Serious Sweet (21 page)

Dear Mr August.

Be very kind.

That's all I would have needed to say, Mr August. Not even that – you were being kind already.

MEG STOOD AT
her kitchen window – Meg, still having her birthday and wishing it might have gone better so far. Meg sober and sober and wholly sober, Meg with the evening still ahead.

She saw the afternoon light colouring the flagstones, the ones she had scrubbed last year when she felt weird and harried one Sunday – they'd given her something to do. They had filled hours and hours with a nice mindlessness. She liked them. They'd been laid out nearest the back door, so you could sit in the sun if there was some. Her mother's idea.

The flags needed to be cleaned again. And the garden required love, detailed and applied affection. Meg was going to tidy and weed it and then she'd plant things. She would grow stuff she could eat – stuff that was healthy. And she'd prune the roses and fill in the gaps she would leave once the weeds were gone. There'd be places she could find that could sell her cheap plants.

It would be satisfying.

She looked through the window, which she polished weekly.

She kept busy with maintenance tasks, because they lent dignity and reassured. The glass was almost invisible, but still there: the surface which had taken her father's gaze, her mother's, which had seen them every day.

I still get so scared and I don't know why, or I don't want to.

Here it is.

An older woman, mildly frail and bundled against the weather, steps on to an upward escalator at London Bridge Station. She has a shopping bag in one hand: not plastic, but a traditional cloth bag which is therefore saving hypothetical trees in some distant forest, or the environment in a wider sense. Her other hand holds the lead of a Labrador: a plump and older and honey-coloured dog, who seems a touch unsettled by the escalator and the lifting and rearing of its unforgiving metal steps, its constant shifting. The animal is positioned quite far below the woman on the long and otherwise empty escalator. Its leash is pulled taut.

The dog, only a little, tugs to and fro and the woman tries to turn in order, perhaps, to calm it. Then the Labrador pulls again and gently, gently, this begins to lean the woman backwards in a way that will soon become physically unsustainable.

It is possible to watch the woman and her pet for an amount of time as they begin to have their accident. They are, to a degree, on display. The woman's leaning becomes a twisting, backward sway and then breaks into a tumble that drops her spine and shoulders down on to the metal steps and their harsh edges. As she flails out her arms for support, she loses her bag. Its contents spread, tipping after her. She hits her head. There is an instant when the impact is clear, jarring. She rolls, exactly as she is fighting strenuously not to, down and over her dog – her full weight pressing on her dog – the animal making one high and bewildered noise and then lying flat and, it would seem, frozen in bewilderment. Meanwhile the steps climb away from the woman who rolls again, head over heels. This rolling seems unlikely and frightening in someone of her age and her body seems very soft and very caught by the movements of such a hard place.

And, as this sadness unfolds, people run.

From all over the station, so many people run.

So many strangers have seen this woman and this dog and now they are pelting, racing in from the upper and lower
concourses of what had appeared to be an almost deserted, mid-afternoon space.

A man sprints and lunges for the Emergency Stop button, hits it and stills the offending escalator. A woman, about the same age as the one who has fallen, runs down from above, speaking as she does, asking questions with a kind of authority, ‘Do you feel sick? Do you know where you are? Do you know what has happened? Can you move? Where are you hurt? No, don't worry about your dog. Not just now. Don't worry about your dog.'

A younger man kneels by the Labrador and talks to it, strokes its head. The fallen woman continues to be concerned about it, as she struggles to sit, dishevelled, trying to gather herself. Shock is plain in her flickering movements, damage and shock. She prefers to be more worried about her pet than her banged head, or her bleeding shin, or whatever else is injured. This is a way of having dignity – to hold cares beyond oneself.

A station employee arrives and he speaks on his radio and seems inexperienced, unsure of where to place his feet, his limbs, but he is trying to be confident and to assist. He pulls across a tape to block off the top of the escalator and pre-empt further confusion. He is thinking ahead. The he leans in and talks to the woman softly.

A dozen human beings who do not know each other are together, doing this one thing, supplying this care for a tumbled woman and her dog.

They ran. They all ran. They all ran beyond themselves.

Something bad had happened and they wanted it to stop.

They wanted things to be OK again.

They all ran so fast.

JON WASN'T SUITED
to pubs. He'd recently begun to dislike them on personal principle. Apart from anything else, the tables never did quite accommodate his length of leg. They gave him knee compression, which must be unhealthy.

And this pub is a tiny slice of Chiswick – same brewer in charge. I would also say that the fish and chips aren't pleasing me, although I'm not best placed with my digestion at the moment and I'm sure they are, in fact, a fine example of their type.

Across two plates of beer-battered hake with chips – Jon's portion hardly attempted – sat Milner, the shine of two lagers and significant additional pre-refreshment brightening his forehead and glinting in the wet hollow of his collarbone. He was pressing what was – according to him – the world's only ethical mobile phone tight against what Jon suspected would be a greasily damp ear.

Somehow that's worse than anything – the thought of his soggy, waxy ear. Which is just a guess on my part. It may actually be a fine example of its type.

I'm OK, though. This is OK. I felt ill and peculiar because I've been awake since four and I missed my breakfast and then I missed lunch. I should eat a little more.

And perhaps I really ought to risk shaming and incomprehension and imprisonment a little less.

Then again …

At half-past six I'll be somewhere with knee room and a lovely view and that isn't a guess on my part and everything involved will be a fine example and not a type. So I can deal with the here and now.

I would like to point out – in the here and now – that I excel under pressure. This has been mentioned in every evaluation I've ever had and was true throughout my marriage, if that's of interest to anyone, which it isn't.

Milner was using the ethical phone to address some assistant whom he clearly viewed as being mentally handicapped by her gender. ‘No, it would be in the white file, love. No, darling … No, the big, white file marked … Yes, that's the one …' He was enunciating with a savage fondness as one might to an elderly relative prone to rewriting their will, or else to some senselessly garrulous animal.

I bet he makes jokes about birds that can talk.

Milner rolled his eyes, almost audibly, for Jon's benefit. ‘And if you run down the index … Exactly …' He winked at Jon to indicate they belonged in the same long-suffering brotherhood. ‘Yeah. So read that to me …?' Milner cocked the mouthpiece away from his face while listening.

The investigator of uncommon influence demonstrates top-flight multi-tasking, yeah yeah fucking yeah. You don't know you're born, mate. Try being at a dinner party and having to ignore the manifest fact that a man you sort of trusted or at least nodded to in lifts has his hand under the table and, of course, on your wife's thigh while you're jamming down your dessert and planning tomorrow's strategies to save the arses of arses. That's what I do, after all – why dress it up, why not leave the arses bare for once? And I coordinate the data arising from overwhelming and overwhelmed change. The data which nobody wants. Except my own individual ministry.

Unlike, for example, the MoJ where it is most especially and stridently the policy to know nothing about anything at all. If there is no news then it can't be bad. And so the politics of faked conviction – in every sense – become the politics of delusion, of delusional narcissism, of assisted suicide, of abuse. Also in every sense.

Although I couldn't swear to that – not being a psychiatrist.

I still do my bloody job, I still assess impacts, consequences, sustainability, costs and benefits. Facts and facts and facts, so many facts. It remains my duty to provide them. This is viewed as a betrayal rather worse than pawing a wife not one's own, or – from one position or another – allowing it.

So why not do what I feel to be proper with my facts, why not share them wrongly when I am already in the wrong?

But I ought to be right.

I am right.

We do have need of the real world.

I am right.

In this and perhaps nothing else, I am right.

Milner – who didn't make one happy about journalists as a species – talked on while Jon regretted having ordered fish. It was probably just out of the freezer. This was nowhere near lunchtime, so asking for a full hot meal had not been reasonable and Christ knew why Milner had joined him in requesting another.

You just couldn't see me having something that you didn't. Is that it? Didn't want to feel deprived, hard done by? Just have a go at living in my today. Just try it. Today is not unbloodycomplicated 
…

Jon allowed himself, unwillingly, to hear Milner explaining, ‘She's new. They can't keep up, the girls. I just get them broken them in and—' Milner looked serious in the manner of television policemen and patronised the phone again. ‘Two hundred and thirty thousand? You're sure? That's what it says? Well, yes then. Courier me a scan of the whole thing – put it on a thumb drive – but that's what I need for this afternoon, that page. Email me when it's done. Use the Hushmail account. Although, by four thirty everyone will know. That way we catch
PM
on Radio Four.' Jon knew perfectly well that the
PM
programme was broadcast on Radio Four. ‘If they have any researchers on who are over twelve, they'll manage something – maybe – depends on their nerves, and whoever has the fastest hands can run with the rest.' He rang off and then studied Jon with lubricated belli-gerence. ‘What?'

Jon was unable to prevent himself saying, ‘That was an odd metaphor.'

‘What?'

‘Fast hands would usually imply boxing, or some kind of contact sport … The running … Were you thinking of rugby?'

Milner speared some remaining chips on to his fork and proceeded to combine eating them with speaking, ‘Writer now, are you. Funny. I thought that was my job.'

‘It's my job, too. You didn't say goodbye.'

‘What?'

‘To your assistant.'

‘I never do. She would think something was wrong if I said goodbye. And there's nothing wrong. So I didn't. That's reasonable, isn't it?'

Jon noted that his hands were shaking minorly and set them down on the tabletop close to his purposeless knife and fork. ‘I …' He found himself exhausted. That was the thing about Milner: aside from his appalling character and appearance, he always contrived to be bone-deeply tiring.

‘Is there something wrong, Mr Sigurdsson?'

‘There's … No.'

‘Every time your fucking phone makes a noise you look queasy. Trouble?'

‘No. No trouble.'

‘Ah …' The red mouth, glistening lips, opened wide. Milner winked like a music-hall spiv. ‘Something up with the love life? Something wrong at work?'

‘No. There's nothing wrong.'

In an everything kind of way.

The sparse drinkers and nibblers around about them registered the usual perimeter of Milner-related irritation. He was loud, he was boorish, he was unmissable and apparently gleeful about it. Even across the room it was possible to follow his conversations and be at least slightly repelled, if not alarmed that he might become truly unruly.

For the whole of their rendezvous Jon had tried his best under the circumstances, abandoning deft manoeuvres once it was clear to everyone in the place that the sun was really very far beyond
Milner's yardarm and subtlety would therefore be ineffective. Jon used the word
caution
as if it were a good thing and mentioned a long-standing series of leaks involving quite accurate statistics. He was able to breathe normally while he did so. He raised the forthcoming election as an issue and used the word
sensitivity
as if it were not funny in this context, and had then been very firm about the government's – any government's – willingness to engage generously with serious and reputable journalists anxious to perfect their craft.

I truly did just hear my own voice pronouncing both
lifeblood
and
democracy
and slipping only a tiny
of
down in between them
.

Christ.

I may plead that the theatricality of the occasion is getting the better of me. An audience – albeit of Westminster topers – always encourages empty rhetoric.

Reasonable assumptions were made – out loud – regarding the levels of privileged access which might reward and welcome team players.

The man can't be bought off with access – he doesn't want access. If he's ever accepted anywhere he misbehaves until he's not. Milner is a human crowbar – he exists to force things open. The man is a tool.

Beyond that, the conversation swung round to Milner's many foreign achievements and his extraordinary levels of guile, which suited Jon, to be truthful – it meant that he needn't contribute further, beyond offering nods and mumbles.

They drifted on to how interesting ethical phones were and blahblahblah – Jon ceased to listen.

I have done my duty for my queen and country and sod this for a lark.

Please roll on this evening.

Milner being determined to prove himself a busy and significant man, their meeting was blessedly limited. ‘Gotta go, Joe. John. Jon without the h … Good to catch up … Unhelpful timing, though, so I do have to rush …'

I did also have somewhere else I was rushing to. Thanks for not asking.

Milner winked at Jon. ‘Don't let the bastards grind you down – you look ground, though. Ground as coffee. Ground as dirt.'
Milner's laugh had an unhealthy bubble about it, suggestive of heavy smoking, although he'd given up years ago, as he put it,
so the fuckers don't get me that way, either
. Milner then stood, his paunch defeating his badly striped shirt and allowing glimpses of a distressing belly: wiry-haired and bluish grey.

Jon smiled. He felt as if he had been smiling mirthlessly for the duration and this was probably the case. ‘We'll … we must do it again.'

‘You're kidding.' Milner wiped at the glisten of his lips with his fat knuckles. ‘They can do their own dirty work next time. No need to send you. Not that you're not fun – you're a monkey
and
an organ-grinder, aren't you …?'

It's not that.

Milner tweaked his voice away from a growl and into a smug bray. ‘Oh, and I won't shut up. I'm the last of the last who never will. No reason to bleat about Leveson – I don't need to bribe anyone for snaps of posh cocks and nightclub-toilet gossip. I'm an actual journalist. I am the actual basis of a free fucking press.'

‘That's …' Jon, still seated, was forced to look up at this creature, to appear in public being belittled and lectured at like a 1950s secretary – taunted by an oaf. ‘Unfortunate.' His one hand was clenching, he couldn't help it, but he thought he might still seem placid otherwise and he hadn't – for example – taken up his fork like an angry trident and plunged it into that exposed leer of belly. His calm would count as one of the civil service's many unsung and yet remarkable achievements.

‘And why are your owners worried, Sigurdsson? Nervy about the folks out there going all Glasgow on them? The public? No one really gives a shit. The worst I could tell the faithful reader is unbelievable, the best is tedious – all of it makes them feel they've been screwed over and who wants that? Nobody wants reminding they've been fucked. Are being fucked. That's the Great British Public for you – like a Saturday-night housewife putting up with it, like a sad little slag lying back and hoping at least the boyfriend won't wipe his dick on the nice new curtains. They spoil everything, your lot. They've put democracy right off its
dinner. Whether the parties parachute more girls in, fanny about with the ethnic diversity, root down the back of the chaise longue and find a coherent pleb, no matter how many muddy pints they gurn behind and cheap snacks and ciggies they hold, how many like-minded freaks they gather … Whoever they put in the cast, they're always just more of the same old show. Like those bargain buckets of chicken – shitty dead meat to start with and in the end it all tastes the same.'

‘You know that's— You can't simply dismiss—'

Milner loomed in and down, breathed hotly. ‘And you let them fuck you, too … You're the closest, you're their old lady, you're Mum. Civil service … So you service 'em, don't you? You're another one of their shiny garage doors – IN CONSTANT USE.' Another laugh rattled out, spattering lightly against Jon's hair, as Milner swung his torso upwards again and then steered his combined weights towards the door.

His exit was not accompanied by an outpouring of affection from the room.

‘And again – no goodbye.' Jon sipped his, by this time, cold cup of tea. His hands performed well while he did so, seemed almost completely reliable.