When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren’t being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they’d struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn’t run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren’t—unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn’t know they were. And they didn’t have eight and a half million pounds.
After a while I tired of watching all these amateur performances and decided to buy a coffee from a small concession a few feet away. It was a themed Seattle coffee bar where you buy caps, lattes and mochas, not coffees. When you order they say
Heyy!
to you, then they repeat your order aloud, correcting the word
large
into
tall, small
into
short.
I ordered a small cappuccino.
“Heyy! Short cap,” the man said. “Coming up! You have a loyalty card?”
“Loyalty card?” I said.
“Each time you visit us, you get a cup stamped,” he said, handing me a card. It had ten small pictures of coffee cups on it. “When you’ve stamped all ten, you get an extra cup for free. And a new card.”
“But I’m not here that often,” I said.
“Oh, we have branches everywhere,” he told me. “It’s the same deal.”
He stamped the first cup and handed me the cappuccino. Just then someone called my name and I turned round. It was Catherine. She’d cleared customs already and had been standing in the coffee bar all the time I’d been watching the sliding doors.
“Heyy!” I said. I went over and hugged her.
“I tried calling you,” said Catherine as we disentangled, “but your phone’s not working.”
“I’ve just become rich!” I said.
“Well heyy!”
“No, really. Just now, today.”
“How come?” she asked.
“Compensation for my accident.”
“My God! Of course!” She peered into my face. “You don’t look like—oh yes, you’ve got a scar right there.” She ran the first two fingers of her left hand down the scar above my right eye, the one I’d had plastic surgery on. When they got to the end of the scar’s track, they stayed there. She took them away just before they’d been there too long for the gesture to be ambiguous. “So they’ve paid up?” she said.
“An enormous amount.”
“How much?”
I hadn’t prepared myself for this question. I stuttered for an instant, then said: “Several—well, after tax and fees and things, a few hundred thousand.”
Maybe a kind of barrier came down between us right then. I felt bad about lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the whole amount. It just seemed so big, too much to even talk about.
We took the tube back to my flat. We sat beside each other, but her profile wasn’t quite as sexy as I’d made it by the field and the parked Fiesta in my fantasy. She had a couple of spots on her cheek. Her dirty and enormous purple backpack kept falling over from between her legs. When we arrived, the phone unit was still lying untwitching on the carpet.
“Wow! Did it get hit by lightning?” she said—then, with a gasp, added: “Oh! I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t…I know it wasn’t lightning, but…”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It doesn’t…I mean, I don’t think of it like…”
My sentence petered out too, and we stood facing one another in silence. Eventually Catherine asked:
“Can I go take a bath?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll run it for you. Would you like tea?”
“Tea!” she said. “That’s so English. Yes, I’d like tea.”
I made tea while she took her bath. I considered whether or not to open the door and take it in to her, but decided not to, set the cup down outside the bathroom and told her through the door that it was there.
“Cool,” she said.
“Qu’est-ce qu’on fait ce soir?”
What are we doing this evening, she meant. I know she said it in French to try to remind us of our time in Paris, but I didn’t feel like answering in French. And I felt slightly miffed about the English quip. Of course tea is English: what did she expect?
“We’re meeting my friend Greg,” I said back through the door. “Near here, in Brixton.”
Greg was my best friend. It was he who’d hooked me up with Daubenay, through an uncle of his. He lived in Vauxhall—maybe still does, who knows. We’d arranged to meet in the Dogstar, a pub at the far end of Coldharbour Lane. He was already there when Catherine and I showed up, buying a pint of lager at the bar.
“Greg, Catherine—Catherine, Greg,” I said.
Greg asked us what we’d have. I said a lager. Catherine took one too, but said she wanted to use the toilet first and asked Greg where it was. Greg told her and then watched her as she walked off. Then he turned to me and asked:
“Friend, or ‘friend’?”
“F…” I began, then told him: “Greg, the Settlement’s come through.”
“Marc Daubenay’s swung it?”
“Yes. They’re settling out of court.”
“How much?” Greg asked.
I looked around, then lowered my voice to a whisper as I told him:
“More than one million pounds!”
By this point we were walking towards a table and Greg had a pint of lager in each hand. He came to a sudden standstill when I told him this—so quickly that some beer from his two glasses sloshed onto the wooden floor. He turned to face me, let out a whoop and made to hug me before realizing that he couldn’t while he was still holding the beers. He turned away again and hurried on towards the table, holding the hug, until he’d set the glasses down. Then he hugged me.
“Well done!” he said.
It felt strange—the whole exchange. I felt we hadn’t done it
right.
It would have seemed more genuine if he’d thrown the drinks up in the air and we’d danced a jig together while the golden drops rained slowly down on us, or if we’d been young aristocrats from another era, unimaginably wealthy lords and viscounts, and he’d just said quietly
Good show, old chap
before we moved on to discuss grouse shooting or some scandal at the opera. But this was neither-nor. And beer got on my elbow when I leant it on the table.
Catherine came back.
“Have you heard his news?” Greg asked her.
“Sure have,” she said. “Like wow! It’s so much money!”
“Keep the figure quiet,” I told them both. “I don’t want it to, you know…I still haven’t…”
“Sure,” they both said. Greg picked up his glass and toasted:
“Cheers!” he said. “To…well, to money!”
We clinked glasses. As I took the first sip of my lager I remembered Daubenay telling me I should go and drink a glass of champagne. I turned to Greg and Catherine and said:
“Why don’t I buy us a bottle of champagne?”
Neither of them answered straight away. Greg held his hands out in an open gesture, making goldfish motions with his mouth. Catherine looked down at the floor.
“Wow, champagne!” she muttered. “I guess I’m not acclimatized yet culturally. From Africa, I mean.”
Greg suddenly became all boisterous and cheery and said:
“We’ve got to! What the hell! Do they do it in here?”
We looked around. The pub wasn’t that full. There were scruffy, dreadlocked white guys wearing woolly jumpers, plus a few people in suits, plus this one weird guy sitting on his own without a drink, glaring at everybody else.
“They probably do have champagne if the guys in suits are here,” I said. “I’ll go and ask.”
The barmaid didn’t know at first if they had any. She disappeared, then came back and said yes. I didn’t have enough cash on me and had to write a cheque.
“I’ll bring it over,” she said.
When I came back, Greg was checking the call list on his mobile and Catherine was looking at the ceiling. They both focused on me now.
“It’s so incredible!” said Catherine.
“Yeah: well done,” said Greg.
“Marc Daubenay said that too,” I told him. “I didn’t do anything. Just got hit by a falling…falling stuff, you know. You’re the one who achieved something, getting hold of Daubenay. Greg found my lawyer for me,” I explained to Catherine. “You know, Greg, I’ll have to give you some commission on that, some kind of…”
“No! No way!” Greg held his hand up and turned his head away. “It’s all yours. Spend it on yourself. Yeah: what are you going to do with all that money?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I haven’t thought about it yet. What would you do?”
“I’d…well, I’d start an account with a coke dealer,” said Greg. “I’d tell him: here’s my bathtub, fill it with cocaine, then come back in a few days’ time and top it up until it’s full again, then same again a few days after that. And find me a girl with nice, firm tits to snort it off.”
“Hmm,” I said. I turned to Catherine and asked her: “What would you do?”
“It’s totally your call,” she said, “but if it were me I’d put money towards a resource fund.”
“Like savings?” I asked.
“No,” she said; “a resource fund. To help people.”
“Like those benevolent philanthropists from former centuries?” I asked.
“Well, sort of,” she said. “But it’s much more modern now. The idea is that instead of just giving people shit, the first world invests so that Africa can become autonomous, which saves the rich countries the cost of paying out in the future. Like, this fieldwork I’ve been doing in Zimbabwe: it’s all about supplying materials for education, health and housing, stuff like that. When they’ve got that, they can start moving to a phase where they don’t need handouts any more. That Victorian model is self-perpetuating.”
“An eternal supply,” said Greg, “a magic fountain. And I’d tell him to find another girl with a rock-solid ass so I could snort the coke off that when I’d got tired of snorting it off the first girl’s tits.”
“You think I should invest in development in Africa, then, rather than here?” I asked Catherine.
“Why not?” she said. “It’s all connected. All part of the same general, you know, caboodle. Markets are all global; why shouldn’t our conscience be?”
“Interesting,” I said. I thought of rails and wires and boxes, all connected. “But what do they, you know,
do
in Africa?”
“What do they do?” she repeated.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like, when they’re just doing their daily thing. Walking around, at home: stuff like that.”
“Strange question,” she said. “They do a million different things, like here. Right now, building is very big in Zimbabwe. There’s loads of people pulling homes together.”
Just then the barmaid arrived with the champagne bottle and three glasses. She asked me if I wanted her to open it.
“I’ll do it,” I said. I wrapped my fingers round the top, trying to penetrate the foil cover with my nails. It was difficult: my nails weren’t sharp enough, and the foil was thicker than I’d thought.
“Here, use my keys,” said Greg.
I wrapped my fingers round his set of keys. Catherine and Greg watched me. I moved my hand back to the champagne bottle’s top, made an incision in the foil, then pinched the broken flap and started pulling it back, slowly peeling the foil off.
“Shall I help?” Catherine asked.
“No,” I said. “I can do it.”
“Sure,” she said. “I didn’t mean…you know, whatever.”
I peeled the foil right off and was about to start untwisting the wire around the cork when I realized we still had our beers.
“We should knock these off first,” I said.
Greg and I started gulping our pints down.
“Whole villages are getting housing kits,” said Catherine. “These big, semi-assembled homes, delivered on giant trucks. They just pull them up and hammer them together.”
“And they all slot in just like that?” I asked her. “Without hitch?”
“They’re well-designed,” she said.
Greg set down his beer and burped. “There’s a party this Saturday,” he said. “David Simpson. You know David Simpson, right?”
I nodded. I knew him vaguely.
“Well, he’s just bought a flat on Plato Road, off Acre Lane. Just round the corner from here. He’s having a house-warming party Saturday, and you’re invited. Both of you.”
“Okay,” I said.
I gulped the last of my beer and started on the wire around the cork. It was a pipe-cleaner wire frame, like the frame beneath those dresses eighteenth-century ladies wore. I had to pinch it between my fingers and twist it. I managed this and started working the cork with my thumbs, but it wouldn’t go.