Chalcot Crescent (25 page)

‘Victor is very stressed at work, of course, and that never makes for matrimonial bliss,’ says Polly now. ‘It may just be a bad patch they’re going through.’

If I’m not going to take Venetia in, Polly certainly doesn’t want to, so she’s already backing down. But that doesn’t mean that Victor hasn’t taken to beating Venetia up. What is this new universe I’m in, in which Victor is a monster?

‘Thank God Corey’s work leaves him time enough to look after his family,’ Polly goes on, smugly. And then she says that according to Amy the reason Victor is in a bad mood these days is because there’s a vacancy on the Prime Committee at NUG, and NIFE being such a power in the land, what with the National Meat Loaf, Victor just might be appointed to it, or he might not, so he’s tense.

I am certainly being kept out of the loop. Whole tangles of loops forming and re-forming in front of my eyes and nothing I can do about it, just sit here in a traffic jam.

‘Like when Stalin, the country boy from Georgia, turned up to join Lenin and Trotsky,’ I say. ‘Did someone die to create this convenient vacancy?’

‘I think she said it was a heart attack,’ Polly says. Her usually confident teacherly ways have deserted her. We both wonder if this new Victor is capable of murder.

‘People do die from heart attacks,’ I say briskly. ‘So now it’s Top Brass Number One, Top Brass Number Two, and our Victor, and if NUG is reviving the cult of personality, as the photoshoots suggest, Victor will be its figurehead and will have quite a lot to hide. His wife’s family can’t be a source of comfort to him. And now you’re going round saying to everyone he beats up his wife. Is this wise? NUGIntel is not going to like it. If you think strange men are trying to push you off Underground platforms and mow you down in cars, can you be surprised?’

‘There was only me and her in the room.’

I wonder if she is telling the truth. I ask her which room and she said the new dream kitchen. I say, well, if that was the case it most certainly was not just her and Venetia in the room but NUGIntel too, the rooms being wired for sound, as all government offices were, so should we stop this conversation now?

Polly says but we’re in the car, and I say, well, perhaps Amos is right and the Jokers are in the pay of NUG, and when they’re out contaminating the diesel they’re bugging the cars as well. Polly snorts and complains about my imagination. I say my imagination has paid her rent for long enough so let her not insult it and if I’ve learned one thing in a writer’s life, it’s that if you can invent something, someone, somewhere else, will actually be doing it. Salman Rushdie told me so.

She looks at me and her face changes, and pales. She nods.

‘I’ve been stupid,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Okay,’ she says. She looks behind to see if she could reverse. I
shake my head. That would make them even more interested. We must take our chances at the checkpoint.

‘It takes them a long time to get round to things,’ I say. ‘We’re probably okay.’

But thereafter our conversation is for public consumption.

‘My sister rather inferred that Victor was beating her up,’ Polly says loudly, ‘and I was taken in at first but then I realized she was working out a what-if scenario for a construal art piece. She’s a real artist, so creative. She imagines things. Victor and she love each other dearly, and the children. I really hope they become First Family – they so deserve to!’ Well done, Polly, I thought. Probably too late but a good try.

‘I didn’t know you knew Amy,’ I say casually. Suppose Polly is more involved than I thought. Perhaps she too is part of the Redpeace conspiracy, the New Republic? Perhaps she and Corey know very well where their children go in their spare time?

‘Amy works for the Neighbourhood Watch,’ says Polly. ‘She’s very keen. She came to talk to our school about the Feeding NUGNation children’s campaign. How are your potatoes going?’

‘Very nicely indeed,’ I say. ‘No rot, no weevil. Neighbourhood Watch is a fine institution. They’re so right, grow what feeds you, not what pleases you.’

Plant the veg, forget the flowers.

‘So true,’ says Polly. ‘Amy’s a nice bright loyal girl even though she doesn’t quite seem Ethan’s type.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I say. ‘But it takes all sorts.’

‘I hadn’t realized you’d met her,’ Polly says.

‘I once called by at Hunter’s Alley and she was there.’

I can lie fast. I write fiction. But I am not feeling too good. If Polly knew Amy as I knew Amy, oh, oh, oh, what a girl! Chances
that my front door key will fail to turn in the lock rise to 100 per cent. My universes are no longer wavering. This is the real one, and it isn’t nice. How am I going to get back into my home?

The queue moves slowly. One in three drivers are being turned out to make their own way home, lucky not to be prosecuted. Either the testing apparatus is faulty or the Jokers have been particularly active. No-one questions, no-one protests.

As for me I am not quite strong enough for reality yet. Better to envisage this new Victor at the office. I have an altogether different view of him now, no longer the benign patriarch: no longer the young Mugabe but the old. People do change.

Now he sits at a great desk in a large room: the man of power. I was once invited to the offices of the head of the Writers’ Union in Tbilisi. He was a fleshy, handsome man with a moustache and a vain, cruel face. There was an ante-room, all tattered gold and crimson splendour, lined with moth-eaten chairs on which pale-faced supplicants sat, queuing for favours. All looked shabby, shoes thin-soled. I was led in past them. I took precedence, there by invitation. Their hungry eyes followed me. They hated me. A shuddering girl in a tattered dress crouched in a corner of his room. God knows what went on there. I doubted that the Culture Tsar had ever read a book in his life.

Instead of a background of faded baroque splendour, everything around Victor is clean and trim, modern and soulless, hard-edged. Otherwise what’s the difference? The ante-room at the National
Institute for Food Excellence is also full of hungry-eyed hopefuls, on their cellphones and BlackBerries, ready to murder for a place in the queue, wanting favours, hoping for preferment. The girl in the tattered dress has turned into a Kate Moss at sixteen lookalike, but the principle is the same. The brave deserve the fair, and why does a man want power other than to have his pick of women? Come to think of it, the Victor in my vision has a faint look of Berlusconi about him.

The vats in the purpose-built labs behind the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall are a mass of heaving, pulsating rumps of flesh: rounded hare-like haunches that look all too like skinned baby limbs as they dip and surface in warm bubbling organic broth. Behind are the laboratories where experiments are perfected: dissecting tables on which flayed animals and humans are pinned out, some still sentient, some not, organs and stem cells for the asking.
NUG – Caring for the Nation! Your Health Is Our Responsibility!

‘It has to be done, how else are we to eat?’ as Victor would argue. And I like National Meat Loaf as much as anyone. The many must suffer that the few may prosper.
NUG – Building Opportunity and Tolerance
. Truckloads of victims come into the yards where they’ve cleared space all the way down to the Thames.
NUG – Moving Beyond the Voluntary
. They arrive, under cover of night. The area is a no-go for civilians.
NUG – Discovering What’s Best for You
. By day the same vans leave, hosed clean, no doubt, and now carrying delectable cans of salt-free National Meat Loaf.
NUG – Creating New Ways of Thinking
.

And here comes NUG in person into Victor’s office. Two top brass: you can tell from their body language, and the smoothness in the fall of their suits. (Whatever the government, good tailors, good cooks and good cleaners will always survive. The chambermaid
escapes a bullet when the royal family is shot: someone has to make the beds.) Victor raises his bulk to meet them. He is nervous. Is this to be the good news he hopes for or the bad news he fears? It is the good news. Smiles all round.

The young Kate Moss clone, who must have said something out of turn and is huddled in the corner like the Tbilisi girl in the tattered dress, pulls herself together quickly and produces champagne. The men behave as if she wasn’t there: she is merely an office accessory with a rapidly developing black eye. They will notice her if they are in the mood for casual sex but not otherwise. Women should never forget that men are bigger than they are and liable to lash out if provoked and unobserved: the respect that virtue brings sometimes protects a girl, but I doubt if this one was laying claim to that.

I remember at the Moscow Writers’ Union back in the seventies pretty girls with writing talent were expected as a matter of course to offer sexual and secretarial services for very low wages and think themselves lucky to be employed at all. One of them told me she wanted to write a novel but where would she find the time?

‘Get up early,’ I advised her. ‘Do it before the working day begins.’ That was my advice in my own country.

‘But I get up at five anyway,’ she said, in her perfect English, ‘and I don’t get to bed until past one.’

She lived with her in-laws and her husband and child in a small apartment and they expected her to keep house and cook food and clean up for all of them, and when she got to work her boss required ‘comfort’ before the day began. Perhaps some day, should she have pleased him enough, she might be invited to join the Union, and be eligible to publish, but what would be the use of that if you had nothing written to publish? I gave up offering advice.

‘Victor,’ Top Brass Number One is saying to him now, ‘the Prime Executive met this morning and agreed that the Ministries of Culture, Sport and Family Values are to be grouped under Nutrition. National Meat Loaf is an achievement of which NUG can be truly proud. A heavy workload, we know, but if all goes well it puts you in line for the Presidency. Perhaps lose a little weight, dear man? The presidential role is mainly photogenic. No reason why things should not go well? No family scandals, no hidden indiscretions?’

‘Of course not,’ Victor says. ‘Nothing at all of that kind.’

They raise a toast to the dear departed Top Brass Number Three whom Victor is replacing. Victor is urbane and charming, his skin polished and plump. The other two are misshapen and ugly, as if they wore their hideous souls spread over their bodies like rancid butter and it ate inwards and consumed them. They need a public face.

‘A fine fellow,’ says Number One, ‘but never quite one of us. Too much the sociologist, the theorist, not enough the pragmatist.’

‘Ate and drank too much,’ says Number Two, ‘but the wrong food, clearly. Never touched National Meat Loaf. Moral objections.’

‘A great mistake,’ says Victor.

Top Brass Number Two has noticed the Kate Moss lookalike. She has managed to tear her dress a little and a section of breast is exposed. Probably the tattered nature of the Tbilisi girl’s dress was contrived, and my pity wasted.

‘Perhaps you’d like to lend me your secretary for a week or two,’ Top Brass Number Two is saying, ‘or are you very short-staffed?’

‘I daresay I can manage,’ says Victor. ‘There’s always the agency pool.’

The queue moves forward. We have no option but to reach the CiviSecure barrier. There are eight young brown-shirted males at the booth. They are overquick and edgy in their movements and I assume are on drugs. They carry weapons, and are scarcely more than children. Everyone hates them. We get out of the car. They study our IDs for rather a long time. One of them looks at me and smiles and gnashes his teeth a little, in a nibbling movement. Once upon a time it would have been a pass, but now I wonder if he just wants to eat me. The trouble with giving birth to a rumour is that it may well come true. They wave us on. We get back into the car, trying to look as uncaring and unthinking as we can.

We pass a motorist who has been rash enough to give lip to the wrong people as he sets out on the long walk down the hill. He is in the centre of a circle of young men – and women too, I am sorry to say – and the Jokers’ maniacal laughter echoes all around as they push him from one to another. Most now sport rouged clown circles on their cheeks again and some wear Joker noses. Heaven knows where it will end – badly, I fear.

We drive up towards Muswell Hill and the famous view over all London.

‘Let’s get out and look at the view,’ I say, just in case.

There are still some things to be said which others should not
overhear. There are useful gaps in the houses and shops up here, where properties were burned down in the middle-class tax riots of 2011, so at least you can get to see the view. The London of my childhood, when we first arrived after World War II, was gattoothed like this. Hitler’s bombs had done that damage. Now we did it to ourselves. Some said it was because we were allowed no enemies for so many years, but must love everyone, that we had forgotten the uses of the common enemy and had turned our innate aggression inwards, not outwards. Though you could see NUG building up resentment once more against the French. We’d mothballed most of our reactors and gone over to wind power. The French hadn’t, so still had plenty of nuclear power, but refused to share it with us. If we could all hate the French, at least we need not hate each other.

Polly and I stood together and looked across to the far towers of Canary Wharf, and I felt great affection for her. She was flawed, but so was I, and by what right did one require a perfect child? She had given me only quasi-grandchildren, true, but Venetia had given me real ones all right, and look what had happened there. Children were once seen as the punishment for sex, and if they were, why then the universe was only exacting its price for the pleasures I had enjoyed with Karl.

‘It’s green where once it was grey,’ Polly says, and it’s true.

The Thames Barrier had failed in November 2012 and the flooded area had more or less been abandoned, and foliage crept up to cover cracked concrete. As with the bombed landscape of London in 1946, it was remarkable how quickly nature reestablished itself. Japanese knotweed could crack bricks, and did; bougainvillea had started a long, long, colourful journey up the sides of steel towers. Someone up here had charitably set up a
telescope, the kind you used to get on seaside piers, in one of the razed sites and trained it on E14. The telescope stayed unstolen and undamaged; vandals, contrary to expectation – and if you left out the suspiciously too well-organized Jokers, who presumably did not have telescopes on their to do, ha-ha lists – were a rarity. If things are in short supply there is less impulse to destroy, though perhaps more to steal.