High society

by Ben Elton

  ‘I want to say something!’ she said.

  ‘Darling…‘ her mother murmured.

  ‘No, Mum, this is our house, our doorstep and this whole thing is just pathetic!’

  ‘How do you mean, pathetic, Cathy?’ the journalists enquired.

  ‘Because it is. Obviously it is and you all know it. Look, first let’s get one thing straight. This whole stupid scandal thing is bollocks, all right? If my dad says he didn’t shag some nutty bird who worked for him then he didn’t. I know him. He may be a pain in the bum, but he’s not a shagger and he’s not a liar. I’m telling you that straight. Plus, the drugs thing is just a joke, right, a complete sodding joke. My dad wouldn’t know an E from an aspirin! He still calls skunk ‘pot’, for Christ’s sake, he’s a classic boring dad, he’s a square, he brews his own beer, guys. Think about it. How sad is that? My dad may be a bit embarrassing, but he is just so not a drug-taker and I’ve known him for sixteen years.’

  Cathy was on the front step now, standing beside her bemused father while the assembled media lapped it up.

  ‘But the point is, supposing all this stuff was true! Supposing he had been knocking this loser off and he had tried a toot of Bolivian marching powder to celebrate her birthday? And as I say that’s about as likely as Paula Wooldridge who trumped this rubbish up constructing a decent sentence…’

  Big laughs, of course, from all but the representatives of Paula’s paper.

  ‘But supposing it was true. So what? My dad has made his arguments and people have listened to them. They’ve seen the sense in what he’s saying. Finally the world’s waking up to the drug madness we’ve created. Now you come to our doorstep and say that maybe Dad lied about his sex life and also about not taking drugs! Like I say, so what! Who cares! Who doesn’t lie? You guys? Your readers? Don’t make me laugh. You lot’ve all taken drugs, that’s for sure, probably last night! Half of you will have cheated on your partners. Does that make you any less able to judge an issue? Are you people honestly so pathetically weak intellectually that you only respect my dad’s arguments as long as you can respect him? That’s insane! The media’s gone mad! If Kennedy’s womanizing had come out in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War Three might have started while you lot asked him about his knob!’

  This was truly a bravura performance. The press did not normally like being ticked off, but something about this pretty sixteen-year-old’s open style was making them laugh.

  ‘Well, let me give you a bit of news to add to all the crap you’re going to write. My dad hasn’t taken drugs since the odd spliff at uni, I’m sure of that. But I have! I’ve taken E twice so far…’

  ‘Darling!’ Angela Paget was astonished.

  ‘And what’s more, I’ve been pissed up on alcopops and I preferred E. So did my mates. What are you going to do about it? Come down our school and arrest us all? Put us on the front page? Shock horror, ‘Britain’s monged generation!’ Maybe it would be better to accept the inevitable and concentrate on making sure the stuff we take isn’t cut with smack and speed.’

  ‘Yeah!’ shouted Suzie, who did not wish to be left totally out of the limelight. ‘And me and my boyfriend smoked a joint!’

  ‘You did not, Suzie,’ Cathy snapped. ‘I checked it out. It was dried parsley.’

  ‘No way, it was a proper spliff!’

  ‘It was parsley, Suzie.’

  ‘Suzie! Go inside.’ This was Peter Paget attempting to regain some control of the press conference.

  ‘I think we should all go in,’ said his wife through gritted teeth.

  But the press were reluctant to allow such an entertaining and newsworthy event to come to an end. ‘Anything to add, Cathy?’ they shouted.

  ‘Who’s your parsley-dealer, Suzie?’ a young man from the Sun enquired.

  ‘Piss off!’ Suzie Paget snapped back. ‘It was grass and we got totally monged on it.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Peter Paget shouted. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum, but I had to say something,’ Cathy said as the family retreated, before turning round for one final sally.

  ‘Whatever my dad has done, and he hasn’t done anything, it’s got nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his bill. Just you lot remember that.’

  It was probably the first time in the history of modern journalism that a full-scale doorstepping had ended with the journalists giving their prey a round of applause.

  The telephone was already ringing when the family got back inside.

  ‘It’s Charlie Ansboro,’ Angela said. ‘He’s with the PM.’

  TEN DOWNING STREET

  Paget. Fucking brilliant,’ Ansboro said. ‘I mean, seriously fucking unbelievable. Not you, obviously. Bog standard, over-formal, looked defensive, adequate but a bit crap, frankly. But those girls of yours! Fuck me, they’re awesome. What is it? Cathy? Incredible, quite a looker, too, which always fucking helps. Well, they both are. Here’s the boss.’ He pressed the conference-call button on the phone so that the PM could speak to Paget.

  ‘Peter, they played the whole thing live on Sky and BBC News 24. It was superb, honest, funny, it made the whole thing look so inconsequential. Amazing what a bit of honesty will do. We really should try it more often ourselves.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Charlie Ansboro interjected. ‘Honesty plays well from sixteen-year-old curies. It just looks like naivety from old cunts like us.’

  ‘Shut up, Charlie, I’m talking to Peter,’ the PM snapped.

  ‘Is young Cathy a party member? Young Socialist? Good God, do we still have them? Sounds positively Stalinist. Anyway, keep her upfront, mate, she’s gold, solid gold. The public love her even more than they love you.’

  THE PAGET HOUSEHOLD, DALSTON

  Peter and Angela lay in bed together. Not touching.

  ‘You know, Peter, Cathy was so good today. So right in what she was saying, that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter at all if what you’re saying makes sense. If only we hadn’t lied. If only we’d just admitted it. This bloody affair of yours. Now we’ll never be out from under this lie as long as we live. We’ll never have…What do the Americans call it? When you can finally walk away from something?’

  ‘Closure,’ Peter replied.

  ‘That’s it. Closure. We’ll never have it.’

  Something in Peter Paget stirred. ‘You know what, Angela? Fuck closure. Who gives a damn about closure? I made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and you’re my wife and you have to carry the burden of it with me. That’s all that’s happened. I had an affair and made us vulnerable and now we’re fighting back. That’s all, we’re fighting back. And we’re going to win. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  A FLAT, WEST HAMPSTEAD

  Kurt had just finished watching the news, which of course had led with Cathy Paget’s two-fisted performance, when the doorbell began to ring. He made the mistake of answering it only once.

  ‘Kurt, you’re supporting Samantha Spencer in her story about Peter Paget, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s so, but I don’t wish to discuss it with you now.’

  ‘Kurt, if Paget took cocaine who supplied it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We know that it could easily have been you, Kurt, because we’ve been asking around your local and you take quite a lot of drugs, don’t you? Do you deal, Kurt? Could you sell us some now?’

  Kurt shut the door, but the journalist outside continued his interrogation through the letterbox. ‘You work for the Affiliated Union of Rail and Sea Workers, don’t you, Kurt? Junior legal officer? Isn’t it the case that the AURSW has recently disaffiliated from the Labour Party, Kurt? Did you not recently attend a chapel meeting in which you accused the Prime Minister of being a Tory stooge? Is your support for Samantha Spencer politically motivated, Kurt?’

  When Kurt phoned his friend Laura, he discovered that she was being subjected to similar harassment.

  ‘They’re saying I’m some so
rt of communist junkie drug-dealer! Just because my chambers is always fighting the government over something, they’re implying I’m backing Sammy just to get at them. It’s amazing.’

  The spin had gone firmly against Samantha Spencer and her friends. The popularity of Peter and his cause, the honest good humour of his daughter’s arguments, the obvious personal agenda of the journalist Paula Wooldridge, had kept the public firmly behind the Minister for Drugs. With the exception of Paula’s own newspaper, the media were currently proceeding under the assumption that Spencer and her friends had formed a conspiracy to destroy Paget.

  The following morning photographs of both Samantha and Laura topless on their respective holidays appeared in all the papers.

  BIRMINGHAM CENTRAL HOSPITAL

  Only one figure was sufficiently newsworthy to intrude briefly on the media feeding frenzy engulfing the Paget family and Samantha Spencer and her associates as they moved towards the libel action brought by Peter Paget against his accusers. That figure was Tommy Hanson.

  Tommy was unconscious, in the coma in which Goldie and his henchman had left him a couple of streets away from the brothel in which Jessie was imprisoned. For a week the identity of the unconscious man had remained a mystery. The man in the coma was clearly not the man whose clothes he had been wearing. He was a thief who had mugged a passerby, taken his clothes and credit cards and paid for a prostitute on the strength of them before falling foul of some gang of toughs or other. Now, as the unconscious man’s bruises and his swollen face began to heal, the nurses began to notice an increasing resemblance to the country’s most famous pop star, who had also been famously reported missing on the day after the unconscious man had been admitted to hospital.

  That Tommy, the press reported. Muggings, prostitutes? What would he get up to next?

  PARKINSON, BBC TV CENTRE

  My next guest is never out of the news and seemingly never out of trouble. Only three months ago he was a guest on the first programme of this series, having been arrested for Crowd-surfing down Oxford Street. Now he faces charges of a much more serious nature. It seems that Tommy Hanson held a man at knifepoint, stole his clothes and his money and used the latter to visit a brothel. He is currently remanded on bail and he’s with us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Tommy Hanson.’

  The applause that greeted Tommy was as warm as ever. The public still loved their Tom, and why wouldn’t they? Anybody who could surprise and entertain them as consistently as Tommy did was fine by them. Besides, as always Tommy played it beautifully. No cocky swagger this time, instead naughty-boy body language and please-forgive-me eyes. He stood at the top of the stairs for a full minute while the applause, which had been warm to begin with, grew and grew. Tommy worked the crowd with nothing more than his eyes, eyes that said it all…I’m sorry, but I’m mad, me, what can I tell you? It’s tough being a tortured boy genius, but I promise I’ll try to be good.

  After a few brief words of greeting, Michael Parkinson got straight to the point. ‘Tommy. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

  ‘Parky, I screwed up big time, but I’ve come on here to tell the world why I done it. First an’ foremost, I ‘ave t’say a public sorry to the bloke I pointed the knife at…’

  ‘And I believe he has already accepted your apology.’

  ‘For sure, Parky, for sure. We’re mates because I told him why I done it an’ got his little kids in to see S Club.’

  ‘And why did you do it, Tommy?’

  ‘Eh, straight to the point, Parky. I like that, that’s why you’re the king.’

  ‘Well, I do my best.’

  ‘And fair play to you.’

  ‘So why did you do it, Tommy?’

  ‘Love, Parky. I done it for love.’

  ‘You mugged a man for love?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Let me tell you ‘ow it ‘appened.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘I’d been stitched up by this journo, see, the one who done all that crap about me winning Pop Hero ‘cos I give a couple o’ hand jobs t’the judge, which I in’t denying but that’s not why I won, right. Plus, I’m not gay even though there’s nowt wrong wi’ being’ gay. I just in’t, that’s all. Least I in’t till I’ve ‘ad three tabs o’ sextasy, that’s for sure.’

  ‘In vino veritas, Tommy. In vino veritas.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It means that wine or in this case drugs often reveals the truth about a man.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I’ve ‘ad more drugs than they’ve got at Boots, an’ the only thing they reveal is the tosser in the man, which is what I’m saying, ‘cos that’s exactly what I done to that Pop Hero judge.’

  Tommy took a sip of water while Parky and the audience applauded his good-humoured honesty.

  ‘All right, so you’d been stitched up,’ Parky reminded Tommy. ‘What next?’

  ‘Well, I chucked a total mental and stormed out into the night, didn’t I? Just buggered off inta a Brummie Saturday night and ended up getting the crap kicked out o’ me. Honest, it were like Trading Places or whatever. I wake up, nobody can recognize me, I’ve got no phone, no money, me office an’ all that is closed, me manager wouldn’t ‘ave ‘card the phone anyway ‘cos Sundays he’s always got ‘is ‘ead stuck between the pendulous breasts of a busty model…So that’s it, I ain’t Tommy Hanson superstar any more, I’m Tommy Anonymous street kid, an’ that’s what I’m gonna be till the following morning…’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Yes, Parky, amazing an’ horrible. Really, truly horrible. If anybody out there wants any proof that kids don’t beg on the streets for fun, just give it an hour or two. It were absolutely terrible, Parky. Cold, filthy, terrifying.’

  ‘Is that why you mugged someone, because you were cold?’

  ‘No way, Parky, no way. Listen, mugging that bloke took every ounce o’ courage I ‘ad. I were more scared than ‘im, I swear. It takes something very special to push a bloke to do somethin’ like that and in my case it were love.’

  ‘You met someone, on the streets?’

  ‘Yes, I did, a girl called Jessie, the loveliest girl I ever saw or ever will see…’

  ‘What happened? How did you meet?’

  ‘I were trying to nick her coat.’

  ‘You tried to mug her too?’

  ‘No! I just thought it were an empty coat in the doorway. But it weren’t, it were Jessie, an’ when them big dark eyes looked up at me in that Marks an’ Sparks doorway I knew I was gone, an’ I was, an’ I still am. But let me tell you, Parky, that girl had the toughest life you can imagine. She were abused at home so she ran away, right? Came to London, starving, homeless, got picked up by a pimp, who introduced her to smack and that were that. Just seventeen an’ a junkie prossie. Y’see this is why that Peter Paget bloke’s so right. The whole criminal drug subculture is a trap, man, it’s a trap for the weak and defenceless. Once Jessie were hooked there was nowhere for her to go but to the people that abused her…’

  ‘You support Peter Paget?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. If he’d ‘a been around a few years ago Jessie would never have ended up like she did.’

  ‘And where did she end up?’

  ‘In a brothel in Brum, right, but get this. She actually managed to kick smack on her own while she were workin’ as a whore and then she ran away. That’s when I met her, Parky, while I were a street kid for a day. I met her an’ she shared her food and her coat wi’ me.’

  ‘And you fell in love with her?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon I did. At least I swore t’God I were goin’ to ‘elp her find a new life. The day we spent together sittin’ in a KFC an’ then in doorways was the most important of my life. It were the day I discovered that there are more important things in the world than Tommy Hanson…almost everything, in fact.’

  ‘But you lost her.’

  Tears welled up in Tommy’s eyes. ‘Yes, I did. Her pimps found her an’ took her back, and I followed her to where they took her. But I were a street
kid, remember. There was no way they’d ‘a’ let me through the door o’ that house they put her in…’

  ‘And that’s when you stole another man’s clothes?’

  ‘I had to, Parky. The girl I loved ‘ad been stolen away.’

  ‘And you went into the brothel?’

  ‘Yes, I did, but they’d already give her a needleful o’ scag, and she were just totally monged out, selling her body, so I tried to grab her and run and they beat me up bad and that were the end of that…’

  ‘You were in a coma for a week.’

  ‘That’s right, and when I come out, after the judge released me on bail, I got all my people, right? I’m on the phone Tiny management team sayin’ I want all my people right here right now. So I’ve got like an army o’ people, two coachloads, one muscle the other brains, an’ I’m in front in a white stretch ‘cos when I save her I want it t’be like a cowboy on a white horse, an’ we drove through Birmingham an’ I went back to that house to get my Jessie an’ also all the other girls which I knew was what Jessie would want…But when we got there it were empty, Parky. Because o’ the beating I’d took an’ the fact that the last credit card transaction ‘ad been from there, the police went an’ had a look at the place an’ it all broke up because the blokes what run establishments like that one know how to keep their exits covered. They just moved on, takin’ Jessie with them. I’ve lost ‘er, Parky. She’s gone, evaporated, disappeared into the air. Except I know she’s out there somewhere an’ I intend to find her. I will, Parky, I’ve given up me career, I’ve kicked the booze an’ drugs, this time for real. I’ll take whatever the law wants to throw at me for mugging that bloke and I’ll find Jessie if it takes me as long as I live.’

  Some of the women in the audience were moved to tears at Tommy’s anguish. Even Parky dabbed at an eye.