Time of Lies Page 7

  ‘How long have you been at Eton, Dr Sotiris?’ Kathy’s sonar is pinging like mad.

  ‘Please – Nassia. Four years.’

  ‘Well, it’s been very nice to meet you. Zack, why don’t we get some food?’

  ‘Great idea. Well, Nassia, I wish you luck with my brother. He’s a tough one.’ It’s an exit line but for some reason my hormones have different plans. I add, ‘So, what kind of sociology should I call you up about – do people call you up about?’

  One-legged she slips a stockinged foot free of her left shoe, extracting a business card perfumed with talcum powder and her contact details. She holds my gaze throughout. ‘I specialise in the sociology of precocity. How and when individuals in different classes and social settings discover that they have unusual talents – star quality, if you will – and how that social setting reacts, positively or negatively. You know the expression ‘cutting down tall poppies’? So Eton is a greenhouse for tall poppies, having provided nineteen of your prime ministers. The school is part of my research, as well as my teaching. And Bob is also a tall poppy, coming from a background more or less opposite. He is exceptionally talented – as both of you are as well, that goes without saying. One day it would be interesting to interview you, Zack, to see how things were for you growing up.’

  Kathy’s reply is firm. ‘No exceptional talent in my case, Dr Sotiris. I count myself lucky to be a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. If I go places, it won’t be because of exceptional pixie dust: I’ll go because the Navy sends me. I’m starving, Zack, and I’ve seen carvery sandwiches.’

  ***

  We come out of the food tent with freshly-roasted-turkey sandwiches, complete with sage stuffing and cranberry sauce. Kathy attacks hers with gusto. The buffet also offers chip butties on ciabatta or supermarket white, with fresh tomato salsa or Heinz, and a daunting display of langoustines dressed with caviar. We didn’t join in the banter in the buffet queue.

  ‘I thought there’d be a pool.’

  ‘Bob’s learned his lesson from Barrymore, right? That’s why there’s no pool.’ Earlier in the week, Barrymore had been told there would be no charges.

  ‘The lesson is don’t be a fucking poof.’

  ‘Too right. Bob ain’t no poof.’

  When we’re free from the tent we roll our eyes. ‘Don’t forget we need to give Bob his present.’ Kathy tapped her bag.

  ‘You’re right. Let’s do that and leave, shall we? I’m glad I came to show my face, but it’s all a bit weird. Not to mention unpleasant.’

  Through bits of turkey Kathy mumbles, ‘Yes. We’ll finish our sandwiches and go hunting.’

  ‘You’ll not go talking with your mouth full, aye, not like that Kathy.’ I exaggerate Cairstine’s inflections.

  When we find Bob it is with his mouth full – full of vodka, lying on the floor of the kitchen. Above him on the breakfast bar is an ice sculpture sitting on a refrigerated base, owned (according to a bright red label) by Shock News. In the crowded kitchen the red-head is presiding, counting to twenty in a crescendo. A backing chorus makes up in enthusiasm for any unfamiliarity with the larger numbers. The counting matches the emptying of a glass of colourless liquid into a hole in the forehead of the ice sculpture, a life-size nude. The nude lies on her back pouting at the ceiling. Her lower parts show signs of global warming: the left foot has melted up to the ankle, while the right leg has been amputated at the knee. Behind her a regiment of Stolichnaya empties parades on the breakfast bar.

  The vodka, now chilled, bubbles up from the nude’s navel and carves its own channel across her belly to cascade from between her legs into Bob’s open mouth.

  I know Kathy has seen stuff in the Navy, even taken part a couple of times (she told me once about an apple-bobbing contest, but it wasn’t water in the bowl). But the mum storming off with her boy suddenly looks like the height of restraint.

  From his earthworm perspective Bob sees the two of us and winks.

  ‘Sixteen… seventeen…’

  Fortunately a lot of the vodka lands on the floor. The glacial erosion in the pubic region had become estuarine, so the colourless liquid falls in a wide, torn sheet.

  ‘Nineteen…’ A camera flashes.

  ‘Twenty!’

  Bob springs up to hooting, high fives and a kiss from Angel. He looks around triumphantly.

  ‘What a cunt,’ I say, loud enough so only Kathy can hear.

  ***

  We still have to get shot of Bob’s present, so when he has been wiped down with a Shock News towel and stumbles towards us with an iced tea, I point towards the garden’s most reclusive corner.

  ‘Try it,’ he says. ‘It clears your head like fuck,’ he adds, shaking his like a hairless dog.

  ‘No thanks bro,’ I respond. ‘I’ve got a life.’

  ‘You’re winding me up – you got a life? All credit to you Kathy, Jack never had one before. Tell him to be careful with it.’

  ‘You might want to be careful yourself,’ she says, trying to be light-hearted as she hands me her bag. I take out two thin rectangles, about seven inches by five, and hand Bob the first. Kathy has wrapped it to make a nation of shopkeepers proud.

  ‘You know that picture we thought was lost? The one Aunt Jessie took, of ma and the two of us in Southwark Park for the fireworks.’

  Bob’s alcoholic fog is pierced. He takes the present and looks up.

  I continue, ‘I was clearing junk to move into Kathy’s and found it. We’ve made you a copy and framed it.’

  Bob clutches it to his chest, before stumbling again. ‘Sweet, bro. I appreciate it.’ He laughs and ribs me. ‘Shame you’re in it, but I guess you can’t have everything.’ The photograph hovers precariously in his grip.

  The second rectangle is an unwrapped paperback, but a fraction of the normal thickness. ‘I don’t know that I would call this a present, but I hope you might want to have it anyway.’

  Bob studies the title, Copenhagen. ‘You think I should go?’ he asks.

  I shake my head. ‘It’s a play. By Michael Frayn. Look.’ I riffle the pages so he can see them laid out as a script, not prose. ‘Two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, meet in 1941 during the war to discuss making the atom bomb. You’re interested in the Second World War, Churchill and all that.’

  Kathy makes a supporting run. ‘Niels Bohr will be Zack’s first leading role! A really big role opening in January in Birmingham. Zack hopes you might want to keep a copy of the play as a souvenir.’

  Bob laughs. ‘It’s about Germans making the atom bomb? But they don’t, do they? Is Churchill in it?’

  I shake my head.

  Bob holds out his hand. ‘Sorry Jack, the vodka – congratulations. Well done mate. Your first leading role.’

  ‘Thanks Bob.’ I gesture at the house, the garden and the guests. ‘You got yourself a leading role some time ago. Congratulations too.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Bob sways, fingering the book before jabbing it in my chest. Suddenly his face is all smiles. ‘All those times we argued? I said acting was pretending, and you said it wasn’t.’ Bob turns to Kathy and rolls up his left sleeve. He shows her the three inch scar near his shoulder which I know well. ‘I used to say to Jack, that’s not pretending. But I get it now. You are in this play, and this play isn’t about pretending, it’s about what shit really happened when these egg-heads meet and change the course of the war.’

  My brow wrinkles. ‘Nobody actually knows what did happen when the two scientists met. Nobody alive. We have a few letters.’

  Bob holds the script up between two fingers. ‘Got it. That’s why it’s so thin. Not a lot of words, nobody knows what happened.’ He claps me on the shoulder. ‘I thought for a moment you got ripped off there, bro.’

  Kathy senses she is in a good position and shoots for goal. ‘In fact, the play is more than two hours! Two h
ours, three characters. It will be a fantastic break for Zack.’

  The gnat which originally had Bob’s attention span wants it back. ‘It’s all cool with me. Just as long as it’s not a load of bollocks in fancy made-up words.’

  I stare at Bob. I’ve no clue whether I’m getting through or pissing in the wind, but I’m giving him what I’ve got. ‘The play is about giving things another go. Frayn calls it doing “another draft”. If you read it, think about you and me, brother. When something’s difficult in a relationship, that’s all we have – giving it another go.’

  Kathy holds my hand, and reaches out for Bob’s. He stays out of reach. I fire my last shots. ‘OK, there is an alternative. The alternative is we don’t do “another draft”. We decide we already know. I already know what you’re like. You already know what I’m like. We stop. We stop now.’

  Bob pitches forward. Glass tinkles as he drops the photograph and the script and throws up over them, before collapsing face down. Kathy steps forward, the decisive first aider. He’s got a pulse, I want to tell her; he just hasn’t got a mind. She’s going to clear his airway – rather her than me. ‘Call an ambulance,’ she says.

  Now that’s a plan. At the very least I can embarrass the scumbag in front of all his guests by calling the ambulance from the house. Oh, I’m not hoping for his death – just something a bit salutary.

  Fuck it, by the time the ambulance comes, Bob’s fine. Some ice from the sculpture helps his headache. Angela is nowhere to be seen.

  Bob’s not even mildly embarrassed; he doesn’t know what embarrassment is. We exchange pretences: he pretends to be sorry for throwing up over the photograph and the book, and I pretend it’s no bother.

  On the train home Kathy and I have half a compartment to ourselves. ‘Tell me again about the knife fight,’ she says, her head nestling against my shoulder. ‘You didn’t have knife fights, did you?’

  No, I tell her; then I tell her the story once more. More exactly, I tell her the only part of the story which I’ve told anyone. I was seventeen and doing a Saturday shift re-stocking shelves in the supermarket, so I didn’t see anything myself. Bob was sixteen, the other boy, Tel, was fifteen. They were from the same estate, but there was a gang from a neighbouring estate. Friends, enemies, bravado, knives. It got out of control. Bob and the other boy got stabbed, the fifteen-year-old very seriously. Bob made it to hospital, the youngster didn’t and died. It was a shocking and very personal educational experience, although not quite the same as Eton.

  A copy of the Daily Mail lying on the next seat says Britain will be swamped after European chiefs bring in an extra 20 million migrants from Asia and Africa. Another story says a Hollywood actress has spent £226,000 on plastic surgery but still can’t get a role. Demi, I feel your pain.

  Two weeks later confirmation came through about my role, and I start the happiest time in my life – planning our wedding and a successful career. The happiness lasts until December when the theatre is gutted in a fire. There are insurance problems, the director of the production is also a director of the theatre and he has to sort them out – so no production. I’m as gutted as the theatre. Time for another draft. Fortunately they do them in pubs.

  13

  London, Friday 24 April 2020

  In the morning the Shock News front page is an over-chubby general impersonating an enraged lobster beneath the headline: WHO DEFENDS BRITAIN – THIS MAN OR BG? Patrick is so keen for me to attend this afternoon’s role-play briefing he’s given Kathy the morning off to play nurse. The man has barely met me but he reads me to a T.

  Kathy brings a hand-woven Panama. After I’ve used the private shower (twice the size of our bathroom at home) we head for a costume shop near Covent Garden. A plus from normally having the right hair for an ELO tribute band turns out to be that getting an emergency wig is easy. Serve me right for poking fun at Cairstine’s pompadour: the curls scratch like hell but do the job.

  Kathy drops me at a nondescript office building across from Waterloo station. I make my way up to the seventh floor with Jeremy Corbyn. Although we are not ‘in costume’ I can see why the MOD wanted to do the meeting somewhere discreet. They have achieved that: the conference room they’ve hired shares the floor with a private clinic. There’s a steady traffic of all shapes of men to the gents, returning with urine samples. I wonder if any of them are estate agents.

  In the conference room six of us sign pages of mumbo-jumbo on secrecy before being handed individual folders – three or four closely typed pages of scenario description plus a similar amount of ‘script’ suggesting how we open the role-play next week. A frisky thirty-five-year-old with nerd glasses explains that each of us will have our own half day role-play with civil servants (in my case, military as well). The group will come in having swotted up and analysed our parties’ manifestos and speeches, but otherwise blind. The first hour will be an extremely lively meeting in which each of us lays out a scenario with demands and instructions. In the second hour the civil servants will then have thirty minutes on their own to formulate a plan, returning for half an hour to attempt to persuade us to agree; a cycle which will repeat in the third hour. All the discussions will be filmed and observed by psychologists, who will analyse what went well and what went badly. Finally, we’ll chip in our own take on what pissed us off or won us around.

  Around the room there are giggles and smirks. The thirty-five-year-old frowns severely. Boris Johnson shows me his first page – bring back hanging, auction it as a reality TV franchise compèred by yours truly. The group breaks up to get into role.

  The BG scenario makes my blood runs cold. China has massacred fifteen civil rights protesters in front of the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong and declared martial law. Several business leaders as well as a vocal part of the Hong Kong public have invoked British protection under the Sino-British Declaration of 1984. The Premier warns that any interference in China’s internal affairs will result in daily blackouts in Britain’s China-owned electricity supply ‘until they see the light’.

  As Prime Minister Bob, I want electricity bosses fired and the Navy’s flagship Queen Elizabeth sent to the scene. The carrier is barely ready for operations, with only six short take-off and vertical landing fighters deployable; I will demand adding a force from the Vigilance with drones. The Navy will insist that it has no ability to protect its flagship within easy reach of thousands of Chinese aircraft, shore-based missiles and stealth submarines: I will accuse them of cowardice. Widespread power cuts could bring the Government down. The loss of the Queen Elizabeth could trigger nuclear war. Will I be persuaded by my staff, or just double down?

  Behind the scenario is Bob’s photo and a psychological profile. I’m intrigued that they have managed to predict his temper – he’s been very careful to keep that out of public view. The psychologists think that beneath the bluster, Bob is nicer than Trump but more unpredictable. I think he’s fooled them on the nice bit. I read the scenario a second time. When I look around, the room has got ten degrees colder.

  From Waterloo it’s an easy train journey home. I tell Kathy that the scenarios scare the shit out of me. She reminds me of the way I took the piss out of war-gaming at Helensburgh. I tell her she did a great casting job: the physical resemblances were secondary and variable, but by the questions we had when we finished reading, it was obvious that we would all deliver. The thirty-five-year-old even had to stop and think a few times.

  We both have big days tomorrow. Kathy goes to bed early while I finish the joint left over from Wednesday; I’m more excited than I thought about having a walk-on part in a national drama, and I need to wind down. Nuclear war puts estate agents into perspective. When I am under the covers I place my hand on the small of Kathy’s back and feel her rise and fall.

  She and I have been talking about whether, if we end up in Washington for two years, that might be the time to have a baby – I can be at home
while she does a bit of the evening ‘power career’ thing. Not having friends around won’t matter too much. Also we’ll be back in this country before kindergarten – the thought of an American accent in the nest freaks both of us out. Of course if my career was taking off … The truth is, as an actor I’m an aircraft who will never do more than taxi along the tarmac.

  Might I still get a lucky break? But my mind traps that thought and turns it around like Lionel Messi. Not getting killed when I fell off the pavement was my lucky break.

  14

  London, Saturday 25 April 2020

  For its biggest rally yet, BG made the obvious choice – Millwall’s Den. Rigged out rock concert style with cable, suspended speakers and giant screens, the location reeked of symbolism. Home of the Millwall Lions. The part of south-east London where Bob Grant had grown up and where he was BG’s parliamentary candidate. The docks and the vanished dockers, slaughtered since the 1950s by containers, cheaper labour, a shrinking and weightless globe followed by an exploding and wait-less web. The forces which took their livelihoods were so huge that the names Britons attached to them, like Thatcher or the unions, were no more than initials carved into the world’s park benches – puny attempts to say that sometime, somebody had been here.

  The stadium was a 20,000-capacity Meccano rectangle opened in 1993 to replace one nearby. It was sneered at from vertiginous heights by all the ‘statement buildings’ within eyeshot, especially the Shard and the financial skyscrapers at Canary Wharf across the river, all less than five minutes away by helicopter. Towering capitalism looked down at Southwark and Bermondsey, its neighbour once criss-crossed by a historic web of small industry but now overwhelmingly residential, and pondered briefly how it could squash some more life out of it.

  The stadium’s main claim to fame was that humans still congregated there. If a goal was scored the crowd could be heard in the supermarket car park a mile away. They could be heard notwithstanding the traffic and the trains, or the jets powdering their noses in the sky before gliding down to Heathrow twenty-five miles to the west, or the myriad beats of private music. Not to mention the unceasing rhythm of chat – ‘He was like, and I was like … No, really?’ – by which south-east London counted down the minutes to death.