Dust and Desire (7 page)

After Barber, after Bach, the musicians play Debussy’s ‘Sonata’ and you shift slightly, the hard edge of your forearm meeting mine on the intervening rest. The playing of music evolves on the stage in several layers, like cells in an animation: the man turning pages of music, the pianist, the cellist. The cello. I see details that might have eluded me at other times, but with this heightening of sensation it does not appear strange that I should notice the cellist’s hand: a white spider fleeing up and down the cello’s neck. Or the polished part of his knee where the bow brushes it at the limit of its stroke; filaments of horsehair; the muscles in the pianist’s arms.

Back home, you set about making tea. I riffle through your CD collection till I find Borodin’s ‘String Quartet No. 2 in D Major’. Lighted by candles, your room looks austere without being imposing. The first night I spent here, you and I looked at each other from opposite sides of the room for an age before you came to sit by my feet and hold my hand. This is what you do now, after placing the tray with the teapot and mugs on the table. I slip down on to the floor and you move between my legs, lying back so that your head finds the dip of my right shoulder. We don’t say anything.

There is a beautiful, haunting phrase that Borodin uses over and over during the
Notturno
. The cello’s voice is plaintive and hopeful, rolling around the other three string instruments like an invocation. Although you don’t move against me, I feel a settling of your weight, as if your muscles and bones have slipped beyond the threshold at which they find their usual repose. I become aware of your heartbeat and the measured journey of your breath. Everything is right for me in a way it hasn’t been for years. Slowly, with as much tenderness as I can muster, I place my hands on your shoulders and squeeze, allowing my fingers to work their way across your arms and the flat gloss of your chest. Your clavicle, the cob of bone at the back of your neck – I touch it all, trying to pass on something of my need for you: all my warmth and good feeling for you. Nothing is so important. Can you feel this? Eyes closed, I move my hands to the swell of the music, following the ebb and flow of the cello’s ache. In my touch is all the tenderness we’ve shared before. The raw centre of you is where I’m trying to reach, softly plucking and drawing upon the area that remembers the good times and knows there will be many more. I know this can work. Can you feel? I know this can work. This is love. Along with the charity of my hands, I send a message, forcing it through my fingertips and into the knot of pain and confusion we all carry at our centre.
I won’t let you down
.

You stay my hands. Bring one to your mouth and kiss the palm. This is love.

The first time: on the heels of a dovetail kiss, you moved over and sank upon me till I had no measure of where I ended and you began. The soft curtain of your hair moving pendulum slow above my face; the sound of the fountain outside the only thing pinning me to reality…

* * *

I was deciding whether to ruin my day with a third martini, when finally Knocker deigned to give me a nanosecond of his time.

‘So,’ he said, ordering a white-wine spritzer, ‘what are you up to?’

I told him.

‘Found him yet?’ he asked. He made himself comfortable at the stool next to me.

‘We might have had a coming together of sorts.’

Knocker took a lighter out of his jacket pocket, started rotating it between his fingers. ‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I like the cocktails. And I was thinking of signing up, maybe doing a few classes. We could enter competitions, be a team. Shit, you can even lead. What do you think?’

‘What is it you want, scummo?’

‘The woman Liptrott introduced me to, Kara Geenan. I wonder if you know where she is?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘Okay, let me put it another way.’ I grabbed hold of his hair, snatched the lighter from his hand and set fire to his tie.

‘You fuck-me brainwank,’ Knocker said bizarrely, trying to back off.

‘Where is she, Knocker?’ The flames were tucking in and I reckoned his shirt would catch fire before they reached his throat. ‘You and The Lip are tighter than a gnat’s chuffpipe. You always know what he’s up to, who he’s up and by how far. Tell me, quick mind, and I’ll put you out.’ I turned to the barman.
Glass of water
, I mouthed. He didn’t bat an eyelid.

‘Last time I saw her,’ he said, ‘she was at a pub in Westminster. She was friendly with the landlord, some guy called Nathan. He’d know where she is.’ He was squawking like a wronged parrot by now. I was smelling burning hair. His chest wig was going up.

‘Name of the pub,’ I said.

‘Fuck it, Sorrell, come
on
!’

‘Name.’

‘The Paviours Arms,’ he said. ‘Page Street.’

I doused him and threw him back off the stool. He landed on his arse and looked up at me, blinking a slice of lemon from his left eye.

‘What was in it for you, Knocker?’ I said. ‘Couple of K? Blow-job? Leg-up to the next broken rung on the ladder? Who is she? What does she want?’

Every time he breathed, he sprayed a little bit of water like some fucking porpoise. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Me and Barry were delivering some watered-down booze for an outfit I’m in with, up Stanford way. This woman, she was waiting for us in the gaffer’s office one day. Said she needed to find some guy called Sorrell, an ex-copper. Said she heard we knew who she was talking about. Told us that if we gave her what she wanted, she’d well, let’s just say she was nice to us. Been a while since anyone was nice to me.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘
I’m
nice to you. I like you enough to sort out your wardrobe for you. You look much better without that tie.’

‘You watch yourself, scummo,’ Knocker sprayed again out of his blowhole. I should have thrown him a fucking fish.

I thanked the barman and left before the bulging suit arrived to make me kiss his knuckles some more.

* * *

Though my flat is pretty spartan, even more so now since it’s been burgled, I’ve always made sure I had some other stuff locked away in a storage joint called Keepsies, which is round the back of the police station at Paddington Green. Special stuff. Emergency stuff. Stuff that you just shouldn’t have lying around the flat. I nip over there and pick some of it up when my life starts filling up with warning signs.

I know Keith, who runs the place, from way back when I first came to London in the early noughties. When I went solo, one of my first pay packets was courtesy of him, after I’d provided the evidence he needed that his wife was cheating on him. What he paid me was a fair whack, but nothing compared to what she had been siphoning from his bank account over the years.

He gives me fifty per cent off the monthly rate for the smallest of his lockers, which is still big enough for, say, one of the larger widescreen TVs on the market, and thirty quid a month is no great drain.

I was early – the place only opens after lunch on certain days of the week – so I sat in the Saab drinking illegally hot coffee from a cardboard cup, waiting for Keepsies to open. I asked myself some tough questions, there in the car, while I blistered the pulp of my lip. Chief among them: Joel, what the
fuck
is going on? I asked that of myself a few times, with increasing volume, but I didn’t scare any answers out of myself. A goodish-looking woman, a cry for help, a missing brother, a botched cosh job, a burgled flat, and a goodish-looking woman vanishing into thin air. She was the key, I reckoned. If I found her then everything would slowly unfold like a scrunched-up ball of cellophane. I hoped.

I was startled out of my thoughts by Keith tapping the plastic stirrer from his own cup of coffee on my window. I got out and we shook hands. He asked me – through mouthfuls of his chicken and mayo sub, as we crossed the road to his warehouse – how things were going, and I said fine. He nodded grimly. He knows exactly what I’ve got locked up at his place, and it’s all credit to him because I could probably get him closed down if the police ever found out. I signed his register and left him at reception, telling him I’d only be a couple of minutes. Then I wandered off to find my cubicle, fishing the unmarked key from my pocket.

In the cubicle was a scuffed brown-leather briefcase and a larger container, one of those solid Samsonite suitcases from, I believe, their Silhouette range. Very attractive silvery appearance, like brushed steel. I used another key to unlock this and took from it a paper envelope that contained three hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes. I skimmed off a hundred and folded it into my wallet. Replacing the envelope, I turned my attention to a soft canvas bag. From this I retrieved a gun, a 9mm Glock 17, the kind of weapon used by the police, and a box full of shells. After a long deliberation, I put the gun and the bullets back. Guns scare the shit out of me.

Then I thought about the bashing I’d been given and took it out again. I had never fired it in my life. In fact I don’t know much more about that gun other than it makes a loud noise and kills people. I don’t know its history (I don’t want to know its history) but it has probably a very ugly past, since I came across the weapon in the bedroom of a teenage runaway who had overdosed on pure heroin. I thought the mother of the boy would be shocked enough by his death and his habit without discovering that he was carrying firearms around with him, too.

There’s other stuff in the bag. Things I wouldn’t get shot at or arrested for. Pictures of Rebecca and me. Pictures of Sarah and me. Pictures of the three of us together, looking happy. I inspected one of them before I locked the cubicle and went back to Keith at reception, to sign out. Three smiles, all on the same 6x4: me, Rebecca and Sarah sitting in the garden in Lime Grove, just as the sun was going down. I can almost smell the buddleia, as well as the perfume on Rebecca’s throat. But whenever I see these photographs, whenever I think about those times, I’m not smiling.

* * *

I motored over to York Road, stopping off at my flat to check that Jimmy Two had done the work I needed. The makeshift door and padlock combo now looked more secure than what had preceded it.

Inside the vet’s were three women, all of them collecting age hard, as if it was a hobby, and holding toy dogs on their knees in various states of tartan and shiveriness.

‘Morning, ladies,’ I said and, leaning on the receptionist’s desk, asked if Dr Henriksen was in.

‘I’m in, but I’m busy,’ she said, stepping out of her surgery. She was wearing a pair of surgical gloves which makes sense. But I wouldn’t have said anything either if she’d come out with a pair of goalkeeper’s mitts on. You don’t question the methods of people in medicine. Somehow, you just don’t. She was also wearing a short black skirt and a pair of barely black nylons that made a noise when she walked, which entered both ears simultaneously and came together in a hot melted knot at the centre of my head.

‘Hi Melanie,’ I said. ‘How’s Mengele?’

The varicose jobs behind me audibly sucked in their breath at my mention of that name, and for the nth time I asked myself just what had been going through my head when I came to name my cat. Bitterness, probably – and the fuck-you bug that I’d been infected with since my teenage years.

‘Your
cat
,’ Melanie said, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the animal’s name, ‘is fine, as you well know. And he’s ready for you to pick up now.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘slight problem.’

Dr Henriksen gave me a look over the oblong frames of her Calvin Klein glasses. A blade of brown hair swung out from behind her ear and hung alongside her deep red mouth. With a face like hers, who needs Zebra crossings?

I could feel the wattles on the old dears behind me quiver as they strained to hear what I had to say.

‘Can I speak to you in private for a second?’ I said.

I think she’s keen on me. I hope she’s keen on me. Sometimes she strikes me as someone who is merely humouring me, using me as a benchmark by which she can measure her connection to the human race, a way of keeping her oar in until such time as she feels she has spent too much time chasing the rewards of her career and decides to knuckle down and swap rings. Other times – just slivers of time, but slivers worth waiting for – she’s warm to me unlike any other woman I’ve known, including Rebecca. We’ve never made love. We’ve never even clashed teeth after a few too many Stellas at the Marylebone Bar and Kitchen. But there’s a change in her voice, her smile, the heart-stopping moments when her bottle-green eyes get tired of looking at mine and slip to check on my mouth for a beat or two. There’s some electricity between us: enough to keep me interested.

I closed the door behind us, once she’d ushered me into her surgery. I could imagine the ecstasy of rolled eyes as I ducked past her to enter. On the operating table was a tortoise. We regarded each other for a moment – the tortoise even nodded – before it went back to looking sullen and daydreaming about lettuce, or roller skates, or whatever.

‘Go through to the back,’ she said. ‘My office.’

‘I’m in a bit of a tight spot,’ I said, as I pushed on through to a tiny room that, until Mengele had been deposited there, had been dominated by an ancient IBM computer and a pot plant.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. She plugged in the kettle and raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Tea?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said. Mengele hissed at me, then looked up at Melanie Henriksen for approval. ‘Anyway, yeah, a tight spot.’

‘Mm,’ Melanie said. I had only known her for six months, but it was enough for her to have learned to grade my bullshit. If there were Pyrex containers for it, mine would be in one bearing the label:
Very poor
.

I blew out my cheeks and widened my eyes to illustrate just how very tight my tight spot was.

‘The answer’s yes,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to ask me.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘would you be kind enough to massage my buttocks? With olive oil?’

‘Try the question that was on your mind first.’

‘Believe me, that
was
the que–’