There and then I declined. I made excuses to do with Jenni, something about her father and a weekend away. Charlie understood, said he had single men he could despatch instead. I walked proudly back to my desk, worked away the afternoon. When the clock struck seven and I decided to call it a night I thought I’d better throw out the postcard.
The mistake I made was turning over the picture, seeing the swirl of her handwriting.
Then telling Charlie I’d get on that plane. ‘Do you a favour.’
‘Good man,’ he’d replied. ‘I’ll get on the phone.’
Of the many decisions I made that could be compared to a bomb disposal technician’s cutting either the red or the blue wire, that was one. Lives detonated, showered in broken glass, promises. Blown from my office on Cannon Street, a suit and tie, to Wall Street, a disguise, Segur’s business card clutched firmly in my hand.
WE SAT AT THE foot of a creaking oak swaying in the breeze. It sounded like the mast of a wooden ship bound for uncharted shores. We’d chosen a spot far enough under the canopy of trees to spy on the road without being seen. On sitting I’d performed a Walter Raleigh flourish by laying my jacket on the ground for Kay.
‘Umbrellas and coats,’ she’d remarked. ‘How chivalrous.’
With my unuttered replies rattling around my head I’d felt like a lunatic. Right there and then, I wanted to give her everything I did and didn’t have. Money and a house, my flesh and blood. These I possessed. But I couldn’t offer my mind, at least not what I thought it was. How could I be sane and thinking such thoughts so soon?
Regardless of what I wanted to say, the intimacy of sitting in a secluded and shady spot beneath a tree had reduced us to the shy strangers who’d first gotten in the car an hour ago. We were awkward again, passing stilted comments on the scenery, the ridiculousness of the predicament. Until Kay reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle. ‘Water?’
‘You better drink before me,’ I warned, catching a waft of the whisky-infused sweat rising from my body after hauling her suitcase up the hill. ‘It’ll taste like Jack Daniel’s if I go first.’
She laughed. ‘If only this were a Coke.’ Then she twisted off the cap and drank. I was wired to the smallest details. The pop of her lips from the bottle top, her gulping, the throb of her throat as she swallowed, her neck, shining with perspiration. And finally, when I drank, the very taste of her in the water.
I then took a breath, a chance. ‘Do you want to hear a story?’
‘What kind?’
I told her about the Valentine’s card and the floating shoe, my first kiss.
Kay said nothing when I’d done, and for a moment I thought I’d made a terrible misjudgement. She just looked out through the leaves, beyond the cows and a wrecked car to the glowing fields and a clear blue sky.
Then she said, ‘When I was little, I loved to climb trees. As high as I could. I’d climb into the top branches and swing with the wind. And then I’d sit for hours, feeling the sway of that big old tree, imagining I was riding on the shoulder of a giant.’
I watched her talk. The very dark eyes, all pupil when she turned and held me in her steady gaze. And just like the boy standing on the bank of that little brook, my ice cream soul was melting.
‘Is that it?’ she suddenly asked. ‘We’ve slipped into some fairy tale and have to get back to the real world.’
‘Shall we slay a dragon?’
‘Save the princess in the tower.’
I could have continued, but a car appeared on the lane, slowed, and then briefly stopped alongside the wreck.
One of us should have run down the hill and hailed a lift into the village. Would that have broken the spell?
Instead we sat and watched as the driver pulled away.
‘You’re still betting on that police car coming by?’
I apologized, once again, for our predicament. ‘It’s not worth the gamble. I’m a wanted man till I sober up.’
Kay was sitting with her legs crossed, reaching out and twisting bunches of grass. She was letting the broken blades drop from her hand, tipping her face to the morning sun that angled under the branches of the oak. She closed her eyes, and when she did I stared at her unabashedly, as though at a canvas illuminated for my private viewing.
She said, ‘How we need the sun today.’
I studied her flaws, that nick across her eyebrow, a tiny scar puncture in her nose from an old piercing. I read these as marks of a life once very different from being the partner of a Wall Street millionaire, a jet-setting wife attending weddings in palatial marquees where the bride arrives in a horse and carriage. A wedding where guests at the reception talk about yachts and which schools to send their children to, boys and girls with flaxen hair and perfect skin running around the tables.
I had no idea I was going to ask what I next did. ‘Do you ever feel like an actor reading lines?’
She opened her eyes and turned to me.
‘Reading lines for the part of you, but written by someone else.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘Me.’
She smiled wryly. ‘Not right now.’
I laughed, perhaps a little nervously. ‘Does that mean you’ve hidden from the police before?’
‘Now this is what you English do with sarcasm.’ She shook her head. ‘You pretend you don’t mean what you’re saying, but you do. You just disguise it in a joke.’
‘Not at all,’ I lied.
‘Come on, admit it. I’m right.’
‘I’m not saying you’ve been on the run or anything.’
‘A fugitive. Hunted down by US marshals.’
She was playing with my embarrassment, making me squirm for suggesting, albeit humorously, previous run-ins with the police.
‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in worse scrapes than this.’
And now she studied me as I’d studied her moments before, but I had my eyes open, frightened by the force of her gaze, a serious focus.
‘Are we baring souls here?’ she asked, the jokey tone replaced by a sharper, almost angry voice. ‘Because I can tell you what I think if you want to hear it. Why not? We’re sitting here in our own little fairy-tale land, and, well, fairy tales end, don’t they?’
I was stunned by her directness, the fearless turn in the conversation.
‘Sorry,’ she said, guessing my pause was a withdrawal from what she wanted to say.
‘You’ve not told me what I don’t want to hear yet.’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing. What do I know about these things? Who does? Some rock falls to earth and scientists tell us it’s from Mars and so are we. They can look at dinosaur footprints in Arizona and say when they were there and what they were doing.’ She picked up a twig and threw it against the trunk. ‘But what do they know about this?’
I buzzed at the word ‘this’. I let it hang in that August morning, what turned out to be the last true day of summer.
Kay opened the bottle and shook the last few drops of water into her mouth. When she angled her head back I noticed a slight cut on her neck, a smear of blood.
‘Hey, you got cut.’
‘Where?’
I pointed. ‘Just under your ear.’
She rubbed the cut, looked at the red smudge on her fingertip before delving into her handbag and pulling out a tissue.
‘Here.’ I took it from her hand and told her to keep still. Then, in the same gentle manner in which I might sweep back Jenni’s hair to kiss her neck, I pushed the hair from Kay’s ear, and gently cleaned the cut.
I reached down for another tissue. I looked away, but kept her hair held back with my hand. She was turned away so I could get to the cut, but when I looked up she faced me. I kept my hand against the side of her head, felt the heat of her ear on my palm, her cheek on the inside of my wrist.
My whole self pulsed. I was all beating heart. I thought my skin might not be enough to contain me. I reached out with my other hand, pushed it
back into her hair and cupped the sides of her head.
This was how I first held her, very delicately, as though if I let go she could break into a million pieces. Or I could.
She breathed hard. I gripped harder, almost clawing.
She said, ‘Go on.’
She said, ‘Do it.’
I pulled us together. We bit lips and forced tongues into mouths. We had fistfuls of each other’s hair. We made two into one. I had no idea who was who, which hand was where. I wanted to see her, I had to see her, and drew back and held her cheeks, framed her face. And then I kissed her eyelids and her temple and the hollow between her jaw and her ear.
When I kissed her cut she whispered something I didn’t hear.
Then she said it again.
‘You fucker.’
WEARING MY RIDICULOUS HAT and thick scarf, I stood next to a stall selling cut-price headphones for iPods and phones. I let the ear flaps dangle on my cheeks and wore the sunglasses even though scattered cloud cast shadows over Wall Street.
‘Bargain price. Best price,’ called the West African stall holder. ‘Times tough. Jobs cut. Houses lost. I save you money. This not expensive Sony. This a China bargain.’ He chattered away at passing pedestrians, paraded his wares and warned, ‘Hard times a’ coming. Next year gonna make the Great Depression look like a vacation.’
I hoped he wasn’t right. And I hoped that by standing next to him I’d be less obvious, less recognizable, should Segur walk from his office and look across the road.
I watched the revolving doors deposit the first workers on the sidewalk. Men and women who’d earned an early run home, keen staff at their desk hours before their colleagues, their managers, the ambitious sleeping an hour less to get ahead. As I once had myself, knowing that to rise above the privileged with school tie connections I had to excel by twirling data twice as fast as the twits with calculators. And I did, passing through the ranks of mid-management, the self-proclaimed big guns. With a natural common sense that some of the better educated seemed to lack, and certainly a better idea of thrift and cost cutting because I’d lived a life that had required these skills, I’d applied the lessons learned from the personal counting of pennies to big business with little effort.
While I waited on the sidewalk I thought about my earlier jobs, shovelling stone on building sites, selling double glazing, a whole career path of petty employment before I’d even met Jenni. Not including teenage girlfriends, or Debbie Western and that first kiss, Jenni was the second, and I truly hoped the last, woman I’d been in love with.
Siobhan was the first.
The day I knocked on her door the man on the news said it was officially the most depressing day of the year. It was hard to disagree. That was the winter after I finished university and moved back to Nottingham. The winter I watched my mother lowered into the earth. I drove around council estates selling windows to families too poor to pay gas bills, taking the job for the company car, a red Escort with a radio but no heater.
Graduate or not, this was the only work I’d found after a summer mixing cement. I’d already spent the cash made from selling a rental van then reporting it as stolen. My fellow doorknockers were much like me. Men in their twenties, either student dropouts or fiddling the dole. And desperate. Whether they were making money or not. This desperation ranged from Class A drug habits to those blacklisted by employment agencies for turning down night shifts stacking pallets or loading lorries.
In a good week I’d make a couple of hundred, not including the dole I picked up every second Thursday, my doorknocking partner Jeff pulling round the back of the job centre while I whipped off my tie and declared I wasn’t earning any money. And I believed it. Talking people into buying plastic windows wasn’t earning in the same way hauling bricks up a ladder was.
That morning in the office, a converted garage off the back of a showroom displaying patio doors and conservatories that had roofs which opened with remote controls, was no different from any other. Cigarette smoke and coffee, cheap aftershave.
‘Shit,’ said Jeff, searching his jacket for some change for the vending machine.
‘What’s the act with your hand in your pocket?’ I asked. ‘We both know you’re skint.’
Jeff borrowed some money from a guy he’d worked with at an abattoir, an agency job before selling windows. A minibus collected them at dawn and drove them out to a huge shed where hooded slaughtermen crashed through metal doors in aprons spattered with blood. Jeff suited up in a back room then stood at a conveyor belt where steaming cuts of meat rattled past. ‘Still warm,’ he grimaced. His job was to bag them up. ‘And they had the radio going full blast so you couldn’t hear the cows scream.’
The first toilet break he ran across the fields and hitched back to town. He had recurring dreams where blood seeped up through lawns in the next village.
But this was the kind of job waiting for us if we quit knocking doors. Not that there wasn’t money to be made. The Indians in telesales were legends. Guys called Mukesh and Gurdip going by names like Sid Thompson and John Roberts, culturing accents of white boys from good families that never lied. I envied their powers of disguise. Mukesh averaged a thousand pounds a week. His record was a three grand bonanza, armed with a contact list burgled from the offices of a rival company.
So with this promise of riches we flapped letterboxes and rang doorbells, occasionally sold a window, but more often than not got told to piss off. We parked in cul-de-sacs and crescents, streets on estates named after what was razed to make way for the red-brick homes: Plumtree Way, Oak Drive, Field Avenue.
I shaved and shined my boots, created discounts for pensioners, families, birthdays and Fridays. Security was a big selling point. ‘Anyone could break this window,’ I’d state, casually waving at the porch glass. ‘But double glaze it and you can go to bed knowing that burglar isn’t creeping around your kitchen, rummaging in the knife drawer.’
With a list of streets where homes were being fitted with new windows to lend credibility to our pitch, the housewife, shift worker or man on the dole could look across the road and see what we were selling.
But the first address that day was in Lenton, a studentville near the university. ‘I’m renting,’ was the standard reply. ‘It’s not my house.’
‘Let’s fuck it off,’ decided Jeff. ‘Get a bag of chips and drive out to where people pay mortgages.’
We looked along the terraced street, the sky and slate roofs merging into the same grey.
‘It’s freezing.’ Jeff rubbed his hands together.
At each door I took my gloves off to knock. I felt like a serial killer when I knocked with gloves on. The few houses I got an answer from were dully predictable. Students. Renting. I looked into the room of a guy who’d paused a computer game. Something was in mid-explosion.
‘You’d better get back to your books.’
Halfway down the street, Jeff shouted, ‘Fuck it.’ He was hunched inside his jacket, trying to shrink into the warmth.
‘I’m finishing this row,’ I told him, then turned to the next front door, took off my gloves and knocked.
And when she opened that door she practically opened up another universe.
‘Well go on then,’ she said.
But I was speechless. She kept her very dark hair bundled up with a pencil. She wore a blue dress patterned with tiny white flowers.
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re selling something.’
I was. Me.
‘And you don’t look like a Jehovah’s Witness.’
Perhaps I looked like a man in an art gallery. The doorway framed her like a painting. I began the pitch then started laughing. Maybe it was the pressure of what was for sale.
‘A free estimate for what?’ she asked, smiling.
At that moment I wanted nothing to do with selling windows ever again. So instead of talking about glass, I asked where in Ireland she was from.
‘Armagh.’
I could se
e goosebumps on her arms. She was cold. How long did I have before she closed that door? I needed an in. But I hadn’t been to Ireland. North or south. I could hear music in the back of the house, a man singing about tea and oranges from China.
‘That’s Leonard Cohen,’ I said.
She said it was.
‘What would you bring me from China?’
She laughed, looked at me long and hard, then said she had the tea but not the biscuits.
‘A brew would be fantastic.’
I followed her through the lounge. I tried not to stare at her swaying hips. Manuscripts scattered her coffee table. A Van Morrison LP with dog-eared corners.
I sat on a wooden chair in her narrow kitchen. She said I could have coffee, but I said tea was fine. She pulled the pencil from her hair, then again bundled those very black curls. I had to look away. It was too much. Postcards, ticket stubs and movie reviews covered the walls. She was working at the Theatre Royal, ‘putting on plays’.
‘It’s a small city,’ I said. ‘I must have seen you before?’
‘But you’re not sure?’
I watched her pouring water from the kettle. I looked her up and down. ‘Actually, I am sure. I’d have remembered.’
She asked if I wanted sugar. I was trying to play things cool, but saw that my hand was shaking when I stirred my tea. I told her I was selling windows because it was better than working in a factory.
‘But you’ve been to university.’
It wasn’t a question, and I asked how she knew.
‘I guessed.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
We talked over ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, lyrics about a frozen New York.
I told her the first time I heard Leonard Cohen I fell in love. ‘But I got the wrong person. I went out with the girl who played me his record, when it was really his music I wanted.’
She laughed. She liked that one. And I say that because she next said we should meet for a drink later.
‘Or do you think I’m being a bit forward?’
‘Not at all.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 5