Hotel Midnight (16 page)

‘Don’t you see?’ Benjay points at the two as, laughing, they kiss each other with a passion that thunders into the furious.

Yes, I do hear them laughing … and they’re laughing like lovers do … giggly, breathless. But I see they aren’t kissing after all. They are biting lumps – bloody lumps at that – out of each other’s faces.

Picture this with a soundtrack – Jim Morrison’s
Riders Of The Storm
works. But Joy Division’s doom-laden, yet monstrously beautiful
Love Will Tear Us Apart
will illuminate the scene with witchfire. London, Charing Cross Road on a January day. Picture it through the eyes of a hovering bird of prey. Traffic lumbering in the depths of the canyon formed by buildings that loom over everything; cold slate; cold stone; cold pavement; cold air sliding up from the river to weep around the faces of demons carved in more cold stone. Those demons are so high above the street no one can see them. No one that is, except a suicide, sliding through an upper storey window who will soon kiss the pavement at 200 feet a second.

Now sweep down between the buildings, with their windows that have all the lustre of dead eyes. The breeze whispers like a man sighing over the tomb of his lover, and London lumbers through another dark, winter day; city sounds are its ponderous heartbeat. Beneath its surface crust of shops, office blocks and asphalt, Tube trains slide: fat iron worms that pass through the dead clay and bones of earlier ages, earlier people.

Continue this image, slipping lower until we’re face to face with London man and woman. Down here a thousand eyes scowl against wind-blown grit; the cold pierces them to the bone. The door of a pub swings open, taking us inside where a dwarf stands on a table to play the slot machine; here a woman in thigh boots and furs walks into a toilet and slams a much-craved needle into her arm. This is the place where you’d find a stillborn baby stuffed up a chimney. Back in 1959 Tom ‘Turn-Out-Your-Pockets’ Frazer and sidekick Bunny Warren were drowned in a tin bath in the cellar. Rumours have it that Warren cried out in a childish voice, ‘I’ll tell! I’ll tell!’ as they forced his head down toward the water. Scroll further back. In 1898 the young playwright Augustus Trayling, cousin and failed blackmailer of Bram Stoker, hanged himself in the stairwell. The constable who found the body burnt the photographs found in Trayling’s pocket – right here on the tiled floor of the bar. The burn mark is still there for everyone to see.

This pub is just one component of the great, oozing Goblin City that is London. For fifty, sixty, seventy years, maybe a bit more, London allows you to run through its maze of buildings, collide with other lives, change them a little, or a lot in the case of the gangsters that drowned the pair of crooks in the bath. Then your time is up: you’re bundled into one of its cemeteries, or you vanish in a blaze of glory up some crematorium chimney. Another boy or girl takes your place and
dum-dee-dum-dee-dum
life goes on.

It’s human beings that soak this Goblin City to saturation point. But there are other things, too. It’s just you tend not to see them – the urban foxes, the sewer rats, the mice (especially those sooty little beasties you see hopping beneath the rails in the Tube). And I’m sure there are other things. Those you glimpse out of the corner of your eye. They haunt the underground places. Or the alleyways that run behind galleries and museums. Perhaps deep down I’ve known they were always there.
Things
sensed rather than seen. Like on a winter’s night and you walk through a subway alone. Someone’s hurrying up behind you. You turn round ready to fight or run (or beg) but there’s no one there. The tunnel’s deserted. Nevertheless, a cold presence seems to pass right through you, chilling your gut, filling your veins with ice, and you clench your fists as if you’ve just woken to the realization that someone’s violated you in your sleep.

London’s like that. Not that I think about it constantly. Just now and then when the icy draughts blow across the back of my neck, and the sensation comes that someone’s just walked over my future grave.

So. Picture this. The door of the pub swings shut. The dwarf pumps his last coin into the bandit. Lemons, melons and oranges spin before his eyes.

I sit with Benjay, a good-looking brown-eyed man, born in Sri Lanka. Now he’s a paid up citizen of the old Imperial Capital with a nice apartment in Holland Park. And that’s me in the corner: Jack Constantine; thirty-five years old; in cowboy boots and wearing a leather jacket that’s a soft, liquorice black. Home for me is a riverside loft conversion with century-old timbers that still exude scents of the Oriental spices once stored there.

We’re sitting hunched over a set of colour prints that have been piped off the video clips we saw earlier in the day. Around us, the pub is buzzing as people take lunch – either solid or liquid. Benjay and I are both drinking bottled beer, or rather allowing the liquor to become tepid as we fix our eyes on the stills.

‘I thought that both were wearing lipstick,’ Benjay said.

‘Kinky.’

‘But you can see that even though they leave something that looks like lipstick marks from a kiss, they actually start to pour blood.’

‘So they really were biting chunks out of their faces as they had sex?’

‘Yes.’

‘These people take their S&M extremely seriously.’

‘But it doesn’t add up, does it?’

‘No?’

‘We watched the first clip with two people making love.’

‘Making love? You’re turning sentimental in your old age, Benjay.’

‘Listen, they were making love in the first clip. Then they were frightened by something that was out of shot on the screen. In the second clip they were squirming on the floor having some kind of …’ he shrugs. ‘Episode? Fit? Seizure? You tell me. Then in the third sequence they had sex. And they were trying to mutilate each other’s faces with their teeth.’

‘And they were laughing all the time.’ I focus on the man’s face. Part of the soft flesh beneath the eye is missing. From a crescent shaped wound blood trickles. ‘Drugs?’

‘Maybe, but we didn’t see them swallow or inject, did we?’

‘It was edited out.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘That’s the danger of wandering through cyber-space, Benjay. You never know what all that surfing’s going to bring up.’

Benjay takes a swallow of beer and grimaces. Those photographs have painted a bad taste across his tongue that just won’t go. ‘There is a point to all this, Jack.’

‘I hoped there would be. You were going to give me a new assignment, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And it has something to do with those internet films we saw this morning?’

He nods.

‘But,’ I give a panto shrug, ‘how do horror movies dovetail into a three thousand word article about a has-been rock band?’

‘It does dovetail. Damn neatly, too.’ He takes another
mouthful
of beer. ‘OK, let’s cut to the chase. You’ve written four—’

‘Five.’

He assents with a smile. ‘Five Where-Are-They-Now articles for the magazine.’

‘Complete with side-bar.’

‘Which we’ve placed in the back quarter of the magazine—’

‘Because they weren’t exactly basking in the white heat of
topicality
. But then I’m a loveable old hack, not one of your young newshounds who are deliriously happy to camp out at Heathrow waiting for Madonna, or trying to catch what goodies come
slipping
into the sewer whenever some rockstar flushes his toilet.’

Benjay’s obscenely young face lights up with a grin when he remembers a well-publicized court wrangle over custody of ‘objects’ found in a sewer.
WHO OWNS LIAM’S POO
? was one
memorable
headline. But then, eighteen months ago
Click This
was a new music magazine fighting glossy, voracious competitors for shelf space. Benjay Sittri’s publicity grabbing talents included the famous – or should that be notorious? –
Rockstars And Their Turds
feature. The cover of the second issue bore a proud rhino
horn-shaped
spoor above blazing type that declaimed:
THERE’S NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ
! The match-the-turd-to-the-star series ran for months. It generated court cases, plus an unsolicited deluge of shit in shoeboxes from popstar wannabes who forced themselves to eat unfeasible objects and ingest food dyes to produce the most spectacular bottom loaves known to man. Magazine sales went supernovae.

I came in stuck to the sole of this publicity miracle. Benjay, the boy editor, needed some articles about rock bands like yesterday. So he commissioned me to write a series of filler Where-
Are-They
-Now articles. You know the sort of thing: library photographs alongside a few hundred words about an eighties’ sex siren who’s now that lollipop lady at the school down the road, or punk drummer turned Franciscan monk, or which
progenitor
of hip-hop now teaches choral music at the University of Vienna. People love the rags to riches story. They love the dark side, too – those riches to rags tales … of the beautiful becoming the damned … and the famous who sang to thousands now reduced to asking an audience of one what kind of drink they want with their hamburger meal.

So, in that Charing Cross Road pub I sit chatting to the editor of
Click This
over photographs of a couple who’ve bitten bloody chunks out of each other’s faces. It seems to have bugger-all to do with music. I sense another Marvel All Ye On The Excrement Of The Famous kind of story in the pipeline. To be candid, I didn’t particularly want to be part of it.

And, yeah, shit again, I could be at home working on the love of my life – a biography of Tod Browning; he of
The Unknown, Freaks
and
Dracula
fame. A book bundled with a DVD package that would include clips, out-takes, and best of all a CGI sequence that replaces Lugosi with Lon Chaney (Browning’s original choice) in the role in Dracula. Of course, a little thing like cancer leading to a not-to-be-missed appointment with the Grim Reaper obstructed Chaney’s career advancement. OK, yes, that book is my private obsession. My Eldorado. The quest for
my
Holy Grail. So what if I have spent the last five years working on it? So what if I take hack jobs like this to pay the rent and feed the cat while I write it?

With the knowledge shining bright in my head that I really need this job I say to Benjay, ‘I take it we know the identity of these love birds in the photographs?’

‘We do. But they’re not important.’

‘Oh?’

‘That is, not important as such to this assignment.’

‘Then why are we lovingly gazing at their photographs over lunch?’

‘Because I want you to write the lead article for the March issue.’

‘Thank you, Benjay. That’s nice of you to invite me to take centre stage.’

He shoots me a little look as if to ask if I’m taking the piss but he sees I’m genuinely grateful. This will be good money. This might buy as much as three months’ writing time on the Tod Browning book. I can even see chapters twelve through sixteen taking up residence in my computer.

‘This is going to be one of the biggest things we’ve done,’ Benjay tells me. ‘What’s more it will be a serious exclusive.’ He twists a grin. ‘You see, the backers want the magazine to gain a little more gravitas.’

‘Gravitas? Does this mean the end of rock star poop scoops?’

‘For now, Jack. Because you are going to provide us with a
serious
, newsworthy article.’

‘On this.’ I nod at the photographs of the bleeding faces. ‘Or about someone connected to this?’

‘Bull’s-eye, Jack.’ He picks up his drink. ‘You remember Cuspidor?’

‘Sure. A five-piece cult band. All Gothic fugues, doom-laden lyrics.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘And they took the name Cuspidor from the pot that people spat into. Picturesque, don’t you think? Their singer-songwriter Katrice Bryden faked her own suicide in Paris. But that was five years ago, Benjay. Who the hell gives a crap about them now?’

‘Because,’ Benjay says, tapping the photographs with his finger, unconsciously hinting at what he’s building up to, ‘Cuspidor are going to have a massive posthumous hit with their best-of album. I’ve got inside word on the pre-orders – they are phenomenal.’

‘Record company hype.’

‘You think so? Just tap the name Cuspidor into any
search-engine
and you’ll come up with two thousand or more hits. Kids are going ape about Cuspidor.’

‘So how do these pair of face biters fit in?’

‘I’ve done some digging around just to make sure this is an
article
worth commissioning.’ He pulls neatly folded sheets from his jacket pocket. ‘These are the names, addresses and backgrounds of the band members. I downloaded that little horror movie we saw this morning from a Cuspidor website. There are more of them. Lots of weird stills as well.’

‘All peeping-tom stuff?’

‘Some – not all. If anything, the overriding theme is that all the footage was shot in cemeteries. Particularly the big old Victorian boneyards like Highgate and Kensal Green.’

‘And their significance to Cuspidor?’

‘We can’t get official confirmation through the agency that handle the band’s material but …’ Again he smiles. ‘Let’s put it like this. Legend has it that the films were shot by Cuspidor’s singer, Katrice Bryden.’

‘She filmed this?’ I look at the photograph of the face biters, with gory red holes in their cheeks. ‘Why?’

‘To use an old cliché:
that, Jack Constantine, is what you need to find out.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That’s all. Oh, by the way, I need the article a week today. Five thousand words on the nail.’

‘With side-bar?’

‘With side-bar, Jack.’ He twists that wry grin of his, then raises the bottle. ‘Cheers.’

The Tube train carries me home. I’m one of those people who looks
Out
through the carriage window rather than
In
. Of course, there’s nothing to see other than a blurred wall as we shoot a hundred feet beneath London’s frozen streets. Only sometimes you catch a glimpse of a tunnel branching away to run into
darkness
. Then you might see the spectral blue-white flash of another train as contacts brush the live rail. For me, it lends a hint of mystery to an otherwise drab as dust journey.