Watching the Wheels Come Off (4 page)

T
he cast-iron pier creaks with age. Its rusted joints shift painfully under the swell of an incoming tide. A gloomy domed building squats above the waves at the far end.

The Starlight Ballroom.

Even the flickering neon sign above the entrance is dim. Music filtered down by the walls to just the ubiquitous drum machine, seemingly the true heartbeat of our civilisation, seeps out on to the deserted,
rain-saturated
deck.

Inside it’s far from gloomy, for the decaying structure has been covered in a multitude of garish paints and twinkling coloured lights. Buzzing like a beehive, the place is already packed. Here the young can collectively escape their lifeless lives via booze and drugs. Oblivion beckons them.

On stage are the Solomon Brothers, five glistening young white boys trying to be black. Dressed in lurid pink suits, green top-pocket handkerchiefs and powder-blue shoes they move in unison.

One step forward.

One step back.

Turn.

Soft young faces with frozen smiles. Mechanical toys with shrill voices. Even the lyrics of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’ carry a certain ironic twist.

Draped across the proscenium arch hangs a painted banner: ‘The Mark Miles Talent Contest’. The impresario himself hovers nervously in the wings. Beside him is the boys’ mother, Mrs Solomon, a fleshy lady of major proportions.

Mark whispers into her large red ear: ‘Train them yourself?’

‘With their father.’

She points at the small bespectacled man standing in the wings opposite. Sporting a pinstripe suit, polished shoes and a pencil moustache, he could be a dodgy car dealer or, in fact, dodgy anything. Engrossed in simulating the routine being performed on stage, he appears to be winding up his clockwork offspring as if by the application of sheer willpower. The lyrics emerging from their cherubic mouths grow more incongruous with every mechanical movement.

Mark watches Mr Solomon’s bizarre performance closely. Struggling to bottle up his own laughter, he can’t resist popping one more question at the wife, ‘Is he a professional choreographer?’

‘No,’ she shakes her head emphatically. ‘A behavioural psychologist.’

‘Are you serious?

‘Of course, I am.’

On stage the boys are winding things up with their final chorus. Shooting a glance at their mother, Mark wonders if he, too, hasn’t just been deliberately wound up. A loud burst of applause breaks the spell. The act dances off, just as he dances on.

‘That was the sensational Solomon Brothers.’

A rowdy gang of tattooed bikers drown him out, chanting for an encore. Mark unhooks the microphone in a futile attempt to ride the swell of drunken shouting.

‘Once again –’

But the chant still grows, as others join in. In desperation, Mark looks sideways into the wings, where Mr Solomon is handing out chocolate bars to his boys.

‘Have you got an encore, boys? Or is that it?’

The whole family, including Mrs Solomon who has rushed over to join them, shake their heads in unison. Their mouths are already covered in brown goo.

‘Nooooo!’

Mark turns back to the chanting crowd. ‘That is it, folks. The Solomon Brothers have to go. It’s way past their bedtime. Say
nighty night
, everybody!’

Everybody obliges – but amid a roar of booing. Mr Solomon momentarily looks like he’s going to be sick. Instead he makes an obscene gesture at Mark, before leading his troop off towards the stage door – leaving Mark feeling convinced that Mrs Solomon had, indeed, wound him up. Giving him the finger is hardly appropriate behaviour for a behavioural psychologist.

Mrs Solomon, now pink with fury, repeats the gesture,
but with two fingers instead of one. Not to be outdone, Mark gives her the full fist three times. This, in full view of the audience, detonates a roar of raucous approval, thereby disturbing the dust in every corner and crevice of the old building. The audience, already morphed into a rabble, is now close to becoming a mob.

Mark cracks the microphone’s cable like a lion tamer, yelling: ‘Once again the Starlight is proud to present this month’s Mark Miles Speciality Act.’

Cheering breaks out as two plump girls, bursting from fishnet stockings and sparkling tutus, wheel trolleys – each carrying a barrel of lager – on to the stage. A third girl follows with a trolley of rattling pint mugs.

Waiting for the cheers to subside, Mark scans the audience and is taken aback when he sees Snazell taking a seat in the circle. The detective gives him a cheery wave, before spotting, several rows away, a woman so buxom she could have stepped from a seaside postcard. He rapidly changes direction, anxious to grab the vacant seat beside her.

Mark recovers his composure, bringing the microphone as close to his mouth as an ice-cream cornet: ‘So, yobs and yobettes, please give a big hand to this month’s Speciality Act: the one and only… Cyril Hammond’

A sallow man, gangly as a giraffe and dressed in an
ill-fitting
tuxedo appears from the wings.

‘Tonight, right now, Cyril will try for a place in the
Guinness Book of Records
. Tell us about it, Cyril.’

‘I want to beat a record listed in Chapter Eleven, “Human Achievements”.’

‘That’s very commendable. Which human achievement in particular?’

‘I will attempt to drink more than 20.79 litres of lager in just sixty minutes.’

‘Wow! 20.79 litres in sixty minutes? So, Cyril, you have this fantastic ability for swallowing things?’

‘I do, Mark.’ Cyril modestly studies his dazzling
patent-leather
shoes: ‘In fact, I think millions of people around the world have a similar ability to swallow things and simply don’t realise it.’

Mark tries not to look at Snazell, now seated next to the pneumatic lady, but he can’t help himself. The detective blows him a kiss.

‘Even me?’

‘Even you, Mark. You will almost certainly have a talent for swallowing things.’

Snazell obviously likes that. He smiles and points an accusing finger at Mark, who drags his eyes back to Cyril. ‘Let me just repeat the current record.’ He again faces the auditorium: ‘Louts and lassies, the current record for sinking lager stands at 20.79 litres in sixty minutes. Am I right, Cyril?’

‘You are, Mark.’

‘Held by?’

‘Wolfgang Pretorius. Since June 1968.’

‘Wolfgang, eh? A German?’

No sooner has he said it than the puss of nationalism wells up from a bundle of shaved heads with faces as purple and blotchy as turnips. They start to scream ‘
Sieg 
Heil
’, stamp their boots and shoot their arms out in the Nazi salute. A regimented chant reminiscent of Nuremberg rapidly sweeps through the hall.

Mark catches Cyril’s arm to stop him doing a runner, whilst himself barking into the microphone.

‘Who said it couldn’t happen here?’ His eyes blaze with memories of orgiastic SS officers overacting in war movies on late-night television. He grabs one of the pints lined up for Cyril and shouts: ‘Ja, ja, meine Kinder! If you swallow Nazism, you’ll swallow anything.’ He raises the mug in a toast: ‘To Adolf.’

The hall falls silent as the golden liquid slips smoothly down his gullet. With a flourish, he tosses the empty mug to an assistant while cheering replaces the jeering. A fickle creature is the crowd, rabble, mob. Mark bows most graciously before turning back to Cyril.

‘Good luck, Cyril. Girls, please.’

One of the assistants holds out a full mug to the quaking contender. Sadly the earlier blitzkrieg has had an adverse effect on Cyril’s nerves. With a supreme effort he steadies his hand and takes the lager offered.

Mark is now in overdrive. ‘Stand by the clock, girls.’

Cyril rests the glass on his bottom lip.

‘A ready… and a steady… and a GO!’

A switch is thrown and the tacky chronometer shudders into action. Within seconds the mug is empty. One assistant takes it from Cyril, while the other stands by with a replacement.

Mark shows his middle finger to the audience. ‘One!’

Then he walks into the wings.

‘Two!’

‘Three!’

He can hear the regular chant all the way to the stage door.

Cyril is off to a cracking start.

Seemingly
in situ
at the stage door since the theatre first opened seven decades ago is Charlie. No one could recollect ever seeing Charlie arrive or leave; he was just there. A permanent fixture. A much-loved but useless pet no one has had the heart to put down.

‘Has my guest arrived, Charlie?’

Mark has to repeat the question three times, since Charlie’s faculties bottomed out years ago. When Mark finally catches his wavering attention, the old man says: ‘Okey-dokey, Mark?’

That’s all Charlie ever says.

Mark sees that the old man is clutching a pass in his shaking hands. Through the window, Mark points to it; ‘His name is Rodney Cole. When he gets here, give that pass to him, Charlie. And tell him I’m in the Manhattan.’

‘Okey-dokey.’

Mark has recently persuaded the owners of the theatre to allow
students from the local art school to carry out, under his personal supervision, a makeover of the extensive bar. His chosen theme had been the
Manhattan Skyline.

Unfortunately it soon became apparent that painting and draughtsmanship were not actually the school’s strong points, so the end result is a hideous mixture of installation art and an excruciating mural. Any vestige of talent is sadly not in evidence.

But Mark, himself, is happy: ‘Meet me in the Manhattan’ sounds cool. Besides, the new décor, and the ambience that came with it, have one redeeming feature. It is like being on the set of the worst American B-movie ever made. This, in turn, has generated a very curious phenomenon: a retro dream time. As the young punters get more and more pissed so they seem to slip into the roles conjured up in the pulp fiction on which these films were based many decades before. A sort of
trompe l’oeil
of
déjà vu.

Alone, in a long black dress on a tall black bar stool, sits Ursula Letts. Everything about her, from the cut of her hair to the shape of her shoes, radiates flair and originality. Even the stigma of a lazy right eye suits her quirky style. Ursula is a primary-school teacher. She also has the dubious honour of being Mark’s childhood sweetheart and very first lover. Unfortunately for her, the affair won’t quite lie down and die.

‘How are you, sugar?’

Mark kisses her on the back of the neck. No sexual shiver there. She icily sips her cocktail and casts a jaundiced eye over the mural.

‘That your idea?’

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘Where’s it meant to be?’

‘New York.’

‘New York,
America
?

‘It’s Manhattan, sugar.’

‘Don’t call me sugar. I’m not feeling sweet tonight.’

She sinks her drink in one, and drums the bar top with black-lacquered nails. ‘Art is whatever shit you can get away with: that’s the motto for art schools now. Fuck any skills. You didn’t pay the useless pricks, did you?’

‘Beer money.’

‘
Oblivion
as a currency, I like that.’

Her bleak humour always cheers him up. It’s very American stand-up.

‘Same again?’ he asks.

‘Why not?’

Mark signals the barman, who deliberately turns the other way.

‘Shit! Did you see that?’

‘Maybe the décor’s struck him blind?’

She sticks two fingers in her mouth, letting rip a whistle worthy of any doorman in New York. The barman swings around.

‘Blind but not deaf it seems.’

She smiles sweetly when he arrives and waits as he wipes the bar top with a sodden tea towel while emptying the ashtray full of butt ends with her lipstick traces. He

takes his time. When he finally looks up at her, she speaks: ‘Same again.’

The barman stares at her with pupils smaller than sheep shit. This guy has seen a lot of Spaghetti Westerns. But so has Ursula. She plucks a cigarette from the pack, fires up her lighter, inhales, blows a smoke ring and only then says: ‘Please.’

A sneer plays on the barman’s mouth. He smacks the wet towel over his shoulder with a loud crack and turns very slowly to face Mark. Unfortunately Mark is in a different film. His order comes fast, too fast and, worse, it’s soft.

‘Orange juice.’

The barman tries to retrieve the scene. He lets his long arms drop to imaginary holsters and doesn’t make a further move. He doesn’t speak either. He just lets his black sheep-shit pupils bore into Mark. Mark returns the stare.
One…two…three…
and Mark blinks. Then he capitulates: ‘Please.’

The barman shakes his head sadly and shuffles off. Meanwhile he gathers his long greasy black hair into a ponytail, slipping a rubber band over it. Mark watches him uneasily until he’s out of earshot.

‘Where does he think
he
is? Tombstone City? The cunt hasn’t even noticed he’s supposed to be in Manhattan. Can you believe it?’

‘Easily.’

Mark, now troubled, ponders some more.

‘Did he seem psychotic to you?’

‘Not anything that exciting, I’m afraid. Somebody
obviously pulled his ponytail and flushed his brains out through his arse.’

Mark keeps shaking his head, while looking nervously at the barman: ‘Jesus, there are crazy people everywhere. Did you hear what happened to Reg?’

‘Of course I did, and it didn’t surprise me.’ She blows another smoke ring. ‘Reg had the IQ of a haddock. Anyway, he made the front pages, which is what he always wanted.’

‘Trouble is he’s not around to read them. And I wish I could say his nearest and dearest were a little more appreciative. One of them – a fucking giant one at that – has actually threatened to kill me.’

‘Good. I love funerals.’

‘Only because you look sexy in black.’

‘Do I?’

‘You were in black when I first fell for you.’

‘Was it the school uniform? Or what was inside it?’

‘You haven’t still got that uniform, have you?’