High society (15 page)

THE GROUCHO CLUB, SOHO

A
wide, supercilious smile spread across Milton’s pasty jowls as his colleague joined him. She was ten years younger than him, much better looking and despite the fact that he was nominally her departmental boss she was rather more successful. Therefore her humiliation at the hands of the teenage Paget girl had been most satisfying. Sweet though it was, Milton had never dared to hope that Paula would further compound her defeat so comprehensively with such a poor effort as the one he had spread out before him. As she sat down, Milton rested his beer carefully on top of her byline and photograph.

‘God, your column was crap this morning, Paula. The editor’s furious with me for even running it. But do you know, I just couldn’t resist it.’

‘What do you mean, crap?’

‘Going after Paget like that, darling, and of course his fragrant daughter.’

‘Why the fuck shouldn’t I go after them?’

‘A whole page, dear? It looks like sour grapes.’

‘What do you mean, sour grapes? What on earth would I have to be sour about?’

Milton actually laughed at her. Paula was playing it all so terribly wrong. The only manner to assume under such circumstances was good-humoured acknowledgement. Put your hand up to it, admit you’ve cocked up and swear to get even. Toughing it out was not an option.

‘What have you to be sour about? Nothing at all, except being made to look like a complete arse by a juvenile on the national news. She really was awfully good, that girl. I think we should offer her a job, voice of youth and all that. Perhaps she could have your page.’

Paula flinched.

‘Do you take drugs, by the way? Do tell, as if we didn’t know. She had you down right there, didn’t she?’

‘Look, Milton, I haven’t given Peter Paget or his smartarse sodding daughter a second thought since we doorstepped them. I wrote my piece because Paget is a shitty little careerist and his obnoxious brat is just one more cocky little posh kid who thinks the world was put there for her own personal amusement.’

‘You can’t call the Pagets posh, Paula. They’re not remotely posh. We’re both miles posher than they are.’

‘We are not the issue.’

‘Yes, that’s what you said to the girl, wasn’t it? They played it on all the channels and it didn’t sound convincing then, either.’

‘Look, they’re posh if I say they’re posh. I can call them what I fucking like, darling, I’m a columnist.’

‘They’re middle-class, Paula. And first generation at that. Angela Paget’s father was a miner.’

‘They live in a five hundred grand house.’

‘Yes, so you said in your desperate little piece. Picture and all, most unethical. I expect he’s already been on to the Press Council. He’s an MP, you know, terrorist target, et cetera.’

‘Bollocks. When did the IRA last blow up a backbencher?’

‘Oh, it’s all mad Muslims these days, dear. Most unpredictable.’

‘Look, this is about hypocrisy. He acts like he’s one of us and yet — ’

‘One of who?’

‘One of the fucking people we represent, Milton! And yet he lives in a posh snob hoity-toity house! That is something which in my opinion is a matter of legitimate public interest.’

‘Paula, even the morons who read your page know that a terrace in Dalston is not posh snob hoity-toity, even a three-storey one. I saw that the picture department did their best to crop out the abandoned car and the council dustbins, but despite that it still looked like the crappy north London terrace it is. Do tell me if you find a large house anywhere in London that you can get for less than half a mil. I’ll buy it.’

‘Look — ’

‘No, you look, Paula! And while you’re looking, listen too. Listen very carefully. It was a pathetic column, so far beneath you it’s looking up your arse, and quite frankly it reflects badly on the whole paper. You got bagged by a kid and you went straight home and tried to get your own back and you’ve made yourself look like an even bigger twat than you did before.’

‘We agreed to go after Paget for using his family for publicity — ’

‘Not the day after that same family scored such a whopping great point off you, dear. Not with zero ammunition beyond one perfectly reasonable photocall and the ABC Book of Spite. I can tell you now that I think you’ve made yourself look an arse.’

Milton sneered at Paula. He fancied her, of course, but she had consistently denied his advances. Right back to that very first week after she had joined the paper’s famous Bitch Squad of gossip columnists of whom Milton was in charge. He’d tried to muscle her into the photocopying room and shag her over the Xerox machine. She’d told him to fuck off in front of everybody and he’d hated her ever since, a fact which had not stopped him periodically repeating his efforts to pull her. Humiliating her now was an act of sexual conquest for Milton, and he was enjoying every moment of it.

‘We’re not happy, Paula. Not happy at all,’ Milton crowed. ‘Even celebrity columnists can be replaced, you know, so if you’re going to go after Paget again you’d better have something worth hitting him with. Otherwise stick to slagging off Posh and Becks and Tommy Hanson.’

THE LANGHAM HOTEL, W1

P
eter’s interview was to take place in a day room at the Langham. Normally Peter enjoyed doing these interviews very much. In his first seventeen years in Parliament scarcely any writer of any sort had sought his opinion on anything. Now his sudden notoriety meant that the world simply could not get enough of him and it was intoxicating. Peter loved the whole business: meeting in flashy hotel foyers, ordering coffee and sandwiches and bottles of mineral water at some newspaper’s expense, perhaps even a drink or two if it was late in the afternoon. All in all, it was very pleasant to spend an hour or two being pampered while one’s opinions were earnestly canvased. Today, however, Peter was out of sorts. He did not return Samantha’s smile of greeting as he mounted the steps of the hotel and he recoiled from her efforts to embrace him.

‘For God’s sake, Samantha!’ he hissed. ‘You’re my parliamentary assistant. We can’t go kissing in public!’

‘Of course we can, everybody hugs these days. Haven’t you noticed? It’s post-Diana Britain. We all show our emotions.’

‘Our emotions are exactly the thing we mustn’t show. Samantha, I am a married man.’

‘Nobody knows that better than I do, Peter.’

‘What on earth were you thinking phoning me like that? On a mobile of all things. Mobiles aren’t secure.’

‘God, you’re talking like I was selling secrets to the Russians, not talking about sex.’

‘Shut up, Sammy! Please! Now is not the time to become blase about our…’

‘Love?’

‘Relationship. My bill is slowly working its way through the house. It would be a disaster if there was a scandal now.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to mess up your career, Peter. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all, flirt with you.’

‘Well, please don’t. And particularly not on a mobile.’

‘Guess what I did?’

‘What?’

‘I asked the paper if we could keep the room they’ve reserved for us for an hour or two after the interview. They said fine, it’s booked for the day anyway.’

‘You did what?

‘It’s all right. I told them we had work to do and another interview later.’

‘And they believed you?’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ And Samantha squeezed Peter’s hand, only briefly, scarcely so as you’d notice.

Except that somebody did notice. Christobel, the journalist whom Peter was supposed to meet, had arrived early and had been watching Peter and Samantha’s conversation from behind a teacup.

Peter put his anger with Samantha behind him and applied himself to the interview with vigour. It was an easy task, because his subject made him angry too.

‘In some areas there is a drug dealer on every street corner but no corner shop! How insane is that, Christobel? There used to be shops, certainly, but now they’re all boarded up. No one is interested in buying the businesses, and why? Because the surrounding area is alive with little boys selling smack and sticking knives into each other, that’s why. For vast sections of the population, Christobel, buying drugs is a simple matter of taking two steps outside their front door, but if they want a teabag it’s a half-hour walk to get to a Sainsbury’s that’s built like Fort Apache in the Bronx. Drugs are totally illegal and yet in some areas they’re the only things available for sale! This is an Alice in Wonderland world, Christobel, a surreal madness. If the government had let the corner shops sell the drugs in the first place, or at least the local chemists and off licences, all those little boys who are closing down neighbourhoods would be doing paper rounds and Saturday jobs instead.’

The interview had gone extremely well. Peter’s arguments had been passionate and convincing and Christobel felt confident that they would make very sexy copy indeed with all that talk of ‘smack’ and ‘knives’ and the like. It had also been clear to her that Paget was genuinely committed to his ideas. Quite obviously he believed absolutely in his cause, that there was only one way for the country and indeed the world to get out of the fix it was in, and that was to legalize all drugs. What was more, having listened to him for over an hour, Christobel was inclined to agree with him. Unfortunately for Peter, the subject of his Private Member’s Bill was not what was on the journalist’s mind when, after the interview, she had called her colleague Paula. Nor was it on her mind now as she and Paula hid in a service cupboard in the corridor outside the room in which Christobel had left Peter working with his parliamentary assistant.

‘If I’m right about this, Paula, you’ll owe me for the rest of your life.’

‘If you’re right I’ll be happy to pay, Chrissie, till the day I die…’

Paula and Christobel had worked together in the early days of their careers, struggling as one against the blokey culture of the early-eighties Sun.

‘There’s certainly been no other interviewer going into that bedroom, which is what the girl said was going to happen.’

‘He’s shagging her in there. Got to be.’

‘No proof, though. Shall we snap them when they come out?’

‘No! Christ, no! We’ve got nothing at the moment and we’ll just put them on their guard.’

They’re in a hotel room together.’

‘A hotel room which you booked, for Christ’s sake, Chrissie! And for which our newspaper will be picking up the bill.’

‘If the bed’s been used…’

‘Oh, come on, nobody would believe we didn’t ruffle it ourselves. No, we have to watch and wait. And if we’re patient, and we get the proof we need, then I can get the little bastard on a family values rap and I’ll kill him for ever. It would be so unutterably sweet. He’s fighting the drugs war as a dedicated family man while knocking off a bird not much older than his daughters. I’d get my revenge on him, his slaggy little brat and my lovely lovely boss Milton all at once. So patience, darling, patience.’

‘That was lovely, Peter, really lovely. It’s such a beautiful thing to be making love to an older man.’

‘Hmm, something of a backhanded compliment that, don’t you think?’

‘No, really. I had a lecturer at university and he was like you — I don’t know, sort of wise…physically. It felt like he understood me, my body, I mean. You’re like that.’

‘I thought you only had young boyfriends at university. You said they were all silly boys.’

‘Well, all the others were, but…

‘All the others? Sounds like there were great hordes of them.’

‘Oh, there were. I was a terrible scrubber. I liked to break their hearts, you see. But this one broke mine. It didn’t last long: two times, that was all. He ended it, position of authority and all that, he didn’t want a scandal.’

‘Ah yes. That I can understand.’

‘He used me.’

‘Just like you used all those other men, eh?’

‘Different.’

‘How so?’

‘Level playing field. Eighteen-year-old girl, eighteen-year-old boy. All’s fair.’

‘Let me assure you, Sammy, eighteen-year-old boys are no match for eighteen-year-old girls. In fact, if you’re talking about level playing fields, I think we’ve got it just about right. Twenty four-year-old girl, forty-three-year-old man. Pretty much parity in terms of emotional development, I’d say.’

‘I’m sorry I upset you by phoning your mobile, Peter. It’s just I really wanted to talk to you. You see, it was eleven o’clock in the morning.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Don’t you remember what I told you, about my father…when I was eleven?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

The uneasy feelings that Peter had been harbouring about his relationship with Samantha shot once more to the surface. End it. Get out now!

Slowly but surely the girl was revealing her emotional hand, and it was a far more complex one than Peter felt remotely comfortable with. Surely she didn’t imagine herself in love with him? Puppy love, perhaps, but she couldn’t be imagining that he might ever leave his wife and family for her…

He had made his position on that point plain, surely? Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? It had to be. Samantha was a sensible girl. Soon he would talk to her about how they must begin to think about ending their affair. He would talk to her firmly and sensibly, and secretly she would be relieved.

Soon he would talk to her. She would be expecting it…Of course she would be. Peter’s thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of his mobile. It was Commander Leman.

‘Peter. We have to talk.’

AN OXFAM SHOP, WEST BROMWICH

T
o Jessie her flight from London was already a distant memory. So much had happened to her since then that her long coach trip, talking to the kind old lady with the peppermints, seemed like it had happened in another age. Now once more she found herself telling her story, except this time she hoped it would win her more than a Trebor Mint. What she needed was clothes.

‘That plan Ah left Francois’ flat with was the most pathetic plan Ah could ‘a come up with, even if Ah’d ‘a racked ma brains for a month, for the simple reason that it was no’ a plan tae kick heroin.’

The old gentleman who ran the Oxfam shop nodded. Jessie could see that he was wondering whether any charity dispensed to her might not go straight back into her arm.

‘Ah can see what you’re thinkin’, mister. But Ah’m clean, Ah swear. Ah know now that givin’ up heroin is the only plan any self-respectin’ smack whore should be considering if she hopes one day tae no’ be a whore. But at the time, the heart of a plan, in fact the overridin’ objective, was to get more heroin. The truth is that in ma entirely screwed-up state o’ mind I imagined that it might be possible for a teenaged prossie wi’ no home, or possessions and a hundred and fifty pounds tucked down her bra tae remain a smackhead without gettin’ beaten and abused within hours. What Ah had decided was that Ah would go it alone as a whore. No more Francois. No more pimps. Ah would do exactly what Ah’d bin doin’, but I’d keep all the money for masel’. Then Ah’d get a nice flat, plenty of good-quality junk and eventually get my life back together. Once Ah’d done that Ah’d kick the habit and go to college and become a vet like Ah’d thought about when I was a wee girl. That was ma plan, but first and foremost I needed to get fixed up, that was the important thing. Basically when ye boil it right down, ma plan was to score some smack.’

The Oxfam shop man had made Jessie a cup of tea. Jessie’s story was certainly a great deal more interesting than trying to prevent teenaged girls stealing costume jewellery.

‘On a whim Ah decided to get out o’ town altogether. London had been shite for me from the first second Ah got off the train. With Francois gone Ah decided that it was time tae leave, so Ah made up ma mind tae get down Victoria Coach Station an’ get the first coach out. But before that of course Ah had tae score. Oh yeah, that was for sure, Ah couldnae be sitting on no coach straight, could Ah? Suppose we got caught in traffic and Ah was trapped and strung out? Ah’d be scratchin’ masel’ an’ fidgetin’ an’ trying not to puke up or shit masel’, and before you knew it Ah’d be writhin’ about on the floor, withdrawin’ and scaring all the old ladies. The funny thing is we did get mightily delayed an’ Ah was sat next tae a right sweet old girl, but luckily Ah was high an’ Ah wasnae sick on her.

‘For a minute as Ah left the flat Ah almost panicked about scoring because the funny thing was that although Ah’d been a hopeless user for months Ah’d never actually bought any gear masel’. Francois always fixed me up, see, that was his power. Anyways, Ah needn’t ‘a worried. As Ah’m sure you’re aware, runnin’ a business round here, it doesnae take much effort to score drugs in this country. Ah walked out of Francois’ crap hole and in the corridor outside the flat, the corridor, the one ye have tae walk along tae get tae the lifts before ye can even get taste the street, there’s these three Somali boys hanging about, couldn’t ‘a been more than seventeen. Ah knew their game for sure, so Ah just goes straight up to them and asks them to fix me up with some brown an’ a bit o’ white, you know, just tae take the edge off. Ah couldnae even see their faces from under their hoods but Ah’d picked ‘em right because this boy just grunts an’ gets on his mobile phone an’ two minutes later his man turns up an’ spits two wraps out o’ his mouth, takes ma forty-five quid and that’s it, done deal. He hardly even stopped moving.

Ah hit masel’ up in the corridor there an’ then. Just stuck a needle in the crook o’ ma knee while the Somali boys stood round and laughed at me from under the hoods o’ their big gangsta tops. Ah suppose Ah should be grateful they didnae rob me there and then. Ah were that strung out Ah never could ‘a run, but Ah guess they didnae know that ma pimp was out the picture and of course pimps have guns — although increasingly Ah’ve found so do wee boys.

‘So off Ah goes tae Victoria, sitting on the tube chilling out on a substantial mellow an’ for a brief moment Ahm happy, ‘cos Francois’ bin nicked, Ah’ve got a hundred an’ five pounds in ma tits, Ah’m leavin’ town. Ah’m a girl in charge of her own destiny. Like fuck, eh? Nobody who does smack is in charge of one atom o’ their body, let alone their destiny.’