Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  ‘You need a refresher course,’ said Saturday. ‘Things move fast in the world of consumer electronics. Today, people do on a phone what you probably used a mainframe computer to do when you were working.’

  Ash elevated an indignant eyebrow. ‘Mainframe? How old do you think I am?’

  Saturday regarded him kindly. ‘Well – pretty old, Gabriel. You can’t expect to pick it up the way people my age do, just by hanging around together and trading tricks. And it’s not like you’ll ever want to do the really cool stuff.’

  Ash stiffened. ‘Really cool stuff?’

  ‘You know – hacking. You don’t need any of that. You just need to update the basics. Work out what you need it for, and learn how to do that. Er – what do you want to do with it?’

  Ash took a deep breath. It was a now-or-never moment: he had the powerful feeling that if he didn’t put it into words now, the whole idea would shrivel and drift away on the wind. ‘I want to go back to work. If I can find a job I can do, that someone’s willing to pay me for.’ There: it was said.

  To his credit, Saturday didn’t immediately hoot with laughter. He had never known Ash as a working man. But he did know that he was an intelligent man, and that he had once held important, well-paid positions – so well paid that, even after four years of economic inactivity, he was still financially secure. ‘Why?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘You don’t need the money.’

  ‘Why not?’ countered Ash. ‘Twelve months ago I didn’t work because I wasn’t capable of working. Two months ago I didn’t work because looking after my boys took all my time. Now I have the time, and I have the capacity, and I’m starting to feel I’d like to put them to some use again. Less for the money than the self-respect. It’s what you do if you’re an adult, particularly if you have children. You find work and that’s how you raise them. So they can tell their friends, “My dad’s a butcher. My dad drives a taxi. My dad”’ – he flicked Saturday a little grin – ‘“works in a service station.” Anything that’s both legal and respectable. I owe it to them.’

  ‘But you’re not a butcher,’ Saturday pointed out, reasonably. ‘And taxi drivers have to drive faster than you do. And the job in the service station is mine, so keep your paws off it. Besides which, those aren’t the sorts of job you want. They’re the sorts of jobs you could do with half your brain, while using the other half to solve quadratic equations.’

  Ash stared at him in astonishment. ‘Saturday, what the hell do you know about quadratic equations?’

  ‘I went to school. Don’t change the subject. You shouldn’t be doing little fill-a-bit-of-time, pay-for-the-piano-lessons jobs. You should be doing proper, important stuff again. You’ll never be satisfied with a nine-to-fiver. There’s only one good reason to take a boring job, and that’s in order to eat. That isn’t a problem for you. If you get a job painting the stripes on humbugs, you’ll be climbing the walls within a week. You might think you’ll be satisfied with just working. But it won’t last. It won’t be enough for long.’

  Ash might have argued, but the youth knew him too well. That came as a bit of a shock too. But he’d started this conversation: he couldn’t pull the plug just because he didn’t like Saturday’s answers. Honesty – total honesty – seemed the only way forward.

  ‘I couldn’t get an important job now,’ he said quietly. ‘Nobody would trust me with anything that mattered. You need to be reliable for those kinds of jobs. People need to feel they can count on you, that you’ll still be up to the task on a bad day. And nobody is going to look at my track-record and feel that.

  ‘I have a history of mental illness. That’s a bit like being a murderer: potential employers are always going to feel that, just because you haven’t done it for a while, you’re still more likely to do it again than someone who never murdered anyone. And there are lots of people available for work who’ve never seen the inside of a straitjacket.’

  Saturday said nothing. He let Ash talk, and he listened and didn’t interrupt.

  ‘I might find someone willing to trust me with an assistant-under-manager sort of job, where I won’t scare off the customers if I go into meltdown someday. I will never find anyone willing to give me a position of real responsibility. Why would they? Why would someone who owes me nothing risk me ruining his business? I’m not even an unknown quantity – I’m someone who’s already proved himself unreliable.

  ‘So I need to start small. Get a foot on the ladder, and try to persuade an employer that I just might be promotable. That’s the only way I’m ever going to earn an honest wage again.’

  Saturday regarded him with compassion. It was a bit like seeing a great boxer reduced to serving as a bouncer in a backstreet nightclub. ‘There are people who’ll take a chance on you. The manager at the service station knew I’d boosted that laptop from his washroom when he took me on.’

  ‘The age of miracles is not yet over. Well, maybe your manager has a brother who’ll take a chance on me. Anyway, I’m going to find out.’ Ash thought for a moment, frowning. ‘Do they really pay people to do that? Paint the stripes on humbugs?’

  Saturday nodded innocently. ‘Oh yeah. And toothpaste. It’s a fiddly job, not everyone can do it. Also, hollowing out chocolate bars to insert biscuits, and squeezing the walnut into the centre of a Walnut Whip.’

  Ash gave a superior smile. ‘I’m unreliable, not an idiot. Everyone knows the walnut goes on top of a Walnut Whip.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ murmured Saturday. ‘Silly me.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Now the idea of finding work had occurred to him, Ash was troubled by his lack of marketable skills. Everything that he once knew was out of date.

  He was good with figures – but he had no accountancy qualifications. Perhaps he could work in a shop – a small shop, with not too many customers – where his ability to do the books would be a bonus. Books … A tiny lightbulb flickered in his head. A bookshop, perhaps. Crowds don’t gather twelve deep around the till of a bookshop, and customers who were themselves not wholly persuaded by the twenty-first century might not notice, or care if they did, that he was an analogue man adrift in a digital world.

  The idea had some appeal. He saw himself dusting rows of leather spines, and heading unerringly for a top-shelf treasure with the aid of sliding library steps. (How Frankie would have laughed at this! He showed no talent for dusting at home.) People who worked in bookshops were allowed to be a little out of touch, he was sure, as long as they knew their shelves inside out and could match their customers to their stock. (‘A little light holiday reading, madam? May I recommend Miss Austen? Such a subversive wit … And perhaps Mrs Gaskell to follow.’)

  How would the boys react? He suspected there was more cachet to having a father who was a fireman, a stand-up comedian or a professional footballer, but presumably a father who worked in a bookshop was better than one who did no work at all.

  There were only two obstacles that Ash could see. One was the perennial one, of persuading any business that he would be an asset rather than a liability. The other was that there was no bookshop in Norbold. He pondered the problem as he walked home, Patience trotting quietly at his side.

  The shortest route from Railway Street to Highfield Road was through the park, but Ash had to call at the garage behind Arkwright Street first. The old grey Volvo that had been his mother’s had started making a strange noise, somewhere between a rumble and a rattle, particularly noticeable on corners, and after listening with mounting unease for a week he’d taken it in for a check-up.

  The young man who ran the garage spoke with a powerful Brummie accent, wore – even in November – T-shirts designed to show off his muscles, and decorated his workshop with calendars that in any other context would be deemed pornographic. But he was a very good, very reliable mechanic, and even if he laughed because someone was still driving a car that was old enough to vote, he still made sure the Volvo would get Ash and his family everywhere they wanted to go.

  ‘Did you have a
ny luck tracking down my rattle?’ asked Ash.

  Diego the mechanic nodded solemnly. ‘I did.’

  Ash didn’t blame him for not going into detail. They hadn’t known one another long, but still long enough for Diego to realise that if he started talking about the arcane world under the bonnet, Ash would go glassy-eyed and start shuffling out of the garage backwards. ‘Big job?’ he hazarded.

  Diego rocked an oily hand. ‘Not particularly. But it did take a fair bit of technical expertise to pin it down. Still, this is what us top-flight mechanics are trained for. Once I knew what was causing the problem, resolving it was easy enough.’ He waited.

  Ash steeled himself. ‘What was causing the problem?’

  Diego took something off the bench behind him, dropped it into Ash’s hand. ‘A boiled sweet in the glove compartment.’

  Ash insisted on paying him for his time, although Diego would have been more than satisfied with the look on Ash’s face. He opened the passenger door for Patience before climbing in behind the wheel.

  He was about to leave when Diego ducked down to the open window. ‘Do you know when Hazel’s coming back?’ It was Hazel who had introduced them.

  ‘She’s back now,’ said Ash. ‘She’s staying with a friend. Why?’

  ‘Her car’s ready, but she isn’t answering her phone. I thought she must still be away.’

  Ash was puzzled. ‘You’ve been working on it since she went to Morocco?’

  Diego shrugged. ‘I don’t know where she is. I just know the car came in three days ago, for a service and a valet. Some bloke brought it in. I told him, “Are you sure she wants it valeting?” After they’ve been upside down in a ditch, valeting is a bit like polishing the silverware on the Titanic. But he insisted. Said she wanted it looking like new. I said, “If she wants a car that looks like new she’ll have to buy a new car.” He just said to do the best I could and got into a taxi.’

  Some bloke. ‘A man about my age? Couple of inches shorter? Good looking, and not unaware of the fact?’

  Diego grinned and nodded. ‘That’s him. Who is he?’

  Maybe the mechanic kept his television tuned to Formula One. But Ash was obscurely pleased to know the man was less universally recognisable than he imagined. ‘His name’s Oliver Ford. He works in television.’

  Diego nodded wisely. ‘That explains the spray tan.’

  Ash laughed out loud. ‘I think the tan is probably genuine.’

  ‘And I’m a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian,’ said Diego cynically.

  Ash drove slowly home. In fact he drove slowly most places – he’d been off the road for four years, and anyway the Volvo was built for endurance not speed – but today he was driving slowly because he was thinking.

  He had that uneasy feeling again. Last time he’d got it he’d made a fool of himself, and he’d sworn he was going to stop jumping to conclusions. Hazel hadn’t been kidnapped by white slavers, she’d been on holiday, and she’d returned safe and well. Nothing untoward would have happened to her this time either. Her partner – Ash still tripped over saying it, even inside his own head – had brought her car in for a service. Wasn’t that exactly the sort of things partners did for one another?

  Why wasn’t she answering her phone? Could be any number of reasons. The simplest was the most likely: that Diego had called at a bad time. Ash pulled over to the side of the road to test this theory; but again he got a female voice – not Hazel’s – informing him that the person he was calling was unavailable and asking him to call back later.

  Perhaps the house Ford had taken was in a mobile black-spot. Or perhaps she’d lost her phone and hadn’t got round to giving him the number of the new one. It was even possible that she’d simply switched it off and forgotten to switch it on again, and any time now would be sufficiently puzzled by the way the world had gone quiet to take it out and call someone herself.

  Ash really hoped it would be him.

  ‘I know I’m being neurotic,’ he said apologetically as he parked the car in his drive. ‘It’s just … I don’t like it when I don’t hear from her.’

  No, said Patience quietly. You’re not being neurotic.

  ‘I’m sure I’m imagining problems where no problems exist. Blowing things out of proportion.’

  I know what neurotic means, said Patience. It’s not neurotic to worry about someone when you have reason to think they might be in trouble.

  They went inside. They had the house to themselves, so the dialogue continued.

  ‘What reason? What makes you think Hazel might be in trouble?’

  The lurcher looked surprised. How a dog whose face is little more than bone and teeth with skin stretched over them can convey expressions is something of a mystery, but they can. Even the ones who don’t talk.

  She said, Have you forgotten what Rachid Iqbal said?

  ‘Rachid Iqbal said almost nothing. Only that Oliver Ford wasn’t to be trusted. He wouldn’t say why not, or how he knew.’

  He said enough to worry you.

  ‘Yes, he did. If I hadn’t bumped into Hazel at the airport, I’d probably still be traipsing round the Middle East looking for her. And she was fine. I was worrying for nothing. I’m pretty sure I’m still worrying for nothing.’

  No, insisted Patience, you’re not. If you were sure we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’re worrying because she’s your friend and she could be in trouble.

  Ash breathed heavily at the dog. ‘And you think this because Ford took Hazel’s car in for a service?’

  No. Because she doesn’t seem to want it back.

  Ash had almost persuaded himself there was nothing to be anxious about. Now Patience – or that alter ego he personified as Patience – had all but persuaded him the very opposite. ‘Even if I thought you were right, what could I do about it? She isn’t answering her phone, and I don’t know where she’s living now.’

  You don’t need to know where Hazel’s living. You need to find out where Oliver Ford is living.

  Ash nodded slowly. Of course: it seemed so obvious, when the dog pointed it out. Obvious, but problematic. ‘Who’s going to tell me that? Anyone who knows will see it as their duty to protect his privacy.’

  Patience had the answer to that too. Who? – his agent. And how? – lie.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Hazel was struggling with the shoes Ford had picked out for her. They were beautiful, but they felt … wrong. It was years since she’d worn heels – they weren’t practical for police work – and even then she hadn’t worn them often. Now she was wearing them around the house to try to learn the knack again. At first she found herself tottering from chair-back to door handle like an old lady with a new hip. But as her balance returned, she felt that indefinable presence, that stature, that a three-inch stiletto confers.

  She smiled condescendingly down at Ford as he came into the kitchen in search of coffee. ‘My goodness, is that the beginnings of a bald spot?’

  If she’d thought for one moment that he would be offended, she would never have said it. But then, if she’d thought for one moment that he would be offended by a casual little joke, a friendly insult of the kind she traded daily with Saturday and Ash and her other friends, she probably wouldn’t have been here.

  But he was offended. His eyes flickered hotly at her and his lips compressed to a thin line. His fingers twitched as if he’d been about to check but refused to give her the satisfaction. ‘I doubt it,’ he said shortly. ‘My father had a full head of hair on the day he died.’

  Hazel blinked. ‘Hey – humour alert? I know the male ego is a delicate thing, but don’t take yourself so seriously. I don’t love you for your hair. I wouldn’t love you any less if you lost it.’

  ‘I am not losing my hair!’

  ‘Well, thanks for making me feel so good about losing mine!’

  They stared at one another for a moment in anger and mutual incomprehension. As if neither could understand how this sudden argument had blown up when the
ir own sensitivities should have been obvious to the other. Every second Hazel expected Ford to pass a weary hand in front of his face, shake his head bemusedly, apologise and say he’d been over-working. But he went on looking at her, hard-eyed, as if he was waiting for the apology.

  Hazel was frankly shaken. She’d been living with this man now for over a month. She knew that he was touchy. She knew that his sense of humour, which could be delightfully impish and droll, never quite extended to his own shortcomings. But she made allowances for this – was happy to – because of how he made her feel. Intensely alive and stimulated. She enjoyed his quick wit and undoubted intelligence, and also his easy mastery of a social milieu in which she had never moved before. He was internationally recognised for his academic work, and enjoyed wide acclaim for his television presenting; he accepted both as his due and juggled their competing demands with a cool aplomb that still impressed her.

  But she had not seen this side of him before. This petty, self-regarding pomposity that could take deep offence at a joke and cling to it like a startled bather hanging onto her towel. It was so … childish! They shared a bed. Their intimacy was absolute. How could he get this so wrong? Either he’d misjudged her so completely as to think she meant to hurt him, or it was a grotesque over-reaction. It hardly mattered which, because each was as inappropriate as the other.

  One of them had to break the leaden silence, and Ford seemed willing to stand there with his jaw clenched bitterly until he starved to death. Hazel took a deep, steadying breath. ‘All right. You’re not a stupid man, so this cannot possibly be about a bald spot, real or imaginary. What is it really about?’

  He cranked his jaw open just wide enough to hammer out one word. ‘Gratitude.’

  It was a sort of counter-explanation. She understood less after he’d said it than before. Her face, from which the redness had finally faded, twisted in a puzzled frown. ‘Oliver, I don’t expect you to go on being grateful to me. I certainly don’t expect you to go on saying you’re grateful. We’ve moved beyond that. What happened in Wittering is how we met, but it isn’t why we’re together. We’re together because, Lord knows why, we found so much pleasure in one another’s company that going our separate ways wasn’t an option. I’m here, in your house, because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. I think you’d have to call that love.’