Chapter 14 Richard
XIV.
Richard
Ben’s opponent is Graham Bunn, who has the support of the rabid anti-woke, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant right-wingers, but not much traction with the centre of the party.
Also – and there’s no kind way to say this – Graham Bunn is a very ugly man.
Sparse hair and eyes of the protruding variety that physicians look for when diagnosing an over-active thyroid.
His face is a map of burst capillaries and he has a squat, flaky wart on the tip of his nose that reminds Richard of an unforgiving portrait he once saw of Oliver Cromwell.
Compared to Ben, with his dashing good looks and extraordinarily well-groomed hair, there is no contest. However racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant the Tory heartland might be, there’s surely no way a majority of them would want to be represented by the odious Graham Bunn on the world stage?
‘Martin Gilmour,’ he reads aloud. ‘What the fuck?’
Terri has an annoying habit of putting in meetings when he least expects them. The man on the next table glares at him. He is reading a hard copy of Hansard and returns to the thickly bound tome when Richard gives him an apologetic shrug.
Richard is sitting in the Portcullis House lobby.
He’s just bought himself a Korean squid and seafood stew from The Debate café, purely because it sounded so fantastical.
When he tastes it, the texture is sponge-like and off-putting.
As he lifts the fork to his mouth for a second go, an unshakeable splotch of brown lands on his tie, reminding him of the burst sewage pipe on Shit Happens!
. He slides the carton away from him. He’ll be able to get something in itsu, he thinks, although why on earth Martin Gilmour wants to see Richard is beyond him.
He’s never warmed to the fellow. The last time they crossed paths was at a campaign strategy ‘brainstorm’ at Tipworth Priory.
Richard hadn’t been sure what Martin was doing there.
The only thing he’d contributed over the course of a two-hour meeting was to suggest Ben rolled up his shirtsleeves for the forthcoming televised leadership debate.
When Martin left, Richard ventured to ask: ‘What’s he doing for you, exactly?’
Ben talked vaguely of ‘the need for a cultural advisor’ and then added: ‘He’s got a good instinct for how things might play out in areas we don’t have access to.’
‘Such as?’
‘Plebs and poofs,’ Jarvis answered, with his usual crassness.
Richard felt obliged to titter. It had been made clear to him that he was expected to defer to Jarvis in all matters, including whether things were funny or not.
‘And,’ Ben continued, ‘I’ve found in the past that, with Martin, it’s a case of better in than out.’
‘That’s what she said,’ Jarvis added, with tiresome inevitability.
‘I find it difficult to get a read on him,’ Richard offered.
Jarvis snorted.
‘Yeah. He’s a slippery little fucker.’
‘Jarvis has never been his biggest fan,’ Ben said. ‘And Martin has certain … well, shall we say, complexities. But he’s been loyal—’
‘Devoted, some might say.’ Jarvis smirked.
‘Now, now.’
‘What you need to know, Dick—’
‘Richard.’ He always tried to stop Jarvis calling him Dick.
‘What you need to know is that Martin has been madly in love’ – Jarvis adopted the campy, effete voice of a 1960s Carry On star – ‘with Benny Boy for longer than either of us can remember.’
‘Oh.’
Ben shook his head but Richard couldn’t help but notice he was grinning. Over the preceding weeks, Richard had come to understand just how much Ben revelled in attention of any description. It didn’t matter who it came from or what the context might be. What mattered most was that it was there.
‘Look, he’s only human,’ Ben said, holding up his hands with a goofy smile.
Richard, unsure what to say, studied the beige-knotted carpet in Ben’s study with great intensity. His eyes wandered to the kelim rug under Ben’s desk, woven with a repetitive triangular pattern in reds and browns.
‘I know he’s a bit of a pest, Jarvis, but would it really be too much to ask for you to play nice?’ Ben added. ‘Just until the leadership contest is over?’
‘Of course, of course,’ Jarvis said. ‘As long as we don’t have to appoint him to cabinet. Make him minister for the limp-wristed or some crap.’
‘I promise,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll find him some inoffensive non-exec role where he can’t do any harm, or I’ll just pay him off again.’
Richard wondered if he’d heard correctly.
‘Again?’ he asked, mildly.
‘He’s only joking,’ Jarvis said, a firm edge to his voice.
‘Yeah, sorry, Richard, just – um – a joke between friends. He’s always sniffing around after money and influence, is our Martin.’
Ben checked his watch. Vintage Rolex, naturally.
‘Right, we should wrap up here.’
Jarvis stood and shoved his hands in his pockets, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet.
Watching him, Richard was reminded of a shoot he’d once been on with Hannah.
One of her awful posh friends who insisted they get kitted out in tweeds and gilets and tramp around the countryside knocking back tots of whisky and trying to shoot pheasants.
The startled birds were ushered into their paths by a group of village locals who had been paid a pittance to thrash the undergrowth with sticks.
They were called beaters. It had struck Richard as a fundamentally unfair fight.
The pheasants would never be able to win.
And the beaters were being exploited, too.
‘Martin just doesn’t get it,’ Jarvis said.
‘What’s that?’ Richard asked. He imagined Jarvis with a stick, beating birds out of the grass and into Ben’s crosshairs.
‘That he’ll never be one of us.’
Recalling this episode now, sitting in Portcullis House and watching his Korean stew congeal, Richard wishes he’d said something.
But when Ben and Jarvis were together, ensconced in the trappings of their success, it was difficult to stand up to them.
What would he have said? That you couldn’t talk about someone in that way?
That it sounded callous and demeaning? That this wasn’t the way to appeal to the electorate?
They’d have laughed him out of the room.
Besides, he’s beginning to suspect the electorate like being fucked over.
He’d met a man while filming Shit Happens!
who had been blown up by an IED while serving in Afghanistan.
The man, now a double amputee, lived in a council flat, repeatedly having to go into hospital for surgical procedures.
The operations would require months of waiting and then they’d be delayed or he’d contract a bug on the ward or he’d be discharged too early and become ill at home.
Day to day, he relied on benefits but found the forms increasingly difficult to complete.
He struggled to make ends meet and had taken to visiting a food bank once a week for tinned goods he could live off over the next seven days.
He was a proud man who hated the humiliation.
And yet when Richard asked how he voted, the man had said, without a moment’s pause, ‘Conservative. Always have.’ At the time, Richard had been thrilled and asked the producer to get it on camera.
But the closer he gets to Ben Fitzmaurice, the more unsettled he starts to feel.
There is a rattling unease at the edge of his consciousness, like a pebble in a shoe.
He tries to ignore it. He reminds himself that this adjacency to power is what he’s always wanted.
He tells himself that politicians have always compromised.
Real choices have to be made. Real decisions that might prove unpopular.
Still, he can’t shake the sensation that there’s a darkness to it all, a moral vacuum at the centre.
He wishes he could speak to Hannah about it.
Hannah would know what to do. Without her, he is a boat cut adrift from its anchor, buffeted by other people’s tides.
He knows this and he also refuses to know it, in the same way that he refuses to believe he needs reading glasses.
If one simply rejects an idea, Richard thinks, getting up from his table and striding towards Westminster tube with what he hopes is the gait of a more self-confident man, then surely it ceases to exist?
Martin is sitting at one of the corner tables when Richard arrives, a plastic tub of edamame beans in front of him.
‘Martin,’ Richard says, putting out his hand to shake. Martin is wearing a pale grey suit with a pink pocket square. His spectacles are tortoiseshell and both these and the pocket square belong to the class of accessory Richard categorises as ‘arty’.
‘Thank you for meeting me,’ Martin says, sitting back down on a wooden stool that has been clamped with bolts to the floor.
There’s a brown folder next to the edamame beans on the table in front of him.
Richard’s heart sinks. He knows one of the green-ink brigade when he sees them.
Terri usually does a good job of filtering them out – those ranting letters written in fountain pen decrying the lack of village centre parking spaces or the difficulties of getting a doctor’s appointment.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ Richard says. ‘I’ll – uh – get some food.’
‘Please.’ Martin gestures towards the open fridge containing trays of pearlescent sashimi.
Richard picks a shredded duck salad that the display informs him contains 756 calories.
There is a baffling automated touchscreen that Richard bumbles his way through to pay ￡7.
99 by tapping his phone against a plastic square.
He misses the days of cash. You knew where you were with the comforting heft of pound coins.
‘What an interesting jacket,’ Martin says when Richard returns to the table.
‘Oh, yes. Thanks.’