Three hundred horsepower. Eight-speed automatic transmission. Four wheel drive. Three litre, six cylinder engine (diesel, naturally). Capable of towing up to 3,500kg – not that Natasha had yet needed to tow anything through the streets of Richmond. Where the Discovery really came into its own was its towering height of almost 1.9m. Natasha would only entertain a vehicle taller than herself. In this dangerous and overcrowded city, it was the only way to travel in safety and comfort. Nothing beat ascending into those leather seats, settling in behind the heated wheel, and having an imperious, unobstructed view of the road ahead.
It was in this unobstructed view, on this brisk April morning, that Natasha Bailey saw the traffic jam.
‘Mummy, come on, why are you stopping?’ whined Isabel from the back. She was only eleven, but had the burned out nerves of a forty-year-old banker.
‘We’ll be moving soon, Issy, there’s just a spot of traffic.’ Natasha glanced at the Discovery’s 11.4-inch infotainment display. 8:46am. Isabel’s clarinet exam, invigilated by the officious Mrs Pemberton, who would not tolerate a minute’s tardiness, began at 9am. Natasha checked the satnav - they could get there on time. If this hold up shifted soon.
‘We’re not gonna make it,’ sang Henry, grinning at his big sister.
‘Mum!’ yelled Isabel.
Natasha palmed her horn (a bassy blare composed by Hans Zimmer no less). The driver in the Fiesta ahead craned back, then up, to see who’d beeped him. He jabbed his middle finger at her, but Natasha ignored him. In his lowly vehicle, he deserved barely more consideration than a piece of roadkill. She pumped the horn again.
But despite the Oscar-worthy cinematic tones blasting from her SUV, none of the surrounding cars moved. The highway was packed solid.
Natasha sighed. 8:49am. Still time, just.
‘We’re going to be la-ate! You’re going to fa-ail!’ sang Henry gleefully.
Isabel slapped him.
‘Ow! Mum, she hit me!’
‘Isabel!’
‘Mum!’
Henry whacked his sister back.
‘Henry!’
‘Mum!’
‘Ow!’
Then came, predictably, the tears.
‘Goddamnit you two. Behave,’ snapped Natasha, reaching back to try and separate the children with her left arm. On this occasion the Discovery’s vast interior betrayed her, permitting her only to brush the kids’ knees with her finger.
She looked back to the road. A Deliveroo rider was attempting to weave through the congested vehicles on his push bike. Natasha gave him a pre-emptive beep lest he think about putting a supportive hand on her bonnet and was fleetingly satisfied to see him jump, wobble, and almost scrape the Fiesta.
8:52.
‘Mum, please, we have to be there!’ squealed Isabel.
Right. Time for action.
Natasha unbuckled, opened the door and slid out of her seat to the tarmac. Having warned the kids to sit tight, she set off through the standstill traffic to root out the cause of this nuisance.
8:53.
Three lanes of London traffic, all set like a brick wall. Natasha squeezed past bumpers and mirrors until she reached the front of the queue and realised why she couldn’t see the cause of the holdup from her Discovery.
The cause was a group of people sat cross-legged on the road, clad in fluorescent red vests and deaf to the horns blaring behind them.
‘What the hell are you idiots doing?’ cried Natasha. There were six of them – a couple of oldies and four students with identities built on a foundation of hair dye, facial piercings and not washing. A banner stretched between them emblazoned with a flame emblem and the phrase ‘STOP BURNING STUFF’.
‘We’re protesting to secure a liveable future,’ said a pink haired girl.
‘What? Well stand up and wave a placard on the bloody pavement – you’re going to get killed.’
‘We’re all going to be killed unless our government takes immediate action on the climate crisis,’ said a scrawny guy with a close-cropped scalp.
‘Jesus, so you’re gonna hold up everyone to do that?’ Natasha couldn’t believe this. A few other drivers had begun to emerge from their vehicles. One was filming on his phone. Natasha looked again at the banner and realised she’d read about these people… What was it the papers had called them? ‘Climate clowns’, that was it. The Mail had exposed how the so-called activists were largely the middle-class offspring of dentists and lecturers, brainwashed by the left into eco-doomism, rejecting any respectable employment to instead invest their time into becoming a public nuisance.
‘We’re so sorry for the disruption, but this is nothing compared to the disruption that will come with climate breakdown.’
‘Sorry? Sorry?! If you’re sorry, just get out of the way. The road is for cars not people.’
‘I’m afraid we can’t do that.’
8:57. There was scant chance of making the exam.
‘I’ve called the police,’ said one of the other drivers.
‘We’re happy to be arrested,’ said a green-mulleted girl.
Heat flared up Natasha’s chest and temples. What right did these yobs – these criminals – have to drive a wrecking ball through her day?
‘I have a family!’ she cried. ‘I have children in my car. I have important appointments to make.’
‘Mummy, my clarinet exam is about to start,’ came an anguished cry from her daughter who was very much not in the car anymore.
‘Darling, I told you to stay in the Discovery.’
‘But Henry keeps saying I’m going to fail my exam.’
8:59.
‘Do you hear that, you selfish morons? My daughter has spent months working for her exam. This is vital to her musical progress and future development!’
‘She will have no future if the government doesn’t take rapid action –’ started the shaven-headed man.
This tipped Natasha over the edge.
‘Don’t you threaten my daughter’s future!’ she shouted, grabbing hold of their STOP BURNING STUFF banner and wrenching it free from the frail claws of the elderlies it had been stretched between. The small gathering of motorists cheered. Natasha tried to rip the banner, even pinning one end under her foot, but the damned laminated thing proved indestructible. Giving up, she threw it to the side of the road.
‘Mummy, please, make them move. The exam is starting!’
Her phone vibrated. 9:01. The invigilators calling.
‘Idiots!’ she screamed, locking on to the guy who’d dared to justify destroying Isabel’s future. Months she’d been practising. Months. Natasha grabbed hold of his rucksack and red vest, ready to drag him out of the road by force if she could.
‘No!’ squawked the technicolour girls. ‘He’s glued on!’
The man’s palms were pressed flat on the tarmac, a tube of UHU beside them and ‘GLUED’ scrawled in Sharpie on the backs of his hands.
‘Well that’s fucking stupid,’ said Natasha, and wrenched the man by his rucksack handle. He let out a squeal. The crowd applauded. The girls sobbed but, their own palms adhered to the tarmac, were unable to help or even wipe their tears.
•
‘Would you accept the title “hero”?’
Natasha smiled. In another world this might have been a bashful smile, but Natasha had long ago abandoned false modesty – it was an affectation that could not be afforded by a serious woman in business. ‘If that’s what people want to call me, I’ll accept it.’
‘And why shouldn’t you?’ Clive Wight nodded approvingly. The producers of The Clive Wight Hour had booked Natasha as soon as the video of her encounter with the Stop Burning Stuff protestors blew up on social media. Up until a few years ago, Clive Wight had been Clive Wight MP. While his party had overlooked his draconian – and, indeed, homicidal – suggestions to tackle asylum seekers, they had drawn the line when it emerged he had been paying eye-watering sums of public money to a young staffer to inflict eye-watering acts upon herself with a three-foot, lubed up silicon tentacle. Nevertheless, he had found a lucrative second life as a primetime host on the recently launched BritNews channel, where he relished the unconstrained freedom to set his own agenda.
Alongside Natasha in the studio tonight was Dick Talbot, a smartly dressed energy expert in his late twenties, and, on screen, Rob Sandercott, the malnourished vegan who Natasha had torn from the tarmac the day before. ‘Rob, do you consider Natasha a hero?’ asked Clive.
‘As much as I respect Natasha as a fellow human on our dying planet, the heroes are those of us – especially the young activists putting their own future liberty in jeopardy – who are fighting for climate justice,’ said Rob, raising a bandaged fist to his chest. ‘We don’t want to stop traffic and piss people off, but disrupting everyday life and breaking social norms is the only effective, non-violent way left to get mass press attention on environmental issues.’
‘Pah,’ snorted Dick Talbot.
‘Dick?’
‘These eco zealots are certainly not heroes. They’re society dropouts inflicting real damage on working people’s lives and livelihoods, never mind achieving nothing to combat their fabled “global warming”. Just think of all the emissions from that idling traffic. For what? Tell me, Rob, how many ambulances did you stop with your obstruction?’
‘We have a blue light pol–’
‘How many people did you prevent visiting their ailing relatives? How many missed weddings, and funerals, and doctors appointments?’
‘I don’t know –’
‘Exactly. Clive, I support freedom of speech and the right to protest quietly in a non-disruptive manner, but this kind of mindless, reckless mob antics should be clamped down on hard and fast by the Met. Otherwise we’ll all be reliant on the bravery of people like Natasha here just to go about our daily lives.’
‘Natasha, what was going through your head as you took on these protestors – or perhaps we should more accurately be calling them terrorists?’
‘I was thinking as a mother,’ said Natasha. ‘My child needed me and I had to act.’
‘Very well put.’ Clive turned to the screen. ‘Rob, do you feel remorse for your actions?’
‘Only that our actions were necessary, Clive. I will fight to the end to stop the burning of fossil fuels and our genocidal gov–’
‘Moving on,’ Clive addressed the camera. ‘Another day, another aggressive demand from the trans lobby…’
•
Over the coming months, Stop Burning Stuff’s assault on motorists escalated. They became a regular sticky-fingered fixture on London’s roads, they dangled over motorways and blasted luxury car showrooms with lurid red paint.
After her debut appearance on Clive Wight’s show, Natasha became a reliable contributor to SBS stories, called up to verbalise the general public’s anger at the group’s latest stunt. She featured on BritNews sections and gave comments to the papers. The media couldn’t get enough of SBS. Each of the group’s actions seemed designed to stoke maximum outrage – which the tabloids were more than happy to fan into a profitable inferno. It was a wonder the activists weren’t funded by the publishers themselves.
(Best of all, in light of the exposure, Mrs Pemberton had granted Isabel a remedial clarinet exam. Hurrah!)
Not all reaction was positive, of course. Natasha was lampooned by the lefty media and online commentators as an entitled ‘latte mummy’ with spoilt brats spilling out of her dirty SUV. But fuck those people and fuck their narrative. Natasha Bailey had built her success through nothing but hard graft – overcoming a shitty start in life to open Nat’s Lashes on Southend high street, which, after a doomed marriage and relocation to the capital, evolved into online store Natashalista’s, shipping lorryloads of beauty products across the country and raking in almost four mill last year. (Not to mention simultaneously raising two children on her own, doing all she could to give them everything she’d been denied at their age. And she only drank macchiatos.) Facebook groups called for boycotts of her site – but just as many came out in her defence and, with all the press attention, sales surged. Some of the more junior members of the marketing team voiced sympathies with the protestors, but after a stern reminder of how difficult it would be to find another entry-level job offering such generous staff discounts on medical-grade retinol, that little rebellion was short lived. Twitter revelled in the irony of Natashalista’s ‘anti-pollution’ range of skin creams but, once again, the publicity drove a sales spike. You couldn’t buy this kind of promotion, as Natasha reminded her chastised marketing executives.
In June, however, a battle line was crossed.
‘Got everything, Hen?’
‘Yes, Mum.’ Henry clambered into the back of the Discovery. Natasha checked his bag anyway (lacrosse gloves, helmet, mouthguard, bottle of filtered water, Organix Oaty Bar, two snack packs of Haribo Tangfastics) and was just about to get into the SUV herself when she noticed something odd. Well, two things. The car was tilting forward ever so slightly. And there was a bright red flyer tacked under her front wiper. ‘Mum?’
Natasha approached the flyer with a nauseous bubble of dread and anger barging up her oesophagus. She plucked it from the windscreen with two sharp, glossy nails.
YOUR VEHICLE HAS BEEN DISARMED!
‘What the fu–’ whispered Natasha.
She scanned the rest of the flyer – higher risk of mortality… extra fuel consumption… soaring pollution… blah blah blah… before the confirmation that saboteurs had deflated her tyres overnight with the aid of dried red lentils pushed in the valves.
Yours in love and rage,
Stop Burning Stuff.
Natasha released a murderous scream. Henry froze. Pigeons scattered from the surrounding trees.
‘Mum–?’
‘BACK IN THE HOUSE!’
•
The video was harrowing.
Natasha watched it, over and over again, till her eyes were red raw and she could no longer hear the kids whining for supper.
Those bastards. Those amoral, insidious bastards.
Rob Sandercott, the protestor she clashed with on BritNews, the imbecile who’d dared to threaten her daughter’s future – did what he said count as a death threat? Natasha made a mental note to check – was the leading man. The bottom half of his face was hidden behind a red Covid mask, but she knew it was him. No mistaking those vile eyes. Eyes that, in the video, brimmed with sick glee. (His scarred palms were another giveaway.)
‘This is not a family car the marketing campaigns would have you believe,’ said Rob to the camera, crouched by her Discovery’s wheels, lit by torchlight. ‘This is a weapon. A tank for the individualistic consumer, turning roads into a killing ground for cyclists, pedestrians and children. A super polluter, stunting lungs and incinerating our planet’s future. Let’s disarm it for Natasha. Let’s disarm it for her children.’
Her name in his mouth.
His fingers on her tyre.
Twist, push, air hissing out.
His feet on her drive.
His dirty hands on her beloved Discovery.
Natasha gripped her phone till her knuckles were white hot, the clip looping endlessly on SBS’s timeline, her brain locked in a silent scream.
•
‘Here’s what we can offer. Pay per appearance. A moderate share of revenue linked to social impressions of your clips. And the latest Ford Raptor pickup, as requested.’
Natasha listened to the specs. Ten-speed automatic transmission. Twin turbocharged V6 engine. Four hundred and fifty horsepower. Over two metres tall, weighing in at 2.7 tonnes. Just the job for nipping round the city.
Natasha accepted. Gordon Orlov, producer of The Clive Wight Hour, was delighted. In return, Natasha would be called up, in her new beast of a vehicle, to confront the eco loons head on – not in the studio, but on the streets, wherever they chose to menace society. With Gordon’s tipoffs, and the Raptor’s turbo engine, she could race to the scene of the crime.
She could, of course, have had the Discovery’s tyres pumped back up. But after the violation on her driveway, she couldn’t think about getting back behind that wheel without a shot of bile rising up her throat. So off to scrap it had gone, and the offer from BritNews of a car even taller than her old one had come at the perfect time. Natasha had been getting fed up with her view of the road being obscured by ever more competing SUVs. Time to rise above the pack once again.
And boy, was it a beauty. Glossy white bodywork, fierce black grill. Behind the wheel, Natasha was a queen, lifted high on a platform above the peasantry. The Raptor’s engine thrummed through her. Forget queen, she was a goddess.
•
A month into her roving reporter role, Natasha had not had any success challenging Stop Burning Stuff. By the time they arrived at the site of the latest protest, the road was already too jammed with cars for Natasha to get anywhere close. Her business was suffering from the constant interruptions, a BritNews cameraman turning up at the office on a daily basis to jump in the Raptor with her. The initial glut of reactionary orders to Natashalista’s had begun to wane and her accountant was getting angsty.
Worst of all, Isabel had failed her second-chance clarinet exam and Henry’s lacrosse performance was suffering immeasurably following his missed practice session. Natasha would never forgive Sandercott and his band of vandals for what they’d done.
On the upside, any public sympathy for the hooligans at SBS had also evaporated. The enviro mob’s stunts had gone from mildly intriguing novelty to tedious irritant to why haven’t these fucking idiots been locked up yet? ‘Stop Burning Stuff’ had lost any resonance as a political demand and instead become a byword for entitled middle class zealots obstructing the working class during a cost of living crisis. For every tweet in favour of cutting back fossil fuel consumption there were ten tabloid articles exposing how an SBS activist had eaten a McDonald’s burger, got a takeaway cup from Costa or flown to Italy for a holiday in 2009. The Sun ran a fabulous exposé on the carbon emissions caused by manufacturing the group’s cans of crimson paint. And they dared tell Natasha how to live a more ‘eco’ life? Fucking hypocrites. Even the political left had been forced to pledge a crackdown on the ‘green menace’ in an effort to hang onto a few more votes.
So the first – and last – time Natasha came up against SBS in the Raptor was by pure chance.
Henry, having clambered up onto the kitchen worktop and conducted a daring heist with the aid of his lacrosse stick, had consumed roughly his bodyweight in Tangfastics and was now in the grip of a brutal stomachache. Natasha, despite the NHS phonelines trying to fob her off with advice to ‘just give him a paracetamol’, was rushing him straight to A&E.
‘Oh gosh, Mummy, it hurts!’ Henry convulsed on the backseat, slipping and sliding across the Italian leather to the limit his strap would allow.
‘Keep calm, darling, it’s OK,’ said Natasha, pumping her horn to speed up the traffic.
Her son bucked like a boy possessed, dirty trainers needling the back of her seat. Natasha gritted her teeth, trying not to think of the scuff marks. Whipping round a corner onto a dual carriageway, Natasha floored it. Not far to go now. But then, like storm clouds souring a summer’s sky, her clear road began to constrict.
‘No no no no no,’ she moaned. Another blast of the horn. To no avail – her panoramic view glowed red with clustering brakelights. She checked her mirrors in a growing panic – they too were clogging up with the impassive glares of approaching headlights.
‘Mum!’ squealed Henry.
‘It’s OK, baby.’ Natasha blared her horn and nudged the Raptor forward, just enough to give the Honda in front a gentle bump. From her elevated position, she saw the driver snap into a demented rage through his sunroof, thumping his own horn and swearing wildly at her. ‘God damnit.’
Her gaze lifted across the dozens of car roofs stretched out ahead of her – and there, in the distance, a red flag waved, mocking, seductive, a rag to a bull, a call of a siren. She should have known. Natasha’s phone buzzed. Gordon Orlov. Too late, Gordy, she was already on the scene.
The Raptor’s engine growled. Her eyes flicked to the wing mirror. The bus lane. Empty, of course. Another waste of council tax and infringement on motorists’ liberties, just to net the Mayor a few more quid. Well not today, Khan. Not today.
Wheels squealing a hard left, they lurched into the bus lane to an audience of incredulous onlookers.
‘Get in the front, Henry.’
‘What?’
‘In the front, now.’
Henry, confused, slipped out of his belt and clambered into the front seat, gripping his stomach. ‘I feel sick.’
‘I know, honey. Everything about this is sickening. So Mummy needs you to take her phone and film this. It’s important.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I say so,’ snapped Natasha.
Henry took the iPhone and held it up to record his mum at the wheel. Say what you like about giving kids smartphones from birth, but they made bloody good videographers.
Foot on the gas. They revved past the ranks of frustrated cars, the cacophony of battle building – honking horns, irate motorists yelling out their windows and vigilante drivers bellowing into the faces of the activists as they tried to drag them out of the road.
‘Once again, these eco maniacs are causing havoc on the streets of London. Where are the police? The anti-terrorist special forces? The water cannons? The mass arrests? The basic defence for ordinary citizens going about their daily business?’ Natasha glared down the lens, emphasising each point with a thump to her horn (which may, admittedly, have drowned out the following point).
Henry’s stomach gurgled and he squirmed. Fuck’s sake. ‘Come on, darling, try to keep Mummy’s phone still.’
Natasha turned back to the road, crawling to the front of the queue where the barrier of protestors sat, arms linked, across the highway in their red vests. And there he was, Rob Sandercott, looking over his shoulder to catch her gaze – and she could sense the smirk behind his wild eyes. He was arm in arm with another scruffy young man wearing a nose stud (probably used for puncturing tyres) and an elderly woman in clear need of a long hot wash and a stern talking to. The pickup growled. Its driver growled. Immaculately manicured fingers throttled the wheel.
‘You poisonous bastard,’ she whispered as Rob turned his back on her.
Foot brushing the accelerator, she inched the truck forward. People on the street began to look their way.
‘It’s time we stand up to these terrorist clowns,’ said Natasha. ‘It’s time to take back our roads.’
HONK! HONK!
Another inch forward. The protestors, bums still fixed to the tarmac, started yelling at her to stop.
A little further.
She felt the slightest pressure against her front bumper – the rucksacked backs of the loons. HONK! Now even some of the other drivers were beginning to look concerned. Phones snapped to the action.
‘Mum?’ Henry was breathless, peering over the dashboard.
‘Keep filming, Henry. This is history.’
Victory was within her grasp. They would move. They’d have to move.
Foot down. Another nudge. HONK!
The old lady was the first to bolt, scrambling to her rickety knees and fixing Natasha with a terrified stare as she staggered away, waving at her to stop. No chance. It was time to teach these nutters they were messing with the wrong woman. Natasha smiled back at her and made a shooing gesture.
A couple of teen girl protestors leaped up next, running to the front of the Raptor, attempting to push it back with their chopstick wrists. Morons.
‘Out of the way!’ shouted Natasha.
‘Stop! Stop!’ they cried. ‘Their vests are cau–’
Natasha’s foot sunk into the accelerator. She was done with this bullshit. No more pandering to the jokers blocking her path, especially the skinhead prick who’d had the gall to threaten her daughter’s future, to mock her children as their lives were ruined. With an urgent whine, the tyres skidded. The pickup lurched up to the left. The girls buckled, stunned. And Natasha’s eyes drifted down to her right to see everything reflected in glorious slow motion.
The red vest sucked under the Raptor’s wheel. Its owner’s temple cracking to the tarmac, dragged along behind vest and rucksack, into the inescapable embrace of her 37-inch tyre. His head, pinned, lifting the vehicle for the briefest moment, before bursting like a plump tomato, spurting its pulp across the road in one foul streak.
Natasha just stared.
The Raptor rocked back level. Outside sound returned – screams, panic. On the other side of the windscreen, a shaken, shaven figure rose to his feet. Rob Sandercott – alive and whole. He stumbled backwards towards the girls, transfixed by the horror of his squashed comrade, who’d been linked in his arm mere moments before and was now neck-deep in black rubber. A long-held breath, exhilarated, flooded from Natasha.
‘Mum?’ asked Henry, peering over her shoulder at the red mess outside her window. She turned – to offer comfort, reassurance, a kiss to his cheek – just as his jaw dropped loose and a slurry of half-digested sweeties slapped her across the face and plastered the Raptor’s plush interior.
•
Even once the adrenaline had drained away, the images played on loop – the lurch, the burst, the splurge of gore. Natasha wasn’t even sure how much she had actually seen and how much her brain had filled in during the aftermath. The noises, though, they were real, and they echoed round her mind. Face scraping on tarmac, fabric tearing in the tyre’s tread, skull splintering with a wet crack. But Natasha felt disconnected to the chaos that reigned around her – she existed in a calm, content bubble, her mind cocooned back in the private sanctuary of the Raptor. She had done the right thing. A scary, terrible thing, for sure. But a brave thing. A necessary thing.
It was just a shame it hadn’t been Sandercott’s head pulverised beneath her wheel.
‘Natasha, sorry, can I just –?’
‘Of course.’ Natasha moved her hand so the makeup girl could touch up her face. She looked wary, like she’d been forced to apply foundation to a wild dog.
It was the evening after the altercation. After hours in police questioning – questioning the police why she had been hauled in rather than the perennial law-breakers – Natasha had spent the night in a cell (slept like a baby), before paying off a ludicrous bail with funds pulled from Natashalista’s and heading straight over to the BritNews studio. (She’d had a Facetime with Henry in the taxi. He seemed fine, if a bit criey.)
Natasha knew this was a crucial moment. While the tabloids were surely hard at work digging up every stain on the recently deceased protestor’s record, this was her prime chance to get on top of the story, to write herself into history as the hero. Get that narrative flying and the accusations and investigations would fall away in her slipstream. Her BritNews contract would become even more lucrative, allowing her to dig Natashalista’s out of the financial quicksands and let it flourish in the glow of her celebrity; she could keep the Raptor (once the bodywork had had a deep clean and maybe a respray – she actually kind of preferred it in red); maybe even get a book deal; basically, all would be well. The alternative – jail, social services, bankruptcy, no Raptor – was a horror not worth entertaining.
‘All done,’ said the makeup girl, scurrying away. Clive Wight was at his studio desk, clearing his throat with a vocal warmup reminiscent of his awkward Newsnight interview post Sordid Silicon Sex Scandal. ‘Big moment,’ he said, tipping Natasha a wink.
Natasha nodded, sitting back and letting that moment wash through her. The spotlights, polished surfaces, cameras gliding into position, red dots blinking by their soulless black eyes, figures shifting in the shadows… and Gordon Orlov, striding over, ashen faced, phone glued to his ear.
He fixed her with a dark glare, something close to repulsion flicking across his features. A burgeoning unease balled in her stomach.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Orlov ignored her, hanging up and rapping a knuckle on Clive’s desk. ‘We’re cutting her.’
‘What? You can’t do that!’ exclaimed Natasha.
‘Reason?’ asked Clive.
‘Police have just confirmed the guy’s name. Turns out our dead protestor isn’t a dead protestor after all. He’s a dead undercover reporter, two years out of university and a fortnight into an assignment to expose the inner workings of SBS.’
Clive winced and let out a low groan. ‘Which outlet? Guardian?’ he asked hopefully.
Orlov shook his head with regret. ‘Telegraph.’
‘Shit.’
‘But… he was… the road… the red vest…’ stuttered Natasha. She swallowed, throat parched. ‘What does this mean for us?’
Orlov turned to her with a bitter, humourless laugh. ‘This doesn’t mean anything for “us”, Natasha. This means that you, operating as a private citizen, have pressed the head of an innocent young journalist into what can only be described as an offal pancake. You’ve just lost any shot at public or media sympathy. In all respects, you’re done. Even worse, you’ve probably bolstered some goodwill towards those eco prats among the cretinous populi. Great fucking going!’
‘No, no…’ she moaned.
Orlov snapped his fingers at a runner. ‘See Miss Bailey out. The delivery entrance. Clive, we’ll go with a story from the backup pile – I’ve got a Muslim bloke coming in who wants schools to stop teaching gay sex ed to our kids.’
‘Fine. And an LBGTQYMCA who’ll be too worried about seeming Islamophobic to say anything coherent?’
‘Naturally.’
‘But, me –’ Natasha’s voice was failing her, a childish squeak. ‘My Raptor?’
‘One silver lining in this cloud of fuckups. Your contract was never fully signed off,’ said Orlov. ‘We can sell that monstrosity as soon as the Met releases it.’
‘Please…’
Her vision was swimming, tears dribbling down her cheeks. She brushed some loose strands of hair behind her ear. They were still flecked with dried sick. The runner’s hand grasped her shoulder, steering her out of her chair, out of the studio.
Lurch, burst, spurt.
‘Please…’
Scrape, tear, crack.
Natasha began to feel very small and vulnerable. A little girl on a lonely road. As she shuffled forwards, the lights bearing down on her swelled into two gigantic, inescapable headlamps, engulfing all she could see and swallowing her up without mercy.
If you enjoyed ‘Don’t Clash with Natasha’, you’ll relish the dark and satirical stories in my last collection, Everyone Is Awful. And to find out what happens to ‘energy expert’ Dick Talbot a couple of decades down the line, check out ‘Burn’.