“Just tell him it’s John X. It’s extremely urgent.”
The line went quiet, that electric nothingness you get when you’re in phone-line limbo. Then a man’s voice.
“Ahhh, Mr. X...”
He sounded relaxed, jovial even.
“This is your last chance, Monroe,” I said. “I’ve been to the Sunday and they are very interested in the tape. They’re prepared to run the story...”
“The Sunday? I see.”
What the fuck is it with this twat? I was talking, you rude cunt.
“So the situation we find ourselves in, Mr. X,” he said, each word measured, calm, “is that you have a firm financial offer from the Sunday newspaper and you’re wondering whether I’m prepared to beat that offer. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Good. And may I ask how much their offer is?”
Five figures, Shavey had said. “Ten grand.”
I regretted the words as soon as I said them. He would have expected me to come up with a figure twice what I was being offered. And why did I tell him which paper it was? I was fucking this up, I knew it. He was too calm and I couldn’t deal with it. It wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Mmm,” Monroe said. “I can probably lay my hands on five thousand by this afternoon — will that do you?”
I suppose it’ll fucking have to. Five grand. It was an insult. But I didn’t really have a choice.
“Six o’clock in the Printers Devil on Fetter Lane — and don’t be late.” I put the receiver down.
I killed the rest of the afternoon in my local, trying to drink away what had happened, and left at 5 to meet Monroe. The platform at Kentish Town was fairly full when I got there — trouble on the Northern Line, as usual — but it was completely rammed by the time the train finally arrived. I fought my way onto the tube, southbound for Tottenham Court Road where I’d change for the Central Line and Chancery Lane. I managed to defend my own little corner by the doors as far as Camden Town, where about a billion people squeezed on and I was thrust into the middle, both hands holding onto the bar above to keep balance. I rarely got the tube, but even I knew that this was worse than normal. Pensioners, office workers, hood rats, tourists — almost every type of low-life London scum was pressed right up against me.
I felt the first risings of a panic attack coming on but pushed it away with a happy thought. I closed my eyes and relived my New Year’s Eve performance, then Monroe, the tape and the letter, the money, the next job, the memoir... then what?... Monroe not turning up, the shavey-head cunt trying to make me look stupid, getting turned away by Rita... Davor... and then Monroe laughing at me on the phone, the arrogant fuck. How dare the cunt? Me with video proof of this fucker — this QC, no less, who knows the Cabinet, is in line for a knighthood — getting finger-fucked up the arse in his stockinged feet by a whore he’s probably managed to have chased out of the country, and all I can get for it is a stinking £5,000, if the cunt shows up at all? He just didn’t seem to give a fuck. It was a minor detail in another week’s work. Hadn’t he grasped the situation? I was in charge here — I was the blackmailer — I had the power.
I opened my eyes. Tottenham Court Road — needed to get off and change. I slowly pushed my way through the pensioners and hood rats, still gripping the bars for balance, and made it to the open doors, squeezing myself out of the carriage just in time before they shut behind me and the train moved off, leaving two dozen or so pissed off commuters to wait for the next one. A moment of schadenfreude consolation for me. I started moving toward the Way Out sign, patted my coat pocket for the camera. Nothing there. I checked the other outside pocket, then the lining one, panic surging through my body, then my trouser pockets, and back to the pocket where I knew I’d put it. Empty. Gone. I started running after the train as it moved along the platform, swearing, screaming at it as it disappeared down the tunnel. I covered my face with my hands.
“You all right, mate?” a voice said.
I let my hands drop to my sides and opened my eyes. It was a station guard.
“No. I’ve been pickpocketed.”
That was six months ago now. I’ve never been back to the flat in Shepherd Market. But I did go to the Printers Devil — that same day, in fact. I don’t know why exactly. Just to see Monroe there, I suppose. See without being seen. Thought I might be able to come up with another plan there and then. I waited till 7. He didn’t turn up.
I got a text message from Dominic the next day, Friday, saying sorry but they couldn’t go ahead with the story, girl or no girl. He didn’t say why.
I’ve been doing more gigs since then. My agency has got me a cruise thing lined up, starts in July, next month.
The funny thing was, though, a few weeks after it all happened I was looking on the web for porn when something caught my eye — a video clip. The description said: Sexy brunette finger-fucks old guy up the ass — in his socks — funny. I downloaded it, sent it out on a group e-mail — to the Law Society, three Cabinet MPs, and the Lord Chancellor’s office. No text, just Nicholas Monroe, QC in the subject field.
Monroe didn’t make it onto the Queen’s birthday honors this year. He must be very disappointed.
I hate his fingers
by Sylvie Simmons
Kentish Town
That’s what she said. “I hate his fingers.” I tugged open the freezer door — iced up, as usual; who the fuck ever had time to defrost a freezer? — and when I managed to pull the box out, it too was encased in solid ice. I stabbed at it a few times with the bread knife — more because it felt good than for any effectiveness it was having — then threw it into the microwave and put it on defrost. I opened a bottle and poured a large glass.
“You’re supposed to let wine breathe.”
I lit a Dunhill — only ten so far today, not bad.
“And you might consider letting me breathe as well,” Dino coughed. He sounded like an old, gay Jack Russell with emphysema.
“Nice try,” I said, “but I never did get the knack of emotional blackmail.”
“Shame, or Kate might still be here and we might have something decent to eat.”
“Fuck you,” I smiled.
“In your dreams. A dangerous line to use on a Freudian,” Dino giggled like a girl. “So, this patient of yours, I take it you thought of asking whose fingers and what she had against them?”
“I told you, that’s all she said.”
“I hate his fingers? For fifty minutes?”
“Apart from the forty spent saying nothing at all and the two spent telling me she was only here because her GP told her she was getting no more temazepam until she took some sessions with the practice shrink.”
“Who’s her GP? Philip?”
“Yeah. His letter said his best guess was OCD — obsessive-compulsive disorder — but it could be a weird phobia. He said he knew what a hard-on I got from those.” Since I moved out of general practice into psychiatry — long story, and one I’d prefer not to go into here — I’d made a name, if I say so myself, with my papers on unusual phobias.
“Hating being touched is not unusual. Having your hand up my arse gives me the heebie-jeebies and I’m a hardened pro.”
I chose to ignore him. “Yeah, haphephobia’s pretty commonplace, but if it’s fingers, per se — well, dactylophobia’s a new one on me. But I don’t know, from the look of her she might well have some kind of body dysmorphic disorder. She looked borderline anorexic. Like she weighed all of seven stone.”