When he stopped in the middle of the street, he said; “Do you want to get out now?”
Naz started opening the door. Mannie said, “Why, what’s the problem?”
Naz said, “The guy’s got to park.”
They were outside a flat—roofed Victorian house. There was a buzzer for every storey but only the upper floor button was decorated with a water-transfer of the Silver Surfer. Mannie looked at it, rolled his eyes upwards and pressed. He and Naz waited in the porch, watching Hogie try to edge his big car into its parking space and listening as the sound of footsteps inside the house got louder. The door opened before Hogie was even half way through his manoeuvre. Mannie turned and found himself looking at his sister.
What struck him first: her mascara had run. Looking closer, he could see tears backed-up in her eyes. He thought to ask if she was okay but she didn’t look ready to talk, only turned around and started trudging back up the stairs. Naz pushed ahead of him, keeping one pace behind Jools. Mannie stayed at the back, weighed down by the bags.
She left the flat door open but carried on walking, through to a room at the back. Mannie only caught a glimpse of the decor before she slammed the door. He recognised the Chebbish traits like the silver foil taped to the walls. He’d seen a man on TV describe the way the foil would amplify a room’s latent energy and deflect it to specific focal points. He’d thought at the time it was an idea Cheb would go for.
Even before Hogie got in, Naz was comfortable on the sofa, licking strips of Rizlas. As he fitted them together, he said, “So, what’s wrong with her?”
Mannie shook his head.
“Some woman thing or what?”
He doubted it. When Jools had woman’s things, it was always more dramatic. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her so mute, so depressed.
By the time Hogie came stumbling through the door, Naz had the joint all fired up. When he asked who was going to make the tea his voice came out in the breathless choke of a man savouring his first blast. Mannie went to the kitchen area and shook the kettle. Hogie followed, ready to help by locating the ingredients.
Naz shouted, “Make a cup for your sister as well. Does she have sugar?”
He was stretched out on the sofa, his head overhanging one arm and his feet the other, relaxed. He didn’t seem to mind that Jools was in the middle of some kind of breakdown. Like he was playing a longer, waiting game. Mannie had to ask himself how long this London holiday was going to last.
He and Hogie stayed huddled in the kitchenette until the kettle was boiled and then stood silently over the four mugs as they waited for them to brew. When there was no more hope, Mannie slopped out the bags and carried two mugs over to Naz.
Naz had swallowed up the whole joint and was back on his feet He grabbed the teas, saying: “Sweet. I’ll take them through.”
Mannie watched him go. There was a knock at the end of the corridor and the sound of the door opening. That was it.
He and Hogie spent the next few hours watching re-runs of seventies TV on cable. It was getting dark and Mannie was already worried they might begin to hear certain sounds through the wall. Hogie had the same thought, using the remote to keep prodding at the volume until the flashing lights on the VCR panel nudged over to the red. No doubt, the flat was a disaster area.
Just when Mannie knew he couldn’t stand it any longer, Hogie was there first.
“We’ve got to get out, Mannie man.” He was ready to buy the drinks just so long as they got out now.
They were walking down Camden Road, back towards the heart of Camden, when Hogie said: “It’s down to Cheb, he’s got to get rid of them.”
Mannie said, “Why do you think he asked Naz down anyway?”
ELEVEN
Cheb couldn’t say exactly how he came to take the job but one of the things he insisted on: he couldn’t do it on his own.
Carmichael hadn’t argued. The boy in the bin was about six foot tall and weighed at least one hundred and fifty pounds Cheb scaled in closer to one-twenty.
He said, ‘That’s fine. Hire who you want, its your decision.” He held out his hand and Cheb found himself holding it, shaking it. The deal done.
As Carmichael was leaving, Cheb said: “Why aren’t we calling the cops?”
He turned back at the door, nothing more than a swift look over his shoulder as he said: “I’m a restauranteur, not a police informant.”
Cheb could have spent the rest of the afternoon thinking that one through, if he could have thought about anything.
One of his problems, he hadn’t been able to eat since Manchester. The last time he’d tried, the night before, he’d opened the fridge and found a fish pie Hogie had made; ingredients: a tin of Campbell’s soup, a tin of tuna and some kind of crumbled biscuit on the top. Cooking for himself, Hogie mostly used crumbled biscuit and either Campbell’s soup or yoghurt, depending whether the recipe was sweet or savoury—peach or pineapple slices when it was both. That was the problem of shopping after midnight when only the Paki supermarkets and petrol stations were open. Cheb had taken the pie and given it to the microwave. It came out fine but he still couldn’t eat it.
Now, sitting in the kitchen a few yards from the body, he only had enough appetite for the smallest meal: one tab of acid and a gram of sulphate. When he next opened the bin lid and looked down, he felt less overwhelmed, which was good. But he was still short on the inspiration adequate to the undertaking. It wasn’t enough to just do a job of work, it had to be done with sympathy and a sense of destiny.
He toppled the bin and dragged the corpse out onto the kitchen floor. The boy seemed whiter than he had that morning, perhaps an effect of the fluorescent lighting, lifting the shadows of daylight and turning the kitchen into a sci-fi sterile morgue. The light brought out the bruises on the boy’s face; like freezer bags of purplish stock, frozen borsch sealed in cloudy skin. The worst of the damage around the left side but also encompassing the broken nose. Then, aside from the stove brand across his backside, precious little damage to the rest of the body. Looking at the face, Cheb got the idea of buying a rapist-style mask from one of the Soho sex shops, something with a zipper mouth and sealed eye pieces that would cover the bruises completely He wasn’t sure the strategy answered but he felt like getting out. He justified it: he was putting some distance into his planning. Rather than let the problem play over and over in his mind, he’d lift the needle out of the groove and busk it.
The evening breeze was beginning to sneak under the car fumes and clear the air. As he set out from the restaurant, Cheb felt he was breathing freely for the first time that day. He tried to centre on the tripping buzz in his chest, tune to the pulsing lights of strip joints and bookshops around him. Basically, feel the Brownian motion at the heart of the capital.
A Manchester-born boy, he’d never got around to London before he moved in with Hogie. But towards the end of his time out East, he borrowed a map of Britain and traced the path of each road and rail track London was the place where the lines warped and collapsed, the twist at the centre of the paper, the un-ironable kink. He pictured the city as a Gothic version of Singapore, or maybe Hong Kong an international city cut free of any local significance. But unlike the other cities, London came with a history. Take any of the words that tagged with London and you got a wide-screen picture of medieval horror. bloody towers, falling bridges, fog, fire, plague, blitz. The words meshed with the stories he’d first heard as a kid and later caught in bars on the satellite news channels: ferries sinking in the Thames, the monarchy collapsing in flames and vomit, live-TV pics of ministers stalking mad cows across the lawns of parliament. Above all, he saw a monster fed on global money, tearing chunks out of the digiverse and sucking them down into its hell. London was a blast of the unreal, the last City, the baseline for the entire chaosphere. Landing at Heathrow was like touching down at ground zero. His close reading of the map convinced him. The timelines, the flight arrows, the roads of England and the folds
of the map all concentrated on a black spot, a negative space like the shadow on a catastrophe graph where every fact gets flipped onto a new scenario: from cuddly puppy to rabid hound, light sleep to nightmare, pedestrianised strip to riot-zone et cetera and contrapuntally yours, London.
Faced with the corpse, Cheb almost lost the full breadth of this vision and got hooked on the blackness. But now the feeling of dynamic possibility was coming back, stronger than ever. He’d find a way to slip into the folds of the catastrophe, ride the cusp and see how far he could flip. He could feel his synapses twang. He was going to have no problem losing the stiff. Throw it out into the night, let it skip and bounce away to another level.
Passing along Old Compton Street, he mixed with the crowds falling kerbside into the chocka coffee shops, a thousand dilated eyes hovering over café lattes. Cheb kept scooting. He had an agenda, he was on a sex shop prowl. No time to be looking at the fauna hereabouts.
A neon silhouette pinned to the window of an old strip joint showed a woman, outlined in pink with bright blue nipples. As the light flickered she appeared to slink across the glass. A display case by the door was filled with coy photographs but a poster promised All-Naked All-Nite Strip-Ola. The neon sign flashed all the way back to the sixties. None of the newer shops he visited had as much style. As he shopped, the assistants tried to interest him in their videos and he watched whatever they showed him. One that kept recurring featured a pale German girl pushing a slippy hand up another girl’s bum. As a twist on the camel-through-a-needle gimmick, it still had some appeal. He once read that the Mayans incorporated fisting into a few of their rites. He didn’t know who’d revived it: from Meso-America to Mittel Europe, a hand across the millenia. Although Cheb had seen similar stunts in Bangkok.
He spent hours searching the specialist shops on the northside of Soho. He never saw a mask he liked, nothing but fra.il constructions in cheap vinyl, impulse buys for tourists who would split the welded seams when they grimaced under duress. When he was asked if he wanted to try something on for size, he was too depressed.
The assistant said, “Is it for your partner?”
Dog-tired of looking at racks of plasticky cowls, jocks and restrainers, he said: “Yeah. Have you got anything about Airedale size? I need one with holes so the ears can poke out.”
He walked out of the shop and stood at the edge of Dean Street, where Soho was bisected by Shaftesbury Avenue. Ahead of him lay London’s Chinatown. He pouted eastwards with amphetamine eyes. The mask idea hadn’t panned out but he wasn’t beaten yet. He was just waiting for the cavalry.
*
George Carmichael had a bottle of gin in one hand and a swinging sack of two lemons in the other. He said: “Why are you so sure it’s cocaine?”
Susan looked from him to the six bags stood on the kitchen table. She said, “Come on. What else would they be? What else would you smuggle from Spain to England?”
George thought; Picassos, El Grecos, broken down donkeys, bull’s cojones and, before skunk weed was invented, black Moroccan. He said, “Okay. It’s probably cocaine. Why did Frankie do it?”
“Because the bastard’s senile. I’d bet it wasn’t even his idea. Callum’s been messing around with some nutters of his own lately—they probably sold him on the idea and told him to get his dad to bankroll it. And Frankie would have agreed. He‘s changed a lot. If you saw him, you’d understand. The soft life doesn’t suit him. These days he’s nothing but a slobbering psychotic bum, growing maudlin about the old days.”
She had a photograph in her hand, her proof. A picture of Frankie and some other men, playing about the deck of a yacht.
George said, “What’s this, a holiday snap?”
She shook her head: It was no holiday.
George took the photo and scanned across it, finding Frankie standing just off-centre. He said, “It looks as though he should cut down on cholesterol. Blood pressure might be a future health worry.’ He took a closer look. “Who are the flickers around him?”
“Who don’t you recognise?”
Squinting now: “That’s not Cardiff is it?”
Susan nodded.
“What’s he doing in the picture?”
“That’s it: Frankie’s gang. The people he hangs out with.”
George couldn’t believe it. “What happened to the guys who pulled the bullion job with him?”
“What do you think?”
George said, “No.”
“Frankie said it would make waiting easier if only one person had to be patient instead of six.”
“They’re all dead?”
She nodded.
“I heard a few whispers but nothing like that. I knew one of them had died in a drugs deal that went wrong. Who was that, Jimmy Viva?”
“Jimmy was the third to go. Frankie paid for him to be thrown overboard, halfway between Morocco and Gib. They’re a lost generation, George. No one noticed they were all dying.”
“And now Frankie hangs out with slags like Cardiff?”
“Drinking in a shitty English pub and talking about the old days—when he wouldn’t have let a creep like Cardiff carry his pool cue to a beating.”
George ticked along the line of faces. He was about to hand the picture back when something about the blond boy at the end made him stop. He said: “I think I need my specs.”
Susan picked them off the table and looked over his shoulder as she passed them to him. She followed his finger and said, “My son.” And then: “What’s wrong George?‘
He knew he’d gone pale but as long as she was behind him, she couldn’t tell. He managed to shrug.
She said. “Have you seen him?”
He shook his head. “No.” Paused. “Maybe.” Another pause. “Look I don’t want to say anything now. But I promise I’ll ask around.”
She said, “Yeah, do. Because I’m going to kill the little bastard.”
*
He mixed a couple of gin and tonics and drank them both before Susan finished dressing. After he’d refreshened the glasses, he took them through to the living room. The TV was still on. He flicked through the channels but he wasn’t really thinking. It had been so easy to persuade Cheb to get rid of the body. No doubt, the kid was deranged but George had gambled on him being just sane enough to do a good, clean job. If there were any complications, George had been prepared to swear he knew nothing and pray the police swallowed it. He was certain that Susan never would.
Partners. He knocked back his third gin and poured a fourth. All day, he’d been trying to think who’d do that to him—dump him with a dead boy. The only name he came up with was Ballistic Frankie, which was why he’d never dreamed it was his son lying there. Susan’s son lying there.
“Partners.”
He looked up. Susan was standing there saying: “Wait for me, this is supposed to be a toast.”
George picked her glass off the table. She took it with her free hand. Only now, George noticed she was carrying a small mirror, holding it flat like a tea tray. There were two lines ready cut and laid out, their underside reflections making them look as thick as sugar fingers.
He thought Why not?
*
It was sometime later, Susan said: “Why don’t we kick back the carpet, have a dance here.” Then, like a delayed reaction, she was suddenly hot for the idea. “Come on George. I’ve brought a couple of my old records along with me.”
She was scrambling for her satchel, coming up with two records. ‘I found these in Callum’s flat. The bastard had stole them off me.”
George shook his head. “The AWB? What’s that?”
“The Average White Band. The record came out about 1973. You must know it.”
George shook his head. “I didn’t buy a single record for pleasure between the death of Judy Garland and the birth of the Village People.”
“That’s not true. What about the music in your clubs?”
“That was business, it was music to strip to. Songs for swingi
ng titties. I used to buy compilations of James Last, Mandingo and The Dave Pell Singers. Or stuff like TJ Brass, you know, anything that’s big on Bossa.”
Susan last heard James Last on ex-pat radio, she didn‘t remember the other names. She skimmed the Average White Band sleeve onto a table and held up her other record. “You remember this, though. Van Morrison.”
George squinted at the cover. “Maybe.”
She hoped he’d like it. Together, they’d resolved the question of the accounts. It was time he began to lighten up.
She put “Moondance” on the record player and held her arms out. As the piano chords began chiming Susan said, “Are you ready, George?” George stepped up to her and they began a slow, near classical jive.
When he first spun her out, she glided so smoothly to the ends of his outstretched fingers that he almost believed he’d made it happen. It gave him confidence. He hadn’t danced like this in years. He remembered a party, at least ten years ago, he’d agreed to dance ballroom for a laugh. It hadn’t worked: two forty-year-old men with moustaches and flight jackets, arguing about which of them should lead. In the end, George’s partner threw up his hands and flounced off. Then this skinny comic actor, well past pensionable age even then, had said he’d play femme. It had been beautiful, the old man could really dance. But not like Susan—she was a dream, she could be an icon.
Susan let herself be wound in until she was up against George’s hard, barrel-shaped chest then took two short, slightly rapid steps, backwards. She knew she was helping him out but he was light—footed and even when he was less than fluid, always managed to carry each step off with style. With subtlety, too. She didn’t notice he was wearing eau de cologne until they were cheek—to-cheek. She could hardly believe how well he’d aged, he had slipped into his mid-fifties as though that was exactly where he had always wanted to be: middle-aged, restrained and grey but super-cool. She had wondered, at least for a moment, if he was still overweight but had finally thought to hide it beneath a well—tailored suit. Dancing with him she realised that he had no more than a few pounds of fat anywhere, and all of it was laid over muscle. He was box—shaped and proud, his suit emphasised it.
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