Chapter III Richard #3
Richard presses his way through a group of tourists in overpadded anoraks and in Caffè Nero orders his regular one-shot cappuccino.
The barista does a double take (the Mirror had run with ‘Double Take: Is That Who You Think It Is?’).
Her cheeks redden and he has to fight the urge to shout ‘I’m not a monster!
’ but he opts for retaining the last filament of his dignity and stays silent until his coffee is ready, whereupon he takes a sip immediately and burns his tongue.
His jacket pocket vibrates. He flails around trying to retrieve his phone and in so doing, spills milky froth down his jacket. He presses to answer, and only then realises he is still wearing his AirPods.
‘Yes, hello?’
‘Richard.’
‘Oh, hi Terri.’
‘I was expecting you back by now.’
Terri is terrifying. Nominative determinism at its finest. He must insist she goes back to the constituency as soon as possible.
‘Moments away, Terri.’
‘Right.’ He can hear her gel nail extensions clicking on the keyboard. ‘We’ve got a fair bit to get through, so, you know, chop chop.’
She hangs up before he has a chance to remonstrate that Terri mustn’t speak to him like this.
He rushes through the rotating doors and the security at Portcullis House, head down, trying not to catch anyone’s eye.
He takes the stairs, as he always does, to get his daily step count in.
The corridors of Portcullis House look exactly the same whatever floor you happen to be on: same green carpet, same brown walls, same smooth wooden panelling leading into infinity.
He reaches his new office without anyone wanting to offer him sympathy or censure, which is a relief.
The office is poky, with sloping ceilings, small windows and a cluster of unpacked boxes.
A red bucket has been placed underneath the eaves after a recent rainfall caused a leak.
There is room for a desk, two dark blue armchairs and two metal bins – one for recycling and one labelled ‘General Waste for Incineration’, which feels aggressive.
‘Terri,’ he says, as he takes off his coat. He looks for somewhere to hang it but there are no hooks, so he throws it onto one of the armchairs. ‘Shall we get on with it, then?’
He rubs his hands, hoping to demonstrate the good-humoured capability of a beloved headmaster or family doctor.
‘About time,’ Terri says as she gathers up her notebook and pen and comes to sit next to him.
‘OK, so, you ready?’ Terri raises one of her tattooed eyebrows.
Her face has a strangely concrete quality that Hannah once told him was the result of ‘too many fillers’.
Terri’s forehead is tight and shiny, her cheeks enlarged like a squirrel storing nuts for winter.
Her mouth is outlined in a permanent pinky-brown that is one shade darker than her lips.
Richard sits on the sofa.
‘Sure thing. Go for it.’
‘You might want to take notes. There’s a lot to get through.’
‘So you said. Thank you. I’ll be able to retain the necessary information.’
He takes a sip of his cappuccino, now at a temperature marginally lower than the surface of the sun.
‘First off, Gary Brotherton has been in touch and says he has some offers. He wants you to call him.’
‘Ah. Great.’
Within two hours of the porn story breaking, Richard had received a call from an ex-tabloid editor called Gary Brotherton.
After quitting his job during the Leveson Inquiry into illegal phone-hacking, Gary had set up a crisis PR company called Rope Inc.
(‘because if you’re on the ropes, you want to give your opponent enough rope to hang ’emselves with,’ he had explained).
Gary had offered Richard his services, insisting he’d be able to ‘maximise media opportunities’ and ‘resurrect your reputation’ and that he’d be willing to waive his usual retainer for the first three months, taking only a very modest 20 per cent cut of any fees he negotiated on his client’s behalf.
Arthur, who generally handled comms, wasn’t keen but Richard, who felt the need for fresh blood, had overruled him.
‘So you’ll do that, will you?’ Terri asks.
Richard nods.
‘Right. Next up. Ben Fitzmaurice has sent you an invitation to his sister’s funeral.’
‘What?’
‘I said: Ben Fitzmaurice has—’
‘No, no I heard you. I just … well, I didn’t know he had a sister.’
Terri makes a great show of lifting the invitation up to the light and re-reading it.
‘Says he did here. Lady Felicity Fitzmaurice. Funeral. 27 July. Denby Hall. You can make it if you leave the opening of the school vegetable garden by 11 a.m. There’s a train from Paddington that gets you there at …’
Richard loosens his tie. He finds himself simultaneously thrilled that he’s been invited to such an intimate society event and aghast that Ben has lost such a close family member.
When he’s caught between jostling thoughts, Richard is never sure how to act.
He feels like a salmon trying to leap upstream but being pushed downstream by competing currents.
On the one hand, Ben has invited him to an intimate family gathering (upstream!).
On the other, why hadn’t Richard known that Ben had a sister, and did this mean he wasn’t in his inner circle (downstream)?
He’d seen Ben in the tea-room only yesterday and Ben had been his usual charming self; not a hint of anguish and no mention of anything even mildly awry.
‘Poor Ben,’ Richard says distractedly. It’s the sort of thing he knows he must say, rather than being a thing he actually feels. Hannah used to tell him he had no emotional intelligence. Which he thought was a bit rich, coming from her.
Perhaps, he thinks, that was simply Ben’s way of coping? Stiff upper lip and all that. Still, it does rather put into perspective his own woes. Although … he can’t help his mind wandering … grief is rather ennobling, isn’t it? He’ll get a lot of press sympathy for that if he plays it right. Unlike—
‘Richard.’ Terri brings him sharply back to the present. ‘Shall I say you’ll go, then?’
‘Yes, yes, sorry.’
‘They’re asking for charity donations instead of flowers.’ Terri’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘Addiction Recovery, so we can all guess why she carked it, can’t we?’
She gives a nasty little smile.
‘Send ￡250,’ he says. ‘And be sure to declare it.’
‘No doubt Andrew Jarvis will be there,’ Terri says. ‘Randy little sod.’
‘Is that so?’ Richard knows Jarvis has a reputation for being a bit of a blowhard, but he hasn’t heard this particular nugget of gossip doing the rounds in the tea-room.
‘Oh yeah,’ Terri continues, her words acquiring a reptilian hiss. ‘Why d’you think he got through so many office managers? Can’t keep his hands to himself, that one.’
‘Alright, that’s enough,’ Richard says, even though he wants to hear more.
Terri gives an insulted little harrumph.
‘You were the one that asked!’
Richard flattens his palm and moves it down, as if pushing steadily on a button marked ‘calm’.
He is immediately reminded of a supply teacher at his old school who tried and failed to gain control of an unruly class with exactly this gesture.
He stands abruptly, claimed by an unsettled energy he cannot name.
‘Where are you going?’ she says. ‘We’ve only just started.’
‘You know what, Terri? The rest of it can wait. I need to call Gary. Please can you get me a goat’s cheese panini from downstairs?’
Terri stiffens. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like that at all.
‘Very well.’
‘And one of those blueberry muffins? Thanks so much.’
She huffs and puffs her way to the door, slamming it behind her.
He listens as the thud of her footsteps recedes and he feels his shoulders drop.
It’s not normal to be this scared of one’s own office manager.
Hannah always said he had an Oedipal complex owing to the fact that his parents had separated when he was six and, unusually, his mother had been the one to move out.
He said that was nonsense, even though hearing it made him want to cry, which maybe proved Hannah’s point.
But he must stop reminding himself of the things Hannah used to say!
He perches on the ergonomic desk stool recently purchased for the relief of lower-back pain and, sliding one archive box across so that he can reach the keyboard, he logs in to his computer.
He decides he will relegate Hannah and all her musings into a locked box in the corner of his mind.
He has used this tactic before and finds it very effective.
When his mother left, he did the same with all his happy memories of her.
Locked them up. Pitched them into blankness, never to be revisited. Et voilà. Done.
On screen, his inbox fills up with unanswered emails. Gary has sent him five, each one containing a CapsLock subject heading followed by a bevy of exclamation marks. The most recent is headlined with ‘TV OFFER. PLZ CALL!!!!! URGENT!!!!’
Richard calls.
‘Riiiichaaaaard,’ Gary says, elongating the vowels unnecessarily. ‘How are ya, mate?’
There is a metallic twanging sound in the background.
‘Where are you?’ Richard asks. ‘It sounds like you’re … being pelted with bullets.’
‘Ha! No, don’t you worry mate. I’m just … er … just leaving an arcade.’
‘An arcade?’
‘Yeah. Slot machines.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Hang on, just gonna move somewhere quieter so we can have a proper chinwag. Bear with me, mate.’
Richard wishes Gary wouldn’t call him ‘mate’. They’ve only met in person once.
‘So,’ Gary says, breathing heavily. ‘We’ve got some corking offers.’
‘Great. That’s great news.’
He imagines a publisher has been in touch asking for him to write a memoir, full of inspiring turns of phrase that will impress the general readership with their lyricism. He’ll call it something Obama-esque, like My Father’s Hopes or The Potential of Possibility.
‘The first one is a podcast called Political Chatter – they want you to go on as a guest and—’
‘No.’
‘Sorry, mate, didn’t quite catch—’
‘No. I don’t want to go on a stuffy old political podcast. I need to be reaching new audiences. Younger voters. Gen Z-ers and TikTokers, you know the kind of thing. That young bloke who wears a polo neck and a fedora. Can I get on his podcast?’
There’s a short pause on the other end of the line.
‘Mickey Minton? The YouTuber?’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
‘Okaaaaay. I’ll, um, target some of the more youth-skewed podcasts.’
‘If you could.’
‘Then we’ve got the normal media stuff – Question Time, Any Questions?, Question and Answer, Questions on a Sunday – they’ve all asked you on as a panellist. But I’m sensing maybe that’s a no, too …’
‘Boring. No.’
There’s a loud, sucking inhale that sounds very much as if Gary is vaping.
‘OK, gotcha. Well, this one is a fantastic opportunity. It’s a TV show. Amazing ratings. It’ll have real cut-through and get you out of the Westminster elite and in front of a whole new audience.’
‘That’s more like it.’
‘Shit happens.’
‘Very true, Gary, very true. And I know that better than most, but what’s the offer?’
‘No, that’s it. That’s what the show’s called: Shit Happens!’
Richard swivels on his stool.
‘I mean, they asterisk out the H and the I because it’s primetime but, yeah, it’s called Shit Happens!
and it’s actually a really powerful premise: celebrities become sewage workers and the cameras follow you as you clean up other people’s waste.
Every night, one of the contestants is voted out by the public.
They’re offering you an up-front fee, which will be a nice chunk of moolah, and if you make it through to the final, you’re guaranteed a shedload of profile and brand partnerships.
The girl who won last year got an ad campaign with Pretty Little Thing and has over a million followers on Instagram.
More importantly for our purposes, she’s become a national sweetheart.
She really showed her authentic self. And her not-so-authentic tits. ’
Gary laughs so hard at his own joke it turns into a rattling smoker’s cough.
Richard blinks. The room recedes briefly into fuzziness then snaps back into focus.
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, not to be ridiculed on the street by strangers or shouted at by cab drivers?
It would be refreshing to be loved by a public who could see him for who he really was: a decent, hardworking man driven by duty and a belief in making society better.
Someone who doesn’t stand on ceremony. A man of the people, unlike all those public-school-educated toffs at the top.
A man who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty with other people’s mess.
‘How much?’ he asks.
‘Three hundred,’ Gary says.
‘That’s pathetic! Do they know I get paid sixty grand plus a year as an MP? I’m insulted, to be frank.’
‘Nah, nah, nah. You don’t get it. Three hundred grand.’
Richard gulps.
‘Ah. Well in that case …’
‘It’s a yes?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Great. Leave it with me. The Dick Take fightback starts here!’
For the first time since everything happened, Richard feels a jolt of optimism.
Maybe he can salvage his reputation, after all.
He’s got a primetime TV slot and an invitation to the inner sanctum of the Fitzmaurice family.
All bases covered. He starts to text his wife the news.
Then he remembers he doesn’t have a wife anymore.
He deletes the text and locks the memory of it away in the box.
There. All done.