Kicking Off

by Jan Needle

  Rosanna held her breath, wondering what horror of mankind he would present to her this time. But after the bare feet came trousered ankles, and above the belt a shirt. Even his face looked better, less cadaverous. When he saw her, he stopped.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t dream it after all. Is that for me?’

  She walked up to street level.

  ‘You might as well. You probably need it. I was only doing it out of boredom, actually. I’ve searched the house.’

  Forbes summoned up a laugh without wincing. He took the coffee and tried a mouthful or two. He walked into the living room and sat at the computer, assuming she would follow. She did, sitting on a wooden straight-backed chair.

  ‘You could be anyone,’ he said. ‘Walking in on a hangover like that. Did you find anything worth photographing?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I got bored. I guess I thought you’d be sort of high-powered. You know, full of…you know. Maurice told me you were shit-hot.’

  Forbes made a face.

  ‘This tastes of fish and chips,’ he said. ‘Good old Maurice, eh? How is the twat?’

  In a stupid way, Rosanna felt extremely happy. For the first time in quite a while, she felt that she was getting somewhere. But that’s stupid, she told herself. I’m sitting here with a man who looks like liver failure, who I don’t know from the Pope, and we’re talking nonsense. It felt right. Bloody marvellous.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Forbes. ‘Time for a drink, surely? I don’t suppose you dragged all the way from Bonnie Scotland just to say hello, did you? I’m old enough to be your brother, anyway. Are you on expenses? You could take me for a meal.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m not on expenses, but Maurice didn’t sack me in the end, so I’ve got a wage. Where shall we go?’

  ‘Well, that depends,’ said Andrew. ‘What do we want to talk about? I mean, if it’s really intimate, we could stay at home. Mull it over underneath the sheets.’

  Rosanna recognised the ploy, the loaded joke, and recognised the sofa, even. But to her surprise it did not annoy her. It was said without any hard intent, she thought, without malice aforethought. It was friendly.

  ‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘I’ve already seen you naked, and we’ve not been properly introduced. Let that be enough for one day, yes? You’ll probably find when you know me that you lose interest. In Scottish journalism they call me the Mouse. But I do need you to be sober. Soberish. If we go to a pub now, can I make an appointment for another day?’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Forbes. ‘They’ve got you wrong, love, you’re a shrew not a mouse. So what’s the subject? Tell me.’

  While Rosanna outlined the story, Forbes wandered round the room. He pulled books out of bookshelves, and pushed them back. He looked at himself in a mirror on the mantelpiece, and grimaced. He found some toast and marmalade underneath a newspaper, and ate it. When she had finished, he let the pause hang for quite some time. There was intermittent traffic noise from out front. A child shrieking nearby. He sat down.

  ‘Well?’ said Rosanna.

  ‘The trouble with being English,’ Andrew answered, ‘is the imperialism. It’s bred into the bone. I mean sure, I’ve heard of Buckie, I heard about the siege. But what’s his name again? Jimmy McGregor? I mean, is he really dead? It didn’t make the papers this end, I can tell you. Nobody fell off a roof, for certain no one died. The Army moved in maybe, maybe not. The new junior minister, whatsisname? Donald Sinclair. He did a secret deal. They came down off the roof, everybody clapped their hands, and Bob’s your uncle. For once, I’ve not heard anyone complaining. He even did a little job for me, indirectly. Put someone I didn’t like inside Bowscar Jail. Too late, but never mind. We can’t have everything, can we?’

  Underneath his untidy, lightish hair, Forbes’ grey eyes clouded. The smile around his lips faded, leaving them, to Rosanna’s eyes, quite grim. Herself, she was hollow. He was being honest, she could not complain, but it left her in the pit. Scotland – where was it? Jimmy McGregor – who was he? A conspiracy to murder – so what?

  ‘He didn’t just fall off the roof, you know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to believe this, so I didn’t say it. He was drugged. The soldiers went onto the roof and they shot him with a dart or something. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was just to keep me interested. The man who rang me up. He mentioned drugs. He said to ask them about how they got into his body. He said to ask about the gun. Then they moved the brother. They whipped him across the border and he’s disappeared. A man called Adrian Rafferty told me. He’s—’

  ‘Christ! You don’t know that old drunk do you? Is he still alive? And what does he reckon? If Rafferty thinks there’s a story in it… Jesus, last time I spoke to him the quacks had given him two months. That was ten years ago!’

  Rosanna was glad they had not gone out to a pub. Forbes, as far as she could tell, was still riddled with booze from the night before. She was reiterating constantly, going carefully over the same ground time and time again. Was he grasping it? Was he doing it deliberately, to tease out everything? Or was his mind following Rafferty’s, on the downward, drunken path?

  ‘Adrian says the Animal’s untraceable,’ she said. ‘After Glasgow—’

  ‘Hang on, hang on! Where does the Animal come in? Isn’t he the guy who minces prison officers? And prisoners, and friends, and— Oh. Angus McGregor. And the guy who died was Jimmy. Why didn’t you say so? It’s his brother?’

  ‘I did. I—’

  Andrew laughed at her.

  ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ he teased. ‘To be so young and earnest. Do you think this is important, Rosanna Nixon?’ He did a stupid, hippy voice. ‘I mean really, really important?’

  You shit, she thought. Has all this been just to take the piss? You boring, useless shit.

  ‘As a matter of fact I do,’ she said. ‘But as I can see you don’t, I might as well sod off, I guess. I guess you’ve got bigger fish to fry. I’m sorry I wasted your time.’

  As she stood, red-faced, Forbes stood with her.

  ‘We’ll have to walk,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid my Porsche’s a bit fucked just at present. Can you see my jacket anywhere? It’s not far to the pub.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rosanna, belligerently. ‘If you want to spend my money, you’ll have to eat. In a restaurant.’

  ‘For a wee sleekit cow’rin’ beastie,’ said Forbes, ‘you’re quite hard, d’you know that? I suppose if I said they did sandwiches at the pub—’

  ‘You’d be on your own. I’m sick to death of drunken journalists.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist, you cheeky bitch,’ he said. ‘I’ve written books!’

  In the photograph, standing outside the old and flaking front door, they were laughing. To Paddy Collins’ lustful eye, they already looked like lovers.

  NINE

  Bowscar. Michael Masters. Barbara.

  It had not occurred to Barbara Masters that Saturday was the worst day possible to visit her husband in prison, and nobody had told her. Sir Cyril France, QC, barrister and family friend, had hinted that it might be possible to squeeze some extra time out of the system – after all, he smiled, twelve half-hours a year could hardly be considered generous – but for the moment, best play it by the rules. Like Barbara, he was not constrained by time as ordinary mortals are, and like her he assumed unthinkingly that there would be something extra pleasant about a weekend visit, something almost festive at the end of a long dull week. Although he’d been in prisons, naturally, he had hardly noticed them in detail, and categorised them, when he bothered to at all, as rather inferior hotels.

  The drive had been quite pleasant, and the weather fine. The BMW had eaten up the miles, with the sound system filling Barbara’s mind with music. In some odd way, both she and the boys had come to terms with the whole affair. She still found it devastatingly sad, but she had lived with the elements of shame for so long that they were no longer sharp. What was more everybody – her fr
iends, Michael’s business associates, the financial press – had behaved wonderfully towards them both. It was the universal opinion that he had done nothing wrong beyond what everybody did, that he was a victim of hypocrisy, a scapegoat for the envious millions. Only her parents had not embraced this view, but that, she thought, was the shallowest of opportunism. They didn’t like him, and they never had done. Not because of any perceived failings in his moral code, but because he wasn’t one of them. He was of a lower class and it amused him – in their company – to revel in it.

  Truth to tell, thought Barbara, as she drove the last few miles through the Staffordshire countryside, I don’t like him much myself. The idea amused her, for a moment. Here she was, the wife of a millionaire, humming through the sunlit countryside in a wonderful limousine towards his prison, and she could be so disloyal! That in itself warmed her to him, and she revised the mental statement. ‘No,’ she said aloud. ‘I don’t dislike you, Michael. But I can stand the thought of prison, you bastard! Oh yes, I can stand the thought of prison!’

  Barbara Masters, after fourteen years of marriage, could contemplate her feelings quite dispassionately. For the first six, Masters’ joint obsessions – making money and making women – had set up an odd conflict in her emotions. The money side amused her, because she was rich herself, and found his naked lust for it endearing. But the woman side, when she had discovered it, had been an appalling, searing shock. Because she’d thought their love and sex life perfect, it made her suspect, horribly, that her wealth had been the first, perhaps the only, thing that had actually attracted him. She had been wrong, but it had taken her six years and three affairs of her own – affairs of desperation, not of love – to make her realise it. Since then, slowly, she had come to accept him as a man who needed certain fixes to feel whole.

  She no longer hated him for the women, nor even cared that much, and she was totally faithful sexually herself, although her love was deeply modified. She did not know of Sarah Williams.

  It was the sight of Bowscar Prison that brought the sadness back. Like many of the great Victorian piles, it had such a presence that it stood out from the landscape as a shock. The houses of the village came quite close, but it was oddly out of scale with them. It was much too large, as if somehow over the years of its existence it had grown by sucking the life from its surroundings. It had an enormous tower, with a gallery around its higher part exactly positioned on its length as the glans of an erect penis would have been. The walls were vastly high, the windows tragically small, in minuscule, inhuman scale. The integrity of the architectural vision, Barbara found amazing. It was not so much a building as a nightmare, genuinely made real. While men believed in retribution, it could never be knocked down.

  And her husband had been sent here for six years? She knew, clearly and simply, that it could not be. He would not stay, he could not. She was close to tears.

  An hour later, humiliatingly, the tears were falling down her cheeks. She was sitting opposite her husband, at a bare deal table with uneven legs, and she could not speak. Masters, sardonically, observed that her distress was selfish, or at least, not to do with the state she found him in. He gathered that she had had a hard time of it. Had found nowhere to park the BMW, had had to queue for ages, surrounded by the lower orders and their squalling brats. In an odd way, it gave him satisfaction to see the slim, elegant woman so unhappy in such squalor. Barbara had pretensions to liberality which occasionally irked him. Now, like Natella Abashvili, she was apparently discovering that the lower orders were giving her a migraine.

  ‘What did you expect?’ he asked. ‘A major-domo to take your coat? For God’s sake dress the part next time. If there is a next time.’

  The words went in like knives. Barbara had genuinely been looking forward to seeing him, and had genuinely been overwhelmed by the horror of the physical reality. It was Saturday, the day when the women who were lucky enough to have jobs could take time off. The visiting hall held thirty prisoners at a time, with the waiting wives and children left in the street until they were counted in like sheep to slaughter. Bored children, after waiting for an hour, became uncontrollable. The toddlers wet themselves, dramatically, on their fathers’ knees. The women, trying to kiss the men, and say they loved them, or that everything was all right, were knocked into by flying kids, looked at slyly by other women who knew their deepest secrets, vomited over by their babies.

  With this all round her, Barbara discovered the other great agony of being a visiting wife. She sat opposite her husband, wishing she were dead, and Michael Masters sat staring at her almost sightlessly, wishing she were someone else. His need for Sarah Williams – no longer doubted, no longer wishable away – was triggered by this meeting, his heart ached and his stomach muscles contracted, progressively, into a knot of terrifying hunger. As Barbara spoke to him, he answered Sarah, in a silent shout. Oh Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. That was all.

  He had not asked her how the boys were, he thought dully. Or had she told him? He had not asked about the house, the cars, the staff, the dogs, the horse, her parents. He had not asked her how she was making out, if Sir Cyril France had been in touch yet with a plan, or whether she would come again or if she’d be surprised to find someone had let her tyres down outside or scratched the paintwork with a knife. He had not asked her why she’d worn such ridiculously opulent clothes, or whether she was mad. He had not asked her if she would divorce him or give a message to Sarah, or kill herself and set him free. As the half-hour ground on, he thought he was going to shout at her, to scream, or strike her. He had grown pale, he knew it. For the first time in his adult life he thought that he might lose control.

  But I can take anything, he told himself. I can; anything at all. That is, Sarah, until I met you.

  You bitch.

  When the buzzer rang, Masters stood abruptly. There was a sheen of moisture on his brow, and the muscles in his jaw were locked. Barbara’s eyes were frightened. She reached a hand out and he flinched.

  ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to Cyril. This is—’ She stopped herself. This was wrong. You had to be brave, didn’t you? She couldn’t leave like this. It was disastrous, insupportable. She tried to smile, but it was a ghastly mask.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. The tears began again, flooding down her cheeks. She turned and banged into a couple at the table behind her. They were locked, astonishingly, in a passionate embrace. As she hit them the woman, who was slewed halfway across the table, seemed to grip the shoulders of her man to stop herself from falling. They moved sideways, still locked mouth to mouth, the table legs scraping noisily across the floor. Only after Barbara passed, trying to mumble an apology through her sobs, did they separate. The woman, who was thin and small and furiously angry, shouted at her: ‘You clumsy fucking cow! Why don’t you look out what you’re fucking doing!’

  At another table, as she bore down on it, Barbara came across two young men, both weeping as they gazed at each other. One, the inmate, was tall and beautiful, with hair that looked as if chunks had been hacked off with a knife. Patches of skull showed through, and the remains were straggly, and different colours. The visitor was short and stubby, with a black motorcycle jacket and tight blue jeans. As Barbara passed, a tiny woman, spiderlike and venomous, spat at him. The two men’s hands, which were almost touching, drew back. Neither of them said a word.

  Outside, the air was still clear, still clean, still beautiful. But most of Barbara’s elegance was gone. She had the clothes, but she had lost the ability to walk properly. She did not exactly stagger, but there was a lumpishness in her gait, a lack of balance. She felt as if she’d turned into a crab, a hermit crab with long, useless legs and a hugely heavy shell. When she reached the BMW – untouched, unscratched – she found it hard to press the button on the key. She leaned her arm on the roof and touched the metal with her forehead, and concentrated. Her arm, she thought, smelled of the awful room. Of dirt, and sick, and poverty. Inside the car, she sat for minutes
, smelling the same smell. It was stronger than the smell of leather from the seats. She pressed the switch to take the window down, but the ignition was not on. She sat.

  Two hundred yards away, the thin woman who had shouted at her approached an old blue Transit van. As she neared him, Peter Smith leaned forward and started up the engine. Thank Christ that’s over, he thought. He didn’t normally go on jobs, he stayed strictly far away in Manchester. But this was urgent. There’d been no choice.

  The woman jerked the door back and climbed in. She glanced at him, with little interest, then away. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘Go all right?’

  He banged the gear-stick into bottom and eased the clutch out. Despite his care, the van juddered before it moved away. The woman did not answer.

  ‘I said,’ said Peter Smith, ‘did it go all right? No problems?’

  ‘Some stupid cow,’ she said. ‘I nearly bloody swallowed it. We was just passing it, she knocks into me. Stupid cow. Rich cow.’

  ‘Shit. What, you were actually passing it? In the plastic?’

  ‘I got it stuck on my tooth. Tony were trying to get it clear with his tongue, he nearly bloody choked me. Then this rich tart.’

  Peter Smith juddered the Transit cautiously through a junction, heading for the trunk road. Jesus Christ, he thought. Only the trigger mechanism!

  ‘You done it, though? Tony got the gear?’

  She dragged deeply on the cigarette.

  ‘Don’t shit yourself. It’s thirty quid. I need it, don’t I?’

  Smith had his foot hard on the floor. The van’s speed climbed towards twenty-eight. When it got there, he changed up to top.

  ‘Make it forty if you like,’ he said. ‘You’ve done good.’

  The woman was surprised.

  ‘What? Forty? Just because of that? For doing good?’