Angel City

by Mike Ripley

  It was my first job of the day and, given the split I was on with the dispatch company, would just about cover the cost of breakfast. Just about. Thank God they don’t expect tips in McDonald’s.

  I checked my Seastar and found I had over half an hour to go and it would take me only five minutes to get to Fly-By on Gower Street. Having taken the job, though, I was stuck in the West One area unless something else turned up very local. With my luck lately, there’d be a call out for a run to Heathrow (good for £20 usually) and I wouldn’t be able to take it as I’d be shunting between Gower Street and Broadcasting House.

  It was crazy. You could virtually see Portland Place from Gower Street. Well, you could if the Post Office Tower wasn’t in the way. And for this sort of money?

  I was depressed.

  The Beast reappeared with two cups of steaming coffee.

  He’d forgotten the lids.

  I began to think of good philosophical justification for suicide. His.

  Two other riders in full leathers followed him out. One I knew as Crimson, a tall black teenager from a rival firm and the best, most natural bike rider I’d seen in a long time. The other worked for the same company, but was a new face to me.

  The Beast handed me a cup and straddled his machine. For the first time, I noticed he had put HAMMER ONE on his petrol tank in the kind of stick-on lettering you normally see on the gates of bungalows in seaside resorts. He probably used it as an aide-memoire.

  Crimson flashed a killer look at the back of the Beast’s head and I gave a shrug of the shoulders in response.

  ‘How ya doin’, Angel?’ Crimson asked, giving the Beast and his bike the widest berth the pavement would allow.

  The kid with him did a little skip and shuffle, almost a dance step, and ran a gauntlet finger over the rear mudguard of the Beast’s Kawasaki as if looking for dust. The Beast didn’t see that but he did see Crimson and his lip twisted so much it wouldn’t fit round his styrofoam cup.

  ‘Struggling on, Crimson, struggling on.’

  ‘You, struggling? Get outa here.’

  ‘It’s true. And it’s true what they say: life’s a bitch, then you die.’

  ‘Man, you are down and I mean pits.’ He rested an elbow on Armstrong’s bonnet. I had to turn to look at him. The kid with him skipped around to stand behind him. It seemed he couldn’t keep still for more than two seconds.

  ‘Why the concern?’ I asked, genuinely puzzled. Crimson was a nodding acquaintance, no more.

  ‘Interested in some work?’

  ‘A bit of moooonlighting,’ whispered the kid loudly, executing a fair Michael Jackson toe tap and twirl through 180 degrees.

  I frowned at Crimson.

  ‘This is Tigger,’ Crimson said sheepishly.

  The kid held up one finger of his right hand to his forehead.

  ‘Hello, Tigger,’ I said, and he put his hand behind his head and did another soft-shoe dance step over the cracks in the pavement.

  ‘What’s up with that ponce?’ snarled the Beast.

  ‘Aerobics, Tony,’ I said over my shoulder.

  Crimson nodded towards Armstrong. I got the message. ‘Come in out of the cold and we’ll blag,’ I said.

  As I moved towards the offside door, Crimson bundled Tigger into the back through the nearside. I had my hand on the rumble seat when the Beast yelled out.

  ‘Hey, Angel, I went down the greengrocer’s on Saturday an’ I was gonna buy my mum a lovely bunch of grapes till I saw they was from South Africa. I told ‘em, I’m not buying South African. What? The thought of all those black bastards handling yer fruit, makes yer flesh crawl.’

  ‘Fine, Tony, good one,’ I said as I slammed the door. I was facing Crimson, our knees touching. ‘Ignore him. He’s just bragging that he’s got a mother after all.’

  ‘He doesn’t get to me,’ said Crimson, who had certainly heard worse.

  ‘He gets to me,’ said Tigger, pulling down the other folding seat and plonking his feet on it.

  I looked at his feet, crossed Nike trainers that had seen better yesterdays. Then I looked up slowly into his face. He held it for a few seconds, then pulled his feet off and let the seat slap back up.

  I turned back to Crimson. ‘So?’

  ‘Tigger here’s got a job offer, driving. It’s no good to me ‘cos it’s night work.’

  ‘And, don’t tell me, your aura is sunlight. You’re a Day Person.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, don’t mind me. I must be feeling my New Age.’ He didn’t look any wiser. ‘Skip it. Why don’t you want it? Is it hooky?’

  ‘It’s legit, but maybe non-union if you get my drift,’ Tigger chipped in. He was crossing and uncrossing his legs rapidly, his leather riding suit creaking in rhythm. The guy could fidget for England at the Olympics.

  ‘So why not you?’ I said to Crimson, ignoring the kid.

  ‘Because I’m busy most nights with my partner, and anyway, I ain’t got an HGV. You have.’

  I did indeed have a Heavy Goods Vehicle driver’s licence. Moreover, it was in my real name, unlike some of my others, and was therefore precious.

  ‘Okay, so it’s lorry work. What are we shifting and how far? I’m not into S & D you know.’

  Crimson knew what I meant, but I wasn’t sure Tigger did. It must have made him think, for every part of his body was still for almost half a minute.

  ‘Stand and Deliver,’ Crimson told him. ‘Lorry drivers who grass their routes to the villains and then go along with a bit of highway robbery for a cut later on.’

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ said Tigger, and I believed him because he started fidgeting again. ‘This is strictly inner city driving and the cargo has no retail value.’

  He’d heard that somewhere and I wondered where. ‘So what’s the catch?’

  ‘No catch I know of, except you take me as driver’s mate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can’t drive at all, my Angel.’ He lisped this and flicked a wrist at my knee, all the time watching my face. ‘Is that really your name?’

  ‘Is yours Tigger?’

  ‘Tigger O’Neil, that’s me. I’m going to be famous one day.’

  ‘I’ll bet you already are in some quarters,’ I said.

  ‘Ain’t that the fact of it,’ Crimson agreed.

  Tigger dropped the camp act.

  ‘Look, you don’t have to like me, but I’m the one who can get you in on this. I’ll load and unload, you drive. That’s fair, isn’t it? Crimson here suggested you and that’s good enough for me.’

  I was also convenient, sitting just round the corner, but I didn’t say anything.

  ‘And it pays a hundred a night – each. We can get maybe three jobs a week. Regular work, see. Now if you’re in, say so.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Crimson put his hand on the door handle. ‘Sort it out amongst yourselves, girls.’

  ‘How do I find you?’ I asked Tigger.

  ‘You don’t. Nobody finds me. There’s a pub called the Grapes in Rimmer Road over in Bow. Know it?’

  ‘I could find it.’

  ‘Then be there at eight tonight and meet the man who gives out the pay packets. See you then. Remember, eight till late, bring a crate.’

  He flashed out a hand and had the door open and closed behind him in a trice. Crimson and I watched open-mouthed as he went up on ballet dancer points and skipped right up to where the Beast sat on his bike.

  Tigger did a pirouette, arms out. He bowed, blew a kiss from the palm of his hand at the Beast, then jumped over the bike, his right foot bouncing off the seat perilously close to the Beast’s crotch.

  He didn’t look back, just landed and started running right out into Baker Street where he hopped aboard a Number 13 bus.

  Th
e Beast was too stunned to move, his cup of coffee still halfway to his mouth. Then he yelled ‘Oi!’ and started to climb off the bike, but by then the bus was gone.

  ‘It might be diplomatic not to mention that in the Beast’s hearing,’ I said.

  ‘You know me, man. I’m all for the quiet life,’ said Crimson.

  Something puzzled me. Tigger had been dressed like a dispatch rider, right down to the chest ponchos they give you with the name of the company on.

  ‘Where’s Tigger’s bike?’

  ‘Oh, he don’t have a bike,’ said Crimson. ‘He just likes wearing leather.’

  They say that all the commissionaires at Broadcasting House are hired because they are war veterans. The trouble is nobody knows which war.

  I had picked up my assigned package dead on time from the Fly-By Ad Agency. In fact, I had been early, as Zandra the receptionist had pointed out. The package was indeed artwork; Zandra was between commitments, a Taurean, and ate lunch in the vegetarian wine bar round the corner.

  I made it to the BBC in 15 minutes, parked on double yellows round the corner as if I was waiting for custom from the hotel there, and then spent 25 minutes trying to get somebody to sign a receipt for the package.

  When one of the uniforms eventually agreed to take on this massive responsibility, he insisted on putting the time in as 0911 hours and he did it in green ink. That meant I would have to buy a green pen in order to fiddle it to prove it had arrived before nine, which it had.

  That, I decided, I could do without, as by then I would be making a loss on the job.

  More than anything, I suppose that got me thinking about Tigger’s offer of work. However shady, it had to be better than arguing the dawn away with BBC commissionaires and then Dispatch – and all for the difference between two quid or four quid or whatever the going rate was for on-time deliveries.

  The morning didn’t get any better. There was the incident with the traffic warden near Goodge Street tube station. Then there was the dipstick from an oil company who wanted taking to Lydford Road, W9, only to find, halfway there, that it should have been Lydeard Road, E6, but he wasn’t going to pay the extra. And then there was having to take a crate of live racing pigeons from a very strange house in Fulham to King’s Cross in order to Red Star them to Doncaster. Or should it have been Warrington? I was past caring.

  By lunch time, I was ready to sign off, go home, grab some sleep and see what Tigger came up with that evening.

  I thought then, and went on thinking, that he was called Tigger because he never stopped moving. I didn’t realise then that his real name was Christopher Robin O’Neil.

  I didn’t find out until I read the report of his inquest in the local paper.

  Chapter Two

  I got home to Hackney by mid-afternoon and made the first constructive decision of the day: to move.

  I have shared a house at 9 Stuart Street for longer than I like to think. I was getting to be the longest-serving resident and there seemed to be no remission for bad behaviour. Nowadays I was actually getting letters there and I wasn’t that keen to hear from people I didn’t know who could write. They have this habit of using recycled brown envelopes with little windows in and funny initials usually starting ‘HM’. What was worse, the junk mail had started to arrive addressed to me personally. That afternoon alone I had won a Ford Fiesta (on condition I bought two tons of concrete in a Spanish timeshare), was being invited to become a mail-order catalogue agent (and claim my free gadget for grating carrots nine million ways) and had three envelopes in which to return my holiday snapshots in the faint hope that the right film would be returned to me that year, if I was lucky. When the junk fliers catch up on you, it is time to show a large proportion of leg and do a runner.

  Why not? Everyone else seemed to be on the move. Except the mysterious Mr Goodson from the ground-floor flat, that is. We didn’t really know about him. He came, he went, he was something in local government. What he did behind his permanently closed door we didn’t know, but he didn’t annoy any of the rest of us, so we let him be. I occasionally imagined he might have an alternative existence as a spy, or moonlighted as Miss Whiplash offering personal services to Cabinet Ministers. Or maybe he was a member of the Cabinet.

  In the flat above mine, the Celtic Twilight were about to move, though it seemed like they’d been there only two minutes. I had called them the Celtic Twilight in case they ever formed a folk group. If they had, it would only have been with the intention of cheering up Leonard Cohen.

  My first impression of them – Inverness Doogie and his Welsh wife Miranda – was that they had both been taking the humourless pills too long. They smiled about as often as every other census, and for a comedian like me, they were the audience from hell. Still, they had their plus points. Doogie was a very good man to have in a scrap, on your side that is, street fighting being his main interest after his job as a chef working his way up the pastry career ladder. Miranda was a journalist on local weekly papers in north London, which wouldn’t normally endear her to me. But, give her her due, she had sneaked in a couple of free small ads so I could get rid of a coven of kittens to good homes – one of which had even insisted on paying for one, and I must give Miranda her cut one of these days.

  The kittens were an unexpected Christmas present – well, more of a paternity suit really – from a man in the same street who had tried to breed Siamese cats and had been doing okay until Springsteen, with whom I happen to share Flat Three, had gone round to pay his respects.

  Once weaned, the kittens had been dumped on me and it had taken ages for me to dump them on unsuspecting homes in north London, even though my odd aunt Dorothea took the three biggest and most vicious, as she was convinced that a new strain of attack cats was the coming thing once they banned Rottweilers.

  To be honest, I’d used a similar line with some of the other punters who’d responded to the ad in the local paper. Somebody had actually worked out that cats killed around 70 million small mammals and birds a year in the UK alone. The odds on you surviving to see your pension if you were a wood mouse, a field vole or a house sparrow were not good. But, let’s face it, when did you ever see a field vole in a betting shop? (‘I didn’t know they raced voles,’ one of the respondents to the ad had said, dead straight. She ended up with a pair of kittens and it served her right.)

  But the traumatic exodus of the kittens paled alongside the prospect of the departure – or threatened departure – of Lisabeth and Fenella, the inhabitants of Flat Two, the one below mine.

  Describing them is difficult, but a transvestite snorting coke while watching a Laurel and Hardy film would know what I meant immediately. They were also downright inconsiderate in that if two out of four flats became vacant, now that Doogie was going back to his roots to work in some posh country hotel in Scotland, then our landlord Nassim Nassim was quite likely to start reviewing his property portfolio. That could mean yours truly out on the streets and all because Lisabeth and Fenella had this really selfish notion that they needed a brighter, more positive aura than that offered by Hackney.

  It had all started when Lisabeth had read a book called The Midwife of Light, or similar, and decided that Glastonbury was the only place to be. Fenella had tried to be enthusiastic about the mythical significance of it all and had gone in for homeopathic medicines in a big way. She’d even tried to teach herself acupuncture, and for a while I thought she’d scuppered the whole plan, but Lisabeth did eventually manage to stop the bleeding and forgave her after being pacified with a red suede spell-pouch to wear round her neck and a jumbo-size bar of milk chocolate. Then I thought I had talked them out of it when I found an old AA road map and, late one night after even the pubs I use were shut, I showed them the dotted lines that proved that London, and especially Hackney, were surrounded by concentric ley lines, thus making it the aura capital of the world.

  For a couple of days they
had been prepared to stay, at least until the end of the age of Aquarius, but then somebody had told them that I had been tracing the line of what was better known as the M25 orbital motorway, and they didn’t speak to me for a week.

  From the outside, it struck me that the Grapes in Rimmer Road was actually short for The Grapes of Wrath. It wasn’t, of course, but I bet that’s what the locals called it come Friday night.

  I was early, so I had my pick of space in the car park, or rather the deserted building site next to the pub, leaving Armstrong near the entrance, pointing out to facilitate a quick exit (Rule of Life No. 277).

  It was a big 1930s roadside boozer with three bars, which had somehow escaped the Blitz even though people with taste had shone searchlights on it and yelled ‘Over here!’ to the bombers overhead. One bar had been retained as a Public Bar and Games Room and there were stickers in the frosted windows advertising eight-ball pool. Even from outside I could hear the mechanical chunter of fruit machines and a pinball machine.

  The two original Lounge Bars had been knocked together into one huge drinking area, something usually regarded as heresy by pub-going traditionalists. In fact, pubs only had one bar until the 17th Century, when stagecoach travel (and then railways) introduced the concept of first- and second-class passengers. The first-class bods had to have a better bar at the staging posts – the pubs – along the road, so they would use the salon, the posh room, of the publican’s house while those hanging on to the roof rack for dear life had to slum it in the bar with the locals. Hence, two-bar pubs and the word ‘saloon’, though not many people know that. Not many people give a toss about it, come to think of it.