Hard Light (10 page)

We went upstairs, footsteps echoing. Silvery mold seemed inextricable from the peeling wallpaper's fleur-de-lis pattern. Everywhere were piles of damp plaster where the crown molding had collapsed, and glass sconces choked with dust. The dark stains left by seeping water looked as though innumerable hands had raked their fingernails down the walls.

When we reached the second floor landing, most of the doors were shut. But I heard voices and smelled cooking—cumin and fried onions, sesame oil, fish. Adrian stopped at a half-open door and poked his head inside.

“Knock knock,” he said.

A young woman in a batik turban stood over a table with a gas camp stove atop it. She turned, dreadlocks wriggling from beneath her turban like spiders' legs. “Hullo, Adrian. You're up early.”

“You're up late.”

“Just got off work.” She poked a wooden spoon into a skillet, and my mouth watered. “I'd invite you in, but I've only got a bit of leftover nosh.”

“Thanks, Mariah. We're not hungry, anyway.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said, as Adrian waved goodbye and we continued down the hall. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Giving me a place to stay.”

“You heard what Mallo said: Keep her in your sights. He wants you inside the tent pissing out. This is my doss.”

He unlocked a padlocked door and went inside. I remained where I was.

“What?” he demanded. “You think I'm going to cut your throat? I could've done that back in Queen's Wood. No one would find you for a week. Sleep on the floor if you want.”

He started to shut the door, and I quickly stepped inside.

The room was dark and cold and smelled strongly of kerosene. The flashlight's beam moved jerkily across bare walls as Adrian crossed to a table with a hurricane lantern. He lit the lamp, switched off the flashlight, and turned to where I stood, shivering.

“It'll get a bit warmer once I get the heater going. Petrol's so expensive, I mostly just throw on another jumper.”

Besides the table, there was a mattress set atop box springs, an armchair upholstered in frayed red silk, and a folding wooden screen. A large kilim rug covered the floor beside the bed. There were no other furnishings, except for a rickety metal clothes rack, stacks of books, and a portable kerosene heater that Adrian was in the process of lighting. Against the wall were two tall metal tanks and a cardboard carton. The room's single window was covered with newspaper to keep light from getting out, or maybe in.

“That's a Tabriz rug.” Adrian struck a match, and I heard a
whoosh
as the heater's pilot lit. “I don't ask for much, but what I have should be of enviable quality.”

He took off his overcoat and hat and placed them on the floor near the heater, removed some dry clothes from the metal rack, and ducked behind the Chinese screen.

I crossed to check out the tanks: medical grade nitrous oxide, 99.9 percent pure. The cardboard box contained balloons.

“For raves,” said Adrian as he re-emerged from behind the Chinese screen, wearing rumpled tweed trousers and a baggy Aran sweater patched at the elbows. I did a double take at his clothing, and he shrugged. “Protective coloration—this is my secret identity. Me and a few of my mates organize raves in abandoned housing.”

“You can make a living at that?”

“If you call this living.”

I cast a doubtful look around, and noticed a number of photocopied 1990s gig posters on the wall. Altern-8, Orbital, Chemical Brothers.

“I know.” Adrian ran a hand across a psychedelic poster advertsing Paul Oakenfold's Spectrum acid club nights at Heaven in Charing Cross. “It used to be more fun. Ibiza, those Sunrise Mystery Trips in Buckinghamshire. Hands-on, balls out, all that. These days we have a Facebook page. At ten we post a number to call for the site of that night's gig. The DJ brings a laptop, someone else brings the sound equipment. Everything's outsourced. Bouncers, lightshow—”

“Drugs?”

He shrugged. “Mostly ecstasy and weed. Ketamine. That's how I got into business with Mallo. Supply and demand, I was the middleman. After he went down I devoted myself to organization. Only thing you need's a mobile and an abandoned site. London has both of those in plenitude. My own needs are modest…” He scanned the room. “As you can see. Used to be I stayed in art squats. Now it's just squats. Your turn,” he added, gesturing at the wooden screen.

I got my bag, stepped behind the screen, and changed. Even after pulling on two pairs of socks and my two extra black sweaters, I couldn't stop shivering. I put my wet clothes and boots and satchel near the kerosene stove and squatted before it, trying to warm myself.

“Makes you appreciate all mod cons, doesn't it?”

Adrian took out his crocodile leather case and popped a nicotine cartridge into his e-cigarette. He began to wander the room, stooping to straighten books on the floor. After a minute I asked, “Why do you live here?”

“Because I can't afford anyplace else.” He reached beneath the clothes rack and pulled out a rumpled sleeping bag that had seen heavy use. “Here.”

I took the sleeping bag, nodding thanks. In the late 1970s and early '80s, I'd known plenty of people who squatted in Alphabet City. Most of them were like me, teenage refugees who jumpstarted the punk scene after hearing the Velvet Underground or New York Dolls on cheap stereos in our bedrooms in Wilmington or Jersey City or Trenton or Queens. They made their homes and art and music in abandoned factories by choice, just like they chose to fuck whomever they wanted, or pop heroin or speed, or drink until they blacked out. Within a few years, addiction and AIDS and the bullish NYC art market took all of that away from them, along with their refurbished lofts.

Adrian watched as I unrolled the sleeping bag. “Do you think I do this by choice?”

“I dunno,” I said. “You just seemed kind of—”

“Old?” Adrian broke in. “White? Educated? All of the above?” He stared at me disdainfully. “Look at you, twitching because you haven't had a drink in an hour. Stolen passport and thick as a brick, thinking you could break into Dunfries's flat. You'll last fifteen minutes out there. They'll be finding what's left of you in the river or a ditch by the M25.”

I scrambled to my feet and grabbed one of my boots. Adrian laughed and quickly sidestepped as I took a swing at him.

“That's the spirit!” His hand shot out and wrenched the boot from my hand. “Calm down. I just wanted to see if you were up to the task. Here: peace offering.”

He handed the boot back to me, dipped into his trouser pocket and held up the vial of cocaine. I glared, then snatched it from him.

“Don't be greedy,” he said. “There's no more where that came from. Not tonight, anyway.”

A few bright bolts to the brain made me feel better. I returned the vial. Adrian finished off what remained, regarded the empty vial with a sigh, and set it on the windowsill.

I glanced around the room. No laptop, no sound system, no coffee maker. Not even a mirror. It was a strangely monastic place. With his top hat and languid air, Adrian had given the impression of being a dandy. Now he seemed like a dissolute college professor in an unraveling sweater and worn tweed trousers, doling out cocaine to a recalcitrant student.

I said, “That address. Where I'm supposed to make the drop. Who is it?”

“Stepney.” He looked pained. “Poppy Teasel's.”

I did a double take. “Poppy Teasel?”

“You know who she is?”

“The singer?”

“The one and only.” Adrian regarded me with wary eyes. “Most people haven't thought of her in yonks.”

Neither had I. Poppy had been a notorious California groupie in the early 1970s, only thirteen when she got her start. Her given name was Patricia Teasdale. Rock photographers loved her pansy eyes and tangled black curls, the tiny pentangle drawn on one cheek like a beauty mark. She was one of the two original Flaming Creatures, affecting the 1920s look popular with groupies of that era. Kohled eyes and bee-stung lips; satin negligees worn with lace-up Frye boots; enough long floaty scarves to choke a dozen Isadora Duncans.

Two years later—a century in groupie time—the fashion would shift to hot pants and platform shoes, halter tops over barely-pubescent boobs, floppy hats and long hair. The look that launched a thousand teenage prostitutes.

Poppy had always seemed smarter than that, the kind of kid who should've been cramming for her SATs, on the fast track to UCLA or Wesleyan. Instead she'd hooked up with the rock star A-list, guys who liked their meat rare and barely bleeding. These days, they'd be busted for pedophilia. Back then, no one batted a glittered eyelid at thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds giving blowjobs or doing threesomes in a suite at the Riot Hyatt.

Poppy ended up marrying a second stringer—Jonno Blitz, platinum-haired lead singer in Lavender Rage, a glitter band whose single ripple in glam's wine-dark sea was “Juice It Up (Ballad of a Silver Lover),” a three-minute amphetamine-and-sugar rush produced by Todd Rundgren. The song hit Number One in the UK charts and went Top Ten in the U.S., where it was picked up by an orange juice company. I bet Poppy still got residuals from that one.

Blitz quickly hit the skids and died in time to join the 27 Club. His nineteen-year-old widow had avoided hard drugs while Jonno was alive, but his death and the fact that he'd gone through two million dollars in two years sent Poppy into a tailspin. She started chipping heroin, and within a few months she was a full-blown junkie. A year later she was turning tricks in London.

The story might have ended there, with Poppy joining the same club as her husband. But Poppy had a few aces in the hole she hadn't shown while she was playing strip poker with her rivals in the GTO's and Plaster Casters. Poppy could write. Poppy could sing. And even after half a lifetime as a moving part of the rock-and-roll industrial complex, Poppy was still only twenty-six years old.

She kicked heroin. One night she renewed her acquaintance with Rundgren at London's Batcave. A week later she presented him with demos of half a dozen songs she'd written and recorded on a thirty-dollar cassette player in her basement apartment. Legend has it that Rundgren bought her a plane ticket on the spot and flew her back to the U.S., to record
Best Eaten Cold
in his Bearsville studio. It was the ultimate groupie's revenge: an album of tell-all songs that was a critical success, if not a commercial one. Poppy might have gotten five minutes of fame out of it. Still, that's more than most of us ever see.

I bent to remove Mallo's neatly gift-wrapped package from my bag and stared at it thoughtfully. “Is she still clean?”

Adrian nodded adamantly. He seemed rattled. “Has been for decades. I don't know what that little pressie is, but it's not drugs.”

He was lying. Not necessarily about the drugs, but whatever Mallo was up to, Adrian was in it neck-deep. I dropped the packet back into my bag. “She did a gig at the Bottom Line when that record came out,” I said. “Blew me away.”

“You sound like a fan.”

“I was. You know her stuff?”

“A bit. I'm more the ‘high on hope' musical demographic.” His expression was unreadable. “I'm going to retire for the night. Toilet's down the hall. Take the torch if you go.”

He moved the wooden screen closer to his bed, tipped an invisible top hat, and disappeared behind the screen.

Exhausted as I was, that bump of coke made it impossible to sleep. The hurricane lamp guttered to an umber flame then went out. I crouched in front of the kerosene heater, and after half an hour of listening to Adrian's rhythmic breathing, I took the flashlight and ventured to the bathroom. Unfinished hardwood floors, expensive sink and toilet fixture, walls scraped in preparation for a paint treatment that had never materialized. No medicine cabinet, just a few copies of
The Big Issue
and
InStyle
magazine. As I crept back to Adrian's room, I heard a baby wailing from somewhere within the cavernous house, and the ghostly pings of text messages.

Adrian's room was pitch black save for the flutter of gas-blue flames within the kerosene heater, like a ring of tiny UFOs. I kept the flashlight with me and crawled into the sleeping bag, staying as near the heater as possible. My thoughts spun, a familiar amphetamine-induced Catherine wheel of panic, paranoia, and the teeth-grinding urge for another hit. But beneath all the neurochemical fireworks something nagged at me: the distant memory of a word associated with Poppy Teasel, the scents of musk and amber.

Happy sixtieth, dearest Creature
 …

It came to me so suddenly that I jolted upright, only to find myself constrained by the sleeping bag. I rolled onto my stomach, cursing under my breath, and gazed into the heater's ghostly light show.

Poppy had been one of the Flaming Creatures. Just like Morven Dunfries.

 

14

I pushed myself up onto my elbows and stared at the wooden screen that hid Adrian where he slept.

The Flaming Creatures: That was the source of my lost memory. The spooky hippie girl whose face I dimly recalled seeing in a magazine had been Morven. The magazine had been called
Tell Star!
It debuted in 1973, its subject teenage groupies, who were photographed and interviewed and written about as though they were on the shortlist for the Academy Awards, rather than fourteen-year-old girls whose sole claim to fame was fucking rock stars and roadies.

I'd scanned
Tell Star!
a few times on the newsstand, where it stood alongside
Creem
and
Circus
and
Tiger Beat,
but it was boring and far more banal than any of those. Someone figured out pretty quickly that
Tell Star!
's most devoted readers were probably not teenage girls in the heartland who dreamed of groupie glory, and pulled the plug on the magazine after three issues. Needless to say, these days copies are scarce and worth a mint.