London Noir

I fought the lawyer by Michael Ward

Mayfair

I pressed PLAY and the screen on the dinky digital camcorder came to life. Vanya’s face the only thing in view, gurning and sticking her tongue out as a kind of visual “testing, testing...” before disappearing.

Good girl.

From where the camera was positioned on top of the wardrobe, it takes in about half the room. In the far right-hand corner is a bed with a large mirror next to it, to the left a small chest of drawers, and in between, against the far wall, a coat stand with a French maid’s outfit, a leather basque, and a nurse’s uniform with a white cap; a pair of black thigh-length boots are slumped in front.

Two seconds later Vanya reappears into view, carrying the chair she’d just used to reach the top of the wardrobe, and placing it in its usual position next to the chest of drawers. She looks in the mirror, makes a cursory adjustment to her hair, and smoothes her hands down her slip before exiting the frame stage left to the door that leads to the sitting room.

Ten seconds of stillness, then back to moving pictures as he enters the room. Four slow, graceful strides bring him to the mirror, where he stops to take in his reflection. A tall, slim, handsome man in his early fifties wearing a tastefully expensive dark gray suit offset by a weighty flop of silver hair. The epitome of conservative English style. He runs an index finger over each arched eyebrow, taming any rogue hairs, then turns and unwittingly strikes a face-on, screen-test pose for the camera.

Perfect.

Vanya’s back in the room now, her heels wobbling slightly on the squishy carpet as she walks to the chest of drawers and finds a condom. The gentleman takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair, then places his shoes neatly underneath. By the time Vanya has rolled the condom over her index finger and greased it thoroughly with Vaseline, the man is naked but for his calf-length thin black socks and has positioned himself on the bed, facing away from the camera, bearing his arse to it.

Vanya kneels behind him on the bed, still in her slip and shoes, and gently greases the QC’s rectal area, accompanying the finger strokes with a softly murmured Croatian lullaby. Mamu ti jebem u guzicu. She gently eases the digit inside and begins finger-fucking the man, her Serbo-Croat mantra rising in volume as the pace of the thrusts quickens. Picka. Mamu ti jebem u guzicu... About one minute later the silver-haired gentleman, wanking furiously now, reaches his climax and the transaction is complete.

I press STOP.

Got the cunt.

Time to rewind.

The previous week — the previous millennium, in fact — I’d been at the River of Fire. The government had organized the Thames to be set on fire on the stroke of midnight. It was going to be an almighty twenty-stories-high flaming surge of orange-and-red pyrotechnic power bursting through the heart of the city at 800 miles an hour. PM Turns Water into Fire; Elemental Alchemy on the Grandest of Scales. But all anyone got were a few oversized candles fizzling away on some barges along a muddy river.

Not that I gave a fuck. Fabrication, fabrication, fabrication. I knew those sloganeering cunts would never deliver. I wasn’t there for the show. I was there to steal stuff from unsuspecting thick cunts. And unsuspecting thick cunts do deliver. Copiously.

I wasn’t doing it for the money — though some of the stuff I nicked did come in handy later. It just needed to be done. With all that sense of hope and expectation for the dawning of a new millennium, someone had to restore the balance. Inject a bit of reality into the situation. These people were supposed to be slick city folk, weren’t they? Experts at the urban experience. Come to London. Where the people are such cunts they piss and shit and vomit on their own streets while a bunch of incompetent failed lawyers-turned-slogan-peddlers fuck them up the arse and make them pay for the pleasure.

So I put on my own show. Illegal performance art. A one-off special for a discerning audience of — me. Creative theft. Taking and giving. No one else would’ve got it anyway. It was a world away from the ham-fisted gippos and hood rats who worked Oxford Street and the tubes. Banging into tourists with an awkward fumble into their pockets and coming away with the odd one-day travel pass to sell on for two quid. The occasional mobile. No sense of style, no originality. No drama. Mine was a virtuoso performance — just me, my rucksack, and my pair of dextrous pals: Right-hand Man and his partner, Leftie. Dab hands, the both of them. Digitally precise, you might say. Got to keep them at arm’s length though. You see? It’s called style, cunt. Wit! Something those fucks will never have. I take and I give. It’s art, fucking art.

True, the actual pickpocketing was pretty much the same as I’d done in my act a hundred times before. Same technically, anyway. And I’d picked pockets for real before, illegally that is, a couple of times. But it hadn’t given me quite the buzz I’d expected it to. No sense of occasion. This was different though. The river bit might have been shit but there were still two million happy, stoned, drunk singing people all squashed up together. All mesmerized by a few colorful lights in the sky. And everyone happily embracing their fellow man, getting up close and hugging, like they didn’t actually hate each other, like they weren’t all cunts for one second. I’ll give you “Auld Lang Fucking Syne,” you twats. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot...” Forgot to keep an eye on that, mate, thanks very much. “And never brought to...” Mind if I take that off you, sir? “Should auld acquaintance be for...” Gotcha! “For the sake of auld lang...” Signing off now, gotta go!

All in front of about a zillion boys in blue. It was a good night. A new beginning. The way forward.

After the show I figured I’d go for a celebratory fuck. Vanya would still be working. I’d been going to her for about six months — since she’d come over from Croatia. She was very good value for money — extremely pretty face and a good body, but still reasonable rates. If she were English she’d probably have charged twice as much. Maybe three times. But then I guess that’s one of the benefits of immigration. Cheap, efficient labor

I started slowly working my way through the throng. Up the Strand, past Trafalgar, and on toward Piccadilly and Shepherd Market. Made up a little song on the way, to the old Robin Hood theme tune: He steals from the thick/And gives to the whore/Robbing’s good!/Robbing’s good!/Robbing’s good! Sometimes, Jonathan Marcus Tiller, I thought, you really are the wittiest fucker in the world. In the fucking world.

I was just taking in Piccadilly Circus — the glitz of Burger King, the glamour of Dunkin’ Donuts — when I was approached by an American tourist: “Hey there. Could you direct me to Piccadilly Circus?” He said the last two words uncertainly, as if no such place with that name could possibly exist.

I didn’t reply, just announced the thing with outstretched arms, then turned to him with an expression I’d hoped conveyed: What the fuck do you think that is, cunt? Now fuck off.

It didn’t work.

“Only, I’m kinda here to make this movie and I was told Piccadilly Circus was where to look.”

I glanced up and down his face as he spoke.

“Look for what?” I said, mildly intrigued.

“To meet actors. Only, I’m filming the thing in my hotel tonight and I thought you might like to...”

Suck your cock? “Don’t think so, mate. But yeah, this is the right area — just a decade or so too late...”

I left the Yank fruit to it and carried on up Piccadilly. Walked along the north side. It’s lined with imposing gray-stoned edifices, like gigantic doormen keeping an eye on things, keeping the undesirables out. Raising a suspicious eyebrow at anyone who dares venture near the promised land of Mayfair. Perhaps sir would be more comfortable taking a different thoroughfare? A street more suited to sir’s... position, shall we say?

Not tonight though. Tonight I wasn’t being hassled by them. It was as if I’d passed some kind of test. Like I was okay now. They hadn’t exactly handed me the keys, but at least they were going to turn a blind eye while I picked the locks for a while. It was definitely a new beginning.

I took a right down White Horse Street and into Shepherd Market, a twisty-turny little red-lit corner where all Mayfair’s dirt had been swept to, out of sight. Like a mini Soho but better-spoken and wearing a blazer. By day, the place wasn’t really that special — a bit too twee for my taste. But come night — proper night, that is, once the after-work lager’s been drunk and the late-night diners have fucked off — that’s when it happens. When it reveals its true identity. The perfect place for a discerning maverick street thief artist.

I stopped to hitch my rucksack up, then turned left, then right into Market Mews. Stopped at the open door marked Model 1st Floor and made my way up the stairs. Up the wooden hill to Shagfordshire. Another good one, Jonny boy. On the way up I waved at the CCTV camera on the wall and pressed the plastic doorbell helpfully labeled Press. Rita opened up. A short round woman with enormous sagging tits, bald but for a few patches of yellowy-gray hair. She was sporting worn-out pink slippers and a loose-fitting cream-colored tracksuit topped with an off-pink toweling dressing gown. Rita is Vanya’s maid, the woman who welcomes the punters.

“Hello, Jonny love, she’s with a gentleman at the moment, be about ten minutes, that all right?”

“Fine,” I said, unhitching the rucksack and plopping myself on the foam two-seater sofa in the living room. The only other rooms in the flat are a tiny kitchen with a kettle and microwave and a small bedroom.

The TV was on so Rita and I sat watching the ITN news report of the millennium celebrations. I broke a Marlboro open to pad out a joint while Rita puffed on her B&H.

“Looks bitter out,” she said, nodding at the TV images of the crowds along the Thames. She got up to turn the thermostat to one hundred.

“Yes,” I said, twisting the end of my newly constructed joint before lighting it up.

“Aren’t you playing a show tonight, love? Thought you’d be busy tonight of all nights.”

“Nah. I could’ve had a gig but I wanted to check out the River of Fire,” I said, watching the end of my joint glow as I toked on it.

I’d often chat with Rita while Vanya was otherwise engaged. She thought I was a bit glamorous cos I was a magician.

“Been busy?” she asked.

I told her about the last gig I’d done — a Christmas party for an accounting firm in the city. I’d been booked with an illusionist called Damon Smart to entertain the staff before dinner. I’d worked with Smart before. His real name was Dave Smith. He was a cheesy cunt, but skillful.

We would approach a group of five or six of the accountants as they enjoyed some preprandial quaffing and introduce ourselves as so-and-so and so-and-so who’d just joined the firm. After a while Smart would start behaving oddly, grimacing and rubbing his stomach, complaining of indigestion. Then he’d do some pretend-wretching and — this is the particularly cuntish bit — start pulling a thread of razor blades from his mouth. Yes, it was that shit. Shitter, in fact, cos once his shtick was over I would then produce a selection of items I’d lifted from them while they were busy watching Smart hamming it up. “And I believe this watch is yours, sir...” I fucking hated it. I fucking, fucking, fucking hated the fucking fuck out of it.

Not that I let Rita know this though. She was happy to think of me as some kind of Paul fucking Daniels, so I figured, why upset her? Nothing to be gained.

“So, yeah, it was a good night,” I lied, and took another draw on my spliff.

“You’ll be on the telly next,” she said, nodding toward the box.

We watched the news coverage for another minute or so, then Rita nodded toward the bedroom door. “That’ll be it then, love,” she said.

She meant it was time for me to step into the kitchen — out of sight so the punter could leave without the embarrassment of seeing another male in the place. I don’t know how the fuck she knew it was time — I hadn’t heard a thing from the other room — but her orgasm-detector was spot on. I went into the kitchen and shut the door, leaving it open a tiny crack so I could see who was coming out without him seeing me. I always liked to get a look at the bloke Vanya had been with immediately before me. Just natural curiosity, I suppose.

Half a minute later Vanya appeared from the bedroom and left the flat for the communal toilet on the landing.

Then out he came.

I knew I knew him as soon as he came into view. Someone famous, but I couldn’t think who. A newsreader maybe? No, not that well-known. An MP? Not sure, but someone...

He picked up the overcoat he’d left on the settee, then pulled out a tenner and handed it to Rita.

Rita smiled and took the tip. “Safe journey now, it’s bitter out.”

“My overcoat will guard me against the cold, my dear,” he said. “And I shall savor your delicious non sequitur the length of my secure passage home.”

The name hit me.

I waited till I heard his footsteps disappear down the staircase before coming back into the room.

“Do you know who that was?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Nicholas Monroe. The lawyer. He’s...”

Vanya teetered back in from the toilet.

“He’s famous. Well, for a lawyer anyway...”

“Fahmous? Fahmous who? Frederick?” Vanya asked, taking the £60 I had ready for her.

I followed her into the bedroom.

“No, yes — no — his name’s Nicholas Monroe. He’s always on the news. He got that gang off who killed that black kid in East Ham a couple of years ago. And that gangster from where you’re from...”

“From Croatia?”

“Somewhere like that, I don’t know. Albania maybe, it doesn’t matter,” I said, shutting the bedroom door. “The point is, he’s fucking well-known, got shitloads of money.”

“He’s not from Croatia, silly, he’s English,” she said. “Very fine English man. Now what shall we do? Talking or fucking?”

“I mean, what the fuck’s he doing here?” I said, ignoring the question.

Vanya plopped herself down on the bed and started inspecting her fingernails.

“If he wants a shag he could go to some discreet high-class place in Kensington or somewhere. What’s he doing coming here?”

Her eyes narrowed. “He like me,” she said. “He like the way I speak and how I—”

“What, has he been here before? He’s a regular?”

“Yes, of course.” She said it as if it was obvious, as if I was the stupid one. “He come to here every week nearly. I speak to him in Croatian and put my finger up his ass and he...”

Fuck me. “You put your finger up his arse?”

“Yes, of course, this is normal, what’s wrong with this?”

“Fucking hell, Vanya — it’s not what’s wrong with it, it’s what’s right with it. He’s rich. He can’t afford this to get out. He’ll pay us not to tell anyone.”

Vanya had a habit of being a bit “kooky,” like she wasn’t quite all there. Like everything was a game, everything was happening in some surreal Eastern European kiddie film. But now she became more serious, more real. I felt a rise of something in my belly.

“Pay us? How much pay us?” she said.

“Dunno. Ten grand. Maybe more.” Fifty, at least. “It’s nothing to him. He can earn that in a week probably...”

“In a week? Nemoj me jebat!”

“Exactly.” I spoke calmly now, took the tempo down a notch. “We just have to do it properly. Plan it right...”

I didn’t know a lot about Vanya, but I knew she wasn’t a whore by choice, that she hadn’t known this was what she’d be doing when she was brought to England. And I knew that, like Anna and Katarina in the flats upstairs, she wasn’t seeing much of the five grand or so a week she was earning for the management. She listened carefully as I went through the plan, nodding slowly as I showed her how to work the camcorder, where the record button was, and how to tell if it was on or not. Then I marked the exact spot on the wardrobe where she should put it next time Monroe visited. She would phone me as soon as he’d gone and I would come and collect the camcorder and tape and put Phase 2 into operation.

Ten minutes later I left. We hadn’t even fucked but it didn’t matter. This was better, I thought. Much better. As I left the place I became aware of the warmth again. Only now it was spreading, up through my chest and arms and down into my groin. This was proper, I could feel it happening now. The real thing. The way forward. The night’s earlier performance was a mere prelude. A toccata to the fugue I was composing. I went home but couldn’t sleep. Six spliffs and a bottle of wine later, I could...

I spent the next few days in my flat in Kentish Town planning Phase 2 and thinking about what to do with the cash. And afterwards too, the next job. Maybe some type of con. It had to be something elegant, stylish. After a few years I’d retire and write my memoir, get it published anonymously. Reveal myself to a select few, my own little magic circle.

The call finally came on Monday night, about 11. I left the flat and hailed a cab for Market Mews. Rita let me in and Vanya was there on the settee eating a Pot Noodle.

“Did you get it? Did it come out okay?” I said.

“Yes, of course.”

“Where is it?”

Vanya put the plastic pot down on the carpet and pulled the camcorder out from under the sofa.

“Brilliant.” I took it off her. “I’ll give you a call. Gotta go. See you.”

I left her to her MSG-flavored processed soya and caught a cab on Piccadilly.

“Kentish Town, please, mate.”

The cabbie nodded and I got in and hit the PLAY button. It was all there. Good girl. Perfect. Got the cunt.

Back at the flat I fired up my Mac and started working on the blackmail letter. The title — Blackmail Demands — in twelve-point size, centered on the page. I used italics in the first draft but decided it was a bit too soft so opted for plain text. Then the font. That proved more difficult. Gothic Bold seemed like a good choice but it looked too melodramatic. I liked the sound of Chicago, a bit gangsterish, but it came across too friendly on the page. Then Typewriter. Quite sinister-looking, but more of a ransom-note font, I thought. In the end I went for Times New Roman. Simple. Serious. Businesslike.

Then the text itself. I spent a good few hours on this and was pretty satisfied with the results:

After a couple of spellchecks I printed it out on a clean piece of white A4. It looked good but the vertical position of the text wasn’t quite right so I moved it down slightly, then printed it out again. That was it. I folded it into thirds and sealed the letter in an envelope. Strictly Private and Confidential. Nicholas Monroe, QC, it said. I used my left hand to write it, just in case, then deleted the document from my Mac.

I looked over at the TV. Countdown was on — the early-morning repeat. It was about half an hour before the tubes started running so I watched the last fifteen minutes, waiting for the nine-letter conundrum bit at the end. I wanted to see if it would be BLACKMAIL. I had a feeling it would be. It wasn’t.

At that time of day, it only took thirty minutes to get from Kentish Town to Chancery Lane, where Monroe’s chambers were. I slipped the letter through the mailbox and went back to the flat to get some sleep.

It was 2 in the afternoon when the alarm woke me up. Wednesday. I shaved, took a shower, put my suit and overcoat on, and headed back Chancery Lane to the Printers Devil. I got there at 3:30 and the place was about half full, which was good. Bought a G&T and found a table with a clear view of the door. While I waited I went over what I was going to say to Monroe. He would walk in alone; I’d gesture for him to come and join me at the table and offer to buy him a drink. He was bound to be nervous and I wanted to keep it friendly. When I’d brought his drink back from the bar I’d say my piece: Well, Mr. Monroe, I think we both know why we’re here, don’t we, so let’s get down to business, shall we? He’d probably just nod, I figured, be happy for me to do the talking so he could get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. After the exchange we’d shake hands and I’d leave him there and go and see Vanya to give her her five grand.

Except it didn’t quite happen like that. For a start, Monroe was late. Very late. So late in fact that he didn’t actually fucking bother to turn up. I phoned his office and was told he was in meetings all afternoon but would I like to leave a message. Would I like to leave a fucking message? What the fuck was going on here? Monroe was in no position to fuck with me. I had the tape; I was in control of the situation. My instructions were clear. The letter. He couldn’t just ignore this. It wasn’t going to go away. I had him by the balls and he had to deal with it. He had to. The arrogance of this cocky fuck — I couldn’t believe it. Like I was some prick of a client he could keep on hold while he plays golf or gets finger-fucked or whatever else the cunt does in his spare time.

I needed to calm myself, so I had another drink and considered my options. There was only really one. Dominic. We’d been at Ampleforth together and had kept in touch since. Dom had taken up journalism and was working as a news sub-editor at the Sunday where his dad had worked. I’d sell the tape to them. It wouldn’t fetch quite the same price, but what else could I do? If this cunt thought he could ignore me, he could think again. He’d been warned. It was all in the letter.

I phoned Dom from the pub and set up the meeting, a drink after work at the Prospect of Whitby in Shadwell, near the Sunday’s offices. I got there at around 6:30 and he introduced me to his workmate.

“Jon, this is Stuart,” Dom said. “He’s up for the Young Journalist of the Year award next month.”

Really? Looks like a cunt to me.

“Nice to meet you, Stuart,” I said. He looked in his late twenties. Had a shaved head and wore a black suit with a dark shirt, no tie. And his handshake was too firm.

“I’ve brought Stu along cos this is more his kinda thing,” Dom explained. “I’m more on the editing side of things, not really a reporter, but Stu here—”

Is a cunt. “Brilliant,” I interrupted, keen to get things moving. “Can I get you guys a drink?”

They both wanted lagers.

When I got back from the bar I launched straight into it. “So, what do you know about Nicholas Monroe, the QC?” I threw the question firmly at Young Cunt of the Year.

“Monroe, yeah, mate, what about him?” Shave-head said, picking up his pint for a gulp.

“Well, what if I were to tell you I have a video of him getting finger-fucked by a £60 whore in Shepherd Market?”

He put his pint down. “What — have you?”

“How much would the Sunday pay for it?” I asked.

“Have you got it with you?”

I played them the tape. A minute in and I could tell he was impressed — with the tape and with me. Once he’d seen Monroe’s face on the vid, he shot me a look that said: Okay, cunt — I can do business with you. When it was over I pressed STOP and put the camera back in my overcoat pocket. Stu spoke first.

“It’s good but we’d need the girl,” he said bluntly.

“The girl? Why? It’s all there...” I looked at Dom for some backup. It didn’t come.

“It’s all there, yeah, yeah,” Stu said, “but it’s more complicated than that. He’s a very powerful guy, old Monroe. He knows half the fucking cabinet. Probably worked with them when they were still practicing.”

“Stu’s tried to do pieces on Monroe before, Jon,” Dom chipped in.

“Yeah, but they always get spiked,” the cunt continued. “He knows everyone. His old flatmate from law school is tipped to be the next DG of the Beeb.” He took another gulp and held my gaze. My move.

“But he couldn’t sue you when you’ve got him there on tape, clear as day,” I said.

“Look, the guy likes to take chances, likes to think he’s a bit dangerous. But he’s smart, he’s fucking smart, covers his tracks. As I say, friends in high places. He’s supposed to be on the Queen’s birthday list for a knighthood.”

“So what? He’s untouchable?” I said. I could feel it slipping away.

“Mate, I’m not saying it’s impossible. But I know Neil and he’s going to be very wary of this.”

“Neil’s our editor, Jon,” Dom said.

“And he wouldn’t even consider it without the girl,” Stu continued. “We’d need her, on the spread, telling her story — and prepared to testify, if necessary.”

“I see. But how much — What’s the story worth if I get her?”

“That’s not really my call. Dunno, probably five figures though,” he said.

Five figures, that’s at least ten grand. It was still good, I thought. I downed my G&T, then made my excuses and left, as the tabloids say. Cabbed it to Shepherd Market, up the wooden hill, and pressed Press.

Rita answered the door. But this time there was no cheery hello. She would only keep the door ajar, wouldn’t let me in. She just said: “Vanya’s gone. She won’t be back.

You’re not to be let in.” And then the door.

What the fuck?

“What do you mean gone?” I said through the door. “Rita? Gone where? Rita?”

“Go on, hop it now or I’ll have to call him,” she said.

She meant Davor, the guy who owned the place.

I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to make sense of what just happened. I’d never seen Rita look stern before. It was odd. And to threaten me with Davor or one of his thugs...

I went home and spliffed myself to sleep. Woke up in my clothes around noon the next day and started getting ready. The camcorder was still in the pocket of my overcoat. I put it on and left the flat to find a pay phone. Dialed the number.

“Put me through to Nicholas Monroe,” I said.

“Mr. Monroe is in a meeting with a client at the moment, he can’t—”

“It’s urgent. He’s expecting me to call.”

“Sir, Mr. Monroe hasn’t mentioned a—”

“Just tell him it’s John X. It’s extremely urgent.”

The line went quiet, that electric nothingness you get when you’re in phone-line limbo. Then a man’s voice.

“Ahhh, Mr. X...”

He sounded relaxed, jovial even.

“This is your last chance, Monroe,” I said. “I’ve been to the Sunday and they are very interested in the tape. They’re prepared to run the story...”

“The Sunday? I see.”

What the fuck is it with this twat? I was talking, you rude cunt.

“So the situation we find ourselves in, Mr. X,” he said, each word measured, calm, “is that you have a firm financial offer from the Sunday newspaper and you’re wondering whether I’m prepared to beat that offer. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And may I ask how much their offer is?”

Five figures, Shavey had said. “Ten grand.”

I regretted the words as soon as I said them. He would have expected me to come up with a figure twice what I was being offered. And why did I tell him which paper it was? I was fucking this up, I knew it. He was too calm and I couldn’t deal with it. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

“Mmm,” Monroe said. “I can probably lay my hands on five thousand by this afternoon — will that do you?”

I suppose it’ll fucking have to. Five grand. It was an insult. But I didn’t really have a choice.

“Six o’clock in the Printers Devil on Fetter Lane — and don’t be late.” I put the receiver down.

I killed the rest of the afternoon in my local, trying to drink away what had happened, and left at 5 to meet Monroe. The platform at Kentish Town was fairly full when I got there — trouble on the Northern Line, as usual — but it was completely rammed by the time the train finally arrived. I fought my way onto the tube, southbound for Tottenham Court Road where I’d change for the Central Line and Chancery Lane. I managed to defend my own little corner by the doors as far as Camden Town, where about a billion people squeezed on and I was thrust into the middle, both hands holding onto the bar above to keep balance. I rarely got the tube, but even I knew that this was worse than normal. Pensioners, office workers, hood rats, tourists — almost every type of low-life London scum was pressed right up against me.

I felt the first risings of a panic attack coming on but pushed it away with a happy thought. I closed my eyes and relived my New Year’s Eve performance, then Monroe, the tape and the letter, the money, the next job, the memoir... then what?... Monroe not turning up, the shavey-head cunt trying to make me look stupid, getting turned away by Rita... Davor... and then Monroe laughing at me on the phone, the arrogant fuck. How dare the cunt? Me with video proof of this fucker — this QC, no less, who knows the Cabinet, is in line for a knighthood — getting finger-fucked up the arse in his stockinged feet by a whore he’s probably managed to have chased out of the country, and all I can get for it is a stinking £5,000, if the cunt shows up at all? He just didn’t seem to give a fuck. It was a minor detail in another week’s work. Hadn’t he grasped the situation? I was in charge here — I was the blackmailer — I had the power.

I opened my eyes. Tottenham Court Road — needed to get off and change. I slowly pushed my way through the pensioners and hood rats, still gripping the bars for balance, and made it to the open doors, squeezing myself out of the carriage just in time before they shut behind me and the train moved off, leaving two dozen or so pissed off commuters to wait for the next one. A moment of schadenfreude consolation for me. I started moving toward the Way Out sign, patted my coat pocket for the camera. Nothing there. I checked the other outside pocket, then the lining one, panic surging through my body, then my trouser pockets, and back to the pocket where I knew I’d put it. Empty. Gone. I started running after the train as it moved along the platform, swearing, screaming at it as it disappeared down the tunnel. I covered my face with my hands.

“You all right, mate?” a voice said.

I let my hands drop to my sides and opened my eyes. It was a station guard.

“No. I’ve been pickpocketed.”

That was six months ago now. I’ve never been back to the flat in Shepherd Market. But I did go to the Printers Devil — that same day, in fact. I don’t know why exactly. Just to see Monroe there, I suppose. See without being seen. Thought I might be able to come up with another plan there and then. I waited till 7. He didn’t turn up.

I got a text message from Dominic the next day, Friday, saying sorry but they couldn’t go ahead with the story, girl or no girl. He didn’t say why.

I’ve been doing more gigs since then. My agency has got me a cruise thing lined up, starts in July, next month.

The funny thing was, though, a few weeks after it all happened I was looking on the web for porn when something caught my eye — a video clip. The description said: Sexy brunette finger-fucks old guy up the ass — in his socks — funny. I downloaded it, sent it out on a group e-mail — to the Law Society, three Cabinet MPs, and the Lord Chancellor’s office. No text, just Nicholas Monroe, QC in the subject field.

Monroe didn’t make it onto the Queen’s birthday honors this year. He must be very disappointed.

I hate his fingers by Sylvie Simmons

Kentish Town

That’s what she said. “I hate his fingers.” I tugged open the freezer door — iced up, as usual; who the fuck ever had time to defrost a freezer? — and when I managed to pull the box out, it too was encased in solid ice. I stabbed at it a few times with the bread knife — more because it felt good than for any effectiveness it was having — then threw it into the microwave and put it on defrost. I opened a bottle and poured a large glass.

“You’re supposed to let wine breathe.”

I lit a Dunhill — only ten so far today, not bad.

“And you might consider letting me breathe as well,” Dino coughed. He sounded like an old, gay Jack Russell with emphysema.

“Nice try,” I said, “but I never did get the knack of emotional blackmail.”

“Shame, or Kate might still be here and we might have something decent to eat.”

“Fuck you,” I smiled.

“In your dreams. A dangerous line to use on a Freudian,” Dino giggled like a girl. “So, this patient of yours, I take it you thought of asking whose fingers and what she had against them?”

“I told you, that’s all she said.”

“I hate his fingers? For fifty minutes?”

“Apart from the forty spent saying nothing at all and the two spent telling me she was only here because her GP told her she was getting no more temazepam until she took some sessions with the practice shrink.”

“Who’s her GP? Philip?”

“Yeah. His letter said his best guess was OCD — obsessive-compulsive disorder — but it could be a weird phobia. He said he knew what a hard-on I got from those.” Since I moved out of general practice into psychiatry — long story, and one I’d prefer not to go into here — I’d made a name, if I say so myself, with my papers on unusual phobias.

“Hating being touched is not unusual. Having your hand up my arse gives me the heebie-jeebies and I’m a hardened pro.”

I chose to ignore him. “Yeah, haphephobia’s pretty commonplace, but if it’s fingers, per se — well, dactylophobia’s a new one on me. But I don’t know, from the look of her she might well have some kind of body dysmorphic disorder. She looked borderline anorexic. Like she weighed all of seven stone.”

She was the kind of girl who leaves no footprints when she comes into a room, but makes a big impression, you know what I mean? She was small and delicate, looked about sixteen years old. Wore one of those little girl dresses, bare legs, short-sleeved cardigan. And big Bambi eyes, like one of those little urchin paintings the tabloids always say are cursed. Burn your house down the second you go out. Maybe they’re right. Her medical records said she was thirty-five and married.

“Would it help if I sat in on a session?” Now and again I’d take Dino along — mostly when I was treating children. They seemed to relax around him. Opened up more. The microwave dinged. The cardboard box was wet and steaming. Smelled disgusting. I tore it off and put the plastic tray back in the oven. Dino was right about the food.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see.”

“I’ll tell you what I see: a lump in your trousers.” Damn if the little fucker wasn’t right again. “Takes wood to know wood. And what I know I see is a man who wants this little girl all to himself.”

When Dino got excited his voice became unbearably camp. Now he was chanting in a high, sour voice, “Doc has got a stiffie, Doc has got a stiffie.”

“Right, that’s it.” I strode across the kitchen and put my hand around his throat, lifting him clean out of the chair. I carried him like that into the living room, and hurled him against the wall. Legs splayed, bow tie skewed, his jaw hinged open like a snake getting ready to swallow a rabbit, the dummy lay propped up against the TV set, staring at space.

For the first half hour of the second session she didn’t say a word. Just chewed the hangnail at the side of her thumb and looked up and sideways at me through her eyelashes. That little-girl-lost look. It was like she was waiting for me to tell her what to do. I found myself reaching across the desk to comfort her, make it all right. Fortunately I stopped myself in time; that was all I needed, another incident. If it wasn’t for my old friends at the practice — or more to the point, if it wasn’t for what I had on my old friends at the practice — I would have been out on the street. Which is where Kate and her fucking lawyer wanted me. At the last minute, I pretended to swat an imaginary bug off the Kleenex box on her side of the desk.

Since she wouldn’t talk, I did. I told her not to worry. That she’d come to the right place. Phobias, I said, like American T-shirts, came in all different colors but just one size, extra-large. There’s no such thing as being a little bit phobic. It’s like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t. As I said that, in reflex, her knees pressed together tight. They were pink and rosy, like a little girl left out in the playground too long, but there was nothing at all childlike about the rest of those legs. They ended in a pair of expensive, black, strappy stilettos, with a half-moon cut out of the end of each one where her red lacquered toenails peeped through.

I found myself, and I don’t know why, talking about myself, telling her about my automatonophobia. Fear of ventriloquist dummies. When she didn’t seem that impressed, I admitted that it wasn’t, of course, as socially debilitating as being finger phobic, since you’re likely to run into more fingers on a daily basis than ventriloquist dummies. But the effects, I said — the panic, the terror, that black-ice, deep-gut nausea — they were exactly the same. A few years ago, I told her, I was in the Oxfam shop buying coffee when I saw an old wooden dummy staring down at me from the shelf behind the till. In the past I would have frozen in fear. But I was so over my phobia that I bought it and took it home. Since then we’d become something of a double act, at least in medical circles, me and Dino. Kate of course would have put it differently, but Kate wasn’t here. Kate was fucking her lawyer, when she was colder to me than a Marks & Spencer microfuckingwave meal.

I assured her that she too could feel the same way about fingers.

“It’s not all fingers I hate,” she said. “Just my hus-band’s.”

Her husband’s? We were getting somewhere. If I’d only known where, I’d have run straight out of that door, down to Kentish Town station, and jumped on the first train going anywhere else.

My other half is a bitch. Did I tell you that? I’m sorry. I’ve been obsessing a lot lately, going over and over the notes. These are from our third session — the one where I looked across the desk at her and fell uselessly, impossibly, in love. It was raining like a dog that day. A typical black, filthy London day, I remember. Sunny when I left home at 7.30, though, or I would have taken the car. But I walked down the street and into a climate change. You’d think I’d be used to that trick by now, wouldn’t you? The one God plays on the English almost every single fucking day: an hour of sun first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you off to work, then pissing on you mightily. I’m a slow learner, I guess.

It’s a short walk to the surgery but not a pretty one. It gets uglier still the closer you get to Kentish Town Road. Shabby, shapeless old buildings, oddly bent, like they’re about to collapse, though no one seems to notice or care. And those garish shop signs. The whole street looks like an old tart with osteoporosis. London’s full of shabby old buildings, but you can look at them and see that once in their lives they looked grand. On Kentish Town Road, they look like they were built to look that shabby. And the people on the street have grown to look just like the buildings, the way people start to look like their dogs. It’s no wonder half of Camden is on SSRIs; the other half are just too fucking depressed to go and fill their prescriptions.

It was still raining hard when she arrived at 3 that afternoon. Her bare legs were so badly splashed by passing cars they looked like Rorschach tests. Her short skirt was soaked right through. It stuck to her so tight you could see she wore no underwear. When she sat down, she tried pulling the thin fabric over her thighs, but realized it was hopeless. She covered her lap with her bag and gave me the sweetest, saddest smile. Then she furrowed her brow. I didn’t have to say a word. She started talking right away.

“Doc,” she said, “I’m telling you this because I think you’re the only person who would understand. I feel like a stranger in my own life.”

I’d heard this before, of course, or a thousand different variations, but coming from her, it shot through me like electricity. She told me she’d been married for eight years — I felt another stab, jealousy, envy, loss? — to, well, let’s just say a famous rock musician. Or as famous as bass players are likely to get. Bass players are the overlooked band members. I’ve had a few of them sitting in that same seat in the past, trying to deal with not getting enough attention, not getting enough love. With nothing ever being quite big enough.

“Have you ever looked at a bass player’s hands?” she asked. I couldn’t say I had. She was looking at my hands now, so intimately it felt like a touch. “You have elegant fingers. Artistic. I’m sure a lot of people have told you that. Bass players’ fingers are repulsive. They don’t have joints like regular fingers. They bend at the knuckle and that’s it. When they play the bass they just kind of throw themselves at the strings and bounce off — thwack. Like pork sausages on a grill. Like pigs throwing themselves at an electric fence.” She illustrated it with an air — bass guitar solo. It made me smile, which made her frown again. “I hate his fingers,” she said.

The rest of him, apparently, was all right. He was ten years older than she was, but that wasn’t a problem. He had money and was happy to let her spend it. He spent most of his time in the studio he had near King’s Cross. Their sex life had always been good, though it had tapered off in the past six months. She thought the reason for that was her bringing up the idea of children, but really she didn’t care either way. Kate didn’t want children — my children anyway. Though I got hold of her medical notes through one of my contacts and, what do you know, she’s four months gone. Did she and her thieving-cunt lawyer think I was dumb enough to just sign it all over to them? She said the only reason she’d mentioned babies was because for a while she thought she might be pregnant. She would throw up every morning, usually when he tried to touch her. It had got to the point where all she could think of were the pigs. His fingers even smelled porky. They revolted her, to the point where she could barely eat... nor sleep, worrying about the morning coming and the fingers. That’s why she needed the temazepam. It wasn’t so bad if she took a couple of those.

The desk clock chimed. I couldn’t believe fifty minutes had gone so fast. I didn’t want to send her out into the rain and ugliness of Kentish Town. I wanted to make things all right for her. Somehow it felt like this was my one last chance to make things right for anybody — me in particular. That night I told Dino I felt there was a voice that wasn’t mine inside me that kept on saying, Drop it. Send her back to her GP. Give her the number of the divorce lawyer. It’s not too late. Stop now. I expected Dino to say something sarcastic about how he knew he had a voice inside him that wasn’t his. But he felt how serious I was and didn’t say a word.

I’ll tell you what it was like. Like I’d dreamed about this so often that I wasn’t sure what to make of the reality. One thing’s for certain, it wasn’t so real. Surreal, certainly, especially after our fifth session — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was session four when she came in, picked up her chair, and carried it around to my side of the desk. She sat down next to me, close enough that the smell of her shoulder made me light-headed. She opened up a large school satchel and said, “I’ve got something I want you to see.”

It was a folder containing several sheets of A4 paper. Pictures printed from a computer. The first was a photograph of her husband. She looked at me expectantly, seeing if I recognized him. I didn’t. Like I said, he was a bass player. Good-looking though. Tall, thin, angular, unkempt in a studied sort of way. A lot of hair for a man in his mid-forties. Very English face, upper-class; it had that distracted, vaguely inbred look. He stood by the front door of a house — theirs, I imagine — with his hands in his pockets, smiling. In the second picture he was onstage. The third was the same photograph zoomed in on his fingers, playing the bass guitar. She was right. They were ugly. Thick, pink, and rigid, like a glove-puppet’s. The last picture was the most disturbing. It was another close-up, but this time so close-up and so fuzzy as to be almost impossible to make it out. It appeared to be his fingers, or the bottom half of them anyway. The top half had disappeared into something white and mottled like cottage cheese and at the same time dark and fleshy like meat.

“He’s cheating,” she said, and then she started to cry, loudly, like someone was gutting her. So loudly one of the practice nurses came in and put an arm around her. For the rest of the session I sat there helplessly, watching her sob. When I got home, Dino asked me if I’d seen the package under the front doormat. I hadn’t, though I must have stepped on it coming in. It was an envelope, which I opened right up. Inside was a DVD. I poured a glass of wine while my laptop booted up. We spent the whole night, me and Dino, watching that DVD over and over on the computer screen. And again, not a single word of sarcasm. Not even about the cigarettes.

She turned up for session five in a pair of black jeans and an oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt — mine, I recognized the bloodstain on the front, but that’s another story. This one’s about fingers. It was funny how boyish she looked. Beautiful though. Especially when she blushed, which she did when I told her that Dino had watched the DVD with me. Dino sat in this time. She told me she wanted to meet him. I asked her if it was shot in her husband’s studio. She said she supposed so but she’d never been inside. If he wasn’t on the road or with the band, he went there at 2 every afternoon, returning home at 8. He told her he was working on a “solo project” and didn’t want to be disturbed.

In the film, the place had the look of a well-appointed office. A wood-paneled front room was hung with gold and platinum albums. There was a large, leather-top desk, an upright bass, three or four electric bass guitars on stands. A trestle table, almost as wide as the room, was packed with an assortment of computer and recording equipment. There must have been webcams everywhere, since you could pretty much see every corner. He selected one of the electric basses, and with that in one hand and a carrier bag in the other, he walked along a corridor that led to another room at the end.

This room was even larger. Most of the space was taken up by an enormous mattress stacked on two, maybe three divans. It was very high for a bed. Lying on top was an old woman. She must have been seventy years old if she was a day. It takes more than sixty-nine years to get that ugly. She was stark naked. And the fattest woman I had ever seen in my life.

He put the carrier bag on the bed and sat beside her. Out of the bag he took a cardboard box which was stuffed with cakes, the sort they sell in cheap bakeries, yellow sponge, bright pink icing. Tenderly he slotted a whole cake into her mouth. As soon as she finished one, he fed her another, until the box was empty. Every time a piece fell from her lips he would guide it back in with one of those broad fingers. When she was all done, he kissed her mouth, which was puffy and purple, hemorrhoidal. Then he tried moving her — with difficulty, but not unkindly — to the foot of the bed. One hundred and ninety kilos of human being, shifted centimeter by centimeter. He got her upright somehow and propped her against a mountain of cushions. She looked like a melting Buddha blancmange. He kissed her face, her breasts — the folds on her body made every part of her look like breasts — then eased her thighs apart. He aimed a remote control at the doorway. Recording equipment clicked on. Facing a camera, he began to speak. I was wrong about him being upper-class English, he was American.

“The music of the spheres. We’ve all heard that expression. Some of us — the true artists — have spent our lives trying to capture the mysterious, terrifying beauty of that siren sound, only to be dashed on the rocks. It was the scientists that discovered its source. It’s the sound waves made when a black hole sucks in and swallows a star.” At these words the old woman licked her lips and grinned. He thrust his right hand between her legs.

“There is no gain without pain. Nothing survives the black hole other than this hum, which is the deepest note ever recorded — a B-flat, oscillating to a B, but six hundred octaves deeper than anything my bass guitar can play.” He pulled his hand out abruptly, grabbed his guitar, and started to play, wet fingers slapping the thick strings. The look on his face was ecstatic.

So. Her husband was a feeder. And a gerontophile. Married to a tiny woman who looked like a child, and whose face, on our sixth and last session, I had touched with my own finger, tracing the thin bones and the delicate chin, down her neck and across her beautifully corrugated sternum, all the while whispering that I was going to help her. The question, as I asked Dino when we got in the car was, who was going to help me?

“A bass solo? And that sniffing business? Yee-uk! This dude,” Dino stretched the word out to a good six seconds long, “doesn’t make snuff films. He makes sniff films. Snuffing them would have been kinder than a bass solo.” Dino’s eyes swung wildly from side to side. “What is wrong with Americans? Do you remember that couple Kate brought here for dinner who said they didn’t think the statue on Nelson’s column looked much like Nelson Mandela at all? And that creature — when he has a princess at home. It’s Charles and Camilla, all over again.” He rolled his eyes back in his head.

“You’d need far more sessions with a shrink than you’ll get on the NHS to figure that out,” I replied. “What was it Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven? It’s got nothing to do with deserves. It’s all about betrayal and double-cross — my work, my life, her husband, my wife...” Maybe she’ll betray me too. Burn the whole house down like one of those big-eyed urchin paintings until there’s nothing left but a pile of ash. But if I wasn’t going to get as iced up as that freezer, right now I needed that flame. Which is why, instead of heading home after my last appointment, Dino and I were in my car, inching along Leighton Road. I parked on Lady Margaret, picked up Dino and my briefcase, and walked around the corner to the tube. By the station, as always, there was a clutter of winos perched on the benches under the glass-andiron canopy. It always struck me that there was something theatrical about this spot. Like it was some kind of project Camden Council had for out-of-work actors. Putting those insane uplighters in the pavement to illuminate the puddles of puke and piss only added to the effect.

As I approached, one of the men looked up. “I’m working hard,” he said, “although I appear to have the air of a holiday-maker.” He patted the space on the bench beside him. “Take a load off, doc. How’s it going?” I recognized him. Back in the day when I worked as a GP around the corner, he had been one of my patients. I sat down and took out the cropped headshot I’d printed from the DVD. A man at the next bench with a can of Special Brew came over and eyed me suspiciously.

“Are you a cop?”

My old patient cut in with, “How many cops have you seen with a ventriloquist’s dummy? I know him, he’s all right,” he said, and the man with the Special Brew came over.

“I know her too.” He pointed at the picture. “It’s Fat Mary.”

“Oh, my love,” his companion laughed. “That it is, and in the prime of health. And I thought she was dead. She’s not dead, is she?”

Mary, he told me, used to work King’s Cross; she had a handful of regulars who’d come to her for years. The cops left her alone mostly, but then they brought in all those community officers who shifted the girls along York Way up to the park by the astroturf football pitch. Her clients stopped coming and the younger girls gave her a rough time. Around a year ago she disappeared. Which must have been when the bass player took her in. They told me they had no clue where she was, but I already had an idea. I picked up Dino and headed for the car.

It was easy. Surprisingly easy. All you need is a computer and the medical profession behind you. The hardest part was changing the appointments; patients, psychiatric ones particularly, don’t like change. My secretary put a few of them off and crammed the real crazies into the mornings. That way I had the afternoons to myself. I didn’t spend the whole of that time with her, even though her husband was at his studio and we could work on her problems at her place, undisturbed. Like I said, I had other things to do, people to track down, plans to make. I’d lost contact with David and Malcolm many years ago, but here we all were, e-mailing each other like old friends.

I’d worked with both of them closely, way back when. It was before I started specializing in phobics. My interest back then was fetishists. David was an accountant. He was also my first feeder. Jailed for locking up and fattening up an underage girl from Poland who had answered his ad for an au pair. He said she lied to him about her age and, already on the chubby side, she looked much older than she was. He believed that she was happy with the setup. Maybe she was. It was clear he worshipped her; he waited on her hand and foot. When they sent me to see him, all he did was ask if I would look out for her and make sure she was all right. At some point after his release, when the Internet started to catch on, he set up a site for fellow fat-admirers; it might even have been the first in the UK.

He knew about Fat Mary — her picture had been posted in a number of places. Feeders took pride in their work, and there was a lot of Mary to be proud of. Most of the feeders were possessive of their gainers, but not the bass player. According to David, Mary had asked the bass player to let her bring customers in once in a while so she could make some money of her own. She said she didn’t want to spend his; the bass player apparently found that amusing. So he lent her out to some of the FA network; probably filmed them too. David told me to give him a week and he’d come up with an address and a key. He did. I left a message with the secretary to book me two days leave.

It’s only polite to take a gift when you visit a woman. I took four. I hadn’t realized I would be so spoiled for choice in Kentish Town. Since she came along, I had been taking more interest in my immediate environment than I had in years, if ever. I’d even defrosted the fridge. Though I hate to say it, and it’s still no excuse, there might have been something in Kate’s accusation about my work taking over everything. I bought flowers, of course, then I crossed the road to the bakery and bought her some of those cakes. I swung back over to Poundstretcher, which Lord knows how but I’d never noticed before, and came out of the place with two huge jars of chocolates and, while I was at it, a child’s silver shell suit for Dino. The tux definitely neeed a trip to the dry cleaner’s.

On the way back home I made another find. A couple of blocks past the station there was a weird old ladies’ underwear shop — you’ll know it if you’ve ever seen it. It’s like the place that time forgot. The main feature of its window display is an absolutely colossal pair of knickers, almost as big as the window itself. Too small for Mary, though. Still, things might change.

When rush hour was over I picked up Dino and got in the car. I knew precisely when the bass player would be leaving. Sitting outside on a yellow line, I pretended to examine the A-Z when I saw him come out the door. He walked a few paces to the residential parking bay, aiming a device on his keychain at a gleaming Range Rover. It chirped and he stepped in. I waited another ten minutes after he’d driven off before I got out and walked up the front steps.

Apart from the cars, the street was empty, or as empty as any Central London street can be. I tried the first key in the lock, then the second. Neither seemed to fit. I dropped them, cursing, just as someone walked out of the building next door. He did not so much as look in my direction. When I picked them up and tried again, it worked.

The front door opened into what appeared to be a storage space. Other doors, all unlocked, opened onto rooms crammed with boxes and packing crates. On the left there was a fairly narrow staircase. There must have been a lot less of Mary when she first came here. I climbed the stairs until they stopped at a locked door at the top. The second key opened it without trouble and I stepped inside.

I knew this room so well from watching that DVD over and over. It was as preternaturally clean and tidy as it appeared in the footage. Not so much as a finger smudge on the paneled walls. I spotted the webcams and wondered if they were filming me. I must have considered, subconsciously at least, the possibility, since I knew I was looking pretty good. Kate didn’t know what she’d thrown away.

And there was the corridor. I walked along it. I noticed another door off to the side that I didn’t remember from the film. I opened it: a large bathroom, also spotless. The mirrors that covered every wall looked like they’d been rubbed harder and more often than a teenager’s dick. I walked on to the end of the corridor and pushed open the door.

“Hello, doc,” she said. “You got a little something for me?”

I opened my bag.

I didn’t feel like going home. Malcolm wouldn’t be here until morning, but I just wanted to sit awhile, take a load off. My shoes were hurting me so I kicked them off. We left her lying there, she looked so peaceful, and went back into the other room. When I passed by the upright bass I felt a compulsion to give the strings a twang, but I resisted. There was a chair by the window, and we sat there, me and Dino, just listening to the traffic go by. Did I tell you about Malcolm? My memory’s been getting fuzzy lately. Maybe it’s the temazepam.

Malcolm was a surgeon, another of my patients from the old days. An acrotomophiliac. Though Dino used to argue with me that he was actually an apotemnophiliac by proxy, didn’t you, Dino? Either way, Malcolm took a keener than usual interest in amputation and amputees in and out of the hospital. Like I said, I know things about people; it’s interesting work. Malcolm is still a surgeon, but it’s all private practice now. Gets paid a fortune. His patients love his work. Mary’s going to love it too. And the bass player — why can’t I remember his name, I’m sure she told me. He’s going to look so much better without those fingers. Mary first in the morning, and then the bass player’s appointment at 2. Shame I didn’t think of asking Kate to come along, there’s plenty of time. Maybe I should call her. What do you think, Dino? Shall I call Kate? Tell her I’ve signed the papers and she can come by and pick them up? Tell her I don’t need her. That I don’t need anyone anymore? What do you say, Dino?

Dino’s awfully quiet tonight.

Park Rites by Dan Bennett

Clissold Park

The black-haired lady jogger beat her way around the concrete path that circled the western edge of Clissold Park, passing the brick shed near the entrance. Enzo watched her come. He stood in his place by the bushes where the path forked up toward the pond. He’d known she’d be here: it was 4 p.m. and she was always here. The lady jogger had her routines.

She ran toward him, the way she always ran, with her elbows pushed out wide, her head bent to the ground, so she couldn’t see anyone in front of her. She ran like she was the only one in the world. Once, Enzo had seen her jog right into a woman with a pushchair. She’d fallen, sprawling on the tarmac. Enzo had walked past as she staggered to her feet, a tear in her leggings showing a large gash. She had touched it gently, wincing, while the woman with the pushchair had asked her if she was okay. Enzo had forced himself to keep on walking, his head down, his hand steady in his pocket. But he was unable to resist one quick glance, thinking, “Yeah, and one day, lady, I’ll be there.”

The jogger made her way onto a stretch of path opposite the estate. She was very close now. Enzo breathed in and smelled the air. He was waiting for a sign that things were ready, that the time was right. The sky was a pale gray above the green of the trees, the air smoky from a fire on the other side of the park, the ground reeking of wet earth. A triangular pattern of geese crossed the sky, and suddenly Enzo knew that this was the final piece that defined the moment: the sign that the time was right. The lady jogger reached the straight track that led right down toward him. Enzo’s left hand worked inside the torn pocket of his tracksuit, his hand squeezing his prick. It was time.

Enzo stepped from the bushes as the jogger approached. He felt very calm. He gave himself one more grasp and then removed his left hand, and placed his right into the pocket of his hooded top. The jogger was almost on top of him now, and Enzo could see the words on her blue T-shirt, University of Kent, stretched over her small breasts, the black lycra tight on her legs, her huge white trainers with fat tongues. She was such a small woman, she was perfect for him, with her black hair in long bangs that flapped as she ran, like the limp beat of blackbird wings.

Enzo tensed, his right arm ready. Suddenly, on the road beyond the railings, a car pulled up, a blue Ford. Enzo looked up to see a man step from the passenger door, saying loudly, “Yeah, well, maybe later, but I’m not sure about it,” to whoever was driving the car. He was wearing a football shirt, red and white. It was all too much for Enzo: he glanced quickly at the woman jogger, thinking maybe, maybe, when the man beyond the railings turned and looked over and stared Enzo fully in the face.

It caused the slightest delay in Enzo’s movement. It was enough to spoil everything (the birds had gone from his eye-line now and the lady jogger was just a few steps too close) and make the moment lose its rhythm. Enzo let his hand drop from his right pocket. He looked down at the ground, kicked at a stone, sucked his lips against his teeth. The jogger pounded past him, the soles of her trainers squeaking slightly as she took the turn up toward the pond. The man slammed the passenger door shut and stood waving as the car pulled away. The moment had sailed away from Enzo, and it was exactly like that.

“Yeah, but I seen you!” Enzo called out to the jogger’s back. “I seen you running, lady. I’ll catch you maybe on the next time round.”

The jogger didn’t hear him. Enzo watched her run up the slight hill that led toward the pond and the white house at the center of the park. He wondered if today was one of the days she’d decide to run another circuit, or if she would leave by the entrance on Church Street, making her way back through Stoke Newington, through the cemetery. It didn’t matter to him anyway. It was spoiled. He put his hand back into his left pocket and squeezed himself a couple more times, his prick sore and hard and hot. But he didn’t let himself finish, although he was so close now, he was ready. To finish now would spoil things even more. That wouldn’t be right. Instead, he set out walking up the path the jogger was running along, although he wasn’t following her now. Instead, he headed over to see the deer.

On the grass by the side of the path, a group of boys were playing football, imitating the game that was going on right now in Highbury Stadium over on the other side of Blackstock Road. Enzo recognized a few of the kids on the football pitch, a couple from school, a couple from his estate. Almost all of them were wearing the red-and-white shirts. Sometimes on match days like this when Arsenal scored, you could hear the crowd screaming in unison, like a choir. It haunted you, but could thrill you too: make you want to be the one to make the crowd scream. It was what all the boys on the park were imitating, and in his way, it was what Enzo was working toward himself. As he walked in the direction of the deer enclosure, the ball squirmed from the playing field and rolled across the path in front of him, but no one shouted for him to kick it back. Enzo let the ball roll into the gully by the side of the path.

Enzo hadn’t been back to school since some black kid, some tall Somali, had called him a freak at break, and who knows what he had been trying to prove? Enzo had stewed on it for the rest of the day. They met up at the gates after school, and when the Somali kid came toward him, Enzo had sliced a split Coke can across the kid’s eyeball, judging it just right. The kid had dropped onto his knees, no time to say anything, not even enough time to put a hand to his eye. He squatted on all fours, staring down at the ground. He couldn’t stop himself from blinking and his eyeball parted with a slice that grew wider every time his eyelid flicked over it, yawning into wet blackness. This disappointed Enzo. He’d hoped it would bleed more.

Not much school for Enzo after that run-in: not many calls of freak either. No calls at all. Enzo spent a lot of time alone. He spent most of it in the park, because it was better than being at home. Back there, Ma stayed in the kitchen, Dad on the living room sofa, the Virgin beaming down at everyone from the picture above the TV, Jesus wherever you wanted to go looking for him. That was life back in the flat. But sometimes Ma and Dad didn’t stay in separate rooms, and for whatever reason, it was a bit more violent. That was home.

The park was a mess this afternoon. During the week, London had suffered under record storms, blowing the TV aerials and skylight covers from the roof of Enzo’s estate, and shredding the heads of the trees. The grass all around was covered with small branches and twigs, as well as rubbish from the bins. Those storms had made Enzo feel crazy; he’d been able to feel them in his prick, like a pulse. He’d come three times that night the winds had shrieked at his window, telling himself no, no, no, have to save it for the park, have to look out for the lady jogger with the black hair. He’d been unable to hold himself back. And all he saw when he was touching himself were the fangs of a wolf piercing raw red meat, blood on white fur, on teeth.

It didn’t take him long to walk around to the deer enclosure, but when he reached it, he found a father and son standing by the rails. A deer stood close by on the other side. The little boy was offering the deer a handful of grass, the father bent low over him, the shape of him spooned around the little boy. Enzo gave the father a look that said, Yeah, and don’t think I don’t know what you’ll be doing when you get the chance. The man must have seen the way Enzo was staring, and he must have known that Enzo knew, because, you know, Enzo had that power too, he had all kinds of power. Eventually, the man got the message and gathered the little boy up in his arms. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go and find Mum.”

When he heard there were animals in the park, Enzo had been disappointed to find only deer and goats. He wanted wolves. When he was a kid, Ma and Dad had taken him to the zoo. This was not long — a few months — after that day. Enzo had seen the wolves at feeding time. He’d watched as they gnawed on raw meat, the blood flicking over the white fur and teeth, and suddenly it all made sense to him. Enzo understood. That night, Enzo pulled himself raw thinking about the wolves. He pulled himself raw, even before anything could happen, thinking of white teeth plunged into red flesh, blood splashed on fur. He pulled himself raw until one night the sperm came, and then he knew he was ready. He rubbed it over his fingers, gummy and warm. Finally he was close. He’d been waiting for years.

Now Enzo was finally alone. He squeezed himself a couple of times before he pulled his left hand away, and again he pushed his right hand into the pocket of his hooded top. He moved close to the fence. The deer raised its head for a moment, surveying him with a large, bland steady eye, a black ball. If the light changes, Enzo said to himself, I will be in that eye. It will shine and I will be inside the deer. He breathed deeply, quivering as he exhaled. The deer bent its head and nibbled at a patch of grass by the fence. Enzo pulled his right hand from his pocket and flashed it into the flank of the deer, two, three, four times, the knife sliding in like a dream, the metal not catching the light at all. The blood burst from the fur, over the blade, and it was all Enzo could do to hold himself back and not finish right there. The deer brayed and kicked up its back legs, bucked away from the fence, and ran over to the rest of the herd, the wound leaking into the gray fur on its side. If I could just go there, Enzo thought, if I could just finish in there it would end everything, I know it. He stayed, despite himself, despite everything he had to get busy with, he stayed staring at that hole in the flank of the deer until it trotted behind a fallen log and disappeared from his sight.

Enzo started walking away from the enclosure quickly, and once he was far enough away, he broke into a run. He headed across the concrete in front of the bandstand, skater punks practicing moves, kids spinning around on bikes. He ran down beyond the pond, to the hedges that lined the northern edge of the park, bordering on a stretch of white houses. Every step that Enzo took made his prick bounce against his tracksuit bottoms, bounce dangerously. The bloody knife was hot in his hand. Enzo dashed around a wooden bench facing the duck pond and pushed himself between a green-barked ash tree and the hedge. He was careful, even though it was the last thing he felt like being. He checked the road behind the hedge first, and the path leading down by the pond. No one was approaching.

He fell down on his knees and rested his head against the bark of the tree, his cheek bitten by the weight of his body. The wood smelled green and bitter. (That day, a man wearing a hooded parka dragged him into a small copse, pushed him up against a tree.) Enzo touched the bark with his tongue, the way he had the first time, tasted the bitter green against his lips, flakes of it dirty on his teeth. (“You keep it quiet now, you keep your mouth tight and shut or I’ll open your throat.”) Enzo screwed up his eyes tight and closed his lips, his left hand moving to his pocket. (And the fur on the man’s hood brushing against the back of his neck as he pushed into him.) His eyes were screwed tight his mouth closed, the way he’d been told to keep it, his breath whistling down his nostrils. (And the feel of the man inside him, pushing against his insides, stretching and pushing, an ache that seemed to rise up through his guts, out of his mouth.) Enzo hardly had to touch his prick to come, it lashed out into his palms, a hot slap that seemed to explode from behind his eyes. (“You turn round, I’m gonna come and get you, cut your throat. Do you understand?”) He stayed for a moment, breathing through his nose, his cheek bitten by the green wood. He opened his eyes. That first time, he’d seen a couple of birds beating steadily in the sky. This time, there was nothing but a cloud.

He sat back on his heels and gently, carefully, pulled his left hand from his pocket and his right from his hooded top. Both palms were wet: the left with the white of his sperm, the right with the red of congealing blood. He looked down at them for a moment, feeling the power of what lay in his hands, all of birth and life right there for him to hold. He saw the red and white of the boys at Mass and the football strip of the boys in the park. He saw the white of the wolf’s teeth in the flesh. He weighed them in his hands and then slowly squeezed them together. He looked once more at his palms, and the white lay on the red like a blister, a pinkish tinge in the place where they had mixed. Life was this color. It caused things to be born.

That day, when the man had gone, Enzo had reached behind him to touch where he’d been hurt, and his hand had come back covered with the white and the red. He’d wiped his hands in the earth to bury it. Now, he bent down to the ground and wiped his palms over the dirt at the base of the tree. He pushed his hands hard into the mud, his fingers clawed at the earth, coming up black under the nails. He tried to bury it again, but this time he was planting it in the earth of the park, making it grow.

Enzo sat back, breathing heavily. The mud was caked onto his hands. Beyond the pond, the routine of the park was continuing. The boys were still playing football. Dogs chased the cyclists. A kite of red silk throbbed in the sky. Enzo watched it, thinking how good it would have been if he’d been able to open his eyes to this afterwards, how it would have been almost perfect. It had become his place now, this park, he ruled it like a kingdom. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t this park where it had happened, that first time. It didn’t matter that Enzo didn’t really know where he’d been, that it was all in pieces, all sharp and bright in his head, like the upturned broken bottles they cemented into the walls to stop the kids climbing over. It didn’t matter that Enzo didn’t really understand the ritual of it. All he knew was that he had to do this, and keep on doing it, because if he fed the land with the red and the white, then maybe he’d grow stronger and one day he would be the wolf.

Later, Enzo walked around to cross the stream and head back over Church Street, back home. He passed the aviary as he crossed the bridge by the side of the house, and another lady jogger came pounding toward him, her blond hair wound up tight on her head. Enzo didn’t even look at her, but the birds started shrieking in their cage. Enzo smiled. The birds knew that he was close to them. They knew what was about to come.

A tree had blown down. It had fallen over from the churchyard at the back of the park, bringing with it a section of the cemetery wall. Enzo stopped for a moment and looked down at the top of the tree, the leaves and shoots and buds. He felt like only a god could, seeing the tree like that, he felt like a giant. One day, he knew, it wouldn’t be the storm that would blow down the trees. Enzo would tear through the city like a wolf, a great creature the size of a storm. Trees and houses would fall in front of him, and all the people would scream, a great noise rising toward him like a choir. And they would feel his breath upon them, and it would burn with the heat of the red, it would stink with the heat of the white.

Trouble is a lonesome town by Cathi Unsworth

King’s Cross

Dougie arrived at the concourse opposite the station just half an hour after it had all gone off. He’d had the cab driver drop him down the end of Gray’s Inn Road, outside a pub on the corner there, where he’d made a quick dive into the gents to remove the red hood he’d been wearing over the black one, pulled on a Burberry cap he’d had in his bag so that the visor was down over his eyes. That done, he’d worked his way through the mass of drinkers, ducked out another door, and walked the rest of the way to King’s Cross.

The Adidas bag he gripped in his right hand held at least twenty grand in cash. Dougie kind of wished it was handcuffed to him, so paranoid was he about letting go of it even for a second that he’d had trouble just putting it on the floor of the taxi between his feet. He’d wanted it to be on his knee, in his arms, more precious than a baby. But Dougie knew that above all else now, he had to look calm, unperturbed. Not like a man who’d just ripped off a clip joint and left a man for dead on a Soho pavement.

That’s why he’d had the idea of making the rendezvous at the Scottish restaurant across the road from the station. He’d just blend in with the other travelers waiting for their train back up north, toting their heavy bags, staring at the TV with blank, gormless expressions as they pushed stringy fries smothered in luminous ketchup into their constantly moving mouths. The way he was dressed now, like some hood rat, council estate born and bred, he’d have no trouble passing amongst them.

He ordered his quarter-pounder and large fries, with a supersize chocolate lard shake to wash it all down, eyes wandering around the harshly lit room as he waited for it all to land on his red plastic tray. All the stereotypes were present and correct. The fat family (minus dad, natch) sitting by the window, mother and two daughters virtually indistinguishable under the layers of flab and identical black-and-white hairstyles by Chavettes of Tyneside to match the colors of their footie team. The solitary male, a lad of maybe ten years and fifteen stone, staring sullenly out the window through pinhole eyes, sucking on the straw of a soft drink that was only giving him back rattling ice cubes. On the back of his shirt read his dreams: 9 SHEARER. But he was already closer to football than footballer.

Then there was the pimp and his crack whore; a thin black man sat opposite an even thinner white woman with bruises on her legs and worn-down heels on her boots. Her head bowed like she was on the nod, while he, all angles and elbows and knees protruding from his slack jeans and oversize Chicago Bulls shirt, kept up a steady monologue of abuse directed at her curly head. The man’s eyes where as rheumy as a seventy-year-old’s, and he sprayed fragments of his masticated fries out as he kept on his litany of insults. Sadly for Iceberg Slim, it looked like the motherfuckingbitchhocuntcocksucker he was railing at had already given up the ghost.

Oblivious to the psychodrama, the Toon Army had half of the room to themselves, singing and punching the air, reliving moment-by-moment the two goals they’d scored over Spurs — well thank fuck they had, wouldn’t like to see this lot disappointed. They were vile enough in victory, hugging and clasping at each other with tears in their eyes, stupid joker’s hats askew over their gleaming red faces, they might as well have been bumming each other, which was obviously what they all wanted.

Yeah, Dougie liked to get down among the filth every now and again, have a good wallow. In picking over the faults of others, he could forget about the million and one he had of his own.

Handing over a fiver to the ashen bloke behind the counter, who had come over here thinking nothing could be worse than Romania, Dougie collected his change and parked himself inconspicuously in the corner. Someone had left a copy of the Scum on his table. It was a bit grubby and he really would have preferred to use surgical gloves to touch it, but it went so perfectly with his disguise and the general ambience of the joint that he forced himself. Not before he had the bag firmly wedged between his feet, however, one of the handles round his ankle so if anyone even dared to try...

Dougie shook his head and busied himself instead by arranging the food on his plastic tray in a manner he found pleasing: the fries tipped out of their cardboard wallet into the half of the Styrofoam container that didn’t have his burger in it. He opened the ketchup so that he could dip them in two at a time, between mouthfuls of burger and sips of chocolate shake. He liked to do everything methodically.

Under the headline “STITCHED UP,” the front page of the Scum was tirelessly defending the good character of the latest batch of rapist footballers who’d all fucked one girl between the entire team and any of their mates who fancied it. Just so they could all check out each other’s dicks while they did it, Dougie reckoned. That sort of shit turned his stomach almost as much as the paper it was printed on, so he quickly flipped the linen over, turned to the racing pages at the back. That would keep his mind from wandering, reading all those odds, totting them up in his head, remembering what names went with what weights and whose colors. All he had to do now was sit tight and wait. Wait for Lola.

Lola.

Just thinking about her name got his fingertips moist, got little beads of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. Got a stirring in his baggy sweatpants so that he had to look up sharply and fill his eyes with a fat daughter chewing fries with her mouth open to get it back down again.

Women didn’t often have this effect on Dougie. Only two, so far, in his life. And he’d gone further down the road with this one than anyone else before.

He could still remember the shock he felt when he first saw her, when she sat herself down next to him at the bar with a tired sigh and asked for a whiskey and soda. He caught the slight inflection in her accent, as if English wasn’t her first language, but her face was turned away from him. A mass of golden-brown curls bobbed on top of her shoulders, she had on a cropped leopardskin jacket and hipster jeans, a pair of pointy heels protruding from the bottom, wound around the stem of the bar stool. The skin on her feet was golden-brown too; mixed-race she must have been, and for a minute Dougie thought he knew what she would look like before she turned her head, somewhere between Scary Spice and that bird off Holby City. An open face, pretty and a bit petulant. Maybe some freckles over the bridge of her nose.

But when she did turn to him, cigarette dangling between her lips and long fingers wound around the short, thick glass of amber liquid, she looked nothing so trite as “pretty.”

Emerald-green eyes fixed him from under deep lids, fringed with the longest dark lashes he had ever seen. Her skin was flawless, the color of the whiskey in her glass, radiating that same intoxicating glow.

For a second he was taken back to a room in Edinburgh a long time ago. An art student’s room, full of draped scarves and fake Tiffany lamps and a picture on the wall of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. This woman looked strangely like Marlene. Marlene with an afro. Black Angel.

She took the cigarette from between her red lips and asked: “Could you give me a light?” Her glittering eyes held his brown ones in a steady gaze, a smile flickered over her perfect lips.

Dougie fumbled in the sleeve of his jacket for his Zippo and fired it up with shaking fingers. Black Angel inhaled deeply, closing her bronze-colored eyelids as she sucked that good smoke down, blowing it out again in a steady stream.

Her long lashes raised and she lifted her glass to him simultaneously.

“Cheers!” she said, and he caught that heavy inflection again. Was he going mad, or did she even sound like Marlene too? “Ach,” she tossed back her mane of curls, “it’s so good to be off vork!”

“I’ll drink to that,” Dougie said, feeling like his tongue was too big for his head, his fingers too big for his hands, that he was entirely too big and clumsy. He slugged down half his pint of Becks to try and get some kind of equilibrium, stop this weird teenage feeling that threatened to paralyze him under the spell of those green eyes.

She looked amused.

“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.

Dougie gave his standard reply. “Och, you know. This an’ that.”

It pleased her, this answer, so she continued to talk. Told him in that smoky, laconic drawl all about the place she worked. One of the clip joints off Old Compton Street, the ones specifically geared up to rip off the day-trippers.

“It izz called Venus in Furs,” she told him. “Is fucking tacky shit, yeah?”

He started to wonder if she was Croatian, or Serbian. Most of the girls pouring into Soho now were supposed to be ones kidnapped from the former Yugoslavia. Slavic was a word that suited the contours of her cheeks, the curve of her green eyes. But how could that be? Dougie didn’t think there was much of a black population in Eastern Europe. And he couldn’t imagine anyone having the balls to kidnap this one. Maybe she was here for a different reason. Images raced through his mind. Spy films, Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War. High on her accent, he didn’t really take the actual words in.

Until at some point close to dawn, she lifted a finger and delicately traced the outline of his jaw. “I like you, Dougie.” She smiled. “I vill see you here again, yes?”

Dougie wasn’t really one for hanging out in drinking clubs. He was only in this one because earlier that evening he’d had to have a meet in Soho and he couldn’t stand any of the pubs round there. Too full, too noisy, too obvious. This was one of the better places. Discreet, old-fashioned, not really the sort of place your younger generation would go for, it was mainly populated by decaying actors skulking in a dimly lit world of memory. It was an old luvvie who’d first shown him the place. An old luvvie friend of a friend who’d been ripped off for all his Queen Anne silver and a collection of Penny Blacks by the mercenary young man he’d been silly enough to invite back for a nightcap. Dougie had at least got the silver back, while the guy was sleeping off what he’d spent the proceeds of the stamps on. He really didn’t come here often, but as he watched the woman slip off her stool and shrug on her furry jacket, he felt a sudden pang and asked, “Wait a minute — what’s your name?”

She smiled and said: “It’s Lola. See you again, honey.” And then she was gone.

Dougie found himself drifting back to the club the next evening.

It was weird, because he’d kept to himself for so long he felt like his heart was a hard, cold stone that no one could melt. It was best, he had long ago told himself, not to form attachments in his line of work. Attachments could trip you up. Attachments could bring you down. It was better that no one knew him outside his small circle of professional contacts and the clients they brought. Safer that way. He’d done six months time as a teenager, when he was stupid and reckless, and had vowed he’d never be caught that way again.

He was mulling over all these facts as he found himself sitting at the bar. He didn’t quite know what he thought he was doing there, just that he felt his heart go each time the buzzer went and a new group of people clattered down the steps. Lola had come into the place alone. He supposed he could ask the guvnor what he knew about her, but that didn’t seem very gentlemanly. After all, he wasn’t a regular himself, who knew how long she’d been making her way down here after the grind of an evening “huzzling the schmucks” under Venus’s neon underskirts?

At half past 1:00 she had wound her way down the stairs toward him. A smile already twitching at the corners of her mouth, she was pleased to see him. One look up her long, bare, perfect legs to her leather miniskirt and that same leopardskin jacket and he felt the same.

“He-looo, Dougie,” she said.

Dougie felt drunk, as he had ever since.

Gradually, over whiskey and sodas with the ice crinkling in the glass, she’d told him her story. It was all very intriguing. Her father was Russian, she said, ex-KGB, who since the fall of Communism had managed to create an empire for himself in electronic goods. He was a thug, but a charming one — he had named her after a character in a Raymond Chandler book that he’d read, contraband, as a teenager.

They had a lot of money, but he was very strict. Made her study hard and never go out. There was not a lot of emotion between him and her mother.

Her mother was an oddity, a Somalian. Lola didn’t know how they met, but she suspected. Back in the old days, it was quite possible her father had bought her out of semi-slavery in a Moscow brothel. Her mother always claimed she was a princess, but she was also a drunk, so what was Lola to believe? She was beautiful, that was for sure. Beautiful and superstitious, always playing with a deck of strange cards and consulting patterns in tea leaves. She might have mastered dark arts, but never managed to speak Russian — probably she never wanted to. So Lola grew up speaking two languages, in one big, empty apartment in Moscow.

Right now, she was supposed to be in Switzerland. She looked embarrassed when she told Dougie this. “At finishing school. Can you believe? Vot a cliché.” Lola had done a bunk six months ago. She’d crossed Europe, taking cash-in-hand work as she did, determined to get to London. She wanted to escape while she was in the “free West” rather than go back to what she knew would be expected of her in Russia. Marriage to some thick bastard son of one of her father’s ex-comrades. A life of looking nice and shutting up, just like her mother.

But she feared her father’s arm was long. There were too many Russians in London already. Someone was bound to rat her out, the reward money would be considerable. So she had to get together a “traveling fund” and find somewhere else to go. Somewhere safe.

“Vere are you from, Dougie?” she purred. “Not from round here, eh?”

“What do you reckon?” he said archly. “Where d’you think I got a name like Dougie from, heh?”

Lola laughed, put her finger on the end of his nose.

“You are from Scotland, yes?”

“Aye,” nodded Dougie.

“Where in Scotland?”

“Edinburgh.”

“Vot’s it like in Edinburgh?”

A warning voice in Dougie’s head told him not to even give her that much. This story she had spun for him, it sounded too much like a fairy tale. She was probably some down-on-her-luck Balkans hooker looking for a sugar daddy. No one could have had the lifestyle she described. It was too far-fetched, too mental.

The touch of her finger stayed on the end of his nose. Her green eyes glittered under the optics. Before Dougie knew what he was doing, words were coming out of his mouth.

She had given him the germ of an idea. The rest he filled in for himself.

Venus in Furs was not run by an established firm, even by Soho standards. Its ostensible owners were a bunch of chancy Jamaican wide boys whose speciality was taking over moody drinking dens by scaring the incumbents into thinking that they were Yardies. Dougie doubted that was the case. They could have been minor players, vaguely connected somehow, but Yardie lands were south of the river. Triads and Micks ran Soho. He doubted these fellas would last long in the scheme of things anyway, so he decided to help Lola out and give fate a hand.

Trying to help her, or trying to impress her?

It helped that her shifts were regular. Six nights a week, 6 till 12. Plenty of time to observe who came and went on a routine basis. Maybe her old man really was KGB cos she’d already worked out that the day that the Suit came in would be the significant one.

There was this office, behind the bar, where they did all their business. Three guys worked the club in a rotation, always two of them there at the same time. Lynton, Neville, and Little Stevie. They had a fondness for Lola, her being blood, so it was usually her they asked to bring drinks through when they had someone to impress in there. She said the room had been painted out with palm trees and a sunset, like one big Hawaiian scene.

Like everyone, Dougie thought, playing at gangsters — they’re playing Scarface.

Once a week, a bald white guy in a dowdy brown suit came in with an attaché case. Whichever of the Brothers Grimm were in at the time would make themselves scarce while he busied himself in the office for half an hour. One of them would hang at the bar, the other find himself a dark corner with one of the girls. Then the bald man would come out, speak to no one, and make his own way out of the club.

Every Thursday, 8 p.m., punctual as clockwork he came.

That proved it to Dougie. The lairy Jamaicans were a front to terrify the public. The bald man collected the money for their unseen offshore master. With his crappy suit and unassuming exterior, he was deliberately done up like a mark to blend in with the rest of the clientele.

Dougie had a couple of guys that owed him favors. They weren’t known faces, and it would be difficult to trace them back to him — their paths crossed infrequently and they moved in different worlds. On two successive Thursdays, he gave them some folding and sent them in as marks. They confirmed Lola’s story and gave him more interesting background on the Brothers Grimm. Both weeks, it was the same pair, Steve and Neville, little and large. Large Neville, a tall skinny guy with swinging dreads and shades who was always chewing on a toothpick, sat behind the bar when the bald man showed up. He practiced dealing cards, played patience, drank beer, and feigned indifference to the world around him, nodding all the while as if a different slow skanking soundtrack was playing in his head — not the cheesy Europop on the club’s PA.

Little Stevie, by comparison, always grabbed himself a girl and a bottle and made his way over to the corner booth. While Neville looked like a classic stoner, Little Stevie was mean. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, with thick gold chains around his bulldog neck. A pork pie hat and thick black shades totally obscured his eyes. Ocassionally, like when the girl slipped underneath the table, he would grin a dazzling display of gold and diamond dental work. Neville always drank proper champagne — not the pear fizz served to the punters as such — and both Dougie’s contacts copped the telltale bulge in his pocket.

Neville’s booth was the one from which the whole room could be surveyed, and even while receiving special favors, he never took his eye off the game. The minute the office door clicked open and the bald man slipped away, he would knee his girl off him, adjust his balls and whatever else was down here, and swagger his way back over to the office all puffed-up and bristling, Neville following at his heels.

Yeah, Stevie, they all agreed, was the one to watch.

While they were in there playing punters, Dougie was watching the door.

The Venus was based in a handy spot, in a dingy alley between Rupert Street and Wardour Street. There was a market on Rupert and all he had to do was pretend to be examining the tourist tat on the corner stall. The bald man went the other way. Straight to a waiting cab on Wardour. Each time the same.

On the night it all happened, Dougie felt a rush in his blood that he hadn’t felt since Edinburgh, like every platelet was singing to him the old songs, high and wild as the wind.

God, he used to love that feeling, used to let it guide him in the days when he was Dougie the Cat, the greatest burglar in that magical city of turrets and towers.

But now he was Dougie Investigates, the private eye for the sort of people who couldn’t go to the police. He had changed sides on purpose after that first prison jolt, never wanting to be in close proximity to such fucking filth ever again. If you couldn’t be a gentleman thief these days, he reckoned, then why not be a Bad Guys’ PI? His methods may have differed from those used by the Old Bill, but Dougie had kept his nose clean for eighteen years, built up his reputation by word of mouth, and made a good living from sorting out shit without causing any fuss. Filled a proper gap in the market, he had.

His blood had never sung to him in all that time. He supposed it must have awakened in him that first night he met Lola, grown strong that night she’d finally allowed him back to her dingy flat above a bookie’s in Balham, where she had so studiously drawn out the map of the Venus’s interior before unzipping his trousers and taking him to a place that seemed very close to heaven.

Bless her, he didn’t need her map. He didn’t even need to know what Neville and Stevie got up to, only that they were good little gangsters and stayed where they were, in that little palace of their imagination where they could be Tony Montana every day.

He wasn’t going to take them on.

All he needed was the thirty seconds between the Venus’s door and Wardour Street. And the curve in the alley that meant the taxi driver wouldn’t be able to see. All he needed was the strength of his arm and the fleetness of his feet and the confusion of bodies packed into a Soho night.

At the end of the alley he slipped a balaclava over his head, put the blue hood over the top of that, and began to run.

He was at full sprint as the bald man came out of the door, fast enough to send him flying when he bowled into his shoulder. The man’s arms spread out and he dropped his precious cargo to the floor. Dougie was just quick enough to catch the look of astonishment in the pale, watery eyes, before he coshed him hard on the top of his head and they rolled up into whites. He had another second to stoop and retrieve the case before he was off again, out of the alley, across Wardour Street, where the taxi was waiting, its engine running, the driver staring straight ahead.

Dougie was already in the downstairs bogs of the Spice of Life before the cabbie was checking his watch to make sure he hadn’t turned up early. Had pulled out his sports bag from the cistern where he’d stashed it and busted the lock on the attaché case by the time the cabbie turned the engine off and stepped out of the car to take a look around. Dougie’s deftness of touch was undiminished by his years on the other side. He counted the bundles of cash roughly as he transferred them into his sports bag, eyebrows raising as he did. It was quite a haul for a weekly skim off a clip joint. He briefly wondered what else they had going on down there, then chased the thought away as excess trouble he didn’t need to know.

By the time the cabbie was standing over the crumpled heap in the alleyway, he had put the attaché case in the cistern and taken off the blue hood, rolling it into a ball when he nipped out the side door of the pub. He junked it in a bin as he came out onto Charing Cross Road and hailed himself a ride up to King’s Cross.

Dougie looked up from his racing pages. As if struck by electrodes, he knew Lola was in the room. She walked toward him, green eyes dancing, clocking amusedly his stupid cap and the bag that lay between his feet. Sat down in front of him and breathed, “Is it enough?”

“Aye,” nodded Dougie. “It’s enough.”

He hadn’t wanted there to be any way in which Lola could be implicated in all this. He’d had her phone in sick for two days running, told her just to spend her time packing only the essentials she needed, and gave her the money for two singles up to Edinburgh.

The night train back to the magic city, not even the Toon Army could ruin that pleasure for him.

“You ready?” he asked her.

Her grin stretched languidly across her perfect face.

“Yes,” she purred. “I’m ready.”

Dougie gripped the Adidas bag, left his floppy fries where they lay. As they stepped out onto the road, St. Pancras was lit up like a fairy tale castle in front of them. “See that,” he nudged her shoulder, “that’s bollocks compared to where we’re going.”

His heart and his soul sung along with his blood. He was leaving the Smoke, leaving his life of shadows, stepping into a better world with the woman he loved by his side. He took her hand and strode toward the crossing, toward the mouth of King’s Cross Station.

Then Lola said: “Oooh, hang on a minute. I have to get my bag.”

“You what?” Dougie was confused. “Don’t you have it with you?”

She laughed, a low tinkling sound. “No, honey, I left it just around the corner. My friend, you know, she runs a bar there and I didn’t want to lug it around with me all day. She’s kept it safe for me, behind the bar. Don’t vorry, it von’t take a minute.”

Dougie was puzzled. He hadn’t heard about this friend or this bar before. But in his limited experience of women, this was typical. Just when you thought you had a plan, they’d make some little amendment. He guessed that was just the way their minds worked.

She leaned to kiss his cheek and whispered in his ear: “Ve still have half an hour before the train goes.”

The pub was, literally, around the corner. One of those horrible, bland chain brewery joints heaving with overweight office workers trying to get lucky with their sniggering secretaries in the last desperate minutes before closing time.

He lingered by the door as Lola hailed the bored-looking blond bartender. Watched her take a small blue suitcase from behind the bar, kiss the barmaid on each cheek, and come smilingly back toward him.

A few seconds before she reached him, her smile turned to a mask of fear.

“Oh shit,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him away from the doorway. “It’s fucking Stevie.”

“What?”

“This vay.” She had his arm firmly in her grasp now, was propelling him through to the other side of the bar, toward the door marked Toilets, cursing and talking a million miles an hour under her breath.

“Stevie was standing right outside the door. I svear to God it was him. I told you, he is bad luck that one, he’s voodoo, got a sixth sense — my mama told me about sheiit like him. We can’t let him see us! I’m supposed to be off sick, the night he gets ripped off — he’s gonna know! He’s gonna kill me if he sees me.”

“Hen, you’re seeing things,” Dougie tried to protest as she pushed him through the door, down some steps into a dank basement that smelled of piss and stale vomit.

“I’m not! It vos him, it vos him!” She looked like she was about to turn hysterical, her eyes were flashing wildly and her nails were digging into his flesh. He tried to use his free hand to extricate himself from her iron grip, but that only served to make her cling on harder.

“Hen, calm down, you’re hurting me...” Dougie began.

“There’s someone coming!” she screamed, and suddenly began to kiss him passionately, smothering him in her arms, grinding her teeth against his lips so that he tasted blood.

And then he heard a noise right behind him.

And the room went black.

“Fucking hell.” Lola looked down on Dougie’s prone body. “That took long enough.”

“I told you he was good,” her companion pouted, brushing his hands on his trousers. “But I thought you’d enjoy using all your skills on him.”

“Hmm.” Lola bent down and prised Dougie’s fingers away from the Adidas bag. “I knew this would be the hardest part. Getting money out of a tight fucking jock.”

The slinky Russian accent had disappeared like a puff of smoke. She sounded more like a petulant queen.

“Come on.” She stepped over her would-be Romeo and the pile of shattered ashtray glass he lay in. “Let’s get out of here.”

The car was parked nearby. As Lola got into the passenger seat, she pulled the honey-gold Afro wig off her head and ran her fingers through the short black fuzz underneath.

“I am soooo tired of that bitch,” she said, tossing it on the backseat.

Her companion started the car with a chuckle.

“He fucking believed everything, didn’t he?” He shook his head as he pulled out.

“Yeah... and you said he was a private detective. Well let me tell you, honey, you wouldn’t believe what I suckered that dick with. My dad was a Russian gangster. My mother was a Somalian princess. I was on the run from Swiss finishing school. Can you believe it?”

Lola hooted with derision. “Almost like the fairy tales I used to make up for myself,” she added. “You know, I thought he might fucking twig when I told him I was named after a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. But I couldn’t resist it.”

“Well,” her companion smiled at her fondly, “you certainly made up for the loss of that Queen Anne silver. We’ve got enough to keep us going for months now. So where do you fancy?”

“Not back to Soho,” Lola sniffed, as the car pulled into the slipstream of Marylebone Road. “I’ve fucking had it with those poseur thugs. I know. I fancy some sea air. How does Brighton sound to you?”

“The perfect place,” her companion agreed, “for a couple of actors.”

Dougie came around with his face stuck to a cold stone floor with his own blood. Shards of glass covered him. He could smell the acrid stench of piss in his nostrils, and from the pub above he could hear a tune, sounding like it was coming from out of a long tunnel of memory. He could just make out the lyrics:

“I met her in a club down in old Soho/Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola...”

Chelsea three. Scotland Yard nil by Max Décharné

King’s Road

Chelsea, July 1977.

They found him in the pedestrian underpass beneath the northern end of the Albert Bridge, a short walk down Oakley Street from the King’s Road. He’d obviously been given a thorough kicking, and there was an orange shoved in his mouth, completely blocking the passage of air. Tied up like something in a butcher-shop window.

Didn’t look like he was bothered, though. He’d been dead for a good few hours already.

There wasn’t much about it in the local papers, but you could tell the police thought they were onto something. They’d been seen nosing around at Seditionaries the following afternoon, flicking through the racks, checking out the Cambridge Rapist T-shirts, clutching copies of the NME as if they were going to stumble over a clue in among the usual snarky jokes and record reviews. Who knows, maybe they thought they had, because there they were again later that day, looking very out of place at the rear of the spiky-haired crowd in the Man in the Moon watching Adam and the Ants.

Nosed around. Asked a few questions. Lowered the tone of the place. Something about bondage. Yeah, well, officer, what can I tell you? There’s a lot of it about...

Didn’t look like the gig was their kind of scene. They left halfway through the headliner, X-Ray Spex.

The following Saturday it was hot as hell. Usual collection of punky scufflers hanging around outside Town Records. Watching the passersby. Opening cans. Wandering off to check out the stalls at Beaufort Street Market. Keeping an eye out for the Teds or the Stamford Bridge boys. Regular King’s Road scene that summer, ever since the Jubilee violence had flared up — Punk Rock Rotten Razored, all the tabloid column inches stoking the flames. “Pretty Vacant” was heading up the charts while “God Save the Queen” was just on its way down, but Boney M and ELP were both in the top ten, and the papers were saying that Warner Brothers had just issued a single featuring a group made up of the Sun’s page three girls. Finger on the pulse, as always...

Davis got out of the tube at Sloane Square, picked up a copy of the Standard at the stall outside, and headed up past Smiths in the direction of the Chelsea Potter for a lunchtime pint. No word on that stiff they’d found the other week at the Albert Bridge, but now some posh woman had been discovered smothered to death in her bed in Cheyne Walk, just a few hundred feet away from the site of the last killing. Done in with a pillow. Police are refusing to comment on possible lines of enquiry. Yeah, sure. Unconfirmed reports of a message of some kind pinned to the body.

Davis looked out from his window seat and watched the nervous out-of-town kids heading for Boy a few doors away, heads down, expecting trouble.

Two killings in as many weeks. Not unusual for the Lower East Side, but this was Chelsea.

He rolled up the Standard and put it in his pocket, digging out the tatty copy of the NME he’d been dragging around for the past couple of days. Front page headline all about violence in the punk scene: This Definitely Ain’t the Summer of Love. Turned to page forty-six and scanned the gig guide, looking for likely shows. Nothing much doing tonight. Pub-rock no-hopers in most of the clubs. Monday looked better — Banshees/Slits/Ants at the Vortex, or Poly Styrene’s lot on Tuesday at the Railway in Putney. All good research material. Getting an article together on the upcoming rash of punk films currently in the planning stages. Russ Meyer farting about in Scotland with the Pistols, trying to get Who Killed Bambi off the ground. Derek Jarman rounding up his mates for something called Jubilee. Then there was the bloke who’d put some money into the last Python film and was now backing a disaster-in-the-making called Punk Rock Rules OK.

“Get out there and see what’s happening,” said his editor. Five thousand words on the punk film scene. Throw in a sidebar about Don Letts’s 8mm footage they’ll be showing at the ICA. Have a look round the clubs. Keep your eyes open. Nice little feature with a few shots of some of these punkettes in fishnet stockings and ripped T-shirts. Play up the punch-ups with the Teddy Boys as well. Sex and violence. Must we fling this filth at our kids? Blah, blah, blah... Get a quote from that GLC nutter, Brooke-Partridge, the one who reckons most punk rockers would be improved by sudden death. Is this the future of the British film industry? The usual bollocks, you know the form...

So there he was, knocking back a few pints in the Chelsea Potter, waiting to interview some idiot who claimed to be getting a script together about punk, but whom none of the bands or the managers on the scene that he’d spoke to had ever heard of. Probably a wasted afternoon, but what the hell. Even if the guy turned out to be a complete dingbat, he might provide some comic relief. A few stupid quotes. Ten years of interviewing some of the “giants” of European cinema for the magazine and listening to all their pompous arty bullshit had taken its toll. Egomaniacs, the fucking lot of them. Fellini’s 8, Fellini’s Roma, Fellini’s talking out of his arse... Give him an out-and-out chancer or a total loser any day of the week. At least they might be funny.

In any event, the guy was a no-show. Two hours late and nothing doing, he was three pints down and had read both papers cover to cover, winding up back at that murder report in the Standard. Smothered to death sometime yesterday? Let’s check out the scene. Mildly pissed but coherent, he pushed through the door and headed west along the King’s Road. Turned left at Oakley Street, down past Scott’s old house, with someone playing Unicorn by Tyrannosaurus Rex out of an upstairs window nearby, then round the corner to where Rossetti had kept wombats and peacocks in his Cheyne Walk back garden a decade before they even built the Albert Bridge.

Bored-looking copper on guard outside, bolting the door after half of Aintree had scarpered. Davis dug through his wallet and pulled out the press card he hardly ever used, knowing full well that it meant damn-all to most people. Still, you never knew.

“Afternoon, officer... Nothing much left to see, eh?” Offered the copper a fag but he turned it down. “Heard there was a note pinned to the body...”

“That’s right. Not that it helps much.”

“Guess he’s hardly likely to have left his home phone number...”

“Sounded like a quote from a book or something.”

“Oh yes?”

“They’ll be putting out a statement this afternoon, so there’s no harm in saying...”

“Saw it, did you?”

“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard...”

July 21. Hadn’t been a bad week. He’d seen the Only Ones at the Speakeasy on the Saturday. The Adverts and 999 at the Nashville on Monday, then that new bunch of Australians, the Saints, down in Twickenham at the Winning Post. Talked to a lot of people — punters, groups, managers. Bernie Rhodes refusing to let him talk to the Clash. Miles Copeland trying to convince him that some desperate bunch of ageing hippies calling themselves the Police were actually a punk band. Same old story. He’d also gone back to Chelsea again, to the Royal Court this time. Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias and their punk rock musical Sleak! with the annoying bloody exclamation mark on the end. The coppers were still sniffing around the scene, chasing some supposed connection with the two murders. As if killers are so eager to be caught they go around leaving clues, just like in the films.

Davis was wandering up the King’s Road with a photographer in tow, looking for likely faces in the right gear who could help decorate the article. Fishnet stockings, the man wanted. Ripped T-shirts. Okay then. Sure, they’d already been down to the Roxy, but that was full of tourists — not like in Czezowski’s day back in the spring. Ever since the Roxy live album had come out a few weeks back, you couldn’t move down there for bandwagon-jumpers. Mind you, if today was any indication, the King’s Road was suffering from the same disease. It was like a lot of people had been telling him at shows all week: Half the real punks had already bailed out of the scene, and the plastics were moving in. Still, the editor wanted photographs...

Saw a couple of likely looking prospects outside the Chelsea Drugstore, on the corner where Royal Avenue met the King’s Road. Bought them a can of beer, slipped them a quid each, and they said it was cool to photograph them for ten minutes or so. Davis let them get on with it and wandered off a few yards away to sit in the sun. Before you knew it, more police, uptight about the camera.

Asking for ID. Getting aggressive. The photographer couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Wasn’t as if she was the first person trying to get some shots of punks on the King’s Road that summer. Turned out it wasn’t that at all. They’d found another body. Right there on Royal Avenue, early that morning. Milkman practically tripped over it.

When he came over to see what the fuss was about, Davis noticed that it was the same policeman he’d talked to outside the Cheyne Walk house.

“Aren’t you the press man who was asking me questions about the previous murder?” said the copper.

He admitted that he was. Somehow, being seen taking photos a few yards away from the latest crime scene started the constable’s antenna twitching. Davis agreed that he had a few minutes spare in which to come along and talk to the detective sergeant.

“Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? What’s your interest in all this?”

“In the first one, pure curiosity. I’m a journalist. I read about it in the paper. I was round the corner having a drink. Thought I’d take a look.”

“And today?”

“Shooting pictures of punks for a feature I’m writing. It’s for a film magazine. They want coverage of some upcoming punk movies. I’ve been going around checking out the scene.”

The sergeant thought about that for a while.

“So would you describe yourself as an expert on this type of music?”

“Not an expert, no. I’m way too old for this. Most of the punters are about sixteen. But I’ve been at a lot of the shows these past couple of months. Talked to some of the bands involved. Research. Building up a picture. Why, is there a connection between the punk scene and the murders?”

“That’s one possible line of enquiry.”

The sergeant produced a clear plastic evidence bag and held it out for inspection. Visible inside was a sheet of paper with the usual blackmail lettering cut out from newspapers which had fast become a punk cliché through overuse. There was just one short phrase written on it:

“Mean anything to you?” asked the sergeant.

“Found on the body, was it?”

“If you’d just answer the question, sir...”

“Yes, actually, it does.”

“I see. And why might that be?”

“X-Ray Spex.”

“X-Ray Spex?”

“The band...”

“I know who they are, sir. I had the pleasure of seeing them perform several songs at the pub up the road a couple of weeks ago...”

“All right then. Go down to Town Records, 402 King’s Road. Get a copy of a new album called Live at the Roxy. X-Ray Spex track called “Oh Bondage Up Yours.” I think you’ll find it’s part of the lyrics.”

Early August. “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer blasting out from every pub jukebox. Pistols still at number four with “Pretty Vacant,” just one place down from “Angelo” by Brotherhood of Man. Check out the record reviews in the NME and the two main albums featured were the new ones from the Grateful Dead and Soft Machine. These were strange times. Davis was finishing up his evening getting plastered at the Roebuck. Usual mixed crowd. A couple of the staff from Seditionaries getting the evil eye from some of the older geezers who took exception to the swastikas on their clothes. Francis Bacon wandering in, looking for who knows what. Two famous actors in the corner, saying nothing, seemingly miserable, and a smattering of underage drinkers keeping their heads down. Davis spotted a few of the punks he’d interviewed at a Rezillos show in the Man in the Moon a few days previously, then went up and bought them a drink on expenses to see if they had any likely tips for the coming week.

“How’s it going, lads? Still getting hassled by the boys in blue?”

“Now and then. They were at the Spex gig at the Hope & Anchor the other day. Taking people outside. Going through your pockets. The usual crap.”

“Did they say what it was about?”

“Nah. Don’t need an excuse, do they?”

Apparently not. He went off to get some more cancer sticks and then pushed his way out through the doors and into the street. It was still bloody hot, but at least the tubes would still be running.

Now it was September. He’d finally finished that bloody punk films article, not that the editor had been particularly impressed. Easy to see why, really. The Pistols film with Meyer was shaping up to be a total fiasco and no one would even let him near that shoot — a sure sign of trouble. Nice idea on paper, but what would a director like that know about punk? Or care, for that matter... As for Jubilee — God help him — if he had to listen to much more of Jarman droning on about his plans to have some of the actors speaking in Latin, like his fucking unwatchable previous effort, then Davis would personally pay a group of King’s Road Teds to show up on the set and batter people to death with copies of the script. At least that German bloke who’d shown up in town from Munich making a punk documentary a week or so back seemed to have the right idea. Go to the clubs, talk to the fans, talk to some of the music papers and shops. Capture it as it’s happening.

Still, what the fuck, the article was done now.

As for the cops, they had rounded up some poor sod who was now “helping them with their enquiries.” Three killings in four weeks. Must have made all the happy little ratepayers in their Chelsea Mews houses start screaming bloody murder at their local MP. No wonder somebody’s been arrested. Can’t have that sort of behavior in the neighborhood. The Standard didn’t have much in the way of details, as per usual. Seems like the guy had been picked up after a show at the Nashville, following “information received.” According to the way it played in the press, it sounded like they were hoping that they’d taken some kind of dangerous lunatic off the streets. Innocent until proven guilty, of course...

What the hell. After a summer in which all the tabloids had spent their time running stories which claimed that the Sex Pistols cut up dead babies onstage and that your average punk was just as likely to bottle you in the face as say hello, hardly surprising that the cops would believe almost anything of someone who wore all the bondage gear. Was he guilty? Well, it seemed like he was their best bet...

Davis turned on the television, but there wasn’t anything on the news about the killings. New Faces on LWT. Couldn’t stomach that so he turned it over and got the last ten minutes of Dr. Who on BBC1, followed by Bruce Forsyth and the bloody Generation Game. Still, at least in the film slot there was a double bill later on of House of Dracula and Corman’s Fall of the House of Usher, kicking off just after 10 p.m. Saturday night, though. What did they expect? Sometimes it looked as if they felt that anyone over the age of about fourteen or under the age of sixty would definitely be out and about having a wild time, so why bother?

He turned off the TV. All right then, if all else fails, do some work. Went to the fridge, dug out a beer, and sat down in front of the Olivetti manual typewriter. The neighbors never liked hearing the clatter it made, but then fuck ’em; their kids had been playing the sodding Muppet Show album all week at huge volume on what appeared to be continuous repeat, and when the father ever succeded in commandeering the record player it changed to the fucking Allman Brothers and The Fucking Road Goes On For-fucking-ever. All of it. Several times. In the same evening.

Jesus wept.

No, a little typing at 7 p.m. was hardly enough to repay them for that kind of abuse.

The punk film article was done and dusted, due to hit the newsstands in a week or so, but he still had a piece to write for some arty French cinema magazine which was right up itself but paid surprisingly well. He supplied them with stuff written in English, which they then translated and printed in French. Who knows if they did a good job or not. He didn’t care, and no one he knew ever saw the stuff. Mostly they wanted pretentious toss of the worst kind, and he was happy to oblige, under a pseudonym. This time, though, he’d sold them on the idea of a subject that actually interested him. Still, better not run this one under his real name either, all the same. Okay, the magazine only sold about 20,000 copies a time, virtually all of them across the channel, but you never quite knew who might be reading it, putting two and two together.

Another swig of beer. Light up a fag. In with a new sheet of paper. Here we go:

He paused and sat back in his chair, consulting his notes. Blow Up, Killing of Sister George, The Party’s Over... Yeah, there were enough other ones to pad out the article. Shame to waste all that research.

And anyway, how many coppers could read French?