‘Yeah, what?’
‘He’s followed us. He’s here.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy in the jeep. Jake. That’s his name. Jake.’
Millie jolted at that. She got to her feet and stood for a moment, half frozen, not knowing which way to go.
‘It’s OK.’ Sally crept to the doorway and put her head into the gap, peering down the corridor. She could just see the hallway – a huge, galleried atrium with a central staircase done in granite and marble with black and white tiles on the floor. Jake was near the front door. His ebony hair was gelled into spikes, his distressed jeans and T-shirt showing off his muscles and the trim line of his belly.
‘He’s in the house,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘Don’t worry – he’s in the hall at the front. He can’t see you.’
She held the phone to her chest and cautiously leaned out of the doorway again to watch him. He seemed smaller and much less confident now he wasn’t in his car. He kept bending a little to crane his neck up the stairs to see where David had disappeared to.
Sally ducked back into the office. ‘I’m not sure what he’s up to,’ she hissed. ‘It’s weird – maybe he’s here just to see David. Go and hide somewhere – somewhere in the trees where he won’t see you from the back of the house. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.’
The noise of a door closing upstairs echoed down the stairs. Sally ended the call and jerked her head back through the door. Jake was still in the hall, tightening his belt, pulling his shoulders back, watching David come along the landing.
‘Jake! Jake the Peg!’ David smiled expansively from the top of the stairs. He was wearing a well-cut white shirt over jeans. His feet were bare as he padded down, his arms open as if greeting a long-lost friend. He stopped a few stairs from the bottom and sat so he was a little above Jake’s eye level, forcing him to look up. ‘It’s been too long. How’s things? How’s the extra leg, mate?’ He held his hands at his crotch to mime an enormous phallus. ‘Still getting out and about, is it? Making lots of new friends?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Jake nodded nervously. He folded his arms tight across his chest, his hands tucked under them. ‘Everything’s wicked. Ticking over. Had a bit of a business proposal and thought I’d – y’know – drop in. Talk to you about it.’
‘Yeah – I saw you “dropping in”. I’ll be honest – I was a bit taken aback you’d think I had the same gate code six months on. Thought that was a bit disrespectful, but … you know how I am. Never dwell on things. If you feel at home enough to plug my code into my gate, after not seeing me in all this time, I reckoned that means you just feel comfortable around me.’ He took a toothpick from his pocket and began studiously picking his teeth, his hand over his mouth, his eyes on Jake. ‘So, Jakey, Jakey, Jakey, my extra-legged boy, Jake. What you bin up to, boyo? Just, from time to time you do hear some stupid rumours. Last I heard you were up to a bit of jiggery-pokery with the old no-no stuff. Selling it on to the rich kids – hanging around outside the posh schools, like a lonely turd in a lake, or so I’ve heard. Course I never listen to that nonsense, cos I’m sure it ain’t true.’
‘Nah …’ Jake shifted anxiously. ‘Course it ain’t.’
‘So how you bringing home the corn, these days, then, matey boy? Now that you’re not cracking off the money shots for me?’
‘Oh, you know. Been – doing my thing. Hoeing my row.’
David made a small sound in his throat as if he found this incredibly funny. He had to put a finger to his head and bend slightly at the waist to stop himself laughing like a horse.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It’s just …’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then gave in to another spasm of giggles. He checked it and sat straight, his face still twitching. ‘It’s just “hoeing my row”. The images it conjures up, mate. Hoeing my—’ He couldn’t get the words out. Again he doubled up with silent contortions.
Jake watched stonily, the huge muscles in his arms twitching slightly. ‘Sounds like they’re funny. The images.’
‘They are,’ David said, his voice tight, as if he was on the verge of hysteria. ‘Very funny. They’re poof images. One poof hoeing the other poof’s row. You know, one poof ploughing into another’s glory hole. That’s what it made me think of.’ David wiped his eyes again. Got himself under control. ‘My mother is a relatively intelligent woman. I mean, apart from the three times she opened her legs to my father, she isn’t altogether thick. Do you know what she used to say to me when I was a nipper? She used to say, “There are several people you should never trust, son. You should never trust a cop, you should never trust a skinny chef, you should never trust a fat beggar. Never trust an Arab or a bloke whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Never trust a man in black shoes and white socks and never trust a black man in a fez. But do you know who was at the top of her never-trust list? The crème de la crème of untrustworthiness?’
‘No.’ Jake said it almost soundlessly.
‘The poofs. The fucking poofters.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
David gave a slow smile. ‘You’re a fucking queer, Jake. A bumboy, a shirt-lifting faggoty shit-stirrer. Now, I ain’t saying that’s your fault. What the scientists are saying, these days, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but what they’re saying is that you can’t help it. Apparently it’s in your biology. You can’t be blamed for it – it’s in your genes.’ He held his hands out in amazement, as if to say, ‘How weird is that?’ ‘Yeah, according to the mad professors it’s nothing to do with you all being a bunch of perverts, it’s all down to some fuck-up in the chromosome department. So I can’t blame you, Jake, for the simple fact of you being a turd-tickler – what you do with your arse is your lookout – but I can blame you, and this is where I start to feel twitchy, like, what I can blame you for …’ he leaned forward ‘… is not having the fucking good manners to mention it to me. Jake the Peg with his extra leg – and turns out the leg’s not got its lead up for the bit of gash lying on the bed. It’s got it up maybe for one of the crew members. Or, God forgive me for saying it, maybe even for me. And he never mentions it. That, you see,’ he jabbed his fingers in the air, ‘that is what I call ignorance.’
David lowered his hand and put it on the banister. For a moment it looked as if he might swing his legs up and kick Jake in the chin. But he didn’t. He simply pulled himself to his feet.
Jake swallowed. He didn’t step back. He put his hands into his jeans pockets defiantly. ‘I’m not a poof.’
‘Liar.’ David’s face didn’t change. ‘You are.’
‘OK – so what if I was? Don’t mean anything, does it? This isn’t the Stone Age – there’s human rights now. You can’t get away with calling me a poof.’
David made a tutting noise. He shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Playing the poofter discrimination card? It’s against the rules, boyo. As bad as playing the race card.’ He dropped his head to one side and put on a fake bright voice: ‘We are sorry, your poof card has been denied. Please be advised that your poof card account has been closed. This decision was based on your account history of excessive over-limit spending. Please destroy your card immediately as it will no longer be honoured. Now, see that crossbow on the wall? Up there.’
Jake raised his eyes. Sally couldn’t see up to the galleried landing, but she knew what was up there. A crossbow mounted in a cabinet with a picture light trained above it. In the back of the cabinet there was a framed photograph of the sun setting over the African bush.