Rise of Dragon

A perfect day for bill-posting. Not too much wind, no thunder and lightning, no miasma of the plague. Miraculous winter sunlight blazes through my grubby windows and I pour another cup of water into the bucket of paste to make it go the extra mile.

I can’t believe this is the last time. My lap of honour. Come next week I’ll be hitting LAX, fixing to head straight on down to Venice Beach. For now, as a final gesture to a world I’m about to leave behind, I’ve got fifty A3 posters for the grand re-opening of Lucca’s club on Slater Street.

As I set off down the street the sun’s already beginning to fall behind the Cathedral. Along the top of St James’ cemetery, sunlight flashes through the wrought-iron railings in bars of gold and darkness. My eyes are half closed. By the time I reach the end of the street I’m in a trance. As I swing down towards the Chinese Arch the ripped plastic bag I’m trying to hide the bucket in keeps smearing cold paste across my jeans, but even that can’t spoil my mood. When you’ve just won twelve grand on a scratch card even the shittiest job seems blessed with grace and dignity.

I’m just passing by the Earl of Wessex when Dozy lurches out into the street in a coat nine sizes to big for him and an old floppy hat falling down over his face.

He hiccoughs convulsively and a fine thread of saliva bungy- jumps from his mouth to less than an inch away from the street then half way back again. His eyes are glazed, semi-dead floaters. But they still partially flicker with that old sharp combustion of sympathy and rage.

‘You mind n’ ... mind y’ look after yourself, y’get me?. That’s all, son…all you’s got t’ do...’

I knew the fella in a past life. The two of us working the kitchen of a Tex-Mex eatery down the business end of town. I was on the dishes, punishing a bad back in the steam rising off aluminium sinks build for midgets. Dozey’d been there for time. He’d been promoted to the food counters, and spent the nights singing tunelessly to himself, happily chopping up meat and vegetables with a variety of meticulously sharpened knives.

‘Yeah, you too, Dozey. Take care.’ I briefly touch his arm and pass on up the street.

One night the assistant manager, Vicente, showed insufficient respect whilst trying to speed up his slicing of the legumes and Dozey opened his left cheek with a bread knife.

It’s busy in town, which is all to the good. I’ve already seen two panda cars and a brace of bizzies on horseback, so by the law of averages I should be safe for at least forty minutes (not that the law of averages has ever held much jurisdiction round here). Students laughing, bullshitting in their street gear that can’t camouflage their accents. All togged-up so like the scallies it’s hard to tell the difference. From fifty paces you can’t tell if you’re about to get slashed by a flick-knife or the paper-cut off a loan check. Then there’s the beggars and the Big Issue sellers. My people. Fools for God, dogs for dope with their broken teeth and diseased legs, their lies and gaping flies. It’s easy to pick out the ones dying even faster than I am - not so easy to imagine where they go then. Reborn in their own abandoned city, hobbling through eternity, doing their skaghead shuffle, halfway between a moonwalk and a lurch. Trying to cadge off each other because there’s no one else there to give them a thing.

In the back street behind the Krazy House I bend down to slosh some more gunk on my brush and catch a pungent blast of piss. All these arse-end doorways where the undead hoydens and drunken revellers batter round the night, hosing out their little stations of the cross - these steaming doorways, they’ve all seen more cock than the great whore of Babylon. But it’s me that gets to bend over and inhale the acrid marrow of their bones, their spent pennies, their gushing libations. I’m an expert. I can tell what they’ve been drinking from the crabbed reek of the half-dried pools: brandy, gut-rot, tequila, Tabasco, lighter fluid, lager, nail varnish remover, petrol… acid rain.

But this is the last time, and it’s sweet. I thought the big prizes were a blag, I swear. I’ve never met anyone who’s won more than a fiver on a scratch card.

‘Hey lad, what you think you’re doin’ there then?’

I carry on pasting. It could be a cop, could be an irate shop owner - it could be the raw faced deadheads that do all the hi-profile postering for the big clubs and the record companies. The reason I keep an eight inch screwdriver in my jacket. But I don’t care. Today they can’t touch me.

‘I’m talkin’ to ya, kidder.’

Ever so casually, I turn.

‘Breaking the law again, mate?’ A grinning, jaundiced, scarily pretty face: ‘Shanghai’ Jimmy Lee.

‘How much is Lucca paying y’for doin’ that, then?’ he says.

‘Thirty quid,’ I lie.

‘‘kin’ hell. He must’ve seen you coming, mate. I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than fifty.’

Times is hard, Jimmy.’ When I stop by the club later and Lucca gives me the sixty quid I’m going to cash it into coins and invest it in the pointless future of every baghead and wino I meet.

‘Lucky for you I’m an understanding kind of fella, isn’t it?’ Shanghai says.

‘I’ve always been lucky,’ I say.
He saunters over to the wall and surveys my handiwork.

‘It’s a wonder you haven’t been collared by the bizzies yet the way its camera’d to fuck round here now.’

‘Must be they’re like you, Jimmy: understanding.’

‘Seriously, mate, it’s genuinely lucky for you that I’ve run into you.’ A quick flash of his feral smile. ‘I think I might just’ve found a way for you to wipe out your little debt, how’s about that? Then we can be real mates again. Like old times.’

I pick up the bucket and brush, smear off the excess paste on my jeans as we stroll off down Maryland Street.

‘You owe me, mate,’ he says. ‘I been letting it ride… But business is business.’

‘What’s the beef?’ I say. ‘I owe you - what? A hundred and twenty quid, something like that? You can clear ten times that in less than ten minutes flat. I’m near fucking starving here, mate.’

A few weeks back I hit on him for a couple of grams of beak I bought to sell-on and ended up snuffling myself.

‘Mate. There’s a serious flaw in your logic. You’re implying that my earning capacity has a direct relationship to the degree of obligation that you should feel to honour your debt - if y’ get me. That’s very shaky thinking. Very un-business-like.’

A lick of wind chills the glue on my fingers. The sun’s buried itself in the river.

‘So,’ he says, ‘you ready to hear how you can make everything sweet again?’

‘Hit me, Jimmy.’ You don’t know how sweet sweetness can get, I think.

‘All’s you got to do, it’s dead simple - you remember Dunoon - the Holy Loch?’
Couple of years back me and Shanghai took a load of tabs up there, flogged them to the Marines at the U.S. Naval base - a little town in Texas that Lucifer licked up skunked and laid down on the firth of the Clyde.

‘Course I remember it.’

‘And you remember Fast Annie?’ He says.

Sweet F.A. A demented speed freak from East Kilbride. I remember trying to sleep on the stinking floor while Shanghai pawed away at her juiced-up bones on the single bed. Night-nurse to the whole town, was Fast Annie, a cottage full of Class-A’s and a conveyor belt between her legs.

‘I need’s you to go up there, mate - get the coach, whatever, lay a nine bar on her, and come back. Simple as. It’s business, mate. In an’ out. You don’t have to shag her. Do this for us, the debt’s discharged. Sorted. History.’

A fire engine screams from nowhere to somewhere else.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I say. In my heart, Roy Orbison hits the high notes in the middle eight of 'California Blue.'

Shanghai watches me struggle with the last poster in a gust of wind.

‘Don’t think about it too long, mate,' he says. Let me down on this and I’ll be waiting for you next time you sign-on. With some friends, y’get me?’

If I could be a lighthouse for the lost or a ferryman for the dead, I would, man, I swear. I’d piss on anyone if they were on fire. But ‘Shanghai’… Jesus. His old fella shot some peasant over a gambling debt back in Kowloon round about ’68, ‘69. Family smuggled Lee pere over to Liverpool and he made out alright - laundries, restaurants, useful links with the Triads. He’s a vicious little prick, Shanghai, but somehow from his dad – the murderer – he’s picked up a weirdly ironic streak of Buddha dharma, Chinee-stylee. But in truth the closest Shanghai gets to religion is the firmly held superstition that one day, like his dad, he’s going to kill someone.

I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket I stroke the cute little wallet from T&A Travel.

As ‘Shanghai’ Jimmy Lee saunters away down the hill, I pick up the stinking old bucket for the last time and the only thing I know for sure is it isn’t going to be me.