The Secrets We Keep

by Jonathan Harvey

  ‘And the darkie?’

  That was Linda’s voice. Linda was calling her own brother a darkie? I wanted to go in there and slap her cheeky face. But I didn’t. I thought it best to wait and hear what the outcome was.

  ‘I can’t do anything for him. Is that a problem, Linda?’

  ‘No, don’t be daft.’

  ‘But you said yourself, he can’t stay here forever.’

  Oh, couldn’t he?

  ‘I’ll call 999. He’s on the run from a children’s home. Surprised they haven’t been knocking the doors down already.’

  ‘Send him back up North?’

  ‘Or down here. Makes no odds to me. Silly little queer.’

  And I heard both women laughing. It was only a little laugh. But it was cold as ice.

  I didn’t bother with a drink. I returned to the sofa bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling. Guinness lay beside me, snoring lightly.

  I had to make a decision. I could go off with Gretchen and get somewhere else to live while Guinness went back to Hansbury.

  But I’d never seen him so happy since getting out of Hansbury. Even if his sister hated him, the racist bitch, she’d done a first-class impression of someone who was glad to see him and take him in. But at the end of the day, she was greedy. She liked the money she made from being a fence. She’d told me, she liked living in her little council flat and drinking champagne and wearing designer gear. She liked her life. Why would she then want her half-brother moving in and spoiling her peace?

  But before I told Guinness what she’d said and what she had planned, I needed to work out a plan of my own. I worried away at it for an hour or so, till sleep overcame me. But when I woke the next morning, the plan was crystal-clear in my head.

  Uncle Benedict

  ‘How do I know you’re not making it up?’

  ‘Why would I make it up? I was on a cushy number back there.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’

  ‘But nothing, Guin.’

  ‘She never said any of that to me. How do I know you’re . . .’

  ‘Oh, all right then, Guin. You get back there and ask her. And see how long it is before the rozzers arrive, eh?’

  We walked in silence for a while.

  ‘I can’t believe you nicked all her money,’ he said, only this time there was a giggle in his voice. Like he was believing me. Like she had it coming.

  ‘Yeah, well. Sure she’ll earn a load more again soon.’

  ‘For her fucking champagne.’

  ‘I know. Silly bitch.’

  We were at a place called Parliament Square. The Houses of Parliament lay before us; Big Ben loomed high, blocking the sun. The square was busy, and I had to stop myself from taking Guinness’s hand when we crossed the road. I had to stop treating him like a kid.

  Eventually we found the entrance. A security guard looked horrified as we approached. He didn’t say anything. Just gave us daggers.

  Which is when I said in my plummiest tones.

  ‘Hello. We’re here to see our uncle, Sir Benedict Bishop?’

  The guard looked us up and down, and then folded his arms.

  ‘He’s not here,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t lie!’ Guinness practically screamed. ‘He’s an MP. He works here. And WE wanna see him.’

  The security guy looked, how to put it nicely, taken aback.

  Before he could say anything, I grabbed Guinness and yanked him away.

  ‘You’re all right, mate,’ I went. ‘We’ll give him a bell. Come back another time.’ And I frog-marched Guinness down the road.

  ‘It’s the summer recess!’ the guard called after us. As if he was about to add, ‘You pair of bloody knobheads.’

  ‘That gob of yours is gonna get you in trouble one day,’ I warned Guinness, but he shook me off and walked despondently to the corner.

  ‘What the fuck’s a summer recess anyway?’ Guinness was practically tapping his feet in the shadow of Big Ben.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So much for this big plan of yours.’

  I didn’t dignify that with a response. Cheeky git.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Guinness had folded his arms.

  And that was the million-dollar question.

  Under the radar

  You might think we had it made. Two lads in London with money to burn. We had the best part of three hundred quid in our pockets – well, in Guinness’s plastic bag – which was a lot in those days. But with no contacts and nowhere to stay, we were screwed. Guinness wanted to stay in a hotel, but I knew this was a non-starter. We couldn’t afford to ring any alarm bells, and two teenage lads checking into even the scuzziest B & B might prompt a call to the authorities. And quiet words on the sly meant tracing us back to Hansbury. And that meant a one-way ticket back up North. We had to stay under the radar.

  In the countryside you could sleep under trees and in barns, I figured, but where could you sleep in the centre of the biggest city in the country? The streets might have been my friend back in St Helens, but I didn’t know this place – only the bits I’d seen from the comfort of Gretchen Tate’s motor. We’d need cover, we’d need shelter, we’d need warmth. I know it sounds mental now, but I took us both in a cab to Harrods, one of the few shops I knew, and spent some dosh on sleeping bags. Truth be told we were going to try and nick them, but with no holdalls and no hoisting drawers we were stymied. And so we paid for them with cold hard cash. Had sleeping bags, I reckoned, could travel. We still had no idea where we were going to lay our heads down, but with sleeping bags we stood a chance of a few hours’ comfortable sleep. We wandered the streets, trying not to look too conspicuous walking round with sleeping bags in plastic bags, and as night fell it became obvious that in central London every street corner, every alleyway, was someone’s bedroom. Maybe this wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d first feared.

  We spent the next few days on a hamster wheel of kipping in back alleys, walking round in the daytimes and exploring our still-new city, hanging round on corners watching the world go by, then moving on each time we saw a copper coming. We’d even do some begging, and we’d make a few coppers, nothing substantial, and each hour we’d move on and keep going. I had no idea where we were heading. But I hoped and prayed something good was round the corner.

  I didn’t know what that something good might be. But hopefully we’d find it.

  One day another lad told us we were hanging round in the wrong places. He said we were too near Bayswater to make any money. We’d strayed north from Knightsbridge, apparently, and we needed to ‘get our arses down to Piccadilly’.

  So we followed his directions, and we did.

  Snow in the summer

  I don’t know what month it was, but I remember the sweltering heat. As we hit Piccadilly, Guinness wandered into a souvenir shop and spent ages looking at all the snowglobes in there. They came in all different sizes, from little miniature ones to ones the size of a loaf of bread. The London skyline, St Paul’s, Nelson’s Column. At the flick of your wrist they’d be lost in a blizzard. Guinness loved them. He loved working his way along the row of them, one by one; then just as the snow was settling he’d start again, eyes ablaze, chuckling like a kid in a Christmas card.

  You gonna get one? I went.

  He looked at me, surprised. Then shook his head.

  As we left the shop he said, Nowhere to put it, have I?

  And he was bang on. When you sleep in a sleeping bag, when all you have is the stuff you stand up in and a bag of tenners, you can’t have things. Yet people say things make them happy. The shops are full of things. Things we really don’t need, but that make us chuckle like Guinness did.

  One day, not sure how, I determined that I’d have somewhere to amass loads and loads of things.

  One day you will, I went. And Guinness shrugged like it didn’t matter.

  But I thought it did.

  The Meat Rack

  When I caught my first glimpse of Piccadilly Ci
rcus, I knew I’d come home. It was early evening, the lights were on and this was a futuristic city all of its own, basking in neon. The look and feel of the place excited me, like the electricity from the hoardings and signage was rippling through me. This didn’t feel like home as in, this was where I wanted to live or a place where I felt comfortable; but it felt like a place I instinctively knew how to work.

  And instinct, as you know, has always been a gift that was important to me.

  I looked around the place and almost instantly knew what to do.

  The furtive glances of younger lads and older men were practically sending off beeping radar signals to me. Five minutes of checking the swirling crowd out around Eros and the islands of pavement opposite had my pulse racing. I knew what to do. The lads were alien to me, but as familiar as my brothers. It was like I’d stepped into the Hansbury end-of-term disco and the dirty bastard teachers were swooping. But no-one was making the first move. The odd transaction happened, I clocked that; but I wanted to put a rocket up their lazy arses. I told Guinness to mind the bags, and got to work.

  A guy in a duffel coat and briefcase was checking out a blond skinny lad leaning against a railing, but he didn’t have the bottle to go up to him, not yet. I approached the duffel.

  You want him? Twenty quid.

  He looked panicked.

  I’m not Old Bill, mate. Look at me.

  He nodded. That was all the info I needed.

  I approached blondie.

  Bloke in the duffel coat. Twenty quid. You give me five.

  Now he looked alarmed.

  Or I’ll fucking go with him.

  Blondie nodded. Tipped Duffel the wink.

  Off they went.

  Ten minutes later Blondie was back. And I was a fiver up. Word got around. By the end of the night I was a hundred quid up.

  But Guinness was nowhere to be seen. Looked like I’d need a new sleeping bag.

  I didn’t realize it then, but I wouldn’t see Guinness again for five years.

  Loyalty

  The lads on the Meat Rack liked me. I got them work. I got them more work than they would’ve got on their own. They could be a lily-livered bunch, as could the fellas pussyfooting round them. What they were all doing was illegal, of course it was, so they were all bricking it about making the first move. So where they might’ve taken anything up to half an hour to work up the courage to make a negotiation, I stuck me foot on the accelerator pedal and got the ball rolling. Soon the lads learned they could trust me. And the fellas. I’d earned their loyalty, their trust. And I was earning a crust.

  The million-dollar question

  But how does a lad from nowhere – on the run, allegedly, from the police – end up owning one of the best clubs of the 1990s? A lad who slept in a (this time stolen) Harrods sleeping bag in an alley round the back of the Dominion Theatre: how does he go from that to millionaire in the space of ten years? What’s the career ladder for that? Two things, really. Drive. And the man in the orang-utan coat.

  Hello, Danny

  The first thing you need to know to really get this is that in Piccadilly and Soho I went by the name of Jimmy. Don’t ask me why I chose that particular name; I guess I wanted something neutral that couldn’t be linked to Bioletti, and instinct told me when those first lads asked me what I was called it was best to keep a bit back. So Jimmy I was. Also, if anyone asked, I was seventeen. Whether folk believed it’s another thing, but it lessened anyone’s interest in me. ‘See him there? He’s only fifteen.’ At seventeen the world was your oyster, and besides, what’s a couple of years here and there?

  I bought myself the BMX I’d been missing all those years and stored it in the flat of a kindly hooker called Framboise (I think that was about as real a name as mine was Jimmy, and for a French lass she had one heck of a Doncaster accent on her). She was based in a side street called Tisbury Court, which was a tiny hiccup of a walkway between Wardour Street and Rupert Street. I’d pick it up first thing in the morning, and drop it off at hers last thing at night. She let me keep my sleeping bag there too, though sometimes she’d invite me in for a drink and I’d kip on her couch, though I didn’t make too much of a habit of it. She even let me keep some stuff in an old locker she had there. I think she thought I kept toiletries in it. In fact it’s where I stashed my hard-earned cash. The new bike gave me freedom if I spotted the Old Bill hanging around. It also earned me the nickname of Jimmy the Bike.

  It was the middle of the morning and not much was going down on the Dilly, so I decided to go for a bike ride and grab myself my latest favourite meal, homity pie, in a vegetarian place called Cranks on Marshall Street. Get me, vegetarian food, I know. London hadn’t just opened my eyes to a brave new world, it’d opened my taste buds and palate too.

  I was dawdling up Wardour Street on the pavement, feet off the pedals, pushing myself along with my feet, when I saw a weird car parked outside the little church garden there. It was a convertible Mini, something I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since – baby blue, and the roof was down. And leaning against it was this fella. He was as odd-looking as his motor. He was tall, like a beanpole. His skin was pockmarked, but he’d tried to hide that by too many sunbeds or too many holidays (I later found out it was the former). He had big New Romantic hair, three different shades of blonde. His eyes were covered in mirrored shades and he was wearing what looked like a dead orang-utan around him, though on closer inspection it was some horrendous fun-fur coat with red feathers hanging off it. Quite an arresting sight, I think you’ll agree.

  And this dude was looking straight at me.

  Of course, I was used to men looking at me: this was Soho, anyone could be easy meat. But there was something else about this look that told me he was no ordinary punter, and I couldn’t help but stare back. I found myself slowing the bike down as I got nearer him, and he nodded, like this was what he expected me to do.

  What did he want? A lad? Nothing doing there for now. Maybe I could tell him to give me half an hour or so.

  But he was on a double yellow, and I wouldn’t have time to sort anything without him getting a ticket or clamped – they were ruthless round here.

  As I stopped in front of him, he smiled. And then he said something that was like a punch to the guts.

  ‘Danny Bioletti.’ He spoke quite posh. Like it was put on. Like he’d taken his words and ironed them flat. And he took this dramatic pause while I registered that he knew my name, my real name. My full name. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your dad.’

  I knew I had to get away. I didn’t know who this geezer was, but he wasn’t good news. I rammed my foot on the pedal, fighting the urge to throw up, and pedalled as hard and fast down the street as I could. Fight or flight reaction. And I flew.

  He couldn’t be Old Bill, could he? Old Bill wouldn’t dress like some freaky Boy George wannabe?

  But he had to be Old Bill. In plain clothes? Or whatever the opposite of plain clothes was? How did he know my name otherwise? Was he after me? Did he want to send me back to Hansbury? But why do it with the barmy car and mirrored shades routine? And if he was plain clothes then I’m sorry, those clothes weren’t plain. Halfway up Wardour Street, swerving for my life to avoid pedestrians, I saw he was still idly leaning against the car, watching me go.

  I got the hell out of Dodge.

  And he was dodge. Well dodgy.

  But if he was Old Bill why didn’t he come after me?

  And why was I so shaken up by the brief encounter?

  Coz he’d known my name. My real name. And I’d never seen him before.

  I wanted to speak to Guinness. I’d not seen him for the best part of a month. I went to a phone box and called the number I had for his Linda. She told me he no longer lived there. When I asked her where he was she said she didn’t know. I asked did the police take him. She gave a curt Yeah, they mighta done. I hung up.

  Anger coursed through my veins. I snapped the receiver up again and redialled the number
, shoving a 10p in the slot.

  ‘D’you know another thing? I think it’s bang out of order calling Guinness a darkie, you racist twat.’

  And I hung up. I stood there, staring at the phone, furious. The fear triggered by the man in the suit, the fear of the unknown, the new, was making me the angriest I’d been in a long time.

  Suddenly the phone rang. I picked it up. No-one rang phone boxes, did they?

  It was Linda. ‘Racist I might be,’ she snapped. ‘But you’re the one that calls him fucking Guinness.’

  And now it was her turn to hang up.

  As she did it was like I’d been slapped in the face. And the sharpness of it had slapped some sense into me. And I could see she had a point.

  His name wasn’t Guinness, it was Sam. Guinness was a piss-take because of the colour of his skin.

  I felt bad. I’d used the name so much, I’d forgotten what it meant. So had he.

  But it in no way made it right.

  Fancy his Linda, the old trout, teaching me a lesson.

  From that second on I vowed only to ever think about him as, or call him by, his real name.

  As I stood in the phone box, my BMX leaning up against it outside, I became aware of a car slowing down on the street outside. I looked. It was him. He was looking at me.

  OK, so this was it. He was going to arrest me. Sod it. I’ve had enough. I can’t cope with this. Slap the handcuffs on, mate, and take me now.

  I thought he’d stop the car and get out.

  He didn’t. He did a thumbs-up sign at me. Then he sped off up the street.

  The Green Lady

  There’s a painting by this Russian artist guy called The Chinese Girl, but you might know it by its more common name, The Green Lady. It’s a really well-known painting, and it’s distinctive because the artist fella painted this Chinese woman and used green paint for her face. She’s wearing this brown dress with yellow bits at the top and she’s got this black hair. If you can’t picture it, look it up online. It’s the sort of thing that was over every other fireplace in St Helens when I was growing up.

  Around this time I was cycling round Piccadilly when I saw a queue outside the Café de Paris. I stopped the bike coz I’d never seen a more amazing, more motley crew waiting to go into a club. There were fellas in drag, but not just any old drag, really over-the-top drag; one had lightbulbs flashing round his face – God knows how. There were women in PVC bodysuits. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.