by Sue Townsend
Cinched-waisted afternoon frock with a swirly skirt in something silky that moves when you walk.
Shoes: MUST BE high heels with straps or peep toes.
Long Coat: Furry? Leather? Animal skin? Snakeskin?
Sunglasses.
Diamonds.
Jack had pointed out that the Prime Minister would be displaying rather a lot of hairy flesh, so the Prime Minister rang the front desk and asked the receptionist to send a porter to Boots to buy four boxes of Immac.
An hour later, when Jack was smearing the depilatory cream behind the Prime Minister’s knees with a little spatula, he thought to himself, “This is beyond surreal.” When Jack left to go shopping the Prime Minister was showering the white paste away from his now almost totally hairless body.
Jack wasn’t a natural shopper—he visited Marks & Spencer twice a year, in April and in November, when he bought clothing appropriate for the season, including extreme cold and extreme heat. His inclination was towards the neutral palette—he steered clear of navy blue, it being a colour he associated with work and duty. In his Marks’ clothes he felt that he blended in and became almost invisible. There was nothing particularly striking about him; his features were evenly balanced on his face. He had the kind of eyes, nose, mouth and ears that Marks & Spencer might sell, if such things could be bought.
Jack studied the floor plan at the bottom of the escalator in Bentley’s department store and went up to the second floor to ladies’ special-occasion wear. There were other men in the department, disconsolate, out-of-place men, who sat on chairs that were provided for them. One was doing the Daily Telegraph crossword. As Jack passed their eyes met and the man looked away as if ashamed. Jack began rifling through the racks looking for size 14 dresses that fulfilled the Prime Minister’s specification. When they were assembled he quickly chose three, and after studying them for a minute or less he made his one final selection. With the red sequinned sheath dress with the chiffon hem and neck trim over his arm, Jack passed through to women’s daywear. Again he collected together all the suitable size 14 afternoon frocks. Jack was in luck: the gypsy look was in fashion. There was a seemingly endless supply of the flouncy and feminine to choose from. He finally chose one that wouldn’t look out of place in a graveyard, on a bus or walking round a council estate. Black was a daring choice, but he thought that black would look good with the Prime Minister’s new blonde hair.
During Jack’s absence the Prime Minister had rung down to reception and asked if there was any Bronco toilet paper in the hotel. “You’ll have to ring housekeeping,” said the receptionist, who now suspected that he was possibly the subject of a series of practical jokes. When he had put the phone down he looked around for hidden cameras, almost convinced that he was unintentionally taking part in a reality-TV programme.
When Jack bustled in with the bags, the Prime Minister could hardly contain his excitement. He was wearing the white towelling bathrobe provided by the hotel management for their guests. A laminated card in the pocket warned guests not to steal the bathrobes, though not in such brutally frank language. It said: “Should you like to purchase this robe a charge of £55 plus VAT will be added to your room bill.” Beneath the robe the Prime Minister’s body glistened. He had ignored the instruction leaflet inside the Immac box, which advised those using the product to desist from using any skincare products immediately afterwards. Excited by the hairlessness of his body, he had raided the complimentary toiletries basket, which he found next to the washbasin in the bathroom. He had rubbed in the body lotion and then followed it with something called rehydrating protein gel. He had used several cotton buds to clean out his nostrils and his ears. He had applied the contents of the conditioner bottle to his hair and was wearing the shower cap. He had even broken into the tiny sewing kit and had tightened the straps on his wife’s bra—he was grateful to a master at his prep school for teaching him to sew many years ago. He had filed his nails with the emery board and polished his wife’s loafers with the shoeshine pad provided. When he had finished he gave himself a very close shave using the magnifying mirror, which hugely enlarged every bristle, pore and blemish on his face. He took this opportunity to examine himself carefully. Was he a good man? Was he honest? Did he deserve the trust of the British people? Was President Bush right to call him a friend? He was slightly disheartened to see in the magnifying mirror that there was actually no such thing as a close shave. However hard he scraped and for however long the bristles still showed through.
Jack laid the contents of the shopping bags on the Prime Minister’s bed. The diamonds, comprising earrings, neck-lace and ring—£33.50 in total—flashed expensively under the reading light just above the bed head.
Jack removed his shoes and lay on his own bed with his head propped up with one hand and prepared to watch the Prime Minister transform himself into Edwina St Clare, star of stage and screen.
But the Prime Minister said to him coyly, “No, don’t watch, Jack.”
Jack turned his back and watched the CNN news. An immaculately made-up and coiffed American woman was telling the television audience that, “Edward Clare, the British Prime Minister, was testing the facilities of a post-nuclear holocaust government control centre. Adele Floret-Clare, the Prime Minister’s wife, was reported to be incandescent with rage, a source close to the family said today.”
Jack turned his head to see how the Prime Minister had reacted to this disturbing news, but the Prime Minister was in the bathroom and the door was closed. Jack turned off the television and shut his eyes.
When all the slight adjustments had been made and the primping and grooming were over—when the straps on the high heels had been tightened several times, the make-up applied and the wig tousled and teased into a pleasing Monroe-ish mop—the bathroom door opened and the Prime Minister said, “You can look now.”
Jack was very disturbed by what he saw. In the low light of the hotel room the Prime Minister looked enchanting in his red sequinned dress, and was very like the woman of Jack’s dreams.
Jack said huskily, “My God, sir, you’re beautiful.”
The Prime Minister practised walking in his high heels between the beds, while Jack washed and shaved and changed his shirt. They then made their way arm in arm down to the hotel dining room. The Prime Minister was slightly overdressed.
As they walked in one waiter said to another, “She’s a handsome woman, it’s a pity she has nay tits on her.”
They talked politics over dinner. The Prime Minister was impressed with Jack’s grasp of economics and social policy.
Over a hideous parcel of filo pastry, anchovies and capers wrapped incomprehensibly in string, Jack said that, in his opinion, giving the pensioners a seventy pence pay rise was a major insult and that it would have been better to have given them nothing.
♦
For the main course, for old times’ sake, the Prime Minister had chosen haggis, tatties and neeps. He explained to Jack that haggis, potatoes and turnips had been his favourite food as a small boy living in Edinburgh, and he advised Jack to have the same. The humble dish the Prime Minister had expected, however, had been arranged by Monsieur Souris, the chef, into something resembling the Eiffel Tower, and was surrounded not by gravy, as Edward had hoped it would be, but by a tepid pool of rhubarb coulis.
Jack said, “Christ, how are we meant to tackle this? From the top down or the bottom up?”
The Prime Minister eased a little haggis away from the centre of the tower and said, “Try the middle way, Jack.”
Over a lemon sorbet ruined by the inclusion of fresh mint leaves and unripe strawberries, they discussed the police retirement issue. Jack, softened by wine and exhilarated by the company of the glamorous Edwina St Clare, lowered his guard for a moment and confessed that a senior officer of his acquaintance had recently retired on health grounds, with full pay, due to the trauma of witnessing two drunks fighting outside a pub on a Friday night.
By the time the foul coffe
e came the two of them were laughing easily together. The Prime Minister said, “You know what, Jack, you’d look great with one of those new very short haircuts.”
Jack sighed inwardly. He hated it when a woman tried to change his appearance.
The waiter who had served them all night, mostly incompetently but good-naturedly, presented them with the bill, saying, “In my country the cost of your dinner would buy a donkey and a cart.”
Jack said, “Cheeky bugger.”
But the Prime Minister asked the waiter which country he was from.
“Albania, miss. I come here to work. No Scotsman will do this job for the minimum wage.”
“And how did you get into the country?” asked the Prime Minister solicitously.
“It was not so difficult,” shrugged the waiter as Jack signed the bill. “It is traditional for the men of my village to travel to Britain hidden inside a turnip truck. Most of the village men are here now living in the Colinton area of Edinburgh; the women and children will be coming next year.”
“Why are we importing turnips from Albania?” asked the Prime Minister.
“These are organic turnips for your middle classes,” laughed the waiter. “They are badly shaped and full of worms because we cannot afford the pesticides.”
Later, as the two men undressed for bed, they discussed the problems of illegal immigration. The Prime Minister recognised that there was a labour shortage, and wondered aloud to Jack if Albania was a country where they should be recruiting for the next intake of trainee policemen.
♦
Adele was searching through one of her three wardrobes for her Nicole Farhi trouser suit. Wendy was pulling drawers open, looking for the two cashmere sweaters. Adele said, “You’re responsible for my wardrobe, Wendy, ergo you’re responsible for the disappearance of my clothes.”
“Are you accusing me of stealing?” Wendy was tired and wanted to leave and go to the hospital. Barry’s leg was coming off tomorrow and she wanted to reassure him that as soon as he was conscious after the operation there would be someone from an amputee self-help group to see him through his darkest hour. “Because if you are, I’m leaving. I don’t know what I’m doing here anyway. I’m not appreciated. I’m vastly overqualified—may I remind you that I have a degree in food science.”
“It was a Third from somewhere nobody’s ever heard of,” shouted Adele.
“Everybody’s heard of Bradford!” yelled Wendy.
Both women started to cry then moved together to comfort each other. Adele said, “I’m sorry, I’m being a complete cow. You’re far too big to fit into my clothes. It’s just that I’m furious with Ed for going off like that without saying goodbye. I can’t even phone him and he can’t phone me. I really can’t live without him, Wendy.”
Wendy said, “I know you’re both very fond of each other—”
“Fond? You obviously don’t understand,” Adele shrieked. “I can’t live without him.”
At the age of eleven Adele had been taken out of her private day school and sent away to a residential school for gifted children, paid for by her local education authority. Her precociousness had both delighted and alarmed her grandmother, who had treated her as though she was an alien princess. However, at her new school she was merely one of many clever children and overnight she felt herself turn into an ordinary little girl who was not even attractive and didn’t seem very popular with the other children.
Edward was Adele’s only true friend. She had never had another. Without him she felt herself falling apart, disintegrating cell by cell. When she looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror she saw that she was already fading away—apart from her nose, which looked bigger than ever. A mocking voice in her head spoke: “Who’s a clever girl, then?”
Two days ago Adele had stopped taking her medication.
∨ Number Ten ∧
EIGHT
Jack had taken the precaution of stuffing his pockets with the pastel-coloured tissues provided by the hotel, but he soon realised that he should have brought the whole box. The Prime Minister’s tears flowed like a torrent released from a dam. His grief was Mediterranean, open-mouthed and noisy. Other visitors to the graveyard crept past on their way to visit their own dead. This area of the graveyard, watched over by pine trees, was seldom disturbed by the sound of raw grief.
In the florist’s earlier that morning the Prime Minister had wept a little when the florist asked him for whom he was buying flowers.
“My mother,” he had replied.
When the florist suggested that elderly ladies preferred quite traditional bouquets rather than the more modern spiky arrangements, the Prime Minister had said, “But my mother is not elderly, she’s only thirty-seven.”
The florist withdrew for a moment to allow the peculiar-looking blonde woman to be comforted by the tall silent man with her, and busied herself arranging pussy willow in a galvanised bucket. She was used to dealing with the public in crisis—sometimes she thought counselling should be taught at floristry school. She’d lost count of the marriages she had probably saved. She always spent longer on the bouquets that carried the little card that said simply ‘Sorry’. She had stood in the shop and cried with the recently bereaved. Kiddies’ floral tributes were always difficult; it was tricky getting the eyes right on a teddy-bear-shaped wreath. And weddings! The trouble they caused. So many brides cancelled at the last minute these days. Not that she blamed them. Why would a young woman want to saddle herself with one man for life when she could more or less buy a baby from a laboratory if she wanted one?
“Perhaps a spring arrangement, then?” said the florist, after watching the woman in sunglasses smelling a bucketful of blue hyacinths.
Jack suggested that a few stems of the pussy willow would be nice, and between the three of them they constructed a sweet-smelling bouquet.
♦
A man was riding a grass-cutting machine over the gravestones. Jack wondered to himself if this was why the graves in that area had no headstones—was it to ease the path of the machine, or was it a local custom?
The full skirt of the Prime Minister’s black dress lifted in the wind that was blowing from the distant sea. “I got into Ampleforth, Mum,” he said. “And I qualified for the Bar, and now I’m the Prime Minister. So thanks for…y’know, the good early start. I hugely enjoyed the years you were my mother.”
The man on the small cutting machine was revving the engine and eyeing the long grass around Heather Clare’s grave. Jack gently led the Prime Minister away before he could talk to his dead mother again; it was bad enough when people did it in films. As they walked down the slight incline towards the entrance Jack said, “Well she’s in a lovely spot, sir.”
They stopped by a sign that said:
Complaints and inquiries regarding the upkeep and maintenance of the graves should be addressed directly to mortltd.co.uk
The Prime Minister said, “Dad’s ashes were scattered in the Gorbals.”
“Why was that, sir?” Jack asked.
“Poor Dad wrote his only will when he was a communist and expected to die for the cause. The money from his estate went to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was a shock for everyone, because he was the chairman of the Berkshire Conservative Association at the time of his death. He should have brought his will up to date.”
“Or his principles,” said Jack.
“Principles?” the Prime Minister repeated the word as though he had never heard it before.
“I’m a bit mystified as to how a person can change his principles so completely, that’s all, sir,” said Jack. “I believe he joined the Liberals at one point in his life?”
“He moved down to the West Country,” said the Prime Minister defensively. “The Liberal Party provided him with a good social life.”
Jack pressed on. It was a mystery to him how a person’s view could change. “Then weren’t there a couple of years with the Social Democrats?”
“He came briefly
under the spell of Shirley Williams, yes,” conceded the Prime Minister.
Jack wondered how low a man’s spirits had to sink in order for him to be mesmerised by Shirley Williams. “So principles are a moveable feast, are they, sir?”
“Look, Jack, you can’t eat principles, neither can you be housed, clothed or educated by them,” said the Prime Minister.
It was their first quarrel. As they sat in the back of the taxi, each man thought his private thoughts about the other. They were often not charitable thoughts.
♦
Clarke and Palmer had no secrets from each other—what was the point? Nothing was secret any more. Clarke used to enjoy walking on the South Downs; on his days off he’d drive out of the city without telling any bugger where he was going and sod off into the hills alone with his thoughts. Sometimes he’d sing the hymns he’d been taught at school; he would leave the well-trodden footpaths to avoid other walkers and would enjoy the feeling that he was an unseen speck on the landscape. One Monday morning he’d gone into work and told Palmer he had walked across the South Downs the day before.
“I know,” said Palmer. “You were wearing new boots but you found it heavy going over the last few hundred metres to Goosehill Camp on the side of Stoughton Down.”
Clarke asked, “Where were you?”
Palmer said, “Here in the office.”
Clarke liked his colleague—even loved him a little—but he hated Palmer invading his privacy and he made him promise not to do it again. Palmer had promised, but Clarke could never be quite sure that Palmer resisted the temptation.
♦
The taxi driver eyed the Prime Minister in his driving mirror and said, “Excuse me, madam, and don’t mind me asking, but why would a person be wearing sunglasses on a day like today? I can see you’re no blind: do you have an eye condition, or what? I mean, are you trying to make yourself look mysterious, is that it? Is it a personality defect, you attempting to cover up, or what?”