Cutting Edge (21 page)

“Mandy’s a beauty queen,” said one of them, looking at the tall girl, who adjusted her profile into what she assumed to be a regal manner.

“Kevin over there’s middleweight champion of the world, aren’t you, Kev? Stings like a butterfly and sucks like a bee.”

Naylor blushed, the girls snorted into their banana daiquiris.

“I am, actually,” Mandy said.

“Yeh?”

“Yes. Miss Amber Valley. Two years running, as a matter of fact.”

“And she was runner-up the year before that,” added one friend.

“And she got into the heats for Miss East Midlands at Skeggy.”

“I can’t cope with all this,” Divine said, getting to his feet, adjusting the crotch of his trousers as he did so. “I’m off for a slash.”

“Coarse, your friend, isn’t he?” the nearest sister confided in Naylor.

“Hey, Kev,” called Divine, turning back towards the table. “What d’you reckon? Shall I get the colored, the ribbed, or just the plain?”

The car hadn’t been outside Aloysius House much more than twenty minutes, long enough for someone to throw up over the nearside of the boot.

“I hope you’re not going to blame us for that,” said Jane Wesley, walking with Ed Silver and Resnick from the door.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Resnick said.

When they had maneuvered Silver into the front seat, she said, angling her head away from the road, “If this happens again, are you sure you want me to call you?”

“No,” Resnick shrugged.

“Does that mean you don’t want me to?”

“No.”

“That’s what I like,” she smiled, “clear, decisive decision-making.”

Resnick raised one hand, open, towards her and went around to the other side of the car. A few more nights like this and he’d give up the idea of sleep altogether.

“Lovely woman,” Ed Silver said. “Lovely.”

“So you said.”

“I did?”

“Last time.”

Silver picked at a scab on his upper lip and a thin line of blood began to run towards his unshaven chin. “Have I seen her before? That woman?”

“Not clearly,” Resnick said.

“Hey!” Silver exclaimed some moments later, the car turning right to pass the central Probation Office and the old Guildhall courts. “Was that a joke? Not clearly. Was that a joke?”

“No,” said Resnick. “I don’t make jokes.”

“Take ’em, eh Charlie. Take ’em. Not like that feller tonight, the one as did this. All that happened was, let me tell you this, he was blathering on about football or something, England, you know. That Parker, he said, not so bad but he’d play a damn sight better if he weren’t black. You see, d’you see? So I goes, being black, that’s part of it, makes him as fucking good as he is. Charlie fucking Parker. And he hit me, not with his fist neither, with his knee. Don’t know how he managed it, but that’s what it was, his knee. Ignorant drunken bastard, he calls me, don’t even know his right bloody name.”

Resnick glanced sideways as they stopped at the lights below the Broad Marsh. The swelling round Silver’s nose was certainly not going down; instead it was spreading across his cheeks, up towards his eyes. “I knew he didn’t mean Charlie Parker, somebody else …”

“Paul,” Resnick said. “Paul Parker.”

“It was a joke.”

“Yes.”

“Fucking joke.”

“Yes.”

Silver rested a hand forward against the windscreen, blinking as he tried to focus. “Where we going?”

“Casualty.”

“I’m not …”

“Ed?”

“Eh?”

“Shut up.”

One of those old Motown songs and Divine was pressing himself up against the former Miss Amber Valley, grateful that she was tall enough for him to wriggle his tongue in her ear without having to bend too low.

“How about it, then? Shall we go?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Come on. Ready?”

“No.”

“Come on.” A tug at her wrist.

“No.”

No attempt at dancing now. “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t worry about your mates, Kev’ll look after them all right.”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“My boyfriend …”

“Your sodding what?”

“Boyfriend. He’s meeting me here, picking me up.”

Divine shook his head in disbelief.

“One of his pals was having his stag night.”

“Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?” He moved in again, hands low at her back, fingers against the top of her buttocks pulling her back towards him, edge of her little panties clear to the touch. “You’ll not see him till morning.”

“What d’you mean?”

“If he’s been out on the piss with his mates, he’s not going to turn up here, is he, ready to drive you home.”

“He will.”

“Be too drunk to stand up, most likely, never mind drive.”

She pulled herself away from him and stood there pouting, lip gloss all but gone. Divine had a sudden vision of the evening ending in nothing and he hated it.

“All right, then,” he said, grabbing her arm at the elbow, “if he’s out there waiting for you, let’s go find him.”

Protesting, Mandy was pushed and pulled towards the exit, until finally, grudgingly she walked with him out through the entrance, past the dinner-jacketed bouncers and round into the car park.

“Where is he, then?”

“I don’t know …”

“Exactly.”

Divine ran his hand up her back and fondled her neck beneath the permed hair. He kissed her shoulder, slid his other hand over her breast as he turned her towards him.

“If you didn’t want this,” he said, “you should have said so before. But then you might not have scored so many free drinks.”

“You offered,” she said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“This,” Divine said.

He was kissing her, pushing his tongue into her mouth, doing his best to stop her wriggling and get a hand inside her dress at the same time, when someone tapped him hard on the shoulder.

The second time it happened Divine turned to give whoever it was a mouthful and got hit by Mandy’s boyfriend, a fourteen-stone West Indian, who brought an eight-inch spanner smack down on to Divine’s left eye.

Resnick wanted to drop Ed Silver off at the doors to casualty and leave him there, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Almost the first things he saw, after steering Silver towards reception, were two familiar faces amongst those waiting for attention. “Naylor,” Resnick said. “Divine. What are you doing here?”

Twenty-seven

“Course, I’d heard the records, a few of them anyway, but I’ll tell you, Charlie, first time I ever saw Bird and Dizzy live, I almost pissed myself.”

One of the other problems with drunks, Resnick was thinking, they never knew when it was time to go to sleep. The visit to casualty had been shorter than some, less painful than many; Ed Silver had emerged with a well-washed face, a slightly remodeled nose, and good intentions. “One thing, Charlie,” he had claimed, getting into Resnick’s car, “this has done it for me, I mean it. My drinking, from now on it’s going to be seriously under control. So help me. And you can bear witness to that.” They hadn’t been back at the house half an hour, before Silver was going through cupboards, searching at the back of shelves. “Just a tot, Charlie. Nobody can be expected to give up totally, just like that. The body wouldn’t stand for it.”

Resnick had found tins of frankfurters and Czechoslovakian sauerkraut, the nub ends of a loaf of black rye, pickled gherkins; he had opened the only bottle of wine he possessed, the cheapest dry white he had found in the Co-op, bought months ago to make a recipe he had since forgotten.

Nervous of all this unwonted night-time activity, Bud chased his tail from room to room, occasionally stopping to look perplexed, the White Rabbit in
Alice
, terrified that he was late but with no idea what for.

“The first of the Dial sessions, Charlie, the ones with Miles and Max Roach, you must have those, eh?”

So they sat through the night, listening to the Charlie Parker Quintet—“The Hymn,” “Bird of Paradise,” “Dexterity”—while, around them, Resnick’s neighbors slept on, dreaming straight dreams unthreatened by flattened fifths.

Ed Silver’s first attempts to play jazz had been as a clarinetist with a revivalist band in Glasgow, doing his best to sound like Johnny Dodds in the twenties. The first thing that changed that was, down south for a rare date at the Hot Club of London, this skinny guy had come up to him and started talking, an accent that stretched across the Atlantic and back to Aldgate. A musician himself, he’d played with a number of USAF band personnel stationed here during the war, taken a job immediately afterwards, polite music for dancers on one of the liners traveling from Southampton to New York. It was in his East End flat that Silver heard his first bursts of Charlie Parker, records he’d made with Jay McShann’s band; each time Parker soloed, the everyday was suddenly pierced by the sublime.

Next day, Silver had pawned his clarinet in exchange for an alto and talked his way into a band working the boats. Anything to get to the Apple, 52nd Street, the Three Deuces and the Royal Roost.

“This is the group,” Silver said now, listening, catching a piece of cucumber at the third attempt and slipping it into his mouth, “I saw at the Deuces. Amazing. Every last dollar I had on me I spent seeing them, three nights in a row, each time it was hotter and better.

“Anyway …” A gulp at the wine now, wincing a little as he moved his mouth. “… there I am the next day, pretty late on, due on board ship at half-seven, taking my last look down Broadway and there’s Bird, crossing the street ahead of me, sax case in his hand. First reaction, Charlie, I’ll tell you, no, it’s not him, can’t be. Then it is and I’m hurrying after him, slapping him on the back, shaking his hand, telling him I’ve come all the way from England just to hear him, every solo he’s played the last three nights has been a fucking inspiration.

“Bird looks at me a shade off and then he smiles. ‘Hey, man. Lend me fifty bucks.’ I would have given that man every stitch of clothing on my back if he’d asked for it, but right then I didn’t have five bucks, never mind fifty. I can’t think of another damn thing to say and all I can do, Charlie, I think of it to this day, is watch him walk away.

“By the time he got to the studio, just a couple of blocks down, he’d copped from somebody else. Story goes he shot up in the studio bogs before going right in and cutting this stuff.”

Ed Silver leaned back and closed his eyes as, unison theme over, Parker’s alto sailed out, clean and clear, over the swish of Max Roach’s cymbals.

“‘Dexterity,’” Ed Silver said.

“Story also goes,” said Resnick, “he’d killed himself before he was forty. Heart, stomach, cirrhosis of the liver.”

Ed Silver didn’t say a thing; continued to sit there, eyes closed, sipping now and then at the last of the white wine.

Saturday: Debbie Naylor sat in the living room, curtains still drawn, trying to get the baby to feed. Up on the first floor, she could hear Kevin retching, head over the lavatory bowl. Serve him right, she thought, though with little satisfaction, let him find out what that’s like, at least.

“What d’you call this?” Graham Millington asked, staring down at his plate. His wife was eating wholemeal toast, drinking chamomile tea, reading the women’s page of the
Mail
. If she could persuade Graham to drop her off at Asda and collect her, there would be time to get her evening-class homework finished before the boys needed ferrying to that party in West Bridgford. “This isn’t what we normally have, is it?” Millington persisted.

“Extra bran,” she said, “fifteen per cent more fruit and nuts. No added sugar or salt. Thought it would make a nice change.”

Graham Millington mumbled to himself and carried on chewing.

Lynn Kellogg sat in the parked car and poured coffee into the flask’s white plastic cup. When she’d been little, six and seven and eight, Sunday afternoon drives with her parents, east to the sea, south to watch the horses canter on Newmarket common, there had been milk in Tupperware containers, sugar—lumps for the horses, granulated for themselves, spooned from a paper bag—a packet of ginger nuts and another—treat of treats!—of jaffa cakes. Sitting there, watching the still deserted street, she could remember the first taste of jam, the quick sweetness of it the moment the chocolate coating broke through.

“What time did she get in last night?” Skelton’s wife asked, tightening the belt of her dressing gown, turn and turn and pull, a double bow.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know.”

Skelton shook his head. Take the kettle to the pot, not the pot to the kettle: amazing how our parents’ precepts stuck with us, governed the trivia of our lives, amazing and terrible. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

His wife opened the glass-fronted cupboard, took out saucers, bone-china cups, white with a tasteful floral design. “If it doesn’t matter, why spend half the night sitting up, the rest of it lying in bed not sleeping?”

Divine blinked into the bathroom mirror with his one good eye. The other was swollen, yellow, stitches like Biro marks, blue-black, across it. “Shit!” He leaned over the toilet bowl to urinate, one arm resting against the wall; when he cleared his throat and spat, it was like dredging Trent Lock. He didn’t know what had been worse, the initial blow, the embarrassment or Resnick’s face. Well. The swelling would subside, the stitches would come out and there was the inspector still to face. “Slag!” wincing as the sound reverberated around his head. “Slag!” slamming the wall with the flat of his hand. “Fucking see her again, I’ll teach her a fucking lesson!”

Calvin Ridgemount woke to the smell of bacon frying and knew instantly which day it was. He cleaned his teeth and splashed cold water up into his face. Same black jeans but a new T-shirt, Stone Roses, he liked the shirt design better than he liked the band. Smack on time, as Calvin entered the kitchen, his father was breaking the first of the eggs against the edge of the pan.

“You goin’ to see your mother today?”

“You know I am.”

“That’s fine. Just a couple of things I’d like you to do for me first.”

“Sure,” said Calvin, picking up one of the slices of bread his father had already buttered, folding it in half and starting to eat. “No problem.”