Breaking Light (35 page)

*

The catalyst to this revelation was an ugly thing – a rather obscene episode – but, in reality, it was a series of unlikely events over the previous forty-eight hours which had led him to this park bench, where he had finally fallen asleep after walking all night until just before dawn.

It had all started with him overhearing a conversation in an Irish pub in King's Cross. Two thuggish-looking men in three-piece suits and greased hair were discussing a new nightclub they'd been to in Soho. Something – a tone or the way their voices would hush deliberately at certain points in the conversation – made Gabriel listen harder. It was clearly a club where you could catch an act that was quite out of the ordinary. One of the men mentioned a dancer called Dolly May and her pianist, who was ‘a bit of a daftie'.

Gabriel shifted closer to the two men under the pretext of taking a look out of the smudged window. The light had started to dim over the streets outside the pub and the taxicabs were putting their headlamps on. Suddenly he realised that the two men had stopped talking. He turned round, only to stare into the face of one of them.

The man looked him up and down, taking his time. ‘Hey, this one looks as if he could do with a bit of excitement, don't you think?' he said, nudging his friend.

The friend grinned and turned to Gabriel. ‘Enjoying our conversation, were you?'

Gabriel swallowed and nodded. ‘Yeah, that club you were talking about sounded grand. Where can I find it?'

The two men stared at him for a moment and then one of them started to laugh. ‘Well,
well
, aren't you a kinky one?' he said, and, turning to his friend, ‘This guy clearly hasn't dipped his wick for a while … You'd better give him the address.'

‘You run straight to the Pelican Club in Greek Street, pal, and you may catch yourself some action tonight.'

Reddening, Gabriel thanked them and, leaving enough change on the bar, he stepped out into the street. It had started to rain. Buttoning up Uncle Gerry's tweed jacket, whose cuffs had started to fray, Gabriel set off towards Soho.

The Pelican Club was not easy to find and he walked past the entrance twice before spotting a narrow black door with an image of a pelican. The door opened on to an equally narrow stairwell, leading down into a large, windowless area with a long, curved bar and tables arranged in front of a small stage.

Leaning against the bar with a drink at his arm, he listened to the band rehearsing that evening's numbers. It was still early and the club was empty, save for himself, the barman, and a couple of men talking business in one of the leather-clad booths. Gabriel could only see the face of one of them – the other one sat with his back to the bar. For a moment, Gabriel thought there was something familiar about that back, but he let it go. Stripped of its clientele, the interior of the club looked shabby and dilapidated. It smelt of cigarettes and stale drink. The barman cleared his throat and spoke without warmth: ‘You all right, there?'

‘Fine thanks,' Gabriel said and turned around to face the bar. In the broken mirror behind the bottles, he saw his own split face and, behind it, multifaceted and fragmented, the duplicate profiles of the two businessmen. And then he saw the poster; it advertised a show – a burlesque show – and there, behind the
long-legged young woman with black hair dressed in a corset and ostrich boa, was an image of Michael at a piano. It was definitely Michael. He was even thinner than when Gabriel had last seen him at the Moor Cross Inn, dressed in black-tie and half hidden in shadow, but it was Michael. The text on the poster read
Dolly May – Cabaret of the Damned
. He turned to the barman, who was drying glasses nearby. ‘Hey, that guy at the piano –' he pointed at the poster – ‘do you know him? Does he play here often?' The barman looked up with a dulled expression. He lit a cigarette and glanced at the poster. ‘I dunno,' he muttered, blowing out the smoke.

‘I'd like to get in touch with him, that's all.'

‘Yeah?'

Gabriel ignored the tone of sarcasm in the barman's voice. ‘Well, could you at least tell me when he played here last?'

The barman glanced over at the two men in the booth, but they were deep in conversation now; they didn't seem to have noticed Gabriel. ‘They played here last Thursday,' he said, and spat into the glass he was wiping. ‘That's all I know,' he added, curtly, and turned his back to Gabriel.

*

On realising that Michael might be close, Gabriel started a tireless, meticulous quest to track him down. He would hear snippets of information here and there – in the clubs and pubs in Archer Street, Wardour Street and Great Windmill Street, from the Caribbean musicians who set the rhythm of those streets and from the girls clustering like grapes in the doorways – but no one could vouch for any of the facts. No one could say anything for certain. And yet they all knew of him. He was remarkably handsome, they seemed to agree, although in a consumptive way. No
one knew where he lived, but one man thought he sometimes slept on a mattress in a room above the Harmony Inn, and once under the grand piano at the Palladium. People said his mind was blown, and that sometimes he spoke in French.

This was all pieced together over the course of a week or two. Michael might have been mistaken for just another bum, another minor character in that incredible cast, but there was clearly a certain quality to him, something which made the low life of Soho's streets hesitate when asked about him, something intangible which would make them stop and smell the air, as if they expected the spirit of the elusive young pianist to be mingling with the stench of frying fat and alcohol. The secret of his attraction seemed to be his boyishness – it was as if he had never grown up – and his link to the owner of the Pelican Club. He was the club's mascot, said some; others used more sinister terms to describe Michael's ties to one of the most feared club owners in London.

He was simply called the Pelican, after his club, and was well known for managing to stay out of the way of the law, in spite of some rather dodgy business tactics. Some said that he offered protection for the brothels throughout the West End. He had a number of police officers and judges on his payroll and no witnesses dared appear against him. His front-of-house staffer was Seamus ‘the Clerk' O'Brien, a devout Catholic with a dingy office above a strip bar. The phone number printed on his visiting card rang in a phone box in Brewer Street.

‘What do you want?' answered an irritated female voice when Gabriel finally called the number from a phone box in nearby Berwick Street.

‘I want to meet the Clerk.'

The woman sighed and yelled to somebody nearby. ‘Hey, it's another one for the Clerk!'

Gabriel listened down the line at the street life, which mingled with the noises outside his own booth.

Finally, a man's voice came on the line: ‘What do you want to see the Clerk about?'

‘I want to talk to him about my brother, Michael, the pianist.'

He could hear the man at the other end of the line breathe for a moment. ‘Your brother?'

‘Yeah.'

The man was silent, considering this. ‘All right; go to Walker's Court and ask for the Clerk.'

This is a long way from Mortford, Gabriel thought to himself as he was led up a rickety flight of stairs to the Clerk's office. Seamus O'Brien was sitting at a large mahogany desk. His jacket was draped across the back of his captain's chair and the sleeves of his white shirt were held back with silver armbands. He might have been a typesetter, shaping the language of the day. A life-sized carved Madonna in sky-blue velvet robes was standing like a sentinel just inside the door. She wore a gold crucifix pendant, studded with red and blue stones – it looked real and very expensive. Gabriel entered and closed the door behind him. O'Brien looked up from his ledgers and studied Gabriel through half-moon glasses. There was a print of the Pope on the wall behind him.

‘Yes?'

‘I'm looking for my brother, Michael Bradley.'

‘And what makes you think I could help you?'

‘Well …'

‘Don't be a weakling, boy. Spit it out!'

‘They say he works for you … For the Pelican, that is.'

‘No one works for me, do you hear? I deal with paperwork – I am a clerk!' O'Brien flared, his face suddenly blazing.

‘I apologise.'

‘Don't mention it.'

There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘Well?' Gabriel dared ask, at last.

‘Well, what?'

‘Would you know where I could find my brother, sir? It would be –' he looked quickly around the room – ‘a good deed, if you could help me.'

‘Ah,' said the Clerk, and started looking distractedly through his papers. ‘Yes, well, I keep a list of names here, you see …'

Gabriel stood, frowning at his shoes, waiting.

Somewhere, a doorbell buzzed. A plastic Sacred Heart in a gold frame started blinking on the mahogany desk. O'Brien sighed and removed his glasses to polish them on his shirtsleeve. His eyes were tiny and red-rimmed. ‘It's another one of the bag men, bringing in this week's money.' He nodded towards the blinking light. ‘You'd better leave through the back door.'

‘But sir – a good deed, please?'

O'Brien sighed. ‘All right, all right; come to the club tonight. I'll make sure he's there.'

*

Gabriel hardly recognised the Pelican Club when he returned later that evening. The shabbiness seemed to have been transformed, at the stroke of a wand, into glamour. A soft glow from uplighters all around the walls picked out the sparkle in the gold ceiling, which stretched like an oriental canopy over the guests, seated at the small round tables in front of the stage. Everyone
was in evening dress. A single couple was dancing; they were beautiful – she pale, slender, almost green-tinted, like the part of the flower stalk that never sees the light; he golden, full of all that love, his hand confident on the small of her back. There was something rather dreamy – almost innocent – about it all. Gabriel felt awkward in his old suit. He smoothed his fringe to one side and wished he'd worn a tie. A jazz band was playing on stage and, for a moment, he was transported back to the safety and comfort of Uncle Gerry's cottage, where he had been able to dream of this allure. Put the blame on Mame, boys.

Keeping to the shadows, Gabriel moved around the periphery of the room, observing the guests. Waiters in white jackets and bow ties flowed around the tables, serving champagne cocktails from silver trays. The smoke from Cuban cigars and cigarettes formed tawny clouds around the tables, as if each one of them had its own weather system – or a volcano, ready to go off at any moment. Gabriel felt himself drawn towards the music. On the wall next to the stage was a large mosaic of a pelican, lowering its beak to its heart, where drops of blood stained its snowy white chest. Just below the pelican's beak, where real drops of blood would have fallen, Michael was sitting at a table by himself, his eyes fixed on the stage.

For a few minutes, Gabriel hung back, watching him. He was wearing black tie and his dark hair had been pasted back with brilliantine. Gabriel remembered Michael's cap of dark hair, the sandy smell of it and the way it used to sit so tightly on his head, like Pinocchio's. Michael's face was half in shadow and there were dark circles under his eyes. He was still and composed but, as he raised a cigarette to his lips, Gabriel detected a tremble in the elegant hand, a slight twitch in the pianist's fingers. Gabriel
realised now why the descriptions he had had from the people in the streets had been admiring and at the same time rather vague; he was inconsolably handsome but in a slightly removed, fuddled way – as if he was an abstraction of himself, a character in a novel, a dark and brooding hero. There was something lack-lustre, something wistful, about the way in which he stared at the band playing.

Gabriel hesitated in the shadows and, for a moment, he contemplated leaving, turning round quietly and sneaking out the way he had come, out of this world he had no place in, where he had ended up, as if by some great mistake. He could not recall why he was there at all and, in his frustration, he felt a wash of anger at having been trapped in this way, like a lobster who crawls greedily through the narrow passage, seeking fulfilment and satisfaction, and finding, at the far end of the creel, a shard of mirror tied to the frame, offering the seduction of company, but delivering only a reflection of himself. And that was at the heart of it: this feeling of loss and the fear of losing Michael once again, as he knew he must. He walked up to Michael's table and pulled out an empty chair.

Michael looked up as Gabriel sat down in front of him; if he had any feelings at that moment, his eyes did not reveal them. ‘Gabe,' he said, flatly, without surprise, ‘you look awful. What's happened to you?' Idly, he reached for the drink in front of him, the cigarette still clasped between his fingers. His face was pallid and gaunt.

‘It's nice to see you, too.'

Michael laughed briefly. ‘Irony never used to be your thing; didn't think you were cut out for it. Too much of a goody-goody; always so naïve.'

This hurt, but Gabriel did not let on. ‘Yeah, well, I suppose I have grown up.'

‘Can I get you a drink?' Michael motioned to one of the waiters.

‘I'll have whatever you're having.'

‘Two whiskies, Sam; water, no ice.'

The waiter bared his teeth at Michael and moved off.

They sat in silence, Gabriel studying Michael, who let it happen, pretending to watch the stage again. At last, the waiter returned with the drinks. They drank without looking at each other.

‘
So
,' Michael spoke quietly, still looking away, ‘what brings you to London?'

‘Long story …' He wondered if Michael remembered the sideshow, Dr Buster and the twins, and contemplated making up a tale that might seem more credible. ‘Well, after I saw you last, I finished school and joined a sideshow for the summer … and then I learnt that I had been accepted to university, so I came here to study.'