Wake Up Happy Every Day (3 page)

I think Sarah’s going to slap me. I even flinch as she raises her hands, but she puts her arms around me. She’s warm and the dressing gown smells of biscuits and sleep. She kisses me full on the lips. She pulls back, looks me right in the eyes. I can see all the freckles around her perfect nose. Across her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. My father used to call her the dot-to-dot girl.

‘Now that is sort of genius,’ she breathes. ‘It really is.’

‘Is it?’

‘Shush a minute. Let me think.’

The cellos seem to stab with controlled violence. I love Taverner I decide. Bloody love him. Classical music – it’s the new rock and roll, that’s what Russell used to say. And tosser that he often was, he was also quite often right about things. Right on the economy, right about music.

At last Sarah says, ‘What about our families? What about our friends?’

Which is nice of her because I don’t really have family or friends. Not as such. She has both. Averagely irritating mum, two averagely irritating sisters, and lots of friends. Really. Lots of them. She’s good at friends and they accept me as part of the package. She shares them. I’m not good at friends. Russell was the height of my success in that area. There are people I can share time with over a sandwich in the council canteen, but they’re not friends as such. And my dad might not even notice to be frank. I say all this and she’s quiet again.

Those cellos. They’re the sound of whole nations bleeding.

She says, ‘You better not wimp out of this, Nicky Fisher. You better not let me down.’

And she says she’s proud of me. Says she always knew I was probably a late bloomer. Says that’s the hope she’s been clinging to all these years. She says it with a smile, but I think she probably means it.

And then later, it’s actually Sarah that panics and tries to backtrack. And that’s another thing that never happens. She’s usually resolute. Makes a plan and sticks to it.

I sober up under the power shower and emerge to find Sarah full of fears, doubts, scruples. While I’ve been scrubbing the terror of the night away, the water so hot it hurts, relentless jets of hot needles, Sarah has come up with one big new impediment to success in the plan.

And it’s this: we’ll get caught. We’ll definitely get caught. All it’ll take is bad luck or bad intelligence or a careless word while pissed – any of that could trip us up. That’s what she says. But, confident now, sparked up by Russell’s special tea tree and starfruit revitalising gel I have an answer.

‘Of course we might get caught,’ I say. ‘I know that. I’m not an idiot.’

‘So what’s the point then?’

‘The point is that it will be worth it.’ And I explain everything gently, quietly, using a voice that actually Sarah is usually master of, expert lecturer and line manager that she is.

I explain that for the months, or, hopefully, the years that we do get away with it, we’ll live the way kings and queens do. Or the way they could do if they had any imagination. We’d see and do things that we never could otherwise. We’d be like gods. All of us, even Scarlett. We won’t walk, we’ll bestride. We’ll live in HiDef 3D. And when we do, finally, get caught – well, it won’t be so bad.

‘Sorry. You’ve lost me now,’ she says.

So I explain that too. Still going slowly, still trying hard, if perhaps not quite successfully, to avoid any hint of lecturing, of line-managering. This, Sarah, my love, this is a white-collar crime without victims. Russell has – had – no family, few friends.

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘by supporting some well-chosen charities or something, we could construct a decent mitigation. We could say that we were motivated by doing good.’

‘A sort of Robin Hood defence.’

‘If you like.’

Taking from the rich to give to the poor. Not so much thieves as Mr and Mrs Santa Claus. Mr and Mrs Saint Theresa. Bonnie and Clyde without the random killing. It’s a very decent mitigation indeed if you ask me.

The thing is that yeah, we might go to jail. But for how long really? A year? Two? Three years tops. Three years in Ford Open Prison. Or the American equivalent. Three years watching TV in a low-security facility. Or we could use that time to do important work on ourselves. We could learn useful new skills, or just take time to think.

‘They’ll kill us,’ she says. ‘They’ll lock us up and throw away the key. They’ll turn us into monsters.’

‘I don’t think so, Sarah. We’ll be heroes. Kind of. Think about it.’

I watch her face grow serious and still while she thinks about it.

They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get to genius level at anything. If that’s true then three years in prison would give us both the exact time needed to come out as concert pianists, human rights lawyers, philosophers, or chess grandmasters. We could get PhDs in criminology. Ten thousand hours of study and thought. That’s something that honest money can’t buy. That’s something only crime can buy.

‘You’re a crazy man.’

But there’s a faint hint of a smile now, and I can detect at least a hint of weakening here, just the quick, heady whiff of it. And so I follow up by explaining that of course we would make sure most of the money is secreted in places where the IRS and HMRC can’t get hold of it.

‘Sarah we could do our time and come out loaded.’

‘And what about Scarlett, Nicky? What will she be doing while we do our ten thousand hours? It’ll be a big deal for her. Especially since she’s only about ten thousand hours old.’

There’s an easy answer to this.

‘She could stay with your mum. She did all right with you. And she loves Scarlett. Anyway, they might not even send you to jail. In fact I’m sure they won’t.’ And I look at her carefully again. To see if she gets it. And yes, I can see her working out how that might go. Hitherto blameless mother of a small child – a child with special challenges no less – clearly led astray by a feckless chancer of a husband. Misplaced loyalty. The judge’s summing up practically writes itself, doesn’t it?

I press home. ‘It’s Scarlett I’m thinking of really. That’s what the money will be for. It’ll be for her. To give her a chance. Think of the shit she’s been through.’

‘It’s completely bonkers,’ she says. But she’s lost. I know it and Sarah knows it – though, because she’s nice, loyal, kind-hearted – because I love her – I’m not going to crow or rub it in. Instead I point out, still gentle, that the real crime would be not to have the courage to act on our convictions. Not to open the door when opportunity is not only knocking on it but trying to break it down. Who dares wins. The only thing to fear is fear itself – all that. She’s properly smiling now. OK, OK, enough already that smile says.

‘Come here, Pog,’ she says, and wraps herself around me, folds me into that biscuity warmth. ‘You’re right. It’s all going to be fine.’

And so, by the time the San Francisco morning is pulling on her hipster threads, putting on her vintage, floaty, cobwebby dress of dust and sunshine – the city’s slutty summer wardrobe – we have a battle plan. We’re thinking together as a couple, as a proper team and – as a team – we’re cooking up breakfast. And Taverner’s off and KOIT is on. Classic hits on FM.

I know. Sick isn’t it? There’s the body of my oldest friend in the bog and we’re putting together the fullest of full Englishes to a soundtrack of Jefferson Starship. Russell has all the necessary in that giant double-sized fridge-freezer. Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, toms, ‘English-style’ sausages. Even baked beans. Even ketchup. These are things he must have had some assistant scouring all the delis of the Mission or Castro for. He even has black pudding. Black pudding. It makes us laugh.

I know, I know, but grief. Shock. Like I say, it does weird things to the appetite.

And so does love.

So does seeing Sarah dance around the kitchen, hearing her sing along to the radio. Because she hasn’t had much to sing about in the last few years. There’s not been much call for dancing.

Four

POLLY

Daniel is showing Polly how to make a kite. He asked her yesterday what her favourite animal was and she’d said an octopus – she can’t think why because she’s all about the horses, anyone who knows her knows that – and now, here on the heavy table in the library, is a smiling octopus face on a large circle of some special green plastic with eight legs dangling down beneath it. To be honest, it looks more like a psychotic jellyfish than an octopus. It’s cartoonish, but not in a way a child would like. Polly thinks an actual child would be scared of it. But then this is not a kite for a child.

Now Daniel cuts the wood to the right lengths with a Stanley knife. Daniel’s hands usually shake quite a lot but today they are firm and steady. He’s quick with the knife and even the splodges of liver spots on the backs of his hands seem to have faded so that they could almost be freckles. So quick with that knife, his old hands a blur. It’s like watching a top chef chop spring onions on TV. Quite something to see.

And he shows her where to place the struts and how to fix them in place. And he shows her how to tie the string. It’s simple really, but he explains that you have to get everything in exactly the right place or it won’t fly and, like Daniel says, there’s nothing sadder than a kite that won’t fly. It’s like a dog that won’t bark or a canary that can’t sing. A woman that can’t have a baby. Polly thinks that’s a strange and horrible thing to say. She shakes her head.

As he works, his hands as clever with his needle and the special plastic string as they were with the box-cutter, Daniel tells Polly the story of his time in India and how he became a kitemaker. He’s told her before several times, but she doesn’t mind. It’s interesting. She likes hearing about what they do in far-away places. Polly has never even lived outside the Anglia TV region.

He was in India working as an engineer, laying pipelines, away from his family back home in England and he was bored. He was probably lonely too but men never admit to that. Anyway, his manservant – they all had manservants then, even junior engineers like Daniel – took him up into the hills to watch a kite contest. Daniel tells Polly again about all the huge fighting kites swooping and attacking each other while the crowds cheered and hooted. It’s like a football match for the people there. And they’re all gambling of course. Thousands of rupees changing hands on the result of some wrestling match way up in the air. The idea is to control your kite so well that you can cut the strings of your opponent’s and send it sailing off on the wind, or send it crashing to the crowd. Only Daniel says that it’s more vicious than that even.

‘See Polly, the idea is actually to castrate your enemy. To catch him, rape him, kill him. And then take money off all his friends.’ He says that to the players that is what it feels like when someone cuts the strings of their kite.

‘You mean it’s like having your dangly bits ripped off,’ and Polly laughs that big infectious laugh that all the residents of Sunny Bank love to hear. And Daniel chuckles along too.

‘Exactly,’ he says as his chuckle turns into a phlegmy cough. Exactly.

Polly’s big laugh can be heard in the office of the manager, Irina, even though it’s all the way down the corridor from the library. Irina pauses in her tapping at her keyboard for a minute and half-smiles, and thinks again how lucky they are to have found Polly. And to think she doesn’t even get paid. She volunteers for this. Because Polly is actually here for the good of her own health, not that of the residents. She had a bit of a depression thing last winter after her dad sold the stud farm, and her doctor prescribed being around others less fortunate than herself. Though it is actually quite hard to imagine a depressed Polly.

At her Sunny Bank interview Polly had said, ‘To be honest I had been hoping for mega-powerful anti-depressants but getting doctors to prescribe actual drugs is pretty difficult these days I find. They really don’t like it. I guess it makes them feel like failures or something.’

So she’d made Irina smile then too. Irina knows what doctors are like. Oh yes. And everyone agrees that Polly is a tonic for the residents. Even the staff who don’t like her, who find her relentless cheerfulness incomprehensible and annoying, even they admit that she’s good for the old people. Especially the difficult ones like Daniel.

And so Daniel carries on with his story, and Polly smiles and nods encouragingly and murmurs in the right places and generally gives no sign that she’s heard all this before. About how when Daniel got back from the fighting-kite festival he got his manservant to find a kite-maker that he could apprentice himself to. In the day he’s organising the laying of pipelines – shouting, giving orders, sacking the lazy and the dishonest. Hectoring, cajoling, coaxing the workers while at the same time fending off nonsensical questions from the bean-counters in head office in London who know nothing about the realities of working in a place like India. Doing all that and then three evenings a week he goes and sits at the feet of the kite guru and learns about flight patterns, about paper, about design, about the discipline you need if you really want to castrate, fuck, kill.

Daniel says that he’s sure it helped him in business. Polly says that she can believe that. And then she smiles and says that she doesn’t really want to castrate, fuck, kill if it’s all right with him.

And Daniel says neither does he any more, that he’s a bit embarrassed by the man he used to be. And then he asks what Polly does want and she can’t believe her own reply. Her own reply is the absolute God’s honest truth and it’s a thing she’s never told anyone before.