by M. P. Wright
Despite his bulk he moved quickly, his weighty arms swiping the cosh towards me as I fought to get up. He was almost on top of me and about to rain down another hefty swipe of the lead club when I lifted my leg and slammed the flat of my foot with all the strength I had into his kneecap, bringing him down hard onto the pavement in front of me. I brought my foot down again twice more, smashing my heel into the back of his head as he writhed in agony.
There was no siren, only the familiar blue flashing beam of a police car that caught my eye as I struggled to my feet. I turned with relief toward the oncoming vehicle, fighting hard to stay upright as it drove towards me.
Rather than slowing down as it approached, the car began to accelerate.
As it drew along side me, the passenger side door was flung open, hitting me square in the chest, spinning me around and knocking every bit of air out of my body as I was flung across the street and into the gutter. Motionless and sprawled out in the street, I faintly heard a man’s voice call out “check the spade” before I lost grip of my conscious world and darkness welcomed me with open arms.
*
The unwelcoming rank smell of the sewers woke me with a jolt: face up, my head on the iron grating of a drain. Sleet still fell from the night sky; I was soaked through to the skin, the cold ground numbing my limbs where I lay. I pulled myself up and sat on the kerb, hands on my knees, my scuffed knuckles stinging and head pounding. Not a soul passed as I sat for what seemed like an age, freezing water running over my sodden shoes, the blood from my nose dripping into its heavy flow and washing it down the road.
After picking my hat out of the snow, I slowly walked the mile back to my digs with every step sending a sharp jolt of pain through my beaten frame. When I finally reached my front door I fumbled with the keys, fingers frozen, hands shaking with cold as I let myself in, taking each step of the stairs one at a time and falling through the door into my bedsit. I wanted to sleep, just hit my bed and forget everything. But that was foolish thinking. I needed to check myself out first. I took off my sodden clothing and left it in a drenched pile in the hall. In the bathroom, naked and on my knees, my head over the toilet bowl, I threw up until my guts had no more to give.
Straining to get myself up, I leant against the sink and looked at the mess that greeted me in the mirror. My face had got off lucky, a cut across my cheekbone and a badly bruised nose was the sum of it, but I had a nasty gash at the back of my head. I ran the tap and rinsed a towel under it, placing it over the wound for a moment. I felt my scalp and winced as I caught the quarter-inch opening with my prying fingertips. The rest of me was a mixture of grazes and developing bruises that would show their true colours by morning.
I got into bed, pulling the sheet and blankets over my perished body. There I lay in the dark shivering, hoping that sleep would soon be with me. I closed my eyes and began whispering her name over and over again to myself until the phoenix rose out of the ashes of my heart and took me by the hand to the place where she always waited for me.
“Hey, hun, you rest now. Ellie gonna take good care o’ you,” she whispered.
I smelt the scent of the poinciana flowers in her hair, then felt Ellie’s warm body move in close against my back as she softly caressed my face with her hand. I felt the child in her belly, its soothing heartbeat pulsating in time to the rising of my sleeping breaths.
*
I was awakened from the deepest of sleep by a heavy thumping at my door. Bright sunlight shone through the curtains, which gave the room a false sense of warmth. I looked at my watch, which was still strapped to my wrist. It was just after three thirty in the afternoon. I hauled myself into an upright position, my head throbbing, and threw the stained bedclothes off of me.
It wasn’t a surprise to find that my upper torso was covered in a series of emerging, and painful, black and blue bruises where I had been beaten with the slapjack. I pulled a sheet around me and wrenched myself outta bed and down the hall to where my door was about to be took off of its damn hinges by whoever was banging on it. I opened it with a look on my face that the devil would have shied away from.
“Git your sorry, lazy ass out—” His sentence abruptly halted, a shocked and now silent Vic stood before me, his gaze focussing on my knocked-about face.
I swung open the door to let him in. I felt weak and leaned against the wall to keep myself from falling over. Vic closed the door and, with his back against the stained-glass panels, flicked on the hall light to get a better look at me.
“Muthafucka . . .” I heard him mutter deeply under his breath. I looked up and watched his face harden and his eyes close, thoughts of revenge burning within every inch of his being, while he desperately tried to hold at bay the brutal retaliation I knew he wanted to inflict on those who had done me harm. I took a step towards him to calm his anger, arm outstretched in a pacifying but futile gesture as my head began to spin and my legs gave away from under me.
9
Vic had carried me back to my bed, where I’d slept for another six hours.
During that time I dreamt that Stella Hopkins had found me in the street where I had been beaten. She’d picked me up and tended to my injuries with a lace handkerchief that had the same sanitised odour of her home. She folded the bloody cloth tissue and pushed it into my hand before walking away into the wintry dimness while I kept calling out her name, pleading for her to return to me.
When I woke, it was after nine in the evening and Vic was standing over me, the light of my bedside lamp casting his shadow on the wall. His arms were folded across his massive chest as he smiled down at me.
“ ’Bout time, too. We got to thinkin’ you might be dead, you been laid in that bed so long.”
I heard a familiar laugh, and I lifted myself up on my elbows to take a look and found Carnell Harris on the other side of the room. He was sitting on my kitchen chair, its back reversed so that he could rest his big arms and chin on the arch.
“Hey, JT, you look like crap.”
“Thanks, Carnell, you’re all heart.”
I dropped back onto the bed. A feeling of nausea rose from my stomach into my mouth as the strong smell of the fiery jack ointment hit me. Someone had smothered it over my torso, and its unfriendly aroma wafted from underneath my bedclothes. Vic bent over me and slid his arm under my back; I flinched in pain as he pulled me forward, propping me up with my pillows.
“I got Carnell to bring Loretta over; she cleaned you up and rubbed that nasty shit all o’ your body.”
I heard the tapping of a pair of stiletto heels as they walked on the wood floor in the hallway outside. Carnell’s wife, Loretta, appeared at my bedroom door, her curvaceous figure leaning on the frame. She wore a tight-fitting scarlet satin dress cut with a deep V in the chest that flatteringly showed off her amply proportioned breasts. Her long jet-black hair was pinned back tight across her head and tied with a red ribbon in a bun. From where I was sitting, she looked too damn good to be playing at night nurse.
“He awake? How’s he doing?”
“Boy gonna be just fine, except for the horse cack you gone and smeared all over him,” Vic said.
“That horse cack gonna save his pretty face and take the sting outta his messed-up hide,” Loretta replied, quick as a whip.
Loretta gave me a sultry wink before walking over to my bedside. She stood for a moment, looking at me, her heady perfume going head to head against the overwhelming medicinal scent of the fiery jack before dropping a familiar-looking brown envelope in my lap.
“I found this in your coat pocket. I’m taking your wet clothes back with me to wash. I’ll drop ’em off fo’ you in the morning. You sleep on some more now and take no notice o’ these two fools, you hear me.”
She picked up her fake-fur coat from the edge of my bed and turned to her husband, jabbing at his foot with the toe of her high heel.
“Carnell, git your fat ass outta that chair and take me home, you been sat on that ting fo’ hours like you got your
butt glued to it!”
Vic let out a roar of laughter at Loretta’s damning gibe as Carnell sluggishly got up, rubbing the top of his balding head.
“OK, cherub, you got everyting?” Carnell asked Loretta, barely masking his indolence.
“Oh yeah, I got everyting I need, including a big lazy-assed fuckin’ excuse fo’ a husband!”
“Loretta, girl, you got the body and looks of a goddess and the mout’ of a whore, you know that?” Vic was desperately trying to keep his face straight as he spoke.
“Yeah, is that so? Well, from what I been hearing the only whore been in this pit is the one he been calling out fo’ while he been sleeping all this time.”
Her words echoed around in my head as I watched her saunter out of my bedroom with Carnell in tow like a medieval serf holding the trailing robes of his magisterial sovereign.
*
I was dead to the world for the rest of Tuesday night and woke the next morning just before eight thirty to the sound of Vic clanking about in my kitchen, where he was cooking eggs and bacon. He had pulled the armchair from out of my lounge and into the bedroom, then slept by my side through the night, using his overcoat as a blanket.
He’d heard me as I was getting out of bed and stuck his head around the opened door. He looked as rough as I felt.
“Sit your ass down, man. You know you need to git yourself some decent fuckin’ furniture in this dump. My back feels like I had Carnell’s big ass sitting on it all night.”
As he spoke, he waved around in his hand a rusty metal spatula, the grease flying off of the end of it, hitting the walls and leaving a series of small oil stains across them.
“You ain’t got a damn ting a bit o’ use in that kitchen out there. Chipped plates, nasty old cups, knives and forks that are all bent outta shape, and you got fuck all in that fridge o’ yours too. I even had to drag my butt down the street in the snow to buy you fuckin’ breakfast this marnin’.”
“I’ve been limited on funds lately.” It was all I could manage in reply.
“Shit, man, that’s seriously limited out there. You need to git your ass down to a soup kitchen an’ git fed, if tings are that bad.”
“Well, I might not need the soup kitchen fo’ a while. Take a look in there.”
I grabbed up the brown Manila envelope that Earl Linney had given to me on Monday evening from off of the bed and threw it over towards Vic. It landed at his feet. He bent down, picked it up, opened it and pulled out the folded five-pound notes and began counting them.
“You got yourself fifty pounds in here, man. Where’d you git it? You been selling ganja?” Vic asked suspiciously.
While we ate breakfast, I told Vic about my meeting with Linney on Monday evening, the money, and being followed by the guy I got into the fight with. I sat with a mug of strong coffee, warming my hands while my cousin listened in silence to the details I recanted.
“So, let me git this straight. Some big honky follows your ass from Clifton then beats you with a sap. Then you’re kicked across the street by a police car, and the fifty notes in your pocket they don’t touch. Someting stinks ’bout it all, brother.”
Vic was on a roll and he had a point.
“JT, the ting you need to be asking yourself is why the Babylon are interested in you meeting up with that old Jamaican bastard. You think on ’bout that befo’ you start worrying ’bout anyting else.”
Vic ran me a hot bath and I soaked my aching body before shaving myself with an unsteady hand. I stretched out in the tub and enjoyed the soothing heat of the water on my limbs. Getting cleaned up had made me feel a little more human again. I put my towel round my waist and returned to my bedroom with Loretta Harris’s comment last night about Stella Hopkins being a whore rolling round in my head.
After slowly changing into a fresh shirt and jeans, I sat in my armchair in the bedroom and struggled to bend over to put on my socks, my beat-up body smarting with each movement I made. Loretta arrived just after eleven with my clothes from last night washed and ironed. Carnell had taken my shoes with him, dried them out and polished them within an inch of their life, buffing away the white tidemarks that the snow had created and leaving a shining gleam on them.
Loretta kissed Vic on the cheek before coming in and sitting down next to me on the edge of the bed, running her red-nailed fingers across my scalp and rubbing my neck before speaking.
“How you feelin’, JT? You sure looking better than you did, lover.”
“I’m good, Loretta, good. Thanks fo’ cleaning up my stuff.”
The humility in my voice caused her cheeks to flush.
“You needn’t thank me, JT. I know you’d do it fo’ me an’ Carnell.”
She smiled and took my hand in hers as she spoke. I looked up towards her and lightly squeezed her fingers. It was a simple gesture of gratitude, which was all I could muster at that moment.
“Loretta, what you said last night ’bout that missing girl, Stella Hopkins, being a whore. What you mean by it?”
“What’s to mean, JT? Last weekend I was with Jocelyn Charles in the Prince o’ Wales. She’s one of Papa Anansi’s girls.” Loretta grimaced as she spoke the pimp’s name. “Anyhow, we git to talking ’bout how that Stella girl had gone missing and that Jocelyn had seen her at a party she was working at.”
“You happen to know where I can find Jocelyn?” I asked.
“Baby, if you wanting somebody to hook up with to keep you warm at night, I can think o’ somebody a little more righteous than Jocelyn.”
“I’m sure you can, Mrs Harris, but I kinda need to speak to her urgently.”
“You can try the Speed Bird club, she normally in there most nights filling herself with rum when she ain’t selling her pokey.”
She got up to leave and turned towards me. The sensual beauty was gone from her face, replaced by worry and fear. Her eyes were telling me what her lips could not. If she had spoken, she’d have told me to stay well clear of Papa Anansi and his girls.
I sat and listened as Loretta spoke to Vic in hushed tones out in the kitchen.
After a short while she called out her farewell to me from the hallway and said that Carnell would be coming around later to collect my bloodied sheets and bedding so that she could launder them. I felt I had given a good friend the unnecessary burden of having to worry about me and that my decision to enter a nocturnal domain where only iniquity resided had been the most unwise of choices.
Vic returned to my room. I had my head in my hands and was lost in my thoughts.
“Hey man, you OK? Look, I’m gonna split, git myself a shave and a few hours’ sleep. I overheard from Pearl you had a dinner date with ’em tonight. I’ll let her and Gabe know you been on the hooch and you ain’t well enough to head over fo’ supper later. You don’t want either of ’em seeing you all busted up like that.”
“Thanks, man, you—”
Vic butted in, not giving me chance to thank him for all that he had done for me these past twenty-four hours.
“Now Loretta says to tell you that if you’re going looking fo’ that cock-rat Jocelyn Charles, that you’ll recognise her by the mangy old fox-fur stole she wears round her neck. So we gonna pay us a visit to the Speed Bird later tonight then?” he asked enthusiastically.
The playful look on his face gave me little chance to reject his enthusiastic proposition.
10
Otis Grey was the stuff of nightmares. He was the kind of man we know exists but we’d rather not think about. At over six feet tall, the powerfully built Jamaican possessed a pockmarked and scarred face that resembled the kind of gothic creatures you would normally find hanging off the inside pillars of a church. Otis inhabited a world of prostitution, drugs and violence, the last brutally meted out to those stupid enough to cross him. The street girls he controlled lived in fear of his cruel wrath and his tendency to inflict physical pain with a large butcher’s knife that he kept hidden in a sheath sewn into the long black leather greatcoat he alw
ays wore. Only his mother had ever called him Otis; to everyone else he was simply known as Papa Anansi.
I had grown up around men like Papa Anansi all my life. As a child I had witnessed the violence and the fear these men elicited when they applied unwanted protection to local store-owners and publicans, and in later life as a police officer I’d see at first hand their rancorous acts of savagery as they waged gang war against each other. They built wealthy empires on misery and then one day would lose all they had to other monsters with equally, if not more, inhuman criminal behaviour than their predecessors had.
I needed to talk to Jocelyn Charles without Papa knowing. But that was easier said than done. Papa had a never-ending string of lackeys who were prepared to offer up the most meagre information for the price of a ropey joint. On top of that, if Jocelyn was found to be talking to me about his business affairs or the other girls in his pox-ridden harem, she would most probably say goodbye to a couple of fingers, or worse.
The Speed Bird club was on Grosvenor Road and only a short walk from Cut Man’s gym. I’d arranged to meet Vic in the Prince of Wales pub at ten that evening, hang around till last orders, then move on to the Speed Bird. I took the only suit I owned from my wardrobe. The navy-blue worsted fabric was wearing thin, but I still looked pretty sharp in it. I picked out a light-blue shirt and a dark knitted tie. I smarted from pain every now and then as I dressed. Loretta had made a fine job of cleaning down my overcoat and hat. I put ’em on, took a couple of aspirin to hold the stinging in my shoulder at bay, then headed out.
I opened my front door and the cold air hit my face, taking my breath away. Coal-fire smoke ran up the chimneys and billowed out into the night, mixing with the freezing fog that was dropping down in the streets as I walked carefully over the frozen, compacted snow and ice on the pavement.
It was just before ten by the time I pulled open the door to the Prince of Wales pub to meet Vic. A heavy mist of cigarette smoke floated across the lounge, where my cousin stood at the polished oak bar talking to the barmaid, his eyes staring downwards towards the low-cut top she was wearing and the ample cleavage on display. The juke box was playing the Rolling Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” to a small, unappreciative audience of mainly elderly men whose only interest was the liquor that sloshed around in their beer glasses.
