Cutting Edge (20 page)

“Ring her, tell her you’re on obs. What’s she going to know?”

“I already did.”

“You told her that?”

“Told her I was in for a half.”

Divine shook his head in disgust. “Fucking women. Think they own you.”

“It isn’t like that,” Naylor said.

“No? Tell us what it is like then?”

Naylor swallowed some more beer. He could no more begin to explain to Divine what it was like than he could get Debbie to talk about what it was that was wrong.

“Get these down,” Divine said, “and we’ll move on.” He pushed at Naylor’s shoulder with his fist. “Strike lucky before the night’s out, eh?”

Naylor drank his best bitter and didn’t say a thing.

Resnick remained where he was, despite the dampness seeping up into his thighs and back, long after he had watched Paul Groves cross the square and climb into one of the cabs at the rank, heading home to Mapperley Top. If Karl Dougherty had only wanted companionship, a friend outside his work, Groves had wanted more. Sex. Love. It was difficult to believe that Karl had been ignorant of Groves’s inclinations, that the younger man—he couldn’t think of any other way to put it—fancied him. So what had he been doing? Pat phrases fell, fully formed, into his mind: stringing him along, playing with fire, dicing with death.

How frustrated would Groves have to be before striking out? How provoked? Two interviews in, Resnick did not consider Paul Groves to be a naturally violent man.

He remembered a pensioner who, after years of caring for his bedridden wife, waiting on her hand and foot, had blinded her suddenly with boiling tea; a fifteen-year-old youth who had stabbed his stepfather forty-two times with a bread knife and then tried to sever his neck with the end of a spade. Neither of them naturally violent, just driven till, like piano wire drawn tight inside them, their anger and frustration had sprung and snapped.

He passed the lavatory where Karl Dougherty had been attacked and thought about Reg Cossall. Likely he had seen which way the wind was blowing and been pleased to have the lot dumped into Resnick’s lap, glad to be shot of it.

He could remember Cossall, a young sergeant then, still in uniform, fulminating against the openness in which a urinal close to the station was used for homosexual assignations. Men would gather there, two or three at a time, quick glances over their shoulders as they approached along the pavement that bordered the cemetery. Sometimes their cars were parked below on Talbot Street, ready for a quick retreat or later meeting. Sometimes a passing PC would whistle his approach, lean in and flash a torch. Occasionally, on the request of an indignant customer, caught short on his way home and unsuspecting, policing would become more positive. Word on the grapevine would pass along and the practice would fall away until things had calmed down and it was safe to return.

From time to dangerous time, the citizens of outrage, primed by beer and armed with sticks and worse, would take the law into their own hands. Resnick had watched as Cossall hauled out one who had been wading through the toilet’s dim interior with the blunted bayonet his father had brought back from Cyprus.

“Go on, youth,” Cossall had said, retaining the weapon. “Off with you, sharpish.”

One of the men they had helped out had been bleeding profusely from superficial wounds; another had to be stretchered to the ambulance, a gash opened up down his side, three layers of clothing exposed through to his ribs.

“Serves the bastards right,” Cossall had said, spitting towards the gutter. “Bugger legislation, castrate the lot of ’em!”

There had been a high anger in his eyes and, seeing it again, in memory, Resnick thought of Karl Dougherty in the steady hum of intensive care, the blows that had been inflicted, Cossall’s face as he had stepped down from the urinal, zipping himself into place. Was that what he had been thinking then? Serve him right. Just another bumboy getting more than he’d bargained for. Teach him a lesson.

Resnick wondered what the lessons were, exactly who was teaching whom? Queer-bashing. Paki-bashing. They broke out in phases, ugly and suppurating, cocky kids in short hair with right on their side. Something to do of a Friday night: someone to hit Midway up that first stretch of Mansfield Road, Resnick turned and looked back at the city: nobody was learning anything.

Twenty-six

The only sign of Ed Silver was the broken glass shining dully in the light from the top of the front door. Bottle glass. The cats, anxious and eager and, as usual, late being fed, brushed around him and he shooed them away. When he went inside they scurried to the kitchen, where Resnick forked food into their bowls before going back out with an old newspaper. He wrapped the larger pieces of glass thickly inside its pages and dropped them in the green council dustbin. Then he used a dustpan and brush to sweep up as much of the rest as he could, finally down on his hands and knees to find any fragments that might end up in the cats’ paws.

The envelopes he carried in from the hall floor were dull and brown and he left them beside the kettle while he ground coffee and gave the cats their milk. Pepper was losing hair in clumps along his back again and he would have to make time to take him to the vet: forty-five minutes of staring out the owners of schnauzers and Alsatians, pretending not to be embarrassed by his cat’s whimpering.

One of the letters was from the Polish Club, reminding him that his subscription was overdue and inviting him to the eightieth birthday celebrations of one of its stalwart members. Second-class mail, it had taken five days to reach him, as the crow flies no more than a mile. A note had been penned at angles to the page:
Please come, Charles. We would all love to see you. Marian
. Marian Witczak, who kept the Polish flag in her window and an atlas open at Eastern Europe as if it were the A–Z. Step outside on to the street and the taxi that draws up will take you to the heart of Warsaw, fifteen minutes.

Resnick poured coffee, wondering about people who so strenuously denied the present, constructed a fantasy from the past. How many nights did Marian fall asleep dreaming of mazurkas and ball gowns? How much alcohol did it take before Ed Silver saw himself stepping up again on to the stand at Ronnie Scott’s, slipping the shield from the mouthpiece, hooking his sax on to its sling, beating in time with his heel and launching into “Dexterity” without even a glance back at the band?

He sliced the sausage he found in the back of the fridge and planned to fry it with pieces of cooked potato, a bulb of garlic, dust in a little dill and thyme. Before that he wanted something with his coffee and mourned for his lost cherry cheesecake. What he did have was honey, black bread it wouldn’t take more than a minute to toast. Take it through and get the weight off his feet, a little rest and then the cooking. He was listening to Miles Davis, the trumpeter’s namesake stretched purring between crotch and knee, a mouthful of coffee still in the cup, feeling better than at any time that day. He knew the phone would ring before the tune finished and it did.

There was one youth, hair cut like a mistake, boogying around the middle of the floor, doing a haphazard strip to Madonna, almost down to his boxers already and the bouncers anxious at the edge of the six-deep circle cheering him on.

“Any minute now,” said Naylor.

“What?”

“Trouble.”

Divine laughed. “Fucking Friday night! What d’you expect?”

The girls he’d been eyeing up were back again, three of them, standing close to the spiral staircase, pretending not to notice.

“Right,” Divine said. “We’re on.”

“What?”

“There.”

“Where?”

“Over there. Hanging out for it.”

All that Naylor could see was a trio of young women, nothing to differentiate them from the others packing the club. Hundreds of them. Lots of makeup, sun tan, streaked and permed hair, short skirts or low tops or both.

“Look at the state of that!” Divine nudged him urgently. “Not wearing much more than a sodding belt.”

At least the woman who’d wriggled by might take his mind off the ones he’d been endlessly on about, but no, there he was again, looking interested, looking cool, wait for it, wait for it, now the grin. One of the three said something to the others and all three of them laughed.

“There you are,” Divine said. “Let’s get over.”

Out on the floor the impromptu stripper was shimmying a pair of boxer shorts with a design like psychedelic crazy-paving lower and lower on his hips. Half the crowd were clapping their hands and bellowing the chorus from “World in Motion,” the rest chanting, “Off! Off! Off!” and the bouncers were flexing their muscles like substitutes about to be thrown into the action.

“We ought to do something about that,” said Naylor.

“Did we, fuck!”

“See what I mean,” Naylor said, as the first of the bouncers tried to barge through the crowd and took an elbow to the face for his pains.

“That’s what we ought to do something about.” Divine turned Naylor round physically, the three girls looking at them openly now, the tallest giving them a touch of open mouth, letting the lip gloss do the work.

Two of the bouncers had broken through the cheering cordon and made a grab for the stripper, managing between them to pull his shorts the rest of the way to the floor. “Leave it,” Divine hissed. “Just leave it alone.” A counter-section of the crowd had deserted the World Cup anthem for a few desultory lines of “Why Was He Born So Beautiful?”, dragged by the occasion from ancestral memory. Naylor found himself in front of the girls, only the tall one holding it out, her friends turned away in embarrassment, real or feigned. “Right,” said Divine. “What are you lot drinking?” One of the bouncers grabbed up the stripper’s clothes and tossed them in the direction of the nearest exit, while another held him by the shoulders and nonchalantly kneed him in the naked groin.

“What’s he threatening to chop off this time?” Resnick asked.

“So far,” said Jane Wesley, “nothing. He got into an argument with one of the regulars about football and there was a fight. Your friend came out of it rather the worse.”

“Far as I know,” said Resnick, “Ed doesn’t know a thing about football.”

“Exactly.”

Resnick sighed. All around them there was the smell of damp clothing and Old Holborn; urine, yesterday’s and today’s. “Where is he?” he asked.

“In the office. I wanted to send for an ambulance, but he wouldn’t let me.”

“Does he know you called me?”

“No.”

Resnick looked at her sharply.

“I thought, if he’s going to have a go at somebody, rather you than some unsuspecting ambulance driver.”

“Right,” said Resnick. “Thanks.”

Ed Silver was sitting, not on the chair but on the floor behind it, both arms wrapped around his head, which was resting on his knees.

“Will you be okay?” Jane asked.

Resnick nodded and she closed the office door behind them.

“Bastard, Charlie.”

“Who?”

“It’s a bastard.” Silver’s voice was muffled and, even when he slid his hands clear of his face, still sounded as if it were being filtered through cotton wool. “Broken my bloody nose.”

In amongst the dried and drying blood and the swelling, it was difficult to see exactly what the damage might be. “Looks like a trip to casualty,” Resnick said, already dreading it, far and away enough of hospitals recently.

Silver was shaking his head, even though it hurt to do so, mumbling no.

“You can’t stay here with a broken nose.”

“Why the sodding hell not?”

“It needs attention.”

“I’ll give it attention.” Silver placed his fingers to either side of the nose and began to push.

“Jesus, no!”

“What?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Go back outside, Charlie. If you’re squeamish.” Instead, Resnick closed his eyes; it wasn’t the blood, more the self-inflicted pain. There was a lot of squeezing, a quick click like balsa wood splintering and a lot more blood.

“There,” announced Silver, “that’s done it.”

“What exactly?”

“If the bastard wasn’t broken, it is now.”

Naylor might not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but there was Divine, leaning over these four lads and talking low and purposeful, smiling all the while. A couple of minutes and the lads got up and vacated their table, great view down over the dance floor.

“What did you say to them?” Naylor asked as they sat down.

Divine winked. “You don’t want to know.”

The girls were all chatty enough now, not that it mattered what they were saying, most of it lost beneath the music and the low roar that rose from the floor and hung beneath the ceiling like hot air.

Divine put his arm around the tall girl’s shoulders and she made a show of shrugging it off; Divine winking then, across the table at Naylor, giving him the thumbs-up when he thought the girl wasn’t looking, though, of course, she was, pursing her lips at him, just a touch of tongue between the lip gloss.

“Fancy your chances, don’t you?”

“I fancy yours.”

The other girls, sisters it turned out, in on the bus from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Lord knows how they were expecting to get back, did some more nudging and giggling and Naylor thought, not for the first time, Christ, they can’t be more than sixteen, seventeen.