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“Which of our kids is your favourite?”
Catherine stiffens. “Excuse me?”
As usual, Jackson doesn’t trouble to offer an explanation of an unclear statement – that would involve admitting some measure of fallibility – when just repeating what he’s said works just as well. He raises his eyebrows into that expression she’s come to recognise, and resent, as ‘smartest one in the room’. “Your favourite? Out of our kids: that collective waste of perfectly good kidneys sitting around downstairs.”
“I’m not picking a favourite, that’s horrible.”
He eyes her with amusement. “You let the ‘our kids’ part go though.”
“When you’re working up to doing a bit I find it best just to let you get it out of your system.” Catherine continues to work around him, tidying up the various files he’s let spill around his desk like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. When he deliberately puts a half-empty whiskey on the file she was just about to grab she adds, seemingly casual: “I understand it’s best to do that with the elderly and the demented.”
Looking up, Jackson flicks her that look. It’s the one she’s come accustomed to over the years – when, very, very occasionally, she catches him by surprise. Usually with how dark a sense of humour she can have, if she doesn’t keep herself in check. Very occasionally – usually on a bad day, when Roddy is being impossible or an order from the Park doesn’t sit right with her, or the urge for a drink really bites – she will say something just awful. And she will flush, and want to claw it back, and Jackson will find this the funniest thing in the world.
Catherine tries very, very hard not to let those moments please her. To let Jackson Lamb’s approval mean something to her would say something about her character, and she’s not sure she wants to consider what that is.
“Nah…” finally he stretches out with a yawn, propping both feet up on the desk, shoes and all, “I just guessed, you know, not to make any improper personal assumptions, but the childbearing time of life must be well and truly over for you now. Unless the booze really did a number on you and you're that much younger than you look. This lot are your last chance to have little kiddiewinks of your own.”
There was a time when Catherine would threaten him with an HR report for that, but this would be akin to admitting defeat. “Well, you’re not exactly twenty-one anymore either, are you?”
“Men have kids in later life. Just look at Al Pacino.”
"I prefer not to these days.”
Another Look. She just glares. I do not need Jackson Lamb’s approval.
“Well, maybe it’s all for the best you didn’t pop any out. You’d have them all in pinafores and singing fucking Edelweiss.”
For a moment genuine indignation flares. “I happen to like my sense of style, thank you very much.”
“I - Jesus, Catherine, that’s not style. You look like you lost a wrestling match with Cath fucking Kidson.”
“And this,” Catherine gestures, “is - what? The latest from London Fashion Week?”
“Skip Chic is very in, I’ll have you know.”
“As is Eau de Fag End and Late Night Chippy, I suppose.”
“Precisely, but at least I don't look like a Laura Ashley showroom threw up on me. And you're avoiding the point. Would last five fucking seconds in an interrogation cell, you would. Which one’s your favourite? The basket case, the psychopath, the fuck-up, or,” another gesture, “well, I don’t think there are even words for Ho.”
“I don’t have one,” she shoots back. “If we’re on the subject, who’s your ‘favourite child’?”
With an exaggerated hum Lamb leans back in his seat, turning his face to the ceiling. “Personally I see them less as kids and more like potted plants. You try to keep them alive and all, but you’re not exactly gunna check in with a therapist when they’re gone.”
“Honestly.”
“Oh, sorry, am I insulting some sort of personal grieving process here? I suppose you do have a little prayer circle whenever you lose a cactus, give it a nice little burial in the compost heap and everything –"
“Jackson -”
“- although you strike me as someone who couldn’t let a potted plant die even if you try. You’ve probably got watering regimes and have a spreadsheet planning when to begin repotting. You strike me as being very on it when it comes to unintelligible plant life, maybe that’s why you get on so well with Cartwright.”
There you go: it’s best not to interrupt when he has a bit going. Catherine shakes her head and glares somewhere into the middle distance, a mixture of genuine annoyance and amused exasperation upon her face. Finally, and against her better nature, she informs him: “You know you only pay compliments as a joke?”
He blinks, nonplussed. Something in his brain seems to be recalibrating. Then: “That wasn’t a compliment.”
“Yes it was. You were calling me competent.”
“With plants. Waste of fucking time in my opinion,” Jackson grumbles. “But then I suppose little old spinsters need something to do.”
If Catherine had ever actually become an agent, and gone through the training of how to break a person down and file them away into useful, useable facets – into little folders marked triggers and pressure points and dangerously fundamental jugular weaknesses – she would perhaps note that Jackson Lamb always, always goes for the jugular when he’s been caught on the raw.
As she is, she just wants to deal him a smack. “And all that about potted plants is just rubbish, anyway.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she counters. “Everyone knows you’re protective of your team. You don’t allow anything to happen to them unanswered.”
“I nearly sent your kidnappers a basket of fruit.”
“Oh, that,” Catherine says lightly. “I don’t count.”
On balance, it’s probably a good thing she’s too busy sweeping up spent fag ends to look up. Jackson’s face briefly takes the expression of something being held forcibly into place, and she probably wouldn’t wholly understand it.
“I’m just the office manager, but,” she continues, “your joes are another matter entirely. Make all the jokes you want, I know you care about them.”
“Oh God. If you’re going to give another you’re-better-than-you-think-you-are speech, I’d rather you just push me out the window now. Go on, it’ll be a clean drop.”
Catherine beams, triumphant. It’s always pleasing to get one over on him; Jackson can try rolling his eyes and mewling like a little boy, that doesn’t mean she’s going to let him off the hook that easily. “Oh, I’m sorry, does it make you feel uncomfortable to know someone’s realised you’re not quite the heartless old sod you pretend to be?” Pulling a face, Jackson rifles around for a cigarette and lights it in a silent sign of fuck off Catherine, and she forges ahead regardless. “If you want to keep everyone at arms’ length that’s your look-out, but don’t pretend you wouldn’t go to the mat if someone put a hand on any one of them.”
“I’ve been reliably informed that I don’t have a heart, actually –"
“Bollocks,” she snaps. The word takes her by surprise – judging by Jackson’s expression, it does him too – but she refuses to look shocked. “As far as...as things such as love and care go, Jackson Lamb, I happen to know you feel them for that team downstairs. You'd rather swallow pins than admit it, but you do, even if you don’t know how to recognise it in yourself. I know you better than you think, and quite frankly I know you’re a better man than you think as well.”
Her voice has carried, slightly more than she was intending. For a moment the murmur of voices from the offices downstairs flounder – this is a cardboard building, you can hear when someone so much as has a dark thought in another room – and then continues. There’s the murmur of a one-liner, a rising of laugher. Young sounds. This is a house of children, she’s thought this more than once, though maybe that just says more about her own age than that of her colleagues.
Jackson himself is sitting with a look of something nearing surprise, as if she’d just taken his tea mug and beaned him between the eyes with it. Her outburst fades into echoes. Then he abruptly clears his throat – she can’t have embarrassed him, Jackson Lamb doesn’t have the embarrassment gland – and shakes his head. “Well, that was a mouthful. You done?”
“Well,” Catherine admits, “yes.”
“Good. Because that was all bollocks.”
Miserable old so-and-so. “Say what you want,” she says pointedly. “I know you better. I know you negotiated with Taverner about Marcus’s service pay, and I know you had Louisa's application for mental health leave rushed through, and I know why River’s still in the Service even though his grandfather has no more influence than a bag of compost anymore. And you had that agent shot in the face for killing Min Harper, a man you once described as having an intellect second only to the pigeon.”
“Oi!” Jackson protests. “That’s circumstantial evidence at best: I didn’t know what Katinsky’d do with that gun when I left him there.”
The joke lands like a corpse in the middle of the floor, splot, lifeless at birth.
They haven’t spoken of Charles since that night at the petrol station. Not openly, anyway. Jackson occasionally keeps his hand in when it comes to tasteless jokes – dead in the bathroom, just like old times – and Catherine shows just how funny these jokes are by how much attention she pays them. It’s just like wasps, she tells herself. Stay still, and they’ll fly away. No, more like like a cat: he brings the dead bodies of mice and birds to her feet and she turns away, waiting for the day he cures himself of the habit. He wants the rise, nothing more.
In her lower moments, she reminds herself that there’s some comfort to knowing Charles chose to end it all. That, in itself, demonstrates the shame he bore for what he did. He was a good man. He had a conscience, and a heart.
In her lowest moments, she tells herself that she shouldn’t think this way, that Charles’ suicide was not born from shame because Charles did nothing wrong. She knows it in her gut. He was a fine man and a fine First Desk; his suicide came from despair, an ageing man turned to despair and uselessness at the end of the Cold War, and if anyone is to blame it’s her, for not reassuring him that he had so much more to offer even with this new chapter beginning. Her fault, not his. Jackson Lamb is a liar through and through, everyone knows that. She doesn’t know what type of terrible rise he was trying to get from her by spinning such lies, but it won’t wash.
She only thinks these things in her lowest moments, when the lack of alcohol bites hard. Mostly she tries not to think about it at all.
Catherine’s also painfully aware that this entire interior monologue has been working away within her, in the silence, and in the time it’s taken to do so Jackson has been watching her carefully. Keeping her within eyesight. As if she might pitch herself out the window, or push a knife into his throat. Bracing, a little, as if they’re both on the edge of a precipice neither had entirely thought to keep an eye on.
Stay still, and they’ll fly away.
“A little unfair, I thought,” she says finally, stiffly.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. Pigeons are far smarter birds than anyone gives them credit for.”
The Look, again. This conversation is full of them. Then Jackson snorts, reluctant. “You’re ducking the question.”
“Oh for – look, I don’t like playing favourites.”
“Very equal opportunities of you.”
“They’re our team!” she exclaims. “And they’re all – well, they all need help for one thing,” she holds up a hand before Jackson can expound on what precise sort of help they need, and how many mental health professionals it would take to deliver it. He sags back in his chair, momentarily defeated: an unshaven bulldog denied a walk. “In some form or another, at least. I don’t think it’s right of me to start having preferences.”
“Oh, indulge yourself.” Jackson grins. She tries not to be amused by it: that stupid, almost childish grin of his, when he tries to push her to be not quite as decent as she’d like to be. He nudges one foot lightly against her hip, leaving a smear of grime against her floral print dress. “Our little secret, go on. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Metaphorically, of course.”
“I don’t play favourites with my coworkers.”
He holds up a finger. “Nah, nah, nah, I said the kids. If we’re talking about coworkers, well, that’s different. That’s me.”
For a brief moment she is lost for words.
Catherine opens her mouth and then closes it again, the words she wants to say – primarily consisting of what, the, and fuck – seeming rather inappropriate in the workplace. Jackson’s still grinning. And watching her with a particular gleam in his eye, the one where he’s just laid down a tripwire and is aching for someone to stumble over it. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction. She won’t.
“Just...how,” she forces out finally, “do you come to that conclusion?”
“Because I’m the only one who you’ve told to go fuck myself.”
Catherine blushes. It’s not as if she’s proud of that, after all.
Well. Not wholly.
“You deserves it,” she says finally.
“They’ll throw you out of the WI for language like that, I reckon.”
“I’m not in the bloody –” Catherine bites into her tongue, mentally deducts herself one point. “I would have considered that a mark against your favour, not for it.”
“Nah. It was a moment of genuine honesty. Don’t they talk about that being some sort of sign of affection, in all your happy-clappy rehab meetings?”
Probably. Damned if she’ll admit it though. “Well. I might have done that to any one of the others,” she says, lying.
Jackson just grins again. One day, she tells herself, she’ll wallop it straight off his face. “Nahh, not you, Catherine. You wouldn’t make a habit of it. You’re squeaky clean right up to the point where you’re not, and in that little pocket,” he pinches his grubby fingers together until only a sliver of light shows between them, “that’s where the danger zone is.” He pauses, and looks almost bemused by his next words. “And the fun, I s’pose.”
Are you drunk? she wants to ask, but that seems like a foolish question, all things considered.
She’s not going to ask. Stay still, they’ll fly away. If Jackson Lamb wants a rise out of you, it’s safest you don’t know why. “Alright,” she says, pushing for normality, “we’ve established that I do not choose favourites. What about you?” Sheer devilry – or maybe this is what Jackson would call her danger zone, her being fun – prompts her to add: “We both know you don't have the principles to not choose. You must have a preference.”
Calmly Jackson regards her. For a moment Catherine feels like telling him to cut it out, and she has no idea why.
“What,” he asks, “out of our kids, you mean?”
He is looking for a rise. To build up to something about spinsters and missed opportunities and all that. Nonetheless Catherine clicks her tongue at him in a scolding fashion that she knows he’ll not give two hoots about. “Yes, out of our kids.”
His lips twitch. Fate chooses that moment to have someone downstairs make another – probably crude, probably unkind – joke, and another wash of laughter briefly washes up through the cardboard floors, the sounds of the community they have unwillingly, begrudgingly created. Jackson rolls his eyes, Catherine hides a smile. For what feels like the briefest and stillest of moments, they exchange glances. It's nice.
Well. If it was shared with anyone else, it would be nice.
“Well,” Jackson says after another moment’s pause, “on the whole, I’d say Cartwright provides the most entertainment value. And he’s got that, y’know, actionmansupermandoubleohbullshit bollocks going on, probably drinks smoothies made of green shit and all that, so he’s my best chance of getting a viable liver transplant if push ever comes to shove. But then Guy was my most competent agent, least until she went off to the funny farm. Danvers too, and she carries the added benefit of being profoundly mad as well. And Ho,” he pulls a face, “well, Ho taught me how to order Deliveroo without getting ads.” Finally he shrugs. “But on the whole I’d have to say Coe, because –"
“…he doesn’t talk to you.” They chime in together.
Noticeably Jackson brightens up. “See, you do know me.”
Catherine rolls her eyes. “A little too well, unfortunately,” she says, and tries to hide her grin as she finishes tidying his desk.