Finding Milly

by Nathan Burrows

  Fortunately for Marmite, the other three men on the lorry liked the man, although Jimmy could see how not everyone did. Marmite seemed to lack any internal filter and just said what he thought. The only time this really caused any problems was when anyone outside their tight-knit group heard him, and they all tried to make sure that nobody did. Anyone who wasn’t white, heterosexual, preferably male, and local was fair game for a barbed and vocal comment from the man.

  Half an hour later, at seven thirty on the nose, the four of them got into the lorry. Jimmy slipped behind the wheel—the only privilege of being the longest serving member of the team—and put the large unwieldy vehicle into gear. He’d been driving for the best part of three years, but for the last couple of months had got out of the lorry less and less to help with the bins. Since the headaches had kicked in. Jimmy knew he should say something to one of the bosses about not being well, and after the visit to the hospital he would have to, but he didn’t want to go on the sick.

  None of the others had said anything, at least not to his face. Even Marmite had kept his opinions to himself, but Jimmy was sure that Fat Alan had had a word to make sure that Marmite kept his own counsel. Few people argued with Fat Alan.

  ‘It’s fucking freezing out there,’ Robbie mumbled from the seat next to Jimmy. ‘Like the fucking Balkans.’

  ‘Not wrong there,’ Marmite replied from the rear seat. ‘That’s that global warming, that is.’

  ‘What the fuck you talking about, Marmite?’ Fat Alan chipped in. ‘How is it global warming when it’s bloody freezing?’

  ‘It’s them ice caps,’ Marmite said. ‘I saw a programme on it. On National Geographic.’

  ‘Since when,’ Fat Alan countered, ‘have you watched National Geographic?’

  ‘Well, the free porn doesn’t start until midnight, so I had to watch something.’

  Jimmy grinned as he listened to the easy back-and-forth banter between his colleagues.

  ‘What do you think, Robbie?’ he asked. ‘Global warming, or just bloody cold?’

  ‘I was just thinking about how Marmite needs to get on the internet.’

  ‘I am on the internet, you cheeky bastard,’ Marmite replied from the back of the lorry.

  ‘You know there’s porn on the internet?’ Robbie asked. ‘You don’t need to wait for the Freeview on the telly?’

  ‘It’s not like the old days, eh Robbie?’ Jimmy said, manoeuvring the lorry past a car driver who didn’t seem to know how roundabouts worked. ‘Back when porn was all about the top shelf in the petrol station?’

  ‘Bloody hell, mate,’ Robbie laughed. ‘Them were the days. Do you remember “Razzle” and the Readers’ Wives section?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jimmy grinned. ‘That’s where I first met your missus.’ The four of them cackled in unison. ‘You working the match on Saturday, Robbie?’ Jimmy asked his friend. The two of them had been part-time stewards at Norwich City Football Club for the last few years. ‘Burnley at home. Should be a good one.’

  ‘Does the pope shit in the woods?’ Robbie replied, prompting another round of laughter from the crew.

  Ten minutes later, the discussion in the lorry had moved to a discussion between Jimmy and Robbie about how VHS tapes used to get worn out if they were paused too much. It tailed away as Jimmy pulled up outside their first stop. It was a large hotel, about as central as it was possible to get in Norwich. Five stories high, all Victorian red brick, and an alleyway leading to the rear of the hotel that was about six inches wider than the lorry.

  ‘Bugger me, this is tight,’ Jimmy mumbled as he reversed the lorry, his eyes flicking from one wing mirror to the other. At the bottom of the alleyway was a large black Bentley with dark, tinted windows. The last thing Jimmy wanted to do was to put a dent in it. None of the others said anything, which Jimmy was grateful for. He didn’t realise he was holding his breath until the lorry emerged into the yard at the rear of the hotel and the others hopped out while it was still moving. Jimmy stopped the lorry within inches of the Bentley and took a second to relax before he opened his door to join them.

  ‘Fuck me, this one’s heavy,’ Fat Alan said as he dragged one of the industrial blue bins to the back of the lorry. He hooked the bin onto the back of the lorry, and Jimmy pressed the button that would lift it a couple of inches into the air and weigh it.

  ‘Hundred and forty-three kilograms,’ Jimmy said out loud, reading from the small LCD screen on the back of the lorry. He pressed the button again to empty the bin and wrote the weight down in a notebook just like he always did. He didn’t have to write the weight down, but he didn’t trust the machine to record it properly. A couple of years ago, the scales on the lorry had gone wrong, and it was only his written notes that had saved the council a few thousand pounds in revenue. He’d not seen any of the money, but got a bonus at the end of the year that had seen him and Milly at one of the poshest restaurants in Norwich for an evening.

  ‘Eighty-four kilograms,’ Fat Alan called out as he hooked up the next bin. Behind him, Robbie and Marmite were already lining up the next bin to be emptied. The sooner they finished their round, the sooner they could all go home, and there was no place that Jimmy would rather be.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ Robbie pleaded as they drove towards the roundabout. ‘I’ll only be a few seconds, and I’ve got a dead cert for the half-past three at Aintree.’ Jimmy stifled a smile as his friend trotted out almost the same lines, word for word, that he always did when they drove along this stretch of road. Just off the roundabout ahead was Robbie’s bookmaker, carefully chosen because there was plenty of space behind it to park a large refuse lorry without annoying too many of the locals. Robbie was only ever going to be a few seconds, and he always had a horse that was absolutely going to win.

  ‘I’m going to time you, mate,’ Jimmy replied. ‘If you’re a second over ten minutes, we’re leaving without you.’ Fat Alan chuckled in the rear seat.

  ‘Oi, Robbie,’ he said, nudging Marmite in the ribs to get his attention. ‘If your horses are all that bloody certain, how come you’re still working the bins?’

  ‘Mate, I’ve got fifty quid in my pocket,’ Marmite joined in. ‘Can you put it on the same horse? I’ll buy you a bacon butty when we’re done as a commission?’ Except for Robbie, they all laughed.

  ‘What a bunch of bloody comedians you all are,’ Robbie muttered as Jimmy brought the lorry to a stop with a loud hydraulic hiss. ‘One day I just won’t turn up, and the next thing you’ll get will be a postcard from Bermuda with a picture of me with a giant fish.’ He hopped down out of the cab, and Jimmy rolled the window down to call after him.

  ‘You might need to put more than twenty pence on each race for that one, mate.’ Robbie didn’t reply, but extended a middle finger in Jimmy’s direction as he hurried towards the bookies.

  ‘He’s a bloody one, isn’t he?’ Marmite asked no-one in particular. ‘Wouldn’t catch me in that Bermuda, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

  ‘Why not, mate?’ Fat Alan replied. ‘I bet it’s bloody great over there. Better than sodding Norwich, at least.’

  ‘Nah, full of foreigners.’

  ‘So’s Great Yarmouth,’ Fat Alan shot back. ‘That doesn’t stop you playing the slots there, does it?’

  ‘Not the same though,’ Marmite said. ‘Different type of foreigner.’

  ‘Anyway, isn’t Bermuda British?’

  ‘Can’t be, it’s miles away.’

  ‘I think it is, mate,’ Fat Alan continued. ‘That come up in a pub quiz a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Still foreign though.’

  Jimmy sighed and tried his best to tune the two men out as they bickered about whether Bermuda was in fact British. It wouldn’t be long before Marmite put forward that the reason Bermuda wasn’t British was because of the colour of most of the population’s skin. The last time the two of them had a similar argument it had resulted in a stony silence for the rest of the round, and Jimmy just wasn
’t in the mood. He was annoyed about what had happened back at the hotel.

  They had been just about to empty the final bin when the driver of the Bentley had put in an appearance. He was, as Robbie had noted when they eventually left the place, a stuck-up idiot who drove a nice car. The man had appeared from a set of fire doors just as they were attaching the last recycling bin and spent a moment exaggeratedly examining his car in case Jimmy had brushed against it with the lorry. Which he hadn’t.

  Jimmy had called him out on it, explaining that he’d not gone anywhere near the car with the lorry, but the man hadn’t replied. The Bentley’s owner, a slim, middle-aged man in a suit that Jimmy would never be able to afford just looked down his nose at Jimmy and the rest of the crew. Eventually, he murmured something in a cut-glass public-school accent about getting a move on. The crew’s reaction was unscripted but coordinated to perfection. Marmite suddenly forgot how to hook up the recycling bin to the back of the lorry. Robbie made out as if he was going to help him, but ended up sucking air through his teeth and staring at the lifting mechanism as if he’d never seen it before in his life. Fat Alan decided he had lost something on the floor of the cab and had to look for it at that very instant. Jimmy just climbed back into the lorry’s cab to wait for the others to finish annoying the man in the suit.

  He watched through the rear-view mirror as the Bentley’s owner stared at the lorry for a few seconds before disappearing back through the open fire doors and into the hotel. There might be a complaint put in to the council, but Jimmy didn’t care and neither would the others. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor would it be the last.

  Jimmy reached forward for his phone to check for any messages from Milly, but there was nothing. According to the screen, it was almost half-past nine, so she should be up and about by now, even if it was only for a few hours before going back to bed. Jimmy started composing a text message, but decided just to call her. She was more likely to respond to a phone call than a text message, anyway. They rarely called each other, and it was almost an unwritten code between them for it’s urgent.

  Jimmy pressed the phone to his ear and listened to the brr brr of the ring tone. After what seemed like ages, there was a click at the other end of the line and he heard his daughter’s voice.

  Hello?

  ‘Milly, it’s me,’ Jimmy said, even though his name would have come up on her screen. ‘Listen, are you about this–’

  Hello? Milly’s voice continued, cutting him off. Oops, sorry, she said with a brief laugh. It’s not actually me. I’m either screening my calls and ignoring you, or I’m actually busy, so just leave a message if you want to find out which one it is.

  Jimmy swore under his breath before disconnecting the call. He remembered Milly laughing about how many people that recorded message had caught out. At least she would see that there was a missed call from him and call back. When Jimmy saw Robbie emerge from the bookies, he decided on a quick text message instead asking her to call him when she was free.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Robbie said as he climbed back up into the cab. ‘Bit of a queue.’ Jimmy ignored him and started up the lorry, grateful for the warm blast of air from the heaters.

  ‘Hey, Robbie,’ Fat Alan leaned forwards from his position in the back. ‘Is Bermuda part of Britain? Only Marmite here reckons it’s not because they’re all black.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Jimmy muttered under his breath. ‘Not again.’

  Two hours later, it was almost midday. It wasn’t just the tachograph in the lorry that made Jimmy park up. It was the gnawing in his stomach. Time for lunch. As he always did, Jimmy parked in the large car-park behind the Heartsease pub in Thorpe St Andrew, a suburb on the outskirts of Norwich that used to be a village in its own right before a large, sprawling council estate joined it up with the rest of the city. Compared to the estate that Jimmy lived on, it was almost posh.

  ‘Here we go, boys,’ Jimmy said as he turned the engine off. ‘Lunchtime.’ The four of them had their own routines for lunch. Robbie would nip into the Tesco’s for a meal deal and come back grumbling about the sandwiches. Fat Alan would just disappear somewhere, and Marmite would stay in the back of the cab with his carefully prepared sandwiches. Most of the time, Jimmy would stay in the cab with Marmite, but he decided instead to nip into the Heartsease pub.

  ‘How do, Jimmy,’ the landlord of the pub boomed out as he walked into the bar. ‘Bit early for you, isn’t it?’ Jimmy looked at his oldest friend—Big Joe to his friends, Big Bastard Joe to his enemies—and gave him a brief smile.

  ‘Alright, mate?’ Jimmy said. ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ Big Joe replied with his trademark response as he looked around the almost empty pub. ‘But until I win the lottery, this is it.’

  Jimmy shrugged the fluorescent vest that the council insisted they all wear off his shoulders and sat on a barstool. The pub extended Big Joe’s character—tired, rough around the edges, but welcoming.

  The first time he’d met Big Joe, they’d both been eleven years old and back to back in the playground in their first week at the big school. A few short moments later, they’d been outside the headmaster’s office, waiting to explain how the five older boys in the school’s infirmary had got there. Despite the suspension they’d both received, the two men had been firm friends ever since, and it wasn’t the last time they’d been in a spot of bother together. Jimmy looked at Big Joe, remembering for a few seconds their time at school together. Big Joe was just Joe back then, and he didn’t have tattooed arms or a huge beer belly like he did now, but forty years and plenty of booze did a lot to a man.

  ‘Can I get a coffee, Joe?’ Jimmy said, checking his phone yet again. Nothing.

  ‘Sure,’ Joe replied, turning to the fancy-looking machine on the bar which he claimed to have bought at a car boot sale but was almost certainly stolen. ‘What type?’

  ‘Just coffee.’

  ‘No worries,’ Joe said, fiddling with a few buttons on the machine. As it whirred and clunked, he turned his attention to Jimmy. ‘I might get you to have a look at this sodding machine at some point, mate. I think it’s on the blink.’

  ‘They didn’t have machines like that when I was at college, Joe.’ It wasn’t just that, but Jimmy had never actually finished the electrical engineering course that he’d started all those years ago. He’d dropped out when he realised he could earn money on the bins without any qualifications.

  ‘You alright, mate? You look, I don’t know, a bit off?’

  ‘It’s all good,’ Jimmy replied. ‘Just tired, that’s all.’ Joe looked at him through rheumy eyes and crossed his heavily tattooed arms across his expansive stomach.

  ‘Bollocks. What’s up?’

  Jimmy looked at his friend and felt a lump at the back of his throat. In an instant, Big Joe had sliced through every defence Jimmy had. The two men stared at each other for a few seconds, Jimmy desperately trying not to lose control. Joe tightened his arms across his belly before sighing.

  ‘Yeah, well, you know where I am when you’re ready.’ He turned away from Jimmy and fussed with the coffee machine.

  ‘You don’t know any lawyers, do you?’ Jimmy said, surprising himself. Where had that come from? At least it was a change of subject, of sorts.

  ‘Really?’ Big Joe replied with a throaty laugh. ‘Why, you been nicked?’

  ‘No, not that,’ Jimmy said, allowing himself a wry smile. It wasn’t as if he was about to tell Joe that he needed one to go over his will. ‘I just need a spot of the old legal advice, you know?’

  ‘That sounds like a story for a beer or two,’ Joe replied, placing a cup of coffee on the bar between them. As he put it on the counter, some dark brown liquid slopped into the saucer. ‘Sorry, spilt a bit. Do you want some food as well?’

  ‘Got any sausage rolls?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Joe replied. ‘Do you want it nuked or half frozen?’

  ‘As it comes mate,’ Jimmy sa
id. ‘I’ll take it with me and have it later.’

  Joe busied himself with a sausage roll that Jimmy was sure had been bought from the Lidl over the road before nodding at the only other customers in the pub.

  ‘Him over there, the big guy?’ Joe said, looking at the small group of men huddled over a small table in the pub’s corner. The largest of the group was a hard-looking man in his mid-twenties, deep in conversation with another couple of men. ‘That’s Gareth Dawson. He’s been hanging around with a lawyer a lot. He denies it, but he’s definitely having a sniff. She works for a mate of mine. Paul Dewar?’

  ‘Never heard of either of them,’ Jimmy replied, picking up the sausage roll and stuffing it in his pocket.

  ‘Top bloke.’

  ‘Who?’ Jimmy replied, looking at the man in the corner. ‘Him, or the Dewar one?’

  ‘Both of them,’ Joe said, leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘Him over there—Gareth—was in nick a while back until Paul Dewar got him out. The girl Gareth’s hanging around with works for Dewar, see?’ Jimmy blinked. He didn’t see at all, nor was he particularly interested. All he wanted was someone to talk to about making a will.

  ‘Right, okay,’ he told Joe. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Do you want me to talk to him?’

  ‘No, mate. Don’t worry.’ Jimmy took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. ‘Bloody hell, Joe. Is that really coffee?

  ‘It should be,’ Joe replied with a laugh. ‘I pressed the button for coffee. At least, I think I did.’

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Jimmy said. ‘You might want to check the instruction booklet. That’s rancid, that is.’

  ‘Well, you can fuck off to Costa in that case,’ Joe shot back with a grin.