Serious Sweet (34 page)

‘Oh, for—' Jon was apparently rolling across cobbles, this assailing weight above him.

‘Hold still.'

‘
What?'

‘I said hold still, you moron.'

Jon realised that both the weight and the voice belonged to Milner while worrying that his coat was going to be ruined and wondering if the lack of pain in his face was due to some kind of numbing hysteria, or the fact that Milner's blow had been glancing. ‘You fucking maniac.' It hadn't felt glancing.

‘That's good. Go with that.' Milner was now kneeling astride Jon's chest – the belly even more alarming in the half-light than usual.

‘You stupid fucking bastard!' Jon allowed an instant of fury to lever him out from under his attacker. ‘You fucking …!' And then the passion didn't stop – it yanked him up, hotly breathless, into a raggedly standing position. ‘You stupid, stupid—'

And for the first time in his life, Jon was wholly furious. He swung fists that had never been guilty of such behaviour and connected with sneering air.

Jon spun round on his heel – the side of his right hand beginning to sting now, along with his right knee, likewise his left cheek – and there was Milner swaying with glossy, early-evening drunkenness.

What the hell is the idiot up to?

At the blind end of the mews they'd just tumbled across: ‘You fucker!' At the end of the mews was the picturesque Victorian pub. It was once frequented by guardsmen. Now it was tucked away enough and charming enough to host a smattering of celebrities wishing to recreate a London that never was. Drinkers lingering outside the prettily painted front steps and quaint novelty sentry box might not relish an outbreak of violence.

Jon bent forward, hands on his knees, and caught his breath while Milner chuckled wetly. ‘You big pansy, Jon. Gotta take your lumps, you know. It's the modern way …' He was enunciating well for someone who was meant to be fighting drunk.

‘You fucking, fucking, shitting … You …' Jon was hissing now, while trying to get his bearings. ‘What are you trying to do? What, exactly? Destroy me? I'm already destroyed – you're too late. I've been all over bar the fighting for years and – oh, look,
we've just had the fucking fighting
.' He suspected that he might be sick.

‘I'm saving you, fuckwit.' Milner patted at Jon's back with admirably judged inaccuracy. ‘This way, you're not meeting that naughty girl Lucy and giving her another instalment of the crown jewels, you've been waylaid by that terrible old soak Milner and taken one for the team.'

Jon felt Milner's clammy paws grab briefly at his hips. ‘Get off me.'

Milner stood close behind Jon's thighs and made jokey thrusts at him. The feeling of that belly pressing and giving as it thumped against Jon's buttocks was entirely as repellent as intended.

Jon broke loose and stood. ‘You …'

Impossible to call him a cunt, I refuse to associate him with … I'm not bloody having that used as an insult, but so help me …

He settled for, ‘You fat, useless prick.' And then attempted to shake out his coat, dust himself down. ‘Prick. Cock. Dick. You are a dick.'

Milner laughed like a pantomime devil and murmured, ‘We'll nip into the bar – best of mates now – nothing like a little anal action to soothe you public-school survivors, put you at ease. And I will buy you a drink to make up for my joke that went wrong. There's no one about who's looking, nobody paying the wrong kind of attention. The bar's preoccupied with tonight's touch of glamour – the place is mildly famous for hosting the extremely famous: caps doffed and come in for an offbeat pint in Good Olde Lahndahn surroundings …'

‘I know that – I'm not an idiot, you fucking idiot.'

‘Touchy … Well, there are two blokes in tonight who stand next to Prince Whatever sometimes and who play that game with the funny-shaped ball.'

‘You're not amusing.'

‘Ruggah buggahs … And there's that woman who didn't win the telly baking competition this year … or last year … Fame ain't what it fuckin' used to be.'

‘You didn't need to do that.'

‘At lunch you gave me the distinct impression that I did …' Milner approached Jon as if he were a petulant animal, a startled horse – his hands wide and low, placating.

And Jon submitted, allowed Milner to slop one heavy arm over his shoulders, make him stoop. Then Milner guided him, like an old pal, towards the glimmer and chatter of the pub.

I can't see her like this. I'm bad enough at the best of times and … I'll look like some cartoon idea of a tumbling drunk. I'll smell of Milner, of tepid pints and ketoacidosis because – yes – I have researched the physical effects of alcohol abuse.

All the large and little harms I would have spared her if I could.

Please let her always be safe.

Please.

Please everything, something, nothing.

Fuck.

Jon heard himself whine –
Christ, I have an ugly voice, tonight worse than ever
 – addressing himself more than Milner: ‘Um … let me …. I'm running late for my next appointment and I have to send a text.'

‘Go ahead.' Milner breathing this against Jon's injured cheek – the impact of his heat felt infectious.

‘I need to do it alone.'

‘Suit yerself, duckie. I'll get you a pint of bitter – that be all right?'

‘I don't want a drink.'

I don't want my mouth to taste of drink.

‘I'll get you a bitter anyway – you're a bitter man, Jon. Ha ha. A bitter man. If you don't want it, I'll take it myself.'

‘Get me a cup of tea, for God's sake.' And Jon shrugged him off at the foot of the endearing and perhaps original steps that led to the pub's entrance. Then he watched the bulk that was Milner ease itself up and inside. Jon closed his eyes.

If he broke my phone on the cobbles … If I can't … If I don't find a way of …

The dark in his head only made his thinking louder than he could bear, so he glanced about. The evening seemed to slither, wet patches of illumination hiding round the cobbles like signs of disease. He reached into his pocket, took out his – as it turned out – undamaged phone. He dialled Meg's number and then stopped the call before it could go through.

Text. That would be better. I'll send a text.

That actually wouldn't be better, but it's what I'll send.

His fingers were slithering suddenly and traitorous.

He felt that he might want to cry.

A text.

JON FOUND THE
Friday-night fug and din of the bar offensive. It made him – inevitably – queasy and then more than queasy.

Perhaps I should develop an eating disorder.

He had to head on straight past Milner and find the gents' as soon as he was penned definitively indoors.

Oh God Oh God Oh God
.

Having made it to the toilets, he coughed and heaved unhappily in an unproductive effort, then left the relative privacy of the stall and rushed water into a sink, cupped it up and over his face like a repeated small rebuke. He looked – according to the mirror – dreadful.

Like some mugged ageing householder, staring out for his headlining picture in the local paper – look what they did to me.

Look what I did to me.

Milner had drained one of the available pints on his table by the time Jon returned. The other pint was grinningly rocked in mid-air before the first of it was taken too, Milner showing his teeth. ‘Now then.' He paused. ‘I didn't hit you that hard, but you look like shit … You're getting on a bit more than I thought, aren't you, Jonnie? Proper grey, you look.'

‘Thanks.' Jon folded himself into a seat and slid one hand into the other – maintained himself, held on. ‘I don't have any figures
for you. And there's no point to them any more, anyway. If there ever was.'

‘Don't lose your balls now.'

‘Why must everyone this evening take such a lively interest in my balls?' Jon was alarming himself. ‘My balls are in place. In fact.'

‘I'll take your word for it. And the figures serve a purpose – if they didn't, why would it be so hard to get them? Why are they being buried at sea? How many suicides, how many deaths, what are the increases in costs and where are they hidden? … Our hints and tips are building a tide for disclosure.'

‘They're building fuck all.' Jon kept his voice as low as he could while this kick of anger jolted up his forearms. ‘Nobody cares. Remember
shop a scrounger
in the soar-away
Sun
? That was ten years ago. The start of the high-octane hate.' He eyed the happy bar, its happy drinkers.

Fuck 'em all.

He continued, ‘We've had more than ten years of being told about the undeserving poor. If you're poor enough to need benefits you must be doing something wrong – you must be something wrong and undeserving. Want shouldn't get – that's our departmental fucking motto. Our national credo – we all love royal babies and hate the poor. At present and for the foreseeable future. That's how it works …'

‘Is it your time of the month?' Milner patted Jon's arm and he felt the man's contact as an unclean thing, as a kind of obscene comment on how Meg might have been when she was drunk.

‘Fuck you, Milner.'

‘Only asking, because it does seem to have taken the whole of your career for you to notice that maybe things were going off course.'

‘It's taken the whole of my career for it to go, as you say, off course … I stayed in …'
Too loud.
Jon noticed he actually had been given tea – teapot, milk, sugar, cup and saucer, the petty litter of it all seeming quite confusing and pathetic, now that he examined it … He poured some out for himself –
More tea, Deputy Director?
 – and added sugar.

Good for shock.

And then he settled his voice down into the murmur reserved for informing a minister while he chairs this or that committee, attends this or that occasion when the public must be faced – his warm undertone for leaning in and making all right. ‘The open secret, the one at the heart of public service is – as you know – that there are facts, but they don't matter. There is knowledge and that knowledge can prove and disprove the better – if not the best – ways to do anything. Anything at all. But ministers, MPs, politicians, theorists, they have to be visible, they have to do things, and if this involves dismantling a functional system, then it will be dismantled – not adjusted, adjustments aren't sexy, not mended, mending is what tradesmen do. They must be certain, they must have strident opinions and tangible faith, the better to overpower reality. We are asked to advise them less and less – the infallible need no advice. More and more, we are required to change what worked into what does not work. We navigate a blossoming coral reef of unnecessary change and legislation and we peep out from its nooks and crannies to look at the sharky exercise of will amongst those who actually want to bring about what does not work. They want to be freed by catastrophe. Freed from logic, freed from restraint.

‘And conservatives know that you can't change human nature and therefore the suffering must have been born to be the suffering; at the most fundamental level – they have brought their pain upon themselves. They could only be forgiven if they thrived and conquered and no longer need any help. And if you can't change human nature, you don't need government – it's an unnecessary burden to tax the people. It has to go – except for those posts occupied by those who believe that you can't change human nature. They have to stay. To make sure there's no change.

‘And progressives believe that you can change human nature and therefore the great plunging herd of voters must be restrained and managed at all times by armies of virulent overseers. And those overseers must justify their presence – they have to make
those inevitable changes very obvious and challenging and extreme, otherwise the change might look as if it would have happened anyway without their help, because you can change human nature.

‘And it used to be just a little bit, you know just here and there, just a little bit more fucking sane and honourable than that. Some of them had brains … Some of then still do …

‘But fuck both sides against the middle now. A plague on all their houses now.'

Milner killed his pint of bitter during this, eating it up while shaking his head. ‘Jon … Poor, Jonnie …' He winked. ‘Abuse and conspiracy theories … That's my cup of tea, surely?'

Jon stirred his syrupy tea, then found the first sip revolting, ‘What is a political party? A conspiracy with membership cards. Conspiracy as re-engineered by greedy children. What is Parliament? An institution designed to prevent any activist from staying active. Ask any decent MP, once the hundred days' shine has rubbed off them.' The sugar wasn't working. ‘I want to give you something else.'

‘I knew you were holding out on me.'

‘Shut up. I can't … I can only …' Jon was breathing badly, stupidly, in a way that might draw attention. He pulled out a pen and wrote a phone number on to a beer mat. This was the number he kept in his head, safe with only one other. It had never been written down.

The things that you don't want to lose, you trust to no one, you hide them inside.

Jon swallowed a mouthful of unruly saliva. ‘Put that in your pocket. Now.' And he waited while Milner gave him that patronising half-smile –
as if he's looking at a crack-up, at a fuck-up –
but then he did pocket the beer mat.

First you step out on the ledge. Then you just step out. You try to like the feeling it gives you – airy. Oh God and St Cecilia, oh Cecilia – in whom I do not believe – please believe in me.

‘Go on, then, James sodding Bond. Left the tuxedo at home, did you? Miniature radio in your knickers?'

‘Shut up.'

‘I do this for a living. I don't sit about being self-righteous and wanking on about the problems I helped create. “Ooh, I am so sorry I built the hand grenade. I just never had the time to think what a hand grenade could be for – and it looked so pretty …” You twat.' Milner troubling the sweat on his face with a broad palm. ‘I actually go to places that could kill me and bring back information that saves lives. I don't piss about in an office being scared of my own paperwork, compromising my dick away …'

‘Shut up.' Jon feeling his own sweat creeping down the back of his neck like the feet of shamed insects. ‘You haven't been anywhere lately – not at all – you're spent. And this, by the way, is the end. Of us. But I brought you a present – OK? A goodbye kiss.' The carpet flexing under his feet as he says this. ‘This is something to make you whole again – possibly – and then you can forget me because I won't be any use to you, I'll be working somewhere else. I mean, I won't be, I will have … It's of no importance what I'll be.'

And Jon caught hold of Milner's hand.

Because I need to – the need to cling – primate need.

The contact was hardly a comfort –
like grabbing a starfish, a squid, a dead animal –
and the grazed area on Jon's palm complained mildly, not liking the touch of hot salt.

Here I go – airy – airy and falling, I can feel the rush.

And then Jon started to talk it all out, spill it – the real stuff – gabbling because he might otherwise faint before he was done. ‘That number will be burned in a week's time, but if you call it before then a man will answer and tell you a story. It's a good story. Very interesting. I'll provide you with a precis, which goes like this: the man is Mr Alex Harcourt and he once worked for a company called Hardstand. Hardstand provides IT solutions, as we have to term them: software, hardware, support, peripherals. The company has another division that deals with office catering … which makes a kind of sense. They sell you the sandwich you eat in front of the computer they also sold you and now maintain for you, because you don't know how to.'

Milner barged in with,‘What, has he scored some dodgy emails? I'm hardly going to wet myself for that.'

‘Pay attention. Please!' This syllable reminding him of a song – of some song …

And Jon was under the impression that his heart was not right any more, that it had come unstuck – if this were possible – and would soon refuse to function – along with his ruined brain – all of which would be sad, but not much of a loss. He couldn't foresee excessive mourning. ‘Mr Harcourt works for a subdivision of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Hardstand. He is a specialist. He was. He retired. Eventually, Milner, one gets old and either does or doesn't deal with it. Harcourt isn't old. He is fatigued. He got nervous, or moral, definitely weary, probably scared. One does. He can give you dates, times, details, whatever you want on this. He is set on giving his particular game away. I won't ever speak to him again. You can if you want. I won't know … I insist on not knowing.'

Milner by this time smiling gently and in the manner of a man who wheedles indiscretions out of imprudently relaxed Kazakh diplomats, or oil-company execs. Or fading civil servants.

‘Harcourt groomed phones. His term. He wanted to talk about grooming – the only reason I met him. He turned up in an email – one email – when I was looking for something else. And I found him out because I can do that – I find out information. It's not some remarkable and exclusive journalistic skill – I do it all the time. And my stuff 's pure …' Jon paused to breathe, let his shoulders come down. He allowed himself to uncover the name, the story, the everything of Harcourt – the everything he packed away each morning in his dusty torso, under his gone-adrift heart, hidden so no one could see it unless they cut him open.

Harcourt. He was in another pub – out Walthamstow way. So I'm sitting there and facing this balding guy in a maroon leather jacket. He looked ex-army and unsuccessful – an NCO who might end up as an unhandy plumber, try driving a cab – looked as if he might enjoy violence of the bullying sort: against women, against kids. I sat and made assumptions about him along those lines … Wrong assumptions.

Jon continued: ‘To take an example – Harcourt's example – if you're a visitor to Downing Street you roll through security, they check you for secret hand grenades and so forth and then you trot up the iconic steps and in through the iconic door and you leave your phone in this nifty little rack provided for the purpose: sort of faux mahogany, it's the kind of thing you'd buy from a catalogue, or a smug ad at the back of a Sunday-newspaper magazine – thin shelves to fit your mobile and keep it while you head off without it. And anybody reasonable can see why a modern mobile phone would be unfit for the inner sanctum – guests couldn't be allowed to wander the hallowed precincts taking photos, or tweeting indiscreetly. It's partly a security issue and partly a matter of taste. Our masters can take selfies with each other at notable funerals, high-profile events, but the rest of us might lack discretion. We might put mocking snaps of their toilet or their canapés on to Facebook. We might record chats that were meant to be just cosy. Which is to say, deniable.'

Jon grabbed another mouthful of tea and felt it – he could swear – beginning to destroy his teeth. Why not add his incisors to the rest of the catastrophe, why not …? ‘Once your phone has been abandoned then you're in for quite a walk – the building is oddly designed, it has to hide a family apartment and close the baize-backed door between the public and the working surfaces, very
Downton Abbey
. It's an old and complicated place. You'll find a hallway gives into a hallway and then you'll climb those wonderful stairs – photos of the previous incumbents lining its rise, a thrum of undiluted narcissism – and up you go to this or that reception room … the slight scruffiness, the tall windows with a view over the garden, over the great big blank of Horse Guards Parade, over the grey bones of St James's …

‘That's just how it is.'

‘And your phone is far away back by the entrance where you can't protect it. You're up above, avoiding the average catering and whatever art they're displaying to impress, or having your official picture taken shaking hands with whoever – touching your skin to theirs in this weird exchange of mutual humanity when maybe
there's nothing like that available at the time. And maybe you're thinking they look peculiar, the top-flight men. You've seen them, Milner: the camera-ready, smoothed-over tribe of mannequin-faced nonentities … They look bizarre. They're the ones who succeed, who mountaineer right the way up to the top, but they just have become bizarre. Nonetheless you're slipping in your wise little word, stating your case and feeling quite close to the heart of things, you're getting eye contact and being reassured that someone's listening – you're learning that someone you possibly thought an opponent is maybe doing their best and giving you artisanal cheese straws, or whatever the occasion may allow … But your phone is still downstairs and lonely.