16. The Phone Rings

e phone rings

Despite their elation over Lizzie’s spectacularly generous offer of nancial help, Jimmy and Monica stil had the immediate problem of a screaming toddler and a screaming baby to deal with.

‘You’re rich, you’re poor, you’re rich again,’ Monica laughed, ‘but some things don’t change, eh? Keeps things in perspective, doesn’t it?’

‘at’s one way of putting it,’ Jimmy replied.

She drained her glass. ‘I’l take Lil ie up to bed. You try and get Cressie to sleep down here.’

And so Jimmy began his long and weary perambulation of the basement of their Notting Hil house. Pushing the buggy round the huge glass coffee table, past the vast at-screen towards the kitchen area, along the breakfast bar, around the polished granite water feature (no longer working), past the aquarium which was set in the wal to mirror the position of the equal y indented at-screen TV opposite, around the central replace with its stainless-steel hood and ue (as big as the roof of a shed) and back to the coffee table. It was a circuitous journey, particularly since Cressida’s buggy was of the large, chunky-wheeled variety, built more for mountain walks than kitchen perambulations. Also the number of toys scattered about the oor further impeded a smooth passage. Jodie used to pick those up, she and the three day staff.

e walk was fraught with tension for Jimmy as he desperately wanted to keep Cressida quiet so that Monica could grab an hour of sleep before Lil ie’s rst night feed. Just as he knew she would be upstairs wil ing Lil ie to go down so that when Jimmy did nal y get to bed he might manage a bit of rest and hence not be feeling dead when he faced his mountain of problems in the morning.

After a while Jimmy dispensed with the buggy, which wasn’t doing the trick at al , and picked Cressida up. He knew that the only way to keep her quiet was to carry on walking, holding her to him so that her head lay on his shoulder. If he did that and sang ‘Morningtown Ride’ to her over and over and

over again, then al would be wel . Cressida would not scream and eventual y she would fal asleep.

If Jimmy should deviate from those rules in any way whatsoever, the child would scream. Jimmy knew that as certainly as night fol ows day. He was not al owed to change arm. He was not al owed to stand stil , scratch his arse or stop singing, and above al , above al , he was not al owed to sit down.

No matter how gently he tried to do it and no matter how meticulously he maintained Cressida’s position relative to his chest, Cressie always knew when he was trying to sit down. Cressie knew if Jimmy was even thinking about sitting down. It was as if she had her own in-built altimeter that was programmed to go off if ever her distance from the oor fel below three feet.

Jimmy looked down at the little sleeping face. How beautiful she looked, that tiny person who exhausted him so. She was smiling now and reminding him so much of Monica (even though some people said Cressie looked like him, which Jimmy thought was just mad). He smiled back as he walked and whispered his song, now with a tiny spring in his step. One moment like that, one moment contemplating that perfect little face, was worth a thousand sleepless nights.

It helped of course that he could occasional y grab a swig of wine too, dipping in his stride as he passed the kitchen bench where he had opened another bottle, sweeping his glass up with the hand he used to steady Cressida’s head and chugging a swig between verse and chorus. Unconditional love and undying devotion were al very wel in keeping a man walking and singing through the stil watches of the night, but a drink or two didn’t do any harm either.

Jimmy would not be marking these extra units of booze on the list stuck to the fridge. It was his little secret, the only one he kept from his wife. She was breastfeeding, she had to watch her intake for fear of damaging Lil ie’s brain cel s, but Jimmy wasn’t. He could bash his liver for six and drink himself into a coma and Lil ie’s little brain would remain unaffected, and so, while maintaining the ction of solidarity with his wife’s enforced semi-discipline, he al owed himself many a sneaky swig when she wasn’t looking.

Besides, he was celebrating. Drinking to the rst glimmer of hope that had appeared on his horizon in a long time. True, it was not exactly a triumph to go two mil ion pounds into debt to a couple of your oldest friends. Not something to be proud of or something he would ever have dreamed of

considering even six months earlier. But these were unique times, capitalism’s uncharted waters, and the rules were changing day by day. Jimmy knew, he absolutely knew, that if he could just get through this period without the whole thing imploding, his assets would regain their value and al would be wel . Like mil ions of other guys across the world in early 2009, al he needed was a bridging loan, something which the banks were no longer prepared to offer. But Jimmy had friends, he had contacts. Why not use them? at was how it worked. It was how life had worked since the dawn of time. Family, friends, tribe, loyalty. at was what counted. A girl he knew from Sussex was going to help him out, that was al . He would have done the same for her, unquestionably.

Jimmy had always been generous with his cash. He had once given an entire day’s personal pro t to Comic Relief. A whole day. at was serious money.

Cressida was beginning to purr gently . . . Was she going down? Jimmy could scarcely dare to hope. It was only just past one. Gently he drew to a halt, and stil Cressida remained unmoved. He had to try the ultimate test: could he sit down? Hovering over a chair, he slowly bent his knees. No good! He’d tried to rush it, she’d only been half gone, her altimeter was stil taking readings.

Instantly the bomb went off, but before she could ramp up the volume Jimmy was moving again. Slickly, smoothly, without a pause or a jolt, he straightened his back and was off again, moving, singing, patting and cooing.

She might not be asleep yet but he had at least prevented her from screaming blue murder and waking Monica. at was what mattered.

en disaster struck. A huge, terrible, jarring noise ripped through the peace of the kitchen, so that the very sh in the wal looked up and took notice.

Jimmy almost dropped Cressida as the high-pitched voice tore at his eardrums and ripped into his brain:

‘London Bridge is fal ing down,

Fal ing down, fal ing down.

London Bridge is fal ing down,

My fair lady.’

It was that stuffed Pokémon toy. It had caught him many times in the past but not for several weeks. Now, however, consumed in thoughts about how best to distribute Lizzie and Robson’s mil ions to avoid the money getting sucked into paying off non-essential debts, Jimmy had strayed from his path a

fraction and fal en victim to one of the numerous electronic noise traps that littered their basement oor.

Since being forced to take a hand in the raising of his children Jimmy had learned that in the modern age no toy is silent, every single one emits endlessly repeated, mind-numbingly unforgettable, bal -crunchingly irritating tunes and jingles. And the big furry yel ow Pokémon was the worst because its song was so loud, so high and so stupidly speeded up.

Cressida started crying instantly, and moments later Jimmy could hear her baby sister reciprocating upstairs. Monica and Lil ie were two oors up, but when the Japanese created an irritating Pokémon toy they wanted the world to know. Inevitably, the next thing Jimmy heard was Monica. She had pushed the intercom button on their endishly complex internal phone system and her voice, metal ic and desperate, emanated from the conference speaker.

‘I had just half closed my eyes,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ Jimmy replied to the wal -mounted unit.

‘I was dreaming that everything was going to be al right.’

‘Everything is going to be al right.’

‘Good. ’Night.’

‘’Night.’

Cressida nal y fel asleep at 2.40am, after which (having sat with her for ve minutes to make absolutely sure) Jimmy gently took her upstairs and began the in nitely slow process of lowering her into her cot. Fading out his song and gently disengaging rst one hand and then the other before straightening up and slowly retreating as the last whispered chorus disappeared into silence. No Danger UXB technician in the Second World War ever approached an unexploded bomb with more care than Jimmy did the process of detaching himself from his sleeping daughter.

Lil ie for once wasn’t feeding but was sleeping peaceful y in her Moses basket while Monica snored gently under the duvet. Toby was asleep next door.

Incredibly, four out of ve members of his family were asleep at the same moment. Jimmy wondered whether this could be the rst time that had happened since Jodie. He almost felt like getting out the video camera.

e situation was so unusual that Jimmy thought about going through to the spare room to avoid any possibility of spoiling the peace. He often slept in the spare room, on those nights when Lil ie simply would not give up the boob and Monica was half demented with exhaustion and he had to go to the site in

the morning. But he didn’t like doing it. It made the evidence too clear that they were no longer a man and woman in the true and proper sense of the words, just two jaded careworkers who happened to share shifts. When he had been rich he had never once gone to the spare room, even when Mon had been feeding Toby and Cressida. ey had so much help both night and day that, tired though he was, he had always known he could sleep because Monica would in extremis express the milk and hand the baby over to the night nanny.

For Lil ie there were no such luxuries, which made Jimmy al the more determined to remain in his marital bed as often as possible. His disastrous career col apse had felt like castration enough without him giving up on sleeping in the same bed as his wife.

He decided to risk it and so undressed very slowly and in absolute silence, constantly vigilant for any electronic toys and beeping teddies that might be lurking underfoot. Approaching the bed, Jimmy gingerly lifted what was left of his side of the covers, debating in his mind whether Monica had left him enough to sleep under. Her habit of wrapping herself in 90 per cent of the duvet and then being extremely grumpy when Jimmy attempted to tug a little back was something that he had learned to live with. Of course Monica was convinced that she never had more than her fair share and if anything it was he who stole the duvet. It was an issue on which they could only agree to differ.

Determined not to disturb her, Jimmy decided that he could probably get by with what she had left him and so he lay down on the bed beside her and closed his eyes.

He had feared that it would be one of those nights on which he was too tired to sleep. When he would lie there, desperate, shivering under a half-covering of duvet, his eyelids twitching in a kind of hysterical half-wakefulness.

In this dizzying state his mind tormented him with the urgent necessity of getting to sleep because of the mountain of shit that was waiting for him in the morning. Nights when he knew that if he didn’t get to sleep he would be completely and terminal y un t to work the fol owing day, and equal y certain that it was only the knowledge that he needed to get to sleep that was keeping him awake.

On this night, however, Jimmy did not suffer this terrible condition.

Perhaps it was because for the rst night in so many awful nights he was hopeful. Hopeful of a solution to the maelstrom of circumstances that was sucking him and his family under. Perhaps it was because, al in al , he had

drunk more than a bottle of wine plus a little Scotch. Perhaps it was because, despite al the hel that he was going through, he stil had the love of his wife and children to sustain him and having al four of them sleeping peaceful y so close by l ed him with happiness. For whatever reason, on this particular night Jimmy slipped effortlessly into the arms of Morpheus before the clock radio on his bedside table had icked from 2.59 to 3.00.

At 3.15 the phone rang.

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