Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (4 page)

'Indeed. You really nailed the experience there; unsurprising, I suppose, in one so informed.'

'Fuck you.'

'But I did catch the odd glimpse of life in the West on those sixteen-inch, black-and-white East German televisions. Believe me, you've never really seen
Dynasty
until you've seen it dubbed into Polish with Czech subtitles. Came as quite a shock to hear Linda Evans didn't actually sound like a shot-putter in drag.'

'Don't knock the big hair and shoulderpads. I can get quite fetishistic about those if I let my mind wander. Probably because that's what the women I fancied were wearing when I had no chance of anything more than a Christmas kiss from an elderly auntie.'

'So is that what the good lady doctor togs up in for a special treat on your birthday?'

'Don't go there.'

'Mister P, I do believe you're blushing. I can picture it now. The intermingling erotic musk of Boots hairspray and Poison perfume, A Flock of Seagulls on the stereo--'

Parlabane slapped the dashboard.

'Ah, see you were doing well there, but you blew it with that Flock of Seagulls remark.'

'How so?'

21

'You picked it up from Nineties American movies, proving you really did spend the decade in that dingy hotel room. Every fucking American movie that harks back to the Eighties goes on about A Flock of fucking Seagulls.'

'To give them their Sunday name.'

'It's become a self-reinforcing myth. Anyone who remembers the Eighties

- and by that I mean anyone who didn't spend it cooped up in a Berlin B&B

stroking his telescopic sight - would know that A Flock of fucking Seagulls blipped onto the radar screens for about a fortnight, mainly because of that stupid cunt's ridiculous hairdo, then failed to trouble the chart compilers ever again. But any time a Yank scriptwriter needs a quick Eighties cultural reference, bang, there it is, remembered from the last movie
he
saw that mentioned the fucking Eighties, and thus the myth lingers on.'

'And do you genuinely feel this strongly about it, Mr P, or were you simply trying to get me away from speculating further about the more embarrassing aspects of your conjugal rites. Because I haven't forgotten.'

'Keep your eyes on the driving, Tim. You've already got us off-track in our conversation. What I meant was, sometimes I miss the ideological simplicity of back then. No grey areas, no middle ground, just them and us, the good guys versus the bad guys, on every issue. East versus West, left versus right, rich versus poor, the Tories versus the miners, the Tories versus CND, the Tories versus homosexuals, the Tories versus Bob Geldof. I mean, you really knew who to hate in those days. Now it's too muddled, so I just hate everybody in case I miss anyone out.'

'Maybe it's the ideological simplicity of yourself you miss.'

'You having a go?'

'Would I? No, seriously, I've been there too. The world, politics, conflicts. . . it didn't all become more complicated, it was always that way, but when you're younger you don't know enough to appreciate that. The more you learn, the more you understand, the greyer the tones get. You're not missing the Eighties, Jack, you're missing your youth, and the comforting certainties of ignorance.'

'Maybe, maybe. But I can't refrain from observing how that sounds pretty ironic coming from a Cold War veteran.'

'Not ironic at all, if you think it through. In fact, I believe you've just reinforced my point. The Cold War might have seemed a very black-and-white ideological conflict to you, and clearly in many ways it was, but remember that my field of operations was entirely in the grey area.'

'Turning agents and all that?'

'And all that, yes. An appreciation of just how flexible this apparently rigid divide really was was one of the most crucial means of surviving it.'

22

'So is that how agents ended up getting tapped by the other side? Too long sleeping with the enemy, looking at it their way, losing sight of those comforting certainties.'

'Well, only for those who forgot
the
most crucial rule of survival: don't bring politics to work. Your job is to play the Us versus Them game. If you start thinking too much about what makes them them and us us, you're either going to be ripe for turning or a mindless zealot, and neither make the most effective agents. The former lose their purpose and the latter their judgement. You couldn't afford to be an extremist in my line of work.'

'Must have made for an interesting perspective upon the people you ultimately worked for at that time.'

'I ultimately worked for you, being the ordinary Brit, something else it paid never to lose sight of. It didn't matter what I thought of Thatcher or Reagan any more than it mattered what I thought of Carter or Callaghan. Just because you disagreed with the Poll Tax and detested Margaret Thatcher--'

'Detested is a little inappropriate,' Parlabane said. 'Maybe closer to say I spent the entire Eighties wishing I was pissing on her rotting corpse.'

'Which, to underline my point, still didn't make the KGB nice people.'

'Agreed, but my point was that there were extremists at the top of the command chain. Margaret Thatcher being the topical example. My understanding of politics may have been less sophisticated back then, but even looking through the retrospectoscope doesn't change my perception of someone who really did render the political world black and white. She cultivated division as a matter of policy, talking about whether you were "one of us" or "the enemy within".'

'And you miss that, that's where we came in, yes?'

'Yes. No. I mean. . . Fuck, I don't know. Maybe I'm starting to feel my age, but I wish I was still as sure of what I believed today as I was back then; or even just as sure of what I hated. Believe me, Tim, it's tough being a bleedingheart liberal in a world full of bampots.'

'Or as Bertrand Russell had it, "The problem with the world is that the fanatics are so sure of themselves while the wiser people so full of doubts."'

'Elegantly put and impressively remembered. See, that's what I love about your generation. You know these things chapter and verse and can pluck them from your skull on cue. What can we quote? Song lyrics, sitcom gags and philosophical soliloquies that sound pseudo-Shakespearean until you remember they were spoken by Jean-Luc Picard.'

'My generation. Cheeky little twerp. But to my wisdom and knowledge I'll add good grace and accept your compliment. That said, I think you're selling your generation short. It shouldn't devalue the words you remember that they 23

derive from popular culture rather than high art. The second usually starts out as the first, and time filters the dross.'

'You know, I can only take so much of you being so damn reasonable. It's winding me up.'

Vale laughed, a sonorous, chesty cackle that was part tormentor and part amused parent. It rattled around the inside of the Land Rover like a trapped bat.

'You're bored, aren't you, Jack?'

'Out of my fucking skull, Tim.'

He laughed again. Nailed. There wasn't much you could hide from Vale. The guy was born to be a spy.

'Is journalism getting too much like working for a living these days then, Mr P?'

'Why do you think I accepted this ridiculous assignment? At least it's getting me out of the office to do more than watch some New Labour blowhards having a circle-jerk.'

'You accepted the assignment because you were flattered by the invitation.'

'Why would I be flattered by some bunch of self publicising charlatans thinking I was the right guy to beta test their holiday camp?'

'They had your number, Mr P. Flattery doesn't necessarily need to take the form of praise. Being specifically requested for a junket involving precisely the kind of nonsense you are on the record as detesting was all but guaranteed to get your attention.'

Parlabane said nothing, and couldn't help a resentfully embarrassed bashful smile. Vale was on the nose, as usual. The self-publicising charlatans' efforts to hook him had been transparent, but they had also been irresistible. It had been Maria Scoular, the
Saturday
magazine editor, who'd received the invite, but only as a conduit towards deploying the name upon whose attendance the junket was conditional.

'Fancy this, Jack?' she'd asked, smirking a little as she waved it in front of his desk with clearly no intention of handing it over until she'd had her fun trickling out the details. ' "Work hard, play hard, and by Monday morning you'll know who you and your colleagues really are."'

'What is that, the latest motivational missive from management?' he asked.

'I know exactly who my colleagues are. The scum of the earth. Oh, did I say that out loud?'

'It's not from management. It's from a company called Ultimate Motivational Leisure. They're having a junket to hawk an upmarket team-building course, or "experience" as they call it. Posh digs and yomping through the hills to make ageing execs feel all up-and-at-'em.' She put on a cringingly duff American accent, the kind it was politest and most humane merely to pretend 24

wasn't happening. ' "The ultimate test of what you're made of, the ultimate journey of self-discovery, the ultimate vision of what you could become." Plus canapes and a turning-down service. Tick box for vegetarian dining option.'

Parlabane reached for the letter, but it still wasn't forthcoming.

'Why is everything "ultimate" in the world of marketing?' he asked, feigning ambivalence about the true question at hand, viz, why she was brandishing this thing at him. 'I used to put it down to some pre-millennial culminatory thing, but the dawn of a new century didn't seem to extinguish this absurd need to claim everything as the last word. Nobody's selling good experiences or even great experiences: it's always ultimate experiences. Sounds pretty final to me. If only. "The ultimate shaving experience": I'd buy that if it was true. "The ultimate reality TV experience, then we promise to fuck off and make something that won't have Lord Reith's coffin burrowing rapidly towards the Earth's core."'

'I saw one on holiday advertising the ultimate bungee jump experience,'

Maria told him. 'Can't say it filled my head with thoughts of safety and assurance. But these guys are making some ballsy claims for what can't amount to more than an activities weekend in the Highlands.'

'Of course they are. They know their target market. They're not pitching to Herbert Grey-Suit who's looking for somewhere a bit different this year for the sales conference. They're after the high-end macho types, guys who want to think they're facing some challenge that not everybody would be up to meeting. But I'll bet we're talking seriously posh digs, because the same target market will also want to indulge their self-image as the refined and cultured elite who need and appreciate the finer things. Easier to hurl yourself facedown in the mud or wade across a ford if you know there's a claw-foot bath waiting for you at the end of the day.'

'McKinley Hall. Recently refurbished. STB Four stars. Taste of Scotland award. There's an uncanny prescience to your cynicism.'

'I'd hardly call it that. But as you're dwelling on the quality of the accommodation, I'll call on the same powers and predict this is the part where you ask me if I want to go. Your own supernatural gifts should be sufficient to divine my answer.'

Maria cocked her head to one side and assumed a deliberately transparent Iknow-something-you-don't-know expression. He imagined she liked to think of herself as 'coquettish' in such moments, when in fact she was treading precariously close to frenzied strangulation. She'd been brought in to 'lend a lighter touch' to the weekend glossy; so light, in Parlabane's opinion, that it surely separated itself from the rest of the paper of its own accord and floated into readers' bins without their fingers soiling its delicate pages. The editor, however, saw it differently, mainly because Maria had lent a lighter touch in 25

precisely the way he had hoped and anticipated: namely, filling half of it with fashion spreads of youthful female models (who would otherwise be described in solicitous email spam as 'barely legal teens') invariably in diaphanous garb. The ed's thinking was that it appealed to female readers 'because women like pictures of clothes', and as far as the male reader went, there'd be no complaints 'as long as you can see their nipples', something never in doubt when you were shooting outdoors and braless in Scotland. Most depressingly, the ed was probably right.

Parlabane didn't dislike Maria, but it amused him, indeed amused both of them, to play up to the images of themselves each perceived the other as harbouring. It was probably also known as flirting, or from Parlabane's side as close to it as his sexual self-consciousness would allow in the everlasting aftermath of a tabloid newspaper informing him (and everybody else) that he had been cuckolded by 'a smouldering young doctor'. The story had been part of a far more elaborate stitch-up that landed him in prison and certain others in the ground. People had died, careers had been ruined, a conspiracy was unmasked, a killer jailed and Parlabane had lost several feet of intestine in the process of getting to the truth, but the main thing anyone remembered was that his wife had shagged some surgeon bearing, according to the chequebook testimony of a former conquest, 'a very big scalpel, if you know what I mean'. Yes, dear, there are partially developed foetuses who know what you mean. That's one holding the tape recorder.

'Aren't you curious as to why I'd even be thinking of offering something like this to you?' Maria asked.

'You mean to me in my capacity as an investigative journalist with better things to do than write advertorial guff for your Travel pages, or to me in my capacity as a cantankerous cynic who thinks any company bearing the word Ultimate in their name should be summarily asset-stripped and its named directors forced into alternative careers as performers in coprophile fetish hardcore videos?'

'Vividly put, as ever. But I mean to you in your capacity as the person named specifically on the invitation.'

Parlabane grabbed in vain for it once more. 'Where?' he asked, less incredulous than intrigued.