Vein

‘Don't tell anyone,’ Taff Wallace half-whispered to his assistant, Brienne Sykes. ‘But the Prime Minister is going to resign.’ His eyebrows bent along with his head, and the purplish vein buried deep inside his forehead’s skin looked fit to burst.

   It took a moment for Brienne to take in this information, for the stale aroma of morning coffee had just wafted out of Taff's mouth and into her nostrils. They flared and she flinched, and in doing so her boss, the Head of Communications at Number 10, stepped back.

   ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, a touch embarrassed.

   ‘It’s fine,’ she said, then unclogged her throat so as not to appear rude. ‘So, the PM’s resigning?’

   ‘Yeah.’

   ‘Crikey.’

   ‘I know.’

   There was a moment’s pause, and from her oaken, semi-circular desk, Brienne took this as an opportunity to observe Taff’s body language. He was a small man, but his grey and slightly baggy suit did him no favours in that department. From a distance one might have thought he was a child, but upon closer inspection his scarecrow face, gaunt, beak-nosed and drooped with wrinkles, each one a testament to the burdens he carried, made it clear he was about half a century old; his salt and pepper hair only accentuated this. None of his weathered features were due to old age but were, in fact, a result of pure stress (although he would have said that it was due to being surrounded by incompetence). Brienne escalated her eyes up and down him and noticed that his lips were scrunched to the side, chewing on his cheeks; his feet had become the legs of a rocking chair and the ends of his trousers kept tucking under his heels.

   Over the years as his assistant, she had mastered reading his emotional tells. She only had to note how much the vein in his head had swelled and from that alone she would know instantly how bad things were getting. The vein operated on a three-point scale: bad, worse, and abysmal. Fortunately, it was still beneath the skin, though darkening and on the verge of worsening. Tempering it would be her mission for today – sod getting back to the Guardian, who wanted a quote from the Foreign Office; forget kicking away any more jugular-stabbing accusations from the Mail; and the TikTok conspirators? They could get back to their sweaty little ring-lights for all she cared.

   Her boss’ vein was on the brink of explosion.

   First and foremost, Brienne asked, ‘Am I allowed to know this?’

   Taff only shook his head sombrely in response and moved towards the maroon leather sofa on the other side of the room. He fell onto it and reclined his head back. He put his feet up on the coffee table and got to massaging his own head; even without her glasses, Brienne could see the bulging vein, the sun radiating onto it through the window next to it. It absorbed the light like a blackhole, ate and swallowed it up with a visceral gulp.

   Finally, through a long sigh, he said, ‘I’m telling you this because I don’t know what it means for me. And subsequently, I don’t know what it means for you.’

   ‘You don’t think you’ll be kept on?’

   ‘Would you keep me on, Brienne?’ he asked. ‘It’s been a fucking dreadful year. The press have been like a pack of hyenas, just constantly laughing at us, eating our dead and pressuring us to move in directions literally no one, not even the public, wants to move in. And don’t get me started on the fucking TikTokers – obnoxious twats with their thick-as-pigshit, one-word-at-a-time subtitles because their audience is so dense they can’t fathom the idea of reading a sentence. But somehow, they’re the ones getting the most traction. Journalism is dead, Brienne. It was killed by kids with mophead fringes and phones. They’re the real threat.’

   ‘So the PM is resigning… because of TikTokers?’

   At that Taff laughed, with a trace of sardonicism, and Brienne couldn’t tell whether he was laughing at the absurdity of the words that came out of her mouth, or at the absurdity of the fact it was true. She never really got an answer.

   She sat up – her lime-green blouse was done up all the way and her black trousers allowed her to comfortably cross her legs. She leant over the desk and awaited his next words.

   ‘The fucking Mail, too,’ he declaimed, the vein now worsening and his arms flailing about the air. ‘Half of their headlines are immigrant-hating and the other half are women-hating, both of which are always somehow our fault. It’s partly them, too, not just the TikTok kids. And the other lot, the Sun, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times, the fucking… all of ‘em! They’re just…’ His voice was breaking with exasperation and he sat forwards with his elbows dug into his knees and his palms pressed firmly onto his eyes. ‘Meanwhile I’m here fending it all off. I’m being told I’m doing a good job, all the while he’s decided to quit. All of this work, for what? The amount of crap I’ve had to clean up for him – the tax loopholes, the various holidays, the fucking lovechild!’

   ‘I know, I know,’ Brienne tried to placate.

   ‘Is it me? Have I not served him well enough?’

   ‘You know that’s not true.’

   ‘Then why?’

   With a smirk, she said, ‘Because he’s a useless pillock, Taff.’

   Taff looked up then and saw Brienne’s emerald eyes; unlike his compressed vein they reflected off the light and formed a firefly-like spectacle around the irises. Her moist teeth glimmered inside her thin mouth and a calm washed over him. An antidote for the pressurised vein. It was only once he looked back down that the vein assumed control, compressing all the information it garnered over the past year; all of the anger, the hate, the impatience – all of it existed within this one tiny, but monstrously overloaded vein.

   Sometimes Brienne wondered what the vein was actually linked to inside his head. Which part of the brain did it advocate for? His broken limbic system? And why on Earth was it so persistently vulgar? She often imagined, in a non-psychopathic way, what would have come out if she cut it open. Perhaps it would have been more than just blood, perhaps a blockage of goo and puss, clogging the vein up after years of stress, not allowing his brain to operate in the way it was meant to. She often had visions of slowly tearing it open with her bare hands, watching as the sunlight it had absorbed in its lifetime exuded.

   To all that came across it, it was a living being that slithered like a slug.

   Brienne said, ‘You’re going to be fine though, Taff. All you’ve done is complain about him recently.’

   ‘It’s not all I’ve done,’ he retorted, avoiding eye contact.

   ‘Well, no, but you’ve complained about him a lot. This will be good for you. You can set your sights on something else. I mean, let’s be honest, you hate this job.’

   ‘I know, I’m going to be fine. I know. I’ve got options. It just feels like all the work I’ve done… what was it for? I moved fucking mountains for him, you know?’

   ‘The money’s pretty good.’

   ‘That it is,’ he chuckled. A dour expression came over him then, and his matured, saggy eyebags took on a darker expression. ‘Listen, erm… the real reason I told you was because, in all honesty, I was worried about you. You should have ample time to find something else.’

   ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I—’

   He raised a hand in the air, ‘Hold on, I haven’t finished. I was also thinking, if you like, you could stay by my side as my assistant, for however long you need. Although, if you want to go and do more – which you very well could – I won’t stand in your way. I just don’t want you struggling for a job because of one man’s fuckup.’

   Brienne’s puffed cheeks flushed crimson. The truth was that she, much like everyone else who worked in Number 10, hated her job. It was thankless, time-consuming and, as was the pejorative word used amongst those who worked there, a piss-take. Every day she was hounded by newspapers, content creators and even average people trying to get a reaction quote for whatever the latest controversy was; it was overwhelming and, therefore, exhausting. Worst of all it trickled into her personal life. She couldn’t even meet her friends without them asking about it and then complaining about the very people she worked for. ‘You tell your boss,’ they would say, ‘that his government needs a complete shake up. A reboot! They need to rethink their whole strategy.’ and in response she would say ‘I know,’ or ‘yep’. Because what else could she say? If she complained and agreed with them, she’d have gotten more pent up and would have grown a vein of her own – she’d be another Taff! She’d seen how miserable he was, how the anger and the stress had overridden him; he was a husk.

   She looked over to him and saw a broken man, but the remnants of a human being were inside, on the verge of cradling himself on the sofa.

   This life of government and power, she thought, it’s no life at all; no one is meant to be in this position. If you take a job in this place, you are hated by everyone. Quite literally everyone. And the chances are, you probably don’t deserve to be here. Anyone who wants power doesn’t deserve it.

   Rather than saying all of this, feeding the vein some more, she simply stood up, slapped her thighs and said with a cheery huff, ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea, and we can talk about it with some biscuits. How does that sound?’

   Taff’s eyes were red and approaching tears, but the vein – the lively, sentient thing living on his head – had died down a trifle.

   ‘That sounds lovely,’ he smiled.