Various Pets Alive and Dead (43 page)

‘There’s a deli on Watling Street,’ he replies, unsmiling, and exits on the next floor.

Doro decides against following him and, not knowing which floor to choose, presses the top button. The glass cage whirls them up through floor after floor. Cables hiss and whirr, wind and unwind. Corridors, open-plan offices, men in suits and women in heels flash past.

‘Ooh!’ gasps Oolie. ‘This is reyt good!’

On the top floor, they step out. No one is around. There’s a reception desk, but nobody is behind it. Wan light floods in through the glass wall facing them. They’re almost on the same level as the clouds. On each side of the lift, a carpeted corridor panelled on one side in glass, on the other in mahogany, gives access to a number of closed mahogany doors. Behind them, the lift doors shut and the lift disappears, summoned from below.

‘Where’s Sausage?’

‘I don’t know. Ssh!’

They stand and listen. An intermittent swishing sound, faint but arresting, is coming from behind one of the doors along the corridor.

‘Are they shagging?’ asks Oolie.

‘Could be.’

Whoever it is seems to have phenomenal stamina.

Suddenly, with a clunk and a swoosh, the lift doors open again. Out come a tall blonde woman and a small dumpy boy. The four stand and eye each other.

‘Who are you?’ says the tall blonde woman to Doro. She’s wearing flat pumps and lots of jewellery, which seems to Doro rather vulgar.

‘Dorothy Marchmont,’ says Doro, feeling not quite confident enough to tell the woman to piss off. ‘And who are you?’

‘Caroline Porter. Have you seen my husband?’

‘I haven’t seen anybody up here,’ says Doro, deciding not to mention the sound, which has now stopped.

‘You wanna see my stimulator?’ the boy whispers to Oolie. He has the same Down’s syndrome features and gentle, slightly lost expression.

‘Yeah, I wanna stimulator!’

‘Oolie! No!’ snaps Doro. ‘I’ve no idea who your husband is,’ she says to the woman. ‘I’m looking for my son.’ Then, seeing the sad expression in the woman’s eyes, she softens her voice. ‘How old’s your little boy?’

‘Not so little. Willy’s twenty-four. And your … is she your daughter?’

They exchange smiles.

‘Yes. Oolie-Anna. Twenty-three.’

Oolie and Willy have disappeared, but she can hear their voices somewhere down the corridor.

At that moment, a tiny white rabbit whizzes along the corridor in front of them. Doro rubs her eyes. Then she realises she’s not asleep and it’s not a white rabbit, it’s a white golf ball, moving very fast.

‘Willy! Be careful!’ yells Caroline. ‘He’s obsessed with the golf simulator,’ she explains.

Ah. Maybe that’s what the sound was.

‘I think my son works here,’ says Doro. ‘I’ve come to find him.’

Caroline nods. ‘We employ something like a thousand staff. Is he a trader?’

‘I’ve no idea. I hope not.’

‘The traders are on the ninth floor. D’you want me to come with you?’

‘Would you?’

‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘What about …?’

‘They’ll be all right. They can play with the golf simulator. There’s nothing much else they can get up to up here.’ She presses the call button for the lift.

‘What about your husband?’ asks Doro, as they glide down to the ninth floor.

‘We’ll see.’

The hum of noise from the trading floor hits Doro like a wave as the double doors swing open.

‘Serge!’ she calls.

Gradually, the hubbub subsides. Some eight hundred pairs of eyes are turned on her.

‘Serge, I know you’re in here! Don’t be afraid!’

Silence.

Beside her, Caroline whispers, ‘Wow! You’ve got some voice!’

‘Yes, I used to go on demos.’

Why doesn’t Serge come forward? There must be a simple explanation why he hasn’t told her before. Maybe he’s afraid she’ll accuse him of betraying his ideals.

‘Serge! It’s your mum! You can come home now. All is forgiven!’

The room shivers with a ripple of suppressed hysteria. All over the trading floor, men in suits and a few girls bury their faces in their hands, their shoulders heaving. Even the computer monitors seem to be chuckling, ripples of blue giving way to ripples of red.

‘What you want? What for you shouting?’

A fierce dark-haired girl wearing a tight black dress and ridiculous high heels has come in through the swinging doors behind them. She’s quite pretty, but too thin, and wearing far too much make-up.

‘I’m looking for my son, Serge Free.’

‘You mother of Sergei?’ The girl throws her a look of barely disguised contempt. ‘I thought you are more cultured.’

Suddenly Caroline lunges and grabs the girl by the hair.

‘It’s you! The Ukrainian whore!’

The girl struggles. ‘Let me go! You no understand him! Old abandon wife!’

Caroline goes for her throat.

The girl fights back with knees and fists, dropping her handbag, whose contents spill all over the floor – grotty bits of make-up, a matted hairbrush, crumpled tissues, stained coins. A small square photograph flutters to Doro’s feet. She picks it up. It shows two women, arm in arm, smiling at the camera. She recognises the same girl, with shorter hair, wearing a striped jumper; the other woman looks like her but older, with a shapeless grey perm and bad front teeth. Her mother? The girl snatches the photograph out of Doro’s hand, scoops up the rest of her scattered possessions and scuttles away, just as the double doors swing open again and a handsome middle-aged man in shirt sleeves approaches them.

Doro had been half expecting to encounter the devil incarnate in the building, but this man looks quite sexy.

‘Caroline! Darling! What brings you here?’ He kisses his wife’s cheek.

His manner is charming, though Doro notes that his shirt is partly hanging out, and his fly is half undone. His smile reminds her of Malcolm Loxley.

‘Willy wanted to play golf, so I left him up there. Didn’t you see him?’ Caroline’s face is still flushed.

‘I haven’t seen anyone. I’ve been … in a meeting. Treasury Committee.’

He waves a wad of papers which Doro notices have a green portcullis logo at the top. So he’s running the country too?

Caroline makes a dive to yank his zip up. ‘With your Ukrainian whore?’

‘What’s got into you, Caroline?’ he hisses. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘Of course I’m bloody mad!’ Caroline hisses back.

‘Caroline, stop it! You’re making an exhibition of yourself!’

Though strangely, the people in the hall are no longer watching their little fracas but seem transfixed by their screens, which are still rippling scarlet.

‘You think I care? After you’ve been exhibiting your cock all over town?’

‘Who …?’

‘This is my friend …’

‘Doro Marchmont. How do you do?’

‘Ken Porter.’

He reaches out a big meaty hand, which Doro notices is slightly sticky.

She seizes the moment. ‘I’m looking for my son, Serge Free.’

Why does he wince like that?

Suddenly a howl of sirens fills the hall. The noise bounces off all the hard hot surfaces in a menacing wail: ‘Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa!’ Then the lights go out, the overhead TV screens flicker and go blank, and one by one all the monitors on all the desks, and all the computers, start to close down. With a grand finale of beeps and farewell chimes, the whole system grinds slowly to a halt.

‘Fire alarm!’ bellows somebody from the back of the hall.

‘Bomb scare!’ calls somebody else.

Only the watery light from the tall windows lights up the scene of panic as dozens – no, hundreds – of prisoners throw off their shackles and bolt towards the double doors.

‘Yes! Liberate yourselves, drones!’ cries Doro, as they pour past her, a human flood, rushing down the stairs, because the lifts aren’t working, following the emergency lighting along the floor.

‘Oh, God! Willy’s up there!’ Caroline shrieks suddenly.

‘And Oolie!’

‘Quick! Up the stairs!’ Caroline grabs her hand, and fighting against the grey-suited tide they battle up one, two, three … six flights of stairs. The husband follows behind.

On the top floor, panting, the three of them stand and listen. All around is eerily calm. No one is there. Eddies of noise drift faintly up from below; the sirens have stopped, but there’s still a babble of voices, and it takes Doro a few moments to make out another closer sound, a soft rising and falling susurration that sounds a bit like snoring.

‘We need to talk rationally, darling,’ the husband says, gripping Caroline by the arm.

Doro notices a mauve vein throbbing on his temple. His left eye is twitching.

‘First we need to find the children,’ she interrupts.

‘Look in the golf simulator.’ Caroline points. ‘Down there. I’ll look in the boardroom.’

Doro has no idea what a golf simulator is, so she pokes her head into several empty offices. At the end of the corridor, a door opens into a room which is completely dark. As she peers into the blackness, a light suddenly flickers on and the far wall of the long narrow room bursts out into a verdant landscape of rolling countryside, a long valley dotted with trees, a stream in the foreground, distant hills. She gasps. In front of the stream in vivid 3D are some lumpy stones and hillocks which, as she approaches, she sees are not hillocks at all, but items of clothing that have been scattered around. Black shoes. Crumpled brown trousers. A pair of white knickers. There’s a quiet tck-tck-tck of a machine whirring somewhere nearby. And yes, the rising-falling susurration is coming from in here too, and now it sounds distinctly like snoring.

‘Oolie?’

The landscape shudders and bulges, and she realises it’s just a hanging sheet on to which the landscape image is projected.

‘Oolie? Willy?’

‘Randy shaggy bloody goat …!’ Caroline’s shrill voice whips down the corridor.

A moment later, she and the man burst into the room. She is slapping him around the face with what looks like a small wet latex glove, and he’s backing away from her, shouting, ‘Stop it, Caroline! Please! At least I
used
a bloody condom!’

‘Ssh!’ whispers Doro. ‘Look!’

She pulls aside the hanging cloth, and in the dark space behind it, strangely illuminated now by the shimmering projected landscape, are the two young people, curled up like cherubs in each other’s arms.

‘Sorry, Dad.’ Willy sits up as the light falls on him, stretches, and rubs his stubby hands through his hair. ‘I tried to turn it off, but I think I got the wrong switch.’

Oolie opens her eyes, blinks, and a smile creeps over her face. She says in a sleepy voice, ‘We’re going to have a babbie.’

Far away in the wavering gleaming landscape, a tiny white rabbit races away and pops down a hole.

Ooh-aah! The pain is worse today. This afternoon he’ll go up to the hospital to discuss the results of the tests with the consultant, and then, if needs be, he’ll have to sit down and talk it through with Doro. Maybe he should have told her before, but why throw her into a panic, when the symptoms are so vague? Generalised tiredness, a bit of bloating, passing wind rather more than usual (little Oolie spotted that one) and recently this painful constipation. Hopefully nothing that a dose of good medicine won’t cure. With any luck, Doro need never know at all. No, it’s not the same as not telling her about Oolie. That was for his benefit, because he couldn’t face her accusations, and he’s not proud of that. But this is for her sake. The trouble is, she does get into such a flap.

Lucky he managed to keep it under control during the wedding yesterday, which was quite a jolly low-key affair at the registry office in Doncaster, though Oolie went a bit OTT bouncing around in a blue outfit covered in bows, kissing everybody. And God knows what persuaded Doro to wear that catastrophic hat, which looked more like an implement for steaming vegetables than headgear. Now that she’s an Oxfam volunteer she comes back with all kinds of tat, but Serge swears he bought it in a boutique in Shoreditch.

It was good to see Serge and his new partner, a very nice and sensible young woman. Doctor. Indian. Looked like she was pregnant – he didn’t like to ask. Apparently they’re talking about moving back up to Yorkshire when Serge has finished his PhD. Doro’ll be pleased, especially now Clara’s gone and Oolie’s moved out. Ooh-aah! That pain!

Good to see Otto too, and Molly and their two kids, though God knows why they’ve given them such ridiculous names. Flossie and Wiki. Whatever next? Toothpick and Nasty? Reminds him of those poor kids Toussaint and Kollontai. Parents should be shot. Kids turned out okay, though, in spite of it. Nick and Jen were there, getting all goo-gooey with the babies. He always thought Nick was a bit Aspergic and Jen was totally mad, but they’ve somehow reinvented themselves as model suburban grandparents. God knows what Doro ever saw in him.

Star couldn’t come – she’s been arrested again for some climate disturbance – but Moira was there. She’s put on a bit of weight, but she’s still gorgeous in the tits department. Funny, he couldn’t have said that in those days without risking the wrath of the Femintern. That’s what Fred Baxendale called them. He was there too. A bit thin on top. Still wearing the same jumper. On to his nineteenth live-in girlfriend. Or twentieth. Lost count. The jumper, which according to Doro he bought in a Boxing Day sale at John Lewis in 1971, has outlasted them all. God knows what they see in him.

Afterwards, there was a bit of a reception back at Hardwick Avenue, with soya patties, bean salad and lentil bake. For old times’ sake, Doro said. Personally, he was never into that lifestyle politics, which he viewed as anti-Marxist. In fact, he used to nip out for an occasional steak to the Little Chef at Adwick. That’s another thing he never told Doro. There are only so many lentils a man can eat in his life.

There were some strange people at the reception, who seemed to have turned up uninvited. The caretaker from Clara’s school was there, going on about his unweeded garden, with his friend, an elderly Ukrainian engineer, who’d worked at the McCormick tractor works in Wheatley Hall back in 1955, and some of Doro’s allotment crowd. There was a wrinkled blonde woman from Askern who sidled up to him in the kitchen and asked whether he remembered sleeping with her during the strike. He nodded and grinned politely, trying to summon an expression of enthusiasm, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember. And a woman with pink leggings and a brown poodle, who kept going on about how the Seeing Eye would make him better. She said Serge had told her about his condition. Bloody cheek. Ay-ay-ay!