Hobbling along the coast road, I listened to the voices of people, youngsters in the main, rising from the open areas outside clubs and cafés along the lower promenade. For years the arches between the town’s two piers had lain neglected and derelict until a bright local councillor had worked his butt off attracting investors to a scheme by which the area would be revamped. Now it had metamorphosed into a lively boulevard of clubs, bars, cafés and craft shops, where locals and tourists mingled on mild evenings and the younger ones, too many of them high on Special K or GHB, raved to their particular caste of Jungle or Techno, Nu Energy or Drum ’n’ Bass, Trance or Speed, Hip Hop or Big Beat, Waltz or Foxtrot (just kidding). Ironically, it was both what I needed and didn’t need at that moment: the noise, the shrieks, and the babble of life was good, and, together with the bright lights, told me that life was incessant and encompassing; and that, in itself, let me know how alone I was. An outsider. Always had been, always would be.
In that lachrymose mood, I moved on, eventually reaching the steps to my basement flat. My home was situated in one of the seaside town’s broad, sweeping crescents, a hilly green park at its centre, the main thoroughfare and the sea itself bounding the open end. It was a terrific location, most of the tall, white Regency properties – some in better condition than others – nowadays split up into flats or grand apartments, the residents a mixture of rent-paying youngsters and high-earning owners. Vehicles lined both sides of the horseshoe road, many of them double-parked, but still the vista from the apex of the curve was breathtaking, day or night. Descending the stone stairway to my front door, I drunkenly scratched the wood around the keyhole with the key’s tip before inserting it. I pushed my way in, flicking the light-switch quickly as I hurried down the short hallway to the bathroom where I kept part of my stash. My hands shook like a regular druggy’s – which, take my word for it, I wasn’t, not really – as I reached inside the bathroom cabinet and scrabbled with the lid of the Elastoplast tin. Somehow I managed not to spill the contents as the lid came off.
Inside, instead of plasters, were my ready-mades (Sunday afternoons was generally reserved for rolling enough joints to get me through the week), comprising of two varieties, some rolled in brown cigarette skins (papers), the others in white. The Skunk – in this case Kali Mist, named after the Hindu goddess of destruction – was for when I was really strung out, and the other, white-skinned, was more gentle, a good Jamaican sinsemilla. Tonight I chose the brown.
Lighting up, I went through to the small furniture-crowded sitting-room and poured myself another Highland Malt, this one a Dalmore, before drawing the curtains of the barred windows a little and flopping on to a cushion-strewn sofa. Anticipation as the smoke burned its way down my throat was almost as pleasant as the mellowness that I knew would quickly follow. No rush involved, just an easy sinking into a better place, and while waiting for the mood change the drug and alcohol hopefully would bring about, I surveyed my surrounds, something I often did when my emotions were low, my perspective hopeless. Two small versions of magnificent sculptures stood at each end of the sideboard, Rodin’s Eternal Spring, a dark bronze whose male and female figures were wonderfully natural on one side, and Epstein’s Genesis, an anti-naturalistic carving of a pregnant woman, an elongated hand stretched across her swollen belly, a piece that was the very antithesis of its opposite neighbour but no less beautiful. Adorning the wall over the room’s mean little fireplace was a wood-framed print of Agnolo Bronzino’s Eleonora da Toledo and Her Son, the mother serene in her beauty, the young boy placid in his innocence, and on the mantelshelf below was a miniature copy of Hepworth’s Mother and Child, an abstract carving in marble, all fluid lines and pierced stone (make what you will of my choice, its romanticism, the obvious underlying yearning – I only knew that they took my mind on journeys). I sipped whisky between the drags.
Sleep, helped along by a couple of Motivals before I turned in, was uneventful that night. Rather than fall into another dimension where everything was troubled and plausible only in the dream state (which was my usual sleep pattern), I drifted off into oblivion instead, cares and worries excluded, fantasies barred. Even my hangover next day was tolerable, and although I suffered a few hurts and bruises from the tumble I’d taken, there seemed to be no real harm done (thank you squidgy stair-carpet).
I wet-shaved in front of the bathroom mirror, used to the ugliness that stared back at me; used to it, yes, but never willingly accepting that countenance, still disturbed and saddened by it, even after all these years. An everyday ritual like shaving was still a routine torture. Once, when I was on heavy stuff like Ice – crystal meth – another face would sometimes regard me from beyond the glass, one that watched me with two good eyes and whose features were regular, though too blurred for recognition. That ill-defined but handsome countenance had hinted at something too evasive to remember properly, too vague to focus upon, yet still filled me with a strange, elusive regret. Regret and guilt. At one time those emotions had become so overwhelming I’d turned away from hallucinatory substances completely – what good was a high whose sidekick was profound but unaccountable remorse? Maybe a shrink would have some answers, albeit predictable ones: cut out the bad stuff, think positive, drugs altered and eventually deteriorated your mind state. You take the drugs to escape your own reality, but in the comedowns the reality only becomes more depressing, and the stronger the substance, the harsher the aftermath. Well, I’d already cut out the heavy stuff, because it scared me too much, and I didn’t need a shrink to tell me so. In fact, Acid, Charlie and Amphets had been easy to dump, and I’d never used H anyway – heroin was too addictive for someone like me who constantly sought escape. My main gig nowadays was Skunk and booze. Hell, I’d spit in your eye if you even offered me E. Sure, I knew it was considered smart to be part of that scene, but I also knew that those poor suckers were the losers in the long run (and that was their problem – it took time to find out). No diatribe here, no preaching; just the hard facts.
Naturally, more than one psychologist – not psychiatrist; nobody’s ever thought me crazy – had tried to get me on their metaphorical couch, assuming I had to have some kind – any kind – of inner turmoil because of my ‘impaired’ physique; and maybe I had – of course I bloody had – but I’d never felt the need, or even the urge, to discuss it with the medical profession – or anyone else, for that matter. My mind was my own territory. Let doctors prescribe medicines and pain-killers for the afflictions my physique brought me, but my thoughts were private, they belonged to me alone. Tormented I might be, but it was my own personal torment, invisible to outsiders, unlike my deformities, which were on show for all the world to see. Besides, I had the constant and irrevocable feeling that no shrink would ever understand, let alone resolve, the reason for my lifelong disquiet, this unease that was always with me and which grew more ponderous as the years went by. They’d assumed my troubled mind was due to my dysfunctional form, and I knew – don’t ask me how I knew, I just did – the issue was far more complex than that.
Self-discovery had never been an indulgence of mine. That earlier time of fierce drug-taking had always had two clear purposes: pleasure and escape. With both there came a ‘lifting’, a supposed ascent on to a higher plane where creative thought is enhanced and where you feel at one with all around you, at one with the essence of life itself. Huh! Try it enough and you’ll discover it’s a false concept; that, rather than being a great mind-expanding experience, it’s ultimately a closing down of avenues of reason, an occlusion of actuality, and so a limiting of the thought process. At the time you may think you’re on the road to perception, to Nirvana even, but in truth you’re travelling blind alleys (although instead of heading towards a dead end, you’re on the way to cerebral dissipation). Am I sure? Sure I’m sure. Just look around at all the deadheads left over from the sixties, the mental cadavers of the drugs revolution, those once creative musicians and artists and writers, and even businessmen and financiers, their
powers of creativity long since withered, their drive stultified, not through passing years but through damaged brain cells and enfeebled resolve. You know who I mean, those dried-up facsimiles of their former selves, their talent mere echoes. Many – of those who survived, that is – are rarely heard from, they seem to exist in some intellective timewarp, while the bleatings from those still in the public eye tend to be an embarrassment.
Anyway, for me the comedowns that followed the highs were too disenchanting to bear and the pursuit itself too ineffectual, meaningless and self-deceiving, to desire. Besides all this, the cost was too great, both to pocket and body (let alone the mind).
These days, I stuck mainly to cannabis and booze for no other reason than to dull my own wretchedness.
I retraced last night’s route to the office, on the way passing by the bar I’d swilled in last night, not even giving its locked door a second glance, and stopping to breakfast at one of those archway café’s along the boulevard. The sun was already working up to a steady blast, the slight sea breeze cooling the few holiday-makers who were about so early. The sea itself was a fresh blue, dark on the horizon, white caps breaking easily along the shoreline; one or two sunbathers were already stretched out on towels on the pebbled beach, but these were probably office workers or hotel staff, catching the early morning heat before commencing duties for the day. Watching sky-weaving seagulls as I sipped lip-burning coffee at an outside table, I felt a calmness come upon me. I wasn’t at peace with myself – I’d never known what that was like – but at least the trauma of the previous night had settled, and the illusion in the broken mirror had become precisely that to my rational mind: an illusion caused by fragmented glass and embellished by the darkness of that windowless room. Why had it shattered completely at my approach? Easy. The former occupier had already smashed it and my footfalls had caused the final meltdown. I refused to consider the fact that I’d witnessed an explosion of glass – that just wasn’t part of my rationale on that warm civilized morning.
A craft-shop owner gave me a wave as she opened her shutters, the young waiter who’d served me breakfast loitered for a friendly chat. As I climbed the steep ramp to the upper road, another acquaintance hailed me from the doorway of the Old Ship hotel. I returned a brisk salute and went on my way.
Looking as I did, I was more noticeable than most around town, and hence had become part of its scenery, a familiar figure to the locals; and that was no bad thing in my line of work, because it made me well enough known to gain people’s confidence and so much easier for me to pursue enquiries. A lot of these people were eager to talk to me, either out of some guilt-ridden pity (there for the grace of God, and all that . . .), or because they were ashamed of the repugnance I aroused in them and felt noble when they were able to hide it. Maybe I’m being a little over-cynical here, but I can only explain the vibes I got from them. Some – a certain few – were unabashed at how I looked, and I received genuine warmth from them, while others – there’s always the opposite extreme to anything – never even tried to conceal their loathing of me. All in all, though, I was generally accepted and only the tourists and out-of-towners tended to give me the hard, or at best, discreet, stare. Kids were always a problem, but then I’d learned to accept that.
Cutting through the Lanes, a pedestrian area of narrow turnings and alleyways filled with antique, jewellery and gift shops, I crossed a broad thoroughfare and turned off into the road that led past the old Regency theatre and the Royal Pavilion’s park opposite. The theatre’s display boards advertised an ‘all-new Rocky Horror Show!’, not quite my taste in live performance, but the kind of thing that brought in the holiday-makers and locals (especially the kids and weirdos) in droves; next week might be a Gilbert and Sullivan, or a murder mystery, or even a ballet. Variety, in the broad sense, is what kept the place going. My mood considerably brightened by the sunshine and ‘hail goodfellows’ along the way, I climbed the creaky stairs to the agency.
‘Okay,’ greeted Henry, who always seemed to beat me into the office, no matter how early I arrived, from his desk. ‘In which movie did Cary Grant say his male co-star resembled Ralph Bellamy and who was that co-star?’
I groaned at the regular ritual, not quite ready for it so soon in the day. Nevertheless the answer came to me before I’d even reached my office door.
‘Easy,’ I told him with a smug grin. ‘His Girl Friday, and the co-star was Ralph Bellamy.’
Henry wasn’t pleased. He went back to his paperwork, grumbling darkly under his breath.
I went around my own desk and studied the day’s agenda, which I usually scheduled in a large diary before leaving the office the previous night. Ida would have gone straight to store duty and Philo, when he arrived in about half-an-hour’s time, breathless and over-heated from his dash from the bus stop and ascent of the stairs, would be busy for most of the day with an assignment that meant catching the train to London. I wanted him to pay a call on the General Registrar Office, where there should be a record of baby Ripstone/Teasdale’s birth, as temporary as that condition might have been.
As I hit the first cigarette of the day I thought of the baby’s mother, Shelly Ripstone, and wondered why she was so positive her son was still alive. Just on the word of a possibly fake clairvoyant? Didn’t make sense. And something else that didn’t make sense was why I shared the same intuition.
6
I was on my second repo of the day when I got the call from Philo on my mobile.
The first of the two vehicle repossessions had been for a BMW, which unfortunately was parked in the driveway of an upmarket residence situated in a plusher part of Brighton’s suburbia. The car’s owner – or non-owner, because he hadn’t kept up his payments – was one of those flash businessmen who knew all the answers, someone who did well by living on his wits and running up debts. He was aware of his rights and was only too pleased to inform me of them when I rang his doorbell and showed him the letter of authorization from the credit company that empowered me to take the BMW away. With a self-satisfied grin he’d snatched the letter from me and torn it to pieces (that was okay, I had three photocopies, two of them in my briefcase). Standing on his doorstep, he towered over me, yet still he stretched himself to full height (I could see him pivoting on the balls of his feet) in an effort to intimidate me even more. I got that kind of thing all the time: people either patronized me, letting me know my deformities meant nothing at all to them, that I was just one of the chaps, or they got nasty and made the most of what they considered my shortcomings. Either way, it made no difference to me: I was there to do a job, that’s all there was to it.
This debtor had been expecting my call, no doubt forewarned by a prior visit from the finance company’s own man, and his only surprise was my appearance itself. He hadn’t bothered to lie by telling me the cheque was in the post, or that the lender and he had come to some agreement about the unpaid sums only an hour or so before I’d arrived; no, he didn’t bother because he knew that legally I couldn’t touch the BMW while it was on private property, i.e. his own driveway. If I tried to repossess, I’d be guilty of taking and driving away without consent, and the police held a dim view of auto theft, whatever the circumstances. However, in such cases there is an answer as far as the poor old repossessor who, after all, is only trying to do his job, is concerned: you turned the tables, reversed the situation. I stuck a copy of the authorization letter under the windscreen wiper and informed the defaulter, who remained on the doorstep, hands in pockets, grin mouldering into a scowl, that the vehicle had been officially repossessed by the finance company and that if he took it out on the public highway (my address was as formal as this) it would constitute an arrestable offence because he was no longer the legal owner. The police would be informed and if he were to be stopped by them, he, himself, would be charged with taking away and driving without the owner’s consent.
That ruse hadn’t pleased him one bit, but I knew as he slammed his front door on me that by th
e time I returned next day he would have seen sense and given in to the inevitable. He might throw the keys at me, but at least I’d be able to drive the BMW away.
My second ‘bust’ that day was a lot easier. The car was a Golf GTi and I had expected some trouble: you can usually tell by the vehicle the kind of person the driver is likely to be and a sports model invariably meant ‘aggressive’. So I was delighted that the GTi was parked in the roadway and even more delighted that when I knocked on the debtor’s front door, there was nobody in. Pushing the authorization letter through the letterbox, I went back to the car and opened the driver’s door with the Slim Jim (a thin metal strip that slides down easily between the window glass and rubber sealing strip, its hook contacting the doorhandle locking pin and opening it by a sharp pull) I always carried on such occasions. Once inside, it was almost as easy, although it took a little longer, to hot wire the ignition and drive off. It was as I was pulling away from the kerb that Philo’s call came through on my mobile.
‘Dismas,’ I said.
‘Dis?’
‘Philo?’
‘Yeah. Just left the Family Record Centre. At the GRO?’
‘Yes, I know, Philo.’ I pictured him outside the registrar office, mobile phone, compliments of the agency, clamped against his ear to cut out the sound of busy London traffic. ‘I’m in a repo at the moment, so give me a couple of seconds to get round the corner.’