Moon Over Soho (31 page)

Surely backup should be arriving soon.

Her back hit the barrier and we came to a shuddering halt. I made a grab for her knee to see if I could trip her up, but she caught me a stunning blow on the side of the head and then threw me hard enough that I fetched up on my side ten feet away. I shook my head and looked up to see the Pale Lady charging toward me with blood staining her clothes and murder in her eyes. She could have at least tried to make her escape; I wasn’t going to follow her anymore. But I think she knew she was going down and was planning to make somebody pay before she went. That somebody being yours truly.

I didn’t have time to shout a warning, I just made the correct shape in my head and shouted, louder than I had intended,
“Impello.”

The spell picked her up and slammed her back against the railing and then, horrifyingly, she toppled backward and was gone.

T
HE CENTRAL
atrium at the Trocadero Centre is four stories high with an open basement that added another story to the fall. The space is crisscrossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were integral parts of the shopping experience. I was told much later that the Pale Lady had bounced off the side of one of the escalators on her way down, that she may even have been angling to try to land on it but couldn’t quite make the distance. That impact broke her back in two places but she was still alive when she hit the basement floor headfirst.

Instantaneous, said Dr. Walid.

A hundred-foot drop at thirty-two feet per second per second I make that about two and a half seconds to watch the ground coming up to meet you—that’s not what I call instantaneous.

Backup was less then a minute away. They saw her fall. They were on hand to seal off the floor and take witness statements. I gave a brief statement to Stephanopoulis before Nightingale insisted that we go to casualty. The next thing I knew, we were in the A&E unit at UCH and Dr. Walid was hovering in the background and making the F2 junior doctor who was treating me nervous. Then Dr. Walid noticed that Nightingale was a bit pale and unsteady and forced him to lie down in an adjacent treatment cubicle. The junior doctor visibly relaxed and started chatting to me as he checked my various
scrapes and bruises but I don’t remember what he was talking about. Then he bustled off to arrange some X-rays and left me with a redheaded Australian nurse whom I recognized from the Punchinello case. She winked at me as she cleaned the blood off my face and glued a cut on my cheek that I wasn’t even aware I had.

“May the blessings of the river be upon you,” said the nurse as they wheeled me off to X-ray and zapped me a couple of times before wheeling me back to my cubicle to lounge around in a drafty hospital gown for an hour or so. It may have been longer because I think I dozed off. Being Saturday night there was a lot of drunken shouting and moaning and the sound of my fellow members of the constabulary telling people to “calm down” or asking them what happened. Dr. Walid popped his head in to say that he was keeping Nightingale in overnight. I asked for some water; he felt my forehead and then vanished.

Somebody with a Scouse accent a couple of cubicles down said that he just wanted to go home. The doctor told him that they had to reset his leg first. The Scouser insisted that he felt fine and the doctor explained that they had to wait for the drink to wear off so they could anesthetize him.

“I want to go home,” said the Scouser.

“As soon as you’re fixed up,” said the doctor.

“Not home here,” said the Scouser mournfully. “I want to go back to Liverpool.”

I wanted the fluorescent lights to stop giving me a headache.

Dr. Walid came back with water and a couple of ibuprofen tablets. He couldn’t stay because he had a brand-new body to look at. After some more time the junior doctor came back.

“You can go home now,” he said. “Nothing is broken.”

I think I walked back to the Folly—it’s not that far.

I woke up the next morning to find that breakfast hadn’t been served. When I went down to the kitchen to find out why, I discovered Molly sitting on the table with her back to the door. Toby was sitting beside her but at least he looked up when I came in.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

She didn’t move. Toby whined.

“I’ll just go have breakfast out,” I said. “In the park.”

That seemed fine with Molly.

Toby jumped up and followed me out.

“You are so mercenary,” I told him.

He yapped. I guess from Toby’s point of view a sausage is a sausage.

The Folly sits on the south side of Russell Square, the center of which is occupied by a park with fixed gravel paths, big trees that I didn’t know the names of, a fountain that was specifically designed to get children and small dogs soaking wet, and on the north side a café that does a decent double sausage, bacon, black pudding, egg, and chips. It was actually quite sunny, so I sat on the terrace outside the café and mechanically shoveled the food into my face. It really didn’t taste of anything, and in the end I put my plate on the floor and let Toby finish it off.

I walked back to the Folly and in through the main door where there was a drift of junk mail. I scooped it up. It was mostly flyers for local pizza joints and kebab houses, although there was one crudely designed leaflet from a Ghanian fortune-teller who felt we could only benefit from his insight into future events. I dropped the lot into the magazine rack that Molly leaves in the atrium for that purpose.

I felt a bit queasy, so I went into the toilet and threw up my breakfast and then I climbed back into my bed and went back to sleep.

I woke up again in the late afternoon, feeling sticky and with the discombobulated feeling you get when you sleep through the day for no good reason. I went down the corridor and ran a bath in the claw-footed enamel monstrosity that we have instead of a proper shower. I got it as scalding as I could take, yelped when it lapped against the bruises on my thigh, and stayed in there until my muscles relaxed and I got bored of impersonating Louis Armstrong singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” I couldn’t shave because of the cut on my cheek, so I left my chin with manly stubble and went to look for some clean clothes.

When I was growing up, the only way to keep my mum
out of my room would have been to install steel security doors and probably not even that would have helped. It did mean that I’ve never been precious about people coming into my bedroom, especially if all they’re going to do is clean it and do the laundry. I put on khaki chinos, the quality button-down shirt, and my good shoes. I looked in the mirror. Miles Davis would have been proud of me; all I needed was a trumpet. There’s only one thing you can do when you look that good, so I picked up my mobile and called Simone.

It didn’t work—I’d blown the chip when I used magic on the Pale Lady.

I took one of my backup phones from the drawer in my desk, a crappy two-year-old Nokia with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. It already had my standard numbers saved so I added Simone’s and called her.

“Hi, baby,” I said. “Want to go out?”

When she stopped laughing, she said that she’d be delighted to.

Only students and people from Basildon go clubbing on a Sunday so we went to the Renoir to see
Spirit of the Escalator—un film de Dominique Baudis
, which turned out, despite the subtitles, to be a romantic comedy. The Renoir is an art cinema that sits underneath the Brunswick Center, a cream-colored shopping center and housing development that reminded me of an Aztec pyramid turned inside out. It’s less than two minutes’ walk from the Folly, so it was convenient. It’s also still got the old-fashioned seats where you can snuggle up to your girlfriend without injuring yourself on a cup holder. She asked me about the cut on my cheek and I told her I’d been in a scuffle.

Afterward we had supper at YO! Sushi—which Simone had never eaten at before, despite there being a branch practically outside her front door.

“I’m terribly loyal to the Patisserie Valerie,” she said by way of explanation.

She loved the little colored bowls trundling around the conveyer belt and was soon piling empty ones up by her plate like so many mounds of skulls. She was actually quite a dainty eater, but steady and determined. I picked at a bowl of
spicy salmon rice. My stomach still wasn’t really settled, but it was a pleasure to watch the obvious delight she got from each dish. Fortunately the YO! Sushi closed before she exceeded my credit card limit and we tumbled out of the Brunswick Centre and walked back along Bernard Street toward Russell Square tube station. It had rained while we were in the cinema and the streets were slick and fresh. Simone stopped walking and dragged my head down so she could kiss me. She tasted of soy sauce.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said.

“How about my place,” I said.

“Your place?”

“Sort of,” I said.

The coach house is not the perfect crash pad but I certainly didn’t want Simone meeting Molly when she was in one of her moods. Simone blew right past my two grand worth of consumer electronics and went straight to the studio under the skylight.

“Who’s this?” she asked. She’d found the portrait of Molly reclining nude while eating cherries.

“Somebody who used to work here years ago,” I said.

She gave me a sly look. “Turn around,” she said. “And close your eyes.”

I did as I was told. Behind me I heard the stealthy rustle of clothes, a suppressed curse followed by a zip unfastening, the thump of her boots hitting the floor, the whisper of silk as it slipped over her skin. There was a long pause and then I heard the creak of antique furniture as she made herself comfortable.

She made me wait a little bit longer.

“You can turn around now,” she said.

She was reclining, nude and beautiful, on the chaise longue. She didn’t have a bowl of cherries so she’d let her fingers drift down to twist in the brown curls of her hair. She was so delicious I didn’t know where to start.

Then I saw it, a blotch like a port-wine birthmark in the corner of her mouth. I thought it was a smear of something she’d been eating but then it ripped while I was staring at it. With a hideous crunch her jaw splintered as a crude triangle
of skin peeled back from her face. I saw muscle, tendon, and bone stretch and pop, and her jaw hung slack like that of a cut puppet.

“What’s wrong?” asked Simone.

Nothing. Her face was back as it had been, wide, beautiful, the arc of her smile fading as I staggered backward.

“Peter?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened there.” I knelt down by the chaise longue and cupped her cheek in my hand—the bones beneath her skin were reassuringly solid. I kissed her, but after a moment she pushed my face away.

“Has something happened?”

“I was involved in an incident,” I said. “Somebody died.”

“Oh,” she said and put her arms around me. “What happened?”

“I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I said and slipped my hand down her hip in the hope that it would distract her.

“But if you could talk about it,” she said. “You’d talk about it with me?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was lying.

“Poor thing,” she said and kissed me.

I found that if I held her close I didn’t have any more nightmares. At one point in the proceedings the chaise longue shifted alarmingly and I heard the crack of splintering wood. We hurriedly separated just long enough for me to put a few cushions on the floor and throw a blanket over them. She pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and it all got wonderfully strenuous and sweaty until finally she flopped down on me as boneless and as slippery as a fish.

“It’s peculiar,” she said after she’d caught her breath. “I used to always want to go out. But with you I just want to stay in all the time.”

She rolled off and slid her hand down my stomach to cup my balls. “Do you know what I’d really like now?” she asked.

“There’s cakes in the fridge,” I said.

I was hard again and slipped her hand up to grab hold.

“You’re a terrible man,” she said. She gave me a quick
shake as if judging my readiness and then, pausing briefly to kiss it on the head, got up and made her way to the fridge. “That Jap food’s all very well,” she said. “But I don’t think they know how to make a decent patisserie.”

Later, exhausted but unable to sleep, I lay with her under the skylight and watched the rain rippling down the panes. Simone again slept with her head on my shoulder, a leg slung possessively across my thighs, and her arm draped around my waist—as if making sure I couldn’t slink away in the middle of the night.

I’m not a player, but I’d never had a girlfriend who’d lasted more than three months. Leslie said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Leslie swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya—counting down to disaster. Leslie could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.