She doesn’t answer.
“Why not?” I say. “I’d have thought it’d make a nice change. All the family together for Christmas dinner. All your cousins and nieces and nephews. All your ex-boyfriends panting for a bit of what you’re not going to let them have. Breakfast in bed, funny-hats. Marvelous. Why not?”
“You’ve just answered your own question,” she says. I smile to myself and look at the snowflakes falling in the empty street and for a moment the street looks like Jackson Street and I can almost see Frank and myself as kids running through the snow to get home to help with the tree that was always put up and decorated the night before Christmas Eve. But that thought is with me for only a moment; the closest I’ll get to a Christmas tree tonight is keeping company with a fairy called Peter the Dutchman.
“So anyway,” Lesley says, “as you so charmingly put it, this place is a crap-hole, and you’ve made it plain how you feel about your origins, where do you go from here? Because from what little I can gather, there aren’t going to be too many places to go.”
Origins. The word has a coldness that matches the falling snow. To paraphrase Goering, the word makes me want to reach for my shooter. Origins are the only things in my life I don’t care to think about. The old lady fetching in the coal while the old man had his slippered feet up on the mantelpiece. Frank doing his homework on time, his exercise books neat on the kitchen table, his quiet thoughtful knowing surface, and all the stuff about why wasn’t I more like him, why didn’t I try harder so I could get off the street the way Frank was going to do, instead of hanging around in
Rowson’s doorway as a prelude to wasting the evenings in the Astoria or the Rex; and of course the beltings my old man enjoyed giving me if I stayed out beyond the specified time. But all that business had made me all the more determined to go my own way, achieve my own kind of success. Christ, I could have run rings round Frank as far as schoolwork was concerned, and he was two years ahead of me. It was just that if anybody had ever expected anything of me I’d had this compulsion to do the opposite. Like the English teacher, a writer himself, he always took me to one side at the slightest excuse to tell me how good I was, how there was no need for me to concentrate on my English; if I just pulled my socks up in some of the other subjects, I’d be six form material, and if I stuck it out in the six form, he’d see me through to university. I mean, he’d just never been able to see that my way of proving myself, of being a peer among my contemporaries, was to show my contempt of the system that expected certain standards of behaviour by behaving in the opposite way, and the irony of the situation being that it turns out that Frank finishes up working behind a bar and living with our old lady and I finish earning the kind of money I’m getting and living the way I do.
But at least he’s still living, and thinking that thought I say to Lesley, “I’ve been to most places already, so with my wide and varied experience, I’ll find somewhere. That is, if this business isn’t sorted by this time tomorrow.”
“And that business being?” she says.
I tap the bridge of my nose with my forefinger. “All you have to know is that you’re here with me,” I tell her.
“Yes, here I am,” she says, looking out at the slow-falling snow. “Here I am, sitting next to Jack Carter, the Fletchers’ organiser.”
“Well, at least you know that much,” I tell her. “Still, in Grimsby you get in practice early, so I’m told.”
“I even had a copper as a boyfriend in those days,” she says.
“Hardly worth leaving home for then, was it? I mean, it’s sort of full circle.”
“At least the rank’s slightly different.”
“Yes, the bigger the rank, the bigger the villain.”
“You should know,” she says.
I smile to myself.
“I mean,” she says, “you think you’re so bloody bright—you’re making a few bob, you’ve got the clothes and you’re well known, but how bright are you really? Whatever this is all about, it’s obviously the end of what you’ve got, and my guess is you won’t be piecing together the strands of your career for at least the next ten years.”
Funny you should say that, I think to myself.
“I mean,” she says, “how do you get to be what you are?”
I don’t answer.
“No, come on,” she says. “This’ll be the first and last time I’ll be on intimate terms with a real villain. I’d like to know, I really would.”
“You’re joking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your boyfriend’s the biggest villain going.”
“No, seriously, I’d really like to know.”
“You want the story of my life? So you can sell it to the papers as part of your memoirs: ‘My Life as a Call Girl and the People with Whom I Mingled.’ ”
“Piss off, then,” she says.
I shrug. “All right,” I say. “I’ll tell you. Doesn’t make any difference one way or the other: I like my work. I wanted the job and I had a good education. Like a ballet dancer, you have to start early in my business, and I went to some very good schools and I don’t mean Eton. And at one of these very good schools I met one of the Fletchers’ helpers and we got on and later I was introduced to the Terrible Twins and taken on as an apprentice. Since then I never looked back. I rose through the ranks to the exalted position I hold today.”
“Except you won’t be getting a gold clock on your retirement,” she says. “They don’t measure time on gold clocks where you’re going.”
I laugh, then there is silence in the car again.
I look at my watch.
“Time for another turn round the block,” I say to Lesley.
Again she does as she’s told and again we turn left into Ellam Street. The lights are still on. Except for Peter’s car, the street is still empty. We drive back to our little parking place. Twenty-five minutes have gone by since Peter got out of his Capri. And nothing’s happened. Perhaps Tony’s not managed to hold him and Peter’s got to a phone. Or maybe Peter’s just out to make a name for himself, by himself, bringing in Jack Carter on his own for whoever it is he’s working for. Or maybe, for once in my life, I’m totally wrong.
“Back again,” I say to Lesley.
“What?”
“Back again,” I tell her. “Only this time park just before the building where the parlor is.”
She swears under her breath and starts the car up again, and again we turn left into Ellam Street. The lights are still on. The car’s still there. The Mini swishes through the thin snow and Lesley guides it gently in to the curb and stops about twenty yards away from the establishment.
We get out of the car. This time I don’t bother to take a grip on Lesley. She just follows me down to the front door of the Fountain of Youth but just as I’m about to push open the door she says, “I’ll wait for you here.”
I give her a look and eventually she shrugs and walks towards me and I go through the door and she follows me inside.
The interior lights are on now and under the cold neon the place seems even quieter than it did before. I push open the door into the reception room. This time there are no girls sitting in the armchairs. We cross the reception room and go through the plastic strips. The corridor that leads to Tony’s office is empty. The only sound is dripping water in the plunge beyond the waterproof curtains on our left, and beyond the curtains of the massage booths on the right there is no sound at all. We start to walk towards Tony’s office and we’re halfway down the passage when behind us the curtain to one of the booths is ripped back with a clatter of wooden rings. I push Lesley out of the way and whirl round reaching for my shooter but all I find myself looking at is one of the girls carrying a pile of dirty sheets and towels. She nearly drops the lot when she sees the quickness of my movements. We stand there looking at each other for a second or two then I turn away and walk the remaining distance to the office door before the girl can say anything and tip the wink to anyone who might be sitting waiting in the office. I yank open the office door and the first thing I see is Peter the Dutchman sitting behind the desk in Tony’s seat. He still has his leather coat draped over his shoulders and in the fingers of one hand he is holding a freshly lit cigarette and the fingers of his other hand are curled round the triggers of a sawn-off shotgun. Tony is leaning against the wall in which the door is set, face to the wallpaper, arms above his head.
Tony says to me, “I’m sorry, Mr. Carter. He had it under his overcoat. I’d got no chance.”
Peter grins and says, “I don’t just wear it for show, you know.”
“The coat or the shotgun?” I say.
“You know better than to ask that,” Peter says.
I sigh and I say, “Yes, I know better than to ask that.” I turn to Lesley. “Come on. You may as well join the party. You said you’d like to be there.” Lesley comes into the office and closes the door behind her, making just about enough room for one person to each wall.
There’s no ventilation and I say to Peter, “It’s a good job you girls are wearing perfume else this could get like the Black Hole of Calcutta.”
Peter grins again. “No such luck,” he says.
“All right,” I say to him. “Let’s stop pissing about. Where are the heavies?”
“What heavies?” Peter says.
“Do me a favour,” I tell him. “I suppose you always carry that around under your coat.”
“When Jack Carter leaves strict instructions for me to meet him on my own, yes. I mean, we’re not exactly bosom pals, are we?”
I give him a long look. “All right,” I say to him, “so why wouldn’t you tell Audrey what you’re supposed to have to tell me?”
“You must be joking. Pass it on to that old boiler? I’ve talked to women before.” He looks at Lesley. “No offense, darling, but you understand, don’t you?”
“You’re lying,” I say to him. “All this trouble didn’t start until you went to work on Gerald and Les to stake you for that job.”
“All what trouble?” Peter says innocently.
I put my hands palms downwards on the table and lean over Peter. The shotgun doesn’t waver and the end of the barrel is touching my breastbone very gently.
“Listen, you fucking fairy,” I say to him, “don’t come all that with me. You know what fucking trouble because you’re part of it.”
The shotgun pushes ever so slightly against me. Peter’s face goes blank and his complexion loses what little colour it had.
“I must be out of my mind,” he says, “passing up a chance like this. I mean, I’ve dreamt of this kind of situation.”
“Yes, you and three thousand others, and I’m still standing upright.”
Peter stares into my face for a long time and then he relaxes and his face breaks into his usual smile and the shotgun is pulled back a couple of inches.
“That’s right,” he says. “I just hope you can keep standing upright for the next twenty years while you’re inside. Because from what I hear it’s on the cards. And that’ll be much worse for you than getting blasted all over the wall. I’ll be able to enjoy it every day each time I think of you, instead of for just the split second it would take to pull these triggers.”
He gets up out of his seat and begins to walk round to my side of the desk. I straighten up and catch sight of Lesley’s face and for the first time today she’s smiling, a smile of triumph; she’s almost wetting herself at the pleasure the scene is giving her.
But there’s no point in dwelling on that aspect of the scene so I say to Peter, “All right, supposing I’m wrong. Supposing I’m—”
Peter cuts me off in midsentence. “Fuck off,” he says. “Worm your own way out.”
I stand between him and the door and brace him but before I can start to persuade him to stay there is a commotion in the passage outside which consists of one of the girls screaming, which is brought to a sudden halt by the sound of a loud slap. I take my shooter out and kick the door open and the scene that presents itself is of the girl who’d had the dirty towels being held in an armlock by a heavy who, with his free arm, is pointing a sawn-off shotgun directly at my chest. My appearance leaves the heavy in no doubt as to what to do. I throw myself back into the room and to the right so I’m out of the frame of the doorway and I crash into Lesley, driving her against the wall and pushing all the breath out of her lungs. At the same time the shotgun blast tears into the tiny room and takes out the light and part of the doorjamb. Lesley covers her head with her arms and from the other side of the doorway Tony decides to make a break but I push him back into the corner, not because I care about his head coming off but so that he won’t be in the way of what I want to do next, which is to fire some shots at the heavy in the passage. I know that providing the girl isn’t in the way I can safely do that because by now he’ll be in the act of reloading. Which is precisely what is happening when I haul off my shots. The girl has been thrown to the floor and is screaming her head off and trying to curl up like a caterpillar and the pig-thick heavy is folded up in the curtains of one of the massage booths as if that would give him some kind of protection. His head is bent over the job in hand so I have time to place a couple of nice ones, one in his chest and the other in his neck. He chokes and the choke leaves his mouth as blood and he gargles his way across the narrow passage and staggers into the waterproof curtains and tears them down with him as he disappears into the plunge with a great splash. The girl on the passage floor starts to get up just as another heavy appears at the far end of the passage. This heavy too is sporting a sawn-off and again it would be pointing straight at me it if weren’t for the girl between, who is now running for the office. I step through the door and pull her to me, the idea being to throw her to the floor and out of the way, but as I take hold of her I feel an almighty thump in my back and I’m flung forwards and the girl and myself hit the floor in a tangled pile. Peter. I’ve forgotten about him in the short space of time it’s taken me to kill a man. I curse and blink and try to get up but the girl is lying across my face and I can’t see a thing and then Peter’s shotgun goes off and the girl screams and wriggles off me and I look up and the first thing I see is the second heavy on all fours trying to crawl to some mindless destination he’s never going to make anyway. The girl gets up and I get up and Peter is reloading his shotgun.