Killing It

by Asia Mackay

  I thought of my daughter asleep upstairs. Early death was one of the risks of the job. Before, I only used to hope it would be quick and the pain not too great before I disappeared into the darkness. A shot, a shrug and a goodbye world. A short fast run at life in that fire-engine red I had always wanted.

  But now I was starting to feel differently. Leaving Gigi was a sharp fear that kicked me in the stomach. I needed to be there for her.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier, sweetheart.’ Will got into bed beside me. ‘I just really wanted us three to get away. I feel like we’re hardly spending any time together.’ He pulled me over into his chest.

  ‘I’m sorry, too. I guess I’m more stressed than I realised about work.’ He kissed my forehead and wrapped himself round me. I always felt safest in his arms. I don’t know why. He wasn’t the one who could kill an armed attacker without breaking a sweat. And he would be rubbish in a fist fight. But things felt quiet when I was with him. I could take a breath. I knew everything there was to know about this man and nothing about him scared me. Maybe that was why I was so at peace being held by him. He had no secrets.

  There were only mine.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A NOTTING HILL PLAYGROUND on an unseasonably warm and sunny October morning is a perfect location for a covert meeting with an informant. The screams, the shouts, the cries, all perfect for drowning out the noise of conversation as well as any coherent thought.

  Dasha was in a long tweed coat and enormous sunglasses, her snakeskin Birkin bag slung over her shoulder. She was pushing a pram with a Missoni print hood; strapped inside was a frowning Irina. Dasha’s elder two children, Natalya and Viktor, stood next to her. Her two bodyguards hovered behind them. They looked even less thrilled about being in a playground on a Sunday morning than the several hungover fathers I had already spotted.

  ‘Say hello to Alexis.’ Dasha gently pushed Natalya and Viktor towards me.

  ‘Hello,’ said Natalya. Her blonde hair was held back in a navy-blue Alice band. She was wearing a tweed coat that matched her mother’s.

  Viktor had his father’s dark eyes. He nodded at me and walked off towards the picnic tables clasping a book.

  ‘He’s very advanced for seven. Loves reading,’ Dasha offered as way of explanation.

  ‘Gigi loves the swings. Shall we go there first?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  One of the bodyguards went to sit next to Viktor. The other followed us.

  ‘Mama, look, it’s Leonora and Iona!’ Natalya had spotted two friends in the sandpit.

  ‘Go on then, darling, we’ll be right here.’ Natalya skipped off towards them. Dasha watched her go. The two little girls looked up when Natalya joined them, but didn’t smile. Dasha stiffened. One of the girls then held out her hand and pulled Natalya down next to her. The three of them leaned in together and started giggling. Dasha’s shoulders slackened and she leant down to unclip Irina from her pram.

  I got Gigi out from her embarrassingly stained Maclaren and plonked her in a swing. Dasha put Irina in the one next to her.

  I kept staring down at Irina’s empty pram. How was it so immaculate? Was there a drive-through pram wash I didn’t know about?

  I moved to the front of the swings so my back was to the bodyguard. I started pushing and Gigi squealed with delight. I looked down at her little chubby face, Mohawk hair blowing in the wind as she went back and forth. Irina was now swinging alongside her, her hands clapping. ‘High! Want high. HIGH!’ Dasha laughed and pushed her harder.

  ‘What do you know about the Dragon?’

  Dasha kept pushing the swing as Irina giggled.

  ‘What is it? A new restaurant?’

  ‘It’s a codename. The Dragon is an associate of your husband’s who wants him dead. He tried and failed to get someone to do the job for him last year. Yesterday we intercepted an email about how the Dragon is coming after Dimitri and Rok-Tech. We can’t risk him interfering in our operation.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of anyone called Dragon. I know this Mayfair property deal Dimitri’s been working on has upset a lot of people so he could be one of the sellers he’s . . . disagreed with.’

  A wine merchant on St. James’s had been burnt to the ground and the high-profile landlord of the property next door to it had been stabbed to death in a supposed mugging gone wrong. It was fair to say Dimitri’s disagreements were a little more violent than usual London property negotiations.

  Dasha adjusted her sunglasses. ‘If you know about this Dragon, Dimitri will too and that means he won’t be around for long. When it comes to his enemies my husband usually strikes before they do.’ She chewed her lip as she looked over at Natalya, now running around the playground with her friends. She knew Dimitri better than all of us. No wonder she was nervous.

  ‘What about “the three”? There was a mention of how Dimitri thought “the three” would protect him.’

  Dasha kept pushing Irina as she thought. ‘Three of the men on the Rok-Tech board are very close to Dimitri. They’re all well connected, useful allies to have.’

  ‘Could one of them be double-crossing him?’

  ‘It’s definitely possible. Last time I saw one of their wives she implied all was not well. There was talk of a management buyout at one point. But they’re all based in Moscow – if they had plans for Dimitri or Rok-Tech they would only strike on Russian soil. If you British succeed it will be too late for them.’ She shook her head. ‘And if you fail, it will be too late for all of us.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry, Dasha. We’re professionals. We won’t fail.’

  Dasha pushed her sunglasses back on to her head and looked me in the eye.

  ‘You’d better not. We all have a lot to lose. No one more than me.’

  ‘Mama! Come, please!’ Viktor was standing in front of the picnic table, pointing to something in his book.

  ‘I’ll drop my children home and see you at the committee meeting.’ Dasha plucked Irina out of the swing and carried her over to Viktor. The bodyguard who had been behind me came round and collected the Missoni pram. He stared at me unsmiling as he pushed the pram round the swings. I took Gigi out of the swing and strapped her into her pram. If Dasha was right and the Dragon was one of ‘the three’ they would not be a threat to the Pop – we could eliminate Dimitri without fear of interference. It would be back in Moscow, when Sergei and the Nyan were taking over Rok-Tech, that we needed to be on the alert.

  As I was leaving the playground, I heard Dasha call for Natalya. The little girl was by the hopscotch court. She shook her head and motioned for Dasha to come to her. Dasha, with one arm around Viktor and the other pushing Irina in the pram, headed towards Natalya, who was now hop-skipping over the numbers all the way to the end.

  ‘You try, Mama, you try!’

  I stopped and watched, wondering how Natalya would take her mother’s refusal. She must have got used to understanding that four-inch Louboutin heels, although fabulous, were movement-restricting. But Dasha touched her daughter’s cheek, threw her snakeskin handbag to the ground, kicked off her shoes and hopped and skipped her way over the numbers on the ground. Natalya cheered her on, jumping up and down while clapping her hands. Viktor stood by Irina’s pram laughing. At the end Dasha threw her arms in the air in triumph. The two of them hugged as Dasha swirled Natalya round. Her happiness made her beauty shine.

  Dasha and Natalya walked hand in hand back towards Viktor and Irina. Dasha picked up her handbag and gave it a little shake; sand sprinkled off the sides. She slipped into her shoes just as one of the bodyguards came towards her pointing at his watch. The face I knew returned and she gave him a curt nod. Back to business for the Queen Bee.

  *

  An hour later I watched, silent, as a high-stakes negotiation played out in front of me.

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘No, you do it.’

  Sitting in the Brasserie I was distracted from Dasha’s to-do list monologue by a long-drawn-out ar
gument at the next table. A mother had been asking her three-year-old daughter to put her coat on for the last fifteen minutes; over the course of which the little girl had been told there would be no television for the day (obviously something that the mother could not face withholding for longer), had been banned from play dates for a week and had lost pudding for a fortnight. It was excruciating to listen to. I stared at the little pig-tailed girl with her arms crossed and mouth set in a stubborn frown and was marvelling at her mother’s ability to not scream, ‘Just put your fucking coat on!’

  Why didn’t the girl do it? What did she have to gain by not doing it? Didn’t she realise all the pain she was causing herself? Why upset the person who was quite obviously in charge? It was not dissimilar to the frustration we had with uncooperative interviewees. They had that same insistence to not comply despite the pain that was coming their way. At least they had reasons for trying to resist our persuasions. Here there was nothing other than, ‘I just don’t want to,’ which was what the child was shouting now. Kids were a different entity entirely. How could you negotiate with individuals who lacked all rationality? It was a terrifying insight into what lay ahead. I made a mental note to sign up for the upcoming training talk that we’d had a memo about the week before: ‘Mind Over Brain Matter: Why Talking Can Be More Effective Than Torture’.

  ‘Alexis? Isn’t that right?’ Dasha drew my attention back to our table where everyone was staring at me.

  ‘Yes, exactly.’ I had no idea what I had confirmed but decided agreeing was by far the safest option.

  ‘Great.’ She looked down at her clipboard. ‘Alexis will supply one hundred home-made cupcakes,’ and made a small tick.

  Fuck.

  With the bonfire business finished, Claudia immediately launched into a hushed monologue to Cynthia and Dasha about her doctor’s advice on her Valium dependency. Cynthia cut her off by turning to Dasha. ‘What are you going to do about Natalya’s party next month?’

  Dasha eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The church fundraiser is the same day. You must’ve seen the email?’

  ‘You can always change the date?’ offered Claudia.

  Dasha was already scrolling through her phone. She looked up. ‘It’s Natalya’s actual birthday. I have members from the Cirque du Soleil booked to do a private show and they are back on tour the day after.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure you won’t lose too many guests to it. Only those in the school choir, as they’re performing,’ said Cynthia.

  ‘Natalya’s two best friends are in the choir.’ Dasha took a long drag on her vape. ‘I need to go.’ She shrugged on her fur coat and got to her feet. Claudia and Cynthia practically tripped over themselves in their rush to accompany her out the door.

  As Frankie ordered us another round of coffees I assured myself that staying here was an important part of my cover, a way to glean useful information about Dasha and Dimitri.

  The truth was, I actually enjoyed these little snapshots of what life as a normal mother would be like. Drinking coffee, comparing notes, asking questions; it wasn’t unlike the group therapy us Rats were occasionally forced to sit through. There was a lot of over-sharing, commiserating and getting to walk away cleansed of all ‘counting down the minutes until bedtime’ sins. Worries that had consumed me when home alone at 3 a.m. were laughed about here out in the open.

  I listened as Shona regaled us with the lowdown of what her day out at Kew Gardens had been like.

  ‘It was a good day, actually. Had an Insta:Shit ratio of 2:1.’

  ‘What the hell’s an Insta:Shit ratio?’ Having spent years learning all the Platform’s lingo it seemed I now had to get to grips with a whole other terminology.

  Frankie laughed. ‘It’s the calculation of how many instagrammable moments there are to how many hours of shit you had to put up to get them. A ratio of 2:1 is great – it means for the one hour of shit Shona had to get through; the rushing around packing the car, the backseat fighting, the whines about being hungry and tired legs, she got two instagrammable moments where everyone was smiling. You should always be aiming for a 1:1. But more often than not it’s a 1:4.’

  I thought back to last weekend’s trip to the park. A painful hour of packing supplies into the nappy bag, two random crying fits, a poonami up the back requiring a full outfit change on a park bench but then . . . Gigi’s elated face as she fed the ducks. Click. A total 1:1. They really did have it all figured out.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ Frankie was looking at her phone. ‘The church fundraiser next month has been cancelled as they’ve already exceeded their fundraising target. I no longer have to give up a Saturday manning a hook-the-duck stall. Prayers really do work.’

  But I knew better.

  ‘I’d better go, I need to drop Gigi home before heading into the office.’ I had mentioned I was back working part-time as a ‘civil servant’. Years of experience had taught me those two words sounded so dull they made sure no one asked any further questions.

  ‘Does your work not have a crèche?’ asked Frankie.

  I imagined Gigi lying on a colourful playmat in my grey stark office, while in the background the only noise interspersing the rumbling of the tube trains was the screams of reticent interviewees. I involuntarily shuddered.

  ‘No, they don’t have any facilities like that.’

  Tamara watched me gather Gigi’s things into the nappy bag.

  ‘I used to be a stockbroker,’ she said, ‘but I genuinely believe raising my family is the most important job in the world. The high I got when Flora crapped in the potty for the first time was every bit as exhilarating as closing a deal that netted my firm millions. Walking through my kitchen admiring my daughter’s faeces was my high point of 2013.’

  ‘Right.’ I didn’t know what to say to that.

  In the last few weeks, having infiltrated a group like this, I was starting to see the all-encompassing, life-changing truth of what being a mother really was.

  No one ever talks about the strength you need to have. Not just the day-to-day muscles to cope with picking up a contorting tantrumming kid, or lugging a toddler-filled buggy up a steep flight of stairs, but the actual mental strength to realise it’s not about you anymore. No matter what’s going on in your life you have tiny humans relying on you to get out of bed each morning, to feed them, to dress them, to act like the world isn’t sometimes a shitty place where shitty things happen.

  Tamara took her youngest to her first day of school while still bleeding and cramping from the miscarriage she had just had.

  ‘She needed me, I wasn’t going to miss it,’ was all she said.

  ‘It was the same when my father died,’ offered Shona quietly. ‘I wanted to just curl up in a little ball and sob for days on end. But I still had to come out of my room every now and then, look happy for the kids, and listen about how their day was and try to field questions about death and heaven without wailing so much it would frighten them.’ I pictured Shona holding back the tears as she sat listening to her chattering and oblivious children.

  As much as what we did at the Platform involved the frequent casual throwing around of words like ‘courage’ and ‘hero’, this bravery was more raw. These were real-life, day-to-day traumas and these mothers just picked themselves up and got on with things. That was what was expected of them. Christ, give me a gun and a room full of men to take down any day over having to tell a three-year-old that they weren’t ever going to see Granddad again. Being a mother was such an under-valued job.

  I looked round at all the women in the restaurant. All deep in conversation, all drinking heavily caffeinated drinks.

  We were all warriors. Pounding the pavements as we pushed our prams. Locked and loaded with enough supplies to make sure we were prepared for combat at every corner; a tantrum here, a spit-up there.

  Parenting was a war that left marks on us: physically, through the scars and stitches from the battlefield of labour; and, for som
e, mentally, in the big black dog of depression. It wasn’t easy for any of us and the losses could be great: sleep, bikini bodies, social lives. But the victories were so very sweet. A smile, a hug, a kiss, a step, a word, every milestone a cause for celebration, a time to rejoice in the little miracles we had made. Our legacies. Living and breathing and growing all because of us.

  And we would never raise the white flag of surrender.

  Not even when they drove us fucking nuts.

  I finally felt like I was getting it. Understanding what being a parent was all about. For the first time since we drove Gigi home from the hospital, at a steady 5 mph scared every little bump could hurt our precious cargo, I was starting to feel more relaxed. That maybe it was all going to be okay.

  And then my phone beeped.

  Please come to dinner on Saturday. Bring your husband. Dimitri wants to meet you.

  ‘It could be a trap,’ was Jake’s immediate reaction to my admission that my playground date had spooked the bodyguards. Clearly they’d decided I warranted a report to their boss. ‘I should come with you.’

  I shook my head as I swallowed another mouthful of canteen cereal.

  ‘It’ll be okay. He just wants to put a face to a name and make sure I’m not a threat. Taking you would be too risky. We don’t know how much he actually knows about me.’ I sat back in my chair. ‘The only person who could play my husband better than you is my actual husband.’

  He took a long drag of his cigarette. ‘I don’t like it. You’ve no idea what you’re walking into.’

  ‘You know we aren’t meant to smoke in here.’

  Jake looked around the room bustling with Rats, caffeine, fry-ups and newspapers. ‘Let’s see who has the balls to report me.’ It was not by chance Jake was sitting alone when I found him this morning, his reputation was such that people tended not to approach him unless invited. ‘And what’s the point in forcing rules on a bunch of people they hired to break them?’ He ashed into his half-empty coffee cup. ‘So what’s your big plan, Tyler? You and Mr Lawyer walk into the Weasel’s lair and bore him to death with how normal you are?’ Jake had met Will several times but still refused to ever use his name.