Strip the Willow (18 page)

– Rebranded? said Lucy. It was likely to be her final throw.

– Rebranded, yes, said Lord Provost William Swink II. We’ve ditched the earlier suggestions. From here on in we’re Leopardeen.

– Did I hear you correctly? said Lucy. The Swinks were
notorious
malapropists, after all.
Leopardeen
?

– Yes, said Swink, you know our coat-of-arms, don’t you? It’s got a fine additional tring.
The City of Leopardeen.

He continued to address her.

– We were wondering, Miss Legge, if you could speed the work in ReCSoc of the blue plaque division. To honour the extinguished of the town, now that things are moving on. Leopardeen and
LeopCorp
wouldn’t want the past of the best to be forgotten, even though it cannot be a patch on what lies ahead.

Or a putsch on what lies behind, thought Lucy.

Swink II had inherited his father’s way with words, though some wondered whether it was not a little put on or affected, so as to make him seem fallible and human, and thus disarm critics and detractors.

– Do you mean the
distinguished
of the past, Lord Provost?

There was an indraw of breath from the silent councillors.

– That’s what I said.

– A city cannot live by plaques alone, said Lucy. Nor by lottery. Does Mr Marr not realise that? It’s a pity the organ grinder isn’t here. I do get tired, talking to the monkey.

Alison broke in.

– Lucy, we know you’re tired. Some of us know only too well how much you’ve put in. But everybody should know. Perhaps if I could call on Guy now to propose a vote of thanks. Guy?

She lay in wait in the bottom corridor, for her former colleague to come down in the lift.

Several others came down first, UbSpec Total LeopCorp people. But they were all UbSpec Total LeopCorp people now. She nodded at some of the councillors, a couple of phased-out genderistas; their star had faded too.

It was as though in a short space of time she had ceased, in effect, to exist.

Guy came down.

– Thanks for the vote of thanks, she said. I’ll do the same for you, one of these days.

– Lucy, said Guy. Wise up. Go with the flow.

The lift stayed at the bottom for quite a long while. Alison was probably trying to avoid her.

Then the lift was summoned, up to the third floor, where the Chamber was. It paused. The doorman in sombre civic blue walked across to Lucy and asked if she was alright.

– I’ll be okay, just leave me, she said. Thanks.

The man in blue walked back to take charge of the external door.

It was exit time. Nobody needed to come in at five to five.

The lift hadn’t made a move. It was up there, suspended.

Then she heard the gate shut. The lift was coming down, with all its antique, slow assurance.

– Bitch, shouted Lucy through the mesh. Bitch! She didn’t even let Alison clash open the hand-operated guard-gate. Backstabber!

– Lucy— said Alison, let me oot, so we can spik.

– Spik, said Lucy. Spik! Turncoat minx.

Lucy was anchoring the mesh of the cage, whereas Alison was jerking it sideways. The blue doorman came hastening up.

– Na, na, na, ladies, this will nivver dae. Time ye were hame.

He gave the jerking side of the contest an extra impetus. Lucy lost, and the forfex of the gate flew back.

– See fit happens? said the doorman. Dafties, ye should be ashamed o yirsels. Hame, I tell ye, this is the Toon’s Hoose, nae a wrasslin parlour.

But there was some blood, as well as the excruciating pain, and he found himself running a couple of cold taps in the Ladies for crushed fingers, and phoning a taxi to A&E at Foresterhill.

Peem made slow inroads in Torry. It was not a territory that came easy to him, or that he found congenial. It was very much across the river, very much rough Praga to Warsaw’s old town; that’s how the Poles said they saw it. Peem had never much mixed with Torry loons as a lad, except of course Spermy, and by that time Spermy was ex-Torry and a semi-orphan.

There were some original Torry folk still there: retired boxmakers, redundant filleters, reserve roustabouts and off-rota drivers. But mostly he had the necessity of getting to know Poles. And the scene was changing fast. They had come in by busload, by boatload, from Gdynia and Gdansk. Some of their gangmasters commuted by air, from Uberdeen Airport out at Dyce.

And he had the difficulty of supporting himself. He looked in the window of a newsagent, at the handwritten postcards on display there. They still used that method. Not all immigrants living twelve or fourteen to a room had immediate access to broadband, and – whatever the infinities of the global market – you still had to relate to the folk next to you for most of your goods and services. The cards had duplicates taped to their base, with a red border to flag they were in Polish.

The only unskilled job that might be within his physical compass was Newspaper Distributor. In the old days that would have just been Paper Boy. Then of course, Paper Boy/Girl. But anti-ageist legislation forbade that. And few kids would work nowadays anyway, when the going rate for pocket money was rising faster than Argentinian inflation.

Yes, Newspaper Distributor might be within his physical
compass. Whether it was within his navigational compass was another matter. He went in. He got the job. It would tide him over till his appointment with Clan Reunited Counselling, who were apparently short-staffed and rushed off their feet.

The man gave him a map and a schedule. It was £5 per 100 papers delivered, or 5p a paper. He discovered afterwards the customers were charged 10p, so that made 100% profit on the service alone for the newsagent, on top of the margin on the paper.

The biggest problem he found, apart from the weight of the satchel, which slung from his neck like a feed-bag on a superannuated
half-starved
stallion, was phone entry. Phone entry tenements seemed to dominate the curved steep scapes of Torry.

You tried the entry phone of the requisite customer. If that failed, you tried the entry phone of somebody else in the building, then of everybody else, in the hope of goodwill. If goodwill was unavailable, you had to take that particular wonderful newspaper away, and come back later in your own time.

But then it was all his own time. He wasn’t being paid for his time, which was of no account. He was being paid to deliver
newspapers
, though if you inspected them, they were more like lurid comics stuffed with gossip about celebs, and stories of utter dross like
Cripple Budgie Survives Fall
and
Udny Man Finds Giant Neep.

Nobody thought the
Grampian Echo
, the good old
Gecko
, could slip so far, but the signs had always been there.

He delivered some Polish papers too, imported. He picked up an English-Polish primer in Waterstone’s, copied out some requisite phrases, and put it back on the shelf again. The Polish-English primers filled a whole bin.

Good evening. Do you wish to receive your newspaper? I have certain goods to give to your neighbour. May I enter? I am not from Social
Security
. I am not the Police. Thank you.

He thought he’d better not waste time learning basic
Good day
. The Poles had come here, or had been brought here, to work. They would hardly be at home during the day.

Yet he was wrong in that assumption. People were always misjudging immigrants. He found out that there was quite often a Pole, several Poles, at home during the day in these sorts of flats. It was the hot bunk system. The warm, smelly sheet system. One bed between two, shiftwork. But whether any of the current occupants of the twelve or fourteen or sixteen bunkbeds would actually leap with alacrity to answer an entry phone seemed to depend on other factors.

Later, he studied the gangmasters’ patterns. 

Then he found it easier to be present outside some of the bigger Polish tenements at specific times of pick-up and dump from the dirty vans, whose occupants wended their way to and from the mutton pie process lines and the vegetarian sausage-enhancers; back and fore from doing the lights or serving the pints in
I Hate Mondays, I Loathe Tuesdays, St Vitus
and other nightspots; in and out of the tradesmen’s entrances to mortgage boutiques or the back doors to bidet-rich mansions; not to mention urgent attendance to fitting and refitting tasks in the five main malls, stuff-full as they were of retro, metro, and new-wave hetero shops.

He could thus distribute his papers en masse.

He couldn’t tell most of the Poles from Adamcek or Eva anyway: he had to take their claimed identities on trust.

But who was he to quarrel about identity, the state he was in?

Lucy had not offered to hem his baggy hand-me-downs.

As for his cracked and shaven brainbox, he kept that item tucked away in a woolly toorie.

So long as the number of papers distributed tallied with the number he set out with in his neck-slung bag, and so long as the complaints recited to him by the newsagent were not overwhelming, with only the odd tenner stopped out of his cash, and so long as he could shoplift bars of chocolate to the value of his stopped wages when the newsagent’s back was turned, then all was, if not strictly for the best, at least not sraczka – total diarrhoea.

At Maciek’s flat, he got to kip on a much-compressed futon. Lying awake on about the fourth or fifth night, he thought of Lucy an awful lot, but there was no going back.

Sometimes you just knew that. Without knowing a good reason why, you knew there was no going back. You couldn’t go back because you had to move on. There was a lack of elastic in that concept.

Lying on a hard mattress, sucking chocolate, trying to snooze, with tired and unemotional Poles tripping over him. Ordinary clumsy tripping.

– You okay there, panie? said Maciek.

– Bardzo, he replied. Bardzo dobrze. Very fine.

Later in the week he was due to go with Maciek’s squad on a
short-term
job, catering support. Swink Stillwater and the Council were jointly hosting an international symposium.
Bottled Water: Your Spring is Your Future.
Evan, Purer, Valvic and the rest were due to be there. Peem was to help in the hall, distributing conference papers, attending to drinks.

He had moved on.

Lucy had been signed off work indefinitely, on account of her left hand. There had been a dislocation, and her ring fingernail was purple and yellow and would probably come off. She was declared unfit for keyboard service.

Alison’s explanations as they sat in line at A&E had all been about the pressure she was being put under.

Pressure? Put under? Lucy had said.

Yeah, I canna ging intae detail, that’s jist the wey it is, hate me if ye must.

Is it Finlay?

Na, an I’m sayin nae mair, Alison had said, sae jist forget it.

Likely, thought Lucy.

She took to going on long walks. It was a change for her. She often headed out on Countesswells Road. She never knew what
Countesswells
was supposed to mean or refer to, but she spoke it like an empty mantra, and prodded it with her mind, along with so many other things.

Or she walked out towards Hazlehead, but never got there, because she stopped and scrambled up the bank to look into the disused Rubislaw Quarry. They were pumping green water by the ten million gallon, into the street drains and out to sea. Something must be afoot. She sat and watched water being pumped away.

She went back to the big empty house, then went online, gingerly, and booked herself a holiday. Fuck the fucking lot of them, she thought. It wasn’t too late in her life to head for Marrakech.

She phoned Marilyn and told her she was taking a month’s leave.

– A month? said Marilyn. You’ll miss GrottoLotto—

– You think?

Alison had chosen to stay at work, even though she had a couple of stitches in her split finger. For a full week after her battle with Lucy, she wore an ostentatious leather finger stall strapped across her palm, and garnered some pity while she was at it. She didn’t normally give a toss for pity, but when you were in a false and exposed position, your needs were different.

At lunch time she would buy herself a wrap and a smoothie from M&S behind the Town House, then wander up to the
Castlegate
, towards LeopCorp Towers.

There were all sorts of works speeding ahead, behind barricades and under awnings. TV positions were springing up, dozens of them it seemed, now that they were going pan-Europe, pan-Asia and Stateside. Indeed, there was much market beyond, if Guy and company were to be believed. GrottoLotto might in time deliver diversion to most watery planets, and serve as a homing signal for the Milky Way.

Universal communication got on her tits. There was only one person she wanted to speak to.

So she hung around the Mercat Cross looking across at North Turret, hoping for that familiar figure to appear at a high window, or emerge.

Gwen had never texted her back. LeopCorp had her daughter, not to put too fine a point on it, by the short and curlies. No matter how much she did their bidding, the blackmail would always be there. She had to deliver but did they?

Gwen, Leopardeen Porno Queen
hadn’t yet turned up on Alison’s searches, or not precisely. But the trouble was this:if you cut it down to
Gwen
and
Porno
as a Google Advanced Search, there were nearly
half a million entries. She felt her gorge rise with disgust when she thought of it.

She took one slug from her smoothie and binned it.

She had had plenty time to sound people out. Rookie Marr, she was advised, had had a difficult childhood. Difficult for everyone else that is. Spoiled, pampered, nursed, toyed with by his nurses, he was only ever countered by his father Hubert when he seemed to lack sufficient selfishness, adequate greed, or acceptable levels of lust for power, or when he showed some fevered sign of wanting to share and play with others. Therefore it was only natural and
understandable
, when he had been afforded such huge rehearsal in human trust, such enormous practice in active teamwork, that his world, his empire, his employees’ clothing, his every facility in the Turret and beyond, should bristle invisibly with miniature cameras.

Alison understood perfectly.

She understood why the Leopard was an untrusting recluse.

For were Rookie Marr ever to appear in the Castlegate, or were he to come and attend just one of her meetings, she would not be able to trust herself.