The House

by Tom Watson

  She sighs and writes something else down. ‘Well, I’ll get this typed up on the computer and you can sign it at the desk. You wait out front with your friends.’

  Owen stays in the chair, can’t face moving. She goes past him and opens the door to the corridor, then puts a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Try and do better next time. And I hope your friend recovers.’

  Chapter 36

  Tuesday 15 March 2022

  They take Lefiami’s car. The permanent care home is near Trent Park not far from Sabal’s house, but on the other side of the North Circular. Its gardens give it an almost country feel. Oak trees and ash fringe the lawns. London plane trees lining the drive. Tarmac paths, easy for wheelchairs, cross the lawns and edge the flower borders. A section to the right of the house seems to have been converted into a wild flower meadow. Owen watches a care worker in a burgundy uniform pause so the patient in the wheelchair she’s pushing can admire them.

  Lefiami pulls up and Sabal lets himself out. They haven’t spoken since they got into the car, and Owen, once he had sent a message to Pam to say he’d been called away, has been staring out of the window. Whenever he glanced towards the front seat, he saw Sabal, watching him in the rear-view mirror.

  Owen has been to permanent care facilities in his constituency, the publicly funded ones. They don’t look like this. It’s another stab in the gut. Creeping privatisation of the NHS, all done under the banner of efficiency, but a child could see through that. Scare those who can afford it into the blossoming private insurance market, and sell off the NHS slice by slice. He thinks about the data. He’s ignored three calls from Christine since he withdrew the question. One thing at a time.

  Owen clambers out of the back seat, brushing crumbs off the edge of his coat. Lefiami sees him.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ she says.

  She looks less like a nemesis today, more like a busy professional mother.

  ‘Don’t be daft. How many kids do you have?’ The back seat is scattered with toys and battered books, thin volumes with neon covers.

  ‘Two. Michael Junior is twelve, Lizzie is six.’

  They follow Sabal up the steps.

  ‘Nice place,’ Lefiami says. Owen walks alongside Lefiami into the marble-tiled lobby.

  Jay hadn’t recovered. They’d got his heart beating in the ambulance, but it had stopped and it took thirty minutes to get it started again in A&E. By the time Georgina, Phil and Owen arrived at the hospital, he had been put in a medically induced coma. He was like that for a fortnight and when he was weaned off the machines it became clear the brain damage he had suffered was severe.

  Sabal signs in at the desk, and Owen and Lefiami do the same. At least, they give their names, the nurse with a pleasant smile does the actual writing, then takes their temperatures and offers them masks. They all have their own. Lefiami’s has a Jamaican flag on it.

  Jay’s room is on the ground floor. It’s huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows opening out onto the lawns. The bed is one of those complicated ones, designed to lift and tilt the body through a range of positions. The sheets are a rich burgundy. It holds Jay in a semi-seated position facing the open French windows. The air smells of the lavender growing along the edge of the path outside. Sabal and Lefiami go in, but Owen stops in the doorway. He can see a shape under the sheets, a flash of the side of Jay’s face, then his view is blocked as Sabal walks up to the bed.

  ‘Jay, I have brought an old friend to see you,’ Sabal says, then beckons to Owen. Owen steps forward and the door eases shut behind him. Sabal puts a chair by the bed, then moves aside.

  Owen walks forward as if in a dream, and looks down onto the bed.

  Jay, but not Jay. His hair is black as ever, but the muscles of his face seem slack. His eyes are open, but vacant. Owen feels them flicker over him.

  ‘Jay, it’s Owen.’ Now he’s read the notes from the counsellor, he almost expects Jay to react, to show some sign of rage or fear. Nothing, just that skittering gaze.

  ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to come and see you, mate.’ He sits down and, before he realises what he is doing, he takes Jay’s hand. Jay’s fingers lie loosely across his own. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  This is better than wondering about him, wondering if anyone would even tell him if Jay had died, wondering where he was or fighting to suppress any thought of him at all. Jay is wearing pale blue pyjamas with a thin white stripe. They are ironed and laundered.

  He doesn’t know how much Jay can understand. Owen hopes to God he isn’t capable of thinking of what might have been, hopes that the brain damage that has stolen his ability to move, to speak, has also taken his capacity to suffer. Then why is Owen here? If the visit is just some sort of performance for Sabal and Lefiami then Owen is contemptible, the sort of hypocrite he tells himself he despises. But he can’t know what Jay does or does not hear. So he needs to say it.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s been so long. And I’m sorry I was a rubbish friend. I should have done things differently, should have listened.’

  He doesn’t know what else to say. Jay’s fingers twitch, a pressure perhaps, Owen looks at his face and perhaps, just perhaps Jay looks briefly back across all those years and all the space between them.

  ‘I was stupid. But Jay, I never stopped believing, not until well after that night, not until we realised how sick you were … I never stopped believing you were going to be party leader someday. I had this idea: I’d be like the Gordon Brown to your Tony Blair.’ His mind could be playing tricks on him, of course, but Jay’s fingers do move a little. Owen blinks. ‘I mean, I hoped we’d get on better than that, of course. But even when things were bad in the house, I still believed that was where we were going to end up.’

  He can’t do this anymore. It’s too much.

  ‘Sorry, mate. I’ll see you later.’

  He gets up and walks out through the open French windows and across the lawns. No idea where he is going or why. He just needs to move. He makes it to the tree line, plucks off his mask and, his back to the home, leans against the trunk of an oak.

  Time passes, seconds or minutes.

  ‘Owen?’

  He turns. Lefiami is a few paces away from him on the grass. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Great. Perfect. I mean, in comparison. Christ! I mean, I knew, but … Sometimes I wonder if … ’

  She holds up her hand.

  ‘If you are going to say you think you did the wrong thing saving his life, then don’t.’

  He points back towards the home. ‘Really? You think he’d want to live like that? I mean, what sort of life is it?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m a Christian, so I have to believe that every life has value and deserves respect. As a politician I think it’s important you do too.’

  He turns away from her again makes his hand into a fist and presses it into the bark of the tree.

  ‘You don’t have to be Christian to value life, Ms Lefiami. But it’s important if you are a politician not to accept suffering with a shrug and a line about God’s plans either.’

  ‘I don’t do that.’

  He presses hard enough to feel the pain in his knuckles. ‘Was this God’s plan? For me to be a crap enough friend not to see he was in danger, but remember enough of my first-aid training so Jay could spend the next thirteen years in this state?’

  She takes off her mask and puts it back into her pocket. ‘I don’t pretend to know His plan. Maybe this is supposed to teach you something.’

  ‘Teach me what? That it’s a really good idea to have health insurance if you can afford it these days? That even when people who are depressed or in extremis’ – he feels the weight of the woman in his arms again outside the surgery – ‘are difficult or irrational, they should be listened to? Even when you don’t want to? Fine. Got it. Why make Jay suffer so long for that? God could have sent me a greetings card with that stamped on it in swirly writing.’

  ‘I don’t know. But I dou
bt God’s telling you to buy health insurance.’

  She has every reason to be angry with him, but her voice is wry. Owen breathes out, turns to face her.

  ‘Sorry, Ms Lefiami. I’ve no right to take this out on you.’

  ‘I can take it, Owen. Sabal is staying for a while. He’ll get a cab home and I’ve signed us out. Want a lift somewhere?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  They start walking across the lawn towards the drive. She takes out her keys, starts swinging them in her hand.

  ‘I worked on a number of cases involving brain injury. I think one of the mercies is the injured brain often doesn’t know it is impaired.’

  Owen does not want to be comforted. ‘Are you telling me he isn’t suffering?’

  ‘I’m telling you it’s impossible to know either way. Sabal said he thought Jay knew you. And was glad to see you.’

  He doesn’t know what to say, but the words hurt. If Jay can be glad to see him, it means he’s aware and surely awareness is suffering in his condition. She beeps off the alarm and they climb into the car.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me to be here when you saw Sabal. I don’t know how much this investigation is worrying you, but I think it’s only fair to mention that though my report will say it was foolish of you to help keep Jay off the candidate lists at the time, my conclusion is that it was not malicious.’

  So now he is doing what Greg tells him to and Lefiami has decided he is not a monster, Owen is in the clear. And he’s faced up to the demons of guilt which have been chasing him for years. Great. So why does he still feel like shit?

  ‘You don’t think it was me who leaked the minutes of that meeting?’

  She puts the car in gear and they drive slowly down under the avenue of plane trees.

  ‘No. From what your colleagues say about you, that doesn’t seem to be your style. But then I don’t think Jay leaked them either.’

  They reach the main road and she indicates, leaning forward over the steering wheel to check the road beyond the high brick walls.

  Owen thinks of Phil. Maybe he was right to accuse him in the Chapter House. He remembers the party, what Phil said about Jay’s emails.

  Lefiami swings out into the road and changes gear, checks her mirror.

  ‘Did you ever have a chance to go through Jay’s emails?’

  ‘I went through his work correspondence, electronic or otherwise. Or rather, one of my assistants did. They showed a young man under pressure who, for all his brilliance, had a tendency to blame others,’ she replies.

  ‘He had a gmail account too. We all did, and used them for non-work stuff.’ He messages her Jay’s old address. ‘I’m glad you’ve judged me not guilty, Ms Lefiami.’

  ‘I’ll look at the other emails. Thank you. And we’re all guilty, Mr McKenna. I’ve just said you didn’t bully Jay. But someone else definitely did.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nods and slows to let someone creep out of one of the side streets.

  ‘I talked to the people who were with him on the Treasury team. They were constantly hearing stories about Jay, about his drinking, drug taking. His sex life.’

  ‘What? That’s bullshit! Yeah, towards the end he drank, and yes, a couple of times I saw him I thought maybe he’d taken pills. But he was a monk, sex wise. Who was spreading the stories?’

  ‘You know what it’s like chasing down rumours, rumours over ten years old? It’s impossible. Everyone just says it was “something they heard”.’

  ‘What about the Union, though?’

  ‘I was asked to look at you, Owen. Not the Union. My remit is limited. I have no authority to compel anyone to talk to me. You and Georgina have to meet me because the Labour Party told you to. Mr Bickford saw me out of courtesy, and he told me about the campaign to keep Jay off the candidates list. And freely confirmed you all agreed it was the best course of action. That was his choice. I had a brief statement from Kieron Hyde, but the Union politely refused to let me talk to any of their people. The investigation is a Labour Party matter. They just pointed me to the rules about workplace relationships, including bullying and what they call “romantic involvements”, which they drew up in 2016.’

  ‘I didn’t realise they’d published new guidelines.’

  ‘More than guidelines. A list of sackable offences.’

  ‘2016 was the year Kieron Hyde lost the election for general secretary,’ Owen says slowly. ‘I thought he’d be the boss well before then, but the previous gen sec stayed on after we lost the 2010 election.’

  The traffic is getting heavier. Another strange fracture of COVID. People drive when they can to avoid the closed-in atmosphere of the Tube – those who can afford to, anyway. So Kieron’s ambitions for leadership were finally crushed, and then the Union brought in new rules. He thinks about Jay talking about the Union on the last day in Glastonbury. You never listen. He was listening now.

  ‘What are you doing today, Ms Lefiami?’

  ‘Working, of course. Why?’

  He tries to put it together in his head, make the jumbled memory of guilt in his mind form into words, a plan. ‘The last time Jay and I spoke he was trying to talk to me and Phil about Kieron Hyde and the Union. We didn’t want to hear it … ’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We should have heard him out. But it was a pain, he was a pain. Georgina was getting ushered into the seat and we were still dealing with the fallout from the expenses scandal. All of Westminster was in fight or flight mode. We didn’t even want to consider there might be something rotten at the PSGWU.’ He looks out of the passenger window at the rows of shops, some shuttered. ‘Even while Kieron was blacklisting our friend, getting me to help blacklist him. Then Kieron and Georgina got together and after that … ’

  ‘After that, what?’

  ‘Kieron seemed to drop all his bullying tactics. It made it easy to forget what Jay had been telling us.’

  He twists round in his seat so he can see her properly. She’s frowning, staring at the traffic ahead.

  ‘Look, Chloe. I think there is someone I could call. Someone we could talk to about the Union at that time.’

  ‘Give me a moment, Owen.’ Lefiami indicates left, and they turn off the ring-road into a half-empty parking lot. A motel, garage and chain café. She parks.

  ‘OK, Owen. Make your calls. I’ll get us a coffee.’

  Chapter 37

  It takes four calls in the end. One to confirm the name, Debra Brooks, then three more to find someone who knows a current number to go with it.

  ‘Look, I’ll try. But I don’t know if she’ll want to speak to you. Shall I give her the number you are calling from?’

  ‘Yes. Will you do that right away, please?’

  The woman hangs up with an exasperated ‘Fine’.

  Lefiami emerges carrying disposable coffee cups and packages of sandwiches. Owen leaves the car and joins her on one of the metal picnic tables up against the blank wall of the motel, puts his phone on the table and they eat in silence staring at it. When it finally buzzes, they both start. He answers.

  ‘This is Debra Brooks. Why do you want to talk to me, Mr McKenna?’

  Her voice is high and she’s speaking fast.

  ‘Ms Brooks, you’re on Speaker. I’m with a barrister called Chloe Lefiami. She’s been looking into the bullying of a young man who worked for the Labour Party in 2008. Jay Dewan?’ Silence. ‘The thing is, Jay mentioned your name to me just before he became ill. He was making accusations about the Union and he mentioned you. I didn’t want to listen at the time, but I think I should have.’

  ‘Ms Lefiami has been investigating you, hasn’t she, Mr McKenna?’ The voice on the speaker says. ‘That’s what I’ve heard. Just you. Are you just trying to shift the blame for what happened to Jay?’

  Chloe and Owen look at each other.

  ‘This is Chloe speaking. Ms Brooks, I think Owen did some foolish things, but I don’t think he was a bully. I feel like I’ve been look
ing in the wrong direction.’ More silence. ‘Did you know Jay?’

  ‘No. Look, I signed an NDA.’

  Chloe leans in. ‘Debra, we can discuss that when we meet, but a lot has changed about non-disclosure agreements and how they are enforced since 2008. You have my word I’ll keep anything we say confidential. It’ll be up to you if anything you say ever gets written down or discussed beyond the people on this phone call.’

  ‘I’ve got the kids today. You’ll have to come to me.’

  Owen feels a sudden burst of triumph, then he realises Chloe is looking at him. He nods. Pam will be angry with him for cancelling the whole day, but he has to do this.

  ‘That’s fine. Where are you?’

  ‘Between Brockley and New Cross.’

  Chloe looks surprised. ‘That’s where I live too.’

  ‘I know. My girl goes to the same school as your son. I saw your picture on the news, in Westminster. I almost spoke to you.’

  ‘How about the park, on Telegraph Hill? Owen will text you when we’re close.’

  ‘OK.’ Debra cuts the connection.

  When they arrive, the sky is overcast, the sort of London afternoon which could easily tip into showers or sunshine. On their way across the city, Chloe talked to Owen a little about what they might expect. He is thinking about it as he sits on the bench. He’s on the edge, by the bins. Chloe takes her place next to him, then there is the gap for Debra, if she comes. Owen hasn’t had a reply to his text saying they’ve got here.

  A couple walk past with a pushchair, and a curious-eyed infant with her mother’s curly hair examines the world like it’s his first time out. The man walking with them has a china mug of tea in his hand.

  ‘Chloe?’

  Chloe looks up and Owen sees the recognition in her face. ‘Hi, Debra. Yes, I recognise you from school. This is Owen.’

  Debra looks like she is Owen’s age, late thirties, on the pivot of middle age. Same age as Christine, as Georgina, but she has none of their gloss and glamour. She has lines around her eyes and streaks of grey emerging from a rough ponytail. Her long cotton coat is smothered with embroidered roses.