Ben, in the World

‘I’ve thought of everything, Reet.’ And he detailed his plan.

Rita had to admit that Johnston had thought of everything. She was impressed. But suppose the plan did succeed, at the end of it Ben would be alone in a foreign country.

‘I don’t want him hanging around here. People notice him. The police want an excuse to close me down. They don’t like the cabs being here. I keep telling them, you may not like us, but the public do. I could keep twice the number of cabs busy, if we had parking space. But they are just putting up with me and waiting for an excuse. And Ben is like a big notice saying, “Here is trouble”. And I’m scared of him starting another fight. One of the drivers said something and Ben knocked him down.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He called him a hairy ape. I stopped the fight. But – I want you to understand, Reet.’

Rita had to concede the justice of all that. But there was more: Johnston was jealous. ‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been jealous of anybody. But you are of him.’

He didn’t like this, but at last grinned a little, not pleasantly, and said, ‘Well, I can’t compete, can I? Not with a great hairy ape?’

‘He’s a lot more than that.’

‘Listen, Reet, I don’t care. I’ve had enough of him.’

Johnston’s plan began with taking Ben to shops, good ones, and buying good clothes. No more stuff from charity shops. Buying jeans, trousers, underclothes – that was easy: but those shoulders, that chest, the heavy arms – in the end Johnston decided on a bespoke tailor, and got him shirts that fitted, and a couple of jackets.

‘And what is all that going to cost?’ asked Rita.

‘I told you, there’s millions in this.’

‘Dream on.’

‘You’ll see.’

Next, Ben was taken to a barber. He wished the old woman could see him now: she had said he would look good, and he knew he did. The barber had exclaimed over the double crown, but by the time he had finished who could notice?

Now Johnston took Ben up for a flight over London in a small plane, to get him used to flying. At first Ben’s eyes rolled in his head and he gave a roar of fear, as he looked down, but Johnston was sitting beside him, behaving as if nothing was wrong, and he said, ‘Look Ben, do you see that? It’s the river, you know the river. And look, there’s Covent Garden. And there’s Charing Cross Road.’ Ben took it all in and told Rita about it. ‘When can I do it again?’ he wanted to know.

‘You are going to do it again. In a big plane. Soon.’

And then, she thought, I’ll probably not see you again… She was fond of him, yes, she was. She was going to miss… She permitted, no, invited, quite a few of the extraordinary fucks that were like nothing she had experienced. She knew very well that it was not in his nature that these could lead to tenderness. There was no connection between those short violent acts of possession and what happened even seconds later, when it was as if nothing at all had happened. And yet, once when she had allowed him to stay the night, he had nuzzled up to her in his sleep, that hairy face pushing into her neck, and he had licked her face and her neck. She supposed he was fond of her. He asked if she was coming to France too, but what did he imagine when he said France?

‘It’s the same as here, Ben,’ she tried to explain. ‘There’s a nice blue sea, though. You know what sea is?’

Yes, he did; he remembered going with his family to the seaside.

‘Well, then, it’s like that. Like here only the sea is right close.’ She found some postcards of Nice, of that coast, and he puzzled over them: she knew he did not see what she saw. And she had not said that there would be a different language, different sounds.

Rita was leaning in her doorway, dressed for the part in black leather and black fishnet stockings, watching Johnston wave people to the minicabs, directing the drivers – the usual scene on this pavement from mid-afternoon till twelve or one in the morning, as people came from theatres and restaurants, when she saw a man she did not like the look of come up to Johnston, confront him. Johnston was afraid, she knew. In her experience trouble always started like this: a man appeared from nowhere with a certain look about him that said, ‘Look out!’ – and then something bad happened. When this man had taken himself off, she saw Johnston sweating, leaning on his cubbyhole counter, taking quick gulps from a bottle kept there. Then he saw her, took in her concern, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Reet.’

That night she made sure the door on the street that led up to her room was locked, and invited Johnston up. She lay on her bed, propped against pillows, one leg dangling – a pose she had evolved to excite customers – smoking, and watched Johnston shifting and fidgeting on his chair. He was smoking, and took frequent mouthfuls from his whisky flask. The stale smoky air was making her cough.

She knew his story – most of it. He had run away at fourteen from a bad home. He had done a spell in borstal, then lived rough, kept himself by shoplifting and thieving. A year in prison. That over, he went straight for a time, but a sentence for robbery with violence took him back. He had finished that five years ago. Wheeling and dealing, at first just ahead of the law, but then in deep, and deeper, involved in a dozen scams, which became increasingly dangerous, he was aided by the skills he had learned in prison and because he was known in the criminal community. The minicab business did well enough, but it had never been much more than a front. She was not surprised that he was in trouble, and when he said, ‘I’m in a trap, Reet,’ imagined a debt or two, perhaps blackmail. But now, as he began to tell her, strengthening himself with large gulps of whisky – he was a bit drunk – she sat up on the edge of the bed, and stared at him.

‘What are you saying? What are you telling me?’

He had been persuaded by a man on the fringes of respectability to try his luck on the stock exchange – futures. You couldn’t lose, this friend said. There was money, if you kept your head. Well, they had kept their heads but not their money.

‘You’re telling me you owe a million pounds?’

‘That’s nothing, Reet. A million’s nothing to that lot.’

‘Well, it’s a lot to you.’

‘True,’ he said, and drank.

‘So. You’re afraid of going back to prison?’

‘Right on. That’s what I’ll be doing, if I can’t get some real money.’

‘Let’s get this straight. You owe a million, or the two of you together?’

‘He owes much more. He was in deeper than me. He did me a bit of a favour really, he let me in – but now if I don’t give him a million he’s going to shop me and I’ll go down.’

She lay back again, and coughed. ‘Fucking pollution,’ she said. ‘Sometimes this room’s so full of stink from the street I can’t breathe.’ The cigarette smoke thus being neatly excused, she lit another, and threw Johnston one.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t get away with this cocaine deal, if they catch you, you’ll go down anyway. For life probably.’

‘That’s right, but I’m going to get away with it.’

‘So before you even start to get some money for yourself you’ve got to pay back a million?’

‘When the stuff arrives in Nice, that’s the million paid. And the rest is for me.’

‘Nothing for Ben?’

‘Oh, I’ll see him right.’

‘And how about me?’ she enquired. ‘Aren’t I taking any risks?’

‘You won’t know what’s in those cases, Reet. I’m going to make sure of that.’

‘When they nab Ben, and ask him where he got the stuff, he’ll say from me. Because he knows me better than he knows you, and he trusts me. So he’ll say it was me.’

A silence.

‘But he knows that he is taking something from me to a friend in France.’

A silence.

‘From me, Reet.’

‘But I’m in it too, aren’t I? Ben doesn’t know enough to lie well. We can’t count on him. He’ll say it was me and you.’

Johnston cut this knot with, ‘You just tell me something. How do you see yourself, Reet? You don’t fancy this life – so I’ve heard you say, haven’t I? Well, you stand by me in this and I’ll see that you get out of this life, for good.’