Felix in the Underworld (16 page)

The pub was an old one, with frosted patterns on big mirrors and threadbare plush, which had been invaded and taken over by a new world. Humming neon lights exposed the cracked ceiling and peeling plaster, the bar throbbed with heavy metal and bleated with flashing Space Invaders. The clientele seemed to go in for bright yellow hair, cut short, pierced noses and ears, leather trousers, caps which might have been worn by storm troopers, tight shorts and patent leather boots. They yelled greetings or abuse at each other and quarrelled in comers. As Felix stood drinking with Yorkie, he saw a young man leaning on the bar, apparently alone, looking at him with particular interest. His hair was cut into short bristles at the side and flat as a table on the top of his head. He wore a black T-shirt with BASIL written on it in green phosphorescent script, white jeans and purple boots. His face was decorated with designer stubble and a single earring. What was unusual about him, in those surroundings, was that he wasn't looking at Yorkie with desire but at Felix with what was clearly suspicion. Felix's fragile sense of security was shattered as he gulped what was left of his lager and, forgetting to say goodbye to Yorkie, moved quickly to a door marked Gents.

As he went, his watcher moved to join Yorkie Bar. There followed a brief conversation during which Basil asked after Yorkie's health, said he had seen him begging earlier (but didn't intend to report it) and who was the newcomer to the area? Yorkie gave him what details he could of Anton, including the fact that he seemed very keen on finding some guy called Gavin who wore a maroon anorak. He remembered that particularly because Anton had told him that it was put in the papers that this Gavin had been knocked off by someone, perhaps him.

‘Sounds as though he's a bit daft!' was Basil's comment.

‘That's what I thought,' Yorkie Bar agreed. ‘I mean, what's the sense in going around looking for blokes that are dead?' Basil was particularly interested in this information and bought Yorkie another lager, after which he stood watching the door of the Gents, waiting for Felix to emerge.

Felix didn't emerge. When he got through the door he had found himself in a passage with a staircase leading down to the porcelain from which came cries of anger and delight. A door from the passageway led into the public bar, a bleak, unpopular area of the Garden of Eden, in which only a few late-night cleaners, about to go on duty, were drinking Guinness. Felix walked by them and out of the pub door, leaving Basil wondering if he hadn't passed out or shot up in a cubicle.

Felix walked into Villiers Street and down towards the river. As he arrived on the Embankment at Hungerford Bridge, he saw an extraordinary procession moving inexorably towards him. In the lead strode Peggy, her hair standing out like a nest of serpents. She marched, as though she were a guard with a red flag before an antique train, in front of what was undoubtedly a moving hospital bed, its iron frame shaking and groaning as its castors hit the road or mounted unsteadily on to the pavement. In it, a very old woman, with long white hair, was sitting bolt upright and shouting. The moving bed was being pushed by the giant Dumbarton, beside whom Esmond in his bobble hat trotted enthusiastically. Awaiting their approach Felix knew what had happened. They had sprung Flo from hospital.

As the impressive cortège approached him, Peggy screamed, pointing, ‘That's him, Flo! Him what told lies about knowing you. So he could sleep in your quarters!' Felix stood amazed at the sudden wave of hatred from the wild-eyed woman who had spread out Flo's sleeping-bag for him. But Flo, like some ancient queen arrived by chariot, pronounced a final judgement, shouting, ‘Get away with you! We don't know you! You're not welcome any more round Shell Mex!'

‘Nothing I can do about it.' Esmond was beside him and apologetic. ‘You could try top of the steps across Blackfriars Bridge. Used to be quite decent. Haven't been there lately.'

‘That's right. You go down under the bridge. We don't want you round us! On we go, Dumbarton. And if he don't move, run him over!' The bed lurched forward and Felix moved out of the path of the approaching juggernaut.

When Flo and her bed had been settled in her favourite spot at the end of the arches, and Peggy and Esmond were enjoying a smoke before getting their heads down, Basil arrived. He was greeted by Peggy as a friend who'd always done his best to protect the respectable and elderly people sleeping in Shell Mex, and only issued a summons for begging after countless warnings – or when his wife told him he'd never make it as a sergeant if he didn't get the layabouts off the streets.

‘I hear you had a newcomer sleeping here, Peggy? Middle-aged and going thin on top, that's how he was described to me.'

‘We had an intruder. Put it that way.'

‘Does the name Anton mean anything to you?'

‘Nothing at all. It means absolutely nothing,' Esmond assured him.

‘Does the name Gavin Piercey mean anything to you?'

‘Sorry, can't help,' Esmond said.

‘You say this man was an intruder?'

‘He wanted to sleep in Flo's place,' Peggy told him.

‘Only when she was away.' Esmond was trying to be reasonable. ‘Anyway, you helped him sleep there.'

‘He thought he could lie his way in.' Peggy's eyes were blazing and a thin column of smoke emerged from each nostril.

‘Flo wasn't having it. Flo told me he was a liar.'

‘Not your sort was he, Peggy?' Basil was understanding.

‘You can say that again! Did you mention something about Gavin?' Peggy was making an effort to remember.

‘Gavin Piercey. Bloke who got himself murdered.'

‘Gavin. Yes. Now I come to think about it, I feel sure he mentioned him. Murdered, did you say? Anyway, he was still looking for him.'

‘You know where he is now?'

‘Blackfriars Bridge steps. Esmond sent him there to sleep.'

‘That right, Esmond?' Basil turned to the retired supermarket manager but Esmond had gone off, as fast as he could trot, in the direction of Blackfriars. Basil took the mobile phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and dialled a number. When he had finished his conversation with Detective Sergeant Wathen he put away his phone and looked into the shadows under the distant arches. ‘Fuck me!' he said, ‘if that's not a hospital bed you've got there.'

‘Donated to us by the Sisters of St Agatha,' Peggy told him. ‘We are
very
saintly girls!' Constable Basil didn't believe a word of it but he had more important things on his mind.

Esmond had set out to give a warning. Although he hadn't greatly admired
The End of the Pier,
he felt that Felix had been unfairly treated by Flo and Peggy, who had broken the firm rule of the colony of sleepers at Shell Mex, which was not to give out any information, even to such friendly and sympathetic members of the police as Constable Basil Bulstrode of the Homeless Squad.

Esmond had seen the mobile in Basil's back pocket and knew that he could be swiftly in touch with more powerful and less humane members of the force. Moreover, he had taken to Felix, he felt they hit it off, and he had enjoyed spending an otherwise fruitless day showing him round the street-sleepers in London, and thought he had made a friend with whom the next few years of anonymity could be pleasantly spent. So he was trotting along towards Blackfriars, fully intending to find Felix and tell him to get as far away, and as quickly, as possible.

Then he saw a cheerful crowd of young men with their laughing girlfriends coming down the steps to the Temple Station. He remembered that he had treated Felix on a few occasions during that day and had earned nothing. A crowd who'd enjoyed a happy evening ought to be good for a quid or two. He took a quick detour, stood at the bottom of the steps, held out his hand and said, ‘Can you spare a bit of change?' The whole transaction would be over in a minute.

It was, in fact, over very quickly. Esmond heard someone shout, ‘Give him change, shall we? Let's all give him change!' He was surrounded, overwhelmed, by a sea of faces, most of them laughing. He heard a girl's voice and felt a heavy weight, which seemed to fall from a great height on to his chest and forced him to his knees. Feet were kicking him, trampling him. He was lying on the ground, stretched out as though he were going to sleep, and then he felt a shuddering pain inside his head and he was falling into darkness. He heard someone shout, ‘Good night, Charlie!' and then silence.

His attackers had had a great night out. Starting with dinner and plenty of drinks at the Strand Palace, then
Anna Darling,
the musical, with a lot of whisky in the interval, finishing off with drinks in the Crow's Nest before they went for their train. Meeting Esmond was just a bit of fun and everyone ought to join in keeping beggars off the streets. They were in a high mood as they got into the tube and ignored one of the girls who insisted on sitting alone at the far end of the carriage and cried softly to herself.

The first thing Felix heard as he started up the steps near Blackfriars Bridge was a dog barking. It was a sharp, angry bark, which seemed to be the product of a dog infuriated by life and eager to bite by the throat, and shake to death, any passing stranger. And then, as he climbed the stairs, he got a great waft of the smell he dreaded, which had made him shamefully sure that he could never have followed Chekhov into the cholera wards and the penal colony. It was the sharp, acrid smell of urine, over which hung the sweet, clinging odour of shit, mixed on this occasion in a cocktail which included stale sweat and mouldering carpets. He was about to see those street-sleepers whose lives were far removed from those of the middle-aged patrons of Shell Mex House, and whom even Constable Basil couldn't tolerate because, as he used to say, of ‘their habit of defecating over the side of their staircase, regardless of the safety and comfort of passers by'.

Felix remembered the books in his grandmother's house: carefully preserved, hardly read copies of Dickens and Victor Hugo. When turning the pages he had passed quickly over the hard engravings of poverty, lean wolf-like faces, some crowned with tall, battered hats, peering out of the dark recesses of a London or Parisian slum – gaunt men, toothless crones and pallid, starved children. When he found himself in such a scene at the top of the steps, he wanted to turn the page quickly to the illustration of a groaning dinner table or a candlelit ball where men with drooping whiskers and bare-shouldered women waltzed eternally. The top of Blackfriars steps had changed utterly since Esmond had last visited it and the colony of dog-lovers and dog-stealers had moved in.

The group was momentarily lit by a flaming cardboard box and, as Felix approached it, he saw that there wasn't one baying dog but a whole pack of varying shapes and sizes, some bounding to the limit of the string that held them, others lying as though dead and one spaniel curled on the stomach of a sleeping man to keep him warm. As he moved towards the group, Felix saw that the faces were white and masculine, except for one girl who seemed very young, a skinny teenager, who stood in the middle of the dogs and young men, not like a captive but as some sort of ruler. She added her voice to the chorus of the dogs and shouted a stream of words which were lost on Felix as he turned and tried to walk slowly back down the steps, afraid that his panic decision not to spend the night with the dogs would rouse the group to anger. As he got back to the level of the street he heard the girl laughing. But when he walked away she and the dogs fell silent.

The baying and the barking started up soon after when Detective Sergeant Wathen and Detective Constable Newbury arrived. They didn't find who they were looking for but resolved to tell the Homeless Squad to get the place hosed down and the whole lot moved on in the morning. Detective Constable Newbury decided he could do nothing whatever about the stolen dogs.

Felix walked westwards along the South Bank, glad to be alone, with no one to talk to or depend on except himself. Some time, he knew, he would have to return to the world and explain. He would soon run out of hiding-places and he couldn't find a home among forgotten people. All he needed was to come back with what he was convinced was the truth: that the man he was suspected, for whatever improbable reason, of killing was alive and eating free sandwiches intended for the homeless.

He tried to imagine what Gavin would do if he were still alive but wanted, perhaps as another stage in his persecution of the author he pretended to admire, to remain hidden. Where would he go? Who could be trusted with his secret?

He felt in his pocket for his money and found he still had some change. He also pulled out a piece of paper which seemed to come as an answer to his questions for on it Huw Hotchkiss had written Miriam's address and number. It was getting on for midnight and he made for the telephone boxes in Waterloo Station.

The telephone rang and no one answered. At first he thought she was asleep, curled up in the pile of rugs, blankets and old clothes, white and naked as he remembered her, with the television bleating, and the smell of joss sticks and Chinese take-away. He thought he'd outwit the Furies again, climb the dark stone stairs, knock on the door and tell her about the inexplicable sightings of Gavin. Then, as there was still no sound of her voice, he became convinced she'd gone out and left Ian alone in the bleak bedroom, sleeping, his glasses neatly folded on the floor, locked in his private and impenetrable world. But then it became worse. The ringing seemed to him to echo in a completely empty flat. They had both gone, sold up, cleared out the junk or poured it in armfuls into the back of some friend's pick-up truck – and the odd couple he had regarded as an intolerable intrusion into his life would never reappear. As he listened to the hopeless ringing he felt unreasonably betrayed. And then he heard a coin tapping the glass of the kiosk and turned to see the pale, hollow-cheeked Yorkie Bar gazing at him like a fish in an aquarium. Felix, seeing him mouth the name Anton, put down the unsuccessful telephone and pulled open the door on Yorkie who said, ‘I seen him.'