1
I
came out of the Beehive on Homer Street and trod on a piece of shit. Big surprise. I’m always doing it. It was the end of a pretty rough day, and the noble gods of misery obviously didn’t fancy me toddling off to bed without pissing in my pockets one last time. I looked down at my shoe. The piece of shit said: ‘Can you get off my face now?’ I lifted my foot and let him stand up.
‘Barry Liptrott,’ I said, ‘you’re looking well.’
Liptrott straightened his collar and, with a grubby handkerchief, did what he could about the muddy cleat marks from my size 9s on his cheek. ‘You didn’t need to do that. I didn’t do nothing to you.’
‘Force of habit,’ I said. ‘Last time we bumped into each other, you were carrying a knife, in a decidedly unfriendly way.’
‘I’m straight now, Sorrell. Straight as arrows.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘Straight as fusilli, more like. Straight as da Vinci’s perfect fucking circle.’
‘I mean it.’
‘What are you doing around here? This isn’t your manor.’ I was thinking of bed, and Mengele. I was thinking of that bottle of Grey Goose all cold and lonely in my freezer.
‘It’s a free country, Sorrell. A man can take a gentle stroll of an evening, can’t he?’
‘Just get out of my sight,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see you around here again. You walking down this street, it’s knocking thousands off the value of my flat.’
‘I’ve been looking for you.’
‘Christ. After “Brand-new ITV comedy”, those are the words that make my blood run cold the most.’
Liptrott spat grit on to the pavement. ‘Just listen, will you, for a fucking change.’
He told me then, and I played nice all the way through it. When he was finished, I nodded, smiled and said: ‘Fuck off.’
‘What
is
your problem?’ he said. ‘I’m doing you a favour here.’
‘
You
are doing
me
a favour? Why? Last time we met, you didn’t even speak because I’d spannered your mouth off, remember? While we were waiting for the coppers to turn up.’
‘All right, then, I’m doing it for her. But I know you could use the work.’
‘I do okay,’ I said, a little too snappily.
‘I don’t mean nothing by it,’ he said. ‘We all need a bit of work, ’specially at this time of the year. And anyway, I know you, and she’s looking for a good man.’
‘Yeah, Lippy, we’re the best of friends, you and me. Who is she, this girl?’
‘Her name’s Kara Geenan. Nice girl, but desperate.’
‘She’d have to be if she counts you as one of her mates. How do you know her?’
The lights in the pub behind us went off. I nodded in the direction of Old Marylebone Road. I didn’t like talking to Liptrott anyway, and I certainly didn’t like talking to him in the dark. We stood at the corner and watched the office workers coming out of the Chapel, the wine bar across the road. They had a Christmas menu going already, seventy quid, all in. I was well up for it myself, but my wallet wasn’t. I listened carefully to Liptrott. I wanted some work, but I wasn’t going to let him know how badly. He told me that he had got chatting to her when he happened to be in the block of flats where she lived, doing some rewiring for a relative. He gave her his number, told her to give him a call if she needed any electrical stuff doing. She had called him last night, pissed and hysterical, convinced that her brother had been murdered.
‘Give her this,’ I said, handing him one of my cards.
‘Wouldn’t it be quicker if you gave me your address? I know it’s round here somewhere.’ He glanced back along Homer Street as if his hunch might reward him with a neon arrow flashing on and off above my window.
‘I’d rather give my cock to medical school at this very minute than tell you my address. Now, fuck off.’
‘She needs to see you, Joel. Tonight. She’s desperate.’
‘Fu. Ck.
Off
.’
* * *
I print out a batch of those cards, about fifty of them, every night. In the daytime, I put half a dozen in my wallet and distribute the rest.
If you are desperate. If you can’t go to the police. If the police won’t help you. Then maybe I can. Private investigations. Discreet. Effective. I get results. Write, in the first instance, to Joel Sorrell…
I then walk all over London, dropping cards in phone boxes, in pub toilets, on cinema seats, buses. Once a week I collect my mail from a post office box at the newsagent’s round the corner. There isn’t usually a lot. Sometimes there’s dog shit in the envelopes. One time there was a photograph of a topless woman who had undergone a double mastectomy. Clipped to the pic was a marriage proposal. Another time there was a cheque for three hundred pounds and a note written in blue crayon:
SEND ME HI-HEELZ, BEE YA TCH
. No return address. Not that I had any high heels to send. I tried cashing the cheque but it bounced like a Spacehopper on a pogo stick. Yet I can manage that. Better than leaving a phone number. Better than leaving my address. I don’t like strangers in my home. Not any more.
When I got back to the flat, I poured myself a drink and turned on the radio. I don’t have a TV. Get away? No, really. Get away? No,
really
. I prefer
Late Junction
on Radio 3. They have some weird shit on there – warbling Finns and people who pluck and bow the inside of grand pianos – but it helps me to relax.
Mengele deigned to lift his head from his favourite bit of rug and blink at me with his amber eyes. Mengele is a silver tabby Maine Coon cat, and he is a big bastard, a stone and a half. I swear he looks at me sometimes as if to say:
I could take you… I know I could take you
. I feed him tuna on Saturdays and some dry stuff called Fishbitz throughout the week. Dry stuff is better for his teeth and his pisser, apparently. In return he dumps half his body weight into his litter tray every night, and uses my legs as a scratching post. Otherwise he sleeps and that’s it. That’s cats for you, I suppose.
I opened the back door and stepped out on to the balcony. I’m on the top floor, so it’s an all-right view. I can see the roof of the Woolworths building on Marylebone Road, and the clock tower at the Landmark Hotel. If I crane my neck to look past the chimney pots on Seymour Place, I can see the top of the BT Tower. Directly opposite me is the back of the Stanley Arms. Sometimes I can see a young girl who sits in a room and plays guitar. Or a plump, middle-aged woman who cleans like she’s sold her soul to the Devil in order to be allowed to do so. Sometimes I watch the guy who does the lunches preparing sandwiches and jacket potatoes and shepherd’s pie. I don’t eat at the Stanley Arms.
I drank my vodka and thought about Barry Liptrott. I didn’t like the way he had tracked me down like that. I must be getting old. Getting careless. Back when I brought Liptrott down for selling knives to kids involved in some nasty school wars, I was on top of my game. If he could nose me out – and Liptrott was not a player; in fact he wasn’t even worth a place on the bench – then presumably the more dangerous people in this sordid city could do the same. That wasn’t good. I wasn’t up to it. I took another gulp of Grey Goose, and that helped a bit. Poured some more: easy way out. This was what was slowing me down, taking away my edge. I had never been much of a drinker, previously, and I prided myself on that. I’d loudly order a glass of orange juice when everyone else was getting the pints in. But that was before a lot of stuff happened, stuff that I found I didn’t like remembering too clearly. Booze is instant fog for the brain. Booze is great in that way. Booze is just great.
Christ, why did he have to use that word:
desperate
. I’m a sucker for desperate people. Perhaps because I’m one myself. In helping them, perhaps I’m hoping that I might find the key to how I can help myself.
When it grew too cold to stand outside, I came indoors and took off my jacket. Quick thumbnail now of the flat, and it won’t take long. One small bedroom with a sofa-bed permanently extended. One bathroom. One kitchen that is visited occasionally by a family of oriental cockroaches. A living room. No pictures on the walls. Bare floorboards. A couple of shelves with a couple of books. My trusty old radio. Mengele’s rug. Mengele. A yucca. The view. A vodka bottle. Me.
* * *
I woke up smartish, found it was still dark. The Grey Goose had stripped the insides of my mouth away; it felt raw, tender. The bottle was still in my lap. I stuck it back in the freezer and turned off the radio. Now I could hear what had disturbed me: voices were steadily rising from next-door west. I hardly ever hear anything from next-door east, and I don’t know if that’s worse, but the guy there lives on his own so what can you expect? Westside, when they aren’t screaming at each other, they’re fucking each other senseless – either that or they’re playing their BBC wildlife videos at full whack; I can’t tell the difference. Now it sounded as though they were in fighting mode. From her – pure Estuary English – I heard: ‘…
I’ve had to put up with free facking years of this
…’ His voice was lyrical Highlands, impossible to goad, and he was going: ‘If you’d just sit down and let me explain…’
At midnight. Christ. I took a shower and put on a fresh shirt. I chucked a handful of Fishbitz into Mengele’s dish and grabbed the car keys. Then I left them to it.
* * *
It’s a Saab V4, since you’re wondering. Maroon. K reg. I bought it in 1985 for three hundred and fifty pounds and it’s been in constant service ever since. It’s seen some action, this car. It’s been driven to places I will never take it again. It’s been pushed more than a car of this age and class ought ever to experience. But there have been some good times, too. A lot of them on that back seat. It’s been to Dungeness and Durness, known fresh air and foul, but it’s never let me down. The steering wheel knows my hands so well, I’m convinced it’s altered its shape over the years to accommodate them more comfortably.
I started her up and took her along Crawford Street, first left into Seymour Place and then left again up on to the Westway. I love driving at night. Obviously, the traffic’s pretty much non-existent at that hour, but that’s not the main appeal. London, for me, comes alive at night, seeming to breathe and seethe with possibilities. It flexes its muscles, this city, when everybody is asleep, perhaps working out the cramp from the previous day, with so much filth clogged in its airways, so many dirty feet shuffling along its streets. Regenerating itself, sloughing off its outer skins, the dark is this city’s friend. They feed off each other, London and the night. As do the few who emerge at this hour, who know how to read its secrets.
I drove the car hard until I reached the White City turn-off. Then I eased her down to forty and cruised to the Holland Park roundabout. A minute later and I was in Shepherd’s Bush. I parked the car on Lime Grove, outside the house I used to live in –
we
used to live in – when everything was all right.
Do you remember?
I wondered.
Do you think about this place, Rebecca, from time to time?
But, of course, she didn’t. The house was dead, just like her. Venetian blinds kept whatever now went on inside there a secret from me. We had built a den for Sarah in the cellar, painted its walls in bright colours, to be her own little place. The nicks on the wooden supports would still be down there, ticking off the inches as she grew taller. Sarah, giggling, as I tried to hold her still, while Rebecca reached up with a penknife.
I sat in the car looking up at the windows while my breath formed some more ghosts to keep me company. Then I gunned the engine and eased out into Goldhawk Road. By the time I got back to my flat, there was silence from the flat next-door. I had another drink, took another shower, and got my head down. Kip was what I needed: a long, hard, X-rated session of hot kip.
Yeah, right.
2
I
don’t remember the last time I had an unbroken night’s sleep. Sometimes I can blame it on Mr and Mrs Decibel next door; sometimes on Mengele, who sings in the night, or claws at the closed windows (I don’t let him out – he cost me two hundred and fifty quid for Christ’s sake, far too much money to just let him end up as cat jam on the road), or else likes to sand-dance in his litter tray. Mostly I have to blame myself: drinking too much, thinking too much. Once I grasp the tail of a thought that’s slinking out of view, I can’t let go. It’s like a crocodile; if I let go, it will turn around and bite my hands off. So I mull stuff over until it starts getting light, and then it’s too light to sleep and I get up, not having resolved anything, really. I’ve resolved to murder the cat a few times, but how could I when he looks at me like that? Should have got myself a fucking lizard instead.
She needs to see you, Joel. Tonight. She’s desperate.
Liptrott told me she’d be in Old Compton Street, in one of the all-night coffee bars. He said she’d be there for as long as it took. If I showed, I showed: if not, big coffee bill. I walked it, needing the spank of cold night air to clear my head, and wondered, not for the first time, about how many desperate people there were out there. It almost made me want to stick my name in the
Yellow Pages
and have done with it, come over as a proper outfit instead of a cheapo prick with a printer, on a par with those kids selling lemonade from their front gates at twenty pence a pop. But I like my privacy. Jesus, I
love
my privacy. I love it so much I want to marry it and provide it with children. The stuff that turned up in my PO Box told me I was doing the right thing.
She was the only
she
in the place, and she was sitting by the window, watching everyone who walked past the entrance. When she saw me come in, her face was so expectant it might have given birth to quins. She asked me if I wanted coffee and I said no, I wanted sleep.
‘There’s no need to be snippy,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to come.’
‘I came because I don’t want Barry Liptrott staining my doorstep any more.’
‘Barry’s all right.’