Lost in Manchester - 27. Making it Happen. April 2010. Ali

Ali pressed hard on the entrance buzzer for the third time, and pulled out her phone as she waited. She opened a text from Adam wishing her luck for today, then checked her watch. Right now he would be on his way to Shropshire, hunting down his ex-flatmate. She had followed the development of the story closely. He had received nothing back from the letter he sent down to Paul’s mum, so they were taking things into their own hands. Ali would have loved to be there for the moment Paul opened the door, but there was no way Adam would have let her go along.

She pressed for the fourth time on the entrance buzzer. In spite of the apparent evidence, her face remained as expectant of a reply as at the first attempt. A young woman with a pushchair approached the entrance door from the inside of the building, and for the courtesy of holding the door back to let the woman through, she gained access to the lobby.

She zipped up the single flight of stairs to his floor and hammered hard on Thomas’ door. After the third heavy knock, there was no reply but she remained steadfast. She knew he was in there.

A door across the corridor opened, and an older lady with grey beehive hair and a floral purple nightgown peered out, appraising the noise-maker in her hallway.

“Sorry” Ali said quietly, conscious that it was still relatively early on a Saturday morning.

The lady looked across sourly, spotting the door she was waiting outside.

“You’ll be lucky to get anything sensible out of him at this time of the day”. Her voice was brittle and her nose twitched like she sensed an allergy coming on. “He’s become nocturnal”. She said it like she was accusing him of war crimes.

Ali nodded noncommittally, and returned to knocking. Bloody busybodies.

The brittle voice got louder. “He’s becoming quite a hazard”. She was clearly hoping he would hear this. “Last weekend he and his friends clattered their way down the corridor at 3.30 in the morning, waking up half of South Manchester on the way.”

Ali tried to ignore her.

Her voice grew louder still. She was looking straight past Ali, clearly directing the words at Thomas’ door.

“If you ask me, I’d question what a man of his age is doing, prowling the city streets at all hours.”

Ali turned back to her, scowling. What the fuck did she know about his life?

“Well no-one did ask you did they…” her gaze settled on the dressing gown, “...Barney the tossing dinosaur.”

The lady looked taken aback, put a hand to the front of her dressing gown, made an indignant harrumph and disappeared back into her flat.

Thomas’ door opened a crack, and then slowly widened, revealing a cautious smile.

“Barney the dinosaur?”

“It was purple…the dressing gown. Look, don’t start…”

“You know, I just don’t have your knack for witty ripostes.”

She shrugged and stepped past him, “I practice it in the mirror for just such occasions. Anyway, why aren’t you answering your door?”

She slowed as she started to walk through. The air was thick with the odour of single male. “Thom, what the fuck…” she said turning.

“Oh, don’t look in…” he started to say, looking across the hallway, but it only drew her eyes into the bedroom, where a pale, shaggy twentysomething ginger man was sprawled out, asleep on the bed.

She saw his head drop. This was presumably not a regular new guy in his life that he was going to introduce.

The table in the kitchen-lounge was littered with spent beer cans and an empty bottle of whisky. The clutter all around the room made her feel itchy. It looked as though he hadn’t properly cleaned the place in weeks.

Thomas followed her into the lounge and shut the door so as not to waken the sleeping figure.

“We need to go in half an hour” she said plainly, her eyes conveying her disappointment in him.

“Ali, you know what I’m going to say. I already texted you.”

“Yes, and I told you that’s bullshit. I know that you know exactly what you’re going to say to them. So you’re coming. Even if I have to drag you down there.”

He sighed, and his eyes looked like defeat. “Ali, look. I’ve been thinking about things lately. A lot. I don’t know that I’m up to being a politician any more.”

She gave him an unimpressed look.

“After this election I think I’m done. I can’t win. And I don’t even want to any more. I’m not cut out to be a public speaker or a politician. Ten years ago I lived in a kind of bubble of my own making. I thought I could be some kind of hero figure that could help people, but I’m not. And I can’t”.

Ali wanted to slap him out of this depression, talk some sense into him. But this wasn’t the time. She shrugged and crossed her arms.

“I don’t give a shit about all that. I have a University event to run, and you’re on the bill, so you’re coming. Even if you have to stand there and ramble for 30 minutes. I’m not going anywhere without you”.

Thomas’ will was quickly broken and Ali waited downstairs in the car for him to tidy up his affairs. Thom eventually stumbled down, along with the ginger guy who he pecked on the cheek and bade farewell to, before climbing into the car.

Despite everything he said, she still had a strong sense that this was going to work.

With ten minutes to go they were backstage and Ali was straightening Thomas’ tie, and brushing down his suit. She knew she had done a remarkable job making him presentable and getting him into position within about 90 minutes. Her part of the mission was almost done.

Thomas glanced in the mirror at the side of the stage and looked almost surprised at what he saw. He turned back to Ali.

“Thanks” he said, looking her in the eye for the first time that morning.

“Well, you know, your tie was a bit skewiff.”

“No, I mean…” he started, but paused, realising she knew that wasn’t what he had meant.

“You know this will almost certainly be the last speech of my political career” he continued. “I’m glad you made me do it right.”

She smiled and patted his arm. He looked nervous though.

There was a lot of noise coming from the hall out in front of the curtain. She hoped he wasn’t going to freeze up when he saw how many people were here.

“Sounds like there might be a few more out there than I expected” she said.

Thomas turned towards the sound, seeming to register it for the first time.

“Yeah. A handful of students in Greenpeace t-shirts you said?”

She shrugged. “You’re never sure with these things”.

She took a breath. “Ok, I’d better go get us going. You ready?”

He nodded, but didn’t look convinced.

Ali stepped out in front of the crowd of one hundred or so, and the noise in the hall died down. She gave her introductory spiel about the itinerary, fire alarms and thankyous, and then welcomed on stage their main guest speaker of the afternoon, Councillor Thomas Delaney.

She waited for him to make his way across, then headed back to the edge of the stage, just out of sight of the audience. She looked back to centre stage as he prepared himself and looked up to the crowd.

“Good afternoon everybody. My name is Thomas Delaney. From the Liberal Democrats.” He paused as if forgetting his lines. “I’m here to talk to you about climate”.

Ali squeezed her eyes shut at the awkward opening. This wasn’t the same man on stage. She scanned the back of the room for Cameron and spotted him. He had promised if she could just get Thom up there, then he would make sure of the rest.

Cameron had come up with this idea a couple of weeks ago when she mentioned this event to him. Thom was breaking down he told her. Fighting for what he believed in was all he had ever known and done, but his confidence was shot. Cameron was worried he might do something terrible. But he also knew Thom wasn’t going to accept any help from him or from Jenny at the moment. So he hatched this plan.

From the first time she met Thomas at the airport protest, he reminded her of her dad. Something about his passion and his way of seeing the important things that everyone else failed to.

She thought now of an essay she had written for A Level English. It was about a poem by a black writer who was hitting back at racial stereotypes. The poem was intentionally challenging and controversial. It had been so weird reading words like honky and caucazoid in a poem, and in a lesson at school. Her English teacher had made it clear that she didn’t approve of the way this poet was responding to racism. She didn’t feel it was a constructive solution. Ali disagreed though. You couldn’t change the way the cards were stacked without throwing them all up in the air first.

She spent ages trying to figure out how to make this argument in the essay without going completely against her teacher’s views, because she needed a good grade. One evening, she sat down with her dad, stuck as ever in his wheelchair, and talked him through how she was planning to approach it. She would hold back some of her views, but felt she could still say just about enough to make the case she wanted to make. Some of the points she could gloss over to avoid causing an issue with the teacher.

When she was done explaining all of this, he smiled at her, picked up the paper she had written this note on and screwed it up into a ball, tossing it into the bin.

“Darling, sometimes some things are more important than grades. Just tell them what you bloody think.”

She watched Thomas take a nervous breath and glance down at the note she had left for him with a few prompts. He looked concerned.

“So, I’m coming to you from a Liberal Democrat point of view here” he started. “I’m sure you all know that as a party we have a stronger position on the climate than most of our rivals. However, we also recognise that this has to be balanced with other goals to create sustainable and economically successful places”.

He looked across to Ali again. She couldn’t work out why he was toeing the party line. The crowd were getting restless. They wanted a passionate advocate, not a waffling politician. She was down to her last shot. She gestured to him to turn over the sheet of paper with the prompts on. He gave a confused look and turned back to face the room.

Somebody heckled him from the audience and he started trying to defend the party’s position. This was all going wrong. She looked again to Cameron at the back of the room who had one hand on the back of his head and looked nervous as hell. She saw him turn and speak a few concerned looking words to another man beside him, somebody Ali hadn’t seen him with before.

“That’s certainly not our position” Thomas was saying, “but, of course, we do recognise that for the good of the city, we have to balance economic and environmental goals”.

Thomas looked across again to Ali. This time she grabbed a piece of paper, lying on a table next to her and mimed flipping it over to the other side. Finally, Thomas looked down at the note, then up at the dissatisfied audience, and then down again to the note, which he flipped over.

He spent a second looking at it, then glanced up to the clock at the back of the hall, then back to Ali again. She gestured furiously with her eyebrows for him get going and he nodded, finally seeming to acknowledge what she was saying.

Still keeping her gaze, he looked suddenly intense, then he grinned, gave her a wink, stood fully upright and turned back to the audience.

Something had changed. It looked like Thomas might just be back in the room.