Various Pets Alive and Dead (25 page)

She shook her head, looking around for escape routes, trying not to stare at the limp manhood dangling before her.

‘It’ll be brought to us from outer space.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah. According to Posadas, any creatures intelligent enough to have devised space travel will already have created a socialist society. It stands to reason.’

Remembering, Doro smiles to herself in the darkness as she curls herself around Marcus’s sleeping form, and feels quietly thankful that the sex rota was short-lived.

The main beneficiary was Chris Watt who, heaven knows, deserved a break.

Serge clutches his arms across his chest and hopes he won’t puke in the back of the cab as it speeds and swerves through the night. It was stupid of him to get so lashed, but forgivable in the circumstances. The vodka Maroushka had given him was a necessary lifeline. A few glasses of champagne on top did no harm. The idiot thing was joining the race with the other quants to knock back those toxic combinations of champagne with whisky, brandy, beer, red wine, Pernod, Campari, fruit juice, Worcester sauce and some orange stuff that tasted like paint stripper.

At one point the barman, a small dark-skinned guy with an earring and not much hair, had tried to suggest that they ease off a bit, and Lucian, the birthday boy, had turned on him wild-eyed and screamed, ‘Pour, you sad little prole! Do your fucking job!’ His arms flung wide, he staggered against the table, knocking a couple of glasses on to the floor.

Another guy who worked at Cazenove, an old school friend of Lucian’s, who was already well juiced, threw his arms around his pal and gave him a soggy kiss.

‘Yay! If you’re not getting it, you’re not worth it!’

The guy was blond and tall – so tall that Serge’s head would fit neatly under his chin. Serge glanced across at Maroushka to check whether she’d clocked him, but she was chatting to the Hamburger.

‘All this fucking wealth in this beautiful fucking city, we made it, we earned it, and we’re going to fucking drink it!’ shrilled Lucian, like a mulletted prophet.

‘Cos it could all dry up tomorrow!’ added Toby. ‘Happy birthday, ginger-boy!’

He poured the contents of his glass over Lucian’s head. The sticky liquid trickled down his face and he stuck out his tongue to catch it as it dripped down. A couple of people clapped, but most said nothing, vaguely aware even through the miasma of booze that their colleagues had gone over the top.

Serge leaned over the counter and said, ‘Sorry, mate. They’re not always like this.’

The barman silently lowered his head and popped another cork. It was at this point that Serge realised he had to get out. He looked around for Maroushka, but she’d disappeared.

‘Thanks! Keep the change!’

Serge hands the driver a tenner, and manages to tumble out of the cab just in time to throw up acidly, yellowly, abundantly on to the pavement outside his block.

But luck is with him – he manages to keep it off his clothes.

Luck: you have to stay on the right side of this unreliable lady, you have to flatter her, study her habits, know her vicissitudes, woo her with promises and gifts. You must never, ever take her for granted. He knows Luck, and he knows her two flighty sisters, Risk and Chance. This naughty threesome hang out together on the up-and-down ladders of stock exchanges; he’s met them often in examination halls; they haunt the poky corners of history, like those crones who used to knit beside the guillotine, always on the lookout for a big-head.

Before turning in to bed, out of habit, he takes a quick peep at Chicken’s bank and email accounts. No action there at all today. Kenporter1601 is still empty. So far, so good. But fixed in his mind is the sickly grimace on Tim the Finn’s face as he was led away from the trading floor. He must have talked to those cops by now.

What has he been telling them?

Will Chicken ask them to investigate the rogue transactions in the 1601 account?

Or does he want to keep his own trading activities in the dark?

Serge knows luck has been with him so far, but how long can it last? To keep on the right side of Lady Luck, to encourage her to see things his way, he decides to make her a small gift. He logs in and transfers £5,000 from Dr Black to Kenporter1601 – a generous interest payment for the money he has borrowed. He attaches a one-word tag to the payment:
THANKS
.

When Clara arrives at school on Tuesday morning, Mr Gorst/Alan is in the staffroom trying to organise a meeting to discuss the school’s SATS results.

‘We could do better.’ He waves the thick printout of doom.

But she can’t take her eyes off the growth of dark stubble around the lower half of his face, which could have aspirations to become a moustache or, worse, beard.

No, no! Don’t go there! You’re lovely as you are, Alan!

In her opinion, facial hair seldom suits anybody.

After he’s gone, Mr Tyldesley whispers in her ear, ‘It’s like being lectured by a badly plucked chicken.’

‘Or Che Gue-Bloody-Vara,’ mutters Mr Kenny, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Only Heidi Postlethwaite springs to his defence.

‘The Ancient Greeks regarded the beard as a symbol of virility.’ (Bitch!)

Clara tries her phone once more. She still hasn’t had any luck contacting the guy from Syrec, who was supposed to pick up the bags of paper and plastic for recycling. Maybe Mr Kenny was right about the regional development grant.

At lunchtime, she puts her head round the door of the boiler room, where Mr Philpott is dozing with a book open on his knee:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. He sits up with a start, and two pairs of glasses tumble off his nose on to his lap.

‘Thanks for keeping the bags for me, Mr Philpott. I’ll take a few more home for recycling.’

The tied black bin bags are waiting in the lobby outside the boiler room. A gust of wind through the open door catches them, and sets them flapping like a flock of outsize rooks come home to roost. Mr Philpott helps her heave a couple more bags to her car and shove them into the boot. She slams the hatch and heads off back to her classroom. Bloody Syrec.

When she gets there, she tries the Syrec mobile number once more and, to her surprise, someone answers. It’s the same teen-on-speed voice as before.

‘Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit, I completely forgot. Sorry. Yeah. Two weeks ago. Three? Where are you? Right, I’ll be round. Yeah, right. Four o’clock this afternoon. Twenty quid.’

The afternoon lesson is history, Miss Postlethwaite’s subject, and she’s decided in her wiggly-bum wisdom that the kids of Greenhills should learn about Ancient Egypt. Maybe the old slag heaps around South Yorkshire remind her of the pyramids.

‘Who can remember which river runs through Egypt?’ Clara asks, keeping one eye on the clock on the wall, which is inching slowly, slowly towards 3.15.

There’s a bit of shuffling and sniggering. Nobody likes to be the first to put their hand up, apart from Dana Kuciak from Poland, who doesn’t mind being thought a swot.

‘Please, miss, the Nail.’

‘Nearly right, Dana! Well done! Now, who can get it exactly right?’

‘I know, miss! T’ Nob!’ shouts Robbie Lewis, his hands furtively at work behind the desk. The convention is that any word beginning with ‘n’ can be substituted with ‘nob’ which is an instant cue for anarchy. There’s a chorus of shrieks, groans and giggles.

Clara silently curses Miss Hippo and writes the answer up on the board.

‘Who knows anything else about Ancient Egypt?’

‘Pyramods!’ shouts Jason.

‘Yes, pyramids! Well done, Jason!’

He’s actually learned something! He looks so pleased with himself she’s almost ready to forgive the stolen purse.

‘Will you shag me now, miss?’

‘No, Jason.’ But she can’t help laughing. ‘Who can tell me what they were for?’

‘Dead bodies!’ several voices clamour.

‘Dead fairies,’ says Dana smugly.

‘And they believed that when you die your heart is weighed against a feather, and every bad deed makes your heart heavier.’ Why is she peddling this anti-scientific nonsense? Maybe she should take it up with Mr Gorst/Alan. ‘And only the people with the very lightest hearts are allowed into Paradise.’

A silence of thirty suspended breaths fills the room. 6F are suckers for any kind of superstitious twaddle. Then Dan Southey, whose brother works in the butcher’s shop on Beckett Road, pitches in.

‘Miss, our Pat fetched a pig’s ’eart ’ome and it were ’eavy like a ’tater.’

‘Well, people in’t the same as pigs,’ says Tracey Dawcey.

‘Oink, oink,’ says Robbie Lewis.

A pandemonium of pointing, poking and oinking erupts, and she has to quieten them down with the Look, followed up by one of Miss Hippo’s tedious worksheets.

As the hand of the clock moves towards 3.30, Jason puts his head up and says,

‘Why we learnin’ about Ashent Egyptians, miss?’

‘Well, Jason …’ She takes a deep breath and counts silently to ten. But just as she gets to nine, the bell goes, and her problem is solved. Another day of 6F’s education is completed.

She loves the silence that settles over the empty classroom at the end of each day. She loves the sound of kids ebbing away down the corridor like the sea withdrawing over pebbles. She goes around the desks, picking up the worksheets on which they’ve recorded their deeds, mostly the bad – ‘thumped Jed’, ‘niked Mams fags’, ‘shaged Rackel Oliver’. That looks like Jason’s writing.

Then she notices, through the classroom window, that a massive black four-by-four is easing into the car park. The door opens and a young guy climbs out with a mobile phone pressed to his ear, wanders around and disappears from view round the corner. By the time she finds him, he’s already been directed to Mr Philpott in the boiler room, and the two of them have started loading the bin bags into his vehicle, struggling to keep them from flying all over the playground in the September wind.

‘Hi, I’m Clara Free. I think we spoke …’

‘Oh yeah, right.’ He shakes her hand bouncily. He looks in his early twenties, a bit spotty, with gelled hair riffling in the breeze, low-hanging jeans and a black zip-up jacket.

‘I thought you’d bring a van or a lorry or something.’

‘It’s okay, they’ll fit in here no problem.’

He and Mr Philpott shove the last few bin bags into the four-wheel drive, which has a logo painted across the side doors: ‘
FIRST CLASS FINANCE: AVAILABLE, AFFORDABLE, ACHIEVABLE. WHY WAIT TO MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE
?’ And the same mobile number she rang earlier.

‘First Class Finance. Is that you?’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I thought you were a recycling company.’

‘Yeah, we do that too. Multi-unlimited opportunity portfolio.’

‘I see.’ Though she doesn’t see at all.

‘Thirty quid, miss, right?’

‘Actually, we agreed twenty.’

‘Thirty. Take it or leave it.’

He opens the back and unloads one of the bags. Quickly she pulls the notes out of her purse. He holds them up to the light before pocketing them, gets into his four-by-four and drives off, revving so hard he leaves tyre marks on the tarmac. The wind catches the bag of left-behind newspapers and swirls them around the car park. She runs around picking them up until she is cross and out of breath.

By the time she gets back to her flat, it’s six o’clock and she’s ready for her only cigarette of the day, but she’s stupidly run out, and the nearest shop will have just closed. Instead, she takes her shoes off, puts the kettle on, sits on the sofa and Googles First Class Finance. Nothing. Then she Googles Syrec. A website opens, with harp music and images of butterflies skimming across wheat fields, then violins soar in aspirational arpeggios while an American-accented voice-over explains how Syrec is helping us to protect our unique heritage for future generations. (Cue a pair of little blonde girls in white frocks gathering daisies in a lush meadow. Your typical Doncaster scene, in fact.) There’s a Contact page with an address in Askern and the same mobile number she’s been calling. That’s all.

By now, she’s desperate for that cigarette. She steps across the landing and rings on Ida Blessingman’s door. No reply, though she’s pretty sure she heard Ida come in earlier. She rings again. After a couple of minutes, Ida appears wearing her turquoise dressing gown, and smoking a cigarette.

‘Oh, hello, Ida, have you got a fag …?’

Behind Ida, somewhere in the depths of the flat, a male voice calls, ‘Who is it?’

‘Nobody,’ Ida shouts over her shoulder.

Through the partly open door, she sees someone streak from the kitchen to the bathroom. Although he’s moving fast, she catches a fleeting glimpse of a naked male with a thin serial-killer-style moustache.

Ida snatches the cigarette from her own lips, thrusts it into Clara’s open mouth, and slams the door.

Checking her Facebook page before she goes to bed, she discovers something else of interest. Her friend Tammy, from university days, has introduced a new Facebook friend called Barbara, a botany post-doc in Cambridge, with a cute pudgy face and short dark hair, who writes about her passion for the northern marsh orchid,
Dactylorhiza purpurella
, which looks like a bristly purple penis and, apparently, grows abundantly in marshland near Doncaster.

But the interesting thing is, this Barbara looks very much like Babs, Serge’s girlfriend at Cambridge, whom Clara met once or twice. Although the hair’s different, there’s a dimply lift to the smile and an incipient double chin which seem familiar. Clara sends Barbara a friendly message confirming that she has seen
Dactylorhiza purpurella
growing at Potteric Carr, and asking whether she knows someone called Serge Free at Queens’ College. Then she waters her plants, gives the leaves a polish and wishes them goodnight.

The rabbits have escaped. They’re running all over the garden, and Serge is trying to chase them back into their cage. Clara is there too – bossy nine-year-old Clara – shouting at the rabbits, and at him. The last rabbit is cornered, and shooed towards the cage door, and it stops, and turns, and looks at him, and he sees that it’s not a rabbit at all, it’s a girl. Her nose is turned up and twitchy, like a rabbit’s, but her eyes are large and brown and bright with tears. It’s Babs. He tries to shove her into the cage, but she won’t go – she fights back, showing her large rabbity teeth, pushing hard against his chest with both hands. He wakes up with a pounding heart; his head is splitting. He drags himself out of bed and into the shower. Sheesh, what did he drink yesterday?