‘Sex is the problem, Mrs Pryce. Sex is always at the back of everything. I slept with a woman, a Londoner, and suddenly I’m all confused. Bodies are such a problem. They say that the human body’s like a city, in all sorts of ways, and I’m sure they’re right.’
Mick went to one of the glass-fronted bookcases and pulled out a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. He turned through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
‘The first cut is the deepest, eh, Mrs Pryce?’ he said.
There was a thick red felt-tip pen lying on Pryce’s desk. Mick picked it up, went over to Louise Pryce and, with reference to the book he’d opened, he painstakingly drew a large, red, valentine heart on the surface of her breast and sternum. The skin resisted the pen. The flesh sank beneath the pressure of the felt-tip but Mick was scrupulous in ensuring that only the pen should touch her, that there should be no skin to skin contact.
‘Yes, a city can have a heart but I don’t know where London’s heart is. Marble Arch? The square mile of the City? Knightsbridge? And where are the lungs? Where’s the liver? The kidneys?’
He drew sketchy representations of lungs, liver, kidneys and a length of colon on the skin of Louise Pryce’s thorax. She couldn’t scream and she could barely struggle but something in her eyes showed absolute terror, as if she thought he might be about to slash her open, perform some butcher’s incision in search of a heart.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Mrs Pryce,’ Mick said again. ‘I know that drawing on your chest with felt-tip is a pretty weird thing to do. It’s true. I feel pretty weird these days. I am weird. But I’m not a nutter. Thanks for being such a good listener, Mrs Pryce.’
He pulled up a chair, placed it close to the examination table and sat there for a long time just looking at her body. There was pleasure in it. He liked to look but he had no desire to touch. He tried to imagine that he was looking at a city, at a new-found land, but all he saw was flesh and sex.
He was still sitting and looking when he heard sounds from the hall; the front door opening, then a man’s footsteps. The return of Dr Graham Pryce. He must surely have realized at once that something was amiss since all the lights were on and the door to the consulting room was open. But even though he was forewarned, he was hardly ready for what hit him.
The moment Pryce entered the consulting room, before he had time to take in the scene, before he was even fully aware of Mick’s presence, Mick started to punch and kick him. He did it silently, without saying a word, without so much as grunting. Pryce had no chance to fight back, not even to defend himself. The blows came from some dark place deep inside Mick, a place of cold, frightening, irresistible violence.
Pryce folded under the blows, was driven down to his knees, then to the floor, where he rolled up into a ball, not struggling, merely enduring, waiting for the attack to cease or to drive him into insensibility. And as Mick’s right foot made repeated contact with his victim’s body, he looked over at Louise Pryce, still pegged out on the table, and he could see she was crying, not much, just enough to make him feel bad, just enough to make him stop kicking her husband.
Mick stood still, trying not to sway, not to fall over, sweat pumping out through the creases in his forehead, an oceanic wash in his ears, and before he made his escape he felt the compulsion to turn apologetically to Louise Pryce and say, ‘If it’s any consolation I don’t really know why I did that.’ And even then he still wasn’t ready to go. He went over to her and said, ‘You know another way the body and the city resemble each other? Answer: neither of them has a soul.’
WORK
All the next day Mick felt like shit. He didn’t think he’d dealt properly or adequately with Dr Graham Pryce. He sensed he’d broken the rules. He’d started to develop a new, highly personal variation of the game, and even if it wasn’t cheating exactly, something told him it was going to end in tears.
He got up late and wasted the morning in his room doing nothing. He didn’t bother trying to phone Gabby. He didn’t much care whether she was there or not, and in either case he had nothing much to say to her, no new questions that he wanted to ask. Her encouragement and approval meant little to him. She was the prime mover but the drama by now was his alone.
His room was as oppressive as ever. He didn’t want to be there, yet he felt becalmed. He knew he ought to be out in the city tracking down rapist number six, the final victim, a feeling that was only confirmed when Judy arrived at his door.
‘The landlady sent me up,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she likes me. I don’t think I pass her high standards of racial purity.’
‘Not many do.’
He was embarrassed by Judy’s presence. His awkwardness and diffidence sat uneasily with his bulk and strength but Judy knew she had the upper hand.
‘I’m sorry I had to come back,’ she said. ‘I realize you don’t want me here.’
He found himself denying that, found himself saying he did want her there, that he was pleased to see her. The words sounded unfamiliar in his mouth but they were undoubtedly true.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m here about something else. About work.’
‘Work?’
‘I want to offer you a job.’
For an uncomfortable moment he thought she had been so horrified to discover what he was doing in London that she was trying to straighten him out by offering him a job in her bookshop.
‘You know what I do,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, although I still don’t know why. But that’s all right too. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to know.’
She was thoughtful, preoccupied, and for a moment she seemed to be a million miles away, a long way from job offers and rooms in Hackney, in some distant suburb of the mind where the tubes didn’t run and where the taxi drivers wouldn’t go.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, and her speech slowed with the awkward weight of what she had to say. ‘Your list of names, could I add a name to it?’
‘No,’ he said loudly.
‘Just one name. Just one man.’
‘Oh, come on!’ he said.
‘Why not? I’ve helped you. Why won’t you help me?’
‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘Why not? It’s what you do. You’ve said so. What difference does one more make?’
‘You want me to beat somebody up for you?’
‘That’s it.’
‘I can’t beat someone up just because you ask me to.’
‘Why not? Whatever these men on your list did, this man did something worse.’
‘You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about it.’
‘This man broke my heart,’ Judy said.
The words sounded so small, so delicate. They seemed so old-fashioned, so fragile and out of place in the world Mick was inhabiting, like a china cup in the hands of meths drinkers.
‘I thought I was over him but I was wrong. I thought I didn’t care any more but now I realize I still do. And I want revenge.’
‘You don’t beat somebody up just because they broke your heart,’ Mick said.
‘I would if I could.’
‘Then maybe you should go ahead and do it. Maybe it’s your job not mine.’
She wasn’t listening.
‘What do I need to give you to make you help me?’ she asked. ‘Money? Sex? Japanese lunches? What’s your motivation here, Mick?’
He wanted to say it was all to do with love. He wanted to say he was punishing these six men because they had hurt somebody he loved. Rape was a special, virulent form of hurt, but it was a matter of degree not of quality. But he didn’t say that because he knew it would sound fake. He wasn’t sure that he still loved Gabby and if he didn’t, then when had he stopped? Come to that, when had he even started? If Gabby had told him that a man in London, maybe even six men, had broken her heart what would he have done to them?
‘What I really want,’ he said, ‘is to stop beating people up altogether.
’
‘But you’re having trouble stopping, is that it? Like giving up cigarettes?’
‘Look, Judy, in other circumstances, a month ago, six months ago, maybe I’d have been the man you’re looking for. But right now I’m not.’
‘His name’s Stuart London,’ she said.
‘Why do I need to know that?’
‘Stuart London. It’s an easy name to remember.’
‘I don’t want to know his name.’
‘Maybe you’ll come across him.’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you’ll change your mind. Maybe you’ll find a reason to do what I ask.’
He didn’t argue. He felt there was no need. He felt safe in the knowledge that London was too big a city to allow chance meetings with Judy Tanaka’s old lovers.
‘London may bring you the very thing you need,’ Judy said.
‘Hey, don’t go all inscrutable on me.’
She smiled and she went up to him and kissed him.
‘You’d better go,’ he said.
She kissed him again, more persuasively this time, and he didn’t need so very much convincing.
‘Or I could stay,’ she said.
‘Yes, you could,’ he admitted.
He felt feeble and powerless, and just as he had been too weak to stop himself beating up Dr Graham Pryce, he was too weak to stop himself making love to Judy Tanaka. As he was taking the clothes off her, he said, ‘You realize none of this is going to make any difference?’ And she said, ‘If you say so,’ and she smiled, and she seemed to him more inscrutable than ever.
ADDICTION
Some men expected strippers to be complete slags, to be anybody’s and everybody’s, to be usable and disposable. However, in Gabby’s experience strippers were no different from any other group of women. Some of them were slappers, but some of them were professional virgins. Some were happily married, some were practising long-term celibacy. Some were desperately looking for love, others were looking for instant gratification.
Gabby would always have said that she occupied the middle ground, but she’d admit that faithfulness didn’t come easily to her. If a man liked her, flattered her, was nice to her, bought her dinner and a few drinks and then asked nicely for sex, well, how could she say no?
She’d wanted to be faithful to Mick, she really had. In fact she’d wanted to be faithful to all her men, but there’d always been a reason why she’d failed in the end; sometimes it was boredom, sometimes it was too much drink, sometimes it was because a better prospect had come along, and that was partly the case here. A good-looking man with money, a flash car and some high-quality drugs had come along and he’d treated her decently and it had all just sort of happened. What was a girl to do?
His name was Ross McLennan and Gabby first met him at the agency that handled her bookings. Most of her dealings were with a chubby, motherly former stripper called Pat. McLennan was there in the office when Gabby called in one day to pick up some money and Pat introduced him as though he was an old friend, maybe even part of the business, maybe a sleeping partner. There was talk of him wanting to hire a few girls for a party he was throwing, but he never mentioned hiring Gabby.
She knew immediately that he wasn’t a good man. He looked difficult and dangerous, and though he smiled at her a lot, she knew it wasn’t a smile she could trust. He was older than Mick and usually that wouldn’t have been attractive to her, but he wore his age lightly, he dressed young, he looked like a somebody and she fancied him like mad.
Not that it seemed to matter at the time. She thought she’d probably never see him again. Then one night he was in the audience at a club in Rotherham where she was stripping. He watched her do the act. He looked out of place in the smoke and crush of the club and he didn’t appear to be enjoying himself very much and he certainly didn’t bother to applaud when she’d finished. Neither did he try to go backstage or try to speak to her as she was leaving. Mick was there and maybe his presence had scared him off, although he didn’t look like a man who was scared of much.
Next day he telephoned her. She knew the agency must have given him her home number, which was another indication that he was somebody very special indeed. She wanted to be angry that her number had been given out, but she couldn’t summon up the pretence. She was glad he’d called her and she didn’t bother to hide it.
He said, ‘Why the gloves?’
She was surprised and impressed. Nobody had ever questioned the gloves before. Nobody had ever seen them as anything more than part of a stripper’s paraphernalia.
‘I spent all night wondering what goes on underneath those gloves,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe it was ugly old tattoos, maybe an ex-lover’s name, but you look too clever to have done something like that. And then I thought maybe you were an old junkie and you were hiding needle tracks, but you don’t look like a junkie either. So then I wondered if it was deformity, burns or skin disease, or maybe you’re missing a finger or even a hand. So which is it?’
‘You’ll have to find out for yourself,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take them off for me.’
Her words sounded too obvious, more salacious and silly than she’d intended, but she knew this man was going to be something in her life whether she liked it or not. What was the point of being evasive, and what was the point of resisting? He had been talking to her on a car phone and ten minutes later he arrived at her door. Ten minutes after that she was being unfaithful to Mick. McLennan peeled off her gloves, looked sympathetically at the scars on her wrists and forearms, and kissed them. She couldn’t stop herself submitting and she didn’t try. She could tell this wasn’t going to be just a one-off, not a case of him trying it on because he thought all strippers were slags. It was not going to be anything nearly so simple.
She never found out what he did for a living. He’d never tell her and she could never quite work it out, although over the next few months she pieced together a few tantalizing bits of information. From things he said it appeared he was involved with property and with gambling and with importing cars from Europe. This might have been legitimate for all she knew. Certainly he employed an accountant and a book keeper like any other business. But he also employed some dodgy-looking heavies, men without job titles, men who were not employed for their entrepreneurial skills.
Gabby knew better than to quiz him about what he did. They were both happy for him to remain mysterious. He travelled a lot, to Birmingham, to Manchester, even to Florida (where he topped up his already radiant tan). But whatever he did, he was obviously good at it and it was obviously extremely profitable. She sometimes thought his business must involve drugs too. He always had the very best dope, speed, cocaine, and he was free with it, at least where she was concerned. But maybe it wasn’t business. Maybe he had the best drugs because he had the best of everything; the best house, the best furnishings, the best cars, the best whisky and, as he repeatedly told her, the best women.
He seemed to take it for granted that she would have a boyfriend. It didn’t seem to bother him. He didn’t tell her to stop seeing him In fact he was very interested in hearing all about Mick.
Gabby felt disloyal enough just sleeping with McLennan; telling him about Mick was even worse. But she did tell him. She couldn’t stop herself, and McLennan seemed to have no ulterior motive. He was interested in a disinterested way, only wanting to know something about Mick, he said, because he wanted to know everything about Gabby. She told him and she was disappointed how little there was to tell, what a nothing he seemed to her now, how she seemed not to need Mick any more, how easy she found it to lie to him.
If she could tell McLennan all about Mick, she knew that Mick must know nothing about McLennan, and so it was. He remained blissfully ignorant. Mick trusted Gabby and he was easy to deceive. She’d tell him she was seeing her sister, staying over at her mother’s, and Mick never questioned it. It wasn’t that she thought Mick would do anything terrible if he found out. She didn’t think he’d hit
her the way some of them might. Mick could be a brute but he was never a brute to her. It was more that he’d have been disappointed in her, that he would have valued her at more than she was worth.
She liked having secrets. The drugs were a secret from Mick. Having an affair with McLennan was an even bigger one. She wondered if she needed secrets because her life as a stripper was so utterly revealing. She showed everything to her audience, more than just her body. Like any good performer she revealed herself, gave herself away. And before long she had given everything to McLennan. Their nights were long and sleepless; intense, relentless sessions fuelled by alcohol, lust and drugs. They left her feeling worn, shaky, wrecked, but at least she knew she was alive.
Some addictions are instant, others take a slow, incremental hold. At first it was easy for her to juggle Mick and McLennan, to balance their opposing demands on her, but she knew that sooner or later she would be wholly McLennan’s. Even before he went to London, she knew that Mick was meaning less and less to her.
And when McLennan said, ‘You shouldn’t be a stripper. You’re far too good for that game,’ well, it was nothing that she hadn’t heard before from other boyfriends, but this time it mattered. This time it meant something. It sounded convincing and true. It felt like the thing she’d always been waiting for, the magic words she’d always wanted to hear. Once McLennan had said that, she was his. She’d do anything for him.
THE SUICIDE TOUR
Stuart was walking along Bernard Street, not far from Russell Square tube station, when he saw a small group of tourists gathering on the opposite side of the road. He could tell they were mostly Americans; it was something to do with the clothes they wore, something alien in the cut, the fabric, the specific tone of the colours.
They were an older crowd with several very tall but stooped white-haired men, some in baseball caps, one in a sort of straw stetson. The men looked bigger and healthier and stronger than their London equivalents, as though they were farming stock, big-framed, with some whiff of Scandinavia in their background. They had their bright, good-humoured wives with them, and in some cases their wives’ recently widowed friends.
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