Hard Light (2 page)

“What's jostaberry juice?” I asked.

A rosy-faced girl with facial piercings smiled at me from beneath the hood of her anorak. “It's a hybrid of gooseberry and black currant. You have to pick them every morning before sunrise.”

I paid her and downed the contents of the paper cup she handed me. She pointed to a metal bowl filled with tiny black fruit. “Our farm's in Devon, if you'd like to come visit sometime. You can even help with the harvest if you like.”

“I'd love that,” I said. “Is there a bar called the Gambrel near here?”

“The gastropub? First right, that way. They do a brilliant ploughman's; we're one of their suppliers for nettle chevre. You might not be able to get a table if you haven't booked. I'll recycle that for you.”

I gave her the empty cup, sloshed my way past more food stalls, and took a right onto a side street.

The sleet had subsided to freezing drizzle. In the sulfurous glare of sodium lamps, street and sky had the smeared look of a botched watercolor. Metal shutters hid storefronts covered with graffiti and an impasto of gig posters. I saw COMING SOON signs for an organic fromagerie, a Bangladeshi Wi-Fi cafe, and a Bruno Magli shoe store.

The Gambrel occupied a corner at the end of the block, across the street from a monolithic concrete structure I assumed was a public housing project. The pub, however, was well tended. Buttery yellow light streamed from windows hung with baskets of ivy, incongruously verdant in the wintry gloom. Strings of Christmas lights still shone above the door, where a painted wooden sign displayed the image of a metal instrument with the carcass of a pig suspended from it.

THE GAMBREL.

I thought of the nickname Quinn had been given by the folks he did business with in Oslo long ago: Varsler, butcher bird. I tightened my grip on my satchel and went inside.

A wave of warmth hit me, redolent of garlic, braised beef, and a sweetly earthy scent that might have been peat smoke. Candles glowed on trestle tables where well-heeled people sat drinking, eating, gazing enraptured at their mobile phones. A young woman in a beautifully tailored jumpsuit and knee-high boots approached me with a concerned look.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“I just want a drink.”

“Of course.” She gazed pointedly at my dripping leather jacket. “Can I take your coat?”

“No thanks.”

A flicker of displeasure as she gestured toward the bar. “Herman will be happy to serve you.”

I ignored the irritated glances of several diners as I crossed the room, leaving a trail of damp bootprints on the glossy hardwood floor. I knew I looked like shit, and I felt worse, shaky and sick from too much speed and booze. The only thing that would make me feel better was more of the same.

But for the first time in forty years, I was starting to get a bad premonition about that. The incident back in Paddington wasn't the first time I'd felt a sudden wave of dizziness, or worse. Black flecks in my recent memory. Night terrors, and the even more terrible knowledge that I no longer dreamed when I slept.

Or maybe it was that I could no longer easily distinguish between wakefulness and nightmare. I'd taken a bad blow to the head in Iceland: This on top of a lifetime of more drunken falls than I could count made me wonder if there was some dark spider nesting in my skull, spinning a toxic web of neurochemicals and failed synapses.

I forced aside the thought. I needed to find Quinn.

There's a bar in Brixton run by someone I know; I'll give you his number.

I had no mobile and no way to get in touch with Quinn; nothing except the name of the pub and its owner, Derek. I'd found the Gambrel. Now, I'd make contact with Derek, then hole up for a few days, until Quinn got here.

Still, “here” didn't seem like a place Quinn would be caught dead in. His employment history for the last few decades included selling used vinyl and disposing of body parts for the Russian mob. The handsomely chiseled block of human granite behind the Gambrel's bar looked more likely to attempt a solo ascent of K2 barefoot than admit to knowing someone like Quinn O'Boyle.

“What can I get for you?”

“Shot of Jack Daniels. And a half pint of—” I squinted, reading the name of this month's craft beers. “Brambly Willy.”

The bartender handed me a brimming shotglass, pulled my beer and slid it across the counter. I downed the Jack Daniels, asked for a second, then handed him a twenty-pound note. “Derek around?”

“Sorry?”

“Derek. The owner.”

The bartender frowned. “You mean Derek Haverty?”

“Yeah, that's him.”

“He's gone. Up in Camden, I think.” He turned to a dark-haired girl slicing lemons at the other end of the bar. “Hey, where's Derek Haverty now? Was it the Hobgoblin?”

The girl set down her knife and wiped her forehead. “The Banshee, I think.”

The bartender nodded. “That's it. The Banshee. Camden Town.”

“Where's Camden Town?”

“Take the Underground to King's Cross, transfer to the Northern line northbound. Take you straight there.”

I knocked back the second shot and chased it with the beer. A man stood at the bar with his back to me, a pack of Gitanes on the zinc countertop beside his mobile. I palmed the cigarettes and strode back out into the street.

Around the corner from the Brixton Underground station, the same grimy kid had nodded out on the steps. Ignoring his baleful mongrel, I dropped the pack of Gitanes into the boy's lap and hurried to catch the subway.

 

4

The quick infusion of alcohol had jolted me awake. But now my unease was tempered with dread. Had Quinn set me up? Given me Dagney's passport just to get me out of town?

The thought made me feel sick. Even after factoring in his CV as a former junkie, drug dealer, hired gun, and worse, I couldn't see him betraying me. I'd spent over thirty years mourning Quinn O'Boyle, certain he'd died in prison or OD'ed. We'd known each other since high school, when he'd been my first lover and my first muse, subject of hundreds of black and white photos I'd shot of him while he was awake or asleep, tying up or nodding out. There was a terrible light in his bruised eyes: Even in photographs it burned through me like acid, but I couldn't look away.

Those photos had been the portal to my career photographing the birth of punk on the Lower East Side, before I flamed out and hit the skids—one of the briefest artistic careers on record, though I had a lot of competition in those days.

Ever since, Quinn's wasted beauty had haunted me. I looked for his face in every lover's, in every blasted landscape I wandered through, in every drink. Reykjavík was the first time I'd seen him since 1978: For the first time in decades, I felt something other than desperation, and craved something more than alcohol or speed. The fact that Quinn hadn't known the Gambrel was under new management didn't seem like a good portent for our reunion.

I found a seat in the back of the subway car and dug out the scrap of paper Quinn had given me, scrawled with four words.

The Gambrel Derek Haverty

Nothing about how Quinn knew this guy; nothing regarding how long it had been since they'd seen each other, or where, or under what circumstances. I was starting to get the feeling that maybe I didn't want to know.

I shoved the note back into my pocket and searched my satchel for the Focalin I'd bought from my connection back in New York, removed four caplets, and popped them dry. I could have done with something stronger, but I assumed London would be a good place for that. The entire 1970s punk scene had been fueled by speed and the same three guitar cords. I stared at the advertisements for cheap mobile phones and vacations in Ibiza, and waited for the buzz to kick in.

At King's Cross, I jammed myself into a Northern line train. I got off at Camden Town, following the crowd through the station. My nerves fizzed like a lit fuse. Freezing wind howled through the tunnels, strong enough to tear the Dr. Seuss hat off the head of the drunken kid stumbling beside me on the escalator.

Despite the icy drizzle, teenagers and twenty-somethings thronged Camden High Street. Nouveau hippies, teenybopper punks, dreadlocked stoners, rude boys, wiggers, black girls in do-rags and leather, Japanese Lolitas and a claque of French-speaking boys in soccer shirts. It was like a high-school prom where the theme was “Masque of the Red Death.” A crap cover of “Creep” blasted from a stall selling Manchester United T-shirts and thongs emblazoned with the Union Jack. The French boys began to sing “Over the Rainbow” as a girl doubled over, puking. The only person close to my age was a rheumy-eyed guy in a gray mohawk who clutched a placard advertising Doc Martens.

Across the street were tattoo and piercing parlors, shuttered shops, a Super Drug pharmacy. I turned in the other direction and headed down the sidewalk, dodging touts who thrust cards advertising massages and cheap tapas at me. CCTV signs emblazoned with a yellow eye were everywhere: streetcorners, shop windows, above waste bins and newsstands. Halfway down the block, I spotted a second pensioner carrying a Doc Martens sign. A tattoo of a crown of thorns encircled his shaved head.

“I'm looking for the Banshee.” I ran my tongue across my cracked lips. The Focalin had given me dry mouth. “This the right way?”

The grizzled punk took a cigarette from behind one ear and nodded. “Yeah. Toward Chalk Farm, past the canal.”

He lit his cigarette, pulled a can of Foster's from the sagging pocket of a leather trench coat, adjusted his placard, and walked off.

I looked around for a place to grab a quick drink, but I didn't see much besides souvenir stalls and shops selling Chinese-made electronics. A line had formed outside a nondescript entryway with a neon sign. ELECTRIC BALLROOM
.
I wandered over, hoping it was a bar.

No such luck. Four bouncers stood behind a yellow rope, smoking as they ignored the queue that trailed down the block. Mostly girls shivering in the cold, many of them clad in polka-dot stockings that I assumed were an homage to whoever was the headline act.

I started back toward Chalk Farm. Near Camden Market, the crowds dispersed in a whirlwind of grit and discarded ad cards as people hurried toward the canal or ducked into tattoo parlors. The air reeked of cigarette smoke and weed, vomit and spilled beer. Sodium streetlights made everything look harshly lit and overexposed. It was a relief to reach a side street where the only illumination came from the sputtering gas lamp outside a steampunk clothing boutique.

I found the Banshee in a cul-de-sac formed by construction barricades and the skeletal outlines of a new high-rise. A mock-Tudor pub, walls encrusted with band posters and flyers protesting the ongoing construction. On the door was an Art Nouveau bronze shield boss of a woman's face surrounded by serpentine coils of hair, her eyes wide and her mouth open in a scream.

Inside, the pub was smaller than it appeared from the street. Scuffed floors and plain wooden tables; unadorned zinc bar counter. A trio of furry folk-music types occupied a table covered with empty pints. Otherwise the place was empty, except for a man polishing glasses at the bar as he stared at a TV replay of a football match.

But for once, my attention snagged on something other than the bar.

“Fucking A,” I murmured.

In the near-darkness at the back of the room glowed a pristine 1952 Seeburg C jukebox. Ice-blue lights rippled up and down its Bakelite panels, and across the glass coping that protected the record selector and sunflower-yellow housing that held a hundred vinyl singles. The casing's mirrored interior reflected an infinity of forty-fives.

I walked toward it, entranced, then stopped and ran my hands across the fake wood paneling. Scores of hand-lettered labels identified the singles' A- and B-sides.

Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, early Stones and Electric Prunes. Tonto's Expanding Head Band and the Green Fuz; “Pretty Vacant” and “Time Has Come Today.” An entire row of Chuck Berry. Big Star. Chris Bell's “I Am the Cosmos,” a rarity even when it was first pressed. The Seeburg was the elephants' graveyard of rock and roll. I shook my head and laughed.

This was Quinn's work—not the immaculately restored jukebox, but the fortune in vinyl. I wondered if it was stuff he'd hoarded over the years, or tracked down for a serious collector—presumably, whoever owned the Banshee.

I checked the coin slot to see if it had been retrofitted for UK currency. It still had the original, with a yellowing note taped beside it.

SEE DEREK TO OPERATE.

I dug through my pockets until I found a handful of coins, picked through them for a quarter. I scanned the rows of 45s, finally slid the quarter into the slot, waiting for it to fall before I punched in three sets of numbers.

Familiar click and grind of the shuttle mechanism as the tonearm slid across the front of the machine, halting as a 45 locked into place. Hiss and pop as the needle dropped then skidded into a groove. Chuck Berry's Gibson roared into the opening chords of “Johnny B. Goode” as I turned and strode to the bar.

The bartender eyed me coolly. “Sign says to ask before using the jukebox.”

“I'm all checked out on that.” I dropped a twenty onto the counter. “Jack Daniels.”

“Good choice.” He was tall and ebony skinned, his head shaved, and wore a black donkey jacket over a flannel shirt. And he was close to my age, which meant he might be the guy I was looking for. He poured a shot and slid it toward me. “The song, I mean.”

“Thanks.”

Even with my brain sparking from the Focalin, I knew I should proceed cautiously. But then Berry's guitar rattled into the bridge, and I downed the whiskey.

“Another.” The bartender refilled my glass as I glanced around the room and asked, “Derek here?”

“I'm Derek.”

I raised my shotglass to him as he stared at me, unsmiling. “I'm Cassandra Neary. Cass.” He remained silent. “Nice jukebox.”