Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  Chris flicked the switch and the machine crackled into life, Dave's voice filling the room with a clarity I had not expected. “It's 7 o’clock and time to rock. Your dial is tuned to 197 longwave, Radio Diablo, don't touch that dial!” he announced, and it was all I could do to stop myself from looking around to see where he was hiding. For a second it really did feel like he and Chris were playing an elaborate joke.

  “We're playing the hottest sounds from the underground,” Dave's disembodied voice went on, “starting with a cat who really knows how to sing, rather than scream, which is what I do. Here's the genius Ray Charles and ‘What I'd Say’…”

  As the sound of the record filled the room, we both began to laugh.

  “He's rather good at it, isn't he?” Chris stared admiringly at the wireless. “All that jive talk of his really comes into its own on the radio.”

  We sat entranced as Dave continued to play a mix of resolutely American jazz, rock’n’roll and R&B tunes, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen in between. It was only when he got near the end of the broadcast that I remembered why I had come here.

  “And now,” Dave announced, “time for a bit of self-promotion. As you may or may not know, I, Del Diablo, am standing for Parliament in the General Election on October the fifteenth, representing the Lunatic Fringe Party. A vote for me is a vote against the crooked cabal who have been running the country for their own personal gain these past unlucky 13 years; and against shifty Harold Wilson who promises you a New Britain but can only offer you more of the same old, a con-man dressed up as the common man. Only I can truly claim to represent you, the young, the working class, the hepcats who don't care to fit inside society's moral straitjacket. I am of sound mind and clean criminal record – so why do I call myself a Loon, I hear you cry? Well, my wide-eared friends, it's because compared to the villainous skulduggery we've had to put up with for so long, the policies of an honest man are bound to sound a little mad. You dig? So here's to an end to the class system, an end to sexual repression and the right to dance for all. With that in mind, here's the latest cut from my band of groovy ghouls, Del and the Diaboliks, a tribute to the outgoing Tories, if you like. It's called, ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ and it's produced, as ever, by the Head Honcho of Holloway Road, my main man James Myers.”

  There was a loud burst of revved-up engine, thundering tom-toms and a maniacal cackle as the song lurched through the airwaves. I tried to suppress the shivers, to make myself enjoy the mock-horror musical hall theatricality of it, Dave's ridiculous lyrics about zombies and the twanging, propulsive guitar, all wrapped up in James's trademark supernatural echo. Chris was clearly loving it, tapping his foot and a wooden spoon along to the beat on the table's edge, that big grin still on his face.

  But I couldn't stop the feeling of dread seeping through me. The five faces peering through the window of my mind, the fingernails tapping on the pane. How could I face Dave, I wondered to myself, how could I talk to him about this? What was I supposed to say, how would I even begin?

  “Stella?” Chris's voice seemed to be coming from down the end of a long tunnel. I looked up and it was as if the room had blurred and then slowly come back into focus. The broadcast had come to an end; there was nothing but static coming from the wireless.

  “Sorry,” I said, trying shake the feeling away, “I must have just drifted off for a minute there.”

  “Well that was some feat with that racket going on.” Chris turned the radio off.

  I tried to laugh, but the fear was inside me now. I got to my feet in a rush.

  “Well,” I said, “I'd better be on my way now, I've taken up enough of your evening already.”

  “Oh really?” he said. “There's no need.” His brow furrowed. “I was enjoying myself. I'm sorry if David's silly band put you off.”

  “No, it's not that,” I lied, flustered now, imagining that his clear blue eyes were seeing straight into my mind. “I was enjoying myself too, I just didn't realise time had flown so quickly, and there's something I should get back to…”

  He put his hand on my arm. “Well,” he said, “then at least let me walk you home?”

  “Oh, you don't have to do that,” I said, hearing the fear leaking through my voice.

  “I'd feel better if I did,” he said. “You never know who's out there these days.”

  Chris didn't ask any questions as we walked home through the twilight, past the glowing lights and laughing punters spilling out of Finches and the Warwick Castle, the places where the girls plied their trade and a man in a long black car stalked their heels. He just linked his arm through mine and talked about everyday things, the latest books he'd read and films he'd seen, things that friends would talk about.

  “Well,” he said, as we reached my doorstep, “here we are, then.” He let go of my arm, put his hands back in the pockets of his jeans as I took the keys from my bag and opened the front door.

  “Thanks Chris,” I said, “that was really good of you.”

  “It was nothing,” he said. “I really enjoyed seeing you. You must drop by more often.”

  I didn't want to say goodbye to him. I wanted to invite him in, to tell him everything that was weighing down my mind. But something else was upon me, a sick feeling in my blood I had come to recognise too well.

  “I will,” I said, looking back at him in the lamplight. “Give my love to Dave as well. We'll all have to get together soon.”

  He nodded. “Will do. Well then, cheerio.”

  I shut the door, shut my eyes. It was coming, she was coming, the next one out there just beyond the door, out in Ladbroke Grove, tapping her heels towards her death, walking into Jack's embrace.

  My steel-tipped white sling-back sandals spark on the pavement as I head towards my front door. Another night's graft over, Wimpy burger and strawberry milkshake sloshing in my stomach from my meal with Wendy before, cold slime of lubricant leaking into my knickers from the bunk-up against the wall after. Ten bob note in my purse for the trouble, should see the wains all right for another few days.

  I put my foot on the first step, look up to the flat, hear a voice say: “Mavis!”

  Turn and see him standing under the trees, under the trees where he knew me. Flare of a match as he lights a cigarette illuminating a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat pulled down low, but not the face between. I know who it belongs to though; know it of old. Sexy Ron, procurer for the rich and famous, leaning against a long black car, the sort he always drives. Knows me by one of my many outlaw names.

  “Got a job if you want it,” he says, smoke around his face like a wraith. “Your speciality.” Gives a little chuckle, knows what Mavis is good at, better money than a drunken fuck round the back of the pub at closing time. “Shouldn't take more than an hour.”

  I look back up the steps at the orange glow from the window where Rita Hayworth's looking after the wains – Rita Hayworth she calls herself, I ask you. Dyed red hair and a chipped front tooth, silly auld bag looks more like Will Hay in drag. She won't mind if I take an hour more, she'll be away with the gin by now.

  I open my handbag, drop the doorkeys back in and catch the reassuring glint of cold steel in the sodium glow of the streetlight. That's my protection, Glasgow-style. Nae Jack the Stripper's going to get his hands on me.

  I straighten my back as I walk towards him, undo the top button of my grey jacket, a sneer on my red lips. He opens the back door of the car, makes a little bow, says: “After you Madam,” then closes it behind me, soft thud of metal on metal as I slide into the leather seat, the smell of real money warming my nostrils. Madam is right. As I often tell the other girls, I've just about serviced all of Burke's Peerage in my time, and most of it thanks to this one. He sets me up with these queer auld dears who want the arse thrashed offa them, pay handsomely for the privilege. Sometimes I think I could go on thrashing and thrashing and thrashing forever, drown out the noise of the wains screaming for their tea, the noise of my landlord screaming for his rent, the noise of
the whole fucking world wanting something offa me.

  I watch the arc of his cigarette as he flicks it from his fingers under the trees, under the trees where he sold me, climbs into the driver's seat and starts the engine, a gentle purr as he pulls away, moving through the black night, gliding into a stream of red and white. I lean back and close my eyes, remembering the times in the past, the whips and leads and sagging old arses, white flesh turning red and red faces twisting purple in the agony of ecstasy. Me lying naked on a blasphemous altar while a procession of men dressed in black cloaks queue up to take me, one by one, still with their shoes and socks on as they dump their load, hoity toity bastards all. Then little kid on a street corner shouting: “Fourpence for a feel, Mavis!” while all his friends snigger behind their hands. The things I have done, the many lives of my 31 years…

  I open my eyes, shake the thoughts away and look in my handbag again. My fingers touch the blade, a talisman, then slide over to my powder compact, check myself in the mirror.

  A strange music starts up from the front of the car, the sound of a motorcycle revving up and a heavy drumbeat caught in a spectral echo. Nearly as funny as this face that stares back at me. Doesnae look like mine. Looks much younger, prettier, like a French girl with black hair whose face I have seen somewhere before but can't quite picture where. I blink and I look again; a lassie from Lincolnshire with her hair like Dusty Springfield stares back at me, icy fingers running down my spine. Swallow and blink and look again and a hard-faced scrubber with shoulder-length brown hair, the girl I knew as Geordie Sue curls her top lip into a sneer and I shut the compact, look out of the window.

  Not where I was expecting to be at all.

  These are not the white mansions of Belgravia, the shady halls of Kensington, where all this malarkey usually takes place. A patch of wasteland Christ knows where, barbed wire and the squat shapes of unlit industrial buildings, far from the glow of streetlights, close to the dark currents of the Thames. The car stops and my stomach lurches, this is not what should happen. Fucking bastard better not try to pull a fast one on Mavis, I think, grabbing my knife as the door opens and he leans in towards me, but even as I pull up the blade, hands reach round my face from behind me, someone else there on the back seat, pushing something into my face, something that makes me drop the knife and stops the scream that's forming in my mouth, the scream into this black and unholy place, the scream that will never now be heard by any living soul but goes on and on and on…

  I woke up with her scream in my throat, the world slipping from underneath me, onto the armchair I'd passed out on in my darkened room, my hair plastered to my face with ice cold sweat. Dear God no, dear God no, oh God, oh someone out there, help me.

  Bring out your dead.

  35 (ALWAYS) SOMETHING THERE TO REMIND ME

  How George Steadman had ever come to be nicknamed ‘Lucky’ was a mystery even he could no longer recall. Five years of prison food had softened his once formidable frame into rolls of flab, the barber's clippers had less to curtail each week and half of that was frosted over with grey. Steadman had never been handsome like Ferrier to begin with, but his round, jovial face and gap-toothed smile had won over enough ladies back in his day. Including little Bobby Clarke, who had let herself believe that he would come Lucky for her and carry her away from the increasingly violent and demanding Ferrier, from the trees that lined Holland Park Avenue and the backseats of the cars that loitered beneath them.

  A sorry story which, if he let himself reflect on it, could still almost bring a tear to Steadman's eye. He was reflecting on it now, as for the second time in only a week these bogeys had come to visit him, to dig around at what he had thought was safely buried long ago. He felt like he was wide awake in the middle of a nightmare.

  “I wouldn't never hurt Bobby,” he kept trying to explain to the older policeman, the one he remembered from the prime of his youth. “I never hit a woman in my life. I ain't like Baby, he the bad one, he the one who hurt her.”

  But it was the other bogey who was scaring Steadman, the one with eyes like two blue diamonds, the one that stood leaning against the wall and said nothing, just chilled him to the bone with his stare. Blue eyes hypnotise, as Steadman's mother used to say. He had a horrible feeling that he was going to tell this one more than he ever wanted to.

  Pete, staring back at him, was thinking exactly the same thing. Steadman wasn't a hard case like Ferrier. He had neither the brains nor the instinct of a predator, which was probably why his boxing career had never amounted to much. Every time Pete tried to lock eyes with him, Steadman's sorrowful browns slid back down towards the floor.

  “That's not what he's been saying.” Coulter leaned across the desk. “He told us that you were very lustful over Miss Clarke, that you'd already had a falling out about it and he'd warned you off her. So what was this, George?” He tapped his finger on the photograph that lay between them. “Took her out and buttered her up with a taste of the highlife, then drove her down to those Elysian fields of Gobbler's Gulch to claim what you thought was rightfully yours? Then, when she didn't want to play her part of the bargain, you started getting rough with her? Ripped the dress off her and had your way anyway? I mean,” Coulter shook his head regretfully, “you are a big man, George, and I daresay, a bit punch drunk from your time in the ring. You probably didn't know your own strength.”

  “No!” Steadman rubbed his eyes. He didn't want a policeman to see him cry. But he couldn't stop the memories of Bobby, the kisses and caresses they had shared, the way she was so nice to him, like no other girl had ever been. The way he had betrayed her.

  “But on the other hand…” Steadman heard the other bogey walk towards the desk, the Blakeys on his shoes harsh against the concrete floor. “There is this matter of twenty-five quid. Your mate Ferrier is still pretty pissed off about it. I don't think he was making that bit up.”

  “But I gave it to him…” Steadman began and then looked up, aghast. He wasn't supposed to have said that.

  Pete smiled. “Ah,” he said. “But what I want to know is, who gave it to you?”

  Fear crawled in Steadman's stomach like the claws of a beast. He felt his sphincter muscles loosening and desperately tried to hold back from breaking wind, from avoiding the hypnotic pull of the blue eyes.

  “Was it this man, George?” Coulter tapped the end of a cigarette down on Simon Fitzgerald's face before lighting it. “That's the daft story Algernon told us. We didn't believe him, of course. What would a man in his position be doing giving that much money to a lad like you? He could have got himself a lot better than that for free.”

  Coulter exhaled in Steadman's face; the smell of it turned his already roiling stomach. “We reckon it was a yarn he was spinning to get himself off the hook,” the older detective went on. “As you just said yourself, Algernon was the one who was hurting Bobby. He killed her, didn't he? You can tell us, George. Tell us enough to put him away. He won't be able to touch you where he's going.”

  Steadman looked from the photo to Coulter and then back down again, at Bobby's smiling face, his own cheerful visage and the man in the middle of them, the little singer she had liked so much, who had been so kind to them that night. Tears rolled down his cheeks unstoppably now as the memories came rushing in.

  Bobby telling him to meet her at one, at the coffee stand by Holland Park tube, that this would be her last night on the game before they went away together, forever. The sparkle in her eyes as she kissed him goodbye and headed off for Leicester Square. Then the way he'd been drawn into an after-hours game of cards at Teddy's, the man who put the whisky in his hand and went on filling up the glass, the hand on his shoulder as he leaned towards him and whispered in his ear. The man with a face like a butcher's board…

  Him staggering home in the early hours, Bobby all forgotten, twenty-five quid in his pocket instead. Baby arriving, screaming with rage, where was she, what had he done with her? Baby hitting him and Steadman letting him, putting u
p no defence, deserving each blow for what he'd done. Then the next day and the report on the news about Bobby, knowing now he'd done worse than sell her out and stand her up.

  The detective that turned up on his doorstep shortly after.

  Steadman had turned over the chemist's ineptly on purpose, wanting to get caught. Fear creating the only solution to his problem he could muster. Got to get off the street, stay off the street until all of this was nothing but a distant memory. He already had two previous convictions. One more would guarantee him five years out of harm's way.

  But now these double-talking bogeys were saying that Baby had killed her. That if he just told them it was Baby and not him, then Baby would die, Baby would die too, hanged by the neck for murder.

  Baby, who had looked after him in London when he'd first come off the boat. Baby who had got him fights and money and seen him all right. Baby whom he had also betrayed. He couldn't say it, they couldn't make him…

  Steadman's eyes rolled towards those two blue diamonds and hung there, mesmerised.

  “It was The Chopper,” he heard himself say. Knowing he was doomed as he did so, not caring any more. Whatever else he had given away, they couldn't make him kill Baby.

  Pete inhaled sharply, a rush of jubilation and relief coursing through him so fast he almost felt faint.

  “What did you say?” asked Coulter. “What do you mean, The Chopper?”

  “I know what he means,” Pete said. “He means Sampson Marks, otherwise known as The Chopper. Owns a strip club in Soho and has shares in Teddy's gaff. A real ladies’ man, isn't that right, George?”

  There was no lying, no fight left in George Steadman's eyes, only the weariness of utter defeat.

  “Uh-huh,” the big man said.