“Who’s it come down from?” said Danny, looking around as if the culprit were hiding somewhere nearby. “That Russian wanker?”
“It don’t matter who,” said Alf. “The decision’s been made. Clear out your locker, they want it emptied ASAP. You still got two weeks’ holiday, so consider that your notice period.” Alf did his best to look at everything else in the room except Danny.
“Four years I’ve worked for you, Alf. Four fucking years. And have I ever, ever let you down in all that time? Even once?”
“It’s not up to me, Dan. I wish it were, but it ain’t. It’s this new management, mate, they’re ruthless. They’d replace their own grandmothers if they could find a cheaper model. It ain’t just you. Nobody’s safe, not even me.”
“You can’t do this,” said Danny. “I need this job. I really need this job.”
Alf sighed like a man who regretted every life choice that had led him to this moment.
“I’m sorry, Dan,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do.”
CHAPTER 7
Danny rammed his meager belongings into a grocery bag with such force that he punched a hole through the bottom of it. Cursing, he shook the bag from his arm and watched it float to the floor before kicking it and cursing again when he got his foot stuck in the hole. Yanking the tangle of plastic from his shoe and screwing it into a ball, he sat on one of the benches scattered around the locker room and buried his head in his hands. Ivan entered a few minutes later and took a seat beside him.
“Alf, he just tell me,” he said.
Danny nodded but said nothing.
“You know, I have cousin,” said Ivan. “He owes me favor. If you like, I call him now. He teach Alf lesson.” Ivan made a gun with his fingers and pretended to shoot himself in the head. “Boom. You know?”
“It’s not Alf’s fault,” said Danny, looking up, “but thanks for offering to murder him for me. That really means a lot.”
“How about job?” he said. “You need new job? I know many people.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Danny, “but, well, I need something… legitimate.”
“Legitimate?” said Ivan, frowning. “What is this word legitimate?”
“Precisely.”
Ivan nodded without really understanding.
“I’ll be okay, don’t worry. This isn’t the only site around, there’s plenty of stuff going up these days. There’s that new office in Brunswick, there’s that big thing going on in Farringdon, there’re loads of opportunities around town. The hard part won’t be finding a job. The hard part will be knowing which one to take.”
“Wait,” said Ivan as Danny turned to leave. He opened his locker and pulled out something shaped like a brick and wrapped in tinfoil. “Here,” he said, handing the parcel to Danny. “From Ivana.”
Ivan’s wife had baked him a walnut cake every few weeks since Liz had died. Danny secretly looked forward to those cakes more than anything else in his life (apart from the day that Will finally started talking again, if that day ever came), not just because they tasted incredible but because they reminded him, in his darkest moments, when Will was asleep and the flat was quiet except for the sound of his own unwanted thoughts, that even though he often felt completely alone in this world, he wasn’t. Not as long as there was cake in the kitchen.
“Smells amazing,” said Danny, lifting the parcel to his nose. “Thanks, Ivan. And please thank Ivana for me.”
“Ivan!” yelled Alf from somewhere outside.
“You better go,” said Danny.
Ivan nodded but didn’t move. “You will be okay?” he said.
“Of course, mate. Don’t worry. I’ll have a new job in no time. Just you wait.”
* * *
Aside from a holiday to Margate when he was seven (a trip he only remembered because his mother had left him on a teacup ride for close to an hour while she went to the pub) and a couple of trips to Brighton, once with Liz when they were teenagers and once with Will when they were parents, Danny had never left London in the twenty-eight years since he was born. He was therefore fairly confident that he knew his hometown better than most, but over the course of the following fortnight Danny saw more of the capital than he’d ever seen before. He passed through almost every borough and he traveled through every fare zone (including zone nine) and during that time he saw countless parts of the city that he hadn’t even known existed until then (including zone nine).
Not wanting to worry Will with the news of his recent sacking, and not wanting to suffer the embarrassment of having to explain it, Danny continued as normal, dressing in his tatty work scruffs every morning and making breakfast for them both before setting off for a long and fruitless day of job hunting once Will had gone to school.
He started out by visiting the larger construction outfits in central London, the ones that were shaping the city’s skyline with gherkins, tins of ham, and other buildings that were inexplicably designed to resemble things you’d usually find in a kitchen cupboard. Next he tried zone two, first hoping to find work on the various skyscrapers popping up in Canary Wharf and Docklands and then, when that failed, trying his luck in Greenwich, where several new housing developments were being built. The farther out from the center he journeyed, the more the opportunities dwindled as large-scale construction projects gave way to compact starter homes and domestic renovations.
He even offered his services to an elderly man who was covered in almost as much paint as the garage he was slapping it onto, but no matter how far he traveled or who he spoke to, the story was always the same. Nobody needed what Danny could offer because Danny couldn’t really offer anything. He wasn’t a plasterer or a carpenter. He wasn’t a roofer, or a tiler, or a bricklayer. He didn’t know how to weld, and although he knew the basics of wiring and pipes, he wasn’t a qualified sparky or plumber. Danny dug holes. He carried bricks. He mixed cement. He hammered nails. And he was good at all of those things. The only problem was that so were loads of other people. He had nothing to set him apart from the masses of unskilled laborers who were also looking for work, nothing that could give him even the slightest edge over anybody else in the labor market. He had no training aside from a basic one-day first aid course he’d done years ago and could no longer remember anything about, and he had no qualifications of any kind except for a school certificate in art (C-) and another one in geography (D). Over the years he’d seen countless adverts for classes and workshops and apprenticeship schemes in everything from joinery and window fitting to quantity surveying—courses that would have given him the requisite skills to improve his own career potential and prove to an employer that he was capable of more than just shoveling cement—but time and again he’d found some excuse for not putting his name down, whether it was because he was too busy, even when he wasn’t, or because he didn’t have the money, even when he did. He’d always known in the back of his mind that this day was coming, he just didn’t know that it would come so soon. Now here he suddenly was, in debt, out of work, and in serious danger of learning the hard way just what Mr. Dent planned to do with that claw hammer unless he found a job, and fast.