Various Pets Alive and Dead (17 page)

She kept checking the drawer. She was so confident the kids would do the right thing.

But they didn’t.

‘So did it turn up?’

Ida helps herself to a slab of cheesecake out of the box on Clara’s kitchen table.

‘No.’ Clara pops the cork of the prosecco and sighs. ‘I guess if you’re going to end up on the dole anyway, or doing some dead-end job for five quid an hour, why not nick someone’s purse and spend it while you can? Why bother to be better than that?’

‘Here, you need some more of this.’ Ida slaps a brick of cheesecake down on Clara’s plate. ‘Before you start getting sentimental.’

She pours out two glasses of prosecco, and between them they polish off all the cheesecake, half the tarte au citron and most of the chocolate mousse. Because they’re worth it.

Evidently Chicken has a sentimental streak. The cockroach memory stick, when Serge finally opens it up on his laptop at home, is full of snaps of the Porter family. Ken and Caroline with their kids William and Arabella, all happy smiley, waving from the deck of their yacht, lazing around the pool of their house in no-tax Monaco where they are domiciled, though as far as Serge knows they actually live in Holland Park. (He knows all this because Chicken cannot resist the occasional little brag on his morning walkabouts.) There he is in close-up, wearing a DJ, with a proprietorial arm around Caroline, a tall blonde with glittery jewellery, glossed lips and deep sad eyes. Why does she look vaguely familiar?

There he is dressed up in combat gear, brandishing a paint-ball gun in a rainy forest with some other guys from the top floor at FATCA – they’re all grinning like psychos. There’s a folder of golfing photos – his companion is a blond curly-haired Apollo type who stands a head taller than him and wears a yellow polo shirt with … what’s that logo? He zooms in. Gant. Nice. There’s a series of Chicken doing the grip ’n’ grin with a guy with big ears and a cheesy smile. Serge stares. Jeez, it’s Tony Blair!

There are some pictures of his kids posing with assorted high-maintenance teenage gear: cello, quad bike, golf clubs, pony. The girl has Chicken’s dark good looks, dimples and little pointy teeth. The boy is smaller and plumper, his face is round – Serge stares – he has the same almond-shaped eyes, the same half-open mouth and slightly lost look as Oolie. A rush of empathy almost sweeps him off course. How can you rip off a man with a Down’s syndrome kid? He pushes the image to the back of his mind, and opens the only non-photo folder, an old-style calendar application with anniversaries, birthdays (the kids’ nicknames are cringe-making – Willywonka and Jinglebell), including Maroushka’s (hey?), and various other significant dates.

But where’s the meat? Where’s the file containing details of all the FATCA bank accounts? Passwords? Scams? There’s nothing but a load of stupid snapshots. His spirits sink, and all the anticipation that was buzzing in his head dissolves into a dull mystified disappointment. The void made by the forty k he’s just lost is still there, nearly half his annual salary, on which he’ll soon be paying credit card interest at 16 per cent, as well as spread betting interest at 18 per cent. Shit! He pours himself another glass of Barolo and finishes off the burned crust of the pizza he picked up from Peppe’s on the way home. He’ll just have to remortgage his flat.

His penthouse flat is sparsely furnished and restful. The main room has a squashy sofa, an armchair and a low table – that’s all. The kitchen is full of high-spec kit that he’s never bothered to master. Why complicate life when Peppe’s is just down the road? He has a low hardwood bed from which he can look straight out of the window and count the stars in the sky. There’s a built-in wardrobe, some drawers and a bookshelf with his college books and Maroushka’s shoes, still waiting for their owner.

While he’s been browsing through the picture files, the storm has abated, and the night outside his window is clear and bright. He takes in the view of London – the movement of traffic between the stillness of buildings, whirling seething patterns of headlights slicing through darkness, and faint above the city lights the galaxies of stars spiralling out of nothingness, chaos and order, stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see. You could lose yourself down there in all that darkness and light; you could drift towards entropy yet still be shielded from the terror of infinity, safe from spinning out of control, as numbers sometimes do.

Maybe that Barolo wasn’t such a good idea. The clash of strong wine against insoluble problems has left his brain feeling bruised, his chest bursting as though someone is pressing on his face with a pillow. On impulse, he grabs his raincoat, takes the lift down to the ground floor and lets himself out through the door into the empty street. The sky is clear, but the pavement is still treacherous with puddles. He steps around them carefully to keep his shoes dry. The storm-washed air smells of ozone and wet leaves. Intoxicated with the scent of it, he walks briskly in random directions, drawn sometimes by a brightly lit café, sometimes by a dark alley where cobbles shine in lamplight, until his breaths come deep and slow and the thrumming in his head eases into a dull background ache.

On the way home, he stops at the cashpoint on Cheapside to get some money for the weekend. As he keys in his four-digit PIN number 0248 – the month and year of Doro’s birth – a stray thought crosses his mind. He knows it’s not advisable to use birthdays for passwords, but everybody does, don’t they? After all, there are so many possible permutations and combinations. Many – but computable. Suddenly the calendar file of birth and anniversary days he downloaded on to his laptop takes on a whole new significance. Here could be the key he needs. He hasn’t got the skill or the patience to unlock it. But he knows a man who could.

Otto stayed on at Churchill College after he graduated, to study software systems at the far reaches of techno-geekery, cruising those way-out galaxies where maths, programing languages and technology collide. When he talks about what he’s doing, it sounds like sci-fi to Serge. He goes to symposia on hypervisor encryption and cryptovirology but, like many cyber-heads, he’s more interested in the technology than the ethics angle. Once, as an undergrad, he designed a packet sniffer to capture the questions on the final-year divinity exam papers, which he posted on all the college noticeboards: it was his idea of a joke.

‘He’s at a conference.’ Molly’s voice sounds faint and anxious down the phone. ‘Is everything all right? I mean, about the money?’

‘Sure,’ says Serge. ‘No stress. I’ll ring on Monday.’

The thought of confiding in Otto – blabby, excitable, unreliable little Otto – is scary. But what choice does he have?

Clara dunks her head under the stream of warm water from the shower, and rubs the shampoo through her hair, wondering how come – despite all the feminist rhetoric at Solidarity Hall, and the fact that her A level grades were almost as good as Serge’s – how come he’s the one who got away to Cambridge and never comes back, geeking out with his nerdy friends in their medieval wonderland, while she’s stuck here, half-in-half-out of Doncaster, still shackled to her crazy family, still trying to shepherd lost kids (who repay her by nicking her purse), still trying to be a Solidarity Hall kind of person. The thought ‘not fair’ bubbles to the surface of her mind, and she pricks it sharply. ‘Not fair’ is for losers and whingers, not for her.

The trouble is, as the oldest child of the commune, she was raised to several divergent blueprints. Feminism, Marxism, vegetarianism, autonomy, responsibility, spontaneity, courage, consideration, self-expression, self-confidence, unselfishness. There was always someone telling her eat up your vegetables, brush your teeth, read this book, go and play outside, help those who can’t help themselves, be your own person and take no notice of what anyone tells you – it was as though half a dozen quarrelsome good fairies had got into a fight as they tried to shower their gifts over her.

She rinses out the warm coconut-scented foam and rubs her hair, carefully wiping her ears with a corner of the towel wrapped around her finger. Even after all these years, she’s still careful about drying her ears. Yes, if Doro had looked after her properly, instead of having one eye out for Serge’s genius and the other for Oolie’s disability, she’d have realised that Clara’s regular earaches after washing her hair were not normal, not caused by the shampoo, like stinging eyes. It wasn’t Doro but Chris Watt, who’d once been a health visitor, who spotted the traces of blood and pus on the pillow one morning.

‘Glue ear,’ she pronounced, and Clara was dragged off to the doctor in Askern by Marcus, who held her hand in the shabby disinfectant-smelling waiting room and showed her the scar where he’d had his pin decks taken out. She ran her finger along the thin white line beneath the elastic of his underpants, wondering whether she too had pin decks, and whether it would hurt to have them removed.

The grommet operation when she was thirteen changed everything. She began to do better at school, and started taking part actively in lessons rather than lurking at the back with the bad kids. The world became much clearer, but also more mundane. In the pre-grommet days, conversations, though muted, were often intriguing, touched with magic, teasing the imagination to fill in the muffled syllables. It was having the grommets inserted in her ears, more than Oolie’s birth or the start of her periods, that marked the end of her childhood.

After Megan left with Crunchy Carl, the atmosphere in the commune seemed to ease, and everybody relaxed. Serge spent hours geeking out with Nick Holliday, and Otto tagged along. Tosser and Kollon hung around Thinlandia with Star, doing weird drawings of Thinmen and Thinwomen, who had long spiky limbs and lived in tunnels. (Yes, newly grommeted Clara tried to tell them it was Fin, not Thin, but they came from London, and they said it was all the same.) She took to reading novels up in her room, avoiding Oolie-Anna because, although Oolie was cute, she was also quite demanding, and Clara didn’t want to get roped in for hours of childcare while the Groans droned on in their endless meetings.

Then, one day, Oolie-Anna herself changed all that.

On their way to and from school, they used to cut through the Prospects, a maze of crumbling red-brick terraces which had been thrown up between the wars to accommodate miners at the Askern colliery. The front doors opened straight into the alley, and there was usually a little gang of wannabe-toughs hanging out by the derelict toilet blocks around the back, making remarks as they passed. That day, Clara was coming home from school, walking fast enough to leave the other kids trailing behind. Her ragtag entourage cramped her style, and their constant bickering got on her nerves, especially Tosser and Kollon with their scarecrow hair and ridiculous names. (They’d been christened Toussaint and Kollontai, but that was too much of a mouthful for the kids at school.) At fourteen you’re sensitive to peer pressure.

She’d just turned the corner into Prospect Street when a small chubby kid in a yellow jumpsuit came hurtling towards her, hair sticking out, face scarlet with panting and terror, mouth open in a scream. It was Oolie-Anna. A couple of little yobs were behind her, chucking bits of broken brick at her legs, shouting, ‘Run, freak! Run!’

She stumbled and flung herself at Clara’s knees. Clara picked up a half-brick and hurled it back at the yobs. Blind fury guided her arm and she hit one of them smack on the nose. Blood spouted everywhere.

‘Fuck off, you fucking retards!’ she yelled. ‘Fuck off, else I’ll fucking kill you!’

The yobs stopped dead. They were smaller than her, but there were two of them. For a moment they just stared. Then they started swivelling round, looking for support from their usual weaselly cohorts. But they were on their own. She picked up another brick. ‘I fucking mean it!’

They turned and ran, whooping over their shoulders, ‘Freak! Freak! Freak!’

Oolie-Anna clung to her legs, wailing.

‘It’s all right,’ Clara said. ‘They’re just morons. Let’s go.’

When they got home, the front door was open and Moira Lafferty was in the sitting room yacking on the phone, her feet up on the sofa, silver rings on her purple-varnished toes, Capiz shell earrings jingling as she talked. She waved at the kids with her free hand, releasing a faint smell of patchouli and BO, and carried on yacking.

Clara usually liked Moira’s benignly neglectful approach to childcare. Moira worked two days a week in a rehab centre for people who’d had brain injuries, and treated them all like they were a bit brain injured. She’d sit at the kitchen table crafting finger puppets or a Capiz shell necklace, letting the kids join in or raid the fridge – there wasn’t usually much to raid – or just watch TV. But she’d recently got a new man in her life, and her concentration had dipped to a low point.

Doro went wild when the other kids told her what had happened. They thought it was a great joke, the yobs running back into the terraces leaving a trail of blood spots on the cobbles, but Doro didn’t see the funny side. She screamed at Moira, who said she was sorry she hadn’t realised the door was still open, but the phone had been ringing and blah, blah, blah … and anyway there was no need to stress because Oolie-Anna had been protected by good karma.

Then Doro flew at Moira, yanking her hair – ‘I’ll give you bloody karma-rama!’ – and Moira sobbed a bit.

Next thing, they were holding and hugging each other, and Doro thanked Moira for giving up her afternoon to look after Oolie. Then they both started yelling at Oolie for running away.

This was too much.

‘She’d be
dead
if it wasn’t for
me
!’ Clara stamped her feet, her eyes wet with tears. ‘You’re both
retards
!’ (She knew not to say ‘fucking’ at home.)

‘Don’t use that word, Clara,’ said Doro.

Seething with rage and self-pity, she stomped off up to her room and flung herself on the bed. A minute later, Oolie-Anna joined her. She was sniffling too. Clara hugged her and told her about the slumbering starlings.