2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (22 page)

“I thought you said there was data missing from Philip’s flat.”

“Not data that affects Zembla-4’s launch.”

“I don’t care what Costas says, I’m sorry. I make this decision. I need to see the facts, the reports. Then the board must sanction the—”

“Ingram,” Keegan interrupted. “Just watch your Calenture-Deutz stock treble—no, quadruple.”

Ingram said nothing. He paced around his office, hands in pockets, head down, giving, he hoped, a good impression of a man deep in thought. There was something about the nasal twang of Keegan’s accent that he found particularly grating this morning.

“I’m sorry, Burton,” he said finally. “This is my company, not yours. I make these decisions—not you. No, repeat, no.”

“It’s too late,” Keegan said flatly, almost insolently, all deferment gone. Both he and de Freitas remained seated. Ingram went to his desk and sat down behind it, as if that restored his authority somewhat.

Now Keegan stood and reached into his briefcase. He fanned out three magazines on Ingram’s desk. Not magazines—learned scientific journals, Ingram saw:
The American Journal of Immunology, The Lancet, Zeitschriftfur Pharmakologie
.

“Three articles by independent experts in their field raving about Zembla-4,” Keegan said.

“How come? Where did they get their information?”

“We gave them the data and, of course, paid them extremely handsomely.” Keegan smiled. “It’s a slam-dunk, Ingram. And then, next month, wait till you see the advertorials. We’re looking for a full licence well within a year. Six to nine months.” He spread his thin fingers, blocking out the banner headlines: “At Last A Cure For Asthma.”

“I’ve seen them,” he said, pleased to score a modest point. “Alfredo showed them to me.” He smiled. “Well, I’m going to rain on your parade, Burton,” he continued, “very sorry, but the answer is still a loud and immovable ‘no’. It’s ridiculously premature and risky. Philip Wang himself told me a week before he died that he wanted at least another year of third-level clinical trials—he wanted more placebo comparisons—before he would confidently consider submitting for licence. No, no, no,” he smiled his cold smile. “Call everything off.”

“I’m afraid not, Ingram. Don’t go down this road, please.”

Ingram felt his stomach churn. He flipped the switch on his intercom. “Any sign of my umbrella, Mrs P.?”

“Umbrella, sir?”

“I mean my coffee.”

Both Keegan and de Freitas were now standing in front of his desk.

“By the way, you’re both sacked—fired—as of this moment. You have twenty minutes to leave the building. Security will escort you to your offices. You will take nothing with you apart from personal effects—”

“No, Ingram,” Keegan said, tiredly. “We’re not fired. I suggest you call Alfredo Rilke.”

“Alfredo will have your heads served up on silver platters.”

“This is Alfredo’s idea, Ingram. It’s his doing, not ours. We’re just following his instructions.”

Mrs Prendergast came in with Ingram’s coffee and biscuits. Ingram smiled warmly at her: “Thank you, Mrs P.” She gave him a terrified, nervous glance and then hurried out, not looking once at Keegan or de Freitas.

“You can call Alfredo now,” Keegan said.

Ingram looked at his watch. “It’s five o’clock in the morning in the Caribbean.”

“Alfredo’s in Auckland, New Zealand. He’ll take your call—the usual number.”

“Kindly leave the room, gentlemen.”

After they had gone, Ingram sat there for a moment, still, taking stock, trying to come to terms with the whirling multitude of implications from this last conversation. It was as if a hundred invisible bats, or doves, were flying crazily round his room, his ears filled with rushing wing-beats signifying something bad, something doom-laden. He felt like the democratically elected president of a small republic that had just been the victim of a military coup. He had his office, his nice house, the limousine with the liveried chauffeur—but that was all.

“Alfredo?…Ingram.”

“Ingram. I was hoping to hear from you. It’s all very exciting, isn’t it.”

“It’s all a bit sudden, that’s for sure.”

“This is how it works, Ingram. Believe me. I think—if you’ll permit—that I can say I’ve had more experience in this field than you.”

“Indubitably.” It was at moments like these that Ingram wished he had not abandoned property development for the baffling world of pharmaceuticals. It was all so simple, then—you borrowed money, bought a building, sold it for a profit. But Rilke was speaking.

“—Surprise is your best weapon. You build momentum, unstoppable momentum. You only get one chance. Zembla-4 is out there. We have to go now. Now, now, now. Go, go, go.”

“I just feel—”

“We estimate five to eight billion dollars in the first year of full licence. Ten to twelve billion per annum is very realisable, thereafter. This is another Lipitor, a Seroquel, a Viagra, a Xenak-2. We have our blockbuster drug, Ingram. A twenty-year patent. Global. We will die enormously, vastly, disgustingly wealthy men.”

“Yes, good…Well…” Ingram didn’t know how to respond. He felt cowed; he felt that small-boy feeling again, out of his depth, not understanding. “Onwards and upwards,” he managed to say.

“God bless,” Alfredo Rilke said, his voice crackling through the ether. “And congratulations.”

“Good night,” Ingram said, reaching for one of Mrs P.’s custard cremes.

“Just one thing, Ingram,” Rilke said, “before I sign off.”

“Yes?”

“We have to find this Adam Kindred.”

T
O STEAL FROM A blind man was almost as low as you could go. To steal a blind man’s white stick surely condemned you to the most nether and excruciating regions of hell—assuming hell existed, Adam said to himself, which of course it didn’t. This rock-solid secular rationality, however, didn’t remove the feelings of guilt he experienced each time he took the stick out with him. But needs must, necessity the mother of invention, and so on, he told himself: there was no doubt that the acquisition of the white stick—the white-stick Damascene moment—and the introduction of the white-stick routine had transformed his begging life and his fortunes. On two particular days he had made over £100, most days he begged £60 to £70 with ease. He was going to clear £1,000 long before the end of the month.

He had seen the blind man—the partially sighted man—in a coffee-shop and had observed the almost visible currents of concern that emanated towards him from other people around him. It was as if he were a kind of care-magnet—chairs were discreetly moved out of his way, couples parted to let him by, a steering hand—was laid gently on his elbow to direct him to the front of the queue. Adam sat, watching him order his cappuccino and muffin (a member of staff came out from behind the counter to place them on a table nearby), and the blind man haltingly came over and sat down. People’s conversations quietened deferentially as he passed. He folded up his stick (it had a little plastic ball on the end) and slipped it into the canvas bag he carried and that he placed on the floor by his seat. Then he ate his muffin and drank his coffee and while he was doing so Adam had his revelation—his begging revelation—he saw, at once, his begging future.

He was scraping by perfectly well on his ‘brown coins only’ appeal—£5 to
£6
a day—a smart idea in itself, but it was a
small
smart idea. He needed to take begging to new heights, he required a quantum leap in his begging imagination, and he saw in this blind man and his white stick the road he had to follow.

So Adam stole this blind man’s white stick. He walked by his table, dropped his newspaper, bent down to retrieve it, picked the stick out of the bag and slid it up his jacket sleeve before strolling out of the coffee-shop.

The next day, Adam went to Paddington Station, wearing a shirt and a tie, his pin-stripe suit and a pair of cheap sunglasses bought from a thrift shop near The Shaft. With the stick unfolded, its white plastic ball-end grazing a zig-zag in front of him over the stone floor of the station concourse, he approached the big, elevated electronic display of departing trains. He chose an elderly woman to ask his question to.

“Excuse me,” Adam said in his politest, middle–class voice, “but am I at Waterloo Station?”

“No. Oh, no, no. You’re at Paddington.”

“Paddington? Oh my god, no. Thank you, thank you. Oh god. Sorry to bother you. Thank you.” He turned away.

“Can I help? Is there anything wrong?”

“I’ve been brought to the wrong station. I’ve spent all my money.”

The woman gave him £10 and paid for his Underground ticket back to Waterloo.

At Waterloo, Adam asked a young couple if he was at Liverpool Street Station. They gave him £5 for his Tube fare. Waiting half an hour, Adam then approached a middle-aged man, also in a pinstriped suit, and asked him if the trains to Scotland left from here.

“Bugger off,” the man said and turned his back on him.

But that was rare. In Adam’s experience, for every ‘bugger off, walk-away or blank ignoring stare he received four offers of financial aid. People thrust money on him, some were absurdly generous, offering to accompany him, buy him food, telling him to ‘take care’, pressing further notes into his hand.

On his first day begging as a blind man he made £53.

On his second day he made £79.

A routine soon established itself: he undertook a daily circuit of London’s railway termini and larger Underground stations—King’s Cross, Paddington, Waterloo, Victoria, London Bridge, Piccadilly, Liverpool Street, Earls Court, Angel, Notting Hill Gate, Bank, Oxford Circus. He also went to Oxford Street and shopping malls, farmers’ markets and museums—anywhere that people gathered and where he would be inconspicuous. Wherever he was he simply asked if he was somewhere else. People were kind and attentive, people were helpful and understanding—his faith in the essential good nature of his fellow human beings was hugely reinforced. He never begged more than once a day at any one location and steadily the wad of notes in his pocket grew. He paid Mhouse’s rent a week in advance; he went to the supermarket and came home with plastic bags full of food and wine for himself and Mhouse and treats for Ly-on. He bought a de-luxe Easy-Reading kit and began to teach Ly-on to read and write (it helped diminish the guilt, a little). In his second week of blind-man begging he purchased a new dark suit, three white shirts, a pseudo-club tie and a pair of black loafers in a sale.

And so when Mhouse scratched her nails on his door that night and offered him a lodger’s discount for sex with the landlady he was both ready and happy to oblige—money no object. She came to his bed five nights in a row. On the third night he asked her to stay—he liked the idea of them sleeping together in each other’s arms but she said a full night was,£100 so he demurred. Then suddenly, after five nights, she stopped coming. He missed her, missed her lean, quick body and her uptilted, dark-nippled breasts.

He had not had sex with anyone since that ill-fated night in the cloud-chamber viewing gallery with Fairfield—and before that there was a distant, dimming memory of making love to Alexa

—her tanned body, her white bikini-shadow, her lustrous blonde hair and perfect teeth. To have Mhouse in his arms, beneath him, to be inside her, to experience orgasm, was as close to happiness as he had known, recently—for the first time since the murder of Philip Wang he felt a sense of ease, of normality, of a stirring of human affection again—of need.

After a few days’ abstinence he said to her: “I’ll give you a hundred, for a whole night.”

“I don’t think so, John. It’s not, you know,
proper
. Ly-on will-know.”

“How come the other five nights were ‘proper’?”

“Well, sort of slam-bam-thank-you-Mam, you know. Quick as a flash. But I think he know something’s happened.”

That was true. After the fourth night Adam had come up behind Mhouse at the sink, put his arms around her, kissed her neck and squeezed her breasts. She’d turned and slapped his face, hard. Adam recoiled and in spinning away was provided with an image of Ly-on looking up from his book, shocked and worried.

“Don’t fucking never do that again,” Mhouse hissed at him in a fury. “This is business. Pure and simple.”

But was it? Adam wondered. That first night she had come into his room she had said she was ‘lonely’. He was lonely too

—sometimes he thought he was the loneliest man on the planet. And he had so liked holding her small, lithe body, feeling the warmth of her breath on his neck and cheek, feeling her squirm and rub herself against him. As the days went by and nothing further happened, Adam—growing richer—began to find living in the flat a near intolerable frustration. He resumed his visits to the Church of John Christ, choosing to eat his evening meal there in the company of Vladimir, Turpin and Gavin Thrale, happy to endure Bishop Yemi’s interminable sermons. But he still came back to The Shaft and lay on the mattress in his room, listening through the wall to Ly-on now reading simple stories to his mother. When all went quiet he would lie in the dark, willing Mhouse to slip out of bed and come and tap on his door, but it didn’t happen again.

Adam thought—vaguely—about leaving: why torment himself in this way? But something kept him there. The flat in The Shaft was a kind of home, after all, and he felt safe, for once. And Ly-on liked him—strange, listless Ly-on who turned out to be a quick learner—and if he left he wouldn’t see Mhouse any more, wouldn’t be in her company, watching television, eating bad meals together, laughing, talking. He wondered if he were becoming unhealthily obsessed with her…

Adam sat in his room counting out £500 and then looped a rubber band around the thick wad of notes. That left him a float of almost
£300
but he was beginning to feel uneasy about carrying such a large amount of money around with him. Luckily he’d thought of somewhere secure where he could bank it.

On the way out of The Shaft he heard a call.

“Hey. Sixteen-oh-three.”

He looked round to see Mr Quality loping towards him, hand held out in greeting. They had met a couple of times before when he had called round at the flat, delivering small packets to Mhouse—pills for her problems, Mhouse said. They slapped hands and gripped thumbs.