Pleasure and a Calling (6 page)

To start, there is the easy pleasure of the kind you might
describe as ‘entry level’ – i.e., that arising from access gained via legitimate means. The client hands you the key, you arrive at the house an hour or so ahead of the buyer, you absorb the atmosphere and carry out a little groundwork, you leave your mark and you open a file.

But then the challenge. The day comes when the view from the foothills has grown too familiar and you feel the lure of higher, bracing air, the urge to add a layer of complexity. You feel your breath quicken. You bind yourself to the category of uninvited guest. Now comes the question of weighing the balance of elements peculiar to a property. What are the chances of getting in and out without being noticed? What does the interior layout present in terms of risk and reward? Are you going to end up on a roof, looking for a drainpipe? Are you looking for relaxation today, or danger? Novelty? Endurance? Degree of difficulty? Or the sublime euphoria of full immersion? (I should say that the latter, though it can and surely must be done – more of which later – is not for the faint-hearted or the unprepared.)

For now, let us say there are varieties of hazard. Here lies the frisson of apprehension and planning. But also calamity. What would be an obvious act of madness in ordinary circumstances assumes, in a dazzling burst of enthusiasm, the shape of a reachable, ripe desire. Any fool, for example, might work out that a flat is much easier to get into when the owner is out than to get out of when the owner is in (having arrived back unexpectedly and slammed the door and sighed with relief, perhaps at the thought of a well-earned cup of tea). So I should mention the day I most resembled the other sort of fool. I thought I was being daring, opportunistic – and, to be frank, with a few years under my belt I would have seen what to do, would more instantly have balanced those elements before me and turned what looked hopeless
into an opportunity of a rarer kind. What followed, instead, was ignominious and sudden flight, which no doubt distressed the poor owner (a woman and her grocery shopping) in the midst of filling her kettle. Don’t ask what I would have done if she had seen me. All I know is that, though I had barely started out in this admittedly singular endeavour, I already felt I had everything to lose. But I took the lesson to heart. After seventeen years I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have been surprised in the act, if not physically caught – mostly from expecting too much pleasure from too little thinking. I have only once been challenged face to face (again, more of which later).

If anything, these days I suffer from a superabundance of alertness to hazard. I know where the exits are. Over the years, I have become birdlike, wary of minor fluctuations. For the most part, the daily crumbs of bread are there for the taking – nothing more menacing than a breath of wind shakes the leaves; a change in shadow signifies only the movement of cloud. But still one prepares for an earthquake.

And so what it becomes, to answer your question, is second nature. Here, among strangers’ belongings, is where I am most at home, moving quietly and surely. I know where they keep their private things, how they arrange their lives. I follow their plans and make mine around them. I try not to enquire deeply into the why, but humbly accept my gift, the exhilaration of being here, of breathing the air at this altitude. I will confess there is ritual. I leave my mark using the key to a red moneybox my mother gave me. I will eat or drink something, perhaps take a small keepsake – a teaspoon, a sock. But I also have my standards. No hidden cameras, wires or microphones are used in the making of my ‘art’. I don’t peep through windows. Where is the pleasure in that? I am not a stalker, or a voyeur. I am simply sharing an experience,
a life as it happens. Think of me as an invisible brother or uncle or boyfriend. I’m no trouble. I may be there when you are, or when you are gone, or more likely just before you arrive. I agree it is an idea that takes some getting used to. But do we not all have a life to make, to mould it somehow around that of others, to search for the dovetail that seems best to fit?

Who could argue with that?

T
WO THINGS HAPPENED WHEN
I was twenty-one. The first was that I inherited what was left of my mother’s money and invested it, along with my savings from Mower’s, in four acres of disused railyard that ran along the wrong side of the river, facing the backs of a stretch of derelict, boarded-up commercial properties.

The second thing was that Guy left the firm. For some months he’d been ill, having managed to poison himself, as Stella told it, courtesy of a thawing chicken in his fridge that had dripped into a dish of cooked pasta on the shelf below. He kept threatening to get well but then got worse again. He lost nearly twenty kilos in weight, and at some stage it was not unreasonably decided by Mr Mower that Guy’s recovery was likely to keep him off work for longer than a middling family business could reasonably bear. Obviously we all sympathized, but he had no alternative, he said, but to wish Guy well and pay off his contract with the firm.

In view of Guy’s often high-handed treatment of me, I couldn’t say I was sorry to see him go. At first it had been low-level sniping dressed up as teasing, usually out of earshot of Mr Mower. That much might have been expected. But things had
begun to change. Although I was still officially the trainee, I had long since done my day releases at college and passed my driving test and by now had handled and completed a number of sales in the way Mr Mower had taught me – adopting his old-fashioned manners and the tweedy dress and thick-soled brogues of the country town professional, courtesy of Hilde & Son, local gentlemen’s outfitters. I was the coming man. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Guy would take it so personally.

It was some weeks before his first spell in hospital that he engineered a crisis in the office that led to a rift between Mr Mower and me. The first I knew of it was when Mr Mower stormed furiously into the office one morning, having just called a client from home with regard to their imminent exchanging of contracts on Brierley Grange.

‘Mrs Wendell was
very
puzzled,’ Mr Mower said, looking at us all. ‘Can anyone guess why she was very puzzled?’

No one could guess.

‘Because it turns out that the Wendells pulled
out
of the Brierley Grange sale two days ago.’ Mr Mower waited for the import of his words to sink in. ‘Yes, I’m astonished too. But it seems she left a message on our answerphone first thing Wednesday morning. And when no one called back, she rang again in the afternoon. And spoke to a young man …’

It was now that Guy looked pointedly at me – indeed, led the others to look at me – causing me in turn to pause for a second, as if …
could
it have been me? No … no, I absolutely
hadn’t
spoken to Mrs Wendell. Had I? The seed of doubt was sprouting and blossoming because Mr Mower, while not quite actually accusing me, was addressing me directly on how the devil
anyone
could be capable of such blatant negligence, that it
simply
wasn’t good enough, and that the collapse of this sale had now derailed four
of our other properties down the line, leaving a fine old damned mess. ‘I’ll get on to it,’ Guy said, wedging the phone between his jaw and shoulder. While Rita dug out contact numbers, I continued to protest my innocence – pointing out that in fact I now distinctly remembered coming in on Wednesday morning to find no messages on the answerphone and thinking it was unusual. But no one cared about the answerphone now, and the more I protested, the more Mr Mower said, with some crossness, that the damage was done, and soon everyone was busy on the phone while I stood by until Guy completed my public shaming by suggesting I make myself useful by running out to the café for doughnuts. ‘I need fuel,’ he said importantly.

It was him. I knew it was him. I could tell by the way he sent long, warning looks in my direction the rest of that day and the following week that it was him. He had wiped the answerphone clean of Mrs Wendell’s message, then failed to act on her follow-up call, with a view to nothing less than making me look like a schoolboy halfwit.

Then two weeks after the Wendell debacle, three rival buyers on the brink of making me offers for an unattractive but extremely well-priced house with conversion potential rang within an hour of each other to count themselves out. None of them was able to give me a convincing reason for their change of heart. Was it bad luck? Was it something I’d said? Mr Mower pursed his lips at the news but remained silent.

I brooded for half an hour then jumped in my car and sprang a visit on one of the buyers who I knew worked at a motor dealership on the town bypass. At first he thought I was a customer and came sauntering out when he saw me browsing the used models in the forecourt. He became flustered when he realized who I was, and gibbered about the weather and market conditions in
auto sales until I eventually pinned him down on the question of the house. After further humming and hawing he said he had been put off buying by reports about the neighbour.

‘The neighbour?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not against people with mental problems. It’s a tragedy. My gran’s in a home, but you know … we’ve got kids. And they’ve got this guy wandering in the street in his pyjama top? He’s not even that old apparently. And I hear he’s pretty full-on when he gets going. A lot of disturbance, night and day, shouting and banging and crying. Once they saw smoke pouring out of the window.’

Was any of this true? I’d heard nothing about it.

‘I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in this,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let me look into it? Perhaps arrange another viewing. I’m sure the vendors would be able to reassure you.’

He grimaced. ‘Sorry. I don’t think so.’

‘I really think whoever told you this might be pulling your leg.’

He looked at me. ‘I can tell you it’s from the horse’s mouth. People in the business. With respect, that’s the trouble with you guys. You only give us half the story.’

I drove back to the office and called the man selling the house. No, there had never been any problems with a neighbour. Yes, there were one or two families on the street caring for elderly relatives but there had never been any trouble. I believed him.

Guy was the trouble. This had his paw-prints all over it.

But I could be trouble too. A couple more weeks went by, and I heard Guy hissing at someone on the phone one afternoon, saying they had to call him later at home. This was suspicious in itself – when Mr Mower and Stella were out of the office, Guy
was more than happy to spend large portions of what he called ‘down time’ purring down the phone at impressionable shop girls or cackling with his drinking chum at the builders’ merchants. But then later he hung back in the office when the rest of us were leaving and the cleaner was just arriving. ‘I’ve just got a couple of clients to catch up with,’ he explained.

I stood in the entrance to the shopping arcade opposite the office where I could see him hunched over his desk talking on the phone. Then he put the phone down and waited by the fax machine. For the next fifteen minutes he shuttled urgently between the fax and the photocopier. At last he came out with his briefcase. I stepped back into the shadows and watched him get into his car and drive off.

The next morning I was first in the office, with Rita, who had opened up. When she went to put the kettle on, I had a look around. There was nothing of interest on Guy’s desk. But there were clues: an activity report on the fax with a phone number; the photocopier was set to magnify at 200 per cent. I pressed the redial button on Guy’s phone. A woman answered. It was the district council – the planning office. How could she help? I asked her for the fax number there. No problem, she said. It matched the last number logged on the activity report. Oh, Guy, what are you up to? I can’t pretend I wasn’t just a little excited.

I waited until Friday, when Guy usually spent the afternoon in the office clearing his paperwork ahead of the weekend rush. After lunch, while he was taking his customary endless lavatory break, I lifted his keys from his jacket. I told Rita there were a number of outstanding For Sale signs that needed picking up around town, and that I’d be out in the van if anyone asked.

Guy’s rented two-room flat was a five-minute drive away. I left the van somewhere out of sight and let myself in. I stood for
a moment, just to test the atmosphere. The door to his bedroom was ajar, leaking his sour sleep-odours into the air. I pushed open a second door to reveal a bachelor lair, dark and untidy, with a leather sofa and an outsized TV with video player and a collection of action movies. Near the window was a dining area, and there, spread on the table with Guy’s unwashed coffee mug, were sheets of photocopied A4 paper arranged in a large rectangle.

This was it – a draughtsman’s plan, rubber-stamped with the council’s logo and marked RIVER DEV 1. At first glance it looked like a layout of the town centre, not very different from the ones that had accumulated over the years in a cupboard at the office. But in this version the main road with its stretch of small run-down businesses had disappeared, freeing up space for ‘pedestrianized retail’. There were shaded residential blocks, and a ‘walkway’ now snaked along the waterside. The reason for Guy’s furtive activity was highlighted in yellow: a wedge of land between the station and the river. I knew this plot – an eyesore you could see from the bridge across the railway line, piled with stones and gravel and dotted with ramshackle buildings and rusting equipment. It looked unsellable. But here it was arrowed excitedly with a pair of question marks. Obviously Guy and his friend at the council were hoping to make a killing with inside information, snapping up this land before this scheme was made public and then selling it on to a developer. But did Guy even have money? That seemed unlikely. A search through his drawers turned up nothing but old pay cheques from Mower’s and motor insurance and utility bills and overdraft statements. No tell-tale applications for mortgages; no hidden investments. Maybe his partner was the one with the money and Guy was in for a cut, presumably for reasons to do with Mower’s.