Happy Days (22 page)

Beyond the shrouded signs for deckchairs and jet ski hire a waiter was giving his café tables a wipe. Winter had no idea whether this was simply optimistic, but he knew the guy had to make a living and – his mood lifting – he decided to show a bit of solidarity. He walked across, took the table with the best view, ordered a lager and asked for the menu. Miles away, across the water, he could see the white bones of a huge hotel complex. It looked like a cruise liner that had somehow ended up among the pinewoods on the mountainside, and by the time the waiter returned with his lager he was determined to find out more.

‘You get lots of English here? In the summer?’

‘English?’ He shook his head. ‘No. Germans, yes. Dutch, yes. Italians, of course. Some Swedes, maybe. But English? No.’

He put the lager on the table. He’d had a good look at Winter’s face by now and Winter knew he was curious.

‘You’re English?’

‘Yes.’

‘A tourist?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You want to live here?’

Winter stared up at him, wondering whether his interest was that obvious.

‘Maybe,’ he said carefully. ‘What do you think?’

‘What do
I
think?’ The man laughed. His English was good. ‘I think people like me would like you to say yes. The winter can be hard.’

‘You want my money?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’re open all the year round?’

‘No. We close next week.’

‘So what happens then?’

‘To me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I go to England.’ Another laugh, softer this time. ‘Where the cafés never close.’

After a second beer Winter phoned Maddox, who said she’d had a slow morning. She’d had time to sort out a whole range of properties. Maybe Winter might like to drop by the agency during the afternoon. Then they could go through them.

‘And something else. I asked Joe about doing you a tatt.’

‘And?’

‘He thinks you’ve got the kiss of death. He fancies something Gothic.’

‘Nice.’ Winter rang off.

An hour with Maddox leafing through a dozen or so properties plunged him back into gloom. The carefully framed colour shots, with all the come-ons about swirl-pools and solar
heating, hid the reality of what probably awaited Winter if he chose to bury himself out here. In Maddox’s view the money he was talking would buy him three bedrooms, at least two en-suite, with a bit of land plus a decent view. If he knew where to go, he could pick up a second-hand car for a handful of euros, after which the entire country was his to explore. There was a lovely town down the coast called Rovinj. Venice was only a couple of hours away by high-speed catamaran. She remembered Portsmouth’s charms only too well, but life beside the Adriatic definitely had its advantages.

‘Why would I want three bedrooms?’

Winter knew she was uncomfortable with questions like these. They led to places she didn’t want to go.

‘Guests?’ she suggested. ‘Maybe a girlfriend or two?’

‘Dream on.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because I’ll have to be Mr Invisible. Mr Nobody.’

He looked at her, expecting a reaction or at least an ounce or two of sympathy. Instead she glanced at her watch.

‘You think I’m being a wuss?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I think you’re out of your depth. I think life’s got to you.’

‘You think I should have stayed in the Job?’

‘Only you can answer that.’

‘Then the answer’s no. It was impossible. In the end those people were totally out of order. Like I said last night, they nearly killed me.’

‘Then move on.’

‘I did. And look what happened.’

‘Then move on again.’

‘Sure. And here I am. Some lonely old dosser. Making life hard for you.’

‘Not me, Paul. You.’

He was right. He knew it. That night she and Josip were
driving down to Pula for the first night of a friend’s new play. She said the guy had a special take on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the incident that had sparked the First World War, and he’d written the piece as a kind of eco-parable. The thrust, she said, was that events had a habit of getting out of control, and only eternal vigilance could save us from oblivion. Winter, who knew a great deal about events getting out of control, was grateful for the invitation but turned it down. The evening would doubtless confirm that Maddox and her boyfriend were inseparable, and that knowledge would probably finish him off. Better, on balance, to get pissed and go to bed.

It didn’t work. Maddox left him at the door of his lodgings, gave him a kiss and made him promise to get in touch again in the morning. There was a fridge in the room, and she’d bought some stuff in case he felt peckish. For a while he lay on the bed, watching the early-evening news on the tiny wall-mounted television, trying to make sense of each story as it came and went. The video and graphics helped, but the language was impenetrable, and the longer he watched the better he understood that this pretty much represented where he’d ended up. He’d lost touch. Stuff was happening that he no longer understood. That sureness of touch, that firmness of purpose that had badged his working life, seemed to have vanished entirely.

After the news came a game show. Laughter was laughter in whatever language you happened to speak, but the real appeal lay in the muttered asides and the knowing half-jokes – a territory Winter had made his own – and here, once again, he was totally out of his depth.

He turned the TV off and inspected the fridge. Maddox, bless her, had left him a pile of cold meat brightened with a tomato-and-onion salad. There were a couple of lagers too, and a pot of something that looked like strawberry yoghurt in case he fancied dessert. He cracked one of the lagers, not bothering
to hunt down a glass, and raised the tin to his lips. Several streets away he could hear the whine of a motor scooter. Then came footsteps and a brief flurry of movement at the window as someone old and bent shuffled past outside. Then silence again. Winter stood in the gathering darkness, knowing that he had to get out, knowing that this cell-like little room would drive him nuts.

He went back to the sports bar, thinking that Friday nights might be livelier. He was wrong. Apart from a couple of solitary drinkers staring into nowhere the place was empty. Even the bartender seemed to have given up. Winter could make no sense of the scribbled note on the counter but rang the little bell beside it in the hope that someone might appear. A girl came through after a while, poured half a litre of thin lager, ignored Winter’s laboured efforts to strike up a conversation and vanished again. One of the drinkers muttered something Winter didn’t catch. The other one, a ghost of a man, was perched on a nearby stool. His head was down and he seemed to be barely conscious. Winter studied him for a long moment, wondering whether this was the fate that awaited anyone who swapped real life for self-imposed exile, cutting yourself off, hiding yourself away, looking for comfort in the bottom of a glass. How else could a guy like this get through an evening? And what happened when the money ran out?

Winter shook his head, alarmed by the thought, and reached for his lager. Then he changed his mind and passed the brimming glass along the bar. The guy on the stool lifted his head. It was impossible to guess his age. He had the sunken haunted eyes of someone who always expected the worst. His gaze settled on the glass. He was having trouble working out exactly what was supposed to happen next. Join the club, Winter thought. He picked up his jacket and headed once again for the darkness outside.

The following morning, early, Winter washed and shaved. He locked the room, walked the twenty metres up the street and
dropped the key through Maddox’s front door. He’d thought about a note to go with it but in the end he didn’t bother.

At the bus station he bought himself a ticket for Trieste. From there, with luck, he could get a flight back to London. He was in Trieste by late morning. He took a cab to the airport and found a Lufthansa flight that would take him to Heathrow via Munich. Late afternoon, after the Tube ride in from the airport, he was crossing the concourse at Waterloo. A couple of hours later, back at the Harbour Station in Pompey, he paused to pick up a copy of the
News
.

The day’s headline story, yet again, centred on Fratton Park. Portsmouth Football Club had recently been sold to an Emirates-based businessman. After the worst start to a season in recent memory, fans were expecting an injection of cash. Under the old owner the club had sold a clutch of star players. Now, before it was too late, they wanted Sulaiman al-Fahim to put his hand in his pocket. But al-Fahim had other ideas. From a chess tournament in Valencia he’d sent word that money was unavailable for new signings. Even worse, he’d just cancelled an appearance at a fans’ forum back in Portsmouth to explain his vision for the club’s future.

Winter’s interest in Portsmouth FC was limited. What caught his attention was a paragraph at the bottom of the story. According to the
News
, a leading city businessman might be riding to the rescue. Winter, turning to page 3 for more details, found himself looking at a photo of his boss. Bazza Mackenzie was posing in front of the Royal Trafalgar. Winter recognised the suit Marie had bought him only last month. Tight-lipped, serious, he looked – in a word – the business. This was someone who knew a thing or two about football. This was someone you’d be glad to have around in a crisis.

Winter read on. Mackenzie, it seemed, had been monitoring events at Fratton Park and was ‘deeply concerned’. On behalf of a huge army of lifelong fans he felt compelled to do whatever he could to bring sanity and order to the current shambles.
To that end he was in conversation with a prominent Russian businessman, a man whose commitment to football was deep and unquestioned, a man who’d made a fortune out of canny foreign investments, a man whom he counted as a close friend. It was still way too early to make any kind of official announcement, but Pompey fans shouldn’t give up hope. Why? Because Bazza Mackenzie was on the case. And why was that? Because Pompey, as ever, always came first.

Winter folded the newspaper. He was still without a mobile. There was a public phone on the station. Winter dialled a number from memory. Jimmy Suttle answered on the second ring. Winter turned his back to the queue of travellers waiting for tickets, catching his reflection in the panel of a nearby billboard. He looked wrecked.

‘It’s me, son,’ he said. ‘You’re on.’

SOUTHSEA: WEDNESDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2009. THREE MONTHS LATER
.

The night before Christmas Eve, for only the second time in his life, Andy Makins was drunk. Apart from a flicker of light from a dying candle, Room 452 was in darkness. He and Gill Reynolds had been in bed since seven o’clock. She’d arrived with two bottles of champagne and a packet of Waitrose mince pies. They’d done the champagne but they’d yet to start on the pies. Gill couldn’t remember when she’d last had sex like this.

‘You want to do it again?’ Her fingers were still busy under the duvet.

Makins frowned. His brain was posting letters to his crotch but nothing seemed to be happening.

‘Later?’ He swallowed a hiccough. ‘Does later sound OK?’

The question made Gill laugh. She laughed a lot when Andy was around. Not because he was especially funny – he wasn’t – but because the dwindling trickle of newsroom gossip about the ex-house geek was just so wrong. In real life, unlike most people she knew, this man of hers knew exactly where he was heading. More to the point, he was incredibly good in bed.

The first time they’d done it, back last month, she’d put it down to beginners’ luck. Not any more. His stamina was extraordinary, his love of oral sex totally unfeigned. For all his preoccupation – the unyielding sense of mission that seemed to
armour him against the silliness of life – he knew exactly how to relax her, how to caress her, how to coax her to orgasm after orgasm.

Sometimes, in her head, she strung these moments on a necklace like beads and tucked them away to think about later. The record so far was four. Andy, who had little patience with numbers, told her she was crazy to even think of doing something like that. Looking back, treasuring memories, had never formed part of his life plan. Better, he always told her, to forge ahead, to look for fresh challenges, new routes up the rockface, summits unconquered by anyone else. If doing it a certain way made her feel that good, then how about trying this? Or this? Or this? A willing accomplice, she did his bidding, only too happy to chalk up the occasional disappointment to her own lack of imagination. The situations Andy invented for them both, and his talent for choreography, never ceased to amaze her. She’d never felt so tactile, so lucky, so
alive
in her entire life. At forty-four, she had nearly a decade and a half on Andy, yet he was the one who was doing the teaching. No wonder Megan had hung on to the relationship way beyond its sell-by date.

She offered him a morsel of mince pie. He peered at it in the darkness as if he’d never seen anything like this in his life. Then he checked his watch.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m supposed to be downstairs.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s some kind of party. You don’t say no around here. Bad move.’ He started giggling and disappeared beneath the duvet. Moments later Gill could feel him between her thighs. It was sticky down there but he didn’t seem to mind. She lay back, her hands cupping his head through the duvet. After a while he stopped. She saw a thin hand feeling around beside the duvet. Then the hand found one of the empty bottles.

A face re-emerged.

‘With or without?’

‘What?’

‘Foil.’

‘Forget it.’ She was laughing. ‘Go to your party.’

While he got dressed, she asked him whether he minded if she stayed the night again. She’d been careful, never making assumptions, never taking liberties, aware that Andy put a lot of store by life’s small print. You always asked first. And normally the answer was yes.