Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

Paul Pope had always wanted something, and his needs were many. As I heard Tomo leave the bathroom, I decided to discover what those wants and needs were.

He slouched at the bar like some old beast in search of Bethlehem. Pope was six years younger than me but looked half a dozen older. Despite a congenital hip problem which made itself manifest in his mid-thirties, he had always been a sporting man, robust, fit, trim — particularly in his forties when he’d adopted the look of Larry Mullen, Jr. the U2 drummer: short hair, matching earrings, broad powerful shoulders, strong arms, a tapered waist. Back then, four decades ago, he’d looked a picture of health. Only I knew the truth. Herpes. Liver problems. Erectile dysfunction (the child he believed he’d fathered was not his). The hip, which prevented him from playing his beloved football (the British version you Americans insist on calling “soccer”). Serious depression. The list went on. To the wide world, Paul Pope was a major Hollywood success; in reality, a self-confessed failure. I and his second wife knew this only too well; I had been fucking her in his bed for over eight months before I broke off the liaison (revenge, as the old saying goes, is a dessert best eaten cold; I disagree: there’s nothing like eating an enemy’s wife’s hot pussy day after day while the stupid, arrogant bastard is completely oblivious).

The Pope of Perversity looked up from his cut-glass tumbler of Dewars. “Jamie!” he cried in mock-loving bonhomie. “How are you?!” He tried to slip off the bar stool and nearly spilled his drink, which made me happy, remembering good, expensive single malt was wasted on him, and grateful Haiyan had served him the standby for the unexpected. “Thank you so much for seeing me at short notice.”

“Not at all, Paul. But I am curious: what brings you all the way up to Mulholland Drive? Last I heard you were living on a boat down in Laguna Beach.”

I sat in my favourite burgundy leather armchair beside the ornate fireplace which had originally appeared in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein . The piece was for show, one of the many set dressings from beloved movies I’d acquired over the years. Pope hovered beside his barstool, clearly already liquored up. He swayed, struggling to find his words.

“I know you can do these things,” he mumbled; then: “She’s disappeared. Wendy. My daughter. I know you can find her, Jamie. I need to find her.” A pause; a sip of scotch. “Please help me. And then, when you do, there’s something else I want you to do.”

“Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “That’s rather presumptuous.”

He blinked — his dark eyes were still like piss holes in the snow — and downed the Dewars. “Then I want you to… to kill me.”

Paul was one of those annoying people who could frequently steal a potentially witty response from your mouth by the sheer inanity or audacity of the shit he frequently shat out of his orifice. This comment, though, was a true gob-smacker.

“Are you serious?” I leaned forward. The leather creaked.

“Yes,” he said with the voice of a condemned man.

I sat back in my chair and stroked my chin. Well, this was interesting: my illegitimate daughter had disappeared, and her fake father wanted me to kill him. Suddenly, the day of my death and Armageddon time for Los Angeles took on a whole new aspect.

“Tell me more,” I smiled.

“I want to kill the bastard,” Rivers said as he pulled the trigger.

The tall teenager was standing still by the open window, and in that instant it occurred to Hurst that he always thought of Rivers in terms of movement: racing their customized sports bicycles, pushing whatever motorbike he could get his hands on to the limit, or running from the law. It was as if Rivers was afraid of stasis, aware that to stay in one position too long was to invite a state of mind akin to living death. Like his surname, Stafford Rivers flowed ever onward, eroding everything around him with ceaseless energy. It was, Hurst acknowledged, what had attracted him to the working-class youth the first day they met, as two eleven-year-olds garbed in uncomfortable black school uniforms standing in the playground of Ralph Taylor Comprehensive — like inmates freshly arrived at a maximum security prison. At the time, he’d thought it was Rivers’s punch-first-ask-questions-later attitude, but now he had to admit it: the guy flowed . There was no other word for him.

Except right now.

“Shit,” Rivers said. “Missed.”

Hurst got up from the bed to look out into the garden as “Wish You Were Here” came to an end on the cheap stereo system. Rivers hadn’t missed; he just hadn’t killed the crow with one shot, and the bird lay twitching on the weed-infested ground. Alex said nothing — Staff was too angry for small talk — and went to change the record.

“That two-timing bitch deserves a smack in the mouth. Fucking slut.”

Hurst selected Motorhead’s “Overkill” from the untidy pile of albums, deciding it was a more suitable accompaniment to the room’s tension than the lush hallucinogen of Pink Floyd. Rivers reloaded the .22 air rifle.

“If the cow was going to cheat on me, why pick a prick like Tully?”

The question was unanswerable. Andy Tully was a dickhead.

So much for a fun evening. Staff had learned about Phillippa and Tully on his way home from work, his last day as an apprentice plumber it turned out, fired for habitual lateness. Things always come in threes, Hurst thought as he looked at the Page Three calendar hanging over the bookcase containing several girlie mags and Sven Hassel war novels. Miss September 1979 grinned vacuously while holding her size thirty-eight breasts. What next? Maybe he should have stayed home listening to Jimi Hendrix while getting stoned. Nah, that was no option; Jamie, his snot-nosed younger brother, would be in his room pounding away on his typewriter pretending to be Ernest fucking Hemingway while listening to Rush ad nauseam. No, Friday nights meant one thing — the Rivers and Hurst Hellraising Show — two seventeen-year-olds on a one-way ticket to oblivion, drinking, smoking dope, crashing parties, boosting a car for a ride, sometimes catching the late show at the cinema if a horror movie was playing, and often committing vandalism as the night’s festivities drew to a close.

Rivers began pacing, waving the gun around as the dying autumn sun cast an auburn hue across the room, his breathing deepening as his anger increased. Hurst had never seen Staff so pissed off, not even after losing that fight to Barry Rogers. He’d already punched a hole in the bedroom door and the air rifle was making Alex nervous.

“Take it easy, Staff. You were going to dump her anyway.”

“Fuck off.” A pause. “Bitch! Tully!” He spat the name out like a wad of phlegm.

Rivers strode to the door and disappeared into the gloomy hallway. Hurst heard him clatter down the linoleum-covered stairs, his size-eleven Doc Martens pounding the creaking wood. When he realized Staff wasn’t coming back, he followed.

The Rivers house was an old terraced ruin crying out for repair. Half of the light fixtures were without bulbs, there was no central heating, the dry-rotted front door drooped on its hinges, and the plaster was coated with a layer of dirt. The stairs groaned as he descended, a damp smell leaking from the walls.

“Turn that bleedin’ racket down,” Mrs. Rivers said as he rounded the corner. If the house needed a ghost to add to its charm, she was it. She seldom left the place and always tried to engage him in conversation, a rare commodity in the slum Staff called home. He smiled as she saw him; Mrs. Rivers, seemingly older than her forty-seven years, had a soft spot for Hurst and was pleased that her son had a friend from the better side of town.