Wake Up Happy Every Day (17 page)

‘This is Mesopotamia, the country where they invented the wheel. This is the land where humanity learned to make bread for fuck’s sake. Not to mention wine. And those animals were pissing on it all like dogs on a lamp post.’ Plus, he told her, two days earlier, three US marines had carried out mock executions on a group of Iraqi schoolboys.

‘So you thought you’d make them see what it felt like?’

‘Exactly. And it’s not only in the interests of justice. It’s good tactics too, isn’t it?’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘Every time some dough-boy intimidates an Iraqi kid, or micturates on a piece of their culture, he simply ensures a thousand other people hate us. He gets his mates killed. He gets our mates killed. If we let it happen we’re being bad soldiers.’

Tough should be in a comic book really. They should make films based around him. He was already fiftyish back then, with a permanently amused expression, desert-sky eyes radiantly blue in a lean face the colour and texture of sand. He was like Indiana Jones. And he had that great name.

‘I know. What else could I do except join the Army? Caused me some grief as a kid though. Everybody wanted to fight the kid called Tough.’

‘I bet.’

‘Especially when they found out I was gay.’

‘Bollocks.’

Tough had raised an eyebrow, blown out a full lungful of poison from one of those stinky cigars he liked. ‘You don’t think I’m gay?’

‘Well, it’s hardly likely . . . is it?’ But the last part of the sentence was uncertain. Tough had laughed. ‘My dear, I’m out and proud and I don’t think my colleagues really care. As long as you do what you’re paid to do, and do it well, the Army is a very tolerant place. Don’t you find?’

‘Not if you’ve got a vagina it isn’t.’

Tough had laughed again.

And it was then that the American captain burst through the sequined curtain that separated their little nook from the rest of the tea shop. It appeared that he and Tough knew each other. The captain was tomato-faced and pretty aeriated.

‘I should have your fucking balls, Tough.’

Tough had turned to look at him slowly. ‘Captain, I believe I have, through my actions today, saved you and your force a great deal of future trouble.’ And he’d outlined once again his theory about why it might be a bad idea, tactically, to go around desecrating the sacred works of the people whose hearts and minds were, in his opinion, crucial to the longer term strategic aims of the campaign.

‘And I have photos of what your goons were up to before I arrived. So off you jolly well fuck, there’s a good captain.’ And he had turned back to Catherine and, somewhat to her surprise, the captain had, indeed, fucked off.

And they’d stayed friends since. Tough had been a mentor and a guide. Not just in Army stuff, and not just in getting her this gig after she left, but in everything else as well. Tough was one of those people who knew everything about everything. He knew about history, art, literature, music. He reminded her of the old boys who used to hang out in the library a lifetime ago. And he’d made her want to know those things too – and the old boys in Hildreth library had never done that. He wrote as well. Not books or anything, but letters. As far as she knew he’d never written an email, never sent a text. Instead he sent funny postcards and long, brilliant letters about the places he’d seen, and what he was reading or listening to. And the boys he was paying to bugger him.

They’d known each other eleven years, and now Tough was some kind of special advisor to the government in Abkhazia. A place the size of Hertfordshire that had fairly recently won its freedom from Georgia by the inspired tactic of getting the Russians to bomb the shit out of the men from Tbilisi. Like a little kid getting his bad boy big brother to twat the reception-class bully.

Tough had been very insistent she come over and see him. In daily letters he told her she’d love the people, the landscape, the language. He also said she’d hate the city, that a combination of earthquakes and Soviet planning had done for it, but they could get out of the capital and walk and talk and catch up properly. She was sure he was behind the job she was doing out there, otherwise it was a bit of a coincidence – a contract comes through for a thing in Abkhazia just as her old friend Tough moves out there.

He’d sent her a book called the Nart sagas about mythical heroes of the region, translated into English from the work of a guy called Bagrat Shinkuba and a DVD of the local martial art, a vicious scrappy version of wrestling with few discernible rules.
You like fighting, come and learn this
he’d written on the card that came with the package. Eleven years and he still doesn’t get it. She doesn’t like fighting. She hates fighting. Hand-to-hand fighting of any kind is primitive and ugly. She never fights unless she has to. She just thinks it’s important to be prepared, because you do have to fight in the end. Everyone does sometimes. And if you are small, if you are a woman, then you need to be able to fight harder and dirtier than everyone else.

She likes arguing with Tough. She doesn’t really win against him – he’s read so damn much – but he is always interested in what she’s saying. And he always stays calm. Always stays dry and amusing actually, and this is probably because not a whole lot means anything to Tough. Not really. For Tough everything is interesting but everything is meaningless. He should be a guest on
Thought For The
bloody
Day
.

And now that trip is in danger of being messed up by this Russell Knox and his failure to adhere to a routine, by his inability to ever be on his own. It is beyond irritating, it really is.

Nineteen

NICKY

And now we are into our Grand Design weeks. The weeks where I’m at the mercy of the man we come to call the architect. Because, yes, it was indeed true that Russell had kept himself in good nick right up until the end, and that meant problems to solve. Risks to assess and then to mitigate. More milestones to negotiate.

When we settle our account with the undertaker, he tells us that the pathologist had commented on the fine figure of a corpse Nicholas Fisher was. How he was a real good ad for that British NHS. Said he had been won over to the whole idea of socialised medicine as a result of dissecting this Fisher guy. The pathologist told him that for a guy that was meant to be more or less broke he had great teeth, great skin, great hair, great muscle tone. He even had great nails.

‘Hell, he told me this Nicky Fisher even smelt good when he was first brought in. Now that’s rare in his line of work. Mine too.’

This admiration has made its mark on the undertaker so that’s two potential new votes for pro-universal healthcare democrats. And the undertaker, like nearly all his profession, had been solidly Republican up to that point. Was it Mark Twain who said there’s nothing certain in life except for death and taxes? Well, undertakers as a profession are unsurprisingly OK with death. They are, after all, sitting pretty. Death is one of the few businesses that can’t migrate to the internet. It’s not like books or music or matchmaking. Death demands a physical presence on the high street. You can’t do the death business via a portal. Undertakers are far less sanguine about taxes than they are about the web.

It’s all an early vindication of our Robin Hood theory. Through our plan – through what we’ve taken to calling our new business model – we’re not just helping ourselves, we’re already helping the powerless, the dispossessed. The poor huddled masses of the near future might have cause to celebrate us. Maybe we really could be heroes. It’s heartwarming really. Right from the very first moment of his death Russell finds himself taking the opportunities to do good with his wedge that he has so rigorously spurned in life. It’s like something out of Dickens, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is nothing more heartwarming than that. Unless it’s
Toy Story 2
.

It’ll all look good in the dock of the future.

But Russell’s self-absorption in life has given us a set of problems which definitely need some of Sarah’s SMART solutions. How are we going to make me – an averagely crumbling middle-aged wreck – pass for an expensively maintained global oligarch? It’s a big ask. This can’t be a mere makeover project. This absolutely has to be a Grand Design. You’ll remember
Grand Designs
. It was that architectural TV programme where couples would take some public toilet, some church, some water-cooled nuclear reactor or whatever and – after a rollercoaster ride of adventures involving cowboy builders and dodgy plumbers – turn it into a modernist palace.

Sarah has always been a fan of these shows and even a casual study reveals that the switchback of triumph and disaster – the sense of jeopardy and threat essential for ratings – is caused by the hubris of the participants who don’t take the advice of the expert presenter. It’s clear the producers deliberately select the psychotically headstrong over the sensibly amenable. Sensibly amenable butters few parsnips in the world of reality TV.

But we are neither of us suicidally stubborn, so we are going to follow to the slavish letter the advice of our chosen experts. We are going to demolish the derelict shed that is Nicky Fisher and remake it as a cathedral. I’m going to get reshaped into the image of the man whose passport is essential to our new lives.

To accomplish this we need a skilled and accredited practitioner of the arts of renovation, preservation and tasteful alteration. We need an architect, in other words. A drawer-up of plans, a supervisor of the building process.

And because the final programmes of works are so radical, Sarah also talks of hiring a support team of counsellors, shrinks, lifestyle gurus – what you might call architects of the head – to sandblast my brain. To supervise the repointing and replastering of the cracks in my psyche. To damp-proof my very soul and guard it against rot and worms. But it turns out that because I have Linwood I don’t need most of these others. Like pretty much everything else in our new lives we find him through Jesus.

‘Linwood is the best trainer on the West Coast. Well, the Bay Area anyway. Everyone knows this.’

‘Expensive?’

Jesus shrugs and smiles. ‘He is the best.’

And he certainly looks the part. Peak period Denzel Washington in looks, with the grave manner of a Harvard maths professor. A man you can tell it will be hard to say no to.

Nevertheless, I think Sarah’s surprised at how compliant I am. I’m not resistant in the way I’m sure she expected me to be. I submit to all the tests, all the treadmills and the charts. And then, when all the assessments have been done I just get on with it. I do the laps, the squats, the lunge-walks, the bench-presses, the pull-ups, the press-ups and all the cardiovascular stuff. I do the yoga – Ashtanga and Hatha – I do the Pilates and eat up my Alexander technique like a good boy. Quite unexpected really, willpower never having been my thing up to that point.

I do the full range of workouts more usually associated with suburban ladies. I do step aerobics, skipping, spinning. I do bloody Zumba for chrissake.

Of course, by necessity, I’m often in a class of one. It’s usually just me working out to the sound of Tom Waits rather than a class of sweating MILFs wobbling to glossy, high-BPM pop. This is my only small rebellion and it causes a satisfying amount of pain to Linwood. He’s a big Katy Perry fan. Sporty types always have terrible taste in music. This is an iron law.

However, sometimes, to keep things interesting, he allows me to do games too. Squash, badminton, tennis with country-club coaches. Basketball on floodlit courts specially kept open late at night just for me where Linwood teaches me the arcane mysteries of the dunk.

I grapple with Brazilian ju-jitsu masters, chase the ping-pong balls of ex-pat ex-North Korean ex-Olympians who came to the 1996 games just to defect. I scramble over the assault courses of the Navy Seals, play carefully supervised beach volleyball with college girls – all in the cause of keeping the regimen stimulating, to avoid the dreaded plateau – which, according to every single architect whatever their discipline, is the very last place you want to be. In the world of the sports coach a plateau is a kind of hell.

And I give up sugar and dairy and alcohol. Replace them with raw carrots, leafy veg and thin lentil soups. I allow my carbs to be weighed, my every wild rice grain counted. And if ever I feel like I’m going to crack then I have Linwood’s soothing tones on speed dial, always ready to talk me down from ordering something dangerous like a pizza, or a fajita. Meanwhile genuinely Scandinavian masseuses – the best, not the cheapest obviously – stretch and sooth mutinous hamstrings and tortured calves, necks, shoulders, ribs.

What anyone who is serious about self-improvement learns is that if it works it hurts. If you’re serious about losing flab and gaining muscle then you will always be hungry and you will always be hurting.

And it’s because of this that we are required to have Linwood or Jesus or both around more or less 24/7 to prevent me from leaving the house on my own. They accompany me on my runs to ensure there are no opportunities to score illicit Oreos or Hershey bars. And sometimes Linwood makes me sit down with him to watch uplifting movies. The kind of movies I’ve put on for Scarlett in the past, to give myself a respite from childcare. The kind I’ve never actually watched properly before.

This is how come I see
Watership Down
,
The Sound of Music
. All the
Back To The Future
s and all the
Toy Story
s. Fables of evil overcome. Tales of grace under pressure. Parables of the little guy made great, the nice guy finishing first, ordinary heroes fulfilling their potential. Stories that should be banned for giving average chumps impossible dreams. God, I can’t believe we’ve been filling Scarlett’s head with this stuff. Thank fuck the agency doesn’t allow Mary to let kids watch DVDs. Not even Pixar ones. It’s not part of the Second-Best Kind of Love method.