Dust and Desire (4 page)

I let that one glide by me and went inside. There was a table with a bunch of leaflets for something called
The OneOnOne Club
. Next to it was a small photocopier and a girl with a Polaroid camera slung around her neck. There was a loose dress slung around her boobs and bum, and she was slinging wine down her shouter with the kind of enthusiasm you just can’t fake.

‘Ickle piccie,’ she said, as I made to walk past her. ‘Gotta have a ickle piccie.’

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘So we can circulate it. Anyone likes your face can write their number on the back, and you get your ickle piccie back at the end of the night with lots of lovely dates to look forward to.’

‘I’m not a swinger,’ I said. ‘I’m a plumber. There’s a blockage in the pipes.’

‘Oh,’ she said, then took a fucking ickle piccie anyway.

It was pretty busy. The tables in the dining area had been pushed to the perimeter, and a mass of people, who had clearly spent for ever getting ready, were demonstrating the admirable skill that is standing the maximum distance from everybody else in a confined space. No milling, no mingling, just lots of people looking as though they were at an audition for a new play called
Rabbit in the Headlights
. At least the lighting was subdued, so the sweat of fear didn’t show up too much.

I grabbed a glass of champagne from a stooge with a tray and found a quiet spot against the wall that gave me a good vantage point over the fun and games, as well as a view of the staff door which I guessed was the entrance to the cellar.

I wondered what Geenan’s brother did here. She hadn’t expounded and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but now I wished I had. Maybe he worked here, maybe he swung here, but I doubted it. If anything, I reckoned he scraped his knuckles off on other people’s faces in Danny Sweet’s bear pit. I was itching to get down there for a look around, but it looked as though match-making alone was on the menu tonight so I relaxed and sipped my champagne.

Gradually, the alcohol did its work and the gaps between the assembled loners shrank. Soon the restaurant was filled with the cacophony of people asking ‘What do you do?’. The photographs soon followed: Xeroxed copies of faces in various degrees of mortification. There was one that didn’t look at all bad, although she was probably only here because she had false teeth, or was married to her job, or she shat herself when she humped. Emboldened by another glass of Piper-Heidsieck, I scribbled my name and my mobile phone number on the back of it and dropped it in the large glass bowl where everyone else was now feverishly doing the same.

I made the mistake of smiling at a woman who was on her way to the toilet. She banked hard left in my direction and sucked the oxygen from my immediate vicinity with a ferocious air kiss.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

‘I make jewellery,’ I said.

‘Wild,’ she said. ‘Silver? Gold?’

‘Human bone,’ I said. I was just spouting now. I didn’t mean to shut her up, but I’d just seen Danny Sweet leading a posse of phenomenally ugly men around the outside of the flirtathon and through the cellar entrance. I forced my eye to fall on each and every one of them, and wondered which one was Geenan’s brother. What was their fucking problem? Wouldn’t Kara be embarrassed when I turned up with her brother, who would be perfectly within his rights to tell her to bugger off out of his life until she stopped behaving like a first-class arse?

‘I… I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your jewellery,’ she was saying.

I lightly squeezed her arm. Another snap-happy dolt took a photograph of me over her shoulder. ‘That’s awfully sweet of you,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to try that hard, though. Believe me, save it up for someone who deserves a woman who will delay taking a piss for him.’

I left her and ambled over to the staff door. Someone had put on some suitable music. Suitable for the fucking grave. Chris de Burgh. A woman dressed in red is doing
what
with you, Chris? Yes, because she’s deaf and blind and quite possibly brain-damaged. I was happy to leave them all to it.

Stone steps. A bare 100-watt bulb. The sound coming up from the cellar was like a sledgehammer being repeatedly introduced to a mound of watermelons.

I hesitated at the swing-doors at the bottom of the steps. Testosterone alone promised to push them open, and not from my side, either. My testosterone was trying to put its belongings in a handkerchief and slink away. I composed myself and slipped through.

Mayhem. Around twenty beery, sweaty bodies were packed in a tight circle around a knot of flailing limbs. I was bemused by the lack of cheering. Apart from the occasional hiss of someone wincing at a punch, the shuffle of footsteps as the scrum watched the scrap, and the sounds of fist on meat, it was relatively restrained. Obviously because Sweet didn’t want to draw any undue attention to his private club.

I caught glimpses of the two shirtless men hammering each other’s faces. They both wore masks of blood. One guy was gradually gaining the upper hand, though.

‘Rather them than me,’ I said, and one of the guys in the audience gave me a look that told me to hurry it up and get on my way. I circled the group, keeping back in the shadows by the wall, and checked faces, looking for someone who resembled Kara Geenan. When one of the men at the back of the crowd broke away for a breather, I collared him and asked him if Jason Phythian was in, tonight. Another ugly look.

I was about to cut my losses and get out of this stifling, violent shit-hole when I noticed that my route back to the door was blocked. Intentionally blocked. The scrum had lost interest in the fight now that it had become so one-sided. A metronomic pulpy slapping sound indicated that the contest was over.

Danny Sweet stepped forward as I tried to make myself look less isolated. Everyone was staring at me.

‘New boy,’ said Sweet. ‘All new boys must fight.’

‘I’m not that new,’ I said. ‘I’ve been around the block a few times.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that block is about to be knocked off. Choose your foe.’

‘I don’t fight.’

‘You do if you’re in here. So, you will.’

‘Look, I was with the party upstairs. I thought the toilets were down here.’

‘Take your shirt off,’ he said, ‘and pick your fight partner.’

‘All right, how about you?’ I said.

‘Fuckhead,’ he said, ‘I don’t fight. I ref. These hands’ – he held up his mitts for me to see – ‘are my prize possessions. They’re insured for half a mill. I’m not going to be knocking up any lamb and flageolet-bean stew with chunks missing out of these beauties, am I?’

‘Is Jason Phythian down here? I’ll fight him.’

Nobody came forward.

Sweet turned to face his cronies. ‘He’s making names up. He’s too shy to pick someone. Who’ll have him?’

‘I’ll have him.’

A walking argument for the introduction of eugenics shambled out of the throng, pulling off his T-shirt as he did so. He had a tattoo on his chest of a naked woman on all fours, her backside raised at an anatomically questionable angle. Underneath was the word LADIEKILLER. He had the face of something that should have been sitting in a bush picking its arse and eating soft fruits. While he flexed his arms, I turned to Sweet and asked him if there were any rules.

‘No rules,’ he said.

So I turned and kicked Ladiekiller’s bollocks into orbit. Then I was pushing through the bodies to the door, before anyone could argue that what I’d done was really rather unpleasant. Ladiekiller’s mewlings drifted after me up the stairs, along with some raised voices. There were going to be some feet following mine pretty soon.

The swingers were pairing off like it was a chromosome lookalike party. I slalomed through them and was hauled back by the beanpole just as I was about to make it on to the street.

‘You forgot something,’ he said, wagging his hoods over to my right. The woman with the Polaroid camera was tottering after me, a clutch of photographs in her hand. I pocketed them, thanked them both, and ran all the way back to the car.

4

A
lthough it was an easy drive home from Hampstead, I dumped the Saab at Belsize Park and caught a tube to Archway. Another of Phythian’s so-called haunts was in N19, a good old-fashioned public house where you drank till you made yourself ill. None of that fannying around that was going on at Stodge. I imagined the most fannying that went on at the Lion was up against the wall outside, at chucking-out time. The excitement of the last hour had made me a bit jittery and I wanted a drink. Scratch that, I wanted several drinks. And I was going to offer a black little toast to Kara Geenan before each one.

Part of what she’d told me the previous evening – hell, earlier that morning – kept rolling around in my mind like a pebble in the drum of a washing machine. Not the lunacy about her brother going missing mere hours after she was with him, but more the detail that she fed me regarding who he was. She hadn’t sounded to me like someone listing the aspects of someone she cared for. There were no little embellishments when it came to describing his face, for example. He was just: brown hair, blue eyes. In my experience, it’s hard to get such a belt-and-braces sketch of a missing person. The client will twat on for twenty minutes about how glossy her hair was because she brushed it morning and night with a Charles Worthington vent brush, or his eyes were grey or green depending on what colour top he wore and the light in the sky just made his eyes come alive… So it concerned me that Kara’s facts should be so naked, so cold. It didn’t sit nicely with her rushing out at midnight, fit to shit with panic about her baby brother.

But I wasn’t too concerned. I really couldn’t care less how weird their relationship was if it meant my bank balance was about to turn a pinker shade of red. I would either find him, or I wouldn’t. I’d get my cash and could forget about missing persons for a while. Or I could forget about
other
people’s missing persons, at least.

I emerged at Archway into that astonishing horrorfest that is the collision of a number of main roads. It seems that all roads lead to Archway. And then they die there. Archway could be the place where old roads come after they have enjoyed their youth as edgy country highways or suburban dual carriageways. They come here and they just go ‘fuck it’ and coil up in weird spaghetti shapes and expire then make the cars grind to a halt. It had been a while since I was last in N19, and I was pretty certain the traffic was the same. All the drivers’ faces look like: ‘Bollocks, I had a choice, but I decided to drive through Archway.’ You can see them, almost physically wrestling with the compulsion to weep.

I crossed Junction Road, averting my eyes as one does at the scene of an atrocity, and breezed into the Lion. According to Kara, her little brother had a flat a little further north, on St John’s Way. But I needed a pint before I tackled Roadkill Central.

‘Kronenbourg,’ I said, as I sat on one of the stools at the bar. The barman went to it without a whimper: just the kind of barman I like. I took a slow look around the pub, guessing which of the half-dozen beer-nursing thugs might be villains and which mightn’t. By the time the barman had delivered my pint and sorted out my change, it was six-nil to the cons. I asked him if he knew someone called Phythian.

‘That his surname?’ he asked. He had something rattish about his face: it was pointed and twitchily interested in what I was questioning him about.

‘Yeah, Jason Phythian. Know him?’

‘Can’t say I do,’ he said. ‘Lot of people round here aren’t so friendly as to give their names up when you pull ’em their pints.’

I described Phythian and expected a shrug from the barman, as if I had just described thirty men who used this pub on any given day.

‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Copper?’

I shook my head and sank a third of the lager. It had a sour aftertaste: there aren’t that many boozers around these days that look after their pipes too well. ‘Just helping to track down a friend for a friend.’

He nodded and moved away to serve one of the grim-faced regulars, who would no doubt still be in the same position at the bar come closing time.

He’s making names up
, Sweet had said. Maybe I was. Maybe Jason Phythian wasn’t his name, or maybe they were just protecting such a young man from his big sister, who might be angry to discover that her brother was mixing it with the missing links down at the fight club.

I was almost finished with my drink when somebody else walked through the door. Somebody I knew? I fished about in my memory for a while, until the name came to me. Whitby. Neville Whitby. Freelance photographer of some repute, although he had no formal training. While most pros were busy with their light meters and flash indexes, playing who’s got the biggest lens, Nev was busy taking photos, solid quality stuff that regularly found its way into the papers. I had crossed his path a few times in the past few years, and liked his blatant disregard for his profession, and the prima donnas who worked in it. He had a hard and fast rule when it came to taking pictures, as I remembered him telling me when we were standing in the rain, waiting for some nugget of information at some outdoor press conference ages before. He took his photos in the morning or in the late afternoon; the light was crap at any other time of day.

I watched him shrug off his coat, and hailed him as he headed towards the cigarette machine.

‘All right there, Joel?’

‘Not so bad, Nev. Let me get you a pint.’

I bought him a Guinness and got myself another pint of lager. We sat by the window, one of those thick glass affairs with lots of flaws and ripples in it, so you can’t see clearly in or out. Weird figures wobbled past beyond the glass as they stalked up and down the Holloway Road.

‘What brings you out here?’ I asked him. ‘You live down in Oval, don’t you?’

He nodded and unwrapped his pack of Embassy Regal. ‘I’m supposed to be covering an eviction, but I don’t know if I can be arsed. Got a tip-off that some crusties are about to be forcibly removed from a derelict flat in Fitzwarren Gardens. Unofficial job, apparently. Some real bruisers involved. I thought it would be fun to snap some kid being hurled out of a top-floor window but I’m not so sure now. I just don’t seem to have the appetite for it any more. I haven’t taken a picture of a cheque presentation for fifteen years, and I’m actually beginning to miss it – the humdrum. You need a bit of humdrum in your life. And, anyway, your modern student type doesn’t seem to have the heart for a battle these days. Too cosseted, obviously.’