Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  Linwood is the most concerned about where Russell might be.

  ‘It’s not like him,’ he keeps saying, ‘not like him at all.’

  ‘You think we should call the cops?’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’ Linwood’s experience of rich people, though largely confined to listening to them talk about business while on treadmills and on rowing machines, is enough for him to know that they don’t really like the police involved in anything much. Rich people see cops as being like valets or bellboys. OK to park your car and open doors, and of course you tip them generously if you want good service, but you don’t want them in your house.

  Nevertheless, there is something dangerously odd about the door of this mansion left open and the whole house has the eerie feel of an abandoned ship waiting to sink. It feels like it’s listing somehow. And maybe that’s another reason why it makes the pulse quicken to be there. Lorna suggests that they all have a beer. She’s seen some in the fridge. Good beer too.

  ‘We could just wait half an hour. See if anyone turns up. They’re lucky it was us who walked in. After all, it could have been axe murderers.’

  And so she liberates two cold bottles of Pyramid ale and a Pepsi Max for Linwood, turns off the blinding main lights, turns on the art-deco lamps, and they sit in their buttercup glow, just chatting about this and that for a while. None of it is important. Nobody says anything profound, but the weirdness of the house fades a little. All the talk is friendly and happy and inconsequential. The best kind of talk. As gentle and as warm as the lamplight. They could be in a quiet bar, the kind where grown-up men and women might go.

  Lorna listens more than she speaks, and indulges herself in a detailed reverie where she and Megs and Linwood all live together. They have healthy breakfasts together. Smoothies and muesli or egg-white omelettes and wholemeal toast. Then they go off to their separate places of work and, later, when it gets dark there’ll be music or films and sometimes Linwood goes to bed with Megs because they clearly fancy each other – look how her knees point to him, look how animated they are with one another. And sometimes he would go to bed with Lorna. And sometimes Linwood might not even come home because he’d been invited back to a house like this by one of his middle-aged women clients, one who’d had an especially successful divorce. But whenever that happened, Lorna and Megs wouldn’t mind.

  Because, after all, Megs would sometimes stay in Lorna’s bed, though Megs maybe also had another lover – a serious, thoughtful grown-up, high-achieving lover – in Castro or somewhere, and she’d spend occasional nights there, planning Democrat fundraisers or whatever.

  And every now and then Lorna might find herself waking up in the self-consciously artistic studio apartment of some poet or film-maker or theatre director. Some good-looking Fuckweasel anyway. Maybe even a baby Fuckweasel. Only every now and again though. Not too often.

  And on Sundays maybe Linwood would go to church and Lorna and Megs would lie together in the big bed they’d had commissioned, and they’d read the Sunday papers. When Linwood came back he’d carefully hang up his church suit and he’d climb between them and love them, and then read the sports pages. And then maybe they wouldn’t get up again until it got dark when Lorna would go and make toast.

  We couldn’t be a proper couple, thought Lorna. But maybe Megan and me, maybe we could be two thirds of a proper trio. We could be part of the polyandrous future of love.

  And of course, the whole set-up couldn’t last for ever, maybe just a year or two, but it would be a time they would all look back on with fondness. When each of them had been reeled back into the safe, quiet horrors of coupledom, as they would be, maybe they would also, in their separate places, sometimes mourn their own lost private triangular Eden.

  And if it did happen, she wondered who would crack first. Who would run back to the regular two-by-two world. Her money would be on Linwood. Men are so conservative when it comes to sex and relationships.

  She wonders if he likes cats, because if he can’t cope with Armitage Shanks then it’s all off anyway. Shanksy is her one true love after all.

  Megan has just asked her what she is smiling about, and is looking at her so shrewdly that Lorna is blushing – maybe she really is a witch that girl – when a couple begin to descend the absurdly grand stairs, like low rent stand-ins for movie leads. These two have been upstairs the whole time.

  One is a tired, white middle-aged man. The very definition of pale, male and stale with his thin, tired hair and a thin, tired suit. With him is a cross-looking old lady in a grubby pink jogging suit. He looks like the deputy head teacher of a failing school, two years off retirement. His companion, the lady, looks like a regular at bingo games and church jumbles.

  Only neither of them are these things.

  When they reach the floor, they stand awkwardly in front of them. The man twists his fingers. The lady glares at them each in turn from behind her cheap plasticky brown glasses. They are, they say, just the tax people, one from the UK, one from the US – so don’t be alarmed, but could they please ask a favour?

  Fifty

  CATHERINE

  So this is the famous Blue Lagoon. She is lying, covered in wellness-promoting mud, amid 5,000 square metres of geothermal seawater, in the shadow of a power station. It is meant to be good for the skin. Good for the soul too.

  Place is pretty packed. Not many Icelanders, not many Brits either, but lots of Russians, Chinese, and Americans judging by the voices around her. And that is fitting in its way. According to the blurb, those trying to rebalance mind, body and spirit at the Blue Lagoon are lying between continents. This hugely overgrown outdoor hot tub is exactly where the Euro-Asian and the American tectonic plates meet.

  As the minerals, silica and algae do whatever it is they are supposed to do, Catherine is thinking of a story where Grettir finds himself in the modern world. It’s a bit like her King Arthur story, but there is no Heidi/Harriet-type character in this one. In this tale Grettir flees all the ninth-century bounty hunters through a crack in the time-space continuum – she’ll work out the details later – and he’d be here, disgusted at the way people happily pay nearly a hundred pounds to bathe in this one when the whole country is full of wellness-promoting pools that are free.

  Maybe he will, all unknowing, somehow allow the bad guys to track him to the twenty-first century and there’ll be a massive battle scene set right here in the Blue Lagoon. Blood and guts and gore mixed with the water and the mud. Very visual. Kids’ll like that. Bearded men in horned helmets causing mayhem with axes and swords, scaring the shit out of all the women who just moments before have been pampering themselves and trying to hold back time.

  It isn’t all women here though. There are some family groups. Children shrieking as they throw handfuls of grey-blue sulphurous gunk at each other. There are plump, middle-class men in baggy shorts looking anywhere except at the women. Here and there you also see a self-confident jock with a V-shaped torso and Speedos.

  She wonders what it would all look like if you could see a bird’s-eye view, if you were in a chopper maybe. All these people, herself included, they’d look like so many strange hairless water rats. Except with less purpose. Rats are always doing something, going somewhere. A rat is always on a mission, they don’t do downtime. A rat isn’t fat. Human beings? Well, downtime is mostly all we do. Rest and relaxation are mankind’s big achievements as far as she can see.

  A rat isn’t fat. She likes that. That could be the title of a good kids’ book. One for younger readers.

  Catherine has at least earned her R and R. One of the things she’s been doing while lying here, is trying to tot up her missions over the last ten years. She thinks it’s thirty-two, but there’s always the possibility she’s forgotten one or two. Nevertheless, she’s definitely completed more actions than she’s had lovers. Killed more people than she’s had sex with, and she can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not. Does it mean she is particularly choosy when it comes to
sex, or does it mean something else, something much worse?

  And here, now, in this packed spa full of people with too much money, too much flesh and too much time, all caked in clay, she can’t feel that she’s done too much harm. Not even if every job has been done under false pretences. What does it matter in the end? The human race keeps on going, keeps on doing its ridiculous stuff. Keeps striving for new ways to do nothing that matters.

  And there are always more people. Thirty-two, thirty-three . . . Not much in a world of seven billion, most of whom are only dreaming of one day being able to take a spa break like this themselves, where they too can have a seventy-five-quid foot massage. She thinks about China. At one time the Chinese just wanted rice and bicycles. These days they want . . . well, they want everything. And who can blame them?

  She wishes now that she hadn’t come here. The Blue Lagoon isn’t blue and it isn’t a lagoon. It’s a super-sized paddling pool. In taupe. Yes, it’s probably a design triumph, but really it’s just another municipal lido with added mud. Though she’s prepared to accept that wouldn’t sound quite so good on the promo leaflets. And since the fish started dying, and the money turned to shit, the Blue Lagoon is probably the country’s biggest hard-currency earner.

  She closes her eyes. She finds that with a bit of effort she can imagine that she’s not here, that she can tune out the hundreds of face-packed spa-breakers and can instead put herself back at Grettislaug, enjoying a companionable silence with Tough.

  And it’s now that she feels the sharp, sudden pain just behind her left knee. It’s like a jellyfish sting. Or like someone poking her in the leg hard with a sharp stick. But she knows what it is really. Shit.

  She opens her eyes and looks around for a likely culprit, but it could be anyone. There are about a dozen people in her little section of the pool, none of them looking her way. That flabby bald man with the ginger chest hair and the matching bushy beard? That petite Indian-looking lady with the two small children? The skinny, tanned teen in the mirrored sunnies? That fat lady in the absurdly cheerful yellow bikini? Really it could be anyone. Nemesis could easily be wearing a mudpack, or a yellow bikini, or have a bushy red beard.

  Catherine swears softly to herself, and closes her eyes again.

  She never finished writing her kids’ book. Come to that she never finished the last few book-club reads either. But she’s always done her best.

  She spreads her arms and legs out so that she is floating in a star-shape. She looks at the roiling columns of steam from the pool. The fat seagulls. The closed sky.

  The soreness behind her knee is already fading. She feels a strange relief. This moment was always going to come and now that it has, she realises how tense worry about it has been making her.

  She thinks about how she might use the week or so she has left. No point in hospitals or doctors. She wonders if she still has enough time to get to Madam.

  She looks again at the people around her. It could even be one of the kids. Probably was. Kids will do anything for sweeties. Cheap, easy to train, remorseless. Savage. Better than a machine in some ways. Real-live terminators. One day all the big outfits will use kids. Firms like hers, they’ll be like factories were in the nineteenth century. Women and children doing all the dangerous work.

  A week. Maybe ten days.

  But it turns out that Catherine has less than ten minutes. She has time to feel the sudden irregularity of her heartbeat, the weird flush of heat down her left side. Time to cry out at the sudden cramping in her legs, time to register some strange, high-pitched keening. She has time to notice the final lie, the one about it being painless. Because this hurts. Really hurts. A diamond-tipped corkscrew deep in her guts.

  And that’s it. She’s gone. She doesn’t hear the screaming that starts up somewhere suddenly. She doesn’t see the panicked rush to clear the pool. She doesn’t feel the strong arms that carry her to the side and pump her chest. She doesn’t even feel the soft lips of the Malaysian dentist Dr Ng, who tries to keep her lungs inflated with the kiss of life. Dr Ng who only stops trying to save her when Catherine’s blood rushes into her mouth and so into his too.

  Two people die every second in the world. Most of them not as lucky as Catherine. Most of them are poor, young, frightened, sick, alone. A lot of them are babies.

  And far away in Suffolk at that moment, an elderly lady shivers while chopping onions and her knife slices deep into the pulp of her thumb, not that she cares. She doesn’t even worry about the blood that pulses from the cut and begins to pool on her chopping board.

  As she reaches for the kitchen roll and begins to wrap a thick wedge around the wound, she is already hurrying to the phone. She feels certain that something awful has happened to one of her children, or to one of her grandchildren maybe.

  And mothers are never wrong about these things.

  Fifty-one

  JESUS

  Jesus is blindfolded, lying face down with his hands cuffed around the bench he’s lying on. His legs are tied together. He is drunk and he is naked apart from his jockey shorts, and he’s also crying. He’s babbling in Spanish and English but not making any sense in either language. It should be pathetic, but it isn’t. It’s actually kind of hot. He’s so vulnerable, so scared.

  She’d been pretty pissed at him at first, the way the knucklehead wetback had been taken in by that bitch, but he’d been so sorry, so willing to do anything to make it up to her. How could she stay sore at him? Guys aren’t as tough as chicks. They aren’t as smart either. She knows that. You want something doing, you don’t get a guy to do it. Unless you have to. Like she has to get Jeremy to do this; she doesn’t know anyone else who could. Or would.

  She wishes now she’d made Jesus take the jockeys off too.

  ‘Hey, Jeremy, you got any sharp scissors?’

  They are in Ink, the new tattooists in Buena Vista Park. Jeremy was her true love in high school, but he’d left town after their thing had ended. Had to really. Moved to the city and now six years later, he runs this place. Or he does at weekends when the boss isn’t around. It was Jeremy who’d done Mary’s first tattoo, back when it was still a hobby for him. When he was still learning. He did that first little baby owl on her right breast. A big day that was. Her fifteenth birthday. Her first tat. And the first time a man had gone down on her. Not to mention the first – and only – time her mom had walked in on her while a man was going down on her. Not just any man, the teacher of Horticulture 101, her favourite subject in high school. Mr Peress. Jeremy.

  It had taken everyone a while to be cool after that. Even though Jeremy had moved on pretty quick. Fact her pop would still shoot him if he saw him again.

  ‘Sure. I have scissors. What for?’

  She has to give him credit, Jeremy is being very chilled considering he hasn’t seen her for like nearly a year. Considering he always says she destroyed his life. Every year she gets a Valentine that says exactly that. It’s like a tradition.

  ‘I’m going to cut those jockeys off.’

  And Jeremy sighs and goes and fetches the scissors from the drawer. Mary looks around approvingly. This is a well-run place, you can see that. Everything is sterile, clean. And the designs Jeremy has had blown up and put up around the main workspace are stunning. He is too good for a place like Ink, like he was too good to be part of a high-school faculty. He should be in LA doing work for the movie stars. She wonders if he has a regular date these days.

  When Jeremy comes back he says, ‘You’ve changed so much since high school.’

  And Mary says, ‘Really?’ and frowns. She doesn’t think she’s changed at all. Except maybe she knows how to get what she wants these days.

  Now to Jesus she says, ‘Keep still and quit bawling,’ but she says it quietly, tenderly even. And she sits on the very edge of the bench next to where Jesus thrashes and moans, and she snips up each leg of the jockeys. She pulls the material away. Jesus yells something. Her Spanish is pretty good, but this she can’t make
out. She looks at Jay who shakes his head.

  ‘Aw, the poor kid,’ says Jeremy. She can’t tell if he means it.

  Jesus is squirming on the bench. Mary puts a hand on the soft fuzz of his ass. A big naked man tied up and at her mercy. She tries an experimental slap. Jesus hollers again. She laughs. She does it again, a bit harder. And then remembers Jeremy is in the room. She looks at him and smirks. Jeremy’s eyes are wide, he licks his lips.

  ‘Hot, huh?’ says Mary. Jeremy nods. Mary turns back to Jesus. His shoulders are shaking. She kisses his neck.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ she soothes. ‘You gotta keep still. All be over soon.’

  ‘Well, about eight hours actually,’ says Jeremy.

  ‘Really, that long?’

  ‘Pretty much. With breaks.’

  ‘He won’t want many breaks.’

  ‘No, but I will. This is a big assignment.’

  ‘We better get started then.’

  But Jeremy still has one more thing to make sure of. One more piece of prep to do.

  ‘You’re gonna pay me right? One hundred dollars. That’s friends’ rates.’

  Which is when Mary knows Jeremy isn’t really a friend, because a friend charges nothing, but she nods and says, ‘Sure. I’m good for it,’ and wonders what the hell he’ll do when he discovers she has no money at all. It isn’t like he can repossess the tattoo. He can’t exactly impound it, can he?

  And Jeremy turns on his machine and approaches Jesus’s broad back with his needle. The needle that seems to Mary to be buzzing with a special eagerness. Jesus is very, very still now.

  ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘You can relax a bit. It’s going to be all right you know. Jeremy knows what he’s doing.’