FIC: A Love Story
Apr. 12th, 2011 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zaubraTitle: A Love Story
Ship(s): David Cameron/Nick Clegg
Word Count: 5,873
Rating: R, for dark themes: character death
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: David Cameron tells the story of how he fell in love with Nick Clegg. For this prompt.
Disclaimer: All works posted on this journal are creative works of fiction, composed of fictional characters inspired by the public personas of living people. No injury or disrespect is intended to the persons named. If you are one of the persons named in these stories, or if you know one of them personally, please bear in mind that stories such as these are written for entertainment value only, in full knowledge that they are not based in truth, and that ultimately they are a labor of love. Also, if you are one of these people, stop playing on the Internet and go run the country.
A Love Story
May, 2056
During his lifetime, the late David Cameron famously refused to discuss his relationship with Nick Clegg. I approached him last year, shortly before the fortieth anniversary of the Downing Street Statement, to ask him if he would be willing to break his silence. He chuckled, in his gentle way, and set down his paintbrush. ‘I’ve written something already,’ he said. ‘My solicitors will send it to you once I’m dead.’ I tried to convince him to publish it for the anniversary, but the Grand Old Man would not be moved. ‘No,’ he said, and smiled, patting my hand. ‘History can treat us how it will, but let it wait until I’m dead.’ He looked up into the Berkshire sunset he’d been painting. ‘It won’t be long now.’
The following is presented unedited.
A Love Story
by David Cameron
The truth.
‘Tell us the truth, Prime Minister!’ a young man calls, outside a Tube station. An old woman sees me, and her face spasms in distaste. Another old woman offers me what she must mean as a comforting smile, but all I can see are fangs, crooked teeth baring themselves at me. A businessman stares, and I feel the condemnation in his eyes; it is my fault, all of it is my fault. A young woman approaches me, giggling. ‘I have to ask – who topped?’ A politician I once counted as a friend refuses to speak to me for four months, corresponding through assistants and emails. Other friends, non-politicians, simply disappear. A young man comes to see me in surgery, and bursts out in tears as soon as he shakes my hand. He spits profanities at me, and is dragged out by security as I watch through a sudden blurriness. My office receives death threats, conspiracy theories, wild accusations that call me everything from a pervert to a homewrecker to a murderer to a Tory whore to an unethical autocratic bastard; after being in power for nearly five years, such accusations are hardly new, but their number is.
A little girl at my daughter’s primary school looks up at me thoughtfully, chewing on her finger. ‘Prime Minister,’ she says, ‘did you really love him?’
Those first few months are hell. Everyone wants different truths. Everyone wants to know what happened during my first term as Prime Minister. Everyone wants to know the sensational, soul-baring details of my four-year relationship with Nick Clegg. Everyone wants pieces of me, of Nick, of us, and I will not give those pieces up.
I have given them a statement, the statement which started it all. That is all the truth that I can – that I will – give. They have no right to the rest. It is mine, and it is Nick’s, and most importantly, it is ours.
What is truth? There are truths, and there are truths. My truth cannot be the same as Nick’s truth, and Nick’s truth cannot be the same as those of the murderers who slit his throat, who left him to die in a back alley, alone and afraid.
What is truth? That I loved him; that he meant more to me than I had believed possible; that my day began with Nick, lived with Nick, ended with Nick; that my eyes could not keep away from the wry set of his mouth, the curve of his ear, the expansive gestures of his hands; that every time I said his name, it felt like a kiss; that he made me believe in soul-mates. These are some of my truths, but they are mine, and they are personal – they belong to no one but me.
I refuse to answer. I cannot give them what they want, I cannot give them the truth.
For nearly forty years, I keep my silence. They have my statement; they have the images of me weeping in Miriam’s arms at the memorial service. They have the spurious recollections of countless interns and anonymous sources. They have the lurid details of the never-ending, never-closed murder investigations. They have the pictures of us together, during those years when he was Nick, and not a fading memory; for the rest of my political career, I never learn to stop flinching at the sight of one of those pictures, ghostly hand reaching out to touch me.
After forty years, I come now to the end. That ghostly hand is nearer - any moment, I may reach out and grasp it. Nick did not believe in heaven, nor did he believe in hell; it is too much to ask that I might join him in either place.
What is truth? In the end, Nick is truth to me: truth embodied, truth personified. As a last gift to him, then – the only gift I can give him now – I will try to tell our story, for the first and last time.
In telling this story, I draw on my memory and on my personal diary. The former is, while a little blurred with age, surprisingly sharp and agile for a man of eighty-nine, according to my doctors. The latter has never been included in any of my memoirs or my published works, and will upon my death be entrusted to the stewardship of my granddaughter Victoria Robinson. I have asked her to publish it in full, without censorship, after all who appear in its pages have died.
I cannot speak to this story’s truth, but I can speak to its love.
~//~
A truth I don’t know: the moment I first fell in love with Nick. It happened gradually, and the first decade of the twenty-first century was not as open a world as today’s. Attitudes were changing, but male politicians falling in love with each other was still a topic for comedians, sketch artists, and Internet forums; it just wasn’t something that was publically acknowledged or discussed. It happened, but it was not seen to happen. Because of this atmosphere, I had to confront a certain internalised fear – fear of the unknown, certainly, but also the more prosaic fears of being outed, of having my career destroyed and my good name rubbished. Before I could acknowledge my feelings for Nick, I had to wrestle with these fears and to make the decision to push past them: I had to make the decision to allow myself to love.
Love, of course, was already there, however unacknowledged. I can’t be sure of the exact moment it first appeared, but I know the moment I was first aware of it. I am a proud grandfather and great-grandfather, which means that years of bedtime stories have taught me my fairy tales. In those fairy tales, there is so often that quiet moment of perfect clarity, when the prince and the princess meet each other’s eyes, time stops, and they are suddenly, irrevocably, in love. All that remains is getting to their happily ever after.
It didn’t happen that way with Nick. There was a moment, certainly, but time didn’t stop, my prince didn’t fall in love with me, and no fairy godmother was changing the colour of my tie. And in the end, most cruelly, we never got our happily ever after.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I first noticed Nick for wholly superficial reasons. People forget how beautiful he was when he stood up and argued for what he believed in. He was never the most suave or polished of speakers, but that was part of his charm - Nick could make you believe that he meant what he said. It was a rare skill to find in a politician, then as now, and it was made possible by the fact that he truly believed what he was arguing. (This was before the difficulties of governance, of course, when people lost faith in Nick and the Liberal Democrats, and when some argue that they lost faith in themselves; but that part of the story is yet to come.) I used to watch Nick at PMQs, after I’d run through my own lot of questions. He was young and fit, and he had fire, a fire that appealed to me on a political as well as a physical level. I’d begun to feel overmanaged and underinspired, which alarmed me, and the new leader of the Liberal Democrats was neither. All in all, he was beautiful.
Nick, of course, had little time for me. At first, I was one of the enemies, and his schedule was dominated by his plans to reinvent and reinvigorate the Liberal Democrats. I hadn’t yet come around to acknowledging the fact that I was attracted to him, but I did know that I had an odd desire to spend time with him. I invited him to play tennis, but he was engaged; I offered to have him and Miriam over to dinner, but he had a previous commitment.
So it went during those strange twilight years of New Labour. Brown led the increasingly restive, disillusioned, intellectually bankrupt Labour ranks – forgive me, my politics are showing - while Nick and I circled, smelling blood, waiting our turn. Nick focussed on reinventing and rallying his party, and I tried to focus on my own, while simultaneously fighting an increasingly difficult battle with my attraction to Nick.
In the 2010 election campaign, I watched as Nick became a celebrity overnight. “I agree with Nick” was the slogan, not just among young people and idealists – the traditional strengths of the Liberal Democrats – but throughout the country. With Labour collapsing, the election had been mine to lose, and now it looked like Nick was going to shoulder his way in and deny us an outright majority. He was everywhere, and everywhere loved.
Election day was not as kind to us as we had each hoped it would be. While Nick was indeed kingmaker, his party did not achieve the landmark advance that had seemed possible for a dazzling moment, instead settling for the usual distant third. Meanwhile, my Conservatives had failed to gain a majority, and whether I would be called to form a government now depended entirely on Nick’s choices. I won’t deny that I was upset. While the results were somewhat expected – after Nick’s game-changing performance in the first debate, we had been playing to catch up ever since - they were nonetheless galling, and I was irrationally angry with Nick for placing me in such a position.
It was under these circumstances that I met with Nick at Admiralty House on 8 May. I was still upset, although we were cautiously optimistic about the negotiations and the possibility of a deal. Nick and I talked for over an hour that night, and by the end I was no longer cautiously optimistic. I knew I was the next Prime Minister, and what’s more, I knew that I was in love with the man who would be the next Deputy Prime Minister.
That sounds, as my granddaughter Margaret would say, absolute feckle. It is, however, the truth. In that hour, I faced the realisation that I had become physically, intellectually, and romantically attracted to Nick, and that I had developed a fascination with him that I found difficult to resist. During that same meeting, Nick decided that I could be trusted, and that the best position for the Liberal Democrats was in a coalition government at our side. It wasn’t quite a fairy-tale moment, but in many ways it does mark the beginning of our personal fairy-tale.
As this piece will be published after my death, I see no need to conceal the fact that I behaved like the simplest love-struck schoolboy over the course of the following weeks. Nick was beautiful; when he spoke, the angels sang; every idea of his was sunshine and roses. Because of Nick’s decision to give his party’s support to mine, we were launched upon governance, and we immediately began to remedy the worst abuses of the Brown years, those abuses which we had both attacked for so long. We were a true team, and despite the difficult political decisions which we had to take, I had never been so energised or fulfilled.
I should not make it seem as if my entire attention was on my newly discovered love for Nick. As yet, that love was unspoken and unrequited; indeed, Nick seemed uncomfortable with the constant media innuendo surrounding our political relationship, and, as a result, with me. For the moment, then, I contented myself with admiring Nick from afar, and devoted the majority of my energies to solving the long-term and immediate problems confronting our country. With Nick at my side, we began to cut the deficit, build the Big Society, and reform the abuses of thirteen years of Labour governance.
The political story of the next four years has been told elsewhere, including in my own memoirs, to which this personal story forms a belated coda. Suffice it to say that our political honeymoon did not last forever. From 2011 on, our first term in office was an increasingly difficult one. Tuition fees, the Libyan massacres, the Lansley intern scandal - all paled next to the cold reality of unemployment rises and a persistently sluggish economy. Thirteen years of Labour had left the country a poisoned chalice, and we spent the entirety of our waking hours attempting to find an antidote.
Nick suffered the most of any of us. It takes a certain backbone to be a Tory, to know that millions of your countrymen despise you for a baby-killer and a class warrior, and you learn that backbone early on. By the time I had been a MP for a year, I had been shouted at, spat upon, threatened with death and dismemberment, and been made the object of countless heart-rending pleas. In such an environment, one either gives in and drops out of politics, or develops a thicker skin. I chose the latter course: I believed that our policies were healthier for the nation, and I felt strongly that Labour’s reckless spending threatened to bring down the economy (as indeed it then did). I grew a thicker skin and learned to defend myself, learned to go on the attack for Tory policies and to see past immediate emotional appeals, to the structural problems which needed to be solved.
When resistance to coalition policies began in earnest, I was thus armed by both belief and experience, and I was able to withstand the emotional pressure of public fury and hold fast to my colours. Nick had no such protection. He was the charismatic, idealistic leader of a charismatic, idealistic party, and his sole experience with nationwide fame had been the spontaneous popularity and affection showered upon him during the election campaign. He had been celebrated as that rare unicorn, a truth-speaking politician, and in the wake of the election he was set up as the kingmaker of a new coalition era.
Any Tory could have told him that he was doomed to fail, that it was only a matter of time before the sunny idealists of the Liberal Democrats came in for a share of the vitriol heretofore directed at us. But in the softly-lit days of the rose garden, we kept our mouths shut, attempting to establish the coalition as firmly as possible before the deluge. It gained us nothing to warn them. And perhaps even we - in some hidden corner of our cynical souls - dared to dream that this time, this time it might be different.
It was not. When the vitriol came, Nick was unprepared and unprotected. In many ways, the attacks were even worse than those to which we Tories had so long been accustomed: this was personal, in a shockingly vengeful manner. The people tore down what the people had raised up. I watched as, day by day, Nick turned into a grey shadow of his former self. The charm faded into a weariness, an almost-tangible weight pulling him down, like Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress. The part of me that loved him wished that I could free him from that burden; the part of me that led my Party saw it as an advantage, having a face for the cuts that was not my own.
I tried to balance the two competing impulses by working as closely with Nick as I could. Some people within my own party saw it as odd, how close a team we became; I know that some of my closest political friends were hurt by how their own counsel was eclipsed by Nick’s. Nick himself saw it as odd at first. He kept asking me, with a little wry twist to his mouth, if we weren’t rather more close than a Tory and a Liberal Democrat rightly ought to be. “We’ll have nothing to disagree about in the bloody debates!” he used to say, long before they caught him saying it on microphone.
I didn’t care. I told myself that I didn’t care for purely political reasons – that the coalition worked best when the two of us were in agreement, that our ministers were calmer when mum and dad refrained from shouting at each other, and that the more closely Nick could be identified with our policies, the more useful he was a human shield.
The truth was that I wanted him close for more than political reasons.
~//~
Day by day, Nick faded. I had seen politicians watch their careers die before; most grew sharper throughout the process, their tongues cutting flesh from their unfortunate underlings, their eyes ever more mistrustful, their set of their shoulders increasingly desperate. Nick did not. He simply faded. His usual buoyant charm became muted, his laugh quiet and exhausted (when it came at all), his gait dogged and dutiful. He had promised both me and the country that he would do his best to solve the difficult issues now before us, and if there was ever a truth about Nick, it is that he took his promises seriously.
It is probably not surprising, then, that it was tuition fees that first started to break him down. The hatred hurt – I watched him through the crack in his office door, as he watched the coverage of the protests, and I saw the pain and self-loathing in his eyes. It was the sense of personal failure, of having betrayed a promise, which first started to make him feel as if he was no longer quite the same Nick Clegg as before the election. He’d never had to make pragmatic decisions before, never had to give up something he’d believed in.
I tried to help. As things got worse, he began to become more receptive to my overtures. In a world where everyone hated him, I think he initially just welcomed the comfort of somewhere where he was understood, somewhere where nobody was judging him. We began to eat together at least once a week in the office. We played a game of tennis; I tried to let him win, but it’s difficult to throw tennis convincingly. He was slow and tired, and his heart wasn’t in it. Samantha and I had him and Miriam over to dinner; he nearly fell asleep, and Samantha told me afterward that I had to stop working him so hard.
The truth was that it wasn’t me. He was doing it to himself. As the coalition came under ever more pressure, he felt as if he needed to be everywhere, shoring up the gaps in the dikes, like the little Dutch boy in the story. I kept as close an eye on him as I could, but I felt as if I was losing him, despite my best efforts.
And then one night, it all changed.
I was leaving my office for the evening. It was late – I had recently returned from an overseas trip, and I had been catching up on some work – and the building was largely deserted. I sent my assistant home, and walked over to Nick’s office, as was my custom before going upstairs to the flat for the night. The door to Nick’s office was slightly open, and I could see Nick inside, sitting at his newspaper-strewn desk, his head in his hands.
I knocked quietly, then pushed the door open, giving Nick no time to tidy up. ‘Nick,’ I said.
I had to push, but eventually he admitted that the constant struggle was taking its toll on him. ‘I’m not made for this kind of politics,’ I remember him saying, the edge of exhaustion in his voice. ‘I’m made for Opposition. I’m made for holding the government to account. I’m made for ideals and dissent. I’m not made for government.’
‘But we’re doing good work together, Nick,’ I told him, from my seat on the edge of his desk, companionable and informal.
Nick laughed a little laugh, scrubbed at his eyes. ‘I don’t know. Are we?’
‘You keep the Liberal in this Liberal Conservative government,’ I said, smiling at him. ‘There are countless policies in place right now that wouldn’t be here without you.’
He sighed, the long line of his jawline flinching. ‘Sometimes I think you just throw me a bone now and then, to keep me following you about and doing your bidding. I’m your lapdog.’
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, keeping his own fixed on his hands. ‘After the referendum, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep the coalition together. The rebels are getting stronger all the time, while I lose power by the day. Soon I won’t have any authority left.’ He smiled, a bitter twist in his beautiful face. ‘It’s not like I’ve ever been able to make any real difference.’
‘You make a real difference,’ I said quietly, and waited until he looked at me to continue. ‘And you are not my lapdog. You mean more to me than that. A lot more.’
Nick was exhausted, but he was not stupid. Nick was never stupid. ‘Are you…’ he asked, trailing off. His eyes were wide.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m attracted to you, and I have been for some time. I like you, and I don’t like the way the media and the public have been treating you recently. If you’ll let me, I’ll do my best to give you and your Lib Dems more real victories.’ I tried to keep my tone light, holding his eyes. ‘With some high-profile victories over the hated Tories, you should be able to keep your troops in line.’
Nick was biting his lip. ‘Is that offer contingent on the earlier one?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I would never force someone into a relationship. Even if you’re not interested, I’ll still do what I can.’ I laughed. ‘It’s for my own best interest, keeping the coalition together, after all.’
Nick looked into my eyes, and seemed to see the truth there. He took a deep breath, while I held my own – then smiled. ‘All right,” he said, and reached out his hand.
I met it with my own. It was there, with our linked hands, Nick looking down at them, colour flooding back into his grey cheeks at last, me looking down at Nick, with a thrill of nervous excitement running through me – that we began.
~//~
Four years. Four years that Nick’s smiles were mine, that Nick’s blushes were mine, that Nick’s secrets were mine. Four years that I knew the shape of his spine, the sound of his step, the whisper of his lips.
You want to know the truth of those years? You can never.
There was love, and that was enough.
~//~
I kept my promise to Nick. The conspiracy theories about me throwing the referendum are, in fact, true: I knew before getting on that stage that I was going to ‘accidentally’ leave my microphone on. As it happened, even my ‘help’ was barely enough; but it was, and Nick’s face looked a little less lined.
Apart from that, however, all of my endeavours on Nick’s behalf were strictly honest, I give my word. It helped that the economy finally began to climb again, which I strongly believe was due to our courageous and desperately-needed cuts; with more people in work, public discontent began to fall, slowly but surely. It also helped that I was at last able to convince Nick to get a professional spin doctor: idealism was all well and good, but credible politicians need spin doctors, or they quickly stop being credible.
You can find the rest of the political story of those four years elsewhere. This is not a story of the politics; this is a story of Nick.
We called the election for May of 2015. It was going to be a hard-fought battle – despite our gains, Labour and the Conservatives were running almost even. With AV in place, it looked as if Nick was once again going to hold the balance.
I felt a little guilty, watching Ed Miliband trying to woo Nick away from me. I had a secret advantage, one that Ed could never hope to guess.
Nick wasn’t leaving me.
~//~
I remember exactly where I was when the head of my security burst in to the room. I was locking up my private safe, where I kept my personal diary. Only in the pages of that diary did I feel safe confiding the truth about Nick; only there did I feel safe being myself.
The head of my security burst into the room without knocking. She had never done that before.
I knew before I turned around.
‘Nick Clegg’s been murdered,’ she said, breathing hard, too urgent to be gentle. And she did not know she needed to be gentle.
I reached out to a chair, holding myself upright with a white-knuckled grip.
‘It looks like a mugging gone wrong, but we’re investigating to make sure there is no threat to you,’ she said. ‘We have to ask you not to leave the building until we finish our preliminary investigation.’
‘The press,’ I managed to get out.
She winced. ‘They’re already outside. Two drug dealers discovered the body, and went straight to them.’
She left. As if in a dream, I called for my assistant. I knew what I had to do.
~//~
When security declared it safe for me to make a statement outside of 10 Downing Street, it was still morning. It felt like it had been an age and an age.
I stepped outside into the morning sunshine. There were more security personnel than reporters.
I blinked up into the sun, already feeling the tears beginning to prick at my eyes. If Nick had been there, he would have smiled at me, given me a little wink to distract me and calm me down.
‘I have a statement,’ I said. I had no notes. I needed no notes.
‘This morning, Britain mourns the loss of a great man,’ I began. ‘Nick Clegg has been cruelly and viciously murdered, and his killers will be brought to justice. I call on anyone who has any information to contact the police immediately.’
I cleared my throat, swallowed. Nick, wherever you are..., I thought, but could not go on. ‘The nation mourns the loss of a great man,’ I repeated, and swallowed again. As if from far away, I heard the click of the cameras, and knew this moment would be one for the history books. ‘I mourn the loss of the man I loved.’
finis
David Cameron was the former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2010-2020, 2023-2027, 2038-2041). The “Grand Old Man” of the Conservative Party lived in retirement in Berkshire with his wife, Samantha, until his death earlier this year. He is survived by Samantha, two of their four children (the former Foreign Secretary, Florence Cameron-Davies, and the playwright Sir Elwen Cameron), eight grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
Nick Clegg was murdered in April 2015. His murderers were never brought to justice.
~//~
September, 2090
Truth
by David Cameron
edited by Victoria Robinson
Editor’s Note:
My grandfather asked me to come see him, a month before he died. He was a frail old man by then, but his eyes still sparkled with the humour and fire that had caused so many Labour leaders to quail over the years. His wife, my grandmother Samantha, tucked his blanket around him, kissed him on the forehead, and left us together.
After some initial conversation – I was seeing an incredibly ugly young man who happened to be a Welsh Nationalist, which amused my grandfather to no end – he cleared his throat. ‘Victoria,’ he said, ‘I’ll be dead before long, and I have a very important favour to ask of you.’
‘Of course,’ I said, feeling thrilled. I loved him, and he’d always been the best of grandfathers, but sometimes it did dawn upon one that he was David Cameron, after all. To be asked to do him a favour felt quite important indeed.
He drew out a large journal from the side of his wheelchair. It was old, and looked as if it would like to fall apart; it had been lovingly patched and put back together. ‘This is my personal diary,’ Grandfather said, looking at me earnestly. His eyes were still as mesmerising as ever.
I think I made an impressed exclamation of some sort, and flipped my ridiculous Fifties hairstyle for emphasis. I was not a particularly articulate young woman.
‘I want it to be published,’ he continued. ‘And I want you to publish it for me.’
‘Erm,’ I said, chewing on a finger. ‘I don’t know much about publishing things. Wouldn’t Uncle Elwen be better at it? He knows everyone and everything.’
Grandfather chuckled. ‘Perhaps. But your Uncle Elwen will most likely be dead when it comes time for this to be published.’
I took my finger out of my mouth and stared at him.
‘You see, there are some very personal things in this diary,’ he said, speaking slowly, tracing the design on the cover. ‘It can’t be published until everyone in it is dead.’
‘Oh,’ I said, intelligently. I thought for a moment. ‘It...’ We all knew not to mention him around Grandfather. But I thought I might have to. ‘Does it...is it about him?’
‘Yes,’ Grandfather said, and his smile was strange and far away. ‘It’s about Nick.’
Before I left that day, I’d promised the following: to take charge of the diary when Grandfather died, to look at a list Grandfather would put in the front of who was in it, to put it safely away until everyone on that list was dead, and then - once they were all dead - to open it once more, read it, and publish it.
I had to promise twice, quite solemnly, not to change a word of it.
The last person on the list died last year. In the intervening thirty-four years, I’d grown up quite a bit. I’d dumped the Welsh Nationalist, dated a series of equally astonishing boyfriends, and finally settled down with a boring accountant in the Midlands and had two children, one of whom I named David after my grandfather. I even have a better haircut these days.
Growing up had taught me some things, and as I took the diary out of its box, heavy with the dust, I knew enough of life to suspect that there might be things in it that I would find difficult to accept. I had learned enough to remember the strange light in my grandfather’s eyes with an edge of misgiving. I told myself it was just my grandfather’s age, that he had simply gone a little potty in his twilight years, but I think I knew even then that I was deceiving myself.
When I finished reading the diary, I thought about destroying it, about having a merry little bonfire and leaving the past in the past. My grandfather was dead, and everyone in the diary’s pages was dead – what would be the harm?
But I thought about what I had read, and I thought about how my grandfather had looked at me – that eccentric young woman with the flyaway hairstyle and the barmy Welsh boyfriend – and I knew that I couldn’t break my promise to him. He had asked me to publish it, and I knew why he had...
Here, then, is my grandfather’s final truth.
~//~
page 295
13 April 2015
Nick came to me tonight. I knew before he opened his mouth. I always know.
He looked so beautiful. I wanted to capture the moment, so perfect. Such a Liberal Democrat, my Nick. The belief and the determination made his eyes shine, his step bounce, his whole body radiate confidence and pride.
‘I have to tell you something,’ he said quietly, and even his voice sounded happy.
I leaned back in my chair and looked up at him. So beautiful. If only he could look this way for me. If only he was not my caged bird – listless but mine inside the cage, beautiful but not mine outside it.
‘You’re going to choose Ed,’ I said, keeping my voice level. ‘You’re going to choose Labour.’
He wouldn’t look at me. He never had been able to look at me. ‘I know it’s the deal we made,’ he said. ‘You let us push more of our policies through, I let you...I stay with you.’
‘We never had a deal like that,’ I said, letting a little warning into my tone.
He laughed. ‘You never would say it out loud.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Look, David, it’s worked for both of us for four years. You’ve held up your end, and I hope...’ He flushed. ‘I hope you’d agree that I’ve held up mine.’
‘But now you want to break it.’ He couldn’t see the way my hand had curled around my pen, holding it so tightly that the end stabbed into my palm, nearly puncturing skin.
‘End it, not break it,’ Nick, my Nick, said. ‘I think it’s run its course. My party can do more with Labour.’
‘That’s all that matters?’ I asked.
He still wouldn’t look at me.
‘I love you,’ I said.
I’d never said it before. I’d known it would get the reaction it did. He flinched backward, his beautiful face contorting, his eyes shutting in protest.
There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t mean it. I know my Nick. I’ve watched him for six years, loved him for five, slept with him for four. I know every expression on his face, every look in his eyes, every fleeting thought that chases itself across that mobile brow.
‘Nick, I’m asking you – I’m begging you – to stay,’ I said, stiffly. I had to try, one last time. He had to know the truth. ‘I love you, Nick. I can’t, I won’t, see you go to Labour.’
‘I’m sorry, David,’ he said again, and perhaps he meant it that time.
He left.
I made the call.
14 April 2015
It’s over.
I’m surprised no one has found him yet.
They’ll be here to tell me any moment.
I can’t go on.
I must go on.
For his sake.
I loved him.
God, I loved him.
A/N: Comments are very much loved (and anon commenting is on), but never required. I would love to hear what you thought about this one in particular, though! <33
Ship(s): David Cameron/Nick Clegg
Word Count: 5,873
Rating: R, for dark themes: character death
Warnings: Character Death
Summary: David Cameron tells the story of how he fell in love with Nick Clegg. For this prompt.
Disclaimer: All works posted on this journal are creative works of fiction, composed of fictional characters inspired by the public personas of living people. No injury or disrespect is intended to the persons named. If you are one of the persons named in these stories, or if you know one of them personally, please bear in mind that stories such as these are written for entertainment value only, in full knowledge that they are not based in truth, and that ultimately they are a labor of love. Also, if you are one of these people, stop playing on the Internet and go run the country.
A Love Story
May, 2056
During his lifetime, the late David Cameron famously refused to discuss his relationship with Nick Clegg. I approached him last year, shortly before the fortieth anniversary of the Downing Street Statement, to ask him if he would be willing to break his silence. He chuckled, in his gentle way, and set down his paintbrush. ‘I’ve written something already,’ he said. ‘My solicitors will send it to you once I’m dead.’ I tried to convince him to publish it for the anniversary, but the Grand Old Man would not be moved. ‘No,’ he said, and smiled, patting my hand. ‘History can treat us how it will, but let it wait until I’m dead.’ He looked up into the Berkshire sunset he’d been painting. ‘It won’t be long now.’
The following is presented unedited.
A Love Story
by David Cameron
The truth.
‘Tell us the truth, Prime Minister!’ a young man calls, outside a Tube station. An old woman sees me, and her face spasms in distaste. Another old woman offers me what she must mean as a comforting smile, but all I can see are fangs, crooked teeth baring themselves at me. A businessman stares, and I feel the condemnation in his eyes; it is my fault, all of it is my fault. A young woman approaches me, giggling. ‘I have to ask – who topped?’ A politician I once counted as a friend refuses to speak to me for four months, corresponding through assistants and emails. Other friends, non-politicians, simply disappear. A young man comes to see me in surgery, and bursts out in tears as soon as he shakes my hand. He spits profanities at me, and is dragged out by security as I watch through a sudden blurriness. My office receives death threats, conspiracy theories, wild accusations that call me everything from a pervert to a homewrecker to a murderer to a Tory whore to an unethical autocratic bastard; after being in power for nearly five years, such accusations are hardly new, but their number is.
A little girl at my daughter’s primary school looks up at me thoughtfully, chewing on her finger. ‘Prime Minister,’ she says, ‘did you really love him?’
Those first few months are hell. Everyone wants different truths. Everyone wants to know what happened during my first term as Prime Minister. Everyone wants to know the sensational, soul-baring details of my four-year relationship with Nick Clegg. Everyone wants pieces of me, of Nick, of us, and I will not give those pieces up.
I have given them a statement, the statement which started it all. That is all the truth that I can – that I will – give. They have no right to the rest. It is mine, and it is Nick’s, and most importantly, it is ours.
What is truth? There are truths, and there are truths. My truth cannot be the same as Nick’s truth, and Nick’s truth cannot be the same as those of the murderers who slit his throat, who left him to die in a back alley, alone and afraid.
What is truth? That I loved him; that he meant more to me than I had believed possible; that my day began with Nick, lived with Nick, ended with Nick; that my eyes could not keep away from the wry set of his mouth, the curve of his ear, the expansive gestures of his hands; that every time I said his name, it felt like a kiss; that he made me believe in soul-mates. These are some of my truths, but they are mine, and they are personal – they belong to no one but me.
I refuse to answer. I cannot give them what they want, I cannot give them the truth.
For nearly forty years, I keep my silence. They have my statement; they have the images of me weeping in Miriam’s arms at the memorial service. They have the spurious recollections of countless interns and anonymous sources. They have the lurid details of the never-ending, never-closed murder investigations. They have the pictures of us together, during those years when he was Nick, and not a fading memory; for the rest of my political career, I never learn to stop flinching at the sight of one of those pictures, ghostly hand reaching out to touch me.
After forty years, I come now to the end. That ghostly hand is nearer - any moment, I may reach out and grasp it. Nick did not believe in heaven, nor did he believe in hell; it is too much to ask that I might join him in either place.
What is truth? In the end, Nick is truth to me: truth embodied, truth personified. As a last gift to him, then – the only gift I can give him now – I will try to tell our story, for the first and last time.
In telling this story, I draw on my memory and on my personal diary. The former is, while a little blurred with age, surprisingly sharp and agile for a man of eighty-nine, according to my doctors. The latter has never been included in any of my memoirs or my published works, and will upon my death be entrusted to the stewardship of my granddaughter Victoria Robinson. I have asked her to publish it in full, without censorship, after all who appear in its pages have died.
I cannot speak to this story’s truth, but I can speak to its love.
~//~
A truth I don’t know: the moment I first fell in love with Nick. It happened gradually, and the first decade of the twenty-first century was not as open a world as today’s. Attitudes were changing, but male politicians falling in love with each other was still a topic for comedians, sketch artists, and Internet forums; it just wasn’t something that was publically acknowledged or discussed. It happened, but it was not seen to happen. Because of this atmosphere, I had to confront a certain internalised fear – fear of the unknown, certainly, but also the more prosaic fears of being outed, of having my career destroyed and my good name rubbished. Before I could acknowledge my feelings for Nick, I had to wrestle with these fears and to make the decision to push past them: I had to make the decision to allow myself to love.
Love, of course, was already there, however unacknowledged. I can’t be sure of the exact moment it first appeared, but I know the moment I was first aware of it. I am a proud grandfather and great-grandfather, which means that years of bedtime stories have taught me my fairy tales. In those fairy tales, there is so often that quiet moment of perfect clarity, when the prince and the princess meet each other’s eyes, time stops, and they are suddenly, irrevocably, in love. All that remains is getting to their happily ever after.
It didn’t happen that way with Nick. There was a moment, certainly, but time didn’t stop, my prince didn’t fall in love with me, and no fairy godmother was changing the colour of my tie. And in the end, most cruelly, we never got our happily ever after.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I first noticed Nick for wholly superficial reasons. People forget how beautiful he was when he stood up and argued for what he believed in. He was never the most suave or polished of speakers, but that was part of his charm - Nick could make you believe that he meant what he said. It was a rare skill to find in a politician, then as now, and it was made possible by the fact that he truly believed what he was arguing. (This was before the difficulties of governance, of course, when people lost faith in Nick and the Liberal Democrats, and when some argue that they lost faith in themselves; but that part of the story is yet to come.) I used to watch Nick at PMQs, after I’d run through my own lot of questions. He was young and fit, and he had fire, a fire that appealed to me on a political as well as a physical level. I’d begun to feel overmanaged and underinspired, which alarmed me, and the new leader of the Liberal Democrats was neither. All in all, he was beautiful.
Nick, of course, had little time for me. At first, I was one of the enemies, and his schedule was dominated by his plans to reinvent and reinvigorate the Liberal Democrats. I hadn’t yet come around to acknowledging the fact that I was attracted to him, but I did know that I had an odd desire to spend time with him. I invited him to play tennis, but he was engaged; I offered to have him and Miriam over to dinner, but he had a previous commitment.
So it went during those strange twilight years of New Labour. Brown led the increasingly restive, disillusioned, intellectually bankrupt Labour ranks – forgive me, my politics are showing - while Nick and I circled, smelling blood, waiting our turn. Nick focussed on reinventing and rallying his party, and I tried to focus on my own, while simultaneously fighting an increasingly difficult battle with my attraction to Nick.
In the 2010 election campaign, I watched as Nick became a celebrity overnight. “I agree with Nick” was the slogan, not just among young people and idealists – the traditional strengths of the Liberal Democrats – but throughout the country. With Labour collapsing, the election had been mine to lose, and now it looked like Nick was going to shoulder his way in and deny us an outright majority. He was everywhere, and everywhere loved.
Election day was not as kind to us as we had each hoped it would be. While Nick was indeed kingmaker, his party did not achieve the landmark advance that had seemed possible for a dazzling moment, instead settling for the usual distant third. Meanwhile, my Conservatives had failed to gain a majority, and whether I would be called to form a government now depended entirely on Nick’s choices. I won’t deny that I was upset. While the results were somewhat expected – after Nick’s game-changing performance in the first debate, we had been playing to catch up ever since - they were nonetheless galling, and I was irrationally angry with Nick for placing me in such a position.
It was under these circumstances that I met with Nick at Admiralty House on 8 May. I was still upset, although we were cautiously optimistic about the negotiations and the possibility of a deal. Nick and I talked for over an hour that night, and by the end I was no longer cautiously optimistic. I knew I was the next Prime Minister, and what’s more, I knew that I was in love with the man who would be the next Deputy Prime Minister.
That sounds, as my granddaughter Margaret would say, absolute feckle. It is, however, the truth. In that hour, I faced the realisation that I had become physically, intellectually, and romantically attracted to Nick, and that I had developed a fascination with him that I found difficult to resist. During that same meeting, Nick decided that I could be trusted, and that the best position for the Liberal Democrats was in a coalition government at our side. It wasn’t quite a fairy-tale moment, but in many ways it does mark the beginning of our personal fairy-tale.
As this piece will be published after my death, I see no need to conceal the fact that I behaved like the simplest love-struck schoolboy over the course of the following weeks. Nick was beautiful; when he spoke, the angels sang; every idea of his was sunshine and roses. Because of Nick’s decision to give his party’s support to mine, we were launched upon governance, and we immediately began to remedy the worst abuses of the Brown years, those abuses which we had both attacked for so long. We were a true team, and despite the difficult political decisions which we had to take, I had never been so energised or fulfilled.
I should not make it seem as if my entire attention was on my newly discovered love for Nick. As yet, that love was unspoken and unrequited; indeed, Nick seemed uncomfortable with the constant media innuendo surrounding our political relationship, and, as a result, with me. For the moment, then, I contented myself with admiring Nick from afar, and devoted the majority of my energies to solving the long-term and immediate problems confronting our country. With Nick at my side, we began to cut the deficit, build the Big Society, and reform the abuses of thirteen years of Labour governance.
The political story of the next four years has been told elsewhere, including in my own memoirs, to which this personal story forms a belated coda. Suffice it to say that our political honeymoon did not last forever. From 2011 on, our first term in office was an increasingly difficult one. Tuition fees, the Libyan massacres, the Lansley intern scandal - all paled next to the cold reality of unemployment rises and a persistently sluggish economy. Thirteen years of Labour had left the country a poisoned chalice, and we spent the entirety of our waking hours attempting to find an antidote.
Nick suffered the most of any of us. It takes a certain backbone to be a Tory, to know that millions of your countrymen despise you for a baby-killer and a class warrior, and you learn that backbone early on. By the time I had been a MP for a year, I had been shouted at, spat upon, threatened with death and dismemberment, and been made the object of countless heart-rending pleas. In such an environment, one either gives in and drops out of politics, or develops a thicker skin. I chose the latter course: I believed that our policies were healthier for the nation, and I felt strongly that Labour’s reckless spending threatened to bring down the economy (as indeed it then did). I grew a thicker skin and learned to defend myself, learned to go on the attack for Tory policies and to see past immediate emotional appeals, to the structural problems which needed to be solved.
When resistance to coalition policies began in earnest, I was thus armed by both belief and experience, and I was able to withstand the emotional pressure of public fury and hold fast to my colours. Nick had no such protection. He was the charismatic, idealistic leader of a charismatic, idealistic party, and his sole experience with nationwide fame had been the spontaneous popularity and affection showered upon him during the election campaign. He had been celebrated as that rare unicorn, a truth-speaking politician, and in the wake of the election he was set up as the kingmaker of a new coalition era.
Any Tory could have told him that he was doomed to fail, that it was only a matter of time before the sunny idealists of the Liberal Democrats came in for a share of the vitriol heretofore directed at us. But in the softly-lit days of the rose garden, we kept our mouths shut, attempting to establish the coalition as firmly as possible before the deluge. It gained us nothing to warn them. And perhaps even we - in some hidden corner of our cynical souls - dared to dream that this time, this time it might be different.
It was not. When the vitriol came, Nick was unprepared and unprotected. In many ways, the attacks were even worse than those to which we Tories had so long been accustomed: this was personal, in a shockingly vengeful manner. The people tore down what the people had raised up. I watched as, day by day, Nick turned into a grey shadow of his former self. The charm faded into a weariness, an almost-tangible weight pulling him down, like Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress. The part of me that loved him wished that I could free him from that burden; the part of me that led my Party saw it as an advantage, having a face for the cuts that was not my own.
I tried to balance the two competing impulses by working as closely with Nick as I could. Some people within my own party saw it as odd, how close a team we became; I know that some of my closest political friends were hurt by how their own counsel was eclipsed by Nick’s. Nick himself saw it as odd at first. He kept asking me, with a little wry twist to his mouth, if we weren’t rather more close than a Tory and a Liberal Democrat rightly ought to be. “We’ll have nothing to disagree about in the bloody debates!” he used to say, long before they caught him saying it on microphone.
I didn’t care. I told myself that I didn’t care for purely political reasons – that the coalition worked best when the two of us were in agreement, that our ministers were calmer when mum and dad refrained from shouting at each other, and that the more closely Nick could be identified with our policies, the more useful he was a human shield.
The truth was that I wanted him close for more than political reasons.
~//~
Day by day, Nick faded. I had seen politicians watch their careers die before; most grew sharper throughout the process, their tongues cutting flesh from their unfortunate underlings, their eyes ever more mistrustful, their set of their shoulders increasingly desperate. Nick did not. He simply faded. His usual buoyant charm became muted, his laugh quiet and exhausted (when it came at all), his gait dogged and dutiful. He had promised both me and the country that he would do his best to solve the difficult issues now before us, and if there was ever a truth about Nick, it is that he took his promises seriously.
It is probably not surprising, then, that it was tuition fees that first started to break him down. The hatred hurt – I watched him through the crack in his office door, as he watched the coverage of the protests, and I saw the pain and self-loathing in his eyes. It was the sense of personal failure, of having betrayed a promise, which first started to make him feel as if he was no longer quite the same Nick Clegg as before the election. He’d never had to make pragmatic decisions before, never had to give up something he’d believed in.
I tried to help. As things got worse, he began to become more receptive to my overtures. In a world where everyone hated him, I think he initially just welcomed the comfort of somewhere where he was understood, somewhere where nobody was judging him. We began to eat together at least once a week in the office. We played a game of tennis; I tried to let him win, but it’s difficult to throw tennis convincingly. He was slow and tired, and his heart wasn’t in it. Samantha and I had him and Miriam over to dinner; he nearly fell asleep, and Samantha told me afterward that I had to stop working him so hard.
The truth was that it wasn’t me. He was doing it to himself. As the coalition came under ever more pressure, he felt as if he needed to be everywhere, shoring up the gaps in the dikes, like the little Dutch boy in the story. I kept as close an eye on him as I could, but I felt as if I was losing him, despite my best efforts.
And then one night, it all changed.
I was leaving my office for the evening. It was late – I had recently returned from an overseas trip, and I had been catching up on some work – and the building was largely deserted. I sent my assistant home, and walked over to Nick’s office, as was my custom before going upstairs to the flat for the night. The door to Nick’s office was slightly open, and I could see Nick inside, sitting at his newspaper-strewn desk, his head in his hands.
I knocked quietly, then pushed the door open, giving Nick no time to tidy up. ‘Nick,’ I said.
I had to push, but eventually he admitted that the constant struggle was taking its toll on him. ‘I’m not made for this kind of politics,’ I remember him saying, the edge of exhaustion in his voice. ‘I’m made for Opposition. I’m made for holding the government to account. I’m made for ideals and dissent. I’m not made for government.’
‘But we’re doing good work together, Nick,’ I told him, from my seat on the edge of his desk, companionable and informal.
Nick laughed a little laugh, scrubbed at his eyes. ‘I don’t know. Are we?’
‘You keep the Liberal in this Liberal Conservative government,’ I said, smiling at him. ‘There are countless policies in place right now that wouldn’t be here without you.’
He sighed, the long line of his jawline flinching. ‘Sometimes I think you just throw me a bone now and then, to keep me following you about and doing your bidding. I’m your lapdog.’
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, keeping his own fixed on his hands. ‘After the referendum, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep the coalition together. The rebels are getting stronger all the time, while I lose power by the day. Soon I won’t have any authority left.’ He smiled, a bitter twist in his beautiful face. ‘It’s not like I’ve ever been able to make any real difference.’
‘You make a real difference,’ I said quietly, and waited until he looked at me to continue. ‘And you are not my lapdog. You mean more to me than that. A lot more.’
Nick was exhausted, but he was not stupid. Nick was never stupid. ‘Are you…’ he asked, trailing off. His eyes were wide.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m attracted to you, and I have been for some time. I like you, and I don’t like the way the media and the public have been treating you recently. If you’ll let me, I’ll do my best to give you and your Lib Dems more real victories.’ I tried to keep my tone light, holding his eyes. ‘With some high-profile victories over the hated Tories, you should be able to keep your troops in line.’
Nick was biting his lip. ‘Is that offer contingent on the earlier one?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I would never force someone into a relationship. Even if you’re not interested, I’ll still do what I can.’ I laughed. ‘It’s for my own best interest, keeping the coalition together, after all.’
Nick looked into my eyes, and seemed to see the truth there. He took a deep breath, while I held my own – then smiled. ‘All right,” he said, and reached out his hand.
I met it with my own. It was there, with our linked hands, Nick looking down at them, colour flooding back into his grey cheeks at last, me looking down at Nick, with a thrill of nervous excitement running through me – that we began.
~//~
Four years. Four years that Nick’s smiles were mine, that Nick’s blushes were mine, that Nick’s secrets were mine. Four years that I knew the shape of his spine, the sound of his step, the whisper of his lips.
You want to know the truth of those years? You can never.
There was love, and that was enough.
~//~
I kept my promise to Nick. The conspiracy theories about me throwing the referendum are, in fact, true: I knew before getting on that stage that I was going to ‘accidentally’ leave my microphone on. As it happened, even my ‘help’ was barely enough; but it was, and Nick’s face looked a little less lined.
Apart from that, however, all of my endeavours on Nick’s behalf were strictly honest, I give my word. It helped that the economy finally began to climb again, which I strongly believe was due to our courageous and desperately-needed cuts; with more people in work, public discontent began to fall, slowly but surely. It also helped that I was at last able to convince Nick to get a professional spin doctor: idealism was all well and good, but credible politicians need spin doctors, or they quickly stop being credible.
You can find the rest of the political story of those four years elsewhere. This is not a story of the politics; this is a story of Nick.
We called the election for May of 2015. It was going to be a hard-fought battle – despite our gains, Labour and the Conservatives were running almost even. With AV in place, it looked as if Nick was once again going to hold the balance.
I felt a little guilty, watching Ed Miliband trying to woo Nick away from me. I had a secret advantage, one that Ed could never hope to guess.
Nick wasn’t leaving me.
~//~
I remember exactly where I was when the head of my security burst in to the room. I was locking up my private safe, where I kept my personal diary. Only in the pages of that diary did I feel safe confiding the truth about Nick; only there did I feel safe being myself.
The head of my security burst into the room without knocking. She had never done that before.
I knew before I turned around.
‘Nick Clegg’s been murdered,’ she said, breathing hard, too urgent to be gentle. And she did not know she needed to be gentle.
I reached out to a chair, holding myself upright with a white-knuckled grip.
‘It looks like a mugging gone wrong, but we’re investigating to make sure there is no threat to you,’ she said. ‘We have to ask you not to leave the building until we finish our preliminary investigation.’
‘The press,’ I managed to get out.
She winced. ‘They’re already outside. Two drug dealers discovered the body, and went straight to them.’
She left. As if in a dream, I called for my assistant. I knew what I had to do.
~//~
When security declared it safe for me to make a statement outside of 10 Downing Street, it was still morning. It felt like it had been an age and an age.
I stepped outside into the morning sunshine. There were more security personnel than reporters.
I blinked up into the sun, already feeling the tears beginning to prick at my eyes. If Nick had been there, he would have smiled at me, given me a little wink to distract me and calm me down.
‘I have a statement,’ I said. I had no notes. I needed no notes.
‘This morning, Britain mourns the loss of a great man,’ I began. ‘Nick Clegg has been cruelly and viciously murdered, and his killers will be brought to justice. I call on anyone who has any information to contact the police immediately.’
I cleared my throat, swallowed. Nick, wherever you are..., I thought, but could not go on. ‘The nation mourns the loss of a great man,’ I repeated, and swallowed again. As if from far away, I heard the click of the cameras, and knew this moment would be one for the history books. ‘I mourn the loss of the man I loved.’
finis
David Cameron was the former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2010-2020, 2023-2027, 2038-2041). The “Grand Old Man” of the Conservative Party lived in retirement in Berkshire with his wife, Samantha, until his death earlier this year. He is survived by Samantha, two of their four children (the former Foreign Secretary, Florence Cameron-Davies, and the playwright Sir Elwen Cameron), eight grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
Nick Clegg was murdered in April 2015. His murderers were never brought to justice.
~//~
September, 2090
Truth
by David Cameron
edited by Victoria Robinson
Editor’s Note:
My grandfather asked me to come see him, a month before he died. He was a frail old man by then, but his eyes still sparkled with the humour and fire that had caused so many Labour leaders to quail over the years. His wife, my grandmother Samantha, tucked his blanket around him, kissed him on the forehead, and left us together.
After some initial conversation – I was seeing an incredibly ugly young man who happened to be a Welsh Nationalist, which amused my grandfather to no end – he cleared his throat. ‘Victoria,’ he said, ‘I’ll be dead before long, and I have a very important favour to ask of you.’
‘Of course,’ I said, feeling thrilled. I loved him, and he’d always been the best of grandfathers, but sometimes it did dawn upon one that he was David Cameron, after all. To be asked to do him a favour felt quite important indeed.
He drew out a large journal from the side of his wheelchair. It was old, and looked as if it would like to fall apart; it had been lovingly patched and put back together. ‘This is my personal diary,’ Grandfather said, looking at me earnestly. His eyes were still as mesmerising as ever.
I think I made an impressed exclamation of some sort, and flipped my ridiculous Fifties hairstyle for emphasis. I was not a particularly articulate young woman.
‘I want it to be published,’ he continued. ‘And I want you to publish it for me.’
‘Erm,’ I said, chewing on a finger. ‘I don’t know much about publishing things. Wouldn’t Uncle Elwen be better at it? He knows everyone and everything.’
Grandfather chuckled. ‘Perhaps. But your Uncle Elwen will most likely be dead when it comes time for this to be published.’
I took my finger out of my mouth and stared at him.
‘You see, there are some very personal things in this diary,’ he said, speaking slowly, tracing the design on the cover. ‘It can’t be published until everyone in it is dead.’
‘Oh,’ I said, intelligently. I thought for a moment. ‘It...’ We all knew not to mention him around Grandfather. But I thought I might have to. ‘Does it...is it about him?’
‘Yes,’ Grandfather said, and his smile was strange and far away. ‘It’s about Nick.’
Before I left that day, I’d promised the following: to take charge of the diary when Grandfather died, to look at a list Grandfather would put in the front of who was in it, to put it safely away until everyone on that list was dead, and then - once they were all dead - to open it once more, read it, and publish it.
I had to promise twice, quite solemnly, not to change a word of it.
The last person on the list died last year. In the intervening thirty-four years, I’d grown up quite a bit. I’d dumped the Welsh Nationalist, dated a series of equally astonishing boyfriends, and finally settled down with a boring accountant in the Midlands and had two children, one of whom I named David after my grandfather. I even have a better haircut these days.
Growing up had taught me some things, and as I took the diary out of its box, heavy with the dust, I knew enough of life to suspect that there might be things in it that I would find difficult to accept. I had learned enough to remember the strange light in my grandfather’s eyes with an edge of misgiving. I told myself it was just my grandfather’s age, that he had simply gone a little potty in his twilight years, but I think I knew even then that I was deceiving myself.
When I finished reading the diary, I thought about destroying it, about having a merry little bonfire and leaving the past in the past. My grandfather was dead, and everyone in the diary’s pages was dead – what would be the harm?
But I thought about what I had read, and I thought about how my grandfather had looked at me – that eccentric young woman with the flyaway hairstyle and the barmy Welsh boyfriend – and I knew that I couldn’t break my promise to him. He had asked me to publish it, and I knew why he had...
Here, then, is my grandfather’s final truth.
~//~
page 295
13 April 2015
Nick came to me tonight. I knew before he opened his mouth. I always know.
He looked so beautiful. I wanted to capture the moment, so perfect. Such a Liberal Democrat, my Nick. The belief and the determination made his eyes shine, his step bounce, his whole body radiate confidence and pride.
‘I have to tell you something,’ he said quietly, and even his voice sounded happy.
I leaned back in my chair and looked up at him. So beautiful. If only he could look this way for me. If only he was not my caged bird – listless but mine inside the cage, beautiful but not mine outside it.
‘You’re going to choose Ed,’ I said, keeping my voice level. ‘You’re going to choose Labour.’
He wouldn’t look at me. He never had been able to look at me. ‘I know it’s the deal we made,’ he said. ‘You let us push more of our policies through, I let you...I stay with you.’
‘We never had a deal like that,’ I said, letting a little warning into my tone.
He laughed. ‘You never would say it out loud.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Look, David, it’s worked for both of us for four years. You’ve held up your end, and I hope...’ He flushed. ‘I hope you’d agree that I’ve held up mine.’
‘But now you want to break it.’ He couldn’t see the way my hand had curled around my pen, holding it so tightly that the end stabbed into my palm, nearly puncturing skin.
‘End it, not break it,’ Nick, my Nick, said. ‘I think it’s run its course. My party can do more with Labour.’
‘That’s all that matters?’ I asked.
He still wouldn’t look at me.
‘I love you,’ I said.
I’d never said it before. I’d known it would get the reaction it did. He flinched backward, his beautiful face contorting, his eyes shutting in protest.
There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t mean it. I know my Nick. I’ve watched him for six years, loved him for five, slept with him for four. I know every expression on his face, every look in his eyes, every fleeting thought that chases itself across that mobile brow.
‘Nick, I’m asking you – I’m begging you – to stay,’ I said, stiffly. I had to try, one last time. He had to know the truth. ‘I love you, Nick. I can’t, I won’t, see you go to Labour.’
‘I’m sorry, David,’ he said again, and perhaps he meant it that time.
He left.
I made the call.
14 April 2015
It’s over.
I’m surprised no one has found him yet.
They’ll be here to tell me any moment.
I can’t go on.
I must go on.
For his sake.
I loved him.
God, I loved him.
~//~
What is truth?
There are truths, and there are truths.
My truth cannot be the same as Nick’s truth,
and Nick’s truth cannot be the same
as those of the murderers who slit his throat,
who left him to die in a back alley,
alone and afraid.
What is truth?
That I loved him;
that he meant more to me than I had believed possible;
that my day began with Nick, lived with Nick, ended with Nick;
that my eyes could not keep away from the wry set of his mouth,
the curve of his ear,
the expansive gestures of his hands;
that every time I said his name, it felt like a kiss;
that he made me believe in soul-mates.
These are some of my truths...
What is truth?
In the end, Nick is truth to me:
truth embodied, truth personified...
I cannot speak to this story's truth, but I can speak to its love.
~//~
A/N: Comments are very much loved (and anon commenting is on), but never required. I would love to hear what you thought about this one in particular, though! <33
