An Other Place Read online

  I hit the red button, which is very small and hard to locate in my ragged state. “You fucker!” I roar at the giggling Battles and advance on him menacingly, but I begin to laugh before I reach him and soon I’m on my knees, weeping happily. “You son of a bitch. I’m going to… going to… Oh, fuck it.”

  “What are you doing?” Hughie asks as I hit redial on my phone.

  “Ringing her back,” I say. “Going to put things straight.” She answers on the third ring. Hughie and Battles are laughing, so I hiss at them to shut the fuck up. “Mum?” I say seriously.

  “Newman?” she asks.

  “Yeah, it’s me. I’m sorry… it wasn’t… Battles took… Oh, hell.” I pretend to gnaw on the end of the phone, then put it to the side of my face again and say in my most businesslike tone, “Mother, please describe to me – in very careful detail – exactly what undergarments you’re wearing.”

  Behind me, Hughie and Battles explode.

  Much later. I’ve drunk and smoked myself sober. Everything’s clear again. I make a note on my phone to ring Mum – it’s too late to bother her now – and apologise. I don’t see my parents that often but I like to keep them sweet.

  Hughie and Battles are beginning to sober up too. We stare at the mess of a room, the empty cans, tequila stains, joint stubs, white stains.

  “Are you going to have to clean this up?” I ask.

  “Am I fuck,” Hughie replies. “The landlord can sweep it before the next tenants arrive. I pay enough not to have to worry about shit like that.”

  “This is horrible,” Battles moans. “I can count my fingers. Look — ten of them. I don’t want to be able to count my fingers. I want to rock ’n’ fucking roll!”

  “There are more cans in the fridge,” Hughie tells him. “A bottle of vodka in the freezer too, I think.”

  “No good,” Battles snarls. “I’m past that shit. What happened to the coke?”

  “Up our noses,” Hughie sighs.

  “All of it?” Battles says in disbelief.

  “We had company,” Hughie reminds him. “The ladies accounted for their fair share.”

  “What about…?” Battles starts rooting in his pockets, before producing a bag of dreamy white. “My emergency stash.”

  “You kept that quiet,” Hughie rumbles.

  “I had a feeling it’d be a long night,” Battles says, moving to the table to lay three lines.

  “I don’t know about this,” I mutter.

  “Got to keep the party going,” Hughie winks.

  “But it’s come to its natural end,” I complain. “I feel good now, exhausted but good. I’ve worked the earlier shit out of my system. If I go back to my hotel and grab some shuteye, I can catch up with the day and…”

  “I don’t have much,” Battles says. “It won’t go far. Just enough to set us up nicely for breakfast.”

  “We’re in the middle of Amsterdam,” I stall. “If that hits the spot, we’ll go out and buy more.”

  “Newman,” Hughie says steadily, “you have to learn to trust yourself.” He leans over, snorts a line through a rolled-up fifty, then passes it across. I should reject it but it’s been two years since our last blow-out and who knows how long it will be until our paths cross again, so even though I know it’s a bad idea, I roll my eyes, take the note and surrender to the fates.

  I’m so wasted, I feel like I’ve crawled out of the pages of a Hunter S. Thompson book. Of course we didn’t stop after Battles’ emergency supply. We went straight out to track down more. Coming on top of everything we consumed earlier, it sets my head spinning so fast that I vomit with vertigo. I flop about the apartment, blubbering, giggling, hallucinating. Hughie and Battles are in better shape – they could always go at it harder than me – but only marginally.

  An hour or two later, I’m not feeling quite so rough, and my mouth has started to work again. In fact my mouth beats my brain back to consciousness, and as I tune into the conversation, I find that I’m the one talking, letting off steam about how over-worked I am.

  “Nine months since my last break,” I growl. “And that was just a long weekend. I’m being exploited. When I get home, I’m going up to the… boss or his… PA, and I’ll… I’ll…”

  “You’ll do fuck all,” Hughie laughs, “because by then you’ll be sober and thinking straight.”

  “Will not,” I pout. “I’ll stay high and fly back on my own fucking wings. We got any more snow?”

  “All out again,” Battles says mournfully. “The snow is no-go, Joe. Let’s go get some more.”

  “Amen,” I pant and stagger for the door.

  “Hold up, hoss,” Hughie says, yanking me back. “We promised ourselves not to let this get out of hand.”

  “Too late for that,” I tell him.

  “Never too late,” Hughie says. “Besides, snow isn’t the answer. What’s needed now is…” His face lights up as he stumbles upon an idea. “That’s it. A holiday you crave, so a holiday you shall have. Come on.” He lurches to his feet and darts into his bedroom. Moments later he emerges, stuffing something into his jacket’s inside pocket, before leading us out into the dawn.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as we worm our way through the streets, the early morning air sobering me up the tiniest bit.

  “Looking for a taxi,” Hughie says.

  “And after that?” I ask.

  Hughie winks. “Wait and see, Cinderella, wait and see.”

  We eventually find a taxi and pile in. Hughie asks for the name of Battles’s hotel and mine, then tells the driver to take us to both, before settling back to sigh the sigh of a man relishing a moment of true inspiration. Battles and I ask him what he’s planning but he ignores us and stares out at the city as it slowly starts coming to life.

  Battles and I grow quiet, then silent, and while we’re en route to whichever of our hotels the driver is taking us to first, in the middle of trying to work out what Hughie might be up to, my eyelids flutter shut and sleep claims me for its own.

  We’re still in the taxi when I jolt back to life. “Where are we?” I ask, looking around blearily. “Did we get to the hotels yet?”

  “Yes,” Hughie says.

  “He let himself into our rooms,” Battles grumbles. “Wouldn’t say what he was after.”

  “How’d you get into mine?” I ask.

  “Your room key wasn’t hard to find,” Hughie laughs. “I packed your clothes and checked you out.”

  “You did what?” I gasp. “Why?”

  “You won’t be going back there,” Hughie says.

  “But the offices… the virus…” I sputter.

  “You can call in later,” he says. “Tell them you had to return home for a family emergency.”

  “Where are you taking me?” I wheeze, worried about where we’re heading, thoughts of white slavers filling my head. I’m on the point of asking the driver to stop, so I can make a break for freedom, when I spot a sign for Schiphol. “The airport!” I shout.

  Hughie claps slowly. “You’ve eagle eyes, Riplan. Should have known you’d rumble me sooner or later.”

  “What’s at the airport?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Planes, you fuckwit.” Hughie looks back at me and decides it’s time to share his big idea. “You need a holiday but we all know you won’t take one. You’ll go back to London after this gig, another virus will crop up, your boss will send you off somewhere else and you won’t complain because if you give him shit he’ll hand you your cards and bring in someone new. Right?”

  “Right,” I sigh.

  “Well, worry no more,” Hughie says. “You are going on holiday, and you’re going today.”

  I blink dumbly and frown. “Come again?”

  “We’re going to pack you off somewhere foreign,” Hughie chuckles. “I have your passport, and the bag with your clothes is in the boot. We’ll get to the airport, book you a ticket on the first flight out, you hop aboard, fall asleep, and when you wake up you’ll probably be ful
l of regrets, but you’ll be out of here and there’ll be nothing you can do about it. You’ll have skipped the job and missed your flight to London, so you’ll have no choice but to sit back and enjoy yourself, since the shit’s going to hit the fan no matter what.”

  I scratch an ear uncertainly. “I don’t know about this,” I mutter. “The holiday bit’s fine but leaving a job halfway through… I could get sacked for that.”

  “Bollocks,” Hughie snorts. “You’ll claim you had a nervous breakdown, say you were working too hard, that you snapped and took off, and next thing you knew, two weeks had passed and you’d worked up a tan and were on a plane back home and can’t remember a thing about it.”

  Hughie is glowing, falling more in love with his idea with every passing word.

  “Your boss won’t be able to say boo,” he assures me. “Sane men don’t take off and disappear for two weeks. It’d be different if you went missing for a day or two, but if you come back after a real holiday, not having rung him once while you were away, he’ll have to accept your word that you lost the run of yourself. He won’t be able to sack you, because if it went before a tribunal and they found out you broke down because you hadn’t been granted a proper break in two years, he’d be hung out to dry.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Battles says, which should be the sign to bail – if he approves of it, you can bet the idea’s a stinker – but in my dazed condition I let the warning slip by unnoticed.

  “Yeah,” I whisper, “it sounds sweet. Nobody will be able to say I planned it, because I didn’t. Just, suddenly, out of the blue…” I slap my knee and grin.

  “Yes?” Hughie asks, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes,” I echo.

  “Yes!” he whoops and bangs the roof of the taxi with his fists, which sets the driver off with a rapid batch of threatening Dutch curses.

  Hughie and Battles take charge of securing me a ticket. They sit me down in a dark corner, stick a pill between my lips to keep me quiet – I don’t dare ask what it is – and get busy on their phones. I doze off and next thing I know I’m being shaken awake and dragged to my feet.

  “C’mon,” Hughie yells, “we’ve got to hurry or you’ll miss your plane.”

  “Are you guys coming too?” I ask as they hustle me towards security and start fiddling with their belts ahead of having to remove them.

  “We booked cheapo flights for ourselves,” Hughie explains, “so we can come with you to your gate.”

  “We want the whole thing to be a shock,” Battles says, fully on board with the idea now. “We don’t want you to know where we’re sending you until you get off the plane.”

  “We’ll escort you to the gate,” Hughie says, “keep the destination a secret if we can, then leave you there and head back to our hotels.”

  “Are you sure?” I mumble. “This must be costing you a fortune.”

  “Too late to gripe about that,” Hughie laughs. “The tickets are non-refundable.”

  They scan our boarding passes from our phones, being careful not to let me see mine, then hurry me through fast-track and into the heart of the sprawling airport. I’ve no liquids in my bag – Hughie left them all at the hotel – so I want to stop and restock, but they tell me I can do that at the far side.

  “That’s given me a thought,” Hughie mutters and darts into a shop by himself. He comes back with ear plugs and an eye mask.

  “For the plane?” I scowl. “I’m obviously not flying first class then, or they’d have provided me with a set on board.”

  “We’re rich,” Battles sniffs, “but we’re cheapskates. You’re in economy.”

  “But we did get you a nice seat close to the front of the cabin and next to a window,” Hughie laughs. “Either way, these aren’t for the plane. We’ll use them to deafen and blind you when we get to the gate, to keep the surprise intact.”

  “You aren’t sending me somewhere horrible, are you?” I ask, slowing down. “Like the DRC or Afghanistan?”

  “Would we do something like that?” Hughie smiles.

  “Of course we fucking would,” Battles bellows. “But we haven’t.”

  “You’ll like this,” Hughie says. “We want you to enjoy yourself and come back refreshed, so that next time we don’t have to listen to you bitch all night about how hard you’re working.”

  I decide to trust them and start moving again. “The magical mystery tour,” I giggle, trying to get into the spirit of things.

  “That’s it,” Hughie hoots. “You’re a lucky fucker. I wish I had mates as great as us. Nobody’s ever bundled me off like this.”

  “I’ll bundle you off if you want,” Battles says earnestly.

  Hughie arcs an eyebrow. “Yeah, and sell me to the fucking slave trade. I bet I’d fetch a top price.”

  “You’re kidding,” Battles says. “I wouldn’t be able to give you away as a freebie with a herd of camels.”

  “Anyway,” Hughie says to me, giving Battles the cold shoulder, “I had a lovely fortnight in the Caribbean a couple of months ago, so I’m good on the holiday front, but if we meet in similar circumstances and I’m in the same condition as you were this time…” He gives my cheek a pinch. “Think of me then, eh?”

  They make me stick in the ear plugs and don the eye mask before we get to the gate, then sit with me until the flight’s called and almost everyone has boarded. When the last few stragglers are rocking up, they remove the plugs and mask and hand me my small travel bag.

  “I don’t have much in this,” I note. “I only planned to be away for a night or two.”

  “You can get some new gear on hols,” Hughie says. “There are plenty of shops where you’re going.”

  “Not a desert island, then?” I smile.

  Hughie winks and claps my back. Battles treats me to a great big man hug.

  “You two really are the best friends,” I say when I’m released. “Thanks for this. It’s extravagant and crazy and I love you both for it.”

  “Easy there, Newman,” Hughie tuts. “We don’t want any waterworks.”

  With that they about-face, leave me at the check-in desk and mosey off into the sunset, to wend their way back through the airport and security and out to the city beyond. I almost call after them, to ask if it will be a long flight, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  My phone and passport are scanned and handed back to me by a smiling flight attendant. “I hope you enjoy your flight with us today,” she titters.

  “It’s not the flight I’m concerned about,” I tell her, “but where I end up.”

  She looks at me oddly, so I force a smile and move on before she says anything to give the game away — having come this far, it would be a shame to spoil the surprise now. I join the line down the gangway – not too long, since most of my fellow passengers have already boarded – and nervously jiggle from foot to foot as I prepare for my flight into the unknown.

  TWO

  I’m worried that I’m behaving erratically – breathing heavily, twitching my head, hands shaking – and will be ejected from the plane by the crew, but none of the stewards pays me any attention, so I mustn’t be as out of it as I fear. I make my way to my seat, put my bag up overhead, smile apologetically at the woman and her daughter who have to get up to let me slide in by the window, then settle back and shut my eyes.

  I only meant to rest my eyes for a minute but the next thing I know, I’m staring down on a sea of white clouds. I’ve missed take-off and – a quick check of my watch – the first hour of the flight, which is probably no bad thing. I stretch my legs, rub my neck and groan.

  “You’re awake,” someone says and I glance over. It’s the girl, no more than ten or eleven years old. Her mother is smiling at her as she addresses me. “You were snoring.”

  “Sorry,” I yawn. “I had a long night.”

  “That’s not uncommon in Amsterdam,” the woman says. “I had a few long nights there myself before this one came along.” She nudges her daughter, who
laughs as if it’s a great joke. Give her another couple of years and she’ll be rolling her eyes at any sort of interaction like that.

  “Have they served the drinks?” I ask.

  “Yes,” the mother says.

  “I wanted to wake you,” the daughter pipes up, “but Mummy said to let you sleep.”

  “Mummies know best,” I grin, then press the button for the flight attendants.

  A stewardess is with me less than a minute later, smiling and warm. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I know I missed it,” I murmur, “but I was wondering if I could have a drink? My throat’s really dry and –”

  “Not a problem,” she interrupts. “What would you like?”

  “Black tea and a big glass of water?” I ask.

  “Coming right up,” she says and goes off to get the drinks. She has an American or Canadian accent, which makes me suspect I might be bound for the Americas, though I guess the flight could be headed in the opposite direction too.

  The stewardess returns with the tea and a bottle of water. I gulp from the bottle first, then sip the tea, sighing with contentment.

  “Tea’s a great soother,” the woman with the daughter says.

  “Yeah,” I grunt, hoping she’ll stop there. I’ve been polite to her and the girl but my head’s pounding and I don’t want to engage in a lengthy conversation.

  “You’re from London, aren’t you?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so,” she says brightly. “The accent. I love London, so full of history. The architecture’s amazing. And all the galleries. I used to…”

  She babbles on about her visits to London, how she loves the Tower and Spitalfields Market and walking along Southbank and good old Buck Palace. And isn’t Trafalgar Square wonderful? And the magical book shops in Charing Cross Road, although there are so few of them left these days. And…

  “Excuse me,” I say abruptly, lurching to my feet. “Call of nature.”

  “No problem,” she says and stands up in the aisle. “Here, Jennifer, let Mr…”