Time of Lies Page 14

  I roll up my shirt-sleeve to my left elbow, showing her the scar from the stabbing. ‘Don’t wind me up. We’ll be pushing back.’

  A smile of acknowledgement flickers over vermilion lip gloss, then catches fire and becomes a grin. ‘I know you will, Bob.’ Suddenly she says, ‘Look around.’

  Both of us do. We pretend not to be, but we’re awestruck by all the dice that history has rolled at this table. I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. That was eighty years ago, almost to the day, in this exact room.

  ‘Remember that day in 2010?’ Angela says.

  ‘Four weeks after the election. In your office at Shock News.’

  ‘That day David Cameron and Nick Clegg were making love here, and in the garden downstairs.’

  ‘I’d failed to win my seat with UKIP.’

  ‘And I told you that you could be prime minister. No-one had ever told you that before.’ Angela’s ready to go. She knocks back her drink and climbs back into her Maison Margiela toeless ankle boots. I show her to the stairs where one of the Bills takes her out the back way, through the Cabinet Office.

  I don’t tell her. Who would? Everyone likes to think they’re the first, and what harm does it do? But that wasn’t the first time someone told me I could be prime minister. My first time was when I was about to turn sixteen. I had got the earring but not yet the knife wound. The guy who beat Angela to it was seventeen, and his name was Jules.

  25

  London, November/December 1994

  I’m five foot ten, an inch taller than Jack. I pretty much shot up to that height when I was thirteen, which made me taller than Jack, even though he was fifteen months older. Puppy-turned-into-a-beanstalk wasn’t a look I fancied, but protein shakes, doing weights and shaving my head fixed that. Acne was number two (as in Jack got it but I didn’t). I’m cleverer with my hands than with my feet, so I was more rugby than football. I’m even better with my brains, so fly half in the under-sixteens was perfect. When it was time for the under-eighteens there were too many bigger and taller players so teams were less interested. I guess that was mutual.

  When I was fifteen, towards the end of November we get thrashed at a school near Windsor Castle with boys in penguin get-ups and heated changing rooms. Twenty minutes into the game a tear in my hamstring starts killing me. From then I’m about thirty per cent, if that. By the second half I’m doing more harm than good, so I come off.

  The only guy watching the game and I exchange words. He’s about seventeen, six-foot, a balletic build – too shapely and dent-free to be a rugby player. His skin is the colour of the outside of a Mars bar (mine’s a pale version of the nougat inside) so he sticks out from his white school-mates. I look up and down his lambswool pullover, pre-washed jeans and calfskin loafers with no socks as he stands on the muddy grass. My school gets thrashed so badly there isn’t much to say about the game, but at the end the Mars bar offers to drive me home. It would save a journey on the world’s slowest train, plus a couple of buses, but is this for real? My face says as much.

  ‘Bermondsey, right? Your school’s there, right? That’s why I came to watch the game. We’ve just got a new place there.’

  Well – la di da. One of the penthouses on the river, obviously. Well, look at it another way – maybe I do a recce and turn the place over sometime. ‘All right then,’ I say, putting my hand out. ‘I’m Bob.’

  ‘I’m Jules,’ says Jules.

  Fuck me, his car turns out to be a white Sierra RS500 Cosworth. He goes up even more in my estimation when he kills a really wanky song on the radio – East 17 trying for a Christmas number one with Stay Another Day! – in favour of Carter USM’s Glam Rock Cops. The car’s got more speakers than Hyde Park – and by the time we’ve gone half a mile beyond my local Tesco and arrive at a boat in the new marina, I’m almost ready to join his weekend love nest. Almost.

  Jules is gay – he says so pretty much straight up – but that turns out not to be what’s going down. He got caught with a few Es. The school has a new gaffer who is determined to be a stinker on drugs, so Jules has been suspended. He might get back in in January but that depends on Dad pausing for breath long enough to persuade the gaffer to do the right thing. Dad is coining it in Singapore, third generation Old Etonian, banker; Mum was Congolese but dropped out of Jules’s life while he was in prep school (whatever that may be). This winter will be a bore because in a few weeks’ time skiing could have been an option, but the house in Switzerland has been rented. Gimme a minute while I burst into tears.

  So Jules has just got himself this floating base in Bermondsey with a residential mooring – running water, power, phone line, the lot. Call it a cross between an unloved canal boat and a Victorian warehouse. In it he plans to trade some stocks and shares, maybe some options, because the gaffer might not take him back or dad might not get his arse in gear for his only son. The lettering across the stern says Meermin, Dordrecht.

  ‘So the boat just stays here all the time, does it? And you own it?’ I say, as Jules unlocks a padlock the size of his fist. He opens a hatch into a space three times the size of my ma’s flat – two decks, three bedrooms, full-size kitchen, study, living room, you name it.

  ‘Yes. My dad bought it but in some kind of trust for me. Don’t ask, it’s all about tax, or alimony. What do you think?’

  I think my life has just changed, but let’s take it easy or I might scare Jules off.

  ‘I live about ten minutes that way,’ I say, pointing at the large council estate. ‘Looks to me like you’re sorted. Maybe catch you around some time – go for a drink.’

  ‘That would be great. I don’t want to go into a Millwall pub by mistake.’

  I laugh. ‘There aren’t any others, really. But if you get shot of those jeans and keep your mouth shut, you can fix it all with the help of a hoodie and some trainers. Black skin goes down better here than where you were.’ Jules looks at me, so I go on, ‘I’m a touch tantastic myself. Apparently my dad was half-Egyptian. That’ll definitely help me pick him out in a line up.’

  We swap phone numbers. Jules has a to-die-for Nokia 232, of course. I saw one the other day at Carphone Warehouse – £50 new or half that with an airtime contract. They might as well have put a sign in the window saying ‘not for the likes of you’.

  ***

  Ten days later Jules hears that the school will take him back in January, and we meet for a drink in the Prince of Wales. He’s taken my tailoring advice but I buy the first round with his money, because his accent will cut through the chatter here like a foghorn. He asks what’s up with me, and then suggests I move into one of the spare rooms on Meermin. I realise that he fancies me but I reckon I can handle it. He’ll be at school most of the time, and whatever he wants he can’t be short of it there. I say yes; my heart is pounding because there’s a much bigger prize.

  I’ll buy a sleeping bag and just bring clothes. I ask Jules to teach me how to trade stocks and shares. If I can hack it, I’ll drop out and earn both of us some money while he parades around school in a penguin suit. Jules thinks someone smart with a modem, a landline, a mobile phone and time to kill has an advantage, if they know what they’re doing. He tells me about Bloomberg terminals. It seems I don’t have to be smarter than the American bankers with those, which suits me – I’m confident but not crazy. I just have to be nimbler than pimply pension fund clerks and perma-tanned golfers who get to the share prices in the Daily Telegraph after lunch.

  I’m so up for it. ‘It gets me out of our shit-hole and beats getting up at 5.30am in the morning to fix stalls in the market for a fiver.’

  ‘Won’t your parents mind?’ Jules asks. ‘You leaving home, living on a boat?’

  ‘What parents?’ I reply. ‘The last man to live in our council flat was a skag head. I threw him out six months ago – that was one of the benefits of getting tall and going to the gym. My ma is out of
her tree half the time. She thinks her main job is making sure that the fridge is empty. Then there’s my brother, Jackshit. Well, Jack, technically. He does my head in as well. He’s older but he just kind of lets it all happen? He’s not bringing in anything, and says he wants to go to uni. Of course Jackshit was nowhere to be seen when I told skag head to take a hike.’

  I slip a hand down into my boots and take out a knife. ‘In case skag head and his mates try to jump me one night,’ I explain. Jules is a little pale. I buy the second round.

  For all that our backgrounds are different, there’s funny ways they are the same. We both learned to drive when we were fifteen. In Jules’s case that happened on the country estates of friends. ‘When you’re a tart at Eton you get to choose where to spend your holidays,’ he explains. He’s pretty enough for it, I can see that, but I don’t want to know any more.

  To get to drive, me and my friends have a different thing going with the assistant manager at Tesco. He can’t be arsed with clamping commuter cars from Kent which get left all day in his car park – it’s far too much grief and the cars are back the following week. So he tells us which ones to lift, and turns a deaf ear when we set off the alarms – nice.

  Nice is also this rave in south London Jules and I are going to for New Year’s (supernice is that Jules will have an ample supply of readies). Soon we’ll see if I can make some of my own from stock trading. Over the holidays we spend two days together travelling financially back in time, working out trades which might have been worth doing in the week before Christmas. I learn fast.

  Other times our journeys are in different parts of the Milky Way. I remember the time Jules announced, ‘William is coming to our school next September. Maybe to my house.’

  ‘William who?’

  ‘Prince William. I saw Diana leaving our house a few weeks ago. I’ll be in my last year. The house master might ask me to look after him.’

  A brown gay boy looking after Prince William? Dream on, my friend. Now William’s mother’s another story. Jules’s skin is really soft and smells of coffee grounds. That and his pop star haircut for New Year’s Eve – part romantic flop-over with highlights and part number two on the side – they might be just a princess’s thing. It seems she might like a bit of dark. Go on, you could always swing the other way for your country.

  26

  London, January 1995

  January dives down to a record -27˚C in the Highlands and wraps the north of England in duvets of snow. But London thaws out, so that by the end of the month the capital is a giant leaking municipal swimming pool with puddles in the changing rooms. Jules is stopping over this Saturday evening. School is normal, he says, although another boy got handed over to the police for dealing. As for my stocks and options, I’m up about 250 quid on the month. Before you open your gob, consider what I started with.

  I swear I hear the Cosworth but it’s a good twenty-five minutes later when Meermin’s hatch bangs open and Jules steps inside, his leather satchel at the ready. The temperature drops ten degrees in as many seconds. I’m watching National Lottery Live with my numbers in my hand – everyone I know is doing the same, the Lottery’s less than three months old. Jules is bemused. ‘The head of maths says we should call the Lottery the stupid tax. If you’re gagging to make a donation to the government, just write them a cheque.’

  Jules’s head of maths can’t add one and one. One, who else is giving me or anyone I know the chance to be a millionaire? Two, horse-racing, the football pools, whatever, he’s against them, right? Because he’s against anything where my chances of winning are as good as his. Where he comes from, that’s not how the world should tilt.

  Jules tries to throw the point back. ‘The chance of winning the jackpot is one in forty-five million. You’ve got more chance of becoming prime minister.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are forty-five million voters. Two or three of them will become prime minister. Much better odds.’

  ‘Who the fuck wants to be prime minister? I’d rather win the jackpot.’

  ‘Clarence, Archibald and Harvey. That’s just in my house, and school’s got about thirty houses. You’re smarter than any of them, so you could become prime minister. Definitely.’ Jules starts running the shower. Tonight the shower will take five minutes to achieve a warm piddle.

  Prime minister? Jules is taking the piss. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘But I never said the odds were fair. We’re up to eighteen now – prime ministers from Eton, that is.’

  Over the last month I’ve kind of had it up to here with Eton. Each time it’s something else – we’re special at this, and then that, and then the other. Fuck me, if any school in England tailors a special jacket and invents first, second and third teams for base jumping, it will be Eton. And they’ll invent peculiar rules so that no other school can beat them. The Field Game, the Wall Game – if the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it was because nobody from Eton thought to play by the same rules as everybody else.

  As usual Jules is in the shower for twenty minutes – the fastest I’ve seen is fifteen – which makes him the cleanest boy I know. A plastic shower tray is rigged up in a corner of a cabin, screwed to wooden floorboards. Around it manky curtains and a heat-as-you-go electric box on the wall don’t stand a chance against tonight’s weather. I can hear the fan heater on full blast. The shower tray drains into the bilges but however you shower, you’ll wet the planking.

  The shower goes quiet and then Jules comes out, towelling his head with his right hand and clutching a YSL toiletries bag in his left. He’s gagging for me to give him a once-over, so I do. I take in the whole six feet of waxed mahogany sculpture – shoulders tapering to the waist like a diagram in a geometry book from the 1950s, dozing pythons for hamstrings. And I mean waxed – no hair anywhere.

  ‘What’s your tattoo?’ I ask. He shows me six letters, FREUDE, curving round his butt like the crown on the Statue of Liberty. ‘Like the psychologist?’

  Jules laughs. ‘No, it’s the German word for joy. Get it?’

  So do I get it? Meaning, of course, do I get any joy from that particular aperture? I want to say – is that any of your fucking business, really? You’re pushing your luck there – count yourself lucky I don’t punch you in the mouth. But help yourself to the following nuggets for free. Jules doesn’t trek to the south-eastern edge of the known universe one weekend in three because I whisper sweet nothings in his ear (not my style, really). Plus his anus gets worked over plenty in Slough. To cap it all, he’s not coming for the quality of the shower. I know, I used their changing rooms after the game. Let’s put it this way – it does take me a while to get it, if by ‘get it’ you mean understand what’s really going on.

  ***

  It’s a fickle Friday night in early March. Half an hour ago it was mild, now it’s nippy. Jack is sitting on one of the cast iron marina benches, ten yards from Meermin. We cycled here from the cinema complex in four minutes. He’s minding our bikes and supposedly keeping an eye out. At least six cigarettes in the packet of Marlboros I bought him to keep him quiet have died already (he’s still whingeing).

  When it was mild we bought tickets to Star Trek Generations at Surrey Quays – the late show. We walked in through the lobby – in front of the security cameras, natch – and slipped out through an unarmed fire exit. We’ll be back in time to exit through the lobby. This job is the cushiest doddle ever – for God’s sake, we’re breaking in because Jules wants a favour – but oh no, that’s still big drama for Jack. Jackshit likes drama – he wants to go to uni to study it.

  I pull on my gloves and fill the external burglar alarm with a long blast of cavity wall expanding foam and open the padlocked hatch doors with my key. I chuck that padlock and key into the dock and scatter the innards of a different smashed padlock on the deck.

  It takes me fifteen minutes rather than Jules’s ten to
unscrew the shower tray and slide it to one side (I assume he spent a few minutes having a shower). I lift the cut plank in the decking, check out what I find and decide what kind of scene to leave – innocence or violation? Violation, naturally. I empty a few drawers onto the floor. In half an hour I’m done, with the stash re-wrapped to keep it safe from Jack’s curious eyes. I set the alarm off as I leave but the foam has well and truly set. A dead cat on a sofa would create more excitement. We cycle back to the cinema via what Jack calls home – I need him to store the package for a couple of days.

  When the movie finishes we nurse a couple of late TGIF pints in Spice Island, watching the Thames surge inland from the North Sea. A boaty told me the tide peaks at Teddington an hour later than here, but it doesn’t go on to Eton because the Teddington lock stops it.

  Jack says, ‘Tell me the story,’ so I do. Jules is dealing. Nothing super-heavy – just Es from what I’ve seen in the stash – but visiting a boat in the marina every two or three weeks suits him well. He revs in, visits his supplier and then drops in on Meermin to sort out his cash and working capital like any businessman. In this case they’re in a compartment under the shower tray. He decides Meermin will be less conspicuous if someone lives on her, sees that a school from this neck of the woods is playing, comes over and scores lucky me. I’m happy as anything, learning a trade, out of school, out of home. I tell Jack I can’t understand how he still stands it.

  He says, ‘Sunday’s ma’s birthday.’

  ‘So? She’ll stagger in at four or six from her night out, and expect you to get her eggs and bacon and beans when you get up. The fridge will be empty, so you’ll get the shit bacon from the Muslim corner shop. Why are you playing her game?’

  ‘It will be her fiftieth. Come on.’

  I roll my eyeballs and get back to the story. Two weeks ago that bank on the telly goes down – Barings. A billion dollar loss run up by a trader in Singapore while no-one was watching. Jules’s dad was supposed to be watching so he vanishes into the night (to Bali, if you believe Jules) with not a word to anyone. Bali beats bail, that’s for sure. Jules hears it all from the school after the police in Singapore phone up. Oh and by the way says the housemaster, in a most nicey-nicey way, while your trauma as a young person with a parent on the run from the police is absolutely top of our mind, come to think of it your dad is behind on the fees. Since his employer is now bankrupt, come September when you start your last year, there won’t be the usual financial contribution from them. Correction – when you start what would have been your last year. Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?