Death & the City Book Two (48 page)

"I'm not allowed candles, I'm a pyromaniac," I tell him automatically. Like a child pointing to where it has hidden the chocolate digestives.

"I know, that's why for the life of me I don't get why they gave you the damn thing." Connor shakes his head to himself, and sips his own tea. "Maybe because they really do think you've got more self-control than anyone else. Even in regards to your own unnecessary urges."

I shrug. I remember ending the phone call with Warren, driving home, parking and locking the car, feeding the cat - the only thing outside of my normal routine, was having a bottle of soft drink with me to open. Creating a pause in my internal program, in which the original spark of my personality woke up to enjoy the event.

"Maybe they just trust me not to go abusing it to make money on the side," I suggest. "To switch allegiances. Go taking contracts instead."

"You've proved enough times how trustworthy you are," he points out.

"Really?" I ask, curiously. "Why, what's everyone else doing?"

"Never mind," he chuckles.

Connor goes home to sleep saying he'll ring later, and I pick up Junior. We go for a walk on the pebble beach, skimming every flat stone we can find across the waves. Junior has only just learnt this trick and her record is five bounces, so when she gets a nine out of a triangular stone, her screams of 'NINE!' quite possibly carry all the way along the coast in the whiplash wind, which is chasing clouds across the sky. Like teams of grey horses pulling coaches to fairy castles.

Some hard-core windsurfers pull off their dream stunts in the swell. Men in green or navy kagools dotted at regular intervals sit in lashed-down windbreakers, nursing their fishing rods. Junior finds three live Dabs in the mouth of an Angler head washed up on the beach near the boats, optimistically setting them free in the surf, which soaks her old pink corduroy trousers up to the knee. I worry that the Dabs will be picked off by seabirds immediately, or caught by the fishermen, but she doesn't mind. I think the only thing she'd have objected to, would have been me suggesting she take them home and cook them herself.

It's a nice way to spend some time out together. We get chips and Southern Fried chicken for lunch in the seafront restaurant at the end of our walk, sitting inside by the window, watching gulls steal chips from customers brave enough to sit outside to eat.

Junior tells me all about the different kinds of clouds in the sky, and how and why they are different. She says her favourite is the Anvil Top Cloud, and you hardly ever see it any more, because there are so many aircraft vapour trails making more cloud than there used to be. And that aircraft vapour trails are actually cooling the Earth down, because the extra cloud is reflecting sunlight and heat by increasing the planet's albedo. She says sometimes she wakes up really early before the early vapour trails expand and watches out of the window, hoping to see an Anvil Top. I tell her I remember them from the village I grew up in, which was a long way from any airport, and we'll go visit one day. And she'll meet Miss Haversham, and can watch clouds from the garden, while my Godmother updates me on whatever version of village events currently have the most reaction value.

I'm glad we're enjoying some quality alone time, not interrupted by the ongoing dramas of work colleagues or head office demands, because I feel as though it's putting last night's job back away into its box. Not labelling it with any more or less importance than any other event. The view of the open sea, idle background chat of the other customers in the restaurant, discussing TV highlights and plans for the summer, or reading today's papers at the counter, alongside the coastal radio station playing faintly on the speakers in the kitchen - perpetually stuck in Fleetwood Mac's 1980's era - and Junior's foraging for the mythological Enormous Chip (as big as an adult-size toothbrush or it doesn't count) all contribute to more of a peaceful state of mind today than I could have wished for. Although part of me supposes it was also the dream about Connor, and waking up to find he was there making me tea. Or rather, more likely - the pyrotechnics demonstration by War In A Box last night, which has given a very small part of my personality the feeling of what it's like to be God in a split second.

I agree with Junior, though. You're better off looking for interesting naturally-formed clouds, and huge potato by-products, attributing them to atmospheric and geological conditions man has no control over, in the search for a God. Rather than just watching your own influence over the carbon cycle, in whatever direction you push it.

"I was thinking last night," I say, while she eyes up my chips for comparative size, speculatively. "We should find out about getting some maintenance money from your dad."

"Good," she says, nodding. "About time. Not even one Christmas card ever. Are you going to eat more chips? I think there might be a really big one hiding at the bottom."

I dutifully dissect my stack of chips, Jenga-style, for Junior's professional scrutineering. A harshly bleached blonde girl with an Alice band holding her hair scraped back, sitting at the table outside the window nearest to us - swathed in scarves, zipped into a padded sports jacket and fashionably white denim jeans tucked into her grey Snugg boots - hasn't stopped typing into her phone since we sat down. A frown of concentration is between her brutally tweezed eyebrows, risking permanent Botox-target lines by simultaneously smoking, even though her food is only half-finished. The pattern-recognition of hair accessory, and her present preoccupation, has me thinking about the other
Alice
, what she's writing about now, how it's working out for her, or helping her psychological state. I wonder how much of it is centrifugal, her own ego running the show, and how much is external, needing approval from the male characters featuring in her delusions. Or whether something else is at work. Her own need for continuity, a commentary or storyline to make sense of the disorder of her life, to fulfil a desire for romance and excitement, or to compensate for a dislike of the mundane. I wonder if she'll grow up to be Miss Haversham, or whether some other thread of hope will lead her onto another lifestyle path, with the attractive mirage of her ideal reality at the far end.

Junior announces that she has won today's Biggest Chip contest, and I buy her an ice-cream cornet as her reward, which she has to finish before we get back in the car to drive home.

I sort out my uniforms for washing and look for more black things to fill the washing machine, finally persuading Junior to let me strip her Halloween-themed bed, while she grumbles that
Johnny Bones
and
Skulldog
don't smell of anything. Except perhaps where she's spilt ketchup, giving the cartoon print more of a gory look than the bedding arrived with. As I'm in her room, and she's changing out of her beach gear, she points out to me a rather frightening pile of clothing which apparently doesn't fit her any more, meaning she is now down to two pairs of jeans, and three t-shirts which aren't quite threatening to turn into crop tops yet. I realise the day has come when I'm handing down my own clothes already, so after starting the laundry, I go into my room and sift out as many t-shirts as I can find which are too short or too tight on me, but still suitable for her. She says yes to approximately a third of them, which is a good enough result, and I remove the rest and bag everything else up destined for the charity shop.

I wonder if I'll grow up to be Miss Haversham when I'm older. Living in some fantasy limbo-world, without anything to connect me in real life to my peer group, and society. I sit on the upturned laundry basket in the utility cupboard, watching the rinse cycle and eating a banana, while the vacuum cleaner fails to grab my attention with reminders that there is still a cobweb on my bedroom ceiling. When I finish the banana, I rest my feet up against the opposite wall, and read another chapter of this month's Scamways chart bookshelf, pulp paperback, dark fantasy romance, for women who like their heroes cold, bitter, twisted, and without a pulse. Makes me worry that modern women now really are a generation of closet necrophiliacs. A man who can't say no, and won't ever see you in daylight without your hair and make-up done. And of course is never around while the shops are open to stop you spending. Would make a new and original psychosis should I want one.

I suppose that's what today's women clubbers see in doormen, I ponder idly, resisting the urge to count how many repetitions of the phrase 'heaving bosom' I've noticed since the start of
Blood Lust
or whatever I'm currently absorbing. Not just a guy they see scrubbed up, in a suit they can picture in all their fantasy wedding photos. He's also a guy they imagine only ever sees them in their most flattering light - in other words, minimal lighting - in their most glamorous attire and most approachable mood. At least until after the first couple of drinks, when all the best intentions come undone, along with the shoe straps and clip-on hair. By the end of the night, they're in the kind of state that only a bucket and a tartan dressing gown can improve anyway, so they might as well allow themselves to be seen during the day. Rather than showing themselves up at both their best and worst within the space of a few hours, or less.

Maybe I'm the one in need of some better form of escapism, I think to myself, closing the book and replacing it on the shelf above my head. I look up at my Travelite suitcase stored higher up. I wonder what books are the best-sellers in airports these days.

I get my phone out to Boogle the thought while it's on my mind, and Connor promptly rings as it's in my hand. Just another of those spooky coincidences. My brain would have sighed, if it was possible. Definitely need some distraction.

"Hey," I greet him, pressing the Power button on the washing machine to stop the spin cycle, so that I can hear. "How was your sleep?"

"Yeah, good thanks. I dreamt about you as well," he says.

"Sorry I'm not there to make you a cup of tea," I grin.

"No worries. You and Junior busy?"

"No, we went out earlier. Just doing laundry. She's watching Zombie cartoons."

"Want to go out this afternoon before work? Both of you, I mean. Do something regular."

"What's regular?" I ask.

"I'll think of something," he says. "I'll pick you up."

Junior has to bring her DS, as she is on the
Zombie Surgeon
mini-game level, learning about Zombie sporting injuries. Every so often, she asks me to pronounce the name of a bone or muscle, or an internal organ for her.

"I thought Pancreas was a train station?" she says, from the back seat of the black Audi. "I saw it on the map of the London Underground. King's Cross Pancreas."

"That's probably why he's diabetic," Connor jokes.

"Is it okay with the balaclava on inside the car?" I ask him, as Junior's bobble-hatted head nods and lowers over her console again.

"Don't worry about it," he just grins. Junior went through a pom-pom making phase and her cardigan looks like it lost a battle with a ball-pond, while her jeans went on a school trip to a badge and enamel pin factory and returned wearing more metal than an Army tank. I'm comfortable with it, I'm just aware that other parents are already sending their little girls to school discos and parties in halter tops and glitter eye-shadow, which I think is kind of sordid. "What did you have for lunch today, Junior? Or is your name Ellie at the moment?"

"I'm Dr. Frankenzombie in this mini-game," she announces. "You can call me Ellie. Chicken and chips. From the chip shop at the beach earlier."

"Nice," Connor nods. "If you're hungry later, just say and we'll stop for food, okay?"

"'Kay," Junior echoes, and concentrates on her game again, intermittently muttering things like 'Stupid Wishbone' and 'Carp Tunnel' and 'Achilles Willy' - which I hope is a name she's made up for a pet Zombie, and not something put in by the game designers to frighten parents with. Doesn't sound like a legitimate sporting injury for a Zombie.

"Did you ever want kids?" I ask Connor, knowing it's one of the big taboo questions that you don't mention to a guy because it sounds as though you have a test tube hidden up your sleeve. But listening to Junior in the back of the car, it sounds as though more unappealing questions might be raised otherwise, from my point of view.

"Don't have any that I know of," he says, in stereotypical single male disclaimer-speak. I've heard it so often in passing conversations at work, that doormen should wear t-shirts with it printed on. "Never thought about it. Goes with meeting the right person. A guy who says he doesn't want kids basically means 'Not with you.'"

"I did suspect that," I grin, knowingly waffling to drown out any sound of dubious anatomical knowledge from the back seat. "I know at least two women who waited years, and even married guys they thought would eventually come around to the idea. One of them split up with her husband after ten years, and he met another woman and became a Dad straight away afterwards. The other left her boyfriend of eight years, and she met a new guy who wanted to start a family as soon as they were married, like, six months later. What's that all about?"