Utterly Monkey. Nick Laird

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      ‘Course I can. The whole thing’ll be forgotten,’ Geordie countered, referring to the second half. ‘They’ve bigger fish to fry. It’s getting to be time for the wild men again.’ Geordie’s eyes opened wider when he said wild. Something excited his face.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Everything’s starting up again. Everyone’s fed up with waiting for something to happen.’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘You know, people in the know with the right sympathies. And semtex, and guns, all that. Apparently. That’s what people are saying. Around the town anyway.’

      Danny read the Belfast Telegraph and the Mid-Ulster Mail online but was more concerned with stories about five-legged lambs being born in Magherafelt or poetry competitions won by arthritic eighty-six-year-olds than politics. He watched the news and watched the breakdown of the Executive but just thought it more posturing and gamesmanship. Danny had a sense that there was no way back into the Troubles. How could people go back to that? He thought every political postponement and disagreement was just another stepping stone, slightly submerged or slime-slippy perhaps, but the only way across the river. Danny’d kind of assumed it was all over bar the shouting, and the occasional shooting.

      ‘I meant to tell you. I met a guy on the boat on the way over. Mrs McAleece’s nephew.’

      ‘Who’s that?’

      ‘One of the dinner ladies at the primary school. You know. The one with the big wide face like a satellite dish and hands like shovels.’

      ‘What’s he called?’

      ‘Ian McAleece.’

      ‘I think I remember her. She looked like Nanny from Count Duckula. Was he all right?’

      ‘Yeah, all right.’

      Geordie had produced another picture frame, this one silver, from under the pile of books by the side of the sofa. The same blonde girl, this time with her hair up, wearing heavy framed black glasses, was sitting on a wooden bench holding a glass of wine. She looked beautiful, and sad.

      ‘Put that back mate. I’ve sorted all her stuff out and you’re messing it up.’

      There were several discreet piles of her stuff collected round the flat: monuments to the death of something. A pile of clothes sat neatly folded on the chair in Danny’s bedroom. Eight CD boxes sat separated from the main pile on the shelves by the living room window. Two columns of novels leant against each side of the sofa like bookends, and three videos and a couple of DVDs sat on top of the TV. Separation, Danny was learning, involves a great deal of separating. He felt the dead weight of failure settle on his chest.

      

      ‘Listen, Geordie, you want me to ring you a cab? Where are you staying?’

      ‘Well, actually Dan, I was hoping I could stay here.’ Danny managed to keep his smile from slipping down into his shoes. ‘Just for a night or two, ‘til I get myself sorted. I was hoping to just kip on the sofa.’

      Danny’s smile increased its wattage. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem. Stay here. I have to get up though and head to work tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ve spare keys for the house.’ Danny knew that two sets of keys, one of which had recently been attached by a silver chain to Olivia’s pink leather purse, were in the drawer under the coffee table about a foot in front of them.

      ‘Sure if you leave me yours, I can get a set cut.’

      ‘I could do I suppose. I’m not sure if you can though. One of them’s a security key or something. You need a letter from the managing agent.’

      ‘Well, if I can’t I’ll just make sure I’m here when you come back.’

      ‘Yeah, okay then. Sure.’

      Geordie leant down and produced a lump of hash about the size of a bar of hotel soap from his rucksack. Danny watched him surreptitiously as he deftly skinned up, and passed the spliff to Dan to spark. Soon they both turned motionless, glassy-eyed as fish.

      When the third spliff came round, Danny had lit a cigarette which he passed to Geordie to smoke when he smoked the joint. It was intimate and odd, all this. But not unworkable, Danny thought, this might be all right, this might even be fun.

      The evening was ending. Danny, feeling too trashed to be anything but at ease with Geordie staying over, and too trashed to clear a space on the floor of the boxroom, locked the front door and tossed Geordie a sleeping bag, bulbous in its carry-sac, and a lank pillow without a cover. In his bedroom he locked his laptop and his diary into a drawer in his desk and climbed messily, many-limbed, into bed.

       THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004

      My office worker’s collar turned unselfconsciously

      up…I return home…feeling a slight, confused concern that I may have lost for ever both my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.

      Fernando Pessoa

      A minute after waking, Danny padded into his shower. His mornings were efficient. He dressed in beige cords, a blue shirt that he rubbed at for a bit with an iron that leaked and was only ever tepid, and strapped his black cycle helmet on his wet hair. His leather satchel slung over his shoulder, he lifted his bike off the hook on the garden wall and set off through the smouldering traffic to work.

      Geordie shifted from facing the back of the sofa to facing the room. He farted a slow crescendo and went back to sleep.

      Danny locked his bike in the underground car park and walked through the office courtyard to a side door into his building. Danny worked at Monks & Turner, a Magic Circle law firm. Which meant that his firm was, supposedly, one of the five best in the country. It was certainly one of the biggest. It felt to Danny like just another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it. He had attended Ballyglass Nursery, Primary and High School and had done pretty much everything right. He was a gaunt truthful child and his teachers had been surprised, and a little perturbed, when they realized that he wanted to know as much as he could. His mother still rang to tell him that one of his old teachers had been in the office telling her how they kept his essays to read out to their classes. He never got less than an A and as he got older it began to seem more and more important not to. It seemed that every A raised the tightrope he was walking on a little higher, so that his fall would be even greater when it came. And then, suddenly, he was at the other end and in university.

      His school had filled out his application for Cambridge and he’d signed it. He’d decided to choose history for a degree. There was so much of it. He’d gone along and been interviewed by a large Australian woman, covered in cream drapes like a dustsheeted wardrobe, and a neat little ginger Englishman. Danny was accepted, worked, thrived, and as he’d promised his father, applied to law firms for a job after graduation. Monks & Turner was the first interview and when they accepted him, he’d cancelled the others. Two years of law school in Tottenham Court Road, living above a Perfect Fried Chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, saw city life settle down on him like smog. He became a first-class Londoner.

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