If you were right now in London, we would be having an affair. Sneaking into cheap hotels, hunting for lies and excuses to the deception. Stealing brief evenings, weekends in search of always more forbidden joy. Would the sex be good? Impossible to say. Feverish, sweaty, shockingly intimate.
Come to think of it, there must also be a London of lovers. A London most of us know little about. A city where the geography is human as well as physical, where I should discover bars which are quiet and discreet, and I could take your hand in mine, without acquaintances spying. Where there are dark streets where I might slip my hand under your shirt and caress your shadowy nipples to hardness, alleys where our crotches might rub against each other with impunity.
Strange how the vision, the topology of a city can change according to circumstances, like a parallel world that exists contiguous to the one we know as normal, invisible but so close. In this one I sell books and write you foolish letters where I reveal the worst of my hidden self, in the other London, we fuck wondrously, mingle juices and sweat in unknown beds and awake blearily in the grey morning with my cock still embedded in you, a familiar geometry of desire and lazy friction binding our bodies together in adulterous ardour (you are married, aren’t you? Somehow I guess you must be, and of course you know I am too).
Kate, sweet sweet Kate, what are we to do?
With much affection.
Maxim
* * * *
Dear Maxim,
We meet in London. Certainly it must be London, the dark London of my imagination, the one from all the books full of fog and dread, the city of a thousand chimneys and unending parks where all policemen are polite like in a novel by Agatha Christie, where all the freaks fix you with mad, staring eyes like in the Factory books of Derek Raymond.
So we come together at last.
Six o’clock in a private club in Soho. We order drinks, make small talk and barely hear each other over the din of the regulars. Drinks over, you suggest we eat. We find a nearby Indian restaurant. The food is truly delicious. Then, a million things still unsaid, we move on to a pub. I imagine it’s in a basement. Clumsily, we try to explain our feelings, how we arrived at this crazy situation. Fleetingly you touch my thigh through the fabric of my dress. I buy the next round. What I don’t say is that you’re not quite the man I expected. Your hair is flecked with grey, you readily admit you’re slightly overweight. You’re probably thinking, she never said she was so tall, and your eyes can’t keep away from the small brown mole there at the onset of her cleavage.
‘I’ll drive you back to your hotel,’ he suggests as closing time approaches. ‘My car’s in a car park just round the corner.’
‘Yeah,’ she answers. ‘That’s no problem.’
The West End theatre crowds were in the midst of their daily exodus and it took another fifteen minutes to climb the serpentine path up the concrete bunker. At one stage, she gently put her hand on his, but the vehicle in front moved a yard or two, and he had to move his hand to disengage the handbrake.
Strange how odd moments live forever in your memory.
A touch of affection.
The blinding sound of yearning, of longing.
Outside the hotel, she kissed him lightly, between lips and cheek.
‘We’ll have to talk again,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
And here my imagination fails me. How do we end the story, Maxim? Does Kate pull a knife from her handbag and stab him to death, blood spurting in all directions over the wet, shiny London street? Or, in a fit of despair, knowing they have nowhere else to go from here, does Maxim gently put his fingers around Kate’s neck and strangle her? It’s what characters in his stories would do, isn’t it?
We both know too well there can be no happy ending, no desperate thrashing of bodies in hotel beds, sheets strewn to all poles, shrieks of orgasm equalling cries of death, no postcoital tenderness as fingers now explore opposite orfices with gentle care rather than brutal passion.
Tell me. Write me another ending.
Send me a mystery book where you don’t come to Seattle to camp on my doorstep, quarrel with my jealous husband and end up badly beaten up by the younger man. Where I arrive in London to see you and learn you were killed when two black armed robbers attacked the store on a Monday morning, looking for the Saturday takings.
No, you will not come to Seattle and I will not go to London.
And delete my name and address from the shop’s mail order records (and thank Thalia and the staff for the excellent service this past year).
So be it.
Kate
* * * *
Wondrous Kate,
So farewell then. By the way, I never did find out what colour were your eyes.
Sadly.
Maxim
* * * *
A cool morning in the American Northwest. Kate moves lazily from bedroom to bathroom, her long white nightdress trailing behind her on the wooden floor. Somehow, she senses that her state of mind is at last serene, appeased. She looks up at the small, square mirror of the medicine cabinet. She appears tired, she thinks. Her mind wanders, aimlessly. Her husband is away on a business trip; he is a financial journalist. She has the whole apartment to herself. She can’t remember the last time this happened. Today is a day off from the library. There are pale, darker shadows under her eyes, she peers closer into the cabinet mirror. Her eyes are dark brown. Soon, she and her husband (who often sleeps on the sofa at night after they have pointless rows) will move into their new house.
In London, eight hours time difference, Maxim wearily moves from bathroom to study, sighing, more flecks of grey in his daily growth of beard. The hell with it, today he doesn’t want to shave. Downstairs, the sounds of the kids readying for school. He pulls the old red Atlas out from one of the bulging shelves. America. Washington State. Oh yes, north of Oregon. Seattle, there it is. He gazes absently at the colours on the map, the blue of the Pacific, immense all the way to Russia, the brown and white of the mountains, the green of the Montana open country. Christ, it’s so far, he thinks. Far, much too far from London.
<
* * * *
IAN RANKIN
A DEEP HOLE
I
used to be a road digger, which is to say I dug up roads for a living. These days I’m a Repair Effecter for the council’s Highways Department. I still dig up roads - sorry, highways - only now it sounds better, doesn’t it? They tell me there’s some guy in an office somewhere whose job is thinking up posh names for people like me, for the rubbish collectors and street sweepers and toilet attendants. (Usually they manage to stick in the word ‘environmental’ somewhere.) This way, we’re made to feel important. Must be some job that, thinking up posh names. I wonder what job title he’s given himself. Environmental Title Coordination Executive, eh?
They call me Sam the Spade. There’s supposed to be a joke there, but I don’t get it. I got the name because after Robbie’s got to work with the pneumatic drill, I get in about things with the spade and clear out everything he’s broken up. Robbie’s called ‘The Driller Killer’. That was the name of an old horror video. I never saw it myself. I tried working with the pneumatic drill a few times. There’s more pay if you operate the drill. You become skilled rather than unskilled labour. But after fifteen seconds I could feel the fillings popping out of my teeth. Even now my spine aches in bed at night. Too much sex, the boys say. Ha ha.
Now Daintry, his title would be something like Last Hope Cash Dispensation Executive. Or, in the old parlance, a plain money lender. Nobody remembers Daintry’s first name. He shrugged it off some time back when he was a teenager, and he hasn’t been a teenager for a few years and some. He’s the guy you go to on a Friday or Saturday for a few quid to see you through the weekend. And come the following week’s dole cheque (or, if you’re one of the fortunate few, pay packet) Daintry’ll be waiting while you cash it, his hand out for the money he loaned plus a whack of interest.
While you’re only too happy to see Daintry before the weekend, you’re not so happy about him still being around after the weekend. You don’t want to pay him back, certainly not the interest. But you do, inevitably. You do pay him back. Because he’s a persistent sort of fellow with a good line in colourful threats and a ready abundance of Physical Persuasion Techniques.
I think the chief reason people didn’t like Daintry was that he never made anything of himself. I mean, he still lived on the same estate as his clients, albeit in one of the two-storey houses rather than the blocks of flats. His front garden was a jungle, his window panes filthy, and the inside of his house a thing of horror. He dressed in cheap clothes, which hung off him. He wouldn’t shave for days, his hair always needed washing . . . You’re getting the picture, eh? Me, when I’m not working I’m a neat and tidy sort of guy. My mum’s friends, the women she gossips with, they’re always shaking their heads and asking how come I never found myself a girl. They speak about me in the past tense like that, like I’m not going to find one now. On the contrary. I’m thirty-eight, and all my friends have split up with their wives by now. So there are more and more single women my age appearing around the estate. It’s only a question of time. Soon it’ll be Brenda’s turn. She’ll leave Harry, or he’ll kick her out. No kids, so that’s not a problem. I hear gossip that their arguments are getting louder and louder and more frequent. There are threats too, late at night after a good drink down at the club. I’m leaving you, no you’re not, yes I am, well get the hell out then, I’ll be back for my stuff, on you go, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction, well stay if you like.
Just like a ballet, eh? Well, I think so anyway. I’ve been waiting for Brenda for a long time. I can wait a little longer. I’m certainly a more attractive prospect than Daintry. Who’d move in with him? Nobody, I can tell you. He’s a loner. No friends, just people he might drink with. He’ll sometimes buy a few drinks for a few of the harder cases, then get them to put the frighteners on some late-payer who’s either getting cocky or else talking about going to the police. Not that the police would do anything. What? Around here? If they’re not in Daintry’s pocket, they either don’t care about the place anyway or else are scared to come near. Daintry did a guy in once inside the club. A Sunday afternoon too, stabbed him in the toilets. Police came, talked to everyone in the club - nobody’d seen anything. Daintry may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. Besides, there’s always a reason. If you haven’t crossed him, you’re none of his business . . . and he’d better not be any of yours.
I knew him of course. Oh yeah, we went to school together, same class all the way from five to sixteen years old. He was never quite as good as me at the subjects, but he was quiet and pretty well behaved. Until about fifteen. A switch flipped in his brain at fifteen. Actually, I’m lying: he was always better than me at arithmetic. So I suppose he was cut out for a career as a money lender. Or, as he once described himself, ‘a bank manager with menaces’.
God knows how many people he’s murdered. Can’t be that many, or we’d all have noticed. That’s why I thought all the information I used to give him was just part of his act. He knew word would get around about what he was asking me for, and those whispers and rumours would strengthen his reputation. That’s what I always thought. I never took it seriously. As a result, I tapped him for a loan once or twice and he never charged me a penny. He also bought me a few drinks, and once provided a van when I wanted to sell the piano. See, he wasn’t all bad. He had his good side. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d never have shifted that piano, and it’d still be sitting there in the living room reminding my mother of the tunes dad used to play on it, tunes she’d hum late into the night and then again at the crack of dawn.
It seemed strange at first that he’d want to see me. He would come over to me in pubs and sling his arm around my neck, asking if I was all right, patting me and ordering the same again. We’d hardly spoken more than a sentence at a time to one another since leaving school, but now he was smiles and reminiscences and all interested in my job of work.
‘I just dig holes.’
He nodded. ‘And that’s important work, believe me. Without the likes of you, my car’s suspension would be shot to hell.’
Of course, his car’s suspension was shot to hell. It was a 1973 Ford Capri with tinted windows, an air duct and a spoiler. It was a loser’s car, with dark green nylon fur on the dashboard and the door panels. The wheel arches were history, long since eaten by rust. Yet every year without fail it passed its MOT. The coincidence was, the garage mechanic was a regular client of Daintry’s.
‘I could get a new car,’ Daintry said, ‘but it gets me from A back to A again, so what’s the point?’
There was something in this. He seldom left the estate. He lived there, shopped there, he’d been born there and he’d die there. He never took a holiday, not even a weekend away, and he never ever ventured south of the river. He spent all his free time watching videos. The guy who runs the video shop reckoned Daintry had seen every film in the shop a dozen times over.
‘He knows their numbers off by heart.’
He did know lots about movies: running time, director, writer, supporting actor. He was always a hot contender when the club ran its trivia quiz. He sat in that smelly house of his with the curtains shut and a blue light flickering. He was a film junkie. And somehow, he managed to spend all his money on them. He must have done, or what else did he do with it? His Rolex was a fake, lighter than air when you picked it up, and probably his gold jewellery was fake too. Maybe somewhere there’s a secret bank account with thousands salted away, but I don’t think so. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t think so.
Roadworks. That’s the information I passed on to Daintry. That’s what he wanted to talk to me about. Roadworks. Major roadworks.
‘You know the sort of thing,’ he’d say, ‘anywhere where you’re digging a big hole. Maybe building a flyover or improving drainage. Major roadworks.’
Sure enough, I had access to this sort of information. I just had to listen to the various crews talking about what they were working on and where they were doing the work. Over tea and biscuits in the canteen, I could earn myself a few drinks and a pint glass of goodwill.
‘How deep does that need to be?’ Daintry would ask.
‘I don’t know, eight maybe ten feet.’
‘By what?’
‘Maybe three long, the same wide.’
And he’d nod. This was early in the game, and I was slow catching on. You’re probably much faster, right? So you know why he was asking. But I was puzzled the first couple of times. I mean, I thought maybe he was interested in the . . . what’s it, the infrastructure. He wanted to see improvements. Then it dawned on me: no, what he wanted to see were big holes. Holes that would be filled in with concrete and covered over with huge immovable objects, like bridge supports for example. Holes where bodies could be hidden. I didn’t say anything, but I knew that’s what we were talking about. We were talking about Human Resource Disposal.
And Daintry knew that I knew. He’d wink from behind his cigarette smoke, using those creased stinging eyes of his. Managing to look a little like his idol Robert de Niro. In Goodfellas. That’s what Daintry would say. He’d always be making physical comparisons like that. Me, I thought he was much more of a Joe Pesci. But I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t even tell him that Pesci isn’t pronounced pesky.
He knew I’d blab about our little dialogues, and I did, casually like. And word spread. And suddenly Daintry was a man to be feared. But he wasn’t really. He was just stupid, with a low flashpoint. And if you wanted to know what sort of mood he was going to be in, you only had to visit the video shop.
‘He’s taken out Goodfellas and Godfather 3.’ So you knew there was trouble coming. Now you really didn’t want to cross him. But if he’d taken out soft core or a Steve Martin or even some early Brando, everything was going to be all right. He must have been on a gangs
ter high the night he went round to speak with Mr and Mrs McAndrew. In his time, Mr McAndrew had been a bit of a lad himself, but he was in his late-seventies with a wife ten years younger. They lived in one of the estate’s nicer houses. They’d bought it from the council and had installed a fancy front door, double-glazed windows, you name it, and all the glass was that leaded criss-cross stuff. It wasn’t cheap. These days, Mr McAndrew spent all his time in the garden. At the front of the house he had some beautiful flower beds, with the back garden given over to vegetables. In the summer, you saw him playing football with his grandchildren.
‘Just like,’ as somebody pointed out, ‘Marlon Brando in The Godfather.’ This was apt in its way since, like I say, despite the gardening Mr McAndrew’s hands were probably cleaner these days than they had been in the past.
How he got to owe Daintry money I do not know. But Daintry, believe me, would have been only too happy to lend. There was McAndrew’s reputation for a start. Plus the McAndrews seemed prosperous enough, he was sure to see his money and interest returned. But not so. Whether out of sheer cussedness or because he really couldn’t pay, McAndrew had been holding out on Daintry. I saw it as a struggle between the old gangster and the new. Maybe Daintry did too. Whatever, one night he walked into the McAndrews’ house and beat up Mrs McAndrew in front of her husband. He had two heavies with him, one to hold Mr McAndrew, one to hold Mrs McAndrew. Either one of them could have dropped dead of a heart attack right then and there.
London Noir - [Anthology] Page 14