by J. S. Monroe
“You’re too kind. Now, when do we start?” He picked up the bottle of wine and poured Charlotte a glass.
“I suggest we go through the mechanics of the City tomorrow,” Charlotte said, looking at me. “I’ve brought some books for you to read.”
“Kids’ stuff,” Walter said. “Honestly. People see the City as some kind of holy labyrinth, shrouded in myth and ritual. It’s not. It’s a place where people make money. Simple as that.”
“It’s full of rich arseholes,” I said. The soup was barely warm.
“True,” Walter said.
“Bourgeois, elitist, Tory arseholes.”
“Also true.”
“Then on Sunday, we run through your new biography,” Charlotte added, looking at both of us in turn.
Walter poured wine into my glass and raised his own into the middle of the table. “To Douglas. Your life as it might have been.”
I didn’t join in the toast.
“Actually, your life’s fairly straightforward,” Charlotte said, putting her glass down. She had already drunk half of it. I hoped I was making her nervous.
“Ha! If only,” Walter said.
“One or two areas worry me, though,” she continued.
“Jesus, his whole damn life worries me,” Walter added.
“Like what?” I asked. The desire to headbutt Walter was suddenly becoming irresistible.
“University. Have you ever been to Cambridge, visited the city?” Charlotte asked.
“Once.”
“A remarkable place for bookshops,” Walter chipped in. “At least it was. I once found a first edition of Lear’s Nonsense near the market. Just sitting there in a box on the sidewalk.”
“You were there for three years,” Charlotte said.
“I was?” I asked.
“Uh huh.”
“It wasn’t mint. For fifty bucks, hey, who’s complaining?” No one was listening to Walter.
“And if I meet someone who was there at the same time as me?” I asked.
“You were at Trinity, a big college. It’s possible no one knew you. You kept to yourself, stayed in your rooms.”
“What sort of degree does he get? A Desmond Tutu?” Walter asked, laughing before he had finished.
“Douglas Hurd, I’m afraid,” Charlotte said, looking at me with sympathy.
“Too bad. Still, I was reading the other day that some British companies make a point of only employing people with thirds. It takes impeccable judgment to know how little work you can get by on and still make the grade.”
I listened to them both with growing contempt. As details of the plan unfolded, the pressure began to build inside me. I reminded myself why I was doing this. Annalese was dead. Killed by a bomb. The bombers work in the City. I join the City to find bombers. Kill bombers. I could go back to the barge after that. Burn the suit, grow my hair. Maybe come back and torch Clapham, too.
“I’ve had a word with a crammer in Oxford,” Charlotte continued. “You completed your A levels there. One B and two Cs.”
“But I ran away.”
“Dutchie ran away. Douglas, on the other hand, did just fine,” Walter said, pouring himself another glass. “Can I ask you something, Dutchie?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “If you had your life to live again, would you do anything different?”
“No,” I said immediately, before I had time to consider.
“You’d still run away? Still throw scaffolding poles at policemen?”
“Yeah,” I said. There was an awkward pause. Just when Charlotte was about to fill it, I asked Walter the same question. “Would you? Would you do anything different?”
“Hey, I can’t. Unlike you. No point in even thinking about it. It’s an unusual situation you’re in. Enviable even.”
“That right?”
“Sure. You’ve got a wonderful chance to start all over again. To wipe the slate clean.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Most of us, we mess things up, and we have to live with the consequences.”
“Who said anything about messing up?”
“Oh come on Dutchie. You’ve screwed up. We all know that.”
“Screwed up. You really believe that, don’t you?”
“It’s not just me. Your father…”
“Fuck him.”
“Your mother.”
I paused, then sucked at a spoonful of soup. “Fuck her.”
“Douglas doesn’t have to disappear when all this is finished,” Charlotte said. “That’s all he’s saying. We can destroy your old file. Providing everything works out.”
“I’m staying as Dutchie.”
Charlotte looked across at Walter. He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with the napkin, leaving an orange smudge on the linen.
“That might not be so smart,” he said. “According to our files, Dutchie’s wanted on seven accounts of shoplifting, attempting to defraud the DSS, jumping bail, assaulting a policeman..
“… fuck you,” I said, interrupting him.
“… causing criminal damage.”
“… shut it.”
“… breaking and entering.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“… arson.”
I couldn’t hear any more and lunged across the table. I grabbed Walter by the throat with both hands, knocking his glasses on to the table. His neck was clammy, malleable. A moment later I was conscious of Charlotte’s arm clamped around my own throat. Everyone struggled for a few seconds, locked into an awkward triangle. Walter was trying desperately to pull my hands away, the maroon skin on his face darkening all the time. His eyes were moist in the corners and beginning to widen unnaturally. A few more seconds and he would be dead. The thought was hypnotic. Then I felt the lock around my own neck tighten dramatically and I realised I was close to passing out. I could smell Charlotte’s perfume: clean apples. Her presence was strangely reassuring, professional. I released the folds of Walter’s throat and slunk back into the chair. I felt better, much better.
“You alright?” Charlotte asked, releasing me and moving around to Walter. His tie askew, he looked warily in my direction, panting hard. He bent his head down close to the table and looked for his glasses. Charlotte reached across, picked them up and gave them to him.
“You take it too far, Dutchie, way too far,” Walter wheezed, and bent the wire of his glasses around his tiny, shiny ears. His hands were shaking. I said nothing and lit a cigarette, watching Charlotte clear the soup plates. I rubbed my neck. Somewhere, deep inside me, a bud of guilt spread itself open. Walter was too fat, too fey to fight.
“It was me who came to you,” I said, for my own benefit. “Remember that. I was the one who spotted the mistake.” “And we want to help you,” Charlotte said, sliding the bowls into the sink. I was suddenly annoyed that she had intervened.
“Is that how you see it?” I asked, getting up from the table and walking over to her. “Part of the job? Putting people back on the straight and narrow? A slice of state correction? Since when was Stella Rimington a fucking social worker?”
“It was just a thought, a friendly offer,” she said, not even bothering to look up at me.
“That’s not what this is about,” I said. “It’s to do with Annalese, not me. Why bring me into this?”
“Forget it. It’s not important.”
“It is to him,” I said, nodding at Walter, who held his palms up in mock defence. “You said you’d hand me over if I didn’t cooperate. I’m cooperating. I’ll find the terrorists. But then Douglas dies. End of story.”
9
Supper finished peacefully enough, given the circumstances. I listened quietly as Walter outlined further details, and made more jokes about my expendability. He kept repeating that the chairman of JKA was an old friend, that I wouldn’t actually have to do anything on the exchange floor. Still, why me? There must have been other people he could have recruited, or blackmailed, who were more qualified. Walter knew my backg
round, knew that I had rejected it utterly. I began to doubt who had initiated the whole idea. Perhaps Walter had been waiting for me to make contact? Hampered by wine and Special Brew, I struggled to think clearly. I had spotted the mistake about the bodies, I had gone to them. Working in the City was their plan, devised in response to my information. There was no confusion, no hidden agenda. I was still in control. But Charlotte’s words – “The terrorists will kill you if they suspect anything” – wouldn’t go away.
Upstairs I ran a bath, rolled a joint. Before Charlotte arrived, I had begun to imagine myself operating on my own, answerable to no one. Walter’s plan was bearable in those terms. Now I had a partner. Charlotte – it couldn’t have been worse. Almost as bad as Douglas. But a dyke? She was too much of a headgirl, a man’s woman. Perhaps Walter’s clumsy advances had been rejected once. She was necessary, though. I had to look credible. Clapham was full of Charlottes. I just wished the whole scheme didn’t give Walter such a kick.
There was a knock on the bathroom door.
“I didn’t think the great unwashed had baths.” It was her. “Are you going to be long?” she asked.
“A couple of days,” I said, sliding under the bubbles. The next moment Charlotte was standing in the middle of the room. I sat up suddenly, sending a small tidal wave over the edge of the bath.
“Pathetic,” she said and went over to the basin.
I stared at her as she started to brush her teeth. She was wearing a crimson towelling dressing gown, the cord tied firmly around her waist. Without tights, her calves were as white as veal.
“Walter was out of order tonight,” she said spitting into the basin. “Drunk and tactless.”
Evidently she was staying. Despite myself, I liked that. “He’s rather quaint in his beliefs,” she continued. “Thinks MI5 is the custodian of the nation’s morals.”
“And what do you think?” I asked, watching her buttocks shimmer with the effort of brushing.
“About MI5? It’s a useful weapon in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.”
“Nothing to do with morals, then?”
“I don’t believe someone has the right to go around blowing innocent people up.”
She dried her face with a towel and went over to the lavatory. For a moment I thought she was about to pee in it. Instead, she closed the lid and sat down.
“Mind if I build one?”
I looked up and saw her holding a small plastic bag which I had left on the shelf above the roll holder.
“Help yourself.” The absurdity of the scene appealed. I sat forward awkwardly, retrieving my own joint from the milky soapdish. Wet and soggy, it took a while to re-light.
“I bet you smoke a bit, all you agents. Gear you’ve nicked,” I said, beginning to relax.
“If only.”
“You know what? I think the old Bill should hold dope auctions, like they do with stolen bikes. That would be alright, wouldn’t it?”
“Lot 48, three kilos of high grade hashish, seized in the English Channel, provenance Pakistan. Any offers? I can’t really see it.”
“Want a light?”
She nodded, the joint angled from her mouth. I threw my lighter across the room. It landed on the edge of a pink rug which didn’t quite fit around the base of the lavatory. I watched her pick it up and saw a flash of breast, faintly shocking in its whiteness. She lit her spliff and inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke into the middle of the room. I leant back, resting my head on the rim of the bath. From where she was sitting, she could see my head and shoulders, nothing more, but it felt provocative.
“What are you doing working for a bunch of tossers like MI5?” I asked.
“There are lots of misconceptions about what the security services do,” she said, beginning to cough.
“You sound just like Stella Rimington.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Why? She was a fascist.”
“You see, there you go again. She was a very decent woman. It’s a tragedy she’s left the service.”
I sat up and started to wash my neck. Her tone had changed. I was suddenly bored, angry at being taken in. “That right?” I said, unconvinced.
“If you only read The Guardian, you’d think she was some kind of witch. She did a difficult job well.”
“Bollocks. Why did she put people on my back then?”
“Yours?”
“You’ve seen the file.”
“The company you chose to live in, perhaps.”
“And what’s wrong with them?”
“MI5’s job is to counter threats to national security.”
“And anyone who decides to live outside society poses a threat?”
“I wouldn’t describe climbing over the gates of Downing Street as the action of a hermit, would you?”
I had heard enough. “Could you leave. I’m having a bath.”
She got up, went to the door and stopped.
“We’ll start at nine. Breakfast at eight. Thanks.” She waved the joint in the air and left.
I lay there confused. I had never met anyone like her before. She was hard to place. Full of the trite rhetoric I would expect from someone working for the state, and yet there was a coldness of heart, an inscrutable confidence which I found attractive. It made me want to peel away her convictions.
10
I woke early the next morning and went downstairs to make a coffee. As I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I heard a noise, a faint moan, in the sitting room. I walked over to the door and opened it gently. There on the sofa, half on it, half off, was Walter, still in his suit and snoring loudly. A hand was hanging limply in the air. His mouth was open, falling away to one side. On the table was an empty bottle of red wine. A glass lay capsized on the carpet, a dark, funnelled stain spreading like an oil slick.
I closed the door quietly and looked down the corridor. The papers had arrived: a copy of The Financial Times, no doubt for the weekend lessons, and The Daily Telegraph. I picked them up and was just about to dump them on the kitchen table when a small headline on the front page of The Daily Telegraph caught my eye: “Police issue warning to protesters”. I only bothered reading half the article, forgot about the coffee and climbed the stairs silently and swiftly.
School was cancelled for the day, no question. It was my last chance before starting in the City. The only problem was what to wear. All I had was a suit, although Walter had said that there were some casual clothes in the wardrobe. I slid open a drawer and discovered a couple of patterned jumpers, a pair of brown cords and some stripey shirts. I wouldn’t last five minutes. In the bottom drawer I found a T-shirt, some black jeans and an inoffensive bottle-green jumper. They would have to do.
I went over to the sink and removed a blade from the razor. Laying the trousers flat on the bed, I made a few small incisions in the legs, which I then ripped open with my hands. I did the same with the jersey, holing it in two places. All that was left were my nose and ear rings, which were in my suit trouser pocket. There wasn’t time to put them all in, so I settled on five in the ear, two in my nose.
Outside in the street I closed the heavy oak door quietly and looked up at the front of the house. One of Charlotte’s windows was open, but her curtains were still closed. I walked briskly down the road to the end, where it joined Clapham Southside, and broke into a run.
*
“Leggit, it’s me, Dutchie.”
“Dutchie! Where’ve you been all my life?”
“Can’t talk now. Anything cooking today?”
“A fest, mate, fucking fest. You in?”
“Yeah.”
“The George at eleven. Get in some decent dipping.”
“Eleven.”
“You still with that fluffy bint?”
I closed my eyes. “No.”
“Good.”
I put the phone down and held on to the receiver for a few seconds. I hadn’t seen Leggit since I had been with Annalese. Even talking to him now felt
like a betrayal. He lived in a famous road near the Elephant and Castle where someone from every household could be counted on to turn up at all the major riots. It was a local profession, a cottage industry. After a day out, everyone would return to the St George’s Tavern at the end of the road where the barman would count them back in, like spitfire pilots. I had first met them years ago when I came up from Bath for an antiapartheid demo. I was impressed with the level of organisation. In case of arrest, we were all issued with the number of a solicitor who specialised in public order offences.
“Don’t mess about with the duty solicitors,” Leggit had warned. “They’re with the pigs.”
I had written the number proudly on the back of my hand, admiring it like the entrance stamp for an exclusive nightclub.
Pocketing a couple of calling cards from the phone booth, I walked towards the tube at Clapham South, glancing occasionally back down the road. A woman in a red tracksuit was having an early morning tennis lesson with an instructor on one of the courts by Nightingale Lane. Her Golf GTI was parked up on the curb. Foolishly she had left the roof down. As I passed I spat wholesomely on the tanned driving seat. I felt lightheaded, de-mob happy, the first time since Annalese had died.
There was something about a riot which induced the same exhilarating feelings I had experienced when I had run away from school. Of course there was the adrenalin, the anticipation of human conflict. And being out of your head in the middle of mayhem, amphetamined, paranoid, striking out at everyone around you – that was fun in its way. But it was the purity of expression, the unambiguity, which appealed to me most. Eyeballing a terrified copper through his scratched visor, screaming at him at the top of your voice, abusing him for working for the State, telling him he was going to die – my life came together in moments like that.
As I approached the tube station entrance I stopped suddenly and moved in close to the wall. Charlotte was standing in the doorway of a newsagent’s, just inside the station foyer. She was talking into a mobile phone and looking around anxiously, her coat pressed against her by the wind from the escalator shaft. The bitch. What was I playing at last night? Turning around, I walked across the grass, partially hidden by trees, and kept my head low. Had she seen me? I broke into a run and crossed a side road stacked up with traffic. New shoes biting, I kept running until I reached the glass domes of Clapham Common underground. Down one subway and up the other, I jumped on to a bus heading for the Elephant and Castle. I looked back. Charlotte was nowhere to be seen.