High society (37 page)

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, WESTMINSTER

I
t was, as Peter Paget and the Prime Minister had both predicted, one of the most radical and reforming monarch’s speeches in the history of the British Parliament. George VI, Queen Elizabeth’s father, had announced the nationalization of health and medicine; Edward VII, her great-grandfather, had delivered the great Liberal reforming budget that introduced old-age pensions, but nothing had ever quite electrified the country and indeed the entire world as the speech prepared by Peter Paget, Minister for Drugs, for Elizabeth II to deliver.

‘My government,’ she said, ‘will introduce legislation to legalize, license and control all recreational drugs.’

Peter Paget had achieved that thing denied to most men and women: he had fulfilled his destiny.

SIMPSON’S RESTAURANT

A
fter the State Opening of Parliament, Peter hosted a splendid lunch for family, colleagues and friends at Simpson’s on the Strand. When the Paget family entered the restaurant every diner in the room rose to applaud them. There was a genuine sense of celebration in the air. The general consensus was that Britain had finally broken the terrifying deadlock which the drugs war had imposed upon society for so long. Once more the British were world leaders, and, whatever the future held, at least something new was finally being tried. Of course there were many doubts, the greatest fear being that young people would simply descend into a life-long drug-induced stupor, but in reality people asked themselves, How likely is that? The nation was not continually drunk, and the use of tobacco, one of the most highly addictive drugs of all, was on the decrease. The popular presumption was that if a man of such obvious intelligence and integrity as Peter Paget, a man who could produce such an extraordinary daughter as Cathy Paget, felt that all would be well, then surely all would be well. Besides, as was said over and over again on that happy day, really, who cared how many drug addicts there were as long as they were not breaking into one’s home and mugging one’s granny for a fiver?

At the end of the meal Peter Paget rose to make a speech.

‘Today, as you all know, is a very special day for Britain and in particular for me. I have been truly fortunate in having been able to be the guiding hand in what is clearly a world-historical piece of legislation. Many kind voices have been joined in my praise and I cannot deny that it is sweet indeed to suddenly find oneself loved and admired after so many years of feeling that one’s voice would never be heard. But today as we sit here, family, friends and colleagues, I should like to state unequivocally that I do not deserve one iota of the praise and good wishes that have been heaped upon me. For whatever the country owes me,

I owe tenfold to my wife, Angela, and so it is in Angela’s debt not mine that the country now finds itself.’

There was of course much cheering at this, although Cathy Paget noted that her mother did not smile or look up.

‘And what I should like to say right here and now is that I am nothing, nothing whatsoever without Angela. She is my life and my love and the enabler of all my happiness. I adore her and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for her kindness and patience in the face of my imbecility and my far too common weaknesses. I love you, Angela, and I’ll love you for ever.’

There was a brief silence. Peter had clearly finished and stood looking at his wife. Angela eventually returned his look with an attempt at a smile, but she seemed strangely unmoved by such a glowing tribute. The assembled company were a little perplexed. Nobody knew what to say. As was now becoming common in the Paget family, Cathy saved the day. She had noted her mother’s apparent unhappiness and she did not understand it. More urgently, however, she had noticed that an embarrassed silence had fallen on what had until then been a very jolly lunch. What was more, the embarrassment was spreading to other tables. Damage control was required, a bit of family spin.

Cathy got to her feet. ‘Dad never did know how to end a speech,’ she said, and then, raising her glass, ‘To Angela and Peter Paget, my mother and father.’

The toast was enthusiastically drunk and the embarrassment passed.

SAMANTHA’S FLAT, ISLINGTON

F
or God’s sake, there must be something! Some small thing proving he’s been here,’ Laura said, her head emerging from beneath Samantha’s bed.

‘He doesn’t deny he’s been here,’ Kurt pointed out rather testily from a stepladder from which he was inspecting the top of a cupboard. ‘He admits he was here many times, working with Sammy. That’s how he’s got away with it.’

‘Look!’ Samantha said. ‘He shagged me in this flat loads and loads of times. We live in a DNA world. He must have left some trace.’

‘What? Cum on the sheets? Sammy, you’re the cleanest woman I ever knew, you wash your sheets every other day.’

‘I know, I know. That’s why I haven’t found anything till now, but we’ve never really looked, I mean really torn the place apart…I don’t know what I’m hoping to find, but we have to search every single millimetre of this flat until we find something — a note, a condom, a hotel check-in receipt signed by the bastard. Something that links him sexually with me!’

And so they searched. Samantha shed tears over every diary entry that she had written about her love for Peter Paget but found nothing in his hand beyond a few discarded parliamentary notes, with not so much as a love heart or swalk scrawled in the margin.

‘It’s quite obvious that he deliberately left no traces from the very start,’ Kurt observed.

They examined every bill and receipt. They looked under carpets, between floorboards and between the neatly piled pairs of spotlessly clean knickers in Samantha’s underwear drawers.

The bastard bought me these,’ Samantha said, holding up the lingerie which had been his first present to her. ‘But I can’t prove it. I’ll throw them out, I think.’

‘I’ll have them,’ Laura said.

Then Kurt pulled the black plastic binliner out of the swingbin in the kitchen.

‘You can’t be going to search that,’ Samantha protested. ‘That’s only the last couple of days’ rubbish. Paget hasn’t been here for ages.’

‘You may have only just thrown something away that was left from his time…I don’t know, a match book with the number of your preferred sex shop on it, a pair of his underpants you’ve been using as a rag…We said we’d search everything.’

‘You’re right, we must,’ Samantha replied, although she was beginning to lose enthusiasm for what was looking like a thankless task. Then she happened to glance into the empty swingbin. Into that unpleasant place normally concealed by the binliner, which in most kitchens means a soiled tissue or two and a squashed carrot made all moist by the rank liquid residue from leaking binliners.

But Samantha’s swingbin was not like that. Samantha emptied her bag long before it burst and leaked. There were never any soiled tissues lurking beneath the bags in Samantha’s bin. It was pristine.

Except not quite. There at the bottom Samantha saw two tiny bits of rubbish. Two screwed-up bits of paper rolled into tiny balls, each not much bigger than a pea. One was the pale yellow of a credit-card till receipt, the other was shiny white — the shiny white of a Switch payment slip.

THE CABINET ROOM, TEN DOWNING STREET

T
he Cabinet were busy discussing how to distribute the predicted cash bonanza that drug legalization would surely bring. Even if tens of billions of pounds were put aside for hospital services on the unproven prediction that addiction would rise dramatically, there would still be countless billions left over.

‘The police will be dripping with surplus,’ the Home Secretary grinned. ‘We won’t have to vote them any more for decades. Same goes for Customs and Excise.’

‘If we make as much out of it as we do from cigarettes,’ the Health Minister gloated, T shall have twenty new hospitals this time next year.’

‘New schools!’ added Education.

‘A new generation of fighter aircraft and a decent medium range missile,’ said Defence.

‘An aid budget we don’t have to be ashamed of,’ Overseas Development added.

‘Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts!’ thundered the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘There’s no point improving people’s lives if the bloody Tories get straight back in and reap the benefits.’

It was at this point that Charlie Ansboro marched in unannounced, strode straight up to the Prime Minister and without a word put a photograph in front of him.

‘What’s this, Charlie?’ the PM enquired, furious at such a perfunctory interruption.

‘Ask — that — cunt — sitting — there,’ Ansboro replied with studied nastiness, pointing his finger at Peter Paget.

The Prime Minister pushed the photograph across to where Peter was sitting. One glance and Peter knew exactly what the photograph was of. He recognized the tiny mole on the rim of the belly-button. He had kissed that small dot many times. The photograph was of his ex-lover’s stomach.

With a sparkling jewel in its navel.

Peter Paget could not reply. Speech had deserted him.

‘Well?’ the Prime Minister enquired once more. ‘What is this?’

Til tell you what it is,’ Ansboro said. ‘It’s Samantha Spencer’s belly-button plus a jewel, a jewel for which Paula Wooldridge of the Daily Bastard now has the Mastercard receipt, a receipt signed by PETER LYING FUCKING BASTARD PAGET!’

Never before had the Cabinet room been the scene of such puerile drama. This majestic apartment of state, the very room from which Neville Chamberlain had announced that Britain was at war with Nazi Germany, was now rocked by horrified protest as one minister after another stared at the photograph.

‘You promised, Peter,’ the Prime Minister said, his voice shaking with fury, ‘that you had not had sexual relations with this woman.’

Peter spoke for the first time since Charlie Ansboro had entered the room.

‘Yes, I did,’ he said, and his voice almost croaked with the effort to keep it steady.

‘Then perhaps you would like to explain to us all what business a man who is not having sex with a woman has giving her a belly button jewel!’

The eyes of the entire Cabinet were fixed on him.

‘I was…fond of Samantha, I admit I gave her the occasional gift…I intended this jewel for her ear…’

‘One ear?’ the Prime Minister enquired.

A little of Peter’s strength was returning. Tough it out. Deny everything.

‘Single earrings are fashionable.’

‘The receipt,’ Charlie Ansboro shouted, banging his fist upon the table, ‘says belly-button ring! For Christ’s sake, you stupid bastard, why didn’t you just buy her a vibrating dildo and make it really obvious?’

Peter Paget breathed deeply. Deny. Deny. Deny.

They were not going to beat him. Make day night and night day, but deny everything.

‘I did not have sexual relations with Ms Spencer,’ he said firmly, ‘and the fact that I bought her a small and entirely innocently meant piece of body jewellery does not change that.’

STARNSTEAD PRISON

M
a name’s Jessie and Ah’m a heroin addict.’

She was healthier now, still a gamine, but her face and figure were fuller. The colour had returned to her cheeks and although she had cut her hair quite short, the deep rich red that flashed from within the black was bright once more. For the first few months that Jessie had been in prison she had continued to take heroin regularly. It was easily available and to her surprise it had been of a rather higher quality than that which she had been used to at the hands of her pimps. It was supplied to her by way of a powerful fixer on her block, who had taken a liking to her. Jessie was not a lesbian but the sexual barter with which she fed her drug habit inside prison was considerably less arduous than that with which she had supplied it outside, and she succumbed to her lover/protector’s advances with the abstracted indifference of one who has long since lost any sense of the sanctity of their own body. Jessie shared her protector’s bunk and together they took their drugs until eventually they decided to try to kick the habit together. It was clear to them both that if by the time they were released from prison they were still junkies, Jessie at least would not survive. Therefore, having undergone a methadone programme that had simply left them addicted to methadone, they had formed their own private prison branch of Narcotics Anonymous.

‘As Ah ran out o’ Goldie’s house makin’ ma second escape from that hellhole in as many months Ah was formulating a radically different plan to the one Ah’d made on ma first bid for freedom. Ah had a long list that first time. Ah can remember going through it one morning with some weirdo who’d tried to nick ma coat. He was a strange one that. Funny how I remember him, though, probably because his thing was pretending tae be Tommy Hanson. I suppose that was how he got through his shitty little rentboy life. Fuck, I settled for just pretending tae be a human being.’

One of the listening group stirred somewhat at this. It reminded her of something, something she’d heard or read.

‘Ma new plan was very simple. Sell Goldie’s bag o’ crack and fuck off tae a new town. That was it, the whole plan. Ah reckoned Ah had at least a grand’s worth but Ah decided Ah’d take seven fifty. And havin’ run for a while Ah literally went up t’the first derelict-lookin’ person Ah found an’ says where can I sell some crack? Who’s a big fuck-off dealer? Well, the fella sends me off down this street full o’ right tough-lookin’ bastards an’ Ah goes up t’the toughest lookin’ o’ the lot an’ says, Ah have a few rocks o’ crack t’sell. Fuck me, but the fella was a cop. Can you believe it? Ah’ve no had a lot o’ luck in my life, have Ah? An’ there’s me tryin’ tae sell crack cocaine tae a copper. Although as it happens, mebbe it was the luckiest break Ah’ve had in a while because he nicked me, o’ course, an’ dealing a grand’s worth o’ crack has got t’be custodial, hasn’t it? So that’s how Ah ended up here, clean for the longest period since first Ah had a taste. An determined tae stay clean for ever more.’