Perfidious Albion
Page 14
‘Fucking hell,’ she said to Bella, around whom none of the family watched what they said, on the theory that they had no interest in raising a coddled child who only later had to learn the realities of adult life. ‘He’s everywhere.’
‘Is it that man?’ called Mia from the other room. ‘Because if it is, don’t watch it.’
‘I’m hate-watching it,’ said Trina.
‘Well don’t. It stresses you out.’
‘Look,’ Hugo Bennington was saying on the television, his face attempting a complicated admixture of sincerity and trademark bonhomie, ‘no-one is more appalled by racism than me.’
‘No-one?’ said Trina. ‘Everyone is more appalled by racism than you.’
‘Racism,’ said Hugo Bennington, now adjusting his facial mixture more in the direction of to-this-point-and-no-further straight-talking authority, ‘is abhorrent.’
‘Wait for the but,’ said Trina.
‘But …’ said Hugo Bennington.
‘There you go,’ said Trina.
‘… I think we need to ask ourselves what racism is, and whether what Ken Henderson said was categorically racist, because I think if people actually listen to what he was saying …’
Trina reached in her pocket for her phone and began to scroll through Twitter. The abject horror she experienced whenever Bennington’s face loomed into her field of vision was, in some ways, offset by the delight she took in watching her Twitter feed fill not only with the highly creative insults his every TV appearance inevitably inspired, but also with a scrolling chorus of criticism and disapproval without which Trina, left alone with the television, would have been at risk of losing all faith in humanity.
Twitter, for Trina, was the exact opposite of the brief overview of television to which she had just subjected herself. No-one was lying about on a lawn in cricket whites on Twitter, or at least, not on Trina’s Twitter. Instead, they were, like her, watching and commenting on the offensive drivel currently spraying from the face of Hugo Bennington.
In the background, Bennington was still banging on about England. On Twitter, which had now become Trina’s foreground, a rush of comment and critique had begun – an ever-expanding stream that took in Bennington’s politics; things he’d said previously in his column that his current appearance on television seemed to contradict; things he’d said as a politician which he now seemed to be forgetting; things other people had said about things he’d previously said which now seemed once again timely and relevant; playground insults about his voice and the fact that he looked as if he was losing the ability to dress himself and brush his own hair; and, of course, many links to the original comments made by Ken Henderson that had begun this whole fiasco.
All the while, on the television, Bennington was talking increasingly heatedly about the plight of white male politicians prevented from saying what they thought by the liberal constraints of mainstream media, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was, at that very moment, on national television, saying exactly what he thought.
‘… and what we’re saying,’ Bennington was saying, ‘is that we need to have a conversation about this. Not a slanging match. Not a guilt trip. Not a whole load of politically correct flimflam. A clear, rational, honest debate about what’s happening in this country and what we can do about it. Because if you asked me what the most fundamental human right of every person living in England today is, I would say that it’s freedom of speech. And I think a lot of people, if you asked them, would agree with me. But I also think a lot of people would agree that much as we might enjoy the idea of freedom of speech, we don’t really have it. We’re living in a censorious age, and if we carry on like this then we’re genuinely, and this is going to sound strong but I want to make it clear to you just how strongly I feel about this, going to come dangerously close to what I honestly feel is a cultural and political purge in which a whole group of people, as far as politics is concerned, cease to exist.’
‘A genocide of white men,’ Trina said, bouncing Bella gently against her chest while she leaned back in her chair and felt the last cloudy wisps of her working day disperse. ‘Maybe by the time you’re grown up, Bella, that’s something we might have achieved.’
‘I can hear you,’ called Carl from the living room.
‘OK,’ said Trina, briefly closing her eyes and letting herself drift a little. ‘Not a total genocide. Just a controlled cull to keep the numbers down.’
She heard him chuckling under the din of the computer game. She scrolled through her feed a little more and then idly tapped out a post.
You can’t even make up racist terms of abuse any more, she tweeted. It’s political correctness gone mad.
Then, as an afterthought, she tweeted #whitemalegenocide. Lol.
She flicked through the channels again, then switched off the television. Bella, who had shown brief interest in Bennington’s face only to quickly realise he was not worth bothering with, had quietened, and, nestled against Trina’s shoulder, was beginning to doze. Trina reached for her phone again. Her #whitemalegenocide tweet had already garnered a substantial number of retweets. She thought of Mia, her orders to unwind. Fair enough, she thought. She’d satisfactorily distracted herself. Perhaps she could just enjoy the next few moments as they were.
0011
‘Robert. Robeeerrrt. Robbie-boy. The Robster. Robbing from the … I’m riffing. It’s freeform. But let’s streamline. How are you doing?’
‘Fine, Silas,’ said Robert, once again resizing windows on his laptop in order to achieve the minimum possible Blandford.
‘I could have done this by email but I thought, what the fuck, let’s make it personal. The buzz in the office is unbelievable, Rob. This piece is like if a fire emoji stopped being an emoji and became an actual fire. You know what I’m saying?’
Robert was thrown. Writing the piece had felt awkward, uncomfortable. His angle had eluded him. He’d tried it angry, tried it sentimental. He’d gone for dignified remove, then thought, fuck dignified remove, and tried his hand at spitting outrage. But then outrage had sounded too much like all the other outrage that littered the web and he’d worked his way back to what he hoped was a kind of dignified empathy. At the last minute, the events in the square, although he had not described them directly, had provided him with the perfect approach: the way in which the Darkins of the world (a phrase he’d actually used, but about which he was now less certain) were not only ignored but actually obscured by contemporary reality. Amidst the babble and froth of opinion and counter-opinion, he’d asked, what possible room could there be for a story like Darkin’s, and what did that say about the future we were all shaping for ourselves? He’d sent it off on a hot whim, pulsing with achievement. Then he’d woken up in the morning and regretted it, gone over it all again, seen other angles, different positions, and, worse, obvious criticisms. Now here was Silas telling him he loved it.
‘I … Really? I mean, people like it?’
‘This piece is beyond that, Rob. It’s beyond like or dislike. I’ve actually heard someone use the phrase new dawn.’
‘In relation to my column? Are you sure?’
‘Well, now that you mention it, no. But let’s look at it another way. No-one in my office ever says new dawn. For your column even to have created an office atmosphere where a phrase like new dawn is able to unironically exist is like some kind of … new dawn.’
Silas’s praise, Robert thought, was complicated. On one level, it was welcome, partly because any praise was welcome and partly because Silas was effectively, though Robert could rarely bring himself to admit it, Robert’s boss. But on another level, it was Silas, a man whose intellectual and ethical shortcomings were so glaring that Robert practically had to adjust the contrast on his computer screen to take him seriously. The result was that Robert felt no less confused than when he’d woken up and gone back over the piece and asked himself if he’d erred. On the one hand, Silas loved it. But on the other hand, Silas loved it.
‘Oh, it’s powerful alright, Rob. It’s seriously powerful. I’m actually overpowered by it. It’s over-powerful. Which is apt when you think about it, because this is a piece that is also like, over power. You know?’
‘I think I kind of know, yeah.’
‘So let’s get serious. We’re running it as it is. It’s long. It’s grandiose. It’s kind of windy in places. It’s everything we don’t dig. Which is why we dig the absolute fuck out of it. We’re going to drop it in the ocean of culture like a fucking depth charge. But look, quick briefing, OK? Don’t think there won’t be pushback, because there will very definitely be pushback. But fuck the pushback, because this piece is itself a pushback, right?’
‘What kind of pushback?’
‘Oh, the usual pushback.’
‘Like Julia Benjamin kind of pushback?’
‘Like that, yeah. Only, you know, more so.’
‘More so?’
‘Well you didn’t think it was going to be met with universal love and acceptance, did you, Rob? This piece is the future. When is the future not controversial?’
‘I suppose I can’t really see what’s controversial about—’
‘About being a man? About being white? About being English? Nor can I, Rob. Nor can you. Nor can the Darkins of the world, am I right? But the point is that it is controversial. And that’s exactly what this piece is saying.’
As Silas was speaking, a rivulet of what felt like pure nitroglycerine had dripped, as if from a pipette, from the base of Robert’s skull and into the opening of his spinal column, from where it had trickled, icily, mercilessly, all the way to his anus.
‘Oh God, Silas. Jesus Christ. I mean, the column mentions those things, but I’m not saying—’
‘What are you saying, Rob?’
‘I’m just saying that we need to have a conversation about—’
‘OK. I’ll stop you there, Rob. Because people are going to ask you what you’re saying. They’re going to want comment. And if you want my advice, don’t come out with a load of shit about starting a conversation or trying to have a dialogue or any of this other crap people say when they’ve finally managed to say something direct. This piece is not having a dialogue, Rob. This piece is saying, Open your ears, fuckwads, I am here to speak.’
Robert wasn’t sure what to say. It would help, he knew, if he had a clearer sense of the column in his head. It would also help if he had some idea, however vague, of what Silas was seeing in the column that he himself had failed to detect. Because yes, OK, it happened to be about a man. An ignored man. An ignored, white, and actually, now that Robert thought about it, quite racist man. But that wasn’t the same as … It wasn’t saying …
‘You know what?’ he said, changing tack. ‘Maybe it needs one more pass. Just tweak a few things.’
‘Tweak a few things? That’s what I’m saying, Rob. This is raw. This is from the gut. If you tweak it, you dilute it.’
‘All the same,’ said Robert, who, much as he might have been experiencing a near-radioactive level of concern and discomfort, was damned if he was going to undermine Silas’s apparently genuine enthusiasm for something he’d written. ‘Call me a perfectionist.’
‘Hey,’ said Blandford, holding up his hands, ‘artistic attention to detail, right? I’m down with that. But seriously, Rob. I don’t want to see you gut this thing.’
Robert had clicked open his piece and was skimming through it. It was no longer familiar to him. It had been distorted through the lens of Silas’s reading, and from there through a series of further, imaginary lenses representing all the readings that were to come. Not only could he not recognise the piece, he realised, he couldn’t recognise the version of himself that had written it, meaning he couldn’t, by extension, trust the accuracy of the reading he was giving it now.
‘People are tired, Rob,’ Silas continued. ‘They’re fed up. They’re worn down. They’ve had it with all this left-wing, liberal dogma. The new anti-authority is on the right, not the left. It’s the new punk, Rob. People were crying out for this piece, and you’ve given it to them. That’s why we’re already seeing such a crazy response profile to it.’
‘Response?’ said Robert. ‘What response? How are you seeing a response?’
‘What? Oh, shit. Did I not say? It’s up. It’s live.’
‘It’s what?’
‘It’s out there, baby. The velociraptor has figured out the locking mechanism and is roaming the park.’
‘But what the fuck, Silas? What about edits? What about me reading it over?’
‘Yeah, yeah, what about this, what about that. You want me to level with you, Rob? This is the best thing you’ve ever written. Why? Because it’s brave. And so we have a question. Why have you not written something this brave before? Obvious answer: because you’re not, essentially, and don’t take this the wrong way, a brave person. So – potential issue with this piece? Your moment of braveness fades and you go back to being not that brave. Solution? We remove the option of you going back to being less brave. I’m like the mother bird here, Rob. I’ve nudged you out of the nest and now I’m going to watch you fly.’
‘Or plummet to the fucking ground.’
‘That never happens, Rob. All birds can fly.’
‘What are you talking about? You find baby birds on the pavement all the time with their heads smashed in.’
‘Those are bad birds, Rob. They’re defective. Are you a defective bird?’
‘I—’
‘Are you a defective bird, Robert?’
‘No. I am not a defective bird.’
‘Well stop acting like a defective bird and let’s fucking fly, yeah? OK, I’ve got to run. Let’s touch base later, because believe me this is going to go stratospheric.’
‘Silas? Silas?’
But he was gone.
*
‘It’s …’ Hugo stared at the A4 printout that Teddy had placed in front of him on the conference-room table. ‘I don’t even know what it is, actually.’
Hugo was not in the mood for this. He hadn’t slept, then he’d overslept. His time without Teddy had been cut short. Now he felt like he was playing catch-up with himself.
‘It’s something,’ said Teddy. ‘I think we can categorically say that.’
Hugo scanned Townsend’s column again. The experience of reading it was unnerving. He felt a weird, distorted familiarity, a kind of perverted recognition. It was, he thought, just one more thing in his morning that made the world feel strange.
‘He sounds like me,’ he said finally.
‘He sounds a lot like you.’
‘Is anyone pointing out how like me he sounds?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Maybe I should point that out?’
Teddy shook his head, gave Hugo a significant look.
‘You’re thinking kill it with kindness,’ said Hugo.
‘I’m thinking basically a bear hug he can’t get out of.’
‘Fine,’ said Hugo. ‘Fuck him, the little prick. That’s not what I’m worried about, though, to be honest.’
‘You’re thinking about this Darkin bloke, I know. But you know what? Same deal.’
‘Townsend’s turning him into some sort of fucking cause.’
‘A cause you’re actually much better placed than him to champion.’
‘But I can’t just go out there and champion him. Downton will shit themselves.’
Hugo’s fear of Jones was, he knew, unseemly, but it was genuine. He deliberately hadn’t considered the specifics of what Jones might be able to do to him if he put his mind to it, but even if Hugo kept his visualisations vague the gist was clear enough. He pictured Jones opening his newspaper, or perhaps, like Hugo, being handed a printout, thinking a moment, his face as expressionless as ever, then morphing into semi-liquid form and pumping himself th
rough the keyholes of Hugo’s life. The shit Downton had on Hugo would act like an expanding foam: a quick squirt into a single crack and everything would be subsumed.
‘Let them shit themselves,’ said Teddy. ‘At the end of the day, this guy’s got, what, a few weeks of holding out left in him? You don’t need to push him. You just need to make him feel like he’s about to be pushed by someone else. Meanwhile, you wring your hands about the tragedy of it all.’
The trick, Hugo thought, was going to be to think as little as possible. That had always been the trick, really. Down at the pit of his stomach, the knowledge of what had to be done was always stubbornly present. His aim was to keep it there, in his gut, and never let it reach his head.
‘It’s hugs all round,’ he said flatly.
‘Big hugs,’ said Teddy.
What a point it had come to, Hugo thought, when he was the man whose embrace was fatal. He couldn’t tell if he felt thrilled at the power or depressed by the implications.
‘Let’s move on,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the TV thing.’
‘Basically,’ said Teddy, bringing up a series of completely unlabelled pie charts and associative diagrams on his tablet, ‘you’re off the scale right now, big guy.’
He showed Hugo a map of England covered in glowing orange conflagrations. ‘This is your resonance slash amplification. See that? It’s off the charts.’
‘And that’s good?’
‘It’s very good.’
‘And people are saying … What are people saying?’
‘I don’t think we should get bogged down in detail here, Hugo. I don’t think what people are saying is really as interesting and important as the simple fact that they are saying stuff.’