Authors: Alastair Campbell
‘How long did that last?’
‘Till 11.50.’
He had a single w to record a small shot of whisky slugged from his top-drawer hip flask as he dealt with correspondence before a noon meeting with the Chief Medical Officer. Alongside, he had noted that he could probably have waited till lunchtime, but he didn’t like the CMO and he felt a quick hit might help him get to the other side of the meeting more quickly.
‘Did it?’ asked Professor Sturrock.
‘Not sure.’
‘And the next drink?’
‘I had lunch at La Barca with the chairman of one of the big employers in my constituency. He was in town for an industry awards ceremony that evening, so in a good mood.’ He pointed to the entry – ‘
ww4, w2
’.
During the afternoon, spent in his department, he recorded three single ws. Alongside the second, he noted feeling that he would end the day absolutely smashed. Alongside the third he had written ‘
mst pc
’ (must pace myself ). He had also recorded cancelling an early-evening office team meeting, telling his secretary he needed time to start writing a speech he had to make in his constituency on Saturday.
‘Was that true?’
‘No. I just wanted to sit on the sofa and see if I could go half an hour with the hip flask in front of me, but not drink from it. It was tough, but I did it. Then I went for a pee and washed my face, then came back and had a very small swig.’
‘Because you thought you deserved it for going through the half-hour?’
‘I suppose so. It felt good, having forced myself to wait. The warm glow you get, it was warmer because of the wait. Then I had to go to a farewell party for one of the senior civil servants. I asked if I could
make
the speech early. I stuck to two wines before speaking, just about got through it even though I barely knew the guy, then really started to pick up the pace. Ww4, wr2. Back to the office, return a few calls, sign a few letters, brush my teeth, wash my face, then out for dinner.’
He had a monthly dinner with a group of his parliamentary colleagues, those he had been friendly with on entering the House, and even though some were now ministers, and others still on the backbenches, he and the other ministers had kept up the routine, pulling out only if really unavoidable.
‘Ww5, w2. One or two of the backbenchers were drinking heavily so I was probably thinking nobody was really noticing how much I was packing away.’
‘My God, Ralph, this is one bad day,’ said Professor Sturrock.
‘I told you it was bad. It gets worse.’
He told Professor Sturrock how his driver had dropped him off at home, a couple of streets behind the Tate Gallery, shortly before eleven, and how the moment the car had sped off, he felt liberated to let his drunkenness flow.
‘I just thought to myself, “Fuck it, you’re pissed out of your brains, and now there’s nobody to hide it from.” I just wanted to be a normal badly behaved drunk.’
He’d had a dozen yards to walk from the road to his house, the last few feet of which required him to climb seven steep steps to his front door. He stood for a while, ministerial red box in hand, head slumped into his chest. He spat on the ground, though some of the spittle hit his coat on the way down. He made a strange snarling sound, then looked from right to left, caught sight of a builders’ skip two houses away, snarled at the skip, spat again, then staggered towards the door. He rummaged around his pockets, found the door keys, plonked his red box down on the top step, spent thirty seconds or so trying to open the door, enjoyed the failure to do so, put the Yale key in the Chubb lock and laughed at his inability to make a connection. When eventually he opened the door, he returned to the step, picked up the red box and slowly made his way back to the door, slamming it behind him. The house was dark, empty of all human life but his. He threw
the
red box on the floor. ‘You can fuck off for starters.’ He laughed, then kicked the red box. He switched on a light. He went into the lounge, switched on the light there too, turned on the TV, snarled at the correspondent pontificating about Iran on
Newsnight
, then stood channel-hopping for a while, settling on an old black-and-white film that was showing on the Turner Movies channel. He snarled at the actors. ‘You can fuck off too. You’re probably dead now anyway. Look at you, you’re not even in colour,’ and he laughed at his insult. He went over to the cupboard in the corner, opened it, took out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and went to sit, still wearing his suit and coat, in the chair closest to the TV. He knew the actress wasn’t Jayne Mansfield, but she was of that era, and he called her Jayne, apologised for being rude earlier, said he hoped she wasn’t dead, made a mental note to ask Sandie when she was back whether Jayne Mansfield was dead because it was the kind of thing Sandie would know without looking it up. She would even know what she died of, if she
was
dead, and what she was up to and where she was living, if she was alive.
He put the bottle on the floor beside him and pressed the remote control so that the time would come up on screen. It was 11.48 p.m. He set himself a test. Not a drop till midnight. Go on, Ralph, you know you can do it. Just twelve minutes, it’s not long, and get through twelve minutes and you’ll deserve it. A w3 coming up, sir, no ice, no fucking glass, mate. A nice w3 straight from the bottle. You cannot beat it, sir. ‘The wife is away, the mouse will play,’ he said, then laughed again.
He reckoned he could waste at least five of the twelve minutes just channel-hopping. ‘Cheerio, Jayne. Live well.’ He skipped over the news channels, where a bunch of journalists were talking to each other about tomorrow’s papers. He gave twenty seconds or so to each of the pop-music channels, whizzed through sport, and settled on one of the TV shopping channels where a young black woman was urging him to call the number on the screen to make a bid for an enormous punchbowl. He could not work out how the price kept changing, and how the young black woman seemed to know, but he imagined it had something to do with supply and demand, and assumed the names appearing on a rolling ticker tape at the bottom of the
screen
were affecting the price. £5.99 seemed quite reasonable if you liked the look of the punchbowl. He thought it was hideous. He wondered what sort of people were up at this time of night watching a nice-looking young black woman trying to sell punchbowls, and then he started laughing again. ‘You, you daft cunt. You’re fucking watching it, and you’re the Secretary of State for Health in Her Majesty’s government. What excuse do all the other sad fuckers have?’
He had three minutes to go. He pulled out his drink diary from his inside pocket. He had recorded nothing since the farewell party, so he tried to remember how much he had drunk at dinner, and scribbled it down. He started laughing again. ‘I’m on for a record here,’ he said. ‘I’m on for a fucking record.’ He looked down at the bottle of Johnnie Walker. ‘You and me, Johnnie, we are heading for the record books. Nice Professor Sturrock is going to be so pleased that I’ve filled this all in, and we’re going in the record books, Johnnie.’
At one minute to midnight, he gave up the wait. ‘What difference does one minute make, one tiny little minute made up of sixty silly little seconds?’ The black woman was going off shift at midnight and saying goodbye to her viewers, so he said goodbye to her, picked up the bottle, unscrewed the top, then held it under his nose and breathed in deeply. W8 later he went to bed, still wearing his suit, though he had at least removed his coat and shoes at the bedroom door.
‘Oh dear,’ said Professor Sturrock as he registered the w8.
‘I’m guessing at 8. There was about a quarter-bottle left and I just downed the lot.’
‘How did you feel?’
‘I didn’t feel anything,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to finish the bottle, and I did. And then I went to bed.’
‘Can you remember going upstairs?’
‘Not really.’
‘Can you remember what you were thinking?’
‘I was just trying to get up there. I think I brushed my teeth. When I woke up one of the photos on Sandie’s dresser was broken. I don’t know if it broke because I was bouncing around, or whether I smashed it. I just don’t remember.’
‘What was it of ?’
‘Our wedding day,’ he said, knowing as he said it Professor Sturrock, probably rightly, would assume he had smashed it in a drunken rage because Sandie wasn’t there, just as he had kicked his red box around downstairs, causing it to fly open and his papers to scatter around the hallway, because he felt his career was not going where he wanted it to.
‘I honestly don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember smashing the photo, and I don’t remember smashing up the box. They were there in the morning, in bits. I don’t remember.’
He couldn’t decide whether the look on Professor Sturrock’s face was disapproval, or sympathy.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked the psychiatrist.
‘I think it’s serious, Ralph, and getting worse. You know that. It’s why you called me first thing this morning, and why you kept calling Phyllis.’
‘What do we do?’
Professor Sturrock looked out of the window, clearly needing time to think.
‘Is there no way you could go to the Prime Minister, tell him you have a problem, and ask if it is possible to take leave of absence for a while? In the meantime I could fix you up with a proper course of treatment, possibly at a residential treatment centre which will put you in touch with Alcoholics Anonymous.’
Ralph looked down towards the floor, shaking his head.
‘It’s a bit hard to be anonymous when I’d be all over the front pages for weeks on end if I did that,’ he said.
‘There is that, I suppose.’
Ralph said there was not a single person in politics that he trusted sufficiently to tell he had a problem, not even his closest friend and ally, Daniel Melchett.
‘I took a big gamble on you, Martin. You know that, don’t you? I’m trusting you because you’re a psychiatrist. But politics is a very different world. I’m truthful with you. I couldn’t be truthful with anyone else about this.’
11
When Sturrock emerged from the Houses of Parliament, he switched his mobile phone back on, and within seconds it pinged with a text from Phyllis. ‘Please call Mrs Sturrock.’ He sighed, scrolled down to their number in his directory, then pressed the green button to call her.
‘Martin, is that you?’ his wife shouted when she answered.
‘Sorry about the noise,’ he said. ‘I’m in Whitehall.’
‘Are you going for the book?’
‘I’ve got the book. All done.’
‘How much was it?’
‘Can’t remember – £19.99 or something.’
‘Oh.’
‘Did Simon call?’
‘Oh yes, sorry. He did.’
‘And?’
‘Noon, Tuesday.’
‘Damn. Where is it?’
‘Yeovil crematorium.’
‘Yeovil! Shit.’ He had been hoping Simon might decide to have it nearer to his own home in Berkshire.
‘He said they had a cancellation,’ said Mrs Sturrock.
‘What, someone decided not to die?’
‘No, there was another one planned, but they couldn’t release the body.’
‘Well, it’s bloody inconvenient. That’s the whole day gone, might even need an overnight stay for Christ’s sake.’
‘Martin. Someone has died. Your relative.’
He recalled her earlier chastisement in the kitchen about his seeming lack of caring about Aunt Jessica. He knew she was right, but he didn’t like to be told by her what he should feel. Perhaps if she tried a bit harder to imagine how he felt most of the time, he would allow her more say over his emotions.
‘I know someone has died, and I know she was my relative, and I am very sorry. But I am dealing with the living and I have one or two people due to see me on Tuesday who need me rather more than Aunt Jessica does.’
There was a pause, and the silence was filled by the sounds of traffic, including an ambulance heading down Whitehall, siren wailing.
‘What a din!’ said Stella, somehow making him feel as though he were personally responsible for the sounds of busy central-London life intruding into the kitchen of their suburban Chiswick home.
‘By the way, Simon asked if your mother would be going to the funeral. I said I didn’t know.’
That brought him up short once more. He had not even thought of his mother, and whether she would want to attend her sister-in-law’s funeral. He hoped not. It would be hugely inconvenient to have to ferry Sheila Sturrock from her care home in Hertfordshire, all the way down to Yeovil, then back again, and doubtless it would fall on him to sort it out. He suspected that she would want to go. She had been very fond of Aunt Jessica – perhaps the only other woman she knew who had really understood what it was like to live with George Sturrock.
‘I’ll ask her when I go over at the weekend,’ he said.
‘What time are you home?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t be too late. I’ve got a couple of budget meetings back at the hospital, then I’ll tidy up. I’ll probably be back around half seven.’
‘What sandwich did Phyllis get you today?’
It was the kind of question that demented him. What did it matter what he had in his sandwich? It was of no interest to anyone but himself and Phyllis who had gone out to buy it, and the Pret A Manger
staff
who supplied it. As it so happened, the uneaten sandwich had been a BLT. But if he said it was cheese and tomato, it would make no difference to Stella’s life whatsoever, so why was she asking? It would make no difference to his. It was a detail of no importance to anyone.
He recalled David Temple’s view that his mother was obsessed with other people’s food because it was a way of interfering in other people’s business. For his wife, there was the added dimension of making him know that she was sitting there at home feeling that she was reduced to asking about sandwiches because that was the only kind of conversation he allowed her to have with him.
‘BLT,’ he said.
‘Nice?’ she asked.
‘Yes, fine.’
He had almost reached Trafalgar Square, but felt a sudden need to sit down. He thought about walking down to the Embankment to sit on one of the benches by the river, but even thinking about it drained him of a little more energy. Instead, he sat on a metallic chair outside a cafe. It was grey overhead and he could feel tiny spots of rain on his face. He felt overwhelmed by lethargy, as if it would be too much effort even to put his mobile back in his pocket. Ralph Hall had been the final dispiriting consultation of an utterly dispiriting day. He had never finished a week feeling quite as bad as this.