London Noir Read online

  “Nice nice nice nice nice.”

  “Rack off, numb-nuts.”

  “Lay down, gal, let me push it up, push it up.”

  “Look, mate, just fuckin’ …”

  “Leave it.”

  “Twenty-four pounds thirty-eight.”

  “What?”

  On the final corner: the pub.

  Well. I wouldn’t know about that anymore, would I? Be the last place I could afford to be seen in. I mean, what if they decide to reopen the case? Then what?

  When Mary tells me that it’s “the best craic in town,” I undoubtedly always agree with her that it just might be, and change the topic as fast as I can, save that she might see me faltering.

  The ways of W9 lives are reflected in the otherwise preposterous comparisons with the South Bronx.

  The five corners.

  The five boroughs?

  Preposterous.

  Henceforth, the tradition of tolerance for the rights of ordinary fucked-up people, a communal tradition that was fought for in the ’70s right on this spot by the one and only Joe Strummer and company, intertwines and combines to make up the disfigured landscape.

  Truth is, there’s no shrugging off the fact that these folk are forever condemned to scrape around like lunatics, sucking for dear life on yesterday’s rotten air, cast over hill and vale.

  Hanging over W9, Mr. Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower watches as the nuclear sun sets down. This architectural abomination stands creaking, turning a blind eye to Japanese photographers, while at its roots, skulls are caved in and crack rocks are sold to whoever the hell wants, by dealers who freewheel the nearby Grand Union Canal on stolen bicycles.

  Meanwhile Gardens is also apparent as it skirts both canal and tower and is the divider and last breathing space before visitors to this hellhole say goodbye to common logic. Forever.

  On the canal itself, most are as oblivious to the Canada goose; Gray heron; Mallard; Kestrel; Coot; Moorhen; Black-headed gull; Wren; Robin; Song thrush; White throat; Chiffchaff; Willow warbler; Starling; Greenfinch; Goldfinch; Woodpigeon; Gray wagtail; Dunnock; and Blackbird, as the birds are to them.

  Best keep it that way.

  Meanwhile.

  Gardens.

  The underdeveloped.

  The youth.

  The hood rats and the squeaks.

  Hood rats (mainly black), who like any young voluble yet asinine revolutionary, guise themselves and any sign of vulnerability in a uniform of oversize sports clothes; hoods pulled down low over cap even lower, with one hand always down the trouser front. Listen listen listen listen. I do what the fuck I want. Don’t arsk. A gun is a gun and I DO have one. Next to my blade. Live at my mum’s, innit. My sister’s got three kids and she’s younger than me, innit. My dad? Don’t know, mate. Don’t fuckin’ know. Three guys, right. Chase me in my car and I get mashed, innit. Don’t want no fuckin’ hospital though, innit.

  Squeaks (mainly white), who like any terrified young revolutionary, guise any sign of vulnerability by wearing a uniform of tight-fitting sportswear which also doubles as a mask for the lack of a soul. Obsessive about their appearance to the point of perfection, their goal is to have you believe that the projection of superiority is indeed true. Nice trainers. Gleaming. I do the right thing by me mum. If you (dirty filthy fucking animal) do anything to hurt any one of my family or their kids, I’ll fuckin’ kill you. I’ll clump you with a fuckin’ hammer. I’ll cut your fuckin’ heart out (after I’ve cleaned the house for me mum and taken me gran up to the hospital). All right? Have you been fuckin’ smokin’?

  A community of chagrins and fighters set against a world of cheap booze and even cheaper promises.

  Fighters against a war they started.

  Fighters for peace.

  Secondhand peace.

  A community of losers and bruisers.

  A community nonetheless.

  Life made difficult is practical by default, with little room for the spiritual.

  Even less room for the likes of me.

  My mobile rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Yes. This is …”

  “I fuckin’ know all about you, you cunt. You won’t get away with it this time.”

  Then the line goes dead.

  I look at the last caller to find the number withheld and flick a somewhat tentative snarl into the eye of my fear.

  Loud pangs begin in my temples. My throat tightens, and remembering to breathe, I look around to see where I might fall if I were to pass out. The world begins to swim around me and the deafening sound of an ambulance threatens to pop my right ear. As though a six-foot tuning fork has been struck at the core of my very being, I vibrate from the inside out. Then I stumble to a chair and clench my eyes as a million pinpricks pepper my forehead, squeezing out tiny beads of alternating hot and cold sweat. I don’t know if I will ever see again as I open my eyes and hear a high-pitched wail that accompanies the darkness. A backward scream travels into my chest, and as though a light has just exploded, I begin to make out solarized shapes in front of me. I can also hear my heartbeat and I know I’m back. After a few deep breaths, I manage to look out of the window from behind drawn curtains. Fade up to a rat and a squeak and a Mazda. Music so, so loud.

  Back from the dead

  Back from the dead

  To put a fucking hole in your motherfucking head.

  Their own heads bop up and down together, as though choreographed like two ornamental dogs that people used to place in the back window of their cars in days gone by.

  Arseholes.

  Easy now.

  Remember the foundations of morality and grace.

  Hovering on Johnny’s lowest periphery, Colleen O’Neill staggers along Harrow Road toward Our Lady and curses those red-nose buggers in Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Her bright red hair ambuscades the crowd; the stench of sperm keeps them at bay. She is literally dying for another drink. She now sweeps aside her blazing locks to reveal a face that resembles a weather-torn cliffside, as she sniffs an air not quite good enough for her and surveys the space with a condemnation reserved for the damned. Her goal is to head out of the space for Westbourne Park Road, where she just might get lucky with a punter, preferably three.

  Since the age of eleven, Colleen has been fucked into one bad situation after another. At the age of twelve, when she realized she could get paid for getting laid, there was no looking back. There were also no trips to the seaside. No hopscotch. No crushes on boys. No Bunty or Judy magazines with cutout dresses and little tabs attached to place on figures that you could also cut out and keep. No bedroom where she and her friends could practice kissing on their arms. No “what’s for tea today, ma’am?” Just no one. When the boxer said he’d take care of her, he kept his promise: beating her to a pulp, using her as an ashtray, and raping her daily. The drink became her only means of protection from a world that offered ineffectual amounts of faith, and little by little the price of that protection got higher and higher and higher.

  I walk around my own little “space between” and straighten everything, catching parallel lines and matching them up to other lines, like the edge of the carpet with the sideboard, the table with the edge of the carpet and the sideboard. Crouch down. Oops! That’s got to be out by two millimeters. I dust and vac just to make sure and straighten the cushions. Then I wash all the dishes. Well, they need it and you never know, do you? I dry them and put them away and wipe down the sink. Polish it? Go on, then. Wow. What a smell. The guy who makes CIF or JIF or whatever they’re calling it now is a genius. Removes even the most stubborn of dirt. That’s the truest statement I’ve heard today. I breathe in synthetic alpine drives and here I am.

  Back from the dead.

  Kelly Mews.

  Kelly’s eye. Number one.

  Ready?

  As I’ll ever be.

  I wash my hands and face several times so I can only smell the soap and brush my teeth a
gain. Then I decide on a shower, where I’m tempted into an act of turpitude, but no. Come on. We all know that the devil makes work for idle hands. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Next to! Alongside!! The very next thing in line!!! I towel down and look at my lean body. Not an ounce of fat. I iron five shirts and lay out several tracksuit tops and stand before them.

  Days off always did throw me into a spin.

  How to blend in? Achieve total stasis?

  No. Freedom. Freedom of choice. That’s the key.

  I pick my clothes for the evening and after several changes of mind (real freedom) I agree on smart but casual and decide I will roam into the open before catching up on some paperwork at the office.

  Into the open.

  Into the space.

  I double-lock the door and then unlock both locks and reenter to straighten out a couple of the cushions that seem to be slightly sagging at their corners. I then stand still. Quite still. I can’t see or hear any dust and breathe yet another sigh of relief. I double-lock the door and bounce down the stairs but the smell and the din of human life begin to take ahold of me, sending my guts into a whirl.

  Here comes Manny. I know him but I don’t know him so neither of us trades any goodwill.

  Best keep it that way.

  In fact, I quickly decipher that he thinks I am not me! That, for all intents and purposes, I am somebody else. He gives me a You’re not who you say you are, are you? kind of a look, and since, truth be told, I am in all earnest pretending to be somebody other that who I really am, I have no argument with the man. At all.

  I turn onto Harrow Road, past the “bus stop of doom.” Twenty people on mobile phones, waiting for a number 18, piled on the pavement and not moving as I approach. The signal of an oncoming bus sends everyone into a frenzy and I just get past before possibly ending up a victim of a human stampede.

  I cross the corner of Woodfield Place and Harrow Road and a 4x4 speeds up to get around the one-way system; it could have all ended right there. Luckily I glanced down to where his indicators are and, seeing no light flickering and knowing that the art of indication has been lost forever, guessed he was going to turn right. I jumped back as the deafening sound of throbbing bass covered the sound of my own aorta. He missed me by an inch. I imagine his face behind the blacked-out glass panel and give him the stare. He stops the car dead in the middle of the road with a screech.

  Suddenly I’m the people’s choice, Mr. Fiduciary!

  I continue to stare at the blacked-out window, letting him know that if someone has to die, let it be me. The door is about to open and I raise the stakes as I spread my arms in a gesture of fearlessness.

  Time stops.

  The light goes on.

  He pulls away with another screech and I cross the road next to an old West Indian gent, in a très chic outfit from Terry’s Menswear. He sees an old flame on the other side of the street; her stockings falling own by her ankles; her stained pinafore billowing in what he perceives to be a lucky gust.

  He calls out, “Old stick a fire don’t tek long to ketch back up!”

  She laughs out loud. “Tiger no fraid fe bull darg!”

  He takes his time crossing.

  Nobody minds. Except for a Prammie (Eighteen and born pregnant, with a hand extended to the council. Hair scraped back, causing a do-it-yourself, council-house face-lift meant to reverse the ageing process. Cigarette extending from an expensive manicure. Two kids and another on the way. Shell-shocked and suicidal seventeen-year-old boyfriend carrying a maxi pack o’ nappies), who pushes out in front of the old guy and kisses her teeth in disdain.

  I hit the five corners.

  Situated here, circus performer and audience participation reach their mutual understanding.

  Crossing at the lights, I see seven drunken Bajans cussing and laughing outside the bookies. They pass the bottle from plastic cup to plastic cup. Close your eyes and you might think you were listening to a bunch of Dorset farmers discussing the price of beef and Mrs. Mottle’s lumbago.

  I see a drunken redheaded woman and walk into the beginnings of a bad dream.

  Sancta Maria, Mater Deu, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

  A performer runs out into Harrow Road, just in front of where I’m positioned. He cajoles his potential crowd.

  “You tink me nah got money?” Everybody turns and laughs.

  Within a moment.

  A lean yoot, one jeans leg rolled up to the knee but not the other, chews on a matchstick and stares into the eyes of potential protagonists.

  A woman in her sixties—jeans emblazoned with the words Foxy Lady across the buttocks, swinging her hips veraciously—blows a bubble from too much gum and bursts it loudly, laughing and adjusting her bra.

  A man in track pants, too short, no socks, beaten-in shoes, and unshaven forever, stands rooted to the spot and dribbling.

  A guy selling scratch cards and methadone is able to pick someone’s pocket as she turns to see what the fuss is about.

  Someone asks for change.

  Someone asks for a cigarette.

  Two crackheads: “See my fucking solicitor?”

  “See my fucking selector?”

  Somebody screams.

  The performer stops the traffic dead.

  A couple of hood rats, left hands disappearing down tracksuit bottoms as though hiding some obscene disfigurement, steel themselves.

  “If yuh no ketch me a moonshine, yuh nah ketch me a dark night.”

  Someone’s mobile pipes up with an unrecognizable series of beeps meant to be the popular tune of the day.

  The guys outside the bookies carry on arguing about irrigation, feigning oblivion to dis stupidness.

  A Fiat Punto’s tires screech as the driver just misses the performer, who is now hitting himself on the head and throwing tens and fives into the air. He then sets about grabbing an aluminum chair from outside of Jenny’s bad food restaurant and throws it at the window.

  Loud smash.

  Applause.

  I enter the chemists opposite the commotion and feel a slight nausea as I automatically smile at the dirty-blond transvestite who works at the sales counter. She knows I know she knows, and I enjoy watching her hoodwinking the locals, our secret tryst sending me into a childish bout of rubescence.

  The chemists is like Doctor Who’s Tardis, as from where I came in; I now stand in a huge space filled with the cheapest goods possible. A queue forms in front of the pharmacist, who’s stationed in the top left corner. Mr. Pill for every ill. He’s got the purple rinses and the overweight hooked into his whole world and is dazzling in his diagnoses.

  I stare at Mishca’s hands, and catching me (as she’s telling some old bat with a mole that’s sprouting more hair than is on my head), she seemingly mocks us both: “Yes. It will work on you every time.”

  She quickly rubs the crotch of her jeans to guide my eye toward her. I over-stare and feign arousal before looking at the various ’70s shaving foams and after-shaves that I remember seeing in Mike’s bathroom at the home.

  My knees begin to knock and I want to fight somebody.

  I approach the counter, not sure what I’m to say.

  “Pack of Wrigley’s, please.”

  “What flavor?”

  Everything grinds to a halt. Freezes, and the natural sound fades out.

  What flavor? How about fucking … COQ AU VIN, eh, Johnny? Be there at 6; bring the van round the back or I’ll fucking kill your sister, all right?

  “Er. Spearmint …? No freshmint.”

  The chemists now seems small. Dirty. That pharmacy guy should be shot.

  So much for providence.

  Mishca licks her lips. “Anytime, sugar.”

  She then turns and reaches up to the shelf for the gum and I’m taking myself out of this place fast.

  I move quickly so that she imagines me to have been merely an apparition.

  I’ll deal with her later.

  I wal
k back toward Kelly Mews.

  Looking skyward and seeing red, I remember it all.

  Red sky at night, Shepherd’s cottage on fire.

  Cops are clearing the place out, as that idiot who threw the chair is being pushed, shirtless, into the back of a van. One slimy copper is talking to a girl of about fifteen and asking her where she lives, with a grin.

  I’ll deal with him later.

  The redhead is talking to some old woman and nodding her head as though she was a kid being told where bad girls go, and catching a ray of hope reflected in my eye, looks to me like the ghost I might have just become. She makes toward me but the woman holds her arm, pulling her back.

  “Just listen to me, Colleen, and you might learn something.”

  I dip my head and keep moving. Someone bumps into me, he’s about seventeen and I can just make out his eyes beneath that hood. I think twice as I know he is armed. He recognizes me. His face widens as I get in first.

  “How’s your mum?”

  “Yeah. She’s good.”

  I’ll have to deal with him later.

  I cross the road by the bank, or at least try to. The lights are on red but the cars just keep coming, afraid that if they were to stop, someone would drag the driver out and beat him to death. I walk out anyway, knowing I’ve got the law on my side. Hit me and I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth, after I’ve dragged you from your vehicle and beaten the life out of you, of course!

  Haven’t been in a gym for a while, but you never lose it. Right cross. Uppercut. Jab. Pow. Pip. Pow. Super-middleweight titleholder from ’74 to ’77. Mike said he’d never seen a lad like me. Said I had the “killer’s gaze.”

  I get to the other side. Away from the din. I cross again and dip between east and west, keeping an eye on Woodfield Place in case the 4x4 has found his stomach and decided to come back and face me.

  No one.

  I’m on the home stretch thinking about later, now I’ve made my decision.

  A drunk is relieving himself against the bins outside the futuristic Science Photo Library next door to mine. A trusta-farian, some spill from the Hill seeking a cheap thrill, opens the door from one of the flats upstairs, and seeing what the drunk’s up to, pretends, It’s all good in da hood, bro.