Dust and Desire (19 page)

Dinner over, I decided to leave the car in the car park near the B&B and walk back into town to shed the mega-calories I’d just taken on board. The gun was left in my bed, keeping it cold for me. When I arrived, I went for a cocktail in the basement bar of a big hotel and gave the brush-off to the prostitutes who latched on to me as I entered, complimented me on my jacket and asked if I wanted some company. They went away when I said, sure, but do you mind if we just talk? About my father? And his special needs? There were plenty of other poor dinks for them to work on.

There was some kind of science-fiction convention going on at the hotel, and everyone was wandering around saying ‘Klaatu’ to each other and comparing home-made phasers made out of dead Persil washing-up bottles. They wore name tags that said stuff like
Epididymus, from the planet Vas Deferens
. I finished up and got out quick, before I was energised into one of their bedrooms for some kind of anal-probe experiment.

It was still cold but the vodka martini had taken the edge off the chill. I went on a crawl through the pubs in the town centre, trying to work out how things had changed since my last visit here. I wasn’t due to meet up with Mike Brinksman for another couple of hours.

It was a little depressing to find that some of the pubs I’d liked, such as the Swan, had been closed down and earmarked for demolition. And drinking in the Grapes or the Vines proved a grim experience. There’s nothing worse than having a pint in a pub for old times’ sake only to find that it’s now just a pub, without any of the magic it contained when you were sitting around a table there with your best friends or a woman who was making the back of your neck hot. A pub you love isn’t so attractive when there’s nobody in it you recognise, beyond lots of other sour-faced thirty-somethings flailing around for the same thing.

At ten I made my way to the Philharmonic at the junction of Hope Street and Hardman Street, not a million miles away from Geenan’s place. I was determined to have another crack at him at home, without his hard-hat hard mates to back him up. I was a fifth of the way into a pint of lager when Mike came in.

I’d been at school with Mike Brinksman. He’d kicked further education into touch when he failed his A levels and got himself a job as a trainee reporter on the
Runcorn World
, a Mickey Mouse free weekly rag that wasn’t even based in the town it represented, but ten miles away. He’d spent two years there, earning eighty-five pounds a week, before lucking into a job at the
Warrington Guardian
, and thence to the
Liverpool Echo
, where he’d been ever since, apart from the occasional casual shift for one of the daily tabloids.

He looked tired. I got him a whisky and patiently listened to him outline the story about the councillor, while inside I seethed with the need to plug him about the killing in Liverpool. Once he’d got it off his chest, he relaxed, taking off his coat and losing some of the tension in his shoulders. He had very small, very blue eyes that appeared permanently surprised, in a face that was childishly round.

‘What brings you up here?’ he asked.

‘Rafa sees me as the new Luis Suarez,’ I said. ‘I’ve resisted up till now, but then Roy got on my case and told me I’d need a few matches to prove myself for England.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I thought you were after information.’

‘Actually, now you mention it…’

We had another drink. I told him about Liptrott and the suspicion that it was linked to a murder committed five years previously in Merseyside.

‘Cause of death?’ Mike asked.

I shrugged. ‘I never got that far, but I saw the body. It looked as if he’d been opened up like a toddler’s Christmas present. I’d say loss of blood, but I couldn’t tell you which the fatal wound was.’

‘Knife, then?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh yes.’

‘I’ll ask around. I don’t remember it off the top of my head, but I’ll check the filed copies and talk to a few plods I get on with. Might be a bit tasty for me up here, anyway, if they’re going to reopen the files on it because your lot have got a hard-on for the killer.’

He gave me one of his cards, and rejected my suggestion that we move on to a club. Mojo’s, an old favourite of mine, was on Hope Street, a hop, skip and piss against the wall away.

‘I’m shagged,’ he said. ‘I’m off home. How long are you in the ’pool for?’

‘Another day or two. Depends what I dig up.’

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. Give us a call round lunchtime.’

Mojo’s was the kind of place you only find out about through a mate. You could wander up Hope Street during the day and not realise that one of its terraced houses concealed a three-floor club with bars, dance floors and the kind of interior decoration that made Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen look as outré as a Mr Byrite cardigan.

I found a table and sat down with a pint. It was a bit early for Mojo’s, but then I knew how packed this place could get once the pubs reached chucking-out time. Which was not to say that the club was filled only with lonely echoes when I got there. There was a good crowd in, and the music was loud, some drum ’n’ bass track that made your lungs vibrate. I people-watched for a bit, enjoying the currents that pulled the girls and boys this way and that. The way they moved to the music, even though they weren’t dancing: the little tics and twitches of those who were trying to impress, the opening and closing of posture depending on who was nearby, the eye contact. Everyone was fluent in body language in here, it seemed. Apart from one or two mutes who continued disrupting the whole, beautiful rhythm.

Like this guy, sitting next to a woman who was saying no to him every which way but verbally. Everything about him was a bit of snot in your ice cream, from his too-shiny bouffant hair to his no-need-to-iron shirt and knitted tank top, his white trousers and slip-on shoes. He was walking a coin across his knuckles, a large one, that looked like one of those commemorative jobs they’d handed out at school for the Silver Jubilee. Some people, I understand, think that looks cool. Nothing that obviously took years of hardcore practice, at the expense of a normal, healthy existence, is cool. And this guy clearly must have spent aeons in front of his mirror, walking that coin, knowing that to perfect it was to unlock the door to an embarrassment of female riches.

Wrong, minge-wipe.

A middle-aged woman was on the prowl, trying to crash drinks from the students sucking their alcopops at the bar. Some mother high on a night out with her mates, maybe tickled by a compliment or two from some pissed lads earlier on, thinking she could cut it with the foxes in here. She had good legs, I’ll give her that, but they were only good for a hippo. Her boobs were situated where they ought to be but her black bra, visible through the sheer white top she was wearing, wore a sign that said Hardcore Scaffolding Ltd. The less said about her arse the better, but she made two stools groan when she spread it across them.

I was groaning, too. She’d picked my table.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘fuck me ragged with a cricket bat.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, trying not to linger too long on her Maybelline mask.

‘I’m waiting for someone.’

‘If it isn’t Joel Sorrell.’

Christ. Please, God. Please,
God
, if I never have another drink and promise to apply for a place in a monastery, please tell me that I’ve never porked this Certificate 18 non-special effect.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

The people who ask that question get it slightly wrong every time. They should try inserting a ‘want to’ in between the ‘don’t’ and the ‘remember’. I studied her eyes, for as long as they stayed in one place, and gritted my teeth. I was in a club that I liked and the last time I’d been here, so had she, but she and I had been fifteen years younger, and then free of an amount of excess fat that could have gone to create a third person.

‘Hello, Annie,’ I said.

‘Are you married?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Where’s your ring? Or maybe you’re on the pull tonight? Naughty boy.’

‘Annie, if there was ever a time when I was not on the pull, it’s tonight. I’m so much not pulling that I’m actually pushing. I’m pushing so hard.’

‘You always were a weirdo,’ she said. ‘Nice arse, though, as I remember.’

‘Yes, well that was yesterday. And today is today and we’ve all moved on, haven’t we?’

She asked me if I was going to be a gentleman and buy her a drink, and I said no. ‘Then I’ll buy you one,’ she said.

She got me a pint of lager, and while she was at the bar I almost made a break for it, but I wasn’t going to let her spoil my night and, anyway, I’d have to wait outside in the cold for Geenan to get home. I thanked her when she came back and then spent some time studying the knots and wormholes in the wooden table. When I looked up again, she was crying.

I felt like all men do when a woman starts to cry: guilty, shitty and confused.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure what I was apologising for. It seemed to work, though, and she sobered up a little.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, dabbing at the panda-esque horror that her eyes had become. ‘I’m just tired and drunk. I was only being friendly.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s me. I’m no good any more at recognising
friendly
.’

‘You sound like a bitter old man,’ she said.

‘Bang on the money,’ I said, and dumped a few big mouthfuls of lager down my neck.

‘Do you remember–’

I touched her arm. ‘Please, could we not play that game?’

‘It’s all I’ve got,’ she said.

‘I remember everything. So no point carrying on.’

‘You still live in the area?’

I shook my head. ‘I ran away years ago. Went down south.’

‘Why?’

I smiled, or tried to. All I could feel was a cold worm trying to move around where my mouth ought to be. ‘I could tell you but it would mean nothing to you.’

She didn’t say anything. For the first time that night, I wished she would.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I moved away because I felt I was getting dragged down. I felt smothered and I didn’t want that.’

The club was getting busier and I glanced at my watch. The pubs were closing and hundreds of people had now realised they were wearing their beer-heads and needed to fill them. Images from my past in the north-west were queuing up like surly youths outside a chip shop, fired, feisty and ready to visit actual bodily harm on me if I so much as dared look at them.

‘I went to hairdressing college when I left school,’ she said. ‘And then, after I dropped out there, I got a job in a baker’s. Hair today, scone tomorrow, that’s what my husband always says.’

I could believe it. I bet he said it every day.

‘I met my husband the day after me and you… you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I had a hangover – as you know. And I was out in the garden getting the washing in. He was next-door, cleaning windows. We got chatting.’

She lifted her glass, which was empty, then returned it to the table. I didn’t offer. I had now changed my mind and decided I was getting out the moment she turned her back. ‘Did you ever get married?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Kids?’

‘Annie.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m just being friendly.’

‘So you keep saying. I wouldn’t bother about that. I had my friendly gland removed in a special operation.’

‘When we, you know… weren’t you seeing someone? Teacher wasn’t she?’

I got up too quickly and knocked our glasses to the floor. I think I turned her chair over too, while she was in it. I can’t be sure. Because I was moving fast then, barging through the students and their trendy oblong spectacles, their tiny rubber handbags and two-storey platform trainers. The bouncers were thinking about pinching me, but whether they thought to let it go because I was leaving anyway or because there was something in my eyes that gave them cause to back off, I couldn’t say. Either way, they were wise to.

I got out on to Hope Street and sucked in the cold air hard until my lungs caught fire and I started getting a headache. The wind dragged its icy nails up and down my spine. I tugged my jacket close and jammed my hands in the pockets, stalked over to Geenan’s house. There was a light on in the front window.

I knocked on the door. He still wasn’t answering. I knelt on the doorstep and pushed open the flap on the letterbox.

‘Jimmy,’ I called out. I thought I heard a television. ‘Jimmy? It’s me. It’s Joel Sorrell. I talked to you today. I didn’t mean to upset you, but I need your help. I know it’s eating you up. But my girl is gone too. My little girl is gone, too, Jimmy. I’m in the same dirty bathwater as you. I know–’

The door opened and he was standing above me, his face twisted up as if he’d just eaten a forkful of shepherd’s pie only to find that it was shepherd’s shit. ‘You don’t know a fucking thing,’ he said.

He went back into the house, leaving me to get to my feet and follow him.

12

I
woke up wearing my clothes. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Jimmy,’ I said, which was also the last thing I remember saying from the previous night, before I reached that point of drunkenness that ensures you remember nothing else. He’d just opened a second bottle of Jameson’s. I’d had one more drink, the whiskey tasting like water, and must have passed out. He then either put me in a taxi or I recovered sufficiently to do it myself. Crucially, though, I remembered pretty much everything that was said up until that point.

I’d slept too late for breakfast, but I wasn’t up to it anyway. I had a wash and scooped up my keys and wallet, then went downstairs. Outside was wetter than a Conservative back bench. I ran through the rain to the rental car and started her up, flicking on the headlights and the wipers as I nosed out of the car park. The intense fragrance of the interior, something rose-based, was so cloying that I almost threw up. I wound down the window a little and chewed on the damp air. By the time I hit the A562 going east, I felt a little better, but every time I thought about Annie, or the way she’d tried to jemmy a way into me, I felt my gorge rising.