by Stephen May
She wonders if he believes this. Maybe he does. ‘No,’ she says at last, still careful to keep her tone light. ‘You’re describing something else. Flu maybe. Or syphilis.’ Or the early stages of pregnancy. But she isn’t going to say that. Jez still doesn’t need to know about that. He won’t ever need to know about that.
Jez shrugs his shoulders.
And he’s not even handsome. Not really. His skin is getting rough, his teeth are going sort of yellowy. Off-white anyway. There are tiny flecks of crud on his eyelids. And he’s too bony to be a proper man. He’s thirty-five for chrissakes, or nearly, and still a hairless streak of piss. It’s not natural.
‘I can’t come here again.’
‘You always say that.’
‘This time I mean it.’
‘You always say that too.’
She sits up. ‘Jez, I do mean it. Next time you call, I’m going to be out, my cell will be off and I’ll be out of state. I’ll be skiing, or diving or . . .’ She stops, unable to think of anything else she wants to do that might sound suitably exotic or playful or adventurous.
‘Or what?’ says Jez.
‘Or dead.’ She holds her breath.
‘OK,’ he says. OK? OK? What does he mean by that?
He pulls her back down on top of him. ‘I’m not going to be allowed to sleep am I?’ He smiles and his face looms into hers, too close for her to see it properly. There is just a sense of teeth and lips and nose and hot breath and a sweaty lump of hair. But he sounds happy now, and she knows he can look beautiful when he’s happy. Her heart cracks.
It’s Friday. She knows already that he won’t call her again until Wednesday at the earliest. She’ll be out. She’ll be away.
Jez moves his hands over shoulders, her back, her arse, her thighs. She kisses his neck. She feels him twitch beneath her, stir against the fuzz between her legs. The fuzz he’s been trying to get her to get rid of actually.
She kisses him again. ‘I don’t come here for warmth, or friendship, or any of that. I come here because I’m a bit bored and a bit lonely.’ And as soon as she says it, she knows that it is true and she knows she has to leave California as soon as. It just isn’t her friend any more.
‘Hush now,’ Jez says.
Three
NICKY
Some time later – who knows how long? – I have the big idea. An idea that could be good for us but one that, miraculously, hurts no one else. Because ideas often do, don’t they? Hurt people, I mean.
And it’s just taking vague shape when Sarah appears, red hair excitingly disordered, the constellations of freckles standing out against the Celtic pale of her skin. Skin made still more ghostly by her being abruptly shaken from sleep. She is Celtic-eyed too, and right now her sharp blue stare flashes dangerous flames as she stumbles in wondering what – exactly – I think I’m doing. We have a child trying to sleep upstairs. And what is this dreadful, churchy music anyway?
And I’m too dazed to say anything so I put my finger to my lips and take her by the hand and show her Russell on the floor of the bathroom. And when she runs for her phone to call 911, I follow and spill out my idea to her hunched and hurrying dressing-gowned back.
It’s important that you know this about Sarah. She’s not just loyal and kind-hearted, she’s also almost pathologically law-abiding. Even getting a parking ticket or a library fine panics her. Uniquely among the people I know, she never had a shoplifting phase as a kid. She’s never even nicked pens or stationery from work. Never jumped a red light, never dropped a sweetie wrapper in the park. She claims she never even tried to buy booze or fags under age. She’s a phenomenon. So when I explain my idea I guess I’m almost certain that she’ll reject it out of hand. In fact, if I’d genuinely thought she’d go for it, I probably would never have said it. Does that make sense? I think at this stage it is just a theoretical plan. An abstract thing. A phantasm conjured by grief and whisky. And cellos. Don’t forget those cellos.
She stops. She turns around, those eyes as blue and as wide as the bay itself. I think I’m really in the shit.
‘What? What did you just say?’
‘Nothing. Just an idea. Forget it.’
But she makes me say it all again, slowly, and I do and this time it doesn’t sound like a big idea. It sounds a bit rubbish.
Deep breath.
It doesn’t have to be Russell there, dead in the bathroom. It could be me. This story doesn’t have to be rich bloke collapses in his toilet. Instead it could so easily be the story of an old friend flown over – with his family – by his generous buddy. An old friend who then – tragically – collapses and dies in a foreign land. A simple story and a beautifully sad one. And it has a kind of truth too. It’s more truthful in a way. It should have been me, not him. It makes more sense that way.
She says nothing. Looks at me agog, scared-looking. I’m in too deep to stop now. I’m aware that what I’m saying is outrageous. Wrong on so many levels, but still on I go.
We have all the passwords. And we have the passports, the utility bills and all the other necessary chip and pin fabric of a life. Two lives. And wasn’t Russell planning to vanish anyway? And he’s dead. That’s nature. It’s not like we killed him. And our life? Due for taking to the recycling centre. It’s a basement life, full of damp plans and mottled schemes. It’s a rusty, grimy, grubby life that needs disinfecting, spring-cleaning, converting into something useful and you, Sarah, you’ve been saying that for years. And we have our girl to think of now too, don’t we? And we won’t have been the first to do this. If you can imagine it, then someone has done it. That’s something my dad always used to say. One of his many wise observations, along with never a borrower or a lender be and early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
I think Sarah’s going to slap me. I even flinch as she raises her hands, but she puts her arms around me. She’s warm and the dressing gown smells of biscuits and sleep. She kisses me full on the lips. She pulls back, looks me right in the eyes. I can see all the freckles around her perfect nose. Across her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. My father used to call her the dot-to-dot girl.
‘Now that is sort of genius,’ she breathes. ‘It really is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Shush a minute. Let me think.’
The cellos seem to stab with controlled violence. I love Taverner I decide. Bloody love him. Classical music – it’s the new rock and roll, that’s what Russell used to say. And tosser that he often was, he was also quite often right about things. Right on the economy, right about music.
At last Sarah says, ‘What about our families? What about our friends?’
Which is nice of her because I don’t really have family or friends. Not as such. She has both. Averagely irritating mum, two averagely irritating sisters, and lots of friends. Really. Lots of them. She’s good at friends and they accept me as part of the package. She shares them. I’m not good at friends. Russell was the height of my success in that area. There are people I can share time with over a sandwich in the council canteen, but they’re not friends as such. And my dad might not even notice to be frank. I say all this and she’s quiet again.
Those cellos. They’re the sound of whole nations bleeding.
She says, ‘You better not wimp out of this, Nicky Fisher. You better not let me down.’
And she says she’s proud of me. Says she always knew I was probably a late bloomer. Says that’s the hope she’s been clinging to all these years. She says it with a smile, but I think she probably means it.
And then later, it’s actually Sarah that panics and tries to backtrack. And that’s another thing that never happens. She’s usually resolute. Makes a plan and sticks to it.
I sober up under the power shower and emerge to find Sarah full of fears, doubts, scruples. While I’ve been scrubbing the terror of the night away, the water so hot it hurts, relentless jets of hot needles, Sarah has come up with one big new impediment to success in the plan.
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And it’s this: we’ll get caught. We’ll definitely get caught. All it’ll take is bad luck or bad intelligence or a careless word while pissed – any of that could trip us up. That’s what she says. But, confident now, sparked up by Russell’s special tea tree and starfruit revitalising gel I have an answer.
‘Of course we might get caught,’ I say. ‘I know that. I’m not an idiot.’
‘So what’s the point then?’
‘The point is that it will be worth it.’ And I explain everything gently, quietly, using a voice that actually Sarah is usually master of, expert lecturer and line manager that she is.
I explain that for the months, or, hopefully, the years that we do get away with it, we’ll live the way kings and queens do. Or the way they could do if they had any imagination. We’d see and do things that we never could otherwise. We’d be like gods. All of us, even Scarlett. We won’t walk, we’ll bestride. We’ll live in HiDef 3D. And when we do, finally, get caught – well, it won’t be so bad.
‘Sorry. You’ve lost me now,’ she says.
So I explain that too. Still going slowly, still trying hard, if perhaps not quite successfully, to avoid any hint of lecturing, of line-managering. This, Sarah, my love, this is a white-collar crime without victims. Russell has – had – no family, few friends.
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘by supporting some well-chosen charities or something, we could construct a decent mitigation. We could say that we were motivated by doing good.’
‘A sort of Robin Hood defence.’
‘If you like.’
Taking from the rich to give to the poor. Not so much thieves as Mr and Mrs Santa Claus. Mr and Mrs Saint Theresa. Bonnie and Clyde without the random killing. It’s a very decent mitigation indeed if you ask me.
The thing is that yeah, we might go to jail. But for how long really? A year? Two? Three years tops. Three years in Ford Open Prison. Or the American equivalent. Three years watching TV in a low-security facility. Or we could use that time to do important work on ourselves. We could learn useful new skills, or just take time to think.
‘They’ll kill us,’ she says. ‘They’ll lock us up and throw away the key. They’ll turn us into monsters.’
‘I don’t think so, Sarah. We’ll be heroes. Kind of. Think about it.’
I watch her face grow serious and still while she thinks about it.
They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get to genius level at anything. If that’s true then three years in prison would give us both the exact time needed to come out as concert pianists, human rights lawyers, philosophers, or chess grandmasters. We could get PhDs in criminology. Ten thousand hours of study and thought. That’s something that honest money can’t buy. That’s something only crime can buy.
‘You’re a crazy man.’
But there’s a faint hint of a smile now, and I can detect at least a hint of weakening here, just the quick, heady whiff of it. And so I follow up by explaining that of course we would make sure most of the money is secreted in places where the IRS and HMRC can’t get hold of it.
‘Sarah we could do our time and come out loaded.’
‘And what about Scarlett, Nicky? What will she be doing while we do our ten thousand hours? It’ll be a big deal for her. Especially since she’s only about ten thousand hours old.’
There’s an easy answer to this.
‘She could stay with your mum. She did all right with you. And she loves Scarlett. Anyway, they might not even send you to jail. In fact I’m sure they won’t.’ And I look at her carefully again. To see if she gets it. And yes, I can see her working out how that might go. Hitherto blameless mother of a small child – a child with special challenges no less – clearly led astray by a feckless chancer of a husband. Misplaced loyalty. The judge’s summing up practically writes itself, doesn’t it?
I press home. ‘It’s Scarlett I’m thinking of really. That’s what the money will be for. It’ll be for her. To give her a chance. Think of the shit she’s been through.’
‘It’s completely bonkers,’ she says. But she’s lost. I know it and Sarah knows it – though, because she’s nice, loyal, kind-hearted – because I love her – I’m not going to crow or rub it in. Instead I point out, still gentle, that the real crime would be not to have the courage to act on our convictions. Not to open the door when opportunity is not only knocking on it but trying to break it down. Who dares wins. The only thing to fear is fear itself – all that. She’s properly smiling now. OK, OK, enough already that smile says.
‘Come here, Pog,’ she says, and wraps herself around me, folds me into that biscuity warmth. ‘You’re right. It’s all going to be fine.’
And so, by the time the San Francisco morning is pulling on her hipster threads, putting on her vintage, floaty, cobwebby dress of dust and sunshine – the city’s slutty summer wardrobe – we have a battle plan. We’re thinking together as a couple, as a proper team and – as a team – we’re cooking up breakfast. And Taverner’s off and KOIT is on. Classic hits on FM.
I know. Sick isn’t it? There’s the body of my oldest friend in the bog and we’re putting together the fullest of full Englishes to a soundtrack of Jefferson Starship. Russell has all the necessary in that giant double-sized fridge-freezer. Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, toms, ‘English-style’ sausages. Even baked beans. Even ketchup. These are things he must have had some assistant scouring all the delis of the Mission or Castro for. He even has black pudding. Black pudding. It makes us laugh.
I know, I know, but grief. Shock. Like I say, it does weird things to the appetite.
And so does love.
So does seeing Sarah dance around the kitchen, hearing her sing along to the radio. Because she hasn’t had much to sing about in the last few years. There’s not been much call for dancing.
Four
POLLY
Daniel is showing Polly how to make a kite. He asked her yesterday what her favourite animal was and she’d said an octopus – she can’t think why because she’s all about the horses, anyone who knows her knows that – and now, here on the heavy table in the library, is a smiling octopus face on a large circle of some special green plastic with eight legs dangling down beneath it. To be honest, it looks more like a psychotic jellyfish than an octopus. It’s cartoonish, but not in a way a child would like. Polly thinks an actual child would be scared of it. But then this is not a kite for a child.
Now Daniel cuts the wood to the right lengths with a Stanley knife. Daniel’s hands usually shake quite a lot but today they are firm and steady. He’s quick with the knife and even the splodges of liver spots on the backs of his hands seem to have faded so that they could almost be freckles. So quick with that knife, his old hands a blur. It’s like watching a top chef chop spring onions on TV. Quite something to see.
And he shows her where to place the struts and how to fix them in place. And he shows her how to tie the string. It’s simple really, but he explains that you have to get everything in exactly the right place or it won’t fly and, like Daniel says, there’s nothing sadder than a kite that won’t fly. It’s like a dog that won’t bark or a canary that can’t sing. A woman that can’t have a baby. Polly thinks that’s a strange and horrible thing to say. She shakes her head.
As he works, his hands as clever with his needle and the special plastic string as they were with the box-cutter, Daniel tells Polly the story of his time in India and how he became a kitemaker. He’s told her before several times, but she doesn’t mind. It’s interesting. She likes hearing about what they do in far-away places. Polly has never even lived outside the Anglia TV region.
He was in India working as an engineer, laying pipelines, away from his family back home in England and he was bored. He was probably lonely too but men never admit to that. Anyway, his manservant – they all had manservants then, even junior engineers like Daniel – took him up into the hills to watch a kite contest. Daniel tells Polly again about all the huge fighting kites swooping and attacking
each other while the crowds cheered and hooted. It’s like a football match for the people there. And they’re all gambling of course. Thousands of rupees changing hands on the result of some wrestling match way up in the air. The idea is to control your kite so well that you can cut the strings of your opponent’s and send it sailing off on the wind, or send it crashing to the crowd. Only Daniel says that it’s more vicious than that even.
‘See Polly, the idea is actually to castrate your enemy. To catch him, rape him, kill him. And then take money off all his friends.’ He says that to the players that is what it feels like when someone cuts the strings of their kite.
‘You mean it’s like having your dangly bits ripped off,’ and Polly laughs that big infectious laugh that all the residents of Sunny Bank love to hear. And Daniel chuckles along too.
‘Exactly,’ he says as his chuckle turns into a phlegmy cough. Exactly.
Polly’s big laugh can be heard in the office of the manager, Irina, even though it’s all the way down the corridor from the library. Irina pauses in her tapping at her keyboard for a minute and half-smiles, and thinks again how lucky they are to have found Polly. And to think she doesn’t even get paid. She volunteers for this. Because Polly is actually here for the good of her own health, not that of the residents. She had a bit of a depression thing last winter after her dad sold the stud farm, and her doctor prescribed being around others less fortunate than herself. Though it is actually quite hard to imagine a depressed Polly.
At her Sunny Bank interview Polly had said, ‘To be honest I had been hoping for mega-powerful anti-depressants but getting doctors to prescribe actual drugs is pretty difficult these days I find. They really don’t like it. I guess it makes them feel like failures or something.’
So she’d made Irina smile then too. Irina knows what doctors are like. Oh yes. And everyone agrees that Polly is a tonic for the residents. Even the staff who don’t like her, who find her relentless cheerfulness incomprehensible and annoying, even they admit that she’s good for the old people. Especially the difficult ones like Daniel.