Escape and Evasion

by Christopher Wakling

  Next step: have this clown chap stake the place out.

  What a tool he’s been!

  Joseph is sure, now, that the clown followed him into the cafe. He has metal tips on his heels, look. Tap, tap, tap: Joseph heard something like that on the pavement behind him. And the clown isn’t about to leave now, either: he’s queuing for another coffee, waiting there patiently while the elf sorts his order, as if to say: don’t mind me mate, I’ve got all day.

  Joseph pulls the traitorous phone from his jacket pocket and places it on the seat beside him. Takes a deep breath. Quick, now, while the clown is waiting for his refill. Go!

  Joseph slips out from behind his table and into the street. Six or seven shopfronts blur past, and another – selling soap, or possibly candles, given the smell – outside which he pauses – he can’t help it – to look back.

  Blatant as a sheepdog! Hustling after him with his takeout cup as if to say: here I am, on your trail.

  Trail? Tail?

  Never mind: run!

  14

  A delivery truck is pulling to the kerb, its air brakes blowing like a whale, and before it rocks to a dead halt, Joseph steps across its path towards a double-decker facing the other way. He jogs around the square back end of the bus and jumps aboard. It’s just about full. The only empty seat is up near the front, next to a young girl in a knitted hat. Joseph shrinks low beside her. She’s playing a game on her screen, swiping at it as though conducting some sort of orchestra for ants, but the earplugs up under that hat can’t be playing the soundtrack to the game because she’s speaking to somebody as she plays.

  ‘I know it’s just a toaster,’ she says.

  Joseph thinks: I don’t have a ticket. Oyster. Need to swipe before …

  ‘But it’s yours!’ she goes on.

  Never mind that, did the clown see him board the bus?

  ‘He’s a bastard!’

  The bus pulls off.

  Too slowly: it’s barely making headway in the traffic.

  Joseph leans forward in his seat to check out the shoppers on the pavement.

  He half stands, leans to look over the knitted head. The bus is moving faster now, but that could still be him in the distance quickstepping through the crowd?

  He has a hand on the seat back in front of the girl and he’s craning to see better but he can’t quite make—

  ‘For fuck’s sake! Get away from me!’ The girl’s knitted head bobs from side to side indignantly. ‘Piss off, you pervert!’

  She’s talking to him. Shouting. Instantly he’s up out of his seat, hands raised, backing down the aisle, all the way to the rear step with its yellow pole, people turning to look at him as he goes, damn them all, and he’s swinging out low onto the pavement before the bus has even come to its next stop. Because he won’t be expecting that, will he, ‘that’ being jumping off just after the bus has rounded the first corner!

  Joseph darts into a shop. There’s an escalator to his right. He takes the moving stairs two at a time and arrives in menswear. All the clothes are hanging on mannequins with tiny heads. Why so small? No idea. And why are they all leaning backwards? In reality they’d fall over, unless they had something to lean on, like the girl on the bus, who had a window to press her knitted hat against, recoiling, from him, Joseph Ashcroft!

  Possibly it was the bandage that did it.

  The bandage.

  Joseph ducks down between two rows of duffel coats, as if to retie a shoelace, and swiftly unwraps his face. There. He hadn’t realised how much the bandage affected his hearing: now he can enjoy the offensively mild rap music bleeding through the shop’s sound system. The bundle of crepe is warm in his hands. He rams it beneath the flap of his satchel. What next? Well, this shelf here is full of baseball caps. One size fits all. Joseph picks a hat at random and looks for a ‘Pay Here’ sign. Glances over the racks of duffel coats as he goes. There’s no sign of anybody watching. The assistant has asymmetric hair, wears a chequered shirt rolled to his tattooed elbows, and handles the hat like it’s some sort of holy relic. Would Joseph like him to put it in a bag?

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joseph puts the hat on his head. Is the assistant smirking? It doesn’t matter. Joseph thanks him and sets off for the escalator, still scanning the shop, but more confidently now. The girl on the bus was helpful in a way. By forcing him to jump straight off again, she helped him give the clown the slap.

  Slip.

  Whatever: he can’t go back to the hotel again, which is a shame, because all that new stuff he bought is still there. Clothes, clippers, whatnot. Well, they can have it. He’ll buy more. So why’s he worried? It takes a second before he realises: the kids’ photographs. He checks his satchel, sees the envelope containing his cash, the unopened letter from St Thomas’ Hospital (ignore it!), his passport, but no photographs, because … they’re still slotted under his pillow.

  Is he a complete idiot?

  It seems, sadly, so.

  15

  There’s no use wallowing in it. He pulls the cap down as he exits the shop, turns north and heads in the direction of Hampstead, but does not stop there, no, because an urge to put distance between himself and his stupidity pushes him on up towards Highgate, Archway and Crouch End beyond. His hoodie is heavy with sweat by the time he stops jog-walking. It’s a long time since he’s run off a treadmill: the pavement feels hard underfoot, and his bag strap has cut into his shoulder with all the bouncing. Still, he’s safe, nobody followed him, and there’s a park bench here to rest on. He sits down, takes off the cap, runs his hand over the damp sharpness of his shorn head, breathes deeply and watches a couple of pigeons bobbing about together next to the bin. One of them has a sort of club foot. My, that’s depressing.

  Dad.

  He didn’t just have a funny turn. The doctors swiftly ruled out a stroke and heart attack, but the good news stopped there. Real cause of flowerbed dive? A vicious disease called Huntington’s chorea. We all get something in the end. But Dad, for all his old-man-pipe-smoking, was just forty-two. Huntington’s chorea is a neurodegenerative disease, meaning it attacks nerves. Cue personality warpage and crippled movement. Normally strikes in mid-life, which is somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. So he got away lightly. No, no, no. Early signs include depression, egocentrism and aggression. Ah. That explains …

  Nothing.

  As the illness progresses, it torches the victim’s capacity to think straight, plan and remember, as well as speak, chew and swallow. Yikes. The lines go down between the brain and the muscles, co-ordination un-ordains itself: roll on spasmodic dancing, jerking, writhing. Seizures, like the one Dad had, take the floor. Still, there must be hope? Sort of. Huntington’s can be kept at bay with drugs for a while, but, very sorry, there’s no cure. In the 1980s life expectancy from diagnosis to death was in the region of ten years. Sharp-end sideshows include pneumonia, heart attack, or, er, suicide. Whichever!

  Dad explained all this, without quite managing to explain any of it, as he drove Joseph home after a month of school. He pulled into a roadside Happy Eater. The car windows fogged up a bit but you could still see out. Joseph stared hard at the large plastic dinosaur slide planted next to the car park. Better to look at that – or anything – than Dad’s face. Dad, who kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gear stick, even though they weren’t going anywhere for the time being. Papery knuckles, wedding band.

  ‘Are you dying?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘But you’re really sick?’

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘That’s what you’re trying to tell me, isn’t it.’

  Dad pulled the Granada back onto the road and accelerated hard. Hedgerows and trees swam backwards past them: Joseph couldn’t focus on any one branch or leaf for long enough to stop the blurring.

  ‘I
didn’t even know I had anything wrong with me at all until my dodgy episode,’ Dad said. ‘And anyway I’m on the medicine now … Jesus! Get out of the way!’

  They’d come upon a tractor. It was dragging a vicious-looking contraption whose raised tines were on a level with the windscreen.

  Another week would pass before Joseph returned to school and sat on his own in the library, the windows black and shiny at the end of the long oak table, the medical textbook’s stark facts splayed between his elbows, and only then would his worst fears be confirmed. For now there was still hope that Dad really was angry with the tractor, which passed a gateway without pulling over, making Dad rev the big Ford’s engine, drifting them to within a few feet of those rusty old spikes, and hit the steering wheel with an open palm. Which wasn’t out of character: for a committed pacifist he got pretty angry from time to time. But the growl he followed up with lacked heart. He shook his head and smiled at Joseph.

  ‘Man to man,’ Dad said.

  Joseph nodded.

  ‘We’re all at it, trying, one way or another.’

  ‘Trying what?’

  ‘Christ,’ Dad said. ‘That’s not what I meant to say.’

  Joseph stared at his father’s knuckles again. The skin across them looked as if it would tear easily. That Christmas he would buy his Dad a pair of leather driving gloves. For now he just nodded again.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Dad went on, letting the car drift back from the tractor. ‘I’ll soldier on.’

  16

  Soldiering on. That’s the job now. And Joseph, what with having been a real soldier, well, he is the man for that job. Except: what is the job exactly? Can’t go back to the hotel because they, meaning Lancaster, will have it staked out. Possibly has the kids’ photos in his own bag already. Joseph takes a deep breath. He won’t, you know, do anything to them, will he? No! Though ruthless, Lancaster was as offended by civilian casualties as the rest of them. Possibly he’ll have the house watched for a bit. No more.

  What’s this, then? A newsagent. Complete with fruit stand displaying grey bananas and dusty apples set out on some sort of AstroTurf mat. Next to it, a plastic tower full of newspapers. A quick look at the headlines beneath the scratched Perspex lids reveals they’re mostly to do with a climate change summit, plus a capsized Indonesian ferry. Pause for a moment, double-checking. Surely, by now?

  But no.

  Joseph pulls his cap low and takes a random red top plus the Financial Times to the till. As he’s paying, a shrieking noise starts up outside. But it’s just a car alarm, or rather a silver-haired man struggling with his four-by-four on the double yellows. Still, the Turkish guy behind the counter finds Joseph’s flinching amusing, until Joseph looks straight at him. Whereupon: nothing. Great! It’s him, Joseph Ashcroft, unrecognised. He strolls back to the park bench with the club-footed pigeon, now departed, to have a read, knowing that if the news had broken it would have been in size forty font on the front of both papers, which it’s not, making it unsurprising he doesn’t find the story tucked inside the pink business pages, let alone on tabloid page three. He should have bought some of that fruit. Didn’t, though, so has nothing to eat while he sits there imagining how the story would have – or will – run in the Sun. Something like this, he thinks.

  WHAT A TOTAL BANKER!

  Joe Ashcroft is not the same as rogue traders of the past. They made bets, lost them, and then lost bigger bets trying to cover up their losses.

  That’s how likeable Watford lad Nick Leeson took down Barings in 1995. His duff trades cost the venerable London bank a whopping £860 million.

  It’s also how crafty Frenchman Jérôme Kerviel left Société Générale with a £3.6 billion hole in its side in 2011.

  Somehow the French bank’s bosses managed to patch things up and sail on. The fate of Airdeen Clore – like Barings before it – is not so sure.

  Ashcroft was one of the bosses. And he hasn’t tried to hide anything about his crime. Except, that is, the money he ‘allegedly’ stole.

  A staggering $1.34 billion has disappeared. Insiders suspect it’s hidden offshore. Red-faced colleagues in the bank’s inner circle are scratching their heads. Some of which, we can expect, will have to roll.

  So far all fingers are pointing one way, in Ashcroft’s direction. ‘I’m convinced he acted alone,’ said Peter Strummer, chief executive of corporate and investment banking at Airdeen’s.

  A huge manhunt is underway. UK police and the bank’s private security are working around the clock to track Ashcroft. He has not been seen since Tuesday night.

  Interpol are also on the case. They may not know where the money has ended up, but if the cash is offshore we suggest they start by looking for the crooked banker under a palm tree, somewhere nice and warm.

  He sits on the park bench for a fair while, imagining alternative versions of the article, eventually noticing that it has begun to rain, not heavily, a gauze of tiny droplets which drift softly in the air and cling to his sweatshirt. He’s shivering lightly. He walks back in amongst the shops, spots an army surplus store which sells camping and outdoor gear, and is about to buy a replacement jacket – the sort of nondescript black North Face parka you see all the cameramen wearing in those behind-the-scenes National Geographic films – when something else catches his eye.

  He leaves the shop encased in a neon-yellow padded anorak with luminous strips on the back and arms, a road-worker intent on ripping up the central reservation.

  17

  This job, then.

  It starts south of the river, in Stockwell, he knows that much.

  With Charlie.

  Charlie?

  Yes, Charlie!

  Who else can he trust, blood being thicker than water, et cetera?

  There’s no point in arriving at his brother’s school before three twenty, and Joseph’s keen to avoid public transport, it being so very public, so he decides to walk, as in retrace his steps to and beyond the centre of town, which does make coming north in the first place a bit questionable, but no, possibly it was helpful re throwing them off the scent, meaning he’s not lost the cunning that’s seen him triumph so far in life’s many theatres, such as of ‘war’ and ‘high finance’.

  He turns up his big yellow collar and strikes out for Vauxhall Bridge. This eventually takes him through Whitehall, et cetera, the very corridors of power. Somewhere in amongst these great grey cakes of stone, with their mullioned, spotless windows, oil-black railings, and many surveillance cameras, there will, undoubtedly, be a meeting in progress to discuss ‘the situation’. A worried politician or two, angry civil servants, conniving lawyers for all sides, of course, plus representatives from the bank. They’ll be doing the old chastened-yet-defiant double act.

  ‘We regret this situation.’

  ‘But it’s not our fault, not exactly.’

  ‘No accounting for such a rotten egg.’

  ‘Yes, we had systems in place, and yes, they were adequate.’

  ‘But no, we didn’t expect one of our own to breach them.’

  ‘Be that as it may, we are where we are.’

  ‘Respectfully, we need your help, to shore things up, for the wider good.’

  ‘Or else.’

  Ha!

  He’s pitched them right into it, hasn’t he?

  From the bridge he can see the Houses of Parliament fronting the Thames. The rain has thickened. It falls in veils. A tourist boat drifts past, the pre-recorded guide’s pronouncements rising up in snatches. A camera flashes pointlessly within the glass-encased upper deck and the boat moves on. As should he. He heads for the Wandsworth Road.

  Two o’clock. Joseph has made good time, and he’s hungry, so he looks for somewhere to wait and eat. Here’s a likely greasy spoon. Its windows offer him his reflection as he takes his seat. Stubble and shorn head, plus eye-stabbing coat. The satchel looks a little out of place. He stows it beneath the Formica table, bolted emphatically to the linoleum. Every conceivable co
mbination of eggs, bacon, sausage, mushroom, beans, tomatoes, toast, chips, tea, coffee and fruit juice is listed on the menu. Also, strangely, moussaka. He ignores that and, rudderless before the other options, orders an all-day breakfast special, which seems to include everything, heaped in a sort of pyramid two handspans wide, plus a cup of tea served with the bag afloat it in, leaking brownly. He starts at the window end of the plate and eats his way east, thinking about Charlie.

  He and Joseph are made of the same stuff, but life has carved them into different shapes.

  This egg is good.

  The seven-year age gap split them from the outset, and Dad’s illness stretched the ties further.

  The fried tomatoes are hotter than the centre of the sun.

  Mum kept Charlie at home. Joseph finished boarding school and went to Cambridge. At twenty-one he joined the army. Charlie was fourteen and wrote a song about it called ‘Idiot Hymn’.

  Pretty good that: hymn, him.

  The teabag bleeds out on the tabletop.

  By the time Joseph gave up his commission, Charlie had been a geography teacher for three years. Joseph sold himself to the City, worked hours Charlie laughed about, and rose through the ranks, making it somehow harder and harder for his brother to speak to him normally.

  Baked beans on soggy toast: delicious.

  ‘It’s an Alfa Romeo, Charlie.’

  ‘Wow, that’s great; you must be really … pleased.’

  Charlie helped organise the Occupy movement and became an inner-city deputy head. Along the way he fathered twin girls, to whose mother he is still married. Joseph forks up another mouthful of bacon and remembers that he spent three hours at Charlie’s house last Boxing Day, during which time his brother didn’t really meet his eye, possibly because he hadn’t called for nigh on a year before that. Still, he never forgets the girls’ birthdays. He even offered to buy them a pony one year, though Charlie (‘of course, we’ll just tether it in the park’) refused the gift.