Surveillance

The shakes begin. You’re thinking about what we just did. I see it there in your face, in the bleak, staring blankness in your eyes. You shake in the seat beside me. You shake and stare straight ahead, seeing not the road, not the streetlights, not the houses drifting past as I carefully drive at the speed limit. You’re seeing again what we just did.

I won’t speak. It’s dangerous to speak to a sleepwalker. Dangerous to touch someone who has just fitted. Dangerous to encroach on the private staring horror of someone shaking in the seat beside you. So I look, then look away again.

I am slowing for traffic lights, drawing the car to a halt. You suddenly lurch and grapple frantically with the controls for the car radio. You press buttons, desperate to fill the car with noise, to block out the visions you are seeing of what we just did. The lights are changing, I let out the clutch, smoothly and controlled. You sit hunched forward beside me staring at the red glow from the buttons on the stereo. I did not know when I bought it that it would glow red. It’s a small thing, but irritating all the same. You sit there, hunched and trembling, the shakes have subsided, but you are not still.

I am thinking of the straightness of the road as we drive up through the suburbs, of the flicker of the streetlights up the centre of the windscreen, of the way they briefly bring our faces out of the dark, revealing to me the expression on your face as you sit there beside me trembling. I am thinking of the taste of metal in my mouth when I bit into the KitKat which had a piece of foil melted into the chocolate, and of how you laughed at my attempts to remove it from my tongue. It was a tiny piece of foil, but the taste of it filled my mouth.

The static of the radio begins to grate on me, low level white noise, so I tune in to some local radio station playing big band music, like the sort your dad listens to. I think of him whistling along. I think of him at home, your mum and dad’s house, his home, listening to big band music. I wonder whether you will tell him what we just did.

More lights turn to red, and this time when they change I will turn left, down another straight road, crossing other roads equally straight, until I bring the car to a stop outside your flat. My guess is that we will sit for a while in silence and then you will get out of the car without a word and I will not follow you.

The lights change and I turn the car into School Lane. You start to weep noiselessly, the only sign is the jerk of your body with each gulping, silent sob. I admire this quality in you, to cry so silently and yet so physically. No roar of grief, no wail of misery, no catch in your throat like a cough that will not come. Just shaking gulps of silently drawn breath, and tears wetting your cheeks and falling plumply to your lap.

You know what we have done in a way I somehow don’t. You know it physically. To me it is abstract.

It has rained. The road is still shiny and slightly slick. The air is freshened, the taste of the rain still there. I open the window to let the air into the car and I taste the rain on the edge of my tongue, sharply biting. It brings with it a smell of earth, this rain-freshened air. A smell of earth in a city suburb, like a memory of fields, and suddenly I am tired and want a warm summer evening and a field and to lie down and stare at the sky.

You shiver slightly as the breeze coming in through my window plays across your bare arms, your hands clasped tightly together sitting on top of your knees pressed tightly together. Your tears have finished and the bleak staring blankness is back in your eyes, making them dully black like coat buttons fixed in your face. Your face is set rigid, the skin stretched over it making it seem like marble, or waxed paper like that you used to get on Warburton’s loaves, that you used to use to make the slide slippy down the park.

We have driven down another straight road, across other roads equally straight, and I am turning right now into a leafy street where the large detached houses have been converted into flats, and I am pulling up outside the one containing your flat, beneath the streetlight to the left of the driveway.

My guess earlier was right. We sit for a while in silence, beneath our own yellow-sulphur glowing moon of light, your face made bleaker still by its harsh artificiality. We sit. I have turned the engine off, removed the keys from the ignition, so the radio has finally stopped as well. No more big band music like that your dad listens to.

You fumble with the door release, you can’t get it to work. I lean across you and pull the lever, springing the door open with a dull clunk, or is it a click? Your strong left hand pushes at the door, widening the opening. Your feet are on the still-wet road and your body angles itself out of my car, your large frame unfolding itself. Absently you push the door shut, your back to the car, your arm extended behind you, pushing the door shut as though you are pushing away some memory. You stand there, paused for a moment, then you turn and walk in front of the car so I can watch you through the windscreen. You do not look my way. I watch you walk up the driveway to the house that contains your flat, walking as though in a dream, walking like a somnambulist.

You know what it is we have done. You feel it. To me it is clinical. Hyperreal, and so therefore surreal. I know the theory, you know the fact.

I watch you walk up the driveway and pause at the door while you search out your key then slide it into the lock. The door opens and you pass through it, into your private world. I sit and look at the door after it has closed behind you and I can no longer see you.

The instant you are gone I wish that I had spoken, because now in this instant I know what we have done, and I am frightened. Your quivering bleak realisation next to me in the car as we drove kept me sane, and now I fear madness.

This killing, this rupture, this rending asunder. This is what we have done. You know it, and so do I.

And now four days later, we are here. I have seen you. I can see you now. I am looking, but not looking. I am looking away, away from where you are standing, your face set as you half-listen to the woman in blue with the too bright lipstick. I am looking away and looking at the same time. Are you listening to her words? Are you observing her, that half-smile on your face? Storing her up for future reference? I am looking away, scanning the room without seeing, because all the time I am looking at you, my eyes keep flicking back to check you are not looking my way.

This room is too crowded, all of us here to see the celebrated writer, home again to be fêted by the people he rejected. And here he is now, entering the room in his Nicole Farhi shirt, his Dolce & Gabbana trousers, his DKNY wool jacket. Softly tailored, smoothly confident, smiling his way through the room. All eyes follow him and if he walks near me your eyes will follow too closely and I mustn’t look to see if they do.

The celebrated writer is stepping up onto the podium, is taking his seat. The representative from his publisher’s is fussing around him and smoothly, suavely he is letting it happen. I am looking at him intently, not looking, not seeing, but definite in my attempt not to look at you. I look at him and I can feel myself go almost cross-eyed with concentration, staring impersonally at the slight fleck of grey in his close-cropped hair.

I am listening, but not listening, as he begins to speak about his latest work that will surely be as celebrated as all the rest. I can’t see him losing his touch. He has not lost his conviction. I am listening to the sound of his voice, not listening to his words, trying hard not to think or wonder about what you might be thinking. Whether you are listening but not listening also. Whether you are cataloguing his flaws, his foibles, his fallacies. Whether your guts churn at the thought of what we did.

I look. I can’t resist it. I can’t see you. The woman in blue is still there, over by Authors G-I, leaning against the book shelves, a glass of something in her right hand, elbow resting on her left arm, crossed over the front of her stomach, beneath her chest. I have looked at her just long enough to absorb this, but now too long because she has felt me looking at her and now is looking my way. As her eyes find mine, I flick mine away, too late for comfort, too late for her not to know that I was looking. I look along the shelves of books by authors among whose names mine will not be found. Nor yours either. My eyes scan the half-turned heads of the people listening to the celebrated writer speak.

I can’t locate you. Panic half-rises in my throat. I need to know where you are. I need to avoid your presence. I should not have come here tonight. Not alone. I should have known. We had the same thought.

I decide to leave and then I will not have to think about the possibility of you seeing me. I decide to slip out unobtrusively, hoping my rudeness goes unnoticed by the celebrated writer I came here to see.

He is standing now, the celebrated writer, speaking to his audience, reading selected passages from the book he hopes we will buy, the book people here hope he will sign, wishing to look into his sad hang-dog eyes as he does so.

I want to look into his eyes and tell him it is done.

I am turning, making my way through the people packed into this room behind me. I am cutting my way through, right hand, right arm raised and preceding me, parting the way. I am making my way to the door, to the staircase, to the ground floor and out to the covered courtyard in the centre of the building where news used to be created. I am making my way out and here I am at the door, and there you are just to the left of it. I baulk. I lower my gaze, my head, and walk towards the door, casting a side-ways glance your way. I must look like my neck does not work.

Having pressed my way through the tight-packed people, here only to see the celebrated writer, and withstood their distracted huffs and tuts, having offered up muttered apologies, alluding to a sorrow I do not feel, I am here at the door with you just to the left of it. So near. I begin to push the door, push it, pushing and it is resisting. I push and I see the sign that tells me to pull, so I push once more, then someone else’s hand pulls at the handle and the door is opening, obscuring you, covering you up, and I slip through and out and down the stairs.

I pause halfway down the stairs. I think I have heard someone else leave that tightly packed room. So why do I pause? Why not carry on my rush and hurry down the stairs? It is to allow him, because I believe it is you, to catch me there on the stairs. So I pause. There is silence. Because no-one else has left that room, no-one else is making their way down the stairs.

I am paused but no longer know whether the resumption of motion will take me down and out of the building or up and back into that room where you will be standing to the right of the door, though you will not have moved. It is me who has moved.

I am paused, facing the handrail, now looking up, back to where I have just come from. How long have I been paused here? I do not know. I should not have come. I should have known you would be there.

Suddenly I am no longer paused. I am making my way downstairs and outside. I came to a decision without knowing it. I am leaving. I feel like a coward. I should go back. I walk down the fake cobbled street and out into the warm August evening. Exchange Square is before me, with its BBC screen and its giant windmills. I should not have left that room. You must have seen me. This should not bother me. I am making my way to the nearest Metrolink platform, up Shudehill. I will catch the tram to Piccadilly. I will not walk. You are in that room. The celebrated writer will see you and know that it is done.

He will know that it is done, and that will be an end to it.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Signs

A woman looks to her left as a man kisses her right cheek. That will be the signal. Sam watches, looks around. Which woman, which man? No-one knows, just keep watching, it will happen. And then? It will happen.

They’ve chosen a busy place again. Not too far from the last time. It doesn’t bother you. Makes it more interesting this way. Sam wanders off towards the racks of blouses, starts fingering them. You wouldn’t have thought they were Sam’s thing, really, but you never can tell these days. It takes all sorts.

You remember the time you first met them all. Not long off the flight in from Dublin, one of those twin-engined planes that brought you to Blackpool airport of all places. Not even Manchester. Still, the security there wasn’t up to much. Just one over-tanned, over-lacquered blonde in her 20s. The noughties’ version of her sixties’ grandmother and her eighties’ mother.

You’d caught the train from Squire’s Gate straight down to Preston and into The Railway pub. Someone had bought you a pint and a hot steak sandwich with twister fries. Twister fries for god’s sake. It was all in the details.

Sam had been there, the first one you’d noticed. Small and dark and classically Mancunian. Scrawny, sharp-eyed and shrewd with one of those timeless, ageless faces. Either young and careworn or old and not doing too badly.

Sam is heading up the escalator now, into menswear. More Sam’s thing, you believe. T-shirts, jeans, jumpers. But still not quite Sam’s thing. Not here, not this shop. Not over the walkway, either. Certainly not over the walkway.

After that meeting in the pub, you’d spent a week in a safe house in Fulwood, up near the hospital and the college. Leafy Fulwood, with its detached houses set back from the road. Privacy in curtain-twitching suburbia. Houses built for merchants and paid for with the sweat of your people. England’s whores, shipped over for their skills in digging and their willingness to work for next to nothing.

You realise that you ought to follow Sam. The shoppers obstruct your progress. You don’t have Sam’s knack for weaving through the crowds or side-stepping the stalled middle-aged women wondering if that shiny black satin thing is right for the Golf Club Dinner. You ride up the escalator and pause at the top, ignoring the tuts and sighs of the shoppers wanting to get past you. You scan the department for Sam’s whereabouts. Over by the café. Then you realise. Toilet. You loiter by the jackets. It wouldn’t be good form to follow.

A woman, a Doreen or a Barbara or a Brenda, thickening waist, slackening jaw line, squeezes unnecessarily past you. You stand your ground, watching for Sam’s return. The woman sighs, “Excuse me!” She’s desperate to look at the jackets you’re standing by. Let her wait. Won’t be long now before she doesn’t need to worry about whether the sage or the taupe will suit George or Basil or Brian better.

Sam’s heading back, wiping hands on jeans. You nod your head, attracting Sam’s attention. Everything okay? Yeah sure. Bit nervous. Dunno why. Never done one of these before. Yours a statement, not a question. Nah, comes the reply, Sam suddenly, clearly, young and careworn.

You head back down the escalator together. It hasn’t happened yet. You know for sure it hasn’t. No signal, no response.

You wonder who’s going to make the phone call this time, claiming responsibility, giving the police 5 minutes’ warning. Last time it was Michael, but Michael isn’t around this time.

After your week in leafy Fulwood, you’d been moved to your own flat in Northenden, near the Tesco and the dual carriageway up into Manchester. You didn’t see anyone else, but you knew Sam was along Palatine Road in West Didsbury, Niall further up in Withington, Ray at Mauldeth Road by the station, and Franny just outside Chorlton. There were others, but it didn’t do to know too many names, too many locations, just in case.

You spent month after month in Northenden, wandering along Palatine Road, looking in the shops, drinking in the pub on Longley Lane. You managed to find work at the Golf Club, in the bar, chatting up the middle-aged and middle-class, charming them with your Irish accent. Bored out of your head, marking time, biding your time, brooding and waiting.

You’d been given a car. A navy blue Fiesta. You parked it on the street, then on the driveway on special days. Days when they came round to tell you a bit more about the plan.

The months dragged on. You knew Northenden as intimately as your own skin. You knew the Princess Parkway/Princess Road like it was one of your own arteries, Palatine/Wilmslow/Oxford Road as though it were a vein. Manchester the heart, Northenden the lungs, you carrying the stuff the plan needed to survive.

You click back to the present, to the plan in action. Sam is restless, sweating slightly, watching, hand in pocket, ready. Sam’s the one who will trigger this, in a way. Sam has the radio detonator for the semtex packed into the cars parked directly beneath this store. Your navy blue Fiesta, Franny’s white Cherry, Niall’s dark green 205. Three cars parked in a triangle. Three cars waiting to explode.

And you. You have your own surprise. You smile at Sam, your hand in your pocket, like a mirror of Sam’s. Sam smiles back, still nervous. Still no sign, no signal, though Sam keeps watching. Looking for the man, the woman.

You remember the day you made the suggestion, your addition to the plan. You remember their raised eyebrows, their reluctance. You’d explained calmly, all the middle-eastern groups were doing it now. The government over here wouldn’t expect it. They weren’t sure. No-one had ever wanted to before. This was a political war, not a holy one, for all its mask of religion. It wasn’t how they saw the fight being fought. The fight, you’d explained, still calmly, wasn’t working. It was time to try something new. The peace process was a joke. Sinn Fein had lost their balls. People were waiting, hoping, wanting something to happen.

It took you a couple of meetings to persuade them. You’d asked to speak to Sam. Sam was the only other one like you. No family, no ties, no long-term future. The way you’d explained it, Sam didn’t know your secret. Sam just knew you would both be in the building when the semtex exploded. But Sam believed in the fight, understood it had to go this way, understood that lives of the faithful would have to be lost.

Sam is getting agitated now, but it’s too late. The detonator is in Sam’s pocket. Sam has to be here to see the signal. You can see in Sam’s face that reality is dawning. Sam is going to die. Sam doesn’t want to die. You smile, lean towards Sam and kiss her on the right cheek. She is looking to her left, looking for the signal. You whisper in her ear. Press the button now Sam. She looks at you, horror mixed with realisation. Your right hand is in your pocket, ready. She isn’t pressing the detonator, her hand is out of her pocket. You put your left hand into her right pocket, press both buttons at once. The explosives packed around your body go off first, taking out the entire first floor of M&S, then the cars in the underground car park explode.

There is a sort of silence in that corner of central Manchester, underpinning the sound of alarms and the creaking of buckled steel. The sort of silence that tells you, by the absence of weeping, that no human life survived. The people shopping on the other streets haven’t made it down there yet, to gawk at the destruction, to begin the weeping. The police were unprepared. No-one made a phone call. The underpinning silence stretches on, like the cloud of dust still blanketing the rubble.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

Subvert Normality

Brenda Mulvaney was 62 years old. She liked Seabrook’s ready salted crisps, the smell of the shampoo her hairdresser used, and the occasional Bacardi Breezer.

Brenda had lived all her life in the leafy end of Chadderton. She had grown up knowing fields and farms, and slowly seen the suburbs creep out from Oldham, across from Middleton and up from Failsworth.

Brenda was trying to embrace technology. She had a computer in the bedroom of one of her long-flown children. She had been on a CLAIT course and surprised herself daily by what she almost remembered. Her children had clubbed together to buy her a mobile phone – for just in case. Just in case what she was not really sure, but she thought it might have something to do with long car journeys to reach the places her far-flung children now lived.

So Brenda knew what it was that she found that day on the train into Manchester. She had boarded at Mills Hill station. The carriage was empty but for one other person, sitting way down on the right. Brenda chose a seat not too far from the doors. These local trains with seats like buses. She missed the proper trains of her youth, with doors you could only open with the outside handle, and luggage racks above the springy seats. Proper trains pulled by proper engines. She sighed to herself. She sounded like her mother. Her mother had been dead goodness knows how many years. Brenda could no longer remember.

As she sat down, she saw it, sleek and discreet and smaller than her own, but a mobile phone none the less.

She picked it up and looked at it. It was one of those dinky flip-top ones. She’d liked the look of them when she’d been choosing her own, but her kids had said, “Nokia 3310 is the best for you, Mum.” The sales assistant had agreed. He hadn’t quite said idiot-proof, but that was what he had meant.

Brenda wondered what to do with the phone. The ticket man came along the aisle. Brenda flashed her pass, received her discount, accepted her ticket and asked him about the phone.

“Hand it in when you get to Victoria, love,” he told her, walking on down the aisle. “Tickets from Rochdale, Castleton, Mills Hill, please,” he bellowed to the other occupant of the carriage.

Brenda opened her bag and dropped the phone in. Instantly it began to ring. At least, she assumed it was ringing. It emitted a curious burbling bubbling sound. She pulled it from her bag and flipped it open, looking for the equivalent button to press to pick up the call. It looked so much different to hers. She found a tiny green phone symbol and pressed that.

“Hello?” she said, cautiously. “Who’s that?” She hunched forward slightly, as though trying to elicit a confidence from the person on the other end, who might be shy of speaking to a stranger.

“Where’s Terry?” said a sharp male voice.

“Oh,” said Brenda, with relief, sitting back in her seat. “Is this Terry’s phone? Only I’ve just found it on the train, you see, and I was wondering how – “

“What are you doing with this phone?” the male voice interrupted, curtly.

“Well, you see, dear, I was just trying to explain all that, but you interrupted. I found it, on the train. I’m going to hand it in at the station.”

“Which station?” the man’s voice rapped.

“Victoria, love. Victoria Station, in Manchester.” The man sounded southern, so Brenda thought she had better be clear she didn’t mean the other Victoria. The one in London.

“Manchester? What are you doing in Manchester?” The man was beginning to sound really very annoyed. She wondered what sort of stress he had in his life. Southern people seemed always to be suffering from some sort of stress. Her eldest was working in London now. She was always stressed when Brenda spoke to her on the phone. As though Brenda was making a huge interruption of her busy life

“Well,” she said now, patiently, thinking she must handle him the way she handled her daughter. “I’m not in Manchester yet, love. I’m just on my way there now. Coming in from Mills Hill.”

“Where the fuck is that?” said the man.

“Now there’s no need for language like that, you know.” Brenda was shocked. She didn’t like bad language. She snapped the phone shut. Swearing at her like that when she was only trying to explain. The phone emitted its strange burbling bubbling sound again. Brenda decided to ignore it. It rang and rang and rang, and she ignored it. She would hand it in at Victoria and the train people could sort it out.

Eventually the phone stopped ringing. Brenda looked at it, silent in her hand. She began to think. Maybe Terry or whoever owned the phone had put his home number in the phone book, like she had, just in case someone found it somewhere. She flipped the phone open and pressed a button that looked like it might call up the menu. She pressed a few other buttons, trying to find the phone book. A couple of times the phone started to dial, and she had to quickly cancel the call.

Suddenly, she was there, scrolling through a list of names. She looked out of the train window to check her progress. Moston Station. Almost there. She had better be quick. Armstrong, Beckett, Blair, Blunkett, Boateng, Brown, Clarke, Darling, Hewitt, Home, Hoon. Home. She scrolled back. The other names seemed familiar. Home. That must be it. Terry’s home number. She stored her home number as Home. It was the sensible thing to do.

She pressed the green phone button and the phone began to dial. It seemed to be a central London number. It rang for a while, then an officious voice came on the line.

“Number 50 Queen Anne’s Gate.”

Funny way to answer the phone, thought Brenda, keeping an eye, through the window, on the train’s progress through the suburbs of north Manchester.

“Hello, love. Could I speak to Terry please?” she said.

There was a pause.

“Do you have a surname, please?”

“No, my love, I don’t. It’s just, I’ve found his phone on the train. I spoke to one of his friends but he was a bit rude, then I thought, you know, maybe his home number was on here, and I found this number under Home, so I rang it.” She took a breath. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Is this Terry’s home number?” she asked.

The silence continued briefly, then the officious voice spoke.

“This is the Home Office, madam.”

The line went dead. Brenda looked at the phone. Those names. No wonder they seemed so familiar. They were names of people in the government, that New Labour lot she’d helped to elect and what for? They were no better than the Tories, that Tony Blair was a sly one. You’d only to take one look at him and his grinning wife to know something was up there. She had half a mind to ring that number, Blair, and tell him what she thought of his precious New Labour.

The train was pulling into Victoria. She slipped the phone into her bag. She wouldn’t hand it in just yet. What was that phrase her grandson used? Subvert normality, or something. She could subvert some normality for Mr Tony Blair with this phone, she knew that. She felt a shiver of delight in her stomach. She hadn’t been this naughty since she was 13 and they had put drawing pins on the French teacher’s chair at school.

She alighted from the train and walked up from the station to Exchange Square, thinking about the phone in her bag and all the things she might say to Mr Blair. Brenda supposed that it would be his secretary that answered if she rang him. It wouldn’t be a direct line to Mr Blair.

Brenda popped into Marks & Spencer for a quick look round. It wasn’t the same since they had made half the store into Selfridge’s. Those footballers and their tarty wives were supposed to shop in there, but Brenda had never seen them. They certainly hadn’t been using the revolving doors any time she had been there.

Manchester was changing now, doing its best to be all glitzy and cosmopolitan. All because of Posh Spice. You wouldn’t recognise the old warehouse district up round Oldham Street. New fancy name they’d given that, as well. The Northern Quarter. Her grandson and his mates shopped round there, she knew. Her youngest daughter had been looking to move back up north, into a flat in the Northern Quarter. A flat, mind you, not a house. A flat in an old warehouse. When she’d heard the price of this flat, Brenda had nearly dropped cork-legged.

There was nothing to tempt her in M & S, so she headed over to Albert Square. She sat on a bench near the statue of Richard Cobden. Sitting in the shadow of the old reformer, Brenda decided now was the time and place to give Mr Tony Blair a quick call. She wasn’t entirely sure what this subverting normality actually entailed. Her grandson had told her once, but it all seemed a little bit like breaking the law to her mind.

She pulled the phone from her bag and flipped it open. She stared at it for a few seconds, trying to remember how she had found the phone book last time. She began to press buttons and, after a few attempts, there she was. And there he was. Blair. Black typeface on a glowing orange screen. Blair.

Brenda pressed the green phone button.

“Terry!” said a familiarly bright voice. “I’ve been waiting for you to call all morning. Alistair said that you’d apparently gone AWOL.”

“This isn’t Terry,” said Brenda. She didn’t intend her voice to sound so menacing. Perhaps nerves had made her lower her tone and speak so monotonously.

There was silence. Then the familiar voice, not so bright now Brenda noticed, said, “Who is this and how did you obtain this number.”

“You don’t need to know who I am,” said Brenda in her new found menacing voice. She quite liked it, actually. Gave her a certain air of, well, menace, she supposed. “You just need to listen.”

“How did you obtain this number? Where did you acquire the phone you are using?”

“Terry left it on a train,” Brenda said.

“Then I advise you to hand it in to the police, madam, before you get into serious trouble.”

“Mr Blair,” said Brenda, “you need to stop speaking for a moment and listen.”

Brenda was pleased to hear silence coming through the phone. Now she had to think of something to say. She was doing menacing quite well, but she didn’t really know what people with menacing voices said to the Prime Minister.

“Mr Blair,” she continued, “I helped to elect you and your government twice. I haven’t seen very much return for my faith in your promises.”

Blair obviously clicked that this was just another disgruntled member of the electorate, and not someone he needed to bother about, because he told Brenda, “I’m a very busy man, I don’t have time for this.” Then he rang off.

Brenda rang back.

“Mr Blair, I think you do have time for this. We the people who elected you,” Brenda paused, pleased with that phrase. “We the people. Who elected you. Are growing weary of your empty promises, your posturing, your dodging of the issues.”

The phone went dead again before Brenda could complete her sentence. She rang back.

“Your dodging of the issues, Mr Blair, and your failure to heed what the people who voted for you are trying to tell you.”

Blair spoke, an icy edge to his voice. “Look. Madam. I don’t know who you are, or how you got hold of the phone you are using, but I advise you very strongly to hand the phone in to the police so that it can be returned to its rightful owner. And if you have an issue with the government, then there are proper channels for you to follow. Starting with a visit to your local MP’s next Surgery.”

The phone went dead a third time. Brenda Mulvaney rang the number again. She listened to the ringing tone for quite a while, then disconnected the call.

She scrolled down. Blunkett. No, he wasn’t worth bothering with. Boateng. She did not have the faintest idea who that was, even if he was a member of the government. Brown. She knew who he was, and what he had done to her pension. She told the phone to dial.

“Hello. Gordon Brown.”

“Mr Brown?” She tried to sound menacing again, but was losing her confidence.

“Who is this?”

“That’s not important, Mr Brown.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I’m using Terry’s phone,” Brenda said, thinking that, really, politicians weren’t as smart as they were made out to be.

“How did you get Terry’s phone?”

“I found it.”

“You found it?”

“Yes.”

Brenda heard voices in the background. She wondered if it were at all possible for her location to be identified. She knew from films that they could tap landlines and have a crack team of snipers round your house in no time, if they didn’t like what you were doing. She didn’t know whether mobile phones worked the same. Mind you, she reminded herself, they had proved that that Christine Hamilton had been where she said she was from her mobile phone. But that was after.

Brown was speaking to her. “Where did you find Terry’s phone?”

“On a train. Look, I want to say a few things to you, Mr Brown.”

“I’m sure you do. Where was the train you found Terry’s phone on?”

He was like a dog with a bone, Brenda thought. Just like he came across on the telly.

“That’s not important. I’m a pensioner, Mr Brown. I voted to elect your party to government because I believed you would do right by pensioners.”

Brown interrupted her. “Yes, I’m sure you did, but I’m afraid I have more important matters to deal with now. If you have an issue, I advise you to take it up with your MP.” He hung up.

Brenda reluctantly flipped the phone shut. She wondered whether she should have phoned Blunkett after all. He always seemed good natured and well-meaning on the telly. Maybe he would have listened to her for longer than those other two.

She decided that she wasn’t very good at this subverting normality business.

She was unaware of the furore she had caused in Whitehall, however. Civil Servants were being called into offices and the whereabouts of Terry were being investigated. How had he lost his phone, why had no-one heard from him for three days? Why had no-one mentioned that he had even gone missing until this morning, when the Prime Minister asked Alistair Darling why Terry hadn’t phoned in lately?

Terry sat on a bench not far away from Brenda Mulvaney, watching her use his phone. He was sick and tired of working for this government. He was sick and tired of scurrying around, feeding stories here, leaking information there. He was sick and tired of setting up the decent ministers and back-benchers for a fall, just because Tony and Gordon were at their playground spats again.

He was a bit irritated that the phone had been found by a pensioner, though. He had been hoping, as he got on the train in Rochdale, that some bright young thing, someone like he had once been, would find the phone, work out what was on it, put it to good use. He wasn’t against a little subversion of normality. He had become too much of a corporate whore for his own liking. Believing in the Party and working for the Party were two different things, he had discovered. All his naïve idealism had evaporated in the 6 years since the Party was first elected to govern. What a day that had been.

He rubbed his face with his hands, then looked across to the woman in possession of his phone.

Brenda Mulvaney was phoning her grandson, who was at university just round the corner. UMIST. Doing computers. He had told her once, but it had been a bit complicated so he had told her to just think of it as “doing computers”.

“You found a phone, Grandma, with the personal numbers of members of the Cabinet?” he was saying to her, incredulously.

“Yes, Tom.”

“Seriously, Grandma? And you’re asking me what to do with it?”

“Yes. I spoke to Mr Blair, and to Mr Brown, and they were very unhelpful.”

“Jeez, Grandma, sorry to swear and all, but – bloody hell fire!”

She smiled at the way he toned down his language for her benefit.

“Where are you now?” he asked her.

“I’m in Albert Square.”

“I’m on my way. 10 minutes.”

Brenda sat back on the bench. She noticed there was a young man across the square from her, head bowed on a bench. He looked weary. Probably an office worker from the Town Hall. They all looked weary. He was late to be out, though. She looked up at the clock. Far too late for him to be on his lunch.

True to his word, 10 minutes later a slightly breathless Tom was sitting beside her on the bench, scrolling excitedly through the names in the phone book of Terry’s flip top phone.

“Grandma, this is amazing.”

“I was going to hand it in at Victoria Station,” Brenda explained, “but everyone I’ve spoken to on it was so rude, I decided I’d try to subvert normality. I wasn’t very good.”

Tom grinned at her.

Across the square, Terry was watching this new development with interest. He recognised the lad sitting with the woman. He was on one of the lists of known student activists. Tom somebody. Maybe the phone had fallen into the right hands after all.

Terry sat up casually and crossed his legs, putting one arm across the back of the bench, and angling his body slightly away from the pair across the square from him. He watched them from the corner of his eye.

“Subvert normality, eh?” Tom was saying to his grandmother. “I didn’t think you paid attention to half the things I said and did, Gran.”

“Tom, you’re my grandson. I might not understand half the things you say and do, but I like to take an interest, you know.”

Tom held the phone up. Across the square Terry wondered what they were talking about. The lad, the activist, was looking excited. Terry knew he was going to keep the phone, put it to use.

“Can I keep this?” Tom asked his grandmother.

Brenda Mulvaney shrugged. “I suppose,” she said. “They deserve what’s coming to them.”

Tom grinned again. “Subvert normality, Grandma.” He winked.

“Subvert normality, Tom,” she replied.

Then he was off, to do who knows what with the numbers in that phone. She hoped he didn’t tell her. She hoped he didn’t get caught. But it was true, what she’d just said. That bloody New Labour lot did deserve what was coming to them.

Across the square, soon-to-be former Civil Servant and ex-employee of the Home Office, Terry Wade, had a good idea of what the young activist was going to do with the contents of his phone. And the government, he was certain, deserved exactly what was coming to them.

He stood up, smiled across the square at the woman who had found his phone, and made his way to Piccadilly Station, where he caught the InterCity and composed his letter of resignation on the way back down to London.

He would leave it a few weeks, then maybe ring his old mobile phone number, or get hold of that activist some other way, and offer him and his activist mates his services.

Brenda Mulvaney saw the weary young man smile at her from across the square. She smiled back. She hoped he was soon less weary than he appeared. People his age shouldn’t be worn out so quickly. Something about the way this world had turned out since her youth was very very wrong.

© J R Hargreaves 2003