Utterly Monkey (27 page)

Geordie scurried on down the ramp to ground level. The male constituents of the German tour group were now displaying much more interest in the view. They lined the bridge’s handrail and clapped and cheered, all while the tiny tour guide carried on recounting, to the nodding frauleins, the story of the princes in the tower.

Ian was trapped in a pincer movement. There were cops behind him and coming towards him. He ran into the open space in front of the colossal brick edifice of the Tate Modern. Two huge crocodile lines of children were entering the building from the left and the right. He found himself funnelled between them and in through the doors. It was suddenly cool and dark. He ran on. He could hear footsteps behind him. The low roof of the entrance gave way to the vast space of the Turbine Hall. An enormous metal spider, maybe fifty feet high, was standing to the right of him. He was on a kind of plat
form, and looked over the balustrade to see dozens of plinths arranged below in neat rows, each holding a different head. The floor below swept up on an incline to another entrance. That one was extremely wide and the way the light came through it made the whole thing look like the opening of a ship’s car-door. He thought of sitting in his van a few days ago, waiting impatiently to start his engine, watching the
Ulster Enterprise
lower its door into Stranraer. He needed to get out again. And here were metal steps leading down. He could hear someone shouting
Stop! Stop that man!
He leapt down the staircase and started pelting up the gentle slope towards the daylight. It felt like running up a drawbridge that’s being slowly raised. Two guards appeared in the mouth of the exit, and started towards him, each in a fluorescent yellow Tate Security jerkin. He spun round and ran back past the foot of the steps just as two cops were clattering down them.

He was in the middle of the exhibition and he was trapped. There were heads all around him, arrayed in their various tribes of plaster and metal and granite. There were stone bonces round as boulders lifted out of a river, bronze faces thumbprinted and pinched into careful expressions, and, at the far end, some black televisions sat on the plinths displaying faces that were trying on various emotions. There was also Ian, his shaved and brutal skull jerking around and around for a way to get out. There were policemen and Tate security guards on every side of the exhibition. He stopped running. The police started to approach, their heads moving steadily among the sculpted ones like chessboard pieces setting up a checkmate. They were shouting stuff to him. Ian
tried to yank free a bronze head that Giacometti had plucked and gouged to almost a blade, but it wouldn’t come loose. He ran towards the TV screens. There was a fire exit at the far end, and if he could just…He was brought to a stop by the wall of a sixteen-stone Turkish gallery attendant named Abdullah Yalcin. Ian’s running head had bounced off his shoulder and hit the industrial floor.

He awoke a few seconds later with four of her majesty’s finest kneeling on various parts of his body, and his head was twisted up so all he could see was two TV screens: one featuring a black guy who looked like a second lieutenant from
Starsky & Hutch
, and the other showing a housewife-y type, white, wearing a frilly collar. They were speaking but Ian couldn’t hear what they said. Two sets of headphones lay where their feet would be. The sign attached to their column said ‘
Good Boy Bad Boy,
Bruce Nauman’. Geordie was a few feet away grinning and watching, leaning with one hand on the tin head of Paolozzi’s
Mr Cruikshank
. A stroppy-looking female attendant appeared and brushed his arm from it. Geordie jumped a little, then gestured with open palms to apologize. He sloped over to Ian. He had to walk round him to get into the line of his sight. One of the policemen shouted ‘Stay back please sir,’ but Geordie ignored him. Fuck it, he thought, I’ve nothing to lose.

‘Hello,’ he said and raised his eyebrows amenably at Ian, as if they’d just met in the street. He had intended to try to stick a toe poke into his side but the police looked pretty angry. Ian remained silent–he was a soldier–and Geordie followed his gaze to the video screens. He watched the faces mouth emptily and then picked
up one set of the headphones and put them on, partly to show that, unlike Ian, he could do what he liked. The two American voices ran together, overlapping each other. The man was angry and the woman almost serene. Geordie listened. It was a weird litany of phrases, like a grammatical primer.

‘
I eat…you eat…we eat…this is eating…

I am a good boy…you are a good boy…we are good boys…’

Ian was being handcuffed and slowly lifted to his feet. A police siren could be heard from the far entrance. Geordie went on listening, and gave Ian a cheeky little wave.

‘I am a bad boy…you are a bad boy…we are bad boys…

I pay…you pay…we pay…this is payment…’

A policeman tapped Geordie on the shoulder and Geordie pulled the headphones off.

‘You’ll have to come with us, sir. Answer a few questions.’

The bomb didn’t go off. When the area was emptied (it had looked to Danny, from the top end of the street, like it had been cleared for shooting a movie), the police had sent in a skeletal robot. After several botched attempts, it eventually opened the door of the van, and not with a bang but a rusty whimper. The BBC in White City had received a telephone warning from a phone box outside Ballymena (eighty metres, it turned out, from the bungalow of a bachelor farmer called Mervyn Watterson) in which it was claimed that a bomb would go off outside the Bank of England in forty minutes. They’d passed the
message on to the police but by the time the robot trundled towards the van fifty-eight minutes had elapsed. As it happened, the bomb could never have exploded: the timer was faulty, and anyway Ian had somehow set it for forty hours instead of forty minutes. In court he unsuccessfully tried to claim that this had been a last minute decision to avoid endangering lives.

Danny had stood by the police cordon the entire time, watching, and telling the tall female officer the beginnings of the story. When he heard the police radios confirm that the bomb posed no danger, he turned to walk up to the churchyard. The officer, Constable Finch, touched him on the arm and asked him to come with her. She eventually agreed he could go and speak to his colleagues but only if she accompanied him. In St Paul’s churchyard certain departments from Monks & Turner had gathered in the sun, chattering excitedly, not about the bomb threat, but about being outdoors in the heat. The sprinklers had stopped and the grass was now dry enough to sit on. Albert, squeezed onto a bench with three other lawyers, was bent right over, wiping one of his shoes with a tissue. He had a large glass bottle of still spring water sitting on the ground between his feet. Albert placed a huge importance on staying adequately hydrated.

‘All right mate?’ Danny said. Albert stood up, lifting the bottle by the neck, and patted Danny’s shoulder with two of his fingers.

‘Where have you been? Everyone in the department was going mad this morning…Are you in trouble?’ he added, noticing the enormous policewoman behind him.

‘I don’t think so. I’m just helping them. I’ll give you a ring later. I’m not going to be in work tomorrow.’

Albert nodded to let him know that there was someone approaching behind him. Danny felt a staccato tap on his shoulder. Vyse. Danny turned round slowly. The partner looked older in daylight.

‘You decided to make an appearance today, did you Mr Williams? Just in to collect your belongings? I see someone else has tried to get their point across.’ Vyse was looking with pleasure at his black eye. Danny glanced at the bottle Albert was carrying and then back at the partner’s polished face. He was briefly tempted to bring the two things together in a glorious union but instead he nodded, unsmilingly.

‘Yes. Sorry about the bid. I don’t know what happened.’
I threw it in a river.

‘Well that little stunt you pulled almost cost us the deal.’
I don’t give a fuck. I’ve beaten you, you little bastard.

‘So it’s all gone through has it?’
Really? Have you?

Adam pushed at his expensive fringe and said nothing while Danny continued, ‘Because,
oddly
, I heard that they didn’t accept it, and went with Yakuma anyway.’
Oh my friend, my little friend, you’re shit and I’m champagne
.

Vyse pushed Danny backwards into the lap of Ryan Smith, a senior Banking litigator who was sitting on the other end of Albert’s bench. Danny stood up again, and was murmuring an apology to Ryan when Vyse started to scream, ‘You stupid little fucker, you prance around thinking you’re too good to be a…’

Danny had noticed Ellen walking over from the churchyard gate and he looked back at Vyse, smiled, and then
pushed past him. The partner stopped shouting and watched him. The policewoman started to say something to Danny but decided instead to follow him.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

Ellen put a hand up to his face.

‘I like your moustache…Everything okay?’

‘Yeah. You know I’ve been sacked?’

‘I heard.’

‘I just need to get my things from the office.’

‘I’ll come over with you. They’re starting to let people back into the buildings.’

They picked a way through the Monks lawyers and secretaries and canteen staff, the Monks security guards and delivery men and IT specialists and librarians. It seemed the entire staff of the London office were sitting or lying around in easy groups on the warm grass as though they’d just brought in the harvest. When Danny reached the churchyard gate he looked back to see Vyse sitting with his head down on the steps of St Paul’s Cross. Andrew Jackson, the senior partner of the department, and Graham Ammons, the managing partner of the whole firm, were standing in front of him talking demonstratively. Danny decided to view it as a victory.

In his office the solicitor Danny Williams gathered up the belongings from his desk and placed them into a single cardboard banker’s box. It didn’t amount to much: a sleeping bag and a cushion, some gym clothes and a pair of trainers, a couple of ties and a spare suit, a pinstripe, that he’d kept hanging behind his door, a box of tissues, two unread novels and a desk calendar of the picturesque glories of Ulster. He told Constable Finch he
just wanted to get a glass of water before they left and the three of them trooped down to the facility room. The policewoman stood in the doorway and effectively plugged it. Ellen leaned on the copier and watched as Danny filled a plastic cup from the water fountain and then drained it in one.

‘So are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked, but Danny didn’t reply. He was feeding the roll of paper from the dispenser into the shredder. The policewoman was engaged in a conversation with the radio on her epaulette. He turned the shredder on and took a step back into the middle of the facilities room, to properly admire his handiwork.

The paper was neatly unspooling into the shredder. It was mesmeric and would continue for ever. Or until the paper ran out. He turned round to face Ellen.

‘If you fancy dinner later, I could tell you about it.’

‘I should come with you now.’

He grinned. ‘Well, I could probably do with a lawyer…No, just see me off the premises. I’ll ring you afterwards and explain.’

The lift was emptying out, with Albert among the silent returners. He stopped and nodded at Danny to ask if he was all right. Danny nodded reassuringly back and walked on into the empty lift. The policewoman and Ellen came in and stood on either side.

‘How long do you think this will take, Constable?’ Danny said.

‘Not that long, shouldn’t think, though these things can depend.’

A lawyer’s response, Danny thought, as the lift doors closed and Ellen pressed the button for the ground floor.
The lift began descending but then slowed and, with a slight sigh of far-off machinery, stopped completely between the fourth and third floors. This had happened periodically over the five years Danny’d worked at Monks & Turner. The policewoman futilely pushed at the buttons. Ellen picked up the emergency phone but it was dead. The constable started describing their whereabouts into her shoulder. Danny felt the unusual sensation of having nothing to do. It was like getting your hair cut or sitting in the back of a black cab. Ellen suddenly, secretly, ran a light fingernail over the back of his hand. She glanced up at him from under her lashes and, as she smiled, revealed that beautifully crooked front tooth. She said, ‘So now what do we do?’

Danny shrugged, smiling. ‘Wait here until it moves again, I suppose.’

About the author

2
Meet Nick Laird

4
A Conversation with Nick Laird

About the book

8
Nick Laird on the London of
Utterly Monkey

Read on

11
Two Poems by Nick Laird

13
Objects on My Desk…

15
Poems Attached by Blue-Tac to the Door of My Study…

16
The Sixteen Most Played Songs on My iTunes…

Meet Nick Laird

N
ICK
L
AIRD
was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1975. He attended Cookstown Nursery School, Cookstown Primary School, and Cookstown High School. (“They were,” he told the
Irish Times,
“all ten meters from each other.”)

He attended Cambridge University, where he won several literary prizes before graduating with a first in English. He next studied law and qualified for practice. He worked as a lawyer in London and Warsaw while writing poems and book reviews during his lunch breaks and evenings.

He was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2003. This seven-month stretch bought him time to complete a book of poetry and begin his novel. Restored to London, he attempted to pick up where he left off. “I got back to work,” he told London’s
Daily Telegraph.
“It was a Monday morning, and by two
P.M
. that afternoon I was back in the same conference with the same barrister and the same client and the same expert witness, and I just thought, I can’t do this. So I resigned…
two months later…. And then I signed a book deal (for
Utterly Monkey)
two months after that.”

His first collection of poetry,
To a Fault,
was published in 2005 to widespread critical acclaim.
The Independent
stated that the volume does “more, in its range and ambition than any first collection…in at least the last ten years.” In 2004 he was awarded an Eric Gregory award, and in 2005 received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Irish Chair of Poetry Prize.

His recent reading has included four “truly great” books: Richard Yates’
Revolutionary Road,
Dave Eggers’
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
Ian McEwan’s
Black Dogs,
and Frank O’Connor’s
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories.

He lives in London with his wife, novelist Zadie Smith. The couple “work at different desks in the same house,” said the
Irish Times,
“both allotting themselves targets of a thousand words a day and both wearing earplugs.”

A Conversation with Nick Laird

from the Cookstown High School magazine

What are your best and worst memories of school?

My best times were with friends. There was always something to laugh about. I remember laughing so hard Mr. Rutherford chucked me out of geography once. My worst memory was probably the headmaster accusing me of vandalizing his car, which, by the way, I hadn’t. And losing hockey matches was always depressing.

When did you realize that you had a talent for writing?

I’m not sure I ever did really. I think of it as more an
interest in
than a
talent for.
At school I did well in English classes and my teachers liked my essays, but it’s a different thing to write poems and novels. I’d written poetry since I was fourteen and I’ve always tried to read a lot of everything, which gives you the vocabulary and techniques to allow your own writing to develop. It’s hard to know where talent ends and acquired skill starts, but all the writers I have met have been readers first. You have to learn how to read closely, to see how things work, before you can write. Most people are awful writers when they start. I was no different.

What was your favorite book when you were at school?

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald and
The Death of a Naturalist,
Seamus Heaney’s first book. They were both huge influences on me. On some level I still feel that I’m writing my way out of those two texts.

Another book that opened doors [for me] that had been previously closed, and which was very useful to me during university, was
The Government of the Tongue,
one of Heaney’s books of essays. It introduced me to amazing poets like Plath, Larkin, Milosz, and, more important, it convinced me that poetry was something worthwhile, even something worthy.

I found the book in the school library and kept reading it, not understanding a lot of it, but very taken with it—so much so, in fact, that I took it with me when I left Cookstown High School. It’s the only thing I’ve ever stolen. In my second year at university I woke up one day thinking about it, and realized that I might be stopping someone else from getting their hands on it. So I went straight to a bookstore, bought a new hardback copy, and sent it to Miss Lennox and the school library. It should be there now if you want to go and steal it.

What advice would you give someone in high school who is interested in pursuing a career in writing?

See above. Also, I’m not sure writing is a career exactly. Most writers, and almost all poets, never make enough money from their writing to live off of, so they supplement it with journalism, criticism, and teaching. That’s one way to go at it. The other way is to get a completely separate job away from books—I worked as a lawyer for six years—
and try to write in your spare time. That, though, can be tiring and lonely.

The best advice to give to someone who knows they want to write, who knows that everything else apart from writing is going to be unsatisfying, is to read. Everything. When you find a writer that you like, read all their books. And then find another one. Writers are readers first, always.

What was the last book you read?

Saturday
by Ian McEwan, although I just finished a read-through of the final draft of my wife’s third novel yesterday. It’s brilliant.

What have been your biggest achievements since leaving school?

This is like a job interview. If achievements mean excitement, the thing that’s given me the biggest thrill since school was when I got a letter from Faber saying that they’d like to take
To a Fault.
I had to be scraped off the ceiling.

In your new book,
Utterly Monkey,
the characters come from Ballyglass. Is it based on Cookstown?

Well, it’s based on it but it’s not it. It’s useful when you’re writing to have a real location in mind—it helps you keep up the semblance of reality—but you have to be able to veer away from it when it suits you. And if I had set the book in a place called Cookstown I wouldn’t have been able to do that.

If your book was turned into a film, would you want to play Danny or Geordie?

I wouldn’t want to play either of them. The last time I acted was in the school play,
Anastasia,
although when Zadie’s novel,
White Teeth,
was made into a television series we went along to the shooting with some friends, and were extras in one scene, a party set in the seventies. We were cut in the end, and no doubt for good reason.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

I’ve just finished doing most of the publicity for
Utterly Monkey,
and I’m reading at various festivals over the summer. In terms of writing, I’m trying to move forward on the second novel. I have characters but a wonky plot. I’m also working on some book reviews, and, as always, tinkering on poems. I usually have about five or six on the go. And I was thinking I should cut the lawn this afternoon.