Sweet Talking Money Read online

  Bryn ran through the symptoms: brain-fog, listlessness, blurred speech, clumsiness.

  ‘His doctor calls that depression?’

  ‘His doctor doesn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Honestly. The way these guys hand out pills … If in doubt, your dad shouldn’t take them.’

  ‘He doesn’t. He crunched them up and mixed them in with the cow feed to see if it perked them up.’

  Cameron laughed. ‘Did it?’

  ‘Made ’em fart, apparently, though they fart like Trojans anyway.’ Bryn sighed again. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Cameron, is there? I know this is outside your area, but I’d love it if you could give us a second opinion.’

  ‘It really isn’t my specialty.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sure, if you want, I’d be happy to see him. Bring him into the clinic, I’ll check him out.’

  ‘This is going to sound crazy, but is there anything you can do without seeing him?’

  ‘A physical exam can be real helpful, but … I guess you could set up a phone consultation.’

  ‘He’s not great with the phone.’

  ‘You want me to treat someone who I haven’t seen and aren’t allowed to speak to? Sure. I also resurrect the dead.’

  ‘He won’t come to London, Cameron. The only time he’s been was for my wedding, and then only because my mother forced him. He’d never come to see a doctor.’

  It was true. The day before his wedding, Bryn had taken his dad sightseeing to Piccadilly Circus. Mervyn Hughes, then in his early fifties, had stood there, mouth open, transfixed. ‘By damn, Bryn, by damn,’ he said. Searching for a comparison huge enough, he added, ‘It’s like Hereford on a market day.’ That once had been enough. He still spoke of it most times Bryn visited, but not even the biggest sheep market in the world would have tempted him back.

  ‘OK, so bring me blood.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Bring me blood, four tubes, stool and urine too. I’ll run a full chemistry panel, see what I find.’

  ‘Thanks, Cameron. You’re a total star.’

  Bryn trailed off into anxious silence, thinking about his dad and the fate of the clinic. If the clinic failed and his dad got worse, then Bryn could always make his mum happy by returning home and managing the farm. Bloody hell, he might even go into business with Dai, coming in as the junior partner. He finished his coffee, terrible though it was. After a silence, Meg and Cameron began to talk about manhunts and makeovers.

  ‘Oh, Bryn, that reminds me. Can you go and take a walk outside?’

  ‘Take a walk? It’s pouring.’

  ‘Just take a walk. That’s why they invented coats.’

  Pushing him out into the rain, Meg turned back to Cameron.

  ‘I’ve had a brainwave. Look what I’ve got. Warpaint, the real McCoy,’ She pushed a bottle of hair-dye along the greasy counter to Cameron. ‘Blondes have more fun.’

  Cameron’s face transformed like a mountainside on a changeable day as she considered the bottle. First, puzzlement. Then, a momentary leap back into the past: worried and defensive. But then, even before Meg had opened her mouth to argue, her new confidence had stormed back to take control and she picked up the bottle, ready to consider it squarely, work out what she wanted.

  ‘Hair-dye, huh?’

  ‘It’ll really suit you, and this is your shade.’

  ‘I gotta tell you Meg, I’ve never had a problem with the colour of my hair.’

  ‘To be fair, love, you never had a problem with anything, so long as it meant people didn’t look at you.’

  Cameron rolled the packet round in her fingers, intrigued by the idea. ‘There’s a lot of bad stuff in these things.’

  ‘You don’t have to drink it.’

  ‘No, it’s the transdermal absorption –’

  ‘English, remember. No hablo medico.’

  ‘It’s absorbed through the skin, Meg. It’s a serious carcinogen.’

  Meg turned to the Iranian at the counter.

  ‘S’cuse me. Can I ask you a question? Do you think my friend here would look better as a blonde, or should she stay as she is?’

  ‘Your friend? How she look?’ One of the Iranian’s two friends spoke to him quickly in a low mutter. He nodded his comprehension. ‘Is a very beautiful lady. She no need to put on top.’ He mimed the action of putting hair-dye on.

  Meg, disappointed, was turning away when Cameron butted in. ‘But Princess Diana, she was blonde, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Iranian. ‘Blonde is beautiful too. Princess Diana, she blonde.’

  Cameron turned to Meg with an air of triumph, as though it was she who had been arguing in favour of the dye. ‘Well, then,’ she said, and dropped the packet into her pocket.

  Just then, Bryn tumbled in, sopping wet. ‘It’s absolutely chucking it down. Newspaper bloke says it’s still another fifty minutes. Some hold-up. Don’t know why.’

  The conversation rolled on to other subjects. Bryn spoke about Cecily. He and she were only a few months from being formally divorced now, but her lawyers were getting shrill about the overdue return of her furniture and paintings.

  ‘So return it,’ said Cameron. ‘It’s hers.’

  ‘Not any more it isn’t. I’ve flogged it off. I had to, to get the clinic funded.’

  Cameron ignored him. ‘When you do return it, careful who you use. When Kati had stuff sent over here, the shippers lost a couple of trunkloads in a fire. Happens surprisingly often, so I’ve heard. You ought to think about it.’

  More coffees, another cup of green tea, another delay in the arrival of the newspapers. The Iranian’s friends left, and he joined Bryn and the others in front of the counter, everyone now drinking the famous green tea. They heard his story: a wealthy Persian of the old regime, lucky to escape with his life in the revolution, years of exile, ending up in England, proud as anything of his baked potato franchise, his fanatical pro-British monarchism.

  Then there was the rumble of a delivery truck outside and the mild swearing as newspapers were hauled across a wet pavement. Bryn left the others and went to help unload the papers, then returned, carrying one of everything.

  It was as bad as could be.

  Every paper carried the story in one way or another. Even the Financial Times ran a couple of sentences in its Company News section: ‘Kessler clinic reported close to collapse’. They went through the papers in silence, even Meg staying quiet in view of the volcano she expected any moment from Bryn. But, for once, he disappointed her.

  ‘Well, at least we know where we stand,’ he said, folding the last paper and speaking quietly.

  ‘How bad is it sweetie? What does this mean?’

  Bryn rubbed his face. It was now one thirty in the morning, and his chin was rough.

  ‘It’s hard to say. If patients desert us, then it’s very bad. We rely completely on the clinic to fund the research programme. If the patients stick with us – well, it’s still bad, very bad. We won’t get any investors if they think we’re drowning. And if we don’t get some money soon … So, I don’t know, Meg, I don’t know. It’s anything from bad to lethal.’

  2

  Early morning.

  Bryn at the boathouse, scrutinising the appointment books. Today, they’re full. Tomorrow – who knows? Do patients believe the lies that papers print? Or are they smarter than that? Does the clinic’s big and growing reputation provide shield enough?

  Meg is in charge of the appointments register. She’s teaching Tallulah to say ‘bunch of tossers’ every time she says ‘Corinth’.

  ‘Corinth,’ says Meg. ‘Corinth, Corinth, Corinth.’

  ‘Uncha gossa,’ squawks Tallulah. ‘Uncha gossa.’

  ‘Good bird!’ Meg feeds it more of the birdseed which is fast turning Tallulah into Fulham’s fattest parrot.

  ‘Have you taken any calls yet? New appointments?’

  ‘It’s not even eight o’clock, matey. How many people phone the doctor at eight
o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Well, let me know how it goes. We need those bloody patients.’

  ‘Get some coffee and stop worrying. You’re bothering Tallulah.’

  Bryn goes off to get more coffee (a silky Hawaiian Kona, too soft for Bryn’s taste), but he’s still worried, still worrying. In the background he hears Tallulah screeching away, rehearsing her lessons. ‘Uncha gossa, uncha gossa, uncha gossa.’

  3

  The Park Lane Hotel, London. An Art Deco ballroom crowded with seats, canapés growing warm on sidetables, scrums of people around the doors to the toilets.

  A pharmaceutical industry conference is in full swing. Boffins gather to talk about the things that turn them on: molecules, viruses, what you get when you grind up a rat’s brain and dunk it in solvent. The chatter in the corridors is scientific, of course, but it’s gossipy and jokey, too.

  ‘… Ten million quid later, they take their discovery to the Patent Office. You know what? The Staedtler crowd had been in that same morning with the same damn thing! Beat them by three hours. ‘Course they sued …’

  ‘… So the experimenter cuts off the fourth leg, tells the rabbit to jump. Nothing happens. He shouts. Still nothing. So he writes up his conclusions: amputation of legs causes total hearing loss …’

  ‘… Claimed he was entitled to a one-third share in the patent. He was an asshole but they thought it was worthless, so they agreed. Damn thing turned out to be a goldmine. Two million bucks a year and he’s still an asshole.’

  Cameron is there. She’s blonde. She made the change not because of pressure from Meg, but because Cameron is the sort of person who, if she sets her mind to something, follows it through as completely as possible. She decided she’d look better blonde, decided she’d enjoy the change, and went for it.

  And one other change is also complete. Cameron knows Bryn doesn’t fancy her. She doesn’t pretend that it didn’t upset her. It did, for a long time. But she’s over him now, almost completely. At long last, for the first time in her unusual life, she’s ready to get a grip of her emotional world, ready to go manhunting in her own territory.

  She’s at this conference to hear the papers, to exchange views, to network with other scientists. But most of all, she’s here for another reason completely, a reason that has nothing to do with research: she’s here to flirt.

  4

  Coffee break – only of course Cameron seldom drank coffee and for her this wasn’t a break, it was a central purpose in being here. She wore a kingfisher-blue suit which was her colour, according to Meg. The blue was in stunning contrast to her sleek pale-blonde hair and coral lips. Her two-and-a-half inch heels left her taller than half the men in the room. She didn’t feel as comfortable as she did in jeans and a T-shirt, but she could sense male heads turning wherever she went; male eyes fastening on to her buttocks, breasts, hair, and lips; male conversations suddenly becalmed as she moved into view.

  She surveyed the room and selected her target: a tall, dark, handsome man with something priestly about him, something that let you know he was better connected to the Almighty than you. She went up to him, feeling naked.

  ‘Hi, there,’ she said. ‘Cameron Wilde.’

  He extended his hand, his eyes doing what men’s eyes do. Without overstepping the limits of politeness, but directly and thoroughly, he took in the face and figure of the person he was talking to. Usually it was a fault-finding procedure. The person looked nice, but their skin was tired, their figure saggy, or their nose wonky. Not today, not with Cameron. The mental register returned a virtually perfect score. The speaker was surprised, alerted.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Allen Green, nice to meet you.’

  5

  The weekend.

  Patient bookings had halved from the week before. They hadn’t dried up, existing patients remained rock solid loyal, but the clinic was in trouble. Worse still – much worse – was the fact that every day spent without money meant another day of Corinth’s relentless advance on the patents and the clinic’s own relative decline.

  Bryn and Cameron had agreed to spend a long Sunday brunch discussing tactics and strategy for what Bryn called ‘the fightback’, but as always, reality intervened.

  A hairline crack just below the waterline of the barge had widened enough to allow damp inside, which was threatening to turn into an out-and-out leak. By the time Cameron arrived at eleven o’clock, Bryn had managed to tilt the heavy barge by moving all the furniture to one side of it and ballasting it further with a half-dozen oil drums filled with water. The crack was now exposed, several inches clear of the river, and Bryn was working to plug it with a black tar paint, beginning at the bows. He wore old jogging pants, and his top half was bare and streaked with sweat.

  Cameron approached from round the corner of the boathouses, down the paved steps leading to the jetty. She was wearing her pale-yellow suit with a clean white top under the jacket, and she stood gingerly at the head of the jetty as though worried that the pitch would fly from Bryn’s tin and splatter her.

  ‘Problem?’ she said.

  ‘Crack,’ said Bryn, pointing to it with his brush. ‘Solution,’ – he waved his tin.

  ‘I’d offer to help, only …’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘You want to meet some other day?’

  ‘Uh, hell.’ Bryn reached in through the barge window to switch off the radio, which was in the middle of some tedious discussion show. He wiped his hands on his old Wales rugby shirt which lay on the deck in front of him. ‘No, it’s important – critical. I’ll be another hour, if you don’t mind waiting. Otherwise, I –’

  ‘No, I’ve got stuff to be getting on with.’

  Bryn nodded and picked up his paintbrush again, dropping gobbets of tar into the sultry Thames. Having finished work on the bows, he needed to continue right down the length of the vessel, and that meant wading into the river. The muddy river bed farted noisily as he sank his feet into it, with an uprush of bubbles full of stinking gas.

  Instead of going into the boathouse, Cameron continued to watch. ‘Do you mind telling me what you’re thinking of? The grand fightback, I mean.’

  ‘Now?’ Bryn shrugged. ‘OK.’ He began to talk, painting as he did so, a burst of fish-flavoured bubbles greeting each further step down the side of the boat. The way he saw it, the first step was to ‘turn the news flow around’. He was full of plans for meeting with editors, launching libel actions, contacting patients who were ‘opinion, formers’, launching new public relations initiatives.

  ‘PR?’ said Cameron, after a time. ‘You think we’re going to survive with some PR?’

  Bryn jabbed his brush into the crevices of the planking in annoyance. ‘We need visibility. We need positive coverage,’ he said. ‘I hate the idea of wasting money on stupid public relations types just as much as you do, but we’ll never get an investor with the media as hostile as it is. And I don’t think we can afford to just wait it out. Corinth are bound to be in fifth gear, while we’re crawling along in bottom.’

  Cameron shook her head. ‘I agree.’ She continued to watch her partner, squatting in front of her looking like a cross between a tar-baby and a mud-demon. ‘How much do we think we can afford to spend? Total cost of the fightback?’

  ‘Anything.’ Bryn wiped his forehead with his pitch-streaked arm, leaving it pitch-streaked too. ‘This is life or death. I just don’t think we can afford to fail.’

  ‘Twenty grand?’ said Cameron. ‘Thirty?’

  ‘Of course. Twice that. As much as we have. Cameron, I don’t think we –’

  ‘OK. I’ll see you later,’ she said abruptly, walking back up to the boathouse.

  An hour passed. Bryn got to the end of the boat, the great curve of the stern, where the timbers rose in a powerful arch above the waterline. The crack was bigger down at this end, and the river deeper. To an outside observer, Bryn was little more than a mud-stained head bobbing in the water, alongside a filthy arm, a tin of
pitch and a paintbrush.

  Light footsteps pattered down the roof of the barge, and Cameron, shoes off, leapt lightly on to the short deck at the end. The movement was enough to send a ripple washing into Bryn’s mouth. He spat out, trying to avoid a swearword.

  ‘Here,’ said Cameron. ‘Take the taste away. Some baklava, from that little Greek shop. I bought you a coffee from your Italian place, too. Milk, no sugar, Java bean I think they said. Can’t remember. Sorry.’

  Bryn, still up to the neck in water, swallowed the baklava, sipped the coffee. ‘Yes, Java,’ he said. ‘I’d have roasted it a little longer myself, but I’m fussy.’

  ‘Damn right. You ought to be gay, you know. Home decoration. Fussy about coffee. I’ve got some friends back in Boston I could introduce you to.’

  ‘Thanks, Cameron, but somehow –’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she said, squinting at him in mock-appraisal. ‘Look at you. Gays are well known for their care over personal hygiene.’

  ‘Listen, I’ll be another ten or fifteen minutes. Do you want to –’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘No need? What? We still have to –’ ‘Sorted. It’s all sorted. We’re paying thirty grand, by the way. Hope that’s OK.’

  ‘Sorted? What d’you mean?’ Bryn the Head spoke from the depths. ‘And I hope you haven’t gone and spent–’

  ‘Like I say, I’ve fixed it. It’ll take two months, then – boom – back on track.’

  Bryn closed his eyes, in a silent prayer for patience. ‘Hang on. I’ll stop here. Finish this later.’ He began to wade back through the water, rising from the surface like an ill-smelling troll. Cameron kept pace with him, treading lightly along the roof, shoes in hand, spotless in her pale yellow, laughing at him. ‘My Boston friends would kill me if they even knew,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know. Isn’t there a kind of sweaty boiler-repairman look among some sections of the gay community? Perhaps if you …’

  But Bryn had reached the bank and Cameron stood her distance, holding her nose.