Half Plus Seven (8 page)

‘A pleasure.'

‘So, what are you here for?'

‘Well, I was kind of hoping you could tell me that.'

‘So, I can look deep into your future with a full deck reading for fifty, can positively align your chakra for twenty…'

I hadn't realised she'd been talking administratively.

‘Look, sister, I'm here for the ten pound fortune. Nothing more, nothing less. Lord knows why I'm even here for that. Pardon my language.'

If she was upset by my reluctance to be upsold she didn't let on. She needed a few months with Morgan & Schwarz. Our sales scams would have doubled her profits in no time at all.

As she took my hand, something happened. Gina's eyes glazed over like she'd been smoking premium strength weed since before she pushed the duvet aside. The nondescript had turned spooky. Rather than examining the crags of my hand for a red flag which screamed Dead By Forty, she held it in a ritualistic way, as if to ground herself in case of an electric shock. Her glassy look focused on the middle distance of the frayed wallpaper over my left shoulder. I'd wanted to think that she'd know I'd become a daytime TV host, would travel the world on the back of a donkey and have my kids go to Ivy League schools just from looking at the lines on my hand, but it seemed it wasn't quite going to play out that way. There was a silence. A strangely comfortable silence. The dog barked. I jumped. She tightened her grip on my hand.

‘Why do you always worry about heart disease?'

Her question knocked me for six. Three months ago, my dad died of a heart attack. Or a broken heart. Either way, he was dead and gone. I tried to regain composure.

‘Doesn't everyone?'

‘Not like you.' She was right. I'd give myself palpitations over palpitations, losing sight of whether they had existed in the first place or were my Frankenstein. She knew she'd hit the bullseye.

‘Well, look, don't worry yourself about it. It won't kill you. You'll live until you're grey and old.' If it meant I'd look like George Clooney, I'd take that now.

‘You work in some kind of office, yes?' I didn't show agreement.

‘Some kind of fancy office, yes? Well don't let those people take advantage of you. Value your ideas and don't let the fat cats get rich off your blood. Money will come, money will go. You've got to hang on in there.'

Gina started to waffle a bit after that; something about a mysterious stranger and a girl, but by then my mind was wandering back to the earlier talk about my ticker.

‘You can do great things. You will do great things. You've just got to hang on in there. Hang on in there.' Sure, hang on in there. I wasn't going to die of heart disease. Repeat, I wasn't going to die of heart disease. This was a fucking revelation. Bullshit, likely, but my kind of bullshit.

Chapter 8

When I wasn't spending my lunchtimes visiting mystics, I had another regular appointment. While colleagues Skyped distant friends and relatives, shopped for educational toys for their children or went and worked out with Brian from Human Resources, I'd go and sit on the bench right outside our office and drink cheap cider and fortified wine with the local pissheads. The beauty of the plan was in its audacity. Most problem drinkers hid their shameful secret from sight, sipping on the odd bottle of gin from their bottom drawer when no one was looking, or slipping into the stationery cupboard for a quench of a quart hidden in with the box files. Not me. My raging alcoholism would remain latent, at least in its delivery, thanks to my woods for the trees approach to the mid-day blues. I'd leave my desk with a kit-bag under the purely aspirational auspices of jogging in the park. I'd ride the seven floors down to the ground and exit our building, always being careful not to get in step with an errand-running or lunch-grabbing colleague, before taking a sharp left to an alleyway which was filled with large industrial bins, used by the kitchens of the mostly Asian restaurants that backed onto the narrow path. There, among the leftover bones, hidden from the main thoroughfare, I'd change out of my luxury merino wool suit into paint-splattered jogging bottoms, a charity shop woolly knit and, the piece de resistance, the chaser to my pint, a full face balaclava. They never suspected a thing.

My fellow winos and wasters – it was no good kidding myself I was a tourist – assumed the balaclava hid some third degree burns picked up in the Iraq war. I did nothing to dispel this myth, regaling them with tales from my days with Royal Welsh 2nd Squadron out in Basra. Maybe I planted the seed from which this crooked tree grew, but a good PR man was never going to leave his fingerprints on the sapling. They particularly liked the one I told about the grenade that was lobbed into my armour-plated vehicle. Sometimes I caught it in my mouth before spitting it out and throwing it out of the window. Other times my hard but fair lesbian co-driver and I jumped out of the door and took cover under the body of a dead insurgent, while the car blew up like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. They didn't notice the details changed every time we talked. I think they wanted to believe. Either that or they were too smashed to register. The way I told them, I often kidded myself I'd done a tour of duty.

It's fair to say that these guys killed me. Not literally, although some of them looked as if they could be the catalyst for my grisly end. It was my emotions they killed. Why were they out here while I was (barely) in there? What fork in the road did they take that I didn't? The one signposted depression, dependence, disease and deathly cold? But sometimes the signpost got spun around, Wile E Coyote style. Who knew where our decisions or indecision would lead? No one, really, but we could load the dice. It was probably time I stopped loading them in the dealer's favour. Soon, anyway, sometime soon.

One of the men, Sid, lived up to your usual trampy stereotypes. Wild beard? Check. Ragged clothes? Check. A stench of stale piss and a taste for industrial strength turpentine? Check. But from his red, flaky face shone two bright childlike eyes which looked like they viewed each new day with wonder. It was only unfortunate that each new day was full of the filth and fury of the fucked up streets. Not quite the first awakenings of life. Poor fella. I'd often fantasised that I'd make a hobo a cut above the average. No sitting in the rain for me. No sir. My days would be spent in the warm, safe haven of the city library, learning, questioning, bettering myself. None of this putting up with the cold and constant precipi-fucking-tation of this place. I'd be off on the railroad, travelling with the cargo, hiding in the washrooms, under seats, over mailbags, always moving, always searching, always getting closer to that better life. What this romantic, rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss vision of life on the road didn't bank on was the high propensity of dangerous addiction. An addiction which was worn well into the faces of those who surrounded me. Sometimes one of the faces would linger on me for too long when I finished a tall tale of derring do on the battlefield, and the others were creased over laughing, lost in their mind's eye or pulling hard on some much-needed nicotine. His face was the most ravaged of the bunch, and in a way the saddest. These dark eyes weren't childlike, but knowing, insightful and accepting. They smiled sadly. They belonged to a man whose age was hard to fathom. They say the streets put years on you, a bit like with TV and pounds on the waistline, but without the ability to be shaken off by hiring a queer stylist with a penchant for vertical stripes. Regardless, he wasn't a young man and his gaze told of a life that had known more than this; known warmth, hot food, self-respect, love even, whatever that means. But not now, not anymore. That was old news, better off boxed away somewhere. The key was in his stare. He gave me the heebie-jeebies.

The balaclava was a voyeur's best friend, allowing me to eavesdrop unmolested on the mundanities of the midday break. Jill on the phone to her husband calling Miles a cunt, me a cunt, him a cunt. Pete haggling energy suppliers. Miles speaking pidgin French to some no doubt knock-out broad. So far, so expected. On this particular day, Carol and Pete ambled in front of me and my drinking buddies on their way back from the coffee house. They were giving an airing to the
topic du jour
at Morgan & Schwarz: Christy.

‘Well, I think she seems like a very responsible young lady,' said Pete. ‘If a little risqué at time. I'm not sure the skirt she had on yesterday was entirely appropriate office wear.'

‘She certainly adds a little colour,' said Carol.

‘Indeed,' Pete said through a steaming latte. Pete didn't usually spend money on boutique beverages, not when there was a kettle in the kitchen. He must have been feeling particularly frivolous today. This was unlike him. Perhaps he knew Carol had the latest gossip. He could be surprisingly perceptive at times.

‘It's a wonder she's here at all,' said Carol, ‘considering everything she's been through.' Pete stopped slurping and urged Carol to continue with a nod of the head. ‘I mean, bringing up her brother all on her own at such a young age and her dad leaving them and all that nasty business. Sounds like the best thing he could have done for them anyway.'

‘I don't quite follow, Carol.'

‘Oh, sorry, Pete. Christy came through the Positive Pathways scheme. You know the one that places young people from underprivileged backgrounds into the workplace.'

‘I see,' said Pete. ‘Sounds like you really bonded.'

‘Well…' said Carol.

‘Well what?' said Pete.

‘You could say that,' said Carol. ‘Or you could say I accidently stumbled across her file when looking for something for Miles. I couldn't help but read it.'

‘Carol, what are you like?' said Pete.

They laughed.

‘Show us your minge! SHOW US YOUR MINGE!'

Carol shrieked. Pete defensively stood in front of her. One of the tramps had lost the plot again. Spider was no good around women. Part of the reason he was out here. He rubbed his legs and salivated at the short, unattractive middle-aged woman in front of him.

‘How dare you?' said Pete, and they scurried away through the revolving glass doors of the office.

I really did need to watch the company I kept.

I'd always go back to the office. Someone had to pay for my booze so it might as well be PRWire. Com's 4
th
Best Agency of 2013. I felt a bit like the tramps' envoy on the other side. The UN ambassador of an embittered tin-pot nation, stating their shaky case to the suits, squares and continent. This afternoon in the office had the potential to be massively awkward and embarrassing. No, I hadn't left my fly undone and asked if anyone was thirsty again. It was the first of my buddy sessions with Christy. Christ alive. Daytime drinking usually sharpened me up, or at least levelled me out, but with the ACME anvil of this afternoon's session hanging over me I felt nervous, edgy and ill at ease. Maybe this was nothing to do with the booze. Maybe these were real life feelings. Imagine that. Time had conditioned me so the only emotions experienced during office hours were apathy or hatred. This was new. I felt like I was preparing for the most disappointing first date ever, one where the off-chance of oral sex had already been ruled out before I'd even washed my knob in the sink and rushed out of the door.

‘So, erm, these things are meant to be so as you can ask, erm, where the washrooms are, and, erm, when the weekly fire alarm goes off, who the biggest douche in the office is and if you're ever going to enjoy working here,' I said.

‘Great. They're down the corridor, second on the left,
2 p.m. on a Wednesday, Miles has taken an early lead and the jury's still out,' she replied.

We were sat facing each other in something that looked like the interrogation room for the Nuremberg Trials, if a daytime cable TV interior design celebrity had been in charge of soft furnishings. Try as it might, the ambience was still more Hermann Göring than Gentle Lavender.

She looked at me, deadpan, for what seemed like an eternity. I looked straight back. She laughed. I followed. The reciprocation rule.

‘So, how are you finding it?' I asked.

‘Well, you know, okay. Really, umm, quite okay,' she answered.

‘I did know.'

‘What?'

‘Oh, nothing… anyway, so do you have any questions or anything? I think this is what these things are meant to be about.'

‘Well, not really, Bill. Pete's orientation didn't leave a stone unturned, and I've managed to find the bathroom all by myself.'

‘Yes, Pete isn't allowed near the Ladies after the incident…'

‘What incident?'

Should I wink? Should I wink? I fucking winked.

‘Have you got something in your eye?' she said.

Oh dear. Oh shit.

‘No, I was trying to denote there was no incident. It was an attempt at a joke,' I said.

‘Ah, of course, there would be no incident with Pete and the ladies would there? He's very thorough but doesn't quite strike me as the sex offender type.'

‘Na, he's too busy tending to his desk tidy for any of that funny business,' I said. I reached for my mug and cupped it with my hands. It was still hot. I swirled the tea inside around a couple of revolutions, lifted it to my lips and blew on it. Her red hair seemed to sway a little in the breeze. Maybe this was in my head. I drank, as ever glad of the crutch appropriate to the situation. Christy broke the silence.