Sheila
Turns out, marking your territory wasn’t the sole preserve of spraying tom cats with big balls. Sheila smiled at the thought as she prowled around the basement bar of M1 House in her Louboutins.
‘I’d like you to rearrange the seating down here,’ she told Frank, describing the space in the bowels of the super-club with a wave of her arm. Her Tiffany bangles jangled merrily, audible above the thub, thub, thub of the bass from upstairs, as the DJ and sound engineers performed the soundcheck ahead of an evening of revelry.
Frank was nodding like one of those toy dogs you got in the rear window of crappy cars. Jumpy, as usual. Her brother-in-law had never been anything but.
‘Yeah. Yeah, Sheila, love. Mint. But what do you mean?’
‘Get one of the staff to move the furniture, Frank. Set up single tables and two chairs.’ Visualising how the space would ideally work in this debut foray into the world of speed-dating, Sheila stalked over to one of the tables in the subterranean bar, recently redubbed, ‘Jack’s bar’. On the wall hung a neon sign, styled from a lyric her nephew had apparently written on one of the toilet doors.
In the beginning, there was Jack.
She glanced momentarily at it. Reminded of how much Frank had lost. Grabbing the sleeve of Frank’s baggy top – an old James long-sleeved T from the band’s Gold Mother heyday – she changed tack. ‘Are you eating?’ Through the cotton fabric, worn soft and thin with use, she could feel that his forearms, always wiry at the best of times, were mere bone and sinew now, covered with skin.
Frank cocked his head to one side. Entirely grey-white, though he’d always boasted the best head of hair out of the two O’Brien brothers. Paddy had had only a ring of shorn fluff around a shining freckled pate, by the end. The fiery ginger of his youth had dulled in later years to a dirty strawberry blond. But Frank had inherited different genes entirely. And not just follically. ‘Course,’ he said. ‘I had a lovely kebab on Tuesday. It had sauce and everything.’
‘That’s two days ago. Have you eaten since?’ Sheila asked, pondering the shadows that the basement bar’s mood-lighting cast along the gaunt furrows either side of his mouth.
He grinned at her. Narrowed his eyes. Wagging his finger, as if he’d just sussed some sister-in-lawly subterfuge. ‘I see what you’re doing. You’re checking up on me, aren’t you?’ He pulled his sleeve gently out of reach, ramming his hands into the pockets of his jeans. ‘It’s nice of you but—’
‘Come round for dinner with me and Conks tonight. I’ll make a curry.’ Sheila knew what an overgrown boy like Frank needed. Mothering. Perhaps she could find him a woman through her speed-dating venture.
‘Aw, She. I’m busy actually. I’ve got this—’
‘Now. Tables and chairs,’ Sheila said, assuming that the dinner was a done deal and turning her attention to the layout of the bar area. ‘Me and Gloria went to another speed-dating night, run as a franchise by some big company that covers the north. They had the same set-up. A number on each table. You ring the bell. The men move round after three minutes to sit with a new woman. So the seating’s really important.’
Scratching at his ear, Frank frowned. ‘Sheila, I hope you don’t think I’m a cheeky sod, but you’re the head of the O’Briens, now. You’re the boss-lady. What the hell are you doing, messing around with lonely hearts crap?’
Sheila moved over to the bar where she had left her laptop in its bag. Beckoned Frank to follow her. She could barely contain her excitement as it effervesced like Cristal champagne inside her. Several months ago, Paddy would have popped those bubbles for her with a verbal put-down or a physical slap.
‘This is my latest entrepreneurial vision, Frank. And you’re helping me do it. Come and look.’
Opening the laptop on the bar, she brought up a brightly coloured website. Photo after photo of beaming, attractive, wholesome-looking couples holding hands, kissing, embracing … ‘Online dating.’
Slack-jawed, Frank stared at the web page’s masthead. True Love Dates.
‘It’s a play on words,’ Sheila said. ‘True Love Dates instead of True Love Waits. Get it?’
Frank nodded, clearly not getting it at all.
‘It’s me and Gloria’s new venture. We’re gonna do speed-dating to draw people in, and I’ve just had this website designed. There’s millions of subscribers to some of the bigger online-dating sites. We get their credit card details and bam! You slap on an admin charge and you’re making a fortune from sod all. Algorithms do the work. And once I’ve got a stack of subscribers, I’m going to do a big phishing scam that can’t be traced. I’ve got this speccy computer geek from UMIST reckons he can cream millions off the top, straight into an offshore account.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘It’s the darknet, or some shit, Frank,’ she said, savouring the thrill of her racing pulse and the endorphins that momentarily almost snuffed out the stress of Ellis James and the tax and annoying CCTV cameras that saw everything. ‘This is the future. It’s so good, because it’s almost legal!’ She tapped her nail extensions on the gleaming reinforced glass bar for emphasis. ‘And sophisticated. The set-up costs are sod all. And me and Gloria get to spread a little love into the bargain. We’ve already got fifty sign-ups for tomorrow night’s speed-dating and a couple of thousand on this dating website.’
‘Doesn’t sound like much,’ Frank said, leaning over the bar to pour himself half a lager from the tap. His T-shirt riding up to reveal an emaciated, concave stomach.
Sheila looked away abruptly, stroking the web page that glowed lovingly out at her from the laptop’s screen. ‘Give it a couple of months and it will,’ she said, somewhat irritated that her enthusiasm wasn’t as contagious as she’d hoped. Remembering the way Paddy had ridiculed her idea to start up a cleaning agency all those years ago. Bastard. But now he was dead, and the cleaning agency, staffed by women they’d rescued from scumbag traffickers, had a turnover of a couple of million a year and was growing month on month. Income she could spend, however circuitously it made its way to her current account … unlike Paddy’s dirty cash that sat in rubble sacks beneath the tiled floor of her guest en-suite. ‘I know what I’m doing, you know. Same as you knew what you were doing when you bought this place, Frank.’
‘I’ve had nothing but aggro since I bought this club,’ Frank said, opening an old-fashioned pill box and dropping a small tablet into his drink. ‘My son was murdered on my dance floor, and then, that twat, the Fish Man killed a
