A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Somehow that’s worse than anything — the thought of his soggy, waxy ear. Which is just a guess on my part. It may actually be a fine example of its type.

I’m OK, though. This is OK. I felt ill and peculiar because I’ve been awake since four and I missed my breakfast and then I missed lunch. I should eat a little more.

And perhaps I really ought to risk shaming and incomprehension and imprisonment a little less.

Then again …

At half-past six I’ll be somewhere with knee room and a lovely view and that isn’t a guess on my part and everything involved will be a fine example and not a type. So I can deal with the here and now.

I would like to point out — in the here and now — that I excel under pressure. This has been mentioned in every evaluation I’ve ever had and was true throughout my marriage, if that’s of interest to anyone, which it isn’t.

Milner was using the ethical phone to address some assistant whom he clearly viewed as being mentally handicapped by her gender. ‘No, it would be in the white file, love. No, darling … No, the big, white file marked … Yes, that’s the one …’ He was enunciating with a savage fondness as one might to an elderly relative prone to rewriting their will, or else to some senselessly garrulous animal.

I bet he makes jokes about birds that can talk.

Milner rolled his eyes, almost audibly, for Jon’s benefit. ‘And if you run down the index … Exactly …’ He winked at Jon to indicate they belonged in the same long-suffering brotherhood. ‘Yeah. So read that to me …?’ Milner cocked the mouthpiece away from his face while listening.

The investigator of uncommon influence demonstrates top-flight multi-tasking, yeah yeah fucking yeah. You don’t know you’re born, mate. Try being at a dinner party and having to ignore the manifest fact that a man you sort of trusted or at least nodded to in lifts has his hand under the table and, of course, on your wife’s thigh while you’re jamming down your dessert and planning tomorrow’s strategies to save the arses of arses. That’s what I do, after all — why dress it up, why not leave the arses bare for once? And I coordinate the data arising from overwhelming and overwhelmed change. The data which nobody wants. Except my own individual ministry.

Unlike, for example, the MoJ where it is most especially and stridently the policy to know nothing about anything at all. If there is no news then it can’t be bad. And so the politics of faked conviction — in every sense — become the politics of delusion, of delusional narcissism, of assisted suicide, of abuse. Also in every sense.

Although I couldn’t swear to that — not being a psychiatrist.

I still do my bloody job, I still assess impacts, consequences, sustainability, costs and benefits. Facts and facts and facts, so many facts. It remains my duty to provide them. This is viewed as a betrayal rather worse than pawing a wife not one’s own, or — from one position or another — allowing it.

So why not do what I feel to be proper with my facts, why not share them wrongly when I am already in the wrong?

But I ought to be right.

I am right.

We do have need of the real world.

I am right.

In this and perhaps nothing else, I am right.

Milner — who didn’t make one happy about journalists as a species — talked on while Jon regretted having ordered fish. It was probably just out of the freezer. This was nowhere near lunchtime, so asking for a full hot meal had not been reasonable and Christ knew why Milner had joined him in requesting another.

You just couldn’t see me having something that you didn’t. Is that it? Didn’t want to feel deprived, hard done by? Just have a go at living in my today. Just try it. Today is not unbloodycomplicated …

Jon allowed himself, unwillingly, to hear Milner explaining, ‘She’s new. They can’t keep up, the girls. I just get them broken them in and—’ Milner looked serious in the manner of television policemen and patronised the phone again. ‘Two hundred and thirty thousand? You’re sure? That’s what it says? Well, yes then. Courier me a scan of the whole thing — put it on a thumb drive — but that’s what I need for this afternoon, that page. Email me when it’s done. Use the Hushmail account. Although, by four thirty everyone will know. That way we catch PM on Radio Four.’ Jon knew perfectly well that the PM programme was broadcast on Radio Four. ‘If they have any researchers on who are over twelve, they’ll manage something — maybe — depends on their nerves, and whoever has the fastest hands can run with the rest.’ He rang off and then studied Jon with lubricated belli-gerence. ‘What?’

Jon was unable to prevent himself saying, ‘That was an odd metaphor.’

‘What?’

‘Fast hands would usually imply boxing, or some kind of contact sport … The running … Were you thinking of rugby?’

Milner speared some remaining chips on to his fork and proceeded to combine eating them with speaking, ‘Writer now, are you. Funny. I thought that was my job.’

‘It’s my job, too. You didn’t say goodbye.’

‘What?’

‘To your assistant.’

‘I never do. She would think something was wrong if I said goodbye. And there’s nothing wrong. So I didn’t. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?’

Jon noted that his hands were shaking minorly and set them down on the tabletop close to his purposeless knife and fork. ‘I …’ He found himself exhausted. That was the thing about Milner: aside from his appalling character and appearance, he always contrived to be bone-deeply tiring.

‘Is there something wrong, Mr Sigurdsson?’

‘There’s … No.’

‘Every time your fucking phone makes a noise you look queasy. Trouble?’

‘No. No trouble.’

‘Ah …’ The red mouth, glistening lips, opened wide. Milner winked like a music-hall spiv. ‘Something up with the love life? Something wrong at work?’

‘No. There’s nothing wrong.’

In an everything kind of way.

The sparse drinkers and nibblers around about them registered the usual perimeter of Milner-related irritation. He was loud, he was boorish, he was unmissable and apparently gleeful about it. Even across the room it was possible to follow his conversations and be at least slightly repelled, if not alarmed that he might become truly unruly.

For the whole of their rendezvous Jon had tried his best under the circumstances, abandoning deft manoeuvres once it was clear to everyone in the place that the sun was really very far beyond Milner’s yardarm and subtlety would therefore be ineffective. Jon used the word caution as if it were a good thing and mentioned a long-standing series of leaks involving quite accurate statistics. He was able to breathe normally while he did so. He raised the forthcoming election as an issue and used the word sensitivity as if it were not funny in this context, and had then been very firm about the government’s — any government’s — willingness to engage generously with serious and reputable journalists anxious to perfect their craft.

I truly did just hear my own voice pronouncing both lifeblood and democracy and slipping only a tiny of down in between them .

Christ.

I may plead that the theatricality of the occasion is getting the better of me. An audience — albeit of Westminster topers — always encourages empty rhetoric.

Reasonable assumptions were made — out loud — regarding the levels of privileged access which might reward and welcome team players.