Utterly Monkey. Nick Laird

gap-toothed grin of a village idiot. You can fix that sort of stuff now, Janice thought, wiping her tongue like a polishing rag over the neat ornaments of her own front teeth.

      There were pumice stones and scalpels and bunion and corn plasters for her mother’s gnarled feet (the legacy of twenty years standing behind the counter in Marshall’s bakery). And there was Brewster’s penknife with the tweezers that saw heavy usage. The hair on Malandra’s body could best be described as adventurous. Her eyebrows, left alone as they had been for approximately fifteen years, had sent out expeditions to explore the rest of her face. The small of her back had fleeced itself. She was pretty, Janice knew, and unlike her was dark, which was really why the flecks of downy, shadowy hair on her face used to be noticeable. From when she was twelve, if she ever pissed any of them off, they’d called her Elvis, what with her sideburns and all. Which was why there were four half-empty tubes of Immac in the cabinet, and the tweezers were kept busy applauding in the natural light by the bathroom window.

      Janice banged the cabinet door and pulled out the blade of the knife with her thumbnail. She wedged it in between the panel and the side of the bath. The panel shifted slightly ajar. She turned on both bath taps: they squealed as she twisted their heads, and dripped in some gloopy orange bubble foam. The panel was a sheet of plywood, painted white, and the green deposit box was still behind it. She pulled it out from its hiding place. It was lighter than she remembered. She put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it, the box and the lid burning her bare thighs with cold. The cash was in rolls packed in little plastic bank bags. They reminded her of messages in bottles somehow. She hadn’t time to count it or estimate how much it was. She quickly took the bags out and pushed some into her trainers, and then pushed her socks in after them. The rest she stuffed into her toilet bag. She stood up then, and touched, gently, as if in remembrance, the cool damp hair between her legs. She would miss him, she thought, and his lovely big cock. Maybe she would try and meet him somewhere. Fuck Budgie. It had been a long time since she’d felt anything but hate for him. Fuck Greer and Chicken and their vicious mouths and fists and friends. Fuck the lot of them. Except Brewster. He was all right, just a bit pathetic. He floated around like a ghost, shocked to be noticed at all. She went to the toilet, wiped, stood and yanked the chain. It was an old-fashioned toilet with the cistern up high on the wall. It glugged and then whimpered, filling up. She stepped into the bath and hunkered. It was too hot to lie down in. She could hear the bubbles in the foam popping softly, audible as an opened can of Coke. She lowered her ass into the water and raised herself again. She cupped some water and let it drizzle down over her knees, onto her thighs, into the nest of hair between her legs. She sat down properly and then, with the dragged, reverberant sound of skin on wet plastic, slipped down into the bath to submerge herself completely. Pinching her nose closed, she felt the water funnel into her ears. She could hear the sounds of the house much clearer here: the television spilling canned laughter in the living room, and the steam whistle of the kettle on the gas ring, and then her mother’s chair scrape back on the lino tiles as she got up in her sheepskin slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to warm the teapot. I live underwater, she thought suddenly, and pushed her feet against the bottom of the bath to surface for air and shampoo.

      Geordie then had a bagful of cash. Janice had put the money in a white plastic bag and he’d placed it in the front pocket of the rucksack he’d nicked from his little sister Grace. As soon as he’d got on the ferry (until then he was still expecting Budgie to appear suddenly, behind some window, tapping softly as rain) he’d nipped into one of the disabled toilets, and sat on the floor and totalled the cash. £49,250. Not bad at all.

      Sitting on Danny’s sofa, Geordie counted it again, dealing the notes into piles like playing cards. £49,300. He recounted it. £49,450. Fuck it, he thought, I’ve a rough idea. He lifted two of the Bank of England fifty pound notes, pushed them into his left trainer and placed the rest back into the plastic bags. He started to look around Danny’s place with replenished interest. Where the hell could he hide it? He wandered through the flat like a prospective buyer, looking up at the plaster cornices and down at the skirting boards. He tapped walls. He opened cupboards and drawers. He peeled back the carpet, like sunburnt skin, from a corner of the living room. The pale epidermis of unpolished floorboards. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He sat down again, heavily, on the sofa. And then it was obvious. He’d hide it where Budgie had hidden it. Geordie lifted a small fork from the cutlery drawer, which was still lolling out like a tongue, and carried the bag into the bathroom.

      The bath must once have been new and white. And that must have been some time ago. It now had a discoloured ring around it, close to the top, like a high tidemark and the base of it was grained by smaller rings and various stains, all of them bad. The panel was plastic and when Geordie inserted the handle of the fork, it scraped open almost immediately. Behind the panel was a paper bag filled with nails, a magazine from July 1995 called Smash Hits (featuring Take That and their magnificent teeth) and an empty bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. He pushed the plastic bag right to the back, past the roughened underside of the bath.

      Geordie, to the tune of ‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’, was softly singing Fifty thousand pounds, fifty thousand pounds, hey-ho ma-dearie-oh, fifty thousand pounds. Janice was an idiot. She reckoned that kind of money was Budgie’s, that it was the proceeds of one scam or another: bleaching red diesel to white, flogging counterfeit DVDs or videos to the stallholders up at Nutts Corner, offering ‘protection’ to the chippies and offies that lined the main street. That kind of folding didn’t come in from that. Not, leastways, all at once. Fitting the panel back into its gap, Geordie started to get a little unnerved. Maybe he was the idiot. Everyone’d heard the rumours. Something was starting up or going down. Something was being unleashed. Maybe he had Something’s money.

      Geordie showered, dressed himself in yesterday’s garb, and set off towards Dalston. Danny’s flat was in Stoke Newington, according to Albert, Olivia and his postcode, but Danny himself admitted Dalston was spiritually, if not technically, its home. He had given Geordie brief instructions last night: turn right out the house, then right again, then buy some food for dinner.

      Stoke Newington High Street runs from the white liberal enclave of Church Street (homeopathic healers, designer clothes shops, independent bookstores) through the Turkish community (men’s clubs with no discernible purpose, kebab shops) to the African and Afro-Caribbean end (hair shops, furniture stores selling coffee tables fashioned from ceramic tigers). Geordie began to walk down it. He passed a mobile phone shop and remembered he’d not brought his phone out. Stupid of him. He’d not seen so many different shades of skin before. Geordie, Danny had learned last night in the pub, had never tried garlic or pasta, unless tinned spaghetti is pasta. Neither had he drank wine outside a church or eaten an aubergine, a courgette, or a sweet potato. Geordie felt himself in a new position: the outsider. He felt white. He couldn’t stop looking at the black people he saw. Their skin looked polished. They were beautiful. In Ridley Road market he thought he was about to get his head kicked in for staring. He was looking at a broad-shouldered young black man wearing a brown leather jacket and a gold-buttoned white shirt with a Nehru collar.

      ‘Wadchu looking at liddle man?’ Geordie realized he was talking to him. The man was repeatedly tilting his head back, as if brandishing his chin like a weapon.

      ‘Nothing,’ Geordie mumbled, shaking his head, scurrying, suddenly animal.

      He came to a butchers, entitled Halal Meat, on the corner of the market. It was one long glass counter open to the street. Bald dead chickens clustered upside down along the back wall. Three men, slick and confident as bartenders, swayed between each other and served the docile queue. They wore white coats smeared with blood. They made Geordie think of a war movie he’d seen once in which sleepless doctors tended to the wounded. He inched to the front.

      ‘Yes? Help you?’ said Omar Sharif’s plumper little brother.

      ‘Can I have a pound of bacon and four chicken breasts please?’

      The moustache behind the counter leant right across and tapped his cleaver on the glass: Are you taking the piss my friend?’ He rolled the ‘r’ of ‘friend’ and toned the phrase as Goldfinger did to James Bond. Geordie, angry, shook his head and then softened his face and shook his