Hard Light (4 page)

“Can I get another drink?” I asked Derek.

Krishna's boyfriend swiveled to stare at me through bloodshot eyes. “Fuckeryou?” he slurred.

If Central Casting had sent over a bad drunk, they couldn't have done better than this guy. He'd lost the fedora, which would have been an improvement if it hadn't left a scalp tufted with greasy black stubble. His waxenly pretty features looked like they'd started to melt. He had an arm around Krishna, but as I approached she slipped away from him.

“Shut up, Lance.” Krishna seized the bar rail to steady herself. She gave me a crooked smile, plucked at a blond tendril that had escaped from her bouffant, and pouted suggestively. The gesture was more childlike than seductive. “Derek—whatever she wants.”

Derek poured a shot and handed it to me. “Compliments of Miss Morgenthal.”

I sidled a safe distance from Lance and raised my glass to Krishna. She picked up her drink and teetered toward me, her platform boots echoing through the empty room.

“You American?”

“Yeah. Thanks for the drink.”

“Noo Yawk Sit-Ay?” I nodded and she smiled in delight. “I always guess right!” Her own accent was so hyperbolically East End, I wondered if it was put on. She took a slug of her drink. A gimlet, light on the Rose's. I could smell the vodka seeping from her pores. “You at the show tonight?”

“Missed that one,” I said.

She grinned. “Now that's your problem, innit?”

Up close she looked very young. Cleopatra kohl made her gray-green eyes appear huge. Cerise lipstick couldn't hide where her lips had been bitten raw. Beneath the ugly plaid coat she wore a sleeveless tank top and a red leatherette miniskirt. No stockings—inside those platform boots, her feet must have been rubbed as raw as her mouth.

I glanced down at her bare arms. There were bruises just above the elbow, the livid ghost of a handprint. When I looked up again, she was staring at me with those spooky green eyes.

I asked, “You got a band?”

“Nah. I do some open mics and pickup gigs, backup for people who come through London. Lulu, I sang with them tonight, they let me do a solo. Not everyone does.”

She gulped her drink. I glanced to where Lance slumped against the bar, staring at us. Derek was nowhere in sight. “Your boyfriend a musician?”

“He's a fucking cunt.” She raised her voice. “A fucking cunt!”

I stiffened. Lance only turned his back to us.

“Fucking cunt,” Krishna murmured a final time.

She set her empty glass on the counter and made a wobbly beeline toward the jukebox. I knocked back the rest of my drink and followed, watching as she stooped to reach behind the Seeburg and plug it back in. The blue glow gave a leaden cast to her thin arms and sharp-featured face as she gazed at the rows of song titles, hand slapping repeatedly at her thigh. After a moment I realized she was searching for a pocket that wasn't there.

“Hey.” I fumbled in my leather jacket for a quarter. “Here.”

She grabbed the quarter and expertly flicked it into the coin slot, stood on tiptoe to run her fingers across the glass coping, and punched in a string of numbers. After a few seconds, six thunderous drumbeats echoed through the room: “Be My Baby.” I closed my eyes.

Max Weinberg said that if Hal Blaine had only played drums on that one song, his name would still be uttered with reverence. It's the Big Bang of rock and roll—a rhapsody of tambourines, shakers, chimes, and guitars, abruptly snarled in static as the needle skipped across vinyl.

I turned to smack the jukebox. Before I could touch it, Ronnie Spector's voice once more filled the room.

Only it wasn't Ronnie Spector singing. It was Krishna Morgenthal, silhouetted in the Seeburg's ice-blue halo, hands raised and body swaying as though she faced an audience. Her voice held none of the transcendent joy of Ronnie Spector's. Instead, the song became something far more ominous. A threat seethed beneath the girl-group lyrics, the words twisted into a pop aria of obsession and barely suppressed rage. For someone who'd loved the song for most of a lifetime, it was a profoundly unsettling command performance. I listened, stunned, until the final drumbeats faded into reverb, then silence.

“Holy shit.” I stared at Krishna. “That's some set of pipes.”

Krishna swiped a bead of sweat from her cheek, stepped over, and stood on tiptoe to kiss me on the mouth, her tongue darting between my lips.

“What's that for?” I asked when she drew away.

“That's for nothing.” She gave me a sly half smile. “Now go do something.” She spun on her platform heels and sashayed back to the bar.

I whistled softly. Where in that tiny body did she keep that enormous voice? I looked around the room. Kerry was gone. Derek was still MIA, and Lance appeared to have been texting for the last two minutes and forty-one seconds.

I licked my lips, tasting smoke and limes. Krishna had staked out a spot at the end of the bar. She gazed at me with that cockeyed smile, one hand splayed below the red leatherette miniskirt. I decided to count to ten before I crossed the room. I made it to five.

“So.” I set my satchel on the floor beside her. “Krishna. Isn't that a guy's name? Or a god's?”

“Yah. My friends call me Krish. My mum was a fucking hippie in a caravan.” She made a face.

“Where'd you learn to belt like that?”

“Singing in tube stations. Brilliant echo. I used to ride up and down the escalator and sing, but I couldn't make any dosh. Down in the station I could make fifty quid a night. When the cops chased me out I'd sing on the street.”

“But you're doing clubs now, right? Backup.”

“Make more money busking. DJ I know just uploaded a song of mine. No dosh in that, either, but maybe someday.”

Her gaze slid sideways to take in Lance, still engrossed in his tiny blue screen. His head was tilted so that I could see teethmarks on the side of his throat. Either a love bite deep enough to draw blood, or proof that Krishna could hold her own with a violent boyfriend.

I scowled. “Tell me that asshole isn't your DJ friend. Because the whole Ronnie Spector thing is already weird enough.”

She shook her head. “Nah. He's nobody. Just a guy.”

“A guy as in a boyfriend and you can dump him? Like, now?”

I ran a finger along the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot. Channeling the Wall of Sound burned a lot of calories. Her leg brushed mine and she looked up at me. I touched her chin and bent to kiss her. Her tongue flicked against my mouth, but before I could pull her closer her head whipped back.

“Ow!”

“What the fuck?” Lance stared at me, his hand buried in Krishna's bouffant. “Fucking sket.”

He yanked Krishna so hard I heard her jaw snap. Blood welled from her lip as she glared at him, shouting, “
You're
the fucking sket!”

He raised his arm to strike her and I lunged at him, the steel tip of my cowboy boot connecting with his kneecap. His legs buckled. With a muffled shriek, he fell.

I grabbed my camera bag. Krishna stared at Lance as he clutched his leg, weeping in pain. I touched her shoulder. “You coming?”

She ran a hand across her head, pulled off the teased blond wig, and threw it Lance with a curse. “You—”

I pulled her toward the front door. “Save it.”

“No.” Krishna shook herself free. “This way.”

She staggered to the back of the room on her platform heels. I followed, down a dim corridor into a storage area filled with crates of empty bottles. Krishna stopped, fumbling with the door latch until it opened, and we ran outside, startling Derek where he paced nervously, mobile pressed to one ear. His head jerked up as we darted past.

“Wait!” Derek shouted. “Don't—”

But we had already reached the High Street.

 

6

I ran with Krishna through a warren of alleys slick with icy rain. Sirens wailed in the distance, and a lone black SUV idled in front of a doorway. Stoned, bewildered kids stumbled along the sidewalks, looking like they'd missed the last boat from Pleasure Island. Without the wig, Krishna's own hair was a tangled mass of cinnamon-colored curls. A few kids recognized her—recognized her as someone they
should
recognize, anyway—but their gazes slid over me as though I were a reflection in a darkened window. The few times someone caught my eyes, they recoiled.

“They're scared of you.” Krishna's tone was admiring. “I could do with some of that.”

“Give it thirty years,” I said.

We hurried down a flight of stone steps to a narrow path alongside the Regent's Canal. Trash floated on the sluggish water. Boats resembling anorexic barges were tied up beside the path. Krishna pointed at the opposite bank. “My place is just over there.”

I saw only shadows cast by the thick curtains of ivy that covered the walls beside the path. The thrum of traffic had diminished to the faint buzz of a trapped fly. Something darted from the underbrush and disappeared into the night. I froze, looked over to see Krishna staring at me.

“You all right?” she asked.

I nodded and croaked, “Yeah. Sorry.”

Years ago I'd been raped in a place like this—three
AM
shadows, an echo of drunken laughter as I stumbled home from CBGB, shitfaced and barefoot and alone. I still have the scars left by a zipknife above my crotch, tangled with the tattoo I got a few years later: TOO TOUGH TO DIE.

Ever since that night, I can sense damage, smell it like an acrid pheromone seeping from the pores of people around me. The wrong kind of street, the wrong kind of light, and the stink of my own terror floods my throat and nostrils. It's why I can read photos the way I do, like they're tarot cards or the I Ching. Because that's what photography is—or was, before the advent of digital—damage, the corrosive effect that sunlight has on chemicals and a prepared surface.

Krishna hooked her arm through mine, tottering on her platform shoes. “Come on,” she urged.

We walked beneath an arched bridge that stank of piss, its security lights blurring Krishna into a blue-gray shadow at my side. When we emerged from the passage, I followed her up a set of stairs back to the street, where we crossed the bridge to the other side of the canal.

An ugly apartment block of council housing rose behind a gate, rows of identical windows looking onto minuscule balconies crammed with bicycles and flowerpots and gas grills, empty pet carriers and plastic chairs. Krishna punched a code into a security panel. We passed through the gate and entered the building.

“My flat looks like a tip,” she said, as we walked down a corridor that stank of cigarette smoke and industrial cleaning fluid. “Lance left all his shit, I told him I'd toss it in the canal.”

She stopped in front of a door and spent most of a minute searching through the pockets of her plaid coat. Frustrated, she thrust a key at me.

“Here. I can never get it to work.”

I jimmied the lock, and the door opened. “That's why I keep him around,” Krishna said absently. “He can always get the door open.”

The flat was not much larger than a walk-in closet, and resembled Fresh Kills on a busy day. Clothes strewn everywhere, along with wigs, gig flyers, takeaway cartons, empty vodka bottles, and several plastic ukuleles. Two silvery, thigh-length boots protruded from a heap of clothing, giving the impression that a robot was buried there, or maybe Gene Simmons. It smelled of unwashed clothes and skunk weed and fenugreek, with that pervasive base note of vodka and lime.

Krishna swept a mound of clothes from a small couch. “You can sleep here.”

I sank onto the couch, my satchel at my feet. If I lost sight of it, I'd never find it again. “That's okay. I can crash anywhere.”

“I'm glad you crashed here,” she murmured.

I pulled Krishna toward me and kissed her, pulling off the heavy coat until I found her nestled inside it. She was so slight I could slip a finger in the furrows between her ribs, her small breasts cool beneath my hands. She was surprisingly strong for a skinny girl: I remembered her loser boyfriend and the dark half moons on his throat.

Eventually we fell asleep, Krishna curled against me. I woke once and stared at her child's face, pale skin beaded with silver from the shadows of rain on the window behind us, her fingers pressed against her mouth, trying to keep a secret as she dreamed. Her eyelids twitched and her mouth twisted as though she were about to cry out. I kissed her cheek and her expression relaxed, fear fading back into some other dream. I fell asleep once more. Later, dimly aware that she was gone, I pulled my satchel close, my head pillowed on a crumpled camisole that smelled of smoke and limes.

 

7

I woke to gray light filtered through windows that overlooked a channel of greasy-looking water. I pushed aside a pile of clothes that weren't mine and sat up groggily.

“That doesn't look very comfortable,” a voice intoned.

I turned. An extraordinarily tall man leaned against the wall and stared down at me, amused.

“Don't panic,” he said. “I'm harmless unless provoked.”

I wasn't sure whether to believe him. I pegged him at mid-forties, wearing a threadbare morning coat and pleated trousers over scuffed black winklepickers. The long-fingered hand he extended to me was so white it appeared bleached. His face was wearily handsome, deep-set dark eyes and strong chin, with a wry, thin-lipped mouth that gave him the air of an actor accustomed to making the best of a badly written, long-playing role. Both his height and appearance were enhanced by a top hat tall enough to hide a live chicken.

“Adrian Carlisle.” The languid voice was coupled with a disconcertingly strong handshake. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. I caught the faint scent of damage in my nostrils, like spoiled apricots, a smell that was almost immediately gone. “I'm a friend of Krishna's. A friend to all humankind. I assume she's beneath the laundry somewhere?”