Utterly Monkey

by Nick Laird

  ‘Do you want to sleep here mate?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Clyde was delving into the crisp packet for the last few crisps and slowly licking his fingers. He seemed subdued, as if he’d finally noticed he was alone.

  ‘Do you want a duvet and stuff?’

  ‘Hm-mmm.’

  ‘Geordie?’ Geordie was buttering toast in the kitchen, having sobered up into hunger.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can you kip in the boxroom on cushions from the chairs? If Clyde stays over on the sofa?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Clyde was already asleep and the light in the boxroom was off when Danny came out of the bathroom. After he had set his three identical travel alarm clocks to go off at staggered five minute intervals–one on his bedside table, one on the chest of drawers, and one on top of his suitbag packed and ready by the door–he lay face down on his bed, still fully clothed. His pillows had the smell of old smoke on them. They smelt like Geordie. What on earth was he going to do about him? That fucking monkey story. The hedge clippers. In front of all his friends. He’d have to sleep on it, but to get to that point, there were first the issues of undressing, and of turning off the bedroom light, and even before that was the issue of becoming vertical. As he rolled over to slide off the bed there was a knock at his door, two shy taps, soft as an embarrassed cough.

  ‘Dan?’ Geordie, rueful.

  ‘Come on in. I’m still up.’

  The door opened and a shrivelled Geordie Wilson entered. He sloped to the bed and balanced neatly on its edge.

  ‘Mate, I’ve got to be up in…’ Danny picked up the bedside alarm clock to look at it, ‘three hours–Jesus Christ–to get my flight. If this is about earlier, I am sorry, really. It was my fault.’

  Geordie was staring straight in front of him, at the far wall. He looked tiny and still and very far away. Danny moved up the bed so he was sitting on the pillows with his back against the wooden headboard. Geordie turned towards him. He had the deferent, hopeful face of a man who’s about to try and sell you something.

  ‘I know mate, I know. I went overboard. We were both stoked. And I’m sorry about your eye–that was an accident…The thing is, there’s something else, something I need to talk to you about. And I need to talk to you about it now.’

  He stopped, and went back to facing the wall, shrugging a little, as if the room were his cell. His voice dropped a pitch.

  ‘So when I came over…when Janice knew I was coming over, she gave me some money.’

  ‘Right.’ Danny drew the word out into two syllables.

  ‘It wasn’t hers. She found it in the house.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Danny nods, interested, and then realizes, ‘No.’

  Geordie nodded in reply. He was still sitting at right angles to Danny. He set his jaw in a curious way, pushing it over to the right so the teeth were all mismatched, and then sighed and nodded again.

  ‘Yep. Budgie’s, and he went ballistic when he found out. Smacking Jan round, smashing the house up, screaming.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. How much are we talking about? You have to give it back. Tell me you’ve still got it.’

  ‘Oh I have it all right, but I’ve been thinking. About Jan. She’s got herself in such a fucking mess for me. She’s not the sharpest tool in the box, but you know, she’s been good to me. Not for any reason really. I wasn’t so good to her.’ Geordie was still staring at a certain patch of the wall like he was reading his speech off it. His voice was a singsong.

  ‘True, true enough.’

  ‘So I thought maybe she could come back with you, back to London.’

  ‘What? Why does she have to come back with me? Why don’t you go back and get her–or get her to come over by herself?’ Danny sat forward and the headrest knocked against the wall.

  ‘Sure how can I go home? I’d be dead the moment I set foot in the town. Dan I’ve never flown before. I couldn’t get in one of those planes. I thought you could bring the money back and swap it for her. There’s no way Budge would let her leave before he got the cash and to be honest I can’t see him letting her leave after. It has to be a swap. You just have to pick her up and put her on the plane with you on Sunday.’

  ‘Mate, she’s not a fucking carrier bag…’ They both sat very still for a few seconds and stared at their hands. Danny started again. ‘So hold on. You want me to just see Budgie Johnson and say Oh by the way here’s the stolen money–Geordie’s awfully sorry about that–He went a bit mental–Can I have your sister now? Cheers… Wise up.’

  ‘You could do that. You could do that easy.’

  ‘And where does she stay? Here?’

  ‘Only for a wee while Dan, like only for a few days. We could kip in the boxroom. Do it up nice. She’s a trooper Dan, honest to god. She’d be helpful, good to have around the place.’

  ‘Jesus, Geordie. I’m going to Belfast to do due diligence on a takeover. I’m a lawyer, not the Scarlet fucking Pimpernel…I’m not even a good lawyer.’ Danny lowered his voice for the last sentence, sat back against the headrest again.

  ‘Danny, it’s a wee thing, a wee favour,’ he looked up at Danny and did the bloodhound gape–big eyes, dark rings, dolorous. ‘We go back, you and me, big man, we have history.’

  Danny looked intently at Geordie’s profile and said nothing. There was something unsaid here. The word history held the shock of a gunshot. Did Geordie mean Hughes? Was that the history they shared? They’d never spoken of it. Danny watched Geordie pick a fleck of tobacco off his white T-shirt and drop it on the wooden floor. Then he started to chew on a ragnail on his left hand. He rearranged himself, crossing his right leg across his left knee. His unusual period of stillness was over. Back was Mister Fidget with his metaphysical itch.

  ‘Look, maybe I could drive down on Sunday morning and pick Janice up. You could just get her to meet me, keep it a secret from Budgie, and then after she gets here, you could send the money over by courier or money transfer or something. On Monday morning say. I’m not carrying it. You can send him a fucking postal order.’

  ‘Well if you’re going to pick her up you might as well take the money. Just give it to Budgie or leave it at the house…’

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Near on fifty.’

  ‘Fifty what?’

  ‘Fifty grand.’

  ‘Fifty grand? You took fifty grand of Budgie Johnson’s money. No way mate. I’m not carrying fifty grand around and certainly not across to Belfast on the plane. And I’m not going to Budgie’s house with it. You can arrange for me to pick Janice up somewhere, and get her to keep it completely quiet. Budgie isn’t going to be watching her every minute. We can do it early on Sunday morning. But I’m not taking the money. Seriously. You can send it to him after.’

  ‘All right…Good man. I’ll ring her in the morning.’

  ‘You need to get her on the three o’clock flight from Belfast City Airport to Heathrow. It’s British Midland and it’ll be expensive.’

  ‘Three o’clock. Okay. Thanks mate.’

  ‘Listen, there’s a spare set of keys in the drawer under the coffee table. You can use those when I’m away. I need to go to sleep now.’

  Danny pushed his curtain aside to look out and the room was turned a little paler by the dawn light. Cars were huddled along the street and a large tomcat was trotting up the pavement, its sleek back moving like a wavelength. Everything was a shade of grey, overwashed and exhausted.

  ‘Yep. Sorry I kept you up. Have a good time at home.’

  Geordie walked to the door, still springy and light on his feet. Danny had decided just to fall asleep as he was.

  ‘Turn the light off please.’

  ‘Aye…Here, Dan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you reckon he’s going to spend it on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘D’you reckon it’s drugs?’

  Danny’s voice came from the pillow.

  ‘I reckon I don’t care.�
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  The market has no morality.

  Michael Heseltine

  SATURDAY, 10 JULY 2004

  The taxi was late. Danny was sitting on the arm of the sofa, dressed in his smartest pinstripe and sporting, jaunty as a carnation in his buttonhole, a big black eye. It was nearly perfectly round and ranged in colour from the ripe purple of a damson to an apricot’s pearly yellow. His face was a well-stocked fruit bowl. In the shower earlier he realized he needed to think of a good excuse for his bruise. He’d considered two options: the kitchen cupboard or the heroic intervention. He still hadn’t decided. He felt like shit. Clyde was in the bathroom, doing what he termed his ablutions. After Clyde had spent ten minutes explaining how Hounslow was actually on the way to Heathrow, Danny’d agreed to take him somewhere west in the taxi and drop him off near a tube station. Now the taxi was outside sounding his horn and Clyde was still abluting.

  After they’d climbed into the cavernous black cab, which seemed appropriately sized for Clyde’s head, as if the vehicle had been adapted specially for him, the cabbie drove off. A few houses down Danny saw a white transit van parked by the kerb. A guy in a sky-blue baseball cap was sitting slumped in the far corner of the front seat. Clyde was discussing Pigtails’ breasts and how near he had come to unleashing them. ‘You’re an animal,’ Danny said placidly, looking out the window.

  Ian had been parked outside Danny’s for thirty minutes. He’d been considering going in when the taxi had pulled up and tooted, so he’d waited. The grey sky was heaped up with clouds. All of the streetlights clicked off together suddenly and other lights came on in the houses, singly, like stars. A bedroom window was raised by a Rastafarian wearing an alice band, a Turkish woman dragged a pushchair over a doorstep and onto the street before going back into her house. She re-appeared a second later carrying a large package shaped like a child, so substantially bundled there was just a slit left for two eyes to peer darkly out. She fastened it into the chair, locked her door and strode off wheeling the buggy. Then Danny came out of his house swinging his suit bag, and that cousin of his who wouldn’t shut up all night was tramping behind him, still talking. Danny’s eye looked mashed up. The cab drove past and Ian slinked down in his seat. He got out and locked the van. To business.

  The doorbell was ringing and ringing and in Geordie’s dream it was a phone that he couldn’t find, hidden somewhere in his old bedroom in Ballyglass. He jumped from his single bed, tugged open his wardrobe, the door of which still stuck after these twenty-odd years, and ripped all the clothes out of it. The shelves held piles of shirts, folded, soft as flags, and of every colour imaginable, which he knew he had never owned or even seen but which, in dream-logic, he understood to be his. Flurries of them fell onto his feet, a rainbow of silks and soft cottons, and as he delved further into the cupboard he could see more and more of them stacked up behind, lemon and cobalt and ivory, then checked and striped and embroidered like blouses, and still others of lace and damask, calico, satin, stiff linen. And the ringing continued. If he could just find the phone he could get out of this room. He woke with a jolt. There was a second’s delay before he knew where he was. Then the doorbell went again, two rings, pause, two rings. He stood up gingerly, one hand against the wall, and then jerked open the door of his room so hard that it banged. He shouted, ‘Danny, your cab’s here.’

  The door banging had echoed in his head, and it hurt it still further to shout. The flat was heavy with silence. He stage-whispered ‘Danny…Clyde?’ then tugged on his jeans and walked down the hall to the door. He opened the snib and Ian kicked the door so hard that it smashed into Geordie’s forehead. He clutched his temples with both hands, like a See No Evil monkey, and pulled the palms apart in time to watch Ian enter and neatly close the door behind him.

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘Morning Geordie. You and me are going to have a little chat.’ The word chat was staccato, a punctuation point. Ian shoved him into the living room and pointed to the sofa. Geordie sat down. Ian leaned against the table looking at him.

  ‘Fucking stinks in here. Did you sleep in here? It fucking stinks.’

  ‘No…Did I piss you off last night?’

  Ian snorted and stared hard at him.

  ‘Well, did you forget something?’

  ‘Yeah, I forgot to get the fifty grand you owe me.’

  Geordie experienced a kind of inner freefall. His throat landed in his stomach, his stomach dropped into his knees, and his bowels tried to escape to his ankles. He attempted to keep a steady face. Ian said, softer, ‘I know about the cash Geordie. I know you took it from Budgie. Well you have to give it back to me. Right now and right here. So let’s make this easier on both of us and you just pay up like a good wee fella and then I can go home and have my cup of tea.’

  Geordie’s stomach was still leaden with dread but he decided, almost as a reflex reaction, to try to bluff it.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about Ian. I don’t know anything about any money or who Budgie…’

  The sound of bone meeting flesh is always lower in pitch than you remember. It sounds like a pack of flour dropped on a tiled kitchen floor. Ian had stepped across the room and punched Geordie in the chest. Although it was an ungainly movement–Geordie was sitting on the sofa and therefore too low for Ian to get a decent purchase–it was sufficient to cause Geordie to sob. It sounded like laughter. Ian stood over him.

  ‘Give me the fucking money Geordie.’

  Ian cuffed him on the ear, almost fatherly.

  ‘I was going to give it back. I’m going to give it back when Janice comes over, as soon as she gets to London.’

  Ian sniggered adolescently.

  ‘Who the fuck’s Janice? Geordie, I don’t think you get it. I need the money now, in London. Budgie was looking after it for me. You were unlucky to meet me, that’s all. Ulster’s a wee place.’

  Geordie looked up. He started to repeat, in a miniature voice, ‘I don’t have…’ but Ian was lifting his hand again.

  ‘All right. All right. It’s under the bath. I’ll get it. I’ll get it now.’

  Geordie scrambled to his feet and Ian followed him, sighing, paternally patient. Geordie fished his keys out of his jeans and squatted down to work at the side of the bath. Ian felt relaxed. He leant against the sink. Geordie’d just made a mistake. But now, by working together, they’d been able to fix it.

  ‘You see Geordie, this money’s important.’ Then he added, as an afterthought, ‘Anything the ’RA can do we can do better.’

  ‘Right,’ said Geordie as the panel edged open. He lay down on the floor on his front, halfway in and halfway out of the bathroom, and reached in under the bath. His chest held the dull ache of Ian’s punch and his forehead was already swelling.

  ‘Here it is.’ Geordie pulled out the white plastic bag filled with money. It was dusty and had ripped on something.

  ‘Excellent. I’ll take that.’ Ian leaned down and snatched it. Geordie was on his knees, one elbow leaning on the bath. The cold tap had a droplet of water hanging from it. He watched it elongate then draw in its waist and wobble. It broke off and hit the enamel with a wet click. Ian jiggled the bag. ‘Let’s count this out shall we?’

  Geordie levered himself up from the floor as Ian sat heavily down on the sofa and emptied the bag onto the coffee table. He started arranging the notes in piles. Geordie looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His forehead was a red bump and you could see he’d been crying. He entered the living room and sat down on one of the dining chairs.

  ‘Now, let’s see what we got. Make us a cup of tea Geordie. Just milk, no sugar.’

  When Geordie came back into the living room carefully carrying the brimmed mug of tea, Ian had the money in three neat piles, all with the Queen’s head on top. There was her imperturbable smile, her mute watchfulness. No one has seen what money has seen. All those arguments she must have witnessed, those atrocities she must have caused. A Helen of Troy, 2-D, with pin curls and thin
lips. Starter of wars. He docked the tea gently on a black slate coaster beside the banknotes.

  ‘I make forty-nine thousand, three hundred. How much did you spend of it?’

  ‘None, nothing at all.’ This was not strictly true. Geordie had spent almost two hundred quid. He sat down again on the dining chair beside the TV.

  ‘I’ll be checking with Budgie.’

  ‘Ask him, he’ll tell you.’

  Ian leant back on the sofa and looked at Geordie. Putting his hands behind his head, he crossed his ankles, so completing his favorite pose: The Man at Home in the World.

  ‘You see, a man has to work out what he wants from his life. For example, what do you want from life?’

  You leaving would be a start, Geordie thought, but mindful of his injuries, he nodded, looked pensive, and replied, ‘What everyone does, I suppose. A nice house, nice car, a nice wife.’

  ‘Not everyone wants that. There’s bigger things. There are some of us who’ll do whatever it takes to protect the rights of our friends and our families.’ Ian was smiling grandiosely.

  ‘Do you see what I’m saying Geordie?’

  ‘Not really.’ Geordie was touching his chest tenderly now, checking for all of his ribs.

  ‘Look at this cunt who lives here. Danny.’ Ian made such a face when he pronounced Danny’s name that it seemed he was picking the word out of his teeth. ‘He doesn’t care about Northern Ireland, or give a fuck about anything but his own life, about making money for big business, about buying a bigger flat, buying more crap to fill it.’ He looked around the room disdainfully. ‘The crimes those big corporations commit…he’s just a foot soldier for them.’