Kingfisher

The Question of the Gallery

It was mid-September, and Michael was starting to panic. Claire was dying. He had not adequately prepared himself for watching someone die of starvation and he had discovered that so doing was scary, miserable and unpleasant. He regularly had to hold back either his gag reflex or tears when he saw her; he was increasingly realising that he loved her—that he really did love her; and he was coming to the rather narcissistic view that the Plan was destroying him as much as it was her. He often cried randomly in class and every couple of days he had to read The President's text messages to remind himself that he had no choice.

But whilst his nerves were undoubtedly not helped by watching his lover struggle to breathe with her rib-cage protruding from her skin, that was not the main source of his anxiety. After all, her death was the core centrepeice of the Plan. The N.H.S. were none the wiser thanks to Mavis's efforts. She was continuing to eat enough to survive for now, and given how surprisingly easy exercising fine-grained control over her eating had been, Michael felt that he wouldn't have any trouble timing the cessation of her food intake so that the sudden exertion on the 8th would be enough to finish her off.

The problem was the press gallery and the couple's lack of access thereto. Charlotte had confirmed that she had been telling the truth about her inability to get passes for Michael and Claire, and the question was weighing heavily on his mind.

It was also weighing on hers. She had decided to get Deborah and Mavis off her back by faking a bout of depression induced by the stress of starting second-year and she was feeling a lot of genuine physical exhaustion and mood swings. Unable to focus on her college work and spending most of her free time in bed, she felt desperately invested in making sure that the Plan worked. There was nothing else on which to pin her hopes.

She could no longer wake up at six o'clock most mornings and she had given up trying; it was Sunday and she eventually woke up at eleven. No message from Mavis. One from Michael—she could almost taste the revulsion she remembered written on his face the last time they had met. Claire slowly pulled herself across her room and put on an outfit that allowed the observer to imagine that she was just very skinny, but not starved.

For the first time in a few days she entered the living room. Her father was at home, dressed in his three-piece suit indoors for some reason and looking over his notes. Claire paused for a moment before clearing her throat to get his attention.

'Claire,' he said. 'What can I do for you, dear?'

'Are you working on that speech?' She sat down on the sofa with some difficulty and gestured at the notes. 'For Conference or for Parliament.'

He was a little bemused at her sudden interest in his career—but entirely disarmed by it. 'Yes, I am. This is the one for Parliament on the 8th.'

'I have to say, I'm surprised you write your own speeches. I always figured that was done by speechwriters.'

'Well,' he replied in a half-distracted voice as he scribbled out and changed a sentence with his £2,000 pen, 'you shouldn't always believe everything that your Michael tells you about politics. He's a smart kid, but not as smart as you are, and very much the kind of youngster who reads blogs.'

As it happened, at that moment in time Michael actually was reading a blog, though he undoubtedly would have stopped reading it to protest the accusation that he was the sort of youngster who read blogs. He was on a Network SouthCentral service to London Victoria: his destination was Brewers Green, Westminster, where he was going to try his last, desperate plan to gain access to the press gallery. He was going to resign from the Young Labour N.E.C. in protest against the Telecommunications Bill, which had been viciously opposed by Matthew Perry M.P., in the hope that Matthew might then invite him to the gallery. It was a long shot but the best bet he had.