Desmond Barry - London Noir

It’s a short walk to the surgery but not a pretty one. It gets uglier still the closer you get to Kentish Town Road. Shabby, shapeless old buildings, oddly bent, like they’re about to collapse, though no one seems to notice or care. And those garish shop signs. The whole street looks like an old tart with osteoporosis. London’s full of shabby old buildings, but you can look at them and see that once in their lives they looked grand. On Kentish Town Road, they look like they were built to look that shabby. And the people on the street have grown to look just like the buildings, the way people start to look like their dogs. It’s no wonder half of Camden is on SSRIs; the other half are just too fucking depressed to go and fill their prescriptions.

It was still raining hard when she arrived at 3 that afternoon. Her bare legs were so badly splashed by passing cars they looked like Rorschach tests. Her short skirt was soaked right through. It stuck to her so tight you could see she wore no underwear. When she sat down, she tried pulling the thin fabric over her thighs, but realized it was hopeless. She covered her lap with her bag and gave me the sweetest, saddest smile. Then she furrowed her brow. I didn’t have to say a word. She started talking right away.

“Doc,” she said, “I’m telling you this because I think you’re the only person who would understand. I feel like a stranger in my own life.”

I’d heard this before, of course, or a thousand different variations, but coming from her, it shot through me like electricity. She told me she’d been married for eight years — I felt another stab, jealousy, envy, loss? — to, well, let’s just say a famous rock musician. Or as famous as bass players are likely to get. Bass players are the overlooked band members. I’ve had a few of them sitting in that same seat in the past, trying to deal with not getting enough attention, not getting enough love. With nothing ever being quite big enough.

“Have you ever looked at a bass player’s hands?” she asked. I couldn’t say I had. She was looking at my hands now, so intimately it felt like a touch. “You have elegant fingers. Artistic. I’m sure a lot of people have told you that. Bass players’ fingers are repulsive. They don’t have joints like regular fingers. They bend at the knuckle and that’s it. When they play the bass they just kind of throw themselves at the strings and bounce off — thwack . Like pork sausages on a grill. Like pigs throwing themselves at an electric fence.” She illustrated it with an air — bass guitar solo. It made me smile, which made her frown again. “I hate his fingers,” she said.

The rest of him, apparently, was all right. He was ten years older than she was, but that wasn’t a problem. He had money and was happy to let her spend it. He spent most of his time in the studio he had near King’s Cross. Their sex life had always been good, though it had tapered off in the past six months. She thought the reason for that was her bringing up the idea of children, but really she didn’t care either way. Kate didn’t want children — my children anyway. Though I got hold of her medical notes through one of my contacts and, what do you know, she’s four months gone. Did she and her thieving-cunt lawyer think I was dumb enough to just sign it all over to them? She said the only reason she’d mentioned babies was because for a while she thought she might be pregnant. She would throw up every morning, usually when he tried to touch her. It had got to the point where all she could think of were the pigs. His fingers even smelled porky. They revolted her, to the point where she could barely eat... nor sleep, worrying about the morning coming and the fingers. That’s why she needed the temazepam. It wasn’t so bad if she took a couple of those.

The desk clock chimed. I couldn’t believe fifty minutes had gone so fast. I didn’t want to send her out into the rain and ugliness of Kentish Town. I wanted to make things all right for her. Somehow it felt like this was my one last chance to make things right for anybody — me in particular. That night I told Dino I felt there was a voice that wasn’t mine inside me that kept on saying, Drop it. Send her back to her GP. Give her the number of the divorce lawyer. It’s not too late. Stop now. I expected Dino to say something sarcastic about how he knew he had a voice inside him that wasn’t his. But he felt how serious I was and didn’t say a word.

I’ll tell you what it was like. Like I’d dreamed about this so often that I wasn’t sure what to make of the reality. One thing’s for certain, it wasn’t so real. Surreal, certainly, especially after our fifth session — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was session four when she came in, picked up her chair, and carried it around to my side of the desk. She sat down next to me, close enough that the smell of her shoulder made me light-headed. She opened up a large school satchel and said, “I’ve got something I want you to see.”

It was a folder containing several sheets of A4 paper. Pictures printed from a computer. The first was a photograph of her husband. She looked at me expectantly, seeing if I recognized him. I didn’t. Like I said, he was a bass player. Good-looking though. Tall, thin, angular, unkempt in a studied sort of way. A lot of hair for a man in his mid-forties. Very English face, upper-class; it had that distracted, vaguely inbred look. He stood by the front door of a house — theirs, I imagine — with his hands in his pockets, smiling. In the second picture he was onstage. The third was the same photograph zoomed in on his fingers, playing the bass guitar. She was right. They were ugly. Thick, pink, and rigid, like a glove-puppet’s. The last picture was the most disturbing. It was another close-up, but this time so close-up and so fuzzy as to be almost impossible to make it out. It appeared to be his fingers, or the bottom half of them anyway. The top half had disappeared into something white and mottled like cottage cheese and at the same time dark and fleshy like meat.

“He’s cheating,” she said, and then she started to cry, loudly, like someone was gutting her. So loudly one of the practice nurses came in and put an arm around her. For the rest of the session I sat there helplessly, watching her sob. When I got home, Dino asked me if I’d seen the package under the front doormat. I hadn’t, though I must have stepped on it coming in. It was an envelope, which I opened right up. Inside was a DVD. I poured a glass of wine while my laptop booted up. We spent the whole night, me and Dino, watching that DVD over and over on the computer screen. And again, not a single word of sarcasm. Not even about the cigarettes.

She turned up for session five in a pair of black jeans and an oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt — mine, I recognized the bloodstain on the front, but that’s another story. This one’s about fingers. It was funny how boyish she looked. Beautiful though. Especially when she blushed, which she did when I told her that Dino had watched the DVD with me. Dino sat in this time. She told me she wanted to meet him. I asked her if it was shot in her husband’s studio. She said she supposed so but she’d never been inside. If he wasn’t on the road or with the band, he went there at 2 every afternoon, returning home at 8. He told her he was working on a “solo project” and didn’t want to be disturbed.

In the film, the place had the look of a well-appointed office. A wood-paneled front room was hung with gold and platinum albums. There was a large, leather-top desk, an upright bass, three or four electric bass guitars on stands. A trestle table, almost as wide as the room, was packed with an assortment of computer and recording equipment. There must have been webcams everywhere, since you could pretty much see every corner. He selected one of the electric basses, and with that in one hand and a carrier bag in the other, he walked along a corridor that led to another room at the end.