What You Don't Know

by David Belbin

  ‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

  ‘Your address is next to your number in the phone book.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘You don’t mind me coming, do you? Only I checked at the Power Project and they said you were off sick. I’ve been round a couple of times. This is the first time I’ve found you home.’

  ‘I was staying at my brother’s before,’ Nick explained.

  ‘Some of the girls were asking when you were going to talk to them,’ Jerry said, after making them both a brew. ‘I told them what a cool guy you are, how you’d done time for growing dope, got them interested.’

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come when I said.’ Nick and Jerry had never discussed his time in prison. He’d hinted at having been in trouble to explain why he was no longer a school teacher. ‘You saw the story in the newspaper?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘I should start work again next week. How about I come round Sunday?’

  ‘Not a good day. A lot of them are busy. Monday’s better.’

  Busy turning tricks? Nick didn’t ask. ‘What book have you brought with you?’

  ‘Great Expectations. Have you read it? I’ll bet you have.’

  ‘I’ve taught it a couple of times, but I don’t have my notes here. We could have a general chat, then arrange a proper session?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’ She handed him the book and Nick opened it at the first page.

  ‘Why don’t I read a bit to you? Get us both into the story.’

  There was always something that caught him unawares when rereading Dickens. The second paragraph contained a line he’d forgotten: the ‘five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long’ that marked the graves of Pip’s five brothers, who had died in infancy. This matter-of-factness moved him, but Jerry did not seem to react to it. When he’d finished the chapter, they talked for a while about the way that it was written, and the things that fear could make people do. Then there was a light, familiar knock on the door.

  While Teach is answering the door, your phone vibrates.

  You check the message. It’s him. He wants to see you. Now. You think about it for a moment then text back, saying where you are. You’ll wait on the corner, just down the road. He replies that that’s okay. Ten minutes. Teach returns with a woman in tow.

  She’s thirty or so. Tarty, but not in too obvious a way. Plenty of make-up, push-up bra, skirt shorter than yours, despite it being frozen outside. She stares daggers for a second, but softens when he introduces you, makes fake conversation, says a couple of smart things about Dickens.

  ‘I’ll bet you’re a teacher too,’ you say.

  ‘For my sins,’ she tells you. ‘Nick and I used to work together.’

  ‘Is that right?’ You take an instant dislike to her. There’s something phoney about her voice, strained. ‘How long have you two been together?’

  This kind of direct question throws her. You are good at throwing teachers, keeping them on their toes.

  ‘Not long,’ she says, with a sigh that suggests they’re in the first flush of love and she can’t wait to get rid of you so she can take Teach to bed.

  ‘Gotta go.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Teach says. ‘We still have a chapter to talk through.’

  ‘I got a text while you were at the door,’ you explain, holding up the phone. ‘I have to meet someone. It’s okay, I’ll pay for the full lesson.’

  ‘It was hardly a lesson.’

  ‘I’ve been here half an hour.’ You compromise on giving him a tenner and arrange to meet on Monday, before he sees the other girls at the hostel. When you reach the bottom of the steps, you see that your lover is already there, illegally parked outside the locksmith’s, instead of the pub where you told him to wait.

  ‘How did you know where I’d be?’ you ask him.

  ‘I know everything,’ he says.

  You believe him.

  ‘Come to bed,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Wait.’ Nick looked down at the street. Jerry was below, getting into a four-by-four. It might be the one that Kingston drove. Nick couldn’t make out the driver, or the licence plates. A lot of people drove cars like that. Andrew Saint had one. Nancy pulled him away from the window.

  ‘It’s a trick, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suspect so.’

  ‘The way she put that money on the table, I could tell. She’s used to getting paid for services rendered.’

  ‘I guess.’ Nick remembered what Alice had told him about Jerry. A boyfriend, maybe, not a pimp.

  ‘You’re not fucking her, are you? Taking payment in kind?’

  ‘I …’

  Nancy put a finger to his lips and unzipped his fly. ‘Nobody said you had to be exclusive. She’s a very pretty girl. But don’t get caught. And, remember, there are things that only an experienced woman can do well.’

  He’d assumed that Nancy expected him to be faithful. He should know by now that, where sex was concerned, few people were consistent. Nick wasn’t like his brother. He’d never cheated on a woman who he’d been in a serious relationship with, not unless you counted the overlap when it was nearly over. But maybe that was cowardly. Men weren’t made to be monogamous, he told himself, as they undressed. And neither, Nancy was implying, were some women.

  ‘In retrospect,’ Suraj Hanspal told Sarah in her parliamentary office, ‘we made a mistake in opening the Power Project so quickly. We thought that a clean replacement organization would minimize the fallout from the CAT fiasco, but people are confusing the two, tarring both with the same brush.’

  ‘We can hardly close the place down because of tabloid lies,’ Sarah said.

  Suraj didn’t reply at once. This was exactly what he was suggesting. ‘Failure to renew funding is not the same as closing something down.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same,’ Sarah said. Would she be so concerned if the project’s closure didn’t mean putting Nick out of a job? The bad publicity was tarnishing the charity’s image. No wonder they wanted rid. ‘What about the drug users that the project supports?’

  ‘We don’t have reliable evidence that the project is helping a significant number of users,’ Suraj said. ‘It takes a supposedly enlightened approach, but perhaps it’s too enlightened. Ultimately the message has to be based on a condemnation of all drugs use.’

  ‘Legal drugs included?’

  ‘Well …’ Suraj hesitated and Sarah seized on his moment of weakness.

  ‘Tobacco, alcohol, painkillers, pick-me-ups … people are addicted to all kinds to get them through the day. We can’t make them all illegal. Or. Wait. Maybe we can. But the government will lose an awful lot of tax revenue if we do.’

  Suraj spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘Surely you, more than anyone else on the board, recognize the political realities we face.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ Sarah paused. ‘Why don’t we compromise? Ask the city to hold back a decision on the next funding stream, see how it goes for a few weeks. Then, after the budget next month, if we decide to let the project run down, we can bury the decision underneath all the good news that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have for local councils.’

  ‘I’m glad we’re agreed.’ Suraj stood and shook her hand. ‘Most of the workers are on six-month contracts so, on that timescale, we won’t need to give notice. Kingston, of course, is on secondment from his council job.’

  At a huge bump in pay, as Sarah recalled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was very good of him to help us out.’

  Suraj, happy with their agreement, couldn’t get out of the office quickly enough. Sarah had effectively co-signed the death warrant for the Power Project. Nick, having been featured across the Daily Mail, would take much of the blame. Unless she could find a way to help him, to change the operation’s reputation. Only one person she knew could help with that. Luckily for Nick, she had just started sleeping with him.

  21

  Nick sat in a circle with five te
enage girls, all of them smoking. Neighbours was on TV, with the sound muted. Shaz, a scrawny kid who had already boasted about how much she made for her pimp, shared her theory about Nick.

  ‘You’re the guy who’s screwing Jerry, aren’t you? We’ve been trying to work it out for months.’

  Nick had told them that the discussion was no holds barred. Nothing they said would leave the room. He smiled patiently. It was a few years since he’d had a bunch of teenagers interested in his private life.

  ‘Not me, sorry.’

  ‘She talks about you,’ said Shaz. ‘You’re the prime suspect.’

  ‘I used to watch that on TV. Helen Mirren, she’s my kind of woman.’

  ‘She’s rough as!’ Pamela interjected. ‘And she’s an alky.’

  ‘Is she?’ Nick had seen the first two series at the start of the decade, but the story must have moved on while he was away. At least the comment gave him room to open a discussion. ‘What makes someone an alky, then? How much do they have to drink?’

  ‘It’s not how much, is it?’ Kim said. ‘It’s how often.’

  ‘At least half a bottle a day,’ Shaz said.

  ‘Half a bottle of what?’ Nick asked.

  The girls mostly drank cider, which they said was better value than lager and got you drunk quicker. They all knew lads who overdid the Special Brew or vodka. Pamela reckoned the biggest problems came when you combined booze with other drugs. Speed and booze made lads mental, they agreed. If you were doing crack, you weren’t bothered about drinking, you just wanted another rock.

  ‘Except for the comedown,’ Kim proffered, lighting another JPS.

  ‘My dad didn’t have a booze problem until he started smoking crack. But then he couldn’t sleep unless he’d had half a bottle of Scotch in him.’

  ‘Everyone knows you need smack to come down off crack,’ Shaz said.

  ‘How old’s your dad, Kim?’

  ‘He were thirty-two when he died. Cirrhosis of the liver.’

  Gradually, he got them to discuss their own drug use. None of them had a problem, that much they were very clear on. Pamela did ‘favours’ for her boyfriend, Jem, but he wasn’t a pimp, not like Shaz’s Beany, who ran three girls. Still, Shaz was the youngest, and his favourite. She was cool with that.

  The girls didn’t buy dope or crack directly themselves; their blokes did it for them. If they bought, they might get ripped off. None of them admitted to trying heroin, but Nick suspected that, if he got a couple of them on their own, he would find out that they’d chased the dragon.

  ‘What about you?’ Teri wanted to know. She had been the quietest up to now. ‘I heard you were in the paper. Said you’re a cokehead.’

  Nick tried to divert the question. ‘Do you girls ever take coke?’

  ‘Powder costs a fortune,’ Shaz said. ‘It’s for rich people.’

  ‘Are you rich?’ Teri asked him.

  ‘I was loaded for a while,’ Nick said. ‘Can’t say I spent it wisely.’

  ‘So you were a cokehead!’ Shaz said, with a cackle. ‘Jerry might be straight but she’s going out with a cokehead!’

  ‘I’m not …’ Nick was going to say ‘going out with Jerry’, but teachers didn’t dignify rumours by discussing them and he still felt like a teacher among these girls. He wasn’t sure where to take the conversation. It was too early to get any of them to tell him that their drug use was causing them problems. That area was better addressed in a one-on-one anyway. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Look at the time. Listen, did you guys find this afternoon interesting? Want to do it again?’

  They agreed to continue in a week’s time. Nick said he’d be there half an hour earlier, in case any of them wanted to talk to him in private.

  ‘How did it go?’ Alice asked afterwards.

  ‘Okay, I think. You’ve got some real characters in there.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Thanks for your help, setting it up. Can I buy you a drink?’

  ‘No pubs round here,’ Alice pointed out. ‘We could join the girls, buy a two-litre bottle of Bulmers and sit on a wall up the road.’

  ‘Bit cold this time of year.’

  ‘Jerry told me she met your girlfriend.’

  ‘She did, yes.’

  ‘Go on home to her, then,’ Alice told him, her voice more plaintive than bitter. ‘You’ve done your duty with the druggies today.’

  Nick headed out into the cold winter rain, cycling against the wind. He could go to Nancy’s but he always ended up getting hammered with her, and he had a big meeting with Kingston in the morning. He would see if his brother fancied a quiet couple of pints instead.

  Paul brought Sarah coffee in bed. They were at his King’s Cross flat. It was the morning after the first time that Sarah had spent the night there. Paul did not make any moves to suggest an encore of last night’s love-making. Sarah’s mind, inevitably on a day when she had to be at the Home Office soon, drifted to work issues that they had in common.

  ‘About the Power Project …’

  ‘Let it go,’ Paul told Sarah. ‘We did our duty by the place, but it was too soon.’

  ‘That’s all very well for you to say,’ Sarah told him. ‘You’re not on the board any more.’

  Now was not the time to tell a new lover that she couldn’t let it go because she wanted to protect a former lover. This was an affair, not a fully fledged relationship. Secrets were allowed. He stroked her hair.

  ‘There won’t be a board for much longer. Look, I’m sorry I talked you into joining it. Truth is, that night, I wanted an excuse to see you. When I showed up in your room and Eric was there, you can’t begin to imagine what went through my mind …’

  ‘I’m sure I can.’

  They both laughed. Paul kissed her, then went for a shower. She was not going to fall in love with Paul, she told herself. She was going to have fun. They had been together for a week and had already, casually but definitively, agreed the terms of their relationship. They would spend one or two nights a week together, but not in public. As far as possible, they would steer clear of each other in Nottingham.

  Paul assured her that, he and Annette having separated, there was nobody else in his life. He was almost as busy with work as she was, so the arrangement suited him as well as it did her. Sarah thought she had found the perfect relationship for a junior Home Office minister. Paul was the best-looking man she’d been out with since Nick. One day, maybe, after he was divorced, she’d be happy to have him seen on her arm. But that day was a long way off.

  They caught separate taxis to the Home Office. Paul ran an unpublicized policy unit on updating drugs laws. He reported directly to the Home Secretary. As did Sarah. Today she had to formulate the government’s response to an EC recommendation that prisoners should be paid real wages for the work they did inside. It was an issue that enraged the kind of voters Labour needed to keep onside if they were to win a second term.

  Sarah didn’t think prisons should be work camps. That said, only idiots believed that governments profited by having men sew mail bags or assemble cheap radios. Each prison place cost more than several new nurses. Any money paid to prisoners came out of some other budget. The point about work in prison was that it kept dissent down and aided rehabilitation. Occasionally it qualified prisoners to do certain jobs when they got out. Pay for work was an important part of the rehabilitation process but she didn’t believe in equal rights for prisoners. There were murmurs from human rights groups that prisoners ought to be allowed the vote. In some countries, that was already happening. Over her dead body.

  Sarah wasn’t at her best in the Commons that afternoon. Mum had phoned to say that she had a date for her operation. It was still weeks away and she sounded scared. Sarah wasn’t used to hearing her that way. At Home Office questions, she had trouble concentrating, gave only an anodyne response to a question about wages in prisons.

  ‘We are committed to fairness and rehabilitation, but we have vowed to stay within the spen
ding limits set by the previous administration and I will not be making any new commitments in the immediate future.’

  Then came the question that she had been expecting, one that she had already answered twice, in different forms, when it was asked by opposition MPs anxious to trip her up. This time, however, it came from one of her own, Ali Blythe. In her preamble, Ali reminded the minister that her constituency included one of the biggest prisons in the Midlands.

  ‘Which I hope she will visit at her earliest convenience to see at first-hand some of the problems created by overcrowding, by underfunding, by the medieval slopping-out system and by desperately low morale among both staff and inmates.’

  ‘I would be happy to arrange a visit at the earliest opportunity and hope that the right honourable member will be able to accompany me.’

  The convention was that the opening question was uncontroversial with the tricky one coming in the follow-up. This, however, was a friendly question, or so Sarah thought. She sat down. Ali bobbed up again.

  ‘One of the reasons for the demoralization in our prisons is the prevalence of drug use and the unfettered spread of diseases connected with the sharing of needles, including such fatal diseases as HIV and hepatitis. Surely it is now time for the government to take decisive action to prevent the spread of such diseases. I’m sure that the honourable member agrees that a custodial sentence ought not to be a death sentence.’

  ‘I do,’ Sarah said. The Home Secretary was at her side, glowering, but she was unable to deny what she had said in the House, more than once. Ali was taking over her issue, knowing well that Sarah could not speak her full mind. In the House, she couldn’t even indicate that she was working on these issues behind the scenes, as she was about to assure Stonewall and other organizations. Sarah had to get her head together, but, when she started to speak again, wasn’t sure what words would come out.

  ‘I do share the honourable member’s concerns and, while there are practical and moral problems associated with needle exchanges that make an early move in that direction unlikely, I look forward to hearing her suggestions in more detail when we undertake the visit discussed in my previous answer.’