Nirvana Bites (11 page)

His toilet bag yielded the most interest. Which is to say, one notch above bugger-all. Among the more obvious items, there was a large selection of condoms – ribbed, ridged, flavoured, rainbow-coloured and ticklers. There was a small vial of what I assumed to be an essential oil. I pulled out the stopper and took a whiff, and for the second time that day I had an out-of-body experience. Only this one was chemically induced. My brain shot upwards, bounced against the ceiling several times and then reversed back into my skull with a force that threw me on to my hands and knees on the floor. I recognised the powerful rush of amyl nitrate, gone almost as soon as it came. No wonder it was so often used to enhance the moment of orgasm.

There were also razor blades in Stan's bag – as well as an electric Shaver. The blades were in a separate zip section, nestled up to a small mirror. Unfortunately, there was no sign of any of the white powder I was sure that little kit was for.

Stan's Tardis-like toilet bag also revealed a prescription bottle of Seconol, which would certainly provide the explanation for his comatose state. A combination of downers and alcohol could have him out for hours. Or even days. Or even permanently…

As that thought hit home, I was up and running back into the front room. I yanked Stan over on to his back and dropped to my knees beside him. I pressed my ear to his chest. I heard nothing. Damn it, you bastard. Don't do this to me. Don't die in my lovely home and poison the karma for ever by sailing out on a cocktail of barbies and booze.

Before terminal panic set in, I realised it would have been impossible for me to hear anything, since the ear welded to Stan's chest was the deaf one. The one damaged by contact with a wall on my seventh birthday. Another of those exciting little high points from my childhood.

I tried the other ear, but by this time the blood was pounding so loudly in my own head, I couldn't work out if what I was hearing were my own rhythms or Stan's. I grabbed a cushion and pounded it until feathers flew. I picked one up and held it under Stan's nostrils. That didn't work either. My hand was trembling so much, the feather acted like it was being buffeted by a tornado. Stan could have been dead for months and the result would have been the same.

I rocked back on my heels and grabbed handfuls of hair, willing myself to think straight. Inspiration struck from an unlikely quarter. I remembered an article in a magazine I'd seen at the dentist's. It was about people who had been wrongly pronounced dead. The most extreme case was that of a Spanish woman who was being lowered into her grave when the mourners heard scratching sounds coming from inside the coffin. In one of those pseudo-scientific info boxes, they had listed the tests for establishing when a person is genuinely dead and not just very, very tired.

I pulled open Stan's eyelid and dry-sobbed relief when his pupil fluttered like a ping-pong ball in an updraught. It was also relief that made me kick him once more for good measure.

So I could get no satisfaction from hurting Stan. And I didn't want to go down the road of hurting myself – a familiar route, but one I did my best to avoid these days. I needed distraction. I went and got a set of Stan's keys cut and returned the originals. I was in acute need of a friendly face.

Mags was the only one in the co-op who knew anything at all about the man who was my biological father. But she wouldn't be back for at least a couple of hours.

I phoned the third house. If I was lucky, Ali would be in. He might be crap at stringing sentences together, but some stonking good sex might help. It certainly couldn't hurt. If Gaia was in, I could at least get an aura massage or something. No reply. I should have known better than to expect any help from a deity who, if not downright vindictive, was at least bloody mischievous where I was concerned.

I gave up on the phone and stomped next door. Frank hardly personified articulate empathy, but he'd had a crap childhood too and had a good heart. Robin and Nick were unknown quantities to me. Their irredeemably bourgeois backgrounds placed them in a different solar system to my own, but again I reckoned their hearts were in the right place. Unfortunately, their bodies weren't. I resisted the urge to head-butt their front door and started back through my own.

I cast one last despairing glance along the street, and was rewarded by the sight of Frank's gaunt frame shambling towards me. Before I could so much as open my mouth, he started a rant of his own.

‘Not one,' he said. ‘Not one fucking
Big Issue
sold all day. I've been there five hours. Five fucking long, cold, boring hours. Can you believe it? What is it with these Bermondsey bastards?'

Frank continued in this vein as he unlocked the door and clumped up the stairs. I followed him, but to be honest I couldn't be sure if he noticed. He could well have been continuing a monologue started long before he saw me.

He flung himself into an over-stuffed armchair he'd rescued from a skip a couple of years earlier. I sat cross-legged on the floor opposite him. His front room was identical to mine in shape only. For a start, it was spotlessly clean. Secondly, it was black. Very, very black. The bare floorboards and walls were painted black. There was a small black and white TV – draped with the same black cloth that covered the armchair. A portable stereo – black of course. And that was it. The only thing that prevented the room from feeling like a large coffin was the ceiling. For some bizarre reason known only to himself, Frank had papered it in tin foil.

His Rotherhithe rant showed no signs of slowing down. I began to wonder if he'd found an alternative source of amphetamines. He'd sworn never to touch whiz again after his previous supplier, Gonzales, had died last year. Big G had climbed into Brockwell Park Lido at the dead of night in mid-November. He'd been speeding out of his box and had either fallen or dived into the freezing cold pool. The inevitable result, as any GCSE biology student would tell you, was instant heart failure. As the lido was closed for the winter, he wasn't found until New Year's Eve, when the place was being spruced up for a millennium party, by which time his corpse was bloated to hideous Michelin-man proportions. You could say, it put Frank off.

I waited till he drew breath and asked him straight out if he was speeding.

Frank seemed shocked at the question. I was actually quite impressed. I never knew adrenalin could be so powerful. I used the ensuing pause to pass on some information of my own.

‘My dad's dead,' I said.

Frank floundered, uncertain what was expected of him.

‘Oh. I didn't know you had a dad. I mean I know you must have – y'know – by nature and that. But I didn't know he was – I dunno – like – in your life.'

‘He wasn't,' I said. ‘He was an evil bastard.'

Frank brightened. ‘Oh, well, that's all right then,' he said with evident relief.

‘Yeah. I suppose it is,' I shrugged. Then, ‘I thought Stan was dead too,' I said.

Frank's eyes filled with panic.

‘But it's OK. He's just off his face.'

Frank nodded. He could relate to that.

I got up to leave. ‘See you then,' I said. ‘Oh, by the way, did you see anything new at Koi Korner?'

Frank froze, his eyes wide with horror. I sighed as I lowered myself back on to the floor. I'd seen him in rabbit-in-headlights mode many times before. Frank had been so caught up in his role as
Big Issue
vendor that he'd forgotten the real reason for being there.

I sat in silence while the horror gradually faded from the open book of his face. He'd thought of something. With a bit of luck, it might even be useful.

‘A guy gobbed at me,' he said with the triumphant air of one delivering a valuable gem of information.

I waited. Frank realised more detail was needed.

‘He was one of those straight weirdos who go in there,' he added, by way of explanation.

‘Anything else?' I enquired.

‘Yeah.' Frank nodded eagerly. ‘He called me scum. And he said…' Frank's brows knitted in concentration as he tried to recall the details. ‘He said – the day would come when the world would be rid of people like me.'

Frank looked at me with his beaten puppy's eyes.

‘That's brill, Frank. Really good,' I managed. I got to my feet again. I couldn't bear to see the childlike look of pride I knew would be on his face. ‘I'll see you later.'

As I walked through the door, he threw a last snippet at my departing back.

‘Yeah. It made me feel like I was in a movie or something.'

I turned back.

‘It was the American accent, y'know?' he said.

I grinned.

‘Frank? You really are a star,' I said and planted a kiss on the top of his head. If he had been a puppy, he would have rolled onto his back and kicked his legs in the air. As it was, he settled for a slice of melon grin, as he rubbed at the spot my lips had landed.

As for me, I had a feeling this information might have some real significance. Mental alarm bells were ringing. Koi Korner had connections with thugs, was fronted by a woman with one of the poshest voices I had ever heard, and visitors who were right-wing bigots with American accents – hardly your average fish shop.

Call it instinct.

Call it desperation.

Call it a woman afloat in a raging sea grasping at a twiglet.

11

I NEEDED SOLITUDE
. Somewhere to think. Somewhere with no phones that could ring, no doors that could be knocked on and no living soul that could fuck things up. That included Stan, even though his current state bore scant resemblance to ‘living', and I had serious reservations about the existence of his soul. Without that thinking space, I knew I would start to panic. I had to try to make sense of the many things that were happening.

It was like trying to find the source of a fart in a jacuzzi.

I walked up the road and across Nunhead Green into the estates opposite. I passed identical sand-coloured houses with little squares of gardens, which the tenants had used as living symbols of their individuality. Here some topiary, there a gnome troop or a water feature. Downtown Alan Titchmarshes vying with wannabe Charlie Dimmocks. Strange to think this area, with its suburban chic pretensions, was only a few short streets away from the estates of north Peckham.

In front of me and to the left loomed a wooded incline, several hundred acres in which trees reached upwards to a sky filled with rural clarity and birdsong. Nunhead Cemetery. I didn't know if it was open. In fact, to this day I have no idea of the opening times. Of the many times I have been there, I've never gone in through the front gates.

I walked up the steep slope of the rubbish-strewn alley that bordered one side. On my left was the cemetery; on my right was the open land of the reservoir, backing on to allotments. Almost rural – yet yards from suburbia that was itself yards from urban heartland. The city in microcosm.

Just before the brow of the hill, I stopped and reached down behind the cemetery wall to where the chain-link fence met the ground. A deft flick at a specific point, a little unwinding and bending, and the fence pulled back just enough for me to wriggle through. Inside the cemetery, I replaced the fence so that it no longer shrieked ‘Side Entrance' in neon lights. To a casual observer, it simply didn't exist.

I picked my way through the thick undergrowth, unconcerned about stepping on the dilapidated graves with their crumbling stones and subsiding earth. I passed under the blind gaze of concrete angels, their features blunted by time and the elements. Weatherbeaten obelisks and crosses and mouldering mossy crypts towered over me. I arrived at my destination: a massive concrete mausoleum housing the mortal remains of the Turnbull dynasty. Mags had once told me they had made their fortune in the slave trade. Which meant I didn't have to feel bad about invading the death space bought by their bloodstained, tear-drenched wealth. Not that I would have done anyway. I'm not superstitious. Gaia reckons I have a strong spirit. All I know is, it's the living that scare me, not the dead. Either way, the cemetery is my favourite haunt.

After a quick glance around, I knelt at the stone side of the tomb entrance. I scrabbled with my fingers at the base of the stone until I could get a purchase under the slab. Ignoring the damage I knew I was doing to my knuckles, I heaved upwards. I had to use every ounce of my strength. The muscles in my arms were trembling as a chunk about three feet square shifted. As it moved, the previously invisible join to the adjacent slab appeared. I used my foot to shove a flat stone into the gap at the bottom. Changing position, I pushed my skinned fingers into the side join and again pushed with all my might. The slab shifted sideways, releasing a shower of dirt and dust. I carried on pushing, using my shoulder once the gap was big enough, until it was large enough for me to wriggle through.

Whoever coined the phrase ‘cold as the grave' knew what they were on about. Inside was freezing. There was a smell too, though not of rotting flesh. The meat on the bones of the Turnbull clan had disintegrated decades before. This smell was of dank undisturbed air, with just a hint of incense. I used the shaft of light coming through the entry hole to find my way inside the tomb.

I reached into one of the wall niches, shivering at the touch of the cold stone on my skin. In a gap between the coffin and the wall, my fingers closed on a battered square tin, which I pulled out in a fog of dust and cobwebs. Inside I found my survival kit: candles, matches, pen and paper, a ready-rolled spliff, joss sticks and a packet of Polo mints. What more could a gal need?

A couple of hours later, the spliff was smoked, the candles were almost burnt down and several pages of the notebook were covered in my scrawl. I crunched the last Polo as I pushed the tin filled with my depleted provisions back into the wall niche. I shifted the stone back into place, left the lengthening shadows of the cemetery to the already dead and headed back home.