When Ben arrived back in Rita’s room, he interrupted this quarrel. In both their minds was the word ‘bars’, both imagined cages. Johnston did not care what happened to this freak, but Rita was crying. If ‘they’ got Ben in a cage, he would roar and shout and bellow, and they would have to hit him or drug him, oh yes, she knew how life was, how people were, what one could expect.
Ben sat with his passport in his hand, reluctant to give it back to Johnston, and looked under his deep brows at them and knew it was him they had been quarrelling about. In his family they argued about him all the time. But more than by this angry atmosphere, he was being bothered by the many odours in the room. It smelled of her, the female, but he did not mind that, it was what emanated from Johnston that was making him want to fight or run away. It was a strong, dangerous male smell, and Ben always knew when Johnston had been on the pavement downstairs, or listening on the stairs, to keep a check on Rita. There were a variety of chemical traces in the air, as sharply differentiated from human ones as traffic stinks from the meat smells coming on to a pavement outside a takeaway. He wanted to get up and go, but knew he must not, until this business was settled. Rita was trying to stop Johnston from doing something.
Rita said to Johnston that he should try and get Ben a job, and ‘look after him’.
‘Meaning?’ said Johnston.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I can’t stop some bloke tripping him up on a dark night or pushing him under a bus. He upsets people, Reet. You know that.’
‘Perhaps he could be one of your drivers?’
‘Oh, come on, you’re dreaming.’
But now Rita took the passport from Ben, and said she would look after it, and put it into a drawer. Down they went to the cars, which were inserted here and there among the ordinary parked cars.
‘Get in,’ said Johnston to Ben, opening the door. Ben looked at Rita—Is this all right?—and she nodded. Ben got in behind the driving wheel and at once his face was all delight, exultation. He was thinking of the great glittering roaring accelerating motorbikes that had been the one joy of his life, like nothing else he had known. And now he was behind a wheel, and could put his hands on it, moving it this way and that. He was making a noise like Brrrr, Brrrr, and laughing.
Johnston pulled Rita into the scene with a hitch of his shoulder, so she was standing right by the driver’s seat. He wanted Rita to see, and she did.
‘Now turn the key, Ben,’ he said.
He did not point the key out to Ben, but Ben’s face turned to Rita, for instructions. Rita bent in, touched the key.
Ben fiddled with it, turned it, turned it off as the machine coughed, turned it on, so the car was alive, but grumbled and coughed and died. It was a rackety, cheap third- or fourth-hand car, belonging to a driver who was in between prison sentences for stealing cars.
‘Try again,’ said Rita. Her voice was actually shaking, because she was thinking, Oh, poor Ben, he’s like a three-year-old, and somewhere she had been foolishly believing that he could learn this job. Ben’s hairy fist enclosed the key, and shook it, the car came alive, and now Ben began a pantomime of shifting gears, for he knew that that was what you had to do. It was an automatic.
‘Now,’ said Johnston, leaning right in, and pointing to the lever. ‘I’m going to show you what to do with that.’ And he did, again and again. ‘You squeeze these little side pieces together—see? Then let the brake go—now do it. Then, be careful, watch to see if a car is coming.’ All this was silly; Ben could not see, could not do it. He was making his fist close up tight, watching Johnston’s hand, pulling his hand back and then putting it forward near the brake, but he wasn’t really doing it, because he couldn’t. As Johnston had known.
Rita was crying. Johnston straightened up from the window, and opened the door, and said to Ben, ‘Get out.’ Obedient, Ben got out, not wanting to; he wanted to go on sitting there playing at being a driver. Then Rita said to Johnston, ‘You’re cruel. I don’t like that.’
She went into her doorway, not looking at him or at Ben. Johnston pretended to find work in his cubbyhole, though no customers had turned up, and Ben followed Rita up the stairs.
It was better up there now Johnston’s powerful odours had gone, leaving only memories in the air.
Rita said to Ben, ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to.’ She sounded sulky, offended, but that was because she was angry at having cried. She did not like showing weakness, and particularly not in front of Johnston.
‘Sit down, Ben,’ she said, and he sat on the chair while she painted her face to hide the marks of tears. Then she made up her eyes again, to look enormous, with the black and green paints. This was so customers would not notice her face, which was not pretty, but pale, or even white, because she was never really well.
‘Why does it say I am a film actor?’ asked Ben.
Rita simply shook her head, defeated, by the difficulty of explaining. She knew he did not go to the cinema, and was able to put herself in his place enough to know that reality was more than enough for him, he could not afford to complicate that by pretence. She did not know that it was the building itself which frightened him: the dark inside, the rows of seats where anybody might be, the tall lit screen, which hurt his eyes.
In fact she had been impressed by Johnston arranging with ‘his friend’ to have actor on the passport. Actors did not work all the time. They were often idle. She had actors among her customers: to be out of work was no crisis for them, though it might be a worry. Ben looked out of the ordinary, but you expected pop stars and actors to look amazing. No, it was a brilliant strategy. In a crowd of film people or the music scene, Ben would not be so conspicuous. But what was Johnston up to? She knew it could be nothing good.
And yet something had to be done about Ben. It was late summer now, but soon it would be autumn, and then winter. Ben had twice been moved on from his favourite bench by the police. What was he going to do in winter? The police knew him. All the homeless and down-and-out people must know him. Probably Johnston was right: Rita had not been to France, but she had been to Spain and Greece, and could imagine Ben more easily in a tapas bar, or a taverna, than a London pub. But Johnston wasn’t concerned for Ben’s well-being, she knew that.
That night, late, when her last customers had gone, and the minicab drivers had gone home, when it was more morning than night, and Ben was crouching in a doorway in Covent Garden, she asked Johnston what he intended for Ben, and when she heard she was angry and tried to hit Johnston, who held her wrists and said, ‘Shut up. It’s going to work, you’ll see.’
Johnston planned to make Ben carry cocaine—‘A lot, Reet, millions’—across to Nice, not concealed at all, but in ordinary holdalls, under a layer of clothes. ‘Don’t you see, Reet? Ben is so amazing the narks will be trying to figure him out, they won’t have time for anything else.’
‘And when he gets there?’
‘Why should you care? What’s he to you? He’s a bit of rough for you, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry for him. I don’t want him to get hurt.’
This was where, in the previous exchange, the word ‘bars’ had arrived. ‘Bars’ were imminent again.
‘He couldn’t manage an aeroplane, he couldn’t manage luggage, what’s he going to do in a place where people don’t speak English?’
‘I’ve thought of everything, Reet.’ And he detailed his plan.
Rita had to admit that Johnston had thought of everything. She was impressed. But suppose the plan did succeed, at the end of it Ben would be alone in a foreign country.
‘I don’t want him hanging around here. People notice him. The police want an excuse to close me down. They don’t like the cabs being here. I keep telling them, you may not like us, but the public do. I could keep twice the number of cabs busy, if we had parking space. But they are just putting up with me and waiting for an excuse. And Ben is like a big notice saying, “Here is trouble”. And I’m scar
ed of him starting another fight. One of the drivers said something and Ben knocked him down.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He called him a hairy ape. I stopped the fight. But—I want you to understand, Reet.’
Rita had to concede the justice of all that. But there was more: Johnston was jealous. ‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been jealous of anybody. But you are of him.’
He didn’t like this, but at last grinned a little, not pleasantly, and said, ‘Well, I can’t compete, can I? Not with a great hairy ape?’
‘He’s a lot more than that.’
‘Listen, Reet, I don’t care. I’ve had enough of him.’
Johnston’s plan began with taking Ben to shops, good ones, and buying good clothes. No more stuff from charity shops. Buying jeans, trousers, underclothes—that was easy: but those shoulders, that chest, the heavy arms—in the end Johnston decided on a bespoke tailor, and got him shirts that fitted, and a couple of jackets.
‘And what is all that going to cost?’ asked Rita.
‘I told you, there’s millions in this.’
‘Dream on.’
‘You’ll see.’
Next, Ben was taken to a barber. He wished the old woman could see him now: she had said he would look good, and he knew he did. The barber had exclaimed over the double crown, but by the time he had finished who could notice?
Now Johnston took Ben up for a flight over London in a small plane, to get him used to flying. At first Ben’s eyes rolled in his head and he gave a roar of fear, as he looked down, but Johnston was sitting beside him, behaving as if nothing was wrong, and he said, ‘Look Ben, do you see that? It’s the river, you know the river. And look, there’s Covent Garden. And there’s Charing Cross Road.’ Ben took it all in and told Rita about it. ‘When can I do it again?’ he wanted to know.
‘You are going to do it again. In a big plane. Soon.’
And then, she thought, I’ll probably not see you again…She was fond of him, yes, she was. She was going to miss…She permitted, no, invited, quite a few of the extraordinary fucks that were like nothing she had experienced. She knew very well that it was not in his nature that these could lead to tenderness. There was no connection between those short violent acts of possession and what happened even seconds later, when it was as if nothing at all had happened. And yet, once when she had allowed him to stay the night, he had nuzzled up to her in his sleep, that hairy face pushing into her neck, and he had licked her face and her neck. She supposed he was fond of her. He asked if she was coming to France too, but what did he imagine when he said France?
‘It’s the same as here, Ben,’ she tried to explain. ‘There’s a nice blue sea, though. You know what sea is?’
Yes, he did; he remembered going with his family to the seaside.
‘Well, then, it’s like that. Like here only the sea is right close.’ She found some postcards of Nice, of that coast, and he puzzled over them: she knew he did not see what she saw. And she had not said that there would be a different language, different sounds.
Rita was leaning in her doorway, dressed for the part in black leather and black fishnet stockings, watching Johnston wave people to the minicabs, directing the drivers—the usual scene on this pavement from mid-afternoon till twelve or one in the morning, as people came from theatres and restaurants, when she saw a man she did not like the look of come up to Johnston, confront him. Johnston was afraid, she knew. In her experience trouble always started like this: a man appeared from nowhere with a certain look about him that said, ‘Look out!’—and then something bad happened. When this man had taken himself off, she saw Johnston sweating, leaning on his cubbyhole counter, taking quick gulps from a bottle kept there. Then he saw her, took in her concern, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Reet.’
That night she made sure the door on the street that led up to her room was locked, and invited Johnston up. She lay on her bed, propped against pillows, one leg dangling—a pose she had evolved to excite customers—smoking, and watched Johnston shifting and fidgeting on his chair. He was smoking, and took frequent mouthfuls from his whisky flask. The stale smoky air was making her cough.
She knew his story—most of it. He had run away at fourteen from a bad home. He had done a spell in borstal, then lived rough, kept himself by shoplifting and thieving. A year in prison. That over, he went straight for a time, but a sentence for robbery with violence took him back. He had finished that five years ago. Wheeling and dealing, at first just ahead of the law, but then in deep, and deeper, involved in a dozen scams, which became increasingly dangerous, he was aided by the skills he had learned in prison and because he was known in the criminal community. The minicab business did well enough, but it had never been much more than a front. She was not surprised that he was in trouble, and when he said, ‘I’m in a trap, Reet,’ imagined a debt or two, perhaps blackmail. But now, as he began to tell her, strengthening himself with large gulps of whisky—he was a bit drunk—she sat up on the edge of the bed, and stared at him.
‘What are you saying? What are you telling me?’
He had been persuaded by a man on the fringes of respectability to try his luck on the stock exchange—futures. You couldn’t lose, this friend said. There was money, if you kept your head. Well, they had kept their heads but not their money.
‘You’re telling me you owe a million pounds?’
‘That’s nothing, Reet. A million’s nothing to that lot.’
‘Well, it’s a lot to you.’
‘True,’ he said, and drank.
‘So. You’re afraid of going back to prison?’
‘Right on. That’s what I’ll be doing, if I can’t get some real money.’
‘Let’s get this straight. You owe a million, or the two of you together?’
‘He owes much more. He was in deeper than me. He did me a bit of a favour really, he let me in—but now if I don’t give him a million he’s going to shop me and I’ll go down.’
She lay back again, and coughed. ‘Fucking pollution,’ she said. ‘Sometimes this room’s so full of stink from the street I can’t breathe.’ The cigarette smoke thus being neatly excused, she lit another, and threw Johnston one.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t get away with this cocaine deal, if they catch you, you’ll go down anyway. For life probably.’
‘That’s right, but I’m going to get away with it.’
‘So before you even start to get some money for yourself you’ve got to pay back a million?’
‘When the stuff arrives in Nice, that’s the million paid. And the rest is for me.’
‘Nothing for Ben?’
‘Oh, I’ll see him right.’
‘And how about me?’ she enquired. ‘Aren’t I taking any risks?’
‘You won’t know what’s in those cases, Reet. I’m going to make sure of that.’
‘When they nab Ben, and ask him where he got the stuff, he’ll say from me. Because he knows me better than he knows you, and he trusts me. So he’ll say it was me.’
A silence.
‘But he knows that he is taking something from me to a friend in France.’
A silence.
‘From me, Reet.’
‘But I’m in it too, aren’t I? Ben doesn’t know enough to lie well. We can’t count on him. He’ll say it was me and you.’
Johnston cut this knot with, ‘You just tell me something. How do you see yourself, Reet? You don’t fancy this life—so I’ve heard you say, haven’t I? Well, you stand by me in this and I’ll see that you get out of this life, for good.’
‘You’ll see me right, like Ben?’
Now Johnston leaned forward, waving away swathes of cigarette smoke, and spoke to her—she saw clearly enough—from the heart. ‘Look, you and I have gone along together—how long now, Reet? Three years? I haven’t let you down ever—well, have I?’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well then?’
He continue
d to lean forward, all drunken appeal, desperate, his reddened eyes wet—from the smoke? From tears?
‘It’s such a gamble,’ she said. ‘You’re taking such a chance.’
‘I’ve got to, Reet. If I get away with this, then I’m clear for the rest of my life.’
She lay back again, this time with her two legs straight in front of her, and stared at him, and thought she didn’t know which of them she was more sorry for, Johnston, who she knew had it in him to be better than he was—she knew because this was true of her, too—and who had such a power to impress people, looking as he did like Humphrey Bogart—well, most of the time he did, a little at least, but not now when he was drunk and stupid—or Ben, who was being sent off into such danger, to save Johnston. But when she came to think of it, and she was thinking hard now, she owed more to Johnston than to Ben. She supposed she could say Johnston was her man: she didn’t have another, after all. And it was true, he had been good to her. And what he said was true, that she hated this life and had several times thought of doing herself in. ‘Better do myself in before some sex maniac does it for me.’ She knew she probably wouldn’t last long, anyway. She was unhealthy. Her skin was bad. Her hair when not dyed silver-blonde was a coarse limp black mess: you had only to touch it to know she was sick. When she was not made up, not dressed for the kill, she looked at herself in the glass—and put on her make-up as fast as she could.
Now she thought, Right! Suppose they do catch Ben and send me down, it couldn’t be much worse than this life. And she decided to help Johnston. In every way she could.
And now Johnston took Ben through what would happen at the airport. When he was finished, Rita repeated it all, again and again.
Everything was going to depend on Johnston’s ‘friend’—‘I knew him in prison, Reet, he’s all right’—he would be with Ben at the airport and then on the plane and then go with him into Nice and look after him.