Keeping Bad Company (6 page)

I’d been lucky because I’d only had to do it for one night. I’d been nothing but a kid at the time, not long after Grandma Varady went into a nursing home. She’d been my only relative since Dad’s death and I’d been living with her. But the place we’d lived in had been rented in her name, not mine, and the landlord had wanted me out. So out I went, into the street, with my belongings in a rucksack. Not that the landlord cared about that.

It had been summer and I thought – being innocent or stupid, whichever word you prefer – that sleeping out under the stars might not be so bad if I did it in the local park. Before I left the house, I crept round the back without the landlord seeing me and filched a piece of tarpaulin from the garden shed, with the idea of making a tent. I probably saw myself like a character in a Famous Five story.

I’d forgotten they locked the park gates at night and that was just the first problem. I had to climb over the wall. Then I found I wasn’t the only one to do that and every bench had a regular, settling himself down for the night. I hadn’t reckoned on company, either.

Some of the company was distinctly unhealthy in more ways than one. Once the danger of it all was brought home to me, I gave up the idea of making a tent. Instead, I wrapped the tarpaulin round me like a sheet of armour, crawled into the centre of a large municipal rosebed, and spent a miserable, sleepless night among the floribundas. I kept telling myself that if anyone tried to come in there after me, he wouldn’t be able to approach quietly and I’d know about it.

The next day I was lucky enough to meet up with someone I’d come across before, on the drama course, and he took me along to a squat where he was living and a place was found there for me. It was in a row of condemned terraced houses. The windows were broken and the floorboards rotted, but it was dry and safe. No one who hasn’t been out on the streets can appreciate those words ‘dry’ and ‘safe’ as an ex-homeless person can, believe me.

That was the first of the many squats I’ve lived in. Sleeping rough was an experience I’m determined never to repeat. I look upon it as the lowest point of my career and from then on, no matter how bad things could get, they had to be better, and that meant I was on the way up.

Gan and I argued about it and in the end, he said, ‘Look, the old fellow told you himself he spends most of the day down the tube if it’s cold, and it’s been cold. Unless you want to ride round London Underground all day, you’re not likely to find him.’

‘He might go back to the railway station. Or if not that one, another one. Maybe over at Paddington? That’s on the Bakerloo Line. If they throw him off Marylebone, he might just nip down the tube, ride two stops northbound and try again.’

‘Check the railway stations, the lot if you like, but if he’s not there, leave it until I can get here after work. I’ll come round the doorways with you then. That’s the best time to look for him. Fair enough?’

We agreed on that one. Ganesh had cheered up by now and suggested we went down the baked potato café for some supper.

The baked potato place was run by an exiled Scot called Reekie Jimmie. (The potatoes were from Cyprus.) If you wanted to know how Jimmie got his nickname you only had to look at his orange fingers and mahogany-coloured nails. But to his credit, Jimmie didn’t smoke in the café. He smoked in the corridor accessed from the eating area by a narrow door behind the service counter.

The potatoes came with filling of your choice but the choice wasn’t great: usually cheese, chilli or baked beans, and there was a suspicious similarity between the last two. Despite much talk of prime Scottish beef, I guessed that Jimmie created the chilli filling by adding an Oxo cube and a pinch of curry powder to the baked bean one.

This evening, when we got there, there was only one perplexed customer, crouched despondently over a corner table. He was dismembering the contents of his plate with painful intensity, setting it all out in small discoloured lumps of mash and baked beans. It was rather like watching a man who’s afraid of swallowing the lucky silver coin with his Christmas pudding. He had probably ordered the chilli and was looking for the meat. I wished him luck.

Jimmie took our order and our money. Jimmie always wisely took your money first before you saw your baked potato. He gave us a numbered card despite the lack of competing custom and told us to sit where we liked.

We made our choice of the greasy tables, I put my numbered card on display, wiped the seat of the chair and sat down. Gan leaned his arms on the table, dislodging the number, and said: ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Let’s say the old man did see a snatch. Then someone’s missing, right? The snatch victim? It’s just possible the police might not know about it but someone must know. She’s got to have been missed.’

‘Go on . . .’ I encouraged.

We had time to talk it over. Jimmie had disappeared into the corridor and blue smoke curled through the open door into the area behind the counter. I was pleased Ganesh had changed his tune and was taking Albie seriously at last. It was always worth having Ganesh put his mind to a problem, because what he said generally made sense.

He made sense now. He was right. Someone who normally lived safely in the bosom of her respectable family couldn’t disappear without it being noticed. No one would notice if I disappeared except Ganesh, and possibly Daphne, after a while. Though Daphne might think I’d just wandered off, and if Gan did go and live in High Wycombe, it’d be a long time before he found out. It was an unsettling thought. Fran Varady, the woman no one would miss.

‘The kidnappers may have said to the family, don’t call the cops or something nasty will happen. The family may be trying to handle this on their own.’

He had a point. It could explain the desk sergeant’s indifference. If he knew of a kidnap in the district, Albie’s story – no matter who was telling it – would have caused more of a stir.

The microwave pinged. Jimmie reappeared wreathed in swirling smoke like an alien in a low-budget film, extricated the spuds, and approached bearing two plates. He set them down before us with a flourish.

The potatoes were monsters of their species, overcooked to a pale brown all through, their skins dry, wrinkled and dull charcoal coloured, like a rhino’s. My cheese had melted to a bright yellow waxy puddle, enveloping the side salad. I should have ordered the beans, like Ganesh.

‘There you go, and I’ve put extra salad.’ Jimmie pointed at it.

Yes, he had. There were two slices of unripe tomato and three of dehydrated cucumber nestling in the yellow sea with the crumpled, transparent lettuce leaf.

‘And more filling!’ he added with the kind of munificence the President of France probably shows when he’s handing out the Legion of Honour.

We thanked him nervously. There had to be something behind this and there was.

Jimmie rested his fists and astonishingly hairy arms on the table and addressed me. ‘I’ve been hoping you’d come in, hen. You’re an actress, is that right?’

‘Ye-es . . .’ I said. ‘But I haven’t got my card yet.’

‘You don’t need a card for this. I’ve got a wee job for you.’

Ganesh asked jocularly, ‘Has she got to dress up as a potato and run up and down outside advertising this place?’

I wished he hadn’t said that because Jimmie obviously hadn’t thought of it and began to think of it now. He frowned. ‘You know, that’s no’ a bad idea there. Mebbe another time, eh?’

‘Maybe another time, no!’ I snapped. Not even for extra salad and cheese.

‘But your friend here’s not that far off the mark. How do you fancy being a model?’

‘Does this involve taking off my clothes?’ I asked, because this is what ‘being a model’ always seems to involve. Not that I’d be prudish in the case of true art. But getting my kit off on a small stage in front of a lunch-time crowd of boozy businessmen was not, to my mind, art. I told Jimmie if this was what he’d got lined up, forget it.

He looked offended. ‘No, no, it’s a young lad, Angus, an artist. He’s a Scot like myself and seeing as he was a bit short of cash, I gave him a job here. He comes in mornings, early, and mops out the place, cleans the tables, that sort of thing. He doesna’ make any money out of the art. But he’s real serious about it and verra talented.’ Jimmie nodded and paused to let all this sink in.

Ganesh twitched an eyebrow in disbelief and turned his attention to his food.

But Jimmie was concentrating on me. ‘Now, you see, the thing is this. The lad needs a model. He had one but she let him down. She broke her leg, poor lassie, and is all laid up with a steel pin in her shin. He’s got an exhibition all fixed up and he’s really in a spot.’

I did see but, still suspicious, pointed out that there were plenty of professional artists’ models. Jimmie said there was a little bit more to it than that. It wasn’t a question of just sitting there and being painted. Wouldn’t I like to come round to the café in the morning, around ten? Angus would be there, having finished his stint mopping out, to explain it all to me himself. Jimmie himself could promise me, hand on heart, that it was absolutely legit and a paying proposition.

I needed a job and money so I agreed to come back around ten in the morning, and meet the talented artist. I insisted I was promising nothing. I’d been offered paying propositions before. Besides, if Angus was reduced to cleaning out Jimmie’s café, it was unlikely he had much dosh to spare and, it followed, not much to pay a model.

‘Don’t do it!’ advised Ganesh when Jimmie had gone back to his counter.

It was good advice but as usual when Ganesh said don’t, I did.

We set off slowly homewards – towards my place, that was. It was half-past ten and the pubs were busy with drinkers getting in a last pint before eleven when most of the pubs locally turned out. The Rose at the end of the street had opened all its windows, despite the cool night, to let out the fug and steaming heat of bodies pressed together in its cramped bar.

The Rose is an unreconstructed bit of Old London Town. It has glazed brown tiles cladding the exterior and inside, although it’s lost the spit and sawdust of its early days, it’s kept the same atmosphere, resolutely downmarket. That’s what its patrons like about it. Everywhere else around has been gentrified, yuppified or poncified. The term depends on whether you’re an estate agent or one of The Rose’s regulars.

There’s plenty of life about the old pub. They had live music in there that night and either something was wrong with the sound equipment or the band was worse than usual. Discordant wails and amateurish guitar-playing escaped in bursts between shouts of laughter, roars of disapproval and the occasional crash of broken glass. All the usual sounds associated with The Rose, in fact. Despite what you might expect, serious trouble there is rare. The landlord pays a couple of bruisers disguised as bar staff to see things stay that way. They don’t have women behind the bar at The Rose.

Another thing they don’t do at The Rose is sell food, unless you want peanuts or potato crisps. They’re a boozer, for Gawd’s sake, and not a naffin’ restaurant, as the landlord likes to explain if some stranger asks to see the bar menu. Anticipating the nightly exit of unfed but well-watered patrons, a van selling hot dogs had taken up position nearby. Puffs of acrid-smelling smoke wafted towards us. The proprietor was setting up a placard by his mobile eatery. It read: ‘Three Hot Dogs for the Price of Two. Unbeatable value.’

I privately thought the mental gymnastics required to work that out were probably beyond the patrons of The Rose by the time they reeled out into what passes for fresh air around there.

‘Hi there, Dilip,’ Ganesh hailed the cook. ‘How’s it going?’

He straightened up. He was remarkable for being about as broad as he was tall, solid as a brick wall, with a walrus moustache. ‘See that?’ He pointed to the placard.

We duly admired it, Ganesh asking tentatively, ‘What’s with the special offer?’

‘You gotta let ’em think they’re getting something for nothing,’ said Dilip. ‘That’s the only way you do any business these days.’

They fell to discussing the general slowness of business, whatever its nature. To illustrate the point, a couple of amateur-looking streetwalkers had appeared, both seeming depressed as if business had vanished altogether. One wore tight red leggings, not a good choice on spindly pins that lacked any discernible thighs or calves and were as sexy as two matchsticks. The other wore a short skirt revealing lace tights on legs that contrasted startlingly with her mate’s, being bulbous about the calf and tapering to disproportionally narrow ankles. They looked like a couple of upturned beer bottles. She wore a silver blouson jacket. At a guess I put Red Leggings’ age at thirteen and her chum in the silver jacket’s at fourteen.