CAFÉ ASSASSIN

by Michael Stewart

There was silence from you. I could hear you breathing down the phone. Look, Andrew, Liv told me she had it out with you. I had to tell her the truth. Let me explain, face to face. We need to talk.

  Well, I suppose …

  Now the worm waits for the apple.

  It was band night at the club. It was a rockabilly band called Wanda and the White Trash. The music wasn’t a million miles away from The Cramps. The same mix of early rock and roll, with surf and punk thrown in. The singer reminded me of a young Liv, a mix of punk, goth and rockabilly. Her hair was dark brown with a white-blonde streak at the front. She was wearing a tight fitted black pencil dress with metal hooks at the front and studs around the hem. The men wore zoot suits, bright coloured shirts, and crepe sole shoes, their hair quiffed with Dax.

  They could drink, this rockabilly crowd, although a lot of it seemed to have ended up on the floor. Their drinking tastes were not particularly sophisticated, pints of lager or bourbon and coke. A few were drinking Sailor Jerry’s. The audience had left some space at the front so that people could jive, jitterbug and lindy hop. I caught the eye of a man standing on his own in the far corner from the bar next to the picture of Baudelaire. He was wearing a military-style hat with ear flaps. He didn’t seem part of this crowd – he seemed completely at odds with it. He was staring at me.

  I tried to shrug it off, a feeling of unease. After two or three minutes I looked back and he was still standing there staring a hole right through me. The fucking cheek. I wanted to go over there and smash the back of his skull into the wall. I took a deep breath. I had to get a grip. I tried to push him out of my mind.

  Ray had caught a rabbit a few days ago. He’d carried it over to me in his mouth, still kicking. I went to take it from his jaws, ready to wring its neck, but as I did it was like someone or something had switched it off. A moment ago it was jerking and writhing. Now it was limp. Its head loose and floppy, blood dripping from its open mouth. How easily they give up.

  I held it by its front legs and took out my knife. I made a good cut between the legs and dragged the blade of the knife down, like it was a zip, reaching the genitals. The giblets slopped out, dangling by a thread. I cut this and freed the mess onto the grass, where they lay steaming. Ray gobbled them up. I fished out the lungs and fed them to him. I plucked the kidneys, still attached to the carcass, and gave them to him one by one, off the blade of the knife. Last I skewered the heart. He took it off the point and swallowed it whole. There is no such thing as a murderer in the animal kingdom. There is no such thing as a barrister either.

  I looked over to the far corner by the bar again. There he was, staring right through me. Could I, if push came to shove, wring his neck? I made an excuse to Pawel and wended my way through the crowd.

  Great night, mate. It was a punter in a blue teddy boy jacket.

  Yes, it’s a good one.

  I think it’s great you’re putting on rockabilly nights. Are you going to make it a regular thing?

  I might do, yes, excuse me.

  And I carried on through the crowd until I came to the staring man in the military-style hat.

  What’s your problem? I asked him.

  It’s the trains.

  What?

  He smiled at me. It’s the trains, they’re never on time.

  Do I know you?

  He just stared at me.

  Look, I said, I don’t know what your game is, but you better lay off, have you got that?

  He didn’t say anything, just carried on staring.

  Whoever smashed the window. Whoever threatened me. Whoever sprayed graffiti on the door and on the mirrors. That you, is it?

  He shrugged.

  What do you want?

  I’ll see you on Friday, he said, making his way through the crowd and up the stairs.

  There are two reasons why I went back to The Royal: Steve Taylor and Vinnie Howell. I bought Steve a beer. He was easily bought. He’d found someone to replace me.

  A cock of a student. Doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He’s even worse at mixing cement than you are. And he drives like a fucking girl.

  Thought you were getting your licence back?

  Yeah, next week. Thank fuck.

  I might have some work for you.

  You! Have work for me?!

  I’m right in thinking you’re not too fussy where you drink?

  Well, up to a point. What’s the crack, cuntyballs?

  I want you to drink at my place on Friday and Saturday nights. I’ll pay the bar tab. In other words you get to drink for free. As much as you like.

  So what’s the catch?

  You’re my insurance, in case things kick off.

  You mean I get to punch students and blokes with beards. Fuck me, I’d pay you to do that.

  And it was that easy to get Steve on the payroll. I had to wait till later on to ‘bump into’ Howler.

  I’ll have to make a phone call, he said, when I popped the question. It’s dead tricky to get hold of at the moment, proper MDMA. Bit of a drought.

  But I knew that was the maggot, the wriggling slimy thing on the end of the line that would cause my eel to bite.

  Why’s it so hard to get hold of? I asked him.

  Sassafras oil, he said. The main source comes from China. It takes hundreds of years to grow a sassafras tree. Then there’s the process of synthesising it – it’s dead complicated. A lot of the precursor ingredients are tricky to get hold of. I can get you tablets no problem, three for a tenner. But there’ll be fuck-all MDMA in them.

  It’s got to be MDMA, I said. Old school.

  It had to be the genuine article. I was going to take you back to 1989. He made a phone call.

  It’s dealt with. Happy days!

  We took a trip in a taxi to a place a few miles away. A back-to-back terrace. A dishevelled man in his thirties answered. Unkempt hair. Bad teeth. He had a dog the size of a lion in a cage by the kitchen door.

  Don’t worry, he said, He can’t get out.

  He had some scales and he weighed out a couple of grams of the grey-brown crystalline powder. He had some coke too.

  It’s not that speedy coke is it? I don’t want anything like that.

  Howler grabbed my arm. Listen Nick, this int no speedy shit. This man sells coke to barristers. It’s the real deal.

  When he said the word ‘barristers’ it was as though he were saying ‘people better than us’. Barristers, as though that were the true test. There were humans and then there were super-humans and these people were barristers and they had to have the best of everything. The dealer held it up.

  Look, see the shimmer on it? That’s how you can tell. Avoid floury stuff. Here, have a sniff.

  I did.

  It smells of kerosene, right? I nodded. It’s the proper stuff.

  I bought a couple of grams.

  Back at the pub, I got us a round in. What you said that time Howler, about helping me out?

  How do you mean?

  If I got into trouble.

  Sure, no problem. Why, do you need someone sorting?

  No. As it turns out. I think it’s sorted.

  I’d done my research. The Top Cat club no longer existed, nor did The Venue. But I’d found another club run by a member of one of the Madchester bands from the late 80s. It played all the same tracks as The Top Cat and The Venue used to play. There was a train going from Manchester to Leeds that ran all night long so we could get back any time we liked. I found the sort of pub we used to hang out in: run down, studenty. I got the first round and we found a cosy place to sit.

  You’re only as good as your last job in this game. I’ve got work for the next six months then there’s nothing in my diary, you said.

  You were looking a bit puffy in the face, eyes rimmed with red, as though you’d been hitting the singl
e malts a little too much. Must be hard to sleep, I thought, so much responsibility on your shoulders, but perhaps this concern was entirely unearned. You could, for all I knew, have slept like the dead.

  But you’ll get work later, right?

  Who’s to say.

  Come off it, Andrew. With your reputation. You’re one of the best players in the game.

  Well, yeah, I should be ok. But it’s a worry, that’s all I’m saying.

  How do you get the work?

  Firms of solicitors. You have to be in with them all. They control the work-flow really.

  You talked to me about how it operated, the social functions, the long hours, the poles that needed greasing, and the grease you needed to grease those poles. I listened and nodded, as though I were actually interested. Then you started talking about all the extra-marital affairs. It went with the job apparently.

  Adrenalin plus ego plus testosterone equals infidelity.

  Ever been tempted?

  Nah.

  Come on, Andrew, no one’s going to blame you. Your secret’s safe with me.

  It’s not my style, you said. You were not going to take this bait, but there were other worms in my pocket.

  How’s the club? Liv’s not mentioned it for a while.

  Well, she’s not working there at the moment, Andrew.

  Right.

  This made me smile. You didn’t even know. You didn’t even know the first thing about your wife.

  It’s going well. You’ll have to come down one night.

  I will, Nick. I promise. It’s just finding the time. My work takes me all over the country.

  Do you like all those long hours, Andrew?

  You thought about this for a while. Well, it’s probably like you and the club. It doesn’t feel like work. I love it, Nick. It gives me a buzz.

  I laughed. Talking of ‘buzz’ – you’re going to love what I’ve got.

  It’s all right though, Nick, right? I’ve not touched it in years.

  It’s the proper stuff, just like what we used to get. Loved up, old school.

  You looked a bit nervous, but you had always had a soft spot for MDMA, indeed you enjoyed it more than me. Every occasion I took it, it was on your insistence. I imagined you’d continued your habit during your time in higher education.

  I shouldn’t really, you know.

  But I could see beneath the nerves, there was excitement.

  Come on, Andrew. You need to let your hair down. I pointed to your thinning pate. We laughed. You’ve got to be able to let off steam once in a while, Andrew. You’re not telling me the rest of the chambers are drug-free?

  Well, there is quite a bit of coke about.

  There you go, see.

  A lot of the big guys, they sort of see themselves outside of the system. Immune from its code.

  Well, there you are. I mean, in a sense, you are the system. You’re the golden hinges, the white pillars.

  You shrugged. Somewhere not that deep down you believed you were. For those who write the code for others to follow, there is no code.

  How’s Liv?

  Fine.

  And the kids?

  Ok.

  Good to have them back, eh?

  How do you mean?

  Nothing, just that they’ve been at boarding school. Thought you’d be pleased to have them back.

  Oh yeah, you said.

  You probably hadn’t even noticed they were home.

  Listen, Nick, I understand about you telling Liv. She confronted me. I couldn’t lie. She’d suspected for a long time.

  How?

  Something to do with my parents, being clammed up about it. I’m glad you told her. It was a relief to get it out in the open. Really. Look, Nick, I want you to know, for what I did to you–

  You don’t need to say it. We were young. I would have done the same.

  I do need to say it, Nick. I absolutely need to say it.

  Then say it.

  I’m sorry.

  Good. You’ve said it.

  Really, I am. I’m sorry, Nick. All these years, every single day. I’ve thought about you. About what I did to you. I … I …

  Your eyes were welling up.

  Got to move on, Andrew. Don’t beat yourself up about it.

  It was unforgiveable.

  It’s over. It’s the past. Done and dusted. I’ve got a life now. I’ve moved on. You’ve helped me with the club.

  The money, it’s nothing. If you want more, I can get you more.

  I don’t need any more. Forget it.

  She’s still angry. Liv.

  She’s bound to be.

  She won’t talk to me.

  You need to ride it out.

  I lied to her. For twenty-two years.

  She’ll come round. She’ll see why you did it.

  You nodded. I really think you believed she would. You went to the bar and ordered another round. The place was starting to fill up with students and members of various youth cults. Mostly all identifiable from our teens. Nothing much had changed: the same ways to indicate outsider status, the same ways to draw attention to yourself, the same ways to attract others. The music was sixties psychedelia. We talked about the old times, skilfully ignoring the elephant.

  I went back to Affleck’s Palace the other day.

  Really, it’s still there then?

  I went back there with your wife, I wanted to say, on a secret date while you were hard at work.

  Exactly how it was, only retro is now 1980s tracky tops.

  That’s funny. I was having this conversation with a colleague recently. All the young men we get in the dock in hooded tops. It’s fashion as camouflage. Punks, hippies, skinheads, all the youth movements that have gone before were there to shock, to stand out from the crowd. Now it’s the opposite. The point is not to be identified.

  I know what you mean, Andrew, but it was only like us, back in the day.

  How do you mean?

  Well, you know, the whole Perry Boy thing.

  Oh yeah! Skinny jeans. Dunlop Greenflash.

  And the haircut – short back and sides with long fringes, the fringe flicked over one eye. I’d been growing my fringe all winter, remember, Andrew, so that it practically reached my chin, I could put the ends of it in my mouth.

  I know, I’d been growing mine too don’t forget.

  You had a good head of hair in those days.

  Cheeky fucker!

  And we were laughing, Andrew, just like the old days.

  We were both silent for a moment, replaying the old film stock in our heads.

  Turner’s night club. Remember that dive, Andrew?

  Course I do.

  Friday night up till 9pm was under-eighteens.

  Salt and vinegar puffs, 6p a packet. And those pink shrimps.

  Two for a penny.

  Seems such a long time ago now.

  Not to me it doesn’t, I said. Because it didn’t. The routine of prison does funny things to time. Every second seems to take an hour, but after ten years, nothing has happened, nothing has changed, and time shrinks. Pulling and pulling on an elastic band, then letting it snap back to exactly where it was.

  Going to Wimpy for burgers and milkshakes. I used to love that place.

  The world was our playground, eh, you said.

  We were a club of two.

  We needed no one else. It was the same Andrew sitting next to me now. It was a different Andrew. You had the same laugh, same smile, same gesticulations. But there was something cold and dead about you now. Cold in the same way a knife is cold and dead in the same way a knife is dead. The knife of authority. The knife that cuts the head from the heart.

  We moved on to another bar. The beer was kicking in. Laughing
, joking, reminiscing. Five beers into the evening. I have to say, I was really enjoying myself. Some of the old you was resurfacing. We were having a great time. But the alcohol was starting to take its toll. We went to the toilets and locked ourselves into a cubicle.

  Christ, not done this in years, you said.

  Again, I observed the mixture of nerves and excitement playing out on your bloated face. You actually giggled. I chopped up two lines of coke on the cistern lid.

  Sshhh, I said. There was no one in but I thought it was best to play it safe. At any point we could have been disturbed by another toilet customer. Me neither, I whispered.

  Not when you were inside? You whispered back.

  Nah. Coke and MDMA – the worst things you can do. It’s dope and opiates. Booze too if you can get it. But you can’t get it. The last thing on the planet you want to be on in a prison cell is Ecstasy.

  Why’s that?

  Because the last thing you want to be inside is horny.

  We laughed. What is funny is truth and pain. Every time. I snorted the first line and moved out of the way to let you near the cistern. I had to be very careful as I took my phone out of my pocket and set it to video mode. I had to hold it up without seeing if the angle was right. It was pot luck really. I recorded for just a few seconds, making sure the camera was back in my pocket before you’d finished hoovering up the line.

  You stood back, gathering your senses about you.

  That hit the spot, you said.

  You passed me my rolled up tenner. Your nerves had been settled by the drug.

  Next, we went to a cocktail bar and worked our way through the menu. It was busy, less studenty, more aspirational city types. Young, fit, wearing expensive clothes, bodies taut with gym classes. The music was contemporary R and B.

  When did you know, Andrew?

  Know what?

  That you wanted to be a barrister?

  Don’t know, probably about the age of fourteen.

  Just as I thought. The day that you became the guy who handed the other guy to the hangman. Steps was a sweet kid. I suppose these days he’d be classed as having learning difficulties, but back then you were just thick. He was in all the bottom groups, but within these groups there was a range of abilities. Steps was at the bottom. He was picked on, beaten up, blamed, set up, ridiculed, the butt of everyone’s joke. He was the one walking around with ‘kick me’ pinned to his blazer. His was the name and address you gave to the security guard of the mill if you were caught on the roof, or the shopkeeper if he copped you nicking sweets.