Harry

by Emma Hamilton

  HARRY

  First published 2019

  Copyright © Emma Hamilton 2019

  The right of Emma Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB

  www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

  ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-070-9

  ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-071-6

  Cover design by Kevin Rylands

  Internal design by Andrew Easton

  Printed and bound in the UK

  This book is printed on FSC certified paper

  HARRY

  EMMA HAMILTON

  In memory of Jonny Porter.

  Foreword

  This book is entirely fictional and none of the characters are real or based on real people. Any similarity with real people is entirely fortuitous and unintended. And Jonny? Jonny is real and we haven’t forgotten you.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter One

  ‘Excuse me. Have you seen the guy who usually sits outside the jeweller’s with a dog?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There’s a guy who sits over there with a dog. I haven’t seen him for a few days. I usually talk to him. I wondered if you might have seen him.’

  ‘You mean the chap who sits there begging? No, mate. I haven’t. I’ve got no time for people like that.’

  ‘Oh, he’s alright. His name’s Harry.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. The other day a woman took pity on one of them and bought him a meat pie from over there.’ He pointed to a greasy spoon café across the road. ‘When she gave it to him, he said, “No thanks, I’m vegetarian.” I’d have rammed it in his fucking face.’

  ‘Well, I’m veggie, too. I hope no one does that to me when I go out to dinner next. Have a good one, matey.’

  ‘Some of them get as much as 70 quid a day at weekends.’ I didn’t reply. I suppose I could have told him that I earned £70 in twelve minutes – my charging rate then was £350 an hour. But that was different, of course. I was not a beggar.

  Anyway, that was me speaking to the man who sells sunglasses and other junk from a stall on the street. I always used to say good morning to him on my run in to the office – I even bought a pair of shades from him once and wore them thinking I looked cool. Until my eldest son, Paul, heard about it and sent me a text: ‘Dad, I don’t mind you running around dressed like a paedophile but promise me you won’t go within 50 yards of a children’s playground. ‘OK, Jimmy Savile sends his love,’ I had replied. But I ditched the glasses – thinking about it, they were a bit red-tinted and round.

  I hadn’t seen Harry for about ten days by then and I was getting anxious about what might have happened to him. The last time I had seen him I had been dying of man flu, the fatal condition no woman ever understands, and had been feeling like shit.

  ‘How are you, Jon?’ Harry had said when I saw him that morning.

  ‘I’ll be dead tomorrow, Harry. Man flu.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Harry hadn’t quite got it.

  ‘No. I’m just pissing about. Bit of a cold. And you? You look frozen.’

  ‘Rough night. Got soaked. Jenny kept me warm, though.’

  Jenny was his immaculately kept bulldog. She always used to smile when she saw me coming over – well, if a dog can smile, that is. But she looked up at me anyway when I crouched down to stroke her and she sort of wagged her stubby tail.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Jenny, aren’t you? Looking after the boss, eh?’ I sat on the pavement next to them.

  I noticed that Harry was shivering. ‘Harry, you’re shivering. Have you had any breakfast?’

  ‘Not yet.’ That is ‘not yet’ as in ‘got no money.’

  ‘Where did you sleep last night?’

  ‘Usual place.’ That meant that he’d slept in the park. There is a large cement pipe that children crawl through and he used that to sleep in when no one else had got there first. If it rained heavily, however, the water poured in at one end of the pipe and turned it into a stream.

  ‘Got any plans for the day?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘Thought I’d catch a plane to the south of France.’ He laughed, showing his rotting teeth that were heavily nicotine-stained. ‘No...Might just go for a walkabout.’

  ‘Well. Keep in touch. I need to get going, buddy. I’m late… as ever. Get yourself some breakfast.’ I gave him the £2 that I had put in my right-hand pocket earlier that morning, expecting to see him on my way in. I noticed his hands were shaking as he took the money.

  ‘Thanks, Jon.’ I was about to run on.

  ‘Oh, fuck it, Harry.’ I reached into my other pocket where I had a D-shaped purse with a load more change. ‘Do me a favour and take the lot, would you?’ I emptied the purse into my hand and gave him the money. It was probably no more than about £3.50 at most. I always shook his hand when I left him and, by then, had even managed to persuade myself not to use an antiseptic hand-wash after doing so.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Harry.’ Stupid thing to say. No one else would take care of him. Well, no one except Jenny. He’d been on the streets for the past two years. He didn’t drink and didn’t do drugs and that meant that he wasn’t treated as any sort of priority for housing. He kept being told by the housing people that he should go back to Oxford, where he had lived before he walked out of everything he knew without a penny to his name. He had left behind his three kids and his failed marriage and hadn’t been back since or seen any of them again. He named his dog after his youngest daughter.

  ‘Why not do as they suggest?’ I asked him once.

  ‘What’s the point? One street looks very much like any other and they’re not going to find me anywhere in Oxford, are they?’

  He was right of course and, anyway, he had told me, he was brought up in Southampton: it felt like home and he liked being by the sea. So, he had come here, by foot, when things went pear-shaped in Oxford. And mental health provision for people like him? It’s called care in the community – AKA living on the streets.

  ‘Were you in trouble when you left?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘With the police, or anything like that.’ He knew what I was getting at.

  ‘No, nothing like that. And don’t worry, I’m not a nonce.’ Harry is clever and very switched on.

  Although, from time to time, Harry did disappear from his usual spot for a few days, there were other stretches when I saw him every day. It just seemed increasingly impossible not to stop and talk to him, so I got to know him quite well after a while. He was always polite and cheery except for once. I had asked him if he missed his kids; that was the only time I’d seen him cry.

  He’d wiped his eyes with the back of his filthy hand, sniffed a bit and then asked: ‘Tell me about your kids, Jon.’ So, I did.

/>   I told him all about them and all about myself. At times, it felt like five minutes of daily therapy for me – a kind of role reversal. I think hearing my tale of happy families allowed him a few minutes away from the shit that surrounded him. I even brought my two youngest kids in to meet him once. They were all over Jenny and then asked if they could give Harry the bit of money they had on them. Bless them: they’re good kids even if they did squabble a lot back then.

  Anyway, I ran on, feeling pleased with myself, plugging the earphones in and listening to loud trash music as I resumed my geriatric jog and sniffed my way down the street. True to his word, Harry had gone for a walkabout, after that day, which is why I didn’t see him for some time.

  ‘Morning, sir.’ That was Harvey, the handsome security guard who always held the door open for me as I arrived at the office in the morning.

  ‘Thanks, Harvey. How’s the best-looking man in town?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir. You’d best look in the mirror.’

  ‘I did once. It cracked.’

  ‘Actually, now you mention it, sir…’ He looked at me and grinned.

  ‘My talents lie in other departments, Harvey. So they all tell me.’

  ‘Really? And you believed them?’

  Yeah, well, Harvey won that one. Then I saw Arun and thought I would try again. Arun was another security guard. He taught me to swear in Welsh.

  ‘Testa di cazzo. Come on, you can say it, Arun.’ I taught him to swear in Italian. It means ‘dickhead.’

  ‘Cachau bant…sir.’ He smiled as only Arun can. It means ‘fuck off’, I think.

  ‘It’s the way you tell them, Arun. You’re the best.’ I realised that I still had trance music playing on my iPod. Arun could hear it, too, even though the plugs were still in my ears.

  ‘Makes you deaf, sir.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ I lied. ‘What does?’

  Arun pretended he was about to put his hand down the front of his trousers.

  ‘Save it for later, Arun. Anyway, it’s blind, not deaf.’

  ‘Not when I went to school, it wasn’t. But you know best, sir. Tidy,’ he said in an exaggerated Welsh accent. Come to think of it, I suppose I lost that one, too, didn’t I?

  Chapter Two

  ‘We need to look through the document you have kindly prepared.’

  The guy sitting opposite me was an estate agent or, rather, he owned a string of estate agencies. He was aged 51, wore a designer sports jacket, a designer shirt, designer shoes… everything about him was designer, even his haircut. He also wore designer trousers, no doubt of the type that he had been unable to keep on when he committed the many acts of adultery that his wife had cited in her first draft petition for divorce. I had negotiated the petition down with his wife’s solicitor to one based on a single act of adultery but was left wondering how his grossly overweight carcass had ever managed to perform any sexual act, let alone repeated acts of infidelity. I couldn’t imagine how any woman could have even found his necessary dangly bits under the layers of wobbling flab or found him attractive enough to do the business. It must have been like having sex under a steamroller, not that I have ever tried that.

  ‘Mr Hamley-Smith, can I just make sure? Have you checked through the document carefully, please?’

  ‘Of course.’ He shifted in his seat. I had already explained to him that it must contain a full and frank account of all his capital and income. He had to swear that it was true, as to which there were two hopes. Bob Hope and no hope.

  Mr Hamley-Smith, or Peregrine as I was asked to call him, was a liar. He had a really irritating habit of sweeping his straight, grey hair back with his hand while throwing his head backwards or pointing with the arm of his designer glasses when he was lying. I knew that, if it ever came to it, he was going to make a lousy witness. But he paid his bills on time and wanted me to pretend that, as decent chaps, we would pull together in his moment of adversity where his wife of fifteen years wanted to make a grasping assault, as he saw it, on his money. Now, when he left the room I really did struggle not to use antiseptic hand-wash.

  ‘So, you say that the house is worth £1.5 million?’ I asked. His wife was running an argument that she should stay in the family home, so he wanted to respond to that by plainly overvaluing it. I knew it was probably worth no more than about £1.3 million and had a mortgage of £300,000 on it. Peregrine wanted it sold and thought he could get a percentage of the sale proceeds by wheeling and dealing through the divorce case. I touched, once, on the possibility that she might stay there with their two horrid children – the result was spectacular. He shifted in his chair, swept his hair back, pointed at me with the arm of his glasses and lied so much that I found myself looking to see if smoke was pouring out of his underwear.

  I had felt compelled to go to the house once for a carnivorous dinner party after the commercial partners had wrapped up a deal for him, my note that I was vegetarian totally ignored. Everything in the house was bright, white, modern and tasteless. We were served canapés by their two spoilt brat daughters who wore fairy dresses and subjected the guests to their under-practised piano pieces during the only lull in the piped boogie-woogie music that played constantly through the ceiling speakers for the rest of the evening.

  ‘Shoot me. And do it quietly,’ I had muttered to my wife after one of the spotty girls, who had the inapposite name of a Greek goddess, had murdered a simplified version of ‘Air on a G String’.

  ‘They’ve renamed that piece,’ my wife giggled, out of control. ‘It’s called Air on a Dirty Pair of Knickers, now.’

  ‘Bet there are skid marks on the piano stool.’

  ‘Stool on stool, then.’ My wife then laughed so much that a spray of champagne came shooting out of her mouth and she had to pretend she was choking.

  ‘Now you really are taking the piss.’

  ‘Stop!’ she told me and went to the loo.

  Also at the dinner party had been Peregrine’s elderly mother who looked like a scrawny goat. To signal that we were amongst the least valued guests we were sitting next to her at dinner. Her only conversation had been to say that she preferred dogs to people – not the best way to get other people to warm to you – and didn’t like vegetables.

  ‘Why don’t you like vegetables?’ Susan, my wife, had asked. What do you say to someone as miserable as that? Met any trolls recently?

  ‘Because I don’t,’ she had bleated with her clipped Essex tongue and had then carried on chewing the steak and forking bits of it out of her mouth when she found her false teeth could not grind them down.

  When we had got back home that night we had sunk a bottle of Prosecco together and both groaned, ‘Never again.’ And we stuck to that.

  ‘Guess what the gossip is about what Peregrine uses as birth control?’ I said to Susan before the alcohol finally cast us both into booze-ridden sleep.

  ‘Give up.’

  ‘His personality.’

  ‘Can’t take any more,’ Susan said and fell asleep.

  Oh well, back to his bloody document of lies. There are lies, damn lies and then there are the utterances of Peregrine.

  ‘We’d better look at what you’ve said about the company,’ I said, realising that it meant that I was putting his underwear well beyond combustion point.

  Peregrine did a multiple lying manoeuvre. Skilful, definitely, but it left me thinking he would fall out of the chair before adopting his prep school manner of fibbing school bully.

  ‘I don’t see why it’s anything to do with her.’

  ‘Come on, Peregrine, you know the score. You’ve been married to her for fifteen years. You’ve got two kids.’

  ‘So what? She had nothing when I married her.’ Peregrine thought he had been a big catch. Big? Yes. Catch? I couldn’t see it.

  ‘Peregrine, once we have got all the documents sorted, we’ll get counsel’s advice. Ducks in a row first, though, that kind of thing. So, for now, we need to get this document right. I k
now it’s a pain.’ I flipped the work of fiction that he had prepared – it’s called a Form E, the ‘E’ in this case stood for evasion. He understood about ducks, though; he shot them.

  ‘Well, I’ve put my share of the company down at the value suggested by our accountant.’ Peregrine, his brother (Bertram) and his mother (Gladys) each had a one-third share in the company which owned the estate agencies. The value of Peregrine’s share had been worked out by their bent accountant looking at the net asset value of the company as shown in the balance sheet of accounts that were two years out of date and then applying a discount of 30% to Peregrine’s share because he only had a minority interest.

  ‘We may have a few problems with the figure you’ve given,’ I tried.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the assets of the company include the freehold of all the business premises. When were they last valued for the accounts?’ I could see from the historical accounts that they had not been revalued for years.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘I’m on your side. But we do need to get this right.’

  ‘OK, Jon…’

  ‘Jonathan.’ I was not getting friendly with him again. He was a client. I wasn’t going within a million miles of another dinner party like the last one. Susan would have refused to go anyway. Point-blank.

  ‘Jonathan. But I would like you to use the figure I’ve given, please. I’m not giving her anything on a plate.’ He tried to put on an ‘I’m the boss’ tone that just made him sound like a complete arse.

  ‘That’s your choice, I accept. But I will write to you to record that we may have problems with this later.’

  ‘Just so long as you don’t charge me for the letter.’

  Chapter Three

  So that was the sort of work I did. Divorces for the big and the brave, or rather the people who could put more than six figures to their wealth. Millionaires, like Peregrine. Some nice. Some not. When I started in this job I used to enjoy fighting for the underdog, but then beggars can’t be choosers, as Harry understands. Your clients pay the bills, so you don’t piss them off.