Just Another Angel (5 page)

I did my juggling act again to get my flat door open, and in trying to thump the light switch, I felt the top come off the crab and sweetcorn soup.

Springsteen had come in via the cat flap in the flat door, a little structural alteration that our landlord hadn't noticed yet, thank Allah. He was sitting in the middle of the floor in the ‘cello position,' one back leg straight up in the air, washing some mysterious part of his anatomy.

He had left his kill, a bundle of half-chewed white fur, in the entrance to the bedroom. I had news for Fenella and Lisabeth. It wasn't a rat, and Springsteen had found yet another way into Mr Cohen's pet shop around the corner.

Some evenings are never dull.

 

 

 

 

 

The communal phone for the house is nailed to the wall near the front door. Our landlord, the gentle and generous Mr Nassim (well, have you tried getting a place in Hackney lately?), had thoughtfully installed extension bells on each landing, which meant that the phone woke me and everybody else the next morning just after six.

Well, almost everybody. It would take more than a phone, unless you applied it physically, to get Lisabeth out of her pit before noon. But from the flat above mine, Frank Asmoyah appeared, wearing the bottom half of a Nike jogging suit in a tasteful light tan colour to set off his ebony skin all the better, and below me, Fenella opened her door cautiously, displaying only the top half of what appeared to be pink Snoopy pyjamas.

I had remembered to wrap a towel round my midriff and was quite prepared to save Fenella's blushes and answer the damn thing before Frank showed me up by jogging downstairs without
breaking sweat. But it was the quietly strange Mr Goodson from the ground-floor flat who got there first.

Of all the weird people living in our house, Mr Goodson was undoubtedly the flakiest. I mean, he didn't smoke, drink, go out, play loud music, indulge in unusual sexual activities or take drugs, and he could do the
Guardian
crossword. Mr Goodson never invited anyone into his flat and never went to parties in the others. He left the house every morning at 8.15 am. And returned at 5.55 pm. No-one saw him at weekends. He was something in local Government, but not much. He stood there in a threadbare, checked dressing-gown, which came almost all the way down to some old-fashioned leather slippers, and held out the receiver as if it had Aids.

‘It's for you,' he said, dead straight, as if he'd never seen a British Telecom advert. He probably hadn't.

I padded downstairs clutching my towel on my hips, but Fenella had retreated back into Lisabeth's lair before I could think up a smart remark. Mr Goodson was holding the phone at arm's length and moving gently from one foot to the other as if he was barefoot on cold lino.

I tried a disarming smile on Mr Goodson, although at that time of the morning it was no more than quarter volume, as I took the phone from him.

‘Sorry about this, Mr G. It's probably my American friend Ray. He always forgets about the time difference.'

I actually do have an American friend called Ray who does forget the time difference, especially when he's stoned, but Mr Goodson didn't look as if he believed me. He just shuffled off back to his flat, opening and closing the door the barest minimum so
that I could see nothing of his inner sanctum. I really will have to go and borrow a cup of sugar one of these days.

‘Hello?'

‘Is that you, Angel?' The voice was female, so unless he was on something spectacular, it wasn't Ray.

‘Who wants him?'

‘It's me. Jo. I saw you in the Mimosa last night. We met last year.'

‘Oh yeah. Hi. Were you in the club?' Mr Cool. ‘I don't … Do you know what time it is?'

‘Yes, and I'm sorry but … there are reasons. I must see you to ... to ask you something.'

‘Ask away.' I was curious, and also worried that I couldn't remember her last name.

‘Not now, it's too difficult. Can you meet at Champnas on Duke Street this afternoon at three?'

‘I suppose so if …'

‘Thanks. I mean it. Thanks.' She hung up.

I went back to bed. What could it be she wanted to see me about? After a five-month gap it could hardly be physical passion. Maybe she wanted to tell me how much she'd enjoyed my backing Peking at the Mimosa. Maybe she'd discovered something missing from her flat after I'd left that morning, and my appearance at the club had reminded her. It could be anything. Life's like that; bloody worrying. Still, if it had been anything bad – surely to God she wasn't pregnant; not these days – she would have come round to play out the big scene. But then I never give out my address after just one date. (Rule of Life No 23.)

Come to think of it, I never give out my phone number either.

 

It seemed like only a couple of minutes later that Frank woke me to remind me that I was doing a job for him, but in fact it was after 9.00 am. Frank knocked once, came in and selected a Zappa tape from the collection near the stereo and started it at full volume, then left. You can tell Frank's woken me up before.

I was reaching across the bed to turn the volume down to a dull roar when Salome, Frank's wife, came in with a mug of coffee. This was always Phase Two of Frank's plan, and the bit I looked forward to most.

Salome was wearing a white shirt and black tie and a red-leather trouser suit with the trousers tucked into short, red-leather boots.

‘Just what does it take to get you up, Fitzroy?' She busied herself clearing old copies of
Melody Maker
, paperbacks and empty Chinese takeaway containers from the drop-leaf table that formed approximately one-third of my furniture.

‘If you hadn't called me that, and if Frank wasn't so much bigger than me, I'd invite you in here and answer that.' I patted the duvet, which had apparently attempted to strangle my legs during the night.

Salome smiled back ravishingly and put on a puzzled expression. She held her right forefinger, long and red-nailed, to her chin.

‘You know, Angel,' she said huskily, ‘I think you have something there.'

‘Really?' I wished that I'd brushed my teeth.

‘Mmmm. Yes, you're right.'

‘I am?'

‘Yeah. Frank is so much bigger …'

She squealed with laughter as I threw a pillow at her; she caught it and flung it back hard, and then was out of the door and clacking her heels up the stairs.

Frank and Salome Asmoyah were what I called Black Anglo Saxon Upwardly Mobiles. BASUMs – though I never said this to Salome when Frank was around. He was a trainee legal beagle in Holborn, one of those who don't have enough cash to buy a round of drinks for three years and then one day they're phoning you from their customised Porsche. Salome was the big earner of the partnership. She was an analyst in a City stockbroking firm specialising in the leisure market, which meant free holidays put down as vital research and the possibility of a six-figure ‘golden hello' should she be good enough to be poached by a rival firm. Still, she worked hard for it, starting at 8.00 every morning and having lunch every day at La Bastille or Le Gamin.

They had taken the day off together in order to work on their new flat in Limehouse, for which they were mortgaged up to the hilt as they had found it only after Limehouse became trendy. I had been hired to act as transport for an industrial floor sander that Frank had rented for the day before realizing that it wouldn't fit in the back of their VW Golf.

Frank also needed a hand carting the damn thing up four flights of stairs, partly because it was heavy and partly because Salome couldn't risk getting oil on her leather suit. She was there not to do any sanding, but to make cups of tea and consult very expensive books on interior design by people with names like Jocasta. The renovation of their flat was to be a shared experience, they said, and so far they had been sharing it for six months. The mortgage, you see, was so much that they could only afford to do things piecemeal. At the moment, the bathroom was the only room worth visiting, but today we were converting the largest empty room into a lounge smart enough for Salome to have the sort of dinner-party she wouldn't invite me to.

I plugged in the sander and showed Frank how to work it. Being multi-talented, intelligent, good at sport and physically attractive to women, he was, of course, totally useless when it came to anything practical. His main achievement of the morning had been to fasten the shoulder-straps on his Levi overalls. When I left him there, just after noon, he had his Sony Walkman on and was waltzing the sander around in a cloud of sawdust. I suppose I should have told him about the bag that goes on the end to collect the dust, but no doubt Salome would. She was experimenting on a bedroom wall with spray paints and stencils of exotic birds when I told her I was off and would be back by 5.00 to return the sander.

‘Now remember, my Angel,' she said, ‘if you can't be careful, at least be good.'

‘You, Salome, darling, are a female chauvinist sow,' I said, running for the door before she could turn the spray paint on me.

I got back to our little Hackney home from home just in time to meet our esteemed landlord, Mr Nassim Nassim, coming out after one of his monthly tours of inspection. We called him that because when we first tried to ascertain his surname, he said it was too difficult for us and just stick to Nassim. So we did. As landlords go – and let's face it, who likes paying rent? – Nassim was an absolute diamond. As long as the rent came through on time and we residents didn't actually blow the house up (unlike the last place I lived down in Southwark), then he left us alone. Once a month he came to re-count the walls and check that nobody had ringed the electricity meter. As a devout Muslim, he always got somebody who wasn't to buy the crate of Scotch he always smuggled back to Pakistan on his annual holiday there to look up his family. At £40 a bottle on the black market there, it almost paid for his bucket-shop ticket, and as I had undertaken to perform the distasteful act of buying the stuff for him that year, I was his blue-eyed boy. Mind you, if he asks me again, I'll make sure I get a bigger discount from Stan round at the off-licence.

Nassim was, however, a chatterer, and for someone who had been speaking English for less than half his life, he couldn't half rabbit. So I jogged up the steps with a smile and a loud ‘Good morning,' and no intention of stopping to pass the time of day.

‘Ah … Good morning, Flat Three,' he beamed, making it sound like I was one of the Hampshire ‘Flat-Threes'. ‘I have news for you.'

That sort of slowed me down as I eased past him through the doorway, but I knew better than to stop.

‘I can explain about the door, Mr Nassim,' I offered cheerfully.

‘No, no, dear boy …' By this time, he was talking to the back of my head as I reached the stairs. ‘… You had a visitor while I was here.'

‘Oh well, never mind. Life's like that. Sometimes you're in when people call, sometimes you're in Limehouse. We're all playthings of the gods …'

I was half-way up the stairs when he said: ‘It was an exceedingly charming young woman.'

Now call me a sucker – many do – but I stopped and turned. ‘Wouldn't have been my sister, would it?' I said.

‘No, no,' smiled Nassim, brushing an imaginary fleck of dust from his Burberry. ‘A professional lady. A married lady. A Mrs Boatman or something similar. I think she wanted to sell you some insurance. She said she was from the National, or similar.'

I started upstairs again. ‘Thanks, Mr Nassim, but you know we don't encourage door-to-door salespersons, whatever their sex.'

I made it to my door and had the key turned before he remembered to shout, ‘What you mean, you can explain about the door?'

 

‘Champnas,' I discovered later, was Hindi for ‘squeeze,' and one of the root words of ‘shampoo.' Now there's not, as they say in the best circles, many people who know that. Come to think of it, there's not many people who would give a toss one way or the other about it.

The patrons did, though. Oh yes, Champnas was an ‘in' place. So in, you got a choice of decaffeinated coffee even if you weren't having a haircut. In fact, having a haircut seemed to be just a rather tedious consequence of enjoying the experience of being there. It was a unisex salon (do they still call them that?) with the requisite number of nubile 16-year-old Youth Opportunity girls called Sharon or Cheryl (they'll be Dianas and Sarahs soon) to wash your hair and massage your scalp before the bossy ones called Shirley or Jeanette turned up to snip away for half an hour and charge you 20 quid. Looking around at the Sharons and Cheryls, I was glad Bunny was elsewhere, as I was having trouble controlling myself, but I made a mental note to bring him here one afternoon as a treat.

I said I was waiting for someone, and they accepted that, so I settled down to flip through
Motor-Cycle News
– it was either that or
Good Housekeeping
– thinking I was early. Then a body emerged from a chair that could have doubled in a dentist's surgery and a pair of jeans you'd have thought were sprayed on moved towards me.