by M. P. Wright
Vic was clean-shaven and dressed in a black velvet jacket with a purple paisley shirt, its top three buttons opened, and around his neck he wore a thin silk scarf held by a gold hoop. His tight dark-grey flares were held up by a wide black leather belt, its diamanté buckle hanging suggestively above his crotch. I called out to him and he turned and walked towards me, a massive grin on his face. He greeted me with all the exuberance of a man who permanently lived his life to the full.
“Brother, you see the titties on her?” he asked. He gave a gentle nod backwards with his head towards the heavyset barmaid. “She carrying more milk in there than on the back o’ a Unigate float.” He gave out a loud belly laugh at his own remark. “What you drinking? No, wait. I’ll git you a rum, you looks like you freezing ya ass off!” He rubbed his hands together excitedly as he returned to the bar.
We found a table that over looked the entrance to the pub and drank in silence. I knew that Vic wasn’t happy with my decision to keep searching for Stella, but he’d go along with me, right or wrong. The way he saw it, you didn’t run out on your family when they needed you the most – it was as simple as that. He looked around the room before knocking back the rest of his rum. He slammed the glass down hard on the table, breathing in deeply through his nose before he spoke.
“Man, this place is giving me the shits. It’s like some nasty honky morgue. Let’s git the hell outta here.”
The Speed Bird club was a brothers and sisters kind of place. That’s not to say that white folk weren’t welcome. It’s just that they chose to stay away. It was run by Elrod Haddon, a one-time heavyweight boxer and now small-time gambler who’d bought a stake in the bar. He’d earned the nickname “Hurps” during the Second World War on account of how many times he had caught the clap off of the hookers that he’d bedded as he made his way across bombed-out France.
“I had me a rifle in one hand and a tube o’ medicated dick cream in the other,” he would joke to those who enquired after his moniker. His character was as large as his ego. Hurps was well known in St Pauls. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy who didn’t take any shit from his customers and expected none back. I liked him.
The Speed Bird was a cellar club that rarely required a doorman. You went in to drink, smoke and dance. You took a fight out in the street, and if you pushed your luck at the bar you’d end up with your ass kicked out on the road. Vic would feel right at home. The effects of the aspirin were wearing off and I just wanted to find out what Jocelyn knew and head back to my bed.
The place reeked of patchouli oil and three-day-old reefer, and like the Prince of Wales, it was practically empty. On the far wall overlooking a small dance floor was a series of American-diner-style booths, each with leather seating on either side of grey Formica-topped tables. We chose the last booth, and Vic slid across the seat and rested his back in the corner, one leg propped up on the cracked leather cushion. He took his hip flask out of his jacket pocket, unscrewing the cap.
“I got no need to ask what you drinking,” I said sarcastically.
He took a heavy glug of rum from the flask before answering me.
“Hell, you don’t buy ice and fry it, fool. I got a shitload o’ this stashed. You know what Hurps can do with his old piss water over there,” he scoffed, waving the back of his big hand towards the bar dismissively.
I crossed the dance floor over to where Hurps was sitting. He was perched on top of a high-backed chrome stool, with a pair of half-framed gold spectacles perched on the tip of his nose while he read a copy of the Bristol Evening Post. Bobby Bland’s “Stormy Monday Blues” was playing on the sound system as I stood beside him.
“How’s tings, Hurps?”
He looked up from his newspaper, lifting his line of sight over his glasses to get a better look at who was speaking to him in his dimly lit, cavernous bar. He took a moment to recognise me.
“Hey, JT, everyting’s good, real good. You ain’t looking too bright at the minute. What you been doing to git a cracked-up face like you got?”
“Fell like a fool on that damn ice out in the street, Hurps. It hurt my pride more than my head,” I lied.
“What you drinking, brother?” Hurps asked me.
“A shot o’ that Red Heart rum would go down real nice, Hurps. Thanks, man.”
Hurps called across the dark teak counter to a skinny white barmaid. Her dyed blonde hair was cut short into her neck and she wore too much eyeliner, which made her look like a circus clown.
“Shirley, git this man a double Red Heart on me,” he snapped at the clown.
She fetched over the bottle and poured a large measure of rum into a small glass with all the finesse of a bricklayer mixing wet concrete. It overflowed and spilt onto the bar.
“Jesus, girl. Why don’t you give the floor a fuckin’ drink while you at it!”
She took a rag from underneath the bar and wiped up the overspill, then pushed the glass across the bar towards me. She looked at Hurps and flashed him an insincere smirk as an apology for the mess she’d caused.
Hurps shook his big head from side to side in dismay. “Fuckin’ woman. She makes my ass itch. More damn trouble than she’s worth. I only keep the skanky bitch on cos I been screwing her mama.” He laughed to himself. “You here on your own, JT?” he asked.
“No. I’m with Vic. He’s sat over there in one o’ your booths.”
“Goddamn, no. Not that big muthafuckin’ cousin o’ yours. You tell him to keep his fists in his fuckin’ pockets while he’s in here. I don’t need him treading pig shit all over my club. Last time he came in, he t’rew some poor bastard over this bar. I can do without his kinda crap at my age. You hear me?”
“He’s cool, Hurps. I’ll keep my eye on him. You got my word.”
Hurps stared back at me with a look on his face that didn’t express a great deal of confidence in my assurances to him. Vic had enjoyed watching Hurps getting irate at me and got up from where he was sitting and swaggered over to the two of us, laughing as he walked.
“Hey, Hurps . . . You lookin’ good, man. Where you been stuffin’ that worthless old prick o’ yours this week, brother? That damn ting ought to a dropped off by now and crawled up your ass to git a rest from all that pumping you been doin’.”
Hurps ignored Vic. He slid off his stool and turned to me, pointing his finger at my face as he began to walk away towards a door behind the bar with a sign on it that read “Staff Only”. As he walked, he shouted over the music, “Just tell him he needs keep his gorilla fists off of my customers, you hear?”
Vic and I watched Hurps mumbling to himself as he strode around the bar and left through the staff exit out to his office. The sharp pain across my shoulder intensified as we both burst out laughing.
I picked my drink off of the bar and called over to clown girl, who was half-heartedly polishing the bar with her dirty rag.
“Hey, Shirley. You know a working woman by the name o’ Jocelyn Charles?”
“Nearly everybody who comes in here knows Jocelyn. I suggest you stay well clear of her unless you want your cock to drop off.”
“I’ll sure bear that in mind. So you expecting her in tonight?” I pried.
“If she can’t find somebody to pay for her cunny, I’d say she’ll be in before midnight.”
“Can you drop me a nod if she comes in?” I pushed a one-pound note across the bar to her. She covered it with the palm of her hand and slipped it into her apron pocket.
“Yeah, I can do that.” She smiled at me and continued listlessly rubbing away at the teak surface that was Hurps’ pride and joy.
We sat back at the booth. I folded four one-pound notes into small squares while Vic tapped his foot to the music as he watched the comings and goings in the bar. He was biting at a hard piece of skin at the edge of his thumb. He pulled at the calloused flesh, breaking it off with his teeth and spitting it out onto the floor before speaking. Clown girl had just caught Vic’s attention and signalled the hooker’s arrival.
/> “Say, brother . . . looks like your cock-rat’s arrived.” Vic leant forward from his seat and gave a hard stare at the Speed Bird club’s new arrival. “Shit . . . Man, she’s looking plain nasty. You need to keep your dick well clear of her, JT, I’m telling you straight!”
Jocelyn Charles stood at the bar. She was wearing a multicoloured mini-dress and black high-heeled platform knee-high boots. Three large, fake golden sovereign rings adorned her small fingers, which had poorly manicured nails. She had no coat on despite the freezing temperature outside. The hideous fox-fur stole hung around her neck like a grisly trophy. She bought herself a large glass of Navy rum and strutted over to a secluded snug on the edge of the room. I got up and winked at Vic. He grinned at me and went on biting at his thumb as I walked back over to the bar.
I bought myself another shot of Red Heart and took myself over to where Jocelyn was sitting. I guessed she was around thirty-five, and she had way too much make up on her dark black skin, which piled the years on her, giving her face a real lived-in feel. She and clown girl made a good pair. I put my drink down on the table and smiled at her.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at, mister? If you wantin’ pussy, you shit outta luck cos I’m off the clock.”
I moved around the circular table and sat down next to her, squeezing myself in closer towards her and making the fabric of her dress ride up over her crossed leg, exposing her stocking top. I picked up my drink, took a sip of the spicy spirit and looked into her tired, rum-soaked eyes.
“Git your fuckin’ face outta mine befo’ I stick my glass in it!”
“Hey, be cool, sugar. I just want ask you a couple o’ questions, that’s all.”
“Questions? What do I look like to you, monkey ass, some kinda public-info’mation service?”
The rum running round her blood was starting to get her mean. I cut to the chase.
“You know of a girl called Stella Hopkins?” I asked.
“Never heard of the bitch. Now fuck off!”
I dropped a folded pound note into her lap and waited. She looked down at the money, returned her gaze to me and sneered a look of disapproval. I put another note on top of the one I’d already dropped. She lost the sneer and replaced it with a scowl.
“You talkin’ ’bout that dummy from round here that’s gone missing?” she asked as she snatched up the cash and stuffed it into her purse.
“Yeah . . . That’s the girl. Let’s just say I heard you saw Stella at a party not so long back. Where was it you seen her?”
“It’s over in Montpelier, a big white place on the corner o’ Richmond Road. They used it as a shebeen.”
She clammed up again and looked out vacantly across the dance floor towards Vic. I dropped another pound note on to her rainbow-coloured dress to get her attention again, and then fired another question at her.
“Who was she there with, Jocelyn? A girlfriend perhaps, some guy?”
I pressed away at her, but she remained silent again. I watched her as she bit at her waxy red-painted bottom lip, her brain ticking over the risks of telling me more.
I let my last note fall, hoping she’d go for it. Jocelyn hesitated, looking down at the money, weighing up in her head how bad business had been lately. She was unsure whether to continue blabbermouthing to me. Thankfully, she did.
“Papa Anansi brought her with him one night ’bout a two month ago. He had her stuck to his side like she was made o’ gold. The only time he let her outta his sight was when some white guy who looked like he had a silver spoon stuck up his ass came in and took her away with him. I never saw the girl again.”
She went back to her rum and I got up without thanking her and walked back to the booth feeling liked I just escaped from some kind of witch’s lair, her curses clinging to my back as a reminder of the price I’d just paid for my liberty.
Jocelyn Charles hid the rest of her easy-earned thirty pieces of silver at the bottom of her purse and sank the rest of her rum in a single swallow, then watched me and Vic leaving before getting up to go to the bar to order another double rum. She caught her reflection in the large mirror that ran across the length of the back wall of the bar and smiled to herself as she thought of how she’d spend her newly gained wealth. The clown brought her drink over. Neither of them spoke as she paid. Jocelyn picked up her drink to toast herself in the mirror for a job well done.
The scarred, unmoving face of Papa Anansi stared back at her as she raised her glass.
11
The fog hadn’t lifted as Vic and I walked along the Grosvenor Road. I told him what Jocelyn Charles had said about Stella Hopkins and how she had seen her with Papa Anansi at the illicit drinking den in Montpelier and the mysterious white dude who she had left with. He took in every word without comment or interruption until I had finished speaking. Then he hit me with the million-dollar question.
“How the hell did a simple bitch like Stella Hopkins end up in some knocking shop speakeasy with Papa? It don’t make a damn bit o’ sense.”
Vic was right: it didn’t make sense. My body ached like hell and I was too tired to think about it any more. I arranged to meet up with my cousin for a drink later in the week. We said goodnight to each other and he left me a short distance from my digs. He’d told me earlier in the evening that he was going to hook up with one of the many female companions that he knew and take it easy for the rest of the night. He walked away, his collar turned up on his velvet jacket, kicking chunks of snow out into the road, his arm outstretched into the air, a white piece of paper held in his hand.
“What the hell you got there?” I shouted out after him.
“It’s that barmaid’s phone number an’ address from the Prince Of Wales. I gotta git me a taste o’ some o’ that milk, brother.”
He hollered with laughter as he vanished into the mist, his hearty guffaws reminding me of the childhood we could never return to.
It was just after one thirty in the morning by the time I got in. I hung up my suit, popped a couple more aspirin, knocking them back with a swig of rum from the bottle, and crawled into bed.
While I slept, an act of unimaginable cruelty was being committed as punishment for an act of indiscretion that did not merit its severity, unaware in my slumber of the unintentional part I’d played in the fatal downfall of another soul.
*
I stirred just after 9 a.m. My body was aching less and the bruising across my chest had blossomed overnight to leave a blue and yellow mottling on my skin. I made coffee and ate a couple of rounds of toast at the kitchen table before having a strip wash. Looking in the bathroom mirror as I shaved, I noted that the swelling on my nose and cheekbone had gone down a little.
I applied some more of the fiery jack to my tender bruises and then made my bed before putting on some fresh underwear and dressing in a pair of brown straight-leg cords and a beige polo neck jumper. As I was about to close my wardrobe door, my eyes were drawn towards the old shoebox that sat on the shelf on the right-hand side of where my clothes hung. I had put it there when I first moved in and had not touched it since.
I sat on the edge of my bed, placing the white box at my side, staring at the lid for a moment before lifting it off. Inside, carefully wrapped in scrappy pieces of old newspaper, were the only surviving memories of a distant and happier life. I picked up the sepia photograph of my parents on their wedding day and the look of happiness on my mama’s face. At the moment that it was taken she had been unaware of the miserable life she, my sister and I would endure at the hands of my father’s violent temper. I tossed it onto the bed and picked out the other precious keepsakes. A small gold oval locket, the only piece of jewellery my grandmother had ever owned. Threaded through its chain were mine and Ellie’s wedding rings. There were some hand-made fishing hooks and a bone-handled penknife I’d used as a boy and my Barbadian police force silver cap badge with a pair of bronze sergeant’s stripes that I had worn on my uniform shirtsleeves.
Lastly, at the very bottom, a s
mall, leather-bound Bible that had belonged to my dead wife, Eleanor. I carefully lifted it out and opened it up. Inside were the only three photographs of Ellie that I possessed. They were taken outside of a photographer’s store in Bridgetown on a sunny August afternoon. She was dressed in a pure-white linen frock, her jet-black hair tied back in a ponytail, the smile on her beautiful face beaming back at me. In my head I heard her calling out my name softly. I snapped the Bible shut and dropped it back into the shoebox, quickly covering it with the other items I had already taken out. I closed the lid back onto the box, ignoring the tiny silver key taped to the inside, a harsh reminder of the kind of man I used to be.
I needed to shake off the ghosts of the past that had sprung up in my head after sifting through old memories and get to work on what I’d learnt last night. So after paying off my rent arrears and giving a little up-front cash to my landlord, I walked the short distance into Montpelier to take a look at the house on Richmond Street where Jocelyn Charles claimed she’d seen Stella.
Finding the place hadn’t been a problem; getting in to have a look around or ask a few questions wasn’t going to be as easy. I stood across the road in the doorway of a tobacconist, looking over the two-storey property with street-level stairs that led to a basement flat. I turned and looked behind me at the shopkeeper standing at the counter; he peered through his shop window at me, wondering what I was up to. A worried expression on his face suggested that he thought I was about to come in and rob the place blind.
As I stood in the cold, I went over in my head the little I knew. How had Stella Hopkins met a nasty piece of work like Papa Anansi and what were her reasons for being at an all-night drinking den and brothel in the first place? The two of them were from different worlds. Neither individual’s paths should have ever crossed. Thing was, they had, and more importantly, if Earl Linney supposedly had Stella’s best interests at heart, then why the hell hadn’t he know about her visiting the place? Either Stella was not the simple or naive woman I’d been led to believe she was or old man Linney was lying to me. I was damned if I knew which it was.