I kicked my heels through the lunchtime, watching the other drinkers come and go. I was becoming a fixture. I didn't drink too much, spacing out the bottles of beer like milestones on a long, straight road to nowhere. Around three I heard the telephone on my desk ringing. I ran across the road and scooped up the receiver. It was John Reid. There were no preliminaries. He got right to the point. ‘What the fuck have you been doing?’ he demanded.
‘Drinking beer,’ I replied,
‘Not today, yesterday.’
‘Drinking beer,’ I said.
‘Get serious Nick, you prat. I told you to keep your head down didn't I?’
‘You mentioned something like that.’
‘Then who was it chasing through Waterloo yesterday, endangering the public and shooting, for God's sake? Where the fuck do you think you are. New York?’
‘I wasn't shooting, and I wasn't doing much chasing.’
‘So it was you,’ he said.
‘Listen John,’ I cut in. ‘No sooner had I left you than those bastards who've beaten me up, tried to frame me for all sorts and threatened my own daughter, start using me for target practice. I wasn't about to stick around and reason with them.’
‘Can't you stay out of trouble for five minutes?’
‘It doesn't look like it. Did you get them by the way?’
‘No, but we got the remains of their motor. Talking of motors there's an anti-terrorist squad looking for that stupid thing you're driving, right now.’
‘It's parked here,’ I said.
‘I should tell them that.’
‘Why don't you?’ I asked.
‘The same reason I haven't told them anything. They don't know it was you or you'd be banged up by now.’
‘What reason?’
‘Old time's sake, I guess,’ he replied.
I didn't say a word.
‘And Nick.’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard it on the grape-vine that there's a contract out on you.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ I asked.
‘No, you've upset some heavy people, being busy.’
‘I haven't done anything.’
‘Look, I can't talk now. I'm snowed under. I get the feeling that people are finding me little jobs to keep me away from you. There's nothing I can do now. So take my advice and drop out of sight tonight. Get right away from the manor. I'll call you tomorrow morning and we'll get together and sort this out once and for all. Can I trust you to do that?’
‘I've got to see George Bright this afternoon,’ I said.
‘Stay away from him,’ said John exasperatedly. ‘He's bad news. You'll get yourself killed if you're not careful.’
‘Like Terry?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Terry Southall,’ I said.
There was a long pause.
‘Of course, you knew him didn't you?’
‘Come on John, you know I did.’
‘I'm sorry Nick, it never occurred to me.’
‘Who did it?’
‘We don't know. At least I don't think we do. It's not my case, but I'll have a word and give you the full SP tomorrow morning.’
‘What time?’ I asked.
He thought for a moment. ‘Tennish,’ he said.
‘I'll be here. Have you heard from Laura?’
‘Yes, she's been in touch.’
‘Not with me she hasn't.’
‘I told her not to. Anyway you're not exactly flavour of the month.’
‘So what's new?’ I asked. ‘Is everything all right with them.’
‘Of course it is. Don't worry, they're well out of harm's way. Just keep a low profile tonight. There's a few cowboys who'll be cruising around looking for you after dark.’
‘Who's put out the contract, do you know?’
‘Tomorrow, Nick. I'll find out everything by tomorrow.’
‘Do they know where I live?’
‘It's no secret, is it?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Then get out of town Nick,’ he said. ‘Come back tomorrow and I'll call you.’
‘I'll be here.’
He said goodbye and hung up. I pushed the button down on the ‘phone and when I got a tone, dialled Bright Leisure. No answer, no answerphone. That slippery bastard was giving me the runaround.
I thought that a quick trip to Herne Hill wouldn't be too dangerous so I locked up and drove down to George's warehouse.
The whole place was as tight as a drum. I tried to call him at home from a callbox that worked, or nearly. There was a notice stuck to the mirror in the box that said that the telephone was only in service for emergency calls. I got the operator and after pleading with her for what seemed like hours she connected me with George's number. No answer there either. George Bright had gone to ground. Now it was my turn.
I wasn't going home. I had a strange feeling down my spine that I'd have visitors if I did. But my choices of where to spend the night were strictly limited. I just didn't know anyone any more, not anyone I could trust. I looked in my notebook where Teresa had written her address. She'd said I'd be welcome any time, and now was any time as far as I was concerned. I decided to pay her a visit, unannounced. She'd probably be out, but what the hell. The only thing was, I didn't want anyone else to tag along. I climbed back into the Trans-Am, switched on the ignition and waited for the engine's note to sink from a howl to a subdued rumble. I slipped the car into gear and drove away from the kerb. I swung the car into the flow of traffic and headed towards Streatham. I drove across the lowlands of the South Circular, going north, but turned off at Clapham and dropped down Lavender Hill towards the junction. I constantly checked in my mirror as I drove, but couldn't make out if I was being followed. I nicked a space on a single yellow line at the back of Arding & Hobbs and went through one of the rear doors into the store. I loitered about just inside, but didn't see anyone who looked suss, just a few shoppers coming and going. One or two gave me funny looks but I just shrugged and grinned inanely back as if I was waiting for the wife to turn up loaded with Marks & Sparks carriers. After a few minutes I began to wander through the shop, taking it slow and easy like any innocent punter looking for a new pair of strides or a top up in the after shave stakes. I passed by one of the front doors leading out to St John's Road and checked the cab rank on the corner. There were a couple of black cabs waiting for the commuter travellers from the station. I let my eyes rove around the shop. Everything looked clean. I pulled a tenner from my back pocket and palmed it. I pushed through the glass doors and dodging a 37 pulling up at the bus stop legged it across the street. I quickened my pace, gauging the green lights and dived through the traffic towards the central reservation where the cabs were parked. I pulled open the back door of the first in the rank and collapsed into the back seat. The driver dropped his paper and half turned.
‘Drive,’ I said.
‘Where to, mister?’ he asked.
‘Just drive,’ I said, leaning forward and pushing the tenner through the partition into his hand. ‘I'll tell you where.’ He crashed the gears as we pulled abruptly into the traffic. ‘Straight on,’ I said.
‘What's up then?’ he asked out of the corner of his mouth as we headed back up the hill.
‘Wife trouble,’ I replied.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah, someone elses.’
‘Gotcha,’ he said with right good humour and cut up a brewery truck. I turned and checked the cars behind us. All seemed OK.
‘Left here,’ I said. He swung the taxi through an amber and down towards the river. No-one followed. ‘Take a tour,’ I instructed. ‘Up to Vauxhall, then back to Stockwell, and if you jump a few red lights I won't mind.’
‘It'll cost.’ I could tell he was getting into it.
‘No problem,’ I told him. The cockle's just a sweetener.’
‘You got it,’ he said.
‘And if you don't mind,’ I went on.
‘What?’
‘No conversation, I need to think.’
‘No probs, mate, I'll be as quiet as the grave.’
The cab sped down Queenstown Road, round the roundabout and snaked up to Vauxhall Cross. The driver pushed it through some back doubles, down a couple of mews I didn't even know existed and, after a brief stop under a railway bridge by a building site hidden behind an overflowing skip, drove serenely down as far as Stockwell Tube. He was good, I'll give him that, and he knew it. I gave him another tenner when he dropped me off in Larkhall Lane. ‘If her husband was after you we've lost him now,’ he said with a grin as he pocketed the cash.
‘Cheers,’ I said.
‘Take care,’ he replied as he drove away. ‘And be good.’
I stood for a time in the empty street then turned and pushed into the deserted public bar of the pub behind me. I ordered a lager and wedged myself on the battered vinyl of a corner seat and watched the door. No one came in until I'd almost finished my second drink, and then it was just a pensioner with a stick and a seedy old dog on a piece of string instead of a lead. I relaxed a bit after that and had another drink and a listen to the jukebox. Yeah, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was on that one too, but I didn't select it. The address Tess had given me was two or three streets down from where I was sitting but I waited until a group of likely lads came piling into the pub before leaving. I walked down the lonely streets under a dark and treacherous sky. It looked and felt as if another storm was in the air. I didn't know if it was that or me that made the air feel so tense and static. The street lights clicked prematurely on as I passed, forging a lighted path for me through the murk.
I knocked on her door around nine thirty, quarter to ten. There was a soft light behind the deckled glass, but no sound. I knocked again and leant back against the brickwork of the porch. I heard the soft pad of feet before I saw a diffuse shape appear. She opened the door on a safety chain. ‘Hello Tess,’ I said.
‘Nick, so soon,’ she said as a greeting.
‘Yeah, bad penny time. Can I come in?’
‘Of course, it's liberty hall at my place, or had you forgotten?’
She fiddled with the chain and pulled the door open. I didn't answer, just slid through the doorway and pushed it gently closed behind me. I turned and refastened the chain. We stood and looked at each other in the hallway. ‘What's up?’ she asked.
‘The usual,’ I said.
‘Are you armed?’
‘No, I'm just pleased to see you.’
‘Funny,’ she said, without cracking the least sign of a smile.
‘Yes, I'm armed.’
‘Well I don't want to see it.’
‘Good enough.’
She led me through the flat, into the living room where a portable colour TV was buzzing quietly in the corner. I didn't see what was on, the faces on the screen were blurred as if covered with a fine gauze.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.
‘Could be, what have you got?’
‘Eggs, bacon.’
‘And a fried plantain?’
‘Why not?’
‘I love your fried plantain.’
‘There's a joke in there somewhere.’ For the first time she touched me. She rested her hand on my arm. Her nails were long and scarlet.
‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘But get rid of the gun.’ I walked over to a chest of drawers, opened the top drawer and laid the Cobra gently on a pile of papers inside, then followed her into the kitchen. It was large and white and looked into an overgrown back garden. All the windows were open to allow some air in from the sultry night.
Somewhere far away, across the river, I guessed, there was a brief flash of sheet lightning that lit up the leaves on the trees and turned them electric green for a second. Teresa shivered in the heat.
‘I hate storms,’ she said.
‘I love them,’ I replied.
‘I remember.’
She went over and opened the fridge and pulled out eggs and a packet of bacon. She loaded the meat onto the mesh of the pan under the grill and turned on the gas. She took a big plantain out of the wicker basket on the dresser, peeled it and sliced it lengthwise. All of a sudden, the heat and the scent of the fruit took me back to another flat in another part of town during another forgotten summer.
Teresa and I had just started seeing each other seriously. My wife was on another planet, and with the help of certain illegal substances, so was I.
One weekend I stayed up with Teresa. I gave Laura a cock-and-bull story about a seminar at Bramshill. I don't know if she believed me and cared less. She was probably glad to see the back of me for forty eight hours.
Tess and I stayed in for the whole weekend. We ate take-outs when we ate at all and fucked each others’ brains out. The weather was tropical. The sky was cloudless for weeks and the city boiled like a cheap kettle. We wore the minimum of clothing for the two days which didn't help, and I watched the drops of sweat roll down Teresa's back from, her hairline until they soaked into the band of her panties. I'd cleared the glass topped table in her living room and it was streaked and smeared with coke dust. We smoked dope, snorted coke, screwed, sucked up strong, cold mixtures of vodka and juice, picked at pizzas and Chinese and screwed again. She'd bought in a hand of bananas and put them on a window sill in a glass bowl. When she'd bought them they'd been green, but I could almost see them ripen in the sunlight that poured through the window. The room filled with the perfume of the yellowing fruit and the Thai stick we were rolling and smoking and the smell of stale sex and stale bodies. In the late evening when the sun finally dropped down to the horizon and the tower blocks turned black and golden we'd sit on the bed by the window, dazed and wiped out from the sex and booze and drugs and listen to the trains rattling across town until it grew full dark and we fell asleep in each others’ arms.
‘A penny from them,’ said Teresa and I was back with her.
‘Thinking about that place of yours in Battersea, remember?’
She smiled. ‘Yes, good days.’
‘Good enough for me,’ I said.
She drained the bacon and scooped two eggs and the fried banana onto a plate. ‘Ketchup?’ she asked.
‘Just a bit.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Not much alters, does it?’ I asked.
‘Doesn't it?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ I said through a mouthful of egg.
She sat and watched me as I ate. She fiddled with her hair and a seam on the skirt of her dress. The food was good. She fetched me a bottle of Bud from the cooler and I swallowed a mouthful from the neck. It tasted cool and rich as it washed the last of the food down my throat. At last she asked the inevitable question. ‘Why did you come?’
‘I'm on the run,’ I said only half jokingly.
‘Serious?’
‘I don't know for sure, but I think so. Anyway don't worry, I haven't brought any little friends along.’
‘Do you want to stay the night?’
‘Can I?’
‘Of course. You wouldn't have come if you'd thought differently would you?’
I ignored the question. ‘Not going out?’ I asked instead.
‘Not tonight, I'm sort of on holiday.’
‘Costa Del Stockwell?’
‘Something like that.’
I sat and finished the beer. ‘You're sure no-one's followed you?’ she asked when I'd put the bottle in the garbage pail.
‘Not a chance.’
She relaxed a little and lit a Marlboro from the red and white pack on the sideboard. She didn't inhale the first drag, just allowed the smoke to drift between her lips in a grey-white, bite-sized swirl. I looked at it greedily and she spat it towards me. ‘Want one?’ she asked. I nodded but stopped her as she pushed the packet towards me.
‘But I won't,’ I said.
‘Please yourself, you always do.’
‘Am I doing something wrong?’ I asked.
‘Just the usual.’
‘What?’
‘Using people, using me!
‘Tess, I'm not, I swear.’
‘I knew you'd come when I could be of some use.’
‘I'll go then.’
‘Where?’
‘God knows,’ I said. ‘I'll walk the streets.’
‘You fucking drama queen. “I'll walk the streets.” ’ she mimicked pretty well too. ‘You know I wouldn't kick you out.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘There, you see.’
‘Jesus Tess,’ I said. ‘What's got into you?’
‘I'm sorry, I've had a rough week.’
‘Why?’
‘It's no good any more.’
‘What?’
‘What I do.’
‘I didn't think goodness ever came into it,’ I replied, rather tactlessly.
She flashed me a dirty look. ‘Don't get funny, Nick,’ she said. ‘It's a living. What the fuck do you do that's so special?’ There was really no answer to that one. ‘I hate being pawed around by those dirty bastards.’
‘So quit.’
‘And do what?’
‘Whatever.’
‘Well tell me Nick, you're so smart. What should I do? What little career do you suggest I should get into?’
I said nothing.
‘There you see, no bright ideas. Well I did quit for a while, and what do you think I did?’
I said nothing.
‘Well I wasn't on the check-out at Sainsbury's. I worked in a peep show, what do you think of that?’
I said nothing.
‘A sleazy little peep show in Wardour Stret. Do you know what that means?’ I shook my head, it beat saying nothing, but I didn't quite get her point. Did she mean morally or philosophically? Or did she mean the nuts and bolts of the thing? I soon found out. ‘It means I showed off my pussy to a bunch of scumbags for half a quid a throw. Do you know how that feels?’ She was full of questions that night. I shook my head again. I was beginning to feel like a metronome.
‘Of course you don't,’ her voice rose, full of tightly suppressed fury. ‘I had to open my cunt to someone I didn't know, someone I couldn't see, someone I hadn't even been introduced to. Do you know what that does to a person?’
My head shook again.
She came up so close I could feel her spit on my face. ‘It's disgusting!’ she shouted. ‘Fucking disgusting. You wouldn't show your precious cock off for a few quid would you?’
I was still shaking my head.
‘It makes you less of a human being.’ She was close to tears. ‘And once a month you have to take unpaid sick leave. It brings the profit margins down. It's not fair. Not many punters get off on a bit of string sticking out of your crack. ‘Cos that's all it is, a half nicker crack, a fifty pence gash and a bit of cunt hair.’ She stopped then, I was glad. My head was shaking so fast by then that I thought my brains would start trickling out of my ears. ‘So I went back on the game.’
‘I'm sorry,’ I said weakly.
‘What the fuck do you know? Nothing as usual, right.’
‘What can I say Tess, you're not interested. You won't listen. I know it's tough out there, especially for a woman on her own.’
‘Spare me that shit will you, next you'll say especially a black woman. Well don't. That would really piss me off.’
‘Even more than you are now?’ I asked.
‘Yes, if you must know,’ she replied.
I looked at her.
‘Don't you look at me like that, Nick,’ she said coldly. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are anyway? You fucking liberal white bastard. If you talk to a nigger, you think you're a real open hearted guy. If you fuck a nigger, you think you're something special. Mister superstud. Then you probably go and brag about it to your friends. If you've got any of course, which I doubt. Bollocks, Nick. Don't patronise every black you see. If you see a black tie his own shoelace you make a fuss. You jump up and down and clap your hands, like it's a big deal. Why don't you just leave us all the hell alone?’
I was confused. She was as changeable as the weather. ‘I must be missing something here,’ I said. ‘Just tell me exactly what's brought this on.’
‘Don't you know?’
‘No.’
‘It's because I thought I was long over you, and then I heard you were back and I just had to see, and of course I wasn't.’ I must have looked as amazed as I felt. ‘It's because I love you, you stupid bastard,’ she said, and literally collapsed into my arms.