Common Clay
‘Political satire became redundant when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.’
Tom Lehrer, prophet.
Chapter One
When Man Is Most Himself
Thomas awoke from the numbing slumber of manual labour to find him there. The
businessman. His moderately under-pumped shoulders, the tailored suit, the implicit sag of a
well-framed chest as the bip, bip, blip of a week’s shopping drifted by. Time fighting against
training. The eyes, deep blue, were lilting and zagging across Thomas’s build and frame. It was
cold, analytical, as finely honed as his selection of shopping. Razor, Gillette. Accompanying
foam, large can. Own-brand bread, chorizo. Butter, unsalted, beer, craft label. Tilting perennially
on the finer side of middle-class.
“£41.72.”
“Hmm?”
“That’ll be £41.72, sir.”
‘Sir’ stumbled from his inspection of Thomas’s body and face with all the subtlety and grace
of a neighbour’s cat pissing on the flowers of a paranoid elderly grandmother.
“Of course.”
Recovery afterwards, though, swift and smooth, wallet open flat. The cash alone could pay
for the next six or so behind him, and the cards were arranged with the subtle precision of a man
who has spent at least forty-five minutes more than anyone else organising and practicing an
intuitive system for drawing cards from his wallet. Card, in the machine. First press. Thomas
was, of course, looking over the man’s shoulder, a professional courtesy rendered largely useless
by the small, curved piece of plastic above the pad, and the man’s evident secondary and tertiary
layers of expense. Nobody would have suspected from the outside though, or from the
shopping. Hunting for wealth in the Home Counties was like antiquing; it was all bound
inexorably in hidden layers, implicit connections, a Morgan coupé stashed down a side-alley,
parked next to a renovated mill which housed either a European trophy bride or an ideally
average-looking shopkeeper’s daughter from the Midlands (there was no in-between).
“You a local?”
Dropping the ‘Are’ at the beginning was either an intentional gambit for relatability or a
lapse in training. The sharpness of the ‘l’ and ‘c’ (cul, and not cahl) gave the background away.
Still, Thomas was thrown off regardless. Conversation with staff was even more of a lapse in
social code, with the bewildered expression of the Homeowner’s Association member behind
him a reflection of the Surrey disposition that interwove itself throughout all conversations.
“Who, me? Ah…no. Just here on a gap year, helping some friends with a student film.
Staying nearby.”
“Ah. Cool.” Sir replied.
Thomas wasn’t even sure why he had felt the need to interweave deception into every single
part of his statements. This was Surrey. The supermarkets and hotels were stuffed with the
detritus of lower-achieving art school students with too high an opinion of themselves. But he,
too, had also settled into the man’s network of word-dropping. He, the resident ‘posh boy’ of
the tills, constantly derided for his use of words like ‘derided’. And the lie was evidently false who films a student film in the suburbs?
Third press. “You just don’t seem like the checkout type.”
Thomas, by this point, was sufficiently perturbed not to even feign internal offence at the
snobbish idea that there could be a ‘checkout type’. There was of course a ‘checkout type’. There
were several, and he had seen them all rotate throughout the shifts over the span of the past few
weeks; the dead-eyed, the obese, the crinkle-shirted and the overly invested. Was he perhaps the
hipster? No, no, he was the fail-son, the broken vessel into which disproportionate hopes and
dreams had been poured over the span of little more than a score.
“Well, you know…in this economy.” A vague platitudinal assemblage. Feasible cover for all
manner of sins, be they of birth or of ineptitude, and likely many of them the man’s own. A wry,
rehearsed nod in response to the acknowledged falsehood, a subtle gesture in lieu of a Keynesian
dialogue. An insightful performance; the actor meeting the actor.
The transfer concluded. With a nod, the suited man took his shopping, which the scriptures
of Thomas’s contract had mandated he arrange into the man’s carefully haphazard assemblage of
bags-for-life. Thomas had been watching, observing. He probably would not have done so had
he not felt that, for some bizarre rhyme or reason, the man had also been observing him, and
circling around some unspoken question. The notion of sex had occurred, as Thomas was
distinctly aware of how attractive he was – disproportionately, for his role and station in life - but
the analysis had none of the faux-seductive hunger of the closeted Tory homosexual. Whoosht,
swept the door. The man left, and looked back briefly over his shoulder, his eyes matching
Thomas. In that moment, Thomas’s daydreaming, sparked into fever pitch by the long
monotony of the labour at hand, imagined a reversal. He imagined himself at meetings, at
business™, at lunch with the boys by the Thames, at an expectedly unattainable restaurant
drawn from a catalogue of a dozen. He imagined the stability of waking up in the morning with
structure-cum-freedom, the wonder of fixed payment united with the glory of genuine financial
liberation. He imagined.
The man dialled something into his phone, and, sliding into conversation with a casual
apathy, disembarked out into the placid lagoon of his existence. Thomas was left in the eddies,
with Agnes, a woman so old she insisted you learn her name before she aggressively demanded
the esoteric riches of coupon-related embezzlement you will never be able, or wish, to grant her.
***
Two horrid weeks slopped on by. Not horrid because of their individual offensiveness, but
rather for their lack of anything notable. Thomas sat, and smoked, and stewed in his relative lack
of preparedness for any aspect of existence. He browsed social media, and YouTube, and
watched video essays from the usual variety of progressives with good editing and aesthetic taste,
who usually could be summarised as ‘left-wing progressive former academic with X slant to their
gender identity’, or, alternately, ‘not white’. (And who among us has not considered the alternative?
Thomas often contemplated his alternate self. He would be called Tamira, and would have the height and bone
structure to be fiercely attractive. It was evident.) If one still questioned whether the left had won the
culture war, one need only look at the quality of the short films they produced as praxis and
compare them to the inane ramblings of some neofascist who believed the nebulous umbrella of
‘logic’ held any real political significance. However, as only a week in Surrey had made him
cognisant of, if the culture war was a real war, it was Afghanistan. Painfully long-term, ongoing, a
pointless investment, and ultimately entirely irrelevant to the world at large, and equally finished
and unfinished.
He continued to turn up for rehearsals for his socialist theatre collective, a mix of fourthyears, listless graduates, and pathological addicts of the social niche of higher education. He had
joined primarily because the co-founder, Emily, was to him one of these unfairly attractive
people, the kind that seems patently unaware that the vast majority of their social interactions are
informed wholly by their physical appearance. As a tall, generically attractive heterosexual white
man - the ‘RADA special’, as one comrade had called it – he had been placed in the role of
Sloane Pickering, a CEO of a company that seemed to have attained enormous wealth through
commercialised ominousness. His role involved, as far as Thomas could determine, an
intentionally farcical degree of posturing, threatening, and scowling. Eventually, he abandoned
his stock options for the unrequited love of one of the many journalists protesting his company’s
devastation of the wilderness, in a twist that wasn’t Shakespearean, but simply unoriginal.
Thomas had been attracted to this production because of the promise of playing the villain.
Broad, dramatic, eye-catching, and with a largely minimal degree of input. But the more he stood
on stage, art imitating life as the well of his dialogue ran dry, he found himself aggrieved. This
was a dry role, a dull role. It was a pantomime villain placed in an arthouse production, with
words provided by the enemy. At times, Thomas even snapped and suggested that Emily try
writing a villain she could even partially sympathise with. A dozen pages of Private Eye’s takeover
of The Financial Times met him in response.
***
This quagmire of slow bitterness had settled into Thomas’s mind by the time he met the
man again. This time, he was with a woman. Younger than him by a good twenty years, and,
judging by the fact that she easily outshone every woman even vaguely nearby, Slavic. Her
fingers bore no rings or fake nails, just the presumptive, handy quickness that separates a
jumped-up university graduate from a true trophy wife. This time, the contents of his basket
were simple: assorted semi-tropical fruits, pepper, lubricant, vodka (Smirnoff), chips
(supermarket brand, but the supermarket was Waitrose) and a new kitchen knife. He seemed
surprised to see Thomas again. It was almost as if he wasn’t expecting to see him there - or,
more accurately, as if he had been arranging a meeting with him at a later stage. His eyebrows
panged backwards, with that signature half-pump of aggravation, surprise, and the mild pleasure
of subversion.
“Ah. Hello again.” He recovered quickly, and adjusted his frame, setting himself upright and
bending inwards like they were old acquaintances. As if this interaction had happened more than
once, two weeks and a day ago. And yet, Thomas had been on the man’s mind, and the man on
his. This was known between them, a tangible fact that passed between their glances with an easy
telepathy that might otherwise be shared between officers. Thomas rang up the mismatched
bevy with only a mild undercurrent of distraction. The Slavic woman’s gaze analysed the
intermittent tremor in his hands with the same cold precision as a butcher inspecting pigs. Truly
‘natural’ beauty was a finely prized asset that can be lost, misplaced, or permitted to rot with such
ease. All it took was a little negligence. She was tall, and she was blonde. A little like him, he
supposed.
Beep, beep, beep, beep. The hazy, comforting balm of cerebral inactivity took over his
movements, as he swung the party acquisitions through like a pendulum. This conversation had
plateaued far sooner than their prior engagement. Was there some unspoken disapproval?
Thomas was met with the inexplicable pain of being aware of a loss that he had largely
projected - the pre-emptive severing of a line of connection he wasn’t even sure he necessarily
wanted. The man was, in truth, probably a well-connected prick, and Thomas, a man who had
been scuppered by the sirocco of false hopes, wanted what he had. Stability, or even the illusion
of it. The till was less than a position, it was a prison. And the more it clung to him, the more
tacitly acceptable it had started to appear to his delusional mind. This should be nobody’s destiny,
his heart spoke. And it should certainly not be yours.
Suddenly, Thomas became aware of the Whoosht of the door, and the man was gone.
Thomas had swung through all his shopping so clinically that the man had acted far more
appropriately in these stolid climes, and departed without any kind of goodbye.
***
Yet, something lingered. And it was only at the end of his shift - which arrived shortly - in
which Thomas cleared out the dejected receipts curled at his station that he noticed handwriting.
A green ink, tight nib. Be more. 07856342891.
He stopped. More. A brief, scrawled note, but in its tight frame it encapsulated all the viscera
of his dejection. More. Tu es moins. Become more.
He would.
I will.
***
The party was held at an isolated facility, meaning a beautiful, detached mill conversion in a
gated house amid the suburbs. (Which suburbs? Irrelevant.) Thomas wandered listlessly through
the stifling rooms with the grace and significance of an unregistered boat battling through the
Channel, and prepared himself, constantly, for a violent reprisal. The knot coiled in his gut
waited for any one of the bloated Oxonians or wiry Cantabrigians to snap forwards in
admonishment, the shaved, flaming coals in their eyes scouring his pitifully working-class heart
and kicking him away. Yet, the camouflage of a rented suit seemed to protect him better than
any accent training might. His core of anxiety, buoyed and eroded by early apathy, quickly
adapted, and began to mirror and heighten the passive, iron-backed state of the red-jowled
crowd. Stanislavski. Meisner. Nigella.
Early in the texting, Thomas had discovered the man’s name. Blake Hartfield. The requisite
stub Wikipedia article confirmed that he was an Oxonian, and that he had had a career in finance
before settling into party membership and becoming the MP for Esher and Walton, a county so
safe it was daydreaming. Falling down an inspection of Image Search results, Thomas had found
himself lost in a miasmic sea of bewildered searching, orienting himself around the same strong
jaw. The headlines determined that the figures Blake was seemingly always swamped by were
central figures in the present government. Thomas had, like so many, a multifaceted awareness
of politics, in that he had a casual awareness of many faces, uninformed emotions based on halfremembered Tweets, and no deeper insight. A broad, oddly cohesive collective, identified
squarely by height, (assumed) weight, sex, and race. Bright eyes, wide smiles. Teeth.
The party sparked like one of those long-range NASA photographs of nebulae; diffusive,
mysterious, and bound inexorably to at least a dozen sets of rules nobody had the time or
generosity to explain. Sequential rows of coke, even as corrugated iron, were being snorted from
the cover of Country Living. Two mid-50s civil servants crashed into him, their sweat-drenched
flesh exuding an unspeakable odour that seemed to blend Tom Ford with the shameful scent of
early masturbation experiments. He veered away from them, stumbling with confidence, out into
the garden. Something about the lack of any exuberant music combined with the hedonism
seemed to make it even more Lynchian - it sounded as if someone had just started the first
playlist under ‘experimental jazz’ on Spotify. Someone was cutting open a grapefruit. Who the fuck
wanted breakfast food in the middle of your dad’s swingers meeting? Thomas watched the thin blade pierce
the soft shell, sink into the interior pink, and draw across, setting a flood of blood-orange fluid
down onto the plate, the pearlescent white seeds buoyed on the eddies. A sympathetic pain
formed in his underwear, and he excused himself to nobody and swung for the toilets.
Conversation, when you desperately need to be excused, takes on a mellifluous, floating
quality. Thomas overheard tell of stock options, of foreign accounts, of Marxism and
accelerationism and references to The Mighty Boosh. He even overheard dialogue in praise of
Kropotkin and Zizek, of numerous Eastern names (both Middle and European) that he had no
context for whatsoever. The incongruity baffled him, but his expectations were in such a strange
state of flux regardless. On his way out of the bathroom, he became exposed to the fallout of
Blake.
Blake had an easy-going, casual assuredness about him, the kind that only comes never
being told ‘no’, but only ‘no, not now’. He had no plans not because of anarchy, but because
plans were destined to form around him. He was wearing a loose Tom Ford shirt underneath a
nameless Savile Row jacket. Caring about labels, as Thomas would learn, was an affliction that
did not affect the enlightened gentry, because unacceptable fashion simply disappeared from
their wardrobes. He was talking, in a way, to a stunningly beautiful Indian woman, with
militarised cheekbones and a gaze that flickered with sharp, analytical precision. Cheyenne, she
was called. She had changed it from her family’s own name for her, Yameena, when she drifted
into Oxford, but she was thinking of changing it back.
“Diversity is a flat circle,” she said, in clipped RP. “and I use it when it works. Now, it
seems to be working more than ever.”
“It’s a hell of a grindset. Passive income from melanin alone.” An older and grimmer man
pushed his way inside the triangle. He was introduced as Douglas. Despite his age, he had a
bizarre air about him that Thomas could describe only as ‘shitposter’. He spoke with the
cadence, aggression, and lilting intonations of chatboards, caffeinated energy drinks, and an
encyclopaedic knowledge of the FBI’s crime statistics, and yet he was wearing a waistcoat with a
watch chain to this imitation of a student party. He was Scottish, likely for strategic purposes.
Thomas found himself being introduced, in turn, to a pleasingly stereotypical cavalcade of
clingers-on, political nomads, and men with broad jowls and temperaments, nicknames, and
desires that had never left public school. They took the greatest pride in the names born from
that fetid, inbred pit, which all seemed to end in a ‘y’ or ‘o’. They were the same man from a
moderately different world, and they all had the same hypothetical job, and the same expensive
education and haircut. None stood as strongly, or as strangely, as Douglas, Cheyenne, or Blake.
“Anyway, Cheyenne, this is the man I told you about. The one for the Pygmalion business.”
Thomas recognised the play as one he’d been assigned to read at uni – he was sure he even had
the book for it. Most likely, it lingered in the pile of ‘not read for the course, but will definitely
read someday, just to catch up’ books that afflicted his self-esteem from their vigil on his bedside
table. Cheyenne inspected him over a dirty martini, casually, before insisting he speak.
“Uh…” Her eyes narrowed, disappointedly. Panicked, he reached for a classic. “Have I ever
told you that you seem, to me, to be the visible personification of absolute perfection?” Blake
cough-laughed some gin inside himself. Cheyenne bit her lip, with an expression that balanced
on the frayed tightrope between intrigue and arousal. “What a…beautiful sentiment.” The
tension hung in the air, and the hot heft of anxiety lifted briefly from Thomas’s shoulders. Their
mouths moved for a time, their bodies shifting closer with the subtle interplay of engaging
dialogue. She was from a place, and had a degree, and a job in the civil service. She also, more
significantly, had a delightful curve to her nape that fitted a hand perfectly. And eyes that
shimmered like emeralds under John Lewis LED lightbulbs.
A time passed. “So, Thomas.” She murmured, running a finger lightly up his arm. “Why
don’t you…give us a turn on the runway?”
Thomas laughed at the suggestion, and looked to Blake, who looked back at him with an
entirely serious expression. He expected Douglas to be the voice of reason, but instead found
him taking notes on an iPad that he had produced from somewhere.
“I…uh…”
“Walk.” Cheyenne gestured to a carpeted stretch of corridor, occupied only by brandy
soaking into the carpet and a traumatised-looking French bulldog. “Come on. It’ll be fun! I’ll join
you afterwards.” The elusive gondola that was her smile met him yet again. Straightening his
back, Thomas decided to eliminate this awkward element of conversation, and walked down the
corridor. When analysed closely, even the most routine elements of daily life become horrifying
showcases of imperfection. He had only had a few drinks, and yet it felt like he had absorbed a
dozen more via osmosis. Thomas observed, with a horrifying clarity, the out-turn of the heel; the
light side-incline of the right thigh; the quivering of the lower back. Anxiety and clarity became
deeply unified, in that moment, and Thomas returned from his walk with the kind of profound
humiliation that one can only either attempt to laugh off or uniquely repress. The impression was
not favourable.
“I thought you said he was an actor?” Cheyenne turned on Blake, eyebrow cocked.
“Yes. Well, CV’s are often inflated. But it’s the first impression that always counts, and what
was yours, truthfully?”
An analytical amber eye turned back to Thomas, and he felt his flesh, clothing and organs
begin to be priced, tallied, and calculated. “Favourable. Desirable. Projectable.” The last word,
despite having the least meaning that Thomas could determine, was said with such emphasis that
he felt in some special sense proud of being projectable.
“Hopefully not rear-view, haha.” Why in the goddamn fuck did he say that. Cheyenne exhaled
through her nose, and, as if in response, spun him around. For a second, he anticipated the
smack; but instead, her hand, with an intermediate grip strength, took a considered hold of his
right buttock and weighed it. It hung there for a good half-minute, probing, and then disengaged.
“Well…don’t sell yourself short.” She smirked, her oddly objectifying compliments sliding
like dates through honey, and turned back to Blake. “I see your point.” Cheyenne put forward a
date, a time, and an address adjacent to Saville Row. “Don’t be late, I hate that attendant.”
As Thomas watched, Cheyenne slid away from his life, with a casual air of sensuality. The
earlier promise, of her turn on the runway, was left unsatisfied. Douglas inched himself away,
and all that was left was the quiet, stilted inspection of Blake. Thomas pecked at his drink.
“What do you think of her?” The question pushed its way into the lack of conversation.
“Well, she’s…she’s…” Thomas’s non-response slopped out.
“Hmm. Yes.”
Thomas watched as Blake began to scrawl wide, looping notes on the back of a napkin. He
responded, in turn, by imbuing the awkward angle into his neck – the kind that is used for
almost all casual pseudo-espionage conducted at parties, the one that the nosy aunt enacts to try
and witness the teenager’s messaging habits. As it is fated to, it failed here, and Blake pocketed
the note before Thomas gained more than a ‘Cnt. Chy., social’. Blake turned back to him,
smiling, and began to walk him around the wide periphery of the party. Things had quietened in
the last few hours, and lacked the intense, compounded desperation of militant depravity that
had met him from the off, with the thronging mass of wrinkled, sweaty flesh. The playlist was
dead, the tonic was flat, and the acrid tang of regret hung low. Was it their age that had disgusted
him, or was it the expectation? What should this party have been? Thomas disentangled a loose
set of M&S panties from around his shoe and stumbled into the kitchen. Whisky had appeared
from somewhere, and it was Scottish and with a dark-coloured bottle and a semi-pronounceable
name, so its goodness was thus assumed inherently. Blake inhaled; Thomas sipped. It burst
across his tongue like brushfire, phosphorous across gasoline. Thomas decided to turn the
challenge of drinking it into a game, neatly matching Blake’s expressions. Of contemplation, of
appreciation, subtle excess. Before long, he realised that he had been so busy in mirroring that
the kitchen had emptied entirely, and they were left alone. Thomas found the world around him
to spark with some latent, regenerative, strangely invigorating tension. Blake’s energy was
magnetic in the same sense as an austere lion, or a lightning storm. It wasn’t erotic or dominant,
but it had the kind of intriguing, layered complexity that made the brain project notions onto it.
It had the unspoken assumption that you would do all the work.
“So, uh…”
“So?”
“So.”
“An album by Peter Gabriel.”
Thomas suppressed a nose-exhale, and the urge to Google whether So was actually of
Gabriel’s oeuvre.
“How did you enjoy tonight?”
Oh, fuck, quoth’d Thomas’s mind. Feedback?
Come up with something.
“I, uh. I overheard some anarchists talking earlier.”
Genius.
Blake turned back to face Thomas with a level of dispassion Thomas imagined, by his
TheyWorkForYou page, he reserved largely for funding for charities for African immigrants. “I
don’t give a shit about anarchists, Thomas.”
“Oh.”
“I know. You might imagine, with your relatively external perspective, that I would despise
anarchists. But actually, I don’t give a piffling shit.” The older man drank, slowly, with the steady
constancy of imbued pragmatism. Thomas didn’t know what to do with his shoulders, and so
tucked them in. “Anarchism is actually something to be encouraged, to be honest. Like
communism. Or libertarianism.” Thomas’s brain found itself mimicking the sensation of a
bewildered duck, cast adrift on unfamiliar shores.
“You see.” Drink, fidget. “If a radical policy has no hope of amassing any form of group
consciousness beyond its own fractured subgroup, it’s actually best to publicise it. Quite a lot of
our digital PR offensives focus on infiltrating such groups, and then boosting the profile. I swear,
90% of the left’s current digital rhetoric is spent in closed Facebook groups debating the ethics
of moderator privileges and The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, so making the laundry they
swear is clean public is actually the best offensive campaigning we could ever hope to enact.”
Responses, half-formed, broke the surface, but never the lips.
Thomas drifted on the wake of Blake, as they pushed out into the garden again, drinks in
hand, chests high, the pinkish sun hue topping the caps of the neighbouring firs. “At the end of
the day, it’s all about optics and ground, you see. Optics and ground. The optics, we cover
automatically. We have the overwhelming advantage of being the expected default, the status
quo. Thus, the key factor is just not to fold. Consistency in presentation is really the only mark
one needs.”
Thomas took all this in as best he could, the advanced political sociology drifting in past the
numbing waves of exhaustion, alcohol, and adrenaline. “But isn’t there always the risk in
amplifying?”
“Risk of what?”
“Of, well…the average voter somewhat, liking the idea of better wages, better pay, better
representation.”
Blake silenced him with a glance, in a fashion akin to a female swan suppressing a partner’s
wailing. “If there was any risk, Thomas, of the wider British public developing enough of a
socio-political comprehension to understand the recursive nature of their pains, it would have
happened by now. It would have happened after Attlee, for fuck’s sake. But it hasn’t. Because
the fundamental truth of the matter is that Janet, aged 43, of Middlesbrough, does not want to
know about Kropotkin. Because she doesn’t know about him already. And people, for all their
bluster, don’t actually want to learn, Thomas. They want to believe they are. They want to go to
night classes, and use Duolingo, and watch nice programmes where a clever man tells them a lot
of interestingly irrelevant things about the universe. Change is undesirable, Thomas, because it
requires awareness, and the cognisant Emperor is a naked Emperor.”
Blake had produced a cigarette from somewhere. Thomas assumed he smoked but was
somehow disappointed to see it confirmed. “So they’ll vote for us, because, for all the terrible
things that occurred on our watch, things didn’t get appreciably worse for them specifically in a
way they can connect to us instinctively. We didn’t make them think about the intrinsic nature of
their being, why donation drives and charities always come back year after year. We offer the
greatest morality. Non-morality. Apathy. Centrism, in your constituency today.”
Thomas found himself able to provide only a limited, floppy opposition. He put forward a
point about the responsibility of the state to the people, and the necessity of government’s
interrelations with the governed. Blake did not dignify him with a true reaction.
“We don’t need to win hearts and minds, Thomas. We’ve already won. The opposition
needs to make us lose. For which, they would need two things they simply don’t possess. Time,
money, unity, and appearance.”
Thomas looked at the densely built, stocky man. His crow’s feet shimmered in the dappled
sun, the sparkle in his eyes like coals, being ever re-stoked. He was constant, constant as the
outmost, sharpest rock, jutting into the sea beneath a northern star.
Thomas decided.
“Tomorrow? That shop?”
“Tomorrow is today now, Thomas. See you then.”
Chapter Two
Stop Trying to Make Proportional Representation Happen
That shop appeared on the high street in front of him. It was, like every other shop on
Savile Row, as old and exclusive as the hills on a shooting estate, and equally as unnavigable. The
interior met him like a dispassionate uncle at a hastily planned funeral. It was purpose-built to
yesterday’s specifications, with a level of finery so exact that it not only resisted showmanship,
but actively subverted it.
Cheyenne was there, with Starbucks. She raised her eyebrow three millimetres. “I see.
Welcome.” What the fuck did she see?
Thomas stepped forwards. He had worn a suit himself for the occasion. In retrospect, that
decision appeared somewhat contradictory. She had worn a pantsuit, of the kind so stylish it
fades into the background. He was immediately defrocked and measured with exacting precision
by a young man whose movements were seemingly manufactured just for this purpose. They
were calculated, but intuitively responsive.
The tailor’s name was Marvin. He was done, all being told, in the span of fifteen minutes.
Thomas felt like it should take longer than that, but he had only the vague flow of suit-fitting
scenes from a litany of Hollywood films as reference. In the aftermath, Thomas wandered back
towards Cheyenne.
“So, uh…what now?”
“Now, we wait. The tailor will take at least two hours.”
He indeed did.
In the interim, Cheyenne began to coach him. For? “A role.” That was the pitch. However,
the role in question did appear to offer him, at the very least, a finely tailored suit, so Thomas
held back from pushing the question too intensely. The coaching in question was moderate and
precise. The back straight, the shoulders tight. Right foot angled forwards, perched on right
knee. Hands in pockets, or at rest in loose cradle, depending on circumstance.
“And speech?” The topic quickly shifted to dialogue. The brief staccato pulse of the sewing
machine punctuated the clinical overhauling of suppositions, declensions, and soundings.
Cheyenne wound her way through the choreography with the precision and warmth she had let
fly in the latter evening, and Thomas took a great deal of pride in being able to match her, word
for word, beat for beat. The steps in question, which were less steps than they were
subcutaneous manifestations of character – millimetre-perfect inching, to invoke a perfect
casualness. Shades of some half-remembered performance, of precise command and worthy
posture, slithered forwards into the back of Thomas’ mind, but failed to manifest any origin. It
just felt…right, somehow. A lot of it was good, simple method, entailing projection and stance.
But a lot more of it was enunciation he’d already been in the process of rehearsing, responses
he’d been giving anyway at the rehearsals.
Some aspect of Thomas’s mind, in addition, queried the divergence between their two
pathways. The heeled shoe versus the rounded brogue, the thick-set calf accenting the
stockinged thigh, lightly dipping from beneath the pantsuit leg. How much her movements, in
instructing his, were differentiated on the basis of her sex. He felt soft, tangible sadness as she
slapped away his daintiness, and turned the calf-muscle back. The firm trunk of the oak, in place
of the willowy branch.
At some point, a suit appeared around him. It was, without doubt, one of the finest things
that had been put upon his body. The soft shimmer of the silk shirt cascaded along ascendant
hairs, each pricking its own glory upwards as the rounded, shapely consonants were birthed and
filtered.
“Mother. Father. Sister. Soldier. Tailor.” A nod, sharply, to the man still fiddling with the
measure, who said nothing. Eventually, the unspoken became too much.
“Wait, Cheyenne…you can’t tell me anything about this?”
***
Before he knew it, that same suit had carried him to a dominantly expensive eatery, the
kind that masquerades its innovative quality behind the walnut-smeared veneer of past ages. The
kind that isn’t reviewed. Blake sat across from him. “She really couldn’t, you know.” Thomas
couldn’t help but notice that, somehow, he looked different than the night of his party. The
smooth line of his jaw, a little looser; the grey more prominent. The shirt, sagging. Thomas’s
sagged too, but under the heft of questions instead of toil. “I’m afraid I insisted on it. You see,
Tom…do you mind Tom? Anyway, Tom, I have a flair for the dramatic. I’m sure you can
sympathise.”
The lamb arrived, as it had been promised. Blake had taken over the ordering process as
soon as they had entered, a factor Thomas didn’t exactly begrudge. He wouldn’t have known
where to start. A British-French fusion restaurant, the menu rejoiced with compilations of
adjectives that ran the gamut from Brittany to Provence, all of which were beyond his
comprehension (and wallet). Money had not come up in conversation, but it pounded at the
back of his head.
The drinks came. Blake had ordered whisky, which was again an assemblage of Gaelic
consonants that smelled like sulphur. Thomas had fallen into red wine, the most middle-priced
one available.
“You see. I want you for a role.” Blake’s eyes settled neatly into line, matched perfectly
with Thomas’s.
“It’s…unconventional.” Tales of niche pornography flashed throughout Thomas’s mind,
as he examined the bizarre series of circumstances that had taken place leading up to this
moment. It was certainly an option, but somehow, it seemed unlikely. The steel eyes across from
him shimmered with a different kind of hunger.
“What is it?” At this point, Thomas’s desire for clarity overrode any residual anxieties.
Blake had a fine tongue, but it did tend to overemphasise a point.
“I want you to become…my protégé, of sorts.”
A mellow tang filled the air. Thomas’s wine, pallid in the mouth, slipped back into his
glass, in a restrained, contextually appropriate spit-take.
“I, guh, ah…sorry. What?”
“You’re going to be my protégé. If you want to be, of course.”
Blake’s casual smirk, so commonly a feature of his dialogue, warmed itself up yet again. A
waiter arrived and asked for orders. Blake ordered immediately, and Thomas hummed over the
choices. Everything was beyond not only his budget, but also the daily income of a minimum
wage worker.
“So…you want me to, what, become an intern?”
A pause practically undergoing labour rang out.
“No. I want you to run for election. I want you in office.”
***
In moments of certain universal instability, the world takes on a particularly detached hue.
Consciousness enters a limbo state, one that seeks not to frame reality but to instead comment
upon it. Thomas found himself utterly transfixed on Blake’s left jawline, a soft scar like a pinkish
trench beneath the brushland of stubble. The instinct was to laugh, but this restaurant had its
noise level set roughly at the Diogenes Club. The jaw was set firm, the brow taut, the tongue
engaged in ardent mastication. The joke was un-present, like on Have I Got News For You. It was
implied, but only contextually so.
***
“My…um.” Thomas ordered, eventually, something with potatoes au gratin, and looked
back to Blake. “My…I’m not exactly qualified for what you’re suggesting.”
It was Blake’s turn to spit-take, or, more accurately, to violently swill. “Qualifications?
Well, perhaps not directly. But we can change that.”
What?
“Are you suggesting…”
“Look, Thomas, if you’re uncomfortable with a mild bit of forgery in the service of an
infinitely better life, I’d say the time to back out is now.”
There was something impressive about the casual nature of the admission, even if was, by
all conventional moral grounds, reprehensible. Thomas noticed, for the first time, a small signet
ring on Blake’s hand. It was gold, but a low-karat kind and had a single line through the middle,
with numerous small lines jutting off from the middle.
Forgery. He reflected on it in the richly appointed bathroom, in the interim. Blake had
recognised the hesitation early, and had slid the conversation to other, less pressing matters.
What he would be doing at uni when he went back, whenever that would be. Where he grew up
(Harrogate), what he thought of it (not much), what his plans were for after university. An
intermittent tremor arose in Thomas’s left hand, and he pressed it shut.
“Thomas.” Blake said, as the dessert circled.
“Hmm?”
“Your tie is tied incorrectly.”
Thomas looked down at his tie. It was in a serviceable half Windsor, the kind his dad had
shown him.
“It’s…it’s fine.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
***
Thomas scowled over the instructions for a full Windsor in meticulous detail before the
mirror, balancing his phone against an insufferably shiny tap, and praying that nobody would
come in and discover him, besieged by his own shame to wrangle silk into unfamiliar loops.
Eventually, another man came in to discover the boy’s fledgling efforts, gazing across over the
taps.
“Do you want some help?”
Thomas flinched, scanned the strange uniformity of the man who was speaking, and had
no real answer. Not from any deep sense of disapproval, just from a profound sense of cyclical
anxiety.
“A full Windsor, right?”
“Right.”
“Here.”
Strong fingers, the smooth bones held in craggy sinew, twisted the silk around Thomas’
throat. A constancy, a sensation, a mood more than a process.
“There you are.”
Thomas stroked over the thin tie, tucking it neatly underneath the waistcoat. When he
looked up, he had almost expected the man to be gone, but he wasn’t. The taut, androgynously
pale skin framed a thin smile, the heavy suit seeming to press him down against the earth. He
carried himself with the spirit of one who had great promise, settled for what he gained ¾ of the
way, and has since recognised the broad comedy of existence.
He looked, Thomas realised, like the kind of man he projected onto too much.
The man left the bathroom.
Thomas’s full Windsor knot returned to the table.
***
The rest of the dinner had proceeded with a great deal of aplomb. The first comment off
Blake’s tongue had been the new knot, and Thomas had found subtle pleasure in the light
pressure it placed around his neck, pushing his throat up and into position. He found himself a
newly proud figure, like a generic businessman frozen in eternal happiness in an M&S
advertisement. Scintillating roast beef was followed by strong cheeses.
Perception proves itself a fluid entity on nights of such wilful and active celebration.
Thomas’s stunted wine choices immediately opened to grander acts of exuberance once it was
firmly established that he would not, in fact, be paying for this evening’s affairs. There should
have been some greater resistance on his part, he remembered thinking, but it somehow seemed
right. The purpose of the dinner, and Blake’s initial comment, had drifted from the centre of his
brain’s moral objection with considerable ease, lubricated by Krug. It simply existed, in its
glorious little limbo in his unobjectionable little life, for the sake of existence. Art for art’s sake.
The pub’s true name was unknown, but, being a subsidised affair, it was known simply as
‘Beull’, for in the Parliamentary dialect, because that was what its name came closest to being. Its
identity was thus analogous to a Buddhist koan, in that perception determined its existence. To
those with genuine conviction in left-wing beliefs, it was an exorbitant waste. To 95% of
Parliamentarians, it was one of many homes away from home, a combination conference room,
dining room, living room, and lebensraum.
“So, Blakey. What’s the deal with the new blood?”
Thomas’s neck swung itself to the new voice. A cocky, loose-jowled haircut in a suit
exactly like his was the speaker.
“His name’s Thomas. He’s Oxford.”
Nodding, smiling, a joke about rowing. That was it. It was simply assumed, as if it held no
more social heft than a declaration about eye colour.
“I see. Internship?”
“For now. He’s got big dreams of government, and I think he’s just the sort to progress
with them.”
***
The dead air was filled with the background radiation of the pub. Thomas, in this precise
moment in time, was deeply and profoundly aware of the moment’s significance. On this stage,
more than the groaning boards of a disused church, he was setting his true face; at this time, he
could stand, declare his disgust, and leave. He could abandon the heinous path set in motion for
him by a man who probably responded to the word ‘no’ in the same way the blue whale
responds to a zoning petition and return to his life. Swap old leather for new polyester, and
tobacco-stained compensated pints for clean, shining, own-brand gin.
This world sung him the only siren song a man of his age needed. Comfort, liberty from
the profound shackles of choice and responsibility, and the open mockery of rebuttal.
His mind sank back into its waiting bosom.
***
“Oh, absolutely.”
***
As they always do, one drink had turned to five, and five to (citation needed). Thomas
awoke in a stranger’s spare bed, in perhaps one of the nicest dwellings he’d ever been in. The
sheets clung to his skin with the needy constancy of fingertips.
Thomas fled the den of iniquity, and the breakfast room of a man whose name he
remembered ¾ of. His skin had become slicked with the thin sweat of the cocaine breakfast. It
was only when he had caught the perennially awkward mid-day Great Western Railways line back
to the suburbs and his phone gradually reanimated that he became patently aware of two truths
in his life. The first, he had technically been aware of before, but it had passed from his life in a
violent haze, and it was that the play he and 14:168 had been rehearsing for, A Butterfly Cried In
Camden, was due to air on the 21st. Today was the second half of the 19th. The second was that
Blake and Tommy and Winkle and Bolsey (and, later at Winkle’s place, Douglas and Cheyenne
for cameo appearances) had convinced him that he should get more involved in Pygmalion and
signed him up for a dinner with the higher-ups. On the 21st. He was unsure why the
Conservative Party had decided to get an entirely unqualified actor elected, and via ‘creative
interpretation’ of his CV at that, but he technically would have been a politician before. He was
about to be one, on stage. The coincidences were certainly Daoist in their irritation.
The Thomas of three days hence would not have hesitated and would have folded
immediately out of the high-stakes bridge tournament that was the interview at (insert restaurant)
with the murmured admission that he, like everyone under the age of 30, had no idea how to
play bridge.
But this was a new Thomas. One you could either say lacked the nerve to retire or had
gained the spine to stay. He committed to both, sending a flurry of apologetic Discord messages
apologising to Emily’s wall of text by saying he had been ‘engaging too hard in the method’ (an
ironclad excuse), and responding to the single WhatsApp message from Blake with an
affirmative.
The old Thomas languished on the bed, the Dane besieged by his arrogance and the email from Waitrose confirming his summary firing, going over his lines.
The new man spent the night in front of a mirror. Wide end to the right, small to the left.
As it follows, rest above the navel. Move only the smaller around the thicker, active to the
passive. Up, around. In.
***
The face of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a difficult entity to become accustomed
to at the table. It was Celebrity, with a medium-case C, but one that Thomas in his prime had
observed through the conduit of Twitter reactions. His failure to engage with basic aspects of
daily existence, his heartless policies. Not his preference for tartare consistency or wine selection.
It was like viewing history through a charcoal-coated pool. What was that Wilde quote about the
rage of Caliban? It swirled on the tip of Thomas’ tongue, suffocated beneath Moët and buttery
ravioli.
The evening had proceeded, all things considered, relatively well. Blake had taken Thomas’
coat as soon as he arrived and ushered him to a backroom table. Here, a private chef had
arranged a spread with two options, presenting a paralysing duality. Everyone else was eating
both, and Thomas joined that boy’s own choir.
“Thomas.” The Chancellor’s grin mirrored itself, a Disney-like arc of looping presumption.
“Yes, Sir?”
“An impressive presentation indeed.”
He had said and done nothing.
“Umm…thank you.”
The Chancellor’s shining face turned to his aide, a squat fellow of middling everything.
“Is the Umm in?”
“The Umm is very much in, Sir. Erring is, after all, human.”
A restrained chuckle bounced around the table. Thomas’s throat involuntarily joined the
call, like frogs in the jungle.
“Marvellous.”
***
“Thomas!”
The screeching echoed, thin and shrill. It was true, granted, that the show was beginning.
It was 7.14 PM, the exact time in which Sloane Pickering first enters and reveals his plans to buy
out the butterfly sanctuary and deny the children of Camden the chance to watch moths with
delusions of grandeur flutter their brief existences. This would be an inciting event for a wave of
predictabilities; the counter-protest movement organising; the shady machinations of X
Corporation; the philosophies of Bakhtin expressed with the competence of Hollyoaks. A rooftop
kiss, and everyone trying constantly to fuck each other, on all sides of the stage.
He knew his lines, of course. But, as Thomas entered, he realised he had several profound
critiques of them. Namely, the words, their order, and how he was supposed to deliver them.
Contemplating this, as he stood stage left with infuriated scene partners and a silent audience,
had slowed him down. But he recovered.
He placed his hands around his neck and undid the half someone else had tied.
Wide to the right. Smaller to the left.
“You know that none of this matters, of course.”
As a sign of respect, he made sure to keep the first and last words the same. Any skilled
actor, he figured, should be perfectly capable of adapting, so long as they still had the frame of
their marks.
Silence.
Thomas repeated the line, raising his left eyebrow three millimetres.
“Mr…Pickering.” Jean, the youngest in the group, stepped back and kept most of her
character intact, barely concealing her irritation at the sudden shift to 70% improv.
Thomas noticed, for the first time, how clammy her forehead and hands always were, and
how flabby her wrists and thighs were. Surely that was incongruous, for a figure that was meant
to be desired?
“I see the ‘attention to detail’ your CV touts isn’t exaggerated.”
It was off-script. It was out of character.
It got the biggest laugh of the evening.
Thomas’s heart soared, as a new man sailed through the play and outwards, onwards into
the night.
***
The chinking of crystal against crystal has a wonderfully soothing effect. Like a wave
machine, or (Thomas imagined) the womb.
“So.”
“So.”
Thomas looked to Blake, expecting the joke.
The course was served. Lamb tagine, hot and neat, with a spiced curve of saffron rice.
“How do you feel about Philosophy?”
The statement was so absurd without context that Thomas had to wrestle back his
imminent laugh. “I…as a concept?”
“Nice. Philosophical answer. Put his degree down as Philosophy unless you’d like to join it
with something spicy.”
The raisins, caramelized, lolloped across Thomas’s mouth.
“Maybe Theatre?”
Silence reigned, a newcomer to an uncontested throne. The Chancellor of the Exchequer
coughed politely and smiled, and Blake affixed his protégé with a withering gaze.
A waiter shuffled into the gloaming silence, supplicating the dry mood with water. Thomas
finessed a parcel of lamb into his mouth.
“Well…actually.”
The aide readjusted his personality and rolled back his shoulders. “The new theatrical angle
could actually be uniquely advantageous to our current market strategies. The bias is, of course,
Classics, Philosophy, Literature, or Politics, but I’ve been hearing recently that that’s led to
detachment from market perspectives. The emergent Gen Z. have a firm appreciation for the
Social Science orient, but a hard Humanities angle could be more advantageous given higher-level
resistance to the area. Of course, the slide is not yet slippery enough for Gender Studies.”
A subcutaneous, amused murmuring echoed throughout the room at the concept of
studying gender, and the notion of Theatre percolated further.
“Of course,” said Blake, “that will mean Cambridge instead of Oxford. I was so hoping for
Oxford.”
Blake’s capacity to evoke undeserved, sudden loss returned, as Thomas mourned a slightly
different derivation of the fake background being brainstormed over wine and pasta.
“Naturally. But that shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve been in touch with Michael, Cedric and
Reuben, and they’re all in favour with the process. All we need is for you to sign a few dozen
forms, put some spin on some essays, and fabricate a small handful of social media posts. No
need for too many, of course – one of them can just specify a disdain for it, or a prolonged
digital detox.”
While Thomas didn’t doubt that this cover was uniquely authentic, he did question what
exact flavour of twat he was supposed to have been and was now becoming. He needled the
lamb ever outwards, spiralling diffuse strands across the tines.
The evening progressed. The Chancellor seemed tickled by the whole process, and, over
a sticky toffee pudding with the consistency of an oil field, handed over ‘All the necessary funds
for Pygmalion to take off, and a 10% increase.’ Despite knowing nothing of the level of the funds
in question, Thomas found himself somehow uniquely proud of his involvement in the venture.
Thomas ended the dinner with his head full of uniquely overpriced Italian wine, Blake’s
arm wrapped tight around his to hold him up, and his mind looping around the process of
realising something very important – much like one of those spiral things at an arcade. The kind
you put a coin into? The one that rolls in, around and around, before falling. It was and wasn’t
there.
Chapter Three
L’enfer, c’est Berwick
“Oh, a butcher, you say! Delightful.”
“Do you think I could get a picture with her? Charming little baby.”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid I’m something of a sassenach myself, but I’d be more than happy to
try one on, if that’s all right. Do you have the Masterson tartan?”
The dinner was now sixty days hence, and Thomas was ensconced firmly within his
constituency – Berwick-Upon-Tweed. In the past, the seat had often been accused of being
‘unstable’ by traditional Tory mindset due to its large Scottish population, which is why it had
been offered as the seat for this experiment. However, despite Scotland itself being a minefield
that, barring small exceptions, was loaded almost to the brim with socialism, nationalism, and
whatever was happening in Shetland, Berwick stood as an eternal reminder to the major
corruption of the dour, pragmatic, Presbyterian heart – money.
“Thrift is such an eternal constant with my people that, you see, whenever you take away
their need to worry about money, they become not only amenable to Conservative ideas, but
some of the staunchest Tories available.”
Whenever Thomas had paced the bleak granite, Douglas was there beside him, serving as a
joint cultural expert and social media manager. In the two months leading up to the campaign,
Douglas had overhauled every aspect of Thomas’ social media profile, deleting his requisite
generic Instagram page of filtered mewling against the state of affairs (but saving a few for later
humiliation) and replacing it, step by step, with a profoundly generic catalogue of teenage life, of
the expected adulations of school and early university, petering off for more occasional and
nuanced postings. He was on Facebook and Instagram, and, despite his protests, on 4Chan (at
least, an anonymous face that rounded him out). Douglas had also been providing him with
unique insights into the English-facing Scottish character.
“Don’t worry about learning Scots, or Gaelic, or any twee expressions. If Berwick has any
who speak like that, they know to speak it in their own homes. It’s not the done thing. People
have come here to escape the low circumstances of their birth, and now they speak English
better than the English do.”
Thomas had severely doubted this last assertion, until he had actually made his rounds in
the town centre – waving, smiling, ducking spontaneously into high street shops. The elocution
was pronounced, and immediate. How may I help you, Sir? What are your plans for the local
pond? It was, in a strange sense, incredibly refreshing, and Berwick a wonderful town to recline
back into after months of horrid graft in helping him formulate this new character. He was
treated here with an immediate degree of intimate respect. Suggestions were politely asked at a
soft lean, instead of shouted from across the room. People often opened doors for him. It
should, by all accounts, be mortifying, and it was familiar to him only as the treatment one
reserved for young children, the ill, or the mentally infirm. And yet, it was simply…correct.
***
Thomas’s busy schedule of campaigning was disrupted when a visit to his mother became
suddenly no longer deferrable. He had, so he felt, done an excellent job of circumventing her
persistent inquiries, but one day a visiting Blake had noticed the text backlog and demanded he
return south to redress this plight. Upon visiting, however, he found that things had been much
the same as they had five years ago. When he had asked how she felt about his career change,
she admitted she had been a little surprised.
“I wasn’t sure, at first, Thomas. You always were so…left-wing, ever since that last year of
high school. Remember that girl, Adama?”
Thomas winced a little. He had, for all intents and purposes, been the very model of a
Keynesian elector-general, but the mention of his first partner of colour brought back a wide
litany of painful memories. Of a sniffy dismissal of ‘ratty hair’, of wearying implications at the
dinner table. Loud conversations, late at night, influenced by a great many stimulants, that he
heard perfectly through his bedroom floor.
Ever the professional, Thomas struck up his same golden curve, and flicked a dismissive
hand.
“Ah, yes. What an…experience that was. For everyone involved.”
This same casual laughter, dismissal of his Bolshevik university years, and reorientation to
his mother’s Liberal Democrat policies (which were essentially his own now) carried through the
night. As he reluctantly took the stairs to bed, his eyes followed his mother’s to the same
armchair shrine, the seat still indented. The smell still preserved. Tobacco. Bruichladdich.
The coin circled.
***
Thomas’s old bedroom held little nostalgia – most of his happy memories had been out in
the garden, rambling through the local parks and hillocks.
A lonely boy, picking through rocks by the stream. Meandering in the hot, English sun.
Wavering nowhere.
In the half-remembered twilight, spinning between consciousness and unconsciousness,
the coin circled further in. Thomas realised, by halves and by inches, his true detachment from
the being that had once lived between these sheets. Had tapped out lonely wishes on the
computer, toiled at school, watched giant projections of hypothetical others, and yearned with
some primal part of his soul to be like their illusion.
Their.
They/them.
A private confession. A turning of the gate.
Even if only to himself.
Thomas, the man, had died.
Thomas, the politician, descended the stairs to breakfast.
***
A safe-seat election, viewed from the victor’s side, is a remarkably banal affair for
something that is meant to be intensely competitive. It less resembles the active, West Wing style
encapsulation of empowered speeches, dedicated scheduling, and ironing at a Dutch angle, and
more resembles a Chekov play called The Politician. A long and drawn-out series of tangentially
interesting individuals sitting in chairs, speculating, waiting, and occasionally indulging in menial
tasks that endlessly loop and spiral.
Whenever they weren’t in the office monitoring polls and social media, Thomas was out
on the streets, canvassing, campaigning, and withstanding the fiendish banality of the citizens of
Berwick. The hustings were two weeks away, and making their presence known on the local
stage was crucial.
‘Strategic’ video calls with Blake, he himself campaigning (as much as he ever did) in his
own seat, spiralled outwards into long, lingering conversations about past events. Blake had
children, but was estranged from his wife, in the optimal possible sense. Both his boys attended a
private school and were high achievers, his wife received a perfectly apt stipend that
supplemented her moderately successful ‘wellness advice’ business. The houses were separate,
and equally contented. Through the lightly grainy pixels, Thomas often thought they could see
some light twinge in the storm’s eye, a ripple in the placid crystal-blue pool. But it would always
pass, and they would return by degrees to everything Blake had done for them. The position, the
by now already won election, (their opponent had asserted that modern-day Britons had an
innate need to apologise financially for the evils of slavery, which would in Berwick net her a
cool 35% at best) the by this point inevitable fling/friends-with-benefits affiliation they and
Cheyenne were due to undertake. Thirteen becomes fourteen so easily, they noticed, as Blake’s
authoritative influence crushed hours into seconds. Thomas felt rejuvenated by their mentor’s
rounded, resonant voice, a stark contrast to Douglas’s bark, Cheyenne’s lilt, and Berwick’s twee
curl-up at the end of words.
A week before the hustings, Douglas confronted Thomas by the same white kettle and sad
collection of aged leaves every office has.
“Hey, laddie.”
He said, the unconscious Scotticism an indicator he’d been in native lands a little too long.
“There’s a ceilidh tonight. I want you at it. Performance, profile, etc. I’ve arranged some
troos.”
Thomas narrowed their eyes at the half-a-word.
“What?”
“Oh, sorry. Tartan trousers. They’re called troos up here.”
“In England?”
“In towns haunted by the spectre of a real culture. Just put on the fucking trousers and
meet me at the Town Hall.”
“Will you don the kilt?”
“I have to.”
***
Being an actor often required truth on multiple stages – a layered performance innately
consists of telling fragments of the core truth, forming a rueful mosaic of attachments. So too it
was with Thomas at the ceilidh. From the second they drifted in, jagged tartan trousers brushing
against the swaying cloth of neighbouring kilts, they became viscerally aware of the profound
alienation they felt from any aspect of their past.
These were not, according to Douglas (who swirled intermittently near the bar, drinking
with a lousy expression), true Scots. The ever-present fallacy as to who could be formed a
question perennially on Thomas’s tongue, but he didn’t like the idea of raising it to Douglas
three whiskeys in.
The dancers had, since their departure, spent as much time in Scotland as Barack
Obama. But even in their detachment and disassociation, they had some trace of true, natural
sentiment in their eyes. They hummed the words in a half-forgotten brogue; they traced again
the steps, drilled in at youth, of the old dances they knew so well. They were happy to show
them to the sassenach, the invader, the apathetic victor of an alien government. The Dashing
White Sergeant. The Gay Gordons. The drum, the reel, the whisky, the yelling. Unity, even in
foggy eyes.
Thomas stood, befuddled. They tried to start polite conversation, but people kept reeling
off to dance. They tried to speak of the positive future Berwick could have under their
administration, but the schoolmaster merely nodded and then launched into a long anecdote
about his youth in Inverness.
It was an evening floated perennially in a past. Thomas was lost inside it.
***
The hustings came. A sleepless Thomas arrived at the affair, their rest having been
disrupted by the constant rattling of near realisations. A thick sediment of whisky and fat had
filtered atop their mind. A hazy web of candidates was read in front of him, and a name that
sounded like theirs was in there somewhere. They smiled, lazily and fondly, in the way they had
trained to for hours.
In the painfully long interim, they reflected on the disparity between them and their
opponent and found themselves looking into a tinted mirror. They had seen her on the trail, at
service stations, with her team: an African man, a semi-local, and an older Party official.
Promises of evolution, of investment, of change. Save for a few remarks on cancel culture (with
a capital Cult), the same local commitments, with different perspectives. A series of lazy, strungout jokes about the Red Tories came to mind. But they were all from the actor Thomas. What
had the politician Thomas to say about Blue Blairites? She smiled at the crowd. The arc was the
same. That gondola.
Their name-sound was voiced. The crowd erupted into polite applause, and Cheyenne
held them close as they entered a profound state of appropriately chaste enthusiasm. Handshake,
handshake, pledge, pledge. The news cameras switched off and trundled back to the vans. The
town hall returned to its default state – a sad, beige little room constructed in the 1970’s due to a
lack of better options. Life, as polished as it was, fled for a moment, and Thomas looked into
their clay-brown cup of over-milked tea.
***
Scheduled programming did, of course, resume, and in some force, at a private manor
house some thirty miles south. Thomas in Pygmalion had been the talk of the Party for weeks, and
seemingly all the Tory apparatus not standing for election had traipsed up the crack of the nation
to query them on the matter. They drifted, caught ceaselessly on an ebbing tide of compliments
and witty references to Greek and Roman mythology. They met with a collection of such
references and anecdotes named Clive Andrews, editor of a satirical magazine named Points of
Revue. Everything about it seemed to anger Thomas, including the title. Whenever Clive spoke
and finished a curt little rejoinder, his head would cock (wobbling) to one side, the unspoken
implication of recognition or humour on your behalf hanging there at the end like a semi-colon.
He seemed full of a great many things to say about the present state of affairs, but had very little
to say about their improvement. When Thomas interrupted a prolonged conjecture about the
precise inadequacies of the present Foreign Policy with a nuanced reference to the works of
Baudelaire and asked Clive what exactly his solution was, he looked puzzled.
“Well…I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have Webber in charge. The man can hardly wrangle
a subjunctive aptly, let alone tackle the web that is Iran.”
Thomas recalled how, minutes earlier, they had witnessed the man trade boarding-school
anecdotes with an Etonian, and swap restaurant tips for the Riviera with a bored Countess. They
recalled hearing the definition of the word ‘activist’ once and reading about the history of the
role of the court jester. The fool, historically, had been defined most by their capacity to speak
truth to power, and to make known to the king grievances and issues that would have ruined any
other courtier’s career. They saw the voice of cultural injury and dissatisfaction walk to the other
side of the room and engage immediately in a conversation about the rooms of different colleges
in Oxford. Thomas watched journalists, writers, investment analysts, media experts and
‘portfolio supervisors’ gather at a meeting supposedly reserved for politicians. The African man
from the Labour side milled around the entryway, picking at appetisers, and loosely drifting to
different phone numbers.
Thoughts overwhelmed them.
Wide end to the right, small to the left. As it follows, rest above the navel. Move only the smaller around
the thicker, active to the passive. Up, around. In.
***
Thomas awoke from mingling with a start. Blake was there. The night had swept in, chill
frost barking across the town. The festivities graduated a dark pub, then a bright pub, then back
to the dark. They oriented themselves, as they had become used to doing, around Blake’s
guidance, and so became inconsolably sauced. They were bipartisan in their fixation with the
stuff, flitting from group to group. Beer with the main crowd, shots with the wives and/or
mistresses. More stereotypes lined up on the toilet cistern. Three in a row, crackling white.
Inevitability is a fickle concept, and retrospect the great prophesier. What was, given
circumstances, destined to happen, is often wildly overwhelming in the moment.
It was thus immensely shocking when the obvious occurred. When the paternal hand on
the back became the patriarchal grasp of the thigh.
When authoritative became dominant.
When the pupil became the…well, pupil, but in the stereotypically kinky sense.
***
Thomas awoke in Blake’s bed, the seal broken, and the first assumption proved true. It
had been, for all its pains, worryingly enjoyable, in a way that sent shivers through their gut and
spine.
They rested in the left-hand crook of Blake’s elbow, quivering in unaddressed concerns.
The cars roared outside. Blake’s fingers tapped their upper thigh. The world was deafening
silence.
Thomas readjusted their hips outwards, rolling up and over the lumbering giant.
They took their clothes, set a reminder on their phone for a party a month from now, and
left.
***
The subsequent realisation took longer for her than she’d have liked. Tamira’s original
choice of actor had proved prophetic in numerous ways, as now her presence and career were
both equally matched illusions. Blake had been immensely sympathetic – understandably, now
that he had invested in her in multiple ways – and had offered them as much time off as they
needed. She reclined in her new apartment, one which compensated for its diminutive size by its
pristine lack of imagination. She had no proper clothes, only Thomas’s (well…Blake’s) suits.
Every time she considered shopping, she found the act unbearable, loitering at the entrance like
the bizarre fetishist Mumsnet.com undoubtedly claimed she was. The city, which before was
masterful in its grandeur, excitement, and promises, had become the subject of a Foucault text.
Everything was a panopticon, most of all the suits. The goosebumps remained, but became the
subject of an unbearable chill, which developed into a full head-cold which knocked her out for a
week.
The concept of Blake having ‘done this’ to her did cross her mind, but she rejected it outof-hand. Yes, there was undoubtedly a corruptive element. But she had known that since the
first party. He was a corruptive man. But at what point does voluntary corruption become tacit
acceptance?
On reflection, she realised she didn’t give a fuck. This was untenable.
Coming out to her parents could wait. But Blake had evolved into the nexus of her life,
professionally and socially. It was the final stage of her being him, and the mere mental load of
the ER being the IM instead was the spoon that broke the tepid metaphors.
***
Eventually, her hand was forced. There was a bash at the Savoy for the incoming, blue-tied
figures, MPs and aides alike. Everyone loved him, that man in the suit. The wonderful scam they,
the preposterous, the gallivanting, the cyclical elite had pulled on the boisterous, cantankerous
naysayers. She cringed at being inside him, stretching her face into the most extroverted and
overexaggerated depiction of who she felt he had been. Doing so was like pushing deeper into
quicksand. The references continued, the champagne flowed, the mandated playlist of Elton
John and Ed Sheeran trickled down through the fairy lights wrapped around the chandelier.
It took her a long time to mix her way to where Blake sat, the Sheik of the Oil Fields
luxuriating in his doting harem. He looked like her inverse. Sleepless nights had kept her hair a
mess, while his shimmered in place like a greased ice sculpture. His suit, the same cut as hers,
was neatly ironed and arranged. She had lost her cufflinks in an anxiety attack a few days ago, as
an errant, spasming foot kicked them to a hidden dimension far beneath her bed.
Tamira realised, in that soft moment by the banister, how hideous Blake actually was. The
moderate swell of his gut, the pouching of his cheeks, the lightly greying hairline made manifest
under the lights. But perhaps that’s why she was so overwhelmingly attracted to him. They both
looked hideous.
“Thomas!” Oh. Fuck. When one fixates on a hypothetical version of an upcoming
conversation for long enough, they can forget elements of it. Much like Tamira forgot that Blake,
the target of the dialogue, would, in fact, not be familiar with her realisation whatsoever. The old
name stuck for the rest of their public talk, and every time it was spoken her gut bucked against
her ribs in instinctual revulsion. Their talk wasn’t eavesdropped upon per se, but the Thomas
Masterson who had won the recent election in Berwick was a figure of some interest, as was his
connection to the older, influential Blake Hartfield.
She knew just what to do. She mirrored, she matched. She waited. Blake ended up putting
his hands on her arm and hip a little more than he historically had, and it shocked her how little
she minded.
***
The evening drifted to a backroom. She sat across from him on a low divan, and he on a
wingback armchair. Steadfast, determined, vaguely bored (or possibly mildly drunk). A
fundamentally passable Roger Allam cosplayer.
“What’s…wait, Thomas. You look like shit, my good man.”
Well, he was right about that, but wrong about the other two statements.
“What’s…what’s going on? You can talk to me.”
In a moment of unparalleled, uncharacteristic, entirely inappropriate honesty,
The coin dropped.
Tamira told him absolutely everything. From the beginning. From the first stirrings of her
in some primal element of her gut;
From her performative urges, to the shivers of fine silk in the wrong cut;
From the urge to claim something of Cheyenne’s perfection, in a fashion she thought was
ownership but was in truth sisterhood;
To the slicing of the grapefruit;
To the man in the bathroom;
To the stinking chair. To the man who never was.
To him. (As in Blake.)
The final stuttering, staccato, badly paced and tear-drenched syllables spattered themselves
against the floor. Silence echoed the room, like the suggestion of theatre.
Blake looked at her. His eyes were as incisive as ever, firm-set as ever – in fact, they had
much of the same fierceness they had once given that boy at the checkout. But the kindness
remained. It was an algorithm reformatting, code reconnecting, the pins again pushed back into
the cork. Gently, eventually, he spoke.
“Well. Tamira?”
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“We can work with that.”
Chapter Four
Bigly Sympathetic
What do you wear to a trans-exclusionary radical feminist conference? It’s a question as old as
time, if one thinks of ‘time’ in the sense that members of the LGB Alliance do, in which time
began with the founding of Mumsnet. (Or, as some rival sects believed, the publication of The
Female Eunuch. Scholars remain divided.) Cheyenne, in her preparations, was met with several
such concerns. Her wardrobe was, of course, impeccable. From her neatly arranged apartment in
Shoreditch, she had accumulated a small but tactically diverse arrangement of pieces. Several
options presented themselves. The simple kaftan, for instance; a flowing green river stitched with
gilt that outlined the words ‘Aha, I have an (insert ethnicity) friend, and here she is’ in muted neon.
The statement pantsuits - black and navy blue, mostly interchangeable and with a neckline and
waist that emphasised feminine independence in a way men (however much they denied it)
fetishized about fucking out of someone. Like any artist, Cheyenne knew her patrons, who
wearing clothes truly benefitted, and who was placing the mirror in her hand. Maybe at some
point gender-critical feminism had been about women, but now, much like mainstream feminism
post-Lean In and society as a default, it was about men. Even gay men. Even men who were
hated for being men.
She wandered casually out into her living room. Her roommate, a career-oriented lesbian from
Dorset, was sprawled out on the sofa. She grunted in a non-committal fashion.
“Busy night?” Cheyenne asked the room.
“Guuuhhh. You’ve no idea. I had a whole fifteen-minute drag-along conversation with my
boss, who was desperate to try and figure out what I actually do. I had to lead him on quite the
merry fucking chase about hyperlink configuration and SEO buzzword engagement, whereas all
the while I was just fixated on this gorgeous little vixen by the bar. You should have fucking seen
her, Chey. Caramel skin, pussy-pink nails, gorgeous legs, and these marvellous little white-gold
Prada heels. We flirted for an hour, but nothing came of it. I don’t know, I think she just thought
I was decisive. Or funny, she laughed a lot.”
Clarissa was the kind of lesbian who had been so overwhelmingly steeped in queer culture
in her university years, and then so disconnected from it in her business environment, that she
had basically decided to embrace a path of radical, honest apathy and honesty, in a manner that
made her social arsenic for everyone who upheld some basic standards of common sense or
decency. This was likely why she was Cheyenne’s best friend. She was always this pathologically
open about her sexual fixations with Cheyenne, a woman who herself floated in the middle of
the Kinsey scale but was too attached to her career to call herself bisexual. They had
experimented once, in a tantric ritual in a heaping of oiled rose petals in the aftermath of a visit
to the Epsom Derby wearing nothing but fascinators, but nothing had come of it. Their sexual
incompatibility likely arose from a difference in desired outcomes. Cheyenne fucked to advance
(successfully); Clarissa fucked to fuck (and usually fucked up).
“Maybe you weren’t honest enough. Did you mime cunnilingus?”
“In this era? I’d be lucky if I were just fired for that, and even you know it, Tory.”
The word ‘Tory’ was here used with a fraction of the malice it would otherwise have
accumulated on the way past a tongue piercing. Cheyenne’s employers were a subject, in this flat,
for ribbing more than anything else.
“Hey, hey. I’m an independent consultant.”
“I imagine a lot of the contractors on the Death Star said the same thing.”
“They probably did, and you know what? They also revolutionised that one planet’s
transportation industry, what with all those new refugees.”
“What planet?”
“The one it blew up.”
“Alderaan.”
“You’re cute when you try to speak Arabic.”
Clarissa turned her face back towards Netflix, the snarl of nerd rage ameliorated by the
flirty little compliment. Having effective flirtation in one’s back pocket was always a useful
category for any relationship. Speaking of, she thought, I haven’t heard from Thomas in a while. That
was meant to be on the cards.
Cheyenne’s approach to hygiene and skincare maintenance existed on a timescale known
approximately as ‘the duration of a French meal’. While she had little doubt that her intellect
remained her most prized aspect, those who believed one could not cultivate both physical and
mental excellence simultaneously were equal parts bitter and deluded. The best glamours of
human civilisation are cast across sparkling intellects, who often are also cunning enough to
subdue their genuine intelligence for the benefit of their careers. Modern feminism also meant it
worked both ways, even. The age of the submarine bim/him/thembo, a brutally cunning mind
hiding below a glass-cutter jawline, was on the horizon, and the thin tightrope of Radio 4
listeners excelling in bureaucracy while the naturally gifted excelled on Instagram was swiftly
going to be replaced in a heinous Night of the Million Likes.
Cheyenne finished her face mask on the rowing machine next to the balcony, the machine
crammed in at an oblique angle next to Clarissa’s whirring behemoth of a gaming PC.
“You know,” mumbled Cheyenne through a mouthful of tzatziki-coated sourdough, “I
really think we need to investigate the idea of splitting up the electricity bill more. I can’t imagine
anything I own uses a fraction of the amount of power that thing does even when it’s sleeping.”
“You talk about it like it’s alive.”
“It certainly hisses like it is. You coddle it like it’s some perverted little cyborg baby you
adopted to score Instagram clout with the transhumanist Tumblr crowd.”
“Chey, do you talk like an analyst when you fuck as well?”
“I’ve told you before about trying to theorise about my sex life, Clarissa. What did I say?”
Clarissa met her friend’s eye with a palpably withering look. “That it’s much more fun if
you can tease me about it.”
“Good girl.”
A quick Uber of the Pakistani-driver varietal (clean, officiant, the desperation breeding
professionalism) brought Cheyenne to an unassuming office building built atop the unfulfilled
dreams of a council planner in the ‘70’s. They needed to talk shop about the meeting, and by
‘they’ she meant a rotating committee of other independent analysts and dealmakers. Some of
the very earliest members of this subsidised revolving restaurant had likely developed a witty
name for it that was some sort of Classical Greek allusion, but those ceaseless virgins had swiftly
been replaced by the New Labour wave of proudly university-educated professional knownothings, who had found that tacit allusions to the Delian League polled poorly among the 25-40
crowd. The current council was spearheaded by Liam Pendleton, a flint-eyed silver fox Cheyenne
had long desired to swing atop; Nigel Haverstock, the actually competent old boy she respected
too much to flirt with despite his evident desire for her to do so; and Emma de Musset, an
incredibly competent and pioneering trend analyst whose surname was too aggressively posh
(read: French) for her to be given any kind of public role. The rest were largely irrelevant, and,
conveniently for Cheyenne, could fit (badly) into the rhyming scheme of We Didn’t Start The Fire:
Posh queer, urban queer, nephew of a brigadier, partially failed Oxonian, defence contractor/
Quiet professional Asian man, horny Cantabrigian, five to six boring fucks, eco-wanker.
Cheyenne had always stood apart as the most profoundly over-dressed in the group, and
her having to arrive here before attending the vulture’s congregation didn’t put paid to that
stereotype, but it was hardly the worst aspersion to have flung at you in a meeting whose explicit
purpose was to make the Conservative Party seem more accessible to the young demographic.
Today, in her long-slitted kaftan dress and pearlescent clusters of jewellery, she was even more
prominently exposed, but paid no heed to the attention – it was simply the same sort of attention
that always met her in clusters of mixed-gender company. 1/3rd delight, 1/3rd apathy, 1/3rd rage.
The meeting was full of words, and she mixed them into her ceaseless flow of clipped
responses. Voter turnout. Voter apathy. Engagement, dynamics, SEO engagement,
presumptions on regional communities. Cheyenne’s qualifications were a nebulous mix of ‘a
middling 2/1 from Cambridge, and thus, a first anywhere else’ and a half-page CV’s worth of
conjured and largely fabricated society presentations. Within her obstruse circle of government
advisory ranks, getting these presentations and talks up and running was a gamut you just had to
do after getting out of university - martyring any lingering respect you had for the aged German
incels and French philanderers that made up modern philosophy on the altar of ‘Affiliated
Buzzwords, Inc.’. Cheyenne had been practically asleep for some of them, and had attended at
least a dozen or so where the ‘presenter’ definitely had been. It didn’t matter. No-one would
check, because anyone she would ever interview for had done exactly the same thing.
After at least a few thousand pounds of nothing had been billed to some vestry of the
governmental budget, Liam pulled her aside into his office. Now this, she considered, is a surprise I
really hadn’t expected. Lucky I wore this dress. She swept her hair back up into a bun as he quipped
her over the hearth. He always kept himself, and his place of business, in such an immaculate
condition, that it made the prospect of desecrating it even more tempting. Even more
surprisingly, however, and disappointingly, the meeting actually had to do with business.
“This, uh…this whole Ell Gee Bee Alliance tat…uh, d’you mind if I smoke?”
He turned to her, tapping out a Marlboro Gold. Cheyenne just nodded, and slid down into
the chair, content to smoulder in his wake.
“I just can’t help but think there’s an opportunity for some palpable expansion. I mean,
this is a whole bunch of people who are right with us! Right down the line on the whole
‘wokism’ thing, but they’re yet to come into the fold. I understand it completely, of course, and
‘the fold’ never means an endorsement or anything. It’s just that, in every communication I’ve
had with these people, they seem to fob us off. I raise the notion of charitable status, under-thetable stipend, permanent quarters…they don’t want anything to do with it. Or rather, I send the
e-mails, and then I talk to a lead figure when I bump into her at some do, and she says that’s a
fantastic idea! Old Jo-Ro’s on board, even. And yet, it’s just…it’s like I’m hitting a tide.”
Cheyenne held her tongue as he ran his. She knew from her intermittent exposure to the
Comintern Against Trannies that their Lead Communications Officer, a delightful housewife
who had knocked out a woman’s tooth in a fit of rage under suspicion of Gender Deviancy (said
woman was, in fact, just a regular woman with a moustache), was named Neema, and that really
said it all. The Muslim half gave her a natural allegiance to conservative social ideas; the African
half, a palpable desire to defend those fleeing from war-torn nations. It was, therefore, relatively
natural that she would position herself against a government with a vitriolic, near-psychosexual
obsession with stopping boats. Still, this inference granted Cheyenne Holmes the link in the
chain she needed to knock this charmingly obtuse man’s problems away. Visions of an early
retirement, an inherited stately house in the countryside, excuses for avoiding pregnancy, and an
engineered accident flooded Cheyenne’s amygdala, and she rejoiced in their soothing balm.
“Leave that matter to me, Nigel. I know these people well…well, well enough to batter our
message through.”
“Oh, darling Cheyenne, thank you awfully.”
Hmm. Homosexual? Maybe. Drat.
He burned another inch off the fag, and continued.
“It’s just this fucking Scottish question, you see. We, in the year of our lord 2024, are at a
vital hinge point. The Scottish have always, en masse, despised us, and to be honest I can’t say I
blame them; it’s part of the English character to be revolted by vermin. But if the SNP crumbles,
it affords us a crucial chance. Either Labour seizes it, or we do. Labour has the advantage there,
given their history in the region; but they’re also being led by a spineless worm, who seems to
hold as much animosity and apathy for them as we do, in public. And it all hinges on the trans
question.”
He turned his razor-sharp brow back to her, furrowing it in contemplation. No, you delicate,
Mr-Darcy adjacent himbo, she pleaded in her mind, don’t use your brain; you do it so badly. “Do you
know any transsexuals, Cheyenne?”
Cheyenne trawled through her internal roster of contacts, skipping to the section she had
termed ‘Strategically Embarrassing Leftists’. She rattled through a score of non-binary starlightkin, a glut of queers (she was popular with lesbians, cultivating their affection like a dog at
Crufts) and a diverse and nebulous range of the ten thousand or so other genders that
Humanities academics concocted in lieu of publishing comprehensible work. The pronouns, she
had long abandoned – they was her life raft in the storm.
“Not a one, sir. Not enough time in Soho, I imagine.”
“I see. Well, it’s an interesting matter, at any rate. It could be the straw that breaks
the…salmon’s back. The SNP are desperate to keep cultivating this image of Scotland as an
innately more progressive, welcoming, and friendly environment than England, and yet most
people in the Highlands, Islands, and older people in the cities seem determined to prove them
wrong. Presbyterianism is still a rock a decent number of people hold to, and if the We Frees
want to be Free to Wee on anything, it’s the graves of ‘autogynophiles’. If we want that core of
culture-war warriors, that rock that will be bussed anywhere, will scream at any time, will fight
and yell for these issues we can send flying out into the ether, pulling focus with them, then I
think that’s the spot to find them. That urge, that impulse, that…fire! We should have that, own
that, clutch it to us. Kate Forbes should be folded in, made leader of that token band we keep up
there to keep the argument going…replace that fat, drunken, idiotic loon, with his ten jobs and
bad haircut. Make it respectable.”
Cheyenne’s initial confusion and disdain over Liam’s bewildering Scottish spin on the
common aphorism was quickly overrun by the rest of this inference-based plan. It seemed to
balance at that charmingly Oxonian fulcrum-point where stereotyping and assumption met
genuine research and a coherent idea. The culture war was imported, yes, and for the first time
into rather than out of Britain, but that still didn’t affect its genuine relevance to a whole new breed
of middle-class pseudo-liberals with an affiliation for buzzwords and apathy towards the actual
lives of others. They wanted ‘trans-identified males’ out of the sacred feminine space that was
the women’s lavatories in Luton Services, just as much as they wanted things to enshrine a
vaguely standard continuation of everything in society; maybe some information billboards in
new, approachable colour-schemes. If this continues as it is, Cheyenne thought, the Lib Dems may some
day be reduced to a collection of old men in an even smaller room.
“Well…I think you’re reaching just a little, Nigel. But I promise, I’ll give it my best shot.
And if she won’t bend for me, I doubt she’ll bend for the pimply intern you no doubt have in
reserve.”
Nigel paused. She had caught him in the midst of a long, toasted-tobacco draught, the
crinkled embers cascading up and around his skin like an incense-fire laid before a statue of a
venerated Oxford dean. Shrouded in that saintly fire, her brain pulsed for a second with a
mixture of tension, anxiety, and deep, profound yearning. That sharply angled, lightly furrowed
brow; the permanent smirk; the signet ring identifying his nobility; the house it came with. The
money was one thing, but…something about that power, that place, suffused him like a radiant
elixir, and made her stand at attention at all times. She lost her greatest weapon around him, that
alluring semi-attached detachment that made men of all stripes want to fuck her to alertness; she
had to have his approval. It sickened her.
There it was.
“Darling Cheyenne! I knew you wouldn’t let me down. All I can ask is that you give it your
best; because, after all, I know from experience that your best is always sensational. I’m not in
the habit of betting on losing horses.”
Caught up in the rarely sighted whirlwind of his unfettered approval, Cheyenne leaned into
the metaphor, and made a whinnying noise, akin to a spirited horse, and bucked a little, imitating
the animal further. Understandably, she immediately regretted performing this insane gesture,
and, as the intense cringe reaction flooded her spinal column, she instinctively turned to leap
from the window, ending her career before that new low could be reported. However, she
stopped midway, stunned by the look of approval it garnered.