Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  In the end it was either get out of bed or face the rest of my life with whittled feet. I poured him out some fresh water and a pile of Fishbitz, and pulled on a shirt that didn’t have too many stains on it. The arse of my jeans was so thin I was in danger of losing my cheeks through osmosis to the outside air. My boots could have passed for two cowpats. I stood in front of the mirror, wishing I’d worn some shades first because – whoah, watch out, London – the world’s most stylish walking cadaver was about to hit the streets.

  But I’m not that bad. At least, I hope I’m not. I will be, no doubt about it. Another ten, fifteen years and my face will look like something that’s been knitted from a heap of overcooked noodles, but for now, well, I’m bearing up. The mirror shows a guy in his mid-thirties with good hair, if a little unkempt, bluey-greeny-grey eyes – good eyes, if a little hunted – and a mouth that, in a novel, would probably be described as cruel. In a certain light I can look gaunt, but maybe I’m doing myself a disservice; it might just be that I’ve got a pair of killer cheekbones. I always wanted a scar, you know, like the one the eagle-eye Action Man had – a slash down the cheek, probably from a dagger, or a bayonet – but the only scar on my face is a three-stitch job sustained when I fell over against the rear end of my dad’s Morris Minor van, aged four. It’s a younger-looking face than it ought to be, considering all the vodka and sleepless nights, never mind the smoky death-pits I patronise. It doesn’t look lived in yet, but it will. It will all catch up with me in the end.

  Outside it was cold enough to freeze the juice in the corners of my eyes. It was depressing to be going out when it was dark again, thus not seeing a moment of daylight for over twenty-four hours. I pulled my jacket – a black, nubuck job that’s on its last legs but still able to keep out most of the bad weather – more tightly around me and stuffed my hands in the pockets. Then I headed off in search of hell.

  You don’t need a map for hell, I suppose. I think that, to know it, you just have to have lived it a little at some point in your life. London knows hell so well, it might be asked to be godfather to its child. And it isn’t necessarily always in the places you’d expect, although a lot of it is. You can find hell in the most exclusive parts of the capital, if you know which streets to cut down, which doors to knock upon. So it was, tonight. Some of the places on Kara’s jolly little list I knew already: the strip clubs, the pubs that were so violent that the management served beer in plastic glasses, the amusement arcades and the snooker halls. But here was one little corner of Hades I had yet to patronise: Stodge, a restaurant in inoffensive Hampstead. I took the car round, and parked it on Gardnor Road, between an Aston Martin DB7 and a Porsche Boxster, where I’m proud to say, though it didn’t gleam quite as much as its neighbours, it did not look out of place one bit. I walked up to Heath Street and hung back from the restaurant a little, just watching for a while who was going in and coming out.

  Stodge is one of those new restaurants that is unashamedly British in its outlook, professing to have been at the vanguard of British cookery’s reinvention and offering a menu larded with pies, puddings and rib-sticking dumplings. The guy who runs the place is called Danny Sweet, an ex-boxer who had brought his pugnacious attitude into his kitchens. He’s in the Sunday supplements now and then, apparently, spouting off about how he hates to be referred to as a celebrity chef, and then a week later he’s on Celebrity Masterchef.

  What the public don’t know is that he’s still into boxing, but not the friendly kind with padded gloves and Queensberry Rules. What is even more incomprehensible, considering his clout in the industry, and his media exposure, is the fact that he hosts bare-knuckle bouts in the cellar of his restaurant.

  I strolled up to the nosh shop, gave the menu some attention, and clocked the beanpole doorman, his eyes so hooded he made Salman Rushdie seem startled.

  ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell me, I should have booked in 1903 if I wanted a bite to eat tonight.’

  ‘Private party, anyway, sir,’ he said, turning said hoods in the direction of a sign in the window that said just that. ‘By invitation only. Unless you know the password.’

  ‘Monosodium Glutamate,’ I said, trying to make out some of the shadows that moved behind the glass.

  ‘Spot on, sir. May I take your coat?’

  We looked at each other for a long time, my watch-it gland reacting in extreme spasm. ‘“Monosodium Glutamate” isn’t the password,’ I said.

  ‘No, sir. But I’m feeling charitable. I’ve been opening doors all day for stiff collars who didn’t even thank me for doing it. At least you had the basic human decency to say hello.’

  I stared at him a while longer, wondering if he was someone I’d helped to put away in the past, but I’d recognise a basketball player like this. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What kind of private party is it?’

  ‘Swingers,’ he said, giving birth to a smirk. ‘You look like you could do with a little fun.’

  I let that one glide by me and went inside. There was a table with a bunch of leaflets for something called The OneOnOne Club. Next to it was a small photocopier and a girl with a Polaroid camera slung around her neck. There was a loose dress slung around her boobs and bum, and she was slinging wine down her shouter with the kind of enthusiasm you just can’t fake.

  ‘Ickle piccie,’ she said, as I made to walk past her. ‘Gotta have a ickle piccie.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  ‘So we can circulate it. Anyone likes your face can write their number on the back, and you get your ickle piccie back at the end of the night with lots of lovely dates to look forward to.’

  ‘I’m not a swinger,’ I said. ‘I’m a plumber. There’s a blockage in the pipes.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, then took a fucking ickle piccie anyway.

  It was pretty busy. The tables in the dining area had been pushed to the perimeter, and a mass of people, who had clearly spent for ever getting ready, were demonstrating the admirable skill that is standing the maximum distance from everybody else in a confined space. No milling, no mingling, just lots of people looking as though they were at an audition for a new play called Rabbit in the Headlights. At least the lighting was subdued, so the sweat of fear didn’t show up too much.

  I grabbed a glass of champagne from a stooge with a tray and found a quiet spot against the wall that gave me a good vantage point over the fun and games, as well as a view of the staff door which I guessed was the entrance to the cellar.

  I wondered what Geenan’s brother did here. She hadn’t expounded and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but now I wished I had. Maybe he worked here, maybe he swung here, but I doubted it. If anything, I reckoned he scraped his knuckles off on other people’s faces in Danny Sweet’s bear pit. I was itching to get down there for a look around, but it looked as though match-making alone was on the menu tonight so I relaxed and sipped my champagne.

  Gradually, the alcohol did its work and the gaps between the assembled loners shrank. Soon the restaurant was filled with the cacophony of people asking ‘What do you do?’. The photographs soon followed: Xeroxed copies of faces in various degrees of mortification. There was one that didn’t look at all bad, although she was probably only here because she had false teeth, or was married to her job, or she shat herself when she humped. Emboldened by another glass of Piper-Heidsieck, I scribbled my name and my mobile phone number on the back of it and dropped it in the large glass bowl where everyone else was now feverishly doing the same.

  I made the mistake of smiling at a woman who was on her way to the toilet. She banked hard left in my direction and sucked the oxygen from my immediate vicinity with a ferocious air kiss.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked.

  ‘I make jewellery,’ I said.

  ‘Wild,’ she said. ‘Silver? Gold?’

  ‘Human bone,’ I said. I was just spouting now. I didn’t mean to shut her up, but I’d just seen Danny Sweet leading a posse of phenomenally ugly men around the outside o
f the flirtathon and through the cellar entrance. I forced my eye to fall on each and every one of them, and wondered which one was Geenan’s brother. What was their fucking problem? Wouldn’t Kara be embarrassed when I turned up with her brother, who would be perfectly within his rights to tell her to bugger off out of his life until she stopped behaving like a first-class arse?

  ‘I… I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your jewellery,’ she was saying.

  I lightly squeezed her arm. Another snap-happy dolt took a photograph of me over her shoulder. ‘That’s awfully sweet of you,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to try that hard, though. Believe me, save it up for someone who deserves a woman who will delay taking a piss for him.’

  I left her and ambled over to the staff door. Someone had put on some suitable music. Suitable for the fucking grave. Chris de Burgh. A woman dressed in red is doing what with you, Chris? Yes, because she’s deaf and blind and quite possibly brain-damaged. I was happy to leave them all to it.

  Stone steps. A bare 100-watt bulb. The sound coming up from the cellar was like a sledgehammer being repeatedly introduced to a mound of watermelons.

  I hesitated at the swing-doors at the bottom of the steps. Testosterone alone promised to push them open, and not from my side, either. My testosterone was trying to put its belongings in a handkerchief and slink away. I composed myself and slipped through.

  Mayhem. Around twenty beery, sweaty bodies were packed in a tight circle around a knot of flailing limbs. I was bemused by the lack of cheering. Apart from the occasional hiss of someone wincing at a punch, the shuffle of footsteps as the scrum watched the scrap, and the sounds of fist on meat, it was relatively restrained. Obviously because Sweet didn’t want to draw any undue attention to his private club.

  I caught glimpses of the two shirtless men hammering each other’s faces. They both wore masks of blood. One guy was gradually gaining the upper hand, though.

  ‘Rather them than me,’ I said, and one of the guys in the audience gave me a look that told me to hurry it up and get on my way. I circled the group, keeping back in the shadows by the wall, and checked faces, looking for someone who resembled Kara Geenan. When one of the men at the back of the crowd broke away for a breather, I collared him and asked him if Jason Phythian was in, tonight. Another ugly look.

  I was about to cut my losses and get out of this stifling, violent shit-hole when I noticed that my route back to the door was blocked. Intentionally blocked. The scrum had lost interest in the fight now that it had become so one-sided. A metronomic pulpy slapping sound indicated that the contest was over.

  Danny Sweet stepped forward as I tried to make myself look less isolated. Everyone was staring at me.

  ‘New boy,’ said Sweet. ‘All new boys must fight.’

  ‘I’m not that new,’ I said. ‘I’ve been around the block a few times.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that block is about to be knocked off. Choose your foe.’

  ‘I don’t fight.’

  ‘You do if you’re in here. So, you will.’

  ‘Look, I was with the party upstairs. I thought the toilets were down here.’

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ he said, ‘and pick your fight partner.’

  ‘All right, how about you?’ I said.

  ‘Fuckhead,’ he said, ‘I don’t fight. I ref. These hands’ – he held up his mitts for me to see – ‘are my prize possessions. They’re insured for half a mill. I’m not going to be knocking up any lamb and flageolet-bean stew with chunks missing out of these beauties, am I?’

  ‘Is Jason Phythian down here? I’ll fight him.’

  Nobody came forward.

  Sweet turned to face his cronies. ‘He’s making names up. He’s too shy to pick someone. Who’ll have him?’

  ‘I’ll have him.’

  A walking argument for the introduction of eugenics shambled out of the throng, pulling off his T-shirt as he did so. He had a tattoo on his chest of a naked woman on all fours, her backside raised at an anatomically questionable angle. Underneath was the word LADIEKILLER. He had the face of something that should have been sitting in a bush picking its arse and eating soft fruits. While he flexed his arms, I turned to Sweet and asked him if there were any rules.

  ‘No rules,’ he said.

  So I turned and kicked Ladiekiller’s bollocks into orbit. Then I was pushing through the bodies to the door, before anyone could argue that what I’d done was really rather unpleasant. Ladiekiller’s mewlings drifted after me up the stairs, along with some raised voices. There were going to be some feet following mine pretty soon.

  The swingers were pairing off like it was a chromosome lookalike party. I slalomed through them and was hauled back by the beanpole just as I was about to make it on to the street.

  ‘You forgot something,’ he said, wagging his hoods over to my right. The woman with the Polaroid camera was tottering after me, a clutch of photographs in her hand. I pocketed them, thanked them both, and ran all the way back to the car.

  4

  Although it was an easy drive home from Hampstead, I dumped the Saab at Belsize Park and caught a tube to Archway. Another of Phythian’s so-called haunts was in N19, a good old-fashioned public house where you drank till you made yourself ill. None of that fannying around that was going on at Stodge. I imagined the most fannying that went on at the Lion was up against the wall outside, at chucking-out time. The excitement of the last hour had made me a bit jittery and I wanted a drink. Scratch that, I wanted several drinks. And I was going to offer a black little toast to Kara Geenan before each one.

  Part of what she’d told me the previous evening – hell, earlier that morning – kept rolling around in my mind like a pebble in the drum of a washing machine. Not the lunacy about her brother going missing mere hours after she was with him, but more the detail that she fed me regarding who he was. She hadn’t sounded to me like someone listing the aspects of someone she cared for. There were no little embellishments when it came to describing his face, for example. He was just: brown hair, blue eyes. In my experience, it’s hard to get such a belt-and-braces sketch of a missing person. The client will twat on for twenty minutes about how glossy her hair was because she brushed it morning and night with a Charles Worthington vent brush, or his eyes were grey or green depending on what colour top he wore and the light in the sky just made his eyes come alive… So it concerned me that Kara’s facts should be so naked, so cold. It didn’t sit nicely with her rushing out at midnight, fit to shit with panic about her baby brother.

  But I wasn’t too concerned. I really couldn’t care less how weird their relationship was if it meant my bank balance was about to turn a pinker shade of red. I would either find him, or I wouldn’t. I’d get my cash and could forget about missing persons for a while. Or I could forget about other people’s missing persons, at least.

  I emerged at Archway into that astonishing horrorfest that is the collision of a number of main roads. It seems that all roads lead to Archway. And then they die there. Archway could be the place where old roads come after they have enjoyed their youth as edgy country highways or suburban dual carriageways. They come here and they just go ‘fuck it’ and coil up in weird spaghetti shapes and expire then make the cars grind to a halt. It had been a while since I was last in N19, and I was pretty certain the traffic was the same. All the drivers’ faces look like: ‘Bollocks, I had a choice, but I decided to drive through Archway.’ You can see them, almost physically wrestling with the compulsion to weep.

  I crossed Junction Road, averting my eyes as one does at the scene of an atrocity, and breezed into the Lion. According to Kara, her little brother had a flat a little further north, on St John’s Way. But I needed a pint before I tackled Roadkill Central.

  ‘Kronenbourg,’ I said, as I sat on one of the stools at the bar. The barman went to it without a whimper: just the kind of barman I like. I took a slow look around the pub, guessing which of the half-dozen beer-nursing thugs might be villains and which mightn�
��t. By the time the barman had delivered my pint and sorted out my change, it was six-nil to the cons. I asked him if he knew someone called Phythian.

  ‘That his surname?’ he asked. He had something rattish about his face: it was pointed and twitchily interested in what I was questioning him about.

  ‘Yeah, Jason Phythian. Know him?’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ he said. ‘Lot of people round here aren’t so friendly as to give their names up when you pull ’em their pints.’

  I described Phythian and expected a shrug from the barman, as if I had just described thirty men who used this pub on any given day.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Copper?’

  I shook my head and sank a third of the lager. It had a sour aftertaste: there aren’t that many boozers around these days that look after their pipes too well. ‘Just helping to track down a friend for a friend.’

  He nodded and moved away to serve one of the grim-faced regulars, who would no doubt still be in the same position at the bar come closing time.

  He’s making names up, Sweet had said. Maybe I was. Maybe Jason Phythian wasn’t his name, or maybe they were just protecting such a young man from his big sister, who might be angry to discover that her brother was mixing it with the missing links down at the fight club.

  I was almost finished with my drink when somebody else walked through the door. Somebody I knew? I fished about in my memory for a while, until the name came to me. Whitby. Neville Whitby. Freelance photographer of some repute, although he had no formal training. While most pros were busy with their light meters and flash indexes, playing who’s got the biggest lens, Nev was busy taking photos, solid quality stuff that regularly found its way into the papers. I had crossed his path a few times in the past few years, and liked his blatant disregard for his profession, and the prima donnas who worked in it. He had a hard and fast rule when it came to taking pictures, as I remembered him telling me when we were standing in the rain, waiting for some nugget of information at some outdoor press conference ages before. He took his photos in the morning or in the late afternoon; the light was crap at any other time of day.