Dead Beat

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Of course I’ll pay rent,’ Kate said, guilty that her friend’s depression could not totally deflate her. But as she sipped her coffee she fell silent, flinching slightly from the bright blue walls painted with crude representations of Capri which would have got you flung out of her art college in a week. She listened idly to the music the two boys sitting behind them had put on the massive chrome and red jukebox.

  ‘Hey, that’s the Beatles’ song,’ she said suddenly, turning round in her chair to catch the eye of the Mods behind. ‘Love Me Do. That was their first record, you know? Do you like them? I knew them in Liverpool.’

  ‘They’re OK,’ one of the boys conceded grudgingly. ‘I reckon their new one’s better though, going up the hit parade that is. But I like Gerry and the Pacemakers better.’

  Kate smiled and shrugged. Maybe Dave Donovan, her former boyfriend, was right when he called John Lennon’s rival band, which had managed to get a record released before he did, just a flash in the pan. And she had put that down to wishful thinking.

  ‘Do you remember them at the Cavern?’ she asked Marie, recalling sweaty, deafening evenings crammed into a small space with hundreds of other overexcited teenagers. Down here, she thought, hardly anyone seemed to have heard of the Liverpool bands.

  Marie nodded. ‘My brother had a skiffle group but it all fizzled out.’

  ‘Everybody’s brother had a skiffle group,’ Kate said, laughing. ‘Even Tom played one of those washboard things for a bit.’ But her face fell again as the thought plunged her back into the anxiety which dogged her now day and night.

  ‘What are we going to do about Tom, then,’ Marie asked, sensing her friend’s mood. ‘You said you’d give me a picture of him so I can ask around.’

  ‘I will do,’ Kate said. ‘Two months will give me a bit of breathing space to try to find him.’ Kate knew she was trying to convince herself as much as her friend, and aware she had absolutely no idea where one single individual, who clearly did not want to be found, might be discovered in this teeming city.

  ‘Why do you think he might be in Soho?’ Marie asked. ‘London’s a huge place, la.’

  Kate shrugged. ‘Just a hunch,’ she said. ‘When we used to talk about what we wanted to do, I’d go on about coming down here to take pictures and he always said he wanted to run a clothes shop on Oxford Street. It was just one of those dreams people have. I never thought either of us would make it, to be honest. And if I’d got the job on the Echo, I wouldn’t have done. I’d have stayed at home and married some nice Catholic boy to please my mam. I don’t know where Tom is, but just up there is Oxford Street and here I am, so it’s worth a look. He sent us a couple of postcards. No address of course, but a W1 postmark, so that’s central, too. It’s as good a place to start as any.’

  ‘If he’s that interested in fashion, there’s lots of garment places up by Oxford Circus. And some small shops, in the side streets behind the big department stores. You’re right, it’s not such a bad place to start,’ Marie said, getting up and moving behind the bar again as two young women came in for coffee and peered at the cakes under glass domes at the end of the counter.

  Kate watched the sugar she’d put in her coffee slowly deflate the bubbles. She adored Tom, her older brother by two years. He had been the one who had encouraged her to stay on at school and go to college, as they had grown up in the crowded house where their mother struggled to keep four children in a neighbourhood which still regarded mothers on their own with disdain if not outright contempt. But as they all grew up, she had watched as the relationship between Tom and her mother had disintegrated until the tension in the house became unbearable and she had never been able to put her finger on what exactly came between them.

  Tom had left school at fifteen and gone straight to work, ostentatiously giving his mother half his wage with a flourish every Friday night, and Kate was only too aware of how valuable that was to the family finances as she struggled through college on a grant while her younger sisters were still at school. But Tom did not seem to keep any single job long, working his way through the large stores and smaller clothing shops in the city centre, always smartly dressed and meticulously turned out in the latest fashion, but always, it seemed, looking for or being forced into something different. And every time he changed his job their mother’s attitude towards him seemed to harden and Tom’s switches of mood, from bravado to anxiety and back again, became more marked. He was unhappy and Kate struggled to understand why.

  In the end he vanished. Their mother went to wake him one morning and found his bed empty and his cupboards bare. A scribbled note left behind the kettle said simply that he had decided to try his luck in London. And after that, silence. After six months a postcard arrived, addressed to Kate, saying that he was well and happy and had a job. A card came at Christmas. But there was no address or phone number attached to either and the presents which his sisters had bought remained forlornly under the tree until finally Kate put them away in her room at the end of the holiday, where they still lay in a dusty heap. Tom’s absence tore a hole in her life but at the same time gave her hope for her own future. She was coming to the end of her course at college and already knew that her choice of career would face obstacles in Liverpool. She might make a living taking endless photographs of schoolchildren, or weddings but her chances of doing anything much more demanding with her beloved camera were minimal. She too, she had decided, would have to move on and she knew that London was the obvious place to go.

  Marie came back from serving her customers and flopped down into the seat beside Kate again. ‘So does your mam know you’re looking for Tom?’ she asked.

  Kate shrugged. ‘She must know, though she never said.’ Her mother, she thought, had taken her own decision to move away stoically enough, although she knew that Tom’s defection had hurt her deeply. Perhaps the suddenness of Tom’s departure had reminded her too forcibly of their father’s similar exit years before. Or perhaps her mother had her favourite and Kate was not that child. She shrugged, drained her coffee and pulled her coat on.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ she said. ‘And I’ll give you a photograph of Tom. You never know. In a place like this, so central, someone might know him or have seen him around.’

  ‘You never know,’ Marie said, though she could not conceal the doubt in her eyes.

  The fire had burnt down to embers when the boy stirred deep inside his huddle of blankets and cardboard. Everyone who lived on the bombed sites knew, and had known all that long and bitter winter, that if they were to survive they needed warmth, even though the fires they lit made them more visible to the forces of law and order. Occasionally the police came in mob-handed, as they had done the previous night, smashing up the fragile encampments, stamping out the fires and bundling all those who hadn’t been quick or agile enough to run away into vans, taking them down to the nick in Snow Hill. The older men didn’t mind too much, didn’t try to run too hard, if they could run at all. Ever since the emaciated body of a tramp known simply as Old Ben had been found frozen stiff close to the underground line they had known the dangers of the relentless ice and snow and did not object to a week or so at Her Majesty’s pleasure and the luxuries of a bed and three meals a day.

  But the boy did not want that. What he did to earn enough to keep body and soul hanging together by the slenderest thread he knew would lead to more violence in custody than out of it, and eventually a return to the children’s home where he had been dumped as a small child, or to somewhere just as bad. That, he had decided as soon as he ran away, was never going to happen to him again. And now, ever since he had been sickened by the sight of the young man’s blood-drenched body sprawled on the floor, he was even more certain that he had to keep himself out of sight. He was haunted by the thought that if he had been a few minutes faster following his mark up the stairs to the flat, he might have been dispatched just as swiftly. The killers would never have left a witness if he had walked into the flat while they w
ere there. The thought filled him with a sick sense of dread, and he was sure that if the men he had seen realized he might be a threat they would come looking for him.

  By the time he had scrambled down through the broken fence from Farringdon Road that night, after running all the way from Soho, most of the vagrants were back, as they were after every police raid, and the boy, who was so adept at melting into the shadows when trouble loomed, was among them again, the fires were lit and the half-life of the homeless continued in the wilderness Hitler’s bombers had created and London had still not yet rebuilt. He had a protector of sorts, a tall, emaciated Scot with grizzled hair to his shoulders and an equally unkempt grey beard. He spoke little and drank copiously but in the short time they had been together the boy gathered that he had been in the army during the war and had come home to find his wife and family vanished without trace, no reason to be found as to why the letters had dried up, their house abandoned and taken over by squatters desperate for a roof in the bombed-out streets of Glasgow. For some reason the boy did not understand, Hamish had become his champion if any of the other men tried to bully him, a champion with a fierce temper if crossed, and ready fists and boots. That a man might befriend him without an ulterior motive was almost beyond his comprehension and he was still wary of the Scot.

  He was there now as he opened bleary eyes and squinted against the grey daylight.

  ‘I’ve a bite of breakfast if ye’re hungry, lad,’ Hamish said, pulling a newspaper-wrapped bundle from deep inside his layers of clothes.

  ‘Not hungry,’ the boy muttered.

  ‘But ye’re freezing cold,’ the older man said, reaching out a gnarled finger to touch the boy’s cheek. The boy flinched and Hamish withdrew.

  ‘What happened to ye, laddie?’ he asked. ‘Ye came back as if all the hounds of hell were on your tail. Ye didn’t find a night’s lodgings, then?’

  The boy shook his head and rolled away to a position closer to the remnants of the night’s fire, where a little warmth could penetrate his wrappings.

  Hamish opened his bundle and pulled out half a loaf of bread which he cut into chunks with the knife he kept inside his shirt. ‘Ach, ye’ll do yoursel’ no good by not eating.’

  Slowly the boy’s shivering subsided and eventually he slipped a hand out of his blankets and accepted a piece of the dry bread Hamish was chewing on slowly. When he had eaten it, Hamish handed him a bottle.

  ‘A wee dram’ll warm ye,’ he said, and the boy took a swig of the fiery liquid, choking as it scorched his throat. ‘I’m off to the Sally Ann in a bit for a wash and a hot meal,’ Hamish went on. ‘Will ye no’ come with me?’

  But the boy shook his head fiercely. The only thing he wanted now was to keep out of sight and, if possible, get out of London. But how he might achieve that he had no idea.

  As evening closed in on her first day in her new job, Kate O’Donnell could not help feeling deflated. She had taken the Central Line into the West End, as she had done the previous week for her interview, but this time during the rush hour, strap-hanging breathlessly in a crowded carriage, and feeling infinitely relieved to breathe something approaching fresh air as the long escalator delivered her back to daylight at Tottenham Court Road. Everything here seemed like a strange and frantic dream, and her nervousness only increased as she hurried down the narrow streets of Soho, hyper-conscious of the aromas of foods she could not recognize and languages she could not understand in the foreign shops and cafes as she dodged her way to the Ken Fellows Agency.

  What followed was mere anticlimax. Fellows was not there, out on a shoot apparently, and the laconic receptionist, with the dark-lined eyes and unnaturally pale face, who this time volunteered that her name was Brenda, had evidently been briefed to greet her, although the word implied more warmth than seemed to be on offer.

  ‘That’s your desk,’ Brenda said, pointing to a small, cluttered space in a corner of the room. ‘And this is Bob Johnson. He’s minding the shop while Ken’s out.’ A small, middle-aged man with a greying, short back and sides and what looked like a permanently sour expression, cast an eye over Kate coldly, as if sizing up a joint of meat, from her dark curls to the slacks and flat shoes she had chosen to meet Ken Fellows’ requirements. It was obvious to Kate that she fell some distance short of whatever Bob Johnson’s requirements might be.

  ‘Boss wants you to do some filing,’ he said. ‘All this lot need sorting.’ He waved a hand vaguely at a heap of glossy prints which had been dumped in the centre of her small desk. ‘Need cross-referencing. Photographer and subject. Brenda’ll show you the system.’

  Brenda showed her the system, and Kate stowed her bag, which contained her precious Voigtlander, under her desk and got to work. Various men came and went during the morning, with cameras and equipment, closeting themselves in the darkrooms, and chatting amongst themselves, but apart from speculative looks when they arrived, they took no notice of Kate at all.

  At lunchtime, when Kate’s stomach began to rumble, Johnson and the two other men who were in the office at the time, took themselves off together without glancing in her direction. Furious, Kate put on her coat, picked up her bag and followed them out. They went into the nearest pub, and she walked slowly up to Oxford Street where she bought an Evening Standard, and ordered poached eggs on toast and a coffee at an ABC cafe, where she ate slowly and read the paper for what she thought amounted to a reasonable lunch hour.

  Back at the agency, she found only Brenda in residence, chatting on the phone as Kate made her way back to her desk, broke open a Fry’s chocolate cream bar and gazed gloomily at the only slightly diminished pile of prints. Two months of this might be Ken Fellows’ way of curing her of what he obviously thought was her inappropriate ambition, she thought wryly, hoping against hope that the boss would turn up soon and find her something more stimulating to do, but Fellows did not come back that afternoon and it was her friend Marie who eventually lifted her spirits. At about four o’clock, when Bob Johnson, the only other person in the office again, looked as if he was deciding to pack up for the day, Brenda put her head round the door.

  ‘There’s a phone call for you, Kate. Take it on that one on the shelf over there.’ Kate located the receiver and picked up as Brenda transferred the call, to find a breathless Marie at the other end.

  ‘Someone recognized that snap of Tom you left here,’ she said.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Kate said, her heart thumping, hardly able to believe it could have been that easy to trace her brother. ‘Do they know where he lives, or where he works?’

  ‘Hold on, keep calm,’ Marie said. ‘He couldn’t hang around, but he’s given me an address. If you come up here when you finish work, I’ll give it to you. It’s only round the corner. What a coincidence, hey? I finish at five. We can go together.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Kate said. ‘Absolutely amazing. See you later.’

  ‘Alligator,’ Marie said, and Kate could sense her excitement down the line.

  The two young women stood in the alley and gazed up at the blank windows of the building on the opposite side, but they could see no sign of life. They had found the address easily enough, only a short walk from The Blue Grotto. But when they rang the doorbell, and then banged on the door, there was no response.

  ‘Whoever lives there, they’re not in,’ Marie said. ‘We’ll have to come back another time.’

  Kate stared around the gloomy alley, where litter from the main road seemed to accumulate in heaps against the blank end wall, and felt desperation swamp the elation that she had felt when they reached the flat. The alley was narrow and the building where Tom allegedly lived looked dilapidated, the windows grimy and the narrow doorway, with no name-cards, in need of a coat of paint. This was a grim place to end up, she thought, and began to hope that it was not, in fact, where Tom was living. The only other place which showed any sign of being inhabited was the small shop immediately beneath the flat, where the lights were on. But having glanced at the
sleazy-looking books in the cluttered display window, she felt very reluctant to step inside.

  ‘Come on,’ Marie said eventually. ‘There’s someone in there. He must know who lives upstairs.’

  Kate shrugged uneasily. The very idea of Tom living here upset her more than she would admit, even to herself. Trying to find him through a dubious bookshop filled her with despair. But Marie was already heading to the door and she followed behind, not knowing quite what to expect.

  The doorbell clanged as they went inside, to find themselves in a very small space crammed with a very large number of books, most of them between covers showing incredibly large-bosomed women, in various states of undress, being pawed by unfeasibly muscled young men, all carefully protected behind cellophane covers. Browsing the pages was evidently discouraged.

  At first they could see no one inside the shop but eventually Kate became aware of a face watching them with unblinking dark eyes through a small hatch at the back. And beyond him, a dog began to bark. After a long moment of unspoken scrutiny, the face disappeared, and the door at the back opened.

  ‘Stay, Hector,’ the man said, backing into the shop and closing the door firmly behind him as the barking intensified. He looked at the two young women with a puzzled expression.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, raising his voice, with its distinct foreign accent, against the dog’s furious protestations.

  ‘We’re not buying,’ Kate said, feeling her colour rise.

  ‘I didn’t think you were,’ the shopkeeper said, with a sneer. ‘So what is it? You’re not one of them church women, cleaning up Soho, are you? You should stick to cleaning up your houses, that’s what I think.’

  ‘Do you know who lives in the flat upstairs?’ Kate said firmly, annoyed by the fat, grumpy foreigner’s attitude. ‘We’re trying to find someone we think lives at this address.’