2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (18 page)

“Dad, please, it’s Nate.”

“I can’t call a child of mine ‘Nate’, I’m sorry to say.”

“Then you shouldn’t have called me Fortunatus.”

“‘Fortunatus Fryzer’,” Meredith said, “it’s a wonderful name.”

“It sounds like a medieval alchemist,” Forty⁄Nate said.

“You
know why
we called you that, darling,” Meredith continued, quietly.

“Yes. Why is so?” Rodinaldo said—his first words of the evening, Ingram realised.

“He nearly died when he was born,” Ingram said, remembering, his throat tightening as if by reflex. “We thought we’d lost him.”

“And I nearly died too,” Meredith reminded him, with some ferocity. “We were both very lucky.”

After dinner, Ingram was drawn aside by Guy, who asked him to invest £50,000 in a classic car business he was starting up.

“What do you mean ‘classic cars’?”

“We buy them, do them up and sell them at a profit. You know: Citroen DS, triumph Stag, Ford Mustang, Jensen Interceptor—modern classics, timeless.”

“What do you know about classic cars?”

“A bit—well, not much. Alisdair’s the real expert. There’s a huge market in these cars, huge.”

“Don’t you need a garage, a warehouse?”

“Alisdair’s working on that. We just need some seed money—get us going.”

“Been to a bank? They lend people money, you know.”

“They were very unhelpful, really negative.”

Ingram said he would think about it and excused himself and went off to his dressing room to drink more Scotch, he rather wanted to be drunk this evening, semi-lose control, for some reason. On his way back down the stairs Minty was waiting for him on a landing. She said she needed £2,000, cash, tonight.

“No, darling, it’s impossible.”

“Then I’ll go down to King’s Cross and sell myself to someone.”

“Don’t be silly and dramatic, you know I hate it.”

She began to cry. “I owe this person money. I have to pay him tonight.”

Ingram went back up the stairs to his bedroom, opened the safe and returned with,£800 and almost $2,000. Minty seemed suddenly calmer.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said. “I’d better go. Happy birthday.” She gave him a swift peck on the cheek. “Don’t tell Mummy, please, not a word.”

“Pay me back whenever you can,” he said to her as she trotted down the stairs, with more bitterness in his voice than he meant.

He followed her slowly down to the hall where Forty and Rodinaldo were putting on their jackets and rucksacks, not lingering either.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” Forty said and gave him a hug. For a second Ingram had his arms around his son before he broke free.

“All going well with the gardening?” Ingram asked.

“Yeah, fine.”

“I’d like to invest in it. You know: help you grow. Ha-ha.” Ingram realised he was finally a little drunk—the Scotches and all the wine.

“We’re very happy as we are. Small is beautiful.”

Rodinaldo nodded. “Nate and me, we can to be everything that we wan’.”

“Lucky you,” Ingram said. “Remember the offer’s on the table. New spades, new van, new…” He couldn’t think what else a gardener might need, for some reason. “Anyway, I’m here.” He felt drunken tears form in his eyes as he watched his youngest son pulling on some form of camouflage jacket. He wanted to hug him again, kiss him, but he stepped back and raised his hand in casual farewell. Meredith put her arm round his waist and squeezed discreetly. Ah, Ingram thought, just time for a PRO-Vyril.

As they went upstairs to their bedrooms the phone rang.

“I’d better get it,” Ingram said.

It was Burton Keegan.

“It’s very late, Burton,” Ingram said, keeping his voice deep and calm.

“We need to meet—tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“The world’s still turning, Ingram.”

B
OZZY HANDED OVER ADAM KINDRED’S mobile phone and his wallet containing his credit cards.

Jonjo fanned them out. “They’re all American—except one.”

“Yeah. We was going to come back to him—get the pin numbers. Zaz kicked him too hard, so we was a bit, you know, emotional. That’s why we left him. When we come back—he gone.”

“Stop moving around like that. Getting on my nerves.”

“Sorry, bruv. Flat.” Bozzy tried to hold himself still.

“And don’t call me ‘bruv’. I’m not your brother—not in any sense of the word.”

“Safe. Check it, boss.”

Jonjo put the cards and the phone in his pocket and gave Bozzy a couple more twenty-pound notes. From another pocket he drew out a roll of printed copies of Kindred’s wanted advertisement and handed them over.

“Go round the estate. Show this to people and ask if they saw him that night.”

Bozzy looked at Kindred’s picture.

“That was the mim we jacked, yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s wanted for murder. Killed a doctor.”

“
Cunt
.”

“Ask around,” Jonjo said, then looked at the soles of his boots—he had stepped on something moist and sticky. He wiped the mess off on one of the mattresses.

“You want to burn this place,” he said. “I’m not meeting you here again, got it?”

“Got it, boss.”

“Find him,” Jonjo said. “Somebody on this estate knows where Kindred is.”

W
HEN YOU HAVE NOTHING, Adam thought, then everything, the tiniest thing, becomes a problem. In order to begin his begging life he had been obliged to steal—steal a felt-tip pen from a stationery shop. Then on a rectangle of cardboard ripped from an empty wine case outside an off-licence he had written with the stolen felt-tip: ‘HUNGRY AND HOMELESS. SPARE A PENNY. BROWN COINS ONLY’

On his first day he had settled down outside a supermarket on the King’s Road. He sat cross-legged on the ground outside the main entrance and propped his sign against his knees. Almost immediately, people began giving him their brown coins, as if relieved to get rid of their annoying small change, the near useless, purse-filling one- and two-pence pieces. Adam was pleased to see how logical his reasoning had been: there is nothing more irritating than heavy pockets and purses full of small-denomination coins. ‘Buddy can you spare a dime’ had been his inspiration. He took his jacket off and spread it in front of his knees so that potential donors could toss their coins on to its material rather than risk contact with his grubby, black-nailed hand. In thirty minutes he had made £3.27. He filled his own pockets with pennies and tuppences—there was the odd five-pence piece as well—and someone had given him a pound, impressed by the modesty of his need and the politeness of his demand.

Twenty minutes later, when he had crossed the £5 margin, a man came up and squatted beside him. He was young, very lean, thickly bearded like Adam and just as dirty.

“
Mshkin n gsadnka
,” he said, or something that sounded like it.

“I don’t understand,” Adam said, “I only speak English.”

“Fucking off,” the man said and showed Adam the blade of a Stanley knife in the palm of his hand. “I here. It belong me. I cut you.”

Adam left promptly and walked to Victoria Station where he found a patch of pavement between a cash-point and a souvenir shop. He made another pound or so before the owner of the souvenir shop came out and sprayed him with insecticide.

“Fuck off, you asylum scum,” the man said. And so Adam moved on, his eyes stinging.

He had made £6.13 his first day; he made £6.90 his second. Now, mid-afternoon on his third day of begging—situated between a newsagent’s and a small twenty-four-hour supermarket called PROXI-MATE—he had garnered another £5 plus. At this rate, he calculated, say £5 per day, he would make £35 per week, almost £2,000 per year. He was both relieved by this and depressed. It meant he wouldn’t starve—he could now afford to buy cheap un-nutritious food, and every now and then go to the Church of John Christ for a proper meal and, of course, sleep rough in the triangle by Chelsea Bridge. But it was early summer—what would he do in December or February? He felt ensnared, already—in a particularly impoverished poverty trap. He saw himself stuck in a barely tolerable circle of hell—underground, yes, undiscovered, yes—but something had to change. How was he going to recover his old life, his old persona? He once had had a wife, a nice, roomy, modern air-conditioned home, a car, a job, a title, a future. This existence he was living now was so marginal it couldn’t really be described as human. He was like the London pigeons he saw around him, pecking in the gutter. Even the urban foxes were better off with their warm dens and families.

He went to banks and bureaux de change to change his handfuls of copper coins to brass pounds. The tellers were not happy, though they grudgingly obliged. He ranged further and wider, trying not to revisit banks and bureaux too often so as not to make a nuisance of himself and therefore become memorable.

He paid to have a shower in the executive suite at Victoria Station and washed his hair for the first time in nearly a month. He looked at the gaunt, bearded stranger staring out at him in the mirror, as he combed his hair back from his forehead, and was struck by the strength of the conflicting emotions inside him: fierce pride at his resilience and resourcefulness; bitter self-pity that he should have ended up like this. Yes, I’m free, he thought, but what has become of me?

Clean, in his mismatched pin-striped suit, with newly purchased, fairly shiny, black lace-up shoes (_£i from a thrift shop), he went back to the triangle and collected Mhouse’s flip-flops. He wanted ordinary, civil contact with another human being (preferably female). In the last few days hundreds of people had given him tiny sums of money, some had even exchanged kind words, but he was more and more grateful to Mhouse for her suggestion of the Church of John Christ

—the church had been his salvation, literally—even in her fury she had somehow been thinking of him, he thought, and he wanted to thank her and keep his promise to return her shoes. She would be surprised, he reckoned—and maybe even touched—that he had honoured it.

He took a bus to Rotherhithe—another small inching up the ladder of civilisation—and stepped out at The Shaft. He wandered around the estate’s three quadrangles before he recognised the area where he had been mugged (the graffiti being the aide-memoire)

—he saw the trashed playground and the stairs beneath which he had Iain unconscious. An old woman, trailing a shopping trolley behind her with a wobbly wheel, came slowly towards him and as she reached him he asked if she knew someone called Mhouse.

“What unit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I can’t help you, darling,” she said, shuffling off.

He wandered deeper into the estate. He felt inconspicuous—a shabby, creased, bearded presence in cast-off clothes, like most of The Shaft’s male denizens. Two enquiries later secured Mhouse’s address—Flat L, Level 3, Unit 14—and he climbed the stairs to her walkway, feeling a little nervous and apprehensive, almost as if he were on a date.

He knocked on her door and after a pause heard her voice saying, “Yeah? Who is it?”

“John 1603,” he said—and of course she opened the door.

He held up the flip-flops.

“Brought them back,” he said.

There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen-diner and a living room in Mhouse’s flat. There were no carpets or curtains and very little furniture: two mismatched armchairs, some cushions and a TV in the sitting room, two mattresses on the floor in the bedroom she shared with Ly-on. The kitchen had a stove but no fridge. In the other bedroom were some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and random possessions. Most odd, Adam thought, was the rubber tubing and electric cables that were fed through an empty pane of the casement window in the kitchen. This provided running cold water in the kitchen but not the bathroom. There was electricity in every room, however, wires snaking out from a cuboid structure of stacked adaptors on the kitchen floor. Mhouse brought Adam a cup of very sweet tea—she hadn’t asked him if he wanted it sugared.

“Ly-on, you sit on floor,” she said to the little boy who was watching the TV. He moved off his armchair obediently and sat on a winded cushion in front of the screen. He moved slowly, lethargically, as if he’d just been woken up. Adam took his seat and Mhouse sat opposite.

“That’s my son,” she said. “Ly-on.”

“Leon?”

“No, Ly-on. Like in the jungle. Like in lions and tigers.”

“Right.” Adam now remembered her tattoo: ‘Mhouse’ and ‘Ly-on’ on the inside of her right forearm. “Good name for a boy.”

Ly-on was a small boy, almost a tiny boy, with a large, curly-haired head and wide brown eyes.

“Say hello to John.”

“Hello, John. You come mummy to take going?”

“We’ll go for a walk tomorrow, darling.”

Adam noticed that although Ly-on was small and in no way fat he had a distinct pot belly, like a beer-drinker’s.

“You still in Chelsea, then?” Mhouse asked.

“Moving around a bit,” Adam said, cautiously. Mhouse had been his only visitor to the triangle, as far as he knew.

“How you like the church?”

“I think it’s…wonderful,” Adam said, with sincerity. “I go there most nights. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Yeah. I try to go, but, you know, it’s difficult, what with Ly-on.” She scratched her right breast, unselfconsciously. She was wearing a cap-sleeved white T–shirt with ‘SUPERMOM!’ across the front and cropped pale-blue denim jeans. She curled herself up in the armchair and tucked her feet under her. She was also small, Adam realised, a tiny child-woman—maybe that was why Ly-on was so small himself.

He looked down at him and saw the boy was now stretched out on the floor as if he was about to go to sleep.

“You get to your bed, sweetness,” Mhouse said and the little boy rose slowly to his feet and weaved off to the bedroom. “He’s just had his supper,” she said. “He’s tired. And I’ve got to get off me bum and get working. No, no, you stay there. Finish your tea. I’ll just go and get changed.”

Adam sipped his too-sweet tea and channel-hopped on the remote control. She seemed to have an interminable number of channels on her TV. When she came out she was wearing white shiny plastic zip-up boots, a mini-skirt and a red-and-black, tight satin bustier that pushed her small breasts up above the lace trim like round balls. Her make–up ‘was vivid: red lips and black eyes.