Crusaders (45 page)

‘Aw, you can get that yer’sel. I’m pushing off then.’

‘Wait on, will ya? ’Til I get round the rooms?’

She gestured to her plastic bag of gear from Superdrug. Claire, though, was resolutely collecting her own goods. ‘D’ye want the paper?’

‘Aye, leave it.’

‘Okay. And are you pleased, then? With your lovely hairdo?’

‘Aye, I fuckin’ love it.’

She checked into the living room – curtains drawn, the faded plush settee where the girls sat watching telly, waiting to be weighed in the balance.
Top of the Pops
was on, some Michael Jackson video. ‘Hiya,’ Lindy sang. Leanne smiled back. She was in her mid-thirties, fair and fair-looking, if plump – worked in a nursing home by day. Lindy was more or less sure she made in a week at the home what she could pull in here in one night, albeit a grossly crowded one.

And there was Yulia, pushing her wispy hair from her face, prodding the ring in her nose, shifting her girlish carriage on the settee. Lindy motioned for her to come outside, as to step into her office.

‘Y’alright?’

‘Not so good. Ah … okay.’

‘Don’t worry, about the police, okay? It all gets settled, honest. There won’t be bother.’

The girl bobbed her head, unconvinced but seeming to
appreciate
the effort.

‘Listen, can you do a bit in the day for us the morra morning? With Jake? It’s just I’ve got a load of errands to run.’

‘Oh yeah, oh sure, Lindy, I love to.’

‘Just maybe three hours? I’ll give you twenty quid, okay? And here, I’ve got a bit special.’ With two fingers she unveiled the small glossy wrap from her jacket top pocket. Yulia’s eyes lit, her hands were greedy. ‘Hang on, we’ll do it together bit later, eh?’

She found it best to be discreet about these things, in deference to house rules about not getting rubbish in off the street – typical Stevie, his twisted universe of right and wrong.

Pressing on down the corridor to the Red Room – which was, in truth, cerise – Lindy found the door closed, in use. Kirsty,
presumably
– younger and less to look at even than Leanne, but with a jutting milk-white bosom. The bathroom door, too, was shut, the hiss of the shower audible – one satisfied soapy customer. She hoped he had thrown the window open, for it was getting mouldy round the corners in there. She threw down clean towels at the foot of the door. These always seemed on the small side for the clientele, the lardy blokes they got in – those keen readers of the small ads in the
Daily Sport
, hungry recipients of a dirty secret down the pub.

She set to business in the Green Room – went from the yucca to the aspidistra, the begonia, the spider ivy, watering the soil from a tooth-mug, wiping the leaves. She propped a window ajar, plumped the pillows, threw the duvet afresh and smoothed it, working carefully around the alarm button screwed into the head of the bed. Then she sprayed the air with several squirts of Woodland Pine freshener, refilled the hand-wash dispenser with Forest Glade liquid soap, pulled off the stained hand-towel by the sink and hung a fresh and folded one. The palaver of each room, its allotted scent and branded goods – it made her laugh, for it was all the same shit really. She got down to her knees to change the bin bag, pick up some nearby detritus, in no hurry, for next up was the Black Room – black walls, black quilt, a teenager’s haven, but a nest for filth too. Whilst the room was not specifically reserved for anal intercourse, its ambience seemed liable to propose the mood. More troublingly, Lindy was never sure she could
properly
see what was on the sheets, or strewn about the floor.

‘Oi, Lind. There’s a fella.’ Dougie, bothered, was filling the doorframe.

‘Eh? What, man?’

‘Claire’s off and there’s a fella pitched up.’

Lindy got testily to her feet, wiped her hands on the hem of her tee-shirt, and followed Dougie’s swaying bulk back down the
corridor
.

Stood by the kitchen counter with his chin to his chest was a
most uncommon customer, clad in a not-bad blue suit. She passed him and rounded the counter, business-like, and now he looked up to her eye – forty, probably, fit and handsome, yes, but a bit of a boozy flush to his cheeks and a challenging kind of a smile. His shirt collar was open, the forked tail of a discarded crimson tie
poking
out of his jacket pocket. The night seemed made for off-cue
surprises
, and this one smelled iffy too. Why would a bloke with money and his own hair and teeth come to pay for it here? Fruitless to ponder, she knew – just blokes, dirty dogs, prey to all manner of mad urges, high fevers, nagging and persistent stiffness.

‘Hiya. What you after?’

‘I can’t quite see …’

‘Well, why don’t you step into the lounge there, have a bit shufty?’

‘Oh, I’ve had a look.’

‘You’ve met the girls?’

‘Not met, just – it’s just I’m not
quite
certain. That’s the thing about girls, eh? All these possibilities. Could I maybe have a word?’

‘Just talk to the lass you’re after.’

He nodded but didn’t seem to listen, just grinned slowly. ‘That’s quite a look you’ve got. Striking.’ He waggled a finger at the side of his head.

‘Thanks. Now why not nip back in the lounge there, just talk to the girls ’bout what sort of massage you fancy.’

‘Aw aye, then, gotcha.’ He was still grinning like an imp. It was giving her the hump. They weren’t stood there for the purpose of sharing a joke.

‘You a bit shy, pet? No need to be. Everybody likes a bit naughty.’

He didn’t seem to care so much for that tone. He could fuck himself. There was a coyness that wasn’t really appropriate in one of his years – was, in fact, a royal nuisance – because the facts were not hard to master, even for a novice. Within the kitchen drawer nearest to her, taped to the base, was a list handwritten in blue-ink capitals on a sheet of ruled A4. Twenty quid for the base, a
half-hour
chat and the so-called ‘fingertip massage’. Then the itemised extras. Hand relief, thirty.
Topless
hand relief, forty. Sixty by mouth. Ninety full-on. Up the arse, one hundred and twenty. The gentleman could either extract this much from Yulia or Leanne in his own sweet time, or else Lindy was minded to shove that tariff under his nose and enquire as to exactly how he fancied getting his dick wet this evening.

But he was sidling back in any case, toward and through the lounge door, fingers stroking his chin. Lindy jerked her head and lowered her voice. ‘Keep an eye on him, Dougie, will ya?’ She mimed the tippling of a pint. Dougie shifted to station himself with a discreet view through the doorway.

Lindy switched the kettle to boil and took up Claire’s
Chronicle
, a more than usually startled front-page splash blazed in high capitals. EXECUTED: DOUBLE PIZZA KILLING SPARKS TIT-FOR-TAT FEARS. Nasty. She paddled through the rest of the front-end. PAEDO PRIEST GETS SIX YEARS. Typical, should have strung him up by his mouldy gonads. EX-PIT GOLF COURSE FLOPS. Well, what did they expect? Golf, in Sunderland? FAKE PISTOL STICK-UP. Well, at least it was a fake. But it was all pretty much grim as fuck, as per usual.

She had reached the Entertainment – STING COMES HOME IN GLORY – and the telly schedule spread, when renewed motion disturbed her. That bashful reddish face was hovering nearby once more.

‘Actually no, I don’t think I will.’

‘Aw right, whatever you like.’

He laid a hand on the counter, tapped as if thoughtful. His smile, she supposed, could have won him favour on a happier day. ‘You’re not by any chance available yourself, are you?’

‘Bugger off out of it, man. What does it look like?’

Lindy flashed a harried look at Dougie, who stirred and stepped forward, hand out. But the client was showing some gumption at last, holding up his own hands in penitence, beating a sharp retreat for the staircase.

The alleyways of Oakwell were slick with overnight rain, an odour of dogs and dead leaves in the air as Gore took the long walk, the walk of shame, a hundred yards to Lindy’s door. If the day’s portents were dank November-dismal, his mood was
cautiously
hopeful, coloured by a night and a morning of solid
self-criticism
and resolutions made firmly on the basis thereof. He carried a spray of pink freesias and the semblance of a plan for an afternoon out, one that would see Lindy nicely lunched, Jake escorted to a bookshop and then, he fancied, the swimming baths. Knowing he was overdue to make good, he intended to settle a goodly portion of the debt. There would have to be agreement, though, each to give some designated inch to the other. He didn’t have an answer for the full extent of Lindy’s charges against him, but he had words as well as deeds prepared.
I know I’ve seemed
distant
. Please let me try and show you it’s not what you think.

He rang the bell, prepared a face. No answer. He looked about him. Two doorways down the alley, a woman had come to her stoop for a cigarette, and surveyed him with some mild interest. He took no offence, for this morning he was wearing his clerical suit and collar, precisely so that all might know where he was coming from.

The door before him was flung open, and a wholly unexpected girl was inspecting him also, her slight smile vaguely critical – Slavic-looking, pallid, very young in her black vest and hooded jersey top, drawstring bag over her shoulder.

‘Hello?’

‘Hallo! For me?’

‘Ha. No, I’m here for Lindy?’

‘Ah, no, I am sitter.’

‘
Sister
?’

‘Sitter. Lindy’s not here, I sit with Jake. Her son?’

‘
Baby
sitter?’

‘Yes! She is back soon, you wait?’ She motioned for him to step aside.

‘Sorry – where are
you
going?’

‘No, no, Jake is fine, is good, he upstairs with his daddy. You go?’

She was holding the door for him, so keen to be on her merry way, oblivious to his confoundment. Gore’s first impulse was to turn tail, get long gone himself. No, he simply wasn’t braced for this encounter.

But wasn’t this the day when matters were set straight? Was he or was he not a serious man? Something was instructing him that this had to be so. His uniform, he knew, gave him both pretext and escapeway. He took hold of the handle as she passed him
cheerfully
, her Saturday newly unburdened. Gore stepped lightly over the threshold, pulled the door closed.

Upstairs indeed was from whence the sound of action emanated – small cries, jarring loud thumps upon the floor. Gore laid the freesias down on Lindy’s coffee table, mounted the stairs, wary, breath bated.

‘Oh! Oh! Eh?
That
’s
a good un …’

A voice bold as brass, commonplace Geordie, and yet with an emphasis he knew he recognised. On the top stair he lingered.

Your steps were always leading you this way. The need to know, to see. Too strong.

He stepped closer and peered through the open door of the boy’s room.

Steve Coulson was crouched upon his knees, packed into his jeans and tee-shirt, playing energetically with Jake. They each sported those shiny red Lonsdale boxing gloves, Jake in football shorts yanked up to his belly button. Stevie was making a comic show of keeping guard as Jake flailed at him, dropping hands at
the last minute so the boy could bash the broad target of his
grinning
face. Hands-on daddying, plain to see.

With a sharp sideways glance Stevie clocked Gore, then looked back in time to weather another haymaker from Jake. Then he planted his gloves vice-like at the sides of the boy’s head.

‘
Eee
, son. Now
look
who it is. It’s the Reverend Gore.’

Jake revolved to face Gore and struck a pose, gloves raised, proud as punch. Gore flicked the fingers of one hand at the boy. Stevie nodded with his chin, then lightly cuffed Jake’s jaw.

‘Shall we duff him up, eh? The Reverend? Shall we’s, Jakey, eh?’

Stevie pushed aside the cut flowers, set a mug of tea and a virgin pack of biscuits down before Gore, then slumped back into the leather sofa. Gore knew he was right to have plumped for Lindy’s chair, as Stevie’s frame made the long settee look a meagre thing. His countenance, though, seemed odd to Gore’s eye – he was
redfaced
, mildly sweaty, as if from fever or whisky rather than
exertion
. There was a rent in the crotch of his jeans, and a flap of striped under-shorts protruded.

‘You admirin’ wor ballroom?’

Gore dragged his eye to Stevie’s flashing overbite, and nodded in the direction of the joke. ‘How you keeping then, Stevie?’

‘Aw …’ A shrug. ‘Not brilliant. You?’

‘Not so good, neither.’

‘Naw?’

‘Just a lot on my mind. Things stacked up. Things not working.’

‘I knaa how you feel. Whey, we’re having a time of it, aren’t wuz?’ Stevie sighed and lifted the biscuits from the table, ran a thumbnail round the wrapping, split it in half and set it down again. ‘Tell ye, I’ve been in a mood lately. It’s like every morning I get up – I want to give thanks to someone. For every day I’ve got. Weird, isn’t it? Maybe not so weird for you, like.’

Baffled, Gore tried a knowing smile. From the first moment of their acquaintance, he knew, Stevie had shown him this curious gravity – some sort of fancy that they were tough and serious men, struggling through a thicket, a vale of tears, sorely
misreck-oned
by their peers. Moreover, that they had something in
common
. The decision to play along had seemed more than worth his time. As of this hour, the fancy seemed substantive and
rebarbative
, the decision foolish. Everything had changed.

He reached to take his mug. Stevie too surged forward and clapped hold of his forearm, vice-like.

‘Look, I want you to knaa, John, it’s not any of my business, your affairs and that. I’ve not got any problem wi’ you.’

‘What do you mean, Steve?’

‘What you get up to, your life, y’knaa? Nowt to do wi’ me nor anyone else.’

Gore measured a reply. Stevie’s grip made clear thought
difficult
.

‘You don’t have to come the choirboy, John. Everybody likes a bit naughty.’

The expression was ludicrous to Gore, but Stevie wasn’t
smiling
. ‘Naughty …?’

Stevie sat back. ‘Just a saying. I mean, you’re not doin’ owt wrong.’

‘No, I’m not. Look, you’ll have gathered, Steve, Lindy and I have been spending –’

Stevie raised a hand, his mouth set. ‘John, I divvint need to
knaa
, man. I
knaa
, like, but I divvint
need
to. That’s my
point
. My only business here is that lad up there.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘She’ll have telt ya all that, aye?’

‘Well, no, you see. She hadn’t said a word.’

‘Aw. Right.’ Stevie scratched at the frayed knee of his blue jeans. ‘Well, she’s like that. Keeps all her bits in a box, like. It’s good habits, but. Cos people talk, I knaa that. From experience. Your enemies, they talk.’

‘Enemies?’

‘Look, I’m only sayin’ – I knaa what it’s like, man. To feel like everyone’s out to get you. It’s rotten. Now, see if someone said you were like a hypocrite, aye? They’d be right out of order.
Right
out of order. It’s just like what you’ve always said. People want to have their own houses clean before they gan round flingin’ stones.’

Gore was tracing a line around the rim of his mug, trying to recall any experience from his past that approximated to this.

‘Now, see me, right? I’ve got my line of work, been at it lot of years now. And I don’t say I’m an angel. Cos there’s bother in it. There’s trouble, aye? All I’m about – all I’ve ever done – is help people enjoy tha’selves. But where you’ve got that, you get tossers and worky tickets and – excuse us, John – but absolute fucking
ratbags
who wanna ruin it for everyone. And sometimes I’ve gotta give it out to them what had it coming.’

Gore nodded as seemed mandatory, dunking a biscuit.

‘People I care about, though, them what’s dear to me – I do right by. So who’s gunna judge us for that?’

Stevie was looking very intently at him. Gore was determined to remain noncommittal. The gaze finally relented, dissolving into that devouring grin. ‘So you like her, but? Our Lind? She’s a smasher, isn’t she?’

‘I’m very fond of her, Stevie.’

‘Whey, champion. She was too good for me, I’ll tell you that.’

Stevie appeared satisfied, gave Gore’s forearm a pat with the formidable flat of his palm and tipped back his mug to drain it. Then he picked up the remote control as if this were his own
parlour
and snapped on the television –
Football Focus
, the picture and sound fuzzy. ‘Eee, I tell ya. I only just got her this and she’s knacked it already …’

Gore was emboldened that it might now be his turn. ‘And she works for you, is that right? Lindy?’

Stevie glanced sharply, not so friendly. Then he leaned back as if oblivious – working his shoulders, straining his chest, as though the tea were percolating down through his massive and
convoluted
internals. ‘Not for
us
, nah. Not really. I mean, she’ll do the odd night in this club I’ve got now, club I manage. She’s got bits of things with some of the same lot I’ve done bits for. I’ve put a bit word in for her, like. Over the years.’

Stevie was rummaging inside his black bomber jacket and he retrieved his mobile phone, becoming very absorbed in its face, punching buttons as if composing a tune. Gore was turning over
the wreckage of his plans for the day, and a range of possible
parting
words. For the moment he let himself tune into the TV show, its prolonged report on whether Man United could turn round a worrying slump against Arsenal.

Then a key was scratching and turning in the front door. Lindy surfaced from around the wall, laden with plastic shopping bags. Clearly she was not happy with the sight that met her, not even the neglected freesias. Gore, for his part, was stunned by what he beheld – a glum dark-eyed androgyne. Stevie clambered to his feet. ‘How pet, the hell you done to your heid?’

She looked through him. ‘John, what you doing here?’

‘I thought I’d drop by. Your sitter let me in. I found Stevie and Jake.’

‘Aye, I think he got a shock and all.’

She looked about her, as if trapped. ‘So what do you –’

‘Perhaps I should –’ He moved toward the sanctuary of the hall.

‘Hang about there.’ From Coulson’s lips it sounded like an order. ‘I’m just thinking, like. Maybe John fancies comin’ wi’ us this afternoon? You’re a Mag, aren’t you, John?’

Strapped into Stevie’s Lexus they drove, a family plus guest, down the Barrack Road, past affable milling hordes in multiple variants of black-and-white stripes, and scattered cheery clusters of claret and blue. On another day, Gore was dully aware, he might have been diverted by the sociological view from the soft leather back seat, rather than feeling raw-skinned, tongue-tied, dull and disconsolate.

Stevie parked and marched his troops through a private entrance, up five flights of stairs, and down a strip-lit hotel
corridor
to the door of an executive box. ‘Pal of mine’s treat,’ he said, pushing in, without elaboration.

There were ten to a dozen bodies thronging the space, a pack of youngish men in good coats, some of them built to Stevie’s scale, sporting gold chains, sovereign rings, grade-one crops. They
loitered
about a table strewn with the remnants of a meaty buffet lunch, and the mood was bullish, a fog of smoke and garrulity, the
boys charging their glasses from a wet bar. Gore hung back uneasily at Lindy’s shoulder, conscious that she and he were the reserves of silence in this full-throated room, and he the butt of some barely suppressed sniggers. He accepted a bottle of beer from Stevie and sought seclusion, stepped quietly out of doors onto a tight balcony that squatted over the eighteen-yard line, folding chairs arrayed down its length. The fine green
checkerboard
fuzz of the turf seemed vast, likewise the raked
amphitheatre
seating and the projecting Perspex rainshield that made a gloomy rectangle of the sky. The hubbub and the thumping chants rising from the standing fans might, it seemed to Gore, have made for a Roman ambience, were it not for the rather shiftless ambling ball-games of the players warming up on the pitch below. He stared at all this for as long as seemed fit, deeming the company indoors hateful.

Back inside, bets were getting loudly placed with a gangly
penlicking
youth in a shirt and tie. The banter was of West Ham, today’s opponent, and – with near-lurid relish – of having ‘
murdered
’ Man United just the other week. A few big dogs were
huddled
over the team sheet, pulling at it as if for scraps, prominent among them a perma-tanned Scot in a camel overcoat, a rusting tub of a man waving a rank stub of cigar.

‘Oi, Stevie, where’s your fifteen-million man then? Your Geordie messiah?’

‘Not playing, Roy man, he canna, he’s under the knife wi’ his groin.’

‘You what? Fifteen million and you broke him already? Shitting
hell
, Stevie. Good bit of business, that.’

The exterior din rose, for the teams were jogging onto the field and the afternoon sodality hastened to their seats, clutching
brimming
drinks, packets of tabs and lighters.

As the match got under way, Gore wrestled with the matter of how he should conduct himself. Resigned to his situation, he remembered anew the longueurs of live football. Excitement must have dissipated in others too, for they watched with furrowed brows. To his right Lindy wore a hunted look, chain-smoking,
eyes watery, repeatedly wiping her raw nose, a soft black cotton cap pulled about her ears, nursing her vulnerable head. To his left Stevie bounced Jake on his knee, tucking a black-and-white scarf round his neck, keeping up a non-stop verbiage, teaching him a song.
‘
Phi-lippe, Phi-lippe Al-bert
, everybody knows his name …’