by Rob Grant
She heard Mum's footfall on the stairs. Alarmingly, Mum was an even bigger clomper than Dad. Mum coming down the stairs sounded like the ceiling was collapsing under the weight of a fully equipped abseiling SWAT team, though she was less than one point seven metres tall and weighed a steady sixty-one kilos.
Now Hayleigh was trapped in the kitchen.
Mum was a much better detective than Dad. Dad, bless, was useless. He was worse, even, than Inspector Lestrade. He was worse than Lieutenant Randy Disher, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer's useless sidekick, who in turn was utterly useless compared to Mr Monk. Dad wouldn't have made it as a traffic cop in that series. Mum, however, made even the great Adrian Monk, who could solve murders in other continents just by reading a newspaper, look like an unobservant, witless blind man. She could sniff out a fake alibi while you were still composing it in your head. She could spot a tiny inconsistency in a slightly invented version of reality you told her years ago with something you said today, and unravel the entire truth in minutes. Hayleigh had to admit, albeit grudgingly, that the lady was a genius. Quite why this genius expended so much energy trying to get a hopelessly fat girl to eat even more was a mystery that would have eluded the combined wits of Poirot, Holmes and Monk.
Mum burst through the door, smiled a good morning at Hayleigh and opened her arms and croaked: 'Morning hug.'
The plastic bag!
Hayleigh shook her head. 'I don't think so, maman. Your breath smells like a New Orleans swamp with bodies floating in it.'
Dad laughed. Whether that was because he'd forgotten he made the joke in the first place, or because he'd remembered, or simply because he enjoyed any joke made at Mum's expense, Hayleigh did not know.
Mum raised her eyebrows. 'Charming.' She glanced around the kitchen, her camera eyes scoping the room like it was a bloody crime scene. 'You've finished your breakfast? Again?'
'Yes. Can't hang around all the livelong morning for you bunch of sleepyheads.'
'But again?'
'You know, some mums would be happy their daughters made breakfast for everybody. Some mums would be glad not to have to be the first one out of bed.'
'But Hayleigh, I asked you last night to have breakfast with us all. Just this once, at least.'
Hayleigh just shrugged. With Mum on the detection trail, it was best to say as little as possible. It wasn't even a good idea, she'd found from bitter experience, to try to change the subject. That could actually make things worse.
Mum crossed to the sink. Hayleigh's heartbeat accelerated. She thought it might be best to volunteer the information, so the sink inspection might not be quite so rigorous. 'Waste disposal's broke. I think it's the buttony thingy underneath, but I couldn't find it.'
'What have you been putting in here?'
Hayleigh shrugged again. 'Tea bags, mostly. Few crumbs of toast.'
Mum gave up in the sink, bent over, found the buttony thingy and pressed it. She flicked the switch and the waste disposal roared and gobbled down the damning evidence greedily. Hayleigh tried not to sigh.
'Please don't use this again, Hayleigh.'
'Sure.'
'I've told you before: it's dangerous.'
'Sure.' Hayleigh made a mental note of the rough position of the button. This was definitely not going to happen again. 'Sorry.'
Mum ran the hot water tap and wiped the grease from the sink. The inquisition seemed to be over, praise de Lord. At least for now. Could she go without arousing more suspicion? Yes, she thought she probably could. She grasped the kitchen door handle, called back a casual 'Love yous' and shuffled out into the hall, trying not to rustle. She took the small step up to the right and paused in the blind spot between the kitchen and the mirrors, and gathered herself. Why couldn't this family be normal, for crying out loud? The smallest of things, the most mundane family rituals, which were carried out daily and unremarkably millions of times in billions of households across the globe, were ordeals fraught with deadly danger in this one. Sometimes Hayleigh thought she was the only normal person she knew.
There was a loud and sudden rattling at the letterbox, and the post thumped onto the mat.
Hayleigh looked over at it. Of course, it was Wednesday, and the one bright spot in this most wretched of days was that her magazine Chick Chat arrived. She squinted down the hall. The mag was wrapped in cellophane and doubled over with an elastic band, but it certainly looked as if that was the bottom-left corner of Jason Black's smile on the cover. No one in the world had dimples on their cheeks that were quite so divine.
She couldn't ignore that and do the sensible thing by slipping straight back up the stairs to the safety of her room. She couldn't leave Jase lying on the mat all folded over.
She had to brave the mirrors.
She crouched low and dashed forward, doubled up, like she was Matt Damon racing down a tunnel chased by an explosion. When she hit the second mirror, she had achieved sufficient speed, she reckoned, to throw herself onto the floor and slide along the polished boards all the way to the mat. A little extreme, maybe, but fast and efficient.
She scooped up the magazine, tenderly eased off the elastic band and straightened Jason out. Now there was lush. Lushness incarnate. A face brimming over with lushiositude. She hugged him to her chest.
She grabbed the rest of the mail and stood up, so her back was towards the mirror. She was about to slip it onto the dresser behind her when she spotted something dangerous.
It was a blue envelope bearing the crest of Milton House. It was a letter from her school. Now, it might be something innocuous, such as a bill for fees, or notice of some dreadful event like a play or a cake sale, or some such form of ritual pupil torture. On the other hand, Mrs Mellish had had That Little Chat with her on Monday, and there was a chance that Hayleigh's denials had not been sufficiently credible, and the damned woman was taking it a step further. She could not risk her parents seeing that kind of nonsense. Why couldn't people just get on with their own lives and stop trying to run hers?
She slipped the letter down the front of her tights. She now had more contraband stuffed down there than a Columbian drug mule. She put the rest of the post on the dresser behind her without turning and sidled sideways towards the stairs like a giant demented crab.
She reached the stairs and turned, and, horror of horrors, Jonny was sitting at the top of them in his underpants and T-shirt, watching her with an expression of delighted contempt.
SIX
Jeremy Slank was waiting to see the Prime Minister.
It wasn't quite how he'd imagined, or hoped. But Jeremy Slank was waiting to see the Prime Minister. Of Great Britain.
He'd imagined and hoped it would be at Number 10. He'd imagined and hoped some paparazzi would have flashed him as he nodded politely at the policeman at the door. Perhaps there would be foreign dignitaries milling about in the hall. The odd A-list celebrity, even. A quick smile and gentle nod in the direction of David Schwimmer and Elton John, the knowing smile of men on equal standing, and he'd be ushered through to an ornate drawing room that smelled of ancient cigars, where the Prime Minister would rise from behind an enormous Louis XIV desk, smile, shake his hand and offer him a seat on a huge, winged red leather chesterfield armchair, under a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill or Sir Robert Peel, perhaps. He'd politely decline the eighteen-year-old whisky in the cut-glass crystal decanter that President Grant had sent as a gift to Benjamin Disraeli, and, after a few pleasantries -- he would laugh gracefully at the Prime Minister's witticisms, the PM would guffaw at his -- they'd get down to business. Jeremy's presentation would be smooth, orderly, swift, yet incisive, sharp and polished. He would close his laptop, the Prime Minister (they might still not be on first-name terms just yet) would nod, impressed. He might even offer genteel applause, or at least a 'Bravo!'. He would rise from his desk and shake Jeremy's hand, sealing the deal. As they walked together to the door, the PM would say that he needed good men such as Jeremy, that he liked the cut of Jeremy's jib,
and, once this project was successfully concluded, perhaps Jeremy might consider something more permanent and intimate in the PM's own coterie. Jeremy would agree at least to think about it, and, just as he was about to leave, the Prime Minister would casually invite him to Chequers for the weekend. There would be a few young people there -- did Jeremy know Beyonce and Lucy Pinder? No, he didn't as yet, but he was sure they'd be fun. And after one last Prime Ministerial slap on his back, Jeremy would wind his way back down the hall, brushing past Gerhard Schroeder in animated conversation with Jacques Chirac, or perhaps, even -- be still his beating heart -- one of the Saatchis, and he'd wink casually at Ricky Gervais and Ben Stiller, who doubtless would be joining him at Chequers that weekend, before stepping out into Downing Street, politely declining a BBC interview, which would doubtless lead to headlines in the morning paper speculating as to the identity of the intriguing hotshot 'mystery man' who was the Prime Minister's new confidant.
Well, perhaps there was slightly more imagination than hope in the fine details of that putative scenario, but he thought the meeting would run pretty much along the same tramlines.
It did not.
Instead, Jeremy was directed to a cheerless modern Government building where he was logged in, paraded through a metal detector and an X-ray machine, and subjected to a body search that stopped just short of his cavities. He was then escorted by a pair of armed uniformed security guards who, in turn, handed him over to a plainclothes security guard, who ran his body over with yet another metal detector and then patted him down most thoroughly yet again. He was then ushered into a stark room with a whiteboard, a wall clock, a glass table and a couple of chairs and left alone for some considerable time.
He exhausted the entertainment value of the room's furnishings fairly quickly. He took out his laptop and ran through his Keynote presentation at accelerated speed four or five times, but he was already fluent, and it was pretty much a waste of time. He took out his carrot juice and set it on the desk, with the label pointing towards the door to make sure nobody thought it was Sunny D or some such insalubrious nonsense. After an hour he'd started to panic. Had he been forgotten? Was he destined to remain locked in this barren room in some kind of bureaucratic Kafkaesque limbo for the rest of his life? After an hour and a half, he'd pretty much given up on hoping the meeting would still occur. After two hours, he was playing Marble Madness on his laptop.
Finally the door burst open, barely giving him time to close his laptop before a burly man in a dark suit and red tie blustered into the room.
'Slank?' he asked, bluff and Northern.
Jeremy stood. 'That's right, Jeremy Slank.' He offered his hand, but the burly man ignored him.
'Right. Let's have it.'
Jeremy was confused. Who was this man? 'Have what?'
'You've got a meeting scheduled with the PM, right?'
Jeremy nodded.
'Show me what you were going to show him.'
Jeremy's heart sank. He wasn't going to meet the PM after all. He was just meeting some bloody lackey. Brilliant. 'I'm sorry? You are?'
The burly man rolled his eyes impatiently. 'We haven't got time for this shite, lad. I need to know what you're planning to present to the Prime Minister. Quick about it.'
Jeremy shrugged. Maybe this was just a pre-meeting screening. Maybe he would get the meeting, after all. 'Fine.' He opened up his laptop.
'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' the burly man yelled. 'The fuck are you doing?'
'I'm giving you the presentation.'
'Not PowerPoint. He's not going to sit through some fucking PowerPoint presentation, you fucked-up little monkey-boy. The Prime Minister of Great Britain is not going to sit around cooing at your fucking Venetian-blind transitions and your fucking 3D cubic wipes and listening to your fucking hip-hop background music shite, now, is he?'
The man was arching over Jeremy in an extremely menacing way by the end of this diatribe. His face was bright red and the cords in his neck were strained to breaking point. On the second usage of the word 'shite', a globette of spittle had leapt from the man's blubbery lips and landed on Jeremy's cheek, but Jeremy did not flinch, or make any move to wipe it off. Nor did he succumb to the urge to leap over the table, fling open the door and race out of the building as fast as his legs would carry him, though it was a very strong urge indeed. Instead, he struck a pose of intelligent fascination, as if this violent brute were explaining the intricate mathematics of a Bach fugue in a most illuminating and scintillating way.
When the man appeared to have finished, Jeremy left a polite pause and said: 'It's not PowerPoint, it's Keynote.'
The man thumped the laptop closed with his astonishingly large and hairy fist. 'It's shite, is what it is. How long is the fucking presentation?'
'Twenty, twenty-five minutes,' Jeremy confirmed, confidently. 'More, depending how many questions--'
'Twenty-five fucking minutes!? Are you fucking out of your fucking banana tree, you fucked-up fucking fuckwit?'
Jeremy hoped that was a rhetorical question, because he certainly couldn't think of an answer.
The bruiser looked at his watch. 'You will have, you dirty little arsewipe, an absolute maximum of two minutes of the Prime Minister's precious time, and only if you can convince me right here and now that it won't be an utter waste of those two precious minutes, which I very much doubt.' He folded his arms. 'Go on, monkey-boy. Amaze me.'
No pressure, then. Jeremy's future depended on impressing this Piltdown bastard with his ability to boil down a complex thirty-minute presentation (Jeremy had lied, in fact) to a few exceptionally grabby sound bites, and to do it on the fly, and without the benefit of Venetian-blind transitions or the amusingly ironic backing of Groove Armada singing 'Shakin' That Ass'.
And he did it.
The hit man gave a tiny nod, unfolded his arms and leaned into Jeremy's face again. 'All right, you dipshit. You've got your moment in the fucking spotlight. But two minutes and no more than that. And speak up. Don't embroider, do not fucking stutter. Do not exchange pleasantries. If he speaks to you at all, listen very carefully and do exactly what he says. Do not ask for embellishment or explanation. He is, my lad, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and he's got a fucking country to run. You will kiss his arse, without hesitation and with great relish. You will, in fact, French kiss his arse, and you will really get your tongue up there and wiggle it. If, after this meeting, your tongue is not thoroughly coated in Prime Ministerial poo, I'll want to know why. Clear?'
Jeremy nodded. He thought he was smiling attentively, but he'd pretty much lost control of his lip muscles by this point.
The Goliath shot out of the room, slamming the door. Jeremy stood for a few moments, swaying slightly on the spot. He hoped he hadn't involuntarily evacuated his bowels. When it became obvious the man wasn't going to come back into the room again and hit him, Jeremy wiped the spittle off his face.
Well, so far, so good.
He glanced at the wall clock. He'd been in this cell of a room for two hours and ten minutes. He had no idea how much longer it would be before the Prime Minister showed up. Should he sit down? Probably not.
Jeremy stood, pretty much stock still, staring at the door in anticipation for another twelve minutes. He'd decided on the precise expression he would wear for the Prime Minister's entrance --confident, yet respectful; intelligent, yet undogmatic -- but his facial muscles were beginning to tire, and he was having trouble holding it. It was a complicated expression to maintain, and he was considering a less demanding alternative -- just plain servile, perhaps -- when the nation's leader entered the room.
There were two other people with him, and the Prime Minister was in conversation with them. None of them seemed to notice Jeremy. He waited, trying on the one hand not to listen nosily, and on the other to make sure he didn't miss his chance to launch into his presentation without wasting a precious nanosecond.
Finally, with a little joke his two cronies found intensely amusing, the P
M turned to Jeremy and smiled. One of the cronies whispered in his ear. The PM nodded and smiled again at Jeremy. 'Gerald.'
Jeremy smiled and nodded. 'Prime Minister.'
'Right, we were very impressed with your work on the Met volunteer promotional, and we want to see what you can do with the Well Farm project. I'm going to be rolling it out in just over a fortnight and I want some good angles. Some great angles. Think you can accommodate?'
'Absolutely, Prime Minister.'
'Good. Don't drop the ball. I'm going to want a complete plan by Monday.'
Monday. Fuck. 'Absolutely, Prime Minister.'
'T'riffic. Debs will deal with you.'
And with that, the great man turned to one of his cronies and started a completely different conversation as they swept out of the room, leaving Debs behind to 'deal' with him.
Marvellous. Jeremy really must have impressed the big cheese with his pithy dialogue and uproarious wit. He'd said three words. Three words! Not even a verb had left his lips. Well, the PM would probably be buzzing with the memory of that meeting. He'd probably relive it tonight as he climbed into bed with his wife. 'Had a fascinating meeting with this total genius today. Gerald, he was called. He said "Prime Minister" three times and "absolutely" twice. He's practically Oscar fucking Wilde. You have got to meet him, darling. He's a fucking laugh riot.' Incredible. Still, at least he'd got the gig. He was, he supposed, at least one step closer to the weekend at Chequers.
'Right.' Debs, a sharp, power-suited woman Jeremy would definitely classify as a 'babe', handed him a thick folder stuffed with documents. 'There's all the blurb we've got so far. You can go through it en route.'
'En route to where?'
'Norfolk. We're flying you out to inspect the launch project.'
