Liselle heard her mother come into the house at seven-thirty. She heard footsteps heavy on the stairs and knew Kerry had been drinking. She carried out her mother’s clothes for the evening. She was singing tonight at The New Yorker as she did once a week whenever she didn’t have concert dates. Victor had been on the telephone twice that afternoon, demanding to know just where her mother was. She had been supposed to meet him to discuss her recording contract and some dates for a European tour. Victor was livid to be stood up, and for the first time ever Liselle felt like telling him to piss off. One day she would. One day, good little girl Liselle would tell them all to piss off, her mother included.
‘Oh, baby, I’ve had a lovely day. Such a lovely day.’
Liselle smiled as her mother came in. It was a forced smile and she hated herself for it.
‘Tonight, after the show, I have a big surprise for you.’
‘Good. Now how about getting in the bath and then getting dressed? We’re late as usual.’
Kerry’s face dropped at her daughter’s flat voice. It was because she’d been drinking. She shouldn’t have drunk that vodka. But hadn’t today been a celebration? Couldn’t she have a celebratory drink?
She walked into the bedroom and began to run a bath, pulling off her clothes and dropping them on the floor. Well, she’d please her baby tonight. It had come to her in the taxi on her way home. Evander, her Evander, had wanted to see that she and Liselle were all right. All her worrying about trouble to come was unnecessary. He had just wanted to see her again. And as they had talked she had seen a shadow of the younger Evander emerge. The man who had attracted her. Well, in the cab it had dawned on her. She would take her daughter to see him. It would please Liselle so once she had met him, spoken to him, heard the full story, and it would please Evander. He had been touched that she’d named her after his mother. He had told her that three times. Sitting there with him had been like going back to her youth. Their time together was short but fruitful. Her baby girl, the result. Now it had come to her how she could right the wrongs she’d done to Liselle and Evander. She had told him how she’d wanted to go to him, how she’d nearly booked the passage but how she’d chickened out. If only she had gone! If only she’d followed her star! Things might have been so different. He was the father of her child and tonight she would give them both a big present.
She’d give them each other, father and daughter.
Skip had played the tape back five times. Evander sat quietly, listening to the husky, unmistakable voice of Kerry baring her soul.
‘You did good, Evander, better than good even. That bitch ain’t gonna know what hit her. This should be good for two hundred thousand dollars at least. There ain’t no way she’ll want all this common knowledge, it’ll ruin her overnight.’
Evander’s mouth fell open at that statement.
‘And ... Mr Skip, how much of that is mine?’
‘How does twenty-five thousand grab you, black boy?’
Evander grinned. ‘It grabs me OK.’
Greed was to the fore now. Listening to Kerry telling the world about their life together had been hard at first, he had felt like a snake in the grass, but the twenty-five Gs would soon put paid to that. He could buy a decent place for that. A decent place with decent acts and a good clientele. A good black clientele.
Skip’s two henchmen let themselves in the house. Marty Duval and Kelvin Tomcola were young and not too bright. Exactly what Skip wanted in his heavies.
‘Let’s all have a drink to celebrate our good fortune. In a couple of days we’ll be on our way back home, out of this godforsaken snowhole, and richer than we dreamed. What a Christmas present! The best part of it all is, we can bleed that bitch for years and years.’
Evander frowned at the words.
Then a large glass of bourbon was placed in his hands and he drank the toast with his so-called friends. But the words stayed with him.
At just after eleven a knock came on the front door. Skip looked out of the window and was amazed to see Kerry Cavanagh and her daughter on the doorstep.
‘Jesus Christ! It’s the broad and the kid. They’re on the doorstep!’
Pushing the two other men from the room, Skip told Evander to let them in and play the game again.
This was working out even better than he’d hoped. As he crept up the stairs to join the others he wished he had reset the tape recorder. This would have been better than ever.
Outside it was snowing again and Liselle looked at the shabby house and shivered.
‘Mum, what are we doing here? What’s this big surprise?’
Kerry, buoyed up with drink, pills and excitement, grinned, hugging her fur coat around her tighter.
‘You’ll soon see.’
Evander stood uncertainly behind the front door. This was not on the agenda, this was not supposed to happen. On the other side of that door was his child. If he met her, spoke to her, he would have to acknowledge her as such. Then he would have to cheat them both. Kerry was hard enough, but he figured she owed him. The child owed him nothing. He wished he hadn’t had so much drink, or that he’d drunk more so he would be oblivious of all these feelings assailing him. Shame, guilt. And worst of all, much worse than the other two, longing. He was longing to see her now.
Kerry knocked again. From the landing came Skip’s angry voice.
‘Open the fucking door, black boy, what you waiting for? Christmas?’
The voice brought him back to earth and Evander opened the door. Kerry swept in, dragging the girl behind her, her red fox coat still glistening with flakes of snow. Her hair glossy and sleek on her head like a luxurious hat. He had to concentrate on Kerr
y
because he was frightened to look at the girl with those deep brown eyes and that coffee-coloured skin.
Kerry, always the dramatist, held out Liselle’s arm and said loudly: ‘Baby, meet your father.’
Evander looked at his daughter then, full in the face. All he was aware of was the distaste he saw there, coupled with shock. Too late, he remembered he was in stockinged feet, his trousers unbuckled because they were tight, his shirt, clean on that afternoon, stained with drink and food. But it wasn’t that that appalled her: it was the grey-tinged hands with their claw-like fingers.
Kerry looked at them both. Seeing Liselle’s eyes riveted to Evander’s distorted hands, she grasped her daughter by the shoulders and pushed her into the open doorway of the lounge. She closed the front door that was letting in a weak light from the street together with the freezing snow, and followed her daughter into the warmth.
‘Yes, look at his hands. That was your Aunt Briony’s work. Oh, she denied it, but she did that. Broke his fingers, every one of them, and his wrists, too. Smashed to smithereens in Briony’s name. Now you know why I never told you. Was never going to tell you. Then he turned up here and I realised that you had to know. Especially after last night.’
Liselle still hadn’t opened her mouth. She was staring in disgust at the man in front of her. He was fat, he was unkempt, this was not what girlish dreams were made of. This was not what she’d wanted. Deep inside herself she had known he was a black man, she admitted to herself she’d always known, but she had never really expected to have it thrust on her like this in a dingy little house in Notting Hill. It was laughable. That this man, with the huge belly and the clawed hands, could have been her reason for living! Nowhere in her wildest imaginings could she imagine him young and handsome and taking her mother, her beautiful mother, and giving her a child. Herself.
Evander looked at the girl with her silky blue-black hair and the high prominent cheekbones, her sensuous lips, and felt the enormity of what he’d done. What he had created. In the States she would have been aware of what she was from day one and would have adjusted accordingly. Brought up here, in this cold barren country, she wasn’t remotely prepared for what life was going to dish out to her. Inside himself, he felt a cracking, breaking sensation. It was fear: fear of what she would think of him, fear of what was going to happen to this tall lithe creature who would draw men to her, who had such a beautiful, appealing exterior thanks to himself and his forefathers. Here in England she’d live in a no man’s land, neither black nor white. Brought up white, she’d have no understanding of the black culture, of her people. Until she began to breed. Then she’d bear the legacy of her father and his father’s father.
Kerry watched the two eyeing each other. Going to the table she poured out three stiff drinks. Handing one to Evander and one to Liselle, she sat on the settee, watching them warily now. It had not worked out as she had thought. It had all gone wrong. No one spoke a word for what seemed an eternity.
Kerry guzzled her drink, coughing at the unfamiliar taste of the raw cheap black market bourbon.
Evander stood silently with his drink in hand. He didn’t want a drink now, when he should want one, when he should be gulping the precious liquid down to kill the pain inside him.
‘Sit down, child. We need to talk.’
His voice was deep. Hearing it for the first time, Liselle was snapped out of her shock. Putting the drink on the mantelpiece untouched she strode past him, out of the room and out into the snow-filled night. Slamming the front door behind her she hurried away, slipping and sliding on the icy pavement.
That couldn’t be her father. It couldn’t. Not because he was black, but because he was so horrible. He was dirty-looking, he smelt of stale food and cheap scotch. She came from better than that, she knew she did.
She made her way back to The New Yorker in a cab. Auntie Briony would know what to do.
She always did.
The twins were in one of their ‘spielers’, an illegal gambling club in Stepney. The place was packed out as usual. The twins were now treated like visiting royalty wherever they went in the East End. People went out of their way to be noticed by them. If they went into a shop, the cigarettes or whatever else they bought became ‘gifts’. Stallholders made a fuss of them, shopkeepers kept on the right side of them. The twins, Boysie especially, loved this. Revelled in it.
The ‘spieler’ was approached through a large barred door, a small peephole was opened to establish who was there, and then they were duly let in, frisked, and allowed to get to the gaming tables and the bar. Prostitutes worked the clubs, generally married women out for a bit of adventure and a few quid to supplement the housekeeping. Nothing was organised in the twins’ establishments unless they organised it themselves.
The place was buzzing tonight. The twins got themselves a drink and went through to the offices. They were waiting for a young Jew named Isaiah Lipman. He was twenty-five years old and one of the best ‘longshoremen’ in the business. The twins wanted to cultivate him.
The Jewish community and the Irish were similar in a lot of respects. They were immigrants, they were disliked by the majority, and Jewish men seemed much like the Irish in the fact that they either succeeded beyond imagination or they were wasters. Both cultures, though, had an inbred cunning. The Lane, or Petticoat Lane as it was better known, traded on a Sunday because of the Jews. Like the Irish they kept to their religion no matter what else they might do. And it paid off for them.
Longshoring was the term used for a particular scam. It involved renting cheap premises, getting headed notepaper printed up and then opening accounts with suppliers. For the first couple of months, while the business was supposedly getting on its feet, you paid for your goods as invoiced, with cash off the hip. Ready money. Gradually building up your credibility as a customer. Then one day you ordered fantastic amounts from your suppliers on credit, as usual. Then you disappeared off the face of the earth with up to one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stock. Usually electrical appliances or good clothes. Anything that could easily be sold on. This stock then found its way on to the markets, into shops and anywhere else it could be sold.
It was a very easy operation, it was patience that was needed. That was where Isaiah came in. Danny and Boysie wanted everything yesterday.
Boysie sipped his drink. ‘That was a turn up, what The Aunt told us about Liselle. I guessed though. We both did. But hearing it like, that’s a different thing.’
Daniel looked at himself in the mirror on the wall behind their desk. He patted down his hair and, licking a finger, smoothed one of his eyebrows.
‘Yeah... We’ll have to watch the rhyming slang now, Boysie. Lemonade, spade. Macaroon, coon. Whistle me dog, wog. Sounds different when it’s one of your family, don’t it? If someone called Liselle that, I’d break their fucking necks. I’d rip their heads off with me bare hands. Yet I use those terms all the time.’
‘That’s because we ain’t never known many blacks. I always liked Bessie, even as a kid. I liked that flowery smell of her when I was little ... We’ll have to stop saying front wheel skid and Yid, as well as a four be two, once old Isaiah becomes a part of the firm. Fuck me, we’re going international, ain’t we?’
Danny laughed. ‘Yeah. I’m looking forward to meeting this bloke properly, though. He ain’t a hardman, but he’s got brains. Brains we can use to our advantage. Once we get him under our wing, we’ll leave him to work on his own. He won’t tuck us up.’
Boysie laughed as he left the room. ‘He wouldn’t dare, Danny Boy.’
Briony listened to Liselle’s story with amazement tinged with annoyance. Only Kerry would pull a stunt like that! Anyone else would have done it gently, prepared the ground. But anyone else wouldn’t have been under the influence of vodka and barbiturates. The way she felt now, if she saw Kerry she would be hard pressed not to slap her a ringing blow across the earhole.
‘All right, love, calm down.’
‘But you don’t understand me! It wasn’t that he was black. I knew that, I’ve always known that, though I couldn’t admit it to myself. Now I know it’s true, I don’t care. It’s him, the man himself. I can’t believe he’s my father. He smelt, Auntie Briony, of stale fags, booze and food. He was gross. He was so ... so ... tatty-looking. That’s what hurt me, that I could have sprung from him. And his hands ... his hands were horrible. Then Mum said you had had that done to him. You got someone to break his fingers. But you wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?’ It was a plea.