Sam Thompson - Communion Town

The light was low enough it didn’t thrust white lances down my optic strings. That made a change. It was even cool.

I stepped up to the bar and put down a coin. The barman put down a shot glass and filled it. I knocked it back.

The place was near empty. No Cherubs and no skirt. Only one shadowy customer propped at the other end of the bar studying a shot glass of his own. I raised my finger to the barman and, as he poured, I caught my eye in the mirror behind him. Not a pretty sight. The eye in question was purple and black, and closing up so fast I couldn’t blame it for preferring not to watch. My reflection and I returned to our drinks, neither of us looking for any trouble.

My appearance. I’d give a wide berth to that ugly character. Now and then people tell me I have a resemblance to someone, a rasping musician who had a bit of success in the last century with deconstructed gothic blues and macabre chanson. I saw a picture of him once in a magazine. A gargoyle in a hunch hat and a postmortem suit, dustbowl stubble, set of teeth you’d find on a bar room floor. Is that what you saw when we met for the first time? You never said. I don’t know.

I tipped the spirit into the back of my throat and choked appreciatively as it burned all the way down. The swell at the other end of the bar was taking a sidelong interest in me. He was a skinny kid, his oiled hair and snakeskin boots winking out of the shadow. The chalkstripe suit was cut boxy and expensive and his fedora lay upend on the bartop.

‘Run into some trouble, Hal?’

The kind of question that recommends silence. The wise guy slid closer, put his elbows on the bar and revealed his face in the mirror. Fine down glowed on his cheek where it caught the light. I noticed the slenderness of the throat extending from the snowy-crisp collar, the rounding of the chin and the moulding of the mouth. My upper lip curled of its own accord and my fingernails scraped the bartop.

‘This was a decent joint,’ I muttered.

The person beside me grinned and fitted a boot to the footrail.

‘What’s the matter, Hal?’ she asked, in a contralto I couldn’t mistake. ‘You ain’t pleased to see me?’

‘I’m not in the mood, Moll.’

‘Ouch, let me guess. You ran into the Cherubs.’

‘You heard what I said.’

She drew back, mock-offended, then unbuttoned her jacket and stuck her hands in her pockets, flashing the points of her braces. Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl of the Liberties. I’d heard it said she’d been twice engaged to be married: once to a man who owned three factories out in Kinsayder Fields, once to an inexperienced heiress from Rosamunda. She booked both weddings for the same day, then left them standing at their respective altars and fenced the gifts for a tidy profit.

I made to leave but she stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

‘What’s the hurry?’ she said. ‘I got something to tell you. As a favour, like. Some frail’s looking for you, you know that? Sparky little baggage. She’s asking for you up and down the waterfront, spreading your name around. That’d make me uneasy. If it was my situation, I’d want to know why. But that’s me. Maybe you’re different.’

She caught her laughter at the corner of her mouth. I gathered the bitter stuff that had collected in my gullet and gave a little something back to the joint’s sticky floor. Then I shoved past, swinging the Roaring Girl on her heel. I heard her throaty chuckle as I climbed back into the heat, and she called up after me: ‘Quite the looker, too — quite the little looker, Hal!’

4. Fate Carries a Blackjack

My office was embedded high up in one of those great decaying blocks that lean out over the quays, ready any day to topple into the water. Black brick and flaked green paint outside, and, inside, a gentle purgatory of stairwell gloom, dead lift shafts and brown corridors with one electric light fluttering off and on. In my particular closet the filing cabinets held each other up like it had been a heavy night. The slatted blind hung splayed across the window. A defunct air conditioning unit lay in the corner, waiting for the end of the world.

When I first took the room I’d had my name stencilled on the frosted glass panel in the door, together with the two initial letters that stood for my profession. Seeing it, ghosted and inverted, used to hit me like hot coffee when I was working into the night amid stacks of case notes and coarse-grained photographs. These days I used the desk drawers for my collection of empty bottles. The city noises didn’t get in here much. You could spend all afternoon watching the parallel lines of daylight creep across the cabinets and disappear before hitting the far corner. If I ever got around to making a will, this was where I wanted to be buried.

I toiled up six storeys and arrived breathing hard and in need of a restorative, but when I turned the corner of the landing something brought me to a stop. The corridor was still and silent, but was the dust stirring through the half-light? At the far end, was the door standing open just an inch?

The sweat had gone cold down my back. Automatically I patted the pockets of my suit but my hands found nothing to reassure them. I settled my hat and moved noiselessly along the corridor, took the last few feet at the pace of a paranoid gastropod and flattened myself beside the door. Yes: it was open a fraction. I’d shut it when I left, hadn’t I? I’d locked it, too, I never forget, but there were no signs of forced entry. Through the crack all I could see was a dark slice of wall. There was no sound.

Then I caught the faintest creak, a creak I knew by heart. Someone shifting in my chair.

My jaw tightened till my fillings hurt. This joker planned to get the drop on me in my own office? Nothing doing. I knew the angles here. The window at the end of the corridor looked on the fire escape. So I’m no gymnast, but was I such a sack that I couldn’t climb out, slip along the walkway and slap a nasty surprise on whoever was sitting in my damn chair taking aim at my door, waiting for the hapless silhouette to appear in the frosted panel? My office window swung open in just the right way to connect clean smack with the back of a complacent skull, I reckoned.

I sank into a crouch and began to creep past the office door. You should see me creep when I want to. If I’d dropped a pin you’d have heard it.

Then I wasn’t creeping any more. I’d caught the tip of my shoe in the hem of my trousers; the turn-up was trailing since my run-in with the Cherub brothers. Somehow I was flailing into a big stride and flinging my whole weight against the door. It flew all the way open, clattering against the cabinets. I just about bounded into the room and sprawled across the desk.

I’d have liked an hour or so to myself to come up with some really appropriate profanities for how I felt about this situation, but it wasn’t to be. Because we were face to face.

5. Stick ’em Up, My Lovely

You know I’m not good at this kind of thing. What was odd, you seemed equally surprised. You sprang out of the chair like you’d been found out taking a liberty, then caught your poise like you calculated you could get away with it.

As I blinked up at you from a drift of the junk I hadn’t got around to filing on a refuse heap, I knew there was only one way this scene was going to go and that was however you wanted. Not that I planned to make it easy on myself. I straightened up, screwed my hat into a ball and threw it at the hatstand. I bared my teeth like I thought the orangutans at the city zoo had perfected the art of conversation. Give me a break, I’d been punched in the jaw by my own desk.

You simply smiled. Anyone would have sworn you were pleased to see me. Then you looked shocked. Something I’d noticed about you already, expressions cross your face like ripples on water. Your thoughts astonish you all by themselves. It’s a charming turn, I’ll allow that. You do it so neat I could nearly buy it.