Wake Up Happy Every Day (5 page)

But who cares if I’m being ever so slightly line-managed here? It’s probably what I need. I put my arms around her. Sarah and Scarlett – the family I never expected to have. All the family I need.

Six

CATHERINE

Catherine Baker despises joggers but there’s no better way of moving around the city and staying invisible. Especially if you’re middle-aged. Women joggers in their perimenopausal years are everywhere and so no one notices them. You can go anywhere and not be seen. It’s important you keep your pace sedate of course, it wouldn’t do to actually run properly. That would attract attention for sure. Catherine Baker can do a half-marathon in one hour eleven and keeping herself to the wobbly tippy-toe stumble of the average evening jogger is irritating to say the least.

And just how has running become so popular a pastime with middle-aged, middle-class ladies? Catherine Baker is forty-four years old and can’t remember there being joggers when she was a little kid. If you did ever see anyone out running in Ipswich in the 1970s then they were serious, tiny, bony men in old T-shirts and shorts – not chubby book-group types in designer shades.

The book group. They are meeting in three days and Catherine hasn’t even started this month’s yet. Still, there is a long plane journey ahead tonight, she’ll probably get through most of it then, though she’s also meant to be writing a book of her own. She’s had this great idea for a kid’s story. A young girl accidentally stumbles into the cave where King Arthur is having his enchanted lie down with all his knights, and she wakes them up and they go on to save England from various menaces. At the same time of course the young girl – Heidi – has to guide them through all the complexities of the modern world. It’s a good idea she thinks. Funny, exciting, quirky, and could easily stretch to a series. It isn’t a J.K. Rowling kind of idea, it’s not on that scale, but she thinks it might have legs.

Maybe she can do both. Some writing and some reading. It’s twelve hours back to the UK after all. She just hopes she isn’t stuck next to a baby. On the flight over the baby next to her had alternated between vomiting and crying. And her screen had been broken so she couldn’t even distract herself with some mindless action movie. She’s going to write and complain, not that it will do much good but she just might get a £100 discount off her next flight and that’ll be something. She’s going to Abkhazia in a couple of months and those flights aren’t cheap.

And that’s another thing, when Catherine was growing up air travel had been glamorous. Catherine had even wanted to be an air hostess. When she went to Spain with her family the stewardesses had seemed impossibly beautiful. Sleek, gracious, like people from some future where stress, hustle and ugliness had been outlawed. They had been these exquisite angels, dispensing inner peace along with crisps and light refreshments. Now they were just snotty waitresses. And she’s sure the planes had been bigger then too, the seats wider, the toilets cleaner, and the airline meals not only edible but tasty. And you could get from London to the States in ninety minutes on Concorde. Hard to believe now. When Catherine was growing up, anything was possible. People played golf on the moon in the seventies. Bloody golf. On the moon. And the music was better too; then there was Abba and the Bee Gees. Now there is, well, that’s the thing, Catherine doesn’t even know what’s around now. K-pop? Is that a thing? Pimba? She’s fairly sure she’s heard someone talking about that on her travels. Where’s that from? Angola? Thing is, she doesn’t care that she doesn’t know. Who can be bothered with keeping up with music now?

The world is going to shit. What we need is a real King Arthur or someone like him to sort the mess out, to bring some pride and ambition back to the world. Only these days it wouldn’t be a man. The new hero would be a woman. A bloody angry woman. A new Joan of Arc.

No one in their right mind would want to be an air hostess now would they? Not with the lowlife who travel by air these days – the crying, vomiting babies and their crying, vomiting parents. And the crying, vomiting students. And the crying, vomiting pilots. She’s heard the stories. Stag parties probably go to Abkhazia now. Club 18–30 probably have an office there.

Catherine is approaching the glass block of the Mercury hotel – just four hundred yards to go, surely she can risk a sprint? She glances about her. Hard to be sure with these shades on but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. Some traffic obviously, but no people. Bugger it. She’s going to go for it anyway.

Christ, it’s good to open out full throttle, feel her lungs begin to burn, feel the power in her legs. She’s like a Ferrari she thinks, a Ferrari that is being used to trundle to Lidl and back. It’s a disgrace.

In her room, after her shower, Catherine Baker examines herself. Her sturdy compact body; the thick, dark forest of her hair. The sharp planes and angles of her face. Her body is in good nick, no doubt about that. Yes. A classic Ferrari of a body, and it should be, it’s well maintained. She gives it the right fuel. Lean protein, lots of leafy green vegetables, fibre, pulses, good carbs, water, lots of water.

Moving closer she inspects the crow’s feet and the deeper lines beginning to carve themselves each side of her mouth. The mouth that is perhaps getting a little thin. A little flinty. She smiles. Her teeth are OK. She was going to get them properly fixed up after that thing in Sierra Leone left them a bit of a mess, but in the end she’d been gripped by tightness. All that dosh on a luxury like straight teeth. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Just as well she made it a policy these days not to smile much.

She remembers now her first week at Sandhurst. The drill sergeant, the one that had a bit more about him than the others, the Welsh one, the one that wasn’t just about shouting VERY VERY LOUDLY – she remembers him saying, ‘Don’t smile Miss Baker, ma’am. It’ll make people think you’re stupid. Or up for sex. Or both.’ And it had made sense, so she has trained herself not to smile. Even when she feels stupid. Even when she’s up for sex.

And now when she does smile it maybe looks a bit weird.

She crosses to the wooden table that, apart from the bed, constitutes the entire furniture in this hotel room. This hotel is, she decides, pretty much on the low side of mid-range. She picks up the cell she’d bought when she arrived in California. She thinks for a minute, then texts. It takes her almost no time at all. Best to keep things simple. Then another few fumbling seconds to remove the sim and to carefully snip that into four with her nail scissors. The phone itself she places in the full sink in her bathroom. It can steep there for a couple of hours and then she’ll bin it on the way to the airport. That’s the thing about this job, people don’t realise that it’s mostly housekeeping and keeping things tidy.

Housekeeping done, she stretches out on the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and begins to go through her stretching routine. It is, she decides for maybe the ten thousandth time, her favourite part of the day.

Seven

NICKY

An hour later and we go into Russell’s office. Everything is run from this room. An empire commanded from the second-smallest room in the house. There’s also an office somewhere downtown, a place for the mail to be picked up from, but really the whole operation is controlled by clicks on a wafer-thin iThing in metallic purple and a printer. There isn’t even a desk, just a worn armchair, though the room is crammed with the paraphernalia of art, music, film. A screen way too big for comfortable viewing in that pressured space, an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, an amp, a box of obscure percussion instruments, vintage seventies hi-fi system, shelves of DVDs along one wall, shelves of vinyl along another. No books. There’s Pre-Raphaelite art on the walls. Beautiful pale-skinned, large-breasted, full-lipped beauties swooning in lakes or forests. They all look a bit like melancholy Victorian versions of Sarah actually. If Millais were alive today he’d definitely want to get off with my wife, no question. So, anyway, it’s not a traditional home office, more a den for an adolescent of refined sensibilities. A cave to hide in. Or a tomb. The tomb of the Unknown Sixth Former perhaps. Definitely Russell’s room.

I flick up the lid of the iThing. Type in the password. SgtB1lko. As long as there had been PCs in our lives, Russell’s password had been SgtB1lko. Sergeant Bilko was one of our shared passions, affectations, whatever. There were whole episodes we could both recite from memory. At uni me and Russell would have Bilkofests. The two of us in my fetid room chortling our way through classic eps. It would screw things up totally if he’d changed tack in the three years or so since we spent time with him. Since the night when he was dancing half-heartedly at our wedding. It’d be crap if he’s now encrypted his vital info in Sanskrit or something.

But he hasn’t. SgtB1lko does the biz, and there it is: all laid out for us The good stuff. The honey. The money. Ten minutes of patient clicking to find accounts in Switzerland, Swaziland, Jersey, Guernsey, The Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Bhutan, Liechtenstein and Monaco. All the most secret safes in the world in the very same places that had the grooviest stamps when we were both briefly collectors back in the day. None of them real countries, more like PO boxes for white-collar rapists and the grandchildren of the SS.

As passwords go, SgtB1lko isn’t such a bad one actually. What East End crack baron or psychotic Rumanian people trafficker is going to connect Russell Knox with anything as mundane as a cosy teatime US sitcom from the distant mouldering past?

I know the kind of people that Russell schlepped around with in his old day-to-day working life would definitely have tried to rob him blind. I see them employing relays of kids to do the job too, in the manner of modern Fagins. Teams of teenage Asperger types, obsessed from infancy with hacking through Pentagon firewalls, recruited now to burrow into Russell’s electronic counting houses. But those kids would have never heard of the wiles of Sergeant Bilko.

Nostalgia. Sentiment. Those were Russell’s weak spots and neither autistic hacker nor murderous gangster would have those qualities in anything like the right amounts.

It really is a lunatic amount of money. Written down as a dizzying, paragraph-long string of zeros, it doesn’t even look like a number. It looks like a page from an avant-garde text-art project.

And the property. For his new super gap life, Russell hasn’t just rented out rooms in hotels. It’s not like when we went InterRailing in 1985. For this trip there’s to be no sharing Deutschebahn seats with New Zealander backpackers called Kev. For this trip he’s bought houses, villas, riads, barns, high-spec yurts, castles, compounds in the desert with helipads. Farms complete with llamas, goats and petting zoos. Narrowboats in Birmingham and stilt houses in Papua New Guinea. He’s bought rivers, lakes, Southwold beach huts and Icelandic turf longhouses. He’s bought yachts with armour plating and sea-to-air missiles.

He’s spunked over all the top property totty of every continent. If anything remotely desres has caught his eye in even the most glancing of ways, then he’s gone for it. He’s been playing supermarket sweep in a top-end realtors. No collection of bricks and mortar anywhere has been safe. No stretch of heather, heath or moorland too wild to escape consideration as a future domicile.

I’m exaggerating obviously – but not by much.

And it isn’t just bricks and mortar. Not just beaches and moors. Not just canvas, keels, decks, hulls and rockets. There’s the whole gamut of RVs too. Magic buses of every kind are part of the portfolio – ancient psychedelic veedub campers that might well have seen action at Woodstock or Altamont. Caravan-club veterans of the B roads of 1950s England, all the way up to the Fleetwood Providence 3000, the ultimate chromium monster designed to glide across the American prairies. A kind of mobile motel complete with its own bar and gymnasium.

Russell, we begin to realise now, was probably clinically insane. Depressed certainly. He was like that old guy we’d lived next to in my second year at uni, when we’d had that house in Wimpole Street. The chap who couldn’t stop ordering from the Littlewoods catalogue. The chap who, when he died, was only found by the emergency services after they had tunnelled a way through a Bauhaus maze of unopened boxes containing kettles, toasters, microwaves, breadmakers, radios and fondue sets. At the end of an epic trek from the front porch, down the hallway to the kitchen, they found the source of the stench the neighbours had reported. There, at the end of the trail was Mr Harry Sigman. A liquefying corpse, still sitting at the kitchen table amid a nest of more boxes – juicers, electric carving knives, outdoor Christmas lights – still with one dripping finger pointed at page 197 – foot spas.

Since he saw us last, Russell seems to have got just like old Harry. Pretty soon he would have needed saving from himself. He would surely have been sectioned before he went completely Howard Hughes.

But the important thing for us is that everything is in order. We have the money, we have the addresses. Another click and we have all the tickets. Tickets to ride that entitle us to travel whenever we like. These are super-first tickets. Tickets that allow us to bump people out of first class should our chosen flight be full. Tickets that mean homeland security come to us and check our passports in the comfort of our VIP lounge. Tickets that mean no queuing ever, for anything.

I check Russell’s personal emails. There are fifteen. That’s all. Even I get more than that on an average day. And his are begging messages mostly. Even the cheery notes from people who might just be mates. Even the ones wishing him safe travels and bon chance. All of them have a sneaky sleeve-tugging quality.
Don’t forget us
they seem to wheedle.
Feed us. Look out for us. Help us, we’re dying here.
Like so many hands stretching out through the bars of some camp, some pen, some cage. Well, fuck that. Fuck them. I feel a pang for him then, but it’s not like we killed him. The worst you can accuse us of really is opportunism and hell, in the modern world that’s actually one of the highest arts, is it not? They teach it in schools now, don’t they? It’s what they do instead of Citizenship or History.