Sam heard the light tinkle of the glass dropping into the bin, then the sharp shrill of the front door bell. It made her jump.
‘It must be your parents. They’ve forgotten their key.’
Sam listened to Annie walking down the stairs and the sound of the front door opening, waiting to hear her parents’ voices, but there was a strange silence. She wondered if the film on the television had finished. She heard the click of the door closing, and there was another silence. Then she heard the soft murmur of a man’s voice; unfamiliar. There was another man’s voice as well that she did not recognise. Puzzled, she slipped out of bed, tiptoed across to her door, and peeked cautiously down the stairs.
Annie was talking to two policemen who were standing awkwardly, holding their caps.
Something was wrong, Sam knew. Something was terribly wrong. She strained her ears, but it was as if someone had turned off the volume, and all she could do was watch them mouthing silent words.
Then Annie turned away from the policemen and walked slowly, grimly, up the stairs while the policemen stayed down in the hall, still holding their caps.
She sat Sam down on the bed, pulling the blankets up around her like a shawl. She dabbed Sam’s cheek with a handkerchief, picked some more pieces of glass from her hair, laid them down on the bedside table and then stared at her with her large, sad eyes. Sam saw a tear trickling down her cheek. She had never seen a grown-up cry before.
Annie took Sam’s hands in hers and squeezed them gently, then she looked Sam directly in the eyes. ‘Your Mummy and Daddy have had an accident in the car, Sam. They aren’t coming home any more. They’ve – gone to heaven.’
Sam did not dream of the hooded man again for twenty-five years. By then he was only a dim memory in her mind. Something that had been a part of her childhood, like the toys she had forgotten and the rusting swing and the secret places that now had housing estates with neat lawns built all over them. Something she thought had gone for ever.
But he had not forgotten her.
2
Sam tapped out a row of figures onto her computer terminal, then sat back wearily and closed her eyes for a moment, the insides of her head banging and crashing like the vacuum cleaner in the corridor outside. She looked at her watch. Six-twenty. Wednesday, 22nd January. Christ, time went fast. It only seemed a few days since Christmas.
She swivelled her chair and stared through her own reflection in the window at the fine needle spray of rain that was falling silently through the darkness of the fast-emptying streets of Covent Garden outside. The wettest rain of all, the type that seemed to come at you from all sides, got inside your clothes, inside your skin, it even seemed to come up out of the pavement at you.
A draught of cold air blew steadily through the glass onto her neck and she hunched her shoulders against it, then rubbed her hands together. The heating had gone off and the office felt cold. She stared at the story board propped up beside the VDU. One coloured frame showed a sketch of a palm-fringed beach. The next showed a man and a woman in designer swimwear and designer suntans bursting out of the sea. In the next frame the woman was biting a chocolate bar which the man was holding.
‘Castaway. To be eaten alone . . . or shared with a very good friend.’
The office had white walls and black furniture, and a skeletal green plant cowering in the corner that resisted all her efforts to make it flourish. She’d watered it, talked to it, played music to it, bathed its leaves in milk – and it stank foul for days – moved it closer to the window, further away from the window, moved it to just about every position in the room where it was possible to put a plant; but it never changed, never actually died so that they could throw it out, but never looked how it was supposed to so that it was worth keeping. Claire, with whom she shared the office, told her she reckoned it was a house plant, not an office plant. Claire had strange views on a lot of things.
The walls were covered in schedules and pinboards with memos and Polaroids and product shots and there were two desks, her own which was vaguely orderly, and Claire’s, which was neat, pristine, irritatingly tidy. Claire always arranged it like that every evening before she left with a smug expression on her face, almost as if to imply she might or might not be coming back.
Sam heard the cleaner coming closer down the corridor, clunk, bang, thump, and she squeezed her eyes shut against her headache which she could scarcely distinguish from the banshee howl of the vacuum cleaner. The door opened and the roar became a thousand times worse. She looked up fit to scream if Rosa was going to try and come and vacuum in here, then she smiled as her boss, Ken Shepperd, came in and closed the door behind him.
‘Hi. Sorry, I’d have been down earlier, but I had a—’ He waved his right hand in the air, then circled it around as if he were winding a ball of string.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I just need to know who you’re going to have to light the Castaway shoot.’
‘You look pale. Feeling OK?’
‘Bit of a headache. I think it may be this VDU. I’m going to get one of those filters for it.’
‘I’ve got some aspirins.’
‘It’s OK, thanks.’
He walked across the office towards her, a restless man in his mid-forties in the clothes of a college student, his steely hair tousled, permanently in need of a cut, his face comfortable and creased like his denim shirt, his sharp blue eyes smiling good-naturedly. He stopped by Claire’s desk.
‘Tidy, isn’t she?’
Sam grinned. ‘Is that a hint?’
‘How are you finding her?’
Claire had only been with them a few weeks. Lara, her predecessor, had left without any warning. One Monday she failed to appear and sent in a letter the next day saying she was suffering from nervous strain and her doctor had advised her to work in a less stressful environment.
‘She’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘She doesn’t talk much.’
‘You complained that Lara nattered too much. Maybe Claire’ll cope better with the pressure.’
Sam shrugged.
‘What’s that look on your face mean?’
She shrugged again. ‘I thought she was nice when she started – but – I don’t know.’
‘Give her time. She’s quite efficient.’
‘Yes, sir!’
He walked over and stood behind Sam’s desk, staring down at the story board. ‘Joncie,’ he said. ‘I want Joncie to light it.’
‘Shall I book him?’
‘Pencil him in.’
‘Who do you want if he’s not available?’
‘I’ve mentioned it already to him.’ He squinted down at the board. ‘Castaway. Daft name for a chocolate bar.’
‘I think it’s all right.’
He glanced down the sequence of coloured frames, and read out aloud. ‘Like a coconut, Castaway has the goodness on the inside.’ He stepped back, patted his stomach and repeated the line again, in a deep bass voice. Sam laughed.
‘Castaway,’ he boomed. ‘The chocolate bar that won’t melt in the sun . . . Castaway, the world’s first pre-digested food. You don’t even need to eat it – just buy it and throw it straight down the lavatory.’
Sam grinned and shook her head. Ken lit a cigarette and the sweet smell tortured her. She watched him prowl around the office, staring at the schedules on the walls; eighteen commercials already booked for this year; they’d made forty-three last year. Ken charged a fee of ten thousand pounds a day for directing and the firm took a percentage of the total production cost. If he weren’t still paying off his debts and his wife, he’d be a rich man by now. And if he could keep his temper and his eye for the changing fashions, he would be eventually.
‘You’re going to behave at the meeting tomorrow, aren’t you?’
‘Behave?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She grinned.
He nodded like a reluctant schoolboy.
‘Big bucks, Ken.’
‘Done the budget?’
‘Just go
ing to print it out.’
He looked at his watch, a heavy macho brute of a watch festooned with important-looking knobs, waterproof to five hundred metres (handy for the bathtub, Sam once told him). ‘Fancy a quick jar?’
‘No thanks. I want to get back in time to bath Nicky. I was late last night.’
‘Only a quick one.’
‘Hot date?’
He pointed a finger downwards. ‘Snooker. Got a couple of new lads from Lowe Howard-Spinks coming over. Business, Sam,’ he said, noticing her expression.
‘Business!’ she mocked.
The wipers of the elderly E-Type Jaguar smeared the rain into a translucent film across the windscreen, making it hard to see. She drove fast, worried Nicky might already be in bed, straining forward to see the road ahead, past the Tower of London, its battlements illuminated in a bright fuzz of light and mist, into London’s docklands and slowed as she turned into Wapping High Street, trying not to shake the twenty-five-year-old car too much on the cobblestones. She passed a block of dark, unfinished apartments, and a large illuminated sign which said SHOW FLATS, and another which said RIVERSIDE HOMES – RIVERSIDE LIFESTYLES. Buy a lifestyle, she thought. I’ll have a pound of salami, two melons and a lifestyle please.
She drove down the dark street, so dark it could have been a hundred years ago, and turned right past a warehouse into an unlit parking lot. She smelled the oily, salty tang of the Thames as she climbed out, hitched her briefcase from the passenger seat and locked the door carefully. She hurried across the lot through the driving rain, glancing warily at the shadows, and flinched at the sudden rattle of a hoarding in the freshening wind.
She climbed the steps into the porch and the automatic light came on with a crisp, metallic click. She punched in the code on the lock, then went inside, closing the door behind her. Her footsteps echoed as she walked in the dim light across the stone floor of the lobby, past the exposed steel girders that were painted bright red, and the two huge oak casks that were recessed into the wall. Warehouse. You could never forget it had once been a warehouse, a huge grimy Victorian Gothic warehouse.
She went into the lift that you had to go into in darkness, because the light only came on when the doors shut. Creepy. Creepy and slow. She leaned against the wall of the lift as it slowly shuffled up the four floors. Lucky there weren’t any more, she thought, or you could eat your dinner going up in it. Then it stopped with a jerk that always unbalanced her, and she walked down the corridor to her front door, unlocked it and went into their huge flat. Nicky came racing down the hallway towards her, his shirt hanging over the top of his trousers, his blond hair flopping over his face.
‘Mummy! Yippee!’
She bent down and hugged him and he put his arms around her and kissed her firmly on each cheek, then he looked up at her solemnly. ‘I’m a ’vestor now.’
‘A vestor, Tiger?’
‘’Vestor! I got a porthole.’
‘Porthole?’ she asked, baffled.
‘Yeah! I made three pounds today.’
‘Three pounds? That’s clever. How did you make three pounds?’
‘From my porthole. Daddy showed me how.’
‘What’s your porthole?’
He took her hand. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ He looked up at her, triumph in his wide blue eyes. ‘We’re going for it.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yeah!’
‘“Yes”, darling, not “yeah”.’
‘Yeah!’ he teased, tugging his hand free and running down the corridor, turning his head back fleetingly. ‘Yeah!’
She put down her briefcase, took off her coat, and followed him across the huge hallway and down the corridor to his bedroom.
‘Daddy! Daddy! Show Mummy how much money we’ve made.’ Nicky stood beside his father, who was kneeling on the red carpet in front of his little computer, a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray beside him, holding his whisky tumbler in one hand and tapping the keyboard with his other. A tall, powerfully built man, even kneeling he dwarfed the cluttered room. He turned and looked at her and smiled his nothing-has-changed-has-it? smile. ‘Hi, Bugs.’
She stared at him for a moment, at his handsome, almost old-fashioned face, the sort of face that belonged more to Forties Hollywood than Eighties London, his slicked-back blond hair, his pink shirt opened at the collar, his checked braces and pin-striped trousers. Stared at the man she used to love so much, who now felt almost like a stranger.
‘Good day?’ he said.
‘Fine.’ She leaned down, more for Nicky’s benefit than for anything else, brushed her cheek cursorily against his, feeling his evening stubble, and mouthed a blank kiss, like a goldfish. ‘You?’
‘Bit slow. Market’s a bit cautious.’
‘Show her, Daddy.’ Nicky put his arm around his father’s back, and patted him excitedly.
‘We’ve made him a little portfolio. Put a few shares in and I’ll update them each day from the Market.’
‘Great,’ she said flatly. ‘What are we going to have? The world’s youngest Yuppie?’
‘Yippie!’ said Nicky, jumping up and down. ‘We got bats.’
‘BAT, Tiger, British American Tobacco.’
The floor, shelves and windowsill were strewn with toys, mostly cars and lorries. He was nuts about cars. A monkey holding a pair of cymbals was lying across the forecourt of a Lego garage, and a robot looked as if it was about to leap off the windowsill. Her husband tapped some more figures out on the keyboard, and Nicky watched intently.
Nicky.
Nicky sensed that something had gone bad between his Mummy and his Daddy, and with a child’s intuition knew his Daddy was in some way responsible. It had seemed to make him even closer to Richard. If that was possible.
His father’s son. He’d nearly killed her when he was born, but he’d never really be her son. Always his father’s. They were close, so close. Cars. Planes. Lego. Games. Boating. Fishing. Guns. And now the computer they’d given him for Christmas. It was always Richard who taught him, Richard who understood his toys, Richard who knew how to play with them. Richard was his mate.
‘American Express down two and a half.’
‘Does that mean we’ve lost money?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Aww.’
‘Bathtime, Nicky.’
‘Aww – just a few minutes more.’
‘No, come on, you’re late already. Start running it. Mummy’s going to change.’ Sam went out of the room and saw Nicky’s nanny coming out of the kitchen. ‘Hello Helen.’
‘Good evening, Mrs Curtis,’ Helen smiled nervously, unsure of herself as always.
‘Everything OK?’
‘Fine, thank you. He’s had a nice day. He did well at school. They’re very pleased with his arithmetic.’
‘Good. Must have got that from his father – I’m hopeless at it.’
Sam went into their bedroom and felt the same coldness she had felt in the office; it seemed to be following her around. She stared at the bright, warm colours of the painting of the reclining nude on the wall, with her massive breasts and earthy clump of pubes and sly grin that she woke up and stared at every morning. Richard liked her. Insisted on having her there. She sat down on the four-postered bed, tugged off her shoes and leaned back for a moment. Her face stared back down from the mirrored panel on the top of the bed, her hair plastered down by the rain, her face white, much too white. Mirrors. Richard had a thing about mirrors.
She stared back at the painting of the nude. Was that what the tart in the office looked like? She wondered. The tart Richard had disappeared with off to a hotel in Torquay? Did she have big tits and a sly grin?
Bitch, she thought, anger and sadness mixing around inside her. It had all been all right. Fine. Great. A neat, ordered world. Happy times. Everything going well. Everything had been just fine.
Until she found out about that. It felt as if a plug had been pulled out from inside her and everything had drained away. r />
She sat on the edge of Nicky’s tiny bed and flicked over the pages of Fungus the Bogeyman on his bedside table. ‘Shall I read?’
‘No.’ He looked quite hurt. ‘Tell me a story. You tell the best stories.’
She glanced around the room. ‘You promised me you were going to tidy up. All those new things you got for Christmas are going to get broken.’ She stood up and walked over to a cupboard door which was ajar and opened it further. A plastic airliner fell out, and the tail section snapped off and cartwheeled along the carpet. Nicky looked as if he was about to cry.
‘That was silly. Who put that in there like that?’ She knelt down.
Nicky said nothing.
‘Was it you?’
Slowly, he pursed his lips.
‘Maybe Daddy’ll be able to fix it for you tomorrow.’ She lifted the pieces off the floor and put them on a chair, then sat back beside him.
‘It’s my birthday on Sunday, isn’t it, Mummy?’
‘Yes, Tiger.’
‘Am I going to get more presents?’
‘Not if you don’t tidy these up.’
‘I will. I promise.’
‘Anyway, you had lots of presents for Christmas.’
‘Christmas was ages ago!’
‘Four weeks, Tiger.’
His face fell. ‘That’s not fair.’
She was taken aback at how sad he looked, and stroked his cheek lightly with her hand. ‘Yes, you’re going to have more presents.’
Bribes. I’m buying his love. Buying my own child’s love.
Shit.
‘Yippee!’ He pummelled the sides of his bed excitedly.
‘Come on now, calm down. It’s Wednesday. You’ve got four more days.’
‘Three more.’
She laughed. ‘OK. Three and a half.’ Her headache was feeling a bit better.
Nicky puffed out his cheeks and contorted his face, deep in thought, counting on his fingers. ‘Three and a quarter. Tell me a story now. Tell me a story about dragons.’
‘You’ve had one about dragons. I told you last night.’