Bad Dreams (8 page)

A wino with black toes poking through his mangled trainers aimed himself at her. He skittered through the Christmas-shopping crowds like a pinball, bouncing off walls, lampposts and people, his shaky eyes fixed on her. The grubby hand was already coming out, and the ritual phrase was working its way down from the speech centres of his brain to the spirits-slurred tongue.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, before he could get it out, ‘Could you spare ten pence for a cup of coffee?’

Usually, derelicts retreated in astonishment at this tactic, but the Soho wino was a hardier breed.

‘Fuck you, sister,’ he coughed at her through black and broken teeth, ‘and the horse you rode in on.’

She sidestepped him, and walked on rapidly. She was not happy with her behaviour. She had done pieces on homelessness. She ought to have more sympathy.

‘I fought in three world wars for you,’ the tramp shouted at her back. She wished Mace was legal in this country.

The capital was turning into a Third World city, she thought. At every central London subway station, there were begging kids, shivering in several layers of clothes, a pleading message printed in biro on a piece of cardboard. Less aggressive than the alky panhandlers, the kids were even more depressing, fiercely ashamed of their situation, never meeting the eyes of the passersby. The tramp she had dodged was one of the old-style bums, the last of the summer winos, and was most likely feeling the pinch. With younger, less stereotypically derelict, not obviously cracked people sleeping rough and trying to get into the spare change business, the old and alcoholic would be pushed out of their place in the begging order. The street population was expanding, as more and more people fell through the gaps in the welfare state’s safety net. There were ways to get by, but none of them were pleasant, or safe. Soon, London would be just Tijuana, Bangkok or Casablanca with a lousy climate.

The Club Des Esseintes was difficult to find, but she guessed that it was supposed to be. There was a nostalgia shop at the address listed in Judi’s diary, with a passport photographer’s and a French model agency upstairs. The plaque was screwed to a wall papered many times over with posters for rock gigs and albums. A group called Faster Pussycat, frozen in mid-scream, dominated the pasted-and-torn collage. She had to look at the wall for a full minute before she found the sign. Someone had scraped a hole in Neneh Cherry’s midriff so the words were still visible. Private Club – Walk Down. And in the corner, in little curlicue letters, Des Esseintes.

The shop was full of faded magazines displayed in racks, piles of movie posters and boxes of still photographs. The major display was a selection of one-sheets for films about Santa Claus. In one, the cheery old gentleman was brandishing a bloody hatchet over a naked girl. The ad line boasted ‘it’s a ho-ho-ho-horror!’ You better watch out, Anne thought. Someone had driven a dagger smeared with stage blood through a smiling cut-out of Dudley Moore dressed as an elf.
Phil Spector’s Christmas Album
was coming through the shop’s speakers, ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ by Darlene Love. At least that was an improvement on Derek Douane. ‘Do you have any material on Caroline Munro,’ a foreign customer was asking a bored attendant, ‘or Rosanna Podesta?’ Anne looked around the shop and found the stairwell behind an impressive array of Japanese warrior robots.

The spiral staircase was black, and the walls bright scarlet, but the well was lit only by one bare bulb at the top. Anne went down into the darkness. The stairs fed her into a corridor, dimly lit by imitation candles in electric sconces. The walls were blood red, the floor herringbone-tiled and polished. There were unrecognizable portraits of men in periwigs hanging between the candles. The Marquis de Sade, she supposed, and intimate friends.

A level below the street, she could no longer hear Darlene Love. Instead, there was the tinkle of musak. She recognized the tune and almost laughed. ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’.

The first serious obstacle stood at the end of the corridor, ominous in a black leather hood. His axe did not look like a prop, and there was a coiled bullwhip in his belt. He was wearing polished boots and lumpy tights, with his chest – muscle just running to meat – bare. Anne thought he was unlikely to be impressed by her NUJ card.

She wanted to go home and forget about the whole thing.

Suddenly, she was one of a crowd. Six or seven people had come down behind her, and she walked down the corridor with them, trying to seem at ease. They looked like an ordinary lunchtime group, office workers out for a Christmas drink. The executioner bowed and opened a pair of double doors, admitting them into a cellar bar. Evidently, he recognized some of the club’s regular patrons. Anne was swept inside with them. She noticed one young businessman buckling a studded dog collar around his neck.

There had been a sign above the doors. The Inferno Lounge. She had expected a vaulted torture chamber in Hammer Films style, but, at first sight, the room was more impressive. Three walls and the ceiling were covered with a fairly expert mural in imitation of Hieronymus Bosch. Damned souls wriggled, turned in on themselves in the corners, pierced by water pipes near the ceiling.

The furnishings were black, with occasional silver and scarlet highlights. The only light came from a rank of glowing bar heaters and from the many television monitors, which were perched on high shelves above the bar and around the walls, or set into the tables like video games. Under the musak was the muted sound of whipping and slapping and yelping. There was also the rumble of something that sounded like vast underground machinery, grinding away behind the walls.

Anne climbed onto a stool at the bar, and looked around at the customers. There were a few young women in already-dated punk outfits, including one girl with green hair cat-napping upright a few stools down, but most of the people in the Inferno Lounge were conservatively-dressed men. Young to middle-aged white collar types, with briefcases and newspapers. The
Mail
and the
Telegraph.
Mostly, they sat alone, watching the televisions and ignoring their drinks.

Anne wondered which, if any, of these people, was N? She did not know whether Judi was meeting a friend, or a… she gulped mentally… or a customer. N could have been anyone, including someone on the staff rather than among the clientele.

Up on the monitors, Anne saw an array of sharp video images. An over-aged schoolgirl, complete with braids and ankle socks, taking her knickers down for a cane-brandishing headmaster. A WPC masturbating furiously with a truncheon. Two bored naked women ineptly flogging a tethered third party. An academic explaining the precise uses of a set of antique nipple clamps.

Anne tried to imagine Judi here, to imagine her talking with the other girls, or with the men. She had specialized in receiving pain, Anne knew, not in giving it. She would have had to determine which was any given client’s preference. Looking at a thin blond young man in a business suit, while trying not to seem as if she was looking, she wondered whether he liked to hurt or be hurt. He had almost colourless eyes, and was ghost-pale in the videolight. He reminded her of Constable Barry Erskine, the Batterer. She imagined him making fists, and using them on a girl’s face. On Judi’s face. Again, Anne wanted to leave, but knew she had taken it too far to just go home…

‘You can’t just sit here, you know,’ someone said, ‘you’ll have to buy a drink.’

The barman looked like a functionary of the Spanish Inquisition, in black robes, picked out with an assorted batch of mystical symbols. Otherwise, he could have been serving in any other unfriendly pub in town.

‘Oh,’ said Anne, ‘Perrier.’

The barman exhumed a green bottle. When he unscrewed the cap, there was the faintest ghost of a carbonated fizz. He poured into a tall glass.

‘Ice and lemon?’

‘Please.’

He picked up the fruit slice and single lump with a wicked-looking pair of hooked tongs, and dropped them in her drink.

‘Four pounds fifty,’ he said. She hesitated. ‘Remember, no one comes here to drink.’

She handed over a five, and received no change. She let the matter drop. She wished she had given the money to the wino out on the street. At least, he would be able to get drunk out of it.

Shit, what a hole.

Some of the young women were approaching the newcomers, pouting and trying to seem masterful. Even to Anne, it was obvious that the working girls were unable to take all this seriously. The thin blond dropped to his knees and licked a girl’s creaking boot, his tongue probing the cracks in the leather. She had guessed wrong about him: he was into M, not S. When he looked up, the girl’s face was set like a school pantomime version of the Wicked Stepmother, but otherwise she just looked ordinary and tired. The would-be slave kept dropping pound coins into her boot-tops. That must get uncomfortable.

Casually, Anne began her Nancy Drew act. ‘Has Judi been in recently?’

‘What’s all this Judi stuff today?’ asked the barman. ‘Has she just won the Miss Popularity award?’

Anne pounced, a little too quickly.

‘Has anyone else been looking for her?’

‘Nina,’ the barman said, looking around. It was difficult in the gloom to make anyone out.

Nina? N?

Anne looked around too. The barman had ignored the green-haired girl, so she was out. Which of the others could Nina be?

Anne turned back to the barman, and found that he was, for the first time, looking carefully at her. She knew he was realizing that he had never seen her before. She glanced at the doors. The executioner was standing by them.

‘You’re curious,’ the barman told her. ‘Open your handbag, love. Let’s see your membership card.’

The executioner was coming over now. Nancy Drew had failed. She would have to start being Clint Eastwood instead, and she did not think she was really up to it.

‘Eric,’ the barman called the executioner, ‘we have a trespasser who needs prosecuting.’

These people, she knew, were good at pain. That was how they made their living.

She dashed her Perrier into the barman’s eyes, and snatched his ice tongs. Eric did not move too fast. She hoped he could not see a thing in his Batman cowl. At school, she had not been a quarterback, but she had not been a cheerleader either. She slammed painfully into the executioner, but he did not fall over.

She grabbed for his mask and pushed it. The eyeholes were now over his forehead. She backed off, but he still managed to hit her hand away before falling over his whip and sprawling on the floor.

She threw the tongs at the barman, and picked up a heavy metal and leather chair. The barman dodged the tongs, but did not try to come out and get her. The weight of the chair felt good.

Some of the businessmen were applauding, and calling for more. The blond was diverted from his ladylove’s boot, and looking up at Anne, imploring with his watering eyes.

Everyone was staying out of the reach of Anne’s chair. She jabbed it in the air a couple of times, like a lion-tamer. People cringed.

Anne felt the need to hit Eric with the chair. She brought it down on him with a log-chopping swing. He grunted and held his head, still trying to struggle out of the hood.

She threw the chair aside, and pushed through the doors. She did not know if Eric was after her or not.

She raced down the corridor.

She nearly lost a shoe on the staircase, but made it easily to the street. For the first time in years, she had a stitch.

Slowing down and trying to get her breath, she walked briskly through the shop and into the street. The cold wrapped around her. After the Inferno Lounge, which she now realized had been overheated, the outside chill was almost welcome.

As she tried to walk away, there was a tug at her smarting shoulder. Someone was pulling her handbag.

‘Excuse me, miss…’

‘
L
ook,’ said Tail Gunner Joe, ‘isn’t that Bogart?’

It was somebody else, but the observation helped the Monster understand the Junior Senator. Sitting in Romanoff ’s, an ill-fitting suit and a sweaty grin among so many tailcoats and panstick-smooth faces, the man was star-gazing, like any other gawk-eyed Mid-Westerner visiting Sin City – Hollywood, California. It almost made him endearing. Tail Gunner Joe was made for this town. Like the glove salesmen tycoons, the grease-monkey ape-men, the waitress demigoddesses and the bogus Russian royalty restaurateurs, the war hero witchfinder was a Great American Fraud. Even politics was not a big enough backdrop for his imagined autobiography. Tail Gunner Joe had to get into Showbiz, and rate more mentions in
Variety
than in
The New York Times.
His was an addictive personality, and the need for fame was as desperate in him as the need for his favoured stimulant, morphine. The Monster knew that the Junior Senator was on his crusade so someone would one day cast Spencer Tracy as him in a film of his heroic life from the dogfights of the war to the pit-bull tussles of the Senate. Like every crooked politician in the United States, he had seen
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
several times, and always identified more fiercely with Jimmy Stewart than Claude Rains. When he had got up in the Senate with his list of ‘card-carrying Communists’, he had been thinking of Mr Smith.

The Lawyer, a boyish mouse of a man with an intensity that frightened most, was irked by Tail Gunner Joe’s lack of concentration. A quiet Jew, he was intent on his papers, and wanted to get the discussion back to the agenda. And the woman, creeping into middle-age with her bobbed hair and staring eyes, was just gaga. Russian originally, she was a prophet of Americanism, and had dignified her sloppy thinking with a neologism, styling herself as the avatar of Objectivism. Even Tail Gunner Joe, who was awed by her intellect, thought of her as a dingbat. The Monster knew there were only two people who counted at this meeting; him, and the Lawyer. They knew that Red-baiting was just a passing thing, and that there was a more important prize to be won through the Committee and its hearings. Between them, the Lawyer and he could own the dreams of America more thoroughly than Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn.