Serious Sweet (17 page)

AS MEG SLOPED
down the hill to her bus stop, she was pursued – as happened now and then – by the stain, the taste, of that other Meg, Maggie, Margaret. Thatcher.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – out, out, out.

You'd hear people yelling it all the time and agree, but all the same – it was hard not to take it personally as well.

And the last person I'd want to be associated with – apart from me – was her.

Laura said once, ‘Well, at least she did something. This lot – they don't do anything. None of them. They just talk. She did something. And she was a woman.'

And I didn't say back, ‘Well, Countess Báthory did something – she did something with virgins' blood and murder and definitely, yes, that's doing something. And that Roman woman who poisoned Claudius and a bunch of other people … I should make a list of women who were unpleasant so I could quote from it properly … and Lucrezia Borgia who did something, a shitload of things, I'd guess, but I can't recall … I have a friend who takes an interest in the Borgias, so I read up on them a bit … I have a memory that's shot to hell … I should know, I shot it – that much I do remember … But I can learn. I can learn about all of those women in the concentration camps, the guards – you see them in photos, in those uniforms looking like … it's like a terrible joke … women in schoolgirl skirts who torture people … These are women who did things. Doing things doesn't make you wonderful. Doing – that's not enough, is it? I do things. We all do things. It's which things – what things we do … And being a woman – that's not a guarantee that you'll be lovely. Trust me, I have a vagina and know. And I am not glad that I have it – the thing does not empower me. I do not stare at it in a hand mirror and wish it well and thank it for granting me a lifetime of pleasant experience … But yes, she was a woman and she did things. Yes. For sure. Thanks for sharing. Bloody marvellous. Bless you sideways and back and forth.'

Yes, I didn't say that.

There's never any point in bothering to say that. If you've got an idea that it might be necessary as something to say, then you already know that actually saying it will not be welcomed or understood and you keep shtum.

If you're sober, you keep yourself shut up. Pissed … Well, if you're pissed, then all bets are off.

The trouble was that Margaret Thatcher got her drunk.

Another lie.

I got me drunk.

Meg had imagined that she would die before old Maggie – time was against the former prime minister, but serious drinking, industrial-scale drinking, had been giving Meg the push towards an early finish line that she'd hoped for. She had, after all, wanted to leave – every other option having apparently been knackered.

But then Baroness Margaret Hilda had slipped out via the Ritz and gone before – the heart people said she didn't have stopped beating.

Her soul was lifted free – if people have souls. I think of it catching in the Green Park branches and resting there like a bird, being unburdened suddenly, turning about and pausing to see and see and see.

And Meg – sober Meg – at that point sober-for-two-years-alreday Meg, had stayed alive, moved past her namesake and gone on. Or something like that.

At the time of Maggie's death, Meg was not doing many AA meetings – not doing any meetings, in fact – she was not attending
and not exactly accepting suggestions and advice offered by people who were, or any other people she might encounter.

She no longer really encountered people.

She was discontented. She had also just abandoned the self-helpless group that had forced her to sit in a circle with Molly once a week and tried to pat her arm.

A bloody therapeutic sewing circle that was supposed to make me feel like a human being, a convincing woman.

Which I am not. Even a gynaecologist doesn't find me quite convincing – ‘Here's some pain, oh and by the way, your life as a reproductive human being is now over. You'll have noticed the little changes – I'm telling you about the Big One. The last one before the Really Big One.'

Although I should leave that now – I should let that be. This morning has gone. And that final morning with Maggie has gone – with no harm to her, only to me.

Meg – still sober, but discontented Meg – had found out the news about Thatcher from the radio and had wanted to be happy.

But you can't be happy that a wandery old lady has died.

She'd played Elvis Costello and sung along and still not managed to be glad.

It had done me no good to outlast her. Or to see the way the world was, beyond her active life, beyond her damage. The place had been steered along unkindly.

Not many pensioners, frail and needful, get to die in a suite at the Ritz, all cosy and dignified.

How many pensioners get to die while being cosy and dignified and never mind the Ritz 
…
?

I tried to be outraged about that, but it didn't make me angry. I wished it would.

I wasn't sad and wasn't happy and wasn't anything – only tired.

The final satisfaction that nature had been meant to provide, the assassination by wear and tear and time and real things – all the stuff politicians liked to ignore – the death that Meg had shouted for in bars and bars and studies and clubs and arguments
and bars and bars, in a significant number of bars … here it was. But the happiness she'd expected to acquire as a result was unavailable.

And next there had been a day and then another and then longer of feeling filthy, somehow, of Meg having this ugliness under her skin and a restless inclination towards darkness.

So she had gone to the funeral, Margaret Hilda's funeral. It was on a Wednesday.

Crazy idea.

And it let her get me in the end.

Meg had anticipated crowds and set out far too early, emerging from Westminster Underground into drizzle and a chill, the pavements mainly empty. Policemen wandered the quiet and quarantined roads, sipping plastic cups of tea, swinging bags of Mars bars and soft drinks. Barriers were in place for the not-there-yet crowd and a camera boom and its tower were set ready at the corner of Whitehall so that a swooping shot could follow the hearse as it passed by.

And there were so many flags, straggling limply at half mast.

The press assembled a nest for themselves: aluminium ladders and long lenses, the ache for an exclusive view – nothing to snap at yet, beyond a trickle of grey-haired tailcoat-wearers heading up from the Tube, along with young men in black suits and white shirts, looking like cut-price schoolboys with carefully shiny shoes.

Coaches began to swing past, filled with apparently dozing men in dress uniform. And there were minibuses – bizarre minibuses, windows filled with hats and fascinators, sparky make-up, gentlemen's well-smoothed hair and brushed lapels, officers' uniforms.

As if it was a wedding they were off to. A society occasion in unfortunate weather.

Which it was, naturally – no more and no less and no more than that.

Occasional soldiers walked from here to there, polished to an unnatural tension. Meg had been surprised by how foolish their thick-soled boots looked – something glam rock about them – and how broad and short the trousers. They were dressed like
armed clowns in aggressive hats. This was apparently how Whitehall and the forces displayed official grief – these were its various manners of mourning, as prescribed. And, here and there, a knot of civilians gathered in sensible outdoor greens and tweeds. There was chatter, vehement chatter, the kind of pre-emptive outrage Meg had to suppose was often heard in the drawing-room conversations of those to whom Thatcher was dear. It was the tone of a successful headline: all risen hackles and crazy swings between self-importance and self-loathing, with more loathing for everyone else.

Curious tourists leaned on the barriers and took pictures while a German film crew cruised back and forth, attempting to find anybody who would willingly offer comment to a German.

And there was a scatter of those who loved their country – their idea of their country – in more personal types of fancy dress: the Union Jack coats and handmade badges, the top hats with the photos attached. They straggled around and paced, anticipating. The nation was set out in bitter, brittle pieces – in sparse and crazy pieces.

It was like staring at the essence of all I would rather not be.

It made me sad.

And the cameraman climbed his tower and started to practise lazy dips with the camera boom. And the drizzle drizzled. And the police in the road – being all there was to watch – acted out their cold for everyone's entertainment: taking little dancing steps, clapping their gloved hands together, puffing out their cheeks.

A man in the crowd who had come all the way from Manchester that morning, announced the fact: ‘I was at Churchill's funeral, too.' Meg listened while he told her this, uninvited, in the same way he had told a number of other people and would presumably tell more. But not the Germans.

Meg was shivering by the time the gun carriage rattled by, heading for the transfer point – bright metal and black gloss. She turned away from it, turned her back, because that seemed appropriate – this helpless spin of 180 degrees about which nobody could surely care.

And then she wound herself back round again to wait for the actual body of a human being, now deceased, defeated by the end of all power, and soon to be limousined along, much as it might have been in life.

Here would be the satisfaction Meg had wished for.

But there was no satisfaction. Naturally.

The hearse lashed around the bend from Parliament Square, as if in flight from a disreputable public.

Someone threw flowers – and again – as what had been the Baroness pelted past. The blooms landed very short and hit the tarmac: they were something with a dingy green flower, a hellebore. They must have been from a garden and perhaps had some personal significance. The hellebore is poisonous. The flowers are meant to drive out discord and bring in tranquillity.

It all has a double meaning now – what any politician says … Where there is hatred, let me sow love …

Whatever they tell you, exactly reverse it and you'll be right.
Meg – having shown disrespect to the gun carriage – had found herself absurdly and unpleasantly flanked by police. They oozed through the crowd towards her and then stuck – two coppers in tall helmets.

As if I would do what? Leap over the barrier and somersault on to the bonnet of the hearse?

Why be afraid of me?

I didn't matter.

Nothing I did mattered.

And nor did their intervention matter.

Meg discovered a third uniform standing close behind her when she turned her back, this time against the limousine. The uniform belonged to a policewoman who wore a name badge which said she was called Debbie. Debbie shouted, ‘Bless her.' She aimed this past Meg's ear with educative fervour as the illustrious corpse shot by in its glossy transportation – propelled at unstately pace.

And that was it.

No more.

There was only cold after, deep cold.

The crowd frittered itself away.

There was a type of shock that nothing was different, even now – that it never would be. The grey and the chill would stay grey and chill.

There was a great disappointment, closing in.

You find yourself disgusting, because you often do and because this time you have wished an old woman to death. Or at least wished that you could.

You are staring at others and seeing they are inexplicable …

You see and see and see and you can't stop …

You have come to watch and be a friend of death, to love it – and, now that you're here, you can feel it take an interest. You feel its scrutiny, digging in sharp – like the attention of the worst kind of police.

Your current police have melted back from you and gone, they are swinging along the pavement somewhere – you can't see them.

Maggie's funeral – it pushes you completely away …

You take yourself away.

You walk through the damp air and find the nearest pub and you ask the lady who's working the optics to set up a double whisky and then another, because you have fallen behind. You ask very politely but inside you are fierce.

You drink among people you cannot agree with – faithful mourners, coddling wine glasses in chilled hands – and yet you don't mind this at all.

Your aim is to not mind anything any more.

You wish to go away.

In every sense, you wish to go far away and have no intention of ever coming back.

Meg had got and then stayed drunk.

It had taken her more than a year to retrieve herself.

Blinds drawn and a minicab to fetch the bottles when you get too scared to send yourself outside, too ashamed in the off-licence. Selling the telly. Selling all manner of odds and ends that your parents kept and cared for and left you so that you could love them – not love death – so you could remember earlier, gentle days.

They left you their house, or you'd have wound up homeless. And even then, you nearly drank the place.

Only a whisker away from the full drop – and no net there to catch you. There's no such thing as a net to catch you, not any more.

And you don't deserve one.

Silly cow, you are.

There's no such thing as anything.

Silly cow, she was, old Maggie.