by Tim Roux
I took Fran for a walk down the street.
“Crime,” I replied.
“What sort of crime?”
“The sort where no-one gets hurt. An insurance scam.”
“It certainly pays well.”
“It does.”
“Congratulations. You have graduated to being a real crook. I never knew you had it in you.”
“Harry didn’t until I turned up.”
“I suppose you want us to get back together again.”
Why not? I wasn’t enjoying Mike’s company that much, and Kathy hadn’t given up her night job, which surprised me as I would have thought that she would have had enough of sucking greasy pubic cock and having some fat, smelly, sweaty lecher pounding her up and down, smearing himself all over her. Perhaps she thought that her good fortune couldn’t last. Perhaps she had become institutionalised.
“All right then,” I replied.
“And not Kathy. I am not having Kathy here!”
“All right,” I conceded.
“And you don’t touch her ever again.”
“You are making up a lot of rules for someone who badly wants me back,” I said.
“You flatter yourself.”
“Yeah, but I can still read minds. Anyway, for the record, I won’t touch Kathy ever again.” How would she ever know whether I did or didn’t?
“Get your stuff, then. Tommy has missed you. What you do for your kids.”
“Not to mention money,” I told myself.
* * *
The first thing I did when I moved back into 34 Pease Street was to take Tommy back to Toys-R-Us, after school, to buy more or less as many toys as he wanted. This time he knew that money was growing on trees, so he browsed the shelves until nearly closing time, and ended up buying over £100 worth of stuff, much of it Lego Star Wars and Star Wars Transformers. I then treated him to a McDonalds and insisted on taking him back to the Market Place, which made him extremely nervous. I, for my part, strutted around the square, savouring the enforced absence of Planty and his gang.
“Aren’t you frightened of those men coming back again, Dad?” Tommy asked, looking agitatedly over his shoulders.
“No, Tommy, they’ve gone. They won’t be troubling us until you are a man and they are old men. You will be able to beat them up without any effort by then.”
“What has happened to them, Dad?”
“They have got themselves arrested.”
“Why?”
“For beating you up.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Well, it was true, if they hadn’t hurt Tommy, I would never have gone through with stitching them up.
I dragged Tommy all over town to make the point – Whitefriargate, Princes Quay, Ferensway, George Street, the old High Street, even Spring Bank and the Avenues (Mike had given me a guided tour of Hull a couple of weeks back). We walked everywhere unmolested, and I was Tommy’s hero, as I wished to become.
Two days later, I decided to go down to Wokingham and talk to Chrissie. Fran was furious. “What’s that in aid of?” she demanded.
“I want to see my wife.”
“I am your wife.”
“Yes, but Chrissie is my real wife.”
“So you are simply going to walk out on Tommy and me.”
“Of course not.”
“It looks like it from where I am standing.”
“Perhaps you should open your eyes too. I want to see Chrissie because we are soul mates, which you and I will never be …..”
“Charming!”
“Oh, come on, Fran. We are not exactly lovers, are we?”
“If you stopped putting it about elsewhere, we might be.”
“I don’t think you have had a proper relationship with Harry for at least ten years.”
“It doesn’t mean we can’t have one now.”
“Fine, but I still want to see Chrissie.”
“So you can walk out on us.”
“I am not walking out on anyone, Fran. I adore Tommy. Strangely enough, I even quite like you. I am committed to giving you a better life than you have had, or even than you could dream of. I will keep my promise. But, on the other hand, I do have another wife and two small children whom I equally adore, and whom I have not the least intention of abandoning either. So, I have to get down South to see what can be arranged. That does not constitute walking out on you.”
“Are you taking Kathy with you?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“No, I am not taking Kathy. She has work to do here.”
“And she is flat out doing it, no doubt.”
Anyway, despite Fran’s protests, her shouting and her tears, I went to pick up the van in Brough, to drive down to Wokingham. Mike and I had already decided that we needed to get the van moved before someone started asking questions. Brough is not a haven of anonymity. Everyone is after everyone else’s business. Just as I fired the van up, a guy came up to the passenger’s window and threw at me “So, it’s your van is it?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you park it somewhere else?”
“I’m going to.”
“And a good job too. I nearly phoned the police.”
What for, exactly, parking in a road in a space that belongs to anyone, first come first served? Who the bloody hell did this guy think he was, Boris Johnson?
Halfway down the M1, I realised that I should really be heading for London. I couldn’t exactly turn up at her home at eleven at night, and I wasn’t going to wait until the weekend. So, I had to stop and pay the congestion charge, not to mention £50 in parking fees but, as I have already mentioned, money was growing on trees at that point.
I turned up in reception and asked for Chrissie. I had been to her office several times before, but not disguised as Harry, of course. It was quite an eye-opener to observe how Harry was treated compared with Keith, the dashing husband of a partner. “Mr. Walker, Mrs. McGuire will be with you in a few minutes. Please help yourself to coffee from the machine and to any magazines you can find.” In the past, I had been treated as an admired long lost adventurer returned from a hazardous tour of the Amazon. Now I was merely a stranger.
Chrissie actually came to collect me at remarkable speed, much faster than she had joined me in reception when I was Keith, the patient husband who could wait while she finished whatever she was doing.
“Mr. Walker, how nice to see you,” Chrissie greeted me with practised courtesy. “Have we ever met before? You look very familiar.” She hadn’t lost her playfulness. “Follow me.” She led me down the back stairs to a conference room on the seventeenth floor. “Do sit down. Coffee?”
“Yes, please, Chrissie,” I responded, making her jump.
“Coming right up.” Linda entered the meeting room and took the order.
“Did you have a good trip South, Mr. Walker?” Chrissie enquired, closing the door.
“Delightful,” I replied, a manner of speech which clashed with my Hull accent.
“What do you think of these offices?”
“What I always thought of them, I suspect, although I have never visited this fishbowl before.” I waved at the glass walls and door of the meeting room we were in. Beyond them, people regularly bobbed up from their cubicles and scuttled or strolled (depending no doubt on their status) across the floor. Most of them glanced surreptitiously at the occupants of the meeting room to add to their office narrative of the events of the day. “Chrissie is with a client, I assume, although he looks a bit of a tramp. Is he an eccentric millionaire, or is Chrissie doing a bit of pro bono work for a down-at-heal relative or a friend of a friend? I shouldn’t think that anyone in her own circle of choice would come here looking like that.”
“So you have visited these offices before, Mr. Walker?”
“Yes, Chrissie, I must have been here seven or eight times, although more often I have met you in Starbucks round the corner. I came here once to bring you y
our mobile phone which you had left at home. I have attended a couple of office parties; three actually. I brought Ella and Mark here once on a family open day, and they set off the fire alarm …..” I laughed, but Chrissie did not join me. My recollections were troubling her too much. “I also picked you up when you were feeling ill with what turned out to be appendicitis, which then turned into peritonitis. And I have signed a couple of documents as a witness as I happened to be passing, I cannot remember quite why.”
“Where is my office from here?”
“Up a floor, on the eighteenth. Out of the lift, turn right, through the double doors, on the left hand side about seventh or eighth office, about twenty-five square metres, desk across the far corner, four pictures of me and the children, the three of us together in Albufeira and three portrait photos taken about three years ago when Ella was nine and Mark was five. You usually have a large pinky-purple orchid right inside the door, and a coffee table with three chairs to the left. The coffee table is steel with a round clear glass top, and the chairs are low slung steel-tubed with white leather seats. You have prints of two Picassos on your walls – ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” on the wall behind the desk, and “Entreinte” (one of my favourites of his) on the wall next to the coffee table behind the door. Have I passed yet?”
Chrissie held her head in her hands. Mike Roberts, passing on the other side of the glass petition stopped to assess the situation, not sure whether to interrupt or not. He knocked on the door. “Sorry to disturb you,” he excused himself to me. “Are you all right, Chrissie?”
Chrissie emerged from her temporary asylum. “Yes, I am fine thanks, Mike. Something that Mr. Walker here told me upset me. Mr. Walker, this is Mr. Roberts.”
“Hello, Mike,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”
Mike reacted with mild embarrassment. “I am sure that I have seen you somewhere before, Mr. Walker, but I cannot quite recall where it was. I do apologise for not recognising you immediately.”
“No problems,” I replied in my thick Hull accent. “I have changed considerably since last time we met. That is what I was telling Chrissie all about, which upset her, I am afraid.”
“I am so sorry,” Mike said. He must have been racking his brains as to what this greasy-looking, thinning, dishevelled geezer from the North might have been before he was transformed into his present incarnation. My guess was that his guess was probably that I was a successful northern industrialist come down in the world. Perhaps my wife had died. Possibly my business had folded. Maybe I had been chronically ill. “Anyway,” he added, “so long as all is well ….” He stared solicitously at Chrissie to reassure himself that he was free to take his leave with a clear conscience.
Chrissie smiled bravely. “I am fine, Mike. Thank you.”
When he had closed the door, she added “We have to go and talk somewhere else. I don’t mind appearing distressed in the office, but it will get gossiped up into a crisis out there, and I cannot cope with that right now. Where do you think we should go?”
“How about Starbucks round the corner? It has served us well in the past.”
“Come on, then.” She touched my arm as she passed me.
We presented ourselves back to reception on the eighteenth floor where George Adair and Sally Brockhurst were conferring with some seriousness about us, I would guess. They interrupted their discussion as we emerged from the lift.
“If you don’t mind waiting for me here a minute, Mr. Walker, I just need to collect a couple of things from my office.”
I smiled at Sally and George who returned bemused acknowledgement.
“That was a short meeting, Mr. Walker,” commented the receptionist.
“Well, I’m a fast worker,” I replied, flashing her one of my disconcerting gleams. “We are now off to inspect the scene of the crime, Mrs. McGuire and me. Mrs. McGuire is a stickler for the gruesome details.”
The receptionist didn’t know how to respond to this obscurely bizarre commentary on our joint itinerary, and nor did Sally and George who decided that they needed to continue with their separate work schedules, colliding with a hurrying Chrissie as she barged through the double doors.
“Sorry,” she apologised to both of them, adding to the receptionist in professional confidentiality “Mr. Walker and I are stepping out for a while to discuss his case. I expect to be back within two or three hours. Joyce knows where I am if anybody needs me, and I’ll leave my mobile on.”
“Thanks, Chrissie. We’ll see you later, then.” The receptionist’s concerned frown followed us into the lift until the doors shut.
Trapped in close proximity, Chrissie and I simply did not know how to behave towards each other. I desperately wanted to hug her and to kiss her on the forehead (kissing her on her lips would have been too intrusive at this stage in our newly-fashioned relationship), and I think that she may have wanted to hug me too, although she was undoubtedly doused by my physical appearance. Instead we hovered around each other for the short time it took to arrive directly at the ground floor. We went through the automatic plate glass doors and into the street. I immediately turned to the right towards Starbucks, a move which seemed to wrong-foot Chrissie. “We are going to Starbucks, aren’t we?” I checked.
“I was thinking,” Chrissie replied, “how about Ha!Ha!s in Victoria?”
“I don’t think I have ever been there. Why not? Presumably you are looking for somewhere public but discreet, are you, Chrissie?”
She stood there with her arms wide, pleading to the world. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to call you. I don’t know how to relate to you.”
“Call me ‘Harry’ for the moment. It will be easier for you, and pretend that I am Gerald or someone, more than an acquaintance, less than a friend.” She nodded gratefully while I hailed a taxi.
Arriving at Ha!Ha!s, we both ordered coffee and sat down in the corner.
“So what has been happening?” she asked. Now there was a tough question.
“I have basically been biding my time and saving up enough money to come to find you.”
“Fran seemed nice,” she said, “and that child of hers seems extremely studious. Never stops drawing. Have you been helping him?”
“Not a lot. I haven’t been there much recently. Fran and I had a disagreement, and I went to stay with a guy called Mike.”
“Yes, I gathered that, but Fran did not say what the disagreement was about.”
I was going to say “bedtime arrangements” but I stopped myself abruptly, realising that would raise the lid on a conversation that I definitely did not want to pursue at that moment, and in all probability never would. “I simply couldn’t fit in,” I explained instead. “We are strangers to each other. She expects me to be her husband, and yet she is not my wife. What would you do?”
“What did you do?” Chrissie replied as I realised that I had unconsciously steered the topic towards the one I explicitly had wanted to avoid.
“I wandered around like a spare prick.”
“And at night?”
“Fran slept with Kathy, when she was there. Kathy mostly works nights,” I added.
“Who is Kathy and what does she do?”
“She is Harry’s sister, and she is a prostitute.”
Chrissie scrunched her face. “Charming,” she observed. “Quite a household.”
“It is that.”
“So you got out before she made any demands on you.”
“Yes, that’s about it. At least Mike is a man. We didn’t need to even talk together much.”
“And what does he do?”
“He is unemployed.”
“Does anybody up there have a normal job?”
“Nobody that I have met so far. Harry’s ex might have done.”
“What was she like?”
“Very angry, especially with Harry.”
“Ow.” She laughed. She placed her left hand on my right knee. “I tell you, Keith, it certainly has its funny
side when you think about it. How did you cope with it all? What must you have been thinking?”
Now that Chrissie’s and my relationship had settled back down to calm normality, it was time to come clean about just how awful the experience had been “I was absolutely terrified,” I started. “I could not get any grip on what was happening to me. I must have been groggy coming out of the trance anyway, but I was then confronted with this hideous woman I had never seen before treating me with the detached contempt professionals have for people who are not paying their own bills and who are forced to attend sessions with them. She clearly thought that I was a right crook and that every word I uttered was designed to either trick her or to stab her. Then there was this absurd body you see before you. Not exactly me, is it?”
“No.”
“And it felt really uncomfortable sitting inside it, as if my diaphragm was squashed up. I had severe indigestion, and was feeling sick, and I had to get to the toilet or throw up all over her or across her floor, which was extremely tempting, but we have brought ourselves up too well for that. And then, when I saw my reflection in the mirror, I started crying. Who was this fucking guy? He was absolutely revolting. Everything about him was revolting, his face, his body, his muscly hairy arms, his hairy bum, his penis, oh God, you should see his penis.”
“I think I can wait.”
“Well I am not bringing it out here. I am too ashamed of it for starters. And when I went back into her room, this hypnotherapist woman totally ignored the fact that I must have looked pretty distraught, and she simply carried on laying into me while I tried to get some basic facts together in order at least to be able to get away from her and to rally my emotional resources to see how I could get back to you.”
“And I didn’t believe you either.”
“I think you did. Even the first time, I think you did. You were just scared, as anybody would have been. There was Keith by your side, there was this stranger with a northern accent barking down the phone, pretending to be Keith. Of course you hesitated. If Keith had been behaving differently, you might have reacted differently.”
“He is behaving a bit differently, Keith. It’s as if he is not all there. He is absent-minded and he seems to have far less energy than he used to have up to a couple of months ago. The children have noticed too, and it is beginning to upset them. He doesn’t really want to interact with them any more. He is distracted and confused, and his work is no longer going well. He has lost his flair. Adam phoned me up the other day to inquire whether everything was all right at home, whether we were having family or marital problems, you know the sort of call. He said that Keith seemed to be having increasing difficulty getting his shit together, kept missing meetings, kept being discovered staring out of the window. Of course, that is what I was almost waiting for after you had contacted me, that there was some significant change in Keith, and there is. Somehow we have to get you two back together again.”
