Keeping Bad Company (2 page)

I couldn’t blame them. The fact was, I belonged to neither group. They didn’t know what to make of me. I didn’t have a mother in skin-tight designer wear nor in a Barbour. I had Grandma Varady, who’d turn up on Open Day in a rusty black velvet dress and a crooked wig. They treated me like a freak so I began to behave like one and it stuck. My family had slaved and saved to send me to that school. I wasn’t sorry to leave it but I was desperately sorry for Dad and Grandma, who sacrificed so much for me. I was also sorry I dropped out of the Dramatic Arts course at the local college which followed my swift removal from school. I did seem to fit in there. But my leaving was due to circumstances beyond my control, as they say: Grandma dying about a year after Dad died, and my becoming homeless and all the rest of it. One day I’ll make it as an actress, you see if I don’t.

In the meantime, even the approval of an old wino like my companion rang comfortingly on the ear. So easily are we flattered.

I said, ‘Thanks.’

He was prising the plastic lid off the beaker and he had a touch of the shakes, so I added a warning that he should take care. I doubt he had much sensation left in his fingers, which were white beneath the dirt, due to lack of circulation, and tipped with ochre-coloured overgrown nails.

‘It’s all right, dear,’ he said. ‘What’s your name, then?’

‘Fran,’ I told him.

‘I’m Albert Antony Smith,’ he announced with something of a flourish. ‘Otherwise known as Alkie Albie. They call me that but it ain’t true. Slander, that’s what it is. I like a drink like anyone does, don’t they? Dare say you like a drink, glass of wine, mebbe?’ He belched and I was engulfed in a souvenir of his last encounter with the grape.

I shifted smartly along the metal bench and told him that yes, I liked a glass of wine, but this wasn’t one of the occasions and if he thought I was going to buy him anything alcoholic, he could forget it. The coffee was as far as it went and he should make the most of it.

His crinkled, grey-stubbled face was a mesh of open-pored skin dotted with blackheads, which gave the impression he looked at you through a spotted veil, like the ones on hats worn by forties film actresses. These damaged features took on a shocked expression. He denied vehemently that he’d had any such idea in mind.

Then he slurped up the boiling coffee in a way that suggested he couldn’t have much sensation left in his mouth either. I sipped mine cautiously and it was still almost unbearably hot. Why do they do that – serve it so hot? They know you’re waiting for a train and have only got so much time to drink the stuff.

‘I’ve been down the tube,’ he said, confirming my guess. He indicated the entry to the Underground a little way off, by the ticket windows. ‘It’s nice and warm down there. I spend most of the day down the tube this time of year, till the transport coppers throw me out. They’re miserable buggers, them coppers. I sleep rough mostly, in doorways and such. Bloody cold it is, too.’

I knew that. But I said nothing because I didn’t want to encourage him, though I’d left it a bit late for that and he didn’t need encouragement anyway.

He rubbed his nose on his sleeve and snorted noisily. ‘Cold gets you terrible on the chest.’

‘Have you tried the Salvation Army hostels?’ I asked.

‘I never go to hostels ’less I has to,’ he said. ‘They’re very keen on baths in them places. Don’t do you no good, bathing. Washes away the natural oils.’ Slurp. Sniff. Snort. ‘You got a job, dear? Or you on the dole?’

‘I haven’t got a job at the moment,’ I said. ‘I was waitressing but the café burnt down.’

‘Shame,’ he sympathised. ‘Protection geezers, was it?’

‘No, just the chip pan.’

‘Nasty,’ he said.

‘I want to be an actress,’ I told him, though goodness knows why. Perhaps to stop him sniffing.

‘They always want girls in them bars in Soho. Bit of waitressing, bit of stripping. Do all right.’

‘Acting, Albie!’ I snapped. ‘A-C-T-I-N-G, all right?’

‘A thespian!’ he said grandly. ‘I know what that is. I ain’t ignorant. Ter be or not ter be, that’s the ticket!’

‘That is the
question
, Albie!’ I wasn’t sure why I was bothering but I sensed there was a good-natured sociability under all that grime. It made me feel I couldn’t just tell the poor old devil to push off.

‘I had an act once.’ He leaned back on the metal bench and gazed dreamily at the Quick Snack stall. People had cleared away from all around us and we sat there together in cosy isolation.

I thought he’d got a pretty good one now, considering how easily he’d conned me out of a cup of coffee. But his next words cut me down to size.

‘I was on the halls,’ he said. ‘Don’t have variety no more. All that tellyvision, that’s what killed it. We had some marvellous acts on the halls.’

‘Go on, Albie.’ I was surprised and really interested. Poor old fellow, He’d been someone once. Just shows you shouldn’t judge. And, oh God, look at him now. Was I going to end up like that? As a bag lady, mad as a hatter, and with all my belongings in a couple of sacks?

‘I had some poodles,’ he said. ‘They’re very intelligent, are poodles. They learn very quick. Three of ’em I had. Mimi, Chou-Chou and Fifi. They done tricks, you know. You wouldn’t think how clever they were. They played football, walked on their hind legs, played dead. Mimi pushed Fifi along in a little cart, done up like a nursemaid in a frilly cap and Fifi with a kid’s bonnet on. But Chou-Chou, he was the smartest. He could count numbers and read ’em. I’d hold up a card and he’d bark the right number of times. I had to give him a bit of signal, of course, but the audience never saw it. He was the best dog I ever had, Chou-Chou, and dead easy to train. He was very partial to a glass of stout. He’d have done anything for a nip of stout, would old Chou-Chou.’

‘I’d have liked to have seen the act,’ I said honestly. I didn’t ask what happened to kill it off because I didn’t want to know. Perhaps it had just been the down-turn in the variety scene, but I guess the bottle had done it. Albie’d shown up once too often, too drunk to do the act, or made a fool of himself on stage and that had been it. I wondered what happened to Mimi, Chou-Chou and Fifi.

As if he could read my mind, he added. ‘I couldn’t feed’em, after that. I couldn’t feed meself. They was clever little dawgs. Woman took them as said she could find ’em homes. I hope she found ’em good homes. I asked her to try and keep ’em together. They were used to being together. But I reckon she split ’em up. No one would want all three of them. Reckon they pined.’

Not only the poodles had pined, I thought.

He seemed to pull himself together with an effort. ‘What else you do, then?’ he asked. ‘When you’re resting, as we sez in the business?’ Clearly he now saw us as fellow professionals.

‘I look into things for people. I’m a sort of enquiry agent – unofficial.’ I tried not to sound self-conscious.

He put down his beaker and stared at me. ‘What, a private eye, like?’

‘Not a proper one. No office or anything. I’d have to keep books and pay tax and stuff if I set up properly. I’m unofficial. Anything legal.’

‘Are you now . . .’ he said very slowly and, when I thought about it later, very seriously.

I should have got up and run then, but I didn’t.

‘You any good at it?’

‘Not bad,’ I said with just a twinge of conscience because I’d only had one case. But I’d managed it pretty well, so my failure rate was nil and there’s not many detectives can say that, can they?

He was quiet for quite a while and I was just grateful for it. A few people had come through the gates from the platforms and it looked as if a train was in. They must have fixed the broken-down train or shunted it away.

‘You see funny things when you sleep rough, like I do.’

What?’ I was watching for Ganesh and only half heard Albie.

He obliged by repeating it. ‘Only I keep my head down. I don’t want no trouble. It’s like anyone what’s out and about at night, on the streets. You see a lot of things and you say nothing. Fellows what work on the dustcarts, going round the restaurants and so on, clearing away, early hours of the morning – they see all sorts, but they never say anything. That way, no one bothers the dustmen and it’s the only way they can work safe, see?’

He peered into the bottom of his empty cup but I wasn’t obliging with another fifty-pence piece. I’d just got my giro but it didn’t stretch to supporting Albie as well as me in the style to which we had the misfortune to be accustomed.

But he had other things on his mind. ‘I saw something the other night, though, and it’s been really buggin’ me ever since. I saw a girl. Nice young girl, she was, not a tart. She wore jeans and a little denim jacket over a big knitted sweater. She had long fair hair with one of them things what keeps it tidy.’

He put his hand to his head and drew a line from ear to ear over the top of his skull, meaning, I supposed, an Alice band. I knew about them. The daughters of the mothers with the baggy skirts had been keen on them.

‘About your age, mebbe a year or two younger. Not very old. Pretty. Running like the clappers. She had a good turn of speed, too.’

‘Running for the last train,’ I said idly. I don’t know why, perhaps because we were in a station.

‘Naw . . . I told you. I was in the porch, over at St Agatha’s church. You know St Agatha’s?’

I did know it. It was a quarter of a mile or so from where I lived, a red-brick Gothic lookalike with wire over all the windows to protect them from missiles, like stones or Molotov cocktails. Churches attract that kind of attention these days.

‘She wasn’t running for no train. She was running from two fellers. Only they was in a car, so it didn’t do her no good. They come screeching round the corner, pulls up by my porch. Out jumps these two blokes and grabs the girl. She starts kicking and yelling, but one of ’em put a hand over her mouth. They shove her in the car and whoosh, off they go.’

This story was beginning to worry me, always supposing that he hadn’t simply made it up. But it had a ring of truth about it. I thought of a possible explanation, not nice, but possible.

‘St Agatha’s runs a refuge,’ I said. ‘For battered wives and so on. She might’ve come from there, or been on her way there, and her husband, or boyfriend, and one of his friends grabbed her.’

‘She didn’t look like no battered wife,’ Albie said. ‘She looked like one of the Sloanes, what they call ’em. I seen it clear. Right by me. Only they didn’t see me. I squeezed in the back of the porch, outa the streetlight.’ He paused. ‘They weren’t no amateurs,’ he said. ‘They were heavies. They weren’t no husband or boyfriend. They knew what they were about. He’d got a bit of a cloth in his hand.’

‘Who had?’ I was getting more and more worried. At this rate I’d be needing some of Hari’s pills.

‘One of the fellers. He put it over her face. It smelled, like a horspital. I could smell it, even from where I was. She stopped kicking, sagged a bit, and he shoved her in the back of the car. She went in limp and just lay there on the back seat in a heap. I could just see her shoulder in that woolly sweater. Knockout drops.’

‘Did you report this, Albie?’

‘Course I didn’t!’ He sounded reproachful as if I’d suggested something mildly indecent. ‘Think I want my head bashed in? They’d come looking for me, they would, them fellers. I’d be a witness. I see their faces and their motor. It was blue, or I think it was. The lamplight plays tricks with colours. It was an old model, Cortina. It’d got a bit of damage along one side, a white scrape, like he’d had a run-in with a white car and it’d left its mark, know what I mean?’

I knew what he meant. I also reflected that the fact he’d noticed so much was remarkable. However, on the whole, I thought so many details made it unlikely he was making it all up.

‘Albie, you’re saying you witnessed a serious crime! That girl could be in real danger. You ought – ’

‘Fran?’

I’d been so engrossed with Albie’s story that I’d failed to see that Ganesh had arrived. He was standing in front of me, hands shoved in the pockets of his black leather jacket, and frowning. The wind whipped up his long black hair. He took a hand from his pocket to point at Albie and asked, ‘What does
he
want?’

‘Who’s this, then?’ asked Albie, and it was clear he was offended. ‘Friend of yours?’

‘Yes, I was waiting – ’ But I didn’t get any further.

Albie got up. ‘Ta for the coffee, ducks.’ He began to pad away in that surprisingly nimble way he had.