Fascinated

  They are staring into a shabby basement room containing two chairs, a paraffin stove and a black sheet tacked to one wall as a backdrop. A plastic shopping bag on the floor spills a jumble of crumpled underwear.

  ‘I can work in different costumes if you want something special,’ the girl tells them as she kicks at the bag with her foot. She picks out a scruffy nylon bra and holds it against her cardigan like a mad woman picking through charity clothes.

  ‘Spare me the sales talk,’ says Webster, turning his back on the studio. ‘Where’s Ronnie the Scrubber?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘Fifteen quid,’ says the girl stubbornly, directing herself at Frank. She looks so cold and bored. Her face has the shine of candle wax, a dark rash spreading around her eyes, her long nose peeling raw at the nostrils. ‘Twenty-four pictures. Different poses.’

  ‘Ronnie the Scrubber,’ says Webster.

  ‘He’s not here.’ The girl pulls a little wad of Kleenex from her sleeve and dabs at the tip of her nose, unpicking the damp paper ball, turning it inside out, dabbing her nose again.

  ‘Where do we find him?’

  ‘Ten quid,’ haggles the girl, still trying to work on Frank. ‘Ten quid. Semi-nude. Twenty-four pictures. Different poses. No extras. Guaranteed. You can afford ten quid.’

  Frank smiles, tries to imagine her cardigan as part of her bump-and-grind routine. Is she alone in this mousery? Where there’s a girl at work there should be a pimp in waiting.

  ‘Give me the price on Ronnie the Scrubber,’ says Webster, putting his hand in his pocket.

  ‘You’re narks!’ snorts the girl in disgust and having reached this dismal conclusion retires again to the comfort of the armchair. ‘It’s frigging cold!’ she adds miserably as she wraps herself in her arms.

  ‘What do you keep down there?’ enquires Frank, pointing towards a small door at the end of the corridor.

  ‘I dunno. It’s private offices.’

  The words Strickly Private have been daubed on the door in thick red paint. Webster leans his weight against it and the door springs open on twisted hinges to reveal a dimly lit storeroom. The girl turns her back, crouched in silent misery as the narks disappear in the twilight.

  The brick vault is filled with crates and boxes, bales of books and magazines. Clockwork cocks from Hong Kong. Suction pumps from Korea. A deflated rubber doll hangs from a hook on the wall like the freshly boiled skin of a woman, cooked and boned in hell’s own kitchen.

  Beyond the crates, a gaunt young black man with a mane of tangled daglocks is stretched on a camp bed flicking through copies of Gang-Bang and Gobble. He’s wearing a Terminator sweatshirt, jeans and fancy ostrich boots. His fingers are covered with heavy gold rings. His head, plugged into a Walkman, trembles with self-inflicted chorea. On the ground beside the bed, within the lazy sweep of his arm, a tin of rolling tobacco, an empty hamburger carton and a bottle of Old Kentucky bourbon. Frank and Webster have reached his bed before he knows they are in the room.

  ‘Hey! Don’t you read? It says Pry-Vit! Right? You got shit for brains?’ He leaps from the bed, tossing the magazines aside, ripping the Walkman from his ears, crushing his tobacco tin with the heel of an ostrich-leather boot.

  ‘Ronnie the Scrubber!’ beams Webster, strolling among the stacks of boxes while Frank sits down on the bed and flicks through the Gang-Bang Christmas Special. ‘Where’s Picasso?’

  ‘I dunno nothing! Right?’ shouts Ronnie, retrieving his tobacco tin from the floor. But he looks scared, startled awake by these strange intruders, glancing around for fear there are others beyond the door waiting to smash his skull with hammers.

  ‘You’re a cheap little smack-head, Ronnie,’ says Webster sadly, breaking into a carton of dildoes. ‘I don’t have time to play games with you. Tell me where we can find Picasso.’

  ‘I don’t know him!’

  ‘You worked for him.’

  ‘I worked a lot of different places. You know what I mean? I done all sorts of work. Right?’

  ‘And you worked for Picasso until he threw you out.’

  ‘What’s it worth? Everything worth something. Right?’ says Ronnie, satisfied now that they’ve come to trade and taking courage from the hunting knife that he likes to keep hidden inside his boot. Nobody leans on him. Right? Nobody frightens Ronnie the Scrubber.

  ‘It’s worth a lot to me, Ronnie,’ declares Webster. ‘It’s worth the effort of driving this boner up your arse.’ He holds the dildo in his fist and smacks it through the air like a cudgel. It’s a truncheon of epic proportions, long and curved, as thick as a man’s wrist, the glans resplendent above a collar of hard rubber nipples.

  Ronnie, spits through a chink in his teeth and wipes his chin with the palm of his hand. ‘You know the Yardies, man? You get heavy with me. Right? You know what they going to do to you?’

  Webster sighs and shakes his head like a man grown tired of a taunting child. ‘You want me to hurt you, Ronnie?’

  ‘I dunno nothing, man! I dunno nothing!’

  ‘Poke him!’ shouts Webster.

  Frank throws down the magazine and pulls himself from the bed in time to catch the weapon as Webster throws it towards him.

  ‘Shit!’ growls Ronnie. ‘Shit!’ He slouches forward, reaching for the blade in his boot, but Webster knocks him down with a neat slap to the side of his head that sends him spinning against the bed.

  Ronnie, his face buried in blanket and daglocks, struggles to get away, pumping with his elbows and knees, but Frank and Webster have thrown their full weight behind him.

  ‘Take his knife!’ says Webster, as they hold their victim against the bed.

  ‘Leave it alone, man!’

  ‘We need the blade, Ronnie,’ says Webster, the sympathetic surgeon. ‘We’re going to cut through your belt to help you out of your jeans.’

  Frank squirms around and catches Ronnie by his legs. Talk, you dumb bastard! How far do they have to take this threat? Ronnie may not be impressed by his fate but it scares the bejabers from Frank. Dear God! Talk, you stupid stubborn bastard! Say something to save yourself from the wrath of the Taiwan Tickler. He finds the handle of a knife protruding from the top of a boot, pulls it from its hiding place and the rush of steel against ankle bone proves enough to break Ronnie’s nerve.

  ‘Fantastic Travel!’ he splutters through the heat of the blanket. ‘Fantastic Travel! That’s all I know, man!’

  Webster turns him around and pins him down with a hand to his throat. ‘Give me the address.’

  ‘It’s somewhere along Beak Street. Right? I don’t know exact. It’s called Fantastic Travel. Right?’

  Webster seems satisfied with this snippet of information. He takes the knife from Frank and throws it across the storeroom while Ronnie crawls from the bed, pulls at his sweatshirt, strokes his daglocks.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ says Frank cheerfully, smacking him in the chest with a tattered magazine.

  ‘I dunno nothing,’ says Ronnie, watching them retreat before searching for solace in Old Kentucky. ‘I dunno nothing.’

  They are walking down Brewer Street when Frank remembers the dildo still clenched like a rolling pin in his fist. There’s nowhere to throw it and no pocket big enough to contain it.

  ‘Do you have any peppermints?’ asks Webster, slapping his tongue against his teeth. He strides forward, glancing anxiously at his watch, determined to reach Fantastic Travel before the door is locked for the night.

  ‘No,’ says Frank, stuffing the dildo under his jacket. ‘I never carry them.’

  ‘I need something,’ grumbles Webster. ‘Scrubber Ronnie always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.’ So they pause at a little tobacco shop and while Webster buys a tube of mints, Frank whips open his jacket and plunges the offensive weapon into an ice-cream freezer where it disappears in the frost and snow, lost among the chocolate Cornettos.

  Fantastic Travel is wedged behind a barber’s shop an
d an empty grocery store. Between the posters in the window they can see a solitary figure sitting at a long counter, reading and smoking a midget cigar.

  ‘That’s our man!’ says Webster, pressing his nose against the glass.

  Frank is looking at a rumpled old man in a grey suit with a wilting bow tie at his throat.

  ‘I think it’s our man,’ says Webster, cracking a peppermint.

  ‘Let’s go and talk to him,’ says Frank. It’s getting cold and the street is filled with a grey diesel fog. But when he tries to enter the shop he finds the door locked against him.

  Frank bangs on the door until the old man is annoyed enough to scowl from the counter and wave them away with a skeleton hand.

  ‘Open the door, you daft bugger!’ shouts Webster. He pulls a roll of money from one of his pockets and thumps it against the glass, grinning and nodding his head by way of encouragement. There must be five hundred pounds or more pressed in that dog-eared bundle.

  The sight of so much money, waved in happy mummery, has a galvanising effect on the old man, who plugs the cigar in his mouth and hurries forward to unbolt the door.

  ‘We’re looking for Picasso,’ says Webster as they step quickly into the shop. The place smells of rubber mats, newspaper print and smoke. Fluorescent ceiling panels cast a spluttering light on racks of leaflets, brochures and guides. A poster on the wall above the counter depicts a girl in a swimsuit having the time of her life in Botswana surrounded by dusty, grinning bushmen.

  ‘I’m Picasso,’ smiles the old man and cocks his head, squinting at Webster over a pair of bent wire spectacles. ‘I know you. I’ve seen you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Webster Boston,’ says Webster.

  ‘That’s right!’ exclaims Picasso, pulling the cigar from his mouth. ‘Webster Boston. Who’s that?’ he demands, nodding at Frank.

  ‘Frank Fisher,’ says Frank.

  ‘Frank Fisher!’ smiles Picasso. ‘I knew I recognised that face. How can I help you, gents?’ He glances hopefully at the pocket where Webster has stowed the money.

  ‘We need passports.’

  ‘That’s easy enough.’

  ‘We need them tonight.’

  Picasso plugs back the cigar and ponders Webster for a long time.

  ‘Late travel plans?’ he says at last.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘The sudden urge to get away? Clean break? Good for the health? Doctor’s orders?’

  ‘You’ve caught the drift of it,’ says Webster.

  ‘Government property, passports,’ says Picasso.

  ‘Worth a lot of money in the wrong hands, I should imagine,’ says Webster, tapping the buttons on his shirt.

  ‘Bad business if they get stolen. Best to keep them under lock and key,’ says Picasso, nodding to a small office at the back of the counter. ‘What was your name again?’

  ‘What names have you got?’

  Picasso bolts the door to the shop, ushers them around the counter and into the office, where he unlocks a tall cupboard to reveal the entrance to a secret workshop. This room, with its high ceiling and tessellated floor, has been cut from an old-fashioned scullery lost a hundred years before when the building was chopped and divided into a warren of offices. A rusty skylight has been sealed with wet leaves and pigeon droppings. An extractor fan in the wall has been stuffed with rags. A wooden bench, in the centre of the room, is cluttered with bottles of inks and solvents, boxes of rubber stamps, scalpels, spoons and engraving tools; glues, clips and masking tape; the humble paraphernalia of a man who is master of his craft.

  ‘Sit down and make yourselves comfortable,’ says Picasso, switching on the lights and waving them into a cracked leather sofa.

  ‘How long does it take?’ says Frank.

  ‘A passport? It takes time. Do you want a drink?’ Picasso blinks around the room, searching for a bottle of whisky.

  ‘No, we’re anxious to get away,’ says Frank, unsettled by the old man’s ditherings.

  ‘Patience,’ says Picasso. He sucks at the butt of his cigar and blows a wobbling ring of smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘If there’s something we can do to help …’ says Webster. He pulls the roll of money from his shirt and tosses it at the bench.

  ‘It’s the labour that is so expensive,’ says Picasso, brushing a spill of ash from his sleeve, and Webster is obliged to remove a second and third bundle of notes from his person before the old man is sufficiently encouraged to set about his work.

  ‘The old British stiff-back was a beauty,’ he says, opening an ancient safe set in the brickwork beside the sofa. He stashes the money and retrieves a heavy, brown envelope. The envelope contains a dozen passports in various stages of construction. ‘In the old days, with a bottle of solvent and a blunt die, you could switch a passport in half an hour.’ He splits the envelope and scatters the contents over the bench. ‘These modern European passports are bitches.’

  ‘They look like coupon books,’ says Frank, peering at the assortment of pages that Picasso begins to arrange beneath the light of his lamp.

  ‘Cheap and nasty but intricate,’ says Picasso. ‘Machine readable. Protected with plastic security shields. There’s no trust left in the world. They have to be taken apart every time you recycle them.’

  He takes their photographs with a Polaroid passport camera and sets out to match their portraits with suitable new identities from the small selection before him.

  ‘Can you do it?’ says Webster anxiously.

  ‘A whisker short of perfect,’ chuckles Picasso. ‘Two white males of uncertain age. No distinguishing marks.’

  The mug shots are lightly glued in position and the finished inside back covers, complete with serial codes and computer check digits, are fed through a lamination machine, taking care to ensure that the plastic coating bleeds a fraction into the gutter for the sake of appearances. There should be a narrow margin of plastic peeping through on the inside front cover. It makes the difference. He’s a stickler for detail. An artist.

  ‘Have you made your travel arrangements?’ he enquires as he checks the effect beneath his lamp.

  ‘I want to feel the sun on my head,’ says Webster, stroking his skull. ‘I want to feel the sand in my shoes.’

  ‘I can get you down to Spain on a flight tomorrow morning. It comes as a package. Cancellation. Seven days. Half board. Courtesy bus to the hotel. Welcome drinks. Complimentary tickets for the folk and flamenco dancing …’

  ‘We were thinking of something a trifle exotic,’ says Webster, looking very disappointed. ‘Sumatra. Java. The South China Sea.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Picasso shakes his head and smiles. ‘Take my advice and fly down to Spain. Why make life so difficult?’

  ‘We’ll take it,’ says Frank, afraid that Webster is going to start an argument. As the passports take shape he feels overcast with guilt knowing that, whatever passage they pick tonight, he’ll abandon their plan tomorrow in favour of finding Valentine.

  He watches while the interior pages, printed with elaborate cobwebs the colour of broken veins, are carefully paginated and stitched together again by running them through a sewing machine.

  ‘That’s the ticket!’ says Picasso. ‘You can buy a visa in Spain that will take you to South America. I’ll give you the name of a man who can help you to grease a few palms. You’ll find him at the Hotel Suncrest in Alicante.’

  ‘South America?’ says Webster suspiciously.

  ‘Panama. Ecuador. Peru. This time next week you could be looking at the Pacific with nothing beyond but paradise. Tahiti. Samoa. Fiji. Scattered strings of islands as far as the Coral Sea.’

  Webster grins and turns to Frank with his face bright with pleasure. ‘What do you think, Frank?’

  ‘It sounds good,’ admits Frank and marvels at the way Picasso has turned a week in Spain into a prospect of blue lagoons and distant jungle volcanoes.

  The familiar claret
covers, gold embossed with their coat of arms, are pasted into position and the finished passports are set to dry.

  ‘Ronald Wister!’ hoots Webster, reading aloud from the back of his book when he finally takes possession. He repeats his new name several times, rolling it around his mouth to savour its unfamiliar flavour.

  ‘Denzil Plowman,’ says Frank, checking his own identity before slipping the passport into his pocket.

  ‘I’m famished!’ says Webster. The business is complete and he’s ready to celebrate. ‘Let’s go down into Chinatown and have a big bowl of noodles.’

  ‘That’s a very generous invitation,’ says Picasso, pulling the spectacles from his ears and wiping his eyes with his sleeve. ‘But my wife is waiting at home and I have to finish your paperwork.’

  ‘Spare ribs with plum sauce,’ says Webster, hoping to tempt him away. ‘Bean curd soup with chicken threads.’

  ‘You’re trying to get me into trouble,’ grins Picasso, leading them from the workshop and switching out the lights.

  ‘If you change your mind we’ll be at the Nan Cheng,’ says Webster, watching the old man rummage beneath the counter.

  ‘Send me a postcard from Alicante,’ says Picasso. He presents them with their flight tickets, hotel vouchers, complimentary cards for the Star Lite Beach Club and six free luggage labels, all neatly packed in a red, white and blue Fantastic Travel folder, and the fugitives return to the streets.

  ‘We’ll spend the night on the town,’ says Webster as they walk through Golden Square towards the lights of Piccadilly. ‘We can sleep on the plane tomorrow.’

  Frank walks beside him in silence, isolated and withdrawn, already divorced from the ordinary world like a sick man preparing for surgery. He has twelve hours left to make a decision. Twelve hours before the flight leaves for Spain. His sense of doom increases with Webster’s exuberance. When they reach the airport tomorrow morning will he watch Webster Boston the bruiser change into Ronald Wister the tourist and take to the skies without him? What’s left for him if he stays behind? The idea of reaching Valentine by circumnavigating her father already seems impossible. Returning to the gatehouse unannounced, taking her by surprise, he’s half-afraid he’ll find her in the arms of another man. Nothing is certain. Nothing can be trusted.