A Christmas Cameron

by Benedict Arthur

  “David”, sighed the Archbishop. “You know that it’s not as simple as that – many have fallen on very hard times this year; due in no small part to your austerity measures. Surely you can muster at least an ounce of feeling for their plight?”

  “Absolutely not, humph!” replied David with an indignant snort. “I did not create this situation Rowan and I do not see why it should ruin my day off!”

  Seeing clearly that it would be futile to pursue his point, the Archbishop withdrew. David relaxed back in his chair with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him. He glanced briefly at the collated responses to the Health and Social care bill that Minister Burstow had left on his desk and for a moment considered granting them his perusal; the impulse was however brief and passed quickly. David pushed the papers to one side, leant right back in his chair and crossed his feet atop of his desk. He felt buoyant – two articulate men had launched heartfelt attacks against his values and he had expertly deflected them. “Time for a little treat” he whispered to himself and opening the top drawer of his desk, reached for his tablet computer.

  He gently, almost affectionately tapped the ‘Irate Birds’ logo that had pride of place at the centre of his home screen. As the familiar colourful images fluttered into view he let out a little sigh of happiness.

  David tapped away contentedly for at least an hour and was beginning to enjoy his Christmas Eve, when his fun was interrupted by a cry of what sounded like sudden pain, emanating from the drawing room. You will remember of course that this is where Samantha Cameron had all the while being conversing with Lady Thatcher.

  “OW!” came the cry once again but more fervently this time. David paused his game and tilted his head to one side so that he could see through the gaps in the open doors. Samantha was sat on the floor; her neck extended upwards, her teeth gritted and her face stretched into a smile of pain. One of her hands was on the floor trying to relieve the pressure on her back whilst the other clutched her gravid belly. Lady Thatcher stood over her, still in her nightgown. She was tense and her face wore a confused frown. Her knees were bent and her hands outstretched as if ready to receive a ball, indeed her whole posture looked as if she was about to pounce on Samantha.

  David rushed into the room. “What an earth is going on?”.

  “Tell me what to do David, I’m ready”, said Lady Thatcher without taking her eyes off Samantha or changing her posture. She swayed gently from side to side.

  “Please Lady Thatcher, just sit down” he replied. “Samantha – what on Earth is the matter?”

  “Pain, David” replied Samantha, still grimacing. “But it’s passing” she said, exhaling deeply.

  “Pain? Said David, wide eyed “but it’s too early for all that business.”

  “It’s passing” Samantha replied. She placed a hand on Lady Thatcher’s bed to push herself up. David took her other arm but as he began to pull she cried out again.”Owww!”. By now three or four aides were in the room awaiting instruction from the Prime Minister.

  “Right” he said. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  --

  The early afternoon gridlock parted slowly in central London, even for a Prime Ministerial entourage heralded by wailing sirens and flashing blue beacons. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. It had been more than thirty minutes since the Cameron’s had left Downing Street and David sat in the armoured Jaguar silently cursing the throngs of merry punters lining the streets of the capital. In his mind he saw them as hordes of bloated ignorami, edging the country closer and closer to financial oblivion with every wasted Christmas pound. Samantha sat next to him with her head rested on his shoulder. She was by now, fast asleep. Glancing at her, David felt a pang of irritation at having had his afternoon fun disrupted for clearly no good reason.

  The Cameron’s car skidded to a halt on the icy road, waking up Samantha with a jolt. Outside the hospital, a group of staff large enough to run a small ward were stood shivering, covered in a light dusting of snow, waiting to receive the first couple. The Prime Ministerial entourage spilled out of its cavalcade of armoured vehicles and approached the hospital entrance. The group of staff parted to reveal a motorised bed onto which the ambulant and clearly pain-free Samantha was promptly bundled before being whisked inside. As the assembly passed through the hospital towards the Maternity unit, the Chief Executive of the Hospital Trust approached Mr. Cameron. He was bald, shorter than David and somewhat rotund with untidy white stubble coating his face and chin. “Prime Minister” he gushed, “can I just say what an unmitigated joy it is to have you visit our Hospital, if there is anything I can…”

  “Joy!”, interrupted David, “are you actually feeling joy at the fact that my Lady wife has had to be rushed into hospital on Christmas eve? He stopped in the corridor and fixed the chief executive with a cold stare. “Well? – explain yourself.” Let me be clear dear reader that of course it was not the Chief executive who displayed the schadenfreude in this situation, that is to say he did not actually feel any joy in Samantha’s suffering. David however displayed that wretched trait of the mean spirited man dressed in a little brief authority - having sniffed out the void where the Chief Executive’s self-respect should have been - he took great pleasure in making his flatterer squirm.

  “No, no, no”, replied the flustered chief executive “forgive me, I’m so sorry Prime Minister – I chose my words poorly. What I meant to say was that I just wanted to offer my services to you and….SAMANTHA!!”

  Although the same word fell from the Chief Executive’s lips it was not him that had shouted it down the corridor. The shout was from a female voice and was followed almost immediately by the sound of a motorised bed crashing to the floor. David and the Chief executive whipped their heads round towards direction of the commotion just in time to see a young lady, painfully thin but heavily pregnant, dressed in a tattered green coat and filthy jeans, come tumbling out of an examination room and collide with the motorised bed. The impact sent Samantha, two of her minders and a member of the hospital staff crashing to the floor. The girl stumbled and took a fleeting, remorseful glance at Samantha laid on the floor. Their eyes met briefly before the girl turned to run down the corridor.

  “After her!” screamed David flailing his arms and gesturing theatrically, but the girl had already disappeared down a stairwell. At the same time, a middle aged woman with short black hair, dressed in a dark blue uniform strode out of the same room from which the girl had emerged. She stepped straight over Samantha Cameron and the people milling round her and peered down the corridor.

  “SAMANTHA!” she shouted again in the girl’s direction, shortly followed by “Shit” on seeing that the girl had disappeared. She turned and stepped over the people on the floor again and went back into the examination room.

  “Who the hell was that?” David screamed at the Chief Executive.

  “Erm, that was Sister Bevan; she runs the Maternity assessment” he replied.

  “You sir, are running a ZOO!! David screamed. He walked over to Samantha and bent over her. “Samantha – are you intact?”

  “Yes Dear, she replied, I landed on my side, I’m fine. I think I just…”

  “Right then” said David, cutting her off and standing up straight. “I want that girl who knocked my wife over found and brought before me.”

  “Really David, it’s fine” said Samantha, “I’m fine, just leave it be.”

  “Samantha please” David hissed at his wife before continuing his oration. “Nobody assaults the first Lady of Britannia – that girl is going to feel the full force of my Prime Ministerial sanction!” Two policemen who had come in from outside to investigate the commotion and another of Samantha’s minders trotted off down the corridor after the girl.

  “David!” said Samantha, clambering back onto her now righted bed, “this really isn’t necessary”.

  “Samantha – that girl is probably a thief, or an immigrant, or an addict – or e
ven a thieving, immigrant addict.” He turned away from her and stomped through the door from which the girl and sister Bevan had emerged. The area into which he entered was a small ward assessment area containing six beds. Five of the beds were occupied by pregnant women of various gestational sizes, accompanied by their respective husbands, partners and friends.

  A visitor unfamiliar with the Gregorian calendar would have had great difficulty deducing that it was the cusp of Christmastime by observing the décor inside the small ward. Indeed, the entire hospital was sadly lacking in any sort of festive garnish. The only slight adornment in sight was a single short strip of purple tinsel sellotaped to the edge of a desk at the end of the ward, adjacent to the second ward entrance. A passing poet might have likened that single, defiant strip of tinsel to the single blades of grass that a careful observer might see jutting through the pavements cracks in a busy city. There was however no poet visiting that day. Nevertheless, sat behind the desk was Sister Bevan, speaking rather animatedly into an old, yellowing phone handset.

  “No I have no idea where she is. No. No! Listen to me, this girl is not in a good frame of mind. No. Look you know how lonely Christmas can make some people feel – I’m worried that she might…..No, I’ve not contacted the police”.

  David marched determinedly up to the desk, flanked by two of his minders. Swollen with righteous indignation he rapped his knuckles sharply on the desk as if banging on a door. Sister Bevan glanced up at him briefly before carrying on with her conversation.

  “She has no next of kin that I can contact either. No. No I don’t think that the police are the right people to deal with this – I know her last address, if you could just send someone out to speak….”

  David slammed his open hand down on the table “Madam – do you know who I am?”

  Sister Bevan looked straight at David, over the top of the black glasses perched on the end of her nose; she covered the bottom of the phone handset with her palm. “Piss off”, she said before continuing with her conversation. A chain of sniggers went around the room from the other patients.

  “How dare you” said David quietly through gritted teeth. Sister Bevan put the phone down. She calmly placed her hands together on the desk in front of her, interlocking her fingers. She looked at David again over the top of her glasses. “Calm down dear” she said, “now what can I do for…”

  Sister Bevan’s lips continued to move but the rest of her sentence didn’t register in David’s awareness for his ears were ringing. All he had heard was the ‘Calm-Down-Dear’. Those words, the very same condescension that he was so proud of deploying with such wit now made him boil with fury. His lips pursed and shrivelled like two slugs covered in salt. He stood up straight and clenched his fists tight by his side. Oh how he wished at that moment that he and Sister Bevan were alone - what dark pleasure he would have felt at unleashing his full, furious verbiage in all its glory. But they were far from alone. They were surrounded by a sniggering public gallery.

  One of the great perils of holding high office is that sometimes, all it takes to be knocked completely off a great pedestal is a few chastening words from a member of the public – delivered at the right time, in front of the right audience. Although David had mainly watched with unrestrained glee as his predecessor Gordon Brown, committed ratings suicide by calling a bigoted old woman a bigot whilst in the full glare of the media spotlight; he had also learned a thing or two about the importance of masking one’s true level of indignation when in public.

  To this end, David had recently furnished himself with a number of imaginative thought techniques for controlling his temper when the occasion called for temperance rather than fervour. Today, he decided to deploy a favourite that he called – ‘the London Dungeon reverie’. He imagined himself as a torturer, topless but clad in a leather hood, deep in the bowels of the Tower of London. Sister Bevan; still in her full NHS uniform, was stretched out upon his rack. David had this technique so well practiced and fleshed out in grisly detail, that he could actually hear in his mind’s ear, the creaking of his victim’s sinews as he slowly turned the roller wheel. Having given his assailant her imaginary comeuppance, he immediately felt better.

  “Er, hello” said the sister interrupting the daydream. David opened his eyes and looked down at her. He unclenched his fists and smiled – that kind of empty smile where the cheeks and lips curl upwards but the eyes and forehead remain cold and unmoved. He placed his right hand over his heart and leant slightly forward.

  “My dear, you are an institution, a bulwark. It is the boorish candour and industriousness of people like you that form the cornerstones of our NHS.”

  “Pardon me?”

  Without answering, David turned and walked away, exiting the ward the same way he had entered. The Chief Executive had all the while been watching the exchange between Sister Bevan and David from a few feet away but had been too paralysed by fear to interject. He now approached Sister Bevan’s desk and began tugging at his tie. His face was grey and sweaty, like that of a man whose heart had just been put under too much strain and couldn’t quite pump enough blood back to his cheeks. “That was very stupid sister” he said, standing sideways on to the desk and fiddling with the top button of his shirt. The depth and tone of his voice were quite altered, restored with an assertiveness that had deserted him during his exchanges with the Prime Minister. “I could finish you for this.”

  “Whatever” replied Sister Bevan shrugging. She picked up the phone again without looking up. The chief executive grabbed the loose end of the tinsel hanging off the end of her desk and ripped off the single strip with one tug.

  “And I told you that Christmas decorations have been banned by the health and safety committee. Get rid of this.” He dropped the tinsel on the floor and trotted off after the Prime Minister.

  --

  In time, the commotion in the corner of the hospital settled. Samantha was seen by a doctor and thankfully both mother and babe were declared fit and well. A small army of police had been dispatched to scour the cold, frosty streets in search of the second vagrant Samantha. The search however was not conducted with any great enthusiasm, with most of the officers cursing the day that they had chosen to enter a profession whose noble cause had been so warped that they could be dispatched like winged monkeys at the whim of a peevish autocrat.

  As a precaution, in light of the terrible trauma and shock that she had undergone that day, Samantha’s good doctor had recommended that she be admitted overnight for observation. In reply to her protests, the doctor had carefully explained how the unborn babe has a certain intuitive wisdom that can sense distress in the mother. In the most extreme circumstances, the babe might try and escape from its uterine abode, should it consider the conditions to have become too hostile. Once Samantha agreed to stay, David made arrangements for her to be transferred to the palatial rooms of the private maternity hospital. The rest of their children were already visiting with their grandparents so David returned alone to Number 10.

  --

  Ruminating over the events of the day, David took a melancholy dinner alone in his melancholy private chambers. Having read all the newspapers, he spent the rest of the evening with his tablet computer. Shortly before the clock struck ten, the phone on David’s desk rang, distracting him once again from his Irate Birds’ stupor. “Prime Minister, I have the Police Commissioner on the line.”

  “Ah yes – put him through”.

  “Hello Prime Minister”, said a deep male voice.

  “Andrew, I trust you have some good news for me?” said David flatly.

  “Yes Prime Minister – we have found the girl, two officers found her sleeping under…..”

  “Excellent!” exclaimed David, cutting the commissioner off mid-sentence. “That is the most heartening news that I have had today. I knew you and the met boys wouldn’t let me down. Right, well what to do with her then?”

  “The thing is” continued the Commissioner, “That this gir
l is apparently very heavily pregnant sir and not in a very good physical condition –I wonder if the best place for her might be a refuge of some sort or even a hospital, at least just for Christmas.”

  “Her pregnant state and the time of year are both completely irrelevant” replied David curtly. “She purposefully assaulted my wife today and I plan to extract the maximum dividend from her for doing so. I want you to put her in a station tonight. Find somewhere rough and dark and cold. And let the staff know that I will ensure that there will be no consequences for the use of corporal punishment if they deem it necessary. Oh and Andrew…”

  “Yes Prime Minister?”

  “We never had this conversation - this stays between you and me. I am understood?”

  “Yes Prime Minister, very well” replied the Commissioner before hanging up the phone. The Commissioner, who had made the call from the hallway of his house, took a brief remorseful glance at his own two teenage daughters that were sat in his cosy, beautifully decorated living room; laughing with their mother at a program on the television. He heaved a great sigh and reassured himself that sometimes it was unavoidable to have to violate one’s deeply held beliefs and to suppress one’s depth of feeling for fellow human beings if it is in the service of a greater good. And being the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was certainly a great good. He heaved another sigh before picking up the phone again.