Wake Up Happy Every Day (14 page)

Now Daniel starts blowing. He blows. And he blows. And he blows. The policeman loses his cool a bit. ‘Please blow properly, sir,’ he says.

‘I am fucking blowing properly,’ snaps Daniel.

‘Don’t swear, Daniel,’ Polly says. It’s the first thing she’s said in the whole incident so far.

Daniel laughs. ‘Sorry, dear,’ he says. And she laughs too. They do sound exactly like a husband and wife. The policeman is trying hard not to stare at her she can tell.

More seconds pass. The policeman takes the device from Daniel and examines it. He bites his lip. He explains to them that the device appears to be faulty and that he will have to administer the test again and that he will need to return to his vehicle to fetch a new test kit. As he goes and does that Polly asks Daniel why he called her his wife. He doesn’t answer, just shrugs.

‘Jumped up little Gauleiter,’ he says.

And they stand in silence until the policeman is back with his new test which he unwraps. Daniel does his little routine with the kit again, sniffing it, rolling it between his fingers, pretending it’s a posh cigar and everything. The policeman sighs. This is all getting too much for him and Polly can’t help it – she giggles and Daniel laughs and the policeman sighs again and puts on a serious voice as he tells them that being in charge of a vehicle while intoxicated is a very serious offence, carrying a possible jail sentence as well as a fine of up to £20,000 or something, and a mandatory twelve-month driving ban.

‘Yes. But I wasn’t fucking driving was I, constable?’

‘Come on, darling, just do it,’ Polly says and she blushes a bit as she feels the policeman’s creepy starling eyes on her.

Daniel smiles at Polly and she smiles back, and then he puts the thing to his lips and blows. He blows. He blows. He blows. The policeman takes it and examines it closely. He puffs out his cheeks.

‘Umm,’ he says.

So Polly sees it now. She sees that the little light on the tester thing is never ever going to go green, or pink, or blue or whatever. It’s just not going to show Daniel over any limit. She can see it from the way the policeman’s face goes a bit wobbly somehow, by the way he presses his lips together, by the way he looks like he’s going to cry. Her heart doesn’t hurt for him though.

Of course the last person to realise the way things are now is Daniel. While the policeman pointlessly twists and turns the little machine in his hands, a delighted grin begins to spread very slowly over Daniel’s face. It’s like the sun coming up, it really is.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ he says. And he starts to dance. He actually starts to dance. Slowly, yes, but for real. He lurches in a slow-motion dance. Almost a spazzy mosh really. He looks like a lunatic drunken great-uncle at a wedding. A lunatic drunken great-uncle who loves the Foo Fighters or something.

‘Woo-hoo!’ he goes. And ‘Yeah, man!’ It’s ridiculous and it’s very, very funny and Polly starts giggling again, she just can’t help it.

Then Daniel starts coughing and he pulls himself together. ‘Phew,’ he says. ‘Sorry about that. Guess we don’t want to have a heart attack, do we?’ He means not now, thinks Polly. Not at the moment of victory.

The policeman doesn’t know what to say. He looks at the ground. Polly wonders about his life. Does he have a girlfriend? Kids? Probably not. He doesn’t look like he has a baby that keeps him awake. Is he gay maybe? It’s all right for there to be gay policeman these days.

Daniel is still smiling, beaming like a lottery winner.

‘Don’t worry, constable,’ he says. ‘Just doing your job, we know that. Dirty work but someone’s got to do it, eh?’ There’s another long awkward pause before he says, ‘Well, we can’t stand here chatting all day, can we, darling? Places to go, people to see.’

Polly doesn’t join in the husband-and-wife game this time but Daniel doesn’t seem to notice as he goes round to the passenger door and opens it.

‘Hop in, dear,’ he says. The policeman looks at her. His eyes twitch – not a starling, she thinks. Not a seagull. A sparrow. A scared hedgerow bird at the mercy of everything.

Polly ducks under Daniel’s arm into the car which, she notices, still smells of beer. Daniel slams the door shut and walks back round to the driver’s side. The sounds of outside are muffled now so she doesn’t hear any words, but she sees him put a friendly arm on the policeman’s shoulder. She imagines him saying something like, ‘Keep up the good work,’ or ‘Chin up, sonny.’

Whatever he says, the policeman doesn’t say anything back. He just stands and watches as Daniel drives carefully, so, so carefully, out of the pub car park.

They don’t speak for a little while. Daniel puts the radio on. Classic FM. They’re playing a tune that Polly recognises from an old advert.

‘Maybe you should have let me drive back.’

‘No, no, no.’ Daniel slaps the leather-veneer steering wheel. ‘That was the best bit. His face as he realised that I was going to drive after all. Priceless. Absolutely priceless.’

‘You were very lucky,’ Polly says.

‘Yes,’ says Daniel. ‘I always am. You can judge the quality of a man by how lucky he is. Napoleon said that you know.’ And then he explains how it wasn’t just luck, how the whole this-is-a-cigar comedy mucking about had been disguising some effective squeezing and shaking and breaking of government equipment. ‘They should invest in the proper stuff,’ he says. ‘Bloody typical of the British plods to spend hard-earned taxpayers’ money on cheap crap.’

Clever man, thinks Polly.

As they stop-start-start-stop through all the traffic in town Polly asks again why Daniel said she was his wife.

Daniel turns to look at her for a long time. Polly stares straight ahead. Behind them there is an angry toot. Funny how you can always tell the difference between an angry get-a-bloody-move-on hoot and a friendly hi-there hoot. They finally start moving.

‘I just wanted to put the little Nazi on the back foot. To discombobulate him. You’re not offended, are you?’

And she’s not, not really, but she wonders if she should be.

‘You’re a bit old for me, Daniel,’ she says.

‘Age ain’t nothin’ but a number,’ he says.

And then they bump into the car in front.

Later she puts the whole incident down in an email for Russell Knox. She’s been sending him little messages most days, any funny little things Daniel has said, what he’s eaten, that kind of thing, and she knows he’s going to want to know about today’s great big adventure.

And she’s right because tonight, for the first time ever, Russell writes back.

He writes: ‘This is hilarious. We should meet up when I’m next in England. R.’ A short message but an exciting one. She writes back straight away saying that yes they should definitely.

And then while she remembers, she writes an Amazon review of the Alfa Romeo Giulietta. Five stars and she makes sure she mentions the classy wood-veneer dashboard and the leather-veneer steering wheel. And she mentions the bumpers because there was hardly a mark on it, while the back end of the shitty Ford they hit was a right mess. And she wonders if somewhere the scary bird-eyed policeman is writing a one-star review of the breathalyser.

And then she surfs the sperm-donor sites for a bit. She’s almost decided on Norwegian. But it’s a big decision. She doesn’t want to rush it.

Fifteen

LORNA

Saturday brunch in the Lover’s Rock Diner. Lorna’s last full day in the States. Her visa is on the point of expiring and it’s time to go home, see her mum, look for a proper job. A career maybe even. Time to accept that the trip to the States hasn’t really worked out and then to put this whole lost decade of assistanting behind her. No more arse-wiping for idiot men in business casual. No more getting too intimately acquainted with a new set of printers, photocopiers and Excel spreadsheets. It is, finally, time to grow up, to think about a mortgage, driving lessons, a teaching qualification perhaps. Christ. She could always kill herself. There is always that.

So lost in the depressing weather of her own thoughts is she that she take ages to notice that Megan is crying. Sluggish twin becks are running from her eyes into her mouth.

‘Don’t,’ Megan says. ‘Don’t say anything.’

So Lorna doesn’t. Instead, she puts her hand out across the plastic table and Megan takes it. Lorna and Megan lock eyes. What a strange impenetrable grey Meg’s eyes are. The colour of ancient standing stones on a moor somewhere. Not American at all really.

They stay quiet like that, Lorna stroking Megan’s thumb with her own, until a goateed hipster appears at their table and coughs. He looks like Jack Black but also, weirdly, a little like Jack White.

‘Shag, marry, dump?’ says Lorna after the waiter has taken their order and sauntered back to the kitchen.

‘Dump,’ says Megan, emphatic.

‘It’s always dump with you, young lady. It’ll heal over if you’re not careful.’

‘Yeah, I got a problem. But you see, I have these things called standards . . .’

Lorna laughs. ‘You like your little luxuries, don’t you?’ Then she says, ‘Here’s to us. Here’s to the transatlantic special relationship. A love that will never die.’

It’s afternoon before they are back in the apartment and Megan clatters around the kitchen fixing snacks while Lorna locates
Some Like It Hot
amid the DVDs scattered like so many giant pennies across the floor of her room. She does this surprisingly quickly and so has time to check her bank balance. Brunch had come to over thirty dollars but Lorna doesn’t mind. She’s determined to empty her American bank account before leaving and that’s only twelve hours away now. As she taps her PIN into her iThing it occurs to Lorna that she is actually going to have to pack at some point.

Ten minutes later she is sitting on the bed, head in her hands, when Megan comes in with hot chocolate.

‘Everything OK?’ says Megan.

‘I’m not sure.’

Megan’s eyebrow quivers. She waits.

‘There seems to have been a bank error.’

Megan is expressionless. ‘I have money,’ she says.

‘No, no, no, dear heart. You misunderstand me. This bank error is in my favour. Yesterday I had fifty-six dollars and nineteen cents. Now there seems to be over a hundred gees in my account.’

And it’s true. Yesterday she was more or less indigent and now she is properly loaded. It is very worrying. Best thing is not to think about it.

‘Ready for this movie then?’

But Megan isn’t ready for the movie even though
Some Like It Hot
is their favourite film and watching it together one last time is what they had agreed to do today. Megan wants to sort out the mistake. She wants to call people, yell at people, make people wish they’d never been born. Really she wants to
pah-pah pah-pah
their stupid, inefficient, incompetent heads in.

‘Just a mistake, babes. Tomorrow it’ll all be gone again. I’ll be lucky if they don’t charge me for the inconvenience. But I really don’t want to spend my last afternoon on the phone to some android. Especially when I’ve been that android and know how shit they feel all day, every day.’ Lorna had spent twenty hours a week cold-calling for a windows company while at uni and had felt her soul shrink a little during every second of every minute of each of those hours. The weird thing was that she’d been quite good at it. Employee of the month four times.

But Megan can’t settle until this is sorted and so Lorna agrees to send a WTF email expressing her dismay at having her mind messed up by Mr Wells and Mr Fargo.

Which is how she finds out that the cash had been deposited by a [email protected] overnight. And that means it isn’t a mistake. It’s worse than that. It’s her dad trying to wash his hands of her. Directed by the android at the bank she finds an explanatory email from Nigel lurking in her spam account.

Nigel@nigelsmith’s email explains that her dad is sorry but he’s planning to be away for an extended period and that he feels it will be too emotionally complicated to begin a relationship now after all these years, but that he – this Nigel – has persuaded Mr Knox that he should at least make a gesture. Hence the cash.

‘What a cunt,’ says Lorna. Megan nods.

‘Gesture my eye,’ says Lorna. Megan nods again.

‘I’m going to send it back,’ says Lorna. Megan doesn’t nod this time. She frowns. She does that thing with her eyebrow.

‘You could do that,’ she says. ‘Or you could . . .’ She pauses meaningfully. Lorna feels she is missing something.

‘What?’ says Lorna.

‘I don’t know,’ Megan shrugs. ‘You could maybe sorta keep it. Spend it. Invest it. Build a future. You could – and here’s a wild and crazy idea – use it to stay here in California. In a nicer apartment maybe.’

‘I like this apartment.’

‘Whatever.’ Megan shrugs again.

‘Bollocks. Let’s watch the bleedin’ film.’

But it turns out that now neither of them can settle and by the time Spats Columbo’s men have machine-gunned their rivals, and before Curtis and Lemmon are even into their frocks, Lorna has inwardly acknowledged that Megan maybe had a point, this is the kind of break that people pray for. She shouldn’t let pride keep her poor. She zaps the DVD to pause.