Final Demand (12 page)

This turned her thoughts to Colin. She was filled with affection for him. Oh, she had been fond of him from the start – who wouldn't be? He was so sweet. But her warmth towards him had grown. He was such a devoted husband. He brought her little gifts, like a dog dropping a bone at her feet, and gazed at her with his spaniel eyes. He carried her tea up in the morning and cooked dinner at night – he was a much better
cook than she was, he had learnt it at his mother's knee. He emptied her ashtray; he picked up her clothes from the floor, folding them reverentially and laying them on the chair, giving them a little stroke. He fussed around her – ‘Won't you catch cold?'

This could become stifling but as yet she didn't mind, because most of the time Colin was busy outside, hammering away in the workshop he had erected in the garden. He was an enthusiastic home-maker. Each weekend he was occupied knocking up shelves, whistling happily, or tending his repulsive pets. He kept them away from the house, thank goodness, though she sometimes found evidence of his hobby: fly-traps, painstakingly assembled from wire mesh; a bag of frozen mice in the freezer. She was too contented to mind, however; she could even joke about it. Only that morning she had pretended that the trilling of the crickets was the phone ringing. ‘Hello, Natalie speaking,' she had said, lifting up the receiver, ‘how may I help you?' They larked around a lot, in those early months.

Having money helped, of course. If their house closed in on her she could simply jump into her car, drive three miles into the city centre and go shopping. Natalie adored buying clothes, she had an insatiable hunger for it. Briefly satisfied, it would well up again and she would surrender. Their bedroom floor was scattered with tiny plastic T-shapes, dropped when she wrenched off price tags.

They could go to the movies; they could buy a microwave. Every morning, as a matter of routine, they drank Sainsbury's freshly squeezed orange juice, with bits in it. It surprised her, how quickly one got used to it. Natalie was extravagant by nature, spending recklessly and hoping that when the credit-card bills arrived it would sort itself out, but to tell the truth she had been rather desperate before she got married – panic-stricken, in fact. Now the pressure had eased and she felt an airy sense of liberation. Who said money didn't buy happiness?

Colin was a worrier but she soothed his fears. All she had to
do was put her arms around him and silence him with kisses. That did the trick. He was in thrall to her body; he was hers, utterly. At first he had been shy in bed but she had coaxed him, releasing in him a clumsy passion which had alarmed him – was he hurting her? But she was teaching him how to please her. She would take his hand and move his fingers over her body, murmuring to him, and his eagerness to learn touched her. He really was a nice boy, and though they had little in common their shared life drew them together. They were young, healthy, and well-disposed towards each other. They had never quarrelled, not yet, and they loved their new home; to her surprise, she had even enjoyed a trip to IKEA. It seemed as good a start as any to a marriage, though ‘husband' seemed an odd word to apply to Colin. Maybe everybody felt like that at the beginning.

So that Tuesday Natalie settled down to work with a sense of benign goodwill towards the world. It seemed ridiculous, that the job had once bored her. Every day now she felt a quickening of the pulse; it gave a zip to things. Each time she picked up an envelope she was a fox, sniffing for a scent. When she slit it open, would she find her quarry? Her senses were heightened; everything seemed in sharper focus. The very desks seemed more desk-like, as if she had never noticed them before. Her separation from her colleagues was palpable; she was amazed they didn't feel it. They worked and chatted, blithely unaware that she lived in a different world. She thought: spies must feel like this. She didn't use the word
criminals
, even to herself. After all, she was just milking the system. And why bloody not?

Some days there were four cheques she could use; some days none. Her secret word for them was
hits
(
two hits today
). She only chose those for modest amounts – up to two hundred pounds. Little and often was her motto. That way they were less likely to be detected.

But they wouldn't be detected. Even if these small shortfalls were noticed, they couldn't be traced back to her. That was the beauty of it. Her scheme was so clever that even in the years to come, when she would look back on her activities with mixed
feelings, even then she would feel a glow of pride at this particular aspect of it.

For if she simply paid the cheques into her own account, sooner or later people would realize that something was wrong. Customers who had presumed they had paid their bill would receive a final demand, or even find their phone cut off. They would kick up a fuss, NT would search its records and discover that the cheques had never been paid in. Presumably this would result in some sort of internal investigation. Only an employee, and an employee in the accounts section, would have access to cheques. It would simply be a matter of time before Natalie was traced.

Her method was foolproof. For security reasons, registering and processing payments were two separate departments. They were served by two separate programs on the computer, but it was easy to access the processing program. All she needed was the password and the name of somebody in that department and she could log in.

It only took a matter of minutes. Natalie tapped in the password, which she had obtained from her friend Belinda, logged in Belinda's name, and downloaded various customer accounts. She ignored the small, domestic accounts; what she used were the accounts of large companies – multinationals, big industries from all over Britain – whose phone bills were so great that an additional two hundred pounds or so would go unquestioned. After all, what was two hundred quid here or there when a bill was in the thousands? It would either go unnoticed or be written off as staff making personal calls – unitemized local ones. She moved the sum to these accounts, processed the original bills as PAID and pocketed the cheques.

The beauty of this was that the bills were indeed paid, but by large firms. None of Her People – for that was how she fondly thought of them, as her unwitting collaborators – none of Her People who had so helpfully written
N.T.
on their cheques would know that anything had happened. For their bills would go through and nobody was the wiser.

And nobody came to any harm, did they?

And nobody knew. The only person she had told was Kieran, but he would have long since forgotten. Chemical abuse had wrecked his short-term memory; besides, he and Angie, who was Australian, had moved to Melbourne; he had another life now. Like the white dog, he had disappeared for ever.

All in all, it was going even better than she had expected. That day, however, there was a hitch. Natalie returned from lunch to find the computers down; the server had crashed. People sat around. Sioban played cards with Amir, who had only started work that week; Stacey disappeared to Dispatch to visit Derek. None of them minded, of course. This had happened before; with any luck they could go home early.

An hour passed. In her office the new supervisor, Mrs Coles, was talking to the Financial Director. Through the glass, Natalie saw him shaking his head and looking at his watch. When he had gone she went in.

‘What's the problem?' Natalie asked.

‘It hasn't been traced yet. They're working on it.'

‘Do you know how long it'll take?'

Mrs Coles raised her eyebrows. She looked gratified, that a member of staff displayed such impatience to get back to work. ‘There's a possibility they'll still be down tomorrow. Such a curse.'

Natalie thought: What the hell. Three cheques had arrived that morning, all final demands. They sat on her desk; she hadn't had time to process them. Oh well, she thought. Just this once.

So, at the end of the day, she slipped them into her bag. And on the way home, as usual, she stopped at a post box and sent them to three of the various building society accounts she had opened in her new name.

By the time Natalie got home, to the smell of chicken cooking, she had forgotten all about them.

A MIDDLE
-
AGED WOMAN
called Margaret was walking along Brighton beach.
April is the cruellest month
 . . . The poem rose to the surface, sentence by sentence. So many words lurked there, in the sediment of her mind. Stray phrases popped up at unexpected moments, like bubbles of escaping gas.

Margaret had been a schoolteacher; she had taught T. S. Eliot, when he had been on the syllabus, to girls who had listened with varying degrees of incomprehension. They would be grown women by now. She thought about them a great deal, more frequently as time went by. They accompanied her like ghosts, her past pupils. They would have husbands now, and children. Their lives, stopped for her at eighteen, continued in unseen homes, scattered over Britain in unvisited towns. Maybe one of them – Annette, Diana, one of the brighter ones – was pausing as she brushed her hair, to remember the words from her A-level Chaucer:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote . . .

Margaret doubted it. She had lost them long ago. For her, however, the words had resurfaced with horrible potency. April was indeed the cruellest month when she looked in the mirror, the sun's pitiless rays illuminating the whiskers on her chin. Recently, in Venice, she had picked up a mirror to inspect the Tintorettos on the ceiling of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Instead she had caught sight of the underside of her own throat, the turkey-wattle collapse of it.
Talk about ancient monuments
, she had joked to her companion.

All her life she had made the best of things, working diligently, heating up her Serves One meals in the evenings, keeping herself well groomed, but now she couldn't be bothered to make the effort. This was, in some ways, a relief. Her life had
run out of steam while her phantom girls heedlessly matured. And so they should, for hadn't she wished the best for them? It was they who were striding into the future, it was their world now, tough and brutal, exhilaratingly free compared to the life she had known. However, she had to admit that their relationship with her seemed somewhat one-sided. Were they all too busy to write? Just a Christmas card would be welcome.

Margaret was scrunching along the pebbles, lost in thought, when she realized she was not alone. A dog was trotting beside her. It accompanied her as if they had just been separated for a few minutes and it had rejoined her for the rest of their walk. A dishevelled creature with curly hair, it stayed close beside her, raising its face from time to time to check that she was still there. When she stopped in her usual place, to look at the sea, it sat down next to her leg, panting.

By the time she reached the underbelly of the Palace Pier, its great iron struts sunk into the beach, she felt as if she and the dog had known each other for years. She knelt down, rummaged in its damp corkscrew curls and found a disc. On it was inscribed an address and a phone number, in Kemp Town.

The dog accompanied her home, pausing with her at the traffic lights. Its eyes, barely visible under its hair, were moist with love. She hadn't been the object of such devotion since an Indian newsagent, many years before, had made her the unlikely recipient of his sexual attentions. When he had pressed a Toblerone into her hand she had taken her patronage elsewhere.

Back in her flat she gave the dog a bowl of water. ‘You're very appealing, but you belong to somebody else,' she said. The dog stopped lapping and looked at her, as if it needed permission to continue. Some of her more diffident girls had looked at her like this. ‘To be perfectly honest, I'd love to keep you, but it would only be a temporary thing and I'd hate to have our hopes dashed.'

She checked the number on its disc and went to the phone. The dog's tail thumped.

She lifted the receiver. The line was dead.

Suddenly, she felt weak. It was moments like these that did it. Bottle tops she couldn't unscrew; a leak sprung in the bathroom pipe. Only the week before, when struggling to open the sealed plastic container of a prawn and avocado sandwich, she had suddenly and inexplicably burst into tears.

She couldn't use her neighbours' phones. ‘Know something?' she told the dog. ‘I don't think I would even recognize them in the street. Funny, isn't it, but I'm a busy person and once you start to talk to people, who knows where it might lead . . . They'd be ringing on my doorbell asking me in for coffee, my life wouldn't be my own . . .' Her voice trailed off. It was odd, talking aloud in her flat. Under its shaggy eyebrows the dog gazed at her, waiting for more. ‘Besides, I'm perfectly happy with my own company, thank you very much. And somehow there's never enough time even to open a book, one's so busy.' There was a silence. The dog waited. ‘We'll have to go to a call box. Now, do you want to stay here or come with me?'

She got up. The dog went to the door and waited for her. They went out together, to the phone box on the corner. The dog sat outside, its eyes fixed on her face as she punched NuLine's number.

A girl's voice said: ‘Good afternoon, Ashley speaking, how may I help you?'

Margaret explained that there seemed to be a fault on her line, could she be put through to the engineers? Ashley told her to hang on. She was replaced by Pachelbel's
Canon
, a piece of music Margaret particularly disliked. Through the glass, the dog gazed at her confidently.

A man came on the line. ‘Clive speaking, how may I help you?'

She explained again, patiently, as if to a slow learner. Clive was replaced by Pachelbel again. Her money was running out. She slotted in her last twenty-pence piece and cursed NuLine. She had only switched to them because BT had kept pestering
her with calls in the middle of supper asking if she was satisfied with their service.