by Clare Carson
She cried for Dave and she slept. She woke and she cried and she whispered the words of Ecclesiastes to herself for comfort. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. The only biblical verse she could remember Jim reciting. He didn’t believe in God, but he was taught by the Jesuits and he knew the Bible. Ecclesiastes, he had said, was the one book that contained meaning he could grasp as well as beauty in its words. The Book of the Preacher. Perhaps it was a coincidence that Sonny had quoted those lines from Ecclesiastes when he was pointing the gun at her. Perhaps it was the inevitable periodic repetition. To every thing there is a season.
She went downstairs, called Luke’s number. Nobody picked up. Dusk already, its arrival accompanied by the drumbeat of rain on glass. She had spent the whole day doing nothing. She had a choice to make, she could stay at home and wallow in misery or she could take the bus to Soho and do her shift behind the nightclub bar. If she didn’t turn up, nobody would call to ask her where she was or reprimand her for not showing. Although, she wouldn’t be able to work there again. She watched the rainwater sluicing the window and considered her options. She couldn’t care less if she lost her job. But there was a good reason to do the shift; at the end of it she could walk round the corner to the club where Luke worked, and talk to Spyder. Ask him face to face what he knew about Luke, watch his reactions. Check whether he had been lying to her on the phone and knew more than he was saying. So that was her choice. She could sit tight, as Harry had instructed, wait for him to sort it, deal with her file. Or she could try and find Luke. She pushed herself off the bed, rummaged in her cupboard for her club gear.
There was no dress code for the nightclub staff apart from black. The other women working there wore skimpy dresses. She went the other way and covered herself in a forties trouser suit she had found in Portobello Market. Armour against the evils of the capital’s night-time economy. Helen had found her the job through a mate; Helen knew all the clubbers and club owners in Soho – she was part of that whole fashion student and photography i-D, Face scene with its shifting tribes. New Romantics, Goths, Buffalo, wild camp. The Ballroom was an outlier, the tepid edge of cool in a basement on the fringe of Soho. Easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there; the inconspicuous entrance gave no clue to the crumbling beauty below the pavement. Bombed in the Blitz, left to rot, rediscovered at the turn of the eighties by a fast-footed entrepreneur who varnished the dance floor, swagged the red velvet curtains, hung a few disco balls and opened the doors for business. Sam found it easy to carve herself a niche among the Ballroom’s subterranean enchantments. She was a quirky fixture with her disinterested gaze, puritanical garb and the book she kept open on the bar to read in quiet moments. Other girls came and went, usually because they were caught with their hand in the till. She persisted. She put her hand in the till too – you would have to be crazy to spend six hours serving drinks in a smoky basement for nothing but the pittance they called a wage, but she made sure she wasn’t caught. On a busy night, trendy Wednesday when they flew a DJ in from Paris, she could make a fortune. Another good reason not to wear a skimpy dress: trouser pockets were essential for storing the takings.
She watched the clubbers with a cynical eye – all that hustling for recording contracts, modelling jobs, bit parts in naff TV soaps. And yet she couldn’t entirely deny the draw of the Ballroom’s wish-fulfilment magic, because it was where she had met Luke. He was working behind the bar in a club around the corner. The Wag was much trendier than the Ballroom. Larry, the huge bouncer with the shaved head and tattooed neck, patrolled the queue and ritually humiliated anybody who didn’t register on his scale of cool by telling them to fuck off. But there were unspoken arrangements among the bouncers and the bar staff of Soho; they let each other in and poured free drinks to their fellow workers from around the corner. A rough and ready extended family. Although, Sam rarely made full use of the reciprocal club-workers’ hospitality – she usually picked up the early-morning edition from the newspaper sellers in Leicester Square and walked straight home over Vauxhall Bridge.
Luke had turned up at the Ballroom one Monday night, which was the night the swing band played the standards.
*
Old-time jazz for old-timers: wartime brides with their GI husbands, ancient Cockney ladies with sugar-spun hair, gold t-bar shoes and balding partners. The wrinkly couples swayed so gracefully around the floor and always touched her with the melancholy of lasting love and fading beauty. The glamorous trannies and leather-dressed madams who hung around the club’s shadier corners with the Lords and ex-cabinet ministers touched her too, for reasons she couldn’t fully explain.
She hadn’t noticed him at first, watching her across the bar. She was sitting on a stool at the back, reading Angela Carter. The Magic Toyshop.
‘Nights at the Circus is better.’
She glanced up. Ugly good looks: big nose, generous skewed mouth smiling, chestnut curls. The kind of face you think nobody else would find attractive and then, later, you realize everybody is drooling over him. There was a sadness about his sea-green eyes, though, which was probably what hooked her.
‘I work at the Wag,’ he said.
She automatically reached for a glass, offered a free drink.
‘No, it’s OK. I just wanted to have a look. One of my mates told me the Ballroom was worth seeing. So I thought I’d take a break and come over.’
She smiled, tongue-tied. He smiled back.
‘I haven’t seen you at the Wag. You don’t go there after work, do you?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘I like to walk home.’
‘You should come over some time. The music on Monday nights is brilliant.’
She couldn’t think of anything to say. She felt like a numskull. She reddened.
He said, ‘I like the music here better in some ways, though, the old-fashioned jazz band. Do you ever dance?’
‘No. You need a partner.’
‘Come and dance with me.’
Her cheeks burned. ‘I’m not very good at dancing. I don’t know how to do all that ballroom stuff.’
‘Me neither. Let’s go and be left-footed together...’
‘I can’t leave the bar.’
‘Don’t you get breaks?’
‘Yes.’
‘There are two other people behind the bar and nobody asking for a drink.’
‘OK. I’ll take ten minutes now.’
‘Luke.’
She joined him round the other side of the bar. ‘Sam.’
He grabbed her hand, navigated the swaying couples, pulled her close, carried away by the music. Laughing. Tripping. Larking around. Uncomplicated enjoyment that made her happy in a way she couldn’t remember feeling for a long time. Perhaps she’d never felt quite so happy. A kind of chemistry she’d not experienced before. Everything glowed and shimmered and all the ancient couples smiled at them, thinking – we were like that once.
Something shifted in her then and, after that night, she couldn’t stop obsessing about him. She tried to keep a lid on it, but it didn’t work. Her brain flipped around, returned to the things he had said, going over every word, the nuance of each syllable, his breath on her face. He must already have a girlfriend and even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t fancy her. But that Wednesday when she had finished the shift, shut the bar, tallied her till, climbed the stairs, blinked in the sleazy light, Luke was there. Waiting for her. Standing, one foot against the wall, outside the entrance, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, chatting to Tony the Ballroom bouncer.
‘I fancied a walk,’ he said.
Tony winked at her and said good night. She shrugged, tried to look more casual than she felt. They walked across St James’s Park, past the fairytale cupolas of the Foreign Office rear end, and she told him about the curlew she had spotted poking its long curved bea
k in the soil just by Buckingham Palace. He was interested. They stopped on Vauxhall Bridge, had a spliff as the sun was rising over Docklands. It became their routine. Monday nights, she finished first, went over to the Wag, waited outside and they walked back to her place together. Wednesdays, it was his turn to wait outside the Ballroom.
That was January. And now it was June and it was raining so she decided to catch the bus to Leicester Square. She was too jittery to enjoy the swing band or take a cut of the money handed over the bar in exchange for spirits. Time was dragging in this dingy corner of the basement. The ageing men squirming around on the red velvet banquettes with the over-made-up hookers made her queasy. She departed the club promptly at three, charged up the stairs, out into the neon-lit dregs of the night, made her way north past the gambling dens and the high-heeled ladies lounging in Soho’s peep-show doorways. The rain had become warm mizzle. A man with a comb-over, fifty odd, respectable in his buttoned trench coat, stepped in front of her, waved a tenner in her face. She pushed him aside with a fuck off you wanker. You stuck-up whore, he shouted after her. She couldn’t be bothered to answer back.
Larry was leaning against the wall outside the Wag, smoking, wearing his leather jacket despite the sultriness of the urban night. She often chatted to him when she was waiting for Luke to emerge after his shift. She had found him intimidating at first, but he had a soft spot for Luke, and Larry knew she was Luke’s girlfriend.
‘Luke’s not here tonight,’ he said as she approached. ‘Spyder said he’s sick.’
‘Oh?’ Christ, perhaps he was in hospital. Emergency treatment. She hadn’t thought of that possibility.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Larry asked.
She could hear the assumption in his voice. Luke hadn’t told her – she’d been dumped. An instant nobody in the absence of Luke. She managed to say, ‘Yes, I knew he wasn’t here. I just wanted to check with Spyder and find out how he was doing.’
Larry let her in with an indifferent nod. She tried to reply with a charming smile of gratitude, but he wasn’t looking – too busy eyeing up some girl in pvc staggering drug glazed on to the pavement.
The narrow staircase was draped with near comatose bodies. Zombies. Girls with eyes unfocused, slipping out of fifties dresses, men sporting silver earrings and leery smiles. Hands up skirts. She stepped over the casualties, up the stairs, into the dim back room, walls dripping, sticky underfoot, rent boys in the corner, toilet queue for hard drug taking. The bass hit her. An irresistible rush that pulsed and transformed the seediness into some mystical high. Low blue lights shaded the clubbers swaying, hypnotized by the rhythm, mesmerized by the twirling sharp-suited black dancers. Through the pall of smoke, she spotted Spyder dancing behind the bar. He was doing tragic jerky arm thrusts, thrashing the air like a man being electrocuted; enough to bring anybody back down from their transcendent cloud. She had loathed Spyder from the moment she met him. He looked like a rat with his Brylcreemed hair and his narrow-lapelled grey suit hanging off his twitchy thin shoulders. His attempt at fifties cool. He didn’t fool her. She knew he was a posh boy, slumming it, playing hard. Small-time drugs dealer, supplier to all the nightclub workers including her when she was desperate, served behind the bar at the Wag most nights of the week, which he thought made him mister big. Luke had laughed when she said Spyder was a creep and she thought he was mad to share a house with him. That was part of Luke’s charisma; he didn’t let anybody get to him. Well, apart from the occasional new age hippy. Luke said the rent was cheap and Spyder was the ideal housemate because he was out of the house most of the time. Crawling through the sewers, searching for shit, Sam reckoned. She had to keep a lid on it, her venom, until she had extracted some answers from him.
He turned away as she approached, pretended he hadn’t seen her. Reached up, glass in hand, released a shot of amber whisky from the upside-down bottle behind the bar.
‘Spyder,’ she shouted above the thump of the bossa-nova bass. He ignored her. Deliberately of course. Git.
‘Spyder.’
He swivelled round slowly.
‘What can I do for you, darlin’?’
She suppressed the urge to tell him he could stop calling her darlin’ for a start. Quit pretending he had been dragged up in the mean streets of east London.
‘I’m looking for Luke. Larry said you told him he was sick.’
He ran his tongue around his thin lips. ‘I was covering for him. Told the gaffer he had flu and he’d be back next week. He’s done it for me before when I’ve not made it in. That’s what we do. Cover for each other. Cos we’re good mates.’ He leered at her. ‘Don’t you know where he is then?’
‘No.’
‘Blown you out, has he?’
She ignored him.
‘Has he been home since Saturday?’
‘I told you already on the blower. I haven’t seen him since Friday night when I left the club. I’ve no idea whether he was in when I got home. He wasn’t there when I got up on Saturday morning. But, you know, that’s nothing unusual.’ He gave her a snide look. ‘Cos he’s often away.’
‘He often stays with me.’
‘Spose so.’
She willed herself not to let him wind her up, gritted her teeth. ‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’
‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He hunched his cadaverous shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘It’s none of my business what he does. Where he goes.’ He licked his lips again. ‘And if he didn’t tell you, then maybe it’s none of your business either, my little friend.’
Fuck the slimy wanker. She wanted to turn and walk, but she made herself stay. She had to see this through.
‘I’m a bit worried about him. Seriously, do you have any idea where he might be?’
He lifted the tumbler from the bar, knocked back the whisky shot he had poured, wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He was eyeing her up, over his forearm. Arsehole.
‘What’s it worth?’
‘Not much.’ She swung away. He leaned over the bar, grabbed her arm, pulled her back.
‘Hang on a minute.’
She yanked her arm free; his ferret eyes darted around her face, calculating lecherously.
‘He told me last week he’d been to see that mate of yours.’
Her muscles tightened.
‘Dave?’
‘Yeah. Him.’
‘I knew about that.’ Her heart was thumping. Had he been to see Dave without telling her? Is that when he told Dave he was worried about her?
‘Oh really?’ Spyder said. ‘He told me not to mention where he was if you phoned.’
She could see his jagged teeth as he pulled his lips back into something resembling a smile.
‘Thought maybe he’d gone to sort ‘im out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Luke told me you and Dave were very close.’ He raised an eyebrow. She found it hard not to react.
‘We are close.’ No, we were close. ‘But not in that way.’
‘What other way is there?’ He smirked, grabbed her arm again. She felt her lip curling with disgust.
‘You owe me one,’ he said.
He jerked her arm up to his mouth, attempted to bite her flesh. She pulled her limb upwards, out of his grip, wiped it on the bar, unable to keep the repulsion from her face.
‘I owe you fuck all.’
She shoved her way through the punters crowding around the bar, and as she left she heard Spyder shouting, ‘Maybe he’s got a new bird.’
She barged across the dance floor, down the stairs, out into the dirty street, the pavement littered with bottles, fag ends, needles. Larry had disappeared. Overhead a wave of starlings flocked and spiralled. She tripped over the kerb, righted herself, spotted something scurrying among the black rubbish bags piled in the gutter. Rodent. Never more than six feet away.
She gathered speed as she headed south. She was a mad woman. Crazy. Off her head with love sickness, an infected heart pumping
poison round her system. What a waste of time that had been, letting Spyder wind her up for nothing. Now she was worried that Luke had thought there was something going on between her and Dave, that it might have pushed him away. Jesus. Why hadn’t he just mentioned it to her? She could have told him straight up there was nothing going on. She had to block out Spyder’s insinuations. She knew deep down that wasn’t the reason Luke had disappeared; he’d gone because he was scared. He was hiding from something. Someone. She had to find him, sort it out. She charged along the alley to Trafalgar Square. Her neck bristled. She recognized the sensation – somebody was following her. Spyder. It must be Spyder. He was after her. Coming to claim his dues. Fucking, fucking jerk. She sheltered against the wall, below the fig tree, in the shadow of the National Portrait Gallery. A nightbus pulled up. She checked the window as the double-decker slowed, searched for Spyder’s ratty reflection, spotted a figure hanging back in the passage. She waited for the bus to pull away, then darted, made a leap for the back platform, clung on to the pole. Along Whitehall, past the Treasury, around Parliament Square, into Millbank. She jumped off as the bus reached the north end of Vauxhall Bridge. The first rays of the rising sun should have been visible in the east, but a ridge of ragged clouds behind St Paul’s was muffling the light, the river swathed in early-morning mist. She breathed in the cool air coming off the Thames. The Tate’s translucent glass dome glowed in the amber phosphorescence of the street lights. As she stepped on to the bridge, she felt a presence and glanced over to the other side of the road. A man bending down to tie his shoelace. He didn’t look up. Couldn’t be Spyder, too broad – and anyway she’d lost him at Trafalgar Square. She breathed a sigh of relief and headed south, reached the far end of the bridge, leaned over the railings, searched for Jim along the foreshore as she always did. No sign of him this time, the gentle water ripples and the twisting vapours the only movements by the river. She turned to walk on and gasped; somebody was standing right behind her.