‘Only you haven’t said anything.’
‘No, I haven’t said anything.’
Then Sheila dropped silent on me and I felt so angry and confused and upset I clattered sections P and Q back in the box and threw the tube of wood glue against the wall.
‘What’s that?’ Sheila wanted to know.
‘I dropped the phone.’
‘Are you coming over?’
I didn’t want to. Go over, I mean. I’d spent the last three months avoiding going over. ‘Yes.’ I thought I detected sniffle at the other end of the line. ‘Look at it this way,’ I said. ‘At least Charlie’s not dead.’
I did go round and it was terrible. Just terrible. After we’d talked about Charlie and what might be done we had nothing to say to each other, and Sheila spent the whole time sighing heavily. I’m the wronged party and yet she’s the one who sighs all the time.
I looked at my watch. I had to be at the Clipper for eight o’clock. They do a decent quiz at the Clipper, and besides I’m part of a team.
‘You don’t have to go,’ Sheila said, getting up.
‘I don’t want to be here when whasisname comes round.’ I know the swine’s name but I always make out I don’t, even though I don’t care whether he’s there or not.
‘He doesn’t come here, Danny. I’ve told you before I’ve never allowed him here.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got to go. I’ll give this bloke from the Foreign Office a ring tomorrow and I’ll tell you what we can work out.’ I brushed my lips against Sheila’s rosy cheeks and she sighed again.
Chiang Mai? I was very glad when I got to the Clipper.
Halfway through the quiz they stop for a breather. This is annoying because we then have to spend twenty minutes making conversation. I have to point out that the other members of my team, even though we’ve been playing together for some years, are not exactly choice company. You need a team of three or four, and we got shuffled together when the thing first got launched.
Quite often we win, though we do have our rivals. Among others there’s an angry-looking mob of militant college teachers who huddle by the fireside; a team of pleasant lesbians; and a beery group of engineers. All of these come close, and every Tuesday the quiz provides a diversion. Though as I say, there are these twenty-minute pauses when we have to make conversation, and Mick Williams always kicks off by asking me what sort of a day I’ve had.
‘What sort of a day have you had then, Dan?’
‘Ach, not bad,’ I always say, and then I try to eavesdrop on the Pleasant Lesbians or on the Fireside Tendency; not to cheat, but to avoid getting drawn in to idle chat. In any event I’m not likely to tell him that today the Foreign Office phoned my now ex-wife at our family home to say that our daughter had been arrested in Chiang Mai for smuggling drugs and was likely to face a death sentence. I wasn’t going to drop that little bombshell in the middle of the pub quiz. Apart from which, Mick Williams didn’t even know I had a daughter, or a son come to that, since I’d never mentioned either.
At this point in the successfully derailed conversation, Mick Williams normally grunts, takes a sip of his Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale and moves on to Izzy, to whom he puts the same question. Slightly more talkative than I am, Izzy can be relied upon to keep the pot boiling until the quiz is ready to resume. But Mick was in an unusual mood that evening, and instead of passing on to Izzy he sucked the buttery beer froth from his upper lip and stared me down. ‘Not bad? Know what Dan, you’ve been not bad for three years now. Time you were summit other.’
Izzy snorted and downed her gin ’n’ tonic. I laughed off the remark, but Mick wasn’t smiling.
‘No,’ he said. ‘For three years I’ve asked you what sort of a day you’ve had, and for three years you’ve given me the same answer. I tell you about my day. Izzy tells us about her day. But you – you never part with anything.’
His bull-like neck was thrust forward at me across the table’s empty glasses. His face was pink, and blue veins twitched on his brow. The half-grin on my lips curdled. ‘You’re a skinflint,’ he said. ‘A tightwad. A miser with information.’
I looked to Izzy for support, but she was on his side. ‘Splendid fellow,’ she said in that cut-glass accent of hers. ‘Winkle him out, that’s it.’
I felt got at. Mostly I was irritated by Izzy’s last remark. A bespectacled elderly spinster with a gigantic bosom and hair fixed in a bun, Izzy was a lecturer at the university across the road from the Clipper. Nylon anorak, tweed skirt, pilled woollen stockings. How she managed to keep her career together was a mystery to Mick and I. Always half-cut when she appeared for the quiz on a Tuesday night, after several large gins she was customarily plastered by the time she left the place. I could have said something nasty about her alcoholism, but I just smiled weakly. ‘Drinks anyone?’
‘No,’ Mick said, snatching the glasses out of my hands. ‘It’s Izzy’s round, and besides you don’t cop out of it that easily.’ Izzy took the hint, and after she’d gone to the bar Mick stuck his nose right up against mine and said, ‘Two lines.’
‘What?’ He was pressed in so close I could feel an airstream on my face, warm from his flaring nostrils.
His pudgy forefinger pointed to a spot between his eyebrows, right above the bridge of his nose. ‘Two thick lines. Right here. You. Worried to death. Now let me ask you again: what sort of a
