When he got back to Hogie and Jools, there was already quite a crowd. Hogie was entertaining a bunch of strangers with the story of the barmaid and her racist refusal to accept any credit card issued by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Someone asked, “How many cards you got?”
“Around ten. Visa, American Express and one Diners Club.”
“Ten? All stolen?”
“No, none are stolen. They’re copies. Me and Cheb are going to set ourselves up in business making more.’
Cheb came up on his blind side, slapping him across the head and slipping a gram of whizz into his hand as he spun around.
“Here, I got some trips as well. Better than an E, we won’t end up with Alzheimers.”
Hogie stared at the tiny squares of acid, squinting at the picture in the centre of each tab. “Purple dragons? Nice one, Cheb. What do I owe you?”
“On the house, courtesy of the Cheb credit plan.” Then whispering, “Just don’t tell everyone about the fucking cards.”
“You getting antsy, mate.”
“I’m fine.”
“No mate, you’re anxious.” Hogie gave him the full comic Oprah, holding out his arms. ‘Do you want to share?”
Cheb took a step back to look him up and down. “You’re fucking beautiful, you know that?”
“Yeah? Then come on felch me you donkey dick bastard.”
Cheb was laughing but he dried up as soon as Jools came pushing through. She’d caught a sniff of the drugs and was whining for her share. He passed her a wrap and a trip. Off to his side, he saw Hogie slope off but before he could follow she had him cornered. She told him she wanted to know about Buddhism. She had this idea it might help with her television career.
The sound system had cranked up a notch, still on overture mode but beginning to throw out dark hints: slow, deep House veined through with trippy beeps. Hogie swam into it, leaving Cheb to set Jools straight on Buddhist law. Cheb loved explaining that stuff. Only it seemed to Hogie he never quite repeated the principles the exact same way every time. Still, it was Jools’s call. So long as it kept her busy.
Hogie kept moving, managing to hit every fault line as he threaded his way along. If the crowd wouldn’t part for him, he turned himself into Elastic Man and slipped through anyhow. Eventually, he found the toilets at the foot of a dead-end flight of stairs. The stalls were full but the cubicle was free. Locked inside, he laid his speed out on the top of the cistern box. The painted metal was flaking and rusting but he found a flattish patch and snorted off that.
When the speed kicked in a half hour later he was still wandering, trying to get his bearings while he scouted out Mannie. The way the club was laid out, it was easy to get lost. Far easier to just keep moving and wait for events to arise. Just now, it was time to take his Purple Dragon. As the acid touched the back of his throat, he felt the twang of electricity play across the nape of his neck and shoot down his spine. His solar plexus tightened and relaxed. It would be three-quarters of an hour before the sideshow began but the whole of his body was already in serious chemicular anticipation. By the time he came face-to-face with his boy on the steps down to the ambient room he had forgotten he was even looking for him. He ended up throwing him a hug, saying: Yeah, I Love You Mannie Mate.
“Your eyes, Hoges.”
Hogie opened wide. “They looking good?”
“Like fucking saucers. Scary. Wrap your smile around this.”
He handed over a loose-packed spliff. Hogie drew hard on the extra-long roach, holding the smoke tight to his gullet as he passed it back with a throaty thanks.
Mannie said, “You seen my sister?”
“Not lately.”
“Well I’ve seen Cheb and he says she’s looking for us both. Apparently she’s complaining the speed was dud so the bastard said either me or you would give her more.“
“Oh shit.”
Mannie crossed himself, “Come on, we’re dancing. If we move fast enough, she won’t be able to catch us.”
He led Hogie through a rubberised tunnel, ending in a low room, pumped with dry-ice. The heat from the dancers had turned into vapour, reeking of poppers and Vicks chest rub. Mannie was handed a bottle of amyl and he passed it onto Hogie. The fumes opened out inside his lungs. He just had time to re-cap the bottle before his head went upside in a blast of red noise. The music was punching up into a mindless frenzy. He loved it. As he danced he made silent Woo-Woo train noises with his mouth, sucking at the air in shallow gulps. His arms jacked out in front of him like a mad drill.
Mannie nudged him and passed a cigarette over. He took it without noticing it wasn’t a spliff. As he dragged at the filter, something boiled over inside him, kicking a thermodynamic charge straight to his heart. The cigarette had been soaked in amyl. Fuck, Hogie thought. I fucking love this. Woo Woo. He propelled himself backwards, into the pulp core of dancers hoping the crush of bodies would form a protective circle. Across the room, he thought he heard Jools shout his name but she didn’t come after him. Soon he was flailing through new waves of dry-ice, losing himself in the lighting patterns, the sequencers, the bpm’s. A girl stroked down his spine with her fingemail and when he turned his smile onto her, she smiled back. Her eyes were round and framed in shadows of blueish grey. Her lips were pulled thin by her smile and her hair lay flat and wet against her skull. She might have been nineteen. She bore an imprint of what she might look like in thirty years time. Later days. Later days. Hogie would come back to her if he could. He flung his arms up in the air and span away. Mannie rose up ahead of him, taking the pace up a gear, his six skinny arms waving like Shiva. Hogie kept the faith. He could not believe how fast his legs were moving, they were a blur below him. They bicycled around like the legs of the Roadrunner when he hurtles past Wile E Coyote. Woo Woo.
Jools dragged him off the dancefloor by his elbows. He stood, melting in sweat, trying to catch his wet breath as she talked up at him. The hot drops of water sliding across his face picked up salt from his hair and stung his eyes. Mannie had disappeared. He couldn’t concentrate on Jools or the words tumbling out of her widening plastic mouth.
She was saying she had a fear of celebrity stalkers. Whenever she went to the bar, she could feel every sleaze in the place trying to close in on her. Wherever she went, they started crowding in and asking what would happen in the next episode of Pony Trek. Could he imagine what that felt like?
Jools had the most unseductive whine. She pleaded with him as she stroked the back of his head. “Let me come and stay with you in London.”
Hogie could have choked. “No way. I mean, don’t you have to work?”
“Didn’t you hear? I’ve been killed-off. A drunk driver swerves across the road and I’m crushed. So can I come and stay with you?”
Hogie scrolled through a stack of excuses. His flat was a slum clearance project, halfway to a fucking barrio, especially since Cheb had flown in with no home of his own. And if she wanted to hear about work, that was another impossibility. Since he’d landed the new job, he had a mass of preparation to think through. He had no space, he had no time, he couldn’t help her and that was the truth. She looked like she had something to say but Hogie started running. He knew if he stayed talking any longer, he’d end by mentioning the opening night party.
Straight up two flights of stairs, he found himself in a pizza queue. The smell of bad food had always made him nauseous. After a full gram of sulphate, the nausea was worse than ever. He staggered round until he found a back staircase and leapt out, touching down in the chill-out room where a warm-oil show was playing across the ceiling and the floor was layered deep in mattresses. The music here was ambient, meaninglessly trippy, but aside from a zippy chick in a tinfoil dress the room was empty. Hogie leapt across her and nose-dived into the mattresses, she followed him with her eyes.
“Hey, you’re the Top Chef guy, right?”
He looked up, surprised, trying to focus. “Yeah, did you see me on television that on
e time?”
“No. There was a bald guy in here, he described you. What’s a gerontophile?”
Hogie didn’t know.
“He said you were one and that you’d fucked his mother.”
Hogie flicked to alert “Jesus no. Was he freaking?”
‘Oh yeah, totally.” The girl seemed happy about it. “He was off the fucking wall, screaming the Viet Cong were coming to kill him. You should have seen him.”
Hogie tried to get up but his feet had collapsed into the mattress. He was being sucked down.
Way, way above him, he heard Mannie shouting. “You got to help, mate. Cheb’s freaked on us.”
FOUR
The carpark at Frankie’s local had plenty of empty spaces behind its chainlink gate but Susan drove around until she found somewhere else. Eventually, she parked high above the shopping street on the hill overlooking the shoreline. After central-locking the Mercedes, she hurried downhill on the shadowy side of the street. It was too early in the year for the holiday crowds and the home-grown Andalucians were on siesta. Susan hardly saw anyone all the way to the Plaza San Sebastian. Callum lived in a flat above an office selling time-shares. She took the steps round the back of the block and hung on his doorbell until she was sure no one would answer. She let herself in. She hadn’t seen his Mazda Miata out on the street but she still half expected him to be home.
Usually, the only place Callum went during the day was El Tozo’s record shop. He spent most of his day listening to the latest releases, mostly imports. Later on, he would stop by a few bars before heading off to the club where he worked as a DJ. Four pm was usually a good time to catch him before he disappeared for the night but he’d always been difficult to keep track of.
There was a half-eaten sausage on a plate on the breakfast bar but she didn’t know if it was left from that morning or the evening before. The floor was scattered with torn cigarettes and the air was rank with the smell of stale dope. She opened a window but that hardly helped. While she walked around, she called out his name but there was no reply. His bed was empty except for a pile of dirty washing and, on top, the contents of the leather satchel she’d intended to take as hand luggage. She found the bag dumped at the bottom of his wardrobe but there was no sign of her suitcase.
She began looking for the airline tickets and the keys to their London flat, at first briskly and then more thoroughly. They weren’t among the loose change and papers she scooped back into her satchel. Looking around the rest of the flat she found a few things she recognised as hers: a couple of LPs she’d bought when she was dating a Canvey Island soul boy in the early seventies, during one of Frankie’s longer prison sentences. She didn’t know why Callum had taken them, unless he planned on starting a revival. She put them in her bag and started flicking through the rest of his collection to see what else he’d stolen. Inside a blank CD case she found a poorly re-folded wrap holding more than a gram of a chunky powder, maybe cocaine but more probably speed. Callum had left his photo album lying on the coffee table and its vinyl cover was criss-crossed with the dust trails of old lines. A semi-unfurled fifty peseta note lay nearby. She dropped the wrap into her bag with her records.
She left the photo album where it was.
Susan knew all about his photo collection and thought it was disgusting. Every picture showed a girl wearing Callum’s dressing gown, sat on Callum’s sofa. A different girl in every photo. Susan could imagine the line Callum would use in the mornings: “Here, put this on and I’ll make us a Spanish breakfast. Hey, why don’t I take a photo of you? Is that okay? Oh, yeah. You look beautiful.” There were at least fifty photographs in the album, the last time she looked. Every one with the same lighting and arrangement, right down to the props. Even the girls’ expressions were similar. At least Callum didn’t collect their underwear. Still, it was disgusting. Even if she had ended up laughing the first time she told George Carmichael about her boy’s trophy album. George would occasionally ask how the collection was progressing. She told him, briskly. George would say: One day I’ll surprise you, you’ll take a peek and see me staring back at you.
Another of his jokes. Even aside from the fact that Callum was straight and George had never liked young boys. The real joke, whenever George fantasised about a guest appearance on the Sofa Of Shame, was that it was Susan who was more likely to be tempted by a shallow, stupid kid.
‘It could be you, on a different sofa, in another town.”
“No. I refuse their dressing gowns and I never pose.”
“Not even on video.”
“No,” Susan had said. “Well, once. But I stole the tape and destroyed it.”
She had once asked Callum about his collection. He had shrugged. He was tall, she would say rangey. His red-blond hair whitened further by bleach or by the sun. His arms hung lean and brown out of the T-shirts he always wore. He caught his tan coming home from nightclubs after dawn. Apart from the tan, she’d always believed he looked more like her than his father. He was soft, though. The wide space between his eyes made him look innocent but he was innocent anyway. And his eyes were not simply spaced apart, they were spaced-out. She asked him what he thought he’d be doing in ten years time, “Still shagging tourists and working as a DJ?”
He said, “Dunno.” They left England when Callum was ten but he still had a London accent – like his father, like all his father’s friends. “Some guys I met over in Ibiza, they reckon they could use me at their all-nighters.”
“In Ibiza?”
“Nah. In London, they run a sound-system back home.”
She’d said, “What would they want you for, your talent?” It came out sharp and as she said it, she already regretted it. But there were so many DJs around, why would anyone look at Callum and think: Yes, he’s just the top talent we need. If they’d invited him to join them, he had to be bringing something extra along – like, maybe, finance. The whole idea was stupid and she ended up telling him so.
But, then, sometime later, she began to think it over herself and the idea stuck. The two of them could go back to London together, and do it on her terms. She didn’t want to see him mixed up with any dodgy London sound-system but if he wanted to be a DJ, then why not? Maybe he did have talent Maybe she could buy a club or something and have him run it…
During the planning stages, the long distance phone calls between her and George, the idea of a nightclub was scaled down to a restaurant — it was just a case of being practical. Then, once everything was settled, she finally got around to telling Callum. Which is when she discovered that he’d kept in touch with the people he’d met in Ibiza and had already made his own plans. She nearly got into another shouting match, then, but thought better of it. When they got back to London she’d find a way to run things to her liking. That’s the way she had rationalised it – but she didn’t know where the hell he’d got to now. She looked at the clock flashing on his VCR. Their flight was in less than four hours.
There was one other photo in the flat, a new one, blu-tacked to the alcove around the breakfast bar. A group shot taken at the marina, it showed Frankie and his drinking pals clowning on the deck of My Lady Suzie. The whole crew were striking Jack-the-Lad poses that they were too old to justify. Susan pulled the picture down and began looking around for a bin when she caught sight of Callum. Off-centre, by the aerial mast, he was definitely out of place but trying his best to fit in: his lips were curled into a Gooner’s sneer and he held a foaming bottle of San Miguel to his crotch. She paused then dropped the picture in her bag, alongside everything else she was going to make the boy apologise for.
Before she left she thought to check his answering machine. The first message was from a girl with a Welsh accent, speaking through tears as she said she loved him and promising to write everyday. The time code put the message at 8:00pm so Callum hadn’t been home all night. The second message was from a friend he DJ-ed with at a nightclub further down the coast, asking him not to forget the whizz when he came over
that night. Susan thought, he’ll be lucky, now she had the speed bagged away.
The third message was from Frankie and was for her.
“He’s gone you stupid tart.”
There was a short burst of laughter before the phone clicked. The time code said twelve noon.
*
Susan ran uphill to the Mercedes, holding the car keys ahead of her and beeping wildly at the car. The central locking flashed off and on twice. Then she couldn’t get the keys in the lock. She slammed her flat palm on the roof. She had to calm down.
When the engine turned over, she pulled away slowly and crept down the hill towards the pub. The carpark was much fuller but the chainlink fence had been removed. At least she didn’t have to get in and out of the car before entering. She wasn’t sure she was steady enough to stand again and she didn’t want to slip before her showdown with Frankie. As she parked, she twisted the a/c dial to deep freeze and stayed seated in the car until she was chilled. Her jeep was sat across the way, Frankie was back from a day killing animals in the mountains. If he’d ever gone in the first place. She looked round slowly when she caught the tapping at the passenger side window. It was Cardiff, Frankie’s sleaziest sidekick. Another North London boy, fat and greying, wheezing so loudly she could hear it over the air conditioning and through the glass. He had one short fat finger out and was miming circles in the air so she’d unwind the window. She pressed the button and the glass slid down.
“Alright, love? How’s it going? fighting fucking fit, I bet.”
Susan said, “I’m fine.”
“That’s the fucking ticket. You coming in for a drink, girl?”
She got out of the car and walked over to the entrance with Cardiff wheezing beside her, his fat legs pummelling the blacktop. The evening breeze had sprung up early today. Susan felt its faint breath against the backs of her legs. Above her head, the pub sign swung an inch to the left, an inch to the right The colours of the Union Jack glowed in the still bright sunshine, the sun now level with the top of the highest roofs. She passed into the dark pub.
Jello Salad Page 3
