‘Neither did Railtrack once the government subsidy was whipped away.’
‘Ha! I bet they got their people from local government.’
‘Oh, don’t be… look. The other great lie is that private can be cheaper; it brings in extra money. But that’s bullshit! Just Treasury accounting rules. Infrastructure costs no matter who builds it. You have to invest in it, so invest as cheaply as possible; pay the least you can in interest payments. And that’s even before you factor in the profits a private investor expects, too; that comes on top. So, ask yourself: who or what can borrow money cheaper than any commercial concern? Answer: the state.’
‘I think you’ll find that depends on which state, actually, Ken.’
‘Okay, the British state can borrow money cheaper, for a smaller interest rate, than any commercial concern.’
‘Yes, because it doesn’t go wasting it on things the private sector can do better.’
‘Amy, that’s ridiculous!’
‘No, it isn’t. And what about risk?’
‘What risk? If it all goes wrong the poor bloody taxpayer ends up paying.’
‘There’s always a risk, Ken,’ Amy said, smiling thinly at me. ‘Life is full of risk.’
I sat back in my seat. We were in La Eateria, an achingly trendy new restaurant in Islington. Wooden garden furniture for tables and chairs, and walls lined with that perforated orange plastic stuff builders use to create instant fences. Menu pretentious, food barely adequate, staff surly. I was amazed it wasn’t busier. Still, it was a Sunday night.
Amy looked great, with her fine, now straight blond hair glowing in the light of what looked like car headlights dangling from the ceiling. She was dressed in black tights and skirt, and a clingy black long-sleeved top with a gold chain lying on the tanned skin revealed by a square, low neck.
So she looked superb and she’d dressed up – if she’d appeared in paint-speckled jeans and an unironed T-shirt I’d have known there was no way anything was going to happen – and yet, suddenly, for the first time in all the times we’d met to eat, she’d turned into Little Miss Capitalist Lobby Girl.
Until now all our lunch and dinner dates-that-were-not-really-dates had consisted of eating, drinking and flirting. Dammit; they’d been great fun! Certainly no arguments about fucking PFI and PPPs. I mean, I knew that the lobbying firm she worked for was involved in promoting that sort of crap, but, Jeez, she’d never started pushing it at me. I’d made one off-hand remark about Railtrack and the forthcoming attractions of Postrack and Tubetrack, and she’d jumped down my throat feet first.
‘You know what really gets me?’ I said, putting my fork down. I hadn’t eaten much of my main course. The chef here seemed obsessed with height and apparently chose his ingredients and cooking methods to ensure the maximum altitude and stability of the towers of material the kitchen created, with edibility and taste coming way down the list of priorities. Probably somewhere between the grid of soggy rosti and the layer of glue-like mustard mash acting as a hold-fast.
‘No, I don’t know what really gets you, Ken,’ Amy said, levering a forkful of her lamb and figs towards her mouth, ‘but I have the awful feeling you’re just dying to tell me.’
Dying to. Shit, I hadn’t even told her about the whole ‘Raine’ thing, my inadvertent trip to the East End, the threatening phone call and the slashed tyres on the Landy yet. I’d told Craig, Ed and Jo, and sworn them all to secrecy, but with Amy I’d been holding it in reserve for later in the evening. Now I was starting to think there was no point.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What I want to know is, why put what is basically greed above the urge to serve? What’s wrong with wanting to help people? Isn’t that what politicians say they want to do? They say they just want to serve society, they tell us that’s why they became politicians in the first fucking place, so why don’t they side with the nurses and the teachers and the fire brigade and the police and all the other people who really do serve?’
‘They do side with the police, Kenneth.’
‘Oh, so they do. But what about everybody else? So are they lying about wanting to serve, and just want power, or have they just not made the connection yet?’
Amy sat back too, breathing deeply and flexing her shoulders. I tried to keep eye contact and appreciate her breasts by peripheral vision only, but it was almost an insult to them. On the other hand, maybe I should make the most of the view, because it looked like what I was seeing now was all I was ever going to see. Amy shook her head and said, ‘You really are quite naïve, aren’t you, Ken?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes. You seem so clued-up and clever but really you just scratch the surface of everything, don’t you?’
‘If you say so, Amy.’
She looked at me for a bit. Her eyes were greeny-blue and her irises had that over-defined look you get with contacts sometimes. She was still breathing fairly deeply and I just let my gaze fall to her chest, which was pleasant in a regretful sort of way. ‘You’re just Sir Jamie’s little performing monkey, but you think you’re some sort of cool radical type, isn’t that right, Ken?’
I thought about this. ‘On a good day,’ I conceded. ‘With a following.’
‘I suppose you think you’re Mouth Corp’s conscience or something, don’t you?’
‘Oh, no. Jester, maybe; bladder, bit of string, that sort of thing, you know.’
Amy sat forward. ‘Think about this, Ken,’ she said. I sat forward too, eager to be given something to think about. ‘You let Sir Jamie get away with more,’ Amy told me. ‘By employing you and allowing you to do your little rants and letting you criticise bits of the Mouth Corp empire and the people and the organisations it gets into bed with, Sir Jamie can give the impression of being even-handed and fair and able to tolerate criticism. What’s actually going on is that the bad corporate stuff, which Mouth Corp does as much as anybody, gets a lot less publicity than it deserves, thanks to you.’ She sat back. So did I. But she wasn’t finished. ‘You cost the radio station the occasional ad placement and Mouth Corp loses the odd contract, but Sir Jamie gets his money’s worth out of you, Ken, don’t think he doesn’t. You’re part of the system, too. You help make it work. We all do. It’s just that some of us know it and some of us don’t.’
She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin.
I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were bright. She was smiling. I thought about Ceel and wondered suddenly what the hell I was doing here. ‘So,’ I said, ‘do I get to fuck you or not?’
She laughed and leaned forward again, which was a good thing in itself. Voice lower this time. ‘Have you got any drugs, Ken? Any E? Or Charlie?’
It actually occurred to me to lie and say no. Can you believe that? ‘Not on me.’
‘Get some.’
‘Okay.’
So we did, but it wasn’t very good. The drugs or the sex.
Eight. DENIAL
Maybe Jo’s right; I hate so many things. I’m a media person and there’s so much media stuff I just despise. From comics who make fun of their audience – ah, the masochism of paying good money to be insulted in public – to crap like Big Brother; hours and hours of boring, self-obsessed dimwits trying to be zany while performing pointless, stupid tasks that would be an insult to anyone with half a brain. Ali G, Dennis Pennis, Mrs Merton, Trigger Happy TV; shows that make me squirm with embarrassment and, sometimes, feel the beginnings of sympathy even for people who deserve nothing but my unalloyed hatred. God, I hated so much TV these days, and the terrifying thing was, it was this stuff that was popular, I who was out of step.
Numty TV, we called it on the show (part of our long-term and deeply insidious campaign to bring more Scottish words into day-to-day English usage). The only aspect of Numty TV I liked was the not-obviously-set-up entries on You’ve Been Framed, but part of me was ashamed of that, because I couldn’t help feeling there was an edge of cruelty watching this stuff; you see a clip begin with some bozo on rollerblades wobbling towards the camcorder at high speed, or perched precariously on a still shiny mountain bike and tearing down a rutted path between the trees, or almost anything to do with jet skis, high winds, people on a rope swing over a muddy puddle, or weddings or wedding reception dances, and you could feel yourself thinking, Oh goody; this’ll be a laugh. It was fun watching people making fools of themselves, but the question is, should it be?