by Parker Bilal
‘You like champagne?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Ah, more of a beer man.’ Her eyes lit up with feigned empathy. Drake remembered her now. He’d seen her back in the old days when her drug habit had been worse. From the smell of her breath it looked like drink was her choice of poison these days. Drake made no move to touch the glass that was set in front of him. The man watched him out of the corner of his eye as he wiped down the bar with a dirty rag. He’d played his part. Now it was up to her.
‘Why don’t we make ourselves comfortable?’ The woman nodded in the direction of one of the booths. ‘Maybe you can pay for the drinks first.’
‘Pay?’ asked Drake. ‘I didn’t ask for it and I haven’t touched it, why would I pay for it?’
‘You got to pay,’ said the man. ‘Everybody pay.’
‘I’m not everybody.’
‘Forget it, Sal. He’s a copper, innit?’
The man’s face froze. ‘Says who?’
‘Says me.’
He looked Drake up and down. ‘I never seen him before. How you know he’s a copper?’
‘Just look at him.’
The man didn’t seem convinced.
‘Sal? Is that short for Salah?’ Drake asked.
‘Huh?’ He was wagging a finger now. ‘No pay, no talk.’
‘Just leave it, Sal,’ the woman said. She leaned over the counter for the cigarettes and lit one, throwing the pack back down on the counter. But Sal was offended. A vein throbbed in the centre of his forehead.
‘You can’t talk to him,’ he said, grabbing for her wrist. ‘He hasn’t paid.’
‘Fuck off.’ She shook herself free. ‘I don’t work for you. And besides, I’m not talking to him.’
Sal stood for a moment before tossing the rag into the sink and stalking back down the narrow hallway where he had come from. Sonja turned to Drake.
‘I remember you.’
‘You knew Zelda.’
Sonja held his gaze while taking a long, slow drag of her cigarette. She jerked her chin in the direction of the back.
‘He’s calling them, you know. You don’t want to be here when they get here.’
‘Who gets here?’
‘The ones who own the place.’
‘Who are they?’
‘What difference does it make? They change the name, the paint, the lighting, but it’s still the same shit on the inside.’ She looked him up and down, not in a good way. ‘I remember you. You were bad news back then.’
‘I was trying to help Zelda.’
‘She went back home.’ An emptiness came into her eyes. ‘You have to go.’
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ said Drake. ‘Not here.’
‘You shouldn’t have come here.’ She turned away and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the counter. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave now.’
Drake could see he wasn’t going to get any more out of her. He climbed the dark narrow staircase and emerged into the light, surprised to see ordinary people going about their lives. As if a part of him had expected the world to have been replaced with brimstone and fire.
The car was parked around the corner in Bridle Lane. He waited there, tapping his hand on the wheel. It didn’t take long. They drove up at high speed in a large silver Transit van that screeched to a halt outside the club entrance. He made a note of the number plate. The side door slid open and four of them jumped out of the back and went in down the stairs. They were big men wearing turtlenecks and leather jackets. One of them carried a cricket bat. It seemed a little over the top, old school. Nothing too sophisticated. They would have leaned on him until he paid. If he refused they would have dragged him out and given him a kicking before emptying his pockets and dumping him by the side of road somewhere that it would take hours to walk back from. Drake recognised one of the men as Khan, the heavy with the tattoo he had seen at Papa Zemba’s place with Donny’s nephew.
How much could they make in a place like that? When it was run by Goran Malevich it was small time, a place to break the women in gently. It stayed open all day and into the early hours. Men walked in off the street. It was random. They were invited to order champagne for themselves and the hostesses. There was a list of services ranging from private lap dances and hand jobs, occasionally going all the way up to full sex with one, two or more women. The local vice mob took a slice of the action. For a little cash and free access to the girls they stayed out of their hair. But business was uneven. The punters irregular. Men on their lunch breaks, or on their way home from work. Groups of drunken youngsters. The odd tourist looking for a little variation before heading home to the wife and kids. It was a sideline. Goran had other things going on, but this was a prime location and he wanted to hold on to it. He made more money on drugs and gambling than on this, but it was all part of the territoriality of it; holding on to your piece of turf.
‘Places like this don’t fall into your hands every day,’ he would say, with that stupid gap-toothed grin and a hint of gold eyeteeth. He’d had that done early on, when he wanted to look like a rapper. A white rapper from the Balkans. ‘I own a little bit of London. You know how that feels?’
‘How does it feel, Goran?’
‘It feels like I’m the fucking king of England.’ He threw back his head and laughed.
Drake settled himself back in his seat, as he watched the men disappear through the narrow doorway and down into the club. They stayed there for a while, maybe fifteen minutes. Sal would have been telling them the whole story. Then he would have poured them all a drink so that they left in a slightly better mood, despite not having had a chance to break someone’s legs. The van came back around, the driver hooted and the goons piled up the stairs and into the back. The door slid shut and away they went.
The afternoon was fading now, as the pale winter light gave way to an angry neon that fizzed like sparklers in the wet pools in the road. It was around six o’clock when Drake finally spotted Sonja emerging. No longer recognisable as the hostess in the red dress. The platinum wig was gone and she wore a long sheepskin coat over jeans and a hoodie. She was holding something wrapped in a handkerchief pressed to the side of her face. Ice. So they had taken out some of their frustration on her after all.
Leaving the car where it was, Drake decided to follow her on foot. She walked down to the Tube station at Piccadilly Circus. He let her get a little way ahead of him, even though she wasn’t paying much attention to her surroundings. To all intents and purposes, she was just another commuter eager to get home in the rush. It was so busy he wasn’t really worried about being spotted by her. Nevertheless, he stayed back just out of sight in case she turned.
There was a moment of panic when he thought he had lost her on the eastbound platform. He rushed through to the westbound platform, which was deserted, and then back again in time to spot her stepping onto a train. He jumped into the next carriage and watched her exit at Caledonian Road. He followed her down the main road to a nondescript grey terraced house. Along the way she had stopped at Salwar’s Supermarket. Through the window of the minimart he watched her take a bag of ice cubes from the freezer, along with a bottle of vodka and a packet of frozen hamburgers. He stood across the street beside the unlit front of the Chiang Mai Thai Massage Centre and watched Sonja disappear through the front door of the grey house. Through a glass panel over the door a naked lightbulb could be seen as it came on. A few minutes later a light came on in a window on the third floor. A low sash window that was half open and in urgent need of paint. Drake turned and made his way back towards the station. He would have liked to call it a day, but he knew the night was far from being over.
28
Drake got back to the car in Soho only to find a fine waiting for him on the windscreen. It was to be expected. He did what he should have done earlier and drove around the corner to the NCP car park in Brewer Street. He backed into a space and then changed into the old set of clothes he had
brought with him.
The evening got off to a bad start. Coming round the corner onto Trafalgar Square he bumped into a group of men wearing yellow hi-vis jackets and waving union flags. As he tried to make his way through he found his path blocked. The men surrounded him, closing in as he turned in a circle trying to find a way out. As they jostled him, they began chanting, blowing beery breath into his face.
‘We are the people! We are the people!’
Drake was already sizing them up, trying to work out a tactic, quickly picking out the biggest of them as the first one to go for. The odds were bad and he didn’t want a confrontation, but he knew he had to be ready if it came to that. There were ten or fifteen of them. His only hope was that taking two or three of them down might cause the others to reconsider their actions, or scarper.
One of them reared up into his face. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you speak English?’
‘Traitor!’ Spitting and shouting in his face, they pushed by. ‘Go back to where you came from!’
He watched them move on, blocking the traffic and shoving their placards in the faces of anyone they came across. Drake picked up his belongings, the carrier bags stuffed with old sweaters and socks. Anything, really, that wasn’t of any value. Stuff he’d been meaning to throw out but never got around to. He was a walking jumble sale. A couple of them had been kicked across the pavement. Not that they contained anything.
‘Crazy, what this country is coming to.’
Drake looked up to see a young man. In his late twenties, his tattered clothes and unlaced boots told their own story. He stepped forwards to hand Drake the fat purple caterpillar that was his sleeping bag.
‘They’re angry,’ muttered Drake.
‘Yes, but not at us. I mean, we didn’t do this.’
‘You’ve got a point there.’
There was something about his manner that was slightly off, as if he was trying to remember something. He stuck out his hand.
‘Spike.’
‘Nash.’ For some reason, Drake was sticking to the alias he had used four years ago when he was undercover. It was easy to remember. Perhaps that was it, or maybe it was the sense that this whole episode was leading him back into his past. Spike told him that he was ex-service too.
‘Never settled down,’ the man said, shaking his head. ‘I know blokes who came home and fitted right back in, as if they had never left. I mean, they were working, taking care of their families. I don’t know how they do it. Me, I wasn’t the same person.’ He cast an eye over his shoulder. ‘I never expected to wind up here. It’s getting more dangerous. People don’t care. They’ll give you a kicking just for the hell of it.’
‘How long have you been back?’
‘Home, you mean?’ The man lifted his head in wonder. ‘I’m still trying to get there, mate.’
Spike, who was something of an old hand, led the way across Trafalgar Square. ‘Come on, we can get a cup of tea around this time.’
Drake didn’t have to try to make conversation. Spike simply laid it all out. ‘I had problems. I admit it. But I never asked anyone to take care of me. I mean, I can take care of myself. I just need, like …’ He cast around for the word he was looking for. ‘The basics. That’s all I ask. A roof over my head, food. I mean, they took me off the medication, said it was for my own good. What do they know, right? I mean, I’m on the inside, dealing with this stuff, not them.’
The two men walked to an old church off the Strand. In a large hall they were served tomato soup in Styrofoam cups. All around them people moved, surging round, back and forth, looking for somewhere to lodge themselves for a time. Everyone was lugging things with them: carrier bags, black plastic sacks, torn backpacks that looked as though they had been trampled by horses, and maybe they had. Where they came from was impossible to say. Drake picked up a smattering of accents, some familiar, others not. There was every race, colour, shape and size, young and old, mostly male.
‘Ever run into a guy wearing a Fender hat?’
Spike’s back stiffened. ‘Friend of yours?’
‘Kind of. Did me a favour once.’
‘You mean like a favour, favour?’ Spike’s eyes darted up and down, from side to side, as if following a particularly vexed fly.
‘Just a favour.’
‘Right. I don’t judge other people. That’s all I ask, right, not to be judged? Not too much to ask, is it?’
‘Sounds fair.’
‘I don’t pay much attention to what people are wearing.’
There was a change in tone, suggesting Spike was having second thoughts about his new-found friend. Drake’s questions were unwelcome. Some unspoken rule about minding your own business. Maybe not so unspoken. Spike got to his feet and slipped away to speak to someone else before vanishing beneath the surface of grubby faces.
Left alone, Drake scanned the crowds. Some faces were so caked in dirt their own mothers would have had trouble recognising them. Others were wrapped in layers of hoodies and scarves, woollen hats and so forth, as if expecting an ice storm. Sunglasses, bandannas, even an airline sleep mask in one case. There was something medieval about the scene, as if they were all part of some ancient exodus. It seemed like an appropriate parallel, since these people were clearly suffering the aftermath of real social catastrophe. Talk about floods, or plagues of locusts, here was a society on the edge of collapse. Aren’t we judged by how well we take care of our most vulnerable?
Across the room he glimpsed an unexpected figure and felt an instinctive recognition. He looked older and the long grey dreadlocks were unfamiliar, but still … Drake crossed the room, clumsily pushing his way through until he could stretch out a hand.
‘Dad?’
The word was out of his mouth before he realised his mistake. The man sniffed, staring at him, ready to fight or flee. Drake lifted his hands in apology. ‘Sorry.’
What had made him think of his father? Something about this place. Something he had always feared. Coming across an older version of himself shuffling around the streets. One of those things that woke him in the middle of the night with a shudder. He wasn’t afraid for his father. He was afraid for how much of his father he might carry inside him.
Cal’s father had been absent for most of his childhood, and when he had been around it had not been for the better. Between his father, who was always trying to find some way of scrounging a living, and his mother’s addictions and fragile mental state, there hadn’t been much of a childhood to salvage. What was left of it had been spent in foster homes and institutions. But it never left you. Although there had been no contact between them for years, it wouldn’t have surprised him to find his father out here among the legions of the lost.
After that, he wandered aimlessly around the hall, latching onto conversations, drifting on when he got the leery eye. Nobody he spoke to had seen the man in the Fender hat, although sometimes he got the impression that people would say no to anything you asked them, simply because they were beyond wanting to comply with anyone. After a time he’d had enough and felt it was time to move on.
Lugging his bags back out into the rain, Drake soon discovered that he was hopelessly unprepared for a night out. Even when the rain eased off, it left a bitter chill to the air. The sleeping bag he had with him might have been fine for summer camping but at this time of year it was cheap, thin and ineffective. It was getting late and the warmth drained from his body into the cold ground. He sat upright with his back to the wall, arms hugging his knees. He’d managed to scrape up some sheets of cardboard, old boxes that had been tucked behind a rubbish container at the back of a fast-food place that smelled of burnt oil and piss, but he was so cold he was beyond caring. Sleep was impossible. After an hour in the doorway of a shuttered bank, he moved on, picking up his bundles and heading down the street.
Walking seemed the best way of passing the time. It was the most efficient way to cover the most ground and it also kept him warm. He arrived eventually, several hours late
r, with aching feet, at a bench outside a homeless shelter in Victoria, where a large man was eating his way through a huge pile of macaroni cheese without saying a word.
Drake began to wonder if perhaps the man he was looking for was not homeless at all. He recalled the grizzled old man at the hostel. Like Drake, perhaps Fender was just faking it. Still, he was committed to his plan and spent the next few hours walking. Not quite aimlessly, but determined to cover as much ground as possible. The rain came and went. He met a group of women who’d set up tents on the Embankment.
At one point Drake became convinced that he was being followed. By then he was beginning to grow tired of walking in circles. It occurred to him that he might be imagining it. He was weary and cold. His feet hurt and he contemplated packing it in and going back to the car. He longed to just go home and crawl into bed. But now, as the clock ticked steadily into the early hours, the field grew thinner. Here was a sign that perhaps his plan was working. A couple of times he circled round to see if he could spot anyone, but either he was losing his touch or his quarry was too nimble for him. Or perhaps it was all in his head.
At the bottom of Villiers Street he met Bekri, a Moroccan man who had set up an all-night mobile kitchen to hand out harira soup and pastries to those who were sleeping rough. When Drake asked him why, he was treated to a lecture on the virtues of charity.
‘We have zakat, which is one of the five pillars of Islam. You must give to the poor, to those who have less than you. It is our religion.’
Inspired by this, perhaps, Drake went over to a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen and handed him his sleeping bag. The boy was reluctant at first. Drake held up his hands, not sure the boy understood him.
‘It’s okay, I don’t want anything in return.’
When the boy still wouldn’t take it, Drake placed it on the ground next to him and turned away. When he looked round the boy had disappeared, taking the purple sleeping bag with him.
