Dying for Millions (2 page)

I considered. To me he'd always been just Andy, someone to tease and teach alternately. My father, who coached me at cricket, had always refused to pass on to Andy the secrets of good slow bowling, on the grounds that he was too idle to learn, so it was from me that Andy had acquired a leg-break so devilish that Warwickshire had selected him for the Colts team. They'd been talking about apprenticeships and professional contracts before he whizzed off to Spain at the age of seventeen. Since the family had insisted that he should become a plumber, I suppose it was his way of cutting a Gordian knot.

‘Don't
you
think he's
gorgeous
?' she prompted me, irate.

‘But he's my cousin, you see,' I said inadequately.

‘
You're
his
cousin
?' Her disbelief was so exquisitely unflattering I couldn't help laughing. ‘But what are you doing – I mean—'

‘What am I doing being a college lecturer when he's doing something so very much more exciting? That's how it is, in real life.'

‘But shouldn't you – you know, be working for him?'

I shook my head, laughing. ‘Oh, Karen – Andy's got everything! How could
I
possibly do anything to help
him
?' If anyone needed help, it was clearly me. I was kneeling on my living room floor, trying to match sets of mud-stained sheets of paper. One, which contained well-documented allegations of racist and sexist behaviour by a well-known city firm of solicitors, bore a large thumb-print which might well have been Andy's. I put it to one side; clearly I'd need to talk to my boss about the contents, and discuss them at length with the student, which would mean yet another lunch-hour consumed by college business. I was beginning to see this job in terms of missed meal-breaks; indeed, missed meals. I had to make my visits at times convenient to the employers but also without disrupting any of my own classes. Since the number of hours a week all the college staff were required to teach had suddenly and mysteriously gone up by ten per cent, this made balancing the two factors extremely tricky unless I was prepared to discount my own needs entirely. I certainly couldn't have done it at all without a car, a form of transport I'd managed to eschew for several years, preferring a combination of cycle and public transport. But I'd been forced to make a virtue of necessity.

Nine-thirty: time to gather the whole lot up. There didn't seem to be anything missing.

The doorbell rang.

It took me longer to struggle to my feet than I liked. My right knee, affronted by an injury last Easter, occasionally chose to lock if it thought I was maltreating it, and it was beginning to regard sitting on the floor with disfavour. The bell rang again.

‘Andy! Why didn't you let yourself in?' He usually rang and unlocked the door at the same time.

‘Thought you'd got company.' He gestured: his thumb curled towards my car.

‘My new toy,' I said proudly.

He stepped past me to dump an overnight case in the hall, and then turned. ‘Show me.'

Huddling against the cold night air, I led the way down the drive. I'd extolled the virtues of half the key features when I dwindled to a halt; this was a man who drove a BMW when he wasn't borrowing his wife's Mercedes.

‘Why did you buy this model?' he asked.

I'd have been tempted, with any other multi-millionaire, to snap that it was because I was bored with my Rolls. But to Andy I told the truth. ‘D'you remember Aggie?' I began.

‘You don't forget the Aggies of this world,' he said. ‘I've brought her some genuine Devon clotted cream: I'll take it round in a minute.'

‘Well, Aggie's daughter had just bought it. Then she won a better model in a competition – she wins things all the time, holidays, hampers, and this is the second time she's won a car – so I bought it from her.'

He nodded as if impressed.

‘I thought we'd take it to the restaurant,' I said. ‘Less obtrusive than that thing of yours.'

‘Tobe's,' he said.

‘Tobe's,' I agreed. ‘Why not your own?'

‘Had a bit of a scrape,' he said. ‘How long's that house been empty?'

I blinked at the snub; it was unlike Andy to be edgy. ‘The one opposite? Six months or so. They cut their losses and left. Aggie reckons someone's going to rent it. The couple in the next house'll be glad of some company – they're pretty frail … Are you all right?'

‘Feeling the cold in these northern climes.' He grinned reassuringly. ‘Let's go back in. Then I'll have a pee and we'll go and eat.'

The restaurant wasn't licensed so I fished a four-pack of lager out from the pantry. Andy eyed it. ‘Why don't I drive your car so you can drink?'

‘You're off booze?'

‘For a bit. Until I – for a bit.'

I looked at him sharply, but he had already picked up his case and was heading towards his bedroom.

It took him a few minutes to deliver the cream to my next-door neighbour and then we set off. He was in vegetarian mode again, after a summer as a carnivore. I didn't comment: after a stint working at the African hospital financed by his trust fund, he often ate frugally. He wasn't ostentatious about it, or about giving up alcohol, which he also did from time to time – no one could ever tell from his behaviour at parties that he wasn't genuinely tipsy on nothing stronger than mineral water.

‘Channa's excellent,' he said, gesturing with a piece of garlic nan.

‘So's my biryani,' I replied, spearing a prawn.

We both smiled at Ahmed, the waiter, who had come not to be sycophantic but to enquire, as he always did, how we were getting on. It was my approval, not Andy's, he was seeking; I was a valued regular, a customer long before the take-away spawned the restaurant, and Andy was valuable as a friend of mine, not as an international megastar – even if he recognised him as such. Ahmed smiled on us almost equally and withdrew. He soon returned with a jug of water.

‘You forgot to ask, dear,' he said.

‘I knew I wouldn't need to, Ahmed,' I said.

He winked, and went off to seat some new customers.

Andy doodled on the tablecloth with his index finger. ‘I'm giving it up, Sophie. Music. Well, the music business.'

‘Permanently? I thought you said something about a sabbatical—'

‘Don't want to make too much of a big deal over this gig. Too bloody emotional as it is, the last gig in a tour. Hope Ruth'll be well enough to come up.' He broke some nan, scooped a mouthful of dhal. ‘You know, for the party afterwards – you'll be there?'

‘Try and keep me away. Shall I bring someone?' Chris, the policeman with whom I had an on-off relationship, might be up from Bramshill for the weekend.

‘Thought you might like to see who you could pull. There's always Duck.'

Duck might be one of the best lighting engineers in Europe but he had a walk like Lady Thatcher's and halitosised for England.

‘Gee, thanks.' Time to change the subject: he'd give me a fistful of passes anyway. Perhaps I could give Karen one – and her mother. I topped up my lager. ‘Mwandara's got to you, has it?'

‘Not just the hospital – the whole of the country. Well, the Third World in general, to be honest. Jesus, Sophie – the waste, the poverty, the corruption, the sheer indifference … I have to do something.' All the laughlines had solidified into frustrated anger.

I nodded; I'd seen it coming. ‘Aren't you more use to Mwandara as a pop star attracting attention and funds than as just another pair of hands – unskilled hands at that?'

‘I shan't be spending any more time there. Not as a field worker, anyway. UNICEF have asked me to become a goodwill ambassador. Yes, despite my past! Don't forget – I've been squeaky-clean for years now.' He smiled ironically, but he had reason to be proud of himself. He'd probably succumbed to all the temptations going, and invented a few more along the way, but he'd come through it all and if he looked back he never showed it, even to me. He'd gone further, been prominent in campaigns against drugs ever since he'd dried out. Some people said he was like a younger Cliff Richard in zealousness – though without the religious bit, I was relieved to say. His crusading image didn't fit his music: once a violent, primitive rock – though always, as Karen's mother had rightly observed, with an accessible melody – and nowadays a much more sophisticated affair, with lots of African rhythms. Nelson Mandela was known to be a fan, and had attended the opening of the township cricket club which had asked Andy to be its Patron.

‘Will you miss it? The music, I mean?'

‘Some of it. The roar of the grease-paint, the smell of the crowd … Same as you'd miss teaching, I suppose.' Suddenly he yawned, showing all those expensively capped teeth. ‘No, no coffee for me, thanks. Sophie?'

‘Sophie doesn't drink it at this time of night,' said Ahmed paternally, giving me the bill.

Andy was hurtling along imaginary roads on my exercise bike when I took a mug of tea into him the next morning. He was also singing along to the radio, sharing Robert Merrill's baritone part in the famous duet from Bizet's
Pearlfishers
; his voice was still pleasing, if huskier these days. He peered at the tea, as if suspicious, but grinned when he saw it was milkless.

I was about to apologise – I never seem to remember to put the milk in the fridge.

‘No, I prefer it like that. Remember that diet I was telling you about? It's best to avoid milk when you're on it. Don't know why – can't be bothered with the philosophy. Just know it works.'

He certainly looked well. He'd never been anything other than slender, apart from during his early twenties, when he was drinking as if he expected them to ration it. But now muscles showed finely under healthy skin. You certainly wouldn't have guessed he was just concluding a gruelling world tour.

I thought of my own body, dull-skinned and flabby after a jogging-less, knee-troubled couple of months, and made a note, when I wasn't late for work, to ask him more about his diet. It wouldn't be today, though. Before I got home, he'd be back to Devon and Ruth.

‘See you Friday, then? At the airport?'

He shook his head. ‘It'll be more like Saturday, and I'll get a taxi. I'll let myself in.'

‘Breakfast?'

He shook his head extravagantly.

‘Lemon tea at eleven?'

‘Some bloke's missing a good wife.'

‘Sexist bastard. Well, I'm off to earn my crust.'

He stopped pedalling and slipped off the bike. A sweaty hug, and a tiny kiss on the lips. That was the routine.

Taking the car into work always generated a mixture of guilt and frustration. I knew I was adding not just to city pollution levels but also to global warming, and I could see quite clearly the effect of extra cars – one-driver, no-passenger cars – on a grievously overloaded road system. Any day now the city would be gridlocked. But today I really needed the car to make another visit, this time to an airport – not Birmingham International, but West Midlands, a small-scale airport where I hoped to place some students. This meant heading out along the A38 via Spaghetti Junction. It was fortunate I had a class till ten: it would allow a little time for the roads to clear.

The motorways into the city were still clogged, but the outward routes, including the A38 Lichfield Road, were clear. There was a slight delay on the Tyburn Road, where a milk-float had somehow spilt its entire load, but eventually I picked up the road to the airport just after the turning for Minworth sewage works. In cold, wet weather like this, there was no smell to betray it; I wouldn't have taken bets on it after a long, hot summer, though.

It was surprisingly easy to get in. I'd expected security guards – but then, it was a public airport. I found my way to a small visitors' car park near the administration block. Mine was easily the smallest car, but I compensated by making it the most neatly parked. I brushed myself down, and headed for Reception.

In addition to the car, the new job had also called for a few changes in my wardrobe: gone were the days when I had merely to decide which pair of jeans to wear. I had had to lose street cred in order to gain credibility with employers. And, perhaps, there was a faint but enduring hope that one of them might one day realise how efficient and professional I was and head-hunt me from the wilting grove of Academe that was William Murdock. I still enjoyed the teaching, and all the pastoral work with the students, but a brief sojourn at another, better-endowed college, had made me realise the advantages of working in a pleasant environment.

Although the administrative block was a low and unimpressive building one grade up from a pre-fab, the doors opened – then shut – automatically, admitting me to a newly-decorated and clean foyer. I was greeted by a motherly middle-aged receptionist who appeared genuinely sorry when she told me that Mark Winfield, the Training Officer I'd come to see, was delayed in a meeting. She brought me current magazines and newly-made tea – with fresh milk – and settled me in a comfortable chair. I wallowed in the unexpected luxury of a break. I flicked through this month's
Cosmopolitan
: my horoscope promised a change in my fortunes by the end of the month and warned me not to let my independence discourage my partner. Partner, indeed! The nearest thing I had to a partner was Chris, now on some course which seemed likely to whizz him from his current rank of DCI to something way beyond superintendent in less than no time. And the higher he flew, the less likely we were to agree.

‘Ms Rivers?'

I jumped, but had the presence of mind to stand up and offer my hand. ‘Sophie, please.'

‘Mark Winfield,' said the young man, taking it and shaking it warmly. He was in a suit considerably flasher than mine, but his hair was well styled and his complexion lightly tanned. He was about thirty. ‘Now, how may I help you? Work experience, I think you said in your letter—'