by George Sims
Taking his plate and beaker to the sink, Buchanan sighed. He had found the good life for a while and now it was gone. There was no doubt that he missed it badly, with a peculiar sensation like homesickness. He turned on the water-heater and then fetched the greengrocer’s carrier-bag which contained all his mail forwarded to the Bathwick Mews address. He emptied the bag on the kitchen table and spread the contents out like a pack of cards, looking for anything that appeared interesting. Nearly all of them were typed and there were a lot of official-looking manilla envelopes, with a good proportion of throw-away circulars. He opened one blue envelope, addressed in a childish hand, which had been forwarded to three different addresses. It contained a request for his autograph from a boy in Birmingham. Buchanan was amused to think how little value his signature must now command, even as swop material. Perhaps the lad was set on obtaining signatures of all the surviving drivers who had taken part in a particular race.
The white telephone rang again, and again Buchanan approached it warily. He had no prejudice at all about homosexuals and he could not remember meeting an unpleasant one, but he felt a little uncomfortable about appearing to be Philip Tureck’s flat-mate.
There was the sound of a bronchial-type cough, some throat-clearing, and then a fussy voice inquired:
‘Is that Mr Edmund Buchanan?’
‘It is.’
‘Ah good. Yes. Very good. How I hate dialling all those terrible digits! Oh for the good old days when one simply commanded the operator to summon up Flaxman or Gerrard or whatever.’
It was a quavery, querulous old voice, the kind that seems to be full of a lifetime’s irritations and frustrations, liable to become peevish given any provocation. Buchanan was curious as to what the old man could be going to say but did not try to hurry him and waited silently.
‘Well then, my dear sir. This is Mr Quentin speaking. Mr Quentin of Loving Care.’
‘Loving what?’
‘Loving Care, laddie. The cattery. Our motto, d’you see, really loving care! Mr Philip Tureck sent me a card saying you were in situ and would probably be willing to look after Jake at home. I’m afraid Jake’s been pining a bit.’
‘So you’ve got the cat. Funny, Tureck did mention a cat but I got the impression it was just a stray who occasionally looked in here for a meal.’
‘Don’t be whimsical, dear boy. Jake a stray! Jake is a beautiful big ginger male. Very much a home-loving and luxury-craving creature. So can you call and pick him up the tooter the sweeter? Here I mean.’
Buchanan brooded for a moment. Having the cat would tie him to the flat for a while, but it seemed rather mean to refuse and it would be some kind of company. ‘All right. Where do I go? And how do I transport him?’
‘Jake’s luxurious, leather-handled basket is here, laddie. That’s no problem.’
‘And here is?’
‘Loving Care. 106B Rushcroft Road, top floor that is. Brixton. Do you know Brixton?’
‘I do. Well, I used to. They can’t have changed it all in five years.’
‘They haven’t. Then you probably know Brixton’s famous Market Row. Rushcroft Road is about a minute from the market.’
‘Near the stewed-eels caff?’
There was a pause and when Quentin spoke again a slight change in his tone had taken place, as if the facetious old man had been replaced by one equally quavery but more down to earth. ‘Quite right. You do know Brixton I see. Very good. Well then, Jake and I will be waiting for you. The cattery’s in the yard at the back, but come straight up to 106B first. Good-bye.’ The phone went dead before Buchanan could say anything else.
Chapter X
London seemed like a heightened version of itself to Ed Buchanan as he made his way to the Loving Care cattery in Brixton—the buses redder, the traffic noises louder, the streets busier, and the voices more cockney than he remembered. He was an authentic cockney himself, born in Hanbury Street well within the sound of Bow Bells, and his childhood had been spent largely in the East End; but living in a remote cottage on Samos for four months had affected him, so that he was irritated by the continuous flow of traffic racing along the Chelsea Embankment. Normally he prided himself on his knowledge of the metropolis, but when he got to Chelsea Bridge Road he felt for a moment like a country bumpkin puzzling about the quickest route to take him south of the river.
Walking along Buckingham Palace Road to Victoria Station, part of his mind was still engaged with the puzzle posed by Leo Selver calling in at Bathwick Mews. He had only one real aunt but as a child he had always addressed the Selvers as ‘Uncle Leo’ and ‘Aunty Bee’. For some years his brief seaside holidays had been spent in their company, and the families’ mutual Christmas festivities had been largely organized by Leo, who liked devising games such as the elaborate annual treasure-hunt which had taken them into each room in the adjoining houses.
Memories of Leo: driving his battered old Austin Seven in a car park while sitting on the floor so that it appeared to be without a driver; fooling about at beach cricket by pretending to run for a catch then falling down into the sea; his transparent card-tricks, and the card houses built with trembling hands; his repertoire of 1930s songs which he would sing mimicking Bing Crosby’s voice. Looking back Buchanan realized that he had spent more of his time during those early seaside holidays with Leo than with his father—Leo had always seemed to really enjoy digging large sand-castles with a system of moats, canals and walls to keep out the returning tide, fishing in rock-pools and playing clock-golf. All that had been changed by Billy Selver’s death: within a few months the Selvers had moved to Hendon, the first of a series of moves, each one of which had taken them further away and decreased the opportunities of family meetings. Buchanan decided that he must look Leo up as soon as possible—it seemed likely that there had been an important reason for his calling in at Bathwick Mews.
The train slowed down just after crossing the Thames and juddered to a halt by Battersea Power Station. Buchanan looked down river towards Vauxhall Bridge and surveyed the desolate Nine Elms Lane area where rows of tiny houses were grouped round the gas-works, goods depots and railway-sidings. He missed the idyllic Samos beach setting where he had worked against a background noise of waves endlessly breaking, with the sea’s salt smell mixed up with rosemary and myrtle under a cloudless blue sky, but London still had a fascination which would take him down any street he did not know.
As the train started again Buchanan was wondering how much Brixton had changed in the five years since he had been there—he had read the odd, disturbing story about trouble between the local people and immigrant West Indians but he could not believe it was being transformed into a ghetto area of the kind which bred bitterness and undirected hatred. He had vivid and unpleasant memories of two such areas abroad: one called Hunters Point south of San Francisco and the other named the Quartier de la Porte d’Aix, the part of Marseilles known as the ‘Kasbah’. He could still visualize the straight and narrow streets of the ‘Kasbah’, with washing hung out from all the windows of the tall buildings and the walls held up by vast timber buttresses; the rows of bright tinsel dresses for the Berber ladies, and Chinese indigo cotton smocks; the Algerian ladies trying not to be noticed and the Kabyles with tattooed faces; the rue de Chapeliers thronged with street vendors and bargaining shoppers. Buchanan’s broken nose was a memento of the ‘Kasbah’, the result of tangling with three Senegalese dandies who had been beating up a member of the Deuxième Corps Cycliste outside Black’s Paradise Bar.
Ed Buchanan had inherited his father’s height, large-boned build and exceptional strength. In his early twenties he had been a finalist in the A.B.A. light-heavyweight class and for a short period he had worked as a bouncer in a Nice nightclub so he was not particularly perturbed at the prospect of being mugged in Brixton, but he disliked the idea of any part of London becoming dangerous in that way. He also liked many of the quali
ties that the West Indians had—it was only a few years since he had been a habitué of a Jamaican restaurant and occasionally attended shebeens in Brixton’s Somerleyton Road. From what he knew of the tough south Londoners he would have thought they were the ideal community to absorb the coloured people who wanted to live there.
Leaving the railway station Buchanan bought a newspaper and mentally framed the advertisement he wanted to find in its columns: ‘Energetic self-reliant man required to put a derelict farm in good order. The farm is situated on an estuary and the farmhouse and seawall will have to be rebuilt. Successful applicant to be working partner…’
The pleasant daydream faded as Buchanan walked along the busy Atlantic Road and turned into the street-market that ran down Electric Avenue. The atmosphere was just like that of the markets in Berwick Street or Portobello Road, noisy and jolly, with lots of cockney banter as passers-by were tempted with bargains. A few of the stalls were run by West Indians and there was a high proportion of coloured shoppers, but the air of gaiety could not have been less like the sullen brooding atmosphere of Hunters Point.
An amplifier in one of the shops was blasting out the reggae song ‘Under the Sun, Moon, and Stars’ in which the West Indian viewpoint was proclaimed through the voice of Jimmy Cliff:
Under the sun, moon and stars
Got to have some fun
Before my life is done…
Buchanan had been a fan of reggae since its early days when it was known as rocksteady, bluebeat and ska. He liked the heavy drum-beat rhythms with, at their roots, the music of ‘sufferation’, of the miserable shanty-town life of rural migrants to Jamaica’s capital of Kingston, and the strange cults like the Rastafarians with their home-made drums and rumba-boxes.
There were some coloured teenagers in floppy velvet caps and knitted tea-cosies walking through the market, a group of coloured children with great big eyes and wonderful smiles, and a couple of Rastafarians whose thick matted tassels of hair hung down over their shoulders, greeting each other with ‘Wha’ happen man?’, the West Indian hello. But they all seemed to fit into the market with its cockney atmosphere of live-and-let-live. Buchanan felt very much at home there and within a few minutes he had bought a carrier, some pink-fleshed grapefruit, sweet potatoes and a cheap cheesecloth shirt. Walking through Market Row he could not resist a bottle of Captain Bligh rum from St Vincent even though it meant he would be rather encumbered when it came to dealing with Jake’s ‘luxurious, leather-handled basket’.
He grinned to himself at the memory of his one-sided conversation with the querulous Mr Quentin. He was looking forward to meeting both Quentin and Jake. There was an odd building on the corner of Rushcroft Road, with glossy green tiles among the brickwork and stained-glass windows, that looked as if it must have been a cross between a church and municipal baths before being converted into flats and shops. Rushcroft Road had a depressed, deserted air; some of the houses were shabby, the biscuit-coloured bricks blackened by grime and the paintwork peeling.
The door of No. 106 was open. Quentin had said that he should come upstairs, so Buchanan stepped inside to find a hallway floored with dirty green linoleum, and two closed doors both of which bore identical signs of the HIGHLIFE CLUB and sketchy paintings of a setting sun. He drummed his knuckles on one of the doors just for fun but there was no sound of any highlife.
The stairway leading to the second floor was as uninviting as the hall, with a badly torn threadbare carpet on the stairs and a pale green wall decorated with graffiti. Buchanan read a sign saying ‘Children beat your mother while she’s young’ and an involved invitation to some sexual assignation as he walked up the stairs. There was a smell of urine and carbolic disinfectant. Somewhere in the house he heard the sound of a sluggishly flushing lavatory.
Buchanan found there were three doors off the landing and they were all locked. He knocked on each one without any response. There was no sign to point to which might be considered 106B or the Loving Care cattery. He muttered ‘Lots of luck’ to himself. Had the call from the strange Mr Quentin been some kind of involved joke—had he been sent to Rushcroft Road on a wild-goose chase? Remembering the sound of the flushing lavatory he banged on each door again, listening intently for any sound on the other side, and tried the handles in vain. After waiting for a few minutes more he reluctantly returned to the head of the stairs.
A heavily built man with wavy black hair that had no parting and was too good to be true, stood in the hallway below with an unpleasant smirking expression. He looked Buchanan up and down and called out, ‘Buch’n. Yes, you, fuck-face. I want you.’
Buchanan said nothing but gave the man a short, dangerous look.
The man in the black wig moved slowly towards the stairs. He had impassive flat features, but a scar that began by his mouth twisted it into a perpetual smirk. He was dressed in light grey trousers, a white shirt and a black cardigan. His eyes were dull and purposely vacant like those of an old man. Despite the blank eyes and the wig, Buchanan judged him to be in his late thirties or early forties. He had a massive chest, bulging biceps and the bullying air of a threatener, the kind who was paid to make late-night calls to scare tenants out of slum property.
Buchanan called down, ‘What’s your problem?’
‘Problem, shitbag? The problem is you’ve got these fucking coons all of a mogador. I mean it’s the bleeding aggro. You’ve been leanin’ on ’em too hard so now I have to do sumfin, don’t I?’
Buchanan was trying to think of some enemy from his past life who could possibly have arranged this little meeting for him. The bruiser knew his name, so it was not a chance encounter with a nut. He had thought the phone-call from Quentin was slightly odd, but he had been put off his guard because it had tied in with what Philip Tureck had told him about the cat at the Swan Walk flat. That meant that Tureck must also somehow be involved in this assignation, which seemed absurd. Buchanan called down to the wig man, ‘You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.’
The man’s eyes had a practically reptilian slowness but now there was a flash of malice in them as he said, ‘Don’t try to moody me. You’re the fucker I want all right.’ He held out his clenched fists like weapons for inspection. ‘Yes, I’m goin’ to hospitalize you—make you piss blood.’
Somewhere deep inside his head Buchanan was smiling—a trait he would have to watch. When his release from the Police Force was being talked over, during the final interview that had led up to his resignation, a good deal had been made of the fact that he was too emotional to make a good copper; but underneath that he had the impression that they had diagnosed the interior aggression which he always had to keep controlled. With this bruiser he was going to make an exception: inner tensions could not find a better object if they had to be released. He dropped his carrier-bag, grinned, and said, ‘Well come on then’, walking back a few steps.
The man in the wig stopped at the top of the stairs and indicated the narrowness of the passage, saying, ‘This is real neat. Stand still, you prick, you’re not goin’ anywhere.’ He gave a little puffy whimper of a laugh.
Buchanan stood with his legs spread wide apart—he had learned in his first boxing lesson that to punch effectively you need a sound base. He held his fists high and watched the man in the wig lumbering towards him, blocking the first sizzling punch and stepping inside the next one. His opponent was what Henry Cooper called ‘an arm puncher’, someone who punches from the shoulder rather than with the shoulder behind the blow. Buchanan jabbed continually with his left, short but accurate punches that kept finding their target. The man in the wig had little science and was obviously used to beating down any opposition with a flurry of massive blows. Buchanan took some stick while waiting for an opening, including a very heavy punch to the chest. Another one seared his cheek, too close for comfort to his capped teeth. But that punch took the man in the wig a little off balance. Buchanan promptly brought his left knee up
in the man’s crotch and tapped his head back with two jolting left jabs. Then he brought his right across, a punch he felt was solid all the way, with thirteen stone weight behind it, the kind of punch his father used to call ‘Good night nurse’.
As the man in the wig staggered back Buchanan used him like a punching-bag, hitting him with every combination he knew. The man’s head banged against a doorway and Buchanan caught him on the rebound with a right uppercut to the point of his chin. A boxer never sees the punch that knocks him out. The man’s eyes became vacant and he slithered down in the hallway. Buchanan said quietly, ‘You fell real neat,’ and crouched beside him.
The man in the wig moved his feet about in an aimless sort of way: the will was there for him to get up for another round, but willpower wasn’t enough to do the trick. One heavy-veined hand scrabbled with the edge of his cardigan as if to find something inside. Buchanan said lightly, ‘Don’t reach for anything apart from a sandwich because I’ll make you eat it.’
The man on the floor raised his head a little way up against the door to make his posture more comfortable, but tried no other movements.
Buchanan said, ‘Who sent you? Was it Quentin?’
The man in the lop-sided wig gingerly felt his chin, looked Buchanan straight in the eyes and grinned, showing yellow side teeth and bridge-work that did not match too well. The derisive grimace was meant to demonstrate to Buchanan that a lot more punishment would be needed before any information would be forthcoming. Buchanan’s aggressive instinct only surfaced in retaliation and did not extend to hitting someone prone on the floor. He got up, collected his carrier-bag and ran down the grimy stairs. He thought there was a possibility that Quentin might have arranged more surprises for him and was glad to find that his exit from 106 Rushcroft Road was not barred.