37

May 2017

Alex, Diana

Diana phoned Alex back when she got out of the operating theater.
“What’re you calling me for?” she asked angrily, although she was actually incredibly pleased to hear his voice.
“I want to talk. Can we meet at Ronnie Scott’s in an hour?”
Arriving at the famed club in Soho as they’d agreed, she found Alex in a separate booth. Judging by his pose and facial expression, Alex had already had a lot to drink. Seeing Diana, he broke out into a smile and with a generous sweep of his arm invited her to sit down.
“I’m so glad to see you, my dear!” he told her. “You go ahead and choose your poison. I’ll slip off and powder my nose.”
Alex headed off to the toilet, coming back far more sober and centered than when he’d left.
“How long have you been using?” Diana asked calmly as soon as Alex sat back down on the sofa opposite her.
Alex tried to joke his way out of the question, quipping “We’re not here to judge!”, but Diana didn’t smile.
“How long? A week? A month?” she continued, rather than retreating.
“Well, a couple of weeks,” Alex answered reluctantly.
“What’s upset the Great Gatsby this time?” smiled Diana.
“I’m tired, Diana. Tired, do you understand?” said Alex, staring her right in the eye. “From all this pointless fuss, these stupid people around us, they all need something from me, and I, unfortunately, need something from them. This sickening work for the system for a miserable pittance.”
At the words “a miserable pittance” Diana rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything.
“These talentless colleagues dreaming of taking your place,” Alex continued grumbling “That’s dirty, beloved London. But I want freedom, all-encompassing and all-forgiving freedom. You see?”
“I understand,” answered Diana.
“And I’m really tired of people too. Tired of lying bosses and revolting clients. They think they’re loyal and bold, although in reality, they’re all cowards. They might be really charming when they’re with you, but as soon as you turn your back, they’ll throw you under the bus just to protect their good names.”
“So, you’ve been using for a couple of months,” concluded Diana, shaking her head unhappily and ignoring Alex’s soul-searching outpourings. “When are you planning on coming off? I know a good team of drug counselors and medics – drips, hypnosis, the works. Just give me the word.”
“Diana, dear, my sweet,” continued Alex, as if he hadn’t heard her, “there’s so much cruelty in this world, such ugliness, so much injustice, that I refuse to look at it all while I’m sober. Do you remember what Churchill said? ‘I’ve gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me’,” he smiled wearily.
Diana looked at him in silence.
“All I’ve done in this horrid life is search for freedom,” he sighed. “But I can’t find it.”
“Everybody wants to be free,” she said quietly.
“No, not everyone,” he retorted quickly.
They sat in silence for a while.
“Alex, you are my close friend,” Diana began in a concerned voice. “I can see how hard it is for you now, and how you’re tired of struggling against all these difficulties that, for the most part, you yourself are inventing. I understand you. Really, I understand. I really feel sorry for you. But drugs and alcohol are just slow suicide. I can imagine how wonderful it is to die high. In my third year at uni an anesthesiologist who was hitting on me treated me and my girlfriend to ketamine. I really can understand how easy it is to breathe when nothing hurts and nothing worries you. But if you keep doing that, in three years’ time you’ll be my patient for a heart transplant.”
Alex looked at Diana gloomily.
“Let’s regard the lecture as having been given and heard. Can we move on to other news, Doctor?” Alex asked challengingly.
“Let’s move on,” sighed Diana.
“I’ve split up with Vickey,” said Alex, draining the remaining whisky in his glass in one gulp.
Diana replied by quoting a folk saying: “’The sweet things argue, they’re just playing!’ This isn’t the first time, after all. You’ll be asking her to come back in a month.”
“Three months have already passed. I kicked her out of the house, out of my life, forever,” said Alex. After a short pause, he added “I did it for her own good.”
“How’s Vickey?” asked Diana, concerned.
“I don’t know how she is. I didn’t ask. You can phone her. I think you wanted to take her off me – be my guest!” The alcohol was winning out over the coke in his blood, and Alex again appeared to be getting drunk before her eyes.
Diana winced at these words. She looked at Alex angrily.
“Think about what you’re saying!” she said sternly.
“I’m being absolutely serious. Take her! You yourself said it: A wonderful chick, a unique specimen,” Alex continued in a cavalier tone.
“If you don’t immediately stop talking offensive nonsense and don’t go and get some sleep…” Diana fired off, losing her breath and coming to a stop.
“Then what?” Alex asked cattily. He was trying to argue with Diana, he was hungry for a fight, for blood, hungry to stir up some shit. He suddenly wanted to wreak vengeance on her for having refused him. The worst in him was stirring up at the very pit of his drunken soul.
Diana didn’t give him an answer. She took out her wallet, threw a ten-pound note on the table for her untouched martini, turned round and left. And stopped answering Alex’s calls.

38

May 2017

Alex, Robert

Alex came to Robert worked up. His hands were shaking, so he turned down the glass of water that was traditionally offered to him and immediately sat himself down in the patient’s chair. He was hungover, but had decided not to cancel their session. Robert was very strict in his attitude to “truants”, simply stopping any further work with them.
And Alex needed Robert like he’d never needed him before. He was the only person he had left that he could talk to, the only person he could possibly talk to in the life situation that he’d driven himself into. All the more so, as for all that time he hadn’t been suffering from hangovers, though he’d been drinking all the same.
Robert, of course, noticed his patient’s unusual condition, but didn’t let on. He didn’t start pressing him with all sorts of questions.
Having slightly calmed the shakes in his hands, Alex spoke in a downcast voice, though challenging tones in his words would crop up unexpectedly on occasion.
“I’ve split up with my girlfriend. I kicked her out of the house. For good.”
“Split up with Vickey?” Robert clarified calmly. “With the person whose love, if I remember correctly, you don’t feel yourself to be worthy of?”
“Yes,” confirmed Alex, mournfully. “With Vickey. I shouted at her. I shouted at her like my mother used to shout at me.”
He leapt up from his chair at the memories that were assailing him and began to walk round the room, disturbed.
“I don’t know, I really don’t know what came over me.” Alex was forcing the words out in bursts. “Vickey is nothing like my mother. She’s good. Kind. Delicate. She loves me.”
“But she can dump you too,” Robert said, concluding Alex’s thoughts. “And you were afraid of that? You took fright and dumped her first.”
“I don’t know,” Alex answered. “I’m scared of destroying her life. Mom always told me that I made her unhappy.” Alex had started to breath heavily, so he walked up to the open window. “While Granny Maggie was alive, Mom would even smile coquettishly in the family photographs, holding me as a plump little baby in her arms. But then being stuck with me turned her into a monster which ruined my whole life.”
Alex fell silent.
“The arrival of a baby,” Robert began after a certain silence, “can have an unpleasant impact on a mother’s life, but it can never ruin the actual person. That’s the way children are built. But what is it that you’re actually afraid of? That something will happen to you and turn you into your mother?”
Alex winced.
“I’m worried that I’ve already turned into my mother. I recognized her, I recognized her voice in mine. I shouted in that voice at Vickey, and I wanted to hit her. I felt my hand filling up with iron. I drove a woman who’d done nothing wrong out of my home because I was afraid that that fury would never pass.”
Robert didn’t interrupt.
“You know, in that moment I didn’t even see Vickey, I didn’t realize that she was in front of me. Everything that I shouted, of course, wasn’t meant for her, it was meant for my mother. That doesn’t excuse the fact that I was totally unable to control myself. I was torn up inside. I wanted to break and destroy everything. I wanted to beat somebody the way that scum had once beaten me.”
Alex left a weighty silence.
Despite what had been said, Robert looked at Alex with understanding and sympathy. He left some time for Alex’s words to settle in before continuing, as always, in his calm voice.
“Unfortunately, the trauma that we experience in childhood is capable of leaving some serious consequences. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with that and lower the effect of the overwhelming influence of the parent. That’s why you came here. Let’s try and work with that trigger.”
Alex nodded in silence.
“Tell me a little about the relationships that you’d had before. Was there any violence in them? Were there any outbursts of aggression from any of the parties?” asked Robert.
“I’m afraid, doctor, that I don’t have a lot to tell you,” said Alex, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I live alone. I have a lot of sexual partners, but apart from Vickey I can’t really say I ever really went out with anyone. I fell deeply in love two or three times. I fell in love with Elaine, but we were kids, so we didn’t live or even sleep together. Then there was that tragic story with Maria. And then that wild story with Rachel.” Alex tried to focus on his memories. “Once I fell in love with my best friend, but she turned out to be a lesbian, I fell in love with a colleague at work before that. I suppose that could count as a relationship, although we didn’t live together. We did spend a lot of time together, in the editorial offices by day, in bed at night. But I don’t remember us shouting at one another. You couldn’t describe it as a healthy relationship, though. Shouting just isn’t what I do.”
“Tell me about your colleague, please,” asked Robert.
“She was called Natasha,” Alex began. She was a tall, statuesque beauty with d-cups that she was very proud of. She wasn’t stupid – on the contrary, she was extremely quick and was moving up the career ladder fast. I liked her for her cheerful approach and ‘her tits that never felt down’, as she herself joked. But the first time we fucked, after we’d completed the New Year issue, I couldn’t have imagined that I would love this woman, or beg her to live with me, even though she never once came when we were having sex. We went out for about a year and, Doctor, I was literally high on her.”
Alex sat back down in his chair and continued.
“Natasha made an incredible impression on people. Men would literally throw themselves at her. She was married.”
Robert wrote something in his notebook.
“Natasha had never been faithful to her husband, and he didn’t seem to have any problem with that, on his initiative they’d had an open marriage and polygamous relations for a long time,” Alex continued, “so I was one of many. But at first that situation turned me on.”
“Go on,” said Robert.
“Something happened, Doctor, and we fell in love with one another. In an instant. We woke up in the same bed, and I thought that I wanted to wake up with her by my side for my whole life. Her scent. She had an incredible scent.”
“There’s a well-regarded theory that maintains that a man, first and foremost, loves a woman’s scent,” said the Doctor.
“We had sex the whole time,” said Alex. “Everywhere, the more dangerous and risky the sex, the more turned on Natasha got.”
He wanted a drink badly. Alex asked for a glass of water, and when the doctor’s charming secretary brought it he thirstily drained half of it. As soon as the secretary had left the room, he continued.
“We often had sex at a height of 40,000 feet, in the toilet of a plane, but that’s a standard, a classic. It was riskier when we got stuck in a lift in our former office – we had sex there too, we could have been caught by the whole editorial staff. That seemed to be her secret goal, the whole point of our having sex. But she never admitted to that. At the beginning of our relationship that really turned me on too. But there was no violence in it.” Alex broke off unexpectedly and asked Robert a question. “Do you find that a lot of people are latent exhibitionists while their bodies are young and they’re in good shape?”
“The majority of people have light sexual perversions. In my opinion, it only confirms that they’re people,” agreed the doctor.
“Anyway, at the beginning of our relationship I was incredibly happy because I had this striking, sexual and interesting character as a partner,” Alex continued. “I fell in love with her love for adventure and her hunger for life. We spent so much time together that I didn’t notice that I’d started to need her, I’d miss her when she spent the weekends with her husband at their house out in the country.
“I wasn’t jealous, I just wanted her entirely. But she refused to even talk about the possibility of her divorcing her husband. She said to me “I love you, but I’ve loved my husband for longer.’ That drove me nuts. ‘loved him longer.’ What does that mean?!?
“I imagined their bed, and that slowly tore my heart to shreds. I couldn’t understand how she could love someone else when I didn’t love anyone apart from her. I understood her polygamous ideals, I often had sex without love, often changed partners, I was in groups, I did all that. But that was different.”
Robert listened to him attentively.
“I felt incredibly dependent on Natasha on a physical level. Fluids, pheromones, the best sex in my life – I don’t know what it was, but I was literally drowning in the aroma of her body, I disappeared. I could lie in bed with her for hours, my nose in her lap, breathing it all in, I liked to be spattered in her juices. I’d get drunk on her scent. I’d never felt anything like that before. She said she felt the same way,” Alex said as if in one breath.
“Then what happened?” asked Robert.
“About a half a year passed like that,” Alex continued. “Then it started to get me down, subtly, but persistently. I was angry when, for her birthday, she flew to Cyprus with her husband rather than spending the day in bed with me, which I’d been dreaming about for a long time. Then her mother-in-law broke her hip and after work she had to go straight to the hospital.”
Alex thirstily drank some more water.
“I understood that it was tough for Natasha, but instead of giving more support, like a fool, I demanded more and more attention from her, and proof of her love,” he said. “We saw each other less and less, and we argued more, but we never shouted. I would just spend hours hopelessly recounting to her how I was upset and how I was in pain, complaint after complaint. She felt sorry for me, I think she loved me too, but it seems that she loved her husband more. And for longer,” he said gloomily, and fell silent.
“Go on,” said Robert.
“After another half year, my obsessive desire to entirely possess her reached shocking heights. On my birthday, instead of having sex as we’d planned, I got drunk and I was in tears telling her how I couldn’t live without her, I threatened to ruin her reputation at work by sending out one of our home porno videos where she sucked my cock, if she stopped seeing me. I begged her to leave her husband and just be with me. She didn’t take me seriously and later I was really ashamed about what I’d said. But, basically, I really was going out of my mind.”
“Then what happened?” Robert asked Alex.
“It was a kind of obsession,” Alex said. “I was on my knees in front of her, grabbing at her hands, when she was trying to leave, I was sniveling, in tears. That really made her angry. She looked at me coldly and said: ‘I don’t come. I’ve never come with you. I don’t have an orgasm. I fake it.’ And then I didn’t stop her leaving.”
“Did you believe her?” asked Robert.
“I thought about it a lot afterwards: about the art of faking it, about the art of not saying what’s in your heart, about the art of hiding and keeping things secret. But I couldn’t understand: Why? Why would she fake the best sex I’d ever had in my life? The way she would shriek at certain points… Once, we got kicked out of a hotel in Lisbon in disgrace because we’d been making so much noise in our room.”
Alex got his breath back and then continued.
“It occurred to me, of course, that she’d lied in anger in order to hurt me. And, of course, I read a lot about female frigidity. I even went out with a girl who never orgasmed, she’d just moan loudly and monotonously for hours on end. I also know that there are men who fake orgasms,” said Alex.
“It does happen,” said Robert.
“But Doctor, there was always laughter in her eyes – when she said those words, though, there was no laughter in them. Yes, I believed her that evening. And I believe her to this day. I suddenly understood her drive to have dangerous sex – it was only then that she got as close as she could to release.”
“How did that make you feel?” asked Robert.
“At first I felt the pain of incomprehension, I’d lost my bearings, I felt betrayed, conned and abandoned,” answered Alex. “I began going through partners furiously, hunting their orgasms and all too often I would forget my own. I trained, I gave head to my colleagues at work, I fucked everything that moved, I didn’t worry about my reputation at all. I started drinking a lot. At the office, Natasha and I tried to avoid one another. And I hated her.” He fell silent, and then added: “Maybe someone had to knock me down in that series of pointless victories.”
“And what do you feel now? Do you still work together?” asked Robert, as if he hadn’t noticed Alex’s last remark.
“Yes, we even slept together one time after a big drinking session with the editorial team. Years later,” said Alex, laughingly loudly. “You have to get closure, after all, don’t you, Doctor?”
“It helps,” agreed Robert. “But first you have to live through that process. What did you feel when you were intimate with Natasha again?”
“You know, it’s strange, but nothing at all! Absolutely nothing. We mechanically fucked, and it wasn’t bad. She, no doubt, faked her orgasm as usual, but I didn’t ask about it. I wasn’t interested in her anymore, she even smelt different – she’d got into smoking cheap ladies’ cigarettes. I didn’t want her anymore. It’s strange, but I immediately started thinking about Vickey,” said Alex and unexpectedly remembered that it was Vickey that he’d come here to talk about.
“You were seeing her then?” asked Robert.
“Yes, I think it was at the very beginning of our affair,” answered Alex. “I cheated on Vickey right from the very start of our relationship,” he concluded gloomily.
“And what did you think of her?” Robert asked again.
“I thought that with Vickey – and she was the only one – I never asked myself if she was faking her orgasm,” Alex answered, deep in thought.
“You trust her?” asked Robert.
“I tested her a lot,” Alex answered with a bitterness in his voice. “And she passed all those tests brilliantly. God,” Alex said, suddenly breaking off in the middle of the sentence, “I’m hearing myself now, and hearing a bad person. Who the hell am I to test anyone?”
A heavy silence hung in the room for a period of time.
“Alex, listen,” Robert suddenly began with a passion that was unusual for him. “Security is one of the main values for anyone. It’s something that you will always, subconsciously, be working towards. Exceptions are motorcyclists and mountain climbers, but we’re not talking about them now. We’re talking about people with statistically average levels of adrenaline. I think that Vickey, for you, is the embodiment of security, she’s your place of strength. But you drive her away.”
“But I do that…” Alex began to object – Robert interrupted him.
“For her own good,” he said, finishing Alex’s sentence. “It’s possible that that’s the case. But you’re destroying yourself. I think that you’ll agree with me on that.”
Robert looked at Alex. The water in his glass was quivering as if they were in the middle of an earthquake.
“You’ve had major trauma in your life, injustice, betrayal. You don’t believe people anymore. You drive everyone away in order to avoid the pain of their loss. I understand that,” the doctor continued. “But we’re built in such a way that we can’t live without trusting people. At some point you have to learn to do that again. It will be very painful for both of you. Like learning to walk again after a very complex leg fracture where you’ve had to be in plaster for a long time.”
“You’re saying that I have to go back to Vickey?” Alex asked, shocked.
“I’m not saying that you have to. I just want you to ask yourself one question. Let’s say that you accidentally killed someone. Who would you tell about that and why?”

39

July 2018

Greg, Maxim, Alex, Vickey, Leon

Greg opted for bowling in East Finchley, in North London. The club was ideal for his robbery plan. Greg understood that they needed to get the main job that they were preparing for done as fast as they could. He told the team, which was to say Alex, Vickey and Leon, that the prep for all successful jobs was done to perfection. But as an experienced criminal, he knew that there are no ideal robberies. Something unexpected can crop up at any time, someone trying to play superhero or some detail that wasn’t thought through, and that could put Greg away for a good ten years for armed robbery. He’d be “doing porridge”, as London’s criminal underworld would put it when referring to prison, fighting for his life against higher-ranking criminals.
If he didn’t need people right now, would he have got mixed up with this trio of dilettantes … Max, of course, was a pro and had been a good shooter in the past. There was no denying that. But these three… Max had brought Leon along when he was needed when they were robbing chemist’s. That wimp was perfect for the role.
But Alex… He was a pampered, egotistical journalist, or whatever it was that he did. Greg could see that Alex belonged to an entirely different class, he noticed Alex’s disdain for him, it seeped out of him however hard he tried to disguise it. But Greg didn’t give a damn about that. All that mattered was Alex doing the right thing on the main job, and that he take out the guard. Everything else had been planned for. And Alex was the only guy that he and Max had to work with. Finding someone else was too risky. Together with Max, he’d control who had access to the button. Greg had already thought through the option where he took out the security guard at the bank. In that case, however, the girls on the till would have a few extra seconds. And that would mean that they could, and probably would, press the alarm button, and a few minutes later cops with machine guns would be coming through the doors of the design school’s bank. And without saying a word they’d shoot up the whole team without a care in the world, and then happily tell this amusing story to their friends while having a barbie in their back gardens out in the suburbs.
That creep Alex would do the job. Otherwise, he’d miss out on five million and would end up with nothing. Greg spat dismissively. And today that white-collar wimp was going to have to show what he could do.
The long corridor leading in from the street to the main bowling hall would be controlled by Vickey. Inside the hall there was a desk. As a rule, there was one member of staff there who gave out the bowling shoes, took the money and put it in the till. In a corner there was a window into the kitchens. They wouldn’t even have to go in there. They’d just put Leon next to it – he’d control the situation and if there was any danger he’d give a signal. And, most importantly, there was a security guard.
He was the only one there. Greg had gone there twice in different disguises – a beard with no moustache, a moustache with no beard – and he’d thought everything through. The layout was simple. The entrance from the street. The long corridor. A door into the main hall at the end of the corridor. A table for the guard at the end of the corridor, right in front of the main entrance. According to the rules, he was supposed to be on his feet almost all of the time.
In reality, he spent almost all of his time sat at his desk reading a free newspaper.
Greg came up with the following plan. Max would go into the main hall and then come back a bit later, open the door from inside and ask the guard something. He’d get his attention. The guard, according to Greg’s plan, would get up from his table and head to the door.
At that moment, Alex and Greg would be behind him. They’d stand at the beginning of the corridor pretending that they were talking on their mobiles. As soon as the doors opened, they’d see Max asking something of the guard. The guard would get up from the table, and Alex and Greg would head for him. And in that key moment, Alex had to whack the guard over the head with a section of pipe.
Vickey, meanwhile, would be keeping the general public outside in the street using the tried and tested trick of the “Service break” sign. That was it. Alex would tie up the guard. And Greg and Max would go inside, quietly take all of the cash out of the till, and then they’d all leave.
The entrance East Finchley tube station was a five-minute walk from the bowling club. Two minutes if you were running. The metro was packed with cameras, but Greg knew exactly where they were sited and how to get round them. To make sure, he’d gone on the tube several times with Leon. They’d both reached the conclusion that if you stood at the end of the platform, you were in the camera’s blind spot. They’d be able to turn in the direction of the tunnel from which the train was coming and, unnoticed, quickly take off their moustaches and beards – that wouldn’t be a problem and they wouldn’t attract attention.
Then they’d go into the last carriage and take their coats off. Together with their wigs, they’d bought reversible, multi-colored coats, unisex models that had been made in China – they could easily be turned inside out. In literally just a few seconds, a red coat could be turned into a yellow coat, a black coat into a white one, and so on.
Leon went in first. He got a bottle of Corona and walked through the club, mingling among the people playing. At six in the evening there were about 25 to 30 players – guests were only just beginning to arrive. Leon walked around, pretending that he was talking to someone on the phone through his hands-free Apple earpiece. He looked like an overweight guy who lacked confidence, a guy who’d come to the club in the hope of chatting up a girl.
Having circled round the club, Leon sat himself down at the table closest to the kitchen door and dialed Max, hung up and then dialed Greg. That was the signal that everything was going according to plan and there was nothing to stop them.
Out in the street, Greg saw Leon’s signal on his mobile and nodded to Max, who immediately headed into the bowling club.
“They haven’t put much into the till yet,” Greg said to Alex. He was standing with him outside, waiting to get started. “Let’s hope they didn’t collect the cash from last night and all the dough from yesterday is still in there.”
Alex watched Max run across the street and go through the door into the club. You couldn’t recognize him at all in his disguise, he thought.
“But that’s not that important,” Greg said.
“What’s not important?” asked Alex.
“It doesn’t matter how much dough there is in there,” answered Greg. “The important thing is that we work as a team today.”
“Yes,” Alex answered dryly.
Alex caught himself thinking that he really wanted this all to be over quickly. Not just the blow, as Greg had titled the day’s robbery, but the whole thing. This whole escapade, this whole episode with the big robbery. The conspiratorial phone calls, the meetings. And, of course, Alex dreamed of the moment when he’d never see Greg again for the rest of his life.
Yes. The sooner this is over the better, thought Alex. He wasn’t afraid anymore. He’d got into the game. He understood that there was no way back. That he was already mixed up in it. And that Greg, of course, had played his hand brilliantly. Having got them all mixed up in it with the first job, and having pulled a gun, Greg had tied them all to him.
Yes. Now, to get off this train that was hurtling forwards, he just had to disappear. Get all his stuff, take Vickey by the hand, and disappear from London. Because Greg didn’t seem to be the kind of person who’d forget someone letting him down. And Max wouldn’t help in the way he had when they were kids.
There was another call on Greg’s mobile. From Max.
“Your turn, pal,” said Greg, patting Alex on the shoulder.
If Greg had touched Alex just a few days earlier, Alex would have experienced extreme revulsion. But now, before getting started on the blow, Alex didn’t experience anything of the kind. On the contrary. He felt that he was a participant in something secret, something special, something that made him stand out from the crowd. He didn’t feel that when his most successful articles were published. How many people found out about that? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand? Two thousand? They’d read the article and then move on, clicking on a link about the dollar-pound exchange rate or an article from the gutter press about whether some popstar or another was gay or not.
“Yes, we’re up,” said Alex, giving Greg a friendly pat on the shoulder in return. He did it sincerely, without even thinking about it. Greg noted it, smiling barely noticeably. Alex was playing his game and Greg liked the fact that he was totally in control of the situation.
When Alex and Greg were already approaching the door to the bowling club, Vickey appeared. She’d been at a bus stop a little further away. As soon as Alex and Greg went through the door, Vickey went through an already familiar set of motions, pinning up the sign about the service break using double-sided sticky tape and taking out her clipboard with her fake questionnaires.
Alex and Greg went into the club, and found themselves at the start of the long corridor.
As soon as they were in the corridor, Greg phoned Max. Max answered.
“We’re arriving,” Greg said into the phone.
“At last,” said Max. “My beer’s been getting warm here.”
That was the signal that in exactly eight seconds Max would open the club’s inner door and call the guard over. Eight seconds that Greg had measured out several times to be sure. Eight seconds from the outer door to the second, inner door that the guard’s table was next to.
At that moment, Alex sensed the piece of piping on his body – it was wrapped in a newspaper and stuck down his trousers. It was held to his side by the belt in his jeans, and his coat, hanging free, masked it from anyone looking at him.
Alex broke out into a sweat. He was hit by a thought – how had he got himself into this? He followed Greg down the bowling club’s corridor. Eight seconds that seemed like an eternity to Alex. A thought floated round in his mind – I could kill a person here.
“Hit him at the base of his neck. Don’t touch the actual head,” Max had told him the night before. He’d gone to see Alex specifically to tell him that. To teach him how to knock a guy out. They’d rolled up a newspaper and used it as a dummy. “But hit him hard, that’ll knock him out, and it’ll be easy for you to tie him up.”
God, how did I get here? His inexplicable euphoria gave way to fear. It gripped him so hard that he found it hard to breath. His chest started to heave. Why? How? How did I get here? “When you get scared, think of just one thing,” Max had taught him. You understand me, bro? Just tell yourself one thing: I’m going to hit him, I’m going to hit him. That’s the only way you can get over the shakes, bro. The only way. I’m going to hit him, I’m going to hit him…”
Eight seconds.
Six. Seven. Eight.
The door to the main hall opened. Max’s face appeared.
Alex and Greg approached the guard.
“Guvnor, can you take a look at me for a second?” Max asked the guard in a laid-back voice. “They said I should show you.”
Max stood in the doorway, blocking the view into and out of the room.
“What? I don’t get it,” said the guard, a man of about fifty years of age in wrinkled trousers and a worn-out shirt from his security firm. Unhappy about being distracted from his crossword, he came out from behind his table, his chair giving a nasty squeak as he pushed it out of the way along the floor. He came up close to Max.
Alex and Greg, precisely according to plan, hit their mark right behind the guard’s back.
Alex faltered for an instant, but a shove from Greg came just in time. The shove brought him back to his senses. The shove was a cold ultimatum. “I’m going to hit him, I’m going to hit him…” The words rattled round his head. An electric charge surged through his body. From his left rib, where Greg had hit him with his elbow, through his stomach and right through his right arm.
He didn’t know how it happened. His hand found the section of pipe of its own accord. He only saw the guard’s neck ahead of him, and then sensed his right hand. A powerful hand lying on a cold section of piping. Just don’t kill him.
The blow hit its target just the way he’d practiced with Max. Sharp. Powerful. He put his whole shoulder into the blow. Right into the neck. Between the neck and beginning of the spine.
Max quickly stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind him. A grey, slimy shroud clouded over Alex’s eyes for an instant. But through that lackluster film, Alex made out Greg catching the limp body of the guard before it hit the ground. Max took him by the legs and they carried him behind the table.
“Tie him up!” Greg ordered Alex.
He had plastic ties at the ready, they were in a trouser pocket. Alex whipped them out and moved to the guard’s body fast.
A single thought whistled through his head on repeat: “Let him be alive. Let him be alive…”
The hair under the wig Alex was wearing was already dripping with sweat. Alex thought his fake moustache was shaking. It felt like this whole masquerade was about to throttle him. Alex couldn’t get enough air.
“Turn him over, for fuck’s sake!” snapped Greg.
Alex turned the guard’s body over with difficulty. He pulled his arms behind his back and then froze, holding his thumb on the guard’s wrist to check his pulse. He felt it throb, and it felt like a weight had been taken off his shoulders.
At any moment, one of the guests could come into the corridor. According to the plan, all this was supposed to take ten seconds. To Alex, it felt like several minutes had already passed.
He pulled the plastic ties tight on the guard’s wrists, then crouched down, his back lent up against the wall, and pushed the guard under the table. He moved the chair back into position, making it look like the guard had slipped out to the toilet.
“Let’s go!” ordered Greg.
Greg entered the hall. Max followed him, the long hair of his disguise trailing in the air as he moved.
Alex followed Max. He followed Max, his childhood friend, but Max was now very much a different person. Again, Lord, how did I get here? Vickey was standing outside the door to the club. A girl who loved him. A girl who was devoted to him. And he’d led her. Into this furnace. He’d been weak. As always, he’d only thought of himself.
Lord, why? He wanted the robbery to be over as fast as possible, and then he wanted to rob the bank as fast as possible. Fast. Both of them. Faster. So that he could forget all this. Sell his apartment and leave. So that no one would know how to find him.
Max tugged at Alex’s sleeve and then pushed him in the direction of the desk with the till on it. Everything was going according to plan. Greg stood opposite the cashier. Alex stood at the side of the desk in order to cut off the cashier’s route to the side door and to be ready to empty out the till. Max stood a few yards away from Alex with his back to him, facing towards the bowlers playing on numerous lanes, just in case one or more of them wanted to play hero.
It was as if Alex’s consciousness had clicked on. He couldn’t remember how he’d got to this point. Alex. Member of a criminal gang.
Alex shook his head. Hard. As hard as he could.
“Just stay quiet, kid,” Greg said in a commanding voice to the cashier.
Alex looked at the cashier. The latter had frozen up, looking at Greg. Or, to be more precise, looking at his pistol, which Greg was holding at stomach level so that it was less visible.
“Just keep quiet and you’ll be ok,” Greg repeated. “Got it?!?”
The cashier, a young, skinny guy of about twenty to twenty-two years of age, may have been happy to answer, but it was as if he’d been pinned to the ground and he couldn’t get a word out. Alex suddenly noticed the unnatural pose the cashier was standing in. His arms were bent at the wrists, which were almost touching his body, and his fingers were splayed out in every imaginable direction. The cashier stood there with his mouth open, and it wasn’t clear if he was about to break down from the fear or just carry on standing there like that eternally.
“Open the till, pal,” Greg said quietly, although it seemed to Alex that Greg’s voice could be heard by every player in the bowling club over the loud music that was playing.
Alex took a quick look round. Max stood facing the players who were busy getting on with their games and paying no attention to what was happening twenty yardss behind them. Alex glanced at Leon. He was sitting by the door to the kitchen, keeping an eye on what was going on at the cashier’s desk. If someone was to come out of the kitchen, he was supposed to shout: “Tracie!” That was the signal for Max to come up and take out anyone coming out of there. It would probably be a waiter. But nobody came through the door, and the whole operation was supposed to be over in a few seconds.
“What’s your name, kid?” Greg asked the cashier.
“Dave,” he replied quietly.
“I’m telling you one last time: open the till, Dave,” Greg ordered. “Then we’ll go quickly. Nobody will get hurt, Dave. Nobody will get hurt.”
Alex heard a click and winced. Greg had cocked the gun. One pull on the trigger and Dave would be dead on the spot.
“No, no,” span through Alex’s head. This wasn’t in the plan. Nobody was supposed to die.
Alex walked round the desk fast, positioning himself right next to the cashier. He didn’t know how he managed it that fast, but he took out the piece of pipe, still wrapped in newspaper, which was poking out from beneath his belt. He whacked it with all the strength he could muster into the cashier’s ribs. The cashier crumpled up in pain, but he didn’t say a word, his eyes still fixed on the barrel of the gun.
“Open the till! Open it!” Alex said quietly to the cashier.
“While I’m around, he won’t shoot him. He won’t,” pounded in Alex’s temples.
The cashier grimaced in pain.
“Open the till, you idiot!” said Alex. “We won’t hurt you. Open the till!”
The cashier, without taking his eyes off the pistol in Greg’s hand, quickly pressed a button on the till and it opened. The draw pinged out in Alex’s direction, revealing piles of fivers and tenners.
“Well done!” Greg smiled through gritted teeth.
Alex wasn’t sure who Greg was talking to – to the cashier or to him. But Alex didn’t really give a damn.
“Lie down on the floor,” Alex quietly commanded the cashier. He didn’t want to hit anyone else over the head. He didn’t want to do that again.
The cashier appeared to have been waiting for such a command. He quickly got down on the floor at Alex’s feet. Alex quickly crouched down, took out a plastic tie and in a practiced movement tied the cashier’s hands behind his back. He got up, took a plastic bag he’d prepared in advance out of his pocket, grabbed the notes, chucked them in the bag and closed the till.
The beat of a rap track, standard for this kind of place, was still pounding out. Alex took a look around. The customers were still hurling their heavy balls down the lanes, happily asking each other for high fives after every successful strike.
Leon was already heading for the exit with Max.
Alex took a look at Greg. He was standing, his lower lip sticking out, nodding with approval at Alex.
“The only person I’d whack with that piece of pipe right now is you, you scum,” thought Alex.
He nodded back to Greg, came out from behind the desk and they headed for the exit.
Alex again got the feeling that his clownish disguise had started to throttle him.
“Don’t turn around,” Alex heard Greg say behind him, the words returning him to reality, from which he found himself sometimes wondering into his own thoughts. “Just don’t turn round!”
It was almost over. Let it be over fast, that was the main thing. And that would be it. The bastard. He would have shot him. Or not.
“Well done!” Alex heard coming from Greg behind him, and it was again as if he’d woken up. They were standing in front of the door out of the club.
Greg threw open the door and the air from the street hit Alex.
He saw Vickey.
“Is everything all right?” she asked and smiled with joy.
Alex saw the backs of Max and Leon receding into the distance, about twenty yards away from him.
“Everything’s fine,” answered Alex. He took her by the hand and they started moving away from the building of the bowling club. “How are you?”
“A couple came up,” Vickey said quickly. “I said there was a service break and that we’d only be opening up in a half hours’ time. And that was it.”
“And that was it,” Alex thought to himself. “I told her everything was all right. But nothing, damn it, is all right.” Another 450 yards to the East Finchley tube station. But first, at a shop along the way, they would buy a bouquet of flowers, five carnations, so that they would look like a couple in love. Then they’d sit in a café, also close by, and only then would they head for the tube station. Max knew, from his experience as a policeman, how they would be looking for people following the call from the bowling club. He knew what they would be looking for. A couple with a bouquet in a coffee shop, a well-dressed man, Greg, also with a bouquet of flowers, walking down the road to meet his nonexistent girlfriend, and a couple of friends, Max and Leon, finishing their three pieces and fries in a fried chicken shop – they didn’t look like the kind of people who had just knocked over a bowling joint.
A half-hour later, standing in a carriage on the tube, Alex stared point blank at Vickey. He couldn’t think about anything. He just looked at her. Looked and understood that she was dear to him. And that was it. And nothing more. She was dear to him. And in answer, through the noise of the rolling iron wheels of the metro carriage, Vickey’s sad, loving eyes looked at him. The eyes of a person he’d got involved in this whirlpool. Got involved in this dangerous, very dangerous game. Where nobody could predict how it would end.
Like the light from a lamp at the end of a dark tunnel, through which the carriage was hurtling, a thought dawned on him – he didn’t know if the guard was still alive… Perhaps he’d felt his own pulse when he checked his wrist?
“Kentish Town station,” came an announcement from the public address system of the Northern Line tube carriage. Following the plan precisely, Vickey got out of the carriage and headed for the exit. She walked without looking back. “Break the stupid rules. I want to see your face,” thought Alex, as if bidding her farewell. But Vickey stuck to the rules. She walked calmly, only looking ahead.
“The next station is Camden Town,” came the next announcement.
“Not now,” thought Alex, “when I need her more than ever. Right now.” His heart tightened up into an abandoned ball. “Idiotic plan. Idiotic safety measures.”
He needed her now more than ever. If he could hold her now, by the hand. If only she was with him now. Her hand would have been a bridge to the rest of the world. “I can’t go on without her,” he thought, gripping the rail so tightly that it began to hurt.
But Alex was imagining all this, it was wishful thinking – Alex was traveling alone. To King’s Cross station. Then he was to walk in the direction of the new Google building, to find a quiet, secluded spot, to crouch down, as if tying his shoelace, take out the piece of pipe, unnoticed, remove its wrapping of newspaper, and throw it into the bushes. And that would be it. Those were Greg’s orders. This was how Greg taught them patience and a cold-blooded approach. After the main job, after all, he would have to walk down the street not with a pipe but with money and jewels from the safe boxes. And he would have to pretend that he was shooting the breeze with his girlfriend and a pal.
But Alex wasn’t thinking about that right now. He was thinking about Vickey, who’d just been standing next to him. With a bouquet of five humble flowers in her hands. “I never gave her flowers,” he thought. Flowers are a sign, after all, there’s so much warmth in them, so much gratitude: for female beauty, for female warmth, for female love. “I need her so badly now, I need her so badly,” Alex repeated to himself like a mantra. “God, I need her so badly now. I need her,” he thought, and the idea warmed him. He carried on repeating the phrase, warming himself further. He was starting to need her. Only her. The iron wheels of the carriage pounded out a monotone waltz on the rails of the metro, bam-bam, bam-bam, and to Alex their racket appeared to be a beautiful melody, a refrain that hadn’t yet been composed, a song being born. She’s needed, she’s needed. She’s needed. Bam-bam, bam-bam.
The train stopped at King’s Cross station.
“If only everything would be all right. If only it would all be over, and everything would be all right. If only no one’s died. One more step. And it’s over.”
But to do that he now had to think about something else. He had to finish off today’s job. Another step to the main job. Another step to freedom. He had to concentrate on Greg’s instructions.
The pipe, hidden under his clothes, touched his rib. A chill went through him, and in his mind’s eye an image of the training, where Max had taught him the right way to hit someone, flashed up. Alex had got it right, he’d whacked Max in the right place with the rolled-up newspaper, and Max had laughed: “I need to be very afraid of you from now on. You’re an animal, now you could kill me easily.” Was it his own pulse, or was the guard still alive after all? One more step.