London Calling - James Craig [38]
‘Doing what?’ Carlyle asked again. Again, he didn’t really want to know.
‘Just some organising, a bit of man management.’ Dom grinned. ‘This and that.’
Carlyle knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘It’s a chance for you to get in at the beginning of something big. Something lucrative.’ Dom raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you say?’
Carlyle looked at Dom, at his cheeky smile and dilated pupils. He needed a haircut and a shave. The man was right about Trevor Miller, but Carlyle knew that he would have to sort out his own mess. Going into business with a drug dealer was not the way to deal with that situation.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, smiling as best he could. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Dom shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Let me know before you go back to work.’
Carlyle headed for the door. ‘Sure.’
‘OK … great.’ Smiling, Dom saw him off with a friendly wave, both of them knowing that Carlyle wouldn’t meet Dom’s deadline.
Walking down Percy Road, Carlyle quickly realised that he had developed a splitting headache. The world was spinning gently. He stopped and tried to breathe in deeply though his mouth, but all he got for his trouble was the taste of car fumes.
ELEVEN
Back in the Middle Ages, a barbican was a fortified gateway, the outer defence to a castle. They fell out of use in the fifteenth century, as military technology improved with the emergence of the mobile cannon. It made no particular sense therefore that the Barbican arts centre and housing estate was located in the middle of London, in an area bombed out during the Second World War. The City of London Corporation, the guys who ran the capital’s financial district, built the arts centre – opened by the Queen in 1982 – as the City’s gift to the nation. However, the 1980s was not a great decade for architecture and what they came up with was a concrete ziggurat, a terraced pyramid with a multi-level layout so complex that it required different coloured lines painted on the ground to help theatre goers and tourists from getting lost on its walkways. If ever a building had a personality bypass, this was it. To no one’s surprise, it was later voted London’s ugliest building.
None of this was of much interest to young Alice Carlyle, who knew exactly where she was going and didn’t need a yellow line to show her the way. Alice sucked greedily from a small carton of apple juice as she stood next to her father on a walkway thirty feet above the ground. Handing Carlyle the carton, she started happily munching on the last of the hoso-maki rolls from her tray of salmon nigiri that they had picked up from a sandwich shop. This was part of the usual breakfast-on-the-run routine, executed by either parent to Alice’s precise specifications for that particular day. The kindergarchy was alive and well in the Carlyle household, with Alice centre stage and Mum and Dad both fretting about being reduced to the role of indentured servants. As many parents knew, it was hard to break free from the dictatorship of the child, but at least they knew that it would pass soon enough.
Carlyle finished his skinny latte, which was, annoyingly, barely lukewarm despite him asking, as always, for it to be extra hot. Irritated by the failings of Bulgarian baristas in particular and the service economy in general, he leant over the balcony and looked down at the City of London School for Girls below. It was about two hundred and fifty yards away, on the far side of an ornamental pond half the size of a football pitch. ‘City’ as it was known, resembled a rather small 1970s comprehensive not unlike the one he had gone to himself, six miles, thirty years and several generations away. Why it had been plonked down in the middle of this rather drab piece of urban planning, Carlyle had no idea. But, watching the other kids make their way happily in, he was glad that it was.
Work-shift patterns and criminals willing, Carlyle managed to take his daughter to school maybe three or four times a month. He knew he should make the most of