‘You’ve been booked in for a while, Ken, is that right?’
‘For what has on occasion felt like a significant part of my life, Cavan, yes.’
He laughed soundlessly. ‘Yes, well, sorry about that.’ He sighed and looked off into the shadows. ‘We’ve all been kept hanging around while Winsome have been getting themselves sorted out.’
‘I’m sure it’s been a lot worse for you than it was for me.’
‘Ah, yes. It’s been a frustrating old time to have a current affairs show waiting in the wings while all this history’s been happening, but hopefully we’ll be making up for – ah. Excuse me, will you?’
‘Sure.’
Lawson Brierley. That was the name of the man who walked out of the darkness, blinking in the light. My age. Green cords, fogey jacket, yellow waistcoat, farm manager’s shirt and a cravat. I almost smiled. Tall, medium-heavy build, verging on beefy; hair like grey sand. Not a bad-looking face in a bland sort of way, except his nose was a little bulbous and he had the peering, scrunched look of a vain man on a date trying to do without his glasses. Ex-Federation of Conservative Students (one of the Hang Nelson Mandela brigade; later thrown out for being too right-wing), ex-National Front (quit when they moved too far to the left), and ex a few other extreme-right groups and parties. Claimed to be a libertarian racist now. I knew one or two people who’d come to libertarianism from the left, and people like Lawson Brierley had them spitting blood.
Monetarist fundamentalist might be a more accurate description of his views, with the racist bit never very far away. According to Lawson, evolution was the ultimate free market in which the white races were proving their innate superiority through money, science and arms, threatened only by the perfidious guile of the Jews and the hordes of dark and dirty Untermenschen breeding like flies thanks to the misguided beneficence of the West.
We’d got all this off the man’s own website; he ran – he basically was – something called the Freedom Research Institute.
Lawson genuinely didn’t approve of democracy. He believed in getting rid of the state, and – in reply to the point that doing so would leave companies, corporations, multi-nationals (or whatever you would call multi-nationals when there were no more nations) in complete control of the world – he would have said, Yes, so? These corporations would be owned by shareholders, and money was the fairest way to exercise power, because as a rule stupid people would have less of it, and therefore less influence, than more intelligent people, and it was the more intelligent and successful people you wanted controlling things, not the great unwashed.
I’d decided my considered reply to all this would have been something on the lines of, Fuck the fucking shareholders, you ghastly fascist cunt.
I watched him sit down and get miked up. He was being wired in, taped to the seat like I’d been. Good. I couldn’t make out what he was saying to the production assistant and the sound engineer as they helped him get settled in. He didn’t look over at me. Cavan had spoken a few words to him and then nodded and gone to sit in his own big seat in the middle, getting its position just so, clearing his throat a few times, patting his tie down and running a hand over the air above his hair.
My heart was beating hard, now. Somebody came to take away the little cup of water, but I had them wait a moment while I drained it, my hand trembling. My bladder seemed to think I needed to pee but I knew I didn’t really. It felt like I was listing to the right with the weight in my jacket pocket. To the right; how very, very inappropriate, I thought.
The monitor behind the cameras flicked to the head-on waist-up shot of Cavan coming from the big camera with the autocue.
The floor manager announced we were doing a taped rehearsal of the intro. Cavan cleared his throat a few more times.
‘Okay; quiet in the studio,’ the floor manager said, then, ‘Turning over.’ She did the ‘Five, four, three…’ thing, with the two and the one shown only on her fingers.
Cavan took a breath and said, ‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Free Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called… Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ the floor manager said. She was a tall gangly girl with close-cut brown hair; she wore big headphones and held a clipboard and a stopwatch. She listened to her phones again. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You all right, Cavan?’
Cavan was squinting towards the camera ahead of him, shading his eyes from the overhead lights. ‘Ah… Could you just move the autocue up a tiny little bit?’ he asked.
The man with the big camera adjusted it fractionally.
Was I really a doyen? I wondered. That meant ‘old’, didn’t it? More ‘senior’ rather than ‘ancient’, if I recalled the dictionary definition correctly, but still. I was sweating badly now. They’d probably notice and have to stop and bring one of the make-up girls in to touch up my face. I felt a pain in my guts and wondered if I was giving myself an ulcer.
Cavan nodded. ‘Fine now.’ He cleared his throat again.
‘Okay,’ said the floor manager. ‘Everybody okay?’ She looked around at us. Everybody seemed to be okay. I wasn’t going to say anything about sweating. Lawson Brierley sat, blinking, looking from Cavan to the monitor, still avoiding my gaze. The little bearded guy with the big camera adjusted it back to where it had been before, but Cavan didn’t notice. ‘We’re going again, quiet in the studio. Turning over,’ said the floor manager. ‘And: Five, four, three…’
‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Freedom Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called Shock Jocks and – as he’s described himself – unrepentant post-lefty.’ Cavan raised his eyebrows for effect. ‘First, though, this report by Mara Engless, on the undeniable existence of deniers.’
I looked over to Lawson Brierley. He was smiling at Cavan.
‘Good,’ the floor manager said, nodding. ‘Good. Perfect, Cavan.’ (Cavan nodded gravely.) ‘Okay, we’re going for-’
‘How long’s the video bit?’ Cavan asked.
The floor manager looked away for a moment, then said, ‘Three twenty, Cavan.’
‘Right, right. And we’re just going straight into the interviews, the ah, discussion bit, now, right?’
‘That’s right, Cavan.’
‘Fine. Fine.’ Cavan cleared his throat a few more times. I found myself wanting to clear my own throat, too, as though in sympathy.
‘Everybody ready to go?’
It looked like we were all ready to go.
‘Okay. Quiet in the studio.’
I put my hand in my pocket.
‘Turning over.’
In my pocket, the plastic coating the metal felt cold and slick in my right hand.
‘And: Five, four, three…’
I leaned forward slightly, to hide my hand coming out of my pocket.
Two.
My other hand was at my belly, holding, steadying.
One.
Click.
Cavan took a breath and turned to me. ‘Ken Nott, if I can turn to you first. You’re on record as-’
I’d snipped the mike cable with the pliers.
I had tried to think all this through, weeks and weeks earlier, and I’d guessed they might wire us up; that was why I’d brought the pliers in my jacket pocket.
But that wasn’t the clever bit.
I let the pliers fall as I kicked the seat back and jumped up on the big desk. I’d have settled for three seats in an arc, but the desk was better; I’d reckoned as long as I didn’t take too long getting myself up there it would provide a highway. So far, so good; seat falling backwards out of the way and a clean leap up onto the wooden surface.