by Mel Stein
‘All I’m saying is that you’d have had to have the constitution of an ox to have made a full recovery already. I can’t believe your doctor knows you’re still smoking.’
‘Oh, you’d better believe it. He knows. I told him.’
‘And he approved?’
‘No. But he’s less devious than you – and he also knows he can do fuck all about it.’
She blew smoke out of the window and, despite the fact that none of it drifted back into the interior of the car, Mark found himself instinctively coughing. Patti clearly thought it was a gesture, an affectation calculated to annoy her. She took one last drag and then reluctantly tossed half a cigarette into the road, hesitated for a moment then lit up a third. She’d once told him she only smoked because she was bored, and he had seen what happened when she became bored at earlier stages in their relationship. Whatever it was that was on her mind she was not ready to share the burden with Mark.
In the elegant dining room they ate together in almost complete silence. Normally she drank little when she was with him. She realised how difficult it was for an ex-alcoholic to be around people drinking wine. Tonight, however, she finished a bottle on her own. Again he could do nothing to stop her without incurring her wrath. Yet, as glass after glass disappeared, the waiter finally dismissed as she emptied the bottle herself, so she became more and more aggressive. He’d seen her in these moods before. Not frequently, but often enough to know that he should be careful to give her no cause for an onslaught. He did not love her any the less in the long term but for the moment he was treading on egg-shells.
They were seated by the window and even in the darkness of the night he could see clearly the white water of the weir tumbling outside. Wild water that man tried to control. Patti was like that. You could swim in her, cool off beside her, but she was untameable. Sitting with her as she struggled for life in the hospital bed he had asked her to marry him. But she had been unconscious and it didn’t work like it did in romantic novels. Her eyes had not opened wide at the sound of his voice, but rather she had slumped deeper into her coma, a coma from which for a time it had seemed she would never emerge. When she did finally surface into the daylight he had not had the courage to put the question again. They did not even live together on a permanent basis as she wanted to retain the independence that the Burrow gave her.
‘If I want to sleep alone then I can sleep alone. And if I want to wake up beside you then I can always call you to come over. And if I fancy a change then I can find a dishy footballer to shag.’ She’d smiled then, but he wondered at this moment whether or not in his absence she did always sleep alone. He did have a set of keys to the Burrow but on the one occasion he’d gone around there uninvited and let himself in she had gone ballistic even though she had been quite on her own.
He’d not repeated the mistake. Sometimes he wondered why he did not stand up to her more. He knew the fact that he simply did not argue drove her crazy at times, but he had had enough dissent in his life. It was easier to remain silent and he was becoming increasingly good at it. In his mind he justified his failure to propose by a reluctance to put any pressure on her as she returned to health. In the real world, however, it was an act of cowardice, a surprising response from a man who had faced death and destruction on more than one occasion.
The church clock across the river struck eleven. He yawned, and a shadow of irritation flickered across her face making her seem far older than her years. Her red hair was pulled straight off her face and tied severely at the back, giving her a look of sophistication that contrasted starkly with the mischievous expression he’d first seen in her eyes some two years before. Two years. It seemed incredible that they’d only known each other for such a relatively brief period of time. He could scarcely remember pre-Patti days, PP as they called the period in their happier times together. But, given his intake of alcohol at the time, his loss of memory was hardly surprising. He’d fought hard for her during the relationship, not just for her but for himself too, and he would not be giving it up without a struggle.
‘Are you trying to tell me it’s time for bed?’ she asked.
‘I’m ready if you’re ready,’ he replied.
‘I’m ready for sleep.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘And I mean sleep. Don’t even think about anything else. Lay one finger on me and I’ll move to the settee.’
Mark said nothing. She had a remarkable talent at times for making him feel cheap. As if by taking her to an expensive hotel he was trying to buy sexual favours. His silence seemed to annoy her more. She had an inner anger that the drink had fuelled rather than subdued and for a moment he thought she was going to storm out of the room and cause a scene in front of the few remaining diners. Instead she rose a little unsteadily to her feet, waving away the waiter who solicitously made to pull back her chair. She swayed for a moment, then steadied herself, finally leaning on Mark for support with obvious reluctance. Together they made their way up the narrow staircase to their room which also overlooked the river. Mark stood at the window admiring the view, reluctant to draw the curtains and remove it from sight.
Behind him he could hear Patti undressing for bed, her clothes dropped in a casual heap on the carpet.
‘What is it, Patti? What’s wrong?’ he asked without turning around.
‘I’m tired and I don’t want to talk about it now.’
‘When then?’ he persisted, knowing he should not push the point at this time of night, but also certain that he would not sleep unless they made some progress in their conversation.
‘Mark, I don’t want to talk. About this mysterious “it”, or anything. OK? Or do you need a translator?’
Again he did not answer. He understood all too well. Instead he watched the lights of the hotel play on the river, dancing with the restless current. He stood for a long time. The church clock struck midnight and when he finally undressed and went to bed, Patti was so deeply asleep that she did not stir and he did not try to touch her.
CHAPTER 4
Mohammed Halid did not feel his age. This year he would be fifty and, with his son Nabil now twenty-three and his daughter Dominique eighteen, he would seem to have every reason to start counting the grey hairs in the mirror; that was if he could bring himself to look into the mirror.
Susie had changed all that. She was nearly twenty years younger and she had given him Jason just a year ago and, with a young wife and an infant son in his life, he was beginning to count backwards. He was also actually spending more time in front of the mirror than he could recall since his teens. Susie had rekindled the pride in his appearance that had threatened to vanish for ever after twenty-five years of marriage to his first wife, Yasmin. Both he and Yasmin had been young and slim when they’d met in pre-revolutionary Tehran. The city was beautiful then and they were part of the beautiful set of people themselves. Yet as Halid prospered so Yasmin had gradually become a less significant part of his life, and to compensate she had begun to eat. She ate steadily and relentlessly until the young attractive girl she had been was as much a part of history as Tehran’s five star hotels.
It did not take too long for Mohammed to realise that his future and that of his family lay beyond his native Iran. Many of his countrymen were moving to the States but Mohammed decided to make London his base. He had a double expertise. He’d trained in communications and he was a natural salesman. He’d already established a business in Tehran. Cables, satellites, mobile phones, they were all a dream of the future when he started out, but he anticipated them all. When they were still close Yasmin had described him proudly as ‘my own H.G. Wells’. She liked to read English classics and as her husband became more and more entwined in his business so she read more and more. And always by her side as she devoured English literature was a box of chocolates, a plate of biscuits or a bag of cakes. Halid liked London. The cosmopolitan nature of the city reminded him of home although he found it less class conscious. Here a man was judged by what he achieved, n
ot who his family had been, or at least so it appeared in the day-to-day world of Halid’s business. Later he learned of all the prejudices of the City, and realised that to the bankers and brokers it did not matter how much money he had, he was still just another grubby Arab clawing his way up the social ladder. Arabs and Jews: there might be an eternal conflict between the two races, but as far as the anti-Semites were concerned they were both equal targets. And so it was with a certain inevitability that Halid met Nathan Carr. Nathan was London born and bred although hardly English through and through. His parents had been born in England but his grandparents had escaped the pogroms of Russia and Poland to seek a new life in what they thought would be the tolerant world of Edwardian Britain. En route Nathan’s grandfather had changed his name from Cohen to Carr in honour of the first motor vehicle he had ever seen.
Curiously enough they had met through one of the bankers that Halid came so to despise. They’d both been invited to a lunch at Granby’s in Frogmorton Street. Halid’s company was being courted by more than one merchant bank as a potential target for a flotation. Carr was more into the world of media and entertainment. Halid never discovered whether or not Granby’s believed there was a genuine synergy between the two companies or whether they simply did not want to impose the two outsiders on their more prestigious clientele.
However, the fact of the matter was that Halid and Carr hit it off immediately. In looks they could not have been more different. Halid was of average height, his hair already grey and the nose aquiline. At times he looked more like a Red Indian Chief than a Middle Eastern trader. He dressed, subtly, traditionally; sombre suits, delicate, pearl-grey ties. His voice was as soft as his hands, well modulated, the accent there for all to hear, although difficult to place. He had seen what gluttony had done to his wife and he was beginning to make the effort to keep himself trim. He had taken on a personal trainer who worked with him every morning and the results were beginning to show.
Carr was tall, well over six feet, his large frame topped by a mass of black unruly hair that always looked in need of a trim yet was the subject of a weekly visit by the hairdresser to his office. Although he was younger than Halid he needed spectacles to see beyond his hand and had never come to terms with the use of contact lenses. Behind the glasses, the chameleon eyes had an expression of permanent, cynical amusement as if this was the only way he could tolerate the madness that was going on in the world around him. His face had a slightly lop-sided look about it, not aided by the broken nose that would have been more in place on a boxer than a successful businessman. Carr never offered an explanation for the break, preferring his rivals to believe it resulted from a fight, when in fact it had occurred on the rugby field at the public school to which his parents had sent him in the hope it would rub smooth the rough edges that he had inherited from his transient grandparents.
In fact, Carr had left the school considerably rougher than when he had joined it. He was the only Jewish boy in his class and, although he’d not thought of himself as particularly Jewish when he’d begun his education, he was left in no doubt about it by the time he finished it. One look at his circumcised penis in the changing room and he was nicknamed ‘Chopper’ and whilst he left school without any great educational qualifications he left with the name ‘Chopper Carr’ hanging around his neck like an albatross. One of the major lessons he did learn was never to try to hide one’s roots, but rather to use them instead. The bullying that at times bordered on persecution had given him the identity of which his parents had deprived him. By the time Nathan Carr met Mohammed Halid he was making no attempt to hide the fact that he was Jewish and proud of it.
The host banker had found it difficult to bring the lunch to an end when Halid and Carr had met for that first time, and, indeed, as they’d left the building together, they’d gone first to a pub, then to a coffee shop and finally to a restaurant to try to discover everything there was to know about themselves. It was only some years later, after their merger, after the bitter dissolution of their partnership, that they discovered it was not possible to know everything about any other person.
Waking on this July morning Halid thought of his time with Carr. He found himself thinking more and more of him nowadays. They may have started out in different fields but they were now deadly rivals. Halid had his company, Ball Park, and Carr had been left with Jet. They were the two fastest growing production empires in the world of media and it was as inevitable that they would meet in the first place that now their paths would cross as they both targeted the same business opportunities with relentless zeal. Halid knew Carr well enough to know that if they were set on a collision course he would not be the one to change direction. He also knew that whatever partnership, whatever friendship, there had been between them was long over and was damaged beyond repair.
The woman beside Halid slept on. Her night had been disturbed by little Jason, at one year old enough to know he was having a bad dream, but not old enough to decide it was nothing more than that. It had taken her a long time to soothe him back to sleep and Halid wished that his own fears could be so easily dispelled.
He stared hard at her fair skin, her youthful complexion, the domestic and maternal strain of the day removed by sleep. She slept like an angel, with the calm serenity she had brought into his life. Susie, his love, Susie, his wife. Yes, she and Jason were indeed the reasons he did not feel his age. They had achieved the impossible by turning back the hands of time.
Yet, for every miracle there was a price. In this case it had been his friendship with his business partner. Because Susie Halid, the mother of his infant child, until she had come to live with him, had been the wife of Nathan Carr.
CHAPTER 5
It was too hot for football. As August tilted into September the sun still beat down remorselessly. It was not so much an Indian summer as a summer that seemed as if was never going to end. Even up on the television gantry Mark Rossetti sat in a T-shirt and shorts, the air still and lifeless, more like the tropics than the south of England. The match being played out beneath him was very much a reaction to the humid atmosphere, and the footballers seemed at times to be treading water. They would make quick darting runs, then pause with hands on knees, bent over like old men trying to catch their breath, their shirts clinging to their skin, sweat pouring down their faces. The coaches rose regularly from their benches to toss water bottles to the team whilst the St John’s Ambulance men kept up a steady stream of journeys to rescue spectators afflicted by the heat.
For the first leg of the Coca-Cola second round cup match Hertsmere’s visitors were Denley Athletic. Given that Denley had finished bottom of the Third Division and had only been saved from relegation by the shortcomings of the Conference champion’s ground, it was hardly surprising that the Park Crescent ground was less than half full.
At one end some two hundred Denley faithfuls had gathered with flags and banners, obviously convinced by the fairly disastrous results this season that this was likely to be the high point of the year. They’d only progressed beyond the first round when their opponents had been reduced to nine men thanks to the efforts of an over-zealous referee and their resistance to Hertsmere had been limited to the first five minutes of the match. At least during those three hundred seconds they had progressed over the halfway line and managed a shot on target, which Greg Sergovitch in the Hertsmere goal had caught with casual ease. Now, however, as half-time approached, Hertsmere had found the back of the net three times, two of them coming from Barry Reed, the other an own goal that the Denley centre-half would relive in his nightmares for the rest of his moderate footballing career.
Having built up the cushion of their lead Hertsmere had then slowed down the pace with all the experience they had gained in Europe. There was a long haul ahead of them and none of them wanted to risk injury or premature burn-out. None of them that was except Barry Reed. Nobody seemed to have told the nineteen-year-old Geordie that the match was as good as won, that they needed to
do nothing more than keep a clean sheet, take the odd chance and then go to Denley for the second leg with a team of reserves.
Reed picked the ball up just inside his own half. There were moments when he looked clumsy, almost immobile. He had a huge bull of a head, his close-cropped hair giving him the look of a storm-trooper which belied his quiet, almost shy personality off the field. A casual observer might have thought him fat with his broad shoulders and barrel chest, but at the stomach there was a tapering down to the waist which was so slim as to be at odds with what went above and below. The thighs were unmistakably those of a professional footballer, the legs slightly bowed, the picture as a whole reminiscent in part of Malcolm MacDonald, in part of Paul Gascoigne.
A Denley midfielder came across to challenge and Reed cheekily nutmegged him, placing the ball between his legs with total precision. Before his opponent could turn, Reed was round and past him, drawing a couple of defenders towards him like filings to a magnet. He ran with his head erect, totally aware of what was going on around him without any need to look. Then he suddenly stopped dead. It became a scene from a silent slapstick movie. The two defenders were both in mid-flight, neither could stop and, as they cannoned into each other, Barry had time to pat each of them on the head as they fell before continuing his run. The crowd, who had seemed to be falling asleep in the heat, erupted, aware of the fact that if he scored this was going to be a goal to reminisce over during the long winter evenings for many years to come. As far as Barry Reed was concerned there was no if about him scoring. He saw another defender hurtling in from the left, kicked into top gear and left him for pace. The defender did not know whether to chase him or head for the goal-line as the keeper came out to narrow the angle. Reed pulled wide to the right, neatly side-stepped the goalie and arrogantly side-footed the ball into the net as a confused Denley player belatedly slid across.