Cutting Edge

by John Harvey

  Resnick had found tins of frankfurters and Czechoslovakian sauerkraut, the nub ends of a loaf of black rye, pickled gherkins; he had opened the only bottle of wine he possessed, the cheapest dry white he had found in the Co-op, bought months ago to make a recipe he had since forgotten.

  Nervous of all this unwonted night-time activity, Bud chased his tail from room to room, occasionally stopping to look perplexed, the White Rabbit in Alice, terrified that he was late but with no idea what for.

  “The first of the Dial sessions, Charlie, the ones with Miles and Max Roach, you must have those, eh?”

  So they sat through the night, listening to the Charlie Parker Quintet—“The Hymn,” “Bird of Paradise,” “Dexterity”—while, around them, Resnick’s neighbors slept on, dreaming straight dreams unthreatened by flattened fifths.

  Ed Silver’s first attempts to play jazz had been as a clarinetist with a revivalist band in Glasgow, doing his best to sound like Johnny Dodds in the twenties. The first thing that changed that was, down south for a rare date at the Hot Club of London, this skinny guy had come up to him and started talking, an accent that stretched across the Atlantic and back to Aldgate. A musician himself, he’d played with a number of USAF band personnel stationed here during the war, taken a job immediately afterwards, polite music for dancers on one of the liners traveling from Southampton to New York. It was in his East End flat that Silver heard his first bursts of Charlie Parker, records he’d made with Jay McShann’s band; each time Parker soloed, the everyday was suddenly pierced by the sublime.

  Next day, Silver had pawned his clarinet in exchange for an alto and talked his way into a band working the boats. Anything to get to the Apple, 52nd Street, the Three Deuces and the Royal Roost.

  “This is the group,” Silver said now, listening, catching a piece of cucumber at the third attempt and slipping it into his mouth, “I saw at the Deuces. Amazing. Every last dollar I had on me I spent seeing them, three nights in a row, each time it was hotter and better.

  “Anyway …” A gulp at the wine now, wincing a little as he moved his mouth. “… there I am the next day, pretty late on, due on board ship at half-seven, taking my last look down Broadway and there’s Bird, crossing the street ahead of me, sax case in his hand. First reaction, Charlie, I’ll tell you, no, it’s not him, can’t be. Then it is and I’m hurrying after him, slapping him on the back, shaking his hand, telling him I’ve come all the way from England just to hear him, every solo he’s played the last three nights has been a fucking inspiration.

  “Bird looks at me a shade off and then he smiles. ‘Hey, man. Lend me fifty bucks.’ I would have given that man every stitch of clothing on my back if he’d asked for it, but right then I didn’t have five bucks, never mind fifty. I can’t think of another damn thing to say and all I can do, Charlie, I think of it to this day, is watch him walk away.

  “By the time he got to the studio, just a couple of blocks down, he’d copped from somebody else. Story goes he shot up in the studio bogs before going right in and cutting this stuff.”

  Ed Silver leaned back and closed his eyes as, unison theme over, Parker’s alto sailed out, clean and clear, over the swish of Max Roach’s cymbals.

  “‘Dexterity,’” Ed Silver said.

  “Story also goes,” said Resnick, “he’d killed himself before he was forty. Heart, stomach, cirrhosis of the liver.”

  Ed Silver didn’t say a thing; continued to sit there, eyes closed, sipping now and then at the last of the white wine.

  Saturday: Debbie Naylor sat in the living room, curtains still drawn, trying to get the baby to feed. Up on the first floor, she could hear Kevin retching, head over the lavatory bowl. Serve him right, she thought, though with little satisfaction, let him find out what that’s like, at least.

  “What d’you call this?” Graham Millington asked, staring down at his plate. His wife was eating wholemeal toast, drinking chamomile tea, reading the women’s page of the Mail. If she could persuade Graham to drop her off at Asda and collect her, there would be time to get her evening-class homework finished before the boys needed ferrying to that party in West Bridgford. “This isn’t what we normally have, is it?” Millington persisted.

  “Extra bran,” she said, “fifteen per cent more fruit and nuts. No added sugar or salt. Thought it would make a nice change.”

  Graham Millington mumbled to himself and carried on chewing.

  Lynn Kellogg sat in the parked car and poured coffee into the flask’s white plastic cup. When she’d been little, six and seven and eight, Sunday afternoon drives with her parents, east to the sea, south to watch the horses canter on Newmarket common, there had been milk in Tupperware containers, sugar—lumps for the horses, granulated for themselves, spooned from a paper bag—a packet of ginger nuts and another—treat of treats!—of jaffa cakes. Sitting there, watching the still deserted street, she could remember the first taste of jam, the quick sweetness of it the moment the chocolate coating broke through.

  “What time did she get in last night?” Skelton’s wife asked, tightening the belt of her dressing gown, turn and turn and pull, a double bow.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know.”

  Skelton shook his head. Take the kettle to the pot, not the pot to the kettle: amazing how our parents’ precepts stuck with us, governed the trivia of our lives, amazing and terrible. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  His wife opened the glass-fronted cupboard, took out saucers, bone-china cups, white with a tasteful floral design. “If it doesn’t matter, why spend half the night sitting up, the rest of it lying in bed not sleeping?”

  Divine blinked into the bathroom mirror with his one good eye. The other was swollen, yellow, stitches like Biro marks, blue-black, across it. “Shit!” He leaned over the toilet bowl to urinate, one arm resting against the wall; when he cleared his throat and spat, it was like dredging Trent Lock. He didn’t know what had been worse, the initial blow, the embarrassment or Resnick’s face. Well. The swelling would subside, the stitches would come out and there was the inspector still to face. “Slag!” wincing as the sound reverberated around his head. “Slag!” slamming the wall with the flat of his hand. “Fucking see her again, I’ll teach her a fucking lesson!”

  Calvin Ridgemount woke to the smell of bacon frying and knew instantly which day it was. He cleaned his teeth and splashed cold water up into his face. Same black jeans but a new T-shirt, Stone Roses, he liked the shirt design better than he liked the band. Smack on time, as Calvin entered the kitchen, his father was breaking the first of the eggs against the edge of the pan.

  “You goin’ to see your mother today?”

  “You know I am.”

  “That’s fine. Just a couple of things I’d like you to do for me first.”

  “Sure,” said Calvin, picking up one of the slices of bread his father had already buttered, folding it in half and starting to eat. “No problem.”

  “I’ve got a note somewhere for your mother, too. You give it to her, see that she reads it.”

  “Sure.”

  The same thing every fortnight, the same note, more or less, same words on blue-lined paper bought in a pad from the shop down on the corner and written painstakingly with a pencil. Knowing what would happen to them at his mother’s hands, Calvin no longer bothered to deliver them, tore them into tiny pieces and pushed them out of sight behind the seat on the bus instead.

  Helen Minton had thought she might write the letters by hand, but had decided instead that typing them would be better. She had a small Silver Reed, a portable she’d bought at Smith’s, oh, so many years ago she couldn’t remember. Typing was far from natural to her, far from fast. Not often did she get through a sentence without having to wind the paper up, dab on the Tippex, wind it back down. She had been up since well before light, curtains open just a crack, lamp by her elbow, the typewriter on the living-room table. Four envelopes were fanned across one another like cards, addressed an
d ready, stamped. The tea had long gone cold in its mug and formed a viscous, orange rim. Dear Mrs. Salt, she wrote, and now that you and Bernard are divorced you may not think this concerns you directly, and during the last eight years of your marriage …

  Dear Father, wrote Patel, another letter of appeasement and promises, what he was doing, how close he was to sitting his sergeant’s exam.

  Dear Mum, wrote Paul Groves, I don’t want you to be too upset, but I might not be able to get home next week, something’s cropped up …

  Dear Helen, wrote Bernard Salt and immediately tore it up.

  In the intensive care ward, Karl Dougherty opened his eyes when the nurse spoke to him and, for the first time since he had been admitted, knew exactly who and where he was.

  Amanda Hooson, a second-year social sciences student at the university, sweated on the floor of her small room, no way of knowing that she was pushing herself through her morning exercises for the very last time.

  Twenty-eight

  “Are you following me?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So what are you doing here then?”

  “Not following anyone, just sitting.”

  “You just happen to be sitting.”

  “Yes.”

  “In a parked car.”

  “Yes.”

  “At the end of my street.”

  “Your street?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “The street where you live.” Lynn had a sudden flash of memory, one of her mother’s few records, its cover torn and bent at the edges, stained with greasy fingerprints and ring-marked by mugs of tea, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, My Fair Lady.

  “What’s so funny?” Carew said, a vein above his right eye standing out through the sweat.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what’s that smirk doing on your face?”

  The smirk disappeared.

  “I suppose you’re here for the view?” Carew said.

  “How was your run?” Lynn asked.

  “Fine.”

  “A little over twenty minutes. What’s that, two miles, three?”

  “Four.”

  “Really? That’s pretty good.”

  “What? You want to be my coach or something?”

  “Depends what you need coaching in.”

  He leaned low towards the car window, a few drops of sweat falling from his nose down on to the sill. “What would you suggest?”

  “Oh,” Lynn said. “I don’t know. I should imagine it’s difficult teaching much to a man like you.”

  He gave her a glare and turned his back, started to walk away. He was wearing shorts this morning, despite the fall in the temperature, brief and tight across his buttocks. The muscles at the backs of his legs were thick and taut and shone with the dull glow of sweat. The hair along his legs and arms was thick and dark.

  “When did you last see Karen Archer?” Lynn called after him.

  Carew stopped instantly and Lynn repeated her question.

  He faced her slowly, began to walk back. Lynn read the expression on his face and thought for a minute he was going to reach in and try to drag her from the car. The moment passed. “You know I’m not allowed to see her,” Carew said.

  “Does that mean you haven’t seen her?” Lynn said.

  “Remember? I’m warned off.”

  “Not everyone pays attention to warnings.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  I doubt that, Lynn thought. “So you haven’t spoken to Karen since you were at the station? You haven’t seen her, there’s been no contact?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because she’s missing.”

  “Oh, well!” Carew threw out both arms like a bad stage tenor. “That’s it then. It’s obviously me. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Karen’s hidden in a cupboard somewhere. Ian Carew. No other explanation.”

  “Is there?”

  “What?”

  “Another explanation?”

  “I should think so, hundreds of them. You just like this one.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because it’s easy. You don’t have to think further than the end of your nose.” He made a gesture, maybe automatic, perhaps not, a tug at the front of his shorts. “Because you resent me.”

  Lynn bit her tongue, best to let it ride. “Why did you say a cupboard?” she said.

  “Did I?”

  “Hidden in a cupboard somewhere, that’s what you said.”

  “The sweat’s drying on me,” he said. “I need to take a shower. It’s getting cold.”

  “A cupboard,” Lynn persisted.

  “That’s right,” Carew smiling, “that’s where I’ve dumped her. Inside a sack after I hacked her to pieces.” He leaned close and leered. “Why don’t you come in and look?”

  Lynn stared at him, stone-faced.

  “Come on, search. You do have a search warrant, don’t you?”

  Lynn turned the key in the ignition. “If Karen gets in touch with you, please let us know. Ask her to contact the station, ask for me.”

  Carew sneered two soundless words, unmistakable. Lynn made herself let out the clutch slowly, check the mirror, indicate. When she reached the main road and swung up past the hospital towards the station, she was still shaking.

  It was raining again: a fine, sweeping drizzle that seeped, finally, into the bones, chilling you as only English rain could. On a makeshift stage at the center of the old market square, the Burton Youth Band were playing a selection from the shows to a scattering of casual listeners and a few sodden relatives who had made the journey over on the band coach. Off to one side of the stage, in a row of their own, a boy and a girl, eleven or twelve and not in uniform like the rest, sat behind a single music stand, mouths moving as they counted the bars. Resnick watched them—the lad with spectacles and cow-licked hair, the girl thin-faced and skimpily dressed, legs purple-patched from rain and wind—nervously fingering the valves of their cornets as they waited to come in.

  It was close to where Resnick was standing that Paul Groves had sat, staring off, and talked about his friendship with Karl Dougherty. I touched him one time and you’d have thought I’d stuck a knife right in his back. Once, while he and Elaine were still sharing the same house, truths spilling like stains everywhere between them, they had passed close together near the foot of the stairs and Resnick, unthinking, had reached to touch the soft skin inside her arm. He could picture now the hostility that had fired her eyes; the already instinctive recoiling.

  The band hit the last note of “Some Enchanted Evening” more or less together and Resnick clapped, startling a few dazed pigeons. An elderly lady wheeled her shopping trolley across in front of the stage and dropped a coin into the bass-drum case that was collecting puddles and contributions towards the band’s winter tour of Germany and the conductor announced the final number. Time to go, Resnick thought, but he stayed on as the two beginners lifted their instruments towards their lips. The conductor waved a hand encouragingly in their direction, the wind lifted their sheet music from its stand and their chance was lost. Without hesitation, the boy retrieved it and Resnick watched the girl’s pinched serious face as, biting the inside of her mouth, she struggled to find her place in time for the next chorus. Only when they had played their sixteen bars and sat back, did Resnick turn away, tears, daft sod, pricking at his eyes.

  Carew had taken his time over showering and now he sat in his room with the gas fire turned high, just blue-and-white striped boxers and a lambswool V-neck, eating a second apple and glancing through the review section of The Times. So many sections, it was getting difficult to tell Saturdays from Sundays. At hand but unopened, a book on neurosurgery that needed returning to the library, notes for an essay that should have been submitted the week before and for which he had every intention of applying for a further extension.

  He refolded the paper and dropped it to the floor, walked on bare feet to the window. The car
was back again, square to the end of the street, he could see the dark-haired silhouette clearly enough but not the face. Well, fuck her! He pulled on faded jeans, clean from the launderette, replaced his sweater with a white shirt. His black leather jacket was hanging behind the door. The door at the side of the kitchen led past an outside toilet, now disused, across a small flagged yard to a narrow entry. Half way along, Carew let himself through someone’s rear gate and slipped through the side passage into the adjacent road.

  He wondered if she’d still be sitting there when he got back, or whether her patience would have run out. On the whole, Carew thought with a smile, he preferred the former. Maybe then he would make a show of walking past, returning when she didn’t even know he’d left, give her something to think about. Or simply go back in the way he’d come out, leaving her none the wiser. Either had its advantages.

  And which one Carew chose, what would that depend on? Whim, mood, or how he got on where he was going?

  Lynn Kellogg shifted her position behind the wheel yet again, stretching her legs as best she could before beginning another set of exercises to keep the circulation flowing, raising and lowering first her toes, then all of the foot, circling and lifting, pressing down. Ankling, her former cyclist boyfriend had called it, one of the few techniques he could be relied upon to demonstrate successfully, those times she caught him flat on his back on their bed. She told herself not to check her watch but, of course, she did. She tried to clear her mind and concentrate, not wanting to think about the state of her bladder, how many more Sundays she could go without driving home to Norfolk, exactly what Resnick would say if ever she had to explain what she was doing.