Bear Necessity

by James Gould-Bourn

  “Work?” said Danny, blanking for a second. Nobody had asked him that question since he’d been fired. “Oh, you mean work. At the building site. Where I work. Yeah, it was great, thanks, Mo. Well, not great but, you know, okay. Pretty rubbish, come to think of it. Just, like, lots of digging and carrying stuff and… are you staying for dinner? You’re more than welcome.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Malooley, but Will’s coming to mine for dinner if that’s okay. We’re just picking up some video games.”

  “Right,” said Danny, partly relieved because he didn’t have much food in the house, but also slightly disappointed that he wouldn’t get to spend any time with Will that evening. They might not have much to say to one another, but having a silent meal with his son was still the highlight of his day.

  Will stuffed some video games into his bag and nudged Mo towards the door.

  “Bye, Mr. Malooley.”

  “Bye, Mo. Have fun, Will.” He watched the boys disappear down the corridor, but Will didn’t turn around.

  * * *

  Danny threw the panda costume into the washing machine and filled the drawer to the brim with detergent. He turned the dial to the monster three-hour wash-and-dry setting that Liz sometimes used to use when Will was younger and had a penchant for rolling around in things that even dogs would think twice about. When the cycle finally finished, Danny cautiously sniffed the costume. It wasn’t quite as bad as before, but it still smelled as bad as he imagined a bear in the wild might smell, so he pumped it with Febreze until his finger cramped up and then looked for a place to hide it. He didn’t want to hang it in his wardrobe for fear that it might infect his other clothes, so he hung it on the back of the wardrobe door, which he then opened to conceal the costume in the small space between the door and the wall near the window (which he also opened).

  Weary after such a long and eventful day, Danny collapsed on the living room couch and slowly ran his hands across his face. Realizing he was being watched, he turned to look at Liz, who was smiling at him from the picture frame on the coffee table. Danny smiled back.

  “What the fuck am I doing, Liz?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Reluctant to return to the park without a license and not yet ready to face the wrath of more angry parents and their shin-kicking gremlins, Danny spent the following day at home.

  Inspired by his conversation with Tim, he sat down to make a list of all the things he could do that people might want to pay him for, but ten minutes later the page was still blank, so he decided to make a list of all the things he couldn’t do instead.

  He couldn’t play an instrument, that much he was sure of. Nor did he have the time to learn one, except for perhaps the triangle, which he’d briefly played in the school band before the music teacher decided it was a little above his station and demoted him to the kazoo. Even if he had been the world’s best triangler, however, the Mozart of the triangle world, the Jay-Z of the idiophone, Danny highly doubted that a panda whacking a three-sided piece of metal on a string was enough to draw the crowds, no matter how skillfully he whacked it.

  Magic was another thing that Danny knew nothing about, even though his father had pulled off a vanishing act that David Copperfield would be envious of, but like all true magicians, the man had never revealed his secrets and he never returned for an encore. As for juggling, Danny couldn’t even catch a cold, let alone a handful of bowling pins, tennis balls, oversize nuts, or anything else that people threw and caught for the amusement of others—but he was still better at that than he was at dancing, a word he underlined twice and accompanied with several exclamation marks.

  He and Liz were similar in so many ways—they both wore their socks in bed, they both liked Marmite, they both knew all the lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song, they both had Piers Morgan on their list of people to invite to a poisoned dinner party—but they couldn’t have been more different when it came to the dance floor. Liz could move to anything. Pop. Classical. Punk. Trance. Reggae. Country. She could even dance to post-rock, something Danny didn’t even realize was possible. Movement came so naturally to her that her mother used to say that she could dance before she could walk. That’s why they’d signed her up for ballet lessons at such an early age, but ballet was too restrictive for Liz. She didn’t have the patience or the discipline to dance according to somebody else’s rules. The more rules there were, the less fun it was, and if it wasn’t fun then it wasn’t dancing. It was performing, and Liz didn’t care about performing, which was why she became a part-time teaching assistant at the local primary school instead of pursuing a dancing career, a decision that Danny had quietly respected despite knowing what a rare and remarkable talent she was wasting.

  He knew she had a gift the very first time they’d met, when Katie, a mutual friend of theirs who ended up marrying a remarkably unattractive and overweight man who, irrespective of his shortcomings, still managed to find at least three people to have affairs with, invited Liz to Danny and Katie’s school disco, an event that lived long in the memories of those who attended for no other reason than that somebody actually danced that night. Kids didn’t go to the disco to dance. They went to cop a feel, or to try to cop a feel, or pretend to cop a feel so they could tell their mates about it. The dance floor was treated like a weird uncle at a birthday party: it had to be there, but everybody went out of their way to avoid it. Everybody but Liz, that is. While the other kids were fumbling in the dark or pretending to be drunk on the one sip of the one Bacardi Breezer that somebody had managed to smuggle in, Liz was busy tearing up the dance floor, much to the joy of the otherwise redundant DJ. When the music finally stopped and the teachers sent the kids home so they could get their own party underway, Katie, Liz, Danny, and his friend Mike went back to Katie’s house where, in the absence of her parents, who had gone away for the weekend, the four of them drank a crusty bottle of ouzo they found in the back of the liquor cabinet, a decision that resulted in Katie waking up facedown in the flower bed, Mike waking up with two of his teeth in his pocket, and Danny and Liz waking up together, fully clothed, in each other’s arms, with no recollection of how they got there but no immediate desire to disentangle themselves.

  Whereas his late wife was something of a natural on the dance floor, Danny was closer to a natural disaster. His problem was simple. He had no rhythm. He could follow a beat and he could just about bob his head along to it, but everything seemed to fall apart the moment his limbs got wind of the party. His arms and legs would run riot whenever he tried to dance, kicking out here and lashing out there like a deep-sea diver suffering from the bends. They didn’t obey the music. They didn’t even obey Danny. The only thing they answered to was the God of Shitty Dance Moves, a merciless deity who could only be appeased by the public sacrifice of Danny’s dignity, which was why he never stepped foot on a dance floor unless the rest of the room was on fire.

  Still, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t, in the slightest—dancing was his best course of action. Unlike musicians and magicians and the various other performers he’d seen, dancers didn’t require any special equipment to get an act up and running. All Danny needed was a CD player, which he had, and his legs, which he also had, at least for another six weeks or so. Gently rubbing the bruise on his shin, Danny also reasoned that children would find it much harder to land a decent kick on a moving target than they would on, say, a guitarist, or a mime, or anybody brave or stupid enough to choose the life of a human statue.

  He stared at the word he’d scribbled down. Dancing. The sight of it made him shudder, but then he thought about Mr. Dent’s hammer and his shudder turned into a full-body spasm, the type that occurs when your shirt label tickles your neck and you momentarily think it’s a spider.

  He was still spasming when his phone rang.

  “What type of panda are you?” said Ivan.

  “What?” said Danny.

  “Panda,” said Ivan. �
�What type?”

  “A Chinese one, I guess? I don’t know. Do pandas come from anywhere else?”

  “For panda license,” said Ivan. “I maybe find person who can help but they ask what type of panda are you. You sing? You dance? You play harmoshka? What?”

  Danny stared at the pad on his lap.

  “Danny?”

  “I dance,” said Danny. “I’m a dancing panda.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Danny was watching TV alone when Ivan called the following evening. Will had asked to sleep at Mo’s (well, Mo had asked) and Danny had reluctantly agreed, but he was glad of the arrangement when Ivan said to meet him at midnight in Peckham. Ivan offered to lend him the thirty pounds that the license was going to cost, but Danny politely refused, not wanting to be in debt to any more people than he had to be, even if one of those people was a friend. He had some rapidly dwindling savings to be used in absolute emergencies, most of which had come from Liz, or, to be more precise, Liz’s parents, who used to give her envelopes full of money for every birthday, Christmas, and any other occasion they could think of. It used to annoy Liz, who rightly or wrongly perceived the gifts as some kind of jab at their less-than-impressive income and refused to spend the money, but Danny was suddenly grateful for those envelopes as he plucked three notes from the small bundle that remained and stuffed them into his pocket.

  * * *

  The building looked as if it had once been scheduled for demolition, something that appeared to have partly gone ahead before the council had a change of heart and decided to pardon the half-mangled eyesore. Ivan was lurking in the graffiti-riddled entrance, where somebody called ChikNwings and somebody called what looked like Bumfuzzle had been waging a war of words by tagging as many surfaces as possible. Bumfuzzle appeared to be winning.

  Ivan seemed nervous, which made Danny nervous, because anything that made Ivan nervous was almost certainly worth getting nervous about.

  “You okay?” said Danny.

  “You bring money?” said Ivan, ignoring the question.

  Danny flashed him the bills. Ivan nodded.

  “You bring weapon?” he said.

  “Weapon?”

  “You know. Bang-bang. Stab-stab,” said Ivan with accompanying hand gestures.

  “No, Ivan, I didn’t bring a weapon. You didn’t ask me to bring a weapon.”

  Ivan nodded and checked his watch.

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me something?”

  “Is fine. We go.”

  Danny followed Ivan into the building. He found himself in a dimly lit lobby that smelled like a well-used urinal cake. Ivan pressed the button for the lift, which seemed to work, much to Danny’s surprise, although the way it clacked and clunked on the way down suggested that it probably wouldn’t be working for much longer.

  “Maybe it’s safer if we take the stairs,” said Danny.

  “You want to take stairs, take stairs,” said Ivan as the doors rattled open. “I take lift.”

  Danny peered into the gloom of the stairwell. It was so dark that only the first five steps were visible, upon which lay a bundle of clothes that on closer inspection turned out to be a person, who might or might not have been breathing. Danny got into the lift.

  “So how do you know this guy?” he said.

  “I don’t,” said Ivan. “My friend, he knows him. Well, friend of sister of friend. He do business with The Shark one time, he says he get good service.”

  “The Shark? That’s his name?”

  “Not his real name. Is just what people call him.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up,” said Danny. “Why do people call him The Shark?”

  “Because he likes water? I don’t know. Why else would he be called The Shark?”

  “Because he loans people money with insanely high interest rates? Because he eats people? Because he’s a merciless, dead-eyed predator?”

  Ivan thought about this for a second. “Good point,” he said.

  The lift lurched. Danny grabbed Ivan’s arm and quickly let go when he realized they weren’t about to plummet to their deaths.

  “So did they look genuine?” said Danny.

  “Did what look genuine?”

  “Whatever your friend’s sister’s friend bought. What was it anyway? Passport? Driving license?”

  “Dynamite,” said Ivan.

  “Dynamite?!”

  “No. Is wrong word. Not dynamite.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Danny.

  “I mean the hand bomb. You know? You pull the thing and you throw the other thing?”

  “A grenade?”

  “Grenade,” said Ivan. “Yes. He buy the grenade. Soviet limonka. Very good.”

  “What the fuck, Ivan? I thought this guy sold fake documents!”

  “He sells many things,” said Ivan, smiling. “He is ‘entrepreneur,’ as you say.”

  The lift stopped and the doors opened. Danny stayed close to Ivan as they slowly walked down a long and dingy corridor towards the only door with a light beneath it. Ivan knocked six times: thrice, then twice, then once. The sound of chains being unchained and locks being unlocked came from inside the flat before the pair were greeted by a thickset man in a black leather jacket with slicked-back hair and a bushy mustache.

  “We are looking for The Shark,” said Ivan. The man looked him up and down and grunted. He did the same with Danny. After frisking them both with alarming thoroughness, he grunted again, stepped aside, and motioned for them to enter.

  The apartment had been completely gutted of anything with purpose or value. Absent carpets exposed rotting floorboards, rusty hinges waited in empty doorways, wires protruded from naked light fittings. Even the windows had gone, their frames now home to ugly tapestries of black bin liners and damp pieces of cardboard. Only a desk and a chair remained, both of which were occupied by a man with a mouthful of shiny gold teeth and a left eye that stared off slightly to the right.

  “Mr. Dancing Bear!” said The Shark in an accent that was north of Manchester but south of Newcastle. He stood and spread his arms in welcome.

  Danny, being almost as nervous as he was unaccustomed to the etiquette for greeting members of the criminal underworld, thought the man wanted a hug, which was what he gave him, much to the surprise of The Shark and much to the horror of Ivan.

  “So,” said the man, awkwardly adjusting his jacket. He sat back down and indicated for Danny and Ivan to do the same despite there being no chairs available. “How many would you gentlemen like?”

  “How many?” said Danny. He glanced at Ivan, but Ivan just shrugged. “Well, just the one, please.”

  “Just the one, please,” said The Shark in an accent designed to impersonate Danny but which actually sounded like Dick Van Dyke impersonating a poor Dick Van Dyke impersonator. He removed a ziplock bag from his desk drawer and gently placed it in front of him. The bag was full of pinkish pills. “Voilà.”

  “What’s this?” said Danny with a nervous laugh.

  “What’s this?” said The Shark, imitating Danny again. He gave his friend a get-a-load-of-this-guy look. “It’s what you asked for.”

  Danny looked at Ivan, hoping for some kind of explanation, but Ivan looked equally confused.

  The Shark opened the bag and removed a handful of pills. He popped one into his mouth and offered them to Danny. “Here,” he said. “Have a try.” He winked at Danny with his dodgy eye.

  “I’d really rather not.”

  “It’s good stuff, I promise.”

  “Thanks, but—”

  “Go on.”

  “I—”

  The Shark pulled a Taser from his jacket pocket and placed it on the desk.

  “Don’t mind if I do!” said Danny. He pinched a pill from The Shark’s hand and winced as it crawled down his painfully dry throat. Ivan did the same.

  The Shark flashed them a dull metallic grin and swallowed the remaining pills—six or seven at least—in one hungry gulp. Sudd
enly he twitched and clutched his chest, and for a brief moment Danny thought that the man might be having a heart attack, but before he’d finished trying to recall his first aid training (was it “Nellie the Elephant” or “Little Miss Muffet” he had to sing while doing the chest compressions? and was it fifteen compressions to two breaths, or fifteen breaths to two compressions?), and before he was able to decide whether it was even ethical to use said training to resuscitate somebody who sold drugs and occasionally grenades for a living, The Shark reached into his jacket and pulled out a trembling mobile phone. He answered the call and started chatting to a man called Rodney while Danny attempted to confer with Ivan via several furtive glances.

  “What the fuck did we just take?” said Danny’s glance.

  “What?” said Ivan’s glance.

  “I’m starting to feel a bit weird. My fingers are buzzing. Are your fingers buzzing? My fingers are buzzing.”

  “Why you are looking at me like that?”

  “Am I having a stroke? Is that what this is?”

  “Seriously, stop looking at me like that.”

  “I really think we should get out of here,” said Danny with his eyebrows.

  “You look like crazy person right now.”

  “What do you think? Should we make a run for it?”

  “Are you even in control of your eyebrows anymore?”

  “He’s got a Taser though. Probably not a good idea.”

  “My fingers are buzzing.” Ivan started rubbing his fingers. “Are your fingers buzzing?”

  “Would it be weird if I started dancing? Like, right now?”

  “So,” said The Shark, ending his call. “Where were we?”

  “Money,” said his friend, who Danny had forgotten was still behind him.

  “Look, I think there’s been some mistake,” said Danny. “I’m not here to buy… whatever it is I just swallowed.”

  “Mistake?” said The Shark. His gold teeth shone but there was no warmth in his smile. “What mistake? You asked for dancing bear, this is dancing bear.” He prodded the pills with his finger. “You asked for one kilo, this is one kilo.” He prodded the pills again, this time more aggressively.