TWO strangers sit on a ledge, or somewhere high up at least. They arrived a few moments ago and only a few inches separate them from this lofty perch and the ground hundreds of feet below.
“So what brings up you here?” the first man says. “Was it the Trump thing?”
The other man nods. “Finished me off that did. I mean how could they…”
“Be so stupid?”
“Yeah – I mean there’s stupid, and then there’s that.”
“I never thought, you know…”
“Me neither. It all seemed like a bad joke at first. All that xenophobic stuff, all that ignorance, all that vainglorious stupidity and…”
“The wall?”
“Yeah, the wall. I reckon the Mexicans will build the wall themselves now, just to keep their country safe. I mean, but can the US recover from this? Can the world recover from this?”
The men are silent for a moment. One of them inches forward to look down, then shuffles back again. The wind is blowing, warm for now but with a sniff of cold to come.
“I understand,” the first man says, “that the prime minister has sent his congratulations and already invited that vile man over here for a game of photo-opportunity golf.”
“Really crazy golf! Yeah, I heard that too. And who’d have thought it on that score, too. Boris Johnson as prime minister – I mean, really. Giving that great pretender London to play with was bad enough but now he’s got his cheating hands on the whole country.”
“Yeah, to be honest this whole Brexit thing was already getting me down, and then the Americans went and voted for the most vacuous, egotistical and dangerous president in memory. I fear for the world, I really do.”
“How did you vote?”
“Me? I’m not American so I didn’t get a vote, did I?”
“Sorry, I mean on Europe.”
“I voted to remain. I wobbled a bit but it was something Sir John Major said. Funny, I know, as I didn’t have much time for him when he was around, but his words hit home.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, back in June he said that the NHS would be as safe as a pet hamster in the presence of a hungry python, if Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith rose to power following Brexit. Pretty extraordinary stuff really. He called the Vote Leave campaign deceitful, untrue, depressing, awful and ‘verging on the squalid’.”
“And yet here we are with Boorish Johnson as prime minister and Donald Turnip Head as President of the US. That really is squalid. It’s like the world just took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the asylum of rampant egos. I mean to say, Trump made all sorts of wild promises about making America great again – and Johnson and that lot made up all sorts of shit and nonsense about Europe and people went and voted out, the idiots.”
“The chancellor hasn’t stopped grinning yet.”
“Osborne?”
“No, Chancellor Gove. Osborne had to go, remember, along with David Cameron on the Night of Blue Murder, at least that’s what the Mail called it. The pair of them brought it on themselves and the country, holding an unnecessary plebiscite. We shouldn’t have had a referendum at all. Cameron only came up with the stupid idea as a way of shutting up Nigel Farage and all the other Ukippers with their one-track Little England minds and their overheated visions of Britain’s lost greatness.”
“And now that man is home secretary – Farage in the Cabinet, whatever next?”
“The whole Europe Vote ended up as a sort of nasty fantasy, with both sides pelting each other with vile exaggerations along with the rotten vegetables. I mean, how was anyone to know what to make of it all in the end? It was like a pantomime without jokes…”
“Or one where all the jokes ended up being horribly hollow.”
“Shall we?”
“Go on then…”
The two strangers hold hands and jump…
Ah, just woke up from that rotten nightmare. It couldn’t possibly happen, could it? President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson? And Britain voting for Brexit? Perhaps we will all come to our senses before it is too late.