Authors: Nick Laird
Ellen was in the dining room sitting alone at a table for two. She looked up when he entered (he’d spoken his room number to the waitress too loudly) and he half-raised his hand in an awkward salute. She nodded back, insuperably cool. At the buffet there was a queue of two, a tweeded octogenarian couple who were vocally concerned about choice. Should they have pineapple or grapefruit juice? And which was this? Was that yoghurt or cottage cheese? Where was the skimmed milk? Danny jiggled a plate from the heated stack and slipped past them, quickly piling it with cold toast, four rashers of stringy brittle bacon and a congealed but watery lump of scrambled egg. Skipping the cereals, he lifted a prepoured glass of orange juice slightly bigger than his thumb and headed over to the table.
He seated himself across the table from Ellen. Her two hollowed-out grapefruit halves sat somehow lasciviously in front of her chest. She gave him a brief sad smile and he nodded back, as curtly as he could. He would be untouchable today, stone-like, and he said, brusquely, all-business, from the middle of his mouth, ‘Good morning. I hope you slept well.’
It sounded sarcastic.
‘Good morning,’ Ellen said softly. She looked tired. ‘I don’t suppose you want to talk about last night.’
‘No, I’d prefer not to, to be honest. Let’s just leave it.’
‘You mean leave us?’
‘Yeah. That’s what I mean.’
‘Right…You’re pathetic.’
Ellen picked up her coffee cup and drained it. Danny began the fiddly work of opening a tiny plastic carton of butter, a sugar sachet, a miniature pot of strawberry jam. He knew Ellen was looking at him but wouldn’t meet her eye. She leant forward, across the table, and he looked up into her face. She was wounded and on the edge of tears.
‘Look, maybe I should never have told you…but I did tell you, and it’s done now, and you should understand that I only told you because I liked you, a whole lot, and I thought that you liked me and I wanted you to know. Your behaviour last night was unforgivable. As if you had a right to…Maybe sleeping with Vyse
was
a mistake. Not that it’s any of your business. But most people make mistakes. Just not you, obviously.’
‘Not that kind of mistake, I don’t…’ He sat watching her. Her anger neither chastened nor embarrassed him. He just felt again the injustice of it, of her and that smarmy vicious twat, that
ancient
twat, and replied, ‘I was just surprised. I mean, are there others in the department you want to tell me about? Have you worked your way alphabetically through the lawyers, all the way down to Vyse and Williams? Who’s next?’
‘Fuck off.’ She said it clearly and calmly, like a serious instruction. Then she pushed her seat back, stood up and left, dropping her napkin several feet from the table. No one was sitting close enough to overhear but a skinny waitress standing in front of the buffet was staring at him. He looked down at his plate and examined the bits of dead cooked animal. He wasn’t hungry at all. The waitress was still staring. He’d hurt Ellen very badly. He knocked back the tiny glass of orange juice and then got
up to leave. As he was going out of the dining room Danny picked up Ellen’s napkin, and thought of those knights’ tales where the heroine drops her ’kerchief and the hero journeys and travails and eventually tracks her down to return it to her, on the payment of a kiss. He strode back to their table, still being watched by the waitress, and dropped the napkin back on his plate.
Upstairs he telephoned her room. She answered with a sniff, as if to dispel any notions he might have that he hadn’t actually made her cry.
‘Ellen, I’m sorry. I had no right to say any of that stuff.’
‘Forget it. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Okay. But I’m sorry. I’m a complete arse. Let’s meet in the lobby in five minutes, okay? We need to pick Janice up in Ballyglass at ten so we should hit the road soon.’
‘Fine.’ She hung up awkwardly, clattering the receiver on the phone’s base.
The drive was along the M1, one of Northern Ireland’s two motorways, and then through Dungannon, a hard hilltop town, before taking the backroads to Ballyglass. As they were leaving Belfast Danny had pointed out local landmarks, the Black Mountain, Cave Hill, but his comments had been left to hang in the air and he’d retreated back into silence. Around Lisburn he turned the radio on. Ellen was sitting with her head turned away. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were closed or she was watching the scenery. When they were passing the turn-off for Portadown he asked her if she wanted to listen to a different station. She sat up, evidently awake, but didn’t reply so he childishly switched it to a Gaelic channel and then, when that got no reaction, detuned it so the car
was filled with hissing and white noise. Ellen leaned forward and turned it off. They sat in silence.
They were on the Ballyglass backroads before anyone spoke again. Ellen suddenly said, ‘I’d like you not to mention what I said to anyone.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not to Albert, or to your secretary, and mostly not to Adam Vyse.’
‘Of course not. I’m sorry for reacting like that last night. I was shocked. I hate him, you see, and I was feeling very happy and suddenly…’
She interrupted, ‘Well I
only
told you ’cause I was feeling happy.’
Danny slipped the car down into second to take a tight corner. As they rounded it Danny was forced to pull up sharply behind a red Astra trailing a herd of Friesians. A young boy in an oversized anorak and salmon-pink baseball cap was goading them along, shouting and tapping their massive haunches with a blackthorn stick. His cap was the same colour as the cows’ lolling tongues.
‘Bloody hell…We’re going to be late.’
Although they were at least ten feet away from the cattle, and inside the safety of the car, it was apparent Ellen was nervous of them. She stared through the windscreen and held onto the door handle.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cow before, up close I mean, like this.’
Danny laughed despite himself. Then her casual revelation made him think how different they were, from what different places, and the residual anger he was holding seemed to evaporate. Who was he to judge? He knew nothing about her at all. He wanted to ask her
forgiveness again but said nothing. They sat in voyeuristic silence. The cows dawdled along, grazing at the verge’s long acre and blowing steam clouds out through their soft nostrils. Occasionally one would turn its melancholic eyes towards them. Ellen eventually said, in barely more than a whisper, ‘They’re so
huge
. I didn’t realize they were so big.’
‘Walking larders, I suppose.’
‘Walk-in larders?’
‘Walk
ing
. It doesn’t matter.’ He went on, after watching them intently again for a moment, ‘I like the way they jostle together, scared of being left behind, and then one at the back will panic and bolt. A real mob mentality.’
Ellen said nothing. She seemed to be holding her breath. The cattle patiently swung the sacks of themselves along and the cars, a tailback of five or six now, purred after them, meekly reverent as a funeral cortège. A Friesian calf strayed into a field through an open gate, and, chased by the boy, came back out level with their car, at the passenger’s side. Ellen shrieked and recoiled, then laughed at her own reaction. She leaned slowly forward, until she was eye to eye with the enormous ponderous face at the window. It looked at her, sniffed the glass and then crushingly turned away, definitively uninterested. The boy in the baseball cap grinned and slapped the calf’s rump with his hand, setting it off at a canter towards the rest of the herd.
They drove past his dad’s estate agency at the top of the town and Danny pointed it out to Ellen. They could have called at his parents’ bungalow for a coffee but they were in Spain for two weeks, golfing with some other couples. Over the brow of the hill was the Esso garage
at Moneyronan Roundabout, and, standing beside a litter bin overflowing with takeaway wrappings from the Golden Dragon on the corner, were Janice and some small bird-like woman in a tracksuit. He pulled up by the air pump, got out and walked over to them.
‘Danny, I’m Janice.’
‘I remember you.’ He went to kiss her cheek just as she thrust out her hand for him to shake, so that he walked into it, and then succeeded in grabbing her in a kind of face-hold. He quickly let go after kissing the side of her head.
‘And this is my aunt, Ronnie.’ Janice had turned away slightly, to try to wipe Danny’s saliva from her earlobe.
‘Hello.’ Ronnie was looking at Danny like he was abducting her niece for his harem. She said, ‘You get into a fight on the way here?’
‘Oh, this?’ Danny pointed towards his eye. ‘No, nothing like that.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘I got mugged.’ He had to stop lying. It would get him in trouble.
‘In London?’ Ronnie said, looking at Janice as if to say
I told you so. It’s a dangerous place.
Danny decided to change the subject. He looked at Janice and said, ‘Anyway, how’s it going? Shall I take this?’ He lifted up her battered holdall.
‘Please. I’m sorry, there’s no shoulder strap,’ Janice said, and then felt embarrassed at saying it.
Ronnie stepped forward and tapped Danny on the shoulder.
‘Now you listen to me. You take care of this one. She’s my only niece.’
‘Well, there’s Malandra,’ Janice said, even more embarrassed now.
‘I mean apart from Malandra.’
‘And Lizzie, on Andy’s side,’ Janice added helpfully.
‘Well obviously I mean apart from Lizzie.’ Ronnie now closed one eye and tilted her head to light a fag but kept on staring at Danny. He was tempted to point to the petrol pumps and suggest that she didn’t smoke, but said nothing, nodded reassuringly and carried the bag to the boot of the Focus. Ronnie and Janice walked along behind. One of them was whispering something.
Ellen got out and said ‘Hello’ across the roof of the car.
‘Hi.’ Janice made a tiny wave back. ‘I’m Janice.’
‘Geordie’s girlfriend, I’ve heard all about you.’
Janice looked at Ronnie with open pleasure.
You see,
she wanted to say,
you see?
Instead she gave her aunt a lengthy hug and slipped into the back seat. Ronnie stopped her from closing the door and pushed a brown envelope into her hand.
‘No, no, I’m not taking that.’ Janice shook her head firmly.
‘It’s nothing. Put it in your handbag. Do as you’re told.’
Janice took it and then squeezed her aunt’s wiry hands.
‘Thank you. You’re too good to me.’
‘Nonsense. Now have you your passport?’ It was the third time she’d asked this.
‘Yes. And tissues, and money, and fags.’
‘Good girl. You take care now. And ring me when you get in.’
‘I will of course.’
In the car Janice texted Geordie to tell him she’d been collected, and then Danny, in the check-in queue at Belfast City Airport, had tried to ring him but neither of them had got a response. Back in the flat Geordie’s mobile was balanced on the arm of the sofa but he was still in bed asleep, motionless in the mid-stroke of a front crawl and lightly wheezing. He’d stayed up ’til 4 a.m. watching Danny’s DVDs. After an initially unpromising start (he tried
The Seven Samurai
but quickly got bored by the subtitles) he’d watched
Ghostbusters
, then the entire first series of
Fawlty Towers
, before taking a break to make beans on toast. He’d then trailed Danny’s duvet through to the living room and watched
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
, three episodes of
The Office
, and lastly
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
. Throughout the viewing Geordie kept up a steady industry of rolling spliffs, smoking spliffs, and drinking tea.
When he awoke on Sunday afternoon then, he couldn’t watch any more television. That capacity for inertly receiving information was severely impaired and he had at least three hours to kill before Danny arrived back with Janice. He took a long bath, putting in a concoction of the various crème foams and herbal oils that Olivia had left behind. The result got him mildly high and afterwards, with a blue towel round his waist, he sang as he shaved, with Danny’s electric razor, in an attempt to look sharp for Janice. Geordie, though no one had ever told him, could hold a tune, if all of the tune’s notes happened to fall within an octave of middle C. However the song he had chosen, ‘Danny Boy’, didn’t work like that at all and the high notes were bear traps into which he quite willingly walked, and accordingly screeched. He used to sing it to Danny when they were kids, out messing on bikes around Drum Manor forest, or getting drunk behind the church hall. It was a love song of sorts. There’d been a fad for singing ‘Danny Boy’ for a while: the boys’ hero, the Clones Cyclone, Monaghan’s diminutive Barry McGuigan, used to have his dad croon it in the boxing ring after his successful fights.
Once Geordie had dressed–having borrowed a pair of Danny’s boxers, a pair of his socks and one of his T-shirts–he stood in front of the pine bookcase in Danny’s bedroom, still humming. He hadn’t a penny, not even enough for a Sunday paper, but there was a glass jar full of spare change on a shelf which he took into the living room and emptied onto the sofa. He picked out a couple of pound coins, a fifty pence piece and several twenties. Plenty. He tugged on his trainers and
locked the front door behind him. If he headed down the Kingsland Road he could stop for a pint somewhere.
He walked past a group of Turkish men who were crowding round one pink newspaper. They didn’t waste time looking at him. This was a new thing, being invisible. He wasn’t Geordie Wilson. He was no one. He could be who he wanted. Maybe he could pass for a Turk. This area Danny lived in was trying to pass for something else. The shops gave it away by protesting too much: Class Boutique, Suavé, Top Marks Salon. Geordie walked by the school where the little bastard with the huge dark eyes had given him the finger on Thursday. The playground was flat and apparently featureless but it made Geordie think of how well, even now, he remembered their playground at Ballyglass Primary. He could see each inch of it practically: the painted yellow and white lines they’d run madly along for a game that someone–Danny maybe–had invented, those divots in the tarmac where they ripped out the climbing frame after Ross Hudson fell from it and cracked his skull, the stain on the tarmac from the blood that came out, the back wall where they’d tossed pennies to win them, the grassy bank where they poked at dead things with sticks. He stopped for a moment at the locked school gates. This playground was silent and still, as if sleeping, as if waiting for its dream about footsteps and screaming to recur.
In the course of half a mile Geordie walked past a Favorite Chicken & Ribs, a Dixy Fried Chicken, a Mighty Chicken & Ribs, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Kings Chicken, a Tasty Fried Chicken, and a Chick Chick Fried Chicken. A lot of the shops were closed down and locked up. The takeaways that didn’t specialize in poultry were Turkish
kebab shops. He passed a Chinese Herbal Medicine store and came to the Kilkenny Arms. He entered it reverently, his small head bowed.
Ian had spent the morning exercising in his dismal room: three sets of a circuit of sit-ups, squats, chair-dips, and press-ups with his feet raised on the edge of the bath. Naked, he stood in front of the cracked wardrobe mirror, flexing the ridges and mounds of his body. He was match-fit, he thought, at his fighting weight. He was a knife newly sharpened, perfectly balanced between hilt and blade, and able to cut through anything that might be stupid enough to come up against it. After showering, he went down to the empty dining room and ate a mountainous breakfast (four small boxes of cornflakes, three poached eggs, half a loaf), and decided to find a park to sit in and read the papers. At the newsagents beside the Lord Gregory he stopped to buy the
Sunday Mirror
and an
A to Z
, and the very young and very fat Pakistani boy behind the counter managed both to serve him and conduct an argument with the bearded man carrying boxes through from the back of the shop. He began by energetically screaming an angular diatribe in Urdu or Punjabi at the man, presumably his father, and abruptly switched to a weary silence for dealing with Ian. Then he held his hand huffily out to receive the cash, and screeched something else over Ian’s head before indifferently poking the buttons on the cash register, and, with a dismissive sigh, slopping the change down on the counter. His practised lassitude suggested he’d worked here for forty years, and would for forty more. His father was tramping back and forth through
the curtain of transparent plastic strips and gradually building a cardboard wall around the chest freezer. He wore a mask of patience that looked to be in danger of slipping. Ian dearly wanted to lean across the counter and clip the kid around the head. The fact that he had no respect for his father was apparent by his screaming, and that he had no respect for his customer, Ian, was obvious from his studied deployment of silence. After picking the coins up Ian stared at him hard but the boy was too preoccupied with puffing his cheeks out and repeatedly crossing his eyes in childish frustration to notice. Ian pushed the
Mini A to Z
into the back pocket of his jeans and started walking down the High Road.
If a road is still the same road so long as it keeps to a straightish line, then Kilburn High Road actually ends miles off, way out past the huge Brent Reservoir and the old American airbase in Hendon. There it’s called The Hyde, and then the Edgware Road, and next it tries on the second-hand threadbare coat of Cricklewood Broadway, though before entering Kilburn, which it does with some apprehension (speed bumps, traffic lights), it changes to Shoot Up Hill, a place once famed for its highwaymen. It then becomes Kilburn proper, or as proper as Kilburn becomes, when it’s reborn as the High Road, which it holds for the length of those restaurants and cafés and barbers and shops until it lightly coasts down into the stuccoed complacency of Maida Vale.
Ian had stopped and taken the
A to Z
out. He was standing beside the local tribute to Soviet architecture, the new Marriott Hotel, located on the cusp of where Kilburn ends. He decided the closest park, according to the map, was Regent’s. He could follow this street straight
down, then take a right onto St John’s Wood Road, cross the Grand Union canal and he’d be there. His mind snagged on the words
The Grand Union
. The Union hadn’t been grand for a long time now but it could be again. It just needed a little push. He’d feel better for walking, for clearing his head, though he couldn’t imagine sleeping tonight.
It had rained all morning, a persistent drizzle, but now the sun was breaking through. Crossing a junction at a set of lights, he walked past a grey BMW at the head of the traffic, which had flurries of white blossom stuck wetly all over it. The wipers had cleared two swathes on the windscreen and bunched the petals up at the bottom and sides of the glass. A young Asian couple peered stonily out. It looks like a wedding car, Ian thought, covered in little bits of confetti. He stopped at another newsagents in St Johns Wood and bought a plastic bottle of orange juice. After entering Regent’s Park, he wandered for a while along the brown gravel walkways and sat down on an empty bench facing a path. He hadn’t expected the park to be so ornate: it was all tree-framed avenues and neat little hedges, trimmed verges and murmurous fountains. Behind him rows of tulips stood in a gangly assembly. There was something adolescent about their too-long stems and their too-big heads. An old man in a three-piece suit was sitting on the next bench along, a walking stick propped by his leg, methodically eating a carton of chips and gazing into the middle distance. He appeared to be watching a wooden signpost for London Zoo that had been planted in the flowerbed on the far side of the path. Ian had never been to a zoo. Cosseted domestic animals bored him but he loved wildlife
documentaries, anything involving a tundra or rainforest. Maybe he’d pop in, just for an hour or two. See a big cat in the flesh. A little black pug waddled past on its own, so inbred its breathing seemed dangerously laboured, and then a strolling couple appeared, crackling with laughter and earthed to an excitable spaniel. A thin man, who couldn’t have been more than thirty but had completely grey hair, pushed an elaborate three-wheeler buggy by. Ian couldn’t see if there was a child in it. The man was followed a few moments later by a chestnut brown Labrador who goofed about the benches, paused to sniff the tulips, and then bounded offstage. The old man had finished his chips and had just stood up, straightening himself in increments, when a reluctant little dachshund appeared on a very long lead. It was ludicrous as a courtier and yapped to herald the arrival of its owner, a pretty mixed-race girl in jeans and a blue headwrap. Watching the dogs made Ian want to see proper animals, wild ones. He posted the newspaper and empty orange juice carton into a litter bin and followed the signs to the zoo.
‘
Thirteen
pounds?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘For one person? Not for a family?’
‘Yes sir. One adult ticket costs thirteen pounds.’ The young Asian man with bad skin and very white teeth leaned forward and tapped on the piece of paper listing the prices, which was Sellotaped to the glass partition of the booth.
‘Okay.’ Ian took his wallet out of the top pocket of his denim jacket and extracted a twenty pound note.
‘Thank you.’ There was a click and whirr and a white slip of card appeared from a slit on the metal counter. ‘Your ticket…and your change sir.’
All in pound coins. Was he winding him up? He swept them into his palm, made a show of looking at the handful of coins and dropped them into his jeans.
The zoo was cluttered with families out for the day. The saddest were the divorced fathers trying hard to smile and think of things to say to the blank-faced children trailing behind them. When two of these groupings met on the paths, the fathers would raise their eyebrows and nod at each other, as if they’d noticed they were wearing football shirts for the same, recently relegated, team. Ian walked past the birdhouses, not noticing the bloody plumage of the Scarlet Ibis or the Stanley Crane’s oriental serenity. He was looking for the big cats, those huge bruisers lounging in their sleekly muscled fur, watching everything with narrowed, passive eyes. The warm day was turning limply grey again. Ian spotted a sign by the camel enclosure as two disdainful dromedaries tried to stare him down.
The tiger cage was outdoors and sizeable but surrounded by a wall that featured several large windows. The two tigers were slumped in front of separate ones. Both had their backs to the onlookers crowding the glass. One little boy with shaggy blond hair and a rucksack shaped like a koala bear tapped at the window and was lifted up by his dad, who started whispering how tigers didn’t like to be tapped at. In fact everyone was whispering, even though the glass was two-inch solid Perspex and, in any event, the tiger looked like it could have used a little distraction. But it was nice all the same, Ian thought,
that people respected these magnificent beasts enough to lower their voices. It was only the strong that commanded respect. Ian stood at the side of one of the windows and wished he’d a camera. Each tiger had chosen a view that didn’t contain either people or walls. Smart cats. The one at Ian’s window suddenly sat up and the little crowd groaned. The tiger turned towards the glass. Yellow eyes peered out from a face both intelligent and utterly bored. It yawned and unleashed a pink tongue the size of a chamois over its jagged incisors before turning again, away from the glass, and slumping back onto the decking.
Seeing the cats hadn’t been that good, Ian thought, as he set off back to the entrance. They shouldn’t be in here. He walked past the penguin pool, where it was feeding time. The little blighters would totter over to the man kneeling down with a bucket, and jostle and nudge until a fish had been placed in their beak, which they’d then immediately toss away. The ground was flecked with these shiny lifeless sardines. It seemed the penguins just wanted attention. A serious one with a scrawny neck and freckles all over his chest set off for a walk around the rim of the pond and was followed by another, and then another, until a whole column of twelve or so penguins were marching purposefully round and arriving back at the group they’d just left. Two pushed a third one off the pond’s rim and into the water. He swam around for a bit and then hopped out, baffled but freshly interested in the big man with the bucket.
A young hand-holding couple, cooing over the penguins as if they had reared them, chanced upon another young couple they knew. The girls spoke loudly in estuary accents.
‘Oh my god! Susan! How weird!’
‘Frannie! How was Glastonbury? Is this Tim?’