Serious Sweet (18 page)

But I'm sillier.

Letting her almost kill me.

And, since then, Meg had agreed it was wise not to dwell – several people had mentioned this – wise not to dwell on politics and the meaninglessness of hope. She was properly sober now and wanted to stay that way. So she tried not to think of politics, not in any form, songs included.

I fill my head with other things.

I just collect all the good stuff that I see and I save it up and write it down and I try to be grateful. I bear it in mind.

A couple stand in Shepherd Market, a corner of Mayfair that harmlessly pretends to be a village square. The pair are just outside a restaurant and may have eaten a meal together, although it is too late for lunch and too early for dinner. They have the look of people who are interested in each other, who are attentive.

The man is taller than the woman by a quite significant amount and so when they embrace her head meets the height of his heart, or thereabouts. Their attempt to hold each other is a little clumsy initially, the man trying to stoop at first, to shape himself both around and away from the woman, perhaps in the hope of avoiding excessive contact. He may not wish to seem overly forceful, he may not wish to feel overly forced. The woman stays still, perhaps unsure of her response, although there is a calm about her which suggests she is concentrating, perhaps finishing a decision, or pressing herself to particularly take note.

Thereafter, the man straightens his back and their bodies meet, fit, they clasp. Their movements are slow and gentle to a degree that suggests a knowledge of previous injury, or mutual illness. Their hands dab and pat, as if they are hoping to offer reassurance after some past calamity. Equally, they may be attempting to furnish support as some present calamity runs its course.

The little courtyard is quiet around them. No one arrives to visit the stationer's, or the parcels office, the small cafés, the restaurant. The couple's privacy is undisturbed, is extending to touch the prettily painted brickwork that confines them, keeps them safe. Their affection is reflected in a number of windows, an echo of care.

At the end of their embrace – which is heralded by more dabbing, smoothing, a hesitant stroke at the woman's hair – the two part by a hand's breadth and then pause once more. They seem puzzled.

The woman reaches up to cradle the man's head between her palms, slips her fingers loosely over his ears and this causes
a visible relaxation that seems to pour downward and into his spine. His face takes on the softness of a sleeper's. She then stands on tiptoe to kiss his forehead and he bows mildly to receive her.

Then they let go, the one from the other. They withdraw.

For a moment the man looks above the woman's head, stares far beyond the high and nicely maintained and drowsy Georgian brick which surrounds him. His expression is one of deep, deep surprise. He has the smile of a man who has stolen something wonderful and not been caught, found something wonderful and not been seen, been given something wonderful and got away, got away, run away with it.

The woman watches while her companion is happy and apparently finds his happiness surprising.

Something about the man's condition means that she takes his hand.

Jon was taking the long way round as he headed back to Tothill Street and a meeting he didn't want. Birdcage Walk, then Buckingham Gate, then Victoria Street – that still didn't add too many minutes, but it was something. Milner was going to be tricky and Jon couldn't handle tricky today, in part because, as he'd told Rowan last night … As he'd said … He couldn't quite seem able to recall his words absolutely, but …

I didn't tell him about the Natural History Museum and I should have.

A place to meet women, I suppose.

It's not that.

I would imagine that individuals do stroll around there and possibly seek out this or that person who seems to share an interest in hawkmoths, or glass models of sea anemones. An opening conversational gambit could be offered – ‘Do you like that moth, or are you staring at your own reflection in the glass of the case and thinking you are not at all who you were and that many of the changes have been for the worse?'

I didn't go there to meet women.

The first time, I was simply in South Kensington on a Saturday afternoon and I'd wandered in and been enveloped by the hell of kickingly bored children and of squeakingly overinterested children and the intensified hell of French teenagers. It was rather relaxing. Everything was louder than my head.

And I loved the small display on human evolution – our sad forebears posed dimly behind glass: life-sized and naked and unable to suggest any yearning to use tools, cooperate, learn above themselves, stand upright and prosper. They seemed endearingly devoid of any aspiration.

It became a quite innocent habit to go there for lunch breaks. I wasn't establishing an alibi in advance.

Jon paused in sight of Buckingham Palace and thought once again how disappointing the building was. It always put him in mind of a novelty cake, or somewhere that would have bad room service.

He watched the wide and blue-white delicacy of a spring sky, drifting massively behind the solid pediments of the east façade. He felt the moment when the building came loose from its
moorings and seemed to fly, while the high race of clouds locked in place and stood above him, watching him back.

Mustn't be sick.

He tried smiling at a pair of older women tourists, but his expression must have failed him. They turned tail and walked briskly the way they'd come, rather than pass him.

Jon fumbled at his collar, intending to take off his tie, and then realised he wasn't wearing one – that sensation of constriction was therefore entirely illusory and should be treated as such.

Like the palace. Like the sky. Like the progress of my evolution.

He started walking again.

Maybe once a month, if I could, I'd rush out at lunchtime, flag a cab and head for the museum, the warm stone façade. All those mad sculptures of animals, reptiles, the living and the extinct: the monstrous swarm of life carved all over the exterior – terracotta gargoyles defending evolution's temple – I grew fond of it.

I liked walking within work built to last, effort drawn from hope and a need to progress, a joy about it, inspiration drawn from fact … It made me feel furious at certain levels, of course – furious and desperate. But also content.

I would eventually establish a pattern: stroll in past the bony architecture of the diplodocus skeleton, climb the stairs and then call upon the prehistoric humans and their skulls.

They made me wonder. My flat-browed, jut-chinned, hairy ancestors – how did they smell? We progressed to walk erect, but do we still bring with us an animal reek? When did that stop? Or did we already, grunting in huddles, smell like people – like unwashed people who were also beasts? That sweetsharp tang of sweat – yours or another's – that taint, that seal, that gift which stays on your skin, when did we first travel with that? Or have we always? Do we carry the scent of the beasts we still are? Would that be our clue, when we look at those onward-marching illustrations of humanity straightening up from its stoop and being bettered by natural forces, swelling its brain, busying its fingers, perfecting its tongue – would that tell us how little has changed?

Jon's balance, his vision billowed and twisted momentarily, slid like a loosened building. He chose to believe this was an effect
of exposure to exhaust fumes and central London's generally pertaining pollution. Probably if Parliament did exile the civil service to the wastes and moorlands of South-east London, it would add years to everyone's lifespan.

His phone rang and – having checked that it was no one he wanted to hear – he slipped it back down into his coat. It protested as it went.

Too modern for my current frame of mind. While all of the other species keep evolving, we simply invent fresh ways to bill each other for being downcast or enraged – rage and despair being all for which we're meant to hope …

The museum used to please me.

After comparing myself unfavourably with Australopithecus, I'd slope off to the modern bit, the wing where they keep their material archive: leaves, bodies, wings, drawings, samples. I like it there, because it contains no dinosaur remains and is therefore fairly child-free and peaceful – even, at times, apparently deserted. You ride a lift up to its top floor, as if you are boarding a spacecraft full of whatever's left of our good, of the earth's generosity – as if you'll be able to leave and start again with seeds from climate-controlled vaults. It looks smart, futuristic – in the sense of suggesting that we have a future.

And there are interactive exhibits, film displays – quickly spurned by the scatter of more French teenagers as they pass along. And cabinets have been made with real drawers which can be pulled back to reveal displays. The drawers also provide ledges, edges, gaps. One can, as it were, fill the gaps.

Jon unbuttoned his jacket, although it wasn't terribly warm, and let the poisoned air attempt to cool him, ease him. He was sweating. Sweating as he walked was not as bad as sweating while he was examined by a malicious superior.

I wouldn't give them the satisfaction – not one of them.

And I also wouldn't tell them about the Natural History Museum and my visits. I couldn't appear to be a man who might make such visits and then sweat about them. Sweat would constitute evidence.

Because …

Because …

Natural history is about evidence. It is supposed to be about evidence, about science, real science. If you want to know the real world and function in it rationally and effectively, if you want to progress, you collect evidence and test it and love it and want more – you have an appetite for it and its intrinsic beauty. Once you have all the information you can currently gather, you collate it and you analyse it and you come to fact-based conclusions. You have used the real world to give you solutions to itself. This is a beautiful thing.

And humans do not thrive without it.

I believe that.

Once upon a time, we won a real war, a world war, with maths: with models and plans and statistics and knowledge underpinning what we did. We weren't always right, but we were the less-deluded side and therefore the less savage. And we won. So that people would not be crushed, or shut up in hells, so that our peace could be filled with human beings living lives to their fullest extent.

That's all I wanted.

That isn't really much to ask.

And it's why I believe that facts are beautiful things.

And …

Because …

The thing is, I must not sweat when Chalice looks at me, because that will make me seem to be a man who slips away to the Natural History Museum and who has a small roll of fine paper in his pocket and who rests that prepared paper – small and white and simple, typed on one side, the interior side – who rests that in the cradle of his modestly evolved hand, opens a prearranged display drawer and then slips that paper into one of the little gaps inside, as agreed in advance.

I can't look like a man who walks on while someone behind him opens that drawer and takes that paper and – later, probably later, I bloody well hope later and discreetly – unrolls it and finds it is covered in evidence, figures, raw data, in what have become the most damaging of the leaks which have left the department …

I have transgressed the Civil Service Code: I have disclosed official information without authority.

But I am meant to behave with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. I am called upon to set out the facts and relevant issues truthfully and correct any errors as soon as possible. I must uphold the administration of justice.

And they won't fucking let me.

Jon felt that thrill beneath his skin – that sense of being rolled and unrolled himself, reworked, evolved, by each of his attempts at crime, each memory of gathering what his fellow human beings, what the voters ought to know.

It's what the voters are unsurprised and indeed massively bored by, as it turns out. They are not a powder keg and I am not a match. And it's what our current media environment finds indigestible, irrelevant, being more concerned with aspirational spending, aspirational violence, aspirational hate, aspirational fucking.

Please, not that.

So it would seem that deeper digging, further research, more transgression, is required to breach the wall of grubby white noise, to provoke public outrage, wakefulness … And so one develops strategy. One has that in one's nature, one is trained for it … It does no good, but one deploys it, nonetheless.

And, of course, strategy shows – it suggests a mind at work, intentions. It could make people start to hunt for a Moriarty. One worries about that. There is an element of stress.

There are days when one is relieved that anything one releases into the public domain simply fizzes slightly and then disappears, leaves not a wrack behind.

Jon swung into Victoria Street and bolstered himself against simply running and not coming back, or forcing a little bit more of a nervous collapse and therefore bolting over the hills and far away, deep and deeper within the privacy of his own mind.

Off to the cloud-topped towers and gorgeous palaces of my own making.

It's not as if I'm fully operational; I could give minor insanity as my excuse for perceived wrongdoing … But I don't want to live in a world where concern for others and for the consequences of actions and for safety and reality and … Well, why not 
…
? I don't want to live in a world where having a concern for true beauty on a wider and wider scale would be regarded as a manifestation of mental illness.

I want people to be proud of me.

Oh, that's pathetic, though.

But I do, would, do want that.

If they knew, I would like the people whose opinion I care for to be happy when they consider what I have done.

And when they see what I will do.

I am my own department. My own ministry – ministry was always a better and more logical word.

He set his shoulders in the way masters had told him to throughout his school life – an old boy who still undressed and dressed in the order he had been given: socks, pants, vest, shirt, trousers, tie. He walked upright. He could manage that.

I am the Ministry of Natural History. I progress.