’s mouth. A woman who worshipped at the shrine of the rational, scientific establishment. A woman who despised conspiracy theorists. Then she's in a coma, what appropriate imagery. Because from there she doesn't just wake up. She launches herself from deep slumber into reality like a lunatic astronaut setting the controls to the heart of the sun (apologies Pink Floyd). This is actually coming from Tanya Parker's own mind. Under her own volition. That's got to be a bit like Psalm 23 coming out of the mouth of Mephistopheles. So unlikely as to bring the world to an end.
I’ve always wondered if as people are jarred awake and realize they’ve been lied to, they’ll get real angry and what would happen when that reaches critical mass. Because even if only a third of the jabbed experienced adversarial events, that’s a whole lotta angry people.
Now if only I can remember and file away all your one liner quips for future use, I’d slay at parties.