‘I’m having a beef phal,’ I said. ‘But not you. It’s too hot for you. Have a dupiaza.’
‘I’ll have what I like,’ she snapped, and ordered a vindaloo.
‘Independent, aren’t you?’
‘That’s what you like about me. At least I’ve sussed out that much about you.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘In that case, why don’t we have a prawn and spinach to go with it? Besides, it’s nice and cheap.’
‘I will say one thing about you,’ she said. ‘You have got style, I don’t bleeding think.’
‘I’ve been saving the style up. The money too.’
‘What’s that supposed to be leading to?’ she said coldly. ‘A joint bank account?’
‘No, a bottle of wine. Know anything about wine?’
‘I’d rather have beer with curry.’
‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘we’ll have both.’
When it had all arrived and we were eating she said: ‘I’d better tell you something, because when I have it’ll be your last chance.’
‘Last chance for what?’
She paused. ‘I’m falling in love with you. Have fallen.’
I didn’t speak.
‘We could just have this lunch, very nice—and then call it a day.’
‘We could,’ I said, ‘but we’re not going to.’ We stared at each other across the table, while the staff stood in the dim background with their feathery music going and napkins over their arms, nodding approval. Everyone likes watching a couple in love.
‘I was nothing but a frigid little virgin up till last night, yet I’ve had hundreds of men.’
‘That’s no crime.’
She was instantly alert. ‘Crime? That’s a funny word to use.’
‘It’s a manner of speech. I don’t care if you’ve had a thousand men. They’re all in the past.’
‘Not all.’
‘They will be from now on.’
‘You mean that?’
‘I mean it. I’ve had women too. But it took you to make me realize they were all the wrong ones.’
She shuddered. ‘I love you,’ she said with great intensity.
‘It’s the same with me. Eat up, your food’s getting cold.’
‘You take a girl’s appetite away.’
‘Well, I’m hungry.’
‘Eat up, then. A lover needs plenty of protein. I read that in the Mirror.’
The head waiter came up. ‘Everything to your satisfaction, sir? Madam?’
I nodded.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, frowning after a memory, ‘haven’t I seen you in the restaurant before?’
I turned cold. ‘No, I’ve never been in here before.’
‘I’m very sorry, sir. My mistake.’ He retreated.
When he had gone Barbara said: ‘I wonder who he thought you were?’
‘God knows.’
‘He certainly seemed to recognize you. Waiters have a good memory; they have to.’
The first time I had gone into the Light of India was as a young copper attached to Chelsea, to arrest a drunk who wouldn’t pay his bill. Then later, when I was with Chelsea CID, I took to eating there off-duty sometimes. I’d had a moustache in those days, which I’d long ago shaved off; that was why he hadn’t been sure.
Barbara was saying: ‘I think you’d better tell me some more about yourself, things being the way they are. You’re still a mystery to me, and I don’t like that if I’m going with a feller, why should I? One thing that strikes me, for instance, is that you aren’t the kind of man who’s really into South London clubs much. You can carry it off, but basically it’s not your style.’
I knew what was coming next.
‘So just what do you do for a living? Come on.’ She spoke flatly.
‘I told you before—it’s so dull it might put you off me.’
‘Not if it’s a steady job it won’t,’ she said. ‘I’m up to my eyeballs with hand-to-mouthers. Anyway, let’s see if I can puzzle it out. You’re bright, and you don’t stand for a lot of shit. You like giving the orders, yet you don’t come the acid. And you’re not rich.’
‘I’m certainly not that.’
‘Not rich,’ she mused, ‘but not on supplementary benefits either. No, because you’ve got this job, at a time when there’s over three million unemployed. How long’ve you been with your firm?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘Fifteen years. Always the same firm?’
‘Always the same.’
‘You’re sort of unobtrusive when you want to be, aren’t you?’
‘It’s not intentional.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about that. It’s there.’ She shook her head wonderingly. ‘Christ, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Except that it’s unbelievable, I’d almost have said I’d fallen for a fucking copper.’
‘Relax, relax,’ I said, ‘you’re way off.’
‘Well, okay, come on, then.’
‘It’s so bloody prosaic,’ I said. ‘But all right—I work for a security firm—you know, taking large sums of cash around in armoured trucks.’
‘Which firm?’
I knew she would check, so I said Ashley Security. They let us use them, and we let them use us—within reason—and they had my name on the nominal payroll.
She lit a cigarette and closed her eyes against the smoke. ‘Still, you work funny hours. You were off last night at the 84, and you’re not working again today, either.’
‘Today’s special. Tonight too. I got a mate to stand in for me this morning; that’s what I went to the office for.’
‘Well, well,’ she said, relaxing. ‘Ashley Security, fancy. An ex-boy-friend of mine, he did one of your trucks not a long while back.’
‘I didn’t know he was your boy-friend,’ I said, ‘but you’re dead right, it was a bloke called Lofty Walker in 1980, up at Edgware. And listen, if you’ve finished with me, how about your answering a question or two?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’ve come clean.’
‘Well, you said your boring job might put me off you—the same goes the other way round.’
‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to tell me. We’ve got to trust each other—it’s hopeless otherwise.’
‘I’ve been mixed up with some funny people.’
‘That’s okay, I can take it.’
‘Well, look, I’ve done porridge, okay?’
‘Okay. What for?’
‘It’s one not many women go down for—grievous bodily harm.’
Physically, she looked well capable of it, with her big shoulders, heavy arms. Beautiful, but big. All it needed was one of her murderous surges of rage, the trigger. Most women don’t go straight into a battle; they’re too frightened of what might happen to their face. But there are exceptions. I didn’t say anything.
‘I did four at Holloway,’ she was saying. ‘Hollywood, we call it, and the rest at Askham Grange Open. Are you sure you still want to go on knowing me?’
‘It doesn’t make any difference to me,’ I said. ‘I know plenty of people that’ve done bird. So what? Once you’ve done it you’ve done it, and that’s the end of it.’
‘I was out of an orphanage,’ she said. ‘No one wanted to adopt me; I started playing rough at no age at all, and I was big. I didn’t want to work at any crappy job, either, and I was bored. Angry, too—I reckoned I’d got all the looks and none of the opportunities. Anyway, one night, I was out with a bunch of mods (I’d long ago fucked off from the orphanage), and that’s when it happened—we got in a fight with some rockers on Brighton beach after the pubs shut. It started because one of the rockers called me a fucking whore. I picked up this big stone and started smashing in his head with it; it took three coppers to get me off of him, I just didn’t care. But by the time they’d got me off of him he was dead, okay? They said for me to plead self-defence, but the judge took against me the way I talked back in court, so did the jury, an I was we
ighed off for five. So then I appealed against sentence, though the lawyer said for me not to, and they bumped it up to seven. Well, the bastards,’ she said, ‘I did four. I didn’t like it, the open nick up north; I ran away so as to get caught and sent back to London. I liked Holloway,’ she said reflectively, ‘I practically ran that nick, I even put the shits up the screws.’
After a pause, she went on: ‘It was all the worse, what that boy said, the one I topped, because it was true. Boredom, that’s always been my worst enemy. School? I hated it. Anyway, I ran our stream at the comprehensive. I was in one of the classes where the teachers had to go round with walkie-talkies so they could call for help if they got beaten up. Mind, it wasn’t that I didn’t have brains—even the teachers admitted that. But I hated the patronizing way they came on. And I didn’t like the way they thought they could select my knowledge for me—you can learn a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So I was all defiance and boredom. Anyway, I started taking my knickers down the minute I realized that was what the boys wanted. Mind, I never thought that much of any of them—I showed them what I’d got to show and said, Okay, get it up, then, and all they did was go gooey on me, and I can’t respect that. But I thought, maybe it’ll give me a kick. It didn’t, though. I just ended up doing it for a living.’
‘Well, that’s over now,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve been thinking it out while you were talking, and I’ll tell you what I think we ought to do. You know I have to work—we need my money.’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, I’m not going to go mad while I’m at work, wonder-ing what you’re getting up to, I’m not the type. Anyway, what kind of relationship would that be?’
‘Lousy.’
‘Right. So it’ll be up to you. You don’t need to worry about me—I don’t play around. But you do what you want while I’m out. I don’t expect you to stay at home all day, getting bored. I’m simply going to trust you because, as I say, I believe that everything worthwhile’s built on trust.’
‘And if it don’t work out?’
‘Then it’ll just be something that wasn’t meant to work out.’
‘Christ,’ she said, ‘you’re chancing your arm. I’ve never heard anyone come on like that before; you’re a pretty amazing feller, aren’t you?’
‘It’s the only way, when you really look at it,’ I said.
‘Well, we’ll try it,’ she said. ‘As I say, it’ll be the first time round for me.’
‘Let’s have a brandy, then. Seal it. Make you feel good.’
‘Brandy? Christ, we’re living it up, aren’t we?’
‘If we can’t do it today, we can’t do it any day.’
‘Seems a shame,’ she said. ‘It’s always the punters buy me the brandies. Seems silly your paying for them.’
‘Wrong,’ I said, ‘it’s worth it. It means I’m not a punter.’
She opened her bag and passed me a tenner under the table. ‘They’re on me. Whatever’s over can go on the lunch. If we’re really going to share everything, we might as well get on with it.’ When the brandies came she said: ‘Look, where are we going to live?’
‘Not at my place,’ I said, ‘that’s a racing certainty. It’s horrible.’
‘You like it over at New Cross? It’s only thirty-five a week and there’s room for the two of us.’
‘You bet I like it. You’ve no idea how grotty a place looks with just a bloke on his jack living in it.’
‘You’d be surprised what I’ve got an idea of,’ she said. ‘There was a place I lived in for a while over at Lewisham. Christ, what a terrible little pad that was.’ She shook her head slowly.
I knew just which place she meant, but it wasn’t the moment for any police work. Looking at her, I began to wonder with trepidation when it would be.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do next? You seem to be giving the orders these days.’
‘That’s easy,’ I said, waving for the bill. ‘We’ll go to bed, then go and have a drink together somewhere when they open.’
She didn’t say no. I kissed her across the table. I smiled at her. I felt heavy as lead at the strides my deceit had made—it was like watching an animal toppling into a trap you had dug for it. I had to remember Staniland, remember him hard.
Barbara and I started living at New Cross together from that day on.
26
‘Just living,’ said Barbara as we lay in bed that night, ‘just rotten old living, I’ve always hated that, it makes me want to puke. Kids, school, smells, Dad working for the council, regular meals, telly in the evening—who needs it? Where’s your time for living gone? Well, it’s gone, but by the time you realize it you’re nothing but a worn-out knitting and washing machine. Then when it’s too late and you’re fifty and you’ve got the menopause, you take off your woolly one night and see there’s fuck-all left of you except a pair of flabby old tits that no one wants to know about and bulges all over. Even your kids don’t want to know you by then; they’re grown up, swinging, they’ve got their own thing going. As for Dad, he’s ogling the teenage slag down at the boozer, drinking up, getting all ready to make a scene when he comes in because he feels cheated—of course he feels cheated, the silly old bastard.’
She slammed her legs viciously straight down in the bed. ‘I’m not having that,’ she said, ‘I’m just not having it.’ Outside it had begun to rain, the cold sort of rain like the night we had found Staniland; wind tore at the steel-framed window, then changed direction so sharply that the walls shuddered.
‘Still,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to be middle-aged somehow. You can’t stop time.’
‘Yes, you can,’ she said, ‘you can die.’
‘Easier said than done,’ I said. I had seen it too often as a copper on the beat, at the station, in the hospitals, people who had tried to top themselves and made a balls-up of it, and who now might go either way, but come back crippled if they came back at all.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to be practical about death, that’s all. It’s a matter of making up your mind and then being practical about it.’
‘Maybe it’s the way I was brought up,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ she said, ‘who’s got the nerve to say it’s wrong? Self-righteous old bastards who wring the juice out of you? Their wrong isn’t my wrong. Your life’s your own—it’s no other nosey parker’s business. Anyway, I’ve always done wrong, I was never any different.’
I looked at her face and saw the shadow over it.
‘Doing wrong’s no worse than reading people lectures. People with money telling people with no money what’s right and wrong, that’s really wrong—it’s always the wrong people who do it. I should know,’ she said bitterly, ‘I had it at the orphanage, then at school, then another dose of it in the nick.’
‘I don’t see the two of us growing old together,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She stared upwards with her hands behind her head, arching her back; it showed off her powerful arms and the large smooth curve of her breast. ‘I’ve never been in a situation like this one with you and me before.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know if I can take it or not.’
‘Why couldn’t you take it?’
‘I don’t like things that go on too long.’
‘You mean you want everything out of a relationship, but not the responsibility.’
‘I’ll tell you what I mean,’ she said. ‘I mean you ask too many fucking questions.’
‘Then don’t disappoint me by not answering them,’ I said.
‘You make a habit of asking questions.’
‘I’ve got a brain,’ I said, ‘so I use it.’
Suddenly the temperature was going up between us. The wind blubbered round the outside of the house and tore through a crack in the window with a whining noise. Just before she balled her fist and hit me in the face I noticed for some stupid reason that the alarm clock beside her said two minutes past twelve.
I got out of bed. I could already feel the bruise coming up at the corner of my mouth, and I sucked some blood in that she had drawn with a ring she had on. ‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘It’s better for both of us that way.’
‘Easier, you mean.’
‘More honest.’ I started to get dressed.
‘So much for love,’ she said. ‘I never thought it lasted long, but this must be a record.’
‘You don’t go in for love,’ I said, ‘only hatred. You’re chock-a-block with it, I hadn’t realized.’
‘It isn’t hatred,’ she said, ‘it’s fear. The moment anyone starts digging into me I get afraid, and that makes me a dangerous cow. You’re the first man who ever made me react in the sack, you’re the first man who’s ever got this deep into me. And you’re leaving?’
‘Put like that,’ I said, ‘leaving does seem feeble.’
‘Well, why don’t we have a farewell drink and think it over? The whisky’s in the sitting-room.’
When I got back with the drinks she was out of bed. She put her hands on my face and felt the bruise with clumsy, unaccustomed fingers: ‘I’ve never done this to a man before. Am I hurting you?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll put something on it.’
‘Whisky’ll do,’ I said, ‘it works every bit as fast as iodine.’
She laughed and fell back on the bed; later on we made love.
Afterwards, when we had uncoupled and she had coughed me out I remembered how Staniland had recorded: ‘No effort succeeds with Barbara. No effort I make with her means any-thing to her, yet I’ve got to keep making one, like a prisoner in a chain-gang. Don’t choke me, Barbara! Listen! Don’t—’
Barbara had put the light out. Wakeful, I fingered the bruise on my face, sensed the leadenness of my body and thought upwards into the dark in circles, the darkness measured by her breathing.
I looked at her sleeping, her body caught briefly in the radiance of the headlights from a passing car. Her face was hard in the white beam, and I was sure suddenly: She knows who I am and why I’m here.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 15