2cool2btrue (25 page)

“My father is a doctor and my parents were living in Cairo when I was born, because he was working there as part of an aid programme. My mother went into labour unexpectedly when Dad was out with some colleagues and medical students at a party. She was rushed to hospital and the servants went out to tell him but it was hopeless, they couldn’t find him anywhere, so they had to wait until he got home after midnight. Then they gave him the news. In fact, all they could tell him, all they knew, was that she had gone to hospital.”

She pauses and bites her lip. I stand back and watch her.

“Unfortunately, though, there had been…there had been a complication. It wasn’t the doctors’ fault…a one in a million chance…and my mother…When he finally got there ready to see his wife and his first child he was told that they had both died. Can you imagine? Instead of having a wife
and
a child, a family, all he ever wanted, he had nothing, no one. So he was taken upstairs to see the bodies—his wife’s that he knew so well, and the tiny corpse of this complete stranger, someone he’d created, who was part of him, someone he’d listened to and felt kick, but he’d never met before and would never know now.

“But I wasn’t dead. Somehow I’d made it. I’d started breathing. The nurse had just noticed this and was so busy trying to revive me that she hadn’t had time to tell anyone else yet. When my dad came in and she saw him she started crying, apparently, even though she was used to seeing life and death every day. My dad says as soon as she handed me to him and he held me in his arms he knew what to call me—Noor. It means ‘light’ in Arabic. Standing with the body of his wife in that terrible darkness, I was his only light.”

She sniffs again and wipes her nose. “You see the irony was that my dad was an obstetrician, the best in the city, probably the best in North Africa. If he’d been on duty at the hospital that night he would probably have been able to save her, save his wife.”

We sit in silence for a moment. Then I walk round the desk to where she is and kneel in front of her, taking her hands in mine. I kiss them gently. She leans down and I feel her rest her face on my head, still sniffing back tears. I don’t know how long we stay like that. It’s my mobile that brings us out of our trance.

“Answer it,” whispers Nora, huskily.

“No, don’t worry.”

“Get it. I’m okay,” she says, sniffing and unfurling the soggy tissue.

Still watching her, I get up slowly and pick up the phone from the desk. It’s showing another mobile number that I don’t recognise. I press “OK” to answer it.

“Hello?” I say and cough to get my voice back.

“Charlie Barrett?” barks a throaty voice that is vaguely familiar.

“Speaking.”

“Anastasia Huntsman.”

“Oh, hi, Anastasia. How are you?”

“Good, thanks. Listen, I know where Piers is.”

I
’m not quite with it so this information takes a moment to sink in. I look round at Nora.

“You what? You know where Piers is?”

“Yes, I made a few phone calls after we spoke and a friend has just come back to say he knows where he’s living at the moment.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” she laughs, clearly revelling in the power this knowledge is giving her, a bored rich girl looking for a thrill, something to tell her other bored, rich friends about. “I’m deadly serious.”

“Well, where is he?”

“It’s a squat in south London. Piers in a squat, can you imagine it?” She laughs again.

“No, I can’t.” I laugh too, but really just to humour her. I look across at Nora, who is staring intently at me. She mouths something but I ignore her, anxious in case Anastasia rings off.

“Can you give me the address?” I ask.

“That I’m waiting for,” she says in her luxurious drawl.

“You haven’t got it?”

“No, patience, my boy.” She is definitely playing with me now. I roll my eyes heavenward and say “Oh, fuck” silently. Nora is now standing up and trying to attract my attention.

“But you could get the address for me?” I ask, mainly for Nora’s benefit. “I’d really appreciate it, Anastasia.”

“Oh, sure. He’s staying in a house owned, well not quite owned, but occupied from time to time by some guys who get my gear for me if you know what I mean. I’m not sure where they’re hanging out at the moment, that’s all. I can call them after seven this evening and they’ll give me the address then, I’m sure, no problem.”

“And you’ll ring me then?”

“Sure, don’t worry,” she says smoothly.

“Thanks, Anastasia.”

“You’re welcome, love. Speak soon. Bye.”

“Oh my God, she knows where he is,” says Nora, hanging on to my arm, eyes still red but now wide with excitement. “I don’t believe it. She knows where he is.”

“Yeah.” I’m wondering whether, when I do get this address, to tell the police.

“Amazing news! That’s
so
great. But why couldn’t she give you the address now?”

I’d feel bad handing Piers over to the police, but then again, why not? He’s landed me in it. If he has defrauded people then he deserves to face the consequences. On the other hand, if he hasn’t done anything wrong he’s got nothing to fear. It would also avoid getting further embroiled with Nora.

“Why didn’t she give you the address now? When is she going to call you?” she asks.

But the idea of handing him to that mean, ugly bastard Slapton on a plate is too much. I have a vision of him standing in my bedroom. He’d have such a coup. Nora is pulling at my arm like a kid. I look at her, wondering how she could turn me over again with this new development.

My thoughts still elsewhere, I tell her, “She doesn’t have the address at the moment. She needs to get it from her dealer and she can’t ring him until after seven tonight.”

“Seven tonight?” Nora looks distraught. “We can’t wait that long.”

“Well, Nora, we’re going to have to, aren’t we?”

She thinks about it for a moment. Then she says, “You’re going to the police.” She looks horrified at this sensible option.

“Well, let’s face it. I should go, shouldn’t I?”

“What?” She stomps across the room and throws her hands up in the air. “Are you crazy? This is huge. This is what we’ve been waiting for. How can you give it all away?”

“Because the police will know what to do.”

“Don’t be insane. This is such a massive story.” She stops when she realises what she’s said.

“That,” I tell her, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

She looks guiltily at me. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Oh, Nora. I just want to get out of this. I want to call the police, give them the address when I know it, let them arrest Piers or whatever and get my life back.”

“Charlieee. Look…look,” she runs her hands through her hair, thinking. “You can tell the police
after
you’ve spoken to him. After all, you don’t even know if he really is where Anastasia says he is until you’ve seen for yourself.” She does have a point. She realises that she’s making progress here. “If it is him, if he is there, we’ll go outside and call the police immediately, okay? And, I promise, I won’t speak to anyone else about it.”

“All right.” It does make sense, I suppose. “You’d better not write anything, though.”

She looks at me for a moment. “I won’t write anything until I’ve spoken to you about it.”

“Until I’ve approved it.”

“Approved it? Oh, honestly—”

“Or I don’t tell you the address.”

She looks at me hard. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. We’ll work on the piece together.”

Nora goes back to her office after another severe warning from me. We’ve arranged to meet back here at seven to await Anastasia’s call. Even then, I decide, peering out of the window at the traffic and people below, I don’t have to tell Nora where Piers is. I could just ring Slapton straight away and hand the whole thing over to him.

I sit down at my desk and spread my hands out before me. What would Lauren do in this situation? If you think you know the answer, ring this number, calls cost fifty pence per minute, and don’t forget to get permission from whoever pays the bill. Hey, I think I do know the answer.

But I’m not Lauren, though, am I? So am I Nora? Or is it Noor? The light of his life. Oh, God, that poor man.

I shuffle some more bits of paper around. No sign of Scarlett or Zac. I realise I’m missing them so I go out and do some window shopping. A couple of people in the street take a second look at me and the people in the sandwich shop exchange very unsubtle glances as I order a turkey salad sandwich to take away.

It’s funny, so many people at my agency, I mean my old agency, want to be celebs. I remember a guy called Dave, a complete jerk, had five pages of editorial in
The Times
magazine, beautiful stuff—winter coats shot in Scotland, I think—but he spent almost the whole day it appeared standing by the bar in a café in the King’s Road, looking around, waiting for people to recognise him.

He was there at 10
A.M
. when Lauren and I were having a quick coffee before we tackled the shops, and he was still there at gone four o’clock in the afternoon when we went past on a bus on our way home. Like anyone was going to recognise his face from the magazine.

“People just look at the clothes, go ‘Blimey! I wouldn’t pay that,’ and turn the page,” said Lauren in a rare moment of cynicism.

I watch telly in the office a bit. The same quiz show that Zac was watching the other day. I can do the abuse—“you pea brain,” “you dingbat”—but I can’t always get the answers right like he can, so I turn over and watch a woman telling another woman how much she hated her former, fat self. I flick over again and another woman is telling yet another chat show hostess about how dieting took over her life and how she is now, finally, happy with who she is—a size twenty. The hostess, a stick-thin blonde, smiles sweetly and invites the audience to give the fat woman a round of applause.

The door buzzer goes. The police? Reporters? Creditors? Not again. I look at my watch; it’s a quarter to seven already. I let Nora in. She rushes upstairs, throws her arms around me and gives me a passionate, slurping kiss, pulling me towards her. Then she pushes me away.

“Has she rung yet?”

“No, it’s only quarter to seven.”

“Good, good,” says Nora, taking off her coat. She sits down on Scarlett’s desk, still breathing heavily from the running up stairs and the kissing and leans back. “Isn’t this exciting? Got anything to drink?”

“No and no,” I tell her.

“Oh, Charlie, don’t be boring.” She comes over to where I’m sitting behind my desk with a sultry sashay.

“I’m not, I’m just…a bit anxious, that’s all.”

“So am I. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

“I just hope we’re doing the right thing.”

“I’m sure we are,” she says, too quickly to sound convincing.

I sigh deeply and start an aimless tour of the office.

“What have you been doing today?”

“Erm, just pissing about here really. You?”

“Oh, I’ve had one of those days. A lot of firefighting, you know, crisis management, trying to sort things out for people,” she says, shaking her head.

“What? Where they’ve cocked things up?”

“No, where
I’ve
cocked things up,” she says blandly.

“That figures.”

Just then my mobile rings.

“Oh, my God. That’ll be her,” says Nora, leaping up off the desk and rooting around in her bag. “Quick, take this. You stick it on to the back of the phone and it records what she says. Oh, fuck, where’s the tape? I’m crap at technical things. Hang on, here it is.”

I wave Nora and her recording gear away as I answer the phone.

“Hello?”

“Charlie? It’s Anastasia.”

“Hi, thanks for ringing back.”

“No, probs, I said I would. Right, I’ve got this address…” I scatter papers around my desk as I find a pen and something to write on, then I swap hands to stop Nora trying to listen in, but she goes round to the other side of me.

“Sorry, Anastasia, go on.”

“Right, I’ve never heard of it, I never go there myself, always get a mate to do it, or a bike from one of Dad’s companies; it’s the absolute back of bloody beyond. You’ll need passports and injections to go there.”

I laugh encouragingly.

“Oh, get on with it,” whispers Nora from beside me.

“It’s number seventy-nine Fairisle Road, London SE twenty-seven. Where the hell’s SE twenty-seven? Never been very good on my SEs.”

I repeat the address to make sure I’ve got it. “That’s great, I really appreciate it.”

“So, you’re going to go down there?”

“Well, we’ll go and have a look.”

Nora is already feverishly consulting a street map.

“Be careful, Charlie.”

“Of course, don’t worry. I’ll let you know how I get on. Thanks again, Anastasia. Bye.”

“Bye. Oh, and, Charlie, try and get me some stuff while you’re there will you, I’m running dangerously low.”

I laugh. “Will do.”

I finish the call and look round at Nora.

“Found it,” she says triumphantly. “It’s near…near…absolutely fucking nowhere. Don’t worry, though, I’ve got a car.”

“A car? That’ll be useful.”

“Right. You can map-read, I’ll drive.” She is already half out of the door.

I’m wondering again whether I should just ring the police and give them the address. It would make life easier. But I can’t bear to speak to Slapton again, let alone help the bastard in his stupid enquiries, so I pick up my stuff and follow Nora out. We’ll talk to Piers and then perhaps ring the police and tell them his whereabouts. It’s already getting dark and and a large spot of rain lands on my face as I step outside.

She is illegally parked—horribly, outrageously, illegally parked so that a couple of passersby stop in disbelief to look at the little blue Renault sitting next to, almost on, the zebra crossing, but of course she has managed to avoid getting a ticket.

She lets me in just as the rain really gets going. We set off down Charing Cross Road ready to cross the river. She is silent and intent. We haven’t been going long before I realise that she isn’t going to pay much attention to traffic regulations and other drivers.

“Fucking hell, Nora,” I say, leaning back in my seat as we seem to be driving straight towards a bus. Traffic lights are a minor hindrance and she seems to pass most as if they were at green. She also seems to think that she has right of way, whatever the road markings and the position of other vehicles might suggest. But her erratic performance is clearly not just a result of her excitement and determination to get to Fairisle Road as soon as possible. As we hurtle over a miniroundabout, causing a couple of other cars to screech to a halt on my side, I find myself saying what has been dawning on me since our last near miss but two.

“Nora, you can’t drive, can you?”

She laughs uncomfortably. “Derr! Huh! What do you think I’m doing now?”

“No, I mean you don’t have a licence. You haven’t passed a test, have you?”

“Oh, honestly.”

By sheer fluke we seem to be heading down the road without any obvious crises for a moment but I don’t let it go. “Nora, whose car is this?”

“A friend from work. She
does
know.”

“That you’ve got it, yes, but she doesn’t know that you haven’t got a licence.”

“Oh, Charlie, for goodness’ sake. Who knows whether I’ve got a goddamn licence or not?”

“Well, everybody else near us on the road, I’d say. Look, just stop the car and we’ll get a taxi or something.”

Face set in grim determination, she carries on.