Heaven's Light

by Hurley, Graham

  Liz, he knew, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the bug on Charlie’s line and, for his part, Tully also had qualms about persevering with the intercept. But as the real agenda behind Pompey First became clearer and clearer, he’d come to regard it almost as a duty. As the months went by, it had become plain that Hayden Barnaby and Charlie Epple’s political ambitions wouldn’t stop with leadership of the city council. What they were really after – what really turned them on – was the possibility of UDI, a city wholly independent of the UK This was alarming enough, especially in the light of the way Barnaby had chosen to conduct his private life. But what drove Tully to transcribe and cross-index the more damning conversations was what lay behind a bid for independence. Where would they find the money to fund this huge gamble? Who’d organize the billions of pounds you’d need to push off from the motherland and float away the infant statelet? Tully studied the Sentinel’s front page again, holding it at arm’s length, concentrating on the photo of Zhu. The smile, as usual, gave nothing away.

  Back home, in his maisonette, Tully slid a dish of shepherd’s pie into the microwave and put a match to the gas beneath the saucepan of frozen peas. The telephone lay on his desk next door. The numbers Ellis had left him were sellotaped to the calendar on the wall. He hesitated, eyeing the line of carefully labelled audio-tapes on the shelf above the desk. The transmitter was still functioning, and with luck the batteries should last another couple of months.

  His hand went to the telephone and he dialled the first of the numbers. In his head, he could still hear the voices of the men arguing in the pub, the faith they placed in other people’s promises, the eagerness with which they traded the glib, catch-all phrases. Grass-roots democracy. Partnership. Powersharing. Was it really as simple as this? Could mere words sort anything out? The number began to ring, then there was a click as an answerphone engaged. At once, Tully recognized Ellis’s flat London vowels. He was abroad on business. He’d attend to messages as soon as he got back. Tully scowled and put down the phone. The second number had an outer London prefix. When he dialled, it answered almost at once. A woman’s voice, rich, warm.

  Tully introduced himself and explained that he was trying to get in touch with Ellis. It seemed that he was out of the country.

  ‘I’m afraid so. He’s in Singapore just now. Back tomorrow, oddly enough.’

  Tully reached for a pen. He had no idea who this woman might be but when he asked for her name she obliged at once. ‘Louise Carlton,’ she said. ‘May I help at all?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. It’s Mr Ellis I’m after.’

  ‘Of course.’ Louise gave a little chuckle. ‘I’ll say you called. I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you again.’

  Tully had nearly finished the shepherd’s pie when the doorbell rang. A glance through the window revealed Liz Barnaby. He let her in. When she saw the remains of the meal she apologized and suggested she came back later, but Tully wouldn’t hear of it. He’d had more than enough. They could share a pot of coffee.

  Liz accompanied him into the kitchen. She’d just had another visit from Lolly. The poor girl was at her wit’s end. She was sure that Jessie was seeing Haagen.

  Tully was trying to find the coffee filters. He looked round, surprised. ‘She’s been over to Holland?’

  ‘No, Lolly thinks he’s here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come?’

  Liz settled on a stool. ‘It’s little things. Things she says. Mood swings. Unexplained absences. Apparently Jessie goes out a lot, always with the dog, always alone. And when she comes back, she’s … different.’

  ‘What do you mean, different?’

  ‘Happy, bubbly, relaxed.’ She frowned. ‘I’ve noticed it, too,’ she added thoughtfully.

  ‘Drugs again?’

  ‘No, thank God. That’s what went through my mind but Lolly said no, definitely not. She says she’d have spotted anything like that. She says she’d know.’

  Tully found the box of filters. The kettle had begun to boil. ‘It could be anyone,’ he said, ‘couldn’t it?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ Liz reached for the kettle, turning it off. ‘But then she found the chocolate. Jess had left it in the fridge. It was Dutch. You can’t get it here. And there’s the phone calls.’

  ‘What phone calls?’

  ‘Every time Jess goes out on these little trips of hers, there’s always been a phone call. They don’t last long. Half a minute at the most. But Jessie’s out of the door like a shot, so Lolly says. It happened again this morning.’ Liz produced an audio-cassette from the pocket of her cardigan. ‘I thought this might be useful.’

  Tully kept his audio equipment next door. Liz stood watching while he loaded the cassette, respooling it through several messages. When he pushed the play button, he heard Barnaby’s voice. He was leaving a message for Charlie. The message was timed at seven twenty-one. The girls must still have been asleep.

  ‘There’s a problem at Wallington’s,’ Barnaby was saying. ‘They had a break-in last night. Someone poured acid all over their bloody machines. Gary’s saying it’s down to us, provoking the opposition, but it’s a pain because we’ll have to find somewhere else. Just wondered if you had any thoughts.’ Tully’s finger found the fast-forward button.

  Liz was staring at the machine. ‘Who’s Gary?’

  ‘Gary Wallington. Runs a printing firm. Epple must get his posters done there—’ Tully broke off. He had the next conversation cued up. Liz stiffened at the new voice, male again, but younger.

  ‘Haagen,’ she said at once.

  Tully picked up a pen. Haagen was in a good mood. The weather, he said, was perfect, absolutely perfect. Sunny, warm, not a cloud in the sky. There was a pause, then the sound of Jessie giggling before the connection went dead.

  Tully looked up. ‘That was this morning,’ he said. ‘Had to be.’

  ‘Of course it was.’

  ‘But it was raining.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And Jessie?’

  ‘Out of the door in seconds. According to Lolly.’

  Tully was looking up at the row of cassettes above his desk. For once the expression on his face betrayed his frustration.

  ‘Shit,’ he said quietly, apologizing at once.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing I can’t put right.’ He glanced round at Liz, suddenly businesslike. ‘What’s Lolly’s line on all this? Will she confront Jess? Have it out?’

  ‘No.’ Liz sighed. ‘She says she’s through with heavy scenes. She says she’s tried all that before and it doesn’t seem to work. She just wants Haagen out of it and I gather she thinks I’m her best hope.’ She smiled. ‘I think she really loves Jess. It’s quite touching.’

  Tully extracted the cassette and left it on the desk. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. When he returned with the coffee, Liz was reading the Sentinel’s special edition.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Can you sort something out?’

  ‘No problem. Give me a couple of days.’

  Jessie was still in bed when Lolly came racing up the stairs.

  ‘Your dad!’ she shouted. ‘He’s on telly.’

  Jessie made her way downstairs. The dog was sprawled on the carpet, tearing at the rag doll Lolly had found at the cathedral bring-and-buy.

  ‘Oz,’ Lolly hauled him towards the door, ‘bugger off.’

  Jessie settled on the sofa. She had brought the duvet from the bedroom and pulled it around her, holding it tight under her chin. Lolly was back with the remains of the doll. ‘See?’ She pointed at the television. Hayden Barnaby was being interviewed outside the dockyard gates. Visible in the background was a small demonstration. One of the hastily scrawled placards read HANDS OFF OUR JOBS.

  Jessie slipped off the sofa and turned up the volume. In his buttonhole her father was wearing the paper rosette she’d made for him only last week. It was a lovely
pale green, close to the shade that Charlie had chosen for Pompey First but, in Jessie’s opinion, infinitely more tasteful. She pointed it out to Lolly, glad that he cared enough to wear it.

  ‘Listen,’ Lolly hissed, ‘he’s doing really well.’

  Barnaby was answering a question about what lay behind the dockyard sale. ‘It’s a political decision,’ he said, ‘made by a politician. But that’s exactly the problem. Politicians are here for five years. The Navy’s been around for five hundred.’

  Lolly clapped, shrieking with delight. Jessie could hear the dog pawing at the door. Barnaby had changed tack now, listing some of the other ways that Whitehall had sought to bring the city to its knees, and Jessie marvelled at how a man she knew so well, so intimately, could appear on television like this, so authoritative, so cool.

  Since he’d moved into his new flat, she’d been seeing a great deal more of him. He’d given her a key and encouraged her to pop in whenever she liked. She’d put herself in charge of his domestic arrangements, adding her own brand of chaos to her father’s half-hearted attempts to keep the place in some kind of order. Some evenings she went over and cooked for him, simple stuff like pasta or risotto, and afterwards they’d linger at the table by the big front window and talk for hours about the way things had been. The break-up had hurt her mum a good deal, and Jessie was glad she’d got round to giving her the flowers, but when she tried to talk to her dad about it, he always changed the subject.

  What seemed to interest him far more was the progress of Pompey First. Jessie had no interest in politics but these last few weeks she’d begun to understand how much this new party meant to him. It was like having a new baby, she’d decided. It preoccupied him day and night, the tiniest details, and it had transformed his life.

  ‘Look!’ Lolly was pointing at the screen again. Barnaby was walking down the bridge that led to the harbour station pontoon. The camera tightened on his face as he paused by the rail, gazing out across the harbour. On the soundtrack, the reporter was speculating about the impact of the dockyard controversy on Pompey First’s chances in Thurday’s elections. Citywide, he was saying, there was a mood of deep anger. If ever there was a time for a fresh start in local politics, that time was surely now. Perhaps this man would soon be the new voice of Portsmouth. Exactly on cue, as if he’d anticipated the thought, Barnaby permitted himself a small smile, then turned and thrust his hands in his pockets. Jessie felt the warmth flood through her as she watched him walk away.

  The dog had started to bark now, and Lolly reached for her plimsolls. ‘I’ll take him out,’ she said. ‘It’s my turn.’

  Billy Goodman was reading the Sunday Mirror when Kate buzzed the entryphone with the takeaway curry. Leaving the paper spread on the carpet in front of his armchair, he let her in and she carried the food through to the kitchen, scolding him for not warming the plates. She filled the washing-up bowl with hot water and plunged them in. Billy was back in the armchair.

  ‘You read this stuff?’ he called. ‘Listen.’

  Kate returned to the lounge. She’d bought four copies of the Mirror already and had read the piece umpteen times, but it still made her laugh.

  Cheeky Charlie Epple and his hit squad of home-grown Portsmouth politicians have got right up the nose of some of Britain’s leading establishment figures. Dismissed as ‘cowboys’ and ‘amateurs’ by Tory MPs, Charlie’s mob (they call themselves Pompey First!) have been taking the mickey something rotten – as our selection of Charlie’s posters shows. But Pompey First may yet have the last laugh. The Mirror’s own poll shows that Charlie’s DIY cowboys stand every chance of winning next week’s head-to-head … by giving the has-beens a thrashing.

  Billy looked up. ‘It’s cartoon-speak,’ he said. ‘How could you?’

  ‘How could we what?’

  ‘Let them get away with that drivel? I thought you lot were serious. In it for real.’

  ‘We are.’ She waved at the paper. ‘That won’t do us any harm.’

  Billy wagged his head, folded the paper and let it drop onto the pile beside his chair. Kate knew him well enough to see through the gruff disapproval and, deep down, suspected he was quietly impressed. However inane the treatment, Charlie Epple had put Pompey First on millions of breakfast tables nationwide.

  She spooned the curry onto the plates and carried them through. The last of the rain had gone now and the room was flooded with sunshine.

  Billy was standing by the sideboard, slopping vodka into tall glasses. ‘It’s lemonade or lemonade,’ he said briefly, ‘else you can take it neat.’

  They ate the curry in near silence. Afterwards, over the third glass of vodka, she told him about the studio recording. She’d brought round a video. It had arrived in the post yesterday morning. She thought maybe he’d like to watch it. Billy grunted, as noncommittal as ever, and she gave him the video to load in the player while she rinsed the plates in the kitchen. Through the open door, she could hear herself performing and three shots of Billy’s vodka made the experience feel somehow remote. Already, since yesterday, a million things had happened, and this morning, after the Sentinel’s, supplement, the phone had rung nonstop. She’d coped as best she could, sticking to what she imagined might be the party line, but she was getting increasingly irritated at being left so exposed. Whenever she’d tried to phone Barnaby, his mobile had been engaged, and her attempts to contact Charlie had got absolutely nowhere. Jessie, answering his home telephone, thought he might be in London. Beyond that, no one seemed to know.

  Kate softened a little, thinking of Charlie. She’d loved his spirit from the start. He affected a kind of manic craziness, a total commitment to excess, but the more she got to know him, the saner he seemed to be. His attitude to politics – that it was giddy, corrupt and wildly enjoyable – was a stark contrast to Barnaby’s trudge to the summit. Given a choice her instincts told her that Charlie was probably right. Changing the world was never going to be easy. But who said you couldn’t have a laugh or two on the way?

  The washing-up finished, Kate rejoined Billy in the lounge. He was fast-forwarding the interview, pausing from time to time to listen to the bits when Kate was talking. At the end, he reached for the remote control and switched off the television. Kate looked at him from across the room. These times she spent with him were precious, little islands of sanity beyond the reach of the bullshitters. However brutal it might be, Billy would never spare her the truth.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think you were bloody good.’

  ‘Yeah? And what do you really think?’

  ‘I just told you.’

  Kate felt the grin spread over her face. Billy had never said anything as positive as this. Ever. ‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Gold star?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Definitely. It’s just a shame, that’s all.’

  ‘Shame? I don’t get it.’

  ‘No.’ He grasped the vodka bottle. ‘And you won’t either. Not now. Not once you’re in with this lot.’ She listened to him, stony-faced, as he listed the ways she’d betrayed what he called her political birthright. He’d heard her talking about her dad, his years in the union, organizing the print boys, taking on the management, squeezing the best possible deal for the blokes he represented. She’d been part of that. He knew she had because she’d told him so. As a youngster, she’d helped keep the books, counting out the weekly subs, arranging the Christmas raffle, understanding what it was to be part of a working-class community. Her socialism, he said, had been of the best kind, unquestioning, instinctive, natural. That was one of the reasons he’d admired her, one of the reasons she’d won his respect. She’d got stuck in. She’d taken people on, face to face. And she’d meant it.

  Kate cut in. She was angry now, tired of Billy’s unending sentimentality. Sentimentality was easy. Sentimentality was where you hid when you’d turned your back on real life.

  ‘Real life?’ Billy’s eyes returned to the screen. ‘T
hat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’ Billy dismissed the proposition. ‘That was circus, make-believe. I’m talking about politics, real people, flesh and blood. Not television.’

  ‘They are flesh and blood. We were flesh and blood. I was there. That was me, believe it or not.’

  ‘No.’ Billy shook his head wearily, the way a teacher might with a particularly backward pupil. ‘There’s a difference, and it’s television that makes the difference. You’re becoming someone else, love. You’re a confection, a sweetie for the masses. They’ll dress you nicely, light you nicely, make you look tasty, make you say the right things, and all of that’s fucking wonderful for a week or so. But do yourself a favour, eh? Never confuse it with real life.’

  Kate felt too upset to argue. Then she bent to the video and extracted the cassette. Standing up again, she pulled on her coat. By the door, she paused. ‘Just say I believe you. Just say I think you’re right. I’m a puppet. A dummy. So who’s pulling the strings? Tell me that.’

  Billy had moved the armchair round. Now he was staring out of the window, the bottle tipped to his lips. He took a pull at the vodka, then wiped his mouth. ‘The note’s in the video box,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t fucking tell me you haven’t read it.’

  ‘Video box?’

  Kate looked at it. Tucked down the side was a piece of paper. She unfolded it. The handwriting was unfamiliar but as soon as she read it she could hear Hendricks’s voice. You were better than ever second time round, he’d written. Where could all this lead? She examined the note a moment longer. He’d no right to put kisses on the end, she thought, no right at all.

  She began to unbutton her coat. Billy was lying back in the armchair.

  ‘It’s a fantasy,’ she said savagely. ‘It’s pathetic.’

  Billy smiled at last, his eyes closed. ‘Then we agree,’ he muttered, offering her the bottle.