He had to eat something. He turned into Old Compton Street and took his bearings, or tried to. The night was busy, the atmosphere tensed-up, tingling with electricity. Could be storm clouds brewing, could be the excitement generated by a street mob-full of people, some of them sipping caffè latte at the pavement tables, but most of them hurrying along as if going somewhere, or waiting at the corners for non-appearing black cabs. Occasionally a couple would climb into an illicitly cruising minicab. A white stretch limo with darkened windows edged slowly along the street. Yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh, they had wunner them in Leeds. Crowds gathered when it pulled up at the Majestick nightclub in City Square, in the hope that someone like Michael Jackson must be in it. They were disappointed when it disgorged a gaggle of giggling girlies and sheepishly grinning laddoes who’d all chipped in for a ride up from Burley-in-Wharfedale or somewhere. But this being down here, mebbe it really was Michael Jackson or somebody.
Whoever, Alex could not understand where everyone was going. Soho was supposed to be where the action was, where it was all at as the old phrase had it, yet they were all darting off somewhere else like rabbits down a hole. Mebbe at this timer night Soho wasn’t where it was all going on after all. Could be they were larging it in Covent Garden, King’s Road, Camden Lock would it be? — wunner them places, anyway. And mebbe that explained why Selby was nowhere to be found.
Following the human tide that was washing out of Old Compton Street and its environs, cross-current with another tide swilling in from Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, Alex was reminded of Venice. Not that he’d ever set foot in Venice but he’d seen video footage of it and the ambience, as he’d heard it called, was similar. Same vibrancy, though of course without the canals.
He found himself just round from Cambridge Circus, at a fast-food joint called the Yankee Doodle Diner. Yeh yeh, franchise job, there were a coupler them in Leeds, same decor, same menu, same T-shirts on the waiters — Cocksuckin Cowgirls, the slogan was — exact replica in fact. Not the same prices, though, not by a long chalk. He perched at the end of a chrome horseshoe bar and ordered. “I’ll get a tuna melt, wet fries, Diet Coke float.” Dead funny, he thought as he waited. Only been down here a day and already he was talking like a blurry Londoner. But was he? Alex realised that in the equivalent establishment on Leeds Bridge he would have phrased his order in the same words, with the same off-Yankee intonation. Everybody talked the same these days, he reckoned, except that they used a different language to suit different venues. Patois, that was the word. And upspeak, as James had told him the expression was? How half these young women in black talked? As if they were asking a question? As if they’d once been to New York? He’d remember all this, bung it in an essay sometime.
A couple of seats along some bird was yakking away on her mobile. “… So he’s like, ‘Get your act together for Chrissake,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m totally arsed with this liner talk,’ and he’s like, ‘I’m telling you, babe’, so I’m like, ‘Fuck you …’” Jesus Christ, they were total pants, summer these women you got down here. But Alex had been prompted to tug his own mobile out of his shirt pocket.
A game plan was forming in Alex’s by now somewhat addled mind. Get Selby’s mate Vicky in Leeds on the blower. He had been in friggin Soho over five friggin hours and there was no sign of Selby. So where was she? Was she coming out of her hideyhole or not? If not, sod her. He would have it away on his toes, as Stephan Dance would have put it, right out of Soho. Sod Brendan Barton and his fifty quid. Sod Stephan Dance — his porn emporium would have long closed by now, anyway, and he would have crawled back down whatever hole he lived in. Unless he was lurking in wunner them clubs. But Alex wouldn’t be here. And sod Kim Grizzard and his blurry manuscript. With a hundred and seventy quid in his pocket — well, far less than that by now, it must be nearer a hundred and thirty after that mad pub crawl with James Flood, who for someone supposedly on exes put his hand in his pocket less than often, and the big mistake of going on to large brandies; but it was still more cash than he had ever seen in cash.
There must be an all-night coach service to Leeds, if he could find out where it went from. Victoria, would it be, wherever Victoria was? Away on his toes.
Unless … But there was no reply from Vicky. Must be out clubbing, this timer night. Shite. All right, he’d give it an hour. Meanwhile he’d find out where this Gerry’s Club was, where James Flood reckoned he was going to be.
A clap of thunder welcomed him back into Cambridge Circus, where a three-card-trick hustler and his drummer, which Alex happened to know was the term for the guy who was supposed to drum up trade by pretending to put a bet on and winning, had set up their orange-box stall outside the theatre. Nah nah nah, you didn’t catch Alex like that, not born yesterday. He’d watch for a coupler minutes, though. Coupler gullible tourists, wanted to chuck their dosh down the toilet. Middle card they were both on, in tenners. Total prats. Fookin hell, the middle card came up and they were paid out. Yeh yeh yeh, though, but it was only a come-on, wasn’t it? Next time round they’d push the betting up to twenty and go down. They pushed the betting up to twenty and came up. Alex began to finger the bundle of notes in his trouser pocket.
Total prat that he was himself, he had lost fifty pounds by the time another crack of thunder, and a spattering of raindrops the size of the dollar pancakes he’d seen being served at the Yankee Doodle Diner, drove him back along Moor Street, the conduit to Soho.
When the actual downpour came — stair-rods, you were talking about — he found a deep-set doorway to scuttle into. With its heavy, uncompromising door, it looked like a club of some kind. Gerry’s? No: the small brass plate over the Ansaphone buzzer you had to press to gain admission identified it as the Transylvania Club, members only. He wondered idly what kind of a joint it was.
He was offered a clue in the shape of a black cab decanting a rouged middle-aged blonde woman in a skin-tight, shimmering dress apparently constructed of iron filings, with an evening bag of the same material though in gold rather than silver, and a fake leopardskin wrap. Hooker, she looked like. She tripped across the rain-bouncing pavement in her gilt dancing pumps into the refuge of the doorway. Flashing a lipsticky smile at Alex she pressed the buzzer. A crackling male voice on the Ansaphone asked who was there. “Georgina, darling. I’m alone.” She was buzzed in, and with another lipstick smile at Alex she opened the heavy door to negotiate, with some difficulty given the tightness of her dress, a steep flight of stairs. Everything in this town was either downstairs or upstairs. Didn’t they have anything at ground level?
As the rain continued to bucket down there appeared, as through one of those glass-bead curtains to be found in Indian restaurants, the presence of Len Gates under a dripping golf umbrella, accompanied by a small cluster of Japanese tourists, each of them sheathed in identical transparent Pac-a-mac raincoats. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you could but see in all this rain, the plaque on the wall here commemorates the fact that we are on the site of a burial pit for the Great Plague of 1665. Now it’s said that, on occasion, shrouded figures …”
Len and his little party passed out of earshot as Alex’s mobile trilled, the first call he’d had since coming south. Selby?
“Hello?”
“AH? You were calling me.” Selby’s mate Vicky. Must’ve gorrim on a 1471.
“Ah, right. Been clubbing, have we?”
“If you can call it that. Pineapple Grove. Dead. On top of which I have a row with Simon, wally that he is, right, and got back totally arsed, so if it’s social chit-chat you’re looking for, Ali, you’ve come to the wrong shop, right?”