by Clare Carson
TEN
THEY SAT AT either end of her favourite embankment bench; the Houses of Parliament ahead, the verandas of the old St Thomas’ Hospital behind. She came here so often to sort stuff out, deal with the phantoms, she considered it her outdoor office. The silver disc of the sun gleamed through the clearing mist. She wrestled silently with the situation, attempting to dissect her feelings rather than reveal them. She needed somebody to help her, she was running out of friends. He had been following her around anyway, and he was unlikely to go away if she ignored him, so she might as well acknowledge he was there. But he was her father’s killer. There had been no investigation, accusation, trial or judgment, there had only been a cover-up and speculation. She couldn’t claim injustice, demand the truth, because her father had chosen to inhabit the shadowlands of the spooks where everything was shrouded in deceits. Although, that didn’t stop her feeling angry. Or scared. And here she was sitting next to the guilty hitman who walked around with loaded guns and was prepared to kill anybody, if the price was right. But he hadn’t killed her, not yet anyway. Maybe he was waiting for a better deal. She briefly wondered what her therapist would make of it, where she would place this meeting on a riverside bench with Jim’s assassin in the five stages of grieving. Still stuck in denial. Yes, but denial was sometimes a good survival mechanism, and she was in survival mode. She shuffled along the bench.
Sonny searched in his pocket for a fag, cupped one hand around its end and flicked his Zippo with the other. Cracked his jaw and blew a smoke ring. She studied the circle as it wobbled and dispersed, and racked her brain for a neutral subject to talk about.
‘South London,’ she indicated behind her, ‘used to be marshland. The big sink. And then by the seventeenth century it was filling up with small industries. Leather tanning. Prostitutes. And of course it’s full of plague pits.’
Sonny puffed a second smoke ring, sent it chasing through the first. ‘Plague?’
‘1665. Thousands of people died in London.’ A black-beaked plague doctor’s mask floated into her head. ‘The graveyards were overflowing so they dug vast pits. Collected the bodies in carts at night and chucked them in, unnamed. London is one large necropolis. Never more than six feet away from a rat and a skeleton.’
A pigeon hopped along the embankment wall. A cormorant perched on a barge railing, spread its black wings to dry.
‘Vauxhall.’ She inclined her head to the left. ‘That was Jim’s favourite bridge.’
Vauxhall. Talking for thirty seconds and she had slipped Jim and the location of his assassination into her supposedly neutral conversation. She couldn’t control herself, the compulsion to return to her dad’s death, even when her rational self knew it was a bad idea to needle. What was she playing at? Perhaps she needed to cross the shadowlands if she was going to escape the darkness hanging over her. Maybe it was inevitable that her travelling companion should be her father’s killer. The repeat patterns. The cormorant took off, flew downstream, searching for breakfast. Sonny stared straight at her and she wondered about his parents because his watery eyes were so dark; she had always thought white South Africans were either sandy Dutchmen or red-necked Germans.
‘Are both your parents South African?’
He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket, like a schoolboy, shook his head.
‘My father is Afrikaner. My mother is Italian. I don’t remember her clearly. She left my father when I was young.’
Perhaps he was inventing a sob story to make her feel sorry for him.
‘You haven’t tried to find her?’
‘I’m always looking for her. She ran away with an Englishman and came to London, but I don’t know his name.’
‘Why did she leave your father?’
‘She couldn’t put up with his drinking and the life.’
‘Why didn’t she take you with her?’
‘I don’t know.’
He hunched his shoulders.
‘So your father brought you up in South Africa?’
‘Yes. In the Transvaal. He’s a stoer boer, a farmer. He kept cattle; there’s not a lot else to do in that part of the Transvaal. He taught me how to hunt. You have to know how to survive out there, you need bushcraft.’
She twitched as she remembered how he’d tracked her down across the marsh, a weasel chasing the petrified rabbit.
‘That’s why I ended up in the Recces, because of the bushcraft. I had to do my national service and the sergeant put me forward for the Special Forces.’
She sighed. He wanted to explain how he had arrived here, next to her, a South African hitman in London. She folded her arms, decided she might as well let him get on with it, justify himself.
He said, ‘We were in Angola 1982, busting SWAPO. My commanding officer was a madman. I suppose they all were. We did so much drinking, even in the coffee there was always some whisky – Renoster koffie. It was a mark of pride, being able to hold your drink.’
The detail struck a chord, although not an easy one – she was familiar with the macho drinking culture of men in uniform.
‘We were on patrol, the two of us alone, my commanding officer and me. He liked going out on patrol with me. He called me his fundi – his apprentice. We looked for animal tracks, hunted game. We shot duiker and took them back for the braai. And then one day we came across some boys playing football in the bush, they were using dirty shirts for goal posts. They were teenagers, about ten of them, wearing rags, barefoot, kicking a ball around in the sand. They didn’t see us coming, they carried on playing.’
He puffed another smoke ring.
‘I remember the sand whirling and the laughter. I was struck by their happiness. Maybe it was their happiness that annoyed the CO. He said take them out, straight like that, as if they were nothing more than antelope. I said you’re kidding, but he repeated the order. In a year’s time they will be fighting for SWAPO or some other commie-backed militia, he said, so take them out now and save somebody else the bother later. It would be doing everybody a favour – including them, because they could die quickly, painlessly, here, and then they wouldn’t have to crawl through the bush with flies swarming around their blood and guts. Get on with it, he said. But something in me flipped. I told him no way. He got mad, said it was an order. I said fuck you, man. I don’t have to take orders from every draadtrekker who gives me shit. And I turned on him. One shot.’
He pulled on his fag. She watched the Thames swirling, the tide indecisive, on the turn.
Eventually she said, ‘That was brave.’
‘It wasn’t brave. It was a reaction.’
Hair trigger, she thought.
‘I wasn’t able to obey him. So it was one jerk for the lives of ten boys. Well, one jerk and me because then I had to run.’
He strained the filter of his fag, removed another from the carton, lit the second from the first and dropped the dead one on the ground.
‘I headed back into South Africa because that’s where I had friends. But it was a mistake. I knew I couldn’t stay there long. I found a bike and I set off north. In my head I was going to England. I thought I would find my mother and everything would be OK, she would help me. I got as far as Zaire and I met this man in a bar in Kinshasa. He was a security expert, he told me. He guessed I was on the run, he offered me work. I thought I could trust him and I made the mistake of telling him I’d shot my commanding officer. He promised me a new identity, a British passport. A fresh start. But he used the story I’d told him to twist my arm. He threatened to hand me back to South Africa whenever I refused to do his shit.’
Sonny’s expression was pleading, his eyes damp. ‘I would have been court martialled if I went back. Executed. I had no choice.’
She kept her sight fixed on the Thames, the eddies and the whirls.
‘There’s always a choice.’ If she said it often enough, perhaps it would be true.
He gave his filter one last tug, dropped the butt; it fizzed in a puddle – raining aga
in and she hadn’t even noticed.
‘I want to make up for what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘I want to help you.’
His story had a ring of truth, but she didn’t trust him. Why would she? On the other hand, at least he didn’t treat her as if she was a paranoid wreck. He acknowledged there was something to be worried about, it wasn’t all in her head.
‘You are in trouble,’ he persisted. ‘Your friend Dave has been killed.’
She nodded.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She sucked her top lip, the sharpness of her teeth cutting her skin. It would be a relief to talk. She had to be careful, though, not to reveal too much. She said, ‘I arranged to meet my boyfriend Luke in Dungeness and he didn’t turn up.’
‘You were looking for him that evening when you camped out on Romney Marsh alone?’
He had been following her then, of course; it must have been his Land Rover she heard driving away in the morning.
‘Yes. We were planning a protest against the transportation of nuclear waste, he went to meet a contact from the power station, then he disappeared, left me a message saying he had to go away. He sounded scared. I haven’t heard from him since.’
He fiddled with his stubble – glints of silver in among the black. She was going to tell him about the note from Dave – 55 pluto – but decided that was too much. Too raw.
She said, ‘I have a friend – Harry – he’s an ex-cop. And now he works for some part of Intelligence, but I don’t know which and he wouldn’t tell me if I asked. So I don’t. But he told me he’s seen a file with my name on it.’
‘Is it a serious file?’
‘Apparently it’s on a pile for further investigation and inputting into some list of possible terrorists that Intelligence keeps on a computer. R2 it’s called, the list.’
‘R2? That is serious.’
‘I know.’
She rubbed her neck, her muscles aching, and then she yawned; too tired to think straight, too drained to fight her instinct that he was not bad, just lost, fumbling for a safe path through dangerous territory. Not unlike her. She made a decision.
‘We are going to get wet if we stay out here and I need some sleep. You might as well come back and hang out at my place for a while.’
Sonny nodded. ‘OK. Ja.’
Funny, the way that South Africans sounded like posh Englishmen from the thirties, the yahs and clipped tone. They walked back along the embankment, under the railway bridge, past the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. A huddle of men in biker jackets and ripped jeans leaned against the railings, talking, laughing, sharing a last smoke before they split. One of them wolf-whistled as they walked past. Sonny turned, smiled at his admirers, and she thought there were some things about him she found appealing too.
*
She had to rest. She offered Sonny the use of Dave’s room. She woke in the late afternoon, surprised to find how easily and for how long she had slept. She had no food in the house so they walked over to South Lambeth Road and ate in the Portuguese café where they always had football on the television. He had clams and squid. She ate potato croquettes and mushrooms with garlic and flirted with the waiters.
‘I’m a vegetarian. Well, I do eat fish occasionally,’ she said. ‘I’ve found it difficult to eat meat since...’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. He knew what she was going to say anyway, she could tell by the way he looked at her with his doleful brown eyes.
‘Two years ago,’ she added. When she had identified her father’s waxy corpse in the morgue.
‘About the same time I...’ His hand went to the crucifix. She wanted to disapprove of his Christianity, see it as fake, but she could see he needed the faith to help him deal with his demons, and she wondered what it said about her that she warmed to his tortured soul.
‘You didn’t believe in God before?’
‘I was brought up a Christian. We went to church and I listened to the pastor. We said prayers at home and read the scriptures. But I didn’t believe.’
She pushed the half-empty bowl away, reached for her espresso. ‘What made you see the light?’
He lit a Marlboro, puffed a stream of grey smoke through his nostrils.
‘It was when...’ He tapped the fag against the ashtray, gave her an earnest look. Or perhaps it was more psychotic than earnest. ‘I wanted to start afresh. Leave all of that behind – the contracts, the agents. But I couldn’t sleep. Every day, I was getting closer to the edge, thinking I didn’t deserve to live, that I should just end it all quickly.’
He was gazing at her with his wet eyes and she tried to shake off the sense that they had some deep connection, both grappling with the same bleak legacy. She needed to keep her distance.
He asked, ‘What did you do after your father’s death?’
‘I went to university. And then I...’ She didn’t want to confess that she had a crisis too that had precipitated a year off, hanging around in Vauxhall. Dungeness.
‘Is that where you met Luke? At uni?’
She shook her head. She hadn’t clicked with any of the men at Oxford; the rugger buggers and the Hooray Henries were non-starters, and when you had dismissed them the pool was considerably diminished. Even among the potential kindred spirits, she hadn’t met anybody who had bowled her over.
*
Nice men. Interesting men. Clever men. Yet they all seemed... were lacking a certain – what – recklessness? Edginess? No chemistry. Nobody clicked. Maybe she hadn’t been in the right frame of mind.
‘I met Luke when I was working at the nightclub.’ She nodded her head in the vague direction of Soho.
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a photographer. He got a scholarship to do a photography course in an American college. LA. And then he ended up working with this NGO that gives cameras to people living in war zones, or in Third World slums, so they can record their lives.’
‘I met some people doing that kind of thing when I was in Angola with the army. He is older than you?’
‘He’s twenty-six. I’m twenty.’
‘Good-looking?’
Sam nodded. ‘But that’s not why I like him.’ She reddened. ‘I want to find him.’
‘Do you think it’s wise to go looking?’
‘Wise?’ She tipped her coffee cup, surveyed the swirl of muddy grounds, wondered whether the patterns could be read like tea leaves.
‘I’m not sure wise comes into it. I have to find Luke before anybody else gets to him. I have to make sure he’s safe.’
‘Ek verstaan,’ Sonny said. ‘I understand.’
She tipped the espresso cup a different way and watched the brown sludge slip across the china; she didn’t have much to go on in her search for Luke. Dave’s note – 55 pluto. The matchbox from Heaven and the clenched fist sign of Venus feminist badge left by the slender dark-haired figure in Bane House. Perhaps she should start somewhere more obvious, go to Luke’s place, look around his room, see if she could find anything that might indicate where he had gone, or exactly what had made him run.
She said, ‘Luke’s housemate Spyder will be out working tonight. Maybe we should go and have a look around, see what we can find.’
‘Have you got a key?’
‘No. But I know how to get in round the back without too much difficulty. We’ll have to wait a few hours. Spyder won’t leave until eight or so.’
Sonny shrugged. ‘If it’s what you wish to do, I’ll help you.’
God, it was like having a gun-toting genie in a bottle for a companion.
*
They set off at ten. Spyder’s house was on the edge of Rotherhithe, east along the river. The property developers had taken over and they had to negotiate the blocked roads and diversions that accompanied the building mania. In the seventies, Jim had worked in Tilbury docks downstream in Essex and he always said the deep water container port would put the London docklands out of business. He was right. But then the city started booming and there was cash everywhere a
nd loads of it was pouring into the vast industrial wasteland sitting on the money market’s doorstep. Docklands was one vast building site now – wet docks, dry docks, wharves and warehouses ripe for conversion into luxury flats. Anybody who had lived there before – boatmen, dockers, packers – had been shunted elsewhere. Although, in among the chaos of bulldozers, cranes, dug-up roads, gas pipes waiting to be buried, there were untouched streets; warehouses, cobbles and back to backs. Bastions of resistance. Spyder had managed to grab a slice of the real-estate action – purchased a small house squeezed on to a corner beside a disused pub on Rotherhithe Street before prices started rocketing. Riverside view, in estate agent’s terms; the grey waters of the Thames visible through a gap in the houses opposite if you craned your neck out of the top-floor window.
Sam parked the van by the river. The construction workers had departed for the day and the drills and bulldozers were sleeping. The eerie silence of the empty streets was broken only by the scurrying of rodents and the creak of a pub sign swinging in the breeze. Spyder’s place was the last in a row of condemned houses. Apart from his, they were all boarded up, front doors marked with red crosses like the houses of plague victims, families locked inside with their already dead relatives, waiting for their turn, the sweet scent of rotting flesh in the air.
The clang of a bell startled her and she thought for a moment it was the corpse collector calling for the dead.
‘Church bells,’ she said. ‘Eleven.’
Spyder’s house was a wreck even though it wasn’t condemned. A squalid drug dealers’ den; peeling wallpaper, broken panes replaced with hardboard, missing floorboards that meant you could see the room below when you used the toilet. And anybody in the room below could look up and see you peeing. When Luke discovered that Oliver Twist was set in nearby Jacob’s Island, he had painted a sign saying Fagin’s Lair, nailed it to the frame above the front door. Luke rented a room from Spyder at the back of the house, which he had painted black. Sam had stayed overnight once, but that was enough. Spyder’s presence, the squalor, the lack of a toilet floor had been too much for her and, after the one-night trial, Luke always came back to Vauxhall with her.