Good Copy

Uriah Form was not sure if he had said these words, and so you hesitate to bracket them in quotation marks. However, it soon became clear that the future Prime Minister had indeed uttered the above phrase when the bowling ball behind the counter raised her pencil eyebrows and excused herself.

‘Not my fault. They were due back six days ago.’

She looked up at Form’s glitterball head, caught his eye and then looked down at the videos, neither of which had been watched during their weeklong sojourn at the Form residence.

‘That’s thirty two pounds,’ she repeated.

Form pushed the two cassettes firmly into the lady’s hands, which were cushioned by a career’s worth of sedentary wine gum flesh. Within seconds F For Fake and Armageddon were back on the shelves, and the hands waited for the money, open like a seal’s mouth at feeding time.

Uriah Form walked down the hill towards his home and wife. He had been glad to leave the house, since it gave him time to ponder his electoral campaign over the forthcoming months. Hampstead looked fine at this time of year, wind waving the higher leaves of the few evergreen trees that reminded him of his country childhood.

Yes. Things had been cheaper then. He passed two men writing their names in urine on the pavement, the rejects of Sunday night early closing. ‘I say,’ he whispered, not without their hearing him.

The one, a simulacrum of the other, dressed in regulation Gap garb, turned and asked him whether he was trying to fucking entertain them. Unsure as to the nature of the question, Form responded to the negative, resisting the temptation to decry their indecent exposure in his constituency.

Ben was the name of the first. The other he assumed to be called Jason, although his bladder had only given him ink enough to write Jaso. In fact, it could have been John. His writing was unclear.

‘Good. I don’t want anyone trying to fucking entertain me,’ griped Ben, his breath, like his micturational graffito, causing small clouds of mist to take restless shape.

Form was set on continuing home, before he remembered something oft forgotten in his day and age. His duty. Yes, this was certainly something that the country had forgotten. Its duty. He turned and was composing a biting attack on the two hooligans, of the sort that Sir Winston would have been proud, when Ben’s fist landed squarely but feebly on Uriah Form’s right temple.

Something strange happened to Form. Like a cat whose tail has been stood upon, his instincts prepared him to fight by raising his paws. He sought a target, and took a half step forward. This last move proved untimely, as Ben’s fist squarely met Uriah’s belly, which was recently beginning to take on the dimensions of an ex-drinker. Uriah doubled and fell to one knee. He was breathless.

’Hey. Ben. It’s whatsisname...’

‘Who?’

‘Whatsisface. You know. Our MP.’

Form tried to catch his breath. His own bladder was crying out for relief now. A hand reached into his armpit and pulled him up.

‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I thought you were trying to entertain me. If you catch my meaning. I thought you were trying to be funny. You’re doing a great job. You know, I’m going to vote for you come May. Definitely. Had enough of those fascist pigs, we have. We both voted for you last elections, honest. We want this country restored to its former greatness. You all right?’

Form said nothing. Ben and Jason, or John, colluded an instant.

‘Sorry I hit you, mate. You never know who’s starting on you round here. You really should leave people to their own business. You going to be all right getting home? I know it’s daft, but you don’t reckon you could give us an autograph. You are in the papers quite a lot.’

Uriah Form had been the darling of the press for some time now, posing with some of the most notable celebrities from the world of film and pop music. No-one seemed to mind that he had been caught buying a copy of Big Butt Monthly two years previous in Soho. If anything, it had given his ratings a boost in the opinion polls.

‘No, I’m fine,’ he said, ignoring their bid for his signature. ‘I’ll just walk home. You take care of yourselves.’

‘Well cheers, mate. See how you go. You’ve definitely got our vote now.’

The two idled up the hill. After a few queasy steps, Form looked over at Hampstead police station, where nothing stirred. He turned into his road and headed for home. Two more votes in the bag, he thought. Still, there really must be something I can do for this land of mine.

Alice Content sat with a cup of tea looking over the various lots that were to be sold in auction the next week. She was concerned that not enough publicity had been given to a number of the artists whose work she had on offer and that not enough money would come in for their unrecognised pieces. Were there not an action painting Jackson Pollock up for grabs, the whole thing might turn out to be a financial disaster. However, given the rather high profile that the late American had recently been accorded in this country, she felt certain that the bidding would escalate beyond the half-million pound mark. Not that Pollocks were to her taste. Of Twentieth Century painters, she could only stand Piet Mondrian at best. She would rather sit in the Prado than Tate Modern any day.

The door opened and Uriah Form entered, clutching his stomach.

‘Hello, darling,’ he uttered. ‘I’ve just been mobbed by two of my voters.’

‘Two is hardly enough to be considered a mob, dearest.’

‘No. Well, they did hit me though. Now really is the winter of our discontent…’

’My dear, it’s always the winter of our discontent. Hit you, you say? What on earth did you do to encourage them?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Purely a mistake. A case of mistaken identity, I should say. I need to sit down.’

‘Okay. Norman Motley called. He wants to talk about foreign policy or something with you.’

‘That all?’

‘I’m afraid so. He sounded awfully flustered.’

Form left the room and installed himself in his study. Alice continued to contemplate the artwork. A hot water bottle filled with the excrement of an Ethiopian tribeswoman had been placed on the ashes of one thousand five-pound notes. The piece was entitled Some Like It Hot. It was unlikely to recoup the amount needed to create the work, she thought. But wouldn’t the artist be proud if it didn’t.

Uriah Form and Alice Content had had the most post-modern of marriages, a marriage of convenience. Not that Ms Content was in need of a visa or anything quite so fashionable. Marriage in fact went rather against her principles. No, she had married because no man could be Prime Minister if he was a bachelor. In fact, people might suspect him of belonging to some sort of gay mafia if he were to accede any position of power without a woman in tow. Thus it was phrased by Uriah Form’s advisors, who also suggested to the party in general that Form was the man to lead them to victory in the next general election. And so it was that on a Friday afternoon in the autumn of 200- (-1) that Alice contentedly became a Form. Her appearance in the press precipitated a mini-boom in business at the auction house, although things had been on the slide since, a product no doubt of the opposition’s lacklustre tenure at the helm of the nation.

Form spoke directly to Norman Motley, his colleague and friend from their days back at university.

‘It’s quite a disaster,’ blurted Motley. ‘This whole politics thing always ends up being far more complicated than anyone could imagine.’

Form held the telephone in front of him and spoke into it as if it were a microphone. At that distance, he could hear Motley loud and clear. ‘I don’t see what the big deal is. Your secretary got caught with his trousers down. In twenty years, he’ll be the darling of the nation. The roguish political aide who had a penchant for car exhausts. Nothing to be done. Sack him. It’ll work out for the best.’

‘But I think you have failed to see the possible implications of this.’

‘The way I see it is this. The young lad has been a bit foolish, and he must pay the price for it. How long has he been with you?’

‘A few months. He’s on a gap year. Going up to Oxford in the autumn.’

‘Oh, really. Which college?’

‘I’ve no idea, actually. I must ask him. But either way, they’ve gone to press with it tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll have a very red face.’

‘But it’s not your fault. Whatever his perversions, the little deviant must face the press alone. We’ve all been through it, if you remember.’

Form could hear Motley blushing at the other end of the line.

‘It’s not that, Uriah,’ he stammered. ‘It- It’s the fact that we all have our peccadilloes and he might relate them for a fast buck.’

‘Let me have a word with the young lad. Do you have his number?’

The next day Jeffrey Mercophilis, of Greek and Maltese descent, made the front page of nearly every tabloid newspaper. At a friend’s twenty-first, he had been caught ‘humping’, as the Daily Hoo Ha described it, his friend’s father’s car. Horror that a future student of Oxford University should perform such an act. More horror that he should be a bright young thing in the electoral campaign for Shadow Foreign Secretary, Norman Motley. In the few months he had been working in Motley’s office, he had proven himself politically astute and an able drinker. His fame was brief, and soon to be forgotten. The party did not suffer too much, and Jeffrey spent the rest of his gap year travelling across Central America.

At eleven thirty the night before his impressive debut, Jeffrey Mercophilis was speaking to the leader of his party. Their conversation entailed nothing more than Uriah Form assuring the young gentleman that his political career was far from over and that much worse had been endured by some of the major figures of their day. Added to this was a brief interrogation as to whether Jeffrey’s boss, Norman Motley, had anything to be ashamed of himself. Although the young man denied knowledge of any untoward activities by the future Cabinet Minister, Uriah Form suggested to him that if he felt any loyalty to the party, he should only sell stories to the press after the next election, when, given a victory, they would have doubled in value from their present going rate. Or, better still, he should keep them for when his own career was in need of a boost in several years’ time, given a successful re-entry into the world of politics after his degree.

Come late August, Jeffrey Mercophilis was to return from Latin America a changed man. Exposed to some of the more harsh realities of exploitation and greed during his voyages, his fine understanding of the colourful world of party politics had been usurped by a rabid naïveté. His world was now a mediatised one of black and white. He vowed that, in spite of his journalised misdemeanour, he would re-enter the political foray, a fighter not for pragmatics but for righteousness.

After merely three weeks at Oxford, Jeffrey fell victim to the biggest killer of British males between the ages of 18 and 25. Only six days after his matriculation into the university, Jeffrey Mercophilis took his own life by hanging himself from the ceiling-level pipes in the communal bathrooms on the first floor of the first year accommodation block of his college.

Norman Motley put the phone down and looked at the yellow skin that enwrapped his carpals and meta-carpals. Only the pollex was exempt from the process of aurification. He twitched his thumb to make sure that he still had control of it, and noticed that it looked younger than his other digits, which were burnished with a golden glow, the result of his addiction to nicotine. Presently, his wrinkled mitts sought the packet of small filtered tubes, the small cankerous batons that, far from appeasing his craving, merely encouraged it.

Norman lit up and pondered his telephone conversation with his leader. Only a few months to go before the election and already a scandal. Had the young man overheard his comment about needing some powdered stimulation? Surely engaging in amorous relations with an automobile was dreadfully unhygienic? Most inebriates get up to much the same, so perhaps the scandal would not be as widespread as he feared. No, of course it would be. The chap was young. He was an easy target. Why did everything have to get so damn complicated? Only the National Express would fail to give it full coverage, thanks to Uriah’s connections with that bawdy nouveau Lowry. Thinking of whom, where had he put his copy of January’s Big Butt Monthly? He couldn’t face the thought of the immanent scandal. He needed to relax and have a few more smokes…

Now that Uriah had put the phone down and was no doubt busy at work in his study, Alice could get on the phone to her sister, with whom she had not communicated for nearly a week.

‘Hello, Teresa dear. How are you?’

‘Alice Delightful to hear from you. How was New Year’s Day?’

‘Well, Uriah was hung over, and hardly polite conversation with mother or father, but we bustled through. I think that I’m going into one of those phases.’

‘We must meet and talk about it. Yes? I have some exciting news to tell you, as well.’

‘What?’

‘Mustn’t say. Daniel might hear. I’ve only just walked in through the door and I don’t know if he’s in, but I’ve had the most interesting time today. Shall we lunch tomorrow?’

‘Fine. Super. I shall only be able to afford an hour, though. I’ve got an auction this week. I’ve got to give the PR cow a kick up the arse, make sure the Pollock makes the papers.’

‘Oh, I’ll get Daniel to plug it. Scott’s, then?’

‘Tomorrow, one o’clock. I’ll leave you to book it.’

Monday morning in the second week in January 200- was dry and cold. There had been no snow for Christmas, no means with which the city’s grime had been absorbed and washed away, leaving the capital - the entire land - to re-emerge clean and brilliant. The world was still grey and overcast.

Alice Content stepped from her taxi on Mount Street and entered Scott’s. Downstairs, she crossed a black and white chequered marble floor and exchanged greetings with Teresa in front of a cylindrical glass tank in which bubbles fought their way from bottom to top in lackadaisical fashion. After smiles, raised forearms and a kiss on each cheek, they made their way back up via a helical staircase to table seven, their usual spot for midweek luncheons.

‘Gosh, this is awfully complicated,’ smiled Teresa, without seeming to open her mouth. Alice complicitly leant forward. ‘Ian would be proud.’

(Table Seven at Scott’s was where Ian Fleming, the author of the original James Bond stories, would customarily eat. Hence 007.)

‘Why? What have you been up to?’

The two ordered chicken salads before divulging secrets. Teresa had started seeing the ex-editor of the National Express on Sunday, a chap called Ian Secure.

‘Ian? What a dreadful name. What on earth does he do now?’

‘Oh. He’s gone respectable. He’s at the Indescribably on Sunday now. He was dreadfully narked actually. The story about this young lad caught in auto erotic poses will have vanished by next weekend. He wanted to do an editorial. I don’t think he’s too fond of the party.’

‘And does Daniel get along with him?’

‘Oh good God, no. No. Ian’s taken an awful pay cut to go to the Indescribably. They have nowhere near the circulation, you know. Anyway, of course Daniel doesn’t know I’m seeing him and I shan’t let him find out. But it was his own fault. He didn’t want to speak to this Ian chap at some awards last month, so he fobbed his wife off on him and went to hobnob with everyone else. I accepted the man’s invitation to lunch out of spite. It turns out he really is quite delightful, if a little rough around the edges.’

‘Daniel really should take better care of you.’

‘What do I care? He’s busy. He has little time for me, but lots of money. I’m perfectly happy that way. I know all about this feminist business, but let’s be honest, if you didn’t have to work again, would you? You only live once, you know, and I always found working somewhat tedious.’

‘I enjoy my work.’

‘Yes, but you’re doing what you like. You know I’ve never been particularly interested in anything. Apart from astronauts, but it’s not like I’m going to bump into one of them at any of our functions.’

Alice raised her hand to her mouth. She was suddenly feeling nauseous. Without a word, she stood and strode with care towards the lavatories. Minutes later she returned, complaining of eating something that was off, before realising…

‘Oh, sh--.’

Decency forbids you from writing the entirety of such a word when spoken by the mouth of a lady.

‘Don’t tell me. It can’t be.’

Teresa took her turn to enquire.

’I think I’m damn well pregnant.’

Teresa could do nothing but laugh. Even Alice could not stop herself from smiling. ‘God damn pregnant. This is not what I needed. Uriah’s going to use this child like a pair of handcuffs, and I’ll never be able to get away.’

‘Not unless my spaceman comes and takes you with him.’

This was not a time for being facetious, as Alice’s scowl towards her sister suggested.

Uriah Form was in joyful mood when he heard the news that he was to be a father. Patriarch to the nation, patriarch of the Form family. Yes. A family. The perfect way to win votes. As it was, news of Alice’s pregnancy was not released until two weeks before the elections. Whilst Form’s party was edging slowly ahead in the opinion polls at that time, the news of the Opposition Leader’s expectancy provided the boost expected to propel Uriah Form into Number Ten, Downing Street.

At the celebration party, Alice was treated like a china doll, an attitude that caused her to have one or two drinks too many.

I don’t care about the baby, she thought. Like her rancour, it was growing inside her, and it needed to be quelled. Such were the feelings of the First Lady of Great Britain, a dreadful Americanism that the National Express had used with typical aplomb in a page two headline the day before.

‘You all right, girl?’

Alice recognised the voice. It was her brother-in-law.

‘See I got you on page two yesterday? I thought the picture looked lovely. I always like to see a pregnant girl… Got that healthiness, that fertile look. Now your old man’s number one, I can turn you into a superstar…’

Alice contemplated Daniel Lowry, the owner of the National Express, various other publications (including Big Butt Monthly and Preggers Prossies) and topless dancing venues. He looked respectable enough at such an event as the Prime Minister’s election-winning party, but Alice shuddered and put a hand to her lightly inflated belly upon thinking of what the man was capable. People had thought him dashing when he had started out as a footballer. After two seasons, the twenty year old Danny Lowry decided that football was not a sure enough means of making money, and left his north London club to set up his own modelling agency. A brave step, and one that appalled the faithful followers of the Hotspurs. Lowry was now in his forties and marvelled constantly at how much today’s players were paid to perform at what in his mind was a lower level of skill and fitness than when he was a pro. However, he consoled himself by knowing that even football would not have brought him the wealth he now enjoyed through his various ventures.

Presently, Lowry was tucking his peepers into the skirt of some luminary’s wife. Alice had become habituated with nausea during the past few months, and did not flinch when a new wave crashed over her throat, sending spray up into her mouth. She had to be grateful to Lowry. Not only did he take being vomited upon with a decent sense of humour, but he had also bought the Jackson Pollock from her auction house back in January for four hundred thousand pounds. That auction had seen the worst melange of works shambled together, under the insistence of the estate selling them, an estate that was trying to shift its eclectic wares in order to remain in the same living quarters. As a result of the incoherence of the lots, buyers were scared out of the bidding room, in spite of some minor coverage in the National Express. But Lowry had come swiftly to the rescue with his cheque book and pen.

And here he was presenting the very painting he had bought that day to the Prime Minister in order to hang in Number Ten’s hallway. Alice did not feel good about repaying his kindness with semi-digested canapés and champagne. Both ahe and Lowry went to their respective lavatory, Alice glimpsing her sister batting eyelids at the astronaut that had been specially invited for her.

Alice was cleaning herself up when a drunk man came in. Being the only occupant of the Ladies’, Alice decided to take no offence. The man was tall, and with his height came the natural good looks of the upper middle class. Definitely Teresa material.

‘That fucking cunt,’ he gargled. ‘I showed him.’

Alice was somewhat confused, although too tired to take offence at a phrase that she heard daily from educated yobs on the underground.

‘Sorry. I’m Ian. Ian Secure. I’ve just had a fight next door with that cunt Daniel Lowry. You’re Alice Content, aren’t you? Yeah, I recognise you. Sorry. I’m drunk.’

‘That’s quite all right. I wish I could be drunk myself,’ answered Alice.

‘I’ve slept with your sister, you’ll be surprised to know.’

‘Actually not, I’m afraid. Teresa told me the whole story. I thought you looked her type when you tumbled in.’

‘And what’s your type? Here, you don’t look at all happy.’

‘I’ve just been ill. It happens during pregnancy.’

Ian Secure articulated something approaching a yes, but which was violated in mid-delivery by a grimful murmur of disgust. He stared at his interlocutor, looked at the room, raised his eyebrows to convey pleasant surprise at the cleanliness of the females’ conveniences, and then turned. As he walked out, he returned to his drunken mode. ‘Least I got the last laugh. Wrote Daniel Lowry is a cunt as an acrostic in my last ever column. Cunt.’

And with that, Ian Secure was gone into the night, in search of the horrendous hangover that found him the next morning as he awoke on a pool table in the Inner Temple. As his eyes slammed shut in avoidance of the light, he remembered that he really must apologise to that lovely woman in the lavatories. If only he could remember who she was.

Daniel Lowry sat at his desk, behind him a framed copy of the front-page picture of himself handing over a four hundred thousand pound cheque to Alice Content for a Jackson Pollock. He was leafing through the day’s National Express, the lead article of which told of mothers suing a record label because the records of one of its artists, Malt-e-zer, had provoked their sons to help an old lady across the road, only for the old wench to beat them with her walking stick and to rob them of their pocket money.

Daniel was in a jolly mood owing to the fact that his brother-in-law was now the most important man in the country. He, Daniel, was on the cusp of greatness. With connections like these, he could really improve circulation. News leaks, scandals. He would hear all about it before everyone else and publish it in the National Express. He might be able to swing lowering the age of procuration of pornographic material. He might even end up with a cabinet position himself.

Daniel Lowry never really asked himself why he wanted to be ever richer. He merely assumed it to be a natural by-product of the day and age he was living in. Although, as every journalist will tell you, never assume anything. To assume makes an ass out of u and me, someone had once told him. Not that Lowry considered himself to be a journalist. In fact, he had gone on record as saying that he knew nothing about journalism, much to the delight of those idle wasters at the Prying Eye. What did it matter? He could buy them out as and when he chose. But why bother? They made him out to be a bastard. He was a bastard. Women love bastards. It seemed to Daniel an odd piece of false logic to think that a bastard was a bad thing to be. It was necessary to get by in the world, and being a bastard was how to do that and more. So why take shame in it? He was a bastard and proud of it.

Such thoughts were foreshortened by a timid knock at the door.

‘Enter,’ commanded Lowry.

Tom Snipe, editor-in-chief of the National Express, appeared. He proposed to his employer that the paper should run a leader concerning the impending visit of recently-elected US President, Dave Berliner. In his usual manner, Snipe talked around the matter before coming to the point.

Lowry did not really listen to Snipe, whom he had always considered a grovelling underling, the kind that was loyal but aggravating. To corroborate this, perhaps you should write that by his fellow employees Snipe had been blessed with the nickname Thrush. The reason being that he was an irritating cunt. Lowry felt that Snipe should be rewarded for his blind loyalty, and even pandered to Snipe’s pretensions at being a proper journalist, giving him a job on a supposedly proper newspaper. What did it matter that Snipe didn’t know the first thing about journalism either?

‘Fine,’ blurted Lowry. ‘Just as long as we don’t give the Americans too much praise. That Berliner bloke strikes me as an absolute fool.’

‘That’s because he is one, I think,’ interjected Snipe, his head poking forward as he spoke, his glasses sitting uneasily on the edge of his nose, his glasses being pushed back up his nose by his right hand, a grease mark left upon the right lens of his glasses from the push. ‘But he’s an important ally to the nation. We can’t sway too far away from America, nor too close to Europe. Otherwise we’ll be caught in the middle of a terrible muddle.’

Lowry had had enough chit-chat. He flicked a wrist, brushing his hair as though he were wantonly swatting a fly. Snipe was dismissed.

What would his bloody wife be doing, thought Lowry. Out shopping, nattering with that bitch sister of hers; she could be doing anything for all he knew. And yet the bastard did not care. These moments of wifely disgust occurred daily for Lowry, and at these moments he picked up the phone, called the number of his first love, Tanya, now a resident of Great Bardfield, Essex, with two children and a Caesarian scar that never quite healed, and waited for her to answer. Tanya had a secret suspicion that the voiceless breath at the other end of the line was Daniel Lowry, the show-off footballer that she had cheated upon the night before he was signed to Tottenham as a professional. She allowed his daily invasion of her privacy, probably because she was bored with the endless talk that were her offspring and the raised fists that was her husband. Sleepless at night, these telephone calls allowed her to dream.

Lowry, on the other end, emptied his head of every thought. Not even his wife could bother him in these moments of blissful silence that marked the hubbub of every day. A silence of remembering a time when he breathed clean air, before health seemed irretrievably lost. Moments of just breathing. Lowry thrived on those.

Barely a month in charge of the country and Uriah Form was already looking forward to summer recess. At the suggestion of the Royal House, a referendum was to be held to decide whether or not to abolish the Royal Family. Not that the Royal Family would lose its Royalty, it would merely be deprived of any direct political power. Of course, international visits by Royal members, charity work, and the use of the palaces as a form of tourism would all continue. So in fact barely anything would change; simply a nation’s indecision would be ended and Form’s popularity would be even further augmented. The United Kingdom would have to be renamed.

Uriah had quickly formed and now stuck to his opinion of the Family. Each and every member he met, including the dashing ones, had a great interest in politics, an interest that was backed up by no understanding of the thing whatsoever. Furthermore, several members were getting on in life, and with old age had come extreme opinions, opinions that never shifted. To these members, the rest of the world was buffoons. Buffoons that would in their minds undoubtedly vote to retain the monarchy.

To add to Uriah’s woes, not only was Norman Motley’s first Budget due before the recess, but he was also about to meet Dave Berliner, whom the Prime Minister considered to be a crass politician, even by American standards.

The American entered directly.

’Howdy, ich bin ein Berliner!’ greeted the recently-elected President. Before Uriah had time to respond, Dave was already slapping his knee and chuckling. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not an idiot like JFK. S’just a little joke I have.’

Uriah smiled politely at the greying American and noticed that he could see the President’s donut-filled belly through a hole in his shirt, a hole caused by the unworking of a button.

‘So tell me. How can you help my beloved country remain in its prem-ear position of world power? I tell you, son, my country’s fallin’ apart quicker than a man what’s got leprosy. We got white supremacists, black supremacists, religious weirdoes, kids with guns, a nigh on thirteen per cent Spanish speaking population — d’you know I can’t speak a word of spic? Get it? Haw haw. But so help me God, I can not even ask for a blessed beer in that damn language. I wish they’d all speak good ol’ darn American English.’

‘Maybe you should take these people into account…’

’Oh, I do. I do. I take ’em into account all right. Cain’t none of ‘em read or write, so they can’t vote. Whaddo I care? That’s jus’ jokin’, ‘tween you an’ me an’ this here painting. What on earth is that?’

Berliner was referring to the Jackson Pollock, so graciously bestowed to the Prime Minister by his brother-in-law, now hanging in the hallway of Number 10 Downing Street. The painting had remained in the hallway, within view of the paparazzi outside, owing to the fact that the painting did not fit in with the décor of the Entrance Hall: a Henry Moore sculpture depicting a reclining figure in an open pose (which Uriah wanted desperately to get rid off; it had been the choice of his predecessor), a painting of a Horse Guards’ Parade, and a portrait of Chatham. Furthermore, Alice had refused to have the painting upstairs.

‘I cain’t never fathom what that’s supposed to be portrayin’,’ remarked Berliner the art critic. ‘But tell me, I admire you a helluva lot. An’ you got England here, this fine lil’ island, and there don’t seem to be no trouble. ‘Cept with them Scotch an’ all. I seen Braveheart. God damn near broke my heart that movie.’

(For those writers who were dead before Braveheart came into being, it is a film concerning the life of William Wallace, Scottish freeeedom fighter. It was directed by and stars Melvin Gibson, an Australian action hero, who soon became one of the biggest icons in late 20th Century Hollywood. It was made in 1995.)

Uriah smiled meekly and showed Berliner through to the Entrance Hall. His reaction to the American was typical of his education: a shy embarrassment and a refusal to correct someone from another part of the globe, someone who had no need to know the difference between Britain and England. Uriah felt that Berliner lacked knowledge, not understanding.

‘Alex, how pleased to meet you!’ boomed Berliner. Alice had presently come through to the Entrance Hall from a different direction and was less patient about Berliner’s latest mistake. She duly replied:

‘It’s Alice. Are you always so flagrantly oafish and unpleasant when you arrive in someone else’s country? Do you realise that there is such a thing as someone else’s country?’

Uriah was noticing that Eve Berliner, who had failed to make her presence felt until that moment, had a slight smattering of spinach on her foremost right incisor, undoubtedly a leftover from her in-flight cuisine, when he heard these words from his wife.

‘Alice. What on earth-’

Before Uriah could utter a syllable more, Alice had disappeared down the hall, through the doorway and out into the army of paparazzi that thronged in Downing Street.

‘Well, I like her. She sho’ has a temper on her.’

‘I’m so terribly sorry. My wife… Alice is six months pregnant. I think that she’s having quite a rough time of it, what with me being busy for the election.’

‘Gawsh. Six months, and she looks so darn diddy,’ mused Eve Berliner. ‘Why, when I was six months pregnant, I felt like I was a beached-up sperm whale.’

‘You still are, girly girl.’

Eve Berliner took her turn to be annoyed at the man who thought himself the most powerful being in the world. He put his arm around her as if no-one could resist him. It was true: Eve Berliner could not deny the abrasive charm that had attracted her to the man who had been debating champion of Montana for two years running at high school. It wasn’t that he was good at getting the facts right, it’s just that he was so confident. Even Uriah Form felt for a minute that he could do with a marriage such as theirs, a good old-fashioned marriage based on honesty and insults.

Alice Content was being chased by seven or eight paparazzi. She had passed the dull Cenotaph and was about to reach Westminster underground station. Why did they not just leave her alone? She wanted some privacy, no more of this acting in front of luminaries, this acting that shed little light on her own, or anyone’s, existence. She entered the station and within instants had lost the flashes and cockney banter of the photographers by jumping the queues and the underground turnstiles without so much as being noticed.

Down the escalators she plunged, before plumping for a Jubilee line train. She did not see whether she was standing on the north- or southbound platform. At least the Jubilee line headed out of town, whilst the Circle (if not strictly the District) line maintained its users within the periphery of the city centre.

A train was before long drawn up. A set of protective glass and the train doors opened simultaneously. Alice barged her way on, only to find not a seat, but a carpeted rest set at a seventy degree angle, against which she could rest her derriere.

The rush was bringing nausea back to her, but she stifled any displeasure that she might cause her fellow travellers by vomiting, one of whom she thought she recognised and who certainly recognised her.

Ian Secure’s mind was addled that morning, but thanks to lenient office hours, he could arrive at work in Canary Wharf at whichever mid-morning hour took his fancy. The night before he had ended up playing psychedelic bobsled with three friends on the pavements of his home quarter, Swiss Cottage. The rules of psychedelic bobsled involve all four members of the team running with their backs bent forward, as if pushing the sled. Once enough speed has been accumulated, the first member stops and jumps into the imaginary bobsled, which he must steer. The other members continue to run on the spot behind him, before each in turn gets into the sled. The fourth member of the crew must run the most and get in last. Once he is safely aboard the sled, all four members must lean forward in a huddle so as to create the least amount of wind resistance possible. They must also swerve in time with the first man, who is the only one who can see which way the course veers. Last night’s run was set to be a world record, when it was prematurely brought to a close by a police officer named Kelvin. Ian Secure received a slap in the ear for telling PC Kelvin to cool off.

There was just enough alcohol left in Secure’s system to encourage him to speak to Mrs Form, who responded badly to his polite manner of address.

‘Don’t use that name near me,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m a bit worse for wear this morning. Listen, are you all right?’

‘The answer is dubious.’

‘The answer is dubious, or you are dubious?’

‘Both.’

‘Good. Good. I always thought that few people saw the benefit of doubt. Obviously, you doubly have cause to be dubious.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, God. I don’t know. I’m sorry, Alice. If I can call you Alice. I believe we have met once. Well, I know your sister if we haven’t.’

‘We have met.’

‘Good. Well, I feel like I am about to be ill. So either we go for a drink and talk about it, or we both recline here in studied silence.’

Silence followed, but Alice followed Ian out of the train and up the autobahn of escalators that makes up the gaping mouth of Canary Wharf station. Within minutes they were sat with milky coffees in a branch of a renowned chain of coffee houses.

‘You know there’s twelve of these in Canary Wharf alone,’ said Ian, pouring some brandy into his latte from a hip flask. ‘Like one chain of coffee house needs twelve branches in an area this small, albeit densely populated. What they’re doing, see, is they drown out the opposition. Twelve in one tiny area, and no other chains can get a look in. Once they have the monopoly, they shut half of the branches down. And the standard invariably drops, because they don’t need to be the best anymore. They’re the only coffee shop. If only bars were open during the morning. You know, if it hadn’t been for the war, there’d be no such thing as licensing laws.’

Alice could see what Teresa had found interesting in this man who, by his very over-familiarity with people he barely knew, was rendered funny. If he kept it up, though, she would, like Teresa, soon tire of him.

‘So come on, what’s the problem?’

Alice was taken aback that she should be given an opportunity to speak. ‘Well, well…’ she stammered before giving up.

‘You really are in a bad way,’ said Ian, hand moving to her shoulder.

Alice could not find the words to say what she was feeling. She did not want to find them, either. The form of the phrases could never match the content of her feelings. The silence that followed was not pregnant, and nor was there a gestation period of any noticeable length for the tears that soon turned Alice’s blushing cheeks an even deeper shade of red. Ian did not know what to think, but as ever his interest was aroused by a woman who shed tears before him. His hand descended from Alice’s shoulder to her elbow. The smooth silk shirt that she wore made Ian yearn for the smooth skin beneath its sleeves. Now her hand became enveloped in his.

‘Come on, I can’t work when you’re like this. Let’s get a cab to my place.’

The ride came to £54.60. Ian was to think it worth every penny.

Uriah Form sat behind his desk, eyes shut, head tilted backwards. Dave Berliner had been hard work, although influential. He and Berliner were due to make speeches the next day at a conference in Whitehall. Berliner had said nothing of note that afternoon aside from asking where the cat was. Uriah did not know whether their two speeches would correspond at all.

None of his sources could tell him the content of the American President’s speech for the next day either, and Uriah was beginning to feel that he was more of a fool than Berliner just because of Britain’s inferior economic status to the USA. In point of fact, Uriah was rather humbled by the whole experience of having a man so self-righteously gauche being able to tell him what to say and do in his own home.

He called Motley.

‘Don’t panic,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer reassured his leader. ‘It’ll be one of those “let’s retain our friendship” kind of bashes, where he praises Britain and we praise the United States.’

‘Norman, I don’t think he even knows what Britain is.’

‘Of course he does. It’s an archipelago off the coast of Europe.’

‘Don’t be facetious. I’m serious.’

‘And there’s no way you’d improvise?’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Call Seville Spin then. He might be able to whip you up a nice little speech.’

In Number 11 Downing Street, two flesh-covered bones that formed the shape of a pincer dropped the handset down on to the receiver. A hair-covered globe tilted over a mirror. Eyes contemplated what was reflected before them. A brown-black dome dominated the landscape that was Norman Motley’s face. From it a single tiny hair emerged, a hair that tickled now so close was Motley’s dome-shaped facial wart to the mirror. He took a deep breath and proceeded to inhale his second line of cocaine of the day. Perked up, he thought that neither he, nor his Prime Minister, nor his country had anything to worry about.

At that moment, a telephone rang in Oxford. Seville Spin picked it up. ‘Hello?’

’Erm, yes, hello. Is that Seville Spin?’

‘It is indeed. May I ask who’s calling?’

‘Yes, it’s Uriah Form.’

‘Oh, Uriah, sorry, I didn’t recognise your voice.’

Spin turned his brow to his pupils, who were sat opposite him, impressed that their philosophy tutor should be speaking to the Prime Minister. Or at least, none of his pupils could think of another person who had that Christian name and so they assumed it to be the Prime Minister.

Spin, whose classes were always challenging for his pupils, thanks to the large amount of pressure he placed upon them to excel, asked his tutorial group presently to leave the room. Out they filed in youthful wonderment. This had been the first General Election at which any of them had voted, and, like most first experiences of the late teenage years, it had been a disappointment. However, now that they were brushing second hand with fame, their interest was greatly aroused.

‘Proceed,’ said Spin in their absence.

In London, not forty feet from his runny nosed neighbour the Chancellor, Uriah Form resented Seville Spin’s tone. Spin, the playboy (albeit ginger) academic, whose half-famous parents had performed the common media trick of naming their child after the place of its conception, tried to conceive of the reason for Form’s intemperate call.

‘It’s this thing with Berliner tomorrow. You do know about it, don’t you?’

‘Sure, but how am I involved?’

‘I have no idea what Berliner is going to say.’

‘Have you asked him?’

‘Well, basically yes. He was somewhat obtuse in his response.’

‘I’m afraid I am not in a position to tell you what he is going to say, though. What do you want me to do?’

’If you could by any chance come up with something, just a general overview of relations with the US, that would be great.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Alice Content stepped from Ian Secure’s Swiss Cottage home a happier woman. Love-making whilst pregnant was fascinating. She felt so much more receptive to even the slightest touch. So great was her pleasure that she did not have any of the pangs of guilt that she thought she would upon being unfaithful to her husband.

Why should she feel guilty? It was his idea for them to get married, all for the politics. Not for love. Neither Uriah Form nor Alice Content believed in love. Certainly not in the kind of love that lasts forever, true love, love from novels and films. And what was the point of thick and thin love, of in sickness and in health love? Periods of unhappiness that were pointless given the number of lives one had to waste on feeling trapped inside a failing relationship. No, she and Uriah believed in the transience of the emotions, and it was indeed this very transience that rendered them more real. Like life itself, you can only appreciate the emotions if they do not last forever.

Alice went down the steps to the Swiss Cottage tube stop. Rather than feeling fat now, she felt voluptuous, a mother-to-be, fertile and attractive. Uriah had not contributed to this feeling. Alice realised that she did not have any money, and that all of her cash, credit and debit cards were in 10 Downing Street. Alice was feeling sufficiently liberated to vault the turnstile and to proceed to the platform to await the southbound train.

She did so without being spotted. Dodging fares was hardly what people would expect of a well-to-do mother-to-be.

As the train pulled away, Alice relived the previous four hours, as if they were a dream. As a result, she did not notice the ticket inspector who got on the train at St John’s Wood. He had already collared one individual when Alice awoke from her reverie.

The inspector had an almost invisible moustache and a side-swept Hitler haircut. This was a perfect appearance to accompany his workaday officiousness. In his bright orange coat, he grabbed the young offender by the ear. The lad, no older than twenty, was complaining with an increasingly high pitched voice.

‘Leave me alone. I’m not a fucking kid. You caught me, I’ll pay. But I’ll fucking tell you something… Fare’s fair, my arse. This underground’s getting more expensive by the month. And car numbers are down. What sort of government’s that? I came out with five quid today and that’s not enough for a bloody one day travel pass. I’m a student. I’m broke, you know. All I wanted was to see the early film up at Finchley Road, and it’s costing me an arm and a leg.’

‘Leave it out, son. Just stay here whilst I check the rest of the carriage.’

The young gentleman had nowhere to run, and the driver had stopped the train just short of Baker Street. Alice thought it her duty to report herself to the inspector post haste.

‘Excuse me. I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t have enough money for a ticket either.’

The student immediately recognised her and started to laugh.

‘Ha! There you go. Prime Minister’s wife can’t even afford a fucking tube ticket. Is this rip-off Britain or what?’

The inspector turned to give the lad a stern look, which of course made no impression on someone who had surpassed the age of tickings-off and talkings-to by the age of fifteen (when the now student had been expelled from his school for exploding a dustbin with the use of saw dust, lighter fluid and flame).

‘Will you give me your details, please, Mrs Form? This won’t take a minute.’

Seville Spin thought himself the kind of man who was churning out the best educated children in the land. He often chided his students for not being as academically capable as he had been at their age. He did not think this harsh, but rather thought it the best way to get the best work out of them.

He quickly cobbled together a half-decent speech for the Prime Minister, working along similar lines to the speeches he had written in the build-up to the elections. He emphasised that the nation must continue to shake off the feeling of resent at having to maintain and perform its responsibilities. Rather, it should take pride in upholding and carrying out its duties. Shirking responsibility was fast becoming the nation’s key fault, and we should look to America, so the speech went, as an exemplary country, a country that feels it is its duty to protect the smaller nations of the world from the threat of tyranny and injustice. And this is not just on an international scale, but within our own country as well. For Britain was far from great. We were living in a country where children were murdered on the streets, where physical violence, assault, battery, drunken disorderliness, paedophilia, racial attacks and theft were all on the rise. And it is not the responsibility of the innocent to stop these things; it is the duty of the would-be guilty to resist temptation, to be better, thinking people, to make Britain great again. Not in the way it used to be, but great in that everyone might get along together; in that Christians, Muslims, Hindus could all join hands within Britain’s shores.

Seville Spin really wanted to mention atheists, religious freaks and nihilists as well. But to admit their presence was not good form. The speech was tosh. Spin knew as much, but he also understood that British politics had become a parody of American politics, which was itself a parody of itself, and of the movies, which were also a parody of themselves and of politics. Hence the choice of Dave Berliner as President. He was all style and no content. And what did it matter about real problems if the speech worked? There were no real problems anymore, just controlled situations, just carefully developed dissatisfaction, to respond to which meant that the world could avoid stagnation, stasis and continue its ecstatic progress.

Seville Spin looked out of the window and over Magdalen College. Its cloisters glowed an affectionate and welcoming yellow in the warm sun. Beyond them loomed a large tower, a beacon to academic minds, a sign that here was a refuge from the scorn that was poured daily upon those stupid enough to want to learn.

Students loitered with Pimms and croquet hoops on the lawn below his rooms. Among them he spotted Zoë, a twenty one year old short-haired brunette from St Andrews with whom he had slept a year previously. That was the last amorous relationship in which Spin had engaged. All six and a half minutes, from her entering his room to his detumescence, haunted him continuously as loneliness built up within the walls of the college whose staff was almost exclusively male. He wished of settling down with a girl like Zoë: bright, keen to learn, keen to please. Instead, he faced conversations about football with his fellow tutors and an endless supply of badly cooked food, excellent wines and Port.

Ian Secure turned up to work after 4pm on the Tuesday when he first made love to Alice Content. He was worried that the likes of Daniel Lowry actually got turned on by the thought of intercourse with pregnant women, given the title of one of his more salacious publications. He was also glad that he did not have to work with Daniel Lowry ever again.

Ian was currently being pestered by Neville Pints, a bespectacled chief sub-editor who was wearing a yellow jumper to match his mildly jaundiced teeth. Neville gave the impression of being extremely slow, due to the fact that he had had surgery performed on his brain ten years previously, following the discovery of a tumour. He was almost exclusively bald, spoke slowly, and had a scar running across the upper reaches of his forehead. However, his thoroughness was second to none, and the Indescribably on Sunday was proud of his work, even if not of his personality. Ian enjoyed Neville’s pestering about as much as he had enjoyed being born.

’If you’ll just take a look, I can get them sent off.’

Neville was trying to put proofs in front of Ian’s nose.

‘Is that Thomas Nurse-Bryden over there? I thought he was working at a dotcom.’

(A dotcom is a business that is based on the internet. The internet, for those writers who died before its invention, was developed in the 1990s as a means to liberate knowledge — a world wide web, an information superhighway that people could visit from home with a computer and a telephone line. Of course, within a short space of time, the internet had become a market place.)

‘He came back last month.’

‘Gosh. That’s just about everyone back from their dotcom adventures, then. No future in it, really, was there?’

‘I would say not, but if you would take a look,’ droned Neville.

‘Yes. Leave them on my desk, please Neville. I’m just going to make a phone call.’

Neville returned to his desk to await more proofs. Now that his son, Yorrick, had left school and Neville was nearly sixty, he was continuously pondering his career. Had it been worth it? He had never managed to make it as a features writer, which was what he had hoped for in the beginning. Fresh out of school, Neville had gone to work on the Ham and Hock, doing three years as a features writer, before landing a job as sub-editor for a men’s style magazine. He did not enjoy his year there, but it moved him one step closer to a national daily. He was soon subbing at the Torygraph, and was asked to join the Indescribably when it started to take off in the 1980s. He had been there ever since, and had never dared to leave as it was at the Indescribably that he had met his wife, Margaret Pints (née Pressman). It was her maiden name that initially attracted him to her, and it proved to be a very fecund relationship, as a son, Yorrick, was born in 199- to two doting parents.

And how proud was Neville of Yorrick. Yorrick was all set to attend Magdalen College, Oxford, starting on Sunday 8 October 200-.

Neville had always felt out of place as a journalist, more so as a sub-editor. In spite of his surname, Neville was not at all fond of a tipple, which meant that he missed out on the after-work get-togethers that would take place at least once a week down in one of the quayside pubs across the way from Canada Square. Neville had pictures of a deceased wife and a living son to return to, a son to whom he had read Finnegan’s Wake and Tristram Shandy from the age of nine. His favourite writer was of course Shakespeare, and it was with pleasure that he had named his son after the court entertainer that had given so much pleasure to Hamlet in his youth.

Neville continued to veer between feelings of pride and despair as he considered his private achievements and failings. Across the floor, Ian Secure was desperately trying to reach Alice Content on her private landline at 10 Downing Street.

All of the phone lines at 10 Downing Street were blocked, discovering the lie that there were any private lines into the Prime Minister’s residence. The reason for the bottleneck was that the Prime Minister’s wife had been caught dodging her fare on the underground, having stormed out of Downing Street earlier in the day in an apparent huff. Members of the press were jamming the lines in avid search of a statement.

Alice Content eased herself into a bubbled bath and relaxed. Here she could not hear a single phone ring. She could not even hear the myriad rings of mobile phones that haunted her days in the same way that still birth and a loveless childhood haunted her nights. She was proud of herself, she felt as though she had done something to define herself, to break out of the confines of her until-then media image. She just hoped that Uriah would take it in the right way — with annoyance.

By the end of the day, Uriah Form had issued a hastily drafted statement declaring that the whole matter of his spouse’s fare-dodging had been an honest mistake as his wife had rushed out to see a friend in need. The telephone lines had been changed and Form knew that he was safe from phone calls from the media for at least a couple of days. He currently sat in his office on the telephone to Seville Spin.

‘This is good copy, Seville. Excellent copy. You really have a way with words. Duty. I like it. It’s our responsibility to be more dutiful. Yes.’

Spin thanked him for his kind words, said that he had to mark some tutorial essays and wished the Prime Minister luck with his speech the next day. As it was, Dave Berliner’s representatives had finally got around to telling Uriah that the President’s speech would be equally inane, which would suit both newly-arrived leaders as they strived to further improve foreign relations in the early numbers of their days in power.

More relaxed now, Uriah walked into the hallway, where he could see his Jackson Pollock, still unable to get over the fact that a piece of work that could have been done by a one year old could fetch so much money — in his mind purely because they had made a biopic of this banally eccentric painter. He went through into a sitting room.

Alice was sprawled in dressing gown and towels on a white sofa, with a matching cushion resting on her baby-filled bulge, a small tub of ice cream resting on the cushion. She was disinterestedly watching television. The programme was a documentary about documentaries within the genre “reality television”, the angle of which was to point out that documentaries within the genre actually contained fabricated scenes so as to be more sensational, and therefore more viewed, than their rivals — which meant that they weren’t documentaries. This supposedly sensational documentir (as Alice thought it) was as interesting to the Prime Minister’s wife as reading that godawful newspaper, the National Express.

‘You all right, dearest?’

‘Fine, dear. Watching a rather tedious television show.’

‘Hmmm. Listen. This whole problem with today… Is everything okay?’

‘Oh, I dare say we could put it down to my hormones playing up.’

‘Hormones. Yes. But nothing worse than that? I don’t think you should be running out of the house when you’re six months pregnant. What I mean to say is, you must look after yourself, protect the little one.’

‘And what interest do you hold in your child? You have barely spoken to me since I told you I was going to have it.’

‘The baby’s not an it. It’s our son.’

Alice slowly turned her head towards Uriah and let out a single, hollow laugh that sounded like an axe descending on dry wood. ‘You buffoon,’ she said.

Uriah Form had often wondered whether his wife was more intelligent than he was. The fact that she had once dyed her hair blonde and her propensity for shopping had consoled him at times when she spoke more cogently than he on the subject of art. The two had met at a mutual friend’s thirty-fourth birthday party and had admired each other at the very least for their respective disrespect for convention. Neither had realised that it was a black tie party; neither pretended to care. Both had thought to fall in love with the other, and with mutual career benefits in mind, they thee wedded. Uriah was hurt that someone could think the Prime Minister a buffoon.

‘How am I a buffoon? Listen, we need to have this baby. We really do.’

’Need to? Who needs this baby? You, me or the party? So you can have a child to show off to the nation? That’s not need. Or maybe you think the world needs to have another baby floating around it? Well I don’t.’

‘Oh, Alice. Please spare me the lecture on population, the world being a terrible place and all that. What do you think I am trying to do in my job?’

’Kindly spare me the political speech, please. I am not one of your voters.’

‘Must you make our private life as stressful as my work life? Why can a man have no rest?’

‘Rest all you like. It won’t make any difference. You won’t make any difference. The television’s on. I am going to bed.’

After an uncomfortable night’s sleep on the sofa, Uriah Form arose at five ante meridian and began to rehearse his speech for that noon. He delivered it with typical aplomb, even managing to insert a couple of his own jokes to raise a smile with reference to the influence of American television and movies in the United Kingdom, perhaps soon to be redubbed the United States of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Dave Berliner nodded at Form as the Briton retook his seat. Spread across his warm features was the kind of smile that Form associated with clown masks, and Uriah was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear that he had said the wrong thing. Berliner majestically strode to the podium, coughed lightly into the side of his clenched fist, which then he struck down hard in front of the microphone stand. This created a boom small enough not to truly shock, big enough to captivate everyone present.

Form exchanged a glance with Motley. Both were impressed and about to take mental note of oratory. Which reminded Form, where would he send his son to school?

‘The United Kingdom is fallin’ apart,’ Berliner started. The hair on the back of Uriah’s neck stood on end. ‘Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a powerful country, an economic ally that the United States of America holds extremely dear. However, it is also a society fallin’ into moral decay. Violent crime has been on the rise for too long. The police are short-staffed, ambulance crews are attacked daily. London has a worse crime rate than New York for every crime except rape and murder. London has surpassed, or should I say fallen below, New York even in its rate of armed robbery. Somethin’ needs to be done about this, and somethin’ needs to be done fast. Your once great cities of Manchester and Leeds are quickly becoming places where the inhabitants are afraid to walk at night. Somethin’ needs to be done about this and somethin’ needs to be done fast. Don’t you think that it’s about time the United Kingdom changed its views on gun laws and allowed its citizens to defend themselves against the potential crimes that could be committed constantly against them? Would introducin’ gun laws not allow the citizens of this beautiful island to actually do somethin’ themselves about the problems of this nation, would it not put the ball in their half of the court, would it not mean that they could improve their standard of livin’ without havin’ to merely blame politicians like my esteemed colleague and friend, Mister Form here, who carries the can for the problems of his nation, who constantly does his all to make this a better country?’

Mr Berliner continued in this vain for several more minutes, expounding the virtues of gun ownership and singing the praises of his own Heckler and Koch, his most prized possession. His discourse was greeted with hesitation and interest. Slow and sparse handclaps developed with some embarrassment into a standing ovation.

Uriah could not smile as he shook hands with Berliner for the cameras.

‘Interesting speech you gave there.’

‘Why thank you. I don’t think of myself as much of an orator, but I do try. Not like that young Shakespeare feller o’ yours.’

‘Erm, who?’

‘Shakespeare. The blond feller makes all those movies set in the past. How he durn writes a script I can’t even understand, I’ll never know. But one thing’s for sho’: he can speak.’

‘Don’t you mean Kenneth Branagh?’

’Kenneth who? No. I’m talking about Shakespeare. The guy that did Hamlet, Henry the Fifth and Peter’s Friends. You must know him. Didn’t you make him a Lord or somethin’?’

(For those writers who died before Kenneth Branagh’s star ascended, he was renowned at the turn of the Twenty First Century as an actor, who went on to direct several films, including adaptations of various Shakespearean dramas.)

At a later press conference held in reaction to Berliner’s speech, Uriah tactfully explained that he appreciated the President’s interesting and well proposed suggestions, but said that Britain was in no real hurry to introduce relaxed gun laws for the general public. The speeches were in retrospect thought to be an enormous success.

The next Sunday, Ian Secure wrote a biting editorial condemning the ignorance of Dave Berliner and the pomposity with which he might suggest to other countries how they should function on a political and social level. He further maligned the British Prime Minister for allowing such embarrassing scenes to take place at all.

Alice Content laughed down the telephone line to Ian Secure and said that he had put together a sound argument in his article. Secure of course returned this praise with respect for his pregnant friend and suggested they meet up again. He was glad that the Indescribably allowed him to write more freely, that he could suggest dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister without Daniel Lowry chiding him as if he were a child who had questioned the authority of the class bully. The National Express had pictured Berliner’s head as a cashew on the day after the speeches, with the headline “Gun Nut”.

‘Only three more weeks until recess,’ said Alice without not a small accent of sadness. ‘He’ll be around the whole time then. I don’t know when I shall be able to see you.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be able to arrange something. I hope the article wasn’t too rude.’

‘Not at all, darling. What a silly boy you are to worry. If you had merely slandered him, I might take offence for propriety’s sake, but you have presented a well-rounded argument. Why should I be angry with you for criticising my toad of a husband?’

‘You can’t always think he is a toad.’

‘Maybe once… Sometimes I feel sorry for him nowadays. And then he speaks to me…’

‘But it breaks my heart to hear you speak of your husband so.’

‘You never said anything of the sort to my sister about her husband.’

‘Do you and your sister really tell each other everything?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, that was different. I really don’t like her husband. And, well, I don’t mind yours. He’s got a very tough job, you know?’

‘Please, Ian. I don’t want you to make me feel guilty about my feelings. I felt so happy after last week when we saw each other. Please don’t put any pressure on me.’

‘I apologise. One just always wants to know.’

‘Well, promise me you’ll never speak of him again. Promise.’

‘I do promise.’

‘Thank you, darling. Thank you very much.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘I think that I do.’

’You think you do? Or you know you do?’

‘Please, Ian. Who is to know?’

Ian pretended not to be hurt. She had a point. ‘So, are you seeing your sister soon?’

‘We shall dine tomorrow in Scott’s’.

‘And are you to speak of me to her?’

‘Ian Secure! Never!’

Teresa Lowry exclaimed, causing fellow-diners to pause in wonder for an instant before returning to the delights of their food. ‘How could you ever take my sloppy seconds? My dear sister, what are you thinking? You know he’s a raging alcoholic?’

Alice smiled and looked down at a morsel of chicken that she pushed to the left extremity of her plate with her fork. She did not know what to say to her sister.

‘And I thought my fling with this astronaut was interesting. He says he’s going to make love to me in weightlessness. Can you imagine that? But Alice, that’s amazing. You’re not going to see him again, are you?’

Silence. Teresa’s eyebrows arched to suggest her shock. She appeared to her sister like a beautiful statue, mouth agape and neck extended forward in static surprise.

‘Darling, you can’t see him. You mustn’t. It’s only your first affair and you’re thinking of love. I thought you brought me up never to take these flings seriously.’

‘Please,’ Teresa continued without encouragement, ‘Ian Secure will fall horribly for you. He did for me. Unless… Oh, no. But he wouldn’t…’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Nothing. It’s impossible. No one would ever do that.’

‘What are you thinking?’ persisted Alice.

It was now Teresa’s turn to turn tacit. Teresa blushed with embarrassment, reminding her sister that Teresa was like a composite of beautiful moments that had no traceable coherence, but that she instinctively made an effort to discover a striking pose from one moment to the next under the given and shifting circumstances.

‘Please don’t think that he’s doing it to get at you,’ said Alice. ‘It would upset me awfully to even contemplate that. I may be fat and mis-shaped by this pregnancy mishap, but occasionally men do like me for who I am.’

‘Darling, you are beautiful. You get much more coverage than I do. You should be my envy. I thought aloud a thought I should have disregarded silently.’

‘But now that the words have escaped, do you disregard them aloud?’

‘Yes. Undoubtedly. But do beware: he is a romantic at heart. And you are the mother-to-be Prime Minister’s wife.’

‘Don’t I know that only too well. I can’t seem to escape being reminded of the fact.’

‘Come on, now. Let us go shop after lunch. Take advantage of this pregnancy leave of yours.’

Norman Motley breathed in. It soothed the dry back of his throat to feel cigarette smoke against it. He held his breath for four or five seconds and breathed out. A rush of smoke, a fleeting screen that masked from Motley the grey and sparsely follicled surface before him that was his bare chest. He sat in only his boxer shorts, slouching back in his leather office chair. He stared blankly at numerous sheets of paper covered with figures.

He was in an agelastic mood. He had been since the election, he thought, as he used his belly button for an ashtray. The Budget was not helping to change this mood and he sought ways to escape it the whole time. But he found nothing to lift his spirits. Everything always got so complicated.

It was hot outside and Motley wished that he could be back at university, wished that he could be in that no place that is the past, when everything appeared simple on days when the sun shined and men could let their apathy run riot. He remembered his first meeting with Uriah Form, on such an afternoon at the Oxford Union, sat outside, a beer festival taking place. Form used to be able to drink fourteen pints a day in that period of debauchery and dalliance. Motley, who had preferred to fill his student days with toxins of more powerful resolve, spoke to Form about changing the country, about turning it into a utopia where everyone would be happy. How naïve they had been back then. In fact, pondered Motley, if it hadn’t been for Uriah’s enthusiasm, he would never have lasted that long in politics. It hurt him every day to see unhappiness everywhere, to imagine the Underground filled with people not talking, not smiling, people who only became alive after a couple of drinks. And it hurt Norman Motley to think that he had become one of those people. And during moments such as these, as he did now, Norman Motley thought of Uriah Form, working hard, encouraging him every day, fulfilling his promise to help him, to honour the trust and loyalty that Motley had shown him throughout their political careers. Uriah Form shone in Motley’s mind as he inhaledrubbedhiseyeputhisfeetonthedesk all at once.

In not two minutes’ time, he decided he would call Uriah and ask for his advice, an advice that he held in much greater esteem than he did that of his counsellors. He wished that they could have Question Time outside on the lawns before Westminster rather than inside, where the air was stuffy with opinion. In the same way that he had first studied politics outside on beautiful English lawns at university.

Motley was jolted back into the present by the splash that his papers made as they spilled from his desk and on to the ground, pushed by his feet which resided on the desk’s surface. He fumbled forward to pick them up, spilling ash everywhere, and finally dropping his cigarette from his mouth as the fatigue provoked by such physical exertion caused his lips to lose grip of his cigarette and his mouth to inhale deeply. Ignited by fag end, the paper caught fire and Motley reached for the nearest liquid to hand.

The flames flared up as Norman Motley’s whisky catalysed the burning of the Budget plan for the year 200-. Motley managed to activate the fire extinguisher in the corner and put out the flames, soaking the plan with water and not before the fire alarm went off. He would be requiring a long chat with Uriah that day.

Norman Motley standing semi-naked outside 11 Downing Street was only page two news the next morning, as Summer-inspired race rioting in Leicester took centre stage. Seventeen Asians and four whites had been hospitalised as looting and damage to private residences and public buildings took place throughout the day and night in North Evington, a suburb east of the home of what was one of Britain’s favourite delicacies, the crisp.

Upon hearing that Alice Content did not wish to see him ever again, the race riots meant not a jot to Ian Secure. He thundered out of work at two in the post meridian and, following a short walk that took him to Limehouse via the kicking of several walls and several burials of head into his palms, he installed himself in a local pub. It was full of medical students and had once been the haunt of the Brothers Kray.

(Those writers who were already dead come the fame of the Kray Brothers — Reggie and Ronnie — should know that they were masterminds that organised crime in London’s east end in the 1950s and later. Both died at about the turn of the Twenty First Century and were made famous as if heroes.)

After having thrown back three drinks, Ian could not stand to be unrecognised and took a cab into the centre of town. He swung by a couple of more fashionable, journalists’ cocktail bars before rocking up at Groucho’s once again to humiliate himself in spectacular manner. This time he insulted a decreasingly fashionable group by pointing out their increasingly apparent lack of talent. One, an artist, had been the flavour of the month in the previous century for drawing bad poetry on plain white canvases. The second, a musician, had been a pretty boy of the pop scene, before his artistic pretensions and drinking habits had got the better of his talent and his belly respectively. The third was famous by association merely. Ian expressed exactly what he thought of each of them in no uncertain terms before being ejected from the club. None minded particularly, as every member of Groucho’s was used both to witnessing and performing inebriation and calumny within its walls.

Once again Ian Secure awoke he knew not where. He knew he must apologise to someone, but he knew not to whom. Then he remembered Alice Content, the woman whom he had decided to love, the impossible woman, who, in his eyes, kept him safe and insane. Why had she rejected him? How could she have seemed so keen, only to rebuff him after so little time? These were not the real questions, Ian realised, and through (might you write on account of?) his wooden faced hangover he achieved the moments of lucidity that daily he held in reverence; the real questions were as follows: did he love her? Could she love him? He needed to speak to her again if only to find out.

Teresa Lowry was reading the National Express on her bed in her second home in Henley-on-Thames. The race riot debate had died down until the next time, and today’s news was dominated by a paediatrician by the name of Icarus Hornblower, who, just outside his home on Thurlow Road in Hampstead, within the constituency of the Prime Minister, had been mugged and had an arm broken by two hoodla, Benjamin Green and John Taylor. The reason for the attack was that the two gentlemen, both drunk, had thought Mr Hornblower a molester of children upon asking him his profession, a supplementary question to their initial enquiry as to whether Mr Hornblower was trying to entertain them.

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

Teresa’s astronaut said nothing. ‘Are stars all that you think about?’ she proceeded.

‘Mainly,’ answered the astronaut, whose name was Dr George Lewis-Bergson, a man of few but precise words.

‘Why? They shine, they go out. That’s it.’

‘I wonder if there might be life out there. Constantly. It fascinates me. Humans are not special. Maybe space holds the answer. People argue we originated in outer space.’

‘Do you believe that?’

’I don’t know. I don’t even know that I don’t know. Sometimes I feel all too tempted to believe that yes, there are alien life forms. Maybe they put us here. Maybe they will get in touch when we are technologically gifted enough. Just like in Star Trek.’

(In case any of the writers of this text died before Star Trek came into being, it was an American television series founded in 1966, the central premise of which was space travel and the discovery of alien life forms. It featured the story that once we had achieved the ability to travel great distances through space, alien life forms came to us to share their knowledge.)

‘You don’t really think that, do you?’

‘I don’t know. You ever think science fiction may be right about some things?’

‘I hate science fiction.’

‘What do you like, then?’

Immediately, Dr Lewis-Bergson sighed to himself at having asked this question. It came as no surprise to him that Teresa Lowry should arch her back upwards and crawl towards him, desirous of full human contact. Lewis-Bergson felt as though he had had enough of such telluric, chthonic activities. He was beginning to make his excuses when

‘I fucking knew it!’

Daniel Lowry stood in the doorway to the bedroom. He resembled a snarling fox in a chicken run. Without thinking he snapped: ‘Who the fuck are you, then? Go on, who the fuck are you?’

George Lewis-Bergson was scared and relieved to see him.

‘Daniel. Don’t be so melodramatic. Just tell me why you happen to be here?’

‘Did Snipe not call you to say I was coming to play golf this afternoon? Obviously not.’

Teresa did not even think to make herself decent and stood up.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Here we are. What are you going to do? Divorce me?’

‘Just get him out of here. We’ll talk about this later.’

Lewis-Bergson gathered his belongings in an enthusiastic rush. Only space lay ahead of him now; the awkwardness of being unable to show his dissatisfaction at being constantly subjected to the desire of Teresa Lowry had ceased. Unlimited space. Infinitely expanding space. Limited, finite time.

As Lewis-Bergson scurried past, Lowry could not help swinging a punch at the back of his head. The newspaper owner missed, and felt even more angry as a result. He turned to Teresa.

‘Bitch.’

Norman Motley’s first Budget was received with hostility in nearly every quarter, as tax on everything rose by slightly more than the norm. This was to ensure more spending on health, education and police forces, assured Motley, but the clever clogses in the media worked out that barely any of the extra money raised would or could be attributed to these sectors. Motley did not quite understand how they had managed to make his figures add up in such a way — but he had never been the best at maths in any case. There were also grumbles from many quarters that strikes would ensue if the situation got any worse. What the public did not seem to understand, in Motley’s mind, was that all of his proposals were endemic of a strong country. People, he thought, would never understand.

Motley soon rode out the storm, though, and was within a week behaving like a rock star in the lavatories of Number 10 Downing Street with some rock and film star friends of Uriah’s that the Prime Minister had invited round for a party the day after Great Britain and Northern Ireland had voted no longer to be a constitutional monarchy, but to retain the Royal Family solely as an emblem of British greatness.

Form had been delighted with the result of the monarchy referendum, although his telephone call of commiseration to the various members of the Royal household did not betray this. He currently stood at a smoking barbecue in his garden cooking beefburgers for his media friends, the kind whose backing was paramount to his success. Britain was to declare itself a Republic in just over one year’s time once all complications with the Commonwealth states had been sorted out.

‘Where on earth is Norman?’ thought Uriah, flipping a burger over. He looked up but could not perceive his old friend anywhere. ‘Where’s Alice, for that matter?’ His wife, too, was nowhere to be seen.

Uriah handed the tongs and the chef’s hat that adorned his head to Seville Spin, who accepted the duty of cooking without question. Spin did not feel in awe of the stars around him, presuming them all to have heard of him, if not read his books. Failing that, they should have heard of his parents.

‘Hey you, chef. Are those burgers ready?’ he heard. He removed the chef’s hat and proceeded to envelope a burger in a sesame seed bap.

Meanwhile, Uriah Form had gone inside to find friend and wife. Neither could be seen. He went to the kitchen: merely a couple of theatre actors in the midst of mutual exaltation. The hallway: Daniel Lowry admiring the Jackson Pollock. ‘I really love this painting,’ he said upon catching sight of his brother-in-law.

‘You haven’t seen Alice or Norman Motley have you?’

‘No. But listen, do you like this painting? I can get you another one if you want. You know we give you very good coverage in the paper.’

‘Absolutely,’ started Uriah without thinking. To his esteemed benefactor he dutifully added: ‘I mean, Daniel, there’s no need. Your support of the party is more than warmly appreciated. Please, any more gifts are wholly unnecessary.’

‘Yes. But there are a few things I would like to suggest to you. Maybe we should speak in private.’

‘That’s a great idea, Daniel. Why don’t you give my secretary a call on Monday, we’ll arrange a time, sit down and talk. I’m so glad the Summer recess is here.’

‘Call your secretary?’

‘I’m sorry, Daniel. You must excuse me. I really am looking for Norman. I think we should talk, it’s just with so many things going on-’

‘You think that because I’m a member of the family you can fob me off. I do a lot for you.’

‘Indeed. In deed and in words, if you see what I mean. Forgive me. Forgive me.’

Uriah disappeared from the hallway and up a set of cantilevered stairs that was lined with the portrait of every Prime Minister to have preceded him. Lowry was left holding a glass of champagne and a headful of insulting language. Maybe he wasn’t trendy, but he could hold his own in this kind of company. In any kind of company. He did not have to suffer being ignored.

Uriah came to the white door of the upstairs lavatory, through which he could hear the laughter of more than one person. He knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ came a giggly voice from inside.

‘It’s room service,’ said another, possibly Norman Motley.

‘It’s me. The host of the party,’ said Uriah.

‘The host? Our führer?’

More laughter, this time raucous and intoxicated. Uriah tried the door; it was open and the once-familiar smell of marijuana worked its way into his nostrils. Norman Motley was partaking with the three celebrities who had been the butt of Ian Secure’s fairly recent insults at the Groucho Club.

‘There’s journalists here, you know,’ exclaimed Uriah as he slammed the door shut and went in search of his wife. ‘I knew this would happen,’ he thought. ‘I try to look out for you, Norman, but you can’t help but get yourself in trouble. Lord help you.’

The sound of giggling faded as Uriah entered his bedroom. His wife stood with her back to him on the telephone. On the four-poster bed that his parents had given them as a wedding present, sat Teresa, mascara and tears pouring down her face. Teresa looked at him fiercely, as if he were peeping at her naked. She resembled a panda bear.

‘Don’t call again,’ said Alice, putting the phone down. She turned to see her husband.

‘Who was that?’

‘Wrong number.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything’s okay. We were just having a discussion.’

‘How could it be a wrong number? This is Ten Downing Street.’

Alice remained calm as she explained that it was someone from work calling, but that she did not want either her husband or herself to be disturbed whilst he was throwing a party unless it was a matter of extreme urgency.

‘Maybe it was.’

‘They would call again or come round if it was.’

Uriah kept looking at Teresa who was shyly drying her eyes, looking at Uriah as if he were a dunce. He suddenly felt a dunce.

‘I’m sorry. How shy-making. I did not mean to interrupt your chat. You forget people have problems at times like this.’

The bald Prime Minister took two steps backwards before turning and leaving the room. Within five seconds the phone was ringing again. Alice picked it up, put it down, and then removed it once more from the receiver before it could ring again.

‘I wish he wouldn’t call.’

Alice sat on the bed and looked at her sister. Teresa had been explaining to Alice that Daniel Lowry was hiring a bodyguard for her, a man who was not to let her out of his sight. He refused to divorce her as her being his wife gave him direct access to the Prime Minister. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ Alice had protested. Teresa had just started to cry when the telephone rang. It was Ian Secure, wanting to speak to Alice. He sounded distraught, needed to see her, wanted to know how the pregnancy was going. Alice, with her sister present, felt obliged to hang up instead of conversing with the journalist of whom she truly felt so fond. Before she could re-engage her sister in conversation, however, he had called again and continued to do so until seconds before (and after) Uriah Form’s interruption.

Now that neither of the men in Alice Content’s life was present anymore in vocal or corporeal form, she returned her attention to the only woman in her life of any importance. ‘You never know. You might find the bodyguard attractive. Then you could shack up with him.’

Teresa let forth a nasal giggle and hid behind her long dark hair in embarrassment. To laugh so soon after tears makes one feel as though the transience of the emotions renders them meaningless. Alice realised that this was far from true and that the fleeting is more often the most precious. She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder, placed her head against her sister’s brow so that their hair interlocked and whose was whose could not be distinguished. In this manner they hugged.

The heat wave continued throughout the United States of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although the Summer of 200- remained more or less without incident. The only embarrassment for the Prime Minister and his party was Norman Motley’s fine upon breaking the hose pipe ban to wash his car on the drive to his country home in Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire.

Uriah Form took his wife Alice on holiday to Valletta in Malta. She was grateful for the fortnight’s break, just three weeks before her baby was due. However, she went prematurely into labour after just four days of her supposed holiday. Bookmakers had favoured that the child would be a boy, for Form’s baldness belied a virility that would surely mean that his genes gained the upper hand during the gestation process. Alice Content had not wanted to know the child’s gender before the birth. Furthermore, her husband had rejected the advice of doctors to check for any genetic defects. Whilst there was a minor chance of various problems arising in the baby, all of which could be cured by the magic of genetic engineering, Uriah Form declared that it would not look good if the child of the country’s leader was deficient, if it needed to be engineered.

Alice Content went into labour at two o’clock in the morning of 4 September 200-, after a day walking around the island where St Paul had been shipwrecked and where St John had based his army of knights, the island where Arabic and European peoples met.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ asked Uriah.

‘My feeling is that the contractions are about fifteen minutes apart. I suspect that we should make our way to a hospital.’

Uriah Form momentarily left his wife and went to seek native help. Soon Alice had been taken to the Sacra Infirmeria hospital in Valletta. Form waited outside in a green floored waiting room. He paced up and down, anxious to begin his patriarchy proper. ‘A father,’ he thought. ‘A father. What does this mean? Am I going to be a good father? If I am too strict on the child, will he rebel against me, make a fool of me, resent me? And if I am too lenient, will the child not grow weak? Will it not hate me for not setting a strong example to it? What if I cannot love my son? Or my daughter? Will there be troubles between father and child anyway? Surely yes. But it must respect me for leading the nation in the same way that the nation respects me for having a child. The nation. I alone hold the key to its future success. What am I doing here in Malta when I should be in England, helping my nation work hard, ensuring that people carry out their responsibilities? A child. This is what Mankind is about, bringing children into the world. This is what we fight for. This is what we die for. This is life itself, to create life. I can do no greater good. But I must also raise the child that is my nation. Life is truth.’

Uriah Form found himself lying across several chairs in the waiting room of the maternity ward. Three other families accompanied him, each Maltese, each composed of several and various members. A child stood in one corner. Uriah could not tell to which family she belonged, but she was talking to herself, quite openly, and waving her arms in the air as if casting spells. She spoke oblivious to all others and in Maltese. ‘How easy it is for children,’ thought Uriah. ‘Only they are allowed to be insane and do not have to care about it.’

Alice closed her eyes and fought against the pain. The contractions were slowly beginning to come more regularly, but it felt like there was no end in sight. There was a brick of life inside her, pushing her insides in every direction from within, in no way inclined to move out of her, only to break through her. This is how she imagined it. She pushed and pushed. ‘Would it ever stop?’ she thought.

The doctor looked unhappy as her heart failed to fall into any kind of monotonous beat. He said something in Maltese to his colleague, the midwife. She left the room in a hurry. The doctor approached Alice with a needle and a smile. ‘Do not worry,’ he said. ‘You will feel nothing.’

‘If I have a daughter, tell Uriah I want her to be called Scheherazade.’

The midwife was presently telling Uriah Form that his spouse was to be the victim of a Caesarian operation. Form nodded, a trace of worry manifesting itself in a furrowed brow. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Of course. This is regular. The child merely seems a little reluctant to make his debut.’

‘It is a boy?’

‘We have not scanned to check. I do not know.’

The midwife disappeared off. She returned with a doctor, taller than the original doctor by nearly a foot. A minute later, the midwife and the disproportionate doctors walked past in the other direction, pushing Alice on a trolley bed. Alice was sound asleep. At a nod of the head from the taller doctor, Uriah followed them.

They went upstairs and into an operating room, different from the delivery room by appearing more anaesthetised, brighter and less roomy due to the proliferation of equipment. Uriah was bid to wait outside. He did so without protest.

At first he stood, then he sat, putting his elbows on his knees, contemplating the shiny, scuff-marked floor of the hospital. Finally, Uriah Form slumped on to the floor of the waiting room, his back supported by the wall of the operating theatre. Within minutes the very base of his spine had gone numb, but he did not move, lost to the world in concentration.

Within the operating room, gel was applied and a scanner set up to see the contents of the dormant Alice Content’s womb. The baby did not seem keen to erupt out of its mother any time soon. To operate was without question; the situation was vital or mortal.

Alice Content slept on as the operation reached its completion. Uriah Form looked up to see the midwife carrying a silent bundle past him and down the corridor. Within must be his child, wrapped in a warm cloth, welcomed to the world by the warm hands of a tall Maltese surgeon. Uriah Form rose rapidly to his feet; he called after the midwife.

‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Is it a boy or a girl?’

The midwife appeared not to hear. Form followed her down the corridor. He even jogged, so fast was the midwife progressing with the child.

Alice Content came round and saw Uriah Form holding their baby daughter in front of her. She could see that tears had dried on his face. She did not recognise where she was and could only hear the hustle of the hospital, for a yellow-white curtain drawn around her bed prevented her from seeing anything apart from the elated father.

She continued to watch for some time. Form was totally oblivious to the gaze of his wife, and he continued to cradle the child, singing ever so softly to it.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘A girl.’

‘Scheherazade,’ whispered Alice. Uriah did not hear her and continued to speak:

‘Wendy we shall call her. Wendy Isobel Form.’

‘You can’t call her that. It spells WIF.’

‘But I’ve already told Daniel Lowry. He’s putting out a special edition this evening. You know, you were in labour for thirteen hours.’

‘Unlucky for some.’

‘Not for us. I’m sure.’

Alice felt the desire to sleep, wanted to forget her recent travails. Uriah woke her just as she teetered on the brink of dream. ‘Do you not want to hold her? I have a press conference to attend.’

A tear fought its way over the brim of Alice’s lower eye and fell vertically down to her right cheek, where the angle of the bone gave it slope enough to slow down to a trickle. She held out her hands; she desperately wanted to say something to stop her from crying more openly.

‘She looks like you. Like a good copy of you.’

‘That’s just because she’s bald,’ replied Uriah, serious and quick. He stood erect, formal and swiped his way through the curtain. Alice caught a snapshot glimpse of the maternity ward, filled with happy families. Except one bed.

In it sat a woman, whitened from labour exhaustion. Upon her lay a one year-old boy, holding tightly to her bosom. Sat on the bed, her legs dangling high above the ground, was a three year-old girl holding her mother’s left hand. On the other side of the bed sat a dark-haired Maltese man with a moustache, his rough fisherman’s hands wrapped around his wife’s right hand. All were crying. No baby was present.

The curtain was swiped shut and Alice could hear Uriah’s workmanlike gait as he made his way through the maternity ward. A great fear filled her. Alice looked down at the life that lay amid her hands. The baby seemed heavy, a fardel of which she would never be able to rid herself. This is what had grown inside her. This is what she had done. She had made this. If it was to be attached to her, then let the child grow up safely; let it shackle her, but please let her not shackle it. If not out of love, then let this be out of respect for the child, which had silently endured with Alice the period of her life that the Prime Minister’s wife had enjoyed least.