by Andy McNab
Josh said, ‘I mean, do you have any idea how many stitches it takes to sew on just one fucking little shape?’
‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ I said. ‘They’ll turn it into a TV commercial for Coke and then you’ll all be rich.’
The bosun wanted us. ‘Oi, you two! Come down and get your rations or ye’ll swing from the yardarm!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
‘I can’t hear you. What did you say?’
Josh got into 82nd Airborne mode, snapped to attention and screamed, ‘SIR! – AYE AYE – SIR!’
The old boy flogging the Big Issue started to cheer and clap, though I wasn’t too sure whether the bosun liked the competition. Josh collected his food and sat down amongst the kids, trying to pinch some of their breakfast.
I got my ration of authentic Elizabethan nuggets, doughnuts and pirate cola. A train from London Bridge station rattled along the elevated railway line behind us, the bells of Southwark Cathedral just fifty metres away fired off a salvo, telling us it was 10.30 a.m., and here I was wondering for the millionth time how I’d landed myself with all this. Josh told me he’d always loved the idea of being with the kids, but had never realized the stress of looking after them all the time until his wife left. Me, I loved it when I was with Kelly, but hated the idea of it. The responsibility filled me with dread. When it came to the world of emotions I was a beginner.
My birthday girl was holding court, telling Josh’s kids about her boarding school. ‘I got a twenty pence fine because I didn’t wear my slippers to the shower room last week.’ She loved the idea of being the same as the other girls; the fact that she had been fined meant she was one of the crowd.
‘Yes, and who has to pay the fine?’ I said.
She laughed. ‘My manager.’
Her school had been fantastic about everything, even though they knew only the bare bones of what had happened. I agreed with Josh that it was the best thing to do, taking her right away from the US and an environment that would bring back memories and screw her up even more. She never brought up the subject of what had happened the day her parents and sister died, but she had no problem talking about them if things came up in daily life to remind us of them. Only once had I made a direct reference, and she’d just said, ‘Nick, that was a long time ago.’
She began telling everyone about the week’s plans. ‘Nick couldn’t see me on my birthday and had to leave me with Granny and Grandad the day before. But this week we’re going to see the Bloody Tower.’
‘What?’ Josh’s mouth dropped open. He might be ex-Airborne at work, but within earshot of his kids not even the mildest cuss would pass his lips.
‘She means the Tower of London,’ I said. ‘There’s a place called the Bloody Tower; it’s where the Crown Jewels are kept, I think. Something like that.’ History had never been my strong point.
Kelly’s face lit up at the thought of seeing all those jewels. As a child, I’d never known that sort of joy. My mother and stepfather never took me anywhere; all they ever gave me was promises. When I was about eight, HMS Belfast docked by Tower Bridge and became a museum. All the kids on the estate went, but not me – all I got for weeks was IOUs. At last I was told I was going with my Auntie Pauline. I spent hours trailing round the local shops behind her, asking when we were going. ‘In a minute, son, not long now.’ The bitch was lying, just like my parents. The whole thing had been a ploy to get me off their hands while they went out on the piss. After that I didn’t even bother to ask. Fuck ’em. I had another eight years before I could leave home; I’d treat it like a waiting room.
‘ . . . then we’re going to have a sleepover at the place where all the mummies are. There’s a museum where you can spend the . . .’
She was interrupted by the bosun, who’d maybe guessed that the tall sailors needed a rest.
‘It’s time for some seafaring tales while ye have your feed. So listen in, all ye crew, small and tall!’
It was while we were sitting there listening to the sea tales, and I was digging a chicken nugget into my red sauce, that I felt my pager go off. I liked the fact that people needed me to do things they couldn’t do themselves, but I always kept it on vibrate because I hated the noise it made; it always spelled trouble, like an alarm clock that wakes you on a morning you’re dreading.
I took it out of its little carrying case, which was attached to the drawcord of my trousers, and checked the screen. It was displaying only a phone number. I was aware that Josh was looking at me. He knew exactly what it was. The other kids were too busy listening to stories of doom and gloom on the high seas to notice, but Kelly never missed a trick. She shot me a concerned glance, which I ignored.
Pager networks cover a larger area than mobile phones, which was why the Intelligence Service used them. I preferred them anyway, because it gave me time to adjust mentally before someone bollocked me – or even worse, gave me the job from hell. I’d only had the pager for about six months. I wasn’t too sure if it was a promotion to be given one, or if it meant I was considered a sad fuck and always available, locked away like a guard dog until needed, then once done, given a bone and sent back into the kennel.
Josh raised an eyebrow. ‘Dramas?’
I shrugged. ‘Dunno, I’m gonna have to phone. Can you hold the fort?’
He nodded. ‘See you in a few.’
The stories were still going on and the rest of the crew were producing tubs of ice cream for the spellbound kids. I slipped away and went down the stairs to one of the lower decks, where we were going to be sleeping that night. Mattresses were spread out on the floor, and we’d had to bring our own fluffy sleeping bags, just like sixteenth-century sailors did, ho ho. I rummaged in my holdall for some small change, and went upstairs and tried to sneak off the boat without Kelly seeing me.
I should have known better. She must have been watching me like a hawk; as I looked round and saw her, I put my hand up and mouthed, ‘Be back in a minute,’ pointing at the pub. She looked puzzled, and more than a bit anxious. Josh was still with them, nodding and grimacing and generally joining in with the tales of seafaring derring-do. The cathedral bell rang out to tell me it was now eleven o’clock.
I found a payphone in the pub hallway. The Olde Thameside Inn had its first customers of the day: traders from the fruit market drinking pints, rubbing shoulders with the City dealers and their bottled beer. As I stood with my finger in my ear trying to listen for the dialling code, I found myself looking at racks of tourist flyers, rows and rows of the things telling me how great the Tower of London was, all of them seeming to point the finger at the scurvy mutineer who might be jumping ship.
I pushed a couple of coins into the slot and dialled the number, putting my finger back into my other ear to cut out Oasis on the juke box. After just one ring a very crisp, efficient female voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Nick, returning the page.’
‘Where are you?’
She knew exactly where I was. Every call to the Firm is logged on a digital display. They put as much effort into spying on each other as they do against the enemy. It was pointless tapping in 141 before the number, and saying, ‘I’m in Glasgow and can’t get back,’ because whatever I did the display would still tell her I was at a payphone in Southwark.
I said, ‘London.’
‘Please wait.’
She pressed the cut-out button. Two minutes later she came back. ‘You need to be at Gatwick at three thirty this afternoon.’
My heart sank, but I already knew I was going to be there. ‘How long for?’ Not that it mattered much, I was already a couple of jumps ahead, thinking about how I was going to make excuses to a recently turned nine-year-old.
She said, ‘I don’t have that information.’
Once she’d finished with the details of the RV, I put the phone down, expecting a refund of my unused coin, but I got nothing. The phone box in the pub was one of those private ones where you can charge whatever you want. For a pound I go
t all of sixty seconds.
I walked back, making my way around the crowd outside which had moved with the sun towards the ship. I was racking my brains thinking of what I was going to say. Not to Josh – that wouldn’t be a problem – but to Kelly.
I saw Josh looking for me. It was only about twenty or thirty metres to the gangplank, and I was looking up at him and slowly shaking my head, getting some of the message across in advance. He knew exactly what was happening; he’d been there himself.
I went up the gangplank, pretty certain I would be in the shit, and no doubt starting to look suitably guilty. This was the first occasion Kelly and I had had any decent time together since she’d been in the UK; it was like a newly-wed leaving his honeymoon to go back to the office.
As I got on deck she and a few other kids were helping to clear up the plates under the bosun’s instructions. For a horrible second or two I had a flashback of her in her house just before her family were killed, laying the table for her mother in the kitchen. It made me feel even more guilty, but I told myself we’d both get over it. She would be upset but I could make it up to her when I came back. Besides, she’d seen Josh and the kids, and we’d had a whale of a time. She’d understand. Plus, she could see her grandparents now.
Josh knew what was on the cards. He bent down to his kids. ‘Yo!’ He clapped his hands together as they waited for the instruction. ‘OK, kids, let’s get all these plates back to the bosun,’ and he dragged them away.
I said, ‘Kelly?’
‘Mmm?’ She didn’t look up, just carried on being too busy picking up plates. She wasn’t going to make it easy for me to give her the news.
‘That was my boss on the phone. He wants me to go away.’
She still didn’t look me in the eye as she put the plates in a bin. She said, ‘Why?’
‘They’ve got a job for me. I told them that I was going to be with you for the week and I didn’t want to go in, but they said I must. There’s nothing I can do.’
I was kind of hoping she’d buy the line that they were to blame, not me. She stopped what she was doing and spun round. Her face told me everything I didn’t need to know. ‘Nick, you promised.’
‘I know, I can’t help it. I’ve just been bleeped—’
‘No,’ she stopped me. ‘It’s beeped!’ She was always giving me a bollocking for getting it wrong.
Her face had gone bright red. Tears were starting to well up in her eyes.
‘Listen, Kelly, we can always do this again some other time. Just think, Josh and his children have to leave for home in a few days and won’t have a chance to see all these places, but we can come back.’
‘But you said . . . you promised me, Nick . . . you said you wanted to have a holiday with me . . .’ The words tumbled out, punctuated by angry gasps for air. ‘You said you’d make up for not seeing me on my birthday. You promised me then, Nick . . . you promised.’
She didn’t just have her hand on my heartstrings, she’d braided them into ropes for extra purchase and was pulling on them big time. I said, ‘I know I did, but that was last time. This time it will be different, I really mean it.’
Her bottom lip was starting to go and her eyes were leaking down her face. ‘But, Nick, you promised . . .’
I stroked her hair. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’ve got to go to work. Oh, come on, Kelly, cheer up.’
What the fuck was I saying? I always hated this. I didn’t know what to do or say, and to make things worse I reckoned I was starting to sound like my Auntie Pauline.
The cry had become heart-rending sobs. ‘But I don’t want you to go . . . I want to stay here and be a sailor . . . I want you to stay here . . . I don’t want to sleep on this boat without you.’
‘Ah,’ I said, and the way I said it was sufficiently ominous to make her look up. ‘You won’t be sleeping on the ship. I’m going to take you to see Granny and Grandad. Listen, I promise, I really do promise, I’ll make this up to you.’
She stared at me long and hard, then slowly shook her head from side to side, deeply wounded. She’d been sold down the river, and she knew it. I wondered if she’d ever trust me again.
There was nothing I could say, because actually she was right. Just to make sure I avoided the issue, I walked across to the bosun. ‘We’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Family problem.’ He nodded; who gives a fuck, he just gets paid to wear the hat and growl.
Josh came back. His kids were halfway through a lesson on how to hoist the sails. I said, ‘We’ve got to go, mate.’
I tried to pat Kelly’s head, but she flinched away from my hand. I said, ‘Do you want to go downstairs and change? You can say goodbye in a minute. Go on, off you go.’
As she disappeared I looked at Josh and shrugged. ‘What can I say, I’ve got to go to work.’ And then, before he had the chance to come up with all sorts of different ways that he could help, I said, ‘I’m going to take her down to her grandmother’s now, then I’m off. I’m really sorry about this, mate.’
‘Hey, chill, it doesn’t matter. These things happen. It was just really good to see you.’
He was right. It had been really good to see him, too. ‘Same here. Have a good flight back. I’ll give you a call as soon as I’ve finished this job, and we’ll come to you next time.’
‘Like I told you, the beds are always made up. The coffee, white and flat, is always hot.’
It took me a moment to understand the white and flat bit. ‘Is that some kind of Airborne saying?’
‘Kinda.’
I said goodbye to his kids and they got back to pulling ropes and getting bollocked by the bosun. Then I went down below and changed.
2
We stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a blue-haired New Age guy saunter across. I laughed. ‘Kelly, look at that bloke there! Isn’t he weird!’ He had big lumps of metal sticking out of his nose, lips, eyebrows, all sorts. I said, ‘I bet he wouldn’t dare walk past a magnet factory.’
I laughed at my own joke. She didn’t, possibly because it was so bad. ‘You shouldn’t make personal remarks like that,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I bet he’s been to the Bloody Tower.’ Her school work might be suffering a bit but she was still as sharp as her old man.
I looked across at her in the passenger seat and felt yet another pang of guilt. She was reading about how wonderful London was from a flyer we had in our hire car; she was sulking away, probably wondering what could be so important in my life that instead of taking her to see the Crown Jewels, I was dumping her back with her dreary old grandparents who she already saw enough of during the weekends out from her boarding school.
We drove through Docklands in the East End of London, past the outrageously tall office block on Canary Wharf; then, as we followed signs for the Blackwall Tunnel, the Millennium Dome, still under construction, came into view across the Thames. Trying anything to lighten the mood, I said, ‘Hey, look, the world’s biggest Burger King hat!’
At last I got a reaction; a slight movement of the lips, accompanied by a determined refusal to laugh.
Still heading towards the tunnel that took us under the Thames and south, we came to a petrol station just past the Burger King dome. I needed to call her grandparents.
It seemed that fuel was a sideline for this garage; it sold everything from disposable barbecues to lottery tickets and firewood. I undid my seat belt and tried to sound happy with life. ‘Do you want anything from the shop?’
She shook her head as I got out to use the payphone on the wall. I’d get her something anyway. A nice bundle of kindling, maybe.
After pulling various bits of paper from my jacket pocket I found Carmen and Jimmy’s phone number on a yellow Post-It note, its sticky bit covered with blue fluff from my jacket. Kelly was still sitting in the car, belted up and staring daggers at me, both for what I had done and what I was about to do.
I knew that they’d be in at this time of day. They always had lunch at home; in nearly fifty years of marriage they
’d never eaten out. Carmen didn’t like other people preparing her husband’s food, and Jimmy had learned better than to argue. I also knew that Carmen would answer the phone; it seemed to be a house rule.
‘Hello, Carmen, it’s Nick. How are you both?’
‘Oh, we’re fine,’ she said, a little crisply. ‘Quite tired, of course,’ she added, to introduce a tone of martyrdom at the first available opportunity.
I should have ignored it and got straight down to business. ‘Tired?’ I asked, and as I said it I suddenly remembered something.
‘Oh yes, we stayed up until well after News At Ten. You said Kelly would be calling us.’
They hadn’t heard from her since I’d taken her away for the trip, and I’d promised she would call. Mind you, Kelly hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to remind me.
‘I’m sorry, Carmen, she was so sleepy last night I didn’t want to wake her.’
She didn’t go for that one and I didn’t blame her. She was right; at ten o’clock last night we were both filling our faces with Double Whoppers and chips.
‘Oh well, I suppose we can talk to her now. Has she had her lunch?’ What the question actually meant was: Have you remembered to feed our granddaughter? My thoughts went out to Jimmy, married to her for half a century, and her son, Kev. No wonder he’d headed west just as soon as he could.
I tried to laugh it off; for Kelly’s sake I didn’t want to rise to this emotional blackmail.
‘Carmen, look, something has come up. I have to go away tonight. Would you be able to have her and take her back to school on Monday? I was going to take her out for the five days to “do” London, but she might as well go back now.’
There was excitement in the air, but she still had to carve off her pound of flesh. ‘Of course. When will you be coming?’
‘That’s the problem, I haven’t enough time to get her to you. Could you meet us at Gatwick?’
I knew they could. In fact, chances were that Jimmy was already being dispatched with an impatient motion of her hand to get his eleven-year-old mint-condition Rover out of the garage. The new door that had just been built gave direct access from the bungalow; he was very proud of that. I could picture him in there, wiping any stray finger marks off the paint work.