by Ted Lewis
We drive in silence for a minute or two and then I say, “Where am I taking you to?”
She lights another cigarette and says, “I thought we’d be going to your place. Home ground and all that kind of thing.”
I take the cigarette packet from her and shake my head.
“Not tonight,” I say. “Got me relations down from up north. They might get the wrong idea. You know what they’re like up there.”
I light my cigarette and drop the packet in her lap.
“I live off Baker Street if that’s not too far out of your way,” she says, snapping up the packet. There is another silence.
“How were you so sure about Grimsby?” she says after
a while.
“Because I’m from Scunthorpe.”
“Scunthorpe?”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
“Well, that’s the difference between you and me then, isn’t it?”
She says something which I don’t catch because as she speaks she turns away and rolls down the window and lets in the sound of the rushing wind.
“Been down here long?” I ask her.
“Have you?”
“Long enough. I think it’s a shit-hole.”
“Rather depends on the life you lead, doesn’t it?”
I laugh and then I say to her, “I expect you think it’s
all right.”
“Have you ever been to Grimsby?”
“Only when Scunthorpe were away to them.”
“Up the bleeding Mariners,” she says and looks out of the window. We don’t speak again until we get close to Baker Street.
“Do you know Crawford Street?” she says.
“I know Crawford Street.”
“Well, that’s where I live.”
I turn in to Crawford Street and drop my speed.
“Just over there,” she says. “Beyond the antique shop. The corner where the pub is.”
I draw the car in to the curb but I keep the engine
running.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says and gets out.
I switch the engine off and I get out as well.
The block where her flat is is a postwar piece of architecture, flat-roofed and ocher-coloured. There is an open access to a flight of tiled steps illuminated by dim lights on the ceiling too high for anyone to smash. There is also a slight smell of urine. I follow her up the stairs and we climb three flights until we get to a landing that has two doors and she goes over to one of them and takes her key out and pushes it in the lock, puts her knee against the door and the door swings inwards. She goes inside without looking behind her. I follow her through the door but she’s already disappeared from the hall. I follow her perfume and I find myself in a long narrow room divided in two by a five-foot-high antique folding screen. In the first half of the room there is a very nicely restored chaise longue and a matching button-back low chair and there is a sheepskin rug on the floor. The walls are painted Prussian blue and the off-white covering of the chaise longue and the chair and the colour of the rug contrast nicely with the walls, as do the framed, pale modern drawings arranged on the walls with perfect carelessness. The carpet is Prussian blue as well and between the carpet and the walls the white baseboard is gleaming and streamlined. I walk over to the screen and look beyond it. There is an aluminum-and-glass dining table with half a dozen matching chairs ranged against a window covered by full-length gray-and-pale-blue patterned curtains. There are dozens of bright-coloured cushions scattered all over the floor and an enormous picture covering most of one wall, painted in two colours: red and red. The only other furniture in this half of the room is a stripped Welsh dresser but instead of crockery on the shelves there is the best selection of drinks I’ve seen in a long time. Next to the dresser there is an open door and through that door I can see the corner of a bed and beyond the bed a wall that is just one big mirror reflecting the salmon-pink glow of a single table lamp. The carpet in the bedroom is white and so is the bed cover. Draped on the bed is the coat that the girl has just been wearing, its dark colour stark against the cover’s whiteness. Then Lesley appears in the doorway, blotting out the view. But I don’t mind that because she’s taken off the remains of her dress and slipped on a mohair cardigan over her shoulders, which she hasn’t bothered to fasten. She is still wearing her tights and her pants.
“Now you can see what Hume didn’t get round to revealing,” she says. “Or would you have rather torn off the rest yourself?”
“Very nice,” I tell her. “Does Hume pay for the central heating as well? Or can you afford to be out of work with pneumonia?”
“I can afford to be out of work,” she says.
“I’ll bet,” I say, looking round the room. “I didn’t know there was that much money in what you did. What was it you said you did?” She doesn’t answer that one.
I go over to the dresser and take a glass and pour myself a drink. After I’ve taken a sip I take off my coat and drape it across the glass-and-aluminum table. Then I sit down on one of the matching chairs and take off my shoes and socks and then I stand up again and take off the rest of my clothes. Then I pick up my glass and take another drink.
“Who’s going to win, then?” I ask her.
She lowers her eyes until she’s staring at the object of my affections.
“Judging by the look of you, you are,” she says.
“Cheers, then,” I say, and put down my glass and walk towards her.
She slips back into the bedroom and slams the door and there is the sound of a bolt sliding into its socket.
I stand there for a minute and then I go back to my glass and pour another drink and take it over to one of the matching chairs and sit down again.
“You could at least throw me out a cigarette,” I call to her. “I’m right out.”
“Fuck off,” she shouts. “Fuck off, you clever condescending bastard. You’ve seen all you’re going to see.”
Her voice is almost breaking with the thrill she got out of slamming the door.
“You know,” I tell her, “I thought I was right about you. I figured this was the way you’d take your pleasure.
Showing out then shutting up. Then when you’ve done that you hope the bloke is going to go raving mad and start tearing off your clothes. You want to be able to blame them afterwards. That’s why you hang around with a piece of shit like Hume. You liked the treatment you got tonight, but being a modest little girl you didn’t like anybody seeing you get it. And that’s why I’m out here, to pay up for the pleasure.”
“Fuck off.”
“You know that door wouldn’t stop a rampant canary. You know all I’d have to do would be to lean on it. But that’s what you expect me to do, don’t you?”
“You’re not having me, you bastard.”
“That’s right,” I say, and I start getting dressed again.
There is silence behind the door. I slip on my clothes and go over to the dresser and pour myself another drink and take it through beyond the screen and sit down on the chaise longue. After a while the bedroom door opens and I imagine her standing in the doorway, looking round the room. Then I hear her stockinged feet pad over to the corner of the screen. First she looks over to the door to see if it’s still open and then out of the corner of her eye she sees that I’m still there and almost jumps out of her tights.
“Just finishing my drink,” I tell her. “That all right?”
Although she does her best to give me her nastiest look I know that she’s relieved I’m still there. Now she can carry on with her games. She leans against the screen and takes her cigarettes out of her cardigan pocket and lights up.
“You got dressed then,” she says.
There’s no point in answering that one.
“Weren�
��t so sure you were going to win?”
I take another sip.
“The only way you would have won,” she says, “is if I’d let you.”
I forget I haven’t any cigarettes and automatically I begin to search my pockets before I remember.
“Can I have one of your cigarettes?” I ask. “Or is that against the rules of this game?”
She inhales deeply and looks at me and grins. Then she says, “Look in the ashtrays. You might find something your size in there.”
“All right,” I say, balancing my drink on the mound of the chaise longue. “Let’s do it your way.”
I get up and walk over to her and take hold of her wrists and carry on past the screen towards the bedroom and as soon as I’ve got hold of her she starts screaming and thrashing about, trying to catch me in the crotch with her knees, trying to bite anything she can get her teeth close to. At one point she sinks them into my ear and I have to pull her hair to get her loose and that makes her eyes water a bit. She’s still performing like this when we’re in the bedroom and next to the bed, wriggling and screaming and kicking. I push her face down onto the bed and hold her wrists together behind her back and with my free hand I pull off her tights and with them I begin to try to tie her wrists together. But she thrashes herself over onto her back so I have to straddle her stomach and pin her arms above her head and tie her wrists that way. When I’ve done that I tie what’s left of the tights to one of the rods in the brass bedstead at the head of the bed and after I’ve done that I can relax for a minute. She doesn’t relax but she stops her thrashing about and goes still and rigid. I smile down at her.
“Relax,” I tell her. “You’re enjoying yourself.”
She begins writhing about again so I slide down a bit lower and start to go to work.
It doesn’t take long. When it’s over she goes all limp and glassy-eyed; her expression isn’t all that different to the one on Hume’s face earlier. I get off the bed and untie her and she doesn’t make any move at all. I feel in the pockets of her cardigan and find her cigarette packet and take two out and drop the cigarette packet on the counterpane. Then I walk out of the bedroom and pick up my coat and go home.
Very carefully I push my key into the lock and turn it and push slightly and then I wait for a while and listen. There is no sound at all coming from inside the flat. Then I open the door a little so that it’s just wide enough for me to slip through. I don’t immediately close the flat door behind me but instead I go over to the door that opens into the main room and have another listen. There is still only silence. So I take out my shooter and open the door as quickly and with as much force as I can and then I stand to one side and wait to see what, if anything, happens.
Nothing happens.
So I poke my head through the door and survey the scene.
Con is sprawled in my easy chair with his hat over his eyes and his shoes off and a copy of Penthouse spread open on his lap. His mouth is wide open and while I’m standing there a deep and shuddering snore rises up from his throat.
Charlie, on the other hand, is lying on the put-u-up which Con has very graciously opened up for him. Con has also draped his leather coat over Charlie as Charlie has rolled his jacket up for a pillow and obviously it wouldn’t do for Charlie to catch a cold. Charlie is sleeping quite deeply considering he has one foot on the floor as Con has used a tie to secure Charlie’s ankle to one of the legs of the divan. The crumpled bag of crisps is lying on the floor, the crumbs scattered all around. I go over to the divan and kneel down and pick up the bits and put them back in the bag and go into the kitchen and drop the bag into the pedal-bin. Then I go back into the lounge and stand in front of Con and put the barrel of my shooter just beneath his nose. The angle of his hat is such that when he gets round to opening his eyes he will be able to see the shooter and not the person who’s holding it. I kick his feet and push the shooter forward a half an inch so that the sight is halfway up his left nostril. Con snaps wide awake and grips the arms of the chair but after he’s done that he doesn’t move at all.
I let him sweat for a minute or two and then I relax the shooter and I say, “You fucking egg. I could have been anybody.”
Con takes his hat off his head as if he’s going to throw it but he slows his action up and all he does is let the hat fall to the floor.
“I fell asleep for a couple of minutes,” Con says. “Two minutes, that’s all.”
“That’s all it takes, isn’t it? Two fucking minutes.”
“Yes, all right, all right,” he says, getting up. “We all know you never made a mistake in your life.”
“I could have made one tonight, couldn’t I? I could have come back here and found Charlie gone.”
“Well you didn’t, did you?”
I shake my head then I go into the kitchen and put a light under the kettle and go back into the lounge.
Charlie stirs slightly in his sleep. Con is standing by the fireplace with his hands in his pockets. I go over to
the drinks and pick up the whisky bottle and take it back into the kitchen. I drop a tea bag into a mug and when I’ve added the milk and sugar I top it up with some of the whisky. Then I pick up the mug, go into the bathroom and turn the bath taps on and while the bath is filling up I plug in my razor and start to shave.
Con appears in the doorway, holding a mug of tea.
“Where’ve you been, anyway?” he says.
“Looking for Gerald and Les, haven’t I?”
“And?”
“I didn’t find them, did I?”
“Took you long enough.”
“That’s right.”
I unplug the razor and start to get undressed.
“So they still don’t know about Finbow?”
I turn off the taps. “That’s right.”
“So we’ve had a wasted evening, then.”
I get into the bath.
“We will have if Charlie wakes up and lets himself out while you’re in here looking at me.”
Con takes my key out of his pocket.
“Just locked the front door, didn’t I?”
I sink low into the bath and ask Con to pass me my mug of tea. When he’s done that he drops the lid on the toilet and sits down.
“So how are we going to score it next?”
“Charlie gives his mother a call, but before he does that I’ve got to decide which is favourite about what we get him to say. We can either get him to creep round or we can make it, so to speak, a matter of life and death. But first I’ll have to put it to those two eggs. If they ever get back from the other side of the looking glass.”
“But Jimmy would never wear us putting the arm on Charlie. He’d be too fucking keen to see him put down.”
“It’s his sister we’d have to get to. We’d have to suss out her feelings. But unfortunately we can only find that out through Charlie and that way’s like getting facts from the Prime Minister.”
Con lights up two cigarettes and hands one of them
to me.
“That Jimmy Swann,” says Con. “You never know about anybody, do you? I mean, there’s a football team of
characters I could imagine turning us in before I’d have thought about Jimmy.”
“Jimmy’s no different to anybody else. He’s faced with it and he’s got a choice to make. What would you do? Stand twenty-five for the sake of all the nice people you happen to know?”
Con shrugs. “What about you?” he says.
“They’d have to take me in the first place,” I tell him.
Con laughs. “Oh, yes,” he says. “They’re never going to take you in, are they?”
“No,” I tell him. “I’ve done my bird once and I’m not doing any more.”
“Even if it meant doing like Jimmy Swann’s doing?”
“It depends. There’s some people
I’d shop and some I wouldn’t. I mean, I’d shop the Colemans, no trouble. I’d know they’d do the same to me so that’d make it square.”
“And Jimmy?”
“Now I know, yes. Although I never did like the cunt. He’s always been too much of a chancer. I’d have shopped him to get somebody else out of it, maybe, if one of Jimmy’s mad moments had dropped somebody else in it.”
“And what about somebody like me?”
“The question doesn’t arise. You’re so fucking stupid you’ll shop yourself without any help from anyone else.”
Con laughs again and leans across and stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray that is balancing on the edge of the bath.
“That’s right,” Con says. “There’s only one smart bastard in this game and that’s Jack Carter, isn’t it?”
“Comparatively speaking, yes.”
Con gets up off the toilet seat. “I’m surprised you’re not floating on top of the water,” he says, and goes out.
I stay in the bath for a while, the Badedas bubbles crackling gently in the quietness. The shaving mirror is at the far end of the bath and the magnifying side is angled so that I can see the reflection of my face. The lines that add up to the sum of my years remind me that if I was really smart I’d have stopped running around for Gerald and Les years ago. If I was really smart I could have invested my money and taken my brother Frank from behind the pub bar and instead put him behind a chip-shop counter for a share of the profits. If I was really smart I wouldn’t be tonking Gerald’s old lady. If I was really smart I wouldn’t be working a twenty-four-hour day. If I was really smart I wouldn’t be thinking about what I was going to do with my next ten-grand split. If I was really smart I wouldn’t need it.
The water begins to go cold so I get out of the bath and towel myself down and put on my dressing gown and go through into the lounge. Con is back in my chair, reading Penthouse. His cigarettes are on the floor by the chair.
