Louisa Young - Baby Love

‘Eighty-eight?’ I said. ‘Maybe eighty-seven?’

‘Oh,’ said Cooper, in that tone of whimsical sarcastic disbelief that you’d think only policemen on the telly use. ‘That’s funny.’

I wasn’t going to say anything more until I knew what he was getting at. I am not a person who by nature lies to policemen, but I find a quietly uninformative courtesy is normally least trouble to all concerned when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Unfortunately, Cooper seemed to have the same idea. I looked at him politely, he looked at me politely. Mexican standoff at the Three Johns.

Well, all I wanted was to give him the five hundred pounds that was burning a hole in my pocket and get his word that his infallible system for the disposal of unwanted drink-driving charges was on my case. I had no desire to get into a discussion about a car that as far as I knew had been squished into a little metal cube and buried in some slagheap in the Essex flatlands. He looked at me, I looked at him.

‘Eddie Bates,’ he said.

‘Who’s Eddie Bates?’ I said, in totally genuine and relieved ignorance. Whatever it was he wanted, I couldn’t help him. I’d never heard of any Eddie Bates.

‘Of Pelham Crescent SW7,’ he said. Blank.

‘Outside which address Pontiac Firebird HGT 425Q has been observed on twelve separate occasions in the past two months. Averaging one and a half times a week. A regular caller.’

‘Ben,’ I said, leaning over the table in an open and friendly fashion. ‘You’ve lost me. I don’t know anyone rich enough to live round there. I don’t go to Joseph or the Conran shop. The last time I set foot in South Ken I was eight years old, visiting the dinosaurs with twenty of my little schoolfriends. I haven’t seen that car since nineteen eighty-seven and I’ve never heard of any Eddie Bates.’

He gave me his clean, steady look. An innocent-looking look, trying to judge innocence. He decided to believe me. I think.

‘How it works is this,’ he said finally. ‘The reason your little misdemeanour last night is not going to be pressed is because I let on that me and my section just happen to be keeping an eye on you in connection with something else entirely which is none of the business of the little street copper who so efficiently picked you up. Your paperwork comes to me and I open a file in your name and pop the papers in and there they stay till kingdom come or till that other case entirely comes to court, whichever is sooner.’

‘Clever,’ I said. I’d been wondering, actually.

‘But,’ he said.

I looked at him politely.

‘There’s already a file in your name.’

I felt a little slow.

‘You actually are under surveillance.’

Alarm was just a tiny, vicious twist in my belly. Anger was swift to follow. I said nothing.

‘You’re not being watched and followed around. We haven’t got that kind of manpower,’ he said. ‘But your car, and your name, are significant in a situation that we are most certainly watching. Now I don’t know why it’s so important to you not to lose your licence, but I imagine the same reasons might hold if it came to being connected with Eddie Bates.’

‘Ben, I don’t know the man …’

‘So you said. That’s irrelevant. The point is that you are in a position to …’

I rather feared I was.

‘… and if you were to I would consider it a great personal favour.’

My heart sank. I had a horrible feeling I had no choice.

‘You’ve got no choice,’ he said.

What he wanted me to do was, as he put it, ‘chum up to Harry Makins’. He knew perfectly well the Pontiac was Harry’s. He was unimpressed when I told him I hadn’t seen Harry since the winter of 1988 and my last view of him was obscured by a chair he was throwing out the window at me. I was to chum up with Harry and chum up with Eddie Bates and await further instructions. That was it.

Chum up with Harry. Chum up with Harry. Like, what, ring him? After eight years? Out of the blue? Hey, Harry!

*

I first met him in a bar, of course. Janie, a Cynthia Heimel fan, said that I’d never meet my dream man in a bar, because my dream man had better things to do than hang around drinking. This wasn’t that kind of bar, though – it was the kind where people hang around drinking on expenses and call it a meeting, a place in Soho full of Mexican beer, sharp, fleshy foliage and men with silly hair.

I noticed Harry because he looked completely wrong. No Paul Smith suit, no pony tail, no eyes leaping to the door at every entrance. He was too naturally cool for such a posy place. He wore his leathers like only very long skinny people can: as if he had been born with one skin too few, and the leather was it, filling the body out to its right and harmonious proportions. Also, he looked very slightly dangerous. Very slightly.

He came in with a bunch of Paul Smiths as I was sitting at the bar, and after some brief backchat wanted to know was that my bike outside – I was in leathers too – because if so he had some blue-dot rear-light covers one of which would probably do for it if I was interested in that kind of thing.

As it happened that’s just the kind of thing I was interested in in those days, and as they are not usually available in this country and as (as I told him) I didn’t know you could even get them for a 1963 Dynaglide (same year as me – one reason I bought it) I said yes, and had taken his phone number before he leaned forward and whispered rather cosily, I thought, considering the brevity of our acquaintance, into my ear: ‘Just checking. You can’t get them for the Dynaglide. But I had to know you weren’t a git.’

And then as I leaned back a little and turned round a little to look at him, he said, ‘Can I just kiss you now? It would save so much time …’

Yee-hah! So I said, ‘You can kiss me now and then not again for a month.’ So he did, and we had this fantastic snog in the middle of the pretentious bar and when he let me go (yes he let me go) five minutes later my knees wobbled slightly as I leant back against my tall stool.

‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a Chevrolet,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you four weeks from Saturday at Gossips.’ And then before I could sneer at his cheek the barman said, ‘You Angeline? Mr Herbert’ll see you now,’ and I had to go because I too was there on business.

‘Mr Herbert?’ Harry said, laughing, as he turned away. ‘You a waitress, or what?’

‘No, I’m a belly dancer,’ I replied. The grin that split Harry’s face was something to see. ‘Belly dancer on a Harley?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’

Gossips. Harry and I used to go there every week and dance in revoltingly sexual fashion to the slinky reggae. I’d do a camel walk to Gregory Isaacs. Harry loved that place. Perhaps he still goes there.