Utterly Monkey

by Nick Laird

  Budgie heard a tap run, and then one, two, three spitting sounds. Then the jangle of a plastic toothbrush being set in a glass.

  ‘Mr Wilson and I became acquainted on the boat over. I have his mobile number. You’re a lucky man Budgie, stupid but lucky. How much money do I need to retrieve from him?’

  Budgie grimaced. ‘About fifty thousand.’

  ‘Fucking hell Budge. This is the last time you look after the cash for the boys. I’ll see to that. You and me’ll be having a chat when I’m back. If I have any fucking problems getting this…Well, I’ll be coming to see you anyway. That’s a promise. I’m going to give Mr Wilson a call and arrange to meet for a drink. Now, meantime, here’s what you can do…’

  ‘Listen mate,’ Ian said, ‘you fancy a pint this afternoon? I’m at a loose end. Waiting for something to arrive.’

  Geordie was leaning back on the sofa but frantically jiggling his right leg. It hadn’t stopped jiggling since Jan’s texts.

  ‘Well, I’m a bit busy at the minute. Something’s come up.’

  ‘Mate, I won’t take no for answer. Seriously. Non-negotiable. Meet me in the centre. What about O’Neill’s off Chinatown? Go to Leicester Square and walk through Chinatown. You can’t miss it. Four o’clock say?’

  ‘Maybe. Look it’s just this thing’s happened and I need to think about…’

  ‘Yeah great. Tell me about it later,’ Ian interjected, ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He hung up. Geordie set the phone on the wooden coffee table and leaned back again on the sofa. He looked up at the ceiling. White paint flaking off the pale pink plaster meant the near corner looked like a sky ragged with clouds. He breathed out heavily, utterly deflated. He picked the phone up and texted I’LL BRING THE CASH BACK to Janice, and immediately turned it off. He looked at the ceiling’s mackerel sky again, and thought how when he was a kid at scout camp in Gosford, his patrol leader, the ruthlessly cheerful Terry Green, had told him that a sky like that meant good weather was on its way. Yeah, right. Where’s Terry Green now? Six feet deep and filled with worms. No good weather came for him, Geordie thought, and it isn’t sunshine that’s heading for me. All those homespun proverbs, country wisdom, local knowledge, old wives’ tales: what a load of shit.

  AFTERNOON

  Danny told Ellen as much as he knew about the Ulster Water case, which was nothing, and neglected to mention that they might be going to Belfast on Saturday. She dutifully took notes, which quickly amounted to at least three times the number of words that he’d used, and sat opposite, listening attentively and asking the appropriate questions. Danny referred to part of the due diligence as ‘real monkey work’ and her efficient face broke into a smile. She had one slightly askew front tooth. It just made her look even sweeter. The bump in the Navaho rug put there to placate the gods. Danny could already feel he might be getting himself into trouble. He listed her faults to counterweight the effect she was having; she appeared to be business-like, brusque and hard-nosed; she might be a little humourless; she had a tiny stain, possibly toothpaste, on the left lapel of her jacket. He told her he’d ring her in a hour or so and she should come down for the conference call. It was noon.

  He’d let Freeman, the Corporate partner, bring up the trip to Belfast, if it was still on the cards. If the two of them had to go Danny knew they’d sit in a dark hallway somewhere, being brought boxes of documents by surly admin staff, admin staff who would make it clear they knew Danny and Ellen worked for the company trying to buy them and sack them. They’d spend hours looking through contracts for onerous undertakings or impending litigation that could influence Syder’s decision to buy. However, unless Danny found some clause stating that in the event of a takeover Ulster Water would collapse like a broken deckchair, and leave Syder sprawled on the sand cursing and rubbing its coccyx, the bid would go ahead. Danny knew he would draft a detailed and lengthy due diligence report that would weigh, in unusually elegant language, any abnormal and arduous clauses in all of Ulster Water’s contracts pertaining to employment, intellectual property, information technology, outsourcing, even the sodding vending machines, and that it would not be read by anyone. It was, he supposed, possible that the conclusion might be perused but it would be so heavily qualified (‘In light of the short time available…given the limited resources and lack of information…due to the hostility shown by the target company and the corresponding impossibility of obtaining proper financial documentation etc. etc.’) that any deductions he’d draw would be completely worthless. At least legally. You ain’t getting us. This is every law firm’s secret motto. Every lawyer is a virtuoso of the ‘On the one hand’ line. We can only give you the facts as they appear to us. The decision, of course, is yours. Of course. And the decision was never Danny’s. So he needed to find out whether he would in fact be spending his weekend in his homeland. And whether he was still having this party tomorrow night.

  Danny had no idea why he’d agreed to have a party. Admittedly it was his birthday next Wednesday but that had never before given him sufficient cause. The idea of planned fun bothered him on a fundamental level. The original idea and impetus for the party had been Olivia’s, several weeks ago, and dates had been bandied about. But since Olivia and he had finally split he’d re-resolved, at Albert’s instigation, to ask everyone else he knew round to his house to get drunk, and possibly, though improbably, get laid. That plan had shrunk somewhat. Danny had then e-mailed about ten friends a week ago telling them that he might be having some people round next Friday and maybe they’d call by. If they were free. Now he had to reconfirm. He opened a new e-mail on the screen, clicked on the appropriate recipients: Dinger, Tippy, Thunderclap Jenkins, The Elephant King of Sodom, Fishboy, Tuzza, Rollson, Renault Minivan, Little Turk, and Simon. Most of these were colleagues, exercising the small freedoms of setting e-mail nicknames. Those were the same recipients who’d received the initial e-mail. Danny then went through the rest of his address book and clicked on random names: five university friends he hadn’t seen for months, three law school mates he saw solely to take drugs with, his friend James who’d dropped out of law school and now lived in Guildford, selling rubbish compactors (or compactors of rubbish, as James would correct him), and Clyde, his oddest cousin, who worked as an environmental health inspector in Hounslow.

  He wrote:

  Party. No exclamation marks. It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’ll be receiving guests from 9ish tomorrow night. If you have nothing better to do, please call in. Bring your own whatever.

  After opening another Internet window and typing in the address roadmap.co.uk, he brought up Sofia Road, copied the link and pasted it into the e-mail.

  Click here for the map: www.roadmap.co.uk/mxccsofia/n16. It’s No. 23. The blue door. Get off at Dalston Kingsland Overland on the Silverlink and turn left. Or get the no. 73, 112, 43 buses.

  Many thanks, kind regards,

  Admiral Sojourner Watkins

  He always signed off with an assumed name. It wasn’t meant to be funny, at least not any more. It was a way of articulating the other lives he could have tried and which were slowly closing up elsewhere. He clicked on Send. Danny thought how if someone transcribed the twenty-five years or so of his speech they would be hard pressed to justify ever using an exclamation mark. When he answered the phone, even at work, people invariably asked him whether they’d woken him up. He never understood why everyone else was so excited by life. He was either bemused or enraged at their effortless joy. Three Out of Office messages pipped into his inbox.

  He called Rollson to tell him how lovely Ellen was in person. Rollson groaned and pretended to choke on his pain au chocolat in a jealous fury. Albert was working on a settlement agreement, something to do with four-wheel drive jeeps which hadn’t yet been made, and which he’d worked on ’til three the night before. He was on course for another late one, waiting for New York to wake up and send him comments on his last draft. He’d been on a conference call all morning and now wanted to chat. Danny agreed t
o nip round for five minutes.

  Rollson’s room was like a show office for the ethical employer, or, more precisely, the employer who is worried about being sued for RSI. He had the desk raised on four wooden blocks for some odd reason, odd given that he was five foot five, and therefore also had a specially high chair, one which Danny called the Wimbledon Judge Seat. The chair raised and lowered itself by levers and Rollson would, as a distraction, frequently drop himself a foot or so in the middle of an argument if he felt like he was losing. The chair also had a special lumbar support fitted, and his keyboard was the new-fangled angled kind allowing maximal access for the wrists to rest on their own special pad. His VDU had a transparent screen fitted on it to reduce glare and even Rollson’s mouse was ergonomically designed and different to every other lawyer’s. It had three buttons and was about twice the normal size: more canine than rodent. His mouse pad contained a further wrist rest, one which Rollson, in his over-enthusiasm at receiving another toy from the company’s full-time physiotherapist, had upsettingly described as feeling like a thirteen-year-old girl’s breast. It should be clarified that overall Albert Rollson wasn’t a particularly sick or delicate or querulous man. He was just very very bored, and had found that the best way to counter the ennui was to exercise all of the pointless opportunities offered by an enormous company. He had them change the pictures on his walls every six weeks. He attended training seminars on using a Dictaphone. He attended a two-day course in Northampton on speed-reading at which the tutor had said ‘the main trick to it is just to read faster’ and they had all lowered their heads and obediently tried. He visited the in-house doctor at least once a month and though the doctor had prescribed him a variety of beta-blockers and anti-depressants, he hadn’t yet suggested that maybe Albert should change his job.

  Danny stood in the doorway but didn’t go in. Something was different.

  ‘Mate, why is your room reminding me of the Blue Grotto?’

  ‘I know, the fluorescent light was making a buzzing noise so I rang down to Business Services and got them to send a man up to change it, but they’ve installed a blue one. It’s like sitting in a brothel.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. It is. Aside from the lack of hookers.’ Albert did a newsreader shuffle of the papers he was looking at and set them aside. He did look wrecked, and unusually for Rollson, his clothes were a little rumpled. His Windsor knotted red silk tie was still on but the top button of his white shirt was open. A stray hair curled out from the gap and his dark brown eyes were underlined for emphasis by thick black lines of sleeplessness.

  ‘You have to ask her to your party tomorrow night.’

  ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Yes, Ellen. You just rambled on about how amazing she is. You have to ask her.’

  ‘She’s working for me. It’d be weird.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. And she’s working with you, not for you. It would be weirder not to mention it. Just casually throw it into the conversation. Who else’ve you invited?’

  ‘You saw the e-mail. That lot plus Geordie.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it at lunch. He’s an old mate from school.’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned him before. Where’d he spring from?’

  After Danny and Ellen had spoken on the conference call to John Freeman, the Corporate partner overseeing the Ulster Water bid, it became apparent that there would be no lunch. Freeman was a short and angry man. The anger was obvious. The shortness Danny inferred from his photo on the firm’s intranet. He was shiny-pated, overweight, and had tiny black perforations for eyes which were looking upwards to the camera. He looked like a malevolent medieval abbot. After Freeman’s secretary had patched the two of them into the call, Freeman launched into the conference without giving Danny time to introduce Ellen. There appeared to be several accountants and clients on the line, aside from the whole Corporate team, presumably down on the second floor, hunched in anticipation round Freeman’s speaker phone. As always, Danny found it difficult to focus at times like these. His ability to concentrate decreased in proportion to how important it was that he did. He could, for example, intimately describe someone he had sat opposite on the tube several days before but couldn’t tell, when asked directly, whether or not he’d sent a holding letter to the lawyers on the other side or indexed a file of documents. As the voices coming from the speaker phone on his desk discussed logistics Danny, sitting opposite Ellen, felt himself unwind, as if the speaker phone was a radio and he was lolling in the bath. She was really quite something, this girl. Absolutely remarkable. Danny found himself staring at her breasts and quickly shifted his eyes onto the pad she was scrawling on.

  ‘Will that be possible, Danny?’ Freeman’s tensed vocal cords were flinging something at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, we seemed to get cut off there. Could you repeat it?’

  A derisory snort issued from the phone. Ellen, her face inspired with concern, was holding up her pad opposite him. CAN YOU GO TO BELFAST ON SAT MORN. She grinned. He grinned back.

  ‘I mean, it sounded like you were about to ask me whether or not I could take a team to Northern Ireland this weekend, but then there was silence.’ Danny winked outrageously at Ellen. ‘If you hadn’t progressed further than that then the answer’s yes. I’ve a trainee briefed and we’re aware of what the exercise will involve. Obviously, I’ve a few specific questions to ask about the set-up, but we don’t all need to be on the call for that.’

  The Corporates were mumbling assent. Freeman took hold of the conversation again, a little too quickly, as if another child had tried to take it off him.

  ‘Quite, quite. Well, I’d anticipated that and sent you an e-mail with a contact list for Syder earlier.’ Danny heard the tap-dancing of far-off typing and an e-mail, headed SYDER CONTACTS, from Freeman, appeared on his screen. Danny stopped listening again.

  Ian was leaning back, unfolded, with his hands locked together behind his head. His posture was one of a man who has taken the board on and won, but his stare was fully engaged, and directed now at three men in suits sitting two tables over. They were laughing loudly and Ian was willing them to stop. Geordie hadn’t turned up yet, though it was ten past and he was starting to think he’d underestimated the little shit. One of the suits was working himself up to say something, but had looked to be doing that since Ian sat down twenty minutes ago. The main mouth, an overweight owl who smiled reflexively and broadly after everything he said, was telling another anecdote.

  ‘So I leaned across to him and said You’ll just have to trust me.’

  The three of them laughed loudly again. One of his attendants, grinning, asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell him to just, you know, foxtrot oscar?’

  The fat one rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together while pursing his lips and lowering his eyebrows so his phizog was puckered in close, as if he were trying to squeeze his facial features through a bangle.

  ‘Money. All about the lettuce. Even Dave knows that.’

  He nodded towards the other man, who tilted his head, guffawed obligingly.

  Ian brought his open palms down on the table so they made enough of a noise to attract the attention of all three men, then stood, pressing hard against the table to flex his triceps in their tight blue polo-shirt sleeves, and walked purposefully to the swing door. It wasn’t that he minded people enjoying themselves. He minded them talking rubbish. And he minded people being impressed by slick and noisy idiots. Ian had the kind of dislike for blokes in suits that men can have who only don a two-piece when they’re in serious trouble (before the bench, at the altar, in the coffin). As he was standing in front of the pub door, looking out, Geordie’s face appeared like a mismatched reflection. For a second they were shocked to see each other so close, even through glass, and Ian shuffled back, embarrassed, as Geordie pushed the door open.

  ‘Big man,’ Geordie said. Ian took the outstretched hand, and felt Geordie’s pipe cleaner fingers bend in
his clasp. Malleable. Ian had ironed out some options, and shelved them in order of desirability. His mind was as neat as the pebbledashed terraced he shared with no one. Ideally, Geordie would spill everything and tell him where the money was. Then, if that didn’t happen, he wanted Geordie to get drunk and ask him back, today, to the house of this friend he was staying with, or, if for some reason he couldn’t swing that, he wanted an invite to go round there, and soon. All of this might go out the window, of course, if Geordie appeared to be a risk. He might just beat the shit out of him. Ian, however, prided himself on judgement. He could read a man the way the others in the wing had read the Sunday Sport. And while they read the Sunday Sport, he had been reading his Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He was politic and ruthless. And he would get what he wanted, which was things in order.

  Geordie, conversely, wanted distraction, and one of its major subsets, drink.

  ‘And what about your business down here? How’s all that going?’

  They were both settled at the table, one hand chilled round a Guinness, the other, propping a lit fag, beginning to smoulder.

  ‘Not bad. I’ve got it all lined up. Just waiting for one thing to arrive and then I’ll probably be heading back over.’

  ‘What is it then, that you do, I mean?’

  ‘Import-export really. Just starting up. Having a look round. Seeing what opportunities are out there.’ Ian was gently bouncing his head forwards and backwards as he spoke.

  ‘I’m looking for work myself you know. Over here. If you know anyone.’

  ‘Yeah? I’ll ask around. I might have something for you actually. A mate of mine is starting a business in London.’

  ‘Oh aye? What kind of thing?’

  ‘Opening a bar. Really plush. Needs cash though. Not the sort of money either of us would have.’

  ‘No, you’re right there.’

  Ian watched Geordie’s face. Nothing coming through it. Like the grimy windows of O’Neill’s. Strike one, Ian thought. The conversation turned to how expensive London was, then how you could have a better standard of living in Northern Ireland, and lastly to politics. When two Ulstermen sit down together, there’s probably an even fifty-fifty chance they’ll try to kill each other, but Ian and Geordie were getting on. Geordie sat and sneaked looks at Ian’s bulbous biceps, his cylindrical neck, the thickness of his wrists and their cord-like veins. Geordie was slight, and fascinated by men like this. They seemed a different species to him. Bull-men, stone-men. Aside from his bulk though, there was something else that held the eye. There was a sense of potential about him, something trapped and coiled and waiting. He was like a box of fireworks.