Think Yourself Lucky Page 9

  Silence met this, and he was afraid he'd somehow given himself away. Would a nephew have the dead man's surname? Apparently the woman was recording the information, because she said "And your address."

  "Look, do you really need all this? I only want to ask a question. I haven't got much time." With a surge of what he supposed a writer might call inspiration David said "I'm just trying to put my mother's mind at rest. She's been worrying about what happened to her brother."

  "I'm afraid we're required to take these details."

  "Nineteen—" That was the number of his own house, and he made a wild bid to head off any further carelessness. "Nineteen Newless Way," he said.

  "Nineteen nineteen Newless Way. And the postcode, please."

  "We never use it. My mother doesn't believe in them. I honestly couldn't tell you." Was this how a writer might improvise? David felt more like a character at the mercy of his creator. "We're in Newcastle," he said, the most remote place he could bring to mind.

  "Newcastle." He thought the lack of the accent had betrayed him until she said "Newcastle upon Tyne."

  "That's the one. Now if I could just—"

  "And may I take a phone number?"

  "Take any you like and stick it wherever it fits." Though David refrained from saying that, his answer felt not much less out of control. "One two," he said, "two one, three, one one, two five..."

  Were those too many digits or still too few? He'd tried to give the woman time to hint when she thought he should have finished. Now that he'd reached the end of the name he was transforming into numbers he heard himself asking "Is that all?"

  "That should cover it, Mr Sugden. Can you tell me what your enquiry is?"

  "As I say, it's my mother's really," David said, which felt like denying who he was. "She's convinced there might have been some kind of foul play."

  "What kind?"

  He would far rather not have put that into words. And hadn't the woman's voice sharpened, leaving politeness behind? "She believes he may have been assaulted," David said.

  "What leads her to think that?"

  "Look, I can't speak for her, can I?" He was close to giggling wildly at the thought that nobody else could. Before the woman had a chance to point out that he was doing exactly that, David tried saying "She's just got it into her head."

  "You're saying she has no basis for it."

  "I wouldn't quite say that." If he said too little the woman might wonder why he'd called at all or suspect him of withholding information. "It just doesn't sound like my uncle," he tried protesting. "We've never known him to have any trouble with his heart."

  How likely was that, given Sugden's corpulence? Even if the woman didn't know his medical history, wouldn't she be able to guess from his appearance? David had to hold his breath until she said "Where does your mother think the assault took place?"

  "She's got the idea it was in the lift."

  The last word was barely out when David felt he'd strayed into a trap. He was struggling to think how to explain his answer when the woman said "Does she have some reason to believe someone had targeted him?"

  "No, nobody. I mean, no reason. He'd no enemies we knew of, none at all." Yet again David felt he was denying too much. "And why she thought the lift," he said in haste, "because you've got cameras on the platform, haven't you. Or have you got them in the lift as well?"

  "We don't give out data from the cameras unless we're seeking help from the public."

  "You mean there is one in the lift." A pause brought no answer, and so David said "You're saying there's no need in my uncle's case. I mean, you're not looking for help." The silence that met this was at best inexplicit, and he had to say "Does that mean nothing showed up on the camera?"

  He couldn't tell if he sounded too eager. Surely the woman would put that down to his concern for his relative, it didn't matter which one, but she said "You're still asking for data, Mr Sugden."

  "Only for my mother. Just to give her closure." Even the fashionable jargon didn't seem to move the woman—and then David had an inspiration that felt reckless. "Now she's here," he complained.

  "Perhaps we'd better have a word with her."

  "I don't mean here. Not right here, not yet. I mean she's coming, coming up the road. She wouldn't have wanted me to make this call."

  "Why not, Mr Sugden?"

  "She doesn't like to trouble anyone." David felt he was reaching the end of his words, but he managed to add "Unless you tell me if there was someone in the lift with him she'll just carry on being troubled herself."

  This time the silence was so prolonged that he was afraid the woman was waiting to hear if not speak to his mother. He was opening his mouth, though he'd no idea what he was about to say, when the woman said "You may tell her that your uncle died of natural causes."

  David hoped the breath he let out wasn't too audible a gasp. "You're saying the camera shows he was on his own when it happened."

  "That's correct, Mr Sugden. Please don't ask for you or your mother to be shown the footage."

  "Of course I won't. I trust you. You've put a mind at rest. You've been very understanding," David said and hoped she hadn't understood more than he wanted as, having thanked her, he ended the call and sank back in the chair.

  How relieved was he entitled to feel? There was still the problem of the blog, and he could see no explanation other than that he was somehow writing it himself. What tricks might his brain have been playing on him? Could he have heard about Sudgen's death and Dent's rail outside his house and then caricatured them online without knowing? Might the very act of writing have erased the memories both of the events he'd learned about and of the writing itself? The idea made his mind feel as unfamiliar and dangerous as it had the night he'd ended up in the moonlit field, but what else could make sense of the situation? There was no point in telling himself that he didn't recognise the voice of the blog—that he didn't think he had ever used some of those words. Perhaps this would at least mean nobody would associate the blog with him.

  He was close to feeling tentatively reassured when a thought occurred to him. As he touched the keyboard of the laptop the Better Out Than In page rose from the darkness of the dormant screen, and he felt as if it had been lying in wait for him. He dismissed it and typed words in the search box, and then he held his breath. It came out along with a groan as he read the news item he'd discovered. While he'd never heard of Robert Thoroughgood, he couldn't pretend he didn't know who the man had been. Witnesses said he must have lost control of his mobility scooter, because he'd sped helplessly into the road in front of a van.

  FIFTEEN

  As David stepped down from the bus a wind brought a takeaway carton clattering towards him. No doubt the squeaky bivalve came from one of the food outlets that faced Stephanie's apartment across the dual carriageway—Cod Almighty or Nice With Rice or Fab Kebab or Curry In A Hurry that had started life as 24 Hour Chapatti People, though the carton was the wrong shape for Picka Pukka Pizza—but it reminded him of far too much. He found he was glad not to see anyone to blame for littering as he crossed the road.

  The front of the apartment overlooked Newsham Park. Skateboarders and equally unlit cyclists were racing about the paths in the dark beneath the trees. As David reached Stephanie's gate he heard a scream, and faltered until it turned into girlish mirth in a park shelter. He hurried along the stone jigsaw of a path between rhododendrons restless as a swarm of beetles and let himself into the house.

  The table in the entrance hall was strewn with multicoloured leaflets and the glum buff envelopes of bills, none of them addressed to Stephanie. On the ground floor the mournful strains of a string quartet were audible beyond the door identified by a rakish number 1, but the upper floors were silent. The wide stairs yielded the occasional carpeted creak as David tramped up to the third floor, which was faintly redolent of spices, an aroma that grew more pronounced when he unlocked Stephanie's door. "It's only me," he called as if he could be someone else.


  He was on the edge of calling out once more when he heard movement in the kitchen at the far end of the hall, beyond the walls covered with framed postcards. Whenever David saw them he was touched by the precision with which she arranged these souvenirs of every holiday she'd taken with her parents. In a moment the door opened, giving him a view of knives ranked by size on a rack on the russet tiles of the wall. He couldn't help finding their gleams ominous, together with the oddly tentative progress of the door, until Stephanie appeared with a glass of wine in each hand and a bottle of Chablis under one arm. "Are we celebrating?" David said.

  They met halfway along the hall, between a cartoon postcard of an almost spherical bather poking his stomach out of the sea above an ambiguous caption and a card of a Turkish lagoon. Stephanie gave him a quick kiss and a glass. "I just thought we might like a drink," she told him, "but let's celebrate if you're saying we should."

  The living-room boasted even more books than she kept in the kitchen. As her armchair gave a delicate leathery sigh David sat on a chair that didn't quite face hers. "I don't suppose I am."

  "We don't know who they're getting rid of."

  This seemed both too pointed and too vague, and David's chair amplified his uneasy restlessness. "Who?"

  "That's what I'm asking. We don't, do we?"

  "I'm not sure what you're talking about," David said and was still more disconcerted to realise that he should have grasped it. "Work, you mean. You're thinking of Andrea."

  "That's who, the snotty ex. Ex marks the snot."

  "More like Rex does. He's the new man. Maybe not such a new kind, the way he seems to treat her. Still, I get the feeling that's what she may like."

  Stephanie took quite a drink from her glass. "Are you wishing you'd had the chance?"

  "I'm not wishing for anything I haven't got."

  "No complaints at all? Now's the time to bring them up."

  "You shouldn't even wonder if there could be."

  "Don't make me out to be too ideal, David. Nobody can live up to that all the time. They shouldn't be expected to. So to get back to Andrea..."

  "She's still deciding as far as any of us know. We haven't even heard when she thinks she'll have to."

  "She couldn't just be saying it to keep you all on your toes."

  "Lying about it, you mean?" His flare of rage went out as he said "I wouldn't be able to tell. I don't feel I know her since she was promoted. Maybe that means I never really did."

  "I think there's more inside us all than anyone else knows, except I hope that isn't true for us."

  Everything he'd said so far had felt like a postponement, but now it seemed more like a barrier he had to struggle over. "I don't know," he said and tried again. "I don't know if you've had a chance to look at that blog I was telling you about."

  "Do you mind if we don't talk about that just now?"

  "Why?" Even this felt more like a hurdle than a question. "What have you found on it?" he had to ask.

  "I haven't looked." She topped up his glass as an excuse for replenishing her own. "To tell you the truth, I'd forgotten about it," she said. "I've had other things on my mind."

  At once David felt he should have had, and guilty too. "You mean Mick's?"

  "He thinks we should be open seven days from lunchtime. He's been talking about opening for breakfast too."

  "He can't expect you to cope with all that by yourself, can he?"

  "He's started hiring short-term help for me so he doesn't have to pay them too much, and to be truthful they aren't very good. He's insisting on serving meals when I'm not happy with them."

  "Tell him it's your kitchen and your reputation."

  "He says they're mostly his and he can live with them."

  "Then let him and you find somewhere that appreciates you."

  "I've been looking around, believe me. There's nothing at the moment that seems like a good move." Stephanie restrained herself to a sip of wine before saying "We're about to lose a waiter. Mick's taking over some of his service. I can't say I'm particularly looking forward to shutting down every night."

  It took David some seconds to understand. "Being on your own with him, you mean," he said, and when Stephanie stayed quiet "What's he been up to?"

  "Nothing I can't deal with, David. Its just uncomfortable, that's all."

  "Would you like me to have a word with him?"

  "Oh, David." With an affectionate laugh that he tried not to find patronising she said "I wasn't trying to make you play the avenger. That isn't what I want you for."

  "You're making me feel helpless."

  "You mustn't. I'm not, so you aren't. I'm lucky I've found you." She took a sip that seemed designed to demonstrate she didn't need more of a drink. "I feel better for talking, so you've helped," she said. "Now what did you want to tell me about your blog?"

  "It isn't mine. That's all." The opportunity to talk about it had grown so remote that he felt as if the words had been snatched from him. He stood the glass beside his chair and went to her. "Are we ready for bed?" he murmured and took her glass to plant it on the carpet. As she rose to her feet he put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed them hard enough to be trying to crush his thoughts. He'd said enough for now—for longer than that. He needn't feel secretive just because she couldn't see his face.

  SIXTEEN

  No, I don't need a menu. I'll just sit here in the darkest corner and watch. Anyway, I can read the menu on the table that's closest to my lurking orphan chair. I expect the format's meant to tell people how fresh the food is, because the card looks like a slate covered with childish writing you can wipe off—in fact, an idle diner has turned MARINATED OLIVES into MA I ATE LIVES. I'm guessing the misspelled list is the work of the manager, since he mispronounces items every time he insists on talking his customers through them. He's a pneumatic sweaty object in a dinner suit that leaves him looking like a bouncer in disguise, and he greets newcomers with horrible jollity and seems determined to take as many orders as he can, a performance his staff have to try to make amends for. He's playing the sommelier as well, and when he uncorks some wine for a pair of women he asks "Who's the man?" He lectures a fellow on how to taste wine—"Just sip it like a girl"—and does his best to shame another diner into not ordering his steak well done—"Everything's well done here, no, it's better." If anyone leaves food on their plate he interrogates them about it while straining to seem chummy, which makes him sound like a father talking down to a child, maybe even one with learning difficulties, that new excuse for bad behaviour. Everyone has some of those, and it's my job to help them learn, but they always catch on too late.

  Not that the diners don't deserve Mr Prick. Some of them might be trying to act worse than him. One man picks fish-bones out of his open mouth and drops them next to his plate, and another doesn't just blow his nose over his food but pokes his handkerchief up each nostril and screws it around with his little finger—I'm surprised he doesn't use the tablecloth. A woman scowls at her meal and digs it over with a fork like a customs officer searching for illegal substances, and a granny sucks her wrinkled whitish lips in as if she's fending off her soup before she even tastes it, a routine that makes her mouth look like the hole she must be sitting on. The worse his clientele behave, the more obsequious the manager grows. "You're the customer," he keeps telling them, but the question isn't who deserves him most—it's who deserves me.

  The competition's hotting up. Two men who've been stroking each other's hands throughout their appetisers have leaned their heads together, not for a kiss but to complain. The high rapid muted racket puts me in mind of headphone leakage, a noise that always makes me want to squeeze the phones until they're squashed deep into the wearer's ears. When their muttering fails to attract Mr Prick they add shrill tuts and increasingly unrestrained groans that sound less like gripes than evidence of some kind of mutual pleasure. Perhaps the idea offends the manly manager, because he makes it plain he's dealing with someone else's bill and then
spends time ushering the escapees to the door, where he shakes the man's hand and pecks the woman's fleeing cheek before he says "Don't forget us. Come back soonest," for the entire restaurant to hear. At last he saunters over to the gay couple, that's to say the glum duo. "Can I do something for you gentlemen?" he says not much more quietly than he saw the leavers off.

  The taller and floppier of the pair flaps a hand at his mate's plate. "You assured us this wouldn't be contaminated."

  The manager peers at the pasta and less happily at him. "Nothing's that way here that I've heard of," he says like at the very least a challenge.

  "You guaranteed it was gluten free."

  "Who's saying different?"

  "My spouse is."

  "Sensitive sort, is he? Can't he speak for himself?"

  "He most certainly can. You tell him."

  "Grateful, I'm sure. I will." The sufferer is squat and wide enough to take anything his partner can offer him. "I have a pain," he informs the manager.

  "Looks like you're dining with him. Aren't you going to ask them who's the man?"

  No doubt Prick can't hear my suggestion, but he does say "Maybe you brought it with you. Where've you got it?"

  "Here." Faddyfat rubs his outthrust stomach and winces like a mime. "In my tummy," he says as well.

  "No call for that," the manager warns Wristy as he extends a limp soothing hand. "How long have you been ailing?"

  "As soon as he swallowed your first mouthful," Wristy declares.

  The manager looks close to responding with more than a retort until Faddyfat says "I know what's wrong with me."

  "You're not the only one, and you can't have got it here." With enough of a pause to have changed the subject Prick says "My chef makes the pasta and she knows what to do about your kind."

  While Wristy looks eager to take this as an insult Faddyfat says "I knew what it was the moment I put it in my mouth."

  Prick makes it obvious that he's suppressing an answer before he strides to the kitchen entrance. "Can you get out here? There's a couple want a word."