The Little Drummer Girl (53 page)

Next came the hairdresser.

She had fixed her hair appointment for eleven, and she kept it, lunch or no. The proprietress was a generous Italian lady called Bibi. She frowned when she saw Charlie come in, and said she would do Charlie herself today.

"You been going with a married fellow again?" she yelled as she worked shampoo into Charlie's hair. "You don't look good, you know that? You been a bad girl, stole someone's husband? What you do, Charlie?"

Three men, said Bibi, when Charlie made her tell. Yesterday.

Said they were tax inspectors, wanted to check Bibi's appointments book and her accounts for the Value Added.

But all they really wanted to hear about was Charlie.

" ‘Who's this Charlie, here?' they say me. ‘Know her well then, Bibi? ‘Sure,' I say to them; ‘Charlie's a good girl, regular.' ‘Oh, a regular, is she? Talk to you about her boyfriends, does she? Who's she got? Where she sleep these days?' All about you been on holiday--who you go with, where you go after Greece. Me, I say them nothing. Trust Bibi." But at the door, when Charlie had safely paid, Bibi turned a little bit nasty, the first time ever. "Don't come again a little while, okay? I don't like trouble. I don't like police."

Nor do I, Beeb. Believe me, nor do I. And these three beauties least of all. The quicker the authorities know about you, the quicker we force the oppositions hand, Joseph had promised her. But he hadn't said it was going to be like this.

Next came the pretty boy, not two hours later.

She had eaten a hamburger somewhere, then started walking although it was raining, because she had a silly idea that while she was moving she was safe, and safer in the rain. She headed west, thinking vaguely of Primrose Hill, then changed her mind and hopped on a bus. It was probably coincidence, but as she glanced back from the departing platform she saw a man get into a taxi fifty yards behind her. And the way she replayed it in her mind, the flag had been down before he hailed it.

Stay with the logic of the fiction,Joseph had told her, again and again. Weaken, and you ruin the operation. Stay with the fiction, and when it's over we'll repair the damage.

Halfway to panic, she had a mind to hightail it to the dressmaker's and demand Joseph immediately. But her loyalty to him held her back. She loved him without shame and without hope. In the world he had turned upside down for her, he was her one remaining constant, in both the fiction and the fact.

So she went to the cinema instead and that was where the pretty man tried to pick her up; and where she very nearly let him.

He was tall and puckish, with a long new leather coat and granny glasses, and as he edged along the row towards her during the interval, she stupidly assumed that she knew him and in her turmoil couldn't put a name or place to him. So she returned his smile.

"Hullo, how are you?" he cried, sitting down beside her. "Charmian, isn't it? Gosh, you were good in Alpha Beta last year! Weren't you absolutely wonderful? Have some popcorn."

Suddenly nothing fitted: the carefree smile didn't fit the skull-like jaw, the granny glasses didn't fit the rat's eyes, the popcorn didn't fit the polished shoes, and the dry leather coat didn't fit the weather. He had arrived here from the moon with nothing else in mind but to pull her.

"You want me to call the manager or are you going quietly?" she said.

He kept up his pitch, protesting, smirking, asking whether she was a dyke, but when she stormed to the foyer to find someone, the staff had disappeared like summer snow, all but one little black girl in the ticket box, who pretended she was too busy counting change.

Going home took more courage than she possessed, more than Joseph had any right to expect of her, and all the way there she prayed that she would break her ankle or be run over by a bus or have another of her fainting fits. It was seven in the evening and the café was having a lull. The chef grinned at her brilliantly and his cheeky boyfriend, as usual, waved as if she were daft. Inside her flat, instead of putting on the light, she sat on the bed and left the curtains open, and watched in the mirror how the two men on the opposite pavement loitered and never talked to each other and never looked in her direction. Michel's letters were still under their floorboard: so was her passport and what was left of her fighting fund. Your passport is now a dangerous document, Joseph had warned her, in his sermon on her new status since Michel's death;he should not have let you use it for the drive. Your passport must be guarded with your other secrets.

Cindy, Charlie thought.

Cindy was a Geordie waif who worked at evening shift downstairs. Her West Indian lover was in prison for grievous bodily harm, and Charlie occasionally gave her free guitar lessons to help her pass the time.

"Cind," she wrote. "Here's a birthday present for you, for whenever your birthday is. Take it home and practise till you're half dead. You've got the touch so don't give up. Take the music case too, but like an idiot I've left the key at Mum's. I'll bring it when I next call. Anyway the music's not right for you yet. Love you,Chas."

Her music case was her father's, a sturdy Edwardian job with serious locks and stitching. She put Michel's letters into it, together with her money and passport and plenty of music. She took it downstairs with the guitar.

"This lot's for Cindy," she told the chef, and the chef burst into a fit of giggles and put them in the Ladies with the Hoover and the empties.

She returned upstairs, switched on the light, pulled the curtains, and dressed herself in her full war paint because it was Peckham night and not all the coppers on earth, and not all her dead lovers, were going to stop her rehearsing her kids for their pantomime. She got home soon after eleven; the pavement was clear; Cindy had taken her music case and guitar. She rang Al because suddenly she wanted a man desperately. No answer. Bastard's out screwing again. She tried a couple of other old stand-bys without success. Her phone sounded funny to her, but the way she was feeling, it could have been her ears. About to go to bed, she took a last look out of the window and there were her two guardians back in position on the pavement.

The next day nothing happened, except that when she called on Lucy, half expecting to find Al there, Lucy said Al had vanished from the earth, she'd phoned the police and the hospitals and everyone.

"Try Battersea Dogs' Home," Charlie advised her. But when she got back to her own flat, there was her old awful Al on the phone in a state of alcoholic hysteria.

"Come round now, woman. Don't talk, just bloody well come now."

She went, knowing it was more of the same. Knowing there was no corner of her life any more that was not occupied by danger.

Al had parked himself on Willy and Pauly, who weren't breaking up after all. She arrived there to find that he had convened a whole supporters' club. Robert had brought a new girlfriend, an idiot in white lipstick and mauve hair called Samantha. But it was Al, as usual, who held the stage.

"And you can tell me what you like, you can!" he was yelling as she entered. "This is if! This is war! Oh yes, it is, and total war at that"

He raged on till Charlie screamed at him: just shut up and tell her what had happened.

"Happened, girl?Happened! What has happened is that the counter-revolution has fired its first salvo is what's happened, and the target was Joe Soap here!"

"Let's have it in bleeding English!" Charlie screamed back, but she still went nearly mad before she dragged the plain facts out of him.

Al was coming out of this pub when these three gorillas just fell on him, he said. One, even two, he could have managed, but they were three and hard as bloody Brighton Rock, and they worked him over as a team. But it wasn't till they'd got him in the police car, half castrated, that he realised they were pigs pulling him in on a trumped-up indecency charge.

"And you know what they wanted to talk about really, don't you?" He struck out an arm at her."You, girl!You and me and our bloody politics, oh yes! And did we count any friendly Palestinian activists among our acquaintance, by any chance? Meanwhile they're telling me I flashed my dick at some fetching copper-boy in the Gents at the Rising Sun and made movements of the right hand of a masturbatory nature. And when they're not telling me that, they're telling me they'll pull out my fingernails one by one and get me ten years in Sing Sing for hatching anarchist plots with my faggot little radical friends on Greek islands, such as Willy and Pauly here. I mean this is it, girl! This is day one and we, in this room, are the front line."

They had smacked his ear so hard he couldn't hear himself speak, he said; his balls were like ostrich eggs, and look at the bloody bruise on his arm. They'd kept him twenty-four hours in the can, questioned him for six. They'd offered him the phone but no small change, and when he wanted a phone book they'd lost it so he couldn't even ring his agent. Then unaccountably they had dropped the indecency charge and let him go with a caution.

There was a boy called Matthew among the party, a tubby-chinned articled accountant looking for life's alternatives; and he had a flat. To his surprise, Charlie went back there and slept with him. Next day there was no rehearsal and she had been meaning to visit her mother, but at lunchtime when she woke in Matthew's bed she hadn't the stomach, so she rang and cancelled, which was probably what threw the police, because when she arrived outside the Goanese café that evening she found a squad car parked on the kerb, and a uniformed Sergeant standing in the open doorway, and the chef beside him, grinning at her with Asian embarrassment.

It's happened, she thought calmly. High time too. They've come out of the woodwork at last.

The Sergeant was the angry-eyed, close-cropped type who hates the whole world, but Indians and pretty women most. Perhaps it was this hatred which blinded him to who Charlie might be at that crucial moment in the drama.

"Cafe's temporarily closed," he snapped at her. "Find somewhere else."

Bereavement engenders its own responses. "Has someone died?" she asked fearfully.

"If they have, they haven't told me. There's a suspected burglar been seen on the premises. Our officers are investigating. Now hop it."

Perhaps he had been on duty too long and was sleepy. Perhaps he did not know how fast an impulsive girl can think and duck. In any case she was under his guard and into the café in a second, slamming the doors behind her as she ran. The café was empty and the machines switched off. Her own front door was closed but she could hear men's voices murmuring through it. Downstairs the Sergeant was yelling and hammering on the door. She heard:"You. Stop that. Come out." But only faintly. She thought, Key, and opened her handbag. She saw the white headscarf and put it on instead, a lightning change between scenes. Then she pressed the bell, two quick, confident rings. Then pushed the flap of her letter box.

"Chas?Are you in? It's me. Sandy."

The voices stopped dead, she heard a footstep and a whispered "Harry, quick!" The door lurched open and she found herself staring straight into the eyes of a grey-haired, savage little man in a grey suit. Behind him, she could see her treasured relics of Michel scattered everywhere, her bed upended, her posters down, her carpet rolled back, and the floorboards open. She saw a downward-faced camera on a stand and a second man peering through the eyepiece, and several of her mother's letters spread beneath it. She saw chisels, pliers, and her would-be lover-boy from the cinema in his granny glasses kneeling among a heap of her expensive new clothes and she knew with one glance that she was not interrupting the investigation, but the break-in itself.

"I'm looking for my sister Charmian," she said. "Who the hell are you?"

"She's not here," the grey-haired man replied, and she caught a whiff of the Welsh on his voice, and noticed claw marks on his jaw.

Still looking at her, he raised his voice to a bellow. "Sergeant Mallis! Sergeant Mallis, get this lady out of here and take her particulars!"

The door slammed in her face. From below she could hear the luckless Sergeant still yelling. She went softly down the stairs but only as far as the half-landing, where she squeezed between heaps of cardboard boxes to the courtyard door. It was bolted but not locked. The courtyard gave on to a mews and the mews on to the street where Miss Dubber lived. Passing her window, Charlie tapped on it and gave her a cheery wave hullo. How she did that, where she got the wit from, she would never know. She kept going, but no footsteps or furious voices came after her, no car screeched alongside. She reached the main road, and somewhere along the way she pulled on one leather glove, which was what Joseph had told her to do if and when they flushed her. She saw a free cab and hailed it. Well then, she thought cheerfully, here we all are. It was only much, much later in her many lives that it crossed her mind they had let her go deliberately.

Joseph had ruled her Fiat out of bounds, and reluctantly she knew he was right. So she moved by stages, nothing hasty. She was talking herself down. After the taxi, we take a bus ride, she told herself, walk a bit, then a stretch by tube. Her mind was sharp as a flint, but she had to get her thoughts straight; her gaiety had not subsided; she knew she had to grab a firm hold on her responses before she made her next move, because if she fluffed this, she fluffed the whole show. Joseph had told her so and she believed him.

I'm on the run. They're after me. Christ, Helg, what do I do?

You may call this number only in extreme emergency, Charlie, if you call unnecessarily, we shall be most angry, do you hear me?

Yes, Helg, I hear you.

She sat in a pub and drank one of Michel's vodkas, remembering the rest of the gratuitous advice Helga had given her while Mesterbein was skulking in the car. Make sure you are not followed. Don't use the telephones of friends or family. Don't use the box on the corner or the box across the road or down the street or up the street from your flat.

Never, do you hear? They are all extremely dangerous. The pigs can tap a phone in one second, you may be certain. And never use the same telephone twice. Do you hear me, Charlie!