by Louise Welsh
She tuned the radio to Radio London and set the volume low, so it wouldn’t drown out the voice of the satnav. The presenter was interviewing a reporter somewhere on the streets of the city. Stevie thought she could detect a sense of excitement in the broadcasters’ voices, exhilaration that the news was right on their doorstep. The quiet hum of their words accompanied her journey: curfew … power failure … lack of manpower … looting … army … rationing … closures of nuclear facilities … food shortages … There was health advice too, instructions to stay at home, to drink plenty of water, to keep children indoors. Schools were closed and teaching suspended, though some had been reopened as official quarantine centres. There was a phone number for relatives of the sick to call, though once again the advice was to stay at home; going to hospital would only result in further delays.
The satnav instructed her to turn left. Stevie obeyed and the mechanical voice announced with a sense of pride that usually made her smile: You have reached your destination. She looked at the bonfire barricading the entrance to Melvin Summers’ street and whispered, ‘Thank you.’
Twenty-Four
Stevie had passed other fires on her journey, distant orange glows that had reminded her of Guy Fawkes Nights of her early childhood, the smell of rotting leaves, burning wood and petrol, the thrill of sanctioned danger. She had been scared of fireworks, had held her mother’s hand fast and refused to go near the front of the crowd for fear of flying embers.
The bonfire blocking her way was as high as any her local council had organised. There were figures moving around the blaze but the fire’s glow was too bright to make out their detail. They might have been trying to guard the road, or raze it to the ground. One of them peeled away from the group and walked towards her car. The firelight illuminated the smears of blood and fingerprints on the passenger window. Stevie remembered the way the strange girl and her companion had tried to push it open. She felt in her bag for the knife she had taken from home and laid it in the shadows of the passenger seat.
The figure made a circling gesture with his hand, indicating that she should turn her car around and drive away. Stevie stayed where she was. The satnav image Iqbal had printed showed that Melvin Summers’ street was a dead end. This was her only way in.
The figure stood still for a moment. She could see that it was a man now, though his features were hidden by a scarf tied around his nose and mouth, like a bandit in an old cowboy film. The man was short, his body square and stocky. His stance was less confident than the fox’s. The creature had seemed to challenge her; the stranger looked hesitant, despite the stick in his hand. Stevie switched off the headlamps so that the man could see her face. She scrolled the window down a smidgen and turned off the engine.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered.
It was as if the man heard her. He took a few tentative steps forward, stopped about a foot away from the passenger window and shouted, ‘This road is under lockdown. Turn your vehicle around and go away.’
The formal words sounded stilted, as if they belonged to an unfamiliar script the stranger was following. Now that he was closer Stevie could see that what she had taken for a stick was actually a metal bar. She wondered where you would find such a thing.
‘I’m here to visit someone.’ She leant across the passenger seat, resting a hand on the hilt of the knife, and raised her voice. ‘Melvin Summers. He lives in this street.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, shaking his head, ‘but there’s no coming and going from here, love.’
His voice was muffled by the scarf tied around his face. It was hard to guess his age without seeing his features, but the leather jacket he was wearing was ten years out of fashion, the body beneath it broad and running to fat.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone beyond this line is healthy. We want to keep it that way.’
The man was still keeping his distance, and Stevie wondered if the improvised mask was intended to block infection rather than hide his features.
‘What happens if someone inside your line gets sick?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge if we get there.’ The stranger paused, as if considering his answer, and added, ‘There’s a quarantine centre in the primary school.’ He pointed to somewhere beyond her car, out into the darkness.
A second man stepped beyond the glow of the fire. He was taller than the first, thin and rangy, and carrying a baseball bat.
‘Are you a journalist?’
The newcomer had a football scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. It made him look like a terrorist glimpsed on a CCTV camera, an already dead man, located after the fact.
‘I just want to visit Mr Summers. He lives here. He’s a dentist. His wife died recently, his wife and his little girl.’
‘I remember him.’ The baseball bat hung loosely in the second man’s hand. ‘He’s not a dentist no more, jacked it in after his missus topped herself.’
‘Does he still live in the street?’
‘No, love.’ The squat man rested the end of his metal bar against the ground and leant his weight against it. ‘He lives in the boozer, said he was spending his savings on drinking himself to death. The sweats would be a blessed relief if you ask me.’
Now that they were talking the men seemed more relaxed, as if they had decided she posed no threat. Stevie gave them the smile that had won her countless sales.
‘You seem pretty organised. Is there any way to find out if he’s in your quarantine zone?’
‘It don’t make no difference if he is or if he ain’t.’ The man with the baseball bat sounded defensive and she guessed they hadn’t carried out a census of their small kingdom. ‘No one gets in. That’s the rule.’
‘I’ve had the sweats. I’m immune.’ She smiled again. ‘Won’t you let me through? It’s important.’
The man with the baseball bat took a step forward and for an instant she thought he might be about to name a price she wouldn’t want to pay. But the man with the metal bar straightened his shoulders and put a hand on his companion’s arm.
‘Sorry, love. Official advice is to stay at home, have contact with as few people as possible, and that’s what we’re making sure happens. We’re just doing our best to protect our properties and our families. You should go home too. It won’t do you no good to go wandering around at night, even if you have had the sweats. There are some funny people about.’
Stevie thought he might have cast a look at the man standing next to him, but if he did, it was so fleeting she couldn’t be sure.
‘Where does Mr Summers drink?’
‘The Nell Gwynne, back the way you came and then first on the right.’ The tall man swung his baseball bat to and fro, a slow-moving pendulum. ‘He’s more than likely there.’
‘Leave it alone, love,’ the smaller man said. ‘It’s after midnight and Nellie’s isn’t a place for a woman on her own, not tonight.’
Stevie put the car into gear. She saw the man armed with the baseball bat take a bottle of spirits from the pocket of his jacket, as if talk of pubs had made him thirsty. His companion took a step forward, shouting to make himself heard over the noise of the car engine.
‘Even if you find Summers, he’ll be too far gone to know you’re there.’
Stevie turned the car around and drove in the direction of the pub.
Twenty-Five
The hanging baskets decorating the front of the Nell Gwynne had once been impressive, but the pub’s clientele were intent on watering themselves, and the begonias, geraniums and trailing lobelia drooped limp as seaweed at low tide. Stevie pulled the zip of her tracksuit top up to her chin and pressed through the crush of drinkers on the pavement, into the warm tobacco fug of the pub’s interior. She detected the sweet, throat-sharp scent of marijuana beneath the cigarette smoke shelving the air. The pub was low-ceilinged and so noisy that at first it seemed everyone was talking at the tops of their voices. But as Stevie pushed her way to the bar she became
aware of drinkers on the periphery, men and women, as limp as the pub’s flower display.
Traces of the cosy pub it must once have been clung to the Nell Gwynne like a light shining in a half-demolished building. A menu was still chalked on the blackboard, offering steak pie, roast lamb, fish and chips and other pub-grub staples. Black-and-white photographs of an older, more rustic London crowded the walls. Stevie noticed a horseshoe pinned above the door, arched end at the bottom, to keep the luck of the house from draining away.
‘All right, love?’ A thin, rat-faced man nodded a gentle, absent greeting in Stevie’s direction and then unzipped his fly and let go a long and hissing stream against the side of the bar.
Stevie stepped smartly backwards, away from the rush of piss.
‘For Christ’s sake, Tony,’ said a man in scuffed jeans and a denim jacket. But no one made a move to throw out the drunk, and when he was finished he zipped up and continued taking steady sips from the beer glass, golden on the bar in front of him.
Iqbal had printed a photograph of Melvin Summers from the dentist’s website. It was a head-and-shoulders shot of a neatly groomed, square-jawed man in a white coat. Stevie took the printout from her tracksuit pocket and cast her gaze around the room.
The drinkers were mainly men, gathered in small huddles or settled determinedly on their own. Pensioners, intoxicated boys and business types mingled with wired-up youths and shell-suited men sporting gold chains and sovereign rings, whose broad bellies suggested long, restful hours in front of flat-screen TVs. A middle-aged cyclist, his flesh squeezed firm by Lycra, shovelled change into the fruit machine, playing with chance as if his life depended on it; a labourer in a fluorescent jacket and work boots cradled his hard hat between his hands; a man with a young face and grey hair talked gently to a standard poodle who stared up at him with rapt attention. There were a few women too. Stevie saw that they were at the centre of clusters of men and knew she would have to watch her step.
The man in denim whispered, ‘Help yourself to a drink, Princess. It’s self-service. John and Doris won’t mind, not where they’ve gone.’
‘A terror against tick, John was,’ Tony said. ‘You remember how he was, Django. Probably spinning in his grave.’
There was an edge of bravado to his voice, as if mentioning graves was a mighty dare.
Django turned his weary gaze on him. ‘Show a bit of respect for the dead.’
Perhaps it was Django’s jeans and denim jacket that reminded Stevie of an urban cowboy, a man unsuited to the times he found himself in. Or maybe it was the casual way he propped himself against the bar, as if he had known all along that life would come to this desperate pass. She showed him the dentist’s photograph.
‘I’m looking for Melvin Summers. I was told this is his local.’
Django continued to contemplate his glass. He spoke without looking at her.
‘You’re not a debt collector, are you, Princess?’
His neighbour laughed. ‘Get even, die in debt.’
Django said, ‘Shut up, Tony,’ in the same calm voice he had used when he had invited Stevie to help herself to a drink. ‘What do you want him for?’
‘I want to ask Mr Summers about the doctors who treated his daughter prior to her death.’
Django asked, ‘What are you then? A private eye?’
‘A private dick,’ crowed Tony.
Django said, ‘You’re a prat, Tony.’
The other man grinned, as if he had just been given a compliment.
Stevie said, ‘I lost someone too. I need to find out why, while I still can.’ She was surprised to find her eyes welling up.
Django looked at the beer glass in front of him with distaste, and then took a long, deep swallow from it.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Princess, but people are dropping like flies. I’m all for justice, always have been, a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, fair enough. But there doesn’t seem much point in chasing after the death of one poor sod any more.’
‘If we stop caring about the death of “one poor sod” we might as well give up.’ Stevie saw a lazy smirk spreading across Tony’s drink-dulled face and felt the futility of it all. ‘There’s no sense in talking to you. You’ve already given in.’
She turned to walk away, but Django caught her by the arm.
‘Hold on a minute, Princess.’
Stevie tried to shrug him off, but his grip held her, hard enough to bruise. The last time anyone had grabbed her had been in the TV station car park. Stevie kicked Django’s shin and gave a swift uppercut to his chin that hurt her knuckles.
‘Hey, hey, hey.’ Django caught her free wrist. Stevie tried to break away, but he was stronger. He brought his mouth close to her ear and whispered, ‘You shouldn’t hit people, unless you’re sure you can beat them,’ his breath warm and beery against her face.
Stevie pulled her foot into a kick, but Django let go before she had a chance to deliver.
‘Leave her alone, Djang.’ Anxiety narrowed Tony’s voice to a whine. ‘She looks like she’s already taken a beating.’
‘Fuck off, Anthony.’
Django’s voice was barely more than a whisper. He rubbed the stubble on his chin where Stevie’s fist had made contact.
Stevie said, ‘Touch me again and I’ll show you just how capable I am of fucking you up.’
To her surprise Django started to laugh, a dry, unhappy sound, barely audible over the noise of the bar.
‘What is this? Christ, I’m your mild-mannered janitor type, but suddenly everybody thinks I’m going to go postal.’ He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and placed a beer mat on top of his pint. ‘Keep your eye on that for me, would you, Tone?’ He nodded to Stevie to follow him and walked towards a door labelled Lounge Bar. ‘Melvin’s through here. But you’ll be lucky to get any sense out of him. I’m guessing if you know enough to look for Melv, you already know what happened to his wife?’
It was as if the altercation had made them allies. Stevie said, ‘I read about it.’
A cheer gusted from the gents’ toilets where a small huddle was spilling out of the door. Django put a hand on Stevie’s elbow and guided her past the rabble, towards the lounge, but not before she had glimpsed a blur of white flesh in the centre of the knot of men, moving to a familiar rhythm.
‘It’s like Hitler’s bunker in here,’ Django said. ‘I’d kick the lot out, except there’s too many of them. They’ll vanish when the drink does.’ He tapped the pocket of his denim jacket, somewhere near his heart. ‘I’ve got the key to John’s secret supply. Once this lot are gone I’ll lock the door, dig out the special stuff, go up to John and Doris’s flat and wait for things to improve.’
‘Do you think they will?’
‘What?’
‘Improve?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Depends what you mean by improve. I reckon there’ll be a lot more jobs to go round. Some people might think that’s a good thing. On the other hand, there are jobs your average bloke can’t do. Like being a brain surgeon or operating a nuclear power station, so life might get a bit less sophisticated. I can guarantee you one thing though.’
‘What?’
‘If I survive, I’ll be spending less time in the local.’
Stevie said, ‘I heard this place has become a refuge for Mr Summers.’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that when he got tired of getting rat-arsed at home, he got rat-arsed here instead.’ Django paused in the centre of the busy room and looked at her. ‘Funny, Melv came in here a lot, but it was always a shock to see him, know what I mean? Like seeing a dead man step through the door. We’re all on borrowed time, but no one really thinks about it until something like this happens, then getting rat-arsed seems like the best thing to do. I guess Melv was just a step or two in front of the rest of us. He’s been a dead man walking since he found his wife.’
A dishevelled man in a no-longer-smart business suit staggered o
ver and put an arm around Stevie’s waist. He leant his head against her chest and slurred, ‘Why don’t you and me go somewhere where we can be kind to each other?’
Django gripped the stranger’s shoulders and turned him in the opposite direction. ‘Piss off, mate, she doesn’t want to know.’ He gave the man a gentle shove that sent him staggering towards the bar, in the broken mechanical walk of the soon-to-crash drunk.
Stevie said, ‘Thanks, but there was no need. I could handle him myself.’
‘Is that how you got those bruises? Handling things yourself?’
Django stretched a hand towards her face, but Stevie stepped beyond his reach.
She said, ‘I saw Melvin’s website. He blames his daughter’s doctors for her death.’
‘Not just her death, his wife’s too. He wanted them struck off.’
‘Did you ever get the impression that he might go further than that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Go outside the law.’
Django’s face was furred with stubble, his jowls soft and puffy from drink and late nights, but his expression hardened.
‘Why would you want to know that?’
Stevie forced a smile. ‘I’m not the police.’
‘Sorry.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘I forgot you lost someone too. Was it your kid?’
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
Django gave a small nod. ‘It looks like we’re all going to learn a lot more about losing people.’
‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘Have you lost somebody?’
Django looked away. Someone had decided it was too dark and set tea lights on the tables. The scruff of stubble on his chin glinted against the candlelight, grey speckling sandy red, an intimation of old age.
‘I guess it says something about my life that the people I’m missing most are John and Doris.’ He gave her a sad smile. ‘Up until now, the only thing I ever lost was chances.’
Twenty-Six
The tables in the lounge were cluttered with a Manhattan skyline of wine goblets, tankards, tumblers and shot glasses. It was obvious that some time earlier it had been the scene of heavy drinking. Now it had become a chill-out room, where people could escape the chaos of the main bar and marshal their resources for their next bout. A couple of sleeping drunks were curled on the banquette, using their jackets as pillows. Another lay beached on the floor, next to the empty fireplace, his breaths raw and laboured, his brow slick with perspiration.