The Outcome III

Mood music

Lorn Macintyre

He can't have slept for days, and in his horn rims
and raincoat looks like a lavatory brush salesman
as he stalks the Tory Shadow in the street mayhem.
Minutes later, he's sitting breathless in the studio,
beside the interrogator. 'What are you hearing, Nick?'
'Mood music' from Number 10. Is it a requiem
for Brown, or The Conquering Hero for Cameron?
The whole of the BBC's apparently in town today,
streets strewn with clichés and cables, the slick
female chief correspondent 'playing hardball'
with the English language. They're snapping up
the scraps thrown to them, spewing them up again.
Cut to the commentator who has nothing to say,
but will say it regardless, because air time
has to be filled, and silence is deemed deadly.
'These negotiations are going to take as long
as they're going to take' is her constant sing-song.
Their pronouncements begin to sound so much
like what we the viewer can deduce, without
the excessive salaries, the generous expenses.
Nick is still with us, hanging on to his mobile,
his external pacemaker. With knowing smile
he discloses that leaks, having sprung, are seeping
through Downing Street's fortified defences,
where 'they're cracking jokes' and not weeping.

Lorn Macintyre is a novellist, short story writer and poet