Utterly Monkey

by Nick Laird

  ‘Hello,’ he said and raised his eyebrows amenably at Ian, as if they’d just met in the street. He had intended to try to stick a toe poke into his side but the police looked pretty angry. Ian remained silent–he was a soldier–and Geordie followed his gaze to the video screens. He watched the faces mouth emptily and then picked up one set of the headphones and put them on, partly to show that, unlike Ian, he could do what he liked. The two American voices ran together, overlapping each other. The man was angry and the woman almost serene. Geordie listened. It was a weird litany of phrases, like a grammatical primer.

  ‘I eat…you eat…we eat…this is eating…

  I am a good boy…you are a good boy…we are good boys…’

  Ian was being handcuffed and slowly lifted to his feet. A police siren could be heard from the far entrance. Geordie went on listening, and gave Ian a cheeky little wave.

  ‘I am a bad boy…you are a bad boy…we are bad boys…

  I pay…you pay…we pay…this is payment…’

  A policeman tapped Geordie on the shoulder and Geordie pulled the headphones off.

  ‘You’ll have to come with us, sir. Answer a few questions.’

  The bomb didn’t go off. When the area was emptied (it had looked to Danny, from the top end of the street, like it had been cleared for shooting a movie), the police had sent in a skeletal robot. After several botched attempts, it eventually opened the door of the van, and not with a bang but a rusty whimper. The BBC in White City had received a telephone warning from a phone box outside Ballymena (eighty metres, it turned out, from the bungalow of a bachelor farmer called Mervyn Watterson) in which it was claimed that a bomb would go off outside the Bank of England in forty minutes. They’d passed the message on to the police but by the time the robot trundled towards the van fifty-eight minutes had elapsed. As it happened, the bomb could never have exploded: the timer was faulty, and anyway Ian had somehow set it for forty hours instead of forty minutes. In court he unsuccessfully tried to claim that this had been a last minute decision to avoid endangering lives.

  Danny had stood by the police cordon the entire time, watching, and telling the tall female officer the beginnings of the story. When he heard the police radios confirm that the bomb posed no danger, he turned to walk up to the churchyard. The officer, Constable Finch, touched him on the arm and asked him to come with her. She eventually agreed he could go and speak to his colleagues but only if she accompanied him. In St Paul’s churchyard certain departments from Monks & Turner had gathered in the sun, chattering excitedly, not about the bomb threat, but about being outdoors in the heat. The sprinklers had stopped and the grass was now dry enough to sit on. Albert, squeezed onto a bench with three other lawyers, was bent right over, wiping one of his shoes with a tissue. He had a large glass bottle of still spring water sitting on the ground between his feet. Albert placed a huge importance on staying adequately hydrated.

  ‘All right mate?’ Danny said. Albert stood up, lifting the bottle by the neck, and patted Danny’s shoulder with two of his fingers.

  ‘Where have you been? Everyone in the department was going mad this morning…Are you in trouble?’ he added, noticing the enormous policewoman behind him.

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m just helping them. I’ll give you a ring later. I’m not going to be in work tomorrow.’

  Albert nodded to let him know that there was someone approaching behind him. Danny felt a staccato tap on his shoulder. Vyse. Danny turned round slowly. The partner looked older in daylight.

  ‘You decided to make an appearance today, did you Mr Williams? Just in to collect your belongings? I see someone else has tried to get their point across.’ Vyse was looking with pleasure at his black eye. Danny glanced at the bottle Albert was carrying and then back at the partner’s polished face. He was briefly tempted to bring the two things together in a glorious union but instead he nodded, unsmilingly.

  ‘Yes. Sorry about the bid. I don’t know what happened.’ I threw it in a river.

  ‘Well that little stunt you pulled almost cost us the deal.’ I don’t give a fuck. I’ve beaten you, you little bastard.

  ‘So it’s all gone through has it?’ Really? Have you?

  Adam pushed at his expensive fringe and said nothing while Danny continued, ‘Because, oddly, I heard that they didn’t accept it, and went with Yakuma anyway.’ Oh my friend, my little friend, you’re shit and I’m champagne.

  Vyse pushed Danny backwards into the lap of Ryan Smith, a senior Banking litigator who was sitting on the other end of Albert’s bench. Danny stood up again, and was murmuring an apology to Ryan when Vyse started to scream, ‘You stupid little fucker, you prance around thinking you’re too good to be a…’

  Danny had noticed Ellen walking over from the churchyard gate and he looked back at Vyse, smiled, and then pushed past him. The partner stopped shouting and watched him. The policewoman started to say something to Danny but decided instead to follow him.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  Ellen put a hand up to his face.

  ‘I like your moustache…Everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah. You know I’ve been sacked?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘I just need to get my things from the office.’

  ‘I’ll come over with you. They’re starting to let people back into the buildings.’

  They picked a way through the Monks lawyers and secretaries and canteen staff, the Monks security guards and delivery men and IT specialists and librarians. It seemed the entire staff of the London office were sitting or lying around in easy groups on the warm grass as though they’d just brought in the harvest. When Danny reached the churchyard gate he looked back to see Vyse sitting with his head down on the steps of St Paul’s Cross. Andrew Jackson, the senior partner of the department, and Graham Ammons, the managing partner of the whole firm, were standing in front of him talking demonstratively. Danny decided to view it as a victory.

  In his office the solicitor Danny Williams gathered up the belongings from his desk and placed them into a single cardboard banker’s box. It didn’t amount to much: a sleeping bag and a cushion, some gym clothes and a pair of trainers, a couple of ties and a spare suit, a pinstripe, that he’d kept hanging behind his door, a box of tissues, two unread novels and a desk calendar of the picturesque glories of Ulster. He told Constable Finch he just wanted to get a glass of water before they left and the three of them trooped down to the facility room. The policewoman stood in the doorway and effectively plugged it. Ellen leaned on the copier and watched as Danny filled a plastic cup from the water fountain and then drained it in one.

  ‘So are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked, but Danny didn’t reply. He was feeding the roll of paper from the dispenser into the shredder. The policewoman was engaged in a conversation with the radio on her epaulette. He turned the shredder on and took a step back into the middle of the facilities room, to properly admire his handiwork.

  The paper was neatly unspooling into the shredder. It was mesmeric and would continue for ever. Or until the paper ran out. He turned round to face Ellen.

  ‘If you fancy dinner later, I could tell you about it.’

  ‘I should come with you now.’

  He grinned. ‘Well, I could probably do with a lawyer…No, just see me off the premises. I’ll ring you afterwards and explain.’

  The lift was emptying out, with Albert among the silent returners. He stopped and nodded at Danny to ask if he was all right. Danny nodded reassuringly back and walked on into the empty lift. The policewoman and Ellen came in and stood on either side.

  ‘How long do you think this will take, Constable?’ Danny said.

  ‘Not that long, shouldn’t think, though these things can depend.’

  A lawyer’s response, Danny thought, as the lift doors closed and Ellen pressed the button for the ground floor. The lift began descending but then slowed and, with a slight sigh of far-off machinery, stopped complete
ly between the fourth and third floors. This had happened periodically over the five years Danny’d worked at Monks & Turner. The policewoman futilely pushed at the buttons. Ellen picked up the emergency phone but it was dead. The constable started describing their whereabouts into her shoulder. Danny felt the unusual sensation of having nothing to do. It was like getting your hair cut or sitting in the back of a black cab. Ellen suddenly, secretly, ran a light fingernail over the back of his hand. She glanced up at him from under her lashes and, as she smiled, revealed that beautifully crooked front tooth. She said, ‘So now what do we do?’

  Danny shrugged, smiling. ‘Wait here until it moves again, I suppose.’

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  2 Meet Nick Laird

  4 A Conversation with Nick Laird

  About the book

  8 Nick Laird on the London of Utterly Monkey

  Read on

  11 Two Poems by Nick Laird

  13 Objects on My Desk…

  15 Poems Attached by Blue-Tac to the Door of My Study…

  16 The Sixteen Most Played Songs on My iTunes…

  About the author

  Meet Nick Laird

  NICK LAIRD was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1975. He attended Cookstown Nursery School, Cookstown Primary School, and Cookstown High School. (“They were,” he told the Irish Times, “all ten meters from each other.”)

  He attended Cambridge University, where he won several literary prizes before graduating with a first in English. He next studied law and qualified for practice. He worked as a lawyer in London and Warsaw while writing poems and book reviews during his lunch breaks and evenings.

  He was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2003. This seven-month stretch bought him time to complete a book of poetry and begin his novel. Restored to London, he attempted to pick up where he left off. “I got back to work,” he told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It was a Monday morning, and by two P.M. that afternoon I was back in the same conference with the same barrister and the same client and the same expert witness, and I just thought, I can’t do this. So I resigned…two months later…. And then I signed a book deal (for Utterly Monkey) two months after that.”

  His first collection of poetry, To a Fault, was published in 2005 to widespread critical acclaim. The Independent stated that the volume does “more, in its range and ambition than any first collection…in at least the last ten years.” In 2004 he was awarded an Eric Gregory award, and in 2005 received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Irish Chair of Poetry Prize.

  His recent reading has included four “truly great” books: Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Frank O’Connor’s My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories.

  He lives in London with his wife, novelist Zadie Smith. The couple “work at different desks in the same house,” said the Irish Times, “both allotting themselves targets of a thousand words a day and both wearing earplugs.”

  A Conversation with Nick Laird

  from the Cookstown High School magazine

  What are your best and worst memories of school?

  My best times were with friends. There was always something to laugh about. I remember laughing so hard Mr. Rutherford chucked me out of geography once. My worst memory was probably the headmaster accusing me of vandalizing his car, which, by the way, I hadn’t. And losing hockey matches was always depressing.

  “My worst memory was probably the headmaster accusing me of vandalizing his car.”

  When did you realize that you had a talent for writing?

  I’m not sure I ever did really. I think of it as more an interest in than a talent for. At school I did well in English classes and my teachers liked my essays, but it’s a different thing to write poems and novels. I’d written poetry since I was fourteen and I’ve always tried to read a lot of everything, which gives you the vocabulary and techniques to allow your own writing to develop. It’s hard to know where talent ends and acquired skill starts, but all the writers I have met have been readers first. You have to learn how to read closely, to see how things work, before you can write. Most people are awful writers when they start. I was no different.

  What was your favorite book when you were at school?

  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney’s first book. They were both huge influences on me. On some level I still feel that I’m writing my way out of those two texts.

  Another book that opened doors [for me] that had been previously closed, and which was very useful to me during university, was The Government of the Tongue, one of Heaney’s books of essays. It introduced me to amazing poets like Plath, Larkin, Milosz, and, more important, it convinced me that poetry was something worthwhile, even something worthy.

  I found the book in the school library and kept reading it, not understanding a lot of it, but very taken with it—so much so, in fact, that I took it with me when I left Cookstown High School. It’s the only thing I’ve ever stolen. In my second year at university I woke up one day thinking about it, and realized that I might be stopping someone else from getting their hands on it. So I went straight to a bookstore, bought a new hardback copy, and sent it to Miss Lennox and the school library. It should be there now if you want to go and steal it.

  “Another book that opened doors [for me] that had been previously closed…was The Government of the Tongue, one of [Seamus] Heaney’s books of essays.”

  What advice would you give someone in high school who is interested in pursuing a career in writing?

  See above. Also, I’m not sure writing is a career exactly. Most writers, and almost all poets, never make enough money from their writing to live off of, so they supplement it with journalism, criticism, and teaching. That’s one way to go at it. The other way is to get a completely separate job away from books—I worked as a lawyer for six years—and try to write in your spare time. That, though, can be tiring and lonely.

  The best advice to give to someone who knows they want to write, who knows that everything else apart from writing is going to be unsatisfying, is to read. Everything. When you find a writer that you like, read all their books. And then find another one. Writers are readers first, always.

  What was the last book you read?

  Saturday by Ian McEwan, although I just finished a read-through of the final draft of my wife’s third novel yesterday. It’s brilliant.

  What have been your biggest achievements since leaving school?

  This is like a job interview. If achievements mean excitement, the thing that’s given me the biggest thrill since school was when I got a letter from Faber saying that they’d like to take To a Fault. I had to be scraped off the ceiling.

  “The thing that’s given me the biggest thrill since school was when I got a letter from Faber saying that they’d like to take To a Fault. I had to be scraped off the ceiling.”

  In your new book, Utterly Monkey, the characters come from Ballyglass. Is it based on Cookstown?

  Well, it’s based on it but it’s not it. It’s useful when you’re writing to have a real location in mind—it helps you keep up the semblance of reality—but you have to be able to veer away from it when it suits you. And if I had set the book in a place called Cookstown I wouldn’t have been able to do that.

  If your book was turned into a film, would you want to play Danny or Geordie?

  I wouldn’t want to play either of them. The last time I acted was in the school play, Anastasia, although when Zadie’s novel, White Teeth, was made into a television series we went along to the shooting with some friends, and were extras in one scene, a party set in the seventies. We were cut in the end, and no doubt for good reason.

  Are you working on anything at the moment?

  I’ve just finished doing most of the publicity for Utterly Monkey, and I’m reading at various festivals over the summ
er. In terms of writing, I’m trying to move forward on the second novel. I have characters but a wonky plot. I’m also working on some book reviews, and, as always, tinkering on poems. I usually have about five or six on the go. And I was thinking I should cut the lawn this afternoon.

  “I’m trying to move forward on the second novel. I have characters but a wonky plot.”

  About the book

  Nick Laird on the London of Utterly Monkey

  I ONCE MET a taxi driver who claimed to remember everything. He said he could remember, exactly, the events of his third birthday, or the weather on Tuesday morning three weeks ago, or what he had for dinner, say, on the eighteenth of December in 1975. You can see how it might have been hard to disprove his claims but anyway I believed him. At the end of the chat, when I was lugging boxes of legal documents onto a pavement on Cheapside, he said, “It’s a curse, you know. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”