Dead Air

Eight. DENIAL

Maybe Jo’s right; I hate so many things. I’m a media person and there’s so much media stuff I just despise. From comics who make fun of their audience – ah, the masochism of paying good money to be insulted in public – to crap like Big Brother; hours and hours of boring, self-obsessed dimwits trying to be zany while performing pointless, stupid tasks that would be an insult to anyone with half a brain. Ali G, Dennis Pennis, Mrs Merton, Trigger Happy TV; shows that make me squirm with embarrassment and, sometimes, feel the beginnings of sympathy even for people who deserve nothing but my unalloyed hatred. God, I hated so much TV these days, and the terrifying thing was, it was this stuff that was popular, I who was out of step.

Numty TV, we called it on the show (part of our long-term and deeply insidious campaign to bring more Scottish words into day-to-day English usage). The only aspect of Numty TV I liked was the not-obviously-set-up entries on You’ve Been Framed, but part of me was ashamed of that, because I couldn’t help feeling there was an edge of cruelty watching this stuff; you see a clip begin with some bozo on rollerblades wobbling towards the camcorder at high speed, or perched precariously on a still shiny mountain bike and tearing down a rutted path between the trees, or almost anything to do with jet skis, high winds, people on a rope swing over a muddy puddle, or weddings or wedding reception dances, and you could feel yourself thinking, Oh goody; this’ll be a laugh. It was fun watching people making fools of themselves, but the question is, should it be?

Better to watch the truly despicable suffer, which was why I was here, I supposed.

Here was a Victorian warehouse in Clerkenwell converted into a TV studio and the place where Winsome Productions would be making their new, if much-delayed and re-scheduled, late-evening news magazine and analysis show Breaking News. Most of it would be live but the bit I’d be doing was being recorded. Sensibly. After I’d had my mad, bad idea for what to do here, I’d felt really deflated when I’d learned that the piece with the Holocaust denier would be taped rather than shown live; I’d wanted the buzz of it happening for real (but then I also started to feel relieved, thinking, Well, no point in doing it at all, then… before I caught myself, and thought, Oh yes there is; no chickening out).

Though I might still chicken out. There was a heavy metallic lump in the right pocket of my jacket reminding me that I had something to do here, something nobody was expecting, but I knew that when it came to the moment, I might still ignore it, play along, do what everybody expected me to do, and do nothing more than shoot my mouth off.

It was late afternoon. I felt over-briefed. Phil had gone through the obvious stuff with me, and so had yet another young, attractive, breathless, awfully well-spoken researcher.

Our presenter would be Cavan Lutton-James, a slim, darkly handsome and energetic guy with a quick, clipped but clear delivery and a natty interview style, which could veer from emollient to biting in the turn of a phrase. He was Irish, so I’d already stockpiled one or two remarks about Ireland ’s inglorious part in the great war against Fascism, to keep in reserve just in case any misguided ideas about balance caused him to start siding with the bad guy. A bad guy I hadn’t seen yet; they were keeping us apart.

The only person I’d met in the Green Room – apart from a couple of attractive but breathlessly awfully production assistants, at least one of whom was called Ravenna – was a young comedian called Preston Wynne, who came across as a bit of a fan boy and was supposed to record a topical, robust, cutting-edge, irreverent, yada-yada piece on something or other, after we’d done the big Holocaust denial discussion/confrontation. He was still working on his script while he sat in the Green Room, clattering quietly on his iBook, staring at a plate of gourmet sandwiches and drinking too much coffee. I almost felt like telling him to let the piece run longer than he’d been told, and even be prepared to pad a little, because the bit I was going to be on might not have quite the run-time the producer was expecting, but of course I didn’t.

I didn’t even have a drink in the Green Room. I really wanted one, but I kept myself sober because I wanted to be sharp and fully alert for what was going to happen.

Phil and I had spent a sober lunch in the corner of the Black Pig, another basic Soho boozer similar to the Bough. Phil was obviously worried I was going to make a mess of things, lose my rag, freeze, rant incoherently and start foaming at the mouth; whatever. He’d really wanted to come along with me but I’d told him weeks ago he wasn’t going to. Partly this was for the stated reason, that he wasn’t my dad and I didn’t need my hand held, but partly also it was because he might, a) guess just from my look or behaviour closer to the event that I was going to get up to something seriously off-piste and so give the game away, and b) catch a little less flak from our mutual bosses after I’d done what I intended to do. If I had the guts to actually do it.

‘Umm… what else. Oh, yeah, and obviously, the whole thing about the Second World War not happening, too; that’s obviously a brilliant line to take. It’s so basically ludicrous, yet it’s not intrinsically any more so than claiming the Holocaust didn’t happen.’

‘I know, Phil,’ I sighed. ‘We have kind of been through this.’

‘I know, I know, but you’ve got to get this rehearsed.’

‘No, I don’t. Actually rehearsed is the last thing I want it to be.’

‘Too risky. What if you make a mess of it?’

‘Look, I don’t make a mess of it in front of a million radio listeners five days a week, why should I make a mess of it in front of a late-night Channel Four audience of probably fewer people… when it’s taped, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Oh, yeah, and you won’t swear, will you?’

‘Phil, have I ever fucking sworn on air?’

Phil looked like a man with severe diarrhoea sitting in a Land Rover heading quickly down a bumpy jungle path towards extremely distant toilets. ‘Well, no,’ he admitted, ‘but I still don’t know how you do it. I mean, it doesn’t seem possible you’ve managed to avoid it all these years.’

‘Well, I have.’

‘What, even on Inverclyde Sound?’

‘StrathClyde Sound; the radio station where the creative’s typist missed the space bar rather than accidentally hit the exclamation mark key, and no, not even there. It’s because even though it might not sound like it, I do have a pretty accurate idea exactly what I’m going to say the instant before I say it, I never forget the context – am I in the pub or the studio? – and there’s just sufficient time for my on-board censor to step in and make the relevant – if not always perfectly elegant or sometimes even grammatical – amendments.’

‘Right. Well.’

‘Anyway, it’s late-night Channel Four, for Christ’s sake, not Blue Peter. If they can say “fuck” on Sex and the City I don’t see why I can’t. Christ, I heard a “cunt” on Larry Sanders once.’

Phil’s eyes went wide. ‘Oh, no, I really don’t think you should-’

‘Look, will you just calm down a bit?’ I told him. ‘I’m not going on intending to swear, okay?’

He said, ‘Okay,’ but he still looked worried.

Of course, what I wanted to add was, Dammit, man, I won’t have time to swear; it’ll probably all be over in about five seconds and I really wouldn’t worry your ugly big head about what I’m going to say.

Again, though, I didn’t.

I was plumbed in. I’d half expected it would be radio mikes (always attached to you with a warning not to visit the loo with them switched on, in case you want to cause the sound engineers, ooh, seconds of hilarity), but they were using hard wire instead. What appeared to be a clone of one of the attractive but awfully assistants slipped the wire beneath my jacket, under the button of my shirt just above the waistband of my trousers and then – once I’d worked it upwards – attached it between the top two buttons of my shirt. I was going for the relaxed, casual, open-necked look. Besides, they take your tie off you in the nick, along with your belt and laces.

The awfully assistant smiled as we were negotiating the cool black wire up between my chest and the fabric of the shirt, and I smiled back, but while we’d been doing this her bare arm had swung against my jacket and made the pocket clunk off the seat and I was secretly terrified she was going to see the sweat prickling up underneath my make-up and ask, ‘Hey, what’s that hard, heavy, metallic thing in your jacket pocket?’

Paranoia. The terrible thing about paranoia is you always have the sneaking suspicion that the moment it passes is when you’ll be at your most vulnerable.

They tested for sound and then the black microphone wire was taped to the arm of the plastic and chrome chair I was sitting in, below desk level and therefore out of sight for the cameras that would be trained on me. On the black-painted floor, the mike cable snaked away, almost invisible save for the lengths of silver gaffer tape securing it there.

I looked about the rest of the studio. Cavan would be in between us, a couple of metres away from me round the giant comma-shaped wooden desk; his seat was bigger and higher-backed than mine or the bad guy’s, which was another two metres past Cavan’s, round the curve. Lots of bright overhead lights kept the place very warm.

Somebody sat in the chair across the desk from mine and for a moment I wondered what was going on; it was one of the awfully assistants, not the scumbag Holocaust denier I was expecting. Then another assistant plonked herself in Cavan’s seat in the middle and I realised they were just sitting in for the real people while they got the cameras sorted out.

In front of Cavan’s position was a big camera with, on the front, the downward-angled hood and attached upward-facing monitor of an autocue; a little bearded guy looked almost lost behind the camera, minutely adjusting its position according to instructions through his headphones. There were two surprisingly small, unmanned cameras on heavy tripods, one for me and one for the bad guy, plus an umbilicalled handheld manned by a plump guy who at this point was muttering into his own head-mike as he crouched back and forth, rehearsing where he could go within the curve in front of the big desk without getting in shot from the other cameras.

Everybody was listening on their headphones and earpieces to the people in the production suite, and for a while it was actually very peaceful, sitting there in what was more or less silence, feeling pleasantly, politely ignored while everything else was sorted out. Somebody rolled a big monitor screen on a trolley to a position a couple of metres behind the cameras and turned it on; it showed a blue screen with a big white clock face on it and the programme ID. It sat, static, unchanging, in the midst of a semi-hush punctuated with murmurs.

I found myself thinking about Ceel. I remembered the feel of her body, the precise touch of her fingers, the satiny sensation of running my hand across her back, the deep, musky smell of her hair, the taste of her lips after a mouthful of champagne, the taste of her sweat from the hollow formed by her collar bone, and most of all the sound of her voice; that measured softness with the faint ghost of accent, a calmly sinuous stream of quiet amusement breaking into sudden rapids when she laughed.

The monitor flickered, the blue and white display replaced with a view of the assistant sitting in Cavan’s chair. Then the clock and ident display flicked on again.

I was missing her. It had been a month now since I’d seen her, and a long month at that. I supposed time seemed to stretch over the Xmas/New Year holidays for everybody, but I felt I’d been particularly busy, which made the interval seem longer. I’d spent an unhealthy amount of time over the holidays checking that there had been no crashes of Air France flights bound for or coming back from Martinique, or sudden unseasonal hurricanes or fresh volcanic eruptions in the Eastern Caribbean.

Things were falling apart around me and it felt like it was all because Ceel wasn’t here. There was no logic to this feeling whatsoever, and it wasn’t as though Ceel and I spent very much time in each other’s company when she was around – we saw each other for about half a day once a fortnight, so she shouldn’t really have felt like any great influence on my life – but nevertheless with her away I felt adrift and disconnected, my life tumbling chaotically.

There wasn’t even the promise, or at least the possibility, that we might meet up in a day or two, steadying me from a distance.

Coping with my break-up with Jo, with the ramifications of that touching Ed and Craig, with everything that had happened at the New Year party, with this continuing campaign of damage and threat some bastard was mounting against me – not to mention the chilly contemplation of what I was thinking of doing here – left me feeling dangerously exposed and at risk.

It was like trying to control a skid on a bike on a rainy street; that same feeling of cold, gut-clenching panic while wrestling desperately with something powerful but suddenly wild and out of control. I’d had a few skids like that in my courier days. I’d always managed to stay upright and I was proud of that, but I’d never kidded myself that on each occasion it had been anything other than luck, mostly, that had kept me out of the gutter or from under the wheels of a bus. At least those incidents were over in seconds; this was going on for weeks, months. Everything I might have hung onto for support seemed compromised. I needed Ceel. I needed to access her calmness, secure myself to that perverse rationality of hers.

I looked at the seat straight across from me, where the bad guy would be sitting. I glanced at my watch. I hated the way they kept you hanging around for TV.

I just wasn’t cut out for this medium. Paul, my agent, despaired of me because I’d been offered TV stuff in the past plenty of times but the proposals always read like shit and I’d turned them down. They all seemed gimmicky, strained and overly elaborated, but that was almost not the point. On radio, you just go in and do it. You can talk about stuff in the pub or the office beforehand, effectively rehearsing bits, and you can script little exchanges and sketches, and there’re always trailers and pre-recorded stuff to work painstakingly over until it’s note perfect… but most of it, the best of it, I think, is just stuff that happens, words that come out of your mouth almost as you think (allowing for the on-board censor, which I was not bullshitting Phil about).

On radio, that fresh stuff is the norm. On TV it’s very much the exception, and most of it’s recorded, re-heated. So you sit there and make some really funny or cutting point and then discover there was a glitch on a camera feed, or somebody backed into a bit of the set and knocked it over, and they have to start again, and you have to either try to say something about the same thing, which is totally different but just as witty, or say the same again and pretend it’s spontaneous. I hated that shit. Come to think of it, some of that had been the gist of Phil’s little laid-back rant in the Capital Live! canteen a month or so earlier. I seemed to have appropriated it. Oh well, that wouldn’t be the first time.

My mouth was dry. There was a very small plastic cup of still water in front of me, which I drained. I looked around, holding it out, and one of the awfully assistants came and topped it up with Evian. I wanted to sink the lot right there, but I put it back on the desk. I suspected they’d take it away before we started recording.

‘Ken?’ a very smooth Irish voice said from behind me. ‘Nice to – ah, now, no; don’t you get up. Cavan. Good to meet you.’

I couldn’t have got up anyway, not with the mike wire securing me to the chair. I shook hands from a seated position. ‘Cavan; hi.’ I smoothed down the flap over my right jacket pocket, making sure he couldn’t see into it.

Cavan perched one fawn, Armani-clad buttock on the desk between my seat and his. He looked tanned underneath the make-up and there was a hint of shadow where his beard would have been that probably no amount of shaving would remove. His blue eyes were deep set, brows dark and full and shaped. A sharp ledge of black hair sat over his forehead. ‘It’s very good of you to come in.’

‘My pleasure, Cavan.’ A translucent wire coiled up from inside the rear collar of his jacket and ended in a discreet flesh-coloured earphone in his right ear. Where his soft beige jacket fell open against his hip, I could see the radio transmitter clipped to his belt. No hard-wiring for Cavan.

‘You’ve been booked in for a while, Ken, is that right?’

‘For what has on occasion felt like a significant part of my life, Cavan, yes.’

He laughed soundlessly. ‘Yes, well, sorry about that.’ He sighed and looked off into the shadows. ‘We’ve all been kept hanging around while Winsome have been getting themselves sorted out.’

‘I’m sure it’s been a lot worse for you than it was for me.’

‘Ah, yes. It’s been a frustrating old time to have a current affairs show waiting in the wings while all this history’s been happening, but hopefully we’ll be making up for – ah. Excuse me, will you?’

‘Sure.’

Lawson Brierley. That was the name of the man who walked out of the darkness, blinking in the light. My age. Green cords, fogey jacket, yellow waistcoat, farm manager’s shirt and a cravat. I almost smiled. Tall, medium-heavy build, verging on beefy; hair like grey sand. Not a bad-looking face in a bland sort of way, except his nose was a little bulbous and he had the peering, scrunched look of a vain man on a date trying to do without his glasses. Ex-Federation of Conservative Students (one of the Hang Nelson Mandela brigade; later thrown out for being too right-wing), ex-National Front (quit when they moved too far to the left), and ex a few other extreme-right groups and parties. Claimed to be a libertarian racist now. I knew one or two people who’d come to libertarianism from the left, and people like Lawson Brierley had them spitting blood.

Monetarist fundamentalist might be a more accurate description of his views, with the racist bit never very far away. According to Lawson, evolution was the ultimate free market in which the white races were proving their innate superiority through money, science and arms, threatened only by the perfidious guile of the Jews and the hordes of dark and dirty Untermenschen breeding like flies thanks to the misguided beneficence of the West.

We’d got all this off the man’s own website; he ran – he basically was – something called the Freedom Research Institute.

Lawson genuinely didn’t approve of democracy. He believed in getting rid of the state, and – in reply to the point that doing so would leave companies, corporations, multi-nationals (or whatever you would call multi-nationals when there were no more nations) in complete control of the world – he would have said, Yes, so? These corporations would be owned by shareholders, and money was the fairest way to exercise power, because as a rule stupid people would have less of it, and therefore less influence, than more intelligent people, and it was the more intelligent and successful people you wanted controlling things, not the great unwashed.

I’d decided my considered reply to all this would have been something on the lines of, Fuck the fucking shareholders, you ghastly fascist cunt.

I watched him sit down and get miked up. He was being wired in, taped to the seat like I’d been. Good. I couldn’t make out what he was saying to the production assistant and the sound engineer as they helped him get settled in. He didn’t look over at me. Cavan had spoken a few words to him and then nodded and gone to sit in his own big seat in the middle, getting its position just so, clearing his throat a few times, patting his tie down and running a hand over the air above his hair.

My heart was beating hard, now. Somebody came to take away the little cup of water, but I had them wait a moment while I drained it, my hand trembling. My bladder seemed to think I needed to pee but I knew I didn’t really. It felt like I was listing to the right with the weight in my jacket pocket. To the right; how very, very inappropriate, I thought.

The monitor behind the cameras flicked to the head-on waist-up shot of Cavan coming from the big camera with the autocue.

The floor manager announced we were doing a taped rehearsal of the intro. Cavan cleared his throat a few more times.

‘Okay; quiet in the studio,’ the floor manager said, then, ‘Turning over.’ She did the ‘Five, four, three…’ thing, with the two and the one shown only on her fingers.

Cavan took a breath and said, ‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Free Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called… Sorry.’

‘No problem,’ the floor manager said. She was a tall gangly girl with close-cut brown hair; she wore big headphones and held a clipboard and a stopwatch. She listened to her phones again. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You all right, Cavan?’

Cavan was squinting towards the camera ahead of him, shading his eyes from the overhead lights. ‘Ah… Could you just move the autocue up a tiny little bit?’ he asked.

The man with the big camera adjusted it fractionally.

Was I really a doyen? I wondered. That meant ‘old’, didn’t it? More ‘senior’ rather than ‘ancient’, if I recalled the dictionary definition correctly, but still. I was sweating badly now. They’d probably notice and have to stop and bring one of the make-up girls in to touch up my face. I felt a pain in my guts and wondered if I was giving myself an ulcer.

Cavan nodded. ‘Fine now.’ He cleared his throat again.

‘Okay,’ said the floor manager. ‘Everybody okay?’ She looked around at us. Everybody seemed to be okay. I wasn’t going to say anything about sweating. Lawson Brierley sat, blinking, looking from Cavan to the monitor, still avoiding my gaze. The little bearded guy with the big camera adjusted it back to where it had been before, but Cavan didn’t notice. ‘We’re going again, quiet in the studio. Turning over,’ said the floor manager. ‘And: Five, four, three…’

‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Freedom Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called Shock Jocks and – as he’s described himself – unrepentant post-lefty.’ Cavan raised his eyebrows for effect. ‘First, though, this report by Mara Engless, on the undeniable existence of deniers.’

I looked over to Lawson Brierley. He was smiling at Cavan.

‘Good,’ the floor manager said, nodding. ‘Good. Perfect, Cavan.’ (Cavan nodded gravely.) ‘Okay, we’re going for-’

‘How long’s the video bit?’ Cavan asked.

The floor manager looked away for a moment, then said, ‘Three twenty, Cavan.’

‘Right, right. And we’re just going straight into the interviews, the ah, discussion bit, now, right?’

‘That’s right, Cavan.’

‘Fine. Fine.’ Cavan cleared his throat a few more times. I found myself wanting to clear my own throat, too, as though in sympathy.

‘Everybody ready to go?’

It looked like we were all ready to go.

‘Okay. Quiet in the studio.’

I put my hand in my pocket.

‘Turning over.’

In my pocket, the plastic coating the metal felt cold and slick in my right hand.

‘And: Five, four, three…’

I leaned forward slightly, to hide my hand coming out of my pocket.

Two.

My other hand was at my belly, holding, steadying.

One.

Click.

Cavan took a breath and turned to me. ‘Ken Nott, if I can turn to you first. You’re on record as-’

I’d snipped the mike cable with the pliers.

I had tried to think all this through, weeks and weeks earlier, and I’d guessed they might wire us up; that was why I’d brought the pliers in my jacket pocket.

But that wasn’t the clever bit.

I let the pliers fall as I kicked the seat back and jumped up on the big desk. I’d have settled for three seats in an arc, but the desk was better; I’d reckoned as long as I didn’t take too long getting myself up there it would provide a highway. So far, so good; seat falling backwards out of the way and a clean leap up onto the wooden surface.

Though that wasn’t the clever bit either.

Cavan had time to shut his mouth and jerk back. Lawson Brierley’s eyes were going wide. I ran at him across the desk. I’d worn a pair of black trainers, for purchase, so I wouldn’t slip, just for this.

That, too, was not the clever bit.

Lawson had his hands on the desk edge, tensing to push himself backwards. Cavan was falling off his seat as I passed him. From the corner of my other eye I thought I saw the big camera and the guy with the handheld both tracking me. From the shadows behind Cavan, somebody threw themself forward and grabbed at my feet, but missed. I threw myself down, too, my left hand out to grab Brierley’s cravat if I could, my right hand coming back in a fist.

Lawson was moving backwards but he hadn’t started pushing away in time, plus the mike wire would be slowing him down. I hit the desk on my belly and slid; my left hand missed his cravat, catching him by the padding in the left shoulder of his hacking jacket instead, but my right fist smacked satisfactorily – and painfully, for my fingers – into his left cheek, just below the eye.

My momentum, and his push, carried us both back over his seat, falling in a flailing tangle to the floor behind, where I landed another couple of lighter blows and he managed to thump me once on the side of the ribs and once on the back of the head with weak, painless punches before we were pulled apart by security guards and production people.

That, obviously, wasn’t the clever bit either.

Brierley was ushered away shouting about communist violence and intimidation, surrounded by headphoned staff, while I was held, the backs of my thighs against the desk, by two uniformed security guards. I was smiling at Lawson, and not struggling at all. I was highly gratified to see that Lawson already looked like he was developing what we used to call, back where I came from, a keeker; a nice black eye. A door closed softly in the darkness and Brierley’s shouts were silenced.

‘It’s okay, guys,’ I told the security guards. ‘Promise I won’t run after him.’

They kept holding me, but their grip might have relaxed a little. I looked around. Cavan seemed to have disappeared as well. I grinned at each of the two security guards as the floor manager came over. She looked professional and unruffled. ‘Ken; Mr Nott? Would you like to go back to the Green Room?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Though I’ll want my pliers back, or a receipt.’ I smiled. ‘I’ll pay for a new mike cable.’

Still not the clever bit.

‘Ken!’ Cavan came into the Green Room. The two guards were in there with me, and two of the awfullies. I was watching News 24 on the room’s TV and relaxing with a Scotch and soda. Not something I’d normally countenance, but, hey, it was only a blend, and besides, I felt a certain refreshing desire to get drunk quickly.

‘Cavan!’ I said.

He looked a little flushed. There was a smile on his face that looked unhappy to be there. ‘Well, that was a bit of a surprise there, Ken. What was that all about?’

‘What was what?’ I asked.

Cavan sat on the edge of the table with all the sandwiches and drink. ‘Bit of a rush to the head there, Ken?’

‘Cavan,’ I said. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

The door opened again and the exec producer came in; a small, bald, harassed, sullen-looking guy I’d met briefly earlier whose name I’d forgotten the instant I’d been told it. ‘Ken,’ he said throatily, ‘Ken; what, what, what was that…? I mean we just can’t allow, I mean, that was just, that was really just, I mean, what, what on earth-?’

‘Cavan, old son,’ I said.

‘… I mean, I mean…’

‘What?’

‘… You can’t, just can’t…’

‘Are you calling the police?’

‘… no respect, professionalism…’

‘Ah, the police?’

‘… ashamed of yourself, quite, I mean, I don’t…’

‘Yes; are you calling the police?’

‘… in my entire career…’

‘Eh? Ah, now…’

‘… disgrace, just a disgrace…’

‘Have you called the police? Do you intend to call the police?’

‘… what you could be thinking of…’

‘I’ve no idea, Ken. Your man here might know. Mike; we calling the police?’

‘What? I… Ah… I… I don’t know? Should we?’

Mike looked at Cavan, who shrugged. He looked at me.

‘Guys,’ I laughed. ‘I can’t tell you!’ I returned my attention to the telly and said, ‘I think you should find out whether the feds are to be involved. Because, otherwise, I’m about to leave.’

‘Ah… leave?’ said Mike the exec producer.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I said, sipping my drink and watching shots of Camp X-Ray.

‘But, well… we thought we could, maybe, still do the discussion. I mean, if you would agree…’

Cavan crossed his arms and appeared innocently bemused.

I was looking at the two of them, shaking my head. ‘Listen, guys, I have no fucking intention of even beginning to take that nasty little right-wing shithead’s diseased ideas seriously, to debate them, for fuck’s sake.’ I looked back at the TV. ‘Never did,’ I muttered. I looked back at the producer. He was standing with his mouth open. I frowned. ‘You did get it all on tape, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. Of course we did.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Very good.’ I watched the TV a moment longer. ‘So,’ I said to him, when he still hadn’t gone, ‘if you could just find out if the boys in blue are going to be involved or not. Okay? Thanks.’ I nodded at the door and then went back to watching the guys in orange shuffling between the cages in Guantanamo.

He shook his head at me, and left. I smiled at the two attractive awfullies, who grinned back nervously.

Cavan chuckled and got up to leave. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if I’m not mistaken, Ken, you’ve totally fucked us.’ He opened the door. ‘But it was elegantly done.’ He nodded as he left. ‘Look after yourself.’

I just smiled at him.

Actually, at that point I’d quite happily have settled for whacking a fascist and getting away with it, but – in theory, according to the mad, bad plan at least – what had to happen next was that somebody did take the matter further, and the cops did become involved, and I was formally charged with assault.

Because then – despite all the witnesses, despite the cameras and the videotape and the thing being replayable in slow motion from two or three different angles, and certainly despite what I hoped would develop into a splendid black eye for Lawson Brierley – I had every intention, in front of the police, in front of the lawyers, in front of a judge and in front of a jury if it came to that, of denying it had ever happened.

And that was the fucking clever bit.