‘Trust me, Riley. If you go down, I go down.’
Maybe he really believed that.
‘It’s an investment, Riley.’
Maybe he believed that too, that the business really was going to work, in all of this forgetting to factor in that while he was a good salesman, he was actually a lousy businessman – something he’d proved with past failures – any sort of detail, any small print, any everyday stuff of business life boring him. Working in the shop bored him too, which is why it lasted less than nine months, and this not least because most days he wouldn’t be in it. Instead it was in the hands of a succession of those pimply youths, the Barrys of this world, who really didn’t care, who’d wander up and down aimlessly, or sit behind the beech sales counter picking at their nails and shuffling the paperwork from non-existent sales, all this while Lennie was, allegedly, out scouting for contracts, which fitted in with the vision he had of himself, of some flamboyant entrepreneur about to make a fortune.
‘Mobile phones?’ I remember I said when he announced the plan a few months into the affair, inviting me to invest although somehow not directly saying so. ‘Maybe for people on the road who have to keep in contact with their offices. But don’t tell me the ordinary Joe is going to want to carry one around.’
Not much of a clairvoyant, you might think, but still not the worst mistake I’d make forecasting the future with Lennie.
Against all the odds – this to borrow from another of those portraits – I think there was a touch of the Micawber about Lennie. He was always waiting, not for something to turn up but for something to work out. What he was good at was groundwork, setting up situations, putting on a good suit and going into banks, business organisations, suppliers, etc., convincing them to part with their goods and their money. His talent lay not just in being a great salesman, but also in survival, in being able to sustain a situation, fight off his creditors, convince them everything was OK long after the thing was collapsing, and this most likely through his own hand, through that carelessness, which in the end wouldn’t let him attach himself to anything or anybody seriously.
‘Who is she?’ I said that day the photograph fell from a pile of papers on a shelf in the flat. He picked it up, gave it a cursory, cool glance of absolute indifference before tossing it back on the shelf.
‘My ex-wife.’
She was sitting in the Porsche in the picture. Dark and pretty, and in front of a shop with Lennie’s name across the fascia.
‘I married for my Green Card,’ he said later, speaking flatly, without either arrogance or apology, and I had no doubt it was true, this because I was learning by now that Lennie had no interest in lying.
That was something else about Lennie, something to pull out, mark about him, the way he had no interest at all in any form of prevarication.
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said the night before the shop opening. ‘Don’t ask me unless you really want to know,’ this with all the new bright shiny phones winking derisively on their display shelves around us, with the bottles of good wine, white and red, standing to attention on the white damask tablecloth besides the wine glasses, with the crisps, and the nuts, and the cheese straws, all of which I was paying for, and all in the same determined effort to demonstrate to those who would be there the next day that this was a serious business exercise, not just some accompaniment to licentious pleasure, to all those people whose names in their little plastic containers lay beside the bottles – the Mayor and Mayoress; the representative from the local development agency; the bank manager who gave Lennie a loan, and who would call it back later in so much less friendly a fashion; the accountant whose biggest earner in the whole affair would be its bankruptcy; Sophie, invited as editor of the local paper, who’d just stick her head in because she was new to the job still and very busy; the reporter she sent called May (long since departed and now the traffic girl on local radio); the photographer who came with her, a newcomer to the paper called Danny; Peter, still with his long thin ponytail in those days, invited as the owner of Mumbo Jumbo on one side of the shop; Magda, from Hocus Pocus on the other side; my mother, who, being Banquo’s ghost, as previously mentioned, if not invited would have turned up anyway; Tommy, who came with her; Cass and Fergie, who slipped out in their lunch time in a show of solidarity despite their huge reservations about a) the shop itself, and b) the whole relationship with Lennie; the boss of the firm that fitted out the shop rather more luxuriously (i.e., boutique style, stripped floor, fitted beech counter, subtle spotlighting) and at considerably more expense than I thought we’d agreed on; some ‘suppliers’ (several of whom I thought, even at the time, distinctly … well, rakish); Martin, he being the estate agent through whom Lennie got the premises (a connection that would come to haunt me); Fleur, who came with Martin even though I didn’t ask her; my cousin Freddy, who by sheer bad luck was that year’s president of the town’s Chamber of Commerce – all of the last three, you might say, adding particular insult to injury as I acted the waitress, filling glasses, passing canapés, posing outside the shop with a glass of champagne in my hand next to Lennie, and all this with a fixed smile on my face, pretending everything was OK when there was a pain through my heart like an arrow.
‘Don’t ask me unless you really want to know,’ he warned me after I’d come storming back into the shop late at night.
‘I want to know,’ but of course I didn’t. I knew the answer. It glinted there, like Macbeth’s dagger in the air.
‘OK then. Right. I slept with her.’
She wasn’t the first. I doubt she was the last. She was called Donna and she worked in office supplies. On my way over to Sophie’s that night I’d seen her car with the firm’s logo parked alongside Lennie’s in the car park of a pub down on the moors. I probably knew what to expect when I parked, looked in the window. I’d seen her in the shop more times than I’d thought strictly necessary. Her handshake was limp when she was introduced to me and she slid her eyes away, making me suspicious.
I held out for a while after Donna. I said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, we’re just business partners now,’ and he said, ‘Sure. Whatever,’ this with a shrug and a careless smile that said it didn’t matter because we’d be back together before long, which is exactly what happened
All of this is why I’m not about to blame anyone but myself for the affair with Lennie, certainly not for the loss of the money. I conspired in my own fate. The gods couldn’t have done more, after all, than toss that picture of his previous business failure off that shelf, or piled up the bills behind the door of his flat, which I’d watch him kick away carelessly every time we entered.
‘But you have to pay your rates/tax the car/pay your credit card bills …’ But he’d just give me that pitying look, which is the way the likes of Lennie will always look at rest of us, this to say that rules are for other people.
I paid his rates in the end, also some of his credit card bills, and this because it’s a small town and I didn’t want people talking. He didn’t thank me for it when he found out. Instead he just gave me another of those mild pitying looks.
He said, ‘Don’t forget I didn’t ask you to do it, Riley.’
It was beginning to dawn on me now – a dull grey dawn – that Lennie was a man willing to skirt around the law, not least from the things that seemed to ‘appear’ and logically were incompatible with his income: the designer suits and shirts and ties he wore, the BMW, the exceedingly upmarket apartment block where he lived and the Italian furniture scattered around it.
Then there were the incidentals, the ones that kept turning up: the mountain bike, the wide-screen TV and VCR and the Tag Heuer he threw carelessly at me one night, a beauti ful thing, 18 carat gold, with a black lizard strap.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘You said you needed a new watch.’
‘Where did it come from?’ I looked him square in the eye, saw the cold hard little shutter drop down in his own. The silence held as if neither of us wan
ted to give in and break it. He reached for the thing, tossed it in the air.
‘I’ve got a friend.’
I’ve got a friend. Another of Lennie’s favourite phrases.
Lennie had many friends, as it turned out. Mostly he met them, these friends, at pubs and clubs in the city. Sometimes we’d drive up together. I’d go shopping and then I’d meet him, finding myself in places I didn’t want to be, in the company of people – mostly men – I didn’t want to be with. They’d always treat me with exaggerated politeness, which was the worst of it, because I knew that behind their queasy smiles lay the truth of the thing: that being what they were they knew that Lennie was on to a good thing, that the affair was a boat that should not be rocked so the least they could do was play along with it.
The night Lennie tried to outrun the police I presumed it was because he was over the limit as he so often was when he drove back from meeting his friends. I heard the screech of his car first in the back lane and then the clatter of the helicopter. The next minute the back door banged and Lennie was beside me, pulling his shirt and sweater off in one over his head.
‘We’ve been in all night,’ he said, grabbing my hand.
Outside there was the sound of sirens, of braking. Behind the beam of light from the helicopter I could see the other flashing lights, the running figures, the panda cars with their doors open.
‘We’ve been here together,’ Lennie said, trying to pull me up the stairs, but I yanked my hand away sharply.
‘That’s the trouble,’ I said. ‘We haven’t, Lennie.’
Because it was pretty much over by then anyway. The swan song had been a couple of days before, when I’d paid a surprise visit to his flat, an expensive thing in a barn conversion in the Mendips, with a grand view, halfway between us and the city. It was his birthday. I’d been intending to cook a meal, lay out his presents. I’d gone round to the shop to tell him, but only pimply Barry was there and, as usual, he had no knowledge of Lennie.
I still don’t know who was in his bedroom that day. Maybe it was Donna or maybe it was a woman called Bryony, whose faintly insinuating message I once caught on the shop answer machine. As I let myself in, my hands full of bags, he appeared at the bedroom door in his bathrobe.
‘Oh, good,’ I said, dropping the bags of food in the hall, walking towards him, extending a hand, ready to curve it through the gap in the bathrobe around his waist. What a fool. Not even suspecting.
He caught me as I walked into him but it wasn’t an embrace. He grasped at my hand too, as I made to push the bedroom door open. Still I didn’t get it. His hand holding mine, I twirled in a circle as if we were jiving but he dropped my hand and raised it to the lintel of the door barring my way.
His voice was not unkind, I remember, just devoid of all identifiable feeling. He said, ‘I wouldn’t if I was you, Riley.’
Looking back now, I see how frail the affair was, how it was just a shadow of what an affair is supposed to be, how it was never more than a house of cards, held together more than anything else by the dope and the wine, the only miracle that it tottered on for the eighteen months it did. I felt it collapsing all around me as I watched the helicopter swoop away, and Lennie walk down the front path with the relaxed and amiable gait of those who operate on the edge of the law, the hand of the young policeman on his arm more of a formality than anything else and not remotely unfriendly.
That night, I rang Lennie at home any number of times but there was no reply. The next day at the shop the number just rang out without the answer machine firing. When I drove round I found it closed up with the iron security shutter down and bolted. There was no sign of Barry and a couple of days later I got the call from the bank manager.
In any half-decent novel he’d have been grave and elderly, that bank manager. He’d have stared at me severely over half-moon spectacles, but with a touch of pity in his eyes, this as I scrunched my reticule in my lap, preparing for a new and reduced life as a governess. Even at the time I knew how much better this would be than this thirty-something, with the picture of his family on the shelf behind him, and his squash racquet and bag beside him.
He said, ‘It appears Mr O’Halloran has ceased trading,’ and he gave me a firm false smile, one clearly designed to say that he hoped I saw that we were both sophisticated adults, that whereas certain things would need to be said they were merely formalities, and as long as I played my part it did not mean we could not be friends hereafter.
It had seemed such a small amount when I had first agreed to coguarantee the loan with Lennie. I could scarcely believe the figure when Mr Shower Fresh pushed the piece of paper towards me.
‘Thank God, I’m only liable for half of it,’ I said, which was when he cleared his throat. Never a good sign, in my experience.
They couldn’t get hold of Lennie, apparently, but it didn’t matter. They weren’t really looking.
‘No assets. No assets at all?’ (I think the phrase is ‘echoed faintly’.) ‘But his flat … the BMW … the shop … the stock …’ About to be repossessed. The lot of it.
I went in search of Lennie after that. It was about all that was open to me. The shop was still locked up. It gave off a cold air of abandonment and when I phoned the number it just rang out unobtainable. There was no answer at his home and when I tried my key, I found the locks had been changed. I drove up to the city, faced out those men in those bars. They shook their heads when I asked for Lennie, and when the doors clashed behind me, I knew he could easily be there, hiding in the gents, and that he and they were probably laughing at me.
It was late one night at the shop that I finally caught him. The security blind was still down but when I biked along the lane I saw the ghost of small thin light beneath the back door. Further along, between some sheds, half-hidden, I saw the BMW. The back door of the shop was bolted from the inside, but there was a toilet at the back, and the window which I’d once climbed through when we’d left the shop keys inside was open. Now I did the same, hoisting myself up in my Ron Hills from the seat of the Hopper.
Lennie was standing behind his desk when I pushed open the door to the showroom. He was pulling out drawers, taking things out, papers, a calculator, pens, throwing them into his briefcase. He looked up briefly as I entered, stopped for a moment, before resuming.
Staring down into the briefcase, he said, ‘So, Riley.’
I said, ‘What are you doing?’
He said, ‘I’m leaving, Riley.’
I put a hand to my head then. It was like the words didn’t make sense.
‘Leaving? But where are you going?’
‘You don’t want to know, Riley.’
‘But you can’t just … be going.’ I could hear the desperation in my voice. ‘You can’t walk out on me. Leave me to pay everything.’
‘I can’t help you.’ He said it sharply and now he looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, Riley.’
The word didn’t seem to make sense to me. I repeated like I was trying to learn a new and difficult language, ‘Sorry?’
‘I’ve got no assets. The bank will have told you.’
‘Sure, but the business … the lease … the stock …’ And that’s when I looked around, saw there was no stock, just empty boxes.
‘Where’s the stock? Where’s all the stock?’ But now it was dawning on me.
‘The suppliers. They took it back.’ It was a joke, a wicked joke, and we both knew it.
‘You’ve cleaned it out. You’ve cleaned the place out.’ I advanced on him, fists in the air. I was crying. ‘You bastard. You wouldn’t even allow me that. You selfish bastard …’
I flung myself at him then, pummelling his chest with my fists. He grabbed hold of them, hurling me violently aside where I went limp, slumping against the desk and on to the floor where I sat for a moment getting my breath back.
‘Have … you … no … shame?’ I said very slowly. The word ‘shame’ seemed to catch him unawares. A frown creased his brow as he stared into th
e air.
‘No. I guess not, Riley.’ He paused as if further considering it. ‘Guess I’ve never had any use for it.’
He picked up his filofax, tossed it into the briefcase, snapped it closed.
‘Look It’s a lot of money. I’m sorry,’ but his voice had taken on a faintly bored tone. Perhaps that’s what did it.
I guess if it had succeeded they’d have called what followed a crime of passion, except that it didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel remotely passionate. Instead it felt ice cold, like what was done was done in cold blood, in blood as cold as his own. It seemed like there never was a clearer calmer moment in my head. Ten years on I can still feel it and it scares me. All I knew was that more than anything else in the world, and this quite regardless of the consequences, I didn’t want this man walking around on the planet.
From where I sat, slumped on the floor, I could see the paper knife on the desk, another birthday present, steel, with a blade like a stiletto, which glinted beneath the spotlights.
‘Where you going?’
‘I’ve already told you. It wouldn’t help to know, Riley.’
That was when I jumped up, grabbed the paper knife, leapt at him a second time. I remember the action of my arm, the way I jabbed at him. Stab, stab, stab. Like Anthony Perkins in the shower scene in Psycho. He was wearing a leather jacket, antique leather. I’d bought it for his birthday. I hacked away at it, first the sleeve, then the front of it, but the leather was hard and it wouldn’t penetrate. He managed to grab my wrist, began pushing me back. Wrestling, we got free of the desk, crashed against a filing cabinet and then fell to the floor where we rolled around for what seemed a long time, heaving and grunting.
I could never have won. Frail he might be but he was still larger than me. I thought maybe his lifestyle would have weakened him, all that smoking and drinking. But I’d forgotten that he was wiry too. He won easily in the end, getting on top of me, forcing my hands back on to the floor either side of my head, prising the paperknife from my grasp and hurling it across the floor, where it bounced and skittered, ending up under a display cabinet. For a moment he stared down at me still holding my wrists back on the floor.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 23