‘Sure,’ she said as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to ask her permission to get some possessions from my own home. ‘I made Dash put them all back tidily. Do you want tea or coffee? We don’t have anything stronger.’
I nodded, thrown by her air of open friendliness. By rights she should have been on the defensive and expecting me to come marching in backed up by a private firm of storm troopers. Yet here she was offering me refreshments like we were old buddies.
I stopped two steps up, aware of a strange quietness. ‘Where is everybody?’ The place should have been heaving, with bodies covered in tattoos and safety pins lying around doing drugs and burning the door frames. Instead there was an almost deathly hush.
Dot popped her head round the kitchen door. ‘Working. They’ll be back later – those that aren’t doing double shifts, anyway. I’m on the sick until tomorrow – I’ve got a belly like Vesuvius erupting. Me periods are playing up.’
‘Sorry to hear it,’ I said, and continued up to my room, where the floor was wall-to-wall with sleeping bags and mattresses. Alongside each one was a collection of clothing, the common colour a muddy green. It looked like a bring-and-buy at the local army surplus store.
I found my wardrobe closed and marked with a sticker saying ‘DO NOT TOUCH’. Inside, all my clothes were neatly arranged on the shelves and hangers. Even my tie was on the rail, looking none the worse for its brief stay round Dash’s waist.
I picked out everything I needed, including and especially a leather jacket I’d had for years and which Susan had tried many times to slip to the Salvation Army. She claimed it made me look like a second-hand car dealer. I shrugged it on with a satisfied smile; there’s nothing like a busted marriage to make you revel in the things you wanted to do over the years but were rarely allowed to.
I packed a few things in a holdall and decided that anything else I needed, I’d buy along the way. I could hardly keep coming back there for a change of clothing, and instinct told me a few new things would be good therapy. Then I dived into the bathroom and had a quick shower, surrounded by other people’s toothbrushes, soap and tubes.
I went down to the kitchen, where the work surfaces were strewn with a collection of mugs and plates. Every item was different and, by the looks of it, hand-thrown to individual requirements. It was a colourful collection.
‘Thanks for putting everything straight,’ I said.
Dot smiled and handed me a mug of coffee. ‘S’all right. Dash really did think the place was deserted at first, otherwise he’d never have gone through your stuff. He’s a bit impetuous sometimes. It’s Jake, right?’ She pointed a blood-red fingernail at the other side of the mug and I turned it round and found my name inscribed in the glaze. ‘Dash had Molly make this for you. She’s our resident potter. She can make anything as long as it’s clay. D’you like it?’
There couldn’t be many things left that could throw me after the events of the last couple of days, but this one did. For some reason I found it difficult to speak for a few seconds.
‘It’s… brilliant. But why?’
Dot shrugged. ‘We crashed your place – it’s the least we could do. Especially after your wife took off the way she did. I mean, shit happens, but there’s no need for complete strangers to pile it on as well, is there?’ She peered at me as I sipped my coffee. ‘Say, did you know someone damaged your front door? It wasn’t us, I promise. We don’t do that sort of thing. Dash fixed it for you so you wouldn’t get anyone barging in. Well, except us, that is.’
‘It was me.’ I explained about not having a key and how I’d ended up at the local nick for being rude to a policeman. Dot seemed to find that impressive, her eyes widening like saucers as I described my stay in the pokey.
‘No way!’ she cried cheerfully. ‘Jeez, you’re a deep sort, Jake… for a guy who looks so square, I mean.’ She managed to conceal the criticism with a big grin and a matey punch on my upper arm. ‘Good on yer! I’ve been busted plenty of times. Nothin’ serious, though – the odd bit of weed, some trespass and that sort of thing. I went on a protest once, too, against whaling. It got a bit heavy when they called out the riot cops – that was in Auckland. Luckily they didn’t have room for all of us in the jail and they had to let us go with a slap on the wrist. Say, are you sure you’re okay about us being here? You ain’t gonna get us bounced by the cops are you?’
I shook my head. For some reason, since stepping back in the house and being greeted by the effervescent Dot, my mood had lifted.
‘No need. I won’t be staying here for the time being. I’ll probably have to sell the place eventually. Stay as long as you like.’
‘Cool. Thanks.’ She jumped up and sat on the work surface, staring at me. ‘So, what do you do, Jake? You look like a solicitor or something. My dad’s a solicitor in Auckland.’ She pulled a face. ‘He thinks I’m a wastrel – d’you believe that? I mean, who uses words like that these days?’
‘Solicitors, usually,’ I told her. ‘I’m a troubleshooter. I sort out problems. Well, I did until yesterday. I got laid off.’
‘Ouch. Bad luck. Still,’ she grinned with the irrepressible attitude of someone happy with her lot, ‘there’s always something out there if you look. You just gotta be ready to change direction, my dad always says.’ She looked suddenly soft-eyed. ‘He’s okay, my dad.’
I thanked Dot for the coffee and the personalised mug, and told her I had to be going. Things to do, people to see. Life to live. Like I’d got it all planned out.
‘No worries. You can leave the mug with us if you like. Most of the others do, even if they’re gone months. Some of them we’ve been carryin’ around for ages.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘So they’ve got something to come back to.’ She looked wistful for a moment. ‘Man, I’d hate that – not havin’ something to go back to.’
‘What if you move on? How do they catch up with you?’
She pointed to a laptop sitting on the end of the work surface. ‘Internet – how do you think? All they have to do is find a cyber café and drop us a note. We tell ’em where we are. Dead easy. You should try it. Here, I’ll give you our email.’ She scribbled out the details on a piece of paper and handed it to me. ‘There. You’re now part of a worldwide family of travellers. If ever you need to crash somewhere, hook up and shout. Someone’ll get back to you. We know loads of places.’
I was amazed. Yet why not? That’s what technology was for, surely. ‘Anywhere?’
‘Pretty near.’ She rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘Well, we haven’t got anybody in Moscow yet, but give it time, eh?’
I left the new and bubbly occupant of my house and managed to avoid Mrs Tree while she was complaining loudly to her neighbour on the other side about the hippie invasion. I had no doubt she’d try to get some action taken against them, but since I wasn’t about to file an official complaint, I guessed she’d have her work cut out.
On the way back to see Marcus I called in at the bank to present my severance cheque and draw some cash. If I was going to set about getting another job and deciding if there was any mileage left to my relationship with Susan, I’d need a fighting fund.
News of Susan’s leaving had evidently spread like a bush fire. As I stepped through the door of the bank, I met Andrew and Lynne Kossof. Lynne was one of Susan’s wolf pack and Andrew was someone who always seemed to be in the background even when he was by himself.
‘How could you!’ Lynne snapped, giving me the kind of look normally reserved for dog owners who failed to scoop the poop. Her wrist was heavy with a collection of bangles, and they shook and clanked as she waved an accusatory finger at me. ‘How you can even show your face I don’t know! That poor woman…’
Since she chose to yell this at me, every syllable was heard by customers and staff alike, who each put their own interpretation on what she meant. I suddenly knew how it must have felt to be on the way to the guillotine in Paris during the French Revolution.
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‘I didn’t–’ I began, but she didn’t want to hear.
‘Andrew, come away. Now.’ With that, she swept out of the door, dragging her docile mate after her. He threw me a sympathetic glance, but it was like being tossed a chocolate teapot.
I sighed and waited for the first available cashier, ignoring the looks coming my way. It was clear that Susan had done a damage-extension job on me, convincing her friends that her leaving and taking every stick of furniture was all my fault. I shouldn’t have been surprised; whatever her failings, communication delays among her mates wasn’t one of them.
‘Mr Foreman,’ said the cashier, her eyes frosting over ominously. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
‘You have?’ I didn’t like the sound of that. Banks don’t expect customers to do anything but pay in money and stay out of the red, and I hadn’t spoken to an employee there for as long as I could remember. Instinct told me I should leave the severance cheque in my pocket.
She guided me to a booth at the far end, where a chirpy youth in Day-Glo braces and hair gel smiled at me as if I’d won first prize in their customer of the year contest. Then he set about stamping all over my face, personal-banker style.
‘Mr Foreman,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We have a problem.’
‘You do?’ He could have fooled me. Anyone that cheerful obviously didn’t know what problems were. He needed to get out more.
‘Uh-huh. Your account doesn’t have sufficient funds to pay your outgoings, I’m afraid. And you’ve exceeded your maximum credit limit.’
I stared at him, my belly turning to liquid. ‘That can’t be right. My salary only went in last week – and I haven’t been down to the pub for my weekly ration of twenty pints and a hundred fags yet.’
As a joke it would have been weak after several pints of vodka. Early on a weekday morning, and to Junior Banker, it didn’t stand a chance. He dropped his smile like knicker elastic snapping, suddenly all serious and cool.
Susan. It had to be.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, speaking slowly as if to a halfwit. ‘All available funds up to the limit have been withdrawn. You haven’t had your cash card or chequebook stolen, have you?’
Actually, he wasn’t too far off the mark.
‘As good as,’ I told him. ‘I think I’ve discovered another way of being mugged.’
NINE
I left the bank and went to a shop round the corner, where I armed myself with a new mobile phone. It was one of those throwaway models and would do me for the time being. With everything that had happened I had a feeling that being off the grid for a while might be a good thing. I found a quiet corner in a coffee bar and called the number Marcus had given me. I had to sort this out. It rang several times before being picked up. I fancied I recognised Susan’s breathing and decided to launch in before I lost my nerve.
‘We need to talk,’ I said, surprised at how calm I felt. Lost job, wife bunked off, empty house, ditto bank account, cold shoulder from friends… I should have been drunk, drugged or sitting on a high building somewhere, contemplating the pavement below. Instead, I felt remarkably sanguine. I wondered how long sanguine lasted.
‘Is there any point?’ Her voice was cold, like a digital answering machine. It was her coping-with-stress voice. I’d heard it many times, usually aimed at shop assistants who couldn’t add up fast enough or call centre operators who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
‘We can hardly leave things the way they are, can we?’
‘All right.’ She sounded unnaturally calm, but I could tell she was nervous. Susan had a way of holding her breath when she was tense which, during the first row we ever had, had me wondering if she was suddenly going to keel over from oxygen starvation. I’d often wondered if it was a hangover from when she was a child, and was something she resorted to when all other avenues had been explored and she could see she obviously wasn’t going to get her own way. ‘Where?’
I thought quickly and suggested a fake tapas bar near Piccadilly which, due to its low atmosphere and extortionate prices, was always quiet. The last thing I needed was a shouting match in the company of a hundred or so hearty lunchtime drinkers eager for a bit of entertainment.
I dropped my things off at Marcus’s place and left him a note, then legged it for Piccadilly, where I found the bar with its usual sparse clientele. I ordered a glass of dry white, took a corner table, and waited for doom to drop in.
Susan arrived forty minutes and two glasses later. She was followed closely by an overweight, sweaty individual in an expensive suit who blinked in the gloomy atmosphere and took another corner table across the room, his eyes on her all the way and not in a lascivious manner. Susan came across and sat down, elegant as usual in a pale cream suit and gold blouse, her auburn hair cut shorter than I remembered and expensively glossy. It made her look younger, and I wondered if it was our current situation which made me think how attractive she looked and if only…
But she soon nipped that in the bud.
‘You’re wearing that old thing just to annoy me,’ she said coolly, sniffing at the sight of my leather jacket.
I grinned, in spite of the situation, and silently thanked her for reminding me what this was all about. Had she come in all sweetness and light, I doubt I’d have been able to remain objective about her. She really was very attractive.
‘If that was all I wanted to do,’ I pointed out, ‘I’d have been late.’
Her expression darkened and I mentally awarded myself a point. Childish perhaps, but I had the feeling I was going to have to take whatever small consolation I could from this meeting.
‘I don’t want any trouble,’ she said frostily, and peered at my glass. ‘Is that medium dry? I’ll have the same.’
I ordered another glass, then changed it to a bottle. If our meeting didn’t last more than a couple of minutes, I could always finish it off myself before going round to Dunckley’s house and lobbing the empty through one of his windows.
‘There won’t be any trouble,’ I said calmly. ‘Not unless Dunckley’s outside and comes within fifty feet of my right fist. I suppose he’s told you he made me redundant?’ It must have been the icing on the cake for him, screwing both of us, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
‘That’s your answer to everything, is it – violence?’ Her voice was tight and I realised this was going to be harder than I’d thought. It suddenly felt as if I was talking to a complete stranger. I decided I couldn’t let that crack pass without comment.
‘Since when have you ever known me be violent?’
‘I haven’t,’ she conceded reluctantly. ‘But there’s always a first time.’ She glanced across to where Mr Sweaty was deliberating over the wine list as if he expected to find a bargain-priced Chateau d’Yquem. I was amazed by her attitude. How could she have cleared out the house and the account and be so calm about it?
‘Is this how it’s going to be?’
She frowned. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Invention. Exaggeration… suggesting things happened which never did. Is that how you’re going to justify what you’ve done?’ My voice began creeping upwards in volume, drawing a look from Mr Sweaty. I lowered it again to little more than a murmur. ‘In case you’ve suffered an acute case of amnesia, Susan, you walked out on me and took all the furniture and emptied the bank account. What was it you said to Marcus – that I’m unstable? Have you done a hatchet job on me with your friends, too, like the Kossoffs and Juliette?’
For a second she looked uncomfortable. As reasons for desertion go it was hardly one to stand up to close scrutiny; plenty of men spend too much time at work, but it was unlikely grounds for divorce. Golf courses, on the other hand, or pubs or the bookies – even other women – were different. But since I was innocent on all fronts, and hadn’t done anything more ambitious than look at another woman over the edges of an in-flight magazine, none of them applied.
She sipped her drink. ‘It was the only way I co
uld see of having any kind of life. Did you ever think of me stuck back here while you were off on one of your jollies?’
That was a new one. I’d described my trips to fly-blown corners of the globe in lots of different ways, but none of them could have been characterised as jollies. I might have been inconsiderate but taking Susan with me to those hell holes would have bordered on cruelty.
‘So it’s true,’ I said resignedly, and wondered if Susan could hear what she sounded like.
‘True?’
‘What you told Juliette – that I didn’t pay you enough attention. That you were bored. I assume that’s what you meant? Or was there something else I didn’t do to make our life complete?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Children.’
She looked surprised and said, ‘God, no. We talked about that, remember? It was never on the cards for either of us, I think we agreed on that. Anyway, isn’t boredom enough of a reason?’
Aware that I was going to sound like an inconsiderate dick, I said, ‘But you never said. I thought you liked the way we had things.’ As game-changing ripostes go it was pretty pathetic, but I was caught on the back foot. Show me a backwater troublemaker stirring the pot in search of a pay-off and I’m your man. Faced with a grasping local politician trying to shaft his workforce to his own benefit and I’m in like Flint. But this?
She tossed her head back, showing me a smooth expanse of throat. It reminded me of what her skin felt like, and the way she used to shiver with pleasure when I nuzzled into the crook of her neck. For a second I even harboured thoughts of a strictly libidinous nature, the kind that had me wondering where the nearest hotel might be. Then I recognised the body language for what it was. She was waiting for me to make the first move; a grand gesture which would include an apology of the self-abasing kind, preferably involving my knees touching the floor seconds before my forehead. I’d seen it before when things had been less than harmonious – usually over money. Or maybe it had always been this, disguised as something else. ‘Is that all you can say?’ she muttered, and I swear I heard the wine in our glasses begin to ice over.
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