Enchantment by Monica Dickens Page A

more like you queuing up to get your job.
    Zara, where are you? Zara would have rustled up the money from somewhere. Even when she was out of work and out of unemployment benefit, she always had enough for booze and drugs.
    Harold, then. H. V. Trotman? Now there was someone who might have a bit of cash to spare in a good cause. He had a house and a car, and he must get decent pay as Superhod, whatever he said about the brickies. Tim rehearsed how he could possibly ask. Would Harold be angry with Tim? They were friends in a way. ‘You’re all right,’ he had said, but would money destroy the friendship?
    When Tim could not make a decision, he would sometimes consult the oracle. You opened the English dictionary at random, shut your eyes and stabbed a pencil at it.
    Tim opened the dictionary somewhere under
h
, screwed up his eyes and let his pencil drop.
    â€˜Gimme a yes or no.’
    The word was ‘hamstring’. There you are – a direct sign from the oracle. Hamstringing would be in Harold’s repertoire for the royal family and other ill-favoured persons.
    He rang the garage. ‘I’m OK on the deposit,’ he told the man. The oracle cannot lie.
    â€˜You going to fetch it in?’
    â€˜I’ll put it in the post. Will you order the gearbox?’
    â€˜When we get the cash,’ the man said patiently.
    Tim rang Harold several times before he got an answer. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for two days,’ he said.
    â€˜Well, I’ve been here. Too wet to work.’
    â€˜Don’t you answer the phone, then?’
    â€˜Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.’
    â€˜I was wondering … well, I’ve not seen you for some time.’
    Harold said nothing.
    â€˜I see you’ve been on the rampage. Black Monk, I mean.’
    Heavy breathing showed that Harold was still there, at least.
    â€˜I gained a lot on the last grid, though. I was wondering – what about if I come round Sunday?’
    â€˜OK,’ Harold said, gravelly as an old gangster movie.
    Harold lived in an ancient market town gone high tech, at ‘Marbella’, Brentwood Close, a goodish walk from the bus station, on a new estate that ended in doomed green fields.
    â€˜Marbella’, a semi on the circle at the end of the close, had an apricot front door guarded by gnomes, and window boxes and flowered curtains. Only the gnomes looked like Harold. He must have a woman there.
    He did. As Tim went up the path, under the stares of two rude small boys in the garden on one side and a baby in a pram on the other, the apricot door opened, and an ochre-skinned woman came out in tight black jeans, with murderous sharp boots and hair fuzzed out like wood shavings.
    â€˜Hullo.’ Tim smiled.
    â€˜Hullo.’ She did not smile. Her mouth was painted on violet, in a heart shape.
    â€˜Harold in?’ Tim knew he was. The white Escort was there, with the troll on a string in the back window, but he had to say something.
    â€˜Who are you?’
    â€˜His – I’m a – like, a friend.’
    â€˜Help yourself,’ she said and went past him to the road, where she got into a red car parked behind Harold’s. The tight black legwear made her bottom stick out, round and high.
    Harold took him into a room full of heavy furniture upholstered in plaid velvet. Harold’s ashtray, almost as big as a toilet bowl, was on a stand by his chair.
    He did not offer any food or drink. ‘Never let anyone put a foot into your home without putting something into their stomachs,’ Tim’s mother always said. Plumbers and electricians always got a legs-under-the-table tea, whatever the time of day. But Harold did not have that kind of mother. His was on his hit list.
    While Tim struggled to find a path of small talk that could lead to money, Harold’s veined protruding eyes roved round the room, looking too big for their sockets. When Tim finally dragged