Rules of Engagement

by Hurley, Graham

  Goodman accepted the point with a smile.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but we can ask. Politely.’

  ‘Oh, sure. And you have. And tonight you’ve got six minutes to say your piece. I’m only sorry it can’t be longer.’ He got up and began to manoeuvre himself around the desk. Goodman stayed seated, looking up at him.

  ‘There’s one thing I thought I ought to mention …’ he began.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Goodman frowned, choosing the words with great care, the soul of discretion.

  ‘If the full emergency powers are introduced …’ he said, ‘we’ll be needing someone down in the Bunker to handle our information policy. Someone whose integrity and professional skills we admire …’

  ‘If the Bill gets through or when?’ enquired Bullock, fishing for confirmation of the afternoon’s rumour on the AP tape.

  ‘If,’ said Goodman.

  ‘Ah.’ Bullock nodded and made a note on his blotter. Then he looked down at Goodman again. ‘So you’re after a tame journalist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone you can bend?’

  ‘Someone we can trust.’

  ‘Same thing, isn’t it?’

  Bullock smiled for the first time, a big spreading grin that Goodman recognized at once as a declaration of war. The conversation was over. There only remained the formality of the live interview. He got to his feet. Davidson did the same. There were more nods, more handshakes. The secretary was back at the door.

  ‘Sandie will look after you,’ he said. ‘Good luck on the show.’

  Goodman and Davidson took their cue and turned to leave. It was only when Goodman was nearly at the door that Bullock spoke again.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘My son’s name is Adam, not Tom. And it was Corneille, not Racine …’ he smiled, ‘just for the record.’

  When Albie Curtis got to the printers, the place was closed. There was a handwritten note on the door directing callers to a pub across the road called the Spanish Arms.

  Albie found the printer in the saloon bar. He was sitting by himself at a table under the window, a pale, nervous man with a glass of brown ale and a facial twitch. The evening edition of the local paper lay open in front of him.

  Albie stood over the man for a moment or two. There was a big photo in the paper – a row of young female faces pressed to the windows of a passing coach – and a headline which read HOSPITAL CHAOS – MUMS MOVE OUT. Albie nudged the table with his knee.

  ‘That stuff of mine,’ he said.

  The printer looked up, recognizing Albie at once.

  ‘It’s in the shop,’ he said.

  ‘I need it now,’ Albie nodded at the window, ‘I’ve got the van.’

  The printer hesitated for a moment, then swallowed the remains of his brown ale, folded the newspaper, and stood up. The bar was filling rapidly with stevedores and freight marshallers from the Ferry port as they headed for the door.

  At the shop, the printer fumbled for his keys and unlocked the door. The place was dark inside, and smelled of ammonia. The printer walked through to the small store room at the back. The leaflets were on a table, neatly packaged. A small pile of rejects lay beside the packet. Albie picked one up. Miracle Emulsion, it read. As developed by NASA. Guaranteed Blast Proof. Peace of Mind with the One-Coat Wonder. There were further details, culled from the pages of a space fantasy magazine, and a phone number to ring for personal service. £10 a window, including VAT.

  Albie held the leaflet at arm’s length and nodded approvingly. Splashy red capitals on a yellow background. Big drawing of a mushroom cloud. Class production. Nice effect.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  The printer grunted and turned to the photocopier. There was an invoice under the flap. He gave it to Albie. Albie glanced at it, then stuffed it into his back pocket and picked up the packet of leaflets.

  ‘Usual terms?’ he said, heading for the door.

  The printer nodded gloomily, reaching for his keys.

  ‘Suppose so,’ he said. ‘Twenty-eight days.’

  Joanna Goodman carried Charlie’s high chair in from the kitchen, and put it carefully on the carpet in front of the TV. Charlie crawled after her, hands and knees, leaving behind him a trail of crumbs from the bib around his neck. James was already on the sofa, balancing a plate of spaghetti on his lap, trying to peer round his mother’s body at the screen. Caroline sat beside him, her plate already empty, neat and watchful as ever.

  Martin had phoned from the TV studios only minutes before. Joanna had taken the call in the kitchen, one hand for the phone, one hand for Charlie. He’d told her he was due to be interviewed, and he wondered whether she and the kids might like to watch. He’d sounded amused, and warm, even a little excited, quite the old Martin, and she, in turn, had grinned at him down the phone, and said she’d have died of disappointment if he hadn’t let them know. Her very own husband. A TV star. She’d wished him luck, and he’d said he’d need it, and she promised champagne on ice for when he got home, and he’d laughed at that, and said she was crazy. She’d smiled, treasuring the conversation, the laughter, the contact, the sudden flood of reassurance, and then Charlie had made a lunge for the cat, and she’d hung up.

  Now, one minute to six, she settled Charlie into the high chair, and retrieved a loop of spaghetti from the carpet beneath James’ plate, and plumped up the cushions, and settled back beside Caroline to wait for Martin to appear. James, his mouth full of spaghetti, turned towards her.

  ‘What about Granny’s,’ he said, ‘when do we go?’

  ‘Ah,’ she grinned at him, ‘depends on Daddy.’

  ‘What does he think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, nodding at the TV. ‘Let’s wait and see.’

  *

  ‘Coastwise’, the Wessex TV nightly news magazine, started on time at one minute past six. The bulk of the programme was on video, three- or four-minute reports from all over the area, and Martin Goodman, the only live guest, was on the interview set in the studio from the start. There were monitor screens suspended from the studio roof showing the programme as it was transmitted live, and he was able to watch the case building up against him. Interviews with anxious shoppers about food shortages. Interviews with worried mums about the rumoured closure of schools. Interviews with harassed businessmen about police roadblocks on the motorway entrances. Footage from the city’s hospital, where one of the injured demonstrators had undergone exploratory brain surgery. And a colourful piece from a pensioner on his plans to raise a vigilante squad to patrol the city’s more productive allotments. ‘Couldn’t have happened at a worse time,’ he mused, ‘nearly Harvest Festival.’

  With five minutes to go to the start of his own contribution, Goodman was joined in the studio by Lawrence Prosser, an interviewer of national standing who’d abandoned the big time for a cottage beside the Solent, an ocean-going yacht, and occasional guest appearances on Wessex TV. Goodman knew that Bullock only wheeled him out for the big occasions, and he was flattered.

  Prosser advanced across the studio, a bulky, cheerful man, one hand outstretched. Goodman knew him by sight, but had never met him personally.

  ‘Martin,’ he said, ‘how nice to see you.’

  Goodman began to get up, remembered he was tethered by a microphone, and abruptly sat down again. Prosser shook him by the hand, checked his appearance in the lens of a nearby camera, and sat down in the chair opposite. He waved away a make-up girl and propped a clipboard comfortably on his knee. Attached to the clipboard was a list of questions. Prosser nodded up at one of the monitor screens.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to watch this bit,’ he said, ‘I won’t disturb you.’

  He smiled briefly and bent to his notes. Goodman eyed the clipboard, untidy lines of scribble, certain words underlined, each question hand-written in red ink, impenetrable as code. He returned to the TV screen. A bearded man of about forty, a sociology lecturer at the city’s polyte
chnic, was talking about the impact of events on the city’s inhabitants. As the prospect of war became more and more real, he said he’d detected a deep unease. He said that some people were becoming depressed and fatalistic. He said others were becoming reckless and anti-social. He expected violence and apathy in about equal proportions. Today’s demo, he said, was merely a symptom, a straw in the wind. Soon, certain sections of society would become scapegoats. Perhaps the French families, now flooding into the city. Perhaps the Asian community. Perhaps even the Jews. But whatever was happening now, and however scary that might seem, worse would inevitably follow because people were becoming progressively disoriented by events. They were losing their spiritual bearings. The man smiled. This interpretation of events was evidently his own. He called it the Hiroshima Syndrome. An off-screen voice asked him what he expected to happen next, and the man shrugged, and said that individuals were no more than the bricks in society’s wall, and once the bricks crumbled then the wall would fall down. This image evidently appealed to him, and he smiled again, and the picture abruptly cut to a persuasive montage of the day’s most haunting images – a French mother in tears at the Ferryport, ambulances loading casualties from the midday demo, a pensioner gazing at an air raid poster, Army sappers humping sandbags in the rubble-strewn no-go area around the dockyard wall. Finally, the reporter signed off and handed the programme back to Prosser in the studio.

  Prosser, preoccupied with his clipboard only seconds before, looked abruptly grave, expressed his regrets about the day’s body count, and turned the programme towards the one man who might throw a little light on it all.

  Goodman blinked. In a second or two, it would be his face in the city’s living rooms, his job to answer the impossible questions. Feeling curiously unreal, he listened to Prosser introducing him as ‘the man in charge’. Goodman acknowledged his name with a nod. Presser turned to him and asked at once how bad the situation really was. The question came at the end of nearly half an hour of bad news, a rising chord of alarm and disaster, and Goodman knew at once that he had, somehow, to stem this seamless flood of images and assumptions, to sound a different note, and to move the debate onto territory of his own choosing. He smiled apologetically at Prosser, only too aware of the importance of first impressions, offering himself as a man concerned to address the facts, to restore a little perspective, to somehow reassure a thoroughly frightened audience that all was far from lost.

  ‘Well …’ he said easily, ‘can I first pick you up on one point. I’m not actually in charge.’

  Prosser looked up from his clipboard, taken by surprise.

  ‘But you are Acting Chief Executive? That is right, isn’t it?’

  Goodman nodded. ‘That’s perfectly correct, yes.’

  ‘So you’re in charge, are you not?’

  Goodman smiled again, ever reasonable, ever polite.

  ‘In charge is an emotive expression,’ he said. ‘I head the officers whose job it is to administer the affairs of the city. For everybody’s benefit.’

  Prosser looked at him for a moment, recognizing at once the path Goodman was trying to take. Democracy and the workings of local government were pure Nembutal. That kind of line would put any audience instantly to sleep. Sensibly, he changed the subject.

  ‘But it is a city, Mr Goodman, that must be high on the Soviet hit list … must it not?’

  Goodman smiled again, the easiest of openings.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not a Soviet military planner,’ he said. ‘If I were I could probably answer that question.’

  Davidson, standing in the shadows at the back of the darkened control room, permitted himself a smile. Goodman was doing well, better than he’d expected. He watched Prosser on one of the monitor screens, recognizing a new note of irritation in the interviewer’s voice. Goodman wasn’t obeying the script. His answers weren’t at all in keeping with the thrust of the rest of the programme. He didn’t look like a man on the edge of the abyss. On the contrary, he looked calm, and benign, the soul of reassurance. Prosser leaned forward, concerned, fearless, the people’s tribune, the bringer of bad news, still convinced that the city lay under the Soviet cosh.

  ‘But how else would you interpret what’s been happening around the dockyard?’ he said. ‘The no-go areas? The sandbags? The barbed wire?’

  ‘Precautions,’ said Goodman at once. ‘The dockyard’s an important national asset, and I’m sure you’d be even more concerned if we didn’t protect it.’

  ‘But isn’t that precisely my point? Doesn’t the naval link mean that the city is under direct threat? If and when the shooting starts?’

  Goodman frowned, modifying his voice slightly, trying to strike the exact vocal balance between understanding and reassurance.

  ‘Well …’ he said, ‘if you’re implying that we all face extinction, which I suspect you are, then I have to say that’s a very gloomy assumption. And one, I might add, that’s very far from justified. Or justifiable.’

  Prosser nodded, closing fast on the real meat of the interview.

  ‘But tell me,’ he said, ‘do you have plans if things get worse?’

  Goodman looked at him for a moment, trying not to sound defensive.

  ‘Well …’ he said, ‘it’s our job to make … ah … provision against certain eventualities. People would quite properly complain if we didn’t.’

  ‘And do these provisions, these plans, include the suspension of civil liberties?’

  Goodman looked thoughtful, the expression of a man to whom such a possibility had not previously occurred.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘That’s purely speculative. I don’t think for a moment that we’re in that kind of situation. Things are pretty serious, yes, but not that serious.’

  ‘Nor likely to be?’

  ‘Oh no …’ Goodman shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not even after today? Refugees? Arms convoys? Police recruiting Special Constables?’

  Goodman smiled, patient again. Next door, Bullock stepped quietly into the control room, standing in the deep shadows by the door from where he could see both the screens and Davidson. The latter was still standing behind the seated row of technicians at the control desk, absolutely motionless, looking at Goodman on the monitor screens.

  ‘These are purely precautionary moves,’ Goodman was saying, ‘any sensible government would make them. Take Special Constables. The Army and most of the Reserve have gone to Germany. The police have a lot on their plate, and they’re simply back-filling. That’s all. It’s nothing sinister. It’s a numbers game. Pure and simple.’ He paused, trying to preempt further questions by bringing the discussion to a natural close. ‘No …’ he said, ‘what we have is a serious international crisis abroad, and a sensible, responsible, measured reaction here at home. But, if I may say so, there’s absolutely no cause for alarm.’

  Prosser looked at him, waiting a moment for the director to change the shot. On screen at last, he leaned slightly forward.

  ‘Do you have plans to ration petrol?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Well …’ Goodman eased away from the firing line, ‘you talk of food and fuel. But I must say the general point is more valid, and I’m afraid I can only repeat it. It’s business as usual. Life, I’m afraid, goes on. Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the fact of the matter.’

  In the control room, the PA was already counting Prosser out of the interview, and with nine seconds to go he had little choice but to accept Goodman’s peroration with a sceptical nod, and to thank him for his time, and to make a final turn into his personal camera to wish the viewers good-night. Anyone who knew him well might sense the anger and frustration, but Bullock’s eyes were still on Davidson. The man had allowed himself the quietest of smiles, the sorcerer applauding the clever young apprentice, and Bullock knew at once that things were far, far worse than they’d anticipated, worse even than Annie’s cynical predictions, and
that somehow they had to find a way of coming to terms with it all.

  Davidson stepped towards him. The end credits were rolling on the screens behind his head. He smiled at Bullock and extended a hand.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Quite fascinating.’

  Bullock smiled grimly.

  ‘Our pleasure,’ he said. ‘Do come again.’

  *

  Gillespie arrived back at Sandra’s as dusk was beginning to fall. He got out of the car. Sean was visible through the window in the front room. He was re-whipping one of the rings onto his favourite sea rod, working under the dim spread of the overhead light, holding the rod section between his knees, the whipping twine in his teeth, one thumb pressed against the rod rings, the other maintaining the pressure on the twine. Gillespie hesitated for a moment on the pavement. What the boy needed was an extra hand, someone to help him. What he didn’t have was a live-in father. He shrugged. The boy would find a way. Always had. Always would.

  Sandra opened the door to his knock. She was wearing a long cotton skirt and a loose blouse, open at the neck. The lipstick was subtle, and the perfume he’d never smelled before. She looked tanned, and happy. He paused on the doorstep, all too aware of the intrusion.

  ‘You’re off out,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’ She smiled at him, enjoying his confusion. ‘You after Sean?’

  Gillespie frowned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you.’

  ‘Oh?’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Better be quick.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Gillespie stepped past her into the house. Sandra began to say something, then stopped herself and followed him into the kitchen. A man in his early forties sat at the table. He was wearing a well-cut jacket and expensive shoes. He had a pleasant, open face, and his hair was flecked with grey at the temples. He looked distinguished, and faintly professional. A lawyer, perhaps, or a doctor. There was a glass of sherry on the table beside him, and a bunch of fresh flowers in the washing-up bowl. The man got up as Gillespie came in. He stopped. The other man extended his hand.