‘I know that — I’m not an idiot, you fucking idiot.’
‘Touchy … Well, there are two blokes in tonight who stand next to Prince Whatever sometimes and who play that game with the funny-shaped ball.’
‘You’re not amusing.’
‘Ruggah buggahs … And there’s that woman who didn’t win the telly baking competition this year … or last year … Fame ain’t what it fuckin’ used to be.’
‘You didn’t need to do that.’
‘At lunch you gave me the distinct impression that I did …’ Milner approached Jon as if he were a petulant animal, a startled horse — his hands wide and low, placating.
And Jon submitted, allowed Milner to slop one heavy arm over his shoulders, make him stoop. Then Milner guided him, like an old pal, towards the glimmer and chatter of the pub.
I can’t see her like this. I’m bad enough at the best of times and … I’ll look like some cartoon idea of a tumbling drunk. I’ll smell of Milner, of tepid pints and ketoacidosis because — yes — I have researched the physical effects of alcohol abuse.
All the large and little harms I would have spared her if I could.
Please let her always be safe.
Please.
Please everything, something, nothing.
Fuck.
Jon heard himself whine — Christ, I have an ugly voice, tonight worse than ever — addressing himself more than Milner: ‘Um … let me …. I’m running late for my next appointment and I have to send a text.’
‘Go ahead.’ Milner breathing this against Jon’s injured cheek — the impact of his heat felt infectious.
‘I need to do it alone.’
‘Suit yerself, duckie. I’ll get you a pint of bitter — that be all right?’
‘I don’t want a drink.’
I don’t want my mouth to taste of drink.
‘I’ll get you a bitter anyway — you’re a bitter man, Jon. Ha ha. A bitter man. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it myself.’
‘Get me a cup of tea, for God’s sake.’ And Jon shrugged him off at the foot of the endearing and perhaps original steps that led to the pub’s entrance. Then he watched the bulk that was Milner ease itself up and inside. Jon closed his eyes.
If he broke my phone on the cobbles … If I can’t … If I don’t find a way of …
The dark in his head only made his thinking louder than he could bear, so he glanced about. The evening seemed to slither, wet patches of illumination hiding round the cobbles like signs of disease. He reached into his pocket, took out his — as it turned out — undamaged phone. He dialled Meg’s number and then stopped the call before it could go through.
Text. That would be better. I’ll send a text.
That actually wouldn’t be better, but it’s what I’ll send.
His fingers were slithering suddenly and traitorous.
He felt that he might want to cry.
A text.
21:52
JON FOUND THE Friday-night fug and din of the bar offensive. It made him — inevitably — queasy and then more than queasy.
Perhaps I should develop an eating disorder.
He had to head on straight past Milner and find the gents’ as soon as he was penned definitively indoors.
Oh God Oh God Oh God.
Having made it to the toilets, he coughed and heaved unhappily in an unproductive effort, then left the relative privacy of the stall and rushed water into a sink, cupped it up and over his face like a repeated small rebuke. He looked — according to the mirror — dreadful.
Like some mugged ageing householder, staring out for his headlining picture in the local paper — look what they did to me.
Look what I did to me.
Milner had drained one of the available pints on his table by the time Jon returned. The other pint was grinningly rocked in mid-air before the first of it was taken too, Milner showing his teeth. ‘Now then.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t hit you that hard, but you look like shit … You’re getting on a bit more than I thought, aren’t you, Jonnie? Proper grey, you look.’
‘Thanks.’ Jon folded himself into a seat and slid one hand into the other — maintained himself, held on. ‘I don’t have any figures for you. And there’s no point to them any more, anyway. If there ever was.’
‘Don’t lose your balls now.’
‘Why must everyone this evening take such a lively interest in my balls?’ Jon was alarming himself. ‘My balls are in place. In fact.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. And the figures serve a purpose — if they didn’t, why would it be so hard to get them? Why are they being buried at sea? How many suicides, how many deaths, what are the increases in costs and where are they hidden? … Our hints and tips are building a tide for disclosure.’
‘They’re building fuck all.’ Jon kept his voice as low as he could while this kick of anger jolted up his forearms. ‘Nobody cares. Remember shop a scrounger in the soar-away Sun? That was ten years ago. The start of the high-octane hate.’ He eyed the happy bar, its happy drinkers.
Fuck ’em all.
He continued, ‘We’ve had more than ten years of being told about the undeserving poor. If you’re poor enough to need benefits you must be doing something wrong — you must be something wrong and undeserving. Want shouldn’t get — that’s our departmental fucking motto. Our national credo — we all love royal babies and hate the poor. At present and for the foreseeable future. That’s how it works …’
‘Is it your time of the month?’ Milner patted Jon’s arm and he felt the man’s contact as an unclean thing, as a kind of obscene comment on how Meg might have been when she was drunk.
‘Fuck you, Milner.’
‘Only asking, because it does seem to have taken the whole of your career for you to notice that maybe things were going off course.’
‘It’s taken the whole of my career for it to go, as you say, off course … I stayed in …’ Too loud. Jon noticed he actually had been given tea — teapot, milk, sugar, cup and saucer, the petty litter of it all seeming quite confusing and pathetic, now that he examined it … He poured some out for himself — More tea, Deputy Director? — and added sugar.
Good for shock.
And then he settled his voice down into the murmur reserved for informing a minister while he chairs this or that committee, attends this or that occasion when the public must be faced — his warm undertone for leaning in and making all right. ‘The open secret, the one at the heart of public service is — as you know — that there are facts, but they don’t matter. There is knowledge and that knowledge can prove and disprove the better — if not the best — ways to do anything. Anything at all. But ministers, MPs, politicians, theorists, they have to be visible, they have to do things, and if this involves dismantling a functional system, then it will be dismantled — not adjusted, adjustments aren’t sexy, not mended, mending is what tradesmen do. They must be certain, they must have strident opinions and tangible faith, the better to overpower reality. We are asked to advise them less and less — the infallible need no advice. More and more, we are required to change what worked into what does not work. We navigate a blossoming coral reef of unnecessary change and legislation and we peep out from its nooks and crannies to look at the sharky exercise of will amongst those who actually want to bring about what does not work. They want to be freed by catastrophe. Freed from logic, freed from restraint.