‘Think again. Think legitimate. Think global.’ Julian thought again and could only come to one unpleasant conclusion.
‘The arms trade?’
‘Bingo,’ Rami said, pointing at Julian as if the room was full of people and he was the first to get it right. ‘And the fastest-growing area of the arms trade is remote-controlled warfare using computers. No different to gaming, really. No different at all.’
Julian sat back in his chair, contemplating Rami. It was as if he was wilfully disregarding Julian’s history. ‘Weapons are not much better than drugs, are they?’ he asked. ‘Besides, you know my—’
Someone knocked on the glass door behind him. He looked round to see their office manager, Naomi, who had been with them for nearly six years. She had grown to become an indispensable part of the company and was the only woman, as far as Julian knew, that Rami looked up to, possibly because she was too old (or too black) to make it on to his sexual radar. Julian had encouraged more from Naomi who’d initially taken the secretarial job on offer as a way of filling the void caused when her kids (soon followed by their father) had flown the nest. But she’d shown an organizational ability both he and Rami lacked, acting as their de facto human resources person. If Julian hired on technical ability, Rami did it on communication skills and, if the candidate was female, looks and charm, so Naomi brought a level head and usually had a deciding vote. ‘Look, we’ll talk about the deal later, maybe after dinner, but I’m not talking about making weapons here, I’m talking about software. Listen,’ he said, tapping Julian’s knee, ‘keep it under your hat for now, things could still go tits up. I haven’t said anything to Naomi.’ He waved Naomi in before Julian could reply. He stood up to leave.
‘By the way,’ Rami said, ‘can you and Sheila be at the restaur-ant by seven thirty tonight? We’ve got to eat early because Cassie’s got a crack-of-dawn flight tomorrow.’
As he turned away from Rami, Julian made a face at Naomi who smiled knowingly. He went next door to his office. Rami had used the word ‘deal’, like he had already made one. The ache in his gut started up again but it wasn’t long before he was attending to a question from one of the coders.
FOUR
Sheila showered off a day’s worth of London grime. She’d shown properties in central London to three interested buyers, made two valuations, taken various offers from potential buyers by phone and relayed them to sellers, then relayed back the responses. As a result she had acquired one more property for her portfolio and made exactly no sales. But some days that’s how it went and she’d gained a good property to have on the books. She came out of the en suite to the sound of her ringing mobile. She checked the caller ID before she picked it up.
‘Hello, Jules.’
‘Hi, babe.’
‘You on your way home?’ She moved to face the long mirror, wedging the phone between ear and neck so she could dry herself with the towel.
‘No, I’m ringing because I’m making up time for this morning at the doctor’s.’
‘OK. But we’re meeting Rami and his new girlfriend tonight,’ she said, unsure why he had to make up time since he was a partner in the company, but then he was conscientious if nothing else.
‘Yep. And we have to be there by seven. She’s got an early start, apparently.’
‘She’s probably got homework to do,’ Sheila said, and listened to Julian chuckle.
‘So, sell any houses today?’ he asked.
‘No, but I landed a brilliant one to the portfolio. A house off the Fulham Road, near South Ken Tube. They’re usually divided into flats, which go for over two mil each, and this is a whole bloody house.’
‘Great. I meant to ask, you’re being careful, aren’t you, when taking men round on their own? It’s just there was that case.’ Ah, yes, the case of the estate agent murdered when showing some bloke round an apartment. Sheila liked to think that her clients were a cut above that sort of thing, that rapists and murderers were priced out of the market.
‘Yes, dear. I always take David with me if it’s a man on his own,’ she said, although she only did that after dark or if she wasn’t sure about the buyer. But she wasn’t going to get into a discussion with Julian about her personal safety; in some respects he was worse than her mother had been. Besides, she’d never had any trouble showing a man on his own round a house. An appreciative look, yes, and the odd invitation to dinner that she’d declined. ‘Just don’t be late home,’ she told him.
‘Well, that’s the thing. Do you mind if we meet at the restaur-ant? You can take a taxi if you don’t want to walk.’
After agreeing to see him there she hung up, turning to examine her profile in the mirror. She stood on the balls of her feet to see what effect that had on her behind. She hadn’t asked Julian how he’d got on at the doctor’s, but she’d lost interest in his visits and various tests about the time it had become obvious that nothing was physically wrong with him. She’d told him he should take up exercise, and suggested he join her at one of the Pilates classes she attended. But he’d called Pilates a ‘women’s thing’ and declined, despite the promise of lithe young women in leotards to ogle. Most of them, in fact, were younger than her. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror, pulling at the skin of her neck. Not bad for someone technically nearer fifty than forty, she thought, not bad at all. Perhaps it was the silver lining to the cloud of not having had children. She stopped that train of thought by drinking from the glass of chilled white wine she’d brought up before her shower. That first drink after work was always a blessing.
Since she had the place to herself she put on Stevie Nicks’ The Other Side of the Mirror really loud, then, singing along, she danced across the polished hardwood floor to the wardrobe, from where she chose a variety of summer dresses to lay on the king-sized bed where she could contemplate them at leisure.
FIVE
In the driver’s seat of a London taxi parked on a residential street off the Parsons Green end of Fulham Road, Boris studied his dyed moustache in the rearview mirror. The taxi was rented on a weekly basis using a fake Green Badge, the licence all London cabbies needed. The tinted windows had been a pleasant bonus. In the mirror he noticed that he had missed a stray hair when trimming it that morning and took out a small penknife from which he unfolded a tiny pair of scissors. Pulling at the rogue hair, he snipped it as close to the skin as possible and checked the result. The wrinkles around his eyes he could do nothing about, but he quite liked the effect, as did the English women he paid to escort him to dinner and beyond when in London. English women were what he insisted on, none of these eastern Europeans who reminded him of those grim nights in the eighties spent doling out training to so-called allies. What a waste of time that turned out to be. He checked the mirror again. He still had a full head of thick wavy hair, and had allowed a little of the grey to remain at the temples. But the moustache couldn’t be allowed to age, no way, nor could his crotch hair. He felt that there had to be consistency in an illusion, even if it was just for the benefit of women paid to enjoy his company. It was the least he could do. He found the switch that opened his window and deposited the offending hair outside. The houses were nice, semi-detached, three storeys high, bay windows on two floors, little gates on to a big enough space in the front for a couple of plant pots, sometimes a small tree. London in the summer was bearable. He could hear music playing, coming from the open window of the top floor of the house he was watching. A female vocalist, some horrible eighties power ballad. He had come to loathe most things from the eighties. It must have been put on by the fit-looking blonde woman (even if she was a bit thin for his tastes) in the trouser suit who had arrived on foot twenty minutes ago. If this is where Julian now lived, and that woman was his wife or partner, then he had done well for himself, no doubt about that. Boris put his ear to the open window. He could swear the woman was singing along. It wasn’t his type of music, really; he was more of a klezmer fan.
SIX
The
first thing Julian noticed when he arrived at the restaur-ant on the King’s Road – another bloody sushi bar that was all the fashion – was Sheila’s dress. To his mind it revealed too much of her, plunging at the neck, hugging her hips and ending mid-thigh. The inappropriateness of her dress was only made more obvious by the fact that Rami’s companion – late twenties, he guessed – Cassandra, who was sitting next to Sheila at a table perpendicular to the conveyor belt that circulated plates of food, had superior cleavage on display. Sheila cocked her head at him when he sat down at the table which Julian took as a ‘what-about-it?’ challenge, and her easy grin told him all he needed to know about how much she’d had to drink. Introductions over, they helped themselves to plates of food that passed by the table.
Cassandra was nice enough, and hardly the bimbo they had presumed she would be. She told them about her PR job in the construction industry, how she was flying to Moscow in the morning for the third time that month. Moscow was a crazy place to do business, she said. It was like someone had let the leash off capitalism.
‘Have you two been to Russia at all?’ she asked.
Julian shook his head.
‘I spent a few months there as a teenager,’ Sheila said. ‘My father was at the embassy.’
Cassandra looked interested but Rami spoke first. ‘Julian used to be a communist at university,’ he said. ‘But he saw sense in his final year. Or maybe Sheila made him see sense.’
‘I wasn’t really a communist as such.’
‘He didn’t display communist tendencies when I met him,’ Sheila said. ‘In fact, you were pretty anodyne when it came to politics.’
‘Anodyne?’ Julian said, feeling annoyed.
‘I remember you attended meetings in your first year,’ Rami said. Sheila looked at Julian, a question on her face.
‘Well,’ Cassandra was saying, ‘I don’t know if the Russians are better off under capitalism. Except there are some very, very rich people now and they’ve managed to create the illusion of democracy.’
‘It’s a tough one to call,’ Rami said.
‘No pogroms though,’ Sheila said.
‘That’s the benchmark, is it?’ Julian asked, trying to curb his annoyance. ‘If there are no pogroms then everything is all right?’
‘Maybe we should do business in Russia,’ Rami said, picking another covered plate from the conveyor belt. They already had a small fortune of used coloured bowls stacked in the middle of the table.
‘You’d love it there, Rami. It’s like feminism has never happened. And some of the clubs … and the women, wow. But you have to be able to take your vodka.’ She patted his hand, managing to be both patronizing and flirtatious. Julian could see the appeal of Cassandra to Rami. She was vivacious, pretty, articulate, a young woman in a young woman’s body. In Julian’s eyes there was something fake about her, but then he found himself thinking that about a lot of people he met.
‘I need the loo,’ Sheila said.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Cassandra said, shuffling off the bench after Sheila, who looked surprised.
Julian smiled at Sheila; no doubt her days of going to the bathroom with other women had passed.
‘You can tell me all the things about Rami he hasn’t told me,’ Cassandra said.
Sheila raised her eyebrows questioningly at Rami and said, ‘How much to keep quiet?’
Rami smiled nervously. The women laughed and walked off, Cassandra leaning in to Sheila and chatting as they walked. Julian prodded with a chopstick at something wrapped in seaweed.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Rami asked. ‘About Cassie, I mean.’
Julian shrugged. ‘She seems nice enough.’
‘There’s a vote of confidence, right there.’
‘Come on, man. You get through women like sushi dishes. No sooner have you chosen one than something better comes down the conveyor belt.’
He didn’t say anything but fished something out of the pocket of his jacket, which was folded neatly next to him. It was a business card, which he handed to Julian.
‘I took Cassie here. She loved it. Amazing little boutique hotel with a spa. Take Sheila. Treat her.’
‘OK,’ he said, pocketing the card unread, a little put out by being told to treat Sheila, like an accusation that he didn’t treat her enough. He turned to Rami. ‘About this deal you’ve concocted. I don’t need to tell you I’m not getting involved in the arms trade again, even if it is on the margins. You know where I came from.’
Rami, still in his work suit, ran a hand inside his open shirt and absent-mindedly fingered the hair on his chest. It was a habit Julian used to believe betrayed self-love on Rami’s part, but he now thought it to be a self-comforting thing, like when Sheila had pointed out that he unconsciously rubbed the back of his head.
‘Yes. I know you came from British Aerospace and that you hated it there. I remember when you joined them straight from UCL. I was surprised given your politics, but you’d just met the lovely Sheila and you made what I thought was a pragmatic decision. Now, I want our company to make a pragmatic decision, one that will save ten jobs, possibly the business, and probably mean taking on more people.’
‘Things aren’t that bad, Rami. Look at the small companies that have folded.’
‘Really? And we’ve gone from thirty people to ten because why?’
‘Things fluctuate in this business, you know that. You get a contract, you take people on for the length of the contract. That’s how it works in software development.’
‘That’s bullshit. I’m talking about a core workforce, not people we take on when we’re pushed. Look, just listen to the job before you decide, it’s not what you think.’
Julian could see the women coming back, single file. Cassie was in front and for a couple of seconds he appreciated the way she negotiated the chairs with her hips, like a skier on a slalom. He caught Sheila’s eye and she gave him a faint smile, letting him know that she’d caught him checking Cassie out but that it was all right. He reciprocated and turned back to Rami.
‘Look, I’m not doing it. Which means we’re not doing it.’
‘Not doing what?’ Cassie said, as they got back in their seats.
‘Not taking on a lucrative new contract, that’s what,’ Rami said. Sheila looked at Rami then Julian, but Julian gave her a this-isn’t-the-time shake of the head.
‘So did Sheila give you the low-down on Rami?’ he asked Cassie, by way of distraction.
‘It may come as a surprise to you that women don’t talk about men when they are alone,’ Sheila said. ‘There are plenty of more interesting topics.’
‘Really?’ Rami asked. ‘Like for instance?’
She exchanged a glance with Cassie and poured herself some more wine too quickly so that it splashed on the tablecloth.
‘So what is this contract that Julian doesn’t want to take on?’ she said, looking directly at Rami. Julian knew she was deliberately provoking him and he was determined not to show his annoyance.
‘Something that would make early retirement possible,’ Rami said.
‘Really? Not his silly video games thing,’ she said.
‘No, something using the same GPS know-how but for a more grown-up purpose. But your partner has qualms, Sheila. Principles, even.’
Sheila laughed, loud enough to turn heads at the next table.
Annoyed, Julian said to him, ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it?’
He shrugged. ‘If it’s not going to happen, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?’
‘I think you two guys should talk about work some other time,’ Cassie said, putting her hand on Rami’s. ‘You’re putting a downer on what was a great evening. Besides, I need to go to bed. Early start in the morning.’
Rami placed his free hand on hers. ‘Then I will take you home and tuck you in,’ he said.
SEVEN
With Sheila snoring lightly next to him, Julian replayed the evening’s events in his head. It w
as irritating how an innocuous conversation, a casual question, could make him so anxious. They had decided to take the forty-minute walk home rather than hail a taxi because it wasn’t yet ten o’clock and the night air was warm. Of course they’d argued, with Julian being unable to resist commenting on her choice of dress, and her calling him a repressed and hypocritical prude who was happy to ogle Cassie.
‘Not that I blame you though,’ she’d said. ‘Do you know what it was we talked about in the toilets?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll like this. After I’d established that she had a first in history from York we obviously discussed her breasts. She made me feel them.’
At this Julian had stopped dead on the King’s Road with Sheila carrying on for a couple of steps until he said, ‘She made you feel them?’
‘Well, she asked me to, wanted me to. She caught me looking at them in the mirror when she was refreshing her lipstick.’
Julian had immediately known why. ‘Because they’re fake, right?’
She’d wagged a finger. ‘Enhanced, apparently, not fake.’ She’d leant against the window of a designer clothes shop and laughed without a shred of self-consciousness. He envied that about her. Envied it and hated it at the same time. Hated it because it was uncontrolled and he was wary of uncontrolled.
‘What did they feel like, then? I want to know.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ She’d made squeezing motions with her hands, as if to relive the experience. ‘They were fantastic. Felt great. Top-of-the-range tits, she called them. That girl must make a fortune in Moscow.’ She had muttered something that Julian couldn’t fully make out. ‘She was just a kid when the Berlin Wall fell. What does she know about communism?’
Julian had shrugged.
They’d started walking again. ‘So you attended meetings at uni? What was it, Socialist Workers Party?’
‘It was part of the Anti-Nazi League movement. Everyone attended SWP meetings at university,’ Julian had said.
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