Page 79 of The Impossible Fortune
Ron nods. ‘Well, she’s had some time off.’
‘Do I need to worry about what you two are up to?’ Donna asks.
‘Course not,’ says Ron. ‘We were bowling.’
‘Bogdan?’
‘Course not,’ agrees Bogdan.
Donna can tell he’s not telling the truth, but she knows there will be a good reason. He’s being bullied into something by Ron. It is very easy to bully Bogdan: you just tell him you need his help.
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Tia keeps finding new bits of metal about her body, and apologizing each time. Coins, a Zippo cigarette lighter, earrings, a nose ring, a hair clasp.
‘A lot of it is religious,’ says Tia. ‘A lot of the jewellery.’
The security guard grunts. Tia knows that he can’t put a tick on his computer until the machine stops beeping. Just her luck there’s a new guy on today.
‘Just turn the machine off,’ says Tia. ‘Or we’ll be here all day – it’s always playing up. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘I’m not supposed to,’ says the guard.
‘Jesus made us with free will,’ says Tia.
‘I suppose so,’ says the guard, and flicks a switch. Tia walks through the metal detector again.
‘No beep,’ says Tia, and continues on her way. The guard flicks his switch back on again. And that’s why you should pay people properly.
Tia descends the ramp that takes her to the wide concrete apron surrounding the warehouse and walks over to the loading-bay doors. Is she excited? Tia guesses so. There’s a bit of adrenaline, but not as much as she is used to. Something is troubling her.
The loading-bay doors are currently wedged open because Hassan has parked his fork-lift truck directly under the closing sensors. If a supervisor spots it, he’ll shout at Hassanand move along. Tia walks into the warehouse and takes the two guns from her overalls. As she passes Hassan, she slips him one of the guns, and she then makes her way to the cleaning cupboard. She places her pass on the keypad, and the cupboard clicks open. Tia’s pass is issued under the name ‘Tracey-Ann Corbett’ and the photo on it is not hers. Nobody has, as yet, noticed. Mainly because no one has, as yet, looked. She wheels out her cleaning trolley and puts her gun into one of the compartments.
Any thrill yet? Not that she can make out. This should be the biggest score of her life? The start of even bigger and better things, the turning point? After this, school is out: she’s a real-life, grown-up gangster now. Perhaps she’s nervous, and that’s taking the edge off the thrill? She once did a painting of a horse for a school competition, and she won and was called up on stage by the deputy head, who gave her a prize. She was so nervous standing up in front of everyone, she nearly threw up. And now look at her. Times change; you grow up.
The delivery should be with them in the next five minutes or so and, preparation all done, Tia decides she will kill some time by doing some actual cleaning. She enjoys it, enjoys making something dirty, clean. She wouldn’t do it for the money they pay her, but it’s good work. Perhaps not at a hotel, where there’s time pressure, and people feel they can make a mess, but here, where people are neat and tidy, and no one’s up in your business every five minutes, it’s not so bad. Hassan enjoys driving the fork lift too. If they hadn’t decided to rob the place, they might have found interesting careers here.
And perhaps that’s just it? Wheeling a trolley with a gun inside it. Waiting to point it at a guy just doing his job. Can that be right?
Tia has been thinking about careers recently. She is good at a lot of things. She has a creative imagination, she is organized, people like her. But how does one go about getting a job? An actual job? Connie has been encouraging, obviously sees something in her, but perhaps one day it would be nice to do something that wasn’t illegal.
Stealing stuff, selling drugs, protection rackets, it’s all cheating really, and it would be nice to start something from the ground up, actually to back herself. Pay tax, employ people. Compete on a level playing field. Paint horses or something? But where are those jobs? They always seem to be taken.
Tia feels for her gun. If you have to point a gun at someone, you’re not making a proper living. You’re scaring people, and that’s easy. ‘I will kill you if you don’t give me your money’ seems an over-the-top way of making money.
It’s like the people who run this warehouse. If you can’t afford to pay your staff proper wages, you’re cheating. You’re not making an honest living. You’re stealing.
Look at the place. There must be companies paying good money to ship their stuff to and from this warehouse. Tia bets there are brochures with photos of the security systems. The brochures will show the metal detectors and the sensors and the security guards, all of which fall down when you don’t pay proper money. You don’t need a gun to do sales. Tia could do sales. It’s just talking to people, isn’t it? Tia likes doing that.
Outside the warehouse, she hears the delivery lorry clear the two security posts, drive down the ramp and make its way towards the warehouse. Make a bit of money, make Connie proud.
Make herself proud? As she sees the lorry driving under the security grille, it doesn’t feel that way. The truck parks up, and the driver waits for two uniformed guards to come out of the secure unit at the heart of the warehouse. Benny and Bobby, they’re called. Tia has tried to have as little as possible to do with both of them, and they’ve been quite happy with that arrangement. Bobby and Benny are uniformed but not armed. Worst of all worlds for poor Benny and Bobby.
Strictly speaking the driver should have stopped the second he saw the security grille was open. Anything out of the ordinary you stop. That’s how Tia would run this place. Pay people properly, ask them to do their job properly. She knew the driver wouldn’t stop though. He’ll have too many deliveries to make today. No one can afford to stop these days. Every minute is precious when people won’t pay you a living wage. It’s why delivery drivers leave your parcels on the doorstep even though you’re in. Going too fast and cutting corners is the only way to make your money on any given day. Miserable for everyone.
As Bobby and Benny approach the truck, they call Hassan over, and he drives the fork lift up to the back of the vehicle. The driver jumps down from his cab with an iPad, and there is some banter, presumably about football. Someone beat someone, and it has reflected poorly on Bobby’s masculinity. He’s taking it well though.
Benny, masculinity still intact by some quirk of the weekend’s football results, checks through the paperwork on the iPad and signs his name with a fingernail. Hassan jumps down from the fork lift and makes his way around the blind side of the lorry. Here we go, then.
