by Anna Maxted
Manjit laughed. ‘You’re gonna be magnificent. I can tell just by looking at you. Have a drink.’
I lunged for the bottle, took a large swig, started choking. Manjit sprang forward and patted my back. But softly, so I didn’t mind.
‘Breathing?’ enquired Manjit. ‘Luverly. Let’s get started. First thing, Hol. I’m not going to teach you anything fancy. No Bruce Lee high-kicking martial arts stuff. That’s pointless. That’s for films. That’s not gonna get you anywhere. Anyrate, I don’t like kicks. They take years to learn, and they don’t work. You lose your balance. You need to keep both feet on the ground. The only time you kick someone is if they’re on the floor. And if they’re on the floor, you shouldn’t be wasting your time. And um, it’s slightly illegal. You should be running away. So. We’re gonna concentrate on a few simple techniques that work. We’re going to repeat ’em and repeat ’em, until they’re instinct. And as we practise, you’ll find out what feels right, what works for you, yeah?’
I nodded, eyes wide.
‘Excellent. Quick word though. Your best defence? These’ – he pointed to my mouth and eyes – ‘and these.’ He pointed to my legs, shivering in lycra shorts. I squeezed my knees together to stop them knocking. For the last ten years I’d been meaning to buy some cool workout trousers, cheekily flared at the ankles. But I hadn’t and my exercise outfit screamed loud as fluorescent orange that I’d last frequented a health club sometime in autumn 1994.
‘Let’s warm up while we’re talking. Alright. Roll the shoulders back. Untense. Worst thing, in a fight, is to be tense. Slows you right down. If you want to strike, you have to unclench your muscles before you can move your arm, yeah? Like this, see? Slower. As opposed to this, whap!’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Best case scenario? No fight. You’re walking down the road, that’s not a time to be daydreaming. Not in this day an’ age. Me, I mentally classify every geezer walks towards me. White, male, six foot, one hand in pocket – like, why? You gotta think, why is he walking towards me with one hand in his pocket? Is that how people walk? I don’t think so. What’s he concealing? A knife? Check, if they’ve got one hand down by their thigh. To me, that says concealed weapon. And thing is, Hol, sounds daft, but if he ain’t close up, he can’t attack you. Cross the road. He crosses, cross again. Fuck ’im. Don’t be embarrassed to make a scene. Scream, dance, act crazy. Whatever he wants off you, he doesn’t want trouble. An’ another thing. People come up, ask you the time. No way. You don’t have it. What do you do, telling the time? You bend over, squint at yer wrist – well, bloodyell. You give ’em a nice opportunity to snatch yer bag, whip out a knife, whatever. I don’t have the time. Yeah, but you got a watch. It’s broken. Here’s another thing. Someone on the street, asks you a question, you don’t have to answer. They ain’t a teacher! This ain’t school! Not polite? Bugger that! You’re a nice polite girl, Hol, well brought up. But from a safety point of view, that ain’t good. That’s what they’re counting on, yeah?’
I nodded. This knowledge was like a shower of jewels. Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, cascading over me. I wanted to burst into tears with love and gratitude. Men like you, I thought. Bless men like you, kind, decent men, who teach women how to be safe.
‘But, Hol,’ added Manjit. ‘Someone really wants your bag. Give it ’em. It’s not worth it. Run-of-the-mill mugger, he’ll wave a knife around to scare you but he doesn’t want fifteen years in the nick. Then again, some people are crazy. Do you understand me?’
I nodded.
‘Alrighty then.’ Manjit grinned. The gym smelled slightly of mildew. It was a small cool room with mirrored walls and large windows on to a courtyard. I was pleased to be there.
‘How is Nick?’ I said.
Manjit could have made one of those ooh-ooh faces, but he was better than that. He shrugged and rolled his eyes. ‘Bo caught him putting dirty plates in the dishwasher when it was still half full of clean stuff. You know what he’s like. Couldn’t be arsed to empty it, was about to switch it on. She was not happy.’
I hid a smirk.
‘He ain’t, isn’t that cheerful either.’
I couldn’t get the word out fast enough. ‘Why?’
‘It’s obvious. I went with him to a kid’s party on Sunday and he was not in a good mood. It’s fancy dress, yeah. Anyrate, Nick opens the front door as Mr Elephant and this snotty little kid done up as a pirate stabs him in the stomach with a plastic sword. I think he winded him. Anyrate, there’s this tent down the bottom of the garden, and Nick waits till the pirate kid is in it, then he sticks his big scary elephant face in the tent and screams “RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” The kid is hysterical, and crying for its mummy and – in front of the mother, yeah – Nick’s going “Aw, what’s the matter?” The kid was a brat, but what a sod! It’s only, what, four? He doesn’t care. Every little kid that’s annoyed him got the RAAAAH! treatment. One of ’em was sick with fright. Or at least, emptied a load of Smarties out of its mouth onto its party dress.’
I tried to look severe but couldn’t manage it. Several things. Manjit referring to every child, male or female, as ‘it’, and Nick being a bigger baby than all of them.
‘But, you know, them, sorry, those mums. They’re something else, aren’t they? They’re like vultures pecking at each other. I mean, on the face of it they’re all “Ooh, how’s your little one?” all cooing over each other, but you can see they’re gagging to have a pop, “And how old is he? He’s not walking yet? My Amelia, she was walking down the shops, buying pints of milk and coming back with the right change, at four months.” Scary.’
I let out the laugh but in a studious way. I was all too aware of Manjit’s ability to veer off on a chatty tangent and not return till tea time.
‘But, you know, some interesting stuff. Watching those kids fight. Thing is, Hol, most adults fight like those kids. Like they’re still at school. Head down, crouched over, arms flailing like a windmill. They don’t know how. Even the buff ones. If you want a laugh, watch Jerry Springer. And that’s good for you. Though, I gotta tell you, you think someone’s gonna hurt you, hurt them first.’
I made a face. Manjit nodded. ‘’S alright, Hol. I’m gonna show you how. And remember, start of a fight, everyone’s scared. He’s scared. Everyone has fear. Your attacker is scared. Seriously. The adrenalin starts pumping, there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s like that kid, emptying its mouth of Smarties. It’s the body’s reflex, it wants to run away, offload extra weight. That’s why people who’re scared puke or wet ’emselves. Or worse. An’ go white in the face, it’s all the blood, rushing to the legs. Anyrate. First thing. Don’t punch. Punching’s rubbish. You gotta make your hand into a tight ball – it’s tiny – you got a good chance of missing your target. And it hurts to punch people, trust me. You’re better off opening your hand and using the flat fleshy part of your palm.’
‘The heel of your palm?’
‘Yeah, the heel, that’s it. Daft, that they couldn’t think of a better name for it. Anyway, you hit someone on the nose with the heel of your palm, you’ll knock ’em out. Their head goes back and their brain wobbles in their skull like a red jelly. So look. Bring one arm up, in front of your chest and face, yeah, bent at the elbow, feels odd, doesn’t it? But you’ll get used to it, right, that’s your guard. Nice strong radius, protecting you. And strike, fast, with the other arm, palm out. Bam! Beautiful. Don’t overextend, don’t pull it back first. Aim beyond the geezer, yeah? Fast, hard, mean it. And lean into it, support that arm with the force of your body weight, yeah? So you’re hitting him with yer whole body. Luverly!’
Manjit slipped his hand into a boxing pad, held it in front of his face, and invited me to hit him. I positioned my feet securely, took my guard and lunged. Unfortunately my aim was off and I flew straight past his right ear. ‘Bother.’
‘Try again,’ said Manjit. He peered over the pad. ‘Still, tonight should cheer him up. I told him he should wear his elephant suit.’
I lowered my guard. ‘Who?’
‘Nick.’
‘What’s tonight?’
Manjit frowned. ‘You know, whatsername, that well-spoken woman with blonde hair’ – I grinned to myself. When I first knew Manjit it was ‘blonde bird this’, ‘posh bird that’. Two decades of companionship with Nick, nothing. Three months with Bo and his vocabulary had been spring-cleaned to within an inch of its life. Then I stopped grinning – ‘he met her at that Girl Meets Yob party and she gave him her card. Elisabeth something? Double barrel. You know about that. I thought you knew about that. I thought he might of, have, I mean, have said something. I mean’ – Manjit shifted his feet – ‘it’s alright though, isn’t it? It’s over and that, I mean, you ended it.’
I nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ Then I hit Manjit’s pad with the heel of my palm and knocked him flat.
‘Beautiful!’ he sighed, beaming, from the floor.
‘I cannot,’ announced Nige, the next morning, ‘abide Robbie Williams. Please hide the paper. I am bored to death of his endless dysfunction.’
Claw threw the Mirror in the bin. ‘So the audition went well, did it?’
Nige crossed himself. ‘One can never tell. But I gave it my all. I have to be satisfied with that.’
‘And you,’ I said to Claudia. ‘You don’t look unwell. What was it that kept you at home yesterday?’
My sister bared her fangs. ‘I had a bug. It might have been brought on by the calamity that was Tuesday night. I was extremely ill, very ill. I nearly called an ambulance.’
Nearly.
‘Was it the kind of ill brought on by excess alcohol?’ enquired Nige.
Claudia smiled. ‘We’re not all like you, petal,’ she replied. ‘Some of us can hold our drink.’
Nige wriggled in his seat. ‘Only through solid years of practice. So did you plan your funeral song? I always do that when I’m ill. Top choice at the moment is “If I Can Dream” – you know, Elvis – “if I can dream of a better place”—’
‘Yeah?’ said Claudia. ‘That’s shit. I’d have “It’s Gonna Be Lonely this Christmas”.’
My voice emerged three octaves squeakier than normal. ‘Excuse me,’ I shrilled. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a business, not a social group, can we start work please?’
Claudia and Nigel went quiet. I could see them looking at each other, covertly.
‘What?’
Finally, Claudia spoke. ‘Holly,’ she said. ‘It’s a business and a social group. And the social part of it is crucial to the success of the business. And, well, this week, it seems to us that you’ve forgotten that. No one got together on Tuesday, thanks to you. It was bloody embarrassing and a disaster we cannot afford to repeat. The week after next we’ve got Gwen Rogers and her TV crew filming us, we have got to get it right.’
A small shrill elf overtook my voice box. ‘What are you talking about! How can you say that? You know I love this business. I’d do anything for this business! Why do you think I hired Issy?’
Nige cut in. ‘Good point. At first, sweets, we thought you’d hired Issy to help you pair people with her psychological expertise. But from what we saw the day before yesterday, you hired her to ignore her expensive advice and weed out just about every man that applies—’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Sweets, you refused to accept a perfectly good candidate, what was he, a musician, because under ‘what’s your favourite book and why?’ he wrote ‘I don’t read books’. Now—’
‘Nigel,’ I said. ‘You cannot deny that there’s something savage about people who don’t read books.’
Nige sighed. ‘Hol, I’m not saying it’s admirable. Yeah, sure, me, I’d want a partner with an extensive library, John Grisham, Jackie Collins, do not pass go, I’d require one Dostoevsky, a Fitzgerald at least, an attempt at Dickens – I’d accept The Pickwick Papers up to page nine – an entire Hardy, a whole Austen, one of the Brontës, not fussed which, but sweets, that’s me, I’m a snob, I despise people who play golf, I shudder at those who call dinner “tea”—’
‘Half the country then.’
‘Correct, Claw, but happily, this agency does not cater for me, or you, or Holly and while many, indeed, most of our candidates are well read, quite a few of them couldn’t give a flying eff if the last book their soul mate opened was Topsy and Tim Go to the Seaside, and that being the case, it is certainly not for us to judge. To reject, what was his name, Tim, on the grounds that he doesn’t like reading is, I’m afraid, unacceptable.’
Claudia nodded. ‘I agree.’
I felt picked on. I wouldn’t mind but those two are professional layabouts who spend a large portion of the working day discussing such weighty issues as how the seals on plastic soup tubs are so hazardous to open that you expect to rip a nail and how the attempt could quite possibly kill an old person, what sort of patterns you see when you shut your eyes really tight, whether Pringles intensely flavour every sixth crisp to entice you further down the tube, and the invention by a Northamptonshire housewife of an item called the Stress Towel, discovered when she found that throwing a tea towel over her head signalled to her family that she’d had enough of them.
Behold, the great minds accusing me of neglecting my job!
‘I am not turning down every man who applies. On Monday I accepted a really lovely guy called, ah, Neil Bottomley—’
‘Aged fifty-seven!’ thundered Nige. ‘With a doctor of philosophy degree in – wait for it – life insurance from the Pacific Western University, California, and who, from his picture taken, we see from the computerised date on the back of the shot, a decade ago when he still had a thin tufting of hair round his ears, before it finally left his head and migrated to inside his ears. Hey, gorgeous twenty-something girlies, check out this mad, bad life insurance salesman we got for you, ooh, it’s your lucky night tonight! Are you insane? This isn’t us! We’re Girl Meets Boy, not Girl Meets Coffin-dodger. My God! I could finish him off by running up behind him with a crisp packet! You carry on this way, you’ll kill us, Hol.’
‘Some women like older men.’
‘Some women,’ retorted Nige, ‘like convicted murderers and we don’t provide those either.’
‘Well. Look. I don’t like some of the things you do.’
‘Tell me. I’d be glad to address them.’
‘Tuesday. The nanny. She’s been three times but only gets friendship ticks.’
‘Shannon?’ Nige’s face was indignant.
‘Yes, Shannon. I thought it was out of order of you to tell her she should go to the gym. I thought that was wrong, and disgusting, actually. I’d never tell a client to go to the gym.’
‘You gave Sam a makeover,’ snapped Claudia.
‘Claudia, she asked me to advise her. That’s different.’
‘Hol,’ said Nige, ‘Shannon asked me for advice. She wanted me to be honest. And I didn’t just tell her to go to the gym. I gave her an entire life coaching session. I’d told her the month before to relax on her dates because the guys felt like they were being interviewed. I’d told her to stop asking them about their ambitions and possessions, and to chat about something like holidays, and then she spent the whole evening grilling them for exact information. Then she was upset because she still wasn’t getting the shag, sorry, relationship ticks. So I spoke to her on Tuesday and said that it could be partly to do with the way she presented herself, and that maybe she should try to do more alone, go to the gym, to galleries, I wanted to motivate her to do something cultural, develop her personality, make an effort with her looks. She can’t be fagged to exercise her body or her brain, what does she expect? It’s tough out there, Hol. There are people ten times better looking than her, ten times more interesting. What does she do? She looks after other people’s babies. That, in itself, is not necessarily interesting. She was expecting all this criteria from the blokes, but not providing any.’
I studied Claudia’s footwea
r. (Pink patent boots with pointy toes, kitten heels and buckles up to the mid-calf.)
‘Holly,’ said my sister, tucking her feet under her chair. ‘We do mess about but you do know that Nige and I take our work here very seriously. Last month, may I remind you, the Chocolate Box chain became our sponsors which, apart from making us all fat, has taken off some of the financial pressure, and who negotiated that deal? – I did, with Nige acting as my personal assistant. We care about what happens to this agency. We think it’s a brilliant service you’ve created here, with incredible potential. I love the idea about starting up a gay section, Boy Meets Boy, Girl Meets Girl. We want this to succeed, and we think you have the talent to make it succeed. That’s why we’re saying these things, not to attack you, but because we believe in you. It’s because we respect your judgment – normally – that we can be honest with you. If there’s anything on your mind stopping you giving the busines your full attention, please tell us, we only want to help. We’re on your side, Holly.’
I swallowed, hard. Gave myself a mental shake. Then I sat up straight and looked at both of them dead on. That caused a fuss in my eye sockets so I settled for gazing first at Claw, then at Nige.
‘You’re both right,’ I said, forcing myself not to add ‘but’. I smiled. ‘And I appreciate’ – listen to me, so emotionally advanced – ‘your honesty. I have been preoccupied this week.’ I paused. They’d expect something. ‘What with Nick, leaving the house, finally.’
‘Christ, Hol, when? Why didn’t you say something?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘Last Friday. A week ago tomorrow. Anyway. From now on, I’m back on form. No professors of life insurance, and lots of men who can’t read. And even more matching people with who they want to be with.’
Nige patted my arm. ‘Poor angel. No wonder. Dreadfully hard to be pro-smooch when you’re at the dog end of a failed relationship. But you’ll do it, Hol, I know you will, you’re such a softie.’
Claudia stood up. ‘If you’ll excuse me. All that earnest niceness and, guah, relating. I’m not used to it. It’s left a foul taste in my mouth. I need to brush my teeth.’