Staying Alive

I switch off the vacuum cleaner and turn on the stereo. Solace in song. A disc is already in the slot so I press play. It’s Caesars. ‘Sort It Out’. A nice, bouncy tune. And, now I listen to it, lyrically apt.

I’m gonna smoke crack

’Cause you’re never coming back

I’m gonna shoot speedballs

Bang my head against the walls

I wanna sniff glue

’Cause I can’t get over you.

Yes, that is sooooo…not me. If, on the other hand, it went, I’m gonna spring clean, Wanna spray some Mister Sheen…

six: it’s kind of personal (#ulink_b0b545ee-7036-5bbe-bbdf-fb5422d9a729)

monday 10 november / 8.57 a.m.

I wake up and the first thing I think—apart, obviously, from Damn, forgot to set the alarm—is that it has been five days since Megan came for her stuff. I wonder why she hasn’t been in touch about the ring. Or the garlic crusher. I tip myself out of bed and make a coffee. Then, still in my pyjama bottoms, I head downstairs to the hall and grab my post. No Jiffy Bag containing a jewellery-box-shaped lump. Just the usual crap.

Back in my flat I sit on my sofa and open…taran-tara!…a Barclaycard statement:

Bugger.

I’ve spent the last few weeks filing this under D for Denial. I have no idea how I’m going to pay it. The truth is that I had no idea when I walked into JP Stein and picked out the chunky diamond in an eighteen-carat setting. I figured that the moment Megan said yes, the world would transform into a magical place where it chucked down in Ethiopia like an August bank holiday, George W embraced Osama B on the White House lawn and credit-card bills were quietly forgotten.

Which I’m sure would have happened if she had said yes.

So, if you’re upset about the sad state of the world, you know who to blame.

No, that’s not fair. The fact is that she never got the chance to reply because I was too wet to ask the question.

I crumple the statement and toss it across the room. Then, unable to fight the Cleaning Impulse, I retrieve it from the floor and put it in the bin. I return to my post and open an exclusive invitation to become the proud owner of a Capital One Platinum Card…an exclusive invitation from Renault to test-drive a Mégane…and an exclusive invitation to an appointment at Saint Matthew’s Hospital in Leytonstone.

Something else I’d filed under D.

Actually, I’m not in denial. Over the last few days I’ve persuaded myself to take up Doctor Stump—a wise and experienced general practitioner—on his reasonable and statistically based suggestion that I almost certainly DO NOT have cancer. It’s probably a straightforward case of seminal granuloma and, honestly, how bad can that be? It sounds like a nourishing high-fibre supplement, available at Boots, Holland and Barrett and all good health-food shops. Whatever, I bet it’s something that clears up with the help of a non-astringent ointment. No, I’ll surely be putting unnecessary pressure on an already stretched health service by showing up for the appointment.

I bin the letter and switch on the TV.

Hyam.

Richard Hyam-Glass. Ex-junior minister for something or other, convicted of taking bribes after having unsuccessfully sued Channel Four, which had made the original accusation. The sleaziest aspect wasn’t the lying or even the backhanders—he was a politician and they’re part of the job spec. No, his one truly despicable act was to shove his thirteen-year-old daughter into the witness box to lie on his behalf. She provided the false alibi that very nearly won his libel trial.

I remember feeling sorry for her, being scarred in public by her own father, branded a perjurer when she’d barely grown out of Barbies. I wonder what she’s up to now. Languishing in a rehab clinic for teenage junkies? I doubt it. Probably lounging around the grounds of a Swiss finishing school.

Finally rumbled, Hyam-Glass did his time in a five-star Hampshire jail, where he wrote an ‘ achingly confessional’ (the Mail) and ‘ poignantly repentant’ ( The Times) memoir. Now he has found redemption. A canny producer read his book, studied the jacket photo—which showed a handsome face etched deeply with the lines of suffering—and decided to re-launch him as daytime telly’s Mr Empathy.

You might wonder why I remember some relatively minor politician’s fall from grace so vividly. Well, I lived and breathed it vicariously through Megan. She was a junior in Channel Four’s legal department at the time. For her it was the clearest case of good against evil since Superman versus Lex Luthor. The TV channel’s cause looked hopelessly lost, but at the eleventh hour their barrister put in a barnstorming performance. He stood up, cleared his throat and reduced the plaintiff’s key witness to tears as he showed her to be nothing more than a brazen liar. Of course, that she was only thirteen might have helped him. At the time a saying about candy and babies sprang to mind, but I didn’t mention it to Megan.

I wish now that I had. The barrister was a bloke called Sandy Morrison.

I watch Richard Hyam-Glass bounding up and down the steps on his set, allowing his audience one or—if they behave—two words in edgeways. The show, like all these things, has nothing to do with giving ordinary people a voice and everything to do with providing a TV studio large enough to contain its presenter’s bloated ego. He’s tossing out empathetic phrases: emotional credit account and the long and winding road to closure. He could be talking about anything that entails trauma—which these days does mean anything—and I have to look at the caption to see what the topic is. Living with cancer.

I switch off the TV—not because I’m in denial, but because I’m late for work—and head for the bathroom. I run the shower and climb in. I squeeze a dollop of gel into my hand and soap my body. Same order as always: face, shoulders, arms, torso, groin…I can feel the lump and I don’t know if it’s an effect created by the blast of water bouncing off my scrotum, but it feels as if it’s alive, like it’s setting off on an impromptu growth spurt for the benefit of my soapy fingertips.

Stupid. Of course it isn’t growing. But I’m panicking now. I rinse off, towel myself dry and dress. Then I head for the office. But not before I’ve retrieved the letter from the bin.

10.54 a.m.

‘You’re late. Again,’ Haye snaps. ‘And you’ve got soap in your ear.’

‘Sorry—I seemed to run out of time this morning.’

‘Well, don’t let it happen again. This isn’t the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients.’

Haye is big on four things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports and the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients. To give him his due, soap in ear surely breaches the spirit, if not the letter of the Blower Mann dress code.

‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘it’s assessment time. I’ve got you down for a thirty-minute slot on Thursday morning. Make sure your diary’s clear.’

After I’d left uni I got a letter from Blower Mann informing me I had an interview with one of their group account directors—Niall Haye. Wow, I thought, Niall Haye. Of course, I’d never heard of him, but what a sexy-cool name—a twinkle-toed Irish footballer’s name, an edgy author’s name, a rock star’s name.

Never be seduced by a name.

Got that?

Never.

Niall Haye is a drone. Of all the drones in the hive, he is the droniest. A hundred-grand showbiz Porsche sits in his designated parking space, but it can’t conceal the man’s total lack of colour.

And if any one thing has killed my ambition it’s the fact that twice a year he sits me down for my assessment and dangles the promise that if I work really hard then one day I could turn into him.

‘Thursday, Thursday,’ I burble as I feel the bump of the hospital letter in my jacket. ‘Er…I can’t, Niall. I’ve got a hospital appointment…Sorry.’

‘Nothing I should worry about, Murray?’

His uncharacteristic display of tenderness surprises me and the words, Er, it’s almost certainly nothing, but I’m having a very minor lump checked out, almost spill out…but not quite. What I say instead is, ‘It’s nothing really…It’s kind of personal.’

Which is a mistake because, now I think about it, Haye is big on five things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports, appear-ance, and the prevention of personal affairs impacting (his favourite verb—though, of course it isn’t actually a verb; just a word that he and his kind have press-ganged into performing against type) on work. Worse still, the linking of a hospital appointment to the phrase it’s kind of personal surely has him picturing a visit to an STD clinic.

‘You of all people,’ he says, ‘should not be taking your biannual appraisal lightly. If I may use my favourite analogy—’

Let me guess. Space, the final frontier?

‘—a career is rather like interplanetary travel—’

Bingo!