No Place in the Sun (39 page)

‘Don’t you remember me, Tom?’

She looked familiar; was it was the blonde girl that he had sold the yellow car to back in City Auto, the girl he had met in the club before he went to Spain? It was, yes. She was a stunner right enough, looked a lot better in normal colours; at least she had got out of her yellow phase. ‘Amanda?’

‘Yes, at least you remembered that much.’ She sounded angry.

‘Sorry, I never contacted you, a lot happened.’

‘Not as sorry as me. I saw you on the news last night, that’s how I knew you were here.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Amanda unbuckled the little boy from the buggy; he stood up quickly and tried to run around the room, but she grabbed him under the arms and lifted him up to stand on the desk. She burst into tears as the little boy looked curiously at Tom.

‘Tommy,’ she sobbed, ‘I want you to meet your daddy.’

’Well, fuck me.’ Walter had a way of summing things up. ‘This has been quite a few days for you, Tom, talk about a blast from the past.’

‘I’m still in shock to be honest. I don’t mind about losing my job, I was beginning to get tired of working for Tania, but Amanda turning up with the kid, with Tommy, that was a shock for sure.’

Harry put the tray of drinks on the table. ‘How do you feel about having a little boy? Is it a good feeling?’

‘After the initial upset, I’m fine about it, really. He’s great actually, a lovely little fellow. Yes, I’m delighted if the truth be known, but it’ll take getting used to.’

‘Did you get to spend some time with him this evening?’

‘A case of not having any choice. She shoved him into my hands and said that she was going for a walk, first time she was able to leave him and be alone for the last couple of years. She came back though after half an hour, just before I panicked altogether.’

‘You did well to mind him, did he make strange with you?’

‘He did at first; I didn’t know what to be saying to him. I just sat him down in my chair and sang songs to him, tried to teach him a few nursery rhymes and that.’

‘Imagine, Tom a daddy. Here’s to Tom, and little Tommy.’ Andrew raised his gin and tonic.

The others raised glasses in salute. ‘Best thing ever happened to you.’ Walter spoke for them all.

‘Thanks, guys. My head is still spinning with it all. I need a good night’s sleep.’

Walter laughed. ‘You can forget that from now on, you’ll have a little alarm clock jumping on your chest every morning now. Andy was saying that they’ll move in with you, your girl and your son?’

‘My son.’ Tom pondered the words. ‘My son, yes. Amanda’s just renting that small flat, my place is big, so we’re going to give it a try, take it as it comes for a month or two and see if it works out.’

‘I don’t want to be a party pooper, Tom, but you two hardly know each other really. Do you think that an instant arrangement like that can work? Are you not rushing things a bit?’

‘I think I’m about ready to try the settled life, and having a kid changes the picture too.’

‘But you only met her a few times, and you know nothing about each other.’

I know that, and it may not work out at all, but I fancied her from the first time I met her, and we really hit it off when we spoke this evening. After she had taken out a few years of frustration on me first that is.’

‘So you are both willing to take a chance?’

‘Yes, we both know it’s a bit of a long shot, but there’s Tommy to consider as well; I missed out on his first couple of years and I don’t want to miss a minute of the rest.’

‘So where are they now?’

‘She’s gone home tonight; give us both a chance to get over the shock and get Tommy to bed. I’m going to give her the keys tomorrow and she’ll move some stuff over while I’m at work. I’m a bit nervous about it, but I’m looking forward to it in another way. I’m too long living on my own.’

‘That’s true.’ Andrew sounded wistful. ‘You were getting crusty, set in your ways.’

Harry laughed. ‘That’s good, coming from you, Andy. What was that about you leaving Scorpio, Tom? I missed that.’

‘Tania sacked him.’ Walter couldn’t resist the jibe.

‘She didn’t sack me; we agreed to part the ways.’

‘You want to come back to work for me? That door is open still.’

‘Thanks, Harry, but she put a clause in my payoff that bars me from working in the business for two years.’

‘I don’t think this business will exist in two years.’

They looked at Walter in surprise. ‘It’s true; I really think we are just riding the crest of a wave here, this will all evaporate as quickly as it grew.’

‘You could be right.’ Harry was inclined to agree with Walter. ‘A lot of the business is based on expectations of price rises when places like Hungary and Bulgaria join the EU; if those rises don’t happen fast, if they take a normal kind of timescale, people will get disillusioned and the market may well fizzle out.’

‘Rise?’ Walter laughed. ‘If they hold their own it’ll be a miracle, particularly in Bulgaria. We’re looking at big losses there anyway no matter what happens with EU membership.’

Tom smiled. ‘You don’t care Harry; you never intended this as anything but one last fling, a retirement fund.’

‘True enough, Tom, I did better than I ever thought possible to be honest, but I’d like to think that Walter’s job would last a few years more.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Harry. The last couple of years have been good to me, set me up well. I think we all did well on this caper really.’

Andrew raised his glass. ‘Amen to that.’

‘So, what makes you think it will all be over sooner rather than later?’

‘I just have a feeling, Tom.’ Harry was in a mellow mood. ‘My gut instinct is that we’ve crested the wave, that’s all.’

‘Any particular reason, or is it just a feeling?’

‘A few things. One thing that will kill it is bad press; if a reporter starts to dig too deep in places like Bulgaria then the shit will hit the fan. That guaranteed rental thing you started has run riot lately, everyone is adding rent on to prices, and a lot of the small guys aren’t doing the deals you did over there. They’re adding margins and rent on to prices that are already way above the market.’

‘True enough, a lot of the developers know what we’re getting for stuff, and that’s the kind of prices they’re quoting to small agencies, so they have to add their margins and rent on top of that again. It’s getting completely crazy out there; I’ve seen places sold lately for a hundred and twenty grand that are worth no more than thirty on a good day.’

‘The whole business is getting really mad in lots of ways.’ Andrew smiled at the thought. ‘Tania even has a load of dentists signed up as agents, they persuade patients that they bought great value from Scorpio and then they pass their details on to us to close the sale. They get a commission for every contact that delivers a sale.’

Tom nodded. ‘That’s true, she went in one day to have her teeth polished, and she signed her dentist up to send clients to her. After that she went around on several of them and she has about six surgeries on her list now. It’s mad all right.’

Walter laughed at Tania’s latest stunt. ‘It’s getting a bit crazy when you can’t have a tooth pulled without someone trying to sell you a place in Bulgaria.’

‘I know. Anytime you visit a lawyer, or an accountant, you’re in the firing line as well. It’s probably gone beyond sanity right enough.’

Walter smiled. ‘So maybe you didn’t mind being sacked?’

‘I wasn’t sacked, I left. Anyone for another pint?’ Tom waved his empty glass at the barman and pointed around the table at the others. ‘Everyone for the same again?’

They nodded.

‘As regards the bad press thing though, I don’t reckon that any reporter will dig very deep. This industry is one of the biggest advertising sectors in the newspapers right now. I know we’re spending up to fifty grand some weeks, and there are more than thirty companies in the market at this stage. Ok, some of them are small, but it still adds up to a lot of bread.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Doesn’t mean someone won’t go after it. Murtagh is already trying to dish the dirt on Budapest, talking about foreigner prices and local prices and all that stuff, seems like a direct reference to the job you sold in the gypsy district. His editor has sat on it so far, but it’s only a matter of time before the talk starts.’

Tom carried the drinks down to the table and collected the empties. ‘I think I know what’s biting that little shit.’

Walter laughed. ‘He wasn’t paid enough dropsy?’

‘Nothing like that, he got plenty; it’s more that he’s pissed off at losing his crown as mister overseas property. Since our Doctor Sherry started getting the TV slots, Murtagh has his knife in her. I did warn her at the time but she was hell bent on being seen as the world’s leading property expert. No talking to our Tania when she has the bit between her teeth.’

‘What have you done, leaving me in the hands of that woman?’ Andrew sounded worried.

‘Don’t worry Andy, she doesn’t know how to handle you, you don’t dance to her charms.’

‘I’ll miss having you there all the same, Tom, all joking apart. It’s been great.’

Tom chugged back the rest of his pint and stood up. ‘I’m heading off, lads, have to clean up the flat and put all breakable stuff up on high shelves, little boy coming to live and all that.’

It would soon be over, and no harm. Tom sat back and watched as the young couple walked over to the lawyer’s desk with their deposit cheque. That sale had been easy, he hadn’t even pushed them; they were so convinced by the rental guarantee in Malko that they had bought two units. Like taking candy from a baby really, lambs to the slaughter. He felt suddenly tired, weary of the endless round of exhibitions and long flights, and the blur of hundreds of people passing his desk, all of them convinced that they were on a path to riches.

It wouldn’t be anything of the sort though, he knew that. Give it four years at the most, two years to build the projects and another two years when they got back their own rent, minus a handling fee and maybe some tax. Then the shit would hit the fan. It might take a few months more, but gradually the realization would dawn on them that there was no crock of gold, no magic formula for getting rich in some foreign place. A few would do ok; the people who had bought from Harry in Spain had already done well, and even the early buyers on Montana Fea were selling on at small profits. Harry had sold some good stuff in Budapest too, downtown in good areas, but Mamser’s rubbish in the Renaissance quarter was always going to be rubbish, no matter what you called it.

He sometimes felt a small pang of conscience when he thought of the people that had bought at high prices in Bulgaria, especially in the mountains where the snow was intermittent and where not many people went to ski. What would happen to all those places? Would they fall down eventually, vandalized during the long closed season when the slopes were green? Would people just sell out at a fraction of what they paid? Maybe local people would someday live there, attracted by the knockdown prices and the mass exodus of foreign owners? It was hard to tell.

He felt sorry for them all in one way, but in other ways his conscience was clear. After all, it was greed that drove them to buy these places, nothing more. They all had homes already, just trying to get rich quick without having to work for it. They all knew about buyer beware, it was up to them to check out the facts, but they didn’t. It was their own fault.

‘Penny for them, Tom.’ Andrew had wandered over; it would soon be time to close.

‘I’ll miss it all, Andy, but maybe now I’ll get a life. Is it nearly time to pull down the shutters?’

‘Give it ten more minutes, and then we’ll call it a day. It wasn’t a bad weekend anyway, we did well.’

‘We did fine.’ Tom was happy enough; his final paycheck would be a good one. It would have been better if he hadn’t lost it a bit on Friday, but it was ok. He wouldn’t starve.

His mobile rang; he was surprised to see Andrew’s number appear. He picked it up and pressed the button. ‘Andy, where did you disappear to?’

‘I’m out in the toilet.’

‘Are you ok?’

‘I can’t come in, she’s here; I can’t face her.’

‘Who’s here, what’s wrong?’

‘That bitch, my uncle’s wife, she just walked into the room. I covered my face with a folder and ran out. Oh, Tom, I can’t face that woman, I can’t come back in. I feel sick.’

Tom looked across the room to where a blonde woman was perusing the displays. She looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties, her skin was very tanned, almost leathery, and she was dressed in cream trousers and a white top with sparkling crystals on it. Her hands and arms were festooned in expensive gold chains and rings. So that was old Milton’s wife, imagine that!

‘Look, Andy, it’s ok, I’ll get rid of her. You go on home and I’ll lock up the stuff.’

‘Thanks, Tom, you’re a pal, I’ll talk to you during the week; I’ll give you a ring.’

Tom stood up and walked over to the woman. ‘Can I help you, madam?’

She smiled a cold smile at him. ‘I have some funds; I’m looking to invest in property.’