Authors: Kim Newman
So, if she could get herself together, there was the prospect of earning some good money. Not in a terribly comfortable way, but good money was good money. She had been to Amelia’s ‘entertainments’ before and survived.
And Clive would be at Amelia’s ‘entertainment’. And wherever Clive went, he did business.
‘Bring a friend.’ Nina had not known if Amelia was being graciously hospitable, or issuing an order. ‘A friend’?
Nina had thought that had to mean Coral. The last time she had met Amelia, she had been with the skinny blonde in the Club Des Esseintes. The hostess could easily have been quite taken with Coral. The girl had certainly been exciting attention for as long as Nina had known her.
They had come from the same school in North London originally. At first, Nina had been the one to show Coral how to get along. They had worked as a sister act for a while, but had got on each other’s nerves. They went back too far to be comfortable together these days. Coral could be a moody cow when she wanted to, and was ungenerous with her gear. She had stopped crashing most nights on Nina’s floor a few months before, and found a place with the American girl, Judi. Once Coral moved out, Nina found she got on better with her friend. There were plenty of relationships that worked best that way.
Judi? Maybe Amelia meant Judi. Nina had introduced her to the hostess as well. The more she had thought about it yesterday, the less she had known whether to call Judi or Coral. In the end, it had hit her that she did not have to make a choice. Judi and Coral were still together, at the same address. If she phoned them, one would answer the phone. Today, she could not remember which she had spoken to. But she had arranged to meet with one of the girls at the Club. Judi or Coral. She wondered which.
In the cramped bathroom, it took Nina a while to get dressed. She kept being distracted by her face in the mirror. Even before she washed the bran off, she did not look like the girl in the old smack adverts. The ones that said it screws you up. Just because she did smack did not mean she could not wash and comb her hair – although soapy water did make her feel squirmy sometimes – and put a little make-up over the blue-ish crescents under her eyes.
She dressed for the party, mainly in her best black. She favoured forties styles, with padded shoulders and deep pleats. She always wore long sleeves. Nina posed like a model in front of the tall mirror. She looked so much better since she started losing weight. She did not have to suck her cheeks in to appear glamorous any more, and she had completely lost her stomach.
She still thought she could get by doing modelling, but she never had the money to assemble a decent portfolio and that was what you needed if you wanted to get into the big money. She only had one nice photo of herself, and that was years out of date now. One of her regulars had wanted her to model for him, but he turned out to be interested only in private camera sessions. She did not want any of
those
photos.
She brushed the tangles out of her hair, feeling the scratch of the tines on her scalp. There was nothing wrong with parties, really. They were probably easier than modelling jobs.
More in control now, she got back to the telephone. After putting the receiver properly in its cradle, she picked it up and, flipping her book open to the number, called Coral and Judi. Knowing what they were like, they probably needed reminding about the meet. Their phone rang and rang until she gave up. She tried Clive again, but put the phone down before his machine could finish.
There were hours to go before Amelia’s ‘entertainment’, so she would have time to set something up with Coral and/or Judi, and to pull herself together.
W
hile Anne waited for the policeman to come back, she listened to the hospital piped music. They were playing something strangled by a million strings. Irritated, she recognized ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ under the Mantovani massacre. Messages from administrators to doctors chirruped in the background like signals gone astray in deep space. The Synthesized Celestial Choir segued into ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’
Even under normal circumstances, she could not comfortably listen to The Beatles any more. They had been so much a part of her pre-adolescence. The four chord melancholies and ecstasies had turned scary. It had been ‘Helter Skelter’. They had gutted Sharon Tate in Hollywood, and shot John Lennon in New York. All that was left was musak.
Judi had been into groups with more honestly horrific names. Paranoid Realities, Skullflower, Coil, Bad Dreamings, The Manson Family Reunion, Three More Bullets and a Shovel. She would have spat on ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’.
Still, The Beatles had been with her all her life. Anne’s first memory was of her father letting her stay up past her bedtime to watch them on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Not the first time, but a re-run. Judi had not been born yet. Later, the
Double White
was the first album she had bought with her own money. She had played it over and over on the old phonograph in the cellar rumpus room of the summer house in New Hampshire. Cam had taken personal offence at ‘Revolution No. 9’, and so it automatically became her favourite track. Even so, she would lift the needle over it when he was not there.
Judi was around then, making her presence felt everywhere, all the time. She had been reading almost before she could put a real sentence together in her mouth, and father had taught her long division before she ever saw the inside of the school. There had been no doubt about it: Judi had been the clever child, the pretty child, the promising child. Cam was the first-born, and thus beloved of God (and his mother, Dad’s ex-wife). That left Anne as the nondescript one in the middle.
Now, Cam was as rich and famous as it was possible for a self-styled
avant garde
composer to be, Anne was working her way up the ladder as a journalist, and Judi was dead.
‘I’m sorry, miss, but I have to tell you that your sister is dead,’ Inspector Hollis had said. No tactful build-up, no euphemisms. The policeman had simply established that he was talking to Anne Nielson, and told her what he had to. She could not help but wonder whether he was familiar with her Aziz pieces. They had not been calculated to endear her to the Metropolitan Police. But she knew really that this was how everybody got treated.
There are a million stories in the naked city, and not enough words to go around. What with government cuts, a copper’s vocabulary would have to be pared down to the absolute minimum. No surplus circumlocutions, synonyms hoarded like golden acorns.
Back in November, Anne had interviewed an ex-marine who had written a good book about Vietnam. He never used the words ‘kill’ or ‘dead’, just ‘waste’ and ‘wasted’. That was bluntly the best way of putting it. Wasted.
Anne saw the doctor who was supposed to have looked at Judi when she was brought in. He was busy now, pulling apart the do-it-yourself mummy swathings wrapped around the head of a little West Indian boy. She glimpsed red cheeks, raw meat rather than blushes. This time, she was impressed by the doctor’s performance as he kept up a non-stop stream of soothing chatter for the boy and his visibly anxious mother.
With Anne, he had been offhand, awkward. She wasn’t his patient, just related to an inconvenient lump of deadness he could have nothing more to do with. Alive, you are a challenge; dead, you are an embarrassment.
There were uniformed soldiers, unarmed, in the corridor. With the ambulance drivers’ dispute dragging on, many local authorities were calling in troops to man the emergency services. Two squaddies, berets folded and tucked into the epaulettes of their olive-drab jerseys, were sharing a cigarette and a joke in an alcove, trying to keep out of the way. Their presence in the hospital made the place not feel like mainland Britain. Anne assumed this was what combat zone first-aid centres were like, in Belfast or in Central America. Even this early in the day, the casualty reception was busy. With the holidays starting, it was a prime time for accidents. Anne had had to do the hospital ring-round when she was starting out as a journalist, fishing for stories. Now, that seemed a long time ago.
Anne had been at home that summer when Judi was fifteen. She was freshly graduated from journalism college, doing bits for the local paper and working on the novel she never did finish. She had been a witness to what their mother, in one of her infrequent bursts of British understatement, called ‘Judi’s turn for the worse’. It was as much her fault as father’s, or Cam’s, or anyone’s. ‘There are some days,’ Judi had told her in a rare communicative mood, ‘when I think that life is an unending Hell of misery and desolation, and others when it seems merely to be a purposeless punishment, unending in its monotony.’ It was hard to come back with something like ‘yes, but what will you be wearing to the junior prom, sis?’
That summer, Judi had realized that being clever was not getting her what she wanted out of life, and so she had decided to be stupid instead. She had stolen money from Cam’s wallet and bought a Greyhound ticket to New York. In the city, it had not taken her long to find 42nd Street. On 42nd Street, it had taken her an absurdly, and probably mercifully, short time to find the undercover vice cop.
Father, the Great Man, had shrugged into a fit of inertia when the NYPD called, and so Anne had had to deal with it. Cameron Nielson Sr. came up with the bail, his agent kept it out of the papers, and Anne went to town to pull her little sister out of the pussy posse’s holding cells.
The next time, Judi had used her one telephone call to get in touch with a stringer for a paper so yellow that a dog could piss on it without making a difference. He had to be told who Cameron Nielson was, but he came up with the headlines anyway. NOBEL PRIZE-WINNER’S DOPER DAUGHTER IN B’WAY BUST. BAR-B-Q MAN’S GIRL IN SEX FOR DRUGS RACKET. Shit, that had been bad for all of them.
Anne thought again about The Call. Father could not talk any more. He had not written anything much since the late ’60s. But he had been the only Nobel laureate ever to write for Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and then have his script redone by a kid fresh from two episodes of
The Mod Squad
and some quickies for
Laugh-In.
Anne thought that humiliation had done more to Cameron Nielson than any of Judi’s exploits. More even than Hugh Farnham and his Committee. His only substantial work in the last ten years was
The Rat Jacket
, an intensely personal one-acter about an informer committing suicide. Widely interpreted as autobiographical, the piece – Anne suspected – would eventually be seen as one of his most important. There was talk of Robert Altman doing it as a television play with Harry Dean Stanton.
‘Miss Nielson,’ said Hollis, not unkindly, ‘we’re ready for you now.’
The policeman escorted her to the lift. He took a gentle hold of her upper arm and steered her. She was too drained to be annoyed by the imposition. The lift was large enough to accommodate several six-foot stretchers, and smelled like a dentist’s office.
‘We’ve contacted your brother. He was at the Grafton, like you said.’
‘That’s where he usually stays when he’s in London.’
‘Cameron Nielson? That’s a famous name.’ He was trying to make conversation, keep her mind busy. ‘Any relation?’
‘We’re his children. It’s Cameron Nielson
Junior.’
‘On the Graveyard Shift at Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill.
It’s a 20th century classic.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘I saw it at the National when Albert Finney did the revival. With Donald Pleasence as Sam. Of course, I’ve seen the film…’
‘Elia Kazan directed that.’
‘…with Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Therese Colt and Eli Wallach and… who was the girl? The English actress?’
‘Victoria Page. My mother. And Judi’s. Not Cam’s. That was another actress, a woman who divorced Dad in the fifties.’
They were there.
It was not like morgues in the movies. They did not have walls with long drawers. The bodies were on gurneys like elongated tea trolleys, with green sheets over them. The air conditioning was breathing low, cooling the place even in December. The place could as easily have been a school kitchen.
Movie morgues were always antiseptic, as clean and dignified as chapels. This was dirty. The waste bins overflowed with plastic cups and used paper towels. Someone had left an oily car battery recharging on a wash stand, and the only attendant was a kid with an unstarched mohican. He wore a Cramps T-shirt under his soiled hospital whites and he was reading the Arts pages of
The Independent.
‘Of course,’ said Hollis, ‘we’ve already identified her from fingerprints…’
‘Yes, this is just a formality, but it has to be done. Right? You have forms to fill in before you can forget her.’
She was immediately sorry for snapping at him. After all, he was not PC Erskine. Hollis continued without taking notice. He must be used to dealing with irrational people.
‘You knew that your sister had a criminal record?’
‘Oh yes.’ Here and in New York. Possession, soliciting, resisting arrest, carrying a concealed weapon, whatever. Judi’s Interpol file was probably more substantial than anything Anne had written.
Hollis lifted the sheet himself.
There had been a mistake. It was not Judi.
This woman was old. All the substance beneath her mottled skin had drained away. She looked like a life-size shrunken head. The hair was dyed a blotchy black, but the roots were the white-yellow colour of drought-killed grass.
‘It’s a mistake,’ said Anne, disorientated. ‘It’s not her. She was…’
‘Twenty-five. We know.’
‘But…’
‘Look again.’
The eyes were open, rolled up into the skull, whites red-veined. The dead old woman’s mouth was shrunken, but still firm. She had all her teeth.
Not wanting to, Anne touched the face. There was a spot on the upper lip, where Bogart had a scar, where Judi had a mole.
‘It can’t be. How…?’ She looked at Hollis, and answered her own question. ‘Drugs. Heroin?’
Hollis gently eased the left arm out from under the sheet. He ran a finger over the extensive abrasions. Amid the bruises, Anne could see fresh and ancient pinpricks. And there was Judi’s crescent scar over the inoculation marks. A childhood scrape with an electric lamp.