Authors: Nick Laird
They were to fly on Saturday morning at 10.30 a.m., collect a hire car at the airport, and drive straight to the Ulster Water headquarters, just outside Belfast. It was the twelfth of July weekend so there would be marches and possibly trouble. They’d just go about their client’s business and then head over to the Europa. A drink and some dinner, and they’d fly back on Sunday, in either the morning or evening, depending on how far they’d got in the diligence. Danny started to read the file.
At noon he e-mailed Albert to see about lunch. Albert mailed back that he couldn’t today as he had ‘to go off to box now’. This actually meant that Albert was off to attend his boxercise class along with a score of female secretaries and lawyers. There was only one other man
who attended: Tel, from the print room by the South Street entrance. Albert was always paired with Tel for the partnered exercises and Tel was terrifying. He was an East Londoner, and appeared to suffer from the East London disorder of considering accidental eye contact an act of overt aggression. He was squat, broad, wide-mouthed: an angry toad with powerful limbs. When he wasn’t staring in generalized hostility around him, Tel was incredibly friendly, at least in that fearsome and dominant manner in which the drunk in the pub’s toilets is incredibly friendly. Last week, when Danny and Albert were eating lunch, Tel had shouted
Wotcha Rollsy
across the canteen, and Albert had frantically lifted his arm to return the greeting, though, by neglecting to set his fork down first, he had newly patterned his pink Gieves & Hawkes tie with arugula and pine nuts washed in balsamic vinegar. There was a perverse pleasure for Danny in seeing Rollson dishevelled and unkempt: embarrassment is most devastating for the normally shevelled and kempt. Rolls had thought Tel okay, really, though he always made his shoulders ache when he had to hold the punch pads for him, but two weeks ago he’d noticed
SKINS
tattooed on Tel’s arm, when they were in the changing room after the class. He now worried at length about whether Tel knew he was Jewish.
Danny e-mailed Rolls back: Don’t forget your legwarmers. And your Combat 18 headband. He supposed he might as well look at Scott’s preliminary due diligence on Ulster Water. He’d ask Ellen to come down and help him. She’d already looked over some stuff on it. He could just brazen it out, mention the party and see what she said. He sent her an e-mail, formal and brusque, and she duly appeared,
formal and brusque, holding a stack of the files she’d been reviewing.
‘Mr Williams, I have a document for your attention. It’s very important.’ She looked serious.
‘You’re the second person to call me Mr Williams today. Please don’t. It would upset my father. What’s the document? Anything that will get us out of going tomorrow?’
Ellen set the files on the pull-out shelf in the filing cabinet and slipped a white card off the top of them.
Danny
was written on the back on it. She had a school-girl’s careful script.
‘Afraid not. Happy Birthday.’ She smiled, unguarded suddenly, showing the slightly crooked tooth again.
‘A-ha. My first and undoubtedly only birthday card. That’s very kind of you. How did you know it was my birthday? Though my birthday’s not ’til Wednesday actually.’
‘It was in the e-mail. About the party? You said it was your birthday party.’
‘Of course. Thanks.’ Danny was waggling the card in his hand and watching her. Ellen looked away, at the files. Stop looking at her, Danny thought, you’re acting like a weirdo.
‘So are you going to come? To the party?’
‘I’ll try to. I’m meeting some friends from law school later. I might come after.’
‘Bring them along. Bring your boyfriend. The more the merrier.’
Your boyfriend? The more the merrier?
What the hell was he saying? Why was he talking like he was in a sitcom?
‘Well, if I find one before tonight I’ll make sure to bring him.’
She turned to the files stacked on the shelf and started sorting them out. Danny looked down, a rush of pleasure at her admission, and opened the card. It said
Happy 40th Birthday
and showed a bottle of champagne, with its cork popping.
‘I wasn’t sure what age you were going to be so I guessed.’
Danny glanced up to see her grinning cheekily.
‘I’m going to be twenty-eight thanks very much. Only a year or two older than you.’
‘I’m twenty-three actually.’ Fuck, Danny thought, I’m going to be too old for her.
‘You’re just a baby.’
‘Yes.’ She sat down, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.
‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got on Ulster Water then.’
Danny stood up and lifted the box of the first load of documents that Scott had been sent. It was surprisingly heavy and he stifled a grunt as he set it on the seat next to Ellen. As she read out the types of contracts, flicking through the pages, Danny tried to note down something useful. The sunray expanding on his desk had now reached his glass of water and was complicating it with light. Danny kept looking at the blackness of her delicate fingers against the white pages. He decided he needed to go outside. He still felt a little unstable, and didn’t trust himself not to reach over and touch this beautiful girl’s hand or face or neck. The air conditioning, and the spliff last night, seemed to be making his mouth completely dry despite his constant attempts to rehydrate it. He needed some food.
‘My head’s splitting. I’m going to nip out for a sandwich. Can I get you something?’
‘Well if it’s all right, I might come for the walk.’
‘Yeah of course, although I’m going to buy an iron first.’
Danny didn’t know why he’d said that. He
did
need an iron and had wanted to buy one today but he could have done it later, on his own. He realised that he wanted her to come with him and lend her calm firm air to the proceedings. They stood now, side by side, a little awkwardly, waiting for the lift. Its doors drew open and they joined a pale woman who was breathing hoarsely and smelt of cigarettes and coffee. The three of them stood in silence. Outside, the street was abuzz with dark suits and the white triangular bibs of shirts, brushing past each other, swerving, reversing. They walked through St Paul’s churchyard. A rabble of Japanese schoolkids, with their harmoniously glossy black hair and discordant Day-Glo rucksacks, blocked their path and stared at Ellen. Danny realized he wanted to stare at her too. When they were waiting to cross Ludgate Hill a van driver tooted his horn at her and shouted something, thankfully incomprehensible. Danny was suddenly embarrassed to be near a woman so publicly beautiful. Everyone seemed to accept it. Danny said that they should walk on down to the water and, once there, they continued, buffeted slightly by wind, onto the Millennium Bridge and stood, leaning over the open side, watching the Thames mosey beneath. More schoolkids waved at them from a red pleasure cruiser headed for Greenwich. He felt he’d stumbled by accident on the centre of the world. Back in the city, with the two of them swinging their mini-carrier bags of
lunch–a Pret à Manger sandwich, a vanilla yoghurt with Brownies, juice–they’d gone into the Robert Dyas hardware store just round the corner from Monks & Turner. It was full of office workers, hurriedly trying to patch the rips in their clockwork harried lives: slug pellets, Polyfilla, teasmaids. Danny felt that it was somehow Future Time, when everything has worked out, and it was a Saturday and he and his wife, whom he loved, had gone shopping for domestic appliances for their neat and lovely terraced house. Danny applied the universal rule for choosing wine in restaurants, and picked out the second cheapest iron as Ellen explained the significance of the descaling plug.
At the till she said to the chubby blonde girl who was prodding despondently at the cash register, as if trying to keep it awake, ‘Bet you can’t wait ’til half-five.’ The girl’s face broke from sullenness into a grin. ‘It’s been like this all day. Really busy for some reason.’ Danny felt something slip a little inside him and settle, like a combination lock coming right. Everything’s sparks and particles, shivers and jottings, approximations, but maybe sometimes you know why you turn one way and not the other. Ellen smiled at the Robert Dyas girl and asked her was she going out tonight. The girl chatted on like she’d known her for ever, and when Danny leant over the checkout desk to endorse the Switch receipt, he felt himself signing up to something else entirely.
‘It’s like this, you see, I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t providing a service. We keep the restaurants clean and the streets quiet. If people sleep safe and in peace in their beds at night it’s basically because of us.’
Danny’s cousin Clyde was talking. This was not unusual. Clyde was an environmental health inspector in Hounslow. He was very pale and possessed an abnormally large head which, as his hairline was receding, still appeared to be growing, and which he jerked around a lot when he was animated. Which he frequently was. Everything amazed Clyde. Particularly himself. He was one of life’s excitables. Leaning against the sink, he was talking to a chubby pigtailed blonde perched on the kitchen counter, and peering down her substantial cleavage. She said something inaudible and raised her pencilled eyebrows. Clyde bobbed his balloon-head wisely.
‘Well I suppose so, but the police are less important than you’d think. To be honest with you, they’re more back-up for us. I mean, they’ll come round if we’re having trouble getting a party to turn it down or something but normally we prefer to work alone.’
The flat was almost full. Ben, Danny’s friend from law school, had arrived at eight with the boot of his Fiesta packed with speakers, an amp and decks. He had immediately set about organizing the furniture in his quietly capable manner. He’d moved the table to the corner of the living room and the sofa against the wall to create floor space, then set the sound system up on the table. He was now standing behind it, an ear cupped to one of the headphones (his ‘cans’ he called them), playing Stevie Wonder’s cover of ‘Light My Fire’. Several people were swaying and jiggling on the floor in varying levels of comfort and confidence, index-linked to sobriety.
Danny had arrived home at 7 p.m. to find Geordie lying flat out on the sofa, almost exactly as he’d left him, but awake, smoking the ubiquitous spliff, and watching a programme called
Dogs with Jobs
on one of the cable channels. Danny sat on the arm of the sofa, beside Geordie’s feet. Still holding his bicycle helmet, he asked him if any of the dogs were lawyers. Geordie grunted. Maybe some of them were cleaners, Danny said pointedly, looking around him.
The coffee table was stacked with beer cans and ashtrays, and Geordie had artfully managed to drape the few clothes he possessed around the flat. Every room was claimed by at least a rolled-up sock. Even the fact of him, his sentience, his being, and particularly his being
on Danny’s sofa, made the flat seem cluttered and too small.
‘Come on wee man, get up. I need this place sorted out for the party.’
‘Two minutes Dan. I’ve just lay down.’
‘Bollocks you have. Get the fuck up. You can go and get a takeaway for us while I tidy.’
Danny suddenly just wanted him out of the house, so he could open the windows, Hoover the floors, and dump all his stuff in the tiny boxroom. He wanted the place to smell fresh, homely, of a bunch of flowers or something cooking on the stove, a shank of lamb braising, not of this Ulsterman, his feet, his breath, his ashy sour scent. He wanted to open a bottle of wine, white, French, not a six pack of Heineken. He wanted his flat back.
‘All right all right. Keep your hair on Captain.’
Geordie had spent the day floating around the locals, smoking and worrying about what to do with the cash. Ian had rung him three times to check about tonight. He seemed madly keen to come. Must be lonely. Geordie knew how he felt. All day he had watched the other piss artists and timewasters sit round and do crosswords, argue, eye the boxy comforter in the corner showing other people doing things, and thought how none of them had his problems. He was the man apart. He was half-considering telling Danny about the cash or even asking him to take it to Belfast tomorrow. He could just tell him it was a present or something for Janice. Or he could run with it. Become the man who disappears. He’d rung Janice and she’d cried on the phone. She was in Martin’s so couldn’t speak for long but her voice had sounded funny, muffled like she’d been at the dentists,
and Geordie’d asked her why she was speaking weird and she told him Budgie had busted her lip. Fucking Budgie. All of this, everything, was Budgie’s fault. He was going to repay him some day, with a ton of interest. Cripple him with the fucking interest. Janice had asked him to bring the money back, to bring it back and apologize. Yeah, right. Like Budgie was going to take that. Like he was going to pat little Geordie on the head and buy him a pint in the Gleneally. She was stupid, Jan. Poor bitch. Sweet though. You could do worse than settle for her. She’d keep you warm, would Janice. That cracking body, a real peach. But not the brightest. Poor wee Jan. Forever fucking up and getting thumped. He sometimes thought he loved her.
‘Any birds coming tonight that aren’t totally monkey?’
Danny laughed. Totally monkey. He hadn’t heard the phrase for years. There are always a hundred local words that mean ‘ugly’ or ‘rough’ and another hundred that mean ‘drunk’. It’s what makes a dialect. The most popular synonyms for ‘totally monkey’ had been gypping (as in ‘she’s a gypping trout’), minging, manky, boiling, munting, rancid, and raw. ‘Chewed’ and ‘melted’ were also popular.
‘A few, aye. All out of your league though mate.’
‘Fuck off. They might fancy a bit of rough.’
‘Not that rough.’
‘They be more into pretty rich boys like you then?’ There was a hard centre to Geordie’s voice, a wire running through the words.
‘All right calm down mate. I was just joking.’
‘Aye, well…you and me, mate, we’re not so fucking different.’
‘I know, I know. Let’s clear this place up.’
Geordie left and brought back cod and chips and Danny tidied, filling three bin bags with rubbish. They wolfed the takeaway, both adding loads of ketchup, and sank matching pint glasses of milk. They watched MTV. The incredible black girls in the videos reminded Danny of Ellen.
‘There is one girl who might turn up tonight that’s really fit. A girl I work with. She’s coming to Northern Ireland with me tomorrow.’
‘Oh yeah? Nice. Point her out to me.’
‘It’s a responsibility to the general public.’ Clyde was still talking. ‘I have their lives in my hands and on my conscience. I’ve seen some things in restaurants. Rats the size of dogs.’
‘You sure they weren’t actually dogs? Were they on leads?’
The pigtailed blonde had disappeared and been replaced by Ben the DJ, who had been caught in a conversation while filling a mug from the cold tap. There were no glasses left. The bathroom door was closed and there were two people outside it waiting. One of them was Ellen, who’d just arrived, and been let in by Fishboy who was sporting a pink Christmas cracker party hat which he appeared to have brought with him. The other was her friend Rowena, a tiny pretty Indian, who was gripping Ellen’s arm and gravely predicting that she was about to wet herself.
The kitchen contained Clyde and Ben (who was repeating that he had to get back to his decks) and several friends of Danny’s from Monks. They were leaning
against the work surfaces and swapping wisecracks. During one of those unfathomable and sudden silences that strike at parties, Tuzza, who was in the corner by the fridge talking to Simon, was heard to say ‘because he’s an oily little prick’, and immediately everyone else in the room swivelled their faces towards him like so many tracking satellite dishes. Through the open kitchen door you could see ten or twelve people standing in the garden. It was a warm and sticky July evening. The sky was mostly grey but in the west, over Islington, it was blushing pinkly. The windows of the houses backing onto Danny’s were lit and quartered by their frames. They almost looked like faded yellow flags hung out for the party.
On the patio Jennifer Bauer, a depressive leveraged finance lawyer, was sitting on an upturned red bucket, in floods of tears after drinking eight gin and tonics and trying to kiss Adela, the sylphic friend now crouched beside her stroking her knees. Another group, consisting solely of men and led decisively by James the compactors salesman, were trying to throw pieces of gravel into a plant pot by the back door and yelping angrily or joyfully as they missed or made it. At the far end of the garden, by the metal bin where Danny kept the secateurs and watering can, four men were standing in an approximate square, facing each other: Ian, who’d arrived with four cans of Carlsberg and his usual serious air; Albert, who’d brought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and an ex-girlfriend called Claire; Geordie, who was already drunk; and Danny, who was wondering if Ellen was coming and swiftly knocking back a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Ian had stood in silence for the first half-hour, after introductions and after he’d politely knocked away any direct questions put to him. If he spoke, he spoke fast, as if he didn’t have much time to waste. Albert was describing in detail his latest vision. It had come to him while he was walking past one of the gyms on the Finchley Road and had noticed the Lycra-ed gerbils on their tread-mills and stairmasters and elliptical machines.
‘Now I figure that running six miles in fifty minutes would burn about four hundred calories.’
‘How do you know that?’ said Geordie, suspicious as a thief.
‘I have experience of exercise, as you can see.’ He pinched a roll of fat, tremulous, above his belt. Albert was continually making succinct forays into fitness, such as the boxercise class (‘to sandpaper me down even smoother’), but hated the locker-room friendliness or unfriendliness (hated even that pressure of whether to speak). He disliked how the disinfected smell reminded him of school, and became too aware of the proximity of foreign bodies, and those sideways methods people had of glancing at each other.
‘And then I thought, calories, of course, are units of energy. We could harness all of this power.’
‘But those machines need electric,’ Geordie again.
‘An ordinary exercise bike doesn’t. It must be easy to rig them so they run off their own power. And it could work for all the machines. It’s brilliant.’
‘I like it,’ said Danny, definitively, as a way of closing the conversation down.
‘It’s textbook genius. This makes use of something people want to discard. Their fat. Imagine the incentive
of knowing you can’t watch
Coronation Street
unless you row for a thousand metres first. Fat would drip off them.’
Ian watched all this like a father at his son’s birthday party: bemused, uninvolved, a little bored. Albert turned to him and said, ‘Well, what do you think? Has it got legs?’
‘I think there’s better uses for your energy than the gym.’
Geordie snorted a little. ‘Yeah, like you don’t go to the fucking gym.’
Ian clenched both his arms in front of him. His shirt reshaped itself, tight, over the muscles which sprang into tension. Ludicrous contours and bulges. Smiling widely, he said, ‘But my energy’s directed towards generation.’
‘And what are you going to generate?’ Danny asked, unimpressed.
‘Justice,’ Ian stated decisively.
‘Right,’ Danny sighed. ‘Anyone got any fags left?’
Danny was watching Ian. All that crap about generating justice was designed to wrong-foot Albert and him. Ian wasn’t to know Albert couldn’t be wrong-footed by an avalanche. Where the hell had Geordie pulled this tosser from? He watched Ian rub at his massive right bicep with a stubby little trowel-hand. He seemed to have Geordie marked out as a wingman and him as the enemy. When Ian shouldered his way to the toilet, Danny turned to Geordie and asked, impatiently, ‘Where the hell’d you find him? He’s wound like a spring. And what the fuck’s he talking about?’
‘Lay off him, he’s all right. He’s Northern Irish. You mightn’t remember what they’re like.’
‘Hello stranger.’ Ellen, at his back, trailing Rowena,
newly returned from the toilet and much relieved. Ellen was wearing a white fitted Burberry shirt and dark blue bootcut jeans. Understated and beautiful. Even the languid way she looked around her made Danny lose confidence. She seemed to have the ability to slow time right down, so that it clung to her, reluctant to let go.
‘Hey. I didn’t know whether you’d make it. How long have you been here?’
‘We just arrived. Some guy in a cracker hat let us in. This is Rowena, Danny, and,’ she looked at the others, ‘I’m Ellen.’
‘This is Geordie, a friend over from Ireland, and Albert, you might know him from work.’ Danny gestured at each in turn, and flicked his eyebrows at Geordie to let him know this was
the
girl. And here was Ian back, looking at Ellen as if he was slightly puzzled.
‘And this is Ian, a friend of Geordie’s.’ Ian nodded stiffly.
‘Sorry I’m not being a good host. Let me get you two a drink. What would you like?’
When Danny returned with two plastic cups brimming with wine, Ian and Albert were standing, patiently, listening to Rowena loudly recount her journey here. The story appeared to involve her losing a shoe en route, although she was wearing two now. Both Albert’s and Ian’s eyes were widening as her voice grew louder and louder. She was practically screaming, in case, it seemed, someone should try to interrupt her.
Geordie had turned away from the group to corner Ellen, and was sitting on the metal bin. Ellen had asked whether he and Danny had been friends since school, and he was now regaling her with some story,
gesticulating, charming. Danny gave Rowena one cup (‘OH GREAT, THANKS DAVY’) and handed Ellen hers. Geordie was leaning slightly back and his head was level with Ellen’s chest: ‘So we were in the local nightclub, the Pink Pussycat it’s called, though we always called it Clubland, dint we?’
He looks up at Danny, who nods.
‘And Danny had pulled this bird from Dungannon called Stacey, about twenty she was, and I’d copped with this fenian called Orla from Pomeroy. We were only wee fellas. Wee boys, fifteen maybe.’
Danny suddenly knows what’s coming.
‘Shut up Geordie.’
Ellen looks up at Danny, her plastic cup about to touch her lips.
‘Just a bit of fun. Just giving Ellen all the facts about you. What friends from home are for, mate.’ The last word was a barb, a tiny hook like his grin.