Untitled (27 page)

  Two of the others came over, also done up like rich men's dinners.

  Then Mo appeared! She looked impossibly scrubbed and wholesome in a flowery print dress and straw boater.

  We'd none of us recognized each other in the church and now frantically exchanged news. I told them how JH had tried to make me eat meat. Mo looked fit to murder him there and then.

  "Has he a suit?" asked IJ.

  "Must have," I said. "He won me in suitplay."

  "Any idea what he uses to make it real?" asked IJ.

I didn't follow.

  "Feelies, 'hancers . . . Drugs to heighten sensitivity," said Mo, smiling at IJ.

  I shrugged.

  "Doesn't matter," said IJ. "He's bound to use something. They all do. Try and make it to church next week. I'll have some black magic for you."

  Mo and I chatted. She, too, was living in Hinton Lea, with the most junior owner of the lot. It turned out that Jeremy had actually won two of us, but his boss made him give the other one – Mo – to his assistant area sales manager, Wayne Roberts.

  "He's an arsehole," she said, "but could be worse. He hasn't tried to rape me yet. I'm kept busy with . . ."

  Three small girls and a boy, the eldest not above seven, rushed up to Mo and clustered around her legs, all chattering, all wanting to show her something or ask her questions.

  "Meet the Roberts brood. I am their governess. My owners have too many kids and not enough money. Has Jezzer got a dog?" she asked, as the youngest tried to climb up her leg.

  A man beckoned her and the kids away. "We go to the park every morning between ten and eleven," she said, waving.

JH graciously invited me to Sunday lunch, which I understand is an important ritual for people in regular well-paid work. Natasha slopped things from Marks & Sparks onto plates. They didn't bother trying to force meat on me. There was a bottle of Slovak plonk, too. JH was a member of the Skinfull of the Month Club, or something; he reckoned it was good stuff. It tasted like vinegar to me.

  Afterwards, JH loosened buttons, draped his arms over the back of the chair, and got expansive. He lectured us about the innate idleness of the unemployed, how he pulled himself up by his bootstraps through a combination of hard work and back-tobasics morality. The jobless, the homeless, the hopeless were, you see, materially poor because they were morally poor – the mantra of smug idiots since time immemorial.

  "Don't you wish you had all this Brian?" he said, waving his arm around, indicating the house, the car, the fridge, the wife . . . He didn't wait for a reply. "You can. If you've got the guts to work hard for it. In this life, you don't get anything for nothing. You're a bright bloke, there's still time, you should go for it."

  I could have said it was all white noise. I actually said nothing.

  He shrugged. "I will win," he said. "I'm a very bad loser. By the end of your time here, you will see everything my way."

  IJ was right. After loading the plates into the dishwasher (his one domestic chore of the week), he took a little onyx box from a cupboard over the sink, popped two pills, and left the room.

  He reappeared in a top-of-the-range suit, a combination of string vest and black plastic sense-pads. He carried one of those wooden Japanese practice swords.

  In the garden, he stood in the middle of the lawn, clapped the visor down, and spent two hours doing battle with fresh air, looking like a very cross, oversized beetle.

The week passed quietly. Jezzer (as Mo had called him) did his nine-to-nines, Natasha watched television, went shopping and played bridge with her friends. Out of boredom I persuaded Jezzer to let me work on the garden. And each morning I took the wolf, whose name was King, for a walk.

  In the park I'd meet Mo and the two of her charges who were too young for school. We talked and talked and talked. Usually about nothing in particular; neither of us wanted to focus too hard on our immediate situation. Naturally we had to be sort of discreet, so not so much as a handshake passed between us, but I really was falling in love. I liked to think she was, too.

  On Sunday, we met IJ and some of the others at church again. He slipped me two small objects. "You'll know what to do with these," he said. "Don't take out the existing chip. Just plug this into the port next to it. I've called it Hieronymus."

  I trousered his "black magic" and forgot about it until later in the day when Jezzer went out to the lawn with his sword. IJ had given me a small plastic bottle of pills and a gizmo with about two-dozen delicate little pins sticking out of it.

  It was too late to try anything that day. Besides, although Jezzer deserved whatever nightmare that IJ had cooked up for him, it had been over a week since that incident, and I hadn't seen much of him since. I was in love, and aside from the fact that I could do little about it, life was almost tolerable.

  My trouble is I get complacent too easily.

  Another week passed and things still got better. I met Mo every weekday, and Natasha, who had the remote during office hours, but never once used it, took me shopping one afternoon. It was the first time we exchanged more than a few sentences, though I did most of the talking, prosing on about my favorite authors. I don't quite know what she made of all this; I think she saw a human being, rather than a criminal, for the first time. Maybe she felt my cultured and sensitive nature (ha!) was valuable. Anyway, she gave me the run of a bookshop on one of her cards.

  Then came Saturday night . . .

I didn't know when or if Natasha was likely to make free with the plastic again, so I'd got her money's worth, and at midnight I was tucked up in the garage with some of my favorite sf classics.

  Jezzer and Natasha were off at a dinner party and had left me with the immobilizer set at twenty yards, which meant that if the house caught fire or got burgled there was cock-all I could do about it. Shame.

  I heard them come in after midnight and was about to sleep when I heard him shouting inside the house.

  Then the side door to the garage burst open. There was Jezzer in his designer skivvies with the remote in one hand. With the other, he pushed Natasha through in front of him. She was wearing a silk nightdress.

  "Here he is, then" he snarled at her. "Go on then. Get into the sack with him, bitch!"

  "Jeremy, no!" she said, in tears.

  He pushed her so hard she fell on top of me. "Go on then, get on with it. Go on Brian, give her a good seeing-to. It's what you both want, isn't it!"

  She scrambled to her feet as Jeremy fumbled with the box, then turned it to maximum.

  "What the hell's going on?" I shouted through the pain.

  "Don't play the innocent with me!" he said. "I know your fucking game. Trying to get into my wife's knickers so's you'll get an easier time of it here!"

  "Rubbish!" was all I could manage. He turned the agony off. Natasha tried to leave, but he blocked her path.

  "You think I'm completely stupid don't you? I call up a credit card statement this afternoon and find she's spent seventy Eeks in a
bookshop!
This ignorant cow hasn't read a single book in the last ten years. And now, like every other Saturday night, she lies there like I'm raping her, never showing any sign of enjoyment. But she's more than happy to spend my hard-earned money on some worthless bum because he talks to her about literature . . ."

  "This is nonsense, JH," I said. "I don't fancy her. I'm sure she doesn't fancy a scruff like me. She was only being . . ."

  Jezzer wasn't listening. "What's your secret, then? Got a bigger cock than me, have you?"

  I snorted.

  "Come on, then!" he said. "Let's both give her one! Maybe she'd like that, the frigid bitch!" He tore off her nightdress and, once more, pushed her onto me, pulling down his underpants as he did so.

  "Come on then, Brian," he said, "let's see you in action."

  "Go to hell!"

  He switched on the pain. I told him to screw himself, which of course is precisely what he would have loved to do.

  "You're one sick individual, you know that?" I said. "And even if I did want to get it up, it'd be difficult with your finger on the pain button."

  Natasha climbed off me again. "I'm sorry," she said to me. "I'm sorry," through her sobbing, gathering up her nightdress. I told her it wasn't her fault. Jezzer let her through the door this time, then spent the next five minutes tearing up the books she'd bought me.

  Next morning, as we got ready for church, I popped IJ's pills into Jezzer's onyx box, and slipped upstairs to plug Hieronymus into the port on the visor of his suit.

  As we were about to leave, Jezzer got an urgent call from the office. He drove off looking grim and determined. Natasha went back to bed.

  I helped myself to some breakfast and spent half the morning sticking books together again. Then I did some work in the garden. I borrowed the antique-styled radio from the kitchen to listen while I worked. Right at the end of the lunchtime news I realized why Jeremy had left in a hurry. LBM, the huge electronics conglomerate, had mounted a bid for Southern Cable, promising new wire and all sorts of brilliant new services for domestic and commercial customers, not to mention bigger dividends.

We didn't see much of Jeremy for a while. He was busy going to meetings and helping with the hearts-and-minds campaign with shareholders. I didn't see much of Natasha either. Whenever I did, she looked sort of apologetic, as though the whole thing had been her fault.

  In the park on Monday I told Mo everything that had happened. She listened in silence then looked me carefully in the eye, trying, I guess, to see if there really was anything between Natasha and me.

  Finally, she said, "It's time to cast a spell. One that will change him forever." She glanced around to see that nobody was watching, kissed me furtively, called the kids together, and left.

  Two days later she gave me a slip of paper with a London landline number on it and a woman's name. "Memorize the name and number," said Mo, "then lose the paper. Call it using one of Jezzer's phones anytime you know he's not at the office and ask for the woman. It doesn't matter if you don't get her. Just keep the line open for a minute or more."

  "What is this, Mo?"

  "The less you know, the less it can harm you," she said. "It's the philosopher's stone. It'll turn an arrogant shit into a sorry shit."

  "Is this going to hurt anyone?"

  "Not physically."

  I took the paper, memorized name and number, and walked the dog home again.

  When I got back, Natasha was waiting in the kitchen. She had made me some lunch. Also on the table were new copies of all the books Jezzer had destroyed. I thanked her lots, told her she didn't have to do this.

  She shrugged. "It's his money."

  "Aren't you frightened of him?"

  "Not anymore. I'm leaving. I'm going to stay with my parents and get a divorce."

  She explained how his behavior the other night was not exceptional. He beat her up every so often, had kinky sexual tastes, had been unfaithful. He kept pestering her to have sex with his friends while he watched. I didn't doubt a word of it.

  She warned me (quite unnecessarily) that he'd be in a vile temper when he got home and found her note, and that it might be best to keep my head down and the books hidden.

  "I would give you your remote control," she said, "so you can hide it or break it. But he's got it. He thinks I'd give it to you." She smiled weakly.

  I carried her cases to the taxi for her.

JH got home at ten, found no supper and no wife waiting. He came into the garage, set the immobilizer and kicked me around a bit. He suspected I'd had a hand in Natasha's desertion. Perhaps I had.

  He disappeared early next morning. The minute he did, I went into the house and punched up the number Mo had given me, making sure the system wasn't set to record.

  A receptionist answered. I didn't get the company name, but it was a long one. I asked to speak to Elizabeth Colley.

  I was put on hold; the screen filled with slo-mo pictures of waves and sea, but there was no company logo. This was obviously a line that prized discretion.

  A young man came on. "I'm sorry," he said, "but Elizabeth is in a meeting. Can I take a message?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "It's personal. Have you any idea what time she'll be free?"

  "About an hour's time," he said. "Who shall I say called?"

  "Henderson," I said, "Jeremy Henderson," and hung up, still no wiser as to what Mo's game was. I then went off to the bathroom to clean up the blood and bruises Jezzer had inflicted the night before.

Midmorning next day I was getting King ready for walkies when Jezzer arrived back home.

  He was a zombie. I didn't ask what the problem was, especially as he went straight for the drinks cabinet. I said I was walking the dog. He ignored me.

  In the park Mo and I sat at our favorite bench watching the kids chase each other around.

  She nodded as I told her what had happened. "It worked then."

  "The call I made?"

  She nodded. "He's been fired."

  
"What?"

  "Sacked, wasted, kicked out . . ."

  "Mo, I'll say this in as many words, even though I'm sure I don't have to. I think I love you, and the only reason I can touch upon for why you're there in everything I think, dream, and do is your mystique, all the fabulous things that go on in your head. I want to spend ten lifetimes with you because I know you'll never become ordinary or boring to me . . ."