Wake Up Happy Every Day (36 page)

Lorna follows Megan into the kitchen. She’s not going to let it lie. Not yet. ‘So there’s going to be a next time is there?’

Megan turns round, slow and deliberate. She looks Lorna right in the eyes. Lorna is shocked by how tired she looks. There are shadows beneath her eyes, and her peachy skin looks smeary somehow. Like a glass that has been breathed on. She looks ill.

‘I don’t know Lorna. I just don’t know. But back off ’kay?’ She spins back round and starts rinsing cups. Her shoulders tense. Her whole posture a kind of force field. Lorna leaves her to it. One thing is certain: it was no work crisis that kept her out. Lorna feels hollow. Megan and her, they don’t tell each other fibs.

She goes back into the living room, calls the direct number the cop had given her.

‘She’s back.’

‘Who is this?’

For fuck’s sake, it had only been a minute ago. ‘Lorna Dawson. I called a few moments ago? About my missing flatmate?’ She’s aware that she’s speaking way more loudly than usual, and that Megan is smart enough to know that she is doing this just so that she’ll hear her, but she’s still bloody angry. Relieved obviously, but angry too.

She explains that Megan has just walked through the door exactly as he had predicted she would. To his credit the cop doesn’t sound amused or smug. Just says that it is good news.

‘Yorkshire. By the way.’

‘Sorry, Ma’am?’

‘You asked where I was from. It’s West Yorkshire, England. Near Bradford.’

‘OK, right. Thank you.’

‘So that’s two mysteries sorted. The SFPD clear-up rate is really picking up today, isn’t it?’

The cop laughs good-naturedly. She carries on, ‘If only everything could be resolved that easily, huh?’

‘You got that right, Ma’am. I’m pleased your friend is safe home.’ A pause. He seems to be on the brink of saying something else. But whatever it is, he doesn’t pursue it. Tells her to have a good day now.

‘You too.’

As she replaces the phone in its cradle, Megan hands her a cup of coffee. She sips it. It’s good. Megs is much, much better than Lorna at coffee.

‘You called the cops?’

‘Yeah, well. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘I should have called you.’

‘No. Like you said, you’re a big girl now. None of my beeswax.’

They sit and drink coffee for a while. Then Lorna tells Megan about seeing Jez. Megan’s nose wrinkles comically. And she tells her about thinking she’d seen her dad or certainly someone who really looked like him. So maybe he’s back from his travels.

‘OK, let me get changed and we’ll go to the city and see if he’s home.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Why not?’

‘You don’t have to go to work?’

‘I’m taking some time off.’

‘Because of yesterday’s late one.’

‘You got it.’

Lorna thinks Megan looks shifty, but she also knows that her own reaction to her friend staying out was over the top, and she’s embarrassed. She isn’t going to start quizzing her about stuff now. If Megan has things to say she’ll tell her when she’s good and ready.

Megan picks up their cups and goes back to the kitchen. Lorna calls out over the sound of the taps.

‘Megan, my love?’

‘Yes, Lorna?’

‘Am I still your best girl?’

Megan reappears in the doorway, broad athletic shoulders filling the whole frame. She is smiling, but a little sadly Lorna thinks. Or maybe she is just being hypersensitive.

‘You will always be my best girl, Lorna. You know that.’

‘Just checking. It’s good to know.’

Thirty-eight

NICKY

The bobby-dazzler suit is almost ready and I go for my final fitting feeling cheerier than I have in days.

I’m reconciled to going back to our soggy little island now. Actually I’ve moved a bit beyond reconciled, maybe I’m even quite looking forward to it. When I was last in England I was a balding, greying, pudgy council drone with dodgy teeth. Now I’m a rascal, a rogue, a rapscallion. A master criminal. Rich and fit, my sharp cheekbones set off by my artfully mussed-up hair. My teeth – they gleam, they sparkle. I could be a kind of dandy highwayman myself, tlot-tlotting my gangster glamour through the damp suburban streets in my eye-catching whistle. I’m so different from the anonymous little man who left from Gatwick three months ago that it’s hard to believe that I won’t see the place differently too. Maybe I should make a documentary on my phone. Capture all the oddities and absurdities of the English.

Another thing that has made me realise it’s time to go. San Francisco is shrinking, the way all places do when you get to know them too well. The other day, for example, glancing into a coffee shop and seeing Lorna Dawson sitting right there holding hands with her boyfriend, that had given me a bit of a turn. Time to go.

England, my England. It is a bit frustrating that the one place I won’t be able to wander is the place where I lived. Even with the new hair, the new teeth, the new threads, and without the twenty pounds of flab I used to haul around with me everywhere – we’ve decided that there’s still a risk I’ll be recognised. So when we’re in Southwood I’ll be in the Manton Grange Spa and Golf complex – Southwood’s premier hotel – watching sport on Sky. But that won’t be for long. Sarah has promised she’ll see her mum and her sister. Maybe a girls’ night out with her mates, and then we’re off. We’re friends again now, by the way. In the morning, Scarlett wriggling and gurgling between us, our snarkiness seemed pointless and stupid. And Mary and Jesus aren’t coming with us anyway, they tell us. But sssh, don’t tell our kid.

We’ll do London – I suspect that London might be the best place in the world to be rich – and then who knows? New York, Paris, Istanbul. Check out some of Russell’s other pieds in other terres.

And even if I’m stuck indoors watching crown-green bowls on a hotel telly, then I may well be wearing this suit. It is truly a thing of rare beauty. A fully hand-sewn summer kid mohair three-piece in the kind of subtle purple the classier kind of Roman emperor might have appreciated. Mother of pearl buttons to add a bit of bling. A bobby dazzler indeed. Jimmy’s not happy though, and even through his mouthful of pins he still manages to articulate the cause of his disapproval.

‘I do wish you’d stop losing weight,’ he says, sulkily. ‘There’s another hour’s work here now.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I have nothing important to do. I’ll just, you know, mooch about a bit. Come back in an hour or so.’

And now Jimmy manages to convey what he thinks of those of us who have nothing to do in the middle of the day except mooch. A shoulder twitches dismissively. It’s obvious that he thinks we’re all a symptom of something profoundly wrong with the state of things. All of us, his clients, we’re unworthy of him – that’s what that shoulder twitch says. And it’s true too. Jimmy after all is a man made stooped and grey and squinty with work. He’s more or less bald apart from the twin feathery tufts of white hair above each ear. He stares anxiously at the world through thick-lensed glasses held together with Sellotape. He doesn’t even wear a suit himself, preferring to work in a vest and old jeans that look a size too big. He shuffles, sighing, around his workshop, crooked with pronounced scoliosis. He looks like a man expecting to be foreclosed at any minute, though Jesus assures me that he is a man of immense personal wealth.

Work is maybe not a choice for this man, it is a weird compulsion.

And so I head off out into the streets around the shop and am startled to come face-to-face with Catherine, the woman who asked me out while running. She looks nervous, agitated. I can’t think what I saw in her.

‘We need to talk,’ she says, and she sounds like she means it.

And so we go to a coffee shop where she has a double expresso and then reveals herself to be completely off her nut.

One of the jobs I had before the cultural services billet came up was working with the long-term mentally ill. The people who were being moved from asylums into ‘the community’, whatever the hell that is. And among that bunch of elderly schizos we had Walter who, he said, drove buses in the spirit world. And I remember thinking then, if you’re going to have a fantasy life that involves you journeying between here and the astral plane, don’t be a bleeding bus driver. It’s your world and you can be anything, so be a king. Be supreme overlord of the Galaxy. Be God. Be Lord of everything. Aim high. Have some ambition, man.

And there was another old man – Doug – whose big thing was that he had come up with the idea of Interpol, but that our dear Queen Elizabeth had infringed his intellectual copyright, and then had him locked up to prevent him gaining the vast riches that would obviously accrue from being the inventor of international cooperation between police forces. Apparently, at some point in the 1940s, he’d tried filing his brainwave with the patent office and the very next day he was in Broadmoor.

Walter and Doug. I’d liked them. As delusional schizos went they were very engaging.

This Catherine is less engaging, her fantasy less compelling and her whole manner less convincing too.

When we’re sitting down, I can see that she’s close to tears.

‘What is it?’ I say. ‘What’s the matter?’ And to be honest I’m expecting a tale of woe involving a lost passport maybe or possibly sudden redundancy. Perhaps a text arriving from England saying that due to the economic situation etc. etc. Or maybe a sick family member. And that seeing me by chance, she’s taken it as a sign that maybe rescue is at hand. Something like that. Maybe not rescue even, but just a supportive shoulder to lean on in a place where she is foreign and alone.

I’m emphatically not expecting her to tell me that I have days to live, that apparently I have a lethal, incurable virus travelling around my bloodstream. That she herself is actually a kind of James Bond figure, licensed to kill and all that, but has been duped into bumping off Western venture capitalists on behalf of shadowy forces operating out of Asia or Moscow. She does tell me the precise details, but to be honest it’s so convoluted and confused that I struggle to keep up. You know when someone’s trying to explain the plot of a movie to you, one that you have no wish to see. Or when someone is trying to tell you about this really amazing dream they had last night? Well, that basically. Give me the simple clarity of a Walter or a Doug any day.

Anyway, less than two minutes in I’m thinking of how best I can escape this psycho nutjob and thanking my lucky stars I never ever got myself properly entangled with her. So, what with one thing and another, I’m not really listening.

‘Russell. You’re not really listening.’

‘I am. You’re a government assassin.’

‘I hate that word.’

‘A foreign agent then, and you shot me with some kind of poisoned dart when we were out running, because her Britannic Majesty’s enemies want to manipulate the international money markets. You’ve been working, without your knowledge, for an organisation which is dedicated to the eradication of usurers.’

‘You think I’m mad.’

‘No, no, no. ’Course not.’

‘I wouldn’t really blame you. Sometimes I think I’m mad.’ Which is good because it does suggest the possibility of some kind of self-awareness, so perhaps some kind of redemption is also possible. I read somewhere that way more people than you think have psychotic episodes in their life. Mental illness is one of the great hidden epidemics.

I decide to humour her. Play along. It seems safest given that we’re in a place full of knives and forks. ‘But what can I do, Catherine? You tell me there’s no cure for this poison. Seems to me like I just have to accept things.’

‘You
do
think I’m mad.’ Her eyes fill up again. I wonder what we look like to the other customers in the cafe. Maybe we look like a couple breaking up. A good-looking middle-aged couple who have come to the end of their rainbow. I wonder if they think I’m the chucker or the chuckee.

‘You can . . . I don’t know . . .’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Look, I’m telling you so you can get your affairs in order.’ Very kind of her I’m sure. ‘And it’s not really much use, but I know the people responsible. And I will get them for you, Russell. You can be sure about that.’

My phone breaks into its polyphonic dawn chorus. Its avian aria. Mary. Hurrah. Saved. Whatever she’s calling about it’s going to necessitate my getting a fast exit out of here. It’ll be something that needs dealing with that can’t be put off. It’ll be
sorry Catherine, thanks for the warning
and then
see ya (don’t wanna be ya).

Mary is hysterical. I can hardly make out a word she’s saying. I make her slow down and start again, take her time. But I can feel my heart start pounding, a sickness rising in my throat. Not Scarlett. Not our gorgeous little girl. Our defenceless angel.

‘They’ve taken her.’

‘What? Who’s taken her?’

‘I don’t know. I only left her for a minute, she was playing with her dolls and I was stacking the dishwasher and I came back in and she was gone.’

‘Where has she gone?’

‘I don’t freaking know, Russell! But someone has taken her. They’ve left a note.’

‘You saying she’s been kidnapped?’