Not Dead Enough

76

The grumpy cleaning woman left Cleo Morey’s house just after twelve thirty. The Time Billionaire made a note of this, from behind the wheel of his Toyota Prius. It was good timing, just minutes before his parking voucher expired. As she stomped off up the hill, talking angrily into her mobile phone, he wondered if she had spent the whole of the last three and a half hours on the phone. He was sure Cleo Morey would be interested to know what she was getting for the money she paid this woman. Although of course that wasn’t really his business.

He put the car in gear and, running silently on the electric motor, glided up past her, then threaded his way through the complex network of streets up to Queens Road, then down past the clock tower, and turned right along the seafront.

He drove across the Hove border, along past the King Alfred development, stopped at the lights at the bottom of Hove Street, then made a right turn a couple of streets further along, into Westbourne Villas, a wide terrace of large semi-detached Victorian houses. Then he made another right turn into a mews where there was a row of lock-ups. The ones he rented were at the end, numbers 11 and 12.

He parked outside number 11 and got out of his car. He then unlocked the garage door and hauled it up, went inside, switched on the light, then pulled the door back down hard. It closed with a loud, echoing clang. Then silence. Just the faintest whir from the two humidifiers.

Peace!

He breathed in the warm smells he loved in here: engine oil, old leather, old bodywork. This was his home. His temple! In this garage – and sometimes in the one next door, where he kept the covered trailer – he used up so many of those hours he had stashed away in the bank. Dozens of them at a time! Hundreds of them every month! Thousands of them every year!

He stared lovingly at the fitted dust cover, at the flowing contours of the car it was protecting, the gleaming moonstone-white 1962 3.8 Jaguar Mk2 saloon, which took up so much of the floor space that he had to edge past it sideways.

The walls were hung with his tools, arranged in patterns, each item so spotless it might have been fresh out of its box, all in their correct places. His hammers formed one display. His ring spanners, his wrenches, his feeler gauges, his screwdrivers – each formed a separate artwork. On the shelves were laid out his tins and bottles of polish, wheel cleaner, chrome cleaner, window cleaner, leather polish, his sponges, chamois leathers, bottle brushes, pipe cleaners – all looking brand new.

‘Hello, baby!’ he whispered, caressing the top of the dust cover, running his hand over the curved hard roof he could feel beneath. ‘You are beautiful. So, so beautiful.’

He edged along the side of the car, running his hand along the cover, feeling the windows, then the bonnet. He knew every wire, every panel, every nut and bolt, every inch of her steel, chromium, leather, glass, walnut and Bakelite. She was his baby. Seven years of painstaking reassembly from a wreck inhabited by rats and mice in a derelict farmyard barn. She was in better condition now than the day, well over forty years ago, she had left the factory. Ten Concours d’Elégance rosettes for First Place pinned to the garage wall attested to that. They had come from all over the country. He had won dozens of second-, third- and even fourth-place rosettes as well. But they always went straight into the bin.

Later today, he reminded himself, he needed to work on the insides of the bumpers, which were invisible to the normal observer. Judges looked behind them sometimes and caught you out, and there was an important Jaguar Drivers’ Club concourse coming up at the end of this month.

But at this moment he had something more important on his mind. It was a key-cutting machine, complete with a wide set of blanks – for any lock, the advertisement on the internet had said – that had been sitting in the brown packaging marked FRAGILE on the floor beside his workbench since its arrival a couple of months ago.

That was the big advantage of being a Time Billionaire. You were able to plan ahead. To think ahead. He had read a quotation in a newspaper from someone called Victor Hugo, who had said, ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.’

He patted the tin full of wax, with the indentation of Cleo Morey’s front door key, that sat heavily in his jacket pocket. Then he began to open the package with a smile on his face. Ordering this had definitely been a very good idea.

Its time had come.