He asked the barman if Charlton Williams was around.
The barman jerked his eyes and eyebrows in the direction of the window. ‘Over there.’
From where he was standing, Barker could only see Charlton Williams’ back. Brown leather jacket, grey trousers. Cropped black hair. Barker moved across the pub towards him, pint in hand.
‘Charlton Williams?’
The man who swung round was this side of forty, but only just. He was going bald from the front, his hair receding at both temples, leaving a round piece that looked as if it might fit into a jigsaw. He reminded Barker of a wrestler who was always on TV on Saturdays in the late sixties.
‘The name’s Barker Dodds. I’m a friend of Ray’s. Ray Peacock. He said to find you here.’
Charlton’s pouchy eyes narrowed. ‘You’re the bloke that needs a place to stay, right?’
Barker nodded.
‘So where’s the luggage?’
‘Bus station. Victoria.’ Barker drained his pint.
Charlton pointed at the glass. ‘Same again?’
‘Cheers.’
Charlton Williams. According to Ray, Charlton had been named after the football club. People used to call him Athletic, which was a bit of a laugh, Ray said, because Charlton had never played sport in his life, not even darts. Charlton was drinking with Ronnie and Malcolm, two mates from the meat market in Smithfield. When they had emptied their glasses, Barker bought another round. It struck him that he had no idea what would happen next. The pub was where his knowledge ended. He was like someone who was about to go missing. A sense of freedom, limitless and exhilarating, suddenly invaded him. He smiled and nodded at the faces that surrounded him, as if they were in on it, as if they were the bearers of his secret.
He breathed in slowly, feeling his lungs expand. The same smell the country over: spilled beer, cigarette smoke, crisps. His ex-wife Leslie used to work in a pub. The Phoenix. The first time he went in there he was drunk. She noticed him straight away, she told him later, but he couldn’t remember seeing her at all. Other things on his mind, she said with a knowing smile. She was used to that. Women came third with a lot of men, after booze and horses — or, sometimes, if the men did drugs, women weren’t even placed.
Then he noticed her.
A wet night in Stonehouse, rain blowing sideways through the streetlights. Still summer, though. His denim jacket soaked, he pushed through the pub’s double-doors. Stood at the bar and smoothed his hair back with both hands, fingers spread over his head, thumbs skimming the tops of his ears. A couple of musicians were setting up next to the Emergency Exit — one of those second-rate bands that tour the country playing other people’s songs. A scrawny man in cowboy boots and jeans was tuning a battered white guitar. Then he stepped forwards. Put his face close to the microphone. One-two. One-two. Sshh. Sshh. One-two … Nothing irritated Barker more. He sat on his tall red stool and scowled. A voice asked him if he was being served. He looked round. Freckles spattered the girl’s bare arms, and one side of her mouth seemed higher than the other when she smiled.
‘You new here?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why? Are you?’
He liked that — the cheek of it. The nerve. He bought her a drink. A ginger ale. And that was what she tasted of when he kissed her, about an hour later, behind the old Pickford’s building on Millbay Road. Ginger ale. Once, she leaned back, away from him, and said, ‘You’re an ugly bastard, aren’t you.’ It was one of those things women say when they like you and they’re not sure why.
She wouldn’t let him fuck her on the street, which was what he wanted, but she didn’t stop him pushing her T-shirt up and pulling down her bra so he could see her breasts shining in the raw white glare of the nearby car-park. When he reached under her skirt, though, she began to struggle.
‘Not now.’
‘When then?’
‘Tomorrow. My night off.’
Steam flowered in the sky behind her; they must have been working late at the laundry that weekend. He walked her back, just one word in his head. Tomorrow. A terrace of brick houses, drainpipes chuckling with the last of the rain. Weeds growing sideways in the walls. And the pub’s double-doors half-open, dirty red carpet, dirty golden light, and from where he was standing, on the pavement, he could see the man with the cowboy boots and the white guitar, talking his way into a song: I’d do this for Dolly Parton, only she’s not here …
At the end of the month Barker walked into Lou’s and had the barmaid’s name tattooed across his chest in big block capitals. LESLIE. Lou tried to warn him. Always a mistake, he said, to have a woman’s name tattooed across your chest. You want to get rid of it, you can’t. But Barker didn’t listen.
‘You coming or what?’
He looked round. Charlton Williams was waiting by the door and, beyond him, in the gritty London sunshine, Ronnie and Malcolm were facing each other, pointing at a folded newspaper and nodding.
From the window of his room in Charlton’s house Barker had a view of the entire estate. Built during the early seventies, the houses were neat boxes of white weatherboard and brick, their front gardens almost non-existent, their short, steep drives more than a match for the hand-brake on most cars. None of the streets followed straight lines. The thinking was, if a street dipped and twisted a bit, then it had character. Nature was just around the corner. You could almost believe you were living in the country.
The Isle of Dogs.
Each morning Barker would wake with an empty feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with hunger and for a moment he would wonder where he was. The walls were smudged with strangers’ fingerprints. A fawn carpet curled against the skirting-board. Then he would see his bags. They lay on the floor under the window, zips gaping. Glimpses of his few possessions: the dull gleam of the weights, his bright-red bowling shirt, the edge of a history book. You’re lucky, he told himself, to have a place at all. He had Ray to thank for it. When Barker mentioned he was leaving, Ray said he would give his mate a call. They had served in the Army together. The Green Jackets. Five minutes on the mobile phone and it was fixed. Though grateful, Barker felt uneasy. He’d seen the look on Ray’s face. Somewhere deep down, below the skin, it said, You’re in my pocket now. You owe me one.
He owed Charlton too, of course — a man he knew much less about. Charlton worked nights at the meat market, but he would never say exactly what he did and Barker chose not to ask. He had to be earning good money, though, because he slept in satin sheets and drove a brand-new Ford Sierra. A shame he didn’t spend some of it on a cleaning-lady. If Charlton had a woman over, he would always try and talk her into tidying the house. Otherwise the empty pizza-boxes piled up like red-and-white pagodas, and the fridge began to smell. Charlton had given Barker the spare room, telling him that he could stay as long as he wanted. Any friend of Ray’s, etc. etc. It turned out that Ray had saved Charlton’s life while they were in Northern Ireland — or so Charlton said three or four days after Barker moved in. Charlton had just finished work and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Bell’s while Barker fried some bacon.
‘I wouldn’t be here now,’ he said, swilling the whisky slowly round the inside of his glass. ‘You’ve seen Ray in action, right?’
Barker broke two eggs into the fat and watched the white appear. ‘We were working in a club once,’ he said, ‘and three blokes wanted to get in. Navy, they were. Shit-faced. Ray told them no. They didn’t like that.’ Barker turned to Charlton, spatula in hand. ‘I never saw exactly how he did it, he moved that fast. But, next time I looked, two of the blokes were lying on the ground and the third was making a run for it.’