So, she wouldn’t go home. When she talked herself out of the hospital, she’d go to the best hotel she had the energy to drive to, Glasgow probably, and she’d book their best room, so long as it had a bath. A bath in the middle of the floor would be best. She never wanted to feel cooped up again. A slipper bath in the middle of a huge room and she’d fill it with bubbles until the foam surged over the rolled edge and broke off to float around the room in scented clouds. She would sink under the perfumed water and feel the dirt lifting off her in oily ribbons that floated to the surface and … popped all the bubbles.
She edited the daydream. She would step into a shower first. A rainforest shower where a hot stream fell from the ceiling like a torrential tropical storm. And it would have glass walls she could see right through so it felt as if she was standing in open space. She would wash herself, scour her hair with three changes of shampoo and then slick it with a whole bottle of conditioner. She would scrub her body with a rough mitt, dollops of gel turning it slidy. She would screw the corner of a flannel into her ears, and her nostrils and her navel. She would straddle the showerhead and turn the dial to a jet instead of a rain, then she’d squat and she’d shut her eyes against the flakes of dried blood from two shameful months of soaking through her meagre rags and paper, two shameful months of strained chalky shitting from the starvation rations those two witches were keeping them on. She’d shut her eyes as all of it ran away down the drain, then she’d sit down on the clean tiles and rub soap between her toes, running a fingernail under her toenails and flicking the worms of dirt and skin down the drain too.
Then, clean, she’d step into that free-standing bath, with a table nearby, a glass of champagne and a box of—
‘Chocolate?’ Ivy’s voice rose to a squawk. ‘Chocolate? You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Why?’
‘Constipation,’ Ivy said. ‘There’s no roughage in chocolate.’
‘Fine,’ Martine said. ‘A glass of champagne and a box of dates. A champagne and prune juice cocktail.’
But Ivy wasn’t always listening. She wasn’t listening now. She had gone on her own favourite journey, a trip away from the fetid air around her and the rough concrete under her. An excursion inside herself. She took herself between her lips and down her throat, deep into her own belly. It started with a cold glass, taken out of a freezer and spangled with glorious fractals of ice, glittering like jewels. Into it went a smoothie of strawberries, blueberries, mangoes, and pineapple. Thick, full-cream yoghurt and a splash of rum and she would drink it down in one long gulp, ignoring the ache in her head and the cramp in her stomach from the cold. Then she would eat a salad of the crispest, greenest lettuce leaves, and the nippiest, pepperiest rocket leaves, and the softest, sweetest spinach leaves, so succulent she had to swallow their juice as she chewed. There would be pomegranate scattered on the leaves, like a cooking programme on the telly, and capers that burst in her mouth, flakes of chili that made her sneeze, little pickled mustard seeds that popped on her tongue and, when she was finished, she would lift the bowl and drink the remnants of black balsamic dressing. And when she had drunk the dressing she would wipe her finger round the bowl and lick it.
Then she’d eat a skate wing, brown and buttery, and a heap of tiny potatoes dredged in flecks of mint and a corn-sheaf of blackened grilled asparagus with hot lemon butter. And she’d sip ice-cold, sweet white wine, just the way she liked it and she’d never let anyone sneer her into ordering dry again. And when she had stopped gasping and burping and her stomach had quietened, she’d take a whole pavlova, the serving plate just for herself, balanced on her lap, and she would dig her spoon into a pistachio-coloured splat of passionfruit and down through the cloud of cream, whipped thick and sharp with sherry, and she’d smash the sweet toffee-brown meringue and lift the first spoonful, the very thought of the tart fruit making her mouth squirt water as she opened her lips.
It was the fur on her teeth that always brought her back again. She ran her tongue along them, dreaming of passionfruit, pomegranate and brown-buttered skate, and felt the rough coat of plaque that had softened them like lichen on gravestones. Then she’d taste her tongue, the dark, sour pelt it wore. She would feel the cracks at the corners of her lips and the flat puckered scab of her last cold sore.
But even when she was back, on the pad, on the floor, in the dark, her stomach stayed lost in the daydream, growling and gripping, whining like a child. At least this time there was a distraction. There was another woman standing there. Ivy could see a suggestion of frills as if, whoever she was, she had dressed for a party.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty room for sitting. It’s a squash when we lie down to sleep but come and sit.’
‘We’ll have to make another pad,’ said Martine. ‘Sacrifice a cover.’
Ivy couldn’t imagine sleeping under one of the thin blankets instead of two, even if they rolled up together. Even if she was in the middle with a body on either side to keep her warm. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘Did you say you had heels on?’
‘Ohhhhh!’ said Martine.
‘What?’ said the new woman.
‘Just that there’s an edge of something. It might even be a trapdoor but we can’t get it up. Maybe one of your heels would do it. Jam it in and hit it with the other one. Who knows what’s under there.’
‘They’re good shoes,’ Laura said, then she felt the foolishness of it and bit her lip. ‘I’ve left them over by the door. I’ll go and get them later. Like you said, right now, I need to sit down. I might fall down.’
‘You’re one step from the edge of the pad,’ Ivy said. ‘Come on. Sit and put your head between your knees till you feel a bit more like it.’
‘This isn’t really happening,’ Laura said, as she squatted and felt for the edge of the ‘pad’ the two women were sitting on. It was a thick platform of flattened cardboard boxes, six or seven layers deep, and she felt the edge of a wool blanket spread on top of it. She hadn’t felt that stiff matted wool of an old blanket since she was a child.
‘What’s your name?’ said Ivy, when Laura raised her head again.
‘Laura Wade. I came to a party.’
‘I’m Martine. I came to a family reunion.’
‘And I’m Ivy. I came because I haven’t got the sense God gave drunk monkeys. However stupid you feel, Laura, I’ve got you beat.’
Ivy stretched out a hand and patted Laura on her shoulder, her hand making contact half with the fluted sleeve of her dress and half with the clean smooth skin of her shoulder.
Laura finally believed then. She knew it. She could smell the months that Ivy had spent in this place. They stayed stamped on to her sleeve and her skin, like a nightclub pass, when the woman took her hand away.
FOURTEEN
No one saw me walk back in. I hadn’t expected drivers to be hanging around in the middle of the day, well after the start of the back shift and long before the end of the day shift, and I parked in the clients’ spaces right in front of the main door, far away from the loading bay and anyone who might catch sight of me from the warehouse.
But I’d reckoned on a few shirts and skirts. There was usually someone crossing the foyer, or looking out of one of the office windows, whiling away a phone call. Sales, marketing, tech, HR, payroll, operations … Big Garry moaned about how many of them he employed and it was him that came up with the nickname for them, but I had always suspected he was proud, on the quiet. Oh, he still talked the butch talk about his success: number of vans, number of rigs, number of drivers; miles covered, countries, tonnage of freight. But if he wasn’t proud of his shirts and skirts, then why didn’t he let them all wear BG polos and fleeces, like they wanted to and for the branding?
Just like the carpark, the foyer was deserted when I pushed my way in through the smoked-glass doors. I stopped dead, arrested by the familiarity of it all. The smell never changed. Floor polish and glass cleaner and a trace of garden centre from the peat that the housepl
ants grew in and the mist the receptionist sprayed them with to keep them shiny. There were two red couches facing each other across a glass coffee-table fanned with trade magazines. On the far wall, a coffee-maker that had cost more, ten years later, than the two couches put together. There was still a box of Krispy Kremes. Big Garry, who would never feed his men for free, knew how to court clients.
I had sprawled on the old couches, colouring in and doing the puzzles in my Saturday comic, waiting for my mum to finish the books and take me and Bazz swimming. I’d sprawled on these new couches waiting for my dad to come and give me a driving lesson. I’d even sat behind the desk on the swivel chair, learning the ropes. ‘Every bit of it from cracking pallets to firing skivers,’ Big Garry had said, although Bazz had never stuck a crowbar in a pallet or fired some scally after a third warning. Plus he was too big a lout to answer the phone without losing business. He’d bunk off and leave the desk unattended, like whoever was supposed to be there now.
I glanced up at the camera in the corner, but I knew there would be no one at the security kiosk in the middle of the day. So I slipped away to the foot of the glass and chrome staircase that rose through the foyer to the office level, climbed up, feeling dizzy and knowing I was pale, then punched in the unchanging security code – my parents’ anniversary – at the top door.
I made my way down the corridor not glancing to left or right, not wanting to catch anyone’s eye through the little windows in the office doors. At the end, I paused, steeling myself to bat open the swing door to his outer office and breeze past the assistant’s desk. But I caught a second break. The woman my dad still insisted on calling his secretary was AWOL too, a dozen tabs open on her monitor and the fan whirring.
I could hear his voice, through the half-open inner door, and my legs threatened to buckle. ‘Aye, aye, aye and Mexico’ll pay for it,’ he was saying. ‘If you want to make an offer, I’m ready to hear it.’ He paused. ‘No,’ he said into the phone with that patient voice that his intimates knew was more dangerous than shouting, ‘that wasn’t an offer. That was an insult.’
With my guts churning, I edged into the room and stood looking at the back of his head. He had spun his chair round to face out the window, like he always did, looking down on the loading bay, the van ballet of arrivals and departures, his empire. He was wearing the same stupid uniform as ever – a striped shirt with a plain collar. A pair of cufflinks, one B and one G, too heavy and too gold. His suit trousers were sharply creased top and bottom but bagged at the knee and his jacket was hung on the back of his chair where its bright lining – chosen to match the stripe in today’s shirt – could be seen. That jacket had had a starring role in my imaginings about today. In my mind’s eye I’d seen my legs giving way, this pale dizzy feeling turning into a full-on faint, my guts letting go as I lay on the floor, and Big Garry putting the jacket on, cracking it over his back like a ringmaster’s whip, like a bullfighter’s cape, then stepping over me.
His desk was the same chaos as ever, I was glad to see. Nothing had happened while I was away to reduce Big Garry’s respect for ‘paper and ink’.
‘I know you’re trying to make a splash,’ he was saying into the phone, ‘and I get that somebody must have told you this was how to make it, but when you’ve been in the game as long as—’
He had seen me. Swinging in his leather chair he had finally turned far enough to glimpse me standing there.
‘I’ll have to go, Dave,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’ He put the phone face down on his desk-top.
‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘“How are you?” she asks!’
‘How’s Mum?’
‘How do you think?’
‘And Bazz?’
‘How do you think?’
‘Useless and cushioned,’ I said. ‘He’ll go far.’ I walked towards him and took a seat in the client chair on the opposite side of his desk. I folded one leg under me to sit on, so I didn’t sink down. No trick was too pathetic for Big Garry to play, including looming over whoever came into his room to bug him.
‘Where have you been?’ he said. He wasn’t breathing hard. He wasn’t even talking loud. He was saying the right words but his heart wasn’t in it.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Did you go to the cops?’ I said. His eyes slid away to the side. ‘No you wouldn’t have gone to the cops, would you? Because they would have asked too many questions. About enemies and associates. They would have snooped around far too much. So … no cops. Did you get a private detective?’
‘Your mum was worried sick,’
‘Oh, I’m sure.’ I was getting angry now and it was helping me. ‘If you had a detective, Dad, you should get your money back.’
‘You think you’re funny?’ There was always a line with Big Garry. It was fine to wind him up, up to a point. The way he was talking to me now told me I’d neared the point but not passed it. I’d heard worse when I was critiquing his wardrobe or being ungrateful for a present.
‘So let’s cut the crap,’ I said.
And just like that we were over the line. Clear over. ‘You think you can talk to me like tha—’ he began.
‘That’s nothing,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘I think I can talk to you like this. Listen carefully. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m taking over.’
‘Taking over what?’ He sounded genuinely puzzled.
‘BG Solutions, BG Connections.’ It still felt strange to say the two names, without BG Europe to round off the trio. Like when someone dies. I’d said ‘Granny and’ for years before I broke the habit. Big Garry watched me for a couple of slow breaths, but he wasn’t thinking. He’s not a stupid man but he can’t hide it when he’s thinking. ‘I’m going to be the CEO,’ I said. ‘And majority shareholder. You’re going to buy Bazz out and give his shares to me. Dangle something shiny in front of him and he’ll bite your hand off. You know that as well as I do.’
There was a flash of amusement but it passed. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What’s the punchline?’
‘No punchline,’ I said. ‘You’re retiring, Dad. And you’re emigrating. Here’s the story: Mum’s health is going to take a nose-dive and you’re both going to drop everything and go somewhere warm where she can enjoy the time that’s left and you can devote yourself to her. Got it? I’m going to run BG now.’
‘Have you fallen and hit your head?’ Garry said. Again, they were the right words but his delivery was off. There was no outrage, just a half-hearted parroting of the sort of thing he imagined someone would say.
‘It makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to embarrass you. I’m not going to tank it. People will be surprised but no one will be suspicious. We wouldn’t want to be raising suspicions, now would we?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘You didn’t tell anyone I’d gone, did you?’ He shifted. ‘Did you, Dad?’
‘We said you were travelling.’
‘Perfect. I have been. And I’ve been training. I’ve been working incognito for a rival operation up north, delivering medicine, and I passed probation as a vulnerable student transport assistant in the Borders and as a patient transport driver on the west coast.’
Garry laughed. ‘What for?’
‘Because it’s not the sort of work you can do without a clue,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got clearance now. I’ve had two police checks and an advanced security check. I’m golden.’
‘What for?’ he repeated.
‘You can tell people that I was off doing some research for our expansion into vulnerable and high-risk transport. That’s the future, Dad. But you’re too old – no offence – to be learning new tricks. So I went off and did some hands-on research and now you’re handing over.’
‘Vulnerable and high-risk?’ Garry said.
I stood and walked forward until my hands were resting on the edge of his desk. I bent over until my face was i
nches from his own. I’d rehearsed this in my head so many times, wondering if I’d have the nerve to do it, hoping I’d see genuine bewilderment in his eyes and then he’d explain the mistake I’d made. Now it was happening, my voice was calm, completely under control, and Big Garry’s hands stayed in his lap without even twitching. ‘You heard me. The guaranteed delivery of controlled, perishable, and/or hazardous essential items. That’s honourable work. But as well as that we’re going to be known for the safe and respectful transport of vulnerable people with complex needs. And that’s God’s work, because nothing is more important than humane and appropriate support and service towards all people in need of transit. Right, Dad? Right?’
‘Tash,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea what this is about. I’ve got nothing to do with whatever you think is going on.’
‘I know you don’t,’ I said. ‘I know you’re out.’ He shook his head almost fondly at me. ‘I saw the news.’ He frowned. ‘I saw the news the night you were in bed after you’d had that bug. You shouted for Mum to come upstairs and watch the news with you.’
He nodded, remembering. I was remembering too: ‘uncovered what appears to be part of an operation stretching overland from Eastern Europe and the Near East all the way to the French ports and into Britain.’ Then he shouted down to my mum and the newsreader said ‘although the UK collaborators in what police are describing as the most ambitious single attempt ever discovered have thus far evaded detection.’ Then I turned the volume away down and just caught: ‘Seventeen of the forty individuals are being cared for in hospital in Calais while French officials—’
‘I don’t know what you think you saw on the news—’ he began.
‘And I found your phone.’
That got him. His smile faded and his eyes narrowed. I felt my stomach rise up into my chest and burn there.
‘What phone?’ he said.
‘See, Dad, I know you. I know what you’re like. I forgot that for a while. I thought a stupid wee flip phone stuck under a desk with duct tape was too casual. But that’s you all over, isn’t it? Nothing on your account, no digital trace. Everything old-fashioned and easy to ditch. That phone was classic you.’
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