Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  Although there had been quite a bit of stuff shifted around or knocked over, there didn’t seem to be anything missing. Maybe the burglar had been freaked by the lack of televisual booty.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  The taxi driver crunched his way into my flat, his mouth sagging as if his chin had been swapped for a ten-kilogram weight.

  ‘Don’t step on anything,’ I said. ‘It’ll all have to be dusted for prints.’

  ‘I thought you’d forgotten about me,’ he said.

  I gave him his fare but he was reluctant to leave. I ventured into the kitchen. The drawers were hanging open like thirsty mouths, their contents junked on the floor. I saw Mengele’s tail whipping about outside, and opened the door on to the balcony. He was sitting on the roof, having presumably escaped through the small sash window above the sink once the ceiling had begun to be smashed open.

  ‘Good boy,’ I soothed, looking up at him. However, he was intent on a pigeon that was rooted to a single spot up on the chimney. The bird was eyeing Mengele as if it couldn’t quite believe the size of him. I left him to it and went back inside. The cabbie was putting down the phone.

  ‘Just called the police for you, mate,’ he said, in his best ‘tip me’ voice. I thanked him, forcing a smile, and ushered him out, then I sat on the sofa and tried to force some thoughts. I had to get out before the plods arrived. It was unlikely that Mawker would look upon this as leaving town, but you never knew.

  I got dressed, packed a small rucksack with some clothes, and dragged Mengele off the roof and into his cage. I made sure I had my keys and my wallet, before I went to the freezer and rescued the bottle of Grey Goose. Then I called a handyman mate of mine, Jimmy Two, and asked him to come round soon as he could, to board up and padlock the doorway. I went downstairs and stood on the pavement for a long time, wondering where the hell to go to next.

  When a police car turned into my street, I made a decision. Away was good enough, for now.

  6

  Barry Liptrott worked lunchtimes at Lava Java, a club in Vauxhall, pulling pints, mixing margaritas, watching pissed office types try to salsa. That was what he did when he wasn’t holding up old age pensioners or shoplifting, trying to impress someone in the underworld, trying to get a leg up to the rarefied climes of… I don’t know, maybe twocking tricycles or beating up blind septuagenarians who had been unfaithful to their partners.

  I got there at around 1 p.m., long before the joint started kicking, and found my entry barred by a phenomenally ugly bouncer. He was so ugly it was like he was really trying at it. He’d have frightened chimps out of a banana factory.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. The bouncer seemed put out by monosyllables. He leaned against the door and crossed his arms. Well, I say arms but they were more like legs. His legs were like legs too, but the kind you find on a rhino.

  ‘Is there an entry fee?’

  He looked me up and down with the speed he might read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. My hair went grey waiting for him. ‘You ain’t comin’ in.’

  ‘I need to speak to Barry. Barry Liptrott.’

  ‘Oh, really, what about?’

  ‘I wanted to ask him where he buys his shoes.’

  He actually gave my feet a look.

  ‘What are you?’ I said. ‘A bouncer, or his secretary? Or his bumboy? What, exactly?’ I wasn’t altogether sure he was human, but he had opposable thumbs, so I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  His face collapsed like a pie crust with too much air underneath it. ‘You say one more thing, I’ll fucking wear your face for a mask.’

  ‘I just–’

  He had a good punch on him, I’ll give him that. I landed on my arse and rocked back till I could see the coils of rust swooping across the sky, where exhaust fumes were reacting with the sunlight. I stayed there for a while. It was quite pleasant, until blood began to leak down the back of my throat. I sat up and felt my teeth. Still there. My lip was split, though, and the pain was so sharp, so intense, that I could feel it a couple of feet in every direction from the epicentre.

  Just then, Jonathan Dayne swung into the car park in his Jaguar XJS. A sticker on the boot read: How’s My Driving? Dial 0-800-EAT-MY-SHIT. Jonathan Dayne, aka Knocker, owned Lava Java. And he had more form than the Inland Revenue.

  ‘Knocker,’ I said, jovially, as he stepped out of the car, the cheeky glottal part of his name helping to pebble-dash my shirt with blood. I was almost happy to see him.

  ‘What do you want, scummo?’ He slammed the door and the car rocked unsteadily on its ancient suspension.

  ‘I want you to call off this no-necked bison-fucker and then invite me in for headache tablets and vodka.’

  ‘I don’t work here any more, dickhead,’ Knocker said. ‘I sold it last year. I’m just here for a salsa lesson.’

  I groaned and drew myself up to my intimidating five foot nine and a half as the single-cell organism in a suit came at me.

  ‘It’s okay, Errol,’ Knocker said, holding up his hand. ‘I’ll deal with him.’

  ‘You’re such a good Samaritan, Knocker,’ I said, ‘but I can take care of myself. Muscle-bound fuckers like that, they go down easier than perished elasticated knickers on a skeleton.’

  ‘Comedian,’ Knocker said, entering the club and not hanging around to see if I was following. ‘Always so fucking quick, no wonder someone gave you a pasting. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.’

  ‘Touché,’ I said, and decided to stop talking for a while, at least until I got some eighty-proof analgesics down my neck.

  * * *

  I waited at the bar for him to finish his lesson. They had Grey Goose, which was a surprise, so I ordered a vodka martini. I stared at my bloody mouth in the mirror, and got the first one down me quick. I like it in a chunky glass with two blocks of ice and a sliver of lemon peel, if I’m not drinking it straight from a shot glass, but here I was glad to have it how you’re supposed to have it.

  I checked out the other frugger-buggers who were gearing up for their dance lessons. Some of them even wore the proper shoes. There were a couple of nine-to-fivers reading their newspapers over a beer and a sandwich, before heading back for another four hours of Rich Tea, Facebook and group memos. Not the kind of place that actually needed a bouncer, but after midnight anything was possible: fights, bloody dance-offs, salsa slayings…

  ‘Another?’ the bartender asked. I nodded, to save my mouth, and he mixed the drink. He gave me a napkin for my mushed-up mush, and I nodded again. Good bartenders don’t just serve you drinks; they’re all about comfort. They know the right things to say, they know never to say too much, and they do the right things.

  This bloke was a good bartender.

  I sipped my second VM of the afternoon and watched him work, preparing a Bloody Mary mix that he stored in a two-litre plastic bottle; making sure there was enough ice – more than enough ice – in the buckets; slicing lemons and limes; arranging his bottles so the labels faced towards the customer. He had a well-stocked cocktail bar: liqueurs (maraschino, crème de menthe, framboisette and so forth) on the left hand side of the cash register; syrups (grenadine, falernum, orgeat, etc.) and cordials on the right. Up above, on glass shelves in the centre, was the hard stuff, none of it, I’m glad to say, in optics. These bottles were flanked by a huge number of cocktail glasses, some 2 ounces, most 3 or 3½ ounces, and all of them with long stems. You drink certain cocktails without a long-stemmed glass, you’ll fuck up your cocktail. They have to be cold from first sip to last, and that isn’t going to happen if you’ve got your clammy mitts wrapped around a beaker. I recognised some of them: Pousse-Café glasses, Delmonico glasses for Sours, a couple of Julep mugs, and the straight glasses for Highballs and Collinses. At one end of the bar were the glasses he used for Old Fashioneds, the chunky ones, 4 or 5 ounces. I keep a couple of cocktail glasses at home, for when I can be bothered. Seven-ounce bastards. And one fifteen-ounce behemoth for when my intention is to rip
my tits down to the bone.

  All of this guy’s glasses, his pitchers, stirring rods, strainers and shakers were so clean they could have passed for mint. I sipped my drink and nodded some more. This bar was a nice bar and I was enjoying sitting here and admiring a man who liked his work.

  A woman came in wearing a smart black dress. She ordered a glass of Chardonnay and opened her purse. She smiled at me, said something about the weather, about not knowing what it was going to do, or something; I wasn’t hearing her too clearly because the smart black dress and the Grey Goose were kicking around in my head, and I was thinking, no, please, no, not now, but you can’t push it away. You must never push it away, not when it wants to come so strongly, not when, some day it might never come and you’ll wish for it to come back so hard that you’ll pull a muscle, and so:

  It was the best day we ever had. And for no crazier reason that everything between us clicked. There was no cinema, no special meal, no day out at the beach. It was just an ordinary day, an ultra-ordinary day, but it was the day that bolted her incontrovertibly on to what it then meant to be me; bolted her so securely that it seemed she had never had a past of her own, never been anything other than mine. The day that, for the first time, I realised I was dumbly, joyously, cripplingly in love with her.

  I’d known Rebecca what? A couple of weeks? We’d clashed together a few times after drunken pub nights, or visits down to the woods with bottles of wine and ghetto blasters playing, Christ, what were we listening to back then? In 1994. The Holy Bible, Grace, Hips and Makers. And this particular night we’d been on the cheap Bulgarian red since the afternoon had withdrawn into one corner of the sky. We’d been talking about culture: it had been the buzzword of this particular day. We didn’t get past a couple of sentences without crowbarring it in. We decided we needed to improve ourselves with a bit of culture, so we dressed up. Shirt and tie, smart black dress… Jesus, Rebecca. Jesus Christ.

  * * *

  It begins.

  On to the stage, to the understated applause that only gatherings of this sort can produce, comes a kind-looking man and a wolfish woman wearing a red dress. She sits at a grand piano. He takes an age over the position of his cello before smoothing his hair and taking in the audience while exhaling levelly. Then, with a disconcerting flurry of movement, the instruments find their voice, driven by manic stabs and jerks of arms and hands. I can’t equate the disarray of their employ with the sublime rapport of their strings.

  Their sound creeps around the slotted pine panelling, stealthy as oil, settling against the skin during slow phrases, spirited away like a rising helix of bubbles during the fast ones. In this moment there are only two spheres of being: the music, and your presence; a silent proximity exerted by the loose arrangement of your clothes, the way your leg climbs over its partner, your left hand gently grips the right. I can smell your perfume (and, if I turn my head a little, I see the wet flash of your eyes and the threaded chunk of metal jolted by your pulse in the gulley between your breasts).

  After Barber, after Bach, the musicians play Debussy’s ‘Sonata’ and you shift slightly, the hard edge of your forearm meeting mine on the intervening rest. The playing of music evolves on the stage in several layers, like cells in an animation: the man turning pages of music, the pianist, the cellist. The cello. I see details that might have eluded me at other times, but with this heightening of sensation it does not appear strange that I should notice the cellist’s hand: a white spider fleeing up and down the cello’s neck. Or the polished part of his knee where the bow brushes it at the limit of its stroke; filaments of horsehair; the muscles in the pianist’s arms.

  Back home, you set about making tea. I riffle through your CD collection till I find Borodin’s ‘String Quartet No. 2 in D Major’. Lighted by candles, your room looks austere without being imposing. The first night I spent here, you and I looked at each other from opposite sides of the room for an age before you came to sit by my feet and hold my hand. This is what you do now, after placing the tray with the teapot and mugs on the table. I slip down on to the floor and you move between my legs, lying back so that your head finds the dip of my right shoulder. We don’t say anything.

  There is a beautiful, haunting phrase that Borodin uses over and over during the Notturno. The cello’s voice is plaintive and hopeful, rolling around the other three string instruments like an invocation. Although you don’t move against me, I feel a settling of your weight, as if your muscles and bones have slipped beyond the threshold at which they find their usual repose. I become aware of your heartbeat and the measured journey of your breath. Everything is right for me in a way it hasn’t been for years. Slowly, with as much tenderness as I can muster, I place my hands on your shoulders and squeeze, allowing my fingers to work their way across your arms and the flat gloss of your chest. Your clavicle, the cob of bone at the back of your neck – I touch it all, trying to pass on something of my need for you: all my warmth and good feeling for you. Nothing is so important. Can you feel this? Eyes closed, I move my hands to the swell of the music, following the ebb and flow of the cello’s ache. In my touch is all the tenderness we’ve shared before. The raw centre of you is where I’m trying to reach, softly plucking and drawing upon the area that remembers the good times and knows there will be many more. I know this can work. Can you feel? I know this can work. This is love. Along with the charity of my hands, I send a message, forcing it through my fingertips and into the knot of pain and confusion we all carry at our centre. I won’t let you down.

  You stay my hands. Bring one to your mouth and kiss the palm. This is love.

  The first time: on the heels of a dovetail kiss, you moved over and sank upon me till I had no measure of where I ended and you began. The soft curtain of your hair moving pendulum slow above my face; the sound of the fountain outside the only thing pinning me to reality…

  * * *

  I was deciding whether to ruin my day with a third martini, when finally Knocker deigned to give me a nanosecond of his time.

  ‘So,’ he said, ordering a white-wine spritzer, ‘what are you up to?’

  I told him.

  ‘Found him yet?’ he asked. He made himself comfortable at the stool next to me.

  ‘We might have had a coming together of sorts.’

  Knocker took a lighter out of his jacket pocket, started rotating it between his fingers. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘I like the cocktails. And I was thinking of signing up, maybe doing a few classes. We could enter competitions, be a team. Shit, you can even lead. What do you think?’

  ‘What is it you want, scummo?’

  ‘The woman Liptrott introduced me to, Kara Geenan. I wonder if you know where she is?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  ‘Okay, let me put it another way.’ I grabbed hold of his hair, snatched the lighter from his hand and set fire to his tie.

  ‘You fuck-me brainwank,’ Knocker said bizarrely, trying to back off.

  ‘Where is she, Knocker?’ The flames were tucking in and I reckoned his shirt would catch fire before they reached his throat. ‘You and The Lip are tighter than a gnat’s chuffpipe. You always know what he’s up to, who he’s up and by how far. Tell me, quick mind, and I’ll put you out.’ I turned to the barman. Glass of water, I mouthed. He didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘Last time I saw her,’ he said, ‘she was at a pub in Westminster. She was friendly with the landlord, some guy called Nathan. He’d know where she is.’ He was squawking like a wronged parrot by now. I was smelling burning hair. His chest wig was going up.

  ‘Name of the pub,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck it, Sorrell, come on!’

  ‘Name.’

  ‘The Paviours Arms,’ he said. ‘Page Street.’

  I doused him and threw him back off the stool. He landed on his arse and looked up at me, blinking a slice of lemon from his left eye.

  ‘What was in it for you, Knocker?’ I said. ‘Couple of K? Blow-j
ob? Leg-up to the next broken rung on the ladder? Who is she? What does she want?’

  Every time he breathed, he sprayed a little bit of water like some fucking porpoise. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Me and Barry were delivering some watered-down booze for an outfit I’m in with, up Stanford way. This woman, she was waiting for us in the gaffer’s office one day. Said she needed to find some guy called Sorrell, an ex-copper. Said she heard we knew who she was talking about. Told us that if we gave her what she wanted, she’d well, let’s just say she was nice to us. Been a while since anyone was nice to me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘I’m nice to you. I like you enough to sort out your wardrobe for you. You look much better without that tie.’

  ‘You watch yourself, scummo,’ Knocker sprayed again out of his blowhole. I should have thrown him a fucking fish.

  I thanked the barman and left before the bulging suit arrived to make me kiss his knuckles some more.

  * * *

  Though my flat is pretty spartan, even more so now since it’s been burgled, I’ve always made sure I had some other stuff locked away in a storage joint called Keepsies, which is round the back of the police station at Paddington Green. Special stuff. Emergency stuff. Stuff that you just shouldn’t have lying around the flat. I nip over there and pick some of it up when my life starts filling up with warning signs.