by Knight, Ali
‘Yassir, you do the offices upstairs,’ barked Kamal, ‘and Darren, you do Newman ward. And today I’m checking every inch of what you clean.’ He wiped a hand across his sweating brow.
Darren tried very hard to look disappointed.
He cleaned the corridors in double-quick time, keen to get to the rec room. A line of women filed past at one point and he feared he would miss her, but when the door was opened for him he could see Olivia standing by the window, feet apart, her baggy elasticated trousers see-through in the sun. The silhouette of her legs and bum was clearly visible. She turned and he could see the swell of her breasts before the effect was lost as a cloud passed over the sun outside.
Darren mopped across the main thoroughfare of the room towards the windows and towards her, passing Linda, parked nearby. She smiled vaguely at him as he mopped under her wheels. Olivia watched him the whole time, unmoving. He ran the mop across the dust on the floor-level runners that opened the plate glass door, should anyone have a key, to the courtyard garden beyond.
‘Walls make people talk. I’ve learned things about you.’
He looked up at her. Olivia’s eyes seemed to glow with flecks of yellow, reflected from the willow tree in the courtyard. He found he couldn’t look away.
He blushed with embarrassment, pulled a cloth from his pocket and began to wipe the window. ‘Oh yeah? Like what?’
‘That you’re an artist, Biological. With a degree and everything.’ She said it quietly, so softly that he had to take a step nearer to hear her. ‘Intelligent. So my question is, why is a bright boy like you cleaning floors in a shithole like this?’
Darren felt his stomach moving unpleasantly. If she had found out that already, then she probably knew he had a dead sister and that he was from Streatham. He began to panic. He had been unbelievably naïve and stupid, to not even consider that casual conversation in the upper offices or from Kamal could get back to her. He met her eye. He had not thought this through, this half-cocked plan to insinuate himself into the world of his sister’s killer; he had never considered that she might discover who he was all by herself – and take his power away from him in one moment.
Her face had turned blank and hard, the soft grins and melodious inflections gone. Her moods were like quicksilver, benign one moment and threatening the next. He had no idea what she knew about him, how much Carly might have told her about her life and her family, how long they had spent together. I’m trying, Carly, he said to himself, I’m trying so hard to get back to you.
‘I’d keep mopping if I were you, they might notice you staring otherwise.’
Darren tried to recover his composure. ‘You think this job is too good for a graduate?’
‘Oh yes, Biological, you’re too good to be true.’
He took a step away, like she was a cobra about to attack, not liking the implications of what she was saying.
‘And then there’s your hair. I imagine it doesn’t get like that without a lot of sun, sea and salt. You’re a surfer or a swimmer aren’t you?’
The gold flecks were back in her eyes now, a come-hither smile on her face.
Darren needed desperately to take control of this conversation, but he simply didn’t know what to say, and stared at her like an imbecile instead.
She sensed his discomfort. ‘What would you bring me in here, if you could?’
‘A noose.’ It was out of his mouth before he had time to consider the consequences and felt for two long seconds that he had blown all his hard work up till now.
But Olivia laughed. Darren took advantage and ventured nearer her with the mop. ‘Actually, I don’t want you to die. Because then those girls will never be found.’
A strange look came over her face and she gazed out of the window at the brilliant summer day she was denied. Her lip curled with disdain. ‘The missing. There are so many of them.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s true.’
‘Cleaner! Move away from the patient please, you’re here to work, not chat.’ A male nurse by the desk was looking over, annoyed.
Darren moved quickly to the low bookshelf filled with tatty paperbacks, frustration overwhelming him.
‘Martyn, I’m just passing the time of day with a new member of the Roehampton family.’
‘Save it, Olivia, I’m not interested,’ Martyn snapped back.
She looked over at Darren and something passed between them. There were so many setbacks and obstructions to his snatched moments with her. He was gathering tiny crumbs from her when he needed to gorge on a big fat cake, but he felt he was getting somewhere, he really felt it.
14
After Darren had seen Olivia twice in quick succession, she now frustratingly disappeared from view and he didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of her for his next three shifts on Newman ward. At the end of eight hours of back-breaking and mind-numbing corridor-wiping on a hot day he’d put the mop and cleaning tools away, changed back into his civilian clothes and was queuing to get past the last security check before the doors to the car park.
The security checkpoint was airport-style, and beeped if something metal such as a mobile phone, laptop or watch was not put in the plastic trays that went round the side. It was manned most often by Nathan, a security guard and part-time model.
Nathan had already begun to high-five Darren when he saw him at the end of his shift. This afternoon they said hello and Darren realised Chloe was in the queue ahead of him, gathering up her things from the tray.
‘How you doing, Darren, OK?’ Nathan asked him.
‘Yeah great. You?’
‘Surviving.’
‘You know you really look like that actor, Bradley Cooper.’
Nathan’s smile was very white and very charming, but Chloe turned round and rolled her eyes. ‘He gets that all the time.’
‘You met Darren yet? This is Darren,’ Nathan said. ‘He’s new.’
Chloe turned towards them both now. ‘Yeah, we met.’ She peered out through the doors into the car park.
Darren had to get her attention before she disappeared for the day. ‘Did you do them mashed or chipped today?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Did you do the potatoes mashed or chipped?’ he said again, feeling lame and awkward.
She smiled cautiously. ‘Both. Nothing but the best for our inmates.’
Nathan was examining the tassels on her bag, listening to their conversation.
‘Do they eat the mash?’ Darren asked.
She looked affronted. ‘Course! That’s all they’re going to get.’
‘That depends on how well you cook it.’
Nathan was running his fingers along a tassel, Darren quite sure he was listening.
‘I’d be a pretty poor caterer if I couldn’t do mashed potato.’
‘It’s hardly Masterchef.’
She looked at him, annoyed. ‘Cleaning the toilets here is hardly being a valet at Claridge’s.’
‘Is that where you’d like to work?’
‘No. It’s where I’d like to stay and have people like you cleaning up my crap.’
Nathan was taking an age with her bag, just so he could enjoy Darren’s embarrassment. He finally pushed the bag to the end of the table and Chloe popped the turnstile over with a side wiggle of her hips, picked up her bag and walked away.
‘I don’t think that went well,’ Nathan said, giving Darren his best sad actor face. Darren said nothing, because there was nothing to say. ‘Cheer up, you could be one of those befrienders over there.’ He nodded towards a short line of visitors queuing at another desk.
‘Who are they?’
‘They’re the people who visit the inmates, keep them company, talk to them.’ He saw Darren’s blank face. ‘The inmates’re allowed to have visitors, people who make them feel better.’
Darren looked over. ‘Do any of them visit Olivia?’
‘She gets more than anyone else! She’s famous, you know.’ Nathan si
ghed a little. ‘More famous than me, anyway. See that guy in the boots? He’s hers.’
The man Nathan was talking about was tall and young, in dark green clothes and combat boots covered in a sheen of white dust. He was turned away and Darren couldn’t see his face.
‘I fear you haven’t got a chance with Chloe mate, gorgeous though she is.’
‘What’s that?’ Darren zoned back in to what Nathan was saying.
‘That’s the boyfriend. In the wanky motor.’ They both stared out at the car park at a man in sunglasses behind the wheel of an open-topped Audi sport.
‘Shit.’
Chloe jogged round to the far side of the car, threw her catering uniform in the back seat and got in.
‘Like I say,’ Nathan added. ‘We’re too poor and too late. He’s come every day for a week.’
‘He doesn’t work then?’
Nathan snorted. ‘He’s a student, he doesn’t bloody have to.’
Darren was horrified. ‘He’s a student driving that car?’
‘That, my friend, is why you – and I – are in here, and she’s out there.’ They both watched as the Audi pulled away.
15
Victoria Coach Station, London
The man could make his pint last a long time as he sat at one of the pub’s outdoor wooden tables, shielded from the rain by the dull plastic roof above the entrance to Victoria Coach Station. A few feet from him untidy groups of weary travellers walked past, pulling suitcases, before they turned the corner and were swallowed up into Europe’s biggest city, their long journeys at an end. It was hard to imagine that Britain was an island state when buses arrived in a continuous stream from Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Zurich and towns further east: Split, Krakow, Sarajevo, dust-blown shitholes in Eastern Europe he’d never visited – and never would, if he was lucky. There was still the regular service clattering in from Cork, but the girls on that route were older now, richer, fatter and world-weary, their Catholic innocence groped away long ago.
The Eastern European girls were the ones he wanted to watch as he nursed his pint: the thin girls in the cheap clothes with plastic suitcases, grabbing for their first post-bus cigarettes. They were the ones he hunted with his eyes.
There were few who didn’t fall into the arms of this person or that, weren’t insulated by family or an address on a scrap of paper, but sometimes he would spot the rare one: a bag so small she could carry it on her skinny shoulder or, even better, no baggage at all, and no phone. Everyone has a phone, people said. It was the lazy comment that unthinking people threw out. You only needed a phone if you had someone to call. And he could spot the women who had nothing and no one. The women looking for rescue, thinking that where they were going would be better than where they were coming from. Their fear on arrival at their destination calmed him. They seemed stunned by the size of the task ahead of them, how hard it was to start over, a new town with new and unfriendly faces. These were the women who had bought into the cruel dreams of youth; the delusions of the army of the missing. And he would grip the pub table so hard that he would break his fingernails.
He felt the alarm vibrate on his phone – he’d been here half an hour. That was all he allowed himself, like a meth addict who needed a hit. He was still in control of his urges – just – and that made him feel triumphant and invincible. He knew that the security cameras covering the exit of the station actually worked, that the film was kept and filed. Life was a series of calculated risks, and following a young piece of meat as it left the station was one he was not prepared to take.
Even though he would never bump into anyone from work or his social life while having a drink here – they had long ago abandoned public transport for taxis and chauffeurs courtesy of the taxpayer – he might possibly one day bump into a friend’s child slumming it to Europe. Although, even those pampered children mostly flew easyJet to the sun. The coach was for the truly desperate, and it was the truly desperate that he craved.
He got up from the table, yanked down the cuffs of his blue shirt and walked away. He was sweating; his desires would need to be sated soon. He turned on an old mobile he had bought earlier that day off a foldaway table on the Camberwell Road and made a call. ‘I need product.’
There was a sigh of resignation from the man at the other end of the line. ‘There’s a problem. I don’t have anything, there’s been a real squeeze lately.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing.’
‘Don’t fuck me around!’ He was frantic now, his voice low, as desperate as a drug addict pleading in an alleyway.
‘You can harass me all you want. You’ll have to go elsewhere. We’re all feeling the pinch.’ He hung up.
The man tried to contain his anger. He yanked on his blue cuffs again. Gert Becker usually had what he needed and it was a serious problem for him that he didn’t.
16
Darren spent every one of his shifts braced for any opportunity to snatch a meeting with Olivia, but more practical problems were proliferating. He had only one uniform and was continually running the risk of his mum seeing the Roehampton logo that was emblazoned on the top when he washed it, so he had to go to see Kamal to get another set of clothes.
Kamal led him to the large cupboard outside his office, picked out a new top and trousers and handed it to him. ‘The girls love a man in uniform, you’ll be beating them off with a stick – or a mop!’
Darren tried to smile, hoping he could then slip away without spending any longer with Kamal, but his boss led him back into his office. ‘Your DBS check, where is it? Get me the paperwork or you’re out the door.’
‘Um, OK, yeah …’
‘And you haven’t filled in the form with your bank details. Without those, you won’t get paid. You want to work here for free?’ He passed Darren a slip of paper and a pen.
Darren hadn’t filled in the form because he was using the wrong surname. He had to stall Kamal. ‘I don’t know the numbers, I’ll fill it in at the end of my shift.’
‘Yes you will, you’ve wasted enough of my time already. Now get to work or I’ll deduct you and you won’t get paid!’ Darren took his mop and bucket and waited by the door. Kamal appeared next to the group of cleaners and handed out the areas of the prison. ‘You do Newman today,’ he said to Darren as the door buzzed open.
Failure stalked Darren as he cleaned the corridors and worked his way to the rec room. He couldn’t hold Kamal off on the paperwork forever; he was about to run out of time to achieve anything at Roehampton.
The inmates were there as he was buzzed in. Women leaned against the glass of the rec room doors or talked in low murmurs together. Olivia was sitting in a chair, alone. He had never seen her talk to any of the other inmates. She probably felt she was above them; there was probably a prison hierarchy and she had the hubris to think she sat at the top. His eye caught hers.
He pushed the bucket across the floor, working from the outside of the room towards the window. The willow outside danced in the wind.
He glanced around the room, at the two nurses by the door, the women moving lazily to and fro. Linda had her eyes open now and was watching them from her wheelchair, her mouth working slowly from side to side, like a cow enjoying a field of spring grass. Darren’s mind was a whirl, calculating how best to use this precious opportunity. ‘You were talking about the missing,’ he said quietly.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. He could see the fury like it was pulsing through her body. A vein pumped in her temple, her eyes were red and hard and mean.
‘You think this is a joke? That I wouldn’t notice who you were?’ His sense of discomfort grew and he pushed the bucket away. ‘You think I did what I did for my own pleasure? That I’m in here because I was stupid enough to get caught?’
Something was terribly wrong. ‘I’m just working.’ Darren turned and walked away, scared. He felt a movement behind him, but before he could even turn his head, the mop was gr
abbed from his hand. He flinched and spun, thinking she was about to strike him, but he heard instead the dull crack of the mop hitting Linda in the face. Linda’s head snapped to the side, an arc of blood and spit arcing across the lino.
He tried to say something that sounded like ‘no’, but it died in his throat as he stumbled backwards.
Olivia lifted the mop and jammed the end of it into Linda’s mouth. The wheels of the chair were on lock, carefully applied by a nurse earlier. The wheelchair toppled backwards under the force of the handle and Olivia began to pulverise Linda’s face and throat with the end of the mop handle.
Darren jumped on Olivia and they tumbled to the floor, Linda’s face a Rorschach inkblot in black and scarlet. A wailing siren exploded across the rec room as Olivia bucked and writhed beneath Darren like a lover. She lunged towards his neck and for a horrid moment he thought she was going to bite him, but she whispered in his ear instead.
‘I know who you are, Darren Evans! I recognised you from a press conference your family gave!’
Darren felt strong hands pulling him off her as a team of six men armed with batons surrounded them. As soon as they were separated Olivia lay still on the floor, submitting without struggle to being carried away, one man taking each of her limbs, one supervising and one carrying a restraining jacket. She never took her eyes off Darren.
Someone turned the alarm off and silence rushed back in. The remaining women in the room were being hustled away by other staff.
A medical team was dealing with Linda, her pink slippers bobbing and jerking. Darren could hear wheezy breathing as she struggled to take in air. Something was broken. He saw a small grey object on the floor by the wheelchair and realised it was a tooth.
A nurse began to try to examine him too but Darren pushed him away.
‘Don’t look,’ the man advised and turned Darren to the wall as he led him out to the door. Behind him Linda’s gurgling and thrashing were becoming more desperate.
