It wasn’t much to ask for, an apology, but to men of honour even a small sign of contrition can heal so many festering wounds. Amadeus stood in the rain, at one of those turning points that mark a man’s life and throw his future unto the hazard, looking up and down this foreign-infested street, and decided upon his course. It was time for action, in the tradition of any wronged British soldier.
He would write a letter. To the Daily Telegraph.
Less than half a mile away from the cracked paving stone on which Amadeus stood resolving to change the world, Thomas Goodfellowe was entering upon a personal crisis of his own. The rain had hesitated and he decided to avoid the scramble for taxis in New Palace Yard after the House had adjourned. With a wary eye cast at the low clouds swooping overhead, the Honourable Member for Marshwood unlocked the chain securing his bicycle – it wasn’t safe nowadays, even left in Speaker’s Court – and resolved to risk the ten-minute ride back to his apartment in Chinatown.
He needed the fresh air. The last two hours had been spent in the manner of a small schoolboy on detention duty, wriggling in discomfort on his seat while he endured a debate about the war against drugs. The war was going exceedingly well, according to the Minister, a former car assembly worker by the name of Prosser who had MUM tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and DAD on the other, a diminutive man who kept rising and falling on the tips of his toes as though peering over the top of a trench under enemy fire. Drug seizures had declined sharply in the last year – proof positive, in the Minister’s view, that the smugglers and cartels no longer saw Britain as a soft touch, scared away by sniffer dogs and the force of his own Napoleonic will. His new shoes squeaked in acclamation.
Trouble was, this was the self-same Minister who, a year previously, had bobbed up and down at the Despatch Box to claim credit for a sharp increase in drug seizures, ‘unambiguous evidence,’ he had claimed at the time, of his ‘commitment in the war against these weeds of evil’.
Fair enough, Goodfellowe had concluded, consistency in politics was usually nothing more than evidence of a closed mind, but in Prosser’s case it seemed scarcely a mind at all. The man hadn’t the wit to appreciate the absurdity of his logic, nor the grace to laugh it off when it was brought to his attention. Goodfellowe had done so, brought it to his attention, intervened in jovial fashion to remind the House of the words the Minister seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.
The Minister, however, had been unappreciative. His eyes narrowed, his knuckles cracked, Mum had chased Dad around the Despatch Box and Goodfellowe had been reduced to parliamentary pulp. Such was the prerogative of Ministers. And the lot of backbenchers.
Goodfellowe had shuffled tediously through the final Division Lobby feeling much like a cow passing through the gates of a milking shed. It had been a long night and several of his colleagues were showing unmistakable symptoms of ‘the staggers’, the parliamentary equivalent of BSE in which the victims stumble aimlessly about their democratic duties, particularly after a heavy dinner – although the political variant of the disease rarely proved fatal. Many members had been known to survive in that condition for years. Thank God they had the Whips to prod them along and to take over when their own faculties failed.
Particularly Whips like Battersby.
Battersby was an oversized man with a figure like a deflating balloon and a face that brought to mind a cauliflower. A couple of outer leaves stuck out from the top of the cauliflower in passing imitation of hair. The Battersby mind could never be described as broad but, in the exercise of his duties, it was extremely singular. He was what was known as the Whip of Last Recourse. It was his function to deal with those Members who had reached that point of utter confusion in which they started rambling about ‘conscience’ and ‘principle’ and refused the invitation to enter the milking shed. At that stage Battersby would reach into his badly cut and over-large jacket and pull out a little black book. The production of this well-thumbed volume was a gesture that inspired remarkable piety, for in it were recorded all the known telephone contacts for that particular Member. Starting with The Wife, of course. Then The Parliamentary Secretary. Also The Constituency Agent. In the case of an alcoholic, the book held the number of The Doctor or The AA Group, and with a gambler, perhaps even The Accountant or The Bookmaker.
But the most potent entries in that little black book seemed to be those numbers that a Member struggled to keep most private – the ‘OI’ numbers, as they were referred to in Battersby’s shorthand. What those in the Whips’ Office called ‘the numbers of the night’. The places where the Member was mostly likely to be found in the hours after the sun had set. The numbers of The Mistress or The Lover.
In Battersby’s book and in his meticulous script, these names were divided into two categories and marked as either ‘OI-1’ or ‘OI-2’. These categories differentiated between ‘Occasional Indiscretion’ and ‘Ongoing Involvement’. Of course, the collection of these numbers was more of a hobby than a necessity since all his Members had waistband pagers by which they could be contacted, but Battersby liked to keep ‘that little personal touch’, as he explained it.
The errant Members themselves were marked with an ‘FU’ designation. ‘FU-1’ indicated ‘Family Unaware’, thereby rendering the Member open to coercion. These Members he liked, even had affection for, so far as his politics allowed. But he drew the line at the ‘FU-2s’. From Battersby’s point of view, those marked with the awesome ‘FU-2’ branding were outcasts, worthy only of eternal exile or – still better – execution as soon as an appropriate scaffold could be nailed together, for it indicated the small number of Members who had not only sniffed at the skirts of perversion but who had grabbed at them and lifted them high. These were the most dangerous of parliamentary colleagues, the Members who were in the habit of switching off their pagers. Who were ‘Frequently Untraceable’. And therefore ‘Fundamentally Unreliable’. And many other things besides.
All were recorded, noted down in Battersby’s lexicon of lusts. His diagnostic skills were something of a legend; a Member need only to have tarried for a few hours beneath a duvet he hadn’t bought himself and Battersby would have discovered not only the number of the bedside telephone but even the tog-value of the duvet. Production of the dog-eared manual at the regular surgery he held in the Whips’ inner sanctum had a similar effect to a cattle herder producing a revolver – cures amongst those beasts afflicted by the disease of conscience proved almost miraculous.
Battersby was a bully. Goodfellowe found him breathing down his collar as he waited his turn in the milking shed.
‘Still shagging that waitress, Goodfellowe?’ Battersby enquired, addressing the back of Goodfellowe’s neck. It was meant without undue maliciousness, almost as humour, as one might have asked after a result at tennis, but Goodfellowe had already played the victim once that evening and was in no mood for a rematch.
‘Did you have garlic for dinner, Alfred?’ Goodfellowe responded, not bothering to turn round. He sniffed. ‘Yes, definitely garlic. And Guinness.’
‘Something’s taking your eye off the plot,’ the Whip growled, responding in kind, his tongue working around his teeth as though in search of a lost sweet. ‘Must be the waitress. ‘Bout time you came round, old chum, and remembered the first duty of every backbencher.’
‘Which is?’
‘To be loyal to his Prime Minister, of course.’
‘And his second duty?’
The question seemed to startle Battersby. ‘Hell, there’s a second?’
Goodfellowe at last turned to face his pursuer. ‘Ever wondered why they keep you in the Whips’ Office, Alfie? Why they never give you a proper job or allow you out amongst real people?’
‘It’s because I’m loyal. An inspiration to others.’
‘It’s because if you fell ill in the outside world they wouldn’t know whether to take you to a hospital or the Natural History Museum.’
‘Don’t push it, sunshine.’
‘And