Verismo Bliss - Chapter 16

16.

Rachel Stacey strode across the street without glancing right or left; even when the cars blasted their horns at her. The silver eyelets of her Victorian style ankle boots reflected the sun into Harry’s eyes as he stood on the steps of the Lyceum Ballroom with Cornelius Apricot. Her hair, a Rita Red colour, fell about her face and curved across her shoulders, pulled back on the right by a silver hairclip in the shape of a dragonfly. Her eyes were a pale blue, with a low viscosity, reminding Harry of a watercolour painting that was still wet. The blue was warm like a sun speckled lake, but the pupil was pitch black cold. Her nose was slightly upturned, and her lips crimson and full. She wore a white blouse and a knee length navy skirt. Her legs were bare to the boots. It wasn’t until she was right in front of him that Harry could tell that she was pregnant; there was just the faintest definition showing through the blouse. Either she wasn’t far gone or she was going to give birth to a mouse.
‘My dear,’ Apricot drawled and drooled, leaning down to take her porcelain like hand and raise it to his sponge like lips. ‘How wonderful to see you again. It must have been such a shock for you, as it was for us all, to hear about Luz,’ he said, gripping her lip wet hand with his. ‘He was such a good man. We all miss him so.’
Her face paled a little - at the mention of Luz or at the touch of Apricot, Harry wasn’t sure, but he wondered if her apparent confidence was as thin as a banker’s generosity.
‘You are showing more now, dear,’ Apricot said, reluctantly letting her remove her hand from his as he nodded at her belly. ‘How far gone are you now?’
She cast her eyes down as though looking for the answer somewhere around her navel. ‘I’m nearly 7 months now. I can’t believe how small the bump still is though. But the midwife at the clinic said it was nothing to worry about and come the time I’d be grateful for such a small baby. I said, just as long as they give me pethidine I don’t give a flying one!’
Harry frowned, it was like listening to Eliza Doolittle – she was laying on the codney like a brickie slapped on the mortar, but it wasn’t enough to hide the upper class accent that seeped out like fresh cream when you bit into an éclair.
‘Now you are back in the fold I am sure that we can sort out the best care for you when the time comes. If you agree?’
‘I’m still not sure, Mr Apricot…’
‘Please, my dear Rachel, call me Corny.’
‘…I really don’t know if I want to keep the child or not.’
Apricot reached out and stroked her cheek. ‘Ah, well, think it over, child. Remember, this life is hard enough when we just have ourselves to look after.’
Harry doubted that Apricot had been responsible for anything in his life other than pleasure seeking, and maybe tying his own laces, but even that was in doubt.
Rachel looked at Harry and he felt that familiar feeling he got whenever a beautiful young girl looked at him: it was a mixture of desire, melancholy, nostalgia and bitterness.
‘Forgive me,’ Apricot said, ‘ my manners are getting as obscene as a fishwife’s mouth. Rachel this is Michael, Michael, Rachel. Michael was a good friend of Luz’s.’
Harry shook her hand. It felt tiny, warm and seductive in his wicket keeping gloved sized one.
‘Luz was a lovely man,’ she said. ‘He always treated me nice.’
‘I had only known him a little while but, yes, he seemed a good man. What happened to him was so undeserved, and such a shock. Did you ever meet his daughter, Ramona?’
She looked away from Harry and her fingers reached up to touch the corner of her mouth. It was such an obvious tell that Harry wondered if she had manufactured it. ‘No, I never did, though he talked about her. I’m sure you know…in my line of work…I’m not exactly invited to family parties.’
‘You are welcome at any of my family parties, my love,’ exclaimed Apricot. ‘Come, to the B.B. Club we must go, for you, my beautiful child, must prepare yourself.’ Apricot spread wide his arms, casting a shadow over Harry and Rachel, and gesturing them into the Lyceum, like a fat conductor.
In the foyer of the Lyceum, with its fin de siècle air, a number of men stood alone, looking at watches, pretending to scroll through their smarts, with coats that were just a little faded, and shoes showing scuff marks. When Harry and Apricot entered with the girl the men jockeyed for position around them; they addressed their words to the men but their eyes were all over the girl, like doctors studying x-rays. They wanted to get into the club, but they weren’t members. They needed a sponsor. They needed a guarantor.
‘Ah,’ Apricot exclaimed, gesturing towards the men as a woman would bat at a fly, ‘these are the on-the-uppers, as we call them. Let’s hurry on down to the club, come. They are desperate to get in but have nothing to offer us. And it isn’t always money we want. A certain prestige is often all it takes. Or, more important of all, if, like Luz, you have a beautiful girl to introduce to us.’
His smile, directed at Rachel, reminded Harry of a toad getting ready to snag a fly with its tongue.
At the entrance a different doorman, but just as big, offered Apricot the members’ book to sign. He signed in Rachel then pushed the book to Harry. ‘My new, dear friend, a surprise.’ And from his wallet he produced a card that displayed the logo of the Bump Banger’s Club, the two heavily pregnant women embracing, and, in gold, the name: Michael Hopkins. ‘Welcome to the club!’ Apricot embraced him within the folds of flesh. It was like being engulfed by a tsunami of blancmange.
Harry beamed his biggest smile, which he last remembered using when he was ten and had received a useless present from an Aunt, but had been told by his mother that he wouldn’t get his other, good, presents, if he wasn’t appreciative. ‘That’s wonderful, Corny: thank you.’
‘Ah, it was the least I could do, especially as you helped to get the beautiful Rachel back to us. Now, my dear, you should run along and get ready. You’re admiring public await.’
The bouncer stood to one side and revealed a small door that Harry hadn’t noticed before. Rachel went through the door. It all happened so quickly that Harry didn’t have time to say anything to her. He needed to talk to her. That was the whole point of coming. Now he had set eyes on her, he didn’t want to lose her.
‘Come, come, you will see her soon enough,’ Apricot said, flopping his arm over Harry’s shoulder, as he registered the disappointment in his face.
They entered the B.B. Club. It was as though Harry had just stepped out for five minutes, rather than the few days, that had elapsed since he was last there. The same people stood around drinking and laughing, wearing the same suits; the same music played in the background, the same lights, the same barmen and waitresses. But he guessed that was all part of a Club like this, that it was familiar, it was home from home.
People greeted Corny with genuine pleasure and large handshakes. Harry was introduced as the new blood with gusto and hearty pats on the back. It was like some old 40’s or 50’s flick, Harry thought, with Anglo-Saxon bonhomie at the Gentleman’s Club where there was a strict no women, no blacks rule. At least that had changed, Harry thought, now women and blacks could be arseholes too.
Harry managed to disengage himself from Apricot by declaring the need to pee, at which point an inebriated fellow with a moustache like a squirrel’s tail pushed a card into his hand and winked: the card was advertising the delights of the Golden Shower Club.
The toilets were re-furbished art nouveau, with iron trellis work and paintings of nude pregnant women in various poses: draped over chez lounges or gazing wistfully out of balcony windows.
Harry was surprised at how easily he had obtained membership. But then he thought, it wasn’t like he was entering the secret service, all he was doing was joining a bunch of pervs who got off looking at pregnant women. Pervs, that was something which nobody said anymore. They were fetishists. Niche sexual adventurers.
He returned to the bar and ordered a Castro. He was in the mood for some revolution in the midst of all that money and power. And no matter what the fuck people tried to say, that women were equal and that women had the right to sell their bodies and display them in any way they wanted, places like this still stank of exploitation. It was the men waving the money at the tits and asses and pregnant bellies.
Around him people talked about the weather, the food, the economy, and sometimes the girls. They never talked directly about pregnancy or maiesiophilia; Harry didn’t think it was due to embarrassment, more that it was that very subject that made them comfortable with each other, so it didn’t need talking about. If you are turned on by the same thing as me then you are my brother. Maiesiophilia wasn’t so much the elephant in the room as the cuddly teddy bear.
The music dimmed and a disembodied voice made an announcement that the show would begin in five minutes, but that first he had the pleasure, and sorrow, to announce that the beautiful Madeleine’s, who had entertained the Club for the past three months, waters had broken and she was now safe and snug in the care of our dear benefactors health care. A toast was called to ‘dear, departed beauties. May they soon return!’ Harry raised his Castro desultory. A picture of Madeleine was projected onto the wall. It was the girl with the straw blonde hair whose belly Harry had touched. The hand that had reached out for him, touching him through his mother’s skin, would soon be feeling his mother’s hand for real. But which mother? The biological or the cash rich/infertile one?
The music stoked up. The lights were lowered. The show began.
Harry stayed at the bar this time, a solitary shadow at the back, whilst the crowd surged forward to reach up and touch, to leer and lust. Watching the way the men demeaned themselves, he wondered if he had got it all wrong. Maybe this was a throw back to a time when the Mother Goddess was worshipped. Up there on the stage was young feminine power, displaying the Mother Goddess form in all its fertile bounty to the men, who reached out to worship. But it still seemed like a mockery. It was a Gentlemen’s Club when all was said and done.
Rachel went about her role with some gusto, flaunting around the stage with a certain disdain that she couldn’t hide no matter how much she smiled and blew kisses. She wore a skimpy purple g-string and matching bra. Her belly looked larger now that it was on display, or maybe it was just clever lighting. She was, he had to admit, very attractive, and made him feel very old.
He needed to talk to her. For a brief, stupid, moment he considered slipping her a note whilst she was on stage, but it was hard for a naked girl to conceal a note. When she bent down for the hands to reach out and touch her, he turned away and gestured at the barman for another Castro. Maybe the revolution would help drown the bitterness of naked capitalism in action.
After the show the girls split up, some going off with a single man or a group of them, through backstage doors, whilst others posed behind red velvet roped off areas for the cameras to pop and the artists to paint. Rachel was one of those. Harry wandered over, Castro in hand, to get a closer look.
She had put on a see-through negligee, slightly rose pink coloured, which draped around her body with a sheen like liquid. She lay across a divan, a look of seriousness in her face, her belly just slightly over-spilling the edge of the furniture. They seemed to like that, the crowd that jockeyed for the best view.
In a way the whole thing was almost chaste, as there was no nudity, just a beautiful, pregnant woman, lying down, thinking seriously about the future. Chaste yes, except for the bulges that Harry could see, pushing against trousers, and hands in pockets, not playing with change.
Harry found Apricot and asked him if he could arrange for him to meet up with Rachel afterwards. Apricot checked some records on his smart and told him that there were already five offers in for the pleasure of Rachel’s company that evening. He turned his smart to Harry and showed him the top bid. Rachel was being offered in a night what Harry would earn in a month – a good month. Harry tapped in his own offer. Apricot raised an eyebrow in the mountainous flesh of his face. ‘That’s very generous. You must really want her company.’
‘I’ve had a profitable month,’ Harry replied.
Sure, paid off big time by a big noise in the medical research industry for doing sweet F.A. But it was appropriate, he thought, that Martin Falsham’s money should pay for his meeting with Rachel.

She was living in Orion House, an old 1950’s office block that had been abandoned after the Financial Meltdown and was now used as social housing, on Upper St Martin’s Lane. From Harry’s office he could see the top of the 16 storey building. He smiled at the irony of that. She had been so close.
Social housing was supposed to provide cheap, clean accommodation to those in the lowest income bracket but, places like Orion House were mostly handed over to dodgy landlords who split up the office space into as many small rooms as possible, put in barely adequate amenities and charged rents that would have embarrassed The Duke of Westminster. Housing Benefit picked up half the tab whilst the rest was paid by the tenant – usually after being threatened by geezers in camel hair coats with pit bulls.
Her apartment was on the 7th floor. The main room, with its bed, TV, radio and settee, was barely twelve foot by twelve; to the right was a kitchen designed for dwarf chefs and, to the left, a bathroom with no bath. That luxury was communal. A poster, a little torn, of Mazzy Star’s lead singer Hope Sandoval, looking romantic, beautiful and sad, was stuck up above the bed.
‘I love her music,’ Harry said, nodding at the poster.
‘Really? You’re the first person I’ve met who has heard of Mazzy Star. But then I guess it’s more your era.’
Even though it was only a short distance from the Lyceum to Orion House, Harry had hailed a taxi. They hadn’t spoken much on the ride. They had that self-consciousness you sometimes get in the back of the taxi, aware that the driver is listening to you and making clichéd assumptions. Older man. Younger girl. Taxi to Orion House. Sure, we all know what that means. But once in her apartment she had relaxed, as though she felt there was no longer any need to play a part. She sat down tugged off her boots and asked Harry if he wanted a drink. She didn’t have much: tea, coffee, but she did have half a bottle of whisky.
‘Ah, I’d like a whisky, but don’t want to drain your bottle.’
She smiled. ‘Hey, with what you’re paying tonight I can afford it.’
The transaction had taken place at the Club. The Club took 10%. Rachel said that nobody had paid that much for her before, but Harry hadn’t seen pleasure in her face, more fear. Fear at what somebody might want her to do to her for such a sum. So she had babbled to him about not doing any funny stuff and he had tried to reassure her.
She came back from the kitchen and put a glass of whisky in his hand.
‘How long you been here?’ he asked.
‘Not that long. It’s shit, but it’s relatively safe - for the Garden, anyway.’
She slumped on to the couch. ‘Do you mind if I just chill for a bit?’ she asked, tucking her legs up under her. ‘Before…’
Harry sat down on the bed. ‘That’s fine. I just want to talk with you for a while.’
‘Ah,’ she said, as though deciding he was one of those men. ‘I can do talking. With your money I can recite War and Peace if you’d like.’
Harry flushed. ‘Do you always keep reminding your customers that you are only with them because they have paid you?’
She jerked her head up. ‘Sorry. You’re right. It’s just…’
‘What?’
She dragged a hand across her face and suddenly there was a smile as wide as Westminster Bridge, and her liquid eyes shone like a lake at dawn. ‘Tell me about yourself, Michael.’
Harry wondered at what point along the evolutionary curve that humans had realised that lying was a worthwhile skill. Did a weaker, cunning Neolithic man tell the stronger leader of the pack that there were no sabre toothed tigers in the forest he had just scouted out? In goes the leader. Leader torn to pieces. The liar gets the women. The liars genes get passed down, getting stronger until the world was full of lies, deception and prevarication, and a beautiful young girl’s face could be lit up by a smile that was just as much a lie as Michael Hopkins’s name.
‘Not much to say about me, Rachel. I’ve just taken a different route to you, yet we’ve both ended up in this room. Tell me how you met Luz.’
She curled up tighter on the couch. ‘Luz was a good one. He treated me really nice. He bought me little presents. I think he’d fallen for me. I know that probably sounds arrogant to you, but you could see it in his eyes. I think you can tell a lot about people by their eyes; I just read a piece in Tatler about how eyes can’t lie. Do you think that’s true?’
Harry had noticed how her codney accent had dropped as she relaxed, to be replaced with a clear diction that could have cut a welfare claimant in two.
‘I think deception always takes two to really work,’ Harry said, draining his whisky and re-filling it from the bottle she had left by the bed. ‘In order for it to work you have to have somebody who wants to believe it.’
‘Maybe you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it like that. It takes two to tango. Luz had fallen for me, and I probably needed him and therefore, according to your theory am complicit in the alleged deception.’ She looked pleased with herself at that statement, as though she was delivering a speech in class, but then thought better of it and added, ‘Know what I mean?’
Harry laughed. ‘You don’t have to put your codney accent on for me. Just relax, be yourself. You say you needed Luz – what else did he provide, other than the money?’
‘When I first came to London – I don’t mean to visit, I came here a lot, of course – I mean to live – I was, I guess, a little confused about things,’ she said, staring out the window at her own reflection, shimmering over the night sky. ‘When I met Luz he was so gentle and kind. He treated me like a daughter. I think that’s why she took such an objection to me: not because I was fucking her father, but because she felt I had replaced her in his affections.’
‘Ramona?’
‘Ramona,’ she said, harshly. ‘She knew Luz paid the self-employed and she turned a blind eye to it. Who wants to think about their father having desires? Besides, nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore. But me, she had a problem with.
‘I used to go to the shop, you know the one in Goodwins Court, and just hang around. I liked the things he had there. Don’t you think that antiques have so much more character than today’s gadgets? He gave me this,’ she said, pulling out the dragonfly hairclip from her hair. ‘It’s beautiful isn’t it,’ she said more to herself, as she fingered it softly. ‘He told me it had been made in the 1920’s. Can you imagine it being worn by a flapper?’ She put it down on the couch, and shook her head like an animal shaking its mane. Her red hair flashed like a beacon in the night. ‘He gave me a lot of beautiful things like that. I liked to hang there, at the shop. He’d tell me stories about his childhood in Mexico and how different life was here, even though the world over people were the same. He believed that very much. That all people were the same, it was just the climate and culture of a place that dictated the pace and taste of life. I don’t think he ever really felt at home in London. I know he wanted to be buried in Baja California. I hope she carries out his wish.’
‘Tell me about Ramona.’
‘You’ve met her. You’re a man. No doubt you think she is beautifully exotic?’
Harry touched the smart in his pocket, thinking about the picture it held.
‘Yeah, I can see you do. Well, as far as I’m concerned she’s a vicious bitch who had some serious father issues to get over.’
‘Which of us hasn’t?’ Harry said, shrugging.
‘Whatever. I think she wanted to keep her father all to herself, comprende? Anyway, first time she turns up at the shop and I’m there she’s all sweetness and girl talk with me. Luz told her that I was the daughter of a guy in the trade and I was helping out at the shop. I could tell she wasn’t taken in and soon as the old man had gone upstairs she had me up against the wall threatening to smash my pretty face into pulp if I ripped him off. She was big on people ripping off her dad. Real paranoid about it. There was this other woman, Gloria something, and Ramona was constantly telling Luz that she was just a gold digger. But Luz liked her. I think he was going to marry her. If he couldn’t marry me, he said, ha ha. I only met her once and she was cool with me.’
She leaned back, letting her hair fall over the back of the couch.
‘Shit, I haven’t spoken like this since…well, since I had Luz to talk to and, there was another…’ She screwed up her face as if trying to remember, or maybe to forget. ‘Somebody from before I moved to London. He was in love with me too.’
She gazed at something that Harry couldn’t see. He said nothing and stayed still, letting her summon up the memories in her loneliness. Suddenly she grimaced and put her hand to her belly.
‘Little bugger’s been doing that a lot recently.’ She shifted her position. ‘You want to feel?’
Harry shook his head, feeling a little ashamed.
‘I thought you were into that stuff?’
‘Does it bother you? The Club? All those eyes looking at you? Those hands reaching out to touch you?’
‘You want the truth, and please don’t take this as an insult, I just think it’s funny and a little sad.’
‘It was Luz who got you into that. If he liked you so much, why take you to the Club?’
‘I found a flyer he had. I knew of the club; I’d heard about it from…elsewhere. It was me who nagged him to let me go. I needed the money. He offered to give me more than my normal fees, but I wouldn’t let him.’
‘You took the gifts though.’
‘What’s a girl to do? We like pretty, shiny things. So, yeah, he took me and at first he was so proud, showing me off, but after I had performed he was a little off with me. I guess it hurt his feelings to realise that I wasn’t his exclusive property. It’s one thing to know the woman you love is self-employed but it’s quite another to see it flaunted in your face.
‘Strange, when I think of Luz now it’s as though I knew him for ages, but it must have only been about two weeks. Maybe it was those long nights when he would listen to my troubles. You know, in those two weeks he listened to me more than my own father did in eighteen years.’
‘Does your father know about…?’ Harry said, nodding at her belly.
‘Not that I know of. It’s one of the reasons I left home. Although I don’t really think he’d give a shit about it. As far as I know he hasn’t even tried to find me. I think his only concern would be how it reflected on him.’
‘He’s a man of position?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Girls get pregnant. It happens. Maybe not so much these days, which makes it even more special.’
‘It’s not so much the pregnancy, but who made me that way.’
She picked at a loose thread of the couch.
Harry poured more whisky into his glass. ‘Does he know? The one who made you that way?’
She shook her head. ‘Most men these days presume they are infertile unless proven otherwise.’
‘Would he support you?’
‘Sure, he’s another one who loves me.’
‘So why not tell him?’
‘Things are a little complicated.’
Harry picked up his glass and sat next to her on the couch. With her red hair set loose, her lips full and red, and her eyes turned up to him, she reminded him of a woman from a Pre-Raphaelite painting, perhaps Rossetti's Ghirlandata. He could see why so many men had fallen in love with her.
‘Life does tend to get complicated at times. Tell me, all these men falling at your feet…’
‘Hey, don’t be smart.’
‘…have you ever been in love, Gwen?’
‘I don’t think…Gwen?’
She stood up and backed away from him. The softness which had crept across her face, like ice retreating before a winter’s fire, now hardened to stone as one who had seen Medusa.
Harry worried that he had shown his cards too soon. He stood and held out his hand to her, palm upwards. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not here to harm you.’
‘My father?’ she said, her voice trembling a little.
‘Yes and no. He did hire me to find you, but then fired me.’
She laughed without humour. ‘He does that a lot. Hires and fires. But mainly fires. Rejects, He’s good at rejection too. So if you’re not working for him now, what are you doing here?’
She stood in the middle of the room, fists clenched, mouth pouting.
‘Two reasons. I’m also investigating the murder of Luz Noche and other associated deaths. And I like to finish a job once I’m asked to do it. Call it professional pride.’
She turned and stepped to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool window.
‘If you want me to go…,’ he said.
‘No, stay. You’ve paid. I’m a professional too.’
Harry sat back down on the edge of the couch and gazed at the whisky in his glass and saw a golden sea of turmoil.
‘Still want to talk?’
‘Sure,’ Harry said.
She kept her head pressed against the glass as though the coolness helped her to think. ‘You want me to talk because you want to learn things. You listen to my words and you put them into your file. I am just another witness/suspect. I think in my whole life there have only been two people who have actually listened to me, just because they were interested in me, as me. And both of them are now dead.
‘Staring out across this fucking city, that I love so much, from a social housing apartment, with a man old enough to be my dad, who I met for the first time tonight and who paid me to have sex with him - and then didn’t want sex; he wanted words. So he can have them. I have words to give by the dictionary load. But what I fear…what I fear most is that once the words start…’
Her throat choked. Harry got up, put down his glass and went to her. He put his arm over her shoulder and she turned, burying her face into his chest; he felt her bump pressing against him. She began sobbing, her body heaving like a small boat on a very large ocean. She tucked her arms in tight against her chest. Her breathing came in gasps as her body began to spasm. Harry thought, not for the first time, how ugly and physical grief was.
Slowly her body calmed, like water going off the boil, and her sobs turned to sniffles. She pulled a tissue from some part of her body and blew her nose loudly and without pride. ‘I’ve wet your shirt,’ she said. She looked up at him, her eyes as large and inviting as Betty Boop’s, and, for the first time since he had held her, he had the desire to do more than comfort. The feeling made him ashamed, but didn’t surprise him.
‘Let’s sit down,’ he said, leading her back to the couch. He sat down, but she didn’t join him on the couch, instead sitting on the floor and leaning against his legs, so that as she talked, all he could see was the top of her Rita Red hair.
‘Being born into a rich family makes you appreciate nothing and everything. Anything material I wanted, I got. For my fourteenth birthday I demanded a horse. I rode for about six months then got bored. I never found out what happened to her after I lost interest, because I didn’t care. But the problem about getting everything you want is that it becomes a substitute for what you really want. Even if you don’t know it. Bugger, this is beginning to sound like those boring poor little rich girl sagas.
‘The truth? I loved having money. I loved having parents who gave me everything I wanted. I loved looking down on people who couldn’t afford the latest fashions. I loved going to the best parties and being seen with the rich and famous. Sure, my parents were never around; my father was always busy working and my mother was always away topping up her tan in some exotic locale, and I can hardly ever remember them hugging me or kissing me. They kissed the air around my cheek and said they loved me in the same way you ask for a cappuccino in Starbucks, so fucking what? I doubt I was the easiest girl to love. I doubt I still am. But Barry loved me.’
She fell silent for a few moments and Harry began to stroke her hair, very softly.
‘I heard his head was cut off.’
‘Once you’re dead what does it matter?’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I imagine it. His head. Just his head. It’s all wrong. He loved me. Jesus, he loved me so much. He wrote me poetry. I used to show it to my friends and we would laugh. It was pretty bloody awful poetry. He loved me and all I did was use him. And look where it got him.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
She turned and looked up at him. ‘Do you know that for sure, Mr Detective?’
He shook his head and she rested her head back on his leg.
‘He helped me get away. He was the first one I told about being pregnant. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t even ask whose it was. He just said if there was anything he could do. He knew I was fucking somebody else and he still wanted to help. How must that feel? How does it feel to want someone so much, and know that they are giving themselves to somebody else? All this stuff, you know, that they teach us in school, that the body is our body and we can give it to whoever we want and that jealousy is a destructive feeling and we should be free of it – well, fuck, we all know jealousy is a destructive feeling but it doesn’t stop us feeling it, does it? It doesn’t stop it tearing people into shreds. It destroyed Barry. Luz felt it when he took me to the B.B. Club. And you, Michael, have you felt it?’
‘My name’s Harry, Harry Reed, and yes, I know what jealousy feels like.’
‘Well then, Harry Reed, I am jealous of you, because I’ve never felt it. I’ve always had whatever I want, except real passion.’
‘Be careful what you wish for.’
‘If you’ve been jealous then you must have been in love.’
‘You say it like it’s a crime.’
‘Isn’t it? I can’t say I’ve ever seen any good come from love.’
‘Maybe you’re right, not saying you are, but you are way too young to be thinking like that. Wait until you’ve actually felt something which us old fucks call love, then see how you feel.’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said, pouting and playfully headbutting his knee.
‘I wasn’t. Just some things have to be experienced before one can really judge. Like pregnancy. What man can really know what it’s like? Who is the father?’
‘No comment. And if I get my way, nobody will know, least of all him.’
‘You never…with Barry?’
‘God, Barry was like a mouse. So timid. I just couldn’t…he wasn’t sex material, bless him.’
Poor bastard, Harry thought.
‘What will you do about the baby?’
‘I’m well past the abortion limit now.’
‘Did you consider it?’
‘Abortion? Sure, you consider everything. But I was already far gone before I realised. My periods have always been out of whack so I didn’t take much notice to start with, besides, with so few men firing live ones these days, you just don’t think.’
‘I do.’
‘What?’
‘Fire live rounds.’
‘You’re fertile?’
He smiled. ‘You sound surprised. Don’t I look fertile?’
She smiled back at him. ‘I guess you never know. You got kids then? I guess you could have kids my age.’
‘No, no kids.’
‘Really? Then what’s the point of being fertile?’
‘Tell me what you’re going to do with your baby.’
‘I’m going to get my dad to pay for it.’
‘How?’
‘My idea of a joke. Or is it irony? I never quite worked out what irony was exactly. Anyway, I’m gonna take up the B.B. Club’s offer of medical treatment. I know who bankrolls the Club. Part of me hoped he’d be there tonight. Could you imagine? His face would’ve been a peach! But Raf-Med will pay for my care and then they will take his grandkid and give it to some rich Yank to look after. I’ll tell him about it in a year or so, when he really pisses me off one day. I might not know what irony is, but I do understand schadenfreude. I’ve just got to hope nobody recognises me at Raf-Med.’
‘That would be Raf-Med Leeds? Oliver works there, doesn’t he?’
‘He’s hardly there. It’s a cosmetic position.’
‘What about Oliver?’
‘What about him?’
Harry took out the memory stick that he had taken from Gwen’s bedroom.
‘What does he know about your situation?’
‘You met Oliver? He’s not the brightest firework in the box.’
‘How do you get on with him?’
Gwendolyn got up from the floor and joined Harry on the couch, moving his arm around her and resting her head against his chest. ‘Oliver is a strange dog. I don’t think he’s ever come to terms with the fact his mother died giving birth to him. Did you know that? Sure, you’re the great detective. I think, in the absence of a flesh and blood mother, he’s created this whole mythology around her and himself. What I find weird is that, when you think about it, he should really hate me, being a product of his father’s second marriage, but by all accounts he doted on me as a baby, and as I grew up we became inseparable. Maybe, in a way, he felt he was stealing my affection away from his father and my mother. But he didn’t have to try too hard to do that.’
Harry was holding the memory card in his fist. ‘So tell me, who do you think killed Luz and Barry?’
‘Do we have to talk about this now,’ she said, sitting up and looking at him. Her face was about six inches from his. He could smell her Shalimar perfume; perfume that hadn’t been smelt in a social housing complex for a long time, and only then as a knock-off. She could be his daughter - she was right about that. And if he did have a daughter how would he feel if he knew she was in an apartment in Orion House with a man old enough to be her dad, who she’d only met a few hours ago, and who was having thoughts that were decidedly unpaternal. ‘Do we have to talk at all,’ she said, but the words sounded more of a whisper, a pout, a sound that was more feral, and heavy with anticipation than any sentence Harry had ever heard spoken.
Harry gripped the memory disk tighter. His throat was dry. Where the fuck was the whisky? ‘I think that…’
The door opened to the small room, sending a draught of cooling air in and a young man, who looked as though he had been through a wind tunnel, stepped in. His long hair was in disarray, his eyes, though youthful, were bloodshot, and his rock revolution clothes had that slept in look about them.
‘Oliver!’ Gwen said, jumping up from the couch.
For a moment Harry wondered if a troupe of charming but dodgy Victorian urchins were going to break into the room, with a hook-nosed stereotype of a Jewish thief at their head, but decided this was no time for levity; but unfortunately the phrase ‘no time for levity’ reminded him of a Laurel & Hardy sketch. He stood up slowly, trying to suppress his levity.
‘What are you doing here?’ Oliver said to Harry. His face was nervous frantic, like he was being pursued by a hell hound.
Gwen stepped in front of Oliver. ‘He’s cool. He’s a friend.’
Oliver smiled. ‘We’ve met. You know Dad hired him to find you?’
‘You didn’t actually say you’d met Oliver,’ Gwen said, half-turning to Harry.
‘Met. Spoken,’ Oliver said. ‘He was at the house. He searched your room. Did he tell you that? He’s had his grubby hands in your panties.’
Now Gwen turned fully, so that both siblings faced him, making Harry feel like a father being confronted by his bolshie kids. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d been in my room.’
Harry shrugged. The memory stick in his hand suddenly felt like stolen goods – which when he thought about it, it was. ‘I told you you’re father hired me to find you. I searched your room for clues.’
‘And did you find any?’
She was staring hard at him now and he held the gaze. ‘Just a flyer, for the Bump Banger’s Club – that’s how I tracked you there.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No.’
For a moment their eyes locked. Gwendolyn’s face reddened a little. Harry wondered if he was reading too much into that. Then Oliver was tugging at the material of Gwen’s top, worrying it like a child who needs to go to the toilet.
‘Forget him for the minute. Gwen,’ he said, tugging harder, ‘I need. You know. Do you have?’
His voice trailed off, his head bending in to her so that Harry couldn’t catch what he was saying, but he could tell from Gwen’s face that she was exasperated. She turned around, pulling her arm free and hissed at him. Harry couldn’t hear it all but he heard her saying he should stop.
Oliver pulled away from her, putting his hands to his face like an imitation of Munch’s Scream. ‘Please, Gwen, you know I need some. Look at me for fuck’s sake! I feel like a rag doll shook by a fucking gorilla. If you’re stocked then fine, but if not then just say and I’m gone.’
There was a pause and then she took his arm and pulled him into the kitchen. ‘Wait here,’ she said to Harry.
Harry stepped over to the window and pretended to watch the lights of the cars below, but in reality he was concentrating on only one of his senses: hearing. Unfortunately he couldn’t make any coherent sense of the voices he heard. All he could glean was the emotions. First, Oliver was imploring and Gwen accusative. Then some silence and Oliver grateful. He heard Gwen say, clearly, ‘It has to stop.’ And then she was back in the room. He smelt her perfume before seeing her.
‘You should go now,’ she said, taking him by the arm. Her face showed concern.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, it’s just…Oliver. He gets a little strung out sometime. And sometimes he is over zealous in protecting me.’
‘Do you need protecting?’
She smiled sadly. ‘Maybe, but only from myself.’
She had led him passed the bed and to the door, but he paused. ‘The flyer I found, with the pictures…’
She put her finger to his lips and shook her head. Suddenly her eyes widened and she looked behind Harry. She started to say something. Instinctively, Harry turned. Coming towards his face was a frying pan and, just before it hit him and knocked him senseless, he had the ridiculous idea that he’d been transported into a Tom and Jerry cartoon.