Utterly Monkey (15 page)

Black cabs are to cars as cathedrals to houses. It is partly the vaulted roofs, the spare air and the silence, but most importantly it’s the meditative aura they encourage. They provoke an impulse not to do but to be. When you get in a cab you’ll find out what’s bothering you. It will rise to the surface. And Danny was snared in contemplation. Staring vacantly out at a London so quiet it was as if the mute button was pressed. He’d dropped Clyde off at West Acton. His black eye, in the clean light of outside, had shifted to a predominance of primrose and violet shades. His face was an amateur flower arrangement. He picked at a dried fleck of food on his tie. He hated his job.

Each of the other check-in queues for British Midland was inching forward and when it became clear that he’d chosen the wrong one and should change lines, someone else would appear and bustlingly join the queue he was about to move into. One of the lines was disappearing so fast it seemed to be staffed by Mr B. Midland himself.
Danny’s queue on the other hand, chosen for its apparent shortness (the first mistake!), was behind a desk manned by a very stoned twelve-year-old with numeracy issues. Three times the couple at the head of his queue had repeated
No, three bags
to his wide-eyed and pitted face. They were a beautiful couple, all glossy like something from an advert, and had now turned sideways to the desk, allowing Danny to watch them in profile. The husband was standing behind his wife, whispering into her ear. She giggled like a geisha, shyly, behind her hand.

Danny had arranged to meet Ellen in the check-in queue at terminal one but had seen when he arrived that there was more than one line, and that they weren’t all within sight of each other. He had to keep leaving his bag and ducking out under a red velveteen rope to get to a clear view of the others. Standing out in the open he heard Ellen before he saw her, a repetitive clipping sound on the marble floor. She was pulling a neat black bag on wheels behind her and looking very seriously at him.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning. You look very smart.’

‘I’m worn out. Oh your eye’s awful. You look like a hooligan.’

‘I don’t feel too clever either.’ Danny moved towards her to kiss her on the cheek but she’d bent her head to retract the extended handle on her bag. Danny found his nose an inch or so from the top of her skull. He could see the line on her scalp where her hair was parted. It wasn’t quite straight. He pulled back.

‘No, I don’t expect you do.’ She looked up again at him, puzzled at his nearness, and then glanced around
her. That bored thing again. Danny followed the direction of her stare but saw nothing distracting.

‘So, have you got the files? Shall we check in? My suit bag’s already in the queue.’

‘All in there.’ She nodded at her own bag, now brought to heel.

On the plane they’d independently decided to sleep. This solved the problem of discussing last night, any of it, and they were both exhausted anyway. Danny had been careful to let her have the arm rest but in the event she’d simply leant against the window and dozed off immediately. He imagined she was the kind of person who never had any trouble sleeping. He could hear her breathing soften into a regular rise and fall. It struck Danny as oddly intimate to listen to it. He looked over at her, keeping his face angled forward as much as possible in case she should open her eyes. She was wearing a trouser suit, black with a faint chalkstripe, and under it a pink shirt, the wide double cuffs of which poked out from under her jacket sleeves, emphasizing the slimness of her wrists. A thin gold chain lay loosely round her throat and her hair looked polished, delicately straight, as if touching it would break it. Her lips had the plush sheen of gloss on them and were in a petulant pout. Her nose was wide and trimly flat and her lashes thick. Mascara, Danny thought and remembered Olivia had put some on his eyelashes once. They’d been getting ready to go out to a New Year’s Eve party, laughing in his bathroom. He’d been quite taken with it. He glanced back over at Ellen’s
figure, feeling a tinge of guilt for doing so but knowing that just looking at her would block out the thought of Olivia. Her thighs were slim but solid beside his own, and almost as long as his. He picked up the British Midland magazine and looked at an article on basket-weaving. There was no way he could sleep.

At Belfast City Airport it was raining heavily. Behind the Avis desk sat a fat woman with short black hair and a skinny bald man. They were each about fifty and sitting, through necessity, very close together. They looked like an unhappily married couple waiting to get in somewhere, a divorce court perhaps. As Danny and Ellen walked over to them Danny had already, in his head, christened them Jack Sprat and his wife. The lady, who could eat no lean, hauled herself up when they got to the desk, evidently excited to have customers.

‘Hello. It’s under Williams. We’re to collect a car until tomorrow.’

‘I’m Jackie and if you have any questions about…’

Danny had accidentally knocked her speech off course. She gave a tiny grimace and looked at her desk.

‘All right. Can you fill this out please?’ She pushed a pink form across the counter. Her fingernails were a darker pink against it and were too raised from the skin to be real.

The car was a silver Ford Focus and seemed in good nick. Danny had forgotten how the Northern Irish registration system worked so he couldn’t figure out how old it was. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember. He used to sit up straight in the back seat and tell his candidly uninterested parents the county and year of each
car going past. Danny hated forgetting things, something he knew was due partly to his upbringing: memory being much more prized in Northern Ireland than intelligence.

Danny got behind the wheel without hesitation. He had been thinking about driving at home on the plane and was looking forward to it. Ellen put her bag in the back and got into the front. Maybe he should have asked her whether she wanted to drive. He looked over to offer but she was pulling her seat belt across and humming some tinny pop song that had been playing in the terminal. The first time they’d been in a car together. Again he felt that odd twinge of chance intimacy. The seat belt was pushing against her breasts. Danny briefly imagined that this was his wife and they were driving home from their honeymoon. He felt deflated suddenly and wound the window down to let a little air in.

When they had circled the car park twice and still couldn’t find the exit Ellen started giggling. After their third orbit Danny asked her to stop. She nodded and bit her lip, but little bubbles of laughter kept escaping. She almost seemed to be nervous. He needed to get out onto the road and turn the radio on. Getting to Lisamore should be pretty easy–through Antrim and follow the signs. A man appeared in front of them suddenly, dressed entirely in yellow waterproofs and a yellow plastic fisherman’s hat. His outfit inexplicably caused Danny to think of ducks. He waved them frantically towards a gap in a row of parked cars and pointed. Danny waved back, ‘They don’t want us to leave. That’s Northern Ireland all over.’

In the car they listened to Cool FM, the province’s premier popular music station. Danny had spent years in
his bedroom listening to Cool Goes Quiet every evening with the lights out. It was an hour of saccharine love songs between eleven and twelve. Danny hadn’t liked it for the music but instead for the maudlin stories that lay behind each of the song requests. A million different case histories.
Sean has been cheated on by Sharon but he is leaving her anyway for Jennifer. This is from Jen to her man Sean. ‘I’m not in love…so don’t forget…’
That kind of thing. Sometimes people rang up and recited their tragic histories down the phone, times and dates of heartbreaks at the ready. Fifteen years later and Cool FM was now a dance music station with a DJ who shouted and laughed continually. Mary J. Blige came on and Danny noticed that Ellen was doing a tiny shoulder shimmy to the music. She leaned forward and turned the volume up.

The rain had stopped by the time they arrived in Lisamore and found Ulster Water’s headquarters. It was a squat grey building surrounded by pebbledashed houses, and had the evening shadow of a large tarmacked car park, empty now except for seven or eight cars clustered by the entrance. They were all Mondeos and Astra Estates, vehicles for mid-ranking executives, and each sat neatly by a low signpost planted in the grass verge. Danny pulled into the first spot lacking a sign, beside the Deputy Finance Director’s empty space, and turned the engine off. He looked out through the windscreen at the sky. It seemed to hang precariously low over the drab office block. Danny opened the back door and removed a slim leather business folder he had brought in his suit bag. Across the seat from him Ellen had opened the other door and was sorting out files.

‘I hope the Deputy Finance Director hasn’t gone too
far. I might want to see him.’ Realizing how arrogant this sounded, Danny added, looking up at her, ‘Although I’m sure his secretary’ll do.’

‘Or hers,’ Ellen said brightly.

‘Of course, or hers.’ Danny stood upright then and placed the documents folder between his knees in order to perform what Albert termed
the preliminary shooting of the cuffs
: he pulled one white cuff down below the sleeve of his pinstriped jacket, as far as it would comfortably go, and repeated the manoeuvre with the other cuff, this time pushing his chunky diving watch under it. He fastened the middle button of his single-breasted. Ellen was beside him, having put her coat back on. They looked well-mannered and ruthless, although Danny’s shiner tinged their efficiency with a surreal
Clockwork Orange
atmosphere. As they walked across the tarmac to the door, Danny suddenly pulled Ellen to a stop by the elbow. ‘What’s the name of the MD again?’

‘Shannon, Jack Shannon.’

‘Of course. Good, good.’

Danny’s nervousness could appear aggressive and he had to remind himself before he went into any meeting, never mind a hostile company’s headquarters, that these people were just, as he was, doing a job. But he was going to be firm and professional. His first trainer’s mantra,
Never apologize, never explain,
ran through his mind. Wetting his lips as a preliminary to speech, he pushed open the glass door. To business.

Mr Jack Shannon was in a wheelchair. This was the first surprise, although it shouldn’t have been, as Ellen reminded Danny, or at least no more of a surprise than that registered by Mr Shannon when a black woman introduced
herself to him. He blinked twice and was late with his smile. The second surprise was how fast Mr Shannon’s wheelchair could go. He whizzed along the corridor in front of them, shouting incomprehensible orders. Danny couldn’t tell whether the instructions were for them or the workers sporadically dotted in offices along the corridors. It was all he could do to keep him in eyeshot.

‘Mr Shannon, excuse me…’

Danny was praying they’d hit some stairs soon. That would slow him down. At one point it seemed they’d lost him but he suddenly glided alongside them, now with a large bottle of Ballygowan water nestled in his lap. He disappeared again after finessing a tricky chicane made by two piles of boxes but when they rounded the next corner there he was, halted outside two silver lifts. He was twisting around in the wheelchair and staring irritably over his shoulder at them.

‘I have to go in one of these. You can take the staircase. Fifth floor.’

‘We’re happy to go up with you,’ Danny said amiably.

‘No room.’ He had pushed his chair right up against the lift and was staring straight ahead at the metal door. They started on the stairs.

‘So you two work for Syder, do you?’ said Mr Shannon. He was sitting on one side of a huge round desk, flanked by three other men. All four were facing them. Ellen and Danny, nodding hello, had just entered the room. Having climbed the five floors Danny could feel each of the cigarettes he’d smoked the night before unionizing against his lungs. He felt overheated. Ellen had reset into her default mode of inscrutable composure.

‘Not for Syder, no. We work for Monks & Turner, Syder’s solicitors.’

‘In Belfast?’ Shannon again.

‘No, in London actually.’

‘We had some Australian here for a couple of weeks looking through files. He was from Monks & Turner. But you’re a local boy, aren’t you?’ The three other heads made tiny nods of agreement.

‘I am. Ballyglass.’

‘My wife’s from Ballyglass.’ The pleasant-looking forty-year-old to Shannon’s right had spoken. He had an unfashionable moustache and reminded Danny of a footballer from the nineteen-eighties, though he couldn’t think which one.

‘Oh right.’ I don’t want to have this conversation, Danny thought.

‘What’s your name?’ Shannon again.

‘I’m Danny Williams and this is Ellen Powell.’

‘Williams. Do you know it?’ Ignoring Ellen, who had started to say hello, Shannon turned to the footballer.

‘Well there’s quite a few Williamses around Bally…’ Danny started to say but the footballer cut him off, ‘Anything to the estate agent, Mark Williams?’

Danny nodded, fourteen again, caught mucking around by an adult.

‘I’m his son.’

‘He sold my father-in-law’s house. Nice man. Very helpful he was. But you’re in London are you?’

‘I am. I’ll let my dad know you said hello, Mr…?’

‘McManus, though he’ll know my wife’s family, the Connollys. Her father’s Tom.’

‘
Tom Connolly
,’ Danny’s voice had unexpectedly
pitched itself at castrato. He hastily dropped it to gruffness. ‘Sure I know him myself. He used to take us for Scouts on a Tuesday night.’

‘That’s right. Still does as far as I know.’

‘Small world.’ Danny was smiling now despite himself. Northern Ireland. Forget about six degrees of separation. Everyone in Ulster was just a person away, sitting on their other side, waiting to lean forward and say hello.

‘It is that.’ Shannon looked happier anyway. He pointed at his own face with one hooked finger. ‘You get thumped on the plane or something?’ Danny forced a short laugh.

‘No, no, I caught my head on a cupboard.’ He had spoken too quickly for it to sound truthful.
Caught my head
? What a ludicrous phrase. He tried to salvage it. The four men were staring at him, looking more interested about this than they had about anything else.

‘I was bending down to get something, and I stood up. Caught my head.’
Stop saying ‘caught my head’.

‘I snagged my face,’
Snagged my face?
‘on the door of the cupboard. Pretty painful.’ Danny reached up and touched his eye. It felt puffy.

‘Looks like you were thumped.’ Shannon said defiantly. The footballer nodded in considered agreement.

‘Well, anyway, shall we get started? Have you a room put aside that we can use?’ Danny brought his hands together as if to pray, but quickly, with the result that they made an unexpectedly loud clap. Ellen flinched and the MD looked at him with open bemusement.

On Kilburn High Road, where things get arranged and sold in pubs, there is a café on a corner that has started to rival the taverns as a place to do business. It has established itself as a favoured haunt of the East Europeans who’ve pitched up to replace the influx of Irish. It may be that the café’s synthetic cream reminds them of the kind used in the monstrous confections sold in Warsaw and Prague. It also may be that the large glass façade, which comprises both the front and one whole side of Pastry Nice, allows nervous men a safe and open meeting place.

Ian had chosen a table for four in the glass corner of the café. An empty coffee cup sat in front of him. Although he was trying very hard to keep still, his leg was jiggling. The coffee, which he normally rejected as a domestic drug, had made him jumpy, but the café had no orange juice and he refused to pay for mineral water. The queue that had formed behind him by the time he reached the cash desk looked like an ID parade for a crime that had been committed by Lech Walesa. Is there a collective noun for moustaches? There was a gaggle of moustaches behind him in the queue. Ian paused to consider whether he could ask for just a glass of tap water but then quickly ordered a coffee, and so his leg was now jumping and the Poles would think he was nervous. He was waiting for two brothers, Bartosz and Tomek. Or Bartek and Tomasz. He couldn’t remember, although he had written it down in the exercise book he’d left, stupidly, at the hotel. When he’d returned from seeing Geordie he’d rang Budgie, exercised in his room, showered, slept for ninety minutes, and then dressed. Ian emphasized function and serviceability in his wardrobe choices. Today he was wearing straight cut stonewashed jeans (too narrow
and tight to be fashionable), a tucked-in white shirt (with button-down collars), a black leather belt, and brown leather shoes. He had a denim jacket, which almost matched, and which he’d placed on the seat beside him.

About four years ago he had done business with an antiques dealer in Yorkshire, a bald, bespectacled man, pious and stealthy as a verger. The Selby man’s indulgences appeared to be bow ties and sherry but he had also a less obvious interest in weapons. He was a quartermaster to the underworld. He had sold Ian twelve deactivated handguns, fifteen deactivated rifles and a deactivated submachine gun, plus the tools and manuals to re-convert them back to weapons. Ian had found him through a small classified ad in an issue of
Guns & Ammo
. The advert detailed a weapons list and stressed the simplicity of the conversion kits. Ian didn’t know if it was legal or not but it was an improbably easy way to buy guns. He had assumed bringing them back would cause him more trouble, at least until Cleaver the Yorkshireman had offered to arrange their delivery for ten per cent of the weapons’ cost. It had all been remarkably smooth. Cleaver, when contacted last year about further objects of desire, had promised to supply Ian with a phone number, but he would have to call for it at the house. Ian had obediently done so on Thursday, taking a cup of tea with Cleaver’s senile wife who had started to cry as he left. That evening, parked at a Welcome Break motorway service station near Watford, he had phoned the number and made the arrangements. This was the result. Pastry Nice at 1 p.m.

Budgie had been pathetic on the phone. He couldn’t focus on the events in hand. An amateur mind, Ian
thought, and when he had asked him who Janice was, his reaction was completely unprofessional. He’d got really wound up.

‘My wee sister. The one who took the money.’

‘Ach of course, I should have realized that.’

‘Why? What’d he say about her?’

‘I think she’s coming over to meet him.’

‘She fucking
isn’t
.’

‘I’m just saying what he said.’

‘The
fucking
bitch.’

‘We’ll talk when I get back.’

‘Fucking
bitch.
’

‘Budgie, we’ll talk when I get back.’

Geordie hadn’t wanted to call him. He hated being made to look stupid. He was always the fall guy and the whipping boy and the scapegoat. And this had turned out no differently. He had to tell Danny that the money had gone back to them, to Budgie and Ian, and he had to ring Janice and tell her to get ready to leave, but he couldn’t find his mobile. Surely someone hadn’t nicked it? They’d all dressed nice and had that healthy shine that money gives. Geordie rang his own number with Danny’s terrestrial phone. One of Danny’s shoes in the boxroom started vibrating. It must have fallen off the shelf and landed in it.

Across the Irish Sea Danny was cheerful. It turned out Scott, the Australian, had been both methodical and industrious, and there were only eight boxes of contracts for them to index and review. They should easily be finished by five. Danny was sitting in a large meeting room at the back of the building. From it you could see
the Lisamore River, a few hundred metres away in open countryside. When his phone rang he’d excused himself from the two Ulster Water admin staff that were searching for missing documents, and moved across to the window. The river looked solid and grey in the afternoon light, like a road winding through the fields. He didn’t recognize the number displayed on his phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Dan, it’s Geordie.’

‘All right mate.’

‘You know Ian?’

‘The bloke from last night?’

‘Yeah. It turns out he knows Budgie.’

‘You’re
joking
.’

‘No joke, and he’s just been round here and tore me to ribbons. Smacked me in the face with the front door…’ Geordie sniffed, reminded.

‘Fuck. Did he get the money?’ Danny was suddenly aware of the other occupants of the room. Ellen was next door but the two administrators, both fifty-something women, were looking at him horrified. One of them was clutching the cross that hung around her neck. Danny nodded at them, smiled reassuringly, and stepped into the corridor. He hadn’t heard Geordie’s reply.

‘
Well
? Did he get the money?’

‘I said yeah. I tried to bluff him, tell him I didn’t have it but he’s a
fucking
animal. My chest…I think he might have broke one of my ribs.’

‘You’ll be all right. Is my door okay?’

‘Fuck off. Your door’s fine.’

‘What about the rest of the flat, did he break anything?’

Geordie grimaced.

Danny edged back solemnly into the meeting room.

‘Sorry about that.’ Danny waved the mobile phone at them.

‘Everything all right love?’ one of the admin assistants asked.

‘Yeah…It was my brother…He just got mugged.’ Danny figured, on the hop, that this would both explain his question and excuse his swearing.

‘Margaret! Did you hear that?’

‘Mugged!
Dear
god. Is he all right?’ Margaret had heard and was clutching her cross again.

‘Oh no he’s fine, just a bit shaken up.’

Sometimes a lie echoes until it becomes deafening.

‘Where did it happen? Has he reported it?’ Margaret had now set her file down on the table and was just looking straight at Danny.