The Year of the Ladybird (12 page)

‘You don’t want to have anything to do with him,’ he said.

‘No. Have you seen him around?’

He shook his head. ‘What’s he to you?’

I gathered up my tray and said, ‘Look at the time. I’ve got to put my foot down.’

Nikki sat on the sea wall just outside the camp. We were going to walk together into Skegness and spend some time there. She looked very pretty. She wore a simple pink dress that bared her
shoulders and she had tied her dark hair back into a ponytail. She dipped her sunglasses as I approached, and squinted at me. ‘That ice-cream,’ she said. ‘It has to be a big
one.’

‘I can do that.’

She linked arms with me, as if we were a couple, and we walked along the promenade in the direction of town. Where the promenade ran out we crossed the dunes of the North Shore Golf Course and
we walked a little way along the beach before going up onto the road called Roman Bank into the town. Nikki took off her flip-flops and carried the straps between her fingers as we crossed the
dunes. Before we’d gone but a short distance she trod on something sharp and let out a little yelp. I made her sit down while I had a look at her foot. There was a bead of blood under her
toe, a bead the size of a ladybird, already clotted with sand. I could see a thorn in her toe and I pulled it out. I put a bit of spit on my finger and cleaned her toe.

She dipped her sunglasses again and looked at me strangely.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’

I suggested she’d be better off wearing her flip-flops because there was quite a lot of thorny debris amongst the dunes. She did what I told her.

‘You’re funny,’ she said.

I couldn’t think of anything I’d said that was funny.

When we got into town I bought her the promised ice-cream. I wanted to sit somewhere up on the Grand Parade and look out to sea. But she studied her thin gold wristwatch and said, no, we had to
go and find somewhere to sit on Castleton Boulevard. I said I didn’t think Castleton Boulevard offered much of a view.

‘Who’s in charge of this trip?’ she said.

‘You are.’

So we went to Castleton Boulevard. There we found a bench and we ate our ice-creams. She glanced at her wristwatch again. ‘Are we waiting for someone?’ I said.

‘Be patient, will you?’

I finished my ice-cream. The sun was already hot in the sky. You could feel it pulse. I felt a trickle of sweat run under my collar as we sat in silence. Then a lion came down the street.

The lion was on a leash. It was a young lion but it was already the size of an Alsatian dog. Bigger even. It pulled at the leash, and only just managing to restrain it was a small man in a
lightweight suit. His companion, a middle-aged woman in heavy-make-up and an extravagant, broad-brimmed hat, clutched a small handbag tight to her side and walked with a slightly theatrical
swing.

Nikki jumped up, almost as if to greet them. ‘Beautiful!’ Nikki said.

The dapper little man stopped and the lion stopped pulling. It blinked patiently. ‘Good morning, my darling,’ the man said to Nikki. His companion smiled. She looked about her as if
expecting more people.

‘Is that a lion? I said, quite stupidly.

‘None other,’ said the man.

‘We met before,’ Nikki said.

‘We did indeed,’ said the man. ‘Though I’m very poor at names.’

‘I’m Nikki. This is David.’

The man turned to me. ‘Lion of the Serengeti. Born in captivity. Live ten to fourteen years in the wild though up to twenty in captivity. They prey mostly on large ungulates and can run
the length of a football pitch in six seconds. This is Hector and Hector is eating twelve pounds of chunk meat fed five days per week.’ I had the feeling that this man regularly said the same
thing through a microphone. He blinked at me.

He seemed about to say more but Nikki spoke up. ‘You let me stroke him last time.’

‘As I said to you before, it’s at your own risk.’ He held a finger up to me and said, very pointedly, ‘Please witness that I said so.’

I nodded.

Nikki stepped forward and gently stroked the lion’s incipient mane on the top of its head. It reacted like any cat, narrowing its eyes in pleasure. Nikki was mesmerised. She ran her
elegant fingers through its fur and stroked along its flank. Then she turned to me. ‘You going to have a go?’

The man made an extravagant gesture of checking his wristwatch. ‘Go ahead, young man. But I do repeat the warning.’ His companion cocked her head at me and smiled.

I stepped forward and gently brushed the lion’s mane. It opened its eyes wide and looked at me hard. I know it’s ridiculous but I felt like the beast had calibrated my soul. Then it
closed its eyes again. I thought maybe his fur would be like that of a cat’s, but it wasn’t. It was much more brittle and coarse but it had extraordinary movement in it, and my playing
with it seemed to trigger a smell of musk and dung.

‘He likes it,’ said the woman.

‘I do,’ I said.

She giggled. ‘I meant Hector likes it.’

The man checked his watch again. ‘We really must be on our way. Good morning to both of you!’

We watched them amble down Castle Boulevard, the man with his lion and the woman swinging her buttocks and fixing her hat in place as she went.

‘How did you know he’d be here?’ I asked Nikki.

‘He has a route he walks every Saturday morning at the same time. Everyone around here knows him. He’s the man with the lion. It’s free advertising for his circus. The police
wanted to stop him in case it’s dangerous; but they decided there’s no by-law against walking your lion.’

‘You know what I think?’

‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘I think you are a lioness.’

She made a lovely cackle. ‘I’ll take that.’

I think I smiled but the smile must have vanished on my lips because I suddenly thought about Terri. I wondered where she was. I wondered
how
she was. Nikki had succeeded in doing exactly
what I’d wanted her to do, which was to take my mind away from Terri and Colin. But now that it had happened I felt guilty. I don’t know why. Nothing had happened between us, but I was
dogged by the feeling that I’d already made Terri some kind of promise.

It was insane. She was married to a violent attack-dog and here I was feeling responsible for her. Whereas I was spending my time in the company of a stunning and beautiful dancer with no
complications. One gave me lions, the other, snakes.

Nikki linked her arm in mine. ‘Come on. I’ve got other things to show you. What’s an ungulate.’

‘Dunno.’

‘Mr clever-clogs college boy doesn’t know what an ungulate is.’

‘No he doesn’t. Happy with that?’

‘Very happy with that. Shows you don’t know everything.’

‘Did I say I did?’

‘Not in so many words.’

We had a wonderful day together. Nikki was fun company and made me laugh. She wanted to show me what she called the secrets of the town. After encountering the lion we went to the old esplanade
with its formal gardens. After that she took me to an Art Deco theatre. It had been closed and turned into a hideous penny-arcade with a nasty plastic hoarding covering half the front of the
building; but you could go inside and see some of the hidden glory of the old theatre. The same thing had happened to a cinema. She told me it was going to be washed away; all of it, and she
didn’t feel sad.

‘It’s just had its day. The holiday camp is living on borrowed time, too. People don’t want all this any more.’

By ‘all this’ I knew she meant Abdul-Shazam, Luca Valletti and dancing girls rehearsing jaded routines in clapped-out Variety clubs. She meant the holidaying habits of the
industrialised working classes. She meant a way of life that had reached the end of its commercial utility. These were the last days of working culture ended not through earthquake or tidal wave or
volcanic eruption, but through the obstinate ticking of the cash register.

We went to a pub and had chicken-and-chips-in-a-basket. I asked Nikki about her future in dancing. I wanted to hear about her next career step, her plans, her dreams. She took off her dark
glasses, folded them and put them on the table next to her chicken-in-a-basket. Then she took a sip of lager.

‘I don’t know. This sort of work is dying out, too. I’m going to have to do something else.’

‘But there must be better work.’

‘And the better you have to be. If you’re really good you could work in the big London shows.’

‘But you are really good.’

The skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. I wondered how old she was. I figured she was about twenty-five but I didn’t want to ask. ‘You know nowt about it.’

‘I know what I see on stage.’

‘So who are the good dancers? Go on! Out of me, Gail, Rebecca and Debbie. Who is good and who isn’t?’

‘Gail is pretty shit.’

‘Gail is classically trained.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Though in a way you’re right. She’s got no sexiness.’

Not compared to you, is what I thought.

‘There is work,’ she said, ‘if you want to take your top off and show your tits to Arab oil sheiks. There are also cruise ships. I don’t really want to do that either.
But I’m never going to be a top dancer and I got used to that idea a while ago.’ There was sadness in that. She was a bird with a broken wing.

Some middle-aged men at a table nearby were eavesdropping. They were utterly fascinated by her. Why wouldn’t they be? She was stunning to look at and here she was talking about dancing
topless in front of Arab millionaires. I could tell they thought she was wasted on me. I felt their envy and their lust. They were like lions in a sawdust pit who had surrendered to the whip. I
didn’t give a damn. They could gnaw on their own livers as far as I was concerned. I could afford to feel superior, so when she offered to buy me another drink I held up my glass to the
staring men before draining it. They all looked away. I wanted them to hate me.

After lunch we decided to go onto the pier and as we came out of the pub, a man nodded at me briefly and passed us by. I knew him from somewhere but I couldn’t place him.

Once on the pier we strolled past a small arcade of fizzing, pinging and gurgling slot machines. There was a glass case with an upper-body manikin of a lady fortune-teller. Zorena. It was an
impressive name for a fortune-teller. Better than Rosa. Sadly, Zorena looked like Punch, but with a dark veil over her head. The paint on her hands was peeling, and in front of them were spread a
few playing cards: aces and queens.

I felt oddly fascinated by it. I was sure I’d seen one of these before. Nikki saw me staring at the thing.

‘Give me a coin,’ she said and I fumbled in my pocket.

Some tinkly music struck up and the dummy was underlit with weak yellow light. Zorena rocked and whirred and her flaking mechanical hands made a pass across the cards. There was actually a tape
recording of some wise words but it was so distorted and muffled we couldn’t make out what was said. When it stopped, a card spat out of a slot.

Nikki grabbed it and showed it to me.
Know Thy elf
The print mechanism had lost its S. We both laughed, but the laughter was won from very different places. Nikki wanted another coin and
the machine spat out a second card.
Choo e your future wi ely.

‘There you are,’ Nikki said.

As if by contract we walked the boards all the way to the end of the pier, where in grander times passengers would be loaded on or off pleasure steamers. We leaned easily against the rails
looking far out to sea. Nikki turned the conversation to my own future. She asked me what I would do with my life. I wanted to say to her that my immediate ambition was to avoid having my arms and
legs broken. Instead I told her some cock about going into journalism or copywriting or teaching, none of which career I’d seriously entertained for more than a few moments.

‘Journalism? Do you get to go around the world breaking big stories?’

‘I guess.’ That was the fantasy anyway.

‘You could take me with you.’

I laughed. Not because of what she’d said but because of what a great time I was having just being with her. She looked at me strangely. Perhaps she was offended, but I was distracted
because in that moment I suddenly realised who the man was outside the pub. I remembered where I’d seen him before. It was at the National Front meeting. He was the second man Colin had
introduced me to, the oily-haired man called Talbot, John Talbot.

Nikki sighed.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You. There’s always something else going on inside your head. You’re never fully there. Or here.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Oh yes it is. You’ve got a noisy inner life.’

‘Have I?’

‘If a woman waved at you with a barn door, what would you do?’

I didn’t know what she meant and I said so. Then she turned away and started to wander back up the pier. I was about to follow her when I was distracted by the sound of a motor boat
cutting across the water.

It was a dazzling white power launch, about twenty-five foot, cruising the shallows at low throttle and turning in a wide arc as it approached the pier. Behind it trailed a frothy wake, rolling
from its rudder like silvery earth from a ploughshare. I couldn’t make out who was at the wheel but a man stood on the deck looking towards me. I was struck by his strange posture. He stood
at a right angle to the line of the boat, looking over the gunwale at the pier. His feet were planted together and one hand seemed to grip his lapel. His chin was raised and he stared right at
me.

As the boat approached the pier my heart scraped. It was the man in the blue suit I’d hallucinated when I’d almost fallen from the roof of the theatre; the man I’d seen on the
beach with the little boy. He wasn’t holding his lapel at all: he had a rope coiled over his shoulder. Though the light made a shadow play of his grey features there was no mistaking that
familiar jaw. Worse than that was the awful confirmation in the shadow of his face. Even though the sun shone full on him and should have lit him like a stage spotlight, his face was grey,
blue-grey, smoky even. As if his face was made of smoke.