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‘I'm looking for work,' Barker said quietly.

The old man looked up from his pile of hair. ‘How m-much experience you got?'

He had a speech impediment – not a stutter exactly, more a kind of hesitation as he attempted certain sounds. He would
say the first letter twice and, while he was trying to make it join the rest of the word, his eyes would flutter rapidly. Then he would carry on as if nothing had happened. Barker found he couldn't lie.

‘I was in the Merchant Navy for a while,' he said. ‘That was in the late sixties, early seventies. After that I worked for the council as a gardener. I worked in a garage too. Mechanic. The last few years I've been a night manager. Well, they call it that. It's a bouncer, really. Down on the south coast. Plymouth.'

The old man studied him, still gripping the broom-handle in both hands, lips twisting sceptically to one side of his face. ‘Doesn't sound like you've cut a w-whole lot of hair.'

‘Not a whole lot,' Barker admitted, ‘but I've done it.'

His father, Frank Dodds, had been a barber. The sight of that slowly spiralling red-white-and-blue pole had been one of the mysteries of Barker's childhood. Where did the ribbons of colour come from? Where did they go? Why didn't they ever run out? He had learned to cut hair when he was thirteen or fourteen – crew-cuts and DAs, mostly. His clients had flat noses and glossy knuckles, and their tattoos had faded to the dirty bluish-grey of veins. Sometimes they would be drunk. Other times his father had to break up fights. In those days it was more like being a bartender than anything else.

‘Tell you what,' the old man said. ‘I'll give you a two-week trial. If I still like you after that, you can stay on.'

‘Sounds fair.'

‘The money's not m-much good.'

‘You really know how to sell a job,' Barker said, ‘don't you.'

The old man chuckled, then held his shoulder, wincing. ‘Arthritis,' he explained. He told Barker what the hours were and what he could afford to pay. ‘Are you still interested?'

When Barker walked back into the house on the Isle of Dogs that afternoon, Charlton was standing in the kitchen,
his face still swollen with sleep. Smoke loitered in a cloud above the grill. Charlton had just burned the toast. Now he was trying again. Barker leaned against the fridge and watched.

‘You seen the Nutella?' Charlton said.

‘No,' Barker said, ‘I haven't.'

‘What about the jam?'

‘You finished it.' Barker reached for the bottle of whisky. He poured a double measure into a cup and swallowed it. ‘I got a job.'

‘About fucking time.' Charlton bit into a slice of buttered toast. Crumbs tumbled down the front of his black silk dressing-gown.

‘You're a slob,' Barker said, ‘you know that?'

Charlton was chewing noisily, mouth open, toast revolving on his tongue. He reached for the paper; he was always reading the financial section and quoting from it afterwards, using words like
merger
and
foreclose
.

Barker shook his head. ‘Who's going to clean up when I'm gone?'

By late September Barker's life had taken on a whole new shape. Six days a week he worked in the barber's shop just off Petticoat Lane. The old man's name was Harold Higgs, and he ran the place along traditional lines – the smell of Brylcreem and hair tonic, copies of the
Radio Times
to read while you were waiting; it was hairdressing the way it used to be, which suited Barker perfectly. He'd found temporary lodgings – a bedsit on Commercial Road. He had a miniature gas-ring, and a wash-basin with no hot tap (if he wanted to shave, he had to boil water in a saucepan). He had a wardrobe filled with multi-coloured hangers. All mod cons, as his landlady put it. A widow in her fifties, she wore slippers trimmed with bright-pink fur that looked like candy-floss. Whenever she saw him, she talked about her microwave – she was
frightened it might give her cancer – but she didn't bother him, not unless he fell behind with the rent.

Almost two months passed with no violence, no arrests. He was living on a small scale, within himself, his routine simple and unvarying. On weekday nights, when he returned from work, he lifted weights for half an hour. Afterwards, he showered in the communal bathroom, which was on the landing, one floor up. Later, he would cook himself a meal – something sealed in plastic, beans out of a tin. Most evenings he went to look at flats which he had circled in the paper during the day; he was always surprised by how run-down they were, and how expensive. By midnight he would be in his room again, easing the ring back on a can of beer. Through his window he could see a petrol station. The neon stained his white net curtains yellow, and, now and then, if it was quiet, he could hear a fierce, abbreviated hiss as somebody put air into their tyres. Before he switched the light off, he would read a few pages of medieval history – either a textbook or, more frequently these days, an original source like Bede or Fredegar or Paul the Deacon. He had stopped dreaming, which he interpreted as a sign of health.

Then, one evening in November, Charlton took him to a night-club in Mile End, and he was reminded of everything in his life that he had chosen to leave behind. At a quarter to eleven on a Friday Charlton called round in the Sierra, windswept aerial, no hubcaps, and they drove east with Billy Joel on the stereo. Charlton was wearing a new jacket that glinted every time a light passed over it. ‘I feel lucky tonight,' he said, and patted his breast pocket, which was where he kept his fruit-flavoured condoms.

They left the car on a patch of wasteground near a roundabout and then walked back, picking their way gingerly through thistles, coils of wire, bricks. From a distance Barker could see the club – a low square building with a scribble of electric blue above the entrance. There was a BMW outside,
there was a jeep with tyres like a tractor's. A chauffeured Daimler dawdled by the kerb, its engine idling. On the top step two doormen stood in a deluge of ultraviolet, their faces looking tanned, their teeth freshly enamelled. Charlton stopped for a word on his way in. Barker nodded, but didn't give his name.

They had only been inside the club for half an hour when Charlton started talking to a girl in a strapless silver dress.
I feel lucky
. Barker thought she was trouble – he had worked on doors for long enough to recognise the type – but this was Charlton's territory, and he didn't want to interfere. Once, he tried half-heartedly to steer Charlton towards the bar, but Charlton resisted and, grinning, turned and introduced him to the girl. Annabel. Or it could have been Charlotte. All Barker could remember afterwards were her pupils, which were tiny, like punctuation, and her white-blonde hair, which looked as if it had been polished.

It was a fight with fists and bottles. Barker caught somebody in the solar plexus with an uppercut. His father had taught him the punch when he was six: one brutal arc, nine inches start to finish. The man dropped to his knees and vomited what looked like a half-chewed McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese on to the tarmac. Out of the corner of his eye Barker saw Charlton shove somebody else's face into a wall. The crunch of skin and bone on pebbledash. In the end, though, they had to run for it. Down an alley, back across the vacant lot. Charlton slammed the Sierra into first gear and raced it over weeds and potholes. The suspension floundered, winced. It sounded more like a bed with people fucking on it than a car.

‘That bloke,' Charlton said. ‘He ought to bite his food up.'

He grinned into the rear-view mirror, his face pale and greasy, his left cheek-bone grazed, already swelling.

‘There's one of them won't be doing that for a while.'
Barker propped his right knee against the dashboard. He could still hear the neat snap as someone's front teeth broke. The impact had ripped a hole in Barker's trouser-leg and torn the skin beneath.

‘You better get yourself a rabies shot,' Charlton said.

They stopped on Mile End Road and bought fish and chips, which they ate in the parked car. Though Barker was angry with Charlton for involving him in something so futile, so unnecessary, he could at least console himself with the thought that he had come to Charlton's aid. His stock had risen, as Charlton would probably have said.

Barker stared through the windscreen, his bag of chips warm and damp on his lap. Wind scoured the streets. The scuttle of litter.

‘We could've done with Ray tonight,' he said.

He turned and looked at Charlton, who bent his head sideways and bit savagely into a crispy orange slab of cod.

‘Sod it,' Charlton said. ‘We did all right.' He spoke through splintered flakes of fish.

‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail,' Barker said.

Charlton grinned. ‘Drive Away Monkey.'

One morning in early spring the door of the barber's shop opened, the bell tingling, and Charlton walked in. Sighing loudly, he eased down on to the red plastic bench, picked up a magazine. Barker had a regular in his chair, a long-distance lorry-driver who came in every three weeks for a trim. As Barker's scissors chattered up the left side of the lorry-driver's head, he glanced at Charlton in the mirror. Charlton was wearing a camel coat over a dark-grey suit, and a pair of brogues that somebody had cleaned for him.

‘Got yourself a new woman?' Barker said.

Charlton passed one hand gently over his cropped black hair, then turned and spoke to Higgs. ‘You the boss?'

Higgs nodded.

‘How much are you paying him?'

‘About two f-fifty an –'

‘Good,' Charlton said. ‘Because that's all he's worth.'

Barker smiled as he reached for the clippers and began to shave the hairs at the base of the lorry-driver's neck. Higgs was bewildered, though. Blinking rapidly, he folded a towel and draped it over a chair.

‘Does he get a lunch-break?' Charlton asked.

‘One-thirty,' Higgs said without looking up.

Barker glanced at the clock above the mirror. Quarter-past.

Charlton spoke to Barker for the first time since he'd walked
in. ‘There's a café down the street, the something Grill. I'll see you there.'

Barker nodded. Bending low, he watched the scissors closely as he steered them round the top of the lorry-driver's ear. Short white hairs dropped through the air, thin as the filaments in lightbulbs. He hadn't seen Charlton for at least a month. In February they had met in a pub in Stepney and drunk pints. Later that evening they had dropped in on a friend of Charlton's, a stand-up comedian, who had offered them cocaine. Charlton did a couple of lines. Barker said no. He listened to them talk for half an hour, their eyes fixed, glittering, their thoughts fascinating and important to each other, then he walked back to his room in Whitechapel.

‘Friend of yours?' Higgs said when Charlton had gone.

Barker dusted the lorry-driver's neck with talcum powder and whisked the few loose hairs away with a soft brush. ‘He did me a favour when I first moved up here. He's all right.'

Higgs turned away, shaking his head.

In the café Charlton was eating toast, his pale lips shiny with butter. He was still wearing his coat. Barker sat down opposite. When the waitress came, he ordered a chicken-salad sandwich and a Coke.

‘You still in that shitty little bedsit?' Charlton said.

Barker didn't answer.

‘I've got a business proposition for you.' Lowering his head, Charlton reached out with his lips and drew the top half-inch off his cup of tea. It was a strange sound, like something being played backwards.

He told Barker he had heard about a flat. It was five minutes' walk from Tower Bridge. Good area, he said. Central.

Barker waited.

‘Only one problem,' said Charlton, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. ‘There's people in it.'

‘You mean –'

‘That's right. Can you handle it?'

Barker looked at the table.

‘You were a bouncer, right?' Charlton said.

‘How many people?' Barker asked.

‘Three.'

Barker looked up again. ‘And if I do the job, the place is mine?'

‘For a while.'

‘What's that mean?'

‘Six months. Maybe longer.' Charlton lifted the two fingers that held his cigarette and pressed them to his mouth, the back of his hand facing outwards, the thumb and little finger spread. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked the smoke into his lungs. ‘You'd have bills to pay, but no rent. You could even have a phone. Just like a normal fucking human being.'

On his next day off, which was a Sunday, Barker walked south through Shadwell, crossing the river at Tower Bridge. The few people who were out looked at him oddly. It must have been the sledgehammer he was carrying. By ten-thirty he was positioned opposite the building Charlton had told him about. Behind him stood a warehouse that had once belonged to a leather company; the loading bays had been painted a sickly orange-brown, and the hoists lay flush against high walls of inky brick. It was a quiet street. To his right, he could see green metal gates, some early roses. Trees rushed in the wind.

Can you handle it?

A scornful noise came out of him, half grunt, half chuckle. He didn't know what Charlton had ever done, but he knew what he himself had done, sometimes for money, sometimes for the joy of it, the buzz. He used to have a temper. A short fuse. Someone only had to look at him the wrong way, or look at him too long, and he was in there with his forehead, his boots, the bottle he was drinking from. The worst thing he ever did? One night, in Stonehouse, he looked up to see George Catt's face floating towards him through a fog of cigarette smoke. The sagging,
bloodhound slant of Catt's eyelids. Almost as if he'd had a stroke. George Catt. Owner of the night-club where he worked, his boss.
How would you like to earn yourself five hundred quid?
When Barker asked him what he'd have to do, Catt tapped a cylinder of ash into an empty glass. ‘Knowles,' he said. Knowles was Catt's accountant. Young bloke, going bald. But cocky. There were rumours he'd been skimming. Catt pinched his pitted, pulpy nose between his fingers. ‘Do the knees.' Catt nodded to himself. ‘You want someone healthy to look after your money, don't you. Someone lucky. You don't want some cripple.' Two days later Barker and another man by the name of Gosling took Knowles to the basement of a derelict hospital. They hung him from the pipes on the ceiling, hung him upside-down, and then they beat him with chair-legs, not the rounded ones, the ones with edges. There were all the usual sounds, but what he remembered most was the drip of fluid down on to the concrete – blood and urine and saliva streaming past the accountant's ears, which had turned bright-red, streaming through his last remaining wisps of hair. A right old cocktail on the floor. At one point Barker leaned over, turned his head the same way round as Knowles's. It reminded him of a film he had seen once, a documentary about men in space, and how their tea had drifted out of their cups and up towards the ceiling …