Fearless

by Jessie Keane

  ‘Yes?’ said a faint female voice.

  ‘It’s Josh Flynn,’ he said.

  ‘Come up,’ said the voice, and there was a whirring buzz and then inch by slow inch the gates opened.

  Josh got back in the car. Shauna flashed him a big grin as he put the car in gear and tore on up the drive.

  ‘Jesus!’ She laughed out loud when they pulled up in front of the house after nearly a quarter mile of driveway had flashed by. ‘Thank God I got some new clothes for this.’

  Josh stopped the car and turned off the engine. There was a Rover parked nearby, and a sporty little Triumph. He looked up at the house itself. What a fucking drum! It was white, huge and modern. It was a bloody mansion.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Josh, smiling at his over-excited wife.

  Shauna was lit up like a Christmas tree. To be fair, Josh thought she looked fucking fantastic. Her almost black hair was piled up on top of her head, her body had long since regained its pre-birth shape, her make-up was faultless. She was wearing white hooped earrings and big dark shades. A teensy little bag sat on her lap – it had cost a small fortune – and she was wearing a dress that was orange and white stripes, with a long-zippered front and a big cut-away in the back to show off her lovely tanned skin. It was the sexiest thing Josh had ever seen, that dress. It looked good enough – almost – to take away the pain of the cost of the damned thing.

  ‘Let’s get in there then,’ he said, and for the first time Josh looked at his old Zephyr – he didn’t actually care much about cars, he wasn’t impressed by them in the least – and thought, Christ, what a heap of junk. She’s right, I do need a new one.

  Shaun looked like a film star today, and she’d been in a mad pelt of excitement over this dinner, double-checking that the babysitter was lined up – she was – and then pulling Josh’s wardrobe open and looking at his clothes with a critical eye.

  ‘I thought I’d wear that jacket,’ Josh had said, coming into the bedroom to get dressed for the evening out, picking up his usual tan-coloured effort.

  ‘You will not,’ said Shauna, standing in front of the dressing table and tugging heated rollers out of her hair. ‘It’s the dark jeans, the white shirt, the grey jacket to match your eyes. I’ve laid it all out, ready.’

  Now they were actually here, Shauna was dubious. She took in the house, the grounds, the expensive cars parked out front. Thought of that visit from Jeb, him saying never forget your roots. But fuck that. This was what she craved. All of this.

  ‘You didn’t tell me it was Blenheim bloody Palace,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Josh. ‘Come on, Shaun. They’re just people. They don’t bite.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘There’s no way those tits are real,’ said Shauna to Josh an hour later, as they stood for a moment alone in a conservatory that wouldn’t have disgraced Kew Gardens.

  ‘Shaun!’ Josh said, laughing and glancing around in case the lady of the house had returned and heard. She hadn’t.

  ‘These are real though,’ said Shauna, and with a cheeky grin she yanked down the zip on the front of her dress and gave him an arousing flash of nude dark-brown nipples. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  ‘Shaun! Behave!’ But Josh was grinning. One of the best things about Shauna’s figure was her big perky tits, and she knew it. Not even breastfeeding Connor had altered the beauty of them, and Josh had only to see them to get a hard-on like a concrete pole.

  Shauna picked up her champagne flute. ‘I’m telling you. No way are they real,’ she said.

  Josh sighed. Shauna had taken against Dave’s wife on sight. And vice versa. From the very first greeting, it had been clear that the two women were not going to be buddies. Philippa, Dave’s missus, was a tall patrician blonde with an elitist manner. She had an ex-model’s slim hips and long legs and – yes, Shaun was probably right – impossibly full, pert breasts that looked weird perched upon her skinny ribcage.

  Dave seemed a lot older than Philippa. In fact, he looked like a weathered little gnome standing by the side of his glamorous wife, the poor cunt. There was no doubt that he was loaded and had probably paid for those plastic tits on his credit card.

  ‘There you are, the pair of you,’ said Dave, joining them, bottle of Bollinger in hand. ‘Top-up, anyone?’

  He refilled both their glasses. Josh thought that Dave was already half-cut and that was only on a couple of glasses of bubbly. You wouldn’t take this cunt out on a Friday night with the lads; one whiff of the barmaid’s apron and he’d be flat on the floor.

  ‘Phil’s dynamite in the kitchen,’ he said with a smile. ‘Dynamite at hiring catering staff, anyway,’ he added, and although he was half-laughing there was something bitter in the way he said it. ‘Come on through to the lounge. You haven’t seen it yet, have you?’

  The lounge was massive, full of large gold-damask-covered sofas, some modern but obviously priceless occasional tables and three matching chandeliers, all lit up down the centre of the room in a dazzling line. The entire length of one wall was glass, and when you stood in front of it you could look out over a vast sweep of sloping lawn to willows dipping their branches into the dark, fast-flowing River Thames. Ducks and swans glided past. The setting sun glinted on the water.

  ‘It’s a hell of a view,’ said Josh.

  ‘It’s what sold the place to us. We’ve only been in two years. Can be a bit of a pain in the arse with the river so close, because apparently it does flood here sometimes. But we’re on a slope, as you can see, and just as well because the council do fuck-all to clear it. The rates we pay, you’d think they’d cut back the weed, do a bit of dredging of the silt and shit that builds up – something. But so far we’ve been lucky and the river hasn’t burst its banks. Philippa’s been costing me a fucking fortune, doing this place up. It’s great, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ said Shauna, green with envy, taking off her shades and drinking in the full splendour of it.

  My God, to own a place like this. To wake every morning to that view and think, This is mine. This was what she wanted. Something exactly like this. She thought of Jeb Cleaver, showing up and trying to intimidate her. Trying to drag her back to what she used to be. Well, she wouldn’t let him. This was the way forward. This was what she deserved – and she was fucking well going to have it, or go bust trying.

  ‘Right!’ said Philippa, coming in from the kitchen and clapping her hands as if they were children to be assembled into straight lines and marched off down the road. ‘Dinner’s ready, let’s sit down.’

  The dining area was a candlelit nook beside the big bank of windows. There was a circular table that looked like marble, and thickly padded high-backed chairs. Neither Josh nor Shauna had ever seen such luxury. The soup was already on the table, waiting for them. There were warm fresh-baked rolls in a wicker basket, and curled pats of butter. And there was a young woman in a black dress and white waist apron, standing discreetly outside the kitchen door, ready to serve them.

  When Shauna took a mouthful of the soup, it was stone cold. She glanced at Josh. He was eating it, saying nothing.

  ‘What?’ he asked her.

  ‘The soup’s cold,’ said Shauna.

  Philippa gave her a look across the table that could have curdled milk. ‘It’s meant to be cold,’ she said. ‘It’s gazpacho.’ Philippa’s eyes dropped to the spoon in Shauna’s hand. ‘And that’s a dessert spoon. That one’s the soup spoon.’

  ‘I get ’em mixed up myself,’ said Dave kindly. ‘All the time! Phil bends my ear about it too, but does it matter what you eat the damned food with? I don’t think so.’ He sent his wife a warning look.

  But the warning didn’t seem to get through. Despite Dave trying gamely to hold up the conversation and keep it civil, Philippa pulled Shauna up on her use of the wrong knife and fork: ‘You work your way inwards, it’s quite simple,’ she said.

  When Shauna tried to refill her own glass of water and the waitr
ess hurried forward and took it out of her hand, Philippa said in a patronizing voice: ‘That’s what she’s there for, Shauna. You don’t have to do that yourself, really.’

  Towards the end of the meal, when Shauna had fallen silent and was simmering away like a bloody volcano – Josh knew the signs so well – Philippa dropped her final bombshell.

  ‘So you’re gypsies, David tells me. How intriguing.’ She turned her baby-blues on Josh. ‘Bare-knuckle fighting, how macho. And what about Shauna?’ She gave Shauna a wide-eyed look. ‘What is it? Mud-wrestling? Selling pegs or lucky heather? Something like that?’

  And that was how Philippa Houghton ended up wearing the pudding course.

  50

  ‘How bloody dare she! That fucking cow!’ spat Shauna in a loud whisper when they got back home and she was yanking off her earrings in their bedroom. They’d paid off the babysitter and she’d gone. The baby was sleeping peacefully in his cot. Now Shauna was kicking off, big time.

  Josh said nothing as he pulled off his clothes. Shauna had ranted all the way home in the car but he had sat silent at the wheel, thinking, Well, that’s fucked then. Dave Houghton wouldn’t want his services now that his wife had been on the receiving end of a bowl of strawberry pavlova. Philippa’s shriek of outrage still echoed in Josh’s brain, cream dripping off her face and strawberries lodged in her hair – and in fact it could almost have been funny, if it wasn’t such a pain to lose a contact like Dave when they so badly needed the extra income.

  ‘Well say something,’ Shauna demanded.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ Josh tossed his shirt on to the chair. ‘You just fucked up a good earner, is that what you want me to say?’

  ‘Keep your bloody voice down, will you? She shouldn’t have talked to me like that,’ hissed Shauna, ripping the grips out of her hair. ‘Like I was a fucking nobody, telling me about which cutlery to use and that the soup was meant to be cold.’

  ‘It was meant to be cold.’

  ‘You know what I mean! It was the way she said it, looking down her bloody nose at me.’

  Josh could see that Philippa’s words and attitude had cut Shauna to the quick, wounded her deeply, but it was because Shauna was so desperate to be better than she was – the product of a travellers’ campsite. Shauna wanted more than that, much more, he knew it. She wanted to mix with society types and rich bastards, to be accepted. And tonight had been a painful reality check. He felt offended and angry on her behalf. She was, after all, his wife. And – it was true – she had been made to look a fool by that over-made-up tart Philippa.

  But . . . even now, he couldn’t help but compare Shauna’s volcanic outburst with Claire’s easy-going good nature. Claire would have laughed at Philippa’s hoity-toity ways, not thrown her toys out of the pram like Shauna had. And he would have shared in the joke with her, too; their eyes would have met across the dinner table, and they would have both suppressed a grin.

  But Shauna wasn’t Claire.

  ‘Never mind, Shaun,’ he said. ‘Gawd, you know what? I’m still hungry.’

  ‘We just had dinner,’ sniffed Shauna, unzipping her dress.

  ‘Call that dinner? Oh, it looked damned good, didn’t it, all laid out poncey with twirls of this and slivers of that. Two mouthfuls and it was gone, even though it was damned pretty. I didn’t know whether to eat it or fuck it.’

  A hint of a smile played around Shauna’s mouth when he said that. She grabbed her dressing gown and yanked it on. ‘You want some sandwiches? I’ll bring them up, we’ll eat in bed. And a beer?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great.’

  Dave phoned a week later. Josh was sitting in their – admittedly poky – little lounge, dandling Connor on his knee while Shauna got dressed upstairs. Here we go, thought Josh. Now for the piss-off-and-die speech.

  ‘So, when you coming in to the club?’ Dave asked.

  Josh was astonished. ‘Blimey. I don’t know. When d’you want me?’ If Dave wasn’t mentioning the car crash that was last weekend, then neither was he, that was for sure.

  ‘Come on Friday. Have a look around, see what’s happening, see what you think. OK?’

  ‘Yeah, all right then.’ He didn’t know whether or not to bother. Shaun wouldn’t like him working for the Houghtons after her set-to with Philippa. And he didn’t know whether he wanted all the grief that would entail. But . . . they needed the money. Shit, did they need it. He had bills coming out of his ears.

  When Dave put the phone down, Josh looked at Connor, who was watching him wide-eyed, his finger stuffed in his rosebud mouth. ‘What d’you make of that?’ he asked, and Connor grinned, bounced his chubby legs up and down in his pale blue rompers, and let out a shout.

  Shauna came downstairs and into the lounge, pulling on her cardigan. ‘Who was that?’ she asked, bending, taking the baby off him. Connor grizzled, but she rocked him and he stopped.

  ‘Dave Houghton.’

  Shauna’s face took on a pinched look. ‘Well, I hope he’s not expecting a fucking apology,’ she fumed.

  ‘He asked me to come in on Friday, start work.’

  ‘What, after that flipping fiasco?’ Shauna looked gobsmacked.

  ‘What the hell. It was nothing,’ said Josh, hoping to make light of it.

  ‘It might have been nothing to you, but to me it was bloody humiliating.’

  ‘Maybe Philippa will apologize.’

  ‘She can stuff her apology up her arse,’ said Shauna, taking the baby out to the kitchen to fetch his milk. She’d stopped breastfeeding and had switched Connor on to the bottle now. ‘She’ll be sorry she ever tried to make a berk out of me.’

  51

  ‘They call cannabis “green petrol”,’ said Dave as Josh sat in his office with him on Friday evening. Out in the club, a girl singer was crooning ‘Downtown’, the big Petula Clark hit. ‘They grow it up in the Rif mountains of Morocco, place called Ketama. They call it kif. It keeps about a million families off the breadline up there. Well, what else can they do? Can’t grow olives or wheat on that soil. But cannabis? Grows like a bastard, that stuff.’

  ‘OK,’ said Josh. He’d never done drugs, but he’d known a few who had, silly sods. All his life he’d been conscious of being blessed with phenomenal health and exceptional strength, so what would he want to go and abuse his body for, just to get high?

  ‘But there’s no money in cannabis on the streets any more. Now what we get mostly is Charlie.’

  ‘Cocaine,’ said Josh.

  ‘Comes in through Ireland. Standing joke is, the Irish Navy is a pedalo and a couple of inflatable bananas. They can’t patrol all that coastline, it’s wide open.’ Dave shrugged. ‘What the hell, people got to make a living, I understand that. But when it hits home, right here in my club, then I got to draw the line.’ Dave paused and looked at Josh. ‘John said you’re a sound man. Trustworthy.’

  ‘I am,’ said Josh.

  ‘You reckon you can sort it out?’

  Josh outlined his plans. He’d talked it over with Linus Pole and Linus was happy to let two of his best boys do one fortnight on the door, then another two would do the next. Josh would handle the cash, pass them on their bit. Linus would, of course, get a cut too. It would be fine.

  Thoughts of Linus made Josh think of the other thing they’d discussed when they’d met up. Linus hadn’t been keen to break it to him, but he had given Josh the bad news anyway: Josh’s mother had finally died in her sleep after years of heavy drinking. At first, Josh didn’t know how he felt about it. After a while, he realized he was relieved. His mother had stood aside and watched his dad batter him as a kid for years. And Josh had never forgiven her for it.

  Dave was nodding, his expression thoughtful. ‘Look . . . do you think you would be able to handle something else? It’s a bit . . . delicate.’

  Josh refocused, wrenched his mind away from his mother’s sad ending. ‘In what way delicate?’

  ‘In the way that things are a bit personal, you unde
rstand?’

  ‘No,’ said Josh. ‘I don’t.’

  Dave paused, looked down at the desk, pushed the newspaper around with one gnarled yellow index finger. Josh glanced at the headlines. Sadat was talking to the Knesset, and in Rhodesia they were still wrestling with black majority rule. Jimmy Carter’s home church in Plains, Georgia, had ended its colour bar, and trouble was looming in England over public sector cuts. Then Dave heaved a sigh. ‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I have a friend.’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Yeah. A close friend.’

  Josh watched Dave’s face. He didn’t know this man well yet, but he didn’t dislike him. Their wives had brawled like mongrel bitches, but that was hardly Dave’s fault. Still, Josh felt he was treading on unsteady ground here. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘A boyfriend,’ said Dave, and Josh could almost have sworn the ugly little cunt was blushing.

  Josh said nothing. Dave was a married man, and he’d believed him to be straight. But now he was saying he wasn’t. Well, it was his business if he wanted to bat for both sides. Josh didn’t care one way or the other.

  ‘This boyfriend’s name is Andrew Meredith. I met him when he came in as a punter and we . . . well, sort of hit it off.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘This was about a year back. Phil don’t know nothing about this, of course.’

  ‘No. Of course.’

  ‘And I want it kept that way.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? Does this friend fit in with the drugs scene here?’

  ‘Andrew . . .’ Dave paused. He was blushing. ‘Andrew’s a toff. Went to Eton. Good family. Had it all, all his life. Not like me. Grew up rough, I did. Council estate. Started making money selling stuff down the market, took it from there. Now I got restaurants, this club, snooker halls, boxing clubs, and a very expensive wife and kids.’

  ‘I know that problem,’ said Josh with a wry smile.

  ‘Jeez, didn’t those two go at it last Sunday?’ Dave almost smiled too. ‘I have to apologize about Phil. She can be a bitch.’