Chapter 16
Ludo
Sunny and I sat beside each other at Mrs Gallacher’s kitchen table while she made the kind of fry-up that sends my arteries screaming in search of a salad.
“You boys want any more fucking coffee?” she said.
“Yes please, Mrs G,” Sunny said.
“Help yourselves, dearies. The pot’s on the side.”
It was the kind of filter coffee that sends anyone who likes coffee screaming in search of a hipster café.
The kind I vomited all over Krishnan Varma-Rajan.
My stomach churned. It would have to do.
I wasn’t terribly sure they did hipster cafés in Shetland.
I was pretty sure all the beards and plaid shirts I’d seen around the island were probably just, you know, actual fishermen and farmers.
Sunny was reading the newspapers on his tablet. It was a very domestic, very homely, scene. If you ignored Mrs Gallacher’s language. I got up, grabbed the coffee pot, and topped up our mugs.
“What page did you get?” I asked.
“They didn’t run it. It might be on the website. You?”
“Picture story on page nine,” I said. I’d checked the online edition before coming down for breakfast. “I think the photo of the puffin sold it. They didn’t use much of my copy.”
“Surely Torsten and Carstairs didn’t drag us all the way up here for bloody puffins,” Sunny said.
“Language,” Mrs Gallacher said.
Sunny was incredulous. Behind her back, we shared a smile.
“Sorry, Mrs G.” Sunny stirred his coffee, and I put the pot back on the side.
Sunny continued his train of thought. “We’re political reporters. They better have something big for us today or JT will string me up from the rafters in Westminster Hall and use me as bait for a story about sex pest MPs.”
“Your mind is a dark place.”
* * *
An hour later the whole press pack was sitting on the coach in the middle of a dreary asphalt car park, high on a windswept hill overlooking a sea whipped up with whitecaps.
I was beginning to regret making the nine o’clock deadline for the bus pickup.
The morning was overcast and cold, and it was threatening to rain.
On the horizon, an oil rig rose from the murky blue of the water, like a rusted Meccano kraken, blighting what would otherwise have been a picture-postcard view.
There was a soft rumbling of a helicopter in the distance.
On the bus, the reporters all wore serious faces.
Annabelle Statham-Drew’s mouth was puckered like a Boston terrier’s butthole, which certainly explained the breath.
Sunny was sitting in the seat beside me, chatting across the aisle to Rafiq about something called Leicester Nirvana, which I thought was a football team but also might have been a hallucinogenic drug.
I wasn’t paying close attention. Torsten Beaumont-Flattery stood at the front of the bus, as beautiful as the statue of David, wearing a cagoule that fit him like a slightly undersized condom.
It could split at any moment. If it did, I was keeping the baby.
The sound of the helicopter grew steadily louder.
“Our lift is almost here,” Torsten announced.
A moment later, the helicopter roared into view over the clifftop, as if this press junket had been produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G.
Wilson. The sound was deafening, and the wind it created buffeted the bus.
The pilot landed the chopper, and the blade rotation slowed to a point where it merely vibrated through the coach rhythmically.
It made my tummy feel a little gippy. This was not good news.
When I was a kid, Mummy had dragged me along to a military base where she was covering a story for the BBC, and I was offered a ride in a helicopter called a Bell 412.
I remember the name specifically because the pilot said he reckoned by the time we finally touched down, I’d done four number ones and a number two.
The second and last time I had been in a helicopter was for a joy flight on a family holiday in Cannes.
I’d heaved my guts up so spectacularly the pilot had to make an emergency landing on the beach.
Father said if the Royal Air Force ever got to hear about my hundred per cent hit rate for downing helicopters, I’d be press-ganged into service.
From his marble plinth at the front of the coach, Michelangelo’s Torsten ran us all through the safety spiel.
“We’ll be in pairs for the next part of our journey,” he said. He pointed at the cammo and photographer. “Terry and Astrid, you’ll be going first so you can get whatever shots you want before the rest of us shuttle across to the rig.”
Terry and Astrid collected their gear and got off the bus.
A minute later, the helicopter took off again.
It was a ten-minute round trip to the oil rig.
Sooner or later, it would be my turn. My stomach was twisting in knots just thinking about it.
How career-ending would it be to soil yourself in front of a dozen colleagues?
“Are you all right?” Sunny asked. “You’ve gone very pale.”
“Not really,” I said. Sunny grabbed my hand, which gave me a start because it was the last thing I expected. His amber-green eyes locked firmly onto mine, his blush-pink lips smiling in reassurance.
“You’ll be fine. It’s an adventure! How often do we get to ride in a chopper?”
It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps riding in a helicopter was not the kind of thing most people did all that often.
Sensing an opportunity to confirm Sunny’s prejudices about my privilege, I didn’t elaborate on my choppy chopper history, but he must have read something in the expression on my face.
He leant in conspiratorially. His breath was warm against my ear.
“And I don’t know about you,” he said. “But I’ve been waiting for years for a chance to ride Torsten’s chopper.”
It broke the tension. I burst out laughing. Sunny tried to not chuckle at his own joke but failed. He let my hand go. Apparently, I had been adequately comforted. I wished he hadn’t. The heat of him had been reassuring.
“For the record, I saw him first,” I said.
“You can’t bagsy Torsten Beaumont-Flattery. He’s a grown man with rights and free will.”
“I’m hardly going to knock him out with chloroform and drag him back to my nest.”
“You have a nest?”
“What does it say about your opinion of me that you don’t question me having enough chloroform on hand to bring down a man the size of a Charolais bull but you question the nest?”
“So, there is a nest.”
“It’s not a nest, per se. It’s a summer house. In my parents’ garden. If this is your way of asking me where I live?”
“It wasn’t. But now that you’ve raised it, is it a Kensington nest? A Chelsea nest?”
“It’s a Hampstead nest.” I spoke without thinking and winced, waiting for Sunny to hit me with more accusations of privilege. Presumably, that’s what this entire line of questioning was about.
“Proper posh,” he said. The attack flashed in his eyes, but it didn’t come. “I don’t live too far from you, as it happens. Although my bit of north London isn’t posh, obviously.”
“Highgate Cemetery?”
“I’m pale, but I’m not that pale.”
“You live under a log on Hampstead Heath?”
“I live in Willesden Green. Above the bus stop on the Willesden Lane. But I’m saving up, and I hope to buy a log of my very own someday.”
We went on like this for a while until the sound of the helicopter returning finally drowned out the conversation.
“Miller, Boche, this is you,” Torsten called out from the front of the bus.
I sat frozen in my seat, unable to will my legs into action. Sunny stood, put his bag over his shoulder, and turned to look at me.
“Come on then, Boche,” he said. “England expects, and all that.”
“I might be posh, but I’m not the motivated-into-action-by-Admiral-Nelson kind of posh.”
“You’re posh enough to know that was Admiral Nelson.”
“Who did you think it was?”
“Stormzy?” Sunny held out a hand expectantly. “Come on. Chopper fuel isn’t cheap, and it’s the taxpayer footing the bill for this.”
I grabbed Sunny’s hand, and he hauled me out of the seat.
Once vertical, I let him go, pulled my bag over my shoulder, and followed him down the aisle of the coach, past Torsten, through the front door, and towards the helicopter I was absolutely, definitely about to redecorate with the contents of my stomach.