by Polly James
That’s him silenced, but Greg’s so annoyed by the whole thing that he spends the next ten minutes ranting about his taxes funding subsidised alcohol in the House of Commons bars. After that, he photocopies the page from the Mail and sticks it on the wall, then gets distracted by another article it contains, which criticises the Sloane Rangers the Tories are alleged to have brought in as their Parliamentary researchers.
Greg says he can’t see that Sloane Rangers are any less qualified for the job than any of The Boss’ long line of researchers have been. If you collated their photographs, the result would look like a line-up for Miss World, with almost every nation represented, if not every shape of leg.
‘Well, we are a multi-cultural society now,’ I say, ‘much to Mr Beales’ disgust.’
We’re supposed to be a multi-lingual one, too – though, in that case, you’d think the French in Max’s itinerary would be a bit more convincing than it is. German must be Ellen’s strongest suit.
TUESDAY, 13 JULY
A builder whistled at me at lunchtime today. At least, I think it was at me. I looked all around and couldn’t see anyone younger nearby. Now I’m just hoping he wasn’t taking the piss.
It’s been ages since that happened – so long that I can’t even remember when it last did. It’s funny, isn’t it? You view wolf-whistling builders with contempt when you’re young and then, as soon as they stop doing it on a regular basis, you end up pathetically grateful for their attention.
I bet this one was taking the mickey, anyway, as I look absolutely knackered when I catch sight of myself in one of the mirrors in Primark at lunchtime, after a particularly demanding call from Miss Chambers. I must do something about this forgotten-the-name-of-my-hotel-induced insomnia. My face is a very funny shade of grey.
So is Max’s – probably due to the weekend’s excesses, and the heatwave. Oh, and now to Josh. Sometimes, I despair.
It’s still so hot this evening that Max decides that he can’t face cooking, so he goes off to get a pizza for Connie and me, and kebabs for him and Josh.
He comes back twenty minutes later, outraged. ‘Where’s Josh?’ he shouts, dropping the bags of food in the hallway.
I’m not at all used to Max yelling, as it’s uncharacteristically energetic even when we’re not in the middle of a heatwave, so I just stand there, shocked into silence.
‘Where is that little shit?’ Max pushes past me and heads up the stairs, two at a time, shouting, ‘Joshua, come here now!’
I decide I’d prefer not to know what Josh has done, so I go outside for a cigarette, but Connie refuses to join me, blaming her aversion to smoke. She loiters in the hallway instead, hoping to hear every word of Josh being given a bollocking, which he’s obviously about to be.
After half an hour of incomprehensible but very loud shouting from Max, and apparent silence from Josh – during which I smoke another cigarette, unpack and serve the food, and Connie and I eat ours – Max finally reappears, this time with Josh in tow.
Josh actually looks chastened, which is quite possibly a first.
‘Do you know what your son did?’ says Max, glaring at me as if I certainly should.
I have no idea, so I shake my head, but the use of the phrase, ‘your son’ is probably an indicator that it isn’t likely to be anything good.
Max continues, ‘I go into the kebab shop, and the guy behind the counter reels backwards when he sees me, in shock. As if he’s seen a ghost.’
‘Why?’ I am still none the wiser, though Josh’s lips seem to be starting to twitch.
‘Because he thought I was dead!’ says Max. He stares at his kebab as if it’s offended him, then pushes the plate away.
‘Why the hell did he think that?’ I say.
‘Because that f*cking comedian told him I was!’ Max looks accusingly at Josh, who averts his head, though not in time to completely stifle a very childlike giggle.
‘You did what?’ I say to Josh, who’s still trying so hard not to laugh that he’s incapable of speech. He shakes his head, then Max steps in.
‘He’s been getting a free can of Coke with every kebab – for months,’ he says. ‘As a gesture of sympathy, for his loss.’
WEDNESDAY, 14 JULY
Max leaves to drive to the airport before I go to work, but first he makes a great show of checking that I have the itinerary, and have noticed that he’s written the name of his hotel on the calendar, as well as in the diary.
This is so annoying that I grunt, but then panic, probably due to the kebab incident. What if Max’s plane crashed and the very last thing I’d said to him was, ‘Humph’? (This is definitely why he and the kids get away with so much, as I’m sure they all know I’m insanely convinced that, should any of us ever part on an argument, that’ll be the last time we see each other. I may well qualify as a mad constituent myself.)
So, just in case, I give Max a kiss, which he turns into a proper one. This is extremely weird, and very disturbing – because if there’s one thing married people don’t do, it’s kiss as if they were in love. Even if they do still have a sex-life. It’s oddly easier to shag someone while resenting them at the same time than it is to kiss them with any degree of conviction. Maybe that’s why prostitutes don’t kiss their clients.
It certainly puts me into a bit of tizz afterwards, which isn’t helped by the walk to work. It’s so hot that I nearly develop heatstroke in the process, so I’m already quite grumpy by the time I arrive – and then PMQs really doesn’t help. A parliamentary question about a family living in a million-pound house in London while on benefits sets the usual suspects off on a series of virtually identical rants.
I have no idea how to defend a system that allows this sort of thing to happen, so by the time I’ve managed to get Mr Beales off the phone, my mood is even worse – so much worse that I accidentally walk off before Joan has finished telling me about the latest fiasco with her tax credit overpayment.
I’ve never been so rude to anyone in my life – but I do wish she wouldn’t lie in wait for me in the ladies’ loo. It drives me mad, and it’ll give me irritable bowel syndrome one of these days. I’ll have to check if there’s any of James’ medication still lying around.
Talking of James, I must arrange for an intern to replace him, too – but the list The Boss has given me seems to consist solely of sixteen-year-old schoolgirls, one of whom is the daughter of the local Tory Party chairman. Has Andrew really not noticed this?
I phone him to enquire. ‘Um, Andrew – this Fiona you’ve got on the interns’ list—’
‘Lovely girl,’ says The Boss. ‘Pretty as a picture, she is.’
‘Well, that’s all very well,’ I say, ‘but are you aware that she’s also George Thompson’s daughter?’
‘Oh, that. Yes, of course I am.’ There’s no ‘of course’ about it, but The Boss doesn’t sound at all concerned. ‘The local Tories are less threat to me than those bastards in my own party. She’ll be fine,’ he says.
That remains to be seen, but what can you do when you’ve carried a horse to water and the damn thing refuses to drink?
I phone Fiona, who agrees to start next Monday. She does sound capable of an intelligent conversation, and is reasonably assertive, so at least that’s promising – and if she also knows how to file, that’ll be a real bonus.
I say this to Greg, who usually hates interns but who doesn’t seem to need any persuading that this one might turn out okay.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say. ‘Why aren’t you moaning about Fiona like you usually would about an intern?’
Greg plays dumb for a few minutes, but then admits that he’s already met her – at a Council function, when she was accompanying her dad.
He starts to twitch when I ask him exactly how attractive she is.
‘Well, she looks a bit like my ex-girlfriend,’ he says, with what sounds like a stifled sob. I will keep on forgetting that Greg’s resemblance to Patrick Bateman is only skin-deep, and that his he
art has recently been broken.
Mine almost has, too – even more recently, thanks to Max and the hotel name fiasco – but he seems determined to compensate for that, on this trip, anyway. During the evening, he phones four times from his hotel. Four times, for God’s sake! I miss half of every television programme I attempt to watch.
The first call is to tell me that he’s arrived; the second to inform me that he’s in his room, which is ‘nice, but a basic single’. Call three advises me that he’s going out for dinner with ‘the group’, and the fourth is to tell me that he’s back from dinner; that the food was rubbish compared to that on the German trip; and that he’s going to bed now as ‘this actually seems as if it’s going to be a working trip’.
I know I should be glad Max has remembered that I exist this time, and that he seems to want to reassure me – but talk about methinks he doth protest too much. Now I’m even more suspicious than I was before.
I ask Josh what he thinks, and he tells me not to be an idiot, and that while ‘Dad can be a prat, he’s not a cheating prat.’
I find that oddly comforting. I doubt Max would.
THURSDAY, 15 JULY
I wish constituents would stop reading the Daily Telegraph. It just encourages them – especially Richard Bloody Levinson, who seems to have suddenly recalled that he hasn’t been in touch since late last year.
This afternoon, he sends me seventeen emails in a row. In the first one, he wants to know why he’s struggling to obtain a housing transfer, when ‘these bloody people in today’s Telegraph can get away with a million-pound house on benefits, just because they’ve got so many children’?
Then he reiterates his long-standing complaint about why he and his wife can’t be expected to stay in their lovely two-bedroomed Council flat in East Cross, because of the stress caused by their ‘uncouth neighbours’.
‘We need a detached house, in the country,’ he says. ‘Even though there are only two of us. My wife has developed a nasty skin condition as a result of living amidst the common herd.’
Richard’s other sixteen emails have no text, but contain a series of photos, all showing evidence of said nasty skin condition, on every part of the body you can imagine. And probably parts you can’t – all in unrelenting close-up. Richard must have a ten-megapixel camera at least, and the results are absolutely repulsive.
Once I’ve stopped feeling sick, I email him to say that I will forward his enquiry to the Housing Department, but add, ‘I regret your attachments were too large to open.’ Hopefully, that’ll put an end to the stream of vile skin-flicks that keep appearing in my inbox.
‘I bet those are what Max is watching,’ says Greg, when I mention them. ‘Skin-flicks, I mean – in his hotel room, late at night. That’s what men do, when they’re bored.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘What do women do?’
Greg says he has no idea, which is no help at all, seeing as I have nothing to occupy me once I get home from work – not after I’ve cooked and eaten beans on burnt toast, and had a quick chat with Max. (He only phones once tonight, when there’s hardly anything on TV to interrupt.)
Connie and Josh are both out, and there aren’t any lights on in Ellen’s house, so there’s no point in popping in to see her, which I’m almost bored enough to do. I’m at such a loose end that, eventually, I decide I may as well give Dad a call.
‘Ah, Molly,’ he says. ‘Glad I caught you.’
Does he really not know that I phoned him?
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Well, I’m off tomorrow morning,’ he says, as if I should have known.
‘Off where?’
‘Thailand.’
There is a long silence, until Dad finally steps in to fill it. ‘I told you about it,’ he says. ‘Ages ago.’
‘Er, no, Dad – no, you didn’t,’ I say. He knows that at least as well as I do, which is probably why he doesn’t bother to deny it.
‘I don’t even want to go,’ he says, instead. ‘It’s my mate, y’see. He booked it, and he doesn’t want to go all by himself. I can’t really afford it, but I don’t like to let him down.’
The trouble with Dad is that he’s exactly like The Boss. He actually believes the stuff he says. This renders arguing with him entirely pointless, even when you can prove he’s talking out of his arse, which I can’t this time – annoyingly.
‘Got to go,’ he says. ‘Haven’t finished packing yet. Take care of yourself while I’m away.’
I’ve just opened my mouth to ask him where exactly in Thailand he’s going, and how long for, when he says, ‘By-ee!’ and, before I know it, all I can hear is a dialling tone.
Holy shit. I wonder if Dinah knows about this? I’m not telling her.
FRIDAY, 16 JULY
God, this is getting so embarrassing. I’ve no idea what’s wrong with The Boss – let alone what (or who) is fuelling his paranoia.
Joan comes in from the Party offices to check something about his latest GC report, and Andrew refuses to even look at her, let alone acknowledge her cheery ‘Good morning!’
Then he gives me a bollocking after she’s gone, for ‘consorting with the enemy’.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I say.
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I’ve just had my eyes opened, that’s all. By someone I can trust, for a change.’
‘Who?’ I say, although, ‘What on earth do you mean?’ might have been a better option, now I come to think of it. It doesn’t make any difference, though, as Andrew’s giving nothing away.
‘Just an old friend,’ he says. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’ Then he taps his nose, and says, ‘Keep this out – and keep quiet, too. Careless talk costs lives, you know.’
Greg says we should phone the men in white coats, but I wouldn’t dare, tempting though it is. I bet we wouldn’t get paid if The Boss ended up in an asylum. We’ll just have to try to manage him as best we can, though it’s not going to be easy, now other people are starting to notice his behaviour. And to object to it.
‘Don’t worry, Mol,’ says Greg. ‘We’ll work out what to do about him over lunch.’
So much for that brilliant idea. Apparently, Greg and I aren’t getting any lunch, because ‘lunch is now for wimps’ – according to Lichford’s own Michael Douglas, MP and resident nut-job, aka The Boss.
He issues this edict with great certainty, and then goes out for lunch himself, all of twenty minutes later, at which point Joan comes back to make a formal complaint about how he behaved towards her earlier.
Things don’t get any better when Andrew returns from what was obviously a largely liquid lunch, just in time for this afternoon’s surgery. Greg makes him eat a whole roll of extra strong mints and drink a very strong coffee, which seems to work, at least until the last appointment of the day.
Mr and Mrs Stafford have come in to complain about the inadequacies of the care home in which Mr Stafford’s father now lives. The Boss keeps it together, and politely explains that we will take up their concerns with Social Services, and with the management of the home.
So far, so good, and I’m just pushing my chair back with a sigh of relief, and intending to show Mr and Mrs Stafford out – but they aren’t going anywhere. There’s more to come, as Mr Stafford launches into a diatribe about how outrageous it is that his father’s house may have to be sold – to cover the costs of his place in the care home.
There follows a long pause, during which I have either a hot flush or a panic attack, and then The Boss leans forward and says, horribly slowly and with great emphasis, ‘Ah, so now we get to what you really care about. Your inheritance.’
Oh, my God. It’s one thing to think it, but quite another to say so, especially while breathing alcohol fumes all over a constituent. There’s nothing for it but to phone Andrew’s mobile from mine, under cover of the table.
As soon as it starts ringing, I say, ‘There’s that very urgent call you need to take, Andrew. You’d better go and answer it.’
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br /> He leaves the room obediently, while I apologise on his behalf, explaining that I’m sure that that wasn’t what he meant, and that he does sometimes have ‘a wacky sense of humour’. The Staffords seem unconvinced, but it’s the best I can do at such short notice.
When I finally return to my desk, after a sneaky cigarette outside, The Boss yells at me that there was nobody on the line, that the number was mine, and what the hell did I think I was playing at?
‘Saving your bacon, as per usual,’ I say.
Talk about ingratitude. I’m just considering a trip to the archive cupboard to throw a few darts at Andrew’s head when I get an email from Johnny. He says he’s missing me, and asks again when he’s going to get to do ‘wonderful things’ to various parts of my anatomy.
Then he proceeds to describe those things, which, I must admit, sound pretty good, especially after the day I’ve had. He even sets his imaginary scenario in my office, rather than in his, which seems to suggest that he thinks I’m more than just a secretary – unlike everyone else around here.
Oh, bugger. Maybe he thinks I’m a dominatrix? That would be typical. I bet he’ll want me to lead him around on a leash if we ever meet up – as if I don’t already have to do that quite often enough with The Boss. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
FRIDAY, 16 JULY (LATE EVENING)
Max arrives home from France just after 10:00pm, and is awfully affectionate, which is very disconcerting indeed. Now I can’t decide if the whole German debacle was a genuine error, or if he’s just over-compensating, to throw me off the scent.
Mind you, he complains that the group were only given one bottle of red and one of white at each meal – between ten of them – so maybe this enforced sobriety is why he was so much better behaved this time? As far as I can tell.
I must still be looking unconvinced, though, because then he says he has photos – and uploads them straight away. They’re almost all of the single bed in his hotel room, except for a few showing items of furniture being made in a factory. Exciting, they’re not. In fact, they’re a lot less exciting than the things Johnny suggested doing to me earlier.
