The boys watched her go.
Theo Miller giggled, tried to stifle the sound, couldn’t, burst out laughing. “Well!” he guffawed, and then, struggling to find inspiration through the champagne, “Well!”
The boy caught his arm, whispered, “Theo, we should…”
“…have her fucking head,” growled the first boy.
“Her head!” agreed the second boy.
Still watching, mused the third. There is something we can all learn from this.
“Her father was joint signatory on the contract he’ll have to pay now he’ll have to…”
“Fucking pay!”
“If she can’t keep her contracts she’ll never work never work never even finish but also never work I’ll see that she…”
“Her! Working for the Company?”
“She can clean the fucking floors no not even the floors she can—she can…”
“A contract is the most sacred thing which can…”
“Philip, I think you’ve got some lobster in your hair. Or is it crab?” Theo leaned in close to the first boy, a blast of alcoholic breath swimming across his face, then reached up and flicked a slip of shiny whiteness, glistening flesh, out of the hair above the boy’s right temple. “There you go! All better now.”
For a moment the boy called Philip looked into Theo’s eyes, and the world waited on the tightrope, wondering which way the wind would blow.
He punched Theo. If he’d had the imagination for a witty put-down, he probably would have chosen that, having not punched anyone since he was twelve and remembering it being quite an awkward experience even then.
As it was, wit failed, and so he hit him, and Theo Miller dropped to the floor and lay on his back in a pool of mingling liquids and torn fishy flesh, stared for a moment up at the ceiling, incredulous, then laughed. He laughed and laughed and let his head roll back and laughed a little bit more, as his friend squatted down next to him and wondered if he was meant to intervene, and how.
Then the boy called Philip said, “I fucking challenge you.”
He offered a few more words too, and they seemed to give him an increased passion for his theme. Most were terms of sexual abuse, but at the end they returned to the point. “I challenge you—get up you little shit—I challenge you!”
“Darling,” chuckled Theo, “you can’t. Duelling hasn’t been legal since—”
“My lawyer will draw up the indemnity. We’ll pay no more than £75,000 apiece. You can afford £75,000, can’t you? Get up! Get up!”
Theo laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed and…
On the following Wednesday a lawyer knocked on his door with the insurance papers to sign.
“Good afternoon. I am from the firm of Hatfield and Bolton and I have a preliminary indemnity insurance here for your perusal. You will see that it states that whoever should kill you should you be found deceased within the next two weeks will pay no more than £75,000 for the cost of your death and here also you will find the equivalent statement for the murder of one Philip Arnslade, assuming that your respective deaths satisfy the circumstances laid out in clauses three through eight of the—”
“I’m not signing this are you fucking kidding me I’m…”
On the Friday morning, as he was walking home, Theo Miller was mugged by three men dressed in balaclavas, who beat the shit out of him and took only £10 from his wallet, leaving credit cards and another £40 in cash behind.
On the Monday the lawyer came again.
“…and you will see a discretion clause of course which has been drawn up at Mr. Arnslade’s own expense, he is generously covering the legal fees in this matter, which have been substantial, to guarantee that the indemnity is worth no more than…”
Theo Miller threw coffee over the papers, and if only he’d planned ahead and made two cups, might have thrown something in the lawyer’s face.
Two days later he got a phone call from his aunty, whose dog had been killed, its mutilated body left on her car bonnet, head balanced on the stump of its neck on the path from the front door.
The day after that Theo Miller knocked on the door of his next-door neighbour, to discover him lying in bed with a swollen face and a split lip, torn almost exactly on the scar where as a baby his mouth had been gently stitched together, and Theo shouted, “You idiot why didn’t you say why didn’t you say this had happened you’re such an idiot why didn’t you…”
Later they sat together in the kitchen. The floor was sticky with old spilt coffee, crunchy with shattered remnants of dry, uncooked pasta, ground into dust by weeks of neglect. The cleaning lady had given up trying to keep the place in order after someone boiled milk and eggs in the kettle.
Theo said to the boy, “It’s stupid, of course. I don’t even know the girl’s name. But I walked into this room at the party and they were holding her down, and Philip had his cock out and was… it happens all the time. The contract doesn’t say that you’ll have to do anything, it’s supposed to be charity, but if you take the contract away then what have you got left? You’ve got dreams, I imagine. You let yourself dream, think for a moment that there was something else, a different future, and then when it stops you realise that there’s just this. Just this. That you’ve been bought as a whore for the master’s son, and they have the discretion to destroy your dreams whenever they want to, and you have nowhere to appeal and nothing to…
…my father bought my mother, you see. She had dreams, and he bought them. Money buys dreams. But it didn’t work out, and so he bought my stepmother and my stepmother is actually a very impressive woman but she knows, she understands that as long as she dreams of money, they’ll be fine. They’ll have a wonderful life. It’s only if she dreams of something else that her world will fall apart. Only then.”
The boy said nothing and thought briefly of Dani Cumali, felt a sudden surge of terror, panic even, and shifted in his seat and winced at the pain, and in that moment of distraction forgot again.
That night Theo Miller called up the lawyer, who’d thoughtfully left a card, and signed the indemnity. “Tell Philip Arnslade that I’m going to blow his damn brains out.”
“Mr. Arnslade will be most relieved,” replied the lawyer.
Chapter 28
“Your grandmother?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I had no idea, it’s so…”
“Sudden?”
“You have a grandmother, Mr. Miller?”
This is clearly a startling idea for her. Theo Miller is an artefact of the Criminal Audit Office; to imagine he has any existence beyond it is a struggle.
“Had. I had a grandmother.”
Theo gives his excuses and wonders if human resources are cross-checking as he speaks, looking for records of any previous absences. They won’t check if the grandmother is real—that’s not their job—but they will look through his work history and do a quick count of just how many grandmothers have died during his employment.
None thus far. That’s a good sign. There are several in the office who’ve lost at least three. And no one credits Theo with much imagination. He’s never given them reason to credit him with anything of anything much at all.
“And when do you think you’ll be back, Mr. Miller? The limit on compassionate leave for this sort of thing is forty-eight hours for a domestic case and seventy-two for a…”
“Forty-eight should be fine. Thank you.”
“Of course. I’ll have your payslip updated. And… I do hope the funeral is nice. When my grandmother died the priest had a double booking, and started giving the eulogy for the wrong dead woman.”