Gabriel swallowed and nodded. ‘Yeah, that club you were talking about sounded grand. Where can I find it?’
The two men stared at him for a moment and then one of them started to laugh. ‘Well, well, aren’t you a kinky one?’ he said, and, turning to his friend, ‘This guy clearly hasn’t dipped his wick for a while … You’d better give him the address.’
‘You run straight to the Pelican Club in Greek Street, pal, and you may catch yourself some action tonight.’
Reddening, Gabriel thanked them and, leaving enough change on the bar, he stepped out into the street. It had started to rain. Buttoning up Uncle Gerry’s tweed jacket, whose cuffs had started to fray, Gabriel set off towards Soho.
The Pelican Club was not easy to find and he walked past the entrance twice before spotting a narrow black door with an image of a pelican. The door opened on to an equally narrow stairwell, leading down into a large, windowless area with a long, curved bar and tables arranged in front of a small stage.
Leaning against the bar with a drink at his arm, he listened to the band rehearsing that evening’s numbers. It was still early and the club was empty, save for himself, the barman, and a couple of men talking business in one of the leather-clad booths. Gabriel could only see the face of one of them – the other one sat with his back to the bar. For a moment, Gabriel thought there was something familiar about that back, but he let it go. Stripped of its clientele, the interior of the club looked shabby and dilapidated. It smelt of cigarettes and stale drink. The barman cleared his throat and spoke without warmth: ‘You all right, there?’
‘Fine thanks,’ Gabriel said and turned around to face the bar. In the broken mirror behind the bottles, he saw his own split face and, behind it, multifaceted and fragmented, the duplicate profiles of the two businessmen. And then he saw the poster; it advertised a show – a burlesque show – and there, behind the long-legged young woman with black hair dressed in a corset and ostrich boa, was an image of Michael at a piano. It was definitely Michael. He was even thinner than when Gabriel had last seen him at the Moor Cross Inn, dressed in black-tie and half hidden in shadow, but it was Michael. The text on the poster read Dolly May – Cabaret of the Damned. He turned to the barman, who was drying glasses nearby. ‘Hey, that guy at the piano –’ he pointed at the poster – ‘do you know him? Does he play here often?’ The barman looked up with a dulled expression. He lit a cigarette and glanced at the poster. ‘I dunno,’ he muttered, blowing out the smoke.
‘I’d like to get in touch with him, that’s all.’
‘Yeah?’
Gabriel ignored the tone of sarcasm in the barman’s voice. ‘Well, could you at least tell me when he played here last?’
The barman glanced over at the two men in the booth, but they were deep in conversation now; they didn’t seem to have noticed Gabriel. ‘They played here last Thursday,’ he said, and spat into the glass he was wiping. ‘That’s all I know,’ he added, curtly, and turned his back to Gabriel.
*
On realising that Michael might be close, Gabriel started a tireless, meticulous quest to track him down. He would hear snippets of information here and there – in the clubs and pubs in Archer Street, Wardour Street and Great Windmill Street, from the Caribbean musicians who set the rhythm of those streets and from the girls clustering like grapes in the doorways – but no one could vouch for any of the facts. No one could say anything for certain. And yet they all knew of him. He was remarkably handsome, they seemed to agree, although in a consumptive way. No one knew where he lived, but one man thought he sometimes slept on a mattress in a room above the Harmony Inn, and once under the grand piano at the Palladium. People said his mind was blown, and that sometimes he spoke in French.
This was all pieced together over the course of a week or two. Michael might have been mistaken for just another bum, another minor character in that incredible cast, but there was clearly a certain quality to him, something which made the low life of Soho’s streets hesitate when asked about him, something intangible which would make them stop and smell the air, as if they expected the spirit of the elusive young pianist to be mingling with the stench of frying fat and alcohol. The secret of his attraction seemed to be his boyishness – it was as if he had never grown up – and his link to the owner of the Pelican Club. He was the club’s mascot, said some; others used more sinister terms to describe Michael’s ties to one of the most feared club owners in London.
He was simply called the Pelican, after his club, and was well known for managing to stay out of the way of the law, in spite of some rather dodgy business tactics. Some said that he offered protection for the brothels throughout the West End. He had a number of police officers and judges on his payroll and no witnesses dared appear against him. His front-of-house staffer was Seamus ‘the Clerk’ O’Brien, a devout Catholic with a dingy office above a strip bar. The phone number printed on his visiting card rang in a phone box in Brewer Street.
‘What do you want?’ answered an irritated female voice when Gabriel finally called the number from a phone box in nearby Berwick Street.
‘I want to meet the Clerk.’
The woman sighed and yelled to somebody nearby. ‘Hey, it’s another one for the Clerk!’
Gabriel listened down the line at the street life, which mingled with the noises outside his own booth.
Finally, a man’s voice came on the line: ‘What do you want to see the Clerk about?’
‘I want to talk to him about my brother, Michael, the pianist.’
He could hear the man at the other end of the line breathe for a moment. ‘Your brother?’
‘Yeah.’
The man was silent, considering this. ‘All right; go to Walker’s Court and ask for the Clerk.’
This is a long way from Mortford, Gabriel thought to himself as he was led up a rickety flight of stairs to the Clerk’s office. Seamus O’Brien was sitting at a large mahogany desk. His jacket was draped across the back of his captain’s chair and the sleeves of his white shirt were held back with silver armbands. He might have been a typesetter, shaping the language of the day. A life-sized carved Madonna in sky-blue velvet robes was standing like a sentinel just inside the door. She wore a gold crucifix pendant, studded with red and blue stones – it looked real and very expensive. Gabriel entered and closed the door behind him. O’Brien looked up from his ledgers and studied Gabriel through half-moon glasses. There was a print of the Pope on the wall behind him.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for my brother, Michael Bradley.’
‘And what makes you think I could help you?’
‘Well …’
‘Don’t be a weakling, boy. Spit it out!’
‘They say he works for you … For the Pelican, that is.’
‘No one works for me, do you hear? I deal with paperwork – I am a clerk!’ O’Brien flared, his face suddenly blazing.
‘I apologise.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
There was a moment of awkward silence.
‘Well?’ Gabriel dared ask, at last.
‘Well, what?’
‘Would you know where I could find my brother, sir? It would be –’ he looked quickly around the room – ‘a good deed, if you could help me.’
‘Ah,’ said the Clerk, and started looking distractedly through his papers. ‘Yes, well, I keep a list of names here, you see …’
Gabriel stood, frowning at his shoes, waiting.
Somewhere, a doorbell buzzed. A plastic Sacred Heart in a gold frame started blinking on the mahogany desk. O’Brien sighed and removed his glasses to polish them on his shirtsleeve. His eyes were tiny and red-rimmed. ‘It’s another one of the bag men, bringing in this week’s money.’ He nodded towards the blinking light. ‘You’d better leave through the back door.’
‘But sir – a good deed, please?’
O’Brien sighed. ‘All right, all right; come to the club tonight. I’ll make sure he’s there.’
/> *
Gabriel hardly recognised the Pelican Club when he returned later that evening. The shabbiness seemed to have been transformed, at the stroke of a wand, into glamour. A soft glow from uplighters all around the walls picked out the sparkle in the gold ceiling, which stretched like an oriental canopy over the guests, seated at the small round tables in front of the stage. Everyone was in evening dress. A single couple was dancing; they were beautiful – she pale, slender, almost green-tinted, like the part of the flower stalk that never sees the light; he golden, full of all that love, his hand confident on the small of her back. There was something rather dreamy – almost innocent – about it all. Gabriel felt awkward in his old suit. He smoothed his fringe to one side and wished he’d worn a tie. A jazz band was playing on stage and, for a moment, he was transported back to the safety and comfort of Uncle Gerry’s cottage, where he had been able to dream of this allure. Put the blame on Mame, boys.
Keeping to the shadows, Gabriel moved around the periphery of the room, observing the guests. Waiters in white jackets and bow ties flowed around the tables, serving champagne cocktails from silver trays. The smoke from Cuban cigars and cigarettes formed tawny clouds around the tables, as if each one of them had its own weather system – or a volcano, ready to go off at any moment. Gabriel felt himself drawn towards the music. On the wall next to the stage was a large mosaic of a pelican, lowering its beak to its heart, where drops of blood stained its snowy white chest. Just below the pelican’s beak, where real drops of blood would have fallen, Michael was sitting at a table by himself, his eyes fixed on the stage.
For a few minutes, Gabriel hung back, watching him. He was wearing black tie and his dark hair had been pasted back with brilliantine. Gabriel remembered Michael’s cap of dark hair, the sandy smell of it and the way it used to sit so tightly on his head, like Pinocchio’s. Michael’s face was half in shadow and there were dark circles under his eyes. He was still and composed but, as he raised a cigarette to his lips, Gabriel detected a tremble in the elegant hand, a slight twitch in the pianist’s fingers. Gabriel realised now why the descriptions he had had from the people in the streets had been admiring and at the same time rather vague; he was inconsolably handsome but in a slightly removed, fuddled way – as if he was an abstraction of himself, a character in a novel, a dark and brooding hero. There was something lack-lustre, something wistful, about the way in which he stared at the band playing.
Gabriel hesitated in the shadows and, for a moment, he contemplated leaving, turning round quietly and sneaking out the way he had come, out of this world he had no place in, where he had ended up, as if by some great mistake. He could not recall why he was there at all and, in his frustration, he felt a wash of anger at having been trapped in this way, like a lobster who crawls greedily through the narrow passage, seeking fulfilment and satisfaction, and finding, at the far end of the creel, a shard of mirror tied to the frame, offering the seduction of company, but delivering only a reflection of himself. And that was at the heart of it: this feeling of loss and the fear of losing Michael once again, as he knew he must. He walked up to Michael’s table and pulled out an empty chair.
Michael looked up as Gabriel sat down in front of him; if he had any feelings at that moment, his eyes did not reveal them. ‘Gabe,’ he said, flatly, without surprise, ‘you look awful. What’s happened to you?’ Idly, he reached for the drink in front of him, the cigarette still clasped between his fingers. His face was pallid and gaunt.
‘It’s nice to see you, too.’
Michael laughed briefly. ‘Irony never used to be your thing; didn’t think you were cut out for it. Too much of a goody-goody; always so naïve.’
This hurt, but Gabriel did not let on. ‘Yeah, well, I suppose I have grown up.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Michael motioned to one of the waiters.
‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’
‘Two whiskies, Sam; water, no ice.’
The waiter bared his teeth at Michael and moved off.
They sat in silence, Gabriel studying Michael, who let it happen, pretending to watch the stage again. At last, the waiter returned with the drinks. They drank without looking at each other.
‘So,’ Michael spoke quietly, still looking away, ‘what brings you to London?’
‘Long story …’ He wondered if Michael remembered the sideshow, Dr Buster and the twins, and contemplated making up a tale that might seem more credible. ‘Well, after I saw you last, I finished school and joined a sideshow for the summer … and then I learnt that I had been accepted to university, so I came here to study.’
Michael looked at him properly for the first time and Gabriel thought he detected a glint of deference, a renewed admiration, in the brown eyes. ‘University?’
Gabriel nodded. ‘Yes, medical history, mostly. About mutants and stuff, you know.’
‘Cripes!’ Michael said and whistled.
They were silent for a while as they contemplated this. Then Michael spoke: ‘So, you have come to me for money?’
Gabriel looked at him astonished. ‘No! Whatever made you think that?’
‘That’s good, because I haven’t got any.’
‘But … what about your part of the inheritance?’
‘Gone.’
‘Oh.’
‘George Bradley’s darling boys – together again – only their fortunes seem to be somewhat reversed …’ Michael slurred with a fatuous grin.
Gabriel looked at him, at the mask of his face, pinched and white like a young Punchinello’s, but still so innocently handsome. A nerve started to twitch visibly under Michael’s right eye and he lowered his face deeper into the shadows. Gabriel felt a surge of panic as the world seemed to shift and he searched his memory for something solid to grab hold of, something to moor him to the moment. Suddenly, he remembered: ‘There’s still Oakstone … We could let it and make some money – or even sell it – if you wouldn’t mind, of course.’
Michael drank at a draught what remained in his glass and clicked his fingers at the waiter. ‘Sam! Another one of these, please.’
‘Seriously, Michael, it might not be such a bad idea.’
‘Oakstone is already gone,’ Michael said, in a voice that seemed to come from very far away.
‘What? What do you mean, “gone”?’
‘I had to get rid of it –’ more remotely still – ‘I had to get rid of Oakstone.’
‘It’s not possible; I still own half of it!’
‘Well, it’s complicated. I was in a bit of a bad spot. I had run into debt, if you like, and Blackaton offered to take Oakstone as part of the security. I forgot to tell him that you owned half of it …’
‘You forgot to tell him … ? This is madness. Crazy! You can’t just give my part of a house away to some crook because of a stupid debt. Why didn’t you speak to me first?’
Michael shrugged.
‘I might have been able to help. I would have paid your debts, somehow.’
‘Well, you did, in a way.’
‘But why Oakstone?’
‘It was the only thing he would accept. A class thing, I suspect – wanting to climb a step on the ladder.’
Gabriel sighed. He realised the feeling that had been nagging at him since he entered the club was one of suspension; it was as if his mind and limbs were tied to invisible strings – harmless enough, until someone tugged at them – and something else too, which was more like childish annoyance, a disappointment that things should be this way. However, rather to his surprise, it was not the loss of Oakstone that upset him the most – his ownership had always seemed rather abstract, anyway – what infuriated him was Michael’s detached, laconic behaviour. ‘How much was it, the debt?’
Michael ignored the question, blowing a ring of smoke. He seemed to be miles away.
‘How much, Michael?’ Gabriel shouted, and shook him by the arm. A few people from the surrounding tables turned to look at them and the waiter called Sam
sidled up to the table. ‘Everything all right here, Fluff?’
‘Yes, Sam, everything is hunky-dory,’ Michael replied, icily, and added, with irritation, ‘Is Mr D not here yet?’
‘No; I said I’d let you know,’ Sam answered, with a faint, derisive grin.
‘Michael, just tell me how much,’ Gabriel whispered, calmer now, when they were alone again.
Suddenly, Michael seemed to re-enter himself; his face opened a little and his eyes lit up briefly, as if somebody had turned on a switch. He smiled shamefacedly, in that old apologetic way, so that something stirred inside Gabriel. ‘Not much, Gabe; not very much at all. It was my life we traded. I gave it to him once, as you may remember, and I wanted it back. And, as I said, Oak-stone was the only prize he would accept to set me free.’
‘The bastard!’
‘Yeah, well …’
‘Can nothing be done?’
‘Not really, no; you see, there was more to the deal than I reckoned. I had been using his drugs, as it turned out – quite a lot of them, and for rather a long time, too. So, I wasn’t quite free, after all.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
He nodded, and gave a sort of laugh. ‘But at least they pay me for my services here. And keep me in fine clothes … and recreational medicine, naturally.’
‘What exactly do your services involve?’
He shrugged and smiled again. That charming smile. ‘This and that, Gabe. This and that.’
Gabriel looked away quickly, for fear his eyes would give him away, the black bead of grief and shame shining through. And then suddenly he remembered: ‘Why don’t you turn to your mother?’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’
‘Do you even know where she is?’
Michael shrugged. That infuriating vagueness.
‘We seem spared from growing old together in our family, eh, Gabe?’ Still ignoring the question. ‘We are blessed.’ The wit fell flatly on the table in front of them.
Gabriel felt a knot of pain in his guts as he thought briefly of his own mother. He pictured her reading the paper at the kitchen table, a towel spread out so as not to stain the oilcloth, and her unhappiness still filling the house, thrumming in the walls like some long-wave radio channel which one could never really tune into. He had loved Mrs Bradley, because of her soft touch. Perhaps more than his own mother. But was that love real or imagined? A young boy’s muddled affections as he grows into his sexuality?
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