The Amateurs by John Niven Read Free Book Online Page B

whammy: room service and Sky Sports. Magic.
    Such were the thoughts of carpet millionaire Findlay Masterson–a man who had never cooked a meal, read a book, relished an aspect of nature or knowingly enjoyed a piece of music in his life.
    Pauline looked at the green digital numbers below the TV screen. Plenty of time–he wasn’t expecting her back until eight. An image of Gary, patting the bed shyly that morning, came back to her. Guilt. When she thought about Gary’s nature–his grinning decency, his total lack of guile–guilt was stillcapable of running through her. Then she thought of the extent of his ambition; to fill a house slightly bigger than the one they had now with children. The past couple of years with Kiddiewinks–with the stumbling, drunken toddlers and the screaming primary-school kids–had brought something forcefully home to Pauline. She hated children. A part of her, she thought, still loved him. And the cliché was on the money because it really did feel like a part . A component. One that was becoming increasingly redundant in the new person Pauline was setting about becoming.
    She untangled herself from Masterson. In the shower she could hear the TV–football–and Masterson’s voice, him saying ‘cheese and ham’. Not his wife then. Pauline looked down and watched as warm soapy water containing tiny pearled globules of semen cascaded across her feet, between her toes and gurgled down the plughole: her adultery washed away and quickly gone, swallowed up as though it had never existed, like raindrops falling far out in the middle of the ocean.
     
    Around the same time as Pauline stepped out of the shower, the manager of the Glasgow Argyll Street branch of Oklahoma Dan’s Discount Golf World signed for his delivery. He checked the pallets of boxes–now being loaded by two employees onto a forklift truck (inevitably a Henderson’s forklift truck)–against his inventory of ordered items and slapped a hand down on a crate just as the warehousemen went to lift it. ‘Haud on,’ he said, ‘put those over there. The Ardgirvan shop is needing baws.’ Deep within the case as it was roughly hauled from the pallet the Spaxon rolled forward in its cardboard sleeve.
    It was a number 3.

8
    ‘S O AH SAID TAE HIM –“H O, CUNT, AH’LL BREAK YOUR fucking jaw if you speak tae me like that again. Ah don’t gie a fuck if you ur a fucking doctor.” Ah’m no kidding, Lee, ah wis raging so ah wis.’
    ‘Aye, he’s a fucking wank that Dr Murray,’ Lee replied with authority. Lee, a prolific and creative benefit cheat, was on intimate terms with most of the members of Ardgirvan’s medical profession. Lee suffered from facial tics, insomnia, ME and chronic fatigue syndrome. He endured bouts of migraine and disabling, non-specific fevers. He was also incontinent–a ruse that brought in an extra twenty-odd pounds a month in laundry payments.
    Lee and Sammy were in a dark corner of the Bam, swapping stories. Hard men, swapping hard stories: jaws that had been/should have been/were going to be tanned. Jobs that were going to be pulled. Who was doing what to whom in the world of Ardgirvan’s underclass. Lee cast an eye around the place as Sammy talked on about the latest threat to hisincapacity benefit. A couple of minor villains looked up from their pints and their tabloids and nodded respectfully to Lee, who returned the nods with a barely perceptible inclination of the head, enjoying feeling like a tuna or a barracuda amongst a shoal of sprats. Lee was afforded this measure of respect in the Bam because he was widely rumoured to have murdered the Kilwinning speed dealer Tits McGee. It was rare for someone to be tactless enough to bring the subject up but, when they did, Lee remained tight-lipped, perhaps, if it was some young bam, going as far as to say, ‘Shut yer fucking mooth. Are ye wantin’ tae get me the jile?’
    Maddeningly, he’d arrived at the bar just before Sammy, so convention had