December (26 page)

IX

Allergy Syndrome

Shelley!' The Weasel hovered
anxiously in his caravan doorway. 'You all right?'
      
Tuesday, five p.m. Just back from
delivering this cargo of Quorn and spinach pasties and stuff to Banbury. A good
run, traffic unexpectedly light and with the short cuts he'd been sussing out,
here he was, home before dark, just.
      
And here
she
was, running across the yard from the house, bristols jogging
like turnips in a Tesco carrier bag. Must've been
waiting
for him.

      
'Weasel, thank heavens.' She was panting, blonde hair all over
the place. 'Look, I need your help.' Her voice higher pitched, maybe on account
of running.

      
He looked beyond her to the house, two or three lights on, but
not in Tom's attic. No sounds from up there, none last night either. Bit
worrying, that, the way Tom was coming unspooled.

      
'It's Vanessa,' she said.

      
The Weasel went rigid. Most of the worst things he imagined
happening if Tom finally threw the big one involved the kid, Vanessa.

      
He jumped down all three steps to the slippery grass and
tumbled to his knees. Action-hippie. Jeez.

      
'Oh gosh, no panic. Weasel. I was simply wondering if ...
look, what are you doing tonight? I mean, you know, I'm sorry to drop this on
you, but Tom and I are sort of... going out.'

      
'You what?' Weasel straightened up, relief giving way to
astonishment. 'You're going out?
Wiv Tom?
'
      
'Yes, yes, all right.' Shelley
shrugged awkwardly. 'Let's call it my personal coup of the year. It's a client,
you see. Potential client, anyway. For the business. He's invited us to
dinner.'
      
'Us? Tom?'

      
'Tom too, yes. Tom was ... resistant, at first. As he would
be. This was last week. You probably ...'
      
'Oh. Yeah.'

      
'The night you came to see him. Which didn't exactly improve
the situation either, at first.'
      
'No. Sorry 'bout that.'

      
'Well ...' Shelley was struggling a bit; personal stuff. 'No
need to be, as it happens. It did, you know, take the wind out of his sails,
somehow. He was very quiet all night. Been fairly quiet since, actually.'

      
'Yeah. Sir Wilf'll fink it's his birthday.'

      
'I'm sorry?'

      
'Your neighbour. Been bitching about the riffs in the night, 'parently.'

      
'I didn't know that,' Shelley said. 'You should have told me.'

      
'Nah,' Weasel said. 'No probs. Down the pub they don't reckon
much to Sir Wilf.'

      
Shelley was silent for a moment, filing this away for future
smoothing-out. And then she said, 'I don't
know
what you were discussing ... not my business.'

      
She wouldn't ask Weasel outright, 'cause that'd be disloyal,
wouldn't it? However bad things got, Shelley was always loyal. Sometimes Weasel
admired her above all other women, the shit she'd taken and still stayed loyal.

      
'It's complicated,' Weasel said. 'About the music.'

      
'Oh,' she said. The music was an issue not relevant to right now,
obviously. 'It ... Weasel, I ...' She took a serious breath. 'What I think is,
he's made a decision to try and pull things together. You know what I'm talking
about? Maybe you don't. I mean, with Tom, you have to …' Gabbling a bit now;
nerves.
      
Nerves? Shelley Love?

      
'I mean, he
knows
we've got problems with cash-flow and we might have to lay people off -
and
before Christmas, God help us.'

She folded her arms across
her chest; she had on this bulky Arran sweater. Weasel wouldn't have minded
folding his arms across there either.

      
'So I held on as long as I reasonably could, just vainly
hoping and then this morning I picked up the phone to tell Broadbank I'd got
flu or something and couldn't make it, playing for time, you know? Tom just
took the receiver off me and put it back and said, "OK." Just like
that. Very calmly. "OK."'

      
'Stone me,' Weasel said.

      
'Don't say it like that, Weasel. He's not that bad.'
      
'He is, Shel,' Weasel said soberly.

      
'Yes, all right. Has been. But it's ... it's not that you
could say he's coming out of it, as such. It's that... I think finally he wants
to come out of it. You know?'

      
Weasel was very dubious. He said nothing.

      
'So what I was wondering,' Shelley said. 'As this has never arisen
before ... was if you could come up to the house tonight and sit with Vanessa.
I mean I'm sure she'd be all right on her own - be absolutely furious if I said
otherwise. But it is the first
time we've had to leave her.'

      
'What, in fourteen years?'

      
'Sounds terrible, doesn't it?'

      
'Nah, nah ... it's just ...'

      
Realising now why she'd come racing across the yard, why her
voice had risen about half an octave. Why she was so nervous. This was, like,
the crucial period. Any time between now and actually getting the car on the
road with Tom inside it, there was an 80-20 chance of him spinning round and
making a dash for his attic, and that'd be it for another ten years.
      
Weasel said, 'Never been on
holiday?'
      
'Are you kidding}'

      
'What about... like ... a honeymoon?'
      
Shelley said deliberately, as if
she was working it out, these indelible details, 'We lived together for two years.
One afternoon, the seventh of July, a Tuesday, we went out to the register office
with a couple of my friends. And then they went home and we came back. To the
flat.'

      
Shelley sighed. 'Vanessa's actually seen more of the world than
we have, what with going to school …'

      
Weasel remembered how Shelley had had a major bust-up with the
education bods to get Vanessa into an ordinary state school, with, like, normal
kids ... then there was the convent.

      
Shelley tossed back her hair. She was a gorgeous woman, and
she'd never spoken to him like this before. Not at such length. Never even stood
as close to him when they was alone, always suspicious of him, what he might be
after.

      
But Weasel feeling honoured was only the half of it. This was
an opportunity that could not be missed.

      
'Shel,' he hesitated. 'I'd be proud to sit in wiv the kid. But
...'

      
'Go on, Weasel, you're holding the cards.'

      
'All right ...' Pushing his luck a lot lately. 'Whatever's,
like, wrong wiv Tom, it ain't improving, right? I mean, I accept he's making a
big effort tonight, but ...'

      
'No,' said Shelley heavily, 'things haven't been improving. Maybe
tonight's just another false dawn. I have to take that chance.'

      
'Maybe I could help. Not just staying wiv the kid, in other
ways. If you was to fill me in ... on how ... Jeez, I wouldn't know where to
start describing his condition.'

      
'There is a name for it,' Shelley said.

There were suddenly so many
comedy clubs in London that people were saying humour was taking over from rock
and roll.

      
Was this likely? After thirty years of youngsters posing in
front of the bathroom mirror holding a tennis racket like an electric guitar, would
they be practising deadpan expressions and working on their timing, collecting
jokes instead of records?

      
It certainly didn't bode well for the industry which had
supported Prof Levin since the days when the Beatles were in suits.

      
At least comedy clubs looked like rock and roll clubs: a
scruffy doorway and steps. This joint was still hedging its bets, singers and
bands sharing the bill with stand-up comics. And tonight, a bloke who had a
foot either side of the great divide.
      
The place was called Muthah Mirth.

      
Ha bloody ha, Prof thought, paying dearly for the gig he'd seen
billed in
Time Out
and an
extortionate membership fee on top.

      
Inside, a three-piece blues band was doing GBH to an old
Elmore James number while about twenty people sat around at tables, some of
them eating nasty-looking bar-meals.

      
A dump. Poor sod couldn't be doing that well, reduced to this
level.

      
It was eight p.m.

      
Prof went over to the bar. 'What time's Dave Kite on?'
      
'Be a couple of hours yet, squire.
Have a drink while you're waiting?'

      
'Yeah,' Prof said. 'Gimme a Pepsi. Non-diet.'

      
The barman was a thirtyish bloke in a pink T-shirt with a
Muthah Mirth logo involving a voluptuous solid guitar with one pick-up turned
into a mouth so the guitar looked like it was grinning. He poured the Pepsi
without comment.

      
'What's his act like?' Prof said.

      
'Who, Kite? Spooky. A bit spooky.'

      
All
I bloody need.

      
'Spooky? What's that supposed to mean? I thought this was supposed
to be a comedy club.'

      
'Yeah, well,' the barman said. 'Sometimes he's funny,
sometimes he ain't. How the mood takes him. I reckon he's got a problem, but
they say that about all the best ones, don't they?
      
All the best comics, there's a
tragedy going on behind the scenes.'

      
Prof glanced down into his full-strength Pepsi. In this light it
looked like blood.
      
Sod it.

      
'Do me a favour, son. Take this away and fetch me a large Bells.'

      
The barman grinned. 'You one too?'

      
'A comic? Meaning you can sense a powerful air of tragedy about
me?'

      
Prof put a tenner on the bar and grabbed his double Scotch with
both hands, like a mother reclaiming a lost child.

      
'You might be right, son.' Taking a deep swallow. 'You might
be right at that.'

Shelley did some thinking,
her Arran sweater and her hair the same colour in the dusk. She was possibly
doing a bit of lip-pursing too, which he couldn't see in this light.

      
Shelley said eventually, 'Have you heard of a thing called Total
Allergy Syndrome?'

      
'Er ...' Everything was a bleeding syndrome nowadays.

      
'It's where ... Look, lots of people are allergic to different
things, like the smell of paint or floor polish or diesel fumes or whatever ...
They come out in rashes or get asthma attacks.'

      
'I'm wiv you. Cats. Some people is allergic to cats.'

      
'And with some it just runs riot, and they're allergic to a whole
lot of different things. There've been people who've had to live in sort of
sterile bubbles. I mean, it can be life-threatening.'

      
'Sometimes freaten other people's lives,' Weasel said darkly.

      
'And Tom ... God, it all sounds so ridiculous. Look - you must
know this, you've known him a lot longer than me - Tom's always been very ...
sensitive
, OK?'

      
'If you mean the second sight, yeah we all knew that. Scary
stuff. We all had a few frights, being around Tom. And Tom hisself...'

      
'Was probably more scared than any of you, I'd guess.'
      
'I fink it just made him mad,'
Weasel said. 'Angry.'
      
'Same thing,' Shelley said.

      
'And then he went frew this stage where he'd make, like, a
joke of it. 'Cept it wasn't that funny. Like … OK, when he was wiv the Brain
Police, in about '72, we had this manager for a while, real money-grabbing, slave-driving
bidder, he'd have the band gigging eight till midnight, seven nights a week. Anyhow,
one night, everybody's well knackered and Tom just points at this manager.
Carlos, and he goes, "You wanna take a night off, tomorrer, mate, gonna do
yourself a mischief." And then he turns his back and just slopes off, the
way he does, you know? We don't fink nuffink of it. And then next night, same time
- same time
exactly
, I reckon - the
geezer goes and falls downstairs at his gaff and breaks his bleeding back.
Stoke Mandeville job, we never seen him since. We said, bleeding hell, Tom ...
He says, "Nah, nah, piss off, I didn't do it, I just seen it coming, all
right." And we didn't say nuffink else, seeing he was about to get ...
annoyed.'