Final day in Alaska. Yesterday’s speech was a stormer. And now this one will be the BEST SPEECH EVER!
Bubble threw the mike to his personal assistant.
‘OK, so wadawesay, boy? What are we gonna do to Russia?’
The aide, overcome with shame for his hideous error, quaked and trembled, wishing the ground would swallow him up.
If looks could kill! Bubble stepped towards the aide, as though (however implausibly this might appear to any but the most narrowminded and bigoted of cynics) he were going to grab the lad by the throat and choke him to death).
‘I meant Ukraine, not Russia!’ the boy screamed in terror. ‘The briefing for tomorrow…’
Bubble momentarily paused in stupefaction. About to swing for the lad’s jaw, he suddenly noticed that everyone around him was laughing and cheering.
He raised his arm aloft, grimly smiling.
‘That’s what it’s all about!’ he roared, in an unprecedently hideous, perfidious exaltation.
‘ASSHOLES DEAL IN FACTS! BUBBLE DEALS THE TRUTH! LOSERS HAVE DISCUSSIONS! MARK TAKES BACK THE LOOT!’ the gibbering menageries of pestiferous imbeciles chanted, carried away in a truly demonic ecstacy of inauthentic rapture.
***
Little Deirdre pulled herself out of the frozen river and sobbed. Even drowning herself was of no use. Her limbs quivered, but even the unbearable Arctic chill could not bring her to her final end. 16 years of torment and misery. How many long, cold, cruel decades lay ahead of her?
The mocking words of Ruby Chandra De Montevideo echoed in her ears.
‘We have no use for the eagerness and idealism of youth. When your ideas have matured a little, and you are ready to deal in practical politics, by all means consider coming to us again. We admire your perfectly understandable fury of youth; let’s just be a little more smart and level-headed about it, and you never know! You might make a highly creditable public mayor at some point in the not-so-distant future.’
All of the sudden a dull, grey-suited figure stumbled out of the bushes.
Deirdre screamed, for she thought that it was Lynton Goering.
It was not.
It was Dickie Klindel, with a camera.
‘Why are you filming me?’ she quivered.
Dickie Klindel gaped at her, dull and lifeless as a frozen trout at the bottom of his horrid river.
But this was now a moment of decision.
He had to find a way to silence her.
He did not know that this fateful day was sowing the seeds of those future hideous, unbearable decades of terror, as the lily-white thunder-crest and sea-storm-motto of Neo-Social Democracy was one day to adorn the White House…
The Mansion of the Common Good.
From this moment on, Deirde was no longer Deirdre.
But what that really meant, there was only one soul on earth who could tell the tale.
***
And even she could not ever tell it.
Not once.
Not ever.