Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  I recognised it instantly, gripped it and swung the discarded chain with all my might at his left leg, feeling, rather than seeing, the metallic links wrap around his boot, their force locking them in place firmly enough so that when I yanked with all my might the chain came towards me, whipping his one earthbound foot out from under him.

  Ginger roared again, his right leg flailing wildly as, completely unbalanced, he crashed to earth, his head smashing into the ground with a nauseating smack.

  He groaned once and was silent.

  I staggered up, the sound of running feet testifying that Chubby had risen from his faint and fled to the side of the fourth man who stayed in the shadows at the end of the street.

  I turned and there was Crewcut, his cricket bat waving around in front of him like a bunch of garage daffs on Mother’s Day.

  “I’ll take you,” he said, in a tone that was less than convincing.

  “Really?” I asked, being sure to inject as much confidence into the phrase as I could, even though my arm was throbbing, my heart racing and my whole body shaking violently.

  “Only I thought he was the one with the murderous streak.” I gestured at the prostrate figure of Ginger, conscious as I did so that Crewcut was moving out from behind the bins and my efforts to keep him in sight meant that I was turning my back to Ginger, Chubby and The Watcher. “You don’t strike me as a psycho,” I announced.

  And he swung at me.

  I was genuinely surprised: he hadn’t seemed the type likely to carry this on once the ringleader was out cold. Which just goes to show that you can’t be right about people all the time.

  The bat – the whole solid willow weight of the thing – collided with the top right side of my head and stars exploded as I staggered backwards and fell to the ground.

  “Colin,” Crewcut was calling now, to his still prone comrade, “are you alright baby?”

  Baby?

  Ginger groaned and I tore my eyes away from him long enough to look up at Crewcut, as he raised the bat over his head. “You should have just taken the warning,” he said, his face creasing in a concentrated frown.

  Now, when Chubby fainted, he’d dropped his weapon. It was a short knife – the sort usually sold in kitchen shops as a paring knife. And I could see it glinting dully on the ground just to the right of Chubby’s foot.

  So I lunged, as Chubby brought the bat slamming downwards towards where my head had been a moment ago and where my upraised arse cheeks now were. The impact stung, don’t get me wrong; but it hurt me a lot less than it would have if the point of impact had been the top of my head.

  And it hurt me a lot less than the knife hurt Chubby when I snatched it up and drove it to the hilt in his trainer-covered foot.

  He shrieked and dropped the bat, reeling backwards as Ginger raised himself to a sitting position.

  Then, deciding, I guess, that enough was enough, he lunged over to his boyfriend, the two of them staggered to their feet and, each supporting the other, they tottered to the end of the alleyway – empty now of any sign of their other compadres – and fled into the night, which remained cold, foggy, and – once their footsteps had receded – absolutely silent.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “No offense, dear, but you should probably absent yourself from the public areas.” Caz dabbed again at my lip and I winced and tried to pull my head back, which sent waves of pain across my shoulders and down my back.

  Across the bar, a couple of regulars sat quietly flipping through the free papers and sipping their pints. They hadn’t reacted badly on arriving to be greeted by a landlord resembling a cut price Elephant Man, but then the only other customer had been Clive, our regular truck-driving tranny who had elected, tonight, to turn up dressed as a seventeen stone be-afroed Diana Ross, so my bruises were possibly somewhat overshadowed.

  “I still reckon we should have the law here,” Ali muttered. “I mean, they’ve turned up here every time someone breaks a bloody nail and now you’ve almost been beaten to death.”

  “No police,” I said, feeling my lower lip tighten.

  “But look at you,” Ali insisted. “You were almost murdered in your own pub. They’ve got to deal with this.”

  I tried to smile at her and winced instead. “It’s OK, Ali. I know who did this and they weren’t supposed to be trying to do any more than scare me.”

  “Chopper?” Ali whispered.

  I shook my head.

  At that point, the pub door opened and a uniformed copper stepped into the bar. “Evening,” he intoned.

  Ye Gods, I thought, what fresh hell is this?

  “I wonder, sir, if you’d be good enough to open the rear door of the pub,” unnamed central casting bobby asked.

  I slid off the bar stool and Caz capped the bottle of TCP and swept it and the cotton wool she’d been dabbing my cuts and bruises with back into her Gladstone bag. “Why?” I asked, as Nick stepped in behind the uniform. He saw me and in a moment his face registered horror.

  “What the hell happened to you?” He asked, pushing past the constable.

  “A misunderstanding,” I replied. “With some messenger boys.”

  “Chopper?”

  I shook my head. Nick frowned. “We’re releasing Lyra’s things to the family. The stepdaughter is outside. We’ll take the dresses out the back way.”

  Ali gestured to the copper and he followed her out of the bar.

  “Listen,” Nick leaned in to me, “about earlier. I’m sorry I got all funny.”

  I patted him on the arm and attempted a rueful smile. “I don’t know what’s going on Nick, but this whole Lyra situation is making everything way too messy for me.”

  “Nothing’s going on, Danny; except that I like you and I want to get to know you more.”

  And, as if on cue, Robert arrived in a cloud of cashmere and sandalwood.

  The look of quiet, comfortable possession on his face vanished as he registered the state of mine.

  “Danny!” He cried, a note of genuine concern entering his tone. “What on earth has happened?”

  I sighed. “Evening, Robert.”

  “My God! Who did this to you?” He stepped forward, ignoring the others and reached out to pull my chin so that he could tilt my face to the light. I pulled my head back, ignoring the stabbing pain that the movement caused.

  “Some friends of a friend.”

  “This would never have happened if you lot hadn’t kept turning up,” Robert shot a venomous glance at Nick.

  “Us lot?” Nick gritted his teeth. “Just what does that mean?”

  Robert ignored Nick. “Danny, this is serious. If you’re getting attacked, you’ve got to get away from here.”

  “No, wait.” Nick stepped forward. “I’ve had just enough of you, mate. What did that cheap pop about me being responsible for this mean?”

  Robert ignored Nick and turned to me, “This gangster you’re involved with can’t be fond of the police being here all the time.”

  I sighed. “Will everyone please stop going on about Chopper. I am not involved with him. He was not responsible for this.”

  “Well who was?” Caz, Nick and Robert chorused.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s a private matter and I’ll deal with it privately.”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s assault and possibly attempted murder.”

  “Christ, I thought I was the drama queen,” I muttered. “Will you lot just leave it, please?”

  “Yes,” Robert addressed Nick, “I think leaving would be the best option. You’ve done enough damage here.”

  “Clever, coming from the man who put him in this position in the first place,” Nick snapped back.

  “Boys,” Caz murmured, “can we stop waving willies at each other and get back to the question in hand?”

  “What?” Robert ignored her and responded to Nick’s upper cut. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’d still be living in blissful sub
urban ignorance if you’d been able to keep it in your pants when the window cleaner came round,” Nick jabbed again.

  Robert turned to me. “You told him?”

  “It’s hardly a state secret, Robert,” Caz joined in.

  “Keep out of this, please,” Robert responded, not even bothering to turn his eyes to Caz.

  “Not poss, I’m afraid,” she shot back. “Friends,” she added, “stick together.”

  “Clearly,” he answered dryly. “Especially when they’re as needy as you are.”

  “Folks,” I tried to calm the situation down. “Can we please just let the past be?”

  “Are you serious?” Nick turned to me with an angry look on his face. “This clown’s ruined your life and you want to shake and walk away.”

  Robert spluttered. “Ruined? I gave this boy the keys to a life that people like him could only have dreamed of. I made his life.”

  “Then dropped him like a stone when you got tired,” Nick replied.

  “Listen Colombo, you know nothing, alright? So keep your nose out of it.”

  “I’m still here,” I muttered.

  “I know a shifty ponce when I see one,” Nick shot back. “You’re up to something; I don’t know what it is, but there’s no way on earth that I’m stepping out of the way so you can get the knife into him again.”

  “Touché!” Caz cried, pulling a couple of vodka miniatures from her bag, offering one to me and settling down with the air of a Madame Lafarge to enjoy the spectacle.

  I, however, had had enough. “Right!” I jumped from the stool between the two men who had begun to move closer together, shoulders straightening and fists curling. “Get out of my pub!”

  They blinked. Robert spoke first. “Danny. We have dinner reservations.”

  “Not tonight,” I snapped. “Possibly not ever.”

  “’Bout time,” Nick muttered.

  I turned to him. “I beg your pardon?”

  He looked sheepish, as though he hadn’t expected me to hear – let alone react to – the utterance. “Sorry, Danny. But you just seem to be still in thrall to him. Like you want him back or something.”

  I almost laughed. “Want him back? Christ, you two seem to think I’m some fucking damsel in distress. I don’t want him. I don’t need him. And I can both make my own mind up and decide my own fate without you two turning every situation into a bloody opera!”

  Robert was reaching into his coat pocket, extracting a packet of paperwork.

  “Well I don’t know about you,” Caz addressed the customers, who were no longer flipping through their papers, but were avidly and openly ear wigging the whole scene, “but I think it’s better than a soap.”

  Robert handed me the pack of papers. “I wanted to talk to you about this.”

  “This?” I looked at the pack sitting in my hand and couldn’t remember actually accepting the papers. “What’s this?”

  “A settlement,” he said, his eyes looking anywhere but at me. “I wanted to discuss this at dinner, not here, not now. But...”

  “Christ,” Caz muttered, “you’ve got a bloody nerve, Robert.”

  I looked from Robert to Caz to Nick to the trio of customers on the far side of the bar and my heart continued to sink. “What sort of settlement?”

  “Danny, we were together for many years. I can’t bear to see you in this hole. I want to make some provision for you; to give you the opportunity of a new start.”

  From somewhere out in the distance I heard my voice, small and completely broken, like a child who’s just discovered there is no Santa Claus, “So you didn’t want to get back with me? This was all just about sorting out the finances?”

  “Danny, we had our time; but I think we both knew it was over several years ago. We’d been going through the motions.”

  “I hadn’t been.” I looked at the paperwork still sitting in my outstretched hand.

  “Wait,” Nick looked from me to Caz to Robert, “I thought you said you didn’t want him back?” He gestured at Robert, who couldn’t resist a tiny flicker of a preen.

  “No!” I put the paperwork down on the bar, looked to Caz for support and reached out to Nick. “No, Nick, I didn’t want him back, I just thought...”

  “Danny,” Robert pointed towards the paperwork lying in a puddle of TCP on the bar, “we need to talk about this.”

  “Later,” I turned my face back to Nick, who was staring fixedly over my head.

  “I need to go check upstairs,” Nick said, his voice a monotone; “make sure Hynde’s filling in all the paperwork properly,” and he nodded at Caz, walked stiffly past me and left the bar.

  “Danny,” Robert persisted. “It’s a good settlement. A very good one. And it’ll give us both closure.”

  “Closure?” I wanted to go back to the bunk bed in my parents flat, crawl into my little bed, pull the East 17 duvet cover over my head and sleep till everything was gone away.

  Caz dumped a large brandy on the bar in front of me “From Clive,” she said and from the other side of the room, the Diana Ross not-quite-lookalike raised a similarly overfilled glass to me in silent tribute.

  I picked up the glass and downed half the contents in one stinging gulp, then turned back to Robert. “I’ll think about it,” I said and, before he could say another word, I turned my back to him, lifted the glass, toasted Clive back and watched, in the mirror behind the bar as Robert, his shoulders slumped, turned and left the pub.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I pressed the doorbell again, held it a little longer and, withdrawing my finger, stepped back slightly.

  From somewhere far below me, a drunk was bellowing “Away in a manger,” while a baby had conniptions that someone else was trying to drown out by turning up the volume on their TV.

  I glanced over the balcony and down to where my dad had parked the cab. He’d put the cabbies network to tracking down Barry Haynes and had come up with three possible contenders.

  This was contender number two. The first one had been a twenty-three-year-old trainee plumber in Dalston, who had never even heard of Lyra Day.

  So we’d piled into the cab and set off for deepest Croydon, where we’d been told of another possible. This Barry Haynes lived six floors up in a building with no lift. This had not gone down well with Caz.

  “In these heels?” She’d grumbled. “Still, at least absence of the same means the lift won’t smell of wee.”

  She was right: instead, the stairwell – all six floors of it – had stank of piss, with a subtle overtone of lavender-scented bleach; as though someone had been ordered to clean the place up, made a half-hearted attempt and had given up and rushed indoors to drink themselves insensible and roar Christmas carols whilst ignoring their hysterical child.

  “Maybe he’s out,” Caz whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” I whispered back, noticing, as I turned to speak to her that the curtain behind her shoulder twitched slightly. I shook my head, trying to avoid glancing at the now still curtain and turned back to the door. “He’s in,” I muttered.

  Caz pressed the doorbell again. She, however, did not remove her finger.

  From behind the grimy door – which looked as though the flaking red paint job had been applied at some point before the invention of steam – a piercing buzz registered.

  It kept on buzzing and Caz kept the pressure on.

  Finally, there was a sound of someone dragging a sack containing a hundred weight of metal across a bar room floor and the door opened a couple of inches, then stopped as the security chain – like something that might have attached an anchor to the Titanic – snapped into place.

  The face that peered out at us was silver and gaunt and seemed to exude malevolence. The cheekbones pressed against tight shiny skin as though the skull was trying to escape from its covering and a pair of tiny black eyes glittered angrily. The head sat atop a neck which seemed to be surrounded by a tight red choker necklace; but a second glance told me that what I was
looking at were the scars left by some sort of serious throat surgery.

  Gollum stared at us malevolently, then lifted a device to his throat. The black torch-like object picked up the resonance of his speech and turned it into a weirdly distorted whining synthesised noise that was somewhere between the voice Professor Hawking had used for his famous lectures on quantum physics and the one Cher had used for the chorus of Believe.

  “You the council?” He asked.

  “Um, no,” I said, finally finding my voice.

  “Then fuck off,” he said and slammed the door.

  “Jesus, Danny,” Caz shivered next to me. “What with the munchkin woman and now the cyber man’s granddad, can this get any weirder?” She pressed her finger to the buzzer again and once more the door was violently tugged open, stopping on the chain so suddenly that the very door frame shook.

  “You the Social?” asked the golden voice of Optimus Prime and, before we could answer, he added “’Cos if you ain’t the Council and you ain’t the Social and you ain’t Cam-a-fuckin-lot with my million quid lottery win, you can Fuck. Right. Off. I don’t want none of whatever you’re selling and if you’re pushing God, you can stick it right up yer,” at which point he stopped dead and his tiny black lips formed a silent “O.”

  The reason for the sudden silence became obvious when I followed his gaze to Caz, or more exactly to the litre bottle of Glenfiddich she had extracted from her voluminous shoulder bag and which was now being held in the manner of a game show prize before a finalist.

  “We’re the Scotch Appreciation Society, Mr Haynes…” Caz announced with a knowing little smile. “You are Mr Haynes? Mr Barry Haynes?”

  Haynes nodded wordlessly, his eyes never leaving the bottle.

  “And you do like whiskey?” Caz asked, her voice developing a smokiness that suggested she was asking if he fancied an evening of unbridled passion.

  “Darlin’,” Haynes said, rediscovering his battery-operated voice, “if you’ve got a packet of fags to go with that you can preach Jesus till New Year’s Eve.”