“We’d better get inside,” he said, and started walking her to the cottage. She did much better this time, and only needed a little support climbing the stairs. She got dressed in some old clothes he had found. They were too big for her, but the pants stayed up with a belt and the jersey was comfortably baggy. Neal was stoking the fire when she came downstairs, all on her own. She stepped gingerly into the sitting room.
“Neal?”
“Yeah?”
“I need some smack.”
She came into his arms and cried for a long time.
29
Colin hated living this way.
He had scrunched himself down in his grandda’s flat, a dingy cellar in the Old East End. He had a mattress in the corner of the sitting room and he could see the street through the one tiny window. He tried hard not to watch every pair of feet that came by, but the thought that Dickie Huan was tracking him down made it tough.
The room was a pit, a real trash heap, and the old man smelled bad, what with the steady diet of cheap sausage and cheaper beer. Plus the filthy old codger watched telly every second that he wasn’t down to the pub, and he liked those quiz shows where fat old bags in pink frocks won holidays to Brighton for knowing the Christian names of every Prime Minister since Christ was a road guard, or the titles of every ultraboring song they used to sing before they took a quick poke up the old canal and started breeding. If Colin had to sit through one more episode of Poldark, he thought he would just let Dickie Huan slice and dice him into pigeon feed. It might be less painful.
And the old one couldn’t shut up, either, not for a moment. He engaged in a never-ending monologue about the war, and then it was Gerry this and Gerry that until Colin would scream out that he wished Gerry had won the bleeding war, anyway, so that at the least the beer would be worth drinking.
Or the old boy would maintain a running dialogue with the quiz-show contestants, shouting out the answers, all of them wrong, and then heaping abuse on the stupid cows when they rejected his well-intentioned advice.
His other hobby was getting on Colin. He enjoyed the spectacle of his big-shot grandson creeping hack to the old neighborhood to hide out, and he never let Colin forget that he owed his existence to the old man’s sufferance. The dirty drunken bastard would deliver lengthy soliloquies about the evils of drugs and fancy ladies, about ponces and ’hores, and dope peddlers, and above all poofters and buggerboys. He was convinced, or pretended to be, that Colin fell into the last category, so he made sure to spice his anecdotes with references to “sodomites” and “bumjockeys” he had known in the Navy, replete with tales of dark and murky deeds done in hammocks.
“Ye’re not such an effin’ great deal now, are ye, Colin lad?” he’d ask while gumming a sausage. “Wi’ yer toff suits of clothes and yer leather shoes all nice and shiny. Now yer content to have a cup of tea with yer old gentleman’s gentleman, who ye haven’t bothered to as much as send a pack of fags to, and a year gone past. No, you were too good, then, wi’ yer ’hores and yer poofters and floggin’ dope like a Chinaman.”
Which brought up a touchy subject.
His grandda had tremendous stamina for such an old croaker, Colin thought as the coot launched into yet another diatribe against him. Colin’s only solace was that his grandmother had died, so he didn’t have to listen to this in stereo.
Colin tuned him out and reflected on his own misery. Not only did he not have Alice, with her delicious body and the delicious things she did with it, neither did he have his twenty thousand quid that bastard Neal had done him out of. Worse than that, his hard-won drug and prostitution business, which he had spent years building up, was going to skat because Colin didn’t dare show his face aboveground, lest he be chopped into Tuesday’s lunch special. Which brought him back to brooding about Neal, who had caused this whole mess. And here he was, living in a root cellar with a crazy old man who smelled like a dead goat, dribbled his breakfast egg down his one decent shirt, and talked to the telly.
Weren’t you the one, Colin asked himself, who swore he’d get out of this neighborhood and never come back? Now look at you, Colin lad, with one shirt to your own back, and afraid to go home. He had to find Neal and Alice, and that was an end to it.
Life was no holiday for Crisp these days, either, what with two Chinamen following him every step that he took.
They had let him up off the floor that night, pushed him around a little for emphasis, and told him they’d be watching him. He’d better lead them to Colin, they said, or they would hold him responsible for the money. The girl, too. And they gave their opinion that it would take this girl one long time to work off twenty thousand pounds.
So now they followed him, not even bothering to be subtle about it, confident that he was frightened enough to lead them straight to Colin. He would, too, if he could figure out where the bugger had got to. He wasn’t anywhere on the Main Drag, or on King’s Highway or at Paddington or Victoria or any of the clubs. He had buggered off, left his old china (no pun intended) holding the old bag. He was probably in France by now, soaking up the rays on the beach, but Crisp wasn’t going to tell his twin shadows that. They might get upset and go back to work with the knife. So for the time being, he settled for the uneasy status quo, and wandered around London as if he was looking for someone.
Sod Colin, anyway. Sod and double sod him.
In his mind, colin kept going back to the flat on Regent’s Park Road. To be sure, it was a painful and humiliating memory, and he knew he had made mistakes there, but he knew it was his only starting point. As he lay on the filthy mattress, he went over it again and again, asking himself the same questions. Whose flat was it? Why bad Neal gone there?
To sell a book, perhaps?
Or perhaps to take one home.
Colin knew only one way to find out.
30
Much to his surprise, Neal liked mornings best. He had always been a night person, but in the cool and quiet of the Yorkshire mornings, he found contentment of a sort. He got up long before Allie, who still had tough nights a week after her last fix. As she slept off her exhaustion, Neal would start the fire in the stove and fireplace and then haul water to the bathtub. He’d force himself into the cold water, even coming to the point where he found it refreshing. He’d wash his hair quickly, towel off, and trot back inside to stand by the fire. He’d put the water to the boil, make himself a strong pot of tea, generously heaping in milk and sugar. Then he’d make toast over the open fire and eat it outside with his second cup of tea. All he found missing was a newspaper, but after a few days, he hadn’t even missed that. He didn’t care about who was killing whom, or even how the Yankees were doing. It didn’t seem to matter up here.
Sometimes in the early cool of morning, he thought about just disappearing and not dealing at all with the troubles he knew were waiting. He recognized it as a fantasy-Graham would track him down through Keyes; he would run out of money; Allie would recover and want to move on with their deal-but he was surprised at its appeal. The quiet and seclusion were powerful drugs. He started to forget about Colin, about John Chase, even about Levine fucking him over. There’d be a time to deal with all of that.
Not necessarily this morning, however-or any particular morning.
So sometimes he’d read a book along with the second and third cup, and other times he’d just sit-something he never thought he’d do-and enjoy the morning as it brightened and warmed. He’d watch the mist clear over the wood in the valley, and watch the shepherd and his dog move their sheep over the crest of the ridge.