Bacon

Bacon by Chris Green

Will notices The Guardian newspaper in front of him has tomorrow’s date. Normally, this might not matter too much. There would probably be an innocent explanation. The Guardian, after all, is famous for its misprints, but it is unlikely that an edition would have gone out with the wrong date on its masthead. Perhaps the paper is a prop carelessly left from a TV dramatisation. But this is the display stand at the public library. You don’t expect anomalies in an official setting. It might not concern Will greatly, were it not for the headline, which reads: Dozens Dead in Bomb Blast at London College. This in itself might not raise alarm bells, but the college is Goldsmiths, and his son Miles is an undergraduate in Fine Arts there. 

Nothing is clear from the photos of the debris. Will has heard that they don’t pay snappers much for pics these days, so this seems to be the result. The photos could even be stock shots of random devastation. The report says the explosion ripped through a crowded lecture theatre at the New Cross campus late yesterday afternoon, but this too is poorly written and short on details. Reporting standards have plummeted, but you would expect better from the broadsheets. Yesterday, of course, would be today, and as it’s still morning here, by this reckoning, the bomb blast would not yet have taken place. Clearly, this is impossible, yet somehow it does nothing to put his mind at rest. There are no other newspapers on the stand, no Times, Independent, or Telegraph to check the headline against, and when asked, Rose Bush, the librarian, can’t come up with an explanation about the Guardian’s erroneous date. Will’s phone does not have a signal, and the internet at the library, Rose tells him, has been down all morning. Cyber warfare, she says, is rife lately with all the big players trying to out-tech each other. 

Will scans the rest of the newspaper to see if there is any more information about what took place or is going to take place. Apart from the Goldsmiths bomb, it looks like a slow news day. The FTSE is down again in anticipation of new tariffs to be introduced. The pump and dump cabinet minister is back in the news for insider trading, along with a prominent backbencher. The celebrity chef sex offender has been at it again. England lost to Albania on penalties in the World Cup qualifier after a dull 0-0 draw, a result which, while unexpected, eliminates them. All of it, he finds strangely familiar.

Will tells Rose the reason for his concern, and she asks him about Miles. He says they have had a falling out. They have not spoken since April. He had not wanted Miles to do Fine Art in the first place. Their animosity had been simmering for months, and it boiled over when he came home for the Easter break and told his father he was going to do his dissertation on Francis Bacon. Will suggested Turner or John Constable. Miles said that no one picked those painters anymore, nor the Impressionists, and even Picasso was considered girly these days. It had to be Bacon, he said. The argument became more heated. Will told him he did not consider Francis Bacon to be a real artist. Miles said that was OK because he did not consider him to be a real father, 

‘So, given the possibility of not having the chance to make up, you regret your poor parenting,’ Rose says. ‘Have I got this right?’

‘Nail on the head,’ Will says. ‘The thing is, Miles is probably right. I have been a rubbish father. I was constantly on his case. I put things in the way of all the ideas he had. I was relentless in my putdowns. Everything he did was wrong. I found fault with all his girlfriends. Tracy was from the wrong side of the tracks, Yvonne was too domineering, Susie was too tarty, Whitney was too black. I never gave him support when he needed it. ….. But to move on, I need to get through to the university to find out if Miles’s course was the one that was in the theatre when the explosion took place. In a word, I need to find a working phone.’

Will is not familiar with this part of Oldbridge. He’s only here to research Francis Crick for a scientific journal. Crick was known to have been a frequent visitor to the town. Oldbridge looks the same as any other town these days, with an excess of Turkish barbers and vape shops, which, he understands, are likely to be a cover for money laundering operations. The High Street also has its quota of competing phone shops. Since the nationwide switch to out-of-town shopping, there appears to be little else. Will ventures into the first one, Fonehouse, feeling hopeful that, given their reputation, they will have a working connection. Or at the very least, know what is causing the outage. They don’t, and neither do 4Gadgets or Total Digital. 

He comes across Kite’s Newsagent, one of the old-fashioned ones that sells stationery supplies, has a good selection of fountain pens, and stocks confectionery and cakes. But Kite’s, too, is short on newspapers. Sebastian Kite, though, seems better informed than the whippersnappers who run the phone shops. He tells him the reason no newspapers have been published is because of an escalating industrial dispute involving nine different unions. It has nothing to do with the internet being down. The internet is down, no question about that. But this appears to be a separate issue that has happened overnight. There have been a lot of drop-outs in Oldbridge lately, he says, so quite likely these are happening all over. We need to get used to it because it’s going to be happening more and more. A team of futurists recently calculated there is a ninety percent probability that advanced AI will pose an existential threat within the next ten years. Sebastian does not, however, have an explanation for the copy of the Guardian bearing tomorrow’s date at the library, but he sympathises with Will’s plight. Would he perhaps like a pipe, he wonders, to settle him. He has some excellent Blue Dream. The best strain to relieve anxiety, he tells him.

Much as he is tempted to take up Sebastian’s offer, Will reasons that Blue Dream may not be the best thing to help him find out about Miles. Given the phone blackout and not knowing how else to make contact, he sets off to Overton Castle to catch up with Miles’s mum, Kate, to see if she has heard anything. She works in publishing, so she should have some idea of what is going on or know how to find out. More importantly, she is likely to have had recent contact with Miles and be aware of what his weekly schedule might look like. Hopefully, it will be one that does not require him to attend lectures very much.

Kate has always had a much closer relationship with Miles, especially since the Easter falling out. It was Kate who encouraged Miles to pursue figurative abstraction, and in particular, Francis Bacon. An odd choice, one might think, for a woman, but Kate would have come across Bacon’s work in her professional capacity. Kate’s company, Kixx, publishes a range of radical material, and is kept afloat by a successful crop of playful, topical satire. Flexible Views by Paige Turner is one that springs to mind. Kate, he suspects, was or is Paige Turner. Most of the material was too cryptic for Will’s scientific sensibilities.

Will has not been in touch with Kate for months. Since their divorce, he has maintained what he understands from the personal pages of the paper is considered a healthy distance, but he occasionally senses that he has not seen the back of Kate’s lingering animus. All he has for her is an address, which is OK because if there is no internet, she’s probably not going to be at work. In her line of work, she probably works from home, anyway.

Overton Castle is fifty miles away. He stops at Sainsbury’s in Darkwell to fill up the Discovery. He still has no phone signal, and there is still no internet. He goes into the store to see if there are any newspapers. There aren’t. They have even taken out the display stand. He carries on towards Overton Castle, waiting for a news bulletin on FM radio. None seems forthcoming. The nine-union dispute has probably spilt over to the broadcast networks. Newspapers are primarily digital now. 

As he drives along the motorway, he goes over the situation. What is and what never should be. The internet is definitely down. He can reasonably assume this has been the case for several hours. Widespread blanket down, affecting everything down. Which leaves the burning question of the copy of tomorrow’s Guardian newspaper in the library. This is a separate matter. Sebastian Kite’s strike would account for the lack of the other dailies, but not for the single copy of tomorrow’s Guardian. To recap, apart from the front page, the rest of the paper contained stories he felt he was already familiar with. Something is not quite right there. He may not have even looked at the date on the inner pages. Why would he have? The date was on the front. Like most busy people, he has become accustomed to simply reading the front pages on the BBC website. 

Which begs the question, could it have been yesterday’s paper that he looked through? Were the front pages fake? A quickly prepared mock up for his benefit? It is beginning to look to Will like he has been scammed. What would be anyone’s interest in scamming him? Who would do it in such a callous way? As he signals to turn off for Overton Castle, it comes to him. It’s not complicated. Has he lunched out a little too often lately? Has he subliminally chosen to ignore the clues? After all, Rose Bush seems like a contrived name. Like Liv Long or Harley Quinn. Or Paige Turner. His ex-wife could not have possibly known that communication networks would be down, but it appears Kate wants a conversation, and she wants it to be on her terms. Why, Will wonders, are women so wily? Why is there so much artifice involved in their negotiations? What bombshell awaits him at Kate’s? What kind of reception can he expect? It’s so difficult to predict with someone who blows hot and cold. On the plus side, if the newspaper article is fake, a reconciliation with Miles remains a possibility. Perhaps he could even reappraise Francis Bacon.

Copyright: © Chris Green, 2025: All rights reserved