He said, “But they—”
She said, “Now Mr Mayor…”
He said, “They’re a bunch of total—”
She said, “Now really, Mr Mayor, may I suggest, just suggest, that before you suggest the sponsors of the biannual Aldermen’s dinner, stakeholders–and serious ones at that–in our very own Harlun and Phelps, suppliers of half our weaponry, and the gentlemen who pay for the golf memberships of senior staff–may I suggest you think before suggesting that these gentlemen engage, as a universal collective, in acts of a socially untoward sexual nature?”
He seethed, fingers drumming on the edge of his desk. A desk, how he hated having a desk; it reminded him every day of how easy it was to fall, how quickly you could forget the things that matter and throw them into the trash can to eternity that lay tucked beneath his damn desk. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Kelly. Leaving aside, for a moment, the sponsorship and the dinner and the shares and the golf; leaving aside, in fact, any reference to sex or death, can I just say this: they are evil.”
“Mr Mayor—”
“And before you say anything, may I just add, I didn’t call them tossers or wankers or festering warts on the arse-end of the devil’s rotting behind. I didn’t say that they were irredeemable gits, blaggards no less, nor the sewer that lies beneath the nether pit. Oh no! I kept it simple, I kept it pure, I kept it almost polite; you could have tweeted my views and still had characters to spare! Burns and Stoke,” he concluded, with his arms flailing in their grubby coat, “are evil bloody bankers!”