by Stella Duffy
Saz was just thinking that perhaps a late afternoon run might make up for the lack of an early morning one, when the phone rang. It was Carrie, “You know that bloke you asked me about? Jonathan Godwin?”
“The man I told you about in confidence, Carrie, yes. In case you heard anything. Not for general public consumption.”
“Well, I knew I recognized his name.”
“You haven’t said anything to him, have you?”
“Give me credit, Saz, I’m not quite as rash as you might like to think.” Saz contented herself with a short laugh and asked Carrie what she wanted. Carrie wanted to take Saz dancing.
SIXTEEN
Carrie’s reasoning was vague to say the least. She wanted Saz to go out with her that night because she thought that a bloke she sort of knew who ran a bar not far from her flat was called Godwin. Luke Godwin. And she thought that maybe he had a wealthy family. Not especially definite and, to Saz’s mind, not very tempting either. So she called Helen.
“How’s your head?”
“Bloody awful. Sorry about last night.”
“That’s fine, Hells, anything to help; you know Molly and I have been really concerned about you since the break-up. Honest, we didn’t need a rest at all last night and I hadn’t been up for hours and I didn’t have loads of work I needed to get on with.”
“Saz, you sound suspiciously like a woman in need of a favour.”
“Helen, you sound suspiciously like a woman who owes me one.”
Half an hour later Helen called back and told her that the owner of Bar Rage was one Luke Godwin. “He used to run a couple of gay venues in pubs in West London, then he bought up this old pub in Brixton and did it all up.”
“So it’s a gay club?”
“No, Saz, it’s an incredibly groovy anybody’s club. I take it you haven’t been?”
“Why, have you?”
“Alex and I went there once when we were first getting together.”
“When you were still with Judith?”
“Yeah, it was somewhere I knew she’d never go. It’s very big. And very loud. And very young. Jude would hate it.”
Saz hurriedly pulled them back to the subject in hand before Helen launched into another rave about Judith – whether it was to be negative ex-lover or the slightly more positive “I never knew what I had until I lost it” – Saz couldn’t wait to find out, there was too much else to get on with. Not to mention her distinct lack of desire to be any more involved in her friend’s ex-relationship.
“Yeah but, Helen, I can’t waste my night at this club just because the guy who owns it has the same surname as someone mentioned in a letter to Gerald Freeman.”
“No stupid, I wouldn’t bother calling otherwise. I think he is his son. Or at least the Luke Godwin who owns this bar is the son of a Jonathan Godwin. Maybe yours, maybe not. Possible though. Luke Godwin’s father put money into the bar and he must be pretty bloody well off, because it’s a big step up from running a gig a couple of nights a week to actually owning your own place. I reckon he’s worth a try, and Jonathan Godwin is more or less the same age as Chris’s parents.”
“I suppose so, just the thought of asking a complete stranger if he’s adopted seems a little excessive.”
“Get Carrie to do it for you. She’s good at excessive.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Anyway, that’s all I have for you. I’ll get back to my real work now – oh, and Saz?”
Saz heard Helen’s tone change to formal in the space of a few words, “Yes?”
“You will tell me if anything starts to get messy, won’t you?”
“I’m only trying to find Chris’s birth parents, Helen. It’s not exactly illegal to adopt a baby.”
“Yeah, but keep me informed, all right? Just in case?”
Saz crossed her fingers and agreed. She hung up, glad she’d chosen not to mention the matter of baby-buying. Helen and Judith had both proved extremely useful friends in the past, but there were also times when their dutiful attitudes clashed with Saz’s work plans. She had no doubt that given the whole truth, this would have been one of those times. And while police-issue DM’s tramping through Georgina Leyton’s offices would probably kick up some interesting information, it would also bring Chris’s search into the open, and she knew her first priority was to honour his desire to protect his mother. She was the only mother he had. So far.
Saz and Molly had intended to spend the evening with Marc and Chris. Rather than put them off, Molly agreed to go out with the boys while Saz went clubbing with Carrie. Molly was perfectly happy to miss out; an evening of loud music in smoke-filled rooms was the last thing she felt like doing, though she seemed just a little bit more interested once Marc and Chris knew where Saz was going and who she was hoping to meet.
Chris’s first reaction was to burst out laughing, “You went all the way to Sussex, trawled through Patrick Freeman’s stuff, only to come up with Luke Godwin?”
“Well, Jonathan Godwin actually. He’s the man who Leyton talked about in the letter. Luke is his son. Or might be his son. At least he’s the son of a Jonathan Godwin, whether or not he’s the son of our Jonathan Godwin …”
“Yes, Saz, I know who Luke is. Or rather Marc does, don’t you, darling?”
“You what?”
“Marc knows Mr Godwin quite well actually.”
Three pairs of eyes turned to Marc who was looking resignedly out the window across to the Heath. “God you’ve got a big mouth, Chris.”
“It’s important. Saz needs to know for her research. Tell the girls about your first love, darling.”
Marc shook his head, finished his beer. “He wasn’t my first love, he wasn’t love at all. Lot of sex though. For about two months, it was never going to be a relationship. I was twenty-six, he was just turned twenty, I met him at the first club he ever ran. He is Jonathan Godwin’s son, he is adopted, his father went completely crazy when he came out at sixteen and refused to talk to him for about five years. Godwin senior gave Luke no help at all for ages but – and I only know this from mutual friends, not because I see him any more – apparently he helped him set up this new business, so I suppose they must be best of buddies again. Enough?”
Nowhere near enough for Saz and Molly who had never been able to get much out of Marc about his past and were astonished to find it thrown up at them like this. Saz pressed Marc for information about Luke’s old clubs, the move from the smaller venues to actually owning the more successful one, and any other family background that might more clearly tie him to the Jonathan Godwin in Leyton’s letter. Molly asked juicier questions about the relationship. Chris maintained that Luke had broken Marc’s heart, Marc held to the view that his ex-lover’s various drug habits and the dangerously violent streak he occasionally exhibited meant that Luke would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be willing to give themselves to him totally.
“The guy can be very warm, quite lovely, but he’s also completely fucking unpredictable. He can be fantastic to be with, even when pissed, especially when coked off his face. And the next minute, on the slightest provocation, he’s threatening to smash your head in. And the way he says it, you think he actually might mean it. I couldn’t fall in love with that. I liked it, fancied it, really fucking wanted it, but anyone with half a brain wouldn’t fall in love with it.”
Saz and Molly listened to him, each woman acutely aware that she had fallen just as dangerously more than once in her past.
Molly left for a movie and dinner and Saz stayed at home to get ready. Despite the potential leap forward in the job, she was not looking forward to her night ahead.
SEVENTEEN
Carrie had first met Luke three months earlier, talking her way past the girl guards at the door and directly into Luke’s face as she fell over his outstretched feet and landed in his lap on the sofa. He thought it was funny enough not to have her thrown out and they embarked on the first of their drinking binges. Since then, they’d wel
comed the morning together a few times, aided by enough vodka to clear up the Russian national debt in a weekend and the odd line from Luke’s constant coke supply. Carrie finally realized the value of drug-confiscating bouncers on club doors. In an early morning discussion the weekend earlier, they revealed they’d both run away from home at fourteen. Carrie because she came out to her mother who was horribly shocked that the flesh of her loins turned out to be a dyke. Baby Barbiedyke, but gay all the same. Carrie and her mother had been best of friends for years now, but the age fourteen trauma still made a good pissed-at-the-bar story. Even easier to tell when the bar was a big fat sofa and Luke was ordering free drinks for the duration of the session.
Unlike Carrie, who had lived with friends, relatives and one very amicable ex-nun until her mother relented, Luke’s was a rather different runaway experience. It was also not a story he was used to telling. Not a story he especially wanted to tell. Except that Carrie poured him another vodka, and another. Then she cut him another three lines of his own coke and rolled his own fifty-pound note for him. Carrie wasn’t after any information in particular, had no especial desire to hear Luke’s personal teenage tragedy. But Luke had both free alcohol and much better coke than she did, and the girl she had been eyeing up at the bar had now left in the arms of a twenty-year-old ski-bunny. It was just gone three in the morning and if Carrie didn’t force Luke to keep talking, then she’d soon be going home too. Alone. And going home alone was bad enough, but going home alone before dawn was too awful to contemplate. The bar was practically empty, Luke was off his face, his mouth was starting to run away with him in a cocaine free-fall and Carrie thankfully sat back to enjoy the show. Luke Godwin began to stutter out the background to his fourteen-year-old departure and, as the story got juicier, Carrie slowly became aware that some of what she was hearing had a familiar ring to it.
Luke’s impetus to depart the familial grasp came when his mother, in the throes of despair as her husband of twenty years left home, revealed that Luke was not really her son. Nor was he his father’s son. Whatever it might say on his birth certificate. Luke went immediately to question his father, was told his mother’s revelation was true and that his father now intended to start a new family with the young blonde who, unlike the old blonde, was actually capable of bearing him a child. Not the finest of partings. The old man and the young man didn’t speak for five years and then met just once, a week before Luke’s twentieth birthday. Luke came out, his father walked out. All this was explained to Carrie in a long and rambling drunken diatribe. What he hadn’t explained, though, was how father and son came to be reunited in business – Carrie being far more interested in messy beginnings than happy endings.
Once Carrie explained what she knew, Saz agreed to go out with her. Saz was hoping the father and son partnership had developed to such an extent that Luke might now know – and would be willing to divulge – details of the adoption process. If Jonathan Godwin was linked to both Richard Leyton and Gerald Freeman, then it wasn’t too much to hope there might be a further connection to Chris’s parents.
However, just because she’d agreed to go out didn’t mean she really wanted to. Four years of happy coupledom with Molly had removed any desire to experience the joys of early morning clubbing. On a Tuesday night. The idea of revisiting a land of early twenties’ angst, peopled with flesh-hungry youth, and ending the night trying to decipher the incoherence of her own drunken babble filled her with a vomit-scented horror, underscored with seriously nostalgic ennui. She had never particularly enjoyed the dubious delights of an ill-lit room surrounded by a trade fair of sweaty flesh. Saz did not like clubbing. She didn’t like pubs. She didn’t like drinking cheap yet over-priced alcohol, and she had long ago worked out that coke sniffed from one’s own clean hand mirror in the privacy of one’s own sitting room was a damn sight more attractive than the same substance imbibed from the cigarette-burnt cistern of an overflowing toilet where there was no toilet paper left by midnight.
Saz did not want to go out. She wanted to stay in and pore over boxes of papers until she could pore no more. To sink to the floor beside her beloved and watch trash TV, eat hot bubbling gruyère glued to dark rye bread with extra strong mustard, followed by half a bar of gooey caramel chocolate, drink one or more bottles of well chosen, very chilled wine and then get a good night’s sleep. Carrie, however, demanded otherwise. That she was probably right to do so didn’t make Saz any more gracious. Her mood was not improved by a difficult journey to Carrie’s flat, evening traffic squeezing down the Walworth Road at a rate of inches, ten minutes spent in a steamy bus outside the old Labour Party headquarters, wondering yet again about the People’s Transport Policy. She spent the first half-hour with her ex-girlfriend moaning about all that she expected to loathe in the hours between midnight and dawn. She expected to loathe quite a lot.
“What do you mean this place charges fifteen quid entry?”
“Twenty.”
“What?”
“After midnight. Doesn’t matter, we’re on the guest list.”
“Bouncers looking us up and down when we try to get in—”
“I said we’re on the guest list.”
“I thought you barely knew this bloke?”
“It’s not like he’s a close mate or anything, but we’ve been pissed together a few times, talked a bit. I’d already asked if I could be on the guest list for tonight. And I mean, I don’t know him well—”
“After all, you’ve only ever talked when you’re both pissed.”
“Yeah, but that can be a great bonding experience, Saz.”
“I know, Carrie. I wasn’t sober when I met you.”
“Anyway, even if we weren’t on the guest list, we’d have no trouble getting in, we’re gorgeous.”
Saz glared at Carrie in the mirror, the truth of the statement lost on her irritated mask, “What about the music?”
“What about it?”
“I don’t think I like young people’s music.”
“Christ, Saz, you’re not that old.”
“I’m not old at all.”
“Then stop bloody well acting like it. You’ll probably like it. You might even have a good time. It’s not going to be like the clubs you went to when you were a kid and nor is it some crappy venue given over to a bunch of dykes with no taste and even less money playing Tracey fucking Chapman all bloody night.”
Saz bit her cheeks to hold back a grin. It wasn’t often she managed to push Carrie enough to upset her; the reverse was far more common. Carrie riled might just cheer her up a bit.
“It’s just a bar, Saz. With music. No one is going to look at what you’re wearing, they don’t care. It isn’t about that, it’s just a place to go. Anyway, you’re going for work, not fun. It isn’t a big deal.”
Saz applied more mascara, disappointed. She’d hoped for a better fight-back than that. She swallowed down another large mouthful of cheap white, not nice enough and not cold enough, but easily the best she could expect from Carrie’s fridge.
“Carrie, I would question your ability to stay sober long enough to notice what kind of a deal it is.”
Carrie smiled, “Well, yes, there’s always that.” She handed Saz the mirror on which she’d laid out four short lines of coke, “Now shut up, cheer up, and get this in you.”
Saz did.
In the past two years Carrie had been through four different lovers who, if they weren’t quite in their late teens – Carrie met Justine at her twenty-first birthday party – certainly liked to behave as if they were. She had therefore become something of an expert on the new bars and clubs that had sprung from the ruins of badly-run corner pubs in the past few years. And, even without a partner by her side, going out alone was bliss to Carrie. She loved talking to strangers. It was why Carrie was useful to Saz – she so often knew someone who knew someone who might know something: in this case, the part-owner of the latest dingy old-man’s pub turned sex-scented lair of the sweet young things,
a century of nicotine-stained afternoons remodelled for the price of eight cans of bright purple paint and a couple of dreadlocked Australian girlies installed behind the bar.
According to Carrie, Luke Godwin spent most nights at one of the three bars in his building and, while he’d drink solidly from midnight on, he always seemed sober enough to make sure the doors were firmly locked when he let himself and his manager out at five in the morning. Carrie knew Saz would want to talk to Luke – if only she could actually get her through the doors. First though, there was quite obviously some softening up to do. The coke would work its into-the-world magic soon enough, but Carrie understood Saz well enough to know she’d need more than just drugs and alcohol to get her really looking forward to the night ahead. She’d need food too.
The couple of lines had cheered Saz up considerably, as did the comfortable feeling of hot London night sticking to her skin. Even her irritation at walking from Camberwell to eat in Stockwell for a night out in Brixton didn’t go too deep, and the extremely circuitous route was a good memories’ walk for Saz.
They stopped outside a small Spanish café, “I figured that as you’re being so brave tonight, we might as well push the boat out and do something really daring.”