‘I’ll put it by the phone,’ he said. ‘Call!’ As he was replacing the leaflet on the hall table he noticed that Petunia too had a card with a picture of her house on it.
‘We had one of those this morning,’ he said. ‘ “We Want What You Have.” ’
‘When you’re my age, nobody wants what you have,’ said Petunia, and Ahmed laughed.
‘We older people have to stick together, Mrs Howe,’ he said. Normally she would have made a joke back, but she was too preoccupied, too deep inside herself, to properly register what he had said.
T
he most unpopular woman in Pepys Road walked slowly down the pavement, taking her time, spreading fear and confusion. She looked from right to left, she looked ahead and back, and no detail escaped her. She seemed to have all the time in the world yet also to be possessed with a sense of mission and purpose. She did not look conscious of the fear and confusion she spread and yet she was, deeply so.
Quentina Mkfesi BSc, MSc (Political Science, University of Zimbabwe, thesis subject: Post-Conflict Resolution in Non-Post-Colonial Societies, with special reference to Northern Ireland, Spain and Chile) was on the lookout for non-residents parked in residents’ parking areas, for business permit–holders parked in residents’ areas and vice versa, for expired permits of both types, for people who had overstayed their paid parking or – and this was a particularly fruitful issue in Pepys Road – for people who had misinterpreted the parking signs and paid for parking but were not parked in the dual-use, residents’ or paid-parking area, but were instead parked in the residents-only area. She was alert to cars parked carelessly, protruding into the public thoroughfare or with one wheel on the pavement. She could also issue tickets for out-of-date vehicle duty. She was not a cruel warden – she regularly allowed a period of grace for out-of-date residents’ permits and unpaid road tax. But she was a very sharp one. She was dressed in a dark green uniform accessorised with webbing in a paler shade of
green, trousers which had white strap-like detailing on the bottom of the legs, and a peaked cap. She looked like the Marx Brothers’ idea of a colonel in the Ruritanian customs service from 1905.
The government, the council, and the company Quentina worked for all publicly and repeatedly denied that there was a quota for issuing parking tickets. That was, as everybody knew, a flat lie. Of course there was a quota. Quentina’s was for twenty tickets a day, yielding £1,200 in revenue if all the violators paid within the two weeks’ grace period, and usually more because many of them did not. If there were no appeals upheld – and Quentina, who was good at her job, had the lowest level of upheld appeals of any current employee of Control Services – the revenue in practice would be worth about £1,500 a day. If she worked 250 days a year that meant Quentina was generating revenue of £375,000 per annum. In return for that she was, in theory, paid £12,000, with four weeks’ paid holiday and no health or pension benefits.
Today was showing signs of being a good day. Not because she had already written ten tickets, all of them rock-solid valid, and it wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning – no, that was easy, that was, for a warden of Quentina’s talents and experience, routine. It was showing signs of being a good day for another reason. Quentina and four other of the African employees of Control Services played a game whose rules were simple: the person who gave out a ticket to the most expensive car was the winner. Photos were required for proof. Sometimes the prize involved a free drink or a £5 bet, sometimes it was played for honour alone. Quentina had been on a losing streak. But now it seemed her luck was on the move. 27 Pepys Road was, Quentina happened to know, owned by a solicitor who worked for a Premiership football club based in West London. The club sometimes rented the house from him; it had properties nearer their training ground in Surrey but people occasionally wanted to live in town. Quentina had long thought this might be a good place to find a very expensive car without a resident’s permit, so she made a point of regularly visiting Pepys Road, which was otherwise only an averagely productive area from a warden’s point of view. But not today. In the visitors’ parking section there was a Range Rover
with only twenty minutes left and a silver Golf with ’05 licence plates which had to move in the next hour – nothing much of interest there. But three parking spaces along from the football solicitor’s house there was the car of Quentina’s dreams, an Aston Martin DB7, a James Bond car with an on-the-road price of £150,000. What made it even better was that the man driving it had bought a parking ticket but – clearly he didn’t know the most recent set of changes in Pepys Road – he had parked in the residents-only area, not the residents-and-visitors area. He had made the classic Pepys Road parking mistake.
With no one in the street and no reason to think she was about to be interrupted, Quentina would normally have gone straight up to the car, written the ticket and taken the pictures and been done. Sometimes, though, it paid to be cunning. She was not a warden who often resorted to tricks but sometimes you had to be street-smart, and so Quentina walked another fifty or so metres past the car, making a mental note of the number and make and model, and then as-if-absent-mindedly tapped the data into her PDA. People were less likely to come running out shouting if they didn’t see you standing right there by the car. The invalid ticket on the car had another hour to run so she should have had plenty of time before the driver came out but you could not be sure; it paid to be careful. Quentina printed the ticket out and wrapped it in the plastic envelope. Now it was game on. She turned, moved briskly to the gleaming, recently washed silver car, snapped up the windscreen wiper – even that felt expensive – and stuck down the violation notice, then, stepping up and down off the kerb and moving backwards to get the relevant parking sign into shot, snapped off four digital photos. As the locals would say: Result!
Everybody hated being ticketed, just as everyone hated all the traffic on the roads except themselves. Everyone knew that the city would grind to a halt without restrictions on where cars could and couldn’t park, and everyone knew that everybody would disobey all the laws without compunction if they weren’t enforced. It was just that nobody wanted the laws to apply to them. Part of the problem, as Quentina had been told several times, was that ‘the laws against drivers are the only fucking laws that are ever fucking enforced’. But that, Quentina
felt, wasn’t her problem. She had no fear of confrontation, which was just as well as it was a very unusual workday that did not feature at least one or two altercations with upset or furious or hysterically weeping or racially abusive or threatening or not entirely sane freshly ticketed motorists. Still, it was better for everyone to avoid ugly scenes, and Quentina was in a good mood as she moved off down Pepys Road. Because she was in a good mood, and because it would have no effect on the quota either way, she merely noted a ten-days-out-of-date resident’s permit on an ’03-reg A-class Mercedes, and magnanimously took no action. Quentina went to spread fear and confusion somewhere else. It was going to be fun after work, showing the photo of the Aston Martin. Quentina planned to tell people she’d personally ticketed James Bond himself. In his tuxedo. And that he’d been with the woman from
Casino Royale
.
M
ichael Lipton-Miller, ‘Mickey’ to his friends, stood in the investment property he owned at 27 Pepys Road with a clipboard under his left arm, a BlackBerry held to his right ear, an iPhone vibrating in his left jacket pocket, a dehydration headache, a solicitor’s letter setting up an appointment to discuss his divorce terms in his right jacket pocket, and a briefcase at his feet. Of all these things, the one which caused him to feel least thrilled with life in general was the clipboard, which held a list of all the things which should have been done at the house to make it ready for a new arrival. Mickey was a qualified solicitor who no longer practised the law but instead worked full-time as a factotum, fixer and odd-job man for a Premiership football club. He loved his work and loved the sense of himself as a man who got things done, whose approach to life was a bit flashy, a bit wide – but had the other connotations of the word ‘wide’ too, a sense of breadth, of generosity, of largeness of spirit. His ideal sense of this did not involve checking over an itemised list of crockery, DVD equipment and toilet paper, but he had sacked his assistant last week (the search for a replacement would be what the vibrating phone was about – there were times, Mickey liked to joke, when putting the phone on vibrate was the nearest thing to sex he got all week) so here he was mired in the daily detail of making spoilt footballers happy. He was fifty years old.
In front of Mickey was the woman from the contract cleaning agency, whose job it had been to supervise the cleaners. She was tall and lean and had high cheekbones: fit. To Mickey’s eye she looked East African. She had that disconcerting African patience as she stood there while Mickey ranted and bollocked somebody else over the phone; she did not look like someone waiting for a verdict to be passed on her work. Standing next to her, Mickey had a thought he often had about good-looking young women: he was amazed that more of them did not sell their bodies for sex. It would surely be easier and much more lucrative than working – certainly than this sort of work – and could it really be so bad? People would pay hundreds of pounds to have sex with this woman, so why on earth would she instead want to clean houses for £4.50 an hour or whatever the sodding minimum wage was? Maybe he should put in an offer. And then Mickey, in the privacy of his own head, told himself: only joking.
‘Right right, sorry sorry,’ said Mickey. ‘Shall we have a look? I’m sure it’s all fine, darling,’ Mickey said, being Good Cop, ‘but you know the powers that be …’
The cleaner was not falling for any charm. She just gave a minimally polite nod.
Mickey started taking the tour. Because the house was not usually lived in for more than about three months at a time, often less, and because the people who lived there came from all over the place, it was decorated in a semi-expensive version of Hotel-Room Neutral. The players often came from families with no money and their only encounters with affluent style came from hotels, so that was a style they felt was aspirational. The walls were a complicated shade of Swedish white, the furniture was a mixture of modern stuff, the video and sound system were some Japanese make Mickey had never heard of but were also wired under the floorboards so that no one could accidentally forget that they belonged to the landlord and not the tenant. This time it was an African kid who was coming to London and was going to bring his dad. ‘Kid’ really did mean kid – he was seventeen. The boy was going to be starting on twenty grand a week with options to go higher or break the contract after a year. Mickey, who was fluent
in money, who had grown up wanting to make money and thought that everything about making shedloads of money was fine, was admirable, was a high and noble goal – even Mickey sometimes felt ill when he thought about how much money was knocking around in football these days.
Why had the kid chosen to live here and not somewhere nice and suburban? Who knew? In any case it hadn’t been the boy but his father who had made the choice. Mickey thought the dad had probably been freaked out by the whiteness of the suburbs and preferred to live somewhere he might occasionally see the odd black face. It would not last, it never did. Klinsmann had lived in London and so had Lineker, and one or two of the European players still did, but by and large they all moved out to the Surrey rockbroker belt as soon as they could. Mickey himself lived in Richmond, not far from Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger.
Floors scrubbed – check. Windows so clean they’re invisible – check. Loos you could eat your dinner off – check. TV system with more buttons and lights than the flight deck of the Space Shuttle – check. TV actually working – check. Wireless broadband working – check. Carpets clean, beds made, windowsills dusted – checkety-check. The fridge was stocked, though whether it was stuffed with things Africans ate Mickey didn’t know, and didn’t care since that was the club-appointed housekeeper’s problem; the dad spoke some English but the kid didn’t, only French, so the club had lined up a translator, a French-speaking housekeeper, and an English teacher. All that was someone else’s worry so that was fine by Mickey.
It all seemed OK. Mickey had kept his game face on throughout. As he finished he felt like relieving his feelings a little, so he turned to the housekeeper.
‘You understand about confidentiality?’
She nodded but did not speak.
‘No, I mean you really understand?’
She nodded again. He had planned to do a version of the confidentiality bollocking he gave people, about how they were not allowed to say anything to anyone, ever. The housekeeper was so blank and
seemed so indifferent, not in an incompetent am-I-bovvered? way but as if her real being was deeply buried somewhere else, that he lost the impetus to go on with it. It was a bit like losing an erection. Too bad. Mickey liked the confidentiality bollocking, because it gave a sense of importance and drama to the work; and the fact was, there was something glamorous about even the mundane aspects of Premier League football. Checking the supply of loo rolls: because a Premiership player was involved, it was important and interesting. Mickey knew plenty of things that people were desperate to know – most of them variations on the theme of ‘what is X really like?’ – as if there were a special category of knowledge called ‘really likeness’ – as if it were somehow the ultimate question.
‘It seems to be OK,’ he told the cleaner. She nodded again. Obviously this was Nod at Mickey Day. Well, two can nod. So he nodded back and headed for the door. There were a couple of bits of post, which he picked up on the way out – an electricity bill and a card which said ‘We Want What You Have’. Mickey had a flash of divorce-paranoia – Dinah’s brief was out to get him! – and then realised it was actually to do with 27 Pepys Road, because the other side of the card was a photo of the front door. This, Mickey thought, was almost certainly something to do with a newspaper staking out the house; maybe it was something specifically to do with the African kid. There were rumours that he’d been poached from Arsenal, or something. Maybe this was loopy Arsenal fans threatening the kid or trying to spook him. Bugger! Mickey thought that the last thing he needed today, as his phone started vibrating again, was a tricky what-should-I-do?