Dead Money (10 page)

She blinked at me, a smile and a frown battling it out on her face. "You're kidding."

"What would you do?"

"You're
not
kidding."

"What was I supposed to do? Go knocking? Excuse me, is this your dog I hit?"

She shook her head. "I don't know."

"You don't know." I finished the brandy, got up to pour myself another. "That's right."

She made a sniffing noise. I didn't turn. Maybe she was crying, maybe she wasn't. If she was, she sure as hell wasn't crying about me.

"I'm going to have a shower," she said.

"You do that."

I poured another drink, then went to the whisky to kill the sweetness in my mouth. It worked. I drank two more until the fatigue hit me and I sat on the sofa staring at the clock. I heard Cath come back into the room, smelled the perfumed steam that wafted in her wake.

"You coming to bed?"

"Yeah." I finished my drink and left the glass on the coffee table. I didn't brush my teeth.

I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Just as I was about to drop off, the mattress started to shake and I knew she was crying. I waited for her to stop. I wasn't good with emotion. Beale, I could handle. If he wasn't set to detonate, it was a moan or a growl, and most of that was a bluff. With the salesmen and the punters, it was a front – nobody'd ever hit a truly bad run, and luck was always on the turn, just you wait. With everyone else, it was a series of masks, the kind people wear when there's a stranger in the house – we're always this tidy, this hospitable, this honest-to-goodness
nice
.

We are happily married.

She wasn't going to stop, and I wasn't going to get any sleep unless I did something about it. I put an arm out to her and she pressed up against me. I heard the back end of a sob and put the other arm around her because it seemed like the thing to do. Her hair was still damp from the shower. It stuck to my neck like wet dog hair.

"I love you, Alan," she said.

I didn't reply. Nothing came to mind.

10

"Hey, hi, Alan, could I have a quick word?"

Should've known better than to try and sneak out the front way when Jimmy Henderson was in the building. The bloke had an office, but it was out back where he couldn't spend his time talking shite with our receptionist Laura and parking his gym-rat arse on the edge of her desk. Six months he'd been getting blown out by her, but he kept on. It was that persistence that'd put Jimmy Henderson in the sales manager's office. That, and his dad owned the company.

I followed him back through to his office. He closed the door behind me, and I faced off against a wall of plaques and awards that probably meant a lot to Henderson but bugger all to the rest of the world. Henderson gestured to a chair in front of his glass-topped desk. I took a seat. He unbuttoned his jacket and planted himself on the corner of his desk. Smelled like a changing room in here. I could see the source through the table top – Henderson's Adidas bag, spewing sports socks.

"Thanks for this, Alan. I appreciate you're busy."

"No problem."

"Hear you pulled in a full house."

"Just windows and a front door."

"Maybe some other time, then."

"Yeah, maybe." I wasn't going to sell fascias and soffits to anyone. It was cosmetic. "What's going on?"

"You got much on this afternoon?"

"A couple."

"Anything promising?"

I was about to shake my head when I remembered the Henderson positivity. "They're all promising, Jimmy."

He smiled. For a moment, I didn't know if he knew I was taking the piss or not. Then I realised I didn't care if he did know. "Good. That's good. It's good to see you bringing in the sales."

"Good to be bringing in the sales."

"How's Les?"

I blinked. "Sorry?"

"Les. I noticed he hasn't been bringing much in, you're his friend ..."

"Just a bad month."

"You believe that?"

Henderson was looking at me as if we shared a secret.

"Yes," I said, "I believe that."

He scratched the side of his nose. "Because I have to say, this bad month is pretty much the culmination of a bad year. I know he won't mind me telling you, you being friends and everything, but your man Les hasn't pulled in anything significant for a long time."

"Why are you telling me?"

Henderson smiled, as if the answer were obvious. "Because you're his friend."

"And?"

"And, I don't know, as his friend perhaps you could take him to one side and have a quiet word about his volume."

"He knows about his volume."

"Then maybe you could show him a few tricks, yeah? Get him back in the game. We're all in this together."

I stared at Henderson. He shifted on the edge of the desk.

"You want me to tell him he's in the shit, Jimmy?"

The smile flickered. He moved his shoulders. "Well, that's not exactly the way I would've put it—"

"But it's the way it is. He doesn't pull in the numbers, he's out on his arse. So what do you suggest I tell him, Jimmy? Why don't you show me a few of
your
tricks, eh?"

Henderson licked his lips, shifted again. He clasped his hands together and looked at the floor. "I honestly don't know, Alan. You can tell him whatever a concerned friend would tell him. I don't want to let anyone go, but I've found it's good practice to at least give some warning. The business being what it is—"

"No, I get it," I said. "Market's constricting like a frightened arsehole, belts need to be tightened, all that. I'll have a chat with him, see what we can do."

"Great. Like I said, I don't want to let anyone go."

"Of course you don't."

Henderson showed me out. As I left the reception, my mobile rang.

The first thing out of her mouth was, "Alan Slater, you're taking the piss."

"I'm sorry—"

Lucy continued talking over the top of me. "That's the only way to look at. You call me up, tell me you're coming over, and then I get the
other
phone call."

"I know."

"Do you, though? I mean, you want to go on like once a week, don't get me wrong, that's fine, but don't piss me about either. I'm not going to spend my whole life sitting around waiting for you to get your arse in gear."

"It's not like I meant to. Stuff just came up."

"You're full of shit. What is it really?"

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. I didn't know what to say. Instead, I stared around the inside of my car for inspiration. I heard her huff on the other end of the phone. What was I going to say? It'd been a weird week.

"Seriously," she said, "what is it? What kind of stuff is it? Is it work? Is it stuff you honestly can't get out of, or is it a last-minute panic attack that your wife will find out about us?"

"It's work stuff."

"At ten o'clock at night."

"It's Beale stuff."

She laughed. "That's your excuse? Beale takes precedence?"

"He had some games he had to go to—"

"I don't want to fucking hear it, Alan."

"See, I knew you wouldn't. That's why I didn't tell you."

"You know how that sounds to me?"

"It's the truth."

"You know what, I don't doubt it, Alan. I really don't. But it's not like that makes it any better. You're blowing me off for Beale."

"He's a mate."

"Yeah, I know. He's your best mate. He's such a good mate you call him by his surname."

"That's just the way it is. Look, let me make it up to you. I'll come round this afternoon—"

"No, I don't think so."

I chewed the inside of my mouth. Thinking, this was it. This was the other shoe ready to drop, and I'd be dropped along with it. Hadn't expected it all to snowball so quickly, though. "Come on, Lucy, let's be sensible about this. You're pissed off at me, I can understand that, but you've got to let me try and make it up to you."

"No, those privileges have been revoked." She was adamant. "You can buy me a coffee and we can take this back a few levels."

"You what?"

"That's the way it's going to work, Alan. You don't respect me enough to treat me nice, you'll have to go back to square one."

"Now who's taking the piss?"

She hung up. I said hello a couple of times just be on the safe side, then disconnected. Unbelievable. It was worse than being dumped. She was making me beg for her attention. And part of me wanted to call it a day right then and there – this might be the time to do some serious decluttering of my social life – but then another part asked me what I would honestly do without Lucy. And the answer to that was spend more time with Beale, which didn't exactly appeal. And what was I going to do about Cath? Try to make it work? That'd be fooling nobody. My marriage got sick a long time ago. Any movement now was just a twitch of the death nerve.

I looked at my phone, thought about calling her back, then decided against it. Better to let her cool off for a bit, then maybe approach the situation from another direction. I had to be at a sit in ten minutes, anyway, and on paper it looked like a good one, came from one of the canvassers who'd been doing it a while. Normally his leads weren't the stuff of fertiliser.

The Lyons were a couple in their thirties who lived in Didsbury. Couple of kids, composter in the back yard, old wooden sashes that were badly in need of a lick of paint. Mr Lyon wasn't home, though. He should've been, but he'd had to go into the office.

"It's really quite awkward," said Mrs Lyon, a woman to whom two kids had done no favours in the arse department. "He normally works from home, and we arranged it so there'd be two of us in ..."

"We can reschedule if you want. I don't mind."

"No, no, come on in. We should probably talk about it, at least."

And while she was holding the door open for me, she might as well have slammed it in my face. A couple, one of which wasn't there, and the other one didn't seem to give a shit about anything I had to offer. Throw in the two kids, obviously off for half-term, whose sole purpose in life was to make as much noise as possible, and it was a dying pitch that stumbled out of my mouth.

Trouble was, other than the kids demanding something of her every couple of minutes, she looked more interested than I'd envisaged. So I kept it light and informative and had to repeat myself because she didn't pick up on everything the first time round. Sometimes she picked up on stuff I hadn't even said.

"Ah, you see, we don't really have room for a conservatory."