Dropping the curtain, Martin shambles back into the darkened room, depression seeping into his pores. He doesn’t understand the world. Sometimes he feels like they pick the road outside his flat just to taunt him. To remind him of the fun he’s not having; of the fact that these spangled, dancing creatures would scutter over to the other side of the pavement if he tried to join in. Whitmouth is a disappointment to him. He thought, once his mother died and he was able to choose his destiny, that the world would be his oyster, life would roll his way at last, but instead he finds himself observing other people’s fun as though he’s watching it on television.
I thought it was Fairyland, he thinks, as he switches on the unshaded ceiling light. When I was a kid. When we used to come down here from Bromwich. It was families, then: cream teas, and the helter-skelter on the pier the tallest building for miles. That was why I came back here: all those good times, all those memories, all that hope. Now I hardly dare to look in shop doorways as I pass them, in case I see Linzi-Dawn’s knees hitched up and Keifer’s low-slung jeans humping away between them, and me excluded, never wanted, always looking in.
She still hasn’t replied. Martin’s skin prickles as he stares at the blank display. Who does she think she is?
Throwing the phone down on the bed, he turns on the television, watches the bad news scroll out on the BBC. Dammit, Jackie. You have no right to treat me like this. If you were going to turn out like the rest of them, why did you pretend to be something else?
Another shriek in the street. Martin presses the volume control, turns it up to full. The rage of rejection crawls beneath his skin; invisible, unscratchable. All she needs to do is text him back. He doesn’t want to go out, but if she refuses to respond he’s going to have to. As his mother was always assuring him, persistence is the most important quality in life. And he knows that he is the most persistent of all.
Chapter Two
Amber Gordon clears out the lost-property cupboard once a week. It’s her favourite job of all. She likes the neatness of it, the tying up of loose ends, even if the loose end is simply deciding that, if someone’s not come back in nine months, they never will. She enjoys the curiosity, the quiet sense of snooping on other people’s lives as she marvels at the things – dentures, diamond earrings, diaries – that they either didn’t notice were lost or didn’t think worth coming back for. But most of all, she enjoys the gift-giving. For the Funnland cleaners, Sunday night brings the chance of an early Christmas.
It’s a good haul tonight. Among the forgotten umbrellas, the plastic bags of souvenir rock, the A Present from Whitmouth keyrings, lie moments of pure gold. A gaudy gilt charm bracelet, hearts and cupids jangling among shards of semi-precious stones. An MP3 player: a cheap thing, none of the touch-screen bells and whistles, but working, and already loaded with tunes. A jumbo bag of Haribo. And an international-call card, still in its wrapper and unactivated. Amber smiles when she sees it. She knows who would benefit from a good long call home. Thanks, fun-seeking stranger, whoever you were, she thinks. You may not know it, but you’ll have made one St Lucian very happy tonight.
She checks her watch, sees that she’s already late for tea break. Locks the cupboard back up, drops the gifts into her shoulder bag and hurries across the floodlit concourse to the café.
Moses is smoking again. It’s something of a sport with him. He knows that she knows – now that everywhere is non-smoking, a single whiff of tobacco indoors stands out like lipstick on a collar – and that she knows that it’s him who’s doing it. And yet he likes to test it anyway, to bend the rules and see what will happen. They’ve reached an unspoken truce on the matter. Amber feels that there are battles worth fighting and battles that are a waste of breath, and this is one of the latter.
And anyway, he’s a good worker. By the time the café staff arrive in the morning, their territory will gleam with hygiene and the scent of chemical lemon.
She sees him jump and drop his butt into the open Coke can in front of him when she pushes the door open, suppresses a smile as he assumes a look of injured innocence and, at the same time, pretends not to have noticed her. Amber pointedly meets his eye, as she always does, and gives him the knowing smile she always gives him. Life is full of small complicities, and she’s found that being boss involves even more than before.
Amber misses very little that goes on in Funnland. The room is full of people whose small stuff she resolutely doesn’t sweat. Jackie Jacobs, and the fact that all work grinds to a halt when her phone rings, but who keeps up morale with the stream of innuendo that pours from her mouth between times. The fact that Blessed Ongom is first into and last out of the café every night but works half as hard again as any of her colleagues in the hours either side. And Moses, of course, who has the stomach of a robot and can be relied on to clean up customer deposits that reduce weaker colleagues to tears.
The room is crowded. Their communal tea break is a ritual that none of these night workers would miss for their lives; not even the new ones, not even the ones whose English is so sketchy they have to communicate with smiling and sign language. A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people’s fun is a wearisome thing, Amber knows that. If a sit-down and a handful of sell-by-yesterday doughnuts make the whole thing bearable, she sees no point in token whip-cracking. As long as everything’s done by shift’s-end at six in the morning, she doesn’t question how her staff timetable themselves. It’s not as if Suzanne Oddie or any of the rest of the board are going to be down with stopwatches and clipboards when they could be tucked up under their 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. This is the great advantage of unsocial hours: as long as the job’s done, no one cares who’s doing it or how it gets there.
Moses’ face falls and his dark eyes fill with doubt as Amber alters her course to approach his table. He thinks I’m going to tell him off at last, she realises. Even though we’ve known each other for years, the fact that I’ve been promoted makes him – makes all of them – look at me now with a touch of suspicion. She smiles, and sees the wariness deepen. Forces herself to laugh, though she feels a tiny bit hurt. ‘It’s OK, Moses,’ she calls reassuringly. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
She reaches his table, takes the card from the bag and holds it out. ‘Lost-property night,’ she says. ‘It’s got about twenty quid on it, I think. I thought you might want to call your gran.’
The suspicion falls away, is replaced by deep, warm pleasure. Moses’ gran, back in Castries, has been ill lately; isn’t expected to last much longer. Amber knows he’ll never find the cash to fly back for the funeral, but at least a final phone call might help ease the loss. ‘Thank you, Amber,’ he says, and beams a wide white smile at her. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’
Amber tuts, tosses her hair. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘No skin off my nose,’ and walks on. She knows, and everyone else does too, that this is not entirely true. Her predecessor in the job treated lost property as a personal bonus. But she couldn’t do that. She’s never earned this much in her life, and she’d feel ugly, keeping these treats from a group of people whose lives are lived on minimum wage. These aren’t just her employees, they’re her neighbours. Her friends. If she kept herself apart at work, they’d soon keep themselves apart on the high street. She gives the bracelet to Julie Kirklees, a skinny eighteen-year-old whose Goth eye-paint, she often suspects, hides black eyes, and walks on to the counter.
She pours herself a cup of stewed tea from the urn and adds two sugars. Eyes the display fridge and the domed plates on top. There are precious few perks to this job, but an almost limitless supply of leftover junk food is one of them. Amber suspects that some of her staff live on little other than half-stale hamburger buns, lukewarm frankfurters, sausage rolls, cold chips; tinned tomato soup and apple turnovers their only vegetable input.