Desmond Barry - London Noir

He seems not to belong here, a refugee from a Grosz painting suppressed as too terrible for public consumption. There would be something comical about him were it not for his awesome vastness and the animal reek around him. It’s an ur -stench, building from base notes of piss, shit, and sweat to encompass subtle undertones of days-old baby vomit and rank meat that linger in the brain much longer than in the nostrils.

I find myself rapt with wonder at him, barely able to contain my authorial glee. I am working heavy juju here; I set out telling myself that something worth putting down on the page would happen tonight, and it seems that I have managed to conjure this flesh golem out of pure narrative requirement — a notional space hitherto marked LOCAL COLOR HERE fills out with something truly strange, an authentic and unfakeable encounter that a better author would have the sense to condense to a paragraph or even a phrase.

But I can’t leave well enough alone, and my mind races to find some way I can steal this creature and tame him for my own purposes. The fact that he is clearly dreaming, his physical appearance, his foulness, these are all good. I wonder for a moment if there is some way he can be shoe-horned into some sort of fiction, some easy way I can turn this to my own advantage.

As I wonder on all this, he stirs and begins to gather his belongings to leave the bus at the next stop. Assaulted by the inevitable accompanying spread of his insulating cloud, I turn back to the book I’ve been concealing myself behind (Maurice Leitch, The Smoke King ) and desperately try to avoid attracting his attention. He is, after all, my creation and I do not want to be held responsible for the consequences should such a perfect beast gaze by accident into the eyes of his creator.

The bus stops, and as the doors open he shudders toward them, white plastic bags flapping from each wrist, stirring up tornadoes which disperse his spoor to the four corners of the vehicle. I steal a sideways glance at him when he blusters out onto the pavement. As he steadies himself from a sideways lurch, one of the bags swings and hits the glass beside me with with a noise I do not like. A pattern of darkness within momentarily resolves itself into what I pray is not a face, and the minotaur is gone.

Aldgate

Right,” I said, and phoned the cops.

“May I ask who’s calling?” she says.

“Edgar Lustgarten,” I said. “You might remember me from Scales of Justice . Then again, you mightn’t.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” she says.

Not that it mattered, for I was gone.

The next thing you know, there’s Feane on the Daily Mirror with an anorak over his head. But it was him all right — the two-tone shoes.

The worst thing about Mickey Feane was his relentless bragging. “Look at me — I’m super-volunteer.”

Never liked them Belfast bastards. Too cocksure.

He’d have all the time he wanted to brag now — any amount in Brixton prison.

Poor old Feane — yet another in a long line of slope-shouldered Irish felons in Albion, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

In the beginning it had been good — there can’t be any denying that.

I think I’ll go to London, I thought. Off I’ll go and I won’t come back.

“Goodbye cows,” I said, “and streets — farewell.”

Up your arse may they happily go and the rest of this miserable country as well.

After all, it was 1973. The whole fucking place was an outhouse deserted.

“Goodbye, Daddy, Mammy. Goodbye other kiddies. I hope you die,” I said as I skipped.

I had met some very good friends indeed. They really were quite jolly good fellows. They wore zig-zag tops and half-mast jeans.

The very first day I arrived in off the boat, Harrods blew up. Two cops stopped me and said, “Hello, hello.” Believe it or believe it not, it’s absolutely true. I gave them an envelope with the old man’s name on it. They weren’t too happy with that, they declared.

“You could get into a lot of trouble over here,” they went on. “These are odd and hair-raising times, my wide-eyed little Irish friend.”

I was tripped out of my skull for most of the journey. I drank a few pints with an old chap sporting a face like a ripe tomato.

“Do you know what the English did?” he said to me. “Hung decent fellows outside their own doors.”

I had never in my life quite seen such a face. The Incredible Melting Man from Tipperary, that was the only name I could think of which might suit.

“I’ll tell you something about London,” he says, but I never heard what it was, for the next thing, slurp, down he goes right into the ashtray with a sprig of red hair sticking up like a flower.

As soon as I was sure there was no one looking, I reached into his inside pocket and effortlessly removed his bulging wallet. Inside there’s a bunch of in memoriam cards with a small square picture of this big farmer smiling. That, I assumed, was the recently deceased brother.

There was a good fat roll of money in there — all tied up with an elastic band. Consummate cattle-dealer style.

Away I went in the direction of Piccadilly. I turned a corner and there it flashed — CINZANO , on-off.

I stood there looking at it — truly mesmerized. The reason for that was, it was on our mantelpiece at home. As a matter of fact, it was the last thing I had laid eyes on before departing.

“You’re a bad boy, Emmet,” Daddy had said.

I had expected the entire town to turn out to bear witness to my leavetaking. They didn’t. It was, I’m afraid, a damp squib of an event.

I just pulled the door after me, and who comes flying right off the fanlight but his holiness — the Infant of Prague.

For the benefit of English people who never go to Mass, the Infant of Prague is a holy young boy who stands guard over doors with a gleaming golden crown and a sceptre in his hand. Sadly, on this occasion, his head had got broken. Which upset Mammy because she loved him so.

“Don’t come back!” I heard her shouting.

Then I saw Daddy glaring from the shadows.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll be able to give her a proper kicking now.”

He had always been very fond of football — especially whenever the ball was Mammy.

He always liked a game at the weekend. And maybe, if he’d the money, after the pub on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays — and Tuesdays.

I went into the great big neon-lit shop. A rubber girl, Rita, who’ll never say no. A woman in a mask belting the lard out of a crawling-around city gent clad in a bowler.

“I’ll teach you some manners,” she says, and she means it.

“Oh no,” he says, “please don’t do it, but do it.”

That would keep me warm, I thought, a good skelp like that, as I retired to my chambers along the banks of the Thames.

I thought of them all the way back there at home — all my turf-molded fellow country-compatriots. By now they would have realized my featherbed had not been slept in. And great consternation would take hold in the midlands.

Little would those gormless fools know just what the true nature of my visit to London was to be. I shivered gleefully as I thought: The London Assignment. A British cabinet minister is gunned down by an IRA assassin. It’s a race against the clock and one false move will be enough to leave him dead before he reaches his target.

I lovingly stroked the butt of my Smith & Wesson.686—four inches, with Hogue grips — which lay nestled deep in the pocket of my jacket. My shiny jacket of soft black leather — standard-issue terrorist fare, perhaps, but comfortable and stylish nonetheless. What the well-dressed volunteer is wearing this autumn in the mid-1970s.