Nick Laird - Utterly Monkey

Geordie then had a bagful of cash. Janice had put the money in a white plastic bag and he’d placed it in the front pocket of the rucksack he’d nicked from his little sister Grace. As soon as he’d got on the ferry (until then he was still expecting Budgie to appear suddenly, behind some window, tapping softly as rain) he’d nipped into one of the disabled toilets, and sat on the floor and totalled the cash. £49,250. Not bad at all.

Sitting on Danny’s sofa, Geordie counted it again, dealing the notes into piles like playing cards. £49,300. He recounted it. £49,450. Fuck it, he thought, I’ve a rough idea. He lifted two of the Bank of England fifty pound notes, pushed them into his left trainer and placed the rest back into the plastic bags. He started to look around Danny’s place with replenished interest. Where the hell could he hide it? He wandered through the flat like a prospective buyer, looking up at the plaster cornices and down at the skirting boards. He tapped walls. He opened cupboards and drawers. He peeled back the carpet, like sunburnt skin, from a corner of the living room. The pale epidermis of unpolished floorboards. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He sat down again, heavily, on the sofa. And then it was obvious. He’d hide it where Budgie had hidden it. Geordie lifted a small fork from the cutlery drawer, which was still lolling out like a tongue, and carried the bag into the bathroom.

The bath must once have been new and white. And that must have been some time ago. It now had a discoloured ring around it, close to the top, like a high tidemark and the base of it was grained by smaller rings and various stains, all of them bad. The panel was plastic and when Geordie inserted the handle of the fork, it scraped open almost immediately. Behind the panel was a paper bag filled with nails, a magazine from July 1995 called Smash Hits (featuring Take That and their magnificent teeth) and an empty bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. He pushed the plastic bag right to the back, past the roughened underside of the bath.

Geordie, to the tune of ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’, was softly singing Fifty thousand pounds, fifty thousand pounds, hey-ho ma-dearie-oh, fifty thousand pounds. Janice was an idiot. She reckoned that kind of money was Budgie’s, that it was the proceeds of one scam or another: bleaching red diesel to white, flogging counterfeit DVDs or videos to the stallholders up at Nutts Corner, offering ‘protection’ to the chippies and offies that lined the main street. That kind of folding didn’t come in from that. Not, leastways, all at once. Fitting the panel back into its gap, Geordie started to get a little unnerved. Maybe he was the idiot. Everyone’d heard the rumours. Something was starting up or going down. Something was being unleashed. Maybe he had Something’s money.

Geordie showered, dressed himself in yesterday’s garb, and set off towards Dalston. Danny’s flat was in Stoke Newington, according to Albert, Olivia and his postcode, but Danny himself admitted Dalston was spiritually, if not technically, its home. He had given Geordie brief instructions last night: turn right out the house, then right again, then buy some food for dinner.

Stoke Newington High Street runs from the white liberal enclave of Church Street (homeopathic healers, designer clothes shops, independent bookstores) through the Turkish community (men’s clubs with no discernible purpose, kebab shops) to the African and Afro-Caribbean end (hair shops, furniture stores selling coffee tables fashioned from ceramic tigers). Geordie began to walk down it. He passed a mobile phone shop and remembered he’d not brought his phone out. Stupid of him. He’d not seen so many different shades of skin before. Geordie, Danny had learned last night in the pub, had never tried garlic or pasta, unless tinned spaghetti is pasta. Neither had he drank wine outside a church or eaten an aubergine, a courgette, or a sweet potato. Geordie felt himself in a new position: the outsider. He felt white. He couldn’t stop looking at the black people he saw. Their skin looked polished. They were beautiful. In Ridley Road market he thought he was about to get his head kicked in for staring. He was looking at a broad-shouldered young black man wearing a brown leather jacket and a gold-buttoned white shirt with a Nehru collar.

‘Wadchu looking at liddle man?’ Geordie realized he was talking to him. The man was repeatedly tilting his head back, as if brandishing his chin like a weapon.

‘Nothing,’ Geordie mumbled, shaking his head, scurrying, suddenly animal.

He came to a butchers, entitled Halal Meat, on the corner of the market. It was one long glass counter open to the street. Bald dead chickens clustered upside down along the back wall. Three men, slick and confident as bartenders, swayed between each other and served the docile queue. They wore white coats smeared with blood. They made Geordie think of a war movie he’d seen once in which sleepless doctors tended to the wounded. He inched to the front.

‘Yes? Help you?’ said Omar Sharif’s plumper little brother.

‘Can I have a pound of bacon and four chicken breasts please?’

The moustache behind the counter leant right across and tapped his cleaver on the glass: Are you taking the piss my friend?’ He rolled the ‘r’ of ‘friend’ and toned the phrase as Goldfinger did to James Bond. Geordie, angry, shook his head and then softened his face and shook his head again.

‘No bacon. How many chicken breasts you want?’ Sharif Jr straightened up behind the counter.

‘Four, please,’ said Geordie, a little stunned.

He crossed the road to the Kilkenny Arms, received his Guinness from the bleached Australian barman, who actually said ‘G’day’, and sat at an empty table. His ears were burning. He felt somehow embarrassed. This was the capital of his country and he felt a million miles from home. This was London, home of Big Ben, unfailingly chiming on the news every night, home of the Houses of Parliament and Churchill and the Union Jack and all the unchangeable symbols the orange banners displayed. Geordie realized he hadn’t seen a flag all day.

Mooning over his Guinness, Geordie thought about Ulster, that little patch of scorched earth. It had stayed loyal to England and now England didn’t want it. England was completely indifferent to it now. Geordie remembered Jenny McClure, this girl he’d known at primary school, who was tall and blonde and posh, which meant that her family lived outside the town and owned two cars and her dad played golf. She was clean and prim and perfect. And all through P6 and P7 he’d asked her to the cinema and made her little Valentine cards and warned the other boys off and waited after school just to walk ten paces behind her to the gates where her pert and pretty mother waited. And all that time she either ignored Geordie, or got her friends to tell him to leave her alone. Geordie remembered the lunchtime when, in an empty classroom, he’d poured the jar of dirty paintbrush water into her school bag. One day you wake up and hate.

At the Orange parades the police would stand on the fringes, attentive and static, like curious strangers who’ve stopped to watch a wedding party leave the church. Geordie remembered sitting on tarmac in fierce bare sunlight watching old Andy MacLean, a friend of his da’s, unwrap the Lambeg from the oilskins with a deft patience. He remembered the clipped neatness of his white rolled shirtsleeves. The snap and flutter of the tendons in his forearms. And how his thin wrists arched as the drumsticks twirled like spokes in front of him, and under his jutted chin how the ordinal drum had pounded and pounded and swung. He remembered how the lodge’s banners had advertised their faithfulness, as if faithfulness was all that mattered. But how could one stay devoted to someone who wants to leave you? Well, they wanted us once, Geordie thought. He stayed on in the pub for an idle hour, opposite a toothless old timer, folded into himself, dressed like Geordie’s dead grandfather, grey suit, flat cap, reading the Irish News. When he stood up to slope past him, the old guy raised his tumbler of whiskey to eyelevel, as if he was toasting the two of them.