Contacts

He’d woken at eleven on a Saturday, having slept badly, and the emptiness of the day ahead descended on him as if the plasterwork had come crashing down from the ceiling. He had no plans; nobody would want to see him. Everyone had kids, or they were in couples having brunch, or they were just mysteriously away as people so often seemed to be when you were yearning for them. His last online date had ended in a humiliation so complete that he couldn’t imagine opening the app again; it felt as if everyone else there could see him, pitied him. Thoughts like that were irrational; they were not the sort of thoughts James was used to having – not until he lost the job, if it was possible to identify a turning point. Since then, they’d been more and more common, and it was exhausting to carry them around.

He went into the hall, made sure Steffi was out. His body felt heavy, his legs reluctant to carry him even this couple of dozen steps. Her bedroom door was open – chaos inside, as usual, as if she’d had a fight with herself in there. In the bathroom, the shower was dripping. James went to turn it off, returned to his room, picked up his phone and typed the strange word into Google. S-a-m. The algorithm finished it off for him. The future Karl had once predicted was here, now; maybe the phone knew you were miserable just from the way you sat on the edge of the bed with it.

His fingers went over the numbers on the screen. 116 123. It felt too short for a phone number. Even as the dial tone sounded in his ears, James doubted that he was going to go through with this. He wasn’t even certain he expected it to be answered. Calling the Samaritans felt like something you did at midnight, not before lunchtime. But it was answered, almost straight away, and it was too late to go back. It was a woman’s voice. She asked what he wanted to talk about. James swallowed and clawed at his scalp and managed to say that he was very lonely, and that he’d been thinking about … not being here any more.

The Samaritan did a good job of sounding surprised and concerned, even though this must be how many of her calls began. In her kind, Home Counties voice – a voice he could imagine speaking authoritatively on Jane Austen, or the need for better cycle lanes – she gently steered him towards more concrete discussion. James found he was, if not enjoying it, at least pleased to be able to answer the questions. He’d once remarked to Michaela, during the cult for Scandinavian murder shows, that he quite liked the idea of being a witness. Being quizzed by the police, ‘helping their investigations’. She’d laughed. ‘How are you going to infiltrate a criminal gang?’ she asked. ‘You literally phoned the Revenue this morning to tell them you owed them more tax.’

‘When were you last in a relationship?’ asked the Samaritan.

‘About two and a half hours ago. I mean, years ago.’ He was annoyed with himself for the slip of the tongue. ‘Two and a half years ago. And that relationship was four years long. It was the only proper one I’ve had. If you see what I mean.’

‘With a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you say a bit about her?’

‘Her name was Michaela.’ Straight away he thought he should have kept her anonymous. ‘We met doing a weight-loss course. We were both, er … Overweight. And then we set up our own health-and-fitness business, which was successful. But she left unexpectedly.’ Unexpectedly, he thought, even to Michaela. It was the way Michaela always did do things. He’d believed her when she said that she never planned it this way, she never meant to hurt him so badly.

‘She’s in Berlin now. With someone else.’

‘That must be difficult,’ said the Samaritan.

‘It is.’

A silence seemed about to fall, but the woman caught the conversation expertly and tossed it back into the air. ‘And do you have a support network?’

‘A …?’

‘People you can talk to, people you trust.’

‘It’s difficult.’ James scratched his scalp, fingered one of the untidy curls. He was more than due a haircut, he was starting to look like someone you’d move away from at a bus stop. But even this had been beyond him, the past couple of weeks. He remembered last time at the barber’s. The awful creak of the chair as he settled into it; the way he caught, in the mirror, the stylist eyeing his body in a way he was used to people eyeing it. Like a house that needed some work. He’d have to go to a different place next time. All this took time and mental energy. ‘My – er – main friend. Well, he became my boss. And recently sacked me. So we haven’t been – we haven’t spoken much since then.’

‘And close friends, family?’ asked the woman.

The word made James think immediately of being young. ‘Family’, like ‘Christmas’, was an idea that belonged to his past, not his current situation.

‘I was very close to my dad. My father. But he’s dead – he died.’ He’s dead had never stopped sounding brutal, winding him, in the saying or the hearing of it. ‘My sister and I, actually, were close too, but we had a disagreement.’ James felt that he wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation very well, even though that was a strange thing to think about a Samaritans call. His list of setbacks didn’t seem substantial enough to justify having called; having confessed to being in despair. He searched for a way of explaining why the thing he was trying to tunnel through felt thicker than the sum of these parts.

‘You know – Tony Hancock, when he … well, when he died,’ said James. ‘He just said too many things seemed to go wrong. Something like that.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,’ said his younger listener, ‘but I do understand the feeling, of course. And it can seem like that for a long time – but also, life can change very quickly for the better.’

The slight easing that James felt, after the chat, lasted about a week – maybe more. But it wore off like aspirin, a little at a time, and he didn’t feel he could call up again. They must have more urgent cases to deal with, and he didn’t want to become a regular; he wasn’t a hypochondriac bothering a GP. What he needed was someone to sit and talk to. What he needed was to have friends again. And that urge had led to his ‘opening up’ to Steffi, someone who wasn’t really a friend, and that had been a terrible misjudgement which embarrassed both of them.

Well. It was gone, now. James listened to the footsteps padding up and down in the corridor; the lilt of the Welsh woman’s peppy voice as she chatted to the sports fans. ‘Yes, be a good game, I should think! You should get some sleep though, mind!’ People he didn’t know; people who couldn’t affect him. Nothing could really affect him any more. It had been as easy as the single touch which slid flight mode into action.

Departing from his own life, he could look back on it like one of Karl’s pub biographies. This fella, can’t remember his name. Girlfriend leaves him for a geezer in Germany. Best mate gives him the sack. He gets the hump, jumps off a bridge. It was a comforting thought, James reflected, allowing himself to open the second beer. That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences. Everything he’d done wrong would pack down into an anecdote for future Karls. Something to pass time between rounds at the bar; something very quickly forgotten.

8

BRISTOL, 01:01

JEAN CHILTERN (MUM)

It had to be Sally calling. At this time of night. It had to be one of the children, Sally or James. Or at least, more worryingly, it had to be about one of the children. But James would be fast asleep. No, it would be Sally in Australia, and that must mean something major was happening. All this went through Jean’s head in the ten seconds after she was woken by the phone. The thoughts didn’t arrange themselves one at a time; they coalesced into a pang of disquiet, something Jean felt before she was even really thinking. It had been years since the children were actually children, but the feeling was cold-stored in her core and could kick in again in a matter of seconds.

‘Wassit?’ muttered Lee.

‘Shush,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing, go back to sleep.’

Lee turned the other way and half-folded the pillow over his head. Jean felt for the light switch in the hall, found the banister with her left hand. These instincts, once more, were more or less automatic, hard-wired by years of maternal nightshifts. Sally with her nightmares about being buried alive; James, fretting over not being able to sleep. What a fine state of affairs, as they used to say, when Alan was still … With her free hand she picked up the trailing edge of her nightie, a recent purchase. Jean had picked it because, although practical, it would also be reasonably stylish if worn in front of strangers in an emergency, like a fire alarm at a hotel. This had happened years ago to Jean on a weekend break in Glasgow, and it continued to affect her nightwear choices.

The phone was on its table by the front door, in almost exactly the same spot Jean’s parents had had the phone in their own house. In the final few seconds before she reached the bottom stair, Jean had a momentary flashback to her father bemoaning its installation. What’s it going to be next? A brass band in the front room? He’d refused ever to use it; if the house was burning down, Jean’s mum used to joke, he’d probably write the fire brigade a letter. Imagine if he’d lived to see this world, where everyone carried a phone in their pocket, or bag. Well. Almost everyone. Not Jean. She was her father’s daughter, still.

‘Hello?’

‘Mum? I’m sorry to wake you up.’

So it was Sally. It wasn’t a policeman or someone from a hospital, as it had been on the awful night when Jean’s sister, Pam, had died – suddenly, incomprehensibly, even though she was still describing her leukaemia as a ‘nuisance’ and had bought them concert tickets for the next week. It was Sally, in Melbourne. And so perhaps after all this was going to be good news. Perhaps … Jean had almost stopped hoping for it. But women did wait a lot longer these days, didn’t they: they had careers first. Which Jean had mixed feelings about, but, well, the world changed, didn’t it?

‘There’s a situation with James,’ Sally was saying, and Jean’s daydream evaporated.

‘What do you mean, a “situation”?’ Sally talked so much like a businesswoman, these days. Was a businesswoman, of course. You just never got used to it, with your own kids: having them speak to you like bank managers discussing your overdraft. Not that Jean had ever been near going into her overdraft.

‘I’ve had a message from James.’

‘What sort of a message?’

‘A text, Mum.’ Sal’s voice crackled with impatience and Jean had the feeling, more and more familiar these days, that she was the junior one. ‘He’s made a threat – and it could be some sort of joke, or … but he’s talking about …’

Even when Sally had explained it, Jean couldn’t understand it, not really. Even when Sally had hung up, promising that she’d find a way to get hold of James, telling her things were going to be all right and that she’d call back as soon as it was sorted.

Jean stared numbly at the phone numbers of her children, the strange long numbers they had these days – especially Sally’s, with the international code, the foreign-looking ‘0061’ at the start. They were written in biro on a strip of paper which never left the phone table, was held down with a kangaroo paperweight Sally had bought her. There was no point in trying James if Sally was doing it. Jean didn’t want to tie up the line, or whatever the phrase was. She would only get in the way. And yet, not to call him. Her son. James. Not to call him, if he was in danger.

She had sat down on the stairs while Sally was talking, but now she stood up again, and her fingers went shakily over the buttons. Nine-nine-seven. Her fingers left a clammy film across the handset and she looked at the phone cord quivering gently as she extended the receiver. No dial tone. ‘The person you are trying to call is not available.’

Jean put the receiver back into its cradle and took a deep, uneven breath. All right. She was going to get dressed. She would get dressed and put the kettle on. There was no point in trying to address this, this baffling emergency, without at least making things as normal as they could be. She would get dressed without waking Lee – not that he wouldn’t be sympathetic, but she needed to wrap her head around this alone. And by the time she had done all this, Sally would surely be on the line again, to say it was all fixed.

But it didn’t feel as if she could go back upstairs, somehow – not straight away. Jean’s heart was beating at a speed which she couldn’t remember it reaching for many years. These had been fairly quiet years, after all. An even keel. Some fresh air would be good, she thought, and went to the front door. The lock, the bolt, all the things you continued to do every night in case of some intruder, some wolf at the door. And yet now the wolf was here, had come in down the telephone line.

She peered across at the Bradshaws’ nice new drive. The silver cars all slumbering as you looked down the hill, ahead of the supermarket trips or drives to country pubs which would make up their Saturday duties. The neat shuttered houses, green and brown bins outside; the absolute normality of it all. No reason, when she and Lee had gone to bed last night, to imagine anything outside that normality could jump on her like this. Of course not. Lee had watched a documentary about Pink Floyd, whose songs went on a bit, if you asked her, but he was happy. Jean had read a bit of her novel, which – like almost all the books chosen by her book group – was about a missing child. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? the blurb had asked, and Jean had thought how distant, how far from one’s real experience, the question seemed. How far-fetched these books always seemed.

And now this.

But the danger here was not of a kind that you could call someone to come and stamp out; it wasn’t in a shape which she could hold in her hands. Jean felt the swirling of her stomach again. Talking about ending his life. Why? He must be depressed, Sally had said. Or in ‘some sort of trouble’. And Jean had felt it like a slap, heard an accusation. She was always there for James to talk to. But how long, in fact, had it been? He wasn’t chatty on the phone. He wasn’t someone you could call for a weekly bulletin in the way she did with Sally.

Depressed about what? In what sort of ‘trouble’? It was appalling that she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. Well. She could guess. Perhaps he still wasn’t over the mixed-race girl, if you were still allowed to say that; lots of things you weren’t allowed to say, nowadays, according to the younger members of the book group. Perhaps it was the job, money. She gathered that he wasn’t working for the taxi company any more, and even that job had been a bit of a comedown because the business went wrong, or he fell out with Michaela, or whatever exactly had happened there. But she could have given him money. She could have come up with job ideas for him, he could move back to Bristol, there were people hiring at the gym where Jean did Pilates, and at Boots, and that was just off the top of her head. Or perhaps it was his weight that was getting him down – but if that was the problem, there were so many diet plans.

It hadn’t been easy to tell, at Christmas, what sort of shape James was in. To her concerned eye he had looked a little overweight and dishevelled, and he’d been evasive when she’d asked about his love life (while trying to avoid that phrase) and what avenues he might explore work-wise (while feeling she was twenty years too old for that phrase). Evasive, but not unhelpful. He’d got involved basting the turkey, chopping vegetables with so much force you’d think, as Lee said, that they’d done something terrible to him. When the Bradshaws had come round on Boxing Day with, as always, a new-smelling and complicated general knowledge board game, James had done his usual trick of getting the first five questions right and then deliberately playing less well when Mr Bradshaw began to get grumpy and swig the port like regular wine. She had glanced across, proud, wondering wherever he got all these facts from. But prouder still that he knew when not to use them. When James had left for London on the 29th, she’d taken both his hands in hers, her boy, and said, as always: look after yourself.

How empty that sounded in her head, now. And how negligent it felt, that she hadn’t seen James since Christmas. Nine weeks, ten? They went by so quickly. But of course she wouldn’t have let nine weeks go by if she had thought he needed something. Whatever was wrong, she could help him; that was the point. It was her job to help him. Yet she had somehow neglected that job. And now – without what felt like fair warning, without anything except this dizzying distress call in the middle of the night – now, things were on this knife-edge, and she felt sick.

She went back into the house. The cool past-midnight air had made her shivery, if anything. She went to fill the kettle. The kitchen felt smaller than it usually did. Jean took a deep breath, opened the dishwasher and began to make little piles of plates and bowls on the worktop, to be transferred into the cupboards. Just something to do that was normal. A neutral taste to offset the acid of this, of the thing there was no possible way of digesting. James has sent people a message that he might do something terrible. James has been talking about – something happening. She couldn’t even quite frame it as a phrase in her head.

If only she had a mobile phone, she would at least have seen the message with her own eyes. It might make no practical difference, but she wouldn’t have this terrible sense of having been wrong-footed. Of being so negligent that dozens of people – by the sound of it – were aware of her own son’s despair before she knew the first thing about it. She’d just never got used to them. She was the wrong generation. Lee had a mobile, and the few times she’d tried to type out a message on it, it had taken so long that she might as well – like her father – be popping a letter in the post. It was the same with all of it. Her Facebook page, set up by James, had gone unmonitored for months; it was too much, the way it kept telling you about new features, and she hadn’t really recovered from the laughter of her children when she asked how to ‘befriend’ people on the site. Emails, Jean tried her best with, but she’d always found typing laborious: her fingers just wouldn’t fall into the right patterns, it was like trying to play the piano. Talking was so much easier. People just didn’t seem to be so keen on that, these days.

The kettle had boiled, and Jean looked blankly at it. It was one of these new ones with a transparent body, so you could watch the water – under a blue light – frothing and bubbling right up to the second it clicked. It was no better at the actual job than the shrieking kettle she’d had for years, before Alan died. But Sal had said that was ‘on its last legs’ and that this one had the best reviews.

Jean flipped the top of the Kilner jar, got a teabag out, tossed it into the mug. Milk came last, no matter what anyone said. She rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even want the tea, not really. Of course not.

She saw James as he had been at twelve, a chubby, polite boy in a smart grey jumper, off to Edinburgh with his father. With Alan, her soulmate. She experienced a quick and lacerating sense of loss for those days, of the time when they were a family. It wasn’t fair to Lee to think like that. It didn’t do any good, either. But this again was not really thinking, it was just feeling; it came from lower than the brain, from somewhere not so easily located. And the loss became a longing, to know where James was, to know what to do to help him.

It was absurd to think it, but without a mobile phone it felt as if she was further away from him than she should be. The decision not to own one of these devices – which she’d never had the slightest desire for – all of a sudden seemed careless to the point of selfishness. And the darkness outside, in the garden barely lit by the fingernail of moon, felt like a big solid wall between Jean and her son.

9

M1 NEAR LUTON, 01:23

KARL DEAN

At about the time James stabbed the screen to dispatch his news, Karl had been waiting to pick up an important passenger from the SSE Arena, formerly Wembley Arena, and take him all the way to Newcastle. This should be just short of a five-hour drive at this time of night, if he kept to the speed limit, which of course he wouldn’t. Newcastle was a fair old schlep, as Karl was fond of saying – but he was happy doing it himself. There weren’t many drivers he’d trust with a VIP job. There were even fewer these days, without James. And besides, there weren’t many drivers who he’d be happy to see earning the money, when he could earn it himself. Yes, Karl was the boss now, so every journey was arguably earning him money. But when he was at the wheel, he was essentially making money for his own business and then paying himself pocket money from that business. It was like being, as he’d recently said at a party, both the ringmaster and the elephant. It didn’t really make sense because elephants in a circus didn’t get paid, and in fact circuses weren’t allowed to have them any more, but it had gone down well with the table, and the reception sometimes meant more than the truth.

Anyway, you didn’t know how long it was going to last, this job, any job, not even when you were in charge. Not in – as radio hosts were always saying – ‘the current climate’. There were plenty of younger drivers who would have taken this in a heartbeat. Karl had been at the bottom of the ladder long enough. He knew that hunger.

There was lots of it about. That hunger. Some of the young ones would keep going till they fell asleep at the wheel, if he let them. Everyone needed the wedge. The fella who’d replaced James had recently done an eighteen-hour stint, which wasn’t technically illegal, but also wasn’t technically a good idea at all. By the end of the shift, his texts had read as if a dog was walking across the screen. Yes, there were a dozen of them who’d do the big schleps. It was where the proper money was. And some of these gold card clients, like the DJ geezer who was currently in the back of Karl’s car, were also capable of coming out with fairy-tale tips. A footballer had once given Karl a pair of trainers, brand new, and – as it turned out – worth £400. Just handed them over at the drop-off. ‘Do you want these, pal?’ Karl had put them on eBay, and someone had paid the reserve price before he got home.

A story had done the rounds about a female driver – little bit of a rarity, in this industry – who’d got a pop star to Gatwick against a very tight deadline and, the next morning, found ten grand in her account. No reference. No sender name. Just a set of life-changing digits. And she’d gone well over the limit, by all accounts. She could have lost her licence, game over. Or, of course, lost more than that. Someone pulls out at a corner, she goes into the back of them, lights out. But the point was, none of these things did happen. She won the gamble and she won the ten thousand big ones. And that was what you were in this job for.

How many other jobs could you watch money coming in every time you got a text, any time the phone hummed in its little perch on the dashboard? And how many people like Karl, whose dad used to wallop him, who dropped out of school at 16, could have built an app like that? Or rather a whole empire, powered by an app?