Walking with Ghosts

which was fully and comically erect. The girl on his left, who was dressed in a pyjama top, was holding his member between thumb and forefinger. The girl to his right, who was tall and thin and brown, seemed to be licking out his ear. When the serving-hatch opened he was caught squealing with laughter, his red face blotchy with alcohol, and his mouth open in a roar of abandonment.
    ‘Bobby!’ he shouted. ‘Tina wants us to make a daisy-chain.’
    Bobby wasn’t fully visible. He was stretched out on his back on the floor. Like the first man, he was completely naked. Only the base of his penis and a few red hairs were visible, the rest of it being subsumed in the mouth of a girl with a badly cut lip who knelt between his thighs. At the other end there was nothing to recognize, as a dumpy blonde with long nipples and a bored expression was sitting on his face.
    ‘Let’s get to work,’ said Marie, flicking on the video camera. Joni kicked open the door, and the two of them tumbled into the room.
    ‘Wheeeee,’ screamed the silver-haired man. ‘More girlies. Hey, Bobby, we’ve got more girlies.’
    Bobby moved the blonde off his face and peeked out between her buttocks. ‘More the merrier,’ he said. ‘Have a drink. Take your clothes off.’
    Then he disappeared again under the blonde. Marie only caught a glimpse of him, but his face was almost a national icon. Robert ‘Bobby’ Neville was only a junior cabinet minister, but heavily tipped for one of the major jobs in the not-too-distant future. The Home Office and the Treasury had both been mentioned by political speculators.
    His swift rise to prominence had been accomplished by a couple of veiled racist speeches, in which Bobby had partially concealed his misanthropy behind the cloak of patriotism.
    But, like others who used flag-waving tactics, Bobby’s only real love was himself. Marie reflected that patriotism was nothing more or less than the conviction that a country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
    She let the camera run. Who knows, she might be making history, recording the formative moments of a future prime minister. Not exactly an in-depth interview, but revealing nevertheless.
    The girl with the cut lip drew back from Bobby’s sex and left it standing there, glistening with saliva. She looked at the camera. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she said.
    Bobby must have picked up on her tone, because he sat up quickly, and his engorged member went down like a pricked balloon, disappeared into that red bush real fast.
    ‘Minister,’ said Marie, zooming in on his face, ‘is it true that when your dick gets hard, your brain gets soft?’
    The minister’s reply would have been censured in Hansard. His choice of words was not exactly considered, and there were far too many adjectives for the one sentence.
     

31
     
    Before he went to the paper shop, Sam looked again at the photograph album Diana had found for him. They were all there, Arthur and Dora, Diana and Billy. There were a couple of photographs of Dora’s parents, portraits gone yellow with age, people with spines so straight and rigid that today they would be regarded as abnormal.
    The wedding-day photographs. Arthur standing tall with his bride on his arm. Dora smiling at the camera, her young face bursting with anticipation, her eyes innocent of the complications and hardships that the years ahead might hold. She looked too young to be married. Like a schoolgirl in a pageant that had nothing to do with real life, a child dressing up, pretending to be adult for the cameraman. Looking hard at the wedding photograph Sam couldn’t detect much of the woman he now lived with. The girl in the photograph remained static, gazing into the dark aperture of the camera, fixed in the moment, unaware that another husband far in the future was looking back down the years at her through the same lens.
    Sam sighed and flicked over a couple of pages. There was Arthur with Billy. Father and son in a studio portrait. Arthur would be around forty, the young Billy five or six years old. Billy had long curly hair and was dressed in a short linen coat, white ankle socks, and tiny sandals. Arthur was looking down at his son, who was standing on a chair. There was no physical contact between the two, but it was as if they were one being. The man’s gaze encompassed the totality of the child, so that Billy was unaware of the precarious nature of his perch. He was aware of the