by Baker, John
Jody was sleeping on her side of the bed and the magician stripped off his clothes and crept in beside her, pulling her towards him. He wrapped his arms around her. ‘Flawless,’ he said. ‘Went like a dream.’ He nuzzled down and took her designer nipple between his teeth, letting his eyes close and the world fade away around him.
Diamond Danny Mann, whacked after a busy day.
2
That morning Ruben Parkins finished his milk-round at 7.50 and went back to his flat to clean up and change his clothes. Ruben was going to spend the whole day with his girlfriend and when he got in the shower he sang ‘Everything I Do, I Do It For You’, modulating his voice like Bryan Adams, crooning away in a deep bellow with the water from the sprinkler splashing around his head and shoulders.
Ruben was a good guy and he was feeling good about it. What made him feel so great, apart from the woman and the fact that he was in love, was that being a good guy was something he hadn’t been before. Well, not for a long time.
He’d been cute as a kid. There were photographs his mother had kept and his auntie Sarah had a couple still, showing Ruben as a toddler, maybe a bit older, up to the time he started school. Dumb little kid with big eyes like a bush-baby, looking around wondering what the world was all about. When he saw those photographs Ruben could remember what it was like back then, when eye-level meant just above his mother’s knees. There was an overhang to the Woolworth’s counters in those days and little Ruben used to walk under it without banging his head. If he wanted to see what the grown-ups were looking at on the counter his mother’d have to lift him up.
The violence had started when he got to school. Ruben wasn’t bigger than the other kids but one of the first things he’d learned was that if he was going to hold his own he’d have to pack a hefty punch. He had a talented straight-right. The gym teacher said he could be a fighter if he wanted. He’d have to learn to block other people’s punches, and do the little dances that pro boxers did, but he’d always have that killer punch. No one could teach him any more about that. It was a gift from God.
There’d been times after he’d left school when Ruben had wished he’d listened to the gym teacher and taken the fighting lessons. The main time he’d wished he’d listened was when he got himself banged away on a GBH count for breaking a nightclub bouncer’s neck. What was unfair about that whole eighteen-month stint was that none of it was Ruben’s fault. The guy had been a jerk-off. Anybody would have broken his neck if they’d been in Ruben’s position that day. If they’d drunk the same amount of booze, if they’d lost half their wages on the last race at Kempton Park and if the slag they were supposed to be getting married to had run off with her own cousin. And then, to cap it all, they’d had to listen to a load of garbage coming out of the jerk-off’s mouth, saying the place was full when he was ushering his own mates through the door on the QT. Fuckin’ Italian into the bargain; nose like a parrot’s perch.
So. Feeling good. Eighteen months banged away all done and finished with. The milk-round in the bag. Nicely showered and padding around his bedroom buck naked, freeing a new pair of leopard-skin skimpies from their cellophane bag.
Ruben nodded at his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. Not an ounce of fat on him; all muscle and bone. Those black hairs on his chest and forearms and on his thighs and legs. He half-turned to see the same hair spread over his back, glistening across his shoulders. He adjusted his lunch-pack inside the skimpies, enough in there to keep a harem happy. Or a convent if they wanted a holiday from chastity.
What he’d planned was to get to Kitty’s house around 9, 9.30, by which time she’d have dolled herself up and be waiting on the doorstep. They’d drive over to Harrogate and have breakfast in one of the posh cafes there. Then they’d shop, which was what Kitty liked to do more than anything else. They’d spend a couple of hours wandering round buying new clothes, whatever took the woman’s eye. She’d see he wasn’t a skinflint, which was the reason she’d got rid of her last boyfriend, and she’d see he had some earning power. That he could earn legitimate money from the milk-round, didn’t need to go back to a criminal lifestyle.
She already knew he was a good lover, that he could get to the parts the other guys in her life couldn’t reach. And she’d got to him, too. The only woman he’d ever met who had made him sit up and think. The one woman who had made him change his way of thinking about the world. Ruben had always said that he was number one, that no one else even came in close second. But now that he’d met Kitty Turner he no longer thought like that. She was number one and Ruben was prepared to do anything for her.
He put on his leather strides, sky-blue socks and new black slip-ons. He found his way through the packaging of a white polyester Double Two shirt, removed the pins and plastic clips and slipped it on. A silk tie the same colour as his socks and a brown suede jacket with his snake-skin wallet in the inside pocket made Ruben feel like the master of the universe.
He was out of the door when he had another thought and rushed back to the bathroom to hit the Brut for the second time since leaving the shower.
He left his flat on the Lenton Boulevard and nosed the Skoda into Derby Road, then south to Clifton, over the river and on to the quiet avenue where Kitty should have been waiting for him. He parked outside the house, watching the front door, expecting her to open it and step down the path to join him in the car.
Nothing.
Ruben looked at the upstairs curtains. Maybe she’d slept late and wasn’t ready yet? Was that a wave from behind the nets or a trick of the light? His mind juggling with reality?
He drummed his fingers on the leather cover of the steering wheel, furrowed his brow and leant back in the seat.
Expectations fuck you up. You can look forward to something so much that you believe it’s a reality before it has happened. That time he walked out of Long Lartin he expected to see a woman waiting for him with some wheels, but he ended up walking the six miles to Evesham station by himself, travelled back to Nottingham by train. The woman had left with a Londoner, guy still in his twenties. She was the gonest little girl in town.
But Kitty was different. She’d be out in a minute. This was a woman’s privilege, that’s what his mother used to tell him, way back, when he was still in shorts. Being late. They had this idea it set up anticipation in the guy, made them look better because he’d been waiting. Got his juices going so he couldn’t see straight.
But what if Ruben had let expectation take over again and Kitty was out on the town with some other guy while he was sitting here outside her house? How would he handle that? Ruben shook his head. He knew he wouldn’t handle it well. He wouldn’t have the normal, expected reaction that society took for granted. He wouldn’t shake his head and carry on as if nothing had happened. He wouldn’t stomach it. There’d be violence involved. Some blood.
Christ, this was what happened if you let the inside of your head take over. Ruben had known it all along, not to entertain the thoughts. Get them out. Keep moving. He opened the car door and stepped on to the tarmac, walked up the path to her front door.
It was locked, but he had a key and she hadn’t changed the lock. See? You blame the woman and she’s done nothing. She’ll be upstairs at the mirror. Ruben didn’t shout her name. He knew she was there because of the smell of her. When you entered the house that scent that accompanied her everywhere she went, it pervaded the place.
Taps running in the bathroom upstairs.
He touched the kettle in the kitchen, see if she’d been down to make a drink. It was cold. He switched it on. Maybe she’d want coffee before they left. If she didn’t that was OK. Whatever the lady desired.
He crept up the stairs breathing shallowly, a faint smile on his face. He imagined the shriek she’d come out with when he pushed open the bathroom door, the intake of her breath and the realization and relief as she came towards him, her arms outstretched.
The upper landing was sodden, water coming u
nder the bathroom door and soaking into the fitted carpet. His feet squelched as he walked towards the bathroom with growing trepidation.
But she wasn’t in there. The radiator was on and there was a pink bath towel hanging on it. A face-cloth lay on the lavatory seat. The taps were running and water was streaming over the side of the bath, flooding the floor. Ruben turned the taps off and fished for the plug. The water gurgled as it ran down the drain. In the mirror on the cabinet Ruben’s face stared back at him like one of those Impressionist paintings. It was hot in the small room and a line of sweat ran off his forehead and into his eye. He brushed it away impatiently and turned for the bedroom.
And she was still in bed, asleep.
It was the silence that got to him. There were no sounds in the house. Nothing apart from the sounds he brought with him. There was tension in his chest, a tightening around his ribs and emptiness inside him. He took two steps into the bedroom, towards the figure obscured by the duvet, and there were flies as luscious as blackberries feeding at her gaping eyes.
For a moment the floor under his feet seemed insubstantial. He reached for something to steady him and touched the side of the bed. He took a breath and pulled the duvet away, watched it slip to the carpet. The pillow over her chest was soaked with blood.
When he’d broken the bouncer’s neck Ruben had felt no twinge of conscience or remorse. And whatever they’d thrown at him in Long Lartin, the screws or the cons, he’d taken it all with a knowing nod. The sight of blood had never fazed him. He’d even shrugged his shoulders when his old lady had breathed her last. This was what happened in life; apart from the occasional shag there was only blood and violence and death, and if you knew that and you took it on board you survived, and if you denied it you were a two-time loser.
This woman, Kitty Turner, had taught him something else. She’d taken the whole of his life and his entire experience and turned it inside out and shown him something of the power of tenderness. He hadn’t fully absorbed it, the world that she’d held out to him. He’d seen it in a dim image, shadowy, flickering, like a flame that could live or die. And as long as she was around there had been hope. His mind reeled. He picked up the pillow and watched as the thick blood oozed out between his fingers. This wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. It was senseless, meaningless. Ruben could find no image to tame it. It swarmed in his mind like an infestation of vermin.
It was worse, much worse than anything he could have imagined. Ruben collected Kitty’s body in his arms and staggered out of the bedroom door. When he reached the head of the stairs he stumbled and recognized that the sounds filling his ears were his own cries for help. He was bawling and screaming at the top of his voice, her name and the name of God. ‘Someone,’ he yelled. ‘Anyone. Look at this, what they’ve done.’
As he opened the front door and pushed his way through to the street, the beloved and bloody love of his life still cradled in his arms, the kettle in the kitchen behind him began to howl.
3
After breakfast the private detective got on a train in Nottingham. He had been there for two days, staying in the High Willows B&B, and was looking forward to returning to York and everyday life.
‘Are you married, Mr Turner?’ the owner of the High Willows had asked him. She was a woman who had been a beauty queen in extreme youth but had shed most of her petals and an errant husband after thirty-eight years of marriage. Sam Turner had guessed as much before she came out with the facts. He was, after all, a detective, and besides the proprietress of the High Willows B&B was precisely the kind of woman he seemed to attract. He had perfected the trick of folding himself into a small parcel when these ladies appeared on his horizon. Attempting, and to some extent succeeding in making himself invisible.
Sam wasn’t averse to tasting the charms that such a lady can bestow, and on occasions, more than he cared to remember, had awoken to find himself enchanted by a surfeit of loneliness and rose-water. But Sam already had a girl-friend in York. Although they lived in separate houses, Angeles Falco and he had been lovers for almost a year. Angeles had been virtually blind since she was twenty-two, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see what was going on. And in any case, Sam didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship with her for the sake of a one-night stand. He’d done it before, too many times. Not with Angeles, but with many of the women who had passed through his life.
Sam wasn’t young anymore, and he was beginning to learn.
On the other hand, Angeles had been distant lately, didn’t always seem as pleased to see him as she had in the past. The waters were cooler. Not terminally as yet. Maybe there were ways to save it, turn it around. Sam was still keen. She was a treasure to him.
He wrote his report to the rhythm of the train’s movement. The client’s wife hadn’t run off with a lover, as he’d suspected. Instead she’d organized a flat for herself close to the Lace Market and was hard at work in a new job at Trent University. She could walk to it on a fine day and in the winter it would be only a couple of stops on the tram. She liked the Arboretum where she spent time alone. She hadn’t run to anything, which would have been some comfort to Sam’s client. She had run away from the guy, preferring instead a strange and empty city, a single and lonely bed in which she could begin to identify the parameters of her own identity.
Sam looked through the rain-streaked windows of the train and tried to think of something upbeat to complete the report. A sentence or a phrase that would allow his client to go forward, to accept what had happened to him and not to regard his abandonment as a black hole. Sam the counsellor trying to elbow the detective aside. But in the end he settled for the ashes and dust of the truth.
He scored an excuse for coffee from the trolley and settled down to listen to the chatter of the two women sitting on the opposite side of the table. One of them had had a dream about buying a Mercedes. ‘It was terrible,’ she said. ‘I suddenly realized that I’d done the most stupid thing. Landed myself with this huge car; it would need litres and litres of fuel and be impossible to park. For the whole dream I was trying to reverse the process, get rid of this monster, swap it for a little Rover or a Renault, something manageable in traffic. It was a nightmare.’
Sam wanted to tell her that it was a middle-class nightmare. If he’d had a dream where he owned a Merc it would have been great. Even a second-hand one. He’d have spent the rest of the night smelling the leather upholstery, running his hands over the smooth lines of the bonnet. True, it would cost a heap to run, but status symbols don’t come cheap.
The last nightmare Sam had had was when he’d bought a bottle of Scotch. He was halfway through it before he remembered it wasn’t a dream and he’d fallen into the jug again. The future was a blur into which he would drag all his friends and his relationships, his health and his conscience and any sense of self-respect he had built up since the last binge.
But he didn’t say anything. He sipped his coffee and gazed at the rain-soaked landscape. Two good women on their way to York for some shopping didn’t want to hear about a drunk, have their dreams criticized by a guy who still wrote with a pen.
At York station there was a Chinese guy with a ponytail leaning against a wall and reading the Guardian and around the bookstall a young Yorkshire entrepreneur was busy taking Upskirt videos. There was the usual drone of tourists, most of them clutching three-colour maps of the city, all seeking ghosts of Vikings or ancient Romans, steam-trains or somewhere they could hire a bike.
Outside on the street the con artists were perfecting their pitch, the local traders polishing their wares, the restaurateurs thickening their sauces and the beggars sharpening their whistles. It was another day in the market place of civilization. You’d have to be blind not to see how far we’d come since the first Constantine was proclaimed the Great Emperor of the Western Roman Empire in this very town at the dawn of the fourth century.
The river was running high. From the Lendal Bridge the stream was fast and lively, an undercurrent form
ing eddies and swirling pools in the black water and various items of flotsam betraying the speed at which the waters fought their way towards the Humber estuary and the sea.
A young woman on the east side of the bridge gazed lovingly into the river. Sam imagined her climbing on to the parapet and taking a dive, bringing her few short years to a watery end. She was twenty years old, maybe a year or two older, with thin hair and a whole summer behind her in which she had not been touched by the sun. Not an ugly girl, but one who had not learned how to look pretty. Or maybe she had learned and simply couldn’t be assed.
Sam wanted to go to her, find the words to tell her that nothing was hopeless, that there would come a point in the future when she’d feel better about the world, about herself. Tell her that we needed more people in the world like her, people who still felt things. But he didn’t do it. Ours is not the kind of world in which you can tell a stranger not to jump. There are too many assumptions involved.
But as he turned the corner, heading towards the post office, Sam couldn’t shake her out of his mind. He imagined the evening paper with her photograph, the tragic headlines and the knowledge that he might have been able to help. Sam had not experienced a moment when he wanted to take his own life. He had come to recognize that his years of alcohol addiction had been fuelled by a death-wish, but there had been no conscious decision to die in the relentless abuse of his health. He had wanted to blot out the world while still using its oxygen.
The girl on the bridge - and he turned now and headed back in her direction - had a countenance which retained no illusions. She didn’t want herself and she didn’t want the palliatives that the world had to offer. She had looked into the dark eyes of death and imagined some comfort there.
She was no longer on the bridge and Sam watched the tumbling stream, hallucinating a pale hand raised from the depths, a goodbye wave from a goodbye waif. When he turned away he saw her sitting on a bench with a bearded giant. The man wore a threadbare coat and huge trainers without laces and he had two plastic carriers overflowing with empty bottles. The girl had a cigarette between her lips and the man was leaning over her with the fag-end of another, passing on the light.