Angel City

by Mike Ripley

  Across the City he sat on Armstrong’s rumble seat and chatted away through the glass partition. He was going to experience everything he could before he was 21, he said, and then he would make a decision on how he was to become famous. It might be music, it might be fashion. It would certainly be outrageous. Oh yes, the world was going to hear from Tigger O’Neil. And I shouldn’t laugh (though I wasn’t) because he was serious and was building up the cash reserves to break out.

  ‘Break out of what?’ I asked.

  ‘The Talent Trap,’ he said, dead straight. ‘I don’t have any natural talent except for showing off. That’s what my school report always said: showing off. So, if you’re gonna be a show-off, do it right, get professional help. That costs money. So I’m saving up. I don’t have expensive habits, well, not that I pay for, and I live cheap and cheerful. The body can take it now, so store it all up as experience for the good life to come.’

  As we hit a red light, I retrieved the pack of Sweet Afton from the glove compartment and lit up.

  ‘You’re weird,’ I told him over my shoulder.

  ‘And why’s that, Mr Angel?’ He reached through the partition and took the cigarette from my lips as I changed gear.

  ‘Where are you from, Tigger?’ I tried to change tack.

  ‘From nowhere, going somewhere,’ he said enigmatically, exhaling smoke into my ear.

  I was right. He was weird.

  As we approached King’s Cross station, Tigger asked me to pull over near a letter box. I watched him in the mirror as he produced a brown envelope from his tracksuit and he checked the road both ways before he climbed out.

  He wasn’t worried about being mugged on the way to the letter box, he was watching the station concourse across the road, and he took his time walking back to Armstrong. ‘Change of plan,’ he said as he got back in. ‘Drop me at Lincoln’s Inn, would you?’

  ‘What’s up? Is the scene too quiet for you?’

  If he had been looking for the street-corner pick-up scene – which I doubted – he was in the wrong place anyway. All the kerb-crawling traffic was round the corner up York Way these days. There were too many lights at the entrance to the station, and that discouraged passing trade. The huge entrance hall, however, still doubled as a meeting point for runaways and rent boys looking for a bed for the night, if only dossing down with some of the dopeheads and drunks too wrecked to care if they got taken in by the Transport Police or the Salvation Army. King’s Cross wasn’t as bad – or as popular, depending on your point of view – as some of the other mainline stations, but even at this time in the morning it seemed oddly quiet.

  ‘There’s been a Whittington,’ said Tigger. ‘I copped a view of the vans round the corner.’

  The first police Operation Whittington, named after the legendary mayor of London, had concentrated on underground stations and had been designed as the human equivalent of an arms amnesty. The cops went round in groups of three, two uniforms and a woman constable, picking up anyone under 18 who didn’t look as if they had a home to go to. They were questioned, but not searched, and gently moved on: to a hostel or a night shelter if they wanted it, even back home if they could face it. Or just moved on, if they insisted. No arrests, no confiscations. What had surprised them, or more probably not the cops but the seriously liberal journalists who wrote it up, was the number of the younger homeless who happily refused the offer of sheltered accommodation. They had made their cardboard-box bed and they were going to lie in it.

  ‘Lee will have gone by now,’ Tigger said quietly. I asked who he meant.

  ‘Lee. Just a friend. I do have friends, you know.’

  ‘I’m surprised; I thought they might cramp your style.’

  ‘Nothing, but nothing, cramps my style, Angel,’ he said in tough guy mode.

  Some tough guy.

  I dropped him at Lincoln’s Inn, outside a long-closed wine bar near the Old Curiosity Shop, and he got out of Armstrong on my side, standing next to the driver’s door as if he wanted something. I let the window down.

  ‘If you wanna do this again, I’d better have some way of contacting you.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘I can give you a number.’

  He went through a routine of patting himself down and then he smiled sheepishly to indicate no paper, no pen.

  I dug a felt-tip out of my jacket and wrote the Stuart Street number on the inside of the top flap of the packet of Sweet Afton, the bit where they print ‘The best that money can buy’. I was going to tear the flap off but he reached in and snatched the pack away from me.

  ‘You really should quit, you know. Smoking’s a young man’s game.’

  ‘So is getting a fat lip.’

  He clutched both fists to his chin in mock terror, then put on his little-boy-lost look.

  ‘You couldn’t spare some change for a cup of tea, could you, guv’nor?’

  ‘Come off it, Tigger, you got your wages tonight as well.’

  ‘Honest, not a cent on me. Look.’

  He pulled his tracksuit top up to his neck, exposing a white hairless chest, then he twirled around in the middle of the road like a ballet dancer again, and as he faced me his hands went to the waist band of the tracksuit bottom.

  ‘Want to see everything?’ he said loudly. ‘Just to make sure?’

  I took a pound coin from my pocket and flipped it at him, and his hand snapped it up like a bird picking off an insect. He pulled the top down and shivered.

  ‘Thank you, kind sir. It’s getting too cold to go through the whole act.’

  ‘It’s a good act,’ I said, putting Armstrong into gear. ‘But where the hell are you going to get a cup of tea at this time of night?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not. I just like to keep my hand in.’

  We did two more runs that weekend on the same pattern. Tigger would ring me and arrange to meet in or near a pub in the East End. Bassotti would turn up looking uneasy and as if he had a better way of spending Friday and Saturday night. He probably had. I had; just couldn’t afford it. Tigger almost certainly had, but that was probably illegal as well.

  Bassotti would have one drink and then take Tigger in his car, and I’d follow in Armstrong until we found a lock-up garage and a box van or a Transit already loaded to the roof with black plastic sacks. That made three different lock-ups and three different vehicles, but all in the general Bow or Mile End areas.

  We used the same dumping ground down near Barking Creek on both occasions, and both times Tigger did all the heavy lifting, insisting I stay in the van and keep look-out. And after dropping the van off, he’d got me to take him to King’s Cross again, and each time he stopped and used a letter box on the way. But what he did with his wages was his business.

  The money was coming in useful, I have to admit. Hell, not just useful, vital. I stayed with the dispatch company but cut it to three days a week, which just about covered Armstrong’s running costs.

  To tell the truth, it kept me out of the house on Stuart Street, which was becoming more depressing by the day.

  Doogie and Miranda were having dry runs at packing all their worldlies into cardboard boxes, some of them so big they would have been classed as condominiums among Tigger’s friends sleeping rough down at Lincoln’s Inn. They still had over three months before Doogie moved north to coincide with one shooting season or other, but every day there would be a different combination of boxes and bags on the stairs. It was Miranda’s way of deciding what could be shipped and what had to be sold. As they didn’t have a car, they were trusting everything to either the postal system or the railways, so maybe they had a reason to be concerned. Yet the volume of sheer stuff that they seemed to have baffled me. When I’d arrived at Stuart Street, I’d had a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. And I’d had trouble filling that.

  Lisabeth and Fenella were no better. They had discovered iridology,
staring deeply into each other’s eyes and claiming to be able to diagnose not only present ailments, but past ones, by studying the iris of the eye. I did the old mine-look-like-road-maps routine (‘You should see them from the inside’) but they didn’t see the funny side and went off in a sulk.

  Even Springsteen kept out of the way, sensing my mood – or, more probably, my bank balance. Once the cans of cat food started to appear more regularly thanks to Bassotti’s pay packets, then I saw him maybe twice a day for a snack, calling in from wherever he’d been to wherever he was going.

  After the third trip, I didn’t hear from Tigger for a couple of days, and then an old mate called Bunny rang and asked if I fancied a few nights jamming at a club in the West End where they were trying to introduce Merengue music as the latest dance craze. I dusted off my faithful old B-flat trumpet, swilled water through it, spat out a couple of scales and made a mental note to buy some new lip-salve as the tube in the trumpet case could now double as sandpaper. Then I rang Bunny back and said sure, where and how much and, by the way, what the fuck was Merengue music anyway?

  Merengue turned out to be the Dominican Republic’s version of salsa, only less structured. That meant the brass section (Bunny on alto sax and me as two out of a seven-piece total) could do as much or as little as they liked, and so could the dancers.

  The club, off Oxford Street, was a flash place, but quality flash, no tat. The owner was an Iranian with money and no hang-ups about the Ayatollah, the Koran or the price of oil. He wandered around the club spreading bonhomie and free samples of Iranian caviar on triangles of toast in equal proportions. Halfway through the set he insisted the band tried some of his world-famous collection of vodkas. I stuck with the lemon vodka but Bunny went straight in the deep end with the Bison-grass vodka followed by a Polish over-proof vodka that had been flavoured with brandy to tone it down. Almost immediately, the seven-piece band became a sextet, but the dancers didn’t seem to notice and Bunny didn’t seem to care.

  It was after two in the morning when I left carrying Bunny’s saxophone case as well as my horn. Despite advanced numbness of most nerve endings brought on by the vodka-flavoured Bison (his words) he’d been drinking, he’d scored with a teenage brunette who said she was ‘in publishing’. I didn’t believe it as, for a start, her clothes smacked of so much money she obviously didn’t have to work, and from her conversation, she had obviously never read a book in her life. Well, not one without pictures. Come to think of it, she could have been in publishing. Then again, she might have said she was in polishing. I wasn’t paying much attention and I didn’t really fancy her friend anyway.

  One of the club’s dinner-jacketed bouncers nodded to me as I left.

  ‘You Angel?’ he grunted, without moving his lips or unfolding his arms.

  ‘I can get a message to him,’ I said cheerfully. It’s best to be reasonably honest with people like that.

  ‘Friend of yours been waiting outside for an hour or so.’

  He smirked the way doormen can get away with smirking.

  Tigger was sitting on Armstrong’s bonnet. He was wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans and was shivering. He rubbed his upper arms with his hands to keep warm.

  ‘Bastards wouldn’t let me in,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘Good. I’ll put my name down for membership immediately. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I rang you. Bassotti had a load on tonight but it’s too late now. How about tomorrow? Meet at the Grapes again, in Rimmer Road?’

  ‘When?’ I asked suspiciously, remembering the ‘Gay Karaoke Night’ signs and the fact that tomorrow was Thursday.

  ‘Closing time, out front?’

  ‘Deal. How did you know I was here?’

  ‘A real snotty bint answered your phone. Knew all about this gig and loved the sound of her own voice.’ Fenella. She’d taken the original message from Bunny. I must have words with her one day.

  ‘That your bit on the side, then?’ Tigger pushed it as I dumped the instruments in the back of Armstrong. ‘Or should that be your bit on the front as you heteros call it?’ I climbed into Armstrong and started him up. Tigger slid off the bonnet and tried the back passenger door.

  ‘Hey! It’s locked. I wanted a lift.’

  He chased me out on to Oxford Street, but the lights were with me and by the time I got to Oxford Circus he had vanished from my mirror.

  The next night, he apologised before climbing into the back of Armstrong.

  ‘Angel, I was well out of order last night.’

  ‘That you were.’

  From inside the pub came the amplified karaoke version of someone giving ‘My Way’ what for. Why was it always ‘My Way’ when it got to closing time?

  ‘Is Tigger forgiven?’ he came on, little-boy-lost.

  ‘Some of us don’t have all night, you know.’ It was Bassotti, moving uncomfortably from one foot to the other beside his Sierra. He had the collar of his jacket turned up, and even in the dark I could see his eyes blinking nervously. A neon sign flashing ‘Drug Dealer’ above his head might have made him look slightly less suspicious.

  ‘Bert,’ I acknowledged him and moved to kill the engine.

  Bassotti dangled a set of keys in front of me.

  ‘I can’t hang about tonight. Tigger knows where the van is. Do the business and leave it where you found it. Flea-brain there can drop the keys off tomorrow.’

  ‘If that’s the way you want it.’ I pocketed the keys.

  From the back, Tigger was drumming on the rumble seat behind me with the palms of his hands, rapping: ‘Let’s go go go go, on the road with this show show show …’

  Bassotti looked at him wearily and slowly shook his head.

  ‘You can’t get the staff these days,’ I said, but if he found it funny he wasn’t telling.

  He turned and walked away, hands in pockets, but he didn’t stop by the Sierra, he went diagonally across the car park. Ignoring the entrance to the pub, he disappeared behind a couple of parked cars, then I saw the glimmer of an interior light flick on and off and a door slammed.

  ‘Go go go …’ Tigger chanted from the back, but once we were out on the street, he stopped drumming and kneeled on the rumble seat so he could shout in my ear.

  ‘The van’s in Whitechapel, but there’s no need for us to trek down to Creekmouth. I’ve found us a new dump site. Just the job. We can be done in five minutes and up West.’

  ‘Does Bassotti know about this?’

  ‘What he don’t know can’t aggravate his ulcers, can it?’

  ‘Hey, I’m new on the payroll. Is it good policy to cross the boss this soon?’

  ‘Relax. What makes you think he’s the boss anyway? You’ll get the same pay for ten per cent of the driving and I do all the heavy lifting again. Can you resist an offer like that?’

  No. But I should have done.

  Chapter Four

  The lock-up wasn’t a lock-up this time. The white Transit van was simply parked at the side of one of the small streets off Stepney Way at the back of the old London Hospital in Whitechapel.

  ‘Mile End Road as far as Stepney Green, then hang a left on to Globe Road.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, not trusting his sense of direction.

  ‘It’s called Globe Town,’ Tigger said, and I noted he was biting his lower lip.

  ‘I know there’s a place called Globe Town, but nobody goes there. You might go through it to get to somewhere else, but there’s nothing there to stop for.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Tigger.

  He had done his homework, I had to give him that. He knew which side-road to take once we had turned off Globe Road on to Roman Road, and which even smaller road to take off that. In fact, if Tigger hadn’t been with me to point it out, I would have missed the entrance to the junkyard altogether.

  ‘Thi
s is it. Go on, go in, it’s okay.’

  I had stopped to let the van’s lights play on a pair of wide open double gates. One gate was resting off its hinges, the other bore the faded, hand-painted legend: HUBBARD’S YARD. I began to make out the pyramid shapes of piles of rusting car bodies organised in two lines; a scrap metal Valley of the Kings.

  ‘Go on, then,’ urged Tigger. ‘Drive in and straight through.’

  ‘Tigger,’ I started patiently, ‘this is somebody’s yard, their place of business. Somebody works here, which means there are things worth nicking, which means they don’t leave places like this undefended.’

  ‘There’s nobody here, I’m sure.’

  ‘Then they’ll have left a Doberman or a couple of pit bulls running around loose.’

  ‘No dogs. No Dobermans, no pit bulls. Promise.’

  ‘Not even an Alsatian with an attitude?’

  ‘Not even a tomcat with an attitude.’

  That didn’t exactly inspire me with confidence, but he couldn’t know why.

  ‘Honest, I’ve sussed this place out. Anything worth having away is in the workshop, and that’s locked. Anyway, we’re just driving through. Straight ahead and you come out on wasteland.’

  ‘Down by the canal.’ He looked surprised at that.

  ‘You know where we are, then?’

  ‘Roughly. We’ve just come through Bethnal Green and that’ – I pointed to our right and up, where a stream of orange lights marked a last train heading for home – ‘is the railway line into Liverpool Street, and it goes over the Grand Union Canal somewhere round about here.’

  ‘It took me days to find this place,’ he said sullenly. ‘But I have checked it out. Really. There’s no one home.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said, finding a gear, ‘but just remember, I don’t get out of the van.’

  I moved the van into the yard less out of reassurance from Tigger than concern that even in a forgotten cul-de-sac, just sitting there with the engine running made us look suspicious.