Barking Read online

  ‘Well, yes,’ Duncan said, and for some reason he thought of the Polish cavalry in World War Two charging the German tanks with lances. ‘I sort of used my discretion there a bit. It’s sort of an unusual case, really.’

  Jenny Sidmouth nodded. ‘Very unusual. It’s the only case in my department where an interim bill hasn’t been sent out for three months, which makes it actually unique. Perhaps you’d like to do something about it. By Friday.’

  No need to say yes or of course or I’ll see to it immediately; just as there’s no need for the grass to acknowledge the edge of the scythe. Ms Sidmouth rolled on over him, her voice sandpaper, her eyes drills: Parsons, Barlotti, Singh, Bowden Allshapes, the Atkinson Will Trust - all the sleepers, cupboard-skeletons and too-difficults that lurked in the places in his filing cabinet where he was too scared or too ashamed to go. It was, Duncan decided, a bit like the Last Judgement would be, if Margaret Thatcher was filling in for God. With an effort he tuned out the voice and did a few quick calculations. A three-point-whatever shortfall wasn’t bad enough for the sack, so the only possible way for the ordeal to end was The Speech. And, sure enough—

  ‘Duncan,’ she said, tightening the apertures of her eyes down to pinpricks, ‘let’s make no bones about this.’

  Thought so. And, of course, he’d heard The Speech before. Parts of it he could recite along with her. Somehow, though, knowing exactly what was coming didn’t make it any easier to handle. If anything, the reverse. Like injections: you know it doesn’t really hurt, far less actual pain than a paper-cut or stubbing your toe. But as you sit there in the waiting room, your knees can’t help shaking and the knot in your stomach slowly gets tighter than a schoolboy’s tie; and then when the buzzer goes and it’s your turn—

  ‘Actually—’

  He’d said it before he’d realised he was speaking. Pure reflex: he didn’t have anything to say. A bit like raising your arm to shield your face when a fifteen-storey building’s about to fall on top of you.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No, sorry. You first.’

  The look on Ms Sidmouth’s face quickly reduced Duncan from three dimensions to two. ‘As I was saying,’ she said, ‘in the final analysis, it all comes down to attitude. In this business, Duncan, we’re all predators.’ Her nostrils twitched slightly, as if scenting the prey. ‘There’s no room for herbivores in the legal profession. You can’t just mumble along, chewing the cud. If you want to eat, you’ve got to hunt and kill. We’re not just a team, you know, Duncan, we’re a pack; and a pack runs at the pace of the fastest dog. So it’s no good waiting for work to come to you. You’ve got to go out there into the long grass and flush it out; and when you’ve got hold of its neck, you’ve got to bite. Letting clients off the hook just because you’re sorry for them isn’t predator thinking, Duncan. That’s your dinner you’re letting get away from you. If it moves, you go after it; that’s the rule you’ve got to learn to live by. Remember: we’re here to get paid, so if you’ve done the work, you’ve got to charge, and charge, and keep on charging—’

  ‘Like the Light Brigade.’

  As already noted, using humour against Jenny Sidmouth was pointless, like trying to stab a dragon with a rose. ‘Exactly like the Light Brigade, Duncan, yes. No matter what the enemy throws at you, no matter how tough it gets along the way, you’ve got to keep going until you get there. It’s survival of the fittest, it’s natural selection, it’s the thrill of the chase and the law of the jungle . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ Duncan said sagely. ‘Only I didn’t do jungle law at college. Timetabling screw-up: you could do either jungle law or tax and probate, and I thought—’

  ‘Attitude.’ She stared through him, as though he was one of those transparent tropical fish and she was a cormorant. ‘That’s what it comes down to. In this business, you’re either a wolf or a sheep; and I want to you ask yourself, really deep down: which one are you?’

  Baa, Duncan thought. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Now you’ve explained it to me, I think I understand.’

  ‘Excellent.’ A smile you could’ve shattered into chunks and stuck in gin and tonic. ‘I’m so glad.’ Jenny Sidmouth looked past him, towards the door. ‘I’ll be keeping an eye on your printouts from now on, Duncan. I’m sure you won’t let me down. Thanks so much for your time.’

  The law of the jungle, he thought as he wandered slowly back to his office; yes, well. It was all very well telling himself it was high time he got away from this bunch of Neanderthals and found himself a proper job, but it wasn’t as easy as that. He’d been trying for - what, six months? During that time, the agency had set him up with half a dozen blind dates. He’d built his hopes up, trotted along to the interviews, sat down in the chair with his confident, capable look smeared all over his face; and guess what? Each time, the eyes that had stared back at him across the interview desk were exactly the same as the eyes he was trying to get away from: the same greedy, vicious glow - predators, Jenny Sidmouth had said, and for once he reckoned she was spot on. He hadn’t needed to listen to the words they said. The eyes told him everything he needed to know. It didn’t matter what sort of face they were lurking in - round and chubby, thin and pointy, smooth or hairy. They were always the same eyes, identical to the ones that glowered at him here, and they gave him the creeps.

  But (Duncan reminded himself as he sat down and reached for the drift of yellow Post-It notes that had settled round his phone while he’d been away from his desk) it’s all very well fantasising about chucking in the legal profession for good: going straight, retraining, carving out a new and meaningful life for himself as a restaurant critic or a gentleman thatcher. The simple fact was, he was a competent lawyer and no bloody good at anything else. True, he had a crummy job, but not so crummy that shelf-stacking or burger-flipping would be better. Besides, he had a mortgage and a credit card to think of.

  Even so. Predators. Well.

  One good thing about being a tax lawyer. When you’re sunk in a bottomless slough of depression and self-loathing, you can always phone the Revenue and reassure yourself that you’re not the greenest, slimiest breed of algae floating on the surface of the gene pool - not by a long way. He returned a call from Our Ref X/187334/PB/7 at the Capital Taxes Office, and it made him feel a lot better.

  Even so . . . It wouldn’t be all that much to show for a life (Duncan mused, as he pencilled in figures in a draft Form IHT200) if all they could find to inscribe on your tombstone was At least he wasn’t a taxman. No, there had to be something better than this, somewhere over the rainbow; not a daydream or a TV lifestyle make-over, but a better, less painful way of being a moderately competent lawyer for eight hours a day. Fix that, and the other stuff - the dustbin bag full of old broken junk he was pleased to call his personal life - would sort itself out without any conscious effort on his part. Or if it didn’t, he wasn’t all that bothered, just so long as he could find a way of making work just a tiny bit less shitty. Possible, surely. Hardly rocket science, but think of how it’d improve his quality of life. One little change was all it’d take. One small step for a lemming; a giant leap for lemmingkind.

  At his elbow the phone burbled. One good thing about being a lawyer: the phone rings so often, you never have a chance to concentrate long enough to get really depressed.

  He didn’t recognise the name of the firm that apparently wanted to talk to him: Ferris and something. ‘Yes, all right,’ he grunted, and there was a click.

  ‘Dunc?’

  Duncan Hughes was six foot two in his socks and no bean-pole; there had only ever been one person big and fast enough to call him Dunc twice. But he blinked three times and stared at the receiver as if it had just kissed his ear; because he hadn’t heard from that one person for fifteen years—

  ‘Luke?’

  He could hear the smile; and two uninsulated wires in the back of his mind brushed together, and he thought, Ferris and something. Luke Ferris—

  A big smile, full of teeth and good humour; he c
ould picture it now. He could picture himself, all spots and elbows, trying to punch it through the back of its proprietor’s neck, and always missing. ‘I thought it must be you,’ the voice said, and fifteen years crumpled up like the front end of a Volvo. ‘I saw your name on this sheet of letterhead - down at the bottom of the cast list, I couldn’t help noticing, in with the lighting assistants and the location caterers - and I thought, could that possibly be my old mate Duncan Hughes, who fell off the edge of the world fifteen years ago and was never heard of again? So,’ the voice added, ‘how are you?’

  Duncan thought long and hard before answering. ‘Oh, fine,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘A bit like the Mary Rose,’ the voice replied. ‘In remarkably good shape, all things considered. Look, is it true what it says on your firm’s notepaper?’

  Duncan frowned. ‘Depends,’ he said.

  ‘You’re at 32 Fortescue Place, EC2?’

  No harm in admitting that. ‘Basically, yes.’

  ‘Upper storey? Facing the street?’

  ‘If I could see through walls.’

  ‘Ah. Well, if you were to climb up on the roof and look sort of east, you’d see a big black glass thing a couple of blocks over, sort of like a minimalist Borg cube. 97 Mortmain Street. That’s us.’

  Us, Duncan repeated to himself; Ferris and somebody, note the word order. ‘Small world,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Fucking tiny,’ the voice replied. ‘And talking of geography, doesn’t it strike you as significant that the Bunch of Grapes in Voulge Street is exactly halfway between your place and mine?’

  ‘Well, not—’

  ‘See you there, then. One-fifteen?’

  ‘No,’ Duncan started to say, but the disconnected-line buzz drowned him out. Which proved, if there was any residual doubt about it, that he’d just been talking to the authentic Luke Ferris, who never took no for an answer, or gave a shit about anybody else’s—

  Hang on, he thought.

  To test out a theory, he asked himself a question: define Luke Ferris in no more than five words. Easy: my best friend at school. The fact that he’d never been able to stand him for more than ten minutes without wanting to hit him had, somehow, never been incompatible with that definition. A more precise and informative version would’ve been not an easy person to get on with, but that was eight words, not five. All right, then; how about a complete pain in the— Nope, six.

  So he glanced at his diary: one-fifteen. Of course, he had mountains of work to be getting on with, and although slipping out of the office for a bit at lunchtime wasn’t exactly forbidden, it was more frowned-on than the foot of Mount Rushmore. On the other hand: my best friend at school. What harm could it possibly do?

  You go through life thinking of yourself as a tall person - brushing snow out of your hair in summer and ducking in the late afternoon to avoid nutting yourself on the setting sun - and then you come across someone who makes you realise you’re merely a slightly elongated hobbit.

  ‘You’ve grown,’ Duncan said.

  Luke raised an eyebrow. ‘You sound just like my aunt,’ he said. ‘What’re you having?’

  ‘You have grown.’ Duncan wasn’t quite sure why he needed an admission at this point, but he knew somehow that it was important. ‘I mean, at school you were a tall bastard and a hazard to aviation, but -’ He shrugged. Luke was looking through him; the way Jenny Sidmouth had done, like management . ‘Coke, please,’ he said.

  A slight frown; then Luke turned to the barman (who’d materialised out of nowhere like a Romulan battlecruiser) and said, ‘Two pints of Guinness.’ No please; just the peremptory order. The barman nodded quickly and flipped the tap. ‘And yes, I have,’ he said. ‘I put on a late spurt while I was at college. I put it down to beer, healthy exercise and clean living.’

  ‘Right,’ Duncan said doubtfully. ‘Clean living.’

  ‘Mphm.’

  Duncan wasn’t quite sure about that. True, Luke looked almost grotesquely fit in an Arnie’s-big-brother sort of a way; he also looked terrible. As far as Duncan could remember, Luke was older than him by no more than a month or so, but his hair (augmented by a shaggy beard and bushy, three-dimensional moustache) was nearly all grey, with only a few untidy-looking splodges of its original black, like paint splashes on a dust sheet; and what little was visible of his face under all that fur was lined and worn, almost as if it had been sandpapered, with craters under his eyes like meteorite strikes. His suit was expensive and immaculate, but his hands were scarred and the nails bitten and torn. He looked like all sorts of things - a Viking, a sixty-year-old rock star, Dorian Gray’s passport photo, a tramp in a millionaire’s suit.

  ‘Table free over there,’ Luke said, nodding at a far corner. The two pint glasses stood on the upturned palm of his hand, as steady as though they were on a tray. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘how are you keeping?’

  They sat down; Luke arranged his enormous legs under the table like someone stacking luggage in the corridor of a train. ‘Oh, not so bad,’ Duncan replied. ‘Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it, both of us ending up in the lawyering racket. I thought you were going into the family business.’

  A faint, sad look. ‘I did,’ Luke replied, ‘for about six months, until it went bust. We got run out of town by the Spanish. Cheap imports,’ he explained. ‘It broke dad’s heart, but I didn’t mind so much. I never quite managed to regard the glove trade with the same crusading zeal as he did. The law biz is much more my style.’

  ‘It must be,’ Duncan said, trying not to let the sourness leak through. ‘Your name on the stationery, and an office in Mortmain Street. I get the impression you’re doing well.’

  ‘It keeps the wolf from the door,’ Luke said, and for a moment his face split around an enormous, humourless grin. ‘Don’t ask me for the secret of my success, because there isn’t one. I mean, we must be doing something right, because people keep bringing us work to do, like a cat brings you dead mice. Beats me what it is, though. The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is, we don’t try. I mean, we don’t chase after people saying how wonderful we are, we just get on and do our best, and when we haven’t got a fucking clue, we say so. I think people respect that. It’s either that or there’s another firm called Ferris and Loop, and people come to us thinking we’re them.’ He lifted his glass and swallowed its contents in five enormous gulps. ‘Either way I’m not bothered. How about you? Getting on all right?’

  Duncan opened his mouth, then shut it again. Given his vocation he could lie, just as Michelangelo could paint a bit. For some reason, however, he felt a powerful urge to tell Luke the truth.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m stuck in a boring job with a rotten firm, bugger-all chance of promotion and a boss who models her management style on Lord Voldemort. Apart from that, it’s all peaches and cream.’

  ‘Good heavens.’ Luke was staring thoughtfully at him, as though he was Fermat’s last theorem. ‘You surprise me. I’d have thought you’d have done all right for yourself. You were always the clever bastard.’

  ‘Was I?’ Duncan raised his eyebrows. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I always thought so. Well, not as far as maths was concerned, I grant you. Not in the fifteen-A-stars-at-GCSE sense so much: more a happy blend of intellectual muscle and low cunning. What went wrong?’

  Duncan shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘After I left school I did law at uni, got a decent degree, applied for what looked like a good job, made the fatal mistake of getting it. And here I still am, like Robinson Crusoe.’

  Luke smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see. Brains but no drive.’

  Duncan suddenly wished he was somewhere else. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘That’s what my boss thinks, too. According to her, I lack thrust, hunger and the killer instinct.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s right,’ Luke said mildly. ‘It’d explain why you aren’t in prison. All right, if it’s such a dump, why don’t you leave?’

  ‘I’m trying. Have been fo
r the last six months.’

  Luke looked puzzled. ‘Picky? Spoilt for choice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ Luke considered him for a moment, as though he was a crossword clue with a misprint in it; then he glanced down at Duncan’s unmolested beer glass. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t drink at—’

  Luke had gone; and a path opened up before him across the crowded bar. It was like watching slowed-down film of the shock wave that precedes a high-velocity bullet. The barman was waiting for him, practically at attention. Duncan - one of those people who have trouble getting served in pubs without the aid of a time machine - couldn’t help feeling slightly jealous.

  ‘So,’ he said, as Luke did the leg-stacking thing again, ‘are you in touch with any of the old crowd? I haven’t seen Micky Halloran since—’

  ‘Actually, he’s my partner. One of them,’ Luke added. ‘Micky and Kevin and Clive all came in with me when I set up the firm; Pete joined up about six months after that. More or less the whole of the gang,’ he added, ‘apart from you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Duncan said. ‘So they all became lawyers, then?’

  ‘I suppose you could call us that, at a pinch.’

  For a second or two, Duncan couldn’t think of anything to say. Envy, of course; but mostly a curious and quite unexpected feeling of resentment at being left out. Irrational: he’d been the one who’d decided he wanted to break with the old crowd, the one who’d changed his address and phone number without telling anybody, made no effort to keep in touch. Even so; all of them except him. It surprised him to realise that the prickle at the back of his mind was anger, but he couldn’t deny it.

  ‘I thought Pete was going off to be a teacher.’

  Very quick grin. ‘So did he. For a little while.’

  Duncan waited for Luke to expand on that, but he didn’t. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Like you said, all of us except me. Must be like old—’