Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  ‘It’s just that Keegan and de Freitas are assuming responsibilities no one gave them. It’s not in their remit to—’

  Rilke held up his hand as if to say, forgive me, stop, please. ‘I asked them to assume these responsibilities after Philip Wang’s death. You know, Burton Keegan has supervised four, no five, successful new drug applications for Rilke Pharma. He’s the best: he knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s too much at stake here, Ingram.’

  ‘Well, that’s a different matter. If I’d known—’

  ‘How are things going on the investigation, by the way? Has Kindred been found?’

  ‘Ah, no. Not yet. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The police have lost all trace of him. Baffling.’

  ‘We don’t need to rely exclusively on the police, thank god,’ Rilke said. What did he mean by that? Ingram wondered.

  Ingram sighed. ‘We ran our reward-advertisements for two whole weeks. The police think Kindred may have killed himself.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I, ah, I really don’t have an opinion.’

  ‘A dangerous state of mind, Ingram. If you don’t have an opinion, you can’t function.’ Rilke smiled.

  Ingram smiled back: safer to say nothing at these moments.

  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ Rilke said, standing, and hoiking his trouser waist up over his gut. ‘We submit Zembla-4 to the licensing authorities in the US and then the UK. The advertorials will begin to appear, first in learned medical journals, then in selected high-class outlets of the global media – New Yorker, Time, Economist, El Pais, Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, etcetera. Who can complain if a drug company declares that it is trying to eradicate asthma? Who can object to a mission statement? Then Rilke Pharmaceutical will offer to buy Calenture-Deutz at a moment of my choosing. But all this will happen only, I repeat, only after Adam Kindred is apprehended and dealt with.’

  ‘Yeeesssss,’ Ingram said slowly drawing the word out, like a piece of chewing gum, his mind whirring like a malfunctioning clockwork toy. ‘What’s, um, your timescale? When will all this start to happen?’

  ‘Maybe next month, all being well,’ Rilke said. ‘You’ll be an even richer man, Ingram. And the world will have its first fully functioning anti-asthma drug. It’s a no-lose situation.’

  Ingram was told that Colonel Fryzer could be found in the rose garden, so he set off through the well-tended grounds of Trelawny Gables in search of his father. He wandered along the meandering pathways of this high-priced, private, sheltered housing, passing uniformed nurses, white-overalled assistants pushing trolleys laden with meals, dry-cleaning, vases of flowers, wondering vaguely if this were the sort of place in which he would end his days – a five-star ante-room to oblivion with cordon-bleu catering. He was also wondering vaguely about his meeting with Alfredo Rilke and what was its real import, its gravitas. Keegan and de Freitas were staying, that much was clear, but it appeared to him there was a near unseemly rush to have Zembla-4 licensed. Philip Wang had always advocated the slow-but-steady route, that was how the Bynogol licence had gone through so smoothly … Ingram paused to sniff at a flower: he was almost sure something was going on behind his back – that he was not in full control of Calenture-Deutz any more was both as clear as day and very troubling.

  His father disliked Trelawny Gables with a calm but fierce intensity, Ingram knew, but he endured its customs and rituals with amused pragmatism. He didn’t blame his son that he had ended up here – at least Ingram hoped not as he now saw his father from a distance, spraying insecticide on rose bushes in a small arbour by the perimeter wall. He was a tall, lean, grey-haired man wearing an olive-green sleeveless fleece, a shirt and tie and neatly pressed blue jeans. Ingram had foresworn jeans at the age of forty – no mature or middle-aged man should be seen dead in them, he reasoned, but he had to admit they rather suited his father, now eighty-seven years old. Perhaps jeans were to be taken up again in one’s eighties …

  ‘Hello, Pa,’ he said, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Looking well.’

  Colonel Gregor Fryzer looked at his son closely – scrutinising me, Ingram thought, as if I were on parade. Ingram smiled at this old man’s foible but then worried – absurdly, he knew – that some scent of Phyllis was emanating from him, some odour of sex that only octogenarians could sniff out.

  ‘You seem a bit nervous, Ingram. Bit edgy.’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘I’ve always thought there was something a little fourbe about you.’

  ‘What does “fourbe” mean?’

  ‘Look it up when you get home.’

  They walked back to his small ground-floor flat – one bedroom with a sitting room, bathroom and kitchenette. The walls were covered with his father’s watercolours – still lifes in the main. His father’s pastimes were tying flies for fishing – that he sold – and painting.

  The Colonel went into the kitchen and returned with two gins and tonic, one ice cube in each, no slice of lemon. He handed one to Ingram and sat down and fitted a cigarette into a holder and lit it.

  ‘What can I do for you, Ingram?’

  ‘I just came to say hello – see how you were getting along. You know I pop up on a Saturday.’

  ‘You haven’t been here for two months. Thank god for Forty.’

  ‘Has Forty been here?’

  ‘He comes up twice a week. He’s got some kind of a contract for the gardens.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ This was news to Ingram. Forty was his youngest son. ‘We’ve been very busy,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Will you come to supper tonight? The whole family will be there. I thought it might—’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I’ll send a car, there and back.’

  ‘No thanks – there’s a documentary on Channel 4 I want to watch.’

  Ingram nodded – at least he’d asked. Meredith would have had a seizure if the Colonel had accepted. He felt the usual cocktail of emotions when confronted by his father: admiration, irritation, affection, frustration, pride, distaste. It astonished him, more often than not, to think this difficult old bastard had sired him. But sometimes all he wanted from his father was a sign of affection – a squeeze of his shoulder, a genuine smile. They sat there sipping their warmish gins and tonic like two strangers in a waiting room, bound only by their blood-line. He thought of his long-dead mother: time had transformed her – a diffident, neurotic woman – into something close to myth, a domestic saint. How he missed her.

  ‘Actually, I wanted to ask your design,’ Ingram began, carefully.

  ‘Ask my design?’

  ‘Sorry – advice.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The Colonel sounded surprised.

  ‘Yes. I think I may be …’ Ingram paused – suddenly having to articulate this intuition made it seem all the more real. ‘I think I may be about to be the victim of a boardroom putsch. I think it’ll look like I’m in charge, but I won’t be.’

  ‘I don’t understand your nasty little world, Ingram – finance, banking, pharmaceuticals. Who are these people plotting against you? Get rid of them. Cut out the cancer.’

  ‘I can’t do that, unfortunately.’

  ‘Then be cleverer than they are: second-guess them, preempt them, frustrate them.’ The Colonel removed his smoked cigarette from his holder and lit up another. ‘Get something on them, Ingram. Find a way of hurting them. Get some ammunition.’

  Not a bad idea, Ingram thought, wondering if this were possible, if he had enough time … Perhaps there were things he could do …

  ‘Thanks, Pa. I’d better be running along.’

  ‘Finish your gin before you go.’

  Ingram drank it down. Sometimes he disliked gin – he thought it made him depressed.

  When Ingram arrived home he took down the French dictionary from its shelf in the library and looked up the word ‘fourbe’. Sly, shifty and crafty were the synonyms on offer. Ingram felt a little hurt, for a second or two
– who did his father think was paying for Trelawny Gables? His army pension? – and then decided that it must have been the after-effects of his encounter with Rilke that had made him seem preoccupied and thoughtful. True, his brain had been working hard, his words of affection to his father had been token, insincere. Whatever quantities of guile he possessed were being summoned into action, like troops in reserve being called up, expelling his usual cultured, focussed politesse: typical of the Colonel to have sensed this.

  He poured himself a large Scotch in his dressing room and drank it before coming downstairs to his birthday party. His three children were already present – Guy, Araminta and Fortunatus – and a stranger, he noticed, someone quickly introduced as Forty’s boyfriend, Rodinaldo.

  ‘Have you met him before?’ he whispered to Meredith when he had a discreet moment.

  ‘A few times.’

  ‘He seems incredibly young.’

  ‘He’s the same age as Forty. They work together.’

  Maria-Rosa served his favourite supper: cheese soufflé, lamb shank with pommes dauphinoises, strawberries with champagne sorbet. The conversation around the table was banal, light-hearted, forgettable. Ingram looked closely at his children, rather in the way his father had looked at him: Guy, thirty years old, handsome, talentless; Araminta, starveling-thin and, to his eyes, almost visibly twitching with nerves. Perhaps his father’s ruthless objectivity was infecting him, but he realised anew, with no particular shock or guilt, that he didn’t much like Guy and Minty – he cared for them, but he didn’t much like them, to be honest, nor was he much interested in them. Only Fortunatus interested him – squat, muscley Forty, already seriously bald in his early twenties – gay, of all improbable things, the only one of his children who never asked him for anything, the only one he loved and the one who would not return it.

  ‘I saw Gramps today,’ Ingram said to him. ‘You’re working at Trelawny Gables, he said. What a coincidence.’

  ‘He got us the job,’ Forty said.

  ‘Really? …’ This required further thought. ‘So, Forty, how’s business?’

  ‘Dad, please, it’s Nate.’

  ‘I can’t call a child of mine “Nate”, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have called me Fortunatus.’

  “Fortunatus Fryzer”,’ Meredith said, ‘it’s a wonderful name.’

  ‘It sounds like a medieval alchemist,’ Forty/Nate said.

  ‘You know why we called you that, darling,’ Meredith continued, quietly.

  ‘Yes. Why is so?’ Rodinaldo said – his first words of the evening, Ingram realised.

  ‘He nearly died when he was born,’ Ingram said, remembering, his throat tightening as if by reflex. ‘We thought we’d lost him.’

  ‘And I nearly died too, ‘Meredith reminded him, with some ferocity. ‘We were both very lucky.’

  After dinner, Ingram was drawn aside by Guy, who asked him to invest £50,000 in a classic car business he was starting up.

  ‘What do you mean “classic cars”?’

  ‘We buy them, do them up and sell them at a profit. You know: Citroën DS, Triumph Stag, Ford Mustang, Jensen Interceptor – modern classics, timeless.’

  ‘What do you know about classic cars?’

  ‘A bit – well, not much. Alisdair’s the real expert. There’s a huge market in these cars, huge.’

  ‘Don’t you need a garage, a warehouse?’

  ‘Alisdair’s working on that. We just need some seed money – get us going.’

  ‘Been to a bank? They lend people money, you know.’

  ‘They were very unhelpful, really negative.’

  Ingram said he would think about it and excused himself and went off to his dressing room to drink more Scotch, he rather wanted to be drunk this evening, semi-lose control, for some reason. On his way back down the stairs Minty was waiting for him on a landing. She said she needed £2,000, cash, tonight.

  ‘No, darling, it’s impossible.’

  ‘Then I’ll go down to King’s Cross and sell myself to someone.’

  ‘Don’t be silly and dramatic, you know I hate it.’

  She began to cry. ‘I owe this person money. I have to pay him tonight.’

  Ingram went back up the stairs to his bedroom, opened the safe and returned with £800 and almost $2,000. Minty seemed suddenly calmer.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’d better go. Happy birthday.’ She gave him a swift peck on the cheek. ‘Don’t tell Mummy, please, not a word.’

  ‘Pay me back whenever you can,’ he said to her as she trotted down the stairs, with more bitterness in his voice than he meant.

  He followed her slowly down to the hall where Forty and Rodinaldo were putting on their jackets and rucksacks, not lingering either.

  ‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ Forty said and gave him a hug. For a second Ingram had his arms around his son before he broke free.

  ‘All going well with the gardening?’ Ingram asked.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  ‘I’d like to invest in it. You know: help you grow. Ha-ha.’ Ingram realised he was finally a little drunk – the Scotches and all the wine.

  ‘We’re very happy as we are. Small is beautiful.’

  Rodinaldo nodded. ‘Nate and me, we can to be everything that we wan’.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Ingram said. ‘Remember the offer’s on the table. New spades, new van, new …’ He couldn’t think what else a gardener might need, for some reason. ‘Anyway, I’m here.’ He felt drunken tears form in his eyes as he watched his youngest son pulling on some form of camouflage jacket. He wanted to hug him again, kiss him, but he stepped back and raised his hand in casual farewell. Meredith put her arm round his waist and squeezed discreetly. Ah, Ingram thought, just time for a PRO-Vyril.

  As they went upstairs to their bedrooms the phone rang.

  ‘I’d better get it,’ Ingram said.

  It was Burton Keegan.

  ‘It’s very late, Burton,’ Ingram said, keeping his voice deep and calm.

  ‘We need to meet – tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

  ‘The world’s still turning, Ingram.’

  18

  BOZZY HANDED OVER ADAM KINDRED’S mobile phone and his wallet containing his credit cards.

  Jonjo fanned them out. ‘They’re all American – except one.’

  ‘Yeah. We was going to come back to him – get the pin numbers. Zaz kicked him too hard, so we was a bit, you know, emotional. That’s why we left him. When we come back – he gone.’

  ‘Stop moving around like that. Getting on my nerves.’

  ‘Sorry, bruv. Flat.’ Bozzy tried to hold himself still.

  ‘And don’t call me “bruv”. I’m not your brother – not in any sense of the word.’

  ‘Safe. Check it, boss.’

  Jonjo put the cards and the phone in his pocket and gave Bozzy a couple more twenty-pound notes. From another pocket he drew out a roll of printed copies of Kindred’s wanted advertisement and handed them over.

  ‘Go round the estate. Show this to people and ask if they saw him that night.’

  Bozzy looked at Kindred’s picture.

  ‘That was the mim we jacked, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s wanted for murder. Killed a doctor.’

  ‘Cunt.’

  ‘Ask around,’ Jonjo said, then looked at the soles of his boots – he had stepped on something moist and sticky. He wiped the mess off on one of the mattresses.

  ‘You want to burn this place,’ he said. ‘I’m not meeting you here again, got it?’

  ‘Got it, boss.’

  ‘Find him,’ Jonjo said. ‘Somebody on this estate knows where Kindred is.’

  19

  WHEN YOU HAVE NOTHING, Adam thought, then everything, the tiniest thing, becomes a problem. In order to begin his begging life he had been obliged to steal – steal a felt-tip pen from a stationery shop. Then on a rectangle of cardboard ripped from an empty wine case
outside an off-licence he had written with the stolen felt-tip: ‘HUNGRY AND HOMELESS. SPARE A PENNY. BROWN COINS ONLY.’

  On his first day he had settled down outside a supermarket on the King’s Road. He sat cross-legged on the ground outside the main entrance and propped his sign against his knees. Almost immediately, people began giving him their brown coins, as if relieved to get rid of their annoying small change, the near useless, purse-filling one- and two-pence pieces. Adam was pleased to see how logical his reasoning had been: there is nothing more irritating than heavy pockets and purses full of small-denomination coins. ‘Buddy can you spare a dime’ had been his inspiration. He took his jacket off and spread it in front of his knees so that potential donors could toss their coins on to its material rather than risk contact with his grubby, black-nailed hand. In thirty minutes he had made £3.27. He filled his own pockets with pennies and tuppences – there was the odd five-pence piece as well – and someone had given him a pound, impressed by the modesty of his need and the politeness of his demand.

  Twenty minutes later, when he had crossed the £5 margin, a man came up and squatted beside him. He was young, very lean, thickly bearded like Adam and just as dirty.

  ‘Mshkin n gsadnka,’ he said, or something that sounded like it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Adam said, ‘I only speak English.’

  ‘Fucking off,’ the man said and showed Adam the blade of a Stanley knife in the palm of his hand. ‘I here. It belong me. I cut you.’

  Adam left promptly and walked to Victoria Station where he found a patch of pavement between a cash-point and a souvenir shop. He made another pound or so before the owner of the souvenir shop came out and sprayed him with insecticide.

  ‘Fuck off, you asylum scum,’ the man said. And so Adam moved on, his eyes stinging.

  He had made £6.13 his first day; he made £6.90 his second. Now, mid-afternoon on his third day of begging – situated between a newsagent’s and a small twenty-four-hour supermarket called PROXI-MATE – he had garnered another £5 plus. At this rate, he calculated, say £5 per day, he would make £35 per week, almost £2,000 per year. He was both relieved by this and depressed. It meant he wouldn’t starve – he could now afford to buy cheap un-nutritious food, and every now and then go to the Church of John Christ for a proper meal and, of course, sleep rough in the triangle by Chelsea Bridge. But it was early summer – what would he do in December or February? He felt ensnared, already – in a particularly impoverished poverty trap. He saw himself stuck in a barely tolerable circle of hell – underground, yes, undiscovered, yes – but something had to change. How was he going to recover his old life, his old persona? He once had had a wife, a nice, roomy, modern air-conditioned home, a car, a job, a title, a future. This existence he was living now was so marginal it couldn’t really be described as human. He was like the London pigeons he saw around him, pecking in the gutter. Even the urban foxes were better off with their warm dens and families.