‘What do you want?’ I asked. Despite my fatigue I felt myself instantly back on guard. I was on my toes. I was fight or flight.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You look like a mop in the gastroenteritis ward.’
‘Save it for your fiction,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m scared,’ he said. ‘I think I’m being followed.’
‘So you came here?’ I said. ‘You fucking legend.’
‘I had nowhere else to go.’
I was sizing up the cars parked on my street, deciding if I recognised them or not, deciding if they were empty, or containing shadows of intent. ‘Where’s Kim?’ I asked. I shook the door keys from my pocket. A taxi pulled up at the end of the street and two men got out. They stood together, talking in hushed voices, while the taxi driver pulled away.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think… I think shuh-shuh-she’s… I think…’ His voice was cracking and crumbling all over the place. I thought, Clever cover, good talent.
‘Get inside,’ I said, and stepped past him, got the door open. The figures at the end of the street were still huddled together, but they were watching me now. I felt the familiar scuttle of adrenaline as it charged up and down my spine. I was drunk and exhausted, but the needles were rising out of the red zone for a while.
We went up to my flat. Niker’s skin was pale enough to light the way. His eyes wouldn’t focus. I thought maybe he’d taken something, or drunk too much, but it was just the thousand-yard stare. I see that a lot. I’ve worn it a couple of times. It was shock, and seeing too much of what was bad for you. It was a combination of terrible memories and a future that wouldn’t resolve itself no matter what decisions or choices you made. The stare was an incremental shutting down.
Mengele had fallen asleep on the sofa, but not before dragging a stack of papers to the floor. I eyed the vodka bottle on the floor and thought a return to oblivion would be great, but I didn’t have the energy to lift it. Niker sat by the cat and pressed a hand against its flank. Mengele jerked awake.
‘You might want to retreat a little if you want to leave this place in one piece,’ I said. ‘He has a trophy room filled with the limbs of those he’s bested in the past.’
But already Mengele was purring like a two-stroke engine at full throttle. He turned over and showed Niker his belly.
‘Well, I’ve never seen that before,’ I said. ‘You have The Touch, I’ll give you that.’
But Niker wasn’t paying attention. He was staring at the wall, and shivering from time to time, the way I sometimes do when I’ve remembered something cringe-inducing from a night of too much sauce.
I left them to their mutual masturbation session and checked the street from my bedroom. The guys were still on the corner. One of them was on the phone. A couple of minutes later and a van pulled up. They got in. It left. Just guys waiting for a lift. Not everyone wanted to fill me full of holes.
Relieved, I went back to the living room. Mengele was sitting up now, a possessive paw resting on Niker’s knee. He shot me a look with those green, coin-slot eyes as if to say, Can we keep him, Master?
I went to the bathroom and peeled off my crust of sick. I showered and shampooed. I put on some jogging pants and a T-shirt. In the kitchen I made a pot of nuclear-strength coffee. ‘You hungry?’ I asked.
‘I can’t eat,’ he said.
I dumped sausages in a pan anyway, and served them to him in a sandwich with plenty of ketchup and English mustard.
‘Best hangover cure I know,’ I said, wolfing mine. ‘This or pho made with tons of hot chillies.’
‘I don’t have a hangover,’ he said.
‘Maybe you need one,’ I said.
‘You drink too much,’ he said.
‘Define “too much”. Personally, I think I don’t drink enough.’
‘You found Solo yet?’
‘Her name’s Sarah.’
‘Getting warm?’
‘I’m working on it,’ I said. I waited for him to get to what it was he wanted from me. ‘Have you heard from her?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think she liked me very much. I heard her telling Odessa once that she thought I was a gobby cuntbuster.’
I winced. ‘Well she didn’t get that language from me,’ I said. I finished my sandwich and fetched the coffee. He was more enthusiastic about that than the food. After a few hefty swigs he closed his eyes and leaned back on the sofa. ‘My God, that’s better,’ he said.
‘Who’s Ronnie?’
‘Who?’
‘That’s what I said. Who is he?’
‘I don’t know any Ronnie,’ he said.
‘Name cropping up in this freak’s manuscripts. Along with your initials.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Mine and probably ten million other people.’
‘It could be a coincidence. Or it could be you.’
‘It isn’t me.’
I believed him. The angriest thing about him at that moment was the crease in his trousers.
‘I always knew there was something screwy about you,’ he said. ‘Right from the off.’
‘How so?’
‘You weirded me out. That first night. The way you threw yourself at that tower. I knew we weren’t dealing with some wannabe short story writer. That there was something more to you than that. And I was right.’
‘Just a dad trying to find his little girl.’
‘Maybe.’
‘And who are you? Behind the cocky look. Full of cum and attitude. What’s behind all that?’
He bowed his lip. ‘I want to be a writer. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. All the other stuff. It was nearly compensation. I pushed myself. I did things. I experienced. The others thought I was reckless. Thought I was pushing the self-destruction button. But that’s me. All or nothing.’
‘You submitted work?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked sheepish, hunted.
‘I mean to agencies. Publishers.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘What do you think? Everything bombed. I wrote, redrafted dozens of times, I honed, I polished, I read all the “How to” manuals. I read fiction like oxygen for the lungs. A novel – sometimes two novels – a week for years. I sent it in and it came straight back. Form rejection.
‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to knock on the door in your Sunday best every day of your life only to find nobody ever opens it? Nobody ever sees you?’
‘I can think of parallels,’ I said.
‘Not many,’ he insisted. ‘Not nearly as crushing. And what’s worse…’ He sat up, sat forward. The thing that was pissing him off the most was also making him the most animated. ‘…is that I wouldn’t be happy even if I did get a taste of it. If I sold a story I’d be buried in the contents. I wouldn’t open the fucking book. I wouldn’t close the fucking book. I’d be lost amid the names. I think it would be worse to be one of the “many others”.’
‘The goalposts are always moving,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, I’m finished. I thought I was good at it. I thought I was a stand out. I used to love writing, just love it for the fun of it, for what it was. I loved it before I knew you could be published or paid. But once you get on that conveyor belt… it gets so you can’t think of anything else. You forget why you were doing it in the first place. All you ever seem to do is hear of younger writers landing big deals and film adaptations and “Hey, everybody, just finished another one…” and it all looks so easy and effortless and you sit alone in your room grinding out some piece of shit that took months and months and it’s bad, it’s derivative and clunky and… just… bad.’
‘Where’s Kim?’ I asked him.
He looked at me and there was terror in his eyes.
‘She’s dead,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘I think she’s dead.’
‘Sean,’ I said. ‘Back up. Relax. Tell me.’
‘We were together. Last night. This morning. Late. We had decided to stick together until this was over. This morning we were going to catch a train to stay with my mother in Leeds. We caught the Tube at Leicester Square. She went through the barriers but my ticket didn’t work properly. She was on the escalator. She turned to me and I saw her sink out of sight. By the time one of the staff let me through the escalator was empty. I couldn’t find her at the bottom. She wasn’t on the platform. A train had just departed. I guessed she’d caught it – I mean, what else could she have done? – but when I got to Tufnell Park she wasn’t there either. I tried calling her but she wasn’t answering her phone. A little later I received a text from her number.’
‘What text?’ I asked. ‘What did it say?’
He slipped his phone from his pocket and fiddled with the screen, passed it over.
New experience
‘She’s playing with you,’ I said. ‘She’s teasing you.’
‘She wouldn’t tease me about this. She was scared rigid. Me too. We talked about it for hours after President died. We knew we were being targeted. I’m the only one left now. Well, me and Solo, if she’s even—’
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ I said, and counted to ten. ‘You don’t know for sure. Kim could turn up. You’ll feel such a prick when she does.’
‘Come on,’ Niker said. ‘You know who sent that text. You know what “new experience” he was referring to.’
I sighed. ‘The kind you can never write about.’
‘You said it. And I’ll be next. Me or—’
‘I told you to leave it.’
‘So what now?’
‘Go to Leeds,’ I said. ‘Right now. Get out of Dodge. But be careful. Don’t get a taxi. Walk. Take the Tube. But don’t go direct. Mix it up. Make sure at every step that there’s nobody at your back. Stay among crowds. Keep moving. Go to Leeds. Stay there until it’s over. Write a classic.’
‘You make it sound easy.’
‘Stay then,’ I said. ‘Die. Like I give a shit.’
I stared at him until he stood up. He pulled his jacket closer around him. I saw the child beneath the stubble, in the wide-eyed shock of people who become what they never thought they’d be.
‘I thought he was you, for a while,’ I said. ‘The initials. And when you showed up here I thought you were reacting to the come on we put out on the TV and radio.’
He seemed a little confused, then he seemed a little angry, but he couldn’t sustain it. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Tough guy.’
‘Wannabe tough guy. One step away from needing a hug from Mummy.’
‘Whatever, Sorrell,’ he said. He pressed his lips together, looked around my flat. ‘I saw the broadcast. I thought it was… desperate.’
‘We are desperate.’
‘He’ll know that.’
‘I want him to know that. I want him to react. If he reacts because he’s narked, great. If he reacts because he thinks he’s untouchable, superior, that’s great too. We need him to make his move.’
‘He’s made plenty. We’re all dead.’
‘Not all,’ I said, but it was a whisper he didn’t hear, or chose to ignore.
27
After he’d gone I dunked my head into a sink full of iced water and kept it there until it felt as if my skull was beginning to compress my brain. Pain ricocheted all around, but it felt great. It felt as if it was zapping all the bad stuff in there; slapping the drunk molecules awake and telling them to get a grip. I surfaced and let out a blast of air mingled with a strange trumpeting that felt like triumph and despair mixed.
‘Hi,’ I said to my reflection. ‘My name is Joel Sorrell and I have a drink problem. The problem is this: I can’t drink as much as I need to get rid of the frighteners in my mind. Please send help. Or if not help, more booze.’
I blew a kiss and towelled myself dry.
The living room was a tip. Mengele sat imperious at the centre of it all. If he knew the gesture he’d have been giving me the Vs. ‘That’s right, clean it all up, bitch,’ I imagined he was saying, probably in a James Mason voice, as I began scooping up magazines and books and stacked plates that his paws had disturbed.
My fingers found the envelope that the manuscript to Patrick Simm had arrived in. The lack of stamps or franking materials was frustrating, and I had to admire the nerve of the guy, stepping up and delivering the thing by hand in broad daylight. He might have been spotted.
But that didn’t make sense. He’d been careful every step. No fingerprints. No sightings. I raised the envelope to my face and inhaled. Utterly neutral. No embossings. No labels. No return addresses. I shook the envelope. I rubbed it like Aladdin, thinking a Royal Mail genie might pop out and offer me three wishes but only if they were correctly addressed and weighed no more than one hundred grams. I spread the flaps and stared inside. Something. A sticker with a barcode on it, and a name: Mustard Bikes.
The Hack hadn’t delivered the parcel in person after all. He’d paid a cycle courier to do it for him.
* * *
Mustard Bikes was based in one of the arches near Stamford Brook station in Chiswick. It took a while to find it. I got there early to find a controller sitting at a desk just inside the red concertina doors. He was eating noodles from a cup and speaking into a radio. Something about a bag of video cassettes to be taken to Lewisham from Wardour Street. Behind him was a bicycle in bits on a large piece of tarpaulin, and a set of tools.
‘Help you?’ he said. He lifted the noodles on a fork and sucked them through a pursed mouth that looked like something prolapsed from a jungle ape’s backside. He wiped his mouth against his arm: his sleeve was streaked with stock.
‘Breakfast of champions,’ I said, thinking of Romy.
‘Fuck all else in. Except for a packet of Malted Milk biscuits, and they taste like sick don’t they?’
‘Are you Jay Taylor? Is this Mustard Bikes?’
‘Yes and yes.’
‘Recently,’ I said, ‘a package – an envelope filled with papers – was delivered by one of your couriers to an address in Mayfair. Albemarle Street. I need to know who booked that job.’
‘“One of my couriers”,’ he said. His voice was full of mockery. ‘I’ve only got one.’
‘Right. Mustard Bike, then. I could do with speaking to him. Or you, if you’ve got an originating address.’
‘I have to be honest,’ he said, as he put the cup of noodles down and drew a large ledger towards him, ‘I almost never make a note of what job is going where, never mind where it came from.’
‘An organised outfit,’ I said.
‘We do okay,’ he said, smiling.
‘I’m surprised,’ I said. ‘You must be shelling out at least ten grand on this place in rent each year. Plus business rates. And you’ve got just the one cyclist? What’s he pulling in per job. Three quid? Four?’
‘Around that, yeah. The tiddlers, yeah. But there are still some people out there who prefer the personal touch, rather than faxes and emails. And some pay well, for, you know, special jobs.’
‘I can believe it,’ I said. ‘What was the Albemarle job? Was that special?’
‘I can’t see it in here,’ the controller was saying, pointedly studying the reams of blank pages.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Ditch the comedy. This is important.’
‘Unpack what you mean by “important” using, oh, I don’t know, monetary terms.’
‘How about I unpack it in pints of blood shed from your worthless sack of shit body?’
He pushed himself back from his desk and stood up. He was half a foot taller than me, but clearly he sat at a desk all day sucking noodles through his arsehole mouth. His belly hung over the waistband of his pants. I punched him straight away, right in the neck. He went down, coughing and spluttering, surprised more than anything. I picked up the cup of noodles and emptied them over his head. Then I grabbed hold of his hair and dragged him over the open le
dger. I pressed his face into the blank page.
‘Look really close,’ I said. ‘Study it hard and tell me what you see. I’d be fascinated to hear.’
‘Cuh-unt,’ he said, in a strangled voice. I made it even more strangled by grabbing his wattle and really digging my nails in. He made a weird animal shriek. I smelled garlic and soy sauce on his breath.
‘People are dead,’ I said. ‘I want to stop it. This is the only lead I have at the moment. I would like to follow it. You are preventing that. Now spill your fucking guts or I will spill your fucking guts.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said, as if he’d only been having a bit of fun with me and I’d gone over the top with my reaction. I let him go and he sat up. His throat looked as though someone had bitten him. Noodles clung to his hair and skin like a kid’s pasta collage gone wrong. ‘I don’t enter details on hush jobs.’
‘Hush jobs,’ I said. ‘You mean bent jobs.’
He ignored me. ‘I don’t know where it originated from,’ he said. ‘You’d have to talk to my brother. His address is on the job list.’ He flicked a piece of paper in my direction.
‘Your brother, the courier?’
‘Yeah, we’re a family business.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘I don’t know. Sucking down porridge. On his fucking bike somewhere, delivering shit.’
‘Call him.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘But you’ll call him when I’ve gone.’
‘Fucking dead right.’
I picked up his rig and hurled it at the wall.
‘That’s the best part of a grand you owe me.’
I grabbed his hair and twisted. When he raised his hands to try to loosen my grip, I slipped my free hand into his pocket and relieved him of his phone. I smashed that against the wall too.
‘Keys,’ I said.
‘Just fucking leave,’ he said.
‘Keys, or I’ll throw you against the wall.’
He handed over his keys. Outside I shut the concertina doors and locked them. Then I dropped his keys through the grate of a drain and hurried back to my own car. I was shaking with the buzz that comes from acts of violence, more so that they seemed these days to be emanating from me. The closer to getting what I needed, the nastier I was becoming. I wasn’t sure I was too happy with that, although, I thought, as I perused the list Jay Taylor had given up, at least it meant quicker results.
Sonata of the Dead Page 23