“In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1888.
Leymann sat at a corner seat, waiting for his friend and waiting for the cocktail hour to begin. It was late afternoon and from the window he could see half-past five commuters walking to their stations in the cool air. He was comfortable, unusually so. The seat had a plush, springiness that made him feel safe and faintly aristocratic and American. He wondered whether it was the novel he was reading—the torn cover of a 1920’s novel dangled on one side of the marble table. His eyes were watering slightly but he was used to that. He believed it something to do with the industrial cleaners that were dabbed on the acrylic carpets once a month. He had been feeling miserable, the past week, looking out from his office towards the Telecom Tower in the distance, wondering where there was any reasonable height from where London—minus tower—could be seen. He presumed not.
His meeting, this evening, concerned his job, the one that made his life feel stale and musty. Each morning, when he visited new houses that had to be torn down, he looked around, feeling that the damp on the walls, the sagging ceilings and the broken, decaying floorboards all resembled the state of his mind and heart. He had grown tired of it. His divorce, only pending at the moment, made it possible for him to drop responsibility from his CONS list as he made his decisions. It was a lucrative post. Most of London’s housing was being pulled down. Not since the sixties and the public housing boom had so many buildings been brushed away. Motorways, too, were flourishing, circling the cities with snails’ pace commuters. The only headache was pushing unnameable squatters and the like from properties. This was where Leymann came in even though he no longer liked doing it. He was bored and tired of it and his choices seemed limited. There was nothing he felt specifically wrong about his job, neither the equity nor the demolition. It was just that this job, along with all its so-called ‘perks’, was like a slow injection, of the flu-jab genre. He worried that if he didn’t get out now, he’d live to be a regretful, old man.
Jocelyn nudged the wheel of her BMW before the car turned into a shabby street, South of the river. She had had an energetic day. There wasn’t a minute in which her mind hadn’t been ticking over some new problem or dilemma. Her work, though she was at the top of her particular ladder, was similar to Leymann’s. It had the same number of rungs and seemed to shake on its pivot when things were going badly. However, she displayed or felt none of his dispiritedness. There wasn’t time to think, there wasn’t the time for any nervous deliberations. Decisions were made at a quick pace. They were calculated and once they were made that was it. Now, there was not a moment in which she could change her mind about ‘everything’. She was tapping on her steering wheel, while dictating to her machine. It was a letter, quite a long one, and as she oscillated on her brake pedal, she slowly moved her lips staring at the road, waiting for an accident.
She had decided that Leymann was to go. That was the only reason she had accepted his invitation, she assured herself. Finding a parking space—she was lucky in parking—she took out a lipstick and began pouting in the car mirror. There was a spot on her left cheek, too red to disguise. She rubbed it a few times and listened to the telephone ring. It was her solicitor. Yet more legal enigmas presented themselves to her. Her divorce was taking years. She threw the phone down disdainfully, having to reposition it soon afterwards. The rare moments when Jocelyn felt out of her depth usually concerned her divorce. Occasionally, a phone-call from a lawyer would throw her completely out of synch. Sighing, she dialled her mother’s number. “What the hell am I doing all this for?” she said commandingly to the dashboard.
Mr. Roeng stood outside his shack and watched schoolchildren gather around a bench before moving to the bus-stop. Most of them were boys, the youngest only five. He rubbed his hands together to warm them up and watched the group of grey blazers enlarge and grow louder. The younger children, while not overjoyed, seemed more enthusiastic than those of ten or fifteen, he thought.
Leymann was still waiting. He had been there nearly an hour and in front of him stood a sheet of tissue paper upon which sat a sickly Bloody Mary in a twenties’ style glass. As he took the tissue paper away, his hold on the glass lapsed and the drink then lay in a pool on the table. He winced and dabbed the corner of the tissue in his eye as a waiter descended. He looked away from the waiter, out of the window and wondered whether Jocelyn had had trouble parking her car. He’d been musing once more on his decision—after all it was a revolution in his life. He liked Jocelyn, she had always been courteous and friendly towards him. While he sat at the office, which wasn’t very often as most of his time was spent at properties, she would stream past his desks in one of her flower-print dresses, smelling of chewing gum and expensive French fragrance. She wasn’t pretty, her features were too rounded and the way her hair was done it sometimes made her look like a Christmas pudding with a ribbon around it.
“Your book, sir,” the waiter said to Leymann as he held out the volume, now blood red in colour.
“Oh, er…thank you.” He placed it on the table next to him noticing that the waiter had crumpled up the torn cover and was using it to wipe down the table.
“Mum, how are you? I’m in a terrible state. Work had been so busy, have you heard from John? He hasn’t called me in weeks. I haven’t even seen the girls properly for months,” Jocelyn said. “I mean, what’s the point of all of this? I sit and work all day so John can while away his hours. The only time I see the kids is when I’ve come from work. And then all I do is tell them off. God! And when they go to their father’s, he takes them to the cinema and the fair. They worship the bastard while he sits and does nothing, nothing at all.
“Yes, I know he’s a nice man. We’ve already gone though all of that. Look, I’d better go—I’ll call you tonight. Okay? Bye,” and Jocelyn had finished her outburst, letting her mother get away with only a few syllables. Then she got out of the car and went into the newsagents to buy some gum.
They began to play music in the bar and the customer-audience went from one to fifty.
“Hello, would you like another drink?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, thank you. Half pint of lager?” Leymann said, his words rising in pitch. The waiter promptly left his table.
There were now three others seated around Leymann’s table, each with an exotic cocktail in front of them. He stared at the lemon, lying in a syrupy brown liquid in front of him. It reminded him of a house he had visited yesterday. Everything was brown or yellow, the wallpaper, the curtains, the carpets—where there were any. There had been a tramp living in one of the upper rooms. He remembered the blankets he was using and how they were stained with blood. He was quite an expert at getting people out of houses without having to resort to the courts. It wasn’t that difficult, of course: most of them were breakable human beings. Others were already broken: alcoholics and mad people that had been thrown out of wherever they had been before. Leymann remembered a documentary he had seen. “Care is expensive,” a woman had said. Jocelyn had always told him to wait, to wait until the decorators were in. “Then you at least have others on your side for backup. If that doesn’t work, let the courts do it all,” she would say. She was right, too. The job was usually quicker with builders and decorators on one’s side. But it was easy for Jocelyn to give advice. She only saw properties after they’d been done up, when there was no more weeping, when the desolate homes were made beautiful. “Each floor now has a video-entry phone and a microwave cooker and if you don’t think they’re beautiful look at the way the light glides into the room, the way the shutters seem to lift the sunshine so it glints in all the right places. It’s like a film, like a Hollywood film,” Jocelyn had once said.
There was no doubt about that. But it wasn’t Leymann’s job to market, to swan through homes when they were glossy and neat. It wasn’t really his job to hang around the finished home at all. He was allowed to come to the press launch, if he didn’t get in the way. But once the press had arrived—the big teethed men and women from magazines—he had to go. He remembered taking an elegant cocktail glass, only meant to look nice and not to be used, and filling it with water and how Jocelyn had told him off.
The houses would smell of flowers, huge bouquets from alluring florists in Knightsbridge garlanded every room. As he sipped his water, he’d wrinkle his toes, savouring the carpet through his soles and then press the video-entry phone button. A sharpish image would appear, the size of a paperback and he would watch the cars meander about and the trees sway a little. An hour later, the journalists would rush in, saying that video entry-phones were more fun than TV. Leymann believed they were right, he felt that watching the curious fixed camera image, silent and matte, was like eavesdropping.
Spotting a copy of The Tatler, she grabbed it from the shelf and began anxiously flicking through it.
“Gotta pay for what you look at, madam,” the tough looking man said.
Jocelyn looked at him for a moment, eyeing the areas on his face that were shadowed by his flat blue hat and put the magazine down. She had bought the gum already and walked out, listening to the man shout at her. “Fuck!” she said, walking towards the car, “cat food!”
It was much darker now, car lights were on and the streets were less crowded. Leymann remembered his brother, the one working for a security agency. He would be starting work now, carrying out real eavesdropping. He rarely spoke to him, these days. Perhaps, he shouldn’t really have told Leymann what little he had. Even a brotherly disagreement seemed now to turn into something about national security. Leymann recalled how his brother had come to mention his occupation.
Jocelyn was fond of Leymann. From the day she started work she had always seen Leymann as a man with potential. There was more to it, she liked the curve of his face, the way his brown eyes were inset at an unusual angle. But there was something stopping them from being together. Their lives weren’t timed in the same way. Jocelyn worked the lunch-breaks and Leymann was, anyway, out most of the time. During the past few weeks, everyone in the office had seen Leymann change. He was becoming less confident, less tough. Jocelyn felt a little guilty. She wondered whether she should help him in some way, offer him more backup. Now, however, it was already too late and he had to go. The cashier read the price out again, holding out the cat food receipt. Jocelyn apologised, noticing the cashier’s crocodile brooch and taking a mental note.
Leymann had been early, he had known it when he arrived. However, his message to Jocelyn was slightly ambiguous, as if relating to a previous time when they had found themselves alone with each other. The implication was the that the meeting was to take place a little earlier than specified, Leymann thought. It was only a half-hope, though. Had he even really expected her to remember?
“No,” murmured Leymann to himself, “no, no, noooo.”
Those at neighbouring tables stopped talking, looking straight at Leymann for at least a few seconds. Then they resumed their conversations.
It was about a fifteen minute car journey to Leymann’s bar. The short cut was through some small roads by the river, past big, deserted warehouses, lit only by a few street lamps. Many lamps had been smashed by the gangs, the groups so beloved by local paper feature writers. Jocelyn remembered the broken glass on the roads and regretted using this route. It had been some three years since her daughter, Evangeline, had disappeared and broken glass always reminded her of those ensuing weeks of hope, expectation and final despondency. “It was a learning experience,” she coaxed herself into believing, pushing on the accelerator.
Leymann was laughing to himself, laughing uncontrollably. Usually, he would have sacrificed his life for composure in a public place. His brother had said that once. Etiquette, or some sort of personal etiquette, was an essential cogwheel in what made Leymann tick. He had inherited it from his father and it was part of a persistent agony.
He was laughing for a reason, though. He was thinking about his prospects if he left his job. If there was ever a good time to be unemployed, it wasn’t now. Despite the reported highest economic growth of all time, Britain seemed in a kind of interminable decline. It would be a year before he would even be eligible for dole. Legislation prevented all but the richest from leaving a miserably employed life.
So now he laughed because it seemed funny, mad even, as mad as the people from the closed down asylums. He had made some provisions, even saving a little money, but it was only enough to allow him to eat and pay bills. Still, his decision still stood: why do something that made one indifferent to all the beauties of life?
Jocelyn pulled over at the side of the road, recollecting the scents of medical halls. The sedatives had had a sweet smell and they must have soon calmed her down. Her daughter had had a round face, too, one with innocent eyes and tiny lips. And while she relived flashes of pain, with only the small light in the car switched on, groups of children, only a few years older than her daughter, gathered around her car.
“Can’t you understand anything? You can’t live on nothing. It’s bad enough the way your flat looks at the moment. What do you expect from life, anyway? I honestly don’t know. That damp on the ceiling of the sitting room—don’t you have any pride?” Leymann was remembering a conversation he had had with his brother.
It had been a lengthy one. He recalled the sound of morning birds calling as his brother left the house. Leymann’s throat had been sore on that day and his brother had been talking about his work. It was reasonably fascinating—Leymann conceded that—but bugging people’s telephones was hardly a nice way of making a living. His brother would tell him of blackmail plots and assassination attempts on union leaders, all in the enthusiastic tones of a thriller fanatic. It didn’t bother Leymann much, even when his brother suggested Leymann himself might be under surveillance. His phone was, anyway, erratic, only working on certain days and at certain hours. This unreliability was not due to neglected final notices but rather some local inefficiency. He faintly recalled an article he had read about how the new cable company was having problems.
Jocelyn started her car with a lurch, swiftly changing gears and staring straight out in front of her. The boys scattered quickly and only one was grazed by a fender.
Leymann often thought of travelling abroad, though the brochures thrown through his letterbox seemed more like elaborate jokes than the beginning of concrete plans. He liked to look at the pictures of sandy beaches and coral blue seas. They sparkled especially on television advertisements, where character seemed to have a very easy time of it all. Things seemed easier on television. They only ever had a few things at once on their minds. Leymann’s mind, however, was always on many things and devoted to each was only a shallow sprinkling of emotion. There was no one thing that wholly absorbed his mind. The closest it came was Jocelyn who, as Leymann paid for yet another drink, kept summoning his thoughts. “It would be fun to lie on a beach with her,” he thought, even then ending his idea with an “I suppose”. It was a catchphrase for him. Leymann closed his eyes and rested for a few minutes.
Drops of rain began to splatter Jocelyn’s windscreen. She concentrated on the road as thoughts of her daughter faded away. Casually, she switched on the radio and listened to the evening news bellow from the speakers at the back of the car. The news was serious but not unusual and Jocelyn paid little attention to it. Only financial indices and property price fluctuations had any bearing on her life.
Leymann looked at his watch. It had been given to him by his long deceased grandmother. He started to think about his family, the members whose screams lay at the back of his mind like smouldering cigarettes. Nearly all of them talked as if they had just digested the text of a book of symptoms. It was as if every minute was spent outdoing each other in their prescriptions for Leymann. They had so much advice but none of them had amounted to much, Leymann thought. One couple was different: a mad aunt and her husband, an uncle whom he had never seen and was rumoured not to exist. The aunt suffered from schizophrenia and she would refer to her non-existent husband with great tenderness. Many years ago, during a family argument, the aunt produced her husband’s National Insurance number as proof of his existence. The family still didn’t believe her. Perhaps he did exist, but only as a garbled computer error in the bowels of a mainframe. Whether he did or not, the couple were Leymann’s favourite relations.
Leymann watched the rain outside and the belisha beacons turn on and off. Passive smoke was beginning to make his eyes water and he wondered whether living like his uncle wasn’t a better way of coping with the world.
“Damn!” shouted Jocelyn, not only because a driver had cut her up at the traffic lights but because there was a fire at 63a Keir Hardie Avenue. Property Developments PLC owned number 65 and Jocelyn, head of the company, didn’t want the fire to spread. It wouldn’t do to delay the survey so Jocelyn felt obliged to visit the scene. After all, what was the point of a mobile phone other than to shoulder responsibility? Within a couple of minutes, Jocelyn was there. Like an ambitious reporter, she lurched out of the car and ran towards the fire crew.
“How did it start?” Jocelyn shouted, blinded by the spray of the hoses.
“Don’t know,” said a fireman, peering above his yellow helmet.
The rain was getting heavier and the smell of burning intermingled with the scent of wet tarmac rose around her. Number 65 looked fine—until she entered the premises, a huge key-chain dangling from her handbag. The hallway, no longer musty, resonated in a damp mist. It was as if someone had tried to kick-start the house into freshness by spraying the house with water in the hope that it might come to life. But, like a dead plant, the house’s response was cold and silent. Jocelyn ran out towards the fireman.
“What’s happened to number 65?”
“Oh…we aimed a hose at the wrong position. Must have gone into the wrong house. Shouldn’t have left the windows open, though,” said the fireman before returning his eyes to number 63a.
Jocelyn remembered opening the windows herself. “Why do things always have to be a mess?” she asked herself. No matter how organised she thought she was, something always turned up. Just like on a partying Saturday night, she reflected, no matter how dressed up and confident she was, all it took was a squeaky irregularly shaped toy on the stairs to shatter her resolve. She didn’t want to be here. It was dark, wet and cold. Running to the steps of 65, she eased the key in and locked the door behind her, holding her breath and looking away. She put her head in one hand when she got into to the car. Her hair was soaking wet, a thin stream of London rainwater edging down her neck and onto her back. She moved her shoulders up and down in a massaging action and stared at the mirror. There were thick, dark lines under her eyes and her nose was shiny. Her makeup had run but her watery eyes sparkled.
One of Leymann’s small numbers of friends—he didn’t make friends easily—had once suggested that it was his parent’s divorce that had unsettled him as a child, may have been responsible for his nervous temperament. Leymann rejected this but wondered about it for days after the conversation. There was definitely a fortnightly clash that had frightened him as a child. His mummy and daddy would be in the same room, trying their best to look away. She would scream and his father would try to ignore it, maybe fingering his glasses before turning to Leymann. In turn, Leymann would stare up at his father and begin to sob. Looking around him, Leymann wondered about the parentages of those around him.
His hands were clammy and his head began to twitch, a nervous affliction he had gained from his brother who had later discarded the habit. As he floundered, his polyester shirt rubbed on his neck like a damp cloth wiping off spilt milk. He had never felt comfortable with his clothes, either.
Jocelyn had got into the practice of talking to herself. The bouts were at first a little inarticulate but after some weeks she found a fluency with herself. The car quite stationary, she would listen to what she considered a finely tuned Home Counties’ accent for fifteen minutes at time. Her voice had been trained. “A fine voice,” her mother had said, “needs well roasted potatoes and good Sunday sprouts.” Her mother had tried to train Evangeline, Jocelyn’s ill-fated daughter. It seemed such a waste of time, now—aspirations as much as the expense of small school blazers and private nurseries. The smell of rain and wool in the car reminded her of dark winter afternoons, outside Evangeline’s school and inevitably of the particular afternoon when she failed to appear.
“Mr. Leymann?” said a crisp voice in the bar. Leymann looked up, his eyes distinctly vexed like those of an animated dog negotiating an unconcerned master.
“Yes?” he answered.
“There’s a message from Jocelyn…” the well-dressed member of the bar-staff began to talk. It was a short speech but enough to make Leymann reach for his book and plastic briefcase, ready to depart. He was unhappy about his failed meeting. It was not only that he had wanted to tell her of his resignation, he had wanted to see her. What with their different lifestyles, he hardly ever saw her and, today, he missed her. Her hazel-brown hair was tied in with his fate. She was confident. She seemed to offer a life of little trouble, even though Leymann believed he would be prepared to suffer for her.
He twitched once more, anxiously wiping moist Bloody Mary from his book onto the table. The threesome in front of him looked at Leymann in turn, waiting for a fourth companion to join them. He had been waiting for Leymann to vacate his seat, eager to get into the conversation and show what he knew about the topics under discussion. Leymann apologised to him and went to the till to pay.
“Can you pay the table please, sir?” a woman in black and white queried. Leymann nodded and came back to the table, searching for the plate his waiter had deposited for him. The four suited men looked at Leymann as if there had been a mistake. The fourth man, the most uncomfortable of the group—he may have assumed that Leymann was coming to claim back his chair—looked with wide open eyes at him. Leymann didn’t feel like talking. He had had a wasteful hour or so and was not in the mood for offering explanations. Luckily, he had the right change. He took one last glance. Two of them had moustaches, modern-looking moustaches, and had been chatting about one of the women behind the bar: “You know, Jack? That guy, he was so pissed…he wanted to fuck and just…” Leymann stopped listening and frowned, not knowing why. They smiled a lot, Leymann thought.
As Leymann walked out of glass doors, he yearned for Jocelyn.
***
Each turn of the 291 bus seemed to mean more than before. The bare trees reach out towards him like clawing, outstretched hands. Afforded a birds’ eye view, he watched the black, wintry expanses of parkland and the people outside blowing illuminated mist from their mouths. The bus shook vigorously as the street lights flickered, some filaments cracking to the roar of a thousand motor engines. Inside the bus, meaningless graffiti covered the seats like reflecting pools of disturbed water under the advertisements.
Leymann breathed out uneasily and got up, steadying himself on the cold steel handrails. As he slowly pushed the button to let the driver know he wanted to get off, he could see his drawn curtains and, lower down, the gun shop and the florist’s. They lay side by side, each occupying half the space of the other shops on the road. The air in his flat was a pleasant mixture of rare flower scent and unused gunpowder, all rising like steam through the floorboards. Leymann’s main grief was the noise. Double glazing was an unaffordable luxury. He wanted to forget the world in this castle of his, not listen to its un-oiled wheels grinding through the nights.
Jocelyn regretted cancelling. She hated the idea that she cared about what she looked like in front of Leymann. They were there to talk professionally, not to stare into each other’s eyes and flirt. She liked Leymann, she realised again. Her two other daughters were with her father tonight and should Leymann have pleased her sufficiently, she could have invited him back to her place. As she pressed the automatic garage door button, she smiled.
Leymann put his case on a chair and began to make some dinner. For most of the week, he relied wholly upon frozen food for his dietary needs. It was a well-rehearsed ceremony: the stinging fingers as he pulled a carton from the freezer, the lighting of the oven with a long match, the depressing wait. Leymann knew he wouldn’t like the result—he never did—and yet, at the supermarket, the images of colourful, beautiful, gourmet food on the boxes seemed to beckon him. He meditated on the well-cleaned aisles and the rows of enticing food, the Warholian soup cans and Henry Moore butchered meat.
His cookery books had never been opened. He had been frightened off by over-protective relatives, afraid that he would hurt himself. All he seemed to have inherited, regarding food, was an unselective addiction to additives. He was now emptying half a plastic container into the waste disposal unit, listening to the whirring machine munch away and spit out a bad piece of beef. He had lost his appetite, now engrossed in a TV chat show. Leymann used to dream of being on a TV chat show, especially the one hosted by John Barleycorn. He felt sorry for himself. He was observing the springiness of the chair that the bottom of Barleycorn’s guest had just met. She had a vulgar, disjointed face, powdered and yet greasy. She was talking about intuition and telepathy, about how women were more telepathic. “It’s just that we’re more daring,” she continued.
“And what of the after-life?” asked Barleycorn, anxious not to sound too serious.
“I firmly believe in it. Last winter I was driving through the Lake District at night. It was freezing and ice covered the steep hill that I was driving down. As I came towards my house, I saw my mother at the door. ‘Silly thing, fancy worrying about me and coming out into the cold!’ I said to myself. Then I remembered: my mother had died two years previously.”
The chat show host was now listening to a detailed account of how his guest’s mother had given her a racing tip and how the guest had become very wealthy. Leymann bit his nails as pictures of her mansion appeared on the screen. He looked around him. It wasn’t a bad flat. It was just that he had such little time to care for it.
Two twenty year old boys were eating at an expensive restaurant in the West End of London. Both wore black suits and brightly coloured ties and both of them were talking about aspirations and handicaps. Sebastian, taller of the two, didn’t care much for Frezzle, partly because he seemed to remind Sebastian that he, himself, was a misfit. They had met at school. Frezzle and just yesterday decided to abandon his university course in favour of taking banking examinations.
There was silence as another bottle of white wine arrived at the table. Sebastian had been vaguely worried about his looming examination failure but the smile of the pretty waitress made him forget. Frezzle, meanwhile, was uninterested in the shortness of her skirt and was instead regretting that he was missing John Barleycorn.
Jocelyn had a big, four-bedroom house. As she entered, she picked up the morning’s mail from a gingham-clothed side-table. Jocelyn cursed the privatised mail system and ripped open a letter addressed to her neighbour, sighing as she took out a glossy photograph of a cat. She turned it around and read the pencilled handwriting, ‘Hello Dolly!’ and placed it back in its envelope. Jocelyn put her arms around her waist, unzipping her skirt a little, happy that No one was around the house. She was a little hungry but her weight was more important than that so she ran upstairs and changed instead.
Jocelyn was proud of her clothes. Even for her, they seemed an expensive item on her household budget. As she unbuttoned her blouse, she sat on the edge of the bed. Her skirt was at her ankles as she looked in the mirror, wondering why her underwear was so dear and then taking pride in it. Gently, she unclipped her bra-strap and let her breasts fall a little. She stared at the mirror, her hands on her skirt, feeling the quality of the wool.
“I’m really tired,” Leymann said to the telephone.
“Aw, c’mon, just down the pub,” said Tony, a friend he had known since the age of six. It was a fight but Leymann got the better of it. He dreaded their evening meetings. They were entangled, tortuous journeys, usually with seven or eight others, none of who seemed to speak or understand Leymann’s tongue. Since Leymann had landed his job with Property Developments PLC, two years ago, Leymann’s language and aspirations became incompatible with those of Tony.
Tony was a clerk at the local postal company. He hated his work and cared more about what he called, ‘the finer things’. His taste in clothes, music and partners was acquired from his younger brother, a slight, uncoordinated man who parted his hair at both sides and had left the area to work in the City. Tony used to talk about him for hours, about how he was helping him to monitor his share portfolio wisely. Leymann would sit in silence, nodding and thinking about whether to book an appointment at the job centre. Tony’s brother drove a fast German car and made lots of money, so Leymann was told. However, Leymann had never ever seen him. He had a vague memory of a four year old boy running around the neighbourhood, smashing dolls on the tarmac outside Tony’s parents’ house. Other than that, he didn’t seem to exist. Tony, himself, admitted to not having seen him for over five years. He said that his brother often flew away to magical sounding places like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Leymann paced the short distance between one wall and the other, remembering the way he did it in vacant properties. He’d stand, all 5’2” of him, and point out sections of the floor, counting in his head with his lips quivering to a tape recorder. The lengths and widths of these rooms, even when approximate, were of some use to the battalion of architects and planners back at Property Developments PLC. The most alarming thing, as he would stand atop a carpet of beer cans and cigarette stubs, was the glassy stares of itinerant groups of squatting young boys and girls. As their eyes focused on him, he would sense danger, though these gentle, almost broken down, youngsters hadn’t even the energy to take a rubbish-bag out. He remembered the sound of sniffling and coughing and young dogs barking. After noting down the figures, he’d march out, avoiding eye-contact, and speculate uncertainly on where these people would go.
Loddington is a Northern town. The closure of the bus and railway stations left the town unconnected, her residents wholly reliant on private transport. In a telephone box with its customary smells of urine and sugary soft-drinks, Jonathan, a twenty-five year old man with weary, grey eyes was waiting for the phone to ring. It was cold. His fingers protruded from some cut-off acrylic gloves that smelled of old vegetables and fruit. He worked at the market on Sundays, casual labour that propped his dole cheque up, five pounds for six hours.
Jocelyn hadn’t bothered to wrap herself in her silk dressing gown. Instead, she walked around the dark room in her panties, tidying up and looking for a telephone number. She went to the dressing table and, finding the yellow square, read it. As she memorised the twelve figures, she sprayed some French perfume onto her armpits. Stomping towards the phone, she looked out of the window. Her chintzy room, looked out onto a large garden. She could see two people in the window of the nearest house. Jocelyn was curious. There had been loud noises coming from that house all evening. She carefully angled the pane and peered out, catching the reflection of her own body. She had been comfortable without clothes on, freer and now she felt embarrassed. As she reached for her gown, loud screams radiated from the window. It was a man slapping a small girl.
Jonathan was becoming impatient. His friends were at the pub and all of them thought that the Employment Seekers Scheme, a new government programme, was futile. Jonathan’s counsellor had told him to wait at the booth at the appointed time. There was a company in London that was prepared to offer him some work.
Leymann sat down again, flicking through a property magazine. He spent many nights laughing at the prices of houses in central London. He couldn’t understand how so many people could afford to buy bedsits, with 15 year leases, for nearly a million pounds. As he sipped a cup of tea he watched a game show.
“Okay, boys and girls…heh…a cryptic clue for a clever crew: where in Paris can you not see the Eiffel Tower on the horizon?” asked an over made-up man with brutally white teeth. There was a pause and then a buzz. “No one?” his face fell, “on the Eiffel Tower, of course!”
Jocelyn closed the window and drew the curtains before dialling the number.
“Hello? Jonathan Mans…ill?” Jocelyn stuttered, listening to the peculiar tones indicative of payphones.
“There’s no Jonathan here. Look, I’m half-way through my dinner, so if you’re selling water filters or mobile phones, I’ll ask to you to hang up now, thank you. Just because its a payphone, doesn’t mean it isn’t a private number, you know,” a woman in Loddington said.
Jocelyn replaced the receiver and dialled again, thinking about the thousands of pounds of tax incentives offered to those hiring unskilled labour. There was no reply, this time.
Jonathan had left. He had been tired lately and wondered if he was getting some sort of ulcer, given his stomach ache. For a twenty-five year old he had the air of someone who had seen everything. He had experienced terrific falls in spirit, this year. His girlfriend of ten years had left on a battered bicycle for the South. Jonathan hadn’t heard from her since and he had only really lived for her.
Leymann wished he had Jocelyn’s number. If he had the number he could have begun to explain his feelings for her. He had realised that he would have to go to work the next day—just one day more. The thought irked him. He remembered waking up that morning, feeling happy and free.
But he had to turn up. His curriculum vitae would be damaged if he didn’t and he didn’t want to burn all his boats and bridges. ‘There are radical steps and then there are radical steps,’ he murmured to himself before turning off the television.
Jocelyn couldn’t remember how many times she had been profane this week. She just had to contact this man from Loddington. Too much was at stake and as her stepfather had once said, ‘some say that the Inland Revenue is real charity, giving from the rich to the poor, but I say screw them for everything.’
Gently, she eased the dressing gown off and got into bed. The sounds of shouts or screams (she couldn’t tell) rose again and she remembered the open window. After closing it, she lay down and looked at the red marks where her underwear had been and at her legs—her best feature, she thought—before opening a best-seller. Seeing the name of a cologne, she said to herself: “I must buy some of that.”
Leymann was frightened about going to work. He had to go to a council estate and bargain with an unemployed father of three. He wondered whether his decision to resign was because he didn’t want this case. His assignments had all been getting grimmer. Just thinking about the facts of this one made him feel ill. Why had the man decided to buy the council flat in the first place? Didn’t he know that the British motor industry was in decline? Didn’t he read the papers? And what about his family? It’s winter and the gas, water and electric had already been cut so how were the family functioning? Leymann asked himself some more questions, sighing as he had done so many times during the course of the day. He set his alarm clock, believing he wouldn’t wake up.
<Begin excerpting here>
Young boy in knife-shock horror…pensioner raped…£5000 of goods stolen from…schoolboy beaten for 12p.
<End excerpting>
Leymann read from the local paper in bed.
“She moved sexily with thoughts of romance. In her short jacket, he could see her bosom, ripe and fulsome like…” Jocelyn was enraptured. She knew the novel was unbelievable, silly even, but she kept on reading, twisting from one side of the bed to the other and repositioning the book in her hands.
Jonathan was brimming with hope despite the absence of a call. He longed to move to London and his stomach turned in expectation.
He was quiet in the pub as his friends laughed and joked about it, his best friends with remarkable passion. He knew it was their way of expressing sorrow rather than ridicule. Surely he knew it wouldn’t work out the way he had wanted it to, things never did work out anymore, they seemed to say. Through the smoky, bittered air of the bar, he looked past the jukebox and to the comedian.
As he walked back across a field, it began to rain. The grass began to turn into mud and instead of running, Jonathan slowed down, the water trickling into his eyes. He was taking deep breaths, smelling the damp grass and cold, fresh air. His face grew red as he looked across at the black ground. He felt water rising in his eyes. He considered what his parents would think. It had been one month since his girlfriend had left and since that day he couldn’t afford a place of his own. Moving back with the family was a strain. His mother would understand: before going to the payphone she had told him not to hope to much. His father had been silent. All his large, black eyes ever seemed to look at were newspapers, these days. He scanned them as if they were maps, guiding him carefully on some night-time journey to Utopia. As Jonathan looked up, tracing the pole star from the plough, he knew his father didn’t know North from South and that a map would never be of use to him.
Towards one o’clock in the morning, Jocelyn and Jonathan were still awake. Jocelyn was still reading, skipping the occasional page to get to the end of the book. She had forgotten to switch the burglar alarm on, had remembered at page 250, but had been to tired to get up. Jonathan was lying awake, looking out of his window, suffering from a combination of insomnia and excitement over whether there was still a chance of getting the job. He would stare outside until the warehouses on the hills in front of the house became visible, silhouettes against the morning sky.
By twelve-thirty, Leymann was asleep.
Next door, Mr. Atkinson pressed his spectacles to his eye sockets and peered at the sports’ pages. It had been a quiet day and there was no cash in the box he kept by the kitchen sink. Shaking his head at the coverage of a football match, he turned to an advertisement for a satellite television dish.
***
The radio began to buzz at seven. Leymann jumped out of the bed and turned it off just before the final news headline about an indefinite, nation-wide social security strike. Leymann began to wonder why he had got out of bed so exuberantly. It was going to be a horrible day. But at least he had the courage to fight it.
Jocelyn lazed about in bed. She didn’t need an alarm, progress in her career had allowed her lie-ins. She remembered how at boarding school her greatest treat came on a Sunday, when she was able to stay in bed till seven. By her late teens, she had loved to get up early, there had been so much to get up for. Boys, tennis lessons, accountancy courses, all these things and so many more, made for a regular daily stride to the left of the mattress. And now she had the time to sleep late, she couldn’t enjoy sleep properly. Every night was restless. She could never remember her dreams.
Jonathan was back at the payphone waiting for the call. The counsellor had said it would be either yesterday or today. The sun had only risen half an hour ago and he shivered in the booth as he ate half a chocolate bar. Path after path had closed, gates had been shut, every step seemed accompanied by an aggressive murmur. He felt that if there was no phonecall now, he would kill himself but he knew he never could.
“Hello, is that Jonathan?” Jocelyn said, still lying in bed, now with a stick of chewing-gum enveloping her tongue.
“Yes…yes…that’s me.”
“Well? Are you the seeker?” asked Jocelyn impatiently, catching sight of a magazine about food on her side-table.
“Yes.”
“You don’t say very much, I hope you’re better than you sound,” Jocelyn spoke louder and more sternly as she heard an aborted interruption, “be at the office by five, this afternoon. That give you enough time? Not sure where you are exactly, but that’s when you’ve got be down here, okay?”
Jonathan found some words: “The address is on the card, right?” But Jocelyn had already hung up. Jonathan was shaking. A light fall of sleet blew from the West as he raised his knuckles to his nose. He had been conscious of his accent on the phone. The woman who rang sounded like a television announcer raising her vowels out of proportion to her consonants. Green turned to white as Jonathan gazed over fields, hills and junk yards, wondering how he’d afford the trip to London. Dick Whittington seemed the only lasting legend from his childhood, not counting Disney films. It was the greatest of dreamy stories, coming from nowhere and making it big in the City.
It’s only a short walk from Highgate Hill, where Whittington turned away and back, to Archway Bridge, suicide bridge. In a few hours, Jonathan, curious and shaven, would weigh up his chances. He’d never see the Bridge, only the seductive view. He knew then that the towers of steel and glass would never let him down.
The first hour of Jonathan’s first visit to London would be spent in a cell. He reflected on his travels, that hour, the walking leg of the trip, the coach leg of the trip, the train leg of the trip. He remembered his mother’s eyes, tearful, angry and as desolate as everything she had ever known in Loddington. He hadn’t wanted to ask his parents for train money. He thought he’s be lucky. He thought his life was now part of a lottery accumulator. After all, he never bought lottery tickets because everyone in Loddington knew the lottery was scammed the poor. Couldn’t this be a way of winning without a ticket?
Leymann ate a piece of burnt toast, covered in a thick layer of gelatinous strawberry jam. The gun shop, downstairs, was always the first shop to open on the street. Innocent-looking men in their twenties, dressed in battle-fatigues vied for first-entry and supremacy. Whose Nazi badge was biggest? Whose boots were comfiest? Leymann looked at his brother’s guitar-case on the dining-table as he flicked through his record collection. “Keep Music Alive” it said in a yellow circle.
“Keep Ammunition Live. The spray-can is mightier than the sword but not mightier than the handgun.” Jonathan read the graffiti on the smoky windows of a train-carriage.
Jocelyn was laughing, a shrill emanation that beat like a toy tambourine. She was watching breakfast television and was laughing at what she thought must be the jokes, as cottage cheese and toast crumbs dropped from her mouth. She wiped it on her dressing gown sleeve and meandered up the stairs to get dressed. Within an hour she was at her office, co-ordinating, organising, bulging with confidence. At the back of her mind sat a niggling worry, the trouble over Leymann. She would have to see him today—she wanted to—and tell him about his redundancy. Until then, Leymann could be measuring up the flats. The company had bought part of a council estate and after a lot of trouble vacating most of it there was now just one flat to discharge. The whole estate was now inoperable what with its severed utility supply and dangerous structural flaws. “Well, Leymann might learn at least something from this business before he leaves,” Jocelyn thought, “we offered everyone a fair price.”
As she looked into the dressing-table mirror and down at a framed photograph of Laura, her eldest daughter, she thought about how similar Leymann was to a little child.
Just a month ago, Property Developments PLC had run smoothly and profitably. Jocelyn would find a property, using her contacts at London’s many estate agencies and council housing departments. Her lawyers, burly, young law graduates with low fees, would take care of the contracts and then it was up to Leymann to handle the tenants and squatters. Leymann accomplished the task with great confidence. He had never been privately educated but had somehow picked up the tough, brash skills required to show who was boss. Leymann had bloomed in the face of inconvenient tenant-trouble. Even in co-ordinating architects, builders and plumbers he was quick-witted and composed.
The other fifteen or so staff had all looked up to him. He seemed to know more than anyone about it all. It was all the more surprising, then, that he of all people should be undergoing a mental crisis. He was the dependable anchorman, not a junior employee to be distressed about. But because Jocelyn cared, more than she admitted to herself, she felt a twinge of guilt about sending him on tough assignments.
Leymann put a record by Mahler on the turntable, wondering whether the Sex Pistols wasn’t really what he wanted to hear. Within ten minutes he was out of the door and back on the trundling bus, watching the same branches, now no longer stretched out but curled into fists. The graffiti, too, had changed, now no longer indecipherable. Leymann felt stronger, as if this day could be beaten into shape, like a slab of red hot iron.
Jonathan had been sitting idly looking at the other passengers, mostly influenza-ridden commuters sniffling their way to London. Jonathan thought about his mother as he looked at the woman in front of him, offering the teat of a milk bottle to a baby in her arms. But within a few minutes of jumping on board an inspector caught him. As a hand had touched his right shoulder, he thought of his friends in Loddington. One in particular shoplifted for a different reason to the others or appeared to. He seemed to actually have a love-hate relationship to the hand of conviction. A grabbing palm on a shoulder could send the same kind of spine-tingling fear as plunging on a roller-coaster.
It had been pointless arguing and Jonathan had resigned himself to an uneasy pilgrimage to North Holloway, from where he was taken to Highgate police station.
He was eventually let out with a warning. The constable wasn’t as terrible as he feared. ‘Let’s give it another try,’ Jonathan said to himself as he went down the stone stairs of the police station, shielding his eyes in the harsh North London sunlight.
Jocelyn wasn’t at the office when Leymann arrived. As he brushed past the glass entry door, he said hello to Jenny, the receptionist. Before today’s visit, he had to deal with a host of development contracts and reports. It would take him about seven hours, with only a short break for coffee.
***
Jonathan resumed his journey, cursing himself for not spending twenty pence on a paper. When the train finally stopped, he had counted hundreds of pylons.
Jocelyn sweated. Nervous about meeting Leymann, she now felt guilty. She wanted to see his face and yet she had interrupted her journey to work, parking her car outside a run-down office block. She procrastinated over a light blue attaché case, using her mobile phone. It was about four in the afternoon that she broke for a round of smoked salmon sandwiches. Phonecalls from her ex had compounded her problems over Leymann. Every time she heard from him, she felt an uncomfortable ache in her stomach.
It wasn’t long before Leymann’s cool imitation of nonchalance faded away. As he looked through the papers, spotting a piece about a family without a gas supply, he felt desperate. The message from Jocelyn had been like a sentence. One more day in hell. She wouldn’t see him till six, this evening. He was expected to finish off today’s work by then. As he passed a young man studying his underground ticket beside the reception desk, Leymann’s pack of paper handkerchiefs fell from his pocket.
“Your handkerchief, sir,” said Jonathan, raising his eyes like those of a pre-Raphaelite angel.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” Leymann answered, surprised by the courtesy. Leymann had a patronising affection for Northern accents. His ex-wife was from Yorkshire and though saddened by thoughts of her, he loved it when he recognised the pronunciation.
The glass front door and the wall-to-wall carpeting of the reception area impressed Jonathan. As he stepped forward he knew that fawning was mandatory, that it didn’t matter who it was, even the subordinate-looking man who dropped his pack of handkerchiefs, they were all target-voter. If he was to get on in the company, he knew he had to unlearn the difference between the genuine and the dishonest, whether while offering sentiment or receiving it.
Inside, an anger at the clerks around him smouldered. The diamanté on a woman’s dress or a man’s gold tie-pin was all it took to catch. But Jonathan was as quick to extinguish any flames.
When Jocelyn had wrapped up the leftover crumbs of bread and salmon in polythene, she remembered Jonathan. The Seeker Scheme involved the possibility of government inspectors’ visits so Jonathan would have to be employed, or look as if he was, if the company was to enjoy the tax advantages. With no vacancy to fill, or job for him to do, Jocelyn would have to figure something out. She put the cling-film parcel into the glove compartment and realised she had long decided she was too tired to go to work today. Her eyes felt sticky, last night’s unwashed mascara clung to her eyelashes like monkeys on branches.
Reports and contracts completed, Leymann cleared out of the office. He escaped the confines of an ozone-filled underground train, warm air permeating his brown suit, and climbed to street-level. His heart pounded dangerously hard as he stood to catch his breath. The stairs had shaken him up enough to worry him. Looking around the effervescent thoroughfare, he breathed in heavily.
“Jonathan?” asked the frail-looking receptionist. She was only about twenty-six, but lines underscored her eyes and her wispy blonde hair made her face look thin and square. She looked at Jonathan sympathetically. He was wearing a light blue suit of his brother’s that had been bought from a discount-store in Loddington. When matched with a thin, short white shirt and over-slim red tie Jonathan looked like someone poor, dressed for a magistrates’ dock. The tie was crooked and the shirt looked grey. The suit hung badly with its bulging pockets. This was what Jenny noticed about Jonathan.
As an incoming cloud obscured the midday sun, Jocelyn entered a pub. “Whiskey and soda,” she said at the bar, wondering about the effects of sun-up alcohol on her diet. The landlady, a strong-looking woman with long black hair, listlessly reached up and pressed the glass to the tip. It was only a minute later that Jocelyn returned for a refill.
Leymann knocked, his knuckles in a state of cold shock as they hammered the wooden boards. After a few minutes, he heard the sound of someone descending stairs. He could only just hear it what with the noise of hurtling traffic saturating the air. The footsteps were slow, like a bag of potatoes balancing and then plunging down a staircase. A man of about seventy moved the door a little and peered out at him. He was wearing a rare pair of government spectacles, one lens cracked as if drawn on by a cartoonist.
“Yes? If you’re from the developers, the answer is no! We’re sitting here until they demolish it. It’s our home—two hundred and fifty of us—and we’d rather be eaten alive than by two dozen bulldozers than yield to you.” He said it slowly, giving Leymann time to looking him up and down. Leymann’s face fell as two elderly women also arrived to join him by the door.
“But this isn’t your property, you’re stealing,” said Leymann, at first shouting and then becoming more calm. He was surprised at the figure of 250. Other developers must be vying for space here, he thought. He also couldn’t tell how his words were being taken. He fell silent
“Not our property? Nonsense, I’m British and this is Britain. This is my country,” he paused, “you know you can’t go buying and selling land just so rich foreigners can buy luxury apartments.” Leymann didn’t expect the man to have enough energy to say a word, let alone a sentence. This outburst, along with the two nodding ladies was disconcerting. Leymann felt the thud of his heart again.
“Gerrof! Young upstart”, said one of the women. That was all it took for Leymann to retreat and retrace his footsteps, glancing at the pieces of timber strewn around the gardens. Once he might have persevered. Beside a slat-less fence a brightly coloured estate agents’ board proclaimed ‘SOLD.’
“It’s a very friendly office. And if you don’t cross anyone they’ll be more than generous to help you out,” said the receptionist, stuttering a little.
“Does that mean I’ve got the job?” asked Jonathan timidly.
“I presume so. Miss Hanwick called in this morning, but she’s always very busy,” Jenny looked at a note distractedly, “here it is. Yes, you start today.” Jonathan began to think about where he would stay tonight.
Jocelyn Hanwick was on her sixth drink and was tipsy. She had never done this before. As she sipped and gurgled, her mind turned to Malcolm Benson, private investigator, a man in his early thirties with ubiquitous tanned, rippling muscles. He had stormed through the pages of last night’s 400 page book. Jocelyn’s posture had sagged. There was No one in the pub apart from the landlady and Jocelyn watched her in case she was looking at her as she wiped down the bar. The landlady wasn’t looking. She sat down, cigarette in one hand, magazine in the other. Jocelyn thought of Leymann and the way his trousers hung. She brimmed with confidence now. She felt she was in a position to tell him that she wanted to love him, to spend time with him. Rubbing the pockmarked wooden table with her red-tipped fingers, she straightened her collar-less blouse over her shoulders and raised her hair a little with a right palm. Jocelyn’s unbalanced walk presaged a stumble into her car.
Leymann began to think about brandy. Once again, he was looking at graffiti, this time on the lower deck of a bus. He wondered about whether the bus driver’s presence made graffiti-artists scared, resulting in strange lines and shapes instead of readable epithets. Upper decks used always to have something readable, even if it was only “John 4 Jane” when he was at school.
He walked from the bus-stop to the pub in a kind of daze, opening the door with an uneven twist of the wrist. He was nervous and cold. The listless bartender with the long, black hair was never very pleased when a customer arrived. The agony pages of a cheap women’s magazine held her interest much more than the people who walked around the surrounding streets or even those who caught her gaze.
It wasn’t long before Jonathan, jacket-less and sleeves rolled up, was engaged in his first pursuit for the company. The subtleties involved in fashioning ready-to-drink coffee seemed tedious. Jenny, the receptionist, who had seemed somewhat cold, was now quite emotional when she spoke about teaspoon numbers and water volumes. She reeled off the figures solemnly like a scientist announcing exponents. Jonathan listened like a new boy in a new class, feeling gradually more indifferent…
As he crossed the artificial corridors, by-products of open-plan partitions, No one looked at him. He felt wounded as he laid the polystyrene cups on their crowded desks. He found it more tiresome than challenging to remember whether cups were to be black, white, sugared or unsweetened.
Leymann gulped down the brandy and looked at his watch, delaying his trip to the family with no gas. He glanced at the Constable on the pub wall and then at the window where, though a black micro-blind, a stream of white light shone, like in a refrigerator. The walls were covered with paintings by nineteenth century artists, careless photographic reproductions scarred by layers of nicotine and tar. There were no other customers here.
Jensen leant back on his leather chair. The weather on Wilshire Boulevard was, as it had been all week and all year, sunny and bright. From his office he could see the traffic. He sucked at a generic-brand cigarette and glanced out again. Police officers had stopped a black man in a car. Hearing an exhaust backfire and interpreting it as a gunshot, Jensen flinched, then relaxed sufficiently to say to himself: “Ah! This could only be America!”
His office was always cool and clean. Its pink walls offered a perpetually rosy outlook on life, as long as he was at work. This morning, he had been downtown. The area always made him feel uneasy. From the milling office workers of Pershing Square, it was only a wrong turn before the unleaded motorcar vapour became thicker and blacks and Latinos seemed to be on every avenue. At first sight, they looked relaxed and worn out, their bums leaning on car bonnets or flaking walls, their limbs like unused machinery. But these men had tinted diamonds for eyes and they shone at passing motorists like warning signs. For all their easy-going deportment, a television news education made them look dangerous and strong.
Jocelyn was about to buy Jensen’s company. Property Redevelopment Inc. was an international concern and Jocelyn always wondered why expensive homes were confined to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades and Malibu. She didn’t know very much about Los Angeles, but did believe Jensen’s company had the potential to expand Eastwards.
As she sifted through the contracts and deeds, she remembered her honeymoon, her first taste of the easygoing West Coast. Although her schooling had been expensive, her parents had never been able to afford the far flung summer destinations of her peers. Her honeymoon memories were marred by the presence of her husband. His ever-flowing words, packed with patronising nuances, had hurt her every kilometre of the freeways. But it had been her first time in the state of love and California. Jocelyn grimaced and looked out of her windscreen, wondering why she did all her work in the car. Was she really scared of her affections for Leymann?
A meeting, presided over by a deputy, was in progress in the bowels of Property Developments PLC. Jonathan sat still, looking at the plastic buttons of a beige phone. He wanted to call his mother. Her worried face had terrified him before he left. She always had a sad, damp look about her but, this morning, she looked as if she was on the edge. Jonathan was very close to her and, though there was no particular tragedy to set her apart from most mothers in Loddington, she seemed to have been consigned a melancholy hand. He pitied her.
Leymann decided he was ready. He got up with the same exuberance he had that morning, striding out of the pub with brandy-induced confidence. “One of the greatest acts of this party is to have given the chance to millions of people to buy their own council homes,” he remembered Jocelyn’s words. He wondered about Jocelyn’s thoughts now. Leymann, who felt weary of missing her, thought up a response: “It’s better than that, one day soon we’ll own them.”
“You bastards! We can’t even warm our baby’s milk bottle. Sell off your fucking property, it’s our fucking gas. What the fuck do you think you’ve been doing?” These were the friendly words that greeted Leymann. Bargaining would be difficult, he surmised.
“Er, I’m not from the gas company. I’m actually from Property Developments PLC. I’m afraid that we actually own your house, not you,” Leymann said softly before an eight-year-old boy came out and kicked him in the shins and then punched him a few times, hard and sharp. A few seconds passed. The boy, screaming and waving a Stanley knife madly in the air, was taken back in by his father. The door slammed shut, leaving Leymann stabbed in a heap outside, pools of dark blood gathering on the concrete slab that made up the pavement. In previous years, it was always Leymann, the most fearless in the office that could handle these situations. “Get a strongman?”
“No, that’s okay, I’ll handle it,” Leymann would reply saving the company money and often, time. Leymann sometimes decided to deal with even the more dangerous cases. But, now, something had made his weak and easy to defeat.
Jonathan’s eyes converged on the phone. He was fidgety about using it: he remembered the receptionist’s monologue, “if you don’t cross anyone.”
Jensen’s office was in a nice part of town. The air was fresher, cleaned by the rolling Pacific nearby. But there was always a perceived threat of violence. He didn’t even feel safe on the freeway he used to get to work. But the Los Angeles Jensen lived in was actually safer than he knew. Freeways bypassed areas that were less safe, gated communities disqualified the insolvent. He chuckled as he recalled a humorous bumper-sticker: “Don’t shoot, I’m reloading.”
“Mum,” said Jonathan.
“Jonathan, where are you? Did everything go well?” asked his mother.
“Yeah, they gave me the job.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“Yes, but the police,” Jonathan was interrupted by a tallish man of about the same age. His moustache was straight and his grey eyes glared. As he jammed the receiver back into its cradle with a light pressure on thumb and finger, he tipped a cup of sweet, black coffee onto Jonathan’s suit. It had been a mistake. The man’s stringency dissipated as he looked at Jonathan as if to say sorry. In silence, he went back to his meeting, papers in hand.
“Jensen, how are you?” Jocelyn asked.
“I’m fine, baby, how are tricks with you?” Jensen’s Midwest rising timbre was hard to lose.
“Not too bad. I called to ask about the account number.”
“Okay, darling, hang on,” Jensen rustled some paper and tapped at his keyboard casting his digits. “So, when you coming around? LA misses you, Josie.”
Jocelyn had always hated diminutives. Jensen was one of the few friends of her husband’s that she talked to and he was thoroughly dislikeable.
“Come on, Josie, I miss you. You’re still not attached, are you?” Jensen asked.
“Actually, there is someone. It looks as if I finally am. A guy called Leymann…” Jocelyn realised that she mentioned his name not only to shake off Jensen but also with a degree of wishful thinking.
“Yes, Leymann,” she repeated.
Leymann crawled along the pavement, his arms clutching his stomach bruises. Exerting slow pressure on his right foot, he made his way to a payphone. Using all his energy, he raised himself and pulled the heavy door open. As he lent across a horizontal shelf of black painted metal, he looked at the digital display, his nostrils flaring in the stench of urine and stale cigarette-smoke. When he bent his arm sufficiently to pick up the receiver, he glanced at his reflection: a blood-stained, grey face with black marks for eyes returned his gaze.
Jonathan wiped his suit off with a piece of tissue and began to worry. He wasn’t so agitated about the stains on his brother’s suit. What troubled him was the effect on his mother of a truncated telephone call. Jonathan was so astonished when his mother’s voice faded away that he couldn’t remember whether he had mentioned his fracas with the police. He didn’t want to remember that he had. Why had he to confide in someone about his journey, let alone his mother? The one piece of advice she had drilled into him from an early age was never to get involved with the police. Even when he once left his wallet in a corner of Loddington, she had reprimanded him for thinking of going to the station. Jonathan thought her actions odd—an unfailing trust and respect for the boys in black was not untypical in Loddington.
Jocelyn mused upon her conversation with Jensen. She realised that now was the time to see Leymann.
Jensen looked out of the window again. Dreamily, he got up and left his office, locking his office door.
“I’ve got to get my car fixed,” he said to the smiling, blonde receptionist who jumpily put her nail-file away in a drawer of her desk. Her plastic jaws expanded a little as her neck contracted with a nod.
Jensen was soon in his Japanese car, depressing the electric window button. On the passenger seat was a pension folder detailing all the payments he’d made over the years. At forty, Jensen would be part of a new breed of retired men and women. He’d be able to spend his hours lolling about at the inherited home in Connecticut or settle down somewhere safer like San Francisco or Santa Barbara. The lump sum ratified a third option which often played on his mind. He harboured dreams of going to Mexico for life of easy money and easy sex, where his money would go further than in America. He might not have seen anything of Mexico except Acapulco but emigration appealed to him.
Both the ear-piece and mouthpiece had been removed from the telephone. Leymann let out a low-volume grunt and fell onto the concrete floor, pushing the door ajar.