Final Demand: A Novel

Chapter One

They blamed it on global warming. It's a wake-up call, they said. It's a sign of what's to come. All that November it rained. Britain was flooded, great swathes of it. On the news, the quaint names of rivers became as familiar as those of the latest celebrities. Day after day gales blew, buffeting Natalie's car when she drove to work, rocking it at traffic lights. Perhaps that had something to do with it, with her restlessness, with a feeling of Is this all there is?

The future of the planet held no interest for her; she seldom read newspapers. The rain, however, affected her. It trapped her in the present tense, the clouds blocking any vista beyond, any possibilities. She was trapped at work, perspiring under the strip lights. Back home she felt unsettled yet torpid, sitting on the edge of the bath and then realizing, with a jolt, that an hour had passed.

Something should be happening. The next big thing in her life should be happening but though time was speeding up, the days whisking past, a breathlessness to them now, Natalie's life remained doggedly the same. She was thirty-two. When she paused to consider this, the accumulation of years startled her. She found it hard to apply thirty-two to herself. Until recently she had been carried heedlessly in the current but now she found herself stilled in the bathroom, gazing at the fogged-up mirror, thinking: what next?

She rubbed herself dry whilst Kieran sat in the next room, channel-hopping. He should be a part of the what next? but when she went into the lounge there he sprawled, in a fug of smoke, and words failed her. They had lived together for three years. She adored him. She adored the way his finger traced her skin, under her dressing gown, with his eyes still fixed on the screen. She adored his fine profile, his mouth twitching as he smiled. His hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was tied with a band he had nicked from her bag.

Words failed her because he seemed content, and until recently, so had she. This new desire to shunt things forward made her shy with him. It revealed her to be like the girls at work, like large plain Stacey who had the hots for Derek in Dispatch and who dreamed of marriage and babies, doodling his surname on her jotter, MRS STACEY WINDSOR . . . MRS S. WINDSOR . . . Natalie pitied this; the naked need seemed humiliating. And then the desire would grip her, so strongly it stopped her breath.

She had no illusions about Kieran. He was a flirt. He sponged off her and stayed out late, supposedly with his mates. He worked when the mood took him, as a motorbike courier, roaring round Leeds on his Kawasaki 500 and chatting up receptionists. One day he might roar off and never return. She had a shameful desire to keep him to herself. He was like a deer, captured and kept in domesticity; one day he would grow restless and make a break for the wild.

This was how she felt, those dark autumn weeks with their turbulent, un-British storms. It's a warning, they said.

The next thing should be happening. And it did, but not the thing she had imagined.

It was a Saturday night, and they went down to the Club Danube in Chapel Street. O-Zone were playing. They were her favourite band and she had been a fan for years, long before their biggest hits ('Dog Days', 'Give It To me'). She felt a proprietorial tenderness towards them, having had a one-night stand, back in 1995, with their lead singer Damon. Travelling down to London to hear them play, she had ended up in Room 316 of the Kensington Hilton (curling hospitality sandwiches, two lines of coke). When she had left, flushed and rumpled, in the small hours, Damon had given her a publicity photo with her name spelt 'Natlie' but she didn't mind. The guy might be dyslexic.

So now they were dancing, jammed up front near the stage, and Natalie was trying to catch the singer's eye whilst also watching Kieran, who was pressed up behind her friend Farida, his arms waving like hers and then dropping down around her shoulders when he shouted something in her ear and made her laugh.

Natalie edged closer. 'I wouldn't bother,' she yelled. 'Farida's getting married next month.'

'Anyone I know?' he asked.

'She hardly knows him herself. She's only met him twice.'

'You kidding?'

Farida nodded. Though Natalie was fond of her - they worked side by side - this arranged marriage revealed Farida as foreign, an Indian girl with her future an Indian one. Soon Natalie would lose her; Farida would step into the next room of her life and close the door. Maureen, too, who worked in the same office: she was leaving to have a baby and Sioban was moving to Scarborough to be near her boyfriend, a married security guard at the Seaspray Caravan Park. Natalie's life felt flimsy, no foundation to it. Up on stage Damon's eye passed over her without a flicker; it was as if she had never crept from his hotel room, her knickers damp with all those unborn songs. In January this very building was to be demolished for redevelopment.

And when they stumbled out into the damp night, ears ringing from the music, she found that somebody had smashed the window of her car and stolen the radio.

Kieran picked up a cassette. 'Seems they didn't fancy your Best of Moby.' He kicked the glass away. 'Should get an alarm fitted.'

'Know how much they cost?'

'Yeah, but-'

'Why don't you pay half then?'

'Listen, babe, it's your car.'

She glared at him. 'Oh, so you'll be wanting to walk home then.'

This had happened before, several times. The neighbourhood where they lived had the highest crime rate in Leeds. Natalie, however, was still upset. She loved her car. It was a silver Honda Civic with sunroof and - before it was ripped out - quadrophonic sound system. Humans were not to be trusted - she had learnt this at an early age - but her car could be relied upon to remain where she had left it, awaiting her return like the most faithful of lovers. When she pressed her foot down, it surged in response. When she changed up to fifth, it sighed like somebody settling back in an armchair. She cared for it too - she, who had cared for little in her life - probing its interior with her dipstick, daintily wiping her fingers with a moistened towelette. Each day it released her from work, from the numbing repetition, swallowing the motorway under its wheels as she sped across the moors, the huddled sheep caught in the headlights as she swung left towards Leeds (South).

And now it had been violated. On Monday morning, when she drove to work, Natalie seethed. The wind blew through the empty window, freezing her shoulder. What turned a human being into a criminal? The moment they smashed the glass? Or did they consider themselves a normal person who occasionally took advantage of other people's stupidity or inattention? Driving to work, that fateful Monday morning, crime was on her mind. She parked and slammed the door shut, hearing the fragments of glass settle into the lining.

Her insurance had expired. She had discovered this the night before, whilst rummaging through the unpaid bills wedged behind the toaster. She would have to find a garage and spend her precious Saturday getting it fixed. This nameless window-smasher, did he consider the time he had stolen from her life, apart from the money? And her O-Zone compilation tape was missing.

So it was hardly surprising that Natalie was in a mutinous mood that morning. It was a dank, foggy day. NuLine Telecommunications, where she worked, was a large office building stuck in the middle of an industrial estate, out on the moors, miles from anywhere. Around it loomed warehouses, Midas Wholesale, K.M.M. Refrigerated Meats. Today they were shrouded in mist. There seemed no reason for the existence of these buildings in this particular place; like Farida's arranged marriage, it was just a matter of chance. 'This way's as good as any,' she said. A random choice, a pin on the map.

Accounts was open-plan. Natalie sat down at her desk. They were mostly women who worked there; they were blurs to each other through the frosted partitions. These were stuck with holiday postcards - beaches at dawn, Seattle at sunset, anywhere but here - and blurred Polaroids of Salsa Nite at Club X-Press. Photos of boyfriends and fiancés too. Soon these girls would disappear into other lives, for nobody stayed at NT for long.

For eight hours a day Natalie's life was suspended. Only her hands were busy, and a small portion of her brain, the part that ticked over like a car engine, for she was good at sums and could do them in her sleep. There were nine of them sitting there, lost in their daydreams. Cheques arrived, customers' cheques, payments for phone bills. They tapped them into their computers, registering them as paid. In the next office, Processing, the money was transferred from the customers accounts to the one belonging to NuLine Telecommunications plc, a rapidly expanding company that prided itself on being, in the dizzy world of communications, the most aggressive competitor to BT. Natalie didn't give a fuck. She never stayed anywhere long. She was restless, waiting for the next thing, whatever that would be.

And the next thing arrived at ten twenty that morning. She slit open the envelope and pulled it out. It was just a cheque, like all the others.

The sum startled her for a moment, it looked so familiar. Then she realized.

Leaning back in her chair, so she could see Farida, she held out the cheque. 'Five hundred and fifty pounds,' she said. 'That's what a car alarm costs. Wouldn't life be simple if I could just pay this into my account?'

Farida took the cheque and looked at it. 'Will they never learn?'

'What do you mean?'

'They've written it out to N.T., the wallies. They should've written the whole name, NuLine Telecommunications, otherwise it could get tampered with.' Her voice went syrupy. 'Bashir told me, the first time we met. He knows, being an accountant.'

At the time this meant nothing to Natalie. She di...