The Perfect 10 by Louise Kean Page B

strip. Especially if you strip.’
    ‘If you’d get another buggering chair in here, Cag, Iwouldn’t have to sit on the desk! Nope, that came out wrong – I don’t want a buggering chair, just a chair would be great – preferably one without straps to hold me down or a hole in the back for anal penetration.’
    Howard slaps the desk and laughs loudly, but stands up as Cagney winces at the air of stupidity that fills the room like cheap heavy aftershave so much it gives him a headache. He almost manages to ignore his name’s abbreviation.
    ‘So, what’s up, Mo’ Fo’?’ Howard crosses his arms, hugging himself, and leans back slightly, chin in the air.
    ‘Howard, you’re from Fulham. It’s not the hood.’
    ‘I’m still trying it out, seeing how it hangs on me … my nizza.’
    ‘Will you be singing “Mammy” later?’ Cagney mumbles, but Howard doesn’t hear, as he raps quietly to himself. Cagney catches the odd ‘fuck’, the odd ‘whore’, and something about being ‘straight out of Compton’. Cagney thinks hard to remember how old Howard is, and when he realises it is twenty-four, he closes his eyes. Was he this foolish fifteen years ago, this blind, stupid, idiotic and pointless? This impressionable, dull, random, inane? This vulnerable? Cagney can’t remember a time when he felt differently from the way he feels now, and although he is the last person to claim his life has any kind of point, he has surely never been as disposable as Howard. He remembers the days of polite conversation, of small talk, of respect and integrity. He has never tried to ‘rap’. Making swear words rhyme has apparently become an art form. He racks his brain, searching for something, anything pure. He finds the Indian Ocean lapping at a secluded beach, and he clutches on … the swell of rage subsides. Cagney opens his eyes half a minute later: a grinning Howard stares back at him.
    ‘Finding your happy place again, boss?’ Howard winks for the second time in five minutes.
    ‘Fetching as it is, Howard, I think you might like to know that you have a brush sticking out of the back of your head.’
    ‘I couldn’t get a comb to stay.’
    Cagney stares at him, incredulous. He actually pays this boy, pays him to live, to eat, to house himself. He employs him when what he should really do is have him put down. But work is work, and Cagney can’t do the younger ones himself; he is old enough to be their father. He glances at his calendar, a subconscious habit that has crept up on him over the last year. September 28 – three months to go. To death or freedom, he doesn’t care which. To forty. Countdown officially commenced nine months ago, but he’s had one eye on that calendar for ten years.
    Cagney visualises the half-empty bottle of Jack in his drawer, and the beaker he stole from a hotel in Brighton ten years ago that has never known water. He controls the urge to lunge for it.
    What he knows is this: in the thirties, in the forties, a guy like him was permitted his idiosyncrasies, with no pressure to air dirty laundry or bandage over neurosis, or cure it somehow. The world deserved – no, it needed – its share of alcoholics and depressives, not that Cagney sees himself as either. But if he were a member of one of these underground clubs, he wouldn’t feel ashamed. He lives in a dirty world, full of vicious tricks, and at some point you accept it. He doesn’t greet the mornings with a smile any more. And so what? He’s no daddy to a doting toddler, no strong husband to a soft sweet-smelling feminine bundle. He’s nobody’s hero.
    Howard fidgets, and Cagney looks up to see him adjusting the brush that sticks out precariously from his short bushy blond hair, admiring himself and using Cagney’s frame as a mirror. It is one of the only things that sits permanently on his desk, propped against an old coffee cupthat has stuck itself spitefully to the wood. A roughly framed quote from a newspaper he’d read