by Stephen May
The world is going to shit. What we need is a real King Arthur or someone like him to sort the mess out, to bring some pride and ambition back to the world. Only these days it wouldn’t be a man. The new hero would be a woman. A bloody angry woman. A new Joan of Arc.
No one in their right mind would want to be an air hostess now would they? Not with the lowlife who travel by air these days – the crying, vomiting babies and their crying, vomiting parents. And the crying, vomiting students. And the crying, vomiting pilots. She’s heard the stories. Stag parties probably go to Abkhazia now. Club 18–30 probably have an office there.
Catherine is approaching the glass block of the Mercury hotel – just four hundred yards to go, surely she can risk a sprint? She glances about her. Hard to be sure with these shades on but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. Some traffic obviously, but no people. Bugger it. She’s going to go for it anyway.
Christ, it’s good to open out full throttle, feel her lungs begin to burn, feel the power in her legs. She’s like a Ferrari she thinks, a Ferrari that is being used to trundle to Lidl and back. It’s a disgrace.
In her room, after her shower, Catherine Baker examines herself. Her sturdy compact body; the thick, dark forest of her hair. The sharp planes and angles of her face. Her body is in good nick, no doubt about that. Yes. A classic Ferrari of a body, and it should be, it’s well maintained. She gives it the right fuel. Lean protein, lots of leafy green vegetables, fibre, pulses, good carbs, water, lots of water.
Moving closer she inspects the crow’s feet and the deeper lines beginning to carve themselves each side of her mouth. The mouth that is perhaps getting a little thin. A little flinty. She smiles. Her teeth are OK. She was going to get them properly fixed up after that thing in Sierra Leone left them a bit of a mess, but in the end she’d been gripped by tightness. All that dosh on a luxury like straight teeth. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Just as well she made it a policy these days not to smile much.
She remembers now her first week at Sandhurst. The drill sergeant, the one that had a bit more about him than the others, the Welsh one, the one that wasn’t just about shouting VERY VERY LOUDLY – she remembers him saying, ‘Don’t smile Miss Baker, ma’am. It’ll make people think you’re stupid. Or up for sex. Or both.’ And it had made sense, so she has trained herself not to smile. Even when she feels stupid. Even when she’s up for sex.
And now when she does smile it maybe looks a bit weird.
She crosses to the wooden table that, apart from the bed, constitutes the entire furniture in this hotel room. This hotel is, she decides, pretty much on the low side of mid-range. She picks up the cell she’d bought when she arrived in California. She thinks for a minute, then texts. It takes her almost no time at all. Best to keep things simple. Then another few fumbling seconds to remove the sim and to carefully snip that into four with her nail scissors. The phone itself she places in the full sink in her bathroom. It can steep there for a couple of hours and then she’ll bin it on the way to the airport. That’s the thing about this job, people don’t realise that it’s mostly housekeeping and keeping things tidy.
Housekeeping done, she stretches out on the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and begins to go through her stretching routine. It is, she decides for maybe the ten thousandth time, her favourite part of the day.
Seven
NICKY
An hour later and we go into Russell’s office. Everything is run from this room. An empire commanded from the second-smallest room in the house. There’s also an office somewhere downtown, a place for the mail to be picked up from, but really the whole operation is controlled by clicks on a wafer-thin iThing in metallic purple and a printer. There isn’t even a desk, just a worn armchair, though the room is crammed with the paraphernalia of art, music, film. A screen way too big for comfortable viewing in that pressured space, an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, an amp, a box of obscure percussion instruments, vintage seventies hi-fi system, shelves of DVDs along one wall, shelves of vinyl along another. No books. There’s Pre-Raphaelite art on the walls. Beautiful pale-skinned, large-breasted, full-lipped beauties swooning in lakes or forests. They all look a bit like melancholy Victorian versions of Sarah actually. If Millais were alive today he’d definitely want to get off with my wife, no question. So, anyway, it’s not a traditional home office, more a den for an adolescent of refined sensibilities. A cave to hide in. Or a tomb. The tomb of the Unknown Sixth Former perhaps. Definitely Russell’s room.
I flick up the lid of the iThing. Type in the password. SgtB1lko. As long as there had been PCs in our lives, Russell’s password had been SgtB1lko. Sergeant Bilko was one of our shared passions, affectations, whatever. There were whole episodes we could both recite from memory. At uni me and Russell would have Bilkofests. The two of us in my fetid room chortling our way through classic eps. It would screw things up totally if he’d changed tack in the three years or so since we spent time with him. Since the night when he was dancing half-heartedly at our wedding. It’d be crap if he’s now encrypted his vital info in Sanskrit or something.
But he hasn’t. SgtB1lko does the biz, and there it is: all laid out for us The good stuff. The honey. The money. Ten minutes of patient clicking to find accounts in Switzerland, Swaziland, Jersey, Guernsey, The Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Bhutan, Liechtenstein and Monaco. All the most secret safes in the world in the very same places that had the grooviest stamps when we were both briefly collectors back in the day. None of them real countries, more like PO boxes for white-collar rapists and the grandchildren of the SS.
As passwords go, SgtB1lko isn’t such a bad one actually. What East End crack baron or psychotic Rumanian people trafficker is going to connect Russell Knox with anything as mundane as a cosy teatime US sitcom from the distant mouldering past?
I know the kind of people that Russell schlepped around with in his old day-to-day working life would definitely have tried to rob him blind. I see them employing relays of kids to do the job too, in the manner of modern Fagins. Teams of teenage Asperger types, obsessed from infancy with hacking through Pentagon firewalls, recruited now to burrow into Russell’s electronic counting houses. But those kids would have never heard of the wiles of Sergeant Bilko.
Nostalgia. Sentiment. Those were Russell’s weak spots and neither autistic hacker nor murderous gangster would have those qualities in anything like the right amounts.
It really is a lunatic amount of money. Written down as a dizzying, paragraph-long string of zeros, it doesn’t even look like a number. It looks like a page from an avant-garde text-art project.
And the property. For his new super gap life, Russell hasn’t just rented out rooms in hotels. It’s not like when we went InterRailing in 1985. For this trip there’s to be no sharing Deutschebahn seats with New Zealander backpackers called Kev. For this trip he’s bought houses, villas, riads, barns, high-spec yurts, castles, compounds in the desert with helipads. Farms complete with llamas, goats and petting zoos. Narrowboats in Birmingham and stilt houses in Papua New Guinea. He’s bought rivers, lakes, Southwold beach huts and Icelandic turf longhouses. He’s bought yachts with armour plating and sea-to-air missiles.
He’s spunked over all the top property totty of every continent. If anything remotely desres has caught his eye in even the most glancing of ways, then he’s gone for it. He’s been playing supermarket sweep in a top-end realtors. No collection of bricks and mortar anywhere has been safe. No stretch of heather, heath or moorland too wild to escape consideration as a future domicile.
I’m exaggerating obviously – but not by much.
And it isn’t just bricks and mortar. Not just beaches and moors. Not just canvas, keels, decks, hulls and rockets. There’s the whole gamut of RVs too. Magic buses of every kind are part of the portfolio – ancient psychedelic veedub campers that might well have seen action at Woodstock or Altamont. Caravan-club veterans of the B roads of
1950s England, all the way up to the Fleetwood Providence 3000, the ultimate chromium monster designed to glide across the American prairies. A kind of mobile motel complete with its own bar and gymnasium.
Russell, we begin to realise now, was probably clinically insane. Depressed certainly. He was like that old guy we’d lived next to in my second year at uni, when we’d had that house in Wimpole Street. The chap who couldn’t stop ordering from the Littlewoods catalogue. The chap who, when he died, was only found by the emergency services after they had tunnelled a way through a Bauhaus maze of unopened boxes containing kettles, toasters, microwaves, breadmakers, radios and fondue sets. At the end of an epic trek from the front porch, down the hallway to the kitchen, they found the source of the stench the neighbours had reported. There, at the end of the trail was Mr Harry Sigman. A liquefying corpse, still sitting at the kitchen table amid a nest of more boxes – juicers, electric carving knives, outdoor Christmas lights – still with one dripping finger pointed at page 197 – foot spas.
Since he saw us last, Russell seems to have got just like old Harry. Pretty soon he would have needed saving from himself. He would surely have been sectioned before he went completely Howard Hughes.
But the important thing for us is that everything is in order. We have the money, we have the addresses. Another click and we have all the tickets. Tickets to ride that entitle us to travel whenever we like. These are super-first tickets. Tickets that allow us to bump people out of first class should our chosen flight be full. Tickets that mean homeland security come to us and check our passports in the comfort of our VIP lounge. Tickets that mean no queuing ever, for anything.
I check Russell’s personal emails. There are fifteen. That’s all. Even I get more than that on an average day. And his are begging messages mostly. Even the cheery notes from people who might just be mates. Even the ones wishing him safe travels and bon chance. All of them have a sneaky sleeve-tugging quality. Don’t forget us they seem to wheedle. Feed us. Look out for us. Help us, we’re dying here. Like so many hands stretching out through the bars of some camp, some pen, some cage. Well, fuck that. Fuck them. I feel a pang for him then, but it’s not like we killed him. The worst you can accuse us of really is opportunism and hell, in the modern world that’s actually one of the highest arts, is it not? They teach it in schools now, don’t they? It’s what they do instead of Citizenship or History.
Russell has already set up a curt out-of-office message saying he’s going to be out of circulation. That he is going to find himself and that it might take a while. No one will think it odd when he doesn’t call. They’ll forget him soon enough. And the PAs and the flunkies and the cleaners and the drivers are all gone, all paid off. So it’s just us now baby. Just us and the money. Alone together at last.
I look at Sarah and she’s frowning.
‘All right, oh queen?’ I say. ‘The world is our bivalve mollusc. Where shall we go first?’
My tone’s all wrong though. I feel foolish.
Sarah smiles but tuts, exasperated.
‘How like a man,’ she says. ‘We can’t just go. There are things to do first.’
‘What? Packing and shit?’
‘Packing and shit,’ she says. And she then laughs. And then she kisses me on the nose. ‘I love you, Pog,’ says Sarah. ‘Can’t think why.’
Eight
LORNA
Lorna has stopped crying by the time she picks up her bike from Macarthur. More or less anyway. He’s so not worth it. Not that she’s really crying over Jez. She’s crying over all the unspeakable shits she’s been drawn to all her life. All the good-looking, self-absorbed bastards she’s wasted precious time on while ignoring all the nice sweet boys.
Twenty minutes later she is letting herself into the Emeryville apartment where she can hear some shameless movie starlet coaxing Megan into stretching and flexing, into reaching out just that little bit further than she did yesterday.
‘Tell the bitch to fuck off and die!’ Lorna shouts this from the hallway as she kicks off her boots. Megan enforces a very strict exclusion zone on outdoor footwear.
When Lorna gets to the living room both Megan and the starlet are doing the downward-facing dog, the starlet with a serenity that makes Lorna want to put her fist through the TV. Megan looks up and Lorna knows that she can tell she’s been crying. Her roomie’s welcoming grin fades. She rolls herself up into a standing position. She frowns at Lorna, hands on hips. Megan has a long, lean, straight-backed dancer’s body with broad swimmer’s shoulders. She keeps fit doing all that boxing training and lacrosse and shit, and Lorna wonders again why she wastes her time on the floor of their lounge copying bullying instructions from a dime-store hoofer on a DVD.
Megan bends at the waist, plucks the remote off the carpet and zaps the bitch into oblivion.
‘The Fuckweasel,’ she says. It’s a statement not a question. Lorna shrugs. Megan’s mouth, normally full and wide and laughing, thins to a hard straight line. Lorna says, ‘Uh-oh, it’s the boyfriend police.’ She tries her best Marilyn voice. ‘Was I doing something wrong, Officer?’ She sticks her little finger in her mouth. ‘Is there anything I can do to make you go easy on me?’
Megan isn’t playing. Just stands there waiting. She’ll make a great mum some day. Her kids are going to get away with fuck all. Lorna can see explanations are needed.
‘Oh nothing really. Jez has just been . . .’ Lorna stops.
‘Been busy being Jez,’ Megan finishes the sentence for her. ‘What a wanker.’
Lorna sometimes feels that one of the attractions she has for Megan is in providing her with an exotic vocabulary. Her room-mate enjoys Anglicisms. Collects them. Wanker is possibly her favourite, though she is also very fond of blimey, bin bag, arse, spot-on, cashpoint and snog.
She makes a point of rarely referring to Jez by name. He is usually simply The Fuckweasel. While Lorna is thinking about this, Megan crosses over to her and wraps sinewy arms around her. Lorna closes her eyes and breathes in the mixture of fruity soap and heat. Megan always smells delicious.
‘Megan,’ she chokes and swallows. ‘Megan. I love you. I love you, I love your face and all your funny little ways. And I love Armitage Shanks. But I’ve got to go home. And soon.’
Armitage Shanks is their cat, and on hearing his name, he pads into the living room to have his belly rubbed.
And later that same evening, after pasta and during Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, Lorna explains that Jez is only part of the problem and she shows Megan the Things I Miss About England list she’d scribbled down on the BART. Megan takes her time studying it. There are thirty-two separate items on that list.
‘What are Hoglumps?’ Megan asks at last. ‘What the fuck is Mucky Fat?’
‘Oh, pork scratchings and dripping.’ And then Lorna tries to explain their appeal, but she can see that Megan doesn’t really get it. ‘And lads?’ says Megan. ‘We have lads.’
‘No you don’t. You have guys. A lad is different. Bigger, louder, cheekier. More boastful. More fun if you don’t take them too seriously.’
And Lorna thinks now about Yorkshire lads with their big shiny faces and their hair inefficiently spiked and their noisy shirts loose over wobbly ale bellies. Their efforts to impress. Their clumsiness. She thinks about the bloke she saw at Huddersfield station the day she left. A fat boy with a T-shirt that proclaimed REMEMBER MY NAME – YOU’LL BE SCREAMING IT LATER. Cocky but insecure Yorkshire lads, she really does miss them. She even sort of likes the dirty carelessness of the way they can go to the bog and come back with suspiciously dry hands but she can see why Megan looks so unconvinced.
‘Mm OK. What about drizzle? That’s like rain, right? Why would you miss that?’
Lorna looks down at the quarried tub of ice cream in her hand. Doesn’t an Inuit miss snow? Doesn’t a monkey miss the green sweat of the jungle? But Megan, clearly thinking the undesirability of drizzle is evident now that she’s pointed it out, is demolishing another item
on the list. ‘And Liberal-Democrat newletters?’ Megan takes a dainty sip of her wine while she waits for an answer. Oh God. Lorna knows now is not really the time for a discussion about the British system of local government.
‘The Liberal Democrats are a political party,’ she begins.
‘I know that,’ Megan cuts in. ‘They’re the guys that come third right? But I thought you were a Green Socialist?’ Lorna blushes. She remembers a party – possibly more than one – where she had waved a bottle and berated the Americans present about how right wing they all were, about their absence of a socialist tradition. It was something guaranteed to upset any Democrats in the room, which, this close to Berkeley and to Pixar, meant practically everyone.
‘I’m not a Lib Dem, no.’ The syllables feel awkward in her mouth, like a sweet you want to crunch but can’t. Megan arches an eyebrow. ‘Stop it. I’m not a Lib Dem but they’re so keen about local politics. It’s like as long as they keep producing their newsletters telling us about how they have managed to get the council to repair the kids playground or improve street lighting or whatever, then it’s like we can sort of rest easy. Like England’s safe, you know?’
Megan shakes her head. It’s clear that, no, she doesn’t really know. She waggles Lorna’s notebook in the air. ‘I think this is actually a list of reasons why you left England in the first place.’ Lorna pauses, teaspoon of Chunky Monkey halfway to her mouth. Meg has said it casually but it has the weight of elemental truth. Lorna puts the spoon back in the tub. Megan grins happily. She knows she’s hit home. ‘Go me.’ She chuckles. And then, ‘I think you need a new list. A list of things you’d miss about here. And she makes Lorna get out her pen and write Great Things About the US of A on a fresh page.