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‘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.
