Meltdown (34 page)

‘You can’t put a foetus down on a school list,’ she had wailed, terrified of getting gazumped by a belly. ‘It isn’t fair.’

Jimmy almost smiled at the memory. At least they would be spared all that agony and tension. Next year Cressida would be coming to Caterham Road.

Jimmy noticed some girls playing hopscotch on the paving stones. It would be nice for Toby to have girls in his class. Jimmy had been through the state system himself and, like Monica, had never really warmed to the idea of single-sex schools. He thought it was good for boys to have girls around. It was civilizing. He had never liked that aspect of Abbey Hall, but the question had never really been raised. It was a given. You simply
had
to go private, there was no other way. And in the vast majority of private schools, private meant single sex.

Jimmy was almost beginning to relax. Just a little. Toby too seemed to be calm. His lip had been quivering earlier but now it was still. He was looking about himself and perhaps feeling as Jimmy was, that, dress and accents aside, there was not much about this school gate that was unfamiliar.

Now there was a stirring among the crowd. Through the bars of the fence Jimmy could see a purposeful-looking woman striding across the playground holding a set of keys. The gates were about to be opened.

‘Well, Tobes,’ Jimmy said, ‘I guess this is you.’

‘Wotevah,’ Toby replied.

Then Jimmy accidentally caught someone’s eye. And in a single moment all his fear returned.

A man was staring at him.

He was a black man with scars on both cheeks and a look of ferocious intensity that Jimmy had never seen before in anyone. Tall and thin and dressed only in old jeans and a T-shirt, his muscular arms looked strong and wiry. They were scarred too.

The man started walking towards Jimmy. A tall boy followed him, a younger version of the man, equally intense and almost as intimidating.

Now the man was standing before Jimmy, his eyes staring into his. Jimmy tried to look back. He thought about saying something but could think of nothing.

The gate was open now. Kids were surging forward, the younger ones with a hug and a kiss, the older ones absolutely not with a hug and a kiss.

Jimmy wanted to move away but the man kept looking at him, holding him in his stare.

Jimmy felt his fists tighten. Enough was enough. It was time to stand up for himself. If he expected Toby to survive in this new and terrifying urban reality then he had to show some strength himself.

‘Yeah?’ said Jimmy. ‘Wot?’

He could feel Toby’s emotions even before he felt the boy’s hand in his. Jimmy had never addressed anyone like that before. Jimmy was kind, he was considerate and, unless directly provoked, he was always polite. Yet here he was producing these two sullen, ugly syllables to address a complete stranger, a man who had as yet done nothing provocative beyond approach him and fail to speak.

Toby knew what that ‘Yeah, wot?’ meant. It meant ‘Don’t fuck with me, arsehole.’ It meant ‘I don’t want trouble but if that’s the way it’s going then bring it on.’

It meant Jimmy was terrified. And Toby knew it.

‘Hello,’ Jimmy heard a voice saying. ‘We are very lost.’

It wasn’t the man who spoke but the skinny boy who stood behind him. The accent was strong, the emphasis quite disconcerting.

‘HELLo. WE are VERy lost.’

The silent man held out a piece of paper.

Still he stared, but this time Jimmy noticed something else besides strength in his eyes. Something besides the intensity which Jimmy had taken for ferocity.

It was tears.

Jimmy knew what the piece of paper was that the man was holding out to him. Jimmy was holding one himself. Clearly the tall man had noticed this and that was why he had approached him. It was the registration document for placing a boy at the school. Now Jimmy understood. The skinny lad with the strong accent was new to the school too.

‘My NAME is KORfa,’ the boy said. ‘This IS my FATHer.’

Jimmy was later to learn that Sharif, Korfa’s father, had, like Jimmy, suffered a cruel and gruelling reduction in his fortunes over the previous year. But Jimmy was forced to admit that beyond that one fact any similarity in their situations ended, and the journey that had brought Korfa and his father to the school gate at Caterham Road on the same morning as Jimmy and Toby rather put Jimmy’s troubles into perspective.

Sharif was a refugee asylum seeker from Somalia. He and his son had escaped a war zone where government and rebel forces were locked in a conflict of unimaginable savagery. Sharif would later explain to Jimmy in faltering English that his wife had been raped and then murdered before his and Korfa’s eyes and that he and Korfa’s elder brother had been taken away and forced to serve with the rebel forces.

Sharif had lost contact with the elder boy during fierce fighting and when he learned that his captors were planning to press eight-year-old Korfa into service too he had managed to escape. It had of course been a near-impossible wrench to leave the elder brother to his fate, but the chances were that he was already dead and for the sake of Korfa the father had resolved to flee.

Through a monumental effort involving courage and good fortune in equal measure, Sharif had managed to get himself and the boy out of Africa, across Europe and eventually to a transit camp in France. From there, with the help of dedicated relief workers, he was brought before a British immigration officer to whom he claimed refugee status.

Monica was later to discover that, by a strange coincidence, the agency that had helped Korfa and Sharif was Asylum Action, the very charity for which she had previously been a fundraiser. On the day she worked this out she cried with joy.

Standing before the school gates as the children rushed in and the parents began to leave, Jimmy knew nothing of this terrible story. What he did know was that the tall man spoke little or no English and was worried and at a loss where to go and what to do with his form.

Jimmy held up his own form and smiled. The tall man smiled back. Glancing down, Jimmy could see that Korfa and Toby were smiling too. Neither was entirely alone any more.

‘I WANT to learn ENGlish VERy fast,’ said Korfa. ‘Will YOU help ME?’

‘Absolutely. Of course,’ said Toby. ‘I mean yeah, right, wotevah.’

Ten. Nine. None

Robbo’s funeral was to prove the last full gathering of the old Sussex Radish Club and its female associates. Jimmy and Monica, David and Laura, Henry and Jane, Rupert and Amanda (who did not speak), and Lizzie with Robson in his coffin.

These ten who had met so often over so many years would never again all be together under the same roof. By the time they got to the wake in the local pub they were only nine, Robbo having been left in the churchyard. And in fact the remaining nine would not gather again either. The gang broke up that day. It wasn’t announced, no collective decision was made, but had any of them thought about it they might have guessed that this would turn out to be the case. The previous six months had changed and divided them all for ever.

Lizzie was a widow. Rupert and Amanda were standing at opposite ends of the pub. Jimmy and Monica were broke and in severe, friendship-ruining debt to David’s company. David himself had seen his celebrated Rainbow project grind to a halt and then become a symbol of corporate excess.

Only Henry and Jane were in much the same position as they had been the year before. Jane was working on another novel (once more, definitely not chick lit) and Henry had continued to progress in both party and government. In fact he was emerging as one of the few beneficiaries of the economic gloom, in as much as he had become the public face of the Prime Minister’s efforts to distance his administration from the financial free-for-all it had tolerated for so long. Henry’s role was finally bringing the long-simmering animosity that had existed between him and Rupert since their student days right out into the open.

‘How are things looking at the Royal Lancashire? Pretty roundly fucked, I imagine,’ Henry said to Rupert after they had paid their respects to Lizzie and found some wine. ‘Do you think you’re going to have to come to us for a public bailout? That’s certainly what they’re saying at the Treasury.’

‘Difficult to say at the moment,’ Rupert replied rather huffily. ‘We’re trying to avoid it, of course. Not something we’d particularly enjoy, obviously. It depends on our next credit rating. If we lose our Triple A status I suppose we may need some sort of temporary bridging help.’

Rupert was trying to sound casual and unfazed but it was clear that he was badly shaken. He’d had a bruising few weeks. The almost overnight transformation of the once-mighty Royal Lancashire Bank from gilt-edged and venerable financial fortress to tottering basket case had shocked the nation. It had left Rupert and his board struggling to refinance their business and facing the prospect of virtual nationalization.

‘Funny thing,’ Henry said, smiling, ‘that
you
may end up coming to
me
for money, eh? Who’d have thought it?’

‘It’s not your money, Henry,’ Rupert snapped, ‘it’s the public’s, and I shan’t be coming to you either.
If
we end up needing government help, and I say
if
, I shall deal directly with the Chancellor of the Exchequer as I always do, and last time I looked, Henry, you hadn’t climbed quite that high up the greasy pole.’

‘All in good time, Rupert,’ Henry replied, ‘all in good time.’

But for Henry, the last of the old friends to remain untouched by the recession, the good times were running out too.

All perfectly legal

It was March 2009 and Henry and Rupert were facing each other across a table, quarrelling, just as they had done so many times before, two old friends who never seemed to agree on anything.

Except that this time the table was not laden with curries, nan bread and pints of beer. There was no Lizzie or Robbo to appeal for calm, no Jimmy to chuck a friendly bit of rolled-up bread and defuse the situation. This was the green baize table of a House of Commons Select Committee and the only things on it were a couple of jugs of water, some glasses and mountains of paper.

And Henry and Rupert were no longer friends.

The Royal Lancashire Bank had recently come within an ace of folding under the weight of its toxic debt. The government had had to bail it out and Rupert was forced to step down in ignominy as CEO. As a price for going, however, he had arranged a redundancy and pension package with the government’s accountants which guaranteed him an income of a million pounds a year, to be paid from the now publicly owned bank’s non-existent resources. It was to explain and justify this package that Rupert Bennett had been brought before the Select Committee, of which Henry was chair.

‘Lord Bennett,’ Henry thundered, ‘you have destroyed not one but two banks, the National City and the Royal Lancashire. Both of them would without doubt have collapsed, had the taxpayer not taken on the responsibilities of your abject failure.’

Rupert shrugged.

‘We’ve all been at the same party, we’ve all enjoyed the many good-time years. If my speculations at the RLB have failed it’s not my fault, but the fault of the financial regulators who failed in their duty to properly police the expanding economy.’

Henry almost shouted his reply.

‘Are you saying it’s our fault, Lord Bennett? You ruin your own bank and you blame us for not stopping you!’

‘You were there,’ Rupert replied with effortless calm, ‘all of you. You were with me every step. With me and a hundred like me. I was brought in to advise you when Caledonian Granite collapsed. You
knighted
me for services to British banking. You made me a Labour peer. How can you possibly pretend that you didn’t know what I was doing and that you didn’t support it 100 per cent? If it turned out I was wrong then you were wrong too. We were
all
wrong.’

Henry’s face was red; he could feel his guts twisting. The bastard had him. Henry knew damn well why Rupert had been knighted
and
why he’d been made a fucking lord.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with service. Either to party or to country.

He’d
bought
the damn honours. No more, no less. But Henry couldn’t say that. He couldn’t stand up in a parliamentary committee room and scream,
don’t pretend you got honoured for anything other than the fact that you were prepared to pay for it, you smug bastard
.

He couldn’t say that because it was his party that had taken the man’s tainted coin. The Labour Party, set up a century earlier because of the excesses of the likes of Lord fucking Bennett of Bel-fucking-Gravia, had ended up in their thrall and in their pay.

He couldn’t say it because it was the one thing he and the rest of the party had been denying for the previous two years. Ever since the Cash for Honours scandal had broken, crippling what was left of Labour’s moral credibility and ruining Blair’s last months in office.

Ever since the police had come within an ace of knocking on the very door of Number 10.

If Henry so much as
breathed
the idea that Rupert had been anything other than a worthy recipient of a genuine honour, it would open up the whole appalling scandal again. And the last thing the government needed was another scandal. Public trust in Parliament was buggered enough without that.

Henry stared at his old friend in the dawning realization that the collapse of Rupert’s career represented much more than just the collapse of a couple of banks. It was symptomatic of the collapse of something even greater, the collapse of the whole New Labour project. The collapse of that mission to improve society on which he and so many others had embarked, with what they fondly believed was passion and idealism, a decade and more before.

Suddenly the unholy alliance that Henry and his colleagues had made with the City of London was exposed for what it was. A tawdry, lazy, back-slapping exercise in greed. Greed for money and for power. Rupert and his ilk had bribed Henry and his, corrupting them before they had had a chance to make the world a better place.