The Last Card (26 page)

H
took out his talisman to light the cigarette. As he flicked it alight and moved it to the cigarette dangling from his mouth, he paused. He looked at the lighter, his talisman, and thought about what it represented. He lit his cigarette, snapped it shut and buried it deep, back in his jacket pocket. He took a long pull on the
cigarette
. The sharp intake of nicotine made him feel light-headed for a moment. He looked out the window: they were just passing through Notting Hill. The Virgin record store which he and Nina had shopped in was on his right-hand side. The memory made him smile. The smile drifted from his face as he again thought about the moment when he’d ‘died’ in the ring. How that moment had changed the course of his life. And how he’d stood up to Mancini again. It had only been for about two minutes but looking back on those minutes made H break out in goose pimples. He’d gone for it, hadn’t he? Just for those brief, two minutes, he’d been back in the zone.

But that was over, this was now. And now H was embarking on a new chapter of his life. He had two airline tickets in his pocket and a bag full of money on his lap. Two hundred thousand pounds! What was he going to do? H knew he needed to just go away for a while and think. Think about his life and where he was going with it. He hadn’t done that in years. The money would certainly give him the space to do that. But would Nina?

The car was going down Holland Park Avenue now and H could see Nina’s turning coming up on the right.

‘Turn here, driver. I’ve got to pick someone up.’

‘Right you are, mate.’ The taxi slowed as it made the turn into Pottery Lane. A minute later it pulled up some fifty metres from Nina’s house. Making sure he left the taxi door open, H stepped out and walked slowly down to Nina’s front door. As he approached, his tread slowed even more, stopping outside one of the kitchen windows. The light was on inside and he could see right through into the living room. And there was Nina, waiting for him …

N
ina sat on the sofa, legs crossed, reading the magazine section of the Evening Standard. She was reading an
interview
with Julia Roberts but as quickly as she read a sentence, the words and the meaning would float out of her mind. When was Hilary going to arrive? Would he have the money with him?

Nina hated the idea that H might have been hurt. She hadn’t seen the fight with Mancini but she had listened to the live report on the radio. She had listened, incredulous, to the commentator’s chatter. How he had never seen an unranked fighter begin the opening round of such a big fight in such explosive style; how Hilary was moving with such fluidity and speed that he was picking off the WBA/WBC number-one-ranked super-middleweight with ease; how he was giving Mancini a master-class in the art of boxing.

The superlatives couldn’t fly from the lips of the reporter fast enough. Nina listened as the noise of the attendant crowd expanded in the background; the audience had recognised that something amazing was happening. But Nina knew it couldn’t last. She knew he was going to take the dive. When it came tears sprang to her eyes.

The commentator’s voice leapt from excitement to shock as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing! From dancing, moving, controlling the ring, H had suddenly stopped doing everything – and walked into a huge Mancini right hand. Mancini himself seemed incredulous. The commentator sounded hollow as he described the rest of the round, as Mancini jumped all over the plucky fighter from South London and
rained blow after blow on him. Hilary didn’t go down immediately and the blows kept coming. Crashing to the canvas, senses probably scrambled, the unranked fighter almost made it to his feet in time, but was counted out.

The reporter concluded that while Hilary had some skill as a boxer he had simply been outclassed by the better fighter, the ‘Bugle Boy’ from Manchester.

Nina had cried for some time after the fight. She cried for the hurt she knew Hilary would be feeling; she cried for the power that big people like Alan had over little people like herself and Hilary; she cried because she had lied to Hilary about her part in his son’s kidnapping and that had forced him into this humiliation.

After a while she had dried her face. She determined to make it up to H in the best way she could. She had no idea where they were going but she packed a small weekend bag. She dressed simply in some black slacks and a black pullover. She pulled her hair back into a bun. Her make-up was light as she sat on the sofa with her travel bag at her feet, passport and purse on top and ES Magazine in her hands. Again she read the sentence about Julia Roberts. And she waited.

H
decided that he couldn’t trust Nina, and trust was everything. The taxi sailed smoothly out of Pottery Lane, back on to Holland Park Avenue. It arrived at the Holland Park roundabout and waited for a break in the traffic.

‘Change of plan, driver. We’re going to Hanwell.’

‘Hanwell?’

‘Yeah, I need to make another stop.’

Irritated at his indecision, the driver glanced at H in the rear view mirror. H looked away. When the break in the traffic came the taxi pulled on to the roundabout, headed around the green and up the Uxbridge Road.

The taxi pulled up outside Alice’s house. It was late now and the house was dark. On his lap H quickly wrapped three stacks of the fifty-pound notes into the pages of The Sun. He figured the bundle totalled about thirty thousand pounds. Taking a pen from his pocket he wrote a quick note on the front: ‘For Beverley and Cyrus – I’m going away for a while but I’ll be back. All my love, Hilary’. No, H couldn’t stay with Beverley. She’d lost respect for him when he’d needed her most. She had abandoned him. Sure, she’d had her reasons. But in the end, there will always be reasons, won’t there? No, what they’d had was gone. Only time would tell if it could ever be rekindled.

With the engine still running, H nipped out of the taxi, walked swiftly to Alice’s front door and posted the parcel through the
letterbox
, squeezing it through.

He climbed back into the taxi.

‘Where now, guv’nor?’ The taxi driver asked, impassive.

‘Heathrow.’ The driver nodded and the taxi pulled out.

‘Going away are you?’

‘Yep.’

‘Where you off to then, anywhere nice?’

‘Montserrat.’

The driver cast H a quizzical look via the rear view mirror. ‘Isn’t that where the volcano happened?’

‘Yeah …’

‘Terrible that was. Saw a documentary about that on the telly. How are they coping over there, then?’

‘It’s tough but … life goes on. It’s tough over here, isn’t it?’

‘You’re right there, sunshine, you’re right there.’

H thought about his brother’s house in Virgin Island, in the
northern
part of Montserrat, far from the exclusion zone around the volcano. The house was set near a cliff face and had broad views of the sea. On a clear day you could see over to St Kitts. Suddenly, H couldn’t wait to be there.

It came to him who Gavin’s killer was - Wha Gwan. Blue’s friend. H shook his head in amazement, the complexities of the universe far greater than he could possibly fathom. He would sort himself out in Montserrat and then he would come back, a different H. Maybe he would meet up again with Ade. And maybe Wha Gwan - who knew?

H pulled another cigarette from his packet and pulled out his lighter, his talisman. He lit the cigarette and was about to push the Zippo back into his pocket. Only he didn’t. He looked at it. This moment was another one of those moments, like the one when he’d almost died in the ring. It was a turning point. Only this time, finally, he was in control. He opened the window and tossed the lighter out. From the speeding taxi, H watched it sail backwards in the dark, hit the asphalt, and bounce forwards.

THE END