9
Michael Lipton-Miller, ‘Mickey’ to his friends, stood in the investment property he owned at 27 Pepys Road with a clipboard under his left arm, a BlackBerry held to his right ear, an iPhone vibrating in his left jacket pocket, a dehydration headache, a solicitor’s letter setting up an appointment to discuss his divorce terms in his right jacket pocket, and a briefcase at his feet. Of all these things, the one which caused him to feel least thrilled with life in general was the clipboard, which held a list of all the things which should have been done at the house to make it ready for a new arrival. Mickey was a qualified solicitor who no longer practised the law but instead worked full-time as a factotum, fixer and odd-job man for a Premiership football club. He loved his work and loved the sense of himself as a man who got things done, whose approach to life was a bit flashy, a bit wide – but had the other connotations of the word ‘wide’ too, a sense of breadth, of generosity, of largeness of spirit. His ideal sense of this did not involve checking over an itemised list of crockery, DVD equipment and toilet paper, but he had sacked his assistant last week (the search for a replacement would be what the vibrating phone was about – there were times, Mickey liked to joke, when putting the phone on vibrate was the nearest thing to sex he got all week) so here he was mired in the daily detail of making spoilt footballers happy. He was fifty years old.
In front of Mickey was the woman from the contract cleaning agency, whose job it had been to supervise the cleaners. She was tall and lean and had high cheekbones: fit. To Mickey’s eye she looked East African. She had that disconcerting African patience as she stood there while Mickey ranted and bollocked somebody else over the phone; she did not look like someone waiting for a verdict to be passed on her work. Standing next to her, Mickey had a thought he often had about good-looking young women: he was amazed that more of them did not sell their bodies for sex. It would surely be easier and much more lucrative than working – certainly than this sort of work – and could it really be so bad? People would pay hundreds of pounds to have sex with this woman, so why on earth would she instead want to clean houses for £4.50 an hour or whatever the sodding minimum wage was? Maybe he should put in an offer. And then Mickey, in the privacy of his own head, told himself: only joking.
‘Right right, sorry sorry,’ said Mickey. ‘Shall we have a look? I’m sure it’s all fine, darling,’ Mickey said, being Good Cop, ‘but you know the powers that be…’
The cleaner was not falling for any charm. She just gave a minimally polite nod.
Mickey started taking the tour. Because the house was not usually lived in for more than about three months at a time, often less, and because the people who lived there came from all over the place, it was decorated in a semi-expensive version of Hotel-Room Neutral. The players often came from families with no money and their only encounters with affluent style came from hotels, so that was a style they felt was aspirational. The walls were a complicated shade of Swedish white, the furniture was a mixture of modern stuff, the video and sound system were some Japanese make Mickey had never heard of but were also wired under the floorboards so that no one could accidentally forget that they belonged to the landlord and not the tenant. This time it was an African kid who was coming to London and was going to bring his dad. ‘Kid’ really did mean kid – he was seventeen. The boy was going to be starting on twenty grand a week with options to go higher or break the contract after a year. Mickey, who was fluent in money, who had grown up wanting to make money and thought that everything about making shedloads of money was fine, was admirable, was a high and noble goal – even Mickey sometimes felt ill when he thought about how much money was knocking around in football these days.
Why had the kid chosen to live here and not somewhere nice and suburban? Who knew? In any case it hadn’t been the boy but his father who had made the choice. Mickey thought the dad had probably been freaked out by the whiteness of the suburbs and preferred to live somewhere he might occasionally see the odd black face. It would not last, it never did. Klinsmann had lived in London and so had Lineker, and one or two of the European players still did, but by and large they all moved out to the Surrey rockbroker belt as soon as they could. Mickey himself lived in Richmond, not far from Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger.
Floors scrubbed – check. Windows so clean they’re invisible – check. Loos you could eat your dinner off – check. TV system with more buttons and lights than the flight deck of the Space Shuttle – check. TV actually working – check. Wireless broadband working – check. Carpets clean, beds made, windowsills dusted – checkety-check. The fridge was stocked, though whether it was stuffed with things Africans ate Mickey didn’t know, and didn’t care since that was the club-appointed housekeeper’s problem; the dad spoke some English but the kid didn’t, only French, so the club had lined up a translator, a French-speaking housekeeper, and an English teacher. All that was someone else’s worry so that was fine by Mickey.
It all seemed OK. Mickey had kept his game face on throughout. As he finished he felt like relieving his feelings a little, so he turned to the housekeeper.
‘You understand about confidentiality?’
She nodded but did not speak.
‘No, I mean you really understand?’
She nodded again. He had planned to do a version of the confidentiality bollocking he gave people, about how they were not allowed to say anything to anyone, ever. The housekeeper was so blank and seemed so indifferent, not in an incompetent am-I-bovvered? way but as if her real being was deeply buried somewhere else, that he lost the impetus to go on with it. It was a bit like losing an erection. Too bad. Mickey liked the confidentiality bollocking, because it gave a sense of importance and drama to the work; and the fact was, there was something glamorous about even the mundane aspects of Premier League football. Checking the supply of loo rolls: because a Premiership player was involved, it was important and interesting. Mickey knew plenty of things that people were desperate to know – most of them variations on the theme of ‘what is X really like?’ – as if there were a special category of knowledge called ‘really likeness’ – as if it were somehow the ultimate question.
‘It seems to be OK,’ he told the cleaner. She nodded again. Obviously this was Nod at Mickey Day. Well, two can nod. So he nodded back and headed for the door. There were a couple of bits of post, which he picked up on the way out – an electricity bill and a card which said ‘We Want What You Have’. Mickey had a flash of divorce-paranoia – Dinah’s brief was out to get him! – and then realised it was actually to do with 27 Pepys Road, because the other side of the card was a photo of the front door. This, Mickey thought, was almost certainly something to do with a newspaper staking out the house; maybe it was something specifically to do with the African kid. There were rumours that he’d been poached from Arsenal, or something. Maybe this was loopy Arsenal fans threatening the kid or trying to spook him. Bugger! Mickey thought that the last thing he needed today, as his phone started vibrating again, was a tricky what-should-I-do?