by Rob Grant
They were flying him to Norfolk? Flying? Norfolk? 'When?'
'Right now. Chopper's on the roof. I'll take you up there.'
She turned and walked briskly out of the room. In less than a minute, Jeremy realised he was supposed to follow her. She was almost at the end of the corridor by the time Jeremy caught up. She hadn't even looked round for him. She stopped and pressed the button to summon the lift.
'Got any overnight stuff?'
'Not really. A toothbrush, that's about it.'
'Always pack for overnight in your future dealings with us, if you should be so lucky.'
'Sure. Of course.' Overnight. In Norfolk. Damn, he'd have to call Susie and cancel his shag.
The lift arrived and Debs stepped in. She slid some kind of card through a reader. As the lift slid upwards, she fixed Jeremy with a piercing stare. 'This is a flagship project for the PM. Do not fuck it up, or I will crush you. I will personally come round to your home and crush your testicles under my heels like overripe kumquats. Am I clear?' Jeremy looked down at the folder and pretended to sort through the pages. He tried, very deliberately, not to notice Debs' heels. He wondered if it wouldn't be marginally less scary working with the Russian Mafiya.
SEVEN
'You're an idiot.' Jonny grinned. 'You are a mentalist. You are a total nutter.'
Hayleigh tried to ignore her brother's cruel, pathetic taunts and started climbing the stairs.
'You are a headcase,' he carried on, relentlessly. 'You are a loony. Looooony. Wayne Loony, that's your name. You are barking mad.'
She shrugged past the little shit, but the heckling didn't stop.
'You are a head-the-ball. You are a psycho. You are braindead.'
And so on, and so on. Same old same old. And even when she'd reached her sanctuary and closed the door behind her, on and on he went.
'You are batty. You are so far round the bend, you can see your own arse.'
She started up her computer, clicked on iTunes and let Jason and the boys drown the little bastard out with 'Some Kinda Lurve'.
Didn't stop him right away, of course. He pressed right up against her door and shouted even louder. 'Nutball. You are a nutball. You live in Nutball City Limits.' Great. Maybe there were some households in Birmingham or Manchester that hadn't heard him yet, but Hayleigh doubted it. Brilliant. Please God, don't let him tell Mum and Dad what he's seen.
What had he seen, in actual fact? Besides the, yes, admittedly, slightly bizarre trip down the hall and back, which must have looked inexplicably strange if you didn't know why she was doing it. Had he seen her tucking the letter away? That would be bad. If she was caught intercepting mail from the school, well, frankly, everything could come unstuck.
There was a lock on her door, but if she was ever caught using it, suspicion was inevitably aroused. Still, on this occasion, she might risk it. Jonny was, after all, laying siege to her room and shouting insults and taunts at her at volumes better suited to a thrash metal concert.
She slipped the letter and the plastic bag behind the big fluffy cushion on her little sofa, crossed to the door, twisted the key, and immediately Jonny started shouting: 'She's locked the door! Hayleigh's locked her door! She's locked the door so she can do loony things in secret!'
Damn! She'd achieved exactly the opposite of her aim. Instead of a few moments of privacy and secrecy, she could now expect the attention of both parents, and possibly Jonny, too, trying to peer past their knees. She undid the lock, cracked open the door and said, very quietly, to Jonny, 'Fuck off.'
Jonny yelped in delight. 'Yaah! Hayleigh said "fuck off"!' he chanted. 'Hayleigh said "fuck off"! Hayleigh said "fuck o-off"!'
She slammed the door shut and pressed her back against it. And the chanting continued.
'Hayleigh said "fuck off".'
She heard her dad at the foot of the stairs. 'Jonny, leave her alone!'
'She's a mentalist.'
'I'm sure she is, now leave her alone.'
'She said the fuck word.'
'I'm not going to tell you again, Jonny.'
She heard Jonny start down the stairs. 'She should be locked up in a loony bin. You should line her room with padding.'
And Dad, the saviour, led him off to the kitchen with the fading words: 'I'll be padding your bottom, laddo.'
Not for the first time, nor, doubtless, the last, Hayleigh wished she'd had the good fortune to acquire a kid sister rather than the freaky kid brother from hell that fortune had blessed her with. Or just a kitten. Frankly, a giant ugly scabrous rat riddled with bubonic plague, weeping sores and rabies would have been infinitely more desirable.
What to do, now, with the plastic bag? She could try flushing the contents down the loo, but that wouldn't necessarily work, as she had discovered to her cost on other dangerous and thoroughly unpleasant occasions. For some reason, food tended to be more buoyant before you ate it. Your body did something to food when it turned it into poo that made it sink. She really didn't want to risk trying to flush away the breakfast debris only to have it float menacingly to the surface time and time again, and wind up having to fish it out and put it back in the bag.
She couldn't access her school-bag just yet, which would have been the easiest option. That was downstairs in the kitchen, where her mum was probably at this very moment filling it with the calorific nightmare she euphemistically called Hayleigh's 'packed lunch'. Packed death trap, more like. Mother had really put her foot down on this one. She had checked through the packed lunch Hayleigh prepared for herself one time, and all hell had broken loose. As if three short sticks of celery was a criminal offence that ranked just below matricide. So, instead of getting a lunch she could actually enjoy (you expended more calories eating celery than you did from ingesting it), Hayleigh was packed off to school with a cornucopia of inedible horrors, and so ate nothing at all. On top of which, she had to peel the bananas and oranges and kiwi fruit or whatever, dispose of the deadly flesh and put the peel back in the bag, along with the emptied-out plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice, the cellophane and crumbs from the discarded sandwich and the wrapper from the (unbelievable!) chocolate bar, which, had she actually consumed it, would have rendered her of sufficient size to be launched into outer space and technically designated a new planet. Instead of having a small, pleasant lunch, she was sent off with a back-breaking sack of supplies that would have allowed Napoleon's army to take Moscow comfortably, all of which then had to be dealt with in all kinds of complicated ways, and the decaying detritus brought smellingly home. Nothing in Hayleigh's life could ever be simple. Nothing.
She could not leave the bag in her room. Mum would, without any kind of doubt, relentlessly search the room with more ruthless efficiency than Gil Grissom's entire night shift of crime scene investigators. 'Oh, here's the murder weapon, Grissom: the moron stuffed it behind a large fluffy pillow.'
She could not risk leaving the house with the bag rammed down the waistband of her tights. There would be hugs at the door from Dad, and the threat of plastic rustling getting into the car, and all through the entire journey she would have to sit perfectly immobile, and Mum would definitely think that was strange, plus another hug risk at the school gate. No. It would be far too fraught.
She could transfer it, though, to another container. Something that wouldn't rustle. But what? She scoured the room. Her eyes lit on a discarded sock. Brilliant! She could easily stuff it into a sock and tuck that down her tights, then neatly fold the plastic bag and ferret that way in her drawers. Even if it were found, it wouldn't be horrendously suspicious. It would just look as if she were being excessively neat, which, last time she'd read the statute book, was no longer a capital offence.
But, then, the stuff was quite wet, wasn't it? What if it seeped through the sock and started dribbling down her leg? That could cause considerably more problems than it solved. Add incontinence to the list of Hayleigh's Imagined Ailments.
On top of which, the sock solution wouldn't solve the problem o
f the letter. The letter had to be kept intact in case it was something innocent but important, like a bill. No matter what she hid that in, she ran the risk of making telltale crinkling sounds.
Why was everything so hard?
Her eyes fell on Jason's lovely smile, and she hit on a solution that was both terrible and perfect at the same time.
She could hide the food debris and the letter between the pages of Chick Chat!
She could open the plastic outer bag carefully and reseal it. Then it would be a simple matter of dropping it quickly into her school-bag on the mad dash from the house.
Of course, the soggy food waste would soak into the mag, rendering it unreadable and destroying any posters she might have wanted to keep. But she could easily get another copy. The worst part was, it might ruin Jason's picture. Pictures, even. There was probably more than one inside the mag, and that seemed somehow sacrilegious, even though she was going to replace them all.
She looked down at those yummy dimples. Wait a minute. What was that? Did Jase's picture actually wink at her? It couldn't have. Could it? Of course it could. True love is a very powerful thing. Miraculous, even. Jason was telling her he didn't mind. He was letting her know it was OK to defile his picture, in a good cause like this one. He was reaching out to her all the way from America, where Big Boys Cry were at this very moment preparing for the Shea Stadium concert in New York that would crack the US market for them, and make them the biggest band in possibly the entire history of the universe, and he'd have a million and seventy-one other more important things on his mind, but he'd taken the time out to send her some magic. Now, how thoughtful was that?
Tears came to her eyes and she clutched the magazine cover to her breast and squeezed it tight. Jason would never, ever let anyone hurt her.
Some kinda lurve, huh?
EIGHT
The whole thing seemed needlessly cruel to Grenville. He'd got himself up off his backside and tried to do something positive, he'd carped the diem, but he'd wound up depressed and defeated. His induction interview at the health club had been one of the most soul-destroying hours of his entire life.
He slumped down the stairs, though all he felt like doing was lying on the floor and going to sleep for a couple of decades, squeezed through the stupid turnstile and out through the automatic doors to the car park.
He crammed himself into his car, which now seemed ludicrously small, given he was such a behemoth, and started up the engine. The CD player burst into life, but the chirpy, upbeat Vivaldi he'd happily hummed along with on his way to the health club seemed vastly inappropriate now, and since he didn't have the 'March of the Russian Slaves' or 'Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground' on CD in the car, he snapped it off.
He slipped off the handbrake and drove towards the exit barrier. He waited with a fair facsimile of patience for the arm to rise. It didn't. For some reason, the barrier required you to enter a code before it would let you leave. Grenville, of course, did not know the code. He tried punching in a few numbers at random -- the obvious four-number combinations, such as one, two, three, four, and so on -- but the barrier refused to budge.
He considered getting out of the car and trying to snap off the offensive red-and-white-striped arm and break it over his knee, which would have given him considerable satisfaction, but thought better of it -- it might have been the source of some unpleasant publicity, and he was, after all, a bit of a minor celebrity now, and he had to mind his p's and q's -- and drove in a mutteringly angry funk back to the health club.
What kind of madness was it, preventing people from leaving a health club car park? There was no barrier stopping people from entering, which would have made some kind of sense. It would probably not be very good for business, but it would keep out undesirables and stop non-customers from availing themselves of the car park facilities, if that's what you were trying to do. But why try to keep non-customers and undesirables in? It made no sense at all. What were they trying to achieve? Did they hope non-customers and undesirables would be forced to drive round endlessly until they dropped dead of starvation? Yes, that would show them, wouldn't it? That would teach the bastards to use car parking facilities they weren't entitled to.
He parked in a yellow crisscross box reserved, theoretically, for people with small children -- he thought this was a slightly less offensive crime than taking up a disabled space, though he was still breaking car park law: he was still a car park criminal, and liable to serve car park time in the car park penitentiary if convicted -- and stormed through the automatic glass doors, which barely had time to open.
He stood at the reception desk, but the blonde behind the counter was doing something so fascinating and vital with a checklist that she couldn't tear herself away, even for a split second, to acknowledge his presence, offer a smile or murmur a simple: 'Be with you in a second, sir,' for fully ten minutes. No matter that Grenville coughed. No matter that he brooded darkly with a thunderous expression on his face. No matter, even, that he actually came right out with it and said: 'Excuse me, can you tell me the barrier code?' For all she knew, there could have been an entire convoy of non-customers out there who'd been driving around the car park aimlessly in a hopeless nomadic funk since Christmas 1972 and were now at death's door, but the blonde had her vital checklist to check, and nothing was going to tear her away from it. Grenville looked down at himself, just to make sure he hadn't become invisible, or somehow drifted into an alternative dimension that rendered him undetectable to people on this physical plane, but no, he seemed to be intact.
He was about to leap over the desk and throttle the life out of the blonde floozy when he spotted a giant sign that Mr Magoo himself couldn't have missed, informing anybody who cared to look that today's barrier code was twelve ninety-nine.
To Grenville's mind, that seemed to make even less sense. Why stop people leaving the car park with a security-coded barrier and then display the code in full view, for everyone to see? Wouldn't it be better to put the sign by the barrier? Wouldn't it be better -- and this is a totally whacked-out, off-the-wall, wild and crazy notion -- wouldn't it be infinitely better not to have the bloody barrier there at all?
He strode out through the automatic plate-glass doors, once again barely allowing them time to open, and walked to his car, thinking this whole health club business had been a world-class mistake, when things suddenly got substantially worse.
His car was hemmed in by a woman in a Sport Utility Vehicle who was struggling to extract a wailing child from a stupidly complex baby seat with one hand, whilst holding a bewildering array of bags, soft toys and chewable books in the other, with a collapsed pushchair tucked awkwardly under her arm.
Grenville cranked up his expression to just below pleasant, which was the best he could muster right then, and said, in a voice that was hardly pissed off at all: 'Excuse me?'
The woman rounded on him like a rampant Gorgon, wide-eyed with hate and venom and screamed: 'What!!??'
Grenville fully expected her hair to unfurl into a twisting nest of hissing snakes. But he stayed almost calm. He pointed to his car. 'I need to--'
'Where's your child?' the woman spat. 'Where's your bloody child?'
Grenville's child was at university, as a matter of fact, sucking what little life hadn't already been leeched out of his bank account by his darling ex, thank you very much. Quite what that had to do with this hag was beyond him. 'I just need to get out, and then you can--'
'That space is for people with small children, you selfish bastard.'
'Well, I was only popping in for a couple of--'
'Well, you can bloody well wait.'
Grenville looked around, as if he might find some arbiter of sanity who could make a quick ruling on this matter, but there was none. Interestingly enough, though, there was a perfectly accessible car parking space not ten feet away.
'But there's a space there.' He smiled with a decent approximation of agreeability. 'You could have used that.'
&nb
sp; 'You could have used that,' the Medusa spat. She'd finally liberated the banshee child from its protective webbing and was struggling to erect the pushchair, an endeavour which looked like it might very well be impossible, given she now had no free hands at all.
'It wasn't there when I--'
'You can bloody well wait,' she spat again, and snapped the pushchair open.
Grenville looked at the parking sign again. He was starting to lose it now. 'Look, lady: that sign is a suggestion. It's not like it's the law of the land. It's not an imprisonable offence to park there without a small child, or even without a fairly large child. You can be childless, impotent and sterile and still park there in all legality.'
The monsteress had stuffed the bawling brat successfully into the pushchair and was now securely belting it in with a complex set of harnesses and trusses in preparation for the arduous, hazard-strewn trek to the health club entrance fully fifteen feet away. She straightened, turned and smiled with all the affection of a rabid Rottweiler and, in a startling burst of wit and originality, announced: 'Well, you can bloody well wait,' and trundled off with the screeching babe. She paused at the automatic doors and added, quite needlessly, 'You fat bastard.'
Well, now. The harpy bitch had gone just a little too far. She had pushed just that one too many of Grenville's buttons. And that was a big mistake.
Grenville squeezed back into his car and turned over the engine. He lifted the arm rest and rifled through the CD collection he kept in there, which was not a simple manoeuvre because it involved simultaneously twisting at the waist and bending, which hurt quite a lot and constricted his breathing, and twice he almost fainted and had to stop and catch his breath. But he found what he was looking for and slid it into the slot. He cranked up the volume as Steppenwolf chunked out the first chords of 'Born to Be Wild' and threw the gears into reverse.
He slammed into the 4x4 ferociously, almost giving himself whiplash.
There was a terrible crunch of metal and the target vehicle's alarm started blaring, as if it were wailing in pain. Grenville grinned wickedly and glanced up at his rear-view mirror, but the termagant's vehicle didn't seem to have moved very much. He twisted round -- again, not a painless feat because it involved, well, moving -- and looked through his rear window. The cronemobile didn't seem to have budged at all.