by Joanna Nadin
I resist the temptation to remind you of your long-celebrated scepticism, of the times you told me that all politicians were the worst kind of wet public schoolboy, that anyone who even sought office was a sociopath or a narcissist or both, that what we really needed was another revolution. Because something has altered, something is in the air. And so we cross our fingers, hold our breath, the clock tick-tocking down until 1 May, while all about us whirls a glittering dust of change, of chance, and, above all, of second chances.
And, running lickety-split into the thick of it, I am about to get mine.
I leave you mid afternoon, after an overly liquid lunch and a minorly fraught discussion of the motives and merits of Tracey Emin, walk both off through Westminster, weaving my way behind Millbank, through Smith Square and up towards Whitehall itself. Vaguely drunk still, or just dazed and dizzy from your determined cheer, I stand at the gates of Downing Street, peer through the railings. And for the first time I feel it – the idea that life might be about to tell a story as glorious and gripping as any conjured on the page. I should read the papers, I tell myself, watch the news, stop miring myself in sub-Tolkien every night, questioning purple suns and implausible pacts and poorly timed wars. At least for an hour or so.
And so it is thanks to you I buy the Guardian from the kiosk outside King’s Cross station. Thanks to you I turn the telly on and flick through the five channels to find something, anything on this colossal story, this election.
Thanks to you I find him.
His hair is shorter now, TV-neat, as clipped as his accent, his suit, his tie – his tie! I haven’t seen him in a tie since he started sixth form. But here he is, all grown-up now – standing on College Green with a minister of something or other, speaking about identity cards and immigration and the impact of the UK Independence Party.
But still unmistakably, undeniably, Tom.
The recognition is instant and the effect profound. My stomach contracts, my pupils dilate, my heart bursts open at this incredible, impossible thing. At him being here with me, in this room; his being tangible, his body touchable, albeit through the static of a screen. I am flooded with feeling, humming with it, while my head flicks through time-faded Polaroids of two children playing in a paddling pool on a sun-parched lawn; of the pair of us lying inches apart on beanbag beds on the day that rocked the world; of us tangle-limbed and damp-bodied, clinging to each other in the cold of a Northern morning. This is it, I tell myself. This is my sign, my portent, my magic amulet even. This will set me off on my hero’s journey, see me take a new path, a better one than I had imagined possible.
I don’t know quite when, yet. Or how. But Tom is my future, I know it. He is my written-in-the-stars destiny. And I will find a way back to him. I will fight off all foes this time – the wicked witches and the dragons and the ne’er-do-wells. I will be magnificent and mesmerizing, this new London me, so that he cannot ignore me now, cannot fail to see that I matter, that I am worthy. And together we will seize our second chance. Seize the day. Carpe diem, reads the red ink on a foolscap note that I have Blu-Tacked to my bedroom wall. Carpe diem, whispers Robin Williams to the Dead Poets Society that lives in my head.
‘O Captain, my Captain,’ I utter in reply, and turn the volume up to full.
‘Do we have to watch this?’
I am sitting on the sofa, glued to my cushion and the television screen, when my flatmate Sophia drifts in, trailed – always trailed – by the ever-wasted Jago.
‘I’m interested in politics,’ I insist.
‘It’s ITV, for God’s sake,’ she snorts, lifting a bottle of vodka from the mess on the table, shaking it to check its weight and contents. ‘It’s like saying you’re interested in . . . in literature, so you read Mills & Boon.’
‘Or maths, and you watch, like, Countdown,’ adds Jago, crashing down onto the sofa next to me, so that I can smell the skunk that sneaks through the holes in his cashmere sweaters, clings to his silk-mix shirts. For somehow, by accident or atavism, I have ended up living in the equivalent of a five-hundred-a-month trust-fund squat.
‘No, it isn’t,’ I mumble.
Because it isn’t.
Yes, it’s commercial television, and no, he’s not Paxman, or not yet, but he’s there, outside Smith Square with the party faithful; on Whitehall; on the doorstep of a white stucco house in Islington as Blair emerges for another day of campaigning. And he is everything: earnest and light-hearted, and angry and still brimming with hope, with the possibility that politics can, will, change the world.
And he is beautiful. Still.
And I am hooked.
So hooked am I that I take to watching the news three times a day, and more at weekends.
So hooked am I that I start to record bulletins on our outdated and temperamental VCR, in case I am stuck in the office, or on a train, or just need to see him again.
So hooked am I that I take to getting up at six and still have to forgo a shower and arrive to work late, offering up elaborate excuses – for I am never short of a story.
And the story I weave for Tom is supreme.
Some days I give him a girlfriend – an impatient, shrill, demanding thing. One who fails to see his brilliance, fails to support him; worse, fails to appreciate the Pink Floyd back catalogue, a sin that will sit like grit in an oyster, becoming not a pearl but a bitter pill of regret.
On other days he is single, has been bereft since that Christmas Eve. I watch him as he wakes alone, pulls on a T-shirt, pours black coffee, turns on the record player so that the room – my head – drowns in the sound of ‘Wish You Were Here’.
But whatever the embellishment, every story ends the same way – with a chance meeting, a gasp, a kiss.
And always, always on 1 May.
I vote first thing, in a cramped school hall redolent of chalk and chip dinners, then take the bus to the Strand, watching the world go by, go about its business on its last recognizable day, humming REM, for this is, surely, the end of the world as we know it.
You think so. You call me early afternoon, and when I ask why you’re not at work, at the art supply shop, you tell me you’ve quit because what with the businessman’s picture commission, and now Blair the great patron of art about to take office, you feel safe, chaperoned, sugar-daddied. And besides, Great-Aunt Nina is still putting food in the fridge and pound coins in the meter so, really, why bother?
On any other day I would have had something to say. Would have reminded you that the work is to give your day shape, to get you up – at least, that’s what Toni told us. But today I get it, I get that feeling of foolishness, of freedom; that sensation of standing on the brink and being brave enough, for once, to jump off. And so I sit fidgeting at my desk, clock-watching, waiting for – no, willing the hands to turn round so that I can take that leap, praying I will not be yellow-bellied, scared that here be, not dragons, but disappointment.
I have it planned. I know where he will be – he told me on the morning news. Looked straight into the camera and said he would be outside Millbank feeding live back to the studio once the polls close at ten.
So I know where to go, but I can’t go then. Because then he’ll be wrapped up in work, too taken up with the urgency and energy of it all, but if I wait – until the early hours, when the counts are beginning to come in, when the victory is crystallizing, when the focus will be on swing constituencies, not on commentary from campaigners (for yes, I have done my homework) – then he will see me and will tell me to wait, to meet him later, that he cannot believe this has happened and on this night of nights as well.
I leave at midnight, leave Sophia and Jago to the sofa, and the skunk, and a French film they have dismissed as no more than porn with pretensions and yet are still goggle-eyed at the gaping mouths and jiggling tits.
Don’t you get it? I want to scream. This is history happening – this is as good as a book. And far better than a – a filthy film.
But they are half a bottle of Stoli gone and full of what
ever.
And then, so am I.
The bus ride is buzzing. Or maybe I am buzzing – so that every glance feels laden with meaning, every smile an acknowledgement of what is about to happen. In the row across from me a woman sits chewing, a bucket of cold fried chicken in her lap.
I’m going to see Tom, I want to tell her.
Good for you, she says in my head. Seize the day.
I will, I reply. I am.
I get off at Pimlico, turn left along the river. The night is clear and cold, my skin pimpling swiftly. I should have brought a coat, I think. Or something more than the backless black dress I am barely wearing. But it is close now, his arms are close now, and so on I go, past taxis, past the Tate, until I see the building towering above me, the glint of glass, the curve of its pillared frontage, and, thank God, the camera crews assembled underneath.
I can’t get close enough to find him, can’t make him out in the crowd. And a rope stops me going forward, a shiny-cheeked woman with a clipboard, a lanyard and a game-show-host smile barring the way.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ I tell her.
‘Mick, this way,’ I hear.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, scanning her list. ‘And you are?’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not . . . I’m not trying to come in.’
‘That’s it,’ she says to someone behind me. ‘Mick’s done.’
‘I just want to see a reporter,’ I plead. ‘Tom. Tom Trevelyan. He’s with ITV.’
‘Tom?’ She checks her list, shrugs.
I feel myself grit my teeth, turn to a photographer. ‘Do you know Tom Trevelyan?’ I ask. ‘He’s an ITV reporter. He was here a while ago. I saw him.’
The snapper in his North Face jacket shrugs. ‘Think that crew went. Cutting a package, probably. Show’s pretty much over here.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and the word catches in my mouth, fat with disappointment.
‘Fancy a drink?’ he says then. ‘You can polish my lens if you like.’
Another snapper laughs, and I feel myself flush, not at his flippancy, but at my own folly. I turn to go, to run, to get back to my bedroom and into a book, any book where the ending is assured and always happy. And that’s when I hear it. Hear him.
‘Dido?’
I swing my head round, and see him standing on the other side of the rope. Short-haired, suited, smiling. Taller than I remember. And tanned too. But undeniably, unbelievably, him.
And so I let my taut jaw relax and a smile spread to match his own.
‘Hello, Jimmy.’
Did you hope it would be Tom? Did you?
I should have done. I should have felt like I’d lost a pound and found a penny. And at first I do; I glance back to check the crowd. But it is still Tom-less.
And then I get it.
This is fate. This.
This is my second chance, my new beginning. Jimmy, whom I almost-loved, whom I imaginarily cheated on with Tom – would have cheated on, given half the chance – when all along he was my destiny, he was the one who truly loved me, though he never said so then, not in so many words. But I left him. Or did he leave me? I am spinning with the thrill of it and the details are hazy, blurred now, by time and six shots of Dutch courage. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because here he is.Now. In front of me.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he says. ‘Is it you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, smiling. ‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I don’t know.’ And it isn’t a lie, not now. Because I have no idea how this story will play out, but play out I will let it.‘What are you doing here?’ I say then.
‘Working,’ he explains. ‘For Labour. I’m a press officer.’
I nod, as if this makes sense. It does make sense – of course he would work in politics. Of course for Labour. He has charm, and spins convincing, clever words, so potent he could be a politician himself one day, a prime minister, even.
‘You’re leaving?’ I say then.
‘Party,’ he says. ‘South Bank.’ Then he clutches at something, an idea, holds it out in his hand like a jewel. ‘Come.’
‘Can I?’
‘You have to.’
‘I have to,’ I agree, laughing. ‘I absolutely have to.’
And just like that, I take the jewel, and his hand, and I do not look back once.
I do not check over my shoulder as he pulls me out of the melee and along the Embankment.
I do not glance into the crowd as I am whisked, a black-clad Cinderella, into the Royal Festival Hall, security assured I am with the party, a special guest.
I do not admit the thought of what might have been – if I had been five minutes earlier, or he five minutes later.
Instead, as Portillo falls, as the champagne glasses are charged, as hearts brim with hope for the new tomorrow we teeter on, I stand in the midst of strangers and I kiss this prodigal boy – man, now – like it’s the last night on earth.
Two hours later, high on all of it and more, we fuck against the wall in a wood-panelled toilet, then again in the comedown and the bright morning in my single bed. Two weeks later my toothbrush is in the pint glass that sits on his toilet cistern, and my underwear nudges for drawer space with his socks and boxers. Another month after that I have given my notice to a barely sober Sophia and Jago, and turned down the offer of a mortgage because I won’t be needing one any more – or not yet. And not alone.
Because, just eleven weeks after we have met, I carry my bags of clothes and my boxes of books, my suitcase of treasure and my stuffed raven, down the Clapton stairs and into the back of a black Golf GTI. Then I leave the East London hinterland for a two-bedroom repossession on a backstreet in Peckham. We paint it and carpet it and put up a shelf for his stereo and more for my books, and there we live, happily ever after.
For almost a year.
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
December 1998
He’s still Jimmy, still the boy I knew. Still charming, still disarming. Still raging against the machine, the man, the dying of the light. But where once he pulsed with optimism, where he railed against Thatcher, believing that once she’d gone the world and all in it would be his for the taking, now he rails against the world itself. Against a prime minister who lacks the courage of his convictions and puts magnificent plans on hold, shelves them like porcelain to gather dust. Against the press who pull apart the ones the government does push through, picking over them like crows on carrion. Against a head of press and a political secretary who fail to recognize Jimmy’s own brilliance, leaving him floundering and fire-fighting at Millbank instead of installing him at Number 10, where he belongs.
Now, instead of hope, his passion is cut with a thin, bitter impotence.
You asked me what I saw in him once. You were drunk and I was dishonest. I told you at least he had a paying job and a name that he hadn’t plucked from a plant or stolen from someone else’s gods.
But it wasn’t that. And it wasn’t just that Tom told me not to all those years ago. Nor that he was thought ugly – or conventionally so.
It was that night, of course – the hand of fate, or the gods, or mere coincidence – whichever, that was part of it; the sheer destiny of it. But something more, too. Because I did see something in him, even in the darker days. Underneath it all – underneath the control, the spite, the silence – God, the silence – I saw vulnerability, I saw hurt. And looming over him I saw the shadow of his father.
I saw the child who’d had to pull his shirtsleeves down and do his collar up to hide the bruises doled out by a brute of a man, though the eye – the result of a lost twenty-pound note that was supposed to buy cigarettes and a pools ticket – was impossible to disguise.
I saw the child who’d been told he was useless, gay, good-for-nowt because he wore clothes, used words, too fancy for the likes of him.
I saw the child who’d saved up his paper-round pounds for fourteen weeks to buy a
pea coat lined in pink silk from the second-hand shop on Silver Street. A coat that was scorned, and then, when he refused to give it up, set alight on a bonfire of old magazines and a broken chair.
He said it was me and him against the world now, did I know that? And I, who had waited my whole life to hear those words, believed him.
That’s why we came home. So he could show his father who he was now. Prove himself a man.
A soon-to-be-married man.
Do you remember that? We were going to get married. That’s how much he loved me.
Or that’s how much he hated Tom.
Tom sits spectre-like in our lives. Not silent, though, not a mute phantasm that we must not mention for fear of making it real, but one whose name is invoked with increasing regularity, thrown at me like a stone.
‘I don’t love Tom,’ I tell him, then. ‘I love you. I always did. I just . . . fucked up.’
But he is unconvinced, says it’s spin, a sop, and he should know.
And yet still he tests me, tells me that he saw him at a launch, that he’s looking fatter, balder, shagging some blonde bird off CNN, moving to the States. And then, the cherry on the cake – news that he carries home like a prize and drops in front of me to watch my face – Tom is getting married.
‘Really?’ I say, attempting to pour utter disinterest and only vague recognition into a single word.
‘Yes, really. Doyle told me.’
I pause, calculating an answer that will get him off the subject, while implying that he has, nonetheless, won. ‘Well, good for him,’ I say. ‘He obviously needs a certificate to prove love. Not like us.’ And I reach for his face then, reach up to kiss him.
But he pulls away, distracted, taken with something.
‘We should get married,’ he says.
I still then, catch my breath. Is this a proposal? Do I want a proposal? Of course I do, I tell myself. That is what normal people want. What normal people do.
‘At New Year,’ he says, warming to the idea he has plucked from nothing more than petty jealousy or pure one-upmanship.
‘What, this New Year? That’s . . . that’s in four weeks.’
