Goodfellowe MP (12 page)

‘What sort of wine?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Does, actually.’ At last Goodfellowe had discovered an opportunity to fight back. ‘You see, as a backbencher I get precious little chance to indulge my principles, so when the opportunity arises I tend to get very stubborn. Cling to them like a drowning man.’ A good analogy, he thought. How often he had felt he was being swept along by irresistible currents and disappearing slowly from sight. ‘In my humble view the Common Agricultural Policy as directed by our masters in Brussels is little short of a Criminal Rip-off Agricultural Policy. So I sulk, stamp my foot. And I won’t drink any of its wine. Silly, I know, but we politicians have to find some way of exercising our consciences, otherwise they get rather rusty.’

Her laughter was like a brisk shower. He felt refreshed.

‘You’re in luck, Mr Goodfellowe. I often think my wine supplier did special duty for the KGB. Has the best vodka in town, and seems to have discovered where all the good Eastern European vintages are
being hoarded. Georgian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, even a little Czech. Would that meet with your principles?’

‘Superbly.’

‘Well, bring your principles along and we’ll see if we can reunite them with your button.’

He sighed. ‘Sadly, and after much patient resistance, I’m afraid that suit is no longer for this world. With or without its button. My daughter was most insistent on the matter.’

‘We women can be such bullies.’

‘Somehow they tend to run my life for me. Only fair, I suppose, while I rush around the backbenches saving the world from extinction.’

More infectious laughter. ‘So, Mr Goodfellowe, we girls at The Kremlin shall expect you here at the wine-tasting. And no excuses.’

‘Can I have the name of the manager or owner? I’d like to thank him.’

‘Shame on you. And still more shame.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened to those principles of yours? The rust seems to have rotted them right through.’

‘I don’t understand. I was only asking after …’

‘Mr Goodfellowe,’ she chided gently, he thought in a slightly Irish brogue, ‘I am the owner.’

The motorcycle being ridden by the Chancellor of the Exchequer had wandered off line. With a desperate flick of the machine he tried to negotiate it back onto the firm pavement but the tyres were already scrabbling in the rubble of the roadside, their
grip gone. He panicked, his limbs froze and he failed to release the throttle. Fool. Into oblivion at full speed – thus he had lived his entire life. Hopelessly out of control, he was drawn towards the crash barrier at the side of the long left-hand turn into Glen Helen, striking it with a fearsome blow which sent the machine spinning wildly into the stone wall on the other side of the road. Beside him the Transport Secretary let forth a whoop of triumph, celebrating by putting his own bike into an outrageous wheelie.

At about the same desperate moment the Opposition’s Spokesman for Defence Affairs had finally got the hang of the joystick and put in a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree barrel roll in his attempt to lock onto the enemy F-14s that were scavenging through the clouds ahead of him. Another flick of the controls, a bead of sweat, then a sighting dead ahead. At last the target indicator blinked hungrily. Contact! He fired the tracer, his thumb squeezed tight until the nail went white, and the first Tomcat went spinning out of sight. Then a second. Easy! It was as he was lining up on the third that a wire brush of warning scraped up his spine. Damn. They had locked onto him, too. He had no time for fear, only regret. Their first missile blew out his starboard engine and then the cockpit screen in front of him shattered. The machine began a slow turning dive, like a duck shot from the sky, and for a moment he was held upside down, his glasses slipping. Then a searing orange-red flash surrounded him as he exploded.

Game over.

The basement of Hamley’s, the best-stocked toyshop in the world, reverberated with the sounds of fun – the roars of motor-mania, the noise of failure and despair, the blast of air hockey tables, all but drowned beneath milk-curdling screams of interplanetary aliens being cut to ribbons with lasers as flashing signs warned of ‘strong animated violence’.

‘Just like the House!’ exulted the Opposition Defence Spokesman as he climbed out of the 360-GLOC Master Blaster cockpit, brushing down his suit as though it were full of shards. ‘Except in this place you get a chance to come back from the dead.’

‘Give me Questions any time,’ the Chancellor threw at him, easing himself off his TT superbike, still glassy-eyed with excitement as he reached for another sip of champagne. ‘You need to be no older than fourteen for this lot.’

‘As he said, just like the bloody House,’ the Transport Secretary agreed, as parliamentary friend and foe set off in search of more Sega sensation.

The party was being thrown to mark the retirement of Rupert Cramp, the Westminster lobby’s most senior correspondent, and the ardent teenagers who normally set up camp in Hamley’s basement had been replaced by an equally ardent but entirely less agile contingent of statesmen, editors, scholars, wits, pundits and politicians, all of whom seemed to have left their middle-age reserve in the cloakroom and were now intent on fulfilling some of their wildest dreams. Mostly these focused on the machines, although a growing number were turning their attentions to the tastefully clad hostesses as alcohol
began to dull the dexterity if not the drive. In the midst of the crowd ‘Duke’ Frobisher, Westminster’s most barbed sketchwriter, stood locked in battle with the Creature from the Swamp; an entire cohort of politicians from all parties cheered to a man as their tormentor became impaled upon the creature’s tusks and, accompanied by suitably gruesome stereophonic sound effects, slowly sank beneath the mire.

Goodfellowe was enjoying the revelry – and the champagne, which was green and dry and plucked from vines six thousand miles away from France on the floor of the Napa Valley. He hadn’t been invited but Lillicrap had and insisted that Goodfellowe accompany him, practically dragging him by the arm from the Smoking Room. Goodfellowe used to get invited to such gatherings as a matter of course; nowadays his only consolation was in the amount of postage he saved on the replies. Yesterday’s Man. He couldn’t deny it hurt, like running his soul up against a cheese grater, leaving little scraps of self-esteem behind, not just because of the loss of attentions and courtesies but because he was now stripped of power, the opportunity to make a difference. And if he couldn’t make a difference, what was he doing in Parliament?

He dismissed such naive self-indulgence from his mind as Lillicrap guided him over to a table where, through a plateful of lobster tails and quails’ eggs, a woman was expounding on the wickedness of discrimination between the sexes, ‘You have to agree, don’t you?’ she turned on the newcomers.

‘I’m a Whip,’ Lillicrap objected, recognizing a
powder-room Puritan and waving his hands in the manner of a referee stopping play. ‘We’re not allowed opinions.’

The woman cast eyes of inquisition at Goodfellowe.

‘I’m sure it’s a case well worth dwelling upon,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of fish roe.

‘Dwelling-schmelling!’ the woman accused, seeking succour in her glass. ‘You male politicians are about as much use as ringlets on a rabbi. Useless decoration.’

‘And I do hope you’re enjoying the party,’ Goodfellowe added, irked, but his coolness only appeared to encourage her.

‘Fancy phrases, fine promises – anything so long as it wins you votes and doesn’t involve you in actually doing anything.’

Goodfellowe considered ignoring her. It would have been the most tactful alternative, but Goodfellowe’s schooling had been badly fragmented and he always assumed he’d missed the relevant lesson on tact. Instead he decided to tell her what he thought.

‘That is silly.’

‘Silly?’ Her voice rose an octave, summoning her wits to battle. ‘Tell me, what do you politicians do in that place?’

‘We try to help.’

‘Help who? Not people like me you don’t.’

‘I’m a politician, not a consultant psychiatrist.’

Her finger, crimson of nail and encrusted in gold, was jabbing at his heart. ‘You’re a public servant. We
pay you to do what we tell you, not to be offensive.’

‘No. You put me there to do what I promised you I would do. No more. You’ve bought my time in that palace of entertainments, not my mind.’

‘You’re sent there to do what we tell you.’

‘No. Otherwise you might as well simply sit in front of the television screen and decide every issue by pushing buttons. Trial by Teletext. Sentence by Sky. Do away with Government and let Gallup take over.’

She threw back her head in contempt. ‘That’s nothing more than an argument for arrogance. Ignoring the people.’

‘And that, since you insist on pressing the point in the middle of what was otherwise an entirely social occasion, is an argument for indulging yourself every time you wake up with a migraine or discover your husband’s just employed a secretary twenty years younger than you are.’ He paused. ‘Or maybe thirty.’

‘Are you deliberately trying to be impertinent? Is this how you treat women?’

‘When I came to sit and enjoy my drink I thought you were trying to tell us there shouldn’t be any difference. Or have I persuaded you otherwise?’

‘God, you men are so bloody arrogant. And you’ll never get my vote again.’

‘A fact which I suspect will come as a considerable relief to us both. Now, since other people have come here to enjoy themselves I suggest that one of us leaves. Which is it to be?’

‘Damn pity,’ Lillicrap intervened. ‘We were all enjoying that.’ Others around the table agreed, chortling their encouragement. The woman suddenly
realized she had become a spectacle, grabbed her handbag and without another word left.

‘Sorry,’ Goodfellowe apologized. ‘Just occasionally I get fed up being the world’s punchbag.’

‘Don’t apologize when you clearly don’t mean a word of it.’

A guest was extending his hand. Lillicrap effected the introductions. They shook.

‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Corsa.’

‘Freddy, please. We’d all been trying to find some way of getting rid of the old crow. Should’ve known we’d need a shotgun.’

And they whiled away many minutes enjoying the banter and the spectacle of grown Ministers making deliberate fools of themselves until Corsa glanced at his watch.

‘Come on. Allow me to blast apart your good standing on the machines just once before we go,’ Corsa encouraged. ‘What’s it to be? You choose. Super Vixens?’

‘Might be good practice for my constituency AGM,’ Goodfellowe pondered. ‘Better still, let’s try Alien Interlopers. Particularly if one’s wearing scarlet lipstick …’

So they had sought out the machine, hustled the controls and spent several contented minutes dismembering toad-like holograms which were pursuing an astronaut.

‘Tell me – I’d appreciate your opinion. We’re thinking of taking on Wes Phibbs as a columnist. I know he’s fashionable, an item on all the chat shows, but is he a good idea?’

Goodfellowe hit another alien and edged himself ahead on the scoreboard. ‘Well, his parents were born in Trinidad and he’s impeccably politically correct, so perhaps that’s a good recommendation for a modern opinion-former. Doesn’t stop him being a shit.’

Corsa sighed in disappointment. ‘That’s the lump in the custard: he’s so damned predictable. No freshness. What I’m looking for is someone who can do the sort of job you just did – getting past the sticky labels to the heart of a thing. Not covering it in second-hand sarcasm.’

Green alien gore had momentarily washed across the screen, obliterating the view, which returned to show a final alien about to pounce upon the unfortunate NASA spaceman. With a stream of tracer Corsa cut the creature in two.

‘Congratulations,’ Goodfellowe offered. ‘The press wins. As always.’

‘And insists on having the final word,’ Corsa mused, using one last burst to obliterate the astronaut, too. ‘No prisoners.’ He turned purposefully to his partner. ‘I don’t suppose you would care to become a columnist.’

‘I’m a politician.’

‘Which puts you in touch with matters of the moment. You’ve the experience of a Minister, and an approach that is highly individual. Some would say bloody cantankerous. Sounds about right. For a columnist.’

‘You don’t know that I can write.
I
don’t know that I can write,’ Goodfellowe argued, feeling flattered
and clearly turning the matter over in his mind.

‘If the writing needs a little polishing, I have a menagerie of journalists who can write. Trouble is, all too few of them can think. That’s the job spec.’

It was growing late, they began to drift upstairs to the exit.

‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, Mother.’

Goodfellowe’s curiosity dissolved in distress. They had emerged to discover Regent Street awash in a sudden cloudburst.

‘I came by bike,’ Goodfellowe explained ruefully. ‘Collapsible. Bit like the Government’s majority.’ He gazed at the malevolent skies. ‘By the time I make it back to Westminster I shall have come to resemble the Alien Interloper rather more closely.’