Mind Games and Ministers

by Chris Longden

  I switched on BBC1. The boys at the Beeb were of the opinion that Michael had managed the Ben Hardy situation extremely well that morning. The programme moved from the studio to the waning sunlight at the tail end of Downing Street; to that Justin Jones, the man with the dodgy spectacles (did he never go home?) It seemed that this would be one of those pointless ‘twenty-four-hour news reporting’ scenarios, where the presenter would have no news to report but would try to convince viewers to keep watching by hanging around Number Ten with an animated look on his face. So I was about to switch the programme off when Lydia appeared, chiming, “Oh. Boring. Grown-up telly. Well dull. Another yoghurt, if you please, Mother. And Matthew says, ‘Bring another basket of your finest!’ Although poopy-pants has spilled most of his yoghurt over the duvet …”

  Would I never learn? Runny substances, small children, laptops and soft furnishings do not mix. I jabbed my finger at the kitchen, indicating that with her second yoghurt, Lydia would be expected to sit at the table. But a sudden wave of excitement projected itself from the TV. A sleek, black car pulled up just behind the reporter at the gates, stopping for the usual security check. Justin Jones pushed the silly specs back up onto the bridge of his nose, held his fingers to the side of his head as he checked his earpiece and then relayed the information to his viewers.

  “And I’ve just been informed that Michael Chiswick, the communities minister – who caused a bit of a stir this morning with his phraseology – has just arrived behind us, here in Downing Street.”

  The rest of his words were drowned out by Lydia, who had decided to act as co-commentator.

  “Downing Street! Mummy – is that where Downy Duckling lives? That man does look a bit like a duck, doesn’t he? A bit of a ropey old duck in glasses, though. One getting ready for the slaughter house! The big chop!”

  “Ssssh!” I hissed, as I moved closer to the TV. The car glided through the famous black iron gates and stopped only feet away from the cameras. The journalists began to poke their media implements through the railings, accompanied by calls of, “Mr Chiswick! Mr Chiswick?”

  Michael emerged from the car, wearing his business best this time. The Ten Downing Street look.

  For the second time that day, a sense of nervous anticipation washed over me. Seeing the man I got naked with at the weekend on our TV screen. Lydia appeared to be excited, too, but for very different reasons.

  “Hey – it’s that bloke off our fridge! The pirates and princesses man!”

  “Ssssh!” I spat again, trying to cancel out small-child inane ramblings. Michael turned back towards the iron railings. Doing the cultivation of the media thing. Our man from the BBC seemed to be flavour of the month, though, because Michael directed his attention at Ol’ Four Eyes.

  “Justin?”

  “Mr Chiswick – is it true that you’re here because the prime minister has asked Ben Hardy to resign from his ministerial position?”

  Michael flashed his politician non-committal smile. It wasn’t quite Tony Blair – less of the fake humility and certainly baring fewer teeth. But I was learning that the TV smile belied how he truly felt. It was different to the grin that I had been exposed to when alone with him– the media beam didn’t possess the tiny wrinkle at the corner of the eyes, the crinkles that told me when he was truly amused.

  “Well, I’ve just been asked to pop in for a quick meeting with the prime minister and I’m sure if anything is going to happen, you chaps will be the first to know.”

  More clamour from the rest of the reporters at the gates.

  Now Matthew entered the lounge, walking stiffly. Yoghurt smeared across his cheeks. And in his eyelashes, somehow. With a yoghurt pot wedged on each hand. Matthew’s best android-style.

  “Look, Mummeh! Ah’m a well-cool Wobot!”

  I chose to temporarily ignore the sticky mess, and turned back to the TV. Lydia was paying no attention to the yoghurt-robot-sibling either. She was narrowing her eyes at the TV. Michael was heading towards Number Ten now.

  “He definitely is!” She crooned. “The fridge man!

  That newspaper clipping on the fridge again. It was embarrassing enough before I’d happened to get jiggy with the fella. Now, somehow, it seemed to be exuding a whiff of immorality. Me parading a weekend-shag while my kids scoffed their Coco Pops of a morning. Must bin the damned thing.

  Lydia added, “He must be as nearly as famous as you are, Mummy! But Grandad says that that man is a slimeygit. Whatever that means.”

  “Please! I’m watching this!” I gritted my teeth, shooting her one of my best evil-red-laser-beams-from-the-eyes glances. Great. Another reminder that Dad hated Michael, his local MP. Mind you, there were few famous people or politicians that Dad did admire. He would probably only approve if I was dating Arthur Scargill. Perhaps Dennis Skinner. Or Spike Milligan. Maybe Harry Seacombe. Gobby firebrands or dead comedians. Strange chap, my dad.

  Michael had half-turned, consenting to answer a final question. One that resurrected the juvenile theme of the day’s news.

  “So you won’t be making any more ‘boobs’ today then, Mr Chiswick?”

  Michael paused for a moment and turned back with his work smile again.

  “Oh, very droll. You lot need a training course in making half-decent jokes, I think!”

  I smirked back at Michael. The bugger had nicked my line.

  Then Michael was safely deposited behind the sombre black door of Number Ten. And two messy yoghurt pots were deposited by Matthew on my living-room rug. I didn’t smirk at my youngest.

  “Boobs, boobs, nice boobies … nice and fat!” chanted Matthew, as he tried to squash the yoghurt pots together before I could reach him.

  “What did he just say?” I turned to look at Lydia, incredulous.

  “You heard him.” Lydia’s response was a little bit too sassy for my liking. She proceeded to take the remote control off me and attempted to search for one of the more hideous children’s cartoon channels.

  “Well, where on earth did he learn that from?”

  Lydia shook her head. Disinterested. She twirled the remote control.

  “I dunno. He’s a boy. He’s stupid. You know. And anyway, you daft little spanner,” she tried to poke Matthew in his stomach, “it’s tits. Not boobies. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Lydia!” But before I could get any further, Matthew began singing:

  “Tits tits tits! Nice and chompy!”

  “Oh, thanks a lot, Lydia! I can't believe you just said that!” I yelled. The yoghurt-smeared child decided that he wasn’t waiting around for the female-dominated drama and headed off upstairs, chanting “tits” to himself. I rounded on Lydia.

  “You do not say words like that!”

  Lydia had the grace to look sheepish for once.

  Two hours later, both children had been parcelled into bed. It was 8 p.m. and the silence engulfed me. The hour when the Ghost of Non-Adult Companionship began its nightly stalk throughout the house.

  A quick calculation: It had now been some twenty-one months and two days since Adam had been killed. Before his death, being on my own had never been a problem. I would have welcomed a weekend alone or just an entire evening simply lying on the settee, reading a book. I was a person perfectly at ease with solitude. But not any more. These days, I yearned for evening conversations. Grown-up chats. About anything that offered a bit more levity than a ten-minute soliloquy as to whether the ‘old Daphne’ or ‘new Daphne’ from Scooby Doo was much prettier (‘as purple suits her better – don't you think so, Matthew?’)

  My gut reaction to losing Adam was to need my own mum. But something between this mother and daughter had always rankled. A default towards misunderstanding one other. During the first few months after Adam’s death, attempts at communication between us had led to rather a few flashpoints. Not helped by the fact that Mum got it into her head that my method of grieving was somewhat abnormal.

  One day, about eighteen months ago, I overheard her talk
ing to Dad and her friend Anne, from church. In what she thought were hushed tones (but actually, the people in the end terrace could probably hear).

  “I'm just worried that she's not doing the stages properly, Terry ... you know. Shock. Then anger. And, oooh. I can’t remember what layer of grief comes next. Is it ‘denial’?”

  I had seen Mum's latest book at the side of her bed: Grandparents Amidst Tragedy: Helping Your Adult Children and Grandchildren Live Beyond Bereavement . The thought of this woman – previously choc-full of common sense – now having to read up on how to help her family touched a raw nerve. I stalked into the kitchen, hands on hips.

  “Well, I'm sorry, Mum, if I’m not doing a good job of ticking your boxes for the stages of grieving. But maybe some of us don’t need a bloody book to tell us how to cope with bereavement!”

  Anne was nibbling at a raspberry bun. She stopped and blinked. Looked at my dad. My mother felt the need to go into semi-scolding mode.

  “I wasn’t saying that, Rachael. It’s just that when someone has … when someone has … I mean, after Adam …”

  “Died!” I offered. “And why do people get so het up about the words? What do they matter? ‘Passed away’, ‘died’, ‘departed’, ‘moved to the other side’, ‘croaked it’, ‘kicked the bucket’ – whatever! Who cares? However you say it, it all just means the same thing. Oh, I'm sure that your new, very evangelical minister would have a nicer turn of phrase. And a cheery outline of what heaven and ‘the new earth’ will be like for us all. But I can’t buy into that crap.”

  A crumb from the raspberry bun lodged in Anne’s throat. My mother whacked her on the back and then tried to say something to me along the lines of “So don’t you believe in God any more?” But I cut her short.

  “Well, I don’t buy into religious brainwashing. So-called followers of God who manipulate human weaknesses, persuading us to put ‘faith’ into something that, quite frankly, our Matthew and Lydia could have invented between them. No. Sorry. I just think that if you’re dead, you’re dead. Adam is dead. I don’t understand why people can't just say that word! Dead!”

  When I finally managed to stomp on the verbal brakes, there was a heavy silence. The two older women stared at me. Both speechless for once. But then a high-pitched voice replied:

  “Or what about … as dead as a donut? Or are you supposed to say ‘as dead as a dormouse?’ ’Cause can donuts really be dead? And anyway. Do dormouses live in doors?”

  The happy-go-lucky reply of my daughter, as she sauntered back into the kitchen. Her grandad's reading glasses perched on her tiny nose and sporting an enormous pair of black Y-fronts on her head (“I'm a nun! I'm Julie Andrews, I am!”)

  I'm not sure if she knew what we were talking about. She was only five after all. But either way, I knew that she wasn’t keen on ‘That Anne from Grandma’s Church’. So she would have been quite happy to freak the poor woman out.

  I glanced over to my dad, who was trying to fix the mantelpiece clock (which Lydia had, for some reason, been shoving pipe cleaners into. Dad looked from me, to my mother, to Anne, and back again. The air sizzled. He yanked another pipe cleaner from the inner workings of the clock, and casually commented, “Well, love, that sounded like our Rachael’s doing your ‘anger’ bit pretty well.”

  A staccato pause. And then my mouth broke into a grin. My dad. Few words. Maximum impact. Dampened the stoked-up atmosphere.

  And yet, despite my mother’s lack of sophisticated emotional lexicology (the woman was about as subtle as a sledgehammer) I missed having her living just that bit closer to us. For the common sense, for her practical nature, for the fact that she loved Lydia and Matthew every bit as much as Adam had done.

  But most days my mum wasn’t there, of course. No significant other adult was.

  And so, this was the worst time of the day. When my heart ached for Adam. When I couldn’t distract myself with other people’s crises or concerns. I missed every stupid, annoying little bit of him. Even the pathetic jokes and ridiculously corny double entendres. The Basil Fawlty impersonations. His inability to put the milk or butter back into the fridge. The sheer number of Wagon Wheels and Jaffa Cakes that one man could get through in a day. And, in the old days, the bits of motorbike that would suddenly turn up in the bath. Usually only half an hour after I had finished cleaning it.

  But most of all, I missed him. My beautiful bloke. My children’s daddy. My best friend and my biggest champion. I craved for that easy affection that had always existed between us. For sure, I had been the less touchy-feely one in the relationship. Half the time I had been too wrapped up in my own stupidly busy world. But I needed someone like Adam: someone who could sense exactly when I needed to be hugged, cuddled or dragged off to bed. He usually knew what I needed, before either my body or my mind realised it.

  And now, all of a sudden, I was moving into a new landscape. Here was Michael. Here was sex. So easy; so natural. And so soon. Surely that couldn’t be a positive start to a relationship?

  Yes, and there he was too. There in That London. Going head to head with the media and the opposition. And here was I. Up north, wiping bottoms and tidying up Lego. There was simply no benchmark for this kind of situation. And now? Enter Shaun Elliot again. With a juicy offer on the table.

  No point in leafing through the pages of Cosmo for a bit of advice on this one.

  I decided to do the ironing. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe I could seek solace and joy in producing nicely-turned-out children. And I could slurp a large glass of red while completing the task in hand.

  Halfway through the pile of clothes, Kate called me. I put her on speakerphone so I could carry on with the ironing. The first part of the conversation involved Kate breaking off every now and then to shriek at Bob, her husband (“It’s the lazy git’s turn to put the twins to bed, but I just caught the three of them sitting on the bed and watching the footie!”) And the second part involved her shrieking rather too much and making far too many juvenile comments. This was after she had managed to wangle from me whose bed I had crashed out in on Saturday night.

  “I cannot believe this! I just saw the guy on the news … everyone laughing their socks off because he made a joke about breasts! Christ. If only people knew that the minister was on such good form today because on Saturday night he got a good shag!”

  “Keep it quiet, Kate. Not even Bob – okay?”

  Then it was, “Yeah, yeah. Hang on – I’m just googling him.”

  “Oh, don’t, Kate; I haven’t done that sort of thing. It’s too intrusive.”

  “Bollocks, mate. You’re so old-fashioned. Everyone googles each other. Hang on ... hmm. His Wiki-entry … it’s all a bit limited. Michael Chiswick must be the most boring bloke on the planet. Probably lives with his mother or something. Or else … he’s got stuff to hide. Some dirty little secret from the past. Maybe from his time in the army. Probably killed Saddam Hussein or something. And the government are complicit in covering his tracks …”

  She screeched with laughter at her own joke, but we were still on speakerphone, so I shushed her. The conversation was becoming raucous. Even the iron was hissing noisily.

  Lydia was still awake, as usual. I could hear her singing along to Jesus Christ Superstar upstairs. (How many parents have to ban their children from excessive listening to religious musicals? I do.)

  I decided to try to distract Kate from the Michael information hunt. Yes, it would be interesting to have a poke around and find out more about Michael’s history and former incarnations thanks to the joys of the internet. But I didn’t want to do that right now. Things felt too new – too strange, still. And I didn’t want to spoil a burgeoning relationship with information overload. Or get all green-eyed about past lady-friends. So I told her about Shaun visiting me at work. About going for a drink with him. About the job that he wanted me to apply for. But I omitted the bit about the barney in the Secret Glade.

  My oldest and dearest chum was aghast. She la
unched into her usual anti-Shaun tirade. How he had reduced me to a “gibbering wreck” in my early twenties; how he had “very inappropriately” turned up to my wedding reception (Adam had invited all his casual acquaintances from the biker club and Shaun had taken him up on the offer, even though Adam had no idea about the fact that Shaun and I had once been involved with each other); how he had “totally taken advantage” of me after Adam’s death.

  “And the twattiest bit of all – having his end away with you when you were still away with the fairies after losing Adam…and forgetting to tell you that he had got married!”

  I managed to shake off my usual stirrings of deep-rooted shame with regard to her latter comment. Only Kate and my sister Vicky knew about the second time around with Shaun. It wasn’t my finest moment, that was for sure.

  “Thanks for the synopsis, Kate. But all I’m talking about here is a job. A dull job, no doubt … but I’m fretting about money at the moment. And, to be fair, he seemed genuinely interested in what we’re doing with the chocolate project …”

  “Rachael! ‘To be fair’? This is Shaun we’re talking about!”

  I was quiet. So her voice levelled somewhat.

  “Oh, I don’t know, chicken. It's just a bit funny, that’s all. You start this thing with your swanky politician bloke and then Shaun trucks up just a day later. I mean, maybe he can sniff out when some other dog has pissed over his lamp post. His perceived territory, you know? Maybe he can sort of sense a threat to his manhood …”

  “Gee, thanks!” I added, with fake glee. “So here’s me. The innocent and hapless lamp post. And there’s Shaun and Michael. Both of them trying to pee over me! You make it all sound so terribly romantic!”

  “Well. They don’t do pistols at dawn any more, you know. But come on, mate. You have to admit that when it comes to Shaun the Shithead, you go into paralysis mode. He’s like this big horrible tom cat. Playing about with this wee terrified mouse.”