The Amateurs Read Online Free

turned onto the dual carriageway a removal lorry shuddered past her. Removal lorries caused Pauline to feel vaguely uneasy. The first time she’d seen one she’d been ten years old. It had pulled up in front of their house and the men had started taking things out to it. But they weren’t moving anywhere. Pauline remembered her mum crying and trying to stop the men. It had all been something to do with her dad’s business. It was years later before Pauline heard the full story. Before she heard the word ‘bankrupt’.
    She couldn’t really remember Gary from school. He was just one of the older boys whose nervy gaze flittered over her as she walked along the corridor. She’d really noticed him for the first time a year or so later, in Annabel’s, the disco in town. He’d already left the school and was working at Henderson’s. He wasn’t drinking. He was driving. It was the first time that a boy had given her a lift home in his own car. She’d blinked and now here she was–thirty-one, with no marketable skills and married to a man who was unlikely to be making six figures any time soon. She had been the May Day Queen and she was going to end up living in an ugly little house, driving second-hand cars and maybe going on holiday twice a year.
    So Pauline set up Kiddiewinks–‘North Ayrshire’s Premier Children’s Entertainment Service’, as her Yellow Pages ad proudly proclaimed. She had been at a friend’s party for their five-year-old and happened to find out what they were paying the idiot who came along and made balloon animals and told stories to the kids. It sounded like a lot. Pauline’s original vision had been to establish the company and then take a purely managerial role as the cash poured in. Sadly this hadn’t quite happened yet–children’s entertainers were thin on the ground and paying them was severely cutting into Pauline’s profit margin. So, for now, it was just her and her seventeen-year-old assistant, Derek, and long hours and lots of driving.
    Pauline’s mobile trilled. She pulled it from her handbag and read the text message. Slowing down and pulling into the left-hand lane, she began thumbing a reply. One, two, four, six words, the longest (‘later’) not more than five letters. Not more than thirty characters then in the sentence that would have sliced her husband’s heart into bloody pieces. She hit ‘Send’, tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and crunched the accelerator all the way down to the floor. Nothing much happened.

3
    G ARY WALKED ACROSS THE FACTORY FLOOR ON HIS WAY to the office. A huge, loud space–many thousands of square feet filled with the sound of machinery; the rumble of the overhead tracks as they whirred large parts from one place to another, the heavy clank of metal on concrete, the hammering of rivet guns. You could comfortably hit a five-wood the length of the place. Plenty of height–the corrugated-iron roof in darkness over a hundred feet above him, pale sunlight coming through the filthy plastic skylights. The smells of the factory too–oil, spray paint and the smoky aroma of hot metal. He kept within the yellow lines and returned the ‘Mornings’ that came his way from the canteen area, an island of Formica tables and orange plastic chairs lit softly by the red, white and orange lights of the vending machines that guarded it. He knew some of the boys down here well, he’d gone to school with many of them, indeed–if it hadn’t been for his three Highers (History, Geography and Maths)–he might well have been one of them.
    Henderson’s Forklift Trucks was one of the very few companies that had come to Ardgirvan in the 1970s. It had weathered the recession of the early 1980s, the redundancies caused later by technological advances (the jerkily moving robot-welders Gary was passing now, their steel limbs oblivious to the blue sparks), and the market erosion caused by cheaper foreign competition. They had offered Gary a job in