Citizen Jesus

Joey’s favourite meal is what he eats every weekday evening, vegetable lasagne with chopped prawns and cream. He can’t eat meat because he’s seen too many horror shows of how they kill animals. Living next door to an abattoir doesn’t help, the constant mooing and squealing of animals awaiting slaughter and the smell of electrocuted blood in the air only strengthens his resolve to abstain from eating meat.

As he sat down at the table in the living room, Joey asked his mum the thing that had been bothering him immensely since returning home.

‘Why did you use the word, chestnut, when I told you what I’d been doing?’

‘Sorry, son.’

‘You could have used any number of expressions but you didn’t. You chose ‘that old chestnut’.’

‘I know. Sorry, son.’ Aimee knew not to argue with him when he was being pedantic. Joining in only made it worse for both of them.

Joey huffed into his fork as it dripped fat above his plate. ‘David Davis used the same word when I told him what I wanted to do this afternoon.’

‘Did he really? Isn’t that funny?’

‘Well, no, not really, considering you were both telling me off.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that. I didn’t mean to be nasty. I just don’t like to think of you getting yourself into trouble. Meeting David Davis is one thing but trying to join the Illuminati is quite another.’

Joey forked in some food and chewed. ‘One must do one’s celestial bidding, mother,’ he squeezed out from the corner of his mouth.

Perhaps I had been a little hasty, he thought. No double agent in his right mind would have made the mistake of approaching an MP for help. Now I’ve been on national telly, too, no doubt picking/scratching my nose while jogging on the spot behind Davis. That would have completely blown my cover. Yes, I’ll just have to think of more cunning ways to get into the secret society.

There was a show on the telly about a girl who went from Berkeley Square debutante to Beverly Hills pornstar to Bexhill-on Sea prostitute via heroin and alcohol in just under two years.

Joey would like to ask his mum a question, but he decides not to. No, he mustn’t.

‘Mum, what would you think if I became a successful pornstar?’ He burst out laughing, then stopped abruptly, looking at her for an answer.

‘I don’t know, son. I thought you didn’t like sex.’

‘It’s an industry, mum, like any other. I’d obviously have to do what was required of me with some of the world’s most beautiful women, but I’d see it as an act of libertarian charity. There are far worse professions, you know, and besides, we’re all whores.’

‘I’m not so sure about that.’

Aimee changed channels to reveal a program about immigration and poverty in Kent.

‘Do you know what I think of when I watch a football match, Mum?’

‘No,’ said Aimee, worriedly.

‘Well, I was watching this European match last night and it was being played in some Godforsaken war-zone in Ukraine, a real dump of a ground with about five thousand fans, mostly from the Everton end, and I just got thinking, if the shit that every player on the field’s done in their lifetime was collected and placed on the pitch, how high would the pile be? Would it spill out onto the terraces? I reckon it would be about a foot high over the whole pitch. What do you reckon, Mum?’’

Aimee raised her lower lip and chin to reveal a sad grimace. ‘Yes, probably about a foot high, dear. Pitches are very big.’

Joey was satisfied with this answer. ‘Some players are older than others, so they’ll have done more shit in their lifetime.’

His mother winced at the thought and put down her cutlery. As he’d finished his food, he decided it was time to go upstairs and write a few songs.

‘I’ll be back down for QT. Thanks for supper, Mum.’

‘Pleasure, darling. See you in a bit. Ooh, don’t forget to come down for the news, you little superstar.’

‘OK.’

In the hour and a half that passed in his bedroom, Joey did nothing, lying on his bed trying to understand the reason he’d been put on the planet. Deep down, he knew he couldn’t be a double agent for the Illuminati. Even he had to admit that he wasn’t up to the job of infiltrating the world’s most elusive and evil society. Perhaps he could be a dogwalker instead. He’d had a dream about a dog the night before last. In the dream, he was walking through a park. Up ahead, he saw three dogs and a man and he noticed that the big dog was holding them up because he was doing a crap. As he got closer, he noticed that the dog doing the poo was huge, as big as a Harley Davidson. As he passed by, he wondered if the man would clean up the massive pile of red crap. It seemed like a mammoth task to Joey. The path was covered in horse poo so he couldn’t work out whether the guy should clean it up.

No songs came to him so he switched on LBC, where they were chatting about women’s rights gone mad. A woman had successfully prosecuted a man for rubbing his thigh against hers in a bar. The experience had caused her considerable anguish, bringing up deeply embedded trauma from her childhood and rendering her powerless to bouts of depression at work. Then there was the mother of four who’d managed to convince a judge to send her husband to jail for throwing a corner of toast at her. The rise of the Feminazi was against the wishes of most women, said the man from Fathers’ Justice, while his opponent decried these isolated incidents as fodder blown up by an insatiable media. It was all very sad.

At ten o’clock Joey made his way downstairs for the news.

‘It was on about halfway through on the six o’clock news so I hope it’s on this one,’ said Aimee.

‘Would you like a cuppa, Mum?’

‘No, thanks. Just got one. Do you want me to make one for you?’

‘You’re alright. I’ll do it.’ Off he went to the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of green tea with a teaspoonful of thickly cut marmalade.

When David Davis came on, Aimee looked over to Joey and asked him to relax. ‘Don’t throw a wobbly, whatever you do. You looked fine to me so just don’t worry when you see yourself, OK?’

Joey watched as he came into shot and started jogging on the spot behind Davis. He noticed that he wasn’t picking his nose, he was scratching it, and felt enormous sense of relief. His trench coat was open so you could make out his natty Rupert the Bear pyjamas, which he found pleasing.

‘Do I look like a bit of a freak?’

‘No, of course you don’t. You look fine.’

It was odd to see himself on telly but he couldn’t quite compute it, so he just sat there watching. Aimee wasn’t confused. Her son had made a fool of himself, but that was OK.

As Joey is liable to throw things at the telly when Question Time is on, his mum had come up with an ingenious idea of using a piece of thick Perspex to place over the screen for such occasions. When the news finished, she pulled the Perspex sheet from behind the curtain and fitted it in place quietly, much to Joey’s disgust.

On the panel were the usual suspects, including David Davis. Joey huffed, waiting to be angered by all of them.

The show passed by relatively calmly until the issue of mental health came up as a topic. A member of the audience asked what may be the possible causes of such a dramatic rise in the number of manic depressives and dementia sufferers over recent years. The panel’s general consensus was that social disharmony was to blame. Cuts had to be made somewhere, said the Ukip guest. We need to get to root causes, said the Green. If it wasn’t for us, we’d be a morally bankrupt society, said the Lib Dem. Labour said the opposite of Davis, but agreed that austerity was a necessary evil.

‘They’re all in it together, aren’t they, Mum?’

‘They certainly seem to be, sonny boy. Still, not to worry, hey. Can’t change the world.’ She regretted saying that last sentence, knowing it might rile him, but then out of the blue Davis started talking about meeting Joey at Westminster.

‘There is so much we don’t know about mental illness,’ he said. ‘Just today, I met a man outside Parliament dressed in pyjamas and a trench coat who was convinced that the Illuminati was taking over the world.’

‘Who knows, David? He might have a point,’ said the Green, much to the muffled laughter of the entire audience and panel.

‘Bloody hell, you’re famous!’ said Aimee, sitting up to laugh and seal clap from her chair.

Joey was suitably bemused by the charade he saw Davis playing. ‘They’re taking the piss out of the mentally ill, Mum.’

After the show, QT’s twitter feed was inundated with pictures of Joey from the news. Everyone wanted to know who he was. After one particularly funny post describing him as Citizen Smith on acid, the hoard of followers adopted him as Citizen Jesus.

‘Who is Citizen Jesus?’ they all asked.

At about midnight, Aimee received a call from a newspaper reporter called Jo Smiley, who’d traced Joey with the help of London Transport Police. With Joey tucked up in bed reading A Confederacy of Dunces for the fourth time in six weeks, Aimee listened to what Smiley had to say.

The gist of it was that she felt compelled to speak Joey about the convictions that drove him to go to Parliament to seek help from David Davis. What she really wanted to do was establish that he was, as suspected, mentally ill or retarded, in order to run the story using that angle. Her editor had briefed her, suggesting that he would be taken as a delusional outcast, ridiculing the scourge of conspiracy theorists in the process.

Aimee said she’d talk to Joey in the morning. If he didn’t want to be interviewed, then that would be final.

But it didn’t work out that way. At six-thirty, when she left to go to work, three cameramen and four reporters swooped upon her before she could get to her car. They asked whether Joey was available for comment and she told them to get lost or she’d call the police. She refused to leave until they went on their way, which took about ten minutes, during which time the developing scene had been broadcast live on ITV’s Breakfast News.

When Aimee arrived at work, her boss told her that the media had been harassing him and then someone called in to say she’d been on the news, at which time she sped back to the house, only to find that the news crews had multiplied. She wrestled her way through the crowd of reporters and disappeared behind the door.

 ‘Joey, where are you?’ she shouted, running into the living room, finding no one. Running up the stairs to his bedroom, there was no one there either. Hearing some splashing noises, she imagined that he was committing suicide in the bath so she raced into the bathroom to find Joey lathering up his hair in shampoo.

‘It’s alright, Mum. Just having a quick bath before I speak to the world. I gather you’ve been on telly, too.’

‘Er, have I? Yes, I have. I haven’t seen it. What the hell’s going on?’

‘The world has awoken, mother. Finally, they can see,’ said Joey, removing suds from his brow.

‘What can they see, Joey? You’re not the Messiah, you know.’

‘Mother, mother, mother. Why else would the eyes and ears of the world camp on our lawn? They have found their leader and I must speak with them.’

‘Oh, Joey. What are you going to say? Please don’t bring up the collective shit of footballers, whatever you do.’

‘The shit of footballers is of no importance right now. If you’ll excuse me, I must practice my speech.’ He turned to face his mother, who was stood rigid to the bath mat. ‘Do you mind, mother?’ he added with a waft of his hand towards the door.

‘Sorry, son. I’ll put the kettle on. Have you eaten yet? Would you like a toasty?’

‘Just leave me to collect my thoughts, please.’

Aimee closed the door behind her and shuffled off down the stairs. Tapping on the kettle and switching on the telly, she took to a chair as if preparing for an earthquake.

As she watched the footage of herself berating the press outside earlier that morning and then returning to the house from work, wading through the crowd, it dawned on her that she had probably appeared on every news channel in the land. What hadn’t occurred to her was that she was in the process of being cast as the scourge of the underclass, the reckless mother of Citizen Jesus, soon to be revealed to the baying public.