Meltdown (12 page)

‘No shoes too high, no hair too big,’ she said without breaking her stride and Jimmy had been smitten. He had gritted his teeth, however, and ridden it out.

Jim’s mum was delighted with the change Monica seemed almost overnight to have brought about in her son. Suddenly he was clean and fit-looking. His hair was nicely cut and that awful constant sniffing appeared to have abated, which was a great relief.

Shortly before Monica’s advent Nora had begun to worry seriously about Jimmy, who was sweating a lot and grinding his teeth. Nora wondered if he might be developing some terrible allergy.

‘That’s what it’s all about these days. Allergies. It’s because of the chemicals they’re putting in the chickens. I mean whoever would have thought peanuts would need a health warning?’

Derek Corby read the Sunday papers and had a pretty good idea what Jimmy’s symptoms were about, but he didn’t want to worry Nora so he kept his own counsel.

And now all that had changed anyway.

‘Whatever he had, she’s cured him of it,’ Nora said. ‘It’s like he was a little boy and now suddenly he’s a man.’

Jimmy’s dad agreed. Slaving away each day running his branch of the National City Bank for a salary that wouldn’t have paid for even one of Jimmy and Monica’s holidays that year, Derek conceded that in Monica, Jimmy had made the one truly clever decision of his life. ‘And poor Monica made her silliest,’ he would add grumpily, but his wife always assured Monica that he didn’t really mean it.

It was Derek and Nora who helped the young couple to move into their first proper marital home, a small riverside cottage in Richmond. Monica’s parents were old hippies who had sold up their pine-furniture business and gone off around the world in a boat, so they were pretty useless. Derek and Nora, on the other hand, were complete homebodies, thrilled and anxious to get involved. Fortunately, Monica loved them both.

‘I always secretly longed to have straight parents,’ Monica said as she unwrapped coffee mugs. ‘When Mum used to pick me up at the school gates dressed entirely in purple with no bra and her bloody nipples showing, I used to die. Dad sometimes came in this terrible old minibus he used for work and which made more noise than all the other parents’ cars put together. One time I had my bike with me and he opened the back to put it in and there was a mattress and duvet laid out for all to see, with empty wine bottles clanging around. It was mortifying. From that day on I was the girl whose parents had a shaggin’ wagon. It was horrible.’

‘Well, you can’t get much straighter than my mum and dad,’ Jimmy said, holding an Allen key and struggling to decipher the Swedish cartoons that were supposed to show him how to assemble his new shelf unit. ‘They are the proverbial shortest distance between two points.’

At that moment Nora came down from upstairs, where she had been stocking the linen cupboard.

‘Lovely fluffy white towels, Monica,’ she said. ‘Were they a wedding present?’

‘Yes. Lizzie and Robbo. Lizzie designed them herself.’

‘How do you
design
a white towel?’ Nora enquired.

‘Mum, it’s 1996,’ Jimmy said gently. ‘I think you’re going to find the twenty-first century very difficult.’

‘I don’t think I’ll bother with it actually, dear,’ Nora replied. ‘I’ll just carry on with this one and keep adding years to it.’

She went to help Monica with the crockery.

‘I noticed there’s a
super
little room right next to yours and Jimmy’s, Monica,’ she said archly. ‘What could that
possibly
be for, I wonder?’

‘Ah-ha!’ Monica smiled. ‘We shall see.’

‘Well, never too soon to start, I say. You don’t want to be an older mum, like all these women seem to want to be these days.’

‘Mum!’ Jimmy demanded. ‘If you don’t shut up I shall take Monica upstairs and impregnate her right now.’

‘There, you see!’ Nora said quite brusquely. ‘There was me thinking you’d changed him, Monica, and it turns out he’s the same awful boy he always was.’

But he wasn’t. He really was different, and the board at Mason Jervis had noticed the change in him too. Jimmy had a promotion to announce.

‘Actually this is a double celebration,’ Jimmy said, clinking a glass as the four of them sat among the boxes over the picnic that Monica had assembled entirely from new ranges at Marks and Spencer. ‘New house. New tier.’

‘New tier?’ Derek asked. ‘Are you planning an extension? You’ll never get planning permission in Richmond. Not in a million years.’

‘New
management
tier, Dad. I’m not a drone any more. They’ve given me a desk to manage.’

‘A
desk
to manage?’ Derek sniffed. ‘At the National City we let the furniture look after itself.’

‘Don’t pretend to be thick, Dad, please.’ Jimmy smiled. ‘You know bloody well what I mean. I’m going to be heading up my own group.’

But Derek Corby was relentlessly refusing to be impressed. ‘As I recall, the last group you “headed up” was called the Electro Fanny Magnets and it was a crime against music.’

‘We were just ahead of our time. Everybody’s doing Goth Psycho Metal now.’

‘He had a nipple pierced, Monica,’ Nora said. ‘Did he tell you?’

‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. He said it was very erotic. Tried to hint at me giving it a try, didn’t you, Jimmy?’

Jimmy shrugged as if to indicate that he couldn’t really recall.

‘Erotic? I don’t think so,’ Nora snorted. ‘It went septic straight away. I was dabbing it with Dettol for a week and he ended up having to have it removed in Casualty.’

‘Look!’ Jimmy said in a firm voice, clearly fearful that more embarrassing episodes from his past were about to be revealed. ‘Do you want to hear about this promotion or don’t you?’

He had been given the news the previous Friday. The CEO had called him into his office, offered him a glass of Krug and explained that he was now looked upon as a coming man.

‘The trading floor’s fine for coked-up juvenile crazies,’ the CEO had explained. ‘Quite frankly you
need
an adolescent mentality in the bear pit, if only to put up with all the bloody shouting. But somebody has to manage all these overgrown teenagers and also manage the money they’re making. You’re a good trader, Jim, but you’re an even better people person. You can communicate and you can motivate. You can build team spirit and
esprit de corps
. Those are much rarer skills than having the balls to take a chance on a basket of dodgy derivatives.’

‘Thanks, Frank,’ Jimmy had replied, trying to look and sound serious and discreetly placing his right hand over his left in order to disguise the skull ring Monica had bought him in Vegas.

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ the CEO said, as if somehow locking into Jimmy’s thoughts.

‘Yes, Frank, I am. But if that’s a problem, I can dump her. I have a watertight pre-nup and she’d get nothing . . . I’m kidding, of course. Love of my life and all that. I met her here, as a matter of fact, which is another reason for me to be grateful to the old firm.’

‘She’s a trader then?’ the CEO asked with a slight frown. ‘Not many women in our game.’

‘No, not a trader. She was trying to flog me a bit of focaccia bread with what looked like half of Kew Gardens on top of it.’

‘Excellent!’ The CEO beamed. ‘Not good to mix work and family. It can lead to all sorts of complications. Never comfortable to have breakfast every morning with someone you’ve just aced on a major deal. Or worse still, sacked. Anyway, well done. Marriage means stability, it means domestic roots and a commitment to the company pension plan. I believe you’ve just embarked on a personal property portfolio, haven’t you?’

‘Well . . . Monica and I have bought a house,’ Jimmy admitted, wondering if that was what the CEO meant.

‘Good. A man with a personal property portfolio is far less likely to let himself get headhunted and be on the next plane to South East Asia with all the company contacts in his personal organizer than a man renting a hovel in Hackney. All in all, Jimmy, the board and I have decided you have management potential. What do you think of that?’

‘Sounds great, Frank. Management is, after all, the new Rock ’n’ Roll.’

That was how it had happened. Jimmy hadn’t been trying to win a promotion, good fortune just followed him around.

‘Good old Lucky Jimmy,’ Robbo had remarked when his friend told him the story in the pub that evening. ‘You marry a bit of top-class totty like Monica and then it gets you bloody promoted into the bargain. Talk about a win-win situation. Looks like we both married our meal tickets in a way.’

Derek Corby echoed Robbo’s sentiment over the picnic lunch.

‘This is all down to Monica, James,’ he said. ‘And I must say I’m delighted to hear that even ridiculous businesses like the one you work in still value domestic stability.’

‘Only because it means I won’t be trying to switch my pension fund or relocate to Frankfurt with a rival firm.’

‘Which are perfectly legitimate economic reasons,’ Derek said with approval. ‘About the
only
economically legitimate thing I’ve ever heard about the business you work in.’

‘Dad,’ Jimmy said in a serious voice, ‘how much would I have to pay you to say congratulations?’

‘What?’

‘I mean it.’ Jimmy went on looking his father in the eye. ‘You have a healthy respect for the value of money and they do say that every man has his price. I’m to be given a management position at Mason Jervis and it would mean a lot to me for you to say well done. So much so, in fact, that I’m actually prepared to
pay
you to do it. What do you say?’

There was a moment of embarrassed silence. Jimmy had such an easy-going spirit that even those who loved him most and knew him best were unused to a serious display of emotion like this one.

Derek Corby stared back at his son. Neither man seemed to blink.

‘I’ll do it for fifty pence,’ Derek said.

‘Bugger off,’ Jimmy replied. ‘It doesn’t mean that much to me. I’ll pay fifteen.’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Done.’

Jimmy counted out the twenty-five pence and handed it over.

‘Well done, Jimmy,’ Derek said as he took the change and his eyes were perhaps a little damp as he said it. ‘I’m very proud of you.’

Jimmy gave Derek a hug. Which Derek clearly found slightly uncomfortable.

‘What has happened to Marks and Spencers?’ he said, disengaging himself. ‘A crisp used to be a crisp. Balsamic vinegar? Cracked pepper? What was wrong with cheese and onion? And what’s “kettle-cooked” supposed to mean? You can’t cook crisps in a kettle, you couldn’t get them up the spout.’

There’s always somebody worse off than yourself

‘Dead?’ Jimmy said.

It could not be true. He must have misheard. Jimmy felt he must be either still dreaming or too drunk and exhausted to understand English any more.

The sob that came over the receiver in reply made it clear that he had not misheard. And Jimmy didn’t need to understand English either. That sob would have meant the same in any language. Guttural, abrasive. Not the sort of sound you would expect to hear from a woman, even in deep distress. It was a shocking sound, a kind of gagging belch rather than a sob. Harsh and abrupt and ugly, as if Lizzie was in the process of hacking up her whole insides.

‘Lizzie, no,’ Jimmy said. ‘Not Robbo.’

Another great bark of pain. Like the hiccup of a very drunken man. Jimmy wondered if she was actually being sick.

‘He crashed . . . his bloody . . . his bloody . . . He crashed his . . .’ Lizzie was trying to speak, but for a moment her convulsions defeated her.

‘Wolseley?’ Jimmy heard himself saying. ‘Churchill?’

‘Ye-e-e-es,’ Lizzie wailed, ‘bloody Churchill.’

Her grief sounded more conventional now. More like the grief that an actress might conjure up, not burping and intestinal but a more recognizable, panting, tear-soaked misery.

‘He crashed his bloody car.’

Churchill. Robbo’s beloved Wolseley. The car he had always stuck with despite his ever-increasing wealth.

He couldn’t have
died
in it.

‘Are you sure he’s . . . ?’ Jimmy heard himself saying. ‘I mean there’s no chance that . . .’

It was stupid, of course. Lizzie wouldn’t have been hiccuping and burping her agony into his phone at three fifteen in the morning if there had been any hope at all, but Jimmy was struggling to find a response.

How had it happened? How
could
it have happened? Robbo?
Fucking dead.

In fact Jimmy already knew how it had happened, or at least he strongly suspected that he did.

Robbo had been driving pissed. He always drove pissed and they’d all been nodding indulgently over it for years. ‘Not pissed but merely over the limit,’ Robbo himself always insisted, believing himself, as all drink drivers do, to be perfectly capable of handling a car on the amount he had imbibed.

‘It’s not as if I’d ever drive shit-faced. I admit I
drink
drive but I strongly disapprove of
drunken
driving,’ Robbo would say.

And it was true that he tended not to drive actually shitfaced. At least he hadn’t since his university days, when on one memorable occasion he had parked his old Mini in the hedge outside the shared house. But like many people, he drove
a bit pissed
. If he’d had a few pints he’d still take his car. What was more, for twenty years he’d got away with it. He’d never even been stopped.

‘The trick is to drive
normally
,’ he’d say. ‘It’s the idiots who crawl along and indicate a mile ahead of time that get pulled.’

Yes, thought Jimmy, he’d always got away with it. Until now. If only he’d been caught and banned yesterday.

‘The bloody fool must have gone out to get some fags,’ Lizzie said, clearly making an effort to sound normal.