Final Demand (6 page)

At lunchtime, in the canteen, she saw Mrs Johns. Lips pursed, she was picking her way through a biryani. Natalie stopped at her table. ‘I've been looking for Mr Tomlinson.'

‘He's in meetings all day.' Mrs Johns removed a piece of cinnamon bark and placed it on the side of her plate. ‘If you want an appointment, phone on Monday.'

Outside there was a rumble of thunder. Natalie comforted herself with the knowledge, gleaned from Phillip, that Mrs
Johns's husband had left her for a twenty-eight-year-old IT consultant.

She sat down with Sioban, who closed the book she was reading,
Do It Yourself Conveyancing.
‘Did you know that the best way to get rid of wrinkles is to rub them with haemorrhoid cream?'

I'm getting old, thought Natalie. I'm nearly thirty-three, there are lines between my eyes, soon I'll be too old for anybody to love. Sioban's bookmark was a boarding pass. Her security guard had taken her to Paris for an illicit weekend.
They
had spent the night together; they had woken in a strange hotel room and brushed their teeth in unison.

All afternoon the storm raged. Over the blips of the computers and the hum of conversation – its volume always rose on Friday afternoons – over this Natalie could hear the rain lashing at the windows. Why didn't Phillip phone? As yet they had made no date for the weekend. In fact, both weekends she had known him he had been busy, the first at a badminton tournament and the second visiting his parents in Keighley.

At the time she just felt mild vexation. He was busy, after all; his work was a lot more demanding than hers. This wouldn't be difficult. ‘You're wasted in that job,' he said, ‘bright girl like you.' She suspected nothing, for love had made her stupid.

At five thirty the others started packing up. She waited until six, then she wrote him a note,
Home all evening, phone me.
She slipped it into a plastic folder extracted from Mrs Roe's cupboard. She and Phillip often stuck things under the windscreens of each other's cars – jokes, assignations. Like the e-mails it gave them a frisson, thrumming beneath the surface of their days.

Natalie left the building. The wind sent her reeling; the moors had their own climate, ten degrees colder than anywhere else. Up on the twelfth floor, Phillip's window was still lit. Bent against the rain, she hurried across to his car.

Another vehicle, however, was parked in its place: a
hatchback. Natalie pressed her face against its window. A child's seat was strapped into the rear.

Puzzled, she straightened up. Around her doors slammed, engines revved. A man was getting into the next car; she recognized him, he had been smoking with Phillip that first day.

‘Whose car's in Mr Tomlinson's space?' she shouted at him, through the rain.

‘Must be Melanie's.'

‘Whose?' She raised her voice.

‘MELANIE'S!' he yelled. ‘His wife's.'

A good liar knows about detail – not too much, which might arouse suspicions, for which innocent person can accurately itemize their actions? Just enough to casually suggest a life, a fictitious scenario of which only the iceberg tip is visible. It's an art, of doubtful moral value but more useful than most, and Natalie herself was a deft practitioner. Indeed, over the coming months she would exploit her skill to breaking point. Part of the pain, in discovering Phillip's deception, part of the pain and loss was the discovery that in the lying stakes she had met her match. He was a man after her own heart.

Phillip had a wife, Melanie, and two children: Kelly, eighteen months, and Tom, four. He didn't have a dog. Arnold, whose urinary problems had roused Natalie's sympathy, was simply a figment of Phillip's surprisingly fertile imagination. No wonder he had had to get home each night. What was Natalie called? Late meetings, business dinners?

All this Natalie discovered as they sat in her car, the rain drumming on the roof. She had ambushed Phillip as he left the building.

‘I'm crazy about you,' he said.

‘Oh yeah?'

‘
Crazy
.'

‘You creep!'

‘I was going to tell you – at the beginning I thought you must
know – but then it was too late—'

‘You lying prick, you – you—' She tried to hit him but there was no room. Uselessly she pummelled him with her fists; the sheepskin jacket was too thick.

‘Melanie and I—'

‘Fuck Melanie—'

‘Melanie and me, we're not happy, the marriage has been dead for years—'

‘Oh shut up.'

‘It's you I love—'

‘So you're going to leave her then?'

There was a silence. The rain had stopped. By now the car park had emptied.

‘Get out,' she said. ‘Get out and fuck off.'

Tears pricked Natalie's eyes but she was not going to cry, not her. She drove along the motorway, back towards Leeds. The oncoming headlamps blurred. Traffic was heavy; it was Friday night, people were on the move. How senselessly busy they all seemed! It felt like a week – a month – since that morning, when she had driven in the opposite direction. Time had been dislocated, its joints swinging loose. She couldn't believe her own stupidity: why hadn't she seen the signs? Was she really such an idiot? And there she was, almost falling in love. Almost dreaming up a
future.

Natalie left the motorway and drove towards the city. Lights dazzled her, blurred by her angry tears. Revving up, she swung out to overtake the car ahead. An oncoming car hooted, blinding her with its headlights. She braked and slipped back.

As she drove into Leeds she thought: So that's the end of my plan then. It was almost a relief, to feel it finally dissolve away. Strangely enough the affair with Phillip, which might have turned it into reality, had made it irrelevant.

She stopped at some traffic lights. It was a crazy idea, truly crazy. Maybe Phillip had sensed something odd about her, from the start. Oh, the
bastard.

The lights changed to green. Natalie pressed the accelerator pedal. Nothing happened. The engine had cut out.

Behind her, cars hooted. Flustered, Natalie tried again. The engine turned over, grindingly, but didn't catch. She tried again: nothing. This time it was for real; her car truly wouldn't start. Behind her, cars reversed. A huge Mcdonald's lorry rumbled past. It was then that she noticed the warning light on the petrol gauge. The tank was empty.

You think you have fallen as low as you can get, that you've hit rock-bottom. Then the floor collapses and you fall still further. As Natalie trudged the two miles home – after a lengthy wait, she had persuaded a passer-by to help push her car on to the pavement, where it would no doubt collect a ticket – as she trudged past lit pubs, laughter issuing from them, other people's Friday nights, she thought: Fuck it all. It had started to rain again; her shoes were sodden, she was freezing cold. She passed an NT Phone Shop, empty and brightly lit. NT, IT'S YOUR CALL. She had tried to phone a cab but her mobile battery was flat and when she tried to use a phone box it swallowed up her twenty-pence piece. Cars hissed past her as she walked along the main road.

Betrayed and sodden, Natalie trudged along the pavement. One of the cars slowed down and parked, a few yards ahead of her.

Natalie stopped. There was nobody around; just a sliding stream of cars passing. She pretended to inspect the wall. Somebody called Kevin had sprayed SUCK MY KNOB on it. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the car, waiting.

Thursday last, a girl was stabbed along there.
Natalie started running. She darted up a side street.
That girl who was raped? My brother was at school with her . . .
She ran past a row of houses due for demolition, their windows boarded up. Calm down, she told herself. She hummed a Sheryl Crow song:
A change, change, change will do you good . . .

Then she was out on a main road, somewhere she didn't recognize, and Kieran waited at the traffic lights. Her heart
leapt. There he was, on his motorbike, clouds of exhaust billowing into the night air.

A damsel in distress . . . such a rare sight nowadays.

‘Kieran!' she yelled. She had never been so pleased to see anybody, in all her life. They would sit in a pub together, like old times. All that rancour would be forgotten.

‘Kieran!' she shouted again, but he didn't hear.

She rushed up to him and tapped his leather jacket. He lifted his visor.

She stepped back. ‘Oh. Sorry.'

By the time Natalie reached home she had made a decision. This time she would really do it – cut her losses and jack it in. Monday morning she would give in her notice; she had had enough of the whole bloody business. As she climbed the stairs, hurrying before the light switched off, as she fumbled, with frozen fingers, for her keys, she thought: I'm getting out of here. I'll go to London, it's high time I bailed out. After all, my mum did it enough times. I'm bright, I'll get by. Something will turn up.

Next morning she was woken by the ring of the bell. She wrapped herself in a towel and opened the door.

A young man stood there: square, sturdy. He wore some sort of official work-clothes.

‘Sorry to disturb you, miss,' he said. ‘I'm from the gas company.' He shifted from one foot to the other. ‘I hate this bit.' He had a broad Yorkshire accent.

She moved aside. ‘The meter's through there.'

‘No.' He cleared his throat. ‘I – er – regret to inform you that I've come here to disconnect your supply. For non-payment of your bill.'

Natalie stared at him.

‘Here's my ID.' He held out a card. Sheathed in yellowing plastic, it showed his photo,
Registered Gas Fitter
and his name: C. TAYLOR. ‘My authorization,' he said.

She bent closer to read. ‘Taylor.'

He nodded. ‘That's the name. Colin Taylor.'

A moment passed. Then Natalie, clutching her towel around her, put out her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you,' she said.

Surprised, he put down his metal case and shook her hand.

‘Come in,' she said, and smiled at him.

COLIN
,
FONDLY KNOWN
as Stumpy to his friends, was one of life's innocents. Unworldly, generally of a cheerful disposition, he was bemused by the litany of violence he heard on the radio when he was driving hither and thither in his gas-board van. How could folk do that to each other? It was beyond his comprehension, for he still believed, against all the odds, in the innate goodness of human nature. Thinking the best of people gave him, at this point in the world's history, a quaintness, as if he should have been born in another era. As if he should have remained a boy.

Which, in a sense, he had. ‘Stumpy' suited him, for he had the rolling gait and eager, open face of a chubby little boy in dungarees, running open-armed to embrace what life had to offer. If it were a slap he would pick himself up and start all over again for he was a born optimist, a simple soul, and everybody loved him.

Nobody loved him more fiercely than his mother. He had lived with her all his life and she protected him with a passion. Her name was Peggy and she came from a long line of grim, determined Yorkshire farmers, who worked the unforgiving land and who had no truck with displays of feeling.

Ah, but she had feelings, powerful ones, and they centred around her son. Colin was her only child, born to her in her middle years when all hope of motherhood had faded. His father was long since dead. Her son was a miracle to her, though she would have gruffly pooh-poohed such a word. They lived together on the edge of Leeds, on a bleak estate where rain lashed the grey stucco houses. Colin was her sunshine, he was the love of her life.

Colin was twenty-five. Whether he was still a virgin was a
source of some speculation to his mates. They were not aware of any girlfriend, past or present, and he expressed no interest in women. In the pub, when they told dirty jokes, he simply looked blank. Sometimes he tried to join in, to show willing, but he hadn't a clue. And he was not a bad-looking chap – shortish and squat, rugger player's thighs, and a charming, twinkling smile that lit up his broad face. They just wished he would stop wearing that woolly hat, but Colin was a loyal sort of bloke, he refused to be parted from it. Once he attached himself to something, it was for keeps.

All in all he was a kind young man; that was why he hated his job. He had trained as a gas fitter but recently he had been transferred to disconnections. The pain of it, ringing a doorbell and seeing the smile wiped off a face . . . His heart bled for them. What was their crime? Murder? Child molestation? They simply didn't have the funds to pay their bill.

That Saturday, the morning that would change his life, Colin had already made two calls: a black woman who had broken down in tears and an elderly woman who had slammed the door in his face. He wished he had been a postman. In general, they were regarded with affection; this seemed to persist even if they were the purveyors of bad news. Everyone, except dogs, liked postmen.

So it was with a heavy heart that Colin trudged up the stairs of Meadowview – a misnomer if ever there was one. It was an ex-council block, smartened up and sold off some years before, but the neighbourhood was a poverty-stricken one; he had visited it on many occasions to perform his melancholy task. He pressed the doorbell of Flat 28.

The young woman who opened the door looked neither startled nor suspicious. This was unusual. Judging by her attire, or lack of it, she had probably been in the bath.

Colin, shuffling and looking at his feet, explained himself. She turned away to lead him to her boiler. He tried to avert his eyes – she wore only a towel – but he couldn't help glimpsing her shoulders. They were frail and bony, and her skin was as
freckled as a wall lizard. Stumpy was one of the few people in Britain who had successfully bred these in captivity. This warmed him to her. He was proud of his hatching record: six eggs in the past year.