Various Pets Alive and Dead (34 page)

‘No!’ says Maroushka, coughing. ‘Is okay! Never mind!’

He fingers the button-sized lumps. Where the fuck …?

All that matted crumbly filth reminds him of the understairs cupboard at Solidarity Hall where bags and wellies were kept, and where lost things disintegrated into the grot of ages.

‘I’ll find it! Don’t worry, pet!’ Jojo digs in with gusto, her plump rubber-covered fingers squeezing and sifting. ‘It’s gotta be somewhere in here!’

This is ridiculous. He definitely heard the sound of something large and button-like being hoovered up. And he knows with a deep gut certainty that if he’s ever to make any progress with Maroushka, he’s got to find this button – their future happiness depends on it.

‘Please, never mind. You making more dirty than you cleaning.’

Maroushka coughs, pushing back a stray strand of hair, and leaving a smudge of brown dust on her cheek. He kisses it tenderly, but his stiffy has well and truly shrivelled away.

Then all three of them start poking through the filth, coughing in the opaque air. They fish out, between them, a pound coin, two euros, a twenty-pence coin, a small lump of brown stuff wrapped in silver foil, a dead cockroach, several paperclips, two pen tops, a small brown memory stick that looks like a dead cockroach (hey?), a false fingernail, a contact lens and something which looks like a green shoot, but turns out to be a shard of lettuce from someone’s sandwich. No button.

He stares at the memory stick poking out of the clumpy dust. Should he pretend it’s his? Just as he’s about to pick it up, Maroushka bends with a little giggle and slips it in her pocket.

It’s half past ten by the time Jojo has vacuumed up the mess on the floor, and they’ve thoroughly washed their hands, turned off their monitors, and are riding downwards together in the lift.

‘I am sorry for this cleaner,’ says Maroushka. ‘She has no ability to improve her situation. She has proletarian mentality.’

He leans towards her and says, ‘Can I take you out for a meal or something, Venus? To compensate for the loss of your button?’

She shakes her head.

And, to be honest, his pang of regret is tempered by a touch of relief.

You can’t hurry love. This girl – she’s worth waiting for. She’s not just a quick office-floor shag. Despite the button incident, he feels buoyant with optimism as he takes the stairs two at a time up to his penthouse, her kisses still fresh on his lips. It can only be a matter of time before he brings her up here, to marvel at the rooftop view, and pop a bottle of bubbly, and then …

On the bookshelf Maroushka’s shoes are standing stiffly to attention, waiting for her to come and claim them.

Not long now.

Maybe in future years they’ll look back on this evening spent sifting through the contents of the office vacuum cleaner, and smile.

Sitting up in bed with his laptop that night, as is his habit, he logs into Kenporter1601’s online broker account before going to sleep – not to trade of course, but just to see.

What he sees is that Chicken sold £525,000 worth of Edenthorpe Engineering shares this afternoon, about half an hour after Serge did. Jeez! A coincidence? A pattern? No, it can’t be a coincidence. Chicken must have known about his trade. But how? The price has dipped right down to 102p. If he’d sold at that price he’d have made an extra few thousand. Has Chicken been snooping on him, when all the while he thought he was the one doing the snooping? He feels the rabbit-squeeze in his chest.

He checks the email account for new information. Here’s a message from Juliette reminding him about an appointment on Friday – ‘you naughty boy, you’. How great to be a fly on the wall at one of those sessions! But what’s this pesky little message there at the bottom of the list?

Tomorrow. Mx

 

Barely two words, but enough to set his heart plummeting like a market in free fall. The email address reveals nothing – [email protected]. He notes it down, but daren’t risk a reply. He rereads the message, reads between and behind the lines – ‘M’. It has to be her – who else? And ‘x’ – a kiss.

Doro trundles the Hoover around upstairs, cursing the rain that has kept her in all day. Since she retired from her part-time lecturing job at the end of last year, and Oolie started working at Edenthorpe’s, she has free hours at her disposal, hundreds of them. If she strung them all together, she could write a book, like Marcus, or learn a language or take up golf. Instead, she fills them with housework, which she loathes because it’s endless, and cups of tea, which she often leaves undrunk. Cleaning must be some primeval female instinct, for Marcus took retirement three years ago without feeling any increased urge to hoover. So much for ‘new man’.

She can’t understand why he’s suddenly so keen to get married, but Oolie-Anna seems to have taken the idea in her stride. In fact, Oolie’s far more excited about being a bridesmaid than about being adopted, since the latter doesn’t involve dressing up, and neither Marcus nor she could suggest any other advantages. When they’ve fixed a date, she’ll have to start making preparations, which no doubt will be left up to her.

In the study, Serge’s former bedroom, the Hoover bumps against a box of papers sealed with sticky tape that hasn’t been opened since they moved from Solidarity Hall in 1995. Maybe it’s time to dump some of this old irrelevant junk? She opens it for inspection and a piece of paper flutters to the ground.

Dear Everybody,

 

By the time you get this, I will be far away.

I had a chance of happiness, and I had to take it.

Look after little Julie-Anna.

She was always more your than mine, and now she is all yours.

If we ever meet again, I hope you will understand.

 

Yours sincearly,

Megan Cromer

The writing is small and round, like a child’s, with circles for dots above the ‘i’s, and that single spelling mistake near the end. She reads it through twice, and is so bowled over by the rush of emotion it brings, she stuffs it back quickly into the box. But the questions persist in her mind as she trails around the house with the Hoover.

Where is ‘far away’?

What ‘chance of happiness’?

The first time she read it, twenty years ago, she’d dismissed it without a thought. Now it seems ludicrous and melodramatic. ‘If we ever meet again, I hope you will understand.’ Straight out of Mills & Boon. She’s suddenly filled with fury at Megan, which political correctness wouldn’t let her feel at the time. As if
her
happiness was what mattered. What about Oolie’s happiness?

Even the names are a question.

Why Megan Cromer? What was she hiding? Or did she already know that she would run away one day?

Why Julie-Anna? Was it a simple mistake, or a refusal to accept the name they’d given her?

She recalls the scene in the sitting room at Solidarity Hall, Chris Watt trying to get her to breastfeed the baby, Megan’s sullen exhaustion, and Chris Howe and Fred bounding in, so pleased with the name they’d come up with. Megan had nodded blankly, staring at the fretful, unresponsive baby. Doro feels a stab of guilt. ‘She was always more your than mine.’ Maybe there was some truth in that. But the commune had been able to give Oolie so much more than Megan could have done on her own – why should she feel guilty? ‘Now she is all yours,’ Megan wrote, and Doro’s life was set on a different course, like a planet that shifts its axis of orbit.

The older kids also adapted to Oolie’s arrival in their family. Clara became more responsible. Serge and Otto withdrew into their own geekish world. It would be nice to talk to them about those days, to explain what it was all about. But why burden them with that old forgotten stuff? Clara’s doing a great job with those difficult kids, not just thinking of me-me-me all the time, as many of the young do today. And Serge hasn’t gone down the easy money road, as he could have, with his brains, but is toiling at the frontiers of knowledge. And little Oolie is so resolutely cheerful, despite all the setbacks she faces. Her kids have done her proud.

She switches off the Hoover, and heaves the old box of papers on to the landing – tomorrow, she’ll get Marcus to help her take it to the recycling dump. On the way back, she’ll stop off at the Oxfam shop, and sign on as a volunteer.

‘Shall I make something for supper?’ he calls up from the kitchen.

Yes, the winds of change are really blowing through her life.

Tomorrow. Mx

 

In other words, today: 07.45, 14th November 2008, according to the Bloomberg TV channel suspended from the high ceiling of the trading hall.

She’s not in yet. Serge hangs his jacket on the back of his chair and switches on his monitor. He didn’t sleep much last night. An exhausted tic pecks away at the lid of his right eye.

But Green Shoots is doing well, and there are other signs of recovery in the housing market. In a show of confidence, Persimmon, the house builder, has reversed provisions it had taken against falls in house prices. The Icelandic banks have stabilised too, thanks to a $2 billion IMF loan.

At Edenthorpe Engineering, however, things are not so rosy. A newsflash reveals that the shares have collapsed to 85p and there are rumours of receivership. Surely it can’t be just his own short selling that brought this about? Serge does a quick search on BBC Business. Seven hundred jobs at risk. Shit! He shuts his eyes and tries to block out the hum of his conscience. But even as he’s grappling with his scruples, another voice is whispering: ‘If you’d held on and bought back at 85p, you’d have made shedloads more.’

While he’s reading the screen, he doesn’t notice that the room has fallen quiet around him. He looks up to see all eyes are turned towards the door. Chicken is standing there, with one of the American suits beside him – Craig Hampton or Max Vearling, he can’t remember which. They whisper together, surveying the scene.

What are they looking at? Who are they looking for?

Chicken’s Dobermann gaze rests on him. His guts lurch.

That email: ‘Tomorrow. Mx.’ A carelessly omitted vowel. Yes, it’s Max Vearling. There he is, staring straight at Serge, with a sly half-smile. So this is it, the word in the ear, the quiet hustling away to a private room where Inspectors Birkett and Jackson or some goons from the FSA are lying in wait. What a fool he’d been to break the rules. What an utter fool to think he could get away with it.

He tries to keep calm as he looks around for an escape route, though his pulses are hammering so hard he can barely think. There’s no exit from the trading floor – or at least, there is, but Chicken and Max Vearling are blocking it. Then they start to walk slowly forward between the desks. They are heading towards the Securitisation area – straight towards him.

‘Good news from Persimmon, hey?’ Toby O’Toole leans back in his chair as they pass.

Bless you, keep them talking, brown-nose boy!

Max Vearling pauses for a moment to exchange pleasantries, but Chicken is still advancing. He stops by Serge’s desk, and says in a low voice, ‘Interesting developments at Edenthorpe Engineering, hey, Freebie?’

A flash of blinding panic strikes Serge’s visual cortex. For a second, the room goes black. Then light floods in, strobing as in a nightmare. He jumps to his feet and, dodging past Chicken, sprints in the opposite direction down to the end of his aisle without looking round, almost knocking the Hamburger out of his seat, takes a left, and then legs it up between the desks of the next aisle. People stare, but nobody tries to stop him. As he runs, the world around him seems to slow down, to collapse into slow motion. On the side, his colleagues are waving their arms like lazy swimmers, as though the huge hall is filled with water instead of air. Big glassy bubbles are rising to the surface, and he is drowning, drowning.

When he reaches the door, he stops and glances over his shoulder. Everybody is staring at him, their faces distorted through the deep sea swell, their mewing voices unintelligible like seagulls. He shoves at the door and stumbles out into the lobby, gasping for breath. A stroke of luck – the lift is waiting there. He pushes the button and lets himself down, down through the rattling oesophagus of FATCA into the sunlit atrium of the reception –
AUDACES FORTUNA IUVAT
– past the chirpy girls at the desk, and out on to the pavement. Sunlight slants in broad beams between the lofty buildings. No one is around. He starts to run.

At the end of the street, he bears right into a narrow alley which after a couple of blocks ejects him into Paternoster Square and he races across the bricky expanse – where did those bloody sheep come from? – towards St Paul’s. His breath comes in hoarse pants through his open mouth. His chest is bursting. His eyes are inexplicably wet and misted. He keeps on running, running.

Then suddenly – pfwhat! The pavement leaps up and thumps him in the face. His arms flail but his legs are caught, entangled in a snare which on closer inspection turns out to be not a snare but a leather lead. At one end of the lead is a large disgruntled poodle, now yelping with annoyance. From his pavement-level view, all he sees at the other end is a pair of pink leggings tucked into shiny black high-heeled boots. A few inches away in front of his eyes is a steaming mound of freshly laid dog pooh. A trickle of blood, presumably from his nose, is leeching towards it. Even in this addled state, a lucid thought flashes into his mind: ‘Sheesh! This could have been so much worse!’