Escape and Evasion

by Christopher Wakling

  25

  En route back to the Travelodge (home!) Joseph succumbs and buys an armful of papers to read in his room. He lays them out on the now-taut bedspread and feels a pang of disappointment. There’s still nothing about the bank, or him, on the front pages. Or, damnit, among the stories that follow.

  What’s going on?

  Back in 2008, as the crash was happening, Airdeen’s did what all the other banks did and refused to revalue their collapsing subprime vehicles for as long as possible. Joseph knows how brazen they were then, because he was down the corridor from the guys who did the work. But this is different. It’s not a fund value deteriorating. He’s liberated cold cash. Keeping this hidden is a new fraudulent low, even for them. But that’s not what’s bothering Joseph. Not really. What he can’t work out is why they don’t think it’s in their best interests to confess immediately and point the finger at him.

  He sleeps on this.

  And wakes feeling lightheaded, purposeless; even the yellow coat folded across the back of that armchair looks deflated.

  There’s only one thing for it: he needs to see if Charlie has done what he said he’d do.

  So let’s tidy this place up. Put the papers in the bin, set the Bible in its drawer and the furniture back in place. And head out again, into what looks like a nice warm day. Because it is! The walk back to Charlie’s school takes him nearly three hours. He arrives in a sweat at just gone two o’clock. The sun is bright in the staff car park, pouring down onto the windscreens, cutting a fishnet of shadows from the chain-link fence. Look at that woman there, bent over on the pavement, scraping dog mess into a plastic bag. Well done! Joseph walks past her and returns when she’s gone.

  The car is there, at least, down the far end of the lot, parked next to the wall.

  Joseph strolls towards it, thinking: look entitled.

  That’s it, just walk on up to it, peer in the big boot window.

  Stupid name, ‘Zafira’: more belly dancer than utility vehicle.

  What’s that hump there in the back, though, covered with a picnic blanket?

  Promising, that’s what.

  Joseph checks quickly across the car roof to make sure nobody’s about, then tries the door. Locked. Ditto tailgate. But there’s something in there for him, he’s sure of it. What else could it be beneath that bulge? Does Charlie expect him to break in? Smash a window? No idea, but it’s possible.

  As he’s casting around for a suitable rock a siren howls.

  The noise sends Joseph down on one knee, his heart up into his mouth.

  Is this some kind of trap?

  He’s wondering which direction to bolt in, when the ambulance surges past.

  Yes!

  The relief spreads through him like a draught of cold water.

  An ambulance!

  Off it Dopplers.

  Great word, that, and right there when he needed it.

  Superb!

  So, where’s a brick, then?

  Let’s do this thing.

  He’s still on one knee, which puts his face on a level with the wheel arch, which makes him think to check the top of the tyre, where – bingo – Charlie has balanced his car key. Bloody obvious! Imagine if Joseph had put the back windscreen in.

  Joseph pops the boot catch and peels back the tartan rug.

  Excellent.

  Charlie’s found him a proper Bergen. Full-sized. Not a camouflaged number, but not some Day-Glo colour either, just a modest, slate grey. And it’s heavy! Blimey. What’s he put in here? As Joseph drags the backpack towards him he spots the note sticking out of the top pocket.

  Joe, you asked for this, so here it is. I want to help you. We all do. When you’re done with the back-to-nature stuff please give me a call. Stay safe in the meantime, Charlie.

  Ah, Charlie.

  How about that.

  Did he doubt him?

  Of course not.

  Charlie!

  Joseph hefts the pack out onto the ground, shuts the boot, blips the lock, and returns the key to the top of the wheel. Then he retrieves it again, re-opens the car, and rummages in the door pocket for a pen or pencil, because there’s always one there, which there is, because he knew there would be. Pulling out the note again, he spreads it on the car window and writes ‘THANK YOU’, just like that, in capitals. Then, with the note on the front seat and the car safely locked again he shoulders the pack – blimey, it’s been a while – and sets off.

  Where to?

  Don’t worry, he’s thought of that, hasn’t he?

  Oh yes.

  26

  The rucksack really is pretty heavy.

  It takes him back.

  He was standing by the pigeonholes in college when he saw it on the floor, an A5 sheet with the words ‘Univer sity Officer Training Corps’ printed across the front in dark green. He picked it up. Nobody he knew had anything to do with the army. He’d never wanted to have anything to do with it himself, either. The flyer said the army paid bursaries of £1,200 a year, but even though Dad’s death had left things tight at home it wasn’t the money that swayed him. Definitely was something else to do with Dad, though. Before the disease kicked in, Dad had marched against the Falkland Islands conflict and delivered food to the Greenham Common protestors, in his suit. Well, Joseph wasn’t him. And six weeks later he would prove it beneath a massive pack crawling up a rain-soaked escarpment in the middle of the night, bits of Wiltshire flint sticking into his elbows and knees, his nose grazing the mud and his pulse banging away in his neck.

  They were attacking themselves, or pretending to. He had a wooden-stocked .303 rifle dating approximately from the Somme cradled across the crooks of his leopard-crawling arms, and a sodden cardboard box full of blanks stashed somewhere in his webbing which, since he hadn’t done it up properly, had slid round his waist to jab him in the gut. Team Blue – one of the other sections in the platoon – were the enemy for now, and they were out there looking for Joseph and the rest of Team Red, who were doing the same, at least in theory. In fact, Joseph was just trying to keep up with Wegg, a biochemistry student from Hull. He was ahead and to the right. Up under that beret he had alopecia. Apparently he’d been doing this pretend army stuff since he was thirteen. The night before the exercise he’d said he could strip, clean and reassemble his Lee–Enfield without looking, so someone blindfolded him and he did.

  Given this competence it seemed a good bet for Joseph to follow him up the ridge. And so it was. They were making progress. It wasn’t Wegg’s fault that the damn webbing was biting into Joseph’s side. He couldn’t go on like that, so suggested they lie up in a handy hollow for a moment while he sorted his shit out. Wegg raised no objection, just used the delay to do some pro-fiddling with his rifle.

  Joseph’s fingers were tingling with cold.

  Once he’d adjusted the webbing, he stuck his hands under his armpits and shut his eyes to concentrate on feeling the warmth there.

  And when he opened them again he saw Team Blue, bent double, working their way along the ridge, outlined against the night sky.

  Ha!

  Whoever was leading clearly hadn’t been paying attention when Sergeant Illis explained the five ‘S’s: shape, shadow, shine, spacing and silhouette.

  Joseph nudged Wegg. ‘Check them out,’ he whispered.

  Wegg’s eyes widened. He held up a gloved hand. Wait for it, wait for it. Now! The hand disappeared and the brambles in front of Joseph burst apart. They may have been firing blanks but the tongues of flame jabbing from their barrels had enough scorch power to burn the leaves. Team Blue were twenty yards away, bolt upright, and very pretend dead when the onslaught stopped. Joseph made out Myers, the geographer from Durham. He was standing with his hands on his hips, saying, ‘Fuck that, then.’

  Clearly Wegg wanted a friend. Why else would he have given Joseph the credit for conceiving an ambush? But that’s what he did at the debrief that morning, fingering the bald path above his ear as he insisted Joseph�
�s decision to lie in wait was astute, not plain lucky. Once a person gets a name for something, even if it’s as nebulous as ‘tactical nous’, the reputation can be hard to shift. Easier, in fact, to have a go at living up to the label. Back in 1982 Joseph’s father had gone on opposing the Falklands War long after the army won it. Though he never thought the thought outright himself, it wouldn’t have taken a master tactician to work out Joseph’s motive for applying for a real commission on leaving the university.

  But that’s what he did.

  With only a ‘seems like something useful to do’, he swapped ivy-clad quadrangles and exams for square-bashing and khaki. Looked up one day to find himself wiping cam-cream along his cheekbones, chin, and the bridge of his nose, ’Nam-style, though in truth it was only Berkshire. The smell of that stuff, not a million miles from the polish they used on their boots and dress shoes, equals Sandhurst. Endless dressing up in the army. Plus cleaning and ironing. And getting filthy again. Yes, the standard hours spent getting kit clean, and many more hours cleaning things that were already pretty spotless before they started. Dust from inside the grille of a radiator. Droplets of water in an otherwise pristine sink. Joseph developed a real interest in mirrored toecaps: just one of the army attributes which later stood him in good stead for the City.

  That’s when he first met Ben Lancaster, polishing boots.

  Lancaster had done something wrong – not aligned his toothbrush with the taps or something – and had to polish the platoon’s boots by way of punishment. Joseph held back and saw that Lancaster had been set an impossible task: he had no chance of finishing the job before the 22.00 curfew. Poor kid was working like a bastard at it anyway, ginger head bent low over the task. He didn’t even look up when Joseph offered to help, just grunted his thanks. This was 1993. Lancaster had a portable radio. They worked side by side spit-and-polishing boots to a soundtrack of Suede, Radiohead and The KLF, which meant they didn’t have to talk much. Still, Joseph learned Lancaster really was as young as he looked: nine months beforehand he’d been sitting his A Levels in a sports hall in Edgbaston. Now here he was at Sandhurst. This boot-polishing punishment was his first slip-up. He didn’t make many more. Keen wasn’t the word. Here, for example, he somehow polished three boots to every two of Joseph’s, no matter how fast Joseph worked. Between them they finished ahead of the deadline.

  ‘What do you need in return, then?’ Lancaster asked when they were walking back across the square.

  ‘Nothing,’ Joseph said.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘It’s worth it just to spite them.’

  ‘I’d have got them all done in time, I reckon.’

  Joseph shrugged.

  ‘But if you think of anything, I owe you.’

  ‘Okay, then.’

  27

  Joseph lugs the pack through Stockwell across the river and up to Victoria. The bulk of the thing. He feels horribly conspicuous, a rhino among poachers. He hits the station concourse in a hot sweat, but at least there, with the Gatwick Express, et cetera, a big backpack makes sense. Off to see the world! Except that he’s not. No way is he going near the airport. They’ll still be watching there. Could well be monitoring the train stations, too, though if you think about the clock face of London, from Victoria at 7 round Paddington at 10, Kings Cross at 12, Euston at 1, Liverpool Street at 3, never mind the smaller stations, all disgorging their countless commuters into and out of the city every day, well, that’s a hell of a lot of faces to watch, making this a calculated ___.

  ___?

  Bollocks.

  ___?

  Risk.

  Joseph buys a train ticket at a self-service machine. Not for the station nearest where he wants to go, because that’s the whole point about taking a calculated risk: you do your best to minimise the downside. Come to think of it, alongside polished footwear, risk minimisation is another army trait that set him up well for the City.

  Shoe-shine plus arse-covering.

  He gets himself within sight of the right platform and waits, thinking, for no good reason he can work out at first, about a Terry’s chocolate orange. You know, the ones with all the segments. The best way to crack one up entirely is to hit it on one end with a blunt instrument.

  Possibly a rolling pin.

  That’s him, he realises, which makes Airdeen Clore the chocolate orange. Hitting it with a $1.34 billion mallet will split the bank apart, won’t it?

  Come on everyone, help yourself to a bit.

  Crumbs for some, whole slices for others.

  Imagine being just a normal punter, relatively poor and so on, and waking up to a swollen bank account, with no idea where the extra money has come from. Some of them will have a go at returning their windfall, no doubt. And no doubt about it, they’ll fail. Look all you like, you’ll never find out! He bounced that cash through more offshore accounts than there are hairs on Lancaster’s head. Still gingerish, after all these years, but cropped shorter than short now, fuzzy as a tennis ball. All it took was a little IT help from that chap in Milton Keynes. At least that’s where he said he was.

  The clackety-clack local train pulls into the platform. Joseph double-checks the departure board. That’s the one. He moves in among the waiting passengers as the train rocks to a stop. Stands in line. Files aboard. Chooses a seat he can stow the rucksack behind and hunkers down.

  Smells a bit like cheese-and-onion crisps in here.

  Nasty, yet his stomach rumbles.

  The train must move off soon.

  Infuriatingly, though, it doesn’t. It just sits there. Joseph checks his watch and sees the departure time drift by.

  Also, out of the corner of his eye, he clocks a moving shape on the platform, coming to a halt just there, right beside his window. Christ. And here’s somebody else looming down the aisle.

  Instantly he’s un-hungry. In fact, his stomach is now a fist. Just keep your head down. But no, try as he might, he can’t stop himself from looking. The guy on the platform is in his sixties, dressed in a houndstooth jacket, a country-casual shirt, and a mustard tie. He’s taken off his glasses and is wiping his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. When he opens them again he’s staring directly at Joseph.

  A pane of glass and three feet are all that separate them.

  That’s a thousand-yard stare.

  Slowly the man smiles.

  Then he blows Joseph a kiss.

  What the—? This must be some kind of Judas-betraying sign! Joseph is up out of his seat, but the way is blocked by the person coming down the aisle. She’s a she, which is good, and older, ditto, and big. Steady on with the prejudices. She’s plonking herself down in the seat opposite, plus also looking straight through him, at the man, who is smiling at her.

  Joseph hadn’t realised he’d been holding his breath, not until now, as he lets it out.

  The engine judders to life and the old boy pushes his glasses back up his nose. The carriage rocks on its wheels, the brakes release with a hiss, and his head jinks back: did he just do what he thinks he did?

  Seems so!

  The train finally starts rolling and the woman across the aisle raises her hand to wave at the man, who shrugs at Joseph and winks again.

  28

  As the train gathers speed Joseph sinks back against the seat and thinks of another kind of winking, the sort he does – or did – with the kids. Lara particularly liked it when she was small. She’d lean in across the big kitchen table and he’d see in her face that she was about to wink or purse her lips funnily, and when she did he’d do the same, making her pull off another type of wink or blink or frown, which he’d copy, too, as fast as possible, and so on, a kind of blink-gurning-tennis that might go on for a full minute and always felt tender and lovely and good.

  Naomi found it funny, right up to the end, when she said thirty seconds of flinching didn’t count for much in the parenting scheme of things. Well, perhaps it didn’t, but …

  Why did she have to be so right? Even wh
en she cut her hair short on her fortieth birthday, a move he’d said up front was a total mistake, given that it was the same polished black curtain as when he first saw her in that bar, the bob did suit her better, as she said it would.

  The train burrows south through the suburbs.

  Bridges and billboards (‘Paradise Is Just Hours Away!’ ‘Thirsty? Drench It!’) and concrete flyovers and blocks of flats eventually making way for terrace after terrace of bay-windowed two-storey houses in yellow London brick. For a stretch: back gardens. Look at the sheds, paving slabs, washing lines. An ornamental pond with a plastic heron. And here, with the train clanking along at a cambered crawl, is another trampoline in a net-cage, only this one is jerking to the rhythm of a small boy’s listless bouncing.

  He looks about Zac’s age.

  One shoe on, one shoe off.

  There’s no way he’ll ever jump high enough to escape like that.

  Put some effort in, small boy!

  ‘Tickets, please.’

  Damn, Joseph hadn’t expected a conductor. Aren’t the ticket barriers all automated these days? She’s coming up the carriage from behind him. He ferrets out his ticket. Drops his face towards the window. She’ll memorise it anyway. That’s her job. Possibly he should have hitchhiked instead.

  ‘Sir.’

  He thrusts the ticket up.

  ‘That’s the reservation. I need to see the other part as well.’

  Her voice is no-nonsense. Maybe she has to get up early. He’s not looked at her but he sees her all the same: dark roots and blonde hair and an M&S dressing gown hung on the back of her bedroom door as she buttons her logo-crested shirt. He’s digging for the ticket part of the ticket now. Why in God’s name can’t they print both halves on the same bit of card? There, that must be … He pretends to scrutinise it, head still down, while offering the ticket for her to check. Sees bitten nails, a tiny engagement ring, and the worry in his chest turns unaccountably sad.