Crusaders (40 page)

Martin tugged at his shirt collar, instantly rueing the shiftiness of the gesture, a gift to his interrogators. He was just as damned if he didn’t, though, for the TREC boardroom, however modishly appointed, was badly in need of a breeze through an open
window
.

He now knew, uselessly, that he should have worn his loose linen suit, not the tweedy coat and woollen strides. If only there were but one soft-eyed female sat there surveying him – not a row of balding men, smugly stripped to shirts and ties, acclimatised to the fug. The Tyneside Regenerative Economics Corporation had set out its stall – take the heat or get out of the sweatbox, come
prepared
or not at all. Martin had arrived fully primed to espouse these sentiments, but his enthusiasm was ebbing with each minute that his curriculum vitae got kicked around the room.

‘I look at this and I see someone who’s been good at exams all their life. That, and ball games. Which is canny, but not a
great
lot of use to us.’

Martin had done his homework, though, could identify his chief antagonist – this long slap-head sourpuss – as Jon Salter of Hart-McGrain, US oil explorer with heavy-duty interests in the North Sea.

‘Mr Salter, I’ve been planning a shift out of academia for a while –’

‘Well, bully for you, but what makes you think you can start here?’

‘With respect, if you look you’ll see, I spent most of last year in a key part-time role for the council, its business centre – an office I
helped to expand – offering a complete consultancy to small
business
.’

‘Right. All the big hitters came to you there, I’ll bet? Wanting your expertise? Look, Mr Pallister, what we’ve got here is a major market-driven project, we’re not the municipality.’

‘Jon, in fairness to Martin – what’s the job here? Officer for
community
development, not chief executive.’

The mild cross-table rebuke was an unexpected boon. Martin looked closer at Frank Ball, a short stocky man who was
chomping
little pills of nicotine gum, and had seemed stone-faced,
bassett
-eyed and scary until a moment ago. He now sported a sort of conciliatory smile. ‘Martin, you’ll have heard, I’m sure, the
council
aren’t happy with us coming on the scene. Cos they can smell there’s government money’s gunna get spent, and they want it all for themselves. So they’re going round saying it’s all a big Thatcherite scam. Well, if it was – would I be sat here?’

Martin nodded. No, the chairman of North East Labour, the regional chief of the Transport and General, was self-evidently no man’s lickspittle.

‘Yes, we’ll report to the minister. But, the fact is – whisper it if you want – the government’s been almost generous. We’ve got some money, and some clout, and we’re going to use it. Cut some red tape, get some things built. Council can moan if they want, but I’m betting they’ll like what they see after we’ve done it. Cos the plan is to be radical.’

‘As reality itself,’ Martin murmured, no longer so bothered by the heat, or those few frowns still trained upon him.

‘Jon’s right, but. We’re not set up to be the Samaritans. We’ve got to follow business logic. Saying that, though, there’s no reason we can’t help the neighbourhood. Now, I see here you live in Hoxheath? So you’ll know the problems there, from a
development
side?’

Martin nodded keenly, until realising he was expected to
exhibit
some of the knowledge to which he tacitly laid claim. ‘Oh aye. Yes, God knows, Hoxheath needs something radical. The
riverside’s
a wasteland. You’ve got buildings derelict, old shop-floors
emptied for storage, left to rot. Polluted land, acres of it in need of a clean-up. I mean, clearly, from a business angle it’s value sitting there to be unlocked.’

Ball beheld him with tolerant rheumy eyes. ‘Of course, now, there’s people living there too …’

‘Of course there are. But we need to get
more
people in there. Moving
back
there. Kill this idea that it’s just the losers get left hanging on. The local people have to feel like they’ve got a stake in what we’re doing.’

‘Right. What we need’s a man who’s good with people. To – I’ll not say
sell
the project, because people should want to buy – it’s in their interest. But to
present
the thing … Do you get me?’

‘I do. That’s me. I’m an explainer. I’m a
proselytiser
. I can hold a room, I can talk to people on their level. Make ’em listen, get through to them …’

A fart of dissent blared forth, Salter shifting audibly in his squashy chair. ‘Says you, my friend. You’re not getting through to
me
.’

‘Whey then, sit up straight, man, get your fingers out your ears.’

A risk, Martin knew, but noting certain smiles across the panel he didn’t think he would have cause for regret. If it came to a vote, right now, he believed he had the numbers.

He convened public meetings, chaired sessions in civic rooms and hired halls and, on occasions, in people’s front parlours. He shook hands up and down the Tyne from Hoxheath to North Shields.

‘I want us to know each other better. Because we should. I want to help you understand what we’re doing, reassure you – if it’s reassurance you need. But I need as much from you in return. I have to convince
you
to participate. I don’t take that lightly. Without you, we’re nothing. With you? We’ll look a hell of a lot better …’

If this much earned him a laugh, however grudging, he was thereafter at ease.

‘They say Tyneside’s in decline, gone to seed. Okay, it’s in a poor state, and there’s reasons for that, you know better than I. Eleven years of this government, for starters. Not soon put right. But I tell you, give us the
tools and tackle and we’ll start doing the job. Because this is God’s own place, right? And we’re God’s own people. What else do we need?’

The usual way was that, within the hour, a gratifying number in the audience were ready to buy him a drink. Always there were some who claimed to have seen his sort coming a mile off, but he could turn closely attentive to them at the spin of a heel. If the complaint was that there would be no jobs for local people, he stressed the focus on training. If the fear was that flash new flats and their owners would only embarrass the old, he spoke of his personal commitment to the Housing Associations. At all times he listened and took good notes, though he reserved the right to form his own views, issue his own recommendations.

He was yet more sedulous on occasions when he dined with selected TREC board members at sponsored meet-and-greets. The favoured venue was Altobello, a glowingly understated Italian restaurant on Dean Street, four months old and already the best in Newcastle. He noted the ostentatious impatience of the most
prosperous
attendees, men who costed their time and scowled at idle chat. He was sometimes baffled when introductions were made and he struggled to connect his work to the ostensible interests of a hotelier or a rep from an American cinema chain. It was explained to him by Jon Salter, originally from Monkseaton, who bore him no grudge over Pinot Grigio and
insalata tricolore
. The heavy hitters were being courted for large-scale ‘flagship’
endeavours
, under which a fleet of smaller projects would sail. ‘We’re used to all this in Newcastle, Martin,’ Salter waved a hand. ‘People
care
about the north-east. Top people. Get ’em up here and they love Geordies. The Tories admire us, they do. Not as a job lot, mind you. But they’re on the side of any have got
initiative
.’

A silvery gent from Scottish and Newcastle invited Martin to a whisky-tasting weekend by the Tay. TREC’s Director of Finance, fresh from KPMG tax & audit, offered to advise him on his ‘
investments
’ – an advance on Titch Harwood. The chief executive of Nissan endured his dauntless jests about Sunderland FC and how it felt to shake Thatcher’s hand. The red wine was always velvety and heady. Frank Ball, though, stayed stony sober at these functions,
and would rise from his chair among the earliest, invariably with a blunt parting to Martin. ‘Don’t drink too much, y’hear?’

But it was only by lingering late over brandies that Martin got palled up with Proctor Wallace, Altobello’s owner. Wallace was a well-tended fifty, still in possession of his black hair and sporty build, and he had a high old tale he liked to tell of his path to glory – from shipyard apprentice to door-to-door salesman, to
renovator
and developer of a better class of homes for the aged, a
business
he had built up, floated, and flogged at its peak. ‘I’m nowt special, me,’ he asserted. ‘Just I was in the right place, and I was hungry.’ Thus did a Fellgate man come to pass his days in a
million
-quid pile in Ponteland, suntanned from jaunts to a Portuguese villa, his ambitions still far from fully realised.

Invited out to the Wallace homestead for a World Cup barbecue in high June, Martin ironed a polo shirt and chinos and collected Alex from Becky. Proctor’s boy Peter was seven too, and they ran off together like tow-headed twins down the epic jade lawn to where a full-sized football net billowed unattended in a slight breeze. Martin fancied a kickabout too, but the grown-ups were meant to watch Italy versus Ireland on Proctor’s monolithic Japanese telly. ‘I probably spoil the lad,’ Wallace shrugged between sips of lager from an engraved frosted tankard. ‘That Sting, he doesn’t give his kids owt. What else is it
for
?’ Martin
nodded
, affirmative of Proctor, his largesse, his sleek young Danish wife.

‘What you’re doing at TREC, y’knaa,’ Proctor confided, ‘I’m all for it. It’s inspiring. I’ve nee clue what I’m worth now, but if I hadn’t got given a bit of start-up cash back when, I’d still be
selling
plastic windies to pensioners.’

It occurred to Martin anew that he had got himself in gear much, much too late in the day – had applied but a fraction of his capacity for clear thought, and accordingly banked but a pittance of what he might otherwise have earned. His focus, his energies – they had always been there, but had led him down some pointless byways, on the narrowest of principles. Stood beside Proctor, he found that stretches of his past life only embarrassed him – none
more so than his ongoing residence at the Blake Estate, Hoxheath.

But Proctor wheedled the story out of him, then got him out of that beleaguered ex-council house by dint of a friendly loan at nought per cent interest. Proctor was big on property, more than happy to be helpful, and Martin would not have refused in a
million
years. In tandem with his new salary, his funds were
adequate
to offload the Blake house at a thumping loss and acquire a light-filled flat on the Jesmond fringes, a secluded Georgian
terrace
nestled amid insurers, accountants and legal services. When the truck came Sharon Price knocked on his door to say cheerio and all the very best, a gesture that cut him unexpectedly. But from the moment he parked his car and closed his new improved front door, it felt right. This was a place that his boy would like, that Becky might covet. That first weekend of occupancy, he strolled up to Town Moor with his tennis racket and smashed a few serves over a net. Regeneration had revived him.

True, the first developer TREC invited for talks at Altobello was discovered to be trading while insolvent. But the firm of Doggett & Delavel stepped into the breach, and Martin was good as his word to the people of Hoxheath, adamant through each and every planning meeting that one-in-four new-build homes be social housing. He was a little sneaky, he knew, in advising Becky to buy one of the smart boxy apartments in the heart of the ‘Project Zone’. He wasn’t surprised when she frowned through her inspection of the show house. But he knew that the gleaming taps, the duck-egg walls and floor-to-ceiling windows rubbed her the right way.

‘Alright for a bachelor boy like you, Martin. Not for me and Alex.’

‘Just trust me, eh, Becks? For once in your life?’

‘What are you doing? Are you in bed yet?’

‘No, I’m fixin’ me supper.’
Indeed the sound of mashing jaws now assailed his ears. But even after the longest of days that ran into evening, he looked forward still to that hour before bed and the more or less nightly phone call. It was one stable fixture in his life, a prized friendship, an intimacy.

‘I like a man who knows how to use the phone.’

‘No great skill there, pet.’

‘You say that. My dad spent his life up a telegraph pole and you hardly get a word out of him.’

Susannah, too, was pressing on, now a tyro lobbyist. Yet she seemed obsessively interested in Martin’s job.

‘It’s a new sort of culture, I’d say,’ he let himself pontificate. ‘A new way to mix public and private. I’m not saying it’s the
socialist
dawn. But we’re handing out money all over.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Marty. You can’t
slightly
endorse the free market. You can’t be
slightly
pregnant.’

‘Says you. Proctor always says he’d never have got on without the state.’

‘Oh, “my mate Proctor”. If he said jump in the Tyne, would you?’
The vying was gentle. She seemed pleased for him.
‘So what’s next?’

‘Suppose I wait for my boss to get another job.’

‘What about Marty Goes to Westminster? I’ve not forgotten.’

‘Aye, well, me neither. I’ve talked to my mate Proctor and all.’

‘You’ve been talking that long and not doing – I could lose respect for you.’

‘It’s the
time,
but, Suze. And the effort. And the money. I can’t be dragging round church halls for a year trying to get selected. Where’s the seat, anyway? I don’t see it, Suze.’

‘It’ll turn up. You’ve got to be ready for it. Gotta sharpen your odds. I mean, look at you. Okay, youngish sort of a fella, not so
shabby-looking
–’