The Geranium Kiss

by John Harvey

  But we both knew that wasn’t true.

  If we had been together it wouldn’t have got said: again. That had been the trouble. For months she must have wanted to say those words, to cut the rope that bound and let me slip silently into the waiting sea. Being close enough to touch, to pull me back, she had not been able to.

  And so the telephone was different; the telephone was better; she couldn’t see me waving … or drowning.

  Five minutes of sharp turns and sudden accelerations and still the other car wouldn’t disappear from my rear view mirror. I wasn’t in a nice mood at all and this sure didn’t help.

  In fact, I was feeling lousy. More than that, I was feeling mean and lousy. Maybe I’d have to do something about that.

  I stopped trying to lose them and took the main road that led down into Hendon. Alongside the main gates to the park, I pulled up and sat there, watching to see what they would do.

  They parked opposite and the driver stared across at me. I showed him one upright finger, then got out of the car and locked the door.

  The class of people there seemed to be around, I wasn’t going to take any chances of having my car pinched.

  There was a call box a few yards down from the entrance to the park. I went in and fumbled in my pockets for a coin, dialled a number. There wasn’t much to say and I said it very quickly; but not too quickly for it not to be understood.

  Then I walked into the park.

  Beyond the tennis courts were the kids’ swings. In this sort of weather, neither of them were exactly overused.

  One small coloured boy, about four years old, was trying to push the long swing-boat and then clamber up on to it, but he wasn’t having much success. After four or five attempts, he gave up and stood looking at the woman sitting on the bench opposite.

  He pushed his red bobble hat back from his curly hair and then drew it across the front of his face, either wiping his nose or the tears that were forming in his eyes. Then he jammed the hat back on again at a wry angle and turned back to the swing.

  The woman got up from the seat. She was short, white; long fair hair hanging over the edges of a grey duffle coat.

  She walked over to the boy and lifted him on to the centre seat. She went to one end and began to push until the thing was going through the dull air at a good rate.

  The swing cut back and forth across my vision, slicing thick lines out of the two men who stood on the edge of the grass, not stepping yet on to the gravel. Not coming for me. Waiting still.

  I didn’t mind. There didn’t appear to be that kind of hurry.

  The woman tired of her efforts and let the long swing come to a halt.

  ‘Come on, Chiedo,’ she said. ‘It’s time we were getting home.’

  The boy didn’t make a move, just sat there, legs stretched wide across the wooden plank, staring at her.

  ‘Chiedo! Come on!’

  He looked as though he was going to let the tears come again, but instead he grinned at her and scrambled down to the ground. She took hold of his gloved hand and the two of them walked over in my direction.

  She looked at me and I liked what I saw in her face. I smiled my best smile at her. Her eyes flickered on to mine suspiciously for a moment then she looked away again, past me and towards the park gate.

  Now there was no-one between the two hoods and myself; nothing but the empty roundabouts and swings.

  I stood up.

  The big one hunched his shoulders and called across to me. ‘You don’t listen, do you? You clever guys are all the same.’

  ‘Sure,’ I shouted back, ‘we’re all brighter than the stupid ones.’

  He jutted out his chin and one large fist emerged from an even larger pocket. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning whatever you can manage … stupid!’

  That did it. The other fist came into sight; it was every bit as big as the first one; the only difference was that there seemed to be a number of heavy rings on its fingers.

  ‘We warned you, Mitchell, and you didn’t listen. Well, perhaps you’ll listen to us now.’

  They started to move across the gravel. Behind them I could see faintly the house lights from the far side of the park. It really was a dark afternoon. And getting darker with each step they took.

  ‘Who’s paying you?’ I asked.

  I hadn’t expected an answer and I didn’t get one. They didn’t even hesitate; simply kept coming at me. They must have thought that I was as easy as a stuffed teddy bear.

  I waited until they were within good spitting distance, then made as if to go to the right. The little one came after me. I turned sharply on my left foot and moved my right side in towards him. My right arm followed through behind.

  He shouted out something I couldn’t quite catch. Maybe a mouthful of fist wasn’t doing anything to improve his diction. Such a shame! It was the first time he’d tried to say anything at all.

  His friend wasn’t so shy.

  ‘Right, bastard!’ he shouted at me and this huge paw reached out for my shoulder. I let him have the shoulder. I also let him have the same bunched hand his colleague had sampled. He didn’t like it much either.

  I looked back at the little one in time to see him feeling around inside his coat. He could have been looking for some sticking plaster to put over the cut on his lip, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I jumped at him and he fell backwards, the two of us rolling over on the harshness of the gravel. I yanked the arm clear and banged it down on to the ground. Then lifted my knee and rammed it down hard into the muscle inside the lower arm. He opened his mouth in a gasp and I moved my knee quickly upwards.

  There was a loud, sharp click as his teeth cracked together and his head jerked backwards. I was just enjoying the sound when something strong and powerful lifted me up into the air, twirled me around like a berserk crane, then dropped me without ceremony on the edge of the roundabout.

  I moved my face away from the right-angled iron bar that was gently caressing it and blinked. A two-handed hammer blow was thundering down towards my head. I ducked and rolled … but fast.

  The blow landed on the wood of the roundabout and a hollow echo boomed out. I reached up for one of the legs and pulled at it. It was like trying to shift one of the columns of the Eiffel Tower. The only thing that budged was the muscle across my own chest.

  This obviously wasn’t getting me anywhere.

  I jumped up as quickly as I could, just in time to meet the other one coming in at me.

  He was easy: I could play with him all day. My right hand was homing in on his face like a guided missile.

  I took his falling body in one hurdling stride and kept on going. Something big and ugly was following me. I let it, until I came to the edge of the playground and the line of kids’ swings that dangled from their lengths of rusting chain.

  Then I pulled myself round on the end support and turned a sudden circle. As I did so, my foot shot out. It caught the guy in the blue overcoat right below the third button and almost doubled him in two. Almost. It took a second kick to do that.

  There he was down on all fours and I was staring around behind me, looking for his mate. I saw him all right. He was scurrying away across the grass like a furry animal.

  Maybe he’d left his sticking plaster in the car, after all.

  The shape in the blue overcoat was showing signs of wanting to return to combat. I looked at the line of swings and smiled to myself.

  Well it was a playground wasn’t it?

  Why shouldn’t I have a little fun?

  I took hold of one of the swings and ran backwards with it. As he clambered to his feet and started to come for me again, I took a couple of fast paces towards him with my arms outstretched, then let go with as much effort as I could muster.

  All those Sunday mornings in the bowling alley had
n’t been wasted after all!

  The edge of the seat struck him full in the face. His mouth spread wide as though trying to swallow it whole, then gave up in a splinter of shattered and broken teeth. The swing came away and I had this sudden vision of two shocked, wide-open eyes and beneath them an equally open mouth, whose lips were blubbering forth bubbles of fresh blood.

  He staggered forward and into the swing’s return flight.

  This time it hit him below the belt. Not so viciously, but still hard enough to send him face first across it. It was as though an unseen pair of hands had carefully folded the blue overcoat in two.

  The body swung back and forth twice more, before it overbalanced and was tumbled forwards. The face struck the gravel almost soundlessly. With only the strangely soft sound of skin being grazed away from the inside of the nose and the bone that surrounded the right eye.

  I hastily glanced back across the park. There was no-one to be seen. The second guy had not bothered to return. I wondered what blue overcoat would think about that when he came round. Whenever that was.

  For the moment, he was dead to the world: around the eye that had lost its skin a bright circle of blood was staring up at me, seeming unreal in the premature darkness.

  There had been questions I had wanted to ask him, after all those he had tried on me. But it didn’t seem as though he was going to be saying much for a while.

  Perhaps he and his buddy could change places.

  Again, I looked around me. If he wasn’t coming back by himself, then that probably meant he had gone for reinforcements.

  I knelt over the unconscious body, all the while trying not to stare back at that enlarged socket of blood.

  There was a wallet in his inside pocket and I pulled it clear and went through it … carefully. But however carefully I did it, there wasn’t a single useful item there.

  I swore and pushed the wallet back. His head moved of its own accord and the eye inside the ring of red flickered once. I didn’t like it.

  So I lifted him clear of the ground by the neck and slammed the head backwards, down on to the ground. Twice.

  After that, the eye didn’t try to open again.

  I began to go through his pockets.

  With the third one, I struck lucky. It was a business card of sorts. In gothic lettering it advertised the Club Internationale, Gerrard Street.

  I wondered if Sandy knew anything about that place. I wondered if she had got the coffee brewing yet.

  When I stood up the wind cut across the flat surface of the park and into my back like a sudden razor. The lights at the far side could be picked out more clearly now.

  When I walked away from the swings, towards the road, it was like walking across years of wasted promises. I thought of the wooden edge opening the man’s mouth with the senseless greed of a ravening shark. I thought of the little boy, perched somewhere between tears and smiles; finally treating his mother to shining teeth and dark eyes that glistened. I thought of a telephone ringing, of knowing who it would be and what would be said, yet picking it up nevertheless.

  Something ached and it wasn’t my bruised knuckles.

  The coffee was more than ready and from the look that Sandy gave me when she opened the door, I guessed that she’d resigned herself to finishing the whole pot without my assistance.

  So I smiled at her and gave her the sort of quick kiss on the lips I reserved for my nearest and dearest. It didn’t get used very often.

  It didn’t impress Sandy, either.

  ‘Don’t think you can get round me just like that, Scott. I’m getting fed up with the way you use me as a coffee shop and quick stopover between better things.’

  Her green eyes gleamed and I knew that she was as aware as I was of how good she looked when she was angry. Or pretending to be … either way it didn’t matter. What did matter was the way her red hair hung richly down, the shine of her skin.

  Sandy wasn’t young; she had been around; been used and abused; she was still one of the most attractive women I had ever seen. Until she took her clothes off.

  Not that that had always been the case.

  Her body had earned her living for a long time. On the game when most girls are still at school, Sandy had finally seen the sense of selling herself in another way and had begun work as a stripper. She had been great … until one evening she had been visited by a large black guy with a nasty habit of waving round an open razor.

  The scars on her head had disappeared under the new growth of hair, but the two long lines down her body were still visible. The raincoat brigade wouldn’t pay to see her any more.

  She’d got a job handling strippers for some of the clubs, a kind of agency thing. It was okay but she obviously didn’t think as much of it as she had of performing herself … and she couldn’t forget the scars which made that impossible.

  She saw the traces of them every morning, every evening.

  Sandy had got them for asking too many questions in dangerous places; questions she had been asking on my behalf.

  And now I was here to get her to find out something else.

  I looked at her as she sat on the edge of the bed, bright green dress sprayed over the white bed cover. She raised the cup to her mouth and drank the bitter coffee, looking at me over the edge of the rim.

  She said, ‘It’s been a long time, Scott.’

  I nodded. ‘I was thinking that earlier.’

  ‘That you hadn’t seen me for a while?’

  ‘Sure, why?’

  ‘Just to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The greenness of her eyes was brighter, keener; she put down the cup and I noticed the length of her fingers, remembered how they felt on my body.

  It was enough only to see her and I would be aroused. After all this time that had never altered, diminished. It wasn’t love, nor anything like it: it was sexual, animal attraction.

  I knew it: she knew it.

  Usually we both enjoyed it. Today, from the way she was acting, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘It couldn’t have been that you wanted something out of me?’

  ‘Coffee?’ I suggested.

  ‘Or a quick lay.’

  I tried to ease things with a half-smile. ‘I don’t know about quick.’

  It didn’t seem to do any good.

  ‘Or something more?’

  ‘More?’

  Sandy stood up and came over to where I was sitting nursing my cup in both hands. She stood over me and for a moment I thought she was going to strike out and send either the cup or my head flying.

  ‘Christ, Scott! You’re a bastard!’ She said it quietly, but with feeling.

  I looked at her face but didn’t argue. How could I?

  ‘You spend all of your time using people,’ she went on, ‘that is, when you’re not sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.’

  I didn’t know what had happened to her last night or what had caused her to try getting out of bed through the wall, but something had made her less than happy all right.

  I reached up for her hand and took it in mine. Squeezed it. There was as much response as from a statue … except that a statue didn’t have warm blood running through its veins.

  And now that I’d touched her …

  I stood up and kept hold of her right hand; slid my right arm around behind her back and pulled her towards me. Her breasts against my chest, I moved my mouth the short distance down to the front of her neck. Kissed her slowly, tenderly.

  For a minute I thought I had it all covered.

  But I’d forgotten that Sandy was left handed.

  The slap caught me around the back of my ear and bounced back off the bone at the rear of my skull. I jumped and let go of her other hand. She had to be ambidextrous!

  At least both ears would be red.

 
‘What the hell was that for?’ I asked. It really was my day for asking stupid questions.

  ‘What the hell do you think it was for?’ she blazed back at me. I thought that she was going to strike out again, but she stood there smouldering away instead.

  ‘But, Sandy …’

  ‘But shit! No sooner do I finish telling you about the way you use people than you get on your feet and try the same thing again. Well, let me tell you this once, Scott Mitchell, and you’d better listen good. I don’t mind you dropping in on me for the occasional cup of coffee, I don’t even mind the occasional fuck. But I will not be treated like some bloody slot machine … especially when you don’t even put the money in! You’re such a smart guy that you think a little fiddling with those famous fingers of yours will get things working for nothing.’

  She paused and I couldn’t do anything but stand there feeling like a circus midget down a deep hole.

  She didn’t pause for long.

  ‘So next time you want something out of me, you can pay like everyone else does. You got that?’

  I nodded stupidly. I thought I had it all right.

  ‘Which means fifteen pence for a cup of coffee, ten pounds for me and everything else on top.’

  She stopped again and stood there looking more beautiful than I had ever seen her. I wanted her now as much as I ever had, probably more so, but I wasn’t risking getting slapped again and, anyway, I didn’t have that kind of money to throw around. Not on my own behalf.

  ‘What’s it to be then, Scott? Apart from the coffee you’ve already had.’

  I took the coins out of my pocket carefully and counted them out into the palm of my other hand. One five, three twos, two ones and five halves. I put them down on the table alongside the bed.

  ‘You can keep the change,’ I said.

  Sandy didn’t move. I did. I turned around and headed for the door. My hand was on the handle before I turned back to face her; she hadn’t altered her position.’

  I reached back into my jacket pocket. Put the card from the Club Internationale down alongside the money.

  ‘Anything useful you can find out about that place, I could do with. Especially why whoever runs it might not like me poking my nose around where others keep clear. Maybe around some guy with a lot of bread called Crosby Blake.’