Malcolm Tucker Finally Relaxes But Not for Long
The legend of Malcolm Tucker was built on a foundation of perpetual, incandescent rage. His natural state was a high-frequency thrum of agitated combustion, a human pressure cooker ready to blow at the slightest whiff of ministerial ineptitude or journalistic imbecility. His office was not a space, but a crucible; his words, not communication, but molten lead poured into the ears of the undeserving. The very notion of Malcolm Tucker relaxing was, to anyone who’d witnessed his terrifying alchemy, akin to imagining a dormant volcano sipping chamomile tea.
Yet, there it was. Or, rather, there he was.
He’d found a cottage, deep in a remote Scottish glen, miles from the nearest mobile signal, accessible only by a track that bucked and swore more than Tucker himself. The decision had been less a conscious choice for peace and more a desperate, strategic retreat, a tactical withdrawal from a political landscape so monumentally screwed that even his Olympian profanity felt inadequate. For a week, he had, against all odds, unwound. He wore mismatched socks, ate suspiciously bland soup, and even, once, stood at the window watching a family of deer graze, his face registering something that might, at a stretch, have been mistaken for mild curiosity rather than simmering contempt. The air, crisp with the scent of pine and peat, was utterly devoid of the frantic hum of Westminster’s misery. His phone lay dead in a drawer, a silent, useless brick. He read old spy novels, the kind with thick paperbacks and predictable plots, and for the first time in decades, the incessant, furious monologue in his head had quieted to a murmur, then, astonishingly, to a hum, and finally, to something akin to silence. It was an alien sensation, a vast, echoing emptiness where the usual symphony of strategic slurs and future-forecasting disasters once played. He almost… smiled. A small, fleeting, almost imperceptible twitch of the lips that, had anyone witnessed it, would have instantly been dismissed as a spasm brought on by indigestion.
The hairline fracture appeared subtly, insidiously. It wasn't a phone call, or a screaming tabloid headline, or even the memory of a particularly egregious gaffe by a junior minister. It was a newspaper, two days old, left behind by the cottage’s previous occupant. A local rag, ‘The Glen Herald,’ folded carelessly on the coffee table. Tucker picked it up, not out of interest, but out of sheer, unthinking habit, a tactile tic of his previous life. His eyes, still softened by the unusual dose of tranquility, scanned the front page.
And there it was. Not a national scandal, not a political earthquake, but an article about the upcoming annual Highland Games. Specifically, a sub-headline, nestled innocuously beneath a photo of a man in a kilt struggling with a caber: “Local Councillor Fails to Secure Adequate Funding for Marquee.”
The stillness in the cottage didn't just break; it shattered.
His eyes, which had moments before been the colour of a calm sea, narrowed to slits of pure, concentrated venom. A muscle twitched violently in his jaw. "Fails to secure adequate funding?" he breathed, the words barely audible, yet laced with the nascent threat of a coming storm. "For a marquee? What is this, the f**king G8 summit of gazebos? Are they holding it together with blu-tack and the faint hope of a dry spell? Who is this Councillor Morag bloody MacPherson, and what in the name of Christ's sweet suffering arse is she playing at?"
The phone, the useless brick, was suddenly ripped from the drawer, slammed onto the table. His fingers, trembling with reawakened fury, scrabbled for the charger. "Where's the signal? WHERE'S THE FKING SIGNAL?" His voice, quiet moments before, was now a guttural roar that bounced off the ancient stone walls, echoing the primal, territorial rage of a trapped beast. He was pacing, a frantic, caged animal, the newspaper crumpled into a pathetic ball in his fist. "I don't care if it's a thousand miles away, I'll find the nearest mast! I'll climb the bloody thing myself! Somebody needs to tell this feckless, plaid-wearing, caber-tossing imbecile that a lack of adequate funding for a marquee is not just a local travesty, it's a strategic f*-up of galactic proportions that will undermine the very fabric of Scottish civic pride! And I'll tell them myself, the utterly useless, gormless, tartan-trousered ****!"
The quiet, the peace, the fleeting glimpse of an alternate reality, evaporated like morning mist under a scorching sun. Malcolm Tucker was back. The calm was merely the pause before the next, inevitable storm. His genius was his rage, and his true, unassailable relaxation was the brief, terrifying moment before he unleashed it. The Scottish glens, for all their tranquil beauty, had merely provided a brief, uncharacteristic intermission. The show, a symphony of creative vitriol, was about to resume.
