‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Patrick said. The two men were sitting downstairs watching Barcelona play Majorca in La Liga on a Sunday evening, while Freddy was upstairs in the games room. All three of them found it painful to watch football, and all three of them were continuing to do so out of principle and also out of the fear that if they ever gave the habit up, they might not get it back. ‘I must ask if you will represent Freddy alone at these meetings. I find them too difficult. I can’t go any more. Until there is real news.’
Mickey understood straight away what was being asked of him and what it implied.
‘Of course I will do that, Patrick. It would be an honour.’
And so that’s what Mickey had been doing – going to the meetings and soaking up the bullshit. In doing this, he had also been dishing out some stick. The absence of the Kamos allowed him to show just how upset he was, which meant it allowed him to be much angrier and much more explicit.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ he said to the most senior of the four executives from the insurance company present at their last meeting. The senior one was the skinniest, as in corporate affairs these days was often the way. Next to him were two plumpish middle-manager types, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, one of whom was in charge of medical mumbo-jumbo and the other responsible for legal bullshit, and the fourth was a subordinate who, to judge from his contributions to meetings thus far, might have been deaf-mute. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You think Freddy Kamo’s some jungle bunny who should piss off back to the bush and still be grateful he’s got one good knee left? Is that it? You think he’s some unfortunate loser who’s so thick he isn’t going to realise he has a valid, legally binding contract with you?’
‘I find this extremely offensive,’ said the man, starting to get up from his seat.
‘Good. And you’ll fucking well sit still and listen to it unless you want to be reading all about your refusal to pay out in the
Daily Mail
tomorrow morning. You move from where you’re sitting and I’ll take this as a sign that these negotiations are no longer proceeding in
good faith. And I have to tell you that my sense of your good faith is pretty fucking tenuous. Which part of “legally binding” don’t you understand?’ Mickey picked up one of the folders of doctors’ reports and waved it. ‘This says, translated into English, “his knee is fucked”. Which part of that don’t you understand? How plain do you want it to be? His knee is fucked, there’s a legally binding contract, and it’s time for you to FUCKING PAY UP.’
Mickey felt better. He knew that the bluster would have no effect, but the threat to go public might. The negotiations were protected by a non-disclosure agreement, but if the insurance company could be shown to be behaving unreasonably he would be able to go public. What was happening behind the scenes, almost certainly, was that they were putting together the final details of the settlement they were prepared to make. This would involve Freddy not being allowed to play football ever again. His pay-out would be conditional on his retiring from football permanently – for the obvious reason that if they shelled out a huge amount of money to compensate him for not playing, he shouldn’t subsequently go on to be paid for playing. Mickey had mentioned this to Patrick, who seemed to have taken it in, but he wasn’t really sure: he didn’t want to labour the point. People who knew him might laugh at the idea of Mickey trying not to labour a point, but the truth was, he didn’t want to, because he didn’t want to seem to be patronising Patrick. Who after all was not stupid, and who would realise what this meant: no more football for Freddy. Ever. He would be being paid not for doing the thing he loved, but for never doing it again. It was a hell of a thing for the boy to have to face, and Mickey was morally certain Patrick wouldn’t have alerted his son to what might happen. The news itself would be hard enough to take: no point building up the badness too far in advance.
‘I suspect you are well aware the medical evidence is much more complex than you are giving us leave to understand,’ said the insurance man. ‘Expert opinion about the condition of Mr Kamo’s knees is not unanimous. As you know, these settlements often impose conditions on the subsequent career of a player and it would be cruel and reckless to see such conditions imposed on a man as young and talented as Mr
Kamo without feeling certain that such constraints were warranted.’ In other words, the man had guessed what Mickey was thinking. He was a complete bastard but he wasn’t a stupid bastard.
Mickey stopped listening. Nothing was going to be decided today. What all of them were really doing was nothing but waiting for the meeting to be over. It was grey and damp outside, not cold, a typical English non-autumn day. Mickey loved football, and football had been good to him, but as he got older there were moments when he felt the cruelty of the game, its emphasis on luck, the brevity of its careers, the long afterlife of its heroes outliving their fame; the way a single bad thing could happen, and then everything was over. As it had happened to Freddy. He wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take. Maybe something like property development was a cleaner racket after all.
R
ain spattered against the window of the two-bedroom flat in Hackney where Parker French lived with his girlfriend Daisy, his perfect girlfriend. Where he lived with her for now, anyway. Parker didn’t know it, but he was right on the verge of being dumped. The reason he didn’t know it was the same reason he was on the verge of being dumped: because he was obsessed, oblivious, lost, locked-in, reckless, deaf. Daisy didn’t know how to get through to him. She was sitting listening to music with a cup of tea and a list divided into two columns, Yes and No. The Yes column was full of negative items and featured words like ‘blank’, ‘absent’, ‘down’ and ‘not here’. The No column had only one item in it: ‘He used to be lovely’.
When Daisy went back over the chronology – which she often found herself doing, just to check and recheck her sense that she wasn’t imagining things – there had been three phases. That was excluding Normal Parker, the boy she had been going out with ever since they kissed at a sixth-form dance on a hot June night back at sixth-form college. Normal Parker was her boyfriend’s habitual sweet, boyish self; her boyfriend who needed more looking after than he realised, was more fragile in his confidence than he knew, was determined to make a mark but never quite clear how or when. He was a boyfriend but he was also at times a little like a younger brother; that wasn’t a complaint, she liked that, and it went with his looks, his narrow dark looks, and it
somehow also went with the fact that he was the exact same height as her. She knew that Parker was completely sincere about his desire to Get Away – meaning Get Away from Norfolk, from the world of their childhoods. That she had always believed in, utterly.
As for Parker’s art, well … the important thing was that Parker believed in it. Parker would do something with his life, she felt sure about that. Whether that thing would be art was less plain. It wasn’t clear to Daisy that Parker had any real feeling for the art world. This wasn’t so much an issue about his talent, but his ability to read how that world worked; it was a long way away from Norfolk and it wasn’t about being able to execute nice collages and your art teacher telling you you’re the most gifted pupil in the class. Daisy’s sense of the art world was that it was much more like a game, a deadly serious adult game, and that Parker hadn’t quite realised how that game worked. But none of that really mattered to Daisy, his naivety was all part of Parker’s Parkerness, and it was that about him that she loved and trusted. If he didn’t do art then he’d do something else. All that was Normal Parker, Parker who she hadn’t seen around for some months and whose existence took a conscious act of effort to recollect.
That was because there had been three successive different versions of Parker since. The first of them was Speechless With Grief Parker, the one who had emerged after he had suddenly been sacked – suddenly in his version of things, anyway, though in Daisy’s experience there was no such thing as an entirely unforeshadowed dismissal, not unless you accidentally reversed your car over the boss’s dog. But his sacking was sudden to Parker, and that was the main thing. For weeks he had been lost, gone, buried under his sense of grief and grievance. That had been sad, of course, and she had felt for him, but it had been irritating too, not least because to Daisy, who was tougher than Parker, the final responsibility for not getting sacked lay with the person doing the job. If you did get sacked there was, finally, no one to blame but yourself, so the best thing to do was to suck it up and get on with it. The fact that she couldn’t say that made it all the more irritating, so she was pleased when, having taken Parker away for the Cotswold weekend in the spring to try and make him snap out of it, she found
that he had, indeed, snapped out of it. Just like that: an idea or plan had hit him, and he had been like a different person. He was bouncy, he was full of vim and jokes, he was hopping up and down.
That was the birth of Manic Parker. This was someone she didn’t recognise at all. He was fizzing with … with … Daisy didn’t know quite what it was, but he was fizzing with something. She would wake up in the morning to find Parker already awake beside her; which was strange enough in itself, since Parker was never awake before her, and certainly not awake like this, staring at the roof, sometimes smiling but not with his usual cheeky look, instead looking like a not very nice person relishing a private joke at somebody else’s expense. Once or twice she had even been woken by Parker tapping his feet or jiggling his legs in bed – which was so strange, so not-Parker, that she hardly knew what to think. She was confident that she knew him well enough to be able to read the signs if he was having an affair, or had run out of money gambling on the internet, or something specific like that; but this she couldn’t decode. When she asked, he was brisk about saying that there was nothing wrong; equally brisk the one time she had asked him about when he was going to start looking for work. More than brisk: he’d said, ‘I’ve still got savings left, but if you don’t feel I’m contributing enough, I can move out.’ That meant, don’t ask again. So she didn’t, but she wasn’t happy. Manic Parker kept about his business, visibly scheming and making plans and cooking things up and, it sometimes seemed, cackling to himself in entirely private, entirely secret glee. She once or twice had the thought that she preferred Speechless With Grief Parker.
As if in answer to that thought, or in punishment for having had it, another version of Parker then turned up. This version was the one with whom Daisy was still living. This was the one who had Daisy making a Yes and No list while listening to Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
on her iPod. He did not appear overnight, but Manic Parker first had moments, then hours, then days, when he transformed into what he was now, Dostoevsky Parker. This version of Parker first arrived in the form of nail-chewing, distraction, and an appearance of shifty preoccupation during times when he was supposed to be
doing something else – paying attention to her, for instance, which had formerly been one of his strengths, but had for some months now seemed something he’d either forgotten to do or had lost interest in. She would go into the kitchen where he was supposed to be cooking the dinner, and find him just standing there gnawing the inside of his lip while the vegetables he was supposed to be stir-frying turned to charcoal. One of Dostoevsky Parker’s new pieces of body language was to sit at the table with his head in his hands. Instead of waking up early, Dostoevsky Parker couldn’t sleep: he had trouble falling asleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of anxiety), he woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep (which Daisy knew was a sign of depression), and during the rare middle bits when he was asleep, he thrashed around like a breakdancing dervish. Dostoevsky Parker even looked different from Normal Parker: he was heavier and paler and more earthbound. He looked as if he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling.
So what was going on? Daisy had no idea. But one big difference between this Dostoevsky Parker and Grieving Parker was that this one didn’t seem to be mourning a specific loss so much as suffering a general and all-consuming sense of gloom and, unless Daisy was mistaken, guilt. He was fretting not about something which had been done to him, but something he’d done.
‘I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, baby,’ Daisy said to him one evening in November, when she’d got home knackered from work and had wanted nothing more than to have supper cooked for her, maybe a back rub, and then to watch some junk TV with her boyfriend of long standing. Instead here she was sitting in silence over a ready meal she herself had microwaved, acting as the equivalent of an unpaid psychiatric nurse. She wanted to yell, but that didn’t work with Parker; he would just retreat further. So she did her best to gentle him out of himself. She also knew that there wasn’t much more of this she could take, and that she couldn’t face doing it for much longer. She couldn’t think of any more things to list under No.
What she didn’t know was that Parker was longing to tell her, was desperate to tell her. He wanted nothing more than to confess. He
wanted to break down all the barriers he had artificially built up, to knock down his jerry-built edifice of silence and secrecy and false self; to blurt and blub and let it all out. The need to confess rose in his throat like a nausea. And yet he couldn’t speak, and so the two young people who loved each other stayed stuck and miserable.
I
f Quentina had been asked what she expected from the detention centre, she might have got several things right straight away. She could for instance have guessed that there would be no privacy, that male guards would feel free to barge into women’s rooms and search their belongings whenever they felt like it, and that many of the women, some of them devout Muslims, would be outraged. No surprise there. She would have expected the food regime to be poor – not that they couldn’t get anything to eat after five o’clock, or that the children, of whom there were many, would sometimes be crying with hunger. She knew that the place was a prison and would feel like one. But what she hadn’t expected was the politics – the internal politics. When she arrived, she found that a large group of prisoners was on hunger strike to protest against conditions at the prison and they had a list of fifteen demands, including that the authorities give back the birth certificates that they’d taken away from children born in the UK, and also that they reinstate the daily allowance of 71 pence. And they wanted access to legal information, since the majority of them had no legal representation.