Stay Dead (18 page)

And this was why Gregor was pissed off one night at around eleven o’clock to find that two of his best payers, Julie and Charmaine, were not on their usual corner where he expected them
to be. He knew this because he was looking out of the window of his toasty-warm flat over the newsagents and from there he could see the corner – and where the fuck were they? Granted, it was
foggy out there, and bloody cold, but they were used to it, they’d been doing it for years. This just went to prove that what his dear old mum had told him on her deathbed was true –
you couldn’t depend on a bloody soul.

Angry, muttering under his breath, he pulled on his silver toecapped shoes, his favourites, and his tailored jacket, and then he pounded off down the stairs to find out what was occurring.
The cold hit him like a knife and he pulled his jacket around him, shivering. Bastard women, he’d have to discipline them over this. And then he was going to give each of them a stiff
talking-to.

He stalked to the corner and looked around. Traffic drifted past, fog lights cutting a swathe through the pea-souper, all the streetlights wearing shadowy mustard-yellow haloes. The fog
dampened all sound, stifled the traffic noise – it felt quite spooky out here. He paced around, looking up the road and down it. No sign of them. No sign of anyone.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered.

‘Got a light?’ asked a voice behind him.

He spun around, startled. He hadn’t heard anyone come up. The fog was drifting, thick as cobwebs; he could feel the dampness of it on his face, seeping into his clothes. Fuck this for a
game. There was a bulky man wearing a mac and with a hat pulled down low over his face standing right there under the sickly, soupy glow of the street light. He was holding a cigarette.

‘Yeah,’ said Gregor, distracted because he was looking for his bitches, who had vanished, apparently, and by fuck, by God, he swore he was going to mark their card good. Give them
both a swift kick up the cunt. And then he was going to get back indoors in the warm.

Gregor pulled out his gold lighter, the one he’d had initialled; he liked his nice threads and he liked his accessories too, his eagle-tipped shoes, his gold initialled bracelet –
he had a lot of style and he liked to show it.

Gregor flicked the lighter and a flame erupted, illuminating the other man’s face. Green eyes, he thought. That was rare, wasn’t it? That was the last thing Gregor thought and
those mean green eyes were the last thing he saw. There was the slightest puff of movement behind him and then there was a crashing pain in his head. Then there was only blackness.

Limehouse, 1962

Time passed and Dolly grew up. Once past sixteen, Celia asked if she’d like to earn some more wedge, become a working girl like the others here; Celia would hire a
cleaner to take over Dolly’s duties, what did she think?

‘What – do the man-and-woman thing?’ asked Dolly, shocked.

‘Fuck the punters, yes.’

‘Oh no. I don’t think so.’

‘Your decision. Up to a hundred sovs a night, though.’

‘How much?’

‘You heard me. The money’s damned good,’ said Celia. ‘Not to be sniffed at. Maybe set yourself up, do something with your life, something different one of these days
with money like that behind you. What do you think of that?’

Dolly looked blank. The money sounded great. But to start all that again . . .

‘Think it over,’ said Celia.

Dolly did, long and hard. She went and sat on Darren’s bed and asked him what he thought of the idea. Darren was nice and he had style, and Dolly – who didn’t –
admired that.

She did try. Sometimes she got the home dye out and coloured her straight mouse-brown hair – but she ended up with a yellowy blonde mop that looked hellish with her pink-toned skin.
Thinking to improve it, she then permed it, and she had nice curls for a little while before her tortured barnet rebelled and took on the dull brittle texture of horse hair.

Ah yes, she tried. Didn’t see the point, really, but she did. She let her roots show on occasion, bit her nails. Truth to tell, she knew she looked a bit of a mess most of the time.
Yeah, Darren had style all right. And so did Celia. Dolly thought sometimes that she’d give a lot to be as polished as them, but she was realistic enough to see that it just wasn’t
going to happen.

‘I wondered when she was going to get round to asking you, with Cindy and Tabs moving on. I should bite her bloody arm off,’ Darren told Dolly, squinting his large blue eyes as he
primped his glossy blond hair in the mirror, then carefully adjusted the peach chiffon scarf around his neck.

Grinning, he blew a kiss at his reflection and turned to Dolly. ‘Wake up, Doll. This is a nice place. I’ve never worked in better. Madam down there looks after us all, she
don’t work us to death either. Gives us breaks, makes sure we’re kept safe, insists on the clients washing themselves first and using French letters. This place is properly
run.’

Then Dolly went in to Ellie’s room where Ellie was loading six 45 rpm records on to the retaining arm of her little red Dansette. Dolly told her about Celia’s offer while they sat
on Ellie’s bed and listened to ‘Stand By Me’, then ‘Crying’, and then Patsy Cline was wailing on about falling to pieces when Ellie said: ‘Do it.’

Ellie shook out a couple of Player’s cigarettes from a packet and passed Dolly one. She struck a match and lit them both up. ‘Lay down any ground rules first, though. Celia knows
I don’t do the French polishes – the blow jobs – never have, don’t like that at all, and she makes sure the clients know it. Anything you really draw the line at, tell
her.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Dolly, pulling a face as she exhaled smoke. She liked smoking. It calmed the nerves, even if it did turn your fingers yellow. And she was remembering
the time when the punter had disregarded Ellie’s wishes, become obsessive and dangerous, and they’d had to call for the Delaney mob to do a dark alley job on the stupid cunt.

‘The money’s bloody good,’ said Ellie.

Dolly thought it over. It wouldn’t be like all that had happened in the past, with Dad. She would be in charge, that was the difference. And this time, should anything untoward happen,
there was always the Delaneys to fall back on. She liked the thought of that, very much.

Thoughts of what happened years back always made her feel depressed. She tried not to think about it, but she didn’t always succeed. Sometimes, she still caught the bus and went down
the end of the street where she had grown up. She watched for Dad going to work, and she saw Sarah and the boys, growing up now, in big school, and little Sand bumbling about the place. She
couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t even know them any more, because they would ask why did she go, and she couldn’t tell them, couldn’t even speak of it.

She didn’t see Mum, but no surprises there; Mum was probably banged up in the funny farm by now, a permanent resident instead of a part-time visitor. Thinking of Mum was the worst thing
of all, because she ought to feel sorry for her but she couldn’t.

She mulled Celia’s offer over for a couple of days, then thought of the money and all that she could do with it out in the big wide world some day in the future when she was no longer
so scared as she was right now, scared like she had been ever since the man-and-woman stuff had started with Dad. So she said yes.

It wasn’t so bad. All she had to do, she discovered, was what she had always done in the past – just take herself off somewhere in her mind while it happened, let
that familiar old blankness settle over her and then, wallop, two minutes and it was all over and the customer was off out the door.

By the time she hit nineteen, she had a pretty good stash of loot put aside in the bottom of her wardrobe but she had no idea what to do with it. Dreams, plans, those were for other people.
Unlike Ellie, there was nothing she objected to with the clients because she was never actually there while it happened. So she did the lot. The blow jobs, the full sex, the hand jobs, anal, even
some tying up and whipping (although most clients preferred to go to the more experienced Aretha for those services) and she even accommodated the Golden Rainers who liked to piss on a woman for
some weird perverted reason of their own.

‘Oh, I seen worse than that, girl,’ said Aretha. ‘One of my boys? He likes to eat my . . . well, I think you get the picture.’

Nothing was off limits to Dolly, because she never felt it, was never truly aware of it happening. Somewhere, deep in her core, she knew that something had been killed in her; something that
had once been alive and well was now dead and rotten.

‘Smarten yourself up a bit, will you, Doll?’ Celia asked sometimes when the blackness descended and Dolly’s scruffiness reached a new low.

Dolly kept up with the home dye but her hair did look frazzled. Sometimes an inch of dark root showed through. She chain-smoked and didn’t eat good food, only rubbish, so her skin was
bad and she had to slather thick make-up on it to make it look passable.

Celia nagged Dolly sometimes about her appearance, but the truth was she didn’t much care what she looked like because what was it for? The punters, who climbed on board and used her?
Fuck them. If they didn’t like it, they knew what they could do.

Despite the bad memories it conjured up, she still made the occasional bus trip to her old home, just to stand at the end of the street, watching. She didn’t know why. It was something
she felt she had to do, a compulsion, beyond her control. Common sense said leave it. The past was dead and it should stay that way. But every so often she’d get the urge to go back there and
no amount of reasoning with herself could stop her.

Then one day – the day when she realized hell had opened up – she stood there at the end of the street for over an hour. That day she saw no boys, no Nige, no Dick, no little Sand
trying to jump over the front wall and falling on his arse as usual, no Mum. What she did see was Sarah, her little sis, now fourteen years old, coming out of the door with Dad, and going out the
front gate.

She saw Dad’s arm draped around Sarah’s shoulders. Saw his springy bow-legged walk, and felt her stomach heave.

But the worst thing? When she thought about it afterwards – and she couldn’t stop thinking about it, try as she might – the very worst thing was Sarah’s face. It was
turned up to her father’s and Dolly saw clearly that it wore an expression that was cowed but at the same time pitifully hopeful. Dolly’s heart stopped in her chest as she saw it.
Sarah’s face said: I’ll be good, Dad, so please don’t hurt me. I love you, Dad, why do you hurt me?

And in that instant, sick beyond words, sick to her stomach, Dolly
knew.

Dolly had her own worries, her own private concerns, but she wasn’t completely cut off from the rest of humanity. She went downstairs one morning and into the kitchen,
and there they all were: Celia, Darren, Aretha and Ellie, all sitting around the table with untouched cups of tea in front of them, all looking like they’d lost a tenner and found
sixpence.

Dolly stopped inside the kitchen door and stared at them. Celia hadn’t even lit a fag, hadn’t even put one in her ivory holder. It lay on the table in front of her, unused, beside
an unopened packet. It was like they were all in suspended animation. They didn’t even look up at her.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked, gazing around at their still, frozen faces.

Celia was the first to respond.

‘Oh! Doll,’ she said, and seemed unable to say more.

‘What is it?’ asked Dolly, taking her usual seat. She gave a tentative smile. ‘What’s happened then? Somebody died or something?’

Celia gave a slow dip of a nod. ‘Yeah. Something like that, Doll.’

‘What?’ Dolly had been joking. The smile fell from her face.

‘You know the Delaney boys?’ said Aretha.

‘What about them?’ said Dolly.

‘We got the news ten minutes ago. Can’t take it in really,’ said Celia.

‘What is it?’ Dolly’s mouth was dry. Whatever it was, it was bad. Really bad. She could see that.

‘Tory Delaney’s dead.’

‘Tory . . .’ Dolly frowned. Tory was the one in charge of the Delaney gang they paid protection money to, the one who’d come in here with his hair-trigger-tempered brother
Pat and sorted out that punter who’d been beating on Ellie.

‘He’s been shot. Outside the Tudor Club in Stoke Newington,’ said Celia, whose face was pale with shock.

‘Four times, they reckon,’ said Darren. ‘Three in the chest, one in the head. Nobody knows who did it, but we’re all thinking the Carters.’

Dolly knew the Delaney and Carter gangs were at loggerheads – had been for years. But this . . . this was going to bring open warfare on to the streets. And if Tory was dead, who was
going to be in charge of the Delaney gang now? Who was going to take revenge for Tory’s murder?

‘Redmond will take over. He’s the eldest. Not Pat – he hasn’t the brains for it,’ said Celia.

‘Redmond? That’s the one with the twin, ain’t it?’ asked Aretha.

‘That’s the one. Redmond and Orla. Redmond’s a thinker. Christ, I’ve only just got used to dealing with Tory. Tory was always a bit of a hothead, but Redmond?
He’s a cold fish. Cold right through, that’s Redmond, that’s what everyone says,’ said Celia.

‘Wasn’t there another son? Younger still?’ asked Ellie.

‘That’s Kieron, the painter. No, he wouldn’t be into dirty games like the others. He’s kept himself apart from all that,’ said Celia.

Dolly tuned them out; she was still thinking about seeing Sarah and Dad on the street, still reliving it, still seeing little Sar’s face. She felt powerless and terrified whenever she
thought of Dad. She couldn’t face him, she couldn’t bear it.