by William Boyd
“Do dogs lick their bollocks? Twenty quid a go, mate. Thirty, no condom. Very high class, know what I mean?” He chuckled to himself.
“How do I get to Cherry Garden Pier?”
35
THE RIVER WAS BEAUTIFUL tonight, she thought, and very high, right up. It was the moving blackness, the beginning of the turn, the great mass of water beginning its journey back to the sea: the black river flowing strongly and the reflected lights on its moving surface staying still. Mhouse saw the power and the entrancement—not that she would have articulated it that way—but the river distracted her and she dwelt on it for a while before she remembered how fucking pissed off she was.
A quiet night—not half. She’d been trolling around Cherry Garden Pier for a couple of hours, up the side streets, down the lanes, looking for customers, for men. She’d met one girl who was thinking of heading up to King’s Cross, it was so dead down here in Rotherhithe. She even wandered back into Southwark Park but it was all gay boys there, although one bloke asked her to follow him to the lake, said he had some kind of shack they could use, but she told him where he could shove his lake and his shack, no way.
She lit and smoked a cigarette. She could see the big hospital, St Bot’s, downstream, every light shining. Some electricity bill that one. It was a shame John 1603 had left—it was like living with a money tap, you just turned it on when you needed a bit more. Short of a £100?—Spend a night with John. He was a nice enough geezer (she wasn’t that keen on men with beards, to be honest)—gentle, kindly, helped out—and he liked her. Well, he liked fucking her, anyway, she knew that, that was as obvious as the nose on his face. Ly-on liked him as well—and he seemed to like Ly-on. So, she let him fuck her from time to time, she got some ready money and he had a roof over his head with satellite TV, so why did he have to clear off like that all of a sudden? Now she owed Mr Quality and Margo and they were bugging her hard to repay. Lot of money. And you didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of Mr Q…
She wondered if she could track down John 1603, offer him his room back, maybe reduce the rates across the board. How you going to do that, silly bitch? I could try the church, she thought—he was always at the church, and they might know where he was. Maybe Scotland won’t work out for him. Maybe he’ll come back to The Shaft, to Mhouse and Ly-on—his little family. Maybe he really wanted to be—
“Evening, darling.”
She turned to see a man standing on the river pathway. Where had he come from? She moved towards him slowly, hitching up the top of her bustier so her cleavage was more defined. Cleavage always worked—funny, that.
“What you after, my lovely?” she asked.
“I got a car back here,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “We could go for a nice drive.”
“I don’t go in cars, dear—sorry. You follow me—you’ll have the time of your life.”
She set off towards the King’s Stair Gardens and she could hear his footsteps behind her. There was a blocked-up doorway she used in a kind of water-pumping station, deeply recessed, very dark—people could walk right past and not see what you were up to.
She stepped into the doorway and sensed rather than saw his bulk fill the space. Big bloke. She reached for his fly—whip it out and get your hands on it, that was her routine. Don’t even let them have a second to think. All over before you knew it—before they had a chance to get specific.
She felt his strong hand on her wrist.
“Hold on, sweetness, not so fast. I got a few ideas myself…”
“It’s forty pound,” she said. “Fifty, no condom. If you want a room it’s a hundred—half an hour.”
She clicked on her cigarette lighter. It freaked them out if they knew you’d seen their face clear—stopped them getting any nasty little notions. The flame lit his big face and she saw the pale-lashed eyes, the weak chin with a big cleft down the middle, the dancing flame making the cleft look even deeper than it was. He seemed familiar to her, somehow.
“Don’t I know you?” she said. “Ain’t I done you before?”
“No. Not unless you work down Chelsea way.”
“I never been to Chelsea, darling.”
“Oh, yes you have.”
Then he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her almost off her feet, ramming her into the wall, driving the breath from her lungs.
“Where’s Adam Kindred,” he breathed into her face. “Tell me that and I won’t have to mark you.”
She couldn’t speak, so she made a choking, gagging noise. She had both hands on his wrist—it felt like the thick branch of a tree—and her toes were just touching the ground. He relaxed his grip slightly, let her down a few inches.
“I don’t know the name,” she said.
“How about ‘John’?”
And, now, for some reason, she remembered him. He was the guy she’d seen getting out of the taxi outside The Shaft, one night a few weeks ago. It was the taxi she’d noticed and then she’d walked right past this man—this big ugly bastard with the cleft chin who now had his hand round her throat. But what did he have to do with John 1603?
“John who?” she said. “There’s lots of Johns in this world.”
“How about the John who was staying in your flat? Let’s start with him.”
This chastened her—and she felt weak being caught out so quickly. How the fuck did he know? Who had told him? And she experienced a horrible premonition: she was suddenly aware that she was going to have to fight this big powerful man, fight him for her life—like that last time she’d got in the car with that evil bastard punter. You turned into an animal—you just knew.
“Tell me about John,” he said.
“Oh, that cunt,” she said, bitterly. “He fucked off to Scotland last week.”
“What? Scotland?”
She sensed his genuine surprise and his grip on her slackened again and she knew this was her moment. She drove her knee into his balls, full force, and heard his bellow of pain as she ducked beneath his arms and ran.
But he was after her in a second, it seemed, and she couldn’t run fast in those fucking high-heeled boots. He caught her just before she got to the river and its lighted walkways, grabbed her hands in some kind of a lock and frogmarched her back up into the darkness of King’s Stairs Gardens and there he did something strange to her neck—fingers digging deep in at the side, a thumb pressing hard behind one ear—and she felt one whole side of her body going limp, and pins and needles in her left hand.
She punched him in the face with her right hand, got her nails in his cheek and raked downwards, feeling his skin tear. She saw his whirling backhander too late and tried to duck but he hit her so hard that the last thing she remembered was the sensation of flying through the air—Mhouse was flying, off the ground, flying in the air like a little birdie.
And then—nothing.
36
GORAN, THE DUTY HEAD porter, came into the porters’ restroom, looked around at the half dozen porters sitting there—reading newspapers, texting, sleeping—and checked his clipboard.
“OK…Is Wellington and Primo, going for to ward 10—Mrs Manning for surgery.” He paused. “Hello, calling Primo, come in, Primo. Home base to Primo…”
Adam didn’t react at first even though he was looking directly at Goran, forgetting for the briefest instant that in fact he was Primo, now, but—remembering—quickly stood and gave a thumbs up. Wellington heaved himself out of the armchair and rubbed his grey hair with a palm and looked over at him.
“Come on, Primo, man, this he going to be fun.”
Waiting for the service lift to arrive and take them up to ward 10 Adam caught a glimpse of his reflection in the scratched stainless steel of the lift-door surround, noting the ceiling lights bouncing off his bald pate, creating the effect of a refulgent skullcap on top of his head—like some kind of incipient halo. He ran his hand over the new stubble growing already on his lucent dome, feeling the rasp against the palm of his hand, keeping a vague, bemused smile on his
face. This was his second day at work but he thought he had now finally figured out what to do with Vladimir’s body. He was surfing the tide of experience, as he put it to himself, free-floating on the turbulent river of events that was carrying him along. Just do it, he said to himself—there would be time enough for calm reflection later.
It was only after the postman had left him and after he had re-entered the flat that Adam had seen—in a visionary flash—the simple beauty, the pure genius and potential of the plan that he had spontaneously and almost inadvertently conceived at the front door—that had allowed, him to sign ‘P. Belem’ on the post office docket without his hand shaking. He had gone straight to the bathroom where it had taken him a surprisingly lengthy time to remove the hair from his head and radically trim his full beard into a Vladimir look-alike goatee. Staring in some shock at his reflection in the mirror—confronting his new appearance—Adam saw the clear generic resemblance: he now looked approximately like thousands of men in London, possibly tens of thousands: head completely shaved and a trimmed short beard around the lips and on the chin. No one looking at Vladimir⁄Primo’s photo on his ID card would have any hesitation in identifying him. The eyes were a bit different, the nose was straighter but, by the standards of a passport photo-shot sealed under plastic, Adam Kindred had, with a bit of strenuous scissor and razor work, to all intents and purposes, become ‘Primo Belem’.
And so it had proved: he had put on Vladimir’s uniform and had reported to the administration at Bethnal & Bow hospital, apologising for being a little late, and had been sent down to the pottering control room where he showed his ID to Goran, had it validated, filled in a form, delivered the form that had been in the registered letter, was led to the porter’s call point and was assigned to one Wellington Barker for induction and general training. It was as straightforward as that. There were twenty porters on duty in the day at the hospital, half a dozen at night. A more polyglot group was hard to imagine: nobody was interested in him, nobody had any personal questions beyond asking him his name. ‘Primo’ came off his tongue as easily as John.
In ward 10 Adam discovered the reasoning behind Wellington’s ‘fun’ prediction. Mrs Manning was a morbidly obese thirty-five-year-old woman who weighed a stone for every year of her life and who was due in surgery to have her stomach stapled. Her thin husband and three extremely plump children were gathered anxiously around her card- and lucky-mascot-strewn bed. Wellington showed Adam how to work the winch (portering in Bethnal & Bow was an on-the-job learning experience) and together they hoisted Mrs Manning off the bed and lowered her on to the creaking trolley before taking her down in the lift to theatre.
She kept up a cheerful banter as they travelled—“I’ll come back and you boys won’t recognise me”—but beneath the chirpy spirits Adam could sense her fear of the future, of the new Mrs Manning she was trying to become, in the same way as he could also discern a once pretty face beneath the triple chins and the bulging, dewlapped cheeks. He wanted to reassure her—don’t worry, Mrs M., it’s not too bad being someone different—but he just smiled and said nothing.
“Ama⁄ing what they can do these days,” Adam said, once they had parked her in the queue of patients waiting for the anaesthetist, and were walking back to the lift.
“Yeah, but you know…” Wellington made a face. “She lose the weight but it don’t end there, man.” Adam listened—Wellington had been a porter at Bethnal & Bow for eighteen years and he knew what he was talking about—in his time the hospital had developed a renowned special unit for the treatment of morbid obesity.
“The fat go, you see, but instead you flappin’ around everywhere—all that stretched skin empty. You like a collapsed washing-line. Then you got three year of ops cuttin’ it away.” Wellington looked balefully at him. “Think of the scarring, man. It not going to be nice.” Maybe Mrs Manning had every right to be fearful.
Adam felt tired at the end of his shift. Amongst general fetching and carrying and trundling of patients here and there with Wellington, they had also moved and set up ten trestle tables in a screened-off area of the cafeteria for a presentation⁄lunch party for area NHS junior managers, taken blood samples to the pathology lab, delivered clinical notes to the medical secretaries, removed decomposing bags of human tissue waste from the operating theatrès to the furnaces, and, in a kind of electric golf-buggy, had made a series of runs transporting empty oxygen cylinders to waiting lorries and returning full ones to the on-site store.
On his way back to Oystergate Buildings he went into a discount electrical warehouse and ordered a fridge. He said to the salesman that he didn’t care what brand it was as long as it could be delivered the next morning. He paid with Vladimir’s credit card (Vladimir had obligingly kept his pin-number on a slip of paper in his wallet) signing ‘P. Belem’ for the second time. Then, in a builders’ merchants, he asked a burly man for a delivery-trolley-thing and was told—tiredly, disdainfully—that what he actually was after was a long-toed, folding sack-truck. This was duly provided and he bought it and an all-in-one blue overall with a zip up the front, an acid green high-visibility waistcoat and a baseball-cap with a hammer-and-nail logo on the front.
He was on night shift the next day and so had the morning and afternoon free. He reasoned that what he was about to do was, paradoxically, safer in broad daylight than darkest night. He would attract no attention in the day—by night he would look hugely suspicious.
His fridge arrived around 10.00 a.m, conveyed by two cursing men—“Why no lift? What building this?”—who grudgingly helped him remove the fridge from its sturdy cardboard box and fit it in the window embrasure in the kitchen and plug it in. He liked its reassuring hum. He said he’d prefer to keep the box if they didn’t mind.
When they had gone he took the empty box into Vladimir’s room and nipped back the blanket from the body. Vladimir didn’t look as though he was sleeping any more—he looked very dead: his skin pale, his face grimacing slightly, cheeks sunken, his eyeballs bulging behind the lids. This was the hardest part, Adam knew, as he put on his latex gloves, feeling queasy as he bent Vladimir into a rough foetal position. He was surprisingly supple—he had been expecting extreme stiffness—but then he remembered that rigor mortis disappeared after twenty-four to thirty-six hours, or thereabouts, and the musculature of the body became limp again. Thank god. He rolled Vladimir’s skinny frame into the up-ended fridge box, lifting it back upright to seal it with yards of gaffer tape. Then with a knife from the kitchen he cut flaps and slits in the cardboard around the base. Then he put on his blue overall, hi-viz waistcoat and baseball-cap and with the box secured on his sack-truck trundled it out of the flat. He bumped it down the four flights of stairs and wheeled it out of Oystergate Buildings.
He stuck to back and side streets, taking a meandering course towards Limehouse Cut, a mile or so away, a canal that ran from Bow River into Limehouse Basin. He looked completely normal, he knew—an ordinary delivery man on an ordinary weekday morning, trundling a new fridge in a cardboard box towards some domestic destination. Nobody he passed even glanced at him.
It took him half an hour to wheel Vladimir to the area he had scouted out the previous day. His hands were raw and his shoulders were hurting, but this access road to a light industrial estate led to the canal and there was a gate to the towpath that ran along the canal side for several hundred yards until the canal linked up with Bow Creek by the gasworks. It was not overlooked by any houses or other buildings, just the blank gable ends of warehouses and the razor-wired truck and lorry parks, shredded with the greying remains of polythene bags. It seemed little used, this path—great clumps of buddleia sprouted from crevices in the low wall built along the canal side, butterflies playing among their bright purple flowers. He paused to let a van go by—again unperturbed: the nearby warehouses explained his presence, with his sack-truck and his big cardboard box. When the van was out of sight he carefully eased the laden sack-truck on to the towpath and pushed it some
yards away from the access gate. He slipped the toe of the sack-truck out from beneath the fridge box and then manoeuvred the box itself to the very edge of the stone coping that ran along the canal-side path.
He looked around: some fleeting midday sun shone between the fair-weather cumulus clouds lighting the scene, the butterflies exulting in the glare and dazzle. He heard children shouting in the playground of a nearby school and some sort of motorcycle testing or rally seemed to be going on somewhere close, the air suddenly loud with the throaty rip of powerful engines. He had a final look and then casually kicked the box into the canal. It fell with a heavy splash and bobbed there for a while, buoyantly, before the water began to fill it, flowing in through the flaps and slits he had cut. Slowly it semi-righted itself and then settled lower and lower before, with some erupting bubbles, it slipped beneath the surface.
He thought he should say something—something for Vladimir. “Rest in peace’ seemed a bit crass so he contented himself with a sotto voce ‘Goodbye, Vlad—and many thanks,” before tossing his new long-toed, folding sack-truck into the water also, letting it join the crowded debris on the canal floor, the rubber tyres and supermarket trolleys, the cast-iron bedsteads and the defunct cookers, the burnt-out chassis of joyriders’ cars.
As he walked away, he wondered how long it would be before Vladimir’s body would be discovered. The new box would hold for a good while, he reckoned, before the cardboard began to deliquesce and shred. A week? A month? It didn’t really matter, he knew. The final, generous benefaction that Vladimir had bestowed on him was his total anonymity. Vladimir who? Even Adam didn’t know his last name or what part of the former Soviet Union he had come from. And even if they found him and were able to identify him—oh, yes, that’s him: the missing cardiac patient who had gone on the run from his village’s mercy mission—no one was ever going to connect this sad drug addict’s fatal overdose with Primo Belem, hospital porter at Bethnal & Bow, alive and well.