by Liza Cody
‘What’re you doing up at this time?’ Smister snarled. ‘It isn’t even seven o’clock.’
Electra smiled at me sleepily and thumped her tall. She was warm and didn’t want to get up.
I was wet and cold but I had to tell them my plan before I forgot again.
‘You’re going to the hairdresser,’ I told Smister.
‘Like fuck, I am. I had a whole restyle a week ago. I’m perfectly happy with it.’
‘Say you’ve got split ends or something.’
‘Split ends? Me?’’ He was outraged.
‘I don’t know what you do at a hairdresser anymore, but you’ve got to go and talk to Hairy Clairey. She lives next door to Mother and she’s the World Champion gossip. She knows all and tells all.’
‘If you think I’m going to let someone called Hairy Clairey within a million miles of my head you’re even more demented than you look.’
I suddenly caught up with what Smister said about the time: it wasn’t even seven o’clock. No wonder Gram had been in such a foul mood. He hated getting up early, and after spending half the night with Natalie he’d want to sleep till noon. She didn’t know how to treat him. She wasn’t a worthy handmaiden for him.
I turned Electra out into the car park to do her business. Smister snuggled back into his sleeping bag with his back to me.
I said, ‘I’ll make coffee.’
‘Don’t even touch the Primus. You’ll break it.’
So I had to sleep till Smister woke me up with a mug of coffee at eleven.
Chapter 32
What Hairy Clairey Said
Smister was in a rancid strop when he got back from Claire’s Hair. ‘I will not say one single word to you till I’ve washed out this suburban crust. Momster, I swear to God there were old age pensioners in there waiting for their monthly blue rinse.’
‘He’s such a snob,’ I said to Electra.
‘Too right,’ Smister said, bending double over the tiny sink and turning on the water. ‘Nobody’s allowed to make my hair feel crusty. She’s made me look middle-aged. It’s unforgivable.’
I had to agree. Hairy Clairey only knew one style, and what was fine on my mother looked like shite on Smister. I should know—it was shite on me too the few times I let Mother bully me into going.
‘Okay, she’s a rubbish hairdresser,’ I said, starting to help him rinse. ‘She’s a world-class gossip though.’
‘Oh she’s that, alright.’ Smister wound a towel into a turban around his head. He examined his face in the mirror. ‘D’you think I should get my cheekbones done when I get my new boobs?’
‘Never mind your boobs; you should get new brains.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘You’re trying to wind me up, aren’t you?’
‘And it’s so easy.’ Smister sighed. ‘No wonder that arsehole dumped you. You’re no challenge. Boring.’
‘You want the body of a woman but you’ll never lose the instincts of a bitch.’
‘I’ll have the body and instincts of a goddess, thank you very much.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Don’t blame me for what your mother told her tragic hairdresser. Her words; not mine.’
‘Boring? Easy?’ My mother was dead, but she could still hurt me.
‘If you’re going to go all whiney I won’t tell you anything.’
Obviously I’d seriously annoyed him by sending him to Claire’s Hair. I said, ‘Let’s go to the pub. I’ll buy.’
‘No! I’m so fed up with you making trouble for me. We’ll have coffee here. And I’m not saying another word till you take the pledge and swear on Electra’s life you’ll stop getting twat-faced.’
I didn’t answer but I let Electra out into the car park. It had stopped raining.
Smister went on, ‘I don’t understand you. Claire said you were quiet and ladylike. You hardly ever had a drink except at Christmas. And then you started making cow’s eyes at a man half your age… ’
‘I didn’t.’ I could hear my mother’s voice coming out of Smister’s mouth. ‘There were only eleven years’ difference. That’s nothing these days.’
‘Plain, unpopular, never one to run around—in fact as far as Claire knew you’d never been out with a lad even as a teenager. Then you took up with a toy-boy and broke your mother’s heart.’ He was deliberately imitating Claire, who I knew had been mimicking my mother.
‘You’re so cruel.’ I was sobbing.
‘How am I being cruel? You forced me to go there and ask questions. You shouldn’t ask questions if you can’t take the answers.’
‘I wanted to know about now, not about years ago.’
‘She was filling in the background. I was expecting some great doomed romance but it was just banal and grubby.’
‘She was telling it wrong then,’ I shouted. ‘My love, my passion, is not banal and grubby.’
‘Nor was my hair,’ he shrieked.
‘Your hair is not as important as my life.’
‘It is my life.’
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid.’
‘You totally don’t get me. You’ll never get me.’ He was so upset his eyes filled with tears. That hadn’t happened even after Jerry-cop abused him. ‘You haven’t even said you’re sorry,’ he wailed.
My throat tightened. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m so, so sorry. Claire’s a horrible person and a worse hairdresser. I shouldn’t have sent you there.’
‘That’s all you had to say,’ he sobbed, gripping my hand. ‘And I’m sorry I said you were easy.’
We sat quiet for a minute. Then he started putting gel onto his damp hair, teasing it, drying it and keeping an eye on its progress with two mirrors. I couldn’t deny that it mattered a lot to him. But his life? I may be barmy but I’m not totally clueless.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said, when he turned off the diffuser and could hear me.
‘One drink,’ he said. ‘Only one. I mean it. And you’ve got to eat something. You haven’t eaten anything since we left the squat.’
So after he’d prettified himself to his own satisfaction he tidied me up too and we took Electra to the pub. Electra had already made friends with the landlady. She’s my ambassador. Maybe she represents my human side. The landlady, Abbie, let us into the pub as long as we sat by the door. ‘Your dog has the most beautiful eyes,’ she told me. ‘I used to have a boyfriend with exactly the same colour eyes.’
‘So did I,’ Smister said. And they giggled together like a couple of schoolgirls.
We had shepherd’s pie and peas. Smister was persuaded to give Abbie a makeover and I promised to sweep the car park so we ate for free. But we had to pay for our own wine and coffee, and Abbie watched me like a hawk while I sipped from my glass and tried to look ‘ladylike’. I’d fallen so far away from Acton’s idea of ‘ladylike’ that I didn’t know what it was anymore. Would I ever recapture it? Would I want to?
Smister said, ‘I told that hair-butcher that I was staying a few days with a friend and I’d been woken up in the dead of night by an ambulance at number 17. She said she had as well, cos she lives at 15 which is next door. She said she couldn’t get to sleep for ages afterwards worrying about that poor Mrs Attwood.’
I started to protest but he interrupted. ‘Don’t gulp. You’re only getting the one glass so don’t look at me like that. Eat your peas or I won’t tell you anymore.’
I gulped my coffee instead and burnt my tongue.
‘Anyway the butcher said that she’d met “Chantelle Attwood” one day last year when she was bringing the milk in and Chantelle was brushing leaves off the windscreen of that swanky little red Porsche. She said, “She wasn’t fooling anybody. She didn’t even wear a ring. If you ask me she deserves everything she’s going to get from that slimy little snake.” She meant your Ashmo-Devil. That’s when she st
arted filling me in on what happened to you and your mother. I shouldn’t have called it banal. I’m sure it was totally horrid.’
‘Why’s she calling that woman Chantelle?’
‘Cos it’s her name?’
‘She’s Natalie Munrow.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw her with Gram outside the National Portrait Gallery and I followed them to Haymarket. Gram took a taxi to her house in Harrison Mews. Then I saw her leaving the theatre with her friend. The next day I saw her leave the house in Harrison Mews. She was picked up by someone in a little red… oh!’
‘What?’
‘The little red Porsche was outside 17 Milton Way last night.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be—if it’s Chantelle’s car and she went there to see Gram?’
‘But… ’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. A structure was falling to pieces in my head and all I could hear was smashing glass.
‘I don’t understand why you think Chantelle’s Natalie and Natalie’s Chantelle,’ Smister said, stirring the debris in my head with a giant spoon.
I said, ‘Because why would Gram kill anyone unless there was money to be made? So it has to be a life insurance scam, or something to do with inheritance. Natalie’s pretending to be Chantelle.’
‘But who said Gram killed anyone?’
‘He’s Ashmodai, Lord of Lust and Wrath. Evil is his game.’
‘I don’t think that would stand up in court,’ Smister said.
Electra got to her feet and stretched. She laid her head on my knee and gave me the sweetest, most sympathetic look I’d ever seen.
‘You agree with me don’t you?’ I said. But she shook her head till her ears flapped.
‘Listen to me,’ Smister said. ‘You’ve got to stop all this devil crap. You don’t believe it yourself—you don’t even believe in God.’
‘I see no evidence for God in this world but the Devil’s work is everywhere.’
‘Bollocks. And who cares anyway? What I want to know is where’s the evidence that a weaselly saddo like Graham Attwood ever got the guts to kill anyone. According to the hairy butcher he’s just an old fashioned fanny-hound who lives on women and has the hots for high finance. She said every single woman she saw him with, including you, was something in a bank.’
‘No!’
‘You’ve got to hear this, cos it seems to me you’ve let a pile of crow droppings ruin your life. He grew in your head until you turned him into a ginormous figure and called him Satan. But he isn’t, Momster, he’s just little. Small. Nothing.’
‘He… ’
‘Don’t start yelling. If you start yelling, the landlady’ll kick us out.’ He covered my depleted wineglass with one hand and snatched his own out of my reach. Electra whimpered.
‘You don’t understand,’ I whispered painfully. ‘You’re talking about something terrifying and mysterious as if it’s… ’
‘Just ordinary? Listen, Momster, somewhere, sometime, you got broken. You can survive out on the street, you can save me from a fire, you can nurse me back to health after I got broken, but for some reason you can’t look up Graham S Attwood in the phonebook. Why? I think you knew where he’d be all the time.’
‘I didn’t… I can’t… ’ I couldn’t get my tongue to work. Suddenly my glass was empty. I said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m his servant. In the beginning I took the blame because he wanted me to. Then he called and I went to a house with a dead body in it, and now the cops are looking for me. He called again. I answered and Natalie Munrow fell downstairs and nearly broke her neck. It isn’t just ordinary. He has powers.’
‘Not over me, he doesn’t,’ Smister said. ‘I went there because I was looking for something to hold over him. See, if he gave your house back I’d have somewhere to live. Okay?’
Then he stopped. ‘You’re not okay, are you? I’m an idiot. Let’s go for a walk.’
Outside, the pavement was still wet and shiny. Electra’s claws clicked by my side. The world smelled of rain and carbon emissions. It was as it should be except for the emptiness and fear in my heart. For if Smister was right, and the Devil was as irrelevant as God, then I’d really have to be afraid of the police who couldn’t even get my name right. I’d have to be afraid of laziness, ignorance, cruelty and bigotry. Ordinary evil.
Electra and I shuffled into the rhythm of long-distance walking, and it soothed us.
Smister said, ‘Chantelle worked in the City for Griswold and Brown—they nearly went bust but the government bailed them out. The crappy crimper said Chantelle was let go when Lloyds took them over, but she got a humungous golden handshake.’
‘How does Hairy Clairey know that?’
‘It was part of a bigger scandal about bonuses and payoffs. The media went in for naming and shaming. Chantelle was named.’
‘What about Natalie?’
‘Forget Natalie.’
‘I can’t. There are two women: one’s dead and the other’s hurt. I don’t know which is which.’
‘I suppose that’s progress.’ Smister sighed. ‘Can we go home now?’
Even in Acton the streets smell of life—the bins whiff of curry, the gardens of syringa and wet grass. There are recycling boxes out on the pavement which smell of soggy newsprint, old milk and cola. Electra’s scent is warm and zooey while Smister’s is salon fresh. Life smells sweet’n’sour. Non-life smells of nothing—except maybe battery acid.
Smister said, ‘Are you sure the woman you saw with Gram outside the National Portrait Gallery was Natalie? Did you even see her face properly?’
‘Not then, I was behind her. But later when she and her friend left the theatre I was as close to her as I am to you. I could smell her. She smelled of Rive Gauche and… oh.’
‘What?’
‘Truffle oil.’
‘So?’
‘That house, in Harrison Mews, I sat at her dressing table. I sprayed myself with… She didn’t have any Rive Gauche, did she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’ve smelled it. Natalie… Chantelle reeks of it and you practically carried her to bed.’
‘Oh, that smell. Momster, surely if Natalie was involved with Gram, Hairy Clairey would’ve known about it? I mean Natalie was in the papers, probably on TV when she died. If she was known as Gram’s squeeze he’d have been crapped on by the cops and the whole of Milton Way would’ve known. The hair butcher would’ve mentioned it.’
‘Maybe nobody knew.’
‘It was a secret shag? He was humping Natalie behind Chantelle’s back? But they were friends so Chantelle must never find out?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Or maybe she still had a job—Natalie I mean. Maybe he’d spent all of Chantelle’s golden boot and was moving on to the next meal ticket.’
‘How could I get it so wrong?’ I said.
‘You were pissed?’ Smister suggested, patting my shoulder sympathetically.
‘But they were friends,’ I protested. ‘Friends talk to each other about their boyfriends.’
‘Not if you’re bonking your friend’s number one shag you don’t. In that case you lie like a stair carpet—up, down and sideways.’
We walked back to the pub car park and the ambo. But I wasn’t happy. Yes, I get pissed and, yes, I may have the odd memory lapse or a rare error of judgement. But this sounded incomplete. It was the sort of reconstruction Smister would indulge in when he was tired and wanted a nap; when an answer was preferable to the answer.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Electra, but she just yawned.
‘Natalie Munrow had Issy Miyake perfume on her dressing table,’ I told Electra. ‘I couldn’t smell it because of the Draino.’ But when I turned over to look, both she and Smister were asleep.
Chapter 33
So I Remembered<
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In the morning Smister took Electra with him when he went to the pub to give Abbie her makeover. I was supposed to sweep the car park but my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold a coffee cup let alone a broom.
I put on my hat and coat, and walked through the rain to the High Street. I wanted money. I sat down outside the Pizza Place with my hat on the pavement in front of me. The hat collected more water than money; people don’t like stopping in the wet to juggle with bags and brollies just to give you a little something. It didn’t matter much. I needed the space around me and my familiar worm’s eye view of the world. I needed quiet because of the shakes. I couldn’t handle Smister or Electra pressuring me.
They simply don’t understand—you need a drink before you can even consider trying to give up drink.
I’d lived in Acton for years but no one recognised me. Not even Claire who peered at me suspiciously through her windows over the road.
Nor, fortunately, did Ulysses. After about an hour and a half he stormed out of the Pizza Place shouting, ‘Wha’s the matter wit chew? What I ever done to you? You’re killing me here. You want I call the cops?’
He also gave me a big slice of pepperoni pizza, a cardboard cup of coffee and a ten pound note. He’s a kind man with a loud voice. I knew that. Why d’you suppose I chose his place to sit outside?
In Speedy Mart I bought Cocoa Pops for Smister and Yum-Chum for Electra as well as a bottle of red for me.
I drank just enough to calm the shakes and stop them from turning into the rattles. I hid the rest behind the driver’s seat of the ambo. Then I had a sweep round the car park with the stiff bristle broom Abbie thoughtfully left out for me. All the abandoned glasses went on the bar with the beer bottles, and all the snack packets went into the bin. I did a good job.
The rain stopped and Electra came out to join me, rummaging around the picnic tables in the little garden and staring in astonishment at two life-sized plastic fawns in the flower bed. Although it was a fairly modern pub, Abbie’s taste in décor ran to coach house twee, with blackened lamps, faux beams, horse brasses and copper bed-warmers; and of course plastic wildlife in the herbaceous borders. There’s nothing as authentically rustic as a 1950s pub in the suburbs.
