Eleven

by Sarah Rayne

  Julius’s eyelids feel like soft cheese. Again he stumbles into a scene too brief for him to perceive; he’s dimly aware of being chased around his school, late at night, by someone, maybe Liam Rollin who calls him ‘Sumo’ and makes farting noises whenever he passes.

  ‘Hey, man, watch it!’

  Julius jolts back to the kitchen. A plate falls from his hands and it smashes on the hard floor with an echoing crack that reminds him of the breaking of a bone.

  ‘Man, you got to wake up,’ the supervisor chastises Julius.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Julius is on his hands and knees, scrabbling for the jagged pieces, when a figure appears in the doorway. Julius’s ears burn. He hears slow, uneven footsteps advancing towards him; Boris lets out a series of short, panicky breaths.

  ‘What the fuck is going on in here?’ demands Andrew Ryan, steadying himself with an arm propped against the wall, four paces from Julius.

  Julius, feeling his shirt clinging to his back, looks up at the restaurant owner, whom he’s only seen once before in his time here.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you think this is a fucking game?’ Andrew Ryan enquires, looking with contempt at the fleshy item crouched below him. How did this fat bastard get a job in my joint? he wonders.

  ‘No,’ mumbles Julius, collecting up the shrapnel, not looking up.

  ‘Is it any wonder,’ Andrew Ryan muses, his innards sloshing with viscous, directionless anger, ‘is it any wonder we get a bad fucking write-up when we’ve got a bunch of clueless fucking . . . clowns in the back room?’

  Neither of his subordinates, standing as if at a military court martial, ventures an answer.

  ‘I mean is there anyone in this place that can actually get the fucking job done?’

  There’ll be no answer to this, either. Andrew Ryan’s rage grasps for a victim. He points a nicotine-smelling finger at Julius.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Julius,’ Julius informs him in an undertone.

  ‘It’s what? Julie?’

  ‘Julius.’

  ‘How long have you worked here, Julius?’

  ‘Eight months.’

  ‘Look at me, you little freak! How long?’

  ‘Eight months.’

  ‘Any chance of calling me “sir”, what with me being the owner of this establishment?’

  Andrew Ryan will look back on this, twenty years later, from a hotel room in Hong Kong – not having thought about the incident once in the intervening period – and will reflect with surprise that his younger self was an absolute arsehole sometimes, what with the drink and the drugs. He’ll be an awful lot calmer in his old age; he’ll wonder what happened to that poor kid. But that’s twenty years away. For now, his only instinct is that of a bully.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Listen, Julius,’ says Andrew Ryan. ‘How much do we pay you to smash my crockery back here?’

  ‘Five pounds an hour.’

  Ryan nods, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a worn twenty-pound note and drops it onto the floor in front of Julius.

  ‘There you are. There’s a bonus.’

  Julius looks up at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘And don’t come back next time. You’re fired.’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘You’re fired. I’ll speak to your manager. Your services are no longer required.’

  Andrew Ryan puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head importantly. He reaches into his pocket for a stick of chewing-gum. Julius swallows. His throat is dry. He feels so tired that he could fall straight through his clothes.

  ‘Please don’t fire me.’

  Ryan, who has half turned away, reluctantly looks back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need the money.’

  ‘I can’t hear you.’

  Julius swallows again. He feels as if his Adam’s apple is a snooker ball.

  ‘I need the money, sir.’

  ‘The money!’ Andrew sneers. ‘Do you know what, Julius, we all need the money. Some of us work very hard for our money just for some bitch to stitch us up in the papers after we bust our fucking balls to get a restaurant on its feet. Tough life, isn’t it!’

  Andrew Ryan is vaguely aware that he is talking as if he thinks he’s in a Mafia movie, or one of those films from the eighties with businessmen in braces. He casts a final look at the doughy, abject form in his kitchen, the distraught young man he will forget the next morning and not remember for two decades, and storms through the kitchen door.

  Julius Brown has lost his part-time job because Andrew Ryan got drunk and lost his temper, because Jacqueline Carstairs wrote a vicious piece about his restaurant, because her son got beaten up on a snowy day a few weeks ago, because Xavier failed to step in and help. But as far as he or anyone knows, he’s simply been sacked for dropping a plate on the floor.

  IV

  On Sunday morning Xavier lies in bed, thinking about another Sunday morning, just under six years ago, when Bec went into the labour ward at St Vincent’s Hospital.

  Chris and Matilda spent seven hours in a café down the road from the hospital, having lunch, coffee, then dinner, with still no news. They tried to talk about other subjects; one by one, each ran out of steam.

  ‘Not even I would stay here as long as you guys,’ remarked the owner, ‘and it’s my place.’

  But as the sun began to cast long shadows over Melbourne, Russell appeared in the distance, running, limbs flailing, looking like a buffalo charging unstoppably down a ravine.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Chris.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Matilda, ‘I hope everything’s—’

  ‘Boy,’ gasped Russell, his shirt dark and heavy with sweat, his face glistening. ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy. She had a boy.’

  They grabbed him, and the three of them jumped around there on the chequered linoleum floor, next to their plastic table with the latest half-drunk coffees, watched indulgently by the proprietor who, having owned a café next to the hospital for fifteen years, had seen it all before: news of births just like this one; the shell-shocked, inert faces of the newly bereaved.

  He gave them a cheap bottle of champagne on the house.

  ‘You’ve already spent enough for me to have a holiday.’

  Russell’s hand was shaking so hard that Chris had a hard time filling his glass. The gang of four was now five. Chris put his arm around Matilda’s waist and they raised their glasses in a toast, feeling drunk already.

  The wind brings a faint, plaintive sound of church bells from half a mile off, and Xavier grips the memory, as if physically, before he lets it go.

  Not far away, the overweight teenager Julius Brown sleeps in late, only momentarily interrupted by the sound of his mother, Simone, leaving for her supermarket shift. On Sunday she works from ten till four. She divides her time between the deli counter and the checkout. (That’s how she put it on her most recent CV, as if talking about summer and winter residences in different hemispheres.) When he hears the door judder shut, setting off short-lived yelps from the Alsatians next door who are pent up and hungry for drama, Julius returns gladly to unconsciousness.

  Around one o’clock he sits up in bed, watches ten minutes of a documentary on wind farms, puts his computer on and then, without looking at it, rolls heavily onto his side and pulls the covers over his head.

  At four thirty Simone returns from work. The shift was all right, apart from a frosty exchange with a customer whose idea of ‘three thick slices of ham’ was different from hers.

  ‘You haven’t been in bed all this time?’

  ‘I’m ill.’ Julius coughs, not unconvincingly. He feels as if a huge, invisible paperweight is pinning him to the bed.

  ‘How was work last night?’

  He hasn’t actually thought about it until now.

  ‘I got sacked.’

  ‘What?’

  Simone Brown takes a step into the room and surveys the bundle of h
er overgrown son, like a hibernating thing in its burrow. She is wearing the supermarket’s regulation blue cardigan and underneath it a T-shirt which says OUR PRICES ARE MAD AS MARCH HARES. The marketing manager wanted checkout staff to wear novelty rabbit-ears for the month, but his suggestion was rejected.

  ‘I got sacked.’

  ‘Oh, Julius.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You must have.’

  ‘I dropped a plate and it smashed.’

  ‘They sacked you for that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Simone hears paws scraping imploringly at the inside of her neighbour’s front door, and the dogs begging in peppery yelps to be taken out, the neighbour – a retired postman – telling them to pipe down.

  ‘They wouldn’t just sack you for that.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘You must have given them some cheek.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  Simone looks helplessly at what can be seen of her son.

  ‘Have you got any washing?’

  ‘I can do it myself. It’s all right.’

  A petulant wind welcomes Julius to Monday morning and blows rain in his face as he walks to the bus stop. There’s only room at the bus shelter for about half of the pale people awaiting the 436. Julius wonders why the numbers go up so high: he bets there aren’t that many bus routes in London. He realizes that two women are discussing him and gets a suspicion they are annoyed with him for taking up so much space in the shelter. He shuffles out into the rain and the two women take his place.

  The bus is damp and crowded and restive, like a suitcase full of wet clothes after a failed weekend break. The already stuffed-in standing passengers survey the trail of new arrivals without enthusiasm as they press their cards one by one against the sensor. The driver listens to the muted bleep-bleep of the sensor, which reminds her of some machine in a hospital. She used to work in a haematology department but was seduced by a campaign by Transport for London to attract more women to the job. It was the worst mistake of her life.

  The bus chugs along in grinding stops and starts. Every crunch of the brakes throws passengers into one another. They get stuck behind a bus which is returning to the depot; on the front it says SORRY I’M NOT IN SERVICE. As they finally pass, Julius glimpses the word SORRY and imagines the bus is apologizing for detaining them. As he is thinking this, the driver has to brake and Julius hurtles back against a small black woman with shopping bags. She gasps at the weight of him; a stranger takes her arm and looks accusingly at Julius. A few people meet each other’s eyes in amusement. Julius’s size is a visual joke, it’s as if merely by appearing in public he is performing a stunt for a hidden-camera show. On the back seats he is aware of Amy, the pretty girl with glasses, giggling with an entourage of her friends. Julius feels very hot.

  In maths he’s aware of her all the way through the lesson, particularly when Liam Rollin makes one of his signature farting noises as Julius sits down: a trick which Rollin has been doing for almost four years without growing tired of it. As soon as the lunch bell goes, Julius heads for the school gates, hoping to avoid the scrum of his fellow sixth-formers in their straggly ties. Carting his school bag over his wide back, he ignores the witticisms that break out behind him. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry, Brown? KFC?’ He hears someone else mutter ‘Brown Trousers’ as he barges his way through the gates. As Julius reaches the gates, head down, he nearly runs into Clive Donald, his maths teacher, who also has his head down; the two unwitting partners in melancholy mutter apologies.

  It’s still raining. From fast-food shops comes an onslaught of delicious smells which make Julius’s stomach thunder with longing. He passes without looking in. He buys a low-calorie sandwich from Boots; the woman serving him looks as though she is on the point of asking whether that will be enough for him. He eats it almost without noticing it on his walk back to school, which takes him past the supermarket where his mother Simone is slicing Wye Valley Cheddar and half a dozen of his classmates are buying snacks and beers. No one at school, thank God, knows that the lady on the deli counter is his mother.

  On the way to the gym after school, Julius has to walk past Amy, on her own this time. She’s using a cloth to clean her glasses. She gives him a look which is, he thinks, not unfriendly. He wonders how it works as you get older, how people eventually find someone to marry. I have to lose weight, thinks Julius, there is no way that someone could hold my hand as we walked down the street. There’s no way a girl could point to someone looking like me in a club and say that’s my boyfriend.

  At the gym, he swipes his membership card and pushes against the turnstile, but it refuses to yield to his bulk, as if someone had put an arm out to stop him. He tries it again.

  The sardonic girl looks up from the computer screen.

  ‘You need to pay. Your membership’s expired.’

  Julius feels his insides sag.

  ‘I thought,’ he says feebly, ‘I thought it wasn’t till the end of this week.’

  ‘No, it’s now. You need to pay another £67 for this month or you can pay £400 to take you up to the end of the year.’

  Julius is almost one hundred per cent sure that she only talks to him this way because he’s fat and doesn’t look like he ought to be in a gym. She wouldn’t speak like this to the lean man in a rugby shirt who nudges him out of the way to get through the turnstile and shoots her a flirtatious wink.

  Julius has £32 in his bank account – or rather, minus £968, but an overdraft facility of £1,000. In his pocket are the remains of the twenty which Andrew Ryan dropped in his lap while firing him.

  ‘Can you just let me . . .?’ mumbles Julius.

  ‘Sorry?’ The girl glances at the phone on the desk, which she would rather be answering.

  ‘Can you just let me through this once and then I’ll pay next time I’m here?’

  ‘That’s not possible, I’m afraid,’ says the girl.

  Julius feels for a second that he could throw himself against the turnstile, just crash through it, like an elephant crashing through a bush, and be on the other side before she knew what was happening.

  ‘Please. I need to . . . I’m in a routine. I need to train.’

  ‘It’s not doing you much good so far,’ he can almost see her struggling not to say: not to spare his feelings, but out of a professional instinct that it might lead to trouble. Sometimes, being able to read what people are trying not to say, seeing the insult they are tiptoeing around, is almost worse than if they had actually said it.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s just not possible,’ says the girl again, as if allowing him in is beyond the limits of what humans can accomplish. She answers the phone on its ninth ring, spelling out the name of the gym, and the conversation is over.

  On the way home Julius fantasizes about Amy, but the gulf between them is too great for his imagination to bridge with even the most far-fetched scenario. Perhaps Julius is too literal-minded, too mathematical, for fantasies; they start to collapse under the weight of reality almost as soon as he starts to conjure them up. All that’s left is brutal fact. I have to lose weight, I have to get back in the gym somehow, I have to get some money.

  As Julius sleeps fitfully a few hours later, his maths teacher Clive Donald again calls Xavier’s show, where the topic of the night is ‘If You Could Live in Any Era’. Clive begins by talking about the 1920s, but soon returns to the subject of loneliness, until Murray cuts him off.

  On the Tuesday afternoon, on his way out to the corner shop, Xavier runs into Tamara, who is sticking a notice up on the board at the foot of the stairs. On the notice is a picture of a teenage girl executing what seems at first to be a spectacular dance move, but is actually a horrible mid-air contortion after being hit by a car. It’s one of a series of images released by the Mayor of London to raise awareness of road accidents. Tamara’s T-shirt rides up, exposing a tranche of flesh, as she stretches to affix the top-right corner but it flaps
away again.

  ‘Can I help with that?’

  Xavier arches a long arm and secures the corner, flattening the ball of Blu-tack against the board.

  ‘Thank you.’ Tamara steps back like a painter to look at the poster. ‘It’s a petition about speed bumps.’

  ‘Speed bumps.’

  ‘We need speed bumps for this street. Don’t you think? People come down here at sixty, but it’s a residential street. Don’t you think?’

  Xavier is surprised to see her animated by this subject.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re—’

  ‘I’ve set up an online petition,’ she says. ‘If you could sign it that would be great.’

  ‘I will,’ he promises. ‘I definitely will.’

  As if a whistle has blown, they both sense the conversation’s imminent slowdown.

  ‘So, anything on tonight?’

  ‘Working,’ says Xavier. ‘You?’

  ‘Boyfriend’s coming round,’ she replies.

  ‘Should be nice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, see you!’

  ‘Remember to sign the petition!’

  Xavier has every intention of looking up the website and putting his name on the petition but, even as he walks up the hill to the corner shop and rashly driven cars swish by at potentially lethal speeds, the task is quickly filed in a minor drawer of his mind, and forgotten.

  Murray comes to 11 Bayham Road for a drink on Thursday night to celebrate the end of another block of shows, and is immediately struck by the cleanliness of Xavier’s flat.

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t got a wer, wer, wer, wife all of a sudden?’

  ‘Just a cleaner.’ Xavier pours the remainder of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon into two bulbous glasses. ‘But she’s a very good one.’

  ‘Looks like she is. I’m scared to touch anything.’

  ‘Wait till you meet her. Then you will be scared.’

  ‘Is she crazy?’

  ‘She’s just quite . . . she’s a character.’

  When Murray leaves, his breath puffing out in white wisps on the doorstep, it’s just after five, and Xavier feels little inclination to sleep: he can hear the stillness of night already giving way to the familiar overtures of the early morning. A fire engine, sirens off, trundles down Bayham Road. In an hour, a couple of fanatical joggers will begin their patrol, and soon after that Tamara, and any number of other workers, will be awake. Xavier puts his computer on and begins to wade through the backlog of emails from listeners.