by Mark Lawson
‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that.’
‘Christ, what I’d give for a big chilled glass of Sav Blank!’
‘Rafi said the warning isn’t better not, it’s don’t.’
Tom knocked his empty plastic bottle against Ned’s. ‘The tranquillizer twins!’
Office Politics
After two days of failing to tell Helen, Tom had phoned her at the magazine from their shared office at home, where he was supposed to be finishing his comparison of the dynastic ambitions and achievements of the Kennedys, Clintons and Bushes.
It was Thursday afternoon, the brief lull in weekly production between the publication of one edition and the preparation of the next. He suggested she found a corner where she wouldn’t be surrounded, less from concern for privacy than to soften her to hear something shocking.
The ruse worked. Through the booming acoustic of a stairwell, his wife, slightly breathless – not just, he guessed, from rushing – asked: ‘What’s happened? Are you okay?’
He knew what she was imagining and found it shamefully useful. Almost any bad news could be broken to a loved one through strategic use of the ABCC tactic: anything but cancer or the children.
‘Tom, just tell me. Becky or Theo?’
It upset him that she was concerned for their kids ahead of him, but would have had the same priorities if the conversation were reversed.
‘They’re fine. Or, if they’re not, they haven’t posted it on Facebook yet. Look, Hells, I’m in trouble at t’ Mill.’
‘What? The cuts?’ Her voice lowered in volume but rose in pitch. ‘They’ve sacked you?’
ABCCC – children, cancer, or career.
‘No, no, no. A “customer” has made a complaint …’
Again, he let her fall into an assumption from which he could save her. ‘Oh, God! You mean a girl has …’
‘Women plural …’
‘Tom!’
‘And merry men as well.’
‘What!’
A wheezing breathing as she contemplated her husband the sex criminal, the bi-sex criminal. He pitied Ned, for whom the revelation had turned out to be what Emma would most have feared.
‘I’ve been accused of … “insubordination” … and what they call “bullying” …’
‘What? … Wait, sweetheart …’
An echoey conversation with an Australian woman about ad pages in the Weekend Breaks supplement. Heavy heels retreating on stone steps.
‘Sorry, I’m back. So they’re saying you’ve – what? Thumped people, threatened them … ?’
‘Basta! Does that sound like me? This is the problem: everyone thinks it’s hitting people or hitting on them. But, as far as I can tell, it’s stuff in seminars and meetings. Challenging Savlon’s idiosyncratic grasp of historical chronology, visibly losing consciousness during bonkers monologues from Daggers in departmentals and so on. And these days, I suppose, failing to tell every student-sorry-client that they’ve got the best grasp of history since Simon Schama.’
‘Right. This is crazy, Tom. You’re an argumentative smartarse but you’re no bully!’
‘Thanks. We’ll let you know if we want that as a formal witness statement.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘From Special.’
‘He told you all this on the phone?’
‘No, no. I was summoned to the Special Zone.’
‘What? But you’re on study leave?’
Shit, yes. An improvised lie: ‘He sent one of those Aspergery e-mails asking me to come in.’
‘Have you told anyone there?’
‘One of the Special requests is that I can’t. So only Nod.’
‘And what does he think?’
‘He’s … sympathetic. Empathetic even.’
‘That’s good. Have they done him for shagging his students?’
‘How dare you, Hells! The word is customer. No, anyway, I think that’s mainly rumour.’
‘And they wouldn’t touch him because he’s their trophy professor.’
Tom didn’t react to insult by implication. Helen asked: ‘So what happens?’
‘Suspension. Which is like study-leave, except you’re too terrified to read or write anything. There’s an appeal next month.’
‘Oh, right. Well, that’s when you’ll knock – not knock, whatever – sense into them.’
‘Remember what I do for a living, Hells. McCarthy, Stalin – the really smart ones have show appeals as well as show trials.’
‘Oh, you poor thing. Look, I’ve got a routine with Marketing at 4pm, but I’ll bunk off early and come home.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Actually, I do.’
The Network
Ned was sure that he would haemorrhage to death. He pressed a towel against the cut but when he pulled it away, blood gushed like an oil-geyser and, in the mirror, the cut showed deep edges that refused to stick together. In a flash of hypochondriac understanding, it struck him that the violent flow was due to heightened blood pressure. Dr Rafi, diagnosing his break-down, had mentioned that his ‘bp and pulse are up but not surprisingly in the circumstances’ and that they should treat the other anxiety symptoms first.
However, Ned had read about haemophiliacs and patients on blood thinners who die from shaving cuts. Presumably an over-pumping heart could have the same result. In the past, his worst razor-damage had always come on the days of TV recordings – when a combination of fear and the desire to be a screen smoothie led to him pressing too hard – and, as trembling hands were one of the physical effects of his crisis, he had contemplated growing a beard until he was cleared.
But if he walked into the production company office with grey stubble, Dominic Ogg’s first reaction would be that despair and disgrace had made Ned careless of his appearance and that, even if he were exonerated, it might be time to try more youthfully telegenic presenters. So he decided to shave and almost accidentally killed himself by slitting his chin.
The thick streaks of blood on the peaks of shaving foam in the basin made the bathroom resemble a scene from Fargo. Seeing no way to tie a tourniquet on a jowl, Ned lay on his back on the mat beside the bath, hoping that gravity might reverse the spurting, while he held a clean piece of towel hard against the gash. When he dared to stand and peeled the emergency bandage away, the slight adhesion surely a good sign, only a few drops sploshed onto the bloody snowscape. Reaching across, he tore off four squares of toilet tissue and folded them into a pad that he pressed gently against the sliced skin. The red line remained wet but no longer pouring and, when he pushed, the loo-roll stuck there, a bright outline of the laceration showing through, but with no dripping on his shirt. When he walked, the paper stayed in place.
‘Oh dear, you are losing it,’ said Emma when he went into her study to say goodbye. ‘That stuff’s supposed to be for wiping your bum.’
‘Ha ha. The jokes are a bonus of you working at home.’
She stayed here most days now, in what he took as a suicide watch. Getting up from the desk – the manuscript of a Monégasque crime novelist for whom she had high hopes, splayed, with several lines yellow-Highlighted – she crossed to kiss him carefully on the lips above the bloody wodge.
‘Do you think you ought to take a spare shirt just in case?’
‘It’s pretty much stopped. And even Ogg wouldn’t hit me. He’s just going to sack me.’
‘He isn’t going to sack you.’
‘My sort of historian connects narrative with character.’
‘He can’t. You haven’t done anything.’
Self-conscious about his grooming-wound and fearful of being spotted on the train, he drove to London, using Emma’s new Golf, the number plates of which were unlikely to have reached newspaper files. He could have parked outside the flat, but convinced himself photographers would be waiting. In the underground NCP just off the slip road from the M40, he paid so much for three hours that he decided, if his TV and teaching career
s proved to be over, he would diversify into car parking. Tilting the rear-view mirror, he pulled away the patch, which smarted like the sticking plaster it was imitating. Poppies of dried blood stained the paper. But the cut had closed, though in a thick and crusted line, which gave the impression that he had been in a fight or an accident.
The offices of Ogglebox were in a granite-and-glass newbuild in Paddington Basin, just across the canal from the roll-up bridge. In a condition where he was constantly alive to possibilities of catastrophe, Ned imagined Heatherwick’s elegant white caterpillar mistakenly curling up and crushing him to death.
In the converted warehouse that the production company occupied, reception was decorated with silk-screen prints of stills from hit series, including several of Ned’s. In the past, he had been flattered by this but it now felt like mockery of his disintegrating condition. Giving his name, which seemed to mean nothing to the receptionist, Ned elaborately kept his eyeline from her cleavage, in exchange for her attempt not to be caught staring at the scarlet-and-black scab on his face.
The boss’s latest assistant – an unusually tall and thin man whose black suit and matching bob of hair gave an impression of an exclamation mark – showed Ned into the office, a massive rectangle with polished wood floors and ethnic rugs hanging on the walls.
At the long glass desk, Ogg was speaking aloud and ahead, like a newsreader, looking as if he was rehearsing a speech until you saw the flashing phone on the desk.
Waving Ned to one of the navy overstuffed sofas, Ogg continued to speak on hands-free. ‘Listen, compadre, if you pass, you pass and I’ll have a deal with Four or Sky by sun-down. I’m just frankly surprised because, from what Tony said at the dinner in Edinburgh, this is exactly the sort of project he’s looking for.’
During the silence at the other end of the line, Ogg winked at his guest. When the answer came, Ned knew the voice of a genre commissioner, his mournful northern tones further distorted by technology and a concern that he might be failing to enact the Director General’s vision.
‘So, Oggy, I’ll tell you what,’ crackled the reply. ‘If you give us another day on this, we’ll have another meeting here.’
Ogg smirked at Ned and bent closer to the phone. ‘I think that’s the right call. Would it help if I texted Tony myself?’
‘No, no, no. Leave it with me.’
‘Great. Same time tomorrow, then. Ciao for now.’
Ogg came over and gave Ned the usual air-hug and back-pat, although stretching the distance between them when he saw the facial injury.
‘Bugger! You do that blading?’
The tycoon subtitled his question with a glance to the side of his desk, where a pair of Inline roller skates was neatly placed. For some years, Ogg had been engaged with rival broadcasting barons in a contest to travel with the highest possible degree of modish environmental responsibility. A BBC senior’s use of increasingly collapsible bikes – culminating in one so tiny that it could be carried like a Picasso handbag – had provoked Ogg to under-feet wheels, which, characteristically, he now assumed everyone used.
‘From Winslow, Dom? Even you wouldn’t,’ Ned said.
‘Gotcha!’
He was also prone to the assumption that the world lived in West London.
‘Even so, whoah! Look after yourself, won’t you?’
Once Ogg’s challengers switched to trundling shoes, Ned assumed, the next step would be to explore teleportation. The assistant entered with a glass tray, perilously hoist, that held the makings of hot drinks. The coffee cups had no handles but, given the executive’s enthusiastic embrace of each new design fad, it could be considered lucky that they retained sides and a base.
After a sip and lip-smack, Ogg’s face became grave. ‘So, what can I say, mate? I’m shocked, concerned, supportive. Everyone here is.’
Finding himself unable to endure the thought of the phone call, Ned had asked Claire to send an explanatory e-mail the day before and to arrange this meeting.
‘Before anything else, what can we do for you? Are you sure you have all the support you need – legally and medically? I have to say, if your lawyer lady’s half as good with coppers as she is at negotiating TV fees, you’ll be fine. Arf Arf.’
One of Ogg’s oddities, charming twenty-five years ago, was signalling amusement in the manner of a cartoon character.
‘I … the hardest thing is to get out of saying: I’m fine. Obviously, I’m not. I don’t recommend it.’
‘You poor thing,’ said Ogg, although the words sounded false and self-conscious, like a politician or priest using slang.
‘Did Claire also tell you she’s convinced this will come to nothing?’
‘In terms. Yes, she did. And we all are.’
‘You ask what you can do for me? I’d really like to keep on working. Otherwise, I think I’ll go mad. I’ve actually had an idea for a series. I know there probably couldn’t be any filming until the charges are dropped but I could get on with the research and the scripting if they’d commission …’
‘Listen,’ Ogg cut in. ‘I spoke to the network this morning and they are absolutely clear that they want another Ned Marriott.’
Ned’s in-head translator, fluent in paranoia, flashed up a subtitle. He asked: ‘What? They’re talking about replacing me already?’
‘Whoah! No, no, no, Prof. What they mean is that they want another Marriott project …’
‘Right. Great!’
‘Well. But. But they are minded to put a hold on future commissions for the moment until the dust has settled.’
‘Okay … and … what, what pan and brush would they use to come to that conclusion?’
‘My sense of that is they want to see what happens.’
‘So if, as I am convinced will be the case, this whole thing is thrown out, then I can go back?’
Ogg seemed to be trying to swallow his lips, the delaying mechanism of someone who always liked to keep two roads open as long as possible.
‘I, um, think they’d be looking to see if, whatever the outcome, there had been any brand-damage.’
The obscure threat that had lain almost hidden behind the more solidly obvious fears now took appalling form. Even if the case against him collapsed, the publicity of the suspicion might have an effect indistinguishable from guilt.
‘But the archive will be fine. They’ll still repeat The English Witch Hunts in September?’
‘Well, you know, there’s a feeling that might also be a distraction in these circumstances.’
‘Pulling the programme, though? Doesn’t that assume guilt?’
‘I don’t think anyone is saying or thinking that for one single moment, Ned.’ It had been his experience of media executives that the more emphatically they denied something the more likely it was to be the truth. ‘And, in any case, it wouldn’t strictly have been pulled as the schedule hasn’t actually been published. Mate, I know what a nightmare this must be for you and, er, Emma. But the jails are filling up with guys who stood on their doorsteps roaring about lynch mobs when their name came up.’
‘Is that what you … ? Fuck you …’
‘Whoah! Professor, I’m not saying that I don’t believe you. But the point is that the network has a moral and legal duty not to be seen to take sides until we have finality on this. They and we also, of course, have a duty of care to you and you must tell me if there is anything you need. Now, please don’t get shouty at me again but our legal eagles have asked me to ask you to confirm that you have no reason to believe that any further allegations may be forthcoming from any of the work that you did with Ogglebox?’
Did. Past-tense. ‘Jesus. What were you saying about witch hunts?’
‘Listen, Ned. We don’t think anything’s coming but we need to know it’s not. What happens on location stays on location – until it doesn’t – is all I’m saying. At the, er, bottom of this is people suddenly remembering things and so …’
‘You want me to search other people’
s memories? The memories of everyone I ever worked with?’
‘I understand that this is difficult for you.’
‘Tell your briefs …’ He was halted by the strangeness of the phrase, like something Bart Simpson might say. ‘Tell them that I am confident that I have never had sex with anyone against their will, either on your time or on anyone else’s.’
Ogg spotted that the response allowed for the possibility that sex had happened during shoots, and considered a rejoinder but then let it go. He softened his voice: ‘Claire told me that you understand that this is bound to come out one way or the other?’
Understand but still can’t imagine. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay. This is the pack drill. There will be no pro-active excons …’
‘Ex-cons. What have criminals … ?’
‘Whoa! Ex-comms. External Communications? Neither we nor the network will ex-comm pro-actively. But in the event of media contacts, network will refer the caller to us, where Press will hold a statement against inquiry. That statement will say that they do not have you under contract at the moment but would not rule out doing so again in future.’
Driving north, Ned squeezed the wheel tightly whenever the radio presenter said breaking news, sure that it would turn out to be his fall. He had been too afraid to Google his name that morning, but would do so when he got home.
The Twins
Phee texted: what do you think it is? Px Although she now finally managed not to start with a capital letter, Phee still refused to stoop to abbreviations and misspellings and only added more than one kiss when a boyfriend made an issue of it. Obvs ES sprogging DXXXXX came Dee’s swift reply, her own communication rules inevitably antithetical. As Daddy often said, if they really came from one egg, it must have been double-yolked.
Explaining that Toby was going to a Wycombe game with a friend, Daddy had e-mailed on the Tuesday night to ask if he and E (as he always called her in writing) could give his daughters lunch at the flat on Saturday. Fleetingly at the time – and more concretely on reflection – three things struck Phee as strange about this invitation: that he hadn’t phoned, that they were eating at home (a disappointment, as he always took them to restaurants far above those she could afford herself) and that the visit to London came so soon after the birthday party.
