Final Demand (3 page)

‘Don't close it,' she said. ‘There's nobody around.'

It was freezing. Her fingers fumbled as she unbuttoned her coat. It seemed to take ages. She pulled up her sweater and T-shirt; then she pushed up her bra around her throat.

A moment passed. ‘They do you proud,' he said, and turned away.

The concrete floor was stained, as if an ox had been slaughtered there. His face averted, the man blew his nose.

She readjusted her clothing and wrote him a cheque for the first instalment. He opened the car door for her.

‘My wife lost her hand,' he said.

Gales blew across the moors, those dark November days. Sheep were battered by the rain. Trees cracked and split, exposing their wounds. Natalie was adrift, an ice floe broken loose. Oh, her friends were sympathetic.
I never liked him
, they said.
Typical bloke
, they said,
afraid of commitment. You can do better than him
, they said. But they were preoccupied, flat-hunting in the evenings, absorbed by their own futures. Nobody wanted to go out any more, drinking and clubbing, staving off the darkness. They were becoming too old for that. They had found their own pockets of light and had disappeared into them, one by one. Even Farida, her closest ally at that time, was preoccupied by her wedding preparations.

Natalie returned at night to an empty flat she could no longer afford. Bills silted up behind the toaster; the landlord had left a message on her answerphone. Outside, whoops echoed from the multistorey car park. She missed Kieran, desperately. That a man is worthless, in the eyes of the world, fails to ease the pain. In fact it makes it keener. How could she have been such a fool?

And then, two weeks after Kieran's departure, she came
home to find the lights fused. Blundering around in the darkness, her lighter flickering, she suddenly burst into tears. She sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Where was her father, now she needed him? The last she had heard, he was living on a beach in Thailand, with a girl called Phoo Long. She was alone in the world, lost, her breasts exposed to men with handless wives.

Through the wall, a woman shrieked with laughter. Kieran knew about electrics; it was he who had found them this rotten flat in the first place. How she longed to hear his voice. He would come round and fix the lights. He would gaze at her, in a blaze of illumination, and realize what a mistake he had made.

Natalie found the piece of paper and dialled his number. A machine answered. It was a woman's voice.

‘
Hi. Angie and Kieran aren't at home but please leave a message . . .
'

Revenge, like love, is a driving force, blind to consequences. Like love, too, it is a form of madness. Looking back, later, Natalie realized that she was possessed by something beyond her control. She had done some wild things in the past, but nothing as bold as the plan that began to form in her head.

Maybe it was triggered by Stacey's doodlings . . . MRS S. WINDSOR . . . STACEY WINDSOR . . . the married names that existed in a dream, holograms of hope superimposed over a reality that lay beneath, stubbornly problematical. Natalie had done this herself, when she was a teenager.

She could remember the moment, however, when it all fell into place. They were huddled in the smokers' doorway, three of them, shifting like cattle in the cold. It was four o'clock and already dark. Up on the roof of the building, amongst the masts and satellite dishes, glowed the sign: NT: IT'S YOUR CALL. They stood there, smoking their way through seven minutes of wages. The top-floor windows were lit; those were the management offices and the corporate hospitality suites. Needless to say, none of them had been invited up there to nibble canapés.

They were talking about love, and for a while Natalie didn't listen. For the hundredth time, she was picturing Kieran and Angie in their love nest. He hadn't wasted any time, had he? How long had he been seeing her, on the sly? Had he been planning it for weeks? Natalie had met this Angie once in the pub; she was his friend Dexter's ex-wife, a mousy woman whose features Natalie could scarcely recall. Kieran had left no address, only a phone number. His new life existed in limbo, but the images were horribly real. Was he pinioning Angie against the kitchen units as she tried to dish up dinner? Was he nuzzling her ear, the way that made Natalie swoon, and sliding his hand between her thighs? The setting for these excruciating tableaux was, for some reason, a dated, soap-opera domesticity that was entirely alien to the life she and Kieran had shared. It pained her, to make it too real. Besides, try as she might, she couldn't picture Angie and Kieran together. She was not his type. One's successor, however, always gives one a jolt, it reveals the unknowableness of the man one had thought so familiar.

Natalie suddenly realized: it was for Angie's benefit that he had cleaned his teeth. In their three years together he had never once visited the dentist.

Belinda, the other smoker, was cross-questioning Farida about her impending wedding. The girls at work kept returning to the subject of Bashir, it fascinated them.

‘He might be a mass-murderer for all you know,' said Belinda. ‘How can you do it?'

‘It worked all right for my mum and dad,' said Farida. ‘I mean, marriage, it's all a matter of chance, isn't it?'

‘What about love?'

‘Love comes later,' said Farida. ‘You have to work at it. It's all a lottery anyway . . .'

Headlights swung across the car park; far away, Natalie heard the hum of traffic on the slip road that led to the motorway. The warehouses were bathed in a sodium glow. She had never seen a sign of life there but people must be working in those pointless places, just as she did.

‘It's all luck. You never really know what you're going to get, even if you think you know somebody.' Farida flicked her butt into the darkness. ‘My mum says it's like raw ingredients.'

Natalie inhaled a lungful of smoke. Something stirred in her brain.

‘. . . they don't mean anything till you start to cook them . . .'

Like the white dog, Natalie's earlier plan had long since disappeared. The one that replaced it was so staggeringly bold that it took her breath away.

She leaned against the doorway. She wanted to burst into laughter and grab the others.
Guess what I've just thought of!
She wanted to see their faces.

Why not give it a try? After all, she had nothing to lose.

The wind blew down from the moors. It blew, with it, the faint sound of sheep bleating. Such a flustered, female noise; so silly. They sounded more nervous than she did.

Back at her desk, Natalie remained calm. She told herself: it's just a game, just a lark. Casually, she downloaded the NT staff list. Bella in Personnel had opened the file for her. Natalie scrolled down the surnames and stopped at T. She gazed at it.

After all, she had made some stupid choices in the past. Why not try pot-luck this time? It seemed as good a way as any. And if it didn't work, nobody would be the loser. Nobody would even know.

‘Nat!'

She jumped. Beside her, through the partition, Farida burst into laughter.

‘Nat, come and look at this.'

On her screen was a woman's face.
Hi, I'm Tiffany. Come and lick me for a fiver!

‘Surely your tongue would stick to the screen.'

Natalie laughed. Suddenly, what she was doing struck her as ridiculous. Worse than that, as mad. Touching the Print key, she already felt like a criminal. The paper slid like a tongue out of the machine.

She only printed up the T page, of course. There were nineteen of them, of whom six were men.
Tring, Mr P.: Product Development, Room 812 . . . Talbot, Mr L.: Office Services . . .
She scanned the list as if the names would tell her something, as if she could learn some detail about these men simply by inspecting their initials. Few of them looked familiar; NT was a large organization, over two hundred people worked in the building and there was little fraternizing, not in that godforsaken place; after work everybody simply got the hell out of there.

She held the sheet. The room drained away from her, like waves retreating hissingly from the shore, and she sat there alone in the echoing space. She thought: I've done nothing yet. I need do nothing. Across the partition, Sioban told Farida: ‘They did it in his Datsun.'

Time passed. Natalie sat there. Her pile of envelopes remained unopened, but nobody noticed. Mrs Roe was in a meeting. At five thirty people started leaving for home.

‘Know that girl in Huddersfield, the one who was raped? My brother was at school with her. He threw her asthma inhaler out of the window.'

Rapes, murders . . . crime was in the air today. Natalie sat there, twisting the ring around her finger. It was the E-string from Damon's guitar, his Martin; before she had left that night she had sliced it off with his coke-cutting knife. Later she had plaited it into a ring, her small, erotic memento.

Natalie rallied. She thought: I've got nothing to lose. After all, I only have to look at the guys and see if any of them takes my fancy. Where's the harm in that? And if one of them delivered her from this, from the boredom and debt, the helplessness of it all, then who would care later what means had been used?

Natalie went outside. It was freezing. Hailstones bounced off the roofs of the cars. She thought: This time next year I'll be lying on a beach. This time next year I'll be free.

And how sweet that revenge would be.

NATALIE
,
WHO COULD
be kind to strangers, once helped an old man across the road. Afterwards she said: ‘Shame you can't see me, because I'm really pretty.'

She was stoned at the time; that excused her. But it was true. She was slim and freckled, with delicate shoulder blades that melted the heart. Her body was firm; she worked out, she took care of it. In those days, before she changed her appearance, her hair was tinted red – curly, wayward hair pinned up with butterfly clips. People could imagine her at school – bright and restless, up to mischief – for there was a vibrancy to her, she radiated energy; next to her voltage other people dimmed. This came from the simplest of sources: she was basically happy. She had sloughed off her past; she travelled through life singing loudly in her car, living for the moment. Kieran had thrown her off-balance, but what the hell. She would show him.

The next morning she woke in high spirits. Her plan energized her, as if she were starting a new job. No, it was better than that. She felt like an actress who, with beating heart, prepares to step on to the stage. That her co-stars were ignorant of the roles prepared for them made her already feel tenderly towards them. She had felt this in the past, when she had stepped into a club and pinpointed the man she was going to fuck that night. While he was still unaware of her intentions there would be a vulnerable look to him that she always found arousing.

She had wedged the bathroom window with newspaper but still a draught whistled through. She didn't care; soon she would be moving out. Down in the street, in front of the barricaded shop, two boys were draped over their bike handlebars. They looked like fellow conspirators.

She applied her war paint, gazing at her parted lips in the mirror. Like many attractive people, she took her beauty for granted. If she put her mind to it, she could get almost any man. This face, this body was her means of escape; this and her quick wits. This and her desire to screw everything she could out of NuLine. All her life she had lived in Leeds but she was destined for better things. This cramped, heavy, Victorian city was too small for her grand ambitions. Its recent attempts at sophistication in the city centre – pavement cafés, atria – were simply like an old lady dressing herself up in youthful clothes. Life throbbed more powerfully somewhere else – anywhere but here. All she needed was nerve.

Roz Lacock, a hefty girl with a good heart, was going on a sponsored bike ride across Cuba.

‘Want to pledge some money?' she asked, on the way to lunch.

‘I'm broke,' said Natalie.

‘Everybody says that.'

‘Yeah, but I'm
really
broke. I'm overdrawn two thousand quid, I owe Farida seventy pounds, I'm behind with the payments on my car—'

‘OK, OK . . .'

Roz moved away. Natalie stopped her. ‘Wait a sec.'

After lunch Natalie took the lift up to the eighth floor. Her heart beat faster. This building was no longer a dull and anonymous office block; with sharpened senses she noticed every detail – the fire exits, the sudden glimpse, through a window, of mist-dimmed moorland. She hadn't been up this high before. Overnight the building had become transformed, as a house does during a game of hide and seek. A woman with a plaster over her nose opened a door, looked out, and closed it again. Natalie walked along the corridor to room 812.

‘Come in,' said P. Tring (Product Development).

The strip light shone on his bald head. His desk was bare, his
fingers poised over a calculating machine. Natalie had the strangest feeling that he had been sitting there all day waiting for her tap on the door.

‘Would you be interested in sponsoring a girl in our department?' She told him about the bike ride. ‘It's for Mencap. That's mental health.'

‘I know it's mental health,' he snapped. He got up and fetched his jacket. She thought he was going to bring out his wallet but he rubbed his arms and said, ‘It's freezing in here. What's happened to the bloody heating?'

By no stretch of the imagination could he be called an attractive man. Still, she perservered. ‘Any amount would do.'

It was then that she noticed the AIDS ribbon – a red AIDS ribbon pinned to his jacket. No Yorkshireman would wear an AIDS ribbon unless he were gay. In fact, it took some courage to wear one at all.

‘It never ends, does it?' he sighed. ‘Once one's home was one's castle. There they come, knocking at the door with their tea-towels and their dishcloths,
Excuse me, I'm just out of prison, excuse me, I've got a disability.
It's take take take . . .'