The Touch of Innocents (31 page)

The door across the pub swung open, complaining on unoiled hinges, and a newcomer entered dressed in an ankle-length leather coat and broad-brimmed fedora. A cigarillo protruded from between carefully trimmed greying whiskers. The teeth were appallingly stained and twisted. He did not cross to the bar but stood by the door, gazing carefully around. Immediately, a young man rose from his stool and crossed to greet him, slapping hands in a perfunctory ritual before both disappeared past the video machines and into the toilet.

Daniel nodded. ‘Sixty seconds and one of them
will be out again and off. The other will be shooting up inside.’

She found herself feeling nauseous. ‘Which one is the pusher?’

‘Who knows? They might both be, buying for themselves and selling to others so they can buy for themselves again. Often there’s little distinction. Whoever leaves first will be the one pushing tonight.’

And it was the leather coat, as Daniel had said, who was out and gone before most people were aware he had even arrived. Five minutes later the younger man emerged, slowly, relaxed, greeting a couple of the old-timers as he made his way back to his chair. He said very little for half an hour, not participating, before he became more animated and once more part of the group.

‘He’s our man,’ Daniel muttered.

‘What man?’

‘The man who can find Paulette for us.’

‘I thought we might ask the barman.’

‘We could try, but there’s a good chance he wouldn’t know, or if he did wouldn’t tell us, or if he told us would also warn Paulette before we got to her.’ He shook his head. ‘Too much of a risk.’

‘And that guy there in his army-surplus shirt and semi-coma is less of a risk?’ she asked sceptically.

‘He’s an addict and he needs money. And in order to get it he’ll trade his grandmother to cannibals without thinking twice. He’d sell Paulette without thinking at all.’

‘Or Bella,’ she whispered.

‘I sold everything I had when I needed to.’

She turned her eyes from the youth back towards Daniel; he was trying to tell her something.

‘Don’t be too harsh on Paulette, Izzy. There’s no point. But try to understand. When you are in that
condition there are no limits, no shame or feelings of guilt which can stop you doing what you have to do. You have no conscience, and no control. You can’t help it.’

‘Can’t help selling babies?’ she protested.

‘I sold everything I had, Izzy. Everything I owned, everything I could steal. My father’s war medals. The few paltry heirlooms my mother had struggled so hard to hang on to. Burgled from my own brother’s flat. I even sold my own body.’

‘You what?’

‘Sold my own body. Just like you did last night.’

‘That was different!’

‘Of course it was different. And you sold your body only once. I sold mine time and time and time again.’

She trembled, backed away a little; he noticed.

‘You have to know. I’m not going to hide the truth from you.’

‘It did that to you?’ she whispered.

He nodded sadly. He could see the confusion eating away at her. It seemed a long time before she spoke again, and suddenly he was vulnerable and very afraid. He wanted to jump back into the suit of armour, to shut out the fear. Her lips were moving but she was having trouble mouthing the words.

‘It did that to you?’ she repeated. ‘Yet you would risk it all again. For me? And for Bella?’

‘For myself. You see, I’m hoping you’ll prove to be the best detox treatment any man could find.’

‘When I get you back home, Danny Blackheart, or wherever it is we end up, you’re going to need treatment.’ A smile broke across her face and she looked suggestively through her glass.

‘You working girls are all the same.’

She reached for his hand but the moment had already passed, his attention wandered. The youth
had stood up from his seat and was meandering across to the bar, intent on ordering another drink.

‘Time to get to work,’ Daniel muttered grimly, preparing to follow.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘My turn, Daniel. You’ve bathed in enough petrol for one day.’

He struggled to find the spirit to protest but already she was on her feet, moving across to the bar. She squeezed in beside the youth, her breast rubbing purposefully against his arm as she did so.

‘Hi, honey,’ she greeted.

He looked around in surprise, eyed the breast that had attacked him, then looked once more towards the barman. ‘Sorry, sister. That’s not my game,’ he responded in an accent smothered in the mud of the Thames Estuary.

‘I don’t think you understand. I’m not selling, I’m buying.’

His curiosity was immediately sparked. ‘What you after? Pills? Grass? E? Summink a little ’eavier, perhaps?’

‘Something much heavier. Information. And I’m willing to pay for it.’

Curiosity turned to suspicion. ‘You’re not—?’

‘Do I look like Filth, for Chrissake? Funny type of policewoman you must have in this country.’

‘What sort of information? And ’ow much?’

‘I’m looking for a girl called Paulette. Been around these parts recently, probably this pub.’

‘Why d’you need to know?’

‘None of your damned business.’

‘Never ’eard of her.’

‘Ever heard of fifty pounds?’ She had withdrawn a tightly folded note from under the strap of her wristwatch. She had his undivided attention.

‘How’s the memory job coming along?’

‘I’ve … ’eard the name. Comes in ’ere once, twice a week maybe. Not seen ’er for a few days though.’

Paulette. Here. His words hit Izzy like exploding mortar shells. She found she had stopped breathing; in her hand the note had begun to tremble.

‘You know where she lives?’

‘No.’

Despair!

‘Bu’ I can find out,’ he added hurriedly.

‘I need to find her, without her knowing I’m even looking. Quietly. Very quietly.’

‘You don’t wanna scare ’er off. No’ my problem. Can be done.’

With great care she proceeded to tear the fifty-pound note in two. One half she clenched in her fist, the other was placed under her hand on the sticky counter. His spot-encrusted upper lip wobbled furiously like a squirrel at a nut.

‘You get the other half if you can give me her address. Noon tomorrow. Here.’

He laid his hand upon hers. ‘And a free fuck?’ he sneered.

‘The only thing you’ll get for free is the feeling you’ve just blown the easiest fifty you ever made.’

He snorted. ‘Cow.’

She removed her hand and he grabbed the torn half.

‘Noon tomorrow.’ She reached up and tweaked his unshaven cheek savagely. ‘And you know what? I like you. Something about your smell. Tell me where she is, where I can find her tomorrow, without her knowing, and there’ll be another fifty in it.’

‘I’ll be ’ere,’ he spat, eyes red with resentment. ‘Anyway, who’d want an old scrubber like you? Even for free?’

They did not return to their hotel, they didn’t dare take the risk on any hotel, not if Devereux and his Establishment were already searching for her. She had slipped away too often and wouldn’t be allowed another chance. In any event sleep was beyond them, carried by a surging tide that swept aside exhaustion and lifted them off their rock of doubt.

They sought refuge in an all-night café where, beneath strip lights and a vapour cloud of cooking fat, they drank coffee and soup and watched as the bleary-eyed owner abused with uninhibited Serbian partiality the patrons he decided were chemically, alcoholically or socially unfit to grace his meagre table. The night was punctuated by frequent rows and bouts of cursing as unwanted visitors were dispatched as promptly as they had arrived back onto the freezing streets, the splintered glass door bearing witness to the fact that more than abuse was occasionally hurled back by those he had offended. Strips of tape stretched across the damage, crudely disguised as a Christmas star. But at least it was warm, and she rather liked the
chorba
cabbage soup.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

They had been talking for several hours, exchanging verbal snapshots of their earlier lives, allowing the other to touch and share the moments and memories upon which a man or woman is built. And which sometimes cause them to crumble.

‘It was my first week at university. I’d bought myself a Norton, 500cc of chromed mechanical beast. To celebrate. And to pull the girls. Damn successful, too, even in the first week.’ He smiled mischievously. ‘Until I was so busy enchanting a rather wonderful classics student named Anna through the university park that I completely missed the bend. Ended up wrapping the bike around a maple, front
and back ends of both me and my beast meeting around the other side of the tree. The Norton was a write-off but they were able to glue me back together, over time. Took them several attempts at getting my leg right and I spent the next two years on painkillers.’

A bellow came from behind the counter and another would-be refugee from the cold night slunk back into the shadows.

‘I was so proud of myself when I finally threw the crutches and the pills away,’ Daniel continued, remembering, still hurting, ‘but when the excitement had died down I found that nothing was quite right. Something was missing, something very important to me and my body, but I couldn’t tell what. So I tried everything – a new Norton, snowboarding, parachuting. And a lot more sex. But nothing got rid of that empty, nagging feeling inside. Nothing. Except drugs. A girlfriend gave me some pills to settle me down before exams and my body told me right away that was it, that’s what I’d been missing. Like a fur coat on a freezing day.’

He wrapped his arms protectively around his body. ‘And, of course, I could handle it, couldn’t I? It was the accident, after all, not my fault; I wasn’t a junkie or anything. Even when I’d gone through popping and sniffing and snorting and was all the way to shoving needles into my arm, I could give it up any time I wanted. It was just to get me through finals, then through the bit where you’re supposed to get out and find a job, and then, when I didn’t, to cope with the disappointment and the rows I began having with everyone around me. Every problem I had, my body told me that heroin was the answer. It made a complicated world so simple. Everybody I
knew was doing it; of course they were. No normal friend would put up with my abuse and lying. And so it went on.’

‘Until?’

‘I was in Salford, I think. I’d sold everything I owned, I’d even started renting out my girlfriend. Then I woke up one morning – or whatever time of day it was; scarcely capable of telling the difference – and she was gone. And I felt awful, and I threw up, and I desperately needed a fix but I had no money. I had only one thing left to sell. Myself. So I did.’

The implication shimmered uncertainly between them.

‘That was me, Izzy. All of me. There was nothing left of me apart from drugs. Then I had a stroke of luck that saved my life,’ he continued. ‘I went back to the Bay to see my mother. Even as an addict I suppose I had some sense of shame left, because I’d avoided her for months. After I’d stolen my father’s medals, I didn’t want her to see me, what I’d become.’

‘You went back to her for help?’

‘No. I went back for the sole purpose of stealing from her again. She had long before thrown me out, told me I wasn’t welcome under her roof while I was still “sorting myself out”, as she put it. So I went back for coffee and lied and told her that I was off it all, and while my mother was busy I stole her purse and a necklace my father had given her. Not much, costume gems, but about the only thing she had left of any value.’

‘So how was all that lucky?’

‘She called the police. Then, when the good men of the Garda tried to brush over it and call it a family dispute, my mother caused a riot and insisted that I be arrested and locked up.’

‘Your mother? Had her son arrested? She must have been extraordinarily bitter.’

‘My mother loved me more deeply than I could ever imagine. She saw me killing myself. She knew that unless I was forced to face up to what I was doing she’d be getting another visit from the police, and soon, to tell her I’d been found stiff in some gutter with a needle in my arm.’

Up to this point Daniel’s account had been delivered in a flat, almost academic manner, recounting dispassionate facts. Now emotion seeped through, a passion rekindled, a new flame flickering through the bruising.

‘She visited me in the cells that night and listened to me ranting and raving. How could my own mother shop me? I screamed. For a few pounds, which she knew I would pay her back? I lied. So she told me she was dying of cancer, had but a few months to live, and didn’t want to see me dead before she was. That if I took any more drugs she would never speak to me again, she loved me too much to co-operate in my own suicide. Then she walked out. That’s when I knew I might never see my mother again. And I have never known a moment in my life when I felt more utterly destroyed.’

He held her gaze fiercely, locked in combat with the memories, his face grown gaunt and his voice shrunk to a hoarse whisper. Then Izzy watched as slowly a flush of pride began to glow inside and fill his cheeks.