by Sue Townsend
They were tracking Ali’s car as it moved along the A46 towards Leicester, where Jack intended to call in and check on his mother. There were intelligence reports that there had been a lot of unusual activity in and around her house lately, but the CCTV pictures had been indistinct. They had picked up the registration of a Mercedes Coupe that had been parked outside for several days guarded by two small boys in hooded tops and baggy trousers. The number plates belonged to the owner of a chain of sportswear shops in Reading; the car had been stolen from the Pink Elephant car park at Stanstead airport and hadn’t been reported missing.
♦
Adele and Lucinda were being driven to Harley Street. Their car was followed by another in which sat Adele’s bodyguard, Sergeant Sandra Lock, and her colleague Sergeant John Harvey.
Adele had yet to find, either in brochures or on the Internet, the perfect nose. Lucinda was growing bored with the subject of Adele’s new nose. She was hoping that Sir Nigel Hambleton would carry the baton from now on.
Their appointment was for seven o’clock in the evening so they had allowed over an hour to travel the short distance of only two and a half kilometres from Downing Street to Harley Street. However, the traffic became gridlocked at several places along the route. At Piccadilly Circus Adele had time to watch the crowds as they milled around the tourist hub of the world. She looked across to Eros and saw now how young he was. He was a teenager in love, and below him on the steps sat other teenagers with beautiful faces, the neon lights reflected in their eyes. A boy who looked remarkably like Morgan was sitting with his arm around the shoulders of a black girl in a combat jacket and khaki trousers, but it couldn’t be Morgan—he had volunteered to put Poppy to bed before writing an essay about child labour.
Lucinda yawned and tried to calculate how much she ought to charge for her time. If she paid her plumber £65 an hour, would it be unreasonable for her to invoice at £150 an hour? After all, she had studied for ten years.
At Cavendish Square the car again came to a complete standstill. In the gardens of the square marquees had been erected and flaring torches illuminated wooden walkways, people in evening dress were showing invitations to dinner jacketed security men. Adele saw several faces that she knew and felt a pang that she hadn’t been invited to whatever it was that was going on. Lucinda murmured, “It’s a charity do to provide water wells in Swaziland.”
The car inched forward and Adele asked the driver to telephone Sir Nigel Hambleton’s secretary and to tell him that the Prime Minister’s wife was stuck in traffic.
Adele said to Lucinda, “What would you say to me if I told you that I want to resign from my unpaid voluntary position, that of being the Prime Minister’s wife?”
Lucinda said, “Are you telling me that you want to divorce Ed?”
“No,” said Adele. “But I want a trial separation from the job.”
Lucinda said, “It’ll be at least two months before your new nose is fit to be seen in public; you should go away, Adele, somewhere warm, take Poppy with you. Do no work, get fat. We women knock ourselves out and for what? I mean, what’s it all about, Alfie?”
Sir Nigel was waiting for them in the entrance lobby of his consulting rooms. He had often seen the notorious nose in photographs and on film and had once murmured to his wife, “By Christ, Betty, I’d like to get my hands on that.” And now here it was. He could hardly restrain himself from feeling its contours, testing the cartilage and accessing the nostrils. He led Adele and Lucinda into his office, where he chatted urbanely about reconstructive surgery. He had recently repaired the septum of a minor royal who had snorted more cocaine than was wise.
The moment came when all three of them had to address the reason for Adele’s visit. Sir Nigel overcame any potential embarrassment by retreating into science and technology.
He measured and calibrated Adele’s nose to the nth degree. He examined it internally with a tiny light on a flexible tube. He asked Adele many nose-related questions. He then pretended to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of giving Adele nasal reconstructive surgery and, unsurprisingly, he suggested that Adele was a suitable candidate. He asked her if she had a particular nose in mind. When she said, “I’d like it a lot smaller, something like Barbra Streisand’s,” he said, “I think we can do better than that, Mrs Floret-Clare.”
He sat her in front of a computer and ordered her to keep absolutely still, then he tapped a few keys and Adele’s face appeared on the screen. He then superimposed a menu of noses on to Adele’s face. She quite liked the Cleopatra; it made her look confident and imperious. The Sophia Loren didn’t work; it made her eyes look too small, though it was beautiful in itself. The Greta Garbo was perfect. She ordered it and insisted on paying a deposit, and asked if it could be given to her the following day.
Sir Nigel said he would shift things about a bit. He would admit her at once and he ordered her not to eat or drink anything after midnight.
♦
Morgan had taken down Poppy’s American mobile. If he was in charge of putting her to bed and getting her to sleep, he would do it on his own terms. She lay on her back watching him through the wooden bars of her cot. He pulled up the low nursery chair and began to tell Poppy a bedtime story.
“Once upon a time in 1856 a boy was born in Scotland called Keir Hardie. He left school and went to work when he was eight. And at the age of ten was working down the mines. Think of that, Poppy, a little kid of ten working in the dark, deep under the ground. He went to night school and became a journalist, then stood for Parliament like Dad. He started the Independent Labour Party.”
Poppy began to whimper. She kicked the blanket off and began to thrash her arms and legs about inside her peppermint-green Babygro. Morgan was amazed at how quickly she worked herself up into a frenzy of open-mouthed screaming, unable to stand it for long; he re-hung the American mobile and set the clockwork in motion.
♦
They entered the outskirts of Leicester. They were 100 miles from London. The Prime Minister said, “I don’t want to go home, Jack. Is there any chance of extending our holiday?”
“This is not a holiday for me,” said Jack. “I’m doing a job of work.”
“C’mon, Jack. It has been absolutely terrific, tremendous fun.”
Jack hated the word ‘fun’. In his opinion it had nothing to do with having a good time and was overused by people who thought practical jokes such as shoving people into swimming pools were funny. It was a word Richard Branson used a lot.
“Have you learned anything?” said Jack bluntly.
“Only that, y’know, people seem to kind of plough their own furrow, regardless of what we in the government want them to do.”
Jack said, “They could plough a straighter furrow with a better plough and a healthier cart horse.”
“Cart horse?” said the Prime Minister. “I’m talking about high-tech computerised farm machinery.”
Jack said, “I tell you what, Ed, it would be an interesting experiment to see how democracy would work in this country, wouldn’t it?”
The Prime Minister said, “Britain is celebrated as being the very cradle of democracy.”
Jack said, “Well, the baby’s fallen out of the cradle into the bathtub and been thrown out with the bathwater.”
Ali was sick of listening to such tangled metaphorical exchanges. He turned the radio on.
“…A hospital spokesman admitted today that the amputated leg at the centre of what has become known as the Barry’s Leg Row has been disposed of by mistake due to an administrative blunder. A mortuary technician has been suspended pending further inquiries. Our medical correspondent, Martha Tree, is at the hospital now. Martha, what can you tell us?”
“Well, very little. As you’ve just said, the leg has been accidentally disposed of and a member of staff has been suspended pending further inquiries.”
“Do we know how the leg was disposed of?”
“No, not at this stage.”
&n
bsp; “Do we know how the family feels about the disposal of the leg?”
“No, not at this stage. But I expect they are devastated. People usually are.”
Jack turned to see how the Prime Minister had taken the news. He appeared to be unconcerned and was fiddling with the hooped gypsy earrings he’d bought from Accessorize in Stratford earlier in the day.
They drove past rows of large detached houses. In the garden of one a woman in a sari was pruning a shrub; in another a brown-skinned family were admiring a new-looking car. There were very few white people around.
The Prime Minister remarked on this and Jack said, sounding like a tour guide, “Leicester’s well on the way to being the first city in Britain to have an ethnic majority.”
Ali laughed and said, “Your women don’t want kids, innit.”
Jack, suddenly conscious of his own childlessness, said defensively, “Our women want to have a life outside of child-bearing.”
The Prime Minister said, “My wife, Adele, has managed to juggle work, children and a social life brilliantly. I don’t know how she does it.”
Ali drove past shops with Indian and Pakistani names. A cinema was showing a Bollywood film. The Bank of India was flanked by Rahki’s shoe shop and Aman’s translation service. Ali said that after he’d dropped Jack and the Prime Minister off at Norma’s house he would visit his second cousin who lived next to the flyover in Belgrave.
“I expect you’ll enjoy eating your own food again,” said the Prime Minister, looking at the restaurants and takeaways.
Ali looked puzzled. “I can get my favourite food anywhere,” he said. “It’s seafood pizza.”
The taxi drove into the estate where Jack had been born and where he had brought himself up. As they passed poorly executed community murals Ali said, “I ain’t happy leaving you here. Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you straight to London?”
The Prime Minister was keen to delay the hour of his return: the weight of his responsibilities was already pushing down on him. He said, “No, we must visit Jack’s mother and find out why she’s not answering her phone. We’ll be perfectly safe, we are protected by CCTV.”
The cameras were everywhere, swivelling their inquisitive heads slowly in 360-degree turns.
Jack said, “CCTV is a joke, Ed. You get badly trained security officers watching a bank of blurred, out-of-focus screens which make everybody on the street look like the abominable snowman. You got caught up in the hysteria whipped up by the private security firms who are hungry for contracts.”
The Prime Minister had come to dread Jack’s lectures and wished he hadn’t encouraged Jack to talk more. Over breakfast at the Grimshaw, Jack had grown alarmingly angry on the subject of the paucity of day nurseries.
♦
Jack failed to recognise the fortified exterior of his mother’s house and he allowed Ali to drive by it twice before he realised that it was in fact Number Ten. He had phoned on and off throughout the day but still received no reply. As he and the Prime Minister walked down the path he thought he saw a face looking through a gap in the curtains at the barred front-room window. The dark beats of drum and bass reverberated through the brickwork.
He banged on the steel-plated door and noticed that the letterbox had disappeared. He wondered how his mother was able to receive the junk mail she was so fond of. She had often rung him in the past to tell him that, according to Mr Tom Champagne of Readers Digest, she had won hundreds of thousands of pounds.
From inside the house came the sound of James shouting. He appeared to think that the drug squad were at the door. The Prime Minister looked around fearfully; he had not expected to find Jack’s mother living in such a depressing area. There was nobody on the street and most of the houses looked unoccupied. It was getting dark and he wished that he had asked Ali to wait for them. Since the beginning of their journey, seven days ago, he had never once felt afraid. Jack had been like a pillar beside him, but a pillar made of cold marble. He sometimes wished that Jack had no political opinions, but he had never doubted Jack’s ability to cope with any situation. Now he saw that Jack himself was afraid and he didn’t like the tremor in Jack’s voice as he shouted, “Mam, Mam, open the door.”
Norma sat behind the closed kitchen door. She could hardly hear herself think, what with James’s music being so loud, but she could still hear Jack shouting from outside. She wanted to run and let him in but James was standing spread-eagled against the kitchen door talking to her in a voice she had come to fear. He was smoking one of his special roll-ups—not the ones with dope in but the other ones, the ones he said would kill her, the kind that made him forget his manners and use terrible words then made him whimper and cry and shit himself.
Jack said to the Prime Minister, “Wait here,” and hoisted himself over the side gate. The Prime Minister wanted to run but the two little hooded figures leaning against the nearby Mercedes did not answer his tentative friendly half-wave.
Jack padded stealthily alongside the house and went into the back garden. The kitchen curtains were closed and the back door had also been reinforced. He pressed close to the window and heard his mother shouting over the music, “Please, I’ll have to let our Jack in.”
Inside, James drew the smoke deep into his lungs, where tens of thousands of tiny capillaries took the chemicals swiftly into his blood stream. And when it hit the section of the brain that produces a feeling of pleasure it destroyed a million cells. James’s pleasure in music, food, sex and the joys of the natural world would be further diminished for ever.
He quickly went through the options that the crack-induced paranoia made available to him. He had a gun he’d bought second-hand for £40; it was inside a cream-cracker tin on top of the kitchen cupboard and he had never fired it yet but he thought he would know what to do. He could shoot Jack and try to escape in the car; he could take Norma hostage; he could invite Jack in and explain to him that his mother was running a crack den from a council house, which was surely grounds for eviction.
He chose to let Jack in and walked to the front door. He drew on the last shreds of his roll-up then began to unfasten the chains and shoot the bolts. The music thudded through his body, his teeth were rattling inside his mouth. He opened the door but Jack wasn’t there; instead he found on the doorstep a blonde woman with hooped earrings, who on closer inspection turned out to be a man in drag. He almost laughed out loud; the Drug Squad filth could never get it right. “Where’s Jack?” he said and pulled the man inside. He shouted into the Prime Minister’s face, “Where’s Jack?”
The Prime Minister had often wondered how he would stand up to interrogation or torture. Then Norma and Jack came to the kitchen door, Jack said “I’m here!” and the Prime Minister was saved from finding out.
Norma was saying inappropriately, “Shall we all have a nice cup of tea?”
∨ Number Ten ∧
TWENTY-ONE
Alexander McPherson went downstairs to the press office and gathered his team around him. They were mostly young and some of them were clever, but not all—one had been chosen because of his obvious stupidity. He was a nice twenty-four-year-old called Ben Fossett who had been carefully selected to represent the gullible, respectable British taxpayer. He had once said, when speaking as a delegate at a Labour Party Conference, that professional politicians should be able to rise high in the Party ranks only if they were totally honest in word and deed.
Fossett’s innocently idealist words were repeated endlessly at New Labour get-togethers and were always accompanied by helpless laughter. Nobody was more surprised than he when he was summoned to the press office at Number Ten and given a job as a special advisor. During his time there he had remained free of cynicism. McPherson used him much as a sea captain of old used a barometer before setting out to cross the Bay of Biscay.
McPherson leaned up against a tall filing cabinet and said, “Right, here’s the facts: One, Adele Floret-Clare has had a psychotic episode or, in other words, s
he’s gone barmy, she’s been given medication and she’s in a private hospital. Two, Barry’s Leg. An injunction has been taken out against publishing anything at all about Barry’s Leg so this is a story that can run no further. I need a statement about Adele to catch the six o’clock news; you’ve got twenty minutes and we haven’t got time for your bollocking laptops to warm up.”
Fossett sat at a desk and chewed at the rubber on the end of his pencil. He thought for a moment then wrote:
Dear Mr or Mrs Editor,
♦
Our mummy has been poorly with a nervous illness, she needs piece and quiet, so please don’t write anything in the newspapers or say anything nasty about her on radio or television. Our Dad is not here to help us, he is away trying to make the world a safer place for children everywhere.
Love from the Clare kiddies.
When it was Fossett’s turn to read his paragraph out loud he introduced it by stammering, “I, er…just sort of, er…put myself, y’know, in the mind of a child…er.”
“Not difficult,” muttered McPherson under his breath.
“If you could get the kiddies to sign it, er…perhaps there is a photograph…And by the way ‘peace’ is deliberately misspelled.”
McPherson tore the paper from Fossett’s sweaty hands, scanned it quickly and ordered a secretary to write it out in a childish hand on Number Ten stationery and to be sure to misspell ‘peace’. When it was done he ran upstairs and entered the Clares’ living quarters, where he found Morgan and Estelle bickering over the TV remote control.
He ordered them to read the letter and to sign it. Morgan refused, stating that it was a crap letter and he would hardly, at his age, be unable to spell the word peace. Estelle, however, had recently been experimenting with her signature and signed with a great flourish. McPherson took the letter and signed for Poppy and said to Morgan, “I know all about your plans to join the anti-globalisation protest next month, Morgan. You should be more discreet with that pay-as-you-go phone of yours.”