The old man chuckled, then held his shoulder, wincing. ‘Arthritis,’ he explained. He told Barker what the hours were and what he could afford to pay. ‘Are you still interested?’
When Barker walked back into the house on the Isle of Dogs that afternoon, Charlton was standing in the kitchen, his face still swollen with sleep. Smoke loitered in a cloud above the grill. Charlton had just burned the toast. Now he was trying again. Barker leaned against the fridge and watched.
‘You seen the Nutella?’ Charlton said.
‘No,’ Barker said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘What about the jam?’
‘You finished it.’ Barker reached for the bottle of whisky. He poured a double measure into a cup and swallowed it. ‘I got a job.’
‘About fucking time.’ Charlton bit into a slice of buttered toast. Crumbs tumbled down the front of his black silk dressing-gown.
‘You’re a slob,’ Barker said, ‘you know that?’
Charlton was chewing noisily, mouth open, toast revolving on his tongue. He reached for the paper; he was always reading the financial section and quoting from it afterwards, using words like merger and foreclose.
Barker shook his head. ‘Who’s going to clean up when I’m gone?’
By late September Barker’s life had taken on a whole new shape. Six days a week he worked in the barber’s shop just off Petticoat Lane. The old man’s name was Harold Higgs, and he ran the place along traditional lines — the smell of Brylcreem and hair tonic, copies of the Radio Times to read while you were waiting; it was hairdressing the way it used to be, which suited Barker perfectly. He’d found temporary lodgings — a bedsit on Commercial Road. He had a miniature gas-ring, and a wash-basin with no hot tap (if he wanted to shave, he had to boil water in a saucepan). He had a wardrobe filled with multi-coloured hangers. All mod cons, as his landlady put it. A widow in her fifties, she wore slippers trimmed with bright-pink fur that looked like candy-floss. Whenever she saw him, she talked about her microwave — she was frightened it might give her cancer — but she didn’t bother him, not unless he fell behind with the rent.
Almost two months passed with no violence, no arrests. He was living on a small scale, within himself, his routine simple and unvarying. On weekday nights, when he returned from work, he lifted weights for half an hour. Afterwards, he showered in the communal bathroom, which was on the landing, one floor up. Later, he would cook himself a meal — something sealed in plastic, beans out of a tin. Most evenings he went to look at flats which he had circled in the paper during the day; he was always surprised by how run-down they were, and how expensive. By midnight he would be in his room again, easing the ring back on a can of beer. Through his window he could see a petrol station. The neon stained his white net curtains yellow, and, now and then, if it was quiet, he could hear a fierce, abbreviated hiss as somebody put air into their tyres. Before he switched the light off, he would read a few pages of medieval history — either a textbook or, more frequently these days, an original source like Bede or Fredegar or Paul the Deacon. He had stopped dreaming, which he interpreted as a sign of health.
Then, one evening in November, Charlton took him to a night-club in Mile End, and he was reminded of everything in his life that he had chosen to leave behind. At a quarter to eleven on a Friday Charlton called round in the Sierra, windswept aerial, no hubcaps, and they drove east with Billy Joel on the stereo. Charlton was wearing a new jacket that glinted every time a light passed over it. ‘I feel lucky tonight,’ he said, and patted his breast pocket, which was where he kept his fruit-flavoured condoms.
They left the car on a patch of wasteground near a roundabout and then walked back, picking their way gingerly through thistles, coils of wire, bricks. From a distance Barker could see the club — a low square building with a scribble of electric blue above the entrance. There was a BMW outside, there was a jeep with tyres like a tractor’s. A chauffeured Daimler dawdled by the kerb, its engine idling. On the top step two doormen stood in a deluge of ultraviolet, their faces looking tanned, their teeth freshly enamelled. Charlton stopped for a word on his way in. Barker nodded, but didn’t give his name.
They had only been inside the club for half an hour when Charlton started talking to a girl in a strapless silver dress. I feel lucky. Barker thought she was trouble — he had worked on doors for long enough to recognise the type — but this was Charlton’s territory, and he didn’t want to interfere. Once, he tried half-heartedly to steer Charlton towards the bar, but Charlton resisted and, grinning, turned and introduced him to the girl. Annabel. Or it could have been Charlotte. All Barker could remember afterwards were her pupils, which were tiny, like punctuation, and her white-blonde hair, which looked as if it had been polished.
It was a fight with fists and bottles. Barker caught somebody in the solar plexus with an uppercut. His father had taught him the punch when he was six: one brutal arc, nine inches start to finish. The man dropped to his knees and vomited what looked like a half-chewed McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese on to the tarmac. Out of the corner of his eye Barker saw Charlton shove somebody else’s face into a wall. The crunch of skin and bone on pebbledash. In the end, though, they had to run for it. Down an alley, back across the vacant lot. Charlton slammed the Sierra into first gear and raced it over weeds and potholes. The suspension floundered, winced. It sounded more like a bed with people fucking on it than a car.
‘That bloke,’ Charlton said. ‘He ought to bite his food up.’
He grinned into the rear-view mirror, his face pale and greasy, his left cheek-bone grazed, already swelling.
‘There’s one of them won’t be doing that for a while.’ Barker propped his right knee against the dashboard. He could still hear the neat snap as someone’s front teeth broke. The impact had ripped a hole in Barker’s trouser-leg and torn the skin beneath.
‘You better get yourself a rabies shot,’ Charlton said.
They stopped on Mile End Road and bought fish and chips, which they ate in the parked car. Though Barker was angry with Charlton for involving him in something so futile, so unnecessary, he could at least console himself with the thought that he had come to Charlton’s aid. His stock had risen, as Charlton would probably have said.
Barker stared through the windscreen, his bag of chips warm and damp on his lap. Wind scoured the streets. The scuttle of litter.
‘We could’ve done with Ray tonight,’ he said.
He turned and looked at Charlton, who bent his head sideways and bit savagely into a crispy orange slab of cod.
‘Sod it,’ Charlton said. ‘We did all right.’ He spoke through splintered flakes of fish.
‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail,’ Barker said.
Charlton grinned. ‘Drive Away Monkey.’
Last Thing I Remember
One morning in early spring the door of the barber’s shop opened, the bell tingling, and Charlton walked in. Sighing loudly, he eased down on to the red plastic bench, picked up a magazine. Barker had a regular in his chair, a long-distance lorry-driver who came in every three weeks for a trim. As Barker’s scissors chattered up the left side of the lorry-driver’s head, he glanced at Charlton in the mirror. Charlton was wearing a camel coat over a dark-grey suit, and a pair of brogues that somebody had cleaned for him.
‘Got yourself a new woman?’ Barker said.
Charlton passed one hand gently over his cropped black hair, then turned and spoke to Higgs. ‘You the boss?’