Upgrading (31 page)

“Ralph, who the hell were they? Do you know them?”

“Just some …” He winces again in pain, holding the side of his stomach. He spits out some blood and reaches inside his mouth. Something tiny and white—a bit of tooth. We stare at it for a moment.

“Just some friends of a friend.”

“Friends? We’d better call the police.”

“No!” he shouts. “No. There’s … there’s no need for that.” He disengages himself from my hands and leans over to pick up his sunglasses, which are miraculously still in one piece.

“Ralph, mate,” I gasp, “shouldn’t you see a doctor or something?”

“No! I’m fine, just let me get my breath back, that’s all. Should have used my TA training. Too many of them.”

“What are you talking about? Who are they?”

“Never mind, it’s just business. It’s not always very pleasant making money.”

He lets me take him back to the café which is only fifty yards away.

The girl behind the Gaggia machine gasps and looks terrified but lets us use the staff toilet again. Ralph says he is fine and so I go back to the counter and order two more cappuccinos from the girl, who is flattened against the far wall. I try to make a joke to reassure her but she is having none of it. I feel pretty disgusting in front of this quiet, hardworking, law-abiding girl with her clean counter and her sensible job. What am I doing? What am I playing at? Is this how it is going to be from now on? I put a generous measure of sugar in one cup for Ralph and begin to sip the other myself, trying to work out what to do next.

After a while Ralph re-emerges, looking cleaner but still badly beaten.

“Cheers,” he says to the girl, with well-rehearsed but very unconvincing jollity. She looks more terrified than ever by this. His left eye is already swollen shut. He limps up to where I am sitting, trying to walk as normally as possible. Watching him brings back my own pain and I feel my stomach. Bruised, but nothing broken. My ear is bleeding slightly and my cheek is burning.

“Right,” he says, trying to smile through swollen lips. I can see now where he has lost a bit of front tooth. “There are some places a couple of blocks away from here that would be right up your street. Oh, no pun intended.” He laughs at his own joke.

I just stare in disbelief and then say slowly, “You’re going to hospital.”

“What? Oh, Jesus! I’m fine. I told you, business isn’t always a tea party, you know. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

“Look,” I say, taking some money out for the coffee. “I’m going. You’d better see a doctor or something.”

As I walk out of the door, I hear him shout, “Come back, Anthony. I-I mean, Andrew, come back. I’ve got some other ideas I’d like to run past you.”

I walk down to Notting Hill station and buy a paper to read on the Tube home but it is difficult to concentrate on anything. The side of my face stings and my ear is still bleeding a bit. I can still hear that dull thump of the first kick that landed on Ralph. I’m think I’m still in shock. As a favour to Marion, Charles had obviously promised him fifty quid or the equivalent in coke if he went through the motions of giving me some business advice.

I sit on the rocking, jarring Circle Line train and am pestered by weirdoes. A variety of weirdoes: a white-haired City gent in a slightly crumpled but otherwise respectable pinstripe suit suddenly shouts at the woman next to him to stop feeding all these fucking immigrants.

She looks horrified and then giggles to her friend. “He’s another one,” shouts the old man pointing to me. A Rumanian gypsy pushes her floppy, drugged baby in my face and then offers her upturned hand, muttering something incomprehensible. At South Kensington station a blonde girl with dreadlocks and a ring through her eyebrow and her nose rattles an old McDonalds cup at me as if she hated doing it but it had to be done.

In their own way, all of these loonies and drop-outs seem to have better prospects than me, a better sales pitch. I’ve sold all I can sell and I haven’t got much in return for it. Perhaps the most I can expect is a few more little treats from Marion until one of us gets sick of the other.

Anna Maria opens the door and says, “Oh, Mr. Andrew, your face.” I smile sadly at her. As I start to walk upstairs I hear Marion grunt and then groan. I look round to Anna Maria for some explanation but she has pissed off back to the kitchen. I go further upstairs and hear Marion breathing deeply. The bed creaks slightly and then she gasps again, “Oh God!”

This was something I hadn’t quite banked on. I suddenly feel quite hurt. OK, she might shower me with gifts by way of apology but all the same it is bloody insulting. The worst thing is that I had never heard her make noises quite like this when we’re making love. What’s his secret?

Two more steps reveal that his secret is that he is a her, weighs twenty stone, is wearing a white apron and is rubbing Marion’s back aggressively with some oils that smell of eucalyptus and mint. I walk in and sit down on the chair while the masseuse carries on pummelling and Marion smiles at me dreamily.

“Oh God,” she says with faint irritation when I tell her the whole story.

“You don’t sound very concerned. I could have had the shit kicked out of me,” I say, yanking off my tie and dropping it on the floor, which I know will irritate her.

“Have you seen a doctor?” she says bossily. Then she reaches out and strokes my injured face gently. “Poor baby.” I begin to feel slightly horny like a medieval knight back from the crusades ready to reclaim my conjugal rights.

“No, it’s not serious,” I say. “I’ll go and put some TCP on it in a moment. I just got thumped in the stomach but you should have seen the state of Ralph. I think he’s lost a tooth.”

“Oh no,” she gasps in horror. “That sort of thing always makes me feel nauseous. I wish you hadn’t told me that. I’ve got a thing about teeth—can’t even have mine capped. Not that I need to.” She runs her tongue over them luxuriously.

“It made me feel quite nauseous as well. What kind of friends does Charles have?”

“I don’t know. Charles has a lot of contacts and some of them probably aren’t nice people. You don’t always do business with people you would invite to dinner.”

“Oh, don’t you start.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Andrew, but it’s true. Where do you want to go for dinner, by the way? Never mind, I’ll think of somewhere.” She groans as the masseuse continues her work. “Anyway, you can have your Rolex back.”

I look up but she is facing the other way now.

“Thank you. Has it been cleaned, then?”

“Clea—?” Caught you, I think to myself with grim satisfaction. I should know, though, that there is no embarrassing Marion. “Yes, yes, they cleaned it at the Rolex store.” She gives into her massage again for a moment and then says, “I think you should have a good quality watch. A watch is one of the ways people evaluate you by.”

“Oh, thank you. It is beautiful.”

I find myself picking my tie up off the floor in gratitude.

“You’re welcome, sweetie. We can discuss it tonight at dinner. I’ll book a table at Aspinalls for eight-thirty. We’ll eat outside if the weather’s still good.”

At this point I can tell she is getting bored with the conversation and wants to devote herself entirely to Brunehilda or whatever her name is.

Lying in the bath, I decide that if making money the Charles Montague way involves getting the shit kicked out of you at regular intervals, then I’d rather not bother. On the other hand, getting my beloved Rolex back (I’m wearing it now and I’ll never take it off again) and the thought of eating tonight and probably tomorrow and the day after that at the kind of restaurants that people in the office can only read about in magazines, makes me reconsider my idea about chucking it all in during that state of panic with my head sandwiched between DM and paving stone. That certainly won’t be a long-term plan—I did say I’d give it a month with Marion, didn’t I? But I’ll never go back to selling fucking ad space as long as I live.

Just as I’m trying to forget it all and enjoy the embrace of the warm bath water on my still aching body, Anna Maria’s voice asking Marion something reminds me of the only alternative.

As the head waiter leads us across the restaurant to our table Marion smiles hello at a couple of people. I do too, in case I’ve met them. The waiter pulls back her chair to let her in and sit down. I could certainly do with some food and good wine after my experiences today. The waiter hands us menus and we order vodka martinis.

“I’ve got a couple of brochures back home you should maybe have a look at,” says Marion, engrossed in the menu.

“Brochures?” I say, wondering what the
brochette de fruits de mer
with saffron sauce will be like. On the other hand, the chateaubriand does sound good. Holiday brochures, I suppose. Well, that’s one good thing about being fired, at least I can go on holiday whenever I want. No need to worry about Debbie giving me time off—or not, more likely. “Brochures for what?”

“Circumcision,” says Marion. “You said you’d do it, remember?” Oh, my God. I’d hoped she’d forgotten. The price for living with her, I suppose. How typical of Marion—no tact whatsoever. Halfway through persuading me to do one demeaning little favour for her, like marry her maid, she starts pushing another at me.

“I think we’re ready to order,” I say to the waiter, who has chosen this moment to reappear.

Mark clicks his tongue when I tell him that I’m going to move in for a month as we drink lattes in the King’s Road the next morning.

“You want me to talk you out of it?” he asks.

“No.” So why am I telling him?

“You want me to tell you how to deal with it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. Point is, I’ve got no money, this business thing didn’t come off and I’m not going back to work in a fucking office so I’ve got to stay with her—at least I don’t have to spend anything on food and bits and pieces. I’ll give up my room in Fulham and then I’ll give it a month, well, perhaps two, then I’ll get out whatever happens.”

“I told you—you’ll be on a short lead.”

“I know, it seems to be getting shorter every day but I can’t afford anything else at the moment and she has bought me a few things recently.”

“Good,” says Mark warmly. “Like I said: Marion wants to have you on standby at any time rather than have to ferret you out of Fulham, that’s all, that’s how she looks at it.”

He smiles at the waitress, who brings us our coffee. She melts. I get pissed off: come on, Mark, what do you think you’re going to get out of her? We’ve already paid for the coffee. Well, I have.

“I did it with this mad old thing who used to be an actress. No one famous but her husband had croaked two years earlier and left her a packet,” he says. “She had a place just outside Nice in the good old S of F. It was great. You could swim in the pool and look out across at the Med. I spent, what? four months just hanging out. Swimming, sunbathing. Met this local girl. Used to see her while Yvonne, the actress that is, was having a nap in the afternoons.”

“Sounds great.”

“It was—for a while. We’d go to parties but they were, well, you’ve been to Marion’s dos, haven’t you? Anyway, I realized that the more pre-lunch martinis she had the longer her naps became. Sometimes she woke up just in time to go to bed. But I suppose I got bored and I wasn’t earning anything, you know. I thought I’d strangle her by the end of it. Eventually I nicked some money from her safe, took a taxi to the airport and came home. Was I ever glad to be back.”

“Nicked it?”

“Well, she owed me
something
for all those weeks,” says Mark casually. “I’m not a bloody charity.”

“I was really hoping she’d set me up in my own flat somewhere,” I say almost to myself.

“No,” Mark tells me authoritatively. “A man would do that. I used to see this German banker when I was about eighteen, nineteen or something. He paid my rent in a place just off Kensington Church Street. Flew in once a week. Couple of meetings in the City, and then back to his wife and family in Frankfurt.” That sex thing again. I’m beginning to develop a bit of a hang up about it. He finishes his coffee, although I’ve only just started mine and raises his eyebrows to the waitress who is only too happy to come over. He hands back his coffee cup and asks for another. “Women want company, conversation, foreplay, cuddling, dinners—all that bollocks. God, women are a pain.” We consider the truth of this profound statement for a moment.

“She said she was embarrassed about my job and the fact that I live in Fulham.”

Mark hoots with laughter and slaps his thigh. “She say that?” I nod. “Good old Marion. Tactful or what?”

I take a mouthful of creamy, comforting coffee and then mention the marriage thing to him.

“Oh, yeah,” he says blandly. “Might as well.”

“Really? You’ve done it, haven’t you?”

“Me? Yeah. Who hasn’t?”

“You married Victoria’s maid or something?”

“Oh, yeah—what’s her name?” He watches a girl walk past us along the road. “It’s no big deal. Most registry office marriages in London are fake anyway, I saw a thing about it on the news. They can’t catch you. How much is Marion paying you? Five thousand?”

“More than that.”

“Ten?”

“Fifteen.”