Whirligig Read Free Page A

phoned,’ said the first incoming text. ‘We only have a week. GC is realistically our last chance.’
    Peregrine replied, thumbing the buttons on his phone with hesitancy, hindered by long-sightedness and lack of expertise. ‘WILCO. REMINT ME WHAT WE NKOW OF GC?’
    A minute later, his phone buzzed with another message. ‘Rumour is he sold biz for big ££. Some sort of tech/media thing.’
    Peregrine decided to tease his niece.‘GOLD-LOOKING, IS HE? ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE. TALL TOO, I SUPPORT.’
    â€˜Haven’t seen him since we were kids,’ replied the niece, ignoring the predictive text problems. ‘Might be Scottish?’
    Peregrine texted back. ‘SOUND LIKE A MATTER OF THE UNIVERSE TYPE. BUSINESSMEN LIKE STRAIGHT TANKING. SHALL JUST BE MYSELF.’
    It was just twenty seconds before the final communication.
    â€˜Strongly advise you not to.’
    Smiling, but with a wrinkled brow, Peregrine tucked his phone away in a well-tailored pocket. He did not generally meet high-powered entrepreneurs, and was unaccustomed to business meetings in which he was not the one being sold to. He inhaled deeply on the remainder of his cigarette. But Peregrine would deal with this challenge as he did all others in life, by assuming that things would probably work out for the best. They always did. So he went back inside his club, there to order a pot of Russian Caravan, and put to the back of his mind the feeling that he would rather his niece were joining him for this meeting on which his fate, and the fate of many others, would be determined.
    As Peregrine waited patiently for his tea, the man he was due to meet was standing just a hundred yards away on Piccadilly, sweating at his reflection in the broad window of an expensive shop.
    Gordon Claypole was tubby, and only in the thorax. His short legs and arms, over which he had only limited control, were thin and weak. He was not ‘a large man’. He was a fat man. This saddened him not just because of its genetic inevitability and the echoof his long-dead father, but because, having been a fat child, he had briefly been a normal-shaped young adult. At thirty-five, he was once again an egg with tentacles, and wished that he had never known what it was like to look anything other than odd. There was always something in his reflection to admonish, and inflict the persistent pain that, he supposed, dogs all people who are physically inadequate. He stared more closely at his reflection. Sometimes it was the beetroot bags under his eyes that struck him as ugly, sometimes the reddening bulb of a nose, or the collection of grey-green chins that hung from his jaw like stuffed shopping bags. Today, though, it was his oyster eyes and their network of scarlet veins that disgusted him. He also found time to loathe the dyed black hair that was losing the battle for influence over his huge potato of a head. And in these clothes – black suit, white shirt, black tie – he thought the entire ensemble gave him the appearance of a ghoulish and hard-living undertaker.
    â€˜Fuck it,’ he burbled idly to his reflection as he stumbled on from the shop front and felt an ache in his chest.
    Claypole was familiar with the other kind of private members’ club. The sort that spring up like dandelions, and very often disappear again as quickly, from the streets of Soho. A short stroll from St James’s, but a world away, the most octane-fuelled of the capital’s media workers and their hangers-on collide in these other haunts on weeknights, bitching, bragging, gossiping and flirting, getting quickly drunk and lording it shrilly over the waiting staff. The older ones are tired and lonely, with the resources to destroy careers, egos or emotions as they choose. The younger ones fight among themselves for position, or fame, ormoney, and possess the joint characteristics of overconfidence and desperation, a combination only otherwise