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“Do you think that listening to his stupid podcast is some kind of subtle form of self-harm?” Nicola asks her therapist. Melody, whose lovely, musical name is only matched by her harsh, no-nonsense attitude, gives her a look that says “I don’t agree, but I’m not going to contradict you because I want you to dig yourself a bigger hole before I throw you a lifeline.”
Melody has a vast array of looks, most of them very done with Nicola’s bullshit. It’s one of the best things about her.
“Well, why do you listen to Malcolm Tucker’s podcast?” Melody asks. Nicola groans.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s so… stupid. I left Britain because I wanted to escape politics, escape the whole fucking… mess of things. And now I spend four hours a week listening to Malcolm Fucking Tucker’s stupid British politics podcast.” She pauses, fingers going to her ring finger with the intention of fiddling with her wedding ring. It's been three years and she still isn't used to not having it.
“It's not like I even agree with him half the time,” she continues. “Or maybe it's more like I agree with him on principle but not in practice. Or maybe I've listened to too many of his rants and Stockholm Syndromed myself into finding him tolerable.”
“Mmm,” Melody hums. The sound is distinctly not a comment on Nicola's words.
“It's fucking insane, actually, hearing him express an actual political opinion,” Nicola says. “More than one, even. He was always loud and opinionated and fucking verbally abusive and all that, but it was just fucking… Party shit. It was politics, but it wasn't political. Maybe he had principles back then, but you wouldn't have been able to tell. He could contradict himself five times over in the same conversation if he thought it would get him and the Party what they wanted.”
“And how does that contradiction - between him when you worked with him and him on his podcast - make you feel?” Melody clearly thinks she's getting at the heart of one of Nicola's issues or another. Nicola thinks that her therapist is clearly full of shit.
“Oh, I don't know,” she says. “He was always a fucking hypocrite. We all were, it’s a fucking prerequisite for being in that level of politics, and he was always the best at all that shit in the Party. There’s a reason he was in charge - until he wasn’t, of course.” Nicola sighs. “Whatever. He's an asshole still. You don't even have to listen to a full episode to get that. If it wasn't for wanting to be somewhat on top of the news in the UK, I wouldn't even fucking bother.”
Melody looks skeptical. Nicola can't blame her.
Here's the thing: Nicola used to think she had ideals.
She had prided herself in voting the right way back when she'd been an anonymous backbencher. She'd seen herself as someone who was, well, maybe not incorruptible, but at the very least not one of the twats. It had prevented her from getting a position at least once that she knew of, maybe more. DoSAC had been an anomaly - a bullshit position in a bullshit department, even if it was one still under the iron fist of Malcolm Tucker.
She'd gone into DoSAC genuinely thinking that she could do some good. It had taken all of a week for her to realize that she could Yay or Nae but she couldn't come up with an idea to save her fucking life.
It had been Malcolm who came up with the ideas. He’d been a manipulative fucking bastard and proud of it, always able to prod and twist the press or the public or the Party to his own sick, twisted ends. He certainly hadn’t pretended to have any ideals back then, but he’d been effective.
If the two of them had managed to ever get through a conversation without him thinking she was completely retarded, they might have eventually made one good politician between them.
Malcolm's terrible, amoral efficiency was probably why, when Nicola had stumbled on his podcast, she had gone half fucking insane. She had only just moved to Tucson then - cut herself off from the ex-husband and the too-large house and the damnable politics of it all. She had wanted a clean slate and she should have had it. There was certainly no one in fucking Arizona who would care that she had once been Leader of the Opposition across the pond.
She had gotten peace and quiet and anonymity at first, of course. She had gotten a flat and a bullshit job with some company that told other companies what they should do to make their employees not quit on them. She had gotten a therapist to help her process the sheer everything of it all and a desert she can fuck off to when it all becomes too much to process.
She doesn't have her convictions anymore. It feels like shit that Malcolm fucking Tucker had gotten out of prison and then promptly started a podcast where he proved that he had somehow found some.
“He's set up a stupid call-in line,” Nicola says to Melody right at the top of one of her appointments.
“Malcolm Tucker?” Melody says, as though Nicola talks about any other guy who would even be within spitting distance of a call-in line.
“Malcolm fucking Tucker,” Nicola says. “I’m not going to call in.”
“I never said you were.”
“I’m just saying,” Nicola says. “Not even if I disagree with him. Not even if he starts on one of his blatantly fucking hypocritical pro-trans rants.”
“Why does the idea of Malcolm being blatantly hypocritical on his podcast annoy you so much?” Melody says.
“Because that man never met a slur he didn’t enjoy calling people,” Nicola says. “No, actually, that's not fair. He tended to avoid the racist ones. But everything else- I mean, who the fuck is he trying to fool? Besides the literal children who see him as some kind of leftist icon just because they don't remember anything about politics before 2015.”
“Okay, I was skeptical about this being unhealthy at first, but don't you think you're a little too obsessed with your ex-coworker's podcast audience?”
“The podcast has a subreddit. A subreddit. Where it's a running joke that they're going to get banned for posting the names of all the Bloody Sunday soldiers.”
“Can you get banned for that?”
“Malcolm's wrong about a lot of things, but he's not wrong about this,” Nicola grumbles. “The Bloody Sunday guys aren't named on bloody Wikipedia. You have to do a weird amount of Google-fu to even get the most prominent, public name - it's Soldier F, aka David Cleary, by the way. There was this other subreddit that got banned for posting about John Brown too much. With how much the British government goes after posting those names, it's totally possible. And then Malcolm just said the names of all the soldiers on his stupid podcast. Had to take it down eventually - he was going to get sued by the government - but he also said that was a thing in the same podcast so a bunch of the kids downloaded it.”
“What would you say if you were to use the call-in number?”
“I would probably just harass him about the Tickel Investigation, if I'm being honest,” Nicola says. “Is that too petty? He ruined my career, I don't think harassing him about his ruined career is too petty.”
“Your career you hated.”
“Still my fucking career,” Nicola says. “No, it's not too petty. Just a reasonable level of petty.”
Melody writes something down on her stupid legal pad.
“Oh, shut up,” Nicola says.
That Tuesday, Nicola calls in at work. Call it a personal day. Call it skiving off.
Call it knowing that she's got a bullshit job that doesn't need her there anyways. Malcolm posts on Tuesdays, and now that he has a fucking call-in line Nicola is, if anything, more determined to listen to his fucking two hour long political rants.
She might even take notes. Just so that, if she does fucking snap and call in, she'll be able to tell him exactly what he's wrong about.
She decides to drive up the I-10, exiting at 255 to go onto Route 77. She does this… a little too often, probably. Going off into the desert with no real destination in mind. Going off into the desert, aircon at full blast, to listen to Malcolm fucking Tucker's dispatches from cold, rainy, fucking miserable England.
It's not like America's any better when it comes to politics - both Politics with a capital P and the political shit that actually matters. England, Britain, the UK - the fucking mess all that is feels more personal, though. She understands some of the complexities better, maybe.
She has to give a shit, even though she fucked off to Tucson.
Technically, she probably shouldn't wear her airpods while driving. Nicola doesn't give a shit. Route 77 is fairly abandoned, it's bright and hot and the middle of a Tuesday, and Nicola has Malcolm fucking Tucker yelling about Sunak's fucking Rwanda bill in her ears.
It's weirdly comforting. It's also weirdly annoying, and also just plain weird. She's comforted by his anger - it's familiar and consistent and fiery and honestly kind of funny now that it's not targeted at her. It's weird, because she doesn't want to be comforted by Malcolm and his maybe actually decent politics, not today.
It's annoying because she fucking agrees with him. It's annoying because she doesn't want to agree with him, not when he has a call-in number that she wants to harass.
The podcast ends, but she's already queued up one from last week. She's aiming for Show Low, she's decided. She'll be about halfway through this second episode when she gets there. She'll get off at Show Low, grab something to eat, then drive back down to Tucson.
She doesn't have anywhere important to be, after all. She might as well waste her entire day mentally composing a fucking voicemail call to Malcolm fucking Tucker, one she may or may not record when she gets to Show Low or to her flat in Tucson.
It's been a weird day. Nicola has a weird life. Is she happy? Happy enough. The desert is bright and hot and wonderfully freeing to drive through. She has a dickhead in her ears who's angry for all the right reasons and a half-formed phone call in her head.
And, even if Melody can be a bitch sometimes, Nicola knows that between the therapy and the scenery she's probably going to be mostly alright. So that's alright then.
Nicola nods decisively to herself. This episode's more like it - Malcolm being a goddamn hypocrite, just the way she likes to hear him. Yeah, she's alright.