Bad Dreams (2 page)

At eight o’clock, the radio and the TV hit news bulletins at the same time, and told the same stories in slightly varying ways. Anne did the remains of last night’s washing-up. Two teacups, two wine-glasses, and the dug-out-from-somewhere ashtray. For a moment, she wondered if Mark had expected to stay the night with her. She thought that was not going to happen, but recently, he had been a bit broody around her at the office. He went all quiet and British when she was talking to anyone else, and was hearty with her in that slightly hollow way of his. She put the dripping cups and glasses up on the rack to dry. She was getting the impression that Mark was capable of a species of desperate devotion she would find stifling. For her, this year, turning thirty without having been married or had children had not been the stereotypical shock. The only thing she wished she had done was write a book, and there was plenty of time for that. Maybe she could fix up the racist attack series. It was an important subject.

She took the croissants out, welcoming the outrush of warm air from the oven. Outside the fire escape window, she could see frost-furred ironwork. It was cold, and the forecasters were saying it would get colder. She carried her breakfast tray through to the front room. The television was warning of a traffic snarl-up in North London. The trains were running intermittently because of the cold. Every year, winter caught London Regional Transport by surprise, as if they expected a dingy summer to stretch on until the year’s end. Anne’s fingers felt the chill, and she warmed them on the croissants. Sitting at the folding table she had pulled out for Mark and not put away, she ate the croissants and watched the television.

Usually, with her breakfast, she opened her mail and set aside letters that needed immediate replies, listed cheques in her account books and paid bills. She liked to get that out of the way before she started anything. Her father’s lawyers were sending her a packet of legal documents federal express. But, thanks to the Christmas post, the mail was not arriving until late in the morning this week. She already had too many cards for her limited mantelpiece and shelf space, and was beginning to regret her decision not to bother this year. She took her first caffeine hit of the day, and considered the muesli and yoghurt.

At first, the expectation of The Call had been constant. Every time she heard a telephone ring, even if she was not in her flat or an office where she could be traced, she had been instantly certain that this was it, and felt her heart squeeze. Then, the dread had turned to a dull resignation, although she realized that, when it came, it would still surprise her.

Fathers died, she knew. Hers had written an entire play about the fact. And when the third seizure came, the film of the play would undoubtedly be pulled out of the vaults and shown on late-night television as a tribute. She had videoed
On the Graveyard Shift at Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill
the last time it was on, but had not got around to watching it again. Produced on Broadway in 1954 and filmed in 1955, the property had been cited by the Nobel Prize Committee as a great achievement, but it had also dwarfed everything else Cameron Nielson ever did, including raise children. Anne still found it hard to associate the play, written before she was born, with the distant, kindly, disappointed man she had known all her life. In the big, last-act speech, where Maish Johnson – the role that proved Brando’s Stanley Kowalski was not a one-off achievement – angrily expressed his grief at the death of Sam, the fatherly-wise owner of the all-night Bar-B-Q and Grill, and denounced everyone else’s numbed reaction to the bad news, Anne knew that her father had written the cornerstone of his own obituary. He had been a young man when he wrote Maish’s speech, fiercely identifying with his hero; how would he feel now that he had been pushed, presumably kicking and screaming inside his chairbound bone-and-flesh prison, into the Lee J. Cobb role of Sam?

She took a spoon to the muesli and yoghurt, and mixed them up more thoroughly. The news was starting to repeat, so she zapped from channel to channel, getting an early morning educational show about claw-feed grinding, a high-tech commercial for a bank, and three presenters on a pastel couch swapping mild innuendoes with a teenage pop star. The coffee was getting into her system, waking her up. She laced her cold fingers, and rubbed her palms together, generating some warmth. Back at the news, there was a thirty second blip on the Aziz incident: a black and white photograph, grainily enlarged, of the smiling Pakistani at his wedding; another, post-mortem, of his swollen face on a pillow; a brief, live, snippet of Constable Erskine, in uniform, being hustled out of the inquest, dodging microphones.

At the sight of Erskine’s face, Anne felt a flash of cold anger. She had never met the policeman, but she had read the doctor’s reports on Charlie Aziz, arrested for ‘driving without due care and attention’, breathalysed and proved not under the influence of alcohol, then battered to death by ‘person or persons unknown’ in a South London cell. The official version was that Charlie suffered a claustrophobic spell and injured himself fatally, but Anne knew that was not consistent with his all-round injuries and with the police force’s unexplained suspension of Erskine, the arresting officer. Erskine, a blandly handsome young man, did not look like a monster, but then they never did. In his off hours, according to Anne’s investigation, Erskine was a member of the English Liberation Front, a far right splinter group who alleged that immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean constitute an army of occupation and should be resisted with
maquis
tactics.

Aziz’s parents were glimpsed, but they did not get to say anything. Over the last few weeks, attending meetings of the Charlie Aziz Memorial Committee to Stop the Attacks, Anne had got quite close to the boy’s mother. She admired the woman’s quiet determination, and her ability to cope with family tragedy while doing something concrete about it. Mrs Aziz, Anne believed, was quite capable of forcing answers from the police where years of investigating journalists would only get nothingy press hand-outs. And if that happened, there would definitely be a book in it. Perhaps even a television docu-drama. Perhaps…

She picked up her spoon, and the telephone rang. She dropped the spoon, and found herself shaking. It was only partly the cold. Using the remote control, she turned off the television. The ringing was needlessly loud.

Nerving herself for The Call, she picked up the telephone, and said ‘hello’.

The line did not crackle. It was not from America. This was not The Call.

‘Anne…’ It was Mark. Her whole body tensed. She did not need an ‘…about last night…’ conversation. ‘Anne, I’m ringing from the office…’

He sounded edgy, urgent, like a conspirator during a crisis.

‘Mark, I…’

‘The police have been checking up on you, Anne…’

The doorbell rang.

‘Mark, excuse me, someone at the door…’

She put the receiver down, and stabbed the entryphone buzzer. It would be the postman, and she did not want to miss him and have to take the trip to the sorting office to pick up the Federal Express packet. She unlatched her door, and stepped out onto the landing.

It was not the postman. Anne shrank back, mentally kicking herself for her lack of caution. In New York, that sort of mistake could get you killed; and London these days was not exactly a paradise of non-violence either.

‘Good morning,’ said the visitor. ‘Anne Nielson?’

It was a civil service type in a grey topcoat, but the dread did not lift.

‘Yes?’

He showed her a card, with his photograph under plastic. She looked at it, but could not focus on the words.

‘I’m Inspector Joseph Hollis, from the Holborn Police Station.’

The name did not mean anything to her. She looked backwards, at the still off-the-hook telephone. She adopted a neutral expression, and did not invite the policeman into her flat. Any business they had could be done on the landing. She was not paranoid, but she had friends who had been harassed for what they wrote. She had not expected any official feedback on her Aziz pieces, but she was not surprised.

‘Miss Nielson?’

The face was unreadable but vaguely sympathetic, the voice professionally expressionless.

She took a breath. ‘Yes.’

‘Anne
Veronica
Nielson?’

She expected to be told her rights. ‘Uh-huh.’

‘And do you have a sister,
Judith
Nielson?’

Judi! She always came out of left field, but today…

‘Yes. What is this about?’

This time, the policeman drew breath. Whatever it was, she knew, it would be bad. With Judi, it was always bad.

‘I’m sorry, miss, but I have to tell you that your sister is dead.’

T
he night before, Nina had been out with Rollo, one of her regulars. They had ended up at his maisonette in Hackney. She had tried her best, but just was not up to it. Afterwards, she had vomited biriani on his new duvet cover. It was decorated with ringlet-haired ancient Greeks kaleidoscopically demonstrating an assortment of lovemaking positions. It was supposed to be tasteful.

Rollo had kicked her off his futon and called for a minicab. He had given her less money than usual, and made her wait for the taxi outside his front door. She had got cold listening to him clatter about the house, tidying up, and had come even further down. Her toes were still frozen, without feeling, from the twenty minutes outside. She had had to pay the driver out of her earnings. Usually, Rollo would give the cabman ten pounds to cover it. He had not made a date to see her again. They had met in the first place through the ‘Heartland’ section of
City Limits.
He was ‘in the music business’, but did not have any records out at the moment. His sitting room was full of framed posters for concerts by bands she could barely remember.

Back in the flat, she hugged her Snoopy pyjama case, imagining a gentle and considerate lover. Someone like Jeremy Irons in
Brideshead Revisited.
A schoolfriend had once told her that all prostitutes were really lesbians. But, then again, Nina was not a real prostitute. She was… What was she? A party girl, she supposed. Like everyone else, she called herself a model on her tax returns.

Exhausted, she did not dream.

When she woke up, she felt ghastly. It was then that she decided to quit using smack. But smack was not ready to leave off using her.

Aware that she needed to build her strength again, she fixed up as substantial a breakfast as was possible with what she had left in the tiny fridge and the cupboard over the sink. Branflakes, six cheddar thins, grapefruit juice and a cup of jasmine tea.

She sat at the kitchen table, looking at the neatly laid breakfast for a quarter of an hour. The hot water in the teacup slowly darkened until she could no longer see the sachet in the bottom. She took the paper tab and hauled the teabag out on its length of cotton. She dangled it in front of her face, and took the soggy lump into her mouth. It was slightly scalding, but the flavour was good. She could taste the perfume.

She spat the bag out into a saucer, and began to nibble one of the biscuits. Her stomach contracted sharply. ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘it’s coming soon.’ She kept the cheesy pulp in her mouth for minutes, squeezing it through her teeth. Finally, she swallowed. It hurt going down, but it hurt a lot more coming up.

She bent double, cracking the cereal bowl with her forehead. The spasms hit her again and again in the belly. She twisted off the stool and dived for the kitchen mat, curling up around her pain. Milk and bran dried on her face. She managed to control herself before the kicking started.

This had happened before. She could live through it.

After a while, she calmed down. She unwound herself, and lay face up on the floor, looking up at the Marvel comic covers pasted to the ceiling by a previous tenant.
Silver Surfer
and
Daredevil
,
Iron Man
and
The Avengers.
She had had a guy around for a party once who was a comic collector. He claimed that, unmutilated, several of the ’60s issues that had been cut up for wallpaper were worth around fifty pounds. What a waste.

She sat up, and felt temporarily at peace with herself. It would not last. There was no smack in the place. She had hoped to be able to find the silver paper her last jab had come in, but it was lost. She had got a hit off that kind of minute residue before, by licking it. It felt like sherbert on the tongue, and a carnival in her brain. At least, it had once. More recently, she had been treading water, using the shot to stay even, not to get ahead. That was dangerous, but she was a strong person, she told herself, she could deal with it.

It took her a full minute to dial Clive’s seven figure number. Apart from her own, it was the only one she knew. She had forgotten her mother’s, and had a little book for regulars and friends.

Clive. Charming Clive. Well-spoken Clive. Cunning Clive. He was the one who had found the song with her name in it. Nina Kenyon. He had suggested she find a partner called Ina Carver. It was the first line of ‘My Darling Clementine’. Ina Carver, Nina Kenyon. Excavating for a mine. Clive would have smack. He always had smack.

Clive’s telephone rang four times, then his answering machine cut in. It told her in the kind of voice she usually only heard on
University Challenge
that Clive Broome was out right now and that she could leave a message after the bleeps if she wanted to. She did not.

She could not quite get her phone back on the hook. The tangled cord got in the way.

In any case, she knew Clive would only come across if she paid him for her last shot. He was her friend and he loved her, but he was a businessman like any other and he could not make that kind of exception. She barely had enough cash left over from last night to get her through the day.

Even from the other side of the room, she could hear the phone. The dialling tone buzzed, annoyingly loud, like a persistent insect.

She squandered a fifty pence coin on the electricity meter and turned the fire on full strength. Standing up, she felt pins and needles in her knees. The gilt-edged invitation that had come in yesterday’s post was on top of a pile of newspapers, magazines and bills on the coffee table. Under the copperplate request for the pleasure of her company and the address, Amelia had written ‘bring a friend’.