Utterly Monkey (17 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can we do this later? Mr Martin’s going to come out in a minute.’ Mr Martin was already coming out. He had walked down the far aisle and was standing beside Mrs Burnett, but looking with evident concern across the shop at the siblings.

‘Janice, everything all right?’ he asked, his hand on Mrs Burnett’s shoulder but with the two of them facing the same way, towards Janice, like in an old style marriage photo.

‘It’s fine Mr Martin. Greer’s just leaving.’

Budgie turned round.

‘Why don’t
you
mind your own business?’

The chemist bristled and sighed, but Mrs Burnett remained completely calm. She glanced up at Mr Martin, who was now looking away, up at the back of the shop, and then said, quite clearly, ‘This
is
his business Greer. Why don’t you take your problems outside?’

‘Fuck off. I’m talking to my sister and I’ll do it where I want to.
All right?
’

Janice came round the counter.

‘Come
on
Budgie, outside.
Now.
’ She walked to the door and went through it. There was an alley two shops down that cut through to the High Street from one of the car parks. She walked through the shoppers and turned into it, growing angrier with every step. Greer walked after her, bouncing on the balls of his feet. In the alley she turned to face him and screamed:

‘LOOK, I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS. IF I WANT TO GO TO LONDON THEN I’M GOING TO FUCKING GO TO LONDON AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME…Sorry, Mrs McClelland.’

Janice stepped aside for Mrs McClelland to pull her tartan shopper between her and Budgie. She scurried through. Budgie made a face at Janice: his tongue pushed over his bottom teeth to create a distended bump below his lower lip, his eyes wide. He had done the same thing, made the same face at her, for maybe twenty years.

‘You’re just so fucking stupid Jan. You’re beyond help. Geordie’s a fucking waste of space. A total fucking loser.’

Janice looked at the wall a few inches behind him. He could say what he liked. She didn’t care. He could even hit her. Someone must have smashed a bottle off the wall here. There was a little jag of green glass on the edge of one of the bricks. She looked back at her brother’s face, its odd bulbous expression and his brown widened eyes. Calm and miles away, she breathed out loudly and said, ‘He gave the money back. To some friend of yours in London. Just leave me alone Budgie. Please. Just leave me alone.’ Then she turned and walked out of the alley back into the street.

At five twenty-seven that afternoon, Mr Martin walked
up the shop to the glass front and stood looking out. He’d been fine about letting Janice have the time off. In fact he’d seemed almost pleased and told her she deserved a holiday. Janice stood watching him now, his hunched back in its white coat framed by the shop window. He sighed with the usual sad and relieved air he liked to adopt at closing time.

‘Well, we won’t be retiring tomorrow anyway.’

Always the same line, but Janice didn’t mind. Being expected, when his statement actually arrived it was also somehow surprising, like the school bell at going-home time.

‘And if you want to head on then…I have some forms to fill out before I lock up.’

‘Okay…And I’m sorry again about earlier, about Greer…he can be a bit wild.’

‘Aye well, these things happen…’ He paused by the shampoos, rearranging two bottles that were heading the wrong columns. ‘Janice, you know, if these two weeks in London…well, if they…
work out,
and you want to stay on, Mrs Martin and I…Mary and I, we’ll get someone in. You shouldn’t be thinking we wouldn’t cope.’

Janice felt embarrassed. She looked down at the carton of paracetamol she was halfway through pricing,

‘Oh I know. I wouldn’t think that…It’s very good of you though…thank you.’

Mr Martin had turned his back and was shuffling off. Janice hung her white coat up in the storeroom and left, shouting goodnight up the stairs at the back. Outside, she turned right and started up the High Street towards her estate. Most of the stalls were packing up. At the
corner of Fountain Street Mrs MacNeill was re-wrapping her ornaments in sheets of the
Newsletter
. Janice managed to get past her without being noticed, and so avoided the long barmy chat that would consist mostly of pauses in which she’d try, unsuccessfully, to move off.

Every Saturday, along with the regular stallholders, Mrs MacNeill would unpack her pick-up truck and set the contents of her living room, including her fireguard and black-and-white TV, onto the street. She was the only person Janice knew who still had a black-and-white telly. After displaying her goods she then sat in her armchair, shouting prices at the shoppers walking past. None of the other traders ever tried to take her space. She was old and mad and smelt of topsoil but had a reputation for charms to get rid of warts and other minor ailments. Janice had gone to her house once–it was the other half of her Auntie’s semi and on the same estate as theirs. It had been a Sunday and she’d had terrible toothache. She was only about fourteen. Mrs MacNeill had made her lie down on the sofa while her slightly retarded son, Gerry, looked on. She’d then torn a scrap off an old brown envelope she found in a drawer, poured pepper on it, and told Janice to open her mouth. Her fingers were filthy, in keeping with her face and her home. She then tried to push the paper into Janice’s mouth, missed, and got most of the pepper in her eye. It had watered for about four days. As she was leaving, and Gerry was angrily rubbing his crotch against the back of the sofa, Mrs MacNeill had gripped both her hands very firmly and growled that Janice needed to bury a tatty in her back garden. Then as she stepped out the front door and took deep breaths of clean air, the old woman had thrust a
shopping list at her (
since I can’t take any money off you love, wouldn’t work then
). When she’d eventually got home her mum had made her take a trowel from under the stairs and bury a white pebbly spud in the flowerbed. It had almost seemed cruel. The potato must have just rotted away in there, stuck back in the dark soil it had managed to get out of. But the toothache was gone by the morning.

At the Fairhill junction Janice had to stand and wait for a wee black Fiat to pull onto the High Street. She took her gloves out of her bag. They were black leather and she had kept them for almost two and a half years. She always set things down somewhere and they’d get lost: her wallet, her keys, her cigarette lighters. But she’d held onto her gloves. The Martins had given them to her as a Christmas present and they were soft, fur-lined, and made her hands look delicate and somehow classy, old-fashioned. There was more of a nip in the air than you’d think from standing inside looking out. Such strange July weather this year. Her denim jacket and pink cardigan weren’t enough to stop her from shivering. She crossed over the junction and walked on to Moneyronan Corner. Outside the new restaurant, Palpitations, a car slowed down alongside her. It was Budgie, sitting in the back of a red Astra filled with four other men. It
was
filled, as their arms and heads seemed to bulge from the four open windows, an enormous tortoise coming out of its shell. They were playing techno music but not particularly loudly. She heard the engine’s timbre drop a gear as it pulled up beside her, and then she heard Budgie shout, ‘Oi, Jan.’

She looked up.

‘YOU’RE A FUCKING WHORE.’

They drove off, but Janice could see the driver wasn’t laughing. He had looked over apologetically as he pulled off. She knew his face but couldn’t think of his name. It almost seemed as if he’d driven away to stop Budgie shouting any more stuff at her. She was sweating suddenly. She looked around but there was no one nearby. She took her bag off her shoulder and pulled out the phone to ring Geordie.

Geordie had booked Janice’s flight, though he had to ring Danny and borrow his Visa card details. The conversation had been short, curtailed when Geordie revealed that he actually had Danny’s Visa card in his hand as he spoke. Danny had left it on his chest of drawers. In such circumstances then, Danny’d agreed. The one-way flight was over two hundred quid.

Danny had been driving when Geordie’d rang. They’d stayed in Lisamore until Margaret and Lillian had put their coats on and sat down at their desks with their handbags in front of them like schoolgirls waiting to be told to go home. Danny had finished reviewing the main contracts and Ellen had made out a list of any missing agreements. It was almost six o’clock when they pulled out of the car park and drove into Belfast, against the rush-hour traffic. The oncoming cars were edging along while
they slipped fluently past them. The odd car carried band members or marchers, unbuttoned, relaxed. Danny was explaining how the bidding for Ulster Water worked. He had to write up a report for tomorrow night on the state of the company. Syder’s new bid had to be in by Monday at 10 a.m. As it stood now, the board of directors were backing Yakuma’s bid and Syder needed to come in much higher. The board of directors would then be obliged to act in the shareholders’ interest, which usually meant backing the highest bid. Yakuma’s strategy was investment, Syder’s to asset-strip and sell off.

‘So Margaret and Lillian will be sacked if our bid wins?’

‘Made redundant,’ Danny automatically corrected, ‘I don’t know really.’
But I could make an intelligent guess, and that would be yes.
Danny didn’t want to think about this. He was feeling hot. He thumbed the electric window button and the pane moved jerkily down, giving an animal squeak.

‘They’d probably lose their jobs anyway, with Yakuma. They weren’t exactly on top of their game.’

Ellen was silent. Danny interpreted it as a reproach for his unkindness.

‘I mean they were nice and everything but a new boss always re-evaluates, puts their own stamp on things, brings in new people.’

‘Not new administrative assistants.’

‘No.’

It was still too hot in the Focus. The sun was setting in the west, behind them, and all the oncoming drivers had pulled down their visors to protect their eyes. It meant the traffic passing him was faceless, a stream of faceless humans getting carried into the setting sun. He loosened his tie.

‘Thing is, Ellen, you can’t
be
a lawyer and worry about
that kind of thing. You don’t choose your clients. They choose you…Everyone’s entitled to access the law and…it’s market forces dictating…’

His turn to fall silent. Ellen was looking out of the window at the low flat fields. There must have been a lot of rain recently and little lakes had formed in them. They wore flushed pink transfers of the sky. Danny continued, ‘I do feel bad about it.’

He wished she would say something.

‘I wish you would say something.’ Ellen looked over at him.

‘There’s nothing to say. Like
you
said, you can’t choose what work you get. It’s just…they seemed nice…I’d prefer if it wasn’t us.’

‘Someone has to do it. You
don’t
get a choice.’

Danny was thinking though that
choice
was the only thing you did get. Life is
all
choice. Even life itself is choice. You have to choose to remain in it. The only time he’d not been consulted was birth but from then on he’d pretty much made the calls. Milk or no milk? Sleep? Scream? Life was one big flow chart, a river system you paddle up ’til you’re alone and the stream peters out to a lake, in a field, flushed pink by a sun going down. The day was ending.

Ellen was looking at the housing estate they were passing. Some boys were kicking a ball around in a car park. They passed another estate. Another group of boys playing something. They were jerkily moving around one of the kids, blocking him in. Was someone about to be jumped? Then the boy ran into view, casting off, with one arm, an orange blur. They were playing basketball. Basketball?

‘You don’t often see that. Or you didn’t used to anyway.’

The traffic was getting heavier. He pulled up behind
a lorry at some lights. The aggressive smell of petrol. Putting his window up, he held the car on the clutch in second. The lights changed and he pulled away. A new estate on the right had some loyalist murals on the gable ends. Danny couldn’t be bothered to point them out, and then have to discuss them. He couldn’t even be bothered to see them. He turned the radio on.

Janice was packing. She’d never flown before. The summer after school had finished, when she turned seventeen, the girls in the salon had booked a week in Rhodes and she was meant to go but her granny had her first heart attack two days before they were due to leave, and she had had to drop out. Booking a holiday abroad always seemed like a bad omen then. She would have to find the passport, although maybe you didn’t need one to fly to London. Geordie would know about that. She had set all the clothes she owned on her bed and was picking her favourites from each pile. Six of everything basically. She’d found a large black holdall in the roof space, which might have been Budgie’s in fact, and it should be big enough, although it had no shoulder strap or wheels. Malandra was across the hall in her bedroom, clicking through her CDs, picking out Janice’s. Malandra had seemed pleased she was going, or at least pleased by the idea of a trip over to London to see her, if she stayed on. Both her mum and Malandra had agreed not to tell Budgie that she was leaving in the morning. He could find out on Sunday afternoon. Or Monday. Or whenever he bothered to pitch up, stinking drunk no doubt, and lairy.

‘What are you doing?’ Ellen asked patiently. They’d pulled into a car park just off Great Victoria Street, between the Opera House and their hotel. Danny was now on his second circuit of it, even though it was half-empty.

‘I was thinking that if a joyrider sees our wee Ford Focus between two more expensive cars then he wouldn’t choose ours.’

‘Okay…presumably though, the joyrider could just look around the car park, and pick whatever he likes…before he would have to crash through the barrier.’

Nodding, Danny obediently pulled into the next space, between a tiny Micra and a battered Cortina. The view through the windscreen was a concrete wall on which someone had written tidily, in black marker,
Sammy is one stupid cunt
. Danny liked the underlining emphasis on
one
. Presumably there were others. They lugged their bags from the back seat and Danny click-locked the car with the remote on the key ring. They crossed to the pavement. He was feeling expansive.

‘The good thing about a city that got bombed a lot is that it always has an excess of car parks…All these open spaces created right in the town centre.’

The NCP
had
done pretty well out of the doings of that other three letter acronym, the IRA. Ellen laughed briefly and Danny knew he was trying to be too funny. By the entrance a bald attendant in a navy round-neck with gold epaulettes was perched in his toll booth. He had been unabashedly watching them since they’d driven in, swivelling on his stool as they’d circled. Walking past him now Danny nodded and said hello, giving the attendant the chance to ignore him, which he duly took. He slowed his pace down to Ellen’s. She
was wheeling her bag beside her and it made the same clip, clip, clip on the pavement that it had at the airport. The weather had cleared up. Though there was a breeze, it didn’t seem to have rained here at all. Belfast looked different to how he remembered it. From the livid Cave Hill up on the mountain down to the shop windows exploding only with colour, the town seemed almost flamboyant. Although it was dusk, people weren’t hurrying home, angled into the wind, clutching their collars. Instead they appeared to be
sauntering.
He could see a packed café over the street, and another one further up. There were already little single-sex groupings of youths passing, heading out for the evening. The men were dressed the same, in ironed shirts of a singular colour, denim or leather jackets, sensible jeans, whereas the women seemed to be sharing one outfit between two or three, so that each of them revealed a different part of their body. They were approaching their hotel.

‘It’s been blown up thirty-two times, apparently. The most bombed hotel in Europe.’

‘So they’ve had to build it
thirty-two
times.’ Ellen said. She made a slight whistling sound as if to say
wow
. Danny wasn’t sure if she was serious. He kept accidentally kicking her wheelie-bag so he paused, let her go ahead of him, and crossed over to her left side.

‘I suppose so. Not from the ground. But windows replaced, that kind of thing.’

Danny noticed two short hard-looking boys coming towards them looking at Ellen. As they were passing one of them muttered ‘Great baps love.’ Danny ignored it, hoping Ellen hadn’t heard or understood. He could hear
them sniggering. He hoped they hadn’t stopped behind them or weren’t about to shout something.

Ellen said, ‘In fact, if you count the first time it was constructed, it’s been built thirty-three times.’

‘Yep.’

‘So
are
you going to tell me what baps are? Or are you just not going to mention it?’

Danny laughed.

‘I was planning not to mention it…They’re what you think they are.’ Ellen made a kind of clicking sound with her mouth, half-tut, half-laugh. Things rolled off her that would have kept Danny awake. A lifetime being stared at must do that to you. A kid on a skateboard went past them. Even
he
was staring at Ellen, so hard in fact that he almost swerved into a lamppost. Danny wished that he’d still been walking on Ellen’s right side so he could have just nudged him on into it.
Make it happen
, as they liked to say at Monks & Turner. It was apparent that in Belfast Ellen wasn’t just unusually beautiful, she was also unusually black. They stopped in front of the hotel and looked up.

The Europa had been kept from the top spot of The Most Bombed Hotel in the World by some place in Tel Aviv, but it didn’t look like any kind of runner-up. Since they’d installed shatter-proof windows the bombings had stopped and it was now shiny, expensive and slick. All steel, glass, and reflected sky. It reminded Danny of some spanking new office block in an Eastern European financial district. It was only medium-sized by London standards. Danny carried Ellen’s bag up the stairs and they entered through a revolving door. Danny misjudged the size of it and squeezed in behind Ellen. With both bags.
He apologized and thought for an awful second that they were about to get stuck but then it moved and Ellen calmly strode out. As he tried to follow, the momentum meant the dividing door behind him hit the bags. He was knocked forward into a stagger and burst with a grunt into the lobby. The receptionist raised his eyebrows. He was called Mr Andrew Terry, according to his name tag, and had quite remarkable hair, coated in what could only have been brylcream and swept to one side in a very straight parting. He looked like he should be sitting behind the controls of a Spitfire instead of a reception desk, an impression heightened by an unexpected posh English accent. Danny hadn’t been so frequently referred to as ‘Sir’ since he’d played Lord Windermere in their school play, or been inter-railing and unaccountably held for six hours at a border in Germany. Danny felt the sarcasm he’d suspected confirmed when Terry allotted them rooms eight floors apart.
Bastard.
He smiled very broadly at Danny when he held their keys out.

Danny sat on the edge of his bed in just his suit trousers. His feet were bare and the rest of his clothes were splayed over the chair in the corner. He turned on the telly and caught the end of a feature on the parades. They showed the main marches in Portadown and Limavady: a collage of children with ice cream on their faces and old men twinkling blue eyes at the camera. Mike Nesbitt appeared behind his desk, reading the UTV news. Actually, because the reception on the TV wasn’t great, two Mike Nesbitts appeared: the real one and his ghostly doppelgänger, his guardian angel, hovering just over his left shoulder. They were both doing a fine job. Danny appreciated their
development of a suitable gravitas as in one level voice they recounted the day’s events: ‘A blaze at a farm in County Fermanagh in which 2,000 bales of hay caught fire, has been brought under control by fire fighters. The alarm was raised just before noon at the farm outside Kesh, close to the border with County Tyrone. Eight fire crews and a water tanker were called to tackle the blaze. The fire service said strong winds made their task more difficult. The oil tank of a nearby house was threatened by the blaze.’ A big fire. On a farm. The shot of the studio cut away to a tousled farmer in a woolly hat standing in front of a razed, blackened field. He was nodding slowly. Ropes of smoke still rose behind him, fraying off into nothing. Danny was thinking how he loved the report’s last line.
The oil tank of a nearby house was threatened by the blaze.
Something almost happened once, and then it didn’t. They should double Mr Nesbitt’s salary, whatever it was. He flicked the telly off with the remote and removed his suit trousers. After folding them carefully, so the crease stayed intact, he hung them up in the rattly closet. Briefly, he considered doing some press-ups and sit-ups but decided, instead, to open the mini-bar. He fixed himself an amateur vodka and tonic (no lemon, no ice) and ran the bath.

An hour later Danny was sitting in the lobby, waiting for Ellen, scanning the
Ulster Tatler
. Every page, it seemed, was just photographs of different exhibitions and launches and openings. The socialites always had their arms around each other’s shoulders, either for support, which, given the drinks in everyone’s hands, was possible, or because they were trying to edge each other out of the frame, which, given their evident joy at being snapped, was also
possible. Why would you buy this? Danny thought. Nobody wanted to look at people so much. Ellen swept out of the lift and revised his opinion. He would subscribe to a magazine full of pictures of her. She had tied her hair back and was wearing her dark bootcut jeans and a fitted black open-necked shirt. A long red raincoat was folded over her arms in front of her. She winked at him. ‘Ready?’