Dead Watch: a fast-paced thriller you don't want to miss
Page 15
Unsurprisingly, Bodhi was a natural. It took a few weeks to get the hang of using the kite, but once he had it figured out, he was up and away, literally. In no time, Bodhi was getting some serious airtime, and he loved it. Suddenly, he no longer wanted to go back to Cornwall on his days off, just in case he missed a windy day and lost time out with his kite. The one thing he noticed was as he was spending less time paddling out through the waves, he was losing some upper body strength. He got around this by sea swimming for fitness, and he also discovered the world of stand-up paddle-boarding, a great workout to keep his core in shape. If the water level was right, he could throw his board off the back of his boat and jump right in after it.
He still loved surfing, he could never get that out of his system, and he still popped back to Cornwall to catch a wave and see his family when he got the chance, but kitesurfing was Bodhi’s new religion, and Shoreham was his Mecca. The houseboat couldn’t have been in a better location. He could walk out of the front door, cross the small green and main road, and he was on Shoreham beach. The beach was pretty narrow and lacked space, but on a low tide, there was ample room for him and the other kite surfers to set up their gear and launch their kites.
When he came back up on deck, he was wearing his shorty wetsuit and had tied his hair back off his face. Carrying his kite and lines in one hand and his board in the other, he departed his boat and started the two-minute journey to the beach. Mornings like this were ones to be cherished; good wind, a low tide and plenty of sunshine. When you had days like this, it made you wonder what else you needed in life. It was the reason why Bodhi knew he wouldn’t have taken the money that night. He already had everything he needed. His life was pretty much complete.
A Meeting with Management
Jimmy pulled on the handles of the rowing machine so hard, the chain shook as it reached its final destination. He was covered in sweat and not only breathing hard, but wheezing both with exertion and pain as lactic acid filled his leg muscles. He had two hundred metres to go and would finish without dropping the pace if it killed him. That was the thing about Jimmy; he may have put a bit of timber on over the last few years, but he had once been a marine, and that do-or-die mentality was still strong in him. Once he took on an endeavour, he refused to quit, no matter what it did to him.
The gym at the station was only small, so Jimmy’s effort was being scrutinised closely by Bodhi, who was somehow standing on the Swiss exercise ball while performing arm curls with a pair of dumbbells. He had been out on the water for nearly two hours that afternoon, but it hadn’t stopped him doing some extra work to keep him on the ball, if you’ll excuse the pun. Dylan was watching, too, as he hung from the pull-up bar by two fingers of each hand. It was a strength exercise he liked to do to help improve his grip strength for rock climbing.
Wesley didn’t like them to use the gym until after nine o’clock usually, but as he taken nights off at short notice, Jimmy was in charge, and he didn’t give a shit what they did. The evening routines had been done, and they’d even squeezed in a Home Safety Visit for an old boy in Kemptown, all by the ripe old time of seven-thirty. Unless they had any calls, Jimmy was happy for them to have a quiet night. Without Jo there to intimidate them with her superior fitness levels, the guys had trooped off to the gym while Harrison cooked moussaka.
Jimmy completed his final few strokes on the rowing machine and swiftly rolled off onto his back. As he cried out in pain, he tried to straighten his legs but they had gone foetal and were not interested in playing any longer. Dylan and Bodhi laughed; they were used to seeing him like this. Bodhi carefully got off the ball and looked at the time on the display.
‘7.05,’ he said. ‘Nearly there, Jim.’
‘Fuck,’ Jimmy just about managed to answer, his eyes were closed so tight, he seemed to be squeezing out tears.
He had been doing the two-thousand metre challenge for a couple of weeks and had already shaved half a minute off his best time, but he was determined to get under seven before he gave up and found some other stupid labour. As he laid there, desperately paying back his oxygen debt, Lenny walked in. Lenny made a point of never using the gym at work; the light weights that could be found there insulted him. He trained at Cheetahs on Hove seafront, a proper old-school, spit and sawdust gym. Lenny’s attitude to training was “Go Big or Go Home,” and it wasn’t just talk, either. The man lived by the code, and the two prolapsed discs in his lower back were his proof. He could dead-lift, squat and bench-press insane amounts of weight. Lowering his standards, so far as to pick up the meagre dumbbells in the gym were definitely not an option, and as for the running or rowing machines, fuck that. Lenny didn’t do cardio.
‘You all right there, Jim?’ he said. ‘Shit yourself again?’
Jimmy held his arm up and waved.
‘If I were you,’ Lenny said, ‘I’d think about getting back to the canteen. That prick Jacobs has just turned up, and Harrison doesn’t look happy.’
Ian Jacobs had been a firefighter for as long as Harrison had. In fact, the two of them had gone to training school together, and once upon a time, they had been firm friends. Their relationship had steadily eroded over the years as Ian rose through the ranks of the brigade, but two years previously, it had been destroyed. Ian had spent much of his career at an operational level. He had been a watch manager at East for over a decade, and his colleagues assumed that was where he would finish his service. But, like a number of officers before him, the urge for promotion hit him at a later date than was normal, but when it had come, he had embraced it with a vengeance.
Ian’s rise though the service was swift. In six years, he had gone from riding in charge of the appliance to being the deputy chief of Sussex Fire and Rescue Service. It wasn’t the promotions that had caused Harrison to fall out with him. He had no problem with people trying to improve their position, especially when they were still on a final salary pension scheme.
No, what caused Harrison’s contempt for his old friend was that just before the last set of strikes, Ian had left the union. Ten years previously, when the firefighters had gone on strike over their pay, he had been one of the strongest advocates for action. He was union, through and through, when he had been an operational firefighter, but since having the management chip inserted, his viewpoint had taken an about-turn. Like many of the other officers, he had refused to go out the doors, claiming that as the army in their ancient Green Goddesses would not be available to provide cover in the strikes, he would do it. He couldn’t let East Sussex be unprotected, it went against his conscience.
If that were the case and the genuine reason why they had not supported their colleagues, Harrison could understand it, but he didn’t see it that way. If management were that concerned with the safety of the city’s residents, they wouldn’t have banned the firefighters from breaking the picket line and turning out to the most serious calls involving life risks, something they’d done in all previous strikes. He regarded the senior officer’s actions as a way of keeping in the chief’s good books with a view to ensuring their future prospects in the job. If the officers just came out and said they were leaving the union to further their careers, he would have found it easier to swallow, but the whole guilt thing they were trying to put on his colleagues made Harrison sick.
As far as he was concerned, morals and consciences didn’t come into it. Did the officers really believe that going on strike didn’t affect the men and women who sat on the fire engines? Harrison had hated every second of being on strike, and he knew his colleagues felt the same way, but it was more than their pensions at stake; it was the very future of the fire service they were trying to protect. Pensions were an expensive burden to any employer. If the scheme collapsed, as many people predicted it would due to the changes imposed by the government, it would suddenly be a whole lot more enticing for private companies that wanted a piece of the action. The privatisation of the service was something that everyone was prepared to fight against.
To his surprise, rather than the chaos he was expecting, Ian was sitting quietly at the table as Harrison kept himself busy in the kitchen.
‘Can I get you a cup of tea, boss?’ Jimmy said.
Ian held aloft the steaming mug that had been on the table out of Jimmy’s sight.
‘I’m good, thanks. Harrison is looking after me.’
‘Nice one,’ Jimmy said, shocked at the statement. He just hoped Harrison hadn’t spat in it or worse.
Jimmy looked to the kitchen door. ‘You all right in there, mate?’
Harrison suddenly appeared in the opening, wearing an apron that had the outline of a curvaceous woman’s body wearing a sexy negligee. It was the same one he always wore when he was cooking.
‘All good in here, Jim. Things are always good in my kitchen. It’s everywhere else there’s a problem.’
Ian looked to the doorway, stood up, then picked up his tea in one hand and his briefcase in the other. ‘I know it’s short notice, but as our last meeting got cancelled, I thought I’d give you chaps the presentation on the station closure now, if you don’t mind.’
Jimmy did mind. He wanted to have his tea and get some kip, but he didn’t feel like the question was a rhetorical one.
‘I’ll give you guys fifteen minutes,’ Ian said. ‘Then, I’ll see you in the lecture room.’
It came as a surprise to no one that the meeting was a disaster. It was doomed from the first slide Ian had produced. The title of the meeting was Service Transformation: Facing the Challenge, and it had immediately set everyone off. In true management style, rather than tell it like it was, they had come up with a flash name, complete with a colon in the title, that did anything except tell the real situation.
The fight to save their fire station had been going on for nearly eighteen months and had been led with much gusto by Harrison. The Service’s budget had been cut by nearly twenty percent, and management had decided that closing East Brighton, as well as a number of retained stations, was the best means to deal with the shortfall. Harrison had argued that the last thing that should be attacked was the front line. The best way to make meaningful savings, he countered, was for the brigades in the South East to amalgamate, reducing backroom staff and admin by a quarter, but more importantly, only relying on one chief and one management team, rather than the five they had now. Obviously, this would take time and effort to set up, but it had been done in Scotland a few years earlier, with the whole country being transformed from nine separate services into one national brigade, saving millions of pounds.
The public had bought into it and had unanimously got behind the campaign to save the station, but it was the fire authority who made the final decision, and after a hard-fought campaign, they had wilted and voted in favour of the cuts. Except management didn’t like using that word. In fact, they went as far as they possibly could to avoid it. Say it or not, the firefighters, the guys on the frontline, knew what the closure of their station meant. A better title for the slideshow would have been Cuts: How to Royally Fuck Up the Fire Service.
The watch had made it painfully clear throughout the presentation about their feelings on the matter. They groaned or laughed as Ian flicked through the slides, first showing how their calls had dropped, and then, how their station not being there anymore should be no cause of alarm for the locals. Harrison had got up and left the room on two occasions, blurting out that he needed to check the food in the oven. He didn’t, the others knew that, but they also knew if he’d stayed in the room, he probably would have killed the man standing in front of them.
It had looked like they were going to get though the meeting without it descending it bedlam, when Ian made his fatal error, well and truly fucking things up. After showing them the final slide, which offered a list of support numbers the firefighters at the station could contact if they were being affected by the issues discussed, he closed his laptop that was linked up to the projector screen and looked around the room.
‘So, that’s it, guys, that’s how things are,’ he said. ‘I know how painful this must be for you, and I also know some of you are feeling let down by management and that we haven’t done enough to fight your corner. Now the chief, rightly or wrongly, has come in for an awful lot of slack from you and from the public about the decisions he has made, but I ask you in all honesty, if you were in his shoes, what would you have done in his situation?’
Instinctively, Jimmy looked to Harrison, but before he could make eye contact and attempt some form of warning, the man had already begun.
‘I’ll tell you what he could have done,’ Harrison said. ‘If he wanted to know how we felt, he should have come down here and asked us himself. We want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey.’
Ian ignored the insult.
‘And I’ll tell you what else he could have done. He could have stopped pretending that these cuts aren’t going to affect the public, because he knows, and we know, that they will. My family live at the top of the hill out there; it’s two and a half minutes from this station. I know that because I’ve been living there most of my life. Now if he’s trying to tell me that having a pump coming from Brighton, which will take an extra five minutes to get here, isn’t going to affect their chances of getting out of a fire alive, then he’s an even bigger liar than I thought he was. “Fire kills in minutes, smoke kills in seconds.” Have you forgotten that logo we used to have written on the back of the fire engines, or is it too inconvenient for you to remember in these times of austerity?’
Ian leant forward in his chair. ‘Come on, Harrison. I don’t think that attitude is going to help anyone, now, is it?’
Harrison held up his hand. ‘If I were you, I’d hold that thought because I haven’t even started yet. You senior officers, you’re all the fucking same. You haven’t got a backbone between you. How dare you make out like you’re on our side. None of you have done a thing to protect this service you claim to love so much.’
‘That’s not fair!’ Ian said, his voice rising slightly. ‘You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes at headquarters.’
‘You’re right, I don’t. But somehow, I can’t see you up in the chief’s office, fighting our corner. That’s not your style, is it?’
‘My feelings on this matter are the same as his. He’s not doing this for the sake of it. He’s as devastated by the closure of this station as anyone else.’
Harrison laughed. ‘If he’s that bothered about the cuts and the damage it’s doing to this service, to his fucking service, then why doesn’t he grow some bollocks and speak out about it?’
‘What would that do?’ Ian said as he reddened. ‘Do you think the government would listen to him if he went cap in hand to them?’
‘Fuck the government. I’m talking about going to the press, telling them about what’s really going on. That’s the sort of action we expect from our leader. Instead, he smiles politely and says that everything is business as usual. He makes me sick, and you can tell him that, if you like.’
‘Here, here,’ Lenny shouted as the others nodded in approval.
‘Come on, Harrison. Calm down, mate,’ Jimmy said. ‘This ain’t helping matters.’
‘It’s making me feel a lot better. You know, a problem shared and all that.’
Ian tried to smile and placed the papers on the desk back into his briefcase. ‘I know this was never going to be easy for you. I know how long you’ve worked at this station and that your dad worked here before you. I know all that, and that’s why I wanted to do the presentation tonight. I thought it was best, given our history.’
Harrison laughed, then shook his head. ‘Given our history, you should have been out there with us, campaigning to save this station, you
fucking turncoat. Just like you should have been out on strike with the rest of us, rather than riding around on that scab lorry with those other bastards. That’s what you should have been doing.’
Harrison’s words made the room grow quiet. Everyone knew that the word he had just used was enough to get him the sack. They had been told, in no uncertain terms at the start of the strikes, it was no longer the 1980s, and that the staff who decided to work were to be treated with respect and dignity by their colleagues. A firefighter in another part of the country had been sacked for using the word on social media. But Harrison had already overstepped that mark; he had called a senior officer a scab to his face with a handful of witnesses present. The retirement and pension that he was due to receive in less than six months suddenly seemed like a distant memory.
Ian closed his briefcase and, without saying another word, got out of his chair and left the room. Jimmy followed behind him, already pleading Harrison’s case. The others just sat there, staring at Harrison, not knowing what the hell to say to a man on death row.
‘I’ve got to give it to you,’ Lenny finally said. ‘That well and truly pisses on anything I’ve ever done wrong in this job. Looks like you’re the daddy now.’
Return of the Mac
‘Careful!’ Lenny yelled at the two children charging towards him.
One of them was dressed much like him in a mini-firefighters outfit, except it was black instead of the beige style that Sussex adopted. In the child’s hand was a plastic axe that must have come included in the set. His friend, for no reason that Lenny could see, was dressed as Thor.
‘How much longer is this going to last?’ he said to Jo, who was helping a little girl direct the hose reel at a wooden house. Its windows and doors spun around when they took a direct jet of water.
‘Chill out, Len,’ she said. ‘It’s only been going for an hour, and it’s all for a good cause.’