Desmond Barry - London Noir

Under the headline “STITCHED UP,” the front page of the Scum was tirelessly defending the good character of the latest batch of rapist footballers who’d all fucked one girl between the entire team and any of their mates who fancied it. Just so they could all check out each other’s dicks while they did it, Dougie reckoned. That sort of shit turned his stomach almost as much as the paper it was printed on, so he quickly flipped the linen over, turned to the racing pages at the back. That would keep his mind from wandering, reading all those odds, totting them up in his head, remembering what names went with what weights and whose colors. All he had to do now was sit tight and wait. Wait for Lola.

Lola.

Just thinking about her name got his fingertips moist, got little beads of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. Got a stirring in his baggy sweatpants so that he had to look up sharply and fill his eyes with a fat daughter chewing fries with her mouth open to get it back down again.

Women didn’t often have this effect on Dougie. Only two, so far, in his life. And he’d gone further down the road with this one than anyone else before.

He could still remember the shock he felt when he first saw her, when she sat herself down next to him at the bar with a tired sigh and asked for a whiskey and soda. He caught the slight inflection in her accent, as if English wasn’t her first language, but her face was turned away from him. A mass of golden-brown curls bobbed on top of her shoulders, she had on a cropped leopardskin jacket and hipster jeans, a pair of pointy heels protruding from the bottom, wound around the stem of the bar stool. The skin on her feet was golden-brown too; mixed-race she must have been, and for a minute Dougie thought he knew what she would look like before she turned her head, somewhere between Scary Spice and that bird off Holby City. An open face, pretty and a bit petulant. Maybe some freckles over the bridge of her nose.

But when she did turn to him, cigarette dangling between her lips and long fingers wound around the short, thick glass of amber liquid, she looked nothing so trite as “pretty.”

Emerald-green eyes fixed him from under deep lids, fringed with the longest dark lashes he had ever seen. Her skin was flawless, the color of the whiskey in her glass, radiating that same intoxicating glow.

For a second he was taken back to a room in Edinburgh a long time ago. An art student’s room, full of draped scarves and fake Tiffany lamps and a picture on the wall of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. This woman looked strangely like Marlene. Marlene with an afro. Black Angel.

She took the cigarette from between her red lips and asked: “Could you give me a light?” Her glittering eyes held his brown ones in a steady gaze, a smile flickered over her perfect lips.

Dougie fumbled in the sleeve of his jacket for his Zippo and fired it up with shaking fingers. Black Angel inhaled deeply, closing her bronze-colored eyelids as she sucked that good smoke down, blowing it out again in a steady stream.

Her long lashes raised and she lifted her glass to him simultaneously.

“Cheers!” she said, and he caught that heavy inflection again. Was he going mad, or did she even sound like Marlene too? “Ach,” she tossed back her mane of curls, “it’s so good to be off vork!”

“I’ll drink to that,” Dougie said, feeling like his tongue was too big for his head, his fingers too big for his hands, that he was entirely too big and clumsy. He slugged down half his pint of Becks to try and get some kind of equilibrium, stop this weird teenage feeling that threatened to paralyze him under the spell of those green eyes.

She looked amused.

“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.

Dougie gave his standard reply. “Och, you know. This an’ that.”

It pleased her, this answer, so she continued to talk. Told him in that smoky, laconic drawl all about the place she worked. One of the clip joints off Old Compton Street, the ones specifically geared up to rip off the day-trippers.

“It izz called Venus in Furs,” she told him. “Is fucking tacky shit, yeah?”

He started to wonder if she was Croatian, or Serbian. Most of the girls pouring into Soho now were supposed to be ones kidnapped from the former Yugoslavia. Slavic was a word that suited the contours of her cheeks, the curve of her green eyes. But how could that be? Dougie didn’t think there was much of a black population in Eastern Europe. And he couldn’t imagine anyone having the balls to kidnap this one. Maybe she was here for a different reason. Images raced through his mind. Spy films, Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War. High on her accent, he didn’t really take the actual words in.

Until at some point close to dawn, she lifted a finger and delicately traced the outline of his jaw. “I like you, Dougie.” She smiled. “I vill see you here again, yes?”

Dougie wasn’t really one for hanging out in drinking clubs. He was only in this one because earlier that evening he’d had to have a meet in Soho and he couldn’t stand any of the pubs round there. Too full, too noisy, too obvious. This was one of the better places. Discreet, old-fashioned, not really the sort of place your younger generation would go for, it was mainly populated by decaying actors skulking in a dimly lit world of memory. It was an old luvvie who’d first shown him the place. An old luvvie friend of a friend who’d been ripped off for all his Queen Anne silver and a collection of Penny Blacks by the mercenary young man he’d been silly enough to invite back for a nightcap. Dougie had at least got the silver back, while the guy was sleeping off what he’d spent the proceeds of the stamps on. He really didn’t come here often, but as he watched the woman slip off her stool and shrug on her furry jacket, he felt a sudden pang and asked, “Wait a minute — what’s your name?”

She smiled and said: “It’s Lola. See you again, honey.” And then she was gone.

Dougie found himself drifting back to the club the next evening.

It was weird, because he’d kept to himself for so long he felt like his heart was a hard, cold stone that no one could melt. It was best, he had long ago told himself, not to form attachments in his line of work. Attachments could trip you up. Attachments could bring you down. It was better that no one knew him outside his small circle of professional contacts and the clients they brought. Safer that way. He’d done six months time as a teenager, when he was stupid and reckless, and had vowed he’d never be caught that way again.

He was mulling over all these facts as he found himself sitting at the bar. He didn’t quite know what he thought he was doing there, just that he felt his heart go each time the buzzer went and a new group of people clattered down the steps. Lola had come into the place alone. He supposed he could ask the guvnor what he knew about her, but that didn’t seem very gentlemanly. After all, he wasn’t a regular himself, who knew how long she’d been making her way down here after the grind of an evening “huzzling the schmucks” under Venus’s neon underskirts?

At half past 1:00 she had wound her way down the stairs toward him. A smile already twitching at the corners of her mouth, she was pleased to see him. One look up her long, bare, perfect legs to her leather miniskirt and that same leopardskin jacket and he felt the same.

“He- looo , Dougie,” she said.

Dougie felt drunk, as he had ever since.

Gradually, over whiskey and sodas with the ice crinkling in the glass, she’d told him her story. It was all very intriguing. Her father was Russian, she said, ex-KGB, who since the fall of Communism had managed to create an empire for himself in electronic goods. He was a thug, but a charming one — he had named her after a character in a Raymond Chandler book that he’d read, contraband, as a teenager.