She fans the notes out, puts them to her face and sniffs them. They smell like – money. Wonderful money. Wonderful, wonderful money, root of all freedom. The only people who really believe the ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’ line are the ones who’ve never had to live without it.
Through the open door to the living room, she can see the melting corpse on the floor. A miserable life, a miserable death. No one to mourn him, no one to care. Died because he was greedy, in the end. Because his love for this stuff made him think an old lady’s life didn’t matter. And he didn’t even get to spend it. Didn’t enjoy his life. Just stashed it in a box and lived on his settee, watching other people live their lives on his TV screens.
Reluctantly, she puts the notes back on top of the pile. Strokes them, as though they were alive. They’re someone else’s, she thinks. Not mine. I’m not that person. If I take them, I’m all the things I ran away to stop myself becoming. Doing the things I do to keep the wolf from the door is one thing. I’d be doing this to chase down luxury. I’d be stepping over the line.
She can’t stop herself from creaming half a dozen notes off the top. She’s not a saint. Tucks them into her bra and feels better. Call it a rent rebate, she thinks. That’s a couple of weeks’ fags and groceries, some shoes and a good winter coat – compensation for the time I couldn’t work.
She puts the tray back in and closes the lid. Pushes the toolbox back into the back of the cupboard. Someone will find it one day. Maybe they’ll be honest, maybe they won’t. But they won’t be me.
She’s been here long enough. If she doesn’t get on with it, it will be rush hour by the time she gets back to Northbourne High Street, and she knows that, strangely enough, you sometimes stand out more in a crowd. People are more on their guard, more aware of potential threats, and the differences become more obvious. She closes the cupboard door and returns to the living room.
The TV taunts her, smug on its single screw. Ach, fuck it, thinks Cher. I may be doing the right thing, but I’m not that much of a bloody saint. She puts her hands on either side of the casing, braces one foot against the wall and rocks. After a couple of seconds, the rawlplugs in the wall give way and the TV comes with her, stand, plaster and all.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
He doesn’t like to waste things, so he folds his Ziploc up into quarters and tucks it into his trouser pocket. The dogs on the common have benefitted from his presence earlier than usual today. It’s always good to mix things up a bit, inject a bit of variety into one’s life. And besides, Marianne is starting to get on his nerves. Having to look at that peeling décolletage is like living with a nag.
It’s Wednesday, and his short working week is already over, at least until his half-day Friday. When he was working full time, he often bemoaned how few hours he seemed to have for himself. But now he has all the time in the world for galleries and museums, the cinema, for just sitting at a pavement table and watching the world go by, and he doesn’t have the money to enjoy them. He can’t even keep himself amused for long on the internet, because top-ups for his dongle seem to be getting more expensive by the day. Life on part-time wages involves a lot of television, a lot of supermarket cider and very few nights out. Not that his social life has ever been a whirl. Thomas has never understood why, but he seems to make people uncomfortable. Even when the CAB was fully open, his colleagues often forgot to ask him when they were planning their after-work drinks, and after a few council meetings the furniture cooperative people could barely meet his eye when he talked.
Today he feels like a treat. His finances, after all, have eased a lot now the Landlord’s dead and no one will be collecting rent for a while. The lunchtime rush is over, and Brasserie Julien will have finished its must-eat period. He fancies a cappuccino, lots of froth, chocolate on top, and a sit among the baby buggies. It’s another bright day, and it’ll be nice to watch the girls – so unselfconscious as they stroll the pavements in their thin summer dresses – from the shade of the brasserie’s awning, the spillover of their air-conditioning cooling him from the open windows. After, he’ll do a little food shop, pick up a four-pack and spend some quality time on the sofa with Nikki.
The High Street is its lackadaisical mid-afternoon self. It has its waves of busy – first thing in the morning and around the rush-hour – but the rest of the time you can see that London is still feeling the triple dip. People just don’t go out to wander shops, even to browse, the way they used to. Too much danger that one might end up buying something. That’s why Thomas stays at home. Art galleries are still mostly free to get in to, but a small bottle of water from one of their cafés quickly compensates for that. The brasserie seems to be the only business that does okay all day. It doesn’t even bother to open until eleven, but it does a moderate-to-good trade from then right through to closing time, catering as it does for each market that washes through: the mummies coming home from the gym, the lunch crowd, the idle time-fillers like himself, the post-work drinkers and the embarrassed first-daters, all looking for somewhere to meet that doesn’t have an edge of scary like most of the local pubs.
He’s disappointed to see that all of the pavement tables are taken. One, though, at the end by the bookies, has only one occupant. A studious-looking woman, late twenties, he thinks, who’s reading a Kindle with the sort of fierce concentration that suggests that she’s not reading it at all. Stood up, he thinks, or filling time before a meeting. Whatever, she doesn’t look like she’ll be there long.
He goes up and asks if she minds sharing. She looks up and he sees that she’s rather pretty: pixie haircut, overlarge eyes, a small but full-lipped mouth, a cute little pointed chin. If it weren’t for the specs and the wrap dress, a cami underneath to cover the worst of her cleavage, she would look rather like a Manga character. I would dress her, he thinks, indulging an idle fantasy as he often does about women he encounters in the street, in a bustier and Capri pants. She has small breasts and what looks like a narrow waist under that blouse. Something to pull her in and hoist her up would be perfect.
He sees her consider him. ‘I’m sort of waiting for someone,’ she says.
‘Okay. How about I move if – when – they come along? I so want to be outside today.’
She shrugs. ‘Sure,’ she says, and turns her chair side-on to the table to signify that she’s not into conversing and looks back down at her screen.
He sits, waves at the waiter, who gestures back that he will be along in a minute. Thomas turns his own chair towards the street and crosses one knee over the other, mirroring her body language as in all the best NLP manuals. ‘Beautiful day,’ he says.
‘Mmm,’ she says, and doesn’t look up from her reader.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Silly. Every day’s a beautiful day at the moment.’
‘Yes,’ she says, and clicks the clicker to turn the page. Clicks the page-back button a second later. Thomas looks out at the street. Not a particularly endearing sight. They’re opposite the Post Office sorting depot whose back wall faces out over the railway embankment’s no man’s land. It’s square, yellow-bricked, featureless, with a wheelchair ramp up to the red metal doors where the undelivered parcel window lives. A woman walks past in a green jersey tunic and black leggings, gladiator sandals on her feet and a rough bun on her head. Leggings, he thinks, are the devil’s work. Women think they hold them in, but they really don’t. If anything, they emphasise.