Provender Gleed (14 page)

'Fair enough. And what's it like over there? What's your impression? All hell breaking loose?'

A grin appeared on his face, and broadened.

'Nice. Very nice.'

The grin vanished.

'I wasn't gloating. I wouldn't call it that at all.' For Is's benefit, he sneered and made a masturbatory gesture at the receiver with his free hand. 'I was just... Yes, I know. Nope. Yes. No.'

Now Damien began wagging his head from side to side, the universal sign language for The Person I'm Having This Phone Conversation With Is Beginning To Get On My Nerves.

'All right. So you'll call me when you want the next phase to start. OK. Yup. Fine. 'Bye.'

He clanked the receiver onto its cradle, then said to the phone, 'Your wish is my command, fuckwit.'

'That was your insider?' Is said. 'Your mole?'

'No, it was my mother.'

She brushed the sarcasm aside. 'So everything's going according to plan?'

'Seems that way.'

'So why aren't you pleased?'

Damien pondered this. 'I suppose because I'm the one meant to be running the show and yet I feel like I'm taking orders a lot of the time and that really wasn't how I saw this going.'

'Why not tell him that? Your insider?'

'Who says it's a him?'

'Or her. Why not tell her?'

Damien shrugged. Is thought there was something furtive about the shrug, but then Damien was perennially touchy on the subject of his contact within Dashlands. Cagey as well. It was as if the less Is knew about the person, the less important it would be that Damien had needed inside help to formulate his kidnap plan. His vanity demanded that he appear solely in charge of the operation.

'Anyway...' Damien stood up, grabbing a jacket. 'I'm off out. Breath of fresh air. Need anything from the shops?'

Is shook her head, then remembered she did need something. 'Latex gloves, please.'

'Eh?'

'Disposable ones.'

'For what?'

She waggled a hand at him. 'For this. For stuff I have to do with Provender.'

'Oh. Oh, right. OK.'

'Not washing-up gloves, either,' she said, as Damien headed for the door. 'Proper ones like I use at the hospital.'

'I'm going to find those around here?'

'Don't see why not.'

Damien sniffed. 'Well, I'll try.' From a small, low table by the door he took his wallet and another object. The wallet went into a pocket of his jacket. The other object he strapped to the back of his belt and carefully covered with the jacket flap. Then he went out.

Is pottered around the flat for a while, tidying, then glanced in on Provender once more. He was sitting crouched against the bath, as ever, head down. He looked small. Waiflike. Lost. She wanted to say something that would lift his spirits, even just slightly. Nothing sprang to mind. Gently, she shut the door.

19

At school Damien had been known as Disgrace. The nickname was coined by a Fifth Form master, Mr Sudworth, who fancied himself something of a stand-up comedian though in truth was as tedious and mirth-free as the subject he taught, geography. Mr Sudworth's brilliant stroke of wit was to take Damien's name as it appeared on the school register, D. Scrase, and pronounce it in such a way that
it sounded like the word 'disgrace'
.

Hilarious!

Mr Sudworth thought so, at any rate, and never tired of the joke. Each time he addressed Damien as Disgrace, he would chortle heartily as if the nickname had only just occurred to him. Damien's classmates, for their part, found it amusing once, perhaps twice, but thereafter could barely muster a titter.

By rights, then, Disgrace ought not to have stuck. It wasn't an especially clever nickname, nor did it lend itself to shortening or further mutation. It was insulting but not terribly so. And perhaps it would not have stuck if Damien had objected to it strongly and put a stop to his peers calling him it by giving anyone who did a bash on the nose. But he hadn't, because deep down, almost at a subconscious level, he felt he deserved it. Disgrace summed up how he regarded himself and his life. He wore it like sackcloth and ashes; like tar and feathers. Even when juniors in the school knew him by it and used it to his face, he bore their jibes with a martyr's patience. Disgrace? Yes, that was him all right.

He had a father who scarcely spoke to anyone; a mother who was an avid, one might even say obsessive ClanFan; an older brother who had died aged seventeen, victim of a hit-and-run drunk-driving incident, and who was never mentioned; an older sister who had moved out to live with her boyfriend but spent as much time back home as she did at her boyfriend's flat because when he was out of work, as he often was, he became morosely depressed and then became too free with his fists; and a younger sister with Down's syndrome who needed more looking after than they could cope with and so had been packed off to live in care but came back to stay for one weekend a month. He had, in short, a family only in the loosest sense of the word, and Damien, as a sensitive boy and then a sensitive young man, always believed at the back of his mind that in some way he was to blame. It was
his
fault that his father read the newspaper during mealtimes and whiled away all of his free hours down in the garden shed, allegedly fixing things but in fact quite evidently doing nothing.
He
was the one who forced his mother to lose herself in a fantasy world of Families, collecting magazines and books about them, clipping out newspaper articles about them to paste into scrapbooks, buying all manner of Family-related bric-a-brac and memorabilia, and building what was effectively a shrine to all things Familial in one corner of the lounge - the walls smothered with posters, the carpet heaped with cheaply-produced souvenir tat, Family members' faces peering out into the Scrases' lives all day every day.
He
was responsible for Jason being killed by that careering car and for Tanya hooking up with that godawful oaf Calvin. It was even possible that
he
had somehow brought about little Adele's birth defect.

As an adult, Damien would realise that he took all this unwarranted guilt on himself simply because no one thought to tell him otherwise. It didn't occur to anyone sit him down and explain that some things happen just because they happen. His parents never even noticed that he was in a state of almost constant torment, agonising over the reasons why his family was so blighted by misfortune and misery (it was something he had done, it must be). As far as Mr and Mrs Scrase were concerned, thank God one of their children had turned out quiet, undemanding, normal. It was a relief to be able to ignore him. They could forget about Damien, in the way they couldn't forget about Tanya and her latest black eye, Adele shrieking through her weekend visits, or the hurtful memory of Jason.

It was around the age of eighteen that Damien had a moment of revelation, an epiphany almost. He was shortly to leave school, and his teachers had assured him that a university place was his for the taking if he only applied himself in his exams. His reports routinely described him as highly intelligent but lacking in drive and motivation. The headmistress promised him that if he made the effort and gained the requisite grades, she would do her utmost to obtain one of the Family-funded university scholarships for him, which would see him through his degree course.

In the lounge at home, Damien knelt at his mother's Family shrine. He studied the clusters of happy faces, the elegant poses, the immaculately-groomed hair, the backdrops of palatial residences and unimaginably expensive furnishings. This privileged international elite who led such perfect, carefree, untroubled lives. Look at them with their arms round one another. Look at their clothes. Look at the way members of each Family, or part of Family, were able to stand together to have their pictures taken. Where was the missing brother, taken too soon? The sullen, uncommunicative father? The sister with the bruises? Oh sure, the Families must have their problems. Damien wasn't so naïve as to think that things didn't wrong for them from time to time. But they had money, huge sums of it, and that made a difference. They also had unity. Every image in front of him said so. Screamed it. Unity radiated from every item of his mother's collection. It shone like the sun.

All at once, Damien understood that he hated them. No, not just hated. That wasn't strong enough a word. He
despised
the Families. They were everything his family was not. They presented an ideal that it was impossible for others to live up to. Their capital F belittled every non-Family family in the world. Their wealth, even when they tried to disburse a tiny fraction of it as charity, mocked those who were poorer and less fortunate than themselves, which was everyone.

He knew, then, that he must dedicate his life to opposing the Families. He would fight them in whatever way he could. He would sacrifice himself to the task of damaging and perhaps even destroying them. It was his mission.

He flunked his exams abysmally. No hope of a Family scholarship then. He left home, moving from a small town just outside London's suburbs to the heart of the city. The night before he went, he did something which was appallingly mean and which he continued to regret but which at the time seemed like a necessity, even an act of generosity. He set fire to his mother's shrine. There were candles in front of it, which his mother would light occasionally to lend the shrine an even more votive air. They were aflame that evening, and Damien promised his mother when she went to bed that he would extinguish them when
he
went to bed. He didn't. He 'nodded off on the settee'. One of the candles must have 'accidentally fallen over'. When he awoke, the whole shrine 'was burning out of control'. He tried to put out the flames 'as fast as possible' but, obviously, 'not fast enough'.

The shrine was devastated. His mother was devastated. She was still in the lounge at dawn the next day, pawing distraughtly through the charred remnants of her collection, trying to salvage what she could of it. The last sounds Damien ever heard her make, as he sneaked out by the back door with a holdall containing all his clothes and possessions, were a series of helpless mewling sobs which degenerated into out-and-out lost-dog howling. The noise pursued him all the way down the street, onto the bus, into the city.

A decade on, if Mrs Scrase were by any chance to meet her younger son, she would almost certainly not recognise him. He was bulkier, thanks to a rigorous regime of bodybuilding (in any mission, physical strength was a must). He was harder-looking (to survive as a resident of Needle Grove you had to be hard-looking). His face had taken on a leaner, meaner air (never let it be said that the outer person did not reflect the inner). If Mrs Scrase had ever hoped that Damien might find himself a nice, secure profession, settle down, marry and give her grandchildren, she would have been disappointed. His career, such as it was, consisted of intermittent menial jobs which earned him enough to pay the rent and keep body and soul together, with a little left over for book-buying. Whatever kind of work he did, he carried it out with no more competence or enthusiasm than was necessary to avoid being sacked, and when he got bored and wanted to be sacked, he simply lowered his effort level that little bit further until his employers took the hint. As for settling down, he had had a string of short-lived affairs, glorified one-night stands many of them, and his only relationship of any significance was the year he had spent with Is, which he now looked back on as the happiest and maybe the only happy year of his life.

He had met her while he was working as a porter at St Fiacre's Hospital. Not porter in the sense of pushing beds and bodies around. He had been under that misapprehension himself when applying for the job. In fact, the position had been for a porter in the hospital's kitchen, where it pretty much meant dogsbody. He had pictured himself racing desperately ill patients to the operating theatre and wheeling dead patients to the morgue, both of which tasks had a kind of dark, noble glamorousness, but in the event his duties were preparing and serving food. He would have quit after the first day has a nurse called Isis Necker not entered the cafeteria that lunchtime and taken a portion of shepherd's pie and mixed vegetables from him.

She scarcely noticed him. She was busy talking to a friend, a fellow-nurse. She glanced at him for no longer than the time it took for him to ask her what she would like and for her to tell him and for him to give it to her. Then she strode away from the serving counter with her tray, and although she would insist later that he
had
made an impression on her, he knew he hadn't. He was just the nonentity in the white smock and silly brimless cap who had slung some grub on a plate for her.

He stuck out the portering job for several months, just because of Is. Day after day he prepared and shovelled rank-smelling hospital meals, simply in hope of catching a glimpse of her. For long stretches of time he wouldn't see her. Her shifts changed; her hours and his didn't always overlap. Then she would be back, and he would have an opportunity to share a few words with her across the heat-lamps, maybe fire a quip at her, and always a smile. She made it all worthwhile. The smells of grease and boiled potato that seemed permanently suffused into his skin; the heat in the kitchen that left him dripping with sweat by day's end; the constant shouting of the chefs and the sullen bickering of the other porters; the numerous nicks in his fingers from knives and peelers; the dinning clatter of pots and pans - all worthwhile, all bearable, thanks to her.

What finally got them together was a chance remark about the Families. It was the day a new wing of the hospital was being opening, built with money endowed by one of the lesser British Families, the Graysons. The inauguration ceremony brought most of St Fiacre's to a standstill, with all the consultants and surgeons and registrars turning out in their best bib and tucker to applaud as Potiphar Grayson, the Family's head, made a lengthy speech about giving something back to the community and then applied scissors to ribbon. None of the nursing staff was invited to attend. Somebody, after all, had to carry on with the minor, inconvenient stuff like tending to patients and keeping the hospital ticking over. Is said as much to Damien as she took a helping of stew off him, and Damien nodded sympathetically and then said, 'You know, it surprises me that a Family member even knows how to use a pair of scissors. Don't servants normally do that sort of thing for them?'