She turned briefly from the road to glance at him, her green eyes shining with emotion.
This glorious creature, he thought, gazing upon her erect head, her purposeful expression now returned to the road ahead of them; and for a brief moment he was almost hopeful – almost – for the sort of future that she, and others like her, would strive to build with decency and hard work and a sense of justice. He hoped to God that they would not mess it up like his generation had done; and beyond the rattle of the motorcar, beyond the charred streets dusty in the brilliant sunlight, he began to discern the possibility of a world finally at peace.
Or rather, he corrected himself, a post-war world: not the same thing at all, old man. Not the same thing at all.
10
The dream was always the same: it didn’t seem to matter how much or how little he had had to drink. It always ended with him flying through the air with the feeling that the inside of his head had been blasted to smithereens and something, some vital part of him, was gone for ever. He never dreamed about hitting the water, floating for God knows how long in the frozen sea clinging to a hatch cover; he did not dream about drowning. He dreamed of flying, which to his mind was a strange thing for a sailor to do.
He had woken up late, still the worse for drink, and gone out to look for cigarettes. He had woken to the dream as he always did these days, and the memory of the dream had stayed with him, vivid, all the way along the Seven Sisters Road; more real to him than the rush and confusion of the street with its crowds of ugly, worn-out people; the bints wearing trousers and the skinny arses on them; the fumes and shrieks of the motor cars and buses.
He had no recollection of the night before, of how he had found his way back to his digs: none of it was as memorable to him as was the dream. The dream was so powerful, he often wondered if that was where he actually existed and it was everything else that was unreal. Of course he knew that this was crazy talk; and the navy doctor had thought so too: he’d tried to fob him off with nerve tonic, but he wasn’t having any of that. One time he’d tried to talk to his pal about it, but it was kind of hard to put into words: he didn’t want to look like a nut-case; better to keep that sort of thing to yourself. In the tobacconist’s he wondered if he had died and was a ghost. He wondered how you could tell for sure.
Kensitas or Weights: that was all that was available under the counter, unless you didn’t mind filthy Turkish which was all that you could get over the counter. He didn’t like Kensitas, so he bought ten Weights, which cost him the best part of two bob. He had heard that Jerry POWs got twenty-five cigs a week, which made you wonder what it had all been about. He went into the café next door to smoke over a cup of tea and a cheese roll. The cheese roll cost him tuppence and tasted faintly of rubber, but he was hungry and needed something to sop up all the alcohol from the night before. He ate it all in one go and ordered another. The waitress was an alright piece, even though she was cock-eyed. He winked at her when she brought him the roll, and smiled slowly as she turned her nose up at him, the snooty little cow. He reckoned he’d have been better off staying down in Portsmouth; at least the bints there knew how to treat a fellow who’d spent four years fighting for his country.
He’d sort of come to the conclusion that the navy suited him; leastways he’d seen enough of how it went on the outside to know that civvy street was not for him. Funny thing: he’d been low priority for demob, seeing as he didn’t have dependents and his injuries didn’t seem to count, and he’d spent months marking off the days – a lot of them spent in the stockade – but now that he had been demobbed it seemed as if he spent all his time wondering whether he ought to join up again. There were times when he felt like leaving the navy had been a sort of betrayal, which was pretty funny when you thought about it.
He knocked the ash of his cigarette into his saucer and smoked without interruption until the rest of it had gone. Then he stuck another cigarette in the corner of his mouth and called over to the waitress for more tea. He wanted to see if she was going to look at him again as if he was dirt. The snooty little cow did not disappoint. He curled his top lip and struck a match on the table-top, his eyes watering against the whiff of sulphur as he held it up to the cig.
He wondered whether, if he was to go to another part of London, he might like it better. He sure hated Holloway, but a pal of his had a room in Finsbury Park and rooms were hard to come by, so he reckoned he’d been lucky there. The house was opposite the park in a crumbling terrace that was subsiding because of the bombing. The room smelled of damp, and was up a set of rickety stairs covered in a seasick-green carpet. It reminded him of being on a ship. There were three rooms to a landing and an outdoor lav, and it was twenty-two bob a week, which was a fucking liberty seeing as the place was such a dump. He and his pal split it, even though his pal was still in the navy and only there one weekend in three. Still, it suited them. They had a system if one of them got his hooks on a bint, not that this happened for him all that often.
He drank his tea and smoked. He caught the waitress looking at him a couple of times, but he wasn’t bothered one way or the other. He could have had her if he put his mind to it; maybe he would. He was a good-looking fellah. He took trouble with his appearance. The jacket, in particular, he was very pleased with. He had a sweet little number going on, and as a matter of fact, he was thinking of pulling off another little caper that very afternoon. He was a bit short, and his pal had gone to Brighton with a girl. He had enough left over for a few cigs and drinks, but not much more. He had plans to take the Tube down to King’s Cross so’s he could pinch another suitcase. His system was simple: he simply waited for the porter to turn his back and then helped himself to whatever was on top of the trolley. The luggage was being forwarded, so nobody was keeping much of an eye on it. A few weeks before he’d picked up a brand-new grey pinhead suit which must have cost at least two guineas; another time he’d got a gold enamel powder compact and a pair of nylons. If the waitress played her cards right he might let her have them. He also had a set of silver egg spoons which he had plans for. There was a woman in his lodgings, a horrible fat old whore, who ran a coupon racket. She charged a couple of bob a piece for them, but he reckoned she’d let him have some in exchange for the egg spoons. He laughed lightly to himself at the thought of the fat old whore. The coppers thought all racketeers were the same and looked out for blokes with thin ’taches, long jackets, wide-cut trousers. The police were mugs. The fat old whore had worked more coupons than half the spivs in London put together. With a few of them coupons he could get the little cock-eyed waitress to go with him alright; not that he needed coupons to get a tart, but it all helped. You’d think that spending four years serving your country would entitle you, but it didn’t seem to: matelots didn’t get any more of anything – coupons, bints – than anyone else.
He finished his tea and asked for a coffee, and the waitress did that half-shrug thing girls do when they like the look of you but don’t want you to know it. He yawned, bored with it already; bored with everything. He thought he might take himself up west so’s he could buy one of those hats with Jimmy Cagney’s autograph on the sweatband, but no sooner had he thought it than he knew it was unlikely that he would do it; he had already decided at some point that he’d end up sitting in the café, smoking, drinking tea and coffee, eating rubbery cheese rolls, until it was time to go back to the room and get ready for the pubs to open. The thing of it was this: since the war he had occupied a vacant space, going through each day and from one day to the next sitting about in cafés waiting for pubs to open; then sitting about in pubs getting lit up. His was a pointless bloody existence: a curse to him. A fucking curse. Maybe tomorrow, which was Sunday when the pubs and cafés were all shut, maybe then he’d go to King’s Cross and pinch a suitcase, but other than that he had no particular ambition. It had all been blown out of him when he was sent flying through the air.
He scowled at the cigarette he was smoking and told himself that it was f
ucking London that was doing this to him: its sordidness, mapped out in pubs and cafés all stinking of grease and toilets. He suffered an overwhelming confusion in the noise of the shopping streets, in the hell of the buses and the crowds of people. No sooner had he come off the train at Waterloo than he was sorry he’d listened to his pal; sorry he’d come. Sorry he hadn’t stayed in Portsmouth. He was sorry for a lot of things. The bloke at the Resettlement Office had told him how he had to start planning for the rest of his life; how he’d come through a tremendous ordeal; how he needed to get some training so’s he could get a job. Jobs were hard to come by. You needed skills. You needed certificates. It wasn’t enough for you to have spent four bloody years fighting for your country and having parts blown out of you, parts of you that you needed. It all made him want to fucking spit. Not that he was one of those commies who spend their time on the wireless and in the newspapers going on about building a future where everyone was more equal. He didn’t have any time for that. He imagined that to be a commie you had to care about the future, and he didn’t give a shit: it had taken him four years to reckon he didn’t have one, and now here he was waiting for the pubs to open and maybe tomorrow he’d take a train ride and pick out a nice piece of luggage for himself, and how was that for making the world a more equal place? He kept his sailor’s uniform clean and pressed, ready for when he was needed again.
He stretched his legs out under the table, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling and wondering how it would have been for him if he’d never lost whatever it was, if he’d stayed like he’d been before. He had flown through the air. He had seen the sea on fire.
It made you think. It really did.
The waitress brought his coffee, and slopped it down on the table in front of him. He fixed her with a cool appraising look, up and down, the whole length of her body. She had a squint, but her figure wasn’t half bad. Not bad at all. She looked back at him, their eyes locking briefly. It was enough. He leaned back in the chair until he had lifted the front legs clean off the ground, laughing lightly; smoking.
11
“Lil! Lil! Wait for me!” Evelyn was pink and breathless with the effort of catching her up. “I thought it was you. I saw you from the other side of the road!”
“Glory! If I’d known you were coming out, you could have saved me a job,” she said. “Honestly, Evvie, you never think. Do you know, I had to queue nearly two hours for bread.” She held up a string bag containing a small split tin loaf, a few buns, a slab of stale fruit cake and a parcel of chopped meat slices. “All morning, and look what it’s got me. And the boy in Jolly’s was very rude to me, just because I wasn’t sure if I had enough points. ‘Don’t you know your entitlement after all this time, madam?’ I ask you.”
“Cheeky little sod,” said Evelyn. She had linked arms with her and was steering them both through the crowds. “Got any cigs, Lil?”
“No, I haven’t. And you shouldn’t smoke in public. It looks very common. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” Evelyn smiled back at her blankly. There really was no point: the girl would not be told. “I was thinking of walking down to the coster at Finsbury Park Station. It’s very rough down there, but I heard a woman in the greengrocer’s say that you can get lettuces there for ninepence.”
“No,” Evelyn said.
“I wasn’t going to pay a shilling for one the size of an orange.”
“Ooh! Hold up a minute…” The girl had stopped in the middle of the pavement, forcing everyone else to go around her. She was turning over the side of one of her shoes. “Oh, I can’t hardly walk in these, Lil. Innit awful? I feel like a tramp going out in them, honest I do.”
She looked at the girl’s long brown legs extending from her little white ankle socks. The legs were the product of hours spent sun-bathing in the backyard with her skirt hitched up. She really was very common.
“There’s ever such a nice pair in Lilley and Skinners…” the girl was saying. She raised an eyebrow but said not one word, while Evelyn appeared to consider something. “Here, Lil,” the kid said after a moment, “why don’t you give me a couple of your mum’s points?”
She hated the way the girl called her ‘Lil’.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“I’ll pay you for them.” Evelyn’s plump, pretty face was puckered into a fawning smile.
What with? The kid hadn’t had a job for months.
“You know, if you didn’t keep turning them over like that they’d do you for years.”
“I’ll give you a quid for five of your mum’s coupons.”
“Where are you going to get a pound from?”
“I’ll put your mum on the po every day for a month, and put the talc on her bedsores.”
Evelyn hated seeing to the bedsores more than she hated anything else.
“Evelyn, I am not giving you any of my mother’s coupons.”
Beneath her blonde sausage-roll curls the kid was scowling at her. People were staring. She hoped there wouldn’t be a scene. She hated any sort of scene.
She smiled tightly.
“You’re making a terrific spectacle, you know. It’s too hot, Evelyn, and I’m exhausted. I’ve been on my feet all morning tramping about the place, enduring the rudeness of Saturday boys and greengrocers and bakers and goodness knows who else.”
She continued along the Holloway Road, leaving the girl behind her on the street. A nice lettuce would be just the ticket. She was imagining Evelyn standing there; it would probably take five minutes before some fellow spotted her and asked her if she was alright. He’d compliment her and suggest that they go and have a cup of tea somewhere and the silly girl would let him run his hands up her leg beneath the table while she asked him if he had any clothing coupons.
Oh for goodness sake! You’re not her mother, she told herself. But it was no good. She stopped and turned round, relieved to see Evelyn a few feet from where she had just left her, looking at the furs in a shop window.
“Evvie.” The girl looked up at her, expectant. “Why don’t we go and get a cup of tea somewhere? I could do with a nice sit down. I’m all in.”
The girl gripped her arm and they walked the rest of the way to Nag’s Head and turned down Seven Sisters Road. The café was a few yards ahead of them on the other side of the road, opposite Woolworths, and when she saw it she realised that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since first thing. It was no wonder she was feeling so queer. A cup of tea; a teacake or a roll and butter: she’d feel better then. They crossed the street. A Number 43 bus passed along the top of the road on its way to somewhere better, and she thought: maybe this time Evelyn will do as she is told. Maybe it would all be alright. Maybe the ninepenny lettuces would be green and crisp and the size of a football; like they used to be.
12
It didn’t matter that it was a Sunday. By definition, crime is no observer of propriety, and observance is for respectable people, living decent lives, and there’s never anything decent about a police station, no matter what day of the week it is. The front desk at “N” Division HQ in Stoke Newington was its usual hive of suspicion, recrimination, skulking and general deplorability. The desk sergeant, stood behind the ledger desk, barely had the opportunity to salute the guv’nor as he walked in at the front door: two telephones were jumping off their cradles in front of him, and a third was clamped to his ear. They exchanged a nod as Cooper made his way through the huddle of local characters, some emitting silent menaces, some greeting him with a rueful shrug, the hall ringing with various sides of numerous convoluted stories, wheedling, insinuating, carping, ingratiating, imploring. Beat coppers sidled past him, some of them looking as shifty as the crooks they were escorting. Everyone was guilty of something; it was contagious. A stout middle-aged woman in a dress that was a couple of sizes too small for her was negotiating with a harassed flatfoot, assuring him that none of it was down to her and it would be a mercy if those who were to blame were held to account.
Co
oper avoided eye contact. He knew a good deal more about most of the villains in that corridor than was proper. He knew where that one bought his paper; which brand of cigs that one favoured; how many sugars the chap in the checked cap had in his tea and the chemist where he bought his indigestion remedy. He knew that Johnny Bristow called on the girl of that one over there whenever the fellow was out of town, and he was certain that one day he would run across that fellow and that piece of information would prove very valuable indeed. The criminal underworld was a sort of village; despite being presently flooded with deserters and demobees with nothing better to do than cause trouble, it was still a close-knit community and information had a habit of leaking like water from a sieve.
“Mr Cooper, Mr Cooper!”
He carried on walking as a weasel-faced Irishman pursued him along the corridor, plucking at the sleeve of his jacket. Like all narks, Short-time Jackie was a fount of information on any crime that didn’t involve him.
“I’m afraid it’ll have to wait, Jackie, whatever it is,” he said. “I’m busy.”
Short-time Jackie carried on walking, looking about him, nodding at a couple of prick-the-garter merchants who, slinking down even further on the bench they were sitting on, sneered in response. Jackie tapped the side of his pickled nose with his finger.
“I might have something for you, Mr Cooper, sir,” he said in a whisper. “A certain someone has had a tickle, if you follow my meaning.” He looked over one shoulder and then the other, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped even further into his boots. “A nice tickle, I should say.”
Cooper stopped walking and absent-mindedly slipped the nark five bob. Jackie winked a rheumy eye.
“O’Leary’s up at Archway,” he said. “I’ll be there any night you care to drop by, Mr Cooper, sir. They got gin. On tap.”
A Commonplace Killing - Siân Busby Page 7