Cutting Edge

Fifteen

“N’cha got no real food, Charlie?”

“Such as?”

“You know, bangers, bacon, nice pork chop.”

Resnick shook his head. “I can fix you a sandwich.”

Ed Silver made a face and tried the refrigerator again, unable to believe his bad luck.

“How about an omelet?”

“All right,” Silver said grudgingly, and Resnick began to chop an onion up small, half a red pepper, a handful of French beans he’d braised a few days before in butter and garlic.

“Vegetarian now, are you?”

Another shake of the head. “Just can’t bring myself to buy meat. Not red meat. Not often. I think it’s the smell.”

“That beer you got in there,” Silver asked, pointing back at the fridge. “You keeping it for something special?”

Resnick opened his last two bottles of Czech Budweiser and lifted glasses down from the shelf. “No,” Silver said, reaching across. “Have mine as it comes. Won’t do to get too used to creature comforts; never know when you might pitch me out on me arse.”

He wandered off into the living room and several minutes later, as the butter was beginning to bubble up round the edges of the pan, Resnick heard a few bars of off-center piano and then, instantly recognizable, the sound of a trumpet, burnished, like brown paper crackling; the soloist stepping into the tune with short, soft steps, deceptive. Clifford Brown. The notes lengthening, sharp blue smoke, rising. The Memorial album. Resnick doubted if he had pulled the record from the shelf in eighteen months, yet he could picture its cover.

a photograph of a playground, a trumpet

lying on a swing, over there

the slides, the splintery line

of benches, chaotic segments of

chain link fence, hazy

apartment buildings beyond.

Perfect.

He continued to listen, tilting the pan so that the egg mixture rolled round the curved sides and down, forking in the onion, seconds later the pepper and the beans. He left it on the flame long enough to cut slices of bread, dark rye, gave the pan a shake and folded the omelet in two. Before Brownie had finished “Lover Come Back to Me,” it would be ready.

“They’re all dying, Charlie.”

“Who?”

“Every bugger!”

Resnick handed him a plate, set his own down on a copy of Police Review, went back for forks and black pepper, started the LP again at the first track.

“Know how old he was when he copped it?” Ed asked.

“Twenty-six?”

“Five. Twenty-five.”

Less than half your age, Ed, Resnick thought, and you’re still going-in a manner of speaking.

“Nineteen,” Silver said, “he was in a car crash nearly finished him. Almost a year in hospital. Enough to kill you in itself, way some of those butchers wade in when they’ve got you strapped down. Anyway …” He pushed a piece of omelet on to a corner of the bread and lifted it to his mouth. “… got over that, started playing again, made it big and wham! Another sodding road accident. Dead.”

“Mm,” said Resnick.

“Twenty-five.”

“Yes.”

“Poor bastard!”

“Amen.”

“Stockholm Sweetnin’” became “’Scuse These Blues.” Resnick took the plates into the kitchen and dumped them in the sink. He thought the last thing he should do was let Ed Silver catch sight of his bottle of Lemon Grass vodka, but the last stray gleams of light were striking the room at just the right angle and, whatever the risks, it seemed the proper thing to do.

“Cheers,” said Resnick.

“To Brownie,” said Ed Silver.

“God bless.”

They drank a little and then they drank a little more. There was a moment when Ed Silver’s wispy gray hair and scarred scalp were outlined against deep orange light. Resnick looked at Silver’s knuckles, cracked and swollen, and wondered when those hands had last held a saxophone; he wanted to ask him if he thought he might ever play again. Of course, he didn’t. They drank a little more. Dizzy sneaked out of the half-dark and lay across Silver’s lap, sniffing from time to time at whatever was matted thick on his jacket.

“They’re all dead, Charlie.”

“Who?”

“Clifford, Sandy, Pete, Lawrence, Vernon, Marshall, Tom. All the fucking Browns. Gone.”

Muted, but jaunty, Clifford Brown was playing “Theme of No Repeat.”

There had to be better places to spend the evening, Millington was thinking, than a lay-by close to Burton-on-Trent. Heavy lorries yammering cross-country between Derby and West Bromwich, bits of lads in tuned-up Fiestas driving as if they were on Donnington race track. Three nights before, a truck loaded with cartons of Embassy, packets of twenty, had pulled in here so that the driver could rest. He had been hoping for a cup of tea, something warm to eat, but the man who ran the stall had closed early and gone home. The driver had stood by the field edge to take a leak and someone had hit him from behind with a wrench and taken his keys. When he came to, surprise, surprise, the truck was gone.

It had been found early the following morning, abandoned and empty, close to the motorway. The police also discovered the driver to have two previous convictions for theft and one, when he was a youngster, for TDA. Which didn’t mean that he had whacked himself round the head, nor agreed beforehand that somebody else should do it, but it did mean officers were keeping a keen eye on who he contacted and watching for tell-tale signs of unsuspected wealth, anything from a spanking new fifty-one-centimeter flat-screen TV with a Nicam stereo decoder to a holiday for two in Tenerife.

Either of which Millington would have been pleased to receive. He stopped trying to figure out exactly what the couple in the car behind were up to by careful use of his rear-view mirror and got out to stretch his legs. The tea stall was actually an old caravan now devoid of wheels and painted all over in a bizarre tartan. Its proprietor was a Glaswegian with one glass eye and a five-inch scar down his cheek along which you could clearly see the stitch marks. Millington reckoned he’d been sewn up on a back-parlor table with a domestic needle and thread and a bottle of Glenlivet for anesthetic.

“Tea, is it?”

Millington fished in his trouser pocket for the money.

“How about a steak and kidney pie? Keep away the cold. If you don’t fancy eating it, you can always set it under your feet, like one of they old stone jobbies your grannie used to have.”

“That the best you can offer?” Millington asked.

“I’ve a hot dog or two in here somewhere,” the man said, lifting the lid from a metal pan and swishing away with a pair of tongs. “Maybe a burger?”

“Yes.”

“A burger?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Great salesman, aren’t you?”

“Onions or without?”

“Onions,” Millington said. “With.”

He tipped sugar into his tea and stirred it with a spoon that was attached to the counter by a length of chain. Three motor bikes throttled down and swung in off the road, stopping between the caravan and Millington’s car. One of the riders was skinny and tall, totally bald beneath his helmet when he took it off; his companions were overweight and stocky, one of them sporting a belly that hung over his studded belt like a pregnancy about to come to term. All three wore boots and leathers and were old enough to have seen Easy Rider and The Wild One when they were first released. The girls riding with them were none of them more than seventeen, pale, pretty faces, sharp features drawn sharper by hours staring into the wind.

They ignored Millington and joked with the Scot behind the counter, old friends. Millington took his burger, added some watered-down ketchup and walked back towards his car to eat it. The couple parked behind him had forsaken the front seat for the back. The burger was gray and greasy, pitted with white gristle; two bites and Millington tossed it into the surrounding dark. He thought about his wife, sitting on the settee with her legs curled beneath her skirt, chuckling over Mary Wesley. “I don’t know how she can even think about sex at her age,” she’d said, “never mind write about it.” Millington had grunted non-committally and waited for her to change the subject: he knew that thinking about it was never the problem.

“Debbie?”

Kevin Naylor lay facing his wife’s back, early night for once, both of them hoping against hope the baby would sleep right through.

“Deb?”

He touched the nape of her neck, above the collar of her night-dress, and felt her flinch.

“Debbie.”

“What?”

“We can’t carry on like this.”

Not for the first time, Karl Dougherty was wondering why there were only fifteen minutes in which to hand over to the night staff; never enough, especially when they’d had two unexpected admissions, which had been the case tonight. The administrators who closed wards for financial reasons didn’t seem to understand there were others who failed to respond to budgetary shortfalls: the sick and the dying.

“Now then,” Karl said to one of the nurses as she stood waiting for the lift, “off home to a cold bed and an improving book, I hope.”

“Oh, yes!” she grinned. “And the rest!”

As Karl walked towards the main road and the buses, he caught sight of Sarah Leonard in her beige coat ahead of him. Hurrying, he drew level with her at the entrance to the subway.

“Catching the bus?”

Sarah smiled and shook her head. “Walking clears my head. Besides, by the time you’ve waited, you could be indoors with your feet up.”

“Well, I’d walk with you, only I promised to meet a friend in town for a drink.”

They came up from the subway at the far side of the street, side by side. “Think of me,” Sarah said, “settling down to a good-night bowl of cornflakes.”

Karl laughed. “I’ll be having mine later, don’t you worry. Only with me it’s Shredded Wheat. I keep thinking if I eat three at a time, it’ll make a man of me.”

Sarah raised a hand as she started to walk. “So much for advertising,” she said.

Karl was still at the bus stop, five minutes later, when Ian Carew drove past. Approaching the railway bridge short of Lenton Recreation Ground, he slowed down, the better to look at the tall woman he was passing, stepping out briskly in a long raincoat, definitely someone who knew where she was going. Even so, Carew thought, no harm in pulling over, offering a lift.

Graham Millington had read the Mail from cover to cover, back to front and front to back. All that was left was to try it upside down. The couple behind had come to a similar conclusion twenty minutes earlier, wiped two circles of steam from the windows and driven off to their respective spouses. Talking to the Scot in the caravan and trying to get some useful information had been like searching for the sea on Southport beach.

“Sod this for a game of soldiers,” Millington said to no one. “I’m off home.”

Kevin and Debbie Naylor lay back to back, their bodies close but not quite touching, each assuming the other was asleep. Very soon, the baby would wake and start crying.

Karl Dougherty came up the stairs from Manhattan’s and looked to see if there was a cab on the rank near the Victorian Hotel. Never when you want one, he thought, when you don’t they’re all over you like crabs. He crossed the street towards Trinity Square, thinking of cutting through towards the center, pick one up there. Seeing that the light outside the Gents was still on, he realized that he needed to go again. Never mind it hadn’t been more than ten minutes. Anything above two lagers and it went through him like a tap.

Ah! He stood at the center of a deserted line of urinals and unfastened his fly. Better off if he’d said no to his appointment, hurried home like Sarah Leonard and got stuck into some cereal, lots of sugar, warm milk.

He fumbled with his buttons, thinking how inconvenient it was that zips had gone out of fashion. Laughing at his own joke, he failed to hear the bolt on the closet door behind him sliding back.