The House

by Tom Watson

  ‘Who is “they”, Christine? And what do you mean, “our story”? You’ve stirred up a bucket of shit that means I have to relive the worst year of my life.’

  She flinches. ‘Owen, it was the year we were together.’

  ‘Yeah and look how that turned out! It was also the year of Jay, the expenses scandal and Phil fucking off to the Tories. Austerity, Brexit. It started there and then in the middle of the banking crisis. Even a few months of being with you doesn’t make up for that.’

  He gets up and grabs his tray, ready to dump it back onto one of the racks to be removed and cleaned so hard another layer of the varnish will come off. She puts her hand on it so he either has to wait or tip it, the dirty cutlery and shreds of salad into her lap. He can’t do that.

  ‘Owen, please. I’m sorry. Come with me now. Meet my girl. Listen to her story.’

  No. He doesn’t want to. He wants to get back to his office, withdraw the question and get on with his life.

  Chapter 14

  Thursday 18 December 2008

  The party is in full swing. The central lobby of the Public Sector and General Workers Union building off Queen Street has been strung with fairy lights and tinsel, and around the edges of the space cabaret tables are set up with doll-sized Christmas trees and piles of cheap crackers. The Union choir is singing carols at the entrance and the caterers are handing out mini Christmas puddings and turkey and cranberry bites.

  Crackers are pulled. Jokes read out. Hats worn. They are generous with the booze, but it’s eggnog and punch, not champagne. As the world slides deeper into recession no one needs the UNION BOSSES IN CHAMPAGNE BLOW-OUT headlines. Owen and Christine have found themselves a corner by the plate-glass windows which look over a stark, modernist courtyard, grey with the London winter. Christine is sipping her eggnog and listening to the choir with a slightly daffy smile on her lips.

  She’s been smiling since they stayed up all night to watch Obama win the US election. She came over and the whole house made a night of it. Jay and Georgina danced together to BB Collins. Phil and Owen fought to out-nerd each other on their deconstructions of American industry and Christine’s heady delight lit them all up. And Jay was himself again. Funny, sharp. They were part of something better. Still. Again. At last.

  After Obama’s speech, Phil, Jay and Georgina went to crash out for a couple of hours before work. Christine and Owen sat on the front step together, just to make this one good day last as long as they could, listening to the city shift towards dawn. Hope. Change. For a few hours Owen felt like he was living the movie version of his life and these were the glorious closing frames. Struggles behind and sunny uplands ahead.

  Christine’s heading up to Alnwick on Tuesday. Owen isn’t leaving London till Christmas Eve, heading up on the train with a sack of gifts from the House of Commons gift shop. His mum loves anything with a portcullis on it. The tins of biscuits are shared with the neighbours, then the tin becomes a store for her sewing bits. Owen’s sister likes the mugs.

  He’s still trying to hang on to the feeling, the Obama buzz, but it’s getting harder. Jay isn’t here. Relationships between the Union and the Treasury team are a bit strained as rumours of public-sector pay freezes gather momentum. It’s party season, though, so no doubt he has some other event, more champagne soaked than this one, to go to.

  Phil has come. Even though he seems to dislike all the unions and what they stand for more and more. And the dislike is mutual. Good for him.

  Owen spots him as he comes in and waves, then watches as Phil grabs a paper cup of punch from the waiter at the door and shrugs off his backpack to avoid clobbering the mini puddings out of the revellers’ hands as he fights across the hall.

  ‘Nice turn-out!’ He tucks the backpack next to the window. ‘Hey, Chris.’

  ‘Hey,’ she replies. ‘Owen, who’s that?’

  She nods sideways. Under the mezzanine level Coogan is talking to a woman of about their age. He towers over her and has a hand on her upper arm. She has her head down and is shaking her head, her face flushed.

  ‘Don’t know her,’ Owen says. Coogan glances around, like he can feel them looking, then he puts his face closer to the woman’s, talking fast. His grip is making the fabric of her suit jacket wrinkle. She moves her arm. Is she trying to pull away? It’s hard to tell through the crowd.

  ‘Looks nasty,’ Phil says, rising up on the balls of his feet to try and see better. ‘Should we do something?’

  Christine pushes herself off her high stool.

  ‘Too bloody right we should. Owen, stay here. Phil, your arm, please. We are now slightly pissed.’

  Phil offers his arm and Christine takes it. Owen watches as they make their way, not unsteadily, across towards where Coogan and the woman are standing. As they pass he watches Christine miming recognition of the girl. Coogan says something and Christine, all smiles, replies.

  The woman moves and even through the crowd Owen can see the reluctance with which he lets her go. Then everything has reconfigured: Christine and the woman are arm in arm and heading further under the mezzanine. Coogan looks at Phil, then turns and stalks off. Owen watches Phil amble back in his direction, then looks round the room again. Happy colleagues raising a glass of Christmas cheer. A few singing along with the carollers. Then he notices Kieron Hyde, standing in the dead centre of the room, staring at the space where Christine and the unknown female disappeared.

  ‘How did you manage to pull a woman like Christine?’ Phil asks him. ‘Explain it to me. Is it the brooding thing you have going on? It must be the brooding, strong-man thing.’

  ‘It’s my cheerful personality and rugged good looks.’

  Phil half-laughs into his reclaimed punch. ‘Seems unlikely.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Christine did the fake “didn’t-we-meet-at-the-conference?” thing, swiftly followed by the “can-you-show-me-where-the-ladies’-is” thing.’ Phil stares into space, a crease of worry on his forehead. ‘Poor girl was eager enough to pretend to recognise Chris, then show her the way. God, I hate Coogan.’

  Owen finishes his eggnog. Weird. Like drinking custard. ‘He’s OK most of the time. Works like a bloody pit pony on Union business. If I had one of him to put in every marginal, we might end up denying the Tories a majority at least.’

  Phil’s face twists in a complicated rictus.

  ‘Not looking good?’

  ‘No. Every time we update the list of defensive marginals with the private polling, it gets longer.’

  Christine is coming back towards them carrying three cups of punch at once, elbows out and biting the side of her lip as she concentrates. Owen takes one carefully from her and feels a frisson as he touches her fingers, her dry smooth skin and the touch of her painted nails.

  ‘So?’ Phil asks. ‘How was the damsel in distress?’

  Chris shrugs and drinks her punch while Owen examines his. It’s neon red and has bits of what might be orange pith in it. He hopes it won’t make the eggnog in his stomach curdle.

  ‘Didn’t get much out of her,’ she says. ‘Didn’t try either, mind you. She seemed pretty shaken up. Owen, do you know what an NDA is?’

  ‘Non-disclosure agreement,’ he says automatically. ‘They get stuck onto lawsuits sometimes, people settling disputes with their employer sign them in return for compensation. Why?’

  ‘She said she’d signed one. Didn’t mention her name, but she told me that. Anyway, she’s gone home.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you what Coogan was going on at her about?’ Phil asks.

  ‘No. Asked me to walk her out. Still, it gave me an excuse to get to the bar.’ She glances at her watch. ‘We have to go in a bit.’

  ‘What?’

  She sighs. Mock exasperation. ‘You are buying me and Phil dinner at Tas, remember? You stood us up last week.’

  Oh yes. Though he didn’t think Phil had minded that much.

  ‘Got to watch your manners, Owen!’ She puts her han
d on his arm, squeezes it and says more gently, ‘Even if we are both terribly grateful for your dedication to saving the country from the Tory scourge.’

  Phil laughs. Bit too hard. Perhaps Christine makes him nervous. Owen is not sure how he’d manage without her, even though they’ve only been together three months. They would make a great team, him and Christine. Him an MP and her running the constituency office. He catches himself. No doubt he’s besotted. He hopes she feels the same way, or something close to it. He doesn’t want to scare her off back into the forest of Westminster where so many more powerful, smarter, richer men are lurking.

  ‘We should say hi to Georgina, make sure she knows we turned up.’ Phil is scanning the room for her.

  Christine points across the room. ‘She’s over there.’

  Owen looks. Georgina is standing next to Kieron Hyde and the chair of the Coventry East Labour Party. She has a tinsel halo perched on top of her head and is wearing a tight red business suit. The look is a confusing mix of business professional and naughty Mrs Santa.

  An upright piano has been dragged into position under the Christmas tree and a man with a thick shock of black hair is playing the opening chords to ‘My Flag is Red’. The choir begins to regroup. As she turns towards it, Georgina sees them and waves. Owen waves back. When the singing starts, Kieron wraps his arm around her waist.

  Christine fake-coughs into her punch. ‘Daddy issues.’

  Owen gives her the side-eye and she tries to look innocent. It’s true Georgina does flirt with powerful, older men. Owen’s still not sure why Christine looks down on her for it.

  ‘Shall we head?’ Phil asks.

  ‘Ah, come on, you misery,’ Owen finishes his drink and sets it down. ‘One chorus.’

  ‘I don’t think I remember the words,’ Phil replies.

  Chapter 15

  Tuesday 8 March 2022

  Owen and Christine take a cab and she gives the driver an address in Vauxhall. Owen remembers the feeling of lockdown in London, of being a hamster on a wheel restricted to a world whose limits were a twenty-minute walk from his flat. He finds himself longing to get back to his home in the constituency for the weekend.

  It didn’t feel like home at first: the terraced house in his target seat was just a place to sleep as he launched his campaign, won that, then lost his argument with his voters on Brexit. He hardly slept during the 2019 campaign, and still his majority was cut by two-thirds.

  Then came the virus. The world shrank, came into focus. When he wasn’t in London he walked the streets around his house, mask in one pocket, sanitiser in the other, talked to his neighbours over the low garden walls and learned to love the place.

  The cab pulls up outside a neat block of flats just off the main road and he follows Christine out and onto the pavement. She’s moving fast; she’s already rung the buzzer and is holding the front door open for him before he slams the cab door behind him. He resents the ease with which she touches things, then remembers the fear when she and Rob were ill and her mother had to take the kids. Squashes the feeling.

  The hall needs a new carpet and the paintwork is scratched, but only the homes of the ultra-wealthy look polished these days. Everyone else, and their landlords, are making do. The air is musty, still.

  The flat they are after is on the ground floor. Christine knocks and the door is opened at once. The woman welcoming them into the room is very pale, and very slim and young. Mid-twenties at most, with long black hair.

  ‘Hey, Christine!’ She glances at Owen, a mix of suspicion and defiance. ‘You must be Owen McKenna.’

  He admits it.

  ‘Elsie Collins.’

  She’s in jeans and a vest top with a lumberjack shirt thrown over it. Geometric tattoos twist out from under them to her wrists and her eyes are heavily made up. She looks like a character in a graphic novel.

  Owen looks around while she offers to make tea and Christine tells her they are pushed for time. A light space painted rental beige. An obvious workstation at one side of the living area with two huge computer screens. The pictures on the walls are posters and prints. He spots reproductions of a couple of early communist propaganda posters, admires them. There are a couple of others advertising sci-fi films and twin Chagalls over the TV.

  The living space is divided from the kitchen by a dining table. Another computer, a laptop this time, and a stack of cardboard folders half-fill a space meant for six. Another flashback of the table in the old house. Elsie indicates the chairs around it and Owen sits down.

  ‘Christine told me I should start from the beginning, Mr McKenna,’ she says as she opens the windows, lets in the purifying breeze. Northumbrian accent, modified by some years down south. It has a rough, unused edge to it. Owen notices the blanket on the sofa, a tea mug next to it. Wonders if Elsie is a long-hauler, one of those whose illness has left a cluster of strange fatigues and random days of pain in its wake.

  ‘Please do.’ No reason he should give this woman a hard time just because he’s angry with Christine. ‘And please, call me Owen.’

  A short nod. She looks away, starts to wrap her hair around her fingers, twisting and unravelling it as she talks. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s about my brother. Victor. Dr Victor Collins. He was a computer scientist who founded and ran a small crypto start-up in Newcastle.’ She notices him pick up on the tense. ‘He killed himself just over a year ago.’

  Owen absorbs this. Gives it a beat. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He catches sight of a photograph hanging to the right of the workstation of a young man, with a slim narrow face like Elsie’s. ‘Is that him? You look alike.’

  She doesn’t look round. ‘Yeah. That’s him. We were twins. Are twins. I never know which to say.’

  ‘Do you work in computers too?’ Owen asks.

  She half-shrugs. ‘I work in visual effects. For the movies. But my brother was the clever one. He got into crypto early, found a couple of engineers he liked and ran his company out of a shed in our parents’ backyard for three years.’ Owen waits and resists the temptation to look at his watch. She stares at the table for a minute, then looks up and meets his eye. ‘Do you know anything about crypto?’

  Owen shakes his head. ‘I know Bitcoin exists, and I read an article in the London Review of Books so I thought I understood it for a while. That illusion didn’t last long.’

  She twists and untwists her hair again. Owen wants to reach out, still the movement. ‘It doesn’t matter. You don’t really need to. Not in this conversation anyway. I’ll give you the layman’s version.’

  ‘Do I need to take notes?’

  Christine cuts in. ‘No. You can read the detail later. Elsie’s made you copies of the documents.’ Oh joy, thinks Owen. She turns back to Elsie. ‘Just tell him the story, Elsie.’

  Elsie blinks rapidly a few times as if she wants to clear her vision before she starts talking, then she speaks quickly, like rattling off a list. ‘So – middle of 2019 Victor read an article about the government selling off NHS data to anyone who fancied buying it, and the concerns that the system they were using to make the data anonymous was full of holes.’ She glances up to check he’s paying attention. ‘Like, Swiss-cheese full of holes. All you needed to do was write a decent bit of code to match them up with publicly available data – anything from the electoral roll to Facebook – and you could match records to individuals like that.’ She snaps her fingers. It echoes. ‘Victor thought there might be a crypto solution, and started playing with it. After the virus arrived he worked on it exclusively. Then the government loosened some of the restrictions on how the medical data could be used.’

  ‘To help the research into COVID-19,’ Owen interrupts.

  ‘Yeah, whatever. Anyway, then he thought it was crucial. He laid down the basic programming and went to the local MP to see if he could help him get the idea in front of the right people in government.’ That would be the man who replaced Christine in the 2019 election, a Brexit fanatic who pumped out thousa
nds of leaflets with the headline ENGLISH AND PROUD OF IT, then acted like an offended toddler when it was pointed out he was a racist twat. He won. By six hundred and eight-two votes.

  ‘The MP wasn’t much help. But Victor talked to one of his old professors from Cambridge. He thought it was brilliant and took it to the health department.’

  Owen shakes his head. ‘I’m going to need to know more about what this “it” is.’

  She plucks at the cuffs of her lumberjack shirt. ‘It takes the data the NHS has, separates it from any geo tags, and stores it in remote lines of code that can only be assembled and recombined with the right set of digital “keys”. If a company comes to you wanting to know about the effect of a certain drug in patients who are like, over forty-five and diabetic, then the NHS programmer can give you a set of “keys” which will let you access that information, with the matching socio-economic status, activity levels, whatever you need, but won’t tie that to the geo information or any of the other hooks and inferences which mean you could match real records to real people and places.’

  She lifts her hands, trying to grab the right analogy out of the air.

  ‘It’s like building a bank with an infinite number of security deposit boxes. The person buying the intel, for legit reasons, gets his specific keys and that opens his particular box. He gets the data he needs and off he trots. Next person wants different data, he gets different keys, and they take him to a different box where his data is assembled, gift-wrapped and completely anonymised.’

  ‘And what happens now?’

  ‘In layman’s terms? Basically it’s one key. One door. One data vault. Access all goodies inside. Companies go in and take whatever they want, which tends to be everything, just to be on the safe side. What they do with it afterwards is up to them.’

  Owen crosses his arms. ‘That can’t be true.’