William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

When she woke it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Ly-on was still sleeping but he’d wet himself.

♦

That night, Mr Quality-He-Delivers knocked on the door at about 8.00.

“Who is it?” Mhouse said, through the letter-box.

“Quality coming,” was the reply.

“Hey, Mr Q, come on in,” she said, unlocking the door. Mr Quality was perhaps the most important man in The Shaft, for all sorts of reasons, none of them particularly violent. No one who dealt with Mr Quality wanted him to be angry with them so he very rarely resorted to main force. He was very tall and thin and Mhouse knew that his real name was Abdul-latif. He stepped into the room, seeming twice as tall as Mhouse, and anyone might have thought he was about to go off running as he was wearing a dark maroon track suit and very new trainers, box-fresh. Only the fact that he had silver rings on all eight fingers and two thumbs made this supposition less than likely.

Mr Quality lounged against the kitchen wall, looking around him, proprietorially — it was his flat, after all. He was always lounging, was Mr Q, Mhouse thought, as if he supposed it made him seem not quite so embarrassingly lofty.

“Hey. Ly-on, man. How it hanging?”

Ly-on looked up from his TV. “Good,” he said. “I fit like new car.”

Mr Quality chuckled. “Sweet-sweet. You keep chillin’, man.”

Mhouse beckoned him away from Ly-on. “Where we at?” she asked.

“Saktellite TV, rent, gas, water, electric…” he pondered. “,£285, I say.” He smiled at her, showing small perfectly white teeth in mottled pink and brown gums. “You dey get problem?”

“No, no,” Mhouse said, thinking thank the good lord for Ramzam and Suleiman. “Everything working. Sometime the light he go out but I know it’s not you fault.”

“The electric he go be difficult. We have many problem. Gas easy, water easy, but electric…” he winced, tellingly. “We done get wahallah. They chase us — ah-ah.”

“Yeah. Bastards.”

She went into the bathroom for her stash, then pretended to rummage in the cardboard box beside her bed and opened and closed the cupboard doors before coming back with his £285. That left her with about £30—and she owed Margo…she’d have to go out again tonight. Still, the good thing about Mr Quality was that he could provide you with anything — anything — as long as you had the money. In Mhouse’s flat the gas, water and electricity had been cut off months ago but Mr Quality had reconnected her within hours. Every now and then Mr Quality paid to have sex with her — or rather, ‘paid’ in the sense that he always offered her money that she always declined.

She handed the,£285 over and Mr Quality paced about the flat, checking it out as if he were a prospective buyer. Mhouse kept it as clean as she could — she had very little furniture, but she had a broom and she always kept the floors swept.

“You have spare room, here,” Mr Quality said, opening a door into the second bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor and a few cardboard boxes with clothes and old toys in them. “I can get you lodger—£20 a week. No worry, clean nice person. Asylum, no speak English.”

“No, I’m fine at the moment. Keeping busy, business is good,” she said, trying to appear casual. “Things are OK, going fine. Yeah, fine.”

“You go let me know.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mr Q.”

After Mr Quality had gone she gave Ly-on his supper — mashed banana and condensed milk with a slug of rum. She crushed a Somnola into the mix and mashed it further with a fork.

“Mummy’s got to go out to work tonight,” she said as she handed him the bowl.

“Mummy working too hard,” he said, spooning the banana pabulum into his mouth.

“You go to toilet if you need pee-pee,” she said. “Don’t do it in you pants.”

“Mum — don’t saying that.” His eyes were on the screen.

She kissed his forehead and went to change into her working clothes. No point in waiting, she thought, might as well get the cash as soon as possible. She put on a cap-sleeved T — shirt with a red heart across her chest, wriggled into her short skirt, pulled on her zip-up white boots, picked up the umbrella, checked her bag for condoms and fastened the keys on the long chain to her belt. She locked the door on a sleeping Ly-on — she’d be back in a couple of hours or so, she reckoned, no need to alert Mrs Darling, and headed along the walkway to the stairs.

As she was leaving The Shaft, heading out to the Rotherhithe shore and her usual beat, she saw a black taxi-cab pull up, its light off. No one got out while it sat for a minute or two at the kerb. Who’s ordering a black cab at The Shaft? she wondered as she made towards it. Brave fool.

The driver stepped out as she walked past — big bloke, ugly face with a weak, cleft chin. She glanced back to see where he was going and saw him lock his cab and wander into the estate.

THE VET HAD BEEN — what was the word? — contemptuous, yes, almost contemptuous when Jonjo had told him what The Dog’s routine diet was. He was a young fellow with a square of beard under his bottom lip and a single dangling earring — something Jonjo didn’t expect to see in a Newhani veterinary surgeon.

“He eats pretty much what I eat,” Jonjo had said, reasonably. “I tend to cook for two — scrambled eggs and bacon, curries, sausage rolls, pork pies — he really likes pork pies — biscuits, crisps, the odd bar of chocolate.”

“This is a pedigree bassett hound,” the vet said. “Anyone would think you were trying to kill him.”

Jonjo sat quietly as the vet berated him for his neglect, then told him the sort of food The Dog should and must eat and wrote a list down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Smug bastard, Jonjo thought.

He touched his breast pocket and felt the crinkle of the vet’s folded list. The back of his cab was full of tins of special dog food and paper sacks of dog biscuit and fibrous additives; there were pills and suppositories and other types of medication should symptoms appear and complications occur. Bloody expensive too. He’d hand it all over to Candy in the morning. He wondered whether he should give The Dog back to his sister…

He stepped out of the cab and locked it, contemplating the tall blocks of the Shaftesbury Estate. He ran through his checks: the small Beretta Tomcat between his shoulder blades, snug in a rig he had designed himself; the larger 1911.45 ACP holstered in the small of his back, one round in the pipe, cocked and locked; knife strapped just above the left ankle. He was wearing an extra roomy leather blouson jacket that perfectly concealed the small prints of his weapons. He had loose, pale blue, stone-washed jeans and yellow builder’s boots with steel toecaps. He eased his shoulders and rotated his head, remembering the last time he’d experienced this adrenalin buzz — when he had knocked on Dr Philip Wang’s door in Anne Boleyn House.

He walked into The Shaft completely unafraid, calm, ready for anything.

Jonjo could hear Sergeant Snell’s voice in his ear. “ The Three O’s, youse cunts! ” Over-arm. Over-react. Over-kill. Number one: you can never have too many weapons. Number two: somebody calls you a name — you knock him down and kick him senseless. Number three — you don’t just wound, you permanently disable. Somebody tries to hit you — you kill him. Somebody tries to kill you — you destroy his family, his house, his village. Snell always made sure you got the picture. True, these instructions were tailored for violent combat zones but Jonjo had always regarded them as pretty sound counsel for life in general and, by and large, adhering to the Three O’s had served him well, only a few of his overreactions landing him in trouble with the police — but they tended to understand once they learned of his background.