4
And just like that, my world changed.
Previously I couldn’t get people to read my blog at gunpoint. On the third day, it crashed from too much traffic, and the stories kept coming. Suddenly I was the go-to-guy if you wanted to leak about impending legal black holes and the government’s apparent obliviousness – studied or otherwise – to the same. I no longer had time to sit around drinking my head off with off-duty dominatrixes. It was as much as I could do to escape to St James’s Park for half an hour to eat a bagel and once again text Cerys an apology for not being able to meet up again.
Maybe that was a good thing. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her about the whole Derek situation, largely because I’d spent the weekend with my dick in the Derek situation.
That, as it turned out, was a huge mistake, because the Derek situation was slippery, manipulative and almost certainly the reason why I was suddenly so busy. I’d suspected as much from the start, but a glance at that morning’s papers had offered an obvious clue as to how that initial leak had ended up in my inbox at that particular time.
He’d texted me before I had time to unwrap my bagel, and now I sat alternating bites with anxious glances at my phone. He said he’d meet me and I had to meet with someone at the Independent by two.
About ten minutes after he texted, I spotted Derek hurrying across the blue bridge in St James’s Park, ducking ‘lucky heather’ sellers and rounding a crowd that had gathered – at a safe distance - around one of the park’s famous pelicans.
“Jesus,” he said, joining me on the bench. “Look at the size of that thing. It’s like a fucking dinosaur.”
“They are dinosaurs. Didn’t you see the end of Jurassic Park?”
He squeezed my knee and smiled. It was an overcast day and his hair looked almost auburn in this light. He was wearing another one of his beautifully cut suits, a dark blue mohair that I was sure cost the best part of a grand, but the cost didn’t impress me. No, what impressed me was what was under that expensive tailoring, because I had been all over that. Over and under and inside and outside and every which way. After our little bondage misunderstanding Derek had explained to me that we didn’t have to do anything like that if I didn’t want to, and that we could also have a good time having regular, non-kinky sex.
Nobody whipped out the handcuffs and nipple clamps that weekend, but we’d explored plenty of other avenues of depravity.
“Are you avoiding me?” he asked.
“No. I’m just busy. Everything seems to be happening at once. Ça plane pour moi, as Plastic Bertrand would have it.”
“Ooh. Nice French accent.”
“Thank you.”
“So,” he said. “When can I see you again?”
“Aren’t you seeing me now? I thought you were terribly busy.”
“I am.”
“Well, so am I,” I said. “It seems like everyone wants a piece of me right now. Would you happen to know anything about that?”
“About what?” said Derek, playing dumb, which didn’t suit him. Plenty of MPs were thick as pigshit, but not him. On Sunday he’d had a call from one of his old Eurocrat friends – now writing for Der Spiegel – and he’d effortlessly switched between English and German several times throughout the conversation. By the time he’d finished I was convinced that German could be as potent a language of lust as French or Italian.
“You know what,” I said. “My sudden upwards career trajectory. Previously I was like walking proof of how that whole thing about Jews controlling the media is nothing more than an anti-Semitic myth. I was never part of the clique. Not in the bubble.”
He shook his head. “You had a good story, at a timely moment…”
“Timely is right. Just as you had a private members bill in the works.”
Derek plastered a blank expression onto his face. “What?”
“Don’t be disingenuous,” I said. “Your private members bill is about guaranteed protections for the rights of the elderly and infirm. Correct?”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“No. Nothing. It’s just that it’s a coincidence that it happened to be up for ballot the same week this story broke,” I said. “Otherwise you’d have to present it to the house or go through all that ten minute rule nonsense. And the private members bills that come through the ballot system–”
“–have a better chance of succeeding,” said Derek. “Yes. What’s the problem? It’s a very good bill, as it happens. It’s going to provide legal protection for a great many vulnerable people.”
I sighed, frustrated. It would have been a lot easier to be angry with him if his bill had been about the right to club stray puppies to death or recycle anyone earning less than twenty thousand a year as fertilizer, but it was a good bill. And if it succeeded then the government would never be able to pull off any dirty tricks like the proposed Dementia Tax ever again. But it was the principle of the thing, and I had to draw the line. “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to ask you straight out. Did you use me to flack your private members bill?”
“Toby, we’ve been through this. I’m not in a position to leak from the Health Department. How could I?”
“You know someone inside the Health Department?” I said. “Disgruntled civil servant, perhaps?” There were enough of those about. Whitehall was at least sixty per cent civil servants, and at least thirty per cent of that sixty existed in a state of near permanent disgruntlement.
He said nothing. Just shrugged. At that moment a pale sun peeked through the clouds and turned the front of his hair to bright autumn fire; it was so hard to be angry with him when I wanted him so much.
“I don’t need a Deep Throat, Derek,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Because I’ve been working on my gag reflex. I mean, I know I’m never going to be able to hold a candle to you, because you can just gulp that thing down like a pelican–”
“–okay. Disgusting similes aside…” Trust him to pretend I meant the Linda Lovelace kind of Deep Throat.
“It’s not disgusting,” he said, waving a hand at the monstrous bird. “It’s nature.”
“It is disgusting,” I said, meaning the pelican. “Have you ever seen one of those things swallow a live pigeon? It’s horrifying.”
He stared at me, appalled. “Live?”
“Yes. There’s flapping. Wriggling.” I sighed. “Look, we’re getting off track here. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want any favours just because I went down on you, okay?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Although while we’re on the subject, how do you feel about favours because you bent me seven different ways over your bed and took me down to Pound Town all weekend?”
“Also that. I’m serious, Derek.”
“So am I,” he said, looking beguiling. “I didn’t think you were allowed to have sex like that over the age of thirty-five. I thought that was the age when you started doing things like taking off your reading glasses, turning out the lights and doing it quietly in the dark.”
I sighed again, still irresistibly horny from our dirty weekend. I think the only time I’d had clothes on was when I’d had to open the door for the take away curry delivery. “Will you please stop fucking flirting with me when I’m trying to tell you off?” I said.
“Fine.” He thinned his lips and composed himself. “Stopped,” he said, but he couldn’t quite squelch the spark in his eyes, and he outright batted his lashes at me.
“Eyelashes,” I said, holding up a finger to point them out.
He took hold of my finger and kissed the tip. “Tonight,” he said. “My place. I’ll cook you dinner. What do you say?”
“I’ll have to bring my laptop.”
“That’s okay. And don’t look so worried. I’m an excellent cook.”
That wasn’t what worried me, but it was easier to let him think that than even try to get into the things that were on my mind right now. People were going to say I was sleeping my way up, since he was hardly discreet. And I still hadn’t got into that whole thing with him and Cerys. Was he still seeing her? I didn’t even dare ask. My first encounter with all that bondage stuff had left me more rattled than I cared to admit. Derek made out that it was just something extreme that he liked to do, the way some people couldn’t feel truly alive unless they were leaping out of aeroplanes or risking death on the slopes of Everest, but I knew it was more than that. There was an emotional dimension here, something fierce and intense and really rather frightening. The extent to which he was willing to make himself vulnerable to me was nothing short of dangerous, because I was still too recently burned to fall in love this fast. And especially not with someone I didn’t understand.
I watched him walk away, giving the pelican a wide berth. He moved with such grace that it was impossible not to mentally undress him. Those long legs and narrow waist. He had that length of bone that spoke of privilege; he’d rowed for Cambridge as an undergraduate and he’d had the perfect body for it. Long limbed, but light, with wiry but powerful shoulders. In bed he sometimes felt like he was all elbows and knees, but then he’d stretch like a cat and my hand would be irresistibly drawn to the smooth planes of his back, his thigh or his hard, flat belly.
My phone rang. It was Cerys.
“Are you busy?” she said. “I feel like I haven’t seen you down the Arse End for ages.”
“I kind of am, yeah.”
“What about tonight?”
“Can’t,” I said. “I’m having dinner with Derek.”
She was silent for a moment, and in that brief gap my jealousy reared up like a monster. This is your cue, I thought. Your cue to tell me what I need to know, and fuck the division between personal and professional. I needed this. I had to know more about him.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh well. Okay. Have a nice time.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying and failing to hide my resentment. “I will.”
*
Derek lived a short walk from Ealing Broadway station, in one of those leafy, West London streets that looked suburban but where most of the houses barely came in at under a million. He had the basement flat of a large Victorian semi-detached, which might have looked gloomy if not for the modern glass box extension that led out onto a below ground patio with round wicker chairs and a series of concrete stepped planters in which herbs grew. The kitchen was sparse and modern, in contrast to the front room, which still had its original tiled fireplace.
“Minton tiles,” he’d said, when he showed me in. “Can you believe it? I was amazed some salvage merchant didn’t spot them. Minton did the ceramics for the Palace of Westminster, you know. He was part of Pugin’s dream team when he did all those fabulous gothic interiors – the Commons, the Lords, the lobbies, the lot. Minton did ceramics, Hardman did glass and I’m sure there was someone else who did the metalwork, but his name escapes me. Take a seat. Make yourself at home. Want some wine?”
I followed him in, past an enormous framed print of John Squires’s Pollock inspired cover for The Stone Roses Made of Stone. Most politicians these days played that unctuous game of pretending to listen to what was cool and current, and then doing things like accidentally pronouncing Jay-Z ‘Jay-Zed’ on Desert Island Discs, causing even shamelessly unhip Radio Four listeners to practically cringe themselves inside out. The Stone Roses were the kind of band that spin doctors advised against admitting to liking, since they dated Derek as one of those crustifying early Millennial/Generation X cusps who still remembered Madchester, Bez, and a time when the Gallagher brothers could almost stand to be in the same building as one another. I was pleased to see that Derek owned his taste well enough to literally nail it to the wall, especially since The Stone Roses eponymous album was up there in my personal top five.
I found myself halfway through a glass of Argentinean Malbec while Derek sliced mushrooms. I’d warned him that the cooking lessons hadn’t taken and he’d said that was fine; he considered home cooking to be a virtuoso performance anyway.
“How was the Independent?” he said, nudging a dish of appetisers towards me. He’d thought of everything. “And have some more. I’m so glad you don’t keep kosher. I don’t think I could function without prosciutto.” He paused mid slice and frowned. “Oh God. Does that sound hopelessly middle class?”
“Afraid so. That’s stage four bougieness right there.”
“Oof. I’m guessing there’s no stage five?”
I took another chargrilled artichoke. “After stage four you level up,” I said. “Evolve. Like a Pokemon.”
“To what?”
“Uh, Marie-Antoinette, I think.”
He laughed. “Fuck. That’s going to play well at the party conference.”
“Right,” I said. “The party conference. You all come back from your summer holidays, run the country for all of about two weeks then piss off en masse to the seaside?”
“Yep.”
“Nice work if you can get it.” I sipped my wine. “Actually the Independent wants to send me to Eastbourne.”
Derek gawped. “The Tory Party Conference? Oh my God. You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. In the middle of all this leak kerfuffle I can’t wait to see how they explain themselves in a town that’s basically a retirement village. Should be a laugh riot. Torches, pitchforks, slow moving mobs on zimmer frames.” I drained my glass. “Except it starts on Sunday and I have to be there early, so…I hope you weren’t making any plans for this weekend?”
“Honestly?” he said. “Haven’t thought that far ahead yet, although now that you mention it, what are you doing the last weekend of this month?”
“Nothing as far as I know. Why? Is that your party conference?”
He shook his head and held out his hand for my wine glass. “That’s the week after. No, this is a wedding. I begged them not to get married during party conference season, but what can you do?”
“People are so inconsiderate like that.”
Derek laughed and handed me a fresh drink. “Come with me,” he said. “I’m short of a plus one. They’re getting married at the Assembly Rooms in Bath. Pure Jane Austen. You’ll love it; it’s beautiful.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “But I don’t know them.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll be with me.”
“I don’t know. It sounds very much like…a couple sort of thing.”
He looked me straight in the eye, his eyes dark gold and full of a warmth that made my knees go weak. “It is,” he said, taking the glass from me and setting it aside so that he could pull me into an embrace. “There’ll be champagne and flowers and music and dancing. Very romantic.”
I nearly said something about his idea of romance involving clothes pegs, but then he kissed me, a soft, slow kiss with the barest flicker of tongue. To this day I’m not sure how I remained standing. My spine – as Sugar from Some Like It Hot would have it – had turned to custard.
“Okay,” I said.
He smiled and kissed me again. “Good. Was that so hard?”
I pulled him closer. “Something is.”
“Uh uh. I’m cooking. We’ll get to that later.”
Chastened but still glowing, I retreated to the other side of the kitchen counter. I watched him as he peeled, halved and effortlessly diced an onion, so fast that my eyes didn’t even have time to start watering. “There,” he said, talking more to himself than me. “Think we’re almost good to go.”
He turned to take a chunk of parmesan from the fridge, then opened a cupboard and peered into it. Obviously not finding what he was looking for, he moved onto the next.
“I don’t know how you do that,” I said, still absurdly impressed by the way he’d tackled that onion. I knew how it was supposed to work; I’d been through it in a dozen or more classes. You cut it, chopped slits one way towards the top of the bulb, turned it around and chopped crossways, only whenever I attempted this most basic of culinary tricks it always ended in tears and/or bloodshed. Literally.
“I wish I could cook,” I said, as Derek moved onto the next cupboard. “I think I’m missing a gene or something.”
“Well, where the fuck is that?” he muttered, and slammed the cupboard door.
“What are you looking for?”
“Cheese grater,” he said, ducking to look in the cupboards below. As he lowered his head I saw that his expression was far more bewildered than it should have been over something so trivial. “Where the fuck did I put the fucking thing?” He exhaled. “There it is. What the hell is it doing in there?”
He straightened up and gave a brief ‘silly me’ sort of smile, but for a moment there he had looked really and truly lost. Scared, even.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Fine. Sorry. I just…I hate losing things. Makes me feel like I’m going insane when something isn’t where I’m sure I left it.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “My ex used to put things away in the wrong cupboards all the time. Then tell me that they should have been in there all along and that I was putting them away in the wrong place. Just one of the many forms of gaslighting that came to him as easily as breathing.”
Derek took the grater and started on the parmesan. “Is this the same charmer who bought you cooking lessons for your birthday?”
“Yep.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but that sounds like a very passive-aggressive birthday present.”
“It was,” I said. “And it wasn’t. I did tell him I wanted to learn, but he had a knack of making everything feel like a rebuke.”
“How long were you two together?”
“Oh, three years? Nearly four, I think. Anyway, we ended it over a year ago. Or rather I did.”
Derek set a pan on the stove and poured in olive oil. “What happened?”
“A number of things,” I said. “Mostly trivial, but it all added up to the same thing: I was sick of him manipulating my emotions. He was extremely bright, and he always knew how to make me feel stupid or small or guilty. And I’d be angry with him for doing it, but then he’d turn around and be so, so sweet.” My throat ached suddenly and I realised what I was saying. I was flat out telling him the things I feared. The ways in which he could hurt me. “And I’d fall for it. Every time. Right up to the day when I didn’t.”
He tossed a piece of chicken into the pan. It sizzled. “What was it?” he said. “That made you draw the line?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I did. I remembered it very clearly. Cerys – her large brown eyes starting to swim in their sockets as she approached the bottom of her second or third Long Island Iced Tea, her tongue uncharacteristically loose. Some guys, she’d said. They come in for the mindfuck. It’s got nothing to do with sex as you or I would understand it. They just want to pay someone who will mess with their heads.
But I didn’t tell him that. I still hadn’t figured out how I felt about this weird triangle, if that’s what it was, although on the way over my resentments had crystallised into something approaching certainty. Cerys needed to fire him as a client. That’s what she’d do, if she cared about me.
We sat down to a meal of excellent home-cooked marsala chicken, and the conversation drifted from food to Bath, to Jane Austen and the new ten pound note and then onto who he’d put on the money if he had his way. “Sid James,” he said. “And Barbara Windsor’s tits. If we’re determined to turn into a nation of cartoon characters then we might as well go all the way.”
I laughed, conscious that I was about to step on territory that might needed to be proceeded by a firm ‘off the record’. After all, he was still a politician and I was still a member of the press. “What about you?” I said.
“Me? No, I don’t think I’m going to end up gracing the currency any time soon.”
“No. That’s not what I meant. I meant going all the way. A lot of people are saying that you want that.”
He seemed to digest that for a moment and then met my gaze with a small, lopsided smile. “You want me to say it, don’t you?”
“It would be off the record.”
“Fine,” he said. “I do. I want it. I want to be the first gay prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”
“Openly gay.”
“Well, yes. We never did quite figure out what was going on with Ted Heath.”
“Or Margaret.”
He laughed. “Her? A lesbian? That’s a good one. She fucking hated women. Wouldn’t have them in her cabinet, never mind her bedroom. Besides, sex is a normal, joyous human experience, and we all know how much she hated those.”
“Well, I’d vote for you,” I said. “If I lived in your constituency.”
Derek actually blushed. “You don’t have to say that just because you’re having sex with me.”
“I’m not,” I said, reaching for a piece of leftover garlic bread. “I read your bill. If it succeeds then it’s going to be something you can feel justifiably proud of.”
He shook his head. “It’s not about me. It’s about the people it’s going to protect. And don’t look so surprised. I know I’m a politician, but I am allowed small moments of human decency.”
“I wasn’t looking surprised. I just bit down on a really big chunk of garlic.”
“Too much?”
“No. I like garlic. And that was delicious.”
“Thank you,” he said, and leaned forward a little. “I do give a shit, you know.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about cooking or legislation, so I said nothing. And I was glad I did, because his expression sobered somewhat.
“I don’t want anyone to have to go through what my mother went through,” he said. “That’s why I wrote it. It’s bad enough seeing someone you love fall apart, but when at every turn you’re hammering on doors asking for help – from the people who are supposed to help in these situations – only to find yourself faced with five million forms and a maze of red tape. And a refusal at the end. It’s…just…well. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
“What happened?” I asked. I knew it was fairly recent, but that was all I knew.
“Alzheimer’s,” he said.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”
He sighed. “It was awful. So often it seems to take from the people who have the most to lose, intellectually speaking. My mother was a professor of Psychology and Behavioural Science at LSE.”
I took his hand. He squeezed my fingers gently, but didn’t look up. “It started with stupid little things,” he said. “Like she’d spend a bit longer hunting for her car keys. Or one time we had a conversation about a film – Julie Walters was in it. That was it. She drew a blank on Julie Walters’s name, like people do sometimes. And I said I knew who she meant, but that wasn’t it, she said. She seemed really angry about it, that she had this blank space in her memory. Like nothing was ever there, she said.”
He took a sip of wine and met my eyes. “I didn’t see it, Toby,” he said. “I didn’t see her reaction for what it was, even though I do the exact same thing. If I’m scared, I blow up. Lose my temper. We were wired identically in that regard. Fight and flight just mashed together. And I didn’t fucking see it.”
I pulled my chair closer and put an arm around him, running a hand up and down his upper arm. He sounded close to tears, and when he spoke again he did so quietly, rapidly, as if he couldn’t get the words out without exerting some kind of superhuman control over himself.
“She called me one night. Speaking really strangely. Like, slowly. Deliberately. Over enunciating everything. And she said ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but I need you to stay calm and come and pick me up, because I think I might have had a small stroke.’” He squeezed my hand again. “Like I said, she was a very bright woman. She’d started training as a doctor before she twitched to Psych and she knew what was going on. Transient ischemic attack – what they call a ‘mini stroke’. Usually a sign that something has either gone wrong in the brain or is about to go wrong, often catastrophically.”
He took a breath. “So I drive her to the hospital and they start asking all of the usual questions they ask if you’ve had some kind of brain event. Any history of epilepsy, seizures and so on. And then it all comes out – that she’s been zoning out for a while now. Just brief moments, sometimes not even a full minute at a time. Absence seizures, they call them. They used to call them petit mal seizures, minor electrical disturbances in the brain. And obviously if you start having them for no apparent reason like a head injury then it’s a problem. They wanted to check her out for the TIA anyway, so it was time for the full battery of neurological tests and scans. And I’m thinking the worst. I’m thinking tumour. Something big and inoperable.”
I ran my hand over his hair, trying to imagine the pain he must have been going through. My own indestructible mother taught special needs students in Harlow and I could see how coming up close and personal with his mother’s fragility must have hurt and frightened Derek. His mother, like mine, sounded like one of those monolithic women who – without even trying – constantly remind you that they were once Mummy, capital M, the centre and beating heart of your small and brand new universe.
“They did the tests,” he said. “And then this neurologist – looked about fourteen years old – came out and said ‘Do you have a family history of Alzheimer’s?’ And then it all came crashing down at once. It had been going on for a while, apparently. She’d kept it from me. I mean, how does that even fucking happen, Toby? How self-absorbed do you have to be not to notice that your own mother has holes in her brain?”
“Derek, no. Don’t do that to yourself.”
He pulled my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles, then held it tight over his heart. I could feel him shaking slightly.
“You’re doing a good thing,” I said. “Out of the best of intentions. And she would be so, so proud of you.”
He blinked back tears. “I know.”
I kissed his forehead. “You want some more wine?”
Derek gave a teary, snotty laugh. “God, no. I’ll get weepy drunk, and nobody wants that.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
He kissed me on the mouth. His lips tasted of salt. “Toby…”
“Mmm?”
“Do you mind if we don’t make love tonight? I feel a bit too…fragile, somehow.”
“No,” I said, my heart hurting in a way I knew meant that I was falling too fast. “I don’t mind.”