London Noir Page 8

  I opened my eyes. Tottenham Court Road—needed to get off and change. I slowly pushed my way through the pensioners and hood rats, still gripping the bars for balance, and made it to the open doors, squeezing myself out of the carriage just in time before they shut behind me and the train moved off, leaving two dozen or so pissed off commuters to wait for the next one. A moment of schadenfreude consolation for me. I started moving toward the Way Out sign, patted my coat pocket for the camera. Nothing there. I checked the other outside pocket, then the lining one, panic surging through my body, then my trouser pockets, and back to the pocket where I knew I’d put it. Empty. Gone. I started running after the train as it moved along the platform, swearing, screaming at it as it disappeared down the tunnel. I covered my face with my hands.

  “You all right, mate?” a voice said.

  I let my hands drop to my sides and opened my eyes. It was a station guard.

  “No. I’ve been pickpocketed.”

  That was six months ago now. I’ve never been back to the flat in Shepherd Market. But I did go to the Printers Devil—that same day, in fact. I don’t know why exactly. Just to see Monroe there, I suppose. See without being seen. Thought I might be able to come up with another plan there and then. I waited till 7. He didn’t turn up.

  I got a text message from Dominic the next day, Friday, saying sorry but they couldn’t go ahead with the story, girl or no girl. He didn’t say why.

  I’ve been doing more gigs since then. My agency has got me a cruise thing lined up, starts in July, next month.

  The funny thing was, though, a few weeks after it all happened I was looking on the web for porn when something caught my eye—a video clip. The description said: Sexy brunette finger-fucks old guy up the ass—in his socks—funny. I downloaded it, sent it out on a group e-mail—to the Law Society, three Cabinet MPs, and the Lord Chancellor’s office. No text, just Nicholas Monroe, QC in the subject field.

  Monroe didn’t make it onto the Queen’s birthday honors this year. He must be very disappointed.

  I HATE HIS FINGERS

  BY SYLVIE SIMMONS

  Kentish Town

  That’s what she said. “I hate his fingers.” I tugged open the freezer door—iced up, as usual; who the fuck ever had time to defrost a freezer?—and when I managed to pull the box out, it too was encased in solid ice. I stabbed at it a few times with the bread knife—more because it felt good than for any effectiveness it was having—then threw it into the microwave and put it on defrost. I opened a bottle and poured a large glass.

  “You’re supposed to let wine breathe.”

  I lit a Dunhill—only ten so far today, not bad.

  “And you might consider letting me breathe as well,” Dino coughed. He sounded like an old, gay Jack Russell with emphysema.

  “Nice try,” I said, “but I never did get the knack of emotional blackmail.”

  “Shame, or Kate might still be here and we might have something decent to eat.”

  “Fuck you,” I smiled.

  “In your dreams. A dangerous line to use on a Freudian,” Dino giggled like a girl. “So, this patient of yours, I take it you thought of asking whose fingers and what she had against them?”

  “I told you, that’s all she said.”

  “I hate his fingers? For fifty minutes?”

  “Apart from the forty spent saying nothing at all and the two spent telling me she was only here because her GP told her she was getting no more temazepam until she took some sessions with the practice shrink.”

  “Who’s her GP? Philip?”

  “Yeah. His letter said his best guess was OCD—obsessive-compulsive disorder—but it could be a weird phobia. He said he knew what a hard-on I got from those.” Since I moved out of general practice into psychiatry—long story, and one I’d prefer not to go into here—I’d made a name, if I say so myself, with my papers on unusual phobias.

  “Hating being touched is not unusual. Having your hand up my arse gives me the heebie-jeebies and I’m a hardened pro.”

  I chose to ignore him. “Yeah, haphephobia’s pretty commonplace, but if it’s fingers, per se—well, dactylophobia’s a new one on me. But I don’t know, from the look of her she might well have some kind of body dysmorphic disorder. She looked borderline anorexic. Like she weighed all of seven stone.”

  She was the kind of girl who leaves no footprints when she comes into a room, but makes a big impression, you know what I mean? She was small and delicate, looked about sixteen years old. Wore one of those little girl dresses, bare legs, short-sleeved cardigan. And big Bambi eyes, like one of those little urchin paintings the tabloids always say are cursed. Burn your house down the second you go out. Maybe they’re right. Her medical records said she was thirty-five and married.

  “Would it help if I sat in on a session?” Now and again I’d take Dino along—mostly when I was treating children. They seemed to relax around him. Opened up more. The microwave dinged. The cardboard box was wet and steaming. Smelled disgusting. I tore it off and put the plastic tray back in the oven. Dino was right about the food.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see.”

  “I’ll tell you what I see: a lump in your trousers.” Damn if the little fucker wasn’t right again. “Takes wood to know wood. And what I know I see is a man who wants this little girl all to himself.”

  When Dino got excited his voice became unbearably camp. Now he was chanting in a high, sour voice, “Doc has got a stiffie, Doc has got a stiffie.”

  “Right, that’s it.” I strode across the kitchen and put my hand around his throat, lifting him clean out of the chair. I carried him like that into the living room, and hurled him against the wall. Legs splayed, bow tie skewed, his jaw hinged open like a snake getting ready to swallow a rabbit, the dummy lay propped up against the TV set, staring at space.

  For the first half hour of the second session she didn’t say a word. Just chewed the hangnail at the side of her thumb and looked up and sideways at me through her eyelashes. That little-girl-lost look. It was like she was waiting for me to tell her what to do. I found myself reaching across the desk to comfort her, make it all right. Fortunately I stopped myself in time; that was all I needed, another incident. If it wasn’t for my old friends at the practice—or more to the point, if it wasn’t for what I had on my old friends at the practice—I would have been out on the street. Which is where Kate and her fucking lawyer wanted me. At the last minute, I pretended to swat an imaginary bug off the Kleenex box on her side of the desk.

  Since she wouldn’t talk, I did. I told her not to worry. That she’d come to the right place. Phobias, I said, like American T-shirts, came in all different colors but just one size, extra-large. There’s no such thing as being a little bit phobic. It’s like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t. As I said that, in reflex, her knees pressed together tight. They were pink and rosy, like a little girl left out in the playground too long, but there was nothing at all childlike about the rest of those legs. They ended in a pair of expensive, black, strappy stilettos, with a half-moon cut out of the end of each one where her red lacquered toenails peeped through.

  I found myself, and I don’t know why, talking about myself, telling her about my automatonophobia. Fear of ventriloquist dummies. When she didn’t seem that impressed, I admitted that it wasn’t, of course, as socially debilitating as being finger phobic, since you’re likely to run into more fingers on a daily basis than ventriloquist dummies. But the effects, I said—the panic, the terror, that black-ice, deep-gut nausea—they were exactly the same. A few years ago, I told her, I was in the Oxfam shop buying coffee when I saw an old wooden dummy staring down at me from the shelf behind the till. In the past I would have frozen in fear. But I was so over my phobia that I bought it and took it home. Since then we’d become something of a double act, at least in medical circles, me and Dino. Kate of course would have put it differently, but Kate wasn’t here. Kate was fucking her lawyer, when she was colde
r to me than a Marks & Spencer microfuckingwave meal.

  I assured her that she too could feel the same way about fingers.

  “It’s not all fingers I hate,” she said. “Just my hus-band’s.”

  Her husband’s? We were getting somewhere. If I’d only known where, I’d have run straight out of that door, down to Kentish Town station, and jumped on the first train going anywhere else.

  My other half is a bitch. Did I tell you that? I’m sorry. I’ve been obsessing a lot lately, going over and over the notes. These are from our third session—the one where I looked across the desk at her and fell uselessly, impossibly, in love. It was raining like a dog that day. A typical black, filthy London day, I remember. Sunny when I left home at 7.30, though, or I would have taken the car. But I walked down the street and into a climate change. You’d think I’d be used to that trick by now, wouldn’t you? The one God plays on the English almost every single fucking day: an hour of sun first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you off to work, then pissing on you mightily. I’m a slow learner, I guess.

  It’s a short walk to the surgery but not a pretty one. It gets uglier still the closer you get to Kentish Town Road. Shabby, shapeless old buildings, oddly bent, like they’re about to collapse, though no one seems to notice or care. And those garish shop signs. The whole street looks like an old tart with osteoporosis. London’s full of shabby old buildings, but you can look at them and see that once in their lives they looked grand. On Kentish Town Road, they look like they were built to look that shabby. And the people on the street have grown to look just like the buildings, the way people start to look like their dogs. It’s no wonder half of Camden is on SSRIs; the other half are just too fucking depressed to go and fill their prescriptions.

  It was still raining hard when she arrived at 3 that afternoon. Her bare legs were so badly splashed by passing cars they looked like Rorschach tests. Her short skirt was soaked right through. It stuck to her so tight you could see she wore no underwear. When she sat down, she tried pulling the thin fabric over her thighs, but realized it was hopeless. She covered her lap with her bag and gave me the sweetest, saddest smile. Then she furrowed her brow. I didn’t have to say a word. She started talking right away.

  “Doc,” she said, “I’m telling you this because I think you’re the only person who would understand. I feel like a stranger in my own life.”

  I’d heard this before, of course, or a thousand different variations, but coming from her, it shot through me like electricity. She told me she’d been married for eight years—I felt another stab, jealousy, envy, loss?—to, well, let’s just say a famous rock musician. Or as famous as bass players are likely to get. Bass players are the overlooked band members. I’ve had a few of them sitting in that same seat in the past, trying to deal with not getting enough attention, not getting enough love. With nothing ever being quite big enough.

  “Have you ever looked at a bass player’s hands?” she asked. I couldn’t say I had. She was looking at my hands now, so intimately it felt like a touch. “You have elegant fingers. Artistic. I’m sure a lot of people have told you that. Bass players’ fingers are repulsive. They don’t have joints like regular fingers. They bend at the knuckle and that’s it. When they play the bass they just kind of throw themselves at the strings and bounce off—thwack. Like pork sausages on a grill. Like pigs throwing themselves at an electric fence.” She illustrated it with an air–bass guitar solo. It made me smile, which made her frown again. “I hate his fingers,” she said.

  The rest of him, apparently, was all right. He was ten years older than she was, but that wasn’t a problem. He had money and was happy to let her spend it. He spent most of his time in the studio he had near King’s Cross. Their sex life had always been good, though it had tapered off in the past six months. She thought the reason for that was her bringing up the idea of children, but really she didn’t care either way. Kate didn’t want children—my children anyway. Though I got hold of her medical notes through one of my contacts and, what do you know, she’s four months gone. Did she and her thieving-cunt lawyer think I was dumb enough to just sign it all over to them? She said the only reason she’d mentioned babies was because for a while she thought she might be pregnant. She would throw up every morning, usually when he tried to touch her. It had got to the point where all she could think of were the pigs. His fingers even smelled porky. They revolted her, to the point where she could barely eat … nor sleep, worrying about the morning coming and the fingers. That’s why she needed the temazepam. It wasn’t so bad if she took a couple of those.

  The desk clock chimed. I couldn’t believe fifty minutes had gone so fast. I didn’t want to send her out into the rain and ugliness of Kentish Town. I wanted to make things all right for her. Somehow it felt like this was my one last chance to make things right for anybody—me in particular. That night I told Dino I felt there was a voice that wasn’t mine inside me that kept on saying, Drop it. Send her back to her GP. Give her the number of the divorce lawyer. It’s not too late. Stop now. I expected Dino to say something sarcastic about how he knew he had a voice inside him that wasn’t his. But he felt how serious I was and didn’t say a word.

  I’ll tell you what it was like. Like I’d dreamed about this so often that I wasn’t sure what to make of the reality. One thing’s for certain, it wasn’t so real. Surreal, certainly, especially after our fifth session—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  It was session four when she came in, picked up her chair, and carried it around to my side of the desk. She sat down next to me, close enough that the smell of her shoulder made me light-headed. She opened up a large school satchel and said, “I’ve got something I want you to see.”

  It was a folder containing several sheets of A4 paper. Pictures printed from a computer. The first was a photograph of her husband. She looked at me expectantly, seeing if I recognized him. I didn’t. Like I said, he was a bass player. Good-looking though. Tall, thin, angular, unkempt in a studied sort of way. A lot of hair for a man in his mid-forties. Very English face, upper-class; it had that distracted, vaguely inbred look. He stood by the front door of a house—theirs, I imagine—with his hands in his pockets, smiling. In the second picture he was onstage. The third was the same photograph zoomed in on his fingers, playing the bass guitar. She was right. They were ugly. Thick, pink, and rigid, like a glove-puppet’s. The last picture was the most disturbing. It was another close-up, but this time so close-up and so fuzzy as to be almost impossible to make it out. It appeared to be his fingers, or the bottom half of them anyway. The top half had disappeared into something white and mottled like cottage cheese and at the same time dark and fleshy like meat.

  “He’s cheating,” she said, and then she started to cry, loudly, like someone was gutting her. So loudly one of the practice nurses came in and put an arm around her. For the rest of the session I sat there helplessly, watching her sob. When I got home, Dino asked me if I’d seen the package under the front doormat. I hadn’t, though I must have stepped on it coming in. It was an envelope, which I opened right up. Inside was a DVD. I poured a glass of wine while my laptop booted up. We spent the whole night, me and Dino, watching that DVD over and over on the computer screen. And again, not a single word of sarcasm. Not even about the cigarettes.

  She turned up for session five in a pair of black jeans and an oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt—mine, I recognized the bloodstain on the front, but that’s another story. This one’s about fingers. It was funny how boyish she looked. Beautiful though. Especially when she blushed, which she did when I told her that Dino had watched the DVD with me. Dino sat in this time. She told me she wanted to meet him. I asked her if it was shot in her husband’s studio. She said she supposed so but she’d never been inside. If he wasn’t on the road or with the band, he went there at 2 every afternoon, returning home at 8. He told her he was working on a “solo project” and didn’t want to be disturbed.

  In the film, the
place had the look of a well-appointed office. A wood-paneled front room was hung with gold and platinum albums. There was a large, leather-top desk, an upright bass, three or four electric bass guitars on stands. A trestle table, almost as wide as the room, was packed with an assortment of computer and recording equipment. There must have been webcams everywhere, since you could pretty much see every corner. He selected one of the electric basses, and with that in one hand and a carrier bag in the other, he walked along a corridor that led to another room at the end.

  This room was even larger. Most of the space was taken up by an enormous mattress stacked on two, maybe three divans. It was very high for a bed. Lying on top was an old woman. She must have been seventy years old if she was a day. It takes more than sixty-nine years to get that ugly. She was stark naked. And the fattest woman I had ever seen in my life.

  He put the carrier bag on the bed and sat beside her. Out of the bag he took a cardboard box which was stuffed with cakes, the sort they sell in cheap bakeries, yellow sponge, bright pink icing. Tenderly he slotted a whole cake into her mouth. As soon as she finished one, he fed her another, until the box was empty. Every time a piece fell from her lips he would guide it back in with one of those broad fingers. When she was all done, he kissed her mouth, which was puffy and purple, hemorrhoidal. Then he tried moving her—with difficulty, but not unkindly—to the foot of the bed. One hundred and ninety kilos of human being, shifted centimeter by centimeter. He got her upright somehow and propped her against a mountain of cushions. She looked like a melting Buddha blancmange. He kissed her face, her breasts—the folds on her body made every part of her look like breasts—then eased her thighs apart. He aimed a remote control at the doorway. Recording equipment clicked on. Facing a camera, he began to speak. I was wrong about him being upper-class English, he was American.

  “The music of the spheres. We’ve all heard that expression. Some of us—the true artists—have spent our lives trying to capture the mysterious, terrifying beauty of that siren sound, only to be dashed on the rocks. It was the scientists that discovered its source. It’s the sound waves made when a black hole sucks in and swallows a star.” At these words the old woman licked her lips and grinned. He thrust his right hand between her legs.