London Blues

by Anthony Frewin

  I walk eastwards down the street, a solitary figure, my footsteps echoing.

  If I remember the A-Z map correctly Caroline Street is about half a mile down on the left. Just keep going, past the derelict bombed sites, the dock warehouses and the Victorian ‘improved dwellings for the labouring classes’.

  There’s a hundred year old street sign set into a brick wall: CAROLINE PLACE. And in front of it, some milk crates and an old plastic-covered sofa somebody has dumped.

  I see the railway sweeping high across the street supported by brick piers and RSJs and I wonder whence it comes and to where it goes? No matter where you are in London you come across railway lines. Everybody knows about the major lines but these subsidiary tracks and branch lines, nobody ever knows their origin or destination. They criss-cross London with a secret logic of their own, stealing through the night.

  Caroline House isn’t this side of the railway. It must be the other. I walk under the bridge and stop and listen to the water dripping from high above and hitting the cobbles of the road. Each splash resonating in the brickwork cavern.

  On the left here is a vast building towering up sans windows. It looks like the back of a cinema and doesn’t look like Caroline House, but who knows? This other place on the right seems more the ticket.

  There, stretching up to the height of the railway, is a three-storey Victorian commercial building done in some Italianate style with cornicing and stuck-on monumental decorations. Italianate, but Gothicky too. Squat and solid. Looking like it was built in the last century as the headquarters of a patent medicine company.

  A solid wooden front door about seven feet high at the top of a short flight of steps. Big heavy brass fittings. A brass rectangle upon which are engraved the words CAROLINE HOUSE in serifed caps. Just that. Its name and nothing else. No clue as to what goes on here. This is Caroline House. ‘Nuff said.

  There are no lights on that I can see on the top floor, or the next one down, or on the ground floor. Is anybody in?

  There’s a bell-pull set in the jamb at the side of the door. A heavy pull of enamel in a brass surround. I pull it out and let it go. It shoots back in accompanied by a grinding sound and then a bell rings deep inside the building. I can just make it out.

  I wait.

  Nothing.

  I step back and look up the building. No lights. No sign of anybody.

  I look up and down the street. It’s deserted. The north end of the street hits a busy road. There’s plenty of traffic and noise, but here in this little inlet all is still and silent.

  I pull the bell again.

  And wait.

  Nothing.

  I look down the street again and see a cat scurrying through the shadows.

  Well, this has certainly been a waste of fucking time all right! Why didn’t I say to her, ‘Listen, lady, if you want to see me tell me what it’s about.’ Why didn’t I? Huh? I must be dumb. Totally dumb. Why didn’t I tell her to come and see me?

  I only got a single ticket on the underground so I’m free to go back whatever way I want. I’ll walk up there to the main road, perhaps take a leisurely bus ride back.

  At the top of the road on the left there’s a quaint little pub that must be as old as Caroline Street itself. It’s a Victorian local called the Brewery Tap. It doesn’t look much bigger than my room. The windows are engraved glass. It looks friendly enough.

  Inside it seems smaller than my room. It’s crowded with locals. All blokes. Nobody seems to be under the age of about sixty-five. This must be some old age pensioners’ pub. They’re all wearing old suits with turn-ups, many of them have waistcoats and white handkerchiefs tied around their neck. Most of them are wearing cloth caps. This is how you picture the East End.

  All these old geezers are too busy nattering away to notice me. I negotiate my way across to the bar where the only two women in the place keep an alert and proprietorial eye on the proceedings. The two old dears look like sisters. Both in their late fifties with lots of lines on their face filled up with powder.

  ‘What would you like to drink, ducks?’

  ‘A large gold watch, please.’

  She turns and takes a glass and gives two hits to the optic. I hand her a pound note and while she’s getting the change I pour some water into the glass from a blue jug that says on it in white brush script lettering: A PRESENT FROM SUNNY CLACTON. She hands me the change and I light a cigarette. I take a large sip of the whisky. The barmaid is looking at me and she is about to say something, there’s a pause … and then she does: ‘Haven’t seen you in here before?’

  ‘No. I’m not local. I live over in Bayswater.’

  ‘Bayswater, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Bayswater.’

  ‘I went there once.’

  This was said with some pride, as if going to Bayswater meant travelling through dangerous countries to the other side of the world. Should I congratulate her?

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘Didn’t think much at all of it … not like home.’

  Home, of course, being hereabouts.

  I then thought I might ask her about Caroline House.

  ‘I was supposed to meet someone here, down the road … tonight.’

  She nodded at me, a nod that meant she approved of what I had said so far and that it was permissible for me to continue.

  ‘At Caroline House.’

  ‘Caroline House, dear?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know what goes on there?’

  ‘It always used to be Snaith Bros and Drax.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘They made dental powder. They were there when I was a little girl. Been there for years. Business closed down just after the Coronation.’

  ‘What happens there now?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s changed hands a good few times. We often see a young girl in a sports car going in and out there. Very fancily dressed. Long blonde hair. Not from around here. I don’t know who’s spoken to her. I haven’t. She had the decorators in last summer. They were there for ages.’

  Well, all that tells me absolutely zero about Vicky Stafford.

  I look at my watch: 9.30. I should be moving. I’m not going to get home until 11 p.m. I down the remainder of the Scotch, thank the landlady and make my way across to the door.

  I look at all the wizened faces and guess quite a few of them were there in Cable Street all those years ago.

  It’s raining a bit now and I look back down the street before I head back. There’s a light on down near the railway bridge that wasn’t on before: streaming out of the main door of Caroline House and illuminating a little sports car now parked outside.

  A beckoning light.

  So Vicky Stafford’s at home for visitors.

  I walk diagonally across the cobbled street and then up the steps to the door which is wide open. It leads on to a carpeted hall in which there is a green leather chesterfield and a long low table. The light comes from a small chandelier suspended on a chain hanging from decorative plaster-work on the ceiling. I say ‘small chandelier’ but I guess it has about thirty or more light-bulbs on it. Bright.

  I can hear music being played somewhere. Upstairs? A radio or a record player. I call out hello? several times. No reply. I draw out the bell-pull and hear the bell chime. Then silence … and no reply.

  Perhaps she’s in the bathroom? I’ll go in and wait. I can smell perfume in the room – the vestiges of some heavy musky perfume. She must have been here only a moment ago. But intermingling with this is another smell and I’m not sure what it is. It reminds me of something.

  I look round the hall. There are some magazines on the table, Punch and Country Life. There’s a drinks cabinet just to one side of the front door. It’s open. Dozens of bottles of wine and spirits. Rows of expensive-looking glasses and tumblers on top of it. An empty ice bucket.

  The carpet is a deep rich green. Classy. Looks like it has just been vacuumed.

  There are half a dozen framed paintings
on the wall. Coastal scenes. Big skies and mud flats and isolated boats. They’ve all been done by the same person in the same place but there’s no signature or identifying panel. Each painting is surrounded by a generous expanse of white mounting board which, in turn, is engirded by a chrome metal frame. Clean looking. Antiseptic, almost. Three polished wood doors lead elsewhere but the room is focused on a wide staircase leading up to the next floor from where the music is coming.

  What’s up there?

  ‘Vicky Stafford!’

  My voice lingers in an echo on the stairs.

  I go back out and ring the bell a couple of times.

  Nobody shows. I pace about inside. Where the fuck is she? What’s she doing? Am I supposed just to wait here for ever and a day until she deigns to appear? This is fucking ridiculous. I’m going. Fuck Vicky Stafford.

  Then the music stops.

  I stop, frozen to the spot. The silence is like a lead smog. Just hanging there. Still and engulfing.

  Minutes seem to go by. I’m stuck there. Expectant.

  She’s waiting for me. I’m supposed to go up the stairs. That’s the deal.

  But why?

  Why can’t she come down here? I’ll only find that out when I go up.

  I took the stairs one tread at a time. I had to be careful. I had to do it right. And silently.

  The walls on either side had more of the framed coastal scenes. Whoever did them certainly rang the changes on that place.

  The stairs turned and ahead I saw a landing. Light was coming from behind a door that was just a few inches open. There I had to go. She was waiting for me.

  This foot here and that foot there and one step at a time. Higher and higher and nearer and nearer.

  And now I’m on the landing.

  The door is about six paces in front of me. There’s no turning back now. It’s too late to stop.

  I glance back down the stairway. It’s silent. Nobody is following me. I’m all alone.

  That smell again. Not the perfume, the other one. I know what it is. It’s like fireworks. Like those indoor fireworks I used to have when I was kid. It’s lingering here, stronger than downstairs. The fingertips of my right hand touch the door but then I pull them back suddenly. I cannot rush this. I wait. The perfume is much stronger here. A heady intoxicating perfume worthy of a beautiful odalisque.

  An odalisque? Why an odalisque?

  There’s a feeling to this place. Yeah, that’s it. Odalisques. Somewhere on the periphery of my mind I was trying to figure out what happens here. It was neither home nor office nor anything else. Homey but antiseptic. Contrived warmth, engineered domesticity, like a special kind of hotel. But not that. Some front for something. But what? A studio she said. A studio for what? Some de luxe bordello?

  My fingertips touched the door again. I waited several seconds, then I moved my hand forward and the door opened. There was a bedroom. A bedroom with floor to ceiling mirrors on every wall. And a bed. A larger than king-size bed low off the floor with black sheets and pillows and what looked like a silk bedspread half hanging on the floor.

  There was also an armchair with its back towards me. It was just a few feet in front of me. On the floor to the right of it was a large crystal ashtray in which sat a fat smoking four-paper joint that someone had just lit up.

  I could not smell the perfume now, not even the joint, just the fireworks.

  There was someone sitting in the armchair. I could see the back of his head. It was Sonny. He was just sitting there feeling really mellow, his joint at his side.

  So this is what that dodgy little black bastard was into. This. But what is this? Some sort of class pimping … on a heroic scale? Something really special for moneyed perverts?

  ‘Sonny!’

  He just sat there.

  I walked forward and gently pushed him. His head started moving forward. It continued moving forward and I thought to myself, how odd that this trajectory bore no resemblance to the amount of pressure I had applied to his skull. How strange! Moving forward still. And now his shoulders and his torso are arcing forward. And then a thump as he hits the floor and he rolls over and now he’s staring at the ceiling. His eyes wide open. His teeth bared. Red stuff in the corner of his mouth. And there in the middle of his forehead a perfectly neat little circular hole surrounded by black markings on the skin and a dull red semi-glistening substance that is blood. Very neat. Right in the centre of his forehead. Perfect.

  I see myself reflected back and forth a million times in the mirrors. I see Sonny from as many angles. The two of us.

  I kneel down and start searching through Sonny’s pockets. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but there may be some clue. But there’s nothing. Nothing. Not even a bus ticket or a bit of loose change. Just nothing.

  There’s an alabaster foot with bright red nails on the floor at the end of the bed. As I move around I see it is attached to an alabaster leg. And now in full view I see the twisted remains of what I assume is Vicky Stafford, her long blonde hair flecked with blood. Her other leg is bent underneath her. Her arms lie limp at her side. Her head is in profile. She’s naked except for a slip pushed up around her hips. Her pubic hair is black. She never bleached there.

  Vicky has a neat little circular hole too. It’s in her right temple, just to the left of her eye.

  She’s frozen, just like in a photograph. Still for eternity.

  Behind her is a record player. It’s switched itself off at the end of a Frank Sinatra record.

  The drawers in the cabinet are full of ointments, unguents, emollients and lubricants – lots of those. There’s also a couple of Pifco vibrators, loose amyl nitrate spansules, and a variety of pink latex dildoes, each one bigger than the last.

  And there, beside a cabinet, languishing on the deep pile of the carpet is the device that lowered the curtains on Sonny and Vicky.

  I pick it up and marvel that something so small and beautifully engineered could be so fatal. It says Walther on it and something about fabrik in Germany. It’s not a revolver, it’s a semi-automatic or whatever they are called. It’s been around a few years. The blueing has aged and faded. I remembered what a newly blued pistol looks like. One of the officers at the Pistol Club in the dockyards had one. All bright and deep rich blue. But this one’s old.

  I hold it to my nose. That firework smell.

  I sit on the bed and look at myself at a thousand different angles in the mirrors and then I look at the two corpses, the two human forms from which life has been extinguished. This has been the end of the road for them. This is it. The grand finale in a gaudy bedroom/studio/something somewhere near Shadwell.

  I hope they rest in peace. It is still and quiet.

  A train passes over the bridge and the building seems to vibrate. The noise is loud and would blanket out any sounds in here, whether they were human cries or gunshots.

  Silence again. A heavy mournful silence.

  A Walther pistol.

  The mirrors.

  Lubricants and dildoes on the floor at my feet.

  A naked woman who, whatever she may have done, didn’t deserve this. But then deserving has nothing to do with it, does it? Doesn’t life teach us that it is indifferent to our values and our hopes and our dreams?

  The stars in the heavens. Is their progress across the night sky affected by this?

  There’s that funny little poem by Stephen Crane. It’s the only bit of verse I can remember aside from the opening two verses of Sir Patrick Spens that I learnt at school. Stephen Crane. The author of The Red Badge of Courage.

  The poem goes:

  A Man said to the Universe,

  ‘Sir, I exist!’

  ‘However,’ replied the Universe,

  ‘That fact has not created in me

  A sense of obligation.’

  And there you have it. Pithily and wittily put. I look down at the mute evidence before me that this is indeed so.

  Somewhere far off over the roof tops of the
East End I can hear a police bell shrieking with urgency. Far off, but getting nearer. And nearer.

  I sit here transfixed, running the Crane poem through my head, oblivious to the bell getting louder.

  There’s more than one bell now. Two, maybe three?

  Ringing. Like there’s an emergency.

  They’re getting nearer.

  And nearer.

  And they now sound like they’re in Caroline Street.

  They must be coming here.

  I race across the room and across the landing. If I go down the stairs I’m going to go bang into them, aren’t I?

  Where can I go?

  In the dark I can see a further flight of steps going up to the floor above.

  I run up them two at a time. There’s a landing illuminated by street light coming through a large window.

  I can hear urgent movements, running, in the street below. Pounding feet. Shouts. Cries. They’re in the building.

  In the dark I can make out several doors and then, ahead of me, there is a fixed ladder leading up to the ceiling. I climb up it and enter darkness. I can feel a wooden door. My hand moves round its edges. There’s a bolt. I slide it and then push the door up. I take a couple more steps up the ladder and push again. The door opens and falls back over with a thud.

  There above me is the vastness of the night sky.

  I pull myself up and look around the roof. There’s nowhere to go. I’m trapped here. I go over to the parapet and look down. There’s about three police cars with flashing lights, a couple of vans, some motorbikes. Coppers milling about. Alsatians.

  I run to the other side of the roof. Nothing except a 40-foot drop. I turn and see that the adjoining building is too far away for me to jump across. I’m stuck. I’ll just have to sit here and wait until the Old Bill piles out on to the roof mob-handed.

  And then a train thunders by over the bridge and along the viaduct. I run across to the parapet and realise that the railway is my only hope.

  There’s a brick wall running along the railway about two feet higher than the top of the parapet. A dark chasm about eight feet wide separating me from it. I’d never be able to jump it. Never. If I could launch myself across and up I could only hope that I’d get a grip on the top of the wall.