A Week in December (24 page)

It was a big day ahead. As well as checking out a striker for his virtual team, Finn was going to a place recommended by Ken, his best friend at school. Ken wasn't really called Ken, he was really called Leo, but when you typed Leo as predictive text on your mobile, it came out as Ken.

Ken told Finn he was mad to score his dope in Pizza Palace from a runner working for that king of rip-off artists, Liston Brown in Muswell Hill. He should go to the main supplier - to a farmer. So, at Esher station, he gave the taxi an address near West End Common. Paying for cabs was easy for Finn, as he always had cash, thanks to his Allied Royal debit card. His balance was kept permanently topped up by a trickle-down from one of his father's accounts; John Veals fiercely resented high-street bank charges and had set up the arrangement so that Finn could never overdraw.

The taxi pulled up outside a large low villa with a gravel forecourt and a waist-high brick wall. Next to the wrought iron gates was a signboard, like those announcing bed and breakfast or a two-star hotel in Bexhill. In blue letters on a red background, it said 'Snoozetime Pet's Rest'. Finn rang the bell by the locked gates, wondering vaguely what his English teacher had said about apostrophes.

The front door of the house opened, and a slightly hunched man came towards Finn over the gravel. He wore an anorak over tracksuit bottoms with brown leather shoes, had smudged spectacles on a long cord round his neck and grey hair sticking out under the sides of a purple baseball cap. There was something wrong about old people wearing baseball caps, Finn felt; and this man looked as though he'd slept in his clothes for a few days.

'I've come about a cat,' said Finn, as instructed by Ken.

'I see. And is Pussy still with us?'

'Er ... Yes, but it's kind of on its last legs. Can you show me some, like, you know, what you do if I bring it.'

The man unlocked the gate. He held out his hand to Finn.

'Simon Tindle,' he said. 'This way please.'

'Yeah, right, er ... Finn, yeah,' Finn mumbled.

'Now then,' said Tindle, 'I can begin by showing you the Garden of Remembrance. We have a special position here, backing on to the common. Would you like to tell me a little about the beloved? I hope you don't think I'm being rude.'

'Rude? No. Why?'

'I'd hate it if you thought I was being rude. People can take things the wrong way and I don't want to cause offence.'

They were walking beside the house down an alley, through a gate and out into a large grassed area of perhaps an acre, criss-crossed by gravel paths.

'Most of my friends,' said Tindle, 'prefer to take the departed home with them but one or two are buried here. You can see all our different stone memorials.'

'When you say "friends" ...'

'I call them friends because I don't like to think of them as clients. You'd be my friend if you decide to leave Pussy with us.'

'I see. So I, like, bring the ... like, the body ... and then what?'

'I give you a special heat-sealed thermabag now. You pop Pussy into it when she passes, then you bring her down here on the train. Or in the car. It doesn't matter, so long as it's within twenty-four hours. After that, it can get a little ... I hope you don't think I'm being--'

'No, no. Not at all. Bring him down here.'

'Oh. Pussy's a boy is he?'

'Well, whatever, bring her down and then?'

'We have a crematorium. You see over there? With the chimney.'

Finn followed the direction of Tindle's pointing finger to a large outhouse.

'Looks like Auschwitz,' Finn said, without thinking. They were always doing the Holocaust at school. That and climate change.

'Oh dear.'

'I'm sorry,' said Finn, 'I didn't mean to be--'

'No, not to worry, it's very upsetting when the dear one is ready to pass. I can show you inside the crematorium if you like. It's very humane.'

'No, that's all right. I believe you. Then what?'

'Then I give you the cremains.'

'The "cremains"?'

'Yes, the ashes if you prefer. I think that sounds rather coarse, though. Cremains is more dignified, don't you think?'

'OK.'

'And we choose a casket. I can show you a selection when we go indoors. We can do that now, if you like. And most of my friends like a cup of tea after the cremation. And then you take Pussy home.'

They were now standing outside the aluminium-framed French doors at the back of the house.

'What I really wanted,' said Finn, following the formula Ken had told him, 'was the full deluxe service with grass covering.'

Tindle stopped. 'Oh, I see. Aren't you rather ... I hope you don't think I'm being rude, but aren't you rather young?'

'Eighteen,' said Finn, pulling himself up to his full height.

'All right. Come on then. This way.'

Finn followed Tindle down some crazy paving, past a bronze bust of an evil-looking German Shepherd with the words 'Ever Faithful' on a plaque beneath it, round the back of the crematorium and into a dropped level of garden, where there was another low shed, this time without a chimney. Tindle took a bunch of keys from a purse in his anorak pocket and fumbled with the two heavy padlocks on the door. He held the door back for Finn.

It took Finn's eyes a moment to adjust to the overhead lights.

'Ah, methinks I see the metal halide blink!' said Tindle. 'The 1,000-watt bulb can put out your eyes if you're not careful. But they put out ever so much more light than your old fluorescent.'

'Heat, too,' said Finn.

'It would be a lot hotter without the fan up there. But it has to be pretty hot. And humid.'

Now that Finn was standing next to Tindle in the germinating atmosphere, he could tell his guess about the old man's clothes was right.

Marijuana plants filled the shed from wall to wall. They were potted on wooden trestles at about waist height, while the lights, in long galvanised metal shades, were suspended on chains from the ceiling, drenching each plant, forcing its growth, so that the room was filled with an odour that made Finn's mouth go dry and his stomach tense in reflex.

'This is a hydroponic system,' said Tindle. 'That means no soil. It's cleaner, quicker and you get more weed. Instead of getting the nutrients haphazardly from the soil, the plants get it in exactly the right amount through what we put in the water.'

Finn inspected the array of tubes and pipes that fed the flourishing plants in their plastic containers, sweating under the lights. They had woolly buds around the top, the promise of power, of great synapse-blocking and reality adjustment.

'This is Aurora Indica, very potent,' said Tindle. 'This little madam is my version of Super Skunk, which was an attempt to beef up the famous Skunk Number One. I've crossed it with a strain of Purple Haze for quick effect.'

'Sounds great.'

'Let me show you through here,' said Tindle, opening a locked door at the end of the room. 'In here we use the sea-of-green method.'

In the second area, the plants made a denser, lower canopy. The idea was to pack the space with smaller plants that matured earlier and force a continuous year-round harvest, Tindle explained. 'We're concentrating all the effort in the main cola, this bit here at the top of the plant,' he said. 'It gets so heavy that we have to support it with chicken wire. When they get nice and tall, we tie the top back down on the stem, like here, leave it for a week and then let it go - and hey presto, it's got twice as bushy. It's a year-round harvest festival.'

'Yeah, great,' said Finn. Something about the room made him uneasy. It was all so unnatural. When he'd first read about marijuana he'd pictured it as a mild weed that grew beside the road in sunshine and was smoked by laughing girls in California. This shed looked like a factory, where everything was forced, intensified.

'Well, anyway, that's enough horticulture,' said Tindle. 'Now let's do some business. Shall we go to my office?'

'All right.' Finn felt nervous. He knew how much he paid at Pizza Palace to Liston Brown's runner for half a sandwich bag of weed and he knew it ought to be cheaper if he was cutting out the middle man, but he wasn't sure he'd know the jargon. If he was confused, he'd be too embarrassed to reveal his ignorance.

Tindle locked the grow shed and led him over the crazy paving to the French doors at the back of his house. With his foot, he cleared away a tortoiseshell cat that was in the way.

'That your cat?' said Finn.

'No, it's next door's,' said Tindle, pulling back the doors. 'I haven't got pets. I don't like animals. I'm allergic.'

Indoors, he pulled the flap down on a walnut bureau, raised his greasy glasses on their string and opened a notebook. 'Now,' he said, 'what can I do you for?'

'I want something that'll give a great high. Big, powerful, but you know, no ill effects.'

'And what quantity are we talking about, young man?'

'I ... Er, what, you know, what do you, like, deal in?'

'Half a kilogram is the minimum I do. I could do you half a kilo of Super Skunk Two, cut with Aurora. That's a popular mixture. It's good value, too, because you don't need much of it.'

'What's it feel like?'

'I don't smoke myself because of my allergies. But I believe it's as good as anything you'll get in London.'

'How much is it?'

'Hang on. Let me have a look at my little book of rules. Right. Here we are. The street price would be about PS45 an ounce - if you could get it. But you can't get anything of this quality on the street. But let's just say for the sake of argument you could. One kilo is thirty-five ounces. Now let me see.' Tindle tapped a calculator. 'As a very special offer, I could let you have it for PS700.'

'Do you take debit cards?'

'Yes, of course. Here's my little johnson. You give me the card. Now you put in your number while I go and get the goods.'

Finn keyed in 1991, the year of his birth. PIN ACCEPTED.

Tindle returned with a giant zip-sealed polythene bag full of skunk and tore off the receipt from the PDQ machine. The slim curl of paper said 'Snoozetime Pet's Rest. 700.00 Received With Thanks.'

Some big coffin, thought Finn.

The first-team players were driven by coach to a modern hotel about a mile from the ground of the team they were playing. In a private dining room they helped themselves to food from the sideboard. There was pasta with tomatoes, pasta with spinach, pasta with peas and sweetcorn, pasta with more pasta and shreds of chicken, baked potatoes with pasta on the side, risotto and pilaff with pasta salad. Spike felt like a few pork sausages or a beef goulash with sour cream, but there was nothing like that on offer. He took a piled plate of pasta with bits of bacon and chicken and tried to pick the meat from the rigatoni. There was rice pudding to follow, with yoghurt and bananas. It was a bit like being in hospital, Spike thought.

What the players ate was carefully overseen by a young man called Gary Foskett, the senior club nutritionist. He had pale red hair, white flaky skin and a slight tremor in his hand.

Towards the end of lunch, the manager finally joined them. Mehmet Kundak had done well in his native Turkey and less well in Italy; his appointment had been a surprise, but he managed to carry with him an air of superior knowledge, intensified by the fact that he seldom spoke. Kundak left the set pieces, the cones and the stretching to Archie Lawler, while he chain-smoked over videos of the opposition. His substitutions were sudden and contrary, but often successful. It was known that he sometimes took against players for no reason. He had paid PS9 million for a Serie A striker the year before and picked him only once, in a Cup match away to a third-division side. His loyalty to players like Danny Bective and Sean Mills, cannon fodder of an English kind that hadn't changed since Agincourt, endeared him to traditional supporters who naturally distrusted the Australian private-equity company which owned the club.

Kundak greeted some of the senior players with a friendly hand on the shoulder. He had large rings round his heavily bagged eyes and their darkness was intensified by the sensitive transitional lenses of his glasses, which seemed to count even a 60-watt bulb as a cue for blackout.

'How you like it?' he said to Spike.

'Yes. OK,' said Spike.

'You like the food?'

'Yes. OK. It stuff you up.'

'It make you run. Run all day like Bective. Eh, Danny?'

'Yes, gaffer.'

'Tell the truth,' said Kundak, 'is shit English food. If you play well Saturday I take you to my best restaurant. OK?'

'Thank you,' said Spike. 'So I play for the team on Saturday?'

'Too right you play for the fucking team. No prima donnas here, mate,' said Sean Mills, and everyone laughed, except the small African and Ali al-Asraf.

After eating, Spike was sent to room 416 with Vladimir and told to relax. Vladimir stretched out his six feet four inches on the bed and scratched his heavy, week-old beard. He was a frightening prospect, even prone. From his bag, he took out a small double-screened games console and began to play something in which baby dragons collected gold coins to the accompaniment of bleeping sounds.

Spike hated lying down on a bed during the day. It reminded him of being a child, when his mother would make him go up and have a rest every afternoon in their flat overlooking the shipyards in Gdansk. Tadeusz, as he was called then, lay and watched the cobweb that joined the flex of the suspended light to a piece of cracked plaster in the ceiling. He looked out of the window, then closed his eyes and wondered at the way that he could still 'see' after-images of what he had glimpsed through the glass.

He went and turned the television on, but Vladimir protested. 'I try to concentrate, you fool,' he said. 'I have nineteen pieces. One more and I go up a level.'

Spike lay down on the bed and flicked through the Gideon Bible. He'd know better another time: get a different room-mate, bring a book. This Bulgarian was a jackass. Spike let his mind turn to his girlfriend, a Russian called Olya he'd met at a sponsored event when he'd first come to sign with his new club. Just thinking of her made Spike happy.