Chapter 28
Ludo
To wake, suddenly and unexpectedly, to Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” booming out of every Bluetooth speaker in your bedroom is to understand the desire to stab a knitting needle through your own head, from ear to ear, without fear of the consequences.
“Bastard!” I shouted at the top of my lungs—though from my hideaway in the summer house, there was little hope of Jonty hearing me.
When had he managed to arrange this? I reached for my glasses on the bedside table, my fingers finding the fat wodge of sticking plasters that was still holding them together.
Sunny’s DIY. The bruise on my face throbbed as I slipped my glasses on.
I turned off the not-my-alarm alarm. It was six o’clock.
By the time I had showered, got into my ballet teaching gear, and made it into the house for a spot of breakfast, Mother and Father were up.
Father was boiling the kettle and smearing something fattening on toast, while Mummy was sitting at the kitchen table working her way through the Saturday papers.
In the background, the BBC’s Today programme—radio for the terminally depressed.
Father offered to make me a cup of tea, and I readily accepted, because, English.
“Morning, Mummy,” I said, kissing her on the top of her head. I plucked the Sentinel from the pile, did a pirouette because I could, and sat in the chair on the other side of the table. “Did we miss anything?”
“If you’ve been scooped, it’s not by this lot,” she said, pointing at the Telegraph.
Father turned up the radio. The lilting sounds of Mum’s old chum and predatory wannabe Sentinel columnist, Lucy Veeraswamy, filled the room.
“A look at the papers now, and the big story of the day, the Bulletin has obtained exclusive images of Energy Secretary Bob Wynn-Jones in what the paper claims is a romantic embrace with a woman MI5 has identified as a Belarusian spy.”
“Bastards!” My father, obviously miffed he’d missed the biggest story of the day, dropped a plate.
“Yes, that’ll show them, Hugo,” Mummy said.
She scrambled through the papers until she found the Bulletin, right at the bottom of the pile, unfolded it, and stared wide-eyed at the picture.
Father, tea towel wrapped tight around his hand in anguish, stood behind her, reading it over his shoulder.
In the background, Lucy Veeraswamy continued talking as if she hadn’t just completely upended the mornings of Hugo and Beverley Barker-Boche.
“The paper claims the woman, known as Ekaterina Ivanova, used her influence to sway the minister’s decision on the controversial Leicestershire nuclear power plant, which was to be built by the Belarusian company Mogilatom, owned by oligarch Yevgeny Safin,” Veeraswamy said.
I stood up and walked around the table, joining my father in reading the article over Mummy’s shoulder.
There it was, staring back up at me from the front page, the photo byline of the beautiful freckled boy with the silly name.
The one who’d knocked me back. The one I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since getting home.
“Well done, Sunny Miller,” I said.
My father looked at me like I’d just taken a dump in his pocket.
“Friend of yours, darling?” Mummy asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We were on Shetland together.”
In the background, Lucy was still banging on.
“And we’ll be talking to the Bulletin’s Sunny Miller about that story after eight o’clock,” she said.
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I’d be at ballet by then, surrounded by twenty-two tutued toddling terrorists, trying to turn them into tiny Tamara Toumanovas.
“Someone must have dropped this to him,” Father said. “Who the bloody hell dropped it to him?”
“You mean why didn’t they drop it to you?” I suggested.
“No, Ludovic. Why didn’t they drop it to you! This is your story. You’ve dropped the ball on this. How the bloody hell did you miss it?”
What the? I wasn’t having this. I opened my mouth to protest, but Mummy beat me to it.
“Don’t be silly, Hugo. You wouldn’t have printed something as salacious as a minister of the Crown having an extramarital affair. Sex between consenting adults is a private matter. Isn’t that your policy?”
“With a spy, Beverley. It’s sex with a bloody spy! Of course we would have bloody well printed it.”
“Fine. But would you have given it a headline like this?”
Mummy held the paper a little higher. A grainy image of Wynn-Jones leching all over a woman, one hand ferreting around under her skirt, dominated the left-hand side of the page.
Beneath a big red banner that screamed “SEXCLUSIVE,” the front-page headline read “BONK WYNN-JONES’ SEXPLOSIVE SECRET!
” Underneath, in inimitable Bulletin fashion, they had chosen the subheading “Revealed: Energy Secretary shagging Soviet honeypot at centre of Leicester nukes deal.” That was at least two factual errors and one instance of base misogyny in the space of a dozen words.
Remarkable, even by the standards of the Bulletin.
But the top prize went to the photo caption, which read “POWER PLAY: Bob sticks two fingers up to Britain, while the rest disappear up Belarus.”
“This story was made for a tabloid like the Bulletin,” Mummy said. “And whoever dropped this to Sunny Miller wanted Bob Wynn-Jones not just out of the cabinet but out of politics for good.”
“Bloody hell!” Father was angry now, balling up the tea towel as if he wanted to strangle it. He threw it hard against the table, but it just kind of flopped there, the perfect symbol of his impotence.
“You took your eyes off the ball, Ludo,” Father said. “I knew you weren’t ready for the big league.”
“Wait, what?”
“You need to lift your game, young man, if you don’t want to find yourself stuck down in features writing obituaries and reviewing last night’s episode of EastEnders. You should have been all over this. It was your story.”
Father was stabbing a finger at me, his face radicchio red.
“How did you miss it?”
I was speechless. Father ripped the paper out of Mummy’s hands, shaking it like he wanted to throttle the life out of it.
“You can bloody well go in tomorrow and clean up this mess.”
“It’s my day off. Uncle Ben and I are—”
“News isn’t a nine-to-five job, Ludo. News is happening now—and it’s your job to break it!” He slammed the newspaper into the table and marched out of the kitchen and up the hall.
“Don’t worry, darling,” Mummy said. “It’ll be old news by tomorrow, and he’ll be outraged about something else. It’s just your turn for the firing line today. You and the dinner service.”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel in that moment.
On one hand, I’d been scooped on a story I had originally broken, by a man I had spent the entire week with and had come to really like—a man who had given no hint that he was working on a story as massive as this.
I sort of felt tremendously proud of him.
On the other hand, Sunny Miller’s rise had apparently led directly to my disgrace—and the end of a long-planned jaunt to the V & A with Uncle Ben.
And for that, frankly, I was jolly well annoyed with him.
Still, I couldn’t deny Sunny was setting the news agenda today.
Council estate kid: one. Establishment: nil.
I made a mental note to send him a message of congratulations on GayHoller.
Later. I wasn’t feeling quite that magnanimous just yet.