Pleasure and a Calling

by Phil Hogan

  It was him. I knew it was him. I could tell by the way he sent long, warning looks in my direction the rest of that day and the following week that it was him. He had wiped the answerphone clean of Mrs Wendell’s message, then failed to act on her follow-up call, with a view to nothing less than making me look like a schoolboy halfwit.

  Then two weeks after the Wendell debacle, three rival buyers on the brink of making me offers for an unattractive but extremely well-priced house with conversion potential rang within an hour of each other to count themselves out. None of them was able to give me a convincing reason for their change of heart. Was it bad luck? Was it something I’d said? Mr Mower pursed his lips at the news but remained silent.

  I brooded for half an hour then jumped in my car and sprang a visit on one of the buyers who I knew worked at a motor dealership on the town bypass. At first he thought I was a customer and came sauntering out when he saw me browsing the used models in the forecourt. He became flustered when he realized who I was, and gibbered about the weather and market conditions in auto sales until I eventually pinned him down on the question of the house. After further humming and hawing he said he had been put off buying by reports about the neighbour.

  ‘The neighbour?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not against people with mental problems. It’s a tragedy. My gran’s in a home, but you know … we’ve got kids. And they’ve got this guy wandering in the street in his pyjama top? He’s not even that old apparently. And I hear he’s pretty full-on when he gets going. A lot of disturbance, night and day, shouting and banging and crying. Once they saw smoke pouring out of the window.’

  Was any of this true? I’d heard nothing about it.

  ‘I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in this,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let me look into it? Perhaps arrange another viewing. I’m sure the vendors would be able to reassure you.’

  He grimaced. ‘Sorry. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I really think whoever told you this might be pulling your leg.’

  He looked at me. ‘I can tell you it’s from the horse’s mouth. People in the business. With respect, that’s the trouble with you guys. You only give us half the story.’

  I drove back to the office and called the man selling the house. No, there had never been any problems with a neighbour. Yes, there were one or two families on the street caring for elderly relatives but there had never been any trouble. I believed him.

  Guy was the trouble. This had his paw-prints all over it.

  But I could be trouble too. A couple more weeks went by, and I heard Guy hissing at someone on the phone one afternoon, saying they had to call him later at home. This was suspicious in itself – when Mr Mower and Stella were out of the office, Guy was more than happy to spend large portions of what he called ‘down time’ purring down the phone at impressionable shop girls or cackling with his drinking chum at the builders’ merchants. But then later he hung back in the office when the rest of us were leaving and the cleaner was just arriving. ‘I’ve just got a couple of clients to catch up with,’ he explained.

  I stood in the entrance to the shopping arcade opposite the office where I could see him hunched over his desk talking on the phone. Then he put the phone down and waited by the fax machine. For the next fifteen minutes he shuttled urgently between the fax and the photocopier. At last he came out with his briefcase. I stepped back into the shadows and watched him get into his car and drive off.

  The next morning I was first in the office, with Rita, who had opened up. When she went to put the kettle on, I had a look around. There was nothing of interest on Guy’s desk. But there were clues: an activity report on the fax with a phone number; the photocopier was set to magnify at 200 per cent. I pressed the redial button on Guy’s phone. A woman answered. It was the district council – the planning office. How could she help? I asked her for the fax number there. No problem, she said. It matched the last number logged on the activity report. Oh, Guy, what are you up to? I can’t pretend I wasn’t just a little excited.

  I waited until Friday, when Guy usually spent the afternoon in the office clearing his paperwork ahead of the weekend rush. After lunch, while he was taking his customary endless lavatory break, I lifted his keys from his jacket. I told Rita there were a number of outstanding For Sale signs that needed picking up around town, and that I’d be out in the van if anyone asked.

  Guy’s rented two-room flat was a five-minute drive away. I left the van somewhere out of sight and let myself in. I stood for a moment, just to test the atmosphere. The door to his bedroom was ajar, leaking his sour sleep-odours into the air. I pushed open a second door to reveal a bachelor lair, dark and untidy, with a leather sofa and an outsized TV with video player and a collection of action movies. Near the window was a dining area, and there, spread on the table with Guy’s unwashed coffee mug, were sheets of photocopied A4 paper arranged in a large rectangle.

  This was it – a draughtsman’s plan, rubber-stamped with the council’s logo and marked RIVER DEV 1. At first glance it looked like a layout of the town centre, not very different from the ones that had accumulated over the years in a cupboard at the office. But in this version the main road with its stretch of small run-down businesses had disappeared, freeing up space for ‘pedestrianized retail’. There were shaded residential blocks, and a ‘walkway’ now snaked along the waterside. The reason for Guy’s furtive activity was highlighted in yellow: a wedge of land between the station and the river. I knew this plot – an eyesore you could see from the bridge across the railway line, piled with stones and gravel and dotted with ramshackle buildings and rusting equipment. It looked unsellable. But here it was arrowed excitedly with a pair of question marks. Obviously Guy and his friend at the council were hoping to make a killing with inside information, snapping up this land before this scheme was made public and then selling it on to a developer. But did Guy even have money? That seemed unlikely. A search through his drawers turned up nothing but old pay cheques from Mower’s and motor insurance and utility bills and overdraft statements. No tell-tale applications for mortgages; no hidden investments. Maybe his partner was the one with the money and Guy was in for a cut, presumably for reasons to do with Mower’s.

  My first thought was simply to expose Guy, but then in a glorious moment of clarity, I saw instead what could be. I saw the future. I was twenty-one and I saw it right there, in Guy’s kitchen.

  His breakfast dishes were still in the sink. I opened his grubby fridge. He’d done some shopping for the weekend. I remember helping myself to a mini apple pie from an open pack. And then there was the raw, thawing chicken – an invitation in itself, sitting there in its pool of pink meltwater, and requiring only a tilt of the plate (the top shelf of the fridge was conveniently full) and a minor rearrangement of the food on the deck below. What could be more perfect? It was easy to imagine Guy arriving home that evening having stopped off at the Cutters for Friday beers with his foolish friends, too tipsy to swear with any certainty that he had clingfilmed that dish of leftover pasta, just lurching in, starving for his supper, tucking instantly into the first thing he found. And don’t they say revenge is a dish best served cold? Myself, I had never cooked at home. This wasn’t the kind of accident that could happen to me. But Guy. You had to shake your head at him.

  I left his flat as he would expect to find it, drove across town to copy his key, then slipped it into his pocket while he was on the phone, no doubt planning his evening. If Rita ever wondered where those For Sale signs had got to, she never mentioned it.

  I wasn’t too surprised when Guy didn’t turn up the next morning, or even when he didn’t pick up when Rita rang him. ‘That’s odd,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps he’s eloped.’ I grinned. ‘With Stella.’

  Rita didn’t see the joke. ‘Stella has appointments this morning.’

  I needed to move quickly, but the weekend would buy me some time. I made sure to go out to the site, a neglected, debris-strewn yard
next to the station, a high perimeter fence erected against vandals, a locked gate. There was nothing to suggest the site was for sale, just warning notices from a security firm that guard dogs were patrolling the grounds. I took down their phone number and called it from a phone box. The man who answered didn’t know who owned the yard but gave me the contact number he was supposed to call in case of problems. ‘Ask for the divestments office,’ he said. ‘But there’ll be no one there till Monday.’

  Next morning, Mr Mower called me at my digs at Mrs Burton’s to ask if I’d mind coming in and standing in for Guy on the Sunday rota. Stella had been round to Guy’s place but there was no one in. It wasn’t until Monday that she found out what had happened: that he’d been sick after eating something; that things had worsened and he’d gone out for air in the early hours and fainted in the street; that he’d had to be taken to hospital. ‘He’s pretty ill,’ she said. I copied Rita’s anxious expression. Stella smiled. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll live.’

  That afternoon I went into Guy’s flat again. Not only did I find the faxes from the council but also one of our enquiry cards ripped out of the office file. Back at the office I found the property listed but dormant, with a line through the entry. There was no sign of it having been worked on or the vendor having pursued a sale. The price, of course, would be rock-bottom. I called them to ask if they were still selling, and told them I might have an interested buyer.

  ‘These are the buyers we talked about a couple of weeks ago?’

  ‘Ah, that would be Guy you spoke to,’ I said. ‘He’s away at the moment. But now the people are asking if you could move a little on price.’

  It took a while, but I bought the site, using an out-of-town lawyer as a purchasing agent. By then, Guy’s absence – prolonged, it turned out, by complications arising from his chronic stomach complaint, an added bonus – had given me a chance to shine again for Mr Mower. I got one of Guy’s moribund properties moving by persuading the vendors to amend Guy’s unrealistic valuation down a notch or two (by asking how they felt about the whispers going round that nearby common land was being earmarked as a stop-over for travellers). Mr Mower was certainly surprised at my instant success with what he remembered to be an unpromising brownfield site by the river that Guy had taken on a year ago. Imagine his delight when I announced that I had found a firm buyer.

  ‘That really is excellent news.’ He beamed. ‘Who has taken it?’

  ‘Damato Associates. They want to build a skateboarding park.’

  ‘Skateboarding, you say? Splendid.’

  This was a long time ago. It was early days for skateboards, at least in our town, but it made me smile to imagine the alarm on the faces of council officials at the prospect of scores of rowdy youths hanging out opposite their new development. But of course that was just mischief. I sat on my investment. I waited. Then just when I was starting to fear that I would have to open a skateboarding park, the council went public and things took off. It was an exciting time. In the years that followed, every middling town across the country was looking to turn its stagnant, weed-clogged waterways into a valuable environment for sleek apartments, shopping and private gyms. Ours was one of the first.

  Oh, Guy. I never saw him again, though I went back into his flat one more time. I half expected to be greeted by the smell of stale vomit and diarrhoea, though I knew Stella had sent one of our cleaners in to spruce the place up. I was in there barely thirty seconds when I heard a bang at the window that made me jump out of my skin. I listened hard. Nothing. I waited a few minutes then crept to the window. A smear of blood was streaked across the pane. I pulled back immediately. There was the faintest stirring outside now. I moved to the door and listened, my heart thudding. Nothing. Then I went back to the window and waited. At last I risked opening it a fraction and inching my head out. It was just a bird lying dead on the ground. I almost laughed out loud. Before I left I took a few pictures – of Guy’s suits, hanging in the wardrobe, and of his fridge, now empty, fresh and gleaming whitely. Then on his answerphone in the hall I found two old messages, both saying the same thing. ‘Guy, it’s me. Where the hell are you?’

  TIME HAS FLOWN, SHALL we say. My life is as fixed as the stars. I feel a bond of kinship with the town that took me to its bosom, and now, in turn, I watch over its interests. But I have always had to look out for myself first, to find a position of strength. I knew this long before the trouble with Guy, long before my name eventually replaced Mr Mower’s above the door. The unseemly tussle for money has to be seen in that context. Money gave me the best seat in the house, and that was all I needed. You wouldn’t guess I was well off. I don’t sit on committees; the local Rotarians don’t know me; I have no active interest in the Chamber of Commerce. But a decent amount of my income is quietly siphoned into good works – schemes to keep youth occupied in our less salubrious housing estates. I fund a community centre and three toddler groups and Heming’s sponsors local schools and adult evening classes. I won’t go on. The people around me in more recent times – Zoe, Katya and the others – have even probably wondered at my own frugality: my modest car; my reluctance to take a holiday; my sturdy but unchanging wardrobe. Even if they found these signs of moderation consistent with my other small eccentricities (my insistence on being called Mr Heming, perhaps), they would doubtless be shocked to discover that my small flat, located in an unassuming development near the Common, was a furnished all-in rental listed in our own books and paid for in cash every month by a Mr Luckham (yes, a name borrowed from doughty Mrs Luckham at school), a quiet, anonymous tenant and low consumer of power and heating. The truth was that, as much as I loved this nurturing town that gave me purpose and happiness, I could pack all tangible evidence of my existence into two suitcases and leave in half an hour. I could disappear and start again. I lived with the knowledge that it could come to that.

  Even Zoe, with whom I’d had a brief personal dalliance, knew nothing of my domestic arrangements – though I should say that keeping her in ignorance was far from easy, and required a level of tact and guile disproportionate to the rewards. In the end I had to choose between the benefits of everyday sexual convenience and the practical need to keep my personal self from the intimate gaze of others.

  No doubt you are shocked to discover that I am drawn to the benefits of everyday sexual convenience. It is true that I have stood in a stranger’s wardrobe with my head in their clothes, but I’m not the sort of man who gets his thrills from masturbating in their pockets. Far from it. Indeed, you may infer from my coup long ago with Marrineau’s girlfriend Sarah that my impulses in that respect are within the usual spectrum. If I smile at a woman, I am aware of a response. In my earlier days at Mower’s there were one-night stands, though these were generally out of town, and always at the girl’s place. In substance nothing much has changed, though responsibility and position have made me more circumspect. There are one or two ladies I see discreetly, straight in and out, as it were, with cash changing hands. I can afford a hotel room, thank you. A massage will often do the trick. Essential maintenance, you might say. But there’s nothing that would frighten the horses. A casual observer – perhaps someone in my own wardrobe! – would see nothing of unconventional interest.

  Zoe was the sort of mundane error that follows from the proximity of men and women in a small office. I was her boss, but not much older than she was. Her green eyes and helpful smile followed me often. She offered a certain allure, a mystery, as it seems to me all women do. It lasted six weeks, though in truth her appeal in those romantic terms began to wilt from the moment she invited me into her house. This, of course, was a turning point: the removal of allure and mystery. Perhaps I might have admired her more if I could have just had a scout round the place without her there to complicate things with her questions about my background and taste in music, or eagerly watching my face as I spoke, trying to read my thoughts. What can I say? Invisibility has for so long been the linchpin to my favourite, most memorable moment
s. This was the opposite as dear Zoe tried to coax me out of my hole and into the light.

  My secrecy was a joke that became an issue. ‘But where do you actually live?’ She would laugh, as if I were merely teasing her. There was no doubt that if I took Zoe back to my place, she would get the wrong idea, or worse, the right one. She was hurt when I called it a day, and quite rightly found my reasons uncompelling (‘This isn’t really working …’; ‘It’s not you, it’s me …’), inspired as they were by the three romantic comedies I had watched in her company, snuggled too closely together at the cinema. I assured here there was no one else. The truth was that rampant sexual relationships are all very fine and necessary but, for me, real intimacy is elsewhere. It is something to impart and absorb, something to be filled with, quiet and slow. It soothes. It fires the senses.

  I expected Zoe to leave the agency, but she stayed, perhaps to convince herself that I didn’t matter, or just to prove me wrong about whatever it was about her open heart and easy laughter I didn’t like. Perhaps, too, she enjoyed the fact that we had an unspoken shared history – as if we were keeping something from Katya, my senior sales consultant and a practical woman who I am certain couldn’t have cared less. Whatever her reasons, Zoe was as bright as ever around the place, often so bright – so cheerful – as to be worrying. There were dates with other men after work, generally telegraphed by the nonchalant application of lip gloss at the close of business. Most recent was an entanglement with some dream man, which she unsubtly dangled under my nose until it crashed and floored her for weeks. Katya gave me a warning glance when she came back, but said nothing, as is Katya’s reserved Lithuanian way.