Cutting Edge

Twenty-six

The only sign of Ed Silver was the broken glass shining dully in the light from the top of the front door. Bottle glass. The cats, anxious and eager and, as usual, late being fed, brushed around him and he shooed them away. When he went inside they scurried to the kitchen, where Resnick forked food into their bowls before going back out with an old newspaper. He wrapped the larger pieces of glass thickly inside its pages and dropped them in the green council dustbin. Then he used a dustpan and brush to sweep up as much of the rest as he could, finally down on his hands and knees to find any fragments that might end up in the cats’ paws.

The envelopes he carried in from the hall floor were dull and brown and he left them beside the kettle while he ground coffee and gave the cats their milk. Pepper was losing hair in clumps along his back again and he would have to make time to take him to the vet: forty-five minutes of staring out the owners of schnauzers and Alsatians, pretending not to be embarrassed by his cat’s whimpering.

One of the letters was from the Polish Club, reminding him that his subscription was overdue and inviting him to the eightieth birthday celebrations of one of its stalwart members. Second-class mail, it had taken five days to reach him, as the crow flies no more than a mile. A note had been penned at angles to the page: Please come, Charles. We would all love to see you. Marian. Marian Witczak, who kept the Polish flag in her window and an atlas open at Eastern Europe as if it were the A-Z. Step outside on to the street and the taxi that draws up will take you to the heart of Warsaw, fifteen minutes.

Resnick poured coffee, wondering about people who so strenuously denied the present, constructed a fantasy from the past. How many nights did Marian fall asleep dreaming of mazurkas and ball gowns? How much alcohol did it take before Ed Silver saw himself stepping up again on to the stand at Ronnie Scott’s, slipping the shield from the mouthpiece, hooking his sax on to its sling, beating in time with his heel and launching into “Dexterity” without even a glance back at the band?

He sliced the sausage he found in the back of the fridge and planned to fry it with pieces of cooked potato, a bulb of garlic, dust in a little dill and thyme. Before that he wanted something with his coffee and mourned for his lost cherry cheesecake. What he did have was honey, black bread it wouldn’t take more than a minute to toast. Take it through and get the weight off his feet, a little rest and then the cooking. He was listening to Miles Davis, the trumpeter’s namesake stretched purring between crotch and knee, a mouthful of coffee still in the cup, feeling better than at any time that day. He knew the phone would ring before the tune finished and it did.

There was one youth, hair cut like a mistake, boogying around the middle of the floor, doing a haphazard strip to Madonna, almost down to his boxers already and the bouncers anxious at the edge of the six-deep circle cheering him on.

“Any minute now,” said Naylor.

“What?”

“Trouble.”

Divine laughed. “Fucking Friday night! What d’you expect?”

The girls he’d been eyeing up were back again, three of them, standing close to the spiral staircase, pretending not to notice.

“Right,” Divine said. “We’re on.”

“What?”

“There.”

“Where?”

“Over there. Hanging out for it.”

All that Naylor could see was a trio of young women, nothing to differentiate them from the others packing the club. Hundreds of them. Lots of makeup, sun tan, streaked and permed hair, short skirts or low tops or both.

“Look at the state of that!” Divine nudged him urgently. “Not wearing much more than a sodding belt.”

At least the woman who’d wriggled by might take his mind off the ones he’d been endlessly on about, but no, there he was again, looking interested, looking cool, wait for it, wait for it, now the grin. One of the three said something to the others and all three of them laughed.

“There you are,” Divine said. “Let’s get over.”

Out on the floor the impromptu stripper was shimmying a pair of boxer shorts with a design like psychedelic crazy-paving lower and lower on his hips. Half the crowd were clapping their hands and bellowing the chorus from “World in Motion,” the rest chanting, “Off! Off! Off!” and the bouncers were flexing their muscles like substitutes about to be thrown into the action.

“We ought to do something about that,” said Naylor.

“Did we, fuck!”

“See what I mean,” Naylor said, as the first of the bouncers tried to barge through the crowd and took an elbow to the face for his pains.

“That’s what we ought to do something about.” Divine turned Naylor round physically, the three girls looking at them openly now, the tallest giving them a touch of open mouth, letting the lip gloss do the work.

Two of the bouncers had broken through the cheering cordon and made a grab for the stripper, managing between them to pull his shorts the rest of the way to the floor. “Leave it,” Divine hissed. “Just leave it alone.” A counter-section of the crowd had deserted the World Cup anthem for a few desultory lines of “Why Was He Born So Beautiful?”, dragged by the occasion from ancestral memory. Naylor found himself in front of the girls, only the tall one holding it out, her friends turned away in embarrassment, real or feigned. “Right,” said Divine. “What are you lot drinking?” One of the bouncers grabbed up the stripper’s clothes and tossed them in the direction of the nearest exit, while another held him by the shoulders and nonchalantly kneed him in the naked groin.

“What’s he threatening to chop off this time?” Resnick asked.

“So far,” said Jane Wesley, “nothing. He got into an argument with one of the regulars about football and there was a fight. Your friend came out of it rather the worse.”

“Far as I know,” said Resnick, “Ed doesn’t know a thing about football.”

“Exactly.”

Resnick sighed. All around them there was the smell of damp clothing and Old Holborn; urine, yesterday’s and today’s. “Where is he?” he asked.

“In the office. I wanted to send for an ambulance, but he wouldn’t let me.”

“Does he know you called me?”

“No.”

Resnick looked at her sharply.

“I thought, if he’s going to have a go at somebody, rather you than some unsuspecting ambulance driver.”

“Right,” said Resnick. “Thanks.”

Ed Silver was sitting, not on the chair but on the floor behind it, both arms wrapped around his head, which was resting on his knees.

“Will you be okay?” Jane asked.

Resnick nodded and she closed the office door behind them.

“Bastard, Charlie.”

“Who?”

“It’s a bastard.” Silver’s voice was muffled and, even when he slid his hands clear of his face, still sounded as if it were being filtered through cotton wool. “Broken my bloody nose.”

In amongst the dried and drying blood and the swelling, it was difficult to see exactly what the damage might be. “Looks like a trip to casualty,” Resnick said, already dreading it, far and away enough of hospitals recently.

Silver was shaking his head, even though it hurt to do so, mumbling no.

“You can’t stay here with a broken nose.”

“Why the sodding hell not?”

“It needs attention.”

“I’ll give it attention.” Silver placed his fingers to either side of the nose and began to push.

“Jesus, no!”

“What?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Go back outside, Charlie. If you’re squeamish.” Instead, Resnick closed his eyes; it wasn’t the blood, more the self-inflicted pain. There was a lot of squeezing, a quick click like balsa wood splintering and a lot more blood.

“There,” announced Silver, “that’s done it.”

“What exactly?”

“If the bastard wasn’t broken, it is now.”

Naylor might not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but there was Divine, leaning over these four lads and talking low and purposeful, smiling all the while. A couple of minutes and the lads got up and vacated their table, great view down over the dance floor.

“What did you say to them?” Naylor asked as they sat down.

Divine winked. “You don’t want to know.”

The girls were all chatty enough now, not that it mattered what they were saying, most of it lost beneath the music and the low roar that rose from the floor and hung beneath the ceiling like hot air.

Divine put his arm around the tall girl’s shoulders and she made a show of shrugging it off; Divine winking then, across the table at Naylor, giving him the thumbs-up when he thought the girl wasn’t looking, though, of course, she was, pursing her lips at him, just a touch of tongue between the lip gloss.

“Fancy your chances, don’t you?”

“I fancy yours.”

The other girls, sisters it turned out, in on the bus from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Lord knows how they were expecting to get back, did some more nudging and giggling and Naylor thought, not for the first time, Christ, they can’t be more than sixteen, seventeen.

“Mandy’s a beauty queen,” said one of them, looking at the tall girl, who adjusted her profile into what she assumed to be a regal manner.

“Kevin over there’s middleweight champion of the world, aren’t you, Kev? Stings like a butterfly and sucks like a bee.”

Naylor blushed, the girls snorted into their banana daiquiris.

“I am, actually,” Mandy said.

“Yeh?”

“Yes. Miss Amber Valley. Two years running, as a matter of fact.”

“And she was runner-up the year before that,” added one friend.

“And she got into the heats for Miss East Midlands at Skeggy.”

“I can’t cope with all this,” Divine said, getting to his feet, adjusting the crotch of his trousers as he did so. “I’m off for a slash.”

“Coarse, your friend, isn’t he?” the nearest sister confided in Naylor.

“Hey, Kev,” called Divine, turning back towards the table. “What d’you reckon? Shall I get the colored, the ribbed, or just the plain?”

The car hadn’t been outside Aloysius House much more than twenty minutes, long enough for someone to throw up over the nearside of the boot.

“I hope you’re not going to blame us for that,” said Jane Wesley, walking with Ed Silver and Resnick from the door.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Resnick said.

When they had maneuvered Silver into the front seat, she said, angling her head away from the road, “If this happens again, are you sure you want me to call you?”

“No,” Resnick shrugged.

“Does that mean you don’t want me to?”

“No.”

“That’s what I like,” she smiled, “clear, decisive decision-making.”

Resnick raised one hand, open, towards her and went around to the other side of the car. A few more nights like this and he’d give up the idea of sleep altogether.

“Lovely woman,” Ed Silver said. “Lovely.”

“So you said.”

“I did?”

“Last time.”

Silver picked at a scab on his upper lip and a thin line of blood began to run towards his unshaven chin. “Have I seen her before? That woman?”

“Not clearly,” Resnick said.

“Hey!” Silver exclaimed some moments later, the car turning right to pass the central Probation Office and the old Guildhall courts. “Was that a joke? Not clearly. Was that a joke?”

“No,” said Resnick. “I don’t make jokes.”

“Take ’em, eh Charlie. Take ’em. Not like that feller tonight, the one as did this. All that happened was, let me tell you this, he was blathering on about football or something, England, you know. That Parker, he said, not so bad but he’d play a damn sight better if he weren’t black. You see, d’you see? So I goes, being black, that’s part of it, makes him as fucking good as he is. Charlie fucking Parker. And he hit me, not with his fist neither, with his knee. Don’t know how he managed it, but that’s what it was, his knee. Ignorant drunken bastard, he calls me, don’t even know his right bloody name.”

Resnick glanced sideways as they stopped at the lights below the Broad Marsh. The swelling round Silver’s nose was certainly not going down; instead it was spreading across his cheeks, up towards his eyes. “I knew he didn’t mean Charlie Parker, somebody else …”

“Paul,” Resnick said. “Paul Parker.”

“It was a joke.”

“Yes.”

“Fucking joke.”

“Yes.”

Silver rested a hand forward against the windscreen, blinking as he tried to focus. “Where we going?”

“Casualty.”

“I’m not …”

“Ed?”

“Eh?”

“Shut up.”

One of those old Motown songs and Divine was pressing himself up against the former Miss Amber Valley, grateful that she was tall enough for him to wriggle his tongue in her ear without having to bend too low.

“How about it, then? Shall we go?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Come on. Ready?”

“No.”

“Come on.” A tug at her wrist.

“No.”

No attempt at dancing now. “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t worry about your mates, Kev’ll look after them all right.”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“My boyfriend …”

“Your sodding what?”

“Boyfriend. He’s meeting me here, picking me up.”

Divine shook his head in disbelief.

“One of his pals was having his stag night.”

“Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?” He moved in again, hands low at her back, fingers against the top of her buttocks pulling her back towards him, edge of her little panties clear to the touch. “You’ll not see him till morning.”

“What d’you mean?”

“If he’s been out on the piss with his mates, he’s not going to turn up here, is he, ready to drive you home.”

“He will.”

“Be too drunk to stand up, most likely, never mind drive.”

She pulled herself away from him and stood there pouting, lip gloss all but gone. Divine had a sudden vision of the evening ending in nothing and he hated it.

“All right, then,” he said, grabbing her arm at the elbow, “if he’s out there waiting for you, let’s go find him.”

Protesting, Mandy was pushed and pulled towards the exit, until finally, grudgingly she walked with him out through the entrance, past the dinner-jacketed bouncers and round into the car park.

“Where is he, then?”

“I don’t know …”

“Exactly.”

Divine ran his hand up her back and fondled her neck beneath the permed hair. He kissed her shoulder, slid his other hand over her breast as he turned her towards him.

“If you didn’t want this,” he said, “you should have said so before. But then you might not have scored so many free drinks.”

“You offered,” she said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“This,” Divine said.

He was kissing her, pushing his tongue into her mouth, doing his best to stop her wriggling and get a hand inside her dress at the same time, when someone tapped him hard on the shoulder.

The second time it happened Divine turned to give whoever it was a mouthful and got hit by Mandy’s boyfriend, a fourteen-stone West Indian, who brought an eight-inch spanner smack down on to Divine’s left eye.

Resnick wanted to drop Ed Silver off at the doors to casualty and leave him there, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Almost the first things he saw, after steering Silver towards reception, were two familiar faces amongst those waiting for attention. “Naylor,” Resnick said. “Divine. What are you doing here?”