Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  So I enjoyed writing this story ‘Billie’s Blues’, and was grateful for the chance to do so, the scenes between Resnick and Eileen perhaps giving me special pleasure, suffused as they are with promise and regret. Very Charlie Resnick.

  John Harvey, London, 2002

  Now’s the Time

  “They’re all dying, Charlie.”

  They had been in the kitchen, burnished tones of Clifford Brown’s trumpet, soft like smoke from down the hall. Dark rye bread sliced and ready, coffee bubbling, Resnick had tilted the omelette pan and let the whisked eggs swirl around before forking the green beans and chopped red pepper into their midst. The smell of garlic and butter permeated the room.

  Ed Silver stood watching, trying to ignore the cats that nudged, variously, around his feet. Through wisps of grey hair, a fresh scab showed clearly among the lattice-work of scars. The hand which held his glass was swollen at the knuckles and it shook.

  “S’pose you think I owe you one, Charlie? That it?”

  Earlier that evening, Resnick had talked Silver out of swinging a butcher’s cleaver through his own bare foot. “What I thought, Charlie, start at the bottom and work your way up, eh?” Resnick had bundled him into a cab and brought him home, stuck a beer in his hand and set to making them both something to eat. He hadn’t seen Ed Silver in ten years or more, a drinking club in Carlton whose owner liked his jazz; Silver had set out his stall early, two choruses of ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’ solo, breakneck tempo, bass and drums both dropping out and the pianist grinning, open-mouthed. The speed of thought: those fingers then.

  Resnick divided the omelette on to two plates. “You want to bring that bread?” he said. “We’ll eat in the other room.”

  The boldest of the cats, Dizzy, followed them hopefully through. The Clifford Brown Memorial album was still playing ‘Theme of No Repeat’.

  “They’re all dying, Charlie.”

  “Who?”

  “Every bugger!”

  And now it was true.

  SILVER Edward Victor. Suddenly at home, on February 16, 1993. Acclaimed jazz musician of the bebop era. Funeral service and memorial meeting, Friday, February 19 at Golders Green Crematorium at 11.45 a.m. Inquiries to Mason Funeral and Monumental Services, High Lanes, Finchley.

  Resnick was not a Guardian reader; not much of a reader at all, truth to tell. Police Review, the local paper, Home Office circulars and misspelt incident reports, Jazz Journal – that was about it. But Frank Delaney had called him Tuesday morning; Frank, who had continued booking Ed Silver into his pub long after most others had turned their backs, left Ed’s calls unanswered on their answerphones. “Seen the Guardian today, Charlie?” Resnick had taken it for a joke.

  Now he was on the train as it approached St Pancras, that copy of the newspaper folded on the seat beside him, the debris of his journey – plastic cups, assorted wrappings from his egg mayonnaise sandwich, bacon and tomato roll, lemon iced gingerbread – pushed to one side of the table. There was the Regent’s canal and as they passed the gas holders at King’s Cross, Resnick got to his feet, lifted his coat down from the rack and shrugged his way inside it. He would have to walk the short distance from one terminal to another and catch the underground.

  *

  Even at that hour, King’s Cross seemed jaded, sour, down at heel, broad corners and black cabs; bare-legged girls whose pallid skin was already beginning to sweat; men who leaned against walls and railings and glanced up at you as you passed, ready to sell you anything that wasn’t theirs. Ageless and sexless, serious alcoholics sat or squatted, clutching brown bottles of cider, cans of Special Brew. High above the entrances, inside the wide concourse, security cameras turned slowly with remote-control eyes.

  The automatic doors slid back at Resnick’s approach and beyond the lights of the computerised arrivals board, the Leeds train spilled several hundred soccer fans across the shiny floor. Enlivened by the possibility of business, two girls who had been sharing a breakfast of chips outside Casey Jones, began to move towards the edges of the throng. One of them was tall, with badly hennaed hair that hung low over the fake fur collar of her coat; the other, younger, smudging a splash of red sauce like crazy lipstick across her cheek, called for her to wait. “Fuck’s sake, Brenda!” Brenda bent low to pull up the strap of her shoe, lit a cigarette.

  “We are the champions!” chanted a dozen or more youths, trailing blue and white scarves from their belts.

  In your dreams, Resnick thought.

  A couple of hapless West Ham fans, on their way to catch an away special north, found themselves shunted up against the glass front of W. H. Smith. Half a dozen British Rail staff busied themselves looking the other way.

  “Come on, love,” the tall girl said to one of the men, an ex-squaddie with regimental colours and a death’s head tattooed along his arms, “me and my mate here. We’ve got a place.”

  “Fuck off!” the man said. “Just fucking fuck off!”

  “Fuck you too!” Turning away from the tide of abuse, she saw Resnick watching. “And you. What the hell d’you think you’re staring at, eh? Wanker!”

  Loud jeers and Resnick moved away between the supporters but now that her attention had been drawn to him, Brenda had him in her sights. Middle-aged man, visitor, not local, not exactly smart but bound to be carrying a quid or two.

  “Don’t go.”

  “What?”

  The hand that spread itself against him was a young girl’s hand. “Don’t go.”

  “How old are you?” Resnick said. The eyes that looked back at him from between badly applied make-up had not so long since been a child’s eyes.

  “Whatever age you want,” Brenda said.

  A harassed woman with one kiddie in a pushchair and another clinging to one hand, banged her suitcase inadvertently against the back of Brenda’s legs and, even as she swore at her, Brenda took the opportunity to lose her balance and stumble forwards. “Oops, sorry,” she giggled, pressing herself against Resnick’s chest.

  “That’s all right,” Resnick said, taking hold of her arms and moving her, not roughly, away. Beneath the thin wool there was precious little flesh on her bones.

  “Don’t want the goods,” her friend said tartly, “don’t mess them about.”

  “Lorraine,” Brenda said, “mind your own fucking business, right?”

  Lorraine pouted a B-movie pout and turned away.

  “Well?” Brenda asked, head cocked.

  Resnick shook his head. “I’m a police officer,” he said.

  “Right,” said Brenda, “and I’m fucking Julia Roberts!” And she wandered off to join her friend.

  The undertaker led Resnick into a side room and unlocked a drawer; from the drawer he took a medium size manila envelope and from this he slid on to the plain table Ed Silver’s possessions. A watch with a cracked face that had stopped at seven minutes past eleven; an address book with more than half the names crossed through; a passport four years out of date, dog-eared at the edges; a packet of saxophone reeds; one pound, thirteen pence in change. In a second envelope there were two photographs. One, in colour, shows Silver in front of a poster for the North Sea Jazz Festival, his name, partly obscured, behind him in small print. He is wearing dark glasses but, even so, it is clear from the shape of his face he is squinting up his eyes against the sun. His grey hair is cut in a once-fashionable crew cut and the sports coat he is wearing is bright dog-tooth check and over large. His alto sax is cradled across his arms. If that picture were ten, fifteen years old, the other is far older – black and white faded almost to sepia. Ed Silver on the deck of the Queen Mary, the New York sky-line rising behind him. Docking or departing, Resnick couldn’t tell. Like many a would-be bopper, he had been part of Geraldo’s navy, happy to play foxtrots and waltzes in exchange for a fervid forty-eight hours in the clubs on 52nd Street, listening to Monk and Bird. Silver had bumped into Charlie Parker once, almost literally, on a midtown street and been too dumbstruck to speak.

 
Resnick slid the photographs back from sight. “Is that all?” he asked.

  Almost as an afterthought, the undertaker asked him to wait while he fetched the saxophone case, with its scuffed leather coating and tarnished clasps; stuck to the lid was a slogan: Keep Music Live! Of course, the case was empty, sax long gone to buy more scotch when Ed Silver had needed it most. Resnick hoped it had tasted good.

  In the small chapel there were dried flowers and the wreath that Frank Delaney had sent. The coffin sat, cheap, before grey curtains and Resnick stood in the second row, glancing round through the vicar’s perfunctory sermon to see if anyone else was going to come in. Nobody did. “He was a man, who in his life, brought pleasure to many,” the vicar said. Amen, thought Resnick, to that. Then the curtains slowly parted and the coffin slid forward, rocking just a little, just enough, towards the flames.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

  If the women don’t get you, the whisky must.

  While the taped organ music wobbled through ‘Abide With Me’, inside his head Resnick was hearing Ed Silver in that small club off Carlton Hill, stilling the drinking and the chatter with an elegiac ‘Parker’s Mood’.

  “No family, then?” the vicar said outside, anxious to find time for a cigarette and a pee before the next service.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  The vicar nodded sagely. “If you’ve nothing else in mind for them, we’ll see to it the ashes are scattered here, on the rose garden. Blooms are a picture, let me tell you, later in the year. We have one or two visitors, find time to lend a hand keeping it in order, but of course there’s no funding as such. We’re dependent upon donations.”

  Resnick reached into his pocket for his wallet and realised it was gone.

  The ‘meat rack’ stretched back either side of the station, roads lined by lock-up garages and hole-in-the-wall businesses offering third-hand office furniture and auto parts. Resnick walked the gauntlet, hands in pockets, head down, the best part of three blocks and neither girl in sight. Finally, he stopped by a woman in a red coat, sitting on an upturned dustbin and using a discarded plastic fork to scrape dog shit from the sole of her shoe. There were bruises on her neck, yellow and violet, fading under the soiled white blouse which was all she was wearing above the waist.

  “Ought to be locked up,” the woman said, scarcely glancing up, “letting their animals do their business anywhere. Fall arse over tit and get your hand in this, God knows what kind of disease you could pick up.” And then, flicking the contents of the fork out towards the street, “Twenty-five, short time.”

  “No,” Resnick said, “I don’t . . .”

  She shook her head and swore as the fork snapped in two. “Fifteen, then, standing up.”

  “I’m looking for someone,” Resnick said.

  “Oh, are you? Right, well,” she stood straight and barely came level with his elbows, “as long as it’s not Jesus.”

  He assured her it was not.

  “You’d be amazed, the number we get round here, looking to find Jesus. Mind you, they’re not above copping a good feel while they’re about it. Took me, one of them, dog collar an’ all, round that bit of waste ground there. Mary, he says, get down on your knees and pray. Father, I says, I doubt you’ll find the Lord up there, one hand on his rosary beads, the other way up my skirt. Mind you, it’s my mother I blame, causing me to be christened Mary. On account of that Mary Magdalene, you know, in the Bible. Right horny twat, and no mistake.” Resnick had the impression that even if he walked away she would carry on talking just the same. “This person you’re looking for,” she said, “does she have a name or what?”

  The hotel was in a row of similar hotels, cream paint flaking from its walls and a sign that advertised all modern conveniences in every room. And then a few, Resnick thought. The manager was in Cyprus and the youth behind the desk was an archaeology student from King’s, working his way, none too laboriously, through college. “Brenda?” he said, slipping an unwrapped condom into the pages of his book to keep his place. “Is that the one from Glasgow or the one from Kirkby-in-Ashfield?”

  “Where?”

  “Kirkby. It’s near . . .”

  “I know where it’s near.”

  “Yes? Don’t sound as though you’re from round there.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Langwith,” the student said. “It’s the posh side of Mansfield.”

  Resnick had heard it called some things in his time, but never that. “That Brenda,” he said. “Is she here?”

  “Look, you’re not her father, are you?”

  Resnick shook his head.

  “Just old enough to be.” When Resnick failed to crack a smile, he apologised. “She’s busy.” He took a quick look at his watch. “Not for so very much longer.”

  Resnick sighed and stepped away. The lobby was airless and smelt of . . . he didn’t like to think what it smelt of. Whoever had Blu-Tacked the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers to the wall had managed to get it upside down. Perhaps it was the student, Resnick thought, perhaps it was a statement. A – what was it called? – a metaphor.

  If Brenda was as young as she looked and from Kirkby, chances were she’d done a runner from home. As soon as this was over, he’d place a call, have her checked out. He was still thinking that when he heard the door slam and then the scream.

  Resnick’s shoulder spun the door wide, shredding wood from around its hinges. At first the man’s back was all he could see, arm raised high and set to come thrashing down, a woman’s heeled shoe reversed in his hand. Hidden behind him, Brenda shrieked in anticipation. Resnick seized the man’s arm as he turned and stepped inside his swing. The shoe flew high and landed on top of the plywood wardrobe in the corner of the room. Resnick released his grip and the man hit the door jamb with a smack and fell to his knees. His round face flushed around startled eyes and a swathe of hair hung sideways from his head. His pale blue shirt was hanging out over dark striped trousers and at one side his braces were undone. Resnick didn’t need to see the briefcase in the corner to know it was there.

  From just beyond the doorway the student stood thinking, there, I was right, he is her father.

  “She was asking . . .” the man began.

  “Shut it!” said Resnick. “I don’t want to hear.”

  Brenda was crying, short sobs that shook her body. Blood was meandering from a cut below one eye. “Bastard wanted to do it without a rubber. Bastard! I wouldn’t let him. Not unless he gave me another twenty pound.”

  Resnick leaned over and lifted her carefully to her feet, held her there. “I don’t suppose,” he said over his shoulder, “you’ve got anything like first aid?”

  The man snatched up his briefcase and ran, careening between the banister and the wall. “I think there’s plasters or something,” the student said.

  Resnick had gone to the hospital with her and waited while they put seven stitches in her cheek. His wallet had been in her bag, warrant card, return ticket and, astonishingly, the credit card he almost never used were still there; the cash, of course, was gone. He used the card to withdraw money from the change kiosk in the station. Now they were sitting in the Burger King opposite St Pancras and Resnick was tucking into a double cheeseburger with bacon, while Brenda picked at chicken pieces and chain-smoked Rothmans King Size.

  Without her make-up, she looked absurdly young.

  “I’m eighteen,” she’d said, when Resnick had informed her he was contacting her family. “I can go wherever I like.”

  She was eleven weeks past her fifteenth birthday; she hadn’t been to school since September, had been in London a little over a month. She had palled up with Lorraine the second or third night she was down. Half her takings went to Lorraine’s pimp boyfriend, who spent it on crack; almost half the rest went on renting out the rooms.

  “You can’t make me go back,” she said.

  Resnick asked if she wanted tea or coffee and she opted for a milk shake instead. The fe
male police officer waiting patiently outside would escort her home on the last train.

  “You know you’re wasting your fucking time, don’t you?” she called at Resnick across the pavement. “I’ll only run off again. I’ll be back down here inside a fucking week!”

  The officer raised an eyebrow towards Resnick, who nodded, and the last he saw was the two of them crossing against the traffic, Brenda keeping one clear step ahead.

  The maître d’ at Ronnie Scott’s had trouble seating Resnick because he was stubbornly on his own; finally he slipped him into one of the raised tables at the side, next to a woman who was drinking copious amounts of mineral water and doing her knitting. Spike Robinson was on the stand, stooped and somewhat fragile-looking, Ed Silver’s contemporary, more or less. A little bit of Stan Getz, a lot of Lester Young, Robinson had been one of Resnick’s favourite tenor players for quite a while. There was an album of Gershwin tunes that found its way on to the record player an awful lot.

  Now Resnick ate spaghetti and measured out his beer and listened as Robinson took the tune of ‘I Should Care’ between his teeth and worried at it like a terrier with a favourite ball. At the end of the number, he stepped back to the microphone. “I’d like to dedicate this final tune of the set to the memory of Ed Silver, a very fine jazz musician who this week passed away. Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’.”

  And when it was over and the musicians had departed backstage and Ronnie Scott himself was standing there encouraging the applause – “Spike Robinson, ladies and gentlemen, Spike Robinson.” – Resnick blew his nose and raised his glass and continued to sit there with the tears drying on his face. Seven minutes past eleven, near as made no difference.

  Dexterity

  If Resnick had bumped into Nicky Snape early that Saturday morning, he could have become the proud owner of a bargain price, next-to-new CD-player, fully programmable, random play facility, digital filter, the whole 16-bit. And all for thirty quid. Twenty-five, should that have been all the cash Resnick could lay his hands on at the time.