After Bathing at Baxters (18 page)

‘Some nourishment and a trim then,' she said. ‘That won't cost much will it?'

O'Brien smiled his broadest smile, the smile of victory. ‘An inconsiderable amount,' he pronounced. He ran his eye quickly over the woman's figure, sensing shabbiness in the creased skirt, noting a boot-heel come askew. He would try for fifteen pounds, perhaps, or twelve.

It was nearly half-past five. In an hour they would close. Mr Trafford often spoke of staying open until eight or nine and plundering the Christmas crowds, but the late-night shoppers were reluctant to be enticed downstairs to luxuriate beneath the basement's haggard light. Picking up the scissors, flicking them expertly against his tunic to detach the tiny residues of oil and grease, O'Brien felt nervousness well up uncontrollably within him. To try and anaesthetise it he wondered about what he ought to do that evening, after he had taken the bus back to Brondesbury and had his tea. He could go down to the White Oak and see if any of the fellows were about, or he could stay and watch television. But then quite often only a few of the fellows were there, or only the ones that he disliked, and he had divined that Mrs Ellingford resented him watching television because she could hear the noises through the wall. For a moment he almost despised himself – a grown man of fifty-one still living in a boarding house with a vanload of teenage navvies fresh off the boat from Rosslare – but this made him feel shamefaced, because they were good fellows, all of them, and one or two even went to Mass, which was the mark of a good fellow, surely, and it was wrong to sneer at them.

Above his head the strip light faltered, died and then sprang into life once more. Holding the scissors at right-angles, O'Brien cut carefully along the line of hair which rested on the nape of the woman's neck. Occasionally he grasped it in a fan between his fingers or smoothed a vagrant strand back into place with his thumb. In the mirror he could see the woman watching him intently, her eyes fixed on the movement of the blades. O'Brien realised that his nervousness had reached a wholly unprecedented pitch. He wished that he could light a cigarette, but Mr Trafford had a strict rule about smoking. He tried to focus again on what it was that was disturbing him. It was not Mr Trafford, or the memory of Keenan, but something else. He prodded tentatively at a small hank of hair above the woman's ear and watched it fall airily onto the sleeve of his tunic. The woman shifted the angle of her face in the mirror, so that he could see the long line of her cheekbone, and without warning he realised what was the matter. For a second the shock was so great that he felt slightly dizzy and had to lean up against the chair back to steady himself.

The woman looked at him reproachfully. ‘Your hands are shaking.'

‘Oh, it's nothing,' O'Brien said. ‘Nothing at all.'

‘Do you feel all right? You look very pale.'

‘A little giddiness,' O'Brien assured her. ‘Nothing at all that you could be concerned about now.' To prove his invincibility he made a brief, feeble movement with the scissors. The woman stared at him. ‘Well, if you're sure.'

O'Brien blinked hard, still alarmed at how much the recognition disconcerted him. He took two deep breaths, carefully exhaling to steady himself. Mr Trafford, he noticed, had stopped reading the sports page and was gazing at him, not angrily but with a kind of mild curiosity. He set to work again hurriedly, stabbing at the protruding tufts of hair and thinking about his discovery. He had been right, he realised, to remember Keenan and the old days because it was then that it had all happened, going to the house out West in Greenford or Hillingdon with Keenan and a fellow called Flaherty who worked on the roads. ‘There'll be some grand girls there,' Flaherty had confided, ‘that I can assure you.' He remembered seeing her for the first time in an empty, deserted kitchen lit by a raw bulb, where he had gone to see if there was anything else to drink, and later in another room, with yellow light seeping in under the closed door and the noise of the party booming beneath them, the woman telling him to be careful of her dress. He thought very hard, choosing and then rejecting a number of colours, but he could remember nothing about the dress.

There was only a little hair left to cut. O'Brien was relieved to find that he had not made too bad a job of it. A few wisps hung down in a cluster above the woman's shoulder and he gathered them up in his fingers and smoothed them out. For a short time he wondered if he should say something, make some remark that would immediately disclose all this knowledge to her. He could imagine her mouth falling open and her eyes staring incredulously if he did. But what was there to say? ‘Do you remember the room in the house in Greenford or Hillingdon, and Keenan and Flaherty, and you telling me to be careful of your dress?' You could not say a thing like that. It was just not possible to say a thing like that.

As he brooded on this the woman said: ‘You've cut me.'

O'Brien stared at the white expanse of her neck. He said slowly: ‘Some mistake, I assure you.'

‘You have. You've cut me. I told you your hands were shaking and now you've cut me. Look.'

There was a small trail of blood glistening along the lobe of her ear. O'Brien watched, fascinated, as a drop fell lightly onto the towel around her shoulders. He said hurriedly and in an undertone: ‘I have a bottle of TCP here you know. That's the safest thing.' From a box by the mirror, kept against such emergencies, O'Brien produced cotton wool, disinfectant, a box of sticking plasters. As he did so he smiled but the woman seized the cotton wool from him and pressed it against the wound. ‘You're clumsy,' she said furiously. ‘Stupid and clumsy. I should never have come here.'

O'Brien found that he could not meet her gaze. He stood meekly to one side as she threw the towel onto the chair and with brisk, jerky movements put on her coat. Mr Trafford's gaze of mild curiosity had altered, he saw, to one of definite annoyance. For a moment he wondered about asking her for a reduced payment and then thought better of it for he saw that she was too angry to listen to him. He waited for a long time until the sound of her footsteps moved away before raising his head. When he looked up he saw her staring at him from the swing doors, beyond the neat rows of chairs and the flaring light, so that there was no doubt about her recognising him. She stayed like that for a long time, curious and uncertain, until a group of women with parcels and umbrellas came rapidly into the salon and she was caught up in them and disappeared. O'Brien, lowering his head to the level of his shoulders, picked up a broom and began to arrange her hair in neat piles across the white, marbled floor.

Fantasy Finals

Twenty miles along the M6 the mini-van broke down. They stood in a semi-circle on the hard shoulder rubbing their hands together against the raw Pennine dawn, while Alex hobbled the five hundred yards down the motorway to call the AA. Coming back from the emergency phone, hearing the surge of the oncoming traffic as it flew dangerously towards him, he saw them loitering stiffly in the pale early light, drinking tea out of flasks and swapping cigarettes. There were red and white scarves knotted over the back of the van, with a slogan that Alex hadn't seen until now – ALEX FERGUSON'S RED AND WHITE ARMY – sprayed in shaving foam on the rear windscreen. They were good lads, Alex thought. Hell, they were the best. Half an hour later, slamming the bonnet down into its frame, the AA patrolman noticed the scarves and the piled Umbro bags. ‘Are you some kind of sports team?' he asked.

High up in the Hotel Pompadour, with its dizzying views out over the level Hertfordshire plain, the boys killed time: lingered by the shining surface of the fifty-metre swimpool, drank half bottles of Bollinger in the Marie-Antoinette Lounge or strolled moodily through the lush pasturages of Axminster and polished pine. A handful – always that intent, stolid handful – kept to their suites and trained.

‘OK. Words that sound the same but with different meaning. One: contraceptive and town in South-west France?'

‘Condom.'

‘
Check
. Two: baby's nappy and eighteenth-century poet?'

‘A what?'

‘Eighteenth-century poet is what it says here.'

‘Diaper.'

Trevor smiled. ‘Nice one, Leroy. You want to me try you on Chemistry? You were weak on that in the semis.'

‘Go ahead.'

‘A white crystalline dextrorotatory sugar found in the form of xylon in wood and straw?'

Leroy beamed in a smile made famous by a hundred fan-posters, souvenir programmes and TV docs. ‘Xylose,' he mouthed happily. ‘
Xylose
.'

Ten miles south of Birmingam they stopped at a Happy Eater for coffee. Coming back from the phone again – if Doreen didn't return those library books this morning they'd get another sodding warning letter – Alex noticed that there was something wrong about the ellipse of hunched, muscular shoulders, the double row of bony, cropped heads that occasionally banged together as their owners bent over the narrow table, the better to apply themselves to the platefuls of chips and the monstrous, glistening donuts. What was wrong was that there was only ten of them.

‘Where's Andy then?'

In the long, uneasy silence that followed only Gary was prepared to catch Alex's eye.

‘He couldn't come boss.'

‘Why couldn't he come?'

‘Said he didn't feel like it … Besides, that Sharon – you heard they got married?– said he ought to go to the sales with her and her mum.'

‘Christ! You know what this means?'

The faces hung and stared, fists halfway to swollen mouths, eyes popping over the formica. They knew he was a hard bastard, Alex reflected, but they respected him.

‘It means,' he said, ‘that I'll have to play myself.'

Supine on the leopardskin sunbed, mobile cradled in the nook formed by head and splayed elbow, Ken Fantoni listened to the poolside chatter.

‘How much did you get for that interview with
Hello
?' Trevor demanded.

‘Which interview?'

‘The one about you and Greta Scacchi. The one where you reckoned she …'

‘Oh,
that
interview … Ten.'

‘Barry got fifteen for that piece about how he remembers stuff with mnemonics.'

‘
Fifteen
!' Leroy shook his head sternly. ‘I'm going to have to talk to Ron about this.'

‘Wow!' Trevor breathed admiringly. ‘You never told me your agent was
Ron
.'

Even now, Fantoni reflected, even now, four hours before the game, with a hundred thousand people on their way to the stadium, with security fighting off the tabloid reporters in the foyer, with the agents' phones burning white-hot with ever more outrageous demands for camcorders, round-the-world flights and virtual reality machines, it was hard to resist a certain complacency. The papers –
Quizmaster
and
Brain-box
– had been sceptical at first, but three months later here they were with the world at their feet. Inevitably, they'd had their share of the breaks. Buying Carlsson from Trondheim had been a lucky one, what with that question about Ibsen in the third round. And who'd have thought Wayne – Wayne of all people – would have memorised a complete list of the English county towns? Fantoni glanced at his watch: ten minutes until the Sky TV crew arrived. Ignoring the respectful nods from the boys, from Barry and Wayne and Trevor, staked out in all their boxer-shorted splendour, he lumbered off to the Louis Quatorze Suite, where only last week, the hotel had hastened to assure him, a Saudi prince and his retinue had been accommodated for the night.

Nosing their way eastward along the North Circular, caught up in the ebb and drift of the Cup Final traffic, Alex listened to the voices from the back seats.

‘Fucking good idea of someone's to pick the same day as the fucking Cup Final.'

‘Think the Red Lion'll win?'

‘Stands to reason dunnit? He's unbelievable, that Carlsson. I saw him in the League against Thetford Dog and Ferret. Ten questions about Brookside and he got the fucking lot.'

‘And he's fucking Norwegian as well. Makes you think.'

Even now, Alex reflected, even now, with a full-strength side – well, nearly a full-strength side, with Ryan let off his paper round for once – it was hard to believe that they weren't going to get steamrollered. Unexpectedly, they'd had their share of the breaks. Chelsea not turning up in the third had been a bonus, though. And who'd have guessed Roy's dad would have been owed a favour by the ref in the fifth? Alex glanced at his watch: ten minutes until the time he'd promised to phone Doreen again. Ignoring the V-signs from the boys and the glimpse of the two brothers, Paul and Gary, hunched over their tattered copy of
Gentleman's Relish
, he eased the van into the nearside lane and started looking for a phone box that took money rather than sodding phonecards.

‘Naturally I'm very proud of the lads,' Fantoni told the reporter from BSkyB. ‘I mean, I found Wayne making notes out of the
Bloomsbury Guide To English Literature
the other day at training: I don't think you can ask for much more commitment than that … Terry? Now don't get me wrong, Tel's done a great job with the Trowel and Hammer lads – the way they came back against the King's Head in the semis was brilliant – but I think there has to be a question mark over their in-depth knowledge. Politics. TV and Leisure. Entomology. These are all areas where we'll be looking for an early advantage. Of course, I'd have paid two million for Darren Guscott if I'd had the chance, but you've got to remember the lad's only nineteen and he's never going to get those seventies pop questions is he?'

‘Fingers crossed love,' Alex told his wife. ‘This is the big one.'

In the hush of the Wembley tunnel, a minute before they stepped out into the bright, coruscating glare, Fantoni stole a look at his team – Wayne taking a last-second glance at his pocket edition of
Who's Who in Showbiz
, Leroy and Barry pooling information on Danish coastal resorts, the subs, Darryl and Maurice, nervously combing their hair in hand-mirrors. Hearing the boom of the taped music, pumped from a hundred speakers high above the concrete – they were playing ‘The March of the Gladiators' – Fantoni thought he was going to cry. He remembered his early days, crouched in the corner of a sweaty pub in Shoeburyness while his dad, old Frank Fantoni, failed to answer questions on pre-war film actresses, his humble apprenticeship as unpaid coach to a non-league winebar in Macclesfield. And now this! Somewhere in the distance a bell rang. Staring resolutely in front of him, Fantoni strode out to meet the wall of dense and noiseless sound.