by Monica Ali
‘Oona,’ said Gabriel, putting his hand in his boxers, weighing, arranging, freeing, making his habitual adjustments to start the day. ‘Never mind Oona. How was it? Tell me everything. I missed you, sweetheart.’
‘I know,’ said Charlie, ‘you just told me. Tell me again.’
‘I did. I do. I want to see you. Why aren’t you here with me?’ He meant it, every word. Except the part about Charlie being here right now, because that would be difficult with Lena still in his bed.
‘Cheap flight,’ said Charlie, ‘bloody Luton in the middle of the night. Listen, baby, if you’re not working, I’ll …’
‘I wish. Oh God, do I wish.’ He still had his hand inside his pants. His penis, he noted, concurred with his expressed desire. He gave it a consolatory stroke. ‘I overslept, that’s all, late one, and it’s going to be a fuck of a day.’
‘Be like that, then,’ said Charlie. ‘Know when I’m not wanted.’
‘Oh, you’re wanted, believe me.’ He had a full erection now and turned to face the cupboards so that Lena, if she walked in, would not catch him. He knew Lena would not affect his desire, his anything, for Charlie. That was why he could let it happen. No one could touch his relationship with Charlie, not Lena anyway. ‘So tell me about Sharm el-Sheikh.’
‘I spoke to you practically every day.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Maybe I got up too early. Might go back to bed. Did I tell you about the golf buggies? The hotel’s all spread out, you know, bungalows, and you ride round the marble paths on these little carts. I drank pomegranate juice and detoxed, think I lost about a stone.’
‘You’d better not.’
‘One of the security guards was Mossad, Israeli secret service, apparently the Egyptian resorts are crawling with them. Everyone said it, but no one really knew. You know how it is in hotels.’
‘Aah,’ said Gabriel, ‘mmm.’
‘You with me, Gabe?’ said Charlie. ‘Oh, and how’s your dad?’
His hand stopped what it was doing. He removed it from his shorts. ‘Well, you know, no change.’
‘You’ve spoken to him, though?’
‘Yes, spoken, of course.’
‘The phone is useless, though, isn’t it? We’ll talk … I’m not working tonight.’
‘Shit,’ he said, ‘tonight. Tonight’s not good, there’s a launch party, big bash, goes on really late. And tomorrow there’s … a … um … PanCont. Directors’ conference, banquet and stuff, got to show my face.’
‘If I didn’t know better,’ said Charlie.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘sweetheart.’ They laughed, she blew him a kiss, they made an arrangement, he hung up the phone. When he turned he saw a ghost in the doorway, Lena in his white shirt. ‘What is name?’ she said, twisting her skinny fingers. ‘Your girlfriend, what she is called?’
When he walked into his office, Oona was sitting in his chair. ‘Praise be,’ she said, ‘the wild rice and buckwheat finally on they way.’
Gabriel sighed. ‘Praise be?’
Oona extricated herself from the chair and spread a buttock over the desk. ‘Giving tanks to the Lord. Go on, darlin’, settle yourself down.’
‘You’re not thanking JD Organics?’
‘The good Lord,’ said Oona, ‘provides.’ She shifted her weight and released it, getting comfortable, making herself at home.
‘Is there anything else, Oona?’
‘We muddlin’ through,’ said Oona happily. She was roosting like a pigeon, all swelling chest and sleepy eyes, bedding down amid the paperwork for a little bill and coo.
Gabriel thought he should thank her for this morning, for holding the fort while he slept. What he said was, ‘Have you thought about retiring? You know you could after all these years.’
She looked at him as if he had suggested they start planning her funeral. Then she smiled and her gold tooth caught the light, a little sunburst, sparkly as false hope, and she said, ‘Retirement? Hoo! Not me, darlin’, I goin’ stay here ’til I drop.’
Gabe grabbed a notepad and took the back stairs on his way to the communications meeting. The meeting would be a farce, as usual, dressed up as a worthy ensemble play about Working Life. Word was that the menus had to be rewritten in the PanCont house style, with a maximum of five ingredients listed and a minimum of three. It was another Initiative. Initiatives were generally designed to remind you that you shouldn’t show any of your own. He’d give Lena a call afterwards, she must be bored out of her skull. She owned a mobile, it had turned out, when he told her not to answer his phone. She had been sullen this morning and they’d rowed about the phone business. ‘I have phone,’ she said. ‘I am not give shit. I am not need nothing from you.’ He’d only told her not to answer it in case Charlie called, or Jenny, or Dad. He let her be angry. It was kinder to let her be angry. She needed her anger right then.
On the way into work he’d thought about it. Was it rare for a porter to have a mobile phone? Or did the others just not own up to it, preferring to remain untraceable?
The bus hummed its way up Bridge Street, the sky watery blue over the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben sounding noontime, baleful as a knell. In the seat in front of Gabriel, teenagers ate chips for a mid-morning snack. Tourists in cagoules and sunglasses littered the pavement. The window creaked as Gabe rested his head against the pane. And then he saw it, a rag-and-bone cart, and he twisted his neck and looked and looked until he lost it as the bus turned into Parliament Square. Did you see it? he wanted to say. Did you see the man, the horse, the blinkers, the way the fetlocks shook? Did you see the pile of old clothes, the television, the toaster, the vegetable rack? The man had a hole in the knee of his trousers, he wore a brown cloth cap, and did you notice how lightly he touched the whip to the horse’s neck? The top deck was almost full. Gabriel looked at the faces around him, each locked in its own private space.
Thirty-five years, must be, since he’d seen the rag-and-bone man, heard the call that sounded nothing like any old iron, a wordless, timeless, animal cry and he could hear it now, from down the decades, and the clop of hooves on the cobbles, and he could see the cartwheels turning pretty circles and feel the heat of the horse as it stopped right by him, smell its dark, packed smell. One thing he couldn’t fathom. Another picture, another memory, this one without root or reason. What tricks the mind can play. But how clearly he could see, though the angle was oblique, over the steaming haunches, up to the seat behind, a woman, madly staring, tangles in her hair, his mother, his mother, and the old rag-and-bone man, dark as a gypsy, with the devil in his eye, winking and grinning, holding her elbow as she raised and turned and lowered herself, stiff as a candle, to the ground.
Checking his watch, he saw he was running later than he’d realized. He turned out of the stairwell to go to the lifts and there, coming towards him from the other end of the corridor, were Ivan and Gleeson, walking fast, tied at the hip, heads inclined, rough with smooth, a gross mating, an unnatural sight. Gabriel stepped into an alcove and flattened against the wall. At once he regretted it. They would see him. Was he a child, imagining himself invisible if only he closed his eyes? He pressed his back and arms to the walls and breathed in. It was ridiculous. The alcove was shallow, not deep enough to conceal his chest, and anyway when they walked past there would be nothing to hide behind. They were close now, very close. Should he step out and continue walking, as if this were nothing unusual, to be standing in an alcove like this, or should he jump out and yell, pretend to some sort of prank? His heart became drunk and disorderly, lurching around in his chest. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. He held his breath.
Ivan and Gleeson muttered past him and stopped at the next door, Gleeson fumbling with the key card while Ivan looked around, up and down the corridor, seeing nothing but his own cleverness, filing a thumbnail on the stubble on his chin.
The smug clunk of the door freed Gabriel’s lungs. He put a hand on his chest as it heaved. What were they doing in a guest room? How did they get the key? It
stank. But it wasn’t a smell he recognized. Gabe peeled himself from the wall. He thought for a moment. These rooms were directly over the kitchen. There’d been complaints. The kitchen started up too early in the morning, the guests were woken by noises from the underworld. It had come up in the management meeting, the rooms were being left empty until they could be reconfigured into an office, a sauna, a meeting room. Gabriel crept to the door and listened. He heard nothing but the shush of a carpeted corridor, the faint tick and purr of the building, white noise that thickened the air in this as in every hotel.
Nikolai stood in the delivery yard in the narrow shaft of sunlight that had punched a hole in the clouds. The sun striped the brick wall behind him, brown, red, brown. It lit his ginger hair. It caressed the smoke from his cigarette, curling and lifting it in a high, voluptuous trail. Gabriel watched him, the way he was smoking. These days, smokers took hurried and furtive puffs. But not Nikolai. He made space for the cigarette. The cigarette made space for him. It was an elegant punctuation, a pause in the sentence, indispensable to the rhythm, the sense.
Gabriel crossed the yard. Nikolai accepted his presence with a nod.
‘Taking a breather.’
‘Yes,’ said Nikolai, ‘good.’
He offered Gabriel a cigarette. Gabe hadn’t smoked in eight, nine years. He took one and Nikolai flicked his lighter, lit another for himself.
Dizzy with the first hit, Gabriel drew less deeply the second time and everything was fine. They smoked together. Gabe remembered how good it was to stand with a colleague and share something, man to man, a smoke.
Nikolai squinted into the sun. He was so pale he could be albino, but for the sand-red hair. A Russian, like Lena. Belarussian, she’d said.
‘A man,’ said Nikolai, ‘feels he is essential. He knows he is only a cog. Not even that – a drop of oil in the machine. But his life is so real to him he cannot imagine a world without him. How incomplete the world would be.’ He took a long, slow drag of the cigarette. He took his time. ‘And then he is gone. The waves close over his head. Is there anything to mark him? Is there a ripple? No.’
He was speaking about Yuri. Gabriel lowered his cigarette and tapped the ash.
‘Two daughters,’ said Nikolai. ‘One studying economics, the other in the second year of a medical degree.’
‘Things happen,’ said Gabe, ‘all the time.’
‘How small we are.’
They stubbed out their butts against the wall. ‘Listen,’ said Gabriel. ‘There’s something.’ He pulled a weed from between the bricks and pulped it between finger and thumb. ‘Ivan and Stanley. Stanley Gleeson. Is there something? Because if there is I need to know.’
‘Something,’ said Nikolai, ‘something,’ as if pondering a philosophical conundrum, the answer to which lay in deep contemplation, without reference to external events.
‘Something they shouldn’t be doing,’ said Gabe, as if it needed explaining. ‘I know they are, but I don’t know what it is.’
Nikolai nodded, acknowledging this state of affairs.
‘Chef, I didn’t know you were a smoker.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Smoking is bad,’ said Nikolai, ‘but it’s like life. Bad, but the alternative is worse.’
You never entered a walk-in and closed the door. Someone passing might pull up the lever to complete the seal and then you’d be locked in a more or less soundproof fridge. Victor was handling a thirty-pound beef rib when Gabriel stepped inside and pulled the door shut.
‘Hey,’ said Victor, dumping the meat and wheeling round.
‘Cosy in here,’ said Gabriel. ‘Quiet. Good place for a chat.’
‘Hey, the door.’
‘Can’t be overheard. No one listening in.’
Victor sniggered. ‘You gonna put me on a meat hook, Chef?’
‘I can do that. If you like.’
Victor’s snigger grew higher and wilder; it struggled to find purchase on Gabriel’s stony gaze. Gabriel let it peter out.
‘I don’t squeal,’ said Victor. He shoved a saddle of lamb that hung at shoulder height. He caught it as it swung and pushed a thumb into the yellowy fat.
‘Victor, you can speak to me. I am not your enemy.’
‘I do my job, Chef,’ said Victor, ‘my nose is clean.’
‘What about Ivan? What is it?’
‘Why you asking me about Ivan?’ He tossed his head and stirred his foot, as if he were a bull about to enter the ring. Gabe was meant to smell testosterone, not the adrenalin surge of fear. ‘Ask Ivan about Ivan. Not me.’
They faced each other. Without noticing, Gabe had mirrored Victor’s stance, squared up to him as though he were a serious adversary rather than an employee who needed a kick up the arse.
‘Let me look at those ribs,’ said Gabriel, so that Victor was forced to stand down, step aside. ‘Did the rib-eyes arrive as well?’
With the door closed, the smell in the meat locker was beginning to become a third presence. They were squeezed uncomfortably close. Gabriel ran his hand along the bones. ‘Nice piece.’
‘It’s good meat,’ said Victor. He shivered. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘Check this. In Moldova, yeah, few years back, there was this woman. A cleaner at the hospital and she took body parts from the hospital. Get me? Body parts that were supposed to go to be burned. She sliced them up, yeah, and sold them in the town centre. Two dollars a kilo, half the market price. She made a killing, man, a killing. People bought it, they ate it, they loved it. They came back for more.’
‘She get caught?’
‘Somebody got suspicious.’
‘Eating human flesh.’
‘Dog eat dog,’ said Victor. ‘You Brits, you think …’ He shook his head.
‘It’s your country we were talking about.’
Victor snorted. He pawed the ground. ‘We’re talking about flesh for sale.’
‘Don’t get in too deep with Ivan. I’m offering you a way out. I’m holding out a hand.’
‘I told you, my nose is clean.’
‘But what you know … nothing comes back to you.’
‘Two dollars a kilo,’ said Victor. ‘For that price you don’t want to know what you’re eating. You don’t want to think about it.’
‘Dog eat dog.’
‘Man,’ said Victor. ‘Seriously.’ He tried the door and it opened. He held it with a hip. ‘Point is, you’re better off not knowing. It’s better not to ask.’
CHAPTER NINE
THEY HATCHED FROM THE CINEMA AT MARBLE ARCH, RUBBING their arms and stretching their necks, shaking off the shell of wakeful slumber that had encased them during the film. They drifted north, arm in arm, along the Edgware Road. The light was dying. Neon signs flickered into life, Beirut, Al-Ahram, Al-Dar, Café du Liban. Office workers began the route march home. The matinee was over and the evening show yet to begin.
‘Intelligent thriller,’ said Charlie, ‘appears to be a contradiction in terms.’
‘Weren’t you thrilled? Clever plot. Give it that.’
‘Yes, but that’s a bad thing. All plot, no story. Nothing unfolds, everything is forced.’
‘You were on the edge of your seat.’
‘I was slumped right down.’
‘Peeping through your fingers.’
‘What happened to make him a star? It’s like, watch me acting now. We’re supposed to forget he’s acting, and he’s waving a big bloody flag.’
‘Got something. Six million a movie.’
‘What’s he got? A lucky break. Six million a movie or flipping burgers in Kansas. A toss-up, I’m telling you.’
Gabriel put his arm around her shoulder. ‘You fancy him. That’s what it is.’
‘Eyes left, that means thinking. I mean, come on.’
Gabe laughed. ‘His entire life is a fluke. If you say so. Anyway, you chose the film, let’s not forget. The story wasn’t bad.’
They kept going, towards Charlie’s place, past shops that sold reproducti
on French furniture, Louis XIV plus twenty-first-century bling, past slot-machine arcades, jewellers, pawnbrokers, estate agents, restaurants, the signs in English and Arabic. In a café window, an old man lifted a newspaper, concealing his white beard, underlining the red and white turban wrapped around his head. Two women in burkhas trailed a toddler by the arms and were overtaken by a girl in a pink tracksuit with SEXY stitched across the bum.
‘See that,’ said Charlie, ‘seems strange, don’t you think? Having a Union Jack flying here.’
‘It’s the Victory Services Club. For old army buffers. Fought for king and country. Surely they can have a flag.’
‘I know,’ said Charlie. ‘But …’
‘We need to buy food, I’m cooking, remember.’ He removed his arm from her shoulder and they broke apart as they entered the shop.
They carried a bag apiece and wove in and out of the human rush hour. When the pavement grew freer they walked side by side. Shazia Food Hall, Al Mustafa, Bureau de Change, Meshwar, Al Arez. On the other side of the road was a pub.
‘What about that, then?’ said Gabriel, tipping his head.
‘What?’
‘Burn the flag, close the pub.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Old English Gentleman. Seems strange. Maybe they should change the name at least.’
Charlie swung her bag at him. ‘All right, you’ve made your point.’
They stopped for coffee at their usual place. Fazal was busy stoking a hubble-bubble but waved them to a table. The chairs were an odd assortment, stacked deep in velvet cushions, but the tables were identical – octagonal wooden fretwork inset with a copper tray. On the far wall a silent television screen showed Arabia TV and from somewhere Middle Eastern music played its endless lament. All the customers except Charlie were men, hookahs squatting faithfully at their feet. The artwork added a touch of the exotic: a pastel of an English country cottage, a collage of postcards depicting the Tower of London, Prince William and the Queen.
Fazal flapped his way across the café, cawing in anticipation, heralding his arrival with arms thrown wide. ‘My friends,’ he said, on landing, ‘what can I get for you?’