Wake Up Happy Every Day (45 page)

She thinks about how she might use the week or so she has left. No point in hospitals or doctors. She wonders if she still has enough time to get to Madam.

She looks again at the people around her. It could even be one of the kids. Probably was. Kids will do anything for sweeties. Cheap, easy to train, remorseless. Savage. Better than a machine in some ways. Real-live terminators. One day all the big outfits will use kids. Firms like hers, they’ll be like factories were in the nineteenth century. Women and children doing all the dangerous work.

A week. Maybe ten days.

But it turns out that Catherine has less than ten minutes. She has time to feel the sudden irregularity of her heartbeat, the weird flush of heat down her left side. Time to cry out at the sudden cramping in her legs, time to register some strange, high-pitched keening. She has time to notice the final lie, the one about it being painless. Because this hurts. Really hurts. A diamond-tipped corkscrew deep in her guts.

And that’s it. She’s gone. She doesn’t hear the screaming that starts up somewhere suddenly. She doesn’t see the panicked rush to clear the pool. She doesn’t feel the strong arms that carry her to the side and pump her chest. She doesn’t even feel the soft lips of the Malaysian dentist Dr Ng, who tries to keep her lungs inflated with the kiss of life. Dr Ng who only stops trying to save her when Catherine’s blood rushes into her mouth and so into his too.

Two people die every second in the world. Most of them not as lucky as Catherine. Most of them are poor, young, frightened, sick, alone. A lot of them are babies.

And far away in Suffolk at that moment, an elderly lady shivers while chopping onions and her knife slices deep into the pulp of her thumb, not that she cares. She doesn’t even worry about the blood that pulses from the cut and begins to pool on her chopping board.

As she reaches for the kitchen roll and begins to wrap a thick wedge around the wound, she is already hurrying to the phone. She feels certain that something awful has happened to one of her children, or to one of her grandchildren maybe.

And mothers are never wrong about these things.

Fifty-one

JESUS

Jesus is blindfolded, lying face down with his hands cuffed around the bench he’s lying on. His legs are tied together. He is drunk and he is naked apart from his jockey shorts, and he’s also crying. He’s babbling in Spanish and English but not making any sense in either language. It should be pathetic, but it isn’t. It’s actually kind of hot. He’s so vulnerable, so scared.

She’d been pretty pissed at him at first, the way the knucklehead wetback had been taken in by that bitch, but he’d been so sorry, so willing to do anything to make it up to her. How could she stay sore at him? Guys aren’t as tough as chicks. They aren’t as smart either. She knows that. You want something doing, you don’t get a guy to do it. Unless you have to. Like she has to get Jeremy to do this; she doesn’t know anyone else who could. Or would.

She wishes now she’d made Jesus take the jockeys off too.

‘Hey, Jeremy, you got any sharp scissors?’

They are in Ink, the new tattooists in Buena Vista Park. Jeremy was her true love in high school, but he’d left town after their thing had ended. Had to really. Moved to the city and now six years later, he runs this place. Or he does at weekends when the boss isn’t around. It was Jeremy who’d done Mary’s first tattoo, back when it was still a hobby for him. When he was still learning. He did that first little baby owl on her right breast. A big day that was. Her fifteenth birthday. Her first tat. And the first time a man had gone down on her. Not to mention the first – and only – time her mom had walked in on her while a man was going down on her. Not just any man, the teacher of Horticulture 101, her favourite subject in high school. Mr Peress. Jeremy.

It had taken everyone a while to be cool after that. Even though Jeremy had moved on pretty quick. Fact her pop would still shoot him if he saw him again.

‘Sure. I have scissors. What for?’

She has to give him credit, Jeremy is being very chilled considering he hasn’t seen her for like nearly a year. Considering he always says she destroyed his life. Every year she gets a Valentine that says exactly that. It’s like a tradition.

‘I’m going to cut those jockeys off.’

And Jeremy sighs and goes and fetches the scissors from the drawer. Mary looks around approvingly. This is a well-run place, you can see that. Everything is sterile, clean. And the designs Jeremy has had blown up and put up around the main workspace are stunning. He is too good for a place like Ink, like he was too good to be part of a high-school faculty. He should be in LA doing work for the movie stars. She wonders if he has a regular date these days.

When Jeremy comes back he says, ‘You’ve changed so much since high school.’

And Mary says, ‘Really?’ and frowns. She doesn’t think she’s changed at all. Except maybe she knows how to get what she wants these days.

Now to Jesus she says, ‘Keep still and quit bawling,’ but she says it quietly, tenderly even. And she sits on the very edge of the bench next to where Jesus thrashes and moans, and she snips up each leg of the jockeys. She pulls the material away. Jesus yells something. Her Spanish is pretty good, but this she can’t make out. She looks at Jay who shakes his head.

‘Aw, the poor kid,’ says Jeremy. She can’t tell if he means it.

Jesus is squirming on the bench. Mary puts a hand on the soft fuzz of his ass. A big naked man tied up and at her mercy. She tries an experimental slap. Jesus hollers again. She laughs. She does it again, a bit harder. And then remembers Jeremy is in the room. She looks at him and smirks. Jeremy’s eyes are wide, he licks his lips.

‘Hot, huh?’ says Mary. Jeremy nods. Mary turns back to Jesus. His shoulders are shaking. She kisses his neck.

‘Hey, hey,’ she soothes. ‘You gotta keep still. All be over soon.’

‘Well, about eight hours actually,’ says Jeremy.

‘Really, that long?’

‘Pretty much. With breaks.’

‘He won’t want many breaks.’

‘No, but I will. This is a big assignment.’

‘We better get started then.’

But Jeremy still has one more thing to make sure of. One more piece of prep to do.

‘You’re gonna pay me right? One hundred dollars. That’s friends’ rates.’

Which is when Mary knows Jeremy isn’t really a friend, because a friend charges nothing, but she nods and says, ‘Sure. I’m good for it,’ and wonders what the hell he’ll do when he discovers she has no money at all. It isn’t like he can repossess the tattoo. He can’t exactly impound it, can he?

And Jeremy turns on his machine and approaches Jesus’s broad back with his needle. The needle that seems to Mary to be buzzing with a special eagerness. Jesus is very, very still now.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘You can relax a bit. It’s going to be all right you know. Jeremy knows what he’s doing.’

‘I’m the best,’ says Jeremy. ‘The best in Buena Vista anyway. And, Mary, you know most people here don’t call me Jeremy any more. Here I’m Jez.’

‘Boss name.’

‘Just wanted to be a bit, you know, less uptown.’

There’s a pause, then Mary asks, ‘You got a girl, uh, Jez?’

‘No,’ says Jez. ‘No girl.’ He’s telling no one about Lorna. The girl he murders nightly before he drinks himself to sleep. The girl who makes him cry when he hears sad songs on the goddamn radio.

‘I spoil you for anyone else, huh?’ Mary’s golden pigtails quiver. She likes this idea. Jez doesn’t say anything. He lets her know that the talking is over because the work is starting. The business.

He begins. Jesus gasps and moans and the blood begins to appear on his back, a thin trail of dots and dashes as the needle makes its careful, steady, repeated loops and curls. Its graceful swoops and dips. Its figure-skater’s dance. Jesus murmurs softly. Still, she can’t make out what he’s saying.

‘See,’ says Mary. ‘See. It’s not that bad.’

Jez pauses a moment. Looks up at Mary’s sweatshirt.

‘What?’ says Mary.

‘Just getting it all fixed in my mind.’

He bends to his task again.

In eight hours’ time Jesus’s back will be covered in the same shouting red swirling Superdry logo as is on the faded purple of Mary’s cheap cotton top. A punishment and an inspiration all at the same time. She hopes it will spur him on. Jesus has greatness in him somewhere, she knows that. All she has to do is find the way to bring it out. As she looks at his ass, she wonders about pegging. She’s never done that. She wonders how it would feel. If Jesus would be game for that. She could talk him into it anyway. Easy.

Jesus is still murmuring, but louder now.

‘What? What is it?’

‘He’s saying he loves you,’ says Jeremy. Jez. He says it deadpan, without pausing in his task, without taking his eyes from Jesus’s back with its flexing muscle, with its vivid quivering spots of blood. Like ladybugs, thinks Mary. Like especially bright and beautiful ladybugs. She puts her thumb on one swelling scarlet oval. Presses firmly. Imagines the bug squished.

‘He’s saying that he loves you, over and over and over.’

‘Of course he loves me,’ says Mary. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Crybaby though, ain’t he?’ says Jez.

And it’s true, Jesus is crying. He’s crying not just from the pain of the tattoo or because he is breaking his momma’s heart by getting one. And he’s not crying because he’s tied to a bench buckass naked. He’s crying because he loves a girl and will do anything for her. He knows now that he will go to hell for Mary. Nothing he won’t do for her. And he knows now there’s nothing she won’t do for him. They’re fucked now, both of them, because this is a real love like in the movies.

Of course he’s crying.

Fifty-two

LORNA

‘The cheek of you people,’ says Lorna. It turns out the favour the tax guys want is for Lorna, Megan and Linwood to ignore the fact that the two of them have broken into a house without a warrant. They are, they say, in the middle of an important investigation and yes, they’ve had to cut corners and should have applied for the necessary permissions from judges – which they would have got – but they are convinced that major crimes are being committed and, in the aftermath of a serious act of violence carried out against them personally, have simply tried to expedite proceedings.

Lorna tells them to fuck right off. She tells them she’ll be making a complaint to all the relevant authorities.

The anxious-looking English tax guy shakes his head sadly, while the bright-eyed American pensioner-lady tax woman tries to explain that this’ll be unfortunate because it will certainly mean the end of the case and that will mean a person of interest, someone who they believed might be a major player in various international frauds, escaping justice.

Megan asks what their evidence is. The lady says she can’t say. Megan says well, they can’t help then, and the woman actually growls.

‘Look at this place,’ she says. ‘No one who can buy a place like this has gotten their money honestly.’

‘So that’s your evidence? He lives in a big house. He must be a crook.’

The Johnny English speaks up in his soft, tired voice. ‘We can tell you there have been a number of recent unusual patterns of funds transfers from Mr Knox’s accounts. Large sums given to charities, as well as private individuals. In our experience philanthropy on this scale is most often associated with criminal endeavours.’

‘Money laundering,’ says the old lady, just in case they hadn’t got it.

There is a sudden flash. Linwood has taken a picture of the tax people on his phone. The tax people blink.

‘I am right now sending this photo to my website. I have eleven thousand followers there. I get twelve thousand hits a day. If you proceed with this investigation, this picture of government agents violating the basic right to privacy of a citizen will be filed as part of a suit against you personally and against the organisations you represent. Mr Knox’s lawyers – and I am sure they will be good ones – are bound to sue for punitive damages that could run into the tens of millions of dollars. So I would get along if I were you and count yourselves fortunate that you don’t get a fistfulla hot lead in yo lilywhite punk asses.’

The tax people say nothing else, they simply leave.

‘And please close the door on your way out,’ calls Linwood as they disappear down the long furlong of the hallway.

‘Go screw yourself,’ calls back the old lady, but seconds later they hear the door slam anyway.

Megan says, ‘Go Linwood! Go Linwood!’

Lorna says, ‘Did you actually say a fistfulla hot lead in yo lilywhite punk asses? Please.’

Linwood shrugs. ‘Sounds better when I say it. But I was just giving ’em what they expect from a big black dude. And I hate those guys. You know, a citizen has the right to get rich without the Feds getting all forensic on him.’

Megan says, ‘Funny, but Lorna doesn’t actually believe that. Lorna thinks that everyone should be paid the same. Rock stars and movie stars and sports stars should be on the government pay roll and paid a wage like teachers or nurses.’

‘No, that’s not right,’ says Lorna. Megan and Linwood look at her expectantly. ‘No. In Lornaworld, parasites like rock stars and movie stars would get far, far less than nurses.’