Duffy (7 page)

He’d just got a fresh line on Big Eddy when the rug was pulled. Quite how it happened and who was the stool he never knew, but there must have been a tip from someone inside the station. Everyone there knew he’d been going through a sticky time with Carol. They’d had one of those spells everyone gets after a year or so of knowing each other, when the freshness has worn off a bit and everyone starts treating you as an established couple and whistling the Wedding March at you and doing cradling gestures and you suddenly wonder whether you’re doing the right thing after all. You want to stand back, think about it a bit, make sure you’re on the right path. Duffy had tried to explain this to Carol, who’d assumed he was trying to drop her in as painless a way as possible. She wasn’t going to be dropped like that by anyone. She yelled and she cried and he told her she was jumping to the wrong conclusions but that her acting like this was anyway proving that she was assuming things which they hadn’t ever discussed, and that of course he still loved her, but she really ought to try and see the relationship from another angle. Like his, for instance, she said.

Eventually they agreed on a couple of months apart, no strings, no bed, no conditions; then they’d see how they felt.

After about three weeks Duffy started getting pretty itchy. They’d agreed not to impose anything on each other for the two months: they could be as free as they liked. Duffy debated with himself about what to do, and then gave in.

The point about Duffy was, as McKechnie surmised, that he plugged in both ways. He didn’t need a transformer. He’d had a very gay phase when he was eighteen, then sobered up a lot when he joined the force, and since then pretty well divided his favours equally between the two sexes. His mates at work saw he was keen enough on women for them not to suspect him; the other half of his preference he kept more or less to himself. He told Carol, who merely said she’d always thought that she had a rather boyish body, and asked if he’d like her to dress up as a bloke from time to time. He said it wasn’t exactly like that; but he was pleased at the way she reacted.

When they took their two months’ separation from each other and Duffy got itchy, he thought a lot about which way to go. If he went for a girl, Carol would be bound to be jealous, despite the agreement. If he went for a guy, then maybe she’d feel he was – what would she say? – slipping backwards; but maybe she wouldn’t feel so threatened when he told her. In terms of sexual pleasure, it didn’t make much difference to him; he wasn’t picky when it came to orgasm.

The first time he went trawling at the Caramel Club and took a chubby journalist back to the flat he was then living in off Westbourne Grove. A couple of nights later he went to the Alligator and landed himself a polite undergraduate hot off the Oxford train. The third time he went back to the Caramel again, drank a bit more than usual, and was half-helped home by a nice black kid of about his own age.

Ten minutes after that his flat door was kicked in by two full-sized policemen, the black kid started yelling, ‘He bought me drinks, he bought me drinks,’ and the larger of the two policemen seized him by the bare shoulder, twisted him round on the bed and said, with heavy irony, ‘Excuse me, sir, but how old is your friend?’ The whisky fumes were clearing from his head as if someone had switched on an Xpelair, and he knew he’d been set up.

The kid was a plant; he said he was nineteen. The police took an address and told him to scram. They took Duffy down to the station and charged him. When he told them his profession, one of the two policemen turned his back while the other punched Duffy in the kidneys. ‘Fucking bent queer copper,’ he said; then ‘Fucking
queer,’
and punched him again.

Duffy knew it was curtains. He was suspended from duty and sat around gloomily at home. Eventually he was called to West Central. And who should give him the good news but Sullivan?

‘When you’ve been around as long as I have, nothing much surprises you, Duffy. But this does. This does. I’ve argued for you, though personally my instinct would be to throw everything at you. I’ve talked to the investigating officer in the case and I’ve got you the best deal I can; a sight better than you deserve. And I’ve done it not for your sake but for the sake of the station, I don’t mind telling you. Westbourne Grove have agreed not to prosecute; they’ll say it might cause the kid too much psychological harm to give evidence and they’re writing the case off. Now go away and come back in five minutes with your resignation.’

It was a perfect fit-up. It destroyed his career, and it wrecked his relationship with Carol. Moreover, Duffy failed to appreciate Sullivan’s avuncular touch when he called Carol into his office to explain what had happened. She had stayed away from Duffy for two months, trying to understand what had happened. When she came to see him, he did his best to explain, but there were too many scars. They tried going to bed together to see what that would do, but she was tense and nervy and he couldn’t get a hard-on. Sleeping was all right, though, and waking up together was usually nice. Gradually they got back together a bit, but only as wary friends. Sometimes Carol stayed the night, but they never made advances to each other in bed. He never got a hard-on when she was in bed with him, not even a sleepy, unintended one.

‘Brother and sister?’ she’d once said to him as they were falling asleep. Brother and sister, but with a suspicious loitering past. Brother and sister with a lot of previous.

Duffy had good reason to remember Sullivan.

4

D
UFFY WOKE UP OUT
of a bad dream. It was a bad dream because for Duffy life within it was all fivers and éclairs. In his dream he was a Chief Super in whose presence villains shrank to the size of earwigs; he snapped his fingers and cases on which the brightest blues had broken their teeth simply fell open in his hands. After a triumphant day at the office like this he was driven home to a large detached house deep in some beech woods where Carol and the kids were waiting for him. As he drove through the gates his eldest son, a flaxen-haired rascal, fired his bow and arrow at the car; the rubber sucker on the end of the arrow glued itself to the hub-cap and the car rolled along like Boadicea’s chariot, slicing the heads off bluebells all the way up the drive. No matter, Duffy thought in his dream, the bluebells will never run out. Then they got to the house and Carol was waiting on the steps. As they stepped inside the door, she gently tugged on his sleeve and took him upstairs. She slipped off her dress and was wearing nothing underneath. Duffy threw his suit over a chair, climbed out of the rest of his clothes, and as he approached the bed where she lay on top of the candlewick cover she exclaimed, as if surprised by joy, ‘Duffy, you’re so big, you’re so big.’

‘AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh…’ He screamed himself awake. It was one of those dreams when you know all the time you’re dreaming. Usually they’re bad dreams, and you comfort yourself with the knowledge that your brain is just having a mean time with you. But when you’re in a good dream and know that it’s only a dream, then you feel an undercurrent of bitterness all the way through and you wake with ashes in your mouth and strange pains and an unconquerable sense of loss. You feel as if America has slipped through your fingers.

Duffy lay on his back shaking a little. Out of curiosity, he lifted the bedclothes to see if he had a hard-on. No dice. Even if he dreamed he had a hard-on with Carol, even if he was fucking her in his dream, he awoke to a peeled prawn and a walnut. No dice.

Duffy wasn’t impotent. He couldn’t lay that at the door of whoever fitted him up. He was just impotent with Carol. At first he’d thought it was the shock of what had happened. Then he began to realise that he might get over the shock and still not recover his powers with her. Perhaps never. He’d tried lying in bed with her and ordering his cock to obey, silently shouting and cursing it. He’d tried closing his eyes and thinking of other women he’d fucked, and other men he’d fucked, and the most exciting pornography he’d ever clapped eyes on. No dice. Desperate, he’d even tried wanking himself to erection and then turning towards Carol; but his cock, unruly to the bitter end, wilted like a flower at dusk. No dice.

And the end
was
bitter. If you can’t fuck the one person you want to fuck, then pleasure got from fucking other people is even more lined with irony. After a while, at Carol’s insistence, he went off and tried fucking other people. To his distress, there was no problem; to his further distress, he always found himself enjoying it just enough to want to do it again. He fucked men and women indiscriminately, but found that, without realising he was doing it, he was setting himself a rule: never twice. The sweetest girl, the randiest guy, both would leave in the morning. However much they asked to see him again, and however nice he thought they were, he would never say ‘All right’. Never. It was, perhaps, a sort of fidelity to Carol, even if a fidelity wrung from the most fevered promiscuity.

What Carol did he never asked. He didn’t ask because all the answers she could give were bad. If she was sleeping with lots of guys, he knew he’d hate it; if she was sleeping with just one guy, he’d hate it more; if she was sleeping with no one, he’d hate it less but feel the pressure on him even more intolerable. Duffy, in short, was in a state of pain.

It’s a state for which the only cure is work. Duffy had mixed feelings about McKechnie’s job. It might increase the pain inside him to go back prowling round his old patch; maybe it would just stir everything up and never give him the chance to come to terms with it. On the other hand, maybe there would be some opportunity of making a settlement with his past. But what if there were, and he muffed it?

Still, it was work, it would get him out of his flat some mornings. It was twenty quid a day plus tube fares. Duffy could do with that. The bars he cruised had suddenly put up their prices a lot. People said it was the one pleasure that was free, but it wasn’t. You had to pay one way or the other: either with your feelings, or else in buying drinks as you tested the company, weighed it up, went through the social rituals which were essential if you wanted to end up not feeling a complete whore.

Duffy dug out his basic electrician’s kit from a cupboard and set off for Rupert Street. He’d already told McKechnie to bring in a small tape recorder and a number of tapes. At the office they sent Belinda out for a couple of take-away coffees and Duffy pressed a rubber sucker on to the body of the telephone on McKechnie’s desk. A short length of wiring connected it to the portable Sony in the top drawer.

‘Secret Service stuff, eh?’ said McKechnie, who was getting quite excited.

‘This is Cubs’ stuff,’ replied Duffy. ‘Put me up to thirty a day and I’ll get you free calls to Australia.’

‘We’re not quite
that
big yet. What about Barnsley?’

‘It’s harder to fix than Australia, funnily enough. Cost you forty.’

‘You’re a hard man, Duffy.’ Duffy winced. McKechnie must have heard that line somewhere and thought it was the thing to say.

‘Now, it’s quite simple. When Salvatore comes on the line, you just press the Record button in the normal way. And don’t forget to talk natural.’

‘What do I do with the tape?’

‘Call me afterwards and I’ll tell you what to do. I won’t come and collect it. Maybe I’ll work out a drop. Or you could always post it.’ The last suggestion sounded rather limp, even if it probably was the most efficient. Duffy constantly found that clients expected all sorts of secret tricks for their money. They wanted you to use a walkie-talkie when it was easier to use a public callbox; they wanted the windows of your car to be all blacked out although this made you the most conspicuous vehicle on the road; they wanted to leave things for you behind lavatory cisterns and wear false moustaches and buy complicated telephoto lenses which they couldn’t work. The last thing they wanted to see you doing was sitting on your butt, applying your brain to their particular problem, and coming up with a one-word solution. And the last thing of all they ever wanted to be told was, ‘I should go to the police if I were you.’ They hated that. Clients, Duffy reflected, were dumb.

Duffy turned down the offer of a second King Kong mask (he couldn’t be bothered to take one, but what he actually said, to boost customer morale, was, ‘No, it’s a better disguise
not
to have one this time’), and stepped out into Rupert Street. The pale man who ran the dirty bookshop had just taken down his shutters and was fiddling with the neon sign in the window. So far it only read
BOO
.

Duffy took a breath, headed up to Shaftesbury Avenue, crossed it, and found himself back on the patch he’d worked for three years. He’d been back a few times, to a restaurant or something, but always in the evening, under cover of dark. Now he felt more unprotected, more recognisable. He dived into a coffee bar. Sitting over a
cappuccino,
he gave himself bottle. Four years was a long time: whores change, villains change, the blues change. If that was bad in terms of finding things out, it was good in terms of not being recognised. Besides, he looked different now. Before, it had been two-piece suits from Burton’s and Hepworth’s, with a sports jacket for when he was trying to look casual. Now it was Jean Junction, street markets, suede and leather, faded denim; his hair was quite a bit longer at the sides, and brush-cut on top; sometimes he wore shades with pale yellow glass in them.

And on top of that, the answer was to walk like a punter. Punters had two ways of walking – very fast, as if they had a couple of minutes to catch a train and couldn’t get out of the Golden Mile quick enough, and very slow, as if they were killing time before an appointment, and that was the only reason they were loitering through the place. And whichever method they adopted, they always walked with their heads a bit down; they didn’t look people in the face, and they believed, if they kept their eyes lowered, that no one could see if they were squinting sideways into the windows of dirty bookshops. The people who walked at a normal pace with their heads up, and who looked other people in the eye as they passed them, were the people who owned the place: the shopkeepers, the whores, the pimps, the restaurateurs, the villains, and the blues.