Ordinary Thunderstorms

35

THE RIVER WAS BEAUTIFUL tonight, she thought, and very high, right up. It was the moving blackness, the beginning of the turn, the great mass of water beginning its journey back to the sea: the black river flowing strongly and the reflected lights on its moving surface staying still. Mhouse saw the power and the entrancement — not that she would have articulated it that way — but the river distracted her and she dwelt on it for a while before she remembered how fucking pissed off she was.

A quiet night — not half. She’d been trolling around Cherry Garden Pier for a couple of hours, up the side streets, down the lanes, looking for customers, for men. She’d met one girl who was thinking of heading up to King’s Cross, it was so dead down here in Rotherhithe. She even wandered back into Southwark Park but it was all gay boys there, although one bloke asked her to follow him to the lake, said he had some kind of shack they could use, but she told him where he could shove his lake and his shack, no way.

She lit and smoked a cigarette. She could see the big hospital, St Bot’s, downstream, every light shining. Some electricity bill that one. It was a shame John 1603 had left — it was like living with a money tap, you just turned it on when you needed a bit more. Short of a £100?—Spend a night with John. He was a nice enough geezer (she wasn’t that keen on men with beards, to be honest) — gentle, kindly, helped out — and he liked her. Well, he liked fucking her, anyway, she knew that, that was as obvious as the nose on his face. Ly-on liked him as well — and he seemed to like Ly-on. So, she let him fuck her from time to time, she got some ready money and he had a roof over his head with satellite TV, so why did he have to clear off like that all of a sudden? Now she owed Mr Quality and Margo and they were bugging her hard to repay. Lot of money. And you didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of Mr Q…

She wondered if she could track down John 1603, offer him his room back, maybe reduce the rates across the board. How you going to do that, silly bitch? I could try the church, she thought — he was always at the church, and they might know where he was. Maybe Scotland won’t work out for him. Maybe he’ll come back to The Shaft, to Mhouse and Ly-on — his little family. Maybe he really wanted to be—

“Evening, darling.”

She turned to see a man standing on the river pathway. Where had he come from? She moved towards him slowly, hitching up the top of her bustier so her cleavage was more defined. Cleavage always worked — funny, that.

“What you after, my lovely?” she asked.

“I got a car back here,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “We could go for a nice drive.”

“I don’t go in cars, dear — sorry. You follow me — you’ll have the time of your life.”

She set off towards the King’s Stair Gardens and she could hear his footsteps behind her. There was a blocked-up doorway she used in a kind of water-pumping station, deeply recessed, very dark — people could walk right past and not see what you were up to.

She stepped into the doorway and sensed rather than saw his bulk fill the space. Big bloke. She reached for his fly — whip it out and get your hands on it, that was her routine. Don’t even let them have a second to think. All over before you knew it — before they had a chance to get specific.

She felt his strong hand on her wrist.

“Hold on, sweetness, not so fast. I got a few ideas myself…”

“It’s forty pound,” she said. “Fifty, no condom. If you want a room it’s a hundred — half an hour.”

She clicked on her cigarette lighter. It freaked them out if they knew you’d seen their face clear — stopped them getting any nasty little notions. The flame lit his big face and she saw the pale-lashed eyes, the weak chin with a big cleft down the middle, the dancing flame making the cleft look even deeper than it was. He seemed familiar to her, somehow.

“Don’t I know you?” she said. “Ain’t I done you before?”

“No. Not unless you work down Chelsea way.”

“I never been to Chelsea, darling.”

“Oh, yes you have.”

Then he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her almost off her feet, ramming her into the wall, driving the breath from her lungs.

“Where’s Adam Kindred,” he breathed into her face. “Tell me that and I won’t have to mark you.”

She couldn’t speak, so she made a choking, gagging noise. She had both hands on his wrist — it felt like the thick branch of a tree — and her toes were just touching the ground. He relaxed his grip slightly, let her down a few inches.

“I don’t know the name,” she said.

“How about ‘John’?”

And, now, for some reason, she remembered him. He was the guy she’d seen getting out of the taxi outside The Shaft, one night a few weeks ago. It was the taxi she’d noticed and then she’d walked right past this man — this big ugly bastard with the cleft chin who now had his hand round her throat. But what did he have to do with John 1603?

“John who?” she said. “There’s lots of Johns in this world.”

“How about the John who was staying in your flat? Let’s start with him.”

This chastened her — and she felt weak being caught out so quickly. How the fuck did he know? Who had told him? And she experienced a horrible premonition: she was suddenly aware that she was going to have to fight this big powerful man, fight him for her life — like that last time she’d got in the car with that evil bastard punter. You turned into an animal — you just knew.

“Tell me about John,” he said.

“Oh, that cunt,” she said, bitterly. “He fucked off to Scotland last week.”

“What? Scotland?”

She sensed his genuine surprise and his grip on her slackened again and she knew this was her moment. She drove her knee into his balls, full force, and heard his bellow of pain as she ducked beneath his arms and ran.

But he was after her in a second, it seemed, and she couldn’t run fast in those fucking high-heeled boots. He caught her just before she got to the river and its lighted walkways, grabbed her hands in some kind of a lock and frogmarched her back up into the darkness of King’s Stairs Gardens and there he did something strange to her neck — fingers digging deep in at the side, a thumb pressing hard behind one ear — and she felt one whole side of her body going limp, and pins and needles in her left hand.

She punched him in the face with her right hand, got her nails in his cheek and raked downwards, feeling his skin tear. She saw his whirling backhander too late and tried to duck but he hit her so hard that the last thing she remembered was the sensation of flying through the air — Mhouse was flying, off the ground, flying in the air like a little birdie.

And then — nothing.