by Drew Davies
JoJo opens her eyes. There’s a crescent moon tonight, it keeps slipping behind the clouds, but she can see it now through the large bay windows of their Battersea townhouse (they’ve never closed the curtains, the angle of the bedroom and a few well-placed trees affording them privacy).
She looks at him now. He’s turned away from her, the sheets pulled protectively under his arm. Apart from the sound of his breathing, Frank is not making any discernible noise, which is unusual – he can snore, grind his teeth, talk and mumble in his sleep if the fancy takes him. Break wind too. The nuns never prepared JoJo for the likes of that.
It’s what she missed most, not the farting, that’s for certain, but having another living breathing human beside her at the end of the day. He had travelled on business, of course, but she always knew he was coming home. When Frank left her that bright spring morning, it didn’t really sink in until she was lying in bed, and found herself all off-balance, like one person on a see-saw.
Is Belinda feeling that sense of aloneness now? JoJo pushes away the thought, but it slips behind her and round the other side. Belinda, with her close-cropped hair. Belinda, the writer for The Economist magazine who’d met Frank at a gala dinner and asked him outright for an interview – Frank who didn’t court the media (‘Court them? Won’t fucking put up with their shit more like!’) – it was quite the coup. JoJo had read the article at a train station. There was nothing flirtatious in it, nothing that would hint at the eighteen months to come, and anyhow, why should JoJo suspect? She and Frank had an agreement. They had been through many things: her hysterectomy, the death of his brother in a skiing accident, his cancer scare. But the rule stayed the same: be with me if you want to be. The moment you don’t, the moment it gets too much, or the urge for the unknown gets too strong, they would tell the other and move on. They even shook hands on it – a gentleman’s agreement. She’d meant it too. It wasn’t some feminist dogma motivating her or an attempt to call his bluff, but a strange sense of entitlement. JoJo had never been the most beautiful woman in the world, but she kept a good figure and people still found her face pleasant enough – the bridge of her nose wrinkling when she smiled. She ignored every faddish hairstyle: strictly no tapering, no texturing, no layering, no nape undercut, no feathering, no bangs, nothing choppy, something simple yet sophisticated – what the wife of a disgraced French politician might wear – a naturally grey imperceptibly tousled bob. She had wit and charm (when she chose to), and felt a keen sense of her own worth and – something deeper – a knowledge that she deserved to be loved. JoJo had met many glamorous and wealthy women in her life, but very few seemed to share this power. And that’s what hurt the most, that Frank had betrayed her in such a conventional way. He had lied to her, slept with a woman half his age – it was all so boring and hurtful. Hadn’t they agreed they would save each other the embarrassment? Hadn’t they shaken on it?
JoJo takes a deep breath – she’s wound herself up now. She considers getting up to make a hot drink, but just then Frank rolls over onto his back. Isn’t it strange, she thinks, how you can tell in a darkened room if a person’s eyes are open? You’d say it was the moonlight catching them, but she checks, the moon is hidden behind the clouds again.
Frank reaches out and takes her hand, stroking it with his thumb. It’s not suggestive – neither of them wants any more sex tonight – merely reassuring, and for some reason it makes JoJo’s eyes well up. Stop this, she thinks. What do you have to cry about? He’s here, isn’t he? You could have taken him for everything he was worth or gone potty and cut up his clothes. But you didn’t. You bided your time and when the moment came, you brought him back, like a ship that had veered off course. That took nerve. Your pride was on the line. But you did it. You won. How many wives can say that?
The old war cry is tiring, and thankfully, she lets it fade. JoJo stares out of the window in that comfortable place of no thought for some time and the trivialities of the day begin drifting back to her. She recalls an article she’d read in the morning – one of those ‘isn’t the world funny?’ pieces The Telegraph seemed full of these days. Apparently – all these articles needed to be prefixed with ‘apparently’ – we each carry an average of nine keys, but can only identify what six of them are for. JoJo had taken out her own set then and counted them. Ten. Close. She’d inspected them one by one. There were the house keys, two of them, and the retractable car key, a heavy one for the shed, and a slighter key for the small greenhouse where she tried (and mostly failed) to grow hothouse tomatoes. One for her wardrobe – though she never locked it, she should really take it off – and another for the cottage. That left three. The first was small and silver – it might open a music box of some kind, the sort where a ballerina twirls to chintzy music – but it was probably for an ancient piece of luggage that had been thrown away years ago. The second was a lever key, not quite silver, not quite brass, with a simple flat top head. It was cold in her hand and seemed to be made of denser metal than the others – perhaps it opened a gate, although JoJo couldn’t imagine where. The final key appeared to be a copy – it had the local locksmith’s name stamped into it – and seemed out of place among the other keys, too, shiny and unmarked, as if it had been cut only yesterday. How had she not noticed it?
Lying in the darkness, JoJo turns the mystery keys around in her mind again. She has a sense that they are definitely hers; there is a certain familiarity to them, but this only makes it more annoying. Not only has she been proven statistically average by The Telegraph, but she feels that somewhere, something is waiting for her, unopened and therefore, by some means, unfinished…
Frank clears his throat. She was almost asleep, JoJo realises now, in that strange mental place where we forget which room we’re in, our names, where the bed seems to float in the ether.
He speaks then; JoJo hears the words, but for a second they don’t register, like a key she can’t quite make fit.
‘She’s pregnant, you know.’
And just like that, the lock clicks open.
Four
On Monday morning – the first Monday in October – Adam wakes with his alarm at six o’clock to shower, shave and get dressed. He eats a hurried breakfast of brown toast and marmalade (trying not to get crumbs on his suit) and leaves the house just before Patrick is due to get up at half past six. It’s drizzling outside, and although Adam is a fervent defender of Hackney’s very rough-around-the-edges east London charm, even he has to admit it’s especially grim and sodden this morning. A rubbish bag has been torn apart by foxes – vegetable peelings, cigarette butts and one bloated disposable nappy, strewn across the footpath – and despite the rain, the air is heavy with car fumes. He opens his umbrella, picks his way through the peelings and sets off along the road.
Half an hour later, Adam has joined the stream of people walking west – it’s like stepping onto a conveyor belt, one that winds itself along towards the City. There, their paths begin to diverge: the secretaries and paralegals in white trainers, the coffee runners and office goons, the bonus chasers, the hotshots in pinstripes, the secret millionaires and atop them all, those masters of the Universe.
As Adam walks, he lists his options, like a soldier about to go over the top. He could turn and run. He could distract himself, maybe head to the gym – he might feel differently after a good long steam? But despite these alternatives, he stays on course. It’s almost out of his control now anyway. Something bigger is in operation. Mercer and Daggen is calling.
Arriving at the building, Adam stands on the opposite side of the street, shielding his face with the umbrella. It looks warm inside. Warm and dry. A tall security guard – no sleepy hound-dog today – is standing to attention beside the doors, inspecting each new person as they walk in, watching as they swipe their card and push through the turnstile (tink-tink-tink, thinks Adam). The security guard can’t remember all their faces though, can he? Adam keeps count – four people arrive within ten seconds. That’s – he takes his mo
bile out of his pocket and selects the calculator app – twenty-four people a minute or 1,440 an hour. There are peaks too, moments when a group appears, five or six people arriving in the foyer together, holding the door open for the others or shaking the water from their brollies. If he times his arrival with one of these flash mobs, he’ll be just another face in the crowd. Simple.
‘Insane,’ Adam mutters under his breath.
His phone vibrates. It’s a text message from Patrick:
Mate! You left before I could say good luck! Congrats on being a wage slave again! Gonna miss having a house bitch to fold my washing though… Beers later to celebrate?
Adam clicks his phone to sleep mode, slips it back in his pocket and crosses the road. His heart is thumping in his chest and his legs feel too springy, as if he’s bouncing towards Mercer and Daggen. ‘Walk normally!’ he commands his legs – he must look like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, bounding up to the front doors.
Adam gets a better view of the security guard now. He’s tall and broad, with olive skin, and sports a buzz cut that accentuates the strong angles of his skull. He’s chewing gum slowly and his jaw bulges menacingly each time he masticates – he’s probably not supposed to chew gum on the job, thinks Adam, but he does anyway. That’s the kind of man this security guard is. He’ll enforce the rules, but he won’t live by them.
Adam remembers to push, not pull the door handle (only a complete rookie would pull it, thank God he didn’t stumble at the first hurdle!) and collapses his umbrella as he whisks through the doors. His heart is beating so hard now, he’s sure it must be audible. A queue has formed behind the two turnstiles and he walks up to the one on the right, furthest away from the security guard.
Sitting behind the reception desk, he sees today, is an alarmingly pretty brunette with bright red lips: she’s cradling a phone between her shoulder and ear, perfectly manicured hands flipping through a folder of papers.
‘No, it’s not here,’ she says down the phone, with a slight twang to her voice. American? Canadian maybe? ‘I’m telling you, it’s not. I can fax it to you if you want? Fine.’ She hangs up the phone and huffs. ‘He won’t find it,’ she says to no one in particular.
Adam reluctantly pulls his gaze away from the beautiful receptionist and risks a peek at the security guard. Mr Mastication is staring out through the glass doors so Adam slips his hand into his left pocket and removes the security card, holding it photo side down. He’s taken precautions with his appearance today – blow-drying the kink out of his hair to make it as straight as possible, and wearing a similar shirt to the one Mark J. Smith has in the photo – but he’s not sure if it’s helped or hindered. Is he a believable doppelgänger or a game of ‘spot the difference’? – Adam can’t decide.
One thing is almost certain: the security card he found two days ago is likely deactivated – the card reported missing or stolen by Mark the moment he realised it was gone from his wallet. Adam is under no illusion about the square of plastic he’s holding.
There’s someone behind him now: Adam is locked into the queue. A bead of sweat runs down his back.
Focus, he thinks.
There are just two people in front of Adam now – a stout older gentleman in pole position, and behind him, a man in wet cycling gear. The older gent is having trouble with his card, he keeps swiping it through the reader but the light on the turnstile stays obstinately red. Stubbornly, he swipes it again and again, cursing and increasingly flustered.
‘Can I help?’ the receptionist asks, one slender hand resting on the counter. ‘Let me see.’ She takes the card from the man and rubs it on her sleeve. ‘It’s the static,’ she explains, still rubbing, ‘I don’t know why it works, but it does. Try it now.’ The receptionist hands the card back to him, and this time when he swipes, the light clicks green.
‘Hey presto!’ she says with a smile, but the stout man shoves his way through the turnstile without a thank you or even a backwards glance. Adam is about to tut and roll his eyes – let the receptionist know not everyone accepts such bad manners – but he pulls himself up sharply. He can’t start flirting with the receptionist, he has to keep his head down and concentrate. The consequences of failing are too great for him to even consider, and he only gets one chance at this. One chance.
Adam takes a quick look of the security guard before he—
The guard turns to meet his gaze.
Shit, buggery, bugger. Adam turns back. The man in cycling gear has misplaced his card – this delay, added to the kerfuffle with the gentleman, is making the people behind Adam defect to the other queue. He feels exposed now and the sweat down his back is slicking his shirt against his skin in a very uncomfortable way.
Is the security guard still staring at him?
Adam turns again. Yes, yes, he is.
‘Mondays, huh?’ says Adam, rolling his eyes.
The security guard nods – he knows all about Mondays (sardonic chew, sardonic chew) – until a new arrival in the foyer draws the guard’s attention.
The cycling man has found his card now so Adam quickly extends the shaft of his collapsible umbrella, the head of the brolly on its longest pole, and readies himself. He spent the previous day in the Underground trying to master the exact timing, but managed to get it right only half the time – more often than not the turnstile would snap closed. The trick was to fully cover the sensor panel on the turnstile without the person in front realising they were being tailgated, but it was a real art, and much harder than the dodgy website Adam had researched made it sound.
Cycling man swipes his card – it takes only one attempt for the light to click green this time – and as he walks through the turnstile, lifting his cycle helmet and bag over the metal arms, Adam extends the umbrella head so it slides along the side of the turnstile. He’s purposefully left the umbrella canopy unfastened so it hangs down and covers more space allowing greater room for error, but if he doesn’t cover the motion sensor in time, the man will pass through the turnstile, it will click back to red and all will be lost. ‘Tink-tink-tink’ – Adam holds his breath – ‘click’. Red.
As a last attempt, Adam swipes his card – maybe he has been overly pessimistic, perhaps it would still work? But the light stays red. Mark must have already called it in.
Game over.
It was game on. Chris called the following night, which was charming, and then the night after, which was cute, and then they had a ritual to follow, and Daisy began surreptitiously clearing her evening schedule to make sure she wouldn’t miss his calls. There was something about talking on the telephone, how intimate it was. Yes, Daisy spoke to her mother almost every day, but there was no new information there, save a few details, and Daisy was usually on her laptop, on the Internet, half listening anyway – except the other night, when she told her parents about him. ‘What’s he like?’ her mum had asked. ‘Tall and posh,’ Daisy had answered. ‘Literally or comparatively?’ Dad had yelled at the phone, once her mother had relayed this information. ‘Both!’ Daisy yelled back.
Phone calls with Chris were different. Daisy would prepare the space – moving the washing off the comfortable chair so she could sit, dimming the lights, making sure her flatmate wasn’t in hearing distance, and pre-boiling the noisy kettle so she could have a hottish drink if she wanted, without having to yell. She’d even brush her teeth. Although she was expecting it, the ringing phone always startled Daisy, making her yelp. And then they’d talk about nothing really, nothing of substance – the people they’d seen that day (a woman so swollen she looked as if she was about to pop – ‘How does she get her shoes on?’ Chris had asked, ‘pregnancy truly is a miracle.’), the mishaps (a sheepish man on the Jubilee line platform with his foot stuck between the train doors) and near misses. Or they would choose a random TV channel or a show to stream, the kookier the better, and try to orientate themselves in an old Western or a Japanese cooking programme, building surreal character motivations into a narrative all their own. T
hese moments seemed the most intimate, when there were long stretches of silence between them, and Daisy wanted to ask, ‘are you still there, Chris?’, feeling the tension of this question building in her throat – but of course, he always was.
Adam retracts the umbrella quickly, palms the card and moves out of the queue, resting his backpack against the reception desk. Here, he pretends to search for his ID to buy himself some time while he figures out what the hell to do next. The receptionist glances up and Adam smiles, remembering to engage with his eyes (he’d practised earlier that morning while shaving) and she returns it with a clinical ‘I get paid to be nice to people’ smile of her own.
He should leave this very second. Chalk this up to experience, one that – mercifully – didn’t get him arrested. If he goes right now, he might even catch the end of his favourite daytime TV show, Cash in the Attic.
Adam wonders if things would be different – scientifically speaking – if his penis were bigger. In the same way that children with vocational surnames (Baker, Pilot) have a greater chance of joining the profession when they grow up (according to the theory of nominative determinism), surely added swagger in the trouser department would have incrementally boosted his confidence over the years? Adam would probably be one of those guys who could talk his way into the building and bed the receptionist to boot – Jason Bourne by way of James Bond. Instead, he’s a sweating, nervous wreck, emptying his pockets (which mostly contain used tissues) in front of a very pretty woman for a third time.