Bone and Cane (6 page)

Nick froze. He’d been blanked by several people, slight acquaintances, mostly, since coming out of prison, but this wasn’t an I’m-pretending-I-didn’t-see-you blanking or an I’ve-forgotten-who-you-are Alzheimer’s impression. This was an I-wouldn’t-be-seen-dead-talking-to-you, in your face insult. Pete had been to Nick’s house, smoked his dope, played pool with him after meetings. Now Pete was being joined by a shrewish woman with a stud in her nose, clearly his new partner. Nick’s imagination lip-read their conversation.

Who was that?

An ex-con I used to know before he went bent, probably trying to scrounge a pint.

In a corner, chatting up a short-haired woman half his age, was Tony Bax, who Nick used to play football with on Saturday afternoons. Tony was a city councillor, last Nick knew. He’d fought Nottingham West back in 1987. No chance of becoming the MP. Nick had worked his arse off for him anyway. Tony couldn’t blank him, would give him the bear hug that would validate Nick’s existence to the rest of the pub. But Tony was having an intense conversation. Nick hesitated. Five years was five years. Time dissolved everything. Nick’s pride couldn’t risk his being blanked again. He left the pub, knowing he wouldn’t go back.

Nick had promised to join Joe before last orders. Maybe they’d go clubbing, Joe said. Nick didn’t feel like dancing, trying to pull. But family was family, so he looked for Joe in the crowded Golden Fleece. His brother was with a couple of mates, one pint in front of him, another waiting. Joe saw Nick arrive and spoke gently to the guys he was with, who left at once. They would be football hangers-on. Plenty of people remembered Joe with affection from when he was a talented midfielder for County.

‘Here, get this down you,’ Joe said.

The small white tablet could have been an aspirin.

‘What is it?’

‘A dove.’

Nick borrowed Joe’s pint to wash the pill down.

‘I thought we’d go to Rock City, for old time’s sake.’

‘Why not?’ Nick said.

Rock City was a big venue. Nick had been to more gigs there than he could count. The first time was when he was a student. New Order’s second ever gig. They came on at eleven and played for just forty mesmerising minutes. Then there was R.E.M., with fewer than a hundred people in the audience. The Smiths, early on. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, with The Pogues supporting. Maybe fifty shows since. It would probably be full of students. Nick would feel his age. But at least he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew.

As they walked down the hill, Joe got out a spliff.

‘Better have this now, before the E kicks in.’

Nick watched him light it. ‘Isn’t that a bit . . .’

‘Don’t worry. Everyone’s dead relaxed about it these days. All the cops care about are violent drunks, you know?’

He handed the joint to Nick just as they were passing the Peacock.

‘Nick?’ It was Tony Bax, coming out of the pub. Up close, Tony had aged. There was grey in his beard. A paunch showed through his jacket.

‘Nick, good to see you!’ Tony threw his arms around Nick. ‘How are you?’

‘Surviving,’ Nick said, stupidly self conscious about the joint in his hand. Tony had never been a doper.

‘What was it like?’ Tony asked, in a sympathetic voice.

‘I won’t be going back again in a hurry.’

Tony focused pointedly on what was in Nick’s right hand.

‘Then I wouldn’t smoke that a hundred yards from the central police station. You’re on parole, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Nick admitted. Tony was right. Having the joint was stupid. But the E was starting to kick in and this conversation felt uncomfortable. He tried to say something diplomatic. ‘I . . . eh . . .’

‘Sorry,’ Tony said, ‘Didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Look, I’ve got to catch the last bus, but if there’s anything I can do, I’m still in the book, all right? Don’t be a stranger.’

He hurried up the hill to catch the Arnold bus.

‘Who was that old fart?’ Joe asked, as Nick returned the joint.

Nick didn’t reply.

The skunk might be stronger than it was five years before, but the Es weren’t. After they’d got past the queue, checked their coats and bought a drink, Nick took an extra half. Then he and Joe had a snort of speed in the bogs. When the drugs were working properly, he hit the dance floor. He found that E’ed up he liked to dance to the techno numbers best, because it didn’t matter if you knew them, they rocked, whereas the guitar songs sounded stodgy and retro. The last gig he’d been to here was Nirvana, in 1991, just as they were breaking big, and rock didn’t seem to have moved on since then. Tonight, when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came on, he felt the old throw-yourself-around-the-room exhilaration, the E, the speed and booze combining to give him a surge of wild energy.

Nick loved drugs: dope, speed, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and, later, when he had the brass, coke. He drew the line at smack: getting a habit was too big a risk. And acid. It wasn’t a fun drug. Acid took you deep inside yourself, deeper than he cared to go. He liked a drink with the drugs, too. People said you shouldn’t mix booze and E: they counteracted each other. He’d never seen it himself. More was more.

Joe was dancing closer and closer to a student in a tight camisole and leather jeans. Nick’s brother had taken off his round glasses and his wedding ring. Caroline had started her maternity leave and gone to visit her mother for a couple of days. Was Joe faithful to his wife? He used to be a philanderer, running three or four women at the same time. Caroline knew all this, had been aware that he wasn’t monogamous when she first went out with him. She went along with it for a while, then chucked him.

That was a first. Joe didn’t like being chucked. He thought it was a negotiation, but Caroline cut him out of her life. He left it a while, then asked her out. When Caroline didn’t come running back, he offered to stop seeing other women. Caroline let him know that she was seeing other guys. She made him beg, then got him back on exactly her terms. A few months later came the injury that ended Joe’s career. Caroline stuck with him and helped him set up the taxi firm. They married not long after Nick was sent down, but had waited four years to become parents.

Weird, your kid brother becoming a father before you. Nick used to think the world was too bad a place to bring children into, but prison had taught him that his old world was a damn good place, compared to most. What did Joe think? Nick and Joe didn’t have those kind of conversations. Joe had never come to Nick for advice.

Joe had left school and Sheffield at sixteen. Five years later he was at Notts County, the country’s oldest football club. Even though they’d ended up in the same city, he and Nick kept their distance. By the time Nick got his first teaching job, Joe was in the first team. He’d always been the successful one of the two of them, and let Nick know it. Then his career went tits up. Scratch Joe deep enough and he’d bleed a reservoir of resentment. Still, County were in the Second Division this year and Joe was thirty. If he’d stayed in the game, his playing days would be numbered.

The girl dancing with Joe would have been five when Nick started teaching, twelve when he finished. He thought about the last woman he’d slept with. During that final drug-fucked fling between his arrest and his conviction, Nick had found himself in bed with a former pupil. He’d picked her up in a club, didn’t even recognise her, and she hadn’t let on. In his bed the next morning, she’d repeated her name, said she’d had a big thing for him when she was in Year 8. Nick found that he could picture her, a dumpy girl with a bad haircut and crippling self-consciousness. Looking at her graceful, naked, adult body, he had pictured the twelve-year-old girl within and felt very old.

‘Why did you leave teaching anyway?’ she asked, as she dressed. ‘I’ve got a friend still in the sixth form. She said you just stopped turning up one day.’

‘I’d had enough,’ he told her. ‘Burnt out.’

‘I’m glad that’s all it was,’ she said, making him ashamed. ‘You know, there are stories going round, but I never believe gossip.’

Whatever the girl had seen in him, she’d exorcised it in that one night. When he phoned the number she’d given him, hoping for an encore, Nick found that it didn’t exist.

Both brothers found women to dance alongside, but neither pulled. It had taken Nick until he was thirty to develop the confidence required to pull at nightclubs – only for him to find that one-night stands were rarely exciting enough to justify the effort involved. He and Joe left Rock City at quarter to two, just before it closed. Cane Cars were fully booked, so they queued to take a black cab home.

This evening had confirmed what Nick had been expecting. His old world was no longer there for him. He was tainted, discredited, an embarrassment to all concerned. The only way to live with that kind of humiliation was to drop out of sight. Under the terms of his probation, he couldn’t leave the city, not unless he got a job elsewhere. His probation officer said there wasn’t much chance of him finding a job anywhere. Not soon, anyway.

That left the black economy or, if he was lucky, the grey one. Maybe now was the time to ask Joe a favour. Once they were back in the house and Joe was skinning up, Nick decided to chance it.

‘You’re always short of drivers after closing time,’ he said.

‘Yeah, the buggers can pick and choose. Some of them won’t even do evenings.’

‘What are the chances of me doing some driving for you? Sharing a cab.’

Joe gave him a lazy grin. ‘Are you tapping your little brother up for a job?’

‘What does it sound like?’

‘Oh, man . . .’ Joe took a hit on the joint. He smoked half an inch of the spliff before speaking again. ‘We can’t employ ex-cons. That’s the law. I’d lose my license.’

‘If I wore a pair of clear glasses, I could pass as you.’

Joe laughed at this, but Nick could tell it made him uncomfortable.

‘I don’t see you as a taxi driver,’ Joe said, after passing Nick the joint.

‘I can’t think what else I could do at the moment.’

‘You’d need to find somebody willing to share their cab with you. Generally, if two drivers share the same car, I charge them one and a half times the normal fee, seeing as they can’t both be working peak times. But the council would never license you, so it’d have to be off the books.’

‘You must have other drivers who moonlight, fiddle their papers,’ Nick argued. ‘I’d be careful not to land you in it. If I got caught out, I’d say I nicked your ID, did a private deal.’ He got up and poured them both a Jack Daniels from the bottle he’d bought with his first dole cheque. ‘Night cap.’

Joe grinned. ‘S’good to have you back, mate.’ He paused and grimaced, as though making a difficult decision. ‘Tell you what, I’ll see Bob when he’s next on. He doesn’t like to work long hours, and, if you made it worth his while, he might be up for some extra cash.’

7

O
n Monday, Nick turned in at the cab office just before three, hungover. He had been drinking with Joe for the second night running. After all those years off the booze, Nick wasn’t used to it. His brother had been at the office since nine, and showed no sign of wear. He was chatting to the daytime switch operator, Nasreen, a Pakistani in her early twenties.

‘Nas, this is my brother, Nick,’ Joe said. ‘He might be doing a little work here on the q.t.’

‘Like that guy who . . .?’

‘Right.’ Joe didn’t let her finish. ‘No questions asked, but I want you to look after him.’

‘My pleasure,’ Nas said, flashing Nick a flirtatious smile.

Nick gave her a sheepish grin. He wasn’t used to Asian women coming on to him so unabashedly, but maybe there had been some rapid changes in their sexual mores while he’d been away. Nas wore western clothes that showed off her figure: well-cut jeans and a sweater tight enough for him to imagine the contours of her small breasts. She was Nick’s type. Except for the wedding ring. Nas might flirt like a western woman, but Asian women didn’t play away.

Nas answered the phone and Joe called Nick over to him.

‘Bob’s not been in yet.’

Nick picked up that day’s evening paper and turned to the story of some guy who’d got out on appeal after being cleared of a double murder. Then Bob arrived. He had a big paunch and facial hair sprouting in every direction. A clump here, a twisty bit there, a moustache that extended over his lips and began to curl upwards, the whole thing a salt and pepper combination with occasional bursts of brown. Beneath the beard, he could be any age from forty to sixty. Joe introduced them, explained what he wanted. They agreed a price.

‘I tend to knock off a bit later than this,’ Bob said, ‘after the school runs. Say I meet you here most days, between three and four. You drive me home. The car’s yours until you drop it off outside mine that night. Deal?’

Nick would spend his first hour every day driving for no pay then get caught in rush hour. But he was unlikely to get a better offer.

‘Deal.’

Nick’s insurance position was dodgy. They talked it over with Joe. He promised Bob he’d see him right if there was any kind of trouble. Bob, in turn, offered to leave Nick the flick knife he kept beneath his seat for awkward customers. Nick told him that carrying a weapon was too big a risk. He’d rely on the brawn he’d picked up in prison. He would carry a pair of round, metal rimmed glasses, like Joe’s, only with plain lenses. The two men looked enough alike to convince anyone checking the ID. Despite many years living in the same city, he and Joe had never had mutual friends.

The next afternoon, Nick got in early and had a go at chatting up Nas. Wouldn’t hurt to get in some practice at talking to a woman other than his sister-in-law. Whatever flirtation he’d picked up yesterday wasn’t there when it was just the two of them on their own. It had been a long while, but didn’t that usually work the other way round?

He picked up the only paper on the small, stained table by the door. When he saw which one it was, he nearly put the thing down again. The
Sun
held little Nick would describe as news, and this copy was, anyway, several days old. The headline was NEW LABOUR TOTTY TO MARCH
.
Nick glanced at the large, colour photo on the front page. The woman wearing evening dress was disturbingly familiar. He didn’t know who Jasper March was, but the Labour MP looked like a glammed up version of his ex, Sarah. He turned inside for the full story and his heart sank. The heading was:
Sexy Sarah Gives Top Tory a Boner.