by Adam Thorpe
‘The arms alone are a scoop, though. An Israeli selling guns to the Taliban? Wow.’ But it struck Bob that Al was possibly right. For someone who wanted to bring down a right-wing government, Sharansky the young left-winger was the perfect conduit. Why hadn’t he seen that straightaway? ‘Anyway, all I know is that Evron Bensoussan has connections up to the highest level. And his daughter was never a junkie, by the way; she was sitting in a car driven by one. Be careful.’
‘Ach, she was in that lousy crowd. And the highest level’s God. I don’t think God’s in the same neighbourhood. Neither are we.’
‘Nope.’
‘You don’t look convinced,’ Al said.
‘Anyway, now you know.’
Al fixed him with the sharp engineer’s gaze that had saved their lives on at least two occasions. ‘Don’t get involved, skipper. Someone else’s dirty games.’ As Bob nodded, Al went on: ‘The thing is, between you and me, war wouldn’t be a bad solution.’
‘To what?’
‘Yob culture. Mop the louts up, siphon off their testosterone levels. That, or send them down the mines, re-opened especially for the occasion. Girls are no better. Underage, on the job, off their heads on poof juice. Another?’
Bob drained his glass, but still had a few miles to drive, so wavered for a few seconds. ‘Weaker, Al, weaker. I’ve a feeling Sharansky’ll try you on, now that I’ve said no. Even if it’s just the naughty green boxes. Your official line is: one, you were just doing your job; two, you are a peacenik.’
‘The fella can fuck off. No, seriously, Bob,’ he went on, handing his late commanding officer a glass writhing with oily swirls, ‘go take a pecker at the centre of Maidenhead of a Friday or a Saturday night, if you don’t mind the risk of getting twatted. Smashed glass and vomit. You can feel it sliding down into a second Bracknell, God help us. Next time you see me I’ll be in a fucking shell suit. This country’s only held together by Big Macs and smack.’
‘There you go, smack.’
Al looked goggle-eyed for a moment, then laughed. ‘You have to eat properly with it, though.’
It was a gas, flying with Al. Bob leaned back in the white furry sofa and sighed. The gin was jolly. ‘Weren’t you a lout once, Al? Up in Fife?’
‘Very, very briefly. No, I’ll just tell your mamby-pamby scribbler to write about the town of Maidenhead instead.’
‘He’s more interested in the town of Radom.’
‘Radom as in Polish massive arms factory?’
‘Yup. Pursuit of the ongoing investigation.’
Al pulled a face. ‘What a little wanker, eh? Writing whatever he likes. It only takes one rotten apple to ruin the entire box.’
There was a silence, apart from the tick of a fancy grandfather clock. Al, despite his politics, had saved them from a graveyard spiral in a full seven-oh freighter by closing the throttle – before Bob had even detected the dive – during a night flight into Kigali. Bob could tell they’d accelerated but not that they were banked, and he was about to push the nose up. Al took over and put them into recovery mode within five seconds, which was about all they had. It wasn’t Bob’s fault, but it did make him think that Al was the more sensitive pilot. As in sixth sense. Which is why he’d ended up with what he’d got: posh house, a pad in the British Virgin Islands and serious time for his hobbies. He hadn’t yet asked about Olivia, the divorce, the house, the twins. He seemed distracted. For his own part, Bob had the impression, as he studied the misty garden, that he was losing everything – wife, kids, home, job, friends – in a kind of receding or miniaturising step-by-step fashion, and that nothing could stop it. He’d have to get a cat.
‘Jesus, Al,’ he sighed suddenly. ‘The stranglehold of life.’
‘Transitional. Sling a few girls over your shoulder and enjoy yourself. You’re still a fucking draw.’
‘Thanks for the in-depth advice, friend.’
There was a kerfuffle in the hall and Jane came back in from the hairdresser’s under a snappy little bob, all streaked and glazed, that jarred with her weight. She looked drawn and pale, held her hand over her nose.
‘Gin,’ she said. ‘That awful smell. One of the ones that makes me literally sick. I’ll get used to it. Hello, Bob darling.’
The two men had to get rid of their half-glasses down their throats instantaneously, flambéing their tonsils. Bob was over the limit and was made to stay the night. Jane magicked up a fine supper, partly by plunging into their vast freezer in the garage. She went to bed early, overcome by nausea from the fumes of ordinary life. No wonder Al was under strain. A very expensive private clinic in California was booked for the new year: Jane talked of little else during the meal.
The two men stayed up late relishing Al’s best malt in sensible amounts. Bob already had a headache. It was, he admitted to himself, a little like the old days. Their hands re-enacted various approaches onto unmarked jungle strips of compacted earth fitfully lit by kerosene markers about as big as birthday candles; in between, Al kept poking and prodding about Olivia, at last – as if there was the remotest chance of a reconciliation.
‘What did she cite in the petition, apart from the fact that you’re a complete fucking prat?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Not hanging out the washing enough, or something. Using too many clothes pegs. Whatever.’
‘Amateur psychology, skipper, but what I reckon is that she feels guilty when you’re around, and is projecting that guilt onto you. You know, about her fling.’
‘As in Highland,’ Bob joked. Al had always been partial to Olivia. What normal male wasn’t? He realised he’d taken up a peculiar recumbent position in the massive sofa and levered himself up somewhat painfully.
‘Easy does it, old boy,’ Al said, in a gruff, colonel-out-in-Inja voice. One thing about Al: he could always do a mean imitation, would once upon a time entertain the kids as a rollicking Santa Claus for the BA staff Christmas do in Hanger Lane.
‘I know,’ Bob said. ‘It’s annoying. I don’t want to be stiff. I keep pretty fit, jogging, workouts in the gym. Press-ups.’
‘Ach, I can just see you, in poofters’ black leggings.’
‘There’s a general lack of oil.’
‘Still clocking up the miles down there?’ Al smiled, patting his crotch.
‘C’mon, Al,’ Bob said, wide-eyed. ‘Loud and proud. It wasn’t that.’
‘Girls get lovelier and lovelier,’ Al sighed. ‘Especially the foreign ones.’
‘That’s because you’re getting uglier and uglier. And more Scottish. Now, remember that last copper mine in Zambia? We were freighting machinery into the copper belt, the Glencore ops. What was it called? Slagsville. All that sulphurous shit in the air.’
‘Mufulira. Christ, yes.’
‘The flash floods that made me come back two days early? Nature is to blame.’
‘It always is,’ said Al. ‘Who else is responsible for the human race?’
‘So, listen. I walked into the house with the taste of that sulphur in my mouth. African copper-mining sulphur. And I walked straight in on them, coupling. Coupling.’
‘What position?’
‘Oh, she was on top, facing his feet. Tantrical or whatever.’
Al’s face was one of intense concentration. ‘But imagine if he’d been in a gorilla suit.’
‘Two years later, and I’ve still got that actual sulphur taste in my mouth. Slightly, but all the time.’
‘That’s psychosomatic,’ said Al, gravely. ‘You need tae suck on a girl’s boobs smeared with lavender honey, every day after meals and last thing at night.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. Not lavender. Clover, maybe.’
‘You’re a fussy one, Captain. As if I could care less what damn flavour the honey was, in those precise circumstances as previously just described.’
They drifted along thus, on a slipstream of Glenlivet.
‘God, I wish you’d been in my crew for the sauna with attached DC-10,’ Bob said, the room circlin
g him slowly. ‘I was stuck at first with a Syrian co-pilot who thought a flame-out was a fire.’
‘You can’t half-know how to fly,’ Al growled, ‘but any little cunt can write.’
At about three o’clock, when they were more asleep than awake, they made a decisive move to stir and go to their respective beds. Bob tottered upstairs and lay mysteriously revived between the crisp, expensive sheets, thinking about the waitress. He hadn’t even asked her what her name was. It made it purer, somehow. All he knew was that she had sprinkled happiness over his day, and therefore over his life. Clover honey would be just fine.
He eventually slept, but uneasily. We carry far too much about with us, was his final waking thought.
‘Half and half,’ he said. ‘Crowthorne in my name, Worcestershire in hers, and she gets part of my savings to notch it all up to fifty-fifty. I pay maintenance until the kids earn, which’ll probably be in about ten years’ time, at this rate. All very amicable, except it straps us both to some extent. Well, quite a bit. Improverishment no, budget cornflakes yes. The court’s verdict is imminent.’
Over breakfast, Al had asked how the finance side of the divorce was playing out. It was eleven o’clock and they had a headache apiece. Al was definitely running to fat, competing with Jane: maybe he lost it during the day.
‘That’s good and bad news,’ he said. ‘She gets the house and the kids, you keep your penis and your soul. As they say.’
Bob chuckled gamely. ‘Given that Olivia reportedly agreed with her charming friends to do me for whatever she could, I think it’s all fairly good.’
‘You’ve got more grounds than her to clean her out,’ Al said, checking Jane wasn’t in earshot. She was in the garden, feeding the koi or whatever you do with koi, avoiding the stench of their toast.
‘Al, I have no intention of cleaning her out. Anyway, the financial shenanigans have nothing to do with the conditions of the divorce. It’s ancillary, as the slimy solicitors call it. She could have had 500 Canadian masseurs all at the same time and refused me her favours with an evil cackle over the entire marriage and still walked out with fifty-fifty, if that’s what the court decided were her needs.’
‘Brown envelopes required,’ Al said.
‘No way. I think I may’ve retired without knowing it.’
‘So you said. You’ve said it before. There are some offal flights going begging out of Nairobi, if you want them. Various destinations. With a few spare parts for the oil industry thrown in, no doubt.’
Organ transplant flights were usually at night and paid well. Bob could feel himself hesitating. He could feel the pull. But he shook his head. ‘I’ll sell the flat. I’ve got a bit put by. I need to stop, reassess. Give myself a break. Run that little pub, build the Sopwith Camel.’
‘You’ll turn smelly and unshaven, skipper.’
‘Like a true freight dog.’
Al wondered what the flat was worth.
‘I’ll be lucky to clear £200,000. Needs a bit of a refit. Rotten sills. What can you buy for two hundred thou that’s halfway decent?’
‘Depends what you’re looking for,’ said Al. ‘And where.’
‘A bolt-hole,’ Bob said, after chewing and swallowing thoughtfully. ‘Correction: a home. I’m looking for a proper home. In this country. The twins. I think Olivia might take over the controls if I’m abroad. Ease them away from me.’
‘Interesting. Take a pecker at this.’
He was stroking his BlackBerry next to the toast, poking, opening a file. A mostly slate-roofed house swam into view, long and low, in a windswept tussocky plot lit by brilliant sunshine.
‘Looks more like the Falkland Islands than the British Virgin Islands,’ said Bob.
Al laughed. ‘Was that a joke? This is fucking Scotland. The home country. “A real rarity”, see? Yours for a hundred thou. The Outer fucking Hebrides.’
The property belonged to Al’s bachelor cousin in Glasgow, now suffering from advanced Parkinson’s. The island was called Scourlay. ‘Pronounced as in moor,’ said Al, ‘not fucking dish-pad. Scoorlay, right? This is the view, Crusoe.’
Low mountains, bright blue water, a great deal of sky. Bob felt something rush like sherbet through his chest. Al was saying he didn’t know what to do with it: no one wanted to buy it, and even though he had enduring powers of attorney, no way could he drop the price below the perceived market value. The price was less than half the value of the flat. Three beds, five acres.
‘Lovely and quiet,’ said Jane, who had joined them by now.
‘Although let me warn you,’ said Al, ‘being an honest feller, they took that photo on the one day in the year that the sun shines.’
‘He does exaggerate,’ said Jane, stroking Al’s broad back in its blue cardie. She had earrings that looked like real diamonds, flashing in the grey day. ‘Though it might get blowy.’
Al chuckled some more. ‘I can tell you, up there you forget what the colour blue looks like in its natural state.’
‘I’ve been a year in Dubai,’ Bob said. ‘You know I love it wet and gusty.’
‘Well, on the off chance. Give it a try, I thought. It’s my inherited headache. If the bugger was in the Grampians, now …’
Jane left off stroking Al’s back and went to lie down.
‘She’s a doll,’ said Al fondly, rolling his large shoulders. ‘Did you see how she rubbed my back?’
‘Rent?’
‘Aye, he was always happy for folk to rent full time. Anything to keep out the damp. It’s been on the market for over two years. Jesus wept, the damp’s terrible. Never, ever be an executor. Character-building. And the midgies. You’d be back screaming after a couple of weeks, pursued by midgies.’
‘I think my character’s built,’ said Bob. ‘From about seven years old.’ He turned and indicated his earlobes. ‘Those rocks of Jane’s, were they real?’
‘Aye,’ Al grunted, ‘and so are her diamonds. Why?’
‘You’re doing very well.’
‘So?’
‘Al, don’t look at me like that. It makes my headache worse.’
Later, as Bob climbed into the Austin Healey, Al held the door open, leaned in and said, ‘You jumped ship, skipper. Stay on shore.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Drop it. Leave the crew alone. Hans, Diez. Me. No more queries. That’s my advice.’
Bob held his gaze, which wasn’t easy. Sometimes Al could look like Major Hench, the worst of young Bob’s five headmasters. ‘You know the score, don’t you?’
‘There isnae a score. There’s just carrying. May we open cargo holds and approach the staircase. Confirmed. That’s it. Pallets. It’s very simple. There’s no score. We’ll keep in touch, skipper.’
He slammed the Healey’s door. Bob braved a smile, and had problems sticking the key in the ignition: hand-tremble. He waved as he drove off, but Al was already on the phone under the pillared porch, shaking his head in some unseen veto.
Back in Crowthorne, Bob called various local estate agents, asking them to re-evaluate the flat for a possible quick sale. They shot round the same day; he told the pimply youths that he was awaiting the divorce court’s verdict any week now. ‘No problem, sir. We’ll be right on hand when you’re ready.’
There were various steely edges to the settlement that were in Olivia’s favour, but friends had warned him that contesting merely expands the solicitor’s bill. A hearty wave is free and a lot better than a scowl.
He had an ‘oh shit’ moment that evening: he’d forgotten to phone Olivia about his bits n pieces. Sophie answered, to his surprise: she was down from Newcastle – her degree’s reading week. Mum was in the bath. He had a good chat with Sophie, battling against his own crosswind of grumpiness, a feeling of family exclusion. Her course was going well, Newcastle was fab, she was clubbing a lot. He wondered if Olivia really was in the bath. Sophie was going no further south than Worcester, with just a brief detour to a rock gig in Birmingham. Dad wasn’t included in her
itinerary; the message that he was back from Dubai had got to her too late – she’d already bought her train tickets. He offered to pay for the additional leg south. To no avail.
‘OK, sweetie,’ he said. ‘I’ll come up to Newcastle soon. Can I speak to your mum?’
To his surprise, she went upstairs with the phone and called out. He could see the landing, the bathroom door, the exposed beams and crooked floors; he could even see the shaggy patch of plaster between a V of rafter and joist that no amount of insulating and specialised paint had ever cured. His wife came on the phone – dripping in her wrap-around towel, no doubt. Her firm and lengthy forty-eight-year-old body with its dense breasts; her quick, high voice, her long fingers.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Who did you think it was?’
‘Sofe didn’t say,’ she sighed. ‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘I’m getting drips on the new floor.’
‘What new floor?’
‘The joists underneath were rotten. That’s why the boards felt sort of spongy. Mike did it, with planks from an old church or something.’
Mike was the local thirty-odd carpenter: a charmer who played the guitar.
‘I thought he wasn’t supposed to be much good.’
‘What difference does it make to you?’
‘Well, we haven’t actually signed anything yet,’ Bob pointed out. ‘Until then it’s still mine as much as yours. Technically.’
‘Did you get my message about all your junk?’
Bob stiffened, took a deep breath, studied the flat’s wheat-meal carpet. ‘I’ve carried junk, when I was flogging round Asia. Plastic junk, made in Chinese slave factories. Half of the stuff I ever carried was junk. I’ve flown over the junk floating in the oceans: circles of plastic the size of France, visible from the cockpit. Half of the stuff we carry in our heads is junk. But my bits and pieces are not junk.’
‘And?’ she said impatiently. She would always claim men went on and on.
‘I’ll sort out storage, hire a big white van and clear it next week. As long as you can put me up for the night. It’ll take more than a day.’
‘A whole day?’
