Nirvana Bites (10 page)

‘Well, he was with Pat ‘n' Pete quite a bit. I think they might have had a little threesome going at one point.'

Pat ‘n' Pete were a pasty-faced couple from Tooting. One thing I was sure of was that neither of them had a straight alter ego. Between them they had enough metal in their faces to make a twenty-eight-piece cutlery service. I knew them well, though I hadn't seen them since I'd made my exit from the Scene several years earlier. I placed this piece of information in my mental filing cabinet for future reference.

‘He's been hanging out with Della a lot too,' Cathy went on. ‘But I don't know if there was anything going on there.'

Della, previously known as Derek, was a six-foot-four transsexual and a good mate. She was raucous and funny and out-womaned me in almost every way. She had a pneumatic chest and pouting collagen lips. I suspect she had more oestrogen pumping round her body than a whole busload of pubescent schoolgirls. I made another mental note. It would be good to see Della again.

Cathy glanced at her watch. She had a client in an hour and would need time to change and get ready. I stood up to leave.

‘I can't really think of anything else,' she frowned. ‘I saw him a couple of times with a woman I don't know. Blonde. Straight-looking. Quite cool though. Didn't look like a voyeur. She didn't rubber-neck,' Cathy sniggered, delivering her first double entendre for at least twenty minutes. Possibly a record.

As I walked back up her hallway she gave me the address of a new club in Brixton. She said Della often went there on a Saturday night, along with several others I knew from the old days. We hugged and promised to stay in touch, then I lurched back into daylight and the real world. A good visit. Productive. I felt better than I had in days.

Until I turned the corner back into Kirkwood Road, that is. Then my stomach catapulted upwards through my chest into a position that had become depressingly familiar over the past week. Parked outside our houses, behind the never-been-cleaner transit, were a police squad car and an ambulance. The fight-or-flight instinct kicked in – cops always bring out that response in me. But doing a runner wasn't an option in these circumstances.

As I dragged my unwilling feet closer, I heard a hellish cacophony of roaring and snarling. I couldn't quite pinpoint the source, but I recognised Tyson's dulcet tones. Just then, the door to Mrs V's shop crashed open. A wild-eyed, howling German Shepherd shot out and up the road, followed by a desperate police dog handler. I stopped and peered through the open door.

Tyson's massive head reared above the wooden counter, a pool of drool forming beneath his slavering jaws. Beneath the folds of muscle and flesh, I swear I could detect a triumphant smirk. The rest of the shop was a mess, even by its usual standards. Smashed glass and pools of milk drenched discarded clothes which in turn wrapped themselves round some disconsolate bars of antique chocolate. Mrs V was sitting on a folding chair in front of the counter. Under her mop of tousled orange hair, a black eye was rapidly forming.

Now that the barking had stopped, everybody began to talk at once. A paramedic was trying to persuade Mrs V to get in the ambulance. A cop was asking exasperated questions. In the corner, Derek muttered incoherently, twisting his fingers into origami.

Mrs V's patience ran out.

‘Shut up, the whole ruddy lot of you,' she shrieked. There was instant shocked silence, broken only by Tyson's occasional satisfied grunts.

‘Now listen, you.' Mrs V stabbed a nicotine-stained finger into the paramedic's midriff. ‘I ain't goin to no hospital, and that's that. And as for you…' She turned to the cop. ‘You can just piss off. It's too little, too late. I've already been bullied once today and I ain't takin it a second time from you.'

At that moment she looked up and saw me lurking in the doorway. ‘Oh, Jessie, darlin. A sensible face at last. Tell them lot to get lost, will you?'

Everyone swung in my direction. For once I was glad Mrs V only ever got the first letter of my name right. I turned to the paramedic.

‘Is she badly hurt?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Nothing broken. But she's badly bruised and shaken. She really should be looked at properly.'

I shook my head. ‘You might as well forget it. She won't leave Derek. And you' – I turned to the cop, determined to brazen it out – ‘should be ashamed of yourself. You're certainly not going to catch whoever did this now. So why can't you leave this poor old lady alone and come back tomorrow to ask your questions?'

I was counting on him not realising that the ‘poor old lady' could have eaten him and his entire station house for breakfast without even getting heartburn. I knew what I was doing. By the next day, they could give Mrs V truth serum, lie-detector tests and anything else they had at their disposal. She would remember almost nothing.

The cop looked stunned. He tried to stamp the last remaining shreds of his authority back on the situation, but he was on a slippery slope and he knew it. He poised his pen over his notebook and raised an eyebrow.

‘And you are…?'

I gulped.

Mrs V to the rescue. ‘Derek?' she rasped. ‘Let Tyson through into the front here.'

Magic. The paramedic and the cop broke the land-speed record for reaching a getaway vehicle.

Mrs V gave me a wicked grin. She sent Derek in to put the kettle on, reached into the pocket of her pink paisley 100 per cent nylon dress and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She was tough as an old boot, but her hand still shook. I took a fag out for her, lit it and handed it to her.

‘So what happened, Mrs V?' I asked.

Mrs V told me that soon after Derek and Tyson had gone out, two men brandishing baseball bats had charged into the shop, wearing ‘baccy lavers' over their faces. It didn't take a huge investigative leap to link them to the two who had attacked me under the bridge the other night, but it didn't feel safe to take anything for granted. The thugs had set about trashing the shop. At the same time, they had uttered dark warnings about noses and business – mainly keeping the former out of the latter.

I checked the Technicolor swelling round Mrs V's eye and made outraged noises about cowardly bastards hitting defenceless little old ladies.

‘Oh no, Jackie, love. That wasn't them,' she replied. ‘That was me. I picked up the phone to call the cops and in the excitement shoved it to me eye instead of me ear.'

We both spluttered with laughter, but it was Mrs V who recovered first.

‘Actually, Julie, it might be funny now, but they scared the life out of me at the time, I can tell you. I'm used to those little bastards off the estate comin in and takin the piss, but these two were a different kettle of fish, I can tell you. I thought I'd had me chips for a while there. It was only when one of them spotted Derek and Tyson comin back that they scarpered.'

It takes a fair bit to frighten me, but I was nowhere near brave enough to tell Mrs V that I was probably the indirect cause of the violence. And something else was sending tremors down my spine. If the baccy-laver boys had waited for Derek and Tyson to leave before embarking on their terrorising of Mrs V, then they must be watching the houses. They could be aware of all our movements. But there were no buildings opposite. Were they hanging out on the railway embankment? Had they set up surveillance cameras under the bridge?

I've always had a paranoid streak. Who hasn't? But this time it seemed that I had serious justification for being freaked. They really were out to get us. The big problem was, I was still no closer to working out who ‘they' were.

I also wanted to know why they had targeted Mrs V. Perhaps they thought she was more than just our neighbour. More likely, they were just proving a point. The point being that they were brutal sadistic thugs who would stop at nothing. On the other hand, it was possible that they were simply incompetent. You can but hope…

10

STAN WAS SLUMPED
in exactly the same position I'd left him in, except now, instead of staring at the TV screen, he was staring at the inside of his eyelids. As I gazed at him in distaste, the phone rang. I snatched it up and gritted my teeth as I heard my sister-in-law's voice.

‘Jenny? Are you there, Jenny? Oh, thank goodness. It's Kate. I have some very bad news. I think you'd better sit down, Jenny.'

I didn't like the way she kept repeating my name. It was the closest Kate ever got to an endearment. I pulled the phone out into the hall and closed the door to the front room.

‘Go on,' I said.

‘Oh, Jenny. I'm so sorry, Jenny. Your father – he passed on. About half an hour ago. We're at the nursing home. Dennis asked me to call you. He's too upset.'

For a moment I was confused by her euphemism.

Then, ‘He's dead?' I asked.

‘Oh, Jenny. Yes. I'm so sorry.'

It was the strangest thing. I had visualised – even prayed for – this moment so many times over the years. I'd imagined my reaction. Elation? Triumph? Relief? So I was totally unprepared to feel this – nothingness. It was as though I had become detached from my body and floated, ceiling height, to look down on the empty shell below.

‘Jenny? Jenny? Are you OK?'

‘Mmmm,' I managed.

‘We – er – we were wondering if…if you'd like to see him.'

See
him? I reeled. The thought of seeing him dead was infinitely preferable to seeing him alive, but even so I was filled with revulsion.

‘Um. Thanks. But I think I'll pass on that one.'

‘As you wish.' Christ she was prim.

‘We also wondered if you would like to be involved with the funeral arrangements. We thought it would be nice if he could be buried next to your mother.'

I catapulted back into my body with a jarring shock. The vacuum was instantly filled with tidal waves of foaming red rage.

‘No!' I shrieked. ‘No! What kind of sadistic bastards are you? She killed herself to escape him. Now you're going to plant his corpse next to hers? You can't do that! You just can't do that!'

‘Now calm down, Jenny,' Straight Kate mewed, ‘I can tell you're upset.'

‘Upset? You think I'm fucking
upset?
I'm not fucking upset. I'm fucking
incan-fucking-descent
. Can't you see what you're doing you, stupid, insensitive cow? That man made my mother's life a living hell! What do you fucking know about it? I was the last to leave. And do you know why? Do you think I willingly chose to stay under the same roof as – as
him?'

My chest was heaving with dry sobs, but the Thames Barrier had shattered and nothing could stop the flood.

‘It was because I didn't want to leave her. I begged her to come with me. But she virtually pushed me out. And do you know what she said? She said her life was over, but mine was still ahead of me.
Her life was over!
She was forty-fucking-five, Kate. Forty-fucking-five! She pushed me out but she still cried when I left. She cried for six weeks. She cried for six weeks and then she died.'

I stopped, my body racked with the pain of unshed tears.

‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,' soothed Kate. ‘Of course this is all very distressing for you. But you know, you're not responsible for your mother's death.'

What?

‘She always was unstable.'

I should have hung up, of course. But that would have robbed me of a target for my rage. A torrent of incoherent abuse tumbled out. In the background, I could dimly hear Kate's measured tones.

‘I can't talk to you when you're like this, Jenny. Dennis said you'd be difficult. I'm going to hang up now. I'll speak to you again when you're calmer.'

I carried on yelling into the receiver long after I heard the dialling tone.

At some point I hung up. I slumped to the floor and sat, knees drawn up, head in hands, and went in for some manic rocking. Agonising pains stabbed my guts. In an award winning moment of self-delusion, I told myself I must have picked up a stomach bug.

I lurched to my feet and shot down the hall in a Groucho Marx lope. Reaching the toilet, I threw up violently, straightened, pulled the chain, splashed cold water on my face and then repeated the process. Twice.

Most people who have trouble expressing their emotions would have gone and kicked the cat. I couldn't do that – Gaia would never have forgiven me – so I decided to go in and kick Stan instead. As it turned out, I was to be denied any satisfaction from even this simple pleasure.

Stan hadn't moved from his previous position. I walked round him, took careful aim and planted a kick on his arse that would have impressed Nick and Robin's rugby-playing chums. There was no reaction. Stan's body jerked with the force of the blow – and that was it. Disappointing or what?

I don't know at what point it occurred to me to go through Stan's bag. Somehow he had come to personify everything that was wrong with my life at that point, if only by denying me the satisfaction of a reaction to my violent impulse. As such, he was now exempt from my normal moral code. This was extremely dubious logic. Before I had a chance to think too hard about it, I was on my hands and knees in the bedroom, rifling through the contents of the Gucci suitcase.

In my experience, snoopers never find anything that will make themselves feel good about their actions, but if they're lucky, they will at least find something that will justify the search. Well, lucky bloody them. Their names clearly aren't Jennifer Stern.

There was his electronic digital data thingy, but I had no idea how it worked. Anyway, it was bound to be password-protected, that much I did know. I found his mobile and made a note of the names and numbers programmed in, and that was it. Hardly a cornucopia of gritty info. His wallet held nothing more exciting than a stack of credit cards. I put his keys aside. I could get copies from the hardware shop on Nunhead Green.