Criminals

by Margot Livesey

  She interrupted. “But you took nothing for her.” She was pointing at the pile of gear she’d left on the table—nappies and bottles, mostly.

  Shit. “Like I told you, she looks after kids all the time. She has everything.”

  “Milk?” Joan asked. “Nappies?”

  “The whole cafuffle. A pram, a cot.” He racked his brains. “One of those nice chairs she can sit in.”

  Gradually Joan shed her suspicion. Of course she believed everyone was as daft about the baby as she was. The part that wanted explaining was not why his mum wanted to look after the little snot but how he could bear to give Grace up, even for a few hours. “So what about going out for a meal,” he suggested.

  She argued at first—she’d bought groceries on the way home—then giggled and agreed. Kenneth began to name restaurants, ticking them off on his fingers: the Peking Palace, the Gondoliers, the Koh-i-Noor, Benny’s. The Koh-i-Noor, she said happily, and went off to tell Mrs. Kemp she wouldn’t need to mind Grace tomorrow. He sat at the kitchen table, eating slice after slice of dry bread, trying to prepare his stomach for the curry and get his brain in order. It was ages since he’d had a scheme, not since he and his mate Duncan had jobs at the off-licence and carefully whittled away a few bottles a week in breakages. At two quid an hour, a couple of bottles of Scotch made quite a difference. Kids’ stuff, he thought now. He’d been too modest, thinking in terms of five hundred pounds. He should squeeze them for a grand, at least.

  He stood up, suddenly wondering if Joan might have bought him a beer. The small fridge was covered with snaps, all of Grace, except for one of Joan with her mother and some young lad beside the river Tay. Now, who could this be? Then he remembered Joan telling him her brother, Lalit, had come up to Perth for a holiday right after he arrived in Britain. Not a bad-looking bloke, Kenneth thought, with his white shirt and dark hair. On impulse he peeled off a photo of Grace in her cot and slipped it into his pocket. You never could tell what might come in handy.

  He was contemplating the fridge, disappointingly full of yoghurt and orange juice, when he heard the tap of Joan’s sandals. She had changed into a long, silky blue top and sleek black trousers, with gold combs in her hair and a row of different-coloured bracelets up her arm (he knew from the time he’d broken one they were made of glass). She stood in the doorway, smiling at him, a toothy, nervous smile that ignited a little spark in his brain—compliment, he thought.

  “Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin?” he said, and went to kiss her.

  He was glad the Koh-i-Noor lay the other way from the bus station. To walk on those same pavements with Joan, he felt, would be a mistake. There might be some lingering trace of his earlier passage with Grace. As they headed down the High Street past Boots and Woolworth’s, Joan told him how they’d been cleaning a storeroom at the infirmary, when a frog hopped out from under the radiator. “The poor creature was terrified,” she said. “Three people chasing it with brooms. At last we got it into a box, and I carried it outside and let it go on the grass. It was a sign. I have to ask my mother.”

  “A sign of what?” Kenneth said, steering her into George Street.

  “Oh, the gods, you know.” She paused in front of a shop window full of dresses. “Pretty,” she murmured, pointing to a nifty red number.

  Inside the Koh-i-Noor, a waiter with a bushy moustache led them to a corner table. He poured water into their glasses from a great height, as if he were doing a conjuring trick and the water would come out as something else. Kenneth ordered papadums and a lager and let Joan do the rest. While she and the waiter yakked in some wog language, he sank back into his own thoughts.

  What was hard, which he hadn’t expected, was keeping his trap shut. He was dying to tell her—or anybody, for that matter—about his cleverness, to have a toff pick up the baby and then sniff out his name and phone number. Bloody brilliant, but he knew it would be a mistake to blab. When Mr. Moustache returned with a plate of papadums, Kenneth ate one in a single greedy swoop and another more slowly. His lager came in a glass streaming with condensation, and he took a long draught. Joan was saying something about Deirdre at work’s retirement party. “We had a cake shaped like a cat. My brother’s girlfriend also is called Deirdre.”

  “Your brother?” For a moment Kenneth was thrown—had she seen him nicking Grace’s photo?—but no, it was just Joanie blethering on.

  “Lalit,” she said. “Down in Preston. He wrote to tell me about her. She cuts hair.”

  He nodded and grabbed another papadum. Something about the conversation was nudging at him, though he couldn’t reel it in. “And what does he do, Lalit? Does he have a job?”

  “Of course. Lalit is not lazy. He is here to work, so he works, making batteries.” She outlined an invisible box with her hands. “Not healthy, I think. The hours are very long.”

  Lazy, thought Kenneth.

  It was touch-and-go whether he would stand up and walk away, tugging the tablecloth with him, just to hear everything crash to the floor. He’d done that before in restaurants, and no one had lifted a finger. In one place the waiter had even held the door open. Now he did his best to keep the lid on it. Who cares what the little bitch thinks? He tore his paper table mat in half and then in quarters. He’d never told Joan that he was fired from the infirmary. They were cutting back, he explained vaguely. Maybe they’d need him later. Lazy, gormless, daft, cretin, idiot, berk—all the words they’d sent hurling his way; they wouldn’t be able to take them back fast enough when they heard about Grace. And in the midst of his anger, he landed the dim thought of a few minutes before.

  “Your brother’s an illegal immigrant, isn’t he?”

  Joan shook her head.

  “Come on,” he coaxed. “I’m Grace’s dad. I’m family.”

  “There is some problem,” she said in a low voice. “My uncle is sorting the business out.”

  He reached across and patted her hand. “Good luck to him. Have a papadum. Anyway, so why’d you call the baby Grace?”

  She laughed shyly. “The first job I had in this country was for a very nice woman, Mrs. Lawson. I cleaned her house. She had a big picture over her fireplace of a girl in a boat, rowing on a stormy sea. I looked at the picture every day, and one day I asked her about it. She told me this girl was Grace Darling and that she was famous for rowing out from her father’s lighthouse to a ship and rescuing people. They would have drowned if she hadn’t saved them. So when Grace was born I decided to call her after that girl, that it was a brave name.”

  “Here’s to Grace.” He raised his glass and clinked it against Joan’s. As usual she had asked for water and then giggled compliantly when he ordered her a shandy. A lighthouse keeper, he thought; now there was a dead-end job.

  Their curries came, and Joan served them. Once they were eating, she said she wanted to ask him something. “In the W.C. at work, someone has written, ‘Betty is a wanker.’ She is not pleased. What is a wanker?”

  Kenneth grinned. “Poor old Betty. A wanker is—” He broke off. How to explain in a way that wasn’t chronically confusing? He took a swig of lager and had an inspiration. “Forget about wanker. What you want to say when you’re cross is ‘shitty bastard.’ ”

  “Which means?”

  “Something nasty and terrible. Have a go.”

  “Shitty bastard,” she said slowly. “Was that right?”

  “Perfect. You need to practise ten times a day.”

  “Shitty bastard,” she repeated. “Shitty bastard.” She raised her glass of shandy, and the bracelets tinkled.

  They made good use of the bed that night, and in the morning, when he woke, Joan had once again left for the infirmary. She worked overtime every other weekend. Filled with feverish excitement, Kenneth made a cup of tea and carried it back to bed. When he was seventeen, he and Duncan had hitchhiked down to London. They had had no clear plan of action, no exact goal, but Kenneth had nursed the sure conviction that he had only to present himself in the capi
tal city for fame and fortune to accost him. He’d been keeping them waiting.

  They ended up living in a broken-down car, which they pushed nightly round the streets of Camden in order to avoid being harassed by the police, or by the residents in whose gardens they sometimes peed. During the day they would beg and in the evening try to pick up women in pubs in order to have a place to sleep. Neither of them ever scored. Finally, one night, facing yet another closing time alone, Kenneth announced to Duncan that he was thinking of going home to see his mum. She’d been poorly recently.

  Duncan could be slow, but he caught on immediately. Though neither of their families had phones—and who would have written to where?—he didn’t question how Kenneth got his information, only chimed in that his dad, too, had been under the weather. By seven the next morning they were heading out to Finchley, as presentable as they could make themselves, to stand fifty feet apart by the roadside. Kenneth couldn’t help being chuffed that he got a lift before Duncan. A black lorry had pulled up. See you in the Perth Arms, he’d shouted as he ran towards it.

  By silent agreement neither of them ever admitted the gloom of those weeks. In memory they made them shine. But what was not invented, what Kenneth had missed for months afterwards, was the energy and excitement pulsing through him, especially the first few days, when it was as if the little pills they bought in a pub off Piccadilly Circus had taken up permanent residence in his veins. Now, in Joan’s bed with his cuppa, he had that same feeling of his blood flowing faster and brighter. Ideas, he thought. I am an ideas man.

  Today he would make the first phone call. The soft creepy one where you didn’t ask for anything, didn’t threaten anybody; just let them know you knew. He drank some tea and closed his eyes to picture all over again the bloke in the suit, walking towards the cinema with Grace. With his specs and his cack-handedness, he had looked like an easy touch. Some of those suits had killer instincts, took no prisoners, and would sell their grannies for a bob, but this bloke could barely get on and off a bus by himself—and why had he taken Grace out of her poncho in the rain, the stupid bugger?

  There was money, no question. Even the name of the house, Mill of Fortune, had a wealthy sound. The more he thought about it, the larger grew his notions of what he ought to ask for. Every hour, every day, they held on to Grace upped the ante, if only he could keep Joan quiet. His mum wasn’t going to wash much longer. He needed something else: not an excuse, a threat. He tugged the sheet tight around him. Ideas, he crooned, ideas. Then he caught sight of the blue top she’d worn the night before and remembered her squirming at the question about Lalit. Maybe that was the answer: he could threaten to report her brother, the illegal immigrant. Taking jobs away from us local lads with his blasted batteries.

  But what if the Laffertys had already handed Grace over to the police? He closed his eyes and sat very still, trying to divine if this awful thing had happened. He climbed out of bed and found a ten-pence piece on the dresser. Heads they had, tails they hadn’t. Best of three. He stood there shivering slightly in his tee shirt, trying to tell the coin its job: how it must read the signals he couldn’t. Then he tossed the coin three times, and three times tails lay gleaming in his palm.

  He left Joan a note saying he was off to see Grace and her granny and would be back later. Keep her calm, he thought, writing, “Love, K.” Miraculously he had just enough left from Easy Does It to pay the newsagents. His mum greeted him with a stream of accusations. He let her go on until he felt sure he’d earned a fiver, then he slammed the receipt down on the table. Right enough, she looked taken aback and offered a cup of tea. While he waited, he glanced through the magazine she’d been reading. Food, food, shopping, some kind of kitchen gizmo. He paused at an article called “Taking Care of Company.” The first sentence said, “Company can be anyone—an aunt, a sister, a baby, a best friend.” Company, he thought, that had a nice ring to it, of fear, of money. His mother put the tea in front of him and announced that Venus was moving into alignment with Saturn, which meant they were going to have a grand week. Romance and finance, she explained, would both flourish. “Okey-dokey,” said Kenneth. He downed his tea and got up to go.

  He was passing the newsagents when he remembered the phone he and Harve had discovered last autumn at The Blind Beggar. The machine took one-pence pieces for twenty, and for a while they’d met there a couple of times a week for Harve to phone a mate in Glasgow. Kenneth didn’t really know people in other places, except his mum’s sister in Braemar, but he phoned radio stations and the off-licence where he and Duncan had worked. Now he changed direction, making his way to The Blind Beggar. Ideas, he was swimming in them.

  A woman answered. Although he hadn’t caught her exact words at the chemists, he recognised the voice. “Mrs. Lafferty?” he asked, and she said yes, hesitantly, as if he might be talking about someone else. In the pause that followed came a high-pitched squeak, a sound so faint he would’ve missed it if he hadn’t had the phone jammed to his ear. Grace, he thought. Bloody fantastic. “I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said smoothly. “You have company.”

  She said something about a brother and then, “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

  “A well-wisher.” He stared at the grubby phonebook. “Somebody wishing you well with your company.”

  “Who is this?” she demanded. “No, that won’t be necessary,” and slammed the phone down.

  I got to her, he thought gleefully. Step one.

  Then back to deal with Joan, who pounced the instant he came through the door. “Grace,” she said. “Where is Grace?”

  “Joanie, she’s with Mum. I thought you’d like some p and q. A nice quiet evening by the telly with your old man.”

  “Take me there,” she said, slipping off her mules and reaching for her outdoor shoes.

  “She’s fine. You don’t want to disturb her. She’ll be getting ready for beddie-bye. I just came from seeing her. She and my mum are getting on famously. Come on, this is a treat not to have her yelling the place down.”

  Joan stopped and looked at him. She was catching on. Her eyes went watery. “Please, Kenneth. I want to see her.”

  He liked that. He liked her saying please and her voice going tiny. “Let me take my coat off,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what’s what.”

  At the kitchen table he explained he needed to borrow Grace for a few days. That she was vital to his plans. “If all goes well,” he said, “she’ll earn us a pretty penny. I’ll be proud of my daughter.”

  When Joan spoke again it was in a tone that suggested that English, the language in which she now conducted her life, had suddenly deserted her, the meaning emptied out and gone like water into the sand. “She is with your mother. Grace is with her Scottish granny.”

  “Yes, yes, of course she’s with my mum, but she’s there for a reason. I can’t explain it to you. You have to trust me.”

  Joan stood up. “I must go and get her,” she said carefully. “It is kind of your mother, very kind, but it is too long for Grace to be away from home. I need her here. She needs me. I will explain, and your mother will understand.”

  Kenneth took her wrist and pulled her back into the chair. These fucking women, he thought. Since when had his life got to be ruled by women—shouting, crying, telling him what to do? “Shut up and listen. Grace is with my mum, okay? She stays there till I say, okay? It’s only a few days. She’ll be fine. Right now you’ve got me to take care of.”

  He wouldn’t have thought she could grow pale, not with her skin, dark as strong tea, but unmistakeably her colour faded, and tears began to slip down her cheeks. “Kenneth, please.”

  “Aren’t you listening?” he said. “It’s not a question of please and thank you. Grace is doing a job, like you at the infirmary. When it’s done, she’ll be home. Meanwhile, you do what I say. Okey-dokey?”

  “I will go to the po-lice,” she said softly, giving the word its Scottish pronunciation.

  “No you bloody won’t.
Your brother, Lalit—if you go to the police, I’ll have him shipped back to Bombay.”

  He had not the faintest clue how to implement his threat—he didn’t even have the guy’s address—but his words had gone home. Joan was rooted, appalled. He was still holding her wrist, and he gave it a good shake. “Come on. Say you understand. Your brother’s fine, your baby’s fine. So just be patient.”

  “Why? Why do this to Grace? She is not with your mother. The Scottish granny. Your mother is no more Grace’s granny than you are her father.”

  Her scorn was for both his duplicity and her own innocence. And then she did something, he realised, she hardly ever did—she stared right into his eyes, and he found himself struggling not to look away. “Is she dead?” she asked. “Is that it? Tell me now.”

  “Of course she’s not dead, you idiot.” He was about to say again that Grace was with his mother, but he could not bring himself to repeat the lie uselessly. “Do what I tell you,” he said, “and everything will be grand. Now what about some grub? I’m starving.”

  He gave her another little shake, meaning cook, meaning where’s your sense of humour? For a few more seconds Joan stared at him, her eyes so dark that he could barely distinguish iris from pupil, then she turned away. She bent to pick something off the floor, and Kenneth watched her, the swoop of her breasts, the curve of her waist. Plenty more where Grace came from, he thought.

  Chapter 11

  In Milan, Ewan made a presentation to various investors and surprised himself by achieving a fluency he had not previously believed lay within his repertoire. On these occasions he usually felt no more than competent, and sometimes, especially when he was tired, his stutter reasserted itself. But in the boardroom of Ginestra and Sedara—with its arched ceiling, and green and black oil paintings by some contemporary Italian artist—the words he needed flowed easily. The men and women around the table studied various charts and graphs, took notes, and nodded. “There are risks, of course,” Ewan reported. “The currency situation is volatile. Nevertheless we project a steady yield over the next three years, with accelerated profits in the second half of the decade.”