London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Someone order a cab?” he said brightly.

  “No, mate,” replied the barman, and Mac shrugged and grimaced and got out of there.

  Back in the car, he checked the time. Eleven, closing. He was about to turn the radio back on when he was struck by a memory. Years ago, he’d played a few gigs at a pub in New Cross. What the hell was it called? The Amersham Arms, that was it. Heading down toward Deptford. Maybe it was still there.

  It was, and practically the first person he saw when he walked into the music room was Luke North—he was slumped on a banquette with his arm around a ghostly pale redhead.

  “Hey,” said Mac, “how you doing?”

  “Hey,” said Luke, his eyes taking a moment to focus, “big man. How you doing?”

  Better than you, thought Mac. Luke looked ravaged. Way back when, he’d been tall and blond and slightly fucked-up looking. Now he was still tall and blond but more than slightly fucked-up looking: His hair was receding and thinning, his face, even in the light of the pub, was mottled and flaking, and his hard drinker’s belly was stretching his shirt underneath a black suit that looked like someone had died in.

  Luke pulled the girl to him, turning her attention away from the band, if that’s what you called a bunch of art-student types hunched over record decks and laptops, silent films playing on a screen behind them. “Sweetie,” he said, “this is Mac, an old mucker of mine. Mac, this is Rose, she’s the best thing ever happened to me.”

  Christ, thought Mac, just how pissed is he? Rose smiled at him enthusiastically. She was very pretty in a Gothic sort of way. Extraordinarily pale skin, set off by hair dyed blood-red, skinny as a rake under a long-sleeved black top.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Mac. “You want a drink?”

  “No,” said Luke, standing up suddenly and banging the table as he did so, sending a glass tumbling to the floor. “Let me get them. Guinness, Mac, yeah? You sit down there and talk to Rose.”

  Mac nodded and watched Luke sway his way toward the bar, then seated himself across the table from Rose.

  She smiled awkwardly at him and mumbled something. Mac gestured to indicate that the art students were making too much of a racket for him to hear, and she leaned forward. “You’re a friend of Luke’s?” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Mac, and paused for a second, then said what was on his mind. “Is he all right? He looks terrible.”

  Rose just gave him a look, like she had no idea what he was talking about, and leaned back and turned her eyes to the band. As she did so, her top rode up and Mac couldn’t help noticing how terribly thin she was, not just skinny but full-on anorexic thin. Oh lord. Well, what sort of a girl did he think would want to go out with someone like Luke? She reminded him of someone. Anja the Slovenian. He’d fallen for her big-time. Typical midlife-crisis number, he supposed. Made him blanch to think of it now. He’d have given up Jackie for her, given up his whole life for her if she’d have had him. Thank Christ she hadn’t been interested. He’d been an experience for her, that was all. A learning experience. Maybe that’s all Luke was to this Rose. He hoped so, but her cuts gave him pause.

  Moments later Luke hoved to, with a mineral water for Rose, a Guinness for Mac, and a pint and a large whiskey chaser for himself. Mercifully, the art students decided to pick that moment for a break in proceedings, and Mac figured he might as well make his pitch while the volume level permitted and Luke was still conscious.

  He ran through the deal. The twenty-fifth-anniversary show. At the Festival Hall. Everyone was going to be there. All Luke had to do was twenty minutes. Could lead on to a whole lot of other stuff—Meltdown, All Tomorrow’s Parties. Mac had no idea whether any of this was true or not, he was just spouting the same bullshit Etheridge had given him.

  “He’ll even sort out the band for you, if you want. Or you can use your own, if you’ve got one at the minute.”

  “Fuck that,” said Luke, and slumped back in his seat. “Fucking wankers.”

  Mac wasn’t sure who the wankers were—his band, Etheridge, the whole crew of post-punk entrepreneurial types with their post-modern music festivals in out-of-season holiday camps. Personally, he was quite happy to agree that the whole lot of them were, indeed, wankers. But that wasn’t going to get the bills paid.

  “There’s good money in it.”

  Luke just shook his head, but Mac knew him well enough to see something feral appearing in his eyes.

  “Five grand,” said Mac, “twenty minutes work. Not too shabby.”

  Luke rolled his eyes like five grand was neither here nor there. Then he leaned forward and grasped Mac’s hands in his. “I don’t give a shit about those wankers, Mac, you know that. But if you want me to do it, I’ll do it. I love you, man.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Mac, wondering what chemicals Luke had imbibed along with the lake full of booze.

  Mac hesitated for a moment. Say he delivered Luke to Etheridge, got him on stage with the right combination of chemicals inside him to impersonate sobriety—or at least sentience—for twenty minutes. What would be the upshot? Five grand for Luke—probably enough to kill himself. A grand for Mac—probably enough to pay off Jackie’s credit cards.

  Shit, why was he feeling guilty? They were all grown-ups, weren’t they? Mac had enough to deal with in his own life, hadn’t he? And anyway, we all had a few too many once in a while, didn’t we? He looked at Luke trying to maneuver the pint of lager to his mouth without spilling it. It was blatantly obvious that he had passed the point of no return, social-drinking-wise. Dylan Thomas had that line about how an alcoholic was someone you didn’t like who drank as much as you did. Well, Mac had been fond of quoting that in his time, but he could see the shallowness of it now. Thomas’s drinking killed him, after all. Luke needed help. It was as simple as that.

  “Look, I want you to promise me one thing. You do this gig, yeah? You’ll spend the money on rehab.”

  “Sure,” said Luke. “I love you, man.”

  Just then Rose got up to go to the loo. Luke watched her go, then leaned forward to Mac. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

  “Yeah,” said Mac, “she seems very nice, bit young though, eh?”

  “Yeah,” said Luke, “goes like a fucking firecracker, though.” He knocked back his whiskey, then leaned forward again, motioning Mac to do the same. “Got some nice friends and all, if you’re interested.”

  Mac was appalled to find himself considering it, by the unwelcome knowledge that somewhere inside him was the capacity to say yes, set me up with an anorexic waif of my own. Linda’s line about them being like twins was running through his head. It struck him now that it was the evil twin she liked, she wanted. It let her off the hook. Maybe he should just give in to his dark side, maybe that actually made it easier for everyone. No self-repression, no hypocrisy. Just get down in the dirt.

  He looked at Rose, heading back from the toilet, stopping at the cigarette machine, all young and fresh and damaged, saw Anja in her place, remembered how much he’d wanted Anja the first time he saw her at that club in Ljubljana. He saw Luke staring at Rose, eyes full of lust and lager, saw himself in Luke, embracing death. He felt like there was no air in the room. He took a deep breath, sucked in as much as he could. Then tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, wondering how he got to this pass. Maybe he could retrain as a social worker or something. Something useful. Something that would stop him from taking his place in the tableau in front of him. He shook his head hard and the fog seemed to clear momentarily.

  He became aware of the record that was playing, some old punk thing by the Damned, probably the art students were playing it ironically. It didn’t sound ironic to Mac though, it sounded like his youth. It reminded him viscerally of what it had felt like being young then, nearly thirty years ago, playing this stupid fast music for no other reason than the sheer rush, the sheer pointless, joyous momentum of it.

  And it reminded him that he wasn’t young anymore, and no matter how many Anjas or bran
d-new Roses he picked up, he would be nothing more than a vampire, not magically returned to the loud stupid kid he’d once been. He tilted his head back down and looked at Luke. Then it struck him, the difference between them. Luke was still the loud stupid kid he had been, still a selfish, pleasure-seeking child. Ah well, good luck to him, he supposed.

  “Sorry, man,” he said, shaking his head, “not my scene.”

  “Your loss,” answered Luke. “I tell you, she’s a fucking firecracker, that one. Another pint?”

  “No thanks,” said Mac, but Luke was already up and lurching bar-wards again. As he did so, Rose ran over to him, threw her arms round him, and kissed him like she hadn’t seen him for a week. He said something in her ear and she nodded and reached into her bag, took out her purse, and handed him a twenty. Luke trousered it and turned toward the bar before suddenly seeming to convulse. And then, slowly and oddly gracefully, he collapsed on the floor, banging into the legs of a couple of his fellow drinkers.

  “You fucking wanker!” shouted one of the drinkers, and wound up to throw a punch, before realizing that his opponent was already down and out.

  Mac looked on transfixed, his attention entirely gripped by Rose, who calmly knelt down on the floor next to Luke and cradled him against her, stroking his head with one hand, a flame-haired, flat-chested Madonna and her debauched infant.

  Later, sitting in the cab, resigned to being a grownup, earning his money the hard way, he found the words “damned” and “blessed” jostling for space in his brain.

  The following afternoon he was woken up by the phone. It was Etheridge on the line. Mac paused for a moment, wondering what to say. He wasn’t sure he really cared what Luke did, but the thought of taking a finder’s fee for tracking him down felt weirdly unclean, seemed to somehow make him complicit in Luke’s grim debauch. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly an easy grand.

  Before he could make the decision, Etheridge started talking. “Look,” he said, “not to worry about tracking down old Luke.”

  “Oh,” said Mac, “decided against risking him on stage, have you?”

  “No, no, not at all,” explained Etheridge, “people love a bit of drama, don’t they? No, his manager’s been in touch so it’s all sorted out. I just thought I’d let you know.”

  “Manager?” said Mac.

  “Oh yes, delightful young woman by the sound of her, name of Rose. Sounds like she’s got him right under her thumb. So there we are. Well, thanks again.”

  “No trouble,” said Mac and put the phone down.

  The next morning he finished his shift deliberately early and got home in time to find Jackie still in bed. After they’d had sex he was happy to realize that for the first time in a long while he hadn’t thought about Anja at all.

  PENGUIN ISLAND

  BY JERRY SYKES

  Camden Town

  Eamonn Coughlan had lived in Camden Town all his life, and from as far back as he could remember there had been packs of teenagers roaming the streets: from the wartime cosh gangs that had operated during the blackouts to the hippies in the ’60s … from the punks of the ’70s through to the … Well, he didn’t know what they were called these days, but whatever they were called he had never come across a group of teenagers that had marked out their territories with as much determination as the current crop. Of course, he knew that graffiti had been around forever, ever since an unknown caveman had first picked up a piece of sharpened flint and scratched into the walls of his cave pictures of the animals that he had killed that morning. But it seemed that in the last few years almost every building in Camden Town had been marked with some kind of multicolored lettering or sign. He knew that it had something to do with drugs, an ongoing turf war, and that the signs were forever changing because of the constant battle for the rights to deal drugs to the thousands of tourists who flocked into the area around Camden Lock each weekend, but the subtleties of the different signs were lost on him.

  For the last eighteen months, the dominant piece of graffiti on the wall beside the lift in his building had been a large picture of a castle in red and blue. But as Coughlan pushed through the door that late spring morning, he saw that the castle had been covered over with black paint and that a couple of boys were now creating a new motif in its place. The new design was still little more than a sketch, he could just about make out three big letters outlined in red and orange—YBT, it looked like—but before Coughlan could see more, one of the boys caught him looking and turned and raised a hard chin in his direction.

  “Yo, what d’you think you’re lookin’ at,” snarled the boy, his neck stretching out of his collar. From the rest of his face he looked to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, but his eyes were cold and hard, aged before their time. He had a greased-down, straight-fringed haircut that made him look like a little Caesar, and the skin around the corners of his mouth was studded with cloves of acne. The other boy continued to paint, his head rising and falling to some music that no one else could hear.

  Coughlan shook his head and let the door fall closed behind him. Averting his eyes, he shuffled across to the lift, Little Caesar following him with narrowed eyes, his breath loud and coarse through his mouth. As Coughlan pressed the button to call the lift, the other boy turned to see what his friend was looking at, and Coughlan recognized him at once as Pete Wilson, a boy from the building that he had known since he was a toddler. From what Coughlan could remember, he must have been about twelve now.

  Pete’s pupils went wide as he recognized the old man and his hands whipped behind his back, hiding the paint can.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Pete?” asked Coughlan, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt his shoulders tense. He had never been one for making a fuss, and his outburst had scared him almost as much as it had surprised him.

  Pete hesitated for a moment, torn between his childhood links and the new alliance of his fresh and future independence.

  “I bet your mother doesn’t know what you’re up to,” Coughlan persisted, brave now. “What do you think she’d say if she knew you were down here vandalizing your own building?”

  Discovering that the decrepit old man in front of them knew his friend, Little Caesar’s mood lightened and he sniggered and punched Pete on the arm. Pete grunted and punched him back, glad for the distraction. From further up the stairs the sound of someone cursing and kicking the lift door could be heard.

  “I hope you’re going to clean that mess up before you go home,” said Coughlan, pointing a crooked finger at the wall.

  “I was just painting over the castle,” protested Pete.

  “With black paint on a white wall? And what’s with the red and orange letters? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s YBT,” replied Pete, smiling. “You Been Torched.”

  “I don’t understand,” replied Coughlan, frowning.

  Pete opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so, Little Caesar hit him on the shoulder again. “You know we’re not supposed to tell no one about that.”

  “It’s not a secret,” protested Pete, holding his arm tight where Little Caesar had punched him.

  “Fuckin’ child,” snapped Little Caesar, snatching the paint can from Pete’s hand and storming out of the building. Pete watched him go and then, after taking a quick glance at the unfinished graffiti, followed him. At the door, Pete cast a look back at the old man, and Coughlan thought he detected the hint of an apologetic word in the nervous stutter of his lips.

  Coughlan watched them disappear around the edge of the building, Pete trailing the other kid like a sibling desperate to please his elder brother. He waited a couple of seconds to make sure there was no return, and then felt a long hot breath leave his chest. He had not realized that he had been holding his breath. He turned back to the lift and pressed the button again.

  A couple of minutes later, an old woman in a blue raincoat appeared at the foot of the stairs, panting as if she had just walked
up them and not down. “I hope you’re not waiting on the lift,” she managed to gasp on a cloud of smoke, a cigarette burning in her fist, before she too disappeared through the door.

  Coughlan took a deep breath and started up the stairs.

  Back in his flat on the fourth floor, he filled the kettle and dropped a teabag into a mug. Waiting for the kettle to boil, he rested his hands on the edge of the sink and looked out over the estate toward Kentish Town Road, toward a couple of phone booths. Behind the booths was a low brick wall where it was common knowledge that a number of drug dealers practiced their trade, their customers either walking up or pulling up on the street in their cars to pick up their goods. There was a dealer out there at the moment, and another one strolling up and down the street, gesturing with a pointed finger at the cars that passed. It had become such a common sight, part of the threadbare fabric of the estate, that it no longer triggered an emotional response in Coughlan. But as he let his attention drift across the rest of the estate, his heart filled with sorrow as he spotted Pete and his friend sitting on the back of a bench no more than fifteen feet from the phone booths, watching the drug dealers in silent fascination.

  Later that night, stretched out on his bed, Coughlan listened with grim acceptance to the sound of his neighbors arguing, the rise and fall of drunken tongues and slurred insults. On the weekend it was like this most nights, along with the rumble of music through the wall that reminded him of the night during the war when a German bomb had reduced their neighbor’s house to smoking ash and rubble. The bomb had buckled the foundations of their own house, and the front door had never fit the frame after that, still letting in a draft when the council had moved them out of the house and into the Castle Estate the same summer he retired. And it was on nights like this that he wished his neighbors, his imagined enemies, could be bombed all over again.