‘Can I play you something?’
He blinks.
‘Like, of your own?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Course! Anytime, babes, anytime.’
‘I’ve got it here.’
‘Oh-kay … Right. Right! Let’s have it on.’
They go back through the soundproof doors, Ricky wearing a faint puzzled frown, and she fishes the reel of ‘Nobody’s Fault’ out of her bag.
‘Something of Jo’s we’re just going to run through,’ announces Ricky to Ed, Rubén, Opiate Dyke, Johnson, the other draggled survivors of the night. ‘Didn’t I always say, look out when Jo gets an album together? Didn’t I always say, she’s gonna do something great?’
They nod, but it’s polite, uncomprehending. None of these are the people they toured with in ’72 and ’73, who saw them in their glory days. Ricky has fallen out with all of those – with everybody, in fact, who knew the non-famous version of him. Except, possibly, her. This lot pick up a few old-girlfriend molecules in the air, and that’s it.
‘Rick?’ says Ed, yawning, before she can get the tape anywhere near the reel-to-reel. ‘Could we maybe do that later? We’ve really got to put this track to bed now?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Ricky, clicking his tongue. ‘I suppose you’re right. Sorry, J. Duty calls. But – next time, yeah?’
Dawn finds her at the store halfway up the canyon. It’s just opened. Normally she pulls the Beetle over and nips inside only for long enough to pick up some milk, and some fruit from the trays in the shade out front: furred peaches, plums with the purple-white bloom still on them, watermelons striped like circus tents. But today for some reason she buys a cup of fresh coffee from the percolator and takes it outside to sit with it under the vine. All the time she’s lived here there’s been a mural on the front wall, a Joan Baez-like hippy-chick face, crowned with stars, growing paler and paler as the LA sun wears away the colours. Now the owners have had it repainted. Their glory days are what they plan to trade on forever. Joan’s eyes are piercing turquoise again, Joan’s hair is a smooth gloss-black waterfall. And above, the sky brightens to the implacable blue of yet another day without rain.
She misses rain.
Vern
Rain is general all over London, falling in a steady dismal downpour on the bridges, on the monuments, on the parks, on the rusting cranes in the docks, on the twenty thousand sullen streets; on the sodden green of Bexford Park and the grey towers of the Park Estate; on last night’s vomit, swilling away across the pavements to join the mush of fish-and-chip paper in the gutter; falling too, further out, on the golf courses of Swanley and the avenue named after a flower where Vern is being thrown out of the large detached house he bought before his second bankruptcy.
‘Don’t forget anything,’ says Kath, watching as he wrestles a cardboard box and a suitcase down the stairs. ‘I’m not sending it after you.’
‘Fuck it,’ says Vern, ‘this is an overnight bag and stuff for this week. Half of everything here is mine.’
‘It bloody isn’t, and watch your mouth in front of the girls, thank you very much.’
Sally and Becky, aged four and six, are hiding behind their mother’s legs.
‘Daddy will be back soon,’ says Vern to them, trying for a voice of reassurance: but he hasn’t ever had much to do with them, and they shrink away. Two stocky little girls and one stocky little woman, like peas in a pod. A female family, sufficient without him.
‘No, he won’t,’ says Kath. ‘Daddy is slinging his hook. Daddy! When were you ever that? We wouldn’t have a bloody roof over our heads if it wasn’t for me. You screwed up, I sorted it. So none of this is yours, not any more.’
It’s true that it was Kath, as the accountant for Albemarle Developments, who talked him into putting the house in her name, ‘just in case’, and it’s true that that’s what stopped the house getting treated as an asset, and washed away by the debts when Albemarle went tits-up. But he can remember other things being true. There’s no point in arguing, not now, but he can’t help himself.
‘You were just as much in favour of the shopping centre as me,’ he says.
‘Well, I didn’t think you’d make such a pig’s ear of it, did I.’
‘It was the bloody interest rates that did us in, you know that!’
‘We’d have coped with them if the income had kept up. But it didn’t, and whose fault was that? You picked the location. You picked the tenants. You skimped on the insurance. You!’
Vern, pinned by banisters, box, suitcase, feels a familiar wrath congesting him. Kath’s sharp little finger is up, poking at the air in front of her, and her face is stony with dislike. But there’s something else in it, a kind of satisfaction, a pleasure in being on the winning end, even in an argument about the wreck of their business; and looking at her, he wonders all of a sudden if her getting together with him in the first place ever had much more in it than this same determination to win. Kath in the back office of the estate agent’s where he met her, grinning at him. Kath in a wedding dress, triumphing over her sisters. Kath in bed, briskly riding on his bulk, impatient eyes fixed on him. Kath in the maternity hospital, presenting a bundled-up Becky like an on-time payment. Kath’s early, decisive pessimism as Albemarle ran into trouble, when he was still telling himself stories of how it could come right. Kath’s detachment, Kath’s self-protection, Kath’s stone face. She’s a bookie’s daughter. He should have realised she’d be good at telling when the odds change. Fuck it.
‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘I’m off.’
‘You need to give me the office key. Where is it?’
‘Dunno,’ he lies. And he uses a little bit of the rage that is thickening his neck, lets out just enough of it to bull his way past, pluck up a random umbrella, hook the front door open, and stomp off down the path in the wet.
Even the short walk to the Mini is enough to plaster his hair, and damp the corners of the cardboard box, in the cold pelt from above. It’s a world of liquid noises outside: pattering from the eaves, guggles from the red-brick path he never got round to weeding, a tireless pissing from the downpipe by the garage. A sheen of water is moving on the driveway. By the time he’s wrestled the case and the box into the narrow back seat and wedged himself behind the wheel, his face is so sopping he has to blot his eyebrows with his tie so he can see straight. The Mini feels tiny. It seemed cute once, a neat trademark for Albemarle that a big man in a blue suit should emerge from a little blue car. Albemarle: Big Things in Small Boxes! That’s what he had in mind to use as a slogan for the company’s next stage, when they built the second, third, fourth shopping centre. None of that is going to happen now. Now, the car seems like a tin skin wrapped too tight around his swollen, damp fury. Bastard thing. Bastard life. Bastard wife. Vern rocks and roars, and having nothing else to do with his fat fists in the small space, pounds on the steering wheel. Of course the horn sticks, sending a thin continuous parp of distress winding through suburban Swanley. Some bastard neighbour would poke their nose over the hedge to see what’s going on, if it wasn’t for the rain. He has to jiggle the steering column to make the button pop back up. Then he puts the Mini in gear and goes.
Traffic hissing on the roads north; the wheels of buses and lorries sloshing out arcs of spray; tail-lights squiggling and goggling through the rain. The wipers on the Mini can’t keep up with the rivulets running down the windscreen. He hunches forward and peers. But everything is going equally slow, and rain can’t stop him knowing the way to Bexford. He could probably drive it blindfold. It’s the A20 all the way: the Swanley bypass, and then the Sidcup bypass, and then the Eltham bypass, gentle curve after gentle curve of tarmacked no-place, with the green signs for the exits coming up in the gloom like unconvincing promises.
Somewhere around Sidcup he fumbles in the glove compartment and finds the cassette of Joan Sutherland singing Lucia di Lammermoor. He saw her do it once, nearly ten years ago, at the point when he’d picked himself up f
rom the smash of Grosvenor and was just working out how to put Albemarle together. He hadn’t met Kath yet; that was coming when he started looking for agencies with small supermarkets in their client lists. And here’s the whole glorious flight of that voice, bottled, time-proofed, except that the cassette is starting to glitch and fade, except that it makes tiny what once was gigantic. Still it’s better than nothing. He left the tape at the end of the mad scene the last time he put it on, so he only has to squibble back through eighteen minutes and there she is again, bloodstained, astonishing, throbbingly distraught. Tenors, Vern has been known to sing along to while he drives and no one can hear the heartfelt mess he makes. But the sopranos, he can’t even aspire to. He just listens, and lets Dame Joan do the heart-work for him.
Past Eltham, and the traffic lights begin, puddled red-amber-green on the glass before him. Red-brick walls and closer trees channel the grey light descending from the sopping air, and darken it. As he stops, goes, stirs through sheets of water where the drains have overflowed, the familiar matrix of the city closes around him. The 1930s semis with their triangular raised eyebrows; the Edwardian schools and the brutalist ones; the corner shops now selling lentils and fenugreek; the railway arches filled with little garages; everywhere the plane trees, the sycamores, the horse chestnuts, so wet now they stand like pulpy chandeliers, dribbling and drooling, filtering the light away so the pavements are dim beneath. He’s back under the eaves of his London. It occurs to him that this may be the last time he ever makes this particular commute, and mad Lucia sings –
Un’armonia celeste, di’, non ascolti?
Ah, l’inno suona di nozze!
Il rito per noi s’appresta! Oh, me felice!
Oh gioia che si sente, e non si dice!
Well, Vern, do you hear a heavenly harmony? His face is wet again, although the car is keeping the rain out. But the answer, to be honest, is no. If he thinks about it – and now he is thinking about it – he has never felt anything like what Joan Sutherland reports that Lucia is feeling. He wants to feel it, he lingers hopefully in its vicinity, at least when he’s listening to opera. But to die for love, to run mad for love: those are not states that have ever come near him. Not in daylight. Not to his waking self. The strongest emotions he knows are the angry ones, the ones in the keys of frustration, or rage. Those have come closest to carrying him away, to overthrowing his usual calculating caution. He had hoped, deep down in some well-concealed compartment, some safe-deposit box of his heart, that being married to Kath might wake up some of what the tenors and the sopranos sing about. But it didn’t. Perhaps the big emotions of the operas don’t really exist, perhaps they are a game of let’s pretend that everyone is agreeing to play. Perhaps they are news from a far country that likewise doesn’t exist. He doesn’t know.
He also doesn’t know, on a practical level, what he is going to do. He has no house, he has no money. Well: not quite true, in either case. There’s a small emergency fund waiting for him in the Albemarle office. That’s why he has to go in one more time. And the account it’s in, carefully off the books, is being fed by the rents from the one property he kept mum about when they were organising Albemarle, and didn’t fold into the company’s portfolio. It’s one of the big old houses on Bexford Rise, a horrible thing, gloomy and ancient, with woodwormed windows and plugs that produce blue flashes and burning smells. But the immigrants and students he’s stuffed into it don’t expect any better, and they also don’t know he’s anything but the rent collector. Something, some habit of caution, made him set these things quietly aside, out of Kath’s reach. So now he won’t be starting again absolutely from scratch. He isn’t quite broke; he still has a toehold in property. If he has to, he can even chuck out a student or three and move in himself, though a bed and breakfast appeals more. And all this is better than the aftermath of Grosvenor, when he really did have nothing left, and had to go back to his mum’s for six months.
But what he hasn’t got is a plan. Grosvenor was supposed to be an empire built on shop rents, and it went wrong when the supermarkets wiped out his butchers and greengrocers. Albemarle was his reaction. It was his way of getting into the bigger commercial spaces the chains were demanding. He went as big as he could, but it wasn’t big enough. The only tenants he could get for the Albemarle Minimart were the marginal players, a fly-by-night cash and carry, a franchised dry-cleaner, a non-chain burger restaurant. Now the likes of Sainsbury’s and Safeway are all looking for huge greenfield properties. He couldn’t play in that league when things were looking promising for Albemarle and he certainly can’t now. He’s got to the end of what he can think of to do with commercial property, and it’s a bust. What the hell is left that’s in his reach, except for bloody residential? Oh, he’s done some, you can’t avoid it, you pick up sitting tenants like fleas just as a side effect of doing small commercial: but it’s so dismal, it’s such a dispiriting, damp, low-margin business, in a sector squeezed between council housing and owner-occupiers. You have to play the heavy just to keep a trickle of cash flowing. Water-stained ceilings, missing stair rods, endless complaints: he wants glass towers, not that shit.
It’s maddening. This should be his time. He listens to the news and he thinks: finally, there’s a government that’s on my side. The world should be his oyster, the world should be falling into his lap, the world should be finally giving him what he’s been reaching for all his adult life. And instead he is parking a Mini in spitting rain in an alley half-blocked by a skip, and fumbling with a lock while balancing the net results of his marriage in a soggy cardboard box. Spargi d’amaro pianto il mio terrestre velo: shed bitter tears on your earthly garment, Vern.
The office is dim from the darkness of the day. It has the stale smell of an unused space, and there are mouse droppings on the floor. A watery glow creeps in from the storefront window facing the court of the Minimart, where unlit plate glass declares the death of burger bar, dry-cleaner, cash and carry. The rain outside makes an indistinct drumming, a fuzz of wet noise. He could turn on the light and get some blue-white illumination on the spider plants, the ominous buff envelopes on the mat, the files stacked on the desk. But there’s a kind of comfort in the room being like a cave, a dim hidey-hole. Also a small chance that one of Albemarle’s local creditors might see lights on. He sets the box down and climbs on a chair. Four polystyrene ceiling tiles along from the left wall, three out into the middle of the room. No reason why Kath should ever have done this, and besides, she’s too short to reach, the little bitch. He presses up, and the tile lifts with a squeaky whisper. Sellotaped to the other side of it, undisturbed, are indeed the emergency bank book and a slender packet of brown tenners and purple twenties. Vern feels better just for having them in his jacket pocket.
With the tile out there’s a big obvious gap overhead, and he feels an urge to leave it like that, so that when Kath next comes in here the square of black announces: you missed something, you cow. Better not, though. He has learned not to underestimate her capacity to make trouble. If she deduces there’s an extra asset she will come after it. But it’s difficult. He stands on the plastic chair with the polystyrene in his hands, and it’s so brittle, so granular, so friable. His hands can feel what it would be like to crack it in half, and in half again, raining down white crumbs on the unswept floor. And then to go on. To lumber down from the chair and go on breaking things. Trash the place. Turn round and round like an angry bear in this old den of his, sweeping the files onto the floor, overturning the desk, smashing the glass of the cabinet, throwing the typewriter at the wall. Trampling on the paper underfoot. Pissing on it. Making chaos. Shredding and clawing and flailing. The bitch, the bitch, the bitch.
At the thought of it, his breath comes fast and his hands tingle where he’s gripping the polystyrene. Better not. It feels as if he might fly apart too, if he gives in to the smashing urge – be discovered by Kath in sections, when she comes in, scattered round the office with the rest of the wreckage. He lifts the ti
le and with trembly delicacy taps it back into place. Tuff. Tuff. Squeak. Then he gets down, one tree-trunk leg and then the other one. And stands, breathing, with his hands over the face.
Cup of tea, that’s what he needs. There’s a kettle in here somewhere. Yes, over there, dusty in the corner, along with most of a packet of Ginger Nuts. He fills it and puts it on to boil, and while he waits, sits at the desk and eats the biscuits one after another till there’s sweet grit packing his teeth and he feels better. He watches the rain on the court-side window run down, branching, slow-slow-quick, briefly mercurial when the grey light catches on the rivulets. The puddles on the concrete outside pock and stipple. The rain has slowed to a finer needle-shower, but the soft blatter of it still carries, mixing with the soothing whirr of the kettle.
Of course, there isn’t any milk, and when it comes to it Vern doesn’t fancy the thought of a milkless mugful, acrid black. But by then he doesn’t care, because he’s had an idea. Not a big idea, mind you, not the kind you build your next business on. But enough of an idea to get him back in the game, maybe – to force the (he checks) two-thousand-odd quid in the emergency account into rapid multiplication and, possibly just as important, to let the voice in his head that tells his life like a story say, Yeah, Vern bounced right back. There’s a bloke he knows called Malcolm Deakin who is planning to go all in on council housing when Right to Buy kicks in next year. Funding for tenants who can’t get mortgages, then the lion’s share of the sale price when the time comes to sell. Deakin’s got his investors lined up and everything. The thing is, Vern has looked into this a little bit, from curiosity, and even though the scheme hasn’t started yet, and there hasn’t been much publicity, the discounts for tenants buying are already available. If someone were to go out on the doorsteps as a kind of unofficial field agent, and sign a few people up now, in advance, he can’t see why Deakin wouldn’t buy them on. He’d save himself the hassle, and he’d be looking at a guaranteed profit. What Vern needs to do is use his two thousand quid to make deals eventually worth seven or eight thou, and then sell them on to Deakin for an instant three or four. Boom. And rinse, and repeat. It’ll have to be flats or maisonettes, not houses, with only two thou to start. But that’s doable.
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