Nirvana Bites

by Debi Alper

  I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘A case like this?’ What, non-stop copping for one ‘pulverised pansy pervert’?

  I followed them down the stairs. In the doorway, Mackay paused and turned back to face me.

  ‘You may as well know, Miss Stern, that we are now conducting a murder inquiry.’

  He paused again, enjoying the expression on my face.

  ‘Ms Courtney died at eight-thirty yesterday evening.’

  The car doors slammed and the engine started up, just as the door to Maggot’s flat crashed open. She reached me in one giant stride and cradled me in her arms on the floor, in the corner where I had subsided, gasping for breath.

  ‘Baby, baby. Ssshhh. Ssshhh. It’s all right, baby,’ she crooned.

  I allowed her to raise me to my feet. She half supported, half carried me into her flat and laid me gently on the massive bed that filled her back room. I turned my face into her soft pillow, drew my legs up to my chest and hugged them with my arms. There was a low moaning sound. I knew it was me, but I was powerless to stop it.

  Some time later, she raised me into a sitting position and popped a couple of torpedoes purloined from Stan’s stash into my mouth. She held a mug to my lips and I washed the tabs down with swigs of hot sweet milk. Then she laid me back on to the pillow, pulled her red, green and gold fluffy duvet up to my chin, and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

  22

  IT WAS A long, deep, dreamless sleep. When my eyes next opened it took a while to work out where I was. I gazed through the double doors into the garden, trying to guess what time of day it was. I took in details of the welfare of the vegetables and flowers I’d planted days before. In another lifetime. BDD. Before Della Died.

  I allowed the memory to seep back into my consciousness.

  ‘Jen? Don’t do that, honey. Please don’t do that’.

  I tore my reluctant gaze from the garden. Time to deal with People. I swivelled my head to look at Mags.

  ‘Don’t do what?’ I croaked. My mouth felt like the bottom of a cage belonging to a hamster whose owners had gone on an extended holiday.

  ‘Bang your head like that on the pillow.’

  ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know I was. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s five o’clock. In the afternoon. Tuesday afternoon. You’ve slept for nearly thirty-six hours.’

  I groaned and flung an arm over my eyes. ‘Fucking hell. What were those pills?’

  ‘Dunno. But I reckon they were the only partly responsible. You needed the rest, honey. You haven’t been taking care of yourself. When did you last eat? I mean a proper meal, not a crisp sandwich or something.’

  I didn’t move.

  ‘You can’t remember, can you? Right.’

  Mags disappeared off into her kitchen, where I heard plates crashing. A moment later she reappeared, carrying a steaming bowl on a tray.

  ‘OK,’ she bustled. ‘Sit up and get yourself on the outside of that.’ Yam, sweet potato, green bananas and carrots jostled for space in the spicy coconut-scented broth. Almost against my will, my mouth began to water. ‘And when you’re finished,’ she continued, ‘We’re going to talk. Or rather, you are. I want to know what’s going on, Jen. What’s really going on. All of it. Not just the bits you fancy sharing. OK?’

  I nodded meekly and raised the spoon to my lips.

  Mags drives a hard bargain. The soup was delicious. I had three huge, invigorating bowlfuls. But it came at a price.

  After the first bowl, we opened the back doors and allowed the late-spring sunshine to flow into the room.

  After the second bowl, we took two wooden folding chairs and sat on the concrete slabs behind the houses.

  By the time I’d consumed the third bowl, it was dark and I’d told Mags all there was to know about Della, Stan and the Scene and the part it had played in my life. Mags yawned and stretched.

  ‘That’s good, Jen. But not good enough,’ she accused. ‘So far you’ve barely told me any more than you’ve told Ali and Frank. You owe me more than that.’

  We took a sheet of plastic and laid it on the clods of earth that had, until recently, been called a lawn. On top of that we laid some giant floor cushions, then us, then the duvet. We lay side by side and looked up at a black velvet sky studded with diamanté stars. Della would have liked the image. My father wouldn’t.

  The occasional train thundered by. From Nick and Robin’s flat, we could hear Robin strumming an acoustic guitar. Badly. From Frank’s came the muted drone of a TV. Next door, Tyson periodically raced round the garden and head-butted the fence. The other sound was my voice. Hesitant and shaky at first, but gaining momentum as my defences melted into the darkness. I told her everything. All of it.

  Maggot’s response was threefold.

  First, there was compassion. But meted out with care, not slapped on with a trowel so as to devalue it. Just enough to make me feel supported, but not weakened.

  Then there was empathy. Mags told me her own story. She never knew her father. When she was three, her mother came to England, leaving Mags with her grandmother. The old lady was a strict disciplinarian, but Mags had never doubted that she was loved. When she was twelve, her mother sent for her. She came to England to live with a woman who was a virtual stranger to her, a cold and distant stepfather and three younger half-siblings. Mags, who was a country girl to whom even the larger towns in her island home were bustling and unfamiliar, came to London. To Harlesden. In January. She said she cried for weeks as she watched the sunshine drain from her skin and her spirit. Mags had never told me any of this before. I knew she was only telling me now to even up the balance.

  Her third response was pure hard-headed practicality.

  ‘Right. We need to work out a strategy. But not now. Tomorrow, first thing, we’ll get to work’.

  I frowned. ‘What day is it tomorrow? Won’t you be at work?’ I turned to face her. I couldn’t make out her expression in the dark. ‘Come to think of it, how come you weren’t at work today?’

  I saw her teeth glint as she grinned.

  ‘Or yesterday. I’m taking a sickie. My first in three years. In a job that has an acknowledged burn-out rate of about two years. I reckon they owe me.’

  See what I mean about Mags? She’s s-o-o-o balanced. We bade farewell to the cool mid-May Peckham night and each crawled to our own bed.

  23

  A BREAK, a real-life solid-gold lucky break, is a strange thing. You can’t predict it. You can’t make it happen. Without it, you don’t stand a chance. You may represent everything that is good, and the forces ranged against you may represent all that is evil in this world, yet without that lucky break you stand less chance of success than a slingshot against a rocket launcher.

  Of course, Gaia would say there’s no such thing as luck. There’s synchronicity, kismet, the divine plan. I don’t care what you call it. Without it, you’re sunk. But with it… With it, it’s like being thrown a single nylon thread when you’re adrift in a raging torrent. It may not save you in the end, but it gives you a glimmer of possibility. It gives you something to cling to. It gives you hope. And without hope, we are truly lost.

  A lucky break. That’s what we needed. And that’s what we got.

  It was the following day. I was in Frank’s front room, waiting for the others to arrive for the meeting Mags had arranged. Stan wasn’t invited. I don’t think I could have handled seeing him. Anyway, I didn’t want him to know about Della until we’d worked out the possible implications.

  Frank clattered cups on to a tray in the kitchen. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, gazing out of Frank’s window. The view was almost identical to mine except it was swivelled a few degrees to the left. I knew how it felt. The close presence of death unsettled me. I felt as though I’d been tipped off my axis and the cogs weren’t quite meshing. My father’s death had left me feeling hollow. Della’s left me feeling like something crucial had been ripped from the centre of my being.

&
nbsp; I shivered and hugged my arms round myself. Next to me on the floor was an old sweatshirt of Frank’s. I picked it up and put it round my shoulders. Underneath was last week’s copy of the South London Press. I turned the pages, trying to tear my thoughts from the grave. The usual stuff – a plea from a mother to catch her son’s murderers, a library book returned after twenty-four years, a battle to save some allotments…

  On page 5 there was a report on the trial of three racist thugs who had attacked and savagely beaten a fifteen-year-old black kid. They’d been found not guilty. It sounded like the police had presented a half-hearted crap case, the result of which was never in doubt.

  There were two photos. One was of the kid, taken soon after the attack, his face contorted and swollen. It brought back an image of Della and I felt a surge of revulsion. The other photo was of the thugs coming out of court, smiling and punching the air. A crowd of supporters jostled around them. And there in the mob, his arm around one of the accused and a triumphant grin on his face, was Phil Mitchell. Not the real Phil Mitchell, of course. And not the actor who plays him either. This Phil Mitchell was the one I’d seen at Stan’s flat. This was the Phil Mitchell who had tried to abduct Stan inside a fish tank. The one I’d chucked an axe at and set about with a fire extinguisher.

  A break. A lucky break. Thank you.

  24

  SOMETIMES YOU GET more than a nylon thread. Tides can and do turn. Spirals can go up as well as down.

  We sat and marvelled over the photo. The others asked if I was sure. I was. We had a link. But there was more to come. Robin was still studying the photo.

  ‘That guy there,’ he said, stabbing a finger at another face in the mob. ‘I can’t be 100 per cent certain, but I think he was one of the ones I saw at Meacham’s Meat Products when I was picketing there.’

  Mags peered over his shoulder. ‘Are you sure, Robin? That was a long time ago…’

  ‘No, like I said, I’m not sure. But it looks like the guy I remember. I wish Nick was here. Maybe he could confirm it.’

  There was still no word from Nick. Short of being worried about him, we couldn’t think what else we could do on that front.

  ‘I dunno,’ Mags shrugged. ‘They all look the same to me. Bald heads, beer bellies and faces straight from the farmyard.’

  ‘Do you think they’re the same guys who attacked you under the bridge, Jen?’ Gaia asked.

  ‘And did over Mrs V’s shop?’ Frank chipped in.

  It was my turn to shrug. It was possible, but I didn’t want to get too carried away. But if it was true, we had our first decent lead. One at least of the guys who had attempted to abduct Stan was a racist and possible fascist, who might also be linked with a worker at an abattoir that could have been a source for the blood chucked over our transit. So what had Stan done to piss off a bunch of Nazis? Something pinged in my brain.

  ‘Mags, you know when Stan first came and we had that meeting? You took notes, didn’t you?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve got them here. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Remember the list of programmes Stan was making that got cancelled when the production suite was trashed?’

  Realisation dawned on Mag’s face. She flicked through the pages of the notebook, a grim smile puckering her lips.

  ‘Here it is.’ She read out the list. And there it was. One of the documentaries Stan’s team was working on was to have been about Britain becoming the base for international fascism. If we were right, we weren’t just dealing with some mindless yobs off the Millwall terraces. We were rumbling with the big boys.

  We spent some more time discussing the implications before formulating The Plan. Mags was going to phone Meacham’s Meat Products in the guise of a researcher from the Ministry of Agriculture. Depending on how stupid these people were, she may or may not extract some useful information. Being Mags, she was going to go to the library to do some genuine research first, so she didn’t come over as someone who hadn’t touched meat since a dodgy goat curry in the late eighties.

  Frank volunteered to check out Koi Korner again, by resuming his pitch selling the Big Issue. He’d contact his mate first to get the most recent edition. Under the circumstances, we thought it wise for Ali to go along with him.

  Robin was going to check out the internet, to see if he could find any leads.

  Me? I was going to devote my energies to attempting to extract information from the most obvious source, who was mere yards away. Stan.

  As for Gaia, she promised to spend the next forty-eight hours fasting, meditating and chanting for our guidance and protection.

  Maybe she got the words wrong. Or maybe she just didn’t chant hard enough.

  25

  I COLLECTED STAN from Gaia’s and together we walked back to my flat. I wasn’t sure yet how I was going to go about my task. I shouldn’t have worried. Events, as usual, were about to overtake me.

  The answerphone light was blinking and I pushed the button. Familiar gruff tones invaded my space for the second time in as many days before I had the chance to hit the ‘off’ switch.

  ‘Miss Stern? Detective Sergeant Mackay here. A Mr Philip Courtney, brother of Derek a.k.a. Della Courtney, would like to contact you. If you call the number on the card I gave you, I’ll pass his details to you.’

  A mechanical click, then the tape rewound.

  Stan stared at me. ‘Della’s brother? What’s that about, Jen?’

  I decided to be brutal.

  ‘Della’s dead, Stan.’

  If I thought my reaction had been extreme, it was virtually deadpan compared to Stan’s.

  He reeled, and clutched the arm of the chair for support.

  ‘Della? Dead? How?’

  In spite of his class and wealth, Stan is essentially a weak man. And weak men with power are the most dangerous. I hated Stan at that point. I wanted to see him writhe. To be forced to confront the consequences of whatever deadly game he was playing. I didn’t feel the merest flicker of compassion for him.

  ‘She was beaten, Stan,’ I spat out. ‘With bats and fists and boots, I’d say.’

  Stan turned a ghastly shade of green. He covered his mouth with his hand and retched. His mind may well have been racing, but his eyes registered only raw fear.

  ‘When did this happen?’ he whispered.

  ‘A couple of weeks ago.’

  Stan gulped. ‘And when did you find out?’

  ‘Last Wednesday.’

  ‘What?? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me before now?’ he shrieked.

  ‘And why the fuck have you not given us the information we need to protect ourselves – not to mention protect your sorry arse?’ I countered.

  Stan groaned and lurched from the room. I followed him into the bedroom, where he began throwing clothes into his Gucci holdall.

  ‘What are you doing, Stan?’ I demanded. ‘Where you gonna go? Where you gonna run to now?’

  He dropped the Prada silk shirt he was holding and turned on me in fury.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.’ Maybe he remembered what happened the last time he got stroppy and threatened to walk out. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a few deep breaths. With visible effort, he softened his tone to a pleading whine.

  ‘Look. I promise I’ll stay in touch. And I’ll carry on paying you. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this. I really am. But I can’t stay. I’ve got to go…’

  I glared at him in contempt.

  ‘Della said you were nasty and she was right,’ I spat.

  Stan’s head snapped back as though I had slapped him.

  ‘Della said that? When did she say that?’

  ‘A couple of days ago. At the hospital.’

  Stan stared at me in disbelief. ‘You saw her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Did she say anything else?’ he breathed.

  ‘Yeah. She asked me to help her die,’ I snapped.

  I watched as he seemed to turn to ash before my eyes. If
I blew hard enough, he would simply crumble and disappear. I’m not so nasty myself I didn’t feel a pang of human sympathy. When all was said and done, we had both loved Della in our own way. And now she was gone. I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone so far who might be feeling the same sense of loss as I was. I thought I’d share a detail to make him smile in recognition through the pain.

  ‘Hey, guess what? She was concerned about her appearance.’

  Stan frowned, his eyes milky and unfocused.

  ‘She was worried she’d be badly scarred,’ I explained.

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Well, I think that’s what she said. It was hard to tell.’

  Stan winced. I racked my brains to remember Della’s exact words.

  ‘Nasty scar. That’s what she said. I asked her who had beaten her and instead of answering, she said, “Nasty scar.” Or that’s what it sounded like. And when I asked if you were involved, she said to tell you you’re nasty. Or possibly “they” are nasty. That’s how I interpreted it, anyway.’

  Stan’s eyes were huge. He took tufts of his hair and wrenched at them. Then he covered his face with his hands. As he slowly drew them downwards, he revealed a man who seemed to have aged twenty years.

  ‘I want some information from you, Stan. So far in this exchange, it’s been a one-way street. As usual. It’s time for some answers.’

  Stan wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. He gave a stomach-tearing retch and loped from the room, down the hall to the toilet, where I heard him throw up several versions of Gaia’s latest food fad.

  I went back to the front room and dug out the card Mackay had given me. I sat on my cushions and twirled it between my fingers, wondering what Della’s brother could want from me. And whether it was something I’d be prepared to give him.

  After some time, Stan appeared in the doorway, ashen and trembling. ‘I have to lie down,’ he murmured. ‘I swear we’ll talk in the morning. I’ll tell you everything then.’