by Mike Ripley
I pulled on a sweatshirt and thought about a shave. Designer stubble was still in, but only just. Mine wasn’t so much designed as crayoned on the back of an envelope. Still, it would do.
Pre-flight check: wallet, watch, packet of Sweet Afton (great Irish smokes but difficult to get in England), lighter, car keys, folded sunglasses, flies zipped. Ready to roll.
Hang on: watch. I’m a bit paranoid about my watches. No, that’s not true. It’s not paranoia; people really do stare at me if I’m not wearing one. I was quite proud of my new one (the old one was lost in, shall we just say suspicious circumstances), which I’d bought with some cash I’d come into. (No, don’t ask.) Getting a Rolex would be like taking out adverts in the Muggers’ Gazette, so I’d gone for a Tissot. Not the stone-faced with the red-and-yellow hands; no, too gross. I’d chosen the much more sensible Seastar, which would work underwater at depths long after I’d get the bends.
Needless to say, Werewolf had a Mickey Mouse watch that made an obscene gesture twice a day at five past 11.
‘Are yer fit to be seen on the street, you old tart?’ Werewolf yelled from the stairs.
‘Okay. Let’s be careful out there,’ I shouted back.
Werewolf scampered down the stairs and out of the front door ahead of me. I winced, knowing what was coming.
As I came out of No 9, the mad Irishman was 20 yards down Stuart Street standing on the kerb looking everywhere but at me. He had his right arm raised and the index finger pointed.
‘Taxi!’
All right, so I drive a taxi, and I get a lot of stick for it. Not that I’m a real musher, and I’ve certainly never done the Knowledge. It’s just that where other people have 2.2 VW Golfs each or a clapped-out Cortina, and ill-mannered gits drive Escort XRis, because they can’t afford BMWs, I have a de-licensed black London cab called Armstrong. So what’s yours called?
But seriously, what else would you drive around London? What other vehicle doesn’t get clamped, speeding tickets or hit by buses, and which other vehicle runs on diesel, can go twice round the clock and still run sweet as a nut, never has any trouble getting an MOT and can go down Oxford Street without getting pulled by the Bill? I’m surprised Ford are still solvent.
Werewolf, as you’ve probably guessed, likes riding in the back and shouting directions. He also waves to the pedestrians. I must have a word with him about that one day.
We made it down to the Garden with the minimum of fuss, all things considered, and I found a half-inch of parking space on Henrietta Street. I turned Armstrong around before parking him (Rule of Life No. 277: always park facing the way you’re likely to make a quick exit), and turning through 180 degrees is another thing you can do in a cab in London without getting honked at.
‘So where do we find this mate of yours?’ asked Werewolf, his eyes following the buttocks of a young lady metronoming her way down the pavement.
‘Given the time of day, the barometric pressure and this morning’s horoscope for Aquarius, there’s a fair chance he’ll be in the Punch and Judy.’
‘Would that be a public house by any chance?’
I could see Werewolf in the driving mirror. He still had his eyes on the pavement.
‘There’s some dispute about that in certain quarters, but roughly speaking, it is.’
‘Then what are we doing here?’
We found Bunny in the downstairs bar of the Punch and Judy, and he and Werewolf got on like a house on fire.
Bunny is one of the few people I know good enough to play as a busker in Covent Garden and, more to the point, he’s actually gone through the audition all the others impose. Anyone who doesn’t go through the right channels soon finds accidents happening. You know the sort of thing: guitar strings suddenly catch fire, sax reeds get Dutch Elm disease, amplifiers turn out to be more use as microwaves, so forth, so fifth.
‘So how much can you make here?’ Werewolf asked him in between gulps of stout.
‘Well, it’s mostly tourists round here. A lot of Dutch birds, the odd Yank, though they tend to go round in pairs, perhaps …’
‘No, Bunny,’ I said soothingly. ‘How much? Not: who?’
‘Oh.’ All innocence. ‘About a ton and a half on a good day. ‘Course, that’s if the bloody mime artists aren’t around. They screw up the traffic flow something rotten.’
Bunny sipped orange juice, and I poured myself some alcohol-free lager. That was the second (and last) sensible move I made that day after brushing my teeth.
‘And what about the police?’ Werewolf pronounced it pol-lis.
‘No problem,’ said Bunny.
And he was probably right. Busking isn’t actually an offence in British law, but obstruction is, and that’s what they do you on. London Transport police, on the other hand, just move you on, though they’re not so worried about the buskers as about the fly boys selling suitcases full of pirated cassette tapes. I tend to be more philosophical about them, as the tapes are so badly and loudly recorded that I reckon it’s a plot to blow the eardrums of all the ginks on the tube wearing impersonal stereos. More power to their elbow, I say.
‘So where do I get my instrument, then?’ asked Werewolf, but not before he’d got another round in. He gave me a withering look as he handed over another non-alcoholic lager to me.
‘Cricketer’s lager,’ he said scornfully.
‘Eh?’ said Bunny.
‘Gives you the runs,’ I explained.
‘Oh. Five-string banjo, wasn’t it?’ Bunny the professional. If it didn’t involve women, Bunny’s sense of humour was strictly limited.
‘That’s the ticket. Got one?’
‘No, I only deal in reeds and brass, but Tiger Tim will give you the loan of one for a tenner.’
‘He sounds just my sort of man,’ grinned Werewolf. I knew he was grinning; I could see his beard move.
Tiger Tim turned out to be a dwarf with three guitars and two banjos, all on stands, upright and forming the points of a pentacle on his pitch near the corner of the entrance to the old market. He wore his hair long over a faded denim jacket and kept it out of his eyes with a red bandana tied pirate-fashion. He had at least six pentacles on chains around his neck and two on an amulet on his left wrist. I’d lay odds that he hadn’t been to a Round Tablers lunch for a while.
I let Bunny do the negotiating, but I found a tenner, which was only fair as I was bank-rolling the band for Salome’s party.
There was a large lunch-time crowd drifting round the flea market and out of the shopping plaza and it was a bright, sunny afternoon. Werewolf couldn’t resist it.
He tuned up Tiger Tim’s banjo and produced an un-coloured bottle neck with the end ground down for safety, probably a souvenir of a Corona drinking session on his last California trip. He slipped the tube of glass over the middle finger of his left hand and tried a few chords before breaking in to the Boss’s ‘Spare Parts and Broken Hearts’.
Tiger Tim jammed along for a few seconds, then gave up. The crowd had never heard bottle-neck banjo before, and Werewolf was what they wanted to hear.
After half an hour, the regular buskers formed a committee and had a whipround. They elected a white-faced clown as their spokesman, which amused me because I thought he was going to do it in mime for a minute.
The clown sidled up to me in the crowd and hissed through the corner of his mouth. ‘Get the mad Irish git aht of ‘ere and there’s a drink in it for yer.’
I felt my hand being tapped, and I looked down to see a couple of ten-pound notes tightly folded. I took them from the clown. Fancy, being run out of town by a Cockney Marcel Marceau impersonator!
I tipped Werewolf the nod and he finished with a flourish, packing up the banjo to the applause of the crowd (and cries of ‘More’ – although some of the other buskers muttered ‘Less’), who pitched another few quid into the banjo case.
When we were in Armstrong heading back to Hackney, Werewolf laughed.
‘Nicely done, Angel me old mucker. I reckon we’re a tenner apiece up on the day, even allowing for the rent of the instrument. We haven’t pulled that one since … when was it?’
‘The Edinburgh Festival.’ That time we got paid to leave by a consortium of fire-eaters, two street-theatre companies, a bagpiper (you ever heard a synthesised bagpipe?) and an accordionist. ‘And you just couldn’t resist showing off, could you? One of these days, they’ll do you over rather than pay you off.’
Werewolf laughed again.
‘I’m terrible aren’t I? Some days –’ he was being philosophical; I could tell, because he’d put his feet up on the glass partition behind my head – ‘I just shouldn’t be let out of the house.’
Chapter Two
Salome’s birthday bash was held in a pub called the Pavilion End, because it had been done out like a cricket pavilion. Apart from the cricket bores from the City who haunt it during the summer, it’s not a bad boozer. It’s just behind St Paul’s, on Watling Street, the old Roman road that connected the Kent coast with St Albans, though it beats me why anyone should want to go to St Albans.
There was a downstairs room for parties and where the pub occasionally had a jazz trio or quartet, but there was little space, so I’d limited our ensemble to five: me and my horn, Werewolf and Tiger Tim’s banjo, a BBC producer called Martin who would take his trombone anywhere to get in a gig, and my regular co-conspirators Dod and Trippy. Dod is not only a passable drummer but he also has a van big enough to transport us all, and Trippy, when he’s straight, is a passable pianist. (Actually, Trippy is a very good pianist, but only passably straight most of the time. He’s not called Trippy because he falls over his bootlaces.)
Martin was there first, partly because he was keen – ‘Jolly decent of you to let me jam with you’ – and partly because the rest of us had arrived in Dod’s van, which is never reliable at the best of times and certainly not in the City at rush hour.
I introduced Werewolf to Martin – he already knew Dod and Trippy – and we managed to set up Dod’s drum kit and tune up before the pub started to fill. Well, I say tune up. Trippy opened the lid of the upright piano, estimated that there were at least 70 keys there and then headed for the bar. Werewolf took Tiger Tim’s banjo out of its case, murmured, ‘A man after me own thirst,’ and followed him.
‘It’ll end in tears,’ I said to Dod.
‘Yer probably right,’ he said. Then he tightened the last butterfly nut on his high hat and went to join them.
‘Er … can I get you a pint in?’ Martin asked nervously.
‘Might as well,’ I said resignedly. ‘Make it two.’
‘Two? Each?’
‘It gets very crowded in here.’
By the time Salome appeared, there were so many red-striped shirts so close together that I thought my vertical hold needed adjusting. The place had filled so much that the next champagne cork would probably constitute assault and battery.
You get the picture already. The jeunesse-dorée-ever-so-slightly-blue (as Werewolf once described them) were there on mass. The young City slickers had taken off their double-breasted suit jackets and were flashing the shirts they’d bought at Next before it went downmarket, which they probably got their mums to wash. I wondered if it was true that they bought suits with an extra jacket so they could leave it over the backs of their chairs in front of their screens when they went to lunch. Not that many of them ever ate lunch. Just think, they might miss a couple of million between Mars bars.
We’d done a W C Handy selection, and I was quite pleased with my solo on ‘Hesitation Blues’, though I fluffed some of the fast high ones on ‘Atlanta Blues’ trying to do a Satchmo. Well, I get carried away. Then we’d done ‘Tiger Rag’, partly because Martin wanted to show off, and I’ve always thought it was a bone player’s piece anyway, and then ‘And the Angels Sing’, which was a bit of a private joke between me and Werewolf involving distant memories of three Aer Lingus hostesses (and, yes, I know all the jokes) in the days way back when there was safe sex, or what we thought was.
Then I saw Salome’s legs coming downstairs and we slid into ‘Happy Birthday’, which could be my theme tune I seem to play it so often.
Salome was wearing a blue jersey dress I hadn’t seen before, a red leather belt about a foot wide with a buckle no bigger than a portcullis, long red evening gloves up to the elbows and really dangerous red high heels. It was enough to impress an atheist.
There was a general increase in the hubbub at her arrival. She seemed to be known by most of the crowd, and a fresh volley of champagne corks went off at the bar. I was
beginning to know how Rommel felt at El Alamein.
It seemed a good time for the band to take five – which Werewolf deliberately misconstrued as meaning pints of stout – and mingle with the throng.
Salome was surrounded by people pushing presents at her and saying ‘Darling’ or ‘‘Ello, darlin’,’ depending on which side of the river they lived. I blew her a kiss when our eyes met, and she smiled back, but even at a distance, I could tell she was going through the motions rather than letting her hair down.
Werewolf and I made our way to the bar by different circular routes – an old U-boat tactic when hunting in packs. I kept an ear open and picked up the City chat.
‘… saw it coming a mile off. Got out of dollars and into yen nearly a year ago …’
‘… but it’s basically bid-proof because of the two-tier voting structure ...’
‘... so I said orwite, son, you can ‘ave what I can get but there’ll be a premium that’ll make your nuts ache, and ‘e said ...’
‘... and as I have never exactly wet myself over the trade figures, I don’t see why my clients should ...’
You know the sort of stuff; well, you would if you’d ever been in a bar within a mile of Bishopsgate after 5.00 pm, or after 4.00 since they changed the pub hours. There was one thing I caught, though, that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
‘... the spade bitch deserves the stick whether she’s doing it or not.’
I turned as much as the crowd would allow, but it was impossible to tell where the voice had come from. It could have been any one of six pairs of large tortoiseshell glasses or about a dozen pale yellow ties. I’d remember it, though.
Werewolf had reached the bar about six feet away, and he sidled along until he was at my elbow, mouthing the words ‘Pint o’ stout,’ and I realised I could lip-read Irish accents.
‘So these are what yer call Yuppies, are they?’ he asked between sips.
‘Some are,’ I said, after ordering a bottle of Pils.
We turned and rested our backs on the bar, like Alan Ladd used to do, except we weren’t standing on boxes.
‘Now he –’ I pointed with my glass – ‘probably is, because he’s had time to go to his squash club or somewhere like Cannon’s gym after work and break into just enough sweat to justify a shower and a change into his country casuals. His work suit’s probably in the Porsche parked round in Finsbury Square.’ The tall blond guy I meant was wearing enough designer labels to account for the GNP of, say, Andorra.
‘But he, on the other hand, –’ I swung my Pils to the right – ‘that’s probably a Puppy.’
Werewolf squinted his eyes in curiosity, but I knew he wouldn’t come out and ask.
‘A Previously Upwardly-mobile etc,’ I explained. ‘Did very well out of the Big Bang but has found it very hard going a year on. Probably been demoted when his brokers got taken over by a bank or similar. You can tell, because he’s still wearing Mr Harry suits even though they’ve been naff for – ooh – six months now.’
‘I’ve heard of them, but I never thought I’d actually see one. It makes me feel like David-fucking-Attenborough.’
; ‘And there –’ I noticed my glass was nearly empty – ‘is the future. The one drinking Coke from the bottle and trying to eat a pound of peanuts because he’s heard protein is good for you. Looks like he hasn’t taken O-Levels yet, and he probably hasn’t, and now he won’t ‘cos he’s earning too much.’
‘As what?’
‘They call them market-makers now. It used to be jobbers, you know, on the Stock Exchange floor. Before the Big Bang, the best he could have hoped for was a tick-tack man’s assistant on a race course.’
Werewolf pushed his tongue into his right cheek until his beard bristled. It was his way of looking thoughtful.
‘And the public school hangers-on?’ he asked.
‘Lombards.’
‘Lots Of Money But Are Right Dickheads?’
‘Correct. Your round.’
Werewolf turned to the bar and noticed a couple of double-breasted suits using mobile phones. I could now sense the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.
‘Watch this,’ he whispered, and edged along the bar as if trying to get to the barman. As he moved, he sneaked up behind the two mobile users and gently nudged each one on the elbow.
I tried to assume my never-seen-him-before-in-my-life (‘your Honour’) expression as the two suits turned angrily on him, but Werewolf just smiled and said ‘Sorry, sur’ in his best bog Irish, and they let it go at that, moving away from the bar before trying to redial.
‘They’re very badly designed, those BT mobiles, yer know. The “Off” button is so close to the ear-piece that it’s ever so easy to cut yerself off, just putting them up close.’
‘How do you know stuff like that, Werewolf?’
‘It’s always happening with mine.’ He handed me a pint.
‘I never had you down as a slave to modern technology.’