Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  She goes on to say that she thinks inheritance tax should be raised. At the moment it’s forty per cent of any estate over £250,000 and in Sarah’s opinion it should be more like seventy-five.

  ‘Why not one hundred per cent?’ snorts my father.

  ‘Actually, why not one hundred per cent?’ muses Sarah. And she goes on to advance other ideas. For example, there’s her idea about how to deal with the homeless problem.

  ‘Basically, anyone with more than one house should be asked to choose which one they want to live in, and we – the state – should be able to take the others and redistribute them to people who need them.’

  Which is when my dad calls her infantile and says even the Khmer Rouge didn’t try anything so stupid and, in any case, we will change our tune when we see how much money we need to support a retarded child.

  Kitty – or whoever it is – tuts. And this just seems to enrage my dad further.

  ‘Well, it’s true. All children cost a fortune and retarded children cost even more.’

  Kitty – or whoever it is – says, ‘Daniel.’

  And he goes, ‘What? Aren’t you allowed to call a bloody spade a bloody spade any more?’

  And I say something lame about calling a spade a shovel, while Sarah is already getting up and gathering all the paraphernalia of new parenthood. The nappies, the wipes, the creams, the potions, the powders, the bottles, the spare Babygros, the blankets, the plastic jar of cotton buds, the toys designed to sooth, the toys designed to stimulate. The unfathomable tank of the buggy.

  ‘Oh-oh,’ says my dad. ‘She’s losing the game so she’s storming off the pitch.’

  And Sarah says that she may be infantile and stupid and she may have a retarded kid but at least she’s not an ignorant old cunt.

  And Kitty – or whoever it is – tuts again, while my dad goes puce and looks like his head is going to explode.

  His last words as we leave are, ‘Well, I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about inheritance tax as far as you’re concerned. I’m going to make sure there’s not a penny left. Not for you anyway. And when you’re struggling to buy all the special equipment you’ll need just remember that there was an ignorant old cunt who just might have helped you out.’

  ‘Fuck off, Dad,’ I say, and he tells me to watch my lip, that I’m not too big to get a clip round the ear. ‘Yes I am,’ I say.

  We go, and there’s silence in the car for a good few miles, until I say, ‘Well, that was nice,’ and Sarah suggests that maybe we don’t go and see my dad as a family any more. ‘You should go, Nicky. Every now and again, see how he’s getting on. But I don’t think we should all go. I don’t think Scarlett should hear language like that.’

  ‘Cunt? That won’t mean anything to her.’

  ‘I meant,’ and her voice drops to a whisper, ‘retarded. She shouldn’t have to hear words like that.’ She looks over to the back where Scarlett sleeps in the car seat.

  She’s right, of course she is, and I think it’s then I make the decision not to see my dad either. You don’t have to see your family, do you? Being related is an accident. And you don’t have to put up with the consequences if you don’t want to. You can decide to be free. As far as I can see that’s one of the big triumphs of Western civilisation – we have liberated ourselves from our obligations to our blood relatives. We can invent our own extended families, thank you very much, make them out of friends and work colleagues – we don’t have to put up with the difficult demented ones. Let the state deal with them. We pay our taxes after all.

  And then the weeks and months go past and we hear that Dad has sold the house and moved into this care home place. Sunny Bank. I hadn’t realised his condition had got so bad.

  I phone him. He sounds OK and I do actually offer to go and see him, but he tells me he doesn’t want that, doesn’t want me to see him there. He’s adamant. And then he tells me that I should know that there really won’t be any inheritance, not unless Sarah apologises. We both know that’s not going to happen.

  ‘It’s a bloody shame,’ he says. ‘I liked her. Sarah was the best decision you ever made, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I know, Dad,’ I say. ‘I know.’

  Seventeen

  JESUS

  Jesus has no one. Whenever he reads about how the great entrepreneurs got started there is always someone who can lend them the first thousand dollars. Some sap with no business sense but who just wants their homeboy to succeed. Even Zuckerberg who no one has ever liked found a couple of buddies to set him up. But not a single person can lend even a few hundred to Jesus. It’s not right.

  ‘You know I’d give you scratch, Jesus.’

  This is Mary, and he knows she would. In their short time together he has learned that Mary will do pretty much anything for him. Really, anything. It’s scary actually. Awesome and scary. She looks so innocent but on their first date he’d been doing stuff with her that he’d never done with any other girl. And he’d done it because she’d told him to. She likes to give instructions during sex, which is new to Jesus but he finds he likes it.

  He looks at her now sitting cross-legged on his bed, naked except for her glasses, taking deep hits from her Beretta. She is wild. He stares, fascinated as always by the tattoos. The green, red and blue birds that flutter across her breasts, the purple snakes that writhe around her thighs, the sunshiny flowers on her shoulders, the carnivores of many colours roaming the burnished prairies of her skin. The trees that climb around her shins and calves. The lifelike red rose petals dancing over her belly as though scattered onto a honeymoon bed by a Valentino.

  Most girls Jesus knows have tattoos, but not as many as this and they don’t keep them such a secret. Mary never wears tees and she never wears skirts. Her tats are a hidden thing. Something she only shares with him.

  ‘The thing is, I know a lot of people who would, but I don’t know anyone that can.’

  ‘You’ve tried banks yeah?’

  Jesus makes a face. Yes, he’s tried banks. He’s tried every bank. Even the small-time savings and loans like the ones in that dumb black-and-white movie with James Stewart in it. The one his father makes the whole family watch every year on the night before Christmas in Quetzaltenango. Not that many of the family are left in Quetzaltenango now. Everyone gets out as soon as.

  For some reason no one is lending to immigrant grad students with no collateral and no resources of their own. And now he doesn’t even have a job, not since he’d brought the limo back so trashed after that night out with that crazy English couple. Actually he has been thinking, maybe they would back him. They had been pretty receptive to his business ideas, they might even feel that they owe him.

  He says as much to Mary and she lies back on his narrow bed – the bed that she has told him he is going to have to upgrade if he is to be her regular polollo, and he watches her think about it. She parts her legs just a tiny bit, left hand resting on the tattoo of an orchid on her hip bone.

  From where Jesus sits on the bedroom’s single plastic chair he can see all her shaved papaya, her munch. Does she know what she’s doing, he wonders? He thinks she probably does. She takes another drag, closes her eyes, now her hand strays between her legs and idly, absent-mindedly, strokes. Yes, she definitely knows what she’s doing. Another thing Jesus knows already is that nothing Mary does is casual, not really.

  He stands, strips off the tracksuit pants he only put on minutes before and crosses over to the bed, he lies next to her and covers her munch-stroking hand with his own. Her eyes open, she smiles. His heart kicks hard in his chest.

  ‘I don’t think Russell will help. I mean he might want to, but she won’t let him.’

  ‘She wears the pants, huh?’

  ‘Most definitely.’

  It’s what he’s known all along. Poor people will help you but they can’t. Rich people can help you, but won’t. It is the way of the world. What you need is someone poor enough to be kind, but rich enough to have some sp
are centavos. It’s the kind of business angel that is hard to find, the piece of the start-up jigsaw that they never mention in the manuals – even though it is absolutely vital. He exhales, blows air towards the dark hair on his lip.

  ‘Cono,’ he murmurs into her ear, her neck, her breast.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He raises his head, looks into her eyes, smiles. ‘I said, “Shit. Shit.”’

  ‘Potty mouth,’ she says.

  He bends and kisses her nipple, she strokes his hair, his shoulders, his back. She smiles up at him. Mouth wide. Her breath smells chemical and sweet. It smells of Diet Coke. Mary has a real thing for Diet Coke. Gets through about twelve cans a day. Says it makes her feel good, but also it cleans her braces. If ever Jesus hears someone pop a soda can out on the street these days, he feels a sudden need to go home and see his love.

  Now Mary says, ‘You do something for me and I’ll tell you my idea.’

  Jesus thinks that he perhaps already knows what the something is and begins to shift down the bed, kissing and licking as he goes. Taking his time. Breasts, stomach, hip bones. Birds, flowers, snakes. Covering with slow kisses all the life that walks, crawls or flies across her honeyed skin.

  Mary really does have a lot of tattoos. From her chest to ankles, she is a gallery of sorts. This close the flowers look wild. The animals fierce. Untameable.

  Jesus has no tattoos. Mary was a bit shocked at first. She hadn’t been with a boy without tats since high school. She had asked if it was a religious thing, something to do with the Kabbalah maybe? But no, he just liked his body the way it was. Mary told him she admired him for being an individual, so he didn’t tell her the real reason, which was that he had promised his mamma he would never get a tat or a piercing.

  Jesus explores on past her knees, down the leaves and vines on her calves then around her ankles, feet, toes. Slowly, slowly, slowly. And then back up again. He’s in no rush.

  ‘You move to your own beat,’ Mary says softly. ‘I like that in a guy.’

  And, later, softer still, hardly more than a breath. ‘I really like that in a guy.’

  Eighteen

  CATHERINE

  Her best chance is when he’s out running. She can just put on a bit of a sprint and fire the thing as she passes. He’ll feel it like a wasp sting or a mosquito bite and between five and ten days later his heart will stop. Very clean, very simple. This stuff has revolutionised things in the industry. No more poisoned umbrellas. No need to blast people on their doorsteps. No need for the double tap. No need to lock drugged targets naked into their own holdalls to make it look like some weird sex thing. Much, much easier now than when she’d started, but there are still precautions to be taken: a need for basic professionalism.

  But he is never on his own these days.

  It had been easier with the other guy, the wrong guy. He’d gone out at exactly six each and every morning. Up at 5.45, quick cup of instant coffee and then a reasonably fast jog around the same old route. Around Huntingdon Park, along California past Grace Cathedral, quick sprint up Larkin as far as Pacific. He’d hang a right there and it was down to Powell, back to Sacramento and home. Not that far, but he’d always done it fast and he’d done it easy, watching out for all the dog-walkers. And when he was back, well, he was precise in his routine then too. Shower for nine minutes, porridge made with Quaker oats and Tate and Lyle golden syrup, and then he was on the iThing or working the phones for the rest of the day. Then, when the day’s work was done, there was a ready meal for one in front of the TV. Comedies or action thrillers. The wrong guy had been a man of fixed habits. A solitary man with an unchangeable schedule. An easy job.

  She’d got him to the stage where he’d been used to her passing him in the opposite direction every day. They’d got as far as smiling and nodding, and then on day six she’d done it. She didn’t really know why she’d waited so long. Maybe it was that he was a good-looking chap. Maybe it was that she’d had some sense, some instinct that he might not be the mark. That he might just be a citizen. A civilian. After all, she could remember thinking it was weird that he had no security, no grunts running alongside.

  This mark, the right mark, he always has a grunt with him, sometimes two. He also varies his routine. He never does the same thing two days in a row. One day he goes running for three slow miles at nine. The next day he gets himself driven to that poncey gym on 3rd. The day after that he might workout at home with weights and barbells, his trainer standing over him. At other times he will emerge from the house and get a cab downtown and disappear.

  It’s very frustrating because she doesn’t want to be here. She wants to do the thing and hightail it home in time to properly prepare for Abkhazia.

  Catherine has been looking forward to Abkhazia because, for once, it isn’t just work. The work should actually be done pretty quickly and then she might get to spend a week hiking with Tough, and she always learns things with him.

  They’d met in 2003 in a museum in Rutbah, Iraq. She’d gone there on a whim to have a look-see after some Mickey Mouse mission nearby, and she’d arrived to see Tough apparently executing three US marines he’d found pissing on the exhibits. The soldiers were kneeling on the ground, blindfolded, gagged, hands bound behind their backs sobbing, choking, straining at the bonds that held them tight, while Tough stood behind them smoking a small cigar. Nearby a towel-head in the uniform of the museum service stood fidgeting nervously. Not knowing what was going on she had, of course, reached for her own gun, but Tough had turned slowly, seeming quite unconcerned, and he’d just grinned and shaken his head. And she’d been confused. He’d put his finger to his lips. Then he put his gun close to the left ear of each weeping soldier in turn, and fired pointing away from their heads. The shots were painfully loud in that echoing room.

  He fired three times and each time the blindfolded GIs must have thought that one of the others was getting whacked.

  After the reverberations of the third shot had died away, he’d said to her, ‘Now, you. You are bloody gorgeous. Fancy a wet? A proper one?’

  And so they’d left the soldiers, still bound, still gagged, still blindfolded, ear-drums ruptured, but alive and, Tough hoped, sadder but wiser grunts. And the two of them had found a tea shop downtown – a place where Tough was welcomed like an old friend. They had retreated to a cosy spot near the back. And, over tea and sticky cakes, they’d clicked.

  ‘This is Mesopotamia, the country where they invented the wheel. This is the land where humanity learned to make bread for fuck’s sake. Not to mention wine. And those animals were pissing on it all like dogs on a lamp post.’ Plus, he told her, two days earlier, three US marines had carried out mock executions on a group of Iraqi schoolboys.

  ‘So you thought you’d make them see what it felt like?’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s not only in the interests of justice. It’s good tactics too, isn’t it?’

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘Every time some dough-boy intimidates an Iraqi kid, or micturates on a piece of their culture, he simply ensures a thousand other people hate us. He gets his mates killed. He gets our mates killed. If we let it happen we’re being bad soldiers.’

  Tough should be in a comic book really. They should make films based around him. He was already fiftyish back then, with a permanently amused expression, desert-sky eyes radiantly blue in a lean face the colour and texture of sand. He was like Indiana Jones. And he had that great name.

  ‘I know. What else could I do except join the Army? Caused me some grief as a kid though. Everybody wanted to fight the kid called Tough.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Especially when they found out I was gay.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  Tough had raised an eyebrow, blown out a full lungful of poison from one of those stinky cigars he liked. ‘You don’t think I’m gay?’

  ‘Well, it’s hardly likely . . . is it?’ But the last part of the sentence was uncertain. Tough had la
ughed. ‘My dear, I’m out and proud and I don’t think my colleagues really care. As long as you do what you’re paid to do, and do it well, the Army is a very tolerant place. Don’t you find?’

  ‘Not if you’ve got a vagina it isn’t.’

  Tough had laughed again.

  And it was then that the American captain burst through the sequined curtain that separated their little nook from the rest of the tea shop. It appeared that he and Tough knew each other. The captain was tomato-faced and pretty aeriated.

  ‘I should have your fucking balls, Tough.’

  Tough had turned to look at him slowly. ‘Captain, I believe I have, through my actions today, saved you and your force a great deal of future trouble.’ And he’d outlined once again his theory about why it might be a bad idea, tactically, to go around desecrating the sacred works of the people whose hearts and minds were, in his opinion, crucial to the longer term strategic aims of the campaign.

  ‘And I have photos of what your goons were up to before I arrived. So off you jolly well fuck, there’s a good captain.’ And he had turned back to Catherine and, somewhat to her surprise, the captain had, indeed, fucked off.

  And they’d stayed friends since. Tough had been a mentor and a guide. Not just in Army stuff, and not just in getting her this gig after she left, but in everything else as well. Tough was one of those people who knew everything about everything. He knew about history, art, literature, music. He reminded her of the old boys who used to hang out in the library a lifetime ago. And he’d made her want to know those things too – and the old boys in Hildreth library had never done that. He wrote as well. Not books or anything, but letters. As far as she knew he’d never written an email, never sent a text. Instead he sent funny postcards and long, brilliant letters about the places he’d seen, and what he was reading or listening to. And the boys he was paying to bugger him.

  They’d known each other eleven years, and now Tough was some kind of special advisor to the government in Abkhazia. A place the size of Hertfordshire that had fairly recently won its freedom from Georgia by the inspired tactic of getting the Russians to bomb the shit out of the men from Tbilisi. Like a little kid getting his bad boy big brother to twat the reception-class bully.