by philip boyle
‘Nothing. I don’t know where she is.’ For a second Eddie thought he was going to break down. Felt his voice on the edge. Just saying what he had crystallised everything for a frightening moment. He couldn’t take his eyes off Tommy’s fake hair, dancing like a jackrabbit still somehow alive after being struck by a car. His gold rings, worn like trophies, now just worn and tired. What was Tommy selling? Tommy was always selling.
‘You still don’t know?’ Eddie just shook his head. No message, no note.
‘Jesus. As you know I couldn’t make it that night. Had to be elsewhere. All I heard was that it went fine. She was fine. I left her a message but heard nothing back. Little pissed off to be honest, after setting everything up for her. You know? But I’ve told you all this already, haven’t I?’
They endured a copious silence, an embarrassment based on Eddie’s incompetence, his inadequacy, even stupidity, whatever you wanted to call it.
‘Why the hell would she go? Was it part of the illness do you think?’
‘Was what?’
‘What made her go. The illness. Made her think funny, act funny.’
Eddie wanted him out of there but it was the man’s house after all.
‘She wasn’t—’ Eddie began, but didn’t want to continue down that route, not with Tommy. What was he selling? ‘I must owe you money, Tommy? How much?’
He shook his head vigorously as if gravely insulted. ‘I couldn’t ask you for anything. Not in the circumstances.’
‘She didn’t die, Tommy. This is your property. You can’t give it away for free, not these days. I can afford it anyway. So tell me what I, we, owe.’
‘Well if that’s the way you feel. Sure. I won’t say no. Business ain’t that good anyway.’ Something false about that last sentence. Tommy looked to have few cares in the world. Eddie was sure he cared about Edie. But. Something. Forty minutes later Tommy was still sitting there. Twisting his gold rings, several times getting up and touring the room, fingers caressing fabrics and table tops. He sat back down, asked if he could have a cup of tea. Enquired if he was keeping Eddie from something. Only breakfast, Eddie remarked, an attempt at humour that whispered over the fake hair without rustling any of the fibres. Eddie made him his cup of tea. A biscuit hung limp on the saucer. He started talking about Edie, about her voice, her potential, what a future she could have had. Talking about her in the past tense, painting a picture of a golden-haired starlet that never existed in Eddie’s mind. And yet Eddie felt this was all for him. Rehearsed lines that dripped from Tommy’s tongue, a door to door salesman with his foot firmly wedged in the door. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, Eddie realised.
‘How could she just disappear? Not like her at all. Even if she was ill. And who’s looking after her now, for God’s sake? She always caught you off guard, didn’t she? I mean, to look at her, to meet her for the first time, you didn’t think she had what it took to last in this business. You know what I mean? I thought, too quiet, too easy, too nice. But underneath all that, she was tough, you know. And that voice. Jesus. Stuck with mediocre bands. Mediocre managers. I include myself in that. But that’s it, isn’t it? All those talented people and they somehow slip through the cracks, while talentless fuckers end up making millions. Ain’t fair, is it?’
Listen, Tommy, Eddie wanted to say, I have to get out of here. The police will be here soon. All those murders, you might have heard of them. Well, I knew all those people, Tommy, yeah me. I have no fucking idea what is going on but I was connected to them all so the police are going to be here soon. So you are indeed keeping me from something. Prison, probably. He stared at Tommy Pearson and said no such thing. Instead he asked a question that came from an odd place.
‘Do you know Stephen Zinny?’
Tommy was momentarily excavated from whatever alien planet he was currently living on. Jolted from his train of careful thoughts, from his memory book of Edie stories.
‘Never heard the name. Should I have?’
‘No.’ Shouldn’t have mentioned it because Tommy would now ask questions of his own. But he didn’t. He left it lying there like a thrown ball never caught. Frayed silence, Tommy drained more tea from the empty cup. Put it down on the carpet.
‘Terrible about that policeman, wasn’t it?’ said Tommy. ‘And coming so soon after that other one. That Irishman. What was his name?’ He had suddenly turned the tide of the conversation, thrown it back at Eddie. Why is this man still here, thought Eddie? A visiting Christmas aunt that nobody likes.
‘Yeah,’ was all Eddie could think of saying.
‘I mean,’ continued Tommy, ‘Edinburgh’s never been a paradise but it was never like this.’
‘I haven’t been here long enough to form an opinion. But no, it ain’t no paradise.’
‘All related no doubt,’ said Tommy. ‘You’ll see. Drugs, what have you.’
A full hour after he’d arrived, Tommy was finally, reluctantly on his way, Eddie having to practically shove the man out of his own house. ‘Keep in touch,’ the man kept saying as he tottered down the gravel drive. In the early morning haze, Eddie fancied he caught a gleam of further mischief in the landlord’s eye. Or it could have just been the light of his dawning imagination.
Eddie shut the door and resumed his ambitions to leave the house, the city, the country as soon as possible. Running away again? There was no time for self-chastisement, self-pity was the order of the day. There was a desperate sadness at the ease with which a person could simply up and leave. It was the lack of possessions, the paucity of friends to which he could turn for help. Recent experience made him briefly fear for Tommy Pearson’s life. Contact with Eddie Brogan was indeed a deadly business. Maybe he would simply disappear. And if that was the case, then his next intended move would suit his purposes. The difficulty he thought would be in finding the man. Once found, Eddie would let his new nature take its own course.
All thoughts, plans, vague schemes led to one Stephen Zinny. Find him. Find Edie. Simple as that.
He thought of taking the car, it would be so much quicker. But he hesitated, thought of every reason not to use it and forty minutes after leaving the house for the last time he was on a bouncing bus bound for the Glasgow badlands. Here, thrust uncomfortably opposite a red glassed student with hippie pretensions, he felt a little easier. He was among the lower depths, the out of their depths. He would go back to go forward. The hotel, the stage, the dressing room, and maybe even the street where they left him to rot. He doubted anything was left, any trace of any of them, the story would have moved on, some other poor soul was probably blindly floundering around in the undergrowth looking for the essential part of himself.
So he hoped against all rational reason. He courted insanity, further insanity. But what else was there? One goal, one purpose, basic in outline, ferociously difficult to achieve.
Stephen Zinny.
CHAPTER 27
The reason for it all Stephen Zinny tore the plaster from his lower leg and scratched hard against the peeling, blistering skin. The relief and the guilt was immeasurable. The blood came easily, in multiple, tiny cuts. He wanted to keep on scratching until some sort of end came to this torture. He had no idea where this invasion had come from. On both legs, an embarrassment of such magnitude that he couldn’t possibly ask for help. He would allow it run its course, which it never would if he didn’t leave it alone. So now he was the proud possessor of two torn and red lower limbs which tormented him night and day. He prayed nobody would come into the room and witness this ludicrous vision.
And the likelihood was that someone would come in. There were so many people in the house, they constantly scurried like grey rats. Loafers, scroungers, drifters, hangers-on hanging to the precarious raft that was Stephen Zinny. Once they checked in, they never seemed to leave and they simply invited others to join, swelling the numbers. Swelling the noise and the headaches he had to endure.
He stood in the cream living room, knowing he should sit down, relax, w
atch TV, read a book, do any one of a thousand normal things. Instead he pressed himself against the large bay window that looked out on a silvery night, the darkness giving the seafront a serenity it never achieved during the day. He could look out now and believe he was at his old house in the Cape, a bedroom window that gave him hope of escape, freedom from the bellowing bickering fights of his parents below. One more scream, one more broken something and he promised he would leave. He never did. Not until his father suffered a terrible death in a crash on a Johannesburg motorway and his mother was safely stowed away at her sister’s house. Stephen didn’t join her, he was fifteen, he was old enough and she hadn’t enough spirit left to fight him. But it wasn’t the Cape, it wasn’t Africa out there. It was Brighton, fucking Brighton and this wasn’t even his house.
~ He finally sat down and cut the snow-line of coke with a blunt razor edge. Lowered his tired head to the low table and snorted the last dreams of hope. Something crashed in another room. Or maybe it was in his head. Maybe it was her. But hadn’t he told them to finish with her? It had seemed so perfect, so symmetrical at the time, a seamless circle of justified revenge. Hurt that Irish fucker where it would hurt most and without touching a hair on his mouldy head. But even revenge outstays it welcome and he’d almost felt sorry for her. Almost. Lay back on the cream leather and drifted away.
Why should he stop taking his own stuff when it brought him such relief as now?
Derailed Stephen Zinny slept a drug-fuelled, dream-filled night where his daughter’s quiet face drifted in and out like weak rain, somnolent solace interrupted at irregular intervals by another face, another story entirely. The face belonged to the man that owned this house, the reason for it all.
The man that owned the house, the reason for it all, fixed his hair and rocked back and forward on the non-rocking chair. Moaned in time with the faces on the screen, moved his hands down over his naked body and began a rhythmic stroking that brought both pain and pleasure in equal measure. On the bare floor around him, spiders ran in crazy dances, eager for escape, under the door, cracks in the wall, anywhere to get away from the foul breath and the obscene mutterings.
He left his hair on the chair, paddled on sore feet to the untidy bed and stumbled down to a staggered, ragged sleep. He faced the wall and curled himself into a foetal position. He had to force her image away. But the more he pushed the clearer she became. He turned in the darkness and she stood glowing in the centre of the room. Floating inches above the floor. An angel with an angel’s voice. She moved ever closer to him, descending to his side, millimetres from his face. She beamed in the shuddering form of a dream, like TV reception on the constant verge of breaking down. He began to relax though, his heartbeat slowing down and she finally disappeared, leaving him able to sleep, at least for tonight.
He woke six hours later, emerged from the cutter-cut world that were his schizophrenic nights and made for the tiny kitchen. He stood at the window with a broken cup and drank milk white tea in gulps. The window looked out on a bare patch of stubble grass filled with the empty crushed thrown beer cans. Beyond a low stone wall Calton Hill stood majestic in whatever light the erratic Scottish weather was able to throw at it. He often sighed at the cavernous gulf between the beauty at hand, and the stale, pale nothingness of his own house. Didn’t think of it as a house at all. It was a refuge, a refuse parlour for a sick man. He thought about showering, clean, ironed clothes, a walk over the hill, a stroll to the Coffee Bean on Galton Street and the luscious smell of the espresso as he skimmed the Guardian. None of that would happen of course. He would barely dress himself, in yesterday’s clothes and retire to his cherubic chair in the bedroom where he would watch cheap, nasty porn until he grew too sick of himself to continue. That was his life now. Because he was afraid. All the dressing rooms in his clubs would be preferable to where he now found himself. His aunt’s house, which he had rescued from the squatters when she had been taken out in a box some years earlier. He remembered his nausea on first entering the house after her removal. How could someone have lived like that? She had wanted to be left alone, never wanted visitors. He had cleaned the place in her aftermath. He transformed it into a gem of a desirable property, perfect for a young, urban couple with pretensions. Tenants had come and gone, never staying too long, and now they didn’t have the money even if they wanted it. But who would want this? He had let the place, like himself, go until it had been restored to its former inglorious state.
He had her house of course but he couldn’t bring himself to live there. And that fucking Irishman was still there, or at least he kept turning up like a sad sack. He could throw him out but he couldn’t live there himself. And there was the house in Brighton, too far, bright, bought in the glory days when the money had flowed in torrents. There was money of course, piled like decaying bricks in broken banks. But what use was it in the end? There was no talent in making it, that wasn’t a real talent anyway. Not like music, theatre, the arts. He had grown up in a household where art, literature, cinema, all such pursuits were viewed as unwelcome immigrants, vermin to be destroyed, enemies at the gate, obstacles to the true honest toils. He rebelled, revolted by sneaking into the Blackheath Picture Palace, by hiding D.H. Lawrence under his sweater, listening to Benny Goodman at the houses of his few fabled friends. He sought comfort in the higher thoughts and was certain he would find his way there, that some talent would emerge, something that would pull him out of that mediocrity. But he found that his only talent was seeing it in others, helping them develop it and then bringing people to see that fruition. But none of it brought any real satisfaction, there was no happy release, no epiphany of the soul. His remained in the gutter where it had been born and reared. The gifts of others were not contagious. He comforted himself with being in the presence of those who, if they didn’t possess greatness, they at least aspired to it. There was pleasure in their passion. And ironically he ended up with more money than most of them would ever have. Coins, notes, clothes, houses, cars, all the possessions in the world. He had everything that other people thought was all that was needed.
He smashed the broken cup in the stained sink, breaking it for good this time. A rare show of anger, even with himself. The world saw him as vibrant and energetic, ruddy faced and cheerful, a Dickensian comic foil, cheerful, content with his lot, a man who knew his place, didn’t want any other. They laughed at his hair, his lack of hair, the ridiculous rings, but he always saw the respect behind the eyes. So, all of that should have been enough.
He had dreamed of love like everyone else. His affections had been toyed with occasionally in his younger days. He had tasted the riches offered up by those women desperate enough to believe that he could deliver something greater. He had loved, endured, requested, all from afar. There comes an age with every man when he realizes what is and isn’t going to be. And you accept that because not to will mean a lifetime of dull heartache. Everywhere he went though, all forms of life seemed to exist in pairs, even the drug-addicts on the docks, all had somebody. So what was wrong, what was so obviously wrong with him? He was always too afraid to ask.
It had started, or started to end, he supposed, on the night she collapsed. He had first seen her in Brighton, in front of a sad-sack crowd of drowsy office workers who saw nothing other than the drinks in front of them and heard even less. The band were like endless others on the crowded circuit, they played with metronome monotony and even less passion. But Edie had something more to offer, the voice was untrained and bad habits had taken root in her over the years, they fed like parasites and could never be removed. But it wasn’t his job to teach her to sing better, it was his job to make her believe a little more. Behind the eyes, behind the voice lay a seismic energy and spirit that startled him, surprised him. The first few nights in Edinburgh had been good, better than good maybe, but there was only so much that could happen in such a stagnant venue. He had ideas for her, hopes of bringing her up, better stages, better crowds, pulling it out of her compl
etely. And she fell. And the sight of that mask on her face, the still, prone body on the stretcher, the clanging ambulance doors and the piercing siren call. His own heart failed him that night too.
He gave her the house, concocting a story of a sister and needing a house-minder. And the boyfriend, that strange, wiry mellow man who seemed permanently stuck in thought.
The shards in the sink and the bleeding finger as he attempted to lift the pieces brought him out of his own stuck thoughts. A phone rang somewhere in the house. It was Zinny, he knew that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be and never ever be in debt to a man like that. The fear rose up in him, catching in his throat and he panicked for breath. He reached for the back door and the air rushed blessedly in. The noise of the phone went away. He doubted that Zinny knew where he was right now but he also knew that it wouldn’t take much to find him.
Maybe he wouldn’t go out today. It looked like rain, he saw the clouds above Arthur’s Seat, settling in for the day. Tommy was afraid. Afraid of the man who had called in his debts. Afraid for the woman that he had offered in part payment. And maybe he should also be afraid of the Irishman.
But mostly he was afraid of himself. Of the dark recent days when he had uncovered rare and frightening abilities. Of the darker days ahead.
CHAPTER 28
‘You’re fuckin’ kiddin’ me…’ Graffiti-lined asphalt, scarred, gouged out walls. Glasgow. Spitting rain, chewing the air with faint breath, Eddie regretted ever coming here again. There was no insight to be found, no trace element, no footprints that led the way to those that had brought him here. Eyes, peeled back behind curious curtains, kept watchful meandering gaze on the intruder. He showed no fear, felt none, no real fighters here.
He found the hotel again, the manager Stone again, who professed remembrance of Eddie and indeed Edie while his manner said otherwise. They offered him soup, sandwiches, he felt absurdly grateful. He prowled the hotel for two hours. There must be something here, must be. Weary from lack of progress, he stayed the rest of the day and then the night. He thought they might offer him the same room again but it wasn’t available. The place had moved on, sheets washed, replaced, new guests, new stories. The function room was empty that night, doors locked, he thought about asking to see it but really what was the point?