The Salt Marsh (19 page)

NINE

S
HE DOZED ON
the floor of the camper van. The sun woke her, shining pink and womblike through the red nylon of her sleeping bag. She lay there for ten minutes or more, the sleeping bag over her head. Reluctant to move. Eventually she decided she had to face the world, drive back to Vauxhall, past the RAF base, through the pine echelons of Thetford Forest one more time. Joy Division playing on her boombox. She kept checking for the green Land Rover in her rearview mirror as she drove, but there was no sign of Sonny – an absence which left her with an unexpected twinge of disappointment.

*

The house whiffed of damp and mould. The red light flashed. She was developing a phobia of the answering machine, afraid to listen in case there was a message from somebody who was dead or disappeared. Or the whistler. She pressed the play button.

‘Sam, are you there?'

The therapist.

‘Give me a call when you get a chance. I know it's a difficult time of year for you – the anniversary of your father's death – so I wanted to check how things are going.'

She took a deep breath; maybe it would help to talk to somebody. She had a bath, a cup of coffee. She called the number, the therapist picked up.

‘Hello.'

‘Oh, hi Sam, are you OK?'

‘Yes.'

‘Shall we have a chat?'

She stalled, nervous again about talking on the phone.

‘Maybe we could arrange another time.'

‘Sam, is there something wrong?'

Sam considered the angles, and then said, ‘It's difficult for me to say exactly what I feel like saying on the phone because I think my line is bugged.'

Silence on the other end for a minute. ‘That's unlikely, isn't it?'

‘No.'

‘Why would anybody bug your phone?'

‘Because that's what the secret state does and I know about that because my father was part of the secret state.'

‘You know, Sam, sometimes we transfer personal feelings from an individual to abstract entities, like the state, or the police. It's projection. A way of avoiding how our reactions and emotions relate to ourselves and traumatic events, like your father's death.'

The phone call was pointless; she shouldn't have bothered. She took a deep breath. ‘I have to go now.'

‘OK. Well, let's talk about this at our usual time. I think we can make some progress here, start to unpack some of the issues around the first stages of grieving.'

Sam wanted to throw the phone at the wall.

‘Right. Bye.'

She replaced the receiver, considered the possibility that her mother had set her up with the therapist in order to drive her mad, or to trap her into revealing something about Jim that Liz could use to justify her relationship with Roger. She traced a silver snail trail across the lino with the tip of her shoe and decided that even her mother wouldn't go quite that far.

She wandered into the kitchen to search for food. The fridge was empty. Dave's biscuit barrel was in the cupboard and inside there were three Hobnobs. He had bought the biscuit barrel after he had asked her to buy a packet of plain chocolate Hobnobs and she said she preferred milk. He came home with the barrel from Brixton market and said they could buy a packet of each and store them. She stared at the biscuit barrel. She couldn't for the life of her work out what had been going on with Dave, whether he'd killed himself or been killed, whether he knew something about the power station he hadn't wanted to tell her, why he had been so edgy the last time they saw each other. What she did know was that she and Dave and Luke were friends, and that was what mattered. In her head she said sorry about the Aston Villa mug she had smashed and he said not to fret, he had another one anyway. She promised him she would support Aston Villa from now on even though they were crap. He laughed and said her therapist would be pleased that she'd managed to go straight to the bargaining stage of grief with his death and she laughed too.

She cried for Dave and she slept. She woke and she cried and she whispered the words of Ecclesiastes to herself for comfort.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
The only biblical verse she could remember Jim reciting. He didn't believe in God, but he was taught by the Jesuits and he knew the Bible. Ecclesiastes, he had said, was the one book that contained meaning he could grasp as well as beauty in its words. The Book of the Preacher. Perhaps it was a coincidence that Sonny had quoted those lines from Ecclesiastes when he was pointing the gun at her. Perhaps it was the inevitable periodic repetition. To every thing there is a season.

She went downstairs, called Luke's number. Nobody picked up. Dusk already, its arrival accompanied by the drumbeat of rain on glass. She had spent the whole day doing nothing. She had a choice to make, she could stay at home and wallow in misery or she could take the bus to Soho and do her shift behind the nightclub bar. If she didn't turn up, nobody would call to ask her where she was or reprimand her for not showing. Although, she wouldn't be able to work there again. She watched the rainwater sluicing the window and considered her options. She couldn't care less if she lost her job. But there was a good reason to do the shift; at the end of it she could walk round the corner to the club where Luke worked, and talk to Spyder. Ask him face to face what he knew about Luke, watch his reactions. Check whether he had been lying to her on the phone and knew more than he was saying. So that was her choice. She could sit tight, as Harry had instructed, wait for him to sort it, deal with her file. Or she could try and find Luke. She pushed herself off the bed, rummaged in her cupboard for her club gear.

There was no dress code for the nightclub staff apart from black. The other women working there wore skimpy dresses. She went the other way and covered herself in a forties trouser suit she had found in Portobello Market. Armour against the evils of the capital's night-time economy. Helen had found her the job through a mate; Helen knew all the clubbers and club owners in Soho – she was part of that whole fashion student and photography
i-D, Face
scene with its shifting tribes. New Romantics, Goths, Buffalo, wild camp. The Ballroom was an outlier, the tepid edge of cool in a basement on the fringe of Soho. Easy to miss if you didn't know it was there; the inconspicuous entrance gave no clue to the crumbling beauty below the pavement. Bombed in the Blitz, left to rot, rediscovered at the turn of the eighties by a fast-footed entrepreneur who varnished the dance floor, swagged the red velvet curtains, hung a few disco balls and opened the doors for business. Sam found it easy to carve herself a niche among the Ballroom's subterranean enchantments. She was a quirky fixture with her disinterested gaze, puritanical garb and the book she kept open on the bar to read in quiet moments. Other girls came and went, usually because they were caught with their hand in the till. She persisted. She put her hand in the till too – you would have to be crazy to spend six hours serving drinks in a smoky basement for nothing but the pittance they called a wage, but she made sure she wasn't caught. On a busy night, trendy Wednesday when they flew a DJ in from Paris, she could make a fortune. Another good reason not to wear a skimpy dress: trouser pockets were essential for storing the takings.

She watched the clubbers with a cynical eye – all that hustling for recording contracts, modelling jobs, bit parts in naff TV soaps. And yet she couldn't entirely deny the draw of the Ballroom's wish-fulfilment magic, because it was where she had met Luke. He was working behind the bar in a club around the corner. The Wag was much trendier than the Ballroom. Larry, the huge bouncer with the shaved head and tattooed neck, patrolled the queue and ritually humiliated anybody who didn't register on his scale of cool by telling them to fuck off. But there were unspoken arrangements among the bouncers and the bar staff of Soho; they let each other in and poured free drinks to their fellow workers from around the corner. A rough and ready extended family. Although, Sam rarely made full use of the reciprocal club-workers' hospitality – she usually picked up the early-morning edition from the newspaper sellers in Leicester Square and walked straight home over Vauxhall Bridge.

Luke had turned up at the Ballroom one Monday night, which was the night the swing band played the standards.

*

Old-time jazz for old-timers: wartime brides with their GI husbands, ancient Cockney ladies with sugar-spun hair, gold t-bar shoes and balding partners. The wrinkly couples swayed so gracefully around the floor and always touched her with the melancholy of lasting love and fading beauty. The glamorous trannies and leather-dressed madams who hung around the club's shadier corners with the Lords and ex-cabinet ministers touched her too, for reasons she couldn't fully explain.

She hadn't noticed him at first, watching her across the bar. She was sitting on a stool at the back, reading Angela Carter.
The Magic Toyshop.

‘
Nights at the Circus
is better.'

She glanced up. Ugly good looks: big nose, generous skewed mouth smiling, chestnut curls. The kind of face you think nobody else would find attractive and then, later, you realize everybody is drooling over him. There was a sadness about his sea-green eyes, though, which was probably what hooked her.

‘I work at the Wag,' he said.

She automatically reached for a glass, offered a free drink.

‘No, it's OK. I just wanted to have a look. One of my mates told me the Ballroom was worth seeing. So I thought I'd take a break and come over.'

She smiled, tongue-tied. He smiled back.

‘I haven't seen you at the Wag. You don't go there after work, do you?'

She shook her head.

‘Why not?'

‘I like to walk home.'

‘You should come over some time. The music on Monday nights is brilliant.'

She couldn't think of anything to say. She felt like a numskull. She reddened.

He said, ‘I like the music here better in some ways, though, the old-fashioned jazz band. Do you ever dance?'

‘No. You need a partner.'

‘Come and dance with me.'

Her cheeks burned. ‘I'm not very good at dancing. I don't know how to do all that ballroom stuff.'

‘Me neither. Let's go and be left-footed together...'

‘I can't leave the bar.'

‘Don't you get breaks?'

‘Yes.'

‘There are two other people behind the bar and nobody asking for a drink.'

‘OK. I'll take ten minutes now.'

‘Luke.'

She joined him round the other side of the bar. ‘Sam.'

He grabbed her hand, navigated the swaying couples, pulled her close, carried away by the music. Laughing. Tripping. Larking around. Uncomplicated enjoyment that made her happy in a way she couldn't remember feeling for a long time. Perhaps she'd never felt quite so happy. A kind of chemistry she'd not experienced before. Everything glowed and shimmered and all the ancient couples smiled at them, thinking – we were like that once.

Something shifted in her then and, after that night, she couldn't stop obsessing about him. She tried to keep a lid on it, but it didn't work. Her brain flipped around, returned to the things he had said, going over every word, the nuance of each syllable, his breath on her face. He must already have a girlfriend and even if he didn't, he wouldn't fancy her. But that Wednesday when she had finished the shift, shut the bar, tallied her till, climbed the stairs, blinked in the sleazy light, Luke was there. Waiting for her. Standing, one foot against the wall, outside the entrance, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, chatting to Tony the Ballroom bouncer.

‘I fancied a walk,' he said.

Tony winked at her and said good night. She shrugged, tried to look more casual than she felt. They walked across St James's Park, past the fairytale cupolas of the Foreign Office rear end, and she told him about the curlew she had spotted poking its long curved beak in the soil just by Buckingham Palace. He was interested. They stopped on Vauxhall Bridge, had a spliff as the sun was rising over Docklands. It became their routine. Monday nights, she finished first, went over to the Wag, waited outside and they walked back to her place together. Wednesdays, it was his turn to wait outside the Ballroom.

That was January. And now it was June and it was raining so she decided to catch the bus to Leicester Square. She was too jittery to enjoy the swing band or take a cut of the money handed over the bar in exchange for spirits. Time was dragging in this dingy corner of the basement. The ageing men squirming around on the red velvet banquettes with the over-made-up hookers made her queasy. She departed the club promptly at three, charged up the stairs, out into the neon-lit dregs of the night, made her way north past the gambling dens and the high-heeled ladies lounging in Soho's peep-show doorways. The rain had become warm mizzle. A man with a comb-over, fifty odd, respectable in his buttoned trench coat, stepped in front of her, waved a tenner in her face. She pushed him aside with a fuck off you wanker. You stuck-up whore, he shouted after her. She couldn't be bothered to answer back.

Larry was leaning against the wall outside the Wag, smoking, wearing his leather jacket despite the sultriness of the urban night. She often chatted to him when she was waiting for Luke to emerge after his shift. She had found him intimidating at first, but he had a soft spot for Luke, and Larry knew she was Luke's girlfriend.

‘Luke's not here tonight,' he said as she approached. ‘Spyder said he's sick.'

‘Oh?' Christ, perhaps he was in hospital. Emergency treatment. She hadn't thought of that possibility.

‘Didn't you know?' Larry asked.

She could hear the assumption in his voice. Luke hadn't told her – she'd been dumped. An instant nobody in the absence of Luke. She managed to say, ‘Yes, I knew he wasn't here. I just wanted to check with Spyder and find out how he was doing.'