‘Pay taxes, dick.’
‘Yeah, but our parents do.’
‘I just wish something would happen. Anything. You know?’
‘Telling me,’ said Stevie.
Dave sat up and looked groggily around. ‘Hang on,’ he said.
‘I think it’s stopped raining. When did it stop raining?’
Stevie squinted through the window for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s stopped.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Dave. ‘Fuck me.’
‘Let’s go find the Asian dudes,’ said Stevie in an American accent. ‘Have a game on the motorway. We should go out and challenge them to a game.’
‘What are you on about?’ said Dave, hearing himself giggle.
‘You hate football. You hate all sports.’
‘Correction, I used to,’ said Stevie. ‘I’m a new man now, don’t forget. I’m getting quite into football.’
‘We’ve got a Frisbee in the back.’
‘Don’t be a pussy. Look, I’ll prove it. I’ll prove it to you, I’ll prove it to them. Come on.’ He opened the car door, and a wedge of cold air slid in.
‘I can’t,’ said Dave, ‘I swear. I fucking can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Still lean, aren’t I? Still fucking biffed.’ He laughed, and Stevie laughed too.‘OK,’ said Stevie. ‘Let’s let you recover. Then we’ll challenge those cunts to a game and shit. Or play Frisbee, or whatever. I don’t fucking care.’
Involuntarily, Dave grinned. ‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Fucking anything for something to do.’
Cider
Now that they had eaten their fill, the three men in the white van – Rhys, Chris and Monty – sat in silence, staring out at the night; and when the rain descended, none of them commented, or even noticed, for a long time. The smell of burgers and chips lingered in the cab, that familiar smell that implied that the world was on pause and all was well. And it had been perfect: pulling cold slugs of Coke through straws, feeling the dull knock-knocking of ice-cubes against oversized cardboard cups, hearing the familiar squeak of straws adjusting in the X-shaped holes in the lids. The burgers had been moist and warm and comforting, like a childhood snog; they always disappeared too soon, that was part of it. And the fries had been stringy and salty and moist, to be gathered in little bundles to scoop up slicks of ketchup. Then they had licked their fingers, and stuffed the packaging into a brown paper bag, and finished their Cokes, and laughed, and the recent tension was all but forgotten.
‘It’s raining,’ said Monty at last. He looked across at the brothers: Chris had fallen asleep, his chin cushioned by the collar of fat around his neck, his lips lolling loosely; Rhys was sitting upright, staring straight ahead. Yet he didn’t appear to have heard him. In his eyes was the reflection of the windscreen, and within that the car-studded road; and across the glassy lens danced millions upon millions of raindrops.
‘What do you reckon he’s got under that hoodie?’ said Monty.
Rhys emerged from his reverie. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Who?’
‘Your brother. Look, under his hoodie. He’s got something.’
‘What, under there? Nah, mate, he’s just fat.’ Rhys leaned over and plucked the hoodie away, revealing a blue plastic bag. Chris let out a loud and irritated snore and sat up, laying his hands over it. His eyes opened; he rubbed them, gathering the bundle to his chest.
‘What’s that?’ said Rhys.
‘What’s what?’
‘That. That bag. There.’
‘What, here?’ Chris looked surprised at what he was holding in his arms. ‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Bollocks. Let’s see.’ Rhys leaned over and made a grab. Chris was groggy but managed to keep hold of it. Then, smiling, he opened it voluntarily.
‘Booze!’ Rhys exclaimed. ‘Chris, you fucking wanker. Give it here.’
Chris passed him a fat bottle of cider. He opened it – the bubbles foamed and bubbled – and took a long draught. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Rhys said, wiping his mouth. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?’
‘Emergency supplies, innit?’ said Chris. ‘Saving it for when the time’s right.’
‘The time’s been right for a long time, bruv. Fucking dick.’ Rhys took another long swig before handing it to Monty, who raised it to his lips and allowed himself a few mouthfuls – he was driving, in theory at least. Then he handed it back to Chris.
Rhys lit a cigarette, and his smoke rose in double helixes towards the ceiling. He dug out the takeaway cups from the brown bags of rubbish, tipped out the ice, and filled them with cider; by the time he had finished, most of the bottle was gone. He handed them out and whooped, loud and long, into the rain-filled silence: ‘To our fucking English streets.’
The brothers laughed as if they were already drunk, and took big gulps. Some splashed onto Chris’s chest as he drank. Then they let out almost simultaneous burps, replaced their cigarettes and laughed again.
Monty took a small sip and turned away, gazing out the window at the people in the Chrysler. It wasn’t such an idyllic scene this time. The woman was turning away, rubbing her forehead, and the black man was staring straight ahead, chin jutting. He looked away. The inertia, the rain, was oppressing him, and being in a confined space with Rhys and Chris made him feel like a caged animal. He leaned over and put on the radio, turning it up a couple of notches too loud. Then he pulled out his own cigarettes, took one out with his teeth and lit it with the van’s stubby lighter. Rhys was speaking to him.
‘So what I want to know, mate,’ said Rhys, raising his voice over the noise of the music, ‘is how I can get into this drugs game of yours.’
‘What?’ said Monty.
‘It’s all right for you, mate.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be a cock. This drugs game you’re playing. You’re flush all the time, innit? Got fucking cash coming out your arse. I ain’t got a job, innit? I want to, I dunno, I want to be your apprentice.’
Chris guffawed. ‘Me too. Fucking cool,’ he said, drawing out the ‘cool’ and tailing it off into a melody. ‘Alan Sugar, innit?’
‘You know I can’t talk about any of that stuff,’ said Monty.
‘For your sake as well as mine.’
‘What a hard bastard,’ said Rhys, ‘what a fucking hard bastard.’ He took another gulp of cider.
The sound of sirens cut through the air, through the music, like lasers, and flashing lights appeared in the mirror. Rhys and Chris instinctively held their ciders down low, and turned their faces from the window as the vehicles raced past on the hard shoulder.
‘Look,’ said Chris. ‘The pigs rush by with all guns blazing and old Monty don’t even flinch.’
‘You got to act completely normal,’ said Monty. ‘Anything else and they’ll pick it up.’
‘Anything else and they’ll pick it up,’ Rhys repeated girlishly.
‘Look,’ said Monty, his temper rising within him, ‘if you got something to say, just fucking say it. Be a man. Don’t just poof around, say it. I can’t be dealing with your shit all the time. You’re giving me shit all the time.’
‘I am the man-boob man,’ Chris interrupted, trying to defuse the tension.
‘Fine,’ said Rhys, licking his lips. ‘I think you’re a bit of a fucking poser, all right? A fucking posh poser. Happy now?’
‘What?’
‘All this hard man stuff. All this fucking money. All this swanning around the fucking world. All this big fucking talk. Some of us ain’t got no money, Monty. Some of us got a shit flat, and a shit fucking car, and not a pot to piss in.’
‘What you on about? I’m a labourer like you. That money stuff, it’s all for the sake of the boys, innit?’
‘Bollocks it is. You might fool Gaz like that, but you can’t fool me. I know what you’re in it for, mate. Your own big fucking ego. It’s all about being the big man with you. You don’t really believe in nothing.’
‘You take that back.’
‘Bol
locks I will. I’ll say what I think. What we all think. You don’t believe in what we believe in. You ain’t the same as us. For you it’s all just one big crack.’
‘You’re jealous, Rhys.’
‘You know it’s true. You know it’s fucking true.’
‘You know what’s true?’ said Monty. ‘You hate it that I’m the one that Gaz trusts. You hate it that I do all the shit in Europe. That I get to travel, meet the big boys, make the big decisions. And you don’t.’
‘Look at you,’ said Rhys. ‘There’s nothing to you, is there? All words, words, words. It’s people like me that are going to do this fucking thing. People who have the balls to stand up and be counted, to get our hands dirty. To get out on the fucking streets, week after week, with no fucking money behind us. My mum’s still on the waiting list for a council flat while all those fucking Muslims jump the queue. I’m the heart and soul of the boys, mate. Not you.’
‘I’m not going to waste my time doing this now, Rhys. I’ve already stopped you making a dick of yourself once tonight.’
‘What have you given up, mate? What have you sacrificed? Fuck all. You’ve bought your way to the top. Like a fucking banker wanker. Fucking tosser. But you can’t buy respect, Monty. You got to earn it.’
‘I’ve earned it, Rhys,’ said Monty. ‘You know I have.’
‘Bollocks you have. You didn’t even have the balls to get some fucking food from that van. We could of done with that, innit? Food, fucking posh toothpaste, all sorts. We’re going to be here all night, and it’s going to be shit. Because with Monty, all the fight is in his head. No red-blooded English guts.’
Monty began to say something, then stopped himself. ‘I’m going for a piss.’ Pulling the keys from the ignition, he swung down on to the road and slammed the door behind him. All at once, the brothers felt far away. The night air was crisp, shocking; the rain had abated, and the world left behind was more vivid than before. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the tarmac and stomped it out aggressively with his heel. He looked around. Cars, lorries, in every direction, and on the other side of the barrier nothing. So many people in the world! So many different lives! And here he was living in this trap. With people like Rhys giving him shit, after everything he’d done for the boys. Load of shit.
He vaulted over the barrier and walked up the grassy embankment. The wet grass enfolded his trainers, dampened the cuffs of his jeans. He groped for his anger, but strangely it had deserted him; instead he was filled with a feeling of dread, dark as the night. He looked over his shoulder: nobody. At the crest of the embankment he opened his flies. The piss took some time to come, but when it did it was good, fulsome and flowing, a pale line pattering in the darkness. It was cathartic and he felt strengthened. How pathetic to feel strengthened by a piss.
He could not recall the moment when his commitment to his job eclipsed his concern for the rest of his life. With each promotion he had become focused on the next step; and when the opportunity had come up to go undercover, he had jumped at it. He had not understood at the time what this kind of work could do to a man, how it could swallow up years of your life. The guy in the Chrysler. What did he have to put up with at work? Office politics, longish hours, perhaps a bit of RSI. He didn’t have to put up with . . . well, he didn’t have to put up with Rhys.
And he didn’t have to put up with enforced celibacy. These days it was out of the question. Getting involved with someone while on the job was a sackable offence, yet there was barely a time when he was not on the job. And he needed a woman, he needed one. It was a basic human need. He believed in what he was doing – the job satisfaction, he often told himself, was its own reward – but the successes were disproportionate to the long years of deprivation. Tonight was proving it: he had been unable to pursue a conversation with the woman by the supermarket van, as his obligations had been with Rhys. That woman. He had not even learned her name. It would probably have come to nothing. But maybe, on the other hand, a single conversation would have revealed a path to a different future. But he had not been able to allow himself to find out. And for what? For what? For what?
Something moved nearby. He looked down at the van. Both of the doors were closed; he could see the outline of Chris’s shoulders, hunched over his mobile; he could see the white glow of his screen. He peered into the darkness. There – a shape that didn’t fit. A human figure, crouching in the shrubbery. He sidestepped into the shadow of a tree and crouched down himself for a better view. Now there was a noise that didn’t fit; a whispering, of water perhaps, or someone’s fingers in the leaves. Then it stopped. The silhouette moved, fumbled, got to its feet. It took a step, then another, and emerged. A woman, facing away from him, stumbling down towards the motorway. By some sixth sense she turned, looked back. An Oriental woman, slim, bespectacled. She hurried down the embankment and disappeared.
Monty squared his shoulders and closed his eyes. He knew that in a moment he would have to go back down to the van and face Rhys. He balled his fists and opened them, balled them and opened them, then flung some punches into the air. He had no choice, he knew that. He would have to try to make peace.
Hubster
Shauna Williams raised her head from the steering wheel at the sound of sirens, watched the lights streak out of the world and pass away into it like something out of Star Trek or something. Knowing that it would be no use at all, she tried her phone once again, and once again it was dead as before. Rain was battering the outside of her car; the air was cold, but she didn’t want to start her engine. So she drew the soft folds of her jumper tighter around her body, up around her cheeks, and for some time visualised Hubster with his arms around her, warming her.
She was still horribly thirsty, and still her head was pounding. It was as if the end of the world had arrived. A numbness crept over her brain and much time passed. Nothing moved but the rain.
Inevitably, her thoughts turned back to the wedding. In the weeks preceding the ceremony, her anxiety had shown itself in disturbed sleeping and eating patterns, which were the dual indicators of mental unease, according to her therapist at least – the therapist she hadn’t seen for over a year. (Who had turned out to be far too balanced and successful to make her clients feel anything other than inadequate; her with her big fucking house in Primrose Hill, her thriller-writer husband, her picture-book children and Labradoodles. Her boutique boho style. Her perfect garden.)
At work Shauna had been stressed, and in the evenings she had gone out, night after night, and got drunk, a clichéd drunk drinking to forget. She had refused to give herself time to trawl through her memories of Seedie and what he had meant to her, what he still, if she was honest, meant. For this reason it wasn’t until the day of the wedding itself, when midway through the ceremony the sky behind the boiled-sweet-stained glass darkened and the buttery church light suddenly turned chill and grey, that she was reminded of the curse that she had invoked so many years ago. It had been contained, she remembered, in a letter she had sent to Seedie; it had been couched in playful terms, if unmistakably bitter in tone. Dear Seedie (she recalled with a start as she sat there nauseated in the darkening church in her turquoise and her fuchsia, avoiding the eye of his mother, looking up at him in his grandiose morning tails and Chloe in her exquisite off-the-shoulder ivory wedding gown, with that simple rollover neckline and Mikado mermaid silhouette), I do understand that sometimes people, like cruise ships, have to move on to new horizons. Well done you. I do also understand that Chloe is as decent a new horizon as any, given that you’ve made your mind up to leave Port Shauna. For your own reasons. Whatever they may be. So I wouldn’t dream of telling you that if you ever get married, you and Chloe, I hope it rains on your fucking wedding day. I wouldn’t dream of saying that I hope the inevitable poncey garden party in Hampshire is a washout, and everybody’s hats get ruined. Because that would be incredibly rude. Wouldn’t it. With very best wishes, S.
So the curse had been cast. And it was before th
e end of the ceremony that the rain, utterly unforecast, began to fall. As Seedie’s lips drew to Chloe’s at the crowning moment of the thing, Shauna fancied she heard a thunderclap, as if the day had been choreographed by the Wizard of Oz.
The morning having been spotlessly clear and bright, little provision had been made for the downpour. An umbrella was somehow found for the bride and groom, and they left the church amid a half-hearted shower of soggy confetti, which fell from the air in woebegone clumps. Everybody put a brave face on it, tried to frame it as romantic, as a sign of grace, as a novelty that would give people something to remember (in which lay the tacit acknowledgment that until that point the wedding had been unremarkable in every way).
Shauna, trying to stifle her superstition, and attempting – unsuccessfully – to brush it off, left the church even more anxiously than she had entered it. She got through the inevitable handshake with the mother, the father, the kiss on the cheek of Seedie himself, and of Chloe, without incident. She had sailed through numbly, thinking of nothing, ‘Raspberry Beret’ still playing relentlessly in her ear, allowing herself to channel polite convention as a witch doctor channels the spirits.
Then came the champagne. With strawberries bobbing in it, bejewelled with golden bubbles. With waiters subtly offering refills when the glass was only half-empty – a ploy, Shauna was convinced, to get the guests trolleyed. In her case certainly it worked. The reception was held in the house itself instead of the garden, while the staff scurried around outside collecting umbrellas, moving buckets of champagne to shelter, sealing the marquee like a submarine. It stretched on and on, that reception in the house, while the sky framed in the old windows glowered more angrily than ever, and began hurling down great twisting sheets of water that exploded relentlessly across the county. Elemental. The rain was complicating things for the staff; there was so much more to be done. Still the champagne flowed. Shauna found herself in a corner of the drawing room, sitting side-saddle in the window seat, talking to a man with very high cheekbones and big pink hands, who went by the name of Hodgy and was busy learning Arabic for the Foreign Office. They had started their conversation as parts of a group, but somehow this and that had come up and people went this way and that, and then it was just him and her fixed by the window, and she shunted up to make room beside her on the seat while the rain sprayed like gravel handfuls on the glass behind them. Their legs touching from thigh to knee, their arms elbow to shoulder as well. Hubster? In her excitement and growing drunkenness she mistakenly called him Podgy, and he flushed a shepherd’s delight, and in the ensuing laughter she nuzzled her head into his chest like a foal. Thereafter a lone waiter entered with more bubble-beaded champagne; they accepted almost without noticing, but both refused the strawberries. Hodgy was a big man, strapping, with a laugh that resounded in her gut. He was also, she reluctantly detected, rather boring, and possibly a bit of a wanker. But the quantity of bubbly was such that these imperfections were smudged out in the roseate haze of alcohol. And then they were called for dinner.
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