Seventy-Two Virgins. Boris Johnson
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BONG The British Prime Minister sat in his small office in Downing Street and gave heartfelt thanks, once again, to the protocol ruling which meant he did not have to attend the speech in Westminster Hall; the theory being that he had proposed the President’s health last night at Windsor, and that was enough. John Major, it had been pointed out, was not there for Nelson Mandela. Nor for Bill Clinton, if his memory served him correctly.
BONG Colonel Bluett of the US Secret Service had decided that it was time to take a more active role in the security operation, and was now being driven in a blacked-out Ford from Grosvenor Square to Scotland Yard.
BONG In the White House in Washington, the Presidential red setter had a beautiful dream, in which he sunk his teeth into the neck of the Presidential cat.
BONG Roger Barlow’s four-year-old heir was sitting cross-legged at school, and looking intently at some pictures of king-killing in old Dahomey.
BONG Jones felt the first drop of perspiration emerge from his temple and run down his cheek.
As Roger and Cameron gained the entrance to New Palace Yard, a taxi drew up. The policeman bent down to look through the window, and then let them through. After twenty-five years everyone knew Felix Thomson. Barlow knew him, too, and offered a mock-salute which was returned, though perhaps a little more mockingly than Barlow, in an ideal world, would have liked.
The policeman at the gate once more demanded production of the pink slip, though for some reason they waved Felix Thomson’s taxi on without too much fuss. The vehicle rolled on a few yards down the cobbles to another barricade, a ramp with winking lights that came up and prevented access, just by the spot where Airey Neave had been blown up by the IRA.
‘No, sorry, sir,’ said the policeman. Barlow had made to follow the taxi, because he wanted to have a word with Felix Thomson, and now he was told this was not on. He’d have to go that way, through the turnstiles. Did he have his pass with him? He had his pass.
‘Oh Cameron, by the way, I have a terrible feeling I have to make a speech in the debate this afternoon.’
‘That’s right, Roger. The whips have been on to us twice already. They are expecting it.’
‘Oh lor’, sighed the MP, stopping. ‘Can you remember what it’s all about?’
Why the hell, wondered Cameron, couldn’t he ever concentrate on what she was saying? ‘I sent you a speech. I mean I sent you a draft of the speech. It was in your mail on Friday.’
‘Oh yes, and what’s the Bill about?’
‘It’s the Water Utilities Bill (England and Wales). The whips thought you might be interested in speaking on fluoridation.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Roger, ‘and what line am I taking?’
‘Well, I sort of presumed you would be taking a libertarian line. A lot of people have been writing in, saying how much they dislike fluoridation. They say it’s the nanny state.’
‘Nasty stuff, is it, fluoride?’
‘Well, it can be deadly poisonous, and they’ve done a lot of research on possible side-effects …’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Roger, ‘I know what it does. It causes premature baldness in rhesus monkeys, hypertension in rats, and it changes the sex of cuttlefish.’
‘If you say so, Roger.’ She tried shifting forwards. Adam would be waiting.
‘I mean, what if the whole libertarian argument is utter tosh? What if this stuff is really good for you, protects the nation’s teeth, mmm? I think of my parents’ generation. They never had the stuff and they had terrible trouble. I remember my father taking a great bite of an apple, and crack. Very psychologically damaging, losing your teeth. It’s all in Freud. You know, if you’re an elephant, and you lose your teeth, you’ve had it.’
‘I expert the same goes if you’re a lion.’
‘Good point,’ said Roger. ‘Here, just say aaah. Go on, open wide the pearly gates.’ Cameron had the surreal experience of offering her teeth for inspection to the Member for Cirencester.
‘See,’ said Roger, ‘inside every skull, thirty-two vital differences between the English and the Americans.’ As he was looking his research assistant in the mouth, he became aware of two people craning their necks to watch him from 120 feet up. It was Jason Pickel and Indira, their scopes glinting in the sun.
‘Can I stop now?’ asked Cameron.
‘Yeah, sure,’ said Barlow, and they resumed their walk to the wrought-iron porch of the Members’ Entrance.
‘You’re quite happy for me to check your teeth?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘Ah,’ said Roger, brightening again. ‘Now that is what we call Barlow’s Law of the Displaced Negative. In principle you are saying that you are happy for me to look at your teeth, but there is a stray negative, the no, which simply needs to be removed from the beginning of that sentence and inserted between subject and predicate, to give the real meaning. You secretly mean, “It’s not fine.” To give another example, men are often asked, “Do I look OK in this dress?” and they answer, “No, no, you look great.” The displaced negative is a clue to their real thoughts. They should say, “Yes, darling, you look great.” The female equivalent is “No, no, darling, you have got masses of hair.”’
Cameron snorted, not altogether fondly. She was damned if she was going to ask Roger if she looked OK, mainly because she had no (real) doubts about the matter.
Finally she left Roger, berthing his bike in the cycle racks at the bottom of New Palace Yard. She felt she had done her best.
He knew about the fluoride speech. He was on top of the Betts case, and the plan to save the respite centre. He was, by his standards, under control.
Now she had to go quickly to find Adam.
Even though it was a warm July morning, the man outside the Red Lion pub in Derby Gate was wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and faded cords. He had scuffed brown brogues from which emerged cheap towelling socks, one of which was blue, and one of which looked suspiciously like a trophy from the goody bag of Virgin Atlantic. When the authorities would come that evening to examine the contents of his wallet, they would confirm that he was Dr Adam Swallow, thirty-five, and that he had recently been travelling in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to judge by the few decayed and crumpled low-denomination bills he had saved from his trips. He was a reader at the Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Oxford, and a plastic badge suggested that he was director of Middle Eastern studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. The innermost fold of his wallet contained a forgotten condom of great antiquity and no contraceptive value whatever.
He was tall and lean and dark, and sitting forward on the beer-splashed bench, and between his thick wrists he held a tabloid paper. He was chuckling.
The centre page feature was a tremendous tub-thumping why oh why piece by Sir Trevor Hutchinson, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Entitled ‘Our Shameful Surrender to Terror’, it dilated on the various erosions of liberty entailed by the current obsession with security. Was it not outrageous, whinnied Sir Trev, that the Queen was being served with plastic cutlery, aboard the royal flight, all these years after 9/11? He gave a vigorous description of the Metropolitan Police Maginot Line around the Palace of Westminster. He railed against the frogmen in the Thames, the boom that had been constructed in the river, to protect the Commons Terrace from a riparian boarding party, the glass barrier in the Chamber, that shielded the electors from their representatives, or vice versa, for the first time in our island story. And then he related