Meltdown (36 page)

‘Jeez,’ Jimmy whistled. ‘Hardball.’

‘Yes, and they’re going to make it very clear to you that the cost of any court action that the bank might incur in getting you out will be added to your mortgage. That’s their big stick.’

‘So I’m buggered then? Might as well roll over.’

‘Well, I’m not an expert on this although I’ve seen a lot of foreclosures from the other side, as a bank manager. If you want to get specific, detailed advice you’ll need to contact a debtors’ charity. There are a couple of really good ones, although they’re all very stretched at the moment.’

Jimmy’s face, which was already devoid of its usual cheerful expression, fell further.
Debtors’ charity
. It sounded so Victorian! And he’d come to this.

In a matter of months.

Derek Corby clearly saw what his son was thinking.

‘Jimmy, this is how it is. There’s no way of avoiding it and certainly no time for false pride. What’s happening to you is only what’s happening to thousands and thousands of other people at the moment, and you need any help and advice you can get. It can actually be quite a lot of trouble to evict a family and my experience is that if you can demonstrate in
practical
terms that you’re attempting to manage your responsibilities the banks and the courts will take a much more favourable line.’

‘So how do I do that, Dad? What do they want to see?’

‘Well, you have to show willingness to at least pay something. A lump sum plus a regular amount towards the interest that’s accruing.’

‘We’ve still got the Discovery. Our one remaining asset. I reckon I could get twenty grand cash on it in a quick sale. It’s worth forty easy, but then it isn’t actually worth that because nobody’s buying cars any more.’

‘Sell it,’ said Derek, ‘and hand the cash straight to the bank. Never mind your other debts.’

‘I’ve managed to pay off most of the small traders and builders at Webb Street with stuff I’ve flogged from the house, pictures and gadgets and stuff. It’s only the bank again, and David’s architectural firm.’

‘They’ll have to wait. You need to secure your home.’

‘We’ll have no car, of course.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that the children have somewhere decent to live.’

‘OK, Dad, I can do that. But as for trying to put down something regular towards the interest, I just don’t see how we can. We have no income at all. We’re living off extending our debt and my unemployment benefit.’

Derek glanced about himself and cleared his throat. It was as if he had something slightly dodgy and conspiratorial to say and a spy might be lurking in the undergrowth rather than just the mob of incontinent cats.

‘Your mother and I have been talk—’ he said.

‘No, Dad! Absolutely not,’ Jimmy interrupted. ‘Forget it.’

This was not the first time that his parents had offered to help and Jimmy simply wasn’t having it. The basic fact was that they could not afford to. Derek’s branch of the RLB had been closed as part of the emergency restructuring that followed Rupert’s fall from grace and the government bailout. Derek had been forced into early retirement and with the markets so low it was the worst possible time to arrange an annuity and begin drawing his pension. Jimmy knew that his parents were facing a considerably poorer old age than they had expected and he had no intention of further reducing their circumstances.

‘Jimmy,’ Derek said, and to Jimmy’s surprise this least tactile of men actually reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen to me. This is a challenge for all of us, all right? Everything’s changed and we’re all trying to think differently. What
I
’m thinking is that my son and wonderful daughter-in-law need help. More importantly, my three grandchildren need help. We haven’t seen as much of them over the last few years as we’d have liked, what with you always carting them off to Florida or skiing and all that. Now’s our chance to be involved. To help. And we want to do it. We’re going to sell the house—’

‘No, Dad! It’s the worst time to—’

‘Which means it’s also the best time to buy, son. That’s an upside, of sorts. We’ll downsize, as you used to say. Sell the house, get a nice flat and have a lump sum left over.’

‘You don’t
want
a lump sum, Dad. They’ve cut the bloody interest rates to zero. Your money’ll just sit there depreciating.’

‘It’ll sit there servicing a standing order in your name of two hundred and fifty pounds a week towards the accruing interest you owe—’

‘Dad—’ Jimmy tried once more to protest.

‘That and the twenty thousand for the car shows an awful lot of willing,’ Derek said firmly. ‘The RLB pre-litigation team will be forced to take a favourable view, for a while at least. I’ve looked into it and talked to a couple of chaps I know and it seems that if you can just get through six months you should be eligible for the government mortgage relief scheme. Of course you owe so much that the bank may lose patience anyway. But it’s worth a shot. It’s a
plan
, Jim, and we need a plan. So unless you can come up with a better one it’s what we’re going to do.’

Just then Monica and Nora came out with the children.

‘I’ve made some sandwiches,’ Nora said, ‘and we’re going to have a picnic in the park.’

‘I made the chocolate biscuit ones,’ Toby said proudly.

‘Chocolate biscuit sandwiches?’ Jimmy enquired.

‘Yeah, Dad. It’s a pretty basic concept. You get two bits of bread and butter and stick a chocolate biscuit between them.’

‘I have to say that sounds brilliant,’ Jimmy replied.

‘
After
he’s had his cheese and tomato ones and eaten his apple,’ Monica said.

As they all made their way to the park, Nora dropped back a little in order to whisper to Monica.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I never mentioned it before, but lovely though Jodie was, I’m glad she’s gone . . . No, really, I don’t want to sound mean, because she really
was
lovely and I know that Toby loved her so much, and Cressie. It’s just that I always felt a bit surplus to requirements. You know, when we visited. Jodie was just so good at everything and always there, playing with them, doing interesting things. I didn’t feel I could get involved. I didn’t want to get in her way, you see.’

‘Yes,’ said Monica, ‘I can understand how that might have felt. I certainly never had a nanny when I was little. I didn’t know anyone who did. It just sort of happened with us and then I felt I couldn’t do without it.’

‘Of course, I know that all this has been terribly hard on you,’ Nora went on, ‘since Jimmy lost his job and everything. But I did want to tell you that. I hope you don’t mind. But at least now I feel
useful
.’

When they had all arrived at the park and Toby and Cressie were on the swings, Jimmy spoke to his father.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said.

‘Absolutely no need to thank me, Jim,’ Derek said. ‘As I told you, your mother and I want to help. It’s what we’ve always wanted.’

‘I wasn’t talking about the money,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’m thanking you for not saying “I told you so”. All those years you’ve said it couldn’t last and it turned out you were right, it didn’t.’

‘I take no pleasure in having been right on that score, Jimmy. Lots of people were at the party. Lots of people are suffering the hangover. It’s a bloody shame, that’s all.’

‘Well, thanks anyway.’

Ending in tears

The MPs’ expenses scandal when it broke shook the Mother of Parliaments to its foundations. It struck at the very core of the public’s trust in their representatives and caused many to doubt that proper government could continue at all with its servants brought to such low repute. The scale and significance of the crisis were unprecedented and yet, as is often the case with public events of magnitude, the whole affair came to be identified with one or two specific images.

Just as a horrific terrorist attack can come to be remembered for a single photograph of a fireman emerging from the ashes with a bloodied baby in his arms, just so the great British parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009, for all its deep constitutional significance, eventually boiled down to such ridiculous and inconsequential things as a dirty moat and a chocolate teddy. And, of course, a hairdryer.

These were the ‘expenses’ that came to embody the public’s sense of disappointment and outrage. Some idiot Tory had claimed to have the moat around his castle cleaned at public expense. A Liberal had put in a chit for sweets bought at the House of Commons shop. And Henry Baker, rising figure of New Labour (and founder member of the Radish Club), apparently thought that the public should pay for his wife’s hairdryer because he sometimes used it.

BLONDEL’S BOMBSHELL

That was the headline that greeted Henry in the early hours of the morning that followed his parliamentary clash with Rupert over Rupert’s RLB pension. Henry had waited up in terror and the early editions confirmed his worst fears.

Henry knew instantly that he would never, ever escape the ridicule of
Blondel’s Bombshell
. That it would destroy his political career.

And he was right.

It is said that all political careers end in tears. Henry’s ended in floods.

The fact that it was all so terribly, terribly unfair was of course beside the point. Henry was far from being the only MP who had made claims which in retrospect looked greedy and ridiculous. What was more, his hairdryer chit was not by any stretch of the imagination the most profligate of them. And there were many MPs guilty of the legal but morally dubious practice of ‘flipping’ their second homes, which was of course the real cause of the public’s outrage. Many of those politicians had generated far greater profits in the process than Henry had done.

There was no particular reason why Henry should become one of the principal poster boys of the crisis. Except for the fact that making a claim upon the public purse for a percentage of the cost of your wife’s hairdryer was just so
bloody funny
. And it didn’t help either that he was identified with his luxuriant blond hair, hair about which he was clearly extremely vain.

Vanity is always an easy target. Particularly in a politician.

As the days of the scandal grew, Hairdryer Henry’s position became more and more impossible. Every time anybody wrote about or spoke about the scandal they referred with mocking contempt to ‘politicians who seem to think it’s the public’s job to pay to dry their wives’ hair’. It wasn’t long before the party moved to staunch the haemorrhage of credibility that Henry’s claim had caused. He received a call from Andy Palmer in the Prime Minister’s office, instructing him to fall on his sword.

The next day Henry resigned as an MP.

That same day, his wife Jane’s publisher decided not to take up their option on her second novel. Her first, they explained, had not performed as well as they had hoped and the second did not seem to them to have quite the same emotional élan that had first attracted them to her.

Jane would always believe that the rejection was entirely down to the fact that she was no longer in their eyes (and in the eyes of her small public) a feisty female novelist, but instead the greedy, grasping hairdryer-claiming wife of yet another disgraced politician.

The curse of the Radish Club had claimed its final victims.

Downsizing

Despite all the pressures, Monica and Jimmy were not entirely downhearted. Something in the challenges they were facing had given them both a new spirit. They felt almost as if they had been children before and were now learning to be grown-ups.

Shopping and cooking on a tiny budget were hard work but also rewarding. What’s more, the rewards were real and tangible. The family discovered that food tasted better if you really had to make the most of it. Monica constantly looked back in amazement at the amount of food she had thrown away in the past.

‘I swear I used to scrape half a week’s worth of food into that bin every night,’ she’d say. ‘God, I’d let Toby chuck an apple away if it had a blemish on it.’

Toby’s diet had actually improved, as they were now spared the endless bargaining with him about eating a pea or two in exchange for a guarantee of chocolate.

‘Sorry, mate, there
is
no chocolate,’ Jimmy would explain. ‘No crisps either. No freezer full of mini Magnums and fun-size Cornettos. No dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. No Frubes or other tubes. No “ordering something else” at Pizza Express, in fact no Pizza Express. We can’t afford any of them.’

It was very liberating, in a strange way. All those battles over treats were in the past now. And when there was a treat, it really
was
a treat, made special by its rareness.

‘You know, the truth is,’ Monica said, ‘that Tobes is actually getting treats for the first time in his life. He got so many before that nothing was a treat at all, just his due, the norm. Do you remember how Easter used to be? He couldn’t fit his egg stash in a bloody bin liner. Now when he gets something at least he appreciates it.’

Toby had got used to it all quite quickly. Just as he had adjusted to Jimmy hocking his Nintendo DS for nappies. And that was another relief. Nintendo had been a cause of friction in the past. Monica hadn’t wanted to buy him one but Jimmy said his son (with his room full of PlayStations and Wii) would be a freak at school if he didn’t have one. Jimmy promised that he would be restricted to two hours at weekends. From that point on, they had fought a constant battle to enforce this rule, which had been draining for the whole family.

‘He used to like books,’ Monica had lamented at the time, ‘but now all he wants to do is get his thumbs on that bloody little box.’

Now the box was gone and since the pawn shop didn’t want books, they remained, and in the absence of both Nintendo and cable TV cartoon channels, Toby rediscovered them. They also discovered the local library, in which books could be borrowed for
free
.