Various Pets Alive and Dead (22 page)

They laughed at his jokes, they drank his coffee, they ate his food, they even allowed him to comfort their exam fears and boyfriend sorrows with a platonic arm around their gazelle shoulders. But that’s as far as he ever got. There were guys in his college, blond six-foot rower types from minor public schools, who when they crossed the quad, it was like a phalanx of girls would race towards them, throwing their knickers over their shoulders as they ran. But that never happened to him. In his second year, an American scholarship boy called Oliver had the room above him, and the staircase was clogged with weeping girls – if Serge just opened his door, he could reach out his arm and haul one in, but all they would do was eat his toast and talk about Oliver.

So he was grateful to Babs, a teachers’ daughter from Manchester whom he met during his final year, who approached the sex thing with down-to-earth cheeriness. They met in the bar after lectures, sometimes went to see a film on Saturdays, or ate pizza and listened to Martha Wainwright together. After three months of this, Babs suddenly stripped off her clothes one night and climbed into his bed. Her body was creamy and plump, with pendulous soft breasts, and her uninhibited vocalisation overrode his own nervousness. He was never quite sure he’d correctly located her clitoris, as advised by
Men’s Health
, but after making love she clung to him squeaking and whimpering in a way he found quite endearing. He held her close and murmured sweet love words, which he hoped she wouldn’t take too literally.

Babs was undemanding at first, and left his head free for maths. He was even unfaithful to her a few times on the side. But when she let slip, some three years into the relationship, that she longed for a baby, he panicked. He was only twenty-six at the time. Babies are cute – he has nothing against them – but the combination of Babs and baby filled him with the kind of hopelessness a prisoner must feel when he hears the cell door slam.

Desperate for an escape route, he wandered into a graduate recruitment fair where a guy he’d known at college three years ago, whom everyone had regarded as an utter no-mark, was swanning around in a Dries Van Noten suit, spouting about careers in finance. Serge took down his details and sent in a couple of applications for City jobs without telling Babs, just to see what was out there. He hadn’t expected to get a job offer so soon. The salary he was offered at FATCA was mind-boggling, especially after all those years on a PhD bursary. He hesitated, but not for long.

He felt terrible of course. But not as bad as he reckons he would have felt if they’d stayed together. It wasn’t just the baby thing that had panicked him; it was the thought of a lifetime buried in Babs’s pudgy soft embrace. He wasn’t ready for it yet. He wasn’t ready to abandon his dream of a faraway freewheeling life, shared with the girl of his dreams, who was not needy and noisy, as Babs had recently become, but distant and disdainful like the posh-school princesses. Dream girl, with whom he had already developed an intense one-handed sexual relationship, was slender and beautiful and, though the specifics of her appearance were vague, he knew he’d recognise her instantly when she would glide past him one day, self-absorbed, barely noticing him except to register a glimmer of amusement.

Someone like Maroushka, in fact.

Logging out of Chicken’s emails and into the Kenporter1601 bank account, he’s alarmed to find there’s been a flurry of trading activity, tens of thousands flying in and out of the account all day. What’s been going on? Browsing through the transactions history, he finds that Chicken has recently been trading in many of the same Yorkshire-based shares as he has. How come? Does Chicken have a special interest in the area? Is it a coincidence? Or part of a pattern? Edenthorpe Engineering, Wymad and Endon are all there. South Yorkshire Consolidated, parent company of Syrec, the Askern-based recycling firm; there’s been some recent buying here. He knows they’ve just been awarded a substantial regional development grant, which could account for the jump in value of their shares. But how did Chicken get wind of this?

While SYC seems to be shooting up, Edenthorpe Engineering is on its way down. And Dr Black’s account is swelling.

On Tuesday, he puts another £250,000 into SYC, going long, and joins Maroushka for a cafeteria lunch, instead of taking a sandwich to his desk as usual.

She’s in a chatty mood.

‘You been following creases in UK housing, Sergei?’ she asks, munching her way through a steak sandwich with coleslaw and chips. The amount she can eat is astonishing – she always seems hungry. ‘Things look very dodging in market. Same scenario like US sub-prime. High level of defaulting is becoming regular. Assumed continued rising of property value which underpin lending show sign of weakling. What you thinking, Sergei?’

Serge finds it difficult to focus on hedging and housing while she’s sitting opposite him wearing a frost-white jacket over a blue polka-dot dress, absently running a bare foot up and down her leg as she dips a chip in her mayonnaise.

Princess Maroushka!

Hear the song of Serge!

Our passion will emerge,

In a faraway auberge …

When you’re lumbered with a name like Serge, you have to be creative. There are so many things he wants to say, but before he can get any words out she starts skimming the room with her eyes, looking for someone more amusing to gaze upon. She fixes on a point behind Serge’s left shoulder and, turning his head, he sees that Chicken has just entered.

He’s with a couple of tall guys whom Serge hasn’t seen before. They stroll between the tables, surveying their domain like Masters of the Universe, Chicken making introductions as they pass.

‘Craig Hampton and Max Vearling from New York Head Office.’

They are sleek, smooth, and fragrant with musky aftershave, their smiles bleached like tooth-whitening ads. Maroushka looks up, flirting with her eyes. The visitors linger a moment then move on to the next table, smiling blandly, offering corporate handshakes. Craig Hampton and Max Vearling – who the fuck are they?

Next day, Wednesday, Maroushka comes in late wearing a new pair of spectacularly high calfskin ankle-strap platforms, tosses him a cursory hello, and gets straight on to her screens. He keeps an eye on her, thinking to follow if she should sneak out of the building, but she remains in her seat, head down, tapping away at the keys. When Timo Jääskeläinen goes off to the loo, she whips out her phone and goes to the glass-walled office for a quick yack, but apart from that she doesn’t move from her place until lunchtime, when she takes a quick coffee break.

At about three in the afternoon, she strolls up to Serge’s desk and leans over him to whisper in his ear, letting her hair brush against his cheek and her complex scent fill his nostrils, so he can’t tell which is her perfume and which is the smell of her body.

‘Sergei, we must re-examine Gaussian copula. Build in random systematic factor loadings. Big money opportunity.’

Then she slides away into the office to make another phone call while Timo is off the scene.

Serge too is puzzled by the way the markets are behaving, but Maroushka’s behaviour bothers him more. She’s taking a risk, using her mobile so openly. Timo could return any minute, and anyway one of almost a hundred traders could make a complaint. Surely she’s not still phoning her mother in Zh – … wherever? He feels like warning her, but she already knows she’s breaking the rules, so he opens up a new algorithm and concentrates on how to make gains in the new market conditions. If it works out, he reckons his bonus should be up on last year, despite the gyrations of the market. Dr Black’s toilet trades are showing a handsome profit too.

But that evening, when he gets home and logs on, he discovers that Kenporter1601 is completely empty. Drained of every last penny. That can only mean one thing: Chicken has realised that someone has been tampering with the account. It was bound to happen sooner or later of course; in fact, he’s surprised it took Chicken so long to cotton on. His stomach lurches as he wonders what’ll happen next. This is the moment when Chicken will decide whether to call in the law, or to stay on the outside of it.

He plays over one scary scenario after another, and it’s three in the morning before he finally drifts off to sleep, to dream of rabbits squeezed tight in dark burrows.

Although Doro misses the wild rabbity garden of Solidarity Hall, she’s transferred her passion to her allotment, a pocket-sized Eden where her crop of beans, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, beetroot, berries, apples and plums is ripening nicely. But all is not well.

‘Summat’s gooin’ off,’ says Reggie Hicks, the next-door plot holder and unofficial chairman of GAGA (Greenhills Allotments Gardeners Association), who has got wind of a dastardly plan on the part of the Council to flog off the land to a developer.

A meeting has been convened on the grassy space under the plum tree at the side of the communal water tap. Relaxing over a strong brew of tea on an assortment of canvas deckchairs, old kitchen stools and a stolen church pew, Doro joins the GAGA members to bask in the late Friday afternoon sun and consider their options. Reggie Hicks, eighty-four years old, an ex-miner from Rossington and winner of the biggest leek competition six years on the trot, is for an immediate all-out strike; Ada Fellowes, seventy-six, church warden, points out that this would just be playing into
their
hands. Danny Fellowes, also seventy-six, argues for negotiation and a softly, softly approach. Jim Smith, even older than Reggie and also a former leek laureate, launches into a long speech which nobody can understand, though Brussels sprouts are somehow involved. Helen Smith agrees and adds that
they
should be strung up by their gizzards. Winston Robinson, sixty-six, from Trinidad, all-time pumpkin champion, suggests a petition.

Ernest Philpott, sixty-four years old and caretaker at Greenhills Primary School, says, ‘Fie on ’em, ’tis an unweeded garden gone to seed,’ and calls for an immediate occupation.

Doro, at sixty, is the baby of the group. She says, ‘Couldn’t we change our name to something which has a less unfortunate acronym?’

‘What’s an acro-gnome?’ says Danny Fellowes.

‘What’s wrong wi’ being gaga?’ says Jim Smith.

Meanwhile, nearby, the real baby of the allotments, Oolie-Anna Free, aged twenty-three, is pottering around the raised vegetable beds, watched over benignly by several pairs of eyes. She digs her hands into the compost heap, scoops out the rotting vegetable matter and crumbles it through her fingers on to the tomato seedlings. She’s wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, so the scars on her arms are visible. Watching, Doro’s heart squeezes with a love so intense it almost feels like pain.

Doro often sees her life divided neatly into two parts: pre-Oolie and post-Oolie. The pre-Oolie Doro was slim, pretty, sexy, experimental, committed. The post-Oolie Doro is plumper, older, often too tired for sex, predictable, over-committed. Most of the time, she doesn’t remember what it felt like to be the pre-Oolie Doro. We all build our lives around the immutables – the things we can’t change – and she’s built her life around Oolie. The allotment has been a big part of their life together, a shared enthusiasm, a place of safety, a calm haven in Oolie’s stormy adolescence. To have all this threatened by remote stony-faced bureaucrats in league with money-grubbing developers is intolerable.

The first thing to remember in any offensive is that you need allies.

She leans across and whispers to Mr Philpott, ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you the other day.’

Through the leaves of the plum tree, the September sun stipples a quivering pattern of light and shade on the grass, and on the gardeners sipping tea and passing around a slightly damp packet of digestives. High up in the blue, swallows are swooping and weaving for their gnatty suppers. Bees hum among the fruit bushes and, beyond that, the faint buzz of traffic from the A630 seems a part of the natural landscape too, though according to Reggie, it’s the allotments’ easy accessibility from major roads which has made them a target for developers.

‘Some bugger wi’ sticky ’ands is gonner make a ruddy mint out of this.’

‘Pavin’ over paradise,’ says Winston Robinson.

‘And building a multi-storey car park,’ adds Doro.

As they sip their way through a third pot of tea, a plan of action emerges. Reggie, Danny and Jim will mobilise the other GAGAs. Ada Fellowes will contact the vicar: ‘It’s time ’e got a bit o’ blood on ’is ’ands.’ Doro, who’s already met the local councillor, will invite him on a tour of the allotments and try to winkle out the full facts about the development. Helen will bribe him with jars of her world-famous-in-Doncaster blackcurrant jam. Winston Robinson will draft a petition. Mr Philpott will draw up a list of demands.

Not since the days of Solidarity Hall has Doro felt the thrill of participating in militant action.

‘When are we going home, Mum?’ Oolie whines.

‘Soon.’ Doro gives her a hug. ‘We’re just making a plan to save the allotment. You wouldn’t want them to build houses here, would you?’

‘I don’t care.’

She pulls a bored face. She’s been so grumpy recently. The only time she’s her old bubbly self is when she’s talking about Edenthorpe’s cafeteria or winding Clara up.

‘Look, Oolie, look at the swallows!’ Doro points up into the sky, but Oolie shrugs.

‘They’re only bleedin’ birds.’

When they get home, Doro puts the kettle on out of habit – though she’s already had three cups and at her age she has to mind her bladder – and logs on to the internet. She goes to the council website, and makes a note of Councillor Malcolm Loxley’s number. An answering machine picks up her call and, caught off guard, she leaves a confused, rambling message.

‘You may remember … we … er … bumped into each other at Greenhills Primary School … ringing to ask for your help on an urgent matter …’