by Stephen May
‘What the fuck? You don’t bring it here!’
Bingo.
‘New plan.’
‘Fucking A.’ The buzzer sounds angrily and Catherine pushes her way in and along the narrow hall that smells of flowers. Gardenias. The smell follows her as she goes up the stairs. That must be nice to wake to every morning, she thinks. Or maybe you don’t notice after a while.
The door to the apartment is open and she walks straight into the living room. A tall, handsome Latino is standing in the centre of the room, biting his thumb. He looks like a villain in a Western. Drooping moustache and everything. Long black hair slicked back. Maybe he could do with losing a few pounds, but he carries it well. The room is cheaply furnished but immaculate. On the foam cushion of a pale, oatmeal Naugahyde sofa sits a small girl, her eyes intent on some kind of DS. She doesn’t even look up.
The Latino guy faces Catherine, puts his hands on his hips. It makes him look even more like a gunslinger.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You a friend of Mary’s?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And it’s safe, right? I mean no one knows you’re here?’ He pulls at his moustache. ‘You want a drink or something? Water? Coke? Beer?’ He’s panicky, gabbling, absolutely not a pro.
‘Just water. Thanks.’
He goes to the kitchenette. While he’s gone, Catherine takes a proper gander round the room. Your typical hutch really. Everything very Sears and Roebuck. Nothing of value, no weapons.
And when the Latino comes back he says, ‘We only got con gas unless you want it from the faucet.’ And then he notices she’s got a gun pointing straight at him. Always surprises Catherine how long it takes people to register a gun in the room. And in this case it’s not just any gun, it’s her favourite gun, the one she hardly ever uses – a Smith and Wesson 38 special, Model 36, five-shot revolver J-frame, blued finish with Dymondwood grips. It was a present from Tough. He’d got it for her after the Iceland trip. Seems appropriate to use it for her last job.
Then she thinks maybe she could go back there. To Saudarkrokur. Disappear there. Live in a cabin miles from anyone, work in the Sportsbar maybe, write her kids’ books.
‘What the fuck?’
‘This is how it goes. I’m going to take the kid home. You try and stop me, I will take you out.’
The Latino is silent. Pondering his options. Catherine makes things easy for him. ‘You actually don’t have any options here,’ she says.
‘What about Mary?’
‘As I drive the kid home, you call and explain things to her. If she’s still at the house when I get there I’ll incapacitate her. Probably with lethal force. Depends how polite she is. How cooperative.’
‘You ain’t the police.’
‘No. I’m what the police should be.’
And then the kid looks up from her toy and says, clear as a bell in beautiful unaccented English, ‘I like it here. Don’t want to go home.’
Forty
LORNA
One of the English habits Megan has adopted is that of the lingering bath, which is why she is still in the tub when Amelia calls round.
Lorna is puzzled, people don’t just call round any more, they just don’t. And now it’s happened twice in two days. First Jez. Now Amelia. Conscious of the marketing emergency situation – whatever that could be – Lorna buzzes her up. So, maybe her and Megs won’t drive out to Russian Hill today after all, maybe she’ll catch up with her buddies from the nineteenth century instead. See if Mr Zwaademaker has anything else to teach her. That won’t be so bad.
She goes and calls through the bathroom door. ‘Hey, marine girl. Your boss is here.’
There are paroxysms of splashing behind the door, which opens suddenly. Megan appears – flushed, wet and naked – without so much as a towel. Clothed only in steam and panic. ‘God girl, you are magnificent,’ says Lorna, because her room-mate does look amazing, like some warrior lioness woman. Like Xena only hotter. Only she isn’t exactly acting much like a warrior. She’s jumpy, twitchy.
‘Shush, Lorna. Amelia’s here? Now?’
‘Yep, she’s on her way up.
‘You haven’t buzzed her in?’
‘’Course I have. Why not?’
‘Shit.’
Megan disappears behind a closed door again and Lorna goes to answer the knock on the door to the flat.
Amelia is wearing Roman sandals, a white shirt drawn tight on a blue skirt, her lips smiling, too red. And she is wearing too much blusher. She looks like she has got dressed in a hurry or with her mind on other things.
‘Hey, Lorna.’
‘Hey, Amelia.’
Lorna wonders if they are meant to kiss hello, but Amelia doesn’t seem inclined to go for one. ‘Come in, take the weight off your feet. Megs is in the bath. You were lucky to catch her in. We’re off out in a bit,’ which is a dig about not phoning first like normal fucking twenty-first-century people. But Amelia just nods.
‘She’s taking a bath?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Figures.’
A weird thing to say, and in fact the whole atmosphere is becoming so deeply odd that Lorna can feel her mouth going dry and her hands getting sweaty. ‘Can I get you anything? A cup of tea?’
‘Yes. OK.’
Yes. OK? One of the things Lorna has struggled to get used to over here is the lack of eagerness when offered tea. In England if you are offered a cuppa you seize on it with the enthusiasm of a dry man in a desert. ‘Oh yes!’ you say. ‘That would be lovely! I’d love one! A cup of tea! Yes, please!’ Cheap and easy to make it may be, but you celebrate each and every cup like it is a rare and exquisite spice brought back from Samarkand at great peril.
Not here. Here tea is just one more beverage option in a land full of them.
‘Right. How do you have it?’
‘Just black.’
And drinking it without milk is wrong, and not saying please or thank you is an absolute diabolical liberty.
She goes to boil the kettle and get out the cups. To make a point she’s going to do it all properly with a teapot, a milk jug – who cares if the Melster doesn’t take it – and those pretty little cups and saucers that they hardly ever use. She is going to use the loose Yorkshire tea bought on a whim in the English deli when she was downtown one day. She is going to use a strainer. Be the change you want to see. You want people to take tea-drinking properly, then you have to set an example.
Biscuits. Where are they? She hopes she didn’t eat them all last night while she was wondering where Megs was.
She didn’t. There are six left. Hobnobs. Another English product taking the States by storm. Perfect.
And now she hears a violent sneeze from the living room. And so she guesses that Amelia is being ostentatiously allergic to poor old Armitage Shanks. She hopes that Megs will be able to get rid of her pretty soon, though this work crisis is clearly bad enough to make everyone behave like freaks. Maybe the firm is going bust, which will be shit but at least they might be able to finally get to go on that Yosemite trip. And Megan will get another job. She’s skilled, talented, sorted. Anyone can tell that just by looking at her. She radiates competent good sense. Megan is the most employable woman she’s ever known. And, in any case, they are loaded now. Lorna has to keep reminding herself about that.
She carries the tray with all the necessary into the living room just as Megan walks in from the bathroom. She’s dressed carefully, Lorna can see that. Her super-skinny claret Hudson jeans. The ones that make her legs even longer. Her black Wildfox sweater. Her Porselli pumps.
Lorna pretends not to notice the heavy weight of the silence as she sets the tea things down.
‘Shall I be mother?’ she says and pours three cups, adding milk and sugar to hers even though she doesn’t usually take sugar, but it allows her to use the nifty little tongs she’s got from that vintage shop for three dollars. She knows Megan will notice this affectation and smile inside but that is all good, she wants Megan
to smile because things are a bit too bloody serious at the minute.
She’s just about to say she’ll leave them to talk business strategies and audience segmentation or whatever when Amelia speaks.
‘He won’t leave me.’ Her voice is dangerously even.
‘I know that,’ says Megan. ‘I don’t want him to. In fact I don’t want to see him again.’
‘Well that’s good, honey. Because you won’t.’
Lorna stirs her tea, takes a sip and leaves the room. This is clearly not the right place for her to be, but fucking hell – Megan and John? Jesus. This is huge.
Music would be good, but there’s nothing that fits. It needs to be loud so she won’t be tempted to try and overhear whatever is happening in the living room. Something loud. Something angry. Something from her loud and angry teens. Opeth.
She lies on her bed and looks at the ceiling. Megan and John? She doesn’t really know her room-mate at all obviously. How have they even managed it? And the whole dinner-party thing takes on a whole new colour. She decides that she is pretty pissed off about that.
Would they be able to say friends after this? Of course they would. Better friends. Or would they? Oh, it’s all a bit of a head-fuck.
Opeth do their madly angry shouty thing and she lets herself think of Megs and her down the line. Five years’ time? Ten? Maybe not room-mates any more, but living near each other in their own places.
And she thinks about the magnificence of Megan. Not just her body, but the all-round brilliance of her. And she wonders what it would be like if she found she actually did have a Sapphic bone or two somewhere in her body.
Maybe one night after too much drink and too many good songs and with the realisation that all men are wankers and that they are both gorgeous – both absolutely smoking fucking hot in fact – they’ll just start snogging and one thing might lead to another, and it’s common knowledge that sex with another girl is actually amazing. And she wonders which of them would be the mum if they decide to have kids. Maybe they both would. Maybe they would have a kid each. At the same time. That would shake up the NCT group. She wonders whether they’d be in the USA or the UK. Certainly be a whole lot cheaper to have their babies in England.
Then again, common knowledge is often wrong. For example, it is common knowledge that dope is a good thing but in Lorna’s experience stoners are very boring people. Give her a conversation with an insurance agent over one with a stoner any day. Which brings her back to John and Amelia.
She presses the remote, stops the album. It’s actually too, too loud, too, too angry. God, her teenage self was a state. Needed help. How come no one saw that back then?
In the sudden silence she wonders if maybe she’s overthinking things. It’s Megs she should be thinking about, because clearly things are fucked up for her right now, this minute. And of course, it’s now that Megs opens the door.
Lorna doesn’t look round. Keeps her eyes on the ceiling.
‘She gone?’ she says.
‘Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Pretty messy, huh?’ Megan says.
‘Just a bit.’
‘You got some questions?’
‘A few.’
‘Fire away.’
Lorna makes a big show of thinking. Puts her hand on her forehead. Then flips around on her bed so she can see Megan hovering sheepishly in the doorway. Sheepish doesn’t really suit Megan, Lorna thinks. Megan should be a beautiful she-wolf in beautiful she-wolves clothing at all times.
‘Question one: did you leave any biscuits? Question two: shall I make a fresh pot of tea? Question three . . . Question three is . . . Dear heart, what the fuck were you thinking?’
There’s a pause, then Megan tries to laugh but it comes out all wrong and suddenly she’s in tears. Lorna can’t feel pissed off any more. It’s not like when Jez was crying. Jez crying just got on her tits. Megan crying tugs at her heart.
She gets up off the bed. Crosses to her roomie and hugs her. ‘It’s OK, hon. If you’ve eaten all the biscuits we can get some more.’
Megan hiccups into Lorna’s hair. ‘It’s fine. There are still biscuits.’
‘That’s all right then,’ says Lorna.
And later, after more tea, after all the biscuits, after some chat about nothing that really matters because they agreed they’d talk about all of that other stuff some other time – maybe over a pool game (‘Like lads would,’ says Lorna, ‘they’re better than us like that.’) . . .
After all that, they finally go outside to drive to the city, like they’d planned, but they can’t get very far because the tyres on Megan’s Focus are flat. Slashed in fact. They won’t be going to Russian Hill today.
‘Bit petty?’ says Lorna. ‘Or fair enough?’
‘Fair enough, I guess,’ says Megan.
‘Can we start drinking now, do you think?’
‘I think that yes, yes we can.’
‘And I think that tonight we should aim for more than a pitiful thirty-two units, don’t you?’
‘Hell, yeah.’
Forty-one
NICKY
The first thing is to calm Mary, who is weeping noisily on the sofa. I can’t think with that racket. I put my arms around her and say the right things – not to worry, not her fault, they won’t harm Scarlett because then how would they get their money? I say all that but it’s hard because I absolutely hate her right now. I can’t help it. Logically, it’s probably really not her fault but it doesn’t matter – she was in charge and now our baby’s gone. She’s our irresponsible first babysitter, Noel, times a million.
When the tears have subsided a bit, I get her to show me the note. It’s a classic pantomime ransom note. You know, letters cut from newspapers and stuck onto card, the thing we’re all familiar with from childhood comics. I’m thinking the police would probably unravel this in minutes. They’d find out which editions of which papers the letters came from. Which shops they were bought from too probably. There’ll be DNA all over the letters, the card, the glue. There’s bound to be fingerprints. Maybe even the grammar of the note has a distinctive hallmark which would point to known suspects. But the police are never going to be in a position to see this note. We absolutely can’t take that risk.
My biggest fear is that whoever did this simply kills Scarlett once we’ve paid the money. She’s the only thing that can give them away. Why take the risk of looking after a kid who might attract attention? We’re clearly going to pay anyway, aren’t we? It’s not like dealing with Amazon or eBay is it? We can’t just ring a helpdesk and complain that we’ve paid but that our goods haven’t arrived.
I say this to Mary. I shouldn’t. I mean, Christ, she obviously feels guilty enough already. I shouldn’t even really acknowledge it to myself. Sometimes articulating things kind of makes them happen. Like you hear about people worrying out loud about their aches and pains being cancer and then that worry actually gives them the disease. I think what I’m probably hoping is that Mary will reassure me by explaining exactly why my fears are groundless, that of course they won’t do that and explaining scientifically why it would be crazy for these bastards to even think of that, how it would fuck up their whole game plan. How history and psychology and plain good sense mean that won’t happen, but of course she can’t do much in the way of reassurance right now. She’s in no fit state to.
But I tell her anyway – the thoughts have to go somewhere – and she looks shocked. ‘Fuck,’ she whispers, wide-eyed. ‘Fuck.’ And she looks so sick that I end up reassuring her. ‘It won’t happen. They won’t do that. These are businessmen. It’s just a transaction to them,’ I say. But of course businessmen will want to maximise profit and minimise risk. Getting rid of Scarlett removes risk entirely, without affecting their potential profit at all.
We could demand proof she’s alive before we pay I suppose, but what proof could we ask for? A photo of Scarlett next to the front page of the paper? A video with date and time along the bottom? That would only prove she was alive
up to the moment the picture or the video was taken.
Mary’s phone goes and she leaves the room to take the call. I remind her not to tell anyone about our situation and she snaps at me.
‘I’m not a retard,’ she says and tosses her pigtails from side to side. She is not one of those women who looks at their most beautiful when angry. She looks quite ugly in fact. But she’s under intolerable pressure here, I know. What if something does happen to Scarlett? How will she live with that? How can she go on?
Though people do. They have to.
Christ, I wish Sarah was here.
And I reach in my pocket to get my phone to call her, even though Mary says she’s called her plenty of times already. And that’s when I realise that I’ve left my phone in that psycho Catherine’s car, or the cafe or somewhere. It’s not here anyway. I haven’t got it. This makes me panic more than anything. Not having a phone makes me feel blind and helpless.
Less than two minutes later Mary’s back and scooping up her tote bag. The one that says ‘My bag. My rules’ in zany pink on the rustic hemp cloth. And she’s gone.
‘Got to go,’ is all she says.
I’m shocked. ‘Now?’ I say. ‘In the middle of all this?’
‘It’s all such fucking bullshit,’ she says and there are angry tears in her eyes. ‘Everyone lets you down. Everyone. In the end.’
And I say, ‘Look, Mary, there’s bigger things to worry about right now than your boyfriend troubles.’
She gives me a long, hard look. It’s chilling actually.
‘Fuck you, Russell,’ she says at last. ‘Fuck you. Fuck Sarah. Fuck the brat. Fuck your money. And fuck England too.’
On another day I’d probably laugh, but now, with my kid missing, possibly dead, with all the rage and fear I have dammed up inside me, I raise my hand. She stops me with a look. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she says. It’s enough. What am I doing? She’s just a kid herself. An angry kid full of guilt and fear. Just like me. Just like all of us. At moments of great stress we all become furious toddlers.
She heads for the door. Then spins back. ‘Land of Hope and Fucking Glory,’ she says. ‘Big joke.’ And then she really is gone, banging out of the doors, crunching down the gravel and power-walking away. I’ve never seen Mary at anything above languid before. She’s pretty speedy when she wants to be.
