In the humming silence of the mid-afternoon house, redolent of beeswax, Michelle Brodie stared hungrily at the television in the kitchen: a packet of humdrum delights. From outside in the road she heard a tinkling 'Byeee!' and could imagine the girl in the brindled uniform of an exclusive Highgate school, her glossy mane and chocolate shoes. But before she could move towards the kettle and the television, Michelle sensed a presence in the house, faint but threatening. She rushed into the drawing room to find Cal bedded down in the Eames chair, the pink and black patchwork of the Financial Times spread on his slow-rising chest.
Michelle woke him up with a cup of Earl Grey. She told him about Blair and the letter he was going to send to her ex — he made the right noises, but his mind was in two other places. 'I can't face another day like today,' he sighed when it was his turn. 'There are consultants and accountants all over the offices like flies on a fucking corpse … and… and I told Saskia I'd go to find Daisy …' Michelle switched her grimace into a smirk of sympathy. If Cal noticed this, he chose not to remark on it; he understood. Daisy stank.
Cal Devenish — former writer, former hell raiser, now the emollient yet forceful face of Channel Devenish — was exhausted. The production company he'd taken over six years ago was being sold to an American media conglomerate. The business had been a wrinkled little thing when Cal got it; now it was a taut balloon of gassy cash. Devenish had developed a series of hit programmes: Tumour Swap, TWOC Rally, Whorecam — and especially Blackie, a kids' show featuring a depressed spaniel that had been Globally syndicated. As well as being a shrewd purveyor of eyetrash to the myopic, Cal was also a panellist on arts review shows and current events forums, a wag and a wit. He'd skilfully blended his waning creativity with orange foundation cream, then slapped it all over his face so that it didn't shine under the studio lights. He bestrode the steadily narrowing gulf between high culture and low entertainment like a credible, shrinking colossus. Even if he managed to flog Channel Devenish — and this was by no means in the bag — he was still going to have to do a management workout, three years in the shafts of corporate carters, while maintaining his public profile because they wanted that as well.
Devenish's career change had come with his recovery from addiction to cocaine, alcohol and commercial sex. Not that he pursued this recovery actively any more. There had been the predictable treatment centre, a Jenga of gables in the Greenbelt, where counsellors nutty as walnuts cracked other nutters with their shells. After that he did therapy for a while — both individual and group — so that he might irrigate his costive immaturity. Then he took to the gym, which tempered his skinny limbs, and acquired a goatee like a neat hairy portcullis, which, oddly, gave him gravitas. Now Cal worked all the hours he could, and when he wasn't working he was dealing with his troublesome daughter or moping around the house, never saying — although clearly thinking… what the fuck have I got myself into with this woman and her mad bloody ex-husband. Her sulky son … where will it all end?
They didn't fight, though. They never raised their voices. They had a great deal of compatible secrecy — which would serve as intimacy for a while. As they were working their way gingerly through this minefield of mutuality, the front door opened, then explosively slammed, the fanlight rattled, the stairs reverberated, and Carl's bedroom door provided the final report that an adolescent was in the house. Michelle became acutely aware of him … my sweety, my honey … sitting up there on the end of his bed, disdaining the pastel-painted work unit, complete with personal computer, ignoring the framed posters of Tintin book covers on the candy-striped walls, instead pawing yet again through the box of kiddy stuff that he'd brought with him from Gospel Oak. Shabby memorabilia of a time before he moved up in the world: an incredibly battered Hulk; some broken Beyblades; a toy London cab driven by a faceless plastic cabbie. Stuck through the window of the cab was a shard of plastic the size of Carl's middle finger. Why it should be talismanic he'd long since forgotten — he could not recall his father demolishing the telephone with its own receiver, nor himself, dutifully collecting the bits and storing them in his toy box — a small archaeologist of the immediate past.
At dinner — eaten en famille complete with candles, linen napkins and powered cruets — Carl sat sullenly. His downy top lip caught the rays from the spotlights, his gelled hair glistened like seaweed, a pimple — hard and yellow as a nose stud — was in the right position to be one. The odour of hormonal surge and pre-emptive aftershave hung about his sharp shoulders. Conversational sallies from his mother were slapped down with single syllables, Cal's simply allowed to fall. Carl's moodiness might have been within the acceptable range of adolescent disaffection — or way off the dial. It was impossible to judge without a control experiment: another world with different rituals, taboos and family groupings, but the same blond boy.
When Cal, rising from tiramisu, clapped his sort of stepson on the shoulder, bent to kiss the top of Michelle's head and turned to go, a shiver of relief shook the tall room. The Op-Art swirls on the walls dilated — and he was gone to his BMW convertible. Michelle, abandoning her son to the television and the dishes to the morning Pole, trudged upstairs to dissolve her face in bottled alcohol and brush her dry lips with Clarins Moisturizing Lip Balm.
There was no forethought on Dave's part. He simply kept ending up here at Mill Hill, up on the Ridgeway, clambering over the fence opposite the National Institute for Medical Research, crossing the nursery-school playground, scaling a second fence, then standing staring towards the Hampstead massif, which rose like an island out of the evening traffic stream on the North Circular. He hadn't intended it — it was the fares that brought him there. His Faredar wasn't working. Instead of detecting know-nothings wiv deep pockets, he got pub-quiz misers.
At two that afternoon Dave had been grating the cab along Stamford Street towards Waterloo … another bit of fucking metal scraped till it wangs off. In the steely jam, rain-washed manufacturers' logos shone: PLAXTON, JONCKHEERE, FORD. Windscreen wipers smeared, drivers sneered at pedestrians, cyclists veered to avoid everything. The fare was one of those cunts who thought he knew the city, thought he knew the real stories behind the news, thought he knew the mind of bloody God, 'cause 'e's the Flying-fucking-Eye. . and was eager to share it with his paid-for listener. He'd deliberated possible routes. 'I mean, Westminster Bridge is the obvious way' — mulling over traffic flows — 'but there might be an argument for cutting through Covent Garden and avoiding the traffic' — and roadworks — 'there's a lane out going through Admiralty Arch and that means the Mall'll be backed up.' Dave wanted to kill him: What you don't understand is that I don't bloody care. I just follow the route most likely to get us there with the minimum hassle. I don't make any extra money for sitting in traffic, and besides, I want SHOT OF YOU. 'It's entirely up to you, sir, if you know a quicker way, I'm only too happy to take it.'
'No, no, driver, you do your thing, you're the professional.' The fare sat back in his seat with a self-satisfied smile that filled the rearview mirror. Happy now, aren't yer, because you're another fucking control freak who finks 'e's swallered a Trafficmaster.