‘Then wot the fuck is?’
‘Whatever it was, I’ve put it behind me. See you, guys.’
Kenneth has entered the building.
I waved my pass at reception and the security guard and had the lift to myself to the second floor. In the lift, I let out a whoop, then relaxed, slumping briefly against the wall.
I’d decided to brave the press on the one-week anniversary of my now near-mythical tussle with the beastly fascist Holocaust denier and all-round rotten egg, Lawson Brierley. I’d walked, tubed and walked from Craig’s to the Capital Live! offices and seen the waiting press pack ahead, on the broad pavement outside the main Soho Square entrance. I’d squared my shoulders, reviewed one or two pre-prepared responses I’d thought might come in handy, and gone sailing in amongst the fuckers.
If they knew they weren’t going to get anything out of you even when they could confront you face-to-face, they might give up a bit earlier than they would if you just plain avoided them, because if you just plain avoided them they could still hope that if they ever did get you alone you’d crumble and blab and basically come up with the goods they wanted. Not, of course, that that would stop them just making stuff up, including supposedly direct quotes – what the guy meant who’d said, You know what’ll happen if you don’t – but at least your own conscience would be clear.
The trick had nothing to do with not answering the sensible, reasonable questions; the trick was all about not responding to the ridiculous ones, the over-the-top ones: had I sent death threats to myself? Had I hit some girl assistant? Had I a conviction for assault already? (If I had, they’d have known all about it; they’d have had a photocopy of the fucking charge sheet.) These probably weren’t even rumours the press had heard from anybody else; these would be questions the journos had made up themselves hoping that I’d react to at least one of them, saying, Of course not!… But the trouble was that answering one question would be like opening a vein while treading water in a pool full of sharks; it’d be a fucking feeding frenzy after that. Start answering – start denying – and it was very hard to stop.
But it had been very hard.
A Muslim accent, indeed. And, Was the show being cancelled? The devious, unprincipled fucks. (What the bampot who thought it was a work of art was on about, I had no fucking idea. Did the Philosophical Review have door-stepping rat-packers in these post-post-modern days? I had to suppose that there was every chance they did.)
Still, in a bizarre, leaving-morality-aside-for-a-moment sort of way, you couldn’t help but be impressed by their ingenuity and dedication. I felt privileged to have been verbally roughed-up by such consummate experts. And I was doing well; those had to be the premier league newshounds out there, not cub reporters cutting their teeth.
Life and the show went on. Craig announced he would be out on the Monday night as well, so I thought I might as well move back to the Temple Belle. I did, and nothing bad happened. The Landy came back from the garage and spent a night outside in the car park without being attacked or set on fire or kidnapped or anything.
Having braved the journos once, it became easier and easier to keep on doing so. The trick was to respond to nothing at all. ‘Ken; your dad says he’s ashamed of you; what’s your response?’ (My response was to phone my mum and dad, who’d been door-stepped by the fucking Mail on Sunday. Of course they hadn’t said they were ashamed of me at all; they’d responded to some hypothetical question the journalist had put to them about people hitting defenceless other people and this had somehow – spookily – been extrapolated into a direct quote.)
On the other hand, the Guardian had done some digging on Lawson Brierley and found that he did have convictions for assault; two, in fact, one with a racial element. Not to mention having done time for fraud and embezzlement. Some of the other papers were sounding just a little more sympathetic to me, though the Telegraph and the Mail still thought I ought to be hung up by the thumbs, and the Mail made a big thing about withdrawing its advertising from Capital Live!. Meanwhile I turned down a couple of TV appearances and several exclusive interviews; I think the offers topped out at eleven grand, which was mildly flattering without amounting to so much that I’d ever entertain actually succumbing.
‘I suppose it must be a bit weird having to defend somebody you know is guilty,’ I said to my lawyer.
Maggie Sefton looked at me with what looked like an, Are you serious? expression. I looked back at her and she obviously decided I was just as naïve as I appeared. ‘Ken,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Ask any defence lawyer; most of our clients are guilty.’ She gave a soundless laugh. ‘Civilians always seem to think it must be really hard defending somebody you know is guilty. It isn’t; that’s what you do practically all the time. Defending somebody you know is innocent; that is weird.’ She hoisted one eyebrow and opened an already fairly stuffed box file. ‘That can cause you sleepless nights.’
‘So, tell me straight, Maggie,’ I said. ‘Am I being really stupid here?’
She looked up sharply. ‘You want my professional or personal opinion?’
‘Both.’
‘Professionally, you’re entering a minefield. Riverdancing.’
I had to smile at that. She smiled too, then the smile went.
‘Ken, you’re risking charges of perjury and being in contempt of court. Happily – if it comes to it – your employers are able to afford a good brief, but I suspect he or she is going to spend a lot of their preparation time impressing upon you the fact that you’ll have to be very, very controlled and careful in what you say. If you go shooting your mouth off – in court or out of it – you could be in serious trouble. The judge can send you down for contempt right there and then, without any extra procedure, and perjury is, rightly, regarded by judges as being a lot more serious an offence than simple unaggravated assault.’
‘What about your personal opinion?’
Maggie smiled. ‘Personally, Ken, I’d say, Bully for you. But then what I think personally doesn’t matter a damn.’
‘And the good news?’
She looked away for a while.
‘… In your own time,’ I said.
She clapped her hands. ‘Let’s crack on, shall we?’
Fending off journalists and ordinary callers interested in the matter during the phone-ins became a game for that week. The crowd of journos shrank rapidly until by the Thursday I got to work completely unmolested. I got it into my head that Ceel would be listening that day, and that there would be a package and a phone call from her when I finished the show, but – again – nothing.
That left Friday; there had to be something from Ceel on the Friday. Otherwise it would just be too long an interval. She’d forget what I looked like. She’d fall in love with her husband again. She’d find somebody else – Jeez, suppose she already had? Oh my God; suppose she was some sort of series-serial sexual adventurer and I was just one of a dozen or so guys she met up with for sex every couple of weeks? What if she was fucking a whole male harem of guys, one a day, even two a day! One in the morning, before me! Maybe she was never out of those five star hotels, maybe she practically lived in them, serviced by a steady stream of sadly deluded lovers. Maybe…
Shit, I was going crazy. I had to see her again, I had to talk to her.
‘Hey; that’s your old girlfriend, isn’t it?’
We were in the office after the Thursday show. Kayla had grabbed our copy of the February edition of Q as soon as it had arrived. She was holding it up across the desk from me. Phil looked up from his computer screen.
I frowned. ‘What? Who?’
‘Jo,’ Kayla said. ‘Look.’ She passed the magazine over.
It was in the News section. A small colour photograph and a couple of paragraphs. Brad Baker of Addicta pictured post-gig in Montreux with current squeeze Jo LePage. La LePage, part of Addicta’s management team, has been spotted on stage helping to provide backing vocals for the band; definitely a better voice than Yoko Ono or Linda McCartney. Comparisons to Courtney Love not invited. Hate mail from female teenage Brad Baker fans probably in post already.