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