Bear Necessity Page 4

  “I know, Reg, I know, and you’ll get it, I promise.”

  “Oh, I know I’ll get it. There’s no question about that. The only question is how I’ll get it. See, I prefer cash, but Dent here, he’s a bit more, let’s say old-school when it comes to recouping expenses. Ain’t that right, Dent?”

  Mr. Dent nodded. He opened his jacket to reveal the head of a well-used claw hammer poking out of his inside pocket. Danny’s chair creaked as he squirmed in his seat.

  “So what’s it going to be?” said Reg.

  “I’ll get the money, Reg, I swear. Just give me a bit more time.”

  Reg took a contemplative drag on his cigarette. Nobody spoke for a moment.

  “I wouldn’t normally do this,” said Reg finally, “but in light of your… extenuating circumstances, I guess it’s only right that I show a little compassion. I might not be pretty, but I ain’t a monster. Still, consider yourself lucky that your wife copped it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be half as understanding.”

  Danny clamped his teeth together and forced himself to nod.

  “I’ll give you two more months to pay everything you owe. Otherwise you and that boy of yours will be looking for a new place to live. I have to warn you, though, Dan, finding a flat with disabled access is a lot harder than you think.”

  “Thanks, Reg,” said Danny. “I appreciate it.”

  “So you should, Dan, so you should. As for interest, I’d say thirty percent is more than reasonable, wouldn’t you?”

  Danny winced as he struggled to swallow his objection. “More than reasonable,” he said.

  “Good. That’s settled, then,” said Reg. His cigarette hissed as he dropped it into Danny’s tea.

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, Reg, but I’ve got to get to work. See, there’s this new guy, he’s a Russian, Vitali or something, and if I’m late—”

  “Two sugars.”

  “What?”

  “In me Rosie,” said Reg. He took another bite of toast.

  “Right. Your tea. Of course. Sorry.”

  Danny disappeared into the kitchen, cursing under his breath as he rushed to make Reg’s tea.

  “And don’t be stingy with the milk!” yelled Reg.

  * * *

  Danny ran across the building site, his hard hat bobbing on his head as he ducked and dodged behind girders and excavators. He made for Ivan, who was busy unloading bags of cement from the back of a lorry.

  “Danny Boy,” said the Ukrainian. “Alf is looking for you.”

  “Did he say why?” said Danny, struggling to catch his breath.

  Ivan shrugged. He was the only man Danny knew who could shrug with a bag of cement on his shoulder.

  “Danny!” yelled someone from across the site. Danny turned to see a red-faced Alf gesticulating angrily from the doorway of his prefab office. “Get your arse in here now!”

  * * *

  Alf was sitting behind his desk, furiously clicking a retractable pen against his mouse pad.

  “All right, Alf,” said Danny, the floor flexing beneath his feet as he stepped into the office and took a seat opposite Alf. “What’s up?”

  “What did I tell you yesterday?”

  Danny removed his hard hat and nervously ruffled his hair. “You told me to go and work on cement with Ivan,” he said.

  “Don’t mug me off, Dan, you know what I’m talking about,” said Alf.

  Danny sighed. “All right, Alf, look, I’m sorry, really, but seriously, mate, it wasn’t my fault. See, me and Will were eating breakfast when somebody starts hammering the door down, right? So I go to investigate and who’s standing on my doorstep but Reg and his giant lummox of a bodyguard. Next thing I know they’re sitting at my dinner table and refusing to leave until the teapot’s empty.”

  “Go on,” said Alf.

  Danny frowned. “Go on what?”

  “Finish your story.”

  “I just did.”

  “That’s it?” said Alf. He looked like he was battling a sudden onset of brain freeze. “That’s your excuse? You were late for work, again, even though I explicitly warned you not to be late again just twenty-four fucking hours ago, and the reason for that, if I’m understanding you correctly, and I really hope I’m not, is that you were busy supping Tetley with your landlord?”

  “Sainsbury’s Basics,” said Danny.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t Tetley, it was Sainsbury’s Basics. We can’t afford Tetley.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Alf, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “They’re actually not that bad once you get used to them.”

  “I’m not talking about your fucking tea bags!” yelled Alf, mashing the desk with his fist.

  “Right. Sorry,” said Danny.

  Alf shook his head. “You should have listened to me, Dan. I was trying to help you.”

  “I did listen, but what was I supposed to do? The guy had a hammer, for Christ’s sake. No, not a hammer, a claw hammer. Why the hell does he need the claw? What’s he planning to do with the claw? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out, so when a man with a claw hammer tells me to make him a cup of tea, I’m not exactly going to say no, am I? I’m sorry, Alf, really, but it’s not like I had much choice in the matter.”

  “Yeah, well, neither do I,” said Alf.

  Danny’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “No, Alf, I don’t.”

  “It means the word’s come down is what it means.”

  “What word?”

  “I’ve got to let you go, Dan.”

  “That’s seven words.”

  “Don’t make this harder than it already is,” said Alf.

  “Who’s it come down from?” said Danny, looking around as if the culprit were hiding somewhere nearby. “That Russian wanker?”

  “It don’t matter who,” said Alf. “The decision’s been made. Clear out your locker, they want it emptied ASAP. You still got two weeks’ holiday, so consider that your notice period.” Alf did his best to look at everything else in the room except Danny.

  “Four years I’ve worked for you, Alf. Four fucking years. And have I ever, ever let you down in all that time? Even once?”

  “It’s not up to me, Dan. I wish it were, but it ain’t. It’s this new management, mate, they’re ruthless. They’d replace their own grandmothers if they could find a cheaper model. It ain’t just you. Nobody’s safe, not even me.”

  “You can’t do this,” said Danny. “I need this job. I really need this job.”

  Alf sighed like a man who regretted every life choice that had led him to this moment.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Danny rammed his meager belongings into a grocery bag with such force that he punched a hole through the bottom of it. Cursing, he shook the bag from his arm and watched it float to the floor before kicking it and cursing again when he got his foot stuck in the hole. Yanking the tangle of plastic from his shoe and screwing it into a ball, he sat on one of the benches scattered around the locker room and buried his head in his hands. Ivan entered a few minutes later and took a seat beside him.

  “Alf, he just tell me,” he said.

  Danny nodded but said nothing.

  “You know, I have cousin,” said Ivan. “He owes me favor. If you like, I call him now. He teach Alf lesson.” Ivan made a gun with his fingers and pretended to shoot himself in the head. “Boom. You know?”

  “It’s not Alf’s fault,” said Danny, looking up, “but thanks for offering to murder him for me. That really means a lot.”

  “How about job?” he said. “You need new job? I know many people.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Danny, “but, well, I need something… legitimate.”

  “Legitimate?” said Ivan, frowning. “What is this word legitimate?”

  “Prec
isely.”

  Ivan nodded without really understanding.

  “I’ll be okay, don’t worry. This isn’t the only site around, there’s plenty of stuff going up these days. There’s that new office in Brunswick, there’s that big thing going on in Farringdon, there’re loads of opportunities around town. The hard part won’t be finding a job. The hard part will be knowing which one to take.”

  “Wait,” said Ivan as Danny turned to leave. He opened his locker and pulled out something shaped like a brick and wrapped in tinfoil. “Here,” he said, handing the parcel to Danny. “From Ivana.”

  Ivan’s wife had baked him a walnut cake every few weeks since Liz had died. Danny secretly looked forward to those cakes more than anything else in his life (apart from the day that Will finally started talking again, if that day ever came), not just because they tasted incredible but because they reminded him, in his darkest moments, when Will was asleep and the flat was quiet except for the sound of his own unwanted thoughts, that even though he often felt completely alone in this world, he wasn’t. Not as long as there was cake in the kitchen.

  “Smells amazing,” said Danny, lifting the parcel to his nose. “Thanks, Ivan. And please thank Ivana for me.”

  “Ivan!” yelled Alf from somewhere outside.

  “You better go,” said Danny.

  Ivan nodded but didn’t move. “You will be okay?” he said.

  “Of course, mate. Don’t worry. I’ll have a new job in no time. Just you wait.”

  * * *

  Aside from a holiday to Margate when he was seven (a trip he only remembered because his mother had left him on a teacup ride for close to an hour while she went to the pub) and a couple of trips to Brighton, once with Liz when they were teenagers and once with Will when they were parents, Danny had never left London in the twenty-eight years since he was born. He was therefore fairly confident that he knew his hometown better than most, but over the course of the following fortnight Danny saw more of the capital than he’d ever seen before. He passed through almost every borough and he traveled through every fare zone (including zone nine) and during that time he saw countless parts of the city that he hadn’t even known existed until then (including zone nine).

  Not wanting to worry Will with the news of his recent sacking, and not wanting to suffer the embarrassment of having to explain it, Danny continued as normal, dressing in his tatty work scruffs every morning and making breakfast for them both before setting off for a long and fruitless day of job hunting once Will had gone to school.

  He started out by visiting the larger construction outfits in central London, the ones that were shaping the city’s skyline with gherkins, tins of ham, and other buildings that were inexplicably designed to resemble things you’d usually find in a kitchen cupboard. Next he tried zone two, first hoping to find work on the various skyscrapers popping up in Canary Wharf and Docklands and then, when that failed, trying his luck in Greenwich, where several new housing developments were being built. The farther out from the center he journeyed, the more the opportunities dwindled as large-scale construction projects gave way to compact starter homes and domestic renovations.

  He even offered his services to an elderly man who was covered in almost as much paint as the garage he was slapping it onto, but no matter how far he traveled or who he spoke to, the story was always the same. Nobody needed what Danny could offer because Danny couldn’t really offer anything. He wasn’t a plasterer or a carpenter. He wasn’t a roofer, or a tiler, or a bricklayer. He didn’t know how to weld, and although he knew the basics of wiring and pipes, he wasn’t a qualified sparky or plumber. Danny dug holes. He carried bricks. He mixed cement. He hammered nails. And he was good at all of those things. The only problem was that so were loads of other people. He had nothing to set him apart from the masses of unskilled laborers who were also looking for work, nothing that could give him even the slightest edge over anybody else in the labor market. He had no training aside from a basic one-day first aid course he’d done years ago and could no longer remember anything about, and he had no qualifications of any kind except for a school certificate in art (C-) and another one in geography (D). Over the years he’d seen countless adverts for classes and workshops and apprenticeship schemes in everything from joinery and window fitting to quantity surveying—courses that would have given him the requisite skills to improve his own career potential and prove to an employer that he was capable of more than just shoveling cement—but time and again he’d found some excuse for not putting his name down, whether it was because he was too busy, even when he wasn’t, or because he didn’t have the money, even when he did. He’d always known in the back of his mind that this day was coming, he just didn’t know that it would come so soon. Now here he suddenly was, in debt, out of work, and in serious danger of learning the hard way just what Mr. Dent planned to do with that claw hammer unless he found a job, and fast.

  He thought about applying for Universal Credit until he saw how long the waiting time was. He needed money now, not five weeks from now, so Danny began to look for work wherever it might be available. Supermarkets. Warehouses. Offices. Haulage companies. Factories. Takeaways. Newsagents. Fast food outlets. Clothes shops. Bakeries. Department stores. Cleaning companies. Waste disposal outfits. Butchers. Jewelers. Restaurants. Sandwich shops. Mobile phone shops. Pet shops. Cinemas. Bookshops. Hairdressers. Art galleries. Zoos. Cemeteries. Taxi companies. He even applied to work as a parking warden, a job that he and everybody else in the world found indefensible (including many parking wardens); but whether it was because people weren’t hiring, or because his CV could have fit on a Post-it note with plenty of room to spare, Danny couldn’t find a job anywhere.

  Another challenge he hadn’t foreseen was looking for work as a single parent. It wasn’t something he’d ever thought about before because, well, he’d never needed to, but now he realized just how difficult it was. Will was never alone when Liz was alive because she and Danny would coordinate their schedules in such a way as to ensure that one of them was always free to look after him, and Danny had since adjusted his hours so that he now left the house after Will had gone to school and was home in time to make dinner every day. He needed a job with similar hours because he couldn’t afford a regular babysitter (like most people in London) and he wasn’t willing to leave his son alone for long periods of time (as much as Will would have liked that). Several times he saw adverts looking for night security staff with immediate starts, and many service industry jobs he found—waitstaff, bar work, call centers—required little more than a pulse and a readiness to work nights. Danny was often more qualified for these positions than for many of the others he came across, but as much as he needed a job, he had no choice but to rule them all out.

  * * *

  Two weeks after getting fired, Danny was wandering around Islington when he noticed a small scrap of paper taped to the inside of a murky shop window. It was a handwritten advert for a full-time assistant, although Danny’s first thought when he peered through the window was that the place wasn’t a shop at all but a front for something dodgy like an organ farm or a meeting place for the Flat Earth Society. Staring back at him were various crooked and sun-bleached mannequins adorned in a bizarre array of costumes, from clown masks with serrated teeth and blood-splattered surgeons’ aprons to a black PVC bondage outfit complete with bright-orange ball gag. It was only when Danny stepped back and read the sign above the door that he realized he was standing outside a costume shop. Quickly smoothing his clothes with his palms and running his hands through his hair, he checked himself in the window and made his way inside.

  The shop smelled like a lost property office and looked like a thrift store, albeit one that received the bulk of its donations from dominatrices, circus performers, and Burning Man attendees. It was also eerily quiet, and as Danny made his way past the various racks that led towards the counter at the back of the shop, all he could hear were the creaks of the floorboards and the murmu
r of the street, which suddenly felt much farther away than it actually was.

  “Hello?” said Danny. He peered over the counter and into the open storeroom behind it. He waited for an answer, but not for very long because the place gave him the heebie-jeebies and all he wanted to do was leave, which was just what he was about to do when a pirate leapt up from behind the counter the moment his back was turned.

  “Ahoy there!” shouted the pirate.

  Danny screamed and spun around to find a man with an eye patch and a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. It wasn’t a stuffed toy that resembled a parrot but an actual stuffed parrot, and a badly stuffed one at that.

  “Sorry, matey,” said the man in a deep and gravelly voice that seemed at odds with his youthful face. “Didn’t mean to scare ya.”

  “Then why did you jump out like that!” yelled Danny.

  The man thought about this for a moment. “Okay, fine, I did mean to scare you, but it just gets so boring in here,” he said, his pirate accent giving way to a Bristolian twang. “You’re the first customer we’ve had all day. All week, actually.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Danny, kneading his heart.

  “Seriously, I think I would have gone mad by now if I didn’t have Barry to keep me company.”

  “Barry?”

  The man nodded at the parrot on his shoulder.

  “Right,” said Danny.

  “What can I do for you anyway?” said the man.

  “I’m looking for—”

  “No, wait, let me guess. I’m usually pretty good at this. Let’s see, it’s too late for Easter, it’s too early for Halloween, it’s definitely too early for Christmas, which means that you want a costume for… a tarts and vicars party!”

  “No, I’m—”

  “Cops and robbers? It’s cops and robbers, isn’t it?”

  “No—”

  “Murder mystery?”