You will not recognize him now.

Forget every memory you have of him, all those images in photo and newsprint that captured him in all his young promise as the coming man, the great white hope, when he strode onto the national stage. Forget the handsome face atop the long neck and the haughty carriage that lent him that irrefutable air of Providence. Forget also the declamatory style, that tone of airy certainty in which so many of us put our faith. Forget all these things and summon instead every cliché of decline and set them against the man who once topped six foot four inches and who drew the eye so easily in all those Cabinet photographs in which he loomed, head and shoulders above his colleagues. Gaze instead upon this terrible decline, the coda of a cautionary tale wound on beyond its final pages.

This room is not what we would have expected. The walls are papered with old campaign posters, some curling at the bottom, some threatening to lift away at the corners and tear through the diagonals. All of them carry his photograph, and the earliest ones date back to his first campaign in the late seventies. Beneath these icons of his younger self he now sits in a wingback chair, looking out the window and down over the lawn to the seashore. At this moment his view is blocked by the woman standing with her back to him. She is broad-shouldered and planted solidly on the ground and we can infer from her flat shoes and her one-piece uniform that she is here in some official capacity – most likely representing one of the caring professions. Her name is Catherine and we know this from the name tag pinned on her right breast.

‘No one can tell me it was not beautiful,’ he says suddenly, swiping the air with a feeble hand. ‘No one.’

‘Yes,’ she says, turning from the window, ‘no one can tell you it was not beautiful.’

She reserves a special tone for him when he’s in this mood, a dull, placatory register that lies almost beneath hearing; it’s as if she needs him to lean close so she can be assured he is fully attentive.

‘Once more, Catherine, my first day in office …’

We notice now that he no longer speaks of himself in the third person. That regal idiom, which made him such a soft target for satirists and which too often occluded his real gifts, has given way to the full intimacy of the first person.

‘My first day, Catherine,’ he persists, ‘my first day.’

She turns from the window – there is nothing out there for her.

‘It was a glorious day,’ she begins, ‘the elements themselves deferred to the occasion; the sun recused itself from the sky. At any moment the clouds might have parted to give God a clearer view.’

‘They were affected, the elements?’

‘Yes, they were affected.’

She would welcome an interruption now, any sort of interruption. Someone with a questionnaire, for instance. She has heard they are out there, people with questionnaires traipsing the land on various need-to-know assignments. A few questions about her marital status, her number of dependents, her religious affiliation, if any … she would gladly answer a few of those queries right now. Anything would be better than this.

‘And how did I present myself on that first day?’

‘You wore a white suit.’

‘And that was unusual?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What was the word?’

‘Transfigured.’

‘Yes! And there was no precedent for that?’

‘No, no one had ever seen the like.’

‘Ha!’ He clapped his hands smartly. ‘Of course not, I was always a step ahead. And what did I say, the clincher, who did I quote?’

‘You quoted Isaiah.’

‘Of course, the prophet.’ He sighs fondly at the memory and shakes his head. ‘I agonized over that, I won’t deny it. Would it be lost on them, would it go over their heads?’ He throws up his hands. ‘Of course it went over their heads. I scanned the editorials the following day and of course they missed it. But they remember it now.’ He falls silent, his chin dipping into his chest, one hand cupping the other. She has noticed this new habit lately – his left thumb in the palm of his right hand and this continual twisting action that threatens to torque it out at the root. She has noticed how it becomes particularly vengeful during these pauses in his story. On resumption he will stop, overcome with that irresistible brightening that always brings him back to himself. As if on cue …

‘And what did I say?’

‘You said that the Messiah would come out of the west.’

‘I did indeed. That’s exactly what I said. And did I lie?’

‘No, you were as good as your word.’

‘Yes.’

She turns to the window once more. But even with her back to him, she can sense his tongue flicking over his cracked lips, this anxious tic preparatory to the final push. She can anticipate him now but she prefers to let him have his say. One of his peevish fits is the last thing she needs at this moment.

‘And how did I do it, Catherine, how did I fulfil my mission?’

Not for the first time something mean in her wants to toy with him, something bitter in her wanting recompense for all the hours she has spent in this room with him. But she dare not risk it; there is something uncanny about him when he is in these moods.

‘Catherine!’

‘Yes?’

‘My mission.’

She turns and sees him looking expectantly at her. Lowering her eyes, she begins in a dull singsong.

‘You came to restore time and you did it by building roads and bridges and bypasses.’

‘Yes,’ he breathes, ‘roads and bridges and bypasses. And there was a formula?’

‘Yes. An average of three thousand cars a day with one point four occupants in every one … each vehicle spending seventeen minutes in traffic jams … multiply one by the other and divide by twenty-four and you get one thousand, one hundred and ninety hours … do the same sum with the alternate five-minute journey through the roundabout, take one from the other and you get eight hundred and forty hours.’

‘Eight hundred and forty hours,’ he intones solemnly, ‘restored to the living.’

‘Multiplied by the number of working days in a year and …’

‘Stop,’ he cries happily, ‘my head …’

He succumbs to a weak giggle and passes his hand across his face. After a moment he waves her on. ‘Cut to the chase, the sum total.’

‘According to the World Health Organization, at year’s end the sum total of thirty-five men’s lives.’

The figure leaves him stunned, as though he is hearing it for the first time and not, as is the case, rehearsing it for the umpteenth. His face tightens to a grimace of satisfaction.

‘This is what I did, thirty-five men per annum restored to the living. And over my lifetime?’

‘Multiply by …’

He silences her once more with a weak stamp of a slippered foot. For all his love of hearing this, he has only ever had a limited degree of patience. And it is always likely to give way to awe.

‘It beggars belief. That one man …’ He tails off, the sentence drooping in the bright air. ‘And if I did not raise the dead themselves, it was only a matter of time; sooner or later they would be elbowing their way up out of their graves.’

She turns back to the window. If past form is anything to go by, this is where he will lapse into silence, his anger and inspiration finally spent. Outside, the tide is at the low water mark, ready to turn at any moment. She readies herself, trying to attune her mind to this short interval when the sea is neither ebbing nor flowing. It is a game she plays with herself, something in her is comforted by this short period of stillness and balance.

‘Catherine.’

‘Yes?’

‘Did they not weep with gratitude?’

She turns once more. His eyes glisten. She remains silent. He does not flinch from her gaze.

‘This will soon be over and I will not be sorry,’ he says.

Now he shrugs himself up in the chair, squares his shoulders and plants both feet bluntly on the floor. Rallying himself, that’s what he’s doing. He wags a finger at her. ‘Someday soon I will be standing on the floor of heaven and I will be asked to account for myself. And this is what I will point to – thirty-five men per annum restored to their lives, my life’s work. No wonder my health is broken, no wonder my … and I will point to the electoral register and say, This is my mandate, this is my authority: thirty-three per cent of the total valid poll, each time returned with a bigger margin than the last; roundabouts and bypasses, bridges and dual carriageways … These are the things I did, Catherine, these are the things I will point to. And then I will say, Now show me your mandate, you prick … you etiolated cunt.’

The savagery of the curse startles him, the sudden force of it driving him back into the chair. But he concludes in a loud, desperate bark, ‘These are the words I will use, Catherine, the very words.’

Despite herself she is impressed; he has never pushed it this far before, never to this end. But in truth she is already bored. The day is gone when she would have found herself caught up in the story, drawn in by his enthusiasm and sometimes moved to embellish it with colour and detail all her own. It has been a while since such flights of fancy took hold of her. Now she stands looking out the window, down over the green lawn to where it ends on the jagged line of the seashore. She has a life of her own outside of this room, she must have, there is surely something out there waiting for her. But for the moment there is nothing but a vacant listlessness within her.

Even with her back turned to him she can sense the grinding effort it has taken him to push this far. His exhaustion fills the room like interference. She knows what it will cost him … the long night of fevered sleeplessness ahead, his bedding twisted into damp ropes.

Behind her, in his chair, he turns out the palms of his hands and looks imploringly at her back.

‘And they carried me shoulder-high, Catherine,’ he whispers hoarsely, ‘they carried me shoulder-high.’