“Yeah.”
“Off limits, Neal.”
“No problem.”
Not to worry, Colin, old sod, Neal thought. I’m only going to grab your beloved and carry her back over the big water. Whether she will or not.
Oh, well, time to play.
“Kind of hard to control, though, isn’t she?” Neal asked.
“Alice? Not hard.”
Neal gave him a little more of a prod in the psychic balls. “If you say so,” he said, smiling.
He watched the little knots in Colin’s jaw tighten. The pimp took a quick swallow of beer and set the bottle down hard on the bar. “Right,” he said.
Colin worked his way through the crowd to where Allie was standing, her eyes closed and body gently weaving. He grabbed her by the shoulders, straightened her up, and gently lifted her chin with his left hand. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He slapped her hard with his right hand. Her eyes widened and filled with tears.
Neal checked the impulse to head over there. Too early for the “white knight” bit, he thought. Also, Colin would beat the shit out of you and his friends would stomp on whatever was left.
Colin stroked the reddening splotch on Allie’s cheek, then hauled back and hit her again, harder this time, snapping her head back.
Good going, Neal thought to himself. So far, you’re doing a real good job for this kid.
He watched as Colin stood, hands at his side, and stared at Allie. She fought off her tears as her chin dropped to her chest and she stared at the floor. Without looking up, she held her arms straight out in front of her. After a couple of seconds that lasted about a week, Colin took her arms and pulled her to him. She burrowed her face into his chest and held him tightly. It was creepy, but Neal had witnessed worse at Westchester cocktail parties. What made this especially bad was that Colin looked over, found Neal with his eyes, and smiled. Alice hard to control? Right.
Now where have I seen this shit before? Neal asked himself. Oh, yeah, about half my life. A pimp is a pimp is a pimp. Come to Daddy. Oops, bad choice of words there.
He looked on as Colin and Allie started to dance. She made your basic miraculous recovery and began to move with the music. Like bad art imitating bad life, the band switched tunes, working into a hard-driving message song that the crowd seemed to know.
It was an anthem of sorts. Neal didn’t catch the title, but the chorus went: “Burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.” The crowd joined in with a passion that could spring only from deep feeling, and Neal found himself shamed at the condescension he’d felt all night. This was a song of the dispossessed, a screaming, angry cri de coeur born of a thousand years of a class-bound society. The dancers whirled in violent sweeps, bumping and bouncing against each other, surrogate objects for mutual rage. No harm meant you, bloke, but burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.
The inchoate fury swept around Neal, taking him along. He felt their anger, shared it. Anger at the hopelessness, at Da’ and Granda’ and you, all living off the dole in the same effin’ project on the same effin’ street with the same effin’ neighbors in the same effin’ heat. Anger at the toffs with their effin’ BBC, and their effin’ Oxbridge accents that keep out you and me. So let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Fury at the useless effin’ effort. of it all, when every job’s the same arsehole-lickin’ beck and call, and who needs their Labour Party and their social-programs bull, so let’s burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down.
Neal shook his head to clear it, and then realized it was already clear. Who the hell expected the Murderous Scum to be eloquent, much less articulate? And didn’t he feel the same sorts of things? Like real anger at the monied class whose messes he cleaned up for a living? Whose living rooms he occupied and whose scotch he drank when they were in trouble? And wasn’t he their sheepdog? Go fetch my kid, Fido, good boy? And suddenly he felt like a traitor in this place, and the rage welled up inside him, and he wanted to beat the shit out of Senator John Chase, and tell him to go fuck himself, and take Ethan Kitteredge’s little toy boat and crunch it in his hands and throw the pieces in his face and tell him what he could do with his private school education, and that was to burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down, and he found himself joining in the dance and in the chorus, weaving, bobbing, bouncing, and slamming off the other dancers as the music throbbed through him and he was hearing the words about your great damn stinking family who will never understand, with their patriotic crap about this putrid, dying land, and the endless block of flats that make a prison you can’t stand, and Christ, he understood! The sheer numbing, stupefying, fucking boredom of it! That you can never escape your class, so quit trying.
Then he was dancing with Allie-not dancing, really, but slamming. Shoulder off shoulder, laughing, singing, sweat flying from one to the other, and he knocked her down, off her feet, but she bounced up laughing and spun around, then put her shoulder into his chest and knocked him down, and burn it, wreck it, fuck it, tear it down. Tear it off, tear it away, tear it to shreds. Two thousand years of civilization, to produce what? Senator Chase for Veep? Then Allie picked him up and spun him around and pushed him off and then he was dancing with Colin. Hands locked, pushing forward and pushing back, chests slamming into each other, shouting at the top of their lungs the chorus that had now become a frenetic chant. Looking at Colin and seeing himself there, another country, another time. Tear it down, tear it down. One chord beating against the wails in a shriek of fury. Hare Krishna, Hare Hare. Tear it down. Then he and Colin fell down in a heap on the floor as the song ended in a crash of drums, and they lay on the floor together, laughing and laughing, and then laughing more as Allie fell face first on top of them, shaking her hair so that her sweat sprayed on their faces.
Neal listened to his heartbeat and felt himself breathing hard, and he made some decisions then and there about Colin, Allie, Kitteredge, and himself.
Allie washed up in the women’s loo. She slipped off her T-shirt and splashed water on herself, roiled on deodorant, and sprayed a touch of perfume between her breasts. She pulled a dark blue silk blouse out of her bag and put it on over her jeans, then went to work with the tiny makeup kit. She expertly penciled around her eyes, used just a trace of mascara, then a light blush; bloodred lipstick topped off the look, casual, expensive, a little dangerous.
“Killer,” said Colin. He shouted out the door. “Neal, come in, lad, and have a spot of tea!”
Neal took a look at Allie and knew he’d seen this movie before. “What are you decked out for?”
“Not what. Who?
“Oh.”
Colin spooned out a generous dose of coke and held it up to Allie. She sighed. “Something more, babe?”
“Later.”
“It’s always later.” She snorted the coke anyway, doing two spoons with practiced ease.
Colin took a hit and offered a spoon to Neal. He took it in, and tasted that funny metallic taste deep down in his throat. It wasn’t very good coke.
Colin handed Allie a slip of paper. “You want me to send Crisp along?”
Allie shook her head. “It’s an easy one. I’ve done it before. See you back at the flat.”
She pecked him on the lips, waved a goodbye, and headed out the door. Neal didn’t say anything; thought he’d let Colin bring it up if he wanted.
“It’s just fucking, right?” Colin asked.
“Sure.”
“I need a pint.”
“I’m buying.”
The band was on a break. You could hear yourself talk. And think.
“You liked it?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not so much bullshit. Most rock’s become bullshit, you know. Like they forgot what it’s about.”
“It’s physical.”
“It’s about living right now, and forget that other crap. There’s no future anyway, so forget about it. Me, I wouldn’t half mind if the IRA blew the whole city up, start with Fuckingham Palace.”