Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Red wine, please,” I said, smiling at her. Up until now, Jackie had been reticent about actually letting me into her other world. This was her way of showing me she could be trusted with any uncomfortable secrets.

  “Red wine and a G&T, please Smithy,” Jackie ordered. “Right,” she said when they arrived. “We'll go through here, it's a bit less crowded.”

  Behind the bar was another small room, with a pool table and a few chairs arranged around it, a row of pegs for coats along the wall, a bit like a miniature youth club. There were a couple in the middle of a game, but the rest of the seats were empty. We made for the furthest corner.

  “Well,” Jackie said as we settled ourselves down. “What d’you reckon to my little home from home?”

  “It's really… something else,” I said.

  She laughed. “I thought it were about time you should see how us lesbians lived.”

  I glanced over at the pool players. One of them looked just like a Teddy boy, complete with long ginger sideburns, green drape jacket and brothel creepers. The other, in a tight-fitting black dress, black bouffant hair and muscular, tattooed arms, was recognisably female, if aggressively so.

  “Is everyone here a lesbian?” I whispered.

  “Mainly.” Jackie surveyed the room. “You get some old omis come in, theatrical types, you know, or painters. Ancient old fruits, like most of our tutors at college. A few famous faces passing through, an’ all, I've seen that Di Dors down here more than once.” She took a sip of her drink, pointed her little finger back through the bar towards the jukebox, where a gaggle of painted ladies lounged, selecting tracks with bored expressions on their faces. “Those lot are working girls, taking some time off where no one will bother them. That's what Gina meant by entertaining Miss Lilly – Lilly Law's the police. She don't want them sticking their beak in.”

  Her words sent a shiver through me.

  “Oh,” Jackie waved her hand, “you don't need to mind them, they keep themselves to themselves…”

  “It's not that,” I said. “Jackie, remember that day in Lenny's flat?”

  She cocked her head. “I'm hardly likely to forget it,” she said.

  “Well, remember what I told you about my family and their funny ways?”

  “Yes, love, what about it?” She dropped her jokey tone, became serious, concerned.

  “Well, unfortunately, I seem to have inherited something from them after all.”

  “What? You've not been seeing ghosts, have you?” She put her hand over her heart.

  “Not quite,” I said. “I've been having dreams… nightmares, really. Only worse.”

  I did my best to explain it all, then gave her Mya's interpretation of events.

  “She thinks that James's experiments are what made it happen – his musical ones, that is. Though I blame rubbish that we threw in the bin that day myself.”

  “Christ,” Jackie said. She had listened to my story in silence, not passing any judgement, just encouraging me on with a few gentle words when I thought I was going to start crying. I knew she would find it all very hard to believe, but to my relief, she didn't act as if she thought I had gone round the bend.

  “That bloody James,” she said. “I don't know if this has got owt to do with it, but he's in a bit of a bad way, now, you know.”

  “No,” I didn't.

  Jackie scowled. “He got arrested last November, coming on to Lilly in some khazi on the Holloway Road. Total bloody set-up.” She shook her head. “Reason I know is, I was at Lenny's when he got the call to bail him out. Lenny were that embarrassed. He didn't want us to know, for obvious reasons. But I've come to realise, whenever James clicks his fingers, Lenny still comes running to sort out his mess for him.”

  “Did he then?” I said. “There was nothing about it in the papers, was there?”

  Jackie snorted. “Well lucky for James Myers, poor old JFK got shot the next day, so no one was really all that bothered about him. It got a couple of lines in the Standard or something. Just enough for him to start getting blackmailed.”

  “God,” I said, “I had no idea.”

  “Aye, well you wouldn't, he keeps it all to himself, does Lenny. Well, most of time. Until James gets so dizzy on his pep pills that he starts smashing up telephones with his bare hands, then he finds the need to talk about it.”

  “I thought we'd got him away from all of that,” I said, “I thought him and Pat…”

  Jackie shook her head. “That's not the same, for either of them,” she said. “That's just a form of entertainment. Pat likes his rough and Lenny likes his posh, but with James it goes deeper. Like I said to you all them years ago, they really are like man and wife.” She rolled the ice around the bottom of her glass. “D’you want another one?”

  As she went to the bar, I realised that it wasn't just me who had needed to have this conversation. Jackie was definitely at ease here though, I thought, as I watched her chat to the bartender. Then, as if drawn by magnets, my gaze drifted towards the women by the jukebox. One with her hair done like Dusty Springfield had started to sing along to a track by her idol, swaying her hips along to the languid beat.

  “So,” Jackie sat back down, passing my drink across, “what else did this Mya woman have to say about our beloved Mr Myers?”

  “I told her about him working with Dave,” I said, “and how their horrible record was in one of my dreams before I'd even heard it in real life. She said I should go and see him, that he'd have something important to tell me. But now you've got me thinking. The last time I saw Dave must have only been about two weeks before James got arrested.”

  “Oh aye?”

  “Yeah, it was at Toby's end-of-show party at Duke Street. We were really pleased to see him; it had been such a long time. Seemed like he was on good form too, telling lots of funny stories about his band. Then Toby wandered off somewhere and Dave started to get a bit weirder. Started going on about these ghost hunts he'd done with James, making out that it was really funny – maybe it is to him. Only now I'm wondering if he was just laying it on thick about James to get rid of Lenny, ’cos as soon as he did, Dave completely changed. Started asking all these questions about Jenny, if I'd seen her, if she was still OK…”

  “Really?” said Jackie.

  “He'd only just found out from Chris about Giles and the riot,” I said, “and he was really worried about her. He reckoned,” for some reason I started to whisper, as if I cared that the pool-playing Ted and her moll might hear, “that Giles really is her brother and her dad had him arrested on purpose, to teach her a lesson for running off to Italy.”

  “You what?” Jackie frowned. “That's mad.”

  “That's what I thought,” I said. “But remember the way she reacted that day? Ranting about not going back to her parents, how scared she was of them? And she did call him her brother, we both heard that.”

  “Oh yeah.” Jackie nodded slowly, then went into her Jenny impersonation: “Daddy could have him released just like that. Well,” she dropped the level of her own voice now, moved her chair closer to mine, “I suppose if he could, then he must be able to get him arrested in the first place too. Lilly Law.” Her eyes darted around the room. “More bent than anyone round here.”

  “Well that's just it,” I said. “Chris proved it, didn't he? But what Dave said that sounded even more mad was that Jenny's dad can get them to do whatever he wants. I thought a lot about that too. That policeman Chris exposed never did have to stand trial, did he?”

  “No,” said Jackie. “And that would also explain why our Jenny's just hitched herself to a new sugar daddy.”

  We stared at each other in silence for a minute.

  “So,” Jackie eventually said. “Are you going to go and see him?”

  “I've tried,” I said. “But he's never in when I go past his house. He's probably on the road somewhere, he said they do a lot of touring. And they don't have a phone, so I can't just ring up and ask Chris if he knows when Dave's next
around. I suppose I could put a note through his door, but how on earth do I explain it without seeing him face-to-face? I know he's a pretty broad-minded guy, but can you imagine? Oh hi, Dave, I've been having all these psychic transmissions from dead prostitutes caused by your producer and I wondered if you could tell me a bit more about that? Oh and, only three months after you first told me, I am beginning to get worried about Jenny…”

  “I take your point,” said Jackie. “I think I need another drink.”

  “So do I,” I replied, nodding. “Is it OK to stay at yours tonight?” I added, watching the Dusty blonde taking her leave and suddenly feeling afraid of being on my own.

  The curtains at the end of our bedroom in Arundel Gardens twitch and out comes Dave, wearing his top hat and a funeral director's black coat. He opens his mouth and there's a sound of a toilet flushing and I find myself on the pavement outside Lansdowne Studios. From the top of the building comes a light like a searchlight, or the sweeping beam of a lighthouse and a weird organ tune starts up, sounding like it's being played underwater. Consumed with a fear that I have been here before, I try to run, but my footsteps are so slow, as if the pavement is made out of treacle, that though I put my whole body's weight into trying to move forwards, my progress is agonisingly slow.

  In my mind, I know I have to find Toby. The first house I come to has a green front door and I can hear laughing and music coming from behind it. It opens up and there's Jackie, framed in an orange glow, wearing a black suit. She smiles at me and says:

  “Here you are at last, come in. We've all been waiting for you.”

  “Is Toby here?” I ask, looking past her down a long hallway with chandeliers and a curving staircase, hearing voices everywhere.

  Jackie chuckles. “You might find him in here,” she says and raises an eyebrow. “But I think he's hiding.”

  I leave her on the doorstep and walk into the room on the left. There are a lot of men in here, all dressed in black, and I scan them desperately to find Toby. They all turn towards me, their hands over their mouths, whispering to each other. Lenny and Bernard Baring sniggering together, looking at me and then looking away. Pat flashes past, unlike the others he's wearing a blue suit, the same intense shade as his eyes. I grab hold of his arm, ask: “Where's Toby? You must know, where is he?” But Pat shakes his head, says: “Let him tell you,” and walks off into the crowd.

  I look behind him and see her, the girl in the blue and white dress, but the dress is now ripped open and her breasts spilling out, covered in bruises and scratches. No one seems to be paying her any attention, despite her outrageous appearance. She looks at me with dull, dead eyes, tears leaking from each corner. “My father's house has many rooms,” she says, and turns her head towards the door. I walk through it and find myself at the foot of the stairs, where Chris is walking down, a bulging folder under his left arm. He looks shocked to see me.

  “Don't go up there,” he says. “Please don't, Stella.”

  “But I must,” I say. “Toby's up there,” and I push past him to where the girl with the mustard-coloured dress stands in a doorframe, under a red light, grinning a gap-toothed smile. She raises up a smeared glass to me and I can see the red mark around her neck, the deep incision into her flesh.

  “For now we see through a glass darkly,” she says, “but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” I feel another great wave of fear and stumble up the next set of stairs in front of me, into a vast ballroom where people are dancing in full evening dress, but wearing black masks over their eyes. I look around, desperately trying to locate Toby, and another woman sways in front of me, naked but for a dog collar around her neck with a lead attached to it. Her face looks ancient and her body is battered, she shakes her head and says: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

  Then a man wearing a gorilla suit yanks the lead and pulls her away as the whole room full of people in evening dress burst into peals of laughter and I turn and run from that place to another staircase, lit only by a shaft of moonlight coming from a skylight above. I hear Pa's voice coming down that silvery trail, saying: “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

  “Pa!” I cry, looking around frantically. But he isn't there, Toby isn't there, it's just me alone in a dark house, all the music and laughter below me has stopped.

  There is a door in front of me and I know that I don't want to go through it; I know that I shouldn't, but it opens anyway and I am at the top of the house in a dark attic room and in the middle of the room is Jenny, wearing a long white dress, her skin glowing like the moonlight. On one side of her are three other women, on the other side two. I realise with a jolt that one of them is the Dusty blonde from the club tonight and that she, like all the rest of them, has marks around her neck the same as the women downstairs, the ones who are already dead. I try to close my eyes, knowing that they are the ones yet to come.

  “Look at me,” says Jenny and my eyes are impelled towards her, the silvery glow emanating from her growing brighter and brighter, her face both beautiful and terrifying. She puts her hand on her stomach and I suddenly realise that she is pregnant, that this is what's making her glow.

  “This,” she says, “is how it all begins and where it all ends.”

  And I felt the ground disappear from under me as I fell backwards, hitting the bed like I had fallen from the ceiling. My heart was beating like a jackhammer and I didn't know where I was, all I could see were the shapes of the furniture around me and I thought for a second that I was four years old, in my grandparents’ house at the time of the Blitz, when a fireball had come down from the sky.

  Then the door opened and Jackie was standing there in her pyjamas, the hallway light spilling into the dark, and telling me where I was and when it was.

  “Christ, Stella,” said Jackie. “That must have been a right bloody nightmare. You were screaming so loud I thought someone had got in here.”

  I tried to open my mouth to speak but nothing would come out.

  25 FEVER

  Ernie in the interview room, still not talking. Not sweating so much since his brief arrived; the kind of stiff upper lip who could have passed off as one of the Cabinet with his steel grey hair and handmade suit. Dick down there with DI Dennis Fielder; the gaffer scenting a whiff of a headline, wanting to break Ernie down before sending him over to Shepherd's Bush and letting them take all the credit.

  Pete was upstairs in the CID room, going through Ernie's prints with a couple of aids and an old DS called Stanley Coulter, a big man with a round face framed with white curls and sorrowful, saucer-shaped blue eyes that lent him the aura of an overgrown choirboy. Pete appreciated Coulter's eyes. Coming towards retirement age, there was not a lot those melancholy lamps hadn't shone over before. Although Ernie may have displayed some of it in a slightly different way.

  The negs had gone off to the lab to be printed; surprisingly there weren't that many of them, only the results of Ernie's most recent session, it seemed. But that still left them with boxes of filth, all separated into different categories and catalogued in blue biro, a fussy, fastidious hand. FOXY DOXIES represented the high end of Ernie's business, the best looking girls falling out of frilly French maids outfits and polka dot bikinis. Pete had seen plenty of this kind of stuff before, it was the sort of thing the Soho shops put out front with the nudist books and incongruous travel guides. Round the back would be the specialist stuff, like FEATHER GIRLS — hard-faced women in steel corsets walking naked men wearing gas masks on collars and leads, brandishing horsewhips over sagging old buttocks. Or FLOPSIE’S MOPSIES, the orgy snaps that Ernie had been so loath to discuss – and no wonder – this was fucking and sucking rendered in forensic close up, along with every spot, bruise and semen-s
plattered cold sore. But it was HOUSE OF WHACKS that formed the most interesting passage of Ernie's oeuvre.

  Men with canes, whips and paddles, their faces always carefully out of shot. The lens instead homing in on the flesh of the women, the welts rising out of their skin, black slashes across round white buttocks, thighs patterned with weals. Women with gags in their mouths, women with their hands tied behind their backs. Sometimes in specialist gear to restrain them, leather and vinyl straps, mostly just trussed up with their own lingerie, silk stockings and the cord from a dressing gown.

  Not so big a jump from this to Susannah Houghton with her pants stuffed down her throat and her stockings around her ankles. From Bobby Clarke with her dress torn open to expose her breasts. A killer buzzing on a tableau of degradation and violence, hating women so much he couldn't even leave them dead with any dignity – could his lust have been fuelled by images like these?

  “I think I've found her.” Tom Spinks, one of the young aids, held up a print he had been studying for some time. “This is the one we're looking for ain't it?”

  They crowded around him.

  “Bleedin’ hell.” The other aid, Bob Bates, scratched his chin. “That's a sight you don't see every day.”

  Indeed it wasn't. Geordie Sue in her birthday suit, skinny arms and bruised legs, breasts lying flat as pancakes across her spotty chest – with a dildo strapped around her waist that she was using to poke a similarly malnourished coloured woman in a wonky beehive wig. The expression on her face was supposed to imply ecstasy, but looked more like she was struggling to remain conscious.

  “So that's what having a speciality means,” said Pete, shaking his head. Fear and anger welled up inside him. Fear that if he got too close to Ernie, he would find that too much of Wesker and his methods had rubbed off on him. Fear that the anger would take over.

  “There's lots more of her in here.” Spinks rifled through the prints in his box. “They must have done a whole action sequence. Yeah, look at this, they're spanking each other.” He passed another one round. “And now out come the whips. Dead into this kinky gear is old Ernie, eh?” Spinks was trying to come across as a man of the world, but his face was flushed, a mixture of embarrassment and shock at what he was seeing.