by Sue Townsend
To Jack’s eyes the Prime Minister still looked like a bloke wearing his wife’s clothes. The wig, however, was a triumph of black curls and tendrils, and once it was in place, and Edward had applied Pan Stik, lipstick and eye make-up, he could almost have passed his own wife on the stairs and not been recognised by her.
Before they left Number Ten, a few ground rules were established. Only Jack would carry a mobile phone, and except in emergencies there was to be no communication between them and Number Ten. Alexander would take charge of everything—Adele would be told her husband was in the bunker and Ron Phillpot would be prevented from making any important decisions during the Prime Minister’s absence.
Police Constable Harris wished Jack Sprat and his female companion goodnight and watched them pass through the gates and walk away through a light drizzle. She couldn’t suppress a pang of jealousy. It should have been her on Jack’s arm.
♦
As the Prime Minister and Jack walked up the road towards Trafalgar Square the Prime Minister’s body felt curiously light, as though the burdens of state were actually falling from his shoulders and rolling back in the direction of Downing Street.
“We’ll get the Tube from Charing Cross, sir.”
“Look, Jack, I’m a pretty straightforward sort of a guy, and y’know I’d rather you didn’t stand on ceremony, so stop calling me ‘sir’, will you?”
Jack nodded and asked what the Prime Minister wanted to be called.
“My friends call me Ed,” said the Prime Minister.
“So what do I call you?” said Jack.
He realised he’d hurt the Prime Minister’s feelings when he loosened the grip on Jack’s arm, but Jack didn’t apologise. “I’m not his bloody friend,” thought Jack. “I didn’t even vote for him, and now here I am saddled with carrying the bag of somebody who looks like a poor man’s Joan Collins for seven long days.”
“Do you think we’re being watched, Jack? Under surveillance?” asked the Prime Minister.
Jack nodded glumly and in a room overlooking the Thames Clarke and Palmer shouted with laughter. Palmer said, “Too right we’re watching!”
Clarke added, “We’ll know when you turn in your bed!”
They had laughed themselves sick when they first saw the Prime Minister leave Number Ten in his woman’s rig-out, and Palmer had said, “I’ll give him half an hour before some hawk-eye puts the finger on him.”
Clarke had replied laughing. “Jack looks proper pissed off.”
Clarke pressed the zoom on the satellite picture showing Jack’s turned-down mouth. “Do you reckon Jack knows we’re watching him?” asked Palmer.
They both laughed out loud again when Jack looked up past Nelson standing on his column and into the dark sky beyond, to where the satellites that would track their progress were orbiting the earth, and mouthed silently, “Hello, boys.”
∨ Number Ten ∧
SIX
Norma and James were sitting side by side on the sofa in front of the gas fire. The discarded vacuum cleaner was still plugged in and only a third of the swirly-patterned carpet had been sucked over. An ashtray, their fags and matches and two mugs of coffee were arranged on the coffee table in front of them, together with a pile of Norma’s photo albums.
“That’s Stuart a month before he died,” said Norma, poking a nicotine-stained forefinger at a photograph of a thin-faced man with terrible teeth.
“Right,” said James, who couldn’t find anything complimentary to say about the stupid smack-head loser who was looking out from the photograph with an expression of pure joy.
“He looks happy there, don’t he?” Norma wanted to believe that Stuart’s short life had not been totally devoid of the odd moment of happiness.
James thought, “He’s happy ‘cause he’s just jacked up, that’s why.” But he said nothing and Norma turned the page and showed him a photograph of Stuart and Jack in the back garden of Number Ten. Both of them were astride gleaming Raleigh racing bikes. The bicycles were in better condition than the boys, who grinned into the camera with faces that already looked worn out.
“Them bikes caused a lot of trouble. Jack wouldn’t ride his again when he found out that Trev, my dead husband, had nicked ‘em from the front of Halfords. Trev was very hurt; he’d gone to a lot of trouble—finding the right bolt-cutters, turning the fire alarm on in the shop. People think it’s easy being a criminal but it’s not. There’s a lot of planning goes into it, and worry. I mean, we’d promised them lads bikes for Christmas, but it weren’t till Christmas Eve that Trev rang to tell me that he’d got two racing bikes in the back of his van.”
James raised his arms and stretched out happily, feeling his body relax into the cushioned softness of the sofa. He had found a place where he felt safe at last. He was among his own kind.
“Norma,” he said, “you wouldn’t know anybody who wants to rent a room out, would you?”
Norma was stroking Stuart’s photographic face. He hadn’t liked being touched when he was alive. Many of the fights he’d been involved in had been caused by him being inadvertently touched by strangers.
Norma said, “Is it you what’s looking for a room?”
“Yeah. My mum’s got took to an hospice last night.” James pulled his soon-to-be-orphaned face and pretended to wipe away imaginary tears. “I can’t stay in that house on my own, Norma.”
Norma said sharply, “You told me your mam was dead.” James did his crying act and thought about the day his dog, Sheba, had been run over by a milk float. He cried hot tears.
Norma was alarmed at such a naked display of emotion. After a minute she put an arm around his shoulders and said, “So, is your mam dead or alive?”
James sobbed. “My real mum’s dead, my adopted mum’s dying.”
“What she got?” said Norma, who was a connoisseur of fatal illnesses.
James took a neatly folded square of paper kitchen towel from his pocket and wiped his eyes. “Liver cancer,” he said.
Norma noticed that his long black eyelashes were wet and sticking together. “Has she got secondaries?” she asked.
“Yeah, loads of ‘em,” sniffed James. He was an imaginative boy and he could clearly see his non-existent adoptive mother in her white hospital bed. She looked a bit like the dying Evita as played by Madonna.
“You can come and stay with me for a bit, if you like,” said Norma. “You can stay in the donkey room.”
James said, “I smoke a bit of dope now and again, Norma; it helps with my arthritis.”
Norma, Trevor and Stuart had often smoked a joint when Jack was out of the house doing one of his boring hobbies—photography or ballroom dancing. Some of her happiest moments had been quietly getting stoned with her husband and eldest son. There had been such a sense of family. It had been exciting, how the three of them had dashed around the house opening windows and spraying air freshener before Jack’s estimated return.
Norma turned another page of the album, and James was surprised to see ex-President Bill Clinton’s big handsome face grinning at him. In the background was the front door of Number Ten Downing Street and a policeman in shirtsleeves, a bullet-proof vest and a helmet.
Norma pointed to the policeman and said in a shamed tone, “You might as well know the truth: that’s our Jack, you met him. He might be a policeman, but I love him just the same.”
When James had got over the shock he said, “Nobody can help how their kids turn out, Norma.”
The song of the little bird in the kitchen alerted Norma to Peter’s feeding time. She got up and shuffled out of the room in her slippers, leaving James exclaiming over the photographs of Jack Sprat with Nelson Mandela, Bobby Charlton, Liam Gallagher, Posh and Becks, and some other old blokes whose faces he vaguely knew but whose names he couldn’t remember.
While Norma was pouring Trill into Peter’s feeding dish she heard James speaking quickly into his mobile phone. “We’ve got a lodger, Pete,” she said. “He’s got young l
egs, he’ll help us out and look after us.”
James shouted through, “Norma, is it OK if I have a few of my mates round?”
Norma said to Peter, “What do you think, Pete, shall I let him?”
But Peter didn’t appear to be listening, so Norma shouted back, “Go on, then.”
She went upstairs to change out of her slippers and into her high heels. It was a long time since she’d had company.
♦
Jack’s aunt Marilyn had said to him a fortnight before she died in hospital, “The only thing I know about you, our Jack, is that you like beetroot.” And it was true that beetroot had featured heavily in their conversation and family interactions. At Christmas parties Marilyn had cried, “Lock up the beetroot, our Jack’s here!” or, “I’ve just got some beetroot in for our Jack, so tell him to come.”
There were other women, among them several police-women, who knew Jack Sprat not as a lover of beetroot but as a lover.
Jack had studied the erotic arts and the psychology of women as thoroughly as he undertook any subject that interested him. He had equipped himself with a map of the female genitalia and explored it until he could find his way around blindfold. He was constantly surprised when he found that he was more conversant with women’s genitalia than women themselves were.
He took it for granted that most women did not know how to handle a penis, either treating it like a torpedo that might go off at any minute if handled firmly or as though it were an old–fashioned gearstick that could be bent in any direction without harm.
Most women remembered Jack with pleasure because he liked them and their bodies and he told them the truth: that he was unable to love anybody—it was a genetic malfunction and there was nothing he could do about it unless science came up with something to save him from a life without love of any kind.
♦
Jack and the Prime Minister were in darkness, standing on a stationary Northern Line train. The Prime Minister hated the dark. He had once been shown round a heritage mine by a miner in an immaculate miner’s uniform and a gleaming helmet. When they had reached the deepest shaft, and were bent double looking at the coal face through a sheet of protective Perspex, the lights had gone out and the Prime Minister had squealed like a girl in the anonymous blackness. The heritage miner had laughed and said, “Who’s the great big Jessie, who’s afraid of the dark?”
The Prime Minister had not been brave enough in that extreme masculine space to confess that it was him, and that he hadn’t slept entirely in the dark since the night of Mummy’s funeral.
He and the others in the party had crouched waiting for an emergency generator to be brought underground.
Now he was hanging on a handle that was suspended from the ceiling of the train, sweat was running between the push-me-up, squeeze-me-together cups of his wife’s brassiere. A madman began to shout about Sir Cliff Richard—accusing him of forcing Hank Marvin to become a Jehovah’s Witness.
Further down the carriage a man with a public-school accent said, “This is the last fucking time I attempt to travel on the arse-bumming, fucking cock-sucking bleeding Northern Line. I’d rather crawl to Camden Town on my arse-fucking, mother-fucking knees.”
A woman’s voice, thick with tears, said, “Please, Roddy, we have to move to the country.”
Slow minutes went by and strangers began hesitant conversation. The madman addressed the carriage and informed everyone that David Beckham was the new Messiah and that Jeremy Paxman was the Antichrist.
The public-address system emitted a high-pitched whistle then a laconic south London accent said, “Ladies, gentlemen and others, London Transport regret to inform you that due to an incident perpetrated by a member of the public this train will be stationary for about twenty minutes. That is two-zero minutes. Once again, London Transport apologise for any inconvenience suffered.”
♦
Very few people had been inside Jack’s flat in Ivor Street, Camden Town. He liked most people, and had even come close to loving a few, but he found it impossible to share his living space with another human being. He cared too much about the minutiae of daily life. It caused him pain if a towel was not hanging in the exact middle of the heated towel rail in the bathroom and anguish if a pickle jar was not lined up in order of height next to its fellows in the preserves and jams cupboard. Every object in the four small rooms of the flat had an exact permanent space, and Jack was at his happiest when every spoon was back in the drawer and every CD was back on the rack in its appropriate alphabetical order.
He had once let chaos into the flat in the form of Gwendolyn Farmer, an extraordinarily pretty but persistent woman whom Jack had taken out for three months in 1998 when he was stationed at New Scotland Yard listening to tapped phone conversations. Gwendolyn had accused him of being married. Why else did he never invite her back to his place? She only lived ten minutes away from him, so why did they always go back to her place to make energetic and imaginative love?
In a weak moment Jack had capitulated and invited her back, but within half an hour of her walking in (dislodging the doormat slightly and moving a sofa cushion a little to the right) the relationship was over.
In Jack’s quiet, ordered space Gwendolyn stood out like a rampaging beast. She brought disorder and mayhem with her—planets collided, the sun went round the earth, rivers reversed their flow, dogs mated with cats, the dead came back to life and time ran backwards.
Gwendolyn never knew what she’d done wrong. As far as she was concerned she’d gone into the unnaturally clean and tidy flat, thrown her coat on the sofa, kicked her shoes off, made herself comfortable, lit a cigarette and told Jack about her day in Missing Persons.
As she tearfully confided to a colleague the following day: “His face went white, he started to shake then he asked me to leave. What did I do?”
Jack nearly asked the Prime Minister to wait outside the front door of the flat, in the street, but the poor sod in his ludicrous get-up would be easy prey for any passing chancer. Jack steeled himself and allowed the Prime Minister to step into the narrow hallway before walking in himself and closing the front door behind him.
“Goodness me, what a lot of books,” said the Prime Minister. “Have you read them all?”
“No sir, I use them for heat and sound insulation,” Jack said sarcastically.
The Prime Minister was almost relieved. He didn’t know why, but he wouldn’t have felt comfortable spending a week with a man who had actually read the collected works of Marx, Engels and Winston Churchill.
“They’re in some sort of order,” the Prime Minister said as he ran his fingers along the spine of Jack’s precious books.
“The Dewey system, sir,” said Jack, wincing when he saw that his guest had pulled out Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man and replaced it incorrectly between Jeremy Paxman’s The English and Jennifer Paterson’s Two Fat Ladies cookbook. Jack left the Prime Minister examining his CD collection in the living room and hurried through to the bedroom where he packed a small bag. He chose a warm suede jacket from one of three hanging in dry cleaner’s bags in the casuals wardrobe and within five minutes was back in the living room steering the Prime Minister towards the door.
“So there is no Mrs Sprat?” said the Prime Minister as they were waiting for a Number 73 bus to take them to King’s Cross.
“No, sir,” said Jack.
The Prime Minister nodded towards the nearby queue and whispered, “You simply have to stop calling me ‘sir’; it’s clearly a bit of a giveaway. Call me Edward. No—perhaps Edwina would be more appropriate in the circumstances.” The Prime Minister laughed his girlish laugh and asked, “Will it be OK to sit upstairs on the bus when it comes?”
Jack practised saying ‘Edwina’ to himself.
♦
The concourse at King’s Cross station resembled a crowd scene from an early Russian film about the October Revolution; there was a similar sense of confusion and despair. A derailment just outside Peterboroug
h station, combined with a computer failure at Swanwick Air Traffic Control, had resulted in a crush of people all wanting to travel to Edinburgh on the overnight train. Jack held the Prime Minister’s hand and pulled him through the crowds.
An onlooker would have seen a solicitous husband caring for his highly strung wife. A closer observer would almost certainly have noticed that the wife had a rather large Adam’s apple, bits of which needed a shave.
Jack looked up at the destination boards and saw that the Edinburgh train they had intended to catch had been delayed until further notice; there was nowhere to sit, so they sat on the floor. Several times during the long wait Jack left the Prime Minister to look after the bags and joined the long queues for food and drink. The Prime Minister sometimes forgot he was a woman and sat with his legs wide open and his wig askew until Jack gently reminded him of his new gender.
An old woman who was sitting on her suitcase said to the Prime Minister, “I paid £130 for my ticket and I’m still sitting here, after five hours, with no announcements, no assistance from the staff. In fact, no staff. At least Mussolini got the trains to run on time. What we need in this country is a dictatorship.”
It was five o’clock in the morning before they finally boarded a train. Jack shouldered both bags and pulled the Prime Minister through the jostling crowds who were racing for seats. They made their way down the aisles looking for two adjacent places and eventually sat diagonally opposite each other at a table for four. Ominously one of the strangers, a morose-looking individual in a camouflage jacket, produced a carrier bag containing six tall tins of McEwan’s extra-strong lager and placed it on the table in front of him. The other stranger, a young woman with a severe geometric haircut, opened her book, Management Systems in a Globalised World.
Soon every seat in the carriage was filled but still more people came in heaving their heavy cases, awkward bundles and bags with them.
The Prime Minister’s wig was almost knocked off several times, until Jack suggested changing places. It offended the Prime Minister’s sense of good manners to see women standing in the aisle; his impulse was to offer them a seat. Then he reminded himself that he was a woman and that anyway women like Adele had fought for years for the right to stand on buses and trains while men remained seated.