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Malcolm remembers a time when he thought a bad day constituted the Home Secretary walking in on his wife with his brother’s cock up her arse and not getting home til 4 a.m. He would take a lifetime of those now, sat in his living room with the world through his tiredness painted in beiges and greys; there are whole rooms of his house he hasn’t seen in weeks, filled with piles of stuff he doesn’t remember ever owning, never mind needing or wanting. He looks up at the spines of books he doesn’t recognise and wonders why he bothers to come back here at all. Just to shit, shower, and shave in a place not surrounded by gaunt, desperate eyes.
The room is still and quiet enough for him to hear the soft huzz of his BlackBerry from across the hall, cheerfully heralding the rest of the world joining him in the new day he’s seen the past six and a half hours of already. He rubs his eyes, stands, stretches to push a little life back into his limbs, a low ache in his bones he knows, but doesn’t remember, he once lived without. As he bends down to fish his phone from in his jacket, dumped uncharacteristically and unceremoniously at the bottom of the stairs, the rising sunlight reaches the bottom of the window, throws insipid, white light straight into his eyes, and he has to squint down to pick out the words on the screen.
The picture loads first; a tiny, fuzzy .jpeg that he’s nonetheless sure is his phone’s clumsy attempt to show an original in stunning 2048-by-1536 HD. It shows, in no uncertain terms, his ex-Press Sec. naked and thoroughly compromised in Malcolm’s bed. Beneath it, Cal Richards has written:
Drop the Mannion lovechild. x
He leans drunkenly against the banister, the phone pressing tightly against his hand. The part of his mind not entirely filled with harsh white noise finds he almost likes the x. It conveys, neatly and quite acutely, what Malcolm himself isn’t sure he could in five hundred words or less.
For the first time in a very long while, Malcolm spends the subsequent car ride in bottomless silence. He’s got past the immediates, the how?s and he wouldn’ts and he’s stuck in a loop of stupid, stupid, fucking stupid, as if he didn’t, hadn’t always known that something, something like this would happen. He spends his life being so fucking careful in everything he says and does; his mistake was, of course, allowing a singular except. (A second, perhaps, if you count his wife; privately, Malcolm thinks he might regret his entire marriage more than any of the time he ever spent with Jamie. He’s never allowed himself to examine that thought too closely.)
He catches sight of the familiar arc of the river from the corner of his eye; he winds his fingers in his hair, tugs hard enough to shoot sparks before his eyes. He lets his eyes slip out of focus, and pretends, fiercely, that the empty weight of the seat beside him isn’t pressing firmly against his mind. He could just let it slide, he thinks. The story he’d been planning to opportunistically run (or, rather, encourage a few entirely independent media outlets to consider for their evening headlines) on one of Mannion’s mostly unknown bastards was just the tip of the iceberg of his extensive proverbial filing cabinet of accumulated shite about both sides; it wasn’t, really, even that much of a good story, especially when contrasted with some of the other metaphorical files.
Cal Richards is smarter than that, though. He is Malcolm’s equal, though with less taste, finesse, and even fewer morals. He’s certainly clever enough to start small and work his way slowly up, inexorable as death, taxes, or a fucking freight train. He understands people; worse, he understands Malcolm, perhaps the only person in the world outside of his mother and his ex-wife who’s even come close to doing so. Cal Richards knows that Malcolm wouldn’t, immediately, dream of doing anything to endanger his party in the same way frogs won’t jump into boiling water.
This is, in other words, the start of a very long and a very fucking slippery slope.
His other option, though, is equally unthinkable. A sex scandal – a gay sex scandal – about anyone in government four weeks before the election would be bad fucking news; but Malcolm, see, Malcolm’s turned into the proverbial three-ton wrinkled grey mammal in the room, who shouldn’t, by all rights, even fucking be there, and the journos are just fucking waiting for the chance to point this out all over again. The accumulated forces of the media had taken his resignation as the perfect opportunity to run every story they ever dreamed of on him, and now he, Malcolm Tucker, the man whom Jamie used to say that Nazi veterans and Japanese ninjas (he’d always had a somewhat focused imagination, trapped squarely around 1954) came to for advice in staying out of the limelight is now firmly in the public eye, pages four, five, six, seven, and thirty-six for readers’-fucking-digest. What once he would have been able to keep small, low-key, and boring, would now quite definitely take the attention away from Nicola in Cheshire and Tom in Bruges and Dan in Cornwall and even Ben fucking Swain, tripping over his own cock in the back end of Gloucestershire.
He has his driver pull up shy of Embankment, leans heavily against the soft-stone balustrade as he stares, unseeing, across the river. Malcolm has never, really, been much of a religious man, but this particular twist of fate has him quite resolutely believing in karma. Apparently it’s not enough for him to be fucked by his colleagues, his party, and the assembled populace of the United Kingdom, but a higher power is required now, too.
He pulls out his phone, exits the email still splayed obstinately across the screen, and calls him. “You’re eager,” Cal says; he’d almost forgotten that voice, the way its drawl sits slick and uncomfortable in your ears. “Here to negotiate terms?”
Two opposite futures yawn open in front of him; he finds, bitterly, he hates both of them. “It’s done,” he croaks, heavy and coppery and twisted on his tongue, and hangs up before he can change his mind.
Cal Richards is nothing if not predictable. Four more relatively incidental requests arrive in Malcolm’s inbox before the week is out; most are annoying, rather than dangerous, the sort of level which allowed one party or the other to score some rather smug political points but aren’t all that apocalyptic in nature. Easy, in other words, for Malcolm to conveniently deal with, send, and dismiss.
Two days after the British media keenly expends its energy on defining the word “bigot”, Cal requests some rather uncompromising health stats from the last quarter. Malcolm, up to his eyes in the clusterfuck that is bigotgate, spares no thought to him save to attach the required PDF; when the story breaks a handful of days later, he roars in the ear of every minister within earshot and, for a good fifteen minutes, forgets that he himself is actually responsible. He doesn’t allow himself to give into the panic that rises when he remembers otherwise, as Sam is stood by his side and Tom is nearby – or so he thinks; he can’t see him, but he’s always fucking lurking. In the past he’d almost found it reassuring to be surrounded, mainly because the men at his back were invariably Scottish and on his side; now he feels caged, vicious, isolated. He threatens to have the Secretary of State sacked – as if he weren’t five minutes away from losing his job anyway – and stalks around Westminster wearing his mask of fury, all cloaking neatly the ever-present ba-doom of thick blood careening recklessly, frantically around his chest.
A fortnight from the election, the expenses forms of Markus Thompson, a Labour back-bencher with as much political clout as Sam’s dead grandmother, arrive in the inbox of Marianne Swift. The subsequent week sees Pyrrhic shit-slinging across Parliament on a spectacular scale. MPs’ expenses had, previously, fallen firmly under the category of political M.A.D.; there wasn’t a single party in Westminster that didn’t have someone quietly fiddling the books, and it was seen as advantageous to politics as a whole that no one took the time to enlighten the world to this fact. But Cal Richards had made the request of Malcolm Tucker; and Malcolm Tucker, lashed on every side by a hot, slamming panic, had acquiesced.
Malcolm then watches the rolling ticker-tape of BBC News 24 and the nosediving polls and thinks, quietly, enough. When Cal Richards requests the paternity test for Tom’s second son, Malcolm replies with a string of obscenities remarkably fervent and personal even for him; a desperate attempt to drown out the quiet thought that it’s too little, too fucking late.
It’s hardly the first time Sam’s found herself drudging through a light, miserable rain on a Sunday afternoon to the red-brick townhouse; generally, though, she’s expected, and not meant to be seventy miles south trying and failing to wear less than four layers on a thickly pebbled beach. By some sixth sense she has yet to develop Malcolm comes to the door before she’s even knocked, still trying to subdue her snarled mess of what laughably claims to be a fold-down umbrella. She sends him a look the moment he does, dares him to pass comment; Malcolm leans against the doorframe, eyebrow raised, and tactfully ignores the black sodden lump entirely. “What happened to Littlehampton?”
“Harry’s got salmonella,” Sam says, dryly, and gives up, dropping the tangled mess to one side and pointedly dropping her gaze past his shoulder. “Can I?”
He sighs a little, kneads his eyes. “Yeah,” he says, and steps aside for her to enter. “It’s a fuckin’ mess, though, and there’s nothing in – coffee?”
“Tea,” she replies, and he breaks away from her side to make it. She loiters in the section of his sprawling, open-plan house that constitutes his living room, noting idly the occasional pile of three-day-old newspapers he considers a fucking mess and privately hoping he never turns up at hers unannounced. Malcolm re-enters with a mug in each hand and the smallest of smiles on his face – an expression she’d almost forgotten he once wore with regularity. He settles onto the sofa, looks up at her with polite interest, and she bites back a sigh, fights the urge to fuck it and run.
For someone already so pale, a remarkable amount of colour drains from his face when she drops a plain brown envelope onto the coffee table in front of him, the broken seal face-up. “Jesus wept,” he says, quietly, and lets his head fall forwards into his hands.
“It came through the door this morning,” she says. “I didn’t show Harry,” she adds, and he throws her a look that tells her in no uncertain terms he had never dreamt of a world in which she might have.
He sits back, scours his face with his hand. “Cal Richards,” he says, finally, heavy and defeated, firmly avoiding her eye.
She sits down on the sofa’s arm. “Shit.”
He looks over, briefly, and snorts. She decides tactfully not to tell him the worst of it; that, though they technically did come through a door this morning, it wasn’t hers, but Nicola Murray’s, and though she had, technically, come here from home, it had been via the Murray residence, to quietly and discreetly remove them from Nicola’s somewhat shaky hands. Sam drains the rest of her tea, guiding the mug onto a tasteful monochrome coaster she’s pretty sure she bought him. The table around it is dotted with a haze of marks and, knowing how firmly protective Malcolm is of his furniture, she wonders idly whether this is where Jamie used to sit.
He still won’t look at her. She feels physically sick, a bone-deep nausea equitable to the nastier strains of ‘flu. “You gave him Thompson, didn’t you,” she says; it’s not a question. Swift had insisted her information came from an unspecified government source. Sam supposes that, if Cal or Malcolm were as smart as she knows they can be, they’d take steps to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to them; nevertheless, the source for one of the biggest political scandals of the decade is, unquestionably, sat in front of her, and she can’t decide whether she wants to hug him or punch him. Her eyes run along the jagged line of his shoulders, the spindle-fingered hands clenched white around his mug. “Why this?” she says, flicking her fingers towards the upturned envelope.
“A warning shot. He wanted something worse. I said no. I didn’t think – ” He doesn’t bother continuing, scours his face with his hand. He looks very small – and, she realises, as something in her chest finally crumples, concern triumphing over rage, very fucking scared. The ineffable, unconquerable Malcolm Tucker is, perhaps for the first time in innumerable decades, way out of his depth. She sits back, swallows a small, grim smile. If it were ever going to happen, it would, of course, be over Jamie.
“Does Jamie know?”
He glances up, gives her a half-hearted shrug, and she bites back a sigh. She’s spent a considerable proportion of her recent career watching them drunkenly stumble around, towards, into one another; she was never privy as to exactly why, one predictably cheery Monday, his desk lay vacant for the first time in over half a decade, and Jamie MacDonald had become the man whom nobody mentioned. She’s always quietly suspected if it wasn’t Malcolm’s doing, it was certainly Malcolm’s fault.
Whatever the reason, something worse than Thompson’s expenses definitely translates to worse than whatever backlash the contents of the envelope would result in; and if she knows this, Malcolm definitely does. She hesitates, leaning forwards, her fingers laced, and says, “this has to,” just as he looks up and says, “I know.” He considers her silently for a long, awful while, and then she watches as he crosses over to a nondescript cabinet, retrieves a bottle of whisky, and heads in the direction of his garden, BlackBerry in his other hand.
Two days traipse unceremoniously past. On the third (because, alongside a weird fondness for the Bee Gees, an inability to spell or say the word Worcestershire, and an unfortunate leaning towards Class B drugs, Cal Richards occasionally suffers from bouts of theatricality), the ostensibly unobtrusive email finds its way to the inbox of Angela Heaney, who swears, loudly, the moment the first picture shifts neatly into focus.
She knows on instinct that any exclusivity Cal’s afforded her will be short-lived. Angela settles back in her chair and grins, Cheshire-like. She’s unashamed to admit she’s going to enjoy this.
Malcolm does, apparently, still have some friends in the right places, and so following a brief text from Sam (who, considering her performance of three days previously, he’s currently unsure whether to hand over to the Queen or the political firing squad) he allows Tom, Nicola, the Treasury, and anyone else vying for his attention to believe he’s far too fucking preoccupied with someone infinitely more important and hotfoots it home.
He unplugs the TV, radio, and phone the moment he closes the door, draws every curtain and blind. He stands in the dark, focuses hard on the push-pull of his own breath and the curve of his nails dug into his palms, and tries, with little success, not to panic. Once upon a time, home is the last place he’d ever have thought to go; Jamie, maybe, or even Julius or Glenn fucking Cullen, but not here, this empty fucking husk of a building, which is, more importantly, exactly where they’ll know to come for him.
He spends the night in the spare room, because the master bedroom overlooks the road and he knows he’ll be able to hear the fucking rustling of the accumulated press the minute they dig out his address from whatever hole they last buried him in. He’s surprised he sleeps at all – but he wakes up, which means that somewhere between staring at the delicate, looping, nonsensical patterns etched on the ceiling and filling his mind entirely with a comforting white noise of panic, he manages to drop off. He feels worse for it, a thick downy feeling clustered right behind his eyeballs, his tongue heavy and clumsy in his mouth. He dresses in a grey jumper and jeans, leaves off his shoes.
He’s playing a sort of Schrodinger’s with the British media; from where he’s standing, so long as he doesn’t look, it’s entirely possible that he’s attracted no attention at all. He just about manages to resist the urge to curtain-twitch, but he can see their dishevelled, lumpen forms through the frosted glass when he stands in the hall, staring absently at his own front door. He doesn’t think he’s ever gone this long without absorbing some sort of news before.
Senses trained by twenty years of back streets in Glasgow and honed by a further thirty of back streets in Westminster catch, at the edge of his hearing, a scuffle, a tear, and a low, extensive curse from his back garden, and for reasons he doesn’t particularly care to analyse it is the thought of some low-paid greasy-fingered Murdoch-employed wankstain legging it over his garden fence that awakes the fury in him. Resisting, barely, the urge to go for the iron poker propped up neatly in his fireplace, he paces over to his back door, flings it open –
– and walks straight into someone’s fist. “You stone cold cunt,” Jamie says by way of greeting, three-dee and lifelike and real in his back garden with a thunderous expression on his face. “I’d’a done it with a golf club if I could’a got one over the fucking fence.”
Malcolm stares up at him from his newfound, unexpected position sprawled across the patio floor. “Shouldn’t you be in – ” He tries, and fails, to recall where Jamie was, the last time he’d summoned the courage to go looking for him. Birmingham? Brighton? “Blackpool?”
Jamie throws him a thoroughly scathing look. “Blackpool? What, are you fucking senile now an’ all? Blackpool, Malcolm, Jesus wept.” He sneers, viciously and wholeheartedly, and Malcolm manages not to flinch. Jamie steps over Malcolm with a pointedly wide gait, and marches through his back door, in search, he bets, of caffeine or alcohol; Malcolm stares after him in a heady daze. He hadn’t even thought – well. That’s half the problem, really. When Jamie is involved, he never thinks it through.
He drags himself up off the patio, wincing slightly as he pokes at his aching cheek, and throws a wary look around the surrounding windows, hoping none of the paparazzi have had the sense to bribe his immediate neighbours. Inside, the television snaps on halfway through an audience’s raucous laugh; he doesn’t remember what channel he last left it on, or even when he last turned on the set at all. Malcolm collects what’s left of his dignity and, shoulders squared, hobbles back inside.
He stares uncomprehendingly at the screen. Jamie is glowering at BBC News 24 with rapt attention, apparently unimpressed by Nick Higham’s particular line of inquiry; Malcolm doesn’t recognise the chinless wanker blathering on about the importance of hypertextuality in his festering turd of a novel. Malcolm forces himself to read the red tickertape; nothing. Not a single word. “Oh, your Sam’s a good girl,” Jamie crows, almost reverentially, the grin on his face bordering on obscene.
Malcolm, mind half-pickled by exhaustion, glances at him in confusion. “Sam?”
Jamie rolls his eyes. “Of course fucking Sam, who else? She had the good nature to drag me out of the back end of fucking Bristol – ” Bristol, Malcolm thinks, in a vague, hysterical way, knew it began with a b. “ – and pull me in to firefight this shite while you did your best concussed ostrich impression. I couldnae get into most of the newsrooms, though I personally went over to the Mail and sucked Angela Heaney off myself – ”
– and it dawns on Malcolm, bright and sharp. “They’re on my side?”
“Of cou- hey, hey, of course they – ”
What strength he had been pretending to still have falls out of him instantly, and he drops forward, leaning on the back of the sofa, the hot, white relief shutting out anything and everything for a few, thundering heartbeats. He comes round to the press of Jamie’s fingers at the crux of his shoulders, the nape of his neck, rubbing small, soothing circles he’d forgotten he used to do.
“ – and the Mirror, except David fucking Barton, ‘cause he’s a cunt. Discreet little page six-and-seven spreads about the virulent homophobia of the media – ” He removes his hand, momentarily, to frame the quote with his fingers. “ – and how it shouldn’t matter if you’re sucking off Prince Philip himself, and every single other page painting Tom and Ben fucking Swain and Nicola cunting Murray as if she’s the next Virgin Mary with shit tits and fucking terrible kids.”
The rant, accompanied by the steady, warm pressure of Jamie’s hand at his back, allows Malcolm to pull in his first clean breath in weeks. Malcolm stares at him dazedly as the world refits itself around him; his biggest, inescapable fear unleashed, and apparently of no consequence whatsoever. Jamie’s wearing an expression he’s accustomed to seeing at three a.m., either the other side of some horrific Downing Street black ops or an enormous orgasm; it means that privately Jamie is fondly calling him a “dozy cunt”. Malcolm wishes he didn’t know that.
“I’m calling Sam,” he says, quietly, and manages to find the phone he deems least likely to throw a dozen angry messages at him the moment he turns it on. She picks up on the third ring, and though she is, as ever, the consummate professional, he can’t help but notice the way her voice is ever so slightly amused. If anything, she’s probably relieved the two of them haven’t killed one another yet. He glances back through to the living room; Jamie’s lounging on the sofa with his feet propped up on the coffee table, eating a packet of crisps he’s pulled from God-knows-where. Malcolm silently prays it wasn’t excavated from the back of one of his kitchen cupboards, a fossil from the last time Jamie had been round. He decides he can’t promise he won’t before the day is out.
“I’ve had to promise twelve blowjobs to Alex Hayhurst, but I’ve got you an interview,” Sam’s saying in his ear, and he drags his attention back to her. Hayhurst, Malcolm thinks; hardly fucking Paxman. He’ll be on the fucking One Show next. The idea of him propped up on a garishly red sofa casually discussing his sex life with Adrian Chiles flashes in a nightmarish scene before his eyes; Malcolm toys again with the idea of hanging up and crawling back under his bed, or enacting his contingency plan of emigrating to the Maldives with a massive fuck-off yacht and a six-figure pension.
Back in the living room, Jamie tips the last of the crisps down his throat and sends crumbs flying all over himself and Malcolm’s impeccable living room floor. Malcolm decides, firmly, not to be such a fucking coward. “Alright,” he says to Sam, and hangs up. He takes a minute to pinch the bridge of his nose, try and massage something other than fear into the backs of his eyes; then he squares his shoulders and marches back to face Jamie, who’s slowly destroying the integrity of his living room. He eyes up the rumpled sofa cushions, the scattering of food, the discarded clothes; at least, he thinks absently, it looks lived in. “Don’t fucking break anything,” Malcolm snaps. “I need to put on a suit.”
He dresses slowly, deliberately, armours himself in Canali and a grim smile. When he comes back down Jamie’s bobbing around in his living room, tongue between his teeth as he hacks out something undoubtedly unpleasant on the phone in his hand – Malcolm’s phone, or one of them. He’d thought he’d changed the pin; it’s possible he has, and Jamie guessed it anyway. The notion makes his skin crawl. He’d forgotten how much it unnerved him to have someone who knew his habits so completely. “Nick Fletcher’s still a cunt,” he says by way of greeting, and Malcolm murmurs something unintelligible in agreement. “Where we off?”
Malcolm decides, with that opening, to finally take control of this clusterfuck. “We’re not going anywhere. I’m, apparently, on my knees at White – ”
Jamie’s expression turns instantly ugly. “Oh, fuck off, man. Aside from the fact that I drove here at four o’clock in the cunting morning because you decided to be too high-and-fucking-mighty to deal with your own mess, that’s my dick splashed in glorious technicolour all across the Daily Express centrefold too, you know – and thanks for the fucking warning, by the way,” he adds, viciously. “Would you’ve waited until my cumface was replacing the undoubtedly fake but nonetheless impressive tits of ‘Sandra in fucking Southampton who thinks we should bring back capital punishment’ before picking up the fucking phone?” He looks ready to punch him again; this time Malcolm does flinch, and though he instantly hates himself for it Jamie calms down in a heartbeat. “Look,” he adds, twenty decibels lower, retreating back across the room with his hands raised. “Don’t get any ideas, I’m not here for some fucking vendetta – ” A filthy look confirms that Jamie firmly believes, however, that Malcolm deserves one. “I’m riding out this shite, putting you back on the proverbial horse, and then I’ll fuck back off to – ”
“Bristol,” Malcolm interrupts, and the smile Jamie rewards him with is painfully familiar.
“Bristol,” Jamie confirms.
Malcolm sags back against the wall; his brain feels like it’s leaking out of his ears, and it’s barely nine a.m. This promises to be a very long fucking day. He looks across at Jamie, still rocking slightly from ball to heel; some part of him is still unable to comprehend the fact he’s actually standing in his living room, tired and vengeful and alive, filling this thin, sombre space with more life than it’s seen in months.
He could – not, he thinks, tentatively, quietly. But he can’t bring himself to say it; the idea of forming the words alone turns his gut viciously sour. Malcolm nods, and mentally derails anything and everything other than finding his overcoat.
They converge in his hallway, Malcolm trying to look twice as tall as he feels, Jamie clad in his inexorable anorak and looking ready to unleash hell. He stares for a minute at his own front door; he can still hear the soft murmur-rustlings he’d noticed before, what feels like days ago. He looks at Jamie, hanging back at his shoulder, his grin beatifically wide. No surrender. Malcolm grips the latch of the door, and turns his hand.
Malcolm cannot deny that the following day is amongst one of the most unpleasant of his life. The BBC’s makeup department dutifully says nothing about the bruise blossoming quietly across his cheek, and covers it completely; he doesn’t miss the amusement in Jamie’s face as he loiters behind him, watching Malcolm valiantly fight the urge to wince. Hayhurst, whose own private life Malcolm had carelessly and with a distinct lack of foresight exposed some three years ago, cheerfully eviscerates him as they wait for the clock to chime one, before resuming a sombre and dignified countenance as the cameras turn to them.
Malcolm is bumped from newsroom to newsroom and met across the board with what becomes a painfully familiar expression of sneered contempt segueing neatly into stoic support the moment the cameras roll; all the while, Jamie is there, standing to one side with an unreadable expression, watching him squirm and humourlessly smile his way through interview after interview. Malcolm oscillates wildly between wanting him to drop through the fucking floor and feeling, for the first time in years, as if he isn’t trapped on a raft in the middle of the Pacific, entirely and indisputably alone. They finish with a slot on Question Time; Jamie is nothing if not frighteningly thorough. Malcolm’s certain he’s amassed more media coverage in the past eighteen hours than in the previous decade of his career, but he feels, at least, as if they’ve pissed out a Guy Fawkes-sized bonfire with a water pistol.
It’s long gone one before Malcolm’s collapsing over his thankfully paparazzi-free doorstep, Jamie still inexplicably in tow, his brain the consistency of mustard and his bones feeling molten inside his skin. He’s incapable of registering anything other than exhaustion and relief, but a small speck of annoyance fights its way through when Jamie neatly bypasses any decorum and pours out a hefty dram of Malcolm’s finest single-malt Glenallachie without seeking permission first. “Some things never fucking change,” he murmurs as Jamie hands his to him.
The answering, somewhat hesitant smile is the last thing he remembers; he wakes hours later, glass gone but the blanket from the spare room tucked carefully round him. Malcolm stares out at the light breaking under the curtains and tries fervently to ignore the vague smell of damp plastic and a familiar aftershave he knows, from experience, won’t leave the house for weeks to come.
Anyone knocking on Sam’s door at three a.m. is, in her opinion, entirely undeserving of sympathy; but even she’s forced to acquiesce a little at the sight of Jamie, damp, miserable, dishevelled, and half-cut on her doorstep. She squints at him, hackles raised, and folds her arms. “You didn’t.”
Jamie throws her a contemptuous look. “Of course we fucking didn’t,” he hisses, shifting unhappily from one foot to another. She surveys him again, decides (on this occasion) he’s guilt free, and steps inside to let him in, noting the wet splodges he leaves on her myopically beige carpet and vowing, silently, to make him clean it up before he leaves.
“You can have the sofa,” she says as she follows him into her living room; Harry, who’d been retching away on it for the last two days, had given up and gone back to his mum’s. As much as she misses him, she’s slightly thankful to ship off the vomit-mopping duties to someone more accustomed to it. No, that’s unfair; she’s sat through plenty of vomit-mopping when it’s been required of her. Someone with more patience for it, maybe, and without an election to run.
She eyes Jamie warily, wondering whether he’d find it insulting if she presented him with a bucket before she went back to bed. “Bathroom’s on the right down the hall,” she says, meaningfully; Jamie shoots her the scathing look she’d expected but doesn’t believe she deserves.
She watches Jamie pulls off his crumpled jacket and gnawed tie in silence, Sam-the-friend in a bitter, familiar war with Sam-the-employee, trying to decide whether, come morning, she should persuade him to stay and have it out with Malcolm or shove him on a bus travelling firmly down the M4. She frames the two possible futures in her mind, Malcolm-with-Jamie and Malcolm-without. She’s seen a little of both, and still isn’t sure which she honestly would prefer.
She pinches the bridge of her nose; a habit that annoys Harry, one she’s picked up off Malcolm. Although Malcolm is usually slick enough to put Goebbels to shame, when the spotlight turns on him he goes to pieces faster, as he would say, than a leper in a wind tunnel; to put it bluntly, he panics, and Malcolm Tucker in a panic has been known to make some monumentally stupid decisions. Hence Jamie; she’d known from the minute she’d guided that brown envelope from Nicola’s wobbling fingers that Malcolm would go to ground on this in truly spectacular fashion, and she’d also known that she by no means had the press nous or clout to even begin firefighting it. What would really be needed to neatly sweep this under the carpet was Malcolm Tucker, but in lieu of the massive nervous collapse she’d known on instinct Malcolm would invariably undergo she’d turned to his ex-Number Two, fully and regrettably aware of the impact Jamie being back in London would have on Malcolm’s sanity but unable to think of any other way to prevent the pixellated image of his cock being blown up to anatomically unlikely proportions on Page Three.
But now the bonfire is out – or at least as out as it’s ever going to get – and she’s left with Jamie miserable and damp and nodding off on her sofa, and a Malcolm who she knows will be skittish for weeks at best. Jamie, to some extent, she can deal with, shove on a train with best wishes and her number plugged into his phone, but Malcolm – they’re barely a handful of days away from an election that’s likely to see them fucked six ways to Sunday. There isn’t time for her to quietly, calmly, and above all subtly reassure him that the entirety of Cabinet aren’t sniggering over the idea of him in fishnets, bent over Julius’ desk with Jamie’s cock up his arse. (She’ll be lying, of course; a man like Malcolm doesn’t get to do what he does for a decade and a half without inviting some resentment, and he himself has proven that Parliament is no place to hang around in if you’d like any semblance of a private life.)
Jamie looks over at her; neither of them is actually telepathic, but the fact they’re sharing a common thought is hardly difficult to guess. “He doesn’t have time for this,” Sam reiterates out loud, quietly.
Once, this might have turned Jamie into the infamous Rottweiler, going off like a ten-ton firework in her face; but here, now, Jamie sends her a weary look, and says, “I’ll get the first train I can tomorrow.”
Sam has been around politicians for longer than she cares to remember, and the decided ambiguity of this phrase does not escape her. She sends him a quick look through narrowed eyes, but he’s curled himself in a ball with his back to her, head pillowed on his arm, quietly and politely indicating she should fuck off.
Fuck it, she decides, and takes the hint. There’s no sense in her sat staring at his stubborn back with three or four hours of sleep still to be had. There’s still no sign of sunlight through the blinds, but they let a slit of orange streetlight fall across Jamie’s back; he’s already snoring. She drops his jacket over him, stands, and turns off the light.
Though there have been many instances in which he’s had to persuade various politicians, lawyers, and even one notable occasion a priest otherwise, Malcolm Tucker is not actually the centre of the universe, and life, as it must, rolls on. Malcolm’s life this particular dreary Friday morning sees him on stage in a mouldy marquee on the outskirts of Runcorn, trying and failing to stop Nicola Murray looking like the most incompetent person to ever attempt to operate in the field of politics.
For the while, the accumulated hordes of the press in front of them appear to be reluctantly accepting the idea that what many probably classed as the greatest breakthrough in their careers was, in fact, a journalistic non-event. That said, he’s had four of them approach him privately when none of the others were looking and ask for a “heart-to-heart”, including one from The Sun, and really, who the fuck do they think he is? Heaney isn’t here, despite it being right up her alley. Malcolm suspects she’s currently trying to disappear through a hole in the floorboards from a vicious lambasting by Adam – no, not Adam, he’s jumped ship. Her boss, whoever they may be. He briefly and cheerfully entertains the notion she might get the sack for all this.
Beside him, Nicola lets out a characteristic braying laugh, and is met by universal, stony silence. Some things never change, he thinks, amused, and then winces; speaking of non-events.
He’s not sure, exactly, what he’d expected – no. That’s not true. He’s had a contingency plan for what precisely would happen should Jamie decide to stray east of Swindon for longer than he can remember, and to say the collective clusterfuck that was yesterday didn’t fit the bill is like saying Fatty’s a tad fond of sponge fingers. For starters, Malcolm should’ve been approximately fifty fucking foot tall, with a sneer so terrifying he’d shoot down an unfortunate passing O.A.P. in friendly fire; definitely not fleece-clad and cowering behind net curtains like some geriatric agoraphobic. And Jamie, he thinks, viciously, Jamie would be fucking repentant, on his knees repentant –
Or, Malcolm thinks, quietly, just on his knees.
Nicola stamps on his foot, hard, and Malcolm’s mind snaps back, his gut reeling. She’s giving him a dour, angry glare above a brilliantly wide smile, and he surveys the slathering pack of paparazzi in front of them; they present him with no clues, aside from half a dozen pairs of maliciously glinting eyes. He has no idea what it is he’s supposed to be responding to. “Excuse me,” he says, quietly, and stalks off, limping slightly from the impact of Nicola’s heel on his toes. Christ, he thinks. He can see why they’re called stilettos.
She finds him five minutes later, visibly fuming; he’s leant up against the metal prop of the marquee, trying and failing desperately to bully his BlackBerry into registering some form of signal. He’s got no issue at all with the countryside, all this fucking fresh air and vitamins or whatever, but is it too much to ask that it comes with decent phone signal and regular public transport? “Christ, Malcolm,” Nicola says, “you were about as useful to me back there as a, a cunting condom in a nunnery.”
Malcolm has to hold back a snort. “You’re clearing going to the wrong fucking nunneries, love.”
He puts away his phone, looks up; he’s delighted to see Nicola’s seething – half, he imagines, from the pet name alone. She’s far too easy to get a rise out of; he’s trying to train her out of it, but she really isn’t learning. He’d have more luck trying to teach Clare Ballantine how to come. Sometimes he depresses himself by remembering that the future of British politics is stood here in front of him, her tits round her ankles and a face that looks like it’s lost to a makeup-smeared frying pan.
“Look, I know you’ve had a rough week,” she begins, and he’d almost forgotten she also has the political tact of a dead walrus; the look Malcolm gives her has been known to cause spontaneous bladder weakness in lesser beings, but she counters it unflinchingly. Maybe there’s hope for her yet. “ – but if you’re just going to stand up there fucking gawping,” she continues, unfazed, “you might as well – ” She gestures, wildly, digs into her imagination, and falls predictably flat. “ – piss off home.”
He jabs his finger towards her, gnarled and thin. “Listen here, you,” he begins, but Nicola’s decidedly not listening to him; her eyes are focused over his shoulder, and she lets out a low groan.
“Oh god, Malcolm,” she says, mildly hysterical, “please don’t do this here.”
Malcolm slowly, briefly closes his eyes; he doesn’t need to look round to understand. “You, fuck off,” he mutters to her, reopening them, his death-mask still firmly in place. “I’ll deal with you later.” She sends him one last, lingering glare; he can’t quite tell whether it’s pitying or withering, and neither is he certain which would be worse. Either way, Nicola Murray’s current opinion of him is pretty fucking low on his list of priorities.
He turns to find, no surprises, Jamie watching him, frustratingly quiescent. He fucking hates this Jamie, cool and calm and fucking enigmatic, not only because he can no longer tell what he’s thinking but because it gives him an irritating air of maturity – which implies, by connection, that Malcolm is somehow backwards, infantile. When Jamie left, they’d had the predictable spittle-flecked row that both of them had honed down to an art, accompanied by ten or so years of – cohabiting? fucking? – that gave them hardwired shortcuts as to how to get under one another’s skin with ruthless efficiency. But the Jamie here, now, perched on a plastic table with his arms crossed and his face carefully nonchalant – Malcolm can’t read him, can’t get at him. He feels entirely disarmed, and hates it, but worse still is that he gets the distinct impression that Jamie can still read him perfectly.
Malcolm swallows a sigh, runs his hand through his hair, and says, quietly, “Jamie, what is it you want?”
(To stay, Jamie thinks, on instinct – but no, that’s wrong. What he wants is to be back in 1999, newly in power and feeling like fucking gods, before pwip-pip, before Tom, before Olly fucking Reeder.)
“You’re gonna lose,” he says, instead, and he doesn’t mean here in fucking Halton, though god knows with Murray at the helm. The elephant’s back again, but Jamie’s not so much pointed it out as the catastrophic mess that’s evidence of its wake; the steaming pile of shite it’s left on the floor, permeating through every square inch of this fucking disastrous, unelectable government. Jamie watches in silence as Malcolm visibly deflates in front of him.
Malcolm’s brain helpfully supplies him with a barrage of potential replies, mostly overly florid threats to Jamie’s person – but he rejects them, scours his face with his hand, and says quietly, hoarsely, “I know.”
Between them drifts the unmistakeable noise of Nicola dying on her arse in the adjoining marquee. Malcolm’s eyes are on the ground, but he looks up to find Jamie still staring straight at him. “So what,” Malcolm continues, anger swiftly replacing apathy, “you’re here to fucking – ”
“No, fuck off, I’m not.” Jamie breaks off, goes fascinatingly red. “I just thought – ”
“Ohhhh,” Malcolm says suddenly, a long, low drawl; understanding dawns. “You’re offering me an out?” He smiles, huge and cruel. “Very fucking convenient timing, that is – are you working for fucking Fleming now, is that it?”
Jamie’s expression turns ugly. “Fuck you,” he reiterates, louder, closer, and for a minute Malcolm can’t breathe, with them half a foot apart and bellowing at one another. “You’re a political fucking non-entity, Malcolm, and this government, this government is so fucked it might as well have JB’s name smeared over its back in come.”
He peters off; Malcolm has gone very still and very quiet. “A non-entity,” he echoes icily, and Jamie does, at least, look slightly abashed.
“No, I didn’t mean,” he begins hastily, backing away, “I meant – just, fuck.” He scrubs his face with his hand. “You’re out here, in the middle of fucking nowhere, and the future of the country is what? Glummy fucking Mummy?”
Malcolm decides firmly to ignore the fact that there he’s mostly on Jamie’s side. “And what,” he continues, taking it up to a roar, “you’d rather I leave it to the Peter Mannions and the JBs and the Mary Drakes – ”
“It’s there already,” Jamie interrupts, hustling closer again. “You’re going to lose. You might as well – ” He stops, inches away. “Malcolm,” he murmurs, hand shifting in a slight, aborted movement beside him, painfully close to settling on Malcolm’s arm.
Malcolm can smell yesterday’s sweat and rain on him, hideously familiar; all the days they lived in yesterday’s clothes, sore-necked and red-eyed from snatched poor sleep in unforgiving places, hungover from whatever crisis had fucked them over the day before but together and solid and victorious nonetheless. Come with me, he’s asking, even though he daren’t say it. As if Malcolm could walk away from his party when it’s on the fucking ground, sit behind a desk in BS13 and leave it in the hands of Dan Miller and Ben Swain and Steve Fleming.
But it’s more than that; Jamie makes him weak. It had taken Cal Richards five fucking minutes to spot this, and about the same time again to use it against him to devastating effect – but not against him, not against his character or his reputation or his person, any of which he could have countered or withstood, but against his party. There’s a tiny, panicked, mosquito whine in the back of Malcolm’s mind that if they lose – when they lose – it will be entirely because of him, them, this. Not because he could have done more, or better, not because of something he didn’t do, but because of him, something he did, despite the fact he knew better, despite the fact he’s always known how this world works – despite the fact he’d written half the fucking rules himself.
In place of panic, Malcolm’s veins sing with hate, twisted and gnarled inside of him, frenzied and undirected but inexorable, unstoppable. As ever, he seizes it, voices it, but twists it outside of him, lashes outwards in place of lashing in. “Get on a fucking train,” he says – spits, more like, straightens his shoulders and snarls. “Go to Brighton or Bristol or whatever fucking cesspit of a think-tank you crawled back out of. Make decisions on parking tickets. Save the fucking rainforest. If we lose,” he continues, suddenly imbued with some blind, alien hope to the contrary, “I will spend the next five years of my life kicking JB to his fucking knees and ramming my cock down his fucking throat.” He pulls back, his smile cruel. “You enjoy sea breezes and TOWIE and forty-hour weeks. Get gone, and this time, fucking stay gone. Don’t ever assume that you have anything to do with what I want or need again.”
Malcolm turns his back, indicates, quite firmly, that he’s done. He leaves Jamie standing there, doesn’t look back, walks blindly, his pulse a low, steady roar, thick in his ears and throat. He can’t shake his last sight of Jamie, confused and a little crumpled, trapped in the brief moment before rage, mouth still a little slack from disbelief; his gut sloshes with battery acid at the thought of it.
Nicola actually walks into him, frazzled and tired and muttering angrily under her breath. “Please let’s leave,” she says instantly, their previous argument and Malcolm’s unwanted company apparently forgotten. “That was a fucking disaster.”
He glances fleetingly back at the marquees, mutters a vague, agreeing yeah. It’s a long fucking drive back to London, and he could definitely use some company.
Sam gets a text just as she’s getting into bed; a bleary photo of Temple Meads station and a brief thanks love written underneath it. She sits down on the side of her bed, fights the latest in a long series of world-weary sighs she’s getting bored of emitting. She wonders briefly why Jamie felt the need to provide evidence that he’d gone home; she’d have found out any alternative arrangement quickly enough.
She doesn’t have time to fret about it. The picture snaps quickly away, her phone swapping its tiny screen to something more urgent; Malcolm’s calling her. “I’m sorry, love,” is the first thing he says, and she bites her cheek sharply to stop herself from laughing. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No,” she says, truthfully, pinches the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. She pushes away her tiredness, all thoughts of the past week and a half, and focuses. Election, she thinks. Sinking ships. “I was up late reading anyway.”