What You Don't Know

by David Belbin

  ‘Articulate. Not particularly charismatic, but he gives off an air of authority. Borderline sanctimonious. Bit of a control freak. Doesn’t like discussion or argument much, especially from me.’

  ‘You probably make him feel insecure. I’ve met people like that.’

  ‘Have you now?’ The door opened. How long had King been stood outside, listening? Andrew held out his hand.

  ‘I’m Andrew Saint, of Saint International Solutions. Nick has been showing me round. I’m considering …’

  King ignored him. ‘Did you give an interview to the Daily Mail on Monday?’ he asked Nick, his voice frighteningly neutral.

  ‘No. A newspaper called me, but I referred them to you.’

  ‘And I refused to talk to them, but they sent me a copy of their article anyway, asked me to comment on it before they go to press tonight. Look!’

  Nick saw exactly why his boss was so pissed off. LABOUR COUNCIL RUNS JOB SCHEME FOR DRUG DEALERS was the headline. He scanned the story. Sordid rumours, dressed up as investigative reporting, with spurious interview quotes, half of them from him: ‘Cane refused to comment on his own drug use but did not deny that teenage prostitutes had been counselled to switch from crack cocaine to cannabis as it was “safer”.’

  ‘I’ve been stitched up,’ Nick told King. ‘Can we get a lawyer onto it?’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew how weak they were.

  ‘Got the money to pay a lawyer? Think you can take out an injunction to get every single copy of the paper off the streets?’

  ‘Most of what they’ve written is really about the Crack Action Team, not us.’

  ‘Why would they care about that? These guys know what they’re doing. They tried to bounce me into giving them a quote or two. I’m going to spend the next two hours talking to board members when I should be with my kids at football training. Thank you for that. Oh, and you’re suspended.’

  Thursday night, late, he phones, tells you where to meet him. He’s been drinking, you can tell when you get to the hotel. That’s why he couldn’t drive to pick you up. He doesn’t break the law, except for one law, and you’re almost legal. Will he still want you then? You’ve grown a cup size in the last six months. Most girls would be happy about that, but you’re not. Sometimes, when you use a bed, he inspects you like he’s appraising you.

  After you’ve done it, he falls asleep. He’s never fallen asleep before. Does that mean he’s got more relaxed with you? Or is he just tired and drunk?

  It’s midnight. You have to go to school in the morning. You don’t know whether to wake him or just go. Trouble is, you spent all your cash paying for the taxi here. You try to wake him, but he swears and turns over. You’re in a shabby hotel on the Mansfield Road. You could walk home from here but it’s dark and cold and uphill all the way. Once you get close to the hostel you’ll get hassle from punters or pimps. You can’t face that. So you phone a cab and reach into his wallet. The taxi will only cost a fiver. You take a tenner. If he was awake, he would give you a lot more, but you’re not a thief.

  You can’t help looking at the contents of the wallet. Two hundred quid or so. A condom, extra strong. No photos of wife and kids, but there is a driving licence. You memorize the address, in case you ever need it.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He’s sitting up, wide awake, and suddenly you’re scared of him.

  ‘I tried to wake you. My taxi’ll be here any minute. I don’t have any money left.’

  He gets out of bed. ‘You spent all the money I gave you last time?’

  ‘I put some in my savings account. If you keep money in the hostel, people nick it. I only need a fiver, but you haven’t got anything smaller than ten. See?’ You open your purse and pull out the ten you just took, show him that there’s nothing else in it.

  ‘You should have woken me.’ He’s not angry, just sleepy. ‘Wait a mo.’

  Outside, the taxi pulls up.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he says, and before he puts his wallet away he gives you half of the contents. ‘Still taking English lessons?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re good.’

  Five minutes later, you’re back in Alexandra Park, sneaking into the hostel long after curfew. All the girls do it. If the wardens kicked up a fuss about dirty stop-outs, half of you would be turfed out. You could do with a shower, but it’ll have to wait until morning. Doesn’t matter, you feel good about yourself. He wanted you enough to see you on a weekday, to wait for you in a rented room. And now you know where he lives.

  17

  At least the story didn’t mention Sarah. The news about her being part of the Power Project board had only been on local media. She wasn’t yet on any of the project’s stationery or publicity material. Kingston had left a message at her parliamentary office to warn her, but she was already on the train home so had missed it. Today, she’d had several messages from the Nottingham Evening Post on her machine. She returned the call from Brian Hicks, the local journalist she was most friendly with. He wanted to interview her. Today.

  ‘We don’t want to turn against the project. But it is front page news.’

  ‘If I were you,’ Sarah insisted, ‘I’d have a different lead story ready.’ Reluctantly, she agreed to see him later. Then, even more reluctantly, she called Nick, at work. A brisk female voice informed her that he wasn’t in today.

  ‘Is he ill, or working in the field?’

  ‘You might find him at home,’ the young woman said, coldly.

  Sarah dialled his home number and let it ring a dozen times. She was about to hang up when he answered.

  ‘I wondered if you’d call.’ Nick sounded hungover.

  ‘I tried you at work first. Why aren’t you there?’

  ‘King suspended me last night.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘He didn’t put it on paper, but if he had “talking to the press without permission” just about covers it. Not that I actually talked to them for more than a minute. You know how the tabloids distort things.’

  ‘I do.’ Sarah was furious at Nick for letting himself be played, but chose her words carefully. ‘You should have hung up rather than say anything.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ve been an idiot.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can get the suspension lifted when I talk to King. But there’s a few things I need to get straight with you first.’

  She ran through the Mail article, establishing what had been said and not said. They had nothing but gossip and hearsay, nothing dirtier than the allegations Sarah and the drugs charity’s chief executive had discussed in their meetings at parliament, and found to be unsubstantiated. The demonstrable truths in the article were the drug-using backgrounds of some of the drugs workers. But that was easy to spin. This wasn’t a line of work for total abstainers.

  She ended the call and the phone immediately rang. Her assistant, Hugh. The Guardian wanted Sarah to do five hundred words for tomorrow’s opinion pages about drugs policy. This was their way of both showing support and getting a news story out of her. Better there than the Indy, which was soft on cannabis.

  ‘Find out what the deadline is and I’ll run it by the party and the Home Office. If I can, I will. And tell them I want the standard NUJ fee donated to the Howard League for Penal Reform.’

  She rang the Power Project again, got the same woman. This time, she told her who she was. ‘Tell Kingston I’m on my way over. I want to meet him in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘He’s not here at the moment.’

  ‘Then you’d better find him.’

  *

  By dinner time it was sorted. The Evening Post would run a sympathetic story the next day. A complaint had been made to the Press Council, which would clip the Mail’s wings should they be tempted to run more scurrilous nonsense. Kingston Bell had agreed that his instinctive suspension of Nick Cane was not in the project’s best interests. Luckily, the suspension had not been leaked to the media. The punishment had been withdrawn a
nd would not appear on Nick’s employment record. All staff would receive immediate training on media liaison issues. The next board meeting would take place three weeks early, at a date on which Sarah was able to attend.

  Sarah had had to cancel several of her planned meetings for the day. Rescheduling them would cut into her red box time on Sunday. She’d hoped to find time to drive to Chesterfield, visit Mum, who was about to go into the Royal Infirmary for her exploratory operation. She’d have to ring her instead. Mum said she wasn’t worried. She didn’t like it when Sarah tried to play the dutiful daughter. So Sarah rarely did. But she mustn’t forget to ring.

  She took one more look at the tabloid before she threw it in the bin. The photo they had of Nick was an old one, probably from his trial. His eyes looked shifty. At least her relationship with him hadn’t come out. If the Mail had got on to that, they would have had a field day.

  Sarah wondered whether she should tell the Home Secretary about having given a former lover a reference for a sensitive job. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time that it was a sensitive job. Naive, naive, naive. Too late to bring it up now without making herself look weak or, worse, stupid and unprofessional. Almost as stupid as letting Paul Morris talk her into joining the board at a time when she was too busy being a minister to give the project enough focused attention.

  Paul. He would be in Nottingham. She could legitimately call him for advice about how to deal with the media situation. She would like to see him again. Perhaps she could invite him round. She’d told him that her cooking wasn’t up to much, so he’d understand that she only had one thing on her mind. That, too, would look weak. But sometimes you had to give in to your weaknesses.

  Jerry phoned Nick to ask if he could fit in an extra lesson. She must be flush, he thought, glad to have something to take his mind off yesterday’s train wreck, to cycle to Alexandra Park on a cold but clear Saturday afternoon. He chose his route carefully to avoid the steepest part of Woodborough Road. This involved turning off Alfreton Road, where his flat was, onto Forest Road, which he followed for its full length, past the recreation ground and cemetery on his left. He cycled through the red-light zone, which was quiet at this time of day. The women he saw were seasoned, in their twenties and older, not the young crack addicts who tended to appear after dark.

  There had been a purge on kerb crawlers recently, their names listed in the Evening Post. A Crown Court judge, two university lecturers, the manager of one of the city’s most popular department stores. It didn’t seem to have had an effect on business, though. The girls stood on Forest Road, at the end of side streets they could disappear down if they saw someone they wanted to avoid. Nick couldn’t imagine paying for sex but, in prison, he’d met plenty of men who did. For them, sex had to be dirty and anonymous. The more sordid, the better.

  For Nick, sex was something to celebrate, at the heart of a life lived well. Inside, that first year, he’d often fantasized about Nancy. Now that he was sleeping with her, he ought to be happy, even if his past life was all over some scummy tabloid. Nancy didn’t care. She’d rung him last night to tell him as much, drunk after ‘a night out with the girls’. He’d been the subject of discussion in the staff room all day, she told him.

  ‘Did you mention that you were going out with me?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I never let anyone there know anything about my private life. Whatever you say leaks like a sieve, ends up reaching the kids.’

  ‘Were the kids talking about it?’

  ‘No. The story didn’t mention the school. You’re ancient history. The only ones you and I taught when we job-shared are in the upper sixth now. I’ll tell you one funny thing, though. Remember Eve Shipton?’

  ‘Of course.’ Eve was the head of English when Nick taught there. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She seems okay. Don’t see her as much as I used to since she was promoted to deputy head. She remarried while you were away, a nice guy. Anyway, she confided in me when it was just the two of us. Said she always liked you, hoped that this story in the paper wasn’t going to set you back.’

  ‘Did you tell her you’d seen me?’

  ‘I told her you’d asked for some help with the syllabus for your private tuition. She asked me to give you her best if you got in touch again. I got the feeling that she used to have a thing for you. I thought you’d like to know that you’re still a hit with the middle-aged mums.’

  Eve would be about fifty now, her kids starting university. Seven years ago, as his boss, she’d allowed him to negotiate a job-share. That was after he’d found the caves beneath his flat in the Park, was working all hours setting up a cannabis factory. He’d had to make up some crap about wanting the extra time to write. He wasn’t sure that Eve had believed him.

  Eve was a handsome woman who had lost confidence in her allure. After her husband left, she was lonely, and Nick had escorted her to the pictures a couple of times, foreign flicks at Broadway. One night, seeing her back to her car, he’d tried to give her a peck on the cheek good night. The kiss hit her mouth instead of just to the side, and he was surprised to find she’d left her lips more than a little open.

  They kept the affair secret at school. Eve was another reason why Nick made no move on Nancy when they worked together. His lover would have known. Eve used to tease Nick about Nancy’s crush on him.

  It was she who brought an end to the affair. Possibly she sensed that Nick was getting out of control. He was doing too much coke at the time, though never around her. Officially her rationale was that she had begun to date a guy her own age and might decide to sleep with him. Of all the break-ups that Nick had had, this was the most civilized. He wondered what Eve looked like now.

  Perhaps because of the kerb-crawler crackdown, some working girls had moved further down Mapperley Road, near to Alexandra Park. Nick cycled past a girl Jerry’s age or younger, wearing fishnet stockings and crudely applied bright red lipstick. Something occurred to Nick, something so blindingly obvious that he should have thought of it weeks ago, when he first got the Power Project job. An opportunity.

  At the hostel, Alice was pleased to see him. They talked a bit about Jerry’s parents’ evening, which she had been to at his request.

  ‘What day are you at the drop-in centre this week?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not. Keeping my head down.’

  ‘Why?’ Alice asked.

  He was relieved that not everybody had read the story about him. ‘You don’t want to know. But can I ask you something? Would it be okay for me to talk to some of the girls here about drug issues? I’m not saying you’ve got a huge problem or anything, just for my work.’

  Alice gave a wry smile. ‘Glad to hear we only have a normalsized problem.’

  ‘I’m having trouble getting young people to come into the Power Project, and it’s them we’re most meant to help. If I could talk to some of the girls here, it would really help me meet my targets.’

  ‘You’re just offering advice, right? Counselling, like you do with me at the drop-in centre?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nick began to think aloud. ‘But more informally. I could just say that I’ll be available at certain times and anything said will be in complete confidence. How does that sound?’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with it. I’ll mention it to the other wardens at the weekly meeting on Monday if you like.’

  ‘That’d be terrific. Want me to come to the meeting?’

  ‘Couldn’t hurt.’

  That would give Nick more time to work out his ideas. Until now, he had kept his work with private pupils separate from his drugs job. But there was no reason why they couldn’t connect.

  Nick and Jerry spent an hour talking about Shakespeare, then she told him about what the teachers had said at parents’ evening.

  ‘Alice played a blinder. She asked some good questions. They reckon I might get seven GCSEs at C or above.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Nick told her about his new scheme. ‘Do you think you could men
tion it to some of the other girls, tell them I’m all right?’

  ‘S’pose. But you know most of the others think I’m super straight cos I only smoke a bit of weed. Half of them will take anything going.’

  ‘Tell them I’m not there to make them stop taking anything, just to offer advice on how to tell if their drug use is turning into a problem.’

  ‘They might be cool with that.’

  Nick realized he was doing exactly what the Daily Mail had accused the Power Project of doing. Because it was the right thing to do.

  18

  Sunday night and he’s back. You meet him late on, get into his four-by-four. Seats down, side lane; he hasn’t got long before he has to get back to his wife and kids.

  ‘Missed you, babe.’

  ‘I missed you, too,’ you tell him. ‘Let me show you how much.’

  ‘Wait.’ His phone is ringing. You listen to him do business. He doesn’t try to hide stuff from you any more. It’s all about weights, transport, distribution. When he’s done, he talks while you suck him, says that when you finish university you can work for him if you want.

  ‘One day the government will get wise, legalize drugs and tax the fuck out of them. Until then, there are fortunes to be had. Make sure you get a language or two. Dutch would be good. Most of them speak English, but it’s useful to know what they’re up to when they talk among themselves.’

  You say you will.

  ‘How are the English lessons going?’

  ‘Good. Teach came round yesterday after I rang him. He said I was doing really well with Shakespeare.’

  ‘You like him a lot, this guy?’

  ‘He treats me like an equal.’ Your lover frowns, so you add, ‘But there’s no funny stuff. He’s never made a move … that way.’ You don’t say that he once turned you down. ‘He’s nice, is all.’

  ‘Men are only nice to you if they want something. Remember that.’