One London Day

by C. C. Humphreys

  The barman set the pint down in front of him. Sebastien took a sip, then got out his iPhone and googled the name he’d also remembered.

  A whole string of headlines came up for Patrick Ogulu.

  8

  “Very fine, Lots. Very fine indeed.”

  Patrick was standing on the rug in front of the mirror in which he’d already checked himself out. She didn’t blame him. He was, Lottie admitted, looking very fine too – a hot and vivid contrast to all that cool and minimalist white.

  He was dressed for the beach. Antigua though or the Seychelles, not Margate. And more for the après rather than any actual sun or surf. Wayfarer shades, a tipped-back panama hat, but not airport bought, the kind you probably could roll into a cigar cylinder. An old long-sleeved linen shirt, folded up to the elbows, Burnt Sienna with a faint frond pattern, open to mid chest. Hemp culottes, tapered to just below his knees. Vans skateboard shoes, forest green with yellow laces, thick-soled. No socks and plenty of skin exposed everywhere, ebony glow on muscles that, if they didn’t bulge like they had when he’d played Rugby Sevens for England Under 18’s, were still prominent and taut.

  Yeah, still pretty fucking gorgeous, she thought, scoping him as he scoped the room. Pity he’s such a tosser.

  She thought back to how she’d first seen him, when she was accompanying at the auditions for the tour of ‘My Fair Lady’. Not cool, nervous as hell, still at Central drama school, his hands actually shook when he handed her the sheet music. Asked if she could transpose it down a third. She could, did, he sang a bit of Che from Evita, old school for an old show. Not brilliantly, not bad, and better the second time when the MD pushed him to sing it in the right key. Truthfully, it wasn’t a great voice but it was good enough. And he had the charm for the role of Freddie, that was for sure. She could sense the creative team leaning forward, that moment when people recognize that someone different has entered the room, someone who is… going places. Plus colour-blind casting was all the rage, so he was in.

  Lottie smiled to herself, thought: right then and there I knew I’d have him. Made my play before any of those anorexic dancers even saw him, and devoured him. Wrote my number on top of his sheet music before handing it back, tapping it so he saw. He was surprised – but he called three days later. And he looked at no one else the six months of the tour, was so sweet, so naïve, with me all of three years older, the seasoned pro. What larks we had. What japes, as I took him in hand. As I took him… everywhere.

  Look at him now, four years on. The boy all gone. Ecco Homo.

  He took off his hat, put it crown down on the coffee table, dropped his shades into it. He’d cut his hair, a close crop on the top, shaved up the sides. He grinned at her. “Bedroom?” he enquired.

  She led him through. He nodded at the bed, the mirror, whistled at the bathroom with its huge walk in shower. She could see him already planning it - the bodies entwining, white on black on white, hot water cascading down. For a moment, she saw it too, and she felt her whole skin flush.

  They returned to the living room. Patrick pointed at the Veuve he’d set down on the coffee table. “Open one, other in the fridge?” he asked.

  “I’ll fetch the glasses,” she said, bending to pick up one bottle, while he lifted the other. She was wearing a Summer dress, Laura Ashley, old school; yellow, patterned in bluebells, buttons down the front, undone almost as far as his. No bra. She took her time, knew he clocked her breasts by the quality of his sudden stillness. ‘A pocket Venus’ he’d called her, that first time she pulled a dress over her head, by candlelight in Tufnell Park, second week of rehearsals. Small in height she may have been, but he was right, she was in perfect proportion. “How tall are you?” he’d asked, on their first date. “Five foot ‘n a fag paper, mate,” she’d said, in her faux London and made him laugh, as she discovered she always could.

  She rose, not fast, and his eyes rose a fraction behind hers. She smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  She went to the kitchen, stashed the one Widow, searched in the cupboards, found an ice bucket, filled it from the spout on the fridge, grabbed three flutes. The place had everything. Came back with it all, and saw Patrick at the mantel, cutting a line on the marble. “Can’t that wait?” she said. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Sorry, love,” he replied, dropping the credit card. “Coming right up.”

  He bent to the bottle, ripped off the foil, the wire, thumbed the cork out, turning at the last moment to the open French window to launch it, with a suitably awesome pop, over the balustrade. He poured, they waited for the froth to die down, he raised his flute. “To an interesting night,” he toasted. “Skaal. No, wait,” he added before sipping. “She’s Russian, Sonya, right? So we should say, what is it… Nostrovia!”

  “Nostrovia!”

  They clinked. They both gulped, then he put his glass down next to the coke. “Want some?” he asked, rolling a twenty pound note.

  “I’m good,” she replied.

  He bent, placed, snorted, just the one line. A modest beginning, Lottie thought. When they first met, and on the road, it hadn’t been part of the repertoire, he’d been content enough with her special roll ups. LA had changed that, his stint there. She’d gone along with it for a bit, ‘cos he liked it. But she’d never reckoned it was the sex drug he cracked it up to be. Coke, in her limited experience, made everyone too selfish. Plus Patrick, who could go on for ages anyway, was rarely able to come when coked up. “It’s alright, love,” he’d said, flopping back the third time it happened, “it’s very millennial to withhold one’s jism.”

  They drained their first glass so he refilled the champagne and they took it out onto the balcony. The street alive with people, out for early evening fun. She smoked the ciggie she’d been rolling when he’d buzzed. Not special, just tobacco. She wanted to keep a clear head for what was to come, at least initially. Given their less than illustrious three way track record, it seemed like a good idea that one of them did.

  They chatted about this and that – mainly the role he’d just scored. Superhero, major Australian director, exotic locales. Then he asked the question he’d obviously been aching to ask.

  “So, Lots… who’d you have to fuck to nab this palace?”

  She thought then of Mr Severin – she still couldn’t think of him as Joe, despite his pleading. Despite the tequila on her back. Only an hour before, and he’d panicked and run straight afterwards. Back to his wife, no doubt. “No one,” she said, picking a tobacco strand off her tongue. “Landlord at Tufnell Park needed someone in here fast, otherwise he’d be paying loads of tax for an empty pad…”

  “… that wouldn’t stay empty for long. It’s gorgeous.” He sniffed, ran a wrist knuckle under his nose. “You can’t afford this. How much you paying?”

  “Same as Tufnell Park,” she lied.

  “Bollocks!”

  “I told you, it’s helping him out.”

  “Who is he again?”

  “Just the landlord. Mr Severin. Jewish fella,” she added, she didn’t know why. Perhaps because the vision came of looking back at him bent over her back, sunlight glistening on the polished leather of his yarmulke.

  “Ah, righteous Jah people,” Patrick said, in the spot-on Jamaican-London accent he’d acquired for the Yardie movie, ‘Payback’. Then he added with a smile, in his normal voice, “Just as long as you’re not Bathsheba to his King David.”

  “How did that go again? I only know it from the Leonard Cohen song.”

  She asked to distract him from his cross-examination – and to distract herself from hers. Ok, she admitted it, it had been weird, with Mr Severin. And she’d wondered then, and wondered again now, if it was going to get any weirder.

  But Patrick, with all the focus of cocaine – while on which she’d heard grown men obsess for twenty minutes on the relative merits of square tea bags versus round – was off. Unlike her school, were they were all heathens, Patrick had attended The Oratory, a Catholic boarding school ne
ar Reading. He’d hated it, ran away at sixteen, but he’d absorbed the stories. Preferred the Old Testament, he said, because it was full of sex, battles and revenge.

  He was juicing up the Book of Samuel, in a most irreligious way, lingering on the voluptuousness of the naked woman bathing on a roof - “Bathsheba was a lot like you, my love,” he said - when the door buzzer sounded. He broke off, and Lottie went to the door, pressed the button. “Yes?” she said.

  A moment’s pause and then a voice. As soon as Lottie heard it, even through the buzzer distortion, she instantly recalled the face that went with it.

  “It is Sonya.”

  “Third Floor. Come on up.”

  She turned back. Patrick was grinning at her. “Game on,” he said, drained his champagne, and headed for the kitchen to fetch the second bottle.

  9

  Sebastien was just finishing his lamb tagine when the Audi A8L pulled up opposite Number 42. He snatched up his Nikon, snapped one of the licence plate, and then trained it on the back door. This model was on the luxury end, not quite full limo, but classy, used for chauffeur work. He suspected whoever arrived would be getting out from the back. Might have nothing to do with the flat he was watching. Might.

  He took a couple of shots of the driver - a broad, pudgy face - as he got out, before he turned and opened the door for a woman. He shot as she stood, immediately confused by her face because he knew he’d seen her before. She was attractive, so his mind went to actresses, since Patrick Ogulu was now in the mess. She turned away, and crossed the road… to the steps of Number 42. He telescoped to the bank of buzzers. He saw her hand heading for Flat C before her back blocked the actual shot. A moment of waiting, the door opened, she was gone. He sat back, went through the frames. Who was she? He knew her, but from where? It didn’t come. He began to regret that second pint.

  There was one shot, just as she was turning away from the car, in which she was angled more towards him. He zoomed down to her face. Attractive, yes, beautiful even – but not quite as young as he’d first thought. There were crow lines around her almond eyes, and though the zoom had blurred them somewhat, he could see age in the expression too, as if she’d seen a lot of life. A… resignation there, perhaps? Then, in the later series across the road, which he played like frames of a film, he’d caught her looking up at 42 and then… setting her shoulders, as if preparing for something. For a role? It said actress again, and he raked his Staropramen-befuddled memory. Still nothing came.

  Then, when it did, he said, “Shit!”, loud enough to make the couple, on stools at the other end of this same ledge, turn around. He’d seen a photo of her before. Not that long before. She’d looked less attractive in that one - on her Visa application.

  “Sonya Ivenetza,” he muttered. He felt a chill, nothing to do with the over air conditioned pub. What the fuck was this? Their book keeper with a blonde in a love nest who’s welcoming… Bernard’s Russian whore?

  He shivered, stood up, raised his glass for the last half inch of lager, then put it down without drinking. He went to the bar, paid cash for his tab. Field work was over for the day. He needed to go to Vauxhall, to his office, and do some serious investigating

  Outside, he glanced up at the flat. As he did he heard a faint pop, and something sailed over the balcony. A champagne cork landed not ten feet from him in the street. Celebrating a sting? It didn’t make sense - a musicals’ pianist, an actor, a whore… what? A KGB op, honey-trapping Bernard? Or worse – this Sonya working for that black bitch he’d mentioned at 5 – Ellerby, was that her name? – probing the Shadows?

  He stopped at his car, clicked the electronic door, but did not stoop to open it. Because another thought had come.

  Could this all be a coincidence? Just a coincidence?

  He hated fucking coincidences.

  “Excuse me? Sir?”

  The strong voice came from close by, and he was so lost to his thoughts, that Sebastien jumped. He turned. Speaking of black bitches, he thought.

  The traffic warden was there. She had her hand stretched towards him. “Can I see your disabled papers, please?”

  “You what?”

  “Your papers, please. You have doctor’s certificate, yes?” She pointed at his windshield. “For disabled licence.”

  Her voice was African, not West Indian. There were even scarification marks on her cheeks. He flushed, hot again outside in this ridiculous summer; hot again inside from what he’d just learned. “Look, lady, why don’t you just fuck off?”

  Her dark eyes narrowed but her voice stayed neutral. She moved her fingers in a give-me gesture. “Licence,” she repeated.

  Sebastien thought. 6 kept those licences in the glove compartment of the car that was registered for the disabled. But he’d snatched the sign from an old, battered Astra and hung it on the Passat’s mirror because he’d decided that if he was going to play James Bond for a day he might as well have some poke under the hood. This car wouldn’t have any licence at all.

  She was still standing there, hand out. “Fuck off, Sheba,” he said, and walked around to the driver’s side.

  She followed him fast. Actually, put her hand on the driver’s door, leant her considerable weight onto it. “You show licence now… sir!”

  He looked at her. He probably gave her forty pounds. The last thing he needed now was to be caught up in some fracas in the street. Not when he needed to be at his desk. “I beg your pardon. Certainly,” he said, and opened the car door, slid in, made a show of reaching over to the glove compartment. She’d kept the door open.

  So much the better, he thought.

  With his foot on the clutch, he pressed the start button and the engine started instantly. “Heh,” she cried, but he ignored the opening door. Already in first, he hammered down the gas; the engine took him out of the parking bay and away fast. He swerved slightly as he reached and slammed the door, forcing an oncoming car to brake hard. It hooted him.

  He glanced into his mirror. The African Queen was on her knees in the road. Two bystanders were already rushing to her. A car had stopped and the driver was getting out.

  Serve her right, he thought. The Bond theme music was playing in his head and made him smile. Though that quickly went as he thought about the evening ahead. First, change the plates on the Passat. Do it himself, not for the first time. Return the disabled sign to the Astra. It would take days for the enquiry to come through, the up-ending of a traffic warden near Portobello. Of course he’d not signed the car out in his own name anyway. It wouldn’t be high priority for 6 to investigate and he’d slow it further. Give him the time he needed.

  Bernadette, you fucking prat, he thought, as he turned briefly onto the Bayswater Road, before cutting down Kensington Church Street, heading south. Not only a call girl but a Russian at that? Shades of Profumo, for god’s sake! –

  Still, it could all just be a bloody coincidence. They happened after all. According to a friend he’d had at Magdalen, Jonathan, mathematician, people shouldn’t be surprised, because they happened all the time. Sebastien considered possible overlaps, the Venn diagram of it all. Bernard had a passion for trendy bars, was a member of several. There was one, what was it called? Soho House! Actors went to it. So did hookers.

  No need to panic. He’d investigate, find out everything about this Sonya Ivenetza. Indeed, more fieldwork might be required. That made him smile again - because she really was quite gorgeous.

  As he took Queens Gate, headed for the Chelsea Embankment, he began to hum.

  “Duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh…

  10

  On the buzz, Sonya pushed the heavy front door open. It clunked solidly behind her and she leaned back against it for a moment.

  She was still tired. On the rare times she did stay over with a client she never slept much. Plus she’d only managed a few hours sleep that afternoon, in her own place, the walls thin on the Aylesbury estate in Peckham, and with kids out in the central yard, y
elling. Besides, her mind was too active. Seeing Georgiy’s face, what he was hiding behind it. Hearing what he said again, about their daughter.

  “She’s getting slower. The painkillers are not working so well. At night she - ”

  Only one way to help with that, she thought, pushing away from the door. At least there was an elevator, waiting, she climbed in, pressed ‘3’. As it rose, she looked in the mirror that was the whole upper rear wall, accessing herself. She dressed for clients, but since these people were new, she’d had to make a guess. It was to be a threesome, she suspected that wasn’t their normal thing, but people didn’t want normality when they were exploring something different, they wanted a little danger, they wanted to lead – but they also wanted to be led. Her pale pink silk blouse was neutral, unthreatening, though it opened enough over her cleavage and her vintage scarlet Schiaparelli upthrust bra to entice. Her pannelled skirt, also dark red, was cut to just below the knee. Above that she wore open crotch panties, and a garter belt to hold up her black, deco patterned stockings. If, after some conversation, she discovered that these people were more conservative, she had simple cotton panties to change into in her bag. If they were not, her red leather bag also contained… accoutrements. Handcuffs, ropes, blindfolds. She never used drugs herself, but she carried them: powdered MDMA, some vials of Amyl Nitrate, Viagra, a pre-rolled joint of Columbian sinsemilla.

  I will just have to see, she said, as the lift arrived at the third floor with a ‘bing’ and she looked into her eyes. They did look tired, despite the make up and drops. But she’d discovered, because so many men had told her this, that it was partly her heavy-lidded eyes that made her the Slavic beauty of their fantasies. ‘Sloe eyed’ one client had called her, in a gushing note he left her and she’d had to look it up, thought he’d misspelled ‘slow’ which had confused her. Until she found, ‘the bluish fruit of a Blackthorn’. Her eyes were brown, though grey now with the contacts, but she supposed he meant the way they drooped, like plums from a bough.