She went back into the house. The cool past-midnight air had made her shivery, if anything. She went to fill the kettle. The kitchen felt smaller than it usually did. Jean took a deep breath, opened the dishwasher and began to make little piles of plates and bowls on the worktop, to be transferred into the cupboards. Just something to do that was normal. A neutral taste to offset the acid of this, of the thing there was no possible way of digesting. James has sent people a message that he might do something terrible. James has been talking about – something happening. She couldn’t even quite frame it as a phrase in her head.
If only she had a mobile phone, she would at least have seen the message with her own eyes. It might make no practical difference, but she wouldn’t have this terrible sense of having been wrong-footed. Of being so negligent that dozens of people – by the sound of it – were aware of her own son’s despair before she knew the first thing about it. She’d just never got used to them. She was the wrong generation. Lee had a mobile, and the few times she’d tried to type out a message on it, it had taken so long that she might as well – like her father – be popping a letter in the post. It was the same with all of it. Her Facebook page, set up by James, had gone unmonitored for months; it was too much, the way it kept telling you about new features, and she hadn’t really recovered from the laughter of her children when she asked how to ‘befriend’ people on the site. Emails, Jean tried her best with, but she’d always found typing laborious: her fingers just wouldn’t fall into the right patterns, it was like trying to play the piano. Talking was so much easier. People just didn’t seem to be so keen on that, these days.
The kettle had boiled, and Jean looked blankly at it. It was one of these new ones with a transparent body, so you could watch the water – under a blue light – frothing and bubbling right up to the second it clicked. It was no better at the actual job than the shrieking kettle she’d had for years, before Alan died. But Sal had said that was ‘on its last legs’ and that this one had the best reviews.
Jean flipped the top of the Kilner jar, got a teabag out, tossed it into the mug. Milk came last, no matter what anyone said. She rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even want the tea, not really. Of course not.
She saw James as he had been at twelve, a chubby, polite boy in a smart grey jumper, off to Edinburgh with his father. With Alan, her soulmate. She experienced a quick and lacerating sense of loss for those days, of the time when they were a family. It wasn’t fair to Lee to think like that. It didn’t do any good, either. But this again was not really thinking, it was just feeling; it came from lower than the brain, from somewhere not so easily located. And the loss became a longing, to know where James was, to know what to do to help him.
It was absurd to think it, but without a mobile phone it felt as if she was further away from him than she should be. The decision not to own one of these devices – which she’d never had the slightest desire for – all of a sudden seemed careless to the point of selfishness. And the darkness outside, in the garden barely lit by the fingernail of moon, felt like a big solid wall between Jean and her son.
KARL DEAN
At about the time James stabbed the screen to dispatch his news, Karl had been waiting to pick up an important passenger from the SSE Arena, formerly Wembley Arena, and take him all the way to Newcastle. This should be just short of a five-hour drive at this time of night, if he kept to the speed limit, which of course he wouldn’t. Newcastle was a fair old schlep, as Karl was fond of saying – but he was happy doing it himself. There weren’t many drivers he’d trust with a VIP job. There were even fewer these days, without James. And besides, there weren’t many drivers who he’d be happy to see earning the money, when he could earn it himself. Yes, Karl was the boss now, so every journey was arguably earning him money. But when he was at the wheel, he was essentially making money for his own business and then paying himself pocket money from that business. It was like being, as he’d recently said at a party, both the ringmaster and the elephant. It didn’t really make sense because elephants in a circus didn’t get paid, and in fact circuses weren’t allowed to have them any more, but it had gone down well with the table, and the reception sometimes meant more than the truth.
Anyway, you didn’t know how long it was going to last, this job, any job, not even when you were in charge. Not in – as radio hosts were always saying – ‘the current climate’. There were plenty of younger drivers who would have taken this in a heartbeat. Karl had been at the bottom of the ladder long enough. He knew that hunger.
There was lots of it about. That hunger. Some of the young ones would keep going till they fell asleep at the wheel, if he let them. Everyone needed the wedge. The fella who’d replaced James had recently done an eighteen-hour stint, which wasn’t technically illegal, but also wasn’t technically a good idea at all. By the end of the shift, his texts had read as if a dog was walking across the screen. Yes, there were a dozen of them who’d do the big schleps. It was where the proper money was. And some of these gold card clients, like the DJ geezer who was currently in the back of Karl’s car, were also capable of coming out with fairy-tale tips. A footballer had once given Karl a pair of trainers, brand new, and – as it turned out – worth £400. Just handed them over at the drop-off. ‘Do you want these, pal?’ Karl had put them on eBay, and someone had paid the reserve price before he got home.
A story had done the rounds about a female driver – little bit of a rarity, in this industry – who’d got a pop star to Gatwick against a very tight deadline and, the next morning, found ten grand in her account. No reference. No sender name. Just a set of life-changing digits. And she’d gone well over the limit, by all accounts. She could have lost her licence, game over. Or, of course, lost more than that. Someone pulls out at a corner, she goes into the back of them, lights out. But the point was, none of these things did happen. She won the gamble and she won the ten thousand big ones. And that was what you were in this job for.
How many other jobs could you watch money coming in every time you got a text, any time the phone hummed in its little perch on the dashboard? And how many people like Karl, whose dad used to wallop him, who dropped out of school at 16, could have built an app like that? Or rather a whole empire, powered by an app?
Yes, life was sweeter than he’d ever thought it could be. But tonight – tonight, as he and James used to say, had not been the dream.
First: the customer, the DJ, had an attitude on him. He wanted to sleep, in fact he had to sleep, that was his thing. As soon as he got in the back. ‘I have to sleep, mate. All the way, yeah? Wake me up at the hotel, I don’t want to wake up at all till then. At all. Yeah?’ Fair enough, it was late: though from what Karl could make out, the geezer had only been on stage for an hour. You’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue the way he talked, you’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue and working a pizza oven at the same time. Still. Fine. Customer always right. But Karl didn’t have the power to guarantee that the guy could ‘just sleep’ all the way. This wasn’t a magic carpet service. This was two hundred and eighty-two miles of bloody tarmac.
And tonight, crossing even a tiny area of that tarmac had been the ball-ache to end all ball-aches. More than half an hour to get away from the Wembley area. The stadium, the arena, all of it, absolute murder to get away from. If Karl had three wishes, he’d use one of them to set the whole place on fire. Not with people in it; he wasn’t a psychopath. And anyway, the genies couldn’t kill people, could they – at least not in Aladdin. That was one of the terms and conditions. Yeah, wish one would be to tear down this whole area. Wish two, that he’d