The Mummyfesto (20 page)

‘So she can stay in Buck House if she wants to and keep all her castles?’ asked Jackie.

‘Absolutely, as long as her family raise enough cash to keep them going.’

‘Whose head will we have on stamps?’ asked Anna.

‘We won’t have anyone’s head. We’ll have pictures painted by kids.’

‘I think you might be sent to the Tower,’ said Jackie.

‘I’d like to see them try and get past Zach and Oscar to do that.’

Anna and Jackie grinned at me. I took that as a yes. I wasn’t going to stop there, though. I was on a roll now.

‘I’d also like us to become secular, like France, and not have any state-funded church schools. I resent the fact that although only about 7 per cent of the UK population are practising Christians, the Church controls about a third of our primary schools and even if you choose for your child to attend a non-church school they still have to do Christian worship in assembly and have vicars coming in to preach at them. Where’s the choice in that?

‘There are about the same number of vegetarians in this country, but we don’t get to run a third of schools and go in to spout our beliefs to impressionable school-children, even though they’ve got proven health benefits. And yet our children come home from school believing God created the world and we’re paying for that. It’s obscene, it really is.’

I paused for breath and looked at Anna and Jackie who were staring at me as if I’d lost the plot.

‘So you basically want to take on the Church, the state and the monarchy,’ said Anna.

‘Yep. That’s about right,’ I said. Anna nodded slowly. She didn’t have to say anything: her expression said it for her.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know it’s ambitious and controversial and will probably lose us some votes, but if we’re going to do this we need to believe in what we’re fighting for and we need to fight for what we believe in.’

‘There you go electioneering again,’ said Jackie. ‘I’ve told you, you’ve already got my vote.’

‘And you’d back the secular bit?’

‘Yeah, with one caveat. We still allow harvest festival assemblies because if we didn’t have them, my cupboards would be full of out-of-date tins and free samples that I don’t want but aren’t going to chuck away.’

‘OK,’ I grinned, ‘we can have a harvest assembly tins amnesty.’

‘So what’s your last suggestion?’ asked Anna. ‘And please tell me you’re not going to sell Cliff Richard off or something.’

‘Is he ours to sell?’ asked Jackie.

‘If we’re going to get rid of the monarchy we’ll need a new national anthem,’ I said. ‘I was thinking a medley of ‘All You Need is Love’, ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’, ‘I Will Walk 500 Miles’ and ‘Teenage Kicks’. That way we represent all the countries in the UK and everyone will know the words.’

Jackie looked as if were in danger of falling off her chair laughing. Anna appeared to be in shock.

‘The
Daily Mail
is going to hate us,’ said Anna eventually.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Won’t it be fantastic?’

The gallery phoned on Monday morning, just after I’d dropped the boys off at school. The woman’s name was Rebecca. She had what Rob called a posh London accent. It wouldn’t bother him this time, though. Wouldn’t bother him at all.

I drove straight to the road where he was working. It was dry today so he was painting the front door of a big house up on Birchcliffe. Pillar-box red he’d said they wanted it. Something to brighten the stonework up a bit.

I pulled up on the corner of the road and started walking down. Rob looked up and saw me, his brow furrowed for a second.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked. I recognised the tone in his voice and wished for a second that I’d phoned to tell him, anything to stop him panicking like that. I smiled, a big, obviously not fake, smile, so that he would know it was OK.

‘Yes. I just wanted to let you know the good news.’

‘Cameron’s resigned and handed the keys of Number Ten to you?’

‘No. Your good news.’

‘Me? But I don’t even do the lottery any more.’

‘You’re going to have an exhibition,’ I said, grinning.

Rob put the paint pot down and stared at me. ‘Where?’

‘Linden Mill. Sorry it’s not the Tate, but from little acorns and all that.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘Just reminding some people of what a brilliant artist you are. Sending them a few photos. You’ll have to get your act together, mind. You’ve only got a couple of weeks.’

A smile spread over Rob’s face. He looked down at the paint on his hands and overalls. ‘I’d give you a hug,’ he said, ‘only you might not appreciate it at the moment.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, giving him a kiss. ‘Save it for later.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rob. ‘For not giving up on me, I mean.’

‘That’s all right. Thank you for not having me sectioned.’

Rob grinned.

‘Anyway, I’d better dash. I’ll give you all the details later. They want you to pop by later this week with your stuff.’

Rob nodded. I started to walk back to the car. Just as I reached the corner, Rob called me. I turned around. He’d written ‘I Love You’ in red paint on the front door. I smiled, remembering how he’d painted it all over the walls of our first house when we’d moved in together.

‘You too,’ I called back.

I clearly wasn’t cut out to be an undercover agent. My first thought as to how to disguise myself for my visit to the Labour Party pre-election meeting in Halifax had been to get one of those Tony Blair masks off eBay.

Sam had pointed out that I didn’t actually need to go incognito because (a) I wasn’t famous and (b) no one outside my immediate family and friends knew what we were about to do. But I still couldn’t help feeling that it was somehow traitorous. I was obviously on a mailing list as a Labour Party voter; they’d been good enough to invite me to their pre-election shindig and yet I hadn’t had the decency to inform them that I was about to announce my intention to stand against them in the constituency.

In the end I opted to wear a hat. I wasn’t sure what it was about sporting a red beret that somehow rendered me invisible, but it was the best I could come up with.

I parked in King Street. It was still the only car park in Halifax I knew my way to despite having lived there for most of my life. Paul often joked that instead of having a girl in every port I had a car park space in every town and city. It just didn’t make sense to me, having found a route I knew into somewhere, to go to the bother of getting lost again by trying a different way.

There was a sign in the foyer of the central library saying ‘Labour Party meeting’ and an arrow pointing down the stairs. It was as near as I was going to get to an underground political gathering. I stepped quietly down the stairs, half expecting a Labour Party henchman to jump out and bar my way at any point. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I realised that any attempt to disguise myself short of hiring a Mrs Doubtfire fancy-dress outfit would have been futile. There appeared to be no one in the queue in front of me under sixty. Perhaps that was what you got if you held a public meeting at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Anyone under thirty was hungover and still in bed, those in their thirties and forties were busy ferrying children to Baby Ballet or Soccer Tots and those in their fifties were presumably enjoying the novelty of not having to get up to ferry their children somewhere because they were now teenagers and consequently still in bed. It was only the sixty-plus age group it seemed, for whom an invitation to a political meeting on a Saturday morning had proved irresistible. And me – who it must now be obvious to everyone had an ulterior reason for being there.

The elderly lady in front of me, who was sporting a red
mac and one of those clear plastic rain-hats, which she’d either forgotten to take off or considered to be a fashion statement, turned around and fixed me with a stare.

‘Are you one of them?’ she asked.

‘Er, one of them what?’

‘One of them who’s come up from London.’

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’m not with Labour Party.’

‘Oh,’ she said, obviously disappointed, ‘I were hoping to meet someone from London. Do you think Mr Miliband will be here?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘I expect he’s a bit busy at moment.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I liked his brother better anyway.’

The doors of the meeting room opened. A young man with short gelled hair and wearing a slick suit poked his head out. I saw the look of disappointment on his face as he surveyed what looked more like a bus-stop queue than the attendees of a top-flight political meeting. And I watched him recompose his features into something more favourable as he moved effortlessly into smooth PR mode.

‘Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for coming,’ he said. ‘Please do come in. We’d appreciate it if you could leave your contact details on our list so that we can keep in touch with you during the election campaign.’

We shuffled forward. The rain-hat woman smiled up at the young man when she got to him.

‘Are you from London?’ she asked.

‘No, Wakefield actually.’ She sighed and made her way into the room.

The first thing I noticed when I looked down at the contact details list was that the people in front of me had left postal addresses. Email addresses and mobile numbers were conspicuous by their absence.

‘Not exactly at the cutting edge of new technology are we?’ I said to the young man. He smiled awkwardly, but said nothing. I suspected he was beginning to wish they hadn’t bothered.

We took our seats. Judging from the number of empty ones, they’d been hoping for a bigger turnout. At least no one had put on ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

The PR man stood at the front of the room and waxed lyrical about how people like us were what the Labour Party was all about. I resisted the temptation to ask him if he meant clapped-out and having seen better days. Then, with something approaching a fanfare, he introduced the special guest speakers, shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and the prospective Labour Party candidate for Halifax (the current Labour MP was standing down at the next election), a man who, rather incongruously, was called Jack Daniels. I thought they missed a trick by not playing ‘Whiskey in My Jar’ as he made his entrance wearing one of those shiny suits that ought never to be let out of a wardrobe, except to be given to a charity shop.

Yvette Cooper, on the other hand, was smart and businesslike. I’d always thought she was attractive on TV, but she was actually even more attractive in the flesh. But
what most impressed me was that despite everything she managed to look as if she was actually pleased to be there.

The PR man did a little spiel about them both. He tried to sell Jack Daniels as a Yorkshireman, but he was actually from Harrogate, which didn’t really count as it was posh Yorkshire as far as Halifax was concerned. I made a mental note to play the ‘born and bred in Halifax’ card on my election leaflet.

Finally, Yvette Cooper got to her feet. ‘Thank you so much for coming here today,’ she said. ‘This is part of a series of events we’re holding across the country to meet with our supporters in order that we can take on board your concerns and priorities as we go into the election campaign.’

‘I don’t know what she sees in that Balls fellow,’ said the rain-hat lady, turning around from her seat in the second row and speaking in a voice which was a little too loud for comfort. ‘Pretty little thing like that could have done much better for herself.’

‘So this is where we throw it open to you,’ Yvette Cooper continued. ‘What are your priorities and what are the big issues you’d like to see us talking about during the election campaign?’

An elderly lady with a Tesco shopping bag sitting in the front row stood up. ‘Me husband’s got arthritis,’ she said. ‘And can I get a jacket for him with buttons big enough for him to do up by himself? I think government should force clothing manufacturers to do summat about it.’ She sat down, having said her piece. Yvette Cooper
nodded sympathetically and made a note of something. Things, it seemed, could indeed only get better.

I popped the painkillers into my mouth, took a big gulp of water and swallowed. There was something odd about taking painkillers for a pain that was yet to come. It made you feel a bit like a junkie. I could hear the voice in my head saying, ‘if you know this is coming, why don’t you avoid it, instead of chucking pills down your throat?’