Utterly Monkey (25 page)

‘Like the white rabbit.’

‘Drive on down slowly. He must have gone in under one of those arches.’

A huge solid yellow gate started to slide across an entrance.

‘There, he must have pulled in down there. The street’s blocked at the far end so we should turn and park facing up to the main road, ’case he comes out.’

In the yard Ian had reversed the van up to a garage. Tomek, Bartosz and Jerzy were standing in front of its open doorway like picketing miners or shipyard workers, arms folded in solidarity. Ian turned the van off and
watched them for a second in the wing mirror. He felt a little nervous, but that was natural. It was like the closing minutes of a game. He got out.

‘Good morning.’ Ian’s mouth was too dry and his voice gave a little. He swallowed some saliva.

‘Ian, good morning. You have the rest of the purse?’ The three of them were still standing there, a defensive wall waiting for the free kick to be taken. It was the one with the abbreviated nose who spoke. Tomek, Ian remembered, thinking of his mnemonic, one of the tricks they’d learned in their LifeSkills class: the name Tomek contains a toe, which is a body-part like a nose. Tomek has a broken nose. He’d had a back-up memory device as well: the name Bartosz contained a bar, and a bar could be used to connect things, like a bridge. Bartosz’s nose had a bridge.

‘What purse?’ Ian said, causing Tomek to look at his brother. Bartosz said nothing and remained eerily motionless. His eyes were a neutral grey in their deep sockets, the kind so sunken that the cheekbones suddenly rush inwards.

‘The other money, the balance of the purse.’

‘Oh aye, of course.’ He went round to the side of the van and opened the front door. When he reappeared, holding the black holdall, Jerzy was pointing a handgun at him. Ian noted that it was a Browning Challenger, not a bad choice.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Ian asked, quite reasonably.

‘Just a little of the caution,’ Tomek replied. He was the only one who had spoken so far. Jerzy moved across the other two men and stood about six feet from Ian. Then Bartosz moved over and lifted the holdall out of
his hand. He passed it to Tomek and patted Ian down. Nothing. Tomek stepped in under the brim of the garage door and set the holdall down on an oily carpentry bench. He unzipped it and pulled out a white plastic bag, loosely rectangular with stacked bank notes. Ian, self-consciously staying completely still, watched as he endlessly, professionally flicked through the cash once, and again, before finally nodding and murmuring something in Polish to the others. Jerzy lowered the pistol and then casually thrust it into his cheap leather jacket like it was his wallet or phone.

‘Okay, thanks for this…’ Tomek’s voice was amplified by the garage and sounded lower than before. ‘And now, for
you
.’ He moved across the gloom and unexpectedly, with a matador’s flourish, whipped back a sheet of tarpaulin.

Danny and Geordie were parked up on the pavement about fifty metres from the gate. The street was quite empty and only a single car, a silver Ford Puma, sat between them and the yard. Geordie’s mobile was down to one bar and he wanted to save it in case Janice should text, so he turned Danny’s phone back on in order to ring her. He hadn’t left her a note to explain where they’d gone. As soon as the mobile had initialized three voicemails and four text messages beeped up on the screen.

‘Here, Hitler, you’re a popular man,’ Geordie said drily. ‘Your fan club are looking for you.’

Danny checked the voicemails. Albert: frantic and almost erotically excited about the unfolding drama. Ellen: upset and concerned, explaining that Adam Vyse had
questioned her over the missing bid. Danny felt sick at the thought of the two of them speaking. Jill, his Welsh secretary: bemused and repeating the tenor of Carrie’s earlier message but advising that Danny apologize, feign illness, a breakdown, and kindly referring to Vyse as a
needle-dicked bastard
. This was solely for his benefit. He knew that she had, in fact, quite a soft spot for Danny’s antagonist and he had often heard the hawking drainage of her laugh when Vyse, sitting on the edge of her desk, regaled the secretarial pod. The texts were all from Albert again: expressing mounting levels of curiosity about what was going on. The last one was simply three rows of question marks with one final full stop.

When Jerzy was loading the van, Ian found that he couldn’t stop watching the flywhisk of the Pole’s ponytail whip about. A couple of times it brushed Ian’s arm when they moved round each other. He was a big man, a solid rod of muscle. Ian was thinking he would make a good training partner. They should spot each other. Jerzy could maybe outpress him on the bench but Ian could definitely clean snatch a bit more. The big man’s legs didn’t look so strong in those tight jeans. Ian climbed into the back of the van and made the final arrangements (it only took a couple of minutes) while the three Poles stood and smoked in the garage. He backed carefully out and gently closed the van door. The men stood four-square and shook each other’s hands with competitive, monkey-wrench grips, and then Jerzy disappeared into the back of the shop. Ian climbed into the van’s driver’s seat. The two brothers, who were to leave that night for Warsaw, stood side by side again in front of
the garage. Both had miniature smiles playing at the corners of their mouths. Tomek folded his arms over the white plastic bag filled with money. Through the windscreen they looked to Ian oddly like a family on a doorstep seeing a visitor off, with the mother holding the swaddled baby. He wiped over the surfaces and steering wheel with a chamois from the passenger seat, pulled on his mesh-backed driving gloves, and started the transit.

The yellow gate started to move back behind the stone wall in a jerky eclipse. Geordie sat up a little and said, ‘Here we go. Open sesame.’ Danny started the car, then unfolded the
Guardian
again to hide his face. The paper was from 4 July 2003. The news in it was more than a year old but could have been yesterday’s. Occupations. Terrorism. Posturings. The same but different.

Ian had pulled out of the yard very slowly and was now inching over the speed bumps at the end of the road. It had all gone smoothly. He had to ring Mervyn. He’d be sorry to have missed all the fun. Fucking Budgie. How had he managed to cock it all up? All he had to do was keep the money safe and give it to Mervyn to bring over, and he couldn’t even manage that. He was going to be surprised though. Budgie thought Ian was going to arrive back with a vanload of drugs. Only Merv knew what the cash was for. They’d talked and talked it through, sitting at Mervyn’s kitchen table drinking endless cups of tea, and occasionally folding up bits of newspaper to set under the one short leg of the wobbly table. It had to be a methodical decision. The money had to make a dam that would turn the flow of the river.

Mervyn knew his stuff. The British government only ever treated the Ulster Unionists as conditionally British. Useful
enough when there was a war to be fought or an Olympics to compete in but otherwise fit only for caricature and ridicule–the bigot braying on the telly, marching sternly past the camera in his archaic bowler hat and ludicrous sash, awkward, brash, unfashionably religious.

There was an assumption in the British media that the Union only existed for the security and comfort of the English. The Ulster Protestants were expendable. They had been in Ireland since well before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, but who was calling for the descendants of those settlers to go home? It was ludicrous. And it was time to say no properly. The Union wasn’t something the English could decide to grant or to withhold. The Protestants would not be pushed into a foreign state. Mervyn could list the names and dates of the betrayals: the 1920 and 1949 Government of Ireland Acts, the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo–Irish Agreement of 1985, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

We are honourable people, Mervyn would say. We tried to play by the rules, and those rules were broken by the English, so we’re entitled to do more than politely dissent. Today was the day. The Glorious Twelfth. Three hundred and fourteen years ago, in 1690, the Protestant William had fought the Catholic James at the Battle of the Boyne and won. Ian was lifting up that mantle. He was ready, he was willing, he was able. It was time to shake the world awake.

Mervyn thought they could learn a thing or two from the Muslims. You had to make the buck stop, you had to break the bank. The only way to hurt the English was to cost them something, to make them pay, to bring to a halt the City’s jingling circuit of money. In the enormous
silence people would listen. There was another strong currency aside from the sterling or dollar, and he possessed a whole vanload of it. He could spend violence for ever. Let’s see them laugh at this.

‘There’s a lot of stuff in there, whatever it is. He’s driving like a granny.’ Geordie was in bullish form. The transit pulled out onto the High Road and set off south.

‘Where’s he heading now? He should be going north, to the boat,’ Geordie continued as Danny waved across a stringy white mother in front of the Polo. She was manoeuvring a pushchair in which a chubby black toddler with bark-brown curls was grinning. ‘We should just write everything down and ring Crimestoppers. They have Crimestoppers over here don’t they?’

‘Yeah, they’re called the police.’

‘Hitler, can you remember all the names of the roads?’

‘We can check them on the
A to Z
.’

‘Good…I’m cracking for a piss.’

It was now just after ten and the traffic was sluggish all the way down through St John’s Wood and on to Maida Vale. When they approached the turn for St John’s Wood Road Ian got caught behind a car in the wrong lane, and Danny and Geordie found themselves driving past him. Danny angled his head so the top of his sunhat was pressed against the window and then pulled the Polo over onto the pavement a hundred metres or so further on. Geordie arched round in his seat, and stared at the van.

‘I think he’s on the phone. He’s definitely on the phone.’

When they got to the top of the Edgware Road Ian started to sing. He had never been a confident vocalist,
not since Mrs Logan, the choirmaster for Edenmore Primary School, had asked him just to mime the words at the Christmas concert, and he only liked to sing when he was completely alone. He crooned in a low murmur to himself. It was the words of ‘The Sash’ but set to the tune of ‘Amazing Grace’.

‘It was old but it was beautiful, and the colours they were fine…’

‘We could just ring the police now,’ Geordie said. ‘He’s bound to have something illegal in there.’

‘Could do.’ Danny was tired. The phone which he’d chucked onto the back seat kept ringing and beeping with messages. He felt sick with nerves and nausea. He needed water and a feed and a warm place to sleep.

‘Though he might be going to pick up more videos. From Brixton maybe.’

Danny smirked at Geordie’s showy display of his new London knowledge.

‘Really. From Brixton you think?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘It was worn in Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne. My father wore it as a youth in by-gone days of yore…’

Danny watched the van drifting down with the rest of the traffic towards the eye of the whirlpool, Marble Arch roundabout, but then it swerved off, into the inside lane, to turn left into Seymour Street. As the van slowed to a stop at the traffic lights, Danny tried to pull into its lane but cars were already tightly packed behind it.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Get into the right lane.’

‘I can’t.’ The traffic to the right of them was solid as well. There was only one way to go. They were being forced to pull up alongside Ian. Geordie pulled his cap right down and turned towards Danny, who was staring straight ahead.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Danny said, without moving his lips. The van was right beside them. He had to slow to a stop. The whiteness of the transit filled the two windows on Geordie’s side. Danny kept staring ahead as Geordie squirmed in his seat. He was wedging his palms in under his thighs.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Sitting on my hands. He might recognize them.’

‘
What?
Why would he recognize your hands?’

‘
I
don’t know. Because they’re quite small.’

‘Act normal, you berk. The lights’ll change in a second.’

‘I want to look up at him.’

‘Don’t fucking dare.’

The lights flicked to green and the van turned left. Danny indicated, and tried to pull across but a large black Mercedes blocked him out. The car behind him began to beep. And then another started. Danny put his hand into the air to acknowledge his stupidity and contrition. A little red Clio let him in. They turned into Seymour Street. The van was three cars ahead. The traffic slowed again. An African–Senegalese, Danny guessed–crossed in front of them. He was carrying a large wooden board wrapped in a cloth. Items bulged under it. Sunglasses, or maybe watches. Danny thought how London itself was a whirlpool’s eye, a huge centripetal machine dragging bodies towards it from across the world. Like Scott Atkins,
the Australian in his department. Like this Senegalese selling sunglasses. Like Albert, Ellen, Geordie, Janice. Like himself. London had seemed to promise to put him at the centre of his life, but the city kept turning, and the song of one small existence became quickly subsumed in the hum of its engine. He was fuel.

The van pulled across Tottenham Court Road and onto Goodge Street. ‘He’s heading east,’ Danny said absently. They cut down Gower and onto High Holborn. Danny was entirely focused on the path of the white van, as if its movements were those of a roulette ball and he had his savings staked on the outcome. The van was getting further away and for a few minutes they lost it.

‘Stop for a bit. He might have turned off somewhere.’

‘Then we’d definitely lose him. We have to keep going straight.’

When they rounded Holborn Circus the van reappeared up ahead, stuck in traffic on the old viaduct. They joined the queue of cars and inched along after it. Concrete dragons, sitting back up on their haunches, appeared on either side of the road, marking the entrance to the City of London. At Cheapside, a grey sky slowly turned on the spire of St Paul’s dome and Danny pointed out Monks, its huge glass windows reflecting the buildings opposite.