‘Your childhood was a hardly a picnic.’
‘Exactly. Which is maybe why I understand him.’
She texted me a few weeks later. I gathered that Troy wanted to meet me or she wanted me to meet him or some combination of the two. I suggested a pub on Blackfriars Road. I might have taken you with me, Caro, but I reckoned you could do without the aggravation.
I got there late and they’d already found a table in the window. Penny went to the bar and left me with Troy. When I sat down he seemed to be waiting for me to speak.
‘So you’re a zoologist,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I work at the zoo. Hang out with the reptiles in the reptile house.’
‘But I thought…’
‘You thought what?’
‘Penny said you work in a lab.’
‘Oh, she told you that. I usually don’t. I prefer to keep things in separate compartments. Work life, home life, pub life, whatever.’
‘Sorry. She didn’t say it was a secret.’
‘It’s not a secret. It’s just that it’s my business not your business.’
He wasn’t good at eye contact. He could do it, look you in the eye – he’d fixed me a couple of times already – but it was always too much. And it was a relief when his stare shifted – to his phone, the door, the noisy table in the far corner. He seemed restless and distracted, but there was this stillness in him at the same time that unnerved me, some predatory quality.
He nodded towards the street. ‘You drove here.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘I know you did. Penny recognised your tank. We saw you go past twice looking for somewhere to park. It gets tedious I should think. You should get rid of it.’
‘What?’
‘The tank. Sell it for scrap. Get a bike.’
‘Sorry, I’m confused. Is that your business or my business?’
‘I’m just saying. It must be hard always looking for places to park.’
‘Well it is, but I need a vehicle for the job.’
‘Which is?’
‘Penny didn’t tell you?’
‘I wanted to hear your version. She gets things wrong sometimes.’
‘I build things.’
‘Things?’
‘Buildings.’
‘You build buildings.’
‘Yes, look, I know you’d rather I did something else, but that happens to be what I do. And I could tell you why it’s a good thing, like nursing or teaching or growing vegetables, because people like living indoors with roofs to keep the rain out and running water and drains so that the streets aren’t open sewers and everyone doesn’t get dysentery, but that’s my business not your business and I prefer to keep things in separate compartments.’
‘No offence, Jason. You do whatever it is you do.’ He smiled, just slightly – a thin sneer of a smile – and he seemed to relax. He’d got me wound up and it made him feel better.
‘So, Troy, I hear you’re interested in finding solutions.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Penny said you’re a solutionist or something.’
‘I don’t think so. I think you got that wrong.’
I wouldn’t have mentioned the solutionists. I intended not to, but I wanted to throw him off balance. I assumed it was important to him, whatever it was, because Penny had phoned specifically to tell me it wasn’t. It was either that or ask him how his dad was doing.
Troy was looking out the window, looking at me, looking out the window again. ‘No, you’ve got me there. I don’t even know what that is. You’ve gone off on some sort of tangent with that one.’
Penny came with the drinks on a tray – a lager for me, something short and fizzy for her, ginger ale maybe, and an obscene quantity of watered down orange juice for Troy. She put the tray down on the table and perched on the edge of a chair. ‘I hope you two found something to talk about.’ She looked at us, each of us in turn.
Troy was staring at the tray. ‘That’s not enough change.’ There was a tenner and a scattering of coins. ‘I gave you a twenty.’
‘That’s all the change I got, Troy, honest.’
‘And you didn’t count it?’
‘There’s hundreds of people up there. Look. It took me ages just to get served.’
‘So you’re saying you weren’t paying attention?’
‘Are you sure it’s not enough?’
Without warning, Troy reached across the table and put a hand to Penny’s face. I thought he meant to take her by the ear like a schoolteacher in an old film. But just as abruptly he pulled back. His hand hovered for a moment above the table and opened with the index and middle fingers pointing upwards. The pound coin between them caught the light, glinting as it turned. He smiled, put the coin in his pocket and gathered up the rest of the money.
Penny had gone pale and her breathing was shallow. She said, ‘What was that about?’
‘You’ve been talking to Jason about our hobby.’
She looked puzzled.
‘You know – our little magic circle – the illusionists.’ He articulated the word, the wrong word, with exaggerated care. ‘I hope you haven’t given away any tricks.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know any tricks.’
‘That’s what you do with the reptiles, then, is it?’ I said, ‘in the reptile house – teach them magic tricks?’
‘Yeah. The snakes are the worst. Hard doing magic if you don’t have hands.’
We sat for a while, listening to other people’s laughter and the sirens on Blackfriars Road.
Then Troy said, ‘We’re going to have to go now, aren’t we, Pen.’
‘But we just got here.’
‘I think you must have left the gas on. I can smell it from here. Can’t you smell something, Jason? You must have left something cooking, Pen. One of these days, you’ll burn the place down.’
I told Penny to call me. If she needed anything, she had my number. I meant if he hit her, or scared her to the point that she just had to get out and needed somewhere to crash, somewhere to hide.
I googled Troy. I had that one name and I had zoology, which turned out to be enough. He did have a PhD – from Imperial College. Something to do with mutations in zoonotic diseases, which I discovered were diseases that originate in animals – HIV, swine fever, avian flu, that sort of thing. For some reason I was reassured. He was more or less who Penny thought he was, even he was a mean fucker. I thought no more about it. I had my own problems.
Weeks passed, a month or more maybe and Penny phoned. ‘Jason, I need to borrow your car. The SUV. We’re moving, Simon and me, and we’ve got all this stuff.’
‘I didn’t know you could drive.’
‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know.’
‘I didn’t know you believed in driving. Aren’t cars part of the problem?’
‘Are you going to lend me the car or not?’
‘If you need a car I’ll get you a car.’
‘Is that a yes, then? I can’t do it on the bus, can I?’
‘Yes, you can have a car. And a driver to go with it, if you like. Is this for a day, a weekend, what?’
‘A driver to go with it?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Like the driver’s just another commodity.’
‘Not a commodity, no. A person who drives for a living and will be glad of the work.’
‘And of course you’ll pay for this car and this driver.’
‘That’s what I’m offering.’
‘Money. That’s what it always comes down to with you, isn’t it.’
‘That’s the way things work, Pen, until the whole system breaks down and we go back to bartering.’
‘But I didn’t ask for your money, I just asked to borrow your car.’
I took a deep breath. ‘And you’ve definitely got a licence.’