Utterly Monkey

by Nick Laird

  ‘Please tell me that’s a fucking joke.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you…I don’t know why I told you.’

  Danny lay there, listening to someone else fucking within a few feet of them. He imagined a room identical to theirs but the bed was spotlit, raised like a stage and contained the robust and grotesque coupling of Ellen and Vyse. His trim body and fatuous grin and old hands all over her skin. Danny scrambled up from the bed and tried to turn on the bedside lamp but the bulb had gone.

  ‘I can’t believe this.’

  He crossed the room and flicked on the main light. Ellen turned back to face the wall, the covers pulled up to her neck.

  ‘Put the light off.’ She was irritated and sad. He wheeled the padded seat by the desk round to face the bed accusingly and sat in it. Placing his elbows on his knees, he put his hands over his eyes. He could have been a man who can’t bear to watch the penalty shoot-out, were he not completely naked.

  ‘We have to talk. I can’t believe what you just told me. He’s at least fifty for fuck’s sake. You fucked Adam Vyse. Jesus Christ, Ellen.’

  ‘He’s forty-four. Danny, don’t talk to me like that. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘I know he’s got three kids and a wife. I know he’s a senior partner. I know you fucked him.’ Suddenly, out of the absolute blue, Danny started to sob. Ellen sat up, hugging a pillow. She stared at him, horrified to have caused his tears.

  ‘Danny, it was a mistake. I worked on something for him with Mark.’ She’d sat in Corporate with Mark Jefferson, an insolvency lawyer. ‘And then after the case ended the whole team went out for dinner. Everybody got drunk. We ended up getting a taxi…’

  Danny interrupted, ‘Jesus, Ellen, spare me the fucking details. I want you to go. Can you go? I want you to go now. I want you to get out.’

  He was shouting. He knew he was being unfair and overreacting but the thought of her with Vyse just ruined everything. He went into the bathroom and leant against the sink. He could hear Ellen crying now as well, and the sounds of her dressing, the rustle of her jeans being pulled on, their zip, and then the door closing firmly behind her.

  The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish…

  Danny Blanchflower

  SUNDAY, 11 JULY 2004

  Ronnie had got her niece drunk. They’d gone through to the kitchen at the back of the house, keeping all of the lights at the front off. After unscrolling the blind, Ronnie turned on the telly and got out three wineglasses, the corkscrew and a bag of crisps the size of a cushion. She was always like this, as if she’d been expecting you, and when you turned up out of the blue, you’d actually arrived precisely on time. They sat round the table and her mum explained it: how Jan was to stay for the night, how they were to pretend not to be in if Budgie called round, and how sorry they were, how tired they felt, how awful it was to have a son who behaved like an animal. Mrs Johnson left after the first bottle of Hungarian Cab Sauv and after Janice and Ronnie had finished the second, the two of them moved on to tumblers of vodka and orange juice before stumbling off to their beds. Ronnie slept at the front of the house and Janice had the single bed in the small yellow room at the back. Fat Andy and Ronnie had earmarked that room for a nursery just after they married and moved here, ten years ago back before what Ronnie called their disappointment. The canary yellow of the walls was now faded out to a dull jaundice. Ronnie was barren. People never used that word any more.

  Janice slept but was woken at 2.32 a.m. by her mobile ringing. The time was displayed on its face, flashing above HOME, the code word for her mum’s raspy whisper.

  ‘Jan, Budgie’s been back and he’s gone off to find you. I said you’d left but there was no talking to him and he broke one of the kitchen chairs, the one with the wicker seat. He kicked the leg clean off it.’ Her mum started coughing. Jan waited until she swallowed the phlegm.

  ‘Are you two all right? Is ’Landra all right?’

  ‘Your dad’s at the end of his tether. Malandra’s crying in the bathroom. Make sure you tell Ronnie not to turn the lights on if the doorbell goes.’

  Janice, in a purple T-shirt and a pair of navy boxer shorts, knocked gently on Ronnie’s bedroom door. No response. She pushed it open and for a second watched the breathing heap of her aunt in the duvet, the lump’s tiny bloat and contraction. Janice was thinking how vulnerable everyone was when they slept.

  ‘Ronnie…’ She moved across to the bed and pushed at the bulge. A groan whistled from it and then Ronnie sat up, very quickly, and took hold of Janice’s forearm.

  ‘Whass wrong? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, but Mum rang. Budgie might be on his…’

  Comedically on cue, there was a banging on the front door. Ronnie’s hand tightened its grip on Janice’s arm and she whispered, ‘Juss keep quiet.’ Ronnie pulled back the duvet and slid across the bed so Janice slipped in beside her and they sat against the headboard, listening and waiting. The banging started again, insistent, malignant. Each bang echoed up through the tinny hall. If he thumped it much harder the door would go in.

  ‘JAN.’

  ‘JAN.’

  ‘JAN.’

  Budgie was walking around the front of the garden. They heard him scoop up a handful of gravel, cursing, and throw it at Ronnie’s bedroom window. The stones smacked and grazed the windowpane, skittering off. Ronnie whispered again, ‘If he puts that window in Andy’ll go through him. They’re only redone the year before last.’

  Janice couldn’t imagine Fat Andy, Sweet FA as Chicken called him, going through anyone, particularly Budgie, unless perhaps he sat on him, or suckled him to death.

  ‘JAN.’

  ‘JAN, I KNOW YOU’RE FUCKING IN THERE. COME BACK TO THE HOUSE. I’M SORRY. ALL RIGHT? YOU CAN’T GO TO ENGLAND.’

  So he’d reached the stage of apologizing, of trying to make good the damage. This always happened with Budgie. Janice didn’t know which was worse: the lunatic anger or the childish attempts to curry favour. Ronnie’s bony hand was still squeezing hers, as if to say Don’t worry, we’re safe. Janice didn’t feel worried though, not really, just a little tired and abstractedly interested like she was watching all this on TV. She was still a little drunk. Budgie had picked up more gravel and was now pinging single stones at the bedroom window. One tapped on the brickwork, another off the wooden frame, and a third plinked the higher register of the glass pane. The room was dark but ribbed by the streetlight that sliced through the Venetian blinds. Janice watched a fly come loose from a pattern on the wallpaper. It buzzed around restlessly, incredibly loudly, and then re-attached itself to the chest of drawers. Budgie was banging the front door again.

  ‘JAN.’

  ‘JAN.’

  The pixel of the fly flicked off the drawers to the deep grey screen of the portable telly. Then they heard Mrs MacNeill’s bedroom window open, just to the left of theirs, and her broad, booming voice.

  ‘GOD’S SAKE WOULD YOU EVER SHUT UP?’

  ‘Fuck off.’ Budgie’s response was slow and half-hearted: he’d taken too much drink.

  ‘You shut yer friggin trap Budgie Johnson. I know who you are. You need to push off. Go on. I’ll be ringing the police.’ Mrs MacNeill’s tone was almost kind, as if she was saving him and he just didn’t know it.

  ‘FUCK OFF,’ Budgie tried again, rousing himself, ‘I’LL BREAK YOUR FUCKING WINDAYS.’

  ‘You do that son, you do that, and I’ll let Gerry use his Christmas present.’ Janice could hear something metal and heavy being banged against a window frame. It had to be an air rifle. Or even a real one.

  ‘I’m looking for my sister. You seen Janice, or Ronnie?’

  ‘Just clear off. You have me scunnered. I mean it now. Get away from the house.’

  ‘I said HAVE YOU SEEN RONNIE?’ They heard Budgie scoop up more stones from the gravel
path.

  ‘You throw one more stone at that house and Gerry’ll shoot you.’ Mrs MacNeill sounded interested by the prospect of this occurring. There followed a confirmatory tap of gun against wood.

  ‘Have you seen my sister?’ Budgie was almost screaming. In a minute he would either break something or begin crying. They heard his shoes scuffle over the wall: he was in Mrs MacNeill’s garden now, under her window, performing an unlikely serenade.

  ‘Just tell me and I’ll go. Have you seen Janice? Do you know who I mean?’

  ‘I do, and I saw her today.’ Janice moved, to get up and cross to the blinds and peer out, but Ronnie touched her arm to hold her back. Mrs MacNeill was talking again.

  ‘She was walking up the street after finishing work. She works in the chemists, doesn’t she?’ They could have been standing at a bus stop or in a checkout queue, just chatting to pass the time. Ronnie made a face of disbelief at Janice, as if to say this is much too surreal. Someone was giggling. Gerry. Pointing a shotgun.

  ‘What about Ronnie?’ Budgie sounded despondent.

  ‘I haven’t seen Ronnie for weeks. I think she went to Tenerife.’ She pronounced it Ten-er-ree-fee. ‘Now you get gone. The boy needs his sleep.’

  There was a long pause, and then the bang of a gate. Mrs MacNeill clanked her window shut.

  Elsewhere, in London, in the Lord Gregory Hotel on Kilburn High Road, Ian had closed his window after listening, at first with interest, and then with mounting despair, to the outdoor symphony of traffic, and the contralto and baritone of a drunken street argument, and then to its crescendoed finale: the smashing of several bottles. He was three floors up but the noise was too much for him to sleep. He would rather suffer the slow heat that seemed to build in the room when the window was shut. If only he’d brought earplugs. They should be part of his basic kit. Earlier someone had tried the door handle to his room and it had unnerved him. He’d shouted a deep-voiced Hello? but there’d been no reply, even though a minute or so later the handle had been turned again. He hadn’t crossed the room to the door to check the spy hole because the floorboards creaked. You saw people do that in the films and then get shot through the door. Basic mistake. Nothing else had happened for more than an hour but he still felt edgy. He lay naked under the sheet, on his back, and set his stubby hands over his chest, then tensed and relaxed his pectoral muscles. He breathed out through his mouth and in through his nose, slowly. Your standard relaxation procedure. No good. He was bothered by the idea that he wasn’t fully ready for Monday. He had to cover all the bases. He thought of his Auntie Florrie in her Elim Pentecostal home in Larne. How she would feel if…well, it wasn’t worth considering. But he should write her a letter in case something went wrong. He sat up, shifting the ridged plates of his chest and stomach, and turned on the bedside light. Its yellow lampshade threw neatly trimmed shadows on the wall and turned the room a warm sepia. The exercise book would do for paper and he lifted it off the chest of drawers beside the bed. There was a Biro clipped to it. He sat and stared heavily at the pad, before writing, in tiny stabbing movements, Dear Florence. He was old enough now not to call her Auntie Florrie.

  I hope all is well at Five Oaks. I’m sorry not to have been to see you recently. I have been very busy. He would have to explain the situation to her. It is right… He put a line through that. It is meet and right… He didn’t know what that meant really, but it was what they’d said at church. Still he shouldn’t write it if he wasn’t sure what it meant. He put a line through it. Mervyn would be able to explain it better than him. Tomorrow he’d write the whole thing out again neat. I have done a far far better thing than other people. I tried to protect my birthright and homeland. They have asked us to accept government by terrorists who have not handed in their weapons, not ONE, nor halted their illegal activities. He crossed out asked and wrote expected above it. It is too much to swallow. The only thing left is to play a game they understand. He crossed out play and wrote beat them at above it.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ian

  Or maybe this was all too much. What were his reasons? He knew all the facts that Mervyn came up with but sometimes it wasn’t a question of reasons. It was the third law of Newton’s they’d learned in Mr Carson’s class. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If something was pushed in one direction, an equal force in the opposite direction appeared. And the day his dad was killed in front of him–mowed down was the phrase the newspapers used, turning his father to grass–he had become the opposite force. It was the way of things. It wasn’t about choice or about reason. The opposite force just appears. He should destroy the letter. He scored lines through it, until he’d forced the point of the Biro through several pages. Florrie was almost senile anyway. His problem was, he told himself, hyper-alertness. He was trying to make sure every eventuality was prepared for, because that was the key to success. What was Sun Tzu’s line in The Art of War? Appear at places which your enemy is unable to rescue; move swiftly in a direction where you are least expected. Well, he wasn’t expected by anyone. They’d all be surprised by him. Even Budgie would be fucking surprised. The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. It was a question of adjustment. Ian had realized, had been in fact the only one smart enough to realize, that it made no difference to the English whether the loyalists in Ulster laid down their weapons or not. It made no difference whether they meted out punishment beatings to joyriders or dealers. It didn’t even make much of a difference if they kidnapped the odd Catholic (all Catholics were odd, Ian reflexively thought), shot them in the back of the head and dumped their corpse. The English didn’t give a fuck. There was only one way to make a difference to the English, and that was to cost them money.

  Sun Tzu talked about it in terms of water. As its flow was shaped in accordance with the ground so an army would manage its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy. And as water has no constant form, so warfare has no constant conditions. You had to melt, flow, and eventually immerse the enemy. Ian was staring at the ceiling. At some point in the past a leak upstairs had created a brown tide line that ran the whole way across it. Absolutely everything was tidal. Sun Tzu believed that of the five elements (Ian tapped his fingers on the slab of his chest as he thought of them–water, fire, metal, wood and earth), none is always dominant. And he knew that none of the seasons lasts for ever, that some days are long and some are short, that the moon both waxes and wanes. Well, it was time enough, Ian thought, for the wheel to turn. Their day is over and ours has come. He put the light out.

  Danny’s telephone rang at 7.30 a.m. He was lying face down on the bed, and wrapped, pupa-style, in the patterned coverlet. He reached out his arm and lifted the mouthpiece, simultaneously croaking Hello? The voice was automated, American, and callously cheerful:

  ‘Good morning. This is your wake-up call.’

  Never a truer word, Danny thought, as he lay there and remembered last night. Ellen had slept with Adam Vyse. He unwrapped himself from the blanket and showered. He would go down to breakfast and if she was there, he would be civil, non-committal, and wholly uninterested in discussing either last night, or Adam Vyse, or any question relating thereto. They’d have to collect Janice in a couple of hours anyway. Funny how he should be thankful now for having to collect Janice. He just had to make it to Heathrow and then he wouldn’t have to see Ellen ever again. It would be simple enough: he could avoid the canteen and her corridor, and get someone else to help on the case.

  He packed with BBC World on the telly. A global terrorism expert was being interviewed. There was terror everywhere now. Danny felt an unkind thought rise in him like bile: now everyone else would know what it felt like–to live with the backdrop of bombings and guns, with murderers sharing your doctors and schools, your restaurants and surnames. Feeling destructive and sad he decided to walk down the twelve flights to breakfast.

  Ellen was in the dining room sitting alone at a table for two. She looked up when he
entered (he’d spoken his room number to the waitress too loudly) and he half-raised his hand in an awkward salute. She nodded back, insuperably cool. At the buffet there was a queue of two, a tweeded octogenarian couple who were vocally concerned about choice. Should they have pineapple or grapefruit juice? And which was this? Was that yoghurt or cottage cheese? Where was the skimmed milk? Danny jiggled a plate from the heated stack and slipped past them, quickly piling it with cold toast, four rashers of stringy brittle bacon and a congealed but watery lump of scrambled egg. Skipping the cereals, he lifted a prepoured glass of orange juice slightly bigger than his thumb and headed over to the table.

  He seated himself across the table from Ellen. Her two hollowed-out grapefruit halves sat somehow lasciviously in front of her chest. She gave him a brief sad smile and he nodded back, as curtly as he could. He would be untouchable today, stone-like, and he said, brusquely, all-business, from the middle of his mouth, ‘Good morning. I hope you slept well.’

  It sounded sarcastic.

  ‘Good morning,’ Ellen said softly. She looked tired. ‘I don’t suppose you want to talk about last night.’

  ‘No, I’d prefer not to, to be honest. Let’s just leave it.’

  ‘You mean leave us?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Right…You’re pathetic.’

  Ellen picked up her coffee cup and drained it. Danny began the fiddly work of opening a tiny plastic carton of butter, a sugar sachet, a miniature pot of strawberry jam. He knew Ellen was looking at him but wouldn’t meet her eye. She leant forward, across the table, and he looked up into her face. She was wounded and on the edge of tears.

  ‘Look, maybe I should never have told you…but I did tell you, and it’s done now, and you should understand that I only told you because I liked you, a whole lot, and I thought that you liked me and I wanted you to know. Your behaviour last night was unforgivable. As if you had a right to…Maybe sleeping with Vyse was a mistake. Not that it’s any of your business. But most people make mistakes. Just not you, obviously.’