Lost in Manchester - 29. Crossroads. April 2010. Thomas

Following Ali’s introduction, Thomas stepped out and saw a full hall before him. There had to be 200 or more people out there. His head was suddenly light and it felt like he was going to trip over with every step he took towards the centre of the stage. He managed to thank Ali, but then experienced a strange wave of panic as she headed back towards the side of the stage. He thought of his mother withdrawing, the first time she gave him a push and left him to glide along on a bike without stabilisers. Ali had left a note on the lectern with a few prompts in case he lost focus, but it wasn’t helping. He tried to focus on the training he’d had years ago. His gaze rested on the clock at the back of the hall. Don’t look at their faces.

He stumbled over an introduction, and there was a nervous silence around the room. He’d given a hundred speeches before, and there was usually more noise than this. He looked down again at the note Ali had left, but couldn’t make sense of where to start.

His mind flashed back to that assembly in Year Nine. Standing proudly in front of everybody in the year group, trying to explain about this new theory that scientists were talking about: the greenhouse effect. But he couldn’t get the words out right, and the boys at the front heckled him the whole way. Then Jamie Nafferton, four rows back shouted out let’s stick Delaney in the greenhouse and the whole assembly bust out laughing. He’d wanted to die.

And here he was again. All those eyes on him, and he couldn’t get the words out. Suddenly all that learning, all that experience he’d gained fell to nothing. This was why he was giving it up.

Thomas tried to gather himself together. He couldn’t go down with such a whimper. He tried to focus on at least being professional about this.

“I’m here today to talk to you about climate” he stated, but his voice was still faltering a little.

What was the party line here? One last shot for the team?

“So I’m coming to you from a Liberal Democrat point of view here...we have a stronger position on the climate than most of our rivals…however this has to be balanced with other goals.”

What am I even saying?

“Like by caving in to the airport developers” a voice shouted from down near the front.

Thomas took a nervous breath, glanced at Ali’s note and then sideways to where she stood at the side of the stage. He saw her gesturing in a circle with her hands. What was she doing?

“That’s certainly not our position” he continued cautiously, “but, of course, we do recognise that for the good of the city, we have to balance economic and environmental goals”. He felt uncomfortable saying the words. But however bad Gordon and Peter were, they would still do more for this agenda than Labour.

He could hear the mutters around the room.

He glanced back at the side of the stage and saw Ali was holding a sheet of paper and miming flipping it over to the other side. He looked down at the note, then up at the dissatisfied audience, and then down again to the note. He flipped it over, and on the back a short note was scrawled.

Just tell them what you bloody think.

He looked up at the clock at the back of the room which revealed only five agonising minutes had passed since he came onto the stage.

He looked back again at Ali, who gestured furiously with her eyebrows for him to get going, grinned at her and returned his gaze to his audience.

“Oh do you know what, sod it” he said, ripping the note in two and throwing it over his shoulder. “Shall I tell you what I really think?”

A few positive sounds came from the floor.

“Look, climate change is basically the biggest booby trap our earth has ever laid for us. And you smart young people here are going to be the leaders of our future, so you are going to get passed this thorny baton, and you will have to run with the task of facing up to the biggest challenge we have faced as a species in all of our history”

A few claps rang round the room.

“Because those massive enchanting glaciers we see floating magnificently at either end of the globe are only glimpses of the scale of our frozen planet. Those bloody giant icebergs floating on our waters only reveal about a tenth of themselves to our above-sea human eyes. Imagine it. As huge as those icebergs you see on TV are, there is another 90% of them lying right beneath the surface. So while your eyes tell you that you’re seeing the full body of a snake coming out of the water, always remember that it isn’t a snake at all, it’s only a hair on the head of a frozen Medusa below”.

His mouth was still dry, but those looked like enraptured eyes around the room now.

“Yes, these floating ice cubes in our overfilled glasses of martini… ”. He walked to the side of the lectern and leaned more casually against it. “…those ice cubes are the biggest threat to life on earth. Because as the room gets warmer, and the ice cubes melt and shrink, drip by drip, so the glass starts to fill and fill, and as the level reaches the rim, it starts to drip on down over the edges, onto our mahogany tables. And as the cubes gradually diminish, millimetre by millimetre and the liquid drains over the edges of the glass, so will the seas over our lands”.

“People, this is what is happening now, and this is what has been happening for 100 years. And 100 years in the future, if the same thing is still happening, then we are going to be facing absolute global catastrophe. And unless my generation, and your generation, and every generation from here on in becomes guardian to this threat, then 200 years from now, our species might not be here at all. This is the scale of the challenge”.

Cheers and claps erupted at every emphatic point.

He took a drink from the glass of water on the lectern.

“Alright, so let me tell you about what my generation has done so far. Let me tell you about broken promises by successive governments, about blundering attempts at global agreements, about smoke and mirrors with energy-intensive industries moving overseas and air travel emissions excluded from calculations, and let me tell you about absolute global failure to meet even basic targets”.

Once he was done and the applause had died down, Thomas pulled up a seat and took questions from the audience.

“So where does it all start? Who acts first to trigger global movement on this?” A man at the front asked.

He took a few seconds to absorb the question.

“Well look, my view has always been that this is too big a problem for any one leader to take on. There’s no time for anyone to wait around for others to start this. Basically, every leader, at every level of government, in every country needs to take this on. Needs to drive our response forward. This is something everyone can be part of. Everyone has to be part of.”

“So how can we make sure our Council is a leader?” somebody asked from the right hand side of the room.

Thomas shrugged. “Look, it’s a great question, and it’s a question every person here should ask their election candidates. If I was running the Council, I can tell you it would be the uppermost question in my head”.

He paused for a few seconds, checking himself. This was all big talk. He had always been good at big talk. But it was all pointless, because he couldn’t deliver on it. He had failed at being a politician.

“Look, I’m sure you’re all aware the Liberal Democrats are already a minority party in the Council and, well…” he paused again, trying to find an acceptable way to say the words, “…look, to be honest, if forecasts are to be believed, it might be even smaller again in two weeks’ time.”

A few grumbles sounded around the room.

“Look, I’m on your side here. I want this to be number one priority. But I think it’s unlikely that I’m going to be the man to lead this.”

“Why not?” another voice shouted up.

“So you’re passing the buck too?” came another.

Thomas stood up. “I’m not passing the buck. But I’m currently in a very unsafe seat. I might not even be a local councillor in two weeks’ time. I don’t think I’m the right person at the right time for this fight”.

He looked across again at Ali who seemed disappointed. But she didn’t understand. She was sold on the big talk like everyone else, but she didn’t get that he wasn’t the man to deliver on it.

“You sounded pretty good just now” a girl shouted up from front left.

He smiled, and picked up the glass of water, but realised it was empty and put it back down again. His mouth was dry.

“Well, look you’re very kind, but I don’t think I’m the leader you need here.” He looked across to the side of the stage for Ali to come and rescue him.

“Oh yes you are” roared a Lancashire voice from the back.

Thomas walked back round to the side of the lectern, and looked up cautiously at the room.

He sighed. “No. Really, I’m not”

The room was alive with belief though. They weren’t going to let him off the hook.

“Oh yes you are” came the collective voice.

What the hell was this?

Thomas smiled. He turned again to Ali at the side of the stage, whose raised eyebrows told him to listen to them.

He turned back to the audience. His face reflected the two minds he was in.

“You actually want me to be the man to fight for this?” Affirmative noises shouted out round the room.

“Am I seriously being pantomimed into action here?”

More cheers.

Ali joined him on stage, the noise continuing around the hall.

“Ladies and gentlemen” she said, above the racket, “thankyou so much to our first speaker, for setting the scene incredibly well for the rest of the day, and for showing us that local politics can be relevant to the things we care about.”

He smiled appreciatively, and properly scanned the crowd for the first time. His gaze stopped on the smiling, applauding figure of Jenny, standing at the back of the room.

What was she doing here?

He looked at Ali who was smiling wide, and it struck him for the first time that there might be a conspiracy afoot.

“Everyone, we’re going to take a short break before our next speaker” Ali told the crowd, “but let me point you to sign-up sheets at the front down here. If you want to get involved in the last two weeks of campaigning ahead of the election, for our city’s best environmental champion, Councillor Thomas Delaney, then sign up, and make sure you show up at the weekend. We need every man, woman and child we can find for this fight.”

The clapping continued and a queue quickly formed behind each of the sign-up sheets.

Ali grabbed Thomas’ hand and pulled him back and off stage, then round and down the side of the hall towards the back.

She was taking him towards Jenny, and Thomas saw now that Cameron was also standing there by her side. The Lancashire voice shouting earlier, he realised now had been Cameron’s. Seeing their warm expressions amongst the buzz in the hall, everything that had passed between them over the last few weeks seemed to evaporate.

Then as he got within a few metres, they turned slightly and somebody else stood up from a chair right behind them. Jenny and Cameron parted to let the figure through.

Thomas stopped dead. At first, for a split second, he didn’t recognise the figure, but then, like a dam bursting, a swell of emotion, memory and history hit him.

Heady nights together, drinking and dancing down Canal Street, kissing and groping everything that moved; lazy summer afternoons lying in Whitworth park with a bottle of prosecco and the world to put right; the way he smelt of swimming that morning he showed up at 8am on the doorstep, weeping into Thomas’ shoulder because useless Jake had broken up with him again; the day his Catholic mother had turned up unexpectedly and Thomas had spent the morning pretending to be a plumber, finding more and more inventive pipe-related problems to resolve, to maintain the charade; that evening preparing for Thomas’ first job interview at that awful architects practice in Stockport, where he insisted on playing the role of interviewer as Liza Minelli. And then that night. That night they were together, in a stranger’s flat with the whole sky of stars up there looking down on them. If his life flashed before his eyes, this man in front of him now would be the first and last image he’d see. Maybe he would be the only image.

Suddenly he couldn’t believe what his recent memories told him about his own life. Who the hell was this whisky-swilling, unshaven depressive, shouting at the walls of his own flat? Who was the shrinking goose, giving up on his career, on politics, on happiness? Suddenly it was five years ago, and his whole world was back, and things made sense again.

He looked into those ocean blue eyes, and that Australian tinged Welsh accent made the hairs on his arms stand up on end.

“And they told me you’d lost your sparkle” Ciaran said, his face lighting up as he opened his arms for the longest and dearest of embraces.