One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (25 page)

‘I mean, when you do open the door, don’t scream.’

‘Why would I—’

The door opened and Simone breathed in sharply. Matt couldn’t be sure whether she was restricting herself to a gasp or gearing up for a lung‐
burster, so he placed a bloody hand over her mouth and backed her into the bedroom. Horror and confusion lit up her wide eyes. He was relieved, for practical reasons, to see that she was still fully dressed. All other ramifications were now a long way from relevant.

‘Something very, very bad is happening,’ he said, looking into her eyes but still covering her mouth, ‘and I need you to keep the heid. Okay?’

She nodded. He took away his hand.

Simone looked him up and down in aghast disbelief. She struggled for words, making a few false starts before managing a bare whisper of ‘What’s going on?’

Matt shook his head. Blood whipped from his hair and streaked the wall.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you this much: it’s the last time
I
practise safe sex.’

Gavin’s party wasn’t proving quite as enjoyable as he’d hoped. He was wise enough to know that when you look forward to something so much, a sense of disappointment is almost inescapable when at last the reality arrives. But nonetheless, it was difficult not to feel hard‐
done‐
by about the way certain things were turning out.

Simone, of course, had screwed things up for him, but that was to be expected. That was her
raison d’être
these days. Her jealousy of his success had eaten her from within and left a rotting hollow where the woman he loved used to be. She couldn’t appreciate that his successes were
their
successes, that everything they had together was the product of
their
marriage, not of his achievements. He’d always understood that her role at home was as important to their success –
theirs
, not his – as his activities further afield, but then he had always thought marriage should be a partnership. Unfortunately that can’t happen if one party sees it as a contest.

For a while he thought he’d simply been naive, too idealistic, but upon reflection he became determined that, damn it, an equal relationship – partnership –
should
be possible. However, for it to work, he realised, the partners had to be equal in the first place, and that was the problem. It was a painful thing to admit, but the honest truth was that Simone perhaps wasn’t quite cut of the right cloth to be the wife of someone like himself. She had too many insecurities, and had consequently grown resentful of his pre‐
eminence, envious that he had turned out to be – for want of a more modest term – a more gifted individual than she. He wasn’t saying she should have been content to bask in his reflected glory, but perhaps a stronger woman would have seen how that glory brightened up the place for both of them, rather than wish she was the one doing the shining.

It was little wonder he’d been driven into the arms of others for comfort.

She knew how much this reunion meant to him. That was the danger when someone so close goes from ally to enemy: they know best how to hurt you. Therefore she had been determined to ruin it for him. He could see that now; in fact, couldn’t believe he hadn’t better anticipated it. Up until tonight he thought the extent of her sabotage had been her insistence on tagging along, even though he knew she’d no desire to see these people again. She never talked about them and she certainly didn’t share his interest in seeing how their lives had worked out, something he found distastefully cold.

But she had done a load more than just tag along – she had gone behind his back and invited Matt bloody Black, for a start. There he’d been, Mr TV star, large as life in the lobby, all bloody full of himself, blissfully unaware that he wasn’t wanted. The man wasn’t even funny. Gavin had seen one of his videos, and as far as he could make out it was just filth and gratuitous abuse. It was the emperor’s new clothes: people laughed because they didn’t want to be seen to be not ‘getting it’, Simone among them. Same as the bloody awful music she listened to. Emperor’s new clothes and a dose of snobbery thrown in. The irony, of course, was that she forgot how it was Gavin’s understanding of the tastes and likes of normal, ordinary people that had made him what he was today. So if M People were good enough for Tony Blair, they were good enough for him.

Also, rather than let him and Catherine get on with their more official role as hosts, Simone had been swanning around the ballroom like she owned the place, all dolled up to the nines too. She looked surprisingly good, he had to give her that, but it did occur to him rather bitterly that if she’d made the effort to look that way for him now and again, their marriage might not be in the state it was these days.

And to worsen matters still, Simone’s high profile had been making Catherine uncomfortable about accompanying him around the ballroom. Catherine even suggested that she should be the one who took a back‐
seat, letting Gavin and Simone play hosts; or that the three of them should work the floor individually. Gavin had insisted Catherine stick with him – he wasn’t letting that bitch spoil everything – but she hadn’t been very happy about it. It wasn’t obvious to the party‐
goers, of course, Catherine being far too professional for that, but in a way she was too professional, as there wasn’t much chemistry on show to get people speculating.

Not everything was down to Simone, though. There’d been a very disheartening lack of rapport between himself and his guests, most of whom had shown a uniform ambivalence about the hotel industry. Only a paltry handful had turned up for his tour, the rest opting to stay in their rooms, at which point he’d made a mental note to check whether some idiot had stocked Buckfast in their mini‐
bars.

They’d not been overjoyed to see him once the party commenced, either. Sure, they’d been polite enough and expressed gratitude for him organising the soirée, but once the initial pleasantries had been dispensed with, they’d often seemed desperate to latch on to someone else’s company. Eventually, he’d decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and cottoned on to a couple of larger groups himself. Unfortunately, all they wanted to talk about was their days at St Michael’s, rather than what everyone was doing now. It was sad, really, to be so obsessed with the past.

The tales featured the same old tired cast of over‐
celebrated characters and exaggerated incidents. Glory days on the football pitch, playground misdemeanours, resultant beltings from teachers, pubescent sexual innnuendo and juvenile pugilism. He did his best to join in but found he had nothing to contribute; or at least nothing involving himself, just witness testimony of stories already being told in the first person by those around him. The only point at which he had become the focus of attention was when it emerged that he was unique in never having been assaulted by David Murdoch.

‘He must have had a fuckin’ force‐
field roon’ him,’ remarked one.

‘Either that or he was invisible,’ offered another, that smart‐
arse McQuade. ‘Are you sure you were in oor class, Gavin? Maybe you’ve invited the wrang year to your reunion.’

Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, he’d thought, watching them clutch the last remnants of that once‐
upon‐
a‐
time when they were somebodies in a limited little world. But who’s fucking invisible now?

Things finally started to look up during his speech, when he noticed Catherine slipping quietly out of the main doors, judiciously choosing her moment when all eyes were on him. That was the Catherine he knew and loved: going up to her suite to prepare for a private little reunion just between the two of them, while everyone else would be busy tucking into the buffet. The lustful glances she’d been receiving all night had made him all the more frustrated that she wasn’t making the true nature of their relationship a little more obvious to those who were admiring her. However, once he’d seen her leave the room, the thought of those glances made him all the more horny, as though he was the receptacle of everyone else’s cumulative desire.

He’d cut short the speech, declared the buffet open and headed for the lift. There were tingles running through him by the time it reached the top floor. That gorgeous tight dress she was wearing … dreadful waste to take it off. Just ride it up around her middle, maybe against the back of the chaise longue …

There was no reply when he knocked at the door, but then she’d more likely be waiting for him to enter, as the master of the house shouldn’t need to be asked. He swiped his card through the slot, another ripple of anticipation pulsing through him as the lock clunked beckoningly open.

He made his way inside to find the suite in darkness. Enticing, he thought, but tonight he wanted to see her. He placed the keycard into the NRG‐
Sava and flicked on the lights.

The place was empty. Catherine’s overnight bag lay next to the dresser but the bed was undisturbed. He called her name twice to no reply. Unless, he suddenly thought, she had gone to
his
suite. It was out of bounds with Simone in residence, but maybe she was being a naughty girl, perhaps even by way of demonstrating who really ought to be in his bedroom.

Gavin was about to go along the hall to find out when it struck him that he hadn’t seen Simone for a while, either, the bitch making a point of not being present during his big speech. The nightmare scenario entered his head of her going upstairs and finding Catherine in their suite, until he remembered that Catherine had no way of getting in. So where the hell was she? He picked up the phone. Idiot Boy Jamie the Geordie receptionist answered it.

‘Hello, Jamie, it’s Mr Hutchison here. Do you happen to know where Miss O’Rourke is?’

‘Ehm, I think she went to check on a guest who didn’t come downstairs to the party. She asked me for his room number. It’s still on the screen. Room 322.’

‘And which guest would that be?’

‘Ehm, let’s see. Just callin’ up the details. Right. The name is Murdoch, David, Mr.’

‘—’

‘Are you all right, sir? Sir?’

Gavin went straight to the fridge and poured himself a very large whisky. He’d vowed to stay straight all night so that he was at his brightest, opting to drink in the occasion instead. But that was before the occasion began to taste like yesterday’s sick. He knocked it right back and had another. And another. After so many kicks in the groin, no‐
one would deny he needed analgesia. Not only was that ego‐
on‐
toast Matt Black here, at the behest of his backstabbing bint of a wife, but so, it turned out, was that uber‐
psycho turned ‘victim of society’ Davie Murdoch, who despite terrorising every last one of them, was being talked of almost with reverence by the assembly of losers downstairs. And as if his balls hadn’t quite been sledgehammered enough, Catherine had fucked off in the middle of his big speech to go to the bastard’s room!

Was there anything else that could possibly go wrong tonight? Not that he could think of. Apart from one of the guests turning out to be a serial killer and topping the whole sodding lot of them, but then he wasn’t so sure he’d consider that a bad thing right now.

Well, he thought, the warmth of the whisky beginning to course through him, he wasn’t going to just sit here and take it. He’d a good mind to throw these uninvited tosspots off the edge of the bloody rig. Gatecrash a place like this and you had to think about the downsides, didn’t you? Bastards. He’d show the lot of them.

Davie flipped through the channels again, barely watching what was flashed before him as he clicked ahead to the next one. In time he switched the thing off and returned the remote to the bedside table. He sighed, placing his hands either side of his face, elbows resting on his thighs, feeling a mixture of failure, depression and embarrassment. He had travelled a hell of a long way for a quiet night in. He wanted Collette. He wanted to see her smiling at him across their living room while Geni and wee D walloped him about the head and body with inflatable plastic zoo animals.

The blank screen and the blank walls mocked him in his useless solitude. His jacket sat accusingly on a chair by the door, like a sulky child who’d been promised an outing then been let down by Daddy at the last gasp. He’d even got as far as gripping the handle before hearing other doors open and close in the corridor beyond. Footsteps and voices.

‘Is that you, Tommy?’

‘Allan! Christ, how you doin’, Aldo? You’re lookin’ great. Allan, this is my wife, Lorna.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Lorna. This is Nadja.’

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘Hi there.’

‘We’re not married. Actually, I got her from an escort service, and she doesnae speak much English.’

Thump.

‘Oow.’

‘Ha ha ha ha.’

‘Leave the jokes to your friend Matthew, darling, huh?’

‘Aye, sure, honey.’

‘God, it’s amazin’ to see you, Aldo, it really is. I suppose we’d better get used to this or we’ll be sayin’ it all night. Every five minutes. “Wow! I cannae believe it’s you!” “Jesus, look who it is.”’

‘Yeah, till we remember we all hated each other.’

‘Aye, right enough. Paul Duff works in the bookie’s on Auchenlea main street. Wonder if he’s offerin’ odds on how long before the first barney.’

‘So I heard you’re in criminal law these days, Tommy, is that right …’

Davie had let go of the handle and stepped back from the door. Tommy Milligan and Allan Crossland. He’d smashed Tommy’s head off one of the massive bins behind the dining hall; punched and kicked Allan down the big steps to the football pitch. He didn’t even remember why, if there had ever been a why.

He couldn’t do this.

When he arrived, he’d loitered at the back of the group while the others queued to check into their rooms. He’d been last off the bus, last off the helicopter, back of the line, out of sight. A bloke he’d assumed to be Gavin Hutchison was talking to people as they waited around the reception area, accompanied by a woman he recognised but couldn’t put a name to. Caroline sounded plausible but he wasn’t sure it was quite right.