Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  Clara silently curses Miss Hippo and writes the answer up on the board.

  ‘Who knows anything else about Ancient Egypt?’

  ‘Pyramods!’ shouts Jason.

  ‘Yes, pyramids! Well done, Jason!’

  He’s actually learned something! He looks so pleased with himself she’s almost ready to forgive the stolen purse.

  ‘Will you shag me now, miss?’

  ‘No, Jason.’ But she can’t help laughing. ‘Who can tell me what they were for?’

  ‘Dead bodies!’ several voices clamour.

  ‘Dead fairies,’ says Dana smugly.

  ‘And they believed that when you die your heart is weighed against a feather, and every bad deed makes your heart heavier.’ Why is she peddling this anti-scientific nonsense? Maybe she should take it up with Mr Gorst/Alan. ‘And only the people with the very lightest hearts are allowed into Paradise.’

  A silence of thirty suspended breaths fills the room. 6F are suckers for any kind of superstitious twaddle. Then Dan Southey, whose brother works in the butcher’s shop on Beckett Road, pitches in.

  ‘Miss, our Pat fetched a pig’s ’eart ’ome and it were ’eavy like a ’tater.’

  ‘Well, people in’t the same as pigs,’ says Tracey Dawcey.

  ‘Oink, oink,’ says Robbie Lewis.

  A pandemonium of pointing, poking and oinking erupts, and she has to quieten them down with the Look, followed up by one of Miss Hippo’s tedious worksheets.

  As the hand of the clock moves towards 3.30, Jason puts his head up and says,

  ‘Why we learnin’ about Ashent Egyptians, miss?’

  ‘Well, Jason …’ She takes a deep breath and counts silently to ten. But just as she gets to nine, the bell goes, and her problem is solved. Another day of 6F’s education is completed.

  She loves the silence that settles over the empty classroom at the end of each day. She loves the sound of kids ebbing away down the corridor like the sea withdrawing over pebbles. She goes around the desks, picking up the worksheets on which they’ve recorded their deeds, mostly the bad – ‘thumped Jed’, ‘niked Mams fags’, ‘shaged Rackel Oliver’. That looks like Jason’s writing.

  Then she notices, through the classroom window, that a massive black four-by-four is easing into the car park. The door opens and a young guy climbs out with a mobile phone pressed to his ear, wanders around and disappears from view round the corner. By the time she finds him, he’s already been directed to Mr Philpott in the boiler room, and the two of them have started loading the bin bags into his vehicle, struggling to keep them from flying all over the playground in the September wind.

  ‘Hi, I’m Clara Free. I think we spoke …’

  ‘Oh yeah, right.’ He shakes her hand bouncily. He looks in his early twenties, a bit spotty, with gelled hair riffling in the breeze, low-hanging jeans and a black zip-up jacket.

  ‘I thought you’d bring a van or a lorry or something.’

  ‘It’s okay, they’ll fit in here no problem.’

  He and Mr Philpott shove the last few bin bags into the four-wheel drive, which has a logo painted across the side doors: ‘FIRST CLASS FINANCE: AVAILABLE, AFFORDABLE, ACHIEVABLE. WHY WAIT TO MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE?’ And the same mobile number she rang earlier.

  ‘First Class Finance. Is that you?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I thought you were a recycling company.’

  ‘Yeah, we do that too. Multi-unlimited opportunity portfolio.’

  ‘I see.’ Though she doesn’t see at all.

  ‘Thirty quid, miss, right?’

  ‘Actually, we agreed twenty.’

  ‘Thirty. Take it or leave it.’

  He opens the back and unloads one of the bags. Quickly she pulls the notes out of her purse. He holds them up to the light before pocketing them, gets into his four-by-four and drives off, revving so hard he leaves tyre marks on the tarmac. The wind catches the bag of left-behind newspapers and swirls them around the car park. She runs around picking them up until she is cross and out of breath.

  By the time she gets back to her flat, it’s six o’clock and she’s ready for her only cigarette of the day, but she’s stupidly run out, and the nearest shop will have just closed. Instead, she takes her shoes off, puts the kettle on, sits on the sofa and Googles First Class Finance. Nothing. Then she Googles Syrec. A website opens, with harp music and images of butterflies skimming across wheat fields, then violins soar in aspirational arpeggios while an American-accented voice-over explains how Syrec is helping us to protect our unique heritage for future generations. (Cue a pair of little blonde girls in white frocks gathering daisies in a lush meadow. Your typical Doncaster scene, in fact.) There’s a Contact page with an address in Askern and the same mobile number she’s been calling. That’s all.

  By now, she’s desperate for that cigarette. She steps across the landing and rings on Ida Blessingman’s door. No reply, though she’s pretty sure she heard Ida come in earlier. She rings again. After a couple of minutes, Ida appears wearing her turquoise dressing gown, and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Oh, hello, Ida, have you got a fag …?’

  Behind Ida, somewhere in the depths of the flat, a male voice calls, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Ida shouts over her shoulder.

  Through the partly open door, she sees someone streak from the kitchen to the bathroom. Although he’s moving fast, she catches a fleeting glimpse of a naked male with a thin serial-killer-style moustache.

  Ida snatches the cigarette from her own lips, thrusts it into Clara’s open mouth, and slams the door.

  Checking her Facebook page before she goes to bed, she discovers something else of interest. Her friend Tammy, from university days, has introduced a new Facebook friend called Barbara, a botany post-doc in Cambridge, with a cute pudgy face and short dark hair, who writes about her passion for the northern marsh orchid, Dactylorhiza purpurella, which looks like a bristly purple penis and, apparently, grows abundantly in marshland near Doncaster.

  But the interesting thing is, this Barbara looks very much like Babs, Serge’s girlfriend at Cambridge, whom Clara met once or twice. Although the hair’s different, there’s a dimply lift to the smile and an incipient double chin which seem familiar. Clara sends Barbara a friendly message confirming that she has seen Dactylorhiza purpurella growing at Potteric Carr, and asking whether she knows someone called Serge Free at Queens’ College. Then she waters her plants, gives the leaves a polish and wishes them goodnight.

  SERGE: A cappella

  The rabbits have escaped. They’re running all over the garden, and Serge is trying to chase them back into their cage. Clara is there too – bossy nine-year-old Clara – shouting at the rabbits, and at him. The last rabbit is cornered, and shooed towards the cage door, and it stops, and turns, and looks at him, and he sees that it’s not a rabbit at all, it’s a girl. Her nose is turned up and twitchy, like a rabbit’s, but her eyes are large and brown and bright with tears. It’s Babs. He tries to shove her into the cage, but she won’t go – she fights back, showing her large rabbity teeth, pushing hard against his chest with both hands. He wakes up with a pounding heart; his head is splitting. He drags himself out of bed and into the shower. Sheesh, what did he drink yesterday?

  When he gets into work, he finds the other quants already huddled in the glass-walled office, clutching their coffees, swapping information. Tim the Finn’s problem, it turns out, wasn’t a dodgy prostate at all, it was a dodgy a cappella quartet. Timo Jääskeläinen has been accused of running a scam with the other three members of his singing quartet through a series of coded texts to one or other of the songsters, who pass the information around the group and bet up to their limit, using a spread betting agency to help avoid detection, rather than going directly to the Stock Exchange where controls are tighter. Meanwhile, the wily tenor has been using the massive reserves of FATCA to manipulate the prices. This has been going on for at least two years.

 
; One at a time, the quants and traders on Securitisation are invited up to the boardroom on the top floor to be questioned by Detective Inspectors Birkett and Jackson, who have been called in by the FSA, which was alerted when controllers in the back office at FATCA picked up irregular movements of equities linked with Timo Jääskeläinen. They couldn’t prove the connection since he wasn’t actually doing the spread betting himself. The mobile phone company provided the police with details of his contacts, but it appeared he was only texting guys in his a cappella group about songs in their repertoire. What is still unclear is the amount of cash they’ve managed to stash away, and where it is.

  ‘I’d do it, if I could get away with it,’ Toby O’Toole shrugs with a mixture of disapproval and admiration. ‘It’s a victimless crime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Le banking, c’est toujours un casino,’ one of the Frenchies adds.

  ‘Personal fraud is not good for bank reputation,’ Maroushka says. ‘Average people must retain belief in banking system. He should be more careful. What you think, Sergei?’

  ‘I think you’re right. As always, Maroushka. How’s Chicken taking it?’

  ‘He remains calm.’

  Toby smirks, fixing Serge with his pale eyes. ‘You should have met him before he was sent on the anger management course, Freebie.’

  ‘Anger? I find him quite …’ It’s hard to define Chicken’s appeal – a mixture of charm, energy and good clothes.

  ‘Charismatic is the word you’re looking for. They teach them that too. Send them off into the woods with paint-ball guns to learn leadership. You didn’t know?’

  Serge keeps quiet. Tootie’s combination of private cynicism and public arse-licking can be hard to take.

  ‘You’re so like young Lucie. Another innocent soul who worships at Chicken’s altar. By the way, he sends his apologies for last night. Called in ill today. Sick as a ginger dog.’ He grins unpleasantly. ‘Doesn’t know when to stop.’

  Serge, when it’s his turn to be interviewed in the boardroom, says and asks as little as possible, hiding his nerves behind a mask of nonchalance. DIs Birkett and Jackson are hiding behind a mask of tight-lipped professionalism.

  He tries to work out from their expressions whether they suspect anyone else, but all he can deduce is that they’re investigating Timo’s contacts, and he’s not on their suspect list yet.

  ‘Did you notice he spent a lot of time in the toilet?’ asks DI Birkett.

  He shrugs. ‘Not really.’

  As soon as he gets home that evening, he turns on his laptop and checks the hacked accounts. Kenporter1601 is empty again. The £5,000 he transferred into it has disappeared, and it hasn’t reappeared in Dr Black. It means his payment’s been accepted. That’s positive.

  From the fridge he grabs a bottle of cold lager, and strolls out on to the balcony of the penthouse, breathing deeply, noticing the autumnal glimmer in the air and the golden evening light enamelling the rooftops of the city. The knot in his stomach loosens, his shoulders relax, the cold beer slides down like silk. Here under the wide sky his soul opens out and philosophical insights gush in. He thinks of Tim the Finn sweating in a cell somewhere, confused from terror, trying to remember what he has and hasn’t said, his Porsche still crouched in the underground car park, waiting for an owner who may never return. It could have been him.

  No, he won’t get too greedy. His £5,000 payment of thanks has been accepted. Now is the time to concentrate on boosting his legitimate bonus by putting all his efforts into his day job. So long as he stays at FATCA, he’ll always have the possibility of an investigation hanging over him. He’ll never know when he’s in the clear, nor ever be free from the fear of being caught. He must be careful. But he’s not quite ready to leave yet.

  ‘Run away with me,’ he’d said, and she’d laughed, not cruelly, but unconvinced. He needs time to win her round. Because love is the ultimate pay-off.

  Because love is the thing that money can’t buy (but it helps).

  Because when he leaves, he wants to be sure she’ll come with him.

  DORO: Stringy

  Doro knows she loves Marcus, with that deep companionable love that’s stood the test of forty years, so she’s surprised to find herself feeling a bit flustered as she prepares to accompany Councillor Loxley on a fact-finding tour of the allotments on Wednesday. After showering, washing and blow-drying her hair, she dabs on a bit of eye make-up and lip gloss, squirts some Chanel No. 5, relic of a long-ago airport splurge, behind her ears, and stands in front of the mirror studying herself with a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction. Where did those eye-bags come from? How long have there been two vertical lines between her eyebrows? And those saggy pouches on each side of her chin – when did they appear? She can make them disappear if she smiles. That’s better. Trouble is, she’ll have to go around smiling all day. Maybe that’s why old women always look so bloody happy.

  Next she looks through her drawer for a suitable T-shirt. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ She pulls it over her head, looks in the mirror, and the feeling of dissatisfaction returns. The T-shirt – like all her slogan T-shirts – looks faded and outdated. Instead, she opts for a white tailored blouse she bought for some formal college event and a pair of blue linen trousers which still fit snugly around her hips, though the zip strains a bit. She brushes her hair so that it parts on one side. Then on the other side. Then she brushes it backwards and lets it fall naturally. The broad silver wings above her ears are quite attractive, she thinks. At the last moment, she puts on a necklace.

  By the time she gets to the allotment entrance, slightly out of breath, a few minutes after four thirty, he is already waiting there. His black BMW is parked by the fence and he is leaning on the bonnet talking into his mobile phone, looking suntanned and relaxed in an open-necked check shirt and grey slacks. A slightly frayed Paul Newman comes to mind.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Marchmont!’

  ‘Hello, Councillor Loxley. It’s very good of you to spare us some of your busy time,’ she coos. (Why is she talking like this? Shouldn’t she be more assertive?)

  ‘My pleasure. I’ve had a chance to look through the paperwork.’

  ‘And?’

  They’ve started walking as they talk, following the lattice of grassy paths around the allotment beds.

  ‘You have to realise the Council stands to make a sizeable sum on this sale …’

  ‘But you can’t! People have been gardening here for years; growing food for their families!’

  ‘… to plough into essential frontline services. The Council can’t afford to let a valuable resource like this remain undercapitalised.’

  ‘This isn’t a resource, it’s a paradise!’

  This isn’t going at all right. She’s supposed to be winkling out information and subtly persuading, not haranguing him.

  ‘I’m open to persuasion,’ he says, and his hand accidentally brushes against hers as they walk.

  She leads him past Ada and Danny’s fruit bushes and Reggie’s spectacular leeks, around the upper border of the allotment where Ian West’s runaway champagne vines are leaping through the hawthorn hedge. The sun is low but still warm, the air so humid that you can almost breathe the dew before it falls and catch the glimmer of midges’ wings in the shade, waiting for dusk, when they will come out and pounce. The plants in the vegetable beds breathe in the moisture too. Their leaves are erect, their fruits and seedpods swell with juice. Fat songbirds, gorged on fruit and flies, warble in the highest branches, piercing the stillness framed by the faraway murmur of traffic, the quiet chit-chat of human voices, the tap-tap of a hammer as someone repairs the roof of a distant hut.

  The councillor pauses by a bed of runner beans to watch a wiry suntanned old gent tightening up the wires that hold the supporting canes together.

  ‘Malcolm Loxley, from the Council.’ He proffers his hand. ‘On a fact-finding tour.’

  The old man wipes his palms on the sides of his trousers.

  ‘Harry Str
ingfellow. I ’ear t’ Council’s gooin’ to shut us down.’

  ‘Don’t you believe everything you hear. Nothin’ decided yet. We’re still carrying out the impact assessment.’

  ‘But don’t you have to go out to tender? Don’t you have to consult?’ asks Doro.

  ‘I’m consulting now.’ He turns to the old man. ‘Great beans you’ve got there.’ His voice has altered slightly, become rougher, more regional. ‘My granddad were a great gardener. He grew some smashin’ runners.’

  A sleek blackbird, heedless of their closeness, starts tugging a worm out of a heaped bed. They all watch, entranced by this clash of forces, pink versus black, resistance versus determination, until the gardener claps his hands to chase the bird away and the worm recoils pinkly into the dark soil.

  ‘Greedy buggers. Always on the scrounge,’ says the councillor.

  Doro, who had sided with the blackbird, attracted by his glossy beauty and urgent hunger, says nothing.

  ‘’Ere,’ says the old man, picking a few fat sticks of beans, ‘try these, pal.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll have them for my tea tonight.’

  He takes the beans, shakes hands and moves on.

  ‘Come and see my patch.’

  She leads him down a narrow track through the heart of the allotments towards the lower plots, where the sun has already dipped away and the cooling air has started to release beads of moisture on to the grass.

  ‘You know, most people who come here haven’t got much money, and it’s an escape for them. Another world. No stress. Companionship. Fresh food. Gentle exercise. Healthy lifestyle.’ She laughs. ‘What else can I say to convince you?’

  He laughs too, wrinkling his eyes. ‘You’re a great persuader. You should go into politics, Mrs Marchmont. Then you’d see how hard it is to make these decisions.’

  She cuts off three fat rosy rhubarb sticks and hands them to him.

  ‘Here, something for your supper.’

  ‘When I were a kid, we always had rhubarb pie on a Sunday.’