by David Thorne
‘Danny? You can sort this, right?’ A small tear rolls down his thin, unloved and unshaved cheek. ‘Right?’
8
GABE’S VOLLEY HAS never been as reliable as his baseline game but, now that he is playing off one leg and a prosthetic limb, a cup on one end attached to his knee and a Nike Air trainer on the other, he has no choice but to stay up at the net; he lacks the speed to chase a wide, deep ball down a tramline. Perhaps I am being harsh on his volley; since his accident he has worked on his net game and right now is putting away angled balls with a casual contempt. Our opponents, two lean investment bankers who sauntered on to court and dumped their expensive tennis bags with a complacent authority, are now running with sweat and wondering how these two men, one with a false leg and the other a meaty thug as wide as he is tall, can be beating them quite so viciously.
I am serving, thirty–love up in the third game of the second set, one set and two games up in the match. These men are not used to losing, either in tennis or, I suspect, judging by their top-line equipment and the Porsche they arrived in, life; they do not appear to be enjoying the experience. My serve has seventeen stone of well-drilled bulk behind it and the man I am serving to, his once-immaculate blond hair plastered to his scalp and eyes dark with exhaustion, can only watch the ball hiss past him down the T and thud into the green screens hanging on the fence behind. He takes a deep ragged breath and goes for his towel. Gabe turns around, looks at me, winks.
‘Serve.’
I nod, grin, bounce the ball, toss it up and cream a flat serve wide to my opponent’s backhand. He doesn’t get within two metres of it, flailing flat-footed, his racket waving clumsily like a drunk wielding a broken bottle. He is absolutely finished. If it had not been for the graceless air of privilege they arrived with, I might feel pity for our opponents.
Gabe has been given, by the local tennis authority, special dispensation to remain exclusively a net player except on his serve, not swapping after every point as the rules stipulate. It is an allowance that he did not ask for and argued strenuously against, until the pain I felt watching him forlornly chase passing shots caused me to deliver an ultimatum: stay at the net or I would no longer play with him. As a war hero, there has been little muttering; besides, Gabe is a popular and well-liked man. Of course, there will always be exceptions.
‘This is bullshit,’ says the man who has just watched my serve go by, tanned with close-shaved black hair and a razor-sharp goatee. ‘I stayed at the net all game I’d have energy to burn.’
‘Return a serve. Wear him out,’ I suggest. ‘Not his fault he’s a spectator.’
‘It speaks,’ says the blond-haired man.
‘What did you say?’ asks Gabe.
‘Nobody told us we’d be playing care in the community.’
‘That why you’re losing? Out of charity?’ I ask coolly.
‘Let’s just fucking play, can we?’ says the close-shaved man. He can’t get off court fast enough.
It is the blond-haired man’s serve; he is wiping sweat out of his eyes, bouncing the ball. He tosses the ball high; I have to give him credit, his serve is a thing of beauty, an easy wind-up and explosive follow-through. It comes at me a little wide and I hustle to it, returning it sweetly, a fast looping cross-court forehand, though a little high and short. It sits up a shade too invitingly on the server’s forehand; he steps into it and hits through it, a vicious flat bomb down the line, the other side of the court from me. I have no chance of making it. Gabe takes the awkward, fast jump step he has learned with his prosthetic leg and reaches out a backhand, takes the ball low at arm’s length with a magnificent touch and punches it back over the net, past the close-shaved volleyer and into the open backhand court of the blond-haired man who is still standing admiring the forehand he would have bet his house was a clear winner.
‘Bollocks,’ the blond-haired man says. I cannot help but laugh, my heart full of pride and admiration for Gabe who, on one leg, has just hit one of the finest volleys I have ever seen.
I put a beer down in front of Gabe, back at our outside table of five nights ago, watching a foursome of retirement-age ladies gently lob balls over the net, trot after them, miss them. My body is still hot and buzzing from our win, the memory of the two men angrily stalking off court as they declined the offer of a third set still exhilarating me.
‘They’ll be worrying at that for a month,’ I say. ‘We took some of their pride away there.’
Gabe doesn’t respond, watches a sixty-year-old hit a tennis ball vertically up in the air. She giggles like a child, hand over her mouth. He seemed well this morning, his eyes dancing with anticipation. Now he looks up at me with his pale eyes radiating scorn. It is a hard gaze to meet for any length of time.
‘Problem?’
‘You think we took their pride away from them? Never happen, never in a million years. They’re back in the Porsche right now, back to their six-figure jobs, they’ll be taking it out on their secretaries within the hour, making themselves feel better. People like that don’t stay down for long.’ He takes a drink, turns away from me. ‘But, if it makes you feel all good and strong inside, fucking press on, Dan.’
This isn’t fair. ‘So, what, beating two good players doesn’t mean anything any more?’
Gabe turns back to me. ‘You talk about taking something away from them. You know what they’ve still got, which’ll keep them sleeping happily in their beds tonight? Two fucking legs each, that’s what they’ve got. They got beaten by a cripple. So what? They’d still rather be them, not me. Call that a victory?’ He shakes his head, disgusted by my naivety.
I do not know what to say, trapped, wanting to offer something to help but conscious that I do not have the first idea what Gabe has been through, what he feels now. For this most bitter and testing part of my best friend’s life, I am no more than a spectator. Anything I do say he will treat with contempt, the empty words of a civilian. But as in tennis, so in life; when in doubt, go on the attack.
‘So you’re smoking weed now,’ I say. ‘Didn’t know that was what tank commanders did.’
‘Well, Dan,’ he replies evenly, ‘I’m not a tank commander any more, am I? So I can do what the fuck I want.’
It was the wrong thing to say, I know. But I also realise that, whatever I say, Gabe will not connect with me, will rise above. He is the most self-reliant and capable man I have ever met; trying to break through to him with confrontational words is like throwing gravel at a headstone. I sit back, out of his space, drink my beer. On court the ladies string a five-shot rally together and react with delight, dropping their rackets and applauding as if they, not us, have emerged the winners today.
The heat seems, over the weeks, to have lowered, settled so that we are now living in a stagnant pool of hot air that smells of dry grass, petrol, melting tarmac. I do not go back to the office but do not wish to head home; I am loath to admit it, but Baldwin’s visit is playing on my mind. I refuse to allow him to have his hand over me and am in danger of becoming consumed by fantasies of vengeance. He is a policeman, backed up and protected by the law; I run an unsuccessful one-man down-at-heel lawyer’s firm. How can I take him on?
I take a drive out on to the three-lane concrete A-roads that encircle the area where I live, the air superheated by articulated lorries heading to the Channel, my window open and a dirty breeze blowing through my hair, tearing at my shirtsleeve. It is nearly evening but the weather is so still I cannot gauge any change in temperature. I pass Tilbury Docks looking for a cooling breeze from the river and drive by mile upon mile of corrugated-steel shipping containers, giant battered Lego blocks stacked by some clumsy, soulless giant. Looking at them, I cannot help but think of Billy Morrison, still in his hospital bed but his problems started here, at these docks, with a stolen consignment of stereo equipment. I would like to wash my hands of him, throw him to the sharks; whatever fate has in store for him, it is of his own making. But Billy’s problems are too close to home, an
d our histories are, to an extent, intertwined; we have both had unhappy upbringings and I am not arrogant enough to pretend that, but for the intervention of kind and generous people like Rachael, I could not have turned out like him. I am his lawyer. I feel that I need to do something for him, or the advantage I have been given in life will be worth nothing. But, heading back for my home and certain trouble, I am able to admit to myself that I do not relish the prospect of getting involved with a man like Halliday.
9
WHEN I WAS young, the building was the clubhouse of a chapter of the Outlaws, the pavement outside blocked by chopped-down Harley-Davidsons and men in leather waistcoats over heavy guts, beards obscuring their black Jack Daniel’s T-shirts. Along with a boy called Gary Kostas, I once, for a dare, emptied a can of black paint over the seat of one of the parked tilted bikes before running as if death was at my back, Gary by my side sobbing and snivelling and gasping in fear. We were never caught, but I did not walk down this street for years afterwards.
The bikers eventually moved on and now the building, part of a row of shopfronts on a busy street just off the centre, is a bar owned by Vincent Halliday. It has been part of his property and entertainment empire for years but tonight it is being relaunched as Karma, refitted and aimed at a modern and fashionable crowd. I am not a betting man, but I would be happy to stake my car that Vincent has no idea what karma means. My background means that I am still sufficiently well connected to the local semi-legitimate business world that I warrant an invitation, and I am curious to see what Vincent Halliday looks like nowadays; I knew him vaguely when I was young as one of the men my father looked up to and occasionally did work for. Nowadays, I know him only by reputation, though it is some reputation.
Halliday began his professional life as a boxer, a big-hearted middleweight who could go the distance but soon got the reputation of a slapper; in all his fights, he never once put a man on the canvas. After he hung up his gloves, he used the connections he had built up with men who were not averse to a fight, and began running security for clubs in the area. But naturally, with such a wealth of muscle at his disposal, he found other uses for it, and soon he was controlling the drugs trade within those clubs; then, when he had cornered that market, expanding out so that he ran the distribution and the importation of whatever that day’s narcotic of choice was, across the whole of south Essex.
Since those days, Halliday has diversified, owning strip clubs, bars, property. But everybody knows that these outward signs of wealth are only the tip of the iceberg and that the real money comes from the dirty worlds of drugs, gambling, women. Despite the superficial appearance of legitimacy, Halliday has always carried with him the whiff of villainy; his chances of assimilating into decent society are about as good as a mongrel winning at Crufts. He is surrounded by stories of violence done, rivals terrorised, enemies found dead; but his network of influence is so diffuse that the trail is always broken before it reaches his door. In the late-eighties, he was almost put away for the murder of two men, Michael Connor and Gavin O’Dwyer, rivals in the door trade who vanished and who were last seen in the company of Halliday. Despite blood being found in his car and a recently fired gun buried at his home, their bodies were never found and the case against him fell apart. You have to give him credit, he has never been caught, done only minor time. And he is a far richer, and possibly happier, man than I will ever be.
I nod to the men on the door, grey camel-hair coats and bald heads, show them my invitation. They look at me with the curious, appraising air I attract from hard men as they assess my threat level. Inside, the bar is full, the crowd separated into its usual constituent parts: middle-aged men talking quietly together, used to getting by without the need to raise their voices; brash young wannabes with chunky silver and hair they have spent too long over, competing to see who can talk loudest, trying to make their mark; and overly made-up skinny women wearing expensive clothes, young and old alike, treading a very thin line between skimpy and indecent and, I think unkindly, more often than not finding themselves on the wrong side. This is the Essex I grew up in, as delineated and hierarchical as any public school, bound by its own laws and expectations and dress code. And it is true that I feel more at home here than I ever did on golf weekends in the company of soft and successful lawyers.
‘Danny! Hello, son, where’ve you crawled from?’ A man named Jimmy, whom I have known since we were small children, has separated himself from a group of men and joined me standing at the bar. I am trying to attract the eye of a sullen girl in a crop top who appears to believe that serving drinks is beneath her, and Jimmy reaches over and closes my fist over the note I am holding. ‘On me, Danny, put your money away. Here, darling, you serving or just looking pretty?’ The girl looks up at Jimmy’s cheerful shout, comes over. ‘Whatchoo having?’ he asks me.
‘Get me a beer then,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
‘Nah, pleasure, Danny.’ To the girl, ‘Two beers, and if you can manage a smile you can have one yourself.’ She twitches a small, sarcastic effort at Jimmy and turns away to handle our order. ‘’Sa matter with her?’ he says. ‘Face on her like her fanny’s healed up.’ He grins at me lopsidedly. He was born with a cleft palate which was perfunctorily reconstructed by a surgeon who perhaps had half a mind on the golf course; it gives Jimmy a perpetual sneer that his irrepressibly cheery character robs of any malice. His father left his family when Jimmy was a young child and he and his two sisters were brought up single-handedly by their mother, a proud, honest and hard-working woman who watched in dismay as Jimmy became involved in petty criminality. But whatever misdemeanours Jimmy gets up to in his life, he is always a welcome face in mine. He is a man it is impossible to dislike and I often wonder how he handles the more unpleasant aspects of his business; I cannot imagine him putting the frighteners on anybody. Perhaps he waits outside in the van.
‘How’ve you been, Jimmy? Your mum?’
‘Yeah, she’s good. She’s well. Still working, you know what she’s like. I try to tell her, “Listen, gel,” I say, “you need to take it easy, slow down.” Says she’ll have plenty of time to rest when she’s dead.’
‘Sounds about right.’ The girl comes back with our beers, holds up a third in meek enquiry.
‘Go on then, seeing as you asked.’ He pays her, takes a swallow. ‘You? Still doing all that lawyering?’
‘Yeah, still doing the lawyering.’
‘You done well there, Danny,’ says Jimmy. ‘Me and Mum, we always say that. Proud of you, what you done, how you got out.’ He points the bottom of his bottle at the crowd. ‘Made summink of yourself.’
This isn’t an area I want to discuss. Got out? Then what am I doing here, my mind full of thoughts of Vincent Halliday? I change the subject. ‘So, Karma. That your idea, Jimmy?’
‘My idea? You think…?’ He looks at me, sees that I am joking. ‘Cheeky cunt. Nah, weren’t me, Halliday’s new piece, it was her idea. You probably know her.’ He stands on tiptoe, looks across the bar. ‘Sat there in that gold dress. Debbie, used to follow her brother around, Paul Chance. Remember?’
I follow his gaze, see a pretty blonde woman sitting on her own. I do, vaguely, a grubby girl in dirty white socks and sandals trailing a cloth doll. Looks like she’s come a long way since then. ‘Yeah, Karma, it was her idea. Reckons it’s classy. Eastern or summink.’
‘Right.’
Jimmy takes a swig, looks at me. ‘Shit, ain’t it?’ He grins, slightly nervously; though he’s talking with me who has no vested interest, mocking any decision Halliday has okayed is dangerously seditious.
‘I’m nearly forty,’ I tell Jimmy. ‘What do I know?’
‘Tell me about it. I need someone like Debbie meself, keep me young.’ He casts a speculative look at the available candidates in the bar, comes up empty, turns back to me. ‘You seeing anybody?’
I think of Sophie, gone from my life now as if she had never existed. ‘Nah. More trouble than it’s worth.’
A man from the group Jimmy left is jerking his head in our direction. Jimmy notices, rolling his eyes at me but making sure his back is turned so the man cannot see. ‘Gotta go.’ He puts his hand on my arm, gives it a squeeze, says honestly, ‘Good seeing you, Danny.’ He swaggers off to the group and I watch him go wondering at the decisions we make at a young age and how they trap us for life; me and my schooling, Jimmy and his early immersion in the local underworld.
I talk to some more people I know, my status as lawyer not causing any suspicion in this gathering of men who habitually live on the wrong side of the law. In this social stratum, lawyers are seen as neutral entities, their allegiances to either side, crooked or straight, merely a matter of which is willing to pay the most. I consider myself a basically honest man; but out here I am a long way away from the black-and-white certainties of law school, and my day-to-day work often reflects that. Cash deals off the books for house purchases, properties put in the names of geriatric Alzheimer’s grandparents babbling to themselves obliviously in nursing homes; I am upholding no cherished ideals. I often ask myself whether I am on a slippery slope. I like to believe that I am not, that my moral underpinnings are still strong. But I am also aware that, so far, they have not been seriously tested.
Debbie recognises me, I don’t know how; but, living in the goldfish bowl of my town, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. I am passing her, heading for the exit and home, when she calls my name. She is alone, texting on her phone, bored. She must be eight, nine years younger than me; she is dressed, even for this place, in an outfit that suggests an equal lack of taste and modesty. I already know, from conversations I have had tonight, that she was a dancer at one of Halliday’s gentlemen’s clubs, the current euphemistic term for a dark room with an expensive bar and a pole in the middle. She caught his eye and it did not take much persuading to tempt her off the stage and into his mansion where she took her place next to him in bed, still warm from the departed body of wife number four.