‘But you said you were avoiding Gwillam.’
‘I’m avoiding a head-on confrontation with him, yeah. But I’m still interested in anything that’s going down at the Salisbury that’s even slightly out of the ordinary. That’s why I’m asking you. Your antenna is pretty sensitive when it comes to stuff like this.’
He acknowledged the compliment with a nod. By this time we were right in front of the doors to the auditorium. Nicky threw them open, brought up the main lights by tripping a big steel switch on the wall, and walked in with me following along behind him.
The rest of the audience stood up, turning to face us. There was only one of her, but this was Juliet so one was more than enough. She smiled at us smoulderingly, her black-on-black eyes swallowing the light.
‘What did you think of the movie?’ Nicky asked.
Juliet thought about this for a moment. ‘I enjoyed the deaths,’ she said, like someone looking around your living room for something to compliment you on and finally settling on the curtains because all of the furniture is eye-wateringly bad.
‘You enjoyed the deaths,’ Nicky repeated, his tone pained and indignant. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? It’s a story. It’s a fucking–’ His hands fluttered ineffectually for a moment as he struggled with some way of defining narrative that he hadn’t already used. ‘Ah, forget it.’
‘A story about something that hasn’t yet happened, and isn’t likely to happen,’ Juliet agreed. ‘I understand what it is. I just don’t really see what it’s for.’
‘It’s for pleasure,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t understand pleasure, Juliet. I won’t believe you.’
‘But you know the things I take pleasure in,’ she countered, calmly exact. ‘Blood. Sex. Blood and sex together. Simple and primal things. Things that never lose their freshness and savour.’
I tried to shut down a whole slew of mental images that were filling my mind in proliferating excess like pop-ups on an Internet browser. ‘I’ve seen you watching the telly with Susan,’ I pointed out. ‘You seemed happy enough then.’
‘Did you notice whether or not my eyes were in focus?’
‘Pearls before swine,’ Nicky muttered, crossing to the trestle table he’d set out earlier. ‘Okay, the inaugural screening is over. The Nicky Heath Gaumont is open for business, and God bless all who sail in her. Which will just be me, except when I see fit to invite you plebeian scum-bags. That’s it for the speeches, so let’s get to the alcohol.’
On the table was a bottle of 1982 Chateau Pichon-Lalande Pauillac, which Nicky had opened and decanted earlier. He poured three glasses, held out one in each hand for me and Juliet to take. Then he raised the third glass himself, put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. That’s how Nicky takes his booze these days: he drinks the wine-breath, like ghosts are supposed to do, because he lacks the digestive enzymes to deal with the stuff if he actually drinks it. The sound he makes when he breathes is harsh and dry and pained, because inflating your lungs is something else that doesn’t come naturally to a corpse.
Juliet finished her glass in a single swig and licked her lips. There’s something subversive about the way she does that: it makes you think of huge jungle cats tonguing gobbets of bloody tissue from between their teeth after a kill. Nicky looked away — not out of fear or distaste but because the bottle had cost him three hundred quid and he knew that she hadn’t really tasted it going down. Juliet is only an epicure when it comes to flesh: anything else she sees as window dressing.
‘So you did it,’ I observed, clinking glasses with him. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’ He took another snort of the Pauillac’s heady bouquet. ‘I thought I might go for a double bill next time.’
‘Yeah? What movies?’
‘Night of the Hunter and They Saved Hitler’s Brain.’
I blinked. ‘I don’t see the connection, Nicky.’
‘Stanley Cortez cinematography. The Salisbury is a fucking dump, Castor.’
The change of topic threw me for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It’s high up on my list of places not to go. But it was meant to be a model community, right? The estate of the future.’
Nicky nodded. ‘That was the hype,’ he said. ‘They got Derek Winch in to consult, back when everyone still thought he was God. Some other guy built it, though — don’t remember the name, but you can see the thinking. Get Winch’s name on the project, then ship someone else in to do it for half the money in a quarter of the time. They were gonna have shops, restaurants, cinemas up there, fuck knows what. The idea was that you never had to touch the ground if you didn’t want to — you could live your whole life up in the towers. Use the walkways like streets, come and go as you pleased, be one step closer to Heaven. Which, coincidentally, was the slogan they used when they opened it up for applications.’
‘Heaven,’ Juliet echoed, pouring herself another brimming glass. Her tone was heavy with sarcasm.
Nicky watched her tilt and swallow, with a slightly tragic face.
‘But it all came apart,’ I prompted him.
He nodded. ‘Before they’d even finished building it. The usual bullshit. They went in without enough money, cut corners, raced deadlines to save political face. But some people will tell you the design was screwed to start with.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked him, listening with half an ear because I was still thinking about the teardrop graffiti with its corona of radiating lines. Actually I was thinking about that and Gwillam, and I was almost making a connection, but chasing it just made it flicker and fizzle out before I could grab hold of it.
‘The walkways were the main problem,’ said Nicky. ‘Having streets eighty feet off the ground seemed like a fantastic idea when they started out. Pure sci-fi. They were talking about a city in the air — linked estates from Peckham to Elephant and Castle. Leave your worries on the ground, take to the skies and live clean.
‘Only it turned out that you left a lot of other stuff on the ground, too. Like law and order. The Salisbury was a vertical maze — and it was impossible to police the place because muggers, pushers and gang-bangers could be somewhere else before the cops ever got within spitting distance. The walkways turned into thieves’ rookeries. And then people started dumping their shit out on them rather than carting it down to the ground floor. And then the damp set in because the concrete was made out of spit and bumfluff. Closer to Heaven, maybe, but you bring the weather with you.’
I took a fastidious sip of the wine: Juliet was emptying the rest of the bottle into her glass, so I figured I’d better make it last. ‘That’s more or less what I heard,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Blair do a photo op there back in ’97, just after he got in?’
‘Shit, yeah. That’s where he did his “forgotten people” speech.’
‘And then—?’
Nicky sneered nastily. ‘He forgot them.’
I decided I’d talked shop for long enough. We were here to celebrate, and we weren’t making much of a fist of it. I toasted the echoing vault around us and the newly painted screen at the far end of it. ‘To the Walthamstow Gaumont,’ I said. ‘Like its owner — come back from the dead with grace and style.’
Juliet drained her glass and crushed it in her hand, letting the fragments spill out between her fingers and squeezing out a few drops of blood to follow them.
‘Ye’air gva aku norim, hesh te va’azor,’ she said.
Nicky gave her a pained stare. ‘Which is . . . ?’
‘The closest thing I know to a blessing.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘And now I’ve got succubus blood on my carpet. Is it — like — acid or something?’
‘It’s like blood,’ said Juliet. And then to me, ‘Would you like a lift?’
‘Where are you going?’ I asked her.
‘Home. To Susan. Our working hours haven’t overlapped for the last three days. I’m starting to forget what she tastes like.’