by Adam Baron
Upstairs in my flat I called the Ludensian to explain what had happened. I wanted Nicky to let Jack know that I would help him, as long as he knew that I might not be able to do him any good. And I still thought he was being pretty irresponsible. I didn’t want to put Nicky in the middle of something, and then feel embarrassed if he happened to mention one of us to the other. I could see a time when I was sat in the Ludensian, talking to Nicky, and Jack dropped by. I called the Ludensian but Toby said Nicky wasn’t there. He’d left after just Jack Draper had, Toby told me. I tried his mobile but he was one of those people who had a mobile they never turned on. I left a message.
I was tired as a marathon runner’s dog. I turned the TV on and stretched out on my futon in front of a review programme. Mark Lawson and friends were discussing a musical some bright spark had written about homelessness, and again I thought of the two girls I’d seen today, wondering if there was something I should have done, rather than simply watching them walk away. It wasn’t the first time I’d had thoughts like that and I never knew if the decisions I made were the right ones. People have asked me why it is that I specialize in locating stray kids, but though I can give reasons enough I don’t really know. My age is certainly on my side – I can get into the sorts of places kids drawn to London like to hang out, and I don’t look like a pervert if I have to spend time inside video arcades or tube stations or skulking round the back streets of Soho peering into shop doorways at obviously young shapes huddling together beneath boxes and newspapers and stained sleeping bags. There is also the fact that I specialize, and as no one else who advertises seems to do that, I usually find myself with more than enough to do.
The real reason may be a little more complicated than expediency. The girl who came before Shulpa, who I’d thought wouldn’t have anyone coming after her, used to say that it was because of the way I felt as a kid myself, that I sympathize with them now. She could have been right. When I left the police I did nothing for a while, and then I asked myself why I’d gone into it in the first place. Naïve as it sounds now, and it sounded naïve after only two or three days on the job as a matter of fact, I joined because I wanted to help people. I never wanted to nick single mothers on council estates for shoplifting in supermarkets, I wanted to catch people who caused other people pain. She used to say that an inbuilt sense of injustice had become a defining part of me, because of the way my father behaved towards my brother and me. And our mother. I’m no psychologist, but she may have been right. She was right about a lot of things, or at least she used to be. Who the hell knew what she was like now?
Images of Sharon came to me like a slide show. Thinking about her I suddenly wondered what she would say about Shulpa and me. I wondered if she’d be happy for me, or resentful, or not give a shit either way. I wondered if the word ‘rebound’ would figure in her conversation. I didn’t know. And as much as I daydreamed about running into her, having that excuse to talk, maybe go for a cup of tea, casually tell her about my new girlfriend, I certainly wasn’t going to do anything to find out.
Back on the TV the subject was a Tate Modern retrospective on Tracy Emin and I sat in front of the debate for a while before obeying the strange impulse to put some washing on. Who said modern art didn’t have a purpose? I bundled my sheets into the machine and came back and they were still talking, and I suddenly wished Tracy Emin was on the show too and that she be allowed to comment on Tony Parsons’ shirt. The conversation moved on to a play I had no intention of seeing and I hit the off button. I sat on my futon for a while and then fetched fresh sheets for it. I paused for a second, remembering where I’d been when I’d bought the sheets, why I’d chosen that colour, and nearly decided not to bother. But they were the only spare ones I had, so I had to use them. I cleaned my teeth before getting under the crisp, fresh covers, telling myself to take it easy with Shulpa for a while. I turned the light out, and pictured a long dark corridor it would take me at least eight hours to get to the end of.
Chapter Five
But it was no use. After the morning I’d spent, getting up early for tax reasons, and then the day I’d spent, I thought I’d slide off faster than an autumn leaf down a running weir. But I didn’t, and at first I didn’t know why. My Jungle-loving neighbour had moved out a while ago and Alberto had been careful enough of my sleeping patterns not to give me an espresso. I just took it as one of those things, and turned a light on. I read for a while but I couldn’t concentrate – as much, I felt, due to Mr Kureishi as to me. I poured myself a good slug of John Powers to see if that would do anything. Then I tried stretching, as though the exhaustion I knew I felt was blocked in me somehow and needed tapping. Sometimes I did find it hard to sleep after a particularly heavy day and stretching often helped.
But not this time. It couldn’t dispel the picture in my head. Eventually, it came to me. It was that, nothing else, that was bolting my mind open. I tried to ignore it, reasoning that because I’d identified what it was that was keeping me awake, it wouldn’t any more. I was wrong. I said fuck out loud and stood, calling myself an idiot, and then I picked up my jeans from the back of my reading chair.
I pulled my jeans on like a reluctant schoolboy and looked around for a tee-shirt, with the picture still stuck in my mind. I pulled on the socks I’d taken off earlier and slid my feet back into my Red Wings, yanking hard at the laces. All the time I could see a woman pushing a pram. I thought about what I saw as Jack Draper’s selfishness in not going to the police, then of my own stubbornness in not agreeing to help him, and wondered how it would make me feel if, on a bizarre off-chance and because of these two things, these two very male things, something terrible happened to the woman in the picture. And her baby. Something, any number of things. Especially if it happened before I could register my willingness to help in the matter. I would feel worse than terrible and Draper would always, always blame me and Nicky would say it wasn’t my fault at all but secretly wonder why the hell I’d been so negative and…
I stopped what I was doing and sighed. I knew I was being less than reasonable. If Draper hadn’t found me in Fred’s, then tonight would have passed without my involvement anyway. But I couldn’t help it. People who can cut a cat’s head off and nail it to a door are probably capable of quite a bit more besides. There was no way I was going to sleep, no way, not wondering what they could be up to now. There was a night, a night eight years ago when I could have done something, something as simple as picking up a telephone. And I hadn’t done it. And every two weeks I go to a hospital north of London and look at the result of my not doing so. At least every two weeks, for eight years, looking at a face that can’t look back at me. My brother’s face, getting slowly older in strange and obscene parallel with my own. And now this thing was there, nagging at me, like knowing you’ve set the alarm the night before something important but still turning the light back on to check anyway. You just have to do it. I pulled the tee-shirt over my head and reached for my jacket.
Still swearing at myself I jogged downstairs and through the now steady drizzle to my old, brown Mazda, which hummed into life with no fuss at all due to the recent service which had almost certainly cost more than the damn thing was worth. I was wide awake and I stopped to think for a second. All I had was the name of a road, having seen it in one of the photographs. That, and the make of a car. I had no sort of plan. I’d think of one on the way. I pulled out towards Old Street and twenty minutes later I was cruising past the thin, naked skeletons of market stalls dripping with rain outside Whitechapel Tube Station.
The rain was a lot less tentative now, picked up by a rising wind and blown in broad sheets across the street in front of me, making it hard to see. As I took a right it smacked hard, straight into my windscreen, laced with the odd rock of hail. I slowed, making sure I had the right street. I did; Stepney Green. I closed my A to Z and left it on the passenger seat. I pulled forward, slowly. I was on a wide road with a long series of gardens running down the middle surrounded by tall,
black iron railings. I didn’t have a house number for Jack Draper and his family, only the street name, and I cruised down at a crawl, casting my eyes around for the blue Renegade that someone as yet unknown had snapped him in. I slowed even more, and then moved forward along the black tarmac, streaked tiger-skin orange from the street lights, checking out the vehicles parked on either side of me.
I still didn’t know what I was going to do. Quickly I decided that if I found Draper’s house then I’d knock on his door and apologize for the way things had gone. Bite my tongue as we kissed and made up. Then, if he wanted me to help him we’d work out where we should go from there. And if I didn’t find the house? Well, I’d just have to park up and wait until morning, trying to keep warm, making sure no one on the street was up to anything they shouldn’t be. I shivered at the thought and said a short but very sincere prayer, hoping that the latter would not be the case.
I’m not a God-fearing man but every now and then He must do favours for strangers because my prayer came true, almost immediately. The rain was continuing to assault my windscreen but somehow my eyes were drawn by a slight movement. At the top of the street, to my right, a row of Georgian houses curved down towards a red-brick building with an old sign telling me that it was called Dunstan House, and had been put up in 1899. I was still looking for Jack’s Renegade but my eyes went to a door, a red door opening in one of the houses closest to the block. I pulled in to the left and slowed. Somehow, I instantly knew that I’d found the place I was looking for.
That’s when I should have gone home.
Through the thick rush of water sluicing down my windscreen I saw the door open and a woman emerge. The woman had a sports bag slung over her shoulder and a covered carrycot held low in her left hand. She was moving quickly, slanted over to one side though her head was directly forward. She looked annoyed.
She was followed out by a man who I could instantly see was Jack Draper.
There was a space to my left and I pulled into it, my eyes never leaving the scene in front of me. Jack was remonstrating with the woman, his big shoulders being pounded by the rain as he tried to get an umbrella open at the same time. The rain was too loud for me to make out what Jack was saying but he wasn’t getting much of a response from his wife, who was striding in front of him with her head down and her mouth shut tight. She marched along the pavement taking small, fast steps. She was moving away from me, now crossing the street to the same side I was parked.
Jack had got the umbrella open now and was trying without much success to hold it above his quickly moving wife and their baby. He had to step behind her when a car swooshed by. His wife still hadn’t said anything to him, though Jack was quite obviously pleading with her. It was as if he wasn’t there. She snapped a quick look over her shoulder to check for further traffic and then started marching along the line of parked cars. As she did so, I caught sight of the Renegade, up ahead of her. I thought she was making for it, but instead she stopped just before it and used her right hand to open the hatchback boot of a small, soap-mould Fiat. Jack stood holding the umbrella over her, not really knowing where to stand, looking like he just wanted to pick her up and bodily carry her back inside, while his wife, Louise, I suddenly remembered, slung her bag into the boot and then slammed the lid down hard.
I watched as Jack’s wife secured their baby’s carrycot onto the back seat of the small car. I didn’t know they could double up like that. She didn’t say a single word to Jack that I could see, and after a while he gave up, just helping her and then standing in the road with his hands on his hips. He put the umbrella in the car and then I watched as his wife, acting as though Jack were invisible, simply stepped into the car and drove away, down towards Canary Wharf, towering above the sodden trees at the far end of the street. When the car was out of sight I looked back to see Draper, still with his hands on his hips, facing the empty road his wife had driven down, ignoring the rain as it plastered his hair onto the side of his face and streamed down his neck into his tee-shirt.
I had to admit I felt sorry for him. If I’d agreed to help, I didn’t think this would be happening. Jack shook his head and turned away. I put my hand on the door handle, about to jump out and call to him, but before I could do it he turned, in a flash, and through the rain I caught a low, dull thump as he sent his famous left foot hard into the back passenger door of the Renegade. From where I was I couldn’t see if he’d put a dent in it, though it did look like he might have. He turned away immediately and stomped back to his house. I took my hand off the handle and watched as he slammed the door behind him.
That’s when I should have gone home. The rain let up a touch and then came down harder, like a flurry of jabs from my friend Des, just when you think he’s tiring. I turned my wipers on and watched the house. I’d leave him a while and then ring his doorbell. I wouldn’t tell him that I’d been sitting outside. No one likes witnesses to their domestic disputes. Telling him that I’d just seen his wife leave wouldn’t endear me to him overmuch. Not that I cared that much about what he thought – it wasn’t him but the picture of his wife that had dragged me out in that miserable night. But I didn’t want another fight with him. I’d give him a little while to cool off, though, before telling him I’d help him out if he still wanted. Then he could call his wife and make it up with her and I could go back home, knowing she was safe at her mother’s or somewhere. And I could forget about them both – at least until morning. I’d think about Shulpa instead, what her methods of curing my insomnia might have been.
It felt good to see the end of this nonsense and I felt myself relax into my seat. My windscreen was starting to steam up and I turned the fan on it. I yawned and stretched, keeping an eye on Draper’s house. I flipped open the glove compartment, looking for my Chet Baker CD to while away the minutes. I couldn’t find it. I slid Roberta Flack in instead, getting through about half of ‘The First Time That Ever I Saw Your Face’ before I had to hit the eject. Those lines about the sun rising in her eyes. I filled my head with thoughts of Shulpa instead. I couldn’t believe how lucky I’d been to find her so soon. I pictured her deep black eyes. I tried to figure out what it was about her. She was so not the kind of girl I ever imagined I’d be with. I remembered meeting her, at Nicky’s birthday party. I remembered the smell of her, that most of all. I could almost feel it now. How it got to me, how it would be there in my flat, hours after she’d left. Other things. The way she bit on her bottom lip without knowing it. How she’d almost completely scrubbed me clean of the feelings I’d been going through when I’d first met her, feelings that only ever seemed to surface when I was alone. I shook my head, wondering what the hell she was hanging around with me for. A private detective with no real prospects who didn’t earn as much in a week as you’d need to pay for the dresses she usually wore. I wasn’t arguing but I couldn’t help wondering. I used to do this with Sharon too, only in a different way…
It hadn’t occurred to me that Draper would be coming out of his house again that night and even though he was right in front of me he’d crossed the road and was a yard away from his Jeep before the blip from his alarm brought me back into the street. It must have been the heat from the fan. I sure as hell wouldn’t have had any trouble sleeping by now. I pushed myself upright. But before I could collect myself he was in the car and pulling away fast, up towards the Mile End Road. He was past me before I could wave at him. I hit my horn but he took no notice.
‘Fuck.’
Shulpa vanished, like she did in the very early morning sometimes, leaving me a pillow to wake up to. I started the Mazda. I yanked the wheel and turned round, having to make a three pointer out of it. Then I pulled off, my left tyre mounting the pavement with a jolt. I wondered if Draper would do a U-turn, and follow his wife. Instead he made it through an amber, turning left towards Whitechapel. I sat at the light, tapping my thumbs, come on, come on, and saw him pull a right onto a cut-through leading up towards Bethnal Green.
I shook my he
ad and swore at myself quite inventively as I tried to catch Draper through Bethnal Green, then up towards Hackney. How much easier would it have been to say sure, I’ll help, though I’m probably not your best option? Two fifty a day okay? Fine. If you ever get any tickets for the Cup Final…I felt like a man who hadn’t been bothered to tie up his boy’s kite properly and was now chasing it through a field of nettles. All I wanted to do was talk to the man. Draper drove fast along Bethnal Green High Street and took a right towards Hoxton. He seemed to be in a hurry. I drove on, trying to catch him, wanting to let him know that I’d help him, wanting to tell him not to panic. He took a left and then a right and when I took that too I thought I’d lost him. I pulled up. I turned my wipers up to maximum. The rain was crashing into my windscreen like a wave of kamikaze pilots. Through them I just caught Draper’s tail lights cutting a left onto Hoxton Square itself, and I followed them.
This would be my chance. He couldn’t go round the square that quick. I could get right behind him and then flash him or hop out at a red light and tap on his window. A quick chat, say I’d do what I could. Then, with his wife safe at her mother’s or somewhere I’d go home, to my bed, to the tunnel I’d been looking down. Shorter now but very welcome nonetheless. I pulled onto Hoxton Square and felt myself relax again, as the brake lights on Draper’s Renegade flared misty red, only twenty yards ahead of me.
The unmarked Sierra behind me only had to give a short flash of blue for me to realize that it was there. My whole body jumped, none of it in the same direction. My foot hit the brake and my eyes went to the mirror. I squinted into the blue light filling my car then looked at the road again. What the hell had I done? The car slowed and I changed down automatically, before pulling to the side of the road and killing the engine. I looked in my mirror again. The lights were off, but the Sierra had pulled in behind me.