The Count of Eleven (2 page)

Jack gave her a brilliant smile which was intended to persuade her that she was wrong to think whatever she was thinking. When he saw that it was more likely to drive her away he let it drop and fumbled an explanation. ‘1 was just, er, practising. Practising to speak toer the bank manager.” She looked blank, and he felt forced to add “He’s deaf.”

“Oh.”

He’d never heard anyone express so much incredulity with one syllable. “I’m teasing,” he said. “I was talking to a monster up there.”

A man with a duffel hood over his scalp and the rest of the coat flapping behind him looked in the window as Jack pointed at the television. “So what can I do for you?” Jack said to the girl.

She wavered and then marched rapidly to the counter, pulling a cassette box out of the pocket of her track suit. “Brought this back for our Timmy.”

“Sounds like a fair exchange to me.”

She shoved Body Heat across the counter and backed away, gabbling “Can I get one?”

“Not one like this.”

“For me,” she said as if she couldn’t believe he had misinterpreted her.

“Be my guest.”

He’d scarcely had time to delete the record of the loan on the Amstrad when she rushed back to the counter with a copy of Dumbo. “Remember your number?” Jack said.

“Smack my bum,” she said in an odd flat tone, and closed her eyes, her lips moving silently. “Five two three.”

“Just checking,” Jack said, having read that membership number on the computer screen. He removed the cassette from its pictorial box and placing it in a transparent one, handed it to her. As soon as she dashed out of the shop the duffel-hooded man came in.

With his cowled head and his jowls which appeared to be dragging his mouth down, he resembled a monk. His spectacles were perched so low on his nose that Jack wasn’t sure if he was peering over them at the membership notice or through them at the box for Body Heat, which Jack had retrieved from the Out on Loan shelf. Assuming it was the latter, he said “Rather like a sexy Chandler.”

“In my day they made candles.”

By the time Jack realised he wasn’t referring to some species of primitive sex-aid, the man had swung towards the window, adding a reek of sweat to the dust he was raising. “Do you know what those are?” he said in a slow almost toneless booming voice.

When Jack didn’t answer immediately he shook one stubby finger in the direction of the Laurel and Hardy poster. The best laughs I’ve ever had,” Jack offered.

The man threw up his arms as if Jack had stabbed him in the back. “Do you think you can say exactly what you like? Don’t you think anyone saw what you did, or are you too far gone to care?”

“Can you give me a hint?”

The man whirled around, clutching at the spectacles on his nose. “Don’t you even know what day it is?”

“Ah,” Jack said, and winked. “Yes, I believe I do.”

“You think it’s set aside for the corruption of the innocent, do you?”

He was miming outrage, his eyes bulging and lips drooping, and Jack thought he was overdoing it even as a joke. “Hardly,” he said.

“Never think for a moment you aren’t being observed, my friend. Even if I hadn’t been in time He would have seen what I saw.”

“Which was?” Jack prompted, replacing the cassette box on one of the Suspense shelves.

The man jabbed a finger at the box. “You encouraging that innocent to handle filth. God only knows what you put in her hands.”

“Dumbo.”

“Call me all the names you wish. Christ and His disciples were called worse.” The man glared at the television, which had begun to croon endearments and display glimpses of bare flesh. “I saw you pointing out filth oh that screen for the child to watch, and I heard you talking to her about her bottom. That’s right,” he boomed triumphantly, ‘you run. You won’t be running anywhere He can’t see you.”

Jack had made for the door in order to sneeze again, only to find that the sneeze wouldn’t come. His having seemed to flee infuriated him. “I’m sure you’re amusing in small doses,” he told his visitor, ‘but I think I’ve had mine for today.”

He stood in the doorway until the man stalked past him, then he grabbed the glossy catalogue and tried to waft out the lingering reek. Now that he was further from the television he realised that the man had been indicating not the poster but the sound of church bells. He was still nursing the suspicion that someone had sent the man as a prank, but a minute past twelve eventually arrived, putting an end to the time for fooling, and the man continued to picket the shop.

For a while he contented himself with staring hard at every cassette which entered or was hired from the library. When he overheard someone suggesting that Jack ought to equip him with a sandwich-board, however, he set about haranguing the customers. “Can’t you hear the bells calling you to worship? Are you going to bow down in front of a television instead? What do you think Our Lord would say if He saw you enjoying profanity on the Sabbath?”

“I reckon he’d say “Give us some room on the couch so I can take the weight off my feet”,” one customer suggested, and in general those he approached seemed untroubled by him. All the same, when Jack saw two young women cross the road to avoid the picket he strode to the door. “Have you taken root there or what?”

“My roots are in the tree on which you and your kind nailed Him.”

Arguing was pointless. Jack sent himself back to the counter. It looked as though he’d acquired a new partner, but that proved to be only until Andy Nation came to the shop.

Andy lived in the Orchards’ road. He began shouting at Jack before he was through the doorway. “Hello, old pip. How’s Mrs. Apple and the sapling? Who’s the character wearing his coat for a hat?”

“My doorman. Started work this morning. Maybe he’ll attract some custom. Just as long as he doesn’t lose me any.”

“You know what I say. Get yourself some stronger films, fill up your top shelf. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? The films you don’t like earn the money that pays for making the kind you like.” He scratched the cleft in his emergent moustache and then his stubbly cheeks, pushing their flesh upwards so that his round face briefly acquired a look of Oriental menace. _”Want rid of him?”

“I expect I could shift him if I believed in violence.”

“Leave it to someone who does.”

Er

Andy was out of the shop again, unzipping his leather jacket to free his brawny shoulders. “Flap away, caped crusader, before they have to carry you off on a stretcher. And don’t go thinking my friend inside sent me after you, he tried to stop me. He knows I’m a madman when I need to be.”

“May God forgive you,” the hooded man said, louder than ever. When Andy lurched at him, however, he scurried downhill, almost leaving his coat behind.

“That’s all it takes to get what you want,” Andy informed Jack, ‘looking fierce and sounding as if you mean to get it.”

Thanks.”

“Anything I can do to help, you know you don’t even need to ask.”

That I do, Andy. Thanks.”

This door could use a coat of paint. The way it looks now, people could think you’ve shut up shop.” Andy began to take boxes from the shelves at random and shake his head. “I don’t know how you can watch films with subtitles. People go to the cinema to be entertained, not to read a book. I didn’t leave a hammer or a drill at your house while I was working there, did I?”

“Only a blow lamp

“Keep it if it’s any use to you. I’ve been meaning to buy something lighter. How’s the house?”

“We’ve someone coming to view it later.” Jack frowned at the door. “You’re right, this doesn’t look too inviting.”

“Can it wait till I’ve finished the next job? I’ll be a couple of weeks.”

“I may as well see to it myself.”

“That’s my boy. Shall I hang on here while you fetch what you need?”

Jack hadn’t meant immediately, but why not? “I’ll drive back,” he promised.

“No panic. I’ll be doing my best to persuade folk that your films are more fun than they look.”

That prospect sent Jack sprinting down the hill once Andy couldn’t see him. Victoria Road was almost crowded, the sun and the seaside-postcard sky having tempted families over from Liverpool. A breeze brought him the smell of fish and chips, or as much of it as his clogged nose could distinguish, and the unctuous amplified invitation of a Bingo caller: “Fun for all the family. Try your luck.”

Nobody was home, though Laura’s bicycle was in the back yard. She’d scribbled “Gone to Jody’s‘ on the message board magnetised to the refrigerator door. He pulled the pedal bin out from beneath the sink and jammed his heels against the doors of the refrigerator and the oven as he manoeuvred the blow lamp from behind the pipe which led to the drain.

The tank of the blow lamp was larger than his head, and he hadn’t realised how heavy it was. He picked it up by the handle and took it to his van, on the rear doors of which there was still a ghost of a satellite dish stencilled by the previous owner. He went upstairs to blow his nose, then he found his old lighter on the kitchen windowsill and snapped it on to check the flame, imagining the taste of the first drag at a cigarette. He’d kept the lighter to remind himself how he’d managed to kick the habit when Laura was born.

Andy was chuckling at the antics of the skip inspectors. “This looks good. You want to get it.”

“You think it would improve my business?”

Andy looked faintly hurt. “Might help.”

“We’ll see, Andy. Anyway, you’ve helped. Let’s go out for a drink some night soon.”

Both men stared awkwardly at the television for a few seconds, then Andy stepped out from behind the counter. “Better be toddling. Got to track down my tools.”

Jack copied onto the Amstrad the details of a loan which Andy had painstakingly scrawled on the front of the wholesaler’s duplicated brochure. The member’s name and the title of the film were misspelled, but the number was accurate. “Safety in numbers,” Jack murmured, and went to the van. The handle of the blow lamp felt satisfyingly solid in his grasp as he carried the tool to the shop doorway. “Brighten my day,” he said to the blow lamp

Once Julia had climbed the dormant escalator from the underground platform at Moorfields she seemed to have the business district of Liverpool almost to herself. Other than several cars parked outside a sex shop there was hardly a sign of life. A few pigeons wandered away from her as she crossed the square of Exchange Flags, where a black skeleton grinned out from beneath a monumental robe, and a frieze of birds stirred and then flapped up from above the pillars of the town hall. She strolled across Dale Street, enjoying the chance to concentrate on the upper storeys of the office buildings, where gargoyles nested among stone leaves while towers suggested that the roofs were dreaming of far lands and distant times. The wail of a fire engine rose from the dock road, sounding much closer to her because of the emptiness, and jarred her out of a reverie which had felt like pure contented anticipation. Time enough to daydream when she’d sorted out Luke’s problem, she thought, hurrying across Castle Street and down towards the river.

His office was on a side street near the Slaughterhouse, a pub with sawdust on its bare floorboards. All the parking meters along the pavement by the office said EXCESS and PENALTY, except for the couple under the window, their heads having been tied up in yellow canvas bags. The gilded name of Rankin, Luke’s surname, glinted at her from the window as she rang the bell beside the heavy panelled bright red door.

The immediate response was a cry from Luke, which sounded as though several vulgar words were stumbling over one another in their haste to leave his mouth. Shortly he peered through the Venetian blind on which a faint shadow of his gilded name lay, then he came to the door. She had never seen him not wearing a suit and tie, but now he wore a purple zippered cardigan which she thought must belong to his wife. Both his grey hair and his greying eyebrows looked as if he’d been raking them with his fingers. “Oh dear, Luke, what have you done?” she said.

“Nothing too fatal, I hope,” he said with a pleading grin which pinched the wrinkled corners of his eyes. “I was on the computer for hours before I called you. I feel as if I’ve still got a green light jumping around my head.”

“The curse of the cursor,” Julia recognised, and lifted the flap in the Reception counter. “Let’s see how bad things are.”

The outer office contained six desks in ranks of three, facing away from the window. The five word processors were hooded, but the computer on Julia’s desk, which was nearest to the door of Luke’s room, was uncovered, and she saw a problem at once. “You left a disc in when you switched off the computer.”

“I must have done that just now. Is it bad?”

“So I’ve been told. Say a prayer,” Julia advised him half-seriously as she slipped the disc out of the drive and switched on the Apricot. The blank slate of the monitor turned green, and she held her breath until it displayed the specifications of the computer. She reinserted the disc as Luke drew up a chair next to hers. By the time the computer had finished chirping to itself over the disc and showed her the directory of contents, Luke was so restless that his chair was squeaking like a mouse.

The disc contained a record of several years’ worth of investments he’d made on behalf of those of his clients whose surnames came first in the alphabet, but now the directory was crowded with new files. Since a file name couldn’t be more than eight characters long, some of them were obviously the beginnings of phrases he’d typed in increasing desperation: EXPLAIN, PLEASE EX IDONTUNDE, WHATDOYO, GOOD GOD WHAT NOW BUG GERIT … “What were you trying to do, Luke?”

He cleared his throat and stared hard at her as if to remind her who was boss. “I thought I’d figured out a better way to organise the information.”

“That’s what you pay me for.”

“I’m not planning to dispense with you. I know you need the work. But you’ve got to appreciate I need to be in control of every aspect of my business. I thought you’d shown me the ropes.”

“Just enough to hang yourself with, by the look of it,” Julia thought better of saying. “You must have forgotten something I showed you,” she said, ‘and anyway I was planning a few more lessons.”