by Simon Brooke
The sun is breaking through the clouds as I leave the shop. I begin to walk down Tottenham Court Road towards Oxford Street. As I approach the Tube station a girl comes up to me, looks me in the eye and says something to me in a sad, soft voice. She has long blonde hair and pale blue eyes. But it's her skin - so clear and so pale you can almost see the veins underneath it. Her eyes open wider, almost in fear, and she speaks to me again.
'What did you say?' I ask. I've got no money if she's begging or looking for business. She seems so vulnerable, so unworldly that I wonder whether perhaps I've found someone who's in worse shit than I am, somebody who has managed with great skill and determination to fuck up their life more badly than I have.
She fixes me with a desperate look and touches my arm 'I say you want learn English?' I look down. She has a flyer in her hand.
'No,' I tell her. 'No, thank you.'
I never went back to Marion's. Slowly I walked all the way from Tottenham Court Road to Fulham. I'd probably have walked even if I'd had the Tube fare. I rehearsed all the things I should have said to Jane, trying to cap her arguments as if winning these little battles would help me win the war I had so hopelessly lost. At the beginning of Knightsbridge I nearly started back again at one point. Then I stopped at Hyde Park Corner, watched the traffic for a while from the safety of the pavement and carried on walking west again.
By the time I got back to Vinny's it was gone four o'clock. I sat down on the step to wait. It rained again, I think, and at one point a woman walked past with a pushchair and a Walkman, telling the little boy running alongside her 'No! I said no. You've already had one - don't be greedy.'
'Andrew?' says Vinny. I look up at him.
'Hi,' I say, my voice surprising me with its huskiness.
'What you doing here?' he says, apparently only slightly surprised to see me. 'Fuck knows.'
He lets me in and we have a long game of One A Side Indoor Football, silent and intense. Both gasping and gleaming with sweat, we come to a sort of natural full time and Vinny takes a couple of my remaining beers out of the fridge. He chucks me one. I open it on the side of the kitchen table and drink.
'Well?' says Vinny after he has done the same.
'My room still free?'
Vinny smiles. 'Yep.'
'Good.'
'Wanna talk about it?'
'No.' I take another swig of beer. 'Well, not yet, anyway.'
*
I found a job in a pub round the corner the next day. My mum and dad were horrified when I told them I'd left the media sales business (OK, I couldn't bring myself to say 'sacked') to go and work in a pub. Later though, my dad was quite impressed when I told him how much I got cash in hand with overtime. I had visions of him trying to find a reference to this in one of his selfhelp books. ('Don't be a service industry wuss! Implement multi-directional manual glass-stacking procedures to suit your personal dynamic opening time schedule!').
The flat's landlord still had my deposit and I calculated that I could actually make my rent quite easily with my new income - and I didn't have to start work until ten. Yes, Marion did ring for me - three or four times. Each time she just left a tight-lipped message asking me to call her as if she was chasing up a debt or ringing to enquire why I'd missed a dental appointment. I never returned her calls.
I got into the habit of letting the answer machine click in rather than answer the phone just in case it was Marion again, or Mark or Jonathan or a dozen other people I didn't want to speak to. But one evening when I was at home between shifts drinking tea and reading the paper in the living room I picked it up without thinking. It was Sami.
'Sami?' I gasped.
'The one and only,' she giggled. 'The notorious.'
'What, what? Where are you? Are you all right? I've been trying to get hold of you but I didn't have your - are you alright?' I was cradling the receiver as if the connection might break at any moment.
'All right, all right,' she laughed. 'I'm staying with a friend at the moment. I'm OK.'
'Thank God. I rang the office and they wouldn't give me your number.'
'I bet they wouldn't - probably Debbie's attempt to punish both of us.' Her voice sounded different - deeper, more selfassured.
'So what happened? You and Wheatley? I can't believe it.' She laughed. 'Neither can I. Neither could anyone else.'
'How ... when?' There were so many questions.
She told me their affair had started about six months ago when he called down to our office for some figures. Sami was working late and she happened to know where the relevant papers were kept so she brought them up to him.
'We spent some time going through them in his office and by that time it was gone ten o'clock so he offered me a lift home. We stopped for a drink in a wine bar nearby,' she said, sounding rather well rehearsed. No doubt she had told this story to quite a few people already. 'After that we had a drink or dinner together a few times, very discreetly, of course, and then-'
My mind was racing for more clues. I remembered Sami's strange reaction - more than simple embarrassment - when we bumped into him that morning in the lobby.
'But he's such a creep,' I blurted out.
'Don't laugh, but he's actually quite charming when you get to know him and quite funny actually.' She giggled at my stunned, sceptical silence. 'Really. Anyway, I suppose he made me feel good, special. Suddenly a rich, successful ... I don't know ... powerful man takes an interest in you, someone who knows how the world works, someone older and more sophisticated who takes you to expensive restaurants .. .' Sounding less practised, he drifted off for a second. 'Do you see what I mean?'
'I know exactly what you mean,' I said quietly.
'And it wasn't just sex - it was more than that. We only slept together a few times, at weekends away and things.'
'I think I can understand.'
'Not many people can. My parents don't know why I left such a good job, they're always going on at me. I told my sister a while ago and she just couldn't believe it, kept asking how I could do a thing like that. Then my brother overheard us talking about it one evening and the next morning he went round to the office and just blew up. He won't speak to me but apparently it was awful.'
'So Maria told me.'
Sami said, 'Then I realised that you were doing something similar ... I mean, going out with an older woman.'
'Sort of,' I said, comparing Ken Wheatley to Marion for a moment but then feeling slightly distrusted at the thought of both of them. 'I don't think I was as much a victim as you were, though. I asked for it.'
'Victim? It takes two to tango.' Sami and her phrases. 'I suppose so. But that's all over now.'
'You split up?'
'Yep.' Then I said, 'Sami, why didn't you tell me?'
'I couldn't believe it was happening at first and then, well, you had troubles of your own, didn't you? How could I?'
I swallowed hard. 'Oh, fuck, I'm so sorry. If only I hadn't been so wrapped up in my own problems, so-'
'Half asleep at your desk?'
'Well, yeah, I suppose so. Otherwise perhaps I would have noticed something.'
'Andrew, men never notice these things.'
I laughed. We made a date to meet for a drink, the first evening out I'd planned for a long time and I hadn't been so excited about a date since Jane.
One weird thing I noticed was that although my biggest work concerns were checking that we weren't running out of clean glasses during opening times and my greatest challenge was trying to understand how the till worked, I was actually enjoying the experience of working again.
When I was with Marion at first I thought that if a day off work was enjoyable and a week off was even nicer then, by simple arithmetic, a lifetime off must be better still. Every day a holiday! Just what I always wanted. Like winning the Lottery.
But it's not. It's like being unemployed except that you're not even aiming towards something. You fill your days but in the same way you kill time on a rainy Sunday
afternoon. 'A task fills the time allocated to it' or something like that, says Parkinson's Law, according to what we learnt at college and it's amazing how long you can spin out going to the shop to buy a newspaper if you work at it. While I was serving one evening some men in suits came in shouting about bonuses and it occurred to me that you can place the various different ways you can get money on a sort of ladder of merit. You can earn it (which is pretty high up), you can make it yourself (also quite high up - unless, perhaps, you're poor, sad Errin's dad), you can earn cash in hand (like I'm doing now and that is slightly lower down), you can inherit it (quite far down), you can steal it (further down) or you can beg for it (just a bit higher up, perhaps?).
I'd probably put Marion, a serial alimony beneficiary, quite low down and the same with Jonathan the pimp, Viv the hooker and Mark the rent boy. I don't quite know where Channing, Charles and Victoria and lots of the other people I met would come because I still don't know how they made their millions but I'd put the scheming, desperate little shit I became somewhere beneath all of them. I was right when I was at Errin's that night - the way you get money can bugger you up. Like I said: make it and it can turn you mean and bitter, inherit and it can make you soft and decadent. Beg it from someone you're living off, leaching off, and it makes you both.
I do miss the expensive restaurants and the holidays but not the stress that went with them. I realise now that I never felt comfortable travelling or eating out with Marion - I knew people were staring at us discreetly in those restaurants, shops and business-class lounges. Going out with Vinny and Male the other night for a curry just felt so easy and natural.
However shocked I was to discover that I was playing slave to Marion's sadistic master, the truth is I can hardly I blame her, of course. Like Chris said, I was just trying to earn a living off her and so perhaps she was right to expect something back - although it wasn't quite what I could ever have imagined. I was doing better out of her than Chris in many ways and Mark, if I'd bothered to ask him, would probably have given me seven out of ten for a first go.
Except that there'll never be a second go.
I bumped into Mark in the King's Road one day. He didn't seem particularly pissed off or surprised that I'd left him and the others in the lurch that rainy Thursday but Marion, he said, was furious. When she got home she physically attacked Ana Maria and blamed her for frightening me off. That's a good one, I thought, when he told me. Then she went off to Mauritius or somewhere with Channing. When I asked Mark whether she was angry and upset because I had dumped her or let her down in front of her friends and inconvenienced her domestic arrangements, or whether it was because she really loved me, he looked surprised by the question.
'Oh, I think she was just generally pretty narked. It was a bit embarrassing for her and Marion hates to be embarrassed. Hey, listen, there's a South African woman I met the other night, late forties, newly divorced, absolutely loaded, horny as hell ...'
Looking at his handsome face and into his smiling, vacant eyes, I said, 'No thanks, mate. Seeya,' and slapped him on the arm affectionately.
Other than not wanting to meet Mark's South African, or anyone else he knew, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life until one Saturday morning, a postcard arrived. It had a picture of the opera house in Buenos Aires on one side and an address in the city on the other.
It was all I needed.
If you enjoyed Sugar Mummy by Simon Brooke you might like Dead Money by Rodney Hobson, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Dead Money
Rodney Hobson
Prologue
The dark came as a shock. It was obviously expected but there was no way of preparing for it, no way of practising for it.
Nor was there any going back. This might be the only opportunity and there was desperately little time.
The stairs were fairly easy, a regular height that could be taken with a steady step, touching the wall with the left hand to guide round corners. It was the level part at each floor and halfway up each flight that was tricky, the sudden lurch forward when the expected step up was missing.
Then came another shuffle round the corner until a toe end caught the next flight.
It was too risky to try counting the stairs. The important thing was to count the floors, to be sure of getting the right one. Two flat turns to each storey.
There was just enough light from the far end to find the door, to avoid clanging the bar against the wall as it was swapped to the left hand and the key to the right, to find the keyhole with a shaking hand and to turn the key.
The door clinked slightly as it was opened but the chain was not on. The curtains were open yet it still took a few precious seconds to make out the way through the lounge and into the short passage.
The door at the far left of the passage was open. The bedroom was dark and only the vaguest shape could be made out.
Down came the bar with a grunt. A pause for breath, then another blow. Then another, the series building up into a frenzy, striking all over the bed to be sure.
Not a sound came from the shape. The bar fell noiselessly onto the thick carpet.
An elbow caught with a start against something at the side. Eyes that were slowly adjusting to what little light crept through the curtains made out a bedside lamp.
One click of the switch revealed the full horror of what had happened.
Chapter 1
“It’s coming to something,” grumbled Nick Foster as he brushed up the leaves. “Coming to something.”
It’s coming to something when you have to put a security barrier up, Foster thought. This is Lincolnshire in the 1990s, for heavens sake. Dull, quiet Lincolnshire. Killiney Court was just a small block of flats in a small town – well, a fairly large block in a fairly large town by Lincolnshire standards, Foster muttered away to himself, but hardly Chicago in the 1930s.
Killiney Court used to be council property but years of neglect, uncaring tenants of an uncaring council, had led to a decision to bulldoze the place. Sleathorpe Properties stepped in at the last minute, picked the place up for a nominal sum and spent millions on refurbishment.
Here was the result: 24 luxury flats, four to each floor, in a solid brick and concrete building. It was a lifestyle that was beyond the hope of most of the surrounding populace but even paradise has its price. Killiney Court had been beset by petty thieving. It had caused tension among the residents as well as complaints that it was easy for envious outsiders to get in.
Hence the new sentry box that was being erected across the entrance. There a guard could sit all day and night, the tedium broken only by occasionally swinging the barrier up and down to let cars in and out of the short narrow drive.
Grumble and rustle, rustle and grumble, Foster edged his way round the bottom of the block. He was in no rush. He was 70 and would die leaning on his broom, though he did not intend that to happen for a long time yet. He had looked 70 since he was 50 and would still look 70 when he was 90.
His hair, though grey, was mainly intact. His face was chubby but lined. His body and clothes were indeterminate, as he hid them under an ill-fitting overall tied loosely at the waist.
The ground level at Killiney Court was open except for the lift in the centre at the back.
“Wind blows right through,” he chuntered. “Brings all the dirt and leaves. Now we’ve got the building mess as well.”
Foster had a point. One workman was drilling into tarmac and concrete while another stood supervising. They were making rather more mess than was necessary. No one, however, paid much attention to Foster’s grumbles, which were in any case directed mainly to himself.
Even the security guard, sitting at his temporary desk under the shelter of the block where he had taken up his duties at the beginning of the week, had learned to turn a deaf ear by the fifth day.
“Just keep an eye on things, Nick, while I nip to the toilet,” he said, easing off the chair and ambling round behind the lifts.
>
“Toilets aren’t that way,” Foster grumbled to himself. He knew the guard was going for a cigarette. Smoking on duty was a serious sin, a sackable offence. Some of the hoity toity residents didn’t like to return to their palatial mansions to be confronted by a security guard with a cigarette protruding from his mouth, forcing them to run the gauntlet of a ring of smoke.
That was the fifth time the guard had “gone to the toilet” and it was still only midday.
“Friday the thirteenth,” grumbled Foster. Rustle and grumble. “Unlucky for somebody.”
It was 4.30 pm when the first car drove in and the new barrier was raised in earnest for its debut performance. Ray Jones, local businessman, entrepreneur with a finger in a dozen small-time enterprises dotted around the area, steered his BMW towards the barrier. He could afford a Mercedes, he told himself frequently, and others occasionally, but he did not like to display his wealth.
Jones, late fifties, stocky, heavily greying and slightly round-shouldered, waved peremptorily at the lone sentinel, now half way through his allotted shift and seated proudly, if a little uncomfortably, in his bright new sentry box. He pressed a button and the barrier swung up, just a little too late to avoid forcing Jones to slow almost to a halt.
Jones gave him a sharp look that meant “get the timing right”, then he swung away into his parking slot down the left hand side of the block and under the high surrounding wall. As he got out and clicked the remote control key to lock the car, he heard a loud peep from another vehicle following him in.
The second car was a Mercedes. Scott Warren’s signal had alerted the guard, who this time swung up the barrier far too soon. This incident annoyed Jones twice over: he hated people to misuse their horns and that guard, who would have to be paid out of the community fees, had got the timing on the barrier wrong again. Jones liked things in their proper place at their proper times just as God had intended them.