The Pink and the Grey Read online

  She laughed, the flavour of laugh that means I’m not laughing, and by the way neither are you. “Sat you upon the fundraising committee? I trust you are respectfully answered. Good evening, Dr Flowers.”

  I was summarily ejected into the ancient, grey, windowless corridors of the Admin dungeon, deep under Drybutter’s Court at the southernmost tip of the college. It was early on a dank Friday evening in the grim fag-end of October and I stood alone under oppressively low wattage, breathing and blinking and processing. Through the closed door behind me I could hear Amanda shuffling back behind her desk, the dragon returning to rest upon the pile of dwarven gold. There was a clatter and a curse and then the muffled bawling of Lulu began to snake around me, a virtuous siren warning me away from the rocks.

  There went my weekend, I thought. But first: booze. The idea relaxed me, releasing the tension from my shoulders. I rubbed my face and headed along the corridor.

  As I made my way out of the dungeon I crossed the path of a lanky young gentleman venturing towards the bone-strewn duelling ground from which I had just escaped. He was new in college — a fresher I supposed, given his unfashionably regional blond locks and saucer-eyes. He wore a laptop bag upon his back, perhaps as some variety of shield against Amanda’s attacks.

  “You might protect your front portions also,” I suggested with a smile and a vague wave.

  He gave me a bemused, lopsided grin that I believed would fare him well among the college cockerati. “I’m sorry?”

  “Posture, confidence, use your height advantage, watch your flanks and— may I ask your name?”

  “Beardsley. Jay Beardsley. I have an appointment with Professor Chatteris.”

  “Well, Mr Beardsley. Chin up. Set your jaw. Always keep her in your sights. And above all,” I leaned in with a hand on his shoulder, “never let her appoint you to a committee.”

  I went off in search of gin.

  two

  The Interloper

  “Conor, lad, I want you at the Union,” the editor had said on the phone. “Got a tip-off, looks legit. Could be a demonstration, or maybe a ruck, full-on handbags. The gits there get pissy about cameras but flash ’em your pearlies and a bit of yer old blarney and squeeze out a couple if it kicks off.” I’d called him a cock-er-ney arsehole under my breath for ruining my Friday night, and hung up. It was always either Geoff or his Evil Henchman Simon sending me out on one pointless little goose chase or another, and ruining the chance of a night of booze with the boys. I doubted they’d forget me, I was hardly a stranger, but it was the principle of the thing.

  After a couple of rounds of therapeutic swearing and a change of shirt, thirty minutes later I was heading north, dodging between headlights and bike lights and dead-eyed pedestrians leaning into the squally drizzle along Sidney Street. The warm and sultry lights of Sainsbury’s were beckoning students into a last-minute beer grab before the traditional Friday binge. I slipped quietly through the swarming toffs like a Henley pickpocket and nodded to the Big Issue seller, who gave me a sly wink. Good source, that man.

  I’d been to the Cambridge Union several times before — but only as a reporter. I’m not one of that bunch. It’s a debating society, where arseholes who want to be MPs argue with other arseholes who want to be MPs and get lectured by arseholes who became MPs. Occasionally there are arseholes who became comedians, and sometimes these aren’t the same as the arseholes who became MPs.

  I took a right after the short colonnade of shops just before the Round Church and zipped along the path to the Union Society building. It’s well secluded behind the church, a Victorian gothic red-brick beastie in a city of old, fancy, fiddly, stuffy stonework. It’s the type of building that belongs to a man in a rubber mask in seventies Doctor Who, and usually gets blown up by Tom Baker in episode forty-nine. It’s got a coffee shop for the tourists, of course — everywhere’s got a coffee shop for the tourists. If you stand still in the street long enough someone buys up your franchise and sticks a cafetière up your arse.

  But the Union’s a pretty anonymous place. There’s nothing outside the building to suggest two hundred years of history, or that its doors have calmly welcomed multicoloured arseholes of all politics and all beliefs, no matter how bat-shit insane. Everyone who was and wasn’t anyone has pontificated here, on expenses, with an agreeable lunch. I wrote an article for the Bugle on its history once. The editor spiked it. Can’t think why.

  I ran a hand through my hair to tidy myself up a little, then skipped up the steps into the entrance hall and planted my face in the office window, cranking up my most ingratiating smile. In a rare moment of actual effort the editor had cleared me with the society in advance and all I had to do was sign in and show my press card to an old fella I’d seen there before: haggard, charcoal pinstripe suit, military ribbon. He was a member of staff, possibly since the place was founded. He didn’t ask about a camera but peered at my bag through inch-thick lenses for long enough for me to notice, and for long enough for him to know I’d noticed.

  “It’s all standard equipment, your honour,” I said. “Notebook, camera, bolt cutters, lock picking kit, big brown envelope of tenners, teddy bear with one arm missing, semtex.”

  I liked to put that one in last. With my accent, guaranteed a reaction.

  He gave me a look and I mimed a gunshot with my hand. “Gotcha,” I said.

  “No photos, sir,” he said. “Standing order of the Society.”

  “What about the semtex?”

  He blinked twice, slowly, and smiled as if to a child. “That would be fine.”

  He buzzed me through the inner door into the main lobby and back in time about a century. Wood panelling, photos of dead people, a deep burgundy carpet, and a wide staircase up to a gallery. The smell of money, and booze, and… chips?

  Ahead, three sets of doors leading into the chamber and used for voting: Ayes, Noes, and Meh, I guessed. I could hear the debate already underway, and hoped I hadn’t missed whatever Geoff was expecting to happen.

  I bounced up the staircase three at a time to the gallery, since the chamber itself was out of bounds to lesser mortals like me. I snuck through the upstairs Aye door as smoothly as I could with my big bag of bits. Nobody else was up here — I had my pick of the shit seats. They ringed the chamber, two rows of bare wooden benches behind a balcony you wouldn’t dare lean against in case it was riddled with woodworm. The place must smell like a monkey sanctuary when it’s full, I thought.

  I didn’t want any doors behind me so I scooted along a bench for a good vantage point on the right-hand side. The floor creaked, the seat creaked. Great anti-surveillance system: I might as well have let off an almighty fart and be done with it.

  Once I’d settled I could take a good look at the stucky-ups below. The debating chamber, a century and a half old, had been designed to look like the House of Commons. Both had seen better days. Rows of benches, tired purple leather slowly cracking in a bitter attempt to escape the monotony, were lined either side of an empty space just like in the Commons. Photos of old debates, or so it looked, hung on the walls around the chamber. There were a couple of despatch boxes all miked up, and the speaker’s chair at the top of some steps like a throne. Except, as I wrote in the report Geoff spiked, it was a president not a speaker. Like I said, arseholes.

  Some poor little suited gobshite sitting by the despatch boxes looked like he was transcribing speeches and pretending desperately that his life had meaning. He was the secretary, I remembered. The sequence, if you sucked enough cock, was something like this: secretary, vice president, president, merchant banker, PR consultant, special adviser, MP, Baron Arsehole of Taint-in-the-Midden, supersized pension, and houses in forty-nine countries.

  The debate: This House Believes That Music Be The Food of Love. Jesus wept, I wanted to shake them all by their hundred quid haircuts and teach them a lesson about the real world. The first speaker was haw-hawing in favour, with one old Etonian hand on the despatch box and the other barel
y avoiding a Hitler salute, and looking like a twelve-year-old in his dad’s DJ trying not to piss his mum’s M&S knickers. A bunch of other no-chins were lined up to follow, for and against, on either side.

  It was all little boys and little girls playing talkie-talkies with their lives mapped out, from here to the Cabinet table in twenty-five years or less or your money back.

  What the hell was I doing here? I thought. A tip-off, said the editor. It might kick off. Kick off? This place wouldn’t kick off if you smacked the Queen in the nose and kneed her in the bejesus. But god help you if you breached the etiquette. Try to make a point of order when it should be a point of information and you’d be skinned and flailed and you’d never get into the Athenaeum or the Carlton or the MCC old bean, no matter how many fifties daddy threw.

  Anyway. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?

  Hypothetically I should have been writing notes for my piece: who was there, who said what, how the vote went, a quote or two about the result, as if any bugger cared. But I knew none of that would get printed. Geoff didn’t want a straight report, or even a proto-toff version of the parliamentary sketch, though god knows I’d have loved to write that. If nothing punchy happened, and it never did, I’d be lucky to get an inch on page ten. Barely enough space to name the penguins flapping away down there and which zoo they belonged to. Better off writing toss all in forty-two point and moving right the hell along.

  For half an hour I sat there, hands on balcony, chin on hands, bored out of my tiny mind and with the lazy, by-the-numbers rhetoric sending me to sleep. I did try to keep one ear on the debate hoping at least to hear a naughty word, as there’s nothing funnier than a posh twat trying to talk dirty. Blahdy terrible, Tarquin.

  No dice.

  My gaze began to wander along the rows of students, arranged like muppet rejects below me. Every few minutes a Statler or Waldorf junior would jump up with a turgid or ho-ho-humorous or otherwise inane interjection. Some sat texting or tweeting or facebooking or cockblocking or whatever it is students got up to. Most were content to sit quietly and listen to all the drivel, rhubarbing when whisked up by whichever penguin was on the quack. God, it was dull. At least with cricket there’s a chance someone might get a ball in the nads or in the face. I hoped that’s what Geoff’s tip-off was all about. A nutjob swinging a cricket bat, that’d be a story. Not the sterling-flavoured monotone that was currently sending me to sleep from the arse upwards.

  This was not why I became a journalist. This wasn’t journalism — this was babysitting. I became a journalist to investigate, to track down crooks with twirly moustaches and see them banged up. I’d learned my trade back home in Dublin and ended up here, all bright-eyed and cocky at the Cambridge Bugle. When Geoff hired me I asked him whether this place had any, you know, actual crime, and he bluffed and scoffed and sweet-talked me into it in his fat cockney barrow-boy way since it was a new paper and, basically, I had no money and he had a small carrot to dangle.

  I’d quickly learned that he wanted me for all the boring shite, all the grunt work. I trod the court beat and dutifully wrote pieces about cats up drainpipes and similar non-stories fuelled by puns every ten words. If I was a good little boy, and ate all my greens, and didn’t sulk, I might get the occasional obituary to flex my muscles. He and his deputy Simon nabbed the juicy stuff, whenever there was any, and the rest of the paper was packed in with topped-and-tailed agency copy and adverts. It’s amazing how many column inches you can fill every week with photos of grumpy pensioners pointing at cracked paving slabs. And of course they buy a copy for themselves, and a copy for their neighbour, and a copy for their bemused grandson in a more sensible city, and that’s how the paper was still going, to be honest.

  It must have been about nine o’clock, when even the speaker — sorry, the president — was unsuccessfully stifling a yawn, that someone new came through the upstairs Aye door and found a seat in the gallery by himself, on the left-hand side, about as far away from me as he could get. A few of the muppets in the chamber below looked up and saw him.

  He gave one a small wave.

  I perked up.

  Very slowly I sat back, hoping the seat wouldn’t creak, and started to unzip my camera bag, one z at a time. There was nobody around to stop me. I removed the camera as slowly and casually as I could and, keeping it well below the edge of the balcony out of sight, powered on and removed the lens cap. For once I remembered to check that everything was set to automatic, so I wouldn’t sit there swearing at the twatting thing and trying to make the photos not-entirely-black and not-entirely-white.

  Zoom, focus, snap, snap, snap, that’s all I’d need.

  If anything did, by some magical fairy chance, kick off, then I’d have photographic evidence and without any question a front-page lead. I knew I could remember enough of what might happen to write it up: it’d be mostly photo, anyway, and I could do interviews afterwards. And if the copy wasn’t long enough I’d upsize the headline and the by-line — especially the by-line. That’s what you get if the journalists sub and lay out the pages themselves, Geoff, you cheapskate. Of course, if the story was any good Geoff would change a few words and ruin a gag and put his own name at the top, and I’d be granted an Additional Reporting By in nought-point text and lump it or take a hike. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’d probably be about the twentieth.

  Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That was writing for the Bugle, in a nutshell. First day: here’s your desk, here’s your computer, let’s measure you up for your straitjacket. By now I’d long given up making a fuss about hijacked by-lines — Geoff and Simon had skins thick enough to snap needles. I just focused on clocking up the experience, pocketing the money, and cultivating the kind of simmering resentment that usually ends with the words “and then he turned the gun on himself”.

  As the current speaker droned on — he was making some half-arsed gag about music being the food of doves, or something, and how my sides were splitting — I kept my eyes fixed on the new guy. I decided to call him the interloper. Everyone has to have a name. He had short, dark hair, and wore a white shirt under a navy blazer. He looked white, but possibly a little stir-fried. Hard to tell from where I was sitting. Mid-twenties by the look of him, a few years or so younger than me. Too old to be an undergraduate, for sure. Maybe a postgrad? He was leaning forward, forearms resting on the balcony with hands clasped in front of him, looking intently at the toff whining away below. A little stressed, maybe? Or was I projecting?

  This had to be the guy, I thought. He was probably the one who’d tipped off Geoff. I realised I should’ve asked Geoff more about the caller, but then again he was the old hand — if it was important he should’ve told me.

  I decided the interloper had almost certainly seen me and figured out who I was, which was why he’d sat directly opposite me, and he was busy winding himself up to kick things off as promised. He had that shifty fake-relaxed look about him, the one you get when some lad notices you’ve been checking him out — that oh, what an interesting ceiling look with a nervous whistle. The same one a straight guy gets when his girlfriend asks him to hold her handbag.

  I had no idea what dastardly act the interloper had planned. If he’d told Geoff, Geoff hadn’t spilled the beans to me. He wasn’t likely to pitch a tent there and try to occupy the Union, not by himself, and no amount of pepper spray could make a decent, photogenic difference from up here. A banner, or a flour bombing? I couldn’t see any bag. That ruled out the cricket bat mayhem too. Was he going to piss all over them? My editor might still use a picture of that, give or take a censoring blob. He was restless, and shifting, which didn’t rule out a full bladder. I felt sure something was brewing.

  I took a chance and raised my camera to the balcony. Not high enough to be seen from below, but high enough to focus on the interloper. It was an SLR, digital of course, which meant I had to look through the viewfinder. I attempted a s
ubtle, slow slouch, no sudden movements to alert anyone in the chamber. Down, down, down, approach, squint, zoom, focus…

  The interloper was looking directly at me.

  OK, I thought. This was either very good, or very very bad. I froze.

  He aimed a nervous smile towards me, a dainty wave. More than a touch of the gays about him, if you knew the signs. No flamer, just what my grammy would call theatrical or a little light in the loafers with jazz hands and a fey little kick back. He’d pass in a crowd as long as you didn’t throw him a ball. A Waitrose balsamic kind of guy. His face definitely showed more than a hint of eastern promise in his past, maybe a scandalous interracial one-nighter a few gens back in the far east. It worked, I thought. I decided I probably would, under different circumstances, and not, you know, while being caught papping him in the upstairs gallery of the Union chamber.

  It was then that I noticed the silence.

  And, through the viewfinder, I saw the interloper point at the president’s chair.

  I sat up slowly and saw my zoomed-in lens overlapping the balcony edge. Shit. Below, a sea of amused muppet-toff faces gazed up at me. I could almost hear the show’s deep sax intro in my head. It’s time to play the music… or face it.

  The president was standing, holding the order paper, and staring at me. “Can I help?” he said.

  Both sides of the chamber erupted in laughter and clapped for the ritual ten seconds, just enough for a light nasal browning without descending into outright rimming.

  There was nothing I could do but brazen it out. I called out: “No, no, you guys carry on with… whatever it is you were doing.” Not so much of a laugh. “Mutual masturbation, wasn’t it?”

  Someone coughed. It was almost a laugh. On a good day, one-to-one, it might’ve been a cough-laugh or a laugh-cough or maybe as much as an honest snigger. But not this time.

  “I think, sir, you ought to leave,” said the president sternly. The secretary dutifully wrote something down, as if this were Nuremberg and they’d just passed sentence.