Wake Up Happy Every Day (34 page)

And when he’s finished, Lorna tells him that he is very sweet and everything but that she thinks they should probably just drift.

Which is when Jez stands and throws his coffee in her face. It isn’t quite a full cup and it’s cold anyway, but still a shock.

‘You fucking heartless bitch,’ says Jez. ‘But don’t worry, Lorna, you’ll get yours.’ And he spits out her name – like it’s a mortal insult. Like it’s something rotten in his mouth. He looks at her for a hard moment. His face slightly pink, that ruby nose dripping. His mouth twisted. She can’t think of anything to say. He turns to leave.

And he then has to do the negotiation past the other customers and their purses, and they tut and look like their mothers again, and the chairs squawk and it all spoils the effect of his storming out somewhat.

Now the waitress comes over with another Kleenex and says that’s seven dollars ninety. Eight dollars nearly for two cups of coffee, one of which went on the floor and the other in her face.

Lorna leaves a twenty-dollar tip on her table, even though she doubts the waitress will pick up on the sarcasm. Those were, thinks Lorna, bloody expensive tissues in the end.

When she gets home Armitage Shanks is waiting for her just inside the door. First thing she does is toss the flowers out onto the sidewalk.

‘Sometimes, Armitage my boy, ambrosiac can still be foul, can still be nauseous. Mr Zwaardemaker didn’t think of that, did he?’ And she thinks that if, God forbid, Armitage Shanks is ever knocked down by a motor, then her next cat might be called Zwaardemaker.

And even though things have been a bit weird between them recently, she wishes Megan was home. She could do with some of her funny little ways right now.

Thirty-five

CATHERINE

If you asked her when and where she was happiest, she would think for a while and then she would probably say the time they went to Grettislaug, Iceland in 2004. In other words the day she spent with Tough in a natural hot tub in the first weeks of this job.

No one knew about Iceland then, how the economy was going to go down the toilet. Except Tough. He explained it as they sat naked in the volcanic hot spring looking beyond the snow-covered turf huts to the Arctic Ocean as it fizzed and foamed against the frigid scorn of the wind.

It wasn’t just greed, he said. And it wasn’t just about Iceland – it was the same with all these small countries on the edge of things, places where for a thousand years it has been a struggle just to get enough to eat. Thing is, now, somehow, they feel rich. Iceland, Ireland, Greece. They are like neglected, deprived foster kids who have found a bag of used twenties. They are going straight to the sweetie shop to spend it all on dolly mixtures and Mars bars. Of course they are. And they are not really caring too much whose twenties they are, who the bag really belongs to.

‘And it turns out it’s our bag,’ Tough said, stretching so she could see all the long muscles of his arms, ‘and it contains all our food money, all our mortgage money, the money that was going to put our kids through college.’

‘So that’s what we’re here for? To get our bag back?’

‘After a fashion,’ said Tough.

And they stayed like that for a while. Just sitting there, not saying anything. It was hard to get your head round the fact that the water, as hot as a hotel bath, never ever cooled while all around a thin layer of snow lay over everything, making everything look pristine like the old Norse Gods have got out the tablecloth they reserve for best.

And Tough told her the story of Grettir, an Icelandic warrior who got into scrapes. Occasionally he was heroic, defeating the undead for example. The original zombie slayer. Or he was saving villages from weird and gruesome monsters, Beowulf style. At other times he was just a yob. His temper getting him into serious bother with the authorities. He was always going too far in bar fights, that kind of thing. Glasses got smashed, pubs got trashed, innocent bystanders ended up a tiny bit dead. He got a bit wasted on super-strength mead and took an axe to people he thought were looking at him a bit funny. Or he burned down the houses of people who disrespected him – while the owners were inside. With their children.

Catherine knew the type. She was always having to pepper spray them in her time in the military police.

‘Eventually they declare him an outlaw, which means anyone can kill him without legal penalty.’

Anyway, there are various adventures and then, after twenty years, he’s chased to Drangey. ‘Which you can just see today.’ Tough pointed at a clenched fist of black rock punching its way out of the water on the horizon. ‘And his enemies think he’ll die there because he’s wounded and there is nothing to give him comfort – no food, no shelter. Only, being actually, you know, a hero, he swims the whole nine-mile stretch between there and here and – nearly dead – manages to revive himself in this very pool.’

Catherine raised herself up a little on the stone bench that ran around the edge of the pool, a bench worn smooth by centuries of bums. It made her smile. She felt the exhilarating tattoo of fresh Arctic air on her bare shoulders.

Such a strange country, Iceland. She wondered if she could live here. Not in Reykjavik, that reminded her too much of Ipswich oddly, but out here where it looked like the surface of the moon, where the wind still sang of trolls and the bad-tempered heroes that fought them. And where you could sit in the exact same place where generations of Vikings had sat, looking at the exact same lunatic landscape they saw.

And Tough and Catherine stayed there in that water that didn’t cool, under the sky that didn’t darken and talked of their childhoods and the different ways in which their fathers and mothers are mad – because all fathers and mothers are mad in their own way. They talked of the blind, unthinking cruelties of school, because all schools are cruel. And when they did finally get out of the pool, unselfconsciously naked with each other as they towelled down briskly, they shared strong black coffee from Tough’s flask – the one that had survived the bullets and the shrapnel of every peace-keeping mission from the Lebanon to Sarajevo.

And late that night, they drove through dusk back into Saudarkrokur. This was Iceland’s eleventh biggest town and basically a single street of punch-drunk houses, homes bullied the year round by weather but refusing to ever quite give up or give in. Refusing to go down.

They walked into the bar like characters from a bad old joke, where Tough ordered two Irish whiskies. It took minutes for the word to spread that there were Irish in town and it did no good for Tough and Catherine to protest that they were from Kent and Suffolk respectively. The people in the Sportbar just wouldn’t hear it. They wanted them to be properly Irish. They wanted craic and they wanted it immediately. The people of Saudarkrokur wanted storytellers and poets in their bar. They wanted singers and fighters and wisecracking charmers, and Catherine watched as Tough gave them all that. He told jokes, he bought drinks, he beat the locals at pool, he flirted with their girlfriends, he got into a ruck, then accepted a drink from the guy he laid flat out on the floor.

He got up and sang a beautiful lament for the auld country. A song in the ancient tongue of the Celts that filled the whole bar with an ache for the things that they have loved and lost and will never see again. Tough made sure no one in the Sportsbar would forget them.

All Catherine had to do was drink and laugh and slap the face of a twat that groped her arse. And then accept another drink off him. ‘No hard feelings?’ he said anxiously. He must be six foot six, with a massive nose and a funny eye. Catherine felt sorry for him.

And in the early hours of the morning with the party still going on, and with no sleep and with Tough surely many times over the limit, they started back through dusk towards Reykjavik.

Catherine asked how he knew Irish and Tough looked at her and said, ‘You mean the song? That was Georgian. Who was going to know though, eh?’

And they drove through the Elvish mists and whispers of Iceland, the rumours of ancient steam, listening to disco hits of the seventies because, bizarrely, that is what Tough insisted on. That landscape, that music, it was an unsettling clash, but it worked somehow.

Catherine dozed and, as they approached the city, Tough ran through it all again.

They were going to do a piece of work on a guy who had four daughters aged between eight and eighteen. He wasn’t a bad man either. He’d done nothing illegal. He was kind. Everyone said so. He was a good dad. He was a senior guy at a bank. Had worked there twenty years. He was a governor at the local elementary school, he was in the amateur dramatic group, the men’s choir.

But if they didn’t do this work then hundreds of thousands of British jobs would go, children would go hungry, or be forced to eat supermarket ready-meals made of donkey eyelids. Transplant operations would be postponed or cancelled.

And the effects would hit the Third World too. No one would be buying trinkets from India or Africa, no one would be going on holiday, the international development budget would have to be cut. And if that happened babies would sicken and die. Millions of them maybe. All those potential doctors, lawyers, teachers, actors, pop stars. All those possible Mandelas, all those tiny Gandhis. All of them starving to death. Flies crawling on their eyeballs. We’ve all seen the pictures.

This was the hard choice. One wife, four crying children, versus suffering and misery for millions. No choice at all really.

‘I know, Tough, I know. I’m OK.’

‘’Course you are. Maybe I’m just reassuring myself.’

They made it look like a freak accident. Einar Jonsson went out for his regular early morning jog, when he stumbled over a fallen power line that was still live. At least the police were able to tell his brave and dignified wife that he died instantly and painlessly.

‘He wouldn’t have known a thing,’ one of them said.

It didn’t really comfort his wife. Didn’t really stop the tears of his girls.

The deeper sadness was that it didn’t work. There were the four crying daughters, the one crying wife, but there was still the misery for millions. Still all the dead Gandhis and all the dead Mandelas. But not every plan comes off and you couldn’t know how much worse things would have been without this action. You have to take risks in this life. The biggest mistake is to be scared to make a mistake.

Yes Grettislaug, Iceland. A top day.

But that was then, this is now. That was all in the old days, before they got the new stuff. At least it’s all much simpler now, or should be. No pissing about with cables. And they have better intelligence these days. But here, in the now, the place where Catherine acknowledges to herself that she is not quite so happy, it has already been over a week and still this Knox is doing his thing. Getting on with living. Fucking things up for her with his tiresome propensity to keep breathing.

Catherine is back from her run and warming down. She does some slow press-ups, and then some stretches while her bath is running. She does her meditation and then flicks through the web, still no news of any sudden deaths of multi-billionaires in Russian Hill.

And then there is a soft knock at the door.

In Catherine’s business this is never good news. You never have anyone come to your room. You never order anything from room service, like you never pick someone up in a hotel bar. Like you always sleep on a mat next to the bed, rather than in it. This is all basic stuff.

The knock comes again. Soft but insistent. A professional knock.

Catherine unfolds herself from the floor, stands up and keeps her eyes on the handle. The most likely thing is that it is the hotel staff here to do something with the air con or the shower. The second most likely thing is that it is the hotel staff come to rob the room.

Yep, the door is opening inwards quietly. Catherine moves in one silent stride until she is standing behind it. She’s not afraid, she’s confident she can deal with whoever it is. She is curious and excited. This is action of a kind even if it just ends with her yelling, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ and a terrified bellboy mumbling some excuse as he backs away.

The door pauses a few inches in. And then swings wide, meaning that Catherine is hidden in a triangular hiding space watching as a thin man steps into the room. Narrow shoulders, a slight stoop, an old man in a cheap suit. Balding head. Not maintenance and no bellboy. Senior staff then. Management. All of this taken on board in less than a split second.

‘What the hell?’ she begins, as she pushes the door closed. She stops.

The old man turns. ‘Catherine?’

‘Tough?’ It is Tough – only old and shrunken, his face scored by a network of lines as close together as those on an ordnance survey map, his neck sagging like the slack rigging of an old sailboat. He looks like a reptile. Like a tortoise. They look at each other for a long moment.

‘You wouldn’t have any booze in the place would you, old girl?’

‘There’s the minibar.’

‘Of course, which means we can each have a snack pack of Pringles too. Oh joy. I get these salt cravings. Now, aren’t you going to hug me?’ And he smiles and it is the old Tough again for a moment. The Tough she knows from Iraq. From Grettislaug.

She finds she can’t smile, but she moves forward obediently into his arms. He seems frail and he smells funny. Expensive scent of course but there is something sour beneath that.