“Ace,” I said.
The weird thing was... Magsy never — ever — invited me round to the flat in Cornwall Gardens... not once.
“Why d’you keep meeting up with that bastard?” Sheri said. Meaning Magsy.
“Well, a mate’s a mate, innit?” I said. “He’ll come round...”
But I didn’t see him for about three months after he moved into Cornwall Gardens. Then I met him on Old Compton Street one weekend.
“What happened to you?” I said.
Magsy’s face was swollen on both sides. And the skin was all swirls of green and yellow and purple.
“Let’s have a drink,” he said.
He had his jaw wired shut so he spoke through clenched teeth. We went into Steiner’s.
“Ted sent me this blotter acid from the States,” Magsy sort of hissed and gurgled. I think he was all coked up so he kept on talking. “Mr. Natural tabs. Pure acid. One drawing of Mr. Natural perforated into four parts. Ted fronted it all, didn’t he? Told me to sell it on for a pound a go and he’d collect when he came home. A few months later, Ted did come home — very sudden. And when he came home, he came to collect. Fair enough, I thought. But he went berserk. Claimed I was giving him only a quarter of the money I was supposed to. I said that he told me to sell the Mr. Naturals for a quid apiece. Ted said I should have sold them for a quid per perforated square.”
I wondered if Magsy was bullshitting me. How much was this a genuine misunderstanding with Ted and how much of the money might have gone up his nose?
“So he did you over?” I said. I found that hard to believe. Ted didn’t look that hard.
“Not just Ted. His family and all...”
“Ah,” I said.
“They’re all old-time villains — just like Danny. So I had to leave the flat, didn’t I? Under some duress... with the aid of all of Ted’s brothers and father and uncles and Danny, who, when they were finished with the duress, like, threw me down the stairs, didn’t they?”
He hissed a bit as he laughed. I was glad he could laugh about it.
“How’s Penny?” I asked.
“They didn’t touch her. She’s with some mates of hers out near Epping.”
“Where you staying?” I asked.
“Sleeping on the floor of the shop.”
“Come back to my flat.”
I thought, well, those bastards have done him over, maybe he’ll drop all the gangster crap and get back to normal. He shook his head.
“Nah, gotta stay in Soho,” he said.
We arranged to meet the following Sunday at Steiner’s, and in those few days the swelling on his face had gone down a bit, though the bruises had started to take on some very spectacular greens and blues. I got us in a couple of pints of Stella Artois.
“I gotta meet someone here,” he said.
Ah shit, I thought.
This curly-haired bloke with a squashed nose and a lot of gold chains came through the door. He went down to the gents and Magsy followed him. Then they came back out and Curly left.
“Got to pay off the debts to Ted,” Magsy said. “Had to borrow some money.”
Ah no, I thought.
Magsy was practically bouncing all of a sudden — his fingers drumming on the bar, the shift of his shoulders. And he was probably low on coke, which gave him a sort of added drive. Magsy necked his lager in three large swallows.
“Sorry, Dex,” he said to me. “Gotta score. Adios, amigo.”
So off went Magsy to buy a load of coke and I went home to Sheri.
And, truth to tell, that was the last I saw of Magsy. Not that I didn’t think about him. The police must have been watching him for ages and they decided to pay a visit to his Dean Street porno shop very early the next morning. They found about an ounce of coke and a weight of grass. Magsy got four years in Brixton. I never went near him in there.
Twenty-six years later and I bump into him at Ristorante Il Pollo in the heart of Soho and we were going to meet in Steiner’s, the last place we’d seen each other before he went down. I took a breath and pushed through the door into the saloon bar. There was Magsy, standing at the bar with Richie Stiles, an old mate of his, who was as tall as ever but plump now, with a receding hairline and fuller cheeks. He was in an Armani suit though.
“Dexie!” Magsy said. “Good to see you, son.”
He and Richie were already three sheets to the wind on the shots of tequila and Corona beers that were lined up on the bar. I couldn’t resist it. Blame it on old time’s sake, or maybe because I was a bit nervous, but I had a lick of salt, a shot of tequila, bit on the lemon, and then soothed the burn in my throat with a cool slug of the Corona.
“Richie!” I said. “Corporate bigwig now, son.”
“Still a party,” Richie said. “But government-licensed now, innit? Make more money being legit these days. No police raids or nothing.”
“So what are you doing with yourself?” Magsy said.
If I said I was a writer, it would have had this stink of me being a bit of a braggart — which I am, really.
“I’m a writer.”
“A writer?” Magsy said. “You make money at that?”
“I got to hustle to make a living,” I said. “But it’s okay. Better than any other job I’ve had... and I’ve had a lot since working in the shipping trade: laboring on building sites, bookkeeping, library assistant, then I decided to get a real life.”
I could see that I’d stung him a bit with that. I hadn’t meant to. What was he doing? Bookies’ clerk? On the dole? I knew he wasn’t dealing.
“God, how long has it been since I seen you?” Magsy said.
I was sure he knew well enough.
“Twenty-six years,” I said.
I was buzzed but not drunk.
“Yeah... right... since just before the trial,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, right.”
What he meant was: You didn’t come to see me in prison, you gutless shit.
And I didn’t, it was true, because when Magsy was sent down — call it total paranoia if you like — I was thoroughly convinced that if I had gone to see Magsy, I would be on a police list of known consorters with convicted drug traffickers and that within a very short time I would receive a similar dawn visit from the police just as Magsy had. And if the police needed to make up their arrest rate and decided that a consorter with known traffickers was worth fitting up, then I would be on the inside with him — with a criminal record and fighting off anal rapists. I just couldn’t face even the remotest possibility of it.
Now he wanted me to feel guilty for it, which he had definitely succeeded in doing, and that made me really mad
What he was doing, you see — what he was really doing — was trying to return me to that position I’d been in back then: him as Jack the Lad and me as the shipping-firm employee dogsbody. Knock me back to square one. He’d always thought of me as a bit of a wimp for not having the balls to do what he’d done: ducking and diving right into the thick of the coke dealing and the porn business. But he’d had his life and I’d had mine, and I wasn’t sorry at all with the way mine had gone. I wasn’t any shipping clerk anymore, was I? And what was he? What was he? Tell me that.
And then it dawned on me... a slow creeping-up kind of dawn. I’d never forgiven him for treating me the way he did when he was all coked up with the Soho dope dealers and porn traders, had I? He’d been in the middle of the trade, and I was just a nobody, and our being mates hadn’t counted for a thing in his eyes back then. And all that shame and rage I felt over being dissed by Magsy, of being dissed by someone I thought was a mate, and, yes... all right... the guilt of my not visiting him in prison... it was that which had driven me to use the story of Magsy’s rise and fall in Soho for the script of Rough House. I hoped he’d like what he’d see when his life story would be all up there on the big screen in glorious Technicolor. If we got the money it would be me who put him there. Magsy on the big screen. Now who was the hot shot? What was he doing — in Bridgwater of all places — while I was on the roof of Soho House drinking expensive gassy water? Well, I thought. Well, the truth is... really, the truth is... it really didn’t matter what he was doing — or what I was doing — because we were both here in Steiner’s breathing the same air and drinking the same tequila, and sucking the same fucking lemons, and nothing was ever going to put the clock back to the time before he went to prison, before his trial, before the cops, before the loan shark, before the coke, before Ted, and before that fucking game of backgammon in Cornwall Gardens. And the truth is... the truth is... I was sorry. I really fucking was.