Warren Fitzgerald - The Go-Away Bird

Phew! That was close. I flicked a look at the girl opposite to see if she’d noticed anything. She stretched her green and white striped sleeves, gripped them and buried her hands between her thighs as if she was trying to keep warm. It wasn’t cold in the train. I was probably giving her the creeps. Camden Town couldn’t come soon enough. I jumped up before the train stopped – a split second before, so did she.

Oh, great, now she thinks the creepy bloke is following her!

I tried to get ahead of her, so she couldn’t possibly think I was after her, but just succeeded in colliding with the people in the flood coming the other way. So I tried walking slowly, so she would quickly lose me in the crowd, but that just got me a barrage of ‘tuts’ and huffs aimed at the back of my head. So now I was walking side by side with the girl and I had made myself just about as conspicuous as possible – as conspicuous as an average-looking bloke can down Camden Tube on a Saturday with its time-warp tunnels of skinheads and punks from the Seventies and cyber-Goths from somewhere in the future in their black PVC macs, fluorescent green dreadlocks, and platform biker boots.

When we got to the escalator I tried to let someone get on between me and her, but as I tried to stand to one side I became the head of a chain of zombies bumping into the person in front like some Marx Brothers moment. After about two seconds, the chain was nearing twenty zombies long, so I gave up and found myself face to back with the girl and her low-cut top. I held my breath in case she felt it on her skin and found my headphones dangling round my neck. I stuffed the cork back in this dodgy sparkling wine and, since I hadn’t bothered to press ‘Stop’ when it was all getting a bit emotional back there, Jeff Buckley was still going – and this time he was rockin’! Led Zeppelin would have been proud of this hard, dirty groove and it injected some conviction back into my step as I slid off the escalator – so much so that I almost forgot to get ready to slip back down again if the barriers were crawling with police and sniffer dogs.

But they weren’t. And stripy girl went left as I went right – I tell you, all you need is a good tune keeping the world at bay and everything seems to go your way.

I marched down the high street, blinking at the sunshine and dodging the crowds in time to ‘Eternal Life’. As I got nearer to the Lock I wanted to take my coat off, but I thought I’d better wait till it no longer had two thousand ecstasy pills in it.

Jimmy Riddle’s tattoo shop is just after the Lock, on the way up to Chalk Farm, between a second-hand furniture shop and a second-hand clothing shop – or vintage clothing shop, as it calls itself. Jimmy Riddle’s not his real name, of course. And he doesn’t call himself Riddle. He calls himself Jim, but I doubt that’s his real name, that’s just what he calls himself to everyone but those he trusts with his life…and I guess that’s just Elaine. And that’s why everyone else calls him Riddle – ’cause that’s the way he likes to be. Elusive is safe, protected if the shit hits the fan, you know?

They do piercing at Jimmy’s too. Elaine does the piercing out back and Jimmy does the tattooing in the front – he likes people to see ‘the artist at work’, although there’s a curtain, heavy and red like in an old theatre, which he pulls across if the client insists – but I’m not sure if anyone has the balls to insist on anything from Jimmy. He’s your classic British Bulldog, at least he looks like one anyway – what’s left of his hair shaved bald; thick, shiny neck that you just want to slap to see how it sounds (never done that, of course!); shorter than most but wider than most – and on a day like today he’ll be in his England top and shorts, and won’t probably take them off till after the World Cup (even though England didn’t even qualify…or perhaps because England didn’t even qualify).

That’s not to say he’s dirty, quite the opposite. Him and Elaine always have the best gear on, the most expensive perfumes and aftershaves; they look like they have four showers a day and Jimmy has a permanent tan as if he lives in Tenerife – it’s from a sun bed, of course, but no one knocks him for it. Like I say, no one insists on anything from Jimmy…but he’ll pull the curtain without you asking if he’s doing your bum or your—

‘Cock?!’

‘Yep.’ Jimmy kept his eyes on the TV screen, as if he was just telling me the football scores, ‘and he wan’ed me to wri’ ’is girlfriend’s name up it, in calligraphy, like.’

‘How does that work then?’ I was genuinely curious. ‘Do you do it when it’s hard or floppy?’

‘I don’t bleedin’ care, Ash! I told ’im, as long as ’e wants i’ done in my shop ’e’s havin’ i’ done on a floppy.’ He looked at me for the first time since I came in. ‘And ’e should think ’imself lucky that I’ll stretch to that.’ He noticed the potential in this line, ‘If you’ll pardon the phrase, matey!’ and he stuck his tongue out as he laughed just in case I needed another reason to think of him as a bulldog.

I laughed too, but I could never fully relax with Jimmy until the business was out the way. But that’s not the way things were done. Whenever I arrived at the shop Jim would say hello and chat as if it was a nice surprise that I had just dropped in. If he was working on someone he’d finish the job, chatting to me all the while, no matter how long it took. If he wasn’t busy, like now, he’d stare at the little portable TV on a bracket high on one of the clinical white walls and comment on the news or the sport for a while.

‘See those poor bleeders in Rwanda, Ash?’

‘Just read something about it on the train.’

‘Some BBC journalist managed to get the bastards on film hackin’ at some poor women with their fuckin’ machetes…Animals.’

‘And they showed it on the news?’

‘Yeh…it was ’orrible…Sad, innit?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling strangely chuffed at how my pal Jimmy always surprised me with his compassion.

And he was my pal…I suppose…At my shaky times I realized that I probably didn’t even know his real name and that I was just the mug who was stupid enough to look after his gear for him (for a fee, of course), so that if the fuzz came knocking he would have nothing harder than some paracetamol in his house…but the rest of the time I liked to think that he’d really taken to me. He’d even taken to hugging me when I left. It nearly blew me away the first time he did it – not just because I hadn’t felt a hug from anyone in God knows how long…but because I didn’t know where to put my hands. Jimmy being that much shorter than me, his face was in my chest and there was that shiny head and I just wanted to pat it, see if it made the same sound as the old bloke’s on The Benny Hill Show . Needless to say, I didn’t.

Elaine loves me; she says I’m ‘nicer than all the other arseholes he hangs around with’, so I guess that makes Jim see me in a better light too. I love Elaine too. She’s gorgeous. Trust Jim to not only have the flashiest car and jewellery, he has to have the tastiest bird too. Elaine’s parents are Indian so I’m not sure how she ended up with a name like Elaine, but she’s definitely got all the best bits from their genes – she has long thick black hair, perfect skin…quite a big nose if you think about it, but her smile, as white as the walls of the shop, just makes you want to melt. And as for the body – athletic, I tell you. She had a kid with Jim a couple of years ago and she still has the body of an eighteen-year-old gymnast.

‘I thought I heard your lovely voice, Ashley.’ She bounced through from the back room after a pale white girl with burning cheeks and a glowing red ear from where Elaine had just skewered it.