Going Down (The Captain / Julian)

Chapter 1

The cubicle door clattered against Julian as he shoved himself, with all the dignity he could, into the cramped toilet stall. The porcelain of the cistern was cold against his hands as he rested them against it, grounding against the dissociative, mindless slurring of the delegates outside, drunkenly shouting their bafflingly ignorant opinions of that day's speeches to each other over the sinks.

Even outside the facilities, from where Julian had just fled, the ground floor conference room of the Grand Hotel was filled with a similar sludge of noise. It was packed to bursting with the monotonous swathe of unattractive men and women who were bow-tied, tight-dressed and shamble-stepping at an attempt to hold rhythm with the warbling live band. They were grouped in little factions according to height, weight and degrees of hair loss, chuntering and guffawing through tax-payer-funded wine. Between these factions, Julian had seen the sickly-looking journos fluttering like thirsty insects, probing for juicy titbits to scrawl into their Filofaxes, and the giant-titted waitresses who were, to their credit, letting everyone have a good ogle, so long as they continued adding drinks to their tabs - tabs which, at this point, probably matched the GDP of a developing African nation. The noise, the crowd, the sheer stupidity. Four exhausting days of party conference, its sluggish social obligations with insufferable cretins and monotonous to-ing and fro-ing from session to session, had drained him of the spirit he needed to pretend that he was anything other than bored to the back teeth with the whole bloody affair.

Luckily, he had a solve. From the soft, inner lining of his dinner jacket, he pulled a tiny plastic bag with a pound-coin sized ball of flaky, white substance. He removed a small chunk of the coke and set it on the cistern, then used his credit card to dice it into two appetisingly thick lines. After rolling up a fiver (Wellington in the middle of the tube; wouldn't do to do such disgraceful things to Her Maj), Julian snorted with faultless proficiency. He rubbed his nostrils with his fingers, then his face with his hands, methodically removing any evidence as he packed everything away.

As a pompous, raucous laugh from outside rumbled the door of the cubicle, Julian felt the familiar chill in the back of his throat, slight sweating on his forehead, the wriggling of emerging butterflies in his stomach and couldn't suppress his grin and the impulse to gleefully clap his hands together. Finally, back on the train. Suddenly, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with fellow attendees felt utterly enchanting. There was so much to share, to be shared.

Julian wrenched open the cubicle door with a wide grin. He realised quickly that he had forgotten to flush (and, therefore, broadcast exactly what he had been doing to everyone outside) but he wasn't worried. There was no need to worry about anything at all. Everything was just fantastic.

"Ah, hallo all!" Julian crowed, offering his best number one smile to the nearest, bemused looking man. "Julian Fawcett, foreign office - somehow still a special adviser, open to a change - absolute pleasure to meet you. Don't worry, not a bender, just a fellow appreciado of old Willie Whitelaw, couldn't help overhearing your conversation there - have you seen him lately? Never known a man look more like an egg!" Julian's laugh was infectious, pulling at the edges of the stuffy, half-cut men, who couldn't help but return intoxicated smiles back. "What are we all doing, then? Loop me in, chums. What's the rumour? What's the gossip? Hugo!" Julian greeted with a wave as his foreign-office desk mate and fellow SpAd entered the toilets. "Hugo - meet my new friends!"

Hugo rolled his eyes in irritation, which Julian thought was awfully funny. He had a lot of time for Hugo, despite him having a family name which meant nothing to anyone and - most shockingly - being from the north. Unlike most of the men at conference who had shoved their ballooning weight into dresswear meant for men three sizes slimmer, Hugo had gone against type, wearing a tailored, grey herringbone suit. Julian had felt jealous earlier (clad himself adhering strictly to the black tie dress code - traditional black dinner jacket and formal white shirt, the white-tie waistcoat being the only element which could be considered even vaguely daring), but now Julian could only feel thrilled for Hugo's bravery.