Getting Home (6 page)

‘Adam, I wouldn't dream—'

‘Good.' He went back to the oysters. There were two of his portion remaining.

‘But I can't see any benefit to Tudor in becoming a side-show to a media circus out at the Thirty-four extension.'

‘Absolutely not. Not what we'd care for at Magno, either.'

‘Not that I'm afraid of the media – for Oak Hill I'd like to see a supplement in
Architecture Today
and a five-page spread in
House & Garden
when we're at the stage of getting a designer in for our show homes. But we don't belong on the evening news.'

‘Quite agree.'

‘But if the BSD says go …'

‘No harm in taking a look.' Adam now spoke encouragingly, as if a very disadvantaged child had suddenly discovered how to tie its shoelaces.

‘Get a good price if we buy now before the inquiry reports.'

‘That's certain.' The lawyer's large, pink, thoroughly manicured hand was poised over his last oyster, the largest, the juiciest, the plumpest, the most invitingly wet. It was time Ted stopped talking. ‘The commissioners aren't obliged to report immediately, either. Law provides for them to take due time to consider the evidence. Gould be another two years. In a way, the more kerfuffle that fella – what's his name, gets on TV nowadays …'

‘Crusty.'

‘The more fuss Crusty and his chums kick up, the better for us.'

‘Two years, eh?' In the end, Ted allowed himself to feel encouraged. He reached for his first oyster as Adam downed his last. Nowadays oysters seemed to be smaller and thinner and less velvety in texture, but perhaps it was his advancing sophistication. Oysters made him think of the sea, and how he would like to sit somewhere in a fisherman's bar and share them with a smilling woman while the sea salt was still on them. One day.

Back in his office the map was looming over him, with an intrepid marker at Oak Hill. Tudor Homes was still a small concern. There was another marker the other side of Helford where he had a smaller development almost finished, and half a dozen query flags around the outer city limits to fill up space and make the thing look busy.

Ted did not care for maps, either. The logic of a map was ruthless. His map showed him the roads snaking over the land, and the businesses following the roads, and the homes following the businesses, and the area between the city and the Coffin gradually ceasing to be country and becoming conurbation, just as earlier the five dying cities in the north had grown into each other and become the Coffin, after which their industries had become extinct and the colonnaded public buildings had become soot-blackened graffiti-soiled shells and whole districts of homes been deserted by those lucky enough to be able to leave.

Anyone with any knowledge of history would be aware that the two cases were not comparable, that the demographics in the final quarter of the twentieth century were quite unlike those of its beginning. This was not Mexico City, this was not Los Angeles, this was not the end-of-the-millennium suburban nightmare, but no argument he could construct stopped the map staring down at him, swarming with black specks of housing development like flies swarming on a carcase.

They all had their little bit of floor, the Cappuccino Crew at The Cedars. Every Friday, there they were, same women, same clothes, same places – it just killed him. And they all drove past the security cameras into the car park and fought for the parking spaces nearest the path to the door, when their reason for coming to the club was to get some exercise. Rod Fuller enjoyed naturally ocurring irony. It put the flint in his eye and the curl in his lip and spun his handsomeness into something supernaturally fascinating; even in these black days, it comforted him to notice the random stupidity of life.

The regulars had claimed their territory. There was Arty T-Shirt right at the back, although she had nothing to be shy about with those legs. Beside her was the Jade Princess, who ran to a different drumbeat but balanced like an angel, and in front of them in all-black stood Catwoman, hypermobile and flaunting it with a leg on the barre. Blubberlugs in Day-Glo pink worked at second row centre with her little black eyes clamped on his backside like leeches. Next to her was Butter-wouldn't-melt-in-it, who came in with all her jewellery but worked like shit, and in front of her, as usual, the black hole in the front row, Sporty Stripes, fiddling with her hair and dropping the combs and retying her shoes and adjusting her bra and doing everything a woman could possibly do to avoid working up a sweat.

‘Hi, team,' he greeted them. There had been a debate about what to call them – they said ‘girls'was sexist and ‘ladies'was bourgeois which was some joke, but he could hardly run in with ‘Hi, women!'

‘Hi, Rod,' they answered. Catwoman shook out her feet.

He strapped on the mike. ‘Earth to class.' His throat was sore. ‘Earth to class, ready to go.' Management told him he ought to yell more, but he never knew what he should yell. The other guys could do the verbals, it wasn't his style. He had to save his voice. In five years he'd be working again, auditioning again. Shin splints he would live with but his voice was sacred; not that he was that kind of actor, but he
had
played Anthony.

Last night's booze sloshed up his oesophagus as he began the warm-up. His eyeballs were sore and there was a pain like an iron bar through his back teeth. The mirror told him he was dehydrated, eyes like ‘The Scream'but great definition. When he reached down for the floor his head swam and he nearly fell over. I can't do this, he told himself. I cannot drink any more. I will not. If there's anything left at home I'll throw it overboard. Ambition's made of sterner stuff. I will not go on like this.

Five minutes into the running, whatever was left in his stomach started a break for freedom, but he held it down. The Cappuccino Crew were flying, endorphin high, even Stripes was smiling. They noticed nothing.

Rod taught at another gym in Helford, another world where the floor was dirty, the class smelt of stale sweat and talcum powder, and they took twice as long to learn new moves, and twice as long to start smiling. Here the floor was sprung maple, cleaned twice a day. He had to ask them not to polish it. The Cappuccino Crew smelt like a first-night bouquet. They had the things only wealth-in-depth could buy: the nose jobs done just right, the posture from ballet lessons since infancy, the serenity created by never in their lives looking at a bill that would not receive the immediate application of the family gold card.

Some of them worked hard, the fast-track women who refused to slow down, concentrating all their high-percentile IQs on keeping beautiful. The rest just cheated, knowing they could buy it all whenever they wanted, flat gut, bouncing hair, peachy skin. They got blow-dried and made-up for class, got sweaty, got showered got blow-dried and made-up again. They sat around the terrace with their coffee, bored to their bone-marrow and looking for trouble. He found them spooky. Perhaps that was why he was the way he was these days.

At the first break he begged some water off Arty T-shirt; did she actually blush? She looked a mite strange this morning, red-eyed and messed-up in some way, but who was he to talk, with his two pissholes in the mud.

His gut heaved again when he went down for the press-ups so he let them off with ten and walked around correcting positions during the floor work. Did his breath smell? Another reason not to talk. Blubberlugs giggled when he showed her how to hold her pelvis right for abductor raises. Mistake, mistake.

Arty T-shirt got up and ran out halfway through the abs. Instructors'guidelines said to check her out. ‘I'm OK,' she said, wiping her face with her towel. ‘I'm sorry. It's just personal. Don't worry.'

Blubberlugs filled him in, lying on her mat propped on her elbows like a little cow walrus. ‘You heard the goss about her? Her husband's gone missing somewhere out East. You've lucked in, Rod.'

‘Keep working,' he told her, trying to find the stretch tape in his bag. The music master tape for the whole class, he had to get it done. One day. One day he would never have another drink. One day he'd have to make a decision about his wife. One day he'd find Sweetheart a new mummy. One day, one day.

‘No shit, he was kidnapped by terrorists.'

His right Achilles was burning as if someone had scraped it with glowing charcoal.

‘Uh-huh.' Was this for real? True, there was something in the Zeitgeist today, some bizarre buzz in the air, be could sense it even through the insulating fog of alcohol. ‘I said, keep working, don't stop now.'

‘You're a sadist.' Blubberlugs was trying to catch his eye.

‘You're lazy.' Had he actually said that or just thought it? His brain was so scrambled he couldn't tell. She was grinning, anyway, thank God.

‘It's true, it's not a joke,' Stripes dragged herself to sitting, for once moved to contribute; this must be serious. ‘He was in Russia on business and the whole delegation got kidnapped. She just heard yesterday.'

‘That's bad.'

‘So now's your chance,' Blubberlugs suggested, flopping on her back and rolling her eyes at him.

‘Another two sets,' he ordered, getting on the podium for the authority. He heard groans. ‘Come on, hit the floor. Ten weeks to the beach, team. You'll thank me then.'

‘Couldn't I thank you earlier?' Blubberlugs suggested, lubriciously eyeing his shorts.

Dear lady, he thought, if only you knew. ‘Keep it smooth, don't jerk it, not too high, work the abs not the hip flexors. Try and pull your belly-button to your backbone, flatten out the stomach, no tension in the shoulders, keep the chest open, don't forget to breathe.' Forgetting to breathe, now that was a temptation. He saw Sweetheart in his mind's eye, the perfect joy of being five years old, streaking into school, waving over her shoulder. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me. ‘And eight,' he counted, ‘and seven …'

‘You just hate rich women,' Blubberlugs taunted, fingers straining half-heartedly towards her thighs.

‘Not especially,' he answered, and wondered what he had said, and why.

Money crusted over The Cedars like clotted cream coagulated over the surface of the bowl. Every vehicle in the car park was brand new, top of the range, accessorised and alarmed to the roof. Rolex watches were found in the lost property basket and they were never claimed. Every child in the tennis squads had orthodontics worth a socialite's champagne bill. Every palm in the gym had its leaves wiped by hand every week. The Cappuccino Crew bought the new shoes as soon as his sponsor issued them. His sponsors were impressed with The Cedars, more impressed than with his silver for the single men's event in the World Aerobic Championships the year before last.

‘Rod – you lucky boy, another private client.' As he checked out, the receptionist handed him the appointment card.

The card read: 4pm, Mrs E Parsons, 4 Church Vale, Maple Grove, Westwick. There was no telephone number. One private session paid enough for one week's groceries, or a new pair of jeans, or a party dress for Sweetheart, or one twenty-sixth of one term's fees at The Magpies. He liked training women, too. They were harder to motivate, but easier to pace; he could usually save his legs. His schedule was getting packed, two classes a day, four days a week and the private clients on top.

‘She's a big TV star,' the receptionist assured him vaguely, too young to be aware of the universe of daytime television. ‘She comes in sometimes but she's more of a social member. Play your cards right we'll be seeing
you
on TV.'

‘Yup,' he agreed. Just five more years.

‘That's it? That's the saddest-looking fish you could find?' Allie Parsons had an indefinable accent, the faintest clip on her words; it could have been Scottish and it gave a patina of sense to whatever she said.

She prodded the trout's speckled back with a finger whose nail felt annoyingly unstable. Eleven people cringed back from the Channel Ten conference table, leaving the fish exposed to the storm of her wrath on a tin foil catering platter.

‘We thought he definitely looked the most unhappy. I mean, his mouth turned down more than the others.' Speaking alone in the trout's defence was Daniel Flynn, also known as The Himbo, co-host of
Family First.
His eyes almost crossed with the effort of composing his pleading. ‘I mean, all fish look kind of miserable, don't they? Like they know they're dead and they're going to be eaten or something.'

‘Precisely – they all look pissed off.' Allie glared at The Himbo as if he were a new wrinkle in her mirror. ‘On behalf of our viewers – our three and a half million viewers, Daniel – we are testing the pledge made by Magno Hypermarkets to replace any unsatisfactory item purchased in the store unconditionally, however wacky or deranged or psychopathic the reason the customer gives for bringing it back – yes?' She was exasperated to see Maria, the stand-in weather girl, nod brightly.

‘So,' she proceeded at a sarcastic pitch, ‘we decide to buy a fish and return for the most ridiculous reason we can think of: we're going to take it back because it looks unhappy. And all you had to do, Daniel, was to pick the most pissed-off looking fish in the store – and you're telling me that's it?'

‘I thought his eyes looked so sad,' the trout's advocate argued wretchedly. ‘If you take a look at him,' and he reached out for the fish and bent its head around to stare his accuser plaintively in the face, ‘his eyes are almost mournful. Haunted. Like he was going to cry any minute. I mean, he's really quite tragic. None of the others had sad eyes.'

‘And you expect me to go out there in front of millions of viewers and tell them that this,
this
, is a sad-looking fish?' She poked the trout again, the loose nail snagging on a fin. ‘The saddest-looking fish they've ever seen? I mean, yes, it looks sad. Absolutely, this is a sad piece of merchandise.' Between finger and thumb, she picked up the fish and exhibited it to the room. ‘It's just not sad in the way we need it to be sad, is it Daniel? And who has to make this sad fish work? Who always gets to make the story work around here? Me.'