Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  Shaun didn’t even have time to register his surprise before his friend was out the door.

  “What’s up with him?” Bugs scowled at Alex’s departing back.

  * * *

  “Oh, look,” Shane Rowlands pointed a fat finger down the Victoria Arcade. “It’s one of them weirdos!”

  “Oh yeah.” Neal Reeder swayed slightly as he tried to focus.

  Rowlands turned to his other companion. “Look who it is, Smollet,” he said.

  Dale hadn’t even put away the half of what his friends had sunk tonight and he was beginning to wonder what he saw in their company. His stomach flipped for a different reason as she snapped towards them into the Arcade.

  Rowlands was studying Dale’s face, while his own grew redder by the second. “You fuckin’ fancy it, don’t you?” he accused. “Go on then,” he lunged towards Smollet, attempting to push him towards her. “Give it one, I dare you.”

  Dale stepped out of his way neatly, years of afterschool judo lessons combining with his comparative soberness to aid him. “Leave off, Shane,” he said.

  Samantha Lamb stopped in front of them, head cocked to one side, her eyes glittering.

  “Yeah,” said Reeder, stumbling to get out of Rowlands’ trajectory and catching his balance on a doorframe. “Leave it out, I in’t in the mood.” He was starting to feel sick.

  “Leave it out?” Rowlands was ready to blow. “I in’t even started yet, you pair of queers. You,” he stared at Samantha, “make me fucking sick.” He wove in front of her, stabbing a finger at her face. “Posh fucking witch. Who d’you think you are?”

  “Shane,” Smollet’s voice turned hard. “I said, leave off.”

  Rowlands turned to stare at him. His face was crimson, a vein pulsating on his forehead. “You’re asking for it,” he said, bunching his hand into a fist.

  “Don’t make me,” Smollet felt icily cool inside, a lifetime’s friendship falling away in the beat of a drunken heart. He could finally see how pathetic Rowlands really was.

  Rowlands swung for him and Dale moved, like he was in slow motion, catching his arm and twisting it back, putting his right leg between his opponent’s knees so that his legs buckled and he was sent sprawling down onto the concrete.

  “Bloody hell,” said Reeder, as the contents of his guts started to rise up his throat.

  “Fuck,” said Rowlands, tasting blood as a tooth dislodged where his chin had hit the floor. He looked up and saw stars dancing around the figure of Smollet.

  Looking past him at Samantha disappearing out of the end of the arcade, walking towards the tall figure waiting for her there, without so much as a backwards glance.

  Behind Smollet, Reeder sprayed the pavement several shades of brown.

  17

  The Yo-Yo Man

  March 2003

  “That’s right,” said Sean, staring down at the eye on her hand, feeling that strange, light-headed disconnection that had come to characterise each one of their meetings.

  In the corner of his mind, a shape moved out from the shadows …

  He dragged his eyes upwards, looked round at the others. “This is who I meant,” he said, waiting to see if they would string out the feigning of ignorance any longer.

  “Oh,” said Bugs, lifting his pint and shaking his head. “Didn’t realise. Thought you said a girl.” He snorted with laughter as she slapped him across the arm.

  “Pay no attention to this philistine,” she said. “Would you like to talk to me? Maybe we should take a walk,” her eyes narrowed, looking beyond him to the corner she had shared with the biker the night before, clocking him there and nodding a greeting. “It might be easier that way.”

  A shape taking on human form, raising both arms, pointing a weapon towards him …

  Sean batted the image away, put his pint down on the counter. He didn’t need any more of that, didn’t want the side effects.

  “Sure,” he said, assuring himself that this slight figure could offer him no harm.

  He followed her out the front door. “See you then, Mr Ward,” Bugs called from behind him, to the chuckles of the others. Sean raised a hand in salute, didn’t look back.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” he said, as they stepped out onto the pavement.

  “I didn’t offer it,” she said, smiling. “I have to say, though, you ought to be more careful. We’re not completely thick down here, however we may sound to you.”

  Sean frowned. “I’m sorry,” he began, “I didn’t mean to—”

  “In his time,” she cut him off, “which was the days of the Civil War, the Witchfinder General’s name was Matthew Hopkins.”

  Sean had a flash of Francesca standing outside the Greek restaurant, telling him about how women were tortured in the Tollhouse for witchcraft.

  “However,” she went on, “in our time, we knew him by a different name. We called him Detective Inspector Leonard Rivett.”

  Sean stared at her.

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ she said. “You’ve come about Corrine.”

  Sean felt his throat grow dry. He nodded.

  “Then it is me you want to see,” she said, and began to walk up the road.

  Sean followed her, wondering exactly what he was doing. She walked swiftly, and he began to sweat keeping up, despite the sharp night air, the wind that was coming off the river, feeding into the chill that coursed up the metal within his bones.

  She passed the bookshop and turned left into the row, following it to its end and turning right into a little square where the remains of some ancient cloisters stood under a cluster of trees.

  “Stop a minute,” said Sean.

  There was something about the trees, the streetlights shining through their bare branches. It was just like he was back in Meanwhile Gardens …

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Sean shook his head, trying to rid himself of the déjà vu.

  “That old war wound I told you about,” he said through gritted teeth. “I can’t keep up with you.”

  “But we’re here,” she said, taking a key from her pocket and nodding towards the two-storey house at the end of the terrace. “If you’d care to come in. It’s just that I’d rather not discuss these things out on the street, walls …”

  “Have eyes and ears around here,” Sean finished the sentence for her.

  “Quite.” She nodded, turning the key in the lock.

  Sean hesitated on the doorstep, waiting for her to go on ahead, turn on the lights, suddenly unsure whether there’d be a reception committee of Swing’s drinkers waiting to lynch him, or even if Francesca would be sitting there, joining in the laughter, ready to take him down the Tollhouse dungeons and clap him in leg irons …

  Leg irons. The thought made him laugh, despite himself – he already had iron legs. He found himself looking down an ordinary hallway, cream walls and beige carpet, neat row of coat hooks along the wall, and through a door into what at first appeared to be a dentist’s surgery. He took a tentative step through and realised the reclining chairs and surgical equipment were those of a tattoo studio; the far wall was covered in photographs of the work. Celtic knots and interlaces; tribal totems; whorls and swirls; flowers and peacock feathers; the horror-book imagery of the teenage dispossessed.

  “So this is what you do,” he thought aloud, his eyes catching the mohicaned head of Bully for the second time that day in a photo on the wall.

  “Pays the mortgage,” his hostess said, her eyes flicking from the montage to Sean and back again. “But come through to the kitchen. We’ll be more comfortable in there.”

  Sean was further surprised by the comparative homeliness of this room too; the pine table and chairs, aspidistra in a pot by the French doors, red ceramic tea pot and stout, matching mugs – not really what he had been expecting.

  “Like some tea?” she said, noticing his gaze.

  “Love some,” said Sean.

  “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing,
picking a kettle up off its stand and taking it over to the sink. Sean’s eyes roamed around the room as she turned on the tap. On the windowsill in front of her were a couple of spider plants. The sink and the draining board stainless steel, the work surfaces white Formica. A four-ring electric oven and a white fridge, white tiling on each wall apart from the dividing one, which was painted pale blue, and hung with a framed watercolour of a seascape. There was an animal’s basket the other side of the French doors, two bowls next to it. A cat, judging from the ginger hairs on the red lining. Everything was neat and tidy but it didn’t look as though an awful lot of money had been spent here. Except perhaps on the painting. His eyes were drawn back to it.

  “English breakfast?” his hostess enquired.

  “Please,” said Sean, turning his head to face her.

  “Thought so,” she said. Under the strip lights that ran across the ceiling, Sean could see her more clearly, but would still be hard pressed to gauge her age accurately.

  The kettle clicked off and she filled the pot, moving across to the fridge to retrieve the milk and placing it down on the table in front of Sean. She took off her leopardskin coat, putting it over the back of a chair, only after she had brought the pot, two cups and a sugar bowl to the table.

  Everything else she was wearing was black – jeans and a long-sleeved ethnic blouse with embroidery on the front. Thin leather straps around her neck hung with amulets. Rings on every finger, including a giant green eye; metal bangles around her wrists. Tendrils of partially concealed tattoos snaked down her arms and around her neck.

  “So,” she said, raising the pot and starting to pour. “If you’re inclined to tell me your name, then I might just tell you mine.”

  “Sean Ward,” he said.

  “Sean Ward,” she said, nodding. “A strong name.”

  This close, he could see that her pupils really were the colour of emeralds, it was not an illusion created by coloured contact lenses. He could finally discern crow’s feet under the kohl she wore around her eyes, fine lines between her nose and lips. Perhaps she actually could be as old as Corrine Woodrow.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  She smiled, dimples forming in her cheeks. “My mother wasn’t much of a churchgoer,” she said. “She never had me christened. But the name on my birth certificate is John Brendan Kenyon.”

  Sean smiled, marvelling at his loss of discernment. Of course, that was it; there had always been something about her voice that didn’t quite ring true.

  “Though my schoolfriends decided, by some form of collective unconscious, that she had got that wrong. They called me Noj – my name backwards – and it stuck. They thought that I couldn’t really be a boy, I was so little like any of them,” she raised one pencilled eyebrow, “so I became a girl.”

  She passed him a teacup. “I like the name,” she went on, “so that’s what you can call me.”

  Sean wondered if that was why he hadn’t seen her in the old police files, because he was looking for a girl and not a boy. But he didn’t think so. He was sure she was not among any of the mugshots he had seen.

  “And you were at school with Corrine?” he asked.

  She cocked her head to one side. “First,” she said, “you tell me why you want to know.”

  Sean stirred his tea, keeping his eyes locked on hers. “That old war wound, yeah?” he said. “The reason I walk funny. That was done to me by a fifteen-year-old boy with a zip gun that, thankfully, he was too stupid to aim straight. He was a dealer, just a corner boy, you know what one of them is?”

  “Oh yes,” said Noj. “I could have been described myself that way, many years ago.”

  “Right,” said Sean, “I thought I was trying to help the kid. I convinced myself that I’d got his trust, talked him into giving up someone higher up the chain. The bastard I was really after, who put all the naughty little boys in my neighbourhood out to work. He set up a meet for me,” he shook his head. “Set-up being the operative words.”

  “He shot you?” said Noj.

  Sean nodded. “There was a load of old guff written about it afterwards, embarrassing shit about me being some kind of hero. Huh. A mug is what I was; trying to help some disadvantaged kid get off the streets, when all along that was the only place he really wanted to be. So then, when they finally patched me back together, I was no good to the Met any more, had to take work as a private eye. That’s what brings me here. There’s a QC up in London thinks she might have enough evidence to get Corrine a review hearing. So she’s hired me to see what else I can dig up.”

  Noj’s eyes widened. “Really?” she said. “So there is a chance …?”

  “She’s a clever lawyer,” said Sean. “Don’t mean she’ll get anywhere. You saw how well my attempts to gain the confidence of Corrine’s known associates just went.”

  Noj shook her head, put her hands out flat on the table in front of her.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “You wouldn’t have got much off of them anyway. I mean, they were all around at the time, they all knew who she was – but they didn’t have anything to do with it. They just got persecuted afterwards, like everybody else who was a little bit different. They think you’re Old Bill and they wouldn’t help the police with their enquiries if their lives depended on it.”

  “So I gather,” said Sean, raising his cup. “So now, you tell me – where do you fit in?”

  “I was there,” said Noj. “I saw everything,” she smiled, raising her eyebrow again. “But unlike everyone else you’re chasing after, nobody saw me.”

  The tea was good, just as strong as Sean liked it, something not many people got right.

  “All right then,” he said, “so let’s start at the beginning.”

  “Very well,” said Noj, clasping her hands together. “Me and Corrine did indeed go to the same school, but we didn’t exactly make friends in the classroom. We just kept bumping into each other, nights and weekends, round the same public toilets on the seafront.”

  She paused, watching that one sink in.

  “You were on the game?” said Sean. “How old were you?”

  She nodded. “Fourteen, fifteen. That’s how we bonded. I did most of my trade there, Corrine preferred to take hers under the pier and come back to the lavs to clean up after. Different strokes,” she raised her little finger to the corner of her mouth, brushed an imaginary speck away.

  “Corrine hated it,” she went on. “Her mum turned her out when she was twelve, made her do a load of dirty bikers. Three of them, she told me, and though she was a bit prone to exaggeration at times, I believed her. Can you imagine,” she closed her eyes, squeezed her fingers closer together, “that for your first time?”

  “No,” Sean shook his head. “Thank Christ, I can’t.”

  “Oh, don’t thank him, please,” said Noj, her eyes snapping open. “Anyway,” she wiggled her fingers as if to dismiss the Almighty from any further discussion, “that woman was a monster. Corrine eventually made a compromise with her, that she wouldn’t have to do it at home if she brought back enough money each week. The summer was OK, she worked in a guesthouse. But as soon as the season ended, well …”

  Sean took another sip of his tea. It was details like this that had made him believe his job was worth doing, before that night in Meanwhile Gardens …

  “It was different for me,” said Noj. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand this …” A wry smile twisted her lips. “But I rather enjoyed myself with those fools I tricked. They were a means to an end.”

  Her stare became more intense. “It wasn’t just the money I wanted,” she said, “though of course that did come in handy. It was the power. In a place like this, for a person like me, you need some kind of insurance policy, and that’s where I got mine. It wasn’t just the sad old men who hung around the toilets who were interested in my pretty young arse, you see. There were a lot more who were very respectable, very prominent upstanding members of our little seaside
community. I made sure that every time they thought they were fucking me, I was fucking them right back …”

  Noj wasn’t looking at Sean now, she was looking through him, revisiting scenes from a past that Sean didn’t even want to start imagining. But she also seemed to be on the verge of wandering away from the point.

  “So,” he said, trying to steer her back, “you felt sorry for her, then? For Corrine?”

  Noj shot him a look of disapproval. “Yes,” she said. “She was so defenceless. I tried to show her how to look after herself.”

  “By dyeing her hair black?” Sean suggested. “That come from you, did it?”

  Noj blinked wearily. “No, it didn’t. There was a bunch of them at Ernemouth High, as well you know. I was not one of them. You wouldn’t have even noticed me in those days, which is just the way I wanted it.”

  “Then what?” Sean dropped his gaze to the eye tattooed on Noj’s hand. “Black magic?”

  Noj pursed her lips, hardened her stare. “You’re starting to annoy me now,” she said. “I’m starting to think I may be wrong about you. That you might be just the same as Rivett and all the rest of your kind.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” said Sean, wondering if all of this wasn’t just the ego trip of some death junkie, trying to weave herself – or himself – into the story. Despite the dramatic flourishes, Noj really hadn’t told him much he didn’t already know. “You know what they used to call us, up in London? The Beast.”

  She laughed, a semi-shriek, then put her hand up to her mouth to stop herself.

  “That’s good,” she said, “naming you after him. Although,” her expression changed, her smile falling away, “he does play his part in this sad story, I’m afraid.”

  “What,” said Sean, “are you talking about?”

  “The misunderstanding that arose,” she said. “The misconceived notion, spread by the press and a thousand gossips, that Corrine was involved in black magic, comes from the policeman that arrested her. Gray, his name was,” she fixed him with her green stare. “He’d caught her once before, you see, with some pervert under the pier. And at the time she had a book with her, which bore the name of Aleister Crowley, or, as he liked to refer to himself, The Great Beast. You know who I’m talking about?”