Utterly Monkey (21 page)

‘Tom. Yes,
this
is him.’ Frannie, a sturdy blonde, simultaneously pulled one boyfriend forward and, leaning round Susan, said, a little coyly, ‘Hello Michael.’ The other boyfriend hung back but nodded seriously at Frannie and gave a tiny wave. ‘God, Glastonbury was mad. We were up for like forty hours or something and then Liz was sick all over the…’

The girls moved away from Ian and the two men stood looking at each other.

‘Tom. How are you?’ Tom said, and extended his hand.

‘Mike. Nice to meet you.’

‘Enjoying the zoo?’ Tom said cheerily.

‘Actually, I was just saying how depressing it is. You just look around and around, and see all these animals that shouldn’t be here–and you end up thinking, God, humans are just this rapacious, horrific species that have colonized the world. It’s just awful. What about you two? How are you finding it?’ Michael thrust his head forward in a little jab of sincerity. He blinked several times as if he’d just put in lenses.

Tom nodded thoughtfully, ‘I don’t think there’s really enough animals, and the ones that are here don’t really
do
that much.’

Ian sloped off. People were odd. Always talking and talking about nothing. He walked past two humourless pacing hyenas and then stopped at a bird enclosure to examine its signs: Black-cheeked Lovebirds, Pin-tailed Whydahs, Lilac-breasted Rollers, Red-billed Queleas. The cage was a speaker box of throaty creaks and shrill whistles but none of the birds were moving.

He stopped at a large exhibit which claimed to hold two Sulawesi Macaques, although he couldn’t see any sign of life. He edged around it and found them in a corner, eleemosynary, watching, their black palms stretched out through the chainlink fence. One began pulling leaves off a bush growing in front of the enclosure and folding them into his mouth. They had tiny black nails on their tiny black hands. They were pitiful. As he reached the Ape House Ian glimpsed the dense black mass of a gorilla slumped in a corner beneath a netting of wooden beams and ropes. It was like a huge puzzle, a Gordian knot, which the gorilla sitting below it just couldn’t be bothered to solve. The only other visitors at the window were the father and his son with the koala rucksack. The boy had a camera and took a flash photo through the glass. His father squatted down beside him, obviously his paternal pose, and patiently, poshly, began to explain, ‘The thing is, Oscar, the window bounces the light back and that means that when we go home–’ Oscar started picking his nose. Without missing a beat, his dad pulled the hooked finger down, ‘and Dora sets up the computer so you can see all your animal pictures, there will probably just be a photo of a flash of light instead of a gorilla.’

Oscar was making a face that suggested a photo of a flash of lightning cooking a gorilla would not sustain his interest. He turned away towards the glass, in order to pick his nose again without his dad seeing. The man straightened up, and tousled Oscar’s girlish hair, ‘Or what
might
even happen would be that you’ll think you’ve taken a photo of a gorilla and it will actually be a photo of you holding your camera up, taking a picture, or even
one of me reflected in the glass.’ The father laughed, but only for the benefit of Ian, who coolly ignored him and watched the gorilla pick something off the shiny black sole of his foot.

At the airport, when Danny went off to get a trolley, Janice said to Ellen, ‘So Geordie was saying that you two are an item?’

‘Not even vaguely. We had a huge argument last night.’

Janice sympathetically tutted. ‘I thought something like that must have gone on. Everyone was very quiet in the car. Sorry for…Just that Geordie mentioned it…Anyway it’ll be all right. You
look
great together.’ Danny was heading back towards them, negotiating with a mutinous trolley. There was a solidarity between the two women, founded, as all solidarities are, on excluding someone else.

After neatly stacking their bags, Danny said, in his best game show voice, ‘Ladies, shall we fly?’

Janice felt a flush of nerves. She hadn’t really thought about it, about taking off and being held in the air by who knew what. As they made their way out of the hire car park and over to the terminal, she turned to Ellen.

‘Have you flown a lot then?’ Janice asked, trying to sound blasé.

‘Not loads but a few times. I’ve been to America a couple of…Are you nervous about flying?’

Janice nodded, grateful to Ellen for catching her meaning.

‘A little bit, yeah. Mum said I need to suck on a boiled sweet when we take off so that my ears pop. She saw it on some travel programme.’ Janice laughed a little, to
show that she thought her mum was being overly protective but wanting Ellen to confirm it.

‘You’ll be fine. Honestly.’

They joined the check-in queue while Danny returned the car keys to the Avis desk. Jackie, the fat lady from yesterday, was missing and only the thin bald man sat there, looking a little adrift untied from the huge buoy of his partner.

‘Here you go squire. The keys to our Ford Focus. The guy in the car park checked it and gave me this form.’ Danny was doing his deferent Ulsterman.

‘Okay, thanks. Here’s your receipt and deposit slip.’ He seemed very low.

‘You on your own today then?’

‘I am. Jackie, the lady usually on with me, the one who looked after you yesterday, she’s been taken ill.’ He was slightly breathless, and his tone made Danny stop bustling with his documents wallet and look up. The man’s face was narrow and unshaven, and his light-blue liquid eyes were kind but also weak and cowardly. The bumpy dome of his bald head was pallid and shiny under the airport’s striplights. A few hairs wafted, as if underwater, on its crown as he leaned in across the counter to Danny. He must have been fifty-something, but looked somehow inexperienced, like a man who finds himself frequently surprised.

‘Nothing serious I hope,’ Danny said lightly.

‘She’d a heart attack last night. Forty-three years of age…Just goes to show.’

‘That’s
awful
. Awful.’ Danny didn’t know what else to say. ‘Will she be all right?’

‘We don’t know.’ The man looked like he wanted Danny to do something.

‘Has she a family to look after her?’

‘Lives with her sister. They’re very close.’

Walking across to the check-in queue Danny was thinking
Goes to show what
?
What does it show? That she should have lost ten stone? That she should have got her cholesterol checked? That she should have used margarine and not butter on her scones?
He reached the queue. Janice was pointing out a Northern Irish television personality to Ellen. The man with orange skin was standing two lines over with several friends and three trolleys’ worth of skiing equipment.
It goes to show, you blethering fool, that your body might just give up at any moment.
The thought took root in his head and stopped him from moving. It was as if he’d looked down and noticed that it wasn’t grey linoleum he was walking across but thin ice. He felt suddenly winded and rocked on the balls of his feet.
This is it, my friend, this is all that you get. No next time round, no trial runs or second laps, no sequels or prequels or reprints. You’ve just one go and it’s your turn now.

On the plane, even though it was just after noon, Danny drank two small bottles of Chenin Blanc. He felt dizzy, damp-palmed and anxious. Should he be working on Ulster Water, trying to get a bid through which would get people sacked? Should it make any difference if those people were Northern Irish? And how the hell was he ever going to work for that slimy fucker Vyse again? Ellen was sitting in front with Janice beside her. The seat to his right was empty. He gazed out at the acres of endless blue nothing.

Janice couldn’t help but stare. Ellen was the first black person she had seen up close and on the plane, when
they had talked, she’d been silently marvelling at her hair and complexion. It was so clear and soft-looking. She was dying to ask what her skin routine was but thought it might come across as forward or rude. Her skin was so different. But when they arrived into Heathrow’s Terminal One, Janice suddenly felt that
she
was the exception. It was like what you’d expect at the UN or something: people-herds of different shapes and colours and outfits rushing around. Four tall black men walked past in full African dress, great patterned sheets wrapped round them, and she saw one woman, at least she assumed it was a woman, who was tented from head to toe in black, with only a rectangular muslin patch to look out through. It was like something from
Star Wars
. Janice saw more shades of skin in those hurried thirty minutes than she ever had before. She’d love to try putting the same eye shadow on all the different colours of women.

They took a separate taxi from Ellen. Danny kissed her goodbye rather formally on the cheek and, smiling, told her that, as she didn’t need to come in to the office that evening, she should give him the files. Ellen nodded, unsure if he was being generous or continuing the argument. As soon as they’d sat back in the seats in the taxi, and the driver was pulling away, Janice turned to Danny and said, ‘She likes you, you know.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because she does.’

‘Right.’

‘Girls can tell. And anyway, she said so.’ Janice nodded and winked at him. Danny raised his eyebrows, as if to say
these things happen to me all the time.

After a pause he said, ‘Did she really say so?’ It was
easier, pretending things worked in the way Janice thought they did. Boys and girls. Mars and Venus. Black and white.

‘Maybe not in so many words. But we were talking and she likes you. Though she thinks you’re a bit mental.’

Danny said nothing for a minute or two, and then asked, ‘So what’s been happening in Ballyglass?’

‘Same-old, same-old.’ Janice smoothed out the lap of her red skirt as if to read something off it. ‘What’s the news?…Do you know Margery Elliot?’

‘Not sure. Who’s she?’

‘Works in the Post Office on the main street. Wee wiry thing with big glasses. Fuzzy black hair.’

‘Oh aye.’

‘Did you hear what happened?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It turns out Jimmy, her husband–drives for Cuddys’ Coaches–was leaving her for some woman he took on a bus tour down south, and then Margery and him rowed and she stabbed him with a breadknife. Just last week. Last Monday I think. She went in under the rib cage.’ Janice’s fingertips pointed at her stomach. ‘Upwards. Three children. And the youngest only a toddler.’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘I know.’

‘Dead?’

‘Completely.’

Danny watched the back of the driver’s head. There was a talk show on the radio and the driver was mumbling and disputing the caller’s point. Danny couldn’t make out the topic.

‘And there’s a new shop opened up on the Burn Road. It sells mobiles.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘It’s called Phones For You but spelt with the number 4 and just the letter U.’ Janice described a horseshoe in the air with her index finger and then paused. She was babbling. She should ask him a question.

‘So what’s London like? Do you like it?’

‘Ach well it’s all right. I’m not so fond of my job.’ Janice nodded, looked concerned. ‘And it’s dirty and expensive. But there’s lots to do. And my friends are all here.’

‘And now Geordie too I s’pose.’

Danny was thinking
Query definition of Geordie as friend
but said, ‘Right, right.’

They looked dully out their windows. The traffic was light. Danny started reading the notes for the report he would have to draft in the office that evening and Janice closed her eyes. They reached Dalston in just over an hour and a half.

Geordie had returned from his wander and cleaned the flat. It had been a proper operation, involving hot water, the ravenous Hoover and a yellow duster, although he had restricted the action to the living room and kitchen. To demonstrate the enormity of the task, he had left all the drying crockery and glasses arrayed upside down on a tea towel beside the sink. When he heard the key scratch into the lock he lunged towards the door and opened it.

‘All right mate,’ Danny said, and clapped him quickly on the shoulder before pushing by.

‘Big man,’ Geordie replied, nodding deferentially and leaning back to let him past.

Janice was on the doorstep, head dipped, smiling at
him. The slight squint of her left eye made it seem like she was looking into sunlight.

‘Hey sexy,’ Geordie said, and stepped down to her level. They were the same height, pretty much, although Janice’s heels usually made her appear an inch taller.

‘Hello stranger,’ she said and hugged him. He felt so skinny, stringily muscled like a twelve-year-old boy. ‘You miss me then? Long four days?’

‘I never said
that
. I just got bored.’

Still embracing him, Janice traced the nail of her index finger in a light circle on the back of his neck. He shivered before steering her inside and showing her round the flat. Danny was setting his satchel on the kitchen table when they appeared in the doorway. Geordie had his hands on her hips and his dark little head poked round her shoulder. ‘Here, Dan, there’ll be things found tonight that were never lost.’

After a quick bath Danny’d put on a fresh T-shirt and the same jeans he’d been wearing. He had left Janice and Geordie in the living room, on the sofa, engrossed in the
Antiques Roadshow
. Geordie was arguing that no painting of a horse could ever be worth the ten thousand pounds some berk in a bow tie claimed it was.
And anyway its head’s all wrong. Looks more like a greyhound.
Janice had already made Geordie two cups of tea since she’d arrived. They were tactile and easy with each other, and Danny noticed that Geordie fidgeted less when she was around, as though in order to balance her femininity he had to be calmer.

He caught the almost empty 76 bus from the end of Sofia Road. He wasn’t cycling home knackered at four in the morning. The bus route ran straight down Kingsland and into the city. At Moorgate he got off by himself and
walked along London Wall to cut through to Cheapside. The city was as deserted as it ever really got. Passing the merchant banks and law firms and brokerages, Danny’d look in to see an occasional figure glancing up from behind a reception desk or steering a huge motorized mop across a marble lobby, shiny and sterile as an operating theatre. On London Wall he heard the ringing assertion of bells, and when he turned onto Wood Street realized they came from the church tower that sat abandoned on the traffic island in front of him. It was
only
a tower: whatever church had been attached to it had long since disappeared. Nor did it seem to have an entrance though sometimes, late at night, Danny had noticed lights on in the windows just below the belfry. He walked carefully round it. The sound was enormous, peal upon peal to summon an imaginary congregation to imaginary worship. Danny reached the building site at the end of the street. A digger sat abandoned in front of scaffolding badged with billboards and hoardings. He thought how advertisements were the only things left singing praises.

On Cheapside the shops and coffee bars were all closed and the only people around were cleaners or security guards arriving or leaving. Two African women sat companionably in silence at a bus stop. As he passed behind them the 25 pulled up, and opened its doors in a loud exhalation. The African women got on. Dan looked at the bus’s windows–there wasn’t one white face. These were the dark ghosts of the City of London, those invited to the party but only if they arrived at the back door, ate nothing, and left before it began.

When Danny worked late, which he usually did, a
cheerful man in the regulation navy polo-shirt, which appropriately signified Monks & Turner’s blue-collar staff, would appear in his corridor around eight o’clock. He would be pushing an enormous red wagon, a movable skip, and collecting every office’s rubbish, before replacing each bin-liner with one slipped from the wad of white plastic bags he kept tucked in his belt. When he came into the room to empty the bin he wouldn’t speak until Danny had said something, though then he was friendly. José was from Nicaragua, specifically from Managua, the capital, and his favourite line was
You work too hard, yes?
Danny’s response was to widen his eyes and nod in agreement, but then to suffer the curious guilt of accepting pity from someone paid to empty his bin, and someone who’d fled from hurricanes, earthquakes, poverty and war. The Nicaraguan, though, was continually grinning, and he had a smile that made Danny respond in kind. It was not pretty–José possessed about double the usual number of teeth–but it was unforced and so generous that Danny would find himself sitting up in his seat and beaming happily back.

On the days that he worked through the night a Nigerian cleaner would appear in his office along with the dawn, around six or so in the morning. She would bustle about him and refuse to make eye contact, and by that stage Danny would be too tired to stretch to the effort of speech. Those were the nights when he would stumble out to the street at seven o’clock to transact Starbucks’ first sale of the day, a latte and still-warm croissant. It was always the same pretty Italian girl serving, and she was always brusque, though there was never anyone waiting behind him. The cleaner, whose name
he didn’t know, would wipe the keyboard and telephone handset (provided he wasn’t using them), and place a wet and folded, lemon-scented tissue (the kind reminiscent of aeroplanes and Chinese restaurants) under the mouthpiece of the phone. Once she’d prodded him awake as he lay slumped over the desk, his forehead being embossed by the lid of a pen, because a small pool of saliva was growing on top of a file. Normally she was kind enough to let him sleep.

His corridor tonight, for 5 p.m. on a Sunday evening, wasn’t too busy. Vyse’s office was empty. Danny paused in the doorway and looked at the photographs of the happy Vyse clan on the far wall. It occurred to him that he could easily deface them: add beards and glasses, scrawl obscenities. He could unpick a few threads from the seam on the seat of every pair of his trousers, or dribble a neat coffee stain onto the ties. He could tangle his Archimedes’ balls. But all of those things would be disrespectful and childish, and besides each corridor had CCTV. He felt entitled to vengeance. It was as if all of the casual agony and hassle Vyse had previously caused him had now been given a specific hook on which to hang his hate. Ellen. The lovely Ellen. Vyse had spoiled everything.

In his own office, Danny had a bundle of e-mails demanding responses. The whole corporate team working on UW appeared to be in, down on the second floor, including Freeman, the nasty abbot, and Tom Howard, the managing director of Syder. They were all at work on the bid. It had to be made by 10 a.m. Danny was supposed to have his report already done. He felt his head itch slightly above both ears. This meant he was
getting hot and he was getting hot because he was getting worried. He pushed at the smooth patch of skin between his eyebrows with the middle finger of his left hand while searching the online info-bank for a precedent.

He began drafting. Scott’s notes on his part of the diligence were thorough but needed reorganizing and polishing. There were no real reasons for not bidding on the company. There were no poison pills hidden in the articles or main contracts, no change of control clauses, no crystallizing financial liabilities or options that kicked in and altered the capital structure of the company. Ulster Water had become a lost cause. The law that applied to it now was the law of the jungle. Syder would bid, UW would be taken over, and the bloodbath would begin. It would be a natural cull. Business was business. Danny bullet-pointed the issues raised. There were minor quibbles on copyright and outsourcing contracts but nothing of any substance. A pack was only as fast as its slowest member. The lame couldn’t be saved. Danny daydreamed for a moment about making up a provision in the company articles that meant the issue of a new class of share capital, to a charity say, in the event of a takeover. It was a stupid idea. They would all have copies of the company’s articles. There was nothing for it. Hunt or be hunted.

He searched the intranet’s
Who’s Who
for Freeman’s details and the photo of his sacerdotal face appeared on the screen. Danny dialled the number listed and after one ring it was picked up–snatched was probably more accurate–and Freeman said, impatiently, ‘Yes?’

‘John, it’s Danny Williams here. I just wanted to ring down…’

‘Where’s the report? We’re waiting for it.’ Danny purposefully coughed loudly into the phone and pressed on regardless.

‘…and let you know that I’ll have the final version of the due diligence report ready in a few hours.’

‘Anything in it?’ Freeman spoke like he had his coat on, and Danny had caught him just nipping out the door. He hadn’t of course. Freeman would have his shirtsleeves rolled up and his little bulbous head would be glowing sunset-pink with stress. He was going about his business. Soon, probably, he would die.

‘A few minor issues, no deal-breakers, at least not in the contracts I saw.’

‘Good. No deal-breakers, glad you think so.’

There was a mordant edge to everything Freeman said. It was the corrosion caused by having too much money and too little time.

‘John, I wanted to ask about when…’

He’d hung up.

Danny lifted the plastic ribbed bottle of Evian from the shelf above his desk and walked down to the facilities room. There were three other lawyers in the corridor. All of them were, like Danny, contravening the firm’s open-door policy. He held the bottle under the water cooler as it noisily filled, pulled two plastic cups from the dispenser and headed back to his office. The Black Bush was nesting in his lockable drawer, among his clean gym clothes, and he poured out a small peat-coloured shot, watered it down to a tawny hue and went back to the document open on his screen.

By midnight Freeman had rang him eight times. Danny still hadn’t quite finished the report and was
now dangerously close to being drunk. Everyone else in the corridor had gone home. He had printed out a fairly coherent thirty-page draft and was taking it by hand to the Corporate team. To get to the lift Danny had to walk along his own and then another corridor, both bookended by security doors requiring a pass. Danny pressed the release button by the doors at the end of his, forgetting that his security card was sitting on his desk, propped against the base of the Anglepoise light. He walked through the doors and, just as they clicked shut behind him, realized that he couldn’t get out.

He was stuck in a vestibule that boasted the facilities of a disabled toilet and views along three empty corridors. No one was around. There is nothing lonelier than an empty corridor. It is not like an empty field or a forest, where humans are neither expected nor wanted. A corridor exists for the traffic of people, and without them is as bereft as a dry riverbed. He sat on a plastic crate that someone had left outside the toilet and set the report on the floor. Then he dragged the crate to the centre of the CCTV’s view, sat on it again and waved at the camera. After a while he stood up and rattled each of the doors. It was already past midnight. 12.27. For fuck’s sake.

Half an hour later Freeman himself came rolling towards him. He was like a little ballbearing, tiny and hard, and Danny’s apologetic grin and open-handed shrug did nothing to temper his scorn.

‘Dan Williams?’

Danny nodded. He knew Freeman would abbreviate his name like that.

‘You prick. You get yourself locked in here?’ His tone was pretend-jovial. Danny nodded again.

‘Sorry, I forgot my security card and…’ He stopped talking. He had nothing to say. Even though it was a Sunday the partner was still dressed for business. He wore a blue shirt, the sleeves, Danny happily noted, rolled up, and high-waisted navy trousers with yellow braces. The fat Windsor knot of his dusky-pink tie seemed a watery reflection of the nose it sat a few inches under. Freeman looked like he drank too much, and he looked angry.

‘Tom wants to see the diligence report before he signs off on the bid. That it?’

The head jerked towards the floor in front of the disabled toilet, where Danny had now spread the report out to spell

Danny nodded again. There hadn’t been enough pages to finish his name and he hadn’t bothered to rearrange it so it worked. Freeman barked, ‘Pick it up, sort it out, bring it with you please.’

Danny was staring at his exceptional head. It was magnificently bald and ridged above the temples where the tectonic plates of his skull met. The partner had reversed
and was holding the door open. Danny scrambled around picking up the pieces of paper, and then Freeman started rolling back up the corridor. Danny felt he was being irresistibly dragged along in his wake.

‘And what the fuck happened to your eye?’

‘Oh nothing. Tennis injury. Is the bid all done?’

‘Yes.’ Freeman hardly opened his mouth when he spoke. ‘I’ve sent my team home.’

They were waiting for the lift and standing shoulder to shoulder, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking they were standing shoulder to elbow. It occurred to Danny to ask Freeman whether he was officially a midget. There was a height requirement and he was pretty sure Freeman filled it. It was something like four foot eleven or under. He decided to ask about the offer instead. ‘And what’s next then?’

‘Well, we
print
it. And then we
deliver
it.’ Freeman sounded like it was all he could do not to punch Danny in the crotch. Danny wondered if he was married. He looked down, without moving his head, and spotted a gold band embedded on his finger. In that case he hoped he didn’t have any kids, particularly slow ones. He was the type of father who would convince his children of their dumbness on a daily basis, and leave them unable to open a window or envelope without feeling anxious and useless. The lift pinged its arrival and the doors slid back. The raging dwarf strode triumphantly in and Danny followed. Freeman jabbed at the button for the second floor, changed to attacking the one saying
Close Doors
, and then returned to jabbing the 2 again.

‘Great. All sorted out then.’

‘Almost. As my team’s gone home, you’ll be taking the
bid to the printers. I’m going to sit down with Tom and run through this.’ He took the report out of Danny’s hands and turned back to the lift door.