by Sue Townsend
He pressed his face against the window and peered out at the grey dawn as they passed the outer environs of north London. He was surprised by the untidiness of the back gardens and yards of the houses they passed and the dilapidated condition of their sheds and outhouses. Why did so many people seem to be collecting old fridges and cookers and other rubbish in their back gardens? Did they imagine that they would come in useful sometime in the future? He asked Jack for his opinion.
The man in the camouflage jacket said, “It will cost you £150 to hire a fucking skip, since the fucking government brought in a landfill tax.”
He then introduced himself. His name was Mick and he was going to his brother’s wedding. He asked the Prime Minister why she was going to Edinburgh.
The Prime Minister lowered his eyes and said quietly, “I’m hoping to find my mother’s grave.”
“That’s heavy,” said Mick, slurping on the third can. “Is that your husband, then?” He nodded across to Jack.
“No,” lied the Prime Minister. “He’s my brother.”
“So where’s your husband?” pressed Mick.
“I’ve never been married.” Lies came easily to Edward. It was telling the truth that was so difficult. In his political world a single truthful statement could send the value of the pound rocketing up or down.
“I’ve not had much luck with women,” said Mick, whose voice was now full of self-pity. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I take them out, I buy them drinks, beer, lager, spirits, even cocktails. I’ll even buy them food if they’re hungry, so you tell me, lassie, what am I doing wrong?”
The young woman with the severe haircut mouthed ‘Jesus’ to herself. And cracked the spine of her book.
Mick rambled on. “My brother shouldn’t be marrying this woman, she’s a dog from Easterhouse. She’s only marrying him for his money, he’s a subcontractor.”
“What in?” asked the Prime Minister.
“In anything at all,” laughed Mick. “He doesn’t have to do any work because he subcontracts the work out to another subcontractor, and he subcontracts the work out to another subcontractor—do you get it?” Mick laughed long and hard.
Jack closed his eyes and allowed himself to be lulled into a state of semi consciousness by the rhythm of the train as it lurched over the subcontracted rails. He heard Mick telling the Prime Minister that he would make some man a ‘bonnie little wife’ and why didn’t they meet for a drink after his brother’s wedding? In fact, why didn’t Edwina attend the brother’s wedding? He would be proud to turn up at the church with Edwina on his arm. He would ring his brother now and order an extra carnation.
Jack heard the Prime Minister stuttering his excuses. “It’s hugely kind of you but y’know I’m only in Edinburgh for a short time and, well, me and Jack are going to be busy so, y’know, very kind but don’t bother ordering another carnation.”
But Mick reacted badly and chose to take offence.
The Prime Minister asked the woman next to him to excuse him. She got up from her seat with ill grace and stood in the aisle holding her mobile phone. She’d been in the middle of sending a text message, and her dextrous fingers continued to spell out the words as the Prime Minister stumbled by on his way to the toilet at the other end of the carriage. He had to get away to somewhere quiet where he could think, not only about the landfill tax and its ugly repercussions but also about the alarming fact that he felt more comfortable wearing his wife’s clothes than he did wearing his own.
He sat down on the toilet-seat cover and looked through his shoulder bag for his lipstick and Pan Stik. It was at least ten hours since he had last shaved and his beard was starting to come through. He smeared the Pan Stik over his face and rubbed it in until it resembled a biscuit-coloured mask, then carefully drew around his mouth with the lipstick. He practised a few womanly expressions in the mirror.
After adjusting the black curls, which were inclined to shift off his head and go skew-whiff, he decided that he was more of a blonde than a brunette and that when they got to Edinburgh he would get Jack to measure his head and send him out to buy a new wig, something in the Marilyn Monroe style from the film Some Like it Hot. It was a film he certainly identified with now. And while Jack was out shopping he may as well pick up some different, more exciting clothes. If he was forced to dress as a woman then he might as well be a sensuous and alluring one. He certainly did not want to spend his week as a woman dressed in apologetic safe clothes. He still resented being talked out of wearing high heels. He was sure that with a bit of practice he could manage them.
During the Prime Minister’s absence Jack took the opportunity to talk to Mick. He leaned towards him and in a very quiet, authoritative voice said, “You say one more word to my sister and I’ll tear your head off your shoulders and sell it to the lion house at the zoo.”
One of the few things that Jack knew about Edinburgh, apart from the existence of Arthur’s Seat and the annual festival, was that there was a zoo.
Mick slurped on his fifth can and nodded respectfully. He would have done the same had his own sister been invited to a wedding by a stranger on a train.
There was a furious banging on the toilet door and a coarse voice shouted, “What the fock are you doing in there?”
But the Prime Minister was cleaning his teeth and couldn’t stop. He was only up to 122 brushstrokes and had another 78 to go. As he brushed he wondered about Adele, how she would have taken the news that he was in a command bunker and incommunicado for a week. Since their first meeting they had never spent a day—half a day, even—without speaking to each other. He hoped that she would remember to take her medication. Without it she became quite a different person—not the confident, A-list celebrity he knew and loved, a woman who strode the international stage like a colossus, but a pathetic whining creature who lay in bed sobbing that her thighs were too fat. He would ask Jack if it was possible to phone Wendy and ask her to stand over Adele and make sure she swallowed her twenty-five milligrams of lithium twice a day.
Jack lay back with his eyes closed listening to the young woman opposite as she made call after call to offices on her mobile phone. “Fergus, I’m on the train. Listen, I’ll not be in time for that meeting with those beakless, footless chicken guys—the chicken-meat people—so you’ll have to cover for me. Listen, they’ll try to argue for a death rate of one in five. That’s pants. If the chicken have no feet then they’ll survive for another forty-eight hours longer, so for a unit rate of…Hello, hello, Fergus, You’re breaking up.”
Mick said, “I like a bit of chicken for my dinner.”
After a fitful sleep Jack woke to find the train jolting through Northumbria. The floor of the carriage had accrued a layer of packaging materials, polystyrene cups rolled up and down the aisles like tumbleweed passing through a Wild West town. There was a smell of fast food and rancid humanity in the air. Jack would like to have strolled along the train to stretch his legs, but when he turned his head to look along the carriages he could see that he would have to step over the bodies of sleeping passengers and their baggage. He would be glad when they got into Edinburgh—he had never cared much for the countryside. When he was a child his mother had talked about sending him there as a punishment, as in, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll send you to the country.”
∨ Number Ten ∧
SEVEN
Norma had never had much to do with foreigners before. There had been Black Charlie at the working men’s club; he was a bit of a character, always making jokes about how he didn’t need to sunbathe to get a tan, and he never took offence when people chucked bananas at him. But since Charlie had suddenly gone berserk once and been taken off to The Towers with a police escort Norma had not had much to do with black, brown or yellow people. Now all at once, it seemed, her living room was full of them. There was hardly any room to move. Two of them were sitting on Jack’s desk and swinging their legs, laughing at a story James was telling about a Mercedes C-class that
he had borrowed when it was parked outside the Freemasons’ hall and that turned out to belong to the head of the drug squad.
Norma said, “You’re a bad boy, James!” She knew what ‘borrowed’ meant.
James got up from the floor where he’d been sitting cross-legged and gave her a kiss on her cheek. “Sorry, Mother,” he said. Then, while she was laughing, he asked, “Mother, is it all right if we smoke here?”
Norma was puzzled at first because most of the boys were already smoking; the room was full of smoke, and Norma had a Lambert & Butler on the go at that very moment.
“You don’t mind a bit of weed, do you, Mother?”
Norma had seen something on the television news recently, something about policemen in Brixton smoking marijuana on the streets to help them with the pain of their rheumatism. “No, go on,” she said. “Light one up and I’ll have a puff myself.”
Several hours later a thick cloud of marijuana smoke enveloped Peter’s cage in the kitchen. The little bird, asleep on its wooden perch, had a glorious dream: he was flying free, high above the Blue Mountains in Australia, a country he had never seen but had always longed for.
♦
Jack had hardly ever misbehaved. He had once refused to go to the shop for Norma’s cigarettes because he was on the penultimate page of The Grapes of Wrath, and there’d been one occasion when he had spent his swimming money on a dictionary. But compared to Stuart, who had fought and screamed through most of his childhood days, Jack had been a saint—clean, tidy, polite and quiet. If he wasn’t at his desk he was up in his room reading. He didn’t seem to want to have any friends, though sometimes a boy called John Bond called for him and they walked to the pork-pie-shaped library on the estate together. Norma had once stood outside Jack’s bedroom and listened to Jack and John’s conversation. It was about incomprehensible things; they were using a vocabulary that was foreign to her. It was English they were speaking, but she could not have told you what they were saying to each other if you had shoved bamboo shoots down her fingernails. Sometimes she wondered if Jack was quite right in the head. A teacher at his junior school had once said to her at the Christmas concert that Jack was remarkably precocious. She had reacted angrily, saying, “He don’t know nothing about sex, let alone how to do it!” But the teacher had explained that ‘precocious’ meant that Jack was very clever for his age and that Norma should be proud.
The train stopped at Newcastle station and weary travellers gathered their belongings together, as requested by the guard over the public-address system, and queued to leave the train. The young woman took down a very small suitcase from the overhead locker then made her final call before leaving the train. “Piers, I’m just about to get off the bloody train. Listen, before I get there can you look up ‘chicken eyes’ on the Net? Yeah, or it could be under ‘optical-waste distribution’, something like that. What I’m looking for is an outlet. At the moment we’re treating chicken eyes as waste, but there may be an untapped market here. The Middle East, it’s just a thought, and if there’s nothing then we’ll have to look at breeding them without eyes; they don’t need them, they’re not going anywhere—it’s not as if they do a bit of embroidery while they wait for the chop. Yeah, I know the quantity would be minute, but we have a surplus of fifty cubic feet of freezer space and it could be utilised. It could be a really profitable niche market.”
Jack thought about the eyeless, beakless, clawless chickens in the young woman’s care. He wondered, not for the first time, if such creatures had a god to look after them.
When the young woman was rolling her suitcase along the platform Jack said, “I’m glad I’m not one of her chickens, Edwina.”
The Prime Minister replied, “We can’t be sentimental about animals, Jack. That young woman has the right entrepreneurial spirit; we need more young business people like her.”
But the next time the Prime Minister fell asleep, somewhere around Berwick-upon-Tweed, he had a three-second nightmare: a blind chicken had taken control of the train and they were hurtling past a red light at 100 miles per hour.
Jack, having swapped places with the Prime Minister, had hoped that the seat next to him would remain vacant, but, as the train gathered speed and swayed around a bend and the McEwan’s cans rolled about and made a tinkling musical sound that was not displeasing, a fat man lumbered down the aisle and stood towering over Jack. In a surprisingly light voice he gasped, “Is this seat free?”
The man put his laptop on the table and rammed himself into the seat. The edge of the table cut into his white-shirted belly. A navy-blue tie with a crossed-golf-clubs design hung from the tight collar of his bullish neck. Jack wondered where he had bought his navy-blue suit. There was enough cloth in it to rig a sail in a tall-ships competition.
The fat man’s rapid breathing alarmed Jack. Eventually the man gasped, “Typical, I wait hours for a seriously delayed train then when it comes in I’m in a queue at the Baguette Bar.”
Jack didn’t want to talk, so, after giving a small laugh that recognised the irony of having to hurry for a train that was six hours late, he closed his eyes, which in any culture signified that he did not want to take part in a conversation. But the fat man had been forced into the role of extrovert by his size and he was unable to keep quiet.
The Prime Minister woke up to find Mick dribbling saliva on to the shoulder of Adele’s silk suit. He gently pushed Mick’s head away but it rolled back like a bowling ball propelled by its own weight.
A business card lay on the table between them. Derek F.M. Baker, Financial Advisor, pensions a speciality. Derek Baker was explaining to Jack that endowment mortgages had had a bad press but were still a viable option for the first-time buyer.
Jack felt as though he was an extra in a cowboy film, gathered around a wagon listening to a travelling salesman in a fancy Stetson selling snake oil.
After failing to interest Jack in re-mortgaging his ‘London property’, Derek inquired into Jack’s financial future. When Jack said that he was ‘sorted, thank you’, Derek held up a podgy finger and said, “Ah, but are you ‘sorted’ for your old age? You could live to be ninety, a hundred, even. Will your pension pay for the nursing home of your choice? Or will you be thrown into a state-run institution and left to rot?”
The Prime Minister could not remain silent. “Sorry, Mr Baker, but can I correct you on one or two facts. First, the Stakeholder Pension Scheme launched by the government in the last parliament is an extremely tax-efficient vehicle and available to all, no matter what their income. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in addition this government has done more than any other to encourage savings for retirement with mini and maxi ISAs as well as stakeholder pensions, not to mention the rigorous overhaul of the rules governing occupational schemes.”
Derek F.M. Baker was not exactly stunned by the weird-looking English woman’s grasp of the finer details of pension policy, but was certainly impressed by her knowledge. It was a shame she had a horrid problem with facial hair; still, it was nothing a bit of Immac wouldn’t solve.
“Are you in business yourself, er…?” asked Baker.
“Edwina,” volunteered the Prime Minister. “No. I’m,” there was a hesitation, and Jack wondered what the Prime Minister had decided upon. Before ‘leaving Downing Street he had been unable to choose between civil servant, housewife or lecturer in politics.
“I’m an actress,” said the Prime Minister, and flicked a black curl out of his eye.
Baker said, “I knew I recognised you from somewhere. So what will I have seen you in?”
By the time the train drew into Waverley station in Edinburgh, the Prime Minister had constructed a complete acting career from an early struggle in rep to dining at the Ivy with Maggie Smith and going to garden centres with Judi Dench.
Jack was impressed with the Prime Minister’s ability to throw himself so vigorously into his own fantasy and was only slightly alarmed when the Prime Minister said as they stepped off the tra
in, “Ah, Edinburgh at last. I won a Perrier Award here in 1982.”
Neither of them were happy about sharing a room. However, that was one of the rules they had agreed on with Alexander McPherson—Jack must be within sight of the Prime Minister at all times, the only exception being visits to the lavatory.
The receptionist at the Caledonian Hotel was used to strange-looking guests booking in. My God, you should see it at festival time! The lobby looked like a mental-hospital outing. So the crazed-looking woman with the tall, unsmiling man were more or less run of the mill as far as guests were concerned. He had once been called to one room to find a man cooking a lobster on a Primus stove. The man had been most indignant when he’d been told that cooking was forbidden in the rooms. “Have you seen the price of lobster in the dining room?” So when Mr and Mrs Sprat rang down for a tape measure and a list of Edinburgh’s crematoriums he was unfazed.
Jack went to Bentley’s department store on the Royal Mile looking for a Marilyn Monroe wig. The salesgirl was barely aware of who Marilyn Monroe was and had never seen Some Like it Hot, so Jack was left to sort through the wigs himself. He was annoyed to find that one size fits all—he need never have bothered measuring the Prime Minister’s head after all, nor waiting an eternity for a tape measure to be found and sent to the room.
When the wig had been wrapped and paid for, Jack looked at the list the Prime Minister had drawn up on hotel stationery at the dressing table.
Dress, size 14. Must be cocktaily, shimmery or sparkly. Something actressy.
Jack had pointed out to the Prime Minister after reading item one that actresses hardly wore such stuff in the daytime. He had once seen Juliet Stevenson in Waterstones Trafalgar Square and she had been wearing an old brown coat and carrying a Kwik Save bag. But the Prime Minister was not to be deterred, so Jack suggested buying two dresses. So item number two became: