Bone and Cane

by David Belbin

  Rock City was a big venue. Nick had been to more gigs there than he could count. The first time was when he was a student. New Order’s second ever gig. They came on at eleven and played for just forty mesmerising minutes. Then there was R.E.M., with fewer than a hundred people in the audience. The Smiths, early on. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, with The Pogues supporting. Maybe fifty shows since. It would probably be full of students. Nick would feel his age. But at least he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew.

  As they walked down the hill, Joe got out a spliff.

  ‘Better have this now, before the E kicks in.’

  Nick watched him light it. ‘Isn’t that a bit . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry. Everyone’s dead relaxed about it these days. All the cops care about are violent drunks, you know?’

  He handed the joint to Nick just as they were passing the Peacock.

  ‘Nick?’ It was Tony Bax, coming out of the pub. Up close, Tony had aged. There was grey in his beard. A paunch showed through his jacket.

  ‘Nick, good to see you!’ Tony threw his arms around Nick. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Surviving,’ Nick said, stupidly self conscious about the joint in his hand. Tony had never been a doper.

  ‘What was it like?’ Tony asked, in a sympathetic voice.

  ‘I won’t be going back again in a hurry.’

  Tony focused pointedly on what was in Nick’s right hand.

  ‘Then I wouldn’t smoke that a hundred yards from the central police station. You’re on parole, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nick admitted. Tony was right. Having the joint was stupid. But the E was starting to kick in and this conversation felt uncomfortable. He tried to say something diplomatic. ‘I . . . eh . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tony said, ‘Didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Look, I’ve got to catch the last bus, but if there’s anything I can do, I’m still in the book, all right? Don’t be a stranger.’

  He hurried up the hill to catch the Arnold bus.

  ‘Who was that old fart?’ Joe asked, as Nick returned the joint.

  Nick didn’t reply.

  The skunk might be stronger than it was five years before, but the Es weren’t. After they’d got past the queue, checked their coats and bought a drink, Nick took an extra half. Then he and Joe had a snort of speed in the bogs. When the drugs were working properly, he hit the dance floor. He found that E’ed up he liked to dance to the techno numbers best, because it didn’t matter if you knew them, they rocked, whereas the guitar songs sounded stodgy and retro. The last gig he’d been to here was Nirvana, in 1991, just as they were breaking big, and rock didn’t seem to have moved on since then. Tonight, when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came on, he felt the old throw-yourself-around-the-room exhilaration, the E, the speed and booze combining to give him a surge of wild energy.

  Nick loved drugs: dope, speed, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and, later, when he had the brass, coke. He drew the line at smack: getting a habit was too big a risk. And acid. It wasn’t a fun drug. Acid took you deep inside yourself, deeper than he cared to go. He liked a drink with the drugs, too. People said you shouldn’t mix booze and E: they counteracted each other. He’d never seen it himself. More was more.

  Joe was dancing closer and closer to a student in a tight camisole and leather jeans. Nick’s brother had taken off his round glasses and his wedding ring. Caroline had started her maternity leave and gone to visit her mother for a couple of days. Was Joe faithful to his wife? He used to be a philanderer, running three or four women at the same time. Caroline knew all this, had been aware that he wasn’t monogamous when she first went out with him. She went along with it for a while, then chucked him.

  That was a first. Joe didn’t like being chucked. He thought it was a negotiation, but Caroline cut him out of her life. He left it a while, then asked her out. When Caroline didn’t come running back, he offered to stop seeing other women. Caroline let him know that she was seeing other guys. She made him beg, then got him back on exactly her terms. A few months later came the injury that ended Joe’s career. Caroline stuck with him and helped him set up the taxi firm. They married not long after Nick was sent down, but had waited four years to become parents.

  Weird, your kid brother becoming a father before you. Nick used to think the world was too bad a place to bring children into, but prison had taught him that his old world was a damn good place, compared to most. What did Joe think? Nick and Joe didn’t have those kind of conversations. Joe had never come to Nick for advice.

  Joe had left school and Sheffield at sixteen. Five years later he was at Notts County, the country’s oldest football club. Even though they’d ended up in the same city, he and Nick kept their distance. By the time Nick got his first teaching job, Joe was in the first team. He’d always been the successful one of the two of them, and let Nick know it. Then his career went tits up. Scratch Joe deep enough and he’d bleed a reservoir of resentment. Still, County were in the Second Division this year and Joe was thirty. If he’d stayed in the game, his playing days would be numbered.

  The girl dancing with Joe would have been five when Nick started teaching, twelve when he finished. He thought about the last woman he’d slept with. During that final drug-fucked fling between his arrest and his conviction, Nick had found himself in bed with a former pupil. He’d picked her up in a club, didn’t even recognise her, and she hadn’t let on. In his bed the next morning, she’d repeated her name, said she’d had a big thing for him when she was in Year 8. Nick found that he could picture her, a dumpy girl with a bad haircut and crippling self-consciousness. Looking at her graceful, naked, adult body, he had pictured the twelve-year-old girl within and felt very old.

  ‘Why did you leave teaching anyway?’ she asked, as she dressed. ‘I’ve got a friend still in the sixth form. She said you just stopped turning up one day.’

  ‘I’d had enough,’ he told her. ‘Burnt out.’

  ‘I’m glad that’s all it was,’ she said, making him ashamed. ‘You know, there are stories going round, but I never believe gossip.’

  Whatever the girl had seen in him, she’d exorcised it in that one night. When he phoned the number she’d given him, hoping for an encore, Nick found that it didn’t exist.

  Both brothers found women to dance alongside, but neither pulled. It had taken Nick until he was thirty to develop the confidence required to pull at nightclubs – only for him to find that one-night stands were rarely exciting enough to justify the effort involved. He and Joe left Rock City at quarter to two, just before it closed. Cane Cars were fully booked, so they queued to take a black cab home.

  This evening had confirmed what Nick had been expecting. His old world was no longer there for him. He was tainted, discredited, an embarrassment to all concerned. The only way to live with that kind of humiliation was to drop out of sight. Under the terms of his probation, he couldn’t leave the city, not unless he got a job elsewhere. His probation officer said there wasn’t much chance of him finding a job anywhere. Not soon, anyway.

  That left the black economy or, if he was lucky, the grey one. Maybe now was the time to ask Joe a favour. Once they were back in the house and Joe was skinning up, Nick decided to chance it.

  ‘You’re always short of drivers after closing time,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, the buggers can pick and choose. Some of them won’t even do evenings.’

  ‘What are the chances of me doing some driving for you? Sharing a cab.’

  Joe gave him a lazy grin. ‘Are you tapping your little brother up for a job?’

  ‘What does it sound like?’

  ‘Oh, man . . .’ Joe took a hit on the joint. He smoked half an inch of the spliff before speaking again. ‘We can’t employ ex-cons. That’s the law. I’d lose my license.’

  ‘If I wore a pair of clear glasses, I could pass as you.’

  Joe laughed at this, but Nick could tell it made him uncomfortable.

  ‘I don�
��t see you as a taxi driver,’ Joe said, after passing Nick the joint.

  ‘I can’t think what else I could do at the moment.’

  ‘You’d need to find somebody willing to share their cab with you. Generally, if two drivers share the same car, I charge them one and a half times the normal fee, seeing as they can’t both be working peak times. But the council would never license you, so it’d have to be off the books.’

  ‘You must have other drivers who moonlight, fiddle their papers,’ Nick argued. ‘I’d be careful not to land you in it. If I got caught out, I’d say I nicked your ID, did a private deal.’ He got up and poured them both a Jack Daniels from the bottle he’d bought with his first dole cheque. ‘Night cap.’

  Joe grinned. ‘S’good to have you back, mate.’ He paused and grimaced, as though making a difficult decision. ‘Tell you what, I’ll see Bob when he’s next on. He doesn’t like to work long hours, and, if you made it worth his while, he might be up for some extra cash.’

  7

  On Monday, Nick turned in at the cab office just before three, hungover. He had been drinking with Joe for the second night running. After all those years off the booze, Nick wasn’t used to it. His brother had been at the office since nine, and showed no sign of wear. He was chatting to the daytime switch operator, Nasreen, a Pakistani in her early twenties.

  ‘Nas, this is my brother, Nick,’ Joe said. ‘He might be doing a little work here on the q.t.’

  ‘Like that guy who . . .?’

  ‘Right.’ Joe didn’t let her finish. ‘No questions asked, but I want you to look after him.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Nas said, flashing Nick a flirtatious smile.

  Nick gave her a sheepish grin. He wasn’t used to Asian women coming on to him so unabashedly, but maybe there had been some rapid changes in their sexual mores while he’d been away. Nas wore western clothes that showed off her figure: well-cut jeans and a sweater tight enough for him to imagine the contours of her small breasts. She was Nick’s type. Except for the wedding ring. Nas might flirt like a western woman, but Asian women didn’t play away.

  Nas answered the phone and Joe called Nick over to him.

  ‘Bob’s not been in yet.’

  Nick picked up that day’s evening paper and turned to the story of some guy who’d got out on appeal after being cleared of a double murder. Then Bob arrived. He had a big paunch and facial hair sprouting in every direction. A clump here, a twisty bit there, a moustache that extended over his lips and began to curl upwards, the whole thing a salt and pepper combination with occasional bursts of brown. Beneath the beard, he could be any age from forty to sixty. Joe introduced them, explained what he wanted. They agreed a price.

  ‘I tend to knock off a bit later than this,’ Bob said, ‘after the school runs. Say I meet you here most days, between three and four. You drive me home. The car’s yours until you drop it off outside mine that night. Deal?’

  Nick would spend his first hour every day driving for no pay then get caught in rush hour. But he was unlikely to get a better offer.

  ‘Deal.’

  Nick’s insurance position was dodgy. They talked it over with Joe. He promised Bob he’d see him right if there was any kind of trouble. Bob, in turn, offered to leave Nick the flick knife he kept beneath his seat for awkward customers. Nick told him that carrying a weapon was too big a risk. He’d rely on the brawn he’d picked up in prison. He would carry a pair of round, metal rimmed glasses, like Joe’s, only with plain lenses. The two men looked enough alike to convince anyone checking the ID. Despite many years living in the same city, he and Joe had never had mutual friends.

  The next afternoon, Nick got in early and had a go at chatting up Nas. Wouldn’t hurt to get in some practice at talking to a woman other than his sister-in-law. Whatever flirtation he’d picked up yesterday wasn’t there when it was just the two of them on their own. It had been a long while, but didn’t that usually work the other way round?

  He picked up the only paper on the small, stained table by the door. When he saw which one it was, he nearly put the thing down again. The Sun held little Nick would describe as news, and this copy was, anyway, several days old. The headline was NEW LABOUR TOTTY TO MARCH. Nick glanced at the large, colour photo on the front page. The woman wearing evening dress was disturbingly familiar. He didn’t know who Jasper March was, but the Labour MP looked like a glammed up version of his ex, Sarah. He turned inside for the full story and his heart sank. The heading was: Sexy Sarah Gives Top Tory a Boner.

  When asked about his relationship with sexy Sarah, March said ‘no comment’. Bone swore at photographers, but our picture tells its own story. Sarah wouldn’t be the first female MP to have the hots for the Tory heart-throb, who is separated from his wife. But she is the first from the Labour benches. What will Tony say when he finds out?

  Nick had to read the story twice before he took it in. Sarah had become an MP. In Nottingham. When Joe arrived, he showed the paper to him.

  ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘I don’t follow politics. Didn’t even vote last time. Here’s Bob.’

  Nick nodded at Bob before going on. ‘This is my Sarah, the one I went out with for two years. And she’s an MP just down the road?’

  ‘I thought she joined the police,’ Joe said. ‘Isn’t that why you dumped her?’

  ‘She’s my MP,’ Bob interrupted. ‘Got in at a by-election two years ago. Nice lass. She came to the door. I voted for her. Won’t last though. Nottingham West has always been Tory. I’m a Tory myself, but I fancied a change.’

  ‘Fancied her you mean,’ Joe said. ‘As for not telling you, Nick, I never knew your Sarah’s surname. And, let’s face it, she was mousy in those days, little glasses, didn’t show off her chest. Whereas here . . . I’m surprised you recognised her.’

  Sarah used to dress down. Political women did in the 1980s. Nick was always encouraging her to grow her hair, with limited success. In the photo in the Sun it was long and wavy, perfectly styled. Nick felt a surge of he-didn’t-know-what: some kind of reverse jealousy the Germans would have a word for. Sarah had finally become the woman he had always known she had the potential to become. That didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was that she was fucking a Tory frontbencher.

  Nick did a school run followed by calls to Carlton and Top Valley, on the edge of the city, to and from the Meadows, then Hyson Green, which had Nottingham’s biggest black and Asian population. Evening came quickly. Nick was tempted to pick up one of the punters coming out of the pubs, but only licensed city cabs were allowed to pick up on the street and in the taxi ranks. They paid for the privilege. An unlicensed driver would get a fine if the police spotted him. A beating, if he cut up a licensed cabbie who’d had a bad day. Even so, everybody did it, especially on quiet nights like this. But Nick was keeping his nose clean.

  One good thing about working nights, there wasn’t time for heavy drinking. Nick would have to cut down on the dope, too. He wasn’t a kid any more and he was on probation. From now on, he would only take calculated risks and the fewer of those, the better. He wasn’t going back.

  He kept a low profile around the taxi office. Anybody, at any time, could grass him up: to the dole or the probation. He’d been grassed up once already. He’d refused to believe that at the time, putting his arrest down to a combination of bad luck and good police work. Inside, he’d learnt that the idea of police investigatory work was a nonsense: the drugs squad relied on grasses and confessions like every other detective. And Nick hadn’t been stupid enough to confess.

  The will for revenge eats at the soul: that was another maxim he’d made up for himself inside. Let it go. But this was a hard one to stick to. Nick wanted to know who’d put him inside. Revenge might’ve been their motive, too. Best not to keep that wheel turning. He’d like to be sure, though, so he could put it behind him. There was a modern cliché saying success was the best form of revenge. Nick ought to devote himself to becoming a succe
ss. That wasn’t going to happen when he was driving a crappy cab for his brother.

  At one in the morning he stopped for diesel. He always left more in the car than when he borrowed it, but if he’d had a bad night, the fuel, on top of the car hire, might mean him working for only a couple of quid an hour. Tonight he’d worked long hours, though, done pretty well. He got out of the car. At night you had to pay at the front of the petrol station, through a small gap in the window – another change while he’d been inside. The cashier’s voice through the grille was disembodied.

  ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’

  Nick looked up.

  ‘Mr Cane, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You were my English teacher – like, ten years ago.’

  ‘Sure, I recognise you – Neville?’

  ‘Nigel. What are you doing driving a cab? Couldn’t hack teaching no more?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘You were a good teacher. Got me a C. Only C I got.’

  ‘Thanks, Nigel. I’d better go. Got a pick up.’

  There was somebody behind him waiting to pay. Nick took his change.

  ‘All right. G’night Mr C, g’luck.’

  ‘Same to you.’

  And what happened to Nigel, Nick wondered, that he was working as a night cashier at a petrol station when he was twenty-five? He’d not been a dim kid, just unsuited to school.

  At two, there was a call to Mapperley Road. A working girl was finishing for the night and wanted to go to Aspley. Most of the older prostitutes lived a long way from their beat. That way, their neighbours wouldn’t know what they got up to. This woman was Nick’s age, nearly past it in sex worker terms.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘You’ll have to open a window,’ Nick said, apologetically. ‘It’s not my cab.’

  ‘Thanks, duck.’

  She didn’t speak again, making her Nick’s favourite kind of customer. He knew where he was going, could relax while listening to Radio One. He’d missed hearing new music while he was inside. Late nights, Radio One played dance, Indie stuff or techno, which was pretty new to him. He’d picked up the difference between techno and drum’n’bass. If it sounded like it had been programmed by a computer, it was techno. The best record was called ‘Born Slippy’, by a band called Underworld. When that came on, Nick was inclined to turn the radio up, though the punters sometimes complained. They wanted Radio Trent or Gem AM, bland commercial pop pap. Tonight, though, when Nick put a couple of notches on the volume for something trippy by Orbital, the woman in the back said, ‘Yeah, louder.’