Ambition (11 page)

He had cringed at the headline the first time he saw it, too, when Sue had shown him the layout. But she had laughed at him patiently. ‘It’s what our readers want from their
politicians, Joe. To their mind anyone with a mortgage and 2.5 children couldn’t possibly be an enemy of the people.’ She rustled the layout importantly and impatiently, but he could
see she was hurt. She had been pleased with herself when she had shown it to him. ‘Look, if you don’t like it just say the word and I’ll write a piece which says you eat small
children for breakfast, want to publicly disembowel the royal family next time Labour win power and believe that Britain should sign the Warsaw Pact. I’m really sorry if you think I’ve
done some smarmy PR job, but I thought your real interest was changing things. And you can’t change things unless you’re in the mainstream. And that means photographs of the kiddies,
and the wife, and the house, and all that irrelevant garbage. I’m sorry, but I didn’t make the rules. I’m just trying to help you because I think the things you believe in are the
right things.’

‘Sue, I’m sorry. I’m just an old hippie.’

She laughed at that, the idea was so ridiculous.

‘It’s great – it really is. It’s just hard for me to think of myself as this person.’

She was a clever girl, and well thought of as a journalist, so he let it go – what did he know?

Now he knew his feelings of dread had been justified as Rupert gazed calculatingly at the paper. ‘How old is little Michael?’ he asked dreamily.

‘Twelve.’

‘Oh, isn’t that nice? In a couple of years he’ll be the right age for you to . . .’

Moorsom lashed out at him and was surprised to feel his wrist caught in a thin iron grip. ‘I am a trained ballet dancer,’ Rupert hissed. ‘My body is a deadly weapon. Rough
stuff comes extra.’

‘Extra?’ Moorsom slumped back in his chair, rubbing his wrist.

‘Au naturellement.
You didn’t think we were going to the chapel and going to get married, did you, dear boy? Oh no. You’re a Labour MP, it says here, and you care about
poor people and the redistribution of wealth. Well, I’m one and I want some of yours.’ Rupert jumped on to the bed, bounced and flung out his arms. ‘Now come here and show me the
honourable member.’

He looked so beautiful, and so familiar; the breathing image of the boy whose face Moorsom had carried in his mind for the past seventeen years. He sat on the bed. ‘I want to ask you
one question and I want you to answer me truthfully. How old are you?’

‘Old enough.’

‘Seriously.’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘It’s still illegal.’

‘So is everything delicious.’ Rupert smiled at him. ‘Now you have to answer me honestly. Tell me what you’d like.’

‘Just . . . I feel awkward saying it.’

‘Go on, silly.’

‘Just . . . act as if you love me.’

Rupert began to unbutton the man’s shirt. ‘Love comes extra,’ he said.

Sexual enchantment doesn’t affect only the lives of those experiencing it. It affected Joe Moorsom’s secretary and researchers, with whom he now flirted mercilessly. It affected
his wife and children, on whom he now lavished long-distance affection. And it affected Susan Street when she received a huge bunch of orchids at work one Tuesday morning with a card saying,
‘LUNCH! CANCEL EVERYTHING! JOE’ and felt obliged to forgo lunch at L’Escargot with a notoriously entertaining and bitchy actress in favour of a working-man’s cafe in
Farringdon – the only place Joe could go to eat without suffering the indigestion of guilt.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, poking moodily at a fried egg.

‘The big one, I’m afraid.’ He laughed modestly.

She sprayed tea all over her egg. ‘You’ve been given a place in the Shadow Cabinet!’

‘What a one-track mind you have, Susan!’ he said impatiently. Couldn’t she tell? Wasn’t it obvious? ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ He lowered his voice.
‘He’s wonderful, Susan.’

‘And you’re telling a hack?’ She was genuinely alarmed.

‘No, Susan,’ he said patiently. ‘I’m telling
you. As
a
friend.’

She shook her head and pushed her plate away. ‘Oh, Joe. Oh, no.’

He was red now, with anger and embarrassment. ‘Susan, I really thought I could tell you. We’ve had a few evenings when you’ve got drunk and told me about your . . . past,
some of the things you got up to. I really thought you’d understand. There’s no one else I can tell. I come from a mining village. I’m married to an NUM woman, I’m sponsored
by the NUM. Don’t you see how impossible things are for me?’

‘I’m sorry, Joe – I’m really happy for you. I’m just worried. With everything that’s happening for you right now . . .’

‘I appreciate your concern,’ he said coldly.

The lunch ended in less than ten minutes and he disappeared quickly, leaving Susan to pay the meagre bill. Which was unusual, because he always paid his half, insisting that there was no
such thing as a free lunch.

She wondered how he had come by the misapprehension that there was such a thing as free fuck.

One person unaffected by the sexual enchantment of Joe Moorsom was Rupert Grey. After the initial relief of not being destitute and prostitute had faded, and after a week
lying in bed reading
Smash Hits,
Rupert was bored. He was not allowed to answer the phone. He was never taken anywhere. Joe was starting to look less like a sugar daddy and more like a
jailer. It was worse than home sweet home.

‘But you’re in
showbusiness!’
he protested when Joe suggested yet another evening nursing a king prawn marsala in front of
EastEnders.
‘Show people
don’t live like this! They lead grand and glamorous lives!’

‘Rupert, I am not in showbusiness. I am a politician. A
Labour
politician.’

‘You get on TV, don’t you?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Then you’re in showbiz. Like Robin Day.’

‘Rupert, if I wanted to live in the way you suggest, which I don’t, I couldn’t. I don’t even take all of my salary. I draw a miner’s wage and give the rest back
to the party.’

Rupert threw back his head and screamed with frustration. ‘You SUCKER!’ That night in bed he said he had a headache.

‘I want to go one of those restaurants I’m always reading about,’ he announced the next day. ‘Langan’s, Lockets, the Gay Hussar. He tittered. ‘I
especially like the sound of the Gay Hussar.’

‘Rupert, I don’t
GO
to those places.’

‘Then maybe I’ll find myself someone who does.’

‘Please don’t say things like that, angel. Oh look, my speech.’

Rupert turned moodily towards the TV. There was a news film of Joe Moorsom taken two nights ago in Cleveland.

‘Society can no longer expect the under-funded and over-stretched social services to save children from abuse and exploitation – society must take a long hard look at itself.
Silence is no option – only an aid and a comfort to the great sickness within ourselves. The great threat to our children today is no longer the anonymous man with the bag of sweets but the
silent mother, the sick father and the scheming relation. For too many of this supposedly civilized nation’s children the place where they should be protected and precious is a place of
torment. If the torture of children happened in Latin America, we would call it fascism; if it happens here, we call it home life. But our houses cannot be home while children are being tortured in
them. Only the truth shall make our children free – and only their freedom will give us the right to call ourselves a civilized country once more. Thank you.’

‘Lovely speech, darling,’ said Rupert over the wild applause.

‘Thanks.’

‘Angel?’

‘Yes?’

‘How much do you think the papers would pay for a story informing them that the nation’s most prominent protector of children from sexual abuse is fucking a
fourteen-year-old?’

‘But you told me—’

‘I was lying,’ the boy answered happily. ‘But even if I was eighteen, it would still be illegal.’

‘Illegal, but not obscene.’

‘OH! So I’m obscene, am I!’

Joe Moorsom looked at the boy he loved standing there in pink ankle-socks and a turquoise satin turban with a fake emerald jammed into his navel and thought that, yet again, honesty was
probably not the best policy. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Thanks a
lot.’
The boy looked at him coldly. ‘Listen, Joe, it’s been a lark. But I don’t think we’re compatible. I can’t waste the best
years of my life in a council flat on the fourteenth floor. I think I should move out quite soon.’

‘Rupert!’ Moorsom caught him by the wrists. ‘Don’t say that!’

‘Shall if I want!’ The boy lit a Sobranie. ‘Though of course, I shall need some help.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Money, silly!’

‘A loan?’

‘Oh, no. That’s all cold and formal and nasty. No, I shall want palimony.’

‘But I’ve only known you for three weeks!’

‘Ah, yes. But to quote your good self, they’ve been the happiest weeks of your life. We’re talking
quality
of time here, not silly old quantity.’

‘Palimony . . .’

‘Just think of it as wealth redistribution, JoJo.’

The palimony demands grew day by day, fuelled equally by Rupert’s wild imagination and greed. The combination proved lethal. Rupert refused to believe that anyone who appeared on TV
was not immensely rich. At first he would just chant at Moorsom, ‘A flat in Cheyne Walk – a charge account at Fortnum’s – a Gaultier suit—’ and then the little
yellow sticky notes started going up:

‘A CRATE OF PINK CHAMPAGNE EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE’

‘MY PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY ROBERT MAPPLE-THORPE’

One day his secretary answered his phone only to nod and turn to Moorsom with a cryptic message. ‘It was someone called Rupee. He said it rhymed with whoopee and he said you’d
understand. The message is, “One large Borzoi, male, dyed puce”.’

It was this indiscretion which made Moorsom realize that a halt had to be called to the proceedings. That evening he confronted the boy. ‘Rupert, I have no money. If I did, I’d
gladly give it you. But these demands have got to stop.’

‘Really?’ There was a new note of contempt, class-based contempt, Moorsom couldn’t help feeling, in the boy’s voice. ‘Well, listen to me, my honourable little
member, and listen closely because I don’t intend to repeat it. I’ll tell you what’s got to stop, and that’s this horrid deceitful stinginess. I’ll do without the
presents – to judge from that awful tie you’re wearing your taste is all in your mouth anyhow – but I want my palimony. I want fifty thousand pounds, JoJo – that’s
five oh comma oh oh oh – and I want it soon, while I’m young enough to enjoy it – before my fifteenth birthday. You can take it from the miner’s slush fund or the blind pit
ponies’ poor-box or you can do more TV – I don’t care where it comes from. But if doesn’t come soon, your lovely wife and wonderful kiddies are going to see their honourable
member splashed all over the front pages one Sunday.’ He smirked, enjoying the look of stunned horror on the man’s face. ‘Won’t that make them sick up their
Shreddies?’

‘You were right,’ he told her grimly, looking into his Scotch. ‘He’s threatening me. Fifty thousand or he’ll sell his story.’

‘Fifty!
What does he think you are, a chat-show host?’

‘He doesn’t live in the real world, Sue. It’s not his fault. It’s that awful soulless middle-class public-school upbringing—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop making party political broadcasts, Joe! There are a million like him in this city from every walk of life. And stop making excuses for the little tart.
He’s a con man, pure and simple.’

Moorsom was silent. To her horror she saw a tear fall into his empty glass. ‘I love him, Sue.’

‘Your wife’s going to love him, too, isn’t she? Not to mention the NUM. Why, they’ll probably sit him on the front float at the next Miners’ Gala and crown him
Queen of the May. After they’ve finished lynching you, that is.’ She gnashed her teeth. ‘Look at what you’ve put in jeopardy, just for some diseased little slut with a tight
asshole.’

‘If you’re going to be obscene there’s no point in going on with this,’ he said primly. ‘I thought that maybe you’d be able to think of some way out,
that’s all.’

She drained her vodka martini and chewed on the lemon twist for a moment. ‘Send him to my office,’ she said finally. ‘Around four, when everyone’s at lunch, tomorrow.
He’s young enough to throw a scare into . . .’

‘Yes, he’s very young—’

‘—but old enough to know better,’ she finished firmly.

Susan sat behind her desk in her best Nicole Farhi houndstooth suit and looked at the boy very seriously as he came in. She rose and shook his hand solemnly. Around her
computers clicked and clattered and by the way he looked around she could tell he already felt out of his depth. Not without reason, he considered newspapers a sort of showbusiness, and
showbusiness was what awed him above all. It was a cinch.

In a quiet but deadly serious voice, she told him about the libel laws of the country and how no newspaper would touch his story. She made most of this up. Then she told him how judges
especially disliked blackmail because many of them were homosexual too and dreaded the day they might be put in the same position by some greedy little boy. To ensure against this, they were fond
of making an example of every unfortunate would-be young blackmailer who appeared before them. She threw in the Freemasons for good measure and Rupert’s eyes widened. It always
worked.