“I bet.”
“A lot easier than saving someone from a beating.”
A few weeks ago, at a dub concert in a community hall in St. Paul’s, a gang of Jamaican youths had decided to get territorial on Martin’s bloodclat white ass. Dr. John and his dealer had chased them off, a heroic deed Dr. John had mentioned no more than fifty or sixty times since. Martin said, “I believe it was your friend Hector who actually saved me.”
“But I alerted him to the situation, I asked him to help you out because you’re a good friend of mine. And friends have to look after each other, right?”
Martin sighed. “If I do this thing for you, will you promise to never mention St. Paul’s again?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, man. See that girl?” Dr. John put his arm around Martin, enveloping him in a powerful odour compounded of stale booze, sweat, and pot smoke, and turned him around.
“What am I looking at?”
“The girl, man. Black hair, white dress.”
She stood beside the St John’s ambulance, in the narrow wedge of shadow it cast. Tall and willowy in a long white dress that clung to her curves, her arms bare and pale, her elfin face framed by a Louise Brooks bob of midnight-black hair.
“I’ve been watching her,” Dr. John said.
“I don’t think she’s your type.”
Regulars at the Tap sometimes speculated about Dr. John’s sex life. Everyone agreed that he must have one, but no one could imagine what it could be like.
“She’s dealing, man. Actually, she’s not really dealing because there’s no money changing hands, she’s been handing out freebies all afternoon. What you can do for me is sashay over there and cop a sample of whatever it is she’s holding. See, it really is an easy-peasey little favour.”
“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”
“Man, that would hardly be cool. I’d blow my reputation if I was seen taking a hand-out from some hippy chick.”
“But I wouldn’t.”
“That’s different, man. You’re not in the business. You’re a civilian. Go get a sample, okay? And talk to her, try to find out where she’s getting her stuff from. A chick like that, she has to be fronting for someone. Maybe those guys who muscled into my business at the Student Union.”
“The ones who put the Fear in you,” Martin said.
One day at the beginning of the long, hot summer, Dr. John had walked into the Tap with two black eyes and a split lip, and insisted on showing everyone the stitches in his scalp whether they wanted to look or not. “Four fuckers beat me up round the back of the Student Union. Told me that it was their territory from now on. Some pockmarked guy with a goatee is working my spot now, turning the kids on to brown heroin by telling them that he’s out of grass right now but if they’d like to try a sample of this little powder...” Dr. John had looked solemn for a moment, then had put on his Get Carter voice. “Still, look on the bright side. They’re only fucking students. Maybe a bit of heroin will light up their immensely dull lives.”
Now he told Martin, “I’m scared of nothing, man. Still, if she is working for them, and they see me talking to her... You see what I mean? But you’re a civilian. They won’t touch you.”
“She looks like she’s from some cult,” Martin said. “Like the Hare Krishnas who were here earlier, handing out copies of George’s favourite book.”
“Don’t knock the guys in orange, man, they serve a mean lentil curry to people who, because of the government’s attitude to alternative lifestyles, often find themselves having to choose between eating and paying the rent. Just walk over there, cop a little of what’s she’s holding, and come right back. It’ll take you all of thirty seconds, and I swear I won’t mention saving your life ever again.”
“I’ll do it,” Martin said, “as long as you stop making those puppy eyes at me.”
He tried to affect a cool stroll as he moved through the crowd towards the girl. The closer he got, the less attractive she appeared. Her face was plastered in white powder, her Louise Brooks bob was a cheap nylon wig, and her skin was puffy and wrinkled, as if she’d spent a couple of days in a bath. Martin told her that he’d heard she had some good stuff, and she looked at him for a moment, a gaze so penetrating he felt she had seen through to the floor of his soul, before she shook her head and looked past him at something a million miles away.
Martin said, “You don’t have anything for me? How about for my friends? They’re playing next, and they could do with a little lift.”
She was staring straight through him. As if, after she’d dismissed him, he’d ceased to exist. Her eyes were bloodshot and slightly bulging, rimmed with thick mascara that made them seem even bigger. Her white dress was badly waterstained, and a clammy odour rose from it.
“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Martin said, remembering how he’d felt when he’d suffered one of his numerous rejections at the school disco. It didn’t help that a gang of teenage boys jeered and toasted him with bottles of cider as he walked away.
Dr. John was waiting for him backstage, a plastic pint glass in his hand.
“I see you found the free beer,” Martin said.
“You really are a superstar, man. I mention your name and it’s like magic, this beer suddenly appears. What did she slip you? What did she say?”
“She didn’t say a word, and she didn’t slip me anything either. It’s probably some kind of scam involving herbal crap made from boiled nettle leaves or grass-type grass, and she realised that I’d see right through it.”
“All the best gear is herbal,” Dr. John said, and launched into a spiel about William Burroughs and a South American Indian drug that was blown into your nostrils through a yard-long pipe and took you on a magical mystery tour, stopping only to give Simon Cowley a shit-eating grin as he came off stage, saying, “Fab set, man. Reminded me of Herman’s Hermits at their peak.”
Simon looked at Martin and said, “Still hanging out with losers I see,” and walked past, chin in the air.
Then Martin was busy setting up his keyboards while the two festival roadies took down Clouds of Memory’s drums and mikes and assembled Sea Change’s kit, and before he knew it the set had kicked off. The sun was setting and a hot wind was getting up, fluttering the stage’s canvas roof, blowing the music towards the traffic that scuttled along the far edge of Clifton Downs. Martin concentrated fiercely on playing all the right notes in the right order in the right place, but whenever he had a few moment’s rest he glanced towards the girl. Seeing her beyond the glare of the footlights, seeing her with a hairy hippy with a beer-drinker’s belly, a couple of giggling girls who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, a bearded boy in bellbottoms and a brown chalkstripe waistcoat, a woman in a summer dress and a chiffon scarf...
When he came off, sweating hard after two encores, the rhythm guitarist of Clouds of Memory got in his face, saying something about his loser friend spiking beer. Martin brushed him off and went to look for Dr. John. There was no sign of him, backstage or front. The crowd was beginning to drift away. Two men in black uniforms had opened the back doors of the ambulance and were packing away their first aid kit. The girl was gone.
* * *
Martin didn’t think any more about it until early the next morning, when he was woken by the doorbell. It was Monday morning, ten to eight, already stiflingly hot, and Martin had a hangover from the post-gig pub session with the guys from Sea Change and their wives and girlfriends and hangers-on. When the bell rang he put a pillow over his head, but the bell just wouldn’t quit, a steady drilling that resonated at the core of his headache. Clearly, some moron had SuperGlued his finger to the bell push, and at last Martin got up and padded into the living room and looked out of the window to see who it was.