Just Another Angel (3 page)

‘I don't smoke much, but when I do, I like a cigarette to be … well … satisfying. They're an old and distinguished brand. Been around for years.'

She closed the packet without taking one and held it and the lighter over my shoulder, then dropped both in my lap. I wondered if it was her way of letting me see that she had no rings on her left hand.

‘You're a very curious cabby, you know.'

‘Oh yeah? And why's that, then?' In the mirror, I saw her bend forward to pull down the rumble seat behind me to put her feet on.

‘To start with, you drink coffee and cognac at seven in the morning in the company of people who don't seem to wash their clothes all that often. Then you tell me that your cab is called Armstrong and you come on like the old man of the hills about three-day weeks and cigarettes that could have come off a troopship going to Gallipoli. Yet the weirdest thing of all is that you never started your meter running.'

They often notice that there is something wrong with the meter as viewed from the back seat, but they are never quite sure what. From the street it simply looks
as if the cab is off duty, but inside I have had a neat little conversion job done incorporating one of the latest fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry tape-decks wired to an amplifier on the dashboard. Well, why not? It's a great conversation-starter.

As I slowed to allow some pedestrians across the zebra crossing near St Paul's, I selected a tape and slotted it in. With a bit of practice, it can be the same movement as a cabby setting his meter running. I flicked on the rear speakers and adjusted the volume to about half strength.

‘It's Dire Straits,' she squealed delightedly, moving into the middle seat. ‘Is it the “Alchemy” concert?'

‘No. I've got that if you'd prefer it, but this is their concert at Wembley this summer.'

‘I didn't know they'd made an album of it.'

‘They didn't. This is bootlegged.'

‘How exciting.' She didn't look excited; she was just as cool as she had been in the Gun.

‘It was a great concert,' I said, to keep the conversation flowing at this stunningly high intellectual level. ‘Well, they all were, ‘cos they were there for about three weeks. I thought everybody in London had been. Princess Diana went.'

‘Yeah, well, she did ask me to make up a foursome but I was washing my hair that night.' Sarky, too.

‘I know it couldn't possibly compare to the Gun and your swinging breakfast scene. What were you up to? Discoing all the way from cocoa to cornflakes?'

‘Christ!' She breathed it more than said it. ‘You only saw them for two minutes and you realised they were a bunch of wallies. I'd been with them since midnight and I didn't twig until about half past one.'

‘So why stay with them?'

‘Because I don't get out much these days. And –'
she stared into the mirror –
‘because I don't have any money on me. Not a penny. So it's a good job you're not a real cab, isn't it?'

One of the really big pluses about running a taxi, or what looks like one, is that you can swan up and down Oxford Street without getting nicked now that civilian traffic has been banned, though of course you still get the odd Swede or Dutchman who gets lost and wonders why all the buses and black cabs and I are hooting horns at him.

We had a good run straight through from Tottenham Court, and even the lights were with us. As we approached the Arch, I could see the Toff outside the tube station entrance selling newspapers and insulting tourists, so all seemed right with the world. They say that tourism will be Britain's biggest industry by the year 2000. Well, every industry has its Luddites, and the Toff is a one-man protest movement dedicated to humiliating visitors, fiddling their change and misdirecting the unwary. I thought about giving him a hoot but decided against it.

‘Here we are, madam,' I said over my shoulder. ‘Where can I drop you?'

‘Do you know Seymour Place? Round the corner.'

‘Sure. Been swimming there.'

‘Swimming?'

‘In the pools down the Sports Centre.'

‘You mean there's a health club down here?'

‘
Not the sort of club you're probably used to, darlin'; it's the local council pool – you know, GLC Working For London — but it's got a sauna and fings.'

‘And it's full of fake
Cockneys like you, huh? Spare
me the cheap imitations and just take a right, then a left. Okay?'

‘Soiternlay, ma'am,' I said in bad bog Irish. ‘De customer is always roight.'

She said nothing, but in the mirror I could see her lip gloss part ever so slightly, which is what passes for a smile these days among the supercool. On the tape, Dire Straits swung into ‘Walk of Life'. (‘You're not supposed to stand on the seats,' Mark Knopfler had told about 7,000 people every night for three weeks, ‘but if you all do it, who's gonna stop you?') I felt dirty, but it was the clothes-slept-in sort of grime that could be easily removed with a shower. Otherwise, pretty good.

‘Stop here. On the left. Park behind the Mini.'

I did as instructed and wondered if I should get out and open the door for her. She beat me to it, and I thought: well, that's that. Then she said: ‘You'll have to come in for your fare. I told you I don't have any cash on me.'

American Express would have done nicely. But I didn't say it.

Her block of apartments was called Sedgeley House. It was one of those custom-built blocks of about a dozen flats that look like left-over sets from 1930s sci-fi movies and are made of grey stone that turns streaky brown when it rains. The double-lock front door opened into a small entrance hall that had a bank of pigeonholes for mail and a desk with an elderly night-watchman (probably called a porter) pouring milk from a freshly opened pint into a Snoopy mug of tea.

‘Oh … er … morning … er …'

She gave the old boy a regal wave and stepped smartly into the open lift before he had time to address
her by name. There had been no names on the mailboxes either; not that it would have helped, as I didn't know which flat. Yet.

It turned out to be No 11, on the top floor, and it was decorated like a Laura Ashley showroom.

‘Nice pad,' I said, watching her drop her bunch of keys on a coffee table and then the fur coat over the back of the chair.

‘Bit twee, don't you think?'

‘Each to her own,' I said to the back of her neck as she continued across the room and through another door without pausing.

‘Back in a minute. Put the radio on.' She didn't turn round.

There, on top of a stripped-pine chest of drawers, was a large, chrome ghetto-blaster that anyone with a degree in electrical engineering could work easily. After a bit of fumbling, I tuned into Radio 4, which had bad news for commuters on Southern Region and a weather report depressing enough to induce mass suicide north of Watford.

I had just time to take in the video-recorder and, through the connecting door, the microwave and jug-style kettle (all portable and saleable) in the kitchen when I heard her behind me.

‘Well, then. We'd better settle your fare, hadn't we?'

She was posing in the doorway of the bedroom; and I mean posing, hands on hips, head angled back and one leg crooked slightly in front of the other. She still wore the high-heeled, really electric-blue shoes and the navy blue stockings, which were the sort that stayed up by themselves and didn't need a suspender belt. I'd seen them before in the sort of magazine that Dod bought for the dirty pictures and I borrowed to read the book reviews. That was all she was wearing.

The BBC timepips cracked out of the radio to announce that it was 8.00 am. And time for the news. It was going to be one of those days.

 

 

 

 

 

It was in the Mimosa Club that I next saw her, about five months later. Okay, so I'd forgotten to write. Or phone. Nobody's perfect.

I was playing about half a dozen frilly but pretty repetitive riffs along with an alto-sax man called Bunny, who was just as bored as I was. We were backing a teenage trio called Peking, who were into electrified Afro-Asian rock, whatever that was, and who were destined to go far. They had a girl lead singer who also played the electric plastic lids that pass for a drum kit nowadays. She was good, if incomprehensible, and quite a looker, despite the salmon-pink Mohican haircut. The other two Pekingetts played keyboards, didn't look old enough to get served in a pub and were probably designing clothes by computer in their spare time.

One of them at least could write music and had scored out a few bars to give us a theme, but we were under strict instructions to stick to the breaks and not to improvise. Which was a pity, because Bunny was very good and could have done a lot for their arrangements, given half a chance. But then Bunny was really interested in only one thing, sex, and was halfway to making the girl drummer before the end of the first set.

It was a way of life with Bunny, who always went for quantity rather than quality and, where possible, married women. It all stemmed from finding his wife in
bed with a bloke from the office. Well, not so much that as finding out during the ritual punch-up that always follows such discoveries that the affair had been going on for three years and two months, the marriage being three years and three months old. Once the divorce had been finalised, the flat in Muswell Hill sold off and the goldfish divided between them, Bunny had packed in his job as an insurance broker and taken to the streets with his alto. He was good with it and earned a regular wage as a theatre-pit musician and a session man on the odd recording. On warm summer evenings, he polished up an ancient soprano sax (making a comeback after Sting's ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles' album) and busked in Covent Garden outside the Punch and Judy. I told you he was good; you have to pass an audition to busk there these days. But it was all only a means to financing his hobby of women.

Not that he needed the cash to wine and dine them or buy them expensive presents. Bunny needed loot to finance his campaign, and it was at times as spontaneous and light-hearted as a U-Boat trailing a convoy. I mean, Bunny thought in terms of this woman being worth
x
gallons of petrol and that woman was
y+1
pints of beer. It was very cold-hearted … I mean, not the sort of thing I could do. Bunny always knew the best days for shopping at Sainsbury's (usually the day women picked up the family allowance) and when every ladies darts team in the area was playing away (home matches sometimes attracted husbands). And the worst thing about it was, he was successful. And with chat-up lines like: ‘Hello, I'm Bunny. I suppose a fuck's out of the question?' I ask you! I once suggested a more subtle approach, such as a sock filled with sand, and I do believe he considered it for a day or two.

So it was not surprising that Bunny saw her first. In between numbers, he nudged me in the ribs and whispered, ‘Third table back near the bar.'

Between the strobes that lit up Peking, I could make out the two girls at the table now in the crosshairs of Bunny's randy sights. If the Mimosa had been smoke-filled and dimly lit, it could have been a scene from a 1940s movie scripted by Chandler. But the Mimosa could never be smoke-filled as it was far too draughty, and the only dimly-lit parts were where the odd light-bulb had blown. The one on the right, wearing what appeared to be a pink jumpsuit, was a stranger to me, but the other was Jo, the girl from the Gun and Seymour Place. Well, at least I'd remembered her name.

‘I think you could be in there, boy. I know the one on the left.'

Bunny perked up at that and put a real zip into the intro to the last number of the set, a good standard rocker that, with a stronger bass line, would stand a chance in the charts. We both enjoyed ourselves with it to the extent that neither of us noticed the two women had left.

The Peking trio didn't bother with a bow – in fact the audience didn't even rate two fingers – they just slumped off stage leaving Bunny and me to pack up our reeds, mouthpieces, mutes and instruments, as the disco at the other end of the club came alive. In the one room backstage, which doubled as a store-room, dressing-room and bar cellar, the girl drummer was dabbing something on to a lace handkerchief held near her nose. One of the keyboard players was half-way down a fat joint. He inhaled and held it out to me. I took a draw and tried to see what the girl was popping.

‘Do you want some snap?' she asked between sniffs.

I shook my head as I exhaled. ‘No, thanks. Isobutyl nitrite really screws you up. Didn't you know?'

‘And smoking is very old-fashioned,' she said, inhaling deeply.

‘So's sex,' I pointed out. She turned her back on me and sat down on an empty beer keg. I handed the joint back to the keyboard player, who was crumbling a couple of white tablets into an open can of Carlsberg Special Brew. These kids were determined not to get to middle age – say 21 or 22.