Chapter Text
In the months leading up to this particular evening, Jamie Macdonald had imagined his re-entry into the world of Westminster politics going one of two ways.
The first naturally involved the happy perversion of a Connery-era Bond action sequence - him swimming up the Thames in the cover of darkness, stripping off the wetsuit to reveal a white tailored knock-out number (not that he has owned a suit that fits him, ever), and going Apocalypse fucking Now on the back benches during the Queen's fucking Speech. The second involved slowly crucifying Malcolm Tucker with nails made of his own frozen bits on the lawn beside Churchill, calling it performance art, and charging more than the Tate fucking Modern might to watch Yoko Ono take a shit. If he pre-sold tickets to the Tories, he figured, he'd end the recession in a day and they'd all be fucking delighted to have him back.
These fantasies have gotten Jamie through a fair bit, namely choking on his own vomit, hysterical tears, and falling into the icy Clyde on a November night after a savage Old Firm match. It is unsurprising, then, that he nearly loses his faith a second time when he helps up a girl who's fallen through the door of a women's toilet in some stinking Northern Quarter Manchester club and sees it's Nicola Murray's fuck-up daughter. Jamie has only had three pints. This is few enough to realise, in a burst of awful clarity, that this is the horrible end of his miserable fucking post-political life.
'Jesus fuck-' And he drags her up, hauling her away from the swinging door, but she's lolling, limp adolescent tarted up in some fucking skimpy black dress with pale limbs flopping like a doll's, green eyelids gumming shut. Her thin arms are clammy beneath his steadying hands, and Jamie is suddenly aware of how fucking young she is, and that he's getting some evils from the middle-aged hen party Jabba the Hutts oozing out the loo.
The emergency exit glows invitingly just beyond the cloakroom - Jamie sees it, shoves the awful bundle of lifeless girl down behind some coats, and and breaks several glasses shoving back through the blue-lit club for his anorak. He's here with Dan and some other shirt-and-tie cunt working for their sorry arsed McTwat of an MP, but they're off on the slavering pull - not Jamie's problem.
In ninety seconds' time, he's out the back with monged-out Wee Murray propped up against the reeking skip, patting her cheek gently and looking (if any police officers and/or Spooks aficionados were to glance down this particular alley at 3 AM) like a dishevelled domestic terrorist.
'C'mon,' Jamie croons to this mess of blond hair, tipping her chin back with an encouraging two fingers as her head slumps against her narrow chest. He can't remember her name - saw it on the fucking six o'clock news five months ago, Droopy Tits Nicola Murray and Co go to some family fucking charity do, the new DoSac Mummy frowning like she'd sat on a halved lemon, and usually Jamie is surprisingly good with names but Malcolm happened to be in the background of two shots looking smug and this had obligated Jamie to put a Glenfiddich bottle through the telly. 'Wake up for me, darlin', tha's it, you cannae have had more than a dry fucking martini, right? Wee Southern bairn like you - come on, Jesus Christ-'
The girls' thin shoulders twitch fretfully - for a second Jamie stupidly wonders if she's cold, and then she sicks up like a dying cat all over the grey Nineties relic he likes to think is his 'going out' shirt. He swears and nearly falls over, but recovers enough to put a gentle hand on the back of her neck and guide her onto shaky hands and knees (he sometimes forgets he's a parent - not that he'd forget his daughters if you fucking Gilderoy Lockharted him, but that he's actually got the practical knowledge to look after fragile poorly weans). Nicola fucking Murray's tiny teenage daughter spits and coughs and leaks more yellowish bile than Jamie's ever seen aside from the time he punched Julius Nicholson in the stomach after a cocktail party, and Jamie Macdonald strokes her hair and tells her she's a sweet clever beautiful thing, puir girl, that's it.
He's almost feeling sentimental instead of out of his mind with horror when she shivers and wails quietly and starts to cry, blubbering and mumbling incoherently. Jamie seizes her by the shoulders and pulls her back up, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of his anorak and whishting her, but then her half-open blue-eyes focus on him a little and she shoves feebly his front.
'Ta'me...I...wan' t'go...in, fuck - off-'
'Hush-' Katie, his brain reminds him, belatedly, how fucking middle class of Nicola and her poofy husband '-Katie, hey, hey, love. How'd you get into a place like that, posh kid like you? Does your mum know you're up North, huh?'
Tears are tracking her mascara down her face - she looks wild and mad and registers the mention of her mother enough to flinch, twisting in Jamie's arms. 'Fuck off!' she screams. 'Fuck - you, g'way-'
A car door slams somewhere close, echoing down the cold alley above the steady bump of bass and the screams of the fucking Jim Henson hen party, and Jamie has no choice but to turn this already-dodgy situation into a full-blown paedophiliac kidnapping. He covers Katie's mouth, scoops her up in one movement, stumbling only a little, and runs in something of a mounting panic towards the adjoining street.
Halfway to his motel, a tiny limp fist catches the corner of his jaw (Katie being half in and out of consciousness, but a fucking psycho when awake, apparently) and Jamie loses his fucking patience. He drops her feet, shakes her, screams some incoherent Glaswegian and possibly even calls her a cunt (for which he's immediately ashamed, as he's not sure if she's even over the age of fucking consent and Jamie has a Rule about that), and astonishes himself with the lie that he works for her fucking mother and she'd best fucking behave, young lady. What astonishes him even more is that this works - not that the fight goes out of her entirely, but she sullenly falls back into his shoulder and that's that. 'Good lass,' Jamie soothes, humming, and as he picks her up again realises he's shaking worse than some addict acquaintances.
He manages to clamber up the motel fire escape with vommy-fucking-Teenage-Wasteland in his arms, and by some miracle they make it without anyone turning on the lights or calling a domestic violence hotline, though Jamie barks his shin climbing through the window and spends a good few minutes bleeding all over the fucking off-white carpet. Katie is a stinking mewling adolescent version of the Grudge Girl, her pointed face smeared with makeup and bile, so he does the sensible Motherwell thing, runs a warm bath low enough not to drown in, and plonks her in it fully clothed. She opens her eyes enough to glare and call him something she must've picked up from home, and for all of fifteen seconds Jamie feels faintly pleased.
He tosses his sicked-on anorak on the floor and it all comes flooding in like the Dutch boy's not only taken his finger out the dyke, kinky little fucker, but had a cheeky fist as well (this is not a convenient innuendo, but how, genuinely, Jamie has always interpreted this story). He catches the inside of his cheek between his teeth and bites down savagely, blood staining his torn trousers already forgotten - this is bad.
This is so bad it's practically been shat out by Osama bin Laden and posted via fucking anthrax letter to the Daily Mail.
Jamie glances at the phone that's tumbled out of his anorak pocket and has to throw himself face-first on the bed and savage a pillow to keep from punting the Blackberry and the inevitability it represents out the window. He realises belatedly that he's bleeding all over the sheets, which Katie might need later, rips them off the bed, and stomps in to check on Courtney Love as his heart tries to eat through his ribs. She's fallen asleep in the bath, looking like a drowned Dickensian waif or a zombie child prostitute with the black dress floating lazily around her thin frame and her mouth half-open: Jamie feels no better.
Of all scandals, it would be Nicola fucking Murray's daughter.
Nicola fucking sod-off cuntface udderfuck Murray. Malcolm Tucker's Frumpy MILF prodigy. Not that the news has ever called her this or the BBC-approved equivalent, but Jamie knows. In his gut. He wouldn't be surprised if they've fucked. In Number Two of his Political Second Coming Options, this notion does not make the Reborn Jamie feel a combination of violent nausea and gut-hammering grief and hyena-raging hate, but now it is just this that drops him to the bloodstained carpet and makes him reach for his Blackberry like it's the last drop of Blood of fucking Christ.
Sam is still the one to get the first call, several plastic bottles of room service wine later. Jamie is almost incoherent, but she hears the fear first, and realises it is this, rather than the alcohol, that makes him stumble and slur.
'Jamie - call Malcolm.' Hundreds of miles away, Sam curls up tighter beneath her duvet and tries to remember how to handle this particular Scottish psychopath at 5 AM. 'I don't care. It's Nicola's daughter, she's been missing a day and a night and they've called the police - I don't care, Jamie. He's been up all night sorting the press and handling Nicola. He'll be relieved.'
She waits, and closes her eyes again.
'Nicola needs to know her daughter's safe. I'm not doing it for you, Jamie, he only sent me home an hour ago and you are being a fucking coward.' A decisive click, and Jamie, on the other end, has to admit she'd grown a proper pair and no mistake even as he nearly shatters his phone throwing it against the wall.
And so it transpires that Jamie Macdonald comes back to politics as fate was always going to have it - drunk, weeping, lying on the bathroom floor with a passed-out teenager in his bed, and calling Malcolm Tucker, Cunt Who Must Not Be Named, after a sleepless night.