Angel City

by Mike Ripley

  I picked up the crappy radio they’d rented me and called it in: POB – passenger on board – to Lincoln’s Inn. Dispatch feigned interest, saying they could maybe find me something in Holborn by the time I got there.

  I swung into Seymour Place and put my foot down, mildly curious as to why Tigger was lying to me.

  Chapter Five

  If I’d had reservations about Tigger getting in the cab, it was going to take an advance course of sensory deprivation to persuade me to let his friend join him in the back of Armstrong.

  We hadn’t gone far, just down Seymour Place and then hanging a right before Marylebone Road into one of the small streets at the back of the Marylebone branch of Westminster Library. At this time of the morning it was notorious as a dossing area for the sad old winos wearing three jackets and someone else’s trainers who had been moved along – or more accurately, moved out – from Baker Street underground station or the nearby subway that stank of urine worse than any urinal.

  And that was exactly what I thought we’d got to begin with.

  Tigger made me stop and was out of Armstrong before I could complain. When I saw him bending over the figure slumped against the wall of a discreet, but high-priced, estate agent’s (‘Flats from £490 per week’), I left the engine idling and got out. My only thought was to close the back door and get out of there, but then Tigger saw the look on my face.

  ‘Come on, Angel, you’ve got to help,’ he said in what I guessed was his normal voice. ‘I’m paying you, remember.’

  ‘Means nothing,’ I said, looking at the figure on the pavement. There was no blood immediately in evidence, that was something, but whoever it was had decided he liked his breakfast so much he had wanted to see it again. Close up. On his T-shirt.

  ‘I’ve got money,’ snapped Tigger.

  He reached into a trouser pocket and produced another wedge of notes, all seemingly £20 ones, folded in half and obviously old.

  ‘From the bank, you said,’ I said vaguely.

  Tigger wasn’t looking at me. He was trying to put an arm around the vagrant’s shoulder. Needing both hands, he pushed the notes back into a pocket.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let it ride.’

  It suddenly didn’t seem important to ask Tigger where he’d got the money. Notes like that would never have come out of a hole-in-the-wall cash machine, even if there had been one at the bank Tigger said he’d been to.

  The reason I stopped worrying about it was that I got my first good look at the corpse Tigger was trying to resurrect. It wasn’t a corpse, of course, it was a kid – a skinny blond boy who could pass for 18 in a dimly lit pub and maybe fool the Social Security that he was 16, but was probably nearer 13. Along with his vomit-stained T-shirt he wore a pair of black ski pants, but no shoes. The black footstraps were indistinguishable from the filthy soles of his feet. I looked back to his face as Tigger tried to raise his head again.

  ‘Come on, Lee, it’s OK, you’re down now,’ he was saying. The kid’s head snapped back, a lock of blond hair stuck to one cheek with snot or vomit or saliva. He didn’t seem to have any eyeballs, or none that faced outwards anyway.

  ‘What’s he on?’ I asked, not wanting to know, because it would mean I would be involved.

  ‘He’s been to a party,’ said Tigger, still trying to get the kid upright. ‘These aren’t his clothes. It was that sort of party.’

  ‘I didn’t ask about his dress sense or his social life.’

  ‘I think he’s been smoking Amp,’ said Tigger quietly.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘I think he’s broken his hand, but he doesn’t know it yet.’

  He moved to one side so I could see the kid’s right hand. At first guess I would have said a Number 159 bus had run over it. Possibly a 73. That was why Tigger had crouched the way he had, shielding the crushed hand, which was red with blood and black with dirt. The dirt you could clean, but no-one touches blood these days.

  ‘Probably did it when he landed,’ I offered.

  Tigger nodded and just breathed.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Amp’ , believe it or not, is good old marijuana – that quaint social drug from those innocent days when people smoked and wore fur – soaked in embalming fluid. Now who thought that one up?

  The effects of smoking it (and it’s easier to buy than cigarette tobacco on some railway stations) were similar to that of the drug PCP, which the Americans called ‘Angel Dust’. In the early ‘80s, there had been numerous cases of Angel Dusters trying to take on the rush hour traffic in the middle of the Los Angeles freeway system. I had once met a paramedic with the LA Fire Department who had seen Viet Nam and the Watts riots and gone into blazing buildings without turning a hair, who dreaded attending a call out to an Angel Duster.

  ‘Where did he get it?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Somewhere, a couple of streets away, a burglar alarm went off. It was nothing to do with us, and under normal circumstances, we would have put it down to the white noise of London’s street life. At that time of day it was invariably going to be either an employee arriving early at a shop or a cleaner leaving an office without thinking. But the noise galvanised us into action.

  ‘You wanted to go to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tigger, looking all the time at Lee’s boyish face, not at me. ‘There’s a medic, a lady doctor, comes round first thing in a morning, just to check on us – them.’

  ‘Then let’s go. The meter’s running, so to speak. Waiting time’s extra.’

  Minicabs, which Armstrong now pretended to be, don’t have meters, just rates per mile, and any extra waiting time usually came out as the driver’s tip.

  Tigger nodded gratefully but still did not move. Down the street, a couple of women on their way to work crossed to the other side of the road to avoid walking near us.

  ‘Come on, Tigger, let’s roll.’

  ‘I can’t lift him by myself,’ he said, his voice cracking.

  I bit my lower lip, then opened Armstrong’s door and reached into the glove compartment for a pair of the plastic gloves I’d used before when we were in the van.

  I pulled them on and took Lee by his left arm and leg, leaving Tigger to handle the damaged side, and we bundled him into the back of the cab.

  Tigger sat with Lee’s head in his lap and didn’t say a word all the way over to Lincoln’s Inn. I made a mental note to remind myself to burn the gloves as soon as I got the chance, and to steal another three pairs from the garage the next time I filled up with diesel.

  It pays to think ahead.

  Despite its resident population, Lincoln’s Inn Fields still remains a regular pit-stop for real black cabs and real cabbies. You can find up to 20 parked along the east side of the Fields at certain times of day, near the public toilets, which, surprisingly, given the resident squatters, are in pretty good shape. It is sufficiently off the beaten track to enable a professional musher to have ten minutes with a newspaper, a sandwich or just a quick kip, without being pestered by potential fares or, even worse, tourists wanting directions but not a cab ride.

  I turned Armstrong into the Fields from Holborn and pulled up, not wanting to go round the square and mix with the professionals. They didn’t like delicensed black cabs being run by anyone in London, and certainly not operated as minicabs.

  ‘Where’s this medic, then?’ I asked Tigger over my shoulder.

  ‘She should be ... there ... over there by the camouflage basha.’

  I spotted what he meant. Someone had used Army camouflage netting, two poles and two branches of a plane tree to construct a three-sided tent with a sagging roof. Outside it stood a tall, thin woman in a white surgical coat. She seemed to be negotiating with the inhabitant of the basha and not at all keen to bend do
wn and crawl inside.

  I turned back to Tigger. ‘Can he walk?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘But he’s breathing more confidently.’

  Oh great. We faced the prospect of carrying him between us like some safari kill. As if Tigger couldn’t draw enough attention to himself normally.

  ‘What’s the medic called?’ I tried.

  ‘Doc,’ said Tigger. Then: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see if she makes house calls.’

  She did, or at least she thought it perfectly natural to treat a comatose young druggie with a broken hand in the back of a taxi at the side of the road as the civilians wandered by to their office jobs.

  ‘Doc’ had spine-length hair twisted tight into a pony tail and segmented every three inches or so by a coloured rubber band. As she bent over to look at Lee in the back of Armstrong, I could see that her designer-label jeans fitted her well, with no visible panty line.

  In an accent that I later found out was Canadian, she gave me instructions to drive to what she called a safe house on Gray’s Inn Road, close to the hospital. There were no prizes for guessing it was a house occupied by medics – students and junior doctors – who ran a vigilante rescue service for druggies and drop-outs. I’d heard of a similar operation up at the university teaching hospital that ran a helpline for sexually transmitted diseases.

  On the way there, she asked Tigger a battery of questions about Lee’s health, diet and lifestyle, though she never asked his name. Once there, she jumped out of Armstrong and ran to the voice-access bell push.

  She said something and headed back. Within a minute, two other females had opened the door and joined us.

  Between them, they bundled Lee into the house without asking for help from either Tigger or me.

  ‘Hey, Doc,’ I shouted, but not too loudly, ‘will he be able to play the violin when you’ve finished with him?’

  ‘Sure he will,’ she said, giving me a smile.

  ‘That is fucking amazing, Doc, ‘cos he couldn’t play a note up till now.’

  It got a laugh and broke the tension. Even Tigger smiled nervously.

  ‘I’d better stay and see he’s okay,’ he said. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Make it 20 quid,’ I said, bumping the mileage rate. Tigger handed over two £20 notes without blinking and stood in front of me weighing up the rest of his roll of notes.

  ‘I’d better make a donation or something,’ he said vaguely. ‘Doc looks after us, you know.’

  ‘She’s very impressive,’ I offered, realising how difficult it was to fold money while wearing plastic gloves.

  ‘Never preaches, never grasses.’

  ‘A real saint. See you around.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll be in touch. Owe you one.’

  He pointed a finger at me like a gun then skipped up the stairs and into the safe house.

  On the Thursday, Tigger rang and arranged a meet for the Friday night for another little driving job. I agreed to meet him at 11.30 in Lambeth, near the hospital and the Elephant and Castle tube station.

  The mention of a hospital prompted me to ask after Lee, but Tigger seemed vague and uninterested, dismissing me with: ‘Yeah, yeah, he’s fine. See you tomorrow and don’t hang about.’

  He was no more forthcoming the next night. I watched him walk, jog and hop through the streetlight towards Armstrong and put it down to his normal hyperactive self. His natural mode of movement seemed to be based on a Michael Jackson video played backwards.

  ‘You can leave the cab here,’ he said through my window. ‘The van’s round the corner.’

  ‘Hi, there, Tigger, good to see you,’ I said sarcastically. ‘How’s Lee?’

  ‘He’s going to be all right,’ Tigger replied without looking at me. ‘I’m going to look after him. Come on, we’ve got to get this shit over to Globe Town.’

  ‘What? Back over the river?’ I fell into step beside him, although Tigger would never be able to say ‘Walk this way,’ as no-one else could.

  ‘Yes. Same place as last time.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t there anywhere around here we can dump it?’

  He held out a set of keys as we turned a corner. Twenty yards away was a parked white Transit van.

  ‘It’s got to be Globe Town and I’ll make it worth your while, because this could be the last run.’

  ‘How worth my while?’ I asked, pulling on the pair of leather gloves I’d remembered to bring.

  ‘Double.’

  ‘Okay. I can be bought.’

  I slowed down as we turned off Roman Road and approached the junkyard.

  ‘Just go in the yard and turn round this time,’ Tigger said quietly.

  ‘What’s up?’ I was instantly nervous and ready to hit reverse. ‘Does the alarm system work all of a sudden?’

  ‘No, nothing like that, I’ve just found a better place. Trust me, Angel. Stay in here and let me do the dirty work. Keep the engine running if you want. Trust me, there’s nobody here.’

  I eased the van through the half-open gate advertising Hubbard’s Yard and swung it round in a circle, killing the lights in the process. I left the engine ticking over.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ said Tigger, slithering across the seat. He was wearing a shell suit with purple and orange stripes. It looked like the sort of garment they give you after they’ve taken away your real clothes and sharp objects and put you in the cell next door to that nice Dr Lecter.

  He turned as he opened his door, but I held up a hand to forestall him.

  ‘If you say “Trust me” one more time, I’m phoning the Samaritans.’

  ‘Give ‘em my love,’ he grinned, jumping out.

  ‘Yeah, I reckoned you’d have an account with them,’ I said to myself.

  I switched off the engine and took the keys from the ignition. I had wound down my window by the time Tigger appeared sheepishly with his hand out.

  ‘Er … the back doors are locked.’ He saw the dangling keys. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Want a hand, to speed things up?’ I offered.

  ‘No.’ He said it quickly; too quickly. ‘I can manage. Don’t get out.’

  I stayed in the cab, my fingers twitching on the wheel until he had opened the back doors and brought back the keys. Knowing I could at least drive away calmed me down a bit, but not enough. In the wing mirrors I could see Tigger taking two black plastic bags on a trip to somewhere in the darkness of the yard, and once I heard a screech of metal and a crash, followed by a distinct ‘Shite!’ as something gave way under him.

  He made three trips in all; six bags. Then he appeared at my window again.

  ‘Got a pen on you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ I said, startled, but handing over a black felt-tip.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he said and winked.

  He disappeared back into the yard and was gone for three or four minutes before reappearing in the nearside mirror. As he walked towards the passenger door, I could see him tucking an envelope into the waistband of his trousers. ‘That’s it, we’re out of here,’ he said, piling in.

  ‘You said something about double the wages.’ I held out a hand. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean I have to ask you twice.’ He sighed and tore open a velcro pocket. ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ he said, handing over a fold of notes.

  ‘That way I’m rarely disappointed.’

  Tigger held up his right hand as if he was administering a blessing.

  ‘I abjure thee, vile spirit and by expelling thee, heal all wounds.’

  I started the Transit’s engine. ‘Don’t throw a wobbler on me now, Tigger. Wait till we’re south of the river.’

  ‘No wobblers.’ He drummed a riff on the dashboard. ‘Job’s done, time to take a break. I’m going to have a monster weekend.’

  ‘Good for you.’ I
was concentrating on my mirror looking for rogue police cars or some of the local tribesmen. It wasn’t a good area to be cruising after midnight. Even the pit bulls went round in pairs.

  ‘You can drop me at the Ritz,’ Tigger said dreamily.

  ‘Sure.’ I let him see me eyeing his shell suit. ‘Formal dress tonight, is it?’

  ‘Now, now, you old tart, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.’

  I checked the rearview again and reckoned we were free and clear.

  ‘I know I’m going to regret this, but tried what?’

  ‘The Friday night throw-outs from the kitchens. Once the rich people have gone, the street people get to lick the plates.’

  ‘Tigger, you’ve just given me two hundred notes, so somewhere about your unwashed little person, you’ve got at least the same if not more. You can afford a square meal, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Angel. You get to meet some interesting street people. Lots of kids from up north, middle-class runaways, druggies, winos – all human lowlife is there. And then, of course, there are the rich punters looking to pick up a bit of lowlife to satisfy their appetites.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘They’re the best of all, because they know they have to pay for their pleasure. Even if it’s not cash on the spot, they pay eventually. And they know they have to, that’s the beauty of it. They feel so guilty about their appetites …’

  ‘Tigger, I really don’t want to know this,’ I sighed.

  ‘That’s what it’s all about, Angel. Appetites. Satisfy your appetites as soon as you can. Find out what you like, have your fill, then move on. If you don’t, you’ll miss out and regret it forever, or you’ll try later in life and your appetites will betray you.’

  ‘Tigger, that’s bullshit.’

  ‘Well, excuse me, Mr Conformity. Pardon me if my lifestyle offends, but from where I’m sitting, the only thing that’s different between us is that I’m still young enough to be taking my chances and enjoying them.’

  I checked the mirrors again and dropped down a gear. ‘There are other differences. Important ones.’