Serious Sweet (35 page)

‘And that's why kind Mr Harcourt takes it away and he speaks to it gently and kindly – grooms it – and then he opens it up – not so that it'll show – and he climbs inside it and leaves what he must, leaves you with clever presents you don't know about.

‘Even if you rush downstairs sharpish, are unexpectedly on hand because you've changed your mind about breathing the same air as whoever's up aloft – even if you leg it back out, having urgently remembered you left the gas on … Well, you'll be too slow to catch him … You have to go all that long way back in this mazey old house … And you'll perhaps need to pick up your coat, put it on, field a polite enquiry from this or that member of staff – they like to be helpful and pleasant at Number 10, they're servants, but not servile, not a bit of it. No matter how fast you come downstairs, Mr Harcourt will have the friend from your pocket back in place and ready for you and shipshape when you reach for it. It will seem the same, but it will now inform upon you in rather more ways than it did already. It will see and overhear and tattletale about your family, your affairs, your travel, co-workers, plans, meetings, flirtations, loves. You're fucked.'

Milner was no longer drinking. ‘Fuck.'

‘Yeah. As I said.'

‘Fuck me sideways. That can't be true, though.'

Which gave Jon a scything headache. ‘I'm telling you it can. I'm telling you because your colleagues who spend their afternoons dozing in the Commons Library, the ones who no longer swap treats for access, because they don't want access – the ones who are as much a part of Parliament as the Pugin wallpaper – those people who call themselves journalists missed this. And I don't think they'd really want it. It would be tasty but it would scare them. You're outside – I needed somebody outside.'

‘Yeah, because you're so far above any journalist, aren't you, Jon? Nobody's lower than us. And you, you don't have opinions, you civil-service fucks, you float above it all like fucking farts – worse than fucking lawyers. You won't rock the boat but if you did … my how clean your hands would be. You help your little masters screw over strangers and you let everybody know that you'd do it so much better if you had your way – only you're too pure to be in nasty, dirty politics … You're the dirtiest there is.'

Jon just nodded and held his tongue.

Yes, fine, agreed – I don't care. Just take the hook and swallow it, will you?

And Milner did have the proper feral gleam about him that Jon had hoped for.

I can brief. I can brief better than Chalice. I can raise an appetite. I can inform and provoke forward motion … And this time it's for me, for my ministry. This time I am doing something that's for me.

‘Targeted?' Milner's voice pressed down to a whisper and he pretended to lean on Jon's shoulder for support. ‘Targeted grooming, or dragnet … No, there wouldn't be time for dragnet …'

We must look like a very mismatched couple.

Or like two sad bastards clinging together for warmth, for their last chance.

‘You should ask him. But not dragnet, no. And it saves bumping people, break-ins, picking their pockets in the street – all that risk.'

‘Just Downing Street?' Milner close enough to tickle breath straight into Jon's ear like a teenager on a date.

‘Think of all the government buildings that ask you to leave your phone when you step inside. Think of all the boisterous
opposition, the NGO reps and agitators, the politically involved, the uppity celebs, the potential rivals. Once they've been invited for drinks and nibbles, you've got their privacy, not just texts and emails and calls – their whole privacy – forever. Or at least until they ditch their phone. I don't exactly know who listens. I think knowing who listens would be unhealthy.'

‘So I'm meant to get unhealthy for you.'

‘There are so many people who already want to kill you, it will make no odds.'

I don't believe that, not anything like that. It would always make odds. Any damage is to be avoided. And I would like to conduct myself in a manner which conforms to that ideal.

‘I don't believe you.' But Milner's grip on Jon's hand feels already fond and committed. It indicates a hearty boy's excitement at the prospect of a rough and tumble game – a good kicking.

‘I don't care, Milner.'
I can kick a bit myself when necessary
. ‘Ask Harcourt – he'll convince you or not. It's none of my business. He knows he'll be hung out to dry – so many skeletons falling out of so many cupboards – and he needs a friend. He feels the end is nigh. And if I could find him, someone else could, too.'

‘Fuck.'

‘He's sleeping – I think – in his car at the moment and no longer has an address. Travel plans in place for somewhere I am assured is not Costa Rica …'

‘But how did you get him?'

Jon attacking his horrible tea again as one of the chaps who slightly knows Prince Whatever goes past to the gents'. The group of chaps who were standing around the chap who knows Prince Whatever now chat like girls, high-pitched and laughing too loudly about something.

‘I got him because I was looking for something else. He was an accident.'

Because I saw the words
grooming specialist
and thought I'd uncovered something else. A jokey memo on a desk – something to draw the eye. I believed I had found something else.

‘I was after something else.'

That wife – the one I stood beside at that party – unhappily drunk and confiding: something not right about her husband, something not right about his finances, something not right about his spending, something not right about the way he is with kids, something not right.

When he'd seen her again, she'd blanked him, been a stalwart partner to her husband: exemplary, busy, devoted. The problem that she had implied might exist had slipped back beneath the surface.

The problem had made people go deaf – deaf, dumb and blind.

But you don't steal other people's futures, souls, bodies – you don't pick the weakest human beings you can find and do that to them. That sort of behaviour isn't meant to happen, isn't meant to be a shared joke, a delicious secret, a proof of power. It's not right.

Some of the truth about that kind of problem is there now, out and stinking in the open air. Some of it.

Even when they're dead – the rapists – they drag pieces of the truth down with them, get it buried again. Cap it with concrete if necessary.

‘You can tell me, Jon. How did you get him?'

‘I did tell you. By mistake. I was looking for ghosts. I have been since 1987.'

That woman's eyes – they stayed the same, though. When she was telling the truth and when she was the fond and charming figure beside and just slightly behind a statesman of genuine promise, her eyes were the same – screaming.

Milner with his pinky-doggy eyes, allowing a display of appetite that's real, that isn't camouflage. ‘Secretive – silly tarts always do get secretive when you've seen everything they've got.' The hand squeezing in around Jon's fingers.

It doesn't matter. Say what you like. I was after the ghost of bad things in the seventies, in the eighties – I was looking for ghosts, monsters. I wanted to do something actually, genuinely useful before I left. But I couldn't get to them – and they kept being monsters.

Which isn't what I tell my daughter when she asks me why I stayed in post, why I haven't retired, why I cling on, still making compromises and knowing that what I do – precisely what I do – means children are more exposed than ever before in my lifetime to predators of every sort.
What happens when a school fails, a community fails, a children's home fails, a parole system fails, a prison system fails … Tired parents and absent parents and desperate parents and shattered parents and lost parents and then here we are … at the nakedness of everything, down to the flesh and bone. Human nature can't be changed and so if you're fuckable you should be fucked. Human nature can be changed and so I will fuck you until you are fuckable, just as I wish.

Who are we that we can't keep our children safe?

‘Are you still with me, Jon? Don't start doing that staring-off-into-space thing – it might impress the ladies, but it irritates the fuck out of me.'

‘Do you want this or not?'

‘Of course I want it. This will fuck the fuckers and the fuckers should be fucked.' He says this as if it is a poem, a declaration of love: softly and with a kind of proud sadness. ‘But this may not be able to make the splash you hope. Not here. It's a bag of frightening for any paper, these days. I may have to take it abroad – feed it back that way. Put it somewhere bombproof online … Shit, I may end up in Costa Rica – some non-extraditable shithole … But I love the sunshine. So yeah … Go out with a bang.'

And the pub's attention rests on the famous baking woman – the quite famous baking woman – over there by the window and it also smiles on the return of the rugby player –
sportingly fast urination –
and there's a merry glow of fake and authentic Victorian charm dutifully winking on the glass and varnish while the air sickens around you, while you sit with this journalist you barely know who may take this trouble, this burden of information, away from you – who may be competent and only pretending to be terminally tired and spent.

‘Take it wherever you like, Milner – just keep it away from me.'

But probably not far away enough. And I can't bolt off to Morocco, or somewhere, because – not the only reason – but because this is my home, my complicated home, and I want to be at home in my home and I want my country to be the country that I have believed could exist.

Not the nation as a blade – the one that will always draw blood, no matter if you hold the handle or the edge. The nation as love.

Stupid.

Morocco.

Costa Rica.

But I would like love.

Why not, as a foundation – that's a knife of a different kind, keeps you right and keeps on cutting.

Milner was shaking his head at Jon like a man who could not be relied upon in any circumstance. ‘I've got your back, Jon. I have.'

This is my best hope for freedom of speech … Noble disclosure of wrongs …

Twenty-first-century Britain.

Like I say – it's all unmarked vans and amateurs and paying more than anybody ought to for what you won't get.

‘Milner …' Jon retrieved his hand from Milner's grasp and tried not to look down and see if it was visibly greasy.

I'm too tired to throw up again. Too tired to try.

Jon wiped his face with his palm to clarify – perhaps that was the intention – his thinking, realising too late that he'd used the wrong hand, smeared himself with Milner. He swallowed, breathed, steadied his impulse to at least flinch and then began, ‘Milner, I have to go now and we won't meet again. I'll be resigning soon and all this will be … everything will be … I won't be any more use.' Jon let his head slop forwards and gazed at the carpet while his thoughts apparently slid into a clump above his eyes and forced him to end up saying, ‘This is the end. That's what I understand to be the case. Because … Because …' He was being too loud and might well disturb the other honest and hard-working, cake- and rugby-loving occupants of the pub. He went on anyway – telling a story he knew Milner wouldn't give a damn about and quite possibly telling it precisely for that reason: ‘A woman came up to me when I walked out of the railway station at the Junction. Where I live … It was a nice evening. Warm. And she was thin and seemed … she had that look they all do now – the face of
someone who no longer understands their own surroundings. I don't mean being somehow rendered foolish by drink or drugs, I mean having the look of someone – being someone who doesn't know why everything has decided to hurt her. Wherever she faced, she seemed to be searching for some kind of answer. And – with this bewilderment ongoing – she caught sight of me and she stopped me and she said, “
I'm not going to attack you.
” '

Jon paused while Milner's attention did indeed wander – he had a fumbling, furtive expression.

The prospect of telling truth to power round the back of the bike sheds – he can't wait … He wants to call Harcourt, probably, and get things under way
.
He's itchy but he won't scratch while I'm watching, while I'm here.

Jon dug in and kept on with his anecdote, no matter how unwelcome.

The political pub bore. There's always one.

But he felt the need to explain himself, even if neither of the people he might pray could understand him were actually here to listen. ‘The thing was, I didn't expect that a slightly frail middle-aged lady
would
attack me – St Kitts accent, that very gentle-sounding St Kitts accent – and she asked me, this breakable-looking black lady, she asked me, ‘What size are your feet? No, your girl's feet. Your wife's feet?' And she wanted to know because she said she needed money so she could buy milk for her child, but she didn't want to just take it, just have me give her money. She said that she wanted to sell me something and that she had shoes with her – women's shoes, her shoes – and I could buy them. She said she'd been asking and asking all day, but had got nowhere. The Junction is certainly nowhere … Oh yes – and she had a hat.' Jon was aware that he was lightly damping the pub's glee and chatter.

I really am being too loud.