A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Your uncle must got a lot of nephews,’ shouted the girl. Rex recognised her as Birgita, a friend of Milda’s, whom he’d met once before. She’d been dressed as a sort of 1920s tweedy lesbian back then. Now she wore a grey t-shirt with KAOS written on it. ‘Every week, one of you coming by and says this is your uncle restaurant.’

  Rex gave the tiniest of laughs – more of a snort – forgetting how sensitive the average skunk-smoking street hood was to subtle vibrations. The peaks of five, carefully-skewed baseball caps turned to look at him.

  ‘Whatchu want, old man?’ The spokesman pimp-rolled over to him, in perfect imitation of a gang-banger from South Central L.A.. These guys spent a lot of time on their look, Rex reflected, as he was slammed up against the wall. Three assaults in one day. Not quite a record, but close.

  ‘Rex Tracey,’ he said, smiling over the pain. ‘From the Gazette.’

  Ten, narrowed eyes appraised him. Teeth were sucked, one set after the next.

  ‘Your name’s really Rex Tracey?’ the spokesman asked. Rex showed him his press card. ‘Sounds like a movie star, man.’ His friends laughed.

  ‘I was,’ Rex said. ‘But you know what Hollywood’s like when you hit forty.’

  He went flying against the wall again, this time injuring a different part of his head on the brick.

  ‘Don’t chat shit to me!’ the gangster hissed, so close Rex could not only feel the carefully-clipped stubble but also see how young he was. Nineteen? Maybe not even that. ‘Report something in your paper about these rats, bruv!’ he said, gesturing towards Birgita. ‘Breaking into our houses, nicking the gas, dealing drugs. Maybe all that gas gonna blow up in their faces, man.’

  A siren sounded nearby. Rex’s attacker pulled away.

  ‘You gonna write something like I tell you?’

  ‘Mehmet, man, come out, man.’ His friends were getting antsy as the siren came nearer. ‘Come out, man.’ Mehmet pointed two fingers, held together, gun-fashion, first at Rex, then at Birgita, and ran away with his crew.

  Birgita tutted. ‘Welcome to the rat-house.’ She stared curiously at Rex. ‘I know you from somewhere, don’t I?’

  * * *

  Just before Hodja Nasreddin closed, Rex had eaten an indifferent dinner in there: the bulgur wheat in the Akçabat köfte had been undercooked, like grains of cat litter, and he’d had to get up and pretend to leave in order to get anyone to take his money. There was a certain, deliberate sadness called huzun; some people considered it to be a national trait of the Turks, almost a point of pride. But it wasn’t huzun at Hodja Nasreddin that night – half the dishes had been off, the fridge had made a loud hum over which bickering could be heard from the kitchen. When Rex had passed by a week later, the restaurant was shuttered up, never to re-emerge.

  A couple of the original, red velvet banquettes were still in one corner, along with a faded photograph of Izmir and a nazar boncuğu – the ubiquitous eye-shaped amulet – over the door to the former kitchen. But far from merely squatting the building, Birgita and her cohorts had transformed it. Striking canvases hung on every wall, sharing space with a cracked leather sofa, a toy train set and a huge, stuffed pelican. The wooden floor, and what tiny bit of the wall-panels remained visible were spattered with coloured oils. The smell of these mingled with the fumes of a calor-gas heater, freshly-peeled tangerines and Birgita’s rolling tobacco.

  She had a wide, flat face with a snub nose. She sat, open-legged like a tribal fishwife, on a low stool, allowing Rex a seat on the vintage sofa. He’d have been glad of it, except that there was a mattress directly behind the sofa, and on it, a thin man wearing only a pair of grey, pain-spattered jeans, asleep. Rex sipped sorrel tea and tried to ignore him.

  ‘Police was here already,’ Birgita said, flatly, as she peeled another tangerine and popped segments of it in her mouth. ‘Asking about the girl that got attack. Her name was Marina Krelkina.’

  ‘And she lived here?’ Rex put the tea down. It tasted truly unpleasant.

  ‘Sometimes here, sometimes squat in Dalston, Leyonstone…’ Birgita waved a hand on the air, symbolising the girl’s wanderings.

  ‘She lived in a squat in Leytonstone?’ Rex clarified, remembering the railway ticket in the girl’s bag. He felt a fresh wave of shame about Terry.

  ‘Squats all over. But not here.’

  ‘You just said she stayed here.’

  ‘And here is not squat,’ Birgita replied, testily. ‘This place costs five hundred fifty pounds a month. The owner allows to us cheap so it doesn’t become crack house. It is not a squat.’

  Rex held up a hand in surrender. ‘But this girl – Marina – she knew Milda? I mean – she had one of Milda’s books.’

  ‘Yes, and she had Mark’s laptop, as well,’ Birgita said, archly. ‘She didn’t deserve that… that scolping thing. But she is vagis. Thief.’ The man behind the sofa yawned and stretched – a blast of unbrushed teeth floated up towards Rex. ‘Actually, when police come I am just glad they don’t say nothing happened to Milda. This is my thought. Imagine it. Rex.’ She shivered. ‘Somebody going round, doing that to women.’ She tapped her head. ‘Ugh.’

  ‘So you’re worried about Milda?’ First Aguta, he thought. Now Birgita. And Susan. Not to mention himself.

  ‘I had bad dream about her,’ Birgita said, distractedly picking a piece of lint off one of her hanging canvases. ‘Last time I saw her, maybe three weeks ago she wasn’t happy.’

  ‘Because of the row with Vadim?’

  Birgita snorted. ‘Vadimas is just a man. She had lost her job at café, and she was sick.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Headaches all the time. She felt…’ Birgita span a finger in the air. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘Dizzy?’

  ‘Dizzy and sick.’

  Before Rex could ask more about this, the man behind the sofa stood up and left the room, making a brief grunt towards Birgita. ‘Mark,’ she said, with a wry look in her eye. Whoever Mark was, it was clear he didn’t always sleep behind the sofa.

  ‘I said it was a spirit sickness,’ Birgita went on. ‘Go back to home country, walk in forests, visit the trees, don’t visit doctors. She was thinking to go on bus. You know, some boys of ours got a bus? One of your old Routemeisters. East Ham to Vilnius, once a week, full of money.’

  Rex had heard about the bus, about all the buses, in fact, leaving various parts of East London for cities behind the former Iron Curtain. ‘You think she might have gone back home? No one’s seen her for a while.’

  Birgita shrugged, revealing a freckled shoulder and a purple bra-strap. ‘It costs quite a lot, that bus. But if you can’t fly…’

  Rex nodded. Milda hated aeroplanes.

  ‘… I hope she has. It’s the only place she’ll find what she needs.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rex liked Birgita: the paintings, her coolness with the thugs outside. But still, throughout all this talk of spirit sickness and prophetic dreams and finding what you needed, he’d wanted to shake her and shout, ‘Yes, but what do you bloody mean?’ in her ears, just as he’d ended up wanting to do with Milda. And he remembered, in that instant, why they’d split up.

  ‘She is too good,’ Birgita answered, after rolling another cigarette. She rummaged in an archive box on the floor and pulled from it a heavy piece of paper. She passed it to Rex.

  It was a portrait of Keith Powell, facing slightly to the right, eyes aloft, like a parody of a Soviet propaganda image. Closer up, he could see it had been made of fine strips of news print. He saw a string of numbers. The fragment-words ‘resourc’ and ‘immi’. She’d made it from British Workers’ Action Party posters. The man, quite literally, in his own words.

  ‘Do you know him?’ Rex asked, turning it towards Birgita. ‘Local fascist leader,’ she said, as if it was quite normal to have local fascist leaders in Newington Green. ‘Ýou see this now? She can draw, then she can paint. Last time I see her, now she starts to work with a camera. I told her: you know
Milda for some artists this is a curse. Really. Too many languages. She doesn’t know which is the… the mum-tongue.’

  ‘Mother tongue,’ Rex corrected, absently. He remembered, when she’d once complained about being artistically stuck, getting one of his old cameras out of the cupboard under the stairs and giving it to her. Two days later, it had been back in there, unused, not a word said. So how had she arrived at photography now? Who’d given her a camera and managed to inspire her? He looked down at the image of Powell and remembered all those artistic shots of fairgrounds and fishing boats on his walls. Had it been him?

  Birgita coughed hard, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I have to go to hospital,’ she said.

  ‘They’ll just tell you to stop smoking those things.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I mean – I got to go the hospital now. For a…’ She waved a hand over the lower half of her body. ‘Appointment.’ She stood up, and held out a hand. As he shook it, she laughed huskily and said, ‘I just wanted Milda’s picture.’

  He handed it back, feeling that this moment probably symbolised his leave-taking with Milda, and her whole world. They’d had fun, a sweet, funny time together, but ultimately, very little in common. She’d almost certainly hopped on a bus and gone home without telling anyone. He had a headache, a neck ache, a back ache. And a big story to write.

  The old restaurant stood on the end of a row of shops, some thriving, others in a perpetual cycle of new beginnings and bailiffs’ notices. There was an alleyway between the off-licence and the café, and as he walked past it on his way back towards the green, he sensed a flurry of movement. The man who’d been asleep behind the sofa, Mark, now stood in the alleyway, zipping up a little pocket in the arm of his bomber jacket. Behind him was a boy on a mountain bike. Grass? A loan? Rex walked on quickly. Not his business. None of it was any of his business.

  But then, sitting on the top deck of another 141 as it sailed past the low, flat buildings of the health centre, he found himself wondering if Milda had visited a doctor with her complaints. Perhaps she had, and her worries had been settled. Or she’d had bad news. Or possibly she’d believed Birgita’s anarchist-art-collective-hippy-squatter bullshit and stayed away from medicine and carried on and just collapsed somewhere. Somewhere dark where no one would come to help her.

  * * *

  At first he was only going to get rid of the pill packets and the bottles, but the urge to sweep the whole thing away became too great. He started with the bottle the girl had been holding. MS-Contin, morphine tablets, his wife’s name printed on the label. As he dropped it into the bin-bag, he felt again a prickle of the anger he’d felt when he’d come upstairs and seen her there, in their bathroom.

  There were other medicines, too: anti-nausea drugs to go with the chemotherapy, dihydrocodeine from the early days when the pain still went away, some herbal rub from the time when the doctors couldn’t give her pains a name, and kept sending her away, telling her it was only stress, nothing to worry about. It was, in reverse, a catalogue of her death.

  Outside, past the rabbit hutches, he’d made a fire-pit from bricks he’d found in a skip. There was dry garden waste waiting in there already, along with some old newspapers and all the rubbish the schoolkids shoved over his wall during the course of a term. He enjoyed lighting the first match, and when he’d put it in and the fire, tentatively, began to catch, he struck another and another, and found, eventually, that he had used up a whole box of matches.

  Caroline hadn’t understood what she was asking. Couldn’t have known of the pact he’d kept all these years, or how intimately connected that was to her. Other people, he knew – he’d read about it in the papers – were happy to do it. Not him. It hadn’t mattered what things she had claimed when torn apart by the pain. And if the girl hadn’t interfered, he would have explained.

  At first he’d seen her as a sort of saviour. It was only later, much later, in the bathroom, that he’d recognised what she’d really been.

  He threw the contents of the bin bag in, item by item, watching them twist and yawn and shatter in the heat. Standing there, so close to the ashes and the smoke and the flames, he remembered his fury with the girl again, how out of control it had made him feel in his stomach and his legs. How his rage had burned so strong that it seemed to erase things from his memory – he couldn’t, for example, remember anything about the rest of that day, where he’d been, what he’d done with himself. Or the girl.

  * * *

  As Rex walked from the bus stop to the office, a smoky drizzle had started to fall, and he remembered a little snippet Milda had told him about her school days, just at the end of communism. They hadn’t been allowed out when it was wet, like in English schools, in fact, but instead of making a racket in the classroom as the English kids did, these junior revolutionaries had to walk, in silence, in a circle, around the gym. Just doing that, in silence, for an hour. That was why she hated rain. And that, he thought, was why he’d found her so fascinating. Her memories. So different from anyone else’s.

  Something caught his eye on a strip of wall between an estate agent’s and a halal butcher. Maybe it was to do with the way he spent his days, but the typeface drew his attention before the words. ‘Wrong Time Wrong Race’ said a small, A6-size handbill on the wall, in the cheap, chunky lettering of the BWAP. It made Rex think of neckless men in bomber jackets, shouting things on the terraces. But someone more intelligent was behind this poster. Below the headline were a few lines pasted from the free paper they gave out on the tube – these referred to the three girls who’d been attacked recently in the area. But, in a few well-chosen phrases, this little square of paper put a whole new spin on the link between immigration and crime. These girls had been attacked because they were newcomers, the poster said. They weren’t responsible for the violence, but they were, nonetheless, the reason it was happening. It was a work of marketing genius, as if Keith Powell’s gang of fascists had hired an ad agency to give them the edge. Then again, maybe Powell had done it himself. He was clearly a bit of an artist. So was that what had pulled him into Milda’s orbit? Or her into his?

  Rex succeeded in taking a picture of the poster on his mobile phone, and quickened his steps back to the office. With a group like this operating in the area, so keen to make capital from violence, Susan couldn’t possibly refuse a big piece. It proved everything he’d been saying.

  The office was cleaner, thanks to the efforts of a tiny, skull-faced Spanish lady who’d been brought in by an agency to cover Magda’s absence, but it was too warm, and it smelled of peoples’ lunches. Rex took a deep breath and headed straight over to Terry, whose knobbly, Norseman’s skull was bent over the desk as he rummaged through the drawers.

  ‘Now I can’t find me bastard hundred-mil macro…’ he muttered, before seeing that it was Rex who’d approached the desk. He fixed him with a baleful gaze.

  ‘Terry. Look. Sorry. Can you blow this picture up for me?’ Rex said, handing over his mobile. ‘You know what Susan’s like – she won’t even look at it if it’s not headline size.’

  Terry continued to stare.

  ‘Can we just forget about the other business?’

  The stare went on.

  ‘I’m sorry, Terry. We are mates. I mean, I hope we still are. And perhaps if I’d remembered that we are, then I might not have… I mean I would have just asked you outright, and not…’ He was jabbering. ‘Can we just chalk it up to inexperience? Or my immense stupidity?’

  ‘We can chalk it up to you being a fucking knob-head, yes.’ Terry inclined his head towards Susan’s office, through whose slatted blinds could be seen the seated forms of the editor and Ellie. ‘But I’d leave your Nazis for a bit if I were you. You’re wanted in there.’

  It soon became clear why. ‘I’m not paying Ellie a Grade One salary for charitable reasons,’ Susan said, as he went in. ‘I expect her to be learning as she works. And I expect you to be taking charge of that process.’

/>   Ellie stared at her feet.

  ‘You’ve been out most of the day,’ Susan continued. ‘You’ve had your mobile switched off, and you’ve left your assistant with nothing to do.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to switch it off, and it’s only actually just after lunch,’ Rex said feebly. ‘And she did have work to do. I asked her to take charge of the competition.’

  ‘I’ve done it,’ Ellie interjected. ‘The changing face of Haringey. Kahn’s are giving a free tripod to the winner and camera bags to the runners-up.’

  ‘She achieved that in the first half hour of your absence,’ Susan went on, stuffing various bits of cutting-edge technology into her handbag. ‘And since then, I’ve had her on the lead story.’

  ‘So we’re exactly where we would have expected to be if I’d been in the office – except that I might have checked her copy earlier, and instead I’m going to be doing it now.’

  Standing up, Susan gave Rex a long, cool look. It suggested that his logic might not be at fault, but many other things still were.

  ‘I want everything on my desk by close of play this evening. And then tomorrow, Ellie and I are going to The Old Dairy for a nice, long, leisurely lunch, to which you are not invited, and while we’re there, she’s going to talk me through every line of the lead story, explaining all the changes you and she made and why.’

  ‘Fine. But can I just show you this?’

  Susan waved his hand away as he produced his mobile phone poster picture. ‘I’m late for the accountants.’

  With that, she took a powerful-looking coat off the hooks and swept out. Rex and Ellie looked at one another, for once equals in sheepishness.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to make trouble for you,’ Ellie said, her cheeks reddening. ‘I got hold of the first girl, Ilona, and she said she’d do an interview if we paid her expenses, and I wasn’t sure if we could do that, so I asked Susan and…’