Richard wondered if he’d heard correctly.
‘Again?’ he asked, mildly.
‘He’s only joking,’ Jarvis said, a firm edge to his voice.
‘Yeah, sorry, Richard, just – um – a joke between friends. He’s always sniffing around after money and influence, is our Martin.’
Ben checked his watch. Vintage Rolex, naturally.
‘Right, we should wrap up here.’
Jarvis stood and shoved his hands in his pockets, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of his feet. Watching him, Richard was reminded of a shoot he’d once been on with Hannah. One of her awful posh friends who insisted they get kitted out in tweeds and gilets and tramp around the countryside knocking back tots of whisky and trying to shoot pheasants. The startled birds were ushered into their paths by a group of village locals who had been paid a pittance to thrash the undergrowth with sticks. They were called beaters. It had struck Richard as a fundamentally unfair fight. The pheasants would never be able to win. And the beaters were being exploited, too.
‘Martin just doesn’t get it,’ Jarvis said.
‘What’s that?’ Richard asked. He imagined Jarvis with a stick, beating birds out of the grass and into Ben’s crosshairs.
‘That he’ll never be one of us.’
Recalling this episode now, sitting in Portcullis House and watching his Korean stew congeal, Richard wishes he’d said something. But when Ben and Jarvis were together, ensconced in the trappings of their success, it was difficult to stand up to them. What would he have said? That you couldn’t talk about someone in that way? That it sounded callous and demeaning? That this wasn’t the way to appeal to the electorate? They’d have laughed him out of the room.
Besides, he’s beginning to suspect the electorate like being fucked over.
He’d met a man while filmingShit Happens!who had been blown up by an IED while serving in Afghanistan. The man, now a double amputee, lived in a council flat, repeatedly having to go into hospital for surgical procedures. The operations would require months of waiting and then they’d be delayed or he’d contract a bug on the ward or he’d be discharged too early and become ill at home. Day to day, he relied on benefits but found the forms increasingly difficult to complete. He struggled to make ends meet and had taken to visiting a food bank once a week for tinned goods he could live off over the next seven days. He was a proud man who hated the humiliation. And yet when Richard asked how he voted, the man had said, without a moment’s pause, ‘Conservative. Always have.’ At the time, Richard had been thrilled and asked the producer to get it on camera. But the closer he gets to Ben Fitzmaurice, the more unsettled he starts to feel. There is a rattling unease at the edge of his consciousness, like a pebble in a shoe. He tries to ignore it. He reminds himself that this adjacency to power is what he’s always wanted. He tells himself that politicians have always compromised. Real choices have to be made. Real decisions that might prove unpopular.
Still, he can’t shake the sensation that there’s a darkness to it all, a moral vacuum at the centre. He wishes he could speak to Hannah about it. Hannah would know what to do. Without her, he is a boat cut adrift from its anchor, buffeted by other people’s tides. He knows this and he also refuses to know it, in the same way that he refuses to believe he needs reading glasses. If one simply rejects an idea, Richard thinks, getting up from his table and striding towards Westminster tube with what he hopes is the gait of a more self-confident man, then surely it ceases to exist?
Martin is sitting at one of the corner tables when Richard arrives, a plastic tub of edamame beans in front of him.
‘Martin,’ Richard says, putting out his hand to shake. Martin is wearing a pale grey suit with a pink pocket square. His spectacles aretortoiseshell and both these and the pocket square belong to the class of accessory Richard categorises as ‘arty’.
‘Thank you for meeting me,’ Martin says, sitting back down on a wooden stool that has been clamped with bolts to the floor. There’s a brown folder next to the edamame beans on the table in front of him. Richard’s heart sinks. He knows one of the green-ink brigade when he sees them. Terri usually does a good job of filtering them out – those ranting letters written in fountain pen decrying the lack of village centre parking spaces or the difficulties of getting a doctor’s appointment.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ Richard says. ‘I’ll – uh – get some food.’
‘Please.’ Martin gestures towards the open fridge containing trays of pearlescent sashimi. Richard picks a shredded duck salad that the display informs him contains 756 calories. There is a baffling automated touchscreen that Richard bumbles his way through to pay £7.99 by tapping his phone against a plastic square. He misses the days of cash. You knew where you were with the comforting heft of pound coins.
‘What an interesting jacket,’ Martin says when Richard returns to the table.
‘Oh, yes. Thanks.’
He’s recently employed a personal stylist called Cody. Cody says Richard’s neckline is suited to a Nehru collar. He has, up until this point, agreed with her but now he worries his three-quarter-length linen number, purchased at considerable expense from a high-end department store might look a bit silly.
‘It’s an Indian designer,’ Richard says, unwrapping his chopsticks. ‘Well, sorry, British-Indian, I should say. His parents came over in the seventies. Immigrants. Hardworking, decent people. British born and bred. The designer, I mean, not the parents. They came over from … uh … somewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. With coming over, I mean.’
‘I never said there was.’
‘No, no, of course you didn’t.’ Richard spears a clump of noodles with his chopsticks. ‘Christ, you have to be so careful with what you say these days, don’t you? Hahahahaha.’
Martin Gilmour makes him nervous. Perhaps it’s his coolly assessing stare or the fact that his reactions seem delayed. Perhaps it’s what Ben and Jarvis have intimated about his murky past and his sexual inclinations. Perhaps it’s the facial twitches Richard has noticed – every so often, a slight but noticeable judder of the jaw, like a cat ridding itself of fleas. Or perhaps it’s simply that Richard can’t get a grip on what Martin might be thinking at any given time. His emotions don’t show on his face like normal people’s.
‘Anyway, the jacket pays tribute to his heritage – hence, you know, the collar,’ Richard concludes, feebly.
‘Mm. I suppose one could say that wearing it is a form of cultural appropriation,’ Martin says.
A piece of duck becomes lodged in Richard’s throat.
‘Do you think so?’
