On The Inside

I see it framed in the rear-view mirror. Marble-red, a smooth shadow of stubble, my face looks fine today. Sam takes one pretty white hand and holds it to my head, while the other one drags a comb down through my hair. I want her to do it slower. My scalp is in ecstasy as the comb skates my skin. Make me look distinguished, Sam, you’re so much prettier when you’re combing me.

I only have time for this sandwich – it’s a BLT but there’s a dressing in there and it all just tastes of the dressing, which I could eat drums of with its bonfire spices, all wood and coal. Next time I’ll make them give me more.

Darren stops abruptly at a red and it’s gone down my lapel in the way you knew it always would. Sam, David and Richard all reach to mop it up. I let Sam do it. I pull out my blackberry but the Sun outside whitens the screen and the figures are too faint for my eye. The heat is forcing the stale smell of sweating car seats down my throat, I try not to swallow. Outside a toothless old Arab is selling the Standard and no, no-one’s buying. My hair is getting matted to the sweat on my forehand, think, think you have polls, the new legislation worked for you, it did, but the Arab, that Arab, they’ll hound you, when this airs, everyone will know you. They don’t know him.

Darren brakes, gently this time, and we’re stopping for good. David looks at me and I wish he’d stop using that bloody hair gel; he looks like a teenager, afraid to grow up. There’s a bloody caravan of hairs moving from one of his eyebrows to the other. He just nods at me. What does that mean David? That I’m ready? Would you be ready?

He opens the door and I get out first.

There’s a chorus of boos blowing like a country wind all around my body from where the cameras are. Their lenses are squinting, the scum. The flashes go off even though it’s daytime. The lights crack along the line like a chain of bangers. Just more for Jackie to print out and complain about, I suppose. All night, she does it, waking me up with photos of myself in mid-blink saying I’m drunk, saying I’m fat, I’m always in the public eye, even in my own bloody bed, there’s no rest for the wicked is there? No rest.

I feel something pass me and I see it splatter. A cup of McDonald’s coke with its innards spilt out across the pavement. My life is just a war movie, dodging missiles. Maintain. Don’t look around, look invincible. That’s your training.

Sam, David and Richard put their hands on my back and show me in, I can feel Sam’s squeezing my jacket a little. A kid gives me a bold nametag, as if people wouldn’t know my face, and tells me where to wait. He looks nervous; he doesn’t look any of us in the eye. He talks so quietly he might as well be in the next room. He’s growing moustache and it makes me think of the time Jackie told me she’d divorce me if I started growing the moustache. I go into a sterile canteen, half empty, with a clinical softly lit buffet. Re-arrange, they won’t mention your rallies, your words, misquotation, semantics, these are all escape routes, look them in the eyes, the eye……

I surf the tray along the buffet and pick a pasta salad that looks second-hand. Richard is pacing around talking on his blackberry and David decided he and Sam should give us some space. Here I am, the leader, and I’m being babysat by an overgrown teenager who can’t even tuck his shirt in. You’ve got to aim high.

I bring the fork to my mouth and I spot a coloured man in a suit walk into the room. He looks me straight in the eye through expensive glasses. I feel my muscles tense from my jaw to my buttocks. He paces towards me, I can only hear the traffic roll outside. My mind clouds up with billowing red and white like paint in water, I open my mouth to speak but remember your training remember your training and suddenly a light snaps on a girl calls me from a doorway and David and Richard sweep me through it. He’s gone.

The sterile looking girl leads me down an equally sterile looking corridor, and pushes me through a door marked ‘keep out’. Everything goes white as I walk into the lights, which instantly prick beads of sweat on my forehead. The audience are already in their seats and I can hear that country wind blowing again. The force of the lights tightens my brow into headache. I know the cameras aren’t rolling but I stare right into the expressionless lens, away from the people. Never blink; it makes them think that you’re nervous.