Speak For England: The Great New Smash Hit Story - Couverture souple

Papua New Guinea, Boxing Day

–Keep the line straight, Marley, said the battle-hardened officer, warmly but firmly. Brian Marley stopped blubbering, helplessly obedient even now. He blinked hard several times, shivered convulsively throughout his soaked and emaciated body, then wiped a forearm and backhand over his face, smearing a mixture of blood, sweat, tears, snot, leeches, mosquitoes and various other small, repulsive, salt-licking, blood-sucking, flesh-eating arthropods (many of them uncatalogued and endangered) a little more thinly across his nose and mouth. –That’s more like it. Right then. Trousers up and let’s show the buggers how an Englishman dies.

There were in fact no Englishmen apart from himself, present or correct, no officer in command of anything and no one to show. Marley was alone in the hellish forest, talking to himself, slumped in a sagging heap, trousers round his knees, forty-three and about to die.

–Can’t, he gasped.

–Now see here, laddie, you still tried to get your trousers down and if a man can still be bothered trying to get his trousers down, even if he doesn’t quite make it in time, then there’s still some fight left in him. So no excuses.

–But I won, I won the show, I’ve got two million pounds waiting in England, this is all so . . . bloody unfair, he whimpered again, as if he might yet appeal to something other than the uncaring jungle. The sheer injustice of it all made the helpless tears start again in his eyes.

–Unfair, man? Who ever said it was fair? We’re here because we’re here. Does it mention fair in the Good Book or the King’s Regulations? Does it buggery. Come on now, Marley, trousers back on, pick up that damn camera and we’ll say no more about it.

Marley pawed feebly at his trousers and looked blearily around to locate the bright yellow, waterproofed, shock-resistant, digital satellite camera which had been his constant companion for the past six weeks and which now lay pathetically in the stinking undergrowth. A yard away. Too far to reach. Even if he could hold it steady. Too late for that now.

He groaned softly and heard the dead, echoless sound of his own lonely voice, damped by the soggy, rampant greenery as effectively as if he were sitting in a soundproofed studio. His head rolled backwards of its own accord, smacking itself hard against the rock wall. He hardly noticed the blow. Yet another nameless insectoid horror, far too big and with far too many legs, wandered across his face, but he only even bothered to brush it idly away when one of its feelers actually began to probe his nostril. He scarcely cared. Death seemed a welcome friend, a mere cessation of horror, a quiet slide into a warm, dark river . . .

–So you’re going to die? What do you want, man, the ruddy VC? Every mincing little pox doctor’s clerk and every arse-licking shopwalker is going to die. You’re one of the lucky ones, for God’s sake. How many of the poor sods on Hood got the chance to know they were sorting things out for their son and heir? And to leave him a message? Eh?

–Yes, yes, yes, OK, mumbled Marley to his invincible other self. Anything to shut the mad bastard up.
He waited for the next shivering lurch in his body and, when it came, allowed himself to slump sideways, using the small momentum he thus gained to fling out his right arm, so that he could hook two fingers into the grab handle of the camera. He caught hold, dragged it in and cradled it to his panting chest. Then he began the long, seemingly impossible process of hauling himself up on to his feet.

–That’s the stuff, Marley!

Marley did not know why he had started talking like this to himself, since he had never been anywhere near the Army. But he remembered when the voice had begun. It had suddenly come to him, out of nowhere, at the end of the first week, after his seventh unbearable, sleepless vigil in the forest (the days were horrendous, but the nights beggared belief), when he had been on the verge of quickly giving up on the chance of winning Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million. That morning, the helicopters had come down to offer the six contestants for the first time the (of course) dramatically televised and (naturally) well-strung-out choice: were they really going to stay for another week in the soaking, sauna-hot, pitch-black forest, amid the unbelievable racket of a trillion oversized insects flying, hunting, mating, killing and eating each other (many of them evidently also partial to large, hairless mammals)? Or would they choose instead to fly straight off home, to warmth, sanity, medical care and the consolation of many tabloid interviews? Marley had hesitated, pen in sweating hand, as he looked at the legal waiver which they all had to re-sign each week, before the helicopters left them here again. Live in front of the cameras, he had almost cracked. What chance did he have of winning? Why not give up now, before too much vileness had been endured for nothing? Why pile new, public shame and failure on to the old, private mess of his life?

–Well? Watcha say, Bri’? You comin’ home? Fancy a nice warm bath and a nice cold beer wiv me an’ the girls, do ya? Decision time, Bri’ . . . Home for Christmas or Hell in the jungle?

Marley remembered the impossibly flawless white teeth in the wide-screen smile of the inane presenter as she had posed the question. He remembered her breasts shoving out against her ludicrous pink T-shirt (NFR it had said, in spangly letters distorted by the uplifted, surgically enhanced flesh beneath; he had wondered what the hell that meant). He had almost given in. But at that moment of decision, the insane, military voice had come into his head.

Brian Marley should be counting his winnings as victor of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show. Instead, he’s stranded on a jungle island after a helicopter crash wipes out the television crew. His ill-fated luck takes a turn when he falls from a precarious cliff and lands in a lost world.

Awaking in a village founded by survivors of a 1958 airplane crash, Brian discovers an idyllic community modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by the stern but judicious Headmaster. But when he uncovers the Headmaster’s methods of survival, the village’s quaint idealism proves to be founded on something far more sinister. With rescue imminent, Brian finds himself at the center of a clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history.

Satirical and insightful, Speak for England explores the changing world by asking whether it ever really changes at all.