Strange Tide (7 page)

There were other city-dwellers, ones who shopped in the cheapest supermarkets and went to sales and ate in junk-food outlets, and watched every last penny. They got fat from sugar and corn starch, and smoked and drank hard. They had a tough time raising kids and in them he recognized something of his own background, so he left them alone to concentrate on the rich ones.

Ali did not have to pay to enter the nightclub in Greek Street. The Syrian on the door had come over in a vegetable truck and eye contact was all it took for the red ropes to be parted. Inside, the music was like a magnified heartbeat. He was making good money now, but had to be careful. He stood at the bar with a beer and looked around because in here he could not hear anyone speaking. He understood much from the way people stood, their hand gestures, the closeness of their faces.

There were three girls grouped together, lambs protecting themselves from wolves. Any two would back up the third. They were of no use to him. There were girls everywhere, some of them beautiful, some dressed like whores. Sullen girls paired with angry, mean-eyed men; clutches of drunk girls quacking like ducks, who had no need of partners tonight. There were hunters looking for prey and invisible people who arrived with prettier, thinner friends. There was hardly anyone alone, except her.

He guessed – rightly, it later turned out – that she had been abandoned, but her pride would not allow her to leave. Instead she had ordered another white wine and stood tapping her cobalt nails on the counter while a José Padilla track brought the Mediterranean into the basement. Padilla had been popular in Libyan beach bars but you couldn't tell that to an Englishman; they thought you lived in mud huts. Besides, he never spoke about his roots. He was a Londoner now. Being a Londoner was, he learned, a state of mind that anyone could attain with a little hard work. You learned to say please and thank you and sorry, always sorry. You said sorry in a thousand different intonations and circumstances. You even apologized for being in the way when you weren't. And you always had to be in a hurry, otherwise you didn't look important.

There was a long list of things you needed to do before becoming a Londoner, starting with learning how to use the system with intelligence and reason. And there were small things to learn, like the trick of catching the right part of the Northern line at King's Cross and knowing how to cross a road diagonally and how to look right through the people you didn't want to see, and having a favourite pub where the barman would, after two or three weeks, send you the faintest nod of greeting as you approached.

By now Ali had been a hotel cleaner, an unregistered tour guide, a café busboy, a barman and a car-park attendant. He was living in a council flat with five others, and made sure that he hardly ever saw them. He paid cash because there were only supposed to be two people renting. The flat was sublet by a Greek electrician who had more than a dozen properties scattered across Camden and Dalston in a scheme he'd arranged without the councils knowing; lots of people ran scams like that.

There were still little things that gave Ali away. He didn't have a bank account or a credit card. He couldn't pronounce ‘Greenwich' or find a fast route across Covent Garden. He watched a lot of films and read a lot of books, but they couldn't teach him everything he needed to know. Up until now the only people who had helped him to move up were those who were getting a cut. It was time to find someone who would help him out of loyalty, even love. Which meant that he would have to make himself appealing in a new way.

This was the hardest part of all. He'd had no practice, which was why he picked the girl standing at the end of the bar tapping her hand to the music. It was important not to look too eager or ingratiating. Better barely to care at all.

He talked to her. If she had looked any less interested she would have fallen asleep. That was fine; it was just her style. He was careful not to stand too close. People here had a circle of space around them that you could not enter without permission. He had seen a film about a boy who was a vampire, and learned that you had to be invited inside. It was like that with girls. She was wearing a very short dress of white lace with black leggings underneath, the kind of outfit the girls at home wore when they were babies, and she had very high heels because she was worried about being short. She looked away from him and flicked her hair, catching sight of herself in the bar mirror. When she looked back she stole a glance at his face, then looked straight ahead.

He casually turned to her. ‘Hey, how you doing?' That was how it was done, as if you could hardly be bothered to open your mouth. He'd watched others and could copy their movements exactly.

‘OK.'

He waited until his own glass was finished before offering. ‘I'm going to the bar – you want . . .?'

She shook her head. ‘No.' But this was part of the game. She wanted him to try a little harder.

‘Your glass is empty. It's Saturday night. I'm going anyway.' He made to move away.

She shrugged and nodded imperceptibly at her glass.
I'm not bothered but if you're going . . .
The thing about Londoners was, you had to interpret everything. No intention was ever made plain. If someone said, ‘Yes, we must do that,' it usually meant, ‘Piss off.' Was this a mark of sophistication or merely a sign that they were emotionally backward? He had already learned the hard way that an angry look from a London girl could crack mirrors, blight crops and freeze the Thames solid. There was a point where you became so refined that it made you stupid.

But this one gave a guarded smile when he returned with the drinks, just a slight turning of the lips. Then she looked ahead again and listened to the music, sipping. They were facing the same direction together. He had read about body language,
matching and mirroring
. He had cracked part of the code but still had much to learn. It helped that he didn't drink. Others revealed too much of themselves when they became drunk.

She finally talked, and after that they moved to a spot where she could actually hear his replies.

Her name was Cassie, short for Cassandra. She had a husky voice and said she came from Henley, had been there all her life until now. It was a town outside London that pretended it was in the countryside. The man she'd come with tonight had turned out to be a
total tosser
(he filed the new phrase) and she was better off without him because – and this she said in a single breath – in seven months he'd like bought her a drink one time only because he had this thing about her making more money than him because she worked for like a really high-end Kensington estate agent and was really ambitious and he was in IT and it paid like really badly but he didn't care because he liked the job but he was all like bent
totally
out of shape about it plus he didn't like her smoking?

He understood the gist of what she was saying, even if he had trouble with some of the words she used. Although he had no knowledge of the English class system, he instinctively knew she came from somewhere in the middle of it. He listened to her and tried to copy the way she spoke.
Hen
ley.
Fox
tons.
Un
believable.
Glas
tonbury. Funny how so many words had the accent on the first syllable.

Ali had an exceptional memory, and filed away all the strange phrases he heard on the street. Earlier in the month he had met a young Indian man in a club on Brick Lane who seemed to be speaking an alien language. He quickly learned that
110
s were expensive trainers.
Bait
was stupid.
Rinsed
was something used up. A
ginul
was a con.
Mash
was a gun. At first he exhausted himself trying to remember everything, but then he realized that he didn't need to; many words belonged to different social groups, and he had not yet decided who he wanted to be. Cassie used none of these words but it was still hard to understand her because she never paused for breath, hurling herself at sentences and then lapsing into silence.

She was still angry with the man who had left her. She wanted to get her own back, and just knowing that she needed something gave him an opening. He was thinking about this when he suddenly realized that she was speaking to him, asking his name. His eyes darted to the bar shelves lined with up-lit bottles behind her head. ‘Gordon,' he said without missing a beat. ‘Gordon Hendrick.'

‘You're kidding, right?'

‘No.' He laughed. ‘That's my name. My mother was an alcoholic.' They both laughed. He was bright, not in the sense of having had a good education, but clever, quick, feral, fast. Because he remembered everything he could not be tricked by anyone.

He said, ‘You have an accent, just a trace, something Russian.' She gave him a long, hard look and said her mother had given her a different name, Natalya, but she had changed it. She had been born in Kazakhstan. How was that possible? She looked so English. Suddenly he realized that he still had a lot to learn. Cassie's parents had brought her to London when she was three years old, so that made her a Londoner. Wasn't everyone from somewhere else?

She told him about her other jobs. She had worked for Allied Breweries but left because everyone drank too much, then went to the FCO, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, as a translator writing press releases and sitting in on immigration interviews. She had a Mazda car and her own flat. What she didn't have, as of an hour ago, was a boyfriend. She seemed as driven and determined as he was.

It was too good to be true. Ali found himself on his best behaviour. It was suddenly very important that Cassie liked him. He had places to go and worlds to conquer. He needed a partner whose ferocious loyalty would cover his weaknesses and hide them from suspicious eyes. He knew what a
power couple
was and sensed great reserves of strength in her. She was pretty in an obvious, over-made-up way and her strength would probably become unbearable when she was older. Right now, though, she was just what he needed.

He turned and smiled slightly and nodded. She was drinking faster than him. ‘Get you another,' he said, and this time he did not have to wait for a reply because he knew he could walk away to the bar and find her there when he got back. Cassie had instinctively lied about her background upon meeting him. That was good. She knew how to protect herself. She was tough. They weren't so different from one another.

While he waited for the barman to pour their drinks, he thought about a possible future for both of them that would be something other than a romantic match. It would be an alliance, and woe betide anyone who was stupid enough to cross them.

Dr Gillespie's third-floor office was situated directly behind the eye-damaging LED Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus, halfway along a dingy sepia-painted hallway filled with threadbare Indian carpets, African masks and earthenware pots of indeterminate origin. It was extraordinary to think that such places still existed in the heart of the city, but for the moment the building's byzantine lease protected its few remaining tenants. London had more offices, clubs, bars and bedrooms hidden in tunnels, cellars, basements and chambers than anywhere else in Europe.

John May stopped before the doctor's door and knocked. An explosion of coughing subsided and a voice gasped, ‘Come in.'

The room had no windows and smelled of Vick's VapoRub and liniment oil. Dr Gillespie had a black eye. He was wearing a flesh-coloured neck brace that forced up his chin and squashed his features into a funhouse-mirror version of his old self. He turned awkwardly and indicated the seat opposite his desk. ‘Impacted vertebrae,' he said.

‘Car accident?' May asked.

‘A difference of opinion with the wife about whose turn it was to bleed the radiators. I dodged a jar of pickled onions and fell over the dog. Your partner.' He searched around for his notes, but couldn't see his desktop.

‘Here, let me.' May passed him a fat folder that looked as if it went back at least fifty years.

‘I've been doing some research. As I told you before, it's not straightforward Alzheimer's, at least not as I've ever experienced it. Excuse me.' Gillespie extracted an enormous white linen handkerchief from his sleeve and released a snotty blast into it, wincing when the shock travelled to his spine. ‘Mr Bryant's bouts of cognitive impairment have distinct phases. I thought at first that his so-called “blank moments” might be due to transient ischaemic episodes triggered by lapses in his brain's blood supply.'

‘You mean mini-strokes.'

‘In layman's terms. Except that there are anomalies. The disease is not taking its traditional path.' Gillespie winced and gingerly touched his eye. ‘For example, he doesn't seem to forget words. His memory is relatively undamaged. There are no indicative genetic markers in his background. He's never had high blood pressure – that's your problem, not his. You're both getting on, you know.'