High society (23 page)

HOUSE OF COMMONS

T
he Home Secretary laid a friendly hand on Peter Paget’s shoulder as he led him to an easy chair.

‘So, how are you feeling?’

‘Not so bad, Douglas, not so bad.’

‘We’re all very impressed, you know, Peter. Very proud, the way you’re handling this.’

‘Well, you know, it’s been over two months and neither I nor my new friend Robert the Junkie have shown positive for HIV or hepatitis C, so we really are looking hopeful. Robert swears to me that the needle was clean and that he hasn’t had sex in two years…’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘Regarding the sex? Certainly. I’ve seen the state of his penis, remember. About the needles? Well, I think I believe him. He really is a bright and articulate man underneath it all. What’s more, he’s been using for the best part of a decade and the tests prove he was clean at least until a couple of months ago, so…Well, look, it’s idle to speculate, Douglas. It’s all looking very hopeful, but I shan’t get a complete all-clear until three full months have passed.’

‘And Angela?’

‘What can I tell you? She’s worried, of course. So are the girls. We talk about it a lot. I mean, it’s a strange thing to walk about with the real possibility that some alien virus has invaded your system. I manage not to think about it most of the time, but sometimes, in the night…Well, you know.’

‘I can certainly try to imagine…’

The Home Secretary had seen to it that a bottle of House of Commons malt whisky and two glasses had been set out. It was early evening, a clubbable hour. Peter could not help but feel excited. This was clearly matey, man-to-man stuff. Sundowners with the Home Secretary was rising-star stuff for sure.

‘Look, Peter. The number-one issue in this whole dreadful business is your health, and yours and Angela’s wellbeing, but you know as well as I do that the immense publicity that has surrounded your accident has brought the issues you’ve been trying to raise firmly to centrestage.’

‘I can assure you, Douglas, that I didn’t deliberately run the risk of contracting a fatal illness in order to improve the fortunes of my Private Member’s Bill.’ Peter felt strong, empowered. Perhaps it was the accident that made him bold. After all, those who have looked death in the face can certainly face down Home Secretaries.

‘You know me better than that, Peter. You know that that’s not what I meant. What I meant is that because of your campaign and the circumstances that have surrounded it the issue of full legalization is now no longer seen as the domain of hippies and lunatics — ’

‘Like me, you mean. I well remember your reaction to my first speech on the issue. Not sympathetic, as I recall.’

‘When you introduced your bill, Peter, the drug debate stood at exactly the same point at which it had stood for twenty years. Zero tolerance, no surrender. We will fight those pushers on the beaches, et cetera, et cetera. But now the public have suddenly been forced to confront the real and present danger that traditional drug policy has brought down upon mainstream society.’

‘And you have also been forced to confront it.’

‘Yes, Peter, I accept that. You don’t need to press your point. You’ve moved me on this issue. It’s quite self-evident that if your acquaintance Robert had had access to a shooting gallery or at the very least a proper needle-exchange programme you would not be living under the threat that currently hangs over your head.’

‘Beautifully put, Home Secretary. Are you going to use it?’

‘Yes, I am as a matter of fact, at a speech to the regional conference in Birmingham this Thursday.’

‘Does this mean that you intend to support my position?’

‘Peter. I don’t mind admitting that a few weeks ago you weren’t exactly my favourite backbencher. You were talking absolute common sense but common sense that at the time I thought too dangerous ever to be even whispered. I thought you were going to drag us all into a polarized debate where you could either be seen as a statesman or a drug pushing lunatic. But don’t think for a moment that even then I didn’t have a great deal of sympathy for your arguments. Of course you’re right. In simple economic terms you’re right if nothing else. The police force is buckling under the strain of drug-related crime, whole communities are becoming fiefdoms for drug gangs.’

‘As I’ve constantly sought to point out, the savings from turning drug-dealers into honest men would run into many billions.’

‘Yes, but it’s not just the savings we’re considering here, it’s the possible profit of legalization. As you’re aware, the government’s policy on smoking tobacco is that everyone should stop immediately — ’

‘But if they did, the Treasury would be bankrupted.’

‘Of course. Cigarettes are our biggest earner. Five quid a packet, four pounds fifty to us. People talk about tobacco-users being a burden on the National Health Service, but they pay for most of the damn health service.’

‘And if every yuppie who had a weekend snort of cocaine was taxed for it?’

‘My God. Ten quid in the kitty per line…we could have a decent railway network in a year!’ The Home Secretary picked up his telephone.

‘Joanna, could you possibly bring through the Treasury briefing I asked you to look out?’

Joanna entered the slightly dusty old room like a little ray of sunshine. Small, blond, smartly turned out in an elegant trouser suit. For a moment Peter Paget found himself speculating on whether the Home Secretary harboured a secret similar to his own. He did not speculate for long, however. The conversation he was having was simply too exciting to allow room for idle thoughts. Even this brief reminder of his affair could not subdue his spirits for long.

‘I’ve asked the Chancellor to join us, if that’s all right, Peter, and the Prime Minister has said that he’ll try to look in.’

Joanna could have been Aphrodite herself and Peter would have failed to consider her further. The Chancellor? The Prime Minister! Only months before, he had been a pariah, lucky to get a meeting with his own constituency chairman. Now this! The Home Secretary continued.

‘This is a highly confidential Treasury report. A report which, I might add, we compiled some time before you began your campaign, Peter. You’re not the only one who has the clear vision to see the wood despite the trees, but you were until now the only one with the balls to state the obvious conclusion. This report looks at the budgetary implications of full legalization. Of necessity it is highly speculative. We don’t know what the health and social implications would be. It is of course possible that the alarmist majority are right and that we would find ourselves dealing with entire communities full of stoned, tripping vegetables, but tentative programmes abroad, particularly in the Netherlands, suggest the opposite. Our best guess is that if any increased usage did occur it would be massively offset in health and social benefits by the fact that usage would be safe and in the open.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, yes, of course, Peter, but you know as well as I do the amount of protest that a policy like this, if implemented, would create. We must be aware of that.’

‘If implemented? My God, Douglas, surely you’re not saying that the government — ’

‘What I’m saying is that this secret report concludes that if we taxed drugs instead of impounding them, if we made them a simple matter of the laws of fair trade, we could destroy ninety per cent of the nation’s criminal networks overnight, we could import the stuff at the cost of tea and sell it at the cost of caviar, all at an immense profit to the Treasury. If the policy became international we could liberate the producing nations in the developing world from the grip of drug warlords, and the peasant population could return to producing the food crops they so desperately need. And finally and quite frankly most importantly, we’d have so much money in the coffers we could cut income tax in half and win every election until Doomsday.’

Once more Joanna entered the room. ‘Home Secretary, the Prime Minister has asked if you and Mr Paget would join him at Number Ten. The Chancellor has also been invited.’

Peter could see that the Home Secretary was not overjoyed to be so perfunctorily summoned. Clearly he felt that this was his initiative and that the PM should come to him. Peter did not care who came to whom, or if the meeting took place at the Westminster McDonald’s, he was going to share conference with the three most powerful men in government. The fast track had just got a whole lot faster.

FALLOWFIELD COMMUNITY HALL, MANCHESTER

S
o the tour’s been going for a while, right? Scotland were mental. I’m an honorary Scot, me. I know how to butter ‘em up, see. I always open the set by saying, ‘I’m like Scotland. Why? Because I am also proudly inde-fookin’—pendent.’ Bang, five minutes o’ cheering. They love all that, they do. Well, who don’t? Quite frankly, I’ve always found that a naked,appeal to petty nationalism goes down well wherever you play it. ‘Good evening, Doncaster, best fookin’ city in the world. Hello, Southend, God’s own holiday resort.’ The house’ll go potty every time. Amazing how much people love it when you big up their town, no matter what kind o’ shitehole it is. In fact, the funny thing is, the posher an’ better a town gets, the less the population want to big it up. I mean, I’m not going to go, ‘Good evening, Royal Tunbridge Wells. You rock!’ am I? It just don’t have the ring. Anyway, I was talkin’ about Scotland, and as it ‘appens I do always feel at home in Scotland. I like the beer, I like the fried haggis an’ sauce in the chippies which you’d think’d be shite but is actually not bad. I like the lamb pies an’ the fact that you can see mountains most o’ the time. Also I’ve always been partial to the birds up there. Love a strawberry blonde, me.

‘The downside is the drugs, man. I mean, that is one very fooked-up scene. Well, it is everywhere, in’t it, but I always seem to feel more aware of it in Scotland. Maybe it’s fookin’ Trainspotting. I bet the Scottish Tourist Board loved it when that came out. Actually, I think it’s the scenery. I mean, you’ve got this devastatingly beautiful, healthy-looking place, what should be full o’ great big fook-off hard men wi’ beards an’ muscles in their spit, chuckin’ logs about, but instead everywhere you look there’s these pale, skinny, spotty lads an’ lasses monged out on God knows what shite or other.

‘I mean, as I think I’ve made clear, I’m no stranger to mind altering substances but fook me, some o’ them Scottish estates, they live off ‘em. Scag on their Frosties in the morning, man! Trainspotting looks like a whitewash, a cover-up job. Edinburgh is a city under siege. The smack’eads and dealers are massing at the gates. It’s weird, that, like with most cities it’s the middle bit that’s the shitehole no-go area, and the outer suburbs are where you escape to when you’ve got a bit o’ dosh. You always hear them on the news goin’ on about the inner cities, don’t you? Like they was talkin’ ‘bout Dante’s In-fookin’—ferno. But wi’ Edinburgh it’s all inside out. The middle bit’s like somethin’ out of a Disney movie. You’ve got this amazing castle and loads of jumper shops and little restaurants in eighteenth-century alleyways wi’ twisting stairwells in the pavement that lead down to ancient basement bars wi’ curling brooms on the walls and three million types o’ single malt. Then a couple of miles up the road you’ve got downtown Sodom and Gomorrah! I’ll never forget when we done the Edinburgh Playhouse on the Pop Hero tour. I was new to fame then an’ only eighteen and bloody stupid wi’ it. I didn’t know much about drugs, see, I mean obviously there were Sandi the Wurzel with her coke up the arse, but most o’ my vast experience, my veneer of sophistication, ‘as come in the years since.

‘We did the gig, which I closed o’ course, and it was a total explanation, o’ course, an’ I was lathered on Tennents lager, o’ course, and there was fookin’ hundreds o’ fans at the stage door, o’ course, which I wasn’t so used to at the time, so it was all pretty intoxicating, an’ I was well up for a bit o’ naughtiness. I remember leanin’ out o’ the dressing room window throwin’ down messages to the kids, an’ I saw this gang o’ girls that I reckoned was a bit older than most of the fans, who were children basically for all their pierced belly buttons, so I got a couple of roadies, showed ‘em which girls I meant, an’ told them to go out an’ pull ‘em.

‘Well, the next thing I knew I was in a taxi wi’ four tough little Scottish birds wi’ white minis an’ bare goosepimpled legs, an’ I never saw one o’ them that didn’t have a fag on the go, even when later on I were shaggin’ ‘em. Honest.

‘So this taxi ride was about three miles, but it might as well ‘ave been to another planet. We gets out at this low-rise estate, like Hulme in Manchester, you know what I’m sayin’? Three five hundred-yard corridors on top of each other, hundreds of little front doors all graffiti’d up, piss-soaked staircases, fookin’ needles crunchin’ under your boots. I’ll tell you, gettin’ along that corridor was scary stuff, they were only a few foot wide so any old granny (or pop star wi’ four birds in tow) who wants to get along ‘em ‘as to squeeze past every single gang o’ lads that’s stood about waitin’ for somebody to punch. ‘Orrible. I were that glad when we finally got into one of the birds’ flat, crappy though it was.

‘It were her mum’s, but she was out so the five of us is just ‘having a party. Like I say, I were only eighteen and it was just great, the version of the night you always wanted to ‘ave wi’ the birds at school but never did. We was smokin’ pot an’ drinking Diamond White cider an’ the cable’s on MTV an’ there’s me on heavy rotation wi’ my first single. I mean what a buzz, man, me four fans, an’ I’m on the fookin’ telly! They love it! So suddenly it’s knickers off and ‘ow’s your father. All four of ‘em are at me! My first genuine orgy. I was literally in heaven.

‘Well, I don’t know how long we was at it, but we certainly wasn’t finished when the bird’s mum whose flat it was came ‘ome wi’ ‘er boyfriend. Honest, I’m ‘having it away in the livin’ room wi’ her daughter and her daughter’s mates an’ this woman walks in wi’ two portions o’ curry an’ chips an’ don’t bat an eyelid! Just starts goin’ on about truant officers! She’s sayin’ to her daughter that she’s gonna have to turn up a bit more at school just for show, else the social workers will be round and where’s she supposed to hide all the smack she’s dealing? Yes, all the smack she’s dealing.

‘An’ don’t forget the truant officer bit. Truant officers do not chase sixteen-year-olds. So I’m realizing that at least one o’ the birds in this orgy were underage. Fook me. I’m eighteen, remember. A year before I’d been Prince Charming at the Bradford Alhambra. I’d only done pot an’ booze up until Sandi an’ her biros up the arse, an’ suddenly I’m beginnin’ to feel a bit uneasy to say the least. The mum’s gone into the other room with the boyfriend (to jack up as I soon discover), an’ I’m on the sofa, trousers round me ankles, realizing that I may have fooked up somewhat. That instead o’ being in a nice bar at the Edinburgh Thistle Hotel chatting up dancing girls off the tour, I’m in a drug dealer’s house shaggin’ schoolgirls. Not good, particularly for someone as career-minded as me.

‘So I gets off the bird I’m on top of and asks them how old they are. I’d thought sixteen-seventeen when I pulled ‘em. Now I’m prayin’ for fifteen or sixteen. But no such luck, man. We are talkin’ twelve an’ thirteen! One of ‘em was twelve years old! They’re smokin’ pot, drinkin’ Diamond White and shaggin’, an’ my hostess is twelve years old.

‘ ‘My ma’s only twenty-seven now,’ the bird says. Which was a shock ‘cos I reckon she looked forty, but the thing was that that woman had had this girl when she were fifteen, an’ by the look o’ things the next generation would not be long in coming. Fook me, I ain’t no social worker, but even I can see that’s not a healthy situation. A grandma when you’re thirty — you’d wanna take drugs, wouldn’t you?

‘Well, anyway, never mind all that. What about me? I’m shitting it, that’s what. Just totally and utterly shitting it. I mean look, I am definitely not into givin’ it Gary Glitter. That is not me, right? I’d reckoned these birds was nearly my age. Anybody would ‘a done. They was faggin’, drinkin’, swearin’ an’ wandering round like they owned the bloody town. How was I supposed to know? But who’s gonna believe me when I’m front-paged for shagging jailbait? So it’s trousers up an’ head for the door…

‘Except the door’s locked!

‘Well, not just locked — locked and barred, from the inside, an’ I’m lookin’ at this door, an’ suddenly I realize it’s a sheet of fookin’ steel. A steel door, right? So I take a look behind the curtains, an’ every window is barred. Then I look at the stuff they’ve got and I’m thinking this level of security is not in order to stop people pinching their video.

‘ ‘There’s a lot o’ competition in our area,’ says this fookin’ twelve-year-old, who can see what I’m thinking. ‘Too much scag aboot the place. Everybody wants tae put everyone else oot o’ business.’

‘As if to illustrate the point there’s a sudden bangin’ at the door. An’ while my little illegal harem pull their knickers back on the boyfriend emerges from the bedroom, curry sauce round his mouth, a pinprick o’ blood dribbling down ‘is arm an’ a fookin’ machine gun in his ‘ands.

‘This is Edinburgh, right? Edinburgh in Britain, fourth-richest economy on earth, right? Not Beirut, not the Gaza Strip, not fooking Croatia, an’ I’m in a flat wi’ a man who carries a machine gun. Not only that but the mum comes out next wi’ a sawn-off! It’s Bonnie an’ fookin’ Clyde except this couple are about as sexy as a dog’s arse, sad drug-fooks the both of ‘em, but heavily armed sad drug-fooks.

‘Well, the knock at the door was just customers. Two women wanting to score. I didn’t see them — the whole thing got transacted through a little letterbox in the door, but I do remember hearin’ a baby crying.

‘Anyway, obviously I was lookin’ for ways to make my exit by this time, an’ I asks the girls if I can call a taxi. They just laughed at that, so I’m thinking that I’d better strike out on my own, but that’s no good either because the boyfriend and the ma have gone back in the bedroom and he’s got the keys to the steel door an’ the girls made it very clear to me he did not like to be disturbed.

‘ ‘They’ll be cooking up rocks o’ crack. Very profitable end o’ the business,’ says the girl. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have tae wait, Tommy.’

‘For a while after that I’m having all these paranoid suspicions that I’ve been set up, that I’m going to get blackmailed by these birds for having shagged ‘em, but then I realize that bearin’ in mind the nature of the business the mum was running they wouldn’t exactly be looking to provoke press and police attention. So then I starts to relax a bit. We have another spliff an’ another cider an’ I’m thinkin’, all right, I’ll stay all night. They’ll have to open up in the morning to get some milk or whatever and quite frankly I didn’t fancy wandering round that estate in the dark anyway. I mean, obviously I wasn’t going to get down to any more sex wi’ ‘em, fookin’ ‘ell that is so not me, although you won’t believe it, they tried! Honest, these little girls were tryin’ to get the party goin’ again, but no way, so instead I said I fancied a bit o’ smack.

‘Big mistake. Obviously.

‘I’d never had any before but t’be quite honest I were curious. Don’t forget I had to face the prospect o’ sitting up all night watching MTV wi’ three thirteen-year-olds an’ a twelve-year-old.

‘Well, two of ‘em didn’t bother with H — yet — but the other two says, ‘Fine, let’s have a wee pipe.’

‘An’ we did. Me an’ two schoolgirls sharing a smoke o’ heroin. T’be honest, it makes me shiver t’think of it. But we did it, an’ two of us mellowed out in a nice big easy chill, an’ one of us tried to look tough and sucked down most of the whole thing before realizing that they had fooked up big time.

That was me, of course. And as the vomit surged up and my mind and heart started to feel like they were shutting down I knew that I had overdone it a bit. Uncool or what?

‘I came round in casualty. The first thing I saw were a flash o’ light that turned out to be a camera. I’d been recognized an’ my first drug-related front page was already being written. They’d dumped me by some dustbins in the car park of their estate. I suppose I should think myself lucky they didn’t just shove me down the rubbish chute. Clearly having found themselves with a potentially dying pop star on their hands, their only agenda had been to get rid of me as quickly as possible. They took my money but not my cards, which was sensible. They were clearly not so fooked up that they couldn’t see that if I were found dead the following morning then hanging on to my credit cards would be a bad idea.

‘The bin men might have saved my life. I don’t know if that big smoke would have killed me, but unconscious in the dustbins of a sink estate is not a good place to be anyways, so I’ll always be grateful. My office still sends one of them a Christmas card.’