Utterly Monkey

LATE EVENING

The word had come in through a friend of his dad’s that Geordie’s name had come up, again, and that he should scarper. And sharply. He’d never been on a plane and wasn’t going to start now, so he needed to get the ferry over to Scotland. That very evening he’d wangled a lift from Fergie, who drove one of Turkington’s laundry vans, to Dungannon, from where he’d caught the bus to Belfast. He’d stayed at his Auntie Val’s overnight in her spick Sandy Row redbrick and she’d driven him up to the docks in her purple Corsa the next morning. In the terminus, after a cardboard cup of coffee and a Danish pastry that resembled a trilobite (in consistency as much as shape), he spent thirty-seven pounds fifty on a single passenger ticket for the next Stranraer boat. Easy. Another country.

He’d left only once before, if you don’t count a day trip to Rathlin. His Uncle Pat had taken him to a Rangers game for his sixteenth birthday. The fabled Ibrox. So many people in the one place. His eyes had scanned the rows and rows of men all standing watching the same thing. What did they all do for a living? How did they all afford this? Where did they all live? It was like five Ballyglasses all shaken out, lined up, and filed in. And he knew this other feeling was not just wonder but pride. When they’d stood and sung his chest was so tense, so strung with emotion that he thought he might cry. It was an Old Firm game, of course, and Celtic had lost 2—1. Ideal. He’d chugged eight cans of McEwans on the ferry home and spent the bus journey back to Ballyglass puking into his rucksack, with Uncle Pat sitting on the aisle seat telling him to hush down and quit his sobbing.

And then, on what might even be the same boat, Geordie had lost some money in the machines, drank a few pints, and met Ian McAleece. When Geordie’d stood out on the deck and felt the ferry engines shudder, he’d thought suddenly of fucking Janice, of coming inside her, of her tiny gasps, and of climbing out through her bedroom window. The shudder, the leaving. The boat seemed to enlarge when the engines started, and take on another, a somehow fuller dimension which lasted all the way to Scotland. Geordie, a naturally small man, delicate even, benefited from this effect too. He was constantly in motion. Sitting in Danny’s living room, after they’d wandered back from the King’s Head, fidgeting, smoking, shifting around, he seemed bigger than he actually was.

They were slumped on Danny’s battered blue Habitat sofa. Danny had brought some cold cans of Heineken out from the fridge and a stupefied silence weathered round them. Their talking had gone the way of most male conversations. They’d lolloped through anecdotes in the pub, the mind-that and mind-this of teachers and football matches, and the there-was and you-never of some night in Cosgroves, paused a little at politics on the walk home while glancing at family, before spinning down gently through jokes into women.

Geordie now picked up a photograph from the top of a little stack of books, face down in a bamboo frame.

‘Who’s this then?’

A pretty straight-backed blonde seated, opposite the photographer, in a restaurant.

‘Well, I said I was seeing someone. That’s her. Olivia.’

Geordie whistled softly. ‘Olivia. Very nice, very nice. Very tidy.’

‘Yeah, she’s beautiful. But a little mental. In fact she’s coming round tomorrow evening to collect her stuff. That’s one of her piles.’

Geordie had already started grinning, preparing a wind-up involving haemorrhoids – but Danny was up and into the bathroom.

The television was on but on low and they sat dully watching Eurotrash: a blonde woman with swollen silicon breasts restrained by a silver tassled bra sat on a comic Frenchman’s lap and mouthed something in Italian. Danny jabbed the remote control and Jools Holland appeared, playing the piano, his droll agile face looking down, slightly surprised, at the blur of his hands, as if they weren’t part of him.

‘Ach,’ said Geordie. ‘Put it back.’

‘So what are you going to do mate? What’s the plan?’

Danny had developed the habit of setting the pace and subject of conversations. After interviewing scores of witnesses in order to draft statements, he’d realized that almost everyone has the capacity to bang contentedly on about, say, tungsten-tipped screws and talk shows and grades of wallpaper, for ever, if you let them. Danny didn’t. He considered himself to have mastered the art of asking questions, but Geordie had managed to talk about everything so far except his future, and Danny wanted to know about it – specifically how much of it, if any, included him and his boxroom.

‘I’m just going to stay in London for a while, a few months, and then go home. If not to Ballyglass, then Belfast or somewhere.’

At the words a few months Danny’s knee twitched. ‘You can’t,’ he said, referring to the first half of his statement.

‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’

‘Like what?’

‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’

Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.

‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘Ian McAleece.’

‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’

‘Yeah, all right.’

Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.

‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’

There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.

‘Listen, Geordie, you want me to ring you a cab? Where are you staying?’

‘Well, actually Dan, I was hoping I could stay here.’ Danny managed to keep his smile from slipping down into his shoes. ‘Just for a night or two, ‘til I get myself sorted. I was hoping to just kip on the sofa.’

Danny’s smile increased its wattage. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem. Stay here. I have to get up though and head to work tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ve spare keys for the house.’ Danny knew that two sets of keys, one of which had recently been attached by a silver chain to Olivia’s pink leather purse, were in the drawer under the coffee table about a foot in front of them.

‘Sure if you leave me yours, I can get a set cut.’

‘I could do I suppose. I’m not sure if you can though. One of them’s a security key or something. You need a letter from the managing agent.’

‘Well, if I can’t I’ll just make sure I’m here when you come back.’

‘Yeah, okay then. Sure.’

Geordie leant down and produced a lump of hash about the size of a bar of hotel soap from his rucksack. Danny watched him surreptitiously as he deftly skinned up, and passed the spliff to Dan to spark. Soon they both turned motionless, glassy-eyed as fish.

When the third spliff came round, Danny had lit a cigarette which he passed to Geordie to smoke when he smoked the joint. It was intimate and odd, all this. But not unworkable, Danny thought, this might be all right, this might even be fun.

The evening was ending. Danny, feeling too trashed to be anything but at ease with Geordie staying over, and too trashed to clear a space on the floor of the boxroom, locked the front door and tossed Geordie a sleeping bag, bulbous in its carry-sac, and a lank pillow without a cover. In his bedroom he locked his laptop and his diary into a drawer in his desk and climbed messily, many-limbed, into bed.

THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004

My office worker’s collar turned unselfconsciously

up…I return home…feeling a slight,

confused concern that I may have lost for ever

both my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.

Fernando Pessoa

A minute after waking, Danny padded into his shower. His mornings were efficient. He dressed in beige cords, a blue shirt that he rubbed at for a bit with an iron that leaked and was only ever tepid, and strapped his black cycle helmet on his wet hair. His leather satchel slung over his shoulder, he lifted his bike off the hook on the garden wall and set off through the smouldering traffic to work.

Geordie shifted from facing the back of the sofa to facing the room. He farted a slow crescendo and went back to sleep.

Danny locked his bike in the underground car park and walked through the office courtyard to a side door into his building. Danny worked at Monks & Turner, a Magic Circle law firm. Which meant that his firm was, supposedly, one of the five best in the country. It was certainly one of the biggest. It felt to Danny like just another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it. He had attended Ballyglass Nursery, Primary and High School and had done pretty much everything right. He was a gaunt truthful child and his teachers had been surprised, and a little perturbed, when they realized that he wanted to know as much as he could. His mother still rang to tell him that one of his old teachers had been in the office telling her how they kept his essays to read out to their classes. He never got less than an A and as he got older it began to seem more and more important not to. It seemed that every A raised the tightrope he was walking on a little higher, so that his fall would be even greater when it came. And then, suddenly, he was at the other end and in university.

His school had filled out his application for Cambridge and he’d signed it. He’d decided to choose history for a degree. There was so much of it. He’d gone along and been interviewed by a large Australian woman, covered in cream drapes like a dustsheeted wardrobe, and a neat little ginger Englishman. Danny was accepted, worked, thrived, and as he’d promised his father, applied to law firms for a job after graduation. Monks & Turner was the first interview and when they accepted him, he’d cancelled the others. Two years of law school in Tottenham Court Road, living above a Perfect Fried Chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, saw city life settle down on him like smog. He became a first-class Londoner.

When he arrived at Monks, a grimy Monday in September, he had sat in Corporate, specifically insurance work. His trainer had just moved into the new office they were going to share. Their new name plaques, James Motion and, underneath of course, and slightly smaller, Daniel Williams, had been put up to replace Townsend Hopkins. Townsend was an infamous old boy partner who’d been given the heave-ho for not bringing the work in. The firm constantly restored itself like that. It put Danny in mind of some vast ruminant. The main entrance, painted, polished, was its mouth, the corridors and meeting rooms served as intestines and organs, and the lawyers were like teeth, yellowy-pale, varying in sharpness, and renewable. Like teeth, they varied not only in sharpness but also in purpose, and some would get clients, others retain them. All, though, were grinders. Danny, when he qualified, had joined Litigation, the only seat he’d done which felt like law, and he was now a two-and-a-half-year qualified solicitor-advocate in the Commercial Litigation department specializing in International Arbitration. Danny sometimes thought that the only job worth doing was one which was covered by one word. Plumber. Joiner. Farmer.

A year ago Danny’d been given his own office, about the size of a garden shed. When his three bookcases and two filing cabinets had initially arrived he’d felt slightly claustrophobic. Now he felt snug. He could reach almost everything in his room from his desk. His computer screen faced the window. He faced the door. His desk had a panelled front on it and Danny had developed the habit of nipping below it, where he kept a duck-down sleeping bag and a cushion embroidered with sunflowers that his sister had made, for a kip either before, during, or after lunch. He would make sure the route to his desk was barricaded by briefcase and recycling box, then slink off his seat, suddenly boneless.

Danny’s central friend at Monks was Albert Rollson, a Brummie who’d ditched his accent in favour of a mid-Atlantic twang. Rollson was neurotic. His terrors included other people’s illnesses and he would get out of a lift at the next floor if someone in it coughed or sneezed. He’d flinch if someone accidentally came too close or brushed against him in passing, and grimaced if hugged. Which is not to say that he was cold, he simply, proudly, possessed an over-developed sense of propriety. It informed his distrust of Antipodeans. And Americans. And Europeans. And was the reason he worked in law. He was born to its hierarchy, its wheels within wheels, its concurrent bitchings and slobberings, its dog-eat-dog, backstab, leapfrog. And it allowed him to dress like Cary Grant.

Danny had shared an office with Rollson when they had qualified, two years after arriving at Monks. They had argued relentlessly over plants. Danny’s view was that offices are the ugliest, most sterile places in the world. Everything is synthetic. You see nothing that is actually growing, bar the perceptible fattening of some of the most sedentary lawyers and secretaries. Danny wanted a real plant in the room. He told Rollson that the lack of flora in the workplace was the reason lawyers started office affairs. There was nothing else to look at but people. The obscene clashing decor, the generic tacky prints, the background corporate hum from air conditioning, VDU and photocopier: people looked at each other more closely. Rollson however, perpetually single, quite liked the idea of people looking at him more closely. Plants were there simply to steal more of his oxygen in a city where there was scarcely enough anyway. He was allergic to anything natural. On a school outing to a stables near Dudley, a large grey mare had once licked his face and he’d never recovered. That rough slobbery smothering tongue. The smell of it. He quite liked seeing the countryside from the motorway, the space, its potential, and he’d once bought a David Attenborough series on video, although he hadn’t watched it.

Danny walked into his corridor. He noted that the doors of Andrew Jackson, departmental senior partner, and Adam Vyse, departmental managing partner, were open. He removed his bag from his shoulder, placed the helmet in it and carried it close to his body. In this way, and by performing two complicated body-spins at just the right moments, he could walk past the partners’ doors without it being immediately apparent that he was just arriving. It was 9.43 a.m.

Geordie stretched out an arm to the coffee table, encountered the remote control and switched on Trisba. He noticed that he’d drooled on his pillow.

Danny’s phone was flashing. This always scared him a little. Either it was a message from last night (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there after he’d left) or from this morning (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there before he’d arrived). In the worst case scenario (the WCS, as Rollson would have called it) there would be two messages from the same partner, one from last night and one from this morning, and in the very WCS, that partner would be Adam Vyse. Danny listened to his messages. Two. First message, yesterday: 7.05 p.m. Carrie, Adam’s calm and pretty secretary, was cooing that Adam wanted to see him as soon as possible. He loved the fact that Carrie refused to say a.s.a.p. We’re not Americans, Danny always thought when he heard it used, we have time to say the whole sentence. Second message, today: 8.11 a.m. Adam. ‘Danny, give me a ring soon as you’re in. Something big’s come up.’ Ach fuck, Danny said, a little too loudly.

Vyse was notorious for handing out difficult work and not supervising it. He would demand a briefing just prior to seeing a client and then, in the meeting, repeat to the client what you had just told him, word for word, before turning to you, smiling encouragingly, and asking whether you agreed with his preliminary views. Danny stood at Vyse’s open door. He was leaning back in his leather easy chair, with his tailored arms crossed behind his slicked head and the phone cradled between his neck and chin.

‘Yes, of course. No you’re quite right. We don’t need any more of them. Oh yes?…Fourteen. No, no about two hundred acres. Uh-uh…A Jet Ski. Well, you know what I say? He who dies with the most toys wins…No, this is it. They need to consolidate and we aren’t going to give them time to. We need to hit them hard now…I know…Yes…’

Danny looked in at the office. A wooden golf putter was propped a little forlornly in the far corner, as if it dreamt of real grass. Aside from Adam’s own enormous bureau, reminiscent of the White House presidential desk, another sheeny table, an eight-seater for team meetings, dominated the middle of the room. The oakveneer cabinets fronted with glass held silver and crystal ornaments given to Adam for successful corporate claims or defences. Danny could read the largest one, a glass rhomboid, from here: Jackman Thorndike Litigation 1998 – The Best Team Won. An open wardrobe displayed navy and grey pinstripe suits, a shelf of shirts and a row of pegs from which numerous ties hung down, entwined. A sky-blue baseball cap hung on one of the pegs. Its motif was illegible but Danny knew that it said I Wouldn’t Say Boo To A Gooson, Gooson being a corporate client involved in a billion dollar insurance dispute which had taken a team of twelve associates and three partners two years to resolve. Danny also knew that Adam had a matching sky-blue polo shirt with a matching logo. After the case had been settled the whole team, in their team outfits, had flown to the firm’s headquarters in Atlanta for a week-long junket. The pictures were still on the noticeboard in the corridor outside. Team Gooson at the check-in. Team Gooson in the departure lounge. Team Gooson at the baggage terminal. They reminded Danny of the Gateway outings for mentally handicapped kids he used to help with at school. It was to do with the grinning. On the meeting table sat an array of executive toys: an Archimedes’ cradle, little metal monkeys on a magnet that could be built up into shapes, a Rubik’s cube sponsored by a pharmaceutical company with different drug logos on each side. On a far shelf, Chopin was seeping softly from the big black speakers that stood, close as bodyguards, on either side of the little silver stereo. A copper plaque above the desk stated, in gothic lettering, Teamwork divides the task and doubles the success. On the far wall photographs were aligned in a row, five of them, like the house’s face-up poker hand. Each contained posed shots of Adam and his family. His wife (Amelia? Amanda?) was pretty much what you’d expect if you watched television on Sunday evenings. Something of the period drama about her. Slighty sad, as if she’d expected something slightly different, skinny (tennis, Danny supposed), naturally blonde. The kids were all versions of either of their parents, and all the shots appeared proprietorial somehow: two of the blondies on a yacht looking more bored than they should; one astride a grey pony which, bearing its teeth, seemed to be grinning for the photograph; the perfect husband and wife posed at their fireplace, holding the lintel (Team Marriage, thought Danny); one of the wife in a manicured garden (of at least two acres) with a lifted glass of wine; the whole family on a ski slope clutching each other and not for balance. They looked happy.