The Cockroach

by Ian Mcewan

  In such exchanges it was important to have, if not the last word, then the last little touch. As the prime minister stood, he pressed a button under the table. It had been carefully arranged. A heavily bearded policeman came in, carrying an automatic rifle.

  ‘Take him out the front way. And go slowly,’ Jim said. ‘Don’t release his elbow until he’s through the gates.’

  The two men shook hands. ‘They’re waiting for you out there, Bennie. A photo-op. Would you like to borrow a comb?’

  * * *

  *

  There was nothing in the near-infinite compendium of EU rules and trade protocols of the customs union that prevented a member state from reversing the circulation of its finances. That did not quite represent permission. Or did it? It was a defining principle of an open society that everything was lawful until there was a law against it. Beyond Europe’s eastern borders, in Russia, China and all the totalitarian states of the world, everything was illegal unless the state sanctioned it. In the corridors of the EU, no one had ever thought of excluding the reverse flow of money from acceptable practice because no one had ever heard of the idea. Even if someone had, it would have been difficult to define the legal or philosophical principles by which it should be illegal. An appeal to basics would not have helped. Everyone knew that in every single law of physics, except one, there was no logical reason why the phenomena described could not run backwards as well as forwards. The famous exception was the second law of thermodynamics. In that beautiful construct, time was bound to run in one direction only. Then Reversalism was a special case of the second law and therefore in breach of it! Or was it? This question was hotly debated in the Strasbourg Parliament right up until the morning the members had to decamp to Brussels, as they frequently had to. By the time they had arrived and unpacked and enjoyed a decent lunch, everyone had lost the thread, even when a theoretical physicist came specially from the CERN laboratories to set everything straight in less than three hours with some interesting equations. Besides, the next day a further question arose. Would what the scientist said remain true if he’d said it in reverse?

  The matter, like many others, was set aside. A fierce debate on Moldovan ice cream was pending. The issue was not as trivial as the Europhobe London press was pretending. The struggle to harmonise the ingredients of the high-quality Moldovan product with EU rules represented a microcosm of growing diplomatic tensions between the west and Russia over the future of the tiny, strategically placed country. It was a complex business but, in theory at least, it was solvable. Reversalism was beyond all that.

  The average Brussels official had watched in wonder as the startling decision was made by referendum. Then, after all, one tended to relax and shrug as the whole process predictably stalled, mired in complexity. Surely, this nonsense was about to be shelved in the time-honoured fashion. But lately there was even greater wonder as kindly, dithering Prime Minister Sams appeared to undergo a personality change to emerge as a modern Pericles, artful and ferocious in driving Reversalism through, do or die, with or without Europe. Was it really going to happen? Couldn’t the mother of parliaments bring the nation to its senses? Could it really be the case that a fellow from Brussels in need of recreation could spend a lavish weekend at the London Ritz, then walk away from the check-out desk with three thousand pounds in his hand? And perhaps be arrested the same day for being in possession of illegal funds? Or at the least, have his funds confiscated as he left the country? Or – what horror – be obliged to buy a job in the hotel kitchens washing dishes until the cash was spent? How could a nation do this to itself? It was tragic. It was laughable. Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia. Perfect. The word began to circulate.

  But the puzzled, weary or condescending smiles began to freeze when the tweets of the US president assumed a degree of consistency on the subject. In the name of free trade, American prosperity and greatness, and raising the poor, Reversalism was ‘good’. Prime Minister Sams was great. And, although by the conventions of EU subsidiarity this was strictly an internal affair, it bothered some in Brussels that President Tupper was proposing an ex-general, the billionaire owner of a string of casinos, to be the new ‘czar’ of the British National Health Service. For these various reasons the prime minister was listened to with unusual courtesy when he delivered a lecture at NATO headquarters in early December.

  Sams was there in place of his disgraced foreign secretary. There was nothing new of substance in his talk except for its urgency. The PM came straight to the point. As everybody knew, the UK would be reversing its finances and therefore its fortunes on the twenty-fifth of that month. ‘Save the date!’ he called out cheerily. There were obliging smiles. The prime minister ran through a list of demands, long familiar to the negotiators among the audience in the grand lecture hall. The first of the EU’s new annual contributions to the UK of £11.5 billion would fall due on 1 January. Nato’s first payment was not expected until June. The funds that would accompany all EU exports to the UK must assume an inflation rate of two per cent. And to repeat – and here Jim spread his hands as though to embrace them all – as a gesture of goodwill, funds accompanying UK exports to the EU would match that rate. There were further technicalities as well as reassurances about the United States’ ‘direction of travel’. In his closing remarks, Jim expressed the hope that before long ‘the scales would drop from your eyes’, a phrase that flummoxed the Bulgarian interpreter in her booth at the back of the hall. The scales would drop, the prime minister said, and everyone would ‘follow us blindly into the future’.

  Afterwards, a young French diplomat was overheard saying to a colleague as they made their way to the banquet, ‘I don’t understand why they stood to applaud. And so loudly, and for so long.’

  ‘Because,’ his older companion explained, ‘they detested everything he said.’

  It was not unreasonable for the British press to describe Jim’s speech as a triumph.

  There was a disconcerting moment the next day in Berlin. He was there for a private meeting with the chancellor. It was a busy day for her in the Reichstag and, with much apology, she met with him in a tiny sitting room near her office. Apart from two interpreters, two notetakers, three bodyguards, the German foreign minister, the British ambassador and the second secretary, they were alone. Where they sat, an ancient oak table separated the two leaders. Everyone else was obliged to stand. Over the chancellor’s shoulder the PM had a view across the Spree towards a museum. Through its plate glass windows, he could see a display of the history of the Berlin Wall. Jim knew two words in German: Auf and Wiedersehen. Halfway through the meeting, he was setting out his stall. He wanted extra funds to accompany German exports of cars to the UK in return for extra funds to supplement British exports of Glaswegian Riesling which, as he explained, was far superior to the Rhenish version.

  It was at this point that the chancellor interrupted him. With her elbow on the table, she pressed a hand to her forehead and closed her tired eyes. ‘Warum?’ she said, and followed this word with a brief tangle of others. And again, ‘Warum…’ and a longer tangle. Then the same again. And finally, still with her eyes closed, and her head sinking a little further towards the table, a simple, plaintive, ‘Warum?’

  Tonelessly, the interpreter said, ‘Why are you doing this? Why, to what end, are you tearing your nation apart? Why are you inflicting these demands on your best friends and pretending we’re your enemies? Why?’

  Jim’s mind went blank. Yes, he was weary from so much travel. There was silence in the room. Across the river a line of schoolchildren was forming up behind a teacher to go into the museum. Standing right behind his chair, the British ambassador softly cleared her throat. It was stuffy. Someone should open a window. There drifted through the PM’s mind a number of compelling answers, though he did not utter them. Because. Because that’s what we’re doing
. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted. Because I’ve come to the rescue. Because. That, ultimately, was the only answer: because.

  Then reason began to seep back and with relief he recalled a word from his speech the evening before. ‘Renewal,’ he told her. ‘And the electric plane.’ After an anxious pause, it came in a rush. Thank God. ‘Because, Madame Chancellor, we intend to become clean, green, prosperous, united, confident and ambitious!’

  That afternoon he was on his way back to Tegel Airport, dozing in the back of the ambassador’s limo, when his phone rang.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ the chief whip said. ‘I’ve threatened all I can. They know they’ll be deselected. But a dozen or more have gone over to Benedict. Sacking has made him popular. And they don’t believe Fish. Or they hate her anyway. The way things stand now we’re more than twenty votes short…Jim, are you there?

  ‘I’m here,’ he said at last.

  ‘So.’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘Prorogue pour mieux sauter?’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  He was gazing out of the bulletproof window. The driver, preceded and followed by the outriders, was taking a circuitous route down narrow green roads, past well-kept shacks with quarter-acre gardens, also nicely tended. Little second homes, he assumed. There was a particular greyness to Berlin. A smooth and pleasant grey. It was in the air, in the light sandy soil, in the speckled stonework. Even in the trees and grass and suburban herbaceous borders. It was the cool and spacious grey necessary to sustained thought. As he mused and the chief whip waited, Jim felt his heartbeat slowing and his thoughts arranging themselves into patterns as neat and self-contained as the little houses he was passing. It was as if he was in possession of an ancient brain that could solve any modern problem it confronted. Even without the deep resource of the pheromonal unconscious. Or of the trivial Internet. Without pen and paper. Without advisers.

  He looked up. The procession of cars and motorbikes ushering the prime minister towards his waiting RAF jet had stopped to rejoin the main road. Just then, a question came to him. It seemed to drift up from the bottom of a well a hundred miles deep. How lightly and beautifully it rose to present itself. How easy it was to pose the question: who was it he loved most in all the world? Instantly, he knew the answer, and he knew exactly what he was going to do.

  * * *

  *

  No one was surprised when Archie Tupper asked a business friend to organise an impromptu conference of Republican lawmakers and the various institutes and think tanks to which they were attached. These meetings were common, rather devout, well funded, patriotic and convivial. The general drift was pro-life, pro-second amendment, with a strong emphasis on free trade. Mining, construction, oil, defence, tobacco and pharmaceuticals were well represented. Jim now recalled that he himself had been a couple of times, before he became leader of the party. He had only fond memories of affable, portly types of a certain age, with their scented, closely shaven pink faces, gentlemen comfortable in their tuxes. (Few women attended and no people of colour.) One kindly fellow had pressed on him a generous invitation to a million-acre ranch in Idaho. Five minutes later, another promised him a welcome in an antebellum spread in Louisiana. Generous and friendly, they tended to be hostile to any mention of climate change and to international organisations like the UN, NATO and the EU. Jim had felt at home. It was inevitable that they would take a close interest in and help fund Britain’s Reversalist project, though many thought it was better suited to a small country and not for the USA. But perhaps Tupper was about to convince them otherwise. British MPs of the right persuasion had often been invited in the past couple of years. But this hastily arranged conference was going to make reverse-flow finance its theme. The president would give a brief keynote speech. Among the international guests invited were forty pro-government Conservative MPs. The venue was a hotel in Washington that happened to belong to Archie Tupper, which was expected to give proceedings there a certain intimacy.

  For the British contingent, the timing was inconvenient. The parliamentary timetable was full. The only conversation was Reversalism. There was much anxiety about the rebellion led by the treacherous ex-foreign secretary. The date set for the vote was 19 December. Constituency business always intensified around this time, and there were the usual Christmas engagements, as well as family gatherings. But this was a luxurious trip, first-class travel, suites measuring six thousand square feet, astonishing five-figure per diem expenses, a handshake with the president and overall excitement that American interest in the British Project was growing. On top of that, the prime minister had written to them all personally, urging them to attend. He wasn’t going himself. Instead he was sending in his place Trevor Gott, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a dull fellow, occasionally impulsive, often described as being ‘two-dimensional’. There was nothing for it – the MPs made their apologies to colleagues, constituency officials and families and set about making their ‘pairing’ arrangements. This was a parliamentary convention by which a member who had to be absent from the house for a vote could pair off with an MP of the opposing benches. Neither would attend, and so the vote could not be affected. It was particularly useful for MPs on the government side who were often away on official business. Useful too for MPs who were ill or demented or attending funerals.

  The conference was a stunning success, as they almost always are. At the start, President Tupper said that the British prime minister was great, and Reversalism was good. Among the congressmen and senators, oligarchs and think-tank intellectuals, there was a joyous sense that the world was configuring itself to their dreams. History was on their side. The banquet on the evening of 18 December was as magnificent as the several banquets that preceded it. After the speeches, a full orchestra backed a Frank Sinatra imitator in a soaring rendition of ‘My Way’. Then a Gloria Gaynor lookalike brought seven hundred tearful diners to their feet with ‘I Will Survive’.

  Just as everybody was sitting down, the phones of forty guests vibrated in unison. They were urgently commanded by the chief whip to return to London. Their ground transport was already outside the hotel. Their flight was leaving in two hours. They had ten minutes to pack. They were needed in the Commons by eleven the next morning for the crucial Reversalism vote. The pairing arrangement had broken down.

  The British left the banqueting room with no time for farewells to their new friends. How they cursed their Labour colleagues all the way to Ronald Reagan Airport. What an outrage, to be dragged from paradise by the perfidy of those they had foolishly trusted. Since most of the MPs were too angry to sleep, they punished the drinks trolley and cursed all the way to Heathrow. Due to heavy traffic around Chiswick, they arrived in the Commons just a few minutes before the Division Bell rang. Only as the Washington Revellers, as they came to be known, filed through the lobby did they notice the absence of their pairing partners. The Bill was passed with a majority of twenty-seven votes. The rest, as people kept saying all through the morning, was ‘history’. The next day, the Reversalism Bill received Royal Assent and passed into law.

  It was, of course, a constitutional scandal, a disgrace. Howls of rage from the Clockwiser press. The forty paired Labour MPs signed a letter to the Observer angrily denouncing the Sams government’s ‘filthy, shameless manoeuvrings’. There were calls for a judicial review.

  ‘We’ll ride it out. It will be fine. Just you see,’ Jim told Jane Fish on the phone. Afterwards, he arranged for a case of champagne to be sent round to the chief whip’s office.

  That evening he gave a long interview to BBC television. He said in grave, reasonable tones, ‘Apologise? Let me explain the fundamentals. In this country we do not have a written constitution. What we have instead are traditions and conventions. And I have always honoured them, even when to do so has been against my best intere
sts. Now, I should point out to you that there is a long and honourable tradition in the house of breaking the pairing arrangement. Not so long ago, but before my time as prime minister, a Liberal Democrat MP was giving birth to her baby while her pairing partner, on the instruction of the whips, was voting in the Commons on a closely contested matter. As is well known, back in 1976 the highly respected Michael Heseltine picked up and swung the mace in the Chamber in celebration, one might say, of a broken pair. Twenty years later three of our MPs were paired not only with three absent Labour MPs but also with three Lib Dems. Labour has broken the pairing arrangement on countless occasions. They’re only too happy to tell you about it late at night in the Strangers’ Bar. All these examples bind into place a convention of cheating that has passed into common practice. It is constitutionally correct. It shows the world that parliament is, above all, a fine and fallible place, warm and vibrant with the human touch. I should also add that pairing is far less common in important votes. It was quite right to bring those MPs back from Washington to the Commons when a matter of vital national importance was at stake. Of course, the opposition is crying foul. That’s their job. Some of them are miffed that Horace Crabbe voted with us. So, in answer to your question, no, emphatically no, neither I nor any members of my government have anything to apologise for.’

  It wasn’t a white Christmas, but it was not far off. There was a light fall on the first of January, just before the R-Day bank holiday. Two inches of snow deterred no one. Millions rushed to the stores to lay in money to pay for their jobs when they returned to work after the break. There were a few expected teething problems. Fans turned up for a Justin Bieber concert expecting to be paid. The event was cancelled. People stood by cash machines wondering whether they were supposed to poke cash into the slot formerly intended for debit cards. But these were the largest January sales on record. Shops were stripped clean of goods – a great boost to the economy some thought. The news that St Kitts and Nevis was withdrawing from the trade deal was barely noticed.