The car I am sitting in this morning cost more than the house I was born in. More than the whole street, to be honest, when I think about it — the whole row of damp brick boxes where I and half a hundred other brats were crammed together like sardines in the tin my father sold off the back of a lorry. The car smells of leather and of money, and on the number plate at the back there are three letters and two numbers that cost me a fortune and that any sensible man would laugh at.
I cannot read them.
Well. That is not quite true, and I do not want to have started lying on the very first day, or you will believe nothing I tell you later, and there is a fair bit coming that you will have to believe. I know what it says, because I chose it myself and because I have carried it about for thirty years like an old tattoo. But if you held a strange plate in front of me, any old one, and said, read that out, Dave — I would stand there like an ox at a new gate and tell you I had forgotten my glasses. I forget my glasses often. I have no glasses. That is one of a hundred little tricks, and the cheapest, and I will come to the dearer ones.
Up front sits Gerald, driving. Gerald has driven me for eleven years, and Gerald knows everything, and Gerald says nothing, which is why Gerald is a made man and will stay one as long as I draw breath. On the seat beside me lies a leather folder, and in the folder lies a contract, and the contract is the reason we are crawling down through the drizzle of Porthaven at seven in the morning, down to the harbour, where the water on this grey morning looks like molten lead.
»Read it to me, Margaret,« I say.
Margaret sits on the folding seat opposite me, facing backwards, which she hates because it turns her stomach, but she never says so, because I pay her not to have her stomach turned. Margaret is my — well, what is Margaret. Her card says Executive Assistant to the Chairman, and she thought that up herself, and it sounds good, and I let her have it. In truth Margaret is my eyes. She has read the world to me for twenty-two years, and she does it so offhandedly, so matter-of-factly, that anyone watching us thinks old Hatcher is merely too lazy or too important to read for himself. Big man, has it read to him. Like a Roman emperor.
That is exactly how it is meant to look. I have worked a whole life so that it would look exactly like that.
Margaret opens the folder, sets her reading glasses on the tip of her nose — she has a pair, a real one — and begins in that calm, dry voice that makes the figures as familiar to me as old friends. She reads me the clauses. She reads me the sums. She reads me what happens if the other side does not deliver, and what happens if we do not pay, and at three places she makes a tiny pause, and at exactly those three places I know something is rotten before she says a word about it. That is the trick, you see. I do not listen to the words. I listen to the pauses.
»The clause on page four,« I say. »Read that one again.«
She reads it again. It is about a deadline. Fourteen days, it says, but somewhere else it says thirty, and nobody but me seems to think that is a problem, when it is the whole deal. Whoever controls the deadline controls the deal. I did not learn that at school. At school I learned that I was stupid. This I learned on the market, at fifteen, a case of lighters slung in front of my belly, when a man named Tucker wanted to buy a whole load off me for half, and I could not do the sums, not on paper anyway, but I could do his face, and his face told me he would pay double.
»Call Mickey,« I say. »Tell him fourteen and thirty, page four. He will know.«
Mickey always knows. Mickey has known for sixty years, and I will come to Mickey at length, for without Mickey there would be no car and no plate and no empire they credit me with, and on some days — not this one, but some — I wonder which of us it really belongs to.
Margaret flips open the telephone and dials, and while she dials I look out of the window, and that is my mistake, because out of the window you can see Porthaven, and Porthaven is a time machine.
We drive down the coast road, and to the right lies the sea, grey and ill-tempered as it always is at this time of year, and to the left the houses slide past. Up on the cliff the new ones, the ones with the double garages and the conservatories, where people live who belong to me without knowing it — who shop in my stores, their garden furniture and their picture frames and their three-piece towel sets, all from me, all cheap, all at thirty per cent margin they never see, because thirty per cent of cheap still looks cheap. That is the whole secret of my wealth, and I will give it to you free on the first page: people think they are getting a bargain, and they really are, and I still make money. Both win. That is how a deal should be. Anything else is theft, and I know a thing or two about theft as well, but that comes later.
And then, further down, where the road drops to the harbour, comes the old town. There the light changes. It is fancy, I know, the light does not change, it is the same wet grey morning everywhere — but for me it always goes a shade darker down there, a shade older, and through the shut window and through the leather and through seventy-five years I can smell the coal smoke and the fish and the damp washing that never properly dried, because the sea would not let it.
Down there they still stand, the terraced houses. Done up now, made pretty, with coloured doors, and rich young people from London pay a fortune to live in the holes the rest of us wanted out of as fast as our legs would carry us. It is a joke, when you think about it. They pay for the view. We paid for the view, every day, with all we had, and we did not call it the view. We called it the estate, and we said it quietly, the way you say the name of an illness quietly.
In one of those houses, fourth from the left, with the door that is painted turquoise today and back then was the colour of nothing, because colour cost money — in that house I was born. In February. It snowed, they say, which on that coast is so rare it passed for an omen, and my mother, who was called Eleanor and whom I shall lose again the moment I truly begin to tell this, is said to have said: He will be something one day. Look at him. He will be something one day.
She was right. She simply did not live to see it, and that is the thing about being right — it rarely does you any good, and to the ones it concerns it always comes too late.
»Mickey is on the line,« says Margaret, and holds out the telephone.
I take it. Mickey’s voice, gone thin over the years, thin as paper, but still with that laugh underneath it that never quite goes away, not even now, when we both know how little time a laugh like that has left.
»Fourteen and thirty,« says Mickey, instead of a greeting. »You saw it.«
»I heard it,« I say. »Margaret made a pause.«
»You and your pauses.« He coughs, and I hear that the cough is worse than last week, and I say nothing, because we do not talk about the cough, that is one of the things we do not talk about, and there have got to be many of them over the years. »It is deliberate, Dave. They wrote the deadline twice on purpose. Sign the short one and they will have you by the neck come February. Let me talk to them.«
»Talk to them.«
»Do not sign anything today.«
»I never sign anything,« I say, and that is my oldest joke, and Mickey laughs, though he has known it for sixty years, and then he coughs again, and then he hangs up, because Mickey never says goodbye. Never has. As though goodbye were a word you must save up for the one time you really need it.
I give Margaret the telephone back. We are nearly down at the harbour. Gerald steers the car onto the car park in front of the harbour office, where the people are already waiting who want to sell me something, and they see the car come and straighten their ties, and one of them, the youngest, with the expensive coat and the nervous face, looks at the number plate.
I see it through the tinted glass. I see him read the letters, and I see the corner of his mouth twitch, that tiny twitch people make when they see the plate for the first time and do not know whether they are allowed to laugh.
DE11 BOY.
That is how it reads, if you can read. Devil Boy, it is meant to say, or Eleven Boy, or simply The Boy with a number in the middle, depending how much imagination a man has. They have called me that since I was fifteen. The Boy. Back then it was meant as mockery, the boy still wet behind the ears who plants himself on the market as though he had any business there. And then, at some point, it was no longer mockery. Then it was a name people went quiet in front of. And I had it bolted to the back of the car, the daft plate that cost thirty-five thousand pounds, because — well, why, really.
Because I can. That is the honest answer, and the dullest.
And because a boy who owned his first pair of pants at twelve stays, somewhere deep down, a boy his whole life who must prove he is no longer a boy. That is the dishonest answer, the truer of the two, and I do not give it gladly, least of all to the men in the expensive coats now walking towards my car with their outstretched hands and their rehearsed sentences.
Gerald cuts the engine.
»Shall I come?« asks Margaret, gathering up the folder with the contract I cannot read and will nonetheless understand, in a moment, better than any lawyer in the room.
»You come,« I say. »You read. I talk.«
She nods. That is how we always do it. That is how we have done it for twenty-two years. She reads, I talk, and at the end of the day I have bought what I meant to buy, at the price I meant to pay, and not one of the men in the coats will ever dream that the man who has just had the skin off their backs has never in his life read a single book from front to back.
Not one. Seventy-six years, a fortune you could not spend if you had the hours for it, houses in three countries, a son, a wife, a friend — and not a single book.
I reach for the door handle, and for a moment, just one, I see my face mirrored in the tinted glass. An old man in a good coat with tired eyes. And behind it, through the glass, the fourth house from the left with the turquoise door, high up at the other end of town, where it all began.
At twelve I owned my first pair of pants.
But let me start at the beginning.