Nocturne Read online

  ‘Tell me about the Politics Society. How come you ended up President?’

  ‘I wanted it,’ I said simply. ‘So I lobbied hard.’

  ‘Big majority?’

  ‘Best ever.’

  ‘And did it live up to your expectations? Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Get lots of the big guys down? For the debates?’

  I nodded, naming half a dozen prominent politicians. Under my stewardship, the left had been more heavily represented than usual, a fact that seemed to amuse him.

  ‘You feel comfortable in that kind of company?’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘How about the Tories?’

  ‘Loathsome. Pond life with ties.’ He smiled.

  ‘Are you always this candid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pressed me for more names. I listed a couple of junior ministers who’d deigned to appear for our end-of-term thrash. One of them he evidently knew well.

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘We didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  For the second time, I wondered just how candid he wanted me to be. A couple of minutes’ banter had altered my first impressions. Behind the seeming arrogance and the blunt one-liners, he was a good deal more perceptive than I’d thought. He also paid me the compliment of serious eye contact, something that few men - in my experience - will risk.

  He still wanted to know about the junior minister.

  ‘He was infantile,’ I said, ‘in every conceivable respect.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like politically. Like socially. Like conversationally. Women be- longed on a different planet. He was barely out of the egg.’

  ‘Did he try it on?’

  I raised an eyebrow, not bothering to suppress a laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Since you ask.’

  ‘And?’

  I looked away for a moment. The houses across the street were in deep shadow.

  ‘We put these guys up for the night,’ I said, ‘if they really insist. There’s a little private hotel we use. It isn’t the Ritz but I don’t think he was interested in room service.’

  ‘So how did you handle it?’

  ‘I told him to fuck off, politely of course.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘He had no choice.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shook my head at last, refusing to go any further. It wasn’t my job to fuel this inquisitive man’s fantasies, though his Tory chum had been so legless that even a child could have fought him off.

  Brendan was back in the CV again, his interest in my sex life evidently at an end.

  ‘Windsurfing,’ he mused. ‘What does it take to get to the nationals?’

  ‘Practice.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘More practice.’

  ‘Are you always so forthcoming?’

  ‘No, it’s just…’ I was still thinking about his previous line of questioning,’… how much do you really want to know?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ The sudden grin transformed his face again. ‘I’ve never tried it. It looks bloody wonderful and I always tell myself I’ll have a go but somehow never get round to it. I need a bit of incentive, someone who knows what they’re doing .. .’

  He let the sentence trail away. I grinned back, playing dumb.

  ‘It’s like riding a bike,’ I told him. ‘You do it, and you do it, and you do it, and one day it just happens.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yes. It’s about balance. And confidence, too. You’d be fine.’

  I began to warm to the subject, moving briskly through the stages that had taken me from novice to runner-up in the National Slalom. In this respect, Poole Harbour had been heaven-sent, God’s gift to board-crazies like me.

  Brendan had abandoned the CV and was leaning back in the chair, his hands behind his head, his feet on the desk. His eyes had an extraordinary frankness and he couldn’t have made it plainer that he fancied me. I was telling him about a friend of mine, a serious contender for the Sydney Olympics, when he interrupted.

  ‘We’re doing a new series,’ he said, ‘and we’re looking for a researcher.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A researcher. A fixer. A gofer. A meeter and greeter.’ A languid hand indicated the Luvvies poster on the wall behind his right shoulder. ‘It’s a political version of that. Thought you might be interested.’

  I heard myself stalling, playing for time, asking for more details. I’d come to London to change the face of social documentary. This man wanted me to tart around while politicians made fools of themselves. He was telling me about the meeting he’d just had with some commissioning executive. The working title for the new programme was Members Only and the people at the Beeb thought the concept was brilliant. Politicians would role-play their way through carefully scripted situations, each tailored to their particular foibles. The risks were pretty obvious but, politicians being what they were they’d gamble anything for the exposure. The series, said Brendan, would roar away. The bloody thing couldn’t fail.

  ‘I’m not quite sure I.. .’

  Brendan leaned forward across the desk.

  ‘You can,’ he said, ‘I know you can.’

  ‘But I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘Why not?’ He had his hand out for the video. I gave it to him. ‘This is OK, as far as it goes, but if you’re serious, really serious, then you have to be around these guys, understand the way they work, what drives them, what keeps them at it.’

  ‘Ego,’ I said at once. ‘And money.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ He was smiling now, indulgent this time, the kindly uncle. ‘But it doesn’t end there, believe me. These guys are more complex than they seem and, like it or not, they matter.’ He tapped the cassette. ‘If you’re really interested in change, in doing something, then you have to start at the top. You want to change the world? Fine. You think the guys we elect are a load of wankers? Terrific. But get to know them first. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Rule number one.’

  Listening to him, it occurred to me that we appeared to have swopped roles. He was pitching. I was playing hard to get.

  ‘What about afterwards?’ I said carefully.

  ‘We do another series.’

  ‘I meant me,’ I nodded at the cassette. ‘And all those ideas I sent you.’

  Brendan looked at me for a long time. Then the smile was back. ‘We’ll see,’ he said softly. ‘But first things first, eh?’

  Back home, in Petersfield, my mother was delighted. So delighted, she offered to pay for the van I’d need to hire to ship my stuff up to London. Thus far, I hadn’t given much thought to where I might live, but once the Doubleact offer was in writing, I knew I had to get myself organised. The series was already in pre-production. Brendan Quayle was insisting I start no later than 1st November. Time was short.

  I spent the best part of the next week in London, camping out on Nikki’s living-room floor. Nikki was my best girlfriend. We’d been together down in Bournemouth and - lucky thing - she’d already got herself a job on a new fashion magazine. Her flat was over in Chiswick and I left every morning after breakfast, taking the tube to the Angel and schlepping from estate agent to estate agent, looking for a place to rent.

  The first shock was financial. Down in Bournemouth, I’d been used to paying £150 a month for a room. Up here, that kind of money wouldn’t buy me a bus shelter. By lunchtime on day one, my dreams of a studio flat in Islington had withered on the vine. They were certainly available, and some of them sounded really nice, but at £650 a month they were way past my limit. With my trusty A-Z, I began to work north, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, amazed at how slowly the rents came down. Even one-bedroomed flats in Sto
ke Newington would have stretched me to the limit. Finally, depressed by yet another afternoon of trudging round damp, badly converted bedsits, I phoned my mother. It might, I suggested, be cheaper to commute.

  ‘Have you thought about buying?’ she said at once.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t got the money. For the deposit.’

  ‘How much would you need?’

  I did the calculations. Up around Tottenham, only that day, I’d seen places going for £48,000.

  ‘They normally ask for five per cent.’ I said. ‘That’s £2,460.’

  ‘When would you want it?’

  ‘Now.’

  My mother gave the proposition a moment or two’s thought then told me the money was mine. I could pay her back on a monthly basis. We’d work the figures out later.

  Next morning, newly bold, I was back in Tottenham Green. The streets off the High Road were full of ‘For Sale’ signs but most of the places looked grim. I was beginning to wonder whether I couldn’t afford a bigger mortgage when - late in the afternoon - I found exactly what I’d been looking for.

  The street was a cul-de-sac, a hundred metres or so from end to end. At the top was a major road; at the bottom, sealing the street off from the cemetery beyond, a pitted brick wall. Adjoining the brick wall, on the north side of the street, was an end-of-terrace house, two stories, with big square bays up and down. The foot or two of garden between the house and the front wall had been covered with crudely poured concrete, and the ‘For Sale’ board was sagging where someone had nicked the loop of wire securing it to the gatepost, but I liked the warm red colour of the bricks and the double bays were capped with a nice piece of stonework in the shape of a Dutch gable.

  I stepped back into the road, consulting the details I’d picked up at the estate agents. The house had been subdivided into two flats and it was the bottom half that was for sale. The window frames needed a lick of paint, and the front door had seen better days but the road was unquestionably quiet and I liked very much the idea of being in a cul-de-sac. Best of all was the price. For a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, the agents were asking just £43,000.

  I returned an hour and a half later with the key. Inside, while the woman from the estate agency did her best to secure a broken window catch at the back of the house, I prowled from room to room, my initial hunch confirmed. Like so many terrace houses, the property was bigger than it seemed, stretching back along a dark, narrow hall that smelled, very faintly, of disinfectant. The two bedrooms were a bit of a cheat, a crude subdivision of a once-larger room, but the kitchen was a good size and whoever had done the conversion had known a thing or two about bathroom suites. This one was in egg-yolk yellow, one of my all-time favourite colours, and it even boasted a bidet between the pedestal washbasin and the big scalloped bath. By the time the estate agent had finished wrestling with the window catch, I’d made up my mind.

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Very definitely yes.’

  We stepped out into the street and she locked the door behind us. It was nearly dark by now but I could see a blur of little black faces behind the curtains in the house next door. One of them offered a shy wave. I waved back.

  ‘Know anything about the neighbours?’ I inquired.

  The woman from the estate agency looked blank. She couldn’t find her car keys.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Apparently there’s some bloke up top but that’s about the size of it.’

  I nodded, another little query answered. Nice to have company, I thought, waving at the kids again and wondering vaguely about the man upstairs.

  It took longer than I’d thought to move in. The mortgage people demanded a survey and the surveyor’s insistence on various ‘structural adjustments’ took my mother’s loan to £4,850 before 31 Napier Road was legally mine.

  By now it was early December and I’d seen enough of the realities of mainstream television to make the prospect of my little hideaway all the more enticing. Doubleact had become a nightmare, a never-ending series of deadlines that seemed to stretch onwards and onwards into some infinite future. Not once at university had it occurred to me that broadcast television might be nothing more than an assembly line, a machine for turning bad ideas into fat profits, but the more people I talked to, the more I realised that this was exactly the way it was. I was working in a factory - exhaustion salted with moments of blind panic - and what made it worse was the fact that I’d finally recognised the logic behind Brendan Quayle’s offer of a job. He’d always made it pretty plain that he badly wanted to shag me. That I could cope with, but what came as a surprise was the realisation that he was offering the same challenge to more or less anyone else who’d demean themselves by appearing on his wretched show. In part, poor sad man, he was using me as a kind of company come-on, a role for which three years at Bournemouth most definitely hadn’t prepared me. Not that I had any intention of playing along.

  I moved into Napier Road on a Saturday, the week before Christmas. We’d partied late on the Friday after a particularly boisterous recording and I’d spent the small hours fighting off a predatory staffer from Conservative Central Office. Because he was so much younger than the rest of them, he seemed to think that conferred special privileges and he’d raised the stakes to a weekend in New York and a chance to meet Michael Portillo before it dawned on him that my knickers were staying on. When I finally got out of his flat he was very drunk and very angry.

  ‘Why the fuck not?’ he shouted down the stairs. ‘Why make it all so bloody personal?’

  Next morning, I left for Petersfield at dawn, badly hungover. I was driving a hire van and had Nikki for company. My brother met us at the other end to help load the one or two bits of heavier stuff and by late morning we were bowling back up the A3, feeling a good deal better. The previous weekend I’d scrubbed the flat out, every single room, and one of the reasons for bringing so little furniture was my determination to strip the doors and sand the floorboards. In my mind’s eye, by early spring, I’d be living in a little minimalist bubble, all varnished pine and fresh flowers, plotting anew my assault on the world of documentary film-making.

  We got to Napier Road in the early afternoon. The heavens had opened and we sat in the van until the shower passed. I remember looking up at the house, wondering why the curtains were never pulled back in the bay window on the top floor. I’d heard someone moving in the top flat the previous weekend, and I’d toyed with going up there and introducing myself, but by the time I got round to it my new neighbour had evidently gone out because there was no answer at his door. Odd, I’d thought at the time, because we had a shared hallway and front door, and I’d heard nothing.

  When the rain stopped, we began to unload the van, carting the cardboard boxes into the house and stacking them in the smaller of the two bedrooms. The house faced south-west. After midday, the front room was flooded with sunshine and this particular afternoon, the clouds gone and the van emptied, we sat on the floor demolishing cheese rolls and toasting the move with a bottle of Cote du Rhone I’d lifted from what my dad used to call his ‘cellar’. Nikki and I were still arguing about my plans for rearranging the kitchen when, for the first time, I became aware of music overhead. It was exquisite, a piece of something classical, light, melodic, almost jaunty.

  Nikki was listening too. She knows much more about music than I do.

  ‘Flute,’ she said. ‘And I think it’s the real thing.’

  ‘What do you mean ?’

  ‘Someone’s playing. It’s not recorded.’

  On cue, as if we’d been overheard, the playing stopped, then started again, picking up a particular phrase, repeating it in a different tempo, first quicker, then slower before returning to the original interpretation, busying along, a perfect musical echo of the way we happened to be feeling.

  We were drinking the w
ine out of plastic picnic mugs, the only ones I could find. Nikki raised hers.

  ‘Trust you,’ she said. ‘Most of us have to put up with head bangers and ghetto blasters.’

  I grinned, touching mugs. Everything was slipping nicely into place. I don’t think I’d felt so happy for years.

  Nikki left late that night. We’d got the back bedroom into some kind of order and unpacked most of the cardboard boxes. I’d already hired a guy to put a couple of extra shelves up in the kitchen and we’d distributed my meagre collection of spices and pickle jars to add a bit of colour to the bare white walls. Tomorrow, Nikki would be back with her two cats. She was off to South Africa for six months on a fashion assignment and I’d volunteered to look after them while she was away. After putting up with me for nearly six weeks, it was the least I could do.

  Way past midnight, I went to bed. Even with the few bits and pieces I’d brought up from Petersfield, the place already felt like home. Like a favourite old sweater, it fitted beautifully, snug and warm and unaccountably familiar, and I lay under the duvet, listening to the ticking of the central heating pipes, wondering just what I’d done to deserve such a perfect landfall. The second bedroom, I’d decided, would make an ideal study. I’d buy a flatpack desk, and line the walls with all the books I’d never had time to read at university, and if I played my cards right with Brendan, I was sure I could borrow one of the Doubleact laptops. At that point, with the door closed on the world, I could get down to some serious work, developing various documentary ideas, lashing together a raft of submissions that would float me away from the cesspit of late-night adult entertainment. I smiled, tallying the ideas in my head, getting them into some kind of order, and the last thing I remember before drifting off to sleep was the sound of the flute again, somewhere overhead, two notes only, the softest imaginable touch.

  I awoke later than usual, pulling on a pair of old tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt before filling the electric kettle in the kitchen. At the top of the road, by the bus stop, I’d noticed a newsagent’s that was bound to sell milk and I was out of my flat and halfway down the communal hall before I registered the flowers. They were lying on the floor outside my door, a bunch of blue flag iris, beautifully wrapped, ribboned and bowed. I picked them up. There was a plain white card tucked inside. In purple italic script, it read ‘Welcome Home’. I turned the card over. There was no name, just the message.