Utterly Monkey
Utterly Monkey
Nick Laird
A very funny, energetic, wonderfully engaging novel about where we’re from and where we’d like to get to…Danny Williams is talented, upwardly mobile and has left his Northern Irish small town roots well behind him. In his mid-twenties he lives in a stylish London flat and has a job in a top London law firm. However, one innocuous Wednesday night his old mucker from home, Geordie Wilson, arrives at the door. On the run from a loyalist militia, whose operational funds he has taken, he manages to bring everything that Danny has been fleeing from right to his smart London doorstep.Taking place over an intense and gripping five-day period–set in both London and the fictional Irish town of Ballyglass–Nick Laird has written an hilarious, touching and ultimately redemptive novel about friendship.
Utterly Monkey
Nick Laird
FOURTH ESTATE • London and New York
For the Lairds
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u658680a1-10c7-5dbb-9698-a5b1cfc1ba89)
Title Page (#u812dbc14-ec8f-5bb9-832d-e5aa672a1055)
Dedication (#ud5396d50-e729-5a9e-b1a5-425f01a165a8)
WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2004 (#u06730342-a402-519e-9502-4306295808b9)
LATE EVENING (#u84f4a89e-5507-5a0f-8253-0659891d91ac)
THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004 (#u4492c56e-40ef-5fad-b8ac-2939536eb0ff)
EARLY MORNING AGAIN (#uefd8f29b-ad48-57d4-abdc-2af416cb1290)
AFTERNOON (#u5b2ba0bb-9608-5e63-96b0-18d7a9d7a25c)
THE HAPPENING (#litres_trial_promo)
FRIDAY, 9 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
SATURDAY, 10 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
SUNDAY, 11 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE LATE NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
MONDAY, 12 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
EARLY AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Nick Laird (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2004 (#ulink_b3623ad4-4690-5806-9c37-5fcdbe31b672)
‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch.
What a bloody awful country.’
Reginald Maudling,
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,
on the plane back to London after his
first visit to Belfast, 1 July 1970
Moving is easy. Everyone does it. But actually leaving somewhere is difficult. Early last Wednesday morning a ferry was slowly detaching itself from a dock at the edge of Belfast. On it, a man called Geordie was losing. He’d slotted eleven pound coins into the Texas Hold’Em without success – not counting a pair of Kings which briefly rallied his credits – and had now moved two feet to the left, onto the gambler. The three reels spun out into click – a bell, click – a BAR, click – a melon. Fuck all. Geordie’s small hands gripped each side of the machine as if it was a pulpit. He kept on staring at the symbols, which again and again represented nothing but loss. Then he sniffed loudly, peeled his twenty Regals off the machine’s gummy top and sloped away. Eighteen quid down and they hadn’t yet left the harbour.
The boat, the Ulster Enterprise, was busy, full of families heading over for the long July weekend. Geordie bought a pint of Harp from the gloomy barman and slumped onto a grey horseshoe-shaped sofa in the Poets Bar, then sat forward suddenly and took a pack of playing cards from the black rucksack by his feet. He started dealing out a hand of patience. A short man in a Rangers tracksuit top stopped by his table, swaying a little with the boat, or maybe with drink. His shoulders were broad and bunched with muscle. He held a pint of lager and a pack of Mayfair fags in one hand. The other was in his tracksuit top, distending it like a pregnancy. He had a sky-blue baseball cap with McCrea’s Animal Feed written across it. He looked as if he’d sooner spit on you than speak to you and yet, nodding towards the other pincher of the sofa, he said: ‘All right. This free?’
Belfast, east, hardnut.
‘No, no, go on ahead.’
The man sat down carefully, like he was very fond of himself, and held Geordie’s eye.
‘You think we’ll still have McLeish next season?’ Geordie continued, looking at his tracksuit top.
‘Oh aye, I think so, though he’s a bit too interested in players and not enough in tactics.’
‘You on holiday?’
‘Spot of business.’
‘Oh right. I’m seeing some friends. You heading to Scotland?’
‘Naw, on down to London.’
‘Oh aye? Me too. You not fly?’
‘Taking a van.’
Geordie paused, to see if the offer of a lift was forthcoming. It wasn’t.
Hot enough today, eh?’
‘It’ll do all right. Better that than pissing down.’
They talked the usual talk. About pubs and places and discovered that the stranger was the nephew of one of Geordie’s dinner ladies. Which was how they swapped names. Ian. Geordie. They played whist and matched pints for the next two hours as the ferry ploughed through the water to Scotland. Just before they got in Geordie went out on deck to clear his head. Outside he shivered and watched the wake turn lacy and fold back into the sea. He felt off. His mouth was dry and the ache in his head suggested that afternoon drinking hadn’t been such a great idea. He turned slightly, to take the wind out of his eyes, and Ian was standing beside him, smiling secretly out to sea. Geordie nodded briskly at him and went in to the toilet.
When he came back to the table Ian had dealt the pack out and was in the middle of a round of pelmanism. Seeing Ian concentrating on the cards, crouched forward, intent, just as he had been doing earlier, made Geordie feel suddenly well-disposed towards him.
‘You not play patience? It’s a better game.’
Ian turned over the Jack of Hearts.
‘No skill in that. This’, he tapped the back of a card, ‘exercises the memory.’
Staring hard at the grid of cards, he turned over a matching Jack, clubs, then placed them both into a discard pile at the side. Geordie said it first.
Listen mate, I’ll be in London for a while later on this week as well, and I don’t know so many folks down there. If you give me your number maybe we could meet up for a jar or two?’
‘Tell you what, you give me yours and I’ll ring you if I’m free.’
‘Aye, do. That’d be a laugh. We’ll go out and get slaughtered.’
The solicitor Danny Williams was looking in his babyblue refrigerator. His pinstripe grey suit jacket sagged over the narrow shoulders of a kitchen chair. He had discarded his tie and shoes. The room was dim and the only light came from this massive fridge. It was like a UFO opening its door in his kitchen. ‘Take me to my dinner,’ Danny said out loud in the empty flat, without humour, as he stood snared in the pale luminous strip. An empty jar of mayonnaise sat by itself in the middle of the top shelf, like a judge on his bench. Danny found it difficult to look in his fridge when he was alone. It witnessed his failures. He would often wander round his airy flat, peckish, open it, see nothing he fancied (or could eat without risk of illness) and walk away again. Danny was skinny. The fridge clicked off its light and Danny resolved to make toast, a Saturday visit to Safeway. The doorbell went. He walked down the hall, unslid the chain, and opened his life.
Geordie Wilson was standing on the step. His small frame was silhouetted against the London evening sky. He looked charred, a little cinder of a man. His navy tracksuit hood cowled round a narrow and freckled face and his bagged eyes looked very blue and watery in the light from the hall. He had several days’ beard growth. He could have been Death’s apprentice. Geordie Fucking Wilson. In the slowed-down moment, Danny registered a furious argument being conducted further down the street between a man and woman out of sight. It was in Russian or maybe Polish.
‘Someone’s for it, eh?’ the figure on the doorstep said, snapping his elbow into the air. Danny felt his head lift suddenly. He shuddered, and realized just as quickly again that Geordie, this burnt-looking thing, was not going to draw a gun and shoot him.
‘Easy up big man,’ said Geordie, reaching a hand out for his shoulder and smirking. ‘It’s me. Geordie. How are you? What about you? Surprised?’
‘Hello,’ Danny said slowly, blinking in exaggerated shock, ‘Geordie Wilson. I knew it was you. What the hell brings you here?’
They would go to the King’s Head, but first Geordie came in and dumped his bag on the sheeny wooden floor of the hall, and they edged round each other, like novice ice-skaters, as Danny moved towards the kitchen to get the jacket of his suit. He slipped it on, felt its impropriety, like armour at dinner, and slipped it off again. He was wearing his grey suit trousers and a white shirt, which, though open-necked, still displayed cuff links as tokens of a serious man. He pulled a navy zip-up fleece off a hook, and then decided to wear his scuffed Levi’s jacket over it. He looked like a social merman: pinstriped lower, denimed upper. Geordie stooped and removed his fags and lighter from the rucksack. It was only when they’d left the house that Geordie asked where the pub was. It was an incontrovertible fact that this was where they were heading. Some friends you take to cafes and cinemas, some to concerts, others to matches or shopping, but some, the ones you grew up alongside, meaning the ones you learnt to drink with, you always always always take to the pub.
As they walked, Geordie was forced to half-skip to keep up with Danny, whose eyes, still varnished with surprise, were trained on the pavement. Gum studded the cement like the beginnings of rain. It was too warm for a jacket and he could feel sweat beginning to prickle along his spine. His face was tight with goodwill, his stomach with nerves and he wasn’t certain that what was happening was happening. Geordie Fucking Wilson. He needed a drink.
The King’s Head was a nasty little place but close, with a chubby cream cat that had the run of it to such an unreasonable extent that customers would be standing, possibly shivering, possibly pregnant, whilst it stretched and yawned and dreamt on a seat in front of the fireplace. It had the look of a theatre bar. All busy carpet, threadbare velvet and smeary mirrors, and signed sepia photographs of stars, faded with smoke and sunlight to the same dulled obscurity as their subjects. Its landlord was the obese and charmless Gerard, who sported a lame goatee in a lame attempt to define a lame jaw. Years back, when Danny had been looking for an evening job during law school, he tried all the local pubs for bar work. Gerard had immediately said Sorry mate, hardly enough for meself here really. Danny had persuaded his then-girlfriend to call in and ask. Tamara, a delicate woman whose distinctive nose exacerbated her accent and deportment into something approaching minor nobility, had put her head round the door and Gerard had offered her work immediately. They then couldn’t decide if Gerard was sexist or anti-Irish or just anti-Danny. Still, it was the closest pub and proximity – to lazy men in the city – is worth an acre of stripped floorboards, battered leather sofas, and four elastic student barmaids, which was what the second nearest, Pravda or Molotov or something, offered.
Geordie wandered to the far end to get a table and Danny stood at the bar. Geordie Wilson. How weird is that? He looked very well, really, considering, Danny thought, watching Geordie tap his lighter on the table at the far end of the bar. Chirpy. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, not since 15 August 1995, the summer Danny came back from his first year of uni, though neither remembered the incident. Danny was driving his father’s grey Volvo estate up the widest main street in Ireland, Ballyglass’s High Street. Ballyglass is really only this street. Other thoroughfares run off it at right angles before petering out into lanes and housing estates and fields. Geordie was crossing the lights by Union Street and Danny was waiting at them, holding the car on the clutch. Geordie saluted him and Danny, reclining, lifted a finger off the wheel and nodded a greeting. Both passed on feeling a little gladdened, a little embarrassed. Old friends know too much.
While Gerard stood and sullenly stared at the two jars of Guinness, waiting for them to settle, Danny watched Geordie fidgeting. He never could sit still. When they were at school, Mr O’Neill the maths teacher had told Geordie that he had no brakes. Danny, remembering that, pictured it literally: Geordie driving through Ballyglass in a car on which the cables have gone. Up Fairhill and Oldtown he could keep pace with the traffic. His car would look like the others, accelerate like the others, and he would sing along tunelessly to the songs on Townland Radio just like the other drivers. But downhill, to James Street, to the Ballymore Road, the car wouldn’t slow. He might try to warn you, flash his lights, beep his horn but he’d still collide and send things flying: other drivers, rickety cyclists, grocery shoppers, idiot dogs. Geordie Wilson, a bad bastard who lacks the ability to stop, and he’s come to see me. Danny delved for his loose change and counted it out while he waited for Gerard to steer his bright blue paunch, like the front of a bumper car, around the open drawer of the till. Gerard performed the manoeuvre quite neatly, pausing in front of the cash register to slam it shut with his side, and then pressed at the optics with two highballs, growling. Danny placed his scuffed Adidas on the brass footrail and shifted his weight onto it, keeping his balance by holding onto the side of bar. What were these rails for? To tie your pet to? He turned again to watch Geordie, sitting at the table, idly aiming and flicking a match, unlit, at the fat white cat which sat a few feet from him, defiantly licking her paws.
Gerard set the two pints down in front of Danny on an already sodden Carlsberg towel, and noiselessly accepted the exact amount (I think that’s right) proffered by Danny. He splashed the coins in the open drawer of the till, and went back to watching some sportive tangle of colour and shouting, wrestling perhaps, on the telly in the corner.
Their table was round, too low, and pocked with circular marks, a Venn diagram of sessions of previous drinking. Their lack of back support forced them to lean forward, conspiratorially. They looked like grandmasters. Geordie moved first.
‘All right fella. Sorry to drop in on you like this. You look a bit shocked.’
‘No don’t be stupid mate. It’s good to see you. What’s been going on?’
‘No no, you go first boss. Last I heard you were doing the law.’
‘Yeah. I’m a fully paid-up lawyer. Qualified almost three years ago. Working in the city. Good money, bad hours. But here, what about you? Let’s hear your news.’
‘Aw, you know me. Bit of this. Bit of that. None of the other. Some of the above.’
Danny had forgotten this, how Geordie spoke. It struck Danny now that maybe it was because he felt awkward. He sounded like a client squirming, mixing bonhomie with avoiding your eye. Danny waited.
‘Well, I’m officially an unemployed labourer.’
‘That what your business card says?’
‘It’s what my dole form says. I wish to labour. But no suitable labour’s available. Suitable’s the key. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve made me go on. I’ve been apprentice, trainee, new-starter, jobseeker.’
‘So you just living off the bru?’
‘Off the bru and on the…’ Geordie lifted his pint and nodded towards it, ‘brew.’ He then laughed too loudly, a little hysterical.
Danny eyed him quizzically. ‘You’re still a funnyman. Funny peculiar.’
‘Sorry mate, I’m a wee bit caned. I had a smoke in that park at the end of the road before I came to see you. What have I been doing? Well…’ Geordie puffed his cheeks and blew breath out for a second. Danny felt the heat of it and moved slightly back. I was doing a bit of cab work with Tommy Vaughan’s Taxis. Driving the old biddies to and from the Bingo. Leaving them over to their friends’ houses for tea and chat or up to the church on a Sunday.’
Danny was reminded of what he’d wanted to ask him when he’d been at the bar.
‘How did you know where I lived anyway?’
‘Just phoned your mum and mentioned I was coming over and she told me. Got your phone number as well but thought I’d just call round, surprise you.’
Damn sure you did. Otherwise I’d have produced a bulletproof excuse. Danny also suddenly realized why his mum had called him at work that morning when he’d been on a conference call: an e-mail from Jill, his secretary, had popped up on his screen asking him to ring her back. He’d forgotten, as usual, but this seemed a disproportionate and cruel punishment.
‘Yeah…You look well. It’s good to see you. How long are you here for? What are you doing here? You know, in London?’
Geordie moved nothing in his face now except his lips.
‘Not sure yet. See how things pan out.’
They drank fast, and let drink do the unpeeling for them. After setting down each new round on the table there was a moment when they waited for the pints to finish settling. It is difficult to get going on a Guinness. There is nothing aesthetic about other refreshments. Lager and cider just slop in their glasses, fizzing at you to get at it, to raise it and down it. Guinness is complete in itself. The first sip is like cutting a wedding cake. After the measured pouring, then the storm in a pint glass, the spindrift apartheid of grains and galaxies settling. And the Guinness was working. Danny began to feel a kind of warmth for this hard-bitten short-arse in front of him. It was good to see him. There was the other thing, of course, that Geordie brought back: guilt. But for the moment that could be disguised with drink, with smoke and mirrors which, indeed, the pub had in abundance. Danny had some knowledge he’d been chewing on for the last hour. It was time to spit it out. He cleared his throat and started, ‘I heard you had some bother a while back.’
The bother was a bullet in the back of each of Geordie’s calves.
‘Ach, you know the way it goes. I wasn’t really up to anything. I was seeing…’
He looks up, expecting an interjection. None comes.
‘Budgie Johnson’s sister. Just for a wee bit of action, nothing serious, and he took it hard. You ever see her? Something else altogether.’
‘Which one is she?’
Janice. With a wonky eye and great fat tits.’
They were grinning. Geordie knew that Danny probably didn’t usually have this sort of chat. Danny knew that Geordie knew.
‘Works in Martin’s Chemists?’
That’s the one.’
‘What happened?’
Greer walked in on me and her. Getting to the pitch. On his sofa.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘No joke. I didn’t know whether to come or shit myself.’
Budgie, also known as Greer, was the eldest of the Johnson brothers. There were two others, Chicken and Brewster, and two younger sisters, Janice and Malandra. Chicken was called Chicken because Budgie was called Budgie, though why Budgie was called Budgie was nobody’s business and anyone’s guess. He probably bit the head off one. Budgie was an animal. He’d knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times. A big lean man like a knife. He looked the part. Shaven headed, serious. You didn’t fuck with Budgie. He ran several things – drugs, local racketeering, a rash of potsheen stills up between The Loup and Cooperstown – but there was some confusion as to how far his fingers went, and into which pies exactly.
‘You weren’t done just for that?’
‘That was the real reason.’
‘Well, what did they say you were done for?’
‘Nicking cars…’
Danny eyed him with a level twenty-twenty.
‘Tha’ wee bit of dealing maybe.’
‘What sort?’
‘Puff mostly. A few pills. Coke at Christmas.’
‘You twat.’
‘They all do it.’
‘So they’re not going to want you cutting in.’
They supped. Geordie removed his fags from the front pouch of his hooded top, and leaned back to squirm the lighter out of his jeans.
‘When did it happen?’
‘I’ve told this thing a million times.’
‘So tell it again. You’re still one whiny bastard. You should be glad of the attention.’
Geordie lit his fag and blew smoke out. Once, twice. He took a sip and wiped the froth away with the back of his hand. Everyone prepares their body before they tell a story.
‘It was around one in the morning, on a Tuesday night. Five months ago or thereabouts. I’d been playing pool in the new pool hall. You won’t know it, it’s down behind the carpet warehouse. Then I’d gone to the Gleneally for a few pints with Den Spratt. You remember him?’
‘Rat-face Spratt.’
‘The very same. More like a chipmunk now. More meat to his cheeks.’
‘Come on.’
‘I was lying in bed, bit pissed, dozing. Mum’s staying at her sister’s in Bangor. Dad’s flat out snoring. There’s a bang of some sort and it wakes me. I figure it’s a car door banging just outside. So I look out the window. My bed’s still beneath the sill. There’s two cunts in the fucking garden in balaclavas. The streetlights are giving off good light and I know them. Not just to see, I know their fucking names. And they’re standing back. Not even keeping a lookout but watching the porch, so I know that there’s others and they’re at the fucking door. And I figure that bang was my fucking door going in.’
He stops and fingers a Regal out from its box. Danny realizes that the story, for Geordie, has slipped from urgency into theatrics. Danny lifts the pack and raises his brows. Geordie nods as he lights his own. Danny draws one out for himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remains of the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.
‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’ – Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window – ‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’
They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.
‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’
Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’
‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll he back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’
Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.
‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’
‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’
Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.
‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’
He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.
‘Bats, yes, and a shotgun, it was an old farm gun, double barrelled, and the pistol. And they had a children’s torch. A fucking children’s torch. Green, with a wee purple dinosaur on it. Couldn’t even get proper torches. And the batteries were shit in it or whatever so they had to reverse the car and put the headlights on me…You’ve heard this bit before haven’t you?’
Danny had. Everyone in the county had, he figured, seeing as his mother’d rang him to tell him.
‘Aye but go on.’
‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’
Danny nodded.
‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’
He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.
‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’
He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.
‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the hats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’
He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’
Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.
‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’
‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’
Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.
‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’
‘Fucking hell mate.’
‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’
Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.
‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’
Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’
Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?
‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’
LATE EVENING (#ulink_4d36d941-9b67-508a-bddd-8543aa419b84)
The word had come in through a friend of his dad’s that Geordie’s name had come up, again, and that he should scarper. And sharply. He’d never been on a plane and wasn’t going to start now, so he needed to get the ferry over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.
He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2—1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.
And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.
They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.
Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.
‘Who’s this then?’
A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.
‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’
Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’
‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’
Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids – but Danny was up and into the bathroom.
The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.
‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’
‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’
Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it – specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.
‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’
At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.
‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’
Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.
‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Ian McAleece.’
‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.
‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’
There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.
‘Listen, Geordie, you want me to ring you a cab? Where are you staying?’
‘Well, actually Dan, I was hoping I could stay here.’ Danny managed to keep his smile from slipping down into his shoes. ‘Just for a night or two, ‘til I get myself sorted. I was hoping to just kip on the sofa.’
Danny’s smile increased its wattage. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem. Stay here. I have to get up though and head to work tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ve spare keys for the house.’ Danny knew that two sets of keys, one of which had recently been attached by a silver chain to Olivia’s pink leather purse, were in the drawer under the coffee table about a foot in front of them.
‘Sure if you leave me yours, I can get a set cut.’
‘I could do I suppose. I’m not sure if you can though. One of them’s a security key or something. You need a letter from the managing agent.’
‘Well, if I can’t I’ll just make sure I’m here when you come back.’
‘Yeah, okay then. Sure.’
Geordie leant down and produced a lump of hash about the size of a bar of hotel soap from his rucksack. Danny watched him surreptitiously as he deftly skinned up, and passed the spliff to Dan to spark. Soon they both turned motionless, glassy-eyed as fish.
When the third spliff came round, Danny had lit a cigarette which he passed to Geordie to smoke when he smoked the joint. It was intimate and odd, all this. But not unworkable, Danny thought, this might be all right, this might even be fun.
The evening was ending. Danny, feeling too trashed to be anything but at ease with Geordie staying over, and too trashed to clear a space on the floor of the boxroom, locked the front door and tossed Geordie a sleeping bag, bulbous in its carry-sac, and a lank pillow without a cover. In his bedroom he locked his laptop and his diary into a drawer in his desk and climbed messily, many-limbed, into bed.
THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004 (#ulink_3c8dbc5d-def9-5a8d-8b73-176124511ad9)
My office worker’s collar turned unselfconsciously
up…I return home…feeling a slight,
confused concern that I may have lost for ever
both my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.
Fernando Pessoa
A minute after waking, Danny padded into his shower. His mornings were efficient. He dressed in beige cords, a blue shirt that he rubbed at for a bit with an iron that leaked and was only ever tepid, and strapped his black cycle helmet on his wet hair. His leather satchel slung over his shoulder, he lifted his bike off the hook on the garden wall and set off through the smouldering traffic to work.
Geordie shifted from facing the back of the sofa to facing the room. He farted a slow crescendo and went back to sleep.
Danny locked his bike in the underground car park and walked through the office courtyard to a side door into his building. Danny worked at Monks & Turner, a Magic Circle law firm. Which meant that his firm was, supposedly, one of the five best in the country. It was certainly one of the biggest. It felt to Danny like just another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it. He had attended Ballyglass Nursery, Primary and High School and had done pretty much everything right. He was a gaunt truthful child and his teachers had been surprised, and a little perturbed, when they realized that he wanted to know as much as he could. His mother still rang to tell him that one of his old teachers had been in the office telling her how they kept his essays to read out to their classes. He never got less than an A and as he got older it began to seem more and more important not to. It seemed that every A raised the tightrope he was walking on a little higher, so that his fall would be even greater when it came. And then, suddenly, he was at the other end and in university.
His school had filled out his application for Cambridge and he’d signed it. He’d decided to choose history for a degree. There was so much of it. He’d gone along and been interviewed by a large Australian woman, covered in cream drapes like a dustsheeted wardrobe, and a neat little ginger Englishman. Danny was accepted, worked, thrived, and as he’d promised his father, applied to law firms for a job after graduation. Monks & Turner was the first interview and when they accepted him, he’d cancelled the others. Two years of law school in Tottenham Court Road, living above a Perfect Fried Chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, saw city life settle down on him like smog. He became a first-class Londoner.
When he arrived at Monks, a grimy Monday in September, he had sat in Corporate, specifically insurance work. His trainer had just moved into the new office they were going to share. Their new name plaques, James Motion and, underneath of course, and slightly smaller, Daniel Williams, had been put up to replace Townsend Hopkins. Townsend was an infamous old boy partner who’d been given the heave-ho for not bringing the work in. The firm constantly restored itself like that. It put Danny in mind of some vast ruminant. The main entrance, painted, polished, was its mouth, the corridors and meeting rooms served as intestines and organs, and the lawyers were like teeth, yellowy-pale, varying in sharpness, and renewable. Like teeth, they varied not only in sharpness but also in purpose, and some would get clients, others retain them. All, though, were grinders. Danny, when he qualified, had joined Litigation, the only seat he’d done which felt like law, and he was now a two-and-a-half-year qualified solicitor-advocate in the Commercial Litigation department specializing in International Arbitration. Danny sometimes thought that the only job worth doing was one which was covered by one word. Plumber. Joiner. Farmer.
A year ago Danny’d been given his own office, about the size of a garden shed. When his three bookcases and two filing cabinets had initially arrived he’d felt slightly claustrophobic. Now he felt snug. He could reach almost everything in his room from his desk. His computer screen faced the window. He faced the door. His desk had a panelled front on it and Danny had developed the habit of nipping below it, where he kept a duck-down sleeping bag and a cushion embroidered with sunflowers that his sister had made, for a kip either before, during, or after lunch. He would make sure the route to his desk was barricaded by briefcase and recycling box, then slink off his seat, suddenly boneless.
Danny’s central friend at Monks was Albert Rollson, a Brummie who’d ditched his accent in favour of a mid-Atlantic twang. Rollson was neurotic. His terrors included other people’s illnesses and he would get out of a lift at the next floor if someone in it coughed or sneezed. He’d flinch if someone accidentally came too close or brushed against him in passing, and grimaced if hugged. Which is not to say that he was cold, he simply, proudly, possessed an over-developed sense of propriety. It informed his distrust of Antipodeans. And Americans. And Europeans. And was the reason he worked in law. He was born to its hierarchy, its wheels within wheels, its concurrent bitchings and slobberings, its dog-eat-dog, backstab, leapfrog. And it allowed him to dress like Cary Grant.
Danny had shared an office with Rollson when they had qualified, two years after arriving at Monks. They had argued relentlessly over plants. Danny’s view was that offices are the ugliest, most sterile places in the world. Everything is synthetic. You see nothing that is actually growing, bar the perceptible fattening of some of the most sedentary lawyers and secretaries. Danny wanted a real plant in the room. He told Rollson that the lack of flora in the workplace was the reason lawyers started office affairs. There was nothing else to look at but people. The obscene clashing decor, the generic tacky prints, the background corporate hum from air conditioning, VDU and photocopier: people looked at each other more closely. Rollson however, perpetually single, quite liked the idea of people looking at him more closely. Plants were there simply to steal more of his oxygen in a city where there was scarcely enough anyway. He was allergic to anything natural. On a school outing to a stables near Dudley, a large grey mare had once licked his face and he’d never recovered. That rough slobbery smothering tongue. The smell of it. He quite liked seeing the countryside from the motorway, the space, its potential, and he’d once bought a David Attenborough series on video, although he hadn’t watched it.
Danny walked into his corridor. He noted that the doors of Andrew Jackson, departmental senior partner, and Adam Vyse, departmental managing partner, were open. He removed his bag from his shoulder, placed the helmet in it and carried it close to his body. In this way, and by performing two complicated body-spins at just the right moments, he could walk past the partners’ doors without it being immediately apparent that he was just arriving. It was 9.43 a.m.
Geordie stretched out an arm to the coffee table, encountered the remote control and switched on Trisba. He noticed that he’d drooled on his pillow.
Danny’s phone was flashing. This always scared him a little. Either it was a message from last night (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there after he’d left) or from this morning (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there before he’d arrived). In the worst case scenario (the WCS, as Rollson would have called it) there would be two messages from the same partner, one from last night and one from this morning, and in the very WCS, that partner would be Adam Vyse. Danny listened to his messages. Two. First message, yesterday: 7.05 p.m. Carrie, Adam’s calm and pretty secretary, was cooing that Adam wanted to see him as soon as possible. He loved the fact that Carrie refused to say a.s.a.p. We’re not Americans, Danny always thought when he heard it used, we have time to say the whole sentence. Second message, today: 8.11 a.m. Adam. ‘Danny, give me a ring soon as you’re in. Something big’s come up.’ Ach fuck, Danny said, a little too loudly.
Vyse was notorious for handing out difficult work and not supervising it. He would demand a briefing just prior to seeing a client and then, in the meeting, repeat to the client what you had just told him, word for word, before turning to you, smiling encouragingly, and asking whether you agreed with his preliminary views. Danny stood at Vyse’s open door. He was leaning back in his leather easy chair, with his tailored arms crossed behind his slicked head and the phone cradled between his neck and chin.
‘Yes, of course. No you’re quite right. We don’t need any more of them. Oh yes?…Fourteen. No, no about two hundred acres. Uh-uh…A Jet Ski. Well, you know what I say? He who dies with the most toys wins…No, this is it. They need to consolidate and we aren’t going to give them time to. We need to hit them hard now…I know…Yes…’
Danny looked in at the office. A wooden golf putter was propped a little forlornly in the far corner, as if it dreamt of real grass. Aside from Adam’s own enormous bureau, reminiscent of the White House presidential desk, another sheeny table, an eight-seater for team meetings, dominated the middle of the room. The oakveneer cabinets fronted with glass held silver and crystal ornaments given to Adam for successful corporate claims or defences. Danny could read the largest one, a glass rhomboid, from here: Jackman Thorndike Litigation1998 – The Best Team Won. An open wardrobe displayed navy and grey pinstripe suits, a shelf of shirts and a row of pegs from which numerous ties hung down, entwined. A sky-blue baseball cap hung on one of the pegs. Its motif was illegible but Danny knew that it said I Wouldn’t Say Boo To A Gooson, Gooson being a corporate client involved in a billion dollar insurance dispute which had taken a team of twelve associates and three partners two years to resolve. Danny also knew that Adam had a matching sky-blue polo shirt with a matching logo. After the case had been settled the whole team, in their team outfits, had flown to the firm’s headquarters in Atlanta for a week-long junket. The pictures were still on the noticeboard in the corridor outside. Team Gooson at the check-in. Team Gooson in the departure lounge. Team Gooson at the baggage terminal. They reminded Danny of the Gateway outings for mentally handicapped kids he used to help with at school. It was to do with the grinning. On the meeting table sat an array of executive toys: an Archimedes’ cradle, little metal monkeys on a magnet that could be built up into shapes, a Rubik’s cube sponsored by a pharmaceutical company with different drug logos on each side. On a far shelf, Chopin was seeping softly from the big black speakers that stood, close as bodyguards, on either side of the little silver stereo. A copper plaque above the desk stated, in gothic lettering, Teamwork divides the task and doubles the success. On the far wall photographs were aligned in a row, five of them, like the house’s face-up poker hand. Each contained posed shots of Adam and his family. His wife (Amelia? Amanda?) was pretty much what you’d expect if you watched television on Sunday evenings. Something of the period drama about her. Slighty sad, as if she’d expected something slightly different, skinny (tennis, Danny supposed), naturally blonde. The kids were all versions of either of their parents, and all the shots appeared proprietorial somehow: two of the blondies on a yacht looking more bored than they should; one astride a grey pony which, bearing its teeth, seemed to be grinning for the photograph; the perfect husband and wife posed at their fireplace, holding the lintel (Team Marriage, thought Danny); one of the wife in a manicured garden (of at least two acres) with a lifted glass of wine; the whole family on a ski slope clutching each other and not for balance. They looked happy.
‘I know…Quite…Well, I looked at him for a moment and said If that’s the way you want it we’ll have no option but to seek an injunction. It was either put up or shut up. We have them by the balls…Yeah, fuck’em…Okay, we’ll talk soon…Okay…take care…Bye…Bye bye.’
Adam swivelled slightly, and with one fluent gesture succeeded in both replacing the phone and waving Danny into the room. Danny. Yes, great. Come in, come in. Shut the door.’
Danny was tempted to nod at the telephone and solemnly ask ‘How is your Mum?’, but thought better of it and stepped inside. He sank slightly into the deep-pile carpet.
‘Sit down. Now, how are things?’
This means, in law firms, Can you do this piece of work for me, this piece that I am keeping up my sleeve? If you are seriously considering saying no, you need a reason better than I have no time or desire or consciousness or limbs.
Danny could have quite enjoyed these non-conversations, where both sides spoke in this unwritten code, like pig Latin, if they didn’t result in pain for him, which they invariably did. There were several responses to Adam’s question, and none of them could save him. Danny’s favoured one was to hedge as much as possible until the work had been described and then try to sidestep it or, if it looked okay, enthusiastically accept it. First off, Danny liked to describe how busy he was, at great and enthusiastic length, in order to strengthen his hand when he would try to brush off the incoming work. He replied, ‘Fairly stuffed at the moment. I’m working on this massive arbitration between a Brazilian company, our client. and a German electronics manufacturer. That’s with Carol and Alastair. And I’m running the disclosure on a new claim for Cartwrights against a ballbearing manufacturer. That’s with Jonathan. We’re fighting over the size of it at the minute.’ Adam’s eyes were scanning a point about six inches to the right of his head. Danny couldn’t remember whether there was a mirror behind him. I haven’t finished yet, he thought, so at least look me in the face. ‘And a couple of pro bono issues have just gone live. The homeless charity I work with are disputing marketing fees, and my death row case in Jamaica is up for review by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Then there’s also the coroner’s inquest that I’ve been doing with Amanda.’
Adam, rather shamelessly, looked bored. ‘Right, right, great. Now I’ve a piece of work I’d like you to look at for me. It’s fairly intensive but really interesting.’ Danny’s simultaneous translation ran on: Stop fucking around. I know you have work. We all have work. And you are about to get some more. And it’s going to be horrific. C’est la fucking vie. Still, even this was unusual. There was normally the pretence of an option. He’d have to force it. ‘Well Adam, I’d really like to help you on it.’ I’m not doing all of it mate. ‘But I really will have to check with the other partners on my matters, Carol and Jonathan, as to whether or not it’s feasible.’ I have friends in powerful places and they will come through for me. Back off tiger.
‘I’ve already spoken to them and they’re fine about it, as long as you get everything done of course.’ Checkmate. Stop your snivelling. You ‘re fucked for the foreseeable. Forget about your holiday, your friends, your sleep.
‘Okay, great.’ Dead man walking, dead man walking. Danny heard a bright, happy voice come out of his own mouth. ‘And will there be someone on this to help me?’ If I really really have to do this, I need to share the shit around.
‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find a willing trainee.’ Screw you wiseguy. ‘Here’s the file.’ I’ve cleared my desk! I’ve cleared my desk! ‘Hard work is character-building, Danny.’ Go fuck yourself.
‘Of course, of course.’ I’m eating it up. ‘Though my character’s already built, thanks.’ Fuck you too.
‘Look, Danny, the thing is, it was one of Scott’s projects and he’s had to clear out to Australia for a while unexpectedly.’ We all know what happened so settle down. ‘We’re in a bit of a bind.’
Scott Atkins had come home from work on Monday, at 1 a.m., to discover that his wife had moved back to Australia. She had left a factual note on his pillow telling him that they had spent a total of two hours together in the last five weeks, aside from sleeping in the same bed, and that she was going home to Melbourne.
Danny nodded. Adam continued, It’s the Ulster Water takeover. You know what I’m talking about? It’s not really your line but things being as they are the Corporate boys need all the help they can get.’ Don’t misunderstand me, I think you’re a piss-poor lawyer.
‘Ulster Water?’
‘Yes.’
‘My part of the world.’
‘Really? I always thought you were Scottish.’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Well, Syder Plc are launching a takeover offer for them. Yakuma are making a rival bid. We’re acting for Syder. You’ll have a quick conference call after lunch with the Syder MD, a Mr Tom Howard, where you can introduce yourself.’ You’re on your own. I know nothing about this. ‘I understand he can be a pretty difficult customer. In the meantime you need to go speak to the Corporate department. You’ll be overseeing the litigation due diligence and maybe heading off to the head office this weekend. In Belfast. John Freeman’s the partner on it. Okay? Thank you.’ He turned abruptly but neatly in his chair and started reading his e-mails.
Danny started back up the corridor. He hadn’t heard of John Freeman. He started listing all the consequences that had flowed from previous hospital-passes, those spinning cases that you catch in mid-air and which end with a sudden high tackle or headbutt from nowhere. One, involving a counterclaim between crisp bag manufacturers, or more specifically between a crisp bag manufacturer and the company that manufactured the machines that manufactured crisp bags, had caused Danny to begin taking anti-depressants. Another, involving suing the Bulgarian Government for reneging on promised subsidies for a hydro-electric power station, forced him to miss his grandmother’s funeral. Danny spent approximately ten per cent of every working day looking at job sites on the Internet.
Albert was waiting in his office. He was sitting in Danny’s seat, clicking out a length of lead from a plastic pencil, one of several that peered out of the handkerchief pocket of his jacket. He’d walked past Adam’s office and witnessed Danny nodding sagely as Adam stitched him up. Rollson had been returning from the stationery stores in the basement with a new haul. He visited them every few days to check out any new pens, pencils or interesting objects that might have arrived and hadn’t been listed on the intranet stationery ordering facility.
‘Well?’
‘I’m in serious trouble.’
‘What on?’
‘Takeover of Ulster Water. One of Scott’s old cases.’
‘The due diligence on that’s huge. You are fucked mate, truly.’
‘I need a trainee on it.’
‘You might get the lovely Ellen.’
‘Fat frigging chance. Come on, get out of my seat.’
The lovely Ellen. Danny and Albert had been having lunch about two months ago when they agreed on a girl. This was noteworthy because it was rare, rare enough to have never happened before. Though neither liked a specific type (aside from Albert’s self-hating weakness for sloans, pearls, turned-up collars) each would say about the target of the other’s amorous (read lewd) remarks, that she was too tall, too small, too fat, too thin, too loud, too quiet and so on. Albert had pointed her out to Danny in the canteen. She had been expertly gathering tomatoes at the salad bar with two primitive wooden utensils, the sort that look like souvenirs from a holiday in Tonga. She was wonderful. They agreed on Ellen. Everyone agreed on Ellen. Albert knew who she was, of course, and which office she was sitting in. Danny had since looked her up at least five times on the intranet to see her picture: those almond eyes levelly staring the camera down.
Ellen was a trainee on the ninth floor in the Banking Litigation department. Danny worked on the tenth floor in the Corporate group. That morning, after his meeting with Adam, and a leisurely dander to Starbucks, he sent out a sequence of increasingly desperate e-mails to the entire Litigation department. There were two positive responses. One from a meat-headed trainee called Bradley who wore a variety of different shades of pastel shirts, all Ralph Lauren, with the sleeves rolled up to display massive pale forearms, like shanks of lamb in a butcher’s window. Bradley’s offer of help, evidently compelled by his trainer, was so loaded with qualifications, and his work of such low quality anyway, that Danny was about to send out a seventh request, addressed only to the senior associates, begging them to allow their trainee to assist him, when Albert’s uncommon optimism came uncommonly good.
Ellen Powell was about to qualify into the Employment department and had been doodling the last seat of her training contract away downstairs on the ninth floor, avoiding work as much as she could and sneaking out the building by way of the catering lift at 6 p.m. Her trainer had gone on secondment and when Ellen returned from reading the newspapers in the library on the fourteenth floor, she had thirty e-mails in her inbox. After reading through Danny’s six requests, and checking Danny’s picture out on the intranet, Ellen e-mailed him offering to help. It had just pinged into Danny’s inbox when she appeared in his doorway. She was standing very straight: a tall, black girl wearing a black trouser suit and a double-cuffed blue and white pinstriped shirt. Her hair was braided and tied back. Her long legs and narrow hips made her seem taller than she was and it was only her breasts that prevented her body from appearing purely athletic. Her face had something reserved and angry about it. She was closed to the general public. Danny grinned.
‘Something amusing?’ A posh bone-dry voice.
‘No. I’m smiling in a friendly manner. It’s the Monks & Turner spirit. You’re Ellen?’
‘And you’re the man with too much work.’
‘I’m one of them. Please. Come in, come in. Sit down. Now, how are things?’ And thus we do the evil we have done to us.
EARLY MORNING AGAIN (#ulink_aa84897f-7842-5ec4-a5e2-2fafc94188b3)
Two miles and forty-seven yards away, Geordie was skinning up a morning spliff to lessen the stress of Trisha. Two men were arguing over an enormously fat girl who was dressed from head to foot in Adidas. The two men were both at least three times her age, which appeared to be around thirteen. Man One and Man Two would periodically stand up and shout at each other and then sit down. Like little figures wheeled out on the chime of a fancy wooden clock, they’d wave their arms, clang around for a while and retreat. The fat girl’s brown hair was scraped up away from her face and sat in a tuft on the top of her scalp, like the green parts of a pineapple. It was becoming apparent that Man Two was the girl’s father and that Man One drove her school bus. It was also becoming apparent that Man One had fathered Pineapple’s baby. This, the offspring of Pineapple and bus driver, was now being brought on stage for some kind of curtain call. It was a pink-faced wailing package and nobody wanted to hold it.
Geordie took the last hot drag on his spliff, and stubbed it out, crooking it like a baby finger. This was interesting. He was alone in Danny’s flat. He stood up. He was wearing only pale blue creased boxers. He lifted his rucksack from the foot of the sofa and emptied the contents out onto the sleeping bag. He replaced everything bar one white plastic bag. He set about counting the cash it contained. Geordie had not left home empty-handed.
The morning of his going he’d been fit to burst with worries about what to take and where to go and how to get. The usual going concerns. He’d rang Janice at work and asked her to meet him in the old children’s playground over in Kildrum. It was out of town and across the road from a housing estate that was being emptied out, house by house, to swankier estates. The windows on some houses were boarded up and some were flung open on the warm summer sky. The place had the look of an advent calendar. Janice had taken her lunch hour early from the chemists and driven out in her wee red Fiesta. Geordie watched her carefully and clumsily reverse the car into one of the outlined spaces in the car park, even though it was completely empty. She sauntered up to him. Tight scant denim skirt, white trainers, a navy V-neck top and a long open maroon cardigan. Her hair was tied back and Geordie fancied she’d been crying or maybe it was hay fever. She looked good, great even, if you forgave the wonky eye, and Geordie did, as he held her waist and kissed the soft swell of the top of her breasts.
‘Jan, I have to disappear. You know your fucking brother has put the word out on me.’
I heard Brewster talking about it in the kitchen. Geordie, I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. I tried to talk to Greer but he wasn’t having any of it. And Da said to shut up or he’ll turf me out. Should I come? Should I come with you? Where are you going?’
Good old Janice, Geordie thought. Good old stupid sexy Janice, with her little waist and little feet and big lips.
Better not, at least not yet. I’ll try and send you a message at Martin’s when I get something sorted. I don’t know where I’m going, to be honest Jan. And I’ve no cash. I was thinking of Australia but there’s visas and stuff to be sorted out and I’ll have to do that in England. You could try and come over and meet me in London maybe, or in Australia even, in a few months. You could do your hairdressing again and I could work in a bar or drive a cab.’
‘Geordie, if you need money, I can get you money.’
He had turned her round and she was leaning into his lap as he drifted slightly on the swing, pleased with the airy movement. He was considering whether or not she’d let him slip her skirt up and fuck her gently from behind, here and now, as a little leaving gift.
‘How can you get money? You can’t nick it from work Jan. They have security cameras in there.’
‘Geordie!’ she snapped a little, ‘I love that job. I wouldn’t steal from Mr and Mrs Martin. They’ve been really good to me.’
‘Aye, Charlie Martin’s been very keen to be really good to you. Mad keen. Mad keen to get you in the back of the shop all alone and be really good to you.’
‘Shut up. Listen to me. Greer has money in a box behind the panel in the bath. He doesn’t know I know it’s there. You have to work the panel off with a knife or screwdriver but the other day I was in there and Da was shouting to let him in the bathroom but I was shaving my legs and I turned round to let him in for a piss and kicked the side panel of the bath and it made a clangy sound, like metal. Geordie, I can feel you.’
Geordie had slipped his hands inside her cardigan, which she’d zipped up, and he was cupping the underside of her breasts. His cock was running lengthways to the left, over the side of his thigh. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and slipped one hand under the pinch of his jeans and pulled his cock up straight, to fit in the shallow indentation that her tight skirt allowed her ass to make. ‘Go on then. What about the bath?’ He pulled her tight to him now, holding her hard little waist. She was rubbing a little against him and her voice was softer, sinking.
‘What? Oh. Well, I let Da in and then when I went back in to finish my legs I took Brewster’s penknife from the cabinet, which Malandra had in there cos it’s got tweezers on it, and I took the panel off and there’s a metal box, with a lock on it but the key was in it, and it’s full of money. I mean full of money. It must be Budgie’s. No one else in the house has cash like that lying around.’ Her voice trailed off as Geordie moved one hand down and under her and touched the warm, wet patch of her cotton knickers.
‘You’re full of money.’ He slipped a finger in under the strict elastic and felt that smallest part of her hardening. With his palm on her thigh, holding her legs apart, his finger moved down to feel the lips loosening, moistening.
‘Geordie, not here. Come into the car and we’ll park down by Macklin’s river.’
‘Ach, come on, there’s no one round. It’s the last time we’ll see each other for a while. Are you saying, Janice,’ and here he moved the other hand up over her breast and freed it from her bra. Loose and soft and billowy. He held the dense little nipple between his finger and thumb, gently, then firmly, ‘that you’ll steal Budgie’s money to give to me? What are you saying?’
‘You’ve nothing to lose. I’ll deny everything. No one knows the money’s there. He never checks it. That first night I put a hair between the panel of the bath and the wall so that if someone took the panel off the hair would fall and Geordie, the hair was still there this morning. I’ll take some of it. Just enough to see you right. Come on.’
Clever girl, Geordie thought. Janice stood up, shivery, adjusted her bra under her top and tugged her skirt round to straighten the seam. She dragged him by the hand to the car, and as she walked she felt the friction tingle between her legs, as if his fingers were still down there. Geordie pulled his checked blue shirt out of his jeans to cover his cock: it had thrust its angry head over the parapet of his belt.
Driving back into town, after a frenetic half-hour at Macklin’s river, feeling sated and lazy and sexy, Janice told Geordie to meet her back at the playground at two, and to bring a bag. She went back to work and told old soft Mr Martin that she wasn’t well. Woman’s problems. He was getting ready to complain when she pushed her chest up against him and made as if to cry. He told her to go straight home and get to bed. They could manage without her. She drove to the semi-detached house at the edge of the Dungiven estate she shared with her parents, Malandra and a varying number of brothers (Budgie’s marriage had faltered, as predicted, almost immediately, and Jackie and little snub-nosed Greer Junior lived with her mother over in Coagh, and Chicken had just moved across town into his girlfriend Jenny’s flat which was, too conveniently, above the offy). She told her mother, who was sitting at the dining-room table doing a jigsaw of two poodles in a pram, that she’d period pains, and needed to take a bath and some aspirin. Her mother, holding two edge pieces between her pursed lips, looked up, nodded and then looked down again. Some old sitcom was on the telly. Janice thudded up the stairs into her room and emptied her toilet bag onto her bed. She carried it into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the bath. She leant against the sink and looked at herself. The mirror was overcast with dust and constellated with stray white flecks of toothpaste. Janice thought how old she looked. She stretched the skin at the side of her eyes to flatten the little crow’s feet that were appearing. She must remember to wear her glasses more when she drove, not squint so much. And she should stop smoking, they say that’s not good for the skin. She turned and looked at herself from the side. Her breasts were still high and still firm, for breasts that size. She cupped them as if weighing them, and thought how last week some asshole down at the building site on the Benaghy Road had shouted after her, as she passed on the way to the solarium at lunchtime, You don’t get many of them to the pound. She felt like kneeing him in the balls as she had Budgie, when he’d tried to get into her room three years ago, drunk. No way Jos´e. She hadn’t let him in since she was sixteen and he never tried any more. She lifted her top. Her stomach was still flat and still hard. Good. She could do with losing some weight off her bum she decided, and suddenly, a little viciously, tugged off her top and wriggled out of her skirt and knickers. She stepped cleanly out of the puddled clothes, and looked at the pale mass of herself again. Skin and then inside that flesh and inside that bone and then inside that what? Didn’t people say the marrow of the bone? People had bone marrow transplants didn’t they? As she stood and stared in the mirror she saw her face waver and emerge as if it was fifty years old. Fleshy cheeks, a corrugated brow, eyelids thickened and heavy. She blinked and came back to herself. You’re getting old Janice, she thought, you’re beginning to die.
She opened the bathroom cabinet. A dimpled strip of Boots paracetamol clattered into the sink, triggering a loose scree of assorted plasters. An ancient bottle of Calpol, still in its stained cardboard sheath, stood at the back of the top shelf. A stippled pink ankle support covered some squat and sturdy pill bottles. It dated from the time Budgie, up playing on ‘the pitch’ (really a partly gravelled field behind the Costcutters which had been earmarked for a car park that never appeared) had his ankle sprained by a dangerous tackle from Jackie McMenemy. That was the first time Budgie had been in trouble, apparently, according to Brewster, as Janice had only been one or two then. As payback Budgie had lifted a broken brick from the pile they were using for one of the goalposts, hobbled over to Jackie, who was sitting cross-legged nursing his own ankle, and smashed it in his face. Her dad had given the McMenemys money so that Budgie wouldn’t go to borstal. You still saw Jackie round the town on a Saturday, holding the hand of one of his wee boys who’d look up, wailing or smiling, into the gap-toothed grin of a village idiot. You can fix that sort of stuff now, Janice thought, wiping her tongue like a polishing rag over the neat ornaments of her own front teeth.
There were pumice stones and scalpels and bunion and corn plasters for her mother’s gnarled feet (the legacy of twenty years standing behind the counter in Marshall’s bakery). And there was Brewster’s penknife with the tweezers that saw heavy usage. The hair on Malandra’s body could best be described as adventurous. Her eyebrows, left alone as they had been for approximately fifteen years, had sent out expeditions to explore the rest of her face. The small of her back had fleeced itself. She was pretty, Janice knew, and unlike her was dark, which was really why the flecks of downy, shadowy hair on her face used to be noticeable. From when she was twelve, if she ever pissed any of them off, they’d called her Elvis, what with her sideburns and all. Which was why there were four half-empty tubes of Immac in the cabinet, and the tweezers were kept busy applauding in the natural light by the bathroom window.
Janice banged the cabinet door and pulled out the blade of the knife with her thumbnail. She wedged it in between the panel and the side of the bath. The panel shifted slightly ajar. She turned on both bath taps: they squealed as she twisted their heads, and dripped in some gloopy orange bubble foam. The panel was a sheet of plywood, painted white, and the green deposit box was still behind it. She pulled it out from its hiding place. It was lighter than she remembered. She put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it, the box and the lid burning her bare thighs with cold. The cash was in rolls packed in little plastic bank bags. They reminded her of messages in bottles somehow. She hadn’t time to count it or estimate how much it was. She quickly took the bags out and pushed some into her trainers, and then pushed her socks in after them. The rest she stuffed into her toilet bag. She stood up then, and touched, gently, as if in remembrance, the cool damp hair between her legs. She would miss him, she thought, and his lovely big cock. Maybe she would try and meet him somewhere. Fuck Budgie. It had been a long time since she’d felt anything but hate for him. Fuck Greer and Chicken and their vicious mouths and fists and friends. Fuck the lot of them. Except Brewster. He was all right, just a bit pathetic. He floated around like a ghost, shocked to be noticed at all. She went to the toilet, wiped, stood and yanked the chain. It was an old-fashioned toilet with the cistern up high on the wall. It glugged and then whimpered, filling up. She stepped into the bath and hunkered. It was too hot to lie down in. She could hear the bubbles in the foam popping softly, audible as an opened can of Coke. She lowered her ass into the water and raised herself again. She cupped some water and let it drizzle down over her knees, onto her thighs, into the nest of hair between her legs. She sat down properly and then, with the dragged, reverberant sound of skin on wet plastic, slipped down into the bath to submerge herself completely. Pinching her nose closed, she felt the water funnel into her ears. She could hear the sounds of the house much clearer here: the television spilling canned laughter in the living room, and the steam whistle of the kettle on the gas ring, and then her mother’s chair scrape back on the lino tiles as she got up in her sheepskin slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to warm the teapot. I live underwater, she thought suddenly, and pushed her feet against the bottom of the bath to surface for air and shampoo.
Geordie then had a bagful of cash. Janice had put the money in a white plastic bag and he’d placed it in the front pocket of the rucksack he’d nicked from his little sister Grace. As soon as he’d got on the ferry (until then he was still expecting Budgie to appear suddenly, behind some window, tapping softly as rain) he’d nipped into one of the disabled toilets, and sat on the floor and totalled the cash. £49,250. Not bad at all.
Sitting on Danny’s sofa, Geordie counted it again, dealing the notes into piles like playing cards. £49,300. He recounted it. £49,450. Fuck it, he thought, I’ve a rough idea. He lifted two of the Bank of England fifty pound notes, pushed them into his left trainer and placed the rest back into the plastic bags. He started to look around Danny’s place with replenished interest. Where the hell could he hide it? He wandered through the flat like a prospective buyer, looking up at the plaster cornices and down at the skirting boards. He tapped walls. He opened cupboards and drawers. He peeled back the carpet, like sunburnt skin, from a corner of the living room. The pale epidermis of unpolished floorboards. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He sat down again, heavily, on the sofa. And then it was obvious. He’d hide it where Budgie had hidden it. Geordie lifted a small fork from the cutlery drawer, which was still lolling out like a tongue, and carried the bag into the bathroom.
The bath must once have been new and white. And that must have been some time ago. It now had a discoloured ring around it, close to the top, like a high tidemark and the base of it was grained by smaller rings and various stains, all of them bad. The panel was plastic and when Geordie inserted the handle of the fork, it scraped open almost immediately. Behind the panel was a paper bag filled with nails, a magazine from July 1995 called Smash Hits (featuring Take That and their magnificent teeth) and an empty bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. He pushed the plastic bag right to the back, past the roughened underside of the bath.
Geordie, to the tune of ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’, was softly singing Fifty thousand pounds, fifty thousand pounds, hey-ho ma-dearie-oh, fifty thousand pounds. Janice was an idiot. She reckoned that kind of money was Budgie’s, that it was the proceeds of one scam or another: bleaching red diesel to white, flogging counterfeit DVDs or videos to the stallholders up at Nutts Corner, offering ‘protection’ to the chippies and offies that lined the main street. That kind of folding didn’t come in from that. Not, leastways, all at once. Fitting the panel back into its gap, Geordie started to get a little unnerved. Maybe he was the idiot. Everyone’d heard the rumours. Something was starting up or going down. Something was being unleashed. Maybe he had Something’s money.
Geordie showered, dressed himself in yesterday’s garb, and set off towards Dalston. Danny’s flat was in Stoke Newington, according to Albert, Olivia and his postcode, but Danny himself admitted Dalston was spiritually, if not technically, its home. He had given Geordie brief instructions last night: turn right out the house, then right again, then buy some food for dinner.
Stoke Newington High Street runs from the white liberal enclave of Church Street (homeopathic healers, designer clothes shops, independent bookstores) through the Turkish community (men’s clubs with no discernible purpose, kebab shops) to the African and Afro-Caribbean end (hair shops, furniture stores selling coffee tables fashioned from ceramic tigers). Geordie began to walk down it. He passed a mobile phone shop and remembered he’d not brought his phone out. Stupid of him. He’d not seen so many different shades of skin before. Geordie, Danny had learned last night in the pub, had never tried garlic or pasta, unless tinned spaghetti is pasta. Neither had he drank wine outside a church or eaten an aubergine, a courgette, or a sweet potato. Geordie felt himself in a new position: the outsider. He felt white. He couldn’t stop looking at the black people he saw. Their skin looked polished. They were beautiful. In Ridley Road market he thought he was about to get his head kicked in for staring. He was looking at a broad-shouldered young black man wearing a brown leather jacket and a gold-buttoned white shirt with a Nehru collar.
‘Wadchu looking at liddle man?’ Geordie realized he was talking to him. The man was repeatedly tilting his head back, as if brandishing his chin like a weapon.
‘Nothing,’ Geordie mumbled, shaking his head, scurrying, suddenly animal.
He came to a butchers, entitled Halal Meat, on the corner of the market. It was one long glass counter open to the street. Bald dead chickens clustered upside down along the back wall. Three men, slick and confident as bartenders, swayed between each other and served the docile queue. They wore white coats smeared with blood. They made Geordie think of a war movie he’d seen once in which sleepless doctors tended to the wounded. He inched to the front.
‘Yes? Help you?’ said Omar Sharif’s plumper little brother.
‘Can I have a pound of bacon and four chicken breasts please?’
The moustache behind the counter leant right across and tapped his cleaver on the glass: Are you taking the piss my friend?’ He rolled the ‘r’ of ‘friend’ and toned the phrase as Goldfinger did to James Bond. Geordie, angry, shook his head and then softened his face and shook his head again.
‘No bacon. How many chicken breasts you want?’ Sharif Jr straightened up behind the counter.
‘Four, please,’ said Geordie, a little stunned.
He crossed the road to the Kilkenny Arms, received his Guinness from the bleached Australian barman, who actually said ‘G’day’, and sat at an empty table. His ears were burning. He felt somehow embarrassed. This was the capital of his country and he felt a million miles from home. This was London, home of Big Ben, unfailingly chiming on the news every night, home of the Houses of Parliament and Churchill and the Union Jack and all the unchangeable symbols the orange banners displayed. Geordie realized he hadn’t seen a flag all day.
Mooning over his Guinness, Geordie thought about Ulster, that little patch of scorched earth. It had stayed loyal to England and now England didn’t want it. England was completely indifferent to it now. Geordie remembered Jenny McClure, this girl he’d known at primary school, who was tall and blonde and posh, which meant that her family lived outside the town and owned two cars and her dad played golf. She was clean and prim and perfect. And all through P6 and P7 he’d asked her to the cinema and made her little Valentine cards and warned the other boys off and waited after school just to walk ten paces behind her to the gates where her pert and pretty mother waited. And all that time she either ignored Geordie, or got her friends to tell him to leave her alone. Geordie remembered the lunchtime when, in an empty classroom, he’d poured the jar of dirty paintbrush water into her school bag. One day you wake up and hate.
At the Orange parades the police would stand on the fringes, attentive and static, like curious strangers who’ve stopped to watch a wedding party leave the church. Geordie remembered sitting on tarmac in fierce bare sunlight watching old Andy MacLean, a friend of his da’s, unwrap the Lambeg from the oilskins with a deft patience. He remembered the clipped neatness of his white rolled shirtsleeves. The snap and flutter of the tendons in his forearms. And how his thin wrists arched as the drumsticks twirled like spokes in front of him, and under his jutted chin how the ordinal drum had pounded and pounded and swung. He remembered how the lodge’s banners had advertised their faithfulness, as if faithfulness was all that mattered. But how could one stay devoted to someone who wants to leave you? Well, they wanted us once, Geordie thought. He stayed on in the pub for an idle hour, opposite a toothless old timer, folded into himself, dressed like Geordie’s dead grandfather, grey suit, flat cap, reading the Irish News. When he stood up to slope past him, the old guy raised his tumbler of whiskey to eyelevel, as if he was toasting the two of them.
Outside the pub a tattered newspaper was lying against the curb and the wind was freeing it sheet by sheet. Some pages blew about restlessly further up the pavement. One had managed to wrap itself around a lamppost and was flapping gently like a drunkard trying to hail a taxi. Geordie stopped to watch an African man, in a brown lounge suit and a piano keyboard tie, across the road. He was preaching about Jesus and reminded Geordie of the McNulty brothers, who, on a Friday night when he was shuttling from pub to pub on Ballyglass main street, would be standing out in suits they were too young to need for work, beseeching the sinners to repent. Geordie wandered back up the High Street and turned left past the school into Sofia Road. The playground was filled with kids shouting and running and taking everything very seriously. Kids don’t really have senses of humour, Geordie thought. Everything seems so important. One little boy, Arabic looking, was standing in uniform by the wire fence looking particularly grave. Geordie looked back, just as level and serious. The kid sneered, casually flipped him the middle finger, and walked off.
In the house Geordie slumped down on the sofa and turned his phone on. He’d two texts, both from Janice. BUDGIE KNOWS UVE CASH said one. RING ME said the other. Geordie needed to piss. He jumped up and went into the bathroom. He was jittery. It was always going to happen, he reasoned, but he didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. He’d need to think. There was no way Budgie would know where he was. It wasn’t like he was still in danger. He zipped up, flushed the toilet, and then checked his voicemails. One from Janice. She’d been crying. He’d probably slapped her about. The second voicemail was from Ian McAleece. Something about a drink. He wasn’t in the mood for that. As he was setting the phone down on the table it rang. He answered it, knowing he shouldn’t, but angry suddenly. ‘Geordie? It’s Ian here. From the boat.’
At eight o’clock that morning, just as Danny was rising soberly from bed, and the sleeping Geordie was making the repetitive gurgling sound of a broken cistern, Ian McAleece was sitting on the side of his sagging single bed in Kilburn Park’s sad little Lord Gregory Hotel. He was intently jabbing his mobile phone buttons with his stubby index finger. In Ballyglass Budgie Johnson woke suddenly and hoarsely answered his little silver Motorola: ‘Hello?’
Yes, it is a small small world. And Ulster but a button on its coat.
‘Budge, listen mate. Get a pen. I need you to get the cash to Mervyn. He’s bringing it across tonight. He needs to get it left in to this hotel. You got a pen?’
‘Okay, okay. What’s the address?’
Seven minutes later, Budgie Johnson went to the makeshift cupboard and found that the cupboard was bare. Wearing his boxer shorts patterned with the prison arrows of Christmas trees, he had locked the bathroom door, knelt on the damp bathmat and slipped his house key in the crack between the wall and bath to lever the panel off. He’d pulled out the green metal box, flipped its lid and gaped. After very slowly mouthing fuck several times, he put the panel back in place, set the box on his bed and banged on Malandra’s door.
‘’Landra, open the door. Ah need ta ask you something.’ Budgie was not yet angry. He was so terrified he felt like he was floating.
A scrape and a click and a tousled, dark, pretty Malandra, in a Bart Simpson nightshirt bearing 1986’s legendary injunction Don’t Have a Cow Man, appeared, holding a mug of tea.
‘What?’ Voices from the portable in her room came into the hall and were chanting Four. Three. Two…in some competition on breakfast television.
‘I had a box under the bath. There was stuff in it. And now there’s not. You know anything about it?’
‘What sort of stuff? Drugs?’
Either she was very sly or knew nothing. Budgie spun round and knocked sharply on Janice’s door.
‘Jan, open the door.’ Malandra waited, interested and leaning against the door jamb, with one leg arched neatly so the heel of her foot rested against her other ankle. She looked poised to execute some daring entrechat or pirouette.
‘What? What is it?” came a voice from the bedroom, unmistakably issuing out from a head on its side with one cheek pressed into a pillow.
‘Open the fucking door Janice.’ Budgie was no longer floating. His thoughts were beginning to settle: he was up to his neck here. His stomach contracted. His fists were itching. He punched the door once, and again. Hard.
‘Okay, okay. Hold on.’
A ratchety noise and the door inched open.
‘What is it? Greer, this is my day off.’ Her tone suggested that her brother didn’t have any days on. Budgie smacked the door fully open with the palm of his left hand and Janice was shoved backwards. He strode into the room and grabbed a fistful of her hair.
‘Where the fuck is it you wee bitch?’
Janice was only aware of Budgie’s breath, his stinking morning breath, on her face, and the sharp pain in her scalp. Her hair was lifting her up onto her tiptoes. Then she registered Malandra screaming as her terrified face appeared over Budgie’s naked shoulder, her arms pulling at Budgie’s neck. She noticed how hairy Budgie’s shoulders had got. And then she started to scream as well. Budgie spun round and in doing so pushed her onto the bed. He launched Malandra into the hall and shut the door and pushed the bolt across.
‘I think you’ve something to tell me.’
‘Greer, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who the fuck…I was asleep and you just force yourself in here and…you’ve no fucking right…’
Budgie moved across the room and neatly slapped her across the face with the back of his hand. Janice stop fucking about. I know you took it. Now where is it? You’ve no idea what you’ve done.’
‘What fucking money? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I never mentioned any money Jan.’
Janice looked scattered, stunned. Budgie sat down beside her and took her hand in his. He started to bend her index finger back. Very calmly he said, ‘I’ll break your fucking finger Jan I swear it. I won’t even blink. Now tell me where the fucking money went.’
‘I didn’t know it was yours. I just found it. I’ve spent it.’
‘Don’t talk shit. You better fucking hope that’s shit. Did you give that money to your little boyfriend? Cause if you did, he’s a dead man. He’s fucking dead Jan. You’ve killed him.’
He didn’t know it was yours. I told him it was mine.’
‘Yeah, cause you re going to have fifty grand in your pocket. You stupid stupid bitch.’
When he said ‘fifty grand’ Janice’s eyes flickered. Budgie read it correctly.
‘You didn’t even know. You didn’t even know how much you’d given him. God, but you are an idiot Jan. You’re nothing but an idiot slut.’
Casually, Budgie punched her hard on her left temple. Jan crumpled onto the duvet and began crying. He stood up.
‘I need that money. You better tell that little thief I’m going to come after him and rip his fucking head off. You better tell him to get that money back to me. Or he’s dead, and you’re dead, and his family’s dead, and everyone his family’s ever fucking met is dead. You hear me Jan? This is big boy rules. You stupid fucking stupid bitch.’
Budgie was breathing hoarsely. He opened her door. His mother and Malandra were standing in the hall. Malandra was crying and sniffing while his mother just stood there watching, bovine and floral in her nightie, open-mouthed. Budgie considered shutting it for her but instead feinted a lunge at them. They flinched and Malandra screamed. Budgie snorted. Back in his room he rang Ian who answered weirdly.
‘Hawwwo.’
‘Ian, everything all right?’
‘Yeah, brushing my teeth. You speak to Merv?’
‘No, not yet, listen there’s a minor problem.’
‘What sort of problem?’
‘The money isn’t quite ready.’
‘What do you mean not ready? It’s been ready for months. Mervyn’s flying tonight. I swear to God Budgie if you’ve taken any of that money you’ll be dead by dusk.’
The same tone he’d just used, the same threat he’d just made to Janice. He suddenly wished he could step out of the way completely, instead of being smack in the middle, making death threats and receiving them, like a domino stood on its end in a row of them, waiting for someone to touch the first one and topple the lot.
‘I swear I never touched it. I kept it safe but there’s been a fuck-up. Not my fault. My…my little bitch of a sister…I think she’s taken some of the money.’
‘How the fuck did she get at the money? What sort of fucking treasurer are you?
‘No listen Ian. It’s fine. Calm down. I know who has the money. I’ll get it back.’
‘Don’t tell me to calm down. I’m your fucking CO. Now who has the money? Where is the fucking money?’
‘Ian, I’m sorry. It’s a guy we told to get out of town. Geordie Wilson. It seems she gave him some money. But he’s just left, he’s…’
‘Geordie Wilson?’ Ian started to laugh.
‘What? What’s funny?’
Budgie heard a tap run, and then one, two, three spitting sounds. Then the jangle of a plastic toothbrush being set in a glass.
‘Mr Wilson and I became acquainted on the boat over. I have his mobile number. You’re a lucky man Budgie, stupid but lucky. How much money do I need to retrieve from him?’
Budgie grimaced. ‘About fifty thousand.’
‘Fucking hell Budge. This is the last time you look after the cash for the boys. I’ll see to that. You and me’ll be having a chat when I’m back. If I have any fucking problems getting this…Well, I’ll be coming to see you anyway. That’s a promise. I’m going to give Mr Wilson a call and arrange to meet for a drink. Now, meantime, here’s what you can do…
‘Listen mate,’ Ian said, ‘you fancy a pint this afternoon? I’m at a loose end. Waiting for something to arrive.’
Geordie was leaning back on the sofa but frantically jiggling his right leg. It hadn’t stopped jiggling since Jan’s texts.
‘Well, I’m a bit busy at the minute. Something’s come up.’
‘Mate, I won’t take no for answer. Seriously. Nonnegotiable. Meet me in the centre. What about O’Neill’s off Chinatown? Go to Leicester Square and walk through Chinatown. You can’t miss it. Four o’clock say?’
‘Maybe. Look it’s just this thing’s happened and I need to think about…’
‘Yeah great. Tell me about it later,’ Ian interjected, ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He hung up. Geordie set the phone on the wooden coffee table and leaned back again on the sofa. He looked up at the ceiling. White paint flaking off the pale pink plaster meant the near corner looked like a sky ragged with clouds. He breathed out heavily, utterly deflated. He picked the phone up and texted I’LL BRING THE CASH BACK to Janice, and immediately turned it off. He looked at the ceiling’s mackerel sky again, and thought how when he was a kid at scout camp in Gosford, his patrol leader, the ruthlessly cheerful Terry Green, had told him that a sky like that meant good weather was on its way. Yeah, right. Where’s Terry Green now? Six feet deep and filled with worms. No good weather came for him, Geordie thought, and it isn’t sunshine that’s heading for me. All those homespun proverbs, country wisdom, local knowledge, old wives’ tales: what a load of shit.
AFTERNOON (#ulink_a5c859ee-ff85-5f52-a121-af55bcb4dc23)
Danny told Ellen as much as he knew about the Ulster Water case, which was nothing, and neglected to mention that they might be going to Belfast on Saturday. She dutifully took notes, which quickly amounted to at least three times the number of words that he’d used, and sat opposite, listening attentively and asking the appropriate questions. Danny referred to part of the due diligence as ‘real monkey work’ and her efficient face broke into a smile. She had one slightly askew front tooth. It just made her look even sweeter. The bump in the Navaho rug put there to placate the gods. Danny could already feel he might be getting himself into trouble. He listed her faults to counterweight the effect she was having; she appeared to be business-like, brusque and hard-nosed; she might be a little humourless; she had a tiny stain, possibly toothpaste, on the left lapel of her jacket. He told her he’d ring her in a hour or so and she should come down for the conference call. It was noon.
He’d let Freeman, the Corporate partner, bring up the trip to Belfast, if it was still on the cards. If the two of them had to go Danny knew they’d sit in a dark hallway somewhere, being brought boxes of documents by surly admin staff, admin staff who would make it clear they knew Danny and Ellen worked for the company trying to buy them and sack them. They’d spend hours looking through contracts for onerous undertakings or impending litigation that could influence Syder’s decision to buy. However, unless Danny found some clause stating that in the event of a takeover Ulster Water would collapse like a broken deckchair, and leave Syder sprawled on the sand cursing and rubbing its coccyx, the bid would go ahead. Danny knew he would draft a detailed and lengthy due diligence report that would weigh, in unusually elegant language, any abnormal and arduous clauses in all of Ulster Water’s contracts pertaining to employment, intellectual property, information technology, outsourcing, even the sodding vending machines, and that it would not be read by anyone. It was, he supposed, possible that the conclusion might be perused but it would be so heavily qualified (‘In light of the short time available…given the limited resources and lack of information…due to the hostility shown by the target company and the corresponding impossibility of obtaining proper financial documentation etc. etc.’) that any deductions he’d draw would be completely worthless. At least legally. You ain’t getting us. This is every law firm’s secret motto. Every lawyer is a virtuoso of the ‘On the one hand’ line. We can only give you the facts as they appear to us. The decision, of course, is yours. Of course. And the decision was never Danny’s. So he needed to find out whether he would in fact be spending his weekend in his homeland. And whether he was still having this party tomorrow night.
Danny had no idea why he’d agreed to have a party. Admittedly it was his birthday next Wednesday but that had never before given him sufficient cause. The idea of planned fun bothered him on a fundamental level. The original idea and impetus for the party had been Olivia’s, several weeks ago, and dates had been bandied about. But since Olivia and he had finally split he’d re-resolved, at Albert’s instigation, to ask everyone else he knew round to his house to get drunk, and possibly, though improbably, get laid. That plan had shrunk somewhat. Danny had then e-mailed about ten friends a week ago telling them that he might be having some people round next Friday and maybe they’d call by. If they were free. Now he had to reconfirm. He opened a new e-mail on the screen, clicked on the appropriate recipients: Dinger, Tippy, Thunderclap Jenkins, The Elephant King of Sodom, Fisbboy, Tuzza, Rollson, Renault Minivan, Little Turk, and Simon. Most of these were colleagues, exercising the small freedoms of setting e-mail nicknames. Those were the same recipients who’d received the initial e-mail. Danny then went through the rest of his address book and clicked on random names: five university friends he hadn’t seen for months, three law school mates he saw solely to take drugs with, his friend James who’d dropped out of law school and now lived in Guildford, selling rubbish compactors (or compactors of rubbish, as James would correct him), and Clyde, his oddest cousin, who worked as an environmental health inspector in Hounslow.
He wrote:
Party. No exclamation marks. It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’ll be receiving guests from 9ish tomorrow night. If you have nothing better to do, please call in. Bring your own whatever.
After opening another Internet window and typing in the address roadmap.co.uk, he brought up Sofia Road, copied the link and pasted it into the e-mail.
Click here for the map: www.roadmap.co.uk/mxccsofia/n16. It’s No.23. The blue door. Get off at Dalston Kingsland Overland on the Silverlink and turn left. Or get the no.73, 112, 43 buses. Many thanks, kind regards, Admiral Sojourner Watkins
He always signed off with an assumed name. It wasn’t meant to be funny, at least not any more. It was a way of articulating the other lives he could have tried and which were slowly closing up elsewhere. He clicked on Send. Danny thought how if someone transcribed the twenty-five years or so of his speech they would be hard pressed to justify ever using an exclamation mark. When he answered the phone, even at work, people invariably asked him whether they’d woken him up. He never understood why everyone else was so excited by life. He was either bemused or enraged at their effortless joy. Three Out of Office messages pipped into his inbox.
He called Rollson to tell him how lovely Ellen was in person. Rollson groaned and pretended to choke on his pain au chocolat in a jealous fury. Albert was working on a settlement agreement, something to do with fourwheel drive jeeps which hadn’t yet been made, and which he’d worked on ‘til three the night before. He was on course for another late one, waiting for New York to wake up and send him comments on his last draft. He’d been on a conference call all morning and now wanted to chat. Danny agreed to nip round for five minutes.
Rollson’s room was like a show office for the ethical employer, or, more precisely, the employer who is worried about being sued for RSI. He had the desk raised on four wooden blocks for some odd reason, odd given that he was five foot five, and therefore also had a specially high chair, one which Danny called the Wimbledon Judge Seat. The chair raised and lowered itself by levers and Rollson would, as a distraction, frequently drop himself a foot or so in the middle of an argument if he felt like he was losing. The chair also had a special lumbar support fitted, and his keyboard was the new-fangled angled kind allowing maximal access for the wrists to rest on their own special pad. His VDU had a transparent screen fitted on it to reduce glare and even Rollson’s mouse was economically designed and different to every other lawyer’s. It had three buttons and was about twice the normal size: more canine than rodent. His mouse pad contained a further wrist rest, one which Rollson, in his over-enthusiasm at receiving another toy from the company’s full-time physiotherapist, had upsettingly described as feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl’s breast. It should be clarified that overall Albert Rollson wasn’t a particularly sick or delicate or querulous man. He was just very very bored, and had found that the best way to counter the ennui was to exercise all of the poindess opportunities offered by an enormous company. He had them change the pictures on his walls every six weeks. He attended training seminars on using a Dictaphone. He attended a two-day course in Northampton on speed-reading at which the tutor had said ‘the main trick to it is just to read faster’ and they had all lowered their heads and obediently tried. He visited the in-house doctor at least once a month and though the doctor had prescribed him a variety of beta-blockers and anti-depressants, he hadn’t yet suggested that maybe Albert should change his job.
Danny stood in the doorway but didn’t go in. Something was different.
‘Mate, why is your room reminding me of the Blue Grotto?’
‘I know, the fluorescent light was making a buzzing noise so I rang down to Business Services and got them to send a man up to change it, but they’ve installed a blue one. It’s like sitting in a brothel.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. It is. Aside from the lack of hookers.’ Albert did a newsreader shuffle of the papers he was looking at and set them aside. He did look wrecked, and unusually for Rollson, his clothes were a little rumpled. His Windsor knotted red silk tie was still on but the top button of his white shirt was open. A stray hair curled out from the gap and his dark brown eyes were underlined for emphasis by thick black lines of sleeplessness.
‘You have to ask her to your party tomorrow night.’
‘Ellen?’
‘Yes, Ellen. You just rambled on about how amazing she is. You have to ask her.’
‘She’s working for me. It’d be weird.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. And she’s working with you, not for you. It would be weirder not to mention it. Just casually throw it into the conversation. Who else’ve you invited?’
‘You saw the e-mail. That lot plus Geordie.’
‘Who is this guy?’
‘I’ll tell you about it at lunch. He’s an old mate from school.’
You haven’t mentioned him before. Where’d he spring from?’
After Danny and Ellen had spoken on the conference call to John Freeman, the Corporate partner overseeing the Ulster Water bid, it became apparent that there would be no lunch. Freeman was a short and angry man. The anger was obvious. The shortness Danny inferred from his photo on the firm’s intranet. He was shiny-pated, overweight, and had tiny black perforations for eyes which were looking upwards to the camera. He looked like a malevolent medieval abbot. After Freeman’s secretary had patched the two of them into the call, Freeman launched into the conference without giving Danny time to introduce Ellen. There appeared to be several accountants and clients on the line, aside from the whole Corporate team, presumably down on the second floor, hunched in anticipation round Freeman’s speaker phone. As always, Danny found it difficult to focus at times like these. His ability to concentrate decreased in proportion to how important it was that he did. He could, for example, intimately describe someone he had sat opposite on the tube several days before but couldn’t tell, when asked directly, whether or not he’d sent a holding letter to the lawyers on the other side or indexed a file of documents. As the voices coming from the speaker phone on his desk discussed logistics Danny, sitting opposite Ellen, felt himself unwind, as if the speaker phone was a radio and he was lolling in the bath. She was really quite something, this girl. Absolutely remarkable. Danny found himself staring at her breasts and quickly shifted his eyes onto the pad she was scrawling on.
‘Will that be possible, Danny?’ Freeman’s tensed vocal cords were flinging something at him.
‘I’m sorry, we seemed to get cut off there. Could you repeat it?’
A derisory snort issued from the phone. Ellen, her face inspired with concern, was holding up her pad opposite him. CAN YOU GO TO BELFAST ON SAT MORN. She grinned. He grinned back.
‘I mean, it sounded like you were about to ask me whether or not I could take a team to Northern Ireland this weekend, but then there was silence.’ Danny winked outrageously at Ellen. ‘If you hadn’t progressed further than that then the answer’s yes. I’ve a trainee briefed and we’re aware of what the exercise will involve. Obviously, I’ve a few specific questions to ask about the set-up, but we don’t all need to be on the call for that.’
The Corporates were mumbling assent. Freeman took hold of the conversation again, a little too quickly, as if another child had tried to take it off him.
Quite, quite. Well, I’d anticipated that and sent you an e-mail with a contact list for Syder earlier.’ Danny heard the tap-dancing of far-off typing and an e-mail, headed SYDER CONTACTS, from Freeman, appeared on his screen. Danny stopped listening again.
Ian was leaning back, unfolded, with his hands locked together behind his head. His posture was one of a man who has taken the board on and won, but his stare was fully engaged, and directed now at three men in suits sitting two tables over. They were laughing loudly and Ian was willing them to stop. Geordie hadn’t turned up yet, though it was ten past and he was starting to think he’d underestimated the little shit. One of the suits was working himself up to say something, but had looked to be doing that since Ian sat down twenty minutes ago. The main mouth, an overweight owl who smiled reflexively and broadly after everything he said, was telling another anecdote.
‘So I leaned across to him and said You’ll just have to trust me.’
The three of them laughed loudly again. One of his attendants, grinning, asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell him to just, you know, foxtrot oscar?’
The fat one rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together while pursing his lips and lowering his eyebrows so his phizog was puckered in close, as if he were trying to squeeze his facial features through a bangle.
‘Money. All about the lettuce. Even Dave knows that.’
He nodded towards the other man, who tilted his head, guffawed obligingly.
Ian brought his open palms down on the table so they made enough of a noise to attract the attention of all three men, then stood, pressing hard against the table to flex his triceps in their tight blue polo-shirt sleeves, and walked purposefully to the swing door. It wasn’t that he minded people enjoying themselves. He minded them talking rubbish. And he minded people being impressed by slick and noisy idiots. Ian had the kind of dislike for blokes in suits that men can have who only don a two-piece when they’re in serious trouble (before the bench, at the altar, in the coffin). As he was standing in front of the pub door, looking out, Geordie’s face appeared like a mismatched reflection. For a second they were shocked to see each other so close, even through glass, and Ian shuffled back, embarrassed, as Geordie pushed the door open.
‘Big man,’ Geordie said. Ian took the outstretched hand, and felt Geordie’s pipe cleaner fingers bend in his clasp. Malleable. Ian had ironed out some options, and shelved them in order of desirability. His mind was as neat as the pebbledashed terraced he shared with no one. Ideally, Geordie would spill everything and tell him where the money was. Then, if that didn’t happen, he wanted Geordie to get drunk and ask him back, today, to the house of this friend he was staying with, or, if for some reason he couldn’t swing that, he wanted an invite to go round there, and soon. All of this might go out the window, of course, if Geordie appeared to be a risk. He might just beat the shit out of him. Ian, however, prided himself on judgement. He could read a man the way the others in the wing had read the Sunday Sport. And while they read the Sunday Sport, he had been reading his Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He was politic and ruthless. And he would get what he wanted, which was things in order.
Geordie, conversely, wanted distraction, and one of its major subsets, drink.
‘And what about your business down here? How’s all that going?’
They were both settled at the table, one hand chilled round a Guinness, the other, propping a lit fag, beginning to smoulder.
‘Not bad. I’ve got it all lined up. Just waiting for one thing to arrive and then I’ll probably be heading back over.’
‘What is it then, that you do, I mean?’
‘Import-export really. Just starting up. Having a look round. Seeing what opportunities are out there.’ Ian was gently bouncing his head forwards and backwards as he spoke.
‘I’m looking for work myself you know. Over here. If you know anyone.’
‘Yeah? I’ll ask around. I might have something for you actually. A mate of mine is starting a business in London.’
‘Oh aye? What kind of thing?’
‘Opening a bar. Really plush. Needs cash though. Not the sort of money either of us would have.’
‘No, you’re right there.’
Ian watched Geordie’s face. Nothing coming through it. Like the grimy windows of O’Neill’s. Strike one, Ian thought. The conversation turned to how expensive London was, then how you could have a better standard of living in Northern Ireland, and lastly to politics. When two Ulstermen sit down together, there’s probably an even fifty-fifty chance they’ll try to kill each other, but Ian and Geordie were getting on. Geordie sat and sneaked looks at Ian’s bulbous biceps, his cylindrical neck, the thickness of his wrists and their cord-like veins. Geordie was slight, and fascinated by men like this. They seemed a different species to him. Bull-men, stone-men. Aside from his bulk though, there was something else that held the eye. There was a sense of potential about him, something trapped and coiled and waiting. He was like a box of fireworks.
For his own part, Ian enjoyed being watched. When the listener admires, the speaker performs better, and Ian was no exception. He flexed his right bicep behind his head as he scratched his back. He nodded kindly at Geordie when he spoke. He bought them pint after pint, and began to think Geordie was all right. He was a good kid at heart. And in fact the kind of kid who’d do better for them than some fucknut like Budgie. Smart, a listener. Surprisingly, he found he was telling Geordie about himself.
Ian McAleece had got into the business of fear quite late, at least late for Northern Ireland. He had been sixteen for three days when his dad was shot in front of him. Twenty-six times in the chest and neck and shoulders, as it turned out. Alfred Robert McAleece had got home from his bread-round and reverse-parked the van, white and emblazoned in red with Hutton’s Bakers, along the kerb outside the house. He opened the van’s back door and lifted out a wooden pallet containing two vedas, one wheaten, and eight apple pancakes. The family always got what was leftover, although Ian was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly leftover so much as nicked. His dad, still holding the pallet of bread, had shut the back door of the van with his hip. Ian was about to leave for school. Swinging his sports bag over his shoulder, he opened the front door. Seeing him, his dad continued to waggle his hips as he crossed the pavement, doing a waltzy little dance with his tray of bread. All of these things took for ever to happen. It was like sitting in a boat drifting down a slow river. It was that passive. Ian remembered tiny details of it, the round brass knob of the porch door. It had been misted with the February cold as he turned it.
A red transit (stolen in Lurgan three days before) was parked just up from the bread-van. Everything happened together then. It was like the boat suddenly tipping over a weir in the river, plunging, slippage, the multiple angles of falling. The transit doors banging open, two men out on the road, all in black, in balaclavas, with semiautomatics, shouting, and then that monstrous sound as they opened fire. Ian’s mum had run out in her socks into the road. The transit was gone in a screech of tyres, leaving behind it a chemically sharp smell of rubber and gunfire. Ian stood in the small green patch of lawn in front of his house. His mother was kneeling by his father. Parts of his father were splattered over the paving stones and against the back of the bread-van. His mother had run out carrying a two-litre bottle of Coke for some reason. She must have been looking for something in the big cupboard by the fridge. Ian watched her crouch forward and try to wipe blood away from her husband’s face. Then she opened the bottle of Coke – it fizzed and hissed like someone stage-whispering shush – and she poured Coke over his dad’s face, and tried again to wipe the blood off. Then she leant over him and tried to mop at it with her baggy white T-shirt. Alfie’s face had looked all shiny and sticky.
They’d got the wrong man, some said. They’d just gone for a Prod, said others. The IRA said they’d got the treasurer of the local UVF. As Alfie McAleece, apolitical and apathetic in everything but football, had seen three businesses fail and twice been declared bankrupt, this seemed the least likely of the explanations. But if you throw enough shit, some of it sticks. A man at the funeral called Gerry approached Ian. He thought that the bastards who’d done this should pay. He was from the Organisation. And that was that. As it turned out, well, Ian was here and now none of that stuff mattered any more. He recounted the story of the shooting to Geordie in three short sentences, all of them broken with curses and pauses.
Geordie nodded, a little embarrassed by the new knowledge. Ian seemed a nice enough bloke. Bit lonely maybe. Geordie responded with a few stories of his own: a friend of his dad’s beaten to death in a pub; his uncle, a policeman, shot dead through the jaw at a checkpoint; how his cousin was killed with a red-hot poker pushed into his throat. He didn’t tell him about his own shooting, the kneecapping. Ian probably knew enough to have noticed the stiffness in his gait, and Geordie felt, obscurely, that he couldn’t tell him because he didn’t want Ian to see him as one of the victims, the losers, the ones sobbing face down in the car park, covered in gravel and piss. Geordie bought two more pints of the black. The pub was starting to fill up with people skiving off early from work. He remembered Danny and his agreement to make dinner. He’d slip off after this next one.
‘Well why don’t I come back with you to Danny’s? We can get a few tinnies on the way home.’
‘No mate, I can’t do today. But Dan’s having this party tomorrow evening so come round for that, yeah? We’ll make a proper night of it.’
‘Yeah, all right. Gis the address then.’ Ian couldn’t be bothered to argue. He felt exhausted. He was sure Geordie wasn’t going anywhere. And tomorrow night was fine. He could stay late and find the money in Geordie’s things or, failing that, beat it out of him. He wouldn’t be any problem. Geordie might still just tell him about it anyway. You never knew. And he might be a useful wee fella to have round.
Cycling home, Danny felt relieved that Geordie would be there when Olivia came round to pick up her things. She would cause a scene. She would start to cry. And he would feel that he’d made the wrong decision. They had met through a friend of hers who worked on a cricket magazine with Danny’s mate from uni. He pulled his brakes and slowed to a stop at the Old Street roundabout lights. A bus pulled up beside him. She had managed, in only a few months, to push him right over to the side of his life. Albert had pointed out to him one day that before he arranged to do anything he had to ask her permission.
The lights changed and Danny pushed off, fairly sure that a kid on the bus was giving him the fingers but not wanting to give him the joy of turning around and seeing it confirmed. Tonight then, he would make sure that when she turned up her stuff would be sitting out for her in his sky-blue hallway – sky-blue because she’d decorated it. Not actually decorated it, but she’d told Danny what colours to paint it and had been instrumental in finally getting it done. She recycled the colour cards as bookmarks, and had left them in the various novels she’d begun and abandoned. Over the last two months, rereading Graham Greene, Danny had learned the colours of the walls in his bedroom and boxroom: apricot and cinnabar. The card wedged between the twelfth and thirteenth pages of The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel and the one he’d pulled out from the shelf, sleepless, to reread three nights back, had revealed the kitchen to be either cowslip or mustard, depending on the light. Someday, possibly, Danny might learn that his hallway was, in fact, teal, if he happened to make it past the fifth chapter of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, left behind by the flat’s previous owner.
Danny was turning into Sofia Road when he noticed Geordie at his storm porch, trying to turn the Chubb lock. He looked like the wiring for a man, with none of the casing, and he was shuffling and mumbling. He’s been drinking, thought Danny, amused more than dismayed. He pulled up onto the pavement and freewheeled towards him.
‘All right wee man,’ Danny shouted when he was right up at the gate. Geordie electric-fenced it into the air.
‘Aw you cunt, you scared the life out of me. Fuck off out of that.’
‘Where you been causing trouble then?’
‘I went into the centre there, to meet that fella from the boat, Ian. I’ve told him to pop along tomorrow night.’
‘Okay, why not.’ Geordie still hadn’t opened the front door.
‘Here, you hold this.’
Danny leaned the bike into Geordie, who held it gingerly for a second and then nimbly hopped on and started pedalling along the pavement and out onto the road. He turned some very small circles in the centre of the street and then expertly bunny-hopped back onto the footpath.
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Nick Laird
A very funny, energetic, wonderfully engaging novel about where we’re from and where we’d like to get to…Danny Williams is talented, upwardly mobile and has left his Northern Irish small town roots well behind him. In his mid-twenties he lives in a stylish London flat and has a job in a top London law firm. However, one innocuous Wednesday night his old mucker from home, Geordie Wilson, arrives at the door. On the run from a loyalist militia, whose operational funds he has taken, he manages to bring everything that Danny has been fleeing from right to his smart London doorstep.Taking place over an intense and gripping five-day period–set in both London and the fictional Irish town of Ballyglass–Nick Laird has written an hilarious, touching and ultimately redemptive novel about friendship.
Utterly Monkey
Nick Laird
FOURTH ESTATE • London and New York
For the Lairds
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u658680a1-10c7-5dbb-9698-a5b1cfc1ba89)
Title Page (#u812dbc14-ec8f-5bb9-832d-e5aa672a1055)
Dedication (#ud5396d50-e729-5a9e-b1a5-425f01a165a8)
WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2004 (#u06730342-a402-519e-9502-4306295808b9)
LATE EVENING (#u84f4a89e-5507-5a0f-8253-0659891d91ac)
THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004 (#u4492c56e-40ef-5fad-b8ac-2939536eb0ff)
EARLY MORNING AGAIN (#uefd8f29b-ad48-57d4-abdc-2af416cb1290)
AFTERNOON (#u5b2ba0bb-9608-5e63-96b0-18d7a9d7a25c)
THE HAPPENING (#litres_trial_promo)
FRIDAY, 9 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
SATURDAY, 10 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
SUNDAY, 11 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
EVENING (#litres_trial_promo)
LATE LATE NIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
MONDAY, 12 JULY 2004 (#litres_trial_promo)
EARLY AFTERNOON (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Nick Laird (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2004 (#ulink_b3623ad4-4690-5806-9c37-5fcdbe31b672)
‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch.
What a bloody awful country.’
Reginald Maudling,
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,
on the plane back to London after his
first visit to Belfast, 1 July 1970
Moving is easy. Everyone does it. But actually leaving somewhere is difficult. Early last Wednesday morning a ferry was slowly detaching itself from a dock at the edge of Belfast. On it, a man called Geordie was losing. He’d slotted eleven pound coins into the Texas Hold’Em without success – not counting a pair of Kings which briefly rallied his credits – and had now moved two feet to the left, onto the gambler. The three reels spun out into click – a bell, click – a BAR, click – a melon. Fuck all. Geordie’s small hands gripped each side of the machine as if it was a pulpit. He kept on staring at the symbols, which again and again represented nothing but loss. Then he sniffed loudly, peeled his twenty Regals off the machine’s gummy top and sloped away. Eighteen quid down and they hadn’t yet left the harbour.
The boat, the Ulster Enterprise, was busy, full of families heading over for the long July weekend. Geordie bought a pint of Harp from the gloomy barman and slumped onto a grey horseshoe-shaped sofa in the Poets Bar, then sat forward suddenly and took a pack of playing cards from the black rucksack by his feet. He started dealing out a hand of patience. A short man in a Rangers tracksuit top stopped by his table, swaying a little with the boat, or maybe with drink. His shoulders were broad and bunched with muscle. He held a pint of lager and a pack of Mayfair fags in one hand. The other was in his tracksuit top, distending it like a pregnancy. He had a sky-blue baseball cap with McCrea’s Animal Feed written across it. He looked as if he’d sooner spit on you than speak to you and yet, nodding towards the other pincher of the sofa, he said: ‘All right. This free?’
Belfast, east, hardnut.
‘No, no, go on ahead.’
The man sat down carefully, like he was very fond of himself, and held Geordie’s eye.
‘You think we’ll still have McLeish next season?’ Geordie continued, looking at his tracksuit top.
‘Oh aye, I think so, though he’s a bit too interested in players and not enough in tactics.’
‘You on holiday?’
‘Spot of business.’
‘Oh right. I’m seeing some friends. You heading to Scotland?’
‘Naw, on down to London.’
‘Oh aye? Me too. You not fly?’
‘Taking a van.’
Geordie paused, to see if the offer of a lift was forthcoming. It wasn’t.
Hot enough today, eh?’
‘It’ll do all right. Better that than pissing down.’
They talked the usual talk. About pubs and places and discovered that the stranger was the nephew of one of Geordie’s dinner ladies. Which was how they swapped names. Ian. Geordie. They played whist and matched pints for the next two hours as the ferry ploughed through the water to Scotland. Just before they got in Geordie went out on deck to clear his head. Outside he shivered and watched the wake turn lacy and fold back into the sea. He felt off. His mouth was dry and the ache in his head suggested that afternoon drinking hadn’t been such a great idea. He turned slightly, to take the wind out of his eyes, and Ian was standing beside him, smiling secretly out to sea. Geordie nodded briskly at him and went in to the toilet.
When he came back to the table Ian had dealt the pack out and was in the middle of a round of pelmanism. Seeing Ian concentrating on the cards, crouched forward, intent, just as he had been doing earlier, made Geordie feel suddenly well-disposed towards him.
‘You not play patience? It’s a better game.’
Ian turned over the Jack of Hearts.
‘No skill in that. This’, he tapped the back of a card, ‘exercises the memory.’
Staring hard at the grid of cards, he turned over a matching Jack, clubs, then placed them both into a discard pile at the side. Geordie said it first.
Listen mate, I’ll be in London for a while later on this week as well, and I don’t know so many folks down there. If you give me your number maybe we could meet up for a jar or two?’
‘Tell you what, you give me yours and I’ll ring you if I’m free.’
‘Aye, do. That’d be a laugh. We’ll go out and get slaughtered.’
The solicitor Danny Williams was looking in his babyblue refrigerator. His pinstripe grey suit jacket sagged over the narrow shoulders of a kitchen chair. He had discarded his tie and shoes. The room was dim and the only light came from this massive fridge. It was like a UFO opening its door in his kitchen. ‘Take me to my dinner,’ Danny said out loud in the empty flat, without humour, as he stood snared in the pale luminous strip. An empty jar of mayonnaise sat by itself in the middle of the top shelf, like a judge on his bench. Danny found it difficult to look in his fridge when he was alone. It witnessed his failures. He would often wander round his airy flat, peckish, open it, see nothing he fancied (or could eat without risk of illness) and walk away again. Danny was skinny. The fridge clicked off its light and Danny resolved to make toast, a Saturday visit to Safeway. The doorbell went. He walked down the hall, unslid the chain, and opened his life.
Geordie Wilson was standing on the step. His small frame was silhouetted against the London evening sky. He looked charred, a little cinder of a man. His navy tracksuit hood cowled round a narrow and freckled face and his bagged eyes looked very blue and watery in the light from the hall. He had several days’ beard growth. He could have been Death’s apprentice. Geordie Fucking Wilson. In the slowed-down moment, Danny registered a furious argument being conducted further down the street between a man and woman out of sight. It was in Russian or maybe Polish.
‘Someone’s for it, eh?’ the figure on the doorstep said, snapping his elbow into the air. Danny felt his head lift suddenly. He shuddered, and realized just as quickly again that Geordie, this burnt-looking thing, was not going to draw a gun and shoot him.
‘Easy up big man,’ said Geordie, reaching a hand out for his shoulder and smirking. ‘It’s me. Geordie. How are you? What about you? Surprised?’
‘Hello,’ Danny said slowly, blinking in exaggerated shock, ‘Geordie Wilson. I knew it was you. What the hell brings you here?’
They would go to the King’s Head, but first Geordie came in and dumped his bag on the sheeny wooden floor of the hall, and they edged round each other, like novice ice-skaters, as Danny moved towards the kitchen to get the jacket of his suit. He slipped it on, felt its impropriety, like armour at dinner, and slipped it off again. He was wearing his grey suit trousers and a white shirt, which, though open-necked, still displayed cuff links as tokens of a serious man. He pulled a navy zip-up fleece off a hook, and then decided to wear his scuffed Levi’s jacket over it. He looked like a social merman: pinstriped lower, denimed upper. Geordie stooped and removed his fags and lighter from the rucksack. It was only when they’d left the house that Geordie asked where the pub was. It was an incontrovertible fact that this was where they were heading. Some friends you take to cafes and cinemas, some to concerts, others to matches or shopping, but some, the ones you grew up alongside, meaning the ones you learnt to drink with, you always always always take to the pub.
As they walked, Geordie was forced to half-skip to keep up with Danny, whose eyes, still varnished with surprise, were trained on the pavement. Gum studded the cement like the beginnings of rain. It was too warm for a jacket and he could feel sweat beginning to prickle along his spine. His face was tight with goodwill, his stomach with nerves and he wasn’t certain that what was happening was happening. Geordie Fucking Wilson. He needed a drink.
The King’s Head was a nasty little place but close, with a chubby cream cat that had the run of it to such an unreasonable extent that customers would be standing, possibly shivering, possibly pregnant, whilst it stretched and yawned and dreamt on a seat in front of the fireplace. It had the look of a theatre bar. All busy carpet, threadbare velvet and smeary mirrors, and signed sepia photographs of stars, faded with smoke and sunlight to the same dulled obscurity as their subjects. Its landlord was the obese and charmless Gerard, who sported a lame goatee in a lame attempt to define a lame jaw. Years back, when Danny had been looking for an evening job during law school, he tried all the local pubs for bar work. Gerard had immediately said Sorry mate, hardly enough for meself here really. Danny had persuaded his then-girlfriend to call in and ask. Tamara, a delicate woman whose distinctive nose exacerbated her accent and deportment into something approaching minor nobility, had put her head round the door and Gerard had offered her work immediately. They then couldn’t decide if Gerard was sexist or anti-Irish or just anti-Danny. Still, it was the closest pub and proximity – to lazy men in the city – is worth an acre of stripped floorboards, battered leather sofas, and four elastic student barmaids, which was what the second nearest, Pravda or Molotov or something, offered.
Geordie wandered to the far end to get a table and Danny stood at the bar. Geordie Wilson. How weird is that? He looked very well, really, considering, Danny thought, watching Geordie tap his lighter on the table at the far end of the bar. Chirpy. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, not since 15 August 1995, the summer Danny came back from his first year of uni, though neither remembered the incident. Danny was driving his father’s grey Volvo estate up the widest main street in Ireland, Ballyglass’s High Street. Ballyglass is really only this street. Other thoroughfares run off it at right angles before petering out into lanes and housing estates and fields. Geordie was crossing the lights by Union Street and Danny was waiting at them, holding the car on the clutch. Geordie saluted him and Danny, reclining, lifted a finger off the wheel and nodded a greeting. Both passed on feeling a little gladdened, a little embarrassed. Old friends know too much.
While Gerard stood and sullenly stared at the two jars of Guinness, waiting for them to settle, Danny watched Geordie fidgeting. He never could sit still. When they were at school, Mr O’Neill the maths teacher had told Geordie that he had no brakes. Danny, remembering that, pictured it literally: Geordie driving through Ballyglass in a car on which the cables have gone. Up Fairhill and Oldtown he could keep pace with the traffic. His car would look like the others, accelerate like the others, and he would sing along tunelessly to the songs on Townland Radio just like the other drivers. But downhill, to James Street, to the Ballymore Road, the car wouldn’t slow. He might try to warn you, flash his lights, beep his horn but he’d still collide and send things flying: other drivers, rickety cyclists, grocery shoppers, idiot dogs. Geordie Wilson, a bad bastard who lacks the ability to stop, and he’s come to see me. Danny delved for his loose change and counted it out while he waited for Gerard to steer his bright blue paunch, like the front of a bumper car, around the open drawer of the till. Gerard performed the manoeuvre quite neatly, pausing in front of the cash register to slam it shut with his side, and then pressed at the optics with two highballs, growling. Danny placed his scuffed Adidas on the brass footrail and shifted his weight onto it, keeping his balance by holding onto the side of bar. What were these rails for? To tie your pet to? He turned again to watch Geordie, sitting at the table, idly aiming and flicking a match, unlit, at the fat white cat which sat a few feet from him, defiantly licking her paws.
Gerard set the two pints down in front of Danny on an already sodden Carlsberg towel, and noiselessly accepted the exact amount (I think that’s right) proffered by Danny. He splashed the coins in the open drawer of the till, and went back to watching some sportive tangle of colour and shouting, wrestling perhaps, on the telly in the corner.
Their table was round, too low, and pocked with circular marks, a Venn diagram of sessions of previous drinking. Their lack of back support forced them to lean forward, conspiratorially. They looked like grandmasters. Geordie moved first.
‘All right fella. Sorry to drop in on you like this. You look a bit shocked.’
‘No don’t be stupid mate. It’s good to see you. What’s been going on?’
‘No no, you go first boss. Last I heard you were doing the law.’
‘Yeah. I’m a fully paid-up lawyer. Qualified almost three years ago. Working in the city. Good money, bad hours. But here, what about you? Let’s hear your news.’
‘Aw, you know me. Bit of this. Bit of that. None of the other. Some of the above.’
Danny had forgotten this, how Geordie spoke. It struck Danny now that maybe it was because he felt awkward. He sounded like a client squirming, mixing bonhomie with avoiding your eye. Danny waited.
‘Well, I’m officially an unemployed labourer.’
‘That what your business card says?’
‘It’s what my dole form says. I wish to labour. But no suitable labour’s available. Suitable’s the key. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve made me go on. I’ve been apprentice, trainee, new-starter, jobseeker.’
‘So you just living off the bru?’
‘Off the bru and on the…’ Geordie lifted his pint and nodded towards it, ‘brew.’ He then laughed too loudly, a little hysterical.
Danny eyed him quizzically. ‘You’re still a funnyman. Funny peculiar.’
‘Sorry mate, I’m a wee bit caned. I had a smoke in that park at the end of the road before I came to see you. What have I been doing? Well…’ Geordie puffed his cheeks and blew breath out for a second. Danny felt the heat of it and moved slightly back. I was doing a bit of cab work with Tommy Vaughan’s Taxis. Driving the old biddies to and from the Bingo. Leaving them over to their friends’ houses for tea and chat or up to the church on a Sunday.’
Danny was reminded of what he’d wanted to ask him when he’d been at the bar.
‘How did you know where I lived anyway?’
‘Just phoned your mum and mentioned I was coming over and she told me. Got your phone number as well but thought I’d just call round, surprise you.’
Damn sure you did. Otherwise I’d have produced a bulletproof excuse. Danny also suddenly realized why his mum had called him at work that morning when he’d been on a conference call: an e-mail from Jill, his secretary, had popped up on his screen asking him to ring her back. He’d forgotten, as usual, but this seemed a disproportionate and cruel punishment.
‘Yeah…You look well. It’s good to see you. How long are you here for? What are you doing here? You know, in London?’
Geordie moved nothing in his face now except his lips.
‘Not sure yet. See how things pan out.’
They drank fast, and let drink do the unpeeling for them. After setting down each new round on the table there was a moment when they waited for the pints to finish settling. It is difficult to get going on a Guinness. There is nothing aesthetic about other refreshments. Lager and cider just slop in their glasses, fizzing at you to get at it, to raise it and down it. Guinness is complete in itself. The first sip is like cutting a wedding cake. After the measured pouring, then the storm in a pint glass, the spindrift apartheid of grains and galaxies settling. And the Guinness was working. Danny began to feel a kind of warmth for this hard-bitten short-arse in front of him. It was good to see him. There was the other thing, of course, that Geordie brought back: guilt. But for the moment that could be disguised with drink, with smoke and mirrors which, indeed, the pub had in abundance. Danny had some knowledge he’d been chewing on for the last hour. It was time to spit it out. He cleared his throat and started, ‘I heard you had some bother a while back.’
The bother was a bullet in the back of each of Geordie’s calves.
‘Ach, you know the way it goes. I wasn’t really up to anything. I was seeing…’
He looks up, expecting an interjection. None comes.
‘Budgie Johnson’s sister. Just for a wee bit of action, nothing serious, and he took it hard. You ever see her? Something else altogether.’
‘Which one is she?’
Janice. With a wonky eye and great fat tits.’
They were grinning. Geordie knew that Danny probably didn’t usually have this sort of chat. Danny knew that Geordie knew.
‘Works in Martin’s Chemists?’
That’s the one.’
‘What happened?’
Greer walked in on me and her. Getting to the pitch. On his sofa.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘No joke. I didn’t know whether to come or shit myself.’
Budgie, also known as Greer, was the eldest of the Johnson brothers. There were two others, Chicken and Brewster, and two younger sisters, Janice and Malandra. Chicken was called Chicken because Budgie was called Budgie, though why Budgie was called Budgie was nobody’s business and anyone’s guess. He probably bit the head off one. Budgie was an animal. He’d knocked over every premises in Ballyglass at least three times. A big lean man like a knife. He looked the part. Shaven headed, serious. You didn’t fuck with Budgie. He ran several things – drugs, local racketeering, a rash of potsheen stills up between The Loup and Cooperstown – but there was some confusion as to how far his fingers went, and into which pies exactly.
‘You weren’t done just for that?’
‘That was the real reason.’
‘Well, what did they say you were done for?’
‘Nicking cars…’
Danny eyed him with a level twenty-twenty.
‘Tha’ wee bit of dealing maybe.’
‘What sort?’
‘Puff mostly. A few pills. Coke at Christmas.’
‘You twat.’
‘They all do it.’
‘So they’re not going to want you cutting in.’
They supped. Geordie removed his fags from the front pouch of his hooded top, and leaned back to squirm the lighter out of his jeans.
‘When did it happen?’
‘I’ve told this thing a million times.’
‘So tell it again. You’re still one whiny bastard. You should be glad of the attention.’
Geordie lit his fag and blew smoke out. Once, twice. He took a sip and wiped the froth away with the back of his hand. Everyone prepares their body before they tell a story.
‘It was around one in the morning, on a Tuesday night. Five months ago or thereabouts. I’d been playing pool in the new pool hall. You won’t know it, it’s down behind the carpet warehouse. Then I’d gone to the Gleneally for a few pints with Den Spratt. You remember him?’
‘Rat-face Spratt.’
‘The very same. More like a chipmunk now. More meat to his cheeks.’
‘Come on.’
‘I was lying in bed, bit pissed, dozing. Mum’s staying at her sister’s in Bangor. Dad’s flat out snoring. There’s a bang of some sort and it wakes me. I figure it’s a car door banging just outside. So I look out the window. My bed’s still beneath the sill. There’s two cunts in the fucking garden in balaclavas. The streetlights are giving off good light and I know them. Not just to see, I know their fucking names. And they’re standing back. Not even keeping a lookout but watching the porch, so I know that there’s others and they’re at the fucking door. And I figure that bang was my fucking door going in.’
He stops and fingers a Regal out from its box. Danny realizes that the story, for Geordie, has slipped from urgency into theatrics. Danny lifts the pack and raises his brows. Geordie nods as he lights his own. Danny draws one out for himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remains of the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.
‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’ – Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window – ‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’
They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.
‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’
Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’
‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll he back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’
Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.
‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’
‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’
Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.
‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’
He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.
‘Bats, yes, and a shotgun, it was an old farm gun, double barrelled, and the pistol. And they had a children’s torch. A fucking children’s torch. Green, with a wee purple dinosaur on it. Couldn’t even get proper torches. And the batteries were shit in it or whatever so they had to reverse the car and put the headlights on me…You’ve heard this bit before haven’t you?’
Danny had. Everyone in the county had, he figured, seeing as his mother’d rang him to tell him.
‘Aye but go on.’
‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’
Danny nodded.
‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’
He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.
‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’
He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.
‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the hats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’
He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’
Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.
‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’
‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’
Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.
‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’
‘Fucking hell mate.’
‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’
Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.
‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’
Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’
Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?
‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’
LATE EVENING (#ulink_4d36d941-9b67-508a-bddd-8543aa419b84)
The word had come in through a friend of his dad’s that Geordie’s name had come up, again, and that he should scarper. And sharply. He’d never been on a plane and wasn’t going to start now, so he needed to get the ferry over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.
He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2—1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.
And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.
They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.
Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.
‘Who’s this then?’
A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.
‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’
Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’
‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’
Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids – but Danny was up and into the bathroom.
The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.
‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’
‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’
Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it – specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.
‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’
At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.
‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’
Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.
‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Ian McAleece.’
‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.
‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’
There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.
‘Listen, Geordie, you want me to ring you a cab? Where are you staying?’
‘Well, actually Dan, I was hoping I could stay here.’ Danny managed to keep his smile from slipping down into his shoes. ‘Just for a night or two, ‘til I get myself sorted. I was hoping to just kip on the sofa.’
Danny’s smile increased its wattage. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem. Stay here. I have to get up though and head to work tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ve spare keys for the house.’ Danny knew that two sets of keys, one of which had recently been attached by a silver chain to Olivia’s pink leather purse, were in the drawer under the coffee table about a foot in front of them.
‘Sure if you leave me yours, I can get a set cut.’
‘I could do I suppose. I’m not sure if you can though. One of them’s a security key or something. You need a letter from the managing agent.’
‘Well, if I can’t I’ll just make sure I’m here when you come back.’
‘Yeah, okay then. Sure.’
Geordie leant down and produced a lump of hash about the size of a bar of hotel soap from his rucksack. Danny watched him surreptitiously as he deftly skinned up, and passed the spliff to Dan to spark. Soon they both turned motionless, glassy-eyed as fish.
When the third spliff came round, Danny had lit a cigarette which he passed to Geordie to smoke when he smoked the joint. It was intimate and odd, all this. But not unworkable, Danny thought, this might be all right, this might even be fun.
The evening was ending. Danny, feeling too trashed to be anything but at ease with Geordie staying over, and too trashed to clear a space on the floor of the boxroom, locked the front door and tossed Geordie a sleeping bag, bulbous in its carry-sac, and a lank pillow without a cover. In his bedroom he locked his laptop and his diary into a drawer in his desk and climbed messily, many-limbed, into bed.
THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004 (#ulink_3c8dbc5d-def9-5a8d-8b73-176124511ad9)
My office worker’s collar turned unselfconsciously
up…I return home…feeling a slight,
confused concern that I may have lost for ever
both my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.
Fernando Pessoa
A minute after waking, Danny padded into his shower. His mornings were efficient. He dressed in beige cords, a blue shirt that he rubbed at for a bit with an iron that leaked and was only ever tepid, and strapped his black cycle helmet on his wet hair. His leather satchel slung over his shoulder, he lifted his bike off the hook on the garden wall and set off through the smouldering traffic to work.
Geordie shifted from facing the back of the sofa to facing the room. He farted a slow crescendo and went back to sleep.
Danny locked his bike in the underground car park and walked through the office courtyard to a side door into his building. Danny worked at Monks & Turner, a Magic Circle law firm. Which meant that his firm was, supposedly, one of the five best in the country. It was certainly one of the biggest. It felt to Danny like just another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it. He had attended Ballyglass Nursery, Primary and High School and had done pretty much everything right. He was a gaunt truthful child and his teachers had been surprised, and a little perturbed, when they realized that he wanted to know as much as he could. His mother still rang to tell him that one of his old teachers had been in the office telling her how they kept his essays to read out to their classes. He never got less than an A and as he got older it began to seem more and more important not to. It seemed that every A raised the tightrope he was walking on a little higher, so that his fall would be even greater when it came. And then, suddenly, he was at the other end and in university.
His school had filled out his application for Cambridge and he’d signed it. He’d decided to choose history for a degree. There was so much of it. He’d gone along and been interviewed by a large Australian woman, covered in cream drapes like a dustsheeted wardrobe, and a neat little ginger Englishman. Danny was accepted, worked, thrived, and as he’d promised his father, applied to law firms for a job after graduation. Monks & Turner was the first interview and when they accepted him, he’d cancelled the others. Two years of law school in Tottenham Court Road, living above a Perfect Fried Chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, saw city life settle down on him like smog. He became a first-class Londoner.
When he arrived at Monks, a grimy Monday in September, he had sat in Corporate, specifically insurance work. His trainer had just moved into the new office they were going to share. Their new name plaques, James Motion and, underneath of course, and slightly smaller, Daniel Williams, had been put up to replace Townsend Hopkins. Townsend was an infamous old boy partner who’d been given the heave-ho for not bringing the work in. The firm constantly restored itself like that. It put Danny in mind of some vast ruminant. The main entrance, painted, polished, was its mouth, the corridors and meeting rooms served as intestines and organs, and the lawyers were like teeth, yellowy-pale, varying in sharpness, and renewable. Like teeth, they varied not only in sharpness but also in purpose, and some would get clients, others retain them. All, though, were grinders. Danny, when he qualified, had joined Litigation, the only seat he’d done which felt like law, and he was now a two-and-a-half-year qualified solicitor-advocate in the Commercial Litigation department specializing in International Arbitration. Danny sometimes thought that the only job worth doing was one which was covered by one word. Plumber. Joiner. Farmer.
A year ago Danny’d been given his own office, about the size of a garden shed. When his three bookcases and two filing cabinets had initially arrived he’d felt slightly claustrophobic. Now he felt snug. He could reach almost everything in his room from his desk. His computer screen faced the window. He faced the door. His desk had a panelled front on it and Danny had developed the habit of nipping below it, where he kept a duck-down sleeping bag and a cushion embroidered with sunflowers that his sister had made, for a kip either before, during, or after lunch. He would make sure the route to his desk was barricaded by briefcase and recycling box, then slink off his seat, suddenly boneless.
Danny’s central friend at Monks was Albert Rollson, a Brummie who’d ditched his accent in favour of a mid-Atlantic twang. Rollson was neurotic. His terrors included other people’s illnesses and he would get out of a lift at the next floor if someone in it coughed or sneezed. He’d flinch if someone accidentally came too close or brushed against him in passing, and grimaced if hugged. Which is not to say that he was cold, he simply, proudly, possessed an over-developed sense of propriety. It informed his distrust of Antipodeans. And Americans. And Europeans. And was the reason he worked in law. He was born to its hierarchy, its wheels within wheels, its concurrent bitchings and slobberings, its dog-eat-dog, backstab, leapfrog. And it allowed him to dress like Cary Grant.
Danny had shared an office with Rollson when they had qualified, two years after arriving at Monks. They had argued relentlessly over plants. Danny’s view was that offices are the ugliest, most sterile places in the world. Everything is synthetic. You see nothing that is actually growing, bar the perceptible fattening of some of the most sedentary lawyers and secretaries. Danny wanted a real plant in the room. He told Rollson that the lack of flora in the workplace was the reason lawyers started office affairs. There was nothing else to look at but people. The obscene clashing decor, the generic tacky prints, the background corporate hum from air conditioning, VDU and photocopier: people looked at each other more closely. Rollson however, perpetually single, quite liked the idea of people looking at him more closely. Plants were there simply to steal more of his oxygen in a city where there was scarcely enough anyway. He was allergic to anything natural. On a school outing to a stables near Dudley, a large grey mare had once licked his face and he’d never recovered. That rough slobbery smothering tongue. The smell of it. He quite liked seeing the countryside from the motorway, the space, its potential, and he’d once bought a David Attenborough series on video, although he hadn’t watched it.
Danny walked into his corridor. He noted that the doors of Andrew Jackson, departmental senior partner, and Adam Vyse, departmental managing partner, were open. He removed his bag from his shoulder, placed the helmet in it and carried it close to his body. In this way, and by performing two complicated body-spins at just the right moments, he could walk past the partners’ doors without it being immediately apparent that he was just arriving. It was 9.43 a.m.
Geordie stretched out an arm to the coffee table, encountered the remote control and switched on Trisba. He noticed that he’d drooled on his pillow.
Danny’s phone was flashing. This always scared him a little. Either it was a message from last night (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there after he’d left) or from this morning (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there before he’d arrived). In the worst case scenario (the WCS, as Rollson would have called it) there would be two messages from the same partner, one from last night and one from this morning, and in the very WCS, that partner would be Adam Vyse. Danny listened to his messages. Two. First message, yesterday: 7.05 p.m. Carrie, Adam’s calm and pretty secretary, was cooing that Adam wanted to see him as soon as possible. He loved the fact that Carrie refused to say a.s.a.p. We’re not Americans, Danny always thought when he heard it used, we have time to say the whole sentence. Second message, today: 8.11 a.m. Adam. ‘Danny, give me a ring soon as you’re in. Something big’s come up.’ Ach fuck, Danny said, a little too loudly.
Vyse was notorious for handing out difficult work and not supervising it. He would demand a briefing just prior to seeing a client and then, in the meeting, repeat to the client what you had just told him, word for word, before turning to you, smiling encouragingly, and asking whether you agreed with his preliminary views. Danny stood at Vyse’s open door. He was leaning back in his leather easy chair, with his tailored arms crossed behind his slicked head and the phone cradled between his neck and chin.
‘Yes, of course. No you’re quite right. We don’t need any more of them. Oh yes?…Fourteen. No, no about two hundred acres. Uh-uh…A Jet Ski. Well, you know what I say? He who dies with the most toys wins…No, this is it. They need to consolidate and we aren’t going to give them time to. We need to hit them hard now…I know…Yes…’
Danny looked in at the office. A wooden golf putter was propped a little forlornly in the far corner, as if it dreamt of real grass. Aside from Adam’s own enormous bureau, reminiscent of the White House presidential desk, another sheeny table, an eight-seater for team meetings, dominated the middle of the room. The oakveneer cabinets fronted with glass held silver and crystal ornaments given to Adam for successful corporate claims or defences. Danny could read the largest one, a glass rhomboid, from here: Jackman Thorndike Litigation1998 – The Best Team Won. An open wardrobe displayed navy and grey pinstripe suits, a shelf of shirts and a row of pegs from which numerous ties hung down, entwined. A sky-blue baseball cap hung on one of the pegs. Its motif was illegible but Danny knew that it said I Wouldn’t Say Boo To A Gooson, Gooson being a corporate client involved in a billion dollar insurance dispute which had taken a team of twelve associates and three partners two years to resolve. Danny also knew that Adam had a matching sky-blue polo shirt with a matching logo. After the case had been settled the whole team, in their team outfits, had flown to the firm’s headquarters in Atlanta for a week-long junket. The pictures were still on the noticeboard in the corridor outside. Team Gooson at the check-in. Team Gooson in the departure lounge. Team Gooson at the baggage terminal. They reminded Danny of the Gateway outings for mentally handicapped kids he used to help with at school. It was to do with the grinning. On the meeting table sat an array of executive toys: an Archimedes’ cradle, little metal monkeys on a magnet that could be built up into shapes, a Rubik’s cube sponsored by a pharmaceutical company with different drug logos on each side. On a far shelf, Chopin was seeping softly from the big black speakers that stood, close as bodyguards, on either side of the little silver stereo. A copper plaque above the desk stated, in gothic lettering, Teamwork divides the task and doubles the success. On the far wall photographs were aligned in a row, five of them, like the house’s face-up poker hand. Each contained posed shots of Adam and his family. His wife (Amelia? Amanda?) was pretty much what you’d expect if you watched television on Sunday evenings. Something of the period drama about her. Slighty sad, as if she’d expected something slightly different, skinny (tennis, Danny supposed), naturally blonde. The kids were all versions of either of their parents, and all the shots appeared proprietorial somehow: two of the blondies on a yacht looking more bored than they should; one astride a grey pony which, bearing its teeth, seemed to be grinning for the photograph; the perfect husband and wife posed at their fireplace, holding the lintel (Team Marriage, thought Danny); one of the wife in a manicured garden (of at least two acres) with a lifted glass of wine; the whole family on a ski slope clutching each other and not for balance. They looked happy.
‘I know…Quite…Well, I looked at him for a moment and said If that’s the way you want it we’ll have no option but to seek an injunction. It was either put up or shut up. We have them by the balls…Yeah, fuck’em…Okay, we’ll talk soon…Okay…take care…Bye…Bye bye.’
Adam swivelled slightly, and with one fluent gesture succeeded in both replacing the phone and waving Danny into the room. Danny. Yes, great. Come in, come in. Shut the door.’
Danny was tempted to nod at the telephone and solemnly ask ‘How is your Mum?’, but thought better of it and stepped inside. He sank slightly into the deep-pile carpet.
‘Sit down. Now, how are things?’
This means, in law firms, Can you do this piece of work for me, this piece that I am keeping up my sleeve? If you are seriously considering saying no, you need a reason better than I have no time or desire or consciousness or limbs.
Danny could have quite enjoyed these non-conversations, where both sides spoke in this unwritten code, like pig Latin, if they didn’t result in pain for him, which they invariably did. There were several responses to Adam’s question, and none of them could save him. Danny’s favoured one was to hedge as much as possible until the work had been described and then try to sidestep it or, if it looked okay, enthusiastically accept it. First off, Danny liked to describe how busy he was, at great and enthusiastic length, in order to strengthen his hand when he would try to brush off the incoming work. He replied, ‘Fairly stuffed at the moment. I’m working on this massive arbitration between a Brazilian company, our client. and a German electronics manufacturer. That’s with Carol and Alastair. And I’m running the disclosure on a new claim for Cartwrights against a ballbearing manufacturer. That’s with Jonathan. We’re fighting over the size of it at the minute.’ Adam’s eyes were scanning a point about six inches to the right of his head. Danny couldn’t remember whether there was a mirror behind him. I haven’t finished yet, he thought, so at least look me in the face. ‘And a couple of pro bono issues have just gone live. The homeless charity I work with are disputing marketing fees, and my death row case in Jamaica is up for review by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Then there’s also the coroner’s inquest that I’ve been doing with Amanda.’
Adam, rather shamelessly, looked bored. ‘Right, right, great. Now I’ve a piece of work I’d like you to look at for me. It’s fairly intensive but really interesting.’ Danny’s simultaneous translation ran on: Stop fucking around. I know you have work. We all have work. And you are about to get some more. And it’s going to be horrific. C’est la fucking vie. Still, even this was unusual. There was normally the pretence of an option. He’d have to force it. ‘Well Adam, I’d really like to help you on it.’ I’m not doing all of it mate. ‘But I really will have to check with the other partners on my matters, Carol and Jonathan, as to whether or not it’s feasible.’ I have friends in powerful places and they will come through for me. Back off tiger.
‘I’ve already spoken to them and they’re fine about it, as long as you get everything done of course.’ Checkmate. Stop your snivelling. You ‘re fucked for the foreseeable. Forget about your holiday, your friends, your sleep.
‘Okay, great.’ Dead man walking, dead man walking. Danny heard a bright, happy voice come out of his own mouth. ‘And will there be someone on this to help me?’ If I really really have to do this, I need to share the shit around.
‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find a willing trainee.’ Screw you wiseguy. ‘Here’s the file.’ I’ve cleared my desk! I’ve cleared my desk! ‘Hard work is character-building, Danny.’ Go fuck yourself.
‘Of course, of course.’ I’m eating it up. ‘Though my character’s already built, thanks.’ Fuck you too.
‘Look, Danny, the thing is, it was one of Scott’s projects and he’s had to clear out to Australia for a while unexpectedly.’ We all know what happened so settle down. ‘We’re in a bit of a bind.’
Scott Atkins had come home from work on Monday, at 1 a.m., to discover that his wife had moved back to Australia. She had left a factual note on his pillow telling him that they had spent a total of two hours together in the last five weeks, aside from sleeping in the same bed, and that she was going home to Melbourne.
Danny nodded. Adam continued, It’s the Ulster Water takeover. You know what I’m talking about? It’s not really your line but things being as they are the Corporate boys need all the help they can get.’ Don’t misunderstand me, I think you’re a piss-poor lawyer.
‘Ulster Water?’
‘Yes.’
‘My part of the world.’
‘Really? I always thought you were Scottish.’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Well, Syder Plc are launching a takeover offer for them. Yakuma are making a rival bid. We’re acting for Syder. You’ll have a quick conference call after lunch with the Syder MD, a Mr Tom Howard, where you can introduce yourself.’ You’re on your own. I know nothing about this. ‘I understand he can be a pretty difficult customer. In the meantime you need to go speak to the Corporate department. You’ll be overseeing the litigation due diligence and maybe heading off to the head office this weekend. In Belfast. John Freeman’s the partner on it. Okay? Thank you.’ He turned abruptly but neatly in his chair and started reading his e-mails.
Danny started back up the corridor. He hadn’t heard of John Freeman. He started listing all the consequences that had flowed from previous hospital-passes, those spinning cases that you catch in mid-air and which end with a sudden high tackle or headbutt from nowhere. One, involving a counterclaim between crisp bag manufacturers, or more specifically between a crisp bag manufacturer and the company that manufactured the machines that manufactured crisp bags, had caused Danny to begin taking anti-depressants. Another, involving suing the Bulgarian Government for reneging on promised subsidies for a hydro-electric power station, forced him to miss his grandmother’s funeral. Danny spent approximately ten per cent of every working day looking at job sites on the Internet.
Albert was waiting in his office. He was sitting in Danny’s seat, clicking out a length of lead from a plastic pencil, one of several that peered out of the handkerchief pocket of his jacket. He’d walked past Adam’s office and witnessed Danny nodding sagely as Adam stitched him up. Rollson had been returning from the stationery stores in the basement with a new haul. He visited them every few days to check out any new pens, pencils or interesting objects that might have arrived and hadn’t been listed on the intranet stationery ordering facility.
‘Well?’
‘I’m in serious trouble.’
‘What on?’
‘Takeover of Ulster Water. One of Scott’s old cases.’
‘The due diligence on that’s huge. You are fucked mate, truly.’
‘I need a trainee on it.’
‘You might get the lovely Ellen.’
‘Fat frigging chance. Come on, get out of my seat.’
The lovely Ellen. Danny and Albert had been having lunch about two months ago when they agreed on a girl. This was noteworthy because it was rare, rare enough to have never happened before. Though neither liked a specific type (aside from Albert’s self-hating weakness for sloans, pearls, turned-up collars) each would say about the target of the other’s amorous (read lewd) remarks, that she was too tall, too small, too fat, too thin, too loud, too quiet and so on. Albert had pointed her out to Danny in the canteen. She had been expertly gathering tomatoes at the salad bar with two primitive wooden utensils, the sort that look like souvenirs from a holiday in Tonga. She was wonderful. They agreed on Ellen. Everyone agreed on Ellen. Albert knew who she was, of course, and which office she was sitting in. Danny had since looked her up at least five times on the intranet to see her picture: those almond eyes levelly staring the camera down.
Ellen was a trainee on the ninth floor in the Banking Litigation department. Danny worked on the tenth floor in the Corporate group. That morning, after his meeting with Adam, and a leisurely dander to Starbucks, he sent out a sequence of increasingly desperate e-mails to the entire Litigation department. There were two positive responses. One from a meat-headed trainee called Bradley who wore a variety of different shades of pastel shirts, all Ralph Lauren, with the sleeves rolled up to display massive pale forearms, like shanks of lamb in a butcher’s window. Bradley’s offer of help, evidently compelled by his trainer, was so loaded with qualifications, and his work of such low quality anyway, that Danny was about to send out a seventh request, addressed only to the senior associates, begging them to allow their trainee to assist him, when Albert’s uncommon optimism came uncommonly good.
Ellen Powell was about to qualify into the Employment department and had been doodling the last seat of her training contract away downstairs on the ninth floor, avoiding work as much as she could and sneaking out the building by way of the catering lift at 6 p.m. Her trainer had gone on secondment and when Ellen returned from reading the newspapers in the library on the fourteenth floor, she had thirty e-mails in her inbox. After reading through Danny’s six requests, and checking Danny’s picture out on the intranet, Ellen e-mailed him offering to help. It had just pinged into Danny’s inbox when she appeared in his doorway. She was standing very straight: a tall, black girl wearing a black trouser suit and a double-cuffed blue and white pinstriped shirt. Her hair was braided and tied back. Her long legs and narrow hips made her seem taller than she was and it was only her breasts that prevented her body from appearing purely athletic. Her face had something reserved and angry about it. She was closed to the general public. Danny grinned.
‘Something amusing?’ A posh bone-dry voice.
‘No. I’m smiling in a friendly manner. It’s the Monks & Turner spirit. You’re Ellen?’
‘And you’re the man with too much work.’
‘I’m one of them. Please. Come in, come in. Sit down. Now, how are things?’ And thus we do the evil we have done to us.
EARLY MORNING AGAIN (#ulink_aa84897f-7842-5ec4-a5e2-2fafc94188b3)
Two miles and forty-seven yards away, Geordie was skinning up a morning spliff to lessen the stress of Trisha. Two men were arguing over an enormously fat girl who was dressed from head to foot in Adidas. The two men were both at least three times her age, which appeared to be around thirteen. Man One and Man Two would periodically stand up and shout at each other and then sit down. Like little figures wheeled out on the chime of a fancy wooden clock, they’d wave their arms, clang around for a while and retreat. The fat girl’s brown hair was scraped up away from her face and sat in a tuft on the top of her scalp, like the green parts of a pineapple. It was becoming apparent that Man Two was the girl’s father and that Man One drove her school bus. It was also becoming apparent that Man One had fathered Pineapple’s baby. This, the offspring of Pineapple and bus driver, was now being brought on stage for some kind of curtain call. It was a pink-faced wailing package and nobody wanted to hold it.
Geordie took the last hot drag on his spliff, and stubbed it out, crooking it like a baby finger. This was interesting. He was alone in Danny’s flat. He stood up. He was wearing only pale blue creased boxers. He lifted his rucksack from the foot of the sofa and emptied the contents out onto the sleeping bag. He replaced everything bar one white plastic bag. He set about counting the cash it contained. Geordie had not left home empty-handed.
The morning of his going he’d been fit to burst with worries about what to take and where to go and how to get. The usual going concerns. He’d rang Janice at work and asked her to meet him in the old children’s playground over in Kildrum. It was out of town and across the road from a housing estate that was being emptied out, house by house, to swankier estates. The windows on some houses were boarded up and some were flung open on the warm summer sky. The place had the look of an advent calendar. Janice had taken her lunch hour early from the chemists and driven out in her wee red Fiesta. Geordie watched her carefully and clumsily reverse the car into one of the outlined spaces in the car park, even though it was completely empty. She sauntered up to him. Tight scant denim skirt, white trainers, a navy V-neck top and a long open maroon cardigan. Her hair was tied back and Geordie fancied she’d been crying or maybe it was hay fever. She looked good, great even, if you forgave the wonky eye, and Geordie did, as he held her waist and kissed the soft swell of the top of her breasts.
‘Jan, I have to disappear. You know your fucking brother has put the word out on me.’
I heard Brewster talking about it in the kitchen. Geordie, I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. I tried to talk to Greer but he wasn’t having any of it. And Da said to shut up or he’ll turf me out. Should I come? Should I come with you? Where are you going?’
Good old Janice, Geordie thought. Good old stupid sexy Janice, with her little waist and little feet and big lips.
Better not, at least not yet. I’ll try and send you a message at Martin’s when I get something sorted. I don’t know where I’m going, to be honest Jan. And I’ve no cash. I was thinking of Australia but there’s visas and stuff to be sorted out and I’ll have to do that in England. You could try and come over and meet me in London maybe, or in Australia even, in a few months. You could do your hairdressing again and I could work in a bar or drive a cab.’
‘Geordie, if you need money, I can get you money.’
He had turned her round and she was leaning into his lap as he drifted slightly on the swing, pleased with the airy movement. He was considering whether or not she’d let him slip her skirt up and fuck her gently from behind, here and now, as a little leaving gift.
‘How can you get money? You can’t nick it from work Jan. They have security cameras in there.’
‘Geordie!’ she snapped a little, ‘I love that job. I wouldn’t steal from Mr and Mrs Martin. They’ve been really good to me.’
‘Aye, Charlie Martin’s been very keen to be really good to you. Mad keen. Mad keen to get you in the back of the shop all alone and be really good to you.’
‘Shut up. Listen to me. Greer has money in a box behind the panel in the bath. He doesn’t know I know it’s there. You have to work the panel off with a knife or screwdriver but the other day I was in there and Da was shouting to let him in the bathroom but I was shaving my legs and I turned round to let him in for a piss and kicked the side panel of the bath and it made a clangy sound, like metal. Geordie, I can feel you.’
Geordie had slipped his hands inside her cardigan, which she’d zipped up, and he was cupping the underside of her breasts. His cock was running lengthways to the left, over the side of his thigh. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and slipped one hand under the pinch of his jeans and pulled his cock up straight, to fit in the shallow indentation that her tight skirt allowed her ass to make. ‘Go on then. What about the bath?’ He pulled her tight to him now, holding her hard little waist. She was rubbing a little against him and her voice was softer, sinking.
‘What? Oh. Well, I let Da in and then when I went back in to finish my legs I took Brewster’s penknife from the cabinet, which Malandra had in there cos it’s got tweezers on it, and I took the panel off and there’s a metal box, with a lock on it but the key was in it, and it’s full of money. I mean full of money. It must be Budgie’s. No one else in the house has cash like that lying around.’ Her voice trailed off as Geordie moved one hand down and under her and touched the warm, wet patch of her cotton knickers.
‘You’re full of money.’ He slipped a finger in under the strict elastic and felt that smallest part of her hardening. With his palm on her thigh, holding her legs apart, his finger moved down to feel the lips loosening, moistening.
‘Geordie, not here. Come into the car and we’ll park down by Macklin’s river.’
‘Ach, come on, there’s no one round. It’s the last time we’ll see each other for a while. Are you saying, Janice,’ and here he moved the other hand up over her breast and freed it from her bra. Loose and soft and billowy. He held the dense little nipple between his finger and thumb, gently, then firmly, ‘that you’ll steal Budgie’s money to give to me? What are you saying?’
‘You’ve nothing to lose. I’ll deny everything. No one knows the money’s there. He never checks it. That first night I put a hair between the panel of the bath and the wall so that if someone took the panel off the hair would fall and Geordie, the hair was still there this morning. I’ll take some of it. Just enough to see you right. Come on.’
Clever girl, Geordie thought. Janice stood up, shivery, adjusted her bra under her top and tugged her skirt round to straighten the seam. She dragged him by the hand to the car, and as she walked she felt the friction tingle between her legs, as if his fingers were still down there. Geordie pulled his checked blue shirt out of his jeans to cover his cock: it had thrust its angry head over the parapet of his belt.
Driving back into town, after a frenetic half-hour at Macklin’s river, feeling sated and lazy and sexy, Janice told Geordie to meet her back at the playground at two, and to bring a bag. She went back to work and told old soft Mr Martin that she wasn’t well. Woman’s problems. He was getting ready to complain when she pushed her chest up against him and made as if to cry. He told her to go straight home and get to bed. They could manage without her. She drove to the semi-detached house at the edge of the Dungiven estate she shared with her parents, Malandra and a varying number of brothers (Budgie’s marriage had faltered, as predicted, almost immediately, and Jackie and little snub-nosed Greer Junior lived with her mother over in Coagh, and Chicken had just moved across town into his girlfriend Jenny’s flat which was, too conveniently, above the offy). She told her mother, who was sitting at the dining-room table doing a jigsaw of two poodles in a pram, that she’d period pains, and needed to take a bath and some aspirin. Her mother, holding two edge pieces between her pursed lips, looked up, nodded and then looked down again. Some old sitcom was on the telly. Janice thudded up the stairs into her room and emptied her toilet bag onto her bed. She carried it into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the bath. She leant against the sink and looked at herself. The mirror was overcast with dust and constellated with stray white flecks of toothpaste. Janice thought how old she looked. She stretched the skin at the side of her eyes to flatten the little crow’s feet that were appearing. She must remember to wear her glasses more when she drove, not squint so much. And she should stop smoking, they say that’s not good for the skin. She turned and looked at herself from the side. Her breasts were still high and still firm, for breasts that size. She cupped them as if weighing them, and thought how last week some asshole down at the building site on the Benaghy Road had shouted after her, as she passed on the way to the solarium at lunchtime, You don’t get many of them to the pound. She felt like kneeing him in the balls as she had Budgie, when he’d tried to get into her room three years ago, drunk. No way Jos´e. She hadn’t let him in since she was sixteen and he never tried any more. She lifted her top. Her stomach was still flat and still hard. Good. She could do with losing some weight off her bum she decided, and suddenly, a little viciously, tugged off her top and wriggled out of her skirt and knickers. She stepped cleanly out of the puddled clothes, and looked at the pale mass of herself again. Skin and then inside that flesh and inside that bone and then inside that what? Didn’t people say the marrow of the bone? People had bone marrow transplants didn’t they? As she stood and stared in the mirror she saw her face waver and emerge as if it was fifty years old. Fleshy cheeks, a corrugated brow, eyelids thickened and heavy. She blinked and came back to herself. You’re getting old Janice, she thought, you’re beginning to die.
She opened the bathroom cabinet. A dimpled strip of Boots paracetamol clattered into the sink, triggering a loose scree of assorted plasters. An ancient bottle of Calpol, still in its stained cardboard sheath, stood at the back of the top shelf. A stippled pink ankle support covered some squat and sturdy pill bottles. It dated from the time Budgie, up playing on ‘the pitch’ (really a partly gravelled field behind the Costcutters which had been earmarked for a car park that never appeared) had his ankle sprained by a dangerous tackle from Jackie McMenemy. That was the first time Budgie had been in trouble, apparently, according to Brewster, as Janice had only been one or two then. As payback Budgie had lifted a broken brick from the pile they were using for one of the goalposts, hobbled over to Jackie, who was sitting cross-legged nursing his own ankle, and smashed it in his face. Her dad had given the McMenemys money so that Budgie wouldn’t go to borstal. You still saw Jackie round the town on a Saturday, holding the hand of one of his wee boys who’d look up, wailing or smiling, into the gap-toothed grin of a village idiot. You can fix that sort of stuff now, Janice thought, wiping her tongue like a polishing rag over the neat ornaments of her own front teeth.
There were pumice stones and scalpels and bunion and corn plasters for her mother’s gnarled feet (the legacy of twenty years standing behind the counter in Marshall’s bakery). And there was Brewster’s penknife with the tweezers that saw heavy usage. The hair on Malandra’s body could best be described as adventurous. Her eyebrows, left alone as they had been for approximately fifteen years, had sent out expeditions to explore the rest of her face. The small of her back had fleeced itself. She was pretty, Janice knew, and unlike her was dark, which was really why the flecks of downy, shadowy hair on her face used to be noticeable. From when she was twelve, if she ever pissed any of them off, they’d called her Elvis, what with her sideburns and all. Which was why there were four half-empty tubes of Immac in the cabinet, and the tweezers were kept busy applauding in the natural light by the bathroom window.
Janice banged the cabinet door and pulled out the blade of the knife with her thumbnail. She wedged it in between the panel and the side of the bath. The panel shifted slightly ajar. She turned on both bath taps: they squealed as she twisted their heads, and dripped in some gloopy orange bubble foam. The panel was a sheet of plywood, painted white, and the green deposit box was still behind it. She pulled it out from its hiding place. It was lighter than she remembered. She put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it, the box and the lid burning her bare thighs with cold. The cash was in rolls packed in little plastic bank bags. They reminded her of messages in bottles somehow. She hadn’t time to count it or estimate how much it was. She quickly took the bags out and pushed some into her trainers, and then pushed her socks in after them. The rest she stuffed into her toilet bag. She stood up then, and touched, gently, as if in remembrance, the cool damp hair between her legs. She would miss him, she thought, and his lovely big cock. Maybe she would try and meet him somewhere. Fuck Budgie. It had been a long time since she’d felt anything but hate for him. Fuck Greer and Chicken and their vicious mouths and fists and friends. Fuck the lot of them. Except Brewster. He was all right, just a bit pathetic. He floated around like a ghost, shocked to be noticed at all. She went to the toilet, wiped, stood and yanked the chain. It was an old-fashioned toilet with the cistern up high on the wall. It glugged and then whimpered, filling up. She stepped into the bath and hunkered. It was too hot to lie down in. She could hear the bubbles in the foam popping softly, audible as an opened can of Coke. She lowered her ass into the water and raised herself again. She cupped some water and let it drizzle down over her knees, onto her thighs, into the nest of hair between her legs. She sat down properly and then, with the dragged, reverberant sound of skin on wet plastic, slipped down into the bath to submerge herself completely. Pinching her nose closed, she felt the water funnel into her ears. She could hear the sounds of the house much clearer here: the television spilling canned laughter in the living room, and the steam whistle of the kettle on the gas ring, and then her mother’s chair scrape back on the lino tiles as she got up in her sheepskin slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to warm the teapot. I live underwater, she thought suddenly, and pushed her feet against the bottom of the bath to surface for air and shampoo.
Geordie then had a bagful of cash. Janice had put the money in a white plastic bag and he’d placed it in the front pocket of the rucksack he’d nicked from his little sister Grace. As soon as he’d got on the ferry (until then he was still expecting Budgie to appear suddenly, behind some window, tapping softly as rain) he’d nipped into one of the disabled toilets, and sat on the floor and totalled the cash. £49,250. Not bad at all.
Sitting on Danny’s sofa, Geordie counted it again, dealing the notes into piles like playing cards. £49,300. He recounted it. £49,450. Fuck it, he thought, I’ve a rough idea. He lifted two of the Bank of England fifty pound notes, pushed them into his left trainer and placed the rest back into the plastic bags. He started to look around Danny’s place with replenished interest. Where the hell could he hide it? He wandered through the flat like a prospective buyer, looking up at the plaster cornices and down at the skirting boards. He tapped walls. He opened cupboards and drawers. He peeled back the carpet, like sunburnt skin, from a corner of the living room. The pale epidermis of unpolished floorboards. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He sat down again, heavily, on the sofa. And then it was obvious. He’d hide it where Budgie had hidden it. Geordie lifted a small fork from the cutlery drawer, which was still lolling out like a tongue, and carried the bag into the bathroom.
The bath must once have been new and white. And that must have been some time ago. It now had a discoloured ring around it, close to the top, like a high tidemark and the base of it was grained by smaller rings and various stains, all of them bad. The panel was plastic and when Geordie inserted the handle of the fork, it scraped open almost immediately. Behind the panel was a paper bag filled with nails, a magazine from July 1995 called Smash Hits (featuring Take That and their magnificent teeth) and an empty bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. He pushed the plastic bag right to the back, past the roughened underside of the bath.
Geordie, to the tune of ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’, was softly singing Fifty thousand pounds, fifty thousand pounds, hey-ho ma-dearie-oh, fifty thousand pounds. Janice was an idiot. She reckoned that kind of money was Budgie’s, that it was the proceeds of one scam or another: bleaching red diesel to white, flogging counterfeit DVDs or videos to the stallholders up at Nutts Corner, offering ‘protection’ to the chippies and offies that lined the main street. That kind of folding didn’t come in from that. Not, leastways, all at once. Fitting the panel back into its gap, Geordie started to get a little unnerved. Maybe he was the idiot. Everyone’d heard the rumours. Something was starting up or going down. Something was being unleashed. Maybe he had Something’s money.
Geordie showered, dressed himself in yesterday’s garb, and set off towards Dalston. Danny’s flat was in Stoke Newington, according to Albert, Olivia and his postcode, but Danny himself admitted Dalston was spiritually, if not technically, its home. He had given Geordie brief instructions last night: turn right out the house, then right again, then buy some food for dinner.
Stoke Newington High Street runs from the white liberal enclave of Church Street (homeopathic healers, designer clothes shops, independent bookstores) through the Turkish community (men’s clubs with no discernible purpose, kebab shops) to the African and Afro-Caribbean end (hair shops, furniture stores selling coffee tables fashioned from ceramic tigers). Geordie began to walk down it. He passed a mobile phone shop and remembered he’d not brought his phone out. Stupid of him. He’d not seen so many different shades of skin before. Geordie, Danny had learned last night in the pub, had never tried garlic or pasta, unless tinned spaghetti is pasta. Neither had he drank wine outside a church or eaten an aubergine, a courgette, or a sweet potato. Geordie felt himself in a new position: the outsider. He felt white. He couldn’t stop looking at the black people he saw. Their skin looked polished. They were beautiful. In Ridley Road market he thought he was about to get his head kicked in for staring. He was looking at a broad-shouldered young black man wearing a brown leather jacket and a gold-buttoned white shirt with a Nehru collar.
‘Wadchu looking at liddle man?’ Geordie realized he was talking to him. The man was repeatedly tilting his head back, as if brandishing his chin like a weapon.
‘Nothing,’ Geordie mumbled, shaking his head, scurrying, suddenly animal.
He came to a butchers, entitled Halal Meat, on the corner of the market. It was one long glass counter open to the street. Bald dead chickens clustered upside down along the back wall. Three men, slick and confident as bartenders, swayed between each other and served the docile queue. They wore white coats smeared with blood. They made Geordie think of a war movie he’d seen once in which sleepless doctors tended to the wounded. He inched to the front.
‘Yes? Help you?’ said Omar Sharif’s plumper little brother.
‘Can I have a pound of bacon and four chicken breasts please?’
The moustache behind the counter leant right across and tapped his cleaver on the glass: Are you taking the piss my friend?’ He rolled the ‘r’ of ‘friend’ and toned the phrase as Goldfinger did to James Bond. Geordie, angry, shook his head and then softened his face and shook his head again.
‘No bacon. How many chicken breasts you want?’ Sharif Jr straightened up behind the counter.
‘Four, please,’ said Geordie, a little stunned.
He crossed the road to the Kilkenny Arms, received his Guinness from the bleached Australian barman, who actually said ‘G’day’, and sat at an empty table. His ears were burning. He felt somehow embarrassed. This was the capital of his country and he felt a million miles from home. This was London, home of Big Ben, unfailingly chiming on the news every night, home of the Houses of Parliament and Churchill and the Union Jack and all the unchangeable symbols the orange banners displayed. Geordie realized he hadn’t seen a flag all day.
Mooning over his Guinness, Geordie thought about Ulster, that little patch of scorched earth. It had stayed loyal to England and now England didn’t want it. England was completely indifferent to it now. Geordie remembered Jenny McClure, this girl he’d known at primary school, who was tall and blonde and posh, which meant that her family lived outside the town and owned two cars and her dad played golf. She was clean and prim and perfect. And all through P6 and P7 he’d asked her to the cinema and made her little Valentine cards and warned the other boys off and waited after school just to walk ten paces behind her to the gates where her pert and pretty mother waited. And all that time she either ignored Geordie, or got her friends to tell him to leave her alone. Geordie remembered the lunchtime when, in an empty classroom, he’d poured the jar of dirty paintbrush water into her school bag. One day you wake up and hate.
At the Orange parades the police would stand on the fringes, attentive and static, like curious strangers who’ve stopped to watch a wedding party leave the church. Geordie remembered sitting on tarmac in fierce bare sunlight watching old Andy MacLean, a friend of his da’s, unwrap the Lambeg from the oilskins with a deft patience. He remembered the clipped neatness of his white rolled shirtsleeves. The snap and flutter of the tendons in his forearms. And how his thin wrists arched as the drumsticks twirled like spokes in front of him, and under his jutted chin how the ordinal drum had pounded and pounded and swung. He remembered how the lodge’s banners had advertised their faithfulness, as if faithfulness was all that mattered. But how could one stay devoted to someone who wants to leave you? Well, they wanted us once, Geordie thought. He stayed on in the pub for an idle hour, opposite a toothless old timer, folded into himself, dressed like Geordie’s dead grandfather, grey suit, flat cap, reading the Irish News. When he stood up to slope past him, the old guy raised his tumbler of whiskey to eyelevel, as if he was toasting the two of them.
Outside the pub a tattered newspaper was lying against the curb and the wind was freeing it sheet by sheet. Some pages blew about restlessly further up the pavement. One had managed to wrap itself around a lamppost and was flapping gently like a drunkard trying to hail a taxi. Geordie stopped to watch an African man, in a brown lounge suit and a piano keyboard tie, across the road. He was preaching about Jesus and reminded Geordie of the McNulty brothers, who, on a Friday night when he was shuttling from pub to pub on Ballyglass main street, would be standing out in suits they were too young to need for work, beseeching the sinners to repent. Geordie wandered back up the High Street and turned left past the school into Sofia Road. The playground was filled with kids shouting and running and taking everything very seriously. Kids don’t really have senses of humour, Geordie thought. Everything seems so important. One little boy, Arabic looking, was standing in uniform by the wire fence looking particularly grave. Geordie looked back, just as level and serious. The kid sneered, casually flipped him the middle finger, and walked off.
In the house Geordie slumped down on the sofa and turned his phone on. He’d two texts, both from Janice. BUDGIE KNOWS UVE CASH said one. RING ME said the other. Geordie needed to piss. He jumped up and went into the bathroom. He was jittery. It was always going to happen, he reasoned, but he didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. He’d need to think. There was no way Budgie would know where he was. It wasn’t like he was still in danger. He zipped up, flushed the toilet, and then checked his voicemails. One from Janice. She’d been crying. He’d probably slapped her about. The second voicemail was from Ian McAleece. Something about a drink. He wasn’t in the mood for that. As he was setting the phone down on the table it rang. He answered it, knowing he shouldn’t, but angry suddenly. ‘Geordie? It’s Ian here. From the boat.’
At eight o’clock that morning, just as Danny was rising soberly from bed, and the sleeping Geordie was making the repetitive gurgling sound of a broken cistern, Ian McAleece was sitting on the side of his sagging single bed in Kilburn Park’s sad little Lord Gregory Hotel. He was intently jabbing his mobile phone buttons with his stubby index finger. In Ballyglass Budgie Johnson woke suddenly and hoarsely answered his little silver Motorola: ‘Hello?’
Yes, it is a small small world. And Ulster but a button on its coat.
‘Budge, listen mate. Get a pen. I need you to get the cash to Mervyn. He’s bringing it across tonight. He needs to get it left in to this hotel. You got a pen?’
‘Okay, okay. What’s the address?’
Seven minutes later, Budgie Johnson went to the makeshift cupboard and found that the cupboard was bare. Wearing his boxer shorts patterned with the prison arrows of Christmas trees, he had locked the bathroom door, knelt on the damp bathmat and slipped his house key in the crack between the wall and bath to lever the panel off. He’d pulled out the green metal box, flipped its lid and gaped. After very slowly mouthing fuck several times, he put the panel back in place, set the box on his bed and banged on Malandra’s door.
‘’Landra, open the door. Ah need ta ask you something.’ Budgie was not yet angry. He was so terrified he felt like he was floating.
A scrape and a click and a tousled, dark, pretty Malandra, in a Bart Simpson nightshirt bearing 1986’s legendary injunction Don’t Have a Cow Man, appeared, holding a mug of tea.
‘What?’ Voices from the portable in her room came into the hall and were chanting Four. Three. Two…in some competition on breakfast television.
‘I had a box under the bath. There was stuff in it. And now there’s not. You know anything about it?’
‘What sort of stuff? Drugs?’
Either she was very sly or knew nothing. Budgie spun round and knocked sharply on Janice’s door.
‘Jan, open the door.’ Malandra waited, interested and leaning against the door jamb, with one leg arched neatly so the heel of her foot rested against her other ankle. She looked poised to execute some daring entrechat or pirouette.
‘What? What is it?” came a voice from the bedroom, unmistakably issuing out from a head on its side with one cheek pressed into a pillow.
‘Open the fucking door Janice.’ Budgie was no longer floating. His thoughts were beginning to settle: he was up to his neck here. His stomach contracted. His fists were itching. He punched the door once, and again. Hard.
‘Okay, okay. Hold on.’
A ratchety noise and the door inched open.
‘What is it? Greer, this is my day off.’ Her tone suggested that her brother didn’t have any days on. Budgie smacked the door fully open with the palm of his left hand and Janice was shoved backwards. He strode into the room and grabbed a fistful of her hair.
‘Where the fuck is it you wee bitch?’
Janice was only aware of Budgie’s breath, his stinking morning breath, on her face, and the sharp pain in her scalp. Her hair was lifting her up onto her tiptoes. Then she registered Malandra screaming as her terrified face appeared over Budgie’s naked shoulder, her arms pulling at Budgie’s neck. She noticed how hairy Budgie’s shoulders had got. And then she started to scream as well. Budgie spun round and in doing so pushed her onto the bed. He launched Malandra into the hall and shut the door and pushed the bolt across.
‘I think you’ve something to tell me.’
‘Greer, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who the fuck…I was asleep and you just force yourself in here and…you’ve no fucking right…’
Budgie moved across the room and neatly slapped her across the face with the back of his hand. Janice stop fucking about. I know you took it. Now where is it? You’ve no idea what you’ve done.’
‘What fucking money? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I never mentioned any money Jan.’
Janice looked scattered, stunned. Budgie sat down beside her and took her hand in his. He started to bend her index finger back. Very calmly he said, ‘I’ll break your fucking finger Jan I swear it. I won’t even blink. Now tell me where the fucking money went.’
‘I didn’t know it was yours. I just found it. I’ve spent it.’
‘Don’t talk shit. You better fucking hope that’s shit. Did you give that money to your little boyfriend? Cause if you did, he’s a dead man. He’s fucking dead Jan. You’ve killed him.’
He didn’t know it was yours. I told him it was mine.’
‘Yeah, cause you re going to have fifty grand in your pocket. You stupid stupid bitch.’
When he said ‘fifty grand’ Janice’s eyes flickered. Budgie read it correctly.
‘You didn’t even know. You didn’t even know how much you’d given him. God, but you are an idiot Jan. You’re nothing but an idiot slut.’
Casually, Budgie punched her hard on her left temple. Jan crumpled onto the duvet and began crying. He stood up.
‘I need that money. You better tell that little thief I’m going to come after him and rip his fucking head off. You better tell him to get that money back to me. Or he’s dead, and you’re dead, and his family’s dead, and everyone his family’s ever fucking met is dead. You hear me Jan? This is big boy rules. You stupid fucking stupid bitch.’
Budgie was breathing hoarsely. He opened her door. His mother and Malandra were standing in the hall. Malandra was crying and sniffing while his mother just stood there watching, bovine and floral in her nightie, open-mouthed. Budgie considered shutting it for her but instead feinted a lunge at them. They flinched and Malandra screamed. Budgie snorted. Back in his room he rang Ian who answered weirdly.
‘Hawwwo.’
‘Ian, everything all right?’
‘Yeah, brushing my teeth. You speak to Merv?’
‘No, not yet, listen there’s a minor problem.’
‘What sort of problem?’
‘The money isn’t quite ready.’
‘What do you mean not ready? It’s been ready for months. Mervyn’s flying tonight. I swear to God Budgie if you’ve taken any of that money you’ll be dead by dusk.’
The same tone he’d just used, the same threat he’d just made to Janice. He suddenly wished he could step out of the way completely, instead of being smack in the middle, making death threats and receiving them, like a domino stood on its end in a row of them, waiting for someone to touch the first one and topple the lot.
‘I swear I never touched it. I kept it safe but there’s been a fuck-up. Not my fault. My…my little bitch of a sister…I think she’s taken some of the money.’
‘How the fuck did she get at the money? What sort of fucking treasurer are you?
‘No listen Ian. It’s fine. Calm down. I know who has the money. I’ll get it back.’
‘Don’t tell me to calm down. I’m your fucking CO. Now who has the money? Where is the fucking money?’
‘Ian, I’m sorry. It’s a guy we told to get out of town. Geordie Wilson. It seems she gave him some money. But he’s just left, he’s…’
‘Geordie Wilson?’ Ian started to laugh.
‘What? What’s funny?’
Budgie heard a tap run, and then one, two, three spitting sounds. Then the jangle of a plastic toothbrush being set in a glass.
‘Mr Wilson and I became acquainted on the boat over. I have his mobile number. You’re a lucky man Budgie, stupid but lucky. How much money do I need to retrieve from him?’
Budgie grimaced. ‘About fifty thousand.’
‘Fucking hell Budge. This is the last time you look after the cash for the boys. I’ll see to that. You and me’ll be having a chat when I’m back. If I have any fucking problems getting this…Well, I’ll be coming to see you anyway. That’s a promise. I’m going to give Mr Wilson a call and arrange to meet for a drink. Now, meantime, here’s what you can do…
‘Listen mate,’ Ian said, ‘you fancy a pint this afternoon? I’m at a loose end. Waiting for something to arrive.’
Geordie was leaning back on the sofa but frantically jiggling his right leg. It hadn’t stopped jiggling since Jan’s texts.
‘Well, I’m a bit busy at the minute. Something’s come up.’
‘Mate, I won’t take no for answer. Seriously. Nonnegotiable. Meet me in the centre. What about O’Neill’s off Chinatown? Go to Leicester Square and walk through Chinatown. You can’t miss it. Four o’clock say?’
‘Maybe. Look it’s just this thing’s happened and I need to think about…’
‘Yeah great. Tell me about it later,’ Ian interjected, ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He hung up. Geordie set the phone on the wooden coffee table and leaned back again on the sofa. He looked up at the ceiling. White paint flaking off the pale pink plaster meant the near corner looked like a sky ragged with clouds. He breathed out heavily, utterly deflated. He picked the phone up and texted I’LL BRING THE CASH BACK to Janice, and immediately turned it off. He looked at the ceiling’s mackerel sky again, and thought how when he was a kid at scout camp in Gosford, his patrol leader, the ruthlessly cheerful Terry Green, had told him that a sky like that meant good weather was on its way. Yeah, right. Where’s Terry Green now? Six feet deep and filled with worms. No good weather came for him, Geordie thought, and it isn’t sunshine that’s heading for me. All those homespun proverbs, country wisdom, local knowledge, old wives’ tales: what a load of shit.
AFTERNOON (#ulink_a5c859ee-ff85-5f52-a121-af55bcb4dc23)
Danny told Ellen as much as he knew about the Ulster Water case, which was nothing, and neglected to mention that they might be going to Belfast on Saturday. She dutifully took notes, which quickly amounted to at least three times the number of words that he’d used, and sat opposite, listening attentively and asking the appropriate questions. Danny referred to part of the due diligence as ‘real monkey work’ and her efficient face broke into a smile. She had one slightly askew front tooth. It just made her look even sweeter. The bump in the Navaho rug put there to placate the gods. Danny could already feel he might be getting himself into trouble. He listed her faults to counterweight the effect she was having; she appeared to be business-like, brusque and hard-nosed; she might be a little humourless; she had a tiny stain, possibly toothpaste, on the left lapel of her jacket. He told her he’d ring her in a hour or so and she should come down for the conference call. It was noon.
He’d let Freeman, the Corporate partner, bring up the trip to Belfast, if it was still on the cards. If the two of them had to go Danny knew they’d sit in a dark hallway somewhere, being brought boxes of documents by surly admin staff, admin staff who would make it clear they knew Danny and Ellen worked for the company trying to buy them and sack them. They’d spend hours looking through contracts for onerous undertakings or impending litigation that could influence Syder’s decision to buy. However, unless Danny found some clause stating that in the event of a takeover Ulster Water would collapse like a broken deckchair, and leave Syder sprawled on the sand cursing and rubbing its coccyx, the bid would go ahead. Danny knew he would draft a detailed and lengthy due diligence report that would weigh, in unusually elegant language, any abnormal and arduous clauses in all of Ulster Water’s contracts pertaining to employment, intellectual property, information technology, outsourcing, even the sodding vending machines, and that it would not be read by anyone. It was, he supposed, possible that the conclusion might be perused but it would be so heavily qualified (‘In light of the short time available…given the limited resources and lack of information…due to the hostility shown by the target company and the corresponding impossibility of obtaining proper financial documentation etc. etc.’) that any deductions he’d draw would be completely worthless. At least legally. You ain’t getting us. This is every law firm’s secret motto. Every lawyer is a virtuoso of the ‘On the one hand’ line. We can only give you the facts as they appear to us. The decision, of course, is yours. Of course. And the decision was never Danny’s. So he needed to find out whether he would in fact be spending his weekend in his homeland. And whether he was still having this party tomorrow night.
Danny had no idea why he’d agreed to have a party. Admittedly it was his birthday next Wednesday but that had never before given him sufficient cause. The idea of planned fun bothered him on a fundamental level. The original idea and impetus for the party had been Olivia’s, several weeks ago, and dates had been bandied about. But since Olivia and he had finally split he’d re-resolved, at Albert’s instigation, to ask everyone else he knew round to his house to get drunk, and possibly, though improbably, get laid. That plan had shrunk somewhat. Danny had then e-mailed about ten friends a week ago telling them that he might be having some people round next Friday and maybe they’d call by. If they were free. Now he had to reconfirm. He opened a new e-mail on the screen, clicked on the appropriate recipients: Dinger, Tippy, Thunderclap Jenkins, The Elephant King of Sodom, Fisbboy, Tuzza, Rollson, Renault Minivan, Little Turk, and Simon. Most of these were colleagues, exercising the small freedoms of setting e-mail nicknames. Those were the same recipients who’d received the initial e-mail. Danny then went through the rest of his address book and clicked on random names: five university friends he hadn’t seen for months, three law school mates he saw solely to take drugs with, his friend James who’d dropped out of law school and now lived in Guildford, selling rubbish compactors (or compactors of rubbish, as James would correct him), and Clyde, his oddest cousin, who worked as an environmental health inspector in Hounslow.
He wrote:
Party. No exclamation marks. It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’ll be receiving guests from 9ish tomorrow night. If you have nothing better to do, please call in. Bring your own whatever.
After opening another Internet window and typing in the address roadmap.co.uk, he brought up Sofia Road, copied the link and pasted it into the e-mail.
Click here for the map: www.roadmap.co.uk/mxccsofia/n16. It’s No.23. The blue door. Get off at Dalston Kingsland Overland on the Silverlink and turn left. Or get the no.73, 112, 43 buses. Many thanks, kind regards, Admiral Sojourner Watkins
He always signed off with an assumed name. It wasn’t meant to be funny, at least not any more. It was a way of articulating the other lives he could have tried and which were slowly closing up elsewhere. He clicked on Send. Danny thought how if someone transcribed the twenty-five years or so of his speech they would be hard pressed to justify ever using an exclamation mark. When he answered the phone, even at work, people invariably asked him whether they’d woken him up. He never understood why everyone else was so excited by life. He was either bemused or enraged at their effortless joy. Three Out of Office messages pipped into his inbox.
He called Rollson to tell him how lovely Ellen was in person. Rollson groaned and pretended to choke on his pain au chocolat in a jealous fury. Albert was working on a settlement agreement, something to do with fourwheel drive jeeps which hadn’t yet been made, and which he’d worked on ‘til three the night before. He was on course for another late one, waiting for New York to wake up and send him comments on his last draft. He’d been on a conference call all morning and now wanted to chat. Danny agreed to nip round for five minutes.
Rollson’s room was like a show office for the ethical employer, or, more precisely, the employer who is worried about being sued for RSI. He had the desk raised on four wooden blocks for some odd reason, odd given that he was five foot five, and therefore also had a specially high chair, one which Danny called the Wimbledon Judge Seat. The chair raised and lowered itself by levers and Rollson would, as a distraction, frequently drop himself a foot or so in the middle of an argument if he felt like he was losing. The chair also had a special lumbar support fitted, and his keyboard was the new-fangled angled kind allowing maximal access for the wrists to rest on their own special pad. His VDU had a transparent screen fitted on it to reduce glare and even Rollson’s mouse was economically designed and different to every other lawyer’s. It had three buttons and was about twice the normal size: more canine than rodent. His mouse pad contained a further wrist rest, one which Rollson, in his over-enthusiasm at receiving another toy from the company’s full-time physiotherapist, had upsettingly described as feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl’s breast. It should be clarified that overall Albert Rollson wasn’t a particularly sick or delicate or querulous man. He was just very very bored, and had found that the best way to counter the ennui was to exercise all of the poindess opportunities offered by an enormous company. He had them change the pictures on his walls every six weeks. He attended training seminars on using a Dictaphone. He attended a two-day course in Northampton on speed-reading at which the tutor had said ‘the main trick to it is just to read faster’ and they had all lowered their heads and obediently tried. He visited the in-house doctor at least once a month and though the doctor had prescribed him a variety of beta-blockers and anti-depressants, he hadn’t yet suggested that maybe Albert should change his job.
Danny stood in the doorway but didn’t go in. Something was different.
‘Mate, why is your room reminding me of the Blue Grotto?’
‘I know, the fluorescent light was making a buzzing noise so I rang down to Business Services and got them to send a man up to change it, but they’ve installed a blue one. It’s like sitting in a brothel.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. It is. Aside from the lack of hookers.’ Albert did a newsreader shuffle of the papers he was looking at and set them aside. He did look wrecked, and unusually for Rollson, his clothes were a little rumpled. His Windsor knotted red silk tie was still on but the top button of his white shirt was open. A stray hair curled out from the gap and his dark brown eyes were underlined for emphasis by thick black lines of sleeplessness.
‘You have to ask her to your party tomorrow night.’
‘Ellen?’
‘Yes, Ellen. You just rambled on about how amazing she is. You have to ask her.’
‘She’s working for me. It’d be weird.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. And she’s working with you, not for you. It would be weirder not to mention it. Just casually throw it into the conversation. Who else’ve you invited?’
‘You saw the e-mail. That lot plus Geordie.’
‘Who is this guy?’
‘I’ll tell you about it at lunch. He’s an old mate from school.’
You haven’t mentioned him before. Where’d he spring from?’
After Danny and Ellen had spoken on the conference call to John Freeman, the Corporate partner overseeing the Ulster Water bid, it became apparent that there would be no lunch. Freeman was a short and angry man. The anger was obvious. The shortness Danny inferred from his photo on the firm’s intranet. He was shiny-pated, overweight, and had tiny black perforations for eyes which were looking upwards to the camera. He looked like a malevolent medieval abbot. After Freeman’s secretary had patched the two of them into the call, Freeman launched into the conference without giving Danny time to introduce Ellen. There appeared to be several accountants and clients on the line, aside from the whole Corporate team, presumably down on the second floor, hunched in anticipation round Freeman’s speaker phone. As always, Danny found it difficult to focus at times like these. His ability to concentrate decreased in proportion to how important it was that he did. He could, for example, intimately describe someone he had sat opposite on the tube several days before but couldn’t tell, when asked directly, whether or not he’d sent a holding letter to the lawyers on the other side or indexed a file of documents. As the voices coming from the speaker phone on his desk discussed logistics Danny, sitting opposite Ellen, felt himself unwind, as if the speaker phone was a radio and he was lolling in the bath. She was really quite something, this girl. Absolutely remarkable. Danny found himself staring at her breasts and quickly shifted his eyes onto the pad she was scrawling on.
‘Will that be possible, Danny?’ Freeman’s tensed vocal cords were flinging something at him.
‘I’m sorry, we seemed to get cut off there. Could you repeat it?’
A derisory snort issued from the phone. Ellen, her face inspired with concern, was holding up her pad opposite him. CAN YOU GO TO BELFAST ON SAT MORN. She grinned. He grinned back.
‘I mean, it sounded like you were about to ask me whether or not I could take a team to Northern Ireland this weekend, but then there was silence.’ Danny winked outrageously at Ellen. ‘If you hadn’t progressed further than that then the answer’s yes. I’ve a trainee briefed and we’re aware of what the exercise will involve. Obviously, I’ve a few specific questions to ask about the set-up, but we don’t all need to be on the call for that.’
The Corporates were mumbling assent. Freeman took hold of the conversation again, a little too quickly, as if another child had tried to take it off him.
Quite, quite. Well, I’d anticipated that and sent you an e-mail with a contact list for Syder earlier.’ Danny heard the tap-dancing of far-off typing and an e-mail, headed SYDER CONTACTS, from Freeman, appeared on his screen. Danny stopped listening again.
Ian was leaning back, unfolded, with his hands locked together behind his head. His posture was one of a man who has taken the board on and won, but his stare was fully engaged, and directed now at three men in suits sitting two tables over. They were laughing loudly and Ian was willing them to stop. Geordie hadn’t turned up yet, though it was ten past and he was starting to think he’d underestimated the little shit. One of the suits was working himself up to say something, but had looked to be doing that since Ian sat down twenty minutes ago. The main mouth, an overweight owl who smiled reflexively and broadly after everything he said, was telling another anecdote.
‘So I leaned across to him and said You’ll just have to trust me.’
The three of them laughed loudly again. One of his attendants, grinning, asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell him to just, you know, foxtrot oscar?’
The fat one rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together while pursing his lips and lowering his eyebrows so his phizog was puckered in close, as if he were trying to squeeze his facial features through a bangle.
‘Money. All about the lettuce. Even Dave knows that.’
He nodded towards the other man, who tilted his head, guffawed obligingly.
Ian brought his open palms down on the table so they made enough of a noise to attract the attention of all three men, then stood, pressing hard against the table to flex his triceps in their tight blue polo-shirt sleeves, and walked purposefully to the swing door. It wasn’t that he minded people enjoying themselves. He minded them talking rubbish. And he minded people being impressed by slick and noisy idiots. Ian had the kind of dislike for blokes in suits that men can have who only don a two-piece when they’re in serious trouble (before the bench, at the altar, in the coffin). As he was standing in front of the pub door, looking out, Geordie’s face appeared like a mismatched reflection. For a second they were shocked to see each other so close, even through glass, and Ian shuffled back, embarrassed, as Geordie pushed the door open.
‘Big man,’ Geordie said. Ian took the outstretched hand, and felt Geordie’s pipe cleaner fingers bend in his clasp. Malleable. Ian had ironed out some options, and shelved them in order of desirability. His mind was as neat as the pebbledashed terraced he shared with no one. Ideally, Geordie would spill everything and tell him where the money was. Then, if that didn’t happen, he wanted Geordie to get drunk and ask him back, today, to the house of this friend he was staying with, or, if for some reason he couldn’t swing that, he wanted an invite to go round there, and soon. All of this might go out the window, of course, if Geordie appeared to be a risk. He might just beat the shit out of him. Ian, however, prided himself on judgement. He could read a man the way the others in the wing had read the Sunday Sport. And while they read the Sunday Sport, he had been reading his Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He was politic and ruthless. And he would get what he wanted, which was things in order.
Geordie, conversely, wanted distraction, and one of its major subsets, drink.
‘And what about your business down here? How’s all that going?’
They were both settled at the table, one hand chilled round a Guinness, the other, propping a lit fag, beginning to smoulder.
‘Not bad. I’ve got it all lined up. Just waiting for one thing to arrive and then I’ll probably be heading back over.’
‘What is it then, that you do, I mean?’
‘Import-export really. Just starting up. Having a look round. Seeing what opportunities are out there.’ Ian was gently bouncing his head forwards and backwards as he spoke.
‘I’m looking for work myself you know. Over here. If you know anyone.’
‘Yeah? I’ll ask around. I might have something for you actually. A mate of mine is starting a business in London.’
‘Oh aye? What kind of thing?’
‘Opening a bar. Really plush. Needs cash though. Not the sort of money either of us would have.’
‘No, you’re right there.’
Ian watched Geordie’s face. Nothing coming through it. Like the grimy windows of O’Neill’s. Strike one, Ian thought. The conversation turned to how expensive London was, then how you could have a better standard of living in Northern Ireland, and lastly to politics. When two Ulstermen sit down together, there’s probably an even fifty-fifty chance they’ll try to kill each other, but Ian and Geordie were getting on. Geordie sat and sneaked looks at Ian’s bulbous biceps, his cylindrical neck, the thickness of his wrists and their cord-like veins. Geordie was slight, and fascinated by men like this. They seemed a different species to him. Bull-men, stone-men. Aside from his bulk though, there was something else that held the eye. There was a sense of potential about him, something trapped and coiled and waiting. He was like a box of fireworks.
For his own part, Ian enjoyed being watched. When the listener admires, the speaker performs better, and Ian was no exception. He flexed his right bicep behind his head as he scratched his back. He nodded kindly at Geordie when he spoke. He bought them pint after pint, and began to think Geordie was all right. He was a good kid at heart. And in fact the kind of kid who’d do better for them than some fucknut like Budgie. Smart, a listener. Surprisingly, he found he was telling Geordie about himself.
Ian McAleece had got into the business of fear quite late, at least late for Northern Ireland. He had been sixteen for three days when his dad was shot in front of him. Twenty-six times in the chest and neck and shoulders, as it turned out. Alfred Robert McAleece had got home from his bread-round and reverse-parked the van, white and emblazoned in red with Hutton’s Bakers, along the kerb outside the house. He opened the van’s back door and lifted out a wooden pallet containing two vedas, one wheaten, and eight apple pancakes. The family always got what was leftover, although Ian was pretty sure it wasn’t exactly leftover so much as nicked. His dad, still holding the pallet of bread, had shut the back door of the van with his hip. Ian was about to leave for school. Swinging his sports bag over his shoulder, he opened the front door. Seeing him, his dad continued to waggle his hips as he crossed the pavement, doing a waltzy little dance with his tray of bread. All of these things took for ever to happen. It was like sitting in a boat drifting down a slow river. It was that passive. Ian remembered tiny details of it, the round brass knob of the porch door. It had been misted with the February cold as he turned it.
A red transit (stolen in Lurgan three days before) was parked just up from the bread-van. Everything happened together then. It was like the boat suddenly tipping over a weir in the river, plunging, slippage, the multiple angles of falling. The transit doors banging open, two men out on the road, all in black, in balaclavas, with semiautomatics, shouting, and then that monstrous sound as they opened fire. Ian’s mum had run out in her socks into the road. The transit was gone in a screech of tyres, leaving behind it a chemically sharp smell of rubber and gunfire. Ian stood in the small green patch of lawn in front of his house. His mother was kneeling by his father. Parts of his father were splattered over the paving stones and against the back of the bread-van. His mother had run out carrying a two-litre bottle of Coke for some reason. She must have been looking for something in the big cupboard by the fridge. Ian watched her crouch forward and try to wipe blood away from her husband’s face. Then she opened the bottle of Coke – it fizzed and hissed like someone stage-whispering shush – and she poured Coke over his dad’s face, and tried again to wipe the blood off. Then she leant over him and tried to mop at it with her baggy white T-shirt. Alfie’s face had looked all shiny and sticky.
They’d got the wrong man, some said. They’d just gone for a Prod, said others. The IRA said they’d got the treasurer of the local UVF. As Alfie McAleece, apolitical and apathetic in everything but football, had seen three businesses fail and twice been declared bankrupt, this seemed the least likely of the explanations. But if you throw enough shit, some of it sticks. A man at the funeral called Gerry approached Ian. He thought that the bastards who’d done this should pay. He was from the Organisation. And that was that. As it turned out, well, Ian was here and now none of that stuff mattered any more. He recounted the story of the shooting to Geordie in three short sentences, all of them broken with curses and pauses.
Geordie nodded, a little embarrassed by the new knowledge. Ian seemed a nice enough bloke. Bit lonely maybe. Geordie responded with a few stories of his own: a friend of his dad’s beaten to death in a pub; his uncle, a policeman, shot dead through the jaw at a checkpoint; how his cousin was killed with a red-hot poker pushed into his throat. He didn’t tell him about his own shooting, the kneecapping. Ian probably knew enough to have noticed the stiffness in his gait, and Geordie felt, obscurely, that he couldn’t tell him because he didn’t want Ian to see him as one of the victims, the losers, the ones sobbing face down in the car park, covered in gravel and piss. Geordie bought two more pints of the black. The pub was starting to fill up with people skiving off early from work. He remembered Danny and his agreement to make dinner. He’d slip off after this next one.
‘Well why don’t I come back with you to Danny’s? We can get a few tinnies on the way home.’
‘No mate, I can’t do today. But Dan’s having this party tomorrow evening so come round for that, yeah? We’ll make a proper night of it.’
‘Yeah, all right. Gis the address then.’ Ian couldn’t be bothered to argue. He felt exhausted. He was sure Geordie wasn’t going anywhere. And tomorrow night was fine. He could stay late and find the money in Geordie’s things or, failing that, beat it out of him. He wouldn’t be any problem. Geordie might still just tell him about it anyway. You never knew. And he might be a useful wee fella to have round.
Cycling home, Danny felt relieved that Geordie would be there when Olivia came round to pick up her things. She would cause a scene. She would start to cry. And he would feel that he’d made the wrong decision. They had met through a friend of hers who worked on a cricket magazine with Danny’s mate from uni. He pulled his brakes and slowed to a stop at the Old Street roundabout lights. A bus pulled up beside him. She had managed, in only a few months, to push him right over to the side of his life. Albert had pointed out to him one day that before he arranged to do anything he had to ask her permission.
The lights changed and Danny pushed off, fairly sure that a kid on the bus was giving him the fingers but not wanting to give him the joy of turning around and seeing it confirmed. Tonight then, he would make sure that when she turned up her stuff would be sitting out for her in his sky-blue hallway – sky-blue because she’d decorated it. Not actually decorated it, but she’d told Danny what colours to paint it and had been instrumental in finally getting it done. She recycled the colour cards as bookmarks, and had left them in the various novels she’d begun and abandoned. Over the last two months, rereading Graham Greene, Danny had learned the colours of the walls in his bedroom and boxroom: apricot and cinnabar. The card wedged between the twelfth and thirteenth pages of The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel and the one he’d pulled out from the shelf, sleepless, to reread three nights back, had revealed the kitchen to be either cowslip or mustard, depending on the light. Someday, possibly, Danny might learn that his hallway was, in fact, teal, if he happened to make it past the fifth chapter of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, left behind by the flat’s previous owner.
Danny was turning into Sofia Road when he noticed Geordie at his storm porch, trying to turn the Chubb lock. He looked like the wiring for a man, with none of the casing, and he was shuffling and mumbling. He’s been drinking, thought Danny, amused more than dismayed. He pulled up onto the pavement and freewheeled towards him.
‘All right wee man,’ Danny shouted when he was right up at the gate. Geordie electric-fenced it into the air.
‘Aw you cunt, you scared the life out of me. Fuck off out of that.’
‘Where you been causing trouble then?’
‘I went into the centre there, to meet that fella from the boat, Ian. I’ve told him to pop along tomorrow night.’
‘Okay, why not.’ Geordie still hadn’t opened the front door.
‘Here, you hold this.’
Danny leaned the bike into Geordie, who held it gingerly for a second and then nimbly hopped on and started pedalling along the pavement and out onto the road. He turned some very small circles in the centre of the street and then expertly bunny-hopped back onto the footpath.
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Nick Laird
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A very funny, energetic, wonderfully engaging novel about where we’re from and where we’d like to get to…Danny Williams is talented, upwardly mobile and has left his Northern Irish small town roots well behind him. In his mid-twenties he lives in a stylish London flat and has a job in a top London law firm. However, one innocuous Wednesday night his old mucker from home, Geordie Wilson, arrives at the door. On the run from a loyalist militia, whose operational funds he has taken, he manages to bring everything that Danny has been fleeing from right to his smart London doorstep.Taking place over an intense and gripping five-day period–set in both London and the fictional Irish town of Ballyglass–Nick Laird has written an hilarious, touching and ultimately redemptive novel about friendship.