London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  Ah, I thought, the flat connection.

  So we turned onto Cornwall Gardens. Angela had a permit to park on the street and she opened this big Georgian door for us and took us up in a lift to a lovely three-bedroom flat with all these Persian carpets in the lounge. It was gorgeous. And the balcony overlooked the fenced-in private gardens.

  Angela started cooking a vegetarian dinner in the open-plan kitchen. She said she always ate macrobiotic food, but she kept having a break from the kitchen every now and then so she could smoke a cigarette, which didn’t seem somehow kosher to me, her being macrobiotic and that. Ted arrived home about half an hour after she’d begun preparing the dinner. He wasn’t that big, a bit skinny with wire-rimmed glasses and a ponytail. A bit of an old-time hippy. He’d been out doing business, according to Angela. What with the sunshine and the shooters and the fresh taste of the lemons, by this time we’d already finished the first bottle of tequila: at least, me and Magsy had; the girls had been chatting most of the time in the kitchen.

  So then we all sat down around a tablecloth that Angela spread over the Persian carpet in the lounge and we polished off the brown rice, pickles, and veggies. I was feeling really healthy after that meal. We slumped back against the giant cushions and started on more shooters of tequila, and Ted brought out this lovely pearl-inlaid backgammon board. We all tried to concentrate on the game. That was when Ted produced a large mirror and laid out five enormous lines of white powder that he said was Colombian cocaine. Ted vacuumed up a line of powder and took the tails off the other lines and handed the rolled-up note to Magsy. Magsy dug into it and then Penelope had a line. I had a sense of relief when Angela said she didn’t want any. It made me feel a little less like a dork when I said, “Thanks, but I’ll stick with the tequila.” I’m not a prude—but I get these terrible asthma attacks if I breath hostile flower pollen, let alone cocaine, and I didn’t want to risk anything at all, given the state I was already in. The black and red and white triangles on the backgammon board already had a glow all their own after we’d finished the second bottle.

  So we threw the dice and moved a few counters and then Ted laid out another set of lines of the Colombian coke and I downed another three shots of tequila and I felt a lot less nervous about the heavy drugs the boys on my right kept snorting and we threw the dice some more and we finished the third bottle of tequila and I was feeling all sunny even though it was dark and time to go home and I stood up and my knees didn’t seem to work so good and I thought, well, it’s all right because I’m going to go home now, and I really hadn’t realized just how good I was at backgammon. I thought, I really wouldn’t mind meeting Ted again, even if he is a bit of cokehead. I really wanted to play another game with him.

  But you know what? I never did get to go back to that flat … not ever again, did I? I’d been there by chance, really, I suppose. I mean, it was Magsy and his girlfriend who Angela had meant to invite and I’d just happened to be along with Magsy after we bought the tequila. So I had no real business being there, did I?

  Just as we were about to leave, Ted grabbed Magsy by the arm, all friendly.

  “Hey, Magsy,” he said. “Think you can shift some coke for me?”

  Magsy’s face lit right up. A business opportunity … Magsy liked that … and no doubt he really had enjoyed all that marching powder, and Ted liked him so much that, right there and then, he laid a couple of ounces on Magsy and told him to pay it back in a week. Even with all that liquor in me, I knew that this was probably a bad idea, but Magsy was dead thrilled. Fair play, I know for a fact he paid Ted back on the fronted coke two days before the week was up.

  Ted, of course, was now my landlord. That made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but after a month or so a lovely woman of thirty-one by the name of Sheri moved in with me and I was glad I had my own gaff. Sheri was a real cockney. I met her when I got a job as a shipping clerk in Mile End. I had to pay the rent somehow. I took her round to see Magsy. He was still my mate, wasn’t he? By now he was doing a brisk trade. What I felt though … when we were around there … was that Magsy seemed a lot happier to see his clients than he did to see us. I thought, well, he’s my mate. I’ll confront him, like.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “You know, really going on?”

  He knew what I was talking about, when you’re mates, you do; but he just said, “I’m doing fine, son. Doing well. Just the sniffles, like. It’s just like having a cold, really. No bother at all.”

  The sniffles? What the …? I wanted to push him on it, but right then Ted walked in. He had this bloke with him called Danny. Danny had a very good haircut, a very expensive suit, a black crewneck cotton pullover, and a camel’shair coat. He was not an old-time hippy at all. He was very definitely an old-time villain—even if he was only about twenty-eight or so. Danny oozed charm.

  “Magsy,” he said, “how would you like to make a very sound investment, my son?”

  “What’s that?” Magsy replied.

  “How would you like to take out a lease on a small pornography outlet on Dean Street? Reckon it might be the perfect front for your proper business.”

  Magsy’s proper business was now, very definitely, hardcore narcotics.

  “Yeah,” Magsy said, big smile on his face. “I could get into that—a finger in every pie, innit? Sex and drugs and rock and roll.”

  I laughed along with him. He was charmed. I was charmed. But I still didn’t know if this investment was a good idea at all. I didn’t know the financial details, of course. But who was I to know, anyway? At that time I had a shit job in a shipping office on the Mile End Road while Magsy was about to move up to the West End with all the villains. And he did. After he opened up the porn shop, I used to go up to Soho every Friday night to have a drink with him after work.

  To tell the truth, I enjoyed meeting all those strippers and hookers and pimps and hustlers—who all seemed to be his mates—especially after I’d just spent the previous five days filing bills of lading. I felt like I was a very well-connected desperado … Well, not exactly … just a sort of desperado by proxy, really, wasn’t I? Magsy moved with the big fish like Ted and Danny, and, more and more often, the time came when we were out for a drink and he’d say, “Sorry, Dex, I got to push off. There’s a party at Ted’s flat.”

  I used to go home to Sheri then.

  “He’s leaving you behind, love,” Sheri would say. “He don’t give a damn about you, does he?”

  “No, he’s just busy with all that business,” I’d respond. “Ted probably don’t want him bringing his mates around there, does he? Got to keep a low profile and that.”

  But it hurt, I tell you that.

  I still met Magsy every now and then for a drink. I still liked it when he’d spin all those yarns about all the gangster stuff.

  So this one Friday night we were on the cognac in Steiner’s and Magsy said, “Hey, Dex, remember that flat on Gloucester Road?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Me and Penny are moving in next week.”

  “Get away,” I said.

  “Ted got tipped off, didn’t he? The Old Bill are looking for a major bust, so him and Angela got to leave the country in a hurry. He asked me and Penelope to house-sit for him.”

  “Ace,” I said.

  The weird thing was … Magsy never—ever—invited me round to the flat in Cornwall Gardens … not once.

  “Why d’you keep meeting up with that bastard?” Sheri said. Meaning Magsy.

  “Well, a mate’s a mate, innit?” I said. “He’ll come round …”

  But I didn’t see him for about three months after he moved into Cornwall Gardens. Then I met him on Old Compton Street one weekend.

  “What happened to you?” I said.

  Magsy’s face was swollen on both sides. And the skin was all swirls of green and yellow and purple.

  “Let’s have a drink,” he said.

  He had his jaw wired shut so he spoke through clenched teeth. We went into St
einer’s.

  “Ted sent me this blotter acid from the States,” Magsy sort of hissed and gurgled. I think he was all coked up so he kept on talking. “Mr. Natural tabs. Pure acid. One drawing of Mr. Natural perforated into four parts. Ted fronted it all, didn’t he? Told me to sell it on for a pound a go and he’d collect when he came home. A few months later, Ted did come home—very sudden. And when he came home, he came to collect. Fair enough, I thought. But he went berserk. Claimed I was giving him only a quarter of the money I was supposed to. I said that he told me to sell the Mr. Naturals for a quid apiece. Ted said I should have sold them for a quid per perforated square.”

  I wondered if Magsy was bullshitting me. How much was this a genuine misunderstanding with Ted and how much of the money might have gone up his nose?

  “So he did you over?” I said. I found that hard to believe. Ted didn’t look that hard.

  “Not just Ted. His family and all …”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “They’re all old-time villains—just like Danny. So I had to leave the flat, didn’t I? Under some duress … with the aid of all of Ted’s brothers and father and uncles and Danny, who, when they were finished with the duress, like, threw me down the stairs, didn’t they?”

  He hissed a bit as he laughed. I was glad he could laugh about it.

  “How’s Penny?” I asked.

  “They didn’t touch her. She’s with some mates of hers out near Epping.”

  “Where you staying?” I asked.

  “Sleeping on the floor of the shop.”

  “Come back to my flat.”

  I thought, well, those bastards have done him over, maybe he’ll drop all the gangster crap and get back to normal. He shook his head.

  “Nah, gotta stay in Soho,” he said.

  We arranged to meet the following Sunday at Steiner’s, and in those few days the swelling on his face had gone down a bit, though the bruises had started to take on some very spectacular greens and blues. I got us in a couple of pints of Stella Artois.

  “I gotta meet someone here,” he said.

  Ah shit, I thought.

  This curly-haired bloke with a squashed nose and a lot of gold chains came through the door. He went down to the gents and Magsy followed him. Then they came back out and Curly left.

  “Got to pay off the debts to Ted,” Magsy said. “Had to borrow some money.”

  Ah no, I thought.

  Magsy was practically bouncing all of a sudden—his fingers drumming on the bar, the shift of his shoulders. And he was probably low on coke, which gave him a sort of added drive. Magsy necked his lager in three large swallows.

  “Sorry, Dex,” he said to me. “Gotta score. Adios, amigo.”

  So off went Magsy to buy a load of coke and I went home to Sheri.

  And, truth to tell, that was the last I saw of Magsy. Not that I didn’t think about him. The police must have been watching him for ages and they decided to pay a visit to his Dean Street porno shop very early the next morning. They found about an ounce of coke and a weight of grass. Magsy got four years in Brixton. I never went near him in there.

  Twenty-six years later and I bump into him at Ristorante Il Pollo in the heart of Soho and we were going to meet in Steiner’s, the last place we’d seen each other before he went down. I took a breath and pushed through the door into the saloon bar. There was Magsy, standing at the bar with Richie Stiles, an old mate of his, who was as tall as ever but plump now, with a receding hairline and fuller cheeks. He was in an Armani suit though.

  “Dexie!” Magsy said. “Good to see you, son.”

  He and Richie were already three sheets to the wind on the shots of tequila and Corona beers that were lined up on the bar. I couldn’t resist it. Blame it on old time’s sake, or maybe because I was a bit nervous, but I had a lick of salt, a shot of tequila, bit on the lemon, and then soothed the burn in my throat with a cool slug of the Corona.

  “Richie!” I said. “Corporate bigwig now, son.”

  “Still a party,” Richie said. “But government-licensed now, innit? Make more money being legit these days. No police raids or nothing.”

  “So what are you doing with yourself?” Magsy said.

  If I said I was a writer, it would have had this stink of me being a bit of a braggart—which I am, really.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “A writer?” Magsy said. “You make money at that?”

  “I got to hustle to make a living,” I said. “But it’s okay. Better than any other job I’ve had … and I’ve had a lot since working in the shipping trade: laboring on building sites, bookkeeping, library assistant, then I decided to get a real life.”

  I could see that I’d stung him a bit with that. I hadn’t meant to. What was he doing? Bookies’ clerk? On the dole? I knew he wasn’t dealing.

  “God, how long has it been since I seen you?” Magsy said.

  I was sure he knew well enough.

  “Twenty-six years,” I said.

  I was buzzed but not drunk.

  “Yeah … right … since just before the trial,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, right.”

  What he meant was: You didn’t come to see me in prison, you gutless shit.

  And I didn’t, it was true, because when Magsy was sent down—call it total paranoia if you like—I was thoroughly convinced that if I had gone to see Magsy, I would be on a police list of known consorters with convicted drug traffickers and that within a very short time I would receive a similar dawn visit from the police just as Magsy had. And if the police needed to make up their arrest rate and decided that a consorter with known traffickers was worth fitting up, then I would be on the inside with him—with a criminal record and fighting off anal rapists. I just couldn’t face even the remotest possibility of it.

  Now he wanted me to feel guilty for it, which he had definitely succeeded in doing, and that made me really mad

  What he was doing, you see—what he was really doing—was trying to return me to that position I’d been in back then: him as Jack the Lad and me as the shipping-firm employee dogsbody. Knock me back to square one. He’d always thought of me as a bit of a wimp for not having the balls to do what he’d done: ducking and diving right into the thick of the coke dealing and the porn business. But he’d had his life and I’d had mine, and I wasn’t sorry at all with the way mine had gone. I wasn’t any shipping clerk anymore, was I? And what was he? What was he? Tell me that.

  And then it dawned on me … a slow creeping-up kind of dawn. I’d never forgiven him for treating me the way he did when he was all coked up with the Soho dope dealers and porn traders, had I? He’d been in the middle of the trade, and I was just a nobody, and our being mates hadn’t counted for a thing in his eyes back then. And all that shame and rage I felt over being dissed by Magsy, of being dissed by someone I thought was a mate, and, yes … all right … the guilt of my not visiting him in prison … it was that which had driven me to use the story of Magsy’s rise and fall in Soho for the script of Rough House. I hoped he’d like what he’d see when his life story would be all up there on the big screen in glorious Technicolor. If we got the money it would be me who put him there. Magsy on the big screen. Now who was the hot shot? What was he doing—in Bridgwater of all places—while I was on the roof of Soho House drinking expensive gassy water? Well, I thought. Well, the truth is … really, the truth is … it really didn’t matter what he was doing—or what I was doing—because we were both here in Steiner’s breathing the same air and drinking the same tequila, and sucking the same fucking lemons, and nothing was ever going to put the clock back to the time before he went to prison, before his trial, before the cops, before the loan shark, before the coke, before Ted, and before that fucking game of backgammon in Cornwall Gardens. And the truth is … the truth is … I was sorry. I really fucking was.

  LOADED

  BY KEN BRUEN

  Brixton

  Blame the Irish.

  I always do.


  The fuckers don’t care, they’re used to it, all that Catholic guilt they inherit, blame is like, habitual. Too, all that rain they get? Makes them amenable to bad shit. I’ve known my share of micks—you grow up in Brixton, they’re part of the landscape. Not necessarily a good part but they have their spot. Worked with a few when I was starting out, getting my act together. I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew, so sure, I had them in my early crew.

  Give them one thing, they’re fearless, will go that extra reckless yard, laugh on the trip, and true, they’ve got your back, won’t let you get ambushed. But it’s after, at the pub, they get stuck in it, and hell, they get to talking, talking loose. Near got my collar felt cos of that. So I don’t use them anymore. One guy, named, of course, Paddy, said to me: “Not that long ago, the B’n’Bs … they had signs proclaiming, No coloreds, no dogs, no Irish.”

  He was smiling when he told me and that’s when you most got to worry, the fucks are smiling, you’re in for the high jump. Paddy got eight years over a botched post office gig, he’d torn off his mask halfway through the deal, as it itched. I’d driven to The Scrubs, see if he needed anything, and he shook his head, said, “Don’t visit anymore.”

  I was a little miffed and he explained, “Nothing personal but you’re a Brit.”

  Like that made any sense, he was in a Brit nick. Logic and the Irish never jell, but he must have clocked my confusion, added, “In here, I’m with my countrymen. They see a Brit visiting, I’m fucked.”