Just Another Angel (7 page)

‘Hello, Angel, glad I caught you.'

When the day comes when Lisabeth catches you, God help you.

‘Hi. I'm just brewing up for Frank and Sal. Do you fancy a cup?'

‘No, thanks, not stopping, wanted a favour.' I'd never noticed how talking to a male upset Lisabeth's speech pattern. ‘Next week.'

‘If it is in my power, my dear, you have but to command.' That was gallant enough and without double entendres. You have to be careful with Lisabeth. Frank Bruno would have to be careful with Lisabeth.

‘I want to move in here for a few days,' she said, looking me straight in the eyes.

I wasn't shocked. I've been around, it's happened before. But Lisabeth? I decided I could pick up the coffee later.

‘It's because of Bin … Fenella.'

‘You've had a fight?' I must have sounded incredulous, but the thought of Fenella standing up to this Amazon was just that.

‘Good God no!' Lisabeth roared. ‘Nothing like that. It's her parents, they're coming up from Rye for a few days and they … they don't know about me … us.'

I looked down at the floor as if considering it heavily.

‘Are you telling me that we are really going to have the Binkworthys of Rye in this house – this very house?'

Lisabeth's upper lip began to curl. She was not the best person to try and wind-up.

‘I'm sure we can work something out,' I said quickly. ‘But you'll have to be nice to Springsteen.'

‘It's a deal.' She smiled and turned on her heel. Without looking back she said: ‘Do you mind him peeing in your coffee?'

 

Lloyd shared an office with a small record-sleeve-design company called Boot-In Inc. On the top floor of what seemed to be an otherwise deserted four-storey building in Curtain Road on the other side of the railway tracks that feed Liverpool Street station. Having cruised the area to find it, I could understand why Boot-In Inc had invested in a triple lock on their office door and a padlock and hasp big enough to have been nicked from Windsor Castle on the street door. Somebody was opening up as I arrived just after 10.00 am; the sort of office hours that could tempt me back into the rat race.

It was a white guy with long, black hair and a short, thick beard. He was taller and broader than me and running to the sort of fat that comes from too many hamburgers. He was carrying a parcel under one arm while struggling with the padlock. He was wearing white Kickers, white Levi's and a green nylon bomber jacket with ‘Porsche' embroidered over the left tit. There was a six-year-old Hillman Avenger parked at the kerb.

We recognised each other. Maybe we'd gatecrashed the same party once.

‘Angel, isn't it?' he said.

‘Yeah. I'm looking for Lloyd. It's Danny, isn't it? Danny Boot.'

‘If you're a friend of Lloyd's, it's Mr Boot to you.' He did not smile when he said it. I remembered that about him. He never smiled.

‘Give me a hand and you can come on up. Lloyd checks in about 11.00.' He gave me the parcel to hold while he worked on the padlock, and then added: ‘Sometimes.'

The parcel was bulky but not heavy and about 18 inches square. It was wrapped in strong, brown paper and had a label with Boot's name on it and underneath simply: ‘London Heathrow'. He got the front door open and led the way up a narrow flight of uncarpeted stairs, leaving me to carry the parcel.

‘If this is prime-cut Colombian snow and the Drugs Squad are photographing us from that Avenger, I'll never forgive you.'

Boot snorted and stared up the second flight.

‘They're videos, if you really must know.'

‘Oh, I must, I must,' I smarmed.

‘Okay. They're tapes of this week's MTV broadcasts from the States, flown in this morning. I've just collected them from Thiefrow. I get them sent by door-to-door courier.' He looked at me as if I'd just come up from the country and the mud hadn't dried on my wellies. ‘All the airlines do it, you know. It costs about 30 quid and the stuff comes as cabin baggage with one of the hostesses. It's rarely checked by Customs, and if the plane gets here, so does your parcel. All dead straight, no naughties involved, perfectly legal. And anyway, the clapped-out old Avenger's mine.'

‘What about taping the shows?'

‘I didn't, did I? It was a guy over there did that. Of course, when I copy them and sell them up West in all the poseur café-bars, that's illegal. Oh yes.'

He would go far, would Boot. And his friends could always see him on visiting days.

Boot-In Inc, up another flight of stairs and through the triple-lock door, was one large, open-plan office containing half-a-dozen desks, several designer's easels, a couple of typewriters and a variety of video-recorders, amps, decks, tape-decks and speakers all spread carelessly across a red metal shelving unit that still had its Habitat price tag on. The office hadn't yet got to the word-processor and rented potted plants stage, but it would. Still, there was a good five grand's worth of gear there if you counted the mobile phones I also spotted. Not that it was really any of my business, of course, but it probably was insured ...

There was also a coffee machine, which Boot ordered me to crank into action while he started making calls on one, and sometimes two, of the mobile phones. I put him down as a phonoholic – he probably never had one as a child – for all he did while I was there was ring people. He didn't say much to them after ‘Hello,' he just grunted a lot.

Staff drifted in and sat down at various workstations, though not many of them made any obvious effort to work. Mostly they found a spare phone and rang people up. Their mothers, their bookmakers, even a bank manager or two. One even rang the speaking clock just to feel part of the crowd. Maybe Boot had bought into Telecom shares.

Being the only one not phoning anybody, I was the only one who heard Lloyd, though it was a good five minutes before I saw him.

I didn't identify the music until he was probably half-way up the stairs, and even then I had to listen carefully before plumping for ‘Riverside Stomp', a Johnny Dankworth (sorry, John Dankworth) piece from a British B picture called
The Criminal
. (Directed by Joseph Losey in 1960 and starring Stanley Baker and Sam Wanamaker. Dankworth played alto and Dudley Moore played piano, if you ever need to know.)

I'd forgotten that Lloyd was deeply into the whole
Absolute Beginners
scene, from drainpipe shiny Italian suits (nowadays made in Bulgaria) and bootlace ties to driving around in an ancient yellow Triumph Herald coupé. So not everything was absolutely authentic, but you know how difficult it is to pick up an original Bubble Car these days? Fashions change, though, and I predict a rush on the old Fiat 500s any day now. As soon as I get some cash, I'm cornering the market, which is something the Fiats never did. The other anachronism with Lloyd, of course, was the portable stereo clamped to his shoulder. Now I know that the old Ferranti Gramophone would hardly be practical let alone smart, but in truth I don't think anything would separate Lloyd from his Brixton briefcase.

To give him his due, he did turn the noise level down to a dull roar as he entered the office. ‘Well, hello one and all,' he beamed. ‘And Angel-my-man, it's you himself.'

‘The one and only. How's the wrestling business?'

‘More coin there than the music business, my man, and –' he looked around the office – ‘you get to meet a nicer class of person. But I'm a specialist, man. Female wrestlers only, and only in mud.'

Boot managed to put down a phone for a minute and ambled over to us holding an artwork board.

‘Your record cover, Mr Allen,' he said. Then to me: ‘See how polite I can be when this pimpy poseur owes us money?'

Lloyd flipped the cover sheet back and looked at the design, then showed it to me. It was a sepia tint of the Great Wall of China with the faces of the three members of the group Peking superimposed at intervals as if carved into the stone. In small, Chinese-style characters down one side was the album's title: ‘55 Days'. You could have guessed.

‘That's large, man, really large,' breathed Lloyd like a proud parent. ‘What do you make of it, Mr A?'

‘Awesome, Lloyd, really awesome.'

Lloyd's clothes may be 1960 Soho, but his jive was pure Malibu surf talk. ‘Large' was the word of the year, rapidly replacing ‘awesome,' which had ousted ‘outstanding' around 1985. I've always found, though, when dealing with someone like Lloyd, that it pays to let him be one step ahead – if, that is, you want something from him.

‘So, you've got a record contract for them. Hey, that's really great, man. It's about them I wanted ...'

‘Hey, don't be too previous. Who said anything about a contract?'

Boot parked his bum on the edge of a desk and put on his Sunday-best sneer.

‘Lloyd does it the easy way, didn't you know? Gets an album cover, gets a fan club, gets some T-shirts and then plays one recording company off against another. It helps if the band can play, but it's not essential.' That was quite a speech for Boot.

‘Someday I'm going to do it without a band,' grinned Lloyd.

‘And give us decent entrepreneurs a bad name,' said Boot, dead serious, though a less likely disciple of Milton Friedman I couldn't think of. ‘Which is why I'll take cash for this job. No more percentages. Two percent of nothing is fuck-all.'

‘Okay, so give me a bill, Mr B.' Lloyd's face lit up. ‘Hey! Mr A and Mr B. What do you know!'

‘And we all know who Mr C is,' said Boot, leaning forward to pat Lloyd on the cheek. ‘Don't go away, my man. I'll get you an invoice.'

‘I think the cover is great, Lloyd,' I said as Boot moved away. ‘And the band is good. I played with them the other night at the Mimosa.'

‘Oh yeah.' Lloyd was looking at his band's album cover, not too aware of me.

‘That's why I wanted to see you,' I pushed on. ‘It's the girl drummer. I need to contact her.'

‘Emma? What you want with her?'

‘Yeah, Emma. I'm looking for a friend of hers and she might know where she is.'

Lloyd looked up. ‘You got the hots for Emma or something?'

‘No, straight up, nothing like that.' Well, that was honest enough. ‘It's a friend of hers I'm after. I just need to talk to her.'

‘Well, okay, Mr A, I'll trust you, ‘cos you're not the man to jive old Lloyd here, but you'd better not hassle my protégée.' He pronounced it pro-tay-jay. ‘She's at a very delicate stage of her development, man, and I don't want the little lady upset.'

‘She's writing songs, huh? Talented lady.'

‘Hell no,' laughed Lloyd. ‘She's doing her O-levels.'

 

About the only thing Hampstead and Hackney share in common is a dropped aitch. Even the pubs in Hampstead are different, being mostly Italian restaurants that accidentally sell beer if you have the required amount of readies, which in some cases meant an Amex card had to do nicely thank you.

The address Lloyd gave me was impressive. I'm not giving it here because Emma's father slipped me a few of the folding to keep his secret now that Emma's getting well-known in the music business. Not her secret, you note: his. He doesn't want the neighbours to know.

Anyway, the house was a big, Georgian affair that Daddy probably afforded on a two percent mortgage from the bank he worked for. It took me a while, though, before I realised that Daddy owned all of it. I'd assumed at first that the place would be carved up into flats.

I had a bit of trouble finding a suitable parking space for Armstrong (Rule 177) among the Metro Citys and those ubiquitous VW Golfs, which I'm sure are breeding somewhere in the backstreets, but I'd sussed the right house, and so it was down to a frontal attack up the six wide stone steps to the door and doing something dynamic like ringing the doorbell. The sound of drums from somewhere up above met me half-way. So she was in. I was rehearsing a line like ‘Hello, is Carol coming out to play?' and trying to improve on it when the drumming stopped to be replaced by footsteps in the hallway.

You must have seen the old horror films where the hero or heroine knocks on the door of the isolated, spooky house (‘completely cut off at high tide, young master …') seeking shelter from the storm. You hear the clump of footsteps for ages before at least 60 bolts are drawn or locks turned and then Karloff's skull peers round the door edge and he says: ‘I'm thorry I took tho long, thir, but I wath delayed at my devotionth.' There is also the spoof version – though nobody spoofed Karloff better than Karloff – where the footsteps are really loud and echoing and then the gaunt butler eventually appears wearing carpet slippers.

If either had happened, it couldn't have surprised me more.

The door opened and there was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in regulation grey pullover and knee-length pleated skirt, white, knee-length socks, sensible shoes and white shirt with a tie tied with a better knot than I could ever manage.